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mostlysignssomeportents · 9 months

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The art of Daniel Danger

[Image ID: Daniel Danger's art print, 'To all who home to this happy place,' depicting a ruined Disneyland castle in a post-apocalyptic landscape with a statue of Walt and Mickey in the rubble.]

There’s this behavioral economics study that completely changed the way i thought about art, teaching, and critique: it’s a 1993 study called “Introspecting about Reasons can Reduce Post-Choice Satisfaction” by Timothy D Wilson, Douglas J Lisle, Jonathan Schooler, Sara Hodges, Kristen Klaaren and Suzanne LaFleur:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240281868_Introspecting_about_Reasons_can_Reduce_Post-Choice_Satisfaction

The experimenters asked subjects to preference-rank some art posters; half the posters were cute cartoony posters, and the other half were fine art posters. One group of subjects assigned a simple numeric rank to the posters, and the other had to rank them and explain their ranking. Once they were done, they got to keep their posters.

There was a stark difference in the two groups’ preferences: the group that had to explain their choices picked the cartoony images, while the group that basically got to point at their favorite and say, “Ooh, I like that!” chose the fine art posters.

Then, months later, the experimenters followed up and asked the subjects what they’d done with the poster they got to take home. The ones who’d had to explain their choices and had brought home cartoony images had thrown those posters away. The ones who didn’t have to explain what they liked about their choice, who’d chosen fine art, had hung them up at home and kept them there.

The implication is that it’s hard to explain what makes art good, and the better art is, the harder it is to put your finger on what makes it so good. More: the obvious, easy-to-articulate virtues of art are the less important virtues. Art’s virtues are easy to spot and hard to explain.

The reason this stuck with me is that I learned to be a writer through writing workshops where we would go around in a circle and explain what we liked and didn’t like about someone’s story, and suggest ways to make it better. I started as a teenager in workshops organized by Judith Merril in Toronto, then through my high-school workshop (which Judy had actually founded a decade-plus earlier through a writer in the schools grant), and then at the Clarion workshop in 1992. I went on to teach many of these workshops: Clarion, Clarion West and Viable Paradise.

So I’ve spent a lot of time trying to explain what was and wasn’t good about other peoples’ art (and my own!), and how to make it better. There’s a kind of checklist to help with this: when a story is falling short in some way, writers roll out these “rules” for what makes for good and bad prose. There are a bunch of these rulesets (think of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style), including some genre-specific ones like the Turkey City Lexicon:

https://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/18/turkey-city-lexicon-a-primer-for-sf-workshops/

A few years ago, I was teaching on the Writing Excuses cruise and a student said something like, “Hey, I know all these rules for writing good stories, but I keep reading these stories I really like and they break the rules. When can I break the rules?”

There’s a stock answer a writing teacher is supposed to give here: “Well, first you have to master the rules, then you can break them. You can’t improvise a jazz solo without first learning your scales.”

But in that moment, I thought back to the study with the posters and I had a revelation. These weren’t “rules” at all — they were just things that are hard and therefore easy to screw up. No one really knows why a story isn’t working, but they absolutely know when it doesn’t, and so, like the experimental subject called upon to explain their preferences, they reach for simple answers: “there’s too much exposition,” or “you don’t foreshadow the ending enough.”

There are lots of amazing stories that are full of exposition (readers of mine will not be shocked to learn I hold this view). There are lots of twist endings that are incredible — and not despite coming out of left field, but because of it.

The thing is, if you can’t say what’s wrong, but you know something is wrong, it’s perfectly reasonable to say, “Well, why don’t you try to replace or polish the things that are hardest to do right. Whatever it is that isn’t working here, chances are it’s the thing that’s hardest to make work”:

https://locusmag.com/2020/05/cory-doctorow-rules-for-writers/

But if I could change one thing about how we talk about writing and its “rules,” it would be to draw this distinction, characterizing certain literary feats as easier to screw up than others, having the humility to admit that we just don’t know what’s wrong with a story, and then helping the writer create probabilistically ranked lists of the things they could tinker with to try and improve their execution.

