Jun 08 2011

Comics Documentary: Folktales and Airships (Featuring Me!)

Did you know that Wake Forest University here in Winston-Salem has a documentary film-making department? I didn’t until I was contacted a while back by filmmaker and MFA candidate Peter Salomone who was interested in making a documentary about comics-making–featuring me. I’m sure you know how exciting and interesting the life of a cartoonist is: there’s lots of, um, sitting…. and also you put stuff on and off a scanner a lot… and sometimes you get up and make some coffee, and… well, I guess that’s pretty much it. I attempted to dissuade him from making a film on this subject, suggesting that any number of things–someone making a sandwich, or changing the oil in a car–would make for a more engaging subject, but he was persistent, so I said “What the hey…” and he came over one afternoon and filmed.

I’m actually a big fan of documentaries in general and comics documentaries in particular. It’s precisely because I’ve seen a ton of comics documentaries, though, that I was also admittedly a bit worried about how the final film might turn out. The comics documentaries I’ve seen (and I’d wager I’ve seen the bulk of them at this point) run the gamut quality-wise, from really well-done examples like the Terry Zwigoff documentary about Robert Crumb to the cringe-inducing Comic Book Confidential.

One of my big personal pet peeves with comics documentaries is how the actual comics artwork is filmed and shown on-screen. Filmmakers (because they’re used to moving images I assume) have a tendency to want to make the comics images move and this often works out really really badly. It also seems to me to imply that the original static comics images are somehow deficient and need to be “augmented” for use in film. A particularly egregious example of this is Tintin and Me, in which Hergé’s artwork is separated into foreground and background elements and then subjected to some sort of half-assed animation effect. On the other hand, I can certainly see some reasoning behind not wanting just a static image on-screen for long periods. There are a lot of ways to handle this problem in film, and I had some trepidations for sure about how it would be dealt with with my artwork.

Fortunately, I think Peter (and Roman Safiullin, who assisted) did a great job here all around. It’s testament to Peter’s directing skill that he was able to extract enough interesting bits from my ramblings to structure a solid eight-minute film around. I was particularly impressed with how he handled the still artwork. The motion effects he’s used are very minimal–enough to keep things interesting on-screen, but never over-doing it. They’re subtle and basically just mimic the first-hand experience of reading a comic. I also really enjoyed how some of the things he’s done with the images show the process of how the comics are made, with the various Photoshop layers made visible or invisible to show how a particular panel is put together.

Anyway, enough of my rambling. A big thanks to Peter for Roman for all the hard work. Here’s the film. Please give it a “like” on Vimeo if you have an account (and assuming you actually like it–you will!):

Direct link to video: here.

Jun 07 2011

Portrait Night 6/7 (Henry Kissinger)

Tonight’s #PortraitNight subject is former Secretary of State and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Henry Kissinger.

If you’d like to suggest a #PortraitNight subject, you can do so either via the comments section here, or via my Twitter.

Jun 06 2011

Heroes Con 2011 – Day 3

Sunday

My Sunday at Heroes Con started out with an interesting–if sparsely attended–panel: “Historical Comics” with Becky Cloonan, Chris Schweizer, Don Rosa and me. It made me wonder if maybe having the first panel each day start an hour (or half hour) after opening might be a good idea, since that would allow time for people to get onto the convention center floor as well as provide a little cushion time for them to decide what programming they want to attend. At any rate, it was a good discussion. Thanks to those of you who attended and especially to Chris who moderated.

The floor of Heroes on Sunday seemed a lot busier to me than it probably actually was. I had built up a small backlog of commissions Saturday afternoon that I had to bump to Sunday because of our Moebius panel Saturday afternoon and so I spent the first few hours of Sunday scrambling to catch up. Here’s one I did based on Marvel’s Godzilla #13:

Here’s the original cover, featuring Godzilla and “Flapjack-zilla” doing battle:

Herb Trimpe sometimes gets written off as being a “just cranking it out” cartoonist, but if he designed all the insane-looking monsters in this series, he’s 100% alright in my book. I should have taken a quick picture of the previous page in that sketchbook because it was a truly amazing Evan Dorkin drawing of the same creatures. Jim Rugg told me he did one as well but I never got a look at it.

