Navelgazing, or Where the Pictures Aren't
Every once in a while* in the last ten-or-so years, I've flirted with the idea of starting a diary comic.
There's a rhythm and honesty to visual memoir that words alone really can't match--
--that is, if you can draw.
I can't--
--at least not well enough to convey any but the crudest and most limited ideas--
--which kind of defies the point.
And I am nothing if not a perfectionist.
Words may be inherently flawed and inexact, but I'd rather wield a clumsy instrument with subtlety and precision than flail awkwardly with a razor-edge scalpel.
The alternative, I suppose, would be scripting diary comics, but the idea of asking someone else to draw my diary strikes me as presumptuous at best, ludicrously egotistical at worst (unless one happens to be Harvey Pekar, of course).
*Triggered, in this instance, by proofreading Volume Two of DAR, which, as diary comics go, pretty well sets the bar.
There's a rhythm and honesty to visual memoir that words alone really can't match--
--that is, if you can draw.
I can't--
--at least not well enough to convey any but the crudest and most limited ideas--
--which kind of defies the point.
And I am nothing if not a perfectionist.
Words may be inherently flawed and inexact, but I'd rather wield a clumsy instrument with subtlety and precision than flail awkwardly with a razor-edge scalpel.
The alternative, I suppose, would be scripting diary comics, but the idea of asking someone else to draw my diary strikes me as presumptuous at best, ludicrously egotistical at worst (unless one happens to be Harvey Pekar, of course).
*Triggered, in this instance, by proofreading Volume Two of DAR, which, as diary comics go, pretty well sets the bar.