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The Nao of Brown by Glyn Dillon

19 Feb

I’ve developed a fairly decent sense of restraint in my old age. Despite my ardent love of comics I will wait until a series is collected in trade paperback, or until I can find it at the library, or obtain it from my galley service. It’s not often that I glance through a book and immediately buy it because I must own it; but this is one of those books.

I had heard good things about it, of course, which is why I picked it up from the shelf in the first place. I knew that it had something to do with Buddhism, and that it had won lots of awards last year; but I hadn’t really properly seen it. And so last night, when I should have been working on my own comics, I devoured this one instead, and am better for it.

The Nao of Brown is the story of a young woman called Nao Brown; she is half-Japanese, half-British, and lives in London with a friend who is a nurse. Nao is a graphic designer in a bit of a downswing, recently dumped by her boyfriend and sacked from the job he had gotten her. She runs into an old friend from school who offers her a job in a geeky toy store that specializes in the kind of Japanese, anime-themed merchandise that Nao loves and knows about.

Nao has a Buddhist meditation practice and other strategies to help her combat her obsessive-compulsive disorder, which causes her to imagine violent things happening to others, especially those who are smaller than her (eg., children). Perhaps that is why she falls in love with Gregory, a burly appliance repairman who knows about Buddhism and Latin; but Gregory has issues of his own.

The Nao of Brown is not a perfect book, but it is so well-realized, from script to art to design. Like Blankets, Essex County, or Fun Home, it is an accomplished auteur piece that I would readily recommend to new readers or veterans alike.

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I’d Still Be Writing 2012 on My Cheques if I Still Wrote Cheques

14 Jan

…which is just a roundabout way of saying that I haven’t quite adjusted to the new year yet. The end of 2012 was a mad dash of holiday visiting and times with Nicole and Jack, then moving in to my new digs on Duke street, then getting back to work, part of which involved sorting out a new laptop and extracting work-related stuff from my Mac. Not to mention trying to get ahead of schedule on the webcomic, which is going reasonably well.

That said, the new year is treating me pretty well. I’m quite comfortable in my Duke street room, was able to squeeze a surprising amount of the stuff that I prefer to keep in it, and took the opportunity to get rid of some unnecessary junk at value village. My typical day involves sitting at my desk or on the bed and tapping away at the keyboard or scratching away on the Wacom while going through various series on Netflix. It’s like being in a kind of productive hibernation.

I should get off my ass and get back to running and meditating. One thing at a time, I suppose. At least I have been getting some reading done, most notably some books I got for Xmas: Corpse on the Imjin by Harvey Kurtzman, Came the Dawn by Wally Wood, The Year of the Beasts by Cecil Catellucci and Nate Powell, and The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt. Coming up are Pete Townshend’s autobiography and volumes 3 and 4 of the new volumes of Love and Rockets.

I’m heading up to Kingston this weekend, with a quick stop in Toronto on the way, to visit Nicole for a couple of weeks. I also need to book tickets for the second annual trip back up with Jack on the train for his March break. It’s a 24 hour trip; good thing he likes the train!

I’m hoping to find a Jot Touch pressure sensitive stylus while in Toronto to see how it works with Sketchbook Pro on the iPad. SBPro is a pretty impressive drawing app and I could easily see myself using it for general sketching and roughs for comics, once I have a stylus that allows for more precision than the cheap pinky-sized thing I have now. I’ll post some results once there is something to post.

For now, back to drawing. Hope your new year is going well.

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Appeal to the True Believers

24 Feb

As a Buddhist, I don’t consider myself a person of faith. But I respect those who do: Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindu, native American, whoever. I truly do. But your churches, man; the organizations that go around shooting off their mouths on your behalf, and less established fringe elements who do the same, they are starting to scare me.

And it must drive you crazy too. Here you are, trying to live your life in a decent way, enjoying the community and comfort you feel from attending your church and doing your charity work and so on, but when you turn on your TV news (especially in America), you are being spoken for by those who make you sound unreasonable at best; insane and heartless at worst.

