Recovering Apostrophobiac

I'm Still Drawing, I Promise!

2012-01-23T12:19:00.000-08:00

This month I began my next comic, "Symphony Number Six." Since it'll only be 32 pages long, I'll be releasing it all at once and won't be maintaining a regularly-updated website as I did for SNitLoE. But for my friends who want a behind-the-scenes peek, I'll be posting the occasional panel on this blog. Here's panel one:

Yes, I am once again beginning a comic with a car driving toward the horizon. Looks a lot better than last time though, huh?

New Years Revolutions

2011-12-31T17:42:00.000-08:00

(click for larger image)

Man, what an amazing year! From January to December, I was filled with so much hope, even though many movements met brutal opposition and the struggle still continues everywhere. Here's to the People in 2012!

From left to right, Juventud Sin Futuro (Spain); South Sudanese secession (South Sudan); "Russia Will Be Free" (Russia); Camila Vallejo, Communist student leader and leftist dreamgirl of the decade (Argentina); Generic Union Guy; Old Man 2011 with Baby 2012; "Islam is a religion of Justice and Tolerance" (Tunisia); Egyptian Revolution (Egypt, where hundreds of protestors swept up their own mess); Wall Street Occupier (U.S.A.); "Indignants in Syntagma" (Greece); Madison, Wisconsin Occupier (U.S.A.)

Happy New Year! Proletarier aller Länder vereinigt Euch!

Merman

2011-12-21T21:39:00.000-08:00

Just fooling around with mermaids for a potential 2012 project.

Christmas Card 2011

2011-12-17T22:02:00.000-08:00

Hey guys. Okay, by now it should be very obvious that I did not complete (or even really begin) the 30 Characters Challenge. A busy month, what can I say.

Here's the postcard I designed for Christmas this year. The Hebrew text at the top reads "Let there be light" (Genesis 1:3) and the large Latin text at the bottom says "and the Word became flesh." (John 1:14)

I knew that given my recent re-involvement with Jesus Christ I couldn't get away with a snowy, jingly "secular" Christmas image this year. I also knew that I didn't want to fall into the sort of sentimental trap of many religious Christmas cards, where the manger scene is played for cuteness or pathos or the Maji for Oriental mystery. Babies are cute, sure. A baby born in an ancient barn is an interesting story, I guess... but the point of the incarnation is that this particular baby was the same person who SPOKE THE UNIVERSE INTO EXISTENCE.

WHAT!?!?

Merry Christmas, y'all! I'll probably have some more drawings up before the 25th.

By the way, if the image looks a little weird it's because it was optimized for print using a tutorial by the digital print sorceress Christianne Goudreau.

#2 - Vincenzio "Fingers" Paganini

2011-11-05T16:29:00.000-07:00

Relax, he's a concert violinist... you racist.

By the way, I've started reading Yo, Is This Racist? on tumblr. Worth a look!

#1 - Slam Aleikum

2011-11-03T10:23:00.000-07:00

This year I'm participating in The 30 Characters Challenge, where you try to design thirty characters in the thirty days of November. Character design is definitely one of my weak points. This is something I just realized after spending two years drawing characters I designed in a few hours.

All my entries won't look like this. Some will be cartoonier, some will be in color, some might be all-digital. I'm hoping to branch out a lot this month. Stay tuned!

The one thing I know for sure is that I want 15 of my characters to be female. Or I might do 14/14/2 or 13/13/4 if I decide to include characters of ambiguous gender. I wanted to start off with a strong Muslim woman character - I think there's a huge dearth of these in popular media.

Biscotomancy

2011-09-16T00:24:00.000-07:00

I drew this picture for my old friend Elliot Kaplan, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. If anyone I know can answer the timeless question "Magnets, how do they work?" it's probably Elliot. He currently works with the Madison Dynamo Experiment. My understanding of this is limited by my own feeble brain and not by Elliot's lucid explanatory skills, but here's the gist: The earth has a magnetic field. The earth's mantle is full of circulating molten metal, and its circulation is what generates this field. In Madison they've built a large, hollow globe, which they fill with liquid sodium (a convenient approximation of the earth's mantle, which I think is mostly silicon and magnesium).

They blend the sodium around with fans and pass magnetic fields through it, measuring the results. And here's where I get a little shaky. Lightning crashes and all the scientists start laughing maniacally, God get furious, Galactus shows up hungry, and before you know it the Dynamo kills your wife on your wedding night.

Okay, so what's this have to do with my drawing? Apparently, it's a tradition for Elliot and his crew to get Chinese food before every run of the experiment. In some cryptic way, the fortune cookie fortunes have so far always predicted the outcome of the day's run. Elliot commissioned a cartoon depicting physicists divining the future from fortune cookies, suggesting that their safety gear would make for good "cultish regalia." I couldn't agree more!

... in bed!

Art for my own Release Party Flier.

2011-09-11T01:04:00.000-07:00

Hey Apostrophobiphiles! If you read this blog then you've probably heard all about my graphic novel Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment, which is now available in print. I'm having a release party on Saturday, October 1st from 4-6pm at Cosmic Monkey Comics in NE Portland, OR. Below is the flyer for that event:

I am sort of please with the artwork for this flyer and sort of not. I think I am getting a better and better "knack" for composition. A big help was reading Framed Ink: Drawing and Composition for Visual Storytellers by Marcos Mateu-Mestre. He has truly amazing skills at designing compositions that are clear, pleasing, and intuitively comprehensible, even when depicting complicated action. He also has a somewhat sketchy, digital graywash style that looks so effortless it must be affected. Since "Framed Ink" is mostly geared towards storyboarding, I found myself wanting to design a SNitLoE scene with a short, wide frame like a movie screen.

(click for larger version)

So while I think the composition is basically sound, I have a lot of qualms about the artwork itself. While I'm glad I rendered the desert mountain beyond a simple sandy mass, I think I might have gone too far the other way - the characters, especially Theo, get lost among the jumble of lines in the rocks. Somehow I am not differentiating enough with my inking between "flesh," "cloth" and "rocks." The blacks are not well placed. There's something wrong with pretty much every single hand in the picture, and some of the proportions are way off. Oh well, it's just for a flyer that'll probably get torn down anyway!

Two things to note: Yes, "algebraic" is misspelled - I corrected it on the finished flyer. And no, a scene like this never occurs in the actual story - but neither does the scene I drew for the cover of the book. Only Tonya and Greg discover Utopiopolis, and they are not dressed that way when they do.

SNitLoE Pre-Orders.

2011-09-09T16:57:00.000-07:00

You can now pre-order the print version of SNitLoE from my online store!

I will mail your copy (or copies) as soon as the books arrive, probably on or around the weekend of September 24th. Books cost $15 each, plus a one-time shipping charge of $5. If you like, I will sign your book and draw a little doodle of one of the characters on the title page.

The store page also has a free download of the entire comic as a .cbz file. If you have friends who enjoy the soulless experience of reading immaterial comics by the cold blue glow of an iPad or laptop, please tell them about this download!

The store also has buttons! But these are not really worth buying unless you are also buying a book!

Lastly, if you live in PORTLAND FREAKIN' OREGON, you should definitely save yourself $5 in shipping by purchasing a book from me directly. A good place to do that might be my release party on October 1st at Cosmic Monkey Comics. But you can just as easily accost me in the park, at the Max station, in my own bed while I'm sleeping, etc. and I will gladly sell you a book on the spot.

Benjamin Franklinstein!

2011-09-02T14:31:00.000-07:00

Today is Independoween, the holiday that is calendrically equidistant from Halloween and the 4th of July. The holiday was the brainchild of my friend Xavier Lyles, who envisions Independoween celebrations as containing the best of these two holidays: fireworks AND costumes; backyard barbecues AND candy; jingoistic patriotism AND a spooky sense of the macabre. You could carve an American flag into a pumpkin. Or you could dress up like Independoween's unofficial mascot, Benjamin Franklinstein:

It would have been really cool if Xavier and I were the originators of Ben Franklinstein, but unfortunately that isn't true. I discovered that people have been mashing these two together for quite some time. There's even a YA book about the character. Alas, there is nothing new under the sun. It is with great sadness that I've decided not to suggest this idea to Dylan Meconis as a potential follow-up to her werewolf/Enlightenment and vampire/French Revolution franchise.

However, my unoriginality is not simply a coincidence. A quote from Frankensteinia, an all-Frankenstein-all-the-time blog:

The connection between the Franklin and Frankenstein has been explored extensively. The real-life Franklin and the fictional Victor Frankenstein were contemporaries, and both were electrical experimenters. Frankenstein observed a tree shattered by lightning, and Franklin apocryphally flew a kite and a key in a thunderstorm, inspiring movie Frankensteins to release kites, capture lightning and zap monsters to life.

Mary Shelley was familiar with Franklin and his experiments. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was tutored in politics by Dr. Richard Price who supported the American Revolution and corresponded with Franklin. One of her publishers, Joseph Johnson, had released Franklin’s works in London, and her lover, Gilbert Imlay, was American and a Revolutionary fighter. Mary Wollstonecraft’s husband, William Godwin, was influenced by Franklin’s politics and he was a member, as was Franklin, of the scientific Royal Society of London. Mary Shelley’s companion, Percy Bysshe Shelley, studied Franklin and was conversant with electrical experimentation.

There is frequently quoted speculation that Mary’s choice of name for her scientist was inspired by, and perhaps even an homage to Franklin, though “Frankenstein” was not a rare name and Mary had almost certainly encountered it in 1814 during her trip down the Rhine and a stopover in the vicinity of Burg Frankenstein. Nevertheless, it is said that Franklin’s electrical experiments were so widely known and notorious that the novel’s original readers, back in 1818, would have easily made the Franklin/Frankenstein connection. Many scholars have since explored the influence of Benjamin Franklin on Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Percy and Mary Shelley, and its reflection in Mary famous novel, making Founding Father Benjamin Franklin one of numerous men of science of the era who are thought of as the “real” Frankenstein.

Ain't that fascinatin'? Happy Independoween, everybody!

Disney Princess Color Analysis

2011-08-30T00:25:00.000-07:00

You know how sometimes you have an idea as soon as you wake up? This morning, this was mine:

It's a combination of Scott McCloud's approach to analyzing Golden Age superhero costumes, and Dustin Weaver's recent observation that, with her bold, primary colors and jet black hair, Snow White is basically Superman.

Just as we involuntarily, subconsciously know that purple + green= Hulk, red + gold = Iron Man and gray + bluish black + a tiny bit of yellow = Batman, we can't see that unique combination of blue-green, red, flesh and lavender without immediately thinking (in a Jamaican accent) "Ariel!" We can instantly recognizable all the Disney heroines from their color schemes alone. I haven't tried it with any other characters, but you can easily imagine similar color swatches for villains (Ursula, Gaston, Jafar, Scar, and Radcliffe all have wonderful and very distinct color schemes), heroes (think of Beast, Aladdin, John Smith, or especially Quasimodo), or even supporting characters (though characters like Flounder, Genie, Phoebus, or Mushu tend to be colored from much simpler palettes.) In every case, the colors are as unique as the character designs themselves.

(Notice that with the exception of Snow White these are all characters from the post-1989 Disney Renaissance. Disney had some terrific character designs in the 30's, 50's and 60's, but the color element doesn't particularly stand out for me. Quick! What color was Aurora's dress in Sleeping Beauty? ...See? Even if you know, you had to think about it.)

I don't understand color. I barely understand how it works in real life, and I'm certainly not to the point of being able design with color in an appealing way. What Disney does (or did?) is simply amazing to me. They can paint with all the colors of the wind!

(By the way, here's a link to a cool artist who drew many of the Disney princesses as superheros.)

Cartoon for Ali Farzat

2011-08-27T17:21:00.000-07:00

Ali Farzat is a great Syrian political cartoonist. Recently he was kidnapped by paramilitary thugs (believed to be working for Pres. Bashar Assad) and brutally beaten. They deliberately broke both of his hands.

(click for larger version)

I was going to write a long tract about the metaphorical dimension of this horrible attack, but it's all pretty obvious, really. Farzat spoke Truth to Power and met a fate similar to so many who do. I'll just add that Farzat's cartoons are awesome, and he's obviously a man after my own heart, my very favorite type of political cartoonist. Google him some time. It's purely visual storytelling - no patronizing labels or captions, none of the gags based solely on dialogue or wordplay which have made our own editorial pages so trite and boring. What's even better, Farzat seldom caricatures specific individuals. He rarely, for instance, draws the tyrant Assad. Rather, he seems to draw "types," the archetypal plutocrat, politician, pauper, or proletarian. This is such a great way to de-emphasize transitory "personality politics" and keep the focus where it should be, on the long-term conflict of classes.

By the way, on the off-chance that somebody wants to read my cartoon right-to-left, here's the Arabic version:

Get well soon, Ali. Get well soon, Syria. Ash-sha`b yurid isqat an-nizam!

Titanzer Fan-Art!

2011-08-24T14:50:00.000-07:00

I drew some fan-art for my friend Kevin Wilson's giant-robot webcomic Titanzer!

The image depicts the titular titan, Titanzer, having his ass handed to him by the immense evil alien robot Inert, whom I internally refer to as "Fisto Punchalot." In the foreground is Titanzer's distressed owner/operator, has-been celebrity Johnny Yamamoto.

In addition to being a fun and hilarious guy who draws a great webcomic, Kevin is also the person who lent me a button machine to make promotional buttons for Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment. Below are the three designs:

Check out Titanzer everybody, and DON'T! GET! FISTED!

