What Is Home ?

I'm very excited to lift the lid a little on a project that's been taking shape over the last couple of months. Lakes International Comic Arts Festival runs a Window Trail each year, in which artists are paired with local businesses, and get to decorate their window fronts in a way that reflect both the comics medium and the business itself.

This year, I've been paired with Kendal YWCA, who operate a Resource centre that includes a cafe and local business resources including a conference room. On the upper floor, Impact Housing Association - also collaborating on this exhibition - provide supported accommodation for young homeless people.

The cafe area has some big, impressive window frontage, with a beautiful curve of 10 panels across the front of the building, and several other full-length surfaces looking onto, and within, the public space of the cafe. It's the closest thing I've encountered in real, physical comics to an infinite canvas! You can see some of the big window in the photos below.

The display will be something between a comic strip, and abstract art installation and a crossword puzzle, readable from both the inside and outside.

Something like this ...

For the subject matter, I've stuck with my improvisation approach, and sent out a questionnaire to the various participants in the building : office staff, residents, the cafe people, and small businesses who use the cafe facilities, getting their ideas on the topic of "home". And, as usual with my improv work, what a lot of interesting answers have come back.

A few (very preliminary) images below, that may end up in the exhibition. They aren't in any particular order here, and won't be arranged in 2x3 grids in their final form (and a few are without words for now). This might look like a lot of images, but it's still a small section of the final exhibition.

This is, as ever, a collaborative work, with the actors from Kendal Community Theatre, and photography from Paul Want, Alan Walker, Julie Walker, Tim Hancock (and myself) all playing a big part.

Recluse

(Fiction for latest meeting of the creative writing group that I attend - 200 words

We each wrote down a few words on scraps of paper and put them in a hat, then picked two out, as seeds for the stories. I got "storm" and "recluse", which happened to be the words I'd put in!)

My family were recluses - parents, sisters, uncles, cousins, aunts. It was expected (but never said outright)  that I would rebel. I stepped outside to embrace the world, but it was raining, so I became a cabinet-maker instead.

I specialised in secret compartments. One day, I fashioned a flexible cantilever, dividing my workshop in two. Each half had the apparent space of the whole room.

The next logical step was repetition. Within a year, I subdivided my shop seven times, creating an area the size of a small town. With pulleys and mirrors directing sunlight to my arable shelf-space, I became self-sufficient.

When my rent fell into arrears, I simply moved into a six-inch strip along one wall, that neither landlord nor new tenant would notice. This vertical arrangement presented challenges, but I’m adaptable, and skilled.

If you’ve found this note, you’ve traversed 20 miles of corridor. Your attention’s flattering, but you can clear off now and leave me alone. Lucky for you it’s only ten miles to the nearest exit, the map’s on the back of this note. If you’re peckish, the sandwich draw’s marked too - hope you like egg. Thanks for visiting, and don’t come back.  

Water Ways

Another Unsplash kata, using the images mailed 29 Feb. Trying to combine the words and pictures in less of a traditional comic-book way here.

Lots of pale, watery images this week, with the bright yellow of the tree standing out among them.

The canoe was the obvious narrative starting point here, and I "cheated" and did a bit of gimp-ing to remove the boys one by one. Leaving in the reflections started out as an accident, but it was a good one that serves the story well, I think!

Credits: Caleb George Taylor Leopold Silvestri Matteo Brownie Casey Fyfe (twice!) Caleb Thal Dustin Scarpitti Todd Quackenbush Matthew Clark

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.

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?

Cells

Another go at those famous painters, after the highly figurative Bruegel, I wanted to have a go at the abstract end of the scale, so here's Mondrian.

attacking one of his famous grid paintings let me build up a nice little abstract comic, but, as Andrew Molotiu points out in his anthology, abstract comics aren't necessarily just collections of abstract images. Here's an attempt at telling the life story of an abstract being in one page.

And finally, the same story, reshaped to explore the dramatic effects of changing panel size.