August 28, 2010

sequential art – You, Want, I, Want, You by Harry Bowers

I was at the de Young last week and saw these. First off, these are not assemblages of clothes; these are photographs (or photos of photographs…). In person, they look 3D, a photographic trompe-l’oeil. As you can probably guess, what struck me about this piece is that it is intended to be sequential. At the de Young, the photographs hang next to each other like a series of comics panels or film stills, and they’re obviously meant to be read left to right, which gives the impression of the clothes dancing.

Also, this illustrates something that I’ve thought about before. Oftentimes, comics artists are encouraged to vary the point of view from panel to panel, vary the shots (both the terms point of view and shot are problematic here, maybe “composition” would be better). How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way is one such proponent of this approach. And it’s true that the same composition over and over again can get stale. Yet varying things excessively from panel to panel just for the sake of doing it can really hurt the readability of a story. Look at any of the early Image comics for examples. And if you look at early newspaper strips, like Little Nemo, there isn’t much variation of the point of view actually. Sure, McCay plays with things a lot, but generally the characters appear at the same distance from the same angle from panel to panel. This actually grounds his flights of fancy and makes them readable. The panel borders act as a frames of measurement that the reader can use to measure change. For example, the reader can tell Nemo is getting bigger because he gets closer to the panel borders in each successive panel. Likewise, the static nature of the frame can be played off against the movements of the characters. Since the shot doesn’t change, the movement of the characters gets highlighted. This is what Bowers does in You, Want, I, Want, You.

In other words, while the panel border is not supposed to be read as part of the picture plane (generally) it is still a graphical element and its lines have a relationship with the lines that are within. I think more talented comics artists have an intuitive understanding of this. Furthermore, this is something that really sets comics apart from film, and, I suspect, is why some film approaches to shots don’t translate well to comics. And c0nversely, why comics don’t always translate well to film. It’s not just the stillness of comics; it’s the two dimensionality of the panel. The depth of the image within a panel–it’s trompe l’oeil of space–is dependent on that image’s relationship to the flat panel border.

April 21, 2010

horror in comics

I got this from The Comics Reporter: a discussion of how comics can be scary.

This is something I’ve thought about off and on, and some of the commenters above make really good points. Personally, I’ve never found the old EC stuff to be scary and nowadays artists tend to mistakenly equate gore with horror. But the work by Al Columbia is genuinely scary. So is Safe Area Gorazde. So are books 2 and 3 of Uzumaki. Horror can take on many different faces. Yet it tends to have certain qualities.

One, it usually involves a level of the unknown and a breakdown of natural or cultural laws. Uzamaki is scary because the laws of nature are perverted and are constantly becoming more so. Safe Area Gorazde is horrific because the tenuous film that covers our social interactions and convinces us we are all decent people is ripped away and a bottomless viciousness roars forth. And the fact that it’s all real adds to the horror.

Second, horror often concerns loss of control. The main characters are at the mercy of forces that they neither understand nor have any say in. One of the scariest comics I’ve read was in an old Epic Illustrated; I think it was called “Hom”. In the part of the story I read, the main character had some kind of protoplasmic jelly stuck to his head and this jelly took over his thoughts. At one point, it forces him to kill a group of innocent creatures. The main characters tries to resist, but the jelly controls him. Sweat pouts down his face during the struggle, but his eyes have the same dull, malevolent stare in each panel. Then he butchers the creatures. It’s a really well-done and horrific scene and it has stuck with me a long time.

Anyway, the discussion I’ve linked to is on-going and I’m curious to see what people say.

April 8, 2010

Sherman Alexie: panels as paragraphs

I just read the Sherman Alexie short story “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight In Heaven” with my class and we also read a short autobiographical essay–”Superman and Me”– in which Alexie says that he first learned how to read by reading Superman comics. Then he makes an interesting comparison between a paragraph and a comics panel:

At the same time I was seeing the world in paragraphs, I also picked up that Superman comic book. Each panel, complete with picture, dialogue, and narrative, was a three-dimensional paragraph.

Since I teach college essay writing and create comics, I often think about the relationships between the two mediums, especially formal and procedural connections. In many ways, a panel can contain the same amount of detail as a paragraph. Yet I find it more useful to think of the entire page as a paragraph and see each individual panel as a sentence. I’ve found this to be a fruitful analogy. Like with a paragraph, a comics page should progress a point. It works towards expressing a main idea. A page therefor is a unit of meaning and the elements in the page should contribute to that meaning. Distracting elements should be edited out.

