Wonder Woman Day 2010!
Every year, a very cool nerd named Andy Mangels organizes a big charity auction in Portland, OR and Flemington, NJ where people bid on pictures of everyone’s favorite Amazon Princess to raise money for various domestic violence programs. These can be by awesome famous artists like Steve Lieber, Scott Koblish (never heard of him, but that drawing kicks ass!) and the guy who painted what I think is the best entry this year, David Chelsea. Or they can be by schmucks like me who had to look on Wikipedia to determine if Wonder Woman can fly. (And if she can, why does she need an invisible plane?)
I probably should have read David Chelsea’s book on perspective a little more closely before I started my own Wonder Woman artwork, because the burning building on the right still looks a little wonky to me – I’m not sure why, because I constructed my grid pretty carefully. I also feel like the architecture in general has the wrong amount of surface detail, though I can’t tell if it’s too little or too much. I am pretty happy with this piece though, my favorite parts being the firefighter’s gesture and Wonder Woman’s gams.
Please, please, please check out Andy Mangel’s online Wonder Woman Museum. It’s as charming and non-creepy as such a thing could feasibly be, and I have shared but a fraction of the terrific auction artwork on display. And of course, if you are in Portland on October 24th, drop a Hamilton on my artwork, for a good cause. (If it doesn’t sell, I wonder if I get it back? If so, I will put it on my Etsy store and donate the proceeds to Andy when it sells.)
Read MoreWeekend Nudes, non-female edition
This week Hipbone’s model was, gasp!, a man. Because he was older, there were tons of veins and wrinkles – these are half-hour poses, but they could easily have been twice as long, there was so much detail.
(Sorry about the censor blocks – ImageShack, the service I use for hosting the images on this blog, will take them down if they violate their decency standards. I can’t really begrudge them this.)
The guy came up with some really unusual poses.
Portrait of the Artist When He Isn’t There
Just in case you were wondering how it all came together.
Enough of this! This weekend I’ll hopefully have new drawings of actual people.
Read MorePotAWHIT Board
Last of the five drawings I did for “Portrait of the Artist When He Isn’t There,” a head-on diagram of my trusty bulletin board. Among these treasures is a flyer I designed for the Philolexian Society to promote the 2005 Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest, an oversized postcard depicting Al Capone’s luxuriously appointed prison cell from when I visited Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, a weird polaroid of me and my friend Andrew Liebowitz, and two postcards from Vox Pop. One bears the clever slogan “Man is born free, and everywhere is in chain-stores, and the other is this gorgeous reproduction:
It’s “International Solidarity of Labour” by Walter Crane, drawn in 1897. It may not live up to our PC standards today (why are the American and Australian white? why is the Angel of Freedom white? etc) but this was 1897! Who else was promoting an image of total racial equality at that time? Practically nobody but the socialists, that’s who. The central motto is, of course, “Workers of the the world, unite!” It was true when Marx said it, it was true when Crane drew it, and it’s still true today.
One last explanation: the long skinny drawing tacked above the bulletin board is the original drawing of Theo crawling through the desert that I incorporated into this “animated” jpeg used to advertise SNitLoE on the internet:
Translations for Page 64
Hoo-boy. Apologies for my handwriting, spelling etc. to any of you who actually read these languages:
1.) The Gayatri Mantra is a popular Hindu mantra, here written out in Devangari Sanskrit. (Very) loosely translated, it means “We meditate on the glory of that Being who has produced this universe; may He enlighten our minds.”
2.) This is from the fourth part of a very common series of Jewish prayers, meaning “You favor a man of (or with) knowledge, and teach mortals understanding.” I love that repetitive biblical syntax; indeed, I adore that redundant grammar.
3.) This verse from the first surah of the Qur’an, “al-Fatiha,” “the Opening” is recited as many as seventeen times a day by observant Muslims. It means “show us the Straight Path.”
For all three of these, I tried to find prayers that were very common, that Theo conceivably could have learned in their original languages during his brief dabbling in each of these religions. I also tried to use prayers united by a similar sentiment – that of imploring God for guidance in a time of confusion. Because Theo is lost, but he’s also… lost. DO YOU GET IT!?!?!
Except I broke the pattern for the final prayer in Greek. Though I found many nice Greek Orthodox prayers, they were more mercy/forgiveness-based than knowledge/guidance-based. Moreover, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to quote Mark 1:3, wherein Mark describes the o.g. freaky desert zealot, John the Baptist, with these words, cribbed from Isaiah: “The voice of one crying in the wilderness “prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”
EXTRA CREDIT: The observant reader (and aren’t you all?) might wonder, why is Theo facing LEFT for his tfila and RIGHT for his salah when both Jerusalem AND Mecca are EAST of New Mexico? Good question; there are two possible explanations. One is that, because this is a splash page in the open desert with no panel borders or natural landmarks to serve as reference points, the “camera” p.o.v. has actually rotated 180 degrees around Theo between prayers two and three, but you the reader do not realize it – this is a gross violation of traditional comics practice, but, I think, a valid aesthetic choice. The second explanation is that Theo is completely “dis-oriented” (haha!) couldn’t find “east” if his life depended on it.
