In the Youth news I saw Ten year old Teddy from England. He led a one-man campaign against the nerd emoji, an icon that you stick in phone messages. The nerd, that is that yellow round head with black glasses that smiles with two front teeth exposed. Not exactly one spitting image of Teddy, but as a glasses wearer he feels “hurt” by the image and especially by what the image stands for. Let me say, you don’t send the nerd along if you think yourself or the other person is very smart. Teddy came up with an alternative emoticon, one in which he recognizes himself. Yellow face, lighter framed glasses and a smile without those teeth. He calls it the genius emoji. Look, this is how you control how you want to be seen.
Later in the evening, in The hour of the wolfcame the documentary Barbara Stok – How to live well Comic artist Barbara Stok makes a two-dimensional version of her life and herself, she is a cartoon character in her autobiographical comic strip. The first drawing with himself in the lead role dates from May 1, 1992, after a crazy night out. She was in her early twenties, attended the Photo Academy, dyed her hair purple and played drums in a punk band. Barbara Stok the cartoon character is tall and thin, like her, has a mop of curls and a pointed nose and she says what Barbara Stok thinks and thinks. Recognizable and humorous. Simple and clever.
The more boring her life becomes, as a photographer and journalist for a door-to-door newspaper, the more numerous and witty her drawings become. She portrays her burnout, her fear of dying – ‘My heart stops.’ ‘I’m dying.’ “Oh, no.” She copies her first comic books tenfold, staples them together and hands them out to friends. She has now written fourteen books, she is getting through it NRC counted among ‘the most important comic strip makers in the Netherlands’, wrote The Times and The Guardian rave reviews about her work and won the Stripschap Prize for her oeuvre in 2023.
But a talker, no, she is not. Her comics express what she means to say better than she does. Documentary maker Frank Wiering solves the problem by letting her drawings speak, having her read from her own work and he captures her quiet desperation when she is surrounded at a comics fair by groups of journalists who keep asking her the same questions about the autobiographical elements in her work. . She is her comic, and vice versa. “Real events and true feelings.”
Wiersma films at her home, in her rental house in Groningen, with her husband Ricky, in her vegetable garden and at a large, international Comic fair in Barcelona where visitors dress up as their favorite comic character and Barbara Stok dresses up as herself. We see her search for the good, we hear her worry about the climate, the dictatorship of the market and inequality. All those words only become light when she captures them in a strip of two pictures. Man and woman raise a glass. “We must disrupt the economy by force,” he says. They toast and say: “But not today.”
For a moment I thought that the documentary Enough was called, and that would have been a fitting title. The common thread in her work and life, she says, is how to live well. She seeks (and finds) an answer to this question from the Greek Cynics, the philosophical movement that predated the Stoics. Diogenes, Crates, Epicurus and Hipparchia, one of the first female philosophers and Stok’s graphic novel is about her The philosopher, the dog and the wedding. Nothing is enough for those who consider what is enough to be little. Renounce all material things and live like a dog on the street. Living your philosophy, that idea. Then you also understand why Barbara Stok lay down on the stage like a dog when she received the Stripschap Prize. Paws up.
Reading list