Also in writing, you can vary sentence length in order to vary the rhythm of your writing. Or you can employ short sentences to create a faster, more staccato pace. The same thing can be done with panels. Also, oftentimes writes employ parallel structure to heighten connections in their writing. Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech is a famous example of repeated uses of parallel structure. This can be done visually in panels also, by repeating certain imagery or by reusing layouts.

As with any theory, ideas are only as good as they are practical. But for me, thinking of comics this way means that what I teach my students I can also apply to my own work.

March 24, 2010

balloon toss

If you didn’t know,  there’s a discussion of thought balloons on the internet which has lead to a discussion of word balloons in general. As far as I can tell, the discussion starts here with Joe McCulloch (Jog). The comments are by people like Evan Dorkin and David Mazzucchelli. Then Scott McCloud weighs in with his opinion that thought balloons are by their very nature insulting. Barry Deutsch counters with some nice examples. And now Jeet Heer discusses word balloons in general. I love discussions about the formal aspects of comics and having so many well-known and well-read people discussing word balloons has me swooning.

Let me toss out a few thoughts.

Yeah, thought balloons are often cumbersome and, I agree with McCloud, often distance the reader instead of bringing the reader in. I didn’t read many superhero comics as a kid, but I did read X-Men and Chris Claremont made me see the evil potential of the thought balloon. Oftentimes a character of his would throw a punch while crowded by three paragraphs of thought. It totally destroyed the realistic sense of time in those comics.

Balloons compete for physical space within the panel and so seem part of that space. This makes a certain sense for speech balloons, since sound can exist within a space and can sometimes take over a space. Yet thoughts are silent. So the very nature of thought balloons seems counter-intuitive: how can a thought take up physical space? And yet sometimes our thoughts can do this. Often, we are so distracted by our mental musings that we don’t see what’s going on around us. A few months ago, I almost hit a young man as I was pulling into a parking space because he was so intent on dialing his cell phone that he didn’t notice me and walked right into the vacant space I was attempting to fill. Luckily, I noticed him and avoided squishing him with my car, but he never even looked up. I don’t think he ever knew I was there. Now, if I were to draw this as a comic I would put a huge word balloon behind the young man, filled with the numbers he was dialing, and the balloon would obstruct the background, obstructing the view of the car. Something like this:

I’m planning on doing something like this in Carnivale, so we’ll see how well this actually works, but my point is that thought balloons are a tool and I think it’s a bad idea to deny the use of any tool outright . Let me quote Dan Clowes on this: “Consider using all of the ‘hokey’ devices available in the comics vocabulary (thought balloons, sound effects, etc.). They are no less inherently neutral than a comma or a whisper or a lap dissolve and it is only their debased usage that has made them so” (Modern Cartoonist 12). In other words, word balloons are only cumbersome because they are used in cumbersome ways. The fault lies with the tool user, not the tool.

Heer’s article is mostly a list of interesting uses of balloons, bubbles, and boxes. I agree that what Clowes has been doing with these in recent stories is fascinating.  His often obstruction of word balloons both creates mystery and reveals character. I just want to add that Thierry Groensteen covers words balloons and their various uses in The System of Comics. He even categorizes some different types (77-78), which Heer says he would like to see a full accounting of. One thing Groensteen points out that I find interesting is that what’s in a panel can sometimes be “innocuous and empty” (84), meaning that the contents can seem unimportant and may even be overlooked by the reader. Yet the content of a word balloon is always deemed as important. Readers read every word in a balloon, while they may not look at every line in a panel. As Groensteen hints, I think this can be used to guide a reader’s eye across a page. If the content of word balloons is always  “must read” content, then it can act as a gravitational force in the page. Groensteen himself pays special attention to the shape of balloons and their tails, and how these also can lead a reader’s eye across a page. He also pays special attention to the shape of the balloon and what that signifies. Going back to McCulloch and McCloud’s discussion of balloons versus boxes, it is easier to give iconic shape to a balloon than a box. In other words, a balloon can be made in various ways to denote the nature of the content: dotted line, jagged line, dripping edges, etc. This is not as easy to do with a text box.

