Original Art Sundays No. 289: Inktober, Week 3

Day

 Sigh. Next page is done except for cleanup and scanning, and I'm very proud of it. But I'm in grading Hell and don't want to take the two hours to run to MCAD and scan, so just to keep on posting schedule, here's the next week of Inktober. These will be old news to those who are with me on Facebook or Twitter, but I hope they give some pleasure anyway.

Day 15:

From the Surrealist Cowgirls, our old friend the floating whale mule Whalliam. I never get tired of drawing him, and this is iconic- the classic "HI" word balloon (he communicates by thinking one word at a time, always with a period, remember?), him floating on an abstract landscape, and the sun wearing shades, smiling down on him.

I miss the Cowgirls. It's been too long since I had a new story for them. Such a joy to create them!

Day 16:

A friend's labradoodle,  from photo reference.

On this and the above drawing, I did minimal cleanup. I liked the energy of the pencil marks, and the paper texture showing through on the image. These were just shots from my phone, not scans. I like the immediacy, though I would not take them to print for any major project.

 

Day 17:
When I was a wee tad, there was a Beatles cartoon series. MY mother didn't trust the Beatles' music until this series made them seem more innocuous, so the cartoon was my road in to my lifelong love of the Fab Four.

TV Guide ran an article on the series, including full figure illustrations of each of the boys. I copied those like crazy! I got particularly good at George, but decided to revisit John for this round.

Another quick sketchbook work with minimal cleanup. Just revisiting a childhood drawing joy.

Day 18:

I seldom do anything remotely resembling technical SF drawing. I like some of it, but it's just not where my strength lies. But since Inktober is about pushing yourself, and I had been diving into a re-viewing of the Battlestar Galactica remake, I decided it was Cylon time. 

Still quick, but I spent a little more time on this one. I love all the curvilinear aspects of the design. It's harsh and smooth at the same time. A bit more cleanup on this one too.

I sure got some mileage out of that small sketchbook this month!

Day 19:

I had a request to draw "a Seuss bird."

I spent some time enjoying vintage Seuss art and applied my own style to it.

Everything got curvy and soft in this one. Aside from a straightedge to draw the post, no mechanical tools at all. Another quick thing that was just fun to draw. I did a fair amount of cleanup on this one.

While my regular work is serious, bordering on grave, at times, I do get such joy from doing simple subjects.

Day 20:

Okay, very happy with this one!

I was getting irritated with me. I like the fast and loose drawings I'd been doing, but felt the need for something more... involved.

This is my interpretation of Jaeger from Carla Speed MacNeil's great work Finder.

Mostly a straight copy, but I did take a few small liberties to make it my own. More time on this one, with lots of cleanup and care.

Carla is doing a Patreon now, I guess. I just met her the one time, and found her vibrant and eager to share her work. When the funds are there, I will honor her Patreon and a couple others that are on my radar.

Day 21:

Another straight copy, this time the wonderful Neil the Horse from Katherine Collins!

Just cutting loose a bit. Pencils not removed.

As noted on the Rosa illustration previously posted, there's a misconception that funny animal books are somehow simple. Nothing could be less true. It takes a special technique to pull this stuff off, and Katherine is a master. I haven't talked with her for a couple years. Based on the Afterword in her Neil the Horse collection from Hermes Press (sadly, color covers not included), she went through a bit of a rough patch, but has endured.

Next: the new page, at last!

Best Comics of 2013, No. 14: Bad Houses

I turn 60 in just under seven weeks. More and more, I find that my views of adolescent narratives shift. Yes, I fully accept that people in their teens and early twenties are people, and that their skills and insights are a constant surprise.  But sometimes, especially when I read some of a seemingly infinite number of graphic novels pandering to them, I suspect that Sue Ann Nivens may have been right in that old episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show: at that age,their interests are shallow and their lives are boring.
Unfair, yes, but it's a judgment on the work about the kids, not about the kids.
Now, there are always strong works within this difficult subgenre. I almost picked Blue is the Warmest Color for this spot on the list. But there was just one cliche too many, the worst offender being the doomed lover angle and its subtext that if you dare to love someone of the same sex, you will die. I thought that was a bad idea when I was first exposed to it in queer porn in the late 70s, and it has NOT improved with age.
I had given up on finding a good book about that age group this year, when along came Bad Houses.

The work of Sara Ryan and Carla Speed McNiel, Bad Houses touches on many themes that resonate with my own adolescence and my subsequent life: rural living, broken homes, missing fathers, dysfunctional parenting, and collecting and hoarding.
More than anything, Bad Houses is about what we take with us and who those choices make us. I'm very familiar with Carla Speed McNeil's work through her enthralling and ongoing  SF magnum opus FINDER (and kudos to Dark Horse for the Ominbus editions!) and with her brief stint on Queen & Country, and quite frankly, her working on this book was my first attraction to it. Having seen the approach she uses to make the mythic plausible, I was curious as to how she'd approach more conventional subject matter.
I didn't expect to get so swept up in the story.
As I've noted, sometimes my bias regarding work aimed at this market leads me to overlook things, though I read Joanna Draper Carlson's blog religiously in an ongoing attempt to not miss anything truly worthwhile. She's turned me on to several fine works, one of which will be discussed later in this year's list.  In any case, this bias has caused me to miss much of Sara Ryan's work, though I do cherish my first printing of her early work Me and Edith Head.

