It's All Geek To Me

I am a comics illiterate, and maybe even a comics Philistine. In my entire life I have never purchased a single comic book. When I was a kid and still reading newspapers that had funny pages, I liked Nancy and Blondie and Archie - which is probably as cool as saying your favorite musician is Ashlee Simpson. During college I would chuckle over my friends' copies of Peter Bagge's HATE, and I truly believe that Matt Groening has made the modern world a better place, but for the most part I just don't get it. The realm of comics seems like an exclusive boy genius club that communicates in codes and dialects I can't be bothered to learn.
    However, "party" is a language I speak, so I happily attended Friday and Saturday night's opening soirees for the massive Masters of American Comics exhibition at the Hammer Museum and the LA MOCA, bringing along Andrew, a certified comics geek, to do the translating for me. I think it's safe to say I've been schooled - which doesn't mean I suddenly relate to American Splendor or that I'll be funneling my lunch money into the latest graphic novel - but the 20th Century spanning survey was almost like a window into the American unconscious. I came away thinking about childhood fantasies, our changing ideals of masculinity and femininity, and the ways we confront life's challenges, both the grand public ones and the secret, personal ones.
    At both events the celebrity quotient was just about nil (blame that dorky image thing), but the bigwigs of the funny business were definitely in the house. Despite my ignorance I managed to snap this picture of Gary Panter, Chris Ware, Sunday Press publisher Peter Maresca, Art Spiegelman, and Matt Groening at MOCA.
The thing about all these guys is, they seem like people you want to know. Gary Panter, in orange, joked that he'd shook so many hands the night before, he had a blister on his finger. "I felt like Eisenhower," he said.
    My friend Andrew, pictured here with the show's curator John Carlin, was definitely a little star struck. "I met Matt Groening, I can leave at any time," he said with a loopy grin. Groening, a longtime LA Weekly contributor, jokingly complained that in all his years of working for the Weekly he's never once been invited to the office - and he lives in LA! I think this would be a fine time to have him up for tea - or roast beef sandwiches, which perplexingly were the sole item served at the MOCA fete.
Andrew asked John about the somewhat controversial exclusion of  Daniel Clowes of Ghost World fame, and John said that was one of his biggest regrets of the whole show. "We only had fifteen artists, though," he pointed out, explaining that he'd cut the list down from forty. Carlin said his next exhibit will be a retrospective of the work of Art Spiegelman, who was awarded a Pulitzer in 1992 for the Holocaust tale Maus. Standing before the haunting, beautiful drawings, I did experience a moment where I was pulled into the imagery and the decades of pain that had found catharsis on the page. For a second or two there, I think I was fluent in Geek.
   
posted by Steffie Nelson

Comments

[Hanna]

of (or run into) online and ofnlife. These are comics from our childhood, such as Tintin & Life in Hell, as well as new internet comics such as Not From

[Adittiya]

Wow! So many comments!Mike At first I wasn't sure what you meant by the exact same boat, since I minteon about three different boats in this comic, but I'm guessing you're talking about trying to get better at the business side of comics.Jon I also want to focus on being a better artist and storyteller, but I don't really compartmentalize it from the business side. Getting it out there is part of the process for me.Vas I'll do what I can. Comics is a notoriously rough business, so even if I eke out a profit of $11 it will be worth trying.Bobby Glad to have you back!Lance If I was just doing this for financial gain, I would have quit years ago. I don't even know if I'll ever break even on this. Although I'm not sure if being a cartoonist and making money need to be mutually exclusive.I kind of want to make another comic about this to go into further detail about what I meant.