Snapshot
Kate Beaton sums up her experience at APE this year with a drawing of fifteen characters, cartoonists, and friends from the event plus URL’s. It’s a fantastic drawing that makes you want to see Ms. B draw everyone’s comic for a month (if you didn’t already), and a great way to commemorate the event.
I could see it being a little more than that though. I’m betting that in ten years or so, it’ll also serve as a snapshot of a moment in a comics community, frozen in time like that photo of the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square.
People are always coming and going in comics. Communities are accidents that happen once in a while when a critical mass of like-minded artists stay in one physical or virtual place long enough to fall into each others’ orbits. They’re never permanent, but you can tell when they start generating the kinds of shared memories that will eventually earn that time and place a name—at least for those who were part of it.
This one doesn’t have a name yet, but it has a snapshot. Let’s just print it, put it in a envelope, mark it “Open in 2019” and see how things shake out.
March 3, 2021
“Hark! A vagrant” is one of the best things you can read on the internet. It shares with Dresden Kodac a certain unreliability, but worth the wait nevertheless. The amount of canadian history I checked on the wikipedia because of Ms.Beaton is a testament of her ability to communicate.
Her work is so curious to me. Her drawings seem simple and sloppy, but they always seem to not just capture but ESTABLISH essence. I grew up in South America, but her drawings of Sucre and Bolivar immediately replaced my internal images of those historical figures.
How does she do it?
Exactly!
How does she do it? How??
[…] “People are always coming and going in comics. Communities are accidents that happen once in a while when a critical mass of like-minded artists stay in one physical or virtual place long enough to fall into each others’ orbits. They’re never permanent, but you can tell when they start generating the kinds of shared memories that will eventually earn that time and place a name — at least for those who were part of it.” – Scott McCloud […]