Wednesday Lunch: Mushrooms & Superheroes

My favorite poet and my favorite poet’s favorite comics scholar are giving a double new-ish books talk on Wednesday at our university library. Lesley will lead-off with a selection from Mycocosmic, followed by a reading/viewing of our collaborative tarot poetry comic “Rhapsodomantic,” then I’ll try to condense The Color of Paper into the following fifteen-minute slideshow. My comments will be semi-extemporaneous, but here are the basics. Like Tarot, my drawing technique has a random element. I drew this skull without lifting the stylus, then hit “delete,” with no idea which areas would be black and which white. Same for this human face. I didn’t intend the nose, left check, bottom lip, lower chin, and right jaw to be black — and I’m curious how viewers interpret those black and white areas. This self-portrait follows roughly the same technique, but at a granular level, creating a woodcut effect of light and shadow on skin. So does this drawing. But here the image is understood to…