Here’s a commissioned superhero mini-pinup I of Nova:

Finally, a quick Manhunter sketch card:

Once those drawings were wrapped up, I thankfully got a bit of a breather and took advantage of the laid back Sunday scene to actually meet some folks. In particular, it was great to meet a lot of the Sketch Charlotte gang, many of whom participate in the Animal Alphabet project. I’ve also been chatting a bit on Twitter/via email with Gabriel Hardman and Corinna Bechko about possibly putting together an anthology pitch with them, so it was nice to finally see them in person. I teach some eLearning classes for the Savannah College of Art and Design and I was glad to be able to interact a bit in person with some of the “on the ground” faculty who had made it up for the show. Speaking of  funnybook schools, there were also a few CCS folks on the floor (although not as many as in some years past) I got to touch base with as well.

I also got to actually buy some stuff ! I’ve got a box or two still to unpack, but here’s the bulk of my haul:

So that’s:

1) Rocking So Hard – Shannon Smith

2) The Sketch Charlotte Anthology – various

3) Dharbin #1 & #2 – Collected Edition – Dustin Harbin

4) Rambo 3.5 – Jim Rugg

5) A feebie post card – Eleanor Davis

6) Untitled sketch mini – Eleanor Davis

7) Wysteria – Brad McGinty (note that this is a hand-assembled hardcover book!)

8) Diary Comics #2 – Dustin Harbin

9) Neatobots: Itty Bitty Sketchbook – J. Chris Campbell

10) Rashy Rabbit: Droppin’ Anchor – Josh Latta

11) Left-overs are Good Luck – Lena H. Chandhok

12) Sketchbooks – Chris Schweizer

13) Favorites (Team Cul de Sac benefit ‘zine) – Various

I’m really looking forward to digging into this stuff, but so far I haven’t really had a chance to catch my breath.

Sales

I had been debating whether to even set up a table at Heroes this year since I didn’t have anything new to hawk, but I sure am glad I decided to set up. I did moderately well book-wise, especially considering my lack of new product, but I sold a ton of original art. In addition to the commissions I’ve been posting daily, I sold a bunch of superhero mini-pinups, all but four of my Animal Alphabet originals, the original cover art to the Ameila book, the cover art to last year’s Wide Awake Press anthology, and a two-page spread from my Count of Monte Cristo sample pages. Here’s how it broke down:


As you can see, artwork accounted for an overwhelming 68% of my sales (and an even higher percentage of my profits, since I have to purchase my books from the publisher to resell at cons).

Overall

I’d have to do some digging to be absolutely sure, but I think this is the best year yet for me sales-wise at a Heroes Con. I’d attribute that partially to having made a real effort to have lots of original art available across a broad range of prices. Projects like the Animal Alphabet are great ways to build up a body of smaller stand-alone pieces for sale. I think also I’m doing a little better job making my presence known online via more consistent blogging and via Twitter (although I’m still Facebook-less).

Areas I could improve on for next year are, I think, being a little better about pricing commissions and of course having new books for sale. I tend to under-price commissions, figuring, “Hey, I’m sitting back here drawing anyway, so why charge much?” But, it’s getting to the point where I’m spending a ton of time doing them and I’m doing enough that they’re impacting my time availability for other things at the show. With the latter, there’s really no chance that Oyster War will be complete and printed by next summer, but I need to at least get back in the mini-comics game to have something new. Certainly the Animal Alphabet illustrations and my Tuesday night Twitter portraits would both make decent minis. I’ve also considered doing some sort of “deluxe edition” of Midnight Sun–maybe printed bigger, with sepia instead of gray toning, and perhaps with an included piece of original art, an original page from the book itself, or a print.

Show-wise, (and this is purely anecdotal) a number of folks seemed to think attendance was down a bit from previous shows. Possible reasons for this I heard bandied about: the general state of the economy, the several unfortunate last-minute cancellations of some big name guests, and/or the show happening while school is still in session (potentially making it more difficult to travel to a three day show).  If the show’s numbers were down, it certainly wasn’t reflected in my sales numbers and when I asked, for example, Gabriel Hardman whether the show had been worth a trip out from the west coast, he answered with a resounding Yes.

