Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Posted in NewsTagged dirty plotte, julie doucet

Caleb Orecchio

Posted on March 11, 2018March 11, 2018

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2/17/2016

Juan FernándezFebruary 17, 2016NewsWottaday… Sarah Bowie, Disa Wallander and L. Nichols all have some new comics for you to dig your teeth into! For some messy, honest, social realism, you can take a poke into Wallander’s world through her hourly comics that swallow up any and all documentary images for the sake of comics. Bowie’s got a new short, Saucepan. Image and narration dance together nicely in this nice slice of microfiction for you. And for the more observational stroll through the woods, join L. Nichols up Hunter Mountain in the latest of Nichol’s hiking comics. There’s a cool new video of Steve Oliff reflecting on his coloring work with Katsuhiro Otomo on Akira. In 1989, Oliff, a veteran colorist, was personally selected by Katsuhiro Otomo to color his seminal manga, AKIRA. This video documents their working relationship, including Otomo’s trip to Point Arena, CA to collaborate with Steve on developing the color scheme. Steve hand-painted every page of AKIRA, using some combination of airbrush, gouache, water marker, colored pencil, Pantone film; these original color guides are now available exclusively from Felix Comic Art. John Kelly’s got a killer piece over at the Comics Journal that delves deep into the history of the East Village Eye, an important alt-newspaper back in the day. It’s really an excellent investigation. Take some time and sit with the article. It’ll have you hopping back and forth across the web, over turning loads of stones to learn more about the publication. “The East Village Eye did a lot of the most significant early hip-hop and aerosol ‘graffiti’ art coverage,” said James Romberger, whose strip and events at his art gallery–both called Ground Zero and both done with his partner and collaborator Marguerite Van Cook–appeared in the Eye. “It highlighted that the East Village of the early and mid-80s as a whole was very multicultural and inclusive. The art that people were doing was aggressive and accessible; and the art scene crossed-over at the time with the music, film and club scenes.” And that was the point of the Eye. “My point of view with the Eye was to blur the lines–and try to obliterate the lines–between the kind of popular culture that people took seriously–that the artists took seriously and the media took seriously,” said Eye founder and editor Leonard Abrams. “And I think that we succeeded. We definitely helped push that point of view.” Bill Boichel riffs on Michale Pisano’s camera about the new Michael DeForge’s issue of Frontier. Watch the review. Matt Davis over at Perfecty Acceptable press just announced the Spring/Summer publishing line up. It looks like a really strong line up of deft cartoonists who know how to use color to great effect. New books by: Daria Tessler @animalsleepstories Jim Pluk @jimpluk Talya Modlin @talyamodlin & Inés Estrada @inechi Share this page: [...]

