Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Posted in NewsTagged all-negro comics, Jaime Hernandez, orrin c. evans

Sally Ingraham

Posted on January 17, 2018January 17, 2018

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Comics WorkbookJuly 31, 2017Essaysby Jackie Kirby Above, I have taken the opening couplet of Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” (1681) scanned and annotated by Phillip Hobsbaum in Metre, Rhythm, and Verse Form (1996) and translated it into an 8-panel grid spread using values of red as a accentual tool. Approaching comics with the assumption that they are or can be included within the scope of poetic practice, one is brought to draw a connection between the formal structures through which time and meaning are manifested on the page: in the comic, geometry and the grid; and in the poem, meter and verse form. Here, I will present what could generously be called “notes” towards a theory of meter and geometry. I apologize now for the inevitable imperfection of the metaphor, but I find this to be an important and positive aspect of the connection between the two, rather than a caveat negating any use the metaphor may provide. Meter is the method of measuring verse by counting elements of it. It is a primarily mathematical system; it was called “numbers” by the Classical poets. Most often, the poet is counting syllables, as many languages exist primarily as a succession of syllables. Through different uses of meter, different methods of counting and measuring, different patterns of arrangement, writers create prosody, or a system of language. Within each language there exist many theories of organization, each of which is catered to both the language the writer uses and the purpose for which she wishes to use it. English poetry uses an accentual-syllabic metrical system, where the units being counted are syllables, and their pattern is defined by the arrangement of more or less strongly emphasized, or accented, syllables. Other languages use different systems. Languages which do not accentuate as strongly, such as French, will use something more akin to a purely syllabic meter, where forms are defined by the counting of syllables and ordering of numbers. This was also used by Ancient Irish and Welsh poets. Classical Greek and Latin poets based their prosody on the number of syllables and the length of time it takes to speak each syllable, creating patterns by arranging longer and shorter syllables. This is all to say, meter is a tool that must be developed accounting for the idiosyncrasies of the language in which one wishes to write. By looking at the metrical forms used by poets across different languages, and restructuring them for use in the language of comics, one can produce comic forms with increased complexity without decreasing (and perhaps even increasing) their legibility. In an initial attempt at translating verse form to comic form let us equate syllables with panels, and spreads with lines. Each row of panels will represent a metrical foot. Stress is produced relationally, and in comics one can use size, color, density, and a myriad of other visual techniques to “stress” a panel. The actual size of each panel per “foot” or row is up to your own discretion but I prefer to use a more qualitative than quantitative approach to my “comics scansion.” The first verse form I’d like to look at is dactylic hexameter, or Homer’s verse. It is the verse used in the Iliad and Odyssey, and later in Latin by Ovid and Virgil. Its historical use has equated it with the most grandiose poetic narratives, and cues a reader that she is reading a grand epic. Dactylic refers to the primary foot pattern of the poem, a dactyl being a long or stressed syllable followed by 2 short or unstressed syllables, while hexameter refers to the number of feet per line, which is 6 in this case (as opposed to pentameter , tetrameter , etc.). Using the system of translation previously established, a “dactylic hexameter” comic, would consist of spreads with 6 rows of 3 panels each, with the primary pattern being to stress the first panel of each row. Visually, this can easily lead us to a spread of 2 pages using a 9-panel grid. Another notable element of Homer’s verse is that the third and sixth feet may be spondees rather than dactyls. A spondee is a foot composed of 2 equally weighted syllables. This could provide a spread looking something like this. Alternatively, one could equate the panel to a metrical foot, and the page to a line. This would produce 6-panel grids, with each spread serving as a couplet. These are only a few different, relatively conservative, attempts at translating a single poetic verse form into comics. These are not prescriptions as to what certain meters must look like in comics, but demonstrations of the ways meter and verse form can be used to develop a prosody of comics. There is such a plethora of verse forms, all with their own particular uses that can be translated into comics. As shown in the Marvell scansion above, the 8-panel grid is quite suited for translating iambic tetrameter, which is used most commonly in the ballad form. This connection could lead to all sorts of comics practices or translated ballads. The harmony of a metered line is based on the same mathematical principals that produce visual harmony in geometric patterns. For instance, the sonnet, one of the most commonly used poetic forms, consisted originally of an octave (8-line stanza) followed by a sestet (6-line stanza). Poetry scholars have connected this with the golden ratio (8/5) with an extra line added to complete an even-numbered rhyme scheme. I have annoyed (to say the least) a number of English department chairs by insisting that poetry is simply linguistic mathematics. Certainly it’s (a bit) more than that, but much of poetics is applied mathematics, just as comics are. ————————————————————————————————————— Jackie Kirby is a poet and comics maker living in New York City. A recent graduate from The New School with a BA in Cultural Studies, she has been making comics and writing poetry seriously for three years. Check out work by Jackie on her website, and follow her on Instagram. Read Jackie’s Comics Workbook Rowhouse Residency Report for more thoughts on comics and poetry. Share this page: [...]

09/24/2018

Caleb OrecchioSeptember 24, 2018NewsCaleb Orecchio here with thoughts on Jason Robinson’s Death Tramp no. 1 ————————————————————————————————— The premiere issue of Jason Robinson’s comic Death Tramp is a poetic fever dream of proliferating madness. The protagonist, whose sole companion is a raven not unlike Poe’s, plunges into a dark den of loneliness and destruction. Love has been lost, but the memory never leaves. The raven skrawws and our hero goes a step deeper into exile. According to the issue’s liner notes, “Death Tramp is a comics anthology of the strips, stories, and works of Jason Robinson. Issue One features the comic Skraww in two parts.” The first part was drawn as his final project for thee Santoro Correspondence Course for Comic Book Makers. Rendered, as are all the course’s student comics, in blue, red and yellow colored pencil with an emphasis on the fundamentals of comics. Mirroring pages on a spread, symbolic coloring as oppose to literal, “L” panel formations, maintaining character model, rhyming images, holding the “camera,” etc. A really great, stripped down student work that shows an understanding of how to compose comics. The second part was made after the course was completed. Colored digitally with a similar palette but with more variety, and drawn with more confidence. Robinson takes what he’d learned from the course and cranked the dial up several notches. The backgrounds become more realistic and the narrative more nuanced and intricate. There is a more specific mood in the second part that gives prominence to the dark, foreboding downward spiral of the protagonist and the burden of the raven. “Skraww” is a poetry leaning comic. The author embraces the timing and composition techniques taught in the correspondence course that is undeniable and emphasizes the more “melodic” aspects of comics making. Robinson’s focus is on the images. We don’t need the words, but the words extend an olive branch and offer a deeper insight into the protagonist’s thoughts. Still, the images and the composition of the 8-panel grid give the comic it’s meter and narrative drive (1234, 1234). I think a lot of cartoonists who consider their work “poetry comics” draw images to lay under their written poetry, but to me the driving force of a poetry comic must be the composition and patterning of images. Robinson achieves this coveted poetic way of cartooning, and I don’t even know if it was an entirely conscious consideration. Though the resemblance to Edgar Allen Poe’s famous narrative poem gives me reason to assume Robinson was at least aware what was happening in front of him. Jason Robinson’s Death Tramp issue 1 is a success. Particularly in a formalistic aspect. This work shows an understanding of comics-making that most cartoonists take for granted, and takes advantage of the music of comics. ————————————————————————————————— 09-24-2018 – by Niall Breen Share this page: [...]

