Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Posted in NewsTagged Alejandra Gutiérrez, Anna Haifisch, caleb orecchio, Cathy Guisewite, hazel newlevant, jessica campbell, julia gfrorer, leela corman, marie duval, mary tourtel, nancy, olivia jaimes, Pénélope Bagieu

Sally Ingraham

Posted on April 12, 2018April 13, 2018

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The Hannah K. Lee Interview

Chris Anthony DiazSeptember 20, 2018Interviews / The Diaz ArchiveRecently nominated in the 2018 Ignatz Awards Outstanding Collection category for her book Language Barrier, congrats to Hannah K. Lee! Here is an interview conducted before Language Barrier was announced as a Koyama Press publication, which is content gathered from Lee’s zines Issues and Close Encounters along with new work, exclusive to the book. A couple of years ago, I first discovered this work through these zines as well as in commercial periodicals like The Pitchfork Review. I view lee’s illustrations not only like cartooning/comics but also influenced by graphic design/iconography and typography. Her work begins from these disciplines but becomes more and ultimately something unique after. Special thanks to Hannah K. Lee for her time doing this interview and providing earlier drafts of her Issues sketches for #2 and #3, offering further insight visually into her process. Graham Willcox color finished the three photos of Lee below, taken at CAB 2015 and TCAF 2014. Annie Ishii (right) This interview was conducted in 2015 via email. Chris Anthony Diaz: In Shoes Over Bills no. 2, there’s a dichotomy in the page layout of materialism and desires (shoes) on the left side of the two-page spread and monthly obligations and needs (bills) on the right side of the spread, rendered in your colorful, stylized, retro graphics and typography. It’s a potent expression of what choices a young woman faces, enticed by beauty to spend her earnings on. Like two sides of a debate, one side wooing her to buy gratification in possessions or the other side pitching her to commit to practicality, like eating. How did this zine come about for you and what was the original impetus of this theme? (The dichotomy appears again in Everyone Else Is Younger And More Talented, so it appears to be a theme or expression that you are concerned with.) Hannah K. Lee: Issues #2: Shoes over Bills was first a smaller chapter of a bigger project I wanted to do called No Money Mo Problems, A “lifestyle guide for impoverished freelancers”. A lot of those ideas were stupid, so I extracted Shoes over Bills and made it its own project. I started it right before I started my corporate day job, when I was learning about boring adult things like money management and regular visits to the dentist. (This is a sketch for Shoes over Bills, before it was a zine) CAD: What attracts you to product graphic iconography, which is the theme in Mascots no. 3? and please speak a little how it manifests its expression in your graphic illustration, which appears to have a graphic influence of russian constructivism. HKL: Issues #3: Mascots first came about when I drew portraits of the Zig Zag man and the Chiquita Banana girl. I made the rest of Mascots with the risograph and overprint techniques in mind, which went well with the limited color palettes often seen in product iconography. Any kind of restriction will force you to find ways to say more with less. When it comes to working with a riso, the color choices are limited and the threshold for showing details is low. As a result, it seems that my work has been becoming more graphic as I exercise more restraint. CAD: How do you come up with merging the ordinary and familiar with the fantastic and surreal in your illustration? HKL: I studied Illustration in school, and we were trained to look for analogs and ideas in weird places to convey a concept, while trying to stay away from cliches. Every project I start begins with words, and then I write down everything that comes to mind that relates to those words. My sketchbook is actually 90% written gibberish that only makes sense to me, instead of thumbnails and doodles. CAD: Color (especially red appears consistently and predominately in your risograph publications) and typography are strong facets of your graphic imagery. Where do you find your inspiration and what do you look at regularly? HKL: Besides the work of other working illustrators, designers, and letterers, I like looking at packaging (fruit boxes and crates, foreign candy), flags, old and ornate rugs/textiles, pop music ephemera, Tumblr teens, fashion, clever logos, bad logos, old calligraphy, illuminated manuscripts, those kids’ Golden Books, I like to absorb and/or pick apart everything. When it comes to certain jobs that require a lot of research, I look at the design and illustration of that particular era and let that inform how it’ll turn out. For example, I just did a piece about the origins of ska, so I looked at a lot of 60’s album art coming out of Kingston. CAD: How has risograph printing affected your published output in these three publications: Mascots and Shoes Over Bills and Everyone Else Is Younger And More Talented? HKL: Someone told me once that if I make something to sell or to promote myself with, it’d better be something the recipient would want to keep. So with that in mind, it should be useful, meaningful, beautiful, or at least 2 of those. I like working with the risograph because it’s an efficient and cost-effective way to make your zine beautiful. There’s a resurgence going on in zine culture that’s very much about thematic or narrative self-expression and considered presentation. Despite my recent output though, I actually don’t think it’s always necessary to make your zine pretty! With a good idea or story, sometimes a xerox is all you need. Share this page: [...]

