On His Trail

It' s been a year since my last post.  Thanks to all who have written to me. 

I'm still working on the biography, following Murray through the decades, hot on his trail.  I have a (very) rough draft of the first half and am still researching the second, going over documents, conducting interviews, and rereading his work.  I'm hoping to have a reasonable draft of the whole thing one year from now.   In the meantime--I'm still looking for memories, insights, and musings, from any who knew him.  I hope to hear from you.

Janet

Dear Friends,

I'm hard at work on my biography of Murray, currently researching his life in the 1960s. The work is going very well, and I'm very excited about this project. As part of my research, I'm also very eager to hear from anyone who knew Murray and has a story to tell about him. Is that you? If so, please write to me at bookchinbiography@gmail.com. I'd love to know your story!

An article I wrote about Murray has just been published on the Communalism website, http://www.communalism.net/Archive/14/bo.pdf. It's a reply to a critic, concerning his work in the 1940s and 1950s.

Cheers,
Janet

Dear Friends,

In the past year, creating these cartoons and posting them here has been a sheer delight for me. Recreating part of our life together in visual form has helped soften the blow of missing him. But lately I've come to the conclusion that I also need to write Murray's biography. I mean in prose. Doing justice to his life and ideas requires far more words that I can squeeze into speech balloons.

So I'm writing his biography, working title Murray Bookchin: A Life in History. I'm currently researching, amassing material, and writing drafts. As I work on it, I will continue posting cartoons but at a much slower rate. I will also post news about publications.

Thanks so much for visiting my blog!

Salud,
Janet

12 The Great Reversal (part 2 of 2)

11 The Great Reversal (part 1 of 2)

10 Moscow 1934 (part 2 of 2)

9 Moscow 1934 (part 1 of 2)

9 Crotona Park Story (cont.)

8 Crotona Park Story (cont.)

Hello everyone,

This project is a work-in-progress, and so the evolution of my style and my development as a comic artist are necessarily visible, on display. This time I'm experimenting with some changes . . .

First of all, the horizontal format that I've been using is really suited for comic strips, whereas I'm writing a graphic memoir. Most graphic novels are in vertical format, so as of this post I'm shifting to vertical. I enjoyed working vertically: it gives me more flexibility with size and arrangement of panels, and their flow from one to the next.

Also I'm using a computer font this time (hand-lettering is extremely time consuming!).

And whereas comics are traditionally in all caps, I'm trying out upper and lowercase.

And finally, since I'm looking at continuity from one page to the next, I'm dropping the title panel that each strip had before . . .

I'm hoping my use of particular colors, amid the basic black and white, will be sufficient to distinguish the flashbacks from the more contemporary scenes. RED alone indicates Murray's time as a Marxist (in these strips the 1930s); I'll add GREEN when he starts working with ecological ideas; and finally the additional YELLOW indicates the "contemporary" period actually starting in 1986 when I came along. Notice that he carries all these colors on him: the red and yellow in his suspenders, the green in his shirt.

Since you've had to wait awhile for a new strip, I'm posting two this time.

By the way my article "Bookchin Breaks with Anarchism" is now online at http://www.communalism.org/; it is also forthcoming in print in the anthology ANARCHISM FOR THE 21st CENTURY, ed. Gambone and Murtagh, from A.K. Press.

Salud! More next month!

Friends, I have no cartoon to post for you this week--I've been busy writing an article called "Bookchin Breaks with Anarchism." I realized after Murray died that some people didn't realize that late in life he'd broken with anarchism, or if they did, they didn't understand the reasons. I saw what happened during the late 1980s and 1990s, and how the break unfolded, so in this article I recount what I observed. The article (it's rather long!) will be published in an anthology called ANARCHISM FOR THE 21ST CENTURY, by Red Lion Press. I'll announce it here when the book is published.

Speaking of publications, A.K. Press has just published a new anthology of Murray's later writings called SOCIAL ECOLOGY AND COMMUNALISM, edited and introduced by Eirik Eiglad. It's a fine collection, whose highlight is "The Communalist Project" (2002), Murray's last important theoretical work (and the place where he broke with anarchism in writing). I recommend it--essential reading for social ecologists and anyone interested in Murray's work.

Here's a photo I took of Murray in 1998 or 1999. Enjoy it! More cartoons coming starting in September.

I love reading your encouraging comments. They mean a great deal to me. Thank you, thank you, to all who have posted them!

My friend Vivien recently gave me a suggestion about how to fix the size problem. I'll try it for this next one, "O Pioneers." The image is smaller than before (right), but click on it, and (I hope) it will fill your screen the right way. Fingers crossed ...

I hate to break the cartooning momentum, but I need to take a few weeks off now to concentrate on writing the script for the memoir. I'll be back here in mid-June or so with the next cartoon.

Someone suggested that I upload the comic strip in a smaller size, so that when you click on it with your mouse, it will get big enough for you to see but not enormous (as happens with the previous ones). I hope this works better!

Continuing the 1930s flashback, edging into color ...

Scooter Reverie 3

I don't have much control over the layout of this blog, since I'm using a Blogspot template; and as a first-time blogger, I'm still figuring out how to do this at all. I know there are kinks in my presentation here, but within the limitations I'm trying to work them out.

Blogs are read from bottom to top, which that can be confusing for cartoons. A few weeks ago, in my first post ever, I published the first panels of "Scooter Reverie" in such a way that you have to read them from bottom to top. In retrospect that seems really confusing! So for these three new "Scooter Reverie" panels, I've posted them so you can read them from top to bottom.

I've also switched from a vertical ("portrait") to a horizontal ("landscape") page layout, which seems more suited to a computer screen. I'll use it from now on. I hope it's easier to read!

I can't promise you new cartoons every week or so--I'll do my best to post new ones once a month. Thanks for your patience, and please drop in on my blog from time to time.

Janet

Scooter Reverie 2

Here are the next panels for "Scooter Reverie." More to come.

"Scooter Reverie" is kind of a slice-of-life series, about Murray's daily life. The memoir will have scenes like that too. But other parts will take up his ideas, and some of the changes he went through in the 1990s.

I expect it will be a big challenge for me to draw abstract ideas like "democracy" and "reason" and "humanism"! I'll figure out a way, though, I'm sure.

Scooter Reverie 1

For my graphic memoir of twenty years with Murray, I'm concentrating now mainly on writing the script. The script is the backbone of any graphic novel. There's no point in making cartoons, after all, till you know what the text is going to be! So I'm working mostly on that part, which may take me a year to finish.

In the meantime I'm practicing drawing and making cartoons. Since January I've been learning Photoshop to see if it can help me make cartoons. Of course I do and will always continue to do the drawing the old-fashioned way, with pen and ink--there's no substitute for that, nor should there be. But I thought Photoshop might help me with speech balloons, lettering, sizing the panels, and applying tone (grays). Here's the first result. It's a practice series of panels that I call "Scooter Reverie." This is the beginning of it ... to be continued.

Studio Show etchings

Last fall, in the weeks immediately after his death on July 30, 2006, I made a series of six etchings of Murray as a tribute to him. These are some of the etchings that were displayed at the Firehouse Gallery (part of Burlington City Arts' Visual Arts Center) from November 15 to December 16, 2006.

I'm starting this blog because I've been making a lot of drawings of Murray Bookchin, myself, and our friends in preparation for the graphic memoir of him that I am working on. When I show my drawings to my friends, they seem to enjoy them. So to make it all easier--a blog!