Mar 07 2011

The Comics Journal Message Board: A Requiem

While I’m certainly excited about the newly-revamped tcj.com, it is with mixed emotions that I note that this event has apparently precipitated the demise of the (in)famous  Comics Journal message board. Admittedly, it’s been a good while since I was an active contributor to the board and for sure there are others who can comment more knowledgeably about its history and general role in comicsdom–Tom Spurgeon’s writeup comes immediately to mind–but here are a few random thoughts.

(Pictured here left to right: TCJ message board regulars “Ray Tan” and Ed Gauthier)

Sean T. Collins over at Robot 6 makes a hilarious but apt comparison of the board to Star Wars’s “Mos Eisley spaceport”–a sort of wild west frontier town in space. That the first thing that comes to one’s mind about the board is its free-for-all nature isn’t really surprising. Through the years the message board has gone through various periods of being somewhat moderated (basically just enforcing a “real names only” rule, and making people stay on comics-related topics) and being pretty much totally unmoderated, as it seemed to be in the last year or two of its existence. (And the “real names” rule really just boiled down to being a “vaguely-real-sounding name” rule anyway.) From what folks can glean at this point, it looks like the new TCJ.com will move to a system similar to the current editors’s previous site, the excellent ComicsComicsMag.com where authors post articles and then feedback (if allowed at all) will be in the form of blog comments, moderated both by the site editors directly and by a Reddit-like up/down vote system. There are certainly many who are applauding this decision, but personally I’m not so sure.

(Film still courtesy of Mark Masterman. Join the Conspiracy!)

Sure, all other things being equal, civil discourse is preferable to the petty bickering, ridiculous flame wars, and obvious sock-puppetry that’s endemic to pretty much any message board (absolutely, positively including the TCJ board), but the point is: all other things aren’t equal. With the fading of the venerable online message board–specifically the TCJ board, but generally just the format itself–and its replacement by the blog/comments format comes an entirely different paradigm: that of the authority, the article-poster himself who hands down thoughts from on-high (and given the editorial lineup at the new TCJ.com, I’m reasonably safe using “him” here) and the responder, the reader who passively receives this information and then is allowed to post brief reactions to it.

(Pictured here: occasional board interlocutor/recent Daily Show guest, Bosch Fawstin)

There are big plus sides to this setup for sure. If you visit a site like ComicsComics that employs this sort of system you’ll see a pronounced lack of a lot of the stuff that made the TCJ boards justifiably notorious. And to be clear, I couldn’t be more excited about relaunch of TCJ.com with the crew of people currently on-board editorially. The bit of trepidation–and dare I say, sadness?–I feel about the ending of the old message board is I guess just a general wariness a the swapping out of the bazaar for the cathedral, so to speak. While the heterogeneous user roles and the (potentially) tight comment moderation of the blog/comment format make for more pleasant reading, it’s often the case that the things that are the most cogent are not the things that either the “authorities” or popular opinion necessarily recognize as such right out of the gate. The internet has made instantly-accessible an incredible wealth of information, but at the same time it has made it incredibly easy for us to pick and choose what information we receive–and we too often choose to surround ourselves with thoughts and opinions that mirror our own. While there were many, many (many!) times that I’d read posts on the old TCJ board that would make me long for a pair of white-hot butter knives to stick in my eye sockets, there are also many many amazing comics, interesting takes on things in the comics world, new cartoonists, and of course just plain entertaining bickering I’d have never experienced except for the “Mos Eisley-esque” chaos of the Comics Journal message board.

I can’t wait to start digging in to some of the upcoming writing on the new TCJ.com, but I wonder if anything posted there will ever give rise to exchanges like this gem–a discussion about the gigantic, super-produced, super-expensive indie comics/art comics anthology, Kramers Ergot 7:

Andrei Molotiu: Next Kramer’s Ergot? I  was thinking about how the next Kramer’s Ergot is going to be the size of the Little Nemo book or something, and I can hardly wait to see it. Any news on when it’s supposed to come out?

COOP:  Sammy told me that the new KE is printed on thin sheets of plywood, and will unfold into a full-size Chris Ware-designed hillbilly outhouse. They have just signed an exclusive distribution deal with Home Depot.

COOP: Can I mention that each issue comes with a dried corncob, hand silkscreened by Jordan Crane?

Rest in peace, Comics Journal Message Board. We’ll miss you. Kind of.

 

Mar 01 2011

Portrait Night 3/1 (Lætitia Sadier)

Tonight’s #PortraitNight subject is the lovely Lætitia Sadier from the band Stereolab. Here’s my drawing of her and the image I used as a basis for it (from the latest issue of Signal to Noise magazine):

If you’d like to request a subject for #PortraitNight, you can do so by leaving a comment here or by direct messaging me via my Twitter.