06/10/2016

Sally IngrahamJune 10, 2016NewsFrom Sally to you – interviews, reviews, and Rowhouse mischief. Dig in! ————————————————————————————————— The Rowhouse had a special guest this week – samurai ninja badass cartoonist Lale Westvind stopped by on her way to CAKE in Chicago. She spent an evening digging into Frank’s library, and somehow simultaneously drew four pages of a new comic, all the while sharing stories about her cross-country motorcycle adventures. You can catch up with her yourself at CAKE this weekend (table 42b), or if you’re not in Chicago, check out a nicely coincidental interview with Lale here on the Comics Workbook site – follow the link below. http://comicsworkbook.com/lale-westvind-sometimes-an-overgrown-golf-course-will-do/ ————————————————————————————————— Speaking of CAKE, there are lots of brilliant books debuting at the show. I’m particularly excited about Hip Hop Family Tree Vol. 4 by Ed Piskor. Here’s the whole list! ————————————————————————————————— Over on The Comics Journal RJ Casey reviewed Ben Sears‘ new book Night Air (Koyama Press, 2016). “I’m nostalgic for things not beholden to nostalgia. I want to read adventure comics without the guilt of knowing that the original creators died flat broke and drowning in menacing legalese. I want to laugh at jokes that aren’t slathered in sanctimonious pandering. Frankly, I’m on the lookout for fun comics with no icky strings attached. So thank goodness for Night Air.” – RJ Casey Read the whole review HERE. ————————————————————————————————— The Comics Beat has a review of Melissa Mendes‘ Lou (Oily Comics). John Seven writes: “Mendes presents a full picture of this family’s life, working with multiple perspectives in reaction to the possibility of getting a puppy, as well as Lou’s hang-outs in an abandoned theater with her buddies, the shady dealings that Eddie encounters at the pizza place, and the mother’s reminiscence of the simpler, more intimate life with her husband before her children came along. Mendes brings all these pieces together to present a family as a form of super organism that can be jolted or made buoyant be the way separate parts of its life fester or expand. The mundanity of a new puppy can bounce up against the desperate actions of a criminal to create the family dynamic.“ Read the rest of the review HERE. ————————————————————————————————— Around the Comics Workbook HQ, we’re still processing the successful first official residency that took place last week. Mahmoud Hashemi, one of the two fellows who joined us, sent us a detailed report of his experience which we will share more of soon. For the moment, here’s the light touch, in Mahmoud’s words: “From May 28th to June 2nd, 2016, I visited Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I went to work with Frank Santoro on Matt Conway’s game Homemake. Overall it was a great vacation because it wasn’t your typical beachside retreat. Rather, it was mounting an effort to renew creativity and productivity on Matt Conway’s longstanding project, Homemake. … Frank’s own creative methods have a focus on systems, especially jazz-inspired rhythmic systems, making them an exceptional fit with Homemake‘s motivations and goals. I was skeptical at first, but it worked wonders. This effectiveness may have been magnified because half of Homemake‘s vision was disparate moments, a grab bag of mental notes about certain aesthetics. This method allowed Matt to express all his thoughts and editors, like me and Frank, to come through, see the patterns a reader would want to see, and develop the most coherent narrative. Everyone wins.” Look for more from Mahmoud and Matt and Frank on the exceptional days they spent together here on Comics Workbook soon! ————————————————————————————————— Have a great weekend folks! – Sally Share this page: [...]

04/26/2018

Caleb OrecchioApril 26, 2018NewsCaleb Orecchio here filling in for Sam, and I’ve just read Prime Cuts #1! ————————————————————————————————— I am always interested in expanding the breadth of my comics knowledge, and was happy when Frank loaned me the first two issues of the Fantagraphics anthology, Prime Cuts. Published at the height of comics’ new respectable reputation in 1987. A nice black and white magazine featuring various comics work of the time from cutting edge cartoonists like Eddie Campbell, underground veterans like R. and Aline Crumb, and reprints of Cliff Sterrett sunday pages; and many many more. The mag even featured prose fiction, plus a great (as always) spirited editorial by Gary Groth in the first issue. The first two issues are solid, but definitely reflect the times and the growing pains of independent comics. A lot of stories are clunkers and seem so stiff and outdated to my millennial eyes, though they don’t take away from the great work. My favorite comic in the first issue has to be Eddie Campbell’s strip “Blues Blues Blues.” Campbell’s work really sings and emits much more electricity than the its neighbors. The strip is dated “’83” and it’s hard to tell if this was when the comic was made or when it takes place or both. Either way, the strip feels pertinent. Though I hate to use this cliché when describing art, “Blues Blues Blues” is kind of sexy. Sexy in the way one would describe Mean Streets or Reservoir Dogs at the time those movies were released if you liked them (and people tended to either love or hate them). There’s a freshness to the comic that you can’t help but be attracted to. The story emphasizes the recklessness of youth. The constant drinking and smoking and mingling and sulking and loving and losing that young people simultaneously rue and romanticize as they experience them. This idea is illustrated through a collage-y, unruled series of images supplemented by Campbell’s lyrical writing along the left side (Campbell is secretly one of comics’ best writers of words). Compound that with the signature loose-yet-perfect drawing, and you got yourself a classic. It feels like a diary or private confessional or memories jotted down in a notebook. I felt like I was hanging out with Campbell and George and all the other lads and lasses, smoking cigarettes and drinking liquor and splashing in the water. His hangover is my hangover. It’s excellent. Unfettered thoughts and embarrassing stories. Real intimate like a folk set in 1955 at Café Wha? or something “They don’t make ’em like they used to,” as the saying goes. I am simply smitten. ————————————————————————————————— if you don’t know, now you know Michael Tisserand on the cartoonist, Eugene Majied, who had a big impact on a certain famous boxer over at TCJ.com. While you’re there, check out the interview with Jared Smith of Big Planet Comics. Josh Simmons is the latest guest on Process Party. Rob Clough reviews books by Sara Lautman and Tom Van Deusen. ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 4-26-2018 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

Ch 5: The Figure in Detail (FACC)

Juan FernándezJanuary 1, 2016ResourcesShare this page: [...]

