The comfort of drawing Batman

Airplane mode, comfort work, and the caped crusader

Hey y’all,

I had a whole sack of books and magazines ready for the 8-hour flight to Honolulu, but I wound up spending half the flight drawing freeze frames of Tim Burton’s Batman.

What possessed me? A combination of things.

Instead of my whole drawing rig, I’d packed some new color brush pens I made with 3 shades of blue-ish Lamy ink: Blackberry (dark, rich, love it), Blue/Black (meh), and “Cliff” (somewhere in between the other two).

I had about 15 pages of a diary left to fill, so I thought it might be fun to finish one in the air and start the new one on the island.

And after the huge disappointment of discovering that the Point Break listed under “Classics” on Hawaiian Air’s in-flight movie menu was the 2015 remake — what a troll! — I thought watching Batman might cheer me up.

After I drew that first panel of Michael Keaton, I put the “only 4 more hours” bubble over his head, and suddenly I knew I was going to draw Batman in coach.

Burton’s Batman, btw, is a beautiful, dark movie — we’ve been saving it for pizza night, but we might have to keep saving it for a few more years. (There’s an excellent bootleg “silent” version online.)

In Keep Going, I wrote about the joys of “airplane mode” — being up in the sky without wifi and nothing to do and no one to bother you. I was particularly inspired by Nina Katchadourian’s “Seat Assignment”:

Katchadourian uses long, disconnected plane rides to make art using only her camera phone, things she's packed for her trip, and materials she discovers on the airplane. She'll add a little sprinkled salt to in-flight magazine photos to create spooky images of spirits and ghosts. She'll fold up her sweater into gorilla faces. She'll dress herself in toilet paper and seat covers in the airplane bathroom and take selfies that recreate old Flemish-style portraits…

Every time I’m on an airplane now, I think about all the art I could be making. My writing teacher used to joke that the first rule of writing is to “apply ass to chair.” Because you’re forced to switch your electronic devices into airplane mode and you’re literally buckled into a chair, I find planes to be a terrific place to get work done.

And yes, planes are excellent places to work, but they’re also excellent places to zone out and to play or do “comfort work” — what I’m calling the creative work we return to when we don’t know what else to do.

Drawing Batman, it turns out, is a great comfort to me!

You don’t even have to draw Batman from a movie or from scratch: If you have a black pen and a magazine or a newspaper in front of you, you can turn anybody into Batman: