About three weeks ago, the Pear-Pear Team made its first public appearance at the Mid-Jersey Comicon. Here, at long last, is some reflection on that momentous occasion. And a few pictures.

Pear-Pear now features RSS feed subscription. Just click the handy icon at the bottom of the page. This comes none too soon, as the school year will shortly be upon me, and updates will return to a much more sporadic schedule. I know I quickly lose interest in a site that doesn't update frequently, so hopefully we can hang on to some readers through the bitter winter months via subscriptions.

If you happen to be in the neighborhood of Bordentown, NJ this Saturday, August 16, be sure to drop by the Mid-Jersey ComiCon. It's a modest get-together of creators and vendors, and I'll be there promoting Pear-Pear. We'll have a couple freebies and items for sale--possibly some original art, but alas no books or prints. I'll mainly be going to meet people and get our names out there. Hope to see you there!

So. What's with that 70s floral kitchen chair? and that spicerack? and that doily?

The last few comics feature these additions to the scenery not just to signify that the protagonists are inhabiting some new environs, but to try and give some clues as to the nature of those environs and what sort of events might ensue.

So far, Comixtalk has been an excellent forum and tool for me to put into words all the thinking surrounding Pear-Pear. As we continue to develop the website, I'll always be thankful for the resources and community here and at TCWL. But something was bugging me about the whole setup.

So, the Pear-Pear team (my wife and I) have been working on an interactive archive menu. One that will be consistent with the spirit and design of the site. And if there's one thing this process has taught me, its to regret being a slacker when my dad tried to teach me BASIC in the 80s.

Pear-Pear, from the get-go, has been a sort of game for me: can I tell a story about a character without ever showing that character, or saying anything about that character? As the story-arc in the comic is about to reach a crucial turning point, a good time has arisen for me to evaluate my strategy for this game, which could be called visual synecdoche.

Yes, the title of this entry is shameless. Anyway, since I'm procrastinating on all those papers I'm supposed to be grading, let's talk about a new thing the Pear-Pear Team is trying out with today's comic.

While I love teaching, it sure hasn’t left me much time to update pear-pear. The irony is that I’m constantly telling my students to budget their time and I can’t seem to do so myself. There are other teacher-webcomickers that get along fine and provide me a good example to follow.

So, somebody went and bought Dover Thrift's reprint of Arthur Wesley Dow's Composition: Understanding Line, Notan and Color. And that somebody was me. After reading about notan (the japanese word for light/dark balance), I had to play with it. So I sketched the above thumbnails. Intrigued by the possibilities, but not satisfied with the results, I kept experimenting.

In comics 50, 51, and 52, I think Dow has helped me make more conscious choices where before I was intuiting and my composition was hit or miss. Luckily for me I had just introduced the perculator, who lends himself to notan, what with being about a third solid black. And finally, in these last few I'm trying to have the graphics within the speech bubbles respond more directly to the overall composition of the panel, while also cohering as self-contained compositions.

But Dow has me intrigued on a deeper level. If I were still in grad school I would probably already be researching to explore whether or not Dow was influenced directly or indirectly by Saussure's notions of how meaning is constructed, because the way Dow explains the construction of beauty in the visual arts may as well be in the same terms. Reading Dow has made me wonder whether within a postmodern framework, beauty can be truth, and truth beauty.