Alan Michael Parker at the Virginia Quarterly Review:
In 2021, after forty adult years of study, practice, and teaching, and nine published volumes, I gave up poetry. In 2022, with no formal training, no understanding of my visual-art skills, and a deep yearning to be vulnerable again in my studio practice, I became a cartoonist. Now I make work that more people see and understand and easily dismiss. Now, as I make single-panel cartoons more in keeping with underground traditions than with The New Yorker’s oeuvre, I’m still dwelling in obscurity. But I’m posting madly and contributing weekly to an online journal and feeling more and more liberated. It’s like I’m a cub reporter: I’m a cub cartoonist. Or maybe that’s called a tadpole or a foal, something just a wee bit wackier.
The single-panel cartoon is not a graphic novel—which publishers and readers alike ask me about when they hear I’m cartooning, i.e., when will I write a graphic novel and climb Art Everest? Instead, the single-panel cartoon is an older and more journalistic cousin of the graphic novel and the comic strip—image and text self-contained within the single panel, nothing else to see.
More here.
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