The obvious recent example is the Republican nomination process, where a field of candidates, none of whom have a real-world chance of defeating the incumbent president, get inordinate amounts of attention from a press corps with so little imagination or initiative that they will “report” on the pandering and proclamations as if they reflected the average person of faith. Every passing day brings us stories of attempts to roll back civil rights and human rights in the name of what someone calls faith or scripture, but is in fact nothing less than bigotry.

I don’t think it’s enough to shake our heads and collectively ask “what are you gonna do?” If you care enough about your faith to observe it, then care enough to speak up for your community and challenge those who are trying to pervert what ought to be a message of peace. Instead of waiting around for your saviour to return and make the world right, have you ever considered the possibility that he is waiting for you?

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Sunday Morning

30 Oct

I don’t have anything special to say this morning, and I don’t like blogs where Every Post Is A Learning Opportunity, so I’m just going to write for a while and then I will stop. If you learn something, that is your problem.

I’m sitting on the couch in Nicole’s Kingston apartment, waiting for her to rouse herself after a late night. One of the side effects of our age difference is that she can sleep late in the way that only younger people can while I am usually up by 8. That’s life. We went to a Halloween party last night dressed as Spike and Drucilla from Buffy, complete with a blonde dye job for me. My hair is extremely yellow right now, I am not sure if I should cut it all off (as I usually would after dyeing it) or not. The party was fun, in a lovely home belonging to one of N’s fellow grad students. I enjoyed meeting and chatting with her classmates while discreetly devouring many cake balls.

I would rather have my eyes gouged out than go to see a new movie called Anonymous, which purports to explain how Shakespeare did not write his plays. This idea is idiotic and repugnant on many levels; this fellow explains it far better than I. I am particularly disappointed that one of my favourite critics, Roger Ebert, has given it 3 1/2 stars, apparently claiming that whatever one may feel about the material, it is a well made film with an “ingenious” script. It’s a shame that a man who has won Pulitzer prizes for film criticism should dignify this material with such an apology. If I were to make a film that denies the Holocaust, with a really ingenious script, I guess I can expect his support. After all, what does the truth matter when there are movie tickets to sell and column inches to fill?

On the other hand, I did just finish a fine young adult novel by Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials and the Sally Lockhart trilogy. Unlike many of his novels, The Broken Bridge is not an explicit adaptation of a fairy tale; though it does have some voodoo. The novel is about a mixed race teenaged girl who lives in Wales with her white father. She soon discovers that she has a half-brother and starts to investigate the other loose threads of her family history, especially the fate of her mother, a painter from Haiti. Like all of the best YA fiction, The Broken Bridge combines coming of age lessons with a discussion of the problems that stick with us well into adulthood.

Age has been on my mind lately, for a number of reasons, some private and relatively unique to me and others that I’m sure are pretty common for anyone at this time of life. The Middle Ages. :)  I get teased sometimes by “friends” for being older. I try not to let it bother me, but sometimes it does. I am not really afraid of getting older, I think I can truthfully say that I am happier on the average day now than I have ever been. My age is only part of that; most of the  positive facets of my current situation (Nicole, Jack, my job) could have come along at other times. I suppose one of the advantages of being older is having the wisdom (for lack of a better word) to know a good thing when you see it, to hang on to it and appreciate it. Like life itself, I suppose.

Enough of that, I don’t want to get maudlin on this cool autumn morning. A stunning young woman is sleeping it off in the next room. A contented cat dozes beside me on the couch, and I’m sure her sister holds a similar vigil over Nicole. A week from now I will be on the train again, missing my fiancee but excited to see Jack again. I will continue to fill my hours with the work I choose to do, to make the money that allows me to live this life; and the work I want or even need to do, be it writing, drawing, meditating, or whatever else I choose to help me understand my little corner of the world. Plus the occasional indulgence: a salted caramel hot chocolate from Starbuck’s, an expensive art or design magazine, an evening of gaming.

