Since Friday is my day off there’re no work news today, it’s all a blur of lettering French mainstream comics. I’ve jotted down a few posts while on the train, but they’re really just starting points to elaborate on during next week’s transportation.
So, have a nice weekend y’all.
See you Monday!
Today’s session was something of a quantum leap from the last two days of relative entry level assignments, and to some degree I believe the students welcomed the change of pace. Their comics are growing visibly bolder to match the demand I’m putting on them.
I’d asked them to tell a single page story spanning three clearly defined genres (without actually mixing the genres, even. That proved nearly impossible, and that criterium had to go, eventually).
Rounding off the day and week, I played Mr Bungle’s Pink Cigarette to the class as inspiration for an open assignment. That proved to be a perfect last task before lunch, and I fancy that this kind of process will be more fruitful with this class.
As for my own performance, I can tell I’m not quite following up on all students’ work, and will have to pay more attention to their individual progress in the weeks to come. I’d hate to lose someone for my not having been sufficiently alert.
Working on Astoria, I generally try to avoid reading too many mainstream comics, old Kirby floppies being the exception since the King is the lynchpin of one Astoria piece.
Even so, with the amount of transportation I have right now, I allow myself a little endulgement to guilty sins.
That’s why I’ve dived into Alan Moore’s Miracle Man, and have his Swamp Thing waiting on the side. I’ve always considered them somehow below standard (for no particular reason other than their age) but those are the works that enabled Moore to write Watchmen, dammit!
I don’t have any sense of how Miracle Man is going to play yet, but the self-referential transition page between the first and second chapter of book one is promising, Nietzsche quotation and all.
Shows how Moore has always had the form down, even in those early days.
Question is, like I said, what does young Alan say under the technique?
I also have a BD lying around that I promised my editor to look through (since our French *combined* might give some idea what goes on in the balloons) – Bastien Vives’ Le Gout du Chlore. Apparently, praise was heaped upon it at this year’s Angouleme festival, and just leafing through it you can’t help but notice that most of the book is composed of silent scenes of people swimming around a public bath. The taste of Chlor, indeed.
From what I gather, the main character is a young man who is adviced by his masseur (a French thing?) to take up swimming. In the bath house he is enfatuated with a female regular who he observates at first, later comes in contact with.
No dirty agendas here, just poetic metaphor as their relationship revolves around swimming, her giving him advice in between sparse casual dialogue and sumptuous, lingering underwater scenes.
The colour scheme is extremely restrained, focusing on azure hues of the bath house and pale skin. The combination (which I involuntarily associate to hospitals) effectively counters the latent sexuality between the main characters, and the sensuality of weightless movement in water.
The otherness of being submerged is emphasized by reducing underwater objects to single colour shapes, in contrast to the steel nib pen outline that constitutes the “real world” of the book. This little trick also supports the surreal aspect of the extended swimming scenes, and vice versa. These registrations of bodies in mute, zero-G motion becomes a platonic ballet that signifies the solitude of individuals in public spaces.
Because G du Chl is also about the fragile tip-toeing of making new acquaintances in a no man’s land (or very limited common ground?) like a bath house, or a cafe, or workspace.
I’m not giving away the bittersweet ending but the book is brilliantly executed, and the dialogue mercifully (or should I say merci-fully?) sparse enough that even someone with my subconversational French abilities get the gist of it.
Considering that the main load of the book is pulled by the pantomime aquatics, it is only fitting that the plot itself is really quite small in scope but unfolded so beautifully that you’d have to be a cynical old wanker, and blind to boot, to not like it.
I am very impressed, and I can’t even swim!
Well, that went okay I guess, in its own anticlimactic little way. I seem to have sorely underestimated the class, even after the praise I laid upon them yesterday.
Today’s assignment was to make a three-panel strip, just to measure the individual student’s ability to tell a story in pictures. So no demands to entertainment value or narrative accomplishment; it’s what goes on between-panel that counts, and legibility.
I then gave a half-hour lecture on the importance of clarity in communicating a story by means of composition, cropping and economy of linework, and ran quickly through McCloud’s six transitions.
After a few show-and-tells we repeated the exercise, applying the new knowledge beautifully. Now, a lot of students had done perfectly the first time around, but in the second attempt there were next to no slip-ups.
Even more impressively, most managed to wring a story or at least some subtle humor out of the space and time given by the assignment!
More than any class I’ve taught before, and judging from what I’ve seen the past two days, these are imagemakers already, with great intuition when it comes to visual narrative.
So tomorrow I have to up the ante a bit. We’ll lunge head first into longer-form comics, tackling layouts and more complex storytelling, AND have changing, daily constraints.
Tomorrow is last day before weekend, so I’ll give a short introduction to storytelling before giving the class a genre-mixing task of telling a simple story through three alternating genres.
See how they like them apples.
Monday will be the day of my big History of Comics slideshow, but hopefully I find the time to test their post-weekend, longterm memory with new assignments, too!
Getting off the train at Malmo Central, there was a movement like a tic under my left eyelid, and the next moment, my contact lens fell out into my hand. As I was staring at it, I had an itch in the right eye, and without thinking, I wiped out the other lens, too. Fortunately, I managed to catch it with the same hand I was already holding the first one in.
I should note that I am close to handicapped without lenses or glasses, and there I was, in the middle of the platform. Stumbling for some calm spot in the middle of the stampeding commuters, I realized that the left lens had somehow been torn from edge to center, and was totally useless. Even though I got the other one in place with just a light sting, it’s a good thing I know my way around the central by no, and could find my bus stop …
So it’s hello, scratched old emergency glasses. Don’t even want to ask what could go wrong now. I’ve seen how that works out in movies!
