Dear Pepper

Why comics?

“Words and pictures together make something happen that is more than good or bad drawing. You don’t have to have any artistic skill to do this. You just need to be brave and sincere.”

-Lynda Barry, Making Comics

I asked my husband, cartoonist Dan Meth, to teach me to make comics while we were in lockdown because I kept pitching ideas for comics to him (about funny things that happened to us) and finally realized I should maybe try to make some myself. I was also inspired by Dan’s constant encouragement of my hesitant drawings, the wisdom of Lynda Barry books, and discovering the wide world of comics, from Little Nemo to 60s Marvel comic books to independent comics today.

Unlike most comics devotees, I arrived at the art form as an adult - I only read the occasional Garfield book and Sunday funnies as a kid. It’s not a language I learned to “speak” from a young age, but I do think learning about the depth and breadth of comics more recently, after decades of wrestling with literary forms, made me particularly aware of how versatile the medium is - welcoming of experimentation with form and materials, and capable of producing compelling results, no matter the skill level.

I started this newsletter with the dual intentions of sharing book opinions and comics, because I thought they might be fun things to get in one’s inbox (and so I would finish things!). I’m sharing my fledgling comic not because I think it’s good, but because I honestly would want to see anyone’s comics (including anyone receiving this message), if done with valor and sincerity, as Ms. Barry says, to see what they might make happen … just like I’m interested in anyone’s reading list. I also discovered that comics, more than anything I’ve tried to make, feel like something that wants to be shared. It seems odd to make a comic and not show it to someone.

I’ve gotten better over the years at not apologizing pre-emptively for flaws in things I make. (Julia Child says to serve food with “no apologies and no excuses,” which is really hard when you cook for people!) I will just say that I’m not a trained artist beyond public school art class. I wasn’t aiming for polish and I didn’t want to be sitting in front of a screen fussing with Photoshop. I wanted to make something with ink and paper. In that process, I had to accept that I’m terrible with rulers and my handwriting in all caps looks unhinged. (I think it gets worse when I try to be neat.) So I released myself from perfectionism and embraced the rawness.

Without further ado:

FIN

[Aside for those here for the book talk and no interest in comics: I recently reviewed two books I really liked for the Chicago Review of Books. The first is To Walk Alone in the Crowd, by Antonio Muñoz Molina, a novel in collage form that contains whole cities (notably Madrid and New York), the found poetry and absurdity of advertising, the quandary of nostalgia, ruminations on the lives of writer-flaneurs, the pleasures of analog life (like writing with a pencil)…. The other was Real Estate by Deborah Levy, the third instalment of her trilogy of books on the writing life that I’d recommend to just about anyone.]