08/15/2017

Aaron CockleAugust 14, 2017NewsAaron Cockle here today with Maqsood-I-Kainaat; Tom of Finland; Wolk on Borges; FRAME Festival Open Call; Fake Photos! ————————————————————————————————— Maqsood-I-Kainaat, by Shreyas R Krishnan The 12th issue of the Ley Lines series is coming soon! Ley Lines is a quarterly publication dedicated to exploring the intersection of comics and the various fields of art & culture that inspire us. Co-published by Grindstone Comics and Czap Books. ————————————————————————————————— Tom of Finland, the Movie Touko Laaksonen gets the biopic treatment, and a fancy review at the Guardian. Considering the film’s subject matter, it actually contains very little sex – the main bedroom scene cuts from a kiss to the morning after. “The core fans were always saying: ‘I’ve seen the drawings, those are my sex, now I want to see the story of the man I idolise,’” says Karukoski. “So the amount of gay sex will come very much from the dramatic need. Where is the line where it becomes provocation? it overrides the emotional balance of the story.” Instead, much of the film focuses on the struggles Laaksonen endured as a gay man in conservative Finland, from facing jail as a young man after a pick-up went awry, to facing constant pressure from his younger sister never to express his true identity, since she believed it would bring shame on the family. “Even when I told her about him being accepted into the permanent collection at MoMA, her response was: ‘Well, what were they thinking?’” says Dehner, still hurt by the memory. The film, he says, is “touching – how terrible society has been to us and how conditional the love is from family members”. ————————————————————————————————— Webmaster Borges This is from way back in 1999, and probably the first piece I read by Douglas Wolk. Jorge Luis Borges and the Internet: Canny Borges never names the Web, of course: As “The Garden of Forking Paths” points out, in a riddle whose answer is chess, the only word that cannot be used is “chess.” But the meaning of his parables is specific and undeniable. The Aleph in the fiction of the same title, the portal through which one can see every point in the universe, is Netscape Navigator in all but name. The Zahir, an object that changes its form over time but monopolizes its owner’s attention forever, is none other than Microsoft Internet Explorer, as anyone who’s tried to unstick it from a computer’s operating system only to click fatally on an innocuous icon will tell you. (Consider, in fact, the alphabetical remove of Borges’ names for the browsers, his subtle jest on the Alpha and Omega of his new world.) ————————————————————————————————— Prague Comic Arts Festival Open Call Sign up for the FRAME festival and become a part of an emerging festival, full of comics, zines and illustrations! We welcome all small publishers, authors and illustrators. OPEN CALL is until 31.8. 2017. Each exhibitor can choose from two options for his presentation – a small table 110 x 55 cm or a large table 220 x 55 cm. The jury of Centrala and No Ordinary Heroes will then select approximately 50 exhibitors who will be contacted with detailed information on arrival and installation no later than September 10, 2017. ————————————————————————————————— ‘Research suggests that regardless of what you might think about your own abilities to spot a hoax, most of us are pretty bad at it.’ The BBC has a handy guide to spotting fake photos: Another giveaway is the colour of people’s ears. “If the Sun is behind me, my ears will look red from the front because you’ll see the blood,” he says. “If the light is coming from the front, you won’t see the red in the ear.” ————————————————————————————————— A Cosmic Journey – 8-15-2017 – by Cameron Arthur ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 8-15-2017 – by Sally Ingraham ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 8-15-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

04/13/2018

Posted on April 12, 2018April 13, 2018 by Sally Ingraham

Sally Ingraham here with Nancy and her new artist, Olivia Jaimes, plus many more “Inking Women”!

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The Washington Post reported earlier this week that for the first time in 85 years, the comic strip Nancy will be drawn by a woman! Olivia Jaimes takes on the legacy, and the future of the strip.

” “Nancy has been my favorite sassy grouch for a long time,” Jaimes says in a syndicate statement. “I’m excited to be sassy and grouchy through her voice instead of just mine, and I can complain to the whole world about things that bother me instead of just my friends and family.” “

Read the rest of the Washington Post story HERE.

In a new story from yesterday, the Washington Post digs in deeper, covering the origins and history of Nancy, why Roz Chast loves it, and what Olivia Jaimes brings to this new iteration of it – along with a look at her first strip, which was published Monday.

The internet continues to be “mums the word” on who Olivia Jaimes really is (the name is a psyeudonym) and what the webcomics that so impressed her new syndicate were… Heidi MacDonald and Mike Peterson have both theorized that her webcomic may have been a bit too “naughty” to sit in company with Nancy. We shall see where all this leads.