It sounds so simple as I write it. Of course it isn’t; I suffer from irrational fears and cravings and worries as much as the next person, and as a Buddhist I try to be aware of those things and keep them in their place. Maybe I feel good about life lately because I succeed at keeping that perspective more often than I used to. When I think about myself in the past, how I carried that chip on my shoulder and felt so angry so often… I don’t miss that guy.

I think that’s enough for today. To the guy who just drove by blasting Foreigner’s “I Want To Know What Love Is”, I can’t say that I agree with your choices but I respect your courage.

Occupy My Ass

16 Oct

“So join the struggle while you may/ the revolution is just a t-shirt away” – Billy Bragg

Yesterday was “Occupy Day,” where concerned citizens around the world protested in their town squares and in front of government buildings because The System Is Broken and they are The 99% and assorted other catchphrases.

Don’t get me wrong. I am well aware that there are inequities, perceived and real, in the distribution of wealth around the world. Perhaps because of the news cycle and assorted documentaries, I almost feel like I know more about the US and UK/European systems than I do about ours. I think, for example, that it is basically criminal that the US congress is influenced to the extent that it is by lobbyists. I think that the system – the one on the books – would work just fine if people actually adhered to the process instead of shrugging and saying that they have no choice but to work within generations of corruption.

I’m glad that the American people in particular seem to be waking up and hitting a breaking point; fighting back, even if it is largely an empty gesture at this point. Pundits are talking about what fortunate timing it is for Obama, energizing the Left just as the election campaign gets underway. As if he was ever going to lose to the assortment of non-starters and chumps in the Republican party!

I don’t have much patience for this “me-too” protesting. The US is in dire fucking straits. We Canadians are not. Our financial system is the envy of the globe. Times are tight, to be sure, and we do have some assholes in power, but our nation is paradise compared to most others in the world. We owe it to them to set an example, and not by shouting vague slogans or marching in a protest one day and then going back to your everyday life.

You think The Man cares about your protest? He doesn’t. Because the truth is that you are The Man. I am The Man. We are all The Man. We are the ones who vote – or should. We are the ones who can hold our elected officials accountable – but we often don’t. We are the ones who can write and call and demand justice – but hey, Grey’s is on. We are the ones who have been like clerks in a jewelry store who keep our backs turned while one thief after another comes in and pilfer everything we have, suddenly rousing ourselves to turn around for a moment and yell “hey! stop!”

Effecting change, real change, takes more than a day. It takes years, generations. In my own lifetime I have seen women, minorities, gay people and others struggle and obtain significant gains in society. I have also seen corporations and the bastard children of Reaganite economists consolidate wealth, lowering our standards and expectations and convincing us that it’s better that way. That Costco is a good shopping experience, that East Side Mario’s is fine dining, that Dr. Phil is helping people, and everyone can be a star one way or another.

If you don’t want the overlords to treat you like sheep, stop acting like one.

The Next Phase

4 Sep

Where does the time go? 16 months ago (more or less), Nicole finished her MA and moved back to Saint John to live with me. We adopted a couple of kittens. We knew that she would leave again to start her PhD somewhere but it seemed so far away; and now, to paraphrase Steve Jobs, that day has come. As I write this, she is approaching the Ontario border, driven by her very patient father with the now-grown-up cats in their carriers and all of her stuff in a trailer.

I don’t think I had quite prepared myself for this day. I’m sad, of course, though not nearly as much as when she went away to Toronto. At least this time we are still a couple and we already know that I will be going to visit in a couple of weeks; even more comforting to know that we are to be married at the halfway point of her time away. Mostly it just feels strange – and wrong – to be in this huge apartment on my own.

Fortunately, I won’t have to worry about that for long. I am moving later this month into a smaller, and I think nicer place on Queen’s Square, so I am looking forward to that. In the meantime I must get this place cleaned up and the rest of my stuff packed. I am challenging myself to shed possessions as I go and doing all right so far. Part of it is simply the zen philosophy which I do believe in quite strongly (despite my sometimes less-than-skillful execution); the less things you own, the less you have to worry about maintaining and caring for, and as a result the more energy you can devote to the important things.