Which is all a very, very long-winded way to explain why I bought a giant, gorgeous art-print at Comic-Con this weekend, even though I have nowhere to hang it and had sworn I would absolutely not buy any art at the con.

I was walking the floor, peeking into booths, when I happened on Daniel Danger’s booth (#5034, if you’re at the con today), and I was just fuckin’ poleaxed by his work.

http://www.tinymediaempire.com/

[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s ‘It stopped being about the panic,’ depicting a ruined mansion interwoven with the skeletal branches of a tree, with a weeping statue and two human figures]

Now, see above. I can’t tell you why I loved this work so much (and that’s OK!), but boy oh boy did it speak to me. I just kind of stood there with my mouth open, slowly moving from print to print, admiring works like “It stopped being about the panic.”

https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/2022-sdcc-it-stopped-being-about-the-panic-v4

[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s ‘headlight in the path of,’ depicting a ruined mall with a pair of stags standing at the top of the escalator.]

On the surface, this is moody, post-apocalyptic stuff, heavily influenced by classic monster/haunter tropes, but it’s shot through with hope and renewal and the sense of something beautiful growing out of the ashes of something that has toppled. There’s real “(Nothing But) Flowers” energy in “Headlight in the path of”:

https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/sdcc2023-headlight-in-the-path-of-v2

[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s ‘We are no longer able to protect you,’ depicting a ruined factory with a coming-apart sign reading ‘We can no longer protect you forever,’ and a statue of a sword-bearing angel.]

Danger isn’t just a

very

talented artist, he’s also an

extremely

talented craftsman. As a recovering pre-press geek, I was (nearly) as impressed by the wild use of spot color and foils as I was by the art, like in “We are no longer able to protect you”:

https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/sdcc-2022-we-can-no-longer-protect-you-forever-v3

[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s ‘made of smoke and chains,’ depicting a ruined landscape with a pair of derelict subway trains at the foot of a hill on whose peak is a rotting mansion. A pair of human figures, holding hands, are approaching the mansion.]

Danger himself calls this work “weird sad hyper-detailed artwork of dreamy buildings of ghosts and trees,” which is a very apt description of this work, as you can see in “Made of smoke and chains”:

https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/made-of-smoke-and-chains-mist-preorder

So I looked at this stuff and sternly reminded myself that there was no way I was going to buy any art at the con. Then I walked away. I got about two aisles over when I realized I had to go back and ask permission to take some pictures so I could put a little link to Danger in my blog’s linkdump, which he graciously permitted:

https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=interestingness-desc&safe_search=1&tags=danieldanger&min_taken_date=1687478400&max_taken_date=1690156799&view_all=1

[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s art print, ‘To all who home to this happy place,’ depicting a ruined Disneyland castle in a post-apocalyptic landscape with a statue of Walt and Mickey in the rubble.]

But then I got all the way ass over to the other ass end of the convention center and I realized I had to go back and buy one of these prints. Which I did, “To all who come to this happy place,” because fuckin’ wow:

https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/sdcc2023-this-happy-place-v6-foil

This was unequivocally the best thing I saw at this year’s SDCC, but I also got some very good news while there, namely, that Emil Ferris’s long, long-awaited My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Vol 2 is finally on the schedule from Fantagraphics:

https://www.fantagraphics.com/collections/emil-ferris/products/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-book-two

It’s coming out in April, which gives you plenty of time to read volume one, which I called, “a haunting diary of a young girl as a dazzling graphic novel”:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/06/20/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-a-haunting-diary-of-a-young-girl-as-a-dazzling-graphic-novel/

If you are or were a monster kid or a haunter, this is your goddamned must-read of the summer. It’s a fully queered, stunning memoir for anyone whose erotic imagination intersected with Famous Monsters of Filmland.

