Mar 12 2009
Interesting Word Balloon Use in Today’s ‘Cul de Sac’
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.
Mar 09 2009
CNN Reports on Real Tintin Submarine
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?
Mar 08 2009
Sketchbook 3/8/09
I’d recently made a sort of informal vow to do one substantive post each week and I’d managed to stick to that for about three weeks… until now. So, in lieu of that, I’ll just post a page from my sketchbook–something I’ve not done in a while. As usual, I’m still drawing a lot of hands and drapery from magazine photos, but I’ve been feeling of late like I’ve been neglecting drawing from imagination. I decided consequently to do a “grid” drawing over the course of the last few days. Basically what I do is divide a sketchbook page into a grid, do a really quick “blind doodle” in non-photo blue pencil in each panel of the grid, then use that doodle as a basis to draw some sort of creature in ink over top. Here’s the resulting page:
Mar 01 2009
Two Comics-Related Things That (Inexplicably) No One Is Linking To
A while back I resolved to do no more link blogging, thinking that–even if it meant only one “real” post a week–it’d be better to not pepper my blog with commentary on random things on the ‘net that likely many, many other folks have noted long before I. However, in this case, I’ll break that vow just to point out two recent items that seemed to have slipped under the radar of the comics blogosphere.
(1) The conclusion of Lone Wolf and Cub Month at Satisfactory Comics
February has twenty-eight days. The great Manga series Lone Wolf and Cub comprises twenty-eight books. So, Mike Wenthe (one half of the Satisfactory Comics duo) decided to read and post a blog entry about one volume each day in February. Let me repeat that: he read one entire volume each and every day and then posted a substantive analysis of that volume to the blog–scans and all. You can find all the posts on a single page here, starting at the bottom.
I’ve only read the first few volumes of this series, but this series of posts has inspired me to add it to my “to read” list… once I’m done with my marathon reading for the upcoming Eisner Awards nomination weekend, of course. Also, from now on when people ask me whether I’m a “Mister Mom” because my daughter is home with me during the weekdays, I’ll tell them that the preferred terminology is that I’m a “lone wolf and cub.” Then I will strike them down thusly with my trusty nihontō:
(2) Free Charles Flanders Instruction Booklet PDF at TeachingComics.org
Over at NACAE/Teachingcomics.org, a operation I’ve been involved with off and on (although, mostly “on”) since its inception, you can download a free educational copy of a comics how-to booklet by the cartoonist Charles Flanders. Who’s Charles Flanders? Like it says:
After attending classes at the Allbright Art School, Charles Flanders (1907-1973) moved to New York, where he was later employed by King Features Syndicate in 1932. There he worked on a number of comic strips by other artists, including Alex Raymond’s Secret Agent X-9, and Bringing Up Father. He adapted Ivanhoe and Treasure Island for Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson’s New Fun Comics as well as his original strip, Sandra of the Secret Service. He’s best known, though, for his work on Fran Striker’s The Lone Ranger, which he drew from 1939 until 1971.
He wrote the booklet, “How to Draw the Newspaper Adventure Strip,” in the 1960s and his daughter Shelley unearthed it recently and allowed it to be hosted and distributed by NACAE. Find it at http://flanders.teachingcomics.org. Edit: find it here
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