06/14/2016

Aaron CockleJune 13, 2016NewsAaron Cockle with In Pieces Part 2; Art crit; Dan Clowes WTF?; Kramers Ergot on the road; Cult of Claymation Cthulhu; Dada@MoMA; “Sonata in primordial sounds” ————————————————————————————————— CW’s Featured Comics continues this week with Part 2 of Kurt Ankeny’s In Pieces: Someplace Which I Call Home. ————————————————————————————————— In the sense that he starts with the idea that the canvas is a limited area to be divided, to be designed, he is following a European tradition. It is the opposite of the concept of the image which unfolds and spreads out, as in the panoramas of the Hudson River School or the panoramas of American Action-Painting where the edges of the canvas are the last facts to be considered, not the first. Many abstract painters today, for instance, work on unstretched canvas tacked to the wall and decide on the size and proportions of the painting after it is finished. This would be as unworkable an approach for Davis as it would for Mondrian or Léger, since the exercise of will and consciousness can only be accomplished within a fixed space. For artists who insist on complete control, the world must be square; there must be boundaries to act against. — Elaine De Kooning on Stuart Davis circa 1957 via ARTNews ————————————————————————————————— Cartoonist and writer Daniel Clowes brings the world of underground comics into Marc ‘s garage. They talk about the great comic artists who paved the way, the difficulty in translating some graphic novels to film, and the similarities between creating comics and performing standup. Plus, filmmaker Ezra Edelman stops by to talk with Marc about his documentary OJ: Made in America. ————————————————————————————————— This Wednesday in Pittsburgh and this Thursday in Brooklyn. ————————————————————————————————— Pingu’s The Thing, by Lee Hardcastle ————————————————————————————————— Dadaglobe Reconstructed reunites over 100 works created for Dadaglobe, Tristan Tzara’s planned but unrealized magnum opus, originally slated for publication in 1921. An ambitious anthology that aimed to document Dada’s international activities, Dadaglobe was not merely a vehicle for existing works, but served as a catalyst for the production of new ones. Tzara invited some 50 artists from 10 countries to submit artworks in four categories: photographic self-portraits, photographs of artworks, original drawings, and layouts for book pages. The exhibition brings together these photographs, drawings, photomontages, and collages, along with a selection of related archival material, to reconstruct this volume. Though never published, due to financial and organizational difficulties, Tzara’s project addresses concerns about art’s reproducibility that continue to be relevant today. — via Museum of Modern Art [Image above: Francis Picabia. Tableau Rastadada. 1920. Cut-and- pasted printed paper on paper with ink, 7 1⁄2 x 6 3⁄4″ (19 x 17.1 cm). Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (by exchange), 2014. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris] ————————————————————————————————— Julie Doucet’s Carpet Sweeper Tales Doucet’s fragmented and reconstituted sound-language echoes Kurt Schwitter’s Dada “sound-poems” and the zaum, or transrational poetry, of Russian Futurist Aleksei Kruchenykh. Both Schwitter and Kruchenykh abstracted words in order to liberate language from meaning: their letterforms are descriptive rather than prescriptive. In Schwitter’s “Ursonate,” which roughly translates to “sonata in primordial sounds,” the four movements are interspersed with a coda that comprises the German alphabet read backward; each of the three iterations is meant to be read aloud with a different pitch and tempo. Much of the poem relies on the repetition of sounds—“Lanke trr gll / Ziiuu lenn trll? / Lümpff tümpff trll.” Kruchenykh’s “Hum of Hillclimbing Locomotive” is a collection of sounds that approximate not just the noise of a train engine but also, importantly, its laboring momentum: “boro / choro / two / one / hubb / sham / ga / gish! / boro sorko ba.” In the same way, Doucet’s collection of sounds and patterns isn’t an unruly mess: she harnesses the constructed ejections and exclamations together, and they accrue a syntax. — Via Nicole Ruddick at TCJ ————————————————————————————————— Share this page: [...]