And so it goes. Watch this space as developments continue for the new place and Nicole’s blog for news on hers.

43

16 Aug

Yup, I turned 43 on Saturday. Thanks to my friends who got me a cake and sang on Friday night after our sketch show, and who came over to hang out and play Magic: The Gathering on the actual day. It was a pleasant (albeit dorky) weekend all in all. I had fun doing the comedy sketches and seeing others in theirs, I probably could have been a little more off-book but it worked out all right. I taught Jack how to play a simplified version of Magic (no spell cards, only land and creatures and the luck of the draw) and he enjoyed beating me as a result.

How do I feel about being 43? About the same as being 42. We number-obsessed humans haven’t attached much importance to 43 that I know of. It’s a prime number, I suppose? Good to be back in my prime, ha ha *cough*.

Coincidentally, as part of the upcoming moving preparations I have been going through my boxes of old stuff and trying to weed out as many old papers and things as I can. This has led to some nice discoveries, like a nice note I got once from Julius Schwartz, and some baffling ones, like pay stubs from over 20 years ago. Yesterday I went through a box of correspondence, some of which dated over 20 years. I decided to keep a letter from each correspondent for my files and consigned the rest to history.

For over 20 years I was a member and sometimes guy-in-charge of an APA, or Amateur Press Association, called APA Centauri. I was the longest-serving member, served as Central Mailer for the longest time altogether, contributed the most pages. A lot of myself was wrapped up in the rising and falling fortunes of AC for a while. I made some good friends there, had some spats with others, and I suppose in a way it was a kind of surrogate family for a while. I have something like 6 bankers’ boxes worth of APA mailings to cart around with me, thousands of pages of other peoples’ zines that I will almost certainly never read again. And yet, I hate to let them go.

From a Buddhist standpoint I certainly understand the need to break unreasonable attachments to things, be they objects or one’s past. But, as an artist and writer I think it is also important to keep a file of one’s old works, for reference and to see how one has developed. So, like any good Buddhist, I must find the middle path here, and I think the solution will be to choose a few favourite old mailings and then strip my zines out of the rest for my files. I had considered scanning them and keeping them on disc or online but I expect a few of my old mates would not really like to see their old zines on the internet a decade or two later.

One nice discovery from yesterday was a note from the mother of an AC member who died due to complications from diabetes in the mid-90s. I had sent her a drawing of the eternal flame that burns in London, ON near a statue of Frederick Banting, the doctor who discovered insulin. Her mother thanked me for the drawing and said that Melisa enjoyed looking at it from her hospital bed before she died. Not long after that, Melisa’s mother died too. All these years later, America still hasn’t fixed its health care system.

I think that as we get older we gain comfort from knowing that we have touched others’ lives, be it as parents or friends or creative people or just strangers. Whenever I feel glum about what I feel is a relative lack of accomplishment as a writer or artist or academic or whatever else, I remember the lonely and completely unnecessary death of a young woman in Tennessee who I never met, and I am humbled.

It’s the Economy, Stupid

12 Aug

The new regime is working well so far. Most mornings this week I have been able to get up at 6:30, go for a run, check in with Wii Fit, shower, meditate, have breakfast, and generally get organized for the day before logging in to work at 8:30.

I am connected to the internet all day but apart from some podcasts and cryptic remarks that people make on Twitter, I don’t follow much news. I know that there was some rioting in England this week and that various persons were tut-tutting about the welfare state and the opportunistic chavs and so forth, but to me it is like a flashback to thirty years ago in Thatcher’s Britain, filled with unemployed and angry youth, the problem then much as it is now: the economy. If only the angry British youth of today were smashing the windows of the banks and brokers that are truly responsible for their situation, rather than corner shops and electronics dealers.

My use of Google plus and its related tools continues more or less successfully, though it is a little disappointing that the adoption rate has slowed significantly after the first couple of weeks; unless of course people just aren’t adding me to their circles, which is certainly possible. I am using Facebook less and less all the time and rarely open Twitter now, since I get both of their feeds in G+, so that makes me happy. Which is actually sad, I suppose.

