The Articulate Guy
When I went to Tennessee to see my sister Meredith graduate, my mom brought up an old comic of mine from New Orleans. I wrote “The Articulate Guy” in 2001-2002 when I was a junior and senior in high school. Those of you who chatted with me back in the “good old days” of AOL Instant Messenger will recall that “TheArticulateGuy” was my screename. These are some random pages:
“The Articulate Guy” is interesting on all kinds of levels. It is a comic about a high-schooler, told from the point of view of a college student reminiscing about when he was that high-schooler’s friend (back in high school), written by a high schooler (me, Everett) who had not even begun visiting colleges yet. I am fascinated not only by my own (surprisingly accurate) depiction of what college life would be like, but by the critical distance I forced upon myself as a writer, imagining how the environment I was immersed in would seem retrospectively. (This, as I understand it, is the Lacanian Imaginary, imagining how I might look to an outside observer who is nevertheless himself a product of my imagination.)
The story was basically this: a hapless transfer student makes a fool of himself every day at the beginning of math class, before the teacher arrives, waxing eloquent over a nameless beautiful girl in his English class. Though he speaks with a vocabulary far beyond his grade-level, he insists that when he actually tries to talk to this girl, he’s completely mute. (I would revisit this theme in my Kilmer-winning 2003 poem “The Ballad of Sweet Donna Lee”. Yeah, I was really into this theme for a while.) Eventually, his words so move the high schoolers that they too decide to start speaking their hearts and using big words. Except I never reached this somewhat Dead Poets-y conclusion. Why?
Because I myself went to college! The strength of this comic was ALL in the framed nature of the narrative – I admit, there was not a lot of tofu to the story itself. Once my artificial critical distance became actual critical distance, I could no longer view my life as a verbose but girl-shy high-schooler through a partial lens!
Moreover, my art improved to the degree where I could no longer finish the comic with any sort of visual consistency. Looking back though, there are still some things I really love about it. My page layouts were much bolder than anything I’d allow myself today – chalk it up to youthful exuberance. I was really into Will Eisner at the time and loved using lots of borderless panels, meta-panels and free-floating vignettes. And there was something tender, something that still captures my imagination, in the way I so openly delved into characters inner emotional states (having demons represent their problems – other parts of the comic featured elaborate fantasy time-travel etc.) Especially compared to SNitLoE, where I have deliberately kept my characters emotionally mysterious and opaque. Sigh.
Read More
Untitled Olympia Comic, pt. 4/4
I just realized this is my second comic in a row about somebody plunging back into a grubby, dreary historical setting after a brief visit to a fastastical wonderland.
Read MoreUntitled Olympia Comic, pt. 3/4
No comic tomorrow – LOST will be taking care of my time-traveling adventures for the day. Come back on Monday or Tuesday.
Read MoreUntitled Olympia Comic, pt. 2/4
Since yesterday I’ve made a few aesthetic changes to Part One.
Read MoreUntitled Olympia Comic, pt. 1/4
Hey guys. Instead of waiting until next week to show you my next completed comic, I will post it up here a page at a time. Since pencils are already done, and I’m inking about a page a day, this comic should take four days to post. Though not Sunday, as I have religious obligations (Pentecost, LOST finale.)
The title of this comic, when I think of one, will go in the clouds in panel one. This is for an anthology being put out by the Olympia Comics Festival. This is a small but extremely rad festival, appropriate for such a small but extremely rad town. The only requirement for the anthology is that it be related to Olympia in some way.
Read MoreEtsy Store Now Up
Hey folks – I’m working on a sweet new 4-page comic about the city of Olympia, Washington for the upcoming Olympia Comics Festival. This is gonna be another long and pretty involved project, though hopefully it won’t take me as long as The Land of Cokaygne did!
In the meantime, I’m happy to announce the launching of my Etsy Store, where you can purchase ORIGINAL ARTWORK by me. I hasten to add that, though there are only a few things up on that page right now, anything that I post on this blog that is not from my graphic novel, Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment or which has not already been given or sold to somebody else is up for sale as well – just e-mail me or comment on this blog and I will put it up on the Etsy Store just for you.
