Whenever Ryan Claytor faces an overwhelming situation or a daunting task, he thinks about something his father used to say: “It’s like eating an elephant. Take it one bite at a time and before you know it, you’re done.”
Claytor is one of the visionary comic artists and educators who set their minds more than 20 years ago to an elephant of a challenge. They wanted comics to have the same cultural reach, expressive range and artistic excellence as music, literature, film and visual art.
Today, comics and graphic novels tackle any subject you can think of, from intimate autobiography, punk rock and hip-hop history to nuclear physics, Nazi death camps and wars in the Middle East. Graphic novels win Pulitzer prizes, inspire hit Broadway plays and top bestseller lists around the world.
Claytor’s gentle, kind-hearted yet clear-eyed visual diaries have long filled a quiet niche in this expanding literary universe.
In a promotional bookmark, Claytor drew three wee images of a car chase, a giant robot and an explosion. An ornate scroll announced that these things are “regretfully absent” from his comics.
Another sign that the elephant of respectability has been eaten is that Claytor is a professor at MSU, but he’s no ivory tower dweller. For the past few weeks, he’s been touring the nation to celebrate the release of a hefty tome marking the 20th anniversary of his multifaceted publishing venture, Elephant Eater Comics. The last of 20 stops is scheduled at Lansing’s The Novel Concept bookstore this Saturday,
The copper-edged puzzle box of a book, fittingly titled “One Bite at a Time,” revels in Claytor’s design work, not only in comics, but in graphic design for neon signs, wristwatches and pinball machines.
Amid the doldrums and anxieties of the pandemic, he perfected the ephemeral medium of “art pancakes,” delighting his young son and thousands of online followers hungry for fun.
For Claytor, creating comics is just one of many ways to break life down and figure it out, one image, one frame, one line of dialogue, one pancake at a time.
The book is big, beautiful and packed with unexpected delights like a double fold-out (and a double fold-down), a night-black section to showcase the neon, and die-cut pages that reveal the artist’s creative process in visible layers.
It even smells good.
“I’m partial to that new print smell,” Claytor agreed. “There’s not many people who appreciate that.”
‘That’s very tender’
To get to the heart of Ryan Claytor, look no further than a sweet strip from “One Bite at a Time” called “Initial Conversations.”
In 2014, Claytor was starting a family with his wife, Candace, and infant son, Owen, having moved to East Lansing from California in 2008. Owen, now 11, will serve as moderator of Saturday’s artist talk at downtown Lansing’s A Novel Concept bookstore.
In the strip, Claytor holds his baby son up to a window and they behold the wonder of a fresh snowfall together.
“Hey, honey! Look at all that snow!” he exclaims. There is no further dialogue for the remainder of the page, only murmurs of “mm” from both father and son.
Claytor’s quiet craftsmanship manipulates time and space to capture an elusive reverie, subtly varying the point of view, panel size and framing.
To his regret, Claytor only drew about half a dozen strips chronicling his earliest months as a new father — not enough to collect into a book. His son was growing up so fast, he couldn’t bear to steal any more at the drawing board and miss a big moment.
But the strips he finished are classic Claytor, proudly grounded and defiantly small-scale.
“I want comics to be imbued with thought and meaning and significance,” Claytor said. “It doesn’t mean they all have to be. They can be a gag a day about a cat eating lasagna, but they can also be more thoughtful than that.”
Claytor admits to not being much of a reader as a kid. He started out reading Walt Disney comics like Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge at 6 or 7 years old.
A bit later, he discovered Mad magazine and began to appreciate satire.
The Mad artist that fascinated him the most was the most (literally) marginalized of them all: Spanish-Mexican artist Sergio Aragonés, creator of the tiny doodles that crawled up, down and across the margins of the magazine.
Claytor’s interest in comics lay dormant until the mid- to late-’90s, when a wild variety of approaches and styles began to crowd muscle-bound superheroes off the shelves and get serious attention from literary and cultural critics.
“Maus,” Art Spiegelman’s bold, multi-layered dive into his father’s experience in Nazi concentration camps, portrayed Germans as cats and Jews as mice in comics fashion, earning Spiegelman a Pulitzer Prize and an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
“Once I rediscovered comics, it was all over for me,” he said. “I started reading voraciously.”
Claytor’s spark was kindled largely by “Boogeyman,” a droll set of morality tales written and drawn by none other than his old favorite from Mad.
By then, Aragonés was bursting out of the margins of Mad to build a wild and woolly body of work, including “Groo the Wanderer,” a subversive parody of overblown barbarian comics (and, by extension, testosterone-driven comics in general).
