Jul 31 2010

Local “Comic Book Reading Room”

Notice anything unusual about the image on the cover of our local monthly rag?  I sure didn’t.  I gave it a cursory flip-through and then left it on the coffee table.  My two year old daughter, though, is apparently far more observant than I; she looked at it and then presented it back to me with an emphatic, “Look, Daddy.  It’s TinTin and his little dog Snowy!”  Sure enough, in the back right corner of the room is some kind of weird stand-thing, and in it is a book with TinTin and Snowy on the cover.

I have no idea what that particular book is, but you can see just below it a French edition of The Blue Lotus.  Sitting on the table front and center is the Essex County collection by Jeff Lemire. According to the picture credit, this some local person’s “comic book reading room.”  Now I’m really intrigued.  Winston-Salem’s not that big a place and most of the graphic novel-reading types here are known to one another.  Anyway, now check out the bookshelf in the back and you can see that it’s stocked with some pretty good GNs.  Here’s the ones I think I recognize from the spine:

1) Footnotes in Gaza – Joe Sacco

2) Volumes of Black Jack? – Osamu Tezuka

3) Volumes of the D&Q Yoshihiro Tatsumi collections

4) Black Hole? – Charles Burns

5) Asterios Polyp – David Mazzucchelli

6) Maybe Acme Novelty Library #14 – Chris Ware

7) More TinTin?

Jul 27 2010

Time Lapse

Well, here’s a first–and only marginally successful–attempt to use my webcam for something other than Skyping with relatives.  I clipped the thing to my above-drafting table track lights and tried to do a time lapse video of my inking a page from Oyster War.  The camera’s too far away by a factor of about two and the glare from the lights is pretty bad, but I suppose it’s worth looking at.

I captured the images every 3 seconds using a simple (and free) piece of software called Perios, which captures an image at an interval you specify and writes it as an individual JPG.  Perios has a built-in AVI exporter, but I didn’t like that it only worked on a currently filming project, so I used PhotoLapse to assemble the files into a AVI movie.  I wound up dropping every other frame, so what’s left is a three minute video of a six hour inking process.  Here’s the video, followed by a scan of the inked page:

Jul 25 2010

The Stones and TinTin

I sent this pic around via Twitter yesterday, but I think it deserves a post here as well.  I’m starting to ink Chapter Two of Oyster War and I’ve been streaming documentaries from Netflix in the background as I do.  One of the ones I watched yesterday was Stones in Exile, a documentary about the making of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street.  I’m surprised I noticed this since I’m usually not looking at the screen unless I’m waiting for a bit of ink to dry, but here’s a great still from the film that caught my eye: Anita Pallenberg, then girlfriend of Keith Richards, holding a copy of the TinTin adventure, The Black Island.  Presumably it’s for their son, Marlon, pictured at the right.  It’s of course in French (L’Iile Noire) since Exile was recorded in the south of France, where the Stones retreated in order to avoid taxes (and a sobriety, apparently).  Anyway, this image touches on a number of my favorite things: The Stones, TinTin and attractive Italian actress/model/groupies who are into black magic:

Jul 21 2010

My Cartoonist Survey Posted at David-Wasting-Paper

There’s a short survey/interview with me now posted over at the David-Wasting-Paper blog.  This is an interesting blog for two reasons beyond just getting to read what various cartoonists say in their surveys.  First, the questions for each cartoonist are exactly the same.  Second, there are so damn many of them!  I’m survey number 145.  Be sure to dig through the previous surveys if you have time.  There are tons of interesting subjects.  I couldn’t find a way to sift through them other than by using the chronological drill-down menu on the right, but they start in November of ’09, so they’re really not that hard to find.

Jul 17 2010

Inked Ukulele One-pager

I hesitate to call this a “comic strip” since it’s about 70% words (maybe “illustrated essay” would be more accurate) but whatever it is, it’s inked.  This strip will appear in the Fall issue of Signal to Noise magazine, which is where my previous very wordy one-page music strip about Winston-Salem’s “5” Royales also appeared.  Like the Royales strip, this one will be in full color, but I’m not going to post that until the magazine’s been out on the stands for a while so folks can have a chance to pick up the real live issue.   This strip is also notable in that it  includes the single worst caricature of William H. Macy ever committed to paper.  What can I say–I’m up against a deadline here.  (And since it says “William H. Macy” right  above the panel, I guess I can get by with it…)