Autobiographical Comics and Constructions of Happiness

I was recently asked to write about my '100 Tiny Moments' project in relation to the concept of 'Construction of Happiness', which is an arts project by Astrid Bussink.  It's been a year and a day since I started the hundred days project so I thought it would be a timely moment to post the piece.  You can explore Astrid's project here.

Comics are simply the meeting of words and pictures.  But as the great comics autobiographer Harvey Pekar once stated “You can do anything with words and pictures”.  There’s something sweet and childlike about this philosophy - the idea that by matching words and pictures we can create a new more perfect artform, full of possibility.  It suggests that the comics artist is a pioneer, constantly able to reinvent visual language through new combinations of word and image.  Because comics utilise these two factors of visual communication (two factors, incidentally, that stimulate different sides of the human brain), the comics artist is free to shape representation in a way unparalleled by any other medium.  And when we shape representation, we can shape our own realities, constructing a vision of our world more perfect and more desirable than the real one.  As a result Comics are perhaps one of the artforms most suited to the construction of happiness.