Friday 31 October 2014

Halloween


Halloween's one of those things that doesn't really make sense unless you look at it from more than one angle at once (like all the best/important things!) So...

Halloween 

It's ghost story time, time to pass on things that go bump and all that. The picture above, George Frederic Watt's Minotaur, was used as an illustration in a book called "Murray's Manual of Mythology" that was in my parents' house when I was little. My brother and I were devouring this book at an early age, but this picture always scared te heck out of me. I remember daring myself to look at it in daylight, then really wishing I hadn't as it got dark. Quite often. I found it online a few days ago, and haven't seen it for years before that - I misremembered the image as being of the creature sat at a table with it's knife and fork ready. I'd often look at the book, being drawn to that page - in the kitchen, getting under my mother's feet in an attempt to not be too alone.  The picture captures something of the bovine stupidity of the creature, and I think that that's what scared me about it - it's realistic, not just in the outward rendering of the painting, but the personality.

I was easily-scared as a kid (I still don't have much capacity for horror films). I remember a very vivid dream of walking downstairs to the living room in the dark, and finding my father's jogging suit standing upright, facing the wall - empty, but filled out as though someone were in it. I stood in the doorway, terrified, thinking that I should move before it saw me, and then it turned it's head to look at me. The scary thing being that there was no head, of course. That one - unlike the minotaur -still gives me the shivers, writing this now, alone in the house, in the dark!

If you want some cracking ghost stories, you could do worse than look at Emily Carroll's excellent "Through the Woods". I'm about halfway through reading it, and enjoying it immensely - provided it's not too dark when I'm reading it!

Halloween

Arguably traces it's roots back to the Celtic Samhain, the day that the Dead have their holiday. If you know loved ones who are dead, and most of us do, spend time in their company on Halloweeen. Walk through the woods, singing to the dead. (No need to restrict this just to Halloween, of course.)

This transcends the scariness, for me.

Halloween

It's a time of year when everyone wants in on the act! Along with Samhain, it shares it's time of year with Diwali, Bonfire Night, and Martinmas - the latter of which has been co-opted as celebration of the birthday of the Protestant Martin Luther. A common theme of light, explosions and revolt runs through all of this, an upturning of the order of things that it shares with it's counterpart April Fools Day, on the other side of the year.


So, I wish you a happy, scary, soulful or revolting Halloween, as you wish. Or a combination of the above!

Oh, I nearly forgot to mention the commercial juggernaut form of Halloween, which really is scary. If you want to gorge yourself on Toffee Apples and pumpkin while wearing a "sexy" Pokemon or Mario Bros. costume, go ahead - I won't watch!

Tuesday 28 October 2014

How many Buffalo does it take to influence the course of history?

SPOILER: The answer is 8. Read the strip to find out why...

What started out as a straightforward attempt at explaining the Buffalo sentence that I posted about on Friday has turned into ... erm ... something else. You'll just have to read it, I'm at a loss to explain it.



Tongue firmly in cheek here. If you happen to look like Karl Marx and go get a buffalo tattoo on your forehead as a result of reading this blog, don't come crying to me!

(Clarification - I meant that you look like Karl Marx anyway, and then get a buffalo tattoo after reading this blog ... if you do develop a resemblance to Karl Marx after reading this blog, come and tell me about it, we may be onto something!)

Friday 24 October 2014

Buffalo buffalo ... and so on



UPDATE: I have created the comic strip that explains this. Yes, diagrams do help to visualise it. But then things went a little strange... It'll be on the blog next Tuesday.

There's just one thing that I want to tell you today...

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

But you probably knew that already, right?

Full explanation here - it really is a sentence, with nouns, verbs, subject and object and all that.

Reading the explanation bamboozled me - I had to go through it several times before it made any sense to me. Which made me wonder whether it could be explained more easily in a comic.

The improvised Graphic Novel is going to be partly about information theory, I wonder if I can sneak a few buffalo in.

The image above is of Tibetan Yak,  closest I could find in my sketchbook to Buffalo at short notice, I'm afraid. It's from a piece that I did a couple of years ago, called "The Bird Princess", that takes it's starting point with a fairly incomprehensible (to me) folk story from the Tibet/Nepal region, that touches on the process of westernisation that many parts of the world are undergoing, and the interweaving of modern and traditional ways of looking at the world. The pictures are a mixture of hand drawn, and stills captured from old public domain movies (with colours added by the ever-lovin' blue-eyed Gimp, of course). It's one of many strips in my new book (see sidebar)

Thursday 23 October 2014

On the "Mainstream" in Comics

Literacy & A Laureate!

