For the remaining three days of professional workshops — the morning sessions — Émile, Badoux, and I decided to keep it simple and just work collaboratively with our Burmese counterparts. We pooled ideas and came up with three we thought would work.

On Wednesday we introduced an “exquisite corpse” jam where each of the artists — including us — drew one panel of a continuing narrative. As a group, we came up with a character and a situation — a man sitting at an outdoor restaurant — and then let our individual (and collective) imaginations take over. As everyone gathered around, I started things off, drawing a guy sitting at a Chinese barbecue, with no overt clues as to what should happen next. Badoux came next, and he added conflict — and humor — by showing a close-up of the guy’s leg, with a hungry rat approaching it. Then the Burmese artists took over, and it was really fun to see the story take off, as the rat was revealed to be remote-controlled, and the protagonist morphed into a true Burmese, with a longyi and everything. The final results, which we tacked up on the board, weren’t exactly publication material, but the exercise was a great ice-breaker. We had seen each other at work, realized we shared a sense of playfulness and humor, and were looking forward to our next get-together.

On Thursday I proposed a new idea, which Émile and Badoux embraced enthusiastically. Taking a pre-ruled sheet of paper, each of us drew the opening panel of a six-panel page. I drew a wooden hut, situated in a rural area at the end of a dirt road. Behind it were some simple mountains, a sign was in the extreme foreground, and a round shape — sun, moon, or… something else — hung in the sky. Badoux drew a jet plane flying overhead in a cloudless sky. And Émile drew a bedraggled, stinky dog, sitting by the side of the road. From each of these jumping-off points, the idea was for the artists to continue the story, bringing it to a satisfying conclusion by panel 6.

Mine, Badoux, and Émile’s opening salvos

Once again, the group embraced the idea and set to work. We three visitors took the challenge too, finishing the stories of our two counterparts (and continuing on to their own page, if they finished the other two in time). It was really fun to share the space as the twelve of us worked, taking occasional breaks to peek over at our neighbor’s progress. For my own part, I used Émile’s panel to reference the then-imminent Thingyan Water Festival, depicted so charmingly in Guy Delisle’s The Burma Chronicles.

Again, I was really impressed with the Burmese artists’ creative and humorous solutions to the “problems” we had posed — particularly in regard to Badoux’s drawing of the plane. For that one, many of them came up with some really rather dark and cynical interpretations, many having to do with terrorism and plane crashes. It was clear that they found the material rich for political commentary, obscured by a veil of humor.

For some reason, during this exercise a number of the Burmese cartoonists worked me into their comics! As you can see from these examples (again, artist’s names redacted), there’s no mistaking who the hapless lovestruck character in these stories is. What’s up with that?! And why didn’t Émile and Badoux suffer the same fate? *Sigh*

Tomorrow: Friday’s exercise, courtesy of Émile Bravo…

For the afternoon “amateur” sessions, to be held over at the Alliance Française, over 35 people had signed up, so Badoux, Émile, and I split them up into three “classes,” with the idea that the students would rotate each day, getting a chance to learn from each one of us.

It turned out that the “amateur” group was actually comprised of about half Burmese comics professionals and half interested amateurs — including two women (one Burmese and the other Australian) and one Buddhist monk.

Now, before we actually arrived in Myanmar, we had received some guidelines from the American and French embassies about the workshops. Remember, at its heart, this was a propaganda mission, to spread Western concepts of democracy and free expression. To quote from the original invitation I received, it was thought that “by utilizing the concept of graphic novels (a popular but rare form of communication in Burma), the target audience will have a chance to better understanding this art form and gain insight into using it as an effective means of telling stories, particularly to the youth. In Burma’s strictly censored and controlled society, people are always seeking ways to circumvent the system, and graphic novels can be another means of doing so.”

That is all well and good, but I couldn’t very well teach a workshop with such an explicit political agenda. From our brief time in the country, Badoux, Émile, and I realized that the Burmese comics culture was starting from such a rudimentary place — especially in terms of the content it addressed — that it would be better to just make comics together. Simple as that. So early ideas of discussing “‘comics and the artistic process,’ ‘the psychology of line styles and color,’ ‘word picture dynamics,’ and ‘visual iconography and its effects” were out the window.

So my approach to the afternoon workshops was to focus on collaboration and creativity. Taking my cues from mini-comics I first discovered back in Chicago — done by Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Terry LaBan, and others — I showed my students how to create eight-page mini-comics from one sheet of paper, and split them up into pairs to work collaboratively. The idea was that each pair come up with a simple concept together — just a launching-pad, really — and then create an eight-page story based on that concept, trading the comic back and forth, each doing a page at a time.

