Broken Frontier

Last April I had a very special opportunity to educate the students in my graphic narrative class on the nature of writing and illustrating comics. Three professionals working in the comic industry—B. Clay Moore, Matt Cashel, and Jeremy Haun—came to Olney to give a special lecture to the students of my school about their works and the artform of comics. This discussion was also a chance to advocate comics to a large group of people who had never read a comic before, since the lecture was open not just to those in my class, but any students or members of the public who wanted to come hear what they had to say.
This lecture proved to be a great success, as I outlined in a two-part column last year, and I decided it would be a good idea to try to recapture some of that success this semester. However, this time around, I wanted to try to find new guests to speak. This decision was not based on any evaluation of the performance of last year’s speakers. (In fact, they were great, and I’d like to thank Clay, Matt, and Jeremy again for traveling many miles from their homes to my very small town to talk about comics and drink heavily.) Instead, I wanted new speakers because of my desire to change things up with the panel, just as I had with my classroom material. I knew I’d have some people in attendance who had gone to last year’s lecture, and I simply wanted to give them new content.

To that end, I started looking for new speakers as early as last summer. I knew going into my search that my chief trouble would lie in finding comics creators who not only had sufficient experience in the industry, but also lived close to me. However, my location is rather centralized, lying close to several major cities, so I didn’t foresee too much of a problem. Indianapolis and St. Louis both are under three hours away, and Chicago is about a four to five hour drive—not inconsequential by any means but also not that big of a hassle. I also knew that my cause would be helped by the fact that I was bribing my speakers with an honorarium that would reimburse them for travel fees, with a little left over to boot.

Last August at Wizard World in Chicago, I tried to find some Chicago talent that would be willing to come and speak, but I didn’t have much luck. There were two people that were kind of my dream speakers, and they were the only two I actually approached in the end. On the final day of the con, I hit up Brian Azzarello to try to get him and his wife Jill Thompson to come, and he told me he’d gladly take my business card and give me an e-mail address at which I could reach him. However, he admitted that he wasn’t big on the public speaking, that it was really more his wife’s thing. When he told me that, I thought back to the panels I’d seen him on in the past few days and how hard the moderators had to work to get him to respond more than a few words. I realized that, as much as I would love to hear him talk about his work, he probably wouldn’t, and just Jill wouldn’t be enough.

Therefore, when the St. Louis Comic Art show came around that following September, I redoubled my efforts, and there I was rewarded for my hard work. One of the many creators there was the creator and artist of Pistolwhip, Matt Kindt. Besides being a St. Louis native, Matt struck me as an ideal candidate for the guest lecture because, despite working with an independent publisher like Top Shelf, he had a modicum of fame. Pistolwhip had received high praise from a number of critics including a mention as one of the top ten comics of 2001 by Time magazine. Luckily for me, he was eager to try his hand at such a lecture, so I had finally found my first speaker.

I had hoped to find another St. Louis creator or two to use, so that perhaps the speakers could carpool. Thus, by cutting back on travel expenses some, they would save a bit of money for themselves. Matt suggested to me a friend of his named Kevin Huzienga, who had just, at the time, had some of his work published in Drawn and Quarterly Showcase. I personally hoped to find a way to contact Brian Hurtt, an artist from St. Louis whose work on several Oni books such as Queen and Country I had greatly enjoyed. But it was to no avail.

Instead, in January, I picked up the book Clumsy by Jeffrey Brown with some of the money I had left over from Christmas gifts. I had decided to check out Clumsy in part because Newsarama had recently done a feature on it, and once I’d read the book I was glad I took their advice. Not only did I greatly enjoy the novel, but I also couldn’t help but notice when reading it that Jeff was from Chicago. Add to his location the fact that he had included his e-mail address at the end of the book, and it seemed almost as if fate had wanted me to read the book. I threw caution to the wind and e-mailed him right away, asking him to come speak to my school, fully expecting him to decline due to the driving distance.

However, he replied almost instantly, saying he wanted to do it if he could find the time, and basically I shifted the dates around to make the time and thus accommodate his schedule. He said he could do the lecture Friday April 2nd since my town is (kind of) on the way to the convention SPACE in Columbus, OH, which he was going to on that following Saturday anyway. So with the date decided and Jeff committed to the event, I had my second speaker and I decided that, since there was limited time left to find a third, two creators would be enough.

Only recently (less than two weeks ago in fact) did Jeff tell me that he was bringing a friend with him to SPACE, and this friend was riding along through my town. This friend turned out to be Paul Hornschemeier, author of the recently released Mother Come Home. I had just read the book myself after having read the positive reviews it received in Entertainment Weekly, so naturally I was thrilled that I had again had such tremendous luck. I asked Jeff to ask Paul if he wanted in, and Paul replied that he would in fact like to participate in the lecture. Unfortunately, my good luck had a downturn then, because I had already spent the money I had budgeted for a third speaker (amusingly enough using the money to buy my copy of Mother Come Home, among other GNs). But I told Paul to come along anyway, and in the interim I have been able to scrounge enough to cash together to pay him his honorarium as well.

Now the event is a mere week away, and my last minute preparations for this excellent chance to advocate comics are well underway. But I mention all of this to you, my readers, because, as I said before, this event is open to the public. If you live anywhere near southern Illinois and you’d like to attend, feel free to drop me an e-mail in order to get more details, including directions. I’d love to see you there, especially if you too take advantage of the opportunity as I have and bring a friend who has at times scoffed at your love for comics. Perhaps this lecture can educate him or her on the true brilliance they are capable of.

If you don’t live anywhere near southern Illinois, don’t fret. I’ll be back next week (on the day of the lecture itself, in fact) with more details on those final arrangements I had to make, and in two weeks I’ll fill you in on what you missed.