Lynda on words vs. pictures, and how she makes her comics:

I’ve been thinking a lot about when words and pictures separate for people. A kid learning to write the alphabet is actually learning to draw the alphabet.

When I remind people that writing by hand is actually drawing, they look surprised and then try to figure out how it is not drawing, how it is different, but there is no way to argue it.

A person knows the physical moves required to make any letter of the alphabet or numeral. The same person can make these marks very small or very large. With a pencil, or a wet mop on a wall. It’s just a specific movement with a mark maker.

When I’m making a comic strip these two things are not separated at all. I don’t pencil my work in before I start. I just work very slowly with a brush and as I draw the frame of the panel I’ll often ‘hear’ a sentence in my head. It’s not mystical at all or deep or anything different than when a song gets caught in your head. You didn’t consciously put it there, but it’s playing, you can ‘hear’ it– it’s not the same as hearing it coming from a radio but I would bet most people would describe it as ‘hearing the song’ in their head rather than ‘thinking the song’

So I ‘hear’ a sentence and I can tell who is saying it– which character– in the same way you can tell who is singing that song in your head. I’ll write out that sentence and if another one follows I’ll write that out too. But if one doesn’t follow I usually start drawing the character who said the sentence or the person she is saying it to. And in that way the comic strip begins. Each line leads to the next one.

In between there are times I have to just wait. So you’ll see a lot of freckles on my characters or patterns on their clothes or little lines built up in the back ground. That’s me waiting for the next line. It won’t come if I’m not in motion. If I just sit there like “The Thinker” nothing comes at all.

Great interview with a cartoonist/songwriter I’m ashamed to admit I had no previous knowledge of. Love what he says here about the (lack of) difference between writing songs and cartoons:

For decades I’d flit from drawing table to typewriter to guitar with no sense of strain or contradiction. They all exercised the same psychic muscle (the Imagination), and working in one medium refreshed my appetite for the others. These days I’m less supple and more entrenched, so it’s a wrench to switch. But writing and drawing a Leviathan strip, say, isn’t all that different from composing a song. They both involve a text embedded in another medium. My father, Erik Blegvad, is an illustrator—he’s at work on his 107th title—and my mother, Lenore, was (she died last September) an author/illustrator/painter, so this symbiosis seems perfectly natural to me. My favorite artists, Marcel Duchamp being perhaps the paradigm, deliberately flouted the decree that art must not be “literary.” The musical heroes of my youth were John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and Captain Beefheart, all of whom drew/wrote/painted when they weren’t composing/performing/recording. I recently learned the word liminal: “occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.” That’s where I feel most at home, for better or worse.