11/15/24: THEM VAULTED CEILINGS

An American cartoonist in Europe: Part 1

Hey y’all, 

Like a lot of artists, a great deal of my time in school was spent daydreaming. Pretending to be someone or somewhere else. Dreaming of worlds and places where life was so much more than the cold gray bars of Algebra class. 

As it turns out having your high school under the flight path of the Charlotte Douglas International Airport will do a lot to keep your head in the clouds. Day after day, year after year we’d sit there, stuck, rotting away while the steel bellies of those birds glided overhead. Taunting us. Rumbling our “soundproofed”cage with the ring of freedom.

As soon as someone got a driver’s license, my friends and I started making trips to that airport. Loitering in the lobbies, cruising the people movers in a bored teenage haze. We’d sit at gates and watch people load on and off. Returning from lands unknown. Departing to worlds undreamt of.

Views of a Latourist in Paris, 2012

Decades later, I’ve boarded those planes many, many times. Sometimes even fooling myself into believing the destination was my new home. But the truth remains that if I put the pedal down I could sit parked in front of my old high school within 15 minutes.

The coffee shop I write this in sits a block from the hospital where I was born.

Loathe as I am to admit it, somehow, despite all the stamps on my passport, for all my fidgety, grumpy restlessness— I’ve spent most of my time comfortably settled in my hometown. Needing some collision with outside forces to nudge me closer or further from it’s orbit.

Higher Education was the excuse on which the travel of my early 20s revolved. Time spent driving across the Southeastern United States that built up the confidence to push across continent. But Europe? Asia? Those places still intimidated me. Put me right back in that West Mecklenburg classroom, staring through the ceiling.

Comics though, have some inherent restlessness vibrating from their core. The solitary nature of creating them tends to bottle up far too much kinetic energy for even the most introverted. You end up flung, so much as pulled, toward parts unknown. Towards places where you’re told the grass is greener. Hills where zip-a-tone flows free. Befriending European creators, and being published abroad left no room for any more fear or excuses. Travel was now both a privilege and an obligation. 

Yet as important as they were, those European work excursions were still timid excuses for travel. Shepherded by gracious locals who sanded down the jagged edges of my bawnjournos and grassy ass-es. Morphed TinTin’s Hurj into Air-Jay. Anchored to pre-scheduled times and places, made those experiences feel, at least retrospectively, kind of guard-railed. 

So when a largely unforeseen, yet welcomed opportunity to kick around France for a couple of weeks arose— I decided it was high time I took advantage of the rare opportunity to travel completely solo. A trip without much plan or purpose. Impromptu to the point that I ended up wrestling with how to explain why I was leaving. 

Or more accurately why I felt the need to leave? 

Selfies on the comics lined streets of Rue Dante, nearly 10 years apart.

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There’s a breeze that blows when you’re looking up a flight. The gentle, perfumed breath of the horizon beckons in a musical tongue. 

The blousy sleeves of your Fabio shirt flap. Your saber rattles in his hilt. 

Romance calls. 

Reality though? Reality is standing on the cobblestone stairs of an MC Escher painting with no cell phone service, and a thousand blocks of distance between you and the pillow you rented from a stranger. 

Reality is the existential see-saw that the all-too-familiar, all-too-American wafts of Old Spice hanging in the crowd around the Mona Lisa have put you on.

If only you can get a better photo. You can prove you ain’t one of THEM people.

You’re the best of them. You belong. Here. 

Amongst these vaulted ceilings. 

Still, as sweaty and chaotic and lonely as the reality of travel can be, there is something about a change of scenery that makes it all seem permissible. Welcome even. 

You are unarmed. Not just untethered from what you know— but in a bigger sense what you think makes up who you are. 

Vulnerability requires that you be more attentive. More analytical. More open to what’s coming your way. If travelling solo is anything universal it’s an exercise in unclenching. And for an artist that forced ejection from a hard-fought creative routine can be as unsettling as it is energizing. 

Maybe that’s because, in America, where art is largely centered around entertainment, we tend to feel bound by what other people want from it. Or more perhaps more accurately what satisfying other people will give us. In terms of our own identity, or value, or bank account. Being unique, or weird, or misunderstood is cool. But way cooler if other people sign off on it. We tend to mythologize Europe’s appreciation of art as something purer. When in reality most art has been in lockstep with the exchange of economic and social capital since the cave painters.

So no, they don’t carry cartoonists around on their shoulders in France. But there IS a social acceptability and influence that just doesn’t exist in the States. Comics are treated as art. And not exactly in some lofty, or reverential way. They’re just what they are, another part of the tapestry. 

They belong. 

Views of a Latourist in Paris, 2024

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As someone who grew up feeling like he was the ONLY person his age reading comics, it’s a little surreal to see ads for them in the Paris airport. To walk down the comic shop-lined blocks of Rue Dante. To see Asterix on the postage stamps. Or Peyo’s work for sale in the bouquinistes along the Seine. It’s not just the characters it’s actual comics, as in the sequential stories, and they are everywhere.

Ho-Hum. 

I tried to stay cooly disinterested. To measure my vacation in blocks walked vs. crepes eaten. And still… serendipitously, almost fated-ly, I’d arrived during the last weeks of a huge Bandes dessinées exhibition at the Centre Pompidou.

Moebius. Hergé. Otomo. Kojima. Tezuka. Frank Miller. Jack Kirby. Will Eisner. Hugo Pratt. Robert Crumb. Charles Burns. Dan Clowes. Chris Ware. Blutch— their art was lining the walls of a giant hybrid library/art museum/Metal Hurlant-style Battlestar Galactica vessel that was just a few train stops away. 

Would there be anything more American than to skip it? 

(To be continued..)

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A little housekeeping before I go—

If you’ve been paying attention to my regularly updated IG account you know that I’ve been teasing the idea of crowdfunding a collection of new comics. A 200-ish page collection, that would include a bunch of new and rare things that remain unseen to most of the internet. 

Despite the delays and dread— I think that my perfectionist compulsions are making for something pretty unique. But I do, and will, need your help to bring this project to life. 

The first thing you can do is help me decide if there’s a better market before or after the holidays. Where I sit each has its plusses and minuses, and at the end of the day what it takes to make and put out the best work is what will ultimately decide my path forward. Your preferences, however, no matter what they are, give me information. Feedback I can use to improve, streamline, and bolster these efforts. So please let me know what you think, either in the comments or via the email option. One way or the other, this book coming very soon. I swear.

As always, I appreciate y’all. More bougie French stuff next time. 

More soon… 

-j