Last Friday, in Kendal, the Comics Literacy Awareness project was announced, and industry veteran / stalwart / good egg Dave Gibbons was crowned the first UK Comics Laureate. CLAw has quite a specific remit of encouraging the use of comics within the educational sector, to improve the literacy level of UK children through use of comics in schools, but it inevitably ties into the bigger discussion of whether comics are any good or not, and whether they're ready to crawl out of the ghetto they've been inhabiting. Certainly, David Barnett's piece in today's Guardian tackles that bigger question, with a list of Five must-read graphic novels that prove that comics are worthy of a laureate.

I want to take issue with the premise of this article on a number of levels. To clarify, I want to take issue with it in order to help further the adoption of comics outside of the ghetto. And I have a positive suggestion to make at the end. I think it's great that CLAw exists, and that we have a laureate. I think it's great that mainstream press like the Guardian is reporting on it, and that this in itself is no longer as remarkable as it used to be. And I think it's great that Dave Gibbons has the job for the next two years - his acceptance speech oozed amiability, enthusiasm and energy. Bring it on.

The Ghetto

A word on the ghetto - I've mentioned it twice now, so let me make myself clear. I'm talking about the Superhero ghetto. Through some quirk of fate/history, the majority of comics have been about superheroes, people who have "special powers", wear lycra-like costumes, have secret identities, nick-names and fight crime. There's a marvellous variety of stories told within these conventions, and I don't intend to dismiss all superhero stories, but the near-monopoly exerted by a genre (superheroes) over a medium (comics) is deeply, utterly, profoundly - well, more than a little bit - strange. It's as if all TV detective stories featured detectives who were also chefs, had speech impediments, and were named after the signature vegetable that showed up in every meal they cooked, or all celebrity chef shows were filmed on the top of a tall building with a resident mime artist in attendance. After 50+ years of such a situation, we just might stop noticing that it's bizarre.

(Ok, so I've just invented the two killer genres that the world never knew it needed, but don't run off and write your best-selling script yet, hear me out to the end of this article!)

So, the stated aim of Mr. Barnett's article is to prove that comics are ready for prime time (inasmuch as having a laureate indicates that), and he's trying to prove it to us by presenting a curated selection of five works.

I so, so want him to prove that point.

Yeah, here comes the "but"s. But four of the five are about superheroes. But one of them was being touted as the "get out of the ghetto" ticket in the late 1980's, and we've evidently made only limited headway. But what about books X, Y and Z, that are definitely in the top 5? (The comments section of his article is brimming with that last one!)

At the root of it, how can a list of any 5 comics make any headway? Can you name the five foods that will "cure" a fussy eater? The five herbaceous plants that will "make" any garden into a work of art? Even the five best writers or painters of the twentieth century?

And who are we trying to convince? The educational establishment? The readership of the Guardian? Society at large? Some shadow projected on the wall because we had a hard time reading comics as a teenager (hey, I've certainly got one of them)?

Audience

For the sake of argument, I'm going to define a target audience. They sometimes read books, watch films and TV, have other interests such as gardening, cycling, walking, sport, pets that consume some parts of their leisure time. Oh, and every Thursday at 7.30pm,  while cooking dinner, they hack into the international banking system under their adopted pseudonym "The Leek", assemble the evidence required to convict a prominent tax dodger, nip round to their house to confront them, and tie them to a chair leaving the evidence neatly filed on the table underneath their calling card, a freshly baked Quiche Lorraine, before calling the police and disappearing quietly into the background. You know, ordinary, if somewhat middle class, people.

Now, maybe this audience isn't to your tastes? Too narrow, maybe? Too posh? Too nice? No probs, they'll do for now, and what I'm going to say to them probably applies to your audience too.

If we look at the tastes in music, or TV, or books, or films, of this audience, it'll be all over the place. Classical to punk rock to death metal to jazz to easy listening to folk to reggae to pop. SAS confessionals to Aga sagas to gritty crime to quirky rom-com/chick-lit to metafiction to costume drama. Oh, and everything in between - I forgot about that.

