Nick Flynn’s BEING FLYNN… the back story

I first met Nick Flynn back in the fall of 1999, in Provincetown, Massachusetts. I had accompanied Sari there for her Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, a residency which would keep us in P-town through the winter and into the following spring. Nick was a second-year fellow, and Sari and I were immediately drawn to his charm, intelligence, and good humor.

Nick was a natural storyteller, and had some amazing stories to tell, about a life filled with drama, heartbreak, debauchery—all that good stuff. By trade, he was a poet—a good one—and over the years he and I did some collaborations, basically me adapting his poems into comics. One of the pieces, “Father Outside,” had to do with the time Nick was working in a homeless shelter and his long-estranged father arrived as a new client. Another piece, “Bag of Mice,” dealt with Nick’s mother’s suicide. In all, we did three collaborations, all of which were published in literary journals (and later published my me in The Vagabonds #2). The original art from our first piece, “Cartoon Physics, Part One,” even traveled as part of a multi-city comics art exhibition.

In 2004, Nick published a memoir, memorably titled Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. (That was a favorite phrase of his father’s.) Nick hoped to collaborate again with me on the cover of the book (which was being published by W.W. Norton, much later to be my publisher for The Influencing Machine.) So we worked together on some sketches. Long story short, Norton declined to use my art for the cover (though it was eventually published as a frontspiece in the British Faber & Faber edition). And I have to admit that the art they used instead, by Hon-Sum Cheng, is far superior.

So, fast forward eight years, and Nick’s book has been made into a feature film. Now called Being Flynn (you can see why they didn’t use the other title), it stars Paul Dano as Nick and the legendary Robert DeNiro as Nick’s father. Julianne Moore makes an appearance as Nick’s mom—not a bad cast! The film opened last week, so to commemorate it, I’m sharing the book’s rejected cover art.

Pull Up Those PIIGS!

My mother, Martha Rosler, and I have just collaborated on a public art piece in central Berlin. It’s on the topic of the ongoing European debt crisis, and it’ll be on display on the building (at Auguststraße 10, 10117 Berlin, Germany) until the end of November. (I wasn’t aware of this beforehand, but “PIIGS” is an acronym used by international bond analysts, academics, and the economic press to refer to the economies of Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain in regard to sovereign debt markets.)

My mom came up with the concept and text, and I did the illustration. The project was commissioned by DAAD (in English, the German Academic Exchange Service). My mother is in Berlin for a year on a residency sponsored by DAAD. This is the second large public art collaboration I’ve done with her, the first being part of the MAK Center’s “How Many Billboards?” project from last year.

The piece is quite massive, approximately 35′ x 42.’ Here’s a photo:

Pull Up Those PIIGS!

This is how the building normally looks (without the palm trees), sorry about the weird cropping:

And here’s a link to a larger version of the original illo, complete with the groovy yellow-green background which they had to cut out for print-compatibility reasons…

9/11 + 10

On September 11, 2001, I had actually woken up early (for me, at that time, pre-Phoebe). I had gotten up at 8 am so I could go with Sari to vote in the N.Y. primary election being held that day. (The election was later cancelled and rescheduled.) Then Sari went off on the subway to work at her job near Madison Square Park in Manhattan, where her train unknowingly passed under the World Trade Center right as the first plane hit the North Tower. By the time Sari made it to work, the second tower had also been hit. I called her at work to relay the news, and the South tower fell as we were talking, which cut us off.

Though I was able to reconnect with Sari a short time later, I spent much of the morning freaking out, watching the second tower fall from the roof of my building, and meeting up in Park Slope with my good buddy Dean Haspiel (aka ). It was all too stunning, surreal, and horrific to truly understand.

Sari left work shortly after the second tower fell and watched TV, and the smoking craters, from the balcony of her sister-in-law's house. She finally decided to walk home over the Manhattan Bridge, where I met her later in the afternoon.

I tell the rest of the story in my three-page comic "Song for September 11," which you can read on ACT-I-VATE. Shortly after 9/11, Alternative Comics publisher Jeff Mason suggested doing a benefit anthology for the Red Cross, and I was invited to contribute. I wrote and drew the piece in November 2001 and it was published in the anthology 9/11: Emergency Relief in January 2002. You can read a little background about the piece on Comic Book Resources. The Library of Congress asked me for the original art for "Song for September 11;" the pages are now in their archives in Washington, D.C.

