A salute to comics

Do you know how excited I am to see our comic submissions increase in number with each issue? Comics are not an easy thing to create, and to find or create one to relate to our theme makes submitting even more difficult! So thank you, all you comic submitters - I appreciate you! (and I appreciate everyone who submits to 5x5, but today we're celebrating the comics).

So let's call this Comics Appreciation day! I can think of plenty of printed comics that I love love love (Scott Pilgrim? Blankets? American Splendor?), but I want to focus on web comics. I love that even though the internet is infinite, so many people manage to avoid the urge to simply go overboard and create a comic of ginormous proportions. If you've been trying to figure out comics for yourself, consider this: less is more! When you have multiple panels to express an idea, why not find the simplest way of putting it? You might be surprised by how limitations can bring out your creativity.

Check out two of my most favorite web comics, I promise you won't be disappointed:


American Elf, August 10th 2011

Jame's Kochalka's American Elf can, admittedly, be found in print, I enjoy taking the time to click through the extensive archive. James Kolchalka has been creating a single comic documenting something that happened to him each day since October of 1998. I started reading American Elf in college and can still remember getting a little emotional over the birth of his son! Each comic leaves me feeling satisfied, like I can totally understand a simple yet strong emotion that another person felt. That's a pretty impressive feat for four panels.


Hark, A Vagrant: Viking Comic, Redone

Oh my goodness, do I love me some Hark, A Vagrant and you will too if you like any of the following: history of Cananda, history of America, history of music, history in general, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, silly teenagers, ponies, Edward Gorey, and/or Nancy Drew. All of these things and more come up in Kate Beaton's hilarious web comic. Hark, A Vagrant doesn't have a continual storyline, but covers a different topic with each update - and they are all hilarious. Kate is smart and funny and deserves way way more recognition!


Do you have any recommendations for me? What do you read?

The Economy

Maybe you heard about the recent government shutdown here in Minnesota.  It's up and running now, just in time for me to receive my new tabs for my car.  My wife volunteers at a women's shelter, which would have been closed during the shutdown if not for volunteers stepping in to do the work of the regular employees.  The employees, although passionate about the work they do, were not allowed to volunteer.  Labor laws and all, which makes sense but also makes you feel like your hands are tied behind your back.  Politicians did finally find a way to work together, though.  Unfortunately, one of the areas they cut was education, to the tune of $700 million.  One district had to borrow money just to pay their previous expenses, the fees and interest from which equal the salary and benefits of a teacher.  And they expect to borrow more.

In addition to this, economists are predicting another recession.  Since we still haven't fully recovered from the last recession, this one will hit harder.

Where does 5x5 fit into all this?  We're just about to drop our filing papers in the mail to become an official nonprofit organization.  Literally, I'm going to make a few copies and send it off.  This means we can apply for grants for which we weren't previously eligible.  With the economy the way it is, there will be fewer grants to apply for, and the ones that are available will be more competitive.  We're not too worried about that though.

Thanks to our readers, contributors and donors, we have never had to step backwards.  We've only grown in the last two and a half years.  And we're still growing.  Our operating costs are low, because we do all the work ourselves, from reading, to managing the website and even printing and mailing the magazine.  We don't pay anyone to do these things, and we don't get paid either.  There are only four of us on the staff, and we all volunteer.  We do it because this is what we believe in.

We aren't going anywhere, despite the direction of our economy.  We believe art is still important, and encouraging the next generation is part of that.  Thankfully, we’re not the only ones who believe this.

Here we are working on the eleventh issue of 5x5, and it will have more art, more pages, more contributors and more readers than the last.  We hope you enjoy it.

On Digging Carefully

This week, I have been watching men in my driveway dig deeper and deeper into the earth.  It has something to do with an underground power line that has been defunct for a better part of a year.  The problem in getting the line fixed is that it’s buried below more than four feet of earth.  An even greater obstacle is that there happened to be a heated driveway on top of that.  Think of the heated driveway as an incredibly expensive, complicated crust placed on top of a pie.  It’s summer and somehow easier to see a pie metaphor from June until September.

So the men have been excavating underneath the heated driveway, delicately, nearly tunneling their way out of the light and into the secret depths of the earth.  Think of trying to locate a spicy whole clove in the center of a just set peach pie, by digging into the side of it, but making sure that you never disturb the perfect golden crust just centimeters above your spoon.

Writing can be just like this—the delicate searching for an ideal word, image or phrase just out of grasp.  A blind reaching into the dark after something that we can only sense somewhere ahead of us.  So often, for me writing is a stretch or leap into the unknown, a wrestling with an angel in the dark.   Let me be clear that not all (or even the majority) of my poems are angels, fallen or otherwise.  But it is rare that I ever see my opponent clearly. 