Calico Jack Guest Comic

2011-08-13T17:28:00.000-07:00

I did a guest comic for my friend Patrick Devine's comic "Calico Jack," which reassures us that in the 26th century there will still be punk rock, piracy, and (apparently) floppy disks! The more things change, huh?

The comic re-depicts an incident from issue 2, page 13. Jack has obviously taken some creative liberties in the retelling. Capt. Miller is nowhere near as villainous or confrontational in the original story, despite working for an organization, the Federal Union, whose initials are "F.U."

More Figure Drawing w/ Periscopers

2011-08-03T23:23:00.000-07:00

Glad I used ink this time instead of my usual scratchy 4H pencil. Without light, form is meaningless.

Life Ain't No Ponyfarm Fan-Art

2011-08-02T14:12:00.000-07:00

My friend Sarah Burrini is visiting Portland this week, all the way from Cologne, Germany! She has a great biweekly webcomic in German AND English called "Life Ain't No Ponyfarm" which I recommend you check out, especially if you "sprechen zie Deutches." I decided to honor her visit by drawing some of her characters.

There are a lot of auto-bio webcomics out there, let's face it. But "Ponyfarm" is exactly the type of auto-bio comic I can really get into i.e. one that is full of lies. Though Sarah herself is the main character, she is only sometimes the focus of the story - the other characters are Ngumbe, an elephant who wants to be Miles Davis, "El Fungo," a hot-headed Mexican mushroom, and Buttercup, who is just an adorable pony.

Here's the color version - I sorta rushed this, but I sense the potential for greatness.

Super-Old SNitLoE Sketches

2011-07-28T11:59:00.000-07:00

This week my dad is visiting me here in Portland, OR. Even though we're having a blast, hanging out with him is definitely slowing down the process of preparing the book for print. However, his visit is not all bad news for SNitLoE fans: in the dark recesses of my old bedroom back in New Orleans, my parents uncovered an ancient dusty sketchbook which contains the earliest known sketches of the Savage Nobles. Check out this ancient history:

The one of Kafir, I think, is the oldest. "A lot of surly teenagers think of themselves as being imprisoned by their parents," I thought. "But what if a guy's actual parents were his actual jailers." Then I drew this image and it was the springboard for creating the entire character. I kinda wish I'd kept the earring!

The early Tonya and the early Theo were both modeled on baristas that I knew. There is one even older drawing of Theo somewhere, which I can no longer locate.

The less said about my drawings skills in the spring of 2009, the better.

VJ Day in Times Square... With Dinosaurs!

2011-07-06T13:41:00.000-07:00

My friends and teachers over at Periscope Studio have a weird and wonderful weekly sketch challenge. This week's theme is "World War II and Dinosaurs." After seeing Ben Dewey's pitch-perfect propaganda piece and the extremely creepy entry by Cat Farris, I knew I had to jump on the bandwagon. WWII-Dinosaurs are surely destined to succeed ninjas, pirates and zombies as the omnipresent emblem of the ironic pop-cultural zeitgeist, and let no one say I wasn't into them before they were cool.

By the way, this really is just a sketch, not like like the gorgeously rendered and researched finished pieces that often pass for "sketches" at Periscope. Way to set the bar impossibly high, guys.

Heat Rises

2011-06-30T02:44:00.000-07:00

Boy oh boy did it feel good to draw something other than Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment, I can't even begin to tell ya. This comic is for the "Summer" issue of Stumptown Underground and draws heavily on my own personal experience living in Brooklyn 4th-floor walk-up apartment during the summer of 2007.

Following the lead of Benjamin Dewey, here are my thumbnails (more like toenails!) for those of you interested in my, ahem, process. A big, special thanks to everyone at Barry Deutch's Graphic Writers' Workgroup for looking these over. They gave me the idea to add the scent-lines on page one, and the idea to make the protagonist black. Guys, if you read this and notice I didn't take your other suggestions, it's not because they were bad! It's because I'm stubborn!

Aside from personal experience, my main inspiration for this comic was Will Eisner, the man who evoked New York City, in all its glitz and gristle, better than any cartoonist ever has or ever will. Eisner's short-story anthology, "New York: The Big City" undoubtedly did more to get me into comics than any other book. Will Eisner also drew the world's most beautiful picture of a pile of uncollected garbage. Look at this:

Without any irony, I can call that beautiful. I can only dream of one day handling graywash the way Eisner did.

To close things out, here's my number one summer jam. There are a lot of songs that remind me of summer in New York City (i.e. pretty much any track on Sublime's self-titled album, a perennial campus favorite on the first warm day of the year), but this song by is actually about summer in New York City! Read my comic again while listening to this!

2028 Tonya Sketch

2011-06-21T02:33:00.001-07:00

When I wrote the script for Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment back in the spring of 2009, I specified that in the final scenes Tonya should be wearing "a sort of ninja-guerilla-superhero-Zorro costume." It became my task two years later to interpret what the heck I meant by this, so before drawing page 170 I did a preliminary costume design:

Even though this was a pretty rapid sketch, I'm pleased with how it turned out. The outlandish costume and hair is a good foil for Sen. Greg's new straight-laced look. The posture is believable and the proportions are a lot more naturalistic than one can usually expect from me. I've actually had to be a consciously cartoonier in the finished artwork for the sake of consistency.

My main regret is that at some point while drawing this the ol' hormones must have taken over, because I made Tonya look sexier than she's really supposed to be. (What's with those gams? And isn't she supposed to be 43?) I always intended Tonya to be a proxy for the reader, a sympathetic punk rock everywoman with real life dreams and problems etc., and I think making her a super-hot babe gets in the way of this. I worry that on certain pages of the comic, especially as my own knowledge of constructive anatomy improved, I probably lapsed into some unwarranted horndoggery, and if so I apologize. That's also a betrayal my own principles: DC and Marvel's ridiculous body imagery and unrealizable physical ideals, both masculine and feminine, were a huge part of what repelled me from reading any comics whatsoever for most of my righteous teenage years... and a desire to smash these norms is part of what brought me back to comics in my mid twenties.

I Am So Great

2011-06-10T00:56:00.001-07:00

I just finished what I consider to be a particularly good page of Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment, maybe one of the best. Not counting thumbnails, I did the entire page from start to finish in one day - actually just about 7-8 hours if you subtract all the time I spent singing in choir, hackey-sacking in the park, applying online for unemployment compensation, and queuing at the Department of Health and Human Services.

(please click the image to see the full-sized version!)

Though I am pleased with almost every aspect of this page (the page layout; the blocking of the figures; the human anatomy, gesture, and costume; the sweet but not saccharine tone, lightened by a little humor; the foreshadowing of Manaka's concerned glance) there are, as always, things I wish I could do better. Pro-inker Gary Martin, who graciously carved me a brand new anus while reviewing my portfolio at this year's Stumptown Comics Fest, wants me to focus on my line weight. So although I was already trying to use heavier lines opposite my light source, I'm trying even harder now - it worked pretty well on Theo's face in panel 4. I don't necessarily want the uber-slick look of some of Gary's (admittedly amazing) inking for my own comics, but even if I ultimately opt for a smudgier/sloppier treatment, it's still a skill I should have under my belt. Some of my lines, I think, are still way too thin, and I am still struggling with ways to create grays - my crosshatching is hopelessly haphazard and 165 pages later I am still smearing my drybrush all over the place inadvisedly.

Figure Drawing with Periscopers!

2011-06-03T01:40:00.000-07:00

I went by Periscope Studio on Wednesday night for a figure drawing session they organized. Surrounded by the greats, it was pretty dang intimidating!

Great model! Though I'm feeling a little rusty. When SNitLoE is done, I wanna get back into figure-drawing regularly.

Theo a la Theo

2011-05-27T11:28:00.001-07:00

Here's a picture I did of Theo and the other characters from Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment in the style of local cartoonist Theo Ellsworth. Consider it my modest tribute to this awesome artist.

I actually got to chat with Theo Ellsworth over burritos last weekend when we were both in Washington for the Olympia Comics Festival. Even though I was bumping elbows with much more famous comics artists during the festival, none of them intimidated me so much as Theo. I feel as though in this candid photograph of the two of us you can actually see the nervousness in my facial expression and posture.

Why would this be? Festival guests Larry Gonick and Paul Chadwick are both excellent artists, but I basically understand how they got that way. They practiced a lot, studied the works of artists they admire, probably read a few instructional books on art or storytelling, or got pointers from fellow cartoonists. By contrast, Theo's artistic process is completely opaque to me. If his comics are to be believed, he basically gets inspiration by delving into some weird interior mental zone and meeting a bunch of thoughts incarnated as fantastical creatures.

This might be why meeting him in person was so intimidating - anyone else who's met him can tell you that Theo has about the gentlest, least intimidating personality you could imagine. The cognitive dissonance comes from knowing that his mind is nevertheless capable of concocting bizarre mystical visions, and may be doing so at any moment. As he was talking to me, was he imagining tassled antlers springing from my head or little monster-men driving on my shoulders in tiny cars?

Even though I've spent the past year honing my "craft" by studying the Masters, and even though I have a long-standing aversion to the "Vesuvius" school of creativity - i.e. the muse strikes you and you simply spew out its inspiration on the page, there's something I still seriously admire about this kind of self-taught, highly personal/intuitive creativity.

When I was a younger and less technically schooled artist, I loved putting little weird things in my drawings, cramming every inch of a picture with whatever quirky idea struck me at the time - sometimes without even knowing what to expect would come out of my pencil. I sort of miss that now!

(By the way, don't take any of this to mean that I don't think Theo's work is also technically very good - it is! Nor is all of it psychologically ponderous - it can be very lighthearted as well.)

(Also, just so you don't think I'm an obsessive fan-boy, I named the character Theo long before I had ever heard of Theo the artist. It's a coincidence, I swear!)

Olympia Comics Fest 2011

2011-05-22T21:58:00.000-07:00

I had a great time this weekend (my birthday weekend!) visiting Olympia, WA for the comics fest. It's organized by Chelsea Baker who also let me stay at her house and sleep on her futon, and who also draws a terrific daily auto-bio comic that you should check out - it's totally addictive.

The guests of honor at this year's Fest were Paul Chadwick, Megan Kelso, and Larry Gonick! Paul Chadwick is extremely charming in real life, a very soft-spoken fella who put up with our sycophantic fawning with dignity and generosity. Megan Kelso is really funny and smart and I'm mad that I missed her panel on feminism in contemporary comics. But the reason I missed it was so that I could attend the hour-long panel with LARRY GONICK!

I sketched Larry while he was giving his slideshow. Until yesterday, it was literally impossible for me to picture the man as looking like anything other than his authorial proxy, the Einstein-haired professor who narrates most of his non-fiction books. The actual Larry Gonick is tall and lanky.

During Q&A, I asked him what he thought was the proper role for a modern Marxist in the world of comics. Larry, who used to be a card-carrying socialist, gave the laudable and succinct answer "to sit back and reconsider," before launching into a pretty weird biology lecture about kin selection. From what I gathered then and later at the book-signing, he thinks Marxism's exclusive focus on the economic aspects of life overlooks the importance of genetics and evolution in shaping history. If this is really his view, then I think he's skewering a straw-man Marx, perhaps his parents' Marx or the Marx of 1970s San Francisco. And why the evolutionary-biologist perspective? Perhaps this is the logical worldview of someone whose "history of the universe" begins with the Big Bang and the Primordial Soup. I worry that a biologically-based view of class struggle can end up being even more mechanistic-deterministic than allegedly "purely economic" orthodox Marxism.

Anyway, that's a minor quip. I'm not even sure I understood him properly. And I still agree with Gonick's politics 1,000x more than last year's guest, the insufferable libertarian Peter Bagge!

Spent Sunday exploring the sweet town of Olympia. Hey, do y'all remember the comic I did about a time-travelling Olympian back in May of 2010?

Katy Ellis O'Brien Coloring Book

2011-05-15T01:01:00.000-07:00

My friend and housemate Katy Ellis O'Brien is having a coloring contest to promote the upcoming release of her coloring book. I encourage all of you to enter it. Digitally coloring Katy's images is particularly fun, since all of her linework is closed, animation-style, meaning you can select areas using Photoshop's magic wand tool instead of the tedious lasso.

Katy originally drew most of these drawings for her after-school-care kids at the YMCA. Often the kids themselves will request the subject matter, resulting in some really quirky images like a dog riding a motorscooter.

Since I'm pretty certain that, as her housemate, I'm ineligible for the contest, I decided to color this image deliberately in a way that would annoy Katy. She has often expressed her distaste for the current trend in computer animation to apply photo-realistic textures to cartoony, malproportioned characters. I guess she thinks that cartoony characters should be rendered in a smoother, more graphical way. I definitely see her point. When this is done badly, it's one of the worst looking things you could imagine.

But there are also times when I think it works, and I don't know exactly what to peg this on. There's something about that Joe-Sacco-type big-picture-little-picture imbalance that I kinda like, where each little piece of stubble is delicately rendered on a figure who is basically a few squares and circles.

Praise Song for Every Hand-Painted Sign

2011-05-08T20:38:00.000-07:00

Today I painted a sign for my friend Rand's new farm, One Leaf Farm up in Carnation, WA. I can't take credit for the design though - somebody else created that logo. I think it's pretty good. Logos for "organic" products are usually characterized by earthen tones and tedious images of red barns nestled in quiet valleys. (Yes, nestled. Always nestled.) This black and white logo will stand out from the colors of the surrounding booths and from the vegetables themselves.

Interesting fact about my friend Rand: the Black Flag t-shirt she used to wear around the farm inspired the one Tonya wears in Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchatment!