02/13/2018

Aaron CockleFebruary 13, 2018NewsAaron here today with Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre?; 3 Comics from Ben Katchor; Tommi Parrish; Adrian Tomine covers TEOTFW; 1987; 24 Frames ————————————————————————————————— Life? or Theatre? At The New York Review of Books, Lisa Appignanesi looks at work by Charlotte Salomon, including a current exhibition at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam. All of the images and text in Life? or Theatre? are painted in three colors: red, yellow, and blue. Salomon blends these into brightly radiant or deadly somber hues. Whether this restricted palette was a deliberate choice or an accident of impoverished circumstances, we will never know. What is clear, however, is that with this paucity of means, the twenty-three-year-old Charlotte created a hybrid work of startling artistic innovation, at once a book, a storyboard for a silent film with indicated musical accompaniment (though sometimes a talkie complete with long shots and close-ups), and a powerful graphic novel decades ahead of its time, incorporating some of the stunning poster-art techniques of Weimar Germany. ————————————————————————————————— An Evening Demonstration. / Hi & Dri in Connecticut / At The Old Unh-Unh Factory Ben Katchor has been posting some comics here, and Oliver Lee Bateman interviewed him over at the Pacific Standard blog. “To be a cartoonist now, in this world, with the costs it imposes on you? Well, it certainly isn’t easy, because this is as bad as I can recall things having been,” he says. “When I was developing my interest in cartoon art, I was enrolled in college studying painting and literature. But I loved this idea of the mass reproduction of artwork that could live on a rack near a candy stand, and I didn’t have nearly that same passion for the world of galleries and high modernist art. And fortunately, when I started working on these projects, the old New York City in which I lived was so astonishingly cheap. Rent, in my case, amounted to $200 a month, and if I sold a strip a week for somewhere between $25 and $100, I could squeeze by. This way of working was possible then.” ————————————————————————————————— The Lie and How We Told It At The Comics Journal, Rachel Davies talks with Tommi Parrish. On that note about bookmaking, I was so shocked when I first got The Lie in the mail because of its size ‘cause Perfect Hair is almost like a pocket book, or something you can easily slip into a bag. I wanted to know if when you’re making the drawings, you’re thinking about how it’s going to look physically. I try to! It’s a really important part of how the story feels, how the object feels in your hand. Ideally I’d like it all to be one of the same. I don’t know if everyone’s the same with this, but it really affects the way that I feel about a piece of writing, if I feel like the vehicle for it is clunky and ugly. I don’t know, making something that’s strange and beautiful, and also trying to make the contents of the book pretty, but also engaging. I want it to all be like… all of it as an object, I guess. I don’t know, I was really unhappy with how Perfect Hair looked. I really like it! It was a fun book. I really like, I don’t know the technical term, but how it has the reflective title. The spot gloss! It’s all about the spot gloss. ————————————————————————————————— TEOTFW Emily Nussbaum on the Netflix adaptation of Charles Forsman’s The End of the Fucking World. Instead, “The End of the F***ing World”—which is written by Charlie Covell, adapted from Charles Forsman’s graphic novel, and directed by Jonathan Entwistle and Lucy Tcherniak—evolves into something much rarer, a convincing teen-age romance. At once a joyful watch and a morally destabilizing one, it bears some relationship to “Fleabag,” another dark British comedy driven by the narration of a deeply screwed-up individual, plotted so that its more compassionate themes come as a pleasant shock. Luckily, in an age of TV overkill, the show doesn’t take long to get there: it is only eight episodes long; each is twenty minutes. ————————————————————————————————— 1987: Drawings by John Ruggeri In 1981, five young men were diagnosed with a rare lung infection. At the same time, numerous gay men in New York and Los Angeles were being diagnosed with an aggressive cancer, Kaposi Sarcoma. These illnesses would soon be understood as being caused by an immuno-suppressing virus, HIV. By the end of 1987, the World Health Organization estimated that up to 10 million people were living with HIV worldwide. This exhibition is titled “1987,” the year that the antiretroviral drug AZT was made available to help combat the plague. By 1999 an estimated 33 million people were living with HIV and 14 million people had died of AIDS. Today, approximately 36.7 million people are living with HIV. BFA Visual & Critical Studies proudly presents “1987: Drawings by John Ruggeri” (1973 Illustration, BFA 1984 Media Arts, MFA 1986 Illustration as Visual Essay), an exhibition of approximately 80 drawings made between 1984 and 1987 that document the devastating early years of the AIDS crisis in New York City. The work, all charcoal drawings on Strathmore spiral-bound paper, were done in the bars, bathhouses, hospitals, prisons and public spaces of New York City and poignantly capture the anxiety etched onto the city and particularly to its often marginalized denizens. School of Visual Arts, 133/141 West 21st Street, through February 28. ————————————————————————————————— Abbas Kiarostami / 24 Frames At Film Comment, Imogen Sara Smith on Abbas Kiarostami’s final film. Photography shows us things invisible to the naked eye, whether it is the moment when a galloping horse takes all four feet off the ground, or a murder in a public park, or just a facial expression too fleeting to catch. When Kiarostami took the original photographs, he was presumably trying to capture something in the world: the hunting motif, from the Brueghel painting through the animals being shot, might also be a metaphor for photography itself. By digitally elaborating on these images, it seems he is trying to paint something seen in his mind’s eye, a memory or an imagined scene. This mixing of the real and the unreal is summed up in that final image: a photograph of a film, or rather a film of a photograph of a film, suspended between stillness and motion, between watching and dreaming. ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 02-13-18 – Caleb Orecchio ————————————————————————————————— Vision Box – 2-13-2018 – by Cameron Arthur Share this page: [...]

10/05/2018

Sally IngrahamOctober 4, 2018NewsSally here. Busy week. I’m working on completing, and starting, a couple of personal comics projects. I’m also (as usual) reading three different comics at once – Rina Ayuyang‘s Blame This on the Boogie, Emma Rios‘ I.D., and Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. Whichever one I finish first I’ll write about next week! For the time being, here’s a roundup of what everyone else has been writing and thinking about, comics-wise, lately. Laura Howell (pictured above) was the first female cartoonist to produce a strip in The Beano (an 80-year old British children’s comic magazine) – 12 years later she is still working for them. Read about her HERE. The mysterious “Olivia Jaimes“, current and much discussed artist behind the rebirth of the strip Nancy, made an appearance at CXC recently (in a disguise) – Rocko Jerome was there and offers a full report. Annie Koyama announced the spring lineup of books for Koyama Press – including the latest from Emily Carroll (above). See what else is coming up HERE. Joe McCulloch reviews Lale Westvind‘s Grip #1 over on The Comics Journal – and words fail him. The Washington Post compares notes on the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation process with Ann Telnaes and Signe Wilkinson, among other editorial cartoonists. The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum is now accepting applications for the 2019 Lucy Shelton Caswell Research Award – details HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Sally Ingraham Share this page: [...]

01/18/2018

Posted on January 17, 2018January 17, 2018 by Sally Ingraham

Sally here with the story of Orrin C. Evans and the first comic made and published by black creators, plus a Toon Book from Jaime Hernandez, and much more!

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*All-Negro Comics* created by Orrin C. Evans in June 1947 – cover art by Bill Driscoll

I was looking at a copy of Paul Gravett’s Holy Sh*t! The World’s Weirdest Comic Books recently, and discovered the remarkable story of Orrin C. Evans. He published the first comic book made by black artists, featuring black heroes, in 1947 (pictured above).

After a career in newspapers, one that already hade some “firsts” in it (he broke the color barrier when he became a reporter at the Philadelphia Record covering general assignments), Evans decided to turn his energy to the issue of black representation in comic books. He had the support of several former editors at the Philadelphia Record (which had folded by then over labor issues) and he put together a proper “bullpen”.

“He co-created the features in the comic along with the artists who included his brother, George J Evans Jr, two other Philadelphia cartoonists, one of whom was John Terrill, the other named Cooper, and a Baltimore artist who signed his work Cravat.” – Tom Christopher

Paul Gravett’s entry on the comic includes details about the stories and characters – Lion Man and Bubba, police detective Ace Harlem, and others:

The first issue was distributed around Philadelphia, and Evans eagerly got started on the second, completing all of the stories and art. Unfortunately, as noted above, it was never published because he lost access to the actual newsprint. Evans didn’t press the matter, having already faced death threats and other harassment due to articles he had written about segregation in the armed forces, among other things. And thus black representation in comics disappeared almost entirely until the mid-60s (when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby brought the Black Panther to life) and a comic made and published by a black creative team didn’t turn up again for even longer.

You can learn more about Orrin C. Evans by reading the rest of Tom Christopher’s article on Evans and All-Negro Comics HERE.