P.S. If you wanna see what a real Etsy Store looks like, check out Periscope Studio‘s page. Awesome, awesome stuff. Buy Ben Dewey’s Catwoman pinup – it will not hurt my feelings.
Read MoreCongratulations, Raza!
Tomorrow my sister Meredith is graduating from Vanderbilt University! Horrible brother that I am, instead of using my new drawing skills to draw a picture of her graduating, I drew this picture of my friend Raza Panjwani, who is also graduating this week (from Columbia Law school).
As Tom Vinciguerra aptly put it: “Congrats to Raz, the colossus bestriding the campus today and the world tomorrow!”
(as with a lot of my recent work, I used a ton of photo-reference for this: for the skyscrapers, for the law school robes, for Raza’s proud mug, and for the unique perspective, below)
Heightening.
Another dumb throw-off cartoon because I am still swamped drawing what I think might be the most epic 4 pages of my life, which I will hopefully post early next week.
In college, I was in an improv comedy group. We always talked about comedic “heightening.”
Read More
Look Out!
Okay, so I am pushing my own envelope and trying to draw a popular superhero character, not because I actually like that kinda thing, just because I want to learn from it. These are NOT YET but are GONNA BE pages 8 and 9 from Marvel Adventures: Spider-Man #58. The script was provided courtesy of its writer, the generous Paul Tobin. It was professionally penciled by Ben Dewey (who finally has the website he deserves- keep refreshing the homepage!) I have made a point not to look at Ben’s art though, yet.
Professional opinion seems to be that the layout and storytelling are pretty good, but the figures need a ton of work and Spiderman’s shoulders are really narrow. I’m gonna take some photo-reference tonight and try to get better-proportioned people and more believable poses, and I’ll post it again when it’s inked. Coming up with something to post every day is HARD.
Read MoreThe Supreme Anarchist Council
NOTE: The color errors in yesterday’s post have been amended!
Here’s a group portrait of the Supreme Anarchist Council from G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday:
Back Row: Gogol aka “Tuesday,” Pole who does not enjoy “goncealment.” “…out of this collar there sprang a head quite unmanageable and quite unmistakable, a bewildering bush of brown hair and beard that almost obscured the eyes like those of a Skye terrier. But the eyes did look out of the tangle, and they were the sad eyes of a sad Russian serf.”
“The Secretary” aka “Monday” “…his smile was a shock, for it was all on one side, going up in the right scheek and down in the left.”
Front Row: Dr. Bull aka “Saturday” “They took away the key to his face. You could not tell what his smile or his gravity meant… Those black discs were dreadful to Syme; they reminded him of half-remembered ugly tales, of some story about pennies being put on the eyes of the dead… Syme even had the thought that his eyes might be covered up because they were too frightful to see.”
Professor de Worms aka “Friday” “…as if some drunken dandies had put their clothes upon a corpse… it did not express decrepitude merely, but corruption.”
Gabriel Syme aka “Thursday” Not an anarchist – an undercover agent for Scotland Yard.
The Marquis de St. Eustache aka “Wednesday” “the man carried a rich atmosphere with him, a rich atmosphere that suffocated. It reminded one irrationally of drowsy odours and of dying lamps in the darker poems of Byron and Poe.
For this image I forwent the brushy ink style I naturally favor and tried thin lines, artificially colored. I’m shooting for the look of animation on this one.
Me & Edith Head
Here are some pages I drew about a month ago of Sara Ryan‘s story Me & Edith Head. This was just for fun, sort of a diagnostic essay for the Periscope people, since Me & Edith Head had already been published, illustrated by Sara’s own husband Steve Lieber (a Periscope member). Without ever reading Steve’s original, I set about illustrating the first four pages of the story.
Even though I feel I’ve come quite a ways from here, this project was a lot of firsts for me. First time illustrating somebody else’s script. First time using blue non-repro pencil. First time using a mechanical pencil. First time coloring digitally. (Edit: the colors now appear correctly on the internet.)
It’s also my first time lettering digitally, and as you can see, I still haven’t completed that part, which is why there are no captions or dialogue. So you might be kind of confused. Here’s a little summary of what your missing.
