harvey pekar

harvey pekar has passed away.

goodbye, harvey.

clowes, niffenegger, ware

chris ware, p. 52 from the

acme novelty date book volume one

tonight was the night: dan clowes and chris ware were in town in honour of clowes new book 'wilson'. the talk was chaired by audrey niffenegger, whose work i am afraid i am only familiar with from film posters, but who apparently also writes comics. something to look up.

it took a while for things to get going and i couldn't help wondering if the evening could have benefited from a different mediator. audrey might have seemed an interesting choice because of the various links between her, chris and dan (chicago, comics, film) but she was a little too timid and it was difficult to tell how familiar she was with chris and dan's work. maybe chris and dan would have been fine without a mediator or maybe paul gravett (who organised the talk) himself could have taken audrey's place.

audrey wisely opened up the talk to questions from the audience early on and things warmed up. although it would have been nice for the talk to have gone on a little longer and maybe for some of the questions to have been taken more as conversation starters.

i don't know what it is exactly that i look for in these talks. maybe it is just to turn the abstract ideas i have of these artists into something more real and three dimensional. for all his self-deprecation and self-consciousness chris ware came across pretty self-assured and witty at times. and i had imagined dan clowes as someone out of one of his own comics, instead he reminded me of frank mandersloot, a tall bald man with a sense of humour who taught me at art school.

chris ware for 'this american life'

different artists are important to you at different stages of your development and for me chris ware more or less kicked things off. when i first read it around christmas 2004 'jimmy corrigan' showed me that a comic can take its sweet time telling a story and that the idea of what a comic is or can be isn't static. comics have only just begun.

dan clowes

i didn't bring any books to sign but after the talk i queued up to give chris and dan copies of some of my comics. one on one contact during signings can never last long, but the very short chats i had with them made me leave (to meet sarah mcintyre down the pub) with a smile on my face.

to see that both authors really look rather human in real life have a look at gosh' blogpost on the talk.

a friend

panel from just friends/love stories 2006

as an awkward 16-year-old i met brink scholtz, equally awkward and similarly aged. i had spotted her before, walking the stretch between our two school buildings in a leather jacket whose original owner might have been a middle aged man. she seemed more out of place than other schoolmates. i don’t remember exactly how we became friends, but i do know that meeting her changed everything.

in a small attic room underneath a window in the roof we sat and sipped rooibos tea and spent hours together talking. with every cup of tea i understood more that life didn't have to be governed by the rules of my lovely but claustrophobic dutch grammar school surroundings. that there were people who lived differently and that they were fine, happy even, just as i had hoped and suspected.
at the end of the year brink left utrecht to return to south-africa with her family.

i once took the bus from amsterdam to heathrow airport, london, with my mum to see brink there for 12 hours whilst she and her family waited for a connecting flight. we met in south-africa twice and after i finished art school we worked and lived together for some time at garvald, a residential day care centre for adults with learning disabilities in scotland. then at the end of 2004 she had to return to south-africa again and i left for a three-month stint in new york.

last week we were in utrecht again sitting next to each other on the couch sipping tea in an apartment she was staying in as part of a 6-week cultural program organized by de buren and vrede van utrecht -for which she is writing a story that mentions utrecht. outside the sun was shining.
i came back to london last friday and -ash clouds allowing- today she’ll return to grahamstown,

listen to the beautiful story brink scholtz wrote for radiobooks here.

interview at avoid the future

judith and martin at avoid the future asked everyone at chicks on comics to answer some questions a couple of weeks ago. saturday and sunday they posted our answers.

also take a look at their archive of posts including reviews, interviews and reading lists.

thank you judith and martin.

post for chicks on comics by anna bas backer

dan clowes and chris ware

dan clowes and chris ware are coming to town. see you there.

nothing much and carrot cake

view of the drawing room at 59 seymour street

by matilda sharpe (1850)

i have been trying to spend my sundays working on my comics at the geffrye museum in their restaurant overlooking the garden. the geffrye is a museum inexplicably but wonderfully dedicated to english domestic interiors and every time i walk through its corridors i have to stop for a moment to look at the above watercolour by matilda sharpe dated 1850. it is small, measuring only 13x15cm, and the scene is just of what i assume to be the drawing room she used daily, but she decided it was important enough to paint it.


after i finished art school but before i got into comics for a short time i was fed up with art. instead of creating video or performance pieces like i had done in school i just did what seemed most obvious and what i had done as a teenager: make small watercolour and pencil drawings of my most immediate surroundings.


they are far from matilda sharpe's little work of wonder, but they are little mementos of time spent by myself doing nothing much.

should you ever venture into the geffrye then make sure to try their carrot cake, laden with cream cheese frosting, basking in the absence of raisins and served by london's friendliest waiting staff it nourishes like nothing else.

studs on inkstuds

sammy harkham on
what things do

the interviews on inkstuds are one of my favourite things to listen to whilst working on comics and other graphics. one of their most recent interviews is with with jordan crane and sammy harkham about jordan's new online initiative what things do. jordan and sammy's observations about online comics are spot on. rather than writing about it more all i can say is go listen to it here.