This idea of cooperation and competition — to me, the foundation stones of collaboration — seemed new to them, and there was some initial resistance (probably also partly caused by the language barrier). Eventually, however, the students got the idea — that they shouldn’t try to work the story out in advance or discuss what they planned to do, but just respond viscerally and playfully to what their partner had left them with — and the results were often really wonderful. (Concepts the students came up with included: a broken clock, learning to play football [soccer], going shopping, being trapped on a desert island, Internet dating, and picking fruit from a very high tree.)

I found that the best pairings were often when two people of different skills worked together, finding a happy medium between their talents. And maybe my favorite pair was the male Burmese professional and the female Australian amateur. He spoke no English and she no Burmese, and yet their collaboration — about a child learning to swim — was dynamic, surprising, and best of all, funny!

During the course of making these two-person “jam” comics, I found time to work in discussions of materials (pencils, pens, brushes, and paper), use of the computer (yes, the Burmese use PhotoShop too!), basic storytelling techniques (e.g., creating characters and situations), and sources of ideas and creative inspiration. And I talked about my work, specifically A.D. I figured that just by talking about the book (and its condemnation of the American response to Hurricane Katrina), the message — and the connection to their own tragedy of Cyclone Nargis — would be explicitly clear.

Professor Josh

Hard at work

Passing around the finished minis

Jet lag works in mysterious ways. Despite my extreme fatigue from the 30 hours of traveling, I didn’t sleep all that well my first night in Myanmar. I woke up bright and early at about 4:30 am, which gave me plenty of time to prepare for the full day ahead: breakfast with my two cartooning compatriots, then a three-hour session at the American Center with the Burmese professionals, three more hours at the Alliance Francaise with amateurs, and an introduction to an evening film showing back at the A.C.

At breakfast, I tried talking a bit with Émile and Christophe about the workshop, but they seemed unconcerned and confident that it would work out. It turned out that both of them had done gigs like this before — Émile in China, India, and the U.S., and Christophe in India and Algeria. I, on the other hand, had very little hands-on teaching experience. Some years back, I gave private lessons in comics to a rich Upper East Side teenager, and last November I did a mini-comics workshop with Sari at the Miami Book Fair, but that was about the extent of it. So even though I was a bit intimidated by the prospect of “teaching comics” to men many years my senior (e.g., the Burmese professionals), Émile & Christophe were so blasé about the whole thing that I was content to follow their lead.

Wesley picked us up in “Rolling Thunder,” and we arrived at the American Center fifteen minutes later. The Center is in a different part of town from the U.S. Embassy, but similarly fortified and guarded. Directly across the road from the A.C. entrance was a small hut used by the Myanmar military to keep an eye on things. It was really a sad little structure, slapped together out of plywood and “protected” by a couple of sandbags. Most of the time, the hut was manned by two slovenly guards, dutifully noting our comings and goings on little clipboards. A laundry line was attached to one side of the open-air hovel, and some stray dogs loitered around.

We entered the A.C. to find most of the cartoonists from Monday’s lunch, as well as our translator Aung. I started things off by distributing the pens I had brought as gifts. The men accepted them graciously but in a subdued manner, but I had read that it is considered rude in Burmese culture to over-react to gifts (and to my satisfaction, during the balance of the morning I noticed the artists examining and experimenting with them).

Christophe, Émile, and myself spent much of the morning introducing ourselves and our work, assisted by Aung. Then we heard from the participants, who were mostly men in their fifties and sixties, many of them with careers stretching back to the 1970s and even earlier. [Because of the nature of the Myanmar government, I’m going to refrain from naming any of the workshop participants. Even though the authorities certainly knew who attended the workshops, and even though we never directly addressed politics in our meetings, I don’t feel comfortable “outing” them in public.]

The artists specialized in children’s comics, humor, romance, gag panels, and so forth, with a couple having experience in the adventure comics field. It was fascinating to meet practitioners of my same field halfway around the world, and to see how much we had in common. For the most part, their style and approach to comics struck me as much closer to the West than, say, their more nearby neighbor Japan (undoubtedly a result of Burma being a British colony for so many years.) There was one artist who worked more in a manga style, but he was firmly in the minority. All the men were talented and technically proficient, but again I had that sad feeling that these were people whose creative aspirations had been stunted at an early age; that the Burmese perceptions of the artistic possibility of comics was quite limited.

Mutual introductions took up the whole three hours, so I was relieved of stressing out about running a professional workshop until the next day. We ended the session with me handing out signed copies of A.D. to each participant, a gift of the U.S. embassy.

Then it was off to lunch and to prepare for the afternoon amateur workshops.

International Week of Graphic Novels

Badoux, Josh, Émile