The View From My Window
I’m finally back! Apologies to the regular readers of this blog (and Google Analytics tells me there are THOUSANDS)for not having posted something in over a month. This is really the unpardonable sin of blogging.
But the damned are full of excuses and here are mine:
1.) Since I stopped being allowed to hang out at Periscope every day, I haven’t had regular access to their two industrial-strength scanners. However this is not really an excuse, since I have taken out a membership at the Independent Publishing Resource Center here in Portland. The IPRC is a veritable Jerusalem for the city’s zinesters and comics people. (Indeed, both the Zinesters and the Comics people claim the IPRC as their ancestral homeland, with every outburst of comicaze attacks provoking new levels of Zineist oppression – but that’s another story.) They have something like six scanners, one of which is often functioning!
2.) I spent the better part of June erecting a website for my graphic novel, Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment. If you haven’t seen this site yet, don’t waste any more time here! Go! Click! Now!
3.) I’ve been grappling with the usual “starving artist” problems this month as well, since the loss of my purely symbolic job led me to realize my very actual lack of income. I am still busily looking for work here in Portland, which at 10.2% unemployment is not that easy. (My hometown of New Orleans is at 7.0%) Especially not with all these #$%!*@^ lazy artists taking all the barista jobs!
4.) I also moved to a new house! It’s a great place with two cats and five people. Many of them (the people, not the cats) are also into comics/graphic-fiction/visual-narrative/sequential-art/making-up-your-own-fake-undergraduate-major. Our “Mad Woman in the Attic” is Katy Ellis O’Brien, who’s putting my work ethic to shame churning out panel after panel of hand-painted comics. Literally panels – she paints them on pieces of wood.
Anyway, the above sketch is the view from one of the two windows of my new room. We live really close to highway 84, though the ambient noise is not that annoying; I can pretend I live by the ocean. Less endearing is the enormous Budweiser logo that tops the Freud-inspired tower across the street. The neon red “B” shines at me nightly like the eyes of Dr. T J Eckelburg. That’s right, I just made a simile comparing a sign to another metaphoric sign. This is why I am a natural graphic novelist.
Dancin’ Fools
These panels of the band dancing around the motel room were really fun to draw. Still unschooled in the ways of computer-based drawing, I had to make sure the furniture lined up the same between panels using old fashioned geometry and a t-square. Pages 22 and 23 specifically were done last July, when a record-breaking BRUTAL HEATWAVE in Washington forced all of us farmers to work from sunup till lunch, take a six hour swimming/siesta break, and resume work from sundown until it was dark. Since the afternoons transformed my trailer into a broiling aluminum coffin of death, I would high-tail it over to the Carnation library, spread my art supplies annoyingly over the table, and draw in the comfort of state-funded air-conditioning until dusk – or until the zucchini started dying, whichever came first.
Thanks everybody for bumping up the numbers on my site – it’s been really heartening. I can’t wait to see what happens when I introduce a plot!
Welcome to SNitLoE!
I’m really excited to debut this site for my in-progess graphic novel, “Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment.” A big thanks to Erika Moen and the other folks at Periscope Studio who convinced me that I should put this online as I was working on it, instead of just waiting until it was finished, printing it, and selling it like some 20th-century hack.
I began drawing “SNitLoE” in March of 2009, so all of the pages you see for the next several weeks were already drawn many months ago. During much of the past year, I was way too busy with work at Local Roots Farm and Periscope to produce more than a trickle of a few pages a month, but since I’m now dedicating myself to cartooning “full-time,” you can expect a much more robust output. Three pages a week, to be precise!
Just to get you started, I’ve posted the first twenty pages in bulk. They’ll introduce you to the members of the band and take you from their show in Las Cruces, NM to a cheap motel on the outskirts of town. I’m pretty excited to post the next few scenes – setting the grounds for a really sharp turn in the story in about ten pages.
Homeless TV
These guys “live” near my house in Portland, and whenever I pass by, it seems they are watching a little television set on their shopping cart. In reality, there are three of them, but I thought this had a more romantic impact.
Preliminary digital sketch:
Pencils
Inks, before adding digital grayscale. This could be a free standing image, but I think that without the extra gray, it looks like the TV screen is as bright as a spotlight.