(Also, if you’re that kind of person and you’re in the region, you should know about Midsummer Scream, a giant haunter show in Long Beach; I’ll be there on Sunday, July 30, for a panel about the Ghost Post, the legendary Haunted Mansion puzzle-boxes I helped make:

https://midsummerscream.org/

Now Favorite Thing book two was the best news, but the best experience was watching Felicia Day get her Inkpot Award and give a moving speech:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkpot_Award

And then learning that Raina Telgemeier also got an Inkpot; I love Raina’s work so much:

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/04/ghosts-raina-telgemeiers-upbeat-tale-of-death-assimilation-and-cystic-fibrosis/

[Image ID: A photo of me with Chuck Tingle, who wears a pink bag over his head on which he has written ‘Love is Real.’]

To cap yesterday off, I also ran into @ChuckTingle, which is as fine a capstone to a successful con as anyone could ask for:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53065500076/in/dateposted/

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/23/but-i-know-what-i-like/#daniel-danger

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brokehorrorfan · 3 months

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My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book Two by Emil Ferris will be published in paperback and e-book on May 28 via Fantagraphics. The 412-page graphic novel is the conclusion to 2017's award-winning My Favorite Thing Is Monsters.

Its presented as a diary of a 10-year-old girl as she attempts to solve the murder of her Holocaust survivor neighbor, illustrated with ballpoint pen. An excerpt can be read at The New Yorker.

Dark mysteries past and present continue to abound in the tumultuous and violent Chicago summer of 1968. 10-year-old Karen Reyes attends a protest in Grant Park and finds herself swept up in a police stomping. Privately, she continues to investigate her beloved and enigmatic upstairs neighbor Anka Silverberg’s recent death and discovers one last cassette tape that sheds light upon Anka's heroic activities in Nazi Germany. She wrestles with her own sexual identity, the death of her mother, and the secrets she suspects her brother Deez of hiding. Ferris's exhilarating cast of characters experience revelations and epiphanies that both resolve and deepen the mysteries visited upon them earlier. Visually, the story is told in Ferris's inimitable style that breathtakingly and seamlessly combines panel-to-panel storytelling and cartoon montages filled with B-movie horror and pulp monster mag iconography.

Pre-order My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book Two.

#my favorite thing is monsters #emil ferris #horror #comics #comic #comic art #graphic novel #fantagraphics #fantagraphics books #book #gift

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dirtyriver · 1 year

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My Favorite Thing is Monsters, 2017, by Emil Ferris

#My Favorite Thing is Monsters #Emil Ferris #Comics

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hyenafan · 2 months

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MY FAVORITE THING IS MONSTERS 2 IS OUT FOR PRE-ORDER!!!!

#my favorite thing is monsters #emil ferris

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entre-image-blog · 1 year

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Moi, ce que j’aime c’est les monstres, Emil Ferris, Tirage Limité, disponible sur entre-image.com

#Emil Ferris #Moi ce que j'aime c'est les monstres #bande dessinée #entre-image.com #éditions Toussaint Louverture

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smashpages · 10 months

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Second volume of ‘My Favorite Thing is Monsters’ by Emil Ferris will arrive next year

Fantagraphics will publish book two of the critically acclaimed, award-winning graphic novel series.

#my favorite thing is monsters #emil ferris #fantagraphics #graphic novels #sdcc 2023

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daataa · 1 year

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Anka's Garden, Emil Ferris 2021

#p #emil ferris

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celestialmega · 1 year

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My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris.

#comic book #comics #comic books #graphic novel #emil ferris #my favorite thing is monsters

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outside-cry · 1 year

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📖 My Favorite Thing is Monsters, 🖋 Emil Ferris

Finished 10/17/22

📔: Graphic novel that portrays the diary of ten year old Karen Reyes who’s investigating the murder of her neighbor, a beautiful and peculiar woman. Set in socially/politically tumultuous Chicago’s Uptown during the 1960’s, Karen moves about the city, interviewing her neighbors, uncovering intertwined dark histories.

There is so much in this book!!! Like so much. There’s complicated family trauma, lots of lying and secrets in a futile attempt to protect the people you care about. Lots of dysfunctional grieving, a really heart wrenching subplot of Anka’s childhood in the holocaust. It’s also got a coming of age/coming to terms with being queer for our narrator, Karen.

