August 23, 2010

so… what’s going on?

Yeah, I haven’t posted much in awhile, especially any Carnivale updates. Mostly this has been due to the distractions of summer and increased parental responsibilities. But there will be fewer Carnivale updates for a little while for another reason. I’ve been asked by the Nashville Review to do a story for their fall issue and I need to get working on it. They don’t want the story to be published previous to the issue date, so don’t expect any preview pages here. But I’m playing around with doing the story in ink and marker, like the images above. I’m working on thumbnailing the story out now. It’s based off my own experiences after graduating from college and moving up to Seattle, but it’s not autobiographical. Anyway, I’m just hoping I can get the bulk of it done from now till the end of September.

June 13, 2010

not duotone Carnivale page 88

Due to life (graduation, birthday, research papers, Slip-and-Slide) I’m going to skip a week. Page 88 of Carnivale should be done for next Sunday.

March 27, 2010

pencil and color experiments

Drawn! pointed me to Warwick Cadwell’s 100 Days in the Gungle. I was inspired by his process. Not only does he simply scan the pencils without inking them, he works one panel at a time, assembling them later on the computer. I just saw a video with Jules Feiffer in which he said that he drew each image separately until he got each one right and then put everything together at the end. This seemed like a very freeing way to work. Obviously, there is a trade-off since you don’t compose the page holistically, but I seem to remember that Chester Brown does his comics this way, focusing on one panel at a time and only putting them all together at the end. Going back to the pencil idea, I just got The Art of Nausicäa Of the Valley of the Wind: Watercolor Impressions from the library and there is a shocking quotation in it regarding the manga that Miyazaki did (which I love).

For the comics serialization, the penciled art was burned out, and test printed with an eye toward making the penciled lines as dark as possible. Miyazaki was not used to working with a pen, so almost all the pages he turned in were done in pencil. (94)

Am I reading this correctly? Was Nausicäa done in pencil only? No ink? This blows my mind.

I still love pen-and-ink, but I thought I’d play around with scanning in pencil (4B). I also used it as a chance to play around with coloring.

First off, if I ever do a kids’ book it’ll have a sea otter as a character, since my daughter loves them

Two experiments, flat color…

and speckled color…

March 1, 2010

thoughts on the Dylan Horrocks interview

Rina and Thien have an interview with Dylan Horrocks at The Comix Claptrap, if you haven’t heard. Their interviews are often meandering and long, but the informal nature of them can sometimes elicit some very personal and insightful comments from the people being interviewed. This is especially true of the Horrocks interview.

I want to highlight a few quotations that I find particularly interesting.

Around forty minutes into the podcast, Horrocks discusses his experience writing comics like Batgirl for DC. He talks about how the stories often felt personally dishonest, because they represented ideals that he felt morally opposed to. But then he broadens this idea of dishonesty and at 44:08 he says: “In a very deep, personal way it made realize that stories and art really can lie. There is a sense in which all fiction is a lie, because it’s just made-up realities. But I think they can be very deep lies.” He clarifies this later: “I have friends who are writers who are still kind of starry eyed about books and stories and they think stories are wonderful and it’s how we find meaning in our lives and everything. But there’s a big part of me now that feels that stories can be really dangerous, too. And they can give us a very false idea of how the world works and how we work. We use stories to lie to ourselves as well as to make sense of things.”

This last sentence states something that I’ve been thinking about recently, about how stories often serve to reinforce cultural assumptions. I was thinking of this in terms of gender, but also in terms of environmentalism. Avatar makes us believe we actually care about rain forests and environmental degradation while we drive to see it into our SUVS and go buy Happymeals afterwards. Art as entertainment can just reinforce our smugness. Obviously, this gets even worse when art reinforces cultural biases about ethnicity and class. But usually it reinforces our beliefs about nationalism. The history of colonialism is full of examples of works of art that were used either as a justification for colonialism or to reinforce the biases about national superiority which make colonialism possible.

But Horrocks also mentions the effects on the artist. Genre makes requirements of plot. The idea that any work of art is part of a genre is incorrect, because not all stories rely on preset plot devices. True genre does. For instance, classical comedies end in a wedding; classical tragedies end with the main character dieing. Sure, Shakespeare was able to use genre to talk about actual truths, but he’s an exception. That’s part of what makes him special. True genre forces the artist to manipulate characters in only certain ways. There are certain types of conflicts that are required. Even the requirement for conflict at all is a requirement. And so an artist is taught to think in a certain path. To deviate from the path is to defy genre and so create a bad piece of work. And so the artist can be trapped into seeing things in a certain way. To offer some examples, look at what Joe Kubert did when he tried to tell a realistic story in Fax From Sarajevo. He told it like a Sgt. Rock story. And Eisner’s later work was plagued by the exaggerated poses that he had earlier used in The Spirit. And artist can get caught, both ideologically and formally.

Back to Horrocks, he mentions several times about how dissatisfied he became with his drawing. Looking at Edmond Baudoin, Blutch, and Craig Thompson drove him to believe that he couldn’t draw. Then at 1:38:06 he states: “I think what I realized in the end is that I can’t draw like them. Actually they can’t draw like me, either. Everyone has their own way of drawing and it’s as personal as handwriting. And I also realized that drawing is not something that goes directly from my brain to the paper. It’s actually more like a collaboration between my brain, and my hand, and the pen, and the paper. And all those parts of the process will contribute something to it. And it means that if I’m trying to just transfer what’s in my brain to the paper I’ll always fail, but if I just embrace that and hope that at the end of the process I’ve produced something that’s interesting to me, then I’m happy.” And later adds: “I’ve now embraced the idea that that process is what gives the work a life of its own.”

I really think that what he says is true. A drawing is not simply an inner vision made real. There is an initial vision, but as soon as you make marks on the paper, you start responding to those marks. The feel of the pen on the paper also influences the kind of marks you make. So it’s a process, a collaboration. I think this is a really insightful and helpful way to look at drawing.

Not that it saves me from hating the way I draw every now and again.

January 27, 2010

gouache over ink notebook drawings

The first two here are taken from Gipi’s Garage Band. The third’s layout is swiped from Gipi, but the character is my own design. In all of these I painted the gouache over the ink lines using my water brush and old dried gouache. So the colors were mixed on the paper.

January 12, 2010

“The Conversation” page 2

Yeah, ink adds clarity of form. For instance, the tangle of word balloon tails in the final panel is more decipherable now than in the pencils. Still, a bit of subtlety is lost.

January 9, 2010

“The Conversation” page 2 process

The sketch in my notebook:

The pencils for the finished page:

The painting process. Backgrounds first, then the figures.

When I’m done with the last two figures, I’ll wait for it all to dry and then lay down the ink.

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.

January 1, 2010

the conversation – gouache

« Older Entries