Lunch with R.C. Harvey

Last Wednesday before driving to Bloomington to drop off a sculpture/painting for the Emerging Illinois Artist exhibition, I had the good fortune of meeting up with R.C. Harvey for lunch at the White Horse Inn.

R.C. is a pretty well-known cartoonist and the writer of a column "Rants and Raves" as well as several books The Art of the Funnies, The Art of the Comic Book, and the book that he gave me a copy of- Kids of the Yellow Kid. I had read his weekly columns in the Accent newspaper (the only thing in there that I read), and I knew he lived in Champaign, but I didn't meet him until we all went out to dinner with Scott and Ivy McCloud.

He has a slightly different perspective on a definition of what "comics" are than McCloud. He seems more invested in the aspect of the medium as a synergy of word and image than McCloud's (and Eisner's) requirement of sequential images- McCloud's definition thereby excluding The Farside. Harvey's emphasis in the interplay of word and picture in comics closely resembles Art Speigelman's construct for comics- the "word-picture." Harvey expressed a concern that the term Sequential Art was perhaps a broader category in which comics fit, but that not everything sequential was necessarily a comic. Like a rhomus is a parallelegram but a parallelagram isn't necessarily a rhombus (it can be a square, rectangel, etc.) Thank you geometry.

We didn't spend the whole time covering comic theory, though, it was a great discussion, and he really seemed to care what I thought. He was interested in how I got into comics and doing it for a Chinese newspaper. I gave him a copy of Dragon and Goat's newest anthology: Into the Jelly (Click to check it out!).

We started to talk about the business of daily comics, newspapers, and various daily artists he knew and how the business worked and didn't work for them. Unbeknownst to me, the Daily Illini is actually paying me hansomely for a daily comic at $9/strip. Harvey was really surprised at the rate since most artists only get $2.5/strip through syndicates, requiring them to sell to a lot of newspapers.

All in all it was a great lunch. We wanted to get together again, but since I was leaving for Chicago for the summer, and he would be moving to Colorado in June it may be difficult. Still I may take the train down for another lunch with one of the great minds of comics.

Check out R.C. Harvey's site at: www.rcharvey.com .