It wasn't that long ago that being a professional cartoonist meant drawing superheroes nonstop on a monthly deadline for distribution through the comics shop market.
But the newest generation of cartoonists comes with a different mindset—comics can be created about many different subjects—and they produce their works for a different marketplace, the bookstore. Artists Lauren Weinstein, Jeffrey Brown, Raina Telgemeier and Bryan Lee O'Malley are four of the most exciting and most praised members of this new generation, turning out work that ranges from satirical fantasy to keenly observed memoir.
Influenced by figures like Chris Ware, Lynda Barry and Dan Clowes, they've grown up thinking about telling stories a different way. Freed from the constraints of working within the rigid genre guidelines of the comic book industry (i.e., bulging muscles, spandex outfits, intergalactic villains), they're turning out boundary-busting work that isn't afraid to connect with the reality of their readers' lives. They've also largely left behind the idea of the monthly comic book as the best way to showcase their work. Instead, the graphic novel—the book format—is their preferred form of expression, and the general book market is where they expect to make their literary mark.
The Next Generation
New York City—based Lauren Weinstein, 30, is best known for the Xeric Award— winning Vineyland, a darkly comic and surreal excursion that covers everything from family pressures to lonely robots. Her work, which explores eighth-grade life in a manner that's part Seventeen magazine and part Monty Python, will be featured in Girl Stories, a full-color comics anthology coming out from Holt early next year. Weinstein found mixing the two sensibilities isn't as hard as it might sound. "My teenage material is dark, too, just concealed in a lighter, more colorful story," she said. "I do feel like my work is a little bit different from a lot of people's. I think humor is important but underdone in comics. There's a complexity that comes with humor—you can be as dire as possible."
Now 30, Weinstein draws on a fine arts background spent studying such painters as Philip Guston and Matisse. While going to art school, however, she realized that she was "never satisfied with any one image in a painting." Inspired by cartoonists like Barry, Debbie Drechsler and Julie Doucet—all of whom work in a strikingly personal style—she turned to comics. A gig at the now defunct gurl.com led to a Web comic, which forms the basis of her upcoming book.
Chicagoan Jeffrey Brown, 28, also started out to be a fine artist, and his work straddles the line between brutally honest autobiography and more fantastic stories like the superhero parody Bighead. He burst onto the scene in 2002 with Clumsy, a warts-and-all look at a relationship, and solidified his reputation with Unlikely, the story of losing his virginity at age 24.
Brown stumbled into cartooning after a particularly bad critique at art school. Clumsy was a reaction to this, drawn in a deliberately rough, sketchy style. "I wanted to do something as completely down to earth as possible," he said. Although Unlikely was self-published, it wasn't long before he had a publishing deal with indie graphic novel publisher Top Shelf, which will put out AEIOU, the last book in his "girlfriend trilogy," this summer.
Being known for utterly candid autobiography does have some problems. "I think I am getting more guarded," he said. "There's this weird crossover between my work and my life that isn't necessary any more. I like to think I'm self aware enough to know who I am now. I'm not necessarily the most confident person, but I can look at the me of the past and laugh at myself."
Raina Telgemeier, 27, is yet another cartoonist who made the leap from self-published minicomics and Web comics to a book deal with a major publisher—in her case Scholastic's new Graphix imprint, which will publish a comics adaptation of The Baby-sitters Club in graphic novel format in early 2006. As a child she dreamed of being a syndicated cartoonist, like Lynn Johnston, but went to New York's School of Visual Arts to study illustration. Her mind lingered on comics, however. "I found myself drawing comics for all the classes I was taking, and my teachers were encouraging."
Telgemeier first saw the creative possibilities of alternative comics after seeing Adrian Tomine's acclaimed comics series Optic Nerve, as well as Jeff Smith's Bone (also on the Graphix list). "They kind of opened my eyes to the possibility of building a whole world out of just nothing, taking an idea and really going with it." Most of her work takes a look at events from her childhood. "I definitely don't write about everyday activities the way that [cartoonist] James Kochalka does. I find it easier to think about things for a couple of years and write about the past."
Although transforming a famed kid's prose franchise into comics is a very different task from telling personal stories, she has an advantage—she was a fan of the Baby-sitters Club series herself. "These are character that I've known since I was nine years old, and I've been thinking about it and identifying with it for a really long time."
Canadian Bryan Lee O'Malley, 26, throws a bit of autobiography into his work, but he also adds elements of Hong Kong kung fu movies, Bollywood musicals and alt-rock icons in Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life(Oni Press), one of 2004's most popular graphic novels. It's the story of 23-year-old Scott Pilgrim, a slacker in a band who meets the love of his life in Ramona, a roller-blading delivery girl. The book has already been optioned for a movie, which has Shaun of the Dead's Edgar Wright slated to direct it. O'Malley's currently hard at work on the second Scott Pilgrim book, due in early summer, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, in which our slacker hero must face another one of Ramona's Seven Evil Ex-Boyfriends.
O'Malley took a slightly more traditional career path than the others, drawing books written by other people, such as Jen Van Meter's Hopeless Savages. His first graphic novel Lost at Sea (Oni Press) got good reviews, but Scott Pilgrim was practically a cause célèbre, it generated so much interest. Although it's not exactly a manga, it takes a lot of the visual energy of manga and translates it into a decidedly contemporary, though utterly oddball, relationship story. Although he's read manga, O'Malley doesn't think of himself as a manga artist: "I think there was some kind of percolation in my mind, but it was partially unconscious." Reading about what other cartoonists were doing on a Web forum run by famed comics writer Warren Ellis helped him crystallize the idea that comics could be about anything and reflect the real world. "I'd pretty much given up on the idea of drawing the X-Men."
Although life as an indie cartoonist is still an uphill struggle for all four, it is a bit cooler and a bit more mainstream than it used to be for comics authors. "Now [being a cartoonist] is something that people can envision," said Telgemeier. "There's knowledge about the various forms of comics out there. It sounds interesting, like something people want to do."