Tonight is the opening night for the show of Shakespeare-themed sketch comedy that a bunch of us are doing as part of Theatre on the Edge. I am fortunate to be in an SCTV sketch, a well-known Wayne & Shuster sketch, and a scene from Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead with Nicole. It’s shaping up to be a good show, so get out to 112 Princess tonight or Sunday at 7:30 and check it out.

When not working or rehearsing, I have been sorting through boxes of old junk, separating it into things to keep, things to give to charity, and things to throw away. For a guy whose philosophy espouses not clinging to material objects, I sure do have a lot of old shit that I have been hanging on to for no good reason; just sentimentality and in some cases, maintaining a fiction of past happiness. So, I am trying to be unsentimental now, limiting certain types of keepsakes to just one banker’s box.

A nice side effect of this archaeology is finding stuff that I had completely forgotten about, like a nice note from the late DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz, thanking me for a drawing I sent him after the passing of Gil Kane and encouraging me in my own comics work at the time. Schwartz and Kane and I had a mutual female friend who has worked as a writer in various media, though not comics that I am aware of, and she was one of the “Juliettes”, a companion for Julie at SF cons who helped him get around, went to dinner with him and so on. Apparently some people used to raise their eyebrows about these ladies at the time, but my friend assured me that these were completely nonsexual escorts, giving Julie some much needed assistance at insane fan events and giving the women in question access to one of the grand old men of the business and his contacts.

Seeing the letter reminded me of the recent brouhaha about women in comics, DC in particular. In retrospect Julie and his companions seem like a paternalistic arrangement to be sure, but if it helped encourage young women to work in comics, I can think of worse outcomes. In a way it strikes me as similar to the many mentorship and apprenticeship-based reality shows that are now on television. Meanwhile, the best assessment of the issue I have seen so far came from Meredith Gran, who has a perfect solution for getting women into comics: pay them.

Finally, a plug for a podcast I started listening to this week: Michael Ian Black and his Ed co-star Tom Cavanaugh meet every week to eat and discuss snacks, with some digression. Funny stuff.

Where It’s At

16 Jul

So here’s what’s been up with me this week.

Work, lots of it. Last week was crazy workwise. some very late nights to hit a deadline and some other stuff going on. This week was more stable but still pretty full. I like my job, I like feeling like I am getting better at doing it. I like being challenged, being able to work from home, and so on. It’s not sunshine and roses all the time but it’s probably the best staff gig I have had in a long time, if not ever.

As a result of this, I have been thinking lately about my other “career” during the last few years: freelancing as a writer and especially as a designer. I wasn’t too successful at it. Part of the reason for that is that freelancing is just plain difficult; it demands even crazier hours and time and attention than a “regular” job, plus you have to be your own salesperson and accountant and manager, none of which I enjoy. Plus, if I am quite honest with myself, I am just not as good a designer as many of my competitors. What skills I had ten years ago have been inconsistently buttressed over the years with small client website and print jobs. I didn’t stay sharp and as a result, my portfolio and skillset are weak.

You can only do so many things if you want to do them well. So, I’m no longer doing design for money, even if I get fired tomorrow. Maybe someday I would be interested in brushing up on those skills again (or maybe technology will change again to eliminate some of that learning curve), but for now and the forseeable future, writing is what puts food on my table. It feels good to simplify like that.

Which brings me to drawing. Because of the aforementioned work, I didn’t get as much done as I would have liked lately but it is creeping back in. I’m making some comics for a local music and multimedia project over the summer and having a blast doing it. I’m really enjoying using Manga Studio as a drawing tool with my decade-old Wacom tablet. If I could make a living doing illustration and making comics, I certainly would, but again, that is not going to happen anytime soon; partly because my skills aren’t there yet, mostly because it would require even more time that I don’t have. So, it’s my hobby, but unlike the many other hobbies I have had for the last 25 years or so, it seems to be the one that I never lose interest in.