February 2, 2010

everything’s coming up comics

The February 1, 2010 issue of The New Yorker features a Bary Blitt illustration of Barack Obama told in four panels. In other words, a comic strip.

The last MLA convention featured a talk about graphic novels.

And I just noticed this new book published by Arsenal Pulp: The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book. The description doesn’t say it’s a comic, but it does mention illustrations. So I assume it is.

This last book makes me think about how often comics are used as a medium of political resistance. Or, more broadly, as a medium through which to challenge the status quo. Perhaps comics’ low-brow status makes the art form perfect for people who wish to break apart traditional paradigms. I’ve heard many artists argue that part of the power of comics is that most polite people assume they are crap. And if your goal is to piss off most polite people, then choosing comics as a medium gets you that almost immediately.

Yet I would also argue that most oppression happens in text, though laws and linguistics. So if words are used against you, then visual art is a way of talking back and giving voice to your reality. This again brings me back to Citizen 13660 and how Akubo uses images to show the reality behind the language. And, of course, there is a bluntness to imagery that attracts artists. Showing oppression is often more effective than describing it.

Anyway, the idea that comics is a medium that lends itself to criticizing and subverting the status quo is one that interests me. I’ll have to give it more thought. Who has written on this topic?

January 6, 2010

It’s all relative, man

An attitude I hear a lot, especially as a teacher, and one that came up in the Tucker Stone interview at The Comics Reporter, is what I call the “it’s all relative, man” attitude towards art.  “I like what I like and you like what you like, so let’s agree to not criticize each other for it.” This is the opposite of elitism, for it’s axiom is no one piece of art is really any better than another and no one person is any better than another at ascribing value to a piece of art. The only value of a piece has is how it speaks to the person who appreciates it. And since there is so much variation in people, there is likewise a lot variation in valuable pieces of art. A sitcom that gets a good laugh out of someone is just as beneficial as the play that makes someone else reassess her relationship with her father. And, as the belief goes, anyone who says that the sitcom is a dumb way to spend an evening and not as valuable a piece of art as the play is an elitist bastard who is trying to paint the world with one brush.

Basically, the argument is about effect. No one piece of art has any “better” effect than another. Let me let Tucker Stone explain it. At one point in the interview, Spurgeon asks Stone why readers of a certain type of comics, superhero comics say, are so reluctant to read another kind, autobio for instance. Stone basically states that it’s not important that readers try other types of comics. The reason why not is that for Stone there is no effect in doing so. “You don’t get smarter, you don’t get more cultured.” And later her states: “The world isn’t going to become a better place if everybody starts reading a wider variety of comics.” So not only are all comics equal in value, they are equal in effect.

I don’t really want to argue with Tucker Stone. Sean T. Collins said what I would say anyway. But take the ideas in the quotations above all the way. No one piece of art has any appreciable difference than another in how that piece of art affects the reader. If high school literature teachers stopped teaching Shakespeare and instead had their students watch Love Boat reruns, would that be okay? Maybe that’s an unfair comparison. But why is it unfair? Is it simply that Shakespeare has had a larger cultural impact? If so, even that is a difference is an effect. Now let’s say that high school teachers stopped teaching Shakespeare in the original and instead had their students read condensed versions of his plays written in contemporary English, kind of like the old Classics Illustrated comics. Would that be okay? The students would still know the basic plots of the plays, enough to get the references in The Simpsons. But the students would never have to wrestle with the language and the subtleties therein. All nuance would be gone. Meaning would be predigested; they would never have to come to it on their own (in our current testing culture, this shift has been happening for a long time unfortunately). There is something about the effect of reading Shakespeare (good Shakespeare, that is…) that is fundamentally different.

I teach college writing. The most frequent thing I have my students read are essays. Over the course of my career I have assigned some mediocre essays. Sometimes this was intentional, to let my students take apart what makes mediocre writing mediocre. Sometimes it has been accidental, using a thematic flow suggested by an anthology and later regretting it. In either case, what I have found is that essays that are not as good generate class discussion and class writing that is not as good. Essays that aren’t too deep, don’t develop a point very far, don’t provide meaty evidence, et cetera just don’t give much for my students to chew on. Yet better written essays tend to provoke better class discussion and better pieces of writing from my students. Obviously this varies and it’s easy to assign essays that are too far beyond the reading level of one’s students. Yet the basic lesson remains for me. Better writing provokes more thought and more emotions in people. It makes us think, feel, and question is ways we haven’t before.

