Читать книгу Who is Rich? - Matthew Klam - Страница 9

After class I cut across the lawn with a girl who wore cat-eye glasses and had small, pointy teeth, and a man with clay dust all over him, whacking it off his clothes, and Vishnu, who kept bumping into me.

“Professor,” he said, “in an interview you said male cartoonists are derivative whereas women are all original. Isn’t that kind of sexist?”

“I think I said guys have to shake off Batman comics. Women don’t have that as much.”

“Did you ever play Five-Card Nancy or stay up all night to do a twenty-four-hour comic?”

“No.”

“Why not?” He gave me a canny look, one cartoonist to another.

“There’s no point.”

“I couldn’t agree less.” He was a thin, beaky young man with a hollow-boned lightness and no romance in his heart. His hair was thick, blue black, and chopped above the ears. “Do you use a drawing tablet?”

“No.”

“Well, what’s your favorite inking tool? And what kind of ink, and which nibs, and how do you hold and use the nib? Can I get a demo tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

“Have you ever used a toothbrush for texture?”

The problem of walking and talking on a hilly, shifting terrain presented itself.

“Do you like to use a smooth paper or something more grainy?” He thought I knew the secrets and could lay them out for him like coconut macaroons. I told him we’d discuss it in class.

At the beginning of class he’d corrected my pronunciation of his name: “Not Veeshnu. Vishnu.” At the end of class he’d asked if I planned to cover self-publishing and self-promotion, and if I had advice on how to get his self-published work into circulation. I said no, but I only said it because I felt that a person who showed up with a stack of sophisticated mini comics to a class advertised for beginners could go fuck himself.

For the rest of class he’d just sat there, though when I asked if he had an idea to work on, he seemed to nod toward his massive accomplishment, his minis, and said he was deciding between a few possibilities, then asked if I had a pub date for my next comic, to draw a comparison I guess, that I wasn’t producing anything at the moment, either. When you’re the new guy, with a new book out, they treat you one way. When you’re the same guy six years later, it’s something else.

In the main office, a blond kid had me sign a tax form so I could get paid. He told me without smiling that they needed people after lunch for softball. According to the contract, teachers were expected to play.