11/04/2016

Sally IngrahamNovember 4, 2016NewsSally here, ready to shout about some cool comics and the women who make them. I’ve got notes on Lynda Barry, Julia Gfrörer, the She Changed Comics project, Lyn Chevli, Shade the Changing Girl #1, the CW Roller Derby “of the mind” League – plus an interview with Kevin Czap and Comics Workbook at CAB. ————————————————————————————————— Comics Workbook will be at Comic Arts Brooklyn this Saturday, Nov. 5th – find us upstairs at table 27! Frank Santoro, Juan Fernandez, Jenn Lisa, and John Kelly will be there, with other Comics Workbook students and friends stopping by throughout the day. Thee incredible Ronald Wimberly will be signing at our table at 2 pm! Just when I thought it was safe to pack up the purel! I’m guesting at @comicsworkbook table at @comicartsbklyn this Saturday at 2pm. I’ll have Prince of Cats, Attack on Titan, and Something Wicked this Way Comes (The original to this is still available $300. Hit me in my DMs) #comicartsbrooklyn #comicbookworkbook #RonaldWimberly #FrankSantoro #GratNin #PrinceofCats #Hanzōbō A photo posted by Ronald Wimberly (@ronaldwimberly) on Nov 3, 2016 at 3:32pm PDT Also catch Whit Taylor and Alyssa Berg and Aaron Cockle tabling downstairs! ————————————————————————————————— I finally had a minute to pick up Shade the Changing Girl #1 while working at Copacetic Comics this week. Steve Ditko’s original Shade the Changing Man series (1970s), and Peter Milligan’s wild reworking of the Shade stories (1990s) seemed to be lurking around, wondering what these GIRLS were going to do with the material. I was curious too (I spent a fair amount of time this past summer just staring in awe at some of those Brendan McCarthy covers of Milligan’s Shade). Shade the Changing Girl comes from creative team Cecil Castellucci (writer), Marley Zarcone (pencils), and Kelly Fitzpatrick (color), and at a glance, it certainly has the right look. The story ties easily into earlier Shade while quickly forging it’s own plot line: university dropout Loma (a big fan of lunatic poet Roc Shade) steals the “madness coat” from a museum on the planet Meta, and zips to Earth where she takes up residence in the body of a dying teenage girl. It doesn’t take Loma long to realize that dealing with high school, the uncontrollable madness, and the folks on Meta who want the coat back will make life a lot more difficult than she anticipated. Cecil Castellucci (whom I know from her work on The Plain Janes – which Jim Rugg did the artwork for) so far seems to be rocking this, and I’m pretty excited to see where the story goes. Here’s an interview with Castellucci from July that details her own excitement about the project. Issue #2 came out this week – I’ll be aiming to get my hands on it asap. ————————————————————————————————— The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund started the She Changed Comics project last year – it was a series they ran on their Tumblr during Women’s History Month. They successfully Kickstarted a book in the spring of 2016, and it has just been released. The book was another one that I managed to check out this week during my time at Copacetic Comics. Meant to be much more than just an overview of (the dreaded phrase) “women in comics”, the book claims to be “the definitive history of the women who changed free expression in comics, with profiles of more than 60 groundbreaking female professionals and interviews with the women who are changing today’s medium“. While a book that clocks in at 170 pages can hardly be called comprehensive, it did feel like a great who’s who of important names, drawing from the breadth of comics history and the mainstream, syndicated, and alt-comics scenes. Cartoonists, publishers, and editors all got a shout out – Edwina Dumm to Jackie Ormes to Marie Severine to Diane Noomin to Kate Beaton to Roz Chast to Fiona Staples to Francoise Mouly to Karen Berger. With two pages devoted to each person, the book is definitely a good resource and a nice thing to have on hand when some idiot wants to claim that women don’t make or read comics. Almost entirely written by women as well. My only complaint is that there weren’t enough pictures! Get a copy of the book HERE. ————————————————————————————————— One of the women who gets a mention in the book above is Lyn Chevli, the co-founder of Tits & Clits – the first comic book written, drawn, and published solely by women (beating the first Wimmen’s Comix to the newsstands by just a few weeks in July of 1972). Lyn recently died, at the age of 84, and Joyce Farmer (her Tits & Clits publishing partner) provided a remembrance of her on The Comics Journal – read it HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Lynda Barry of course also makes the CBLDF’s list of women who changed comics, thoroughly, constantly, and wonderfully. She is featured in The Guardian this week, riffing on “comics, creativity, and Matt Groening”. Her career has zigzagged through the comics industry, beginning in the syndicated world with the strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek (which ran for 30 years), bumping into a novel or two along the way, and now exploding in both the classroom at the University of Wisconsin (where she was recently named as the UW-Madison’s first recipient of the Chazen Family Distinguished Chair in Art) and a lively lecture circuit, where she preaches the gospel of creativity. Read the article HERE. ————————————————————————————————— You can see some pages from Julia Gfrörer‘s new book Laid Waste (Fantagraphics, November 2016) over on Flood Magazine, part of an interview with Julia that digs into her interest in the Middle Ages and the origins of this particular dark story. Check it out HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Kevin Czap was awarded the CXC 2016 Emerging Talent Award a few weeks ago during Cartoon Crossroads Columbus. In the words of Tom Spurgeon, who presented the award to an astonished Kevin, “…this goes to a cartoonist whom we feel has plenty of promise as a cartoonist and has shown themselves to be a solid and giving community member as well… We love everything we’ve ever learned about you, in terms of your comics community heart.” Alyssa Berg caught up with Kevin a week later and continued the conversation about CXC, comics, and community – and the type of energy a person consciously puts into their work. Their conversation is featured here on the site today. Catch Kevin and Czap Books at Comic Arts Brooklyn this weekend! ————————————————————————————————— The Comics Workbook Roller Derby League has shared the results of a recent “roller derby bout”. The group is constantly expanding, while dialing in a deeper team practice and refining the goals and projects that we’re about. Much more to come – meanwhile, check out some comics we’ve made recently. See the rest of this “derby bout” HERE. ————————————————————————————————— #sallyingraham #comics A video posted by Sally Ingraham (@sally_ingraham) on Nov 2, 2016 at 9:57pm PDT Have a fantastic weekend folks, and get up to some mischief. Don’t let November get to you yet – and don’t forget to turn your clocks back an hour on Sunday! – Sally (Rogue) Share this page: [...]

