Apr 04 2008

What Are You Working On Next?

It seems like as soon as you get done with one project, folks start asking you what your next project is going to be. After completing Midnight Sun toward the end of last year, I wound up taking a month or two off, just working in my sketchbook, getting some things done around the house and generally getting prepared for the arrival of my daughter, Marion. Since then, there’s been the inevitable stage of adjusting to life with a child, but I’m getting back into a work groove of some sort now and I just handed in a three-pager that will appear in this year’s caveman/dinosaur-themed Wide Awake Press book for Free Comic Book Day… and now I’m itching to get working on new projects.

After a bit of rumination, here’s what it looks like I’ll be working on comics-wise for the foreseeable future:

Project the first – Oyster War

(Edit – Since this page, which is from April of last year,  is being linked to from The Beat, here’s a link to my post with the completed splash page shown on The Beat.)

This’ll be my next solo graphic novel that I’ll be submitting, likely to SLG, when it’s nearing completion. When will that be? Who knows… but at this point I’ve settled on this particular project and have begun doing research and some character sketches, which I’ve posted here before. I wound up abandoning a few other potential projects that I’d considered to varying degrees since Midnight Sun was in its final stages, including: a science fiction-ish story set in modern-day Iraq; a second book of folk tales and tall tales, this one about North Carolina; and a 1930s football story based around the real life story of a controversial championship game in which my grandfather played.

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The book is tentatively titled Oyster War, but of course that may change. I often read about writers who have whole plot-lines materialize in their heads from out of nowhere… but that ain’t me. For me, developing stories is a methodical and arduous process that usually begins with a lot of reading and note-taking, then moves on to slowly building up a visual narrative through multiple drafts (a method I likely acquired as a student of James Sturm, whose teaching always emphasized the importance of editing—he wrote about his process recently here). At the moment what I’ve got is less a story, and more just the hunch that there’s a good story to be found somewhere in the jumble of ideas I’ve been contemplating.

I’ve been reading a lot about the Chesapeake Bay at the turn of the century, and in particular about the town of Crisfield, Maryland. Around this time Crisfield was the center of a huge boom in oyster production, and with the building of a railroad into the town, it became the seafood capital of America… and with the influx of money inevitably came an influx of lawlessness, prostitution, corruption, crime, and all that other good stuff. For a while, Crisfield was a little like Deadwood, South Dakota in the 1870s, but instead of gold, it was oysters that were fueling the fervor. The oyster beds were such a valuable asset that an Oyster Navy, established by the state of Maryland in the late 1800s, was involved in skirmishes in which shots were fired as recently as the 1950s.

In and of itself this isn’t necessarily a great story waiting to happen, but add into the mix that just across the bay is Smiths Island, founded and populated by Methodists. Already this idea of a decadent economic boomtown right across from a Methodist colony seemed like a great story setup—and a great opportunity to use the locations for some ham-handed narrative metaphor—but when I read that there were watermen who lived in the off-season as pious Methodists, but who in the oyster season would shift “loyalties” in favor of easy money oyster-tonging on the Bay and selling (and spending) their catch in Crisfield, I was sold.

Tone-wise, I’m looking forward to doing something less melodramatic and more fantastic than Midnight Sun, which is what I’m going to be going for with Oyster War. There’s a lot of ripe fodder for this kind of story in lore of the Chesapeake Bay—like “Chessie” the alleged sea serpent of the bay, as well as numerous things piratical in nature. I’m imagining Oyster War (or whatever it winds up being called) as a sort of comics mix of Thimble Theater, Deadwood and Moby Dick.

Art-wise, I’m thinking that I’ll do this in straight hatched black and white instead of the gray-tone style I’ve used for Midnight Sun and Farewell, Georgia.

I’ve clearly got my work cut out for me here… I’ll be posting things regularly here as I develop the story, and I’ve been considering serializing the book online prior to publication, but I’ll have to see of that’s something I can pull off before I commit to it.

Project the second – Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean

I haven’t officially “signed on the dotted line” yet, but I’ve got the official go-ahead to mention this project publicly: I’ll be handling the drawing phase of production for a book called Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean, with writing and layout/thumbnails handled by Sarah Stewart Taylor and Jason Lutes respectively. The book is being published by Hyperion and is part of the same series, done in conjunction with the Center for Cartoon Studies, that’s so far comprised Houdini: The Handcuff King and Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow. I think the John Porcellino book, Thoreau at Walden, is due out this month.