The annual Theatre on the Edge Festival is coming up about a month from now, and I will be performing with friends in some improv shows and some Shakespeare-themed sketch shows, so that should be fun. It will be nice to be in a scene with Nicole again before she moves away to Kingston, ON to start her PhD. I feel like that will be the first of several big changes in my life; changes that are largely good but changes nonetheless. Not long after she moves, I plan to move too, hopefully somewhere else uptown, to a smaller and less expensive apartment. I’ll be traveling by train every few weeks to see her and making adjustments to my work life as required.

Later this month I pay off a loan that has hung over my head for about 6 years, so that should give me some much needed financial breathing room and a little more flexibility. I don’t like being this age and living from paycheck to paycheck, with not much in the way of savings or investments. I will continue to pay down my debts and try to start saving in earnest so that if there is some kind of catastrophe, I have more of a cushion than selling all of my stuff to get by. I’ve gotten rid of so many possessions over the last few years; as a Buddhist I certainly don’t mind it, but when you pare your life down to the stuff you need every day, it makes it harder still to shed those things, especially if the only reason to do so is bad finances. That said, I’m proud of myself for sticking it out and paying off the loan. It hasn’t been easy. I hope I am never in that kind of debt again.

In far less important matters, I started using Google Plus, and that has led me to using Google Reader (I know, welcome to 2008), Chrome, Google Docs, Gmail again instead of Mail.app. You win, Google. I haven’t dropped Facebook yet but I like all this centralized, sort-of-open-sourced, nice-interfaced, Farmville-less new frontier.

Meanwhile the US is broke (I originally typed broken; I guess that works too). The leader of the IMF is a rapist. Belgium has been without a government for 13 months and may break into two nations, leading to even more discord in Europe and perhaps the breakup of the EU itself. People are starving and terrorized in Africa, but still not enough for the West to do anything about it. I turn 43 in August and some days it feels like I am struggling to think clearly; or is it that I am only now thinking clearly after years of not doing so? My little troubles seem so insignificant, and I suppose they are in the grand scheme. All the same I feel like I should do what I can to stabilize my own small section of the world and do what I can to help others.

It feels like summer is going fast.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

25 Feb

Life is a blur these days. Rehearsals for Black Comedy, busy times at work, spending time with Jack and Nicole, and so on.

Nicole has been accepted to grad school at Queen’s, and is waiting to hear back from the others, so she’ll be deciding where to move in the fall soon. Hard to believe that I’ll be moving her somewhere in only six months, and going back to commuting. I’ll miss her of course, but I don’t mind the travel, and of course we have wedding plans in case things aren’t interesting enough.

As a result of this, I too plan on moving in the fall, to a smaller apartment hopefully somewhere uptown, with the hope that the money I save on rent will offset travel costs. I should also be done paying off a consolidation loan by then, so that will help. I like my apartment, have lived here a long time, but it’s really too much space for one guy and his son. The local Buddhist group that used to meet here weekly has grown over the last year to the point where “The Sitting Room” was getting cramped, so they have found a new space and I am back to sitting on my own most days. That’s cool; if there is one thing that Buddhism teaches, it is that life is impermanent. We are constantly changing, in subtle and not so subtle ways, every moment.

Nicole and I have been watching the entire series of Lost (first time for her) and are just starting the last season. I had forgotten how many great moments there were once the show found its momentum again at the end of Season 3. We should probably do Battlestar: Galactica next…

I’ve been spending most of my downtime playing DC Universe Online, reading Inspector Rebus novels, and working on “The Last Day.” I managed to fix my PS3 last weekend after it displayed the Yellow Light of Death; the solder needed reflowing under the processors. It’s nice to work with your hands sometimes, even if it’s with circuit boards.

A couple of housekeeping notes: I have added new links to some old comics on the “My Comics” page, added a new page of links to my plays, and have posted an interview I did for Here newspaper earlier this year over at The Last Day site. My cheeky webcomic, “Are We Not Batmen?” updates on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Thanks for reading.

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