Sometimes writing can be an act of excavation.  Only after going deeper and deeper do I finally catch a glimpse of what I was digging for.  In the case of the men outside, it was a snarl of black utility lines that looked so much like a clustering of black snakes, eager to slide out of reach of the shovel.  There are times when I am so frustrated, dirty, and fed up with writing that I want to throw the shovel into the ditch and bury the whole project.  Nevertheless, somehow, I always keep on digging, if haltingly toward my goals.

While at the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, another poet asked me why I wrote poems, why not some other genre.  The answer I gave him was immediate and without thought, “Poems allow me to access my inner life.”  My certainty surprised me.  Poetry, after a handful of years, has become the way in which I make sense of my inner and outer world.  It is the eye through which I order my universe.

A poem usually begins as a question or conversation that I am having with myself.  The words and images arise from that unmappable center I call the inner life.  Others may call it the unconscious, the higher self, the muse or the soul. 

It is the deep place where the sable snakes lie slumbering in the dark. 

It is the single perfect clove has scented your entire kitchen from the middle of a pie. 

That is where my writing, at its best, comes from and it takes a spade, a shovel, and a hell of a lot of sweat to get there.  

E-Readers

For a few months now I've been weighing the pros and cons of buying an E-Reader.  There are many debates surrounding this issue.  One debate is which device to buy: Nook (Barnes & Noble); Kindle (Amazon); Kobo; Sony.  Once you decide which device you like the best (I’m leaning toward the Nook), there’s the issue of the catalog behind it.  Although, for the most part, they’re all going to have the bestsellers and such.

The reason I’m leaning toward the Nook is that it’s small, touchscreen and e-ink.  Yes, I’m only interested in e-ink, because what I really want to do is read text that I would otherwise have to read on my computer (or print, but that would waste a lot of paper).  I’m trying to avoid LCD lights shining into my eyes.

This leads to another debate: electronics vs. real books.  I prefer real books.  I love the feel of the paper; I love the smell of a used bookstore.  I’m also a visual and kinesthetic learner: I remember that Milly said, “Wasn’t this the damnedest thing?” on the top of the right page, about a quarter of the way through the book, although I may not remember the page number.  This is something that will be lost with an E-Reader.  While there will still be “page numbers,” they will seem arbitrary, and there will be no left and right pages, no top and bottom.

Sidenote: once books disappear entirely, pages will become an abstract idea.  A marker in the text, yes, but for someone who has never seen a real book, it will have no concrete meaning.  Like “dialing” a phone number for someone who’s never seen a rotary phone.

Sidenote: Yes, I believe that eventually books will disappear.  Maybe not entirely.  Maybe they’ll still exist in poorer countries, and religious groups may still print their holy books, but the big publishing companies will be something very different, if they’re around at all.  I’m talking about the distant future here.

I’m not a luddite.  I like change, although I’m not generally the first person go out and buy the newest gadget.  I’ve been burned before; I bought a Minidisc player in high school.  Of course there are pros and cons to E-Readers, and for the most part the pros outweigh the cons.  But here’s the problem I see, the one problem that has deterred me from buying an E-Reader: you can only buy/download books from huge corporations.

What about Magers & Quinn, or Village Books? 

Powell’s, the biggest independent bookstore, is fighting to be in the game.  Google ebooks and Adobe Digital Editions can be read on Nook, Kobo and Sony, but there’s no mention of Kindle.  This is where it starts to get complicated and I want to reach for a paperback and forget the whole electronic thing.

And then there are libraries.  While an electronic file can be downloaded many, many times, this benefits the publishing house, not the library.  Harper Collins recently limited the number of times the library can lend an eBook to twenty-six.  This is estimated to be the lifespan of a real book.  After twenty-six times, the library would have to buy another copy from the publisher.  Of course, publishers need to make money too so they can pay their authors and CEO and everyone.  I'm not saying they're completely wrong here, but are they the only ones who should benefit from the eternal life of eBooks?  Shouldn't we all be able to benefit from technological advances?

I want an E-Reader that will allow me to download books from anywhere.  I don’t want to buy the Nook and then only be able to buy books from Barnes & Noble, although I know that’s exactly what they want.  I also want to be able to buy books from small, local bookstores, but even if we could, small bookstores don’t have the manpower to convert paper into computer files.  And, why would a person go to the store to buy something they can download at home?

The point here is that E-Readers seem to favor large corporations, and I really want to support the local stores, where local writers hold readings.  I don’t think there’s an easy answer here, and I’m afraid that one day soon I’ll give in and buy a Nook.  I’ll buy it so that I can read PDFs, like all the submissions 5x5 gets, but then I’ll want to buy a new book, and the electronic version will be cheaper than the paper version, and “I don’t have time to stop by the store before work, but I can download it right now before I leave the house,” and I don’t have room on the shelf for another book anyway.

When I started 5x5, I advertized it as a real magazine, printed and mailed.  Since then, we’ve gotten requests for an electronic version.  What do you think?