So any list of five isn't going to hit a very big target within that group, as I grumped to Messrs Barnett, Gibbons and CLAw earlier today on twitter. So what can hit the mark? Well, Paul Gravett's given us a list of 1001, and a very fine list it is too, but it takes rather a long time to read, and therefore the drop-off rate is going to be quite high. Can we target things a bit better?

#comicequiv

So here's an experiment. On twitter, make a connection between a film, TV series or novel (or a director or author), and a comic (or graphic novel if you're feeling posh!), and word it like this:

"If you like X then you might like Y #comicequiv". Two words in there are particularly important:

  • "might" (because up to 50% of the time, we'll be wrong!)
  • #comicequiv : that's a hashtag, a meaningless bit of interweb flotsam-y, jetsam-y metadata. Twitter knows how they work, and will allow all of us to track and collate posts with that tag on it. Nobody else is using that tag right now.
  • If there's a longer review of the comic that you think is persuasive, stick in a link to that. Shout out to the comic writer AND the book author/film maker etc. You've got 140 characters to play with!

Does this make sense? If we build up a map of good comics based on tastes in other media, would that help CLAw, and Dave Gibbons, and writers like David Barnett in the mainstream press to get their message across in away that sticks?

Us

I want to have a look at a second target audience - the ones who I wrote this article for, the people who care passionately about comics and want to see them grow up big and strong. (I didn't write this for the readership of the Guardian, or for the people I'd like to persuade about how cool comics are.)

The majority of us, the promoters of comics, are comic fans, and have grown up within the ghetto. We're steeped in the culture of comics, and therefore have a certain myopia. Whatever we grew up with as kids and teenagers is imprinted deep in our brains. I grew up on Marvel UK and 2000AD in the late '70's, Miller's Ronin, Simonson's Thor and Moore & Gibbons' Watchmen blew my socks off in the '80's, and Gaiman and McKean's early experiments & McCloud's "Understanding Comics" wowed me as a student in the early '90's. I've since gone on to discover all sorts of other amazing comics - Mattotti, Tan, Toppi, Peeters, Modan, Greenberg etc. etc. etc. - but somehow I'm not imprinted in the same way to works I've come across as an adult. Not that I think the stuff of the '80's is better, or even that I enjoy it more - far from it - but it's deep in my cultural make-up somewhere, and I'm therefore more prone to overlook it's faults. And therefore more likely to make a poor recommendation.

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be

B&Q is a large DIY chain store in the UK. They play piped music to their customers. I realised I had reached a certain age, in the late 90's, when I went into the store and they were playing popular schlock from my teenage years - the sort of music that I wouldn't touch with a barge-pole. Wham!, Duran Duran, that sort of thing. And, before my cultural censor kicked in, I felt a thrill of recognition. We are imprinted by all sorts of things. I wouldn't expect someone not growing up in the '80's to be moved by the same music, nor someone who didn't read 2000AD aged 8 to be completely excited by Ron Smith's rubbery Mega-Citizens or Ezquerra's "Stainless Steel Rat" as I still am. Nostalgia does weird things to us. I raise it now, because reading through the many comments on David Barnett's article that suggest an alternative "obvious" contender, I think the majority are driven by nostalgia. It's as powerful as a kick to the head, and - get this - utterly impossible to communicate to someone who wasn't there.

(I think the big two publishers understand nostalgia quite well, in the way they sell more to their existing, ageing audiences, rather than broadening the audience out.)

Case in point: I remember trying to convince a non-comic-fan friend that comics were cool (this was a while ago). I picked Morrison & McKean's "Arkham Asylum" as the then=pinnacle of the medium, with it's gorgeous multi-layered artwork and symbolically-dense script, that was inextricably tied in my head to the two non-superhero plays Morrison had brought the Edinburgh Fringe with Oxygen House theatre. I watched my friend read it, with a creeping realisation that they didn't have the in-depth knowledge of second-tier batman villains - Mad Hatter, Scarecrow, Killer Croc - required to even have a clue what was going on. Bad choice, my myopic nostalgia and acclimatisation to life in the ghetto. They were not convinced.

When making a recommendation now, I try to bear nostalgia in mind.

There, that's all. Let's get tweeting!