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Jaime Hernandez is doing a Toon Book! Coming in March, it riffs on “the classic works of F. Isabel Campoy and Alma Flor Ada” – more details HERE.
“Pioneering cartoonist Jackie Ormes and influential Marvel Marvel marketing manager Carol Kalish have been selected for induction into the Will Eisner Comic Awards Hall of Fame for 2018.” The Comics Beat has the full story, plus a list of the other 16 nominees who have been announced – from which 4 will be selected and added later in the year.
Paste Magazine has a preview of one of the comics coming from the Berger Books imprint at Dark Horse – Incognegro: Renaissance #1, written by Mat Johnson and drawn by Warren Pleece. It is a prequel mini-series set before the events in their 2018 graphic novel. Both stories deal with black reporter Zane Pinchback, who can pass as white and uses this to investigate lynchings and other anti-black violence in the 1920s and 30s. See the preview HERE.
Sloane Leong published her latest “dragnet” of comics on The Comics Journal – webcomics and paper, definitely some that I’ve been meaning to check out. See the list HERE.
Silver Sprocket has announced a lineup of comics coming out soon, including a new hardcover 112 page volume that collects Ben Passmore’s political cartoons from The Nib and VICE along with his story Your Black Friend. See this project and 11 more from other cartoonists over on The Comics Beat.
John Ridley, the screen-writer behind 12 Years a Slave and author of the DC series The American Way: Those Above and This Below, has a new project – The Other History of the DC Universe, which will examine some of the marginalized DC superheroes. Here’s the story, on i09.
Atlanta’s High Museum has figured out how to diversify their audience, with an increase of 45% in their nonwhite visitors, which shouldn’t be a noteworthy feat but in today’s world still is – Hyperallergic has the story.

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Frank Santoro and Simon Hanselmann, CAB 2013 – photo by Chris Anthony Diaz, colored by Graham Willcox

We still have a space open in the Winter Semester of thee Santoro Correspondence Course for Comic Book Makers! 8 weeks – 500 bux – coaching for as long as you need. The course is hard, but Frank will push your comics making practice to a new level, getting you to think about timing and color in new ways. His experience and ideas have influenced the likes of Connor Willumsen, Michael DeForge, and Simon Hanselmann (quote “I consider Frank Santoro to be my L. Ron Hubbard”) among many others. Dig into something new in the new year!

Full details and how to apply can be found HERE.

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One thought on “01/18/2018”

tom christopher says:

January 19, 2018 at 1:29 pm

dear sally.
i’m glad you liked my article on all negro comics and passed it on to your readers.
please know my grandfather and mother were born in pittsburgh.

yrs, tom christopher

Reply

Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Posted in NewsTagged all-negro comics, Jaime Hernandez, orrin c. evans

Sally Ingraham

Posted on January 17, 2018January 17, 2018

Explore

08/06/2018

Caleb OrecchioAugust 6, 2018NewsCaleb Orecchio here with early morning thoughts and other news. ————————————————————————————————— “Sometimes I think that I know too much.” Talking to a friend recently while he was visiting Pittsburgh, we discussed this feeling of knowing “too much” about comics. The thought seems silly in retrospect. Obviously you can’t know too much about comics, but the breadth of history and accessibility of the medium can be overwhelming. We asked ourselves: Should I try to draw like Jaime Hernandez? Should I try to write like Alan Moore? Should I learn to paint? Will I ever be as good as my heroes? Who is better, Ditko or Kirby? Ware or Mazzucchelli? Bushmiller or Schulz? Fisher or Herriman? Crane or Caniff? Does it matter? Will there ever be another publisher like PictureBox? Was Moebius actually a good cartoonist? Do these pants make my ass look fat? Have you been eating your vegetables? Do you watch gladiator movies? We are frustrated to find that our work does not live up to our knowledge. “It’s a slow process,” we have to remind ourselves. “But Mazzucchelli was working at Marvel while still in college! And Trevor Von Eeden started working for DC on his own character when he was 17! And don’t get me started on Xaime!” Hahahaha! We had a big laugh at the expense of our lack of confidence. What else can we do? Quit? We put the success of our heroes aside, and went back to our drawing boards. ————————————————————————————————— if you don’t know, now you know Matt Seneca wrote about the BWS classic Weapon X over on TCJ.com. Speaking of The Comics Journal, you might know by now that it is coming back as a printed object (separate from TCJ.com). AND Nemo is coming back too! Rob Clough reviews the new King-Cat on High-Low. ————————————————————————————————— Share this page: [...]

