Shakespeare wrote the most bleakly beautiful line of Iambic pentameter in the English language (see title). It's a line that gets stuck in my head whenever I try to remember any Shakespeare. Here's James Earl Jones doing the very line, Ian McKellen here, and also Paul Scofield. Each fantastic actor does the line differently, but each with great power.
Out of the three though, I think I like Scofield's mutter the best. That's the sort of reading I have in my head.
I have a short comic idea. The plot wrote itself and unwound 30 or so panels, typed, unpenciled, from my fingertips. I can't think of a better title for a comic about the death of humanity and the destruction of the solar system by cruel time than "Never never never never never."
A title is important. I find I love the writing of Jorge Luis Borges not only for the content and ideas, but also for his titles. If you ever pick up Borges' Book of Sand or Collected Fictions read his Lovecraft tribute "There Are More Things," as wonderful for its Shakespearean title as it is for its abrupt ending.
25
Artists, Mathematicians, Scientists, Writers, people who rely on their plasticity of their minds to make a living, with few exceptions, are said to produce their best works before age 25.
I am 21, with a half-birthday a month and a half away, and I have, to show for my age, a defunct rock band, multiple half baked stories, numerous poor paintings, a handful of vapid poems, a slew of unformed ideas, a lifeless blog, and precious little time to get them out.
Tomorrow morning I'm going to wake up, walk a dog, eat coffee cake, and read American Psycho some more. Then, I am going to force myself to write something. Perhaps it will go on this blog. Perhaps it will in some aspect be a work of visual art, e.g. a comic or graphic novel segment. Perhaps I will merely email it to somebody.
I have the time if I make the time.
Problems with Representation
I've been advised to keep a journal about my graphic-novel writing process. Considering that I've been working on it for the past three months(ish) and haven't posted anything except for the previous sketch, I thought I'd take a moment to jot down my thoughts.
I have three friends in two states (which two states those are depends on the time of year you talk to them), all three of whom have been kind enough to lend their likenesses to my artistic endeavor and would doubtlessly be okay with me posting their likenesses on this blog.
I have three friends in two states (which two states those are depends on the time of year you talk to them), all three of whom have been kind enough to lend their likenesses to my artistic endeavor and would doubtlessly be okay with me posting their likenesses on this blog.
My idea was to base three different characters in two different graphic novels on my three friends, but as I practiced my portraiture skills, I arrived at a realization.
In sequential art, likeness is not as important as repeatability.
That is, the closer I got to capturing the likeness of each friend, the more difficult it was to draw said friend over and over again. In the context of a comic book, it is best if the face in a panel resembles the same face in the next panel, even if it does not resemble the face in real life.
This is the dilemma I face. As will any problem though, seeking the solution is exhilarating.
A tantalizing teaser
This sketch is a taste of things to come.
I have not finished Beowulf, but I'm making something...
Beowulf
I have commenced work on a four page comic entitled Beowulf. It's ten after one in the morning, and a steady stream of The Hives, The Arctic Monkeys, and The Hold Steady have kept me going as well as a band I only recently discovered called Dragonette. Good stuff.
Here's my setup, with the penciled, inked, and colored pages.
Here's the first page. There's a backstory behind this idea. I'll explain it once all four pages are finished.
That's the second page. I actually did research for this work. Sparrows do actually kill bluebirds and raid their nests. Depressing. The tree limbs are inspired by Japanese artists; I reference my Art of Edo Japan textbook for examples.
There are two pages left in this series. What fun!
Comic Jam with Mo
With more time on my hands this evening than brainpower, I finagled Mo into playing a series of drawing games.
Mo proposed the first one, where we each draw a crazy body and then switch drawings, each
drawing a crazy head WITHOUT SEEING THE CRAZY BODY!
Here are the results:
After there, we went on to Scot McCloud's EPIC TIC TAC TOE JAM:
The first one goes Mo-Vernon-Mo...
and this one goes Vernon-Mo-Vernon...
The time couldn't have been spent grander. Good luck on your homework now Mo.
*Edit: I have since looked up what the tic-tac-toe jam actually is, and we did it wrong. Oh well...
The Anteaters from Outer Space
Once upon a time, around 3rd grade or so, I wrote a story called "A worm's life". It was a scant paragraph long and related the exploits of an anthropomorphized inchworm from his birth from an egg to his death - eaten by a bird - mere seconds later.