Page 1 – Katrina has just tried out for the role of Queen Titania in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” She’s daydreaming about how nice it will be, but the sound of her parents’ bitter arguing in the next room sours her mood.
Page 2 – The next day, Katrina nervously waits to see what role she got, and found out that she has been assigned “costume design,” a role she considers herself totally unfit for. She has to go see Gabriel Chang in the costume room. He explains that costume design is all about mixing and matching and considering “juxtapositions.” Katrina takes a utilitarian view of clothes and isn’t buying it.
Page 3 – Katrina impugns that Mr. Chang is a costume man now because, like her, he was once turned down for acting roles. He says no, and in his office pulls out two books, “How to Dress for Success” and “Edith Head’s Hollywood,” a biography of the famous costume designer. He tells her to read them.
Page 4 – While her parents put together a slap-dash meal, Katrina reads Head’s book. Edith, in a very 1950’s way, says that a wife must continue looking as well turned-out years into her marriage as she did at the beginning, and not “as if she had been shot out of a cannon.” This leads Katrina to picture first her mom and then her dad, well…
Over the rest of the story, which I won’t draw, Katrina gets more and more into costume design, and starts taking better care of her own personal appearance as well. Meanwhile, her parents keep fighting and end up getting divorced. She designs a terrific costume for Titania and the cast, and even though her parents sit separately in the audience, they’re both proud of how self-assured she’s become.
Read MoreLucian Gregory
Okay, so I fell through on my promise to post something every day, and pretty quickly. Sorry! But give me a break; the Stumptown Comics Fest is this weekend, and in addition to helping everyone around the studio get ready, I’m putting together my own portfolio to show editors and stuff. Very intimidating!
Lucian Gregory is a character introduced in the first pages of G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. He’s an “aesthete anarchist,” and a delightful straw-man, who falls into an ideological dispute with the protagonist, Gabriel Syme, who, along with the narrator, is basically Chesterton by a different name. But shortly thereafter, the rebellious poet introduces Syme (an undercover “philosophical policeman”) into the company of the world’s most dangerous ring of anarchists!
Here is GKC’s opening description of Gregory:
“…the red-haired poet was really (in some sense) a man worth listening to, even if one laughed at the end of it. He put the old cant of the lawlessness of art and the art of lawlessness with a certain impudent freshness which gave at least momentary pleasure. He was helped in some degree by the arresting oddity of his appearance, which he worked, as the phrase goes, for all it was worth. His dark red hair parted in the middle was literaly like a woman’s, and curved into the slow curls of a virgin in a pre-Raphaelite picture. from within this almost saintly oval, however, his face projected suddenly broad and brutal, the chin carried forward with a look of cockney contempt. This combination at once tickled and terrified the nerves of a neurotic population. He seemed like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape.”
My picture is not worth a dozen, much less a thousand, of Chesterton’s words, but my hope is to at some point illustrate in comics form a scene from this book, or at least draw a decent pin-up of it’s seven main characters (code-named Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday). Everything I’ve ever wanted to say, Chesterton has said it already and better. For months now I’ve been dreaming of writing a story where the characters were purely allegorical and had no personalities beyond their respective ideologies, but in Thursday I have already just that.
edit: I will say I’m proud of Gregory’s gesture. My original conception was to having him point up a finger, mid-tirade. Way too Platonic. This way, he looks more like he’s shaking his fist at God!
Read MorePochahantas?
Gasp! Now there’s a picture of a naked person on the internet! (click for full)
On Saturday mornings I’ve been going to life-drawing sessions at Hipbone Studios. Needless to say, there’s no better way to study anatomy. A lot of my sketches look great until I look at them from arm’s length and realize the proportions are totally off – I’ve got to work on keeping the “big picture” in mind even as I’m rendering the details. Betty Edward’s Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain has already been of invaluable service in helping to fix this.
The model this Saturday had the high cheekbones I associate with Native Americans, and one of the poses she struck made me think of the classic image of an Indian on a mountain outcrop watching the arrival of the first Europeans. Specifically, it makes me think of the line from Disney’s Pochahantas, “… strange clouds…” Hey, if they’re from the western hemisphere, it can’t be orientalist, right? RIGHT?
Read More