Feb 28 2011

Craft: X-Statix/Abbey Road Illustration

I have really good luck with commissions. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a commission that involved drawing something that I didn’t really like. Most recently, I got a commission to do a pinup of the great Mike Allred/Peter Milligan superhero team, X-Statix. The book started in the early 2000s (initially as X-Force) and it was one of the few superhero genre books I was reading at the time. Luckily I still had my old issues of it floating around to use as reference.

Initially, I’d started out thinking I’d just do a straight “pin-up” of the team–just them lined up, standing on a blank background. Searching for ideas, though, I remembered how much I loved Mike Allred’s rock and roll comic book series Red Rocket 7 and I started brainstorming on rock-themed ideas. What I decided to do was to base the drawing on a well-known rock album cover. I needed something that was immediately recognizable and that also featured actual people on the image (rather than a design or illustration) so I could “swap” those people out for the members of X-Statix. I narrowed it down to the cover of the Ramones first record and The Beatles’s Abbey Road. The client liked the idea and selected Abbey Road, so that was settled and I got working.

I began in my sketchbook, just doodling out poses in pencil. I start with a light blue, then orange, then red, then (if necessary) going on to pencil for a final refinement.  Here, though, I just wanted to get something on the page to start monkeying with, so I just went through three iterations: up to red.

Next up, I scanned the rough, turned it into a grayscale image in Photoshop, and began playing with the sizes and locations of characters. I decided to do a general “wedge” design, with the tallest elements on the left, and elements getting gradually smaller to the right.

At this point I went ahead and refined this drawing a bit and added in some details of each character. Now you can see recognizably (left to right) Anarchist, Venus Dee Milo, Mr. Sensitive, Vivisector, Doop, and Dead Girl. (Is there a greater modern superhero name than “Mr. Sensitive”? No.)

I now needed to get them adjusted so they could be drawn in the Abbey Road setting, walking across the street, so I mocked them up over the actual album cover, adjusting scale and position again.

I then printed this out and I used some graphite transfer paper to transfer the important stuff to a piece of Strathmore bristol. Once done, I polished up the pencils and added the setting/background.

Finally, I inked the piece using a combination of brush and nib–brush mostly for the foreground figures and dip pens for the background.

Feb 25 2011

Portrait Night 2/22 (The Men of Fleetwood Mac)

I’m still on a music kick as far as my regular weekly portrait-drawing goes. For this past Tuesday’s #PortraitNight I did the guys in Fleetwood Mac. I would have liked to have done the whole band, but in the picture I was working from the males were in the foreground and the two women were in the background, too small to really draw. Maybe in the future I can find a different pic of the women, draw them in the same style, and then combine the two drawings in Photoshop.

Feb 22 2011

How to get Better at Drawing Hands

On the short list of most common problems with student comics artwork is “mitten hands.” You know what I’m talking about: a drawn hand that’s just a thumb hooked to an amorphous, fingerless blob. The close cousin of the mitten hand is the “hidey-hand” in which the character’s hands are always in his/her pockets, behind the back, concealed by a mysterious mist, etc. The common origin of these two problems is of course this: hands are hard to draw. But, check it; there’s a simple solution:

Q: How do I get better at drawing hands?

A: Draw hands.

Fortunately you have a handy <groan> reference freely available here in the form of your own hands which are conveniently attached to your body. You’ll note that many of my comics characters are left-handed. This is because I’m right-handed and can draw with my right hand while looking at my left hand. Ideally, though, you’d want to practice by drawing someone else’s hands. Unless you’re in some situation where there’s a regular life drawing session you can attend you’ll probably need to work from pictures.

For my hand-drawing exercises, I use magazines–specifically, I use TIME magazine (which I subscribe to anyway). If you’re going to do this, it’s preferable to use news magazines rather than, for example, fashion magazines. News magazines will contain candid shots of real people’s hands in natural poses; fashion magazines feature posed hands that are often quite unnatural.  What I do is basically start at the beginning of the magazine and draw every hand I see that’s printed big enough for me to see and draw reasonably well. Then I just keep going until I’ve filled up a sketchbook page. That usually takes me around 45 minutes. Here are my three most recent hand exercise pages from my sketchbook:

You can use whatever drawing tools you find most comfortable. Personally, I feel that speed and volume of hands-drawn is far more important than laboring over each hand and trying to get them all perfect. (You can spot some real duds in the pages above, but that comes with the territory.) Accordingly, I use my favorite drawing pen, the Rotring Art Pen, and just start drawing directly in ink. As you can see, I sometimes–but not always–go in with Prismacolor marker afterwords and add some shading. Mitten hands, I CAST THEE OUT!!