EDIT:
I am now accepting ads at a low flat rate. Payment via Paypal. Click on the right or left sidebar ads for details. No pesky bidding, your flat ad rate is good for one month of more than 250,000 page views WORLDWIDE.
We also still have a selection of Project Wonderful ads. I reduced the number of available boxes to reduce clutter.
I hope my fine sponsors will renew their ad space. Thanks!
Yeah, I know I’ve gone silent the last few days, and am a VEWWY BAD BWOGGER. I was under the weather for a few days, and now have to catch up.
My new agent is awesome, and needs all kinds of press data from me, and sales figures, and yadda yadda. I have almost nothing on file or on my computer, and many hours were devoted to doing all the administrative stuff I should have at my fingertips.
Press clippings and reviews have always embarrassed me, and I usually toss them. That is very silly. Press and promotion are part of the job.
As for the main job, I am deeply in the drawing zone, keeping to a schedule, by golly.
Quite nice, doing almost nothing but inking. A lot of that can be done on a lap board. Lovely to sit in the family room and have people around, and work at the same time. Some artists need to be alone, but not me. When inking, I enjoy having folks about.
Slowly getting warmer outside, too. Looking forward to taking the lap board out to the porch.
Join my nifty Facebook fan page, and get a chance to win a page of comic art.
Ah yes… out among the pioneer homesteads of Nebraska, women would gather for an evening of communal drawing and sketching. If paper were scarce (usually in the winter, as the rivers were frozen and could not be used to produce sheets), sketches would be produced by spreading ashes on the floor and using a stick to “draw”. Women (and the occasional man) would tell stories while sketching the scene in ashes. Sometimes a “narrative corpse” technique would be used, allowing everyone to participate.
Pioneer comics (also known as “grass-cans” among todays fans) are rare. They are usually unique, and given the vagaries of time, paper quality, and the marginilization of women during that period, few exist today. The best known example is a diary kept by Maria Gerda Johanna von Entenhausen. This leather-bound diary includes the gripping first-person account of the Blizzard of 1888, as her family weathers the storm inside their sod house in the desolate sandhills of Nebraska.
While primitive by today’s standards, the craft is considerable, as Ms. von Entenhausen used only a simple nibbed pen. (The equivalent of a Bic ballpoint pen today.)
More common are “story quilts”. Usually comprised of 20-36 panels, these quilts tell a silent story. Sometimes a simple narrative will be sewn along the border or, more rare, on the panel itself, like a caption. Although similar to a narrative corpse, the story was usually plotted beforehand, with each quilter assigned a panel. Finished quilts were communally owned, being used to tell stories in group settings. The University of Nebraska Press published a catalog of the1989 Sheldon Art Gallery exhibition titled “Narrative Threads: Story Quilts From The American Frontier”. Foreward by Faith Ringgold.
That’s pretty darned funny!
This post has been sponsored by Greater Metropolitan Children’s Psychiatric Hospital brand peanut butter.
Remember…. It takes a lot of little nuts to make a jar of GMCPH Peanut Butter®!
it’s true in a way… girls weren’t supposed to be able to read, yet were assigned samplers to stitch. What a sneaky way to learn the alphabet.
Duckburg, Torsten? DUCKBURG??
The peanut butter is funny too!