In 2006, on the 5th anniversary of 9/11, I did another 9/11-related piece, the one-page "Post-Traumatic Skyscraper Anxiety," which you can also read on ACT-I-VATE. The piece was recently published in print in Cousin Corrinne's Reminder #3. There's a video of me reading the piece here.

In many ways the experience of 9/11 led me to volunteering for the Red Cross after Hurricane Katrina. Both catastrophes led me to make art. I muse on the connection in the paper, "Filtering Catastrophe Through Comics," which I wrote for a panel I was on earlier this year.

As I listen to the roll-call of names of those lost on September 11 at the World Trade Center, I devoutly hope to never witness such tragedy again.

Seth Kushner’s HARVEY PEKAR Tribute

Today is the one-year anniversary of Harvey Pekar‘s death. One of the more extraordinary homages appearing today is Seth Kushner’s photo comic, "Harvey Pekar: Tribute to ‘Our Man.’" (It’s #25 of Seth’s CulturePop series on ACT-I-VATE.) Weaving wonderful photos of Harvey with Pekar’s own words, it takes the reader through his remarkable life and career. People like Harvey’s wife Joyce Brabner, the filmmakers behind the American Splendor movie, and collaborators like Dean ( ) Haspiel, Jeff () Newelt, and Joseph Remnant make appearances as well. (Oh, and I’m in there too.) It’s memoir, it’s photography, it’s comics — it’s Seth’s unique form of creative expression. Please check it out: http://act-i-vate.com/104-25-1.comic.

P.S. Another nice tribute is KCRW’s re-broadcast of a 2003 conversation between Harvey and Elvis Mitchell: http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/tt/tt030813harvey_pekar

Now up on ACT-I-VATE: “Operation Les Subs”

I'm back home from Lyon and still processing the incredibly, energizing experience of Les Subsistances' "Points de vue, Nouvelles du monde" festival. Today I'm posting the photo comic which served as the introduction to each of my nightly performances. I produced the photocomic in the two days (June 21 –June 22) leading up to the festival. It's a satirical look at the "journaliste BD"'s process of producing a daily comic on the news. (This is an English version — the original is in French.) The beautiful and talented Sari Wilson took the photos.

Once the 120 members of the audience had entered and were seated, the photo comic was projected on a screen, accompanied by a soundtrack. I was waiting in the wings, out of view. Right as the last image came on the screen, I burst into the room (to some applause!), and distributed copies of the day's comic to the crowd. Then (with the help of a translator) I presented the comic on the projector as the audience followed along.

I've set this up so it's Chapter 1 of the "Points de vue" comic. Chapter 2 is my first 8-page mini-mini, on Chinese dissident artist Ai Wei Wei. Chapter 3 is the 8-pager I did on Friday, on the exorbitant fines being handed out to bloggers in Taiwan. Tomorrow, I'll post Chapter 4, the 8-page comic I did on Saturday, the festival's final day.

Now up on ACT-I-VATE, “Ai Weiwei: Free in Body, not in Voice”

Today is the final day of Les Subsistances‘ "Points de vue, Nouvelles du monde" festival. It’s been a thrilling — and exhausting — journey. I’ve really enjoyed mixing with the rest of the participants: Congolese dancer Faustin Linyekula, French experimental theatre company Hauts & Court, Italian theatre troupe Compagny Motus, American radio producer Benjamen Walker, French anthropologist & writer Eric Chauvier, and Haitian-Candian writer Dany Laferrière.

In the two days leading up to the festival, Sari & shot and put together a satirical fumetti (photo comic) about my process as a "journaliste BD." And then each day I researched, wrote, drew, and assembled an eight-page mini-comic in response to a news event of the day. For the first day of the festival (Thursday, June 23, 2011) I chose a story about Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei and his release that day from prison.

I’ve just posted the comic up on ACT-I-VATE. I’ve got to get to work on today’s project now, but if I have time I will post yesterday’s project a bit later. Enjoy…

TragiComix

Friday, our last day with the Burmese professionals, was taken up with an exercise dreamt up by my French compatriot Émile Bravo (currently the recipient of three Eisner Award nominations for his recent book My Mommy Is In America And She Met Buffalo Bill!). The assignment was to take a “tragic” event from your life and depict it in a humorous way.

