In anticipation of Gabrielle Bell's new comic, Career Shoplifter (coming September!), we decided to do an impromptu Gabrielle Bell week at Uncivilized. We start with a thread on diary comics. @luckygab
This thread is based on an essay from the Gabrielle Bell mini-comic we published: LA Diary. The essay was written by @BetaTestingTomK . Without further ado:
Everyday Alchemy: The Comics of Gabrielle Bell @luckygab
"Quit the night and seek the day"— from a Magick ritual.
The Diary as a form didn't begin to flower until the Renaissance and the "invention" of the individual. The existence of the Latin term "diarum" or day indicates a more ancient lineage of the Diary. The Diary is a daily act. But what kind of act?
Before a diary can be kept, time must be invented. In the Paleolithic, ancient astronomers transformed lunar phases, flood cycles, and other natural phenomena into marks on wood or bone. It was a way to gain knowledge and understand the forces that ruled their lives.
Imagine the cognitive leap: "if I make a mark every day, I will learn the moon's secret." It wasn't just the invention of time; it was also the invention of process itself: the daily act through which something can be learned or achieved.
At some point, the act of recording turned into the art of predicting and eventually into ritual. Natural phenomena became hidden behind the semantic inventions created to describe them. They became sacred calendars, traditions, and gods.
The original act of discovery turned into esoteric lore and occult secrets. The origins of these systems were forgotten and mutated into divine revelation. In the beginning, was the word.
The Renaissance, "Cogito, Ergo Sum," and Psychoanalysis ushered the individual onto the historical stage. Sacred law gave way to profane science.
The Diary as we know it today came out of that ferment of ideas and became a technology of consciousness, a way to construct the uniqueness of the individual. "I keep a diary; therefore, I am."
The Diary entered the world of comics in the 1970s through the work of Justin Green (RIP: https://www.tcj.com/remembering-justin-green/ @ComicsJournal ). Following Green's lead, significant artists like Harvey Pekar, Art Spiegelman, Robert Crumb, and Eddie Campbell contributed to the genre.
By the 1990s, the autobio comic was a staple of alternative comics, and a new generation of artists like Julie Doucet, Chester Brown, Joe Matt, Joe Sacco, James Kochalka, Phoebe Gloeckner, and Marjane Satrapi pushed the genre into uncharted territories.
The intense confessional nature of Green's work set the tone for autobiographical comics that followed. From Crumb, through Brown, Matt, and Doucet, to David Heatly, etc., the genre's trajectory has been towards transgression. Authenticity constructed as a duel of grimaces.
Gabrielle Bell's comics have much in common with this lineage, but in her recent Diary Comics, traces of that more ancient tradition peak through.
Reading these pages, one gets the sense of the Diary as a daily magickal act: the declaration of fidelity to the Great Work. Individually the stories are small slices of mundane moments. Taken as a continuum, the accumulated moments transform into a world.
It's not just the world as seen by the artist, but an inner world of being. If Green's or Crumb's compulsive cartoon confessions resemble divine (or demonic) prophecy, Gabrielle Bell's comics diary is an assemblage of different revelations.
For Bell, the daily resolutions, reminders, and notes to self act as spells and enchantments to bind her to the task at hand: drawing comics.
Her daily comics are a reminder that the divine breath of inspiration is created from small everyday miracles. @luckygab
Preorder Gabrielle Bell's @luckygab Career Shoplifter:
https://uncivilizedbooks.com/career-shoplifter-by-gabrielle-bell/
Read the original essay here:
https://blog.uncivilizedbooks.com/2019/07/06/everyday-alchemy/