Episode 456 – Zoe Beloff
Episode 314 – Mark Alan Stamaty
Episode 303 – Peter Kuper
Episode 290 – Jason Lutes
Episode 267 – JJ Sedelmaier
Episode 262 – Jerry Moriarty
Episode 261 – Robert Weil
Episode 143 – Jennifer Hayden and Summer Pierre
Virtual Memories Show #143:
Jennifer Hayden and Summer Pierre LIVE!
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“Middle age is such a perfect term. You’re right in the middle of life. You could not be more in the middle of everything. Your parents are old, your kids are little. Life is just swirling around you.”
–Jennifer Hayden
Time for another LIVE episode of the Virtual Memories Show! Jennifer Hayden (The Story of My Tits) and Summer Pierre (Paper Pencil Life) join us at Labyrinth Books in Princeton, NJ to talk about comics, cancer, middle age, art vs. work, learning compassion through memoir, and more! Give it a listen!
“With my mom dying, I thought, ‘Oh, I’m gonna die? Great, I work well with deadlines!'”
–Summer Pierre
According to Labyrinth Books’ promo for the event, “Art is not something we create in isolation. Art happens between the diaper change and the trip to the vet. Between the car accident and the roast chicken. Every day we fight to seize a little more art from the jaws of this wild existence. And if we’re lucky we catch the spark while it’s rising. Autobiographical cartoonists and graphic novelists Jennifer Hayden, and Summer Pierre discuss their graphic lives with moderator Gil Roth of the Virtual Memories Show.” It’s a great conversation about making art in the interstices of life, so go listen! (And go buy The Story of My Tits
!)
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Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! You might like:
Follow The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guests
Jennifer Hayden came to comics from fiction-writing and children’s book illustration. Her new book, The Story of My Tits
(Top Shelf, 2015), is a 352-page graphic memoir and breast cancer narrative. Her previous book, the autobiographical collection Underwire
(Top Shelf, 2011), was excerpted in the Best American Comics 2013 and named one of “the best comics by women” by DoubleX. She is a member of Activate (the premier webcomics collective in New York City), where she posts her webcomic S’crapbook, which earned a Notable listing in the Best American Comics 2012. Jennifer currently posts the daily diary strip Rushes at thegoddessrushes.blogspot.com. Her comics have appeared in print anthologies such as The Activate Primer, Cousin Corrine’s Reminder, and The Strumpet. After hours, Jennifer plays electric fiddle with The Rocky Hill Ramblers and The Spring Hill Band. She lives in Central New Jersey with her husband, their two college-age children, two cats, and the dog.
Summer Pierre is a cartoonist, illustrator, writer, and teacher living in the Hudson Valley, NY. She makes an autobiographical comic called Paper Pencil Life, and is the author of The Artist in the Office: How to Creatively Survive and Thrive Seven Days a Week
(which the Boston Globe called, “A virtual bible for artists and day jobs”) and Great Gals: Inspired Ideas for Living a Kick-Ass Life
. Her writing and art have appeared in The Rumpus, Hobart, The Nashville Review & Booth Literary Journal, among other places.
Credits: This episode’s music is Nothing’s Gonna Bring Me Down by David Baerwald, used with permission of the artist. The conversation was recorded at the Labyrinth Books in Princeton on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones and a Blue enCORE 100 microphone
feeding into a Zoom H5
digital recorder. I recorded the intro and outro on a Blue Yeti USB Microphone
. Processing was done in Audacity and Logic Pro.
Episode 137 – Scott McCloud
Virtual Memories Show #137:
Scott McCloud – Tumblings
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“I want to be working, making comics, and knowing that the thing I’m doing right now is the thing I should be doing and I shouldn’t feel guilty about doing it. I’ve been able to keep that going much of the time for the last 20 years, and it’s kinda great.”
Is Scott McCloud comics’ leading theorist or a deranged lunatic? Find out in this lengthy conversation we recorded during SPX 2015! Scott talks about applying (and forgetting) the lessons of Understanding Comics in his new book, The Sculptor
(First Second), the massive implications of crowdfunding for cartoonists and other creators, the problems with ‘balance’ in comics pages, his rebellion against Facebook, the Laurie Anderson model of comics, how he defines success, how to keep a happy marriage inside the comics world, and more! Give it a listen!
“We’ve never seen the consumer dollar at full strength. In traditional print markets, somebody spends a dollar on my work, and I get 10 cents at the end of that chain, that massive army of middlemen. Now we’re seeing what kind of world happens when the consumer dollar stays closer to a dollar. That army of consumers really has an enormous power to put your boat afloat.”
We also talk about his next book (on visual communication and education), his strengths and weaknesses as a cartoonist, making a 500-page comic book that readers could tackle in one sitting, why Reinventing Comics was like “trying to eat 10 lbs. of potato salad”, how every success story in cartooning is unique, the differences in working in print vs. working for the screen, and trying to be a scholar for the first time. Now go listen!
“Craig Thompson’s Blankets
is probably off the hook now, because I finally did a comic even more sentimental. So now I made Craig look like Gary Panter.”
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We mention a few books in this episode. Here they are:
- The Sculptor
– Scott McCloud
- Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
– Scott McCloud
- Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form
– Scott McCloud
- Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels
– Scott McCloud
- Zot!: The Complete Black and White Collection: 1987-1991
– Scott McCloud
- Maus: A Survivor’s Tale
– Art Spiegelman
- Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth
– Chris Ware
- The Complete Elfquest Volume 1
– Wendy Pini
- The Dark Knight Returns
– Frank Miller
- Watchmen
– Alan Moore
- Beautiful Darkness
– Kerascoët, Fabien Vehlmann
- Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir
– Roz Chast
- Kill My Mother
– Jules Feiffer
- Blankets
– Craig Thompson
- Here
– Richard McGuire
- Gamify Your Classroom: A Field Guide to Game-Based Learning (New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies)
– Matthew Farber
- The Year of Magical Thinking
– Joan Didion
- Rosalie Lightning: A Graphic Memoir
– Tom Hart
- Essays
– Orwell
- Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
– Joshua Foer
- How Music Works
– David Byrne
- Runaway
– Alice Munro
- Blonde: A Novel
– Joyce Carol Oates
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! You might like:
Follow The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Scott McCloud is the award-winning author of Understanding Comics, Making Comics
, Zot!
, The Sculptor
, and many other fiction and non-fiction comics spanning 30 years. An internationally-recognized authority on comics and visual communication, technology, and the power of storytelling, McCloud has lectured at Google, Pixar, Sony, and the Smithsonian Institution. There’s a more extensive and funny bio at his site.
Credits: This episode’s music is Nothing’s Gonna Bring Me Down by David Baerwald, used with permission of the artist. The conversation was recorded during the Small Press Expo at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel on a Zoom H2n Handy Recorder and a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones
feeding into a Zoom H5
digital recorder. I recorded the intro and outro on a Blue Yeti USB Microphone
. Processing was done in Audacity and Logic Pro. Photo of Mr. McCloud by me.