Tuesday 21 October 2014

Tea Bag Ceremony

Another exercise using the curated selection of images from free stock image service unsplash.com, which they email out every ten days. Howto weave these random (and rather good) images into a narrative, given that our brains are hardwired to look for narrative in any sequence of images.






I felt lucky to get a couple of people in this week's selection, and, even better, more than one image of each of them. Just to be clear, the insults on p.4 are an ironical reflection on the calm voice of the narrator, nothing to do with the models!!

There's a seductive sense of authority to the "documentary" narrative voice, even when it's talking gibberish. One mis-step can make the presence of the voice jump back into the foreground.

Image Credits: Paula Vermeulen Noe Araujo Jan Erik Caroline Gutman mr.lee Jake Givens

Saturday 18 October 2014

Compression

Sometimes an idea comes into one's life from several angles at once. This week, for me, it was compression.

1. Compression and Information

I've been reading James Gleick's "The Information" recently - just finished the chapter where he described Chaitin and Kolmogorov's simultaneous discovery of the notion of "interestingness" and randomness of numbers, and the extent to which a number can be described by an algorithm that is shorter than the number itself. Some can, some can't. (It's hard to prove that a number can't be compressed, or that any compression algorithm is the most concise.)

Chaitin considered applying this notion to science - a scientific theory is essentially an attempt to compress the observed data into a terser form (which, come to think of it, ignores the predictive quality of a theory - but anyway...).

Chewing this over in the back of my head, I thought that scientific theory is simply a more rigorous/structured form of our everyday functioning in this world. We compress information all the time. When dealing with people I know, I have a preset mental model of them that (usually) helps us to rub along together. When I drive, I deal with the road at a conceptual/symbolic level of white lines, traffic lights, road signs, speed limits, etc.

Compression of data in computer science can be loss-less (the uncompressed data can be reconstructed with absolute fidelity) or lossy (we only have a "good enough" facsimile of the original). The JPEG image compression used by most digital cameras, for example, is lossy, with "good enough" defined in terms of our ability to recognise the image after the "noise" is discarded.

Compression is good, it lets us get on with things.

There are times, though, when it's necessary to uncompress, to experience life in it's raw, undiluted glory, to become incapable of functioning in the normal way, because of the sheer grandeur of it all. To see everyone that we meet as an ineffable mystery, an unknown miracle, an impossible marvel. This is the experience written of my Rumi, Kabir, and other holy fools.

Being a living intelligence entails a certain balance between the compressed, capable outlook and being open to the point of incapability. every moment is a choice. I strongly suspect that sticking to either one is dangerous in the extreme. Certainly, mechanical, unreflexive compression can, in extreme, lead to the "them and us" thinking of racism, sexism and any other-ism, pigeon-holing of the light that inarguably resides in all of us (whatever it might be, no theological, rational or other baggage required) as "other".

2. Compression and Comics

Scott McCloud gave an excellent opening talk at Kendal yesterday, at the Lakes International comic Art Festival, that touched on much more than the comic-book medium. Two things struck me particularly in what he said (amidst much else that I'm still digesting):

  • he described cartoons as compressed visual descriptions - shorthand notations for describing people that cut right through to the parts of our brains that recognise humans, stripping the visual description of everything but the bare minimum needed to communicate the character's state of being.
  • digital comics have lifted some boundaries on the comics form that were previously taken for granted. They do not spell the instant demise of print comics, but they force practitioners of print into greater awareness of what they are doing e.g. printing on paper, working within a fixed page size. New media challenge the old media rather than killing them - challenge can be constructive.

So, compression. A compressed, cartooned character communicates more efficiently than a realistically rendered one. Reduced cognitive friction eases the flow of reading, which is, on the whole good. Provided our goal is to function. If, as in life, there is a balance to be struck between
functioning/getting through the day and some other transcendental outlook, then what is the visual equivalent of that? Can it buy us anything in terms of good storytelling - the higher goal that all the elements of comic-making should be serving - and can efficient cartooning lead to pigeon-holing, if practised mechanically?