A few NYC sketches

2011-05-07T14:49:00.000-07:00

I visited New York City last weekend and was kept so busy with friends that I barely got to draw at all. But on my last day there I did manage to sketch a bunch of people having lunch in Union Square. I like the quizzical woman in the center - she really did look like that.

And this dog with a tennis ball, and this other guy.

Drawing from life is really fun, and I wish I'd gotten to do more of it while I was in New York. The city is full of such interesting-looking people, even if most of them won't stand still. These picture all had to be scribbled in under a minute.

On Cast Shadows

2011-05-03T09:54:00.000-07:00

"Too late I loved thee, beauty both so ancient and so new!" - St. Augustine

Okay, that's a little hyperbolic, but it still aptly describes my newfound appreciation for cast shadows. I frickin' love these guys.

Just so we're clear on the terms, a cast shadow is dark patch formed by something coming between an object and the light source illuminating it. This is distinct from part of an object being IN SHADOW because part of it faces away from the light source. For instance, if I am performing on a spotlighted stage, the back of my head and clothes will be IN SHADOW, but I will CAST A SHADOW on the wall behind me, and perhaps my microphone will cast a shadow on my own chest.

In real life, cast shadows are everywhere, but in comics, artists often need to reduce their number to keep a composition from becoming an unintelligible mess. Many cast shadows are also distracting and unflattering: the shadow the nose casts on the upper lip at noonday, when drawn in stark black and white, has a tendency to look like Hitler's mustache.

Isn't the image at left so much better?

However, cast shadows in comics can also be used to tremendous effect in any of several different ways.

1.) They indicate a light source. This is pretty obvious, but cast shadows can do wonders to establish the time of day or the location of a lamp, candelabra, etc.

2.) They define the object they fall on. Nothing makes a cylindrical object look more cylindrical than the big ol' black semicircle of a cast shadow. We wouldn’t necessarily know that a speeding motorcycle has both wheels off the ground unless we saw that black oval on the ground beneath it. Shadows can also describe texture - the shadow I cast on a stucko wall will have ragged edges compared to one I cast on a linoleum floor.

3.) They assist in storytelling. A shadow can function like a big black arrow pointing to the intended center of attention, leading the reader’s eye. A shadow can let us know an enemy is approaching around the corner, and that he’s got a gun.

4.) Perhaps most subtly, they can suggest moods or even themes. When a father’s cast shadow falls across the face of his son, we begin to suspect that his domineering attitude is always with the boy, as if looming over him. A tiny businessman might cast an enormous shadow, suggesting his disproportionate financial power.

As an overall example, check out this panel from an amazing "Mandy Riley" 1983 comic drawn by Ernesto Garcia Seijas:

That cast shadow 1.) establishes the light source as being somewhere outside the hut, to the right, 2.) further defines the location of the wall behind the hero, AND describes its texture as a rough, stone surface. 3.) The shadow helps clarify a rather tricky bit of stage-blocking, reemphasizing that the snake has actually wound partly around Mandy and is now facing his left shoulder. 4.) Notice that, while the actual snake’s head is facing Mandy, its shadow is facing the girl on the left. Thematically, this suggests that, while self-preservation is Mandy’s immediate goal, his ultimate purpose is to protect his benippled friend, menaced by the snake’s shadow. This type of suggestion may only work subconsciously, or it may only work for overanalytical nerds like me.

(By the way, I recommend that you check out the full Mandy story, El Torrente. Every single page is a total work of art. But bear in mind that it is in Spanish. Also, even with my limited Spanish skills, I can tell that it is DEFINITELY sexist and also quite racist. But I am getting desensitized to this kinda crap as I study Caniff, Toth and all these other dead comics geniuses. Unfortunately the best artists also drew some of the stupidest, most bigoted stories.)

Hooray for cast shadows! How many more can you spot in recent pages of Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment?

SNitLoE April Fools

2011-03-30T22:01:00.000-07:00

For April Fools Day I thought I'd treat my SNitLoE readers to a false ending that was only slightly more of a disappointing cop-out than the final season of LOST. From the writing point of view, I think we can all agree that there's pretty much nothing worse than the "it was all a dream" ending. Don't worry, kids, I've got a much better conclusion in store.

From the artistic point of view, there are two fun things about this page. I got to redraw Tonya's bolting-awake pose from page 38. That page was drawn around November of 2009, and it's pretty obvious my drawing as gotten a lot better.

Tonya's head used to be basically a guitar pick with a face, which is how I had been drawing womens' heads ever since high school. I've got a much better understanding of the skull now, and I've done a good job eschewing the cartoonist's problem of "chronic C-mouth," even if many of my mouths still don't look quite right. My below-the-neck anatomy has improved too, as Tonya now has a torso and not just shoulders coming out of her boobs. In fact, I like pretty much everything about this second drawing better. And I had damn well better, since it's the result of more than a year's worth of practice! However, I already see things that need a lot of work in the more recent drawing -the muscles of the arm (I am still faking it), the folds in the sleeve, something about the way the nose connects to the upper lip. There are so many places where "not quite right" is almost worse than "completely wrong."

There is a panel on this page about which I have no complaints:

Though there are many figures in government I dislike, Jan Brewer is the first politician since President Bush the very sight of whom actually triggers in me revulsion. This has nothing to do with her actual appearance - she's basically a standard issue older white lady, with perhaps whiter teeth than most. No, my revulsion stems entirely from Gov. Brewer's passage of the racist SB 1070 law, her inexcusable fearmongering, and her absurd and xenophobic lies. (I also don't like her regressive tax policies, her cancellation of crucial state benefit programs like AZ children's health insurance, or her shameless complicity with the private prison giant Corrections Corporation of America, but unfortunately none of these practices make her unique among U.S. governors.)

There are a lot of funny things about Brewer on the internet, funny videos of her getting tangled up in her own idiotic rhetoric, often to the point where she just totally shuts down and stares blankly like a moron... giving a certain Alaskan a run for her money in the race to be the most unqualified gubernatorial ditz.

But remember, George Bush also said and did a lot of stupid, amusing, ridiculous things. Neither Bush nor Brewer are idiots. And as a Christian, I don't maintain that either of them is in any constitutive sense evil. But they are both totally incorrect in their beliefs. Bush and his ilk wreaked havoc on the last American decade, and it's people like Brewer, with their careless alarmism, who could potentially destroy this one.

HAHAHAHA SORRY, THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE AN APRIL FOOLS POST AND NOW ITS DEPRESSING INSTEAD OF FUNNY.

I suppose the lesson I want you to take away is that, if your state elects (or, sigh, re-elects) a governor like Jan Brewer, you should figure out a way to impeach him or her. Failing this, you should draw a comic book where all the bad guys are beefy immigration cops/ corporate prison guards and the good guys are square-jawed immigrant rights activists.

Edna Mode Birthday Card

2011-03-25T14:13:00.000-07:00

Here's a birthday card I made for my friend Tamar, who is a big fan of Edna Mode from The Incredibles. As I've mentioned before on this blog, I don't consider myself to be very adept at drawing characters designed by other people, unlike some of my artist friends who are very good at it. But I think I did a little better here, after scrutinizing some screencaps from the movie and rewatching Edna's scenes on YouTube.

Of course, Edna Mode is (c) Disney, Pixar etc. But maybe I could make some money marketing this as a birthday card!

BADASS ST. PATRICK!

2011-03-16T00:49:00.000-07:00

BIND UNTO YOURSELF THIS, BITCH!!!

(Before I decided to make this a comic-book cover, I wanted it to be a movie poster.)

"Larry, baby! Got a new idea for St. Patty's Day. Yeah, I know, who can care any more? He's an old dead saint, grey beard, lotta robes. The kids ain't exactly beating down the doors for this fella's autograph, am I right? So here's how I see it: we go darker and edgier. Think "300" meets "Anaconda," in 5th century Ireland! Ol' Pat himself is three parts Kratos from "God of War" and one part Boondock Saint... a total badass! He's gotta rescue the pagan princess from the coils of a cobra voiced by Sean Connery - she's Keira Knightley from "King Arthur," but with a D-cup. A comical CGI leprechaun? Sure, I guess that'd work. Howabout I give Marlon Wayans a call? Think it over - we'll do lunch!"

By the way, the black-and-white original for this picture, though flawed (what's with his right arm? You call that foreshortening?) is still probably one of the best things I've ever drawn. Because of this, and because I am broke as a 5th-century pagan, I am selling it on my etsy page for $25. Consider snatching it up! Proceeds will go toward the health insurance I have to buy because I don't live in Ireland.

Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone. I hope it's BRUTAL!!!!1!

Ten Minute Robert La Follette

2011-03-11T21:58:00.000-08:00

I'm working really hard on some elaborate SNitLoE scenes and a pin-up for St. Patrick's Day right now, so I don't have much to post besides this quick sketch of famous Wisconsin senator Robert La Follette. This guy was amazing! I feel his spirit must still somehow be stalking the capitol building in Madison, as the protesters and workers occupying the building honor his legacy by fighting for union rights, and Republican legislators trample his grave.

Wisconsin brought our nation its first workman's comp program, its first unemployment insurance program, its first statewide election primaries, and its first state income tax. Looks like it's your turn to lead the way again, cheeseheads. Stick it to the bastards... the nation and the restless spirit of "Fighting Bob" are watching.

Below: results from the 1924 presidential election. La Follette had 17% of the popular vote!

Eskimo Breakup

2011-02-28T10:18:00.001-08:00

I had to take a break from my Years of Rice and Salt illustrations because I was falling waaaay behind on Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment, which is still my #1 drawing priority, at least for another 35 pages, damn it all.

This heartwrenching spread is for the upcoming issue of Stumptown Underground, with the extremely unfortunate theme of "breakups." Pick it up at a comic store near you and enjoy more mopey, Craig Thomson-y navel-gazing than anybody ever thought you'd need. Then buck the hell up and draw something for April's issue, which will be about "friendship," thank goodness.

And just in case you want to still believe in love, check out the hot lip-lockin' action in today's installment of "SNitLoE." Looks like Theo's found the universal language, ho ho!

See you soon with more art!

7.) The Years of Great Progress

2011-02-22T23:20:00.000-08:00

Just don't call it steampunk! Click to read more.

Chapter seven of Kim Stanley Robinson's alternate history novel The Years of Rice and Salt chronicles the rise of Travancore (modern-day Thiruvananthapuram in southern India) as a world power. This is chiefly because they invent steam power. Their charismatic leader, the Kerala, ousted the Mughals (who, with the British empire never having arisen, continued to dominate India unchallenged well into what we would call the 19th century.) After that, the Kerala embarked on semi-peaceful Asoka-style conquest of the Muslim world, even conquering Konstantiniyye on the Bosphorus. The Kerala always brings the intellectuals of a new territory back to his capitol where, with a host of scholars and scientists from Africa, the New World, and especially the enormous Japanese diaspora, their scientific investigations are fully funded.

"The Years of Great Progress" contains one of my favorite passages in all of Robinson, recited by the Kerala as they float above the city and its orchards in the scene depicted:

“We will go out into the world and plant gardens and orchards to the horizons, we will build roads through the mountains and across the deserts, and terrace the mountains and irrigate the deserts until there will be garden everywhere, and plenty for all, and there will be no more empires or kingdoms, no more caliphs, sultans, emirs, khans, or zamindars, no more kings or queens or princes, no more quadis or mullahs or ulema, no more slavery and no more usury, no more property and no more taxes, no more rich and no more poor, no killing or maiming or torture or execution, no more jailers and no more prisoners, no more generals, soldiers, armies or navies, no more patriarchy, no more caste, no more hunger, no more suffering than what life brings us for being born and having to die, and then we will see for the first time what kind of creatures we really are.”

I have a complicated view of KSR's specific brand of utopianism, which I will elaborate upon in a later post. But while I think a lot of his positions need to be problematized, there's nevertheless something about his egalitarian vision that stirs me pretty deeply. Unlike (sadly) many sci-fi writers, KSR is actually capable of beautiful writing, and passages like these set my leftist heart a-reeling.

He forgot to say "no more Qaddafis!"

Briefly, regarding the art: I had an obscene amount of fun being obsessive and anal over all the details in this picture. Though overzealous detail is something I try to avoid, I fear that I more often sway too far the other way, being sketchy and sloppy and leaving my characters against stark, uninteresting backgrounds. (I'm particuarly guilty of this in SNitLoE, which, to be fair, takes place mostly in the desert and in completely dark rooms.)

I've also been more careful with the "camera angles" of my art lately. I'm trying to use "upshots" more often for dramatic effect, but I don't wanna become somebody who uses them all the time because they are easier than elaborate downshots. This picture would have taken half the time if we were looking up from the city at the hot air balloon, but would it have been better? I doubt it. Before composing the downshot in this image I studied some of the absolutely gorgeous urban downshots of Dustin Weaver (whose fantastic Shield series is kind of an alternate history itself).

I wanna be absolutely clear that in displaying Dustin's work here and linking to his blog I am not comparing myself to him or anything like that. As an artist, he is to me what, as a writer, Kim Stanley Robinson is to... also me. An inspiration!

6.) Widow Kang

2011-02-19T12:59:00.000-08:00

Click to read my commentary.

I've set myself a February goal of illustrating every chapter of Kim Stanley Robinson's alternate-history novel, The Years of Rice and Salt, and so far it's been really exciting! I feel as though I learn three or four new things with each drawing, and each is (to me) better than the previous. The only downside is that it's making me slack off on my main project, Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment. For some reason I do not put as much effort into my comics pages as I do into these illustrations - maybe it's because of the demanding 2 1/2-page-a-week schedule of SNitLoE, or because I've been drawing those same characters off and on for two whole years. Don't get me wrong, I definitely plan to finish the story. But my "side projects" are opening new and fascinating possibilities for my future!

