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 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)
The Land of Cokaygne
Imagine my surprise when Anu Garg’s Word of the Day today was “Cockaigne!” I’ve spent this week and the better part of last working on an awesome 4-page comic based on an anonymous 14th century poem about said mystical land of earthly pleasures. See below!
This is for Stumptown Underground‘s June issue, which has the theme of “myth/folk tales/fairy tales.” If this submission don’t get accepted, I’ll eat my hat! I really busted my patootie on this one.
Back in 2005-2006, when I was a senior at Columbia University, I attempted to write a thesis paper on the poetry of the Goliards, semi-mythical wandering, drunken scholars of the later middle ages, probably best known from the Carmina Burana. I even learned medieval Latin so I could read their doggerel in the original! But no thesis came of it, and maybe from this comic you can see why. It’s just a bunch of crazy nonsense! I lost credit from the course and almost didn’t graduate 🙁
The text of the poetry portion of the comic was freely edited by me based on the original Middle English and two modern translations, all available here. (WARNING: The sex in the original poem is much less consensual than what I’ve depicted here. Even so, I recommend you give it a read, as there are many beautiful and hilarious parts I had to leave out of the comic for space considerations.)
Read MoreHeightening.
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 More10 Minute Marx
Happy 192nd Birthday, Karl Marx.
(apologies for the throwoff sketch today – I am still working on several concurrent TOP SECRET projects which will all come tumbling out onto the internet early next week)
One of my favorite Marx quotes ever is:
“A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”
Though it always appealed to me, I only realized the quote’s deeper meaning when I read this short article by Slavoj Zizek. (This same article addresses one of my other all-time favorite [paraphrased] quotes by Jaques Lacan: “If God is dead, then nothing is permitted.”)
In short, the duty of the Communist is NOT to say “You naive bourgeois idiot! You talk as though money were some magical thing endowed with intrinsic properties, when it is really just a reification of labor relations!” No. Rather, to the capitalist, we should say: “Like any intelligent modern man, you freely assert that money is nothing more than a codified system which stands in for certain relations of labor. However, in your day-to-day life, you nevertheless unconsciously ACT as though money is truly it’s own magical thing.” Wrap your head around that, my friend, and you’ve finished your first lap around Jericho.
Read MoreThe Weekend’s Nudes
I have so much great stuff in the works right now, but nothing I can show you yet (incomplete comics projects, drawings that are gifts for people who haven’t received them yet, etc.!) So here are some of my gradually improving nudes. (Warning! Not Safe For Church!)
I must say, I’m particularly proud of that last one – it actually looks like the subject. Er, model. Woman. I mean lady. I mean person.
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From SNitLoE page 68
I am still caught up in Spider-Man stuff and chores around the studio, so nothing new today. However, here’s a quick scan of a panel from a very recent page of Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment.
Hippies! Goats! Don’t you wanna read this book?
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!
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