Heat Rises

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

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.

Figure Drawing with Periscopers!

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

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

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

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.