“’Boogeyman’ was so passionately illustrated,” Claytor said. “That’s the book that got me back into comics. I found myself gravitating to historical fiction and comics that are autobiographical, more true to reality.”
Determined to pursue comics seriously, Claytor got an art studio degree at the University of California Santa Barbara, but there was still a lot of elephant left to eat. There was no comics curriculum anywhere in California when Claytor enrolled at the University of San Diego for his master’s degree.
“I was trying to make a place in a fine arts program, not only for comics, but for myself,” he said. “There were professors who were friendly to me, and to comics, but there were also professors who were not.”
He opted for a multimedia concentration, with an eye on a teaching gig, but relentlessly worked comics into his assignments. He designed a video game (“Educate or Passively Agree?”) that follows a “fashion inept” Claytor avatar, in socks and sandals, as he encounters a phalanx of comics skeptics. A librarian tells him, “Sorry, we only carry real books.” All the dialogue in the game came from Claytor’s own experience.
Fitting comics into a fine arts program led to some awkward feedback. To fulfill another assignment, Claytor filled a large broadsheet with a typically low-key, two-color strip about a quiet moment he shared with his father. To his bafflement, the professor told him he liked the brown layer, without the line art (which had all the facial expressions and the dialogue) and should consider exhibiting it that way, thus missing the whole point of the comic.
However, a short while later, Claytor’s disappointment turned to joy when he put the same broadsheet up at a comics convention and observed a familiar figure scrutinizing every panel. His lifelong comics hero, Sergio Aragonés, turned to him and said, “That’s very tender.”
‘Accepting yourself’
Staying true to the core of his being, as a comics creator and chronicler of life, wasn’t always easy for Claytor. But everyone, whether they are interested in comics or not, can relate to being misunderstood, underestimated and brushed off. Like many other comics creators of the 21st century, Claytor devoted himself wholeheartedly to the medium he loves. Over the past 20 years, the payoff has been huge, for himself, his fans and his students at MSU.
“There’s something powerful to accepting yourself,” Claytor said. “Somehow, magically, in turn, it helps people to find their own acceptance for what makes them happy in the world.”
Typically, he seemed abashed at venturing such a sweeping proposition.
“I don’t know. It’s a weird thing.”
Many bites of the elephant are chronicled in the book, beginning with the self-published series of autobiographical comics Claytor launched in 2004, “And Then One Day,” a labor of love that flourished through six collected volumes.
Claytor enjoys book tours, and he’s taken quite a few of them, including the one ending Saturday. The national comics community is a mutually supportive, unpretentious and fun crowd to be in. For decades, comics lovers also shared the experience of loving a thing many people dismiss out of hand.
In 2007, Claytor embarked on a 50-stop tour of bookstores, museums, colleges and specialty comic shops that he believes was the biggest such tour ever attempted. He shoehorned another tour into his big 2008 move to Michigan to marry his wife, Candace, who teaches at MSU.
In his first few years in Lansing, Claytor patched together teaching gigs at various colleges, including MSU, along with small self-publishing ventures.
When Candace was seven months’ pregnant in 2013, Claytor made a few extra bucks “for diaper and milk money” by drawing an anthropomorphic marijuana leaf for a City Pulse cover. His credit line read “Piere Clayton,” a nickname given to him by an uncle, because Claytor was still working toward a professorship at MSU and didn’t want to “sabotage” his chances.
Since then, he’s done two more City Pulse covers, one of them in conjunction with a book, “A Hunter’s Tale,” based on a poem by his grandfather and serialized in these pages in 2022.
Needless to say, these covers appeared under his real name. In sync with national and international literary trends, Claytor’s status, and that of the comics medium, has inexorably risen to nearly full equality with the long-recognized forms of art.
Since Claytor became director of the MSU Comics Forum in 2010, the annual symposium and celebration of comics art has grown in scope and renown.
“I still get the occasional eyebrow raise when I mention that I’m a cartoonist, and I’m a professor who teaches comics,” he said. “It’s still surprising to a lot of people. ‘You teach comics? Really?’ So I don’t think the stigma is completely gone, but it’s in a whole lot better place than it’s been in the past.”
After 20 years in the comics trenches, “One Bite at a Time” is the physical embodiment of Claytor’s personal triumph as an established comics artist and professor, and of the coming of age of comics in general.
“I’m over the moon at the way it came out,” he said.
In spite of all its fancy features, from foldouts and cutouts to copper-foil edges, “One Bite at a Time” is not a mere vanity project.