So even though this illustration is pretty exciting, "Widow Kang" is definitely the book's most boring chapter. Most of it is about the feisty titular widow and her second marriage to a Chinese Muslim scholar, Ibrahim Ibn Hasan. Ibrahim is a sort of alternate-history Hegel who undertakes the possibly impossible task of synthesizing Islam and Confucianism, but stumbles upon some clever ideas along the way. He sees the philosophical synthesis as indispensable, for huge populations of Muslims continue to move into western China's Gansu corridor, where this chapter takes place, and skirmishes and rebellions are frequent.

Since most of the chapter is about two middle aged people sitting on their porch and debating ideas, it makes for interesting reading, but not much worth drawing. Until there is a huge flood! Poor Kang has to evacuate her house and try to save her writings in a state of advanced pregnancy and with legs crippled long ago by footbinding. (And in the story, her husband was not there to help her - I just added him to the illustration for the heck of it.) I did some google searches for images of footbinding... just, ew.

5.) Warp and Weft

2011-02-17T11:37:00.000-08:00

Here's my illustration from chapter five of Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt, an alternate history novel that imagines how history might have developed if the plague had wiped out 99% of the European population instead of 30-60%.

Chapter five, "Warp and Weft" (a basket-weaving term), is told from the point of view of Hodenosaunee Indians in what we would call the Hudson River valley, in what we would call the early 18th century. The story centers around a mysterious stranger "Fromwest." Fromwest is actually a ronin (masterless samurai) who fled to the New World from Japan, which has been completely conquered by the Chinese. Determined to preserve the "unspoilt" natives from a similar fate, at the hands of China or the European Muslims (who are simultaneously colonizing the New World from the east), Fromwest tries to convince the Hodenosaunee 0f the importance of industrialization and firearms manufacture to their survival. However, he urges that, while industrializing, the tribe must not abandon their complex but functional system of consensus-based, psuedo-matriarchal government, which is the best form of government he has ever seen. Through such a system, a massive alliance of all New World tribes against the colonizers is an actual possibility.

Robinson is not so naively PC as to suggest that the "American" natives were always fully capable of defending themselves, but neither is he so condescending as to intimate that they could only be defended by an altruistic outsider (what we might call the "Avatar" approach.) Instead, he invents a properly radical-historical narrative, where the "best" of the oppressive outsider (in this case, industry and empirical science) is adopted by the colonized and turned against them. KSR's dialectical ideas really start to emerge in this chapter, and are further solidified in the next chapter, "Widow Kang." I think he's right to point out that often the most productive areas of society are not the central monoliths, but the interces, the points where two cultures intersect on the periphery of either.

I'm still trying to get a handle on this ink-wash thing, trying to keep in mind the principles of atmospheric perspective, with pretty limited success. I feel that if I can learn how to craft pleasing compositions in grays, my black and white illustrations will improve and I might even learn something about color.

Up until the very last minute, I had planned to show Fromwest and the Indian practicing katana stances from a medium close-up point of view, and I'd even done some fairly detailed figure studies based on actual katana positions. But I'm trying to keep myself from falling into a comfortable 2/5 rut, where all my compositions are based on dividing the page into fifths and placing the center of attention two fifths from the left or from the right. That approach is like the minor pentatonic scale - just because it always sounds good, that's no excuse not to try something else. I woke up yesterday and decided to go for the wide shot, to show tiny figures against the expanse of the American wilderness. My hero James Gurney would be so aghast to see how inconsiderately I've treated the Hudson River valley, the site and subject of so much incredible plein air painting.

4.) The Alchemist

2011-02-12T17:45:00.000-08:00

Click to read my explanation of what's happening here.

Here's my illustration for chapter four of The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. "The Alchemist" tells the tale of Khalid, a Samarqandi armorer whose right hand is chopped off by the Khan when his demonstration of transmuting lead into gold is discovered to be fraudulent. He is rescued from spiraling depression by his son-in-law, the Sufi-minded Bahram (center), and Iwang(right), a mathematically-minded polyglot. They gradually launch an Islamic Renaissance in Samarqand (in the Muslim 1050's, our 1640s), eschewing the conjectures of the Ancients and constructing a method of empiricism that quickly leads to many discoveries in diverse fields, theoretical and practical. (Of course the Khan is only interested in weapons).

In the scene I've depicted, the three of them are walking home one night after a vailiant but failed attempt to measure the speed of light, slightly drunk. When Bahram asserts that the purpose of life is to "make more love," Khalid (whose scribbly notebooks designate him as a sort of alternate-history Leonardo Da Vinci, with a touch of the martyred Galileo) concedes but adds that it is our duty to Allah to understand His world, in order to love it. Iwang, meanwhile, envisions a mathematics that would measure "the speed-of-the-speed."

It's a great chapter, where KSR's strength for writing that is intellectually stimulating, and not just a relentless emotional roller-coaster, really shines. Sure, there are some beautiful moments of character development, but the most engaging passages are where we witness an old discovery or invention (vacuum pumps, barometers, the telescope, calculus, even nasty things like mustard gas) being made again in a novel way. It reminds me of middle school, when science was in my hands, not in the hands of distant, corporate-funded lab technicians; when science was fun. It's a chapter I think my scientific-atheist friends could really appreciate, despite the heavy Muslim/Buddhist overtones.

3.) Ocean Continents

2011-02-11T15:19:00.000-08:00

Here's my illustration for chapter three of The Years of Rice and Salt, in which the Chinese discover the New World. An expedition in the Christian 1620s to conquer a small Japanese port goes astray and is dragged by a current all the way across the Pacific. The survivors eventually dock in what we would call the San Francisco Bay. The relationship between Admiral Kheim and his crew, and Butterfly, a small Miwok girl they adopt to use as a translator, is in my opinion the most touching in the book. Oh, and though Kheim and the Chinese marvel at the unspoiled simplicity of the Miwok, suffice it to say a journey much further south convinces them that not all savages are noble.

Great quote for those of you who've read it (context-sensitive, spoiler alert):

Kheim said to [the emperor], "That far country is lost in time, its streets paved with gold, its palaces roofed with gold. You could conquer it in a month, and rule over all its immensity, and bring back all the treasure that it has, endless forest and furs, turquoise and gold, more gold than there is yet now in the world; and yet still the greatest treasure in that land is already lost."

2.) The Haj in the Heart

2011-02-06T19:00:00.000-08:00

Here's my illustration for chapter two of Kim Stanley Robinson's alternate history novel The Years of Rice and Salt, entitled "The Haj in the Heart." Most of this chapter is set in the 970's (the Christian 1590's) and follows Bistami, a Sufi Muslim from Gujarat, India who is saved from marauding thugs by a friendly tiger and later becomes a personal religious adviser to the Mughal Emperor Akbar (another real historical figure). After he falls out of favor with the emperor and his bureaucracy, he is sent on the Haj to Mecca, and proceeds from thence west (chapter two is basically a geographical mirror image of the east-bound chapter one) across northern Africa. Eventually he crosses the straight of Gibraltar to Spain, where an intrepid group of Muslim pioneers have been gradually recolonizing the abandoned European continent and attempting to recreate the golden age of al-Andalus. It is here that Bistami sits in an orange grove with Ibn Ezra, a sort of proto-proto-scientist, in the scene I have chosen to depict.

A debate arises over why the plague happened. An orchard-keeper proposes the common explanation, that Allah killed the Christians because of their wicked and polytheistic ways. Ibn Ezra differs, noting that many Christians in Ethiopia and elsewhere survived, and moreover that the plague killed many Muslims in the Balkans and southern Spain. Instead, he offers a biological explanation. Since he lacks the language of genetics or evolution, Ibn Ezra uses the human-bred oranges (and the naturally occurring fungus that attacks them) as examples to explain how a new, stronger version of plague might arise through cross-breeding. He argues for a less interventionist God, while still remaining within the realm of orthodoxy.

Shortly after this, the Sultana Katima arrives, a sort of proto-proto-feminist character who gets down from her camel unaided. She leads Bistami and a troop of outcasts further north into "Firanja," where they found a new city (on the ruins of an old city) and construct a progressive, feminist-egalitarian Islamic theology which discards much of the established Hadith.

I was very excited to read today's entry in my favorite blog of all time, GURNEY JOURNEY, by Dinotopia-creator James Gurney. If you are reading this now, you should definitely go read that next! It's about models and photo-reference, and how to use them sparingly, and only in the final stages of a piece, so that the imagination isn't too stifled by an overzealous adherence to observation. Like many of my friends in the comics world, James Gurney is a big advocate of the 1950's Famous Artist courses and their mannequin-based approach to constructive anatomy. I was pretty late to this party, but I'm proud that I was able to construct all three of these figures from geometric shapes, only sitting on the floor once or twice to figure out where Bistami's feet should go.

1.) Awake to Emptiness

2011-02-04T18:57:00.000-08:00

I'm hoping to do a series of illustrations based around the chapters of one of my favorite novels of all time, The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson, which I am rereading this month. This project is partly to give me a little bit of a break from SNitLoE, which for some reason has been bogging me down a little bit, and partly to introduce myself to new art techniques, like the ink-wash used here. I also want to practice the "illustration-a-day" ethos of Benjamin Dewey, where the point is not for an illustration to be be perfect in every way, but for it to be completely finished in a day. This drawing took me about three or three and a half hours.

The Years of Rice and Salt is an alternate history novel which speculates how the world would have developed without the influence of European Christendom. Some time in the 14th century, a mutant strain of the plague kills 99% of Europeans (instead of the historical 30-60%), effectively eliminating them from history, and leaving China and Islam the dominant powers on earth. The novel traces humanity's progress over the next seven centuries, all the way up to the Islamic year 1423 (which would be 2002 on the Christian calendar).

But Kim Stanley Robinson, very characteristically, never spells this all out. (Amazingly, KSR is often accused by other sci-fi writers of being prone to "infodumps," but I think this charge is ridiculous.) Instead, he tells the new history through the eyes of his characters, ordinary and extraordinary people who are only barely figuring it out themselves. The central character of chapter one, "Awake to Emptiness," is Bold, a Mongolian raider under the conquering Temur Khan in what would be the very early 15th Christian century. Bold takes a wrong turn and heads out into the Magyar plain (present-day Hungary), where he finds villages and entire cities completely depopulated by the plague, their buildings and cathedrals still ghostily in tact.

(Fearing that he has been exposed to plague, the Khan orders Bold's execution, but Bold flees. He works his way through deserted eastern Europe alone, down through Greece, where, on the brink of starvation, he is captured by Arab slave traders. He journeys with them down the east coast of Africa, where he forms a deep bond with another enslaved person, an African boy named Kyu. They are taken on the magnificent trading fleet of Admiral Zheng He (a real historical figure) to Hangzhou, where they are employed in a restaurant, until Kyu gets the idea... well, I won't spoil it.)

By the way, I haven't forgotten about the "alternate history" that's happening RIGHT NOW. Here's my 3-minute warm-up sketch of a man whose power-grubbing would give ol' Genghis a run for his money, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak:

Art For the Egypt Protests

2011-01-29T03:54:00.001-08:00

I spend most of my time drawing imaginary people fighting imaginary oppression, but tonight I really felt I should draw something to honor the real heroes out there this week on the streets of Cairo, enduring truncheons, rubber bullets and firehoses in the hopes of a freer Egypt. Of course none of them will ever see my stupid drawing, even if Mubarak hadn't shut down the internet, but I guess it's my way adding my voice to the throng.

I kinda like the black and white version, though I wish I could think of cleverer ways to create gray. The b&w original is for sale on etsy.

"Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless. What will you do on the day of reckoning, when disaster comes from afar? To whom will you run for help? Where will you leave your riches?" - Isaiah 10:1-3

GOOD LUCK EGYPT! And remember, the real fight will begin the morning after Mubarak steps down.

My Next Project

2011-01-21T23:25:00.001-08:00

Guys, great news! I've decided what my next graphic novel will be:

"The Li'lest Nobles," a heartwarming children's adventure about the Savage Nobles as BABIES. When their wagon becomes mired in the sandbox, their only hope of getting home in time for dinner is THE POWER OF IMAGINATION!

But shouldn't Theo be like a teenager already?

Okay, seriously, this was a lot of fun to draw (especially since I pencilled most of it while on the clock at my barista job). I'm totally indebted to Aaron McConnell for the idea. Aaron drew a hilarious image of Marvel's team of reformed supervillains, the Thunderbolts, as teeny tiny adowable widdle kids.

Aaron has had the disastrous good luck of becoming well known for drawing in the very narrow genre of Non-Fiction American History Comics. That's because he does it very well, but he's SUPER-diverse and I hate to see him straightjacketed into what can be a pretty staid style (as I guess comics about Civil War massacres, the founding of banks, etc. should be) when he is capable of such wonderful lunacy as well.

For MLK Day

2011-01-15T15:58:00.000-08:00

I know that saying "King has really meant something to me" is a bit like saying you like the music of the Beatles or that you enjoyed the first Matrix movie, but I can only assert that in my case it's really, actually true. But sometimes MLK Day bums me out; I feel the popular image of King the civil rights pioneer - the guy who led the Montgomery bus boycott, the guy who gave the "I Have a Dream" speech - often obscures the legacy of King the theologian, the political philosopher. I think he is at least as important as a thinker as he was as a public speaker, which is why I drew him with his mouth closed.

