a robot reading a book

8/9/2019 A Robot Reading a Book

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A Robot Reading a Book?

We've been busy watching the NBA playoffs and analyzing the Bulls' chances for upsetting the BostonCeltics, which is apparently why we've missed this story that has had other sports bloggers wagging theirtongues for the past few days. Why anybody would bother to flip over the Bulls logo and think they see aRobot reading a bible while sitting on a bench is beyond us...

Can we see what they're talking about? Sure... but who spent enough time looking at the rotated logo todiscover a supposedly hidden double image that doesn't make any sense to include? A robot? Reading abible -- or some sort of large book? What does a robot or reading have to do with Bulls or basketball?Nada! See, the "hidden" images included in the FedEx and Baskin-Robbins logos mentioned actuallymean something relevant. And those logos don't need to be rotated to be seen. We're going to go withsilly coincidence on this one.

Ulysses "Seen"

It has been quite an odyssey, so to speak, for Rob Berry, Mike Barsanti, Josh Levitas and Chad Rutkowski,

the partners in Throwaway Horse and the creators, in one sense or another, of the webcomic Ulysses

"Seen."Berry and Levitas started out doing a fairly straightfoward adaptation of James Joyce's Ulysses,

with extensive notes and translations by Mike Barsanti just a click away from each page. Then the iTunes

store picked up their comic for the iPad, but Apple asked them to censor some of the content (ironic, in

light of the novel's history) and then reversed itself after the issue drew public attention. And now the


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creators are closing the circle by bringing the comic into print: They have signed a deal with independent

publisher Atlas & Co. to bring out a print edition ofUlysses "Seen,"which will hopefully be on

bookstores shelves by BloomsDay (June 16) 2011.

I talked to Berry, Atlas and Rutkowski about the new project and the challenges involved in

bringing an interactive webcomic into print.

Brigid: Was making a print edition of the Ulysses comic part of your plan from the

beginning? If so, what role did you feel the webcomic would play in creating and

promoting the comic, and if not, at what point did you start thinking of a print edition?

Rob: Most of my plans about making comics instead of paintings (as I used to do) revolve

around the notion that I wanted to make stories and books instead of one-of-a-kind objects. Soeverything I've been doing these past couple of years has been seeing where the web and print

models are alike yet different. We always knew there'd be a desire to see this kind of a projectthrough to print, so it's designed with some of that potential in mind, but as an educational or

social platform we wanted to make sure Ulysses "Seen"was something completely different onthe web or iPad.

Brigid: From a purely technical point of view, one of the features of the webcomic right

now is that you can click on a panel and go directly to Mike's notes. How will that work

with the print version?

Rob: Yeah, that's a great example of one of the differences about the shape of web contentversus print. And there are a lot of nuances in Joyce's work that I can keep somewhat enigmatic

in my comic adaptation so that Mike can explain further through the Readers' Guide. I reallyhappy to say that Atlas & Co wants to preserve that kind of scholarship approach to the project.

This means Mike will be adding a new version of his Readers' Guide notes to fit the print model.Really, really happy about that.

Brigid: Another format question: The webcomic is formatted horizontally, to fit a

computer screen, which can be awkward in terms of shelving in bookstores and libraries.

Are you going to keep that or reformat the comic vertically?

Rob:I designed the comic adaptation in the "landscape" format because I felt that there's a

different kind of interface going on in entertainment platforms these days. We're being given achoice for reading books and watching movies seeing family photos all in one presentation

arena; the monitor, and the monitor is, for the most part, horizontal.

But the design choices I made to keep in line with this trend will remain when we move to print.

The comic is horizontal, so it makes sense that the book would be as well. Comix is a languageof design to a large part, so changing the page design would be like starting over from scratch.

We'll be working right alongside the people at Atlas & Co to put together an attractive designthat I think any bookstore or library would be happy to feature on their shelves.


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Brigid: On a more philosophical level, how do you think the experience of reading the

comic as a print volume (like the original novel) will differ from reading it digitally? Do

you think it's purely a mechanical difference, or does print add gravitas?

Rob: Well, I think that in comix as it stands at the moment there's a certain truth to that as it's

relatively easy for cartoonists to get their work out in the world as a webcomic. There's a certainperception about art and literature in general that one's talents are measured in whether or not a

stranger would pay money for them and that an unpublished author or unpaid blogger is "merely

an over-ambitious hobbyist." I've never really had much patience for that kind of thinking,however.

With Ulysses "Seen" I and my partners set out to use our combined talents to give people a new

way to look at a really great novel and we took that goal very seriously whether it was for free onthe web or as a book in the neighborhood library. It'll feel great, believe me, to feel the book in

my hand, to hold the physical product. There's a feeling there that I suppose is much like"gravitas". But it's always really about the work you do behind the product, not the product itself,

right?

Brigid: Will you be altering the pages to remove any of the nudity or other potentially

problematic content?

Rob: Oh, absolutely not! It is a valuable point, however. A friend of mine is the comics librarianat Columbia and we had a conversation once about Moore and Gebbie's Lost Girls, a beautiful

book that is a "must have" for any collection, but where do you put it in a public library? TheRare Book Room so people have to wear gloves when touching it?

OurUlysses "Seen"is meant to have and respectfully portray all the earthiness of Joyce's 1922

edition of the novel. But to see it filed in a certain category or on a certain shelf because of thatwould, I think, be just as sad as placing it next to Witchblade in the "graphic novel" section by

sheer alphabetical order. It's a tricky business, that sorting out of content, and not something I'dbe particularly good at. But would we even have these same questions come up if we didn't some

how still believe that in America comicbooks are for kids? Would we even have a "graphicnovel" section?