Claytor is a teacher as well as a creator down to his bones. Early on, he decided to lift the veil on his artistic process, showing how every piece came to be.
A page with die-cut holes lines up an earlier draft of a drawing with the final version. A vertical “fold-down” allows the reader to see a poster in its original size, 18” by 24.”
“That’s the close as you’ll get to the original art without actually owning it,” he said.
Claytor didn’t even know if a vertical foldout was possible in a hardcover book. The printer had to cut a gap between the two sides of the foldout so it wouldn’t rip when you pull it down.
A design for a pinball machine includes an overlay sheet, in transparent vellum, that shows how Claytor used tracing paper to layer the machine’s complicated moving parts. Claytor’s fascination with pinball could fill a separate book, beginning in his childhood, when his father owned several pinball machines.
Only last week, Claytor’s current book tour made a stop at a pinball expo in Chicago. His only major departure from autobiographical comics was “Coin-Op Carnival,” a history of pinball in words and pictures that featured an interview with 100-year-old pinball icon Wayne Newens, who designed over 150 machines.
There’s plenty of pinball lore and love in “One Bite at a Time,” including a complete Groo the Wanderer machine designed by Claytor in homage to his hero, Aragonés, who also happens to be a fan of pinball.
Claytor compared the white pages of “One Bite at a Time” to a plain gallery wall, but that wouldn’t do to showcase another art form that fascinates Claytor: neon.
So, about halfway through, the book moves into from day into night, with vivid photographs of neon signs printed on rich black paper.
“You can see neon in the daytime, but man, they really pop at night,” Claytor said. “There’ s something so captivating about standing in front of an actual neon sign, bona fide gas and glass neon, not that new LED stuff.”
In 2019, Claytor joined with Josh Goodacre, a neon maker based in Vermontville, Michigan, to create a string of gorgeous signs for businesses and private clients united in their love of “actual” neon. The book lovingly displays many of these, from an elaborate emblem for the Sunfield Historical Society’s Welch Museum in Sunfield, Michigan, to a sign for a private client that depicts a giant lizard (you know its name; no sense getting people sued) vaporizing Dallas.
The neon section also shows that simplicity of purpose is not limited to Claytor’s comics work.
“I get excited about things,” he said. “I get excited about neon, to see if I can find my place in it.”
He’s creating a neon sign for a client whose son is fascinated with labyrinths and mazes and finds them calming.
“We’re working on this neon sign that will be a maze, and, hopefully, it will be a reminder to his son that he can find this meditative space in the chaos of the world.”
Claytor hopes that the book’s many twists and turns, along with its layered exposure of the process of making art, will attract and hold the attention of curious kids as well as adults.
“I wanted to make an object a young person could discover,” he said. “’What is this quadruple page spread? Pancakes? How did he do that?’”
Ah, yes, the pancakes. Claytor admits that in spite of all the other things he’s done, his “art pancakes” almost steal the show. A captivating quadruple page spread in the book documents a panoply of “art pancakes,” from plucky Captain Underpants to an angry COVID virus, outlined and colored so confidently you’d think pancake batter were standard issue at your local art supply store.
To create the pancakes, Claytor mixes up batter in various colors and squeezes it from a plastic bag with one end snipped off.
“After doing a hundred of them, you get to know the medium,” he said.
Fine black lines call for thinner batter. A higher viscosity is required to paint in colored areas.
In a few weeks, he got to the point where he could re-create Edvard Munch’s famous painting, “The Scream,” in vivid, edible, unsettling fidelity to the original.
From indelible ink to edible pancakes, there is a strong theme running through all of these varied projects.
“It sounds like a mish-mash, but I view all these as integrally related to the medium of comics,” Claytor said. “A custom puzzle-solving experience is at the core of comics making for me. I see that in all of these projects, and that’s very exciting to me.”
And there’s always something new around the bend. Early in the current tour, Claytor got a chance to branch into a spectacular new format at a presentation Sept. 10 at MSU’s Abrams Planetarium.
Taking advantage of the immersive planetarium dome, he showed a 360-degree movie of his workspace and displayed his art in ways it had never been seen before.
He worked with MSU Planetarium production coordinator John French to program an immersive ride through “Mirror Drawings,” a book of abstract, geometric patterns totally different from Claytor’s other work.
Claytor was amazed at seeing the mirror drawings float across the planetarium dome.
“While we were working on it, we stopped in our tracks and looked at this thing for a while,” Claytor said. “It was really incredible.”
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