It's interesting the things we write when we're children. One afternoon at my friend Nikolei's house I picked up a notebook on the ground and opened it up. There on the first three pages I found a 3 chapter (one chapter per page) story about aliens attacking Earth. The first chapter described the invasion and how our eight-and-a-half year old hero Nikolei subsequently saved his family and became a hero.
The second chapter contained only one sentence: "I deroy them all". The third was completely blank.
I don't know how I can recall the story so lucidly, or even if Nikolei remembers reading it. Consciously, I've never thought about that story again until now, but I can't help but wonder if subliminal memories may have manifested in this song...
A Challenge
There are probably not enough starving artists who stumble across my blog for this to work, but I think I'll still shoot this out there, even if it just serves as a reminder for Bobor and Maggie. I would like to act as a sort of art patron, not in that I'll hand out money, but in that I'd like to support young artists any way I can.
That is to say, I am commissioning artwork.
I'd like to see, from artist friends, what you could do with this prompt:
Create a work of sequential art that functions cyclically.
I've just been thinking about Beanworld (as I always do) and Monet's Haystacks, and Eisner's depiction of a neighborhood's life and I thought of this.
As long as this blog post doesn't fall on deaf ears, I hope we'll get something out of this
PS: I'm going to give this a try too, results will eventually be posted on this blog
Power Rangers: Felsic Force
Here's the rundown:
The Red Ranger - Quartz
The Blue Ranger - Plagioclase Feldspar
The Pink Ranger - K-Feldspar
The Yellow Ranger - Muscovite
The Black Ranger - Obsidian
They can combine their powers into three different Zords: Rhyolite, Granite, and Pegmatitic Granite.
And though the other rangers make fun of the black ranger for not being a mineral, which leads to some team tension...
Together, the battle the evil mafic forces of the dark lord Olivine, with his minions: basalt, biotite, and scoria.
I've ranted about this before, but right now, I'm just jotting these down so I won't forget TO MAKE THIS MOVIE!!!
Maybe I can do this for my senior Geology project...
PS: The white ranger will be andesite
Comic #2
Once more, I enter into the weird recesses of my mind, the thoughts that concern the differences between telephones and telegraphs, sousaphones and sousagraphs:
Comic #1
Hopefully I can begin to do this on a weekly basis. I should also get a working scanner instead of using a digital camera, but oh well.
Steadman v. Crumb
Back to my blog after a long time of absence. In that absence, my love of comic books has grown. I had the chance to meet my personal hero, the Wallace Stevens of the comic book world, Larry Marder, creator of Beanworld, at wordstock in Portland, Oregon.
Robert Crumb. The
That meeting inspired me not only to write the run-on sentence above, but also to look at older comics and even create my own. Be on the lookout of "Tim in Taiwan."
So, Ralph Steadman and Robert Crumb, two counterculture cartoonists with very visceral visual styles. If you research comic art at all these two guys are going to pop up over and over. First, Mr. Crumb:
Robert Crumb. Thegodfather of all neurotic and angsty
cartoonists. Crumb's drawings are hyperrealistic, his written dialogue is beyond frank, his depiction of women is misogynistic, and his outlook on life is bleak. Every local cartoonist who thinks he's somebody thinks he can become great by bearing his soul on a sheet of paper is emulating Crumb. That kind of copying is might demean to original, but so far, Crumb stands alone.
The only other artist I've read that draws from Crumb in a way that doesn't make me sick is Larry Marder. The images of his inspiration
constellation carry with it a same qualities as Crumb's portraits. Marder even captures the roiling rhythm of Crumb panel in the intestine patterns on Gran'ma'pa.
I suppose like many people, I first discovered the drawings of Ralph Steadman in the pages of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. People talk about how Steadman is
expressionistic, and how his work is a result of hanging out with and being a drug crazed lunatic. It's easy to pigeonhole Steaman's work into the violent counterculture world of the Hells Angels and Gonzo journalism of the late 60s and early 70s, but have you actually ever tried to draw like Steadman? It's not that hard, all you have to do is move like a dancer on your paper and splatter ink like you're a little kid again. Steadman is joyful, natural. Crumb is the real counterculture man here, his lines are too intentional to be happy. I'd like to crown Crumb the counterculture king of comics, but there is something beautiful about the intention behind Steadman's linework. And the picture on the right? Not steadman, that's Bill Watterson.
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