09/11/2018

Aaron CockleSeptember 11, 2018NewsJason Lutes; Sharad Sharma; Dash Shaw; Comics Carousel; Brooklyn Book Festival ————————————————————————————————— ‘Otherwise it’s all just a bloodbath, right?’ Josh Kramer talks with Jason Lutes about the new Berlin collection: What were your main narrative inspirations for Berlin? From a straightforward, mechanical, storytelling perspective, the comics of Herge, right? All of my basic “Comics 101” self-education that I got was from studying Tintin both growing up and then as an adult. And then once I sort of figured out the conventions that Herge was applying, then tinkering them and changing them and making them my own in a lot of cases. In terms of like tone, for Berlin specifically, tone and technique, I think I was I was thinking a lot about Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders, which I had seen in my early 20s, which was very affecting. And the novel Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin which takes a very kind of impressionistic view of the city at the time. And both of those works do a lot of drifting in and out of the consciousness of various people on the street. So those had a big effect on how I ended up telling the story. And then beyond that I would have to say it’s probably a combination of any number of indie films that I absorbed when I was in art school or after. I remember I watched a lot of Jim Jarmusch. Then I remember there was this one year at the Seattle Film Festival where I had press passes. I would just go walk into a movie theater and sit down and watch movies for four hours, not knowing what they were going to be. I think there was a period there where I kind of just immersed myself in cinematic visual storytelling. I think Herge, Alfred Döblin and Wim Wenders would be the three big ones that were the obvious influences. ————————————————————————————————— The 222nd meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2018 at 7pm at Parsons School of Design, University Center, 63 Fifth Avenue, room UL 105 (lower level). Free and open to the public. Skype presentation. Sharad Sharma on Grassroots Comics: By the people, for the people. Via Skype, Sharad Sharma, will share hundred of stories of common people using Grassroots Comics that tell a local story. They are a communication tool for all citizens that can transcend the barriers of language, literacy, media access, social classes and even resources. For these reasons, grassroots comics have been extremely successful in both rural and urban, remote and low literacy areas widely in Indian subcontinent. The simple format and participatory methodology made the grassroots comics popular worldwide. In last 20 years his organization World Comics has conducted more than 1200 comics workshop in most remote and disturbed areas of the globe and trained over 1,00,000 common people. He will also share the impact of his work. www.worldcomicsindia.com ————————————————————————————————— “My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea” Screening and Q&A As part of After School Special: The 2018 School of Visual Arts Alumni Film & Animation Festival, we are pleased to present graphic novelist, animator, writer, director, and SVA alumnus Dash Shaw’s first feature-length animated film, My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea (2016). Shaw will be on hand following the film for a Q&A. The feature will be preceded by the short film series Makin’ Things and the world premiere of the short film Noise by another multi-hypenate artist/director and SVA alumnus, Jim McKenzie. The Q&A will be moderated by current student Stephanie Kim (BFA 2019 Illustration). Tuesday, September 11, 2018, 7:30-10PM SVA Theatre 333 West 23rd Street New York, NY 10011 ————————————————————————————————— Comics Carousel at Society of Illustrators A special Carousel at the Society of Illustrators for the Brooklyn Book Festival. Presentations of graphic novels and comics as read by the artists: Jordan Crane (We Are All Me) Maria Hoey (COIN-OP Comics Anthology) Paul Levitz & Tim Hamilton (Brooklyn Blood) Connie Sun (@cartoonconnie) Ngozi Ukazu (Check, Please!) Kriota Willberg (Draw Stronger) and more! The event will be followed by a book signing. Hosted by: R. Sikoryak (Terms and Conditions, The Unquotable Trump) THIS IS AN OFFICIAL 2018 BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL EVENT Society of Illustrators 128 East 63rd Street NY, NY 10065 Monday, September 17, 2018, 7-9pm Tickets: $10 General Admission ————————————————————————————————— Brooklyn Book Festival Comics-related Panels: September 16, 2018, 12pm Find Your Family Brooklyn Historical Society Library, 128 Pierrepont St Refugees, outcasts, inheritors of hard history — whoever we are, we all struggle to find the human connections that make us safe. Caldecott Award-winning illustrator/author David Small (Home After Dark), New Yorker cartoonist Liana Finck (Passing for Human), and anthropologist Bessora (Alpha) explore the universal yearning for defining and keeping what we think of as family. Moderated by agent and editor Anjali Singh, Ayesha Pande Literary. September 16, 2018, 1pm TV vs. Reality Brooklyn Historical Society Library 128 Pierrepont St When on-air celebrity and imagery shape your earliest memories, how do you reconcile it all with the hard realities of adulthood? Catch the wide-ranging experiences, from quiz kids to musicals to stand-up comedy, of comics creators Michael Kupperman (All The Answers), Box Brown (Is This Guy for Real?), and Rina Ayuyang (Blame This on the Boogie). Moderated by Joan Hilty, Comics Editor at Nickelodeon. September 16, 2018, 2pm Two-Ways — Weird Romance Brooklyn Historical Auditorium, 128 Pierrepont St Two astoundingly accomplished team-ups of authors explore their many attractions to weird romance and speculative fiction, and all the things that happen when you create genre-bending graphic novels in collaboration! Audrey Niffenegger and Eddie Campbell (Bizarre Romance) and Alex de Campi and Katie Skelly (Twisted Romance) . Moderated by Tor Books editor Diana Pho. September 16, 2018, 4pm The Graphic City Brooklyn Historical Auditorium, 128 Pierrepont St In alternately gripping, funny, and tragic graphic novels about urban history, Julia Wertz (Tenements, Towers & Trash), Peter J. Tomasi (The Bridge), and Jason Lutes (Berlin) take us high up to skyscraper views of two great cities flanking the Atlantic — and beyond. Moderated by Publishers Weekly senior news editor Calvin Reid. ————————————————————————————————— Cement Mixer – 9-11-18 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

10/20/2016

Sally IngrahamOctober 20, 2016NewsSam Ombiri is here today with some thoughts on his experience at the Pittsburgh Zine Fair, and then Sally Ingraham rounds up some other happenings in the greater comics community! ————————————————————————————————— thank you for attending the 2016 #pittsburghzinefair! we had almost 700 attendees this year, our largest turnout ever! another big thanks to our exhibitors, sponsors, and partners. watch this space for upcoming events soon! #zines #pittsburgh pic credit: @annesleyadventures A photo posted by Pittsburgh Zine Fair (@pittsburghzinefair) on Oct 16, 2016 at 6:49pm PDT Sam Ombiri was helping run the Pittsburgh Comics Salon table at the zine fair this past weekend. He writes: The Pittsburgh Zine Fair was a lot of fun, it was a such great environment. There was a constant wave of sound the whole time I was there. I’d try to make out what people were talking about from a small distance, but I guess that’s not how it works. I like how one person doesn’t see what the other sees – I maybe see person 1 and 3, but because I’m moving along too quickly I totally miss person 2. So I could think I found the coolest zines, but someone else shows me that’s not the case. This one guy’s book was about being in a place where someone else had previously left their mark there, and his fascination of the ghost like quality that comes with someone else being there before he’s there – but as he said, “I’m trying to avoid being didactic about it.” His name was Alex Lukas. I dig his marks, I wish I browsed more of his stuff, he has really cool work on his website. I talked to him a bit, then I went back to my table, then I went back to buy a book from him, then I gave him one of my zines (without intention of trading,) to which he generously gave me three, and then I walked away. He wanted to have a lot of ambiguity in the work, so that the readers draw their own conclusions to it – altogether irrelevant from his intentions. I started to think about what Alex’s intention was for his pictures of, say, rocks with chalk drawn on them by some mysterious people (who we don’t know what they looked like, their way of life, or their concerns – we know about them themselves through the marks that they left). In my view, the marks on the rocks were fueled by boredom, and the ones who drew it were moving their hands before they themselves realized they were moving their hands, and something else altogether powerful was moving through this, and that power is there in those marks they made. With that mark they left there’s not too much concern about design or maybe there was concern with design. So, Alex’s work, or at least the book, makes you think it’s design oriented. I guess this happens because Alex has designed the book, but the people who leave their marks not so much. There’s a couple of photographs of graffiti and signs, but he wasn’t taking a picture just because it just looked cool, I think. This will most likely be the only way we have of knowing them instead of seeing their face or hearing their voice. Then on top of that Alex copied the pattern on security envelopes and added them to confuse you as the reader, to my understanding it was just for having an effect there, but he said it also served in adding ambiguity. There was other people I got great stuff from as well – I did not leave dissatisfied, far from it. – Sam Ombiri ————————————————————————————————— Frank, Aidan Koch, and Connor Willumsen made it safely back from the U.K. earlier this week, after a wildly successful trip to The Lakes International Comic Art Festival in Kendal. Frank scribbled some thoughts about the show on the plane home, and we have shared them here on the site. A taster: “One of the current riffs about comics festivals is that many different shows exist within the show. Meaning, you can go to SPX and not even see everything or miss your friends completely – whereas in years past you could lap the room each hour and see everything and everyone there. LICAF is different insomuch as it is not situated centrally in a hotel or a convention center. So what happens is that one has their interactions in the town of Kendal itself. The Brewery Arts Centre provides ample space to host everyone and the short walk to the Clock Tower is where I found myself most often running into friendly faces – friends and strangers alike. It was very pleasant, I thought, especially because it was so unlike what we are used to in the States and specific to the town of Kendal.” – Frank Santoro Read the rest of the report HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Cartoon Crossroads Columbus for the Comics Workbook team – in one minute! Full festival report coming Friday, thanks to Whit Taylor – stay tuned! #comicsworkbook #cxc2016 A video posted by Comics Workbook (@comicsworkbook) on Oct 19, 2016 at 2:20pm PDT The rest of the team was in Ohio last weekend for Cartoon Crossroads Columbus – Whit Taylor will provide a full report for us soon – meanwhile you can get a taste of the show above! ————————————————————————————————— Alyssa Berg led a workshop for Comics Workbook at CXC, and as I was cleaning up afterward I noticed that attendee Phil Dokes had left his pages behind – check it out: ————————————————————————————————— #Repost @madegibbs with @repostapp ・・・ Ronald Wimberly at CMA, ey! A video posted by Ronald Wimberly (@ronaldwimberly) on Oct 18, 2016 at 6:16pm PDT Ronald Wimberly is the 2016 graphic-novelist-in-residence at the Columbus Museum of Art – over 100 pieces of his art will hang in the museum through this coming February, and he will be staying at the Thurber House through the end of this month working on his own projects and hanging out with high school students in the Young Writers’ Studio program. He got a lot of hype over the weekend of CXC, of course, and the Columbus Dispatch wrote a nice piece about him and the residency program. ————————————————————————————————— Copacetic Comics is hosting an auction of some SUPER scarce or rare Michael DeForge items – check it out HERE! ————————————————————————————————— P.S. A video about the Pittsburgh Zine Fair by Dan Scullin: Share this page: [...]