05/02/2017

Aaron CockleMay 2, 2017NewsAaron here today with Risography!, Kickstarter(s) of Note; Anthologies of Europa; The Necrophilic Landscape; Fax Art; Jacob Khepler. ————————————————————————————————— A p-shop airbrush set to “dissolve” Frank Santoro continues to look at recent use and development of comics printed on Risograph machines. This time around he talks with John Pham: I’ve noticed risograph printers have “meet-ups,” little fairs and conventions. I imagine it is like any other subculture, however this one interests me because of the direct connection to book making. It reminds me of zine culture and comics fandom in a way. Can you speak to how risograph printers are different than other printers, beyond obvious differences in materials? I’ve got a lot respect for the other Riso printers out there, folks like Mickey Z, Colour Code, George Wietor and Sarah McNeil. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a really sloppy and brutal printer. Printing my books is one of the last steps in my process and at that point I’m usually pretty sleep deprived and grouchy. So I kinda just shove the books through the printer and try to troubleshoot as I go along. This sort of urgency probably creates its own aesthetic but I’m definitely not as knowledgeable or precise as a lot of the printers mentioned above. I think the differences between riso printers and other kinds of printers is pretty negligible, but they’re likely to be more inclined to focus on holistic book making than, say, just prints and covers. ————————————————————————————————— Tiny Report and Retrofit Comics 2 contemporary comics institutions are currently Kickstarting publishing endeavors: Robyn Chapman’s Paper Rocket Minicomics continues its increasingly vital small press efforts, with plans to publish the annual micro-press yearbook, The Tiny Report, as well as the second issue of Colin Lidston’s Age of Elves, for its Spring 2017 line-up. Retrofit Comics is gathering funds for another super-ambitious collection of comics: Combed Clap of Thunder by Zach Hazard Vaupen Steam Clean by Laura Ķeniņš How To Be Alive by Tara Booth Iceland by Yuichi Yokoyama Tales from the Hyperverse by Will Cardini TRUMPTRUMP vol. 1: nomination to inauguration by Warren Craghead III ————————————————————————————————— ‘In this context, the works are comics, sequential art, visual narrative, comics-adjacent storytelling, informatics and some other lumpy labels for stuff that tells a story with pictures.’ Elsewhere on the CW site, Matt Rhodes writes about European comics anthologies: Through the 1920s, there was a series of art journals and publications put out by various art groups in Europe: de Stilj, Dada, Cannibale, Le Couer, Cabaret Voltaire. Due to modern advances in printing technology, it is easier to self-publish zines with better production values. But it’s also interesting to note that the impulse to run an amateur publication of random stuff is perfectly normal. There’s a certain amount of debate regarding how and when the cartooning tradition in Western Europe became the comics tradition of Western Europe. Some point to the broadsheets of the 17 century that introduced the twin concepts of anthologies and episodic storytelling as a precursor to modern sequential art. But it’s more likely that comics as we know them grew up during the 19th Century. And anthologies were an important part of that maturation. ————————————————————————————————— “No one would expect that these two figures are in fact a single man: the fearless detective Lucas Barrette.” Greg Hunter reviews Tracy Auch’s excellent The Necrophilic Landscape over at TCJ: Despite being, unrelentingly, an art comic, The Necrophilic Landscape isn’t shy about utilizing genre conventions. Pulpy, ironic narration describes the detective’s quest, the sort that would not have been on a ’40s radio serial: “No one would expect that these two figures are in fact a single man: the fearless detective Lucas Barrette.” (The detective, for his part, bears a sideways resemblance to McGruff the Crime Dog.) The children’s means of infiltrating the adult world echoes the comedy trope of two kids walking one atop the other in a single large coat. And the story’s dystopian trappings provide a context for Barrette’s fantastical procedure. But the most compelling generic element is one the story shares with horror: the protagonist, Barrette, stands for order and orthodoxy, with the story’s antagonists, the children, deviating from that orthodoxy—and readers are likely to empathize with the antagonists to a degree that the protagonist does not. (By the end of the comic, Barrett hasn’t assumed the role of villain, but he doesn’t have much of a defense to offer on behalf of the prevailing order.) ————————————————————————————————— Fax Machines and Their Discontents For those interested in showing dissatisfaction with the recent talk about the National Endowment for the Arts de-funding, and who are also able to access a fax machine, and who also want to be artistic about it, Claire Voon at Hyperallergic has a piece about organizations contacting United States Congresspeople via fax: The process may sound archaic in 2017, but as Kathryn Schulz recently wrote for The New Yorker, faxes do reach congressional representatives. They get entered into a “constituent-management system” like any other message, and staffers will read each one. And as Schulz reported, personalized forms of material communication actually have more sway on a lawmaker’s opinion than a phone call. Faxing a message may take much more time — but that’s why services like Artifax are particularly handy for amplifying your concerns while adding a little creative flair to your political activism. ————————————————————————————————— Jacob Khepler‘s run at the Outline has ended, but he has preserved the column he wrote weekly from Dec. 2016-April 2017 HERE. Never one to lose momentum, he is currently working on editing a Mothers News collection book among other projects. ————————————————————————————————— A Cosmic Journey – 5-2-2017 – by Cameron Arthur ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 5-2-2017 – by Gabriella Tito ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 5-2-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

