Austin Kleon – Page 610

INFINITE CANVAS

Friday, November 4, 2005

I’ve been drawing with my tablet pen in Flash recently, and I’m absolutely hooked on vector-based drawing. Drawing with vectors in Flash, you are free from the restrictions of resolution, so you can lay out panels on an 8 x 11 page meant for print, but then you can mega zoom inside each panel and draw in whatever level detail you want. This has worked great for traditional layouts, but I’ve been looking into other possibilites of using Flash for comics…

In REINVENTING COMICS, Scott McCloud coined the concept of the “infinite canvas.” (Check out this page where McCloud “continues his thinking” about the book.) Because of technology like Flash animation, the size of a digital comics page is theoretically infinite, so comics presented online shouldn’t be limited by conventional page sizes. An artist could conceivably display a complete comics story of indefinite length on a single page…

…enter the Tarquin Engine, a Flash-based template created by Daniel Merlin Goodbrey. With Tarquin, you can make huge, labyrinth-like comics with dead ends and web-like paths, that automatically zoom when you click the panels. A prime example of what the Tarquin Engine can do, here. Some other hypercomics, here. I’m tempted by hypercomics, and some online literary magazines like Born Magazine even encourage Flash-based literary endeavors, but on the other hand, I wonder if we shouldn’t just head back to the copy machine.

D E E R !

Thursday, November 3, 2005

The following, just another scenario when firearms would’ve been handy, from Don:

BENTONVILLE, Ark. – For 40 exhausting minutes, Wayne Goldsberry battled a buck with his bare hands in his daughter’s bedroom.

Goldsberry finally subdued the five-point whitetail deer that crashed through a bedroom window at his daughter’s home Friday. When it was over, blood splattered the walls and the deer lay dead on the bedroom floor, its neck broken.

[Read more…]

3 CHUNKS OF DYBEK

Thursday, November 3, 2005

From an interview with Stuart Dybek in the November Writer’s Chronicle:

1. On place: “A writer’s relationship to place is more complex and mysterious than whether he physically lives in the place or not. Each writer is wired differently. Some need to be situated there to be nourished by it. Others need to be away from it in order to reimagine it; such writers carry it around with them wherever they go, like an accent…”

2. On the grotesque: “[Wolfgang Kayser, in THE GROTESQUE IN ART AND LITERATURE] says that tragedy and comedy aren’t inclusive enough and that we need a third category, the grotesque. What are its prominent features? The conjoinment between human beings and animals, for instance, one you find in the Metamorphoses: Kafka’s story as well as in Ovid.”

3. On lyric mode vs. narrative mode: “The narrative mode is linear, chronological–this happened, then this happened–it implies cause and effect. The lyrical, by contrast, is the mode of dreams: associative both in terms of image and sound, so that we can get from one idea to the other via assonance, alliteration, rhyme. Time in the lyric is subjective: you can speed it up, slow-mo it, flash forward. Often in stories what is called the epiphany is actually a switch from the narrative to the lyric mode. Joyce’s “The Dead” offers a classic example of this: the story is in the narrative and dramatic mode for most of its length, but at the very end, closure involves a leap into the lyric complete with images of falling snow and the f-sounds Joyce employs.”