As such, I enjoyed the emotional whirlwind of the no longer a boy but not quite a man Lewis as his life intersects with that of Anne, still young but forced to be the parent to her obsessive hoarder mother. Lewis helps his mother run her business, Cat's Matchless Estate Sales. During a sale, Anne takes shelter in a room marked "private" to pore over an old photo album, fascinated.
Trying to clear the place at the end of the day's business, Lewis walks in.

Inevitably, they become one another's anchors, revealing pieces of their shame and isolation based puzzles to each other and to themselves in the process. There's also a subplot dealing with the fear of aging, one dealing with loss and resentment, the story of Lewis' long-gone father.
And stuff. This book talks about people and their use/abuse of stuff.

How we see our stuff says a great deal about how we see ourselves. 

The nightmare scenario of any hoarder, a fire, happens in this story. While its outcome is surprising and saddening, it's also inevitable and very true to many such characters I've known.

I have some hoarder in me. I suspect every collector does. My mother had a lot more in her. Seeing Anne's mother wrestle to hold on to every slip of paper going back decades "in case there's a problem" reminds me of her so much. I wonder what it says about this country that there are enough people who resonate with that experience to make this #95 on Amazon's Graphic Novels bestseller list. There's so much to recommend here. The down on his luck rural badass character avoids being a cliche´; there's an odd vulnerability to the extreme assholiness of the character AJ, not so much that you want him to succeed in his half-brained, selfish, pointless and destructive schemes, but enough that you want him to turn himself around, even when you know it's an evolutionary unlikelihood.

Carla Speed McNeil's art shines here. She uses her characteristic loose yet confident blacks and just enough background detail to bring the scene, and the town, to life. And her character design, a clear strength in her SF work, is noteworthy here. One of the things about working in the realm of the fantastic is that since you're dealing entirely with the imaginary, there are a great many places where nobody can tell you that you got it wrong. Some artists (not Ms. McNeil) use that as a crutch. If anyone was fool enough to include her in that number, however, she's acquitted herself admirably here. It's much more challenging to create something real plausibly than it is to do so with something unreal. Carla Speed McNeil sets a higher standard here.

As I drove up North for Christmas with my family, my thoughts turned inevitably to the past. But this year they were also on this book, which some will be getting as a present next year.

Small towns, dysfunctional families, stuff. You know. Life.

Next: Best of 2013, Number 13: something old, something new, something black.

Survival, the Interwebs, and Moses

Heidi McDonald over at the Beat (see links to the left) quotes this article on survival concerns of creative types in a free consumer market, the Net.
While it's hardly a new concern, this piece expresses it with admirable clarity.
There are two concerns here. The first concern is for the ethics of the situation. Why should a creator work for free, as the net audience tends to expect? The second concern, which directly relates, is the issues of survival in a free or low-cost per unit economy.
So the creator's concerns range from "this is wrong" to the inevitable "adapt or die".
It is in the latter that the future lies. I'd like to suggest that there's another possibility evolving.
In Reinventing Comics, Scott McCloud talks of the micro-economy for paid comic downloads. While it did not play out at the level McCloud anticipated, the options for print-on-demand have opened up distribution and micro-economies to creators in numerous but similar markets, ranging from Cafe' Press to Kablam and Indy Planet.
While these new markets have their downsides,  they do accomplish something wonderful. They afford the opportunity for anyone with Net access- 75% as of six years ago, and I think it's raised slightly and plateaued there for a while- to sell their wares. A variation on the old vanity press model.
The downside of this is that not everything that people put out is salable.
Another downside is that things are not vetted by the same publication cycle, which means you are your own editor.  Not always a wise choice.
Inevitably, an online presence and distribution model with a formal editing structure will evolve. It's begun through the majors already, and Dark Horse has been at the forefront of this process for years.
Jenni Gregory experimented with a creator-owned online publishing venture- doing POD for the books of others, which she edited- but it appears to have died, since her Dreamwalker book is now at IndyPlanet. 

Some creators, like Carla Speed Macneil, whose Finder I adore (site has been on low activity for a bit- hope all is well!), thrive in the online and self-publishing models, putting out trades after they've amassed a body of work. Tyler Page has had great critical and at least modest commercial success with his Nothing Better, a great read.
Needless to say, I've toyed with this idea for some of my own work from time to time.
But overall, the model will find its own direction. Similar models will evolve for musicians, photographers, writers, illustrators, possibly even sculptors, anyone with a creative endeavor to offer the world.
How long will it take?
It's already begun.
When Moses led the tribes out of Egypt, they wandered for 40 days and 40 nights. But according to many Judaic scholars, the days in that are a metaphor for years. The reason it took that long was that a generation had to come to maturity not knowing slavery to perceive freedom as real.
Along the same lines, as soon as a generation has grown expecting to remunerate creative people for their online work, and that work has an online vetting process that's matured the same way, the world will once again see such payments for creativity as real.
At least, as much as they did before, which is a topic for another day.