Brigid: Your first volume covers the first chapter of the book, Telemachus, and also

Calypso, which is the fourth chapter. Are you rearranging it?

Rob: Right you are; "Calypso" is the fourth episode (Joyce didn't like the word "chapter") in

Ulysses and the next one we're covering. These episodes depict events that happen more or lesssimultaneously on Bloomsday and I made a decision about a year or so that I was going to go

chronologically through the day to make things a bit easier on new readers. There are echoesbetween the main characters' lives that are easier to showcase this way and I feel it moves people

a bit more into the meat of the drama by highlighting those similarities right away.

And it opens the door for something I wanted to do with episodes 2 and 5 ("Nestor" and "The

Lotus Eaters"). Those two chapters will be drawn by me at the same time and presented together


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chronologically as well, jumping every couple of pages from one to the other. A bit morecinematic approach, perhaps, but will still get them all in there. Promise.

Brigid: How many volumes do you anticipate the finished work to be? Will it be longer

than the original?

Rob: There are 18 episodes to Joyce's novel and all of them present unique structural problemsfor translating into the language of comix. It's difficult to say exactly then how many pages of

the comic each episode might yield, but the plan is for me to draw two episodes a year for thenext eight years. And two episodes seem to give us a nice size print volume with the Readers'

Guide.

But the first episode, "Telemachus," is 21 pages in the novel and it took me 68 pages to carry it

off in the comic. James Joyce's Ulysses is 732 pages. Does this mean it'll take me 2,360 pages totranslate into comix? I certainly hope not, but this may be why some of my peers look at me like

I'm crazy. It's a very big book.

Brigid: Can you tell me a bit about the creation processhow you and Josh divide up the

story into pages, and how you create each one. They look like watercolor paintingsis that

right? And about how long does it take you to do a page, from start to finish?

Rob: All the adaptation work from novel to comic book storyboard is done by me, usually afterthe four of us have had a chance to get together and talk about the particulars of a given chapter.

After those storyboards are done we all sit down together to edit. Josh then does what we call a"floorplan," putting in the hand-lettered text and key-lining the panels, so I'm actual putting my

drawings back in around the lettering. We make a black & white file first from my ink work andthen I do a watercolor version. Josh steps in again then enhancing the rougher watercolor through

Photoshop. He'

ll be doing a lot of free-hand drawing in the coming chapters as well with sets,props and patterns we'll be using throughout the book.

Brigid: Here's a technical question for Chad: Who owns the copyright on this? Is Ulysses in

the public domain?

Chad: We are using the 1922 version ofUlysses which our research indicates is in the pubic

domain in the United States. You'll notice, for example, that Project Gutenberg is treating the '22as public domain in the U.S.

Throwaway Horse, of which Rob is a member, owns copyright to Rob's illustrations, the

arrangement of the text and the Reader'

s Guide, among other things. We do not own theunderlying text ofUlysses or the words themselves.


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Brigid: OK, James, I just lost an hour of my life browsing the Atlas & Co. website. How

would you describe your company's focus, and how does Ulysses "Seen" fit into it?

James: Thanks so much for spending some time on our site, Brigid. We are publishers of qualitynonfiction, focusing on memoir, biography, and long-form reportage. Our primary concern is the

quality of the prose; the works we publish have a distinctive voice, a sense of literary tradition,and a consciousness of craft. What really interests me is story-telling; i'm a biographer (Delmore

Schwartz, Saul Bellow) and journalist as well as a publisher, so it's all part of the same narrative

impulse.

Brigid: Is this your first graphic novel, and if so, what sort of challenges do you anticipate

that a prose book does not present?

James: We have not been publishing fiction; my feeling is that other publishers are adept at

finding the new novelists, and have more experience, so we've focused our energies on what wedo best. But I am obsessed with the graphic form, and avid reader of Daniel Clowes, Art

Spiegelman, the late Harvey Pekar, R. Crumb and other graphic artists.

Ulysses fits our mandate as a publisher: it's a literary classic, unabridged and in its original form.

What's exciting to me is that the entire book is there; the illustrations are an enhancement, not asimplification. The technical challenge will be to include the scholarly commentary that's part ofthe package; we will find a way.

Brigid: How did you first become aware ofUlysses?

James: My father, a physician by trade, was a Joyce freak, and loved to read the book aloud; Iheard a lot of it before I ever read it, in high school. Forty years ago, as a graduate student at


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Oxford, I studied with Richard Ellmann, author of the definitive Joyce biography, and I'veconsidered myself an amateur Joyceanvery amateurever since.

Brigid: Who do you see as the audience for this book, and how will it be marketed?

James: This is a Ulysses for a large and diverse audience: The young reader wanting anintroduction to the book; the college student who knows the book and can enjoy it in this newform; and readers like myself, for whom Joyce is a familiar presence and who want to read the

book in a readily accessible form that will allow them to linger over the words to give thewords a new dimension without having to embark once again on the long march through the

whole book. It's a way of savoring Joyce.

We intend to market the book to these audiences in a targeted way, through course adoption; and

to a trade readership. It's going to be beautifully packaged, most likely in paperback, not as a"fine" book but as a book to carry aroundnot just to own but to read.

a robot reading a book

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