Original Art Sundays no. 378: Sharp Invitiations: Esther's Hands: Interlude, page 2

 The next page of our interlude, in which the meaning of the title becomes apparent.

Continuing to work in Vaughn Bodé mode. The primary factors are the isolation of text and image, and the use of panel elements as parts of the borders. I wanted to keep the lettering loose but legible. To get the deep night effect, I toyed with a deep graphite over the inks, but finally decided on a deep wash, going for a misty effect.

The first panel went through several images. The problem was that it was too static. I mean, a bunch of people eating. I finally decided to concentrate on the emotions, to try to convey the sense of being fed after a long trip. This is the third or fourth time I've included a cemetery in a story. The challenge is that, despite usually strong upkeep, they are often desolate looking places. There's also a variety to tombstones and monuments that the casual observer overlooks. The 1987 Concrete story Now is Now is an excellent example of a well-drawn cemetery narrative. Leave it to the great Paul Chadwick! As regards the cemetery in THIS story, I'm pretty happy with the final result, but as I often do, I might tweak it before going to press. I looked up the actual cemetery, but it's visually boring, so I worked with memory and my renewed artistic license.

Including the rest of this interlude, there's less than 10 pages less to the Mother story. Then comes Daddy's Song, approximately the same length, 15 - 20 pages. I'm incorporating some smaller but significant story elements into these two chapters, so the book doesn't drag. I hope they're not offended, but several significant people in my life are mentioned only in passing, in the interest of advancing the narrative.

The final chapter is currently planned for 20 pages.

Foregoing tool list again this week. Suffice to say, nothing not frequently used before except a 1/4" Windsor Newton flat brush used for washes. I've had that brush forever- no idea where I got it! It's very floppy and works quite playfully.

Next: morning in the graveyard.

Original Art Sundays No. 295: Sharp Invitations: Curt, p. 26

 Hi, all. I hope you got something out of the little piece I did on 1/6 (arguably as important as 9/11, both days when our proud nation was attacked). We're back into it with a challenging page.

At the end of the last page, our heroine was evicted from hearth and home. Read on.

I may have made this page harder than it needed to be, but I'm fairly happy with the result. I played with numerous layout options before deciding on two tiers with exposition block in between. The one drawback is the last panel on tier one comes before the exposition. But I decided there was sufficient context to pull it off.

Strategic considerations: the challenge of land line phones! Though the first hand held independent phone unit was patented in France in 1917 (!), they weren't in common use until many years after the events chronicled here happened. So I used the old saw of phone cords and answering machines, hoping there is sufficient visual context for a modern reader. I also had the issue of showing a missing painting. I opted for a blank wall space with dotted outline. In reality, it didn't look anything like that. I know this page minimizes the impact of someone deliberately destroying family art, or some destroying art in general, but we must choose our moments in this drama. In the third panel, I used the conceit of popping in one of my favorite Surrealist Cowgirls characters. The area needed some weight, so I opted to have some fun with it. The weight in the bottom tier mostly comes from Photoshop patterns and fills. My emotional response to the suggestion that he would have me committed after we were married was not that drastic at the time. I was becoming convinced he was right about me. But I just LOVED Sara's response, just hanging up on him! He made 5 or 6 more calls not included in this page. Going into meticulous detail over such things would bog down the narrative.

The initial panel strategy for this page was so boring! Head shot, head shot, head shot.... blah... then I was re-reading the first run of Paul Chadwick's Concrete, and found a page of phone conversations that used some brilliant and simple visual devices (page 19 of The Complete Concrete). Inspired, I created new layouts for panels 3, 4, 6 and the text block, and popped them in using Photoshop. So this page took two full pages to do! I'm going to tweak a couple little things before this book goes to press, as we used to say.

Not as much pen and brush work as on some pages, but it's always about balance and doing what the page calls for.