I loved the idea of the exercise, and think it’s a wonderful way to get beginning cartoonists to flex their creativity, but for some reason I had a terrible time with it. It’s not that I’ve lived a charmed life and have no sad stories to tell — far from it — but I just found it incredibly difficult to boil one of those stories down — to a one- or two-page comics story no less! As the other artists set to work right away, I sat there sweating, running different ideas through my mind — and rejecting all of them. I even left the room and stalked around the grounds of the American Center, attempting to clear my mind and find the right story. By the time a half hour had passed and I still had nothing, it became a joke, as Émile and Badoux saw me agonizing over the assignment. It got so extreme I was even thinking my story should be my anguish at trying to find the right story!

Finally, however, I settled on an incident from my deep past, when I was but a babe. I had to scramble to plot out the piece, and pencil and ink it, all within the three-hour time allotted. The end result isn’t quite the masterpiece I had hoped, but it’s not awful…

For an example of how a master works, here’s Émile’s simple solution — just one of at least three different stories he came up with on the spot for this assignment. Sheesh — what a show-off!

R. Crumb, tailor

I guess The Book of Genesis didn’t do as well for Crumb as he hoped. I shot this outside a tailor shop on Henry St. in Brooklyn. If you need anything taken in or shortened, please give Bob the work

My ten favorite comics/graphic novels of the decade

As things wind down, prompted by the Daily Cross Hatch, here are my picks of the 00s, in no particular order…

• Safe Area Gorazde, by Joe Sacco
• Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel
• Ice Haven, by Daniel Clowes
• Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi
• Asterios Polyp, by David Mazzucchelli
• Blankets, by Craig Thompson
• The Salon, by Nick Bertozzi
• Identity Crisis, by Brad Meltzer, Rags Morales, and Michael Bair
• All-Star Superman, by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely
• Y, the Last Man, by Brian K. Vaughan and (mostly) Pia Guerra

My picks for best graphic novels of ’09

The website The Daily Cross Hatch has just posted its year-end popularity list, "The Best Damned Comics of 2009 Chosen by the Artists." Here are my picks (in no particular order):

• Masterpiece Comics by R. Sikoryak — I’ve loved Sikoryak’s comics for years, and this beautiful volume collects all his “mash-ups” of high and low, merging the look of classic strips and comics with stories from the Western literary canon. Bob Kane’s Batman vs. Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment! Blondie & Dagwood vs Adam & Eve! Siegel & Shuster’s Superman vs. Camus’ The Stranger! Hilarious, clever, and yet designed to make you think…
• The Book of Genesis by R. Crumb — A formidable work, filled with respect for the material yet still pulsing with the earthy, pungent humanity that Crumb defines. And the man has lost nothing in the cross-hatching department
• Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli — Maybe the best fusion of art & words yet produced, the pinnacle of what defines comics. A true work of literature by one of my all-time favorite cartoonists. If only we didn’t have to wait a decade for each new book of his!
• ACT-I-VATE Primer — Beautifully produced anthology featuring some of my favorite cartoonists: Dean Haspiel, Michel Fiffe, Mike Dawson, Nick Bertozzi, Tim Hamilton, Leland Purvis, Joe Infurnari, and Simon Fraser, just to name a few. Cleverly, each of the stories in the book is a print-only example of the ongoing free stories on the ACT-I-VATE website.
• Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays, edited by Brendan Burford — I know, I shouldn’t be allowed to nominate this because I’m a contributor, but my piece is entirely forgettable, while the rest of this anthology is top-notch. Syncopated features 16 nonfiction stories ranging from from the history of vintage postcards to the glory days of old Coney Island, from the secret world of graffiti artists to the chess champs of Greenwich Village, from the Tulsa race riots of 1921 to the interrogation of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. Contributors include editor Burford, Nick Bertozzi, Alex Holden, Greg Cook, Jim Campbell, and Paul Karasik.

It was really hard limiting my list to just five books, so here are five more 2009 GNs which merit an "Honorable Mention":

• A Mess of Everything by Miss Lasko-Gross
• Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451: The Authorized Adaptation by Tim Hamilton
• Some New Kind of Slaughter: Lost in The Flood (and How We Found Home Again) by A. David Lewis And mpMann
• Stitches: A Memoir by David Small
• The Imposter’s Daughter: A True Memoir by Laurie Sandell
• ‘08: A Graphic Diary Of the Campaign Trail by Michael Crowley and Dan Goldman