WHICH IT POSSIBLY DOES!!!!(?)!!
PotAWHIT Desk
When I got to Portland, I knew I’d need a drafting table for comics. I bought one from somebody’s grandparents and brought it home on the bus. The driver was not happy.
Hanging to the left of the bulletin board is a print that I bought of one of my favorite webcomic strips ever, a guest strip for Pictures for Sad Children by KC Green.
Read MorePotAWHIT Rack
Here’s part three of “Portrait of the Artist When He Isn’t There,” my coat-rack. Found it on the side of the road near the Hollywood Max stop. Prominently featured are:
– the cassock and supplice I wore during the Byrd festival
– my limited edition t-shirt: “Local Roots Farm Team 2009: This Bunch is Rad-ish”
– my hat from when I worked at Brooklyn’s greatest coffeeshop, the late Vox Pop.
– my piece-of-s*** shoes
I am still a little distraught by the foreshortening of the ellipses in this drawing. As you can deduce, my eye-level was about 75-80% up the full length of the rack (I was sitting on my bed). Maybe the rack itself is bent a little bit.
By the way, tonight was a rad party for the release of Stumptown Undeground’s “Birthday” issue. My “screaming baby” piece made the inside front cover, probably because they didn’t want a blood-spattered infant penis on the front cover.
Read MorePotAWHIT Bed
This was the second drawing I did for the “Portrait of the Artist When He Isn’t There” series. It features the Nigerian blanket given to me in primary school by my best friend Sule Otori, my severely dilapidated schoolbag “Ursula,” some Renaissance sheet music, and a copy of G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. I’ve gotten in the habit of piling crap on my bed so I’m not tempted to sleep on it during the day.
Read MorePotAWHIT Shelf
The theme of October’s Stumptown Underground compilation is “Self-Portrait/Self-Reflection.” I’ve never been one for auto-biography. So though many of my friends have worked in the genre, and I enjoy many auto-bio comics, I’ve never been able to do one myself. Even when I tried keeping a daily “comics journal” in the style of Chelsea Baker at the beginning of 2010, I was unable to stay on the topic of my own life (which in January was admittedly pretty boring) – I would end up describing the book I had just read or the movie I’d just seen, including only a cursory auto-bio framing narrative, or none at all.
I hardly want to come off sounding like some righteous crusader against solipsism or attention-whoring; after all, I have a facebook page and TWO blogs. I’m certainly not above the frothy foam of perpetual self-reinvention that characterizes my generation of rootless hipsters. But nevertheless, I do think a certain diligence is required to look beyond the confines of the self, or at least an acknowledgment of the self’s permeability. Increasingly I think of it as a duty to understand that “who I am” is not some secret identity locked in the vault of my own skull, but a complicated network of relationships, many of them mysterious to my own subjectivity. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said something like “the self is not that part that is known only to me and to no one else, but precisely that part that is external and unknown to me, who I am to others.” I could write on this subject endlessly, but this is an art blog.
Anyway, this mush of Anglican theology and waaaaay too much structuralist criticism resulted in me not wanting to draw a traditional self-portrait or an auto-bio comic, but rather a series of still life drawings of the things around my room entitled “Portrait of the Artist When He Isn’t There” (PotAWHIT) Talk about the absent core of subjectivity! I think somebody snooping around my room when I wasn’t there could get a better idea of “who I am” just from looking at the books on my shelf, the drawings on my desk, and even the clothes on my hangers, than from briefly meeting me in person. I’ve left little pieces of my self strewn on the floor.
Read MoreGuantanamo-Fi-Na-Nae
Well, the inky black prison cell where Whoever-they-are have taken Kafir certainly isn’t in Cuba*, but I was inspired by accounts of the U.S.’s notorious overseas prison complex at Guantanamo Bay when drawing these pages, especially page 60.
The inclusion of a Qur’an among the meager provisions of Muslim prisoners held at Guantanamo on suspicion of terrorism has always struck me as particularly humiliating. It is almost as if to say “just when we have deprived you of every other freedom and dignity – your own clothes, space to move around in, a private place to use the bathroom, etc. – only then will we assure you of the ability to practice your religion.”
