Processing and the ultraprocessed

OR "I co-hosted a powerful academic event and all I made was this stupid comic about chips."

A symposium two years in the making, “Cartooning the Medieval” at the Newberry Library is now two weeks in the past and I am still processing the experience. I’ve been eagerly reading and collecting responses from others who attended the event: words like “transformative,” “unbelievable delight,” “truly wonderful,” and “inspired” keep popping up and it makes my heart swell to see that this thing we made, this thing that we found exciting and moving, was exciting and moving to other people as well. (To experience just one of the touching movement of the event, I highly recommend you go read Marnie Galloway’s reflections and script of the artist talk she gave at the event. I have read it repeatedly and still get choked up each time I revisit it.)

I’ve started scripting my own comic about the event but, as you might know, comics are slow and it will be some time before I’ve finished that task. (This task is also delayed as I wrap up a comic I’m making for an Actual Journal, which is very exciting for me. The below panels are taken from the upcoming work. Very academic. Much scholar.)

In the past, when I traveled, I was often able to make comics about the trip or event either alone in the evening, or first thing in the morning. Holidays, conferences, trips to the US, you name it. I went, I drew, I returned home with a record of where I had been and how it had gone. Somewhere along the way, I fell out of this habit and I’m trying to figure out how to get it back. I took pages and pages and pages of notes in Chicago but I was unable to find the mental space or energy to convert these thoughts to diary pages. This leaves me with the task of reflecting and trying to capture all this after the fact once I’m home. That is a daunting position to be in for a few reasons: first, it requires me to either count on my memory or on my ability to decipher my own handwriting as I attempt to reconstruct the past.

What was I trying to write? Why did I think it was so important? Mysteries upon mysteries!

Second, the discipline and time commitment behind the task. Giving my diary an hour a day to draw a page feels far less onerous than planning out after the fact and realizing it’s going to require ten to twelve pages, translating to twenty-plus hours of work, to get the story out. The third reason comes down to a quirk of personal psychology: drawing in my diary feels ephemeral and low-stakes and gives me a sense of permission to draw fast and loose, to not get hung up on constructing a narrative, to just draw in my little floppy diary book. Drawing after the fact tends to feel more like an event. I feel compelled to use the “good” paper, to draw bigger and neater, to make something that matters (whatever that means). It becomes work, in other words.

This is exactly what happened as I considered telling my diary about the event. As my script grew, so did the task. I know it will be worth it, but it does mean I have nothing much to share here in the way of comics right now. Nothing, save this single diary page about how I celebrated the successful completion of both symposium (on Thursday and Friday) and Adult Education workshop (on Saturday): with trash. Glorious, salty, crunchy, bubbly, mind-numbing trash!

Chaucer would probably approve.