Whatever the case, describing a character in any form of storytelling requires some deep insight into their inner lives. A writer must love all their characters if they're to have life. I don't know "the answers" to these, I suspect there are none, and would rather live with the questions. I'll finish with a quote from Jacques Lusseyran, that seems appropriate, in describing how he saw other people after going blind:

"Frankly, hair, eyes, mouth, the necktie, the rings on fingers mattered very little to me. I no longer even thought about them. People no longer seemed to possess them. Sometimes in my mind, men and ladies appeared without heads or fingers. Then again, the lady in the armchair suddenly rose before me in her bracelet, turned into the bracelet itself. There were people whose teeth seemed to fill their whole faces, and others so harmonious they seemed to be made of music. But in reality, none of these sights is made to be described. They are so mobile, so alive, that they defy words."

Try drawing that! Well, I'm going to try. Using photographs as a starting point - far removed from the cartoon approach. Wish me luck!

A Wooden Man in Wode

An evening's non-goal-oriented digital doodling and looking through old photos.  should have been preparing for the improvisation work at LICAF that is happening today, but this happened instead.


Friday 17 October 2014

The Second Sleep


An interesting news story: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783

The business of sleeping in one uninterrupted 6-8 hour session is a modern phenomenon, largely aided and abetted by cheap artificial lighting. There are common literary and historical references to a “the second sleep”, and a period of wakefulness during the night commonly devoted to prayer and reflection.

This is interesting in it's own right, but itt sets my imagination going too. Fictionalising this, it’s like the discovery of an extra day in the week, potentially with supernatural or otherworldly visitors, a gateway into something rather strange. Again, there’s a possibility of using this as a framing device for stories in the graphic novel, with the nocturnal visitors of the Second Sleep meeting and talking with a variety of people.


Thursday 16 October 2014

Improvised Comics - Getting There - A Local Handy Reference Map

Because we love you all! Simply print off onto an improbably-sized roll of paper, and stumble about the High Street of Kendal apologising to those you bump into or knock over as you trp over the tail end of this useful "little" map.

See you all tomorrow!


Imaginary Friend


Even the closest stars are so far away as to appear as nothing but little dots in the sky. Stars dwarf their planets, so our ability to see planets of other solar systems is minimal.

We can, however, infer their existence, by looking at minor, cyclical changes in the signals from the stars themselves.

A planet orbiting a star will exert a small tug upon it’s parent, towards or away from us, at different points of it’s orbit. This wobble is just large enough to be picked up as changes in the star’s radial velocity.

Inferring the presence of a planet from these changes in the light is difficult. where several planets orbit the star, at different frequencies, the changes in signal are laid on top of one another. it is necessary to look for evidence of a repeated pattern, and subtract it from the sum of the signal, gradually working backwards, uncovering evidence of further regularities, and hopefully of further, less influential planets.

Other entirely unrelated factors may also contribute to the changes in signal, further compounding the problem.

The search for life on systems outside our own is fraught with false hope and disappointment.

The Gliese 581 star is a close neighbour, only 20 light years away. In 2007, strong evidence of a third exoplanet, within the goldilocks zone, was discovered. A year later, a radio signal sending greetings from Earth was sent there.

More recently, better data has allowed us to factor in the presence of sunspot activity from the signal, peeling back another layer of noise. Subtracting that strengthened the regularity of the signal detected for the planets dubbed B, C and E, but D, previously considered to be a strong candidate for life, has faded from the picture entirely. (The others are well outside the Goldilocks zone.)

By the time our signal of hope reaches Gliese, it is likely that we will know that it’s intended target was nothing but a mirage, an artefact of our inability to see more clearly when we were younger.



Tuesday 14 October 2014

A Sense of Place : Bristol M-Shed Museum



Some nice photos I took of Bristol Docks Museum (a.k.a. "M-Shed") a while back, but the key question I'm tying to answer here is how can page & panel layout communicate a sense of place? A jumbled, textured, busy place, with a lot going on at once, and everything bobbing up and down.

Anomaly

Another "test swatch" for the Improvised Comics thing at LICAF this Saturday, using some of Paul Want's fine photography. Starring players of Kendal Community Theatre (and a local newspaper!)


Sunday 12 October 2014

The Plain And Simple Truth

It started with a tweet - this one in particular, from comedian Adam Conover. Just in case that corner of the internet disappears overnight, here's the picture that he posted, as "the most obsolete book ever":

Embedded image permalink

Because nowadays, we just look it up on google (yandex, bing, baidu, whatever competitor -I'm using the brand name "google" with a little"g", in the sense that a vacuum cleaner is a "hoover").