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Here’s a very worthy addition to the comic historian’s bookshelf. As much as I’ve been attempting to thoroughly familiarize myself with female cartoonists working in America, the tradition of women working in comics in the UK is just as lengthy and rich – and here’s the proof. In fact, editors Nicola Streeten and Cath Tate state that women have been making comics in England since 1760…! Britain’s first true comic character, Ally Slopper, was created by a woman named Marie Duval. I have bumped into info about Marie Duval before, and wrote about her HERE, but this was a new one to me:

“In 1920, Mary Tourtel created Rupert Bear for the Daily Express, and nearly a hundred years later her character is still going strong.“

A *Rupert Bear* comic from later in the comic’s history – drawn by Alfred Bestall- more about this comic HERE.

Mary Tourtel wrote and drew Rupert stories for 15 years, before her eyesight began to fail and Punch cartoonist Alfred Bestall took it over. There’s a bit more about Mary Tourtel HERE.

There is more info on The Inking Women HERE on the publisher’s website, as well as in this article. This is definitely a book I need to track down in person, however – I’ll get on that ASAP!

Incidentally, The Inking Women editor Nicola Streeten is one of the founders of Laydeez Do Comics, a woman led comics forum in the UK (with branches increasingly worldwide) . Read about the project HERE.

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Hazel Newlevant and Julia Gfrörer at MoCCA 2018

Chris Anthony Diaz shares a terrific photo journal of MoCCA 2018 for Comics Workbook – check it out HERE!

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Weekend Snacks

Leela Corman has a new comic up on Tablet Magazine about a visit to Buchenwald which left her feeling defiantly alive – read it HERE.
Hillary Brown looks at Penelope Bagieu’s Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World – for Paste Magazine.
Jessica Campbell takes on the tricky topic of “when your friend becomes a famous artist” – for Hyperallergic.
Do you hate Cathy (the comic strip by Cathy Guisewite)? If so, you are far from alone, but Juliet Kahn wants you to question why you hate it/her and asks you to consider why Cathy is perhaps one of the more important comic strips of last few decades. HERE on The Comics Journal.
While you’re on the Journal, check out Alejandra Gutiérrez‘s A Cartoonist’s Diary which has been going live this week and will be wrapping up today.
Hazlitt has an interview with Anna Haifisch about her new comic Von Spatz and other weirdness – HERE.

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Joanie and Jordie – 4-13-2018 – by Caleb Orecchio

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Comics Workbook

An online magazine for comics makers

Sally Ingraham

Posted on April 12, 2018April 13, 2018

Explore

06/26/2017

Caleb OrecchioJune 26, 2017NewsCaleb Orecchio here with thoughts on the art of Kull the Conqueror #3 by John Buscema and Klaus Janson. Plus, you guessed it, links! ————————————————————————————————— Here are some thoughts on one of my favorite look-but-don’t-read comics. Below are some highlights from the book I always refer to: Often when I am tired or depressed about comics, I will dig out Kull the Conqueror #3 (vol. 3). Penciled by John Buscema with inks and colors by Klaus Janson in 1983. I don’t “read” it because the writing sucks, but I love looking at the artwork. This is during a time when Buscema was no longer the next best thing to Kirby. He’s basically been dethroned by the likes of John Byrne and Frank Miller. He’s more or less the barbarian guy at this point. On the other hand, Janson is really hitting his stride. Post Miller-Daredevil and Pre-Dark Knight Returns, Janson is becoming one of the most sought-after inkers of the 80s. So it’s a bit of a transitional yin-yang comic and it harmonizes perfectly; the solid, “generic” drawing of Buscema laying the foundation down for Janson’s scratchy, energetic lines and rich colors—it just sings for me. The seasoned veteran fuses with the ambitious dynamo. The above spread is one of my favorite “passages” in the book. Notice the first panel on the left page. The clouds are green and yellow without any dividing lines in the inking to indicate any division of color. Usually an inker would have a line to “hold” the colors, basically guiding the colorist where the colors change. But since Janson is doing both, he can think in color. Color and lines combine to a point that feels much more cohesive than most mainstream comics of the time. And look at that torch. Instead of inking the outline of the fire, Janson cuts out the zipatone (dots) to make the fire seem more alive and bright. I also really like how he used brown to yellow to white to show the range of the torch. Again, no holding lines—and notice the sparse inking where he knew he wanted to use brown. I could go on and on about the little ways Janson makes this book interesting, but again, keep in mind that Buscema was a really solid penciler. He literally wrote the book on drawing Marvel comics. The concrete drawing of Buscema I think really let Janson stretch his legs; and I assume Buscema had a generally quick turnaround so I imagine working with Buscema lent itself to an inker or colorist taking their time to push themselves if they so desired. I will cap this off with an excerpt from Amazing Heroes No. 155 where Andy Mengels’ interview with Janson is the cover story for the issue. This is 1988—post-Dark Knight Returns, and Janson is gaining more penciling and writing credits. ————————————————————————————————— if you don’t know, now you know Matthew Thurber writes an excellent article for Artsy–“10 Cartoonists Every Art Lover Needs to Know” Françoise Mouly and Genevieve Bormes talk to Gary Panter at The New Yorker about his new book, Songy of Paradise. Sally covered this last week but I just really like this Mardou comic about her pregnancy and firing her doctor 38 weeks in. If you missed Friday’s post, give this comic a look. It’s so achingly personal, I cannot recommend it enough. I heard about this via Desert Island‘s Instagram—art from Dan Clowes’ tenure at Cracked over on Last of the Spinner Rack Junkies. Last but not least, there’s a new comics publisher in my hometown. This is indicative of Dayton, OH’s cultural taste: horror/fantasy—general genre. ————————————————————————————————— Suzy and Cecil – 6-26-2017 – by Sally Ingraham ————————————————————————————————— Joanie and Jordie – 6-26-2017 – by Caleb Orecchio Share this page: [...]