Jonny Negron Draws MR. FREEDOM

Chris Anthony DiazJune 15, 2016The Diaz ArchiveJonny Negron’s portrayal of John Abbey as Mr. Freedom and Delphine Seyrig as Marie-Madeleine along with the freedom dancers in William Klein’s MR. FREEDOM (1969, France) for my ILLUSTRATED MOMENTS IN CINEMA/TELEVISION collection. The illustration was completed around November 2011 in marker pen, and Jonny’s candid was taken at MISSION: COMICS & ART, San Francisco, Friday, October 12, 2012 and Graham Willcox did the color on Jonny’s candid Share this page: [...]

The Black Callus Interviews: Tyler Landry

Kurt AnkenyMarch 25, 2016Interviews / Resources / Tool TalkTyler Landry has been working at a furious pace lately. I feel like every time I look up from my own drafting table, Tyler is dropping some new comic on the scene, usually oozing mood and style, and generally being just great exercises in atmosphere and design. He’s had work published online by Study Group, as well as many projects on the Comics Workbook Tumblr. In print, he’s published several well-received works under the shared label Clavicle Cocoris, and his latest work, Vile #1: The Coward’s Hole is coming to stores in May, also from Study Group. Kurt Ankeny: I know you work sometimes digitally and sometimes in analog media. What are your preferred tools for each technique, and how do you lay out your workspace? Tyler Landry: I was asked something similar recently, and I’ve been thinking about it a bit, and I really don’t have any set in stone prescribed standards when it comes to tools and workspace. I’m sure this will make a lot of people angry, especially those who wanna know which pencils to buy, or which brush-set to use, or shit like that. I know that if you’re looking for certain specific, consistent final results your choice of tools can be critical—but the more comics I draw, the less I care about those kinds of things. Let’s see now… Stories come out of thin air for me, so where I begin can change—but generally I’m drawing, thumbnailing, or mocking-up sequences on whatever is close by. I’ve got heaps of sketchbooks, index cards, sticky notes, paper scraps. I wanna record these ideas as quickly as they come, so it’s literally whatever’s available. I suppose I prefer pens and fat markers for this work, because it’s gotta be fast, man. No silly lingering. Whether I plan on working digitally, or on paper, I’ll always start out this way. If I can’t touch the work, especially at this raw idea stage, it has no permanence for me, and it will slip away. This work happens anywhere—at lunch, at the coffee shop, at my desk at work, or while I’m watching TV in bed at night. Kurt: I get that, completely. There’s often a sense as an artist that you don’t want to miss that initial spark that makes an idea exciting. For me, however, I often find that ideas that I churn out immediately fade in importance to me, where ideas that keep bubbling back up in my mind tend to create…more lasting? satisfying? work. Have you ever run into that, or do you just find your mind works oppositely? Tyler: There’s always a few duds in the initial deluge, but even the less complete drawings and snippets of words tend to be seeds destined for big growth. I find too, that if I linger on an idea and work it over too much that it turns into garbage, and I’ll either scrap it or return it to its first version. I think most of the best stuff comes at the beginning for me because I’m not inhibited by what I’ve begun turning the story into, subconsciously censoring myself. Kurt: Interesting. So you find your stories best in a Jungian sense, by tapping into that primal dream-world that we all have floating within us, is that fair? Tyler: That’s not a bad way to put it, yeah. Every comic story I’ve ever done has come out of nothingness. I’m slowly learning how to interpret and condense all of the chaos and more efficiently transform it into useful material (pictures/words/narratives). Kurt: Ok, so you have all these condensed ideas on various scraps of paper/notebooks, and then? Tyler: I spread these scraps and cards all over my drawing table, or on the living room floor, and just start arranging. At this stage the only real workspace requirement is…well…space. I just need lots of room to arrange things. Whatever sat in sketchbooks gets translated to cards or sticky notes or whatever so it can be sequenced too. Always on papers, always drawing by hand. This hands-on arrangement is the best way to make sense of my ideas, by far. I find I have to revisit this process a number of times before I get what I want—always adding a new bit here, cutting an old bit there—till it feels totally complete. Kurt: How much space are we talking? Because I often like to do this as well, but I run into the problem of “if I lay out the whole thing at once, I have to step so far away from it that I can’t read it”, and can only process it on a macro level. Are you processing at a macro level at this point? Just trying to see large shapes and spread layouts for whatever it is your after? And what is it that you try to capture on a macro level, design-wise? Tyler: I always consider it per spread. The biggest picture anyone will ever get of the work, visually, is per page (in a web/phone scroll) or per spread (in print), so that’s how I arrange at this stage. I end up arranging by moments, or by scenes—essentially by spreads or groups of spreads, depending on the length of a discreet scene. I’ll work one out, set it aside, and spread out another. I’m looking for the pacing and completeness of ideas first, then I adjust the visuals—flipping cards for position/direction of forms, replacing a drawing with a different image representing the same moment/idea, or adding new drawings to lengthen a moment. I only consider things between spreads/scenes once I begin to feel like I’m covering everything story-wise and I really know exactly what I’m dealing with chronologically. Then it becomes about things like intensity in one spread, versus breathing space in the next, or whatever sorts of dynamics or glue the story feels like it calls for. Kurt: So, not the whole story at once, gotcha. Just spread-by-spread… Tyler: If I plan on working digitally, I’ll photograph these arrangements, and use them as rough guides under my digital drawing. They don’t need to be precise. Analog setup might involve a light table and redrawing overtop of the cards, or just translating them by eye, in spirit, to paper. I have an old animator’s cartooning wheel, and I just stick a lamp behind it. For a while I would do some underdrawing in coloured pencil, mostly just to make sure I was nailing the layout and proportions, but I’ve all but given it up—it’s just too slow and fussy for me, and it can really contribute to flattening my results, so I just straight draw over the sequences in ink. Here’s where people are gonna get pissed off at me… Pretty much every comic I’ve drawn naturally in the last few years has been on regular old shitty copy paper, often with a photocopied grid on it, inked with dying sharpies of all sizes and whatever smooth, black pens I can find. There are a handful of reasons for this, but the biggest one is speed. I just want to get the work together so I can scan it, and have it set up for reproduction. I also tend to draw a page, or a portion of one, and get that “I fucked this up” feeling, so I trash it and restart. Much easier when your materials are dirt cheap. My space for doing this is a standard drafting table. I’ve got a rubber cut-mat, heaps of paper, things that make marks, tape, my story cards, and I just draw. Page after page. Kurt: So what are the other reasons other than speed in your choice of