04/17/2018

Aaron CockleApril 17, 2018NewsAaron here today with Latin American Art; Remembering Geneviève Castrée; Banksy/Zehra Doğan; Retrofit Comics 2018 Subscription ————————————————————————————————— Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 At the Brooklyn Museum through July 22: The artworks on view range from painting and sculpture to photography, video, performance, and other new mediums. Included are emblematic figures such as Lygia Pape, Ana Mendieta, and Marta Minujín, alongside lesser‐known names such as Cuban‐born abstract painter Zilia Sánchez; Colombian sculptor Feliza Bursztyn; Peruvian composer, choreographer, and activist Victoria Santa Cruz; and Argentine mixed‐media artist Margarita Paksa. The Brooklyn presentation also includes Nuyorican portraits by photographer Sophie Rivera, as well as work from Chicana graphic arts pioneer Ester Hernández, Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez, and Afro-Latina activist and artist Marta Moreno Vega. ————————————————————————————————— “Poetry seemed useless in the context of actual annihilation.” On Studio 360, Kurt Anderson talks with Phil Elverum, husband of Geneviève Castrée, who passed away in 2016, about Elverum’s recent Mount Eerie albums, which are about Castrée’s death. Her last book, A Bubble, will be published in June by D&Q. ————————————————————————————————— Zehra Doğan/Banksy Patricia Mastricolo at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund wrote about the Banksy mural protesting the imprisonment of Turkish artist and journalist Zehra Doğana few weeks back: This first night the mural was revealed, a projection of the dark painting Doğan is imprisoned for showed over the mural. Based off a photo Doğan saw, she painted the rubble of a Kurdish town, destroyed by tanks, with the Turkish flag flying over the town. She painted the tanks as surreal monsters. The Turkish government said that the painting compromised military security, even though it was based on a government photograph. ————————————————————————————————— Retrofit Comics 2018 All the Sad Songs – Summer Pierre Fashion Forecasts – Yumi Sakugawa I Love You – Sara Lautman John, Dear – Laura Lannes Our Wretched Town Hall – Eric Kostiuk Williams The Prince – Liam Cobb Survive 300 Million 1 – Pat Aulisio Survive 300 Million 2: Serpentine Captives – Pat Aulisio The Troublemakers – Baron Yoshimoto TRUMPTRUMP vol. 2: Modern Day Presidential – Warren Craghead III Understanding – Becca Tobin The Winner – Karl Stevens ————————————————————————————————— Vision Box – 4-17-2018 – by Cameron Arthur ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 4-17-2018 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

11/09/2018

Sally IngrahamNovember 9, 2018NewsSally Ingraham here – I am traveling at the moment, going to birding festivals (which are a lot like comics expos!) in TX and NM. I am seeing rare and interesting birds, meeting amateur and professional naturalists and ornithologists and quite a few “bird artists”. When I walk the floor of the vender show at these birding festivals, I see similarities to the small press comics community – but I am one of the few people who plays in both sandboxes. Increasingly, I am a “bird comics” maker. Right before this trip I gathered all of my birding comics into one place – check them out on Instagram by following me at @duck_hollow_comics. My work is documentary and verging on journal comics, especially when I make them on the fly, in the middle of a birding trip, as seen below: Typical “rare bird” behavior! Incidentally, the Golden-Crowned Warbler, which we DID NOT see, is a Central American warbler that has ventured a bit further north than it usually does. The Buff-bellied Hummingbird which you see in the comic above – one of the birds that we DID see – is not a rarity for South Texas, but it is not a species I ever see in my usual haunts of Western PA! (Apologies for my bird nerd moment!) I met another “bird comics” maker at the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival yesterday – Rosemary Mosco, who became well known for her web comics Bird and Moon. Science and nature cartoons! I have been a fan of her work for awhile, and it was terrific to meet her and immediately find a kindred spirit. Just briefly we touched on the interesting and historic significance of science comics, and the relationship between female artists and nature, and the overlooked impact of amateur female naturalists on science, etc. Great stuff. Check out Rosemary Mosco’s work and if you haven’t already, be sure to follow me on Instagram too. See you out there, on the road or somewhere in nature! Share this page: [...]