11/08/2016

Aaron CockleNovember 7, 2016NewsAaron here today with Triple Canopy CFP; Montreal Expozine & Philly Small Press Zine Faire; Moaz Eleman Comics; Ben Jones Interviewed; CAB Photos; Goethe Color Studies ————————————————————————————————— Canopy Canopy Canopy Triple Canopy has announced a call for proposals for it’s 23rd issue, Vanitas. In an age defined by extremes of finitude and excess, deprivation and luxury, what is vanity? How do we register our own transitoriness even as we strive against decay and senescence, by way of cryogenics labs, biotechnology innovations, spa treatments, and the hoarding of material goods and digital files? This issue explores contemporary meditations on mortality as well as the delights, delusions, and pressures of fleshly existence, and ranges from the much-heralded “end of death” to collective processes of aging to the pursuit of impossible—or nearly impossible—forms of beauty. The name is taken from the opulent, hyperrealist still lifes popularized by Dutch and Flemish painters in the seventeenth century, which symbolize the brevity of human life and essential emptiness of earthly pursuits, even as they advertise the artist’s ability to fix time. These paradoxical images prompt us to consider how and why we strive to overcome death while reminding us of our certain mortality. Apply via the online form. The deadline for submissions is Sunday, November 13, at 11:59 pm EDT. Commission recipients will be announced on December 15. ————————————————————————————————— Upcoming Shows in N.America In Montreal: EXPOZINE 2016 Saturday-Sunday, November 12-13, 11h-18h, free admission. Église Saint-Denis, 454 Laurier E. (main entrance 5075 Rivard, accessible entrance 5050 Berri) In Philadelphia: Philly Small Press Zine Faire Saturday, December 3, 12-5pm. Fleisher Art Memorial, 719 Catharine St, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19147 ————————————————————————————————— Distant Fires: A Sudanese-American ponders how much death a presidential candidate can be responsible for, by Moaz Eleman ————————————————————————————————— Lines of Thought: An Interview with Ben Jones – via Nicole Rudick at Hyperallergic: NR: Do you mean that shows like Adventure Time were created because imagery from the sixties and seventies has become more readily available through sites like Tumblr? BJ: Contemporary animation like Adventure Time is a complete celebration/homage/furthering of the language that Miyazaki, Crumb, Mœbius, and Disney created. If you watch that new Werner Herzog documentary Lo and Behold (2016), he interviews one of the three guys who invented the Internet, who says, “The Internet’s all wrong. A hyperlink isn’t a link. You don’t put Nike.com and click on it and it takes you to Nike, I never meant for that to happen.” A hyperlink was excerpting a stanza from Shakespeare, and when you would click on it, you would go to that part of the play. That’s all that hyperlinks were meant to do. Now, I don’t really care about that, but it shows you that the system of organizing information on the Internet is the Internet. And the fact that we have URLs that are links controls your whole reality, so much so that when you look at how we’re organizing data into platforms like Instagram – I mean, the fact that people are on Instagram all day and not the Internet just shows that how you’re linking to and presenting data is incredibly important. Tumblr was a platform that sped up kids’ understanding what good art was. Now, there are plenty of dolphin GIFs that are shit, but also in three minutes, Johnny Negron — sorry to keep using him as an example — could see every good thing ever made, whereas Chris Forgues and I were lucky to get half of that in our first twenty-four years of life. The Internet is decentralized, but Tumblr is a black hole of curation and appropriation and aggregation. It figured out art. It didn’t figure out the stock market or pornography. ————————————————————————————————— Some photos from this past weekend’s Comic Arts Brooklyn show, if you’re into that sort of thing – From the Publisher’s Weekly blog. See if you can spot your favorite cartoonist and/or human being (who attended CAB on Saturday, November 5). ————————————————————————————————— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Via Maria Popova at the Brainpickings blog, some lovely words and images regarding Goethe‘s theory of color. Goethe believed that there were only two pure colors, blue (“a darkness weakened by light”) and yellow (“a light which has been dampened by darkness”), but he was particularly interested in morphology — the study of forms. His theories of color were also heavily rooted in morphology — from his color wheel, a symmetrical arrangement of six colors against Newton’s asymmetry of seven, to his geometric diagrams of how the relationship between darkness and light shapes color. ————————————————————————————————— Also, today (Tuesday, November 8, 2016) is Election Day in the United States of America, please vote if you are eligible to do so. Share this page: [...]