It’s funny and sad, and very important, how the Human “as such” usually emerges only when a person has been totally debased and stripped of everything else save his life. We still define comfortable individuals in terms of their roles as communist, capitalist, Hutu, Tutsi, gay, straight, etc. etc. Only when they are starving refugees at the gates does a plea arise to respect “our common humanity.”
Not that things have gotten nearly that bad for Kafir… yet. And anyway, Kafir’s parents are Zoroastrian, you bigoted idiot.
*Where it is exactly is a mystery that won’t be explained until later in the comic!
Go Buy Ben Bates’s Comic
My friend Ben Bates from Periscope Studio penciled the most recent issue of Sonic the Hedgehog, #217, on stands this week. From what he’s told me, Ben has pretty much wanted to draw the Sonic comic since he was like thirteen. At that time, he was thrilled to discover that there was a comic about the beloved video game, but was very disappointed upon realizing just how crappy it actually was. Now at the helm, he has some very fixed ideas of how the comic should be. I’m pretty awed by a.) how well Ben knows what it is he wants and b.) how doggedly he has pursued that goal. If I had half as much of either quality as Ben does, I’d have it made in the shade.
If that weren’t bad enough, I also lack the ability to draw the spinny Sonic legs – you know, where he’s running so fast his legs are a total blur? Admittedly I didn’t really try this time – except for the color, this was drawn in about 10 minutes in a waiting room. The dude getting knocked over is supposed to be Andy Johnson of Cosmic Monkey Comics.
Read MoreFinally Back to Figure Drawing
Hey blogsciples. I finally have enough discretionary income to start going figure drawing at Hipbone Studio again. This morning I went with Katy Ellis O’Brien; she gave me some of her big brown pieces of paper to draw on.
They’re useful, because then you can draw highlights and not just shadows. Human skin is shiny, and to look convincing, part of it has to be lighter than the overall tone of the paper.
The model was very, very good, as usual. Great dynamic poses. I also assure you that she had a pretty face and did not, in fact, look like Kevin Kline.
Stay tuned to this blog! Lots of fun stuff coming up next week.
Read MoreTheo’s Tattoos: Bismillah
On his inner left bicep, Theo has a tattoo of the “Bismillah” or “Basmala,” which is a word for the phrase “bismi-llāhi r-raḥmāni r-raḥīm,” which in Arabic means “In the Name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.” Any actual readers of Arabic, please forgive my unintelligible squiggles. Their accuracy ranges from “Trying and Failing” to “Not Even Really Trying.”
The Bismillah is found at the beginning of (almost) every sura of the Q’uran, as well in the preambles to a lot of Islamic constitutions, and in many other places. In a much less flattering context, this was the way Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad began his speech when he spoke at my alma matter, Columbia University. So clearly, it’s a pretty versatile phrase.
As with Judaism, tattoos are actually forbidden in Islam, though I’ve had a little trouble discerning exactly why – most explanations, however, feature the argument that tattooing alters God’s perfect design of the human body. Sometimes I imagine that Theo would get a tattoo not at the height of his experimentation with a particular faith, but at the end of it, as a sort of fare-well commemoration.
I’ll be at the Portland Zine Symposium this Weekend
Just a personal update: this weekend I will be tabling at the Portland Zine Symposium in PSU’s Peter W. Scott Main Gym. If you are in Portland, OR (and honestly, why aren’t you?), stop by and pick up one of the three zines I will have for sale at $1 each:
Wakey-Wakey is a short anthology of various comics and illustrations I’ve done, most of them while I was interning at Periscope Studio, and some of it previously published in Stumptown Underground. There is nothing in this zine you haven’t already seen on this blog.
The Savage Nobles Preview Zine includes pages 26 through 51 of the comic you are reading right now. (That’s right, if you buy it this weekend you’ll be able to see page 51 a full two days before it hits this site!) This is mainly intended to serve as a “gateway drug” for the website. At 5.5×8.5″, it’s a little smaller than I’d like to publish it eventually, but it still looks durned good in print if I d.s.s.m.
Flight of the Flightless is the 24-Hour Comic I drew in (one day of) April of this year. It’s based on a true story as comically reimagined by me and my ex-roommate Turhan Sarwar about evacuating the penguins from the New Orleans Aquarium after Hurricane Katrina. (yes, a comedy about Hurricane Katrina – it’s about time!) It’s got cute animals, madcap action, and has a super-happy ending with a wedding and a rainbow; it will one day make me a millionaire and relaunch Cuba Gooding, Jr.’s career.
See y’all at the Symposium!
Read MoreByrdSeed
Hey internet stalkers – sorry I have been so delinquent in posting. August has proven to be a crazy month, singing for the William Byrd Festival and prepping for the Portland Zine Symposium. The only time I’ve had to draw is between rehearsals! (see below)