Any remembrance of the civil rights activities of the 60's can easily turn into a self-congratulatory massage circle, where the implicit message is "thank goodness we've got it right nowadays." Even the more modest pundits who add that "there is still so much work to do" often seem to buy into the general end-of-history onanism. I'm afraid that this spectacle has become more obscene since Obama's election, and the MLK Day ceremonies he's presided over have filled me with a disgust that borders on despair. (By the way, I blame the ceremony organizers, not the President, who I'm pretty sure just shows up.) While Obama's election was definitely a symbolic triumph of huge proportions, and I can't begin to imagine what it meant to people who were alive in the 60's, especially blacks, I always try to remember King's own aversion to specific examples of individually successful black people. In his writings and speeches, he didn't count the existence of a narrow black middle class as a victory, and if he did cite the accomplishments of individuals like James Meredith or Marian Anderson, it always accompanied a parallel citation of the nameless masses.

I think anyone with eyes can see there are still serious racial inequalities in the U.S. today, and I even think most of the above-mentioned memorializers know this very well, even if they continue to play an ideological game. Moreover, I think, with King, that a fundamental class division underlies most racial divides, and that racial strife, if not exactly a subset of class strife, is certainly inseparable from it. It's a big taboo to suggest (especially if you're a white guy like me!) that King's ideas extend beyond issues of racial injustice, but I think this is exactly what needs to be said if his legacy is to be rescued from those who are turning him into a historical relic of a social fait accompli. A stone monument, for goodness' sake!

I used to refer to this socialist-minded King as the "post-63 King." My happy discovery of 2010 was just how inept this description was. For instance, in this mushy 1952 letter to his then-girlfriend Coretta Scott, (90% of which ends up being about the book she lent him, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, which I have also read) King claims that "capitalism has outlived its usefulness." In 1952! It was so refreshing to see that the socialist attitudes that characterize King in the final years of his life had been there all along.

For many years, starting in college, I've struggled to reconcile my own leftist (I'd even like to say "communist," at the risk of being misunderstood) political convictions with my Christianity, and King has probably helped me through more moments of crisis than any one else. When I despondently Googled "can a christian be a communist?" one night, I found this transcription of a 1962 King sermon of the same title. I really encourage you all to read it, and the other archived speeches and writings at Stanford's MLK Research and Education Institute online, but if you don't have time, I'll summarize: Can a Christian be a Communist? King's answer is a big "no," followed by an even bigger "BUT..."

My favorite quote: "Indeed, it may be that communism is a necessary corrective for a Christianity that has been all too passive and a democracy that has been all too inert."

As contradictory as they now seem, I do think Marxist ideas must somehow be incorporated into Christian theology, perhaps in a similar way to how Aristotelian thought was adapted in the later middle ages (a proposal that at the time would have seemed equally untenable!) If this mammoth intellectual project of synthesis ever happens, I think King will be remembered as one who laid the groundwork.

Oh, and one last thing! Let's please, please, PLEASE start just calling him "King" instead of saying "the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr." or something like that every single time. We don't feel the need to say "Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi" every time, do we?! Maybe at one time it was a big deal to point out that a black person had a PhD, fine. But when a somebody has attained the level of world-historical individual, we generally recognize this by dropping all but their last name. Heck, if the words "Derridean," "Clintonite" and "Reaganomics" have entered the common parlance since '68, isn't it about time we promoted the poor old doctor to a monosyllable?

The Misadventures of Herschel Pachman

2011-01-13T19:28:00.000-08:00

That's right, the ghosts are Klansmen! How's that for dark?

I pencilled these pages in a burst of New-Yearsy determination two weekends ago during a visit from Vancouver cartoonists Wei Li and Vanessa Kelly, two people who don't mind if you look down while you talk to them (my kinda people!). I let the comic languish uninked until today, when I was home from work with a seriously nasty cold.

I'll be submitting "The Misadventures of Herschel Pachman" to the video-game-themed February issue of Stumptown Underground.

I have a few friends and acquaintances who draw lots of video game characters or vg-related art, and I'm pretty much in awe of what they do. Drawing only these four pages has convinced me that I probably do not have what it takes to do justice to the intricate designs of these types of characters. I really phoned it in on Sonic the Hedgehog, and only got away with the guy from "Dig Dug" (in the breadline behind Zelda's Link) because that character is so pixellated already that nobody seems to know or care what he actually looks like - I certainly don't. But otherwise, I'm actually quite pleased with how this comic turned out!

Nude with cap - still nude?

2011-01-09T02:20:00.000-08:00

Just so you don't think this is turning into some kind of boy's club after yesterday's cartoon, here's a little Russian beefcake courtesy of this morning's figure drawing session. This model brought a hat, a prop gun and A LIGHT SABER! (not pictured) (haha)

Sorority Disaster

2011-01-07T19:53:00.000-08:00

This is a silly gag that's been floating around in my head for about a month now. Even though it's a fairly small cartoon (5"x9"), its composition took me a fairly long time, because there's so much going on and it has to be chaotic but intelligible. I spent a lot of time trying to get rid of tangencies, spots where the edges of subjects touch but don't overlap, which confuse depth perception. Of course, tangencies happen all the time in real life, but our brains usually don't have as much trouble with them then. I wasn't entirely successful eliminating all the tangencies in this drawing - I really don't like how the delivery man's left arm lines up with the passenger-side door, for instance - but I like to think I'm getting better all the time.

I am in constant awe of artists who can create female characters who are simultaneously sexy and funny. As many horribly unentertaining Cameron Diaz pratfalls attest, such a synthesis is much more easily proposed than executed. One of my life goals is to be able to draw a beautiful woman making a funny face. The flecks of bloody gray matter currently clinging to my dining room ceiling are attributable to the mind-blowing art of Jaime Hernandez, whom I am only just now really "discovering." In addition to doing just about everything else in comics perfectly, J.H. can draw a woman crossing her eyes and sticking her tongue out, while still making her obviously beautiful.

This is the first non-SNitLoE cartoon I've scanned with my new Mustek scanner. Thanks mom and dad!

EDIT: This cartoon is now for sale on my Etsy page!

Life Imitates Art

2010-12-30T16:10:00.000-08:00

When my aunt and uncle saw Sunday's blog post, they immediately realized that the drawing I had done of my father, dog, and grandfather was strikingly reminiscent of a photograph my uncle had taken of the same subject. But believe it or not, I had not seen this photo at all when I drew that picture. I wish I had drawn my dad's hand on the back of the chair - it would be a better composition.

Also: I realize that a lot of people who read this blog also read my webcomic, but I figured I might as well post this pin-up here as well. It's a SNitLoE tribute to Roy Lichtenstein!

My dad, his dad, and my dog.

2010-12-26T12:51:00.000-08:00

Though my dog Scallywag is now almost 13 years old and is suffering from arthritis, she is still capable of being immensely comfortable. When she lay at the feet of her beloved, my grandfather "Grandpat," sunken into the armchair, the two were the picture of contented senectitude.

Next to them was my dad, slightly impaired in the comfort department by his long legs. He can only cross his right leg over his left knee, not the reverse, and even then, his right knee sticks way up in the air.

Sketching in Church

2010-12-24T21:41:00.000-08:00

Though I'm normally a pretty attentive churchgoer, two things get in the way on Christmas Eve:

1.) You've already heard this story, this sermon, and these songs a zillion times before. And even though it's very important to hear the message yet again, it's not easy.

2.) The pews are generally packed, often with people you have never seen before, or, even more distractingly, people you haven't seen in years.

The guy at the bottom is Rev. Gene Finnel. I had really wanted to do a full-portrait. Both of Gene's hands freeze into an emphatic gesture, fingers spread stiffly wide, and they float around like that for the whole sermon, seemingly unconnected to his body by any arms beneath his voluminous black robe. I would describe the effect as "muppetesque."

Anyway, Merry Christmas to you all, and be sure to check out my Savage Nobles/Three Wise Men crossover pin-up over at Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment!

Greg Punches a Scientist (mild spoilers)

2010-12-18T12:00:00.000-08:00

I find myself kind of drowning in SNitLoE these days, mainly because I'm trying to complete the whole project on a deadline, and instead of getting faster, I'm getting slower. This is mostly a good thing, as it means I am finally constructing my figures thoroughly and overall pencilling in a much more diligent manner than I used to, as per the advice of Steve Lieber. I'm mostly pleased with results, though my newly discerning eye also spies a lot to complain about - I guess my standards are rising. Three or four months ago I would have been thrilled to bits to have drawn any of the four hands in the above panel (from page 115), but today I immediately notice something wrong with all of them.

I have a New Yorker-style one-panel cartoon in mind which I hope to draw in the next week and which I will post here.

SNitLoE Car Trouble

2010-11-27T13:57:00.000-08:00

Here's a pinup I did for my friend Turhan Sarwar when he won contest I was having over at Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment. After I sent him this black and white image:

I decided to color it, with the following result:

Even though I'm generally pretty pleased with how it came out, I still suffer from that oh-so-common cartoonist regret: that the finished drawing never achieves the wonderful, spontaneous dynamism of the original 2"x3" pencil-scrawled thumnail:

(when I am thumnailing pages for the main comic, I routinely indicate the character Kafir with nothing but two angry rectangles (his glasses) and a black oval (his perpetually yelling mouth.) Jeff Smith said he designed "Phoney Bone" as a child to be a character with a telephone receiver for a head so that it always looked like he was yelling - which was appropriate, because in Bone, Phoney always is yelling. I think I might have pulled a Jeff Smith.)

Religious "Auto-Bio" Comic

2010-11-22T23:50:00.001-08:00

The theme for December's issue of Stumptown Underground is "Religion & Spirituality." Though I have spilled a fair amount of ink in my graphic novel so far regarding these topics (and will spill even more before it's done), a lot of SNitLoE's religious material is theoretical commentary told through allegorical characters. But for this little comic, I decided to do something unusual (for me) and write more in the Stumptown spirit of revelatory auto-bio. And if other zinesters and comic artists can write so frankly about their intimate experiences with family, sex, food, having sex with food, eating their families, etc., then I can certainly tell a little story about my own faith.

Hopefully that speaks for itself, but I feel I should add one thing: This comic is very unfair to St. Teresa of Avila, who was definitely experienced in painful doubt and "the long dark night of the soul" (an expression, incidentally, which comes from the title of a poem by another 16th-century Spaniard, St. John of the Cross.) Really, the whole "the past = faith; modernity = doubt" shtick is incredibly disingenuous on my part, as I know very well it's not that simple at all. As usual, I think it's Slavoj Zizek who sums it best in this short video:

I quoted Mother Teresa's anxious letter, but I might just as well have quoted the earlier Teresa, who wrote:

"As to the aridity you are suffering from, it seems to me our Lord is treating you like someone He considers strong: He wants to test you and see if you love Him as much at times of aridity as when He sends you consolations. I think this is a very great favor for God to show you."

Again with the aridity! The desert metaphors come fast and furious.

I know you only read this blog for the nudity

2010-11-06T23:10:00.000-07:00

Some more life-drawing. By next week I hope to have a few actual comics to show you guys, namely my submission for Stumptown Underground's Religion & Spirituality issue and my submission for Hazel Newlevant's "Ultimate Sadness" anthology. I really need to draw my butt off this week.

I've really learned a lot recently from Michael Mattesi's excellent guide Force: Dynamic Life Drawing for Animators, though I'm still figuring out how to put it into practice. Though I'd always though that, while you're in the studio, your life-drawing should be as "realistic" as possible, and that you should only "cartoonify" what you've learned later on, Mattesi gives the opposite recommendation: cartoon/caricature "as you go" so that you bring out the most important aspects of the model or pose. In that drawing above, I deliberately widened the trunk of the body by about 20%, just to emphasize the smug, masculine confidence of the pose. I also caricatured the face and gave him a cigarette. I think it's very interesting how you can do this and still be very faithful to what's in front of your eyes - I feel I'm only scratching the surface here. I've only just discovered Mattesi's incredible video blog and website.

Wonder Woman Day 2010!

2010-10-07T00:08:00.000-07:00

Every year, a very cool nerd named Andy Mangels organizes a big charity auction in Portland, OR and Flemington, NJ where people bid on pictures of everyone's favorite Amazon Princess to raise money for various domestic violence programs. These can be by awesome famous artists like Steve Lieber, Scott Koblish (never heard of him, but that drawing kicks ass!) and the guy who painted what I think is the best entry this year, David Chelsea. Or they can be by schmucks like me who had to look on Wikipedia to determine if Wonder Woman can fly. (And if she can, why does she need an invisible plane?)

I probably should have read David Chelsea's book on perspective a little more closely before I started my own Wonder Woman artwork, because the burning building on the right still looks a little wonky to me - I'm not sure why, because I constructed my grid pretty carefully. I also feel like the architecture in general has the wrong amount of surface detail, though I can't tell if it's too little or too much. I am pretty happy with this piece though, my favorite parts being the firefighter's gesture and Wonder Woman's gams.

Please, please, please check out Andy Mangel's online Wonder Woman Museum. It's as charming and non-creepy as such a thing could feasibly be, and I have shared but a fraction of the terrific auction artwork on display. And of course, if you are in Portland on October 24th, drop a Hamilton on my artwork, for a good cause. (If it doesn't sell, I wonder if I get it back? If so, I will put it on my Etsy store and donate the proceeds to Andy when it sells.)

Weekend Nudes, non-female edition

2010-10-02T16:42:00.000-07:00

This week Hipbone's model was, gasp!, a man. Because he was older, there were tons of veins and wrinkles - these are half-hour poses, but they could easily have been twice as long, there was so much detail.