03/12/2018

Posted on March 11, 2018March 11, 2018 by Caleb Orecchio

Caleb Orecchio here with Dirty Plotte #1 by Julie Doucet, and other news.

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I was rummaging through the back-issues at Copacetic Comics here in Pittsburgh, and I miraculously came across a copy of Julie Doucet’s Dirty Plotte #1. Whatta treat! The idea of finding it “in the wild” was almost as exciting as finding it period. That’s a classic Comics Workbook lesson in format. Imagine if Doucet had made her comics in various ACME Novelty dimensions, I’d never find the individual issues ever!

This encounter and subsequent reading of the issue reminded me of Doucet’s intensity as a cartoonist. An unfettered intensity and earnestness in both narrative and drawing. A simultaneity that basically went unrivaled among her comics graduating class (the exception probably being Chester Brown). Even in our current comics community, I am hard-pressed to think of any cartoonist that revels so deeply and gleefully in one’s day-to-day routine of life, fantasies and bodily functions—and in a completely fun and personal way. Which is fine, it’s just something I notice.

That day at Copacetic, I also took home Frank Miller and Lynn Varley’s Ronin #1, an old Marvel Team-Up, an issue of Special Forces by Kyle Baker, and Destroyer Duck #2 by Steve Gerber and Jack Kirby; but Dirty Plotte #1 was the real stand-out find of the day I think.

Check out Mardou’s appreciation of Doucet’s work on this very site.

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if you don’t know, now you know

Thee great Eddie Campbell has a brand spankin’ new website, complete with an amazing and hilarious limited weekly webcomic.
Michael Dooley has two reviews up on Print, one on Monograph by Chris Ware, and the other on Fun by Paolo Bacilieri.
Sean Howe on the thee great Billy Graham at The New York Times.

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Suzy and Cecil – 3-12-2018 – by Sally Ingraham

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Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Posted in NewsTagged dirty plotte, julie doucet

Caleb Orecchio

Posted on March 11, 2018March 11, 2018

Explore

01/17/2018

Juan FernándezJanuary 17, 2018los Cómics / NewsJuan empieza el día con Klari Moreno dibuja-charl-ando con Jose Ja Ja Ja en Revista Cactus, Panchulei en La Polola, y más! ——————————————— En el último número de Revista Cactus, Klari Moreno dibujo una entrevista a José Ja ja ja. Es un verdadero placer ver este formato de entrevista entre dibujantes. “José Ja Ja Ja se dedicaba precisamente a diseñar casas cuando trabajaba de arquitecto, hasta que lo dejó para hacer comics y seguir, a su manera, contando historias, como nos cuenta en una entrevista gráfica.” Podéis leerla completa aquí. ————————————————————————————————— Los cómics y las noticias que me han llamado la atención esta semana: ~ In English and en Español ~ Sol Díaz Castillo y Marcela Trujillo tienen una nueva edicion de La Polola Podcast! Las chicas conversan con Panchulei (Francisca Cárcamo) dibujante, escritora, editora de Pánico Ediciones y dueña de la librería del mismo nombre. Hablaron acerca de la injusta diferencia en la cantidad de hombres versus la cantidad de mujeres invitadas a festivales, conversaron acerca del mundo de la historieta, los festivales, las mejoras que pueden construir y los espacios que aún faltan por explorar. Enero viene con sus listas de propósitos y también con las de las nuevas obras que pasan al dominio público. ¿Te apetece conocer algunos de los entresijos del DOMINIO PUBLICO? Firmado Por, tu asesor en derechos del autor, te lo cuenta en el post de hoy! Crítica de “Sadboi” de Berliac y publicado por Sapristi Comic a cargo de Álvaro Arbonés en CuCo 9. Reseña doble del excepcional rescate por parte de El Nadir de los trabajos de Gustave Doré y Olaf Gulbransson. Un auténtico tesoro revisado por Óscar Gual que además sirve para revisar algunas cuestiones formales del arte secuencial. ————————————————————————————————— Convocatorias + Deadlines: ¡¡Convocatoria abierta del I Concurso Nacional de Cómic Biblioteca Insular de Gran Canaria!! 3 premios y 9 accésits con una dotación de entre 3.000 y 400 euros y la publicación de las obras ganadoras en un volumen conjunto editado por Astiberri. Bases. Deadline Reminder: submissions for Ink Brick no. 9 are due Monday, Feb 19, 2018! Do yourself a favor and submit your comics-poetry, won’t you? La Casa Encendida y Fulgencio Pimentel siguen buscando un libro. La convocatoria de #PuchiAward 2018 está abierta a todo tipo de géneros y formas: ficción, no ficción, novela, poesía, cómic, álbum ilustrado, ensayo, libro de cocina, geografía… Hasta el 25 de enero. Call for Chapter Contributions: Comics Beyond the Page in Latin America. ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 01-17-2018 – by Gabriella Tito Share this page: [...]

