Clouds Making Friends
June Newsletter
So there I was, huddled under the spreading beams in the attic of a Serbian cultural center, drawing. The old men around me did the same, but much, much better. There were airplanes and devils, stubbly tough men, video game characters, a full-sized portrait in acrylics of a knight on horseback. Watching them, I remembered high school, and how I’d wanted to be just like them.
I stuck close to my guide, Artyom, who introduced me as “my writer,” and created the top two-thirds of a brigand prince before my eyes. He began with the eyebrows. “Eh?” Then a Salvador Dalí mustache like the hands of a clock at 2:45. “How about this?” A pair of bells hung off the tips of the mustache, an homage to the bad guy from our comic Sharp Eye.
“Now what can I do with the mouth?” Some teeth were missing, some overlarge.
“A gold tooth,” I said, trying to hold up my end of our relationship. But of course in an ink drawing, you can’t see the color of a tooth.
While he drew, Artyom wanted to talk about his workload and income. “If I can do two big projects, I don’t need to be hustling for commissions. I have a video game, and half another video game, and Sharp Eye II will be my other big project.”
I didn’t really want to talk about money or scheduling. I wanted to talk about the characters and the trouble they’d gotten themselves into. And all right, what they would look like when they solved those problems. That’s why I do this. Those are the questions that interest me. But I didn’t want to distract Artyom. I wanted to watch while he worked.
Some football hooligan came in and shouted that Artyom was a pussy for penciling before inking. It turned out that he was one of the Bulgarian artists. Artyom ignored him.
“Now I just have to do something interesting for the important parts.” Artyom leaned in and made a few quick loops with his marker around the eyes. The brigand was a man beginning to go slack, his face pouched like a wineskin just a little more than half drunk.
He waved at the shoulders. “And I’ll just put some bullshit over here.”
“All right!” It was Marko, a tall, teacherly man with a ponytail, who managed to organize the whole Balkans Festival of Young Comic Creators without letting his manic energy tilt all the way into “crazed.”
He was standing at the head of the room and filling it with his voice. “Everybody, there is a documentary film in the theater. It’s very comfortable there, very cool. The film is only forty-five minutes long. So go!”
The film showed the history of The Leskovac School of Comics, beginning in 1995 and ending with Marko calling to a playground full of children: “Draw three panels, beginning, middle, and end. It can be about anything. A flower and a bug. Two clouds that made friends with each other.”
Marko found me back in the attic and asked if I had everything I needed. I said I’d already gotten my hamburger, and I thanked him for inviting me. He strode off, head on a swivel, putting out more fires and distributing more burgers.
The air conditioners blasted into the attic, battling the heat that baked down from the underside of the roof. All of the speakers went overtime. There was a box full of hamburgers. Comic artists from all over Europe drew and drew and drew.
I started my own drawing, trying to mimic the top two-thirds of Artyom’s smiling, dangerous man. But I was always more interested in non-humans. I drew some of the species from Fellow Tetrapod: a Quotidian, a Monumental, a Tensor, like a soccer ball with dinosaur arms. Maybe someone would pass behind me and discover me. Artyom clapped me on the back, and I straightened. Looked up at him. “Now draw two clouds making friends,” he said.
It was time for our panel discussion. Marko himself joined another comic writer and me to talk about our side of the work, and someone in the audience asked about ethical dilemmas. What if readers were offended by what we wrote? Marko related the story of a comic where he had a tank driver talking about his grandfather who fought for the Nazis in World War Two.
His commander asked the driver how he could be proud of such a man. The driver said that his grandfather had fought and died for his country; how could you not be proud of such an ancestor? The commander answered, “In that case, your family will be proud of you. We’re not going to survive the upcoming battle.” That was the most real story I heard during the festival, and it got cut. It was censored out by the publisher.
“Thank you.” The audience member pointed at me. “But what do you think?” This is why the youngest member of the panel answers first, people, so they don’t have to follow an act delivered by a master. I could’ve spend my time listening appreciatively, instead of figuring out how the hell I was going to answer.
First I said, “I wish I was famous enough that I had this problem. Ha ha.” That was my fear speaking. What if I was discovered? But I did recover: Fear is your compass. If you are afraid of something you’ve written, that means it’s good. And if you’re afraid to write something, that means you write it.1 I think that goes for deeds as well as stories.
“Have you met Dimo?” It was our final night in Leskovac, and Marko steered a crop-haired, energetic young man toward me. “He’s from Sofia, too. He’s written a historical comic.”
“Well,” said Dimo, “alternate history. In the real world, we lost that battle.”
I bought a copy and asked him to sign it for my daughter. He did so, wielding a brush pen taped to a felt-tip marker, which he twirled as he wrote, outlined, and shaded a signature and a cavalry officer with out-thrust saber.
“Let’s have coffee,” I told him.
I’ll sound him out. See what he'd be like to work with.
Paraphrasing Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art.