(Sorry about the censor blocks - ImageShack, the service I use for hosting the images on this blog, will take them down if they violate their decency standards. I can't really begrudge them this.)

The guy came up with some really unusual poses.

Portrait of the Artist When He Isn't There

2010-09-29T22:09:00.001-07:00

Just in case you were wondering how it all came together.

Enough of this! This weekend I'll hopefully have new drawings of actual people.

PotAWHIT Board

2010-09-28T20:09:00.000-07:00

Last of the five drawings I did for "Portrait of the Artist When He Isn't There," a head-on diagram of my trusty bulletin board. Among these treasures is a flyer I designed for the Philolexian Society to promote the 2005 Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest, an oversized postcard depicting Al Capone's luxuriously appointed prison cell from when I visited Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, a weird polaroid of me and my friend Andrew Liebowitz, and two postcards from Vox Pop. One bears the clever slogan "Man is born free, and everywhere is in chain-stores, and the other is this gorgeous reproduction:

It's "International Solidarity of Labour" by Walter Crane, drawn in 1897. It may not live up to our PC standards today (why are the American and Australian white? why is the Angel of Freedom white? etc) but this was 1897! Who else was promoting an image of total racial equality at that time? Practically nobody but the socialists, that's who. The central motto is, of course, "Workers of the the world, unite!" It was true when Marx said it, it was true when Crane drew it, and it's still true today.

One last explanation: the long skinny drawing tacked above the bulletin board is the original drawing of Theo crawling through the desert that I incorporated into this "animated" jpeg used to advertise SNitLoE on the internet:

PotAWHIT Desk

2010-09-27T20:59:00.000-07:00

When I got to Portland, I knew I'd need a drafting table for comics. I bought one from somebody's grandparents and brought it home on the bus. The driver was not happy.

Hanging to the left of the bulletin board is a print that I bought of one of my favorite webcomic strips ever, a guest strip for Pictures for Sad Children by KC Green.

PotAWHIT Rack

2010-09-26T23:07:00.000-07:00

Here's part three of "Portrait of the Artist When He Isn't There," my coat-rack. Found it on the side of the road near the Hollywood Max stop. Prominently featured are:
- the cassock and supplice I wore during the Byrd festival
- my limited edition t-shirt: "Local Roots Farm Team 2009: This Bunch is Rad-ish"
- my hat from when I worked at Brooklyn's greatest coffeeshop, the late Vox Pop.
- my piece-of-s*** shoes

I am still a little distraught by the foreshortening of the ellipses in this drawing. As you can deduce, my eye-level was about 75-80% up the full length of the rack (I was sitting on my bed). Maybe the rack itself is bent a little bit.

By the way, tonight was a rad party for the release of Stumptown Undeground's "Birthday" issue. My "screaming baby" piece made the inside front cover, probably because they didn't want a blood-spattered infant penis on the front cover.

PotAWHIT Bed

2010-09-25T22:09:00.000-07:00

This was the second drawing I did for the "Portrait of the Artist When He Isn't There" series. It features the Nigerian blanket given to me in primary school by my best friend Sule Otori, my severely dilapidated schoolbag "Ursula," some Renaissance sheet music, and a copy of G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy. I've gotten in the habit of piling crap on my bed so I'm not tempted to sleep on it during the day.

PotAWHIT Shelf

2010-09-24T20:51:00.000-07:00

The theme of October's Stumptown Underground compilation is "Self-Portrait/Self-Reflection." I've never been one for auto-biography. So though many of my friends have worked in the genre, and I enjoy many auto-bio comics, I've never been able to do one myself. Even when I tried keeping a daily "comics journal" in the style of Chelsea Baker at the beginning of 2010, I was unable to stay on the topic of my own life (which in January was admittedly pretty boring) - I would end up describing the book I had just read or the movie I'd just seen, including only a cursory auto-bio framing narrative, or none at all.

I hardly want to come off sounding like some righteous crusader against solipsism or attention-whoring; after all, I have a facebook page and TWO blogs. I'm certainly not above the frothy foam of perpetual self-reinvention that characterizes my generation of rootless hipsters. But nevertheless, I do think a certain diligence is required to look beyond the confines of the self, or at least an acknowledgment of the self's permeability. Increasingly I think of it as a duty to understand that "who I am" is not some secret identity locked in the vault of my own skull, but a complicated network of relationships, many of them mysterious to my own subjectivity. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said something like "the self is not that part that is known only to me and to no one else, but precisely that part that is external and unknown to me, who I am to others." I could write on this subject endlessly, but this is an art blog.

Anyway, this mush of Anglican theology and waaaaay too much structuralist criticism resulted in me not wanting to draw a traditional self-portrait or an auto-bio comic, but rather a series of still life drawings of the things around my room entitled "Portrait of the Artist When He Isn't There" (PotAWHIT) Talk about the absent core of subjectivity! I think somebody snooping around my room when I wasn't there could get a better idea of "who I am" just from looking at the books on my shelf, the drawings on my desk, and even the clothes on my hangers, than from briefly meeting me in person. I've left little pieces of my self strewn on the floor.

Go Buy Ben Bates's Comic

2010-09-24T00:38:00.000-07:00

My friend Ben Bates from Periscope Studio penciled the most recent issue of Sonic the Hedgehog, #217, on stands this week. From what he's told me, Ben has pretty much wanted to draw the Sonic comic since he was like thirteen. At that time, he was thrilled to discover that there was a comic about the beloved video game, but was very disappointed upon realizing just how crappy it actually was. Now at the helm, he has some very fixed ideas of how the comic should be. I'm pretty awed by a.) how well Ben knows what it is he wants and b.) how doggedly he has pursued that goal. If I had half as much of either quality as Ben does, I'd have it made in the shade.

If that weren't bad enough, I also lack the ability to draw the spinny Sonic legs - you know, where he's running so fast his legs are a total blur? Admittedly I didn't really try this time - except for the color, this was drawn in about 10 minutes in a waiting room. The dude getting knocked over is supposed to be Andy Johnson of Cosmic Monkey Comics.

Finally Back to Figure Drawing

2010-09-18T13:53:00.000-07:00

Hey blogsciples. I finally have enough discretionary income to start going figure drawing at Hipbone Studio again. This morning I went with Katy Ellis O'Brien; she gave me some of her big brown pieces of paper to draw on.

They're useful, because then you can draw highlights and not just shadows. Human skin is shiny, and to look convincing, part of it has to be lighter than the overall tone of the paper.

The model was very, very good, as usual. Great dynamic poses. I also assure you that she had a pretty face and did not, in fact, look like Kevin Kline.

Stay tuned to this blog! Lots of fun stuff coming up next week.

I'll be at the Portland Zine Symposium this Weekend

2010-08-27T14:25:00.000-07:00

Just a personal update: this weekend I will be tabling at the Portland Zine Symposium in PSU's Peter W. Scott Main Gym. If you are in Portland, OR (and honestly, why aren't you?), stop by and pick up one of the three zines I will have for sale at $1 each:

Wakey-Wakey is a short anthology of various comics and illustrations I've done, most of them while I was interning at Periscope Studio, and some of it previously published in Stumptown Underground. There is nothing in this zine you haven't already seen on this blog.

The Savage Nobles Preview Zine includes pages 26 through 51 of the comic you are reading right now. (That's right, if you buy it this weekend you'll be able to see page 51 a full two days before it hits this site!) This is mainly intended to serve as a "gateway drug" for the website. At 5.5x8.5", it's a little smaller than I'd like to publish it eventually, but it still looks durned good in print if I d.s.s.m.

Flight of the Flightless is the 24-Hour Comic I drew in (one day of) April of this year. It's based on a true story as comically reimagined by me and my ex-roommate Turhan Sarwar about evacuating the penguins from the New Orleans Aquarium after Hurricane Katrina. (yes, a comedy about Hurricane Katrina - it's about time!) It's got cute animals, madcap action, and has a super-happy ending with a wedding and a rainbow; it will one day make me a millionaire and relaunch Cuba Gooding, Jr.'s career.

See y'all at the Symposium!

ByrdSeed

2010-08-22T18:34:00.000-07:00

Hey internet stalkers - sorry I have been so delinquent in posting. August has proven to be a crazy month, singing for the William Byrd Festival and prepping for the Portland Zine Symposium. The only time I've had to draw is between rehearsals! (see below)

Surprise!

2010-07-31T12:10:00.000-07:00

This is my submission for Stumptown Undeground's birthday-themed first anniversary issue. Even if it doesn't get accepted (I wouldn't blame them), I'm going to include it in a planned zine anthology I'll be putting together for the Portland Zine Symposium. Together with my story Laundryman, the illustrated poem Cockaygne, and maybe some new original stuff, I think I've got a nice 12-pager about being yanked out of a fantasy comfort zone into dingy, corporeal reality.

Frank Reade, Jr.

2010-07-14T22:43:00.000-07:00

This blog post is long because it's about something I've been doing for a long time.

Though I complained about a lack of income in a previous post, the truth is I've been kept afloat because of the editorial work given to me by Paul Guinan. Paul and his wife Anina Bennett are working on the companion piece to their hit fake-history-coffee-table-book, Boilerplate. The new book will focus on the dime-novel character Frank Reade, Jr.

From what Paul has told me, this guy was all the rage in his time, basically the 1870's version of Superman. Is it proto-scifi or the last gasp of classic adventure fantasy? Thomas Edison fan-fiction or the original steam-punk? Harmless escapism for teenage boys, or an Anglo-sadistic fantasy of racist-imperialist propoganda? The answer, of course, is all of the above.

I've now skimmed through all 191 issues of "the Frank Reade Library," summarized them all, categorized them by the type of invented vehicle (usually an electric submarine, airship, or all-terrain land vehicle, but sometimes something preposterous like a steam-powered horse), by quest (it's always buried/sunken treasure, tracking down a bandit/pirate, rescuing a maiden, finding evidence that will exonerate somebody on death row, or viewing a meteor that can only be seen from one spot on the globe), location (the earlier stories were all in the wild west, but they moved on to Africa, India, China, Russia, Peru, the Arctic - basically wherever there are minorities to blow up... and in the world of Frank Reade, "Spanish" counts as a minority) and by the presence of strong female characters (zero, none, absolutely none, or, occasionally, one). The stories somehow managed to be both incredibly imaginative and diverse while still mind-squashingly formulaic. I can safely say they are everything, but well-written.

Paul is a sensitive guy who knows how to deal with sensitive issues, and I think he and Anina are planning to give Frank a serious 21st-century face-lift. I suspect Frank's two sidekicks, the dixie imbecile/expert electrical engineer Pomp (called "a negro" if you're lucky, much worse things if you're not, and who says things like 'Massa Lawdy, what am dis chile gwonna do?') and the comical Barney O'Shea (apparently 1870's Americans thought being Irish was endearingly hilarious - Barney's impassioned tirades against British oppression are played alternately for laffs and sympathy) will be transformed into Denzel Washington and Brad Pitt respectively. I'm sure his world-policing expeditions will be morphed into humanitarian diplomacy. I'm still not sure if they should be.

I was a history major, and I'm still fascinated by history. Lord knows that even though my area of study (the Middle Ages) was a millenia-long parade of horrors, I still idealize and even romanticize it. But as a leftist, I cannot help but view the late-19th-century Atlantic world with burning contempt. Truly, when I read about the deeds of the industrialist or imperialist elite of the 1870's, it makes my blood boil. And in the Frank Reade stories, these are the very people the hero comes to rescue! Half the stories are about rescuing millionaires or millionaire's beautiful daughters from the ebony clutches of colonized forces.

In the Philolexian Society, we often liked to pretend it was the 19th-century. I did it too, because it's fun. The inscrutable "steam-punks" have built up an entire lifestyle around how fun it is. But I always feel like I'm dining with the devil. The late 1800s is a period we should remember, which we can respect or even playfully recreate. But it's not a period I want to identify with. Frank Reade, Jr. may have been the vicarious idol of thousands of boys, but there's almost nobody in fiction I'd rather not be.

All that said, lookin' forward to the new book... and even more for _____________ (Paul told me what I had written here before is a secret - if you read this blog on Thursday, July 15, please don't mention what I accidentally said!)

edit: okay, it's okay to disclose now! JJ Abrams is producing the Boilerplate Movie! Whoohoo! You didn't hear it here first.

Barnaby a.k.a. Fatty

2010-07-13T16:26:00.000-07:00

I mentioned that my house has two cats. The younger one, a kitten named Javier, will never sit still long enough for a portrait. The older one, Barnaby, definitely will.

The View From My Window

2010-07-10T19:47:00.001-07:00

I'm finally back! Apologies to the regular readers of this blog (and Google Analytics tells me there are THOUSANDS)for not having posted something in over a month. This is really the unpardonable sin of blogging.

But the damned are full of excuses and here are mine:

1.) Since I stopped being allowed to hang out at Periscope every day, I haven't had regular access to their two industrial-strength scanners. However this is not really an excuse, since I have taken out a membership at the Independent Publishing Resource Center here in Portland. The IPRC is a veritable Jerusalem for the city's zinesters and comics people. (Indeed, both the Zinesters and the Comics people claim the IPRC as their ancestral homeland, with every outburst of comicaze attacks provoking new levels of Zineist oppression - but that's another story.) They have something like six scanners, one of which is often functioning!

2.) I spent the better part of June erecting a website for my graphic novel, Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment. If you haven't seen this site yet, don't waste any more time here! Go! Click! Now!