Juan Fernandez @ CAB 2016

Juan FernándezNovember 14, 2016Festivals and ShowsComic. Arts. Brooklyn. 2016: Comics, zines, prints. A shmorgasbord of color. A dazzling display of print. The 2016 Comic Arts Brooklyn (CAB) presented by Brooklyn’s Desert Island Comics was held on Saturday, November 5th. Organized by Desert Island proprietor Gabe Fowler, this marks the fourth year that the show has been called CAB and the eighth year of the show, which was originally called The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival. Gabe has turned the fest into a well-oiled machine and this year featured satellite events the day before and the day after the Saturday exhibitors showcase at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church. Friday saw Altcomics 8, a night of music, live comics readings, and art hosted by 2dcloud, along with the opening of Buzz Saw, an exhibition of art from the Sequential Artists Workshop. Sunday saw Color Giants, the Brooklyn Animation Expo, which was held in conjunction with Art Brooklyn Fireproof. Screenings were programmed by Kenneth Filmer. There were no panels or artist spotlights this year. A bummer in some ways, but given the last minute green lighting of this year’s CAB, it makes sense to not have wanted to rush programming only to wind up with subpar panels. I exhibited as Comics Workbook and tabled next to the great Julia Gfrörer and Sean T. Collins, alongside Patrick Kyle(and Lala Albert who set up shop at Patrick’s table towards the end of the day). The Comics Workbook table consisted of myself, Jenn Lisa, Ronald Wimberly and Simon Reinhardt. I thought it was a wonderful show. Rumors had been going around earlier this year that it wasn’t going to happen. Well, IT HAPPENED! A huge thank you to Mr. Fowler for the last minute opportunity to exhibit at this year’s CAB. Comics Workbook got word late in the week that there was a need for another exhibitor. Of course, we agreed to go. You don’t miss CAB. We hunkered down prepared a wide array of comics to bring to the good folks of New York. Unfortunately Frank’s car had been giving him trouble all week and was in the shop. We planned everything carefully. I would leave with Jenn Lisa and haul what I could. He would get it out of the garage Saturday morning and he would book it to make it in the afternooon Saturday to catch the second half of the buzzing show. Unlike Frank though, I can’t haul short box after short box of comics in my VW Bug… We had to decide what would go first and then did some intense tetris outside the Rowhouse Residency to fit in as much as we could. We slammed the trunk and hauled ass to NYC! Frank would bring the rest in the morning. Jenn Lisa and I hit the road, spirits high. We arrived early Saturday morning, got some shut eye and then booked it for Our Lady of Mt. Carmel in the morning. I was worried about parking, so Jenn and I took off to set up as early as we could. Frank’s taught me how critical these kind of considerations are for making these exhausting days fall into place. We lucked out out and found a spot right in front of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel. Unloading and setting up was a breeze. We were tabling next to Patrick Kyle, Lala Albert, Julia Gfrörer and Sean T. Collins. Good folks. I told Jenn to get ready, because CAB’s prime time is 11-1:30. A choc-a-bloc that builds to a fever pitch. Everyone’s oogling and oggling round that time. Most attendees hope to make a full tour of the show before breaking out their wallets, but within that first hour I heard that attendees just couldn’t wait on buying so-an-so’s latest book or zine. They knew that things were going to fast. We sold a Truth Zone within the first 20 minutes of the show. That set the tone for the show. It was wonderful to meet so many people. Lots of people were familiar with what we’d been doing over the past year in Pittsburgh with the house and with the residencies. It emboldens the spirit to know that what we’re doing is rippling out. A HUGE shout out to all former students that came by and traded your books with us! You know who you are <3 Jenn and I brought a lot of our own books and were excited to share them with New Yorkers. I sold out of my zine I Can See the Birds, which was awesome. What else sold well? Connor. Willumsen. This is his show! Everyone was asking for his stuff. We sold out of all the copies of Swinespritzen that we brought which was a real thrill. That Connor… The great Ronald Wimberly stepped up to the plate at 2PM to do a signing and the fans start piling up. He brought the goods. While his fans waited, to chat with the shinobi himself, they dug through our shortboxes. We riffed on the primo comics Frank had curated. It was a good time. They found some 80s gold. No one curates a small selection of comics like Frank… Ron had brought the Artist edition of Prince of Cats, the Attack on Titan anthology he was in and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Ron is one of the most exciting comics makers I can think of right now. His