these materials to make the final work? And are all of these dying and fucked up markers just naturally occurring, or do you do stuff to them to fuck them up to the point where they’re making the marks you’re after? If you don’t fuck them up on purpose, what’s the point at which you know they’ll work for what you want them to do? Tyler: I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have destroyed markers, rotten brushes, or crusty old ink bottles lying around. I don’t wreck ‘em on purpose for any specific effect, I just never throw them out until they’re actually not making marks anymore. With that said, I suppose I just pick up something when I think it’ll work for me. For instance, dying markers are great for tonal gradient in otherwise flat black work, and one of my favourite parts of them is that they’re a little unpredictable, so I use them sparingly and in places where I can let a little chaos occur. They also translate well to high-res bitmap art. Crusty gross magic happens when the software has to decide between only black pixels and white ones. Another thing I like, and am just learning how to use to my advantage, is the uncomfortable balance between tools that really aren’t meant to compliment each other. Fat bent marker tips, leaving bled out blobs on the ends of their lines mixed with a mutilated dried out brush, mixed with ballpoint pen, slightly bled out in more deliberate strokes, and hair-thin where i’ve drawn more quickly. Yup. There are a few exceptions to this cheap and dirty rule. When I did Likeness I used a Pentel brush pen. Primarily because of the ease of getting mixed thick and thin lines with a single stroke. It’s a little more organic than mechanically building up those thicks and thins, and it served me well for that project. I also used it a bit for portions of Clav City—again, a case of ease with thicks and thins, and separating organic content from more rigid stuff. Otherwise it’s been sharpies, miscellaneous brands of thin ballpoint/gel style pens, and a few occasional heavy-handed dumps of crispy, ill-treated, cheap brushes and dried up rehydrated india ink. My original pages are probably disintegrating as I type this. Kurt: All the best artists rarely care about what their originals are going to look like, years down the road. I’m often paranoid that my insistence on using stuff that’s going to last is keeping me from doing my best work…but anyway. Let’s talk about line quality. What do you look for in your linework? I see a copy of Domu on your desk, and you often work in what Toth would’ve called a “dead line” which is just a line with little to no variation in it. Like from a ballpoint or felt-tip pen. And then you flavor it with spotted blacks that are rougher and contrast with those clean “dead” lines. So are you after different things when you choose to use the brush pen, and what drives your decision about which tools to use on a particular story? Tyler: I borrowed Domu from a friend, and only just started into it, so I couldn’t say much just yet. Otomo has always had a very deliberate, precise, line-quality-aware rendering style, though. I think I used to try to work that way, but I’ve really been trying not to climb anyone else’s tree these past few years. I’ve been trying, bit by bit, to strip all of the style and decoration and residual aping from my work, and reduce it to its barest necessities. When it comes to mark-making tools, I choose based on what kind of visual language I think will benefit the feel of the story. There’s a certain smooth elegance to the brush (or brush pen), something I used heavily in Likeness because it dealt with things in the natural world, human bodies, flab, muscle, jungle creatures, and the moods varied from sad, to furious, to tender. There’s a more rugged quality to writing pens, which is I what I used when I did Lonesome, about a crusty old prospector, scrubby, unforgiving nature, and fear. I try not to think about flavour in every stroke. I choose some tools overall, and apply them in the moment as best I can to compliment each other and the thing I’m trying to convey in any one panel or drawing. I’d say just as much as the tools, the way in which I compose and control the drawing has a lot to do with the final flavour of it. Where Likeness and Clav City have more structured, controlled, clean setup, even a bit of underdrawing, Lonesome was all off the cuff, ink on the page, no preparation type drawings—full of energy and mistakes all the way through. Kurt: Ok, so what should I make of the fact that one of your most visceral works, Shit and Piss, is done in the dead-line/crusty spotted blacks style? Is it because this is less warm than the Pentel brush style….less…human? Or should I just not make anything of it at all? (laughs) Tyler: You more or less hit that nail on the head, yeah. When I set out to do Shit and Piss, I had intended for it to be much more sloppy and mean in its execution—but I lost a certain level of visual clarity there. That’s my super anal, “all things must be perfect” nagging voice guiding me a bit too much. I didn’t have the confidence to proceed with the madness, so I decided to go for something so plain that it was almost dull—pretty far down to the other end of the spectrum. It was partly its lack of humanity, and partly a bit of a challenge in simplification (in some aspects). Kurt: Ok, I have this pet theory, and it pertains to this thing I think you’re describing. And that is: it’s very difficult to make an “arty” SF piece, because if you want to explain/guide the reader through a weird/foreign/alien world, you need to be clear so that they know something is weird, or alien, and so that they don’t just throw their hands up and say “what the fuck is going on???” And that need for clarity imposes certain limitations on the way you present the story. Do you find yourself running up against this in your work? I feel like you tried to get past this with The Jaundiced Eye… Tyler: This is a REALLY GOOD question. In retrospect I think I’ve played in the same sandbox as your pet theory, but never interacted with it directly. In Shit and Piss, the desire for clarity I’m speaking of was purely (initially) a visual one. The ability to describe a creature, a room, a pile of bones, etc. as clearly as possible felt essential to me. It’s also lent the story a particular layer to its identity, overall. But that’s all surface. Those things don’t require the absolute to-the-detail clarity I had originally aimed for, and their purpose as devices, lending/bending meaning to certain aspects of the stories really only requires their mere suggestion—something I really felt I succeeded in achieving to a much larger degree in The Jaundiced Eye—thanks for noticing. The limitation I see in overindulgence in “clearing everything up” like that seems to be one of potential. When reducing everything to its technical, clinical definition (which is what it feels more and more like to me), you lose the potential to let it speak for itself and add its own depth to the story. You also run the risk of beating people over the head with identifying things, or shifting the balance of focus onto less important aspects of a given thing. Comics has so much room for subtlety, a veritable mille feuille, and I feel like i’m just lifting the topmost layer. Kurt: I liked The Jaundiced Eye because it really felt like a weird style, like cut out stencils that were sprayed with a fucked-up airbrush. It was jarring and disorienting, which I felt added to the story’s mood tremendously. I also am interested in what you said about “Crusty gross magic happens when the software has to decide between only black pixels and