Who
is... Donna Barr? Donna
Barr has been drawing since 1954, writing since 1962, published since 1986,
and publishing since 1996.
She has a Bachelors' Degree in German, and
is a veteran of the United States Army (1970-1973).
Readers worldwide
follower her THE DESERT PEACH, STINZ, BOSOM ENEMIES, HADER
AND THE COLONEL, among others.
She is recognized by her peers as
a pioneer in the field of drawn books and their use in new technologies of distribution
and reproduction. She is a contributor to the world's largest webcomics site,
moderntales.com, and its affiliate
sites.
She achieved her lifetime career goal in 2004 when her life's
work -- past, present and future -- has been accepted as part of the San Diego
State University's Library's Special Collection, and will be available to students
and professors for research, and to the public for exhibits.
She can
be emailed at barr at stinz dot com (remove spam barriers). She answers. Keep
the sentences short.
"Androo Robinson's work looks like Linda Medley and Carla Speed McNeil got drunk and produced the best love child ever. His deeply-internalized knowledge of emotions and mind is irresistable. And his line-work is a treat."
That's what my blurb going to say on the cover of his new collection, Cryptozoa. _____________________________________________________________________
Speaking of the Medster, Evan Dorkin was praising Linda Medley's HC collection -- and one cannot praise her work too much -- as being "without obsessive world-building."
We know what Evan means when he brings up OWB; all those D&D maps and hiearchies and social orders. The kind of thing we've all done, in our attempts to figure out what in the Midnight Library is going on across the lands of the Jungian archetypes. We're not so much mapping fantasy as mapping our own internal order. But what about those artists and writers who base their work in our own reality, our own multi-layered social order, the one you and I actually live in?
We cheat.
We use those complex existing mythologies and social orders, while assuming everybody knows what they are. We don't have to explain all the multi-layered levels of Grimm's fairy tails or the Third Reich, because people either know them in detail, or can look them up at Wikipedia.
Are we lazy? Or have we gotten the OWB out of our system? We've written our fake languages, we've drawn our unknown lands, we've taken our slog through the afterlife and the dreamworld.
Jason Lute's Berlin wanders through the real world, as well. It's drawn with great control, it's well-researched and intense, using another time and place to comment on our own.
No one ever really does an historical book; no one ever really writes about any time but their own or out of any other viewpoint than their own. If you want to know what a writer is really like, don't bother with the biographies; all her or his characters are just slivers of the writer's own soul. If you think otherwise, you're kidding yourself. Your brain is locked up in one skull, communicating through your eyeballs and ear-tubes, and there's no way you can really get into somebody else's head without your own interpretation. It's all going to be garlicked up with your own grey matter, like a a literary baba ganush (I always make the connection between brains and the middle-eastern eggplant dish since the day I got stuck between a tech writer and an undertaker's son at a party, in two conversations about head-embalming and cookery; evidently there's a great resemblance in consistency between the dip and the dipped-out).
Berlin is a sliver of life in pre-war Berlin, specifically the life of artists and writers, rather than an over-all picture of the great city within a complex overall community (like I'm one to talk; the only sliver I do is wearing jackboots). Read every book you can get on Germany in the period and you'll start seeing why the only people on the planet who have any sympathy for us Murkins right now are the Krauts.
Berlin is from an American's viewpoint, of course, without the finely-tuned, arch irony of Berlin itself, but it's sure as hell NOT Hogan's Heroes (This is the compliment I get and I'm passing it on, but it's usually the only one the Americans can get a reference lock on). Which show has its own moments, but you have to know about 150 years of German anti-military humor to get all the jokes the kraut crew snuck into the mix.
You have to read Arnold Beck's An Underground Life to get why the phrase "I know nothing, I see nothing," should make you catch your breath.
Oh, I'm sorry -- you poor Americans are already finding out why, aren't you? Sorry for the momentary lapse.
Beck's book will probably also show you why I just bang my head on the wall any time I think I'm being original before I'm gob-smacked by just one more example of Life imitating Art. Then there's the photo of Vincent Price as a young asthete around 1934 in Germany and Vienna and all he needs is the mole... _____________________________________________________________________
Oh, wait a minute. Those chimneys and bleak worker's houses. I think the Timster already got ahead of me on that one.
I don't want to do color! Will anybody hate me if I just like black and white better? How Ed Wood of me. Some of us in the old BlackandWhite Revolution really did like it better, not just because it's easier and cheaper to print.
