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I'm a writer and videographer in Oakland, California. My day job is at Colorlines.com (opinions here are my own etc). I use Twitter sometimes and Google Reader often. My wife is better at tumbling than me.

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November 14 2011 8:35 PM · 2 notes

I think this comic by Tessa Brunton, “A Positive Outlook,” is great. After she posted it, she tweeted about the fear that her friends would see it and think of her as being more emotional baggage than she was worth, and would quietly leave her behind — and how she had been keeping herself from drawing and posting it for that reason. I like how it’s discouraging and anti-inspirational as shit; really, witnessing her raw-ass feelings is plenty inspirational in and of itself. But also, I like it specifically because her bravery in drawing it made me uncomfortable, right? There’s a scene in the documentary Crumb in which Robert Crumb talks about a comic he’d drawn, about a woman with no head who could be used for sex but it turns out the head is just shoved down inside her body. He recalls that he felt uncomfortable about it and considered abandoning it, until his wife urged him to finish it, because it was about Something That Was Inside Him and is thus Honest and Brave. Maybe a year or two ago, I had a conversation with a friend about a gag comic he’d just finished and was debating putting online, in which the joke involved a blind woman being sold into sex slavery, mutilated, addicted to heroin etc. etc. without her realizing it. He’d let me see it and it made us both feel uncomfortable, and I told him I thought he should keep it to himself. As I phrased it to him, he could either put it up because things that are Honest and Brave and that are Something That Is Inside You are objectively good; or, he could keep it to himself because the internet already has enough imagery (ironic or otherwise) that lines up with our cultural tradition of terrible things happening to women. He chose the former; fair enough. I do like comics that are Brave and Honest and that are about Something That Is Inside their creators, of course, and I like Robert Crumb’s and my friend’s comics. I’ve also been known to watch Family Guy when hung over. But reading Tessa’s notes and tweets about this piece was a real sock-in-the-gut illustration of how comics can in fact be Honest and Brave and about Something That Is Inside someone, AND that that Something doesn’t have to be anti-P.C. backlash. (An aside: in 2011, there’s pretty much nothing a straight white dude can draw, short of actual child pornography, that other straight white dudes won’t forgive or explain. Frank Miller is still getting paid.) But yeah. This comic has no redeeming moral. It’s heavy and mean and vulgar and uncomfortable and great. Kudos. I met Tessa at APE a few months ago and bought her new book Passage, which is fantastic (as multiple convention-goers informed me as I walked around with it). Her visual style, a sort of meeting point between Aubrey Beardsley and the Wild Thornberries, meshes great with the material — busy and homespun, and vaguely unwelcoming.

I think this comic by Tessa Brunton, “A Positive Outlook,” is great. After she posted it, she tweeted about the fear that her friends would see it and think of her as being more emotional baggage than she was worth, and would quietly leave her behind — and how she had been keeping herself from drawing and posting it for that reason. I like how it’s discouraging and anti-inspirational as shit; really, witnessing her raw-ass feelings is plenty inspirational in and of itself. But also, I like it specifically because her bravery in drawing it made me uncomfortable, right?

There’s a scene in the documentary Crumb in which Robert Crumb talks about a comic he’d drawn, about a woman with no head who could be used for sex but it turns out the head is just shoved down inside her body. He recalls that he felt uncomfortable about it and considered abandoning it, until his wife urged him to finish it, because it was about Something That Was Inside Him and is thus Honest and Brave.

Maybe a year or two ago, I had a conversation with a friend about a gag comic he’d just finished and was debating putting online, in which the joke involved a blind woman being sold into sex slavery, mutilated, addicted to heroin etc. etc. without her realizing it. He’d let me see it and it made us both feel uncomfortable, and I told him I thought he should keep it to himself. As I phrased it to him, he could either put it up because things that are Honest and Brave and that are Something That Is Inside You are objectively good; or, he could keep it to himself because the internet already has enough imagery (ironic or otherwise) that lines up with our cultural tradition of terrible things happening to women. He chose the former; fair enough. I do like comics that are Brave and Honest and that are about Something That Is Inside their creators, of course, and I like Robert Crumb’s and my friend’s comics. I’ve also been known to watch Family Guy when hung over.

But reading Tessa’s notes and tweets about this piece was a real sock-in-the-gut illustration of how comics can in fact be Honest and Brave and about Something That Is Inside someone, AND that that Something doesn’t have to be anti-P.C. backlash. (An aside: in 2011, there’s pretty much nothing a straight white dude can draw, short of actual child pornography, that other straight white dudes won’t forgive or explain. Frank Miller is still getting paid.)

But yeah. This comic has no redeeming moral. It’s heavy and mean and vulgar and uncomfortable and great. Kudos.

I met Tessa at APE a few months ago and bought her new book Passage, which is fantastic (as multiple convention-goers informed me as I walked around with it). Her visual style, a sort of meeting point between Aubrey Beardsley and the Wild Thornberries, meshes great with the material — busy and homespun, and vaguely unwelcoming.

  1. channingkennedy posted this