white ones.” So you’re using the computer’s choices in the final art too? Do you play with the Threshold settings (in Photoshop) a couple of times to find the best version of the bitmapping to your eye? Tyler: Thanks! The Jaundiced Eye was a tough nut to crack. I had these little ideas about pointy hats and an oppressive fear cloud hanging over a village for a while, and I actually boarded out the whole story a bunch of months ago and it’s just been sitting, waiting for the right treatment to justify its existence. I drew the first spread 3 or 4 times in a different hand/tool/style to try and figure out how it wanted to be shown, but no luck. Stuff was too fussy, too contrived, didn’t serve the feel I was hoping for. One evening I was doing some wicked loose drawing with really dull pencils and had a proper eureka moment. The idea of swaths of crumbling noise with just minimal detail for recognition’s sake punched out—that was it. I found a couple of PS brush tool combos that worked and the thing took me no time at all to draw—just painting in huge fields of mess and cutting back silhouettes from them. This story didn’t see any of that black and white magic transformation because it was done 100% digitally, and I kept the greyscale very smooth and soft and anti-aliased, so everything was kinda set up ahead of time to do its job. The magic tends to happen for me when I’ve scanned art with gradients, or when I decide to paint tone or gradient digitally, in a soft, greyscale sort of way—and then convert to bitmap. It’s just how hard I hit the threshold. Usually just a matter of adjusting levels a bit for the results I want. Kurt: Since we’re on the topic anyway, let’s get into how you work digitally… Tyler: When I’m working digitally I work in a more reductive way. What I mean by that is that I generally apply much more black than I will need anywhere, and shave it back with an eraser—something that differs a lot from my analog drawing process. Workspace in this sense is pretty sparse—I use a Cintiq and work in Photoshop. I draw primarily in one black layer, often with one additional black layer set to 40% opacity so I can get that secondary tone in there. I usually use just a couple of brushes I made myself from scans of old drawings—a couple for ragged lines/blobs, and a couple of others for spatter and gradient tones. Recently I made use of some of the famous Kyle Webster’s brushes to do The Jaundiced Eye, but that’s about the only deviation I’ve made to date. Kurt: And let’s talk real technical: how do you set up your pages for print: dpi, scan rates, any special tricks you use that give you the print job you’re after with these projects? Does it vary significantly between black & white or color? Tyler: Whether scanned or straight digital, I usually work at 600dpi. I’ve been told to work higher, but with a bunch of layers and large(ish) pages, I tend to get drawing lag which makes it pretty unworkable. I work pretty much exclusively in Photoshop, because I know it, and I can achieve pretty much anything I care about in it. I also tend to save my pages as individual PSD files. I know some people do some major huge spread files, or entire story files, or use smart objects or whatever, but I keep it pretty simple. I don’t like all that shit getting in my way. As for the work itself, anything that’s straight black, or flat coloured, I work in plain bitmap—that is no anti-aliased edges. Every pixel is black, or white. Gives much more crisp end result when going to print—I’ve found. I’m not a pressman, though, so my tricks don’t go too deep there. I don’t do much “color” work, other than flats like I’ve done with Likeness and Hermit Crab Real Estate, which are essentially straight black layers printed in a color other than black. In that respect, it really doesn’t vary much at all between straight b/w and color work for me—except that I trap my colors properly (combination of applying a stroke and hand painting in some of the non-uniform stuff) since they’ll be printed in separate passes. Shit and Piss has been totally black and white, right down to the textures I crafted and paste into the “tone” layer. When I do the covers, it’s a free-for-all, methods-wise, anything goes, eventually creating a duplicate, baked flat, converted to CMYK and tweaked for balance as best I can. Clav City, and Lonesome use a couple of transparent colors/tones that overlap to give an additional color/tone—but being made for the screen as they were, they’re just plain old PS layers with multiplication/transparency applied to them. Translated to the page, I’d be reworking them similarly to the previous examples, flat layers, trapped, relying on transparent inks, or a full 4-color process to keep the balance and legibility. All of the setup/process I just described is becoming a bit stale for me, as most of my recent work has been done with slight variations on the same methods—so I may be exploring a new approach soon. Something to refresh me, and the work. Kurt: So, what’s coming up for you as far as work, and what are your personal struggles in your art as you see it? What are you trying to attain that you feel you haven’t yet? I’m curious as to where artists are aiming, how they envision their “perfect” masterwork and what it contains. What kind of influences or ideas are you trying to put into your art that you feel you haven’t figured out yet? Tyler: Upcoming work includes quarterly (I hope) installments of Vile, via Study Group. Each of these will be a unique story, under the common banner of Vile. I also plan on doing two more Shit and Piss tales, then to collect all five in a single volume. Those are the hard commitments I’ve made. In addition, I’ve got a pile of stories in various states of early note-taking, card-drawing, narrative building. They’ll all find their way into finished-ness sooner or later. I’ve got a story about future life on Mars, a sort of “interview” with a vampire, a folly of youth story with heavily relevant societal undertones, a book of landscapes, more chapters of Clav City, and so on… My personal struggles stem from and guide my aspirations. I grew up copying style. Always. I was a fan of so many painters, illustrators, cartoonists, and spent years just learning how to execute like they did. The fundamentals came later when I realized I hadn’t any voice for sharing my own ideas, and needed to build up from the ground again. I’m forever trying to shed the trappings of stylistic shackles—either by purposefully altering my visual approach every time I draw a new story, or by drawing at such a base level that style doesn’t even come into play. I’d love to someday be able to execute my drawings on a completely raw and primitive level, using only the bare necessities. With those ideas constantly nagging at me, my deeper more longterm aspiration is really just to continue to expand on and really develop my ability to tell relevant (I hope) stories within the medium of comics. It really is capable of so many wonderful, dynamic, and infinitely subtle things, and I want to explore, invent, and master them all—built up around stories that actually matter. To someone. Somewhere. Many thanks to Tyler for taking the time to discuss all of this over email! Kurt Ankeny is a cartoonist working in Ipswich, Massachusetts. He’s the co-author of the Santoro School Handbook for Making Better Comics, and the author of Saltwater Snow, A Bomb, and the upcoming In Pieces: Someplace Which I Call Home, which is currently being serialized on the Comics Workbook Tumblr. You can find him on Tumblr as well as at www.kurtankeny.com. Share this page: [...]

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