blade cuts across a thousand forms. He gives his fans, new and old, the attention they deserve while he signs. It was a real honor to work by his side on Saturday! Image did right by this edition of Prince of Cats. It’s glorious. Lots of people asked for Frank. In the end his mechanics in Pittsburgh let him down. This CAB was lacking in it’s requisite levels of Santoro. Alas! For all of those who left messages, rest assured, we passed along all the memos to Frank. There were so many amazing books of all shapes and sizes. Here are some of my favorites: Lale Westvind’s Breakdown Press book, Hax Anya Davidson’s Gloom Planet Alabaster Pizzo’s Mimi and the Wolves Act 3: The Howl Conor Stechschulte’s new self published print masterpiece, Christmas In Prison. Richard Short’s Klaus Magazine 2 On a personal level, I was especially startled by how many people were familiar with my own zines and comics. Comics Workbook has been sharing some of them through our social media network over the past year, but I never expected people to be hep to my work just yet! The reach that the blog and the social media network has is really inspiring. There’s still some viral mystery to it all… CAB is such a whirlwind of a show. It’s definitely the New York City atmosphere. It all just goes by so fast. It was busy. Sales were solid. There are so many comics festivals these days (curated and non-curated) that I know for a fact that I can’t handle more than regional shows around Pittsburgh and the heavy hitters around the East Coast. It’s a delight to end the season with CAB, you leave inspired with work that invites you to pore over it all winter long. I firmly believe that the most interesting, and arguably pioneering comics makers are all in a room at CAB(some come every other year). Wish that I could have gone around and interviewed people about their work! That’ll be for next year. I wound up holding down the fort at the Comics Workbook table. The comics weren’t going to sell themselves 😉 Towards the end of the show Simon M. Reinhardt arrived to hold it down and I was able to make the rounds. Thanks Simon! Here are some photos of only a few of the many amazing people I bumped into. Gabe’s got the market place down to a science. So, naturally, I’m interested to see the ways in which CAB continues to evolve. Will it stabilize into being an amped up zine fest and wild style art book fair that focuses exclusively on the marketplace? Will someone step in to lend a hand to the team to develop some track of programming during the weekend or the week before? To return to it’s BCGF format. Does that matter? Who’s ready to step up to the plate? On the floor I heard some people discuss this being the last CAB. And damn, that’s a little pessimistic. For what it’s worth, CAB can’t be beat for a lot of reasons. Easy access via transportation. Trains, plains, buses, cars all make their way easily to NYC. For the most part either you know someone in the City or there’s an affordable place to stay for a night or two. The crowds are great. People are squeezing CAB into their busy Saturday. It’s just one of many things they’re doing so they bring an incredible energy into the space. Most people likely just heard that there was something cool with comics going on in that one church in Brooklyn. That’s a good place to be. Gabe’s curation can’t be beat. You wan’t to find the coolest books published in a year? You can’t do any better in the US than coming to CAB. Oh and people come ready to spend money. Real money. I think it’s been year of a lot of change for comics shows. A new regime of shows is definitely falling into place. CAB showed that it is definitely a part of that new regime. As a show, it does what so few comics can do. It’s got the verve of Montreal’s legendary Expozine. When it comes to art comics and accessible art from the outer limits – It can’t be beat. Mr. Fowler’s extensive knowledge of “what’s happening” in comics comes directly out of his experience as a retailer and it’s clear he curates the show like he curates his store. Desert Island is a great store which serves its community. In my eyes, it’s a must stop for an any all comics pilgrims that travel along the East Coast. I urge everyone to go to CAB next year. It’s a different show than TCAF and a very different show then SPX and CXC. Whether you are a maker or a reader, it’s good to go to them all if you can. It bears repeating – to soak up all these shows and to be at the epicenter of new work and current conversations – YOU DON’T NEED TO BE EXHIBITING. Just pack your bags, grab a bunch of your zines and hop on a bus. While you’re there, give away some books, maybe trade some, take some photos and notes! You’ll come home with lots of ideas and inspiration. There’ll be a lot of new encounters with other makers known and unknown. These shows are where it all happens. You get to meet the authors who are making some of the most amazing work in the world at the moment. Worth it’s weight in gold. -can’t wait for next year, Juan Share this page: [...]

