Hey, Jason has a blog, Cats Without Dogs. And it’s in English for those of us who can’t read Norwegian and have trouble with complex French. And he has a cool little comic about Darth Vader and Tom Waits.
September 1, 2010
August 6, 2010
Dan Clowes interview at Amazon
If you go to the Wilson page at Amazon, you can listen to a nice interview with Dan Clowes.
August 2, 2010
Gene Yang speech
Here’s a link to a nice little speech given by Gene Yang (American Born Chinese, The Eternal Smile, Prime Baby). And apparently, Gene and Derek won an Eisner.
July 1, 2010
Wonder Woman
So, they’ve created a new costume for Wonder Woman. Now she looks like an extra from a late 80s New Mutants comic. Or maybe she borrowed the jacket from the X-Men movie. I don’t read Wonder Woman, but her history and Marston’s philosophy really intrigue me. Wonder Woman is an Amazon warrior, so it seems to me she should look like one. Most often she looks like a supermodel, with big hair and no muscle tone. And in this new version, she looks just… dorky. Not the impression one should get from a hero with the powers of a Greek goddess. Actually, there are a lot of good costume designs out there, but here’s mine:
June 20, 2010
I’d be able to work more if I didn’t have so much work to do
Still… reading… research… papers…
So check out Tom Spurgeon’s interview with Gene Yang. I’ve know Gene a long time and besides being a fellow comics artist, he is also a fellow teacher and father. He’s also an incredibly nice guy. So it’s been nice to see his comics work get so much attention since the publication of American Born Chinese. I think his work has gotten more complex as he’s begun to delve into the complexities of culture and assimilation.
May 28, 2010
May 17, 2010
and they say all manga artists draw the same…
I really like this post of 50 manga eyes. Let your cursor sit over one to see who drew it.
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.
