damn, it’s cold and gray in Pittsburgh. Bummer.
Gotta get toasty somehow… thankfully Tara Helfer‘s got a little 10-panel winter ditty for you. Great pantomime of a hungry young troll girl. Interesting, subtle designs that leave you excitedly filling the narrative blanks. It’s the kind of comic that leaves you smiling imagining the before and after of the sequence. Read her comic here.
– Jillian Tamaki has a new comic out on Hazlitt entitled Boundless. She glides through the animal kingdom, giving the reader a taste of what life is like for several critters. The comic is a great empathetic exploration of the human in the natural. No panels, just images and words swimming together. Hop on over to Hazlitt.net to read Boundless.
– Tyler Landry has uploaded the gory, grotesque glory that is Shit and Piss 3 over on Ello. It’s a glorious, carnal, fetid, sumptuously human 16 pages. Beautifully choreographed action, spliced with strong poetic imagery. Dive into the muck and give it a read.
– If you haven’t yet heard through the grapevine, Sally Ingraham and Maggie Umber are hosting a drawing challenge over at the comicsworkbook.tumblr. It’s the Gato Gif Competition.
Do you like to draw?
Do you like cats?
Do you want to win comics books from Comics Workbook and 2dcloud?
Then you best get the inside scoop on the Gato Gif Challenge from Maggie and Sally!
– Emma Rios and Hwei Lim Reflect on their collaboration for their work on Image’s new miniseries Mirror. It’s a standalone narrative where the duos been collaborating in new and leftfield ways, dipping into the experimental waters with gusto. Rios, known as the artist on Pretty Deadly, here writes for Lim. Sit down with the two of them over at Comics Alliance and learn more about their collaboration.
CA: How have you found the collaborative process together?
HL: Emma is incredibly open to all my crazy suggestions, and extremely forgiving of my countless silly questions and backtracking and forgetfulness!
ER: Beyond the obvious beauty of her lines and colors, Hwei’s brilliant narrative, and her ability to make characters feel, have always stood out from anything I’ve ever seen. She turns everything into twice as nuanced with very little, a glance, a wink, a joke… in a way that looks almost effortless and natural. If you don´t draw it’s hard to imagine how difficult that is but, literally, it’s bringing life to the pages.
Analyzing how she is building Mirror, and comparing the result with what I would have done myself is mind-blowing for me as an artist. If I were the one drawing the book, this story would have looked grittier and more disgusting, because I’m rather visceral and sometimes I just can’t restrain myself when drawing violence and similar stuff. But this light she brings … has transformed the story even since before I started writing a single line. It allows us to work on another level, with cuteness and humor, and is taking the tragedy to a whole new level of pain, haha…
The eyes she draws are the saddest eyes, and if they belong to a caged animal, man… I don’t even know how I can even deal with it. Actually I’m always apologizing to her each time I send her stuff that is twisted with a, “Sorry, I’m a horrible person” but she seems to enjoy it.
There’s a nice interview with Conor Stechschulte at Broken Frontier. They dig into lots of really interesting aspects of Conor’s comics making processes and the evolution of his creative interests from his years studying art at MICA with the Closed Captioned Comics crew to present day. Read all the nitty gritty here. [and you can pick up Generous Bosom 1 and 2 at the Breakdown Press online store here. ;)]
With up to 25 panels per page, the pacing of your comics seems very carefully laid out. Do you plan it out carefully?
When I get down to planning the pages, I do work a good deal on it. I think a lot about timing and focus, especially on where the page turns fall. I write out dialog, then thumbnail pages, then do a “Scratch” version of the full-size page, then lightbox the finished drawing from there, and I’m making changes at every stage.