Lola

"Banana Slug Love" (c) 2011, Chrissy Spallone

Meat Party

Ladies and gentlemen, "Swiney Todd" (c) 2011, Chrissy Spallone

I wrote this "rap" (read it again with rap in mind in case the foot and meter was throwing you off) in the shower a couple weeks ago. It gets boring in there sometimes...not much else to do once I'm finished reading the riddles on my shampoo bottles. Showering is one of my least favorite things to do, but I try to make the best of it.

The gym is another common place where ideas are born. I wrote "Bun Home" on a rowing machine...

I hope you enjoyed "Swiney Todd". The medium is all pencils of varying hardnesses. I used a kneaded eraser to highlight areas where light would hit. One of my favorite techniques.

History:Part 1

This girl is a woman now; I've just received my MSLIS, and I can't

wait for someone to give me a chance to use it. In the meantime, I'm

back at home in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, and you know what that

means -- I'm gonna scan in a bunch of old stuff from my childhood!

This time, I looked through a bunch of old notebooks I saved from middle

school and high school, all of them rich with old notes; amusingly half-baked,

smart alecky, and/or brutally honest school assignments; sketches; comics;

plays; poems; raps...I was pretty creative back then.

Some of the stuff was pretty disturbing... I wrote some mean things targeting

specific classmates, even turning in some of it for a grade! I can't believe that

it was accepted, and even given decent marks. Very pre-Columbine. But the stuff I'm

including in this post is material I still like today. Even the little story above which

hints at harm coming to a dog...that was out of character, but interesting.

For Part 1 of History, I'll post the "writing" selections from the notebooks.

Coming soon in Part 2 will be the comics and sketches...including a comic my friend

wrote about me back then! I promise you that this post will include some

funny, funny stuff, so PLEASE click UNDER THE CUT to see it all!

Freshman English Class (1998-1999)

Above is a list of things I, 14-year-old Chrissy, would do for love, an
assignment given while my class was reading Return of the Native. What
kind of sociopath was I back then? This sort of filterless writing was typical.
I don't think I was aware that anyone would find this list to be out of the
ordinary. Was I being sarcastic? I'm not exactly sure. All I know is that my
morals have improved since then.

This is an example of "symbolism" I came up with to describe the events

taking place in the book The Grapes of Wrath, a book I greatly enjoyed.

Lamely, I used a turtle to symbolize the Joads' journey, as it was slow, etc.

Was I for real here? There's no grade on this paper, so maybe it was just an

example the teacher gave. But it's so dumb...I could see myself turning

something like this in as a joke between me, myself, and I. It wouldn't

be the first time I completely made fun of an assignment for the benefit

of self-amusement, even at the risk of a lower grade. This was back in

freshman year of high school, of course...again, my morals and work ethic

improved as I grew older, and continue to develop.

The following three examples were from a journal we kept of Romeo and Juliet -related assignments:

Here is a "conceit" I wrote about unrequited love, although we were given
a choice between writing on this theme or writing on "love at first sight".
"Unrequited love is a disease like chicken pox/which you can give but
won't get back again," my 14-year-old hand wrote in the girly handwriting
which didn't come naturally, but which I briefly affected in an uncharacteristic
attempt to conform with others. Where did that little gem come from? That
wasn't bad at all! I don't remember being 14 years old and not wanting to get
out of bed in the morning... at least not because of unrequited love. I wrote some
promising poems back then (for my age), and now I never come up with serious
poems. I don't know where I got the information to write something like this, as I
never loved anyone in that way, nor had I caught chicken pox.

Above: In another example of sociopathy/honesty, my response to the question,
"What would you have done if you were on the streets of Verona and a fight broke
out?" Referring to the fight at the beginning of Romeo and Juliet. I also cussed
lightly. Some of this stuff is so embarrassing; I wish I had been more respectful.
It's stuff like this that kept me out of the top ten.

Above: We were to write a "fractured fairy tale", a.k.a. an alternate, twisted
retelling of Romeo and Juliet, and of course I made it so that Romeo dies,
but Juliet ends up becoming a necrophiliac. Of course. Boy was I an eerie kid.
I was apparently so innocent that I didn't know why this couldn't work out,
yet perverted enough that I somehow came up with this unique idea and found
it appropriate to submit to a teacher. Can you believe this?

Freshman World Cultures Class (1998-1999)

World Cultures was a class that I enjoyed and excelled in. I have negative feelings

about this class, however, because I was mean to the teacher. Early in
the year, I was seated next to two close friends, and I would converse with them
and eat Power Bars during class, which was disruptive and arrogant. I received
top marks on all the quizzes, but my friends received D's and F's, I think. After a
couple weeks, this disruption and distraction of my friends got old, and my teacher
rightfully reseated me. Being immature back then, however, I held a grudge against
this teacher for the rest of the year, turning in violently-themed and sarcastic
assignments that nevertheless received top marks. I feel horrible about my bad

attitude to this day. This was a good teacher, new at the time, and I think I wore

him down after awhile, or at least made a bad impression of myself. A student would
not be able to get away with stuff like this today. Maybe I feel bad because I know
what I know now...maybe we were all obnoxious brats back then, and I'm over
sensitive about it because I hang on to every detail. I seem to remember that
kids were more comfortable with my sense of humor back then. No one was
calling me a psycho early in freshman year. It's interesting to see these
assignments today, though. I remember that one of the lost ones had a
comment that I "have a future as a satirist".