Anyway, looking up and finding things out is easy now, right?

Tabs, Tabs Everywhere

Being a natural curmudgeon, my first instinct was to spoil the party and prove it wrong, find the loophole, etc., so I tweet back some riposte about getting distracted by the number of other open tabs (and yes, this is one of them, I'm "supposed" to be doing something else this evening, not writing this article-cum-rant).

No time to fix the internet tonight, but it kept bugging me. Little-g google doesn't instantly connect us to the truth. What book should we have in it's place? And if Mr. Felknor's dead-tree tome has anything about critical thinking, cross-checking references, etc., then how obsolete is it?

Let's take a simple factoid, free-flying through cyberspace that I also came across tonight while not doing what I was supposed to: Wolves have changed the course of the rivers in Yellowsone Park since they were reintroduce in 1995. Watch this, and tell me it ain't so. I was moved, and humbled, and amazed. Then I read this article by Arthur Middleton, which basically trashes the story of the Yellowstone wolves.

Ah, but editorial bias, I thought... The second article's by the New York Times, I thought, and they're in my bad books just now for publishing an editorial trying to discredit ecologist/campaigner Vandana Shiva as a hippy crackpot. So I can discount the discomfort that Middleton's article caused, and return to my fuzzy sense of eco-well-being, right?

Except for those pesky details. If you were paying attention,you may have noticed that the editorial was published by the New Yorker, whereasMiddleton wrote in the New York Times, completely different outfits. A stupid mis-step during a moment of internet downtime/factoid grazing on my part, but these things do take on a life of their own:

"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."

wrote Winston Churchill, in the stone age days before little-g googling rescued us from the antiquated horrors of books like Mr. Felknor's. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to google a few humorous anecdotes of misguided mistruths that have been parrotted all over the internet, with which to decorate this remark.

Getting Back to the Wolves...

And if you had read the article in the New York Times (and I suggest you do), you'd see that the author advances a somewhat nuanced argument:

  1. although the Yellowstone wolf story hasn't help up to scientific scrutiny, lots of other similar cases have
  2. the way that the wolf story caught the public imagination has done more good than the "harm" of that specific scientific fact being called into question


Do I agree with Middleton, then? Is he right? Is he going to get the Golden Seal of Truth as far as the Yellowsone wolves are concerned? If I agree to point 1. do I have to agree to point 2. as well? I'm not going to say, I haven't the authority or in-depth knowledge to make my mind up right now. But he sure poses some interesting and uncomfortable questions about whether a mistruth can do more good than the truth.

May the Gods poke me with an uncomfortable question every time the complacency of instant dehydrated Truth settles upon my brow, whether it comes from the internet or not. For that way lies the stony death of the mind, heart and hand.

And now you must excuse me, while I attend to something that I've persuaded myself is more boring than writing this. As I have opened an extra ten tabs in the course of writing it so far, don't rate my chances of getting that task done tonight, of course - maybe my first response was actually the most telling one?

And I leave it as an exercise to the reader to condense this into a pithy 140-character tweet, something I completely failed to do.








Friday 10 October 2014

Dogs' Lives

The internet's full of interesting news stories about just about any topic.

A Dog Vandal

A persistent tire slasher is caught on CCTV, and turns out to be a dog. Cue the obvious joke about sheepdog trials :-{

A Dog Hero


A stray dog was adopted by soldiers, who has intuitive ability to know when enemy shells are coming (and a hi-tech equivalent here that takes the dog out of the equation: http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/07/pointless-yo-app-now-alerts-israelis-to-rocket-attacks/ - using the utterly pointless “Yo!” iphone app to warn people of incoming missiles)

You were expecting a picture of a dog, were you, human?

Wednesday 8 October 2014

Tuesday 7 October 2014

Cat on a Roof

Take1

Observed from my living room the other day, and luckily, I happened to have the zoom lens camera to hand.

The cat took about five minutes to figure out the safe way down, trying one thing after another. Describing this maze-walking algorithm via the panel layout, a flattening of the geometry of the house seemed appropriate.

I love working with regular grids on the whole, in part because I don't have to think to much about the layout. This exercise forced me to do a bit more thinking, emphasising long drops, distance and tight turns in the panel shapes.

