Digital Paris
Three gargoyles look at the sunrise in the photography-based webcomic "Sinister Bedfellows" by Larry Holderfield.
“I had moved back to North Carolina after being away for about 10 years in Berkley, California and Paris, France and wanted to rebuild my social network.” Larry Holderfield, the artists behind the webcomic Sinister Bedfellows, is talking with Frank Stasio on the WUNC radio show The State of Things. “I had been doing the webcomic for about a year, so I thought that would be a good hook. So I googled ‘North Carolina webcomics,’ emailed all of them that I could find, and invited them out for coffee.”[1] The result is the North Carolina Webcomic Coffee Clatch, a monthly meeting of North Carolinian webcomic artists and writers. The comics are a diverse rainbow of genres: fantasy, history, slice-of-life, horror, high art, even a Catgirl Island or two. What started out as coffee became three comic anthologies.[2]
“Larry, how important is it that artists actually get together and actually meet and get coffee?” Frank Stasio asks.
“Actually, I think it’s really important,” Holderfield responds. “We are prone to a solitary lifestyle. We’re chained to our computers and sketchpads and drafting tables.”
“Every now and then, we’ll all get together and we’ll all just be talking about something and somebody will go ‘Oh my God, I have to use that.” That’s Ursula Vernon, the creative force behind Digger and one of the original members of the group. “Or someone will say something, they’ll be a pause, and three or four people will go for their notebooks and start writing things down… but I think a lot of it is like Larry said – getting out of our hermit-like lifestyles and hanging out with other people who understand what it’s like to be an artist.”
“And you can do that,” Statsio interrupts. “That was part of the café culture that we’ve come to romanticize as sort of the artists’ life.” [3] Stasio sound nostalgic for a time where Van Gogh and Matisse lived and worked together. It’s a cultural phenomenon, one that Stasio rightfully describes as ‘romanticized.” What is the appeal of this? Are groups like the NCWCCC carrying the tradition on?
Sylvia Beach outside of Shakespeare and Company, her bookstore. This store was the center of activity for many of the "Lost Generation."
To understand these artist collectives, we must first look at the examples of the past. The so-called Lost Generation of 1920s Paris is one of these. After the Great War, Paris was the beating, throbbing heart of the artistic world and like the great American writers of the past, the aspiring literary scene made their own trips there. Most, according Noel Riley Fitch, only stayed a few weeks, but “[Ezra] Pound came in 1920 and stayed four years; Hemmingway came at the end of 1922 and stayed five.”[4] The ones who stayed percolated around the lives of Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach, the guardians and symbolic leaders of the group. They were, in the words of Beach, “literary pilgrims… consecrated to the cult of Art which was their uncommon bond of faith.”[5] The work produced was a particular bright spot between two terrible wars.
But for the collective, it was just as much about being within the artistic group as it was the merits of the individuals. Paris is a romanticized place; as Van Wyck Brooks pointed out, “writing in Paris is one of the oldest American customs.”[6] By the twenties, cheap travel and the end of American isolationism following the Great War made spending time in Paris a very feasible option. The close knit support community that developed along the Left Bank was an additional plus for the expatriate Americans.[7] As Fitch asserts, “communication and support functioned in their favor… here they were challenged, stimulated, reviewed and – above all – read by a community of literati.”[8]
Today, artists don’t need to travel halfway around the world to get that same community atmosphere. Instead of gathering in a cheap neighborhood – like Montmartre at the end of the 19th century or Greenwich Village during the middle of the 20th – or travelling to an artistic Mecca, the aspiring creative class instead gather online. This is where the “death of distance” comes into play again. Artists no longer need to be in the same neighborhood, or the same city, or even the same country. These support networks, powered by critique, challenge, and praise, are forming over the internet.
The North Carolina Webcomic Coffee Clatch is not by far the only such collective that has formed, although it is unusual in that it eventually manifestied itself in the real world. Lisa N Jones “met a lot of artists over MySpace”[9] and other pre-existing social networks. “I’d add people just because I like their art,” she told me. “Then a couple of them, we’d talk and go ‘oh hey, I really like your stuff.’ I’d talk to a couple of guys that didn’t know how to get their art business going… MySpace is the place I did the most talking about art, more than Flickr (a photostream site) or Etsy (an art commerce site).”[10] The people she talked to came from all over the country. These relationships with other artists are important to her like they are to the artists of the Coffee Clatch; she recently participated in SparkCon, a local arts festival in Raleigh, and will be soon joining the Rock & Shop event at the urging of an artist friend.[11]
Kelly Turnbull has a similar journey when she first started posting her art on the internet. “Elfwood was probably the first one I was on, way back in the day,” she reminisced. “Then I hung around anime boards, whatever I was into when I was a teenager. But I think the first place I really got involved with –” here she starts to laugh “– was Y!Gallery, which you know I’m kind of ashamed to admit because it’s basically a male gay porn site.”[12] To explain: the letter ‘y’ in Y!Gallery stands for yaoi, a Japanese word that means “boy love or homosexuality” as defined by slang dispensary UrbanDictionary.[13]
“Back when I was on there it must have been just starting out because it was a pretty small community,” Turnbull recalls. “I was like, ‘Wow, these are people who professionally make a living drawing gay cartoon porn! It’s not what I want to do, but it’s flattering that they’re paying attention to me and talking to me!”[14] One could make note of the similarities between this website and the often seedy neighborhoods where artists tend to gather due to cheap rents. They’re often the dens of vice, of sin, of the poor. These artists still gather in these places today. We can tell Frank Stasio yes, the romantic “café culture” still does exist. It has simply expanded beyond the café, past the limitations of distance and into the digital realm.
[1] (Holderfield, Vernon, & Feese, 2008)
[2] (Robertson, 2009)
[3] (Holderfield, Vernon, & Feese, 2008)
[4] (Fitch, 1985, p. 162)
[5] (Fitch, 1985, p. 12)
[6] (Fitch, 1985, p. 163)
[7] (Fitch, 1985, pp. 163-164)
[8] (Fitch, 1985, p. 164)
[9] (Jones, 2009)
[10] (Jones, 2009)
[11] (Jones, 2009)
[12] (Turnbull, 2009)
[13] (‘Francesca’, 2003)
[14] (Turnbull, 2009)
