Search Results for: log book

IT SOUNDS GREAT WITH THE VOLUME DOWN

Friday, October 20, 2006

My friend Brandon (who keeps refusing to answer my e-mails now that he’s a fancypants graduate student — maybe he’ll read this and feel guilty) once told me that in the lazy afternoons, he’d been watching soap operas with sound off, writing his own dialogue for the characters on the screen. I thought that sounded like a fun writing exercise, but wasn’t sure what the equivalent would be for drawing.*

Then, a few weeks ago I came across a crappy-looking movie that was shot in the same whaling town one of my characters lived in. So I picked up the DVD, sat down with my sketchbook in front of the TV. But instead of watching it, I used the fast forward and pause buttons to freeze-frame scenes that I thought were pretty decent. Then I super-imposed my own characters over those scenes.

By the time I’d made it through the movie, I had several pages worth of comics panels (without dialogue — but you could certainly add dialogue), and it occured to me, you could do a whole comic like this, if you really wanted to.

* Though, come to think of it, Kenneth Koch used to give his poetry students comic books that they’d never read, and order them to white-out the speech balloons without reading the dialogue, and write their own….

THE GATES OF PARADISE AS A COMIC

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Ever since I saw this bit from Art Spiegelman’s PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG %@?*! where his mentor Ken Jacobs tells a young Art to just think of paintings “as giant comic panels,” I’ve had a new eye towards paintings and all kinds of visual art. I spent a good part of our recent visit to the Art Institue of Chicago thinking, comic…comic…comics!

When I was 20, I had the good fortune to study renaissance art in Florence, Italy for a few summer months. My teacher was Kevin Murphy, an expert on Italian Renaissance Art who teaches at the British Institute of Florence. (His other claim to fame is giving art tours to Mel Gibson whenever Mel’s in town.)

Florence has been my favorite city in the world ever since. (And consequently, Meghan’s, too.)

So I was really excited to hear that three of the newly restored panels from Ghiberti’s “Gates of Paradise” are going to be at the Met while we’re on our honeymoon in New York.

The “Gates of Paradise,” are actually gilded bronze panels on the door to the Battistero di San Giovanni in the Piazza del Duomo:

Their 10 panels depict scenes from the Old Testament, intricately illustrated in high and low relief. When the three-ton, 20-foot-tall doors were completed, in 1452, Michelangelo pronounced them grand enough to adorn the entrance to paradise, and so they became known as “The Gates of Paradise.” They have for centuries been considered one of the masterpieces of Western art.

Of course, it’s impossible for me to not look at those panels and think, “A huge comic!”

The individual panels themselves have a really interesting art history lesson to tell. See, in medieval times, before the invention of perspective, individual figures were compartmentalized into boxes, sized according to importance, and depth of field was weakly displayed by overlapping. With the adaptation of perspective technique, all of the sudden artists were able to fake the illusion of depth, and squeeze several different figures into the same scene.

Now here’s the bizarre part, courtesy of my old textbook, A. Richard Turner’s Renaissance Art:

We assume that a represented fictive space will contain narrative events understood to be happening simultaneously. For instance, a picture may show several events, say a friar preaching, a man leading a train of donkeys across a square, a fishmonger purveying his wares. We do not necessarily assume that these events have any narrative connection with one another, but because they occupy a common space, we assume they are happening at the same time.

Take a look at the “Isaac” panel from “The Gates”:

At first glance, it looks like a single moment frozen in time, right? Lots of people standing around.

But that’s not what the viewer of the fifteenth century saw, or what the artist intended! What you’re really looking at is the sequence of a story (Isaac’s unintentional blessing of Jacob) spread out across one compositional field, or panel. When you understand the story, the panel can be read sequentially:

Perspective, in this case, isn’t just used to fake the illusion of depth and space: it’s actually used as a storytelling device. So if you look at The Gates as a comic, each panel doesn’t represent a moment of a story, it represents a complete story in itself, and the panels together tell a bigger story.

For some reason, this really blows my mind.

To see more really cool pictures of “The Gates,” check out this site.

DEAR DIARY

Thursday, October 12, 2006

The most honest, funny, nitty-gritty, cutting-edge work happens in your sketchbook — you don’t have to worry about whether anything is good or bad, you just fart around. And when you’re just farting around, that’s when the good stuff happens.

For the past couple of months, I’d been so focused on what I thought was my “real” work that I wasn’t working in my sketchbook. And funny enough, even after working on several pages of “finished” comics, I still felt unfulfilled, like I didn’t get anything done: my sketchbook was blank, and that was failure. It seemed like my daily life, because it wasn’t chronicled, or at least eluded to, was lost.

So for the past week or so, I’ve been on a diary kick, filling something like five pages a night, right after Meg falls asleep, and before I do, too. There’s something about the twilight of consciousness — it’s kind of a magical time where you pull crazy things out of your ass. One of the things I’ve been doing is keeping my diary entries strictly comics-based: lots of pictures, speech bubbles, etc. Not like James Kochalka, I don’t try to make perfect comics from a moment that captures the day. Something more like Anders Nilsen (his whole book, Monologues for the Coming Plague, came straight out of sketchbooks), where I just try to empty the junk in my head onto the page — fast and dirty.

It’s been really wonderful.

Anyways, I had breakfast this morning with Dan (who also, it turns out, is a fan of Anders), and I wrote about it in my diary this afternoon using my new style. Here’s a couple pages from it:

For anybody who lives in Madison (this means you, Sean), check out Dan at the Wisconsin Book Festival next week, where Chris Ware and Marjane Satrapi will also be hanging out.