As the title suggests, the entire novel deals with the monsters in our world, in our villains, in our loved ones, in ourselves. The illustrations are distinctive, and the prose can hit you like a cartoon anvil. One of my favorite things about the book is that because Karen often visits the Chicago Art Institute, there’s a lot of “notebook sketches” of famous historical art pieces woven into the story. Also loved all of the illustrations of areas in Uptown - where I live!! The Graceland cemetery, the Wilson red line stop (my stop!!), and the distinctly Chicago buildings.

#my favorite thing is monsters #emil ferris #Things I Read

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ciaervo1 · 2 years

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My Favorite Thing is Monsters

by Emil Ferris

#my favorite thing is monsters #graphic novel #crosshatching #not mine #sketch #emil ferris #traditional tumblr post #portrait

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nathanpenlington · 1 year

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Books of the year 2022

I'm not sure where the year went, but here we are again at my books of the year list.

Like my previous books of the year posts, date of publication is not relevant for this list. This year I had to reread about 70 Choose Your Own Adventure books for a project - they are still as smart, funny, and engaging as ever, but as my love for those is so well documented I haven't included any here.

So, these are the best books to find me - for the first time - in 2022.

#1 - My favourite thing is monsters - Volume 1 - Emil Ferris (2017)

This book is truly incredible, but not an easy read.

Drawn mostly with Bic ballpoint pen, it breaks the conventions of graphic novels in many ways. On the surface Monsters is a coming of age story set in 60's Chicago, but it is a multi-layered narrative that catalogues monsters in all forms - those in pulp comics, those responsible for the horrors of the holocaust, and monsters that enable brutal sexual exploitation and abuse.

It's embedded with sadness, weighed with the heaviness of human struggle, but shot through with light and love. A genuinely important work.

Volume 2 is forthcoming, I hope in 2023. If so, I can't see it not making next year's list.

#2 - Acting Class - Nick Drnaso (2022)

I loved Nick's previous books - Beverly, and Sabrina - but Acting Class, for me, surpasses both. In Acting Class, as you'd expect, a disparate group of strangers join an amateur acting class. But what the title doesn't give away is the David Lynch like sense of uncanny, an under the surface oddness, which makes the ongoing narrative full of tension. It's compelling in every way.

#3 - The Labyrinth - Simon Stålenhag (2021)

All of Simon's other books have made my previous books of the year lists, The Labyrinth deserves its place on this year's list too.

In short The Labyrinth is a brutal sci-fi graphic novel, in which guilt and redemption collide. The art and words work together to build a darker world, where everyday horror seeps into an alternate past future.

#4 - The Confidence Men - Margalit Fox (2021)

During the 1st World War, two British officers conspired to escape a remote Turkish prisoner of war camp. What follows is a true story of an elaborately planned, long running con, involving seances, spirits, and sleight of hand trickery. It's an outstandingly researched and written book. Film rights have been optioned by Fox, which doesn't surprise me, but the detail in the writing is a joy.

#5 - Magritte in 400 images - Julie Waseige (2021)

Rene Magritte has been one of my favourite artists since discovering his work as a teenager, tucked away in the tiny Abergele library in a book on surrealist painters.

This book covers a huge amount of his output, in chronological order. It's interesting to track his obsessions and motifs as they recur and develop. Magritte's use of the ordinary made strange creates a quiet unease, at odds with the more fleshy surrealism of someone like Dali. Magritte's work often playfully explores aspects of illusion and unreality, an area I'm constantly drawn to. And the best children's book we've read this last year? My oldest daughter is now 6, she's learnt to read using the Biff, Chip and Kipper series (created by Roderick Hunt and illustrated by Alex Brychta in 1986). The illustrations are full of incidental details that are brilliant asides to a world bigger than the story. Creating compelling stories using a limited vocabulary is a constraint greater in challenge than anything used by George Perec.

My daughter's favourite books have been the Pizazz series by Sophy Henn.

Imagine a girl who is a reluctant super-hero, embarrassed by her super-power (glitter jazz hands anyone?), always wearing her too long cape (chosen by her mum), having to save the world before school, and still forced to do homework. We read them all in a month, thanks to the well stocked Hackney library. Pizazz is funny, smart, and identifiable.