This was also the first year of the show (other than a one-off absence a few years back ) without creative director Dustin Harbin and given the size and complexity of a show like Heroes, I can imagine that could have presented some stumbling blocks. As far as I could tell, though, everything ran without a hitch. Heroes is known as one of the best-run and best-organized shows around and this year was no exception. A big tip-of-the-hat goes out to the folks at Heroes, in particular Rico Renzi, Andrew Mansell and all the volunteers (and of course Shelton himself!).

Speaking of volunteers, here’s something funny that you’re not gonna find at any other con: Unofficial Hereos Con photographer Vy Tran was on the scene with her camera as usual documenting things. She also, though, recently graduated with a degree in healthcare administration and this year kicked off her “Healthy Heroes(Con) Project” which involved distributing these little “stay healthy” goody bags to all the guests:

They were packed full of vitamin C, green tea, and sanitizing wipes!

Say… that gives me a great idea for a convention promo item:

Jun 06 2011

Animal Alphabet: J is for Jellyfish

You can follow the other “I” entries as people post them to Twitter this morning by following the #AnimalAlphabet hashtag. To see all the entries so far, check out the Animal Alphabet Tumblr: http://animalalphabet.tumblr.com.

J is for Jellyfish


The original art for this is for sale here.

Jun 05 2011

Heroes Con 2011 – Day 2

Saturday at Heroes Con was actually somewhat slower for me than the supposedly-slow Friday that precedes it. I think, though, that this is largely because I don’t have a new book for sale and have been selling primarily original art and commissioned sketches. Friday (not Saturday) seems to be the day that original art folk come to Heroes in order to beat the lines. I also spent the later portion of the day in a panel, which meant I lost a few potential drawing hours.

I did get a really fun commission pretty early in the day: characters from the film Legend. This is the second Legend drawing I’ve done for this particular person (it’s entirely possible the he and I are the only two people that really, really love Legend) but this one was a bit more elaborate than the previous single-character drawing I’d done for him:

I had to make up a bunch of stuff for this one; apparently there are no existing stills of any of the characters from Legend that include their legs/feet.

I did an Ambush Bug commission yesterday and bought an Ambush Bug issue from a dollar bin yesterday for reference. Since I had it floating around, I figured I go ahead and do a mini-pinup of the character:

‘Round about three in the afternoon I abandoned my table for our “mega panel”: Master of Screaming Metal: Tribute to Moebius. (My table was graciously held down by one of my SCAD students. Thanks!) I guess I’ll wait until online feedback starts trickling in… but, I thought the panel went really well. We showed the documentary Moebius Redux, which was really well-done, although it certainly shied away from addressing some of the more troubling aspects of the artist’s later career. The real star of the panel, though, was Geof Darrow who had a seemingly-limitless well of hilarious anecdotes about Moebius. My friend and co-conspirator Craig Fischer wrapped up the presentation with a really fascinating discussion that made me (and others I’d guess) question the conventional narrative about the division between Jean Giraud and “Moebius.”

I observed the art Heroes Con art auction intermittently and only caught bits and pieces of it. My Machine Man piece sold for something in the neighborhood of $125.00 and I think it maybe wound up with Chris Pitzer from Adhouse Books. I was amazed (in a good way!) to learn that Rich Barrett’s Emma Frost piece sold for $750. There were people telling me that the Adam Huges piece had broken all previous Heroes Con records and sold for $12,000.. but that’s just, you know, insane.

Having been absent from my table for a bit, I’ve now got a line-up of commissions for tomorrow that I’m really excited about: Nova, Godzilla, and Manhunter so far… Come see me at AA-544 if you want to commission a sketch, or just say Hi. I’ll be participating as well in an Historical Comics panel at 11 am along with Chris Schweizer, Don Rosa and Becky Cloonan.

I often have a hard time coming up with a good “concluding paragraph” for my posts, but how about if instead of that I give you this: cartoonist Patrick Dean displaying his hand-Sharpie-drawn “Garfield 4 Life/In Lasagne we Trust” tattoo? That is all.

Good night, y’all!