Take 2

But wait, look at the middle row - at this point, the cat changes direction, and starts to walk from ight to left across the rooftop. I've depicted this as a series of panels arranged left to right, in the conventional (Western European/Anglicised) reading direction. the reader has to scull across the page in the opposite direction to the cat, and it comes off a little muddled.

But if I order the panel sequence right to left, won't that be equally confusing?

I think it worked, don't you? I broke one of the fundamental reading directions, so helped guide the reader by preserving the other : top to bottom. To guide the eye, I've staggered the middle row downwards a little, and created a smoother reading experience that better describes our protagonist's epic journey!

Take 3

seeing as I'm all loosened up now, panel-wise, let's add a little flourish. I wasn't fast enough to catch a snap of the cat in mid-air, but picking on some random cat from google images, I can add a silhouette easily enough.

This moment is the finale of the story - the cat makes the leap from rooftops to ground, from imprisonment to freedom, from faith to knowledge, from here to eternity, from Russia with love... well, you get the idea. In previous takes, this happened between the panels, in the reader's imagination, and that's no bad thing - in fact it's at the very core of reading comics.

Here I've made the leap more explicit, but still not depicted it quite as explicitly as the rest of the strip:
- no borders, signifying the transient, almost mythic status of this moment
- the cat's flying through the sky, so echo the sky colours from the first two panels, helping to pull everything together
- I made the strange and scary leap away from an A4 page, embracing the possibilities of digital comics, and the infinite plane that Scott McCloud's been extolling us to use for over a decade!

Here it is then - what have I gained and lost by pulling the climactic finale out of the gutter (that's the little white space between the panels) and onto the page?


Sunday 5 October 2014

Nostalgia

A quick kata, following this recipe:
  • take a weekly email from the excellent Unsplash.com
  • Download all the pictures into Gimp
  • Rearrange into a short story (no need to use every image, but extra marks for using most)
I'll be practicing this one regularly here, I think. I enjoyed the repetition of images here, the ambiguity, and the shift in authorial voice between p1 and pp2-4.

Good luck to Maurice and the narrator, whoever they are - here's to a non-violent resolution over a cup of tea!




Credits for Pictures:
Amanda SandlinJacob WaltiTanvi MalikDesi MendozaMaciej SerafinowicGabriel SantiagoSteven LewisMia Di DomenicoJoshua Earle

Saturday 4 October 2014

First drafts from Photo Shoot

After much riffling through the hundreds of photos taken by myself and Paul Want with Kendal Community Theatre last weekend, here's a couple of early test pieces that may end up as part of the finished work in one form or another.

If you're in Kendal for LICAF, come and join us - this could be you!!



Friday 3 October 2014

Exercises

Some of the things we might be getting up to with attendees at LICAF on 18th October. We're still playing with ideas, so no promises!!

Directions

Solo Interview
Ask someone to give directions - to a nearby landmark if they’re local, how they got to Kendal if they’re visiting, their journey to work, etc. a simple way to capture gesticulations and body language

Listening

Solo Interview
Present the interviewee with a menu, consisting of:
  • meaningful/zen story (Rumi, Nasruddin, etc.)
  • joke (3 little pigs, “wide mouth frog”, anything long and repetitive)
  • moving poem (WW1 war poetry)
They get to pick one of the three, and will be recorded listening to the chosen item. Variations include the narrator being of-camera, with us just recording the listener, or recording the narrator (in costume?) too, or a third character (death, a mouse, whatever else?) interrupting or simply observing them.

How Things Work

Solo or pairs

Hand the interviewee a common object, such as a camera, egg-whisk, a child’s toy, and ask them to explain how it works, either to the camera, or to a partner (another member of public or an actor). Or explain the relative movements of the sun, earth and moon, using tennis balls, footballs or balloons. (If balloons, could we also film people blowing them up? Interesting visual angle on the creation of the world/universe.)


Thursday 2 October 2014

Improvised Comic Update


Promo material for the upcoming collaboration at LICAF with Kendal Community Theatre and Paul Want, photographer. A big hand too for their talented costumier Kate Reid, just look at the detail on those dresses!!

Last Saturday we met up for the first time for a preliminary photo-shoot and planning session, of which this is the first result. Suffice it to say our plans have become even more expansive and exuberant! Look out world, on 18th October - and to the rest of you, if you're in Kendal for the festival, drop in to see us.

Look forward to meeting you!