Art for my own Release Party Flier.

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.

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.

Super-Old SNitLoE Sketches

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.

2028 Tonya Sketch

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

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.

Theo a la Theo

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!)

On Cast Shadows

"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

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.

My Next Project

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.

Greg Punches a Scientist (mild spoilers)

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

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.)

From SNitLoE page 68

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?

SNitLoE page 51

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!