This is partially why I wrote the previous post about character. To deny that one piece of art may be able to open your eyes more than another piece of art is to deny the transcendent power of art. And so art becomes just another commodity. This is what people tend to fear when they make a distinction between art and entertainment. Entertainment is art that makes us feel good and reinforces the status quo. It is art without teeth. This is art without spirit. And if we all start to believe that this is all that art is, then art loses its transformative power. Or, more accurately, we close ourselves to that power. I believe that this is what all of us who get labeled as “elitists” are fighting against.

January 5, 2010

The Dickensian Level of Characterization

So I was watching Up with my daughter and I was struck by how well delineated the characters were, but also how predictable. They had quirks and recognizable traits, but they also lacked a certain amount of depth (yes, it’s a kids’ movie, but bear with me). This lead me to my continual criticism of Dickens. As I get older, I appreciate his sentences and humor more, but I still get frustrated with the shallowness of his characterization. But it struck me that this level of characterization is what most creators of popular media are going for.

The Dickensian level of characterization is not exactly the same as flat or static characterization. It’s two dimensional. The emotions and opinions of characters can change, but the characters are singular of purpose at any given time. They are lucid. They may wrestle with choices, but the choices are clearly defined. Take Pip in Great Expectations. He ends up regretting the decisions he makes in his life, but he has clearly defined goals. He wants to be a gentleman. He wants Estella. He struggles with his connection to Joe, but the struggle is between two clear choices: stay and remain with the person who loves him, or go and try to become a gentleman. There are no unconscious desires. No hidden passions. So characters like this may change, but they are not self-sabotaging and contradictory. They follow one clear goal at a time and see where that path leads them. This is the level of characterization of most popular media when they are good.

Just to explain this further, let’s look at some contrast. Hamlet is the most famous example of the conflicted character.  Should he take revenge or not? If so, how? If Shakespeare were a Hollywood writer Hamlet would be clear that he needed to take revenge and his desire would be pitted against that of Claudius and maybe that of Laertes. In a more “serious” film Hamlet would be conflicted, but it would be between two clear poles, loyalty to his father on one end, say, and a moral aversion to murder on the other. But the actual Hamlet is a lot murkier. Why exactly can he not exact revenge? Does he not trust the ghost of his father? Does he hate the bloody act of murder? Is it because he thinks “the paragon of animals” should not stoop to the baseness of revenge? Is he just indecisive? Is he a wimp? All of these answers fit his character. He is layered. There’s a reason why people are able to write so many essays about Hamlet (not that all of them are unique or are any good…). Or take Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. We get hints that he knows that his wife is unfaithful and that his whole “odyssey” is his way of avoiding having to confront that fact. But we see this as readers. It’s not so clear whether or not Bloom understands this about himself. His decisions in the novel are not always based on rational self interest. Furthermore, his mind is a jumble of many different thoughts. At one point, we get on intimate terms with his sexual desires and see that in his deepest id he feels himself to be a submissive girl. He is probably one of the most layered characters in English language literature.

Yet I can see why the Dickensian level of characterization is so popular. On the one hand, it creates clarity in the storytelling. Each character is clearly defined and nothing muddies the waters. This is especially useful in films where time is limited. On the other hand, characters with more complexity have the problem of seeming inconsistent. For some receivers of the art (readers/viewers), they blame this inconsistency on the artist instead of ascribing it to the truth of human nature.

While one may argue that one of the purposes of art is to create focus out of the chaos of life, the Dickensian level of characterization is a lie. People rarely know what they want and the biggest obstacles most of us face are self-created. So the Dickensian level of characterization is a version of escapism. It presents us with a world in which desires are knowable and obstacles are clear. It is a world free of clutter. And that’s something we all long for at one time or another. Obviously, this clarity can be used to call our attention to specific ideas. Editing, after all, is the removal of unnecessary clutter so that the core of a work can come into greater focus. Still, many creators are not using the Dickensian level of characterization this way. They mistake artifice with the way things are.

This trend in characterization is due in large part to our understanding of how stories should be structured. We are taught that most stories involve a central conflict and conflict often arises from competing desires in the main characters. So to construct a story, a narrative artist must, or so the artist believes, first understand the motives of the characters. Yet what this amounts to is the needs of plot dictating the elements of character. In other words, because most narrative artists believe a story requires clear conflict, these artists are limited in how they approach character.