The story, by writer Sarah Stewart Taylor, is exactly the kind of biographical fiction that I really like: instead of talking its subject starting from day one and ending when she dies (as seems to always be the case in those horrible Hollywood “biopic” things), the book takes just one short, but pivotal, moment in the subject’s life and uses it as a way to get at what makes the subject tick. Specifically, Amelia deals with Earhart’s team’s tricky departure from Trepassey Harbor, Newfoundland, from which they launched their 1928 transatlantic flight.

I’ve never really undertaken a collaborative project of this scope before, but given the subject matter (those who’ve read my last book, Midnight Sun, will see that this project is a good fit both ways) and the folks involved, I’m pretty excited to be involved in this.

I’ve known James Sturm, who’s the head honcho of this Hyperion/CCS graphic novels series, for a while; he and I were at the Savannah College of Art and Design concurrently around the year 2000 or so, he a professor and I a grad student. He and I both put together NACAE/teachingcomics.org before he went on to found the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont. (A bit of trivia: I was the first, and by far the least notable, cartoonist to visit the school!)

I met Jason back in 2003 when I was teaching at the North Carolina Governor’s school and I’d invited him down as a guest lecturer. He was living in Asheville at the time. I’d been teaching a comics program for the summer and was trying to keep things all artsy-fartsy and had the students reading MAUS and Ghost World and stuff like that… but of course what they really wound up being interested in was MODOK. They’d gotten a hold of my copy of The Journal of MODOK Studies and decided that MODOK was the funniest thing ever and so by the time Jason arrived all they could talk about was MODOK. I did a mini-comic about that whole episode called Hey, Teach that I was hoping to post here, but I don’t think I ever scanned the art (back in the day, we did minis with a Xerox machine and a proportional scale—AND WE LIKED IT!) and I sold the originals a while back. Oh well… I’ll dig around and see.

At any rate, I’m really looking forward to this project. Given that it’s work-for-hire (pretty much) I’m not sure what kind of stuff I’ll be able to post as far as my work process goes, but I’m sure I’ll be able to put things online every now and again. It’d be interesting I think to take one “scene” and post it from beginning of the process to end, including the script, Jason’s thumbnailed pages, roughs, pencils, etc. We’ll see as things progress.

Amelia will certainly see the light of day before Oyster War, given that the story’s written, thumbnails are in-progress and I’ll be digging into the project pretty soon here once I get a few freelance odds and ends off my desk, but I’ll hopefully be working on both stories simultaneously. How will I get all this done? I’m investing in one of these, and setting it up to donate to some group of people I really hate–like, say, those crackpots who picket soldier’s funerals–to prevent myself from sleeping more than 2 hours a night. And also I’ll drink lots of beer. And coffee. And coffee-flavored beer.

Mar 30 2008

How to Divide a Comics Page Row into Three Panels

Like it says up top, this is a short and easy tutorial about how to divide a row (or “tier” as it’s sometimes called) on a comics page into three equally-sized panels. Why am I writing about this? Because I was really surprised by the fact that a Google search for how to do this didn’t yield a quick tutorial on it… so hopefully this’ll get indexed and folks will find it useful.

Some background: The nine-panel grid, based on a grid of three rows of three panels each, used to be a pretty standard comics page layout back in the “golden age” of comic books. Look at an old Superman page and that’s pretty much what you’ll find. While superhero books have largely dropped this as their basic grid, you still see it used in “homages” like Watchmen, and in other genres of comics. For example, my first book for SLG, Farewell, Georgia, was entirely based on the nine-panel grid. Chances are at some point, no matter what type of comics you do, you’re going to need to divide some area into thirds.

Dividing an area into two panels is easy both mathematically (measure and divide that number in half) and on the page (just make an “x” from corner to corner, and the center is at the crosspoint). Dividing into thirds, though, can be trickier because of us Americans and our back-asswards insistence on measuring in inches, which don’t break down fractionally into thirds very well. Even using centimeters, you often wind up with things not dividing evenly. So what to do?

If you don’t mind drawing on that cheap paper that’s got a light blue panel grid already printed on it, you can use that; I think it’s got thirds marked on it. Personally, I’d just as soon try to draw on a Kleenex as use that stuff. So, usually what I do is work in a page area that’s designed to be easily divisible into both halves and thirds. So, for Midnight Sun, I worked at 12″ x 15″–both those measurements being easily divisible by two and by three. (Midnight Sun has an unusual trim size. For a “standard” comics page shape, I do 12″ x 18″ which also works well.)

Sometimes, though, you just gotta deal with an area where the measurements just won’t cooperate and divide equally. Here’s how you do it:

First, here’s our area I’m going to divide into thirds, shown in light blue dotted lines.