Exhibit A: Was this even an assignment? There's not really an explanation
for it. An anti-death penalty statement, perhaps? I mean, the teacher commented
on it, and it's drawn in crayons, indicating that it was more than an in-class
doodle...but what on earth is this? By the way, the boy drawn in this picture
is based on my friend Karl, but I wasn't mad at him at the time or anything.
We always got along, but during our teenybopper years I guess we had sort
of a love-hate relationship.

Exhibit B: We were learning about the Chinese Zodiac and asked to create
our own Chinese-style zodiac sign. This wasn't so bad; "has very short
friendships" was kind of clever, as was "least compatible with other
cannibals". It was dark, but in that charming Grimm's Fairy Tales way.

The Greatest Thing I Ever Wrote?
Of course, I did a lot of writing during my free time, too, or while bored in class.
The following might be my greatest achievement to date; a play I started to write
about myself and my friends 20 years into the future (which would now be 9 years
into the future). It's based on the John Updike poem "Lament for Cocoa," which
my 9th grade English class read and I remember really getting a kick out of and memorizing. 
Read this script. It is truly excellent and eerie. I am so glad I found this, as I had completely forgotten about its existence. This is the best thing that has ever been published on my blog to date.


Tune in next time for more "history."
Again, part 2 will concentrate on my old drawings and comics.

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You Are My Life

Spring is in the air, and what's spring without a couple of bunnies? The new seasons of our favorite TV shows are starting up again, but it's reruns here at Bibliowhining. Reruns for the old-time fans, that is. Schoolwork beckoning and spring break in the near future, this entry features a fan favorite: 2008's Bun Home, my parody of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, which also satirizes intellectual posturing. I hope you enjoy this bit of sequential storytelling. I hope to turn it into a graphic novel someday.

You can tell this is old material by my naive use of the blue pencil. Blue pencil is the devil, and turned my early self-publishing endeavors into a nightmare. I recommend clicking on the below image to enlarge it and make it more readable.



It seems that many who didn't grow up reading comics have a hard time understanding them. It's no longer the case that everything that comes out must be approved by the Comics Code Authority, so cartoonists have as much freedom as filmmakers, and many have taken advantage of this. Unfortunately, looking at the available comics/graphic novels in libraries and even many comic book stores, it would seem that there are only three options: Manga, Superheroes, or long self-pitying memoirs completely drained of any humor or imagination. Once Fun Home won Time Magazine's "Book of the Year," comics -- I'm sorry, "graphic novels" were suddenly on everyone's radar, inspiring many copycat books, depressing and uncreative autobiographies about someone's failed hipster romance or experiences with the AIDS virus or physical abuse. While it's fine that these books are published as they are surely a comfort to some people, they aren't the only genre available in the adult comics medium. Libraries typically order only these new books which appear in the reviews they read, and the history of comics is ignored. There is a lot of autobiographical stuff that is interesting, and Fun Home, though not my taste, is at least very well drawn, but a lot of the bios and nonfiction that have come out since just don't do it for me.

In general, libraries started to collect movies only in the past 20 years. And yet, all the DVD and VHS collections I've seen represent the entire history of film, in all genres -- classics such as Night of the Hunter and Taxi Driver and The Wizard of Oz are available on the shelves right next to the new releases. I wish that the comics medium was given the same respect in libraries. I don't enjoy reading the trendy autobiographical comics that are being churned out today, and it's frustrating not to see my old favorites on the shelves for others to discover. Fun Home may have come out recently and catalyzed a mainstream popularity of alternative comics, but that doesn't mean that the medium suddenly came into existence in the year 2005, or that there is no older material of value. Also, even new titles that are humorous/satirical/literary are being ignored for some reason -- maybe they aren't being reviewed?

I encourage librarians to order a greater variety of adult comics for their collections; older titles, and also different genres besides superhero, manga, and autobiography. Fantagraphics is constantly coming out with a variety of quality titles, and they also publish reprints of classic comic strips which I'm sure younger readers will find fascinating. The librarian at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum (formerly the Cartoon Research Library) is a very helpful person to ask about "key" comics that should be in the collection. I have emailed her for several class assignments, and her responses are always incredibly quick and thorough. Or just ask me!

Though I guess I was sort of an underground cartoonist since age 8, drawing strips which lovingly made fun of other kids in class, I first became aware of "real" underground comics when I was a 13-year old kid browsing the stacks of a public library in South Jersey...I checked out the book Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art by Roger Sabin, and became fascinated by R. Crumb. Of course, the Internet being off my radar at the time, and the library being lacking in actual comics (the title I mentioned was more of a history book about comics), I was unable to explore the medium more. I mean, I probably shouldn't have been reading R. Crumb comics at age 13, but you get my point, right?