Sep 14 2008

Drawing Words & Writing Pictures – WK 3 Homework

Homework for week three was basically just a 3-5 panel newspaper-style strip.  I wound up making a list of a dozen or so possible “situations” to build a newspaper strip around, but ultimately got lazy and just went with something I know: musicians.

I think the main thing I learned from doing this is just how important it is to the newspaper strip format for the readers to really know and be familiar with the characters and settings.  It’s really difficult to come up with a single, isolated newspaper strip that really works well.  I regularly read and enjoy strips like Get Fuzzy, Mutts, Pearls before Swine, and Cul de Sac, but doing this assignment made me realize how much of my enjoyment of those strips is based on my knowing the characters.  The way this assignment is set up in DW&WP stresses gags and funny situations, which makes a lot of sense for a one-off strip, but really most newspaper strips (or most good ones, anyway) work more because they’re character-driven.  A prime example of this is Get Fuzzy, which rarely has a “gag” per-se; its humor is driven by the interactions of the characters, and it’s really at its funniest if you’ve known and followed those characters for a while.

Anyway, here’s my strip… Not particularly inspired, but certainly complete to the thumbnail stage as per the assignment.  If I had to develop this further, I’d concentrate on correcting and making consistent the head/body ratio of the two characters, and I’d try to simplify and make clearer the elements in panels one and four (the van, trailer, venue, etc.).

wk3_h1

Sep 11 2008

Book Festival Appearance: Bookmarks 9/13

 

bookmarks

I’ll be  making the second of my two book festival appearances this year at this weekend’s Bookmarks book festival here in Winston-Salem.  The festival is on Saturday and I’ll be at the “All That & then Some” tent (V-2) at 2:30 PM where I’ll be discussing Midnight Sun, comics-making, and comics and graphic novels in generall–followed by a Q&A session and book signing.  There’ll be lots of other interesting folks attending including local, national and regional authors.  Come check it out.  More info at the link above.

Sep 10 2008

Conventions: SPX Table Layout

 

spx2008floor

Table assignments for SPX 2008 are now posted online. For quick reference, the above map shows the locations of me and some of my “peeps” who’ll be attending the show.  Conspicuously absent, though, are the Wide Awake Press crew as well as the fabulous Josh Latta/Brad McGinty duo.  One hopes they’ll jump onboard last minute. 

1 – H3A – Me!

2 – H15-16 – Rob Ullman 

3 – W36-37 – Adhouse Books/Chris Pitzer

4 – W34B – Adam Casey

5 – A9-10B – Paul Friedrich

6 – W36-37 – Dustin Harbin

7 – W10 – Batton Lash

8 – H3B – Chris Reilly

9 – W27-30 – Andy Runton

10 – B1-2- Joey Weiser

 

Sep 08 2008

Sketchbook 09/08

sketch_090808

This is a potential character I’ve been playing around with for my next creator-owned book, tenatively titled Oyster War. I’ve had it in mind that I’d do this book entirely with a dip pen, rather than with my usual tool-of-choice, a #3 brush.  I’m having a really hard time weaning myself of the brush, though, and I don’t really think this “hybrid” technique, with brush outlines and “interior” hatching, really works.  Making the transition is probably going to have to start with drawing much smaller than I’m usually accustomed to.

Sep 03 2008

“5” Royales Comic in New Issue of ‘Signal to Noise’

The new issue, issue #51, of Signal to Noise magazine should be arriving on stands shortly.  If’n you’ve got a hip music store in your town that carries the magazine, please consider picking it up.  They’ve begun running comics features with the previous issue, and this current issue includes my comics take on Winston-Salem’s legendary and influential soul/R&B act, The “5” Royales.    Once issue #52 is out and this current issue is no longer for sale, I’ll post the whole strip, but here’s a panel from it:

royales_strip_sample

It’s especially fun to see my work in color, since that almost never happens (at least other than work-for-hire freelance stuff).

I mention this for the sake of search engines: for some reason, one of the two credits listed in the magazine for me has a typo and appears as “Ben Towie” instead of “Ben Towle”–one of the many annoying properties of the relatively low-res computer monitors these days is the near similarty of the lower case “i” and lower case “l” at small point sizes.