January Comics Salon 2016

Juan FernándezJanuary 12, 2016ResourcesPittsburgh Comics Salon – January 6, 2016 Good crowd again tonight. Did some easy drawing exercises while we chit-chatted. This is our one year anniversary for meeting regularly and so far so good. Feels less forced. More natural.We highly recommend starting a comics club that meets regularly wherever you live. –FS —————- Juan Fernandez here! Every month during the Salon we focus on exploring a new way of thinking about visual literacy in comics. What does it mean to compose a page? What are the different ways you can draw from memory? The focus today was point of view. This month I brought some photos and wanted participants to create an 8 panel comic. Unbeknownst to the Salon this was my family from Teruel, Spain from 1953. Each participant was to render the scene in 3-5 minutes on a notecard, choosing one of the people in the photograph as the character through whom they would depict the world. They were to draw simple things. Their hands, what they saw above them, an object nearby, a detail of that object, their wrist. After completing 8 drawings, they arranged and added to their sequences in a way they found pleasing. They would be focusing on making be studies in point of view. So why’d we do all this? Alright, hear me out, point of view in comics is an interesting thing. More often than not the goings on in comics pages occur via characters acting out on a “stage”. The camera moves from panel to panel, the setting changes. The reader is a viewer. A voyeur. It doesn’t always have to be this way though. There are ways to make the reader an actor. When you move between a character’s point of view, of their hands and looking up at the sky it’s about their vision. It’s their mindset. The images can expand as the reader improvises how the character’s vision joins them together. Whereas if you draw a whole scene that shows a character over and over, the reader is an outsider in relation to the story, a spectator. The reader is making a mental model of the character, how and why they perceive what they perceive. This mode of unfolding a narrative creates a space for empathy. To understand that character you have to BE that character for a short while, moving back and forth between panels, trying to put together the how and why of a character. The comic is then a living tissue, you’ve extended your mind into it. Those mental jumps that the reader makes between panels, the understanding of why a character holds their gaze or focuses on a new object, it fills the space between the panels with empathy. Aidan Koch, among others, is brilliantly adept at using this technique. Just another tool to think about for your comics making arsenal. -Juan Fernandez Share this page: [...]

8/22/2016

Juan FernándezAugust 22, 2016NewsJuan here with the latest over here at CW: Hernandez Brothers’ Rowhouse Residency Benefit Auction; Gabriella Tito’s HOMESICK; PORTRAITS by Connor Willumsen pre-orders; MORIYAMA’S DOG by Berliac; Sloane Leong’s MAPS TO THE SUN; Julia Gfrörer BLACK IS THE COLOR back in print; new STREET ANGEL from Jim Rugg; Ben Sears’ print sale. ——————————————————————————————————————— Los Bros Hernandez Benefit Auction You heard it hear first, folks, thee great Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez have generously donated art and comics to benefit the Comics Workbook Rowhouse Residency! Our auction runs through Saturday August 27th at 3pm. Get in on it while you can! ——————————————————————————————————————— Gabriella Tito revisiting Homesick I’m happy to announce that we are featuring Gabriella Tito’s Homesick on the site this week. Tito made Homesick for the first issue of Zona (Comics Workbook, January 2016), channeling her considerable drawing chops into a story of quiet exploration in black and white. During her recent Comics Workbook Rowhouse Residency, Gabriella revisited her comic in a unique way. She decided to color it, experimenting with different mediums ranging from airbrush to pencils, taking this burst of new energy directly to the printed pages of Frank Santoro’s personal copy. The results are quite amazing. We are thrilled to share those pages HERE! ——————————————————————————————————————— Portraits by Connor Willumsen Comics Workbook is very pleased to present a new book from Connor Willumsen – Portraits. Available now for pre-order – get your copy HERE! Connor is one of our original CW samurais. He will be joining Frank Santoro at The Lakes International Comic Arts Festival this fall, teaching workshops and sharing his process. Look for him there! ——————————————————————————————————————— Moriyama’s Dog – Berliac Berliac‘s got a new comic up on Vice! The printed version of Moriyama’s Dog was originally published Kus! #25: “Gaijin Mangaka”. ——————————————————————————————————————— Maps to the Sun – Sloane Leong Sloane Leong‘s got a new one for ya. It’s a short comic about two girls during a hot whirlwind of a summer. Leong knows how to make a comic breathe. Check it out, it’ll make your heart heavy. ——————————————————————————————————————— ————————————————————————————————— Black is the Color: Back in Print It’s true, Julia Gfrörer‘s Black is the Color is back in print from Fantagraphics Books! – to celebrate we have a review by Bill Boichel up on the site. Check out the video above for an in depth discussion from 2014 between Julia Gfrörer & Tucker Stone on Black is the Color at The Strand in NYC. ——————————————————————————————————————— Ben Sear’s Printsale Ben Sears’ is having a print sale on his site to cover some unexpected expenses. Here’s your chance to pick up some of his delicious prints for that special someone. For discounts, enter “printsale” at checkout. There’s so much to choose from when it comes to Sear’s art! ——————————————————————————————————————— until next time! JF 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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