Oh joy, not only did I land a THIRD of the students for my comics class (not a fifth like I said yesterday!), I had to do a double-check slapstick-style when I saw the level these kids are at!
I say kids; they’re in their twenties, but I have to imagine I have some edge on them, if only in age. It’s really an impressive talent mass to be working with, and diverse, too.
Am actually looking *forward to* getting up at five in the AM tomorrow…! Who’d have thunk?!
Okay, I’m getting dangerously hooked on a Flickr-via-Facebook internet meme. You’ve probably all seen it by now, you know the one:
Create your own album cover
1 – Go to “wikipedia.” Hit “random”
or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.2 – Go to “Random quotations”or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
3 – Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7daysThird picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4 – Use photoshop or similar to put it all together.
5 – Post it to FB with this text in the “caption” and TAG the friends you want to join in. (you can untag yourself if you don’t want this photo up.)
This kind of formal restriction is always tempting in that you just have to mount (and make some sense of) the three random parts – title, band name, photo – and The way you will alawys add meaning to the juxtaposition is, well, very much do with comics if you ask me.
No? Don’t ask me, then.
My first offering was as drummer with black metal band Blue Leach on their second and last album, Your Work is All You Are. The strains of making a concept album from the Egyptian Book of the Dead drove keyboardist/singer/guitarist/harmonica player and main songwriter Trond Spàfon to steady, manual labor shortly afterward.
A few years later, I joined avant rock band Prix Novembre as a session musician for the recording of their fifth album (ominously, their 13th if you count splits, special edition remix albums, anniversary digipaks and live albums) named Half of Them are True. Don’t believe anything you’ve heard, it was the tucan that started on the heavy drugs, and his performance was the worse for it.
The American Experiment: it was worth the try (2003)
Only in the beginning of the 21st century did I found the post-rock project The American Experiment, and in the fall of 2003 published what was intended to be a stark, satirical comment on the War on Terror, the It Was Worth a Try EP. Only later I discovered that the record was used by the US Army in interrogating prisoners in Guantánamò. That send my musical carreer on hiatus for a couple of years.
That was not the end of my music endeavors, however. Watch this space …
After a large scale questionnaire campaign in the area where I live, the council has published a pamphlet of “remedies” toward bettering the township according to the wishes of the citizens. At least that’s what they say in the introductory remarks – and it does look good in print.
The rest consists of individual departments explaining “We’re doing that already” or “We won’t be doing that”. No active changes appear to come from the suggestions; seems all the funding went to printing the pamphlet.
Overall, I’m not complaining. I think the city is doing well with their money, a few exceptions seem to be on their to-do list. One paragraph from the Police Dept. cracks me up, though:
It answers a request for more police presence in local traffic, and loosely translated it says, “We have two motorbikes at our disposal and with the next budget plan we hope to be able to train officers to drive them” …!
Nice move, you may want to work on the train of actions next time 
Some time this year I’ll be done with the Astoria artwork, and rather than going Ho-Hum and sit on my hands, I’d like to hit the ground running. I have a couple of mainstream-ish ideas that may work in a serialized online form, and I’m contemplating hosting the things myself, going through the arduous schedule of posting weekly installments of three different comics.
Well, those plans are all blowing in the wind right now, waiting for funding to fall from the sky, but individual concepts are under development.
What I *am* looking into is new ways of promoting a site like that. I am totally oblivious to webcomics in general, and by extension what marketing channels they may use, having more often been struck by “Neh” than “Wow!” reading webbed cartoons.
That’s right, I actually think I can do one better than most, but not immediately reaching the heights of my favorites, American Elf or Anders loves Maria, of course.
So why the “discuss” in the post title? Because I’m asking for advice here. Post a comment if you have a brilliant idea for pushing comics online. What I’m not looking for:
1. Badly spelled “visit my site” comments
2. Encouragements to join this portal or that, unless you’re top dog at Webcomicsnation and can present a viable financial plan. So, allhotnudiecomics.to, don’t bother.
3. Software recommendations. I have that figured out, TYVM.
4. Agency offers: I have my own package, so unless you’ll front me at no profit – don’t post.
Are we good on that subject? Good, I think I just killed all discussion Here’s hoping for some input in spite of preemptive rejection!
And I’m off to the Oscars. No, wait. Been reading Matt Fractions Twitter coverage (twitterage?) of the awards.
I’m really off to teach comics for the next four weeks. It’s going to be a logistic limbo of connecting trains between Malmoe and Holbak (Shit Creek, Denmark) since I want to go home and see my kids every day. The school has set me up with a room on the premises but I’d rather commute five hrs a day(!) than be away from the family.
Plus, I can get some (comic lettering) work done on the train, so I’m fully paid up for my time
Starting off today by repeating the same speech four times to different groups of students to enlist them to the course/cause. Repetition is fun (?) and hopefully effective. Should keep statistic lists of enrollment by group to check on own performance. First group is an obvious no-win since I will have no clue what I’m saying. By last session I’ll be going on pure coffee-induced stamina and routine, so that’s a goner, too.
Betting the rest of the course on groups two and three. If I get my little speech together, that is, otherwise there’ll be lots of quality time with the young’uns…
[Edit: seems like I landed a whopping fifth of the entire student body for my little course, or my maths are awhack. Who said comics were dead, motherfucker?!]
Below: a picture from scenic Holbak (iPhone keyboard won’t take international signs, so I included the correct spelling on the sign at the top)
