Hi guys,
if you're new to this blog you probably heard it from me or a friend or from my comic that I'm releasing... very soon!
I'm just writing this entry to explain the inception of this little project of mine. But before I go on, I would like to clarify one thing. I'm cautious when it comes to explaining my work, I am someone who feels uncomfortable when too much is explained about an artist's intentions. So when it comes to explanation, the furthest I'll go is describe the origins behind one or two of my ideas. Another thing I'd like to do is to talk about one or two of the technical difficulties I had while making a work. I'm a teacher as well as an artist, so I'm always hoping my students can learn from my mistakes :)
NOT EVEN FUNNIE is meant to be more than a place to showcase my comics, it's a space where I'll blog about all kinds of stuff. The beginnings of this blog started germinating in my head a couple of years ago but I was still a little directionless about what angle to approach the idea, so it sort of just sat there in one of the quiet segments of my brain, then a few months later, I read Saul Bellow's book Herzog. It's an epistolary novel about a middle age guy (Herzog) who keeps a diary about all his past relationships, his feelings towards his fellow men etc. The Funny thing is I never got to finish the book, but I got really inspired by it. The excerpts from the diary are really short fragments of thoughts and ideas about society and life, but the way it's framed, from the standpoint of a diary, I found that very affecting. It occurred to me that I should make a blog that could showcase fragments about my own life, in the vain of a diary.
But the problem, is that diaries are difficult things to handle when thrown in the public sphere. I think that there is something wrong about writing statements about how you feel about someone you know and whom you don't like and posting these statements publicly. I'm the sort of person who would like relationships to be restored rather than shattered. And anyway, I'd hate to give a one-sided opinion about any person. Although I have to say, some people are like magnets for those kinds of statements. But still, I love the diary. I think the diary of any living person is like a sacred text. That's why I love auto-biographical comics to death. When you hold one of these comics in your hands, it's a real privilege in my opinion. So in these comics on NOT EVEN FUNNIE , I decided to explore the diary theme through fiction just like in Herzog, keeping it fictional saves me a whole lot of heartache. So the short comics on this blog works like diary fragments and the writing in each of the posts are like an ongoing stream of fiction to support these various fragments.
The comics in NOT EVEN FUNNIE will be split into two different comics, the first will be a comic strip by the title of Soreheads. Soreheads are a group of characters I made while serving in the army. They were conceived in a training shed one sunny afternoon, out of boredom. I abandoned these characters for a few years and only now am I coming back to them. Another kind of comic I want to make are individual shorts that have no connection to Soreheads. These shorts have the same diaristic approach, but they have no leading characters.
The reason I'm focusing on short strips, for these blog comics is that I'd like to express the little moments in life that get convoluted when made into a longer narrative. Sometimes, I like to look at these comics as short prose poems. This doesn't mean I won't be making longer comics, I will. It's just that not all stories should be long in my opinion and that this blog is a place for those shorter narratives. So don't think of this blog as B-sides or waste material instead of being longer grander narratives. They're just as important to me.
In the end, this blog and these comics are another venue, a space, where I'm choosing to put to words, thoughts and emotions that have no place in the mambo jumbo of everyday life. Hopefully through the medium of this art form, I will start to express myself sincerely in a language that I hold dear to me... I hope!
best regards,
Fatcrumb