3.) I've been grappling with the usual "starving artist" problems this month as well, since the loss of my purely symbolic job led me to realize my very actual lack of income. I am still busily looking for work here in Portland, which at 10.2% unemployment is not that easy. (My hometown of New Orleans is at 7.0%) Especially not with all these #$%!*@^ lazy artists taking all the barista jobs!

4.) I also moved to a new house! It's a great place with two cats and five people. Many of them (the people, not the cats) are also into comics/graphic-fiction/visual-narrative/sequential-art/making-up-your-own-fake-undergraduate-major. Our "Mad Woman in the Attic" is Katy Ellis O'Brien, who's putting my work ethic to shame churning out panel after panel of hand-painted comics. Literally panels - she paints them on pieces of wood.
Anyway, the above sketch is the view from one of the two windows of my new room. We live really close to highway 84, though the ambient noise is not that annoying; I can pretend I live by the ocean. Less endearing is the enormous Budweiser logo that tops the Freud-inspired tower across the street. The neon red "B" shines at me nightly like the eyes of Dr. T J Eckelburg. That's right, I just made a simile comparing a sign to another metaphoric sign. This is why I am a natural graphic novelist.

Homeless TV

2010-06-06T00:30:00.000-07:00

These guys "live" near my house in Portland, and whenever I pass by, it seems they are watching a little television set on their shopping cart. In reality, there are three of them, but I thought this had a more romantic impact.

Preliminary digital sketch:

Pencils

Inks, before adding digital grayscale. This could be a free standing image, but I think that without the extra gray, it looks like the TV screen is as bright as a spotlight.

Au Revoir, Periscope!

2010-06-04T11:00:00.000-07:00

Today is my last day as an intern at Periscope Studio. A thousand pictures or a million words could not explain what these three intense months have done for me. It's not just that I've learned a lot (which, obviously, I have), but that I have been brought over the crest of the learning curve in such a way that I feel that future learning will be precipitously self-propelled. (I had the same feeling sometime around my junior year of college: "Holy crap! I'm actually teaching myself!)

But, as LOST has taught us all, the important thing is not what I learned or what I did, but that I made a bunch of white friends and one Asian friend that will last a lifetime. Thanks (in order of desk placement only) to Ron Randal, Karl Kesel, Steve Lieber, Ron Chan, Terri Nelson, Erika Moen, Dylan Meconis, David Hahn, Paul Guinan, Ben Dewey, Jonathan Case, Paul Tobin, Colleen Coover, Jeff Parker, Rich Ellis, Aaron McConnel, Jesse Hamm, Susan Tardiff, Dustin Weaver, Ben Bates and Jeremy Barlow (and my fellow intern Zach "The Deuce" Fischer). Wow, I did that so easily, without looking up the names anywhere! On day one, I thought I'd never get 'em all down.

Au Revoir, Periscope. I will be back to bother you once a month for the next 10-20 years.

Everett

LOST Doodles

2010-06-02T22:01:00.000-07:00

Jack was the first and most spontaneous, and unsurprisingly the one I'm most happy with.

The Articulate Guy

2010-06-01T19:30:00.000-07:00

When I went to Tennessee to see my sister Meredith graduate, my mom brought up an old comic of mine from New Orleans. I wrote "The Articulate Guy" in 2001-2002 when I was a junior and senior in high school. Those of you who chatted with me back in the "good old days" of AOL Instant Messenger will recall that "TheArticulateGuy" was my screename. These are some random pages:

"The Articulate Guy" is interesting on all kinds of levels. It is a comic about a high-schooler, told from the point of view of a college student reminiscing about when he was that high-schooler's friend (back in high school), written by a high schooler (me, Everett) who had not even begun visiting colleges yet. I am fascinated not only by my own (surprisingly accurate) depiction of what college life would be like, but by the critical distance I forced upon myself as a writer, imagining how the environment I was immersed in would seem retrospectively. (This, as I understand it, is the Lacanian Imaginary, imagining how I might look to an outside observer who is nevertheless himself a product of my imagination.)

The story was basically this: a hapless transfer student makes a fool of himself every day at the beginning of math class, before the teacher arrives, waxing eloquent over a nameless beautiful girl in his English class. Though he speaks with a vocabulary far beyond his grade-level, he insists that when he actually tries to talk to this girl, he's completely mute. (I would revisit this theme in my Kilmer-winning 2003 poem "The Ballad of Sweet Donna Lee". Yeah, I was really into this theme for a while.) Eventually, his words so move the high schoolers that they too decide to start speaking their hearts and using big words. Except I never reached this somewhat Dead Poets-y conclusion. Why?

Because I myself went to college! The strength of this comic was ALL in the framed nature of the narrative - I admit, there was not a lot of tofu to the story itself. Once my artificial critical distance became actual critical distance, I could no longer view my life as a verbose but girl-shy high-schooler through a partial lens!

Moreover, my art improved to the degree where I could no longer finish the comic with any sort of visual consistency. Looking back though, there are still some things I really love about it. My page layouts were much bolder than anything I'd allow myself today - chalk it up to youthful exuberance. I was really into Will Eisner at the time and loved using lots of borderless panels, meta-panels and free-floating vignettes. And there was something tender, something that still captures my imagination, in the way I so openly delved into characters inner emotional states (having demons represent their problems - other parts of the comic featured elaborate fantasy time-travel etc.) Especially compared to SNitLoE, where I have deliberately kept my characters emotionally mysterious and opaque. Sigh.

Colorful Nude

2010-05-31T14:23:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I shared a cab with a woman (not pictured). I got out first, and accidentally took her grocery bag instead of my own. With no way to get back in contact, the deal was sealed. She got wheat bread and peanut butter. I got dates, prunes, vanilla wafers and... COLORED PENCILS!

Happy Birthday Frank Oz!

2010-05-25T18:31:00.001-07:00

Untitled Olympia Comic, pt. 4/4

2010-05-24T17:34:00.000-07:00

I just realized this is my second comic in a row about somebody plunging back into a grubby, dreary historical setting after a brief visit to a fastastical wonderland.

Part 3
Part 2
Part 1

Untitled Olympia Comic, pt. 3/4

2010-05-22T19:40:00.000-07:00

No comic tomorrow - LOST will be taking care of my time-traveling adventures for the day. Come back on Monday or Tuesday.

Part 2
Part 1

Untitled Olympia Comic, pt. 2/4

2010-05-21T20:12:00.000-07:00

Since yesterday I've made a few aesthetic changes to Part One.

Untitled Olympia Comic, pt. 1/4

2010-05-20T20:55:00.000-07:00

Hey guys. Instead of waiting until next week to show you my next completed comic, I will post it up here a page at a time. Since pencils are already done, and I'm inking about a page a day, this comic should take four days to post. Though not Sunday, as I have religious obligations (Pentecost, LOST finale.)

The title of this comic, when I think of one, will go in the clouds in panel one. This is for an anthology being put out by the Olympia Comics Festival. This is a small but extremely rad festival, appropriate for such a small but extremely rad town. The only requirement for the anthology is that it be related to Olympia in some way.

Etsy Store Now Up

2010-05-17T22:05:00.000-07:00

Hey folks - I'm working on a sweet new 4-page comic about the city of Olympia, Washington for the upcoming Olympia Comics Festival. This is gonna be another long and pretty involved project, though hopefully it won't take me as long as The Land of Cokaygne did!

In the meantime, I'm happy to announce the launching of my Etsy Store, where you can purchase ORIGINAL ARTWORK by me. I hasten to add that, though there are only a few things up on that page right now, anything that I post on this blog that is not from my graphic novel, Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment or which has not already been given or sold to somebody else is up for sale as well - just e-mail me or comment on this blog and I will put it up on the Etsy Store just for you.

P.S. If you wanna see what a real Etsy Store looks like, check out Periscope Studio's page. Awesome, awesome stuff. Buy Ben Dewey's Catwoman pinup - it will not hurt my feelings.

Congratulations, Raza!

2010-05-13T15:24:00.001-07:00

Tomorrow my sister Meredith is graduating from Vanderbilt University! Horrible brother that I am, instead of using my new drawing skills to draw a picture of her graduating, I drew this picture of my friend Raza Panjwani, who is also graduating this week (from Columbia Law school).

As Tom Vinciguerra aptly put it: "Congrats to Raz, the colossus bestriding the campus today and the world tomorrow!"

(as with a lot of my recent work, I used a ton of photo-reference for this: for the skyscrapers, for the law school robes, for Raza's proud mug, and for the unique perspective, below)

The Land of Cokaygne

2010-05-11T18:04:00.000-07:00

Imagine my surprise when Anu Garg's Word of the Day today was "Cockaigne!" I've spent this week and the better part of last working on an awesome 4-page comic based on an anonymous 14th century poem about said mystical land of earthly pleasures. See below!

This is for Stumptown Underground's June issue, which has the theme of "myth/folk tales/fairy tales." If this submission don't get accepted, I'll eat my hat! I really busted my patootie on this one.

Back in 2005-2006, when I was a senior at Columbia University, I attempted to write a thesis paper on the poetry of the Goliards, semi-mythical wandering, drunken scholars of the later middle ages, probably best known from the Carmina Burana. I even learned medieval Latin so I could read their doggerel in the original! But no thesis came of it, and maybe from this comic you can see why. It's just a bunch of crazy nonsense! I lost credit from the course and almost didn't graduate :-(

The text of the poetry portion of the comic was freely edited by me based on the original Middle English and two modern translations, all available here. (WARNING: The sex in the original poem is much less consensual than what I've depicted here. Even so, I recommend you give it a read, as there are many beautiful and hilarious parts I had to leave out of the comic for space considerations.)

Heightening.

2010-05-07T21:44:00.000-07:00

Another dumb throw-off cartoon because I am still swamped drawing what I think might be the most epic 4 pages of my life, which I will hopefully post early next week.

In college, I was in an improv comedy group. We always talked about comedic "heightening."

10 Minute Marx

2010-05-05T15:54:00.000-07:00

Happy 192nd Birthday, Karl Marx.

(apologies for the throwoff sketch today - I am still working on several concurrent TOP SECRET projects which will all come tumbling out onto the internet early next week)

One of my favorite Marx quotes ever is:

"A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties."

Though it always appealed to me, I only realized the quote's deeper meaning when I read this short article by Slavoj Zizek. (This same article addresses one of my other all-time favorite [paraphrased] quotes by Jaques Lacan: "If God is dead, then nothing is permitted.")

In short, the duty of the Communist is NOT to say "You naive bourgeois idiot! You talk as though money were some magical thing endowed with intrinsic properties, when it is really just a reification of labor relations!" No. Rather, to the capitalist, we should say: "Like any intelligent modern man, you freely assert that money is nothing more than a codified system which stands in for certain relations of labor. However, in your day-to-day life, you nevertheless unconsciously ACT as though money is truly it's own magical thing." Wrap your head around that, my friend, and you've finished your first lap around Jericho.

The Weekend's Nudes

2010-05-03T23:12:00.001-07:00

I have so much great stuff in the works right now, but nothing I can show you yet (incomplete comics projects, drawings that are gifts for people who haven't received them yet, etc.!) So here are some of my gradually improving nudes. (Warning! Not Safe For Church!)

I must say, I'm particularly proud of that last one - it actually looks like the subject. Er, model. Woman. I mean lady. I mean person.

John Wilkes Booth at Garrett's Barn

2010-04-30T23:21:00.000-07:00

From SNitLoE page 68

2010-04-29T22:54:00.000-07:00

I am still caught up in Spider-Man stuff and chores around the studio, so nothing new today. However, here's a quick scan of a panel from a very recent page of Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment.

Hippies! Goats! Don't you wanna read this book?

Look Out!

2010-04-28T21:11:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I am pushing my own envelope and trying to draw a popular superhero character, not because I actually like that kinda thing, just because I want to learn from it. These are NOT YET but are GONNA BE pages 8 and 9 from Marvel Adventures: Spider-Man #58. The script was provided courtesy of its writer, the generous Paul Tobin. It was professionally penciled by Ben Dewey (who finally has the website he deserves- keep refreshing the homepage!) I have made a point not to look at Ben's art though, yet.

Professional opinion seems to be that the layout and storytelling are pretty good, but the figures need a ton of work and Spiderman's shoulders are really narrow. I'm gonna take some photo-reference tonight and try to get better-proportioned people and more believable poses, and I'll post it again when it's inked. Coming up with something to post every day is HARD.

The Supreme Anarchist Council

2010-04-27T19:19:00.000-07:00

NOTE: The color errors in yesterday's post have been amended!

Here's a group portrait of the Supreme Anarchist Council from G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday:

Back Row: Gogol aka "Tuesday," Pole who does not enjoy "goncealment." "...out of this collar there sprang a head quite unmanageable and quite unmistakable, a bewildering bush of brown hair and beard that almost obscured the eyes like those of a Skye terrier. But the eyes did look out of the tangle, and they were the sad eyes of a sad Russian serf."

"The Secretary" aka "Monday" "...his smile was a shock, for it was all on one side, going up in the right scheek and down in the left."

Front Row: Dr. Bull aka "Saturday" "They took away the key to his face. You could not tell what his smile or his gravity meant... Those black discs were dreadful to Syme; they reminded him of half-remembered ugly tales, of some story about pennies being put on the eyes of the dead... Syme even had the thought that his eyes might be covered up because they were too frightful to see."

Professor de Worms aka "Friday" "...as if some drunken dandies had put their clothes upon a corpse... it did not express decrepitude merely, but corruption."

Gabriel Syme aka "Thursday" Not an anarchist - an undercover agent for Scotland Yard.

