Just when I’d gotten into the habit of cranking out one substantive post every week or so, I’ve now pretty much ground to a halt.  Why?  Because, as some of you might know, the deadline for submissions to the 2009 Eisner Awards was a couple of days ago… which means that Eisner nomination time is looming near and now, with every book in, the pressure is really on for us judges to get up to speed reading-wise.  Of late, my studio shelves, which are usually at least semi-organized, have become a massive “in/out” box for reading material from 2008 and any time I get the inclination to do a little writing on something of interest, a little voice in my head starts with, “The SHELF, think of the SHELF!”

The photo above is just a small sampling of the constantly-rotating stock of comics and graphic novels I’ve been making my way through.  (A note on the books that are headed for the library or my own personal collection: stuff that’s submitted to the Eisners of course stays with the Eisner folks after reading, but some publishers will also send comps to individual judges–and it’s these that one’s free to do whatever with, once they’ve been read.  I’ll be passing what ones I can on to the public library.)

Today’s Cul de Sac features an interesting formal use of word balloons that I’ve not seen before.  The basic setup here is that Alice has a new pair of shoes that she’s been enjoying mainly for their incessant squeaking, which has now ceased.  In the strip, she’s imitating the squeaking and the placement of the balloons gets ever higher within the panel to indicate the increasing pitch of her squeaking.  Finally, the “squeak”‘s being all the way out of the panel is used to indicate that Alice’s squeaking is now so high-pitched that it’s out of human hearing range.  Not seeing = not hearing.

When I saw this article on CNN.com about “winged luxury submarines,” the first thing I thought of was that awesome shark submarine from the Tintin book, Red Rackham’s Treasure:

I was surprised to note that the article did in fact mention Tintin.  I was really surprised, though, to note that the Tintin book mentioned was one I’d never heard of: Tintin and the Lake of Sharks.  This is because apparently this Tintin book is not one penned by Hergé, but rather a book made to look like stills from an animated Tintin movie written by Belgian cartoonist “Greg” (Michel Regnier), a friend of Hergé.  Out of curiosity, I tracked down some sample pages from Lake of Sharks and although I was disappointed to find that the submarine in question is actually just the same shark sub from Red Rackham, it’s kind of interesting to see Tintn art done in a style designed to ape the look of animation:

The Hergé-drawn Tintin exhibits a differential between the way the figures and the way the background are drawn (much discussed in Understanding Comics), but stylistically they cohere quite well.  In the animation-style page above though, this disconnect is, to my eye, just too great and produces an odd effect.

I gotta wonder about the reference to Lake of Sharks in the original article.  Was the author a hardcore Tintin fan who used this opportunity to show off his knowledge of obscure Tintin books… of maybe someone who knew nothing at all about Tintin and just maybe got Lake of Sharks from an errant google search?