Chicago, IL Scene Report

Frank SantoroJanuary 8, 2012Riff Raff / Scene ReportsThis week’s Scene Report is brought to you by Edie Fake. Thanks Flakes! —– It’s important to say one thing straight off the bat: Chicago loves comics like no other place I’ve ever been. It’s town is full of oddballs and oddities, a fermented blend of cheap rent, cheap beer, bad weather and good house shows…and somehow the result is a veritable hotbed of activity in all directions. Let’s start this report on my block. Down four flights of stairs from my apartment you’ll find Anya Davidson working furiously on her next graphic onslaught in a studio surrounded by many animals and no windows. She’s made these super lush silkscreened comics for years, usually in itty-bitty editions of five or so, but now she’s also got some killer pages in the Kramer’s E. that just came out, so get on it. When we make it out the door of the building and just head down the block, we’ll be at Robin Hustle’s house. Hustle not only draws perverse zine-comic hybrids about hair, milk and sex economies, she’s also spearheaded the reawakening of a Chicago punk free paper, to be known henceforth as The Land Line. This is the reincarnated version of the monthly paper called The Skeleton News that ran itself fabulously ragged for about two years while I was outta town. The Land Line is going to be quarterly and also free, content-rich and dirty, just like good soil. The first issue debuts right around the new year. There’s a million folks meeting, working and partying to make it happen…on the visual end, Grant Reynolds notably took on the helm of “Comics Editor” and recent transplants Mika Lee and Otto Splotch are throwing down some real brain bender drawings for it. A couple blocks further down the street towards my P.O. Box we run into this household that is a crazy pit of comics talent. Leslie Weibler, Andy Burkholder and Max Morris are all holed up together living with a collective library of approximately a million great comic books, spurring each other onward towards greatness. Dane Martin used to live here and Blaise Larmee too. Max can talk comics in a real way for days without stopping and he just launched a great Chicago comics anthology called “Vacuum Horror” at this year’s BCGF. There goes the neighborhood! Let’s expand a little…One of my favorite places in town is Spudnik Press. Started four years ago by Angee Lennard (who also draws the geriatric comic Mossdale Estates), the press has grown exponentially even during the year I’ve been a member. Part of the thrill of this shop is you might run into the likes of Lilli Carré printing some gorgeous, witty edition, or Sanya Glisic blowing your mind with her cosmic-ly perverse Struwwelpeter prints. Artist book maker Aaron Smith just got the AB Dick offset press up and running and it’s a force to be reckoned with, along with the functional facilities for letterpress, silkscreen, etching, woodblock and litho printing. Add to this the number of active copy scams in town and the fact that Aaron Renier just scored a free Risograph machine and we’ve got a print renaissance on our hands. …Which reminds me of Keith Herzik’s big show that just happened at the historic Hyde Park Art Center which included 4 zillion comics and posters he’s made plus a frozen pizza he accidentally cooked for 6 hours. Keith’s got colors on lockdown that no one has names for yet. That’s the sort of thing we encourage round these parts. …Which reminds me of the “Cartoon Ink” show Christa Donner, Jeremy Tinder and Surabhi Ghosh curated a few months back at the School of the Art Institute which showcased some of SAIC’s young guns like Sua Yoo, Wax Wing, Emily Fundis, Sarah Drake and William Cleveland next to the likes of Chris Ware, Anders Nilsen and Jeffrey Brown. Hey -right- Chicago’s a great place to learn comics in a school, if that’s your bag! When local rabble-rouser Anne Elizabeth Moore isn’t busy teaching zinemaking in Cambodia, starting her own tripped-out grad school or calling the comics industry on its own shit, she also teaches comics at the ‘tute. The comics-inclined SAIC student body has staged an impressive Small Press and Comics Symposium two years running and puts out an anthology Xerox Candy Bar. Comics historian Hillary Chute is down at University of Chicago, as is Paul Hornschemeier, as will be Alison Bechdel in the spring. Curmudgeon-with-a-heart-of-gold, Ivan Brunetti teaches at Columbia College where his passionate students like Onsmith and David Alvarado crank out the gorgeous anthology Linework. Ivan just re-released his iron-clad comics syllabus as a concise and potent little instruction volume that I am working through with Marian Runk at our biweekly gay comics coffee klatch. Jeremy Tinder is a good guy to know – not only is he awesome in a general way, he’s also one of the solid forces behind the weekly rendez-vous of Chicago’s notorious Trubble Club. TC roll call will break your drawing-chops-o-meter: frequent offenders include Aaron Renier, Nate Beaty, Carrie Vinarsky, Corinne Mucha, Grant Reynolds, Lilli Carré, Joe Tallarico, Sam Sharpe, Rachel Niffenegger, Ben Marcus, Bernie McGovern, Jo Dery, Becca Taylor, Travis Lampe and the unstoppable Laura Park– plus a rotating cast of out-of-town visitors. When I started going to this thing I thought that no way was I going to enjoy drawing against someone else’s panel, but it turns out that it’s actually utterly inspiring. Trubble Club is a beast unto