New Brain Buster: Haiku Comics

 

5/26/24 Wedgwood neighborhood (I love sketching with a Pentel Pocket Brush Pen, but I'm having difficulty writing tiny and legibly with it, which is essential for comics.) 

A lot of good things have been happening serendipitously in my life lately, and one of them is haiku comics. What?? Putting haiku poems together with comics is something I had never heard of until Kim put out a notice in the USk Facebook group about an exhibition at Push/Pull Gallery. I let my comics compadre Roy know about the concept, and that sent us both down the rabbit hole.

Our first stop was Old Pond Comics, which teaches haiku through whimsical comics. This article in the South Seattle Emerald explains why haiku and comics go together so well: “Haiku in comic strip form really works, in part because three lines of poetry and three or four panels of comics have similar rhythms and goals,” says Justin Rueff, illustrator of Shin Yu Pai’s book Less Desolate. “Comic strips usually consist of a set-up and a punchline, while haiku often begin with an observation and end with a surprise, a reveal, or an ‘ah’ moment.”

“Ah moment,” indeed!

Although I have two degrees in creative writing, and my master’s thesis was a collection of poems, I had not written poetry in decades. My mom, however, was a lifelong haiku poet (she wrote her last one only a couple weeks before she passed away), so I do have haiku in my genes. Learning about haiku comics fanned the flame of my current interest in comics while also introducing a new twist to an already challenging form. I was in!

With on-location comics, I literally sketch as I go. I don’t know how much space to leave for more sketches on the page, nor do I know what the orientation of the compositions might be for sketches I haven’t made yet. Writing haiku to go with a page of comics adds a new layer of complexity, because the sequence of the sketches on the page might affect the arrangement of lines in the poem. It’s a double brain buster, for sure! 

I find haiku to be an especially appropriate addition to diary comics as a method for linking seemingly unrelated images. In my attempts so far, I’ve loosened the structure of the haiku on the page so that each poem line doesn’t necessarily correspond to an individual comic panel (most examples of haiku comics I’ve seen are three-panel comics that align with the three lines of haiku). 

5/24/24 Green Lake neighborhood bus shelter

Although I’ve made only a few haiku comics so far, my current process is to make the sketches first, then write the haiku later. I’m often thinking about potential haiku as I sketch, and sometimes the lines come easily because I’ve already done most of the writing in my head.

As suggested by Old Pond Comics, I’m not sticking rigidly to the 5/7/5 syllabic structure of traditional Japanese haiku, which doesn’t work well in English anyway. (Years ago after our mom died, my siblings and I hired a translator to translate a volume of her haiku, and we discovered what a clumsy language English can be compared to the delicate nuances available in Japanese.) Instead, I’m following a short/long/short line structure that still captures the intention and spirit of the haiku form.

You’ve already seen a couple of examples of my haiku comics; this post shows a couple more. You’ll see more sporadically as I continue exploring this new creative challenge!