Funny how things change.
I started a writing project called Les Pages aux Folles in 1984. In 2002, events conspired to have the project migrate to the World Wide Web. As originally conceived, the Internet page was to contain all of the writing I had accumulated to that time, plus new writing every week (which, over seven and three quarters years, recently hit 400!). Not long after I began, my Web Goddess Gisela McKay (the woman who gives me space on her server and occasional computing help as needed) insisted that I add some graphic content, the Web being a graphical medium and all.
At first, I resisted Gisela’s arguments, pointing out that I had no artistic talent. Then, I got a digital camera. I realized that, by adding funny captions to photographic images, I could use the camera to create cartoons (I believe the term for this kind of cartoon is “fumetti”). Thus was My Toronto born. The only parameter for the comic was that the photos that were the basis of the cartoons be taken in my home town. Other than that, it tended to be surreal, with lots of references to other artists and, unlike my writing, not very political.
After a couple of years, I added a second comic to the Web site: Blackout Funnies. This was a four panel comic; each of the panels was black, simulating an energy outage. The darkness was punctuated by word balloons. For the most part, the humour was, to be charitable, absurdist (or, if we’re not being charitable, silly).
I stopped doing Blackout Funnies after 100, feeling that the format was too restrictive. I still create My Toronto cartoons, which appear occasionally on Les Pages aux Folles. For the last couple of years, though, my attention has been focused on a third cartoon: Delicate Negotiations.
I had always been taken by the elegant cartoons of Jules Pfeiffer, which often featured simple line drawings and a lot of pointed dialogue, and was keen on doing a cartoon about relationships that had a similar feel. Not being able to draw was a drawback. Then, I had the inspiration that made the comic possible: I took the face of a woman in one of my photographs and traced her profile with three point line. (The woman was the former love of my life: artists truly are scavengers who use everything at their disposal.) Then, I removed everything except the line. Voila. My cartoon had a face.
I added four curvy lines for hair denoting a woman and four straighter lines for hair denoting a man. Then, because the world isn’t really made up entirely of white people, I added a light grey tone to some of the faces to denote Asians and a dark grey tone to other faces to denote African-Canadians. As ideas developed, I have added the silhouettes of the heads of a cat, a dog, a shark, a squid and a t-Rex to the mix. By greying the hair and adding curved lines around the eyes or changing the faces to half their size, I have suggested characters at different ages. Using my rudimentary art skills, I have developed a cartoon that is increasingly complex.
Two Delicate Negotiations cartoons appear on my Web site every week; I have replicated that publishing schedule on Comic Genesis. At the time I started posting the cartoon on Comic Genesis, I had already created around 300 (about 190 of which had previously appeared on my Web site), so it’s going to be around for a while.
Delicate Negotiations is an absurdist look at how we negotiate relationships, mostly with other people, but sometimes with animals and even the universe itself. I would be the last person to argue that it was art. However, the strength of the cartoon (as with most cartoons) lies in the conception and writing. If you would like a taste, go to my Comics Genesis page (http://follesguy.comicgenesis.com/); as of this writing, there are nine. If you would like to catch up on what you have missed, you can check out the first collection of cartoons, Delicate Negotiations: Round One: The Quiet Melancholy on Les Pages aux Folles at: http://www.lespagesauxfolles.ca/?pg=43 (124 cartoons). There are also cartoons in the new section of the Web page (http://www.lespagesauxfolles.ca/?pg=13) that have yet to appear on Comic Genesis.
Enjoy.
- Ira Nayman
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