itself! Not only is it a running contest to see who can be the most vile and crude, it keeps you loose and lucid and it’s like DIY drawing school, to boot. Trubble will be putting out it’s first full color edition momentarily courtesy of some Post Family support and we get to do an installation and curate a comics reading room at the DePaul Museum next year for a Chicago Imagists show they’re staging. On the note of shows staged, I wanna be sure to mention that people are doing some pretty amazing things with performative comics here. Does this even happen in other towns? Ezra Clayton Daniels used to throw infamous and rowdy Comics Art Battles back in the day, and since he just moved back to town I guess that means we should all look out. Brett Koontz makes brilliant comic books about post-apocalyptic sci-fi lifestyles and then turns them into these (also brilliant) backyard theater productions so you can figure out who he based each character on. Lyra Hill just started the world’s most exciting comic book reading series, Brain Frame, that alternates between feeding you jell-o shots and splashing you with fake blood. Lyra herself always goes above and beyond at these happenings and then hands the stage over to hams like Ian McDuffie and Krystal DiFronzo. It’s made me cry tears of joy and laugh food into my nose and I look forward to it every month like as if it were Halloween or something. It’s definitely a town where comics and art have met, fallen mad in love and now they’re having a baby. Just take a look at Paul Nudd’s crud, or check out Kerry James Marshall’s RYTHM MASTR paintings. And check out Deb Sokolow’s drawings. Did I mention the Imagists? That Yoshida shit runs deep! Even the Museum of Contemporary Art here is down, staging the giant Jim Nutt show last year as well as a special exhibit called “New Chicago Comics”. A few months ago Ruby Thorkelson got the local feminist gallery, WomanMade, to put on a great show of comics work from women and trans identified artists called “Underground” which included an amazing, amazing reading room. Also of underground note, The Chicago Underground Library got a new home and a new name after sustaining major damages last winter. Now it’s called Read/Write and it’s still rad all over. Additionally, Joe Tallarico has not-so-secretly been improving the underground comics stronghold in the Art Institute Library, as well as rooting some old-school Hot Nuts like George Hansen out of the woodwork. Joe’s been busy on the print end too, doing comics making and editing for the long running freak sheet, Lumpen which just up and turned 20. Also aging gracefully is Roctober, the best music/comics magazine in the universe; they’re about to turn twenty just as the clock strikes issue #50 Who else turned twenty this year? Oh, why, Quimby’s Books, the infamous weirdo comics and zines shop, my current place of employment and a truly astounding place to hang. I’ve been coming to Quimby’s since shortly before it moved to its current location in ’94, back when I was a zitty, obnoxious teenager and Dan Clowes was probably down the street drawing Eightball. Twenty years in now, this beast has made itself an international hub of self-publishing and small press comics, not only by keeping our eyes peeled for interesting experimental stuff on paper but also by accepting anything and everything folks send our way. For a good part of it’s run, the shop has been owned by Eric Kirsammer, who guides with a gentle hand and keeps us stocked in twisted art. Traditionally, the floor has been handled by rabid self-publishers like my powerhouse co-workers Liz Mason and Neil Brideau. There’s no telling how many minds have been blown in these walls, I certainly count mine among them. Deep scene resource 4eva. Can’t forget the other stores around here- Quimby’s is not the only game in town, especially if you’re a traditionalist. Our sister store, also under the mindful proprietorship of Kirsammer, is the stocked-to-the-gills Chicago Comics which I will proceed to call whenever I am confused about Marvel. There’s also Brainstorm for a passionate mix of superheroes, videos, and funny jokes. Challengers carries its own eccentric combo of local and mainstream work. I’ve only been into Vigilante once, but I liked it, and then if you go up so north it’s suburbia, Comix Revolution holds court and holds down the fort. What’s a better place to wrap things up than the future? For Chicago, that means getting a solid annual independent comics festival started here. Originally dreamed up by my Quimbyian coworker Neil (who also helped jump start the Chicago Zine Fest a few years ago), the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (or CAKE, for short) finally has its ducks in a row – a plum location at Columbia College’s Ludington Building, a solid date (June 16th and 17th, 2012) and a gorgeous promotional poster by Laura Park. Applications are open until the first of January, the tables are truly affordable and things are really starting to get up and rolling to make it happen. CAKE’s core team of organizers (Neil, my neighbors Max and Andy along with Grace Tran, Jeff Zwirek, Nick Drnaso and myself) are starting the exciting work of mapping how we want the space set up and imagineering what the programming will look like. …So things are brewing in Chicago, in the past, in the now, and in the near next- If I were you I’d come check it out. 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: [...]