The Marquis de St. Eustache aka "Wednesday" "the man carried a rich atmosphere with him, a rich atmosphere that suffocated. It reminded one irrationally of drowsy odours and of dying lamps in the darker poems of Byron and Poe.

For this image I forwent the brushy ink style I naturally favor and tried thin lines, artificially colored. I'm shooting for the look of animation on this one.

Me & Edith Head

2010-04-26T22:34:00.000-07:00

Here are some pages I drew about a month ago of Sara Ryan's story Me & Edith Head. This was just for fun, sort of a diagnostic essay for the Periscope people, since Me & Edith Head had already been published, illustrated by Sara's own husband Steve Lieber (a Periscope member). Without ever reading Steve's original, I set about illustrating the first four pages of the story.

Even though I feel I've come quite a ways from here, this project was a lot of firsts for me. First time illustrating somebody else's script. First time using blue non-repro pencil. First time using a mechanical pencil. First time coloring digitally. (Edit: the colors now appear correctly on the internet.)

It's also my first time lettering digitally, and as you can see, I still haven't completed that part, which is why there are no captions or dialogue. So you might be kind of confused. Here's a little summary of what your missing.

Page 1 - Katrina has just tried out for the role of Queen Titania in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." She's daydreaming about how nice it will be, but the sound of her parents' bitter arguing in the next room sours her mood.

Page 2 - The next day, Katrina nervously waits to see what role she got, and found out that she has been assigned "costume design," a role she considers herself totally unfit for. She has to go see Gabriel Chang in the costume room. He explains that costume design is all about mixing and matching and considering "juxtapositions." Katrina takes a utilitarian view of clothes and isn't buying it.

Page 3 - Katrina impugns that Mr. Chang is a costume man now because, like her, he was once turned down for acting roles. He says no, and in his office pulls out two books, "How to Dress for Success" and "Edith Head's Hollywood," a biography of the famous costume designer. He tells her to read them.

Page 4 - While her parents put together a slap-dash meal, Katrina reads Head's book. Edith, in a very 1950's way, says that a wife must continue looking as well turned-out years into her marriage as she did at the beginning, and not "as if she had been shot out of a cannon." This leads Katrina to picture first her mom and then her dad, well...

Over the rest of the story, which I won't draw, Katrina gets more and more into costume design, and starts taking better care of her own personal appearance as well. Meanwhile, her parents keep fighting and end up getting divorced. She designs a terrific costume for Titania and the cast, and even though her parents sit separately in the audience, they're both proud of how self-assured she's become.

Lucian Gregory

2010-04-23T20:43:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I fell through on my promise to post something every day, and pretty quickly. Sorry! But give me a break; the Stumptown Comics Fest is this weekend, and in addition to helping everyone around the studio get ready, I'm putting together my own portfolio to show editors and stuff. Very intimidating!

Lucian Gregory is a character introduced in the first pages of G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. He's an "aesthete anarchist," and a delightful straw-man, who falls into an ideological dispute with the protagonist, Gabriel Syme, who, along with the narrator, is basically Chesterton by a different name. But shortly thereafter, the rebellious poet introduces Syme (an undercover "philosophical policeman") into the company of the world's most dangerous ring of anarchists!

Here is GKC's opening description of Gregory:

"...the red-haired poet was really (in some sense) a man worth listening to, even if one laughed at the end of it. He put the old cant of the lawlessness of art and the art of lawlessness with a certain impudent freshness which gave at least momentary pleasure. He was helped in some degree by the arresting oddity of his appearance, which he worked, as the phrase goes, for all it was worth. His dark red hair parted in the middle was literaly like a woman's, and curved into the slow curls of a virgin in a pre-Raphaelite picture. from within this almost saintly oval, however, his face projected suddenly broad and brutal, the chin carried forward with a look of cockney contempt. This combination at once tickled and terrified the nerves of a neurotic population. He seemed like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape."

My picture is not worth a dozen, much less a thousand, of Chesterton's words, but my hope is to at some point illustrate in comics form a scene from this book, or at least draw a decent pin-up of it's seven main characters (code-named Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday). Everything I've ever wanted to say, Chesterton has said it already and better. For months now I've been dreaming of writing a story where the characters were purely allegorical and had no personalities beyond their respective ideologies, but in Thursday I have already just that.

edit: I will say I'm proud of Gregory's gesture. My original conception was to having him point up a finger, mid-tirade. Way too Platonic. This way, he looks more like he's shaking his fist at God!

Relativity

2010-04-21T22:26:00.000-07:00

My goal is to post something here every day. I'm very late today, but it's still Wednesday on the West Coast. I've been working on this all week and it's finally ready to post:

I did this two-page comic for Steve Fuson (sorry, no website), a writer (and I think artist?) here in Portland whom I met at some random comics get-together. We're submitting it to the zine Stumptown Underground for their "Family"-themed issue coming up in May. I'm pretty confident we'll make the cut, as Steve has been featured in I think every single issue of Stumptown Underground so far.

Steve gave me a good script to work with - very little stage direction aside from dialogue and a camera-angle recommendation for the penultimate panel. If I had one complaint, there is a little too much material on the second page compared to the first, and it's unfortunate that the break in time after David picks Avery up from jail doesn't occur across a page break. Oh well, I don't see away around it and apparently neither did Steve. A two page story is fun for both the writer and artist - you have to get so much information across right away if you are gonna have any chance of telling a complete story.

My big focus for these two pages was "spotting blacks." This is the illustration technique of choosing where to put the large black areas 1.) to direct the reader's eye and 2.) to give form to the objects, suggest light-sources, etc. Even though it's all over the best comics (especially the old black and white ones), it's a frightfully artificial technique.

Think about it. Virtually nothing you see in real life during the daytime is truly jet black, and certainly not shadows, which are generally just a darker shade of whatever color they are falling across, maybe a little more bluish if the light is coming from the sky. When I look at even the best spotted blacks for too long, the scenes start to look as though they were lit by a floodlight on a planet with no atmosphere. But then my eyes pop back into place and I resume my awe of people like Periscope's Jonathan Case, whom I have literally seen color the shaded side of the white sail of a white sailboat on the beach at noon PITCH BLACK and get away with it beautifully. Everyone should buy his forthcoming novel "Dear Creature" (formerly "Sea Freak") if they want to see the true extent of what can be done with these two colors.

Pochahantas?

2010-04-20T13:11:00.000-07:00

Gasp! Now there's a picture of a naked person on the internet! (click for full)

On Saturday mornings I've been going to life-drawing sessions at Hipbone Studios. Needless to say, there's no better way to study anatomy. A lot of my sketches look great until I look at them from arm's length and realize the proportions are totally off - I've got to work on keeping the "big picture" in mind even as I'm rendering the details. Betty Edward's Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain has already been of invaluable service in helping to fix this.

The model this Saturday had the high cheekbones I associate with Native Americans, and one of the poses she struck made me think of the classic image of an Indian on a mountain outcrop watching the arrival of the first Europeans. Specifically, it makes me think of the line from Disney's Pochahantas, "... strange clouds..." Hey, if they're from the western hemisphere, it can't be orientalist, right? RIGHT?

BKLYN Recycle

2010-04-19T13:02:00.000-07:00

Here's a drawing I did this weekend of the stoop of my old apartment building in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

Here is an actual piece of dialogue that transpired on these steps some time in late '06, early '07:

Thug: Heymanyouliketoshmokeitdown?
Everett: What?
Thug: You like to shmokeitdown?
Everett: ... ... ... WHAT?
Thug: Weed, man. Do You Smoke It?
Everett: Oh. No.
Thug: ... seriously?

I'm trying to get better w/ the crow quill pen, but I think I'm going overboard. When every surface is peppered with detail, it all flattens out into an indecipherable mess. Next time, stronger blacks and whites to set off the grays.

SNitLoE page 51

2010-04-18T18:10:00.000-07:00

Part of what I want to do with this blog is get people excited about my up'n'coming graphic novel Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment. Many of my new professional comics friends have suggested that at this stage, it's better to work on many small projects than to pour one's self entirely into one big one - this reminds me of friendly advice in American Pie or The 40 Year-Old Virgin, except in this case, they have a good point. But I, still a Biggs or a Carrell at heart, can not take their advice literally. SNitLoE is too close to my heart for too many personal reasons, not least of all being that it's pretty much the only reason I started drawing again in spring of '09. I'm also convinced it's the only reason I even got my internship at Periscope Studios at all. Other than a few of the better Apostrophobia strips, which were four years old, SNitLoE was the only thing I had to prove to the Periscopers I wasn't a total cartooning novice. So while I spend Monday through Friday diligently drawing other stuff, the weekends are still dedicated to documenting the perils of the titular garage band, lost and separated in the endless deserts of southern New Mexico.

I am working through SNitLoE completely in order, one page at a time, and of an anticipated ~150, I have completed 71. In my opinion, that's an antihistamine number (by which I mean, it's nothing to sneeze at!) and if I were gonna give up, i think I would have done it by now. What you're looking at is page 51, one of the classic "lost in the desert" pages I was so excited about drawing . But how did Theo get out there? Why is the ground strewn with music equipment? This is not LOST; I really do have answers. But you'll have to read to find out!

"Fun" "Facts": The bird is the Cactus Finch, state bird of Arizona, whose call really is "cha cha cha." The plant stem is that of the rarely-flowering agave americana. Theo's tattoos (which can be seen more clearly in other panels) feature authentic Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, and Japanese! Maybe the finished comic will suck, but LET NO ONE SAY I DIDN'T DO MY RESEARCH!

24-Hour Comic

2010-04-17T22:15:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, April 10th, I stayed up for 24 hours straight and drew a 24-page comic (that's one page an hour, for those of you keeping track at home)! It was an incredibly intense and exhausting, but also immensely rewarding, "experience," in the most hippie/psychedelic sense of the term. This was at Cosmic Monkey Comics in Portland. About 8-10 other people also participated, although I think only four of us reached the 24-page goal as laid out by Scott McCloud (whom we can credit/blame for devising this perverse past-time).

The art is definitely a little rough around the edges, but the artificial constraints on its production render me invulnerable to criticism! I can excuse bogus anatomy, warped perspective, and spelling errors with the catch-all rebuttal "I was sleep-deprived!" (Clever, huh?)

After catching up on sleep, I also made a fancy cover and back-page image for the printed mini-comic version. Comic below - you can read my irrelevant commentary at the bottom if you still want.

To quote Wayne's World, "let's do the super-happy ending!" This story was based on a screenplay idea hatched years ago by me and roommate Turhan Sarwar. We wanted to pitch it to Disney and envisioned Cuba Gooding, Jr. in the lead role. (I still do.) But was the world ready for a Katrina Komedy?

In 2007, I think the answer was no. But now I'm not so sure. Melancholy is a totally valid reaction to catastrophe, especially in the immediate aftermath, but it is not the only reaction. Some of the sickest, blackest and most hilarious humor comes out of unthinkable tragedy during times of political turmoil etc. It's another way to cope!

Not that FotF is really black humor. If anything, I think it's pretty tame satire, and that approach is potentially even more tasteless. I preemptively apologize to any Gulf Coast readers offended by it. The hurricane let my family off so easy (comparatively) that I truly have no right to complain. I tried to work in an empowering message of triumph through adversity, recovery, etc. etc. that hopefully balances out the questionable humor. I also hope it counteracts what strikes me as a despairing attitude of victimhood in mainstream Katrina-coverage.

I guess I was a little tired of the morose treatment of the storm's legacy by well-intentioned outsider artists. As usual, the South serves as a vessel for the rest of the nation's angst - nothing new there. I have been away from the Crescent City for most of the rebuilding process, and so I don't exactly have my finger on the pulse, but something tells me that the city that invented jazz funerals has a more nuanced view of what it means to pull through a disaster.

Let There Be Art Blog

2010-04-17T21:16:00.000-07:00

Much smarter people than me (namely, the wonderful artists at Periscope Studios in Portland, OR, where I am interning) have suggested that I start a blog to show my art. You ought to have some kind of web presence, they say, and a blog is preferable to a typical gallery site for this reason: a potentially intere$ted per$on who reads your blog knows how recently and how frequently you are coming out with new art, and can easily trace your improvement. A gallery site only shows that at some point sometime in the past you did some art. For all the gallery reader knows, you haven't done anything new in years

Which for me was sadly true, for a few years after college anyway. But 2010 has brought a new period of unprecedented productivity which I might as well share with the world. Read this blog to see what I've drawn recently. For all my eagerly waiting fans (I know you're out there), I'll also be posting occasional sneak previews of my still-in-progress "graphic novel," Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment.

To kick things off, here's a drawing from about a week and a half ago, "Temptation."

What I like about it: My first use of hugely popular grayscale markers was not a complete disaster, mainly because I limited myself to only two. This was also the first time I did a digital layout for a drawing. (I printed that out, penciled over it, scanned that, printed it out in non-repro blue, and inked that. Phew! Don't think I could do that every time!) The goat-face was directly inspired by my favorite art-blogger, James Gurney.

What I don't like: I wasn't sure, but Periscope "floating assistant" (i.e. power behind the throne) Ben Dewey almost immediately spotted the essential problem with this type of image. An intentionally flat "stained-glass"-style layout, however appropriate to the subject matter, jives poorly with the minor hints of three-dimensionality and modern perspective (on the chair, the censer, etc.) Better to go with one or the other. Also, the chair is jabbing the demon's armpit.

My church choir makes us launder our own robes, which gave me the opportunity for photo-reference!

Stay tuned!
Everett