STAR WARS AND COUGH DROPS

Monday, October 9, 2006

It seems like just about everybody has the plague these days, and over at our place it’s no different. I spent the weekend recovering from the crud, watching the Star Wars trilogy on DVD, reading comic books and Elmore Leonard, and eating like a hog. (Starve a fever, feed a cold.)

The best thing about the trilogy box set is a 2 1/2 hour long documentary called Empire of Dreams. It mostly focuses on the first movie, but it does a pretty amazing job at putting Star Wars — which seems like it came out of nowhere — into a context.

What interested me the most was the huge role played by Ralph McQuarrie, a conceptual design artist who Lucas hired to make paintings of several scenes (including C-3P0, R2-D2, a lightsaber battle, stormtroopers, and Darth Vader) so that Lucas could take them to the studio and say, “This is what it’s going to look like.” Essentially, McQuarrie’s drawings sold the movie, and got the thing made, but not only that, he created the look of the films. He took what was in Lucas’s head, and made it come to life.

Pictures trumped words.

You can see a bunch of these things at McQuarrie’s website.

Other inspiration from the weekend? Check out Tom Gauld’s Guardians of the Kingdom:

I love pretty much everything that I’ve seen from him.

And I can’t say it enough: if you haven’t read Elmore Leonard before, you are in for a real treat. Killshot is about to come out as a movie.
Ok, that’s all I can think of. Between wedding plans, GRE, and grad school apps, there’s not much time for anything else, but maybe I’ll put something pretty up this week.

ALISON BECHDEL IN CLEVELAND

Wednesday, October 4, 2006

After scarfing down some tacos with about 50 soccer brats at the Chipotle across the street, last night we went to see Alison Bechdel read at the Joseph-Beth in Legacy Village. (Here’s Alison’s own blog of the event.) They had the reading hidden upstairs in this special conference room that had a fantastic projector. Then Harvey Pekar got up and gave an introduction that emphasized her skills as a writer:

Genuinely thrilled, Alison said, “That’s like the Grateful Dead introducing Phish.”

She started out by reading from the first chapter of Fun Home. Using Powerpoint, she projected the individual panels onto the projection screen while she read the narration from a script. (She let the speech bubbles inside the panels speak for themselves.) It was really soothing, and blowing the panels up several times bigger than their actual size you could see every hatch, every stroke, every variation in the inkwash. Meg said it was like seeing slides in architecture studio — you could see the way the imagery was working in a way different from reading the book.

“The thing about doing a graphic novel is that it’s a really physical process,” Alison said. “You have to know every square inch of the book. So there’s no way for me to talk about the book without showing it to you.”

It was truly using Powerpoint for good and not for evil, and I’m convinced now that Powerpoint is the key to presenting comix readings.

After she finished the chapter, she went into a slideshow detailing how she wrote the book.

What blew me away is how much writing leads her process. She used this panel from page 189 to illustrate:

She starts out by using Adobe Illustrator to type out her narration and dialogue into boxes. (She also includes a textual description of how the art will look.) Then she arranges the text around the page how she wants. At this stage, it looks very much like visual poetry. In her senior thesis, an undergrad colleague of mine, Elisabeth Price, reverse-engineered a Frank Miller page this way:

After getting the text just right, she rough pencils the panel on the typing paper.

The next step involves lots of photographic research — for this panel, she researched pictures of gay men from the period, fireworks, rooftops, water towers, and random people sitting on rooftops.

“I couldn’t have done this book without Google Image Search.”

She also takes digital pictures of herself in every pose that takes place in the panel.

“After this step,” she said, “the work is ninety-percent done.”

And yeah, the next steps are pretty standard comics stuff — tight pencil, then inking, erasing the pencil. Then the whole thing is scanned into Photoshop and cleaned up.

She did a gray inkwash for the shading that was later turned green by her publisher.
“It was weird because I never knew how it was all going to come together.”

Watching her describe her process, I thought once again about how I believe that comics is really collage — cobbling together layers of text and images. It’s the style that unifies the work — the style that convinces you that all this stuff is supposed to be in the same place.

After her process presentation, she read from chapter four, and then it was time for questions and answers.

She talked about her relationship with her mom, about the unexpected success of the book, and the bizarre mix of excitement over its success, and the burden of having her family story everywhere. Harvey chimed in by telling an anecdote about Robert Crumb and his reaction to Terry Zwigoff’s documentary about him.

“Crumb didn’t want to be bothered,” Harvey said. “He figured Terry would do the film, and everyone would forget about it.”

Then Harvey’s wife, Joyce Brabner, said: “Crumb’s first wife, Dana, has been trying to get a book published for years. It’s called, It Was My Life Too, Goddamnit!”

Afterwards, Alison signed books. Here’s a funny story about how much of a perfectionist she is:

She was going to draw a portrait of one of the women in line, but she said she didn’t have a pencil. “Does anybody have a pencil?” So I gave her one of those golf pencils you get at Ikea, and she did the sketch, then inked it.

I tried to draw her several times during the night, but just couldn’t get it right. Part of the problem was that I was caught off guard by her looks: from photos, she looks very, well, masculine and angular (butch hair, dark suit, glasses), but when you really start trying to draw her, looking close at her face, you realize that her lines are much softer in real life…

Meg and I, we’re always arguing about whether it’s more invasive to draw someone or take their picture. You certainly see a person much clearer by drawing them.

A lesson that maybe Alison has learned herself.