Are Comics In Your Future?

1-hour workshop on Sunday.

I never thought I liked comics. Mostly I don’t.

Comic books were nowhere to be found in my rural childhood. By the time I was grown I’d seen four or five at most.

They seemed unreadable. Everything was all flashing lights and leaping supermen and explosions.

Therefore, when graphic novels became a thing, I had no interest.

I have changed.

Chris Fink, head of the English Department at Beloit College, where I was teaching this semester, handed me a copy of a comic book, Map of My Heart. It was written and drawn by John Porcellino, a cartoonist who lives in Beloit and the creator of King-Cat. Chris thought I’d like the book because it has a lot of nature in it.

Being honest, that was the first comic book I ever read.

John teaches a course, “Making Comix Out of Life,” and one day I met him in Chris’s office. John’s a shy man somewhere in his 50s who wears glasses and a ball cap. I told him I liked his book and asked if I could sit in on one of his classes.

Sure.

The day I showed up he was talking about words. That comes first in comic-drawing for him. And he calls the words poetry.

“Poetry is just writing and hitting return a lot,” he said. “You can sneak poetry into people’s conscious by using the form of comics.”

My brain was churning, thinking of all the things I could do with comics. I could make a graphic memoir out of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. I could turn some of my poems into comics. (At least I could if I knew how to draw.)

There’s more.

Chris and John paired up to create a little comic book of sorts. Chris writes and records flash essays for his public radio station, and he collected twenty of these into a book, Forage Like a Bear, which John illustrated with comics. The book is just out, available at Spit and a Half—my copy has arrived and I like it.

Chris Fink on the left and John Porcellino on the right with their collaboration.

There’s even more.

When the climate anthology All We Can Save came out, I was introduced to the art of cartoonist Madeleine Jubilee Saito.

The form that Madeleine’s poetry comics takes is a box divided into four squares. I started calling these Wisdom Quadrants, and I “taught” them in my nature journaling classes. Really I introduced folks to Madeleine’s work and we fumbled our way through creating one.

Now Madeleine too has a new book, You Are a Sacred Place: Visual Poems for Living in Climate Crisis. Both Naomi Klein and Krista Tippett have blurbed it.

The best news of all.

I asked Madeleine to teach a short, hour-long workshop next Sunday online via Zoom. I want to introduce more folks to Madeleine’s work and help promote her new book.

If you want to attend Sunday’s “Poetry Comics” workshop, online via Zoom, a ticket is $11.

If you’re already registered for Journaling the Garden, then you have a ticket.

One last strange thing.

Madeleine is originally from Rockford, Illinois, 10 miles away from Beloit, Wisconsin, where Chris and John live.

I guess cheese-eating turns out really talented people.

Question

Is your brain churning too? How could you incorporate comics into your work? Want to try your hand at it?