Cartoon Crossroads Columbus: is this real life?

MardouOctober 21, 2016Festivals and ShowsCXC happened last weekend in Columbus, OH, and I got to represent Team Comics Workbook and also myself as a special guest (this has never happened to me before – count me overexcited and also terrified!) I get in on Thursday night and head to the President’s Reception feeling very wallflowerish as I know literally no one except through Facebook and Instagram. First off I meet Tom Spurgeon (finally!), Jeff Bone and his lovely wife Vijaya, Caitlyn McGurk, and Robin the Inkstud. I nervously nurse my wine and then I am rescued by Sergio Aragonés, who sits next to me with a plate of meatballs and a beer. I’m a vegan but I don’t even care about the meatballs! It’s Sergio Aragonés and I proceed to fannishly monopolize him for the next hour. Sergio! I’ve loved his comics in Mad Magazine since I was eight years old. Ahhh. Those moments of life where nothing degrades or disappoints. CXC is already off to a GREAT start. Friday morning I’m giving a Peer-to-Peer talk at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. I’m very nervous, but also ‘over prepared’ – I’m not going to TRUMP this, thank you very much. It’s also at 10 am, so I figure no one’s hardly going to be there. WRONG! It was a full house; I talked about scripting and planning processes for long form fiction in comics. I tried to jazz it up with stories of ayahuasca (not my own of course, I’m totally square, dear reader) and out of body experiences and Amazonian explorers. And I did a reading from the thumbnails of a new graphic novel I’ve been working on this year. Once that was out of the way, I was free to enjoy the Billy Ireland Museum. I loved it so much. I copied some stuff in my sketchbook whilst I explored in a blissed out state. Oh and I ran into old pal T. Edward Bak and we had lunch. Day Two: AWESOME. I skipped the festivities on Friday night so that I could be the sole un-hungover person at CXC on Saturday for a full day of tabling and socializing. I made the right decision. You have to treat comic’s shows like an eleven-hour congressional hearing, i.e.: you need STAMINA. (Apologies if the election has snuck in to my CXC coverage. Ohio is very much a swing state and my weekend, traffic, eating in bars etc, were interrupted by bizarre looking fashionista Trumpettes and a presidential motorcade – yes, both Trump and Obama had been/were in Columbus that very weekend.) So, Day Three: Saturday tabling. It went great. I hunkered down with Team Comics Workbook, and got to finally meet some of my Comics Workbook Roller Derby of the Mind compadres, particularly Alyssa Berg, Whit Taylor and Sally Ingraham. At one o’clock I had an author spotlight thing, which was easy and fun, thanks to Jared Gardner. I read from Sky In Stereo, and afterwards would sell all my copies. Sweet! So far I’m enjoying this show so much. The downtown Columbus Metropolitan Library is bright and airy, there’s some good energy about, the locals are so friendly and the organizers are present and visible. And I’ve sold all my comics! This never happens. But afterwards when I’m alone again, in this new Midwestern city, I’m strolling around downtown Columbus at twilight. It’s Saturday but everything’s closing or closed. I feel a little spooked out and get to thinking about Dorothy Thompson talking about Terre Haute in the 40s or something. She wrote to her man, Sinclair Lewis: “This is a lonely country, it is so goddamned empty. I am turning mystic. Surely there is something in the very air of a city where civilized people have lived, worked, dreamed loved and enjoyed civilized pleasures for hundreds of years…some radioactivity which lingers in the atmosphere. I begin to believe in ghosts, gentle ghosts which keep one company in ancient towns. Here there are none.” Traveling alone spooks me out. I’m not a good traveler at the best of times. I walk; admire statues and fountains and government buildings. I pass a tiny Episcopalian church. It has an 8am service on Sunday morning. Tomorrow! Maybe I’ll go, I tell myself, just to feel somehow cosmically rooted again. ‘You know what?’ I think, ‘I will definitely go. I’ll set my alarm tonight.’ I go back to my hotel room and spruce up for that evening’s drinks reception in honor of Stan Sakai. And I have fun! I forget my lonely existential Midwestern emptiness and that night I roll into bed at 3am having been to a Haunted House in ruralish Ohio with my publisher and a couple of Rhode Island hepcats. The Haunted House has a definite ‘juggalo’ vibe, something I’d heard about but never seen. It was gross and yucky, people in costumes tried to touch me! But the sight of rural folk wielding fake chainsaws made out of leaf blowers and duct tape PLUS the company of good friends has somehow righted me again. I don’t set my alarm after all. I don’t need church. I just need sleep dammit, and I just need ‘my people’ and this weekend Columbus, OH, has been full of them. On Sunday I sell all my publisher’s copies of Sky in Stereo, experience a sleep-deprived meltdown and Alyssa Berg revives me with dried mango slices and crystal healing. I get through! I meet Keiler Roberts and Noah Van Sciver, they’re both great! I talk to lots and lots of people. Until its time to go get my plane! Sergio Aragonés stops by my table to say goodbye. Is this real life? Before I go I coerce Tom Spurgeon into a hug. It feels right. My delightful assistant (I have an assistant!) Sara drives me to Chipotle and then to the airport. I fly home that night in the darkness over Midwestern cities that look like small bejeweled funfairs in pools of rural soupy darkness. America is a strange place. I’m full of that crackling comics energy. Ready to retreat again and draw my next comic. Thanks Columbus, OH. Thanks to all the volunteers who were so nice and the librarians who were unfazed by all these cartoonists, and to the comics community, including my own Comics Workbook community, for being so rad. Is it not amazing that comics people can just assemble and friendships made at CAKE or SPX years ago, can just pick up again, over printed pages and falafels? Well, it’s sort of magical to me. I get to be part of this. It was a strange and spooky, magical weekend. I wanna come back for more! I do, I do. ————————————————————————————————— Sacha Mardou is a Brit making comics in St Louis, Missouri. Sky in Stereo is her most recent comic. For the rest of our complete CXC coverage check out the special “round up” report HERE. Share this page: [...]

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