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1) Take the area you want to divide into thirds, and divide it into halves using an “x” drawn from each of the corners. Make a vertical line at the center-point, dividing the area into halves.

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2) Now draw a diagonal line connecting each bottom corner to the top corner of each half-area you created in step one. (Works in reverse, also obviously.)  Draw a vertical line at the points where these new lines intersect the lines you drew in step one. The three sections you’ve created by doing this are equal widths.

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3) Finally, give yourself some gutters and you’re done! (Technically, the center panel will now be very slightly thinner than the two outer panels because it’s had a bit lopped off from both sides to create the gutter, whereas the outer panels have had only their inner-facing sides docked… but, hey, it’s close enough for me.)

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Mar 28 2008

Polar Bear Attack!

Folks over at the Blog@Newsarama Fringe Benefits column, did a nice review of Midnight Sun, and gave special mention to the encounter one of the characters has with a polar bear in the book.  Since drawing the page they sample there, I—like a lot of folks—have been following the “career” of Flock the baby Polar bear… you know, ‘cause he’s so darned cute.  Unfortunately, though, the time I’ve wasted looking at the adorable beast has made me realize that in my drawing I’ve shorted the bear a couple of digits.  Who knew polar bears had such strange feet, with no real thumb equivalent like a dog’s dew-claw?  This should distract you from any further contemplation of my anatomical cartooning gaffs:

Mar 23 2008

Comics Terminology: “Alternative,” “Indie,” etc.

This question was posted over at the Indie Spinner Rack message board:

What’s the definition (if any) of the various terms such as Independent, Small Press, Alternative, etc. What do you call companies in Previews outside of the Big Four (DC/Marvel/Dark Horse/Image)? Outside of the Established (Fantagraphics, Top Shelf, Drawn & Quarterly, Oni, AdHouse, etc)? What about those creators going through Ka-Blam and ComixPress? Where do mini-comics fit in?

Here’re my thoughts on the matter, which I posted there:

I’ve always found terms like “independent,” “mainstream,” “alternative,” etc. to be problematic because in using them, one is attempting to describe two different things at the same time–things which may or may not bear any real relation to one another. Specifically, when these terms are used, folks are often trying to describe (1) the narrative content of a comic, and (2) the publishing model of a publisher. When someone says something is an “independent comic” (or whatever) what they’re usually trying to put forth is that that comics subject matter is not something like superhero stories. But they’re also trying to describe how that comic is published–what its circulation is perhaps, or whether the creators own the stories and characters.

The problem is that these really don’t necessarily relate to one another. Is “Jack Staff” an “alternative” book? It’s creator-owned… but it’s a superhero book. Is “Swamp Thing” a “mainstream” book? It’s published by DC, but it’s not superheroes. Etc…

I’ve always found it more useful in getting across what you mean to simply take them each individually.

Regarding a book’s content, why don’t we comics folk (like regular old prose book people) simply refer to it by genre? Is it a crime book? A fantasy book? Non fiction? Character Drama? Historical fiction? Autobiography?

Likewise, if what you want to do is describe the publisher, then do that. Is the publisher a corporate publisher who does work-for-hire stuff like Marvel or DC? Is it a publisher who does more cooperative creator-owned stuff like Adhouse or SLG or Fanta? Is it something in between like Image?

The only time this stuff gets contentious it seems to me is when you try to use one term to describe these two different things.

Mar 17 2008

“Rent” Party for Comics Artist Craig Hamilton

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I got a ginormous long email this morning from friend and comics artist Craig Hamilton, but I’ll condense it for you here: He’s been renting a cool house that he loves in downtown Macon for years, and now he wants to buy it.   So, he’s having a “rent” party, but instead of rent money, he’s trying to get enough money together to put the wheels in motion to buy the house… and instead of the traditional rent party keg o’ beer, he’s got artwork to sell.  Says Craig:

I have roughly a thousand 11×14 Conan “Stranger In A Mirrored Glass” prints which I am selling for $25 each, and the 20×26 Peter Pan and Wendy prints are printed to order for $50 each.

Craig’s also got a ton of stuff posted over at his ComicArtFans.com gallery.  It doesn’t look like there are prices listed for that stuff, buy you can email Craig about those pieces, or about commissions, at anonymouseye [at] bellsouth [dot] net.  If you’re in Macon, the get-together is on Thursday, 7:00 pm, at Craig’s house on Cherry Street.

(The above two-page spread is from Craig’s ill-fated Peter Pan project, the rights to which he says may finally be reverting back to him–so maybe we’ll get to see it in print at long last.)