This is an old hobby horse for me. When I was a teenager I liked comics, but I also liked to read literary fiction. And while I thought comics were fun, I wondered why they were never as deep and as moving as the books I read. One major flaw, I felt, in the comics I read was the characterization. Mostly, it was flat. One-dimensional. If it was good, it got to this level of Dickensian characterization. But that was it. I knew comics didn’t have to be this way. This wasn’t blind faith; I had proof. My mother owned a copy of King Lear “illustrated” by Ian Pollack. I put “illustrated” in quotation marks, because the book was a graphic novel. Not in the Classics Illustrated sense. Pollack used Shakespeare’s complete text and broke it down into panels, complete with word balloons. And the drawings were not cheesy realistic ones. They were expressionistic, pulling from a fine art background more than an EC Comics background. To be honest, I didn’t really like this book at the time, but it’s existence showed to me that comics could be as layered as King Lear. There was nothing inherent in the medium to keep it from being so. So this has been an idea in the back of my mind for decades. It’s only now that I have the language to begin to be able to describe it.

September 4, 2009

180 degree rule and Artists on Comics Art summary

Not everyone in comics adheres to the 180 degree rule (also known as the axis of action). But to me, I think it’s useful for getting clarity in one’s work. I see it like grammar rules in writing: it’s best to follow them, unless situations warrant a change. For instance, English is a S-V-O language, and if one constructs sentences that follow a strict subject-verb-object order without intrusions then one’s sentences will be clearer. Yet if one does that all the time, one’s writing will be very boring. For me, the same thing goes with the 180 degree rule. It’s the default setting, but slavishly adhering to it may deaden your art.

I bring all this up because Mark Kennedy has a discussion of times when this rule can be successfully broken.

Also, I found a link to a synopsis of the book Artists on Comics Art. The summary is so fascinating that I think I may need to buy the book (and yet again, it’s a book on comics with a horrible cover–the trend continues…).

August 19, 2009

comic books, graphic novels, sequential art, and the imprecision of language

So there’s yet another discussion of the term “graphic novel.” While this has probably been discussed into the ground, there are some good responses. I totally agree with Bryan Talbot about the misleading connotations of “graphic” and I’ve had to disabuse people of misinterpretations in the past, but the more time goes on, the more people seem to understand what the term “graphic novel” is referring to. Up to a point anyway. A lot of the respondents say that most people seem to know what a graphic novel is now. Tom Spurgeon (on linking to the above discussion) even says that the term is commonplace and doesn’t require much discussion anymore. He also says “I think it’s a useful term for describing a general format, and increasingly irrelevant for describing a certain sensibility of or ambition for comics.” In contrast, Eddie Campbell says such an opinion is a mangling of the term. “[A] novel is not a format but a literary form, which I realize may be too abstract for some comic book minds.” So maybe everyone is tired of talking about what the term means, and maybe the average citizen knows the term refers to a comic published with a thick spine, but beyond that I don’t think we’ve reached consensus. “Graphic novel” has just become another term like “democracy” or “freedom”: the meaning depends on the person using the term.

Personally, I still think it should mean more about content than packaging, but I don’t feel like fighting about it. And I’ve gotten used to the fact that this medium seems uncannily cursed with bad terminology. I mean, c’mon, “comic books“?!

On a similar note, I just got the Dick Blick catalogue in the mail and noticed that Strathmore has a new brand of bristol board: “sequential art surfaces.” First off, it’s interesting to me that the term “sequential art” seems to be sticking. As terms go, it’s not so bad. Though if one is literal, then film is also sequential art and emphasizing the sequential nature leads to the McCloud paradox, single panel cartoons don’t count. Still, I’m generally in favor of the term and of trying to separate the medium from the format of publication. Second, I find it curious how Strathmore defines sequential art: “Comics, cartoons, and graphic novels all fall into this popular art category.” Comics and graphic novels are separate here. To me, graphic novels are a type of comics, as are comic books. Comics mean the art form, like sequential art does. Again, I don’t think we all agree about what these things mean. I realize that even in my own thinking I tend to flip-flop between thinking of graphic novels as a form and thinking of them as a publishing format. My own brain is the battle ground. While part of me would like to work things out and be consistent in my thinking, another part of me just laughs and wants to get back to drawing.

