You Can't Hear Music in a Comic Book

I once wrote a short story in college called "You Can't Hear Music in a Comic Book." It was based on my love of all things Josie and the Pussycats as a kid--and how my mind filled in the music I was never actually ever to hear from Josie and her band of scantily clad Pussycats. It wasn't a very good story--it was a STRETCH, where you try to milk MEANING from the flimsiest of sources. Yet, I always liked the title and it has stuck with me all these years later and it was buzzing in my mind when I made this comic for Skirt! Magazine based on my blog entry on mixed tapes.

I haven't drawn comics since college and I found the experience of this VERY satisfying. I think I like the one page form. I am an impatient person, and have always found the medium of comic book drawing TEDIOUSLY slow. I remember attempting my own version of a graphic novel--an autobiographical number on a childhood marked by divorce (or as I liked to say in the dramatic and oppression-crazy 199o's--a childhood SURVIVED through divorce). At the time I read Art Spiegelman's Maus books and thought I might (modestly) attempt something akin to it in scope. It took Spiegelman YEARS to create both books and they are researched and created with such incredible and beautiful detail, I look back on my 10 pages of sad, attempted HIGH DRAMA and realize just how FAR OFF I was. I remember my advisor Bill VanderClute (hello wherever you are Bill VanderClute!), looking at these pages and saying, "You don't think those tears are just a bit TOO MUCH?" I thought as a fellow SURVIVOR of divorce he'd be more UNDERSTANDING of what I was trying to do, but obviously, he was not familiar with the genius that is known as graphic ART. He also came to it like a writer who might be able to um, EDIT a story--and well, once I had inked in a single page that had taken me HOURS to create, he wanted me to CHANGE IT? Silly editing writer man.

After the semester I never went back to my attempts of serious comic book creating. I put it on my list of things that I would do in the future--right in between marrying River Phoenix and becoming a rock star. It was fun to return to the medium in a simpler and more specific form. Like so much else I have learned since college, it was a great example of break it down to the essentials, start small and create from what you know. And because I was familiar with the music depicted so assuredly in this comic, I swear I could hear a soundtrack blaring from those black and white boxes.