June 15, 2009

Citing comics and pre- versus post-production editing

I just received the new edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. The Modern Language Association just updated its rules and since I teach MLA style in my classes, I needed to get up to date. As I was flipping through the book, I noticed that it provided guidelines for how to cite comics, or as the book puts it “an illustrated book or graphic narrative.” Now, I can understand not wanting to say comics, but it’s funny the book uses the term “graphic narrative” instead of “graphic novel.” Maybe the MLA is trying to be more inclusive. But I also think it points out that “graphic novel” may not as ubiquitous as those of us involved in comics assume it to be. The MLA does say that “in a graphic narrative, text and illustrations are intermingled” (166). The use of “illustrations” may raise some people’s hackles, but at least the MLA understands that word and image work together. If a graphic novel is by  a single artist, then the works cited entry is like that for any other book. Yet when the book includes different creators, such as a different writer and artist, the rules change slightly:

Many graphic narratives are created through collaboration. Begin the entry for such a work with the name of the person whose contribution is most relevant to your research, following it with a label identifying the person’s role. List other collaborators after the title in the order in which they appear on the title page… (166) 

On the surface, this seems reasonable. If you are quoting dialogue, then it makes sense that you’d cite the author of the words. If you’re analyzing the page layout, then you’d cite the artist. Yet this implies that comics are just a combination of words and pictures. It overlooks the fact that the effect is cumulative. What makes the narrative (if there is one) is the interplay of all the elements. It also doesn’t take into account the full collaborative nature in some collaborations. For instance, looking at samples of Alan Moore’s scripts it’s obvious that he controls much of the page layout. From reading things by Frank Miller, it’s apparent that he gives his artists more free reign. The story changes due to the strengths of the person he’s working with. So Elektra: Assassin with Bill Sienkiewicz is a crazy ride, while Daredevil: Born Again and Batman: Year One with David Mazzucchelli are more tightly paced works. The divisions are not clear. Also, if what you are looking at is the pacing of a work, who do you cite? The MLA does say that “sometimes you must improvise to record features not anticipated by this handbook,” so I suppose you could cite both collaborators if you feel it necessary (183). And despite my nitpicking, I was happy to see that comics were included in the MLA Handbook at all.

On a completely different note, I gave the collector’s edition DVD of A Bug’s Life to my daughter for her fifth birthday (we must have rented it at least ten times in the past two months). We watched some of the production footage and I was interested in the discussion of the story reel. Basically, a story reel is a mock-up of the film using only the storyboards. The sound effects and music are in place, but no actual animation has been done. Animation directors do this to get the pacing and sequence down before they begin to animate. It’s a time saver. It makes no sense to spend all the time animating a scene that might end up being shortened or gotten rid of altogether. So what this means is that the bulk of the editing is done before the actual production of the movie. As the directors of A Bug’s Life point out, this is the opposite of how most movies are made. A film director shoots the scenes often using lots of coverage. After the shooting, the director then edits the film, choosing which shots to use, what sequence to put them in, and how long to run them. So films involve post-production editing.

This lead me to think about splitting up the narrative arts into two process categories: pre-production editing and post-production editing. Now, I realize that many artists don’t edit and just go with the first thought, so these categories leave them out. Yet in general, it seems to me that film and literature involve post-production editing: the bulk of the editing happens after the main production process, after the shooting in film, after the first draft in literature. In both mediums, the artist creates a bulk of work and then goes back over it to sculpt it into shape. Conversely, traditional animation involves pre-production editing, the explanation of which is above. It strikes me that this should also be true for comics. Not that everyone creates comics this way, but it saves a lot of time to edit the narrative before the main bulk of the production–drawing the thing–begins. This is why many artists use scripts and thumbnail breakdowns. They want to know what the scenes will look like basically before they begin the long process of drawing.

I’ve been trying to move this direction. I’ve got three or four stories in thumbnail process now. I tried to do this with Carnivale, but I started the production part before the thumbnails were completed. And so I have since thrown out about 30 pages of drawn story and inserted easily that much. I’m assuming this is a direct cause and effect relationship. I might have saved myself a lot of time if I had been patient and finished the thumbnails. At least that’s what I’m telling myself. I definitely realized that I discover a story as I’m working on it. I’m hoping that this can be done mostly in the thumbnail stage. It would save a lot of time. I’m just looking for the process that will allow me to be the most productive.

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