Tools used:

• Canson Bristol (2 sheets)
• Nib holder and pen nibs
• Lead holder and no. 3B leads
• 4B graphite stick
• Magic Rub eraser
• Micron No. .02, .03, .05, .08, 1.0 and brush tip
• Tight Spot for corrections
• FW Artists White Acrylic 
• Doc Martin's Black Star Matte India Ink
• Photoshop. Mountains of Photoshop.
• Renaissance # 2 Sable Cats Tongue Brush

I picked up a few new tools while I was preparing for next semester's classes, and am eager for the next page, despite the dire place the story is going.

Best Comics of 2013, No. 7: 7 Against Chaos

Really, when Harlan Ellison and Paul Chadwick collaborate, how could the result not make the list?
Chadwick's Concrete remains one of my two favorite superheroes (the other, oddly, is Herbie, the Fat Fury, with James Robinson's Starman as runner-up). And Ellison is - well, Ellison. I'm relieved his health appears to be holding, despite reports of his imminent demise a couple years ago.
Concurrent with the Strange Armor storyline, a Concrete short story appeared in which our heroes visited the home of Dwayne Byrd, a not so thinly veiled reference to Ellison's preferred nom de plume, Cordwainer Bird. The story, Byrdland's Secret, used Ellison's life, work and philosophies as a starting point to muse on the role of art and literature in our lives, and the urgent, almost primal need to cling to a spirit of adventure in those lives.

This story appears at first blush to be old-school space opera- some fun ideas and elaborate trappings. However, as is the case with most of Ellison's work, it quickly becomes something larger than the sum of its parts. An aggregate of strange beings, given singular abilities by the perversion of their forms in the names of profit, politics, power and entertainment, is off on a quest to do - well, something. Only one of them knows their mission at its outset. At this point, it feels a bit like a fairly conventional superhero narrative, albeit a smartly written one.
The plot and its implications quickly thicken.
The stakes are no less than the nature of existence, as a reptilian life form is trying to rewrite not only history, but evolution. Unbeknownst to the rest of the universe, this group of rejects is fighting for the existence of everyone, and should they succeed, nobody will know.
There are several Ellison themes that come into play here. Of course, the humanizing of those considered rejects dates back to his civil rights work, and the classic short story The Discarded. And the tragedy of great work going unrecognized has been a recurring theme in Ellison interviews for decades.

Ellison's proprieties: Sugar & Spike rightly rank with Mount Rushmore in the scope of human achievement!

Paul Chadwick's work here is as strong as anything else he's done. While I cherish the populist notions in Concrete, his vivid imagination is seen in other works, including his The World Below mini-series and one issue of the classic Dr. Strange mini-series, The Flight of Bones. In 7 Against Chaos, he's given the opportunity to stretch thematically and offer some beyond cool science fiction illustration, and he rises to both challenges admirably. The work is reminiscent of the best of the 1960s DC science fiction stories in terms of pure imagination and joy, while holding to a contemporary quality. This is not a nostalgia piece, but it does recognize the value of past works, a challenging balancing act, well executed.
And it's cool to see, and a great adventure to read!
7 Against Chaos begins with a fairly direct, albeit elaborate, scenario and sweeps the reader along to ask complex questions about the nature and purpose of life, all while riding an interstellar roller coaster. In addressing the best of 2013, I've talked about works that have value as pure enjoyment, and works that say something deeper and challenge the reader. This is both. I pray that Ellison and Chadwick collaborate again!
Next: Best Comics of 2013, No. 6, gets lost.

Frank Miller owes me two hours

I just finished watching The Spirit courtesy of Netflix.
I'm trying to work up the vitriol to be disappointed.
Oh, I was told what to expect. But this was so much worse. A mish-mash of styles, dialogue that suits none of the characters, a plot so full of holes you could fill Wildwood Cemetery with them, and visuals that lack energy.
Oh, people have commented at length about how visually striking this film is, but it doesn't work for me. It's just a sorry pastiche of Kill Bill and Sin City.
Miller was once capable of great innovation. Now he's a parody of himself, creating implausible cities in which all the women are gorgeous in a sleazy way, all the men are gruff and nobody seems to actually like each other very much. The whole thing was a bizarre nightmare vision of Sin City recast as a camp 60s TV show.
Lest you think me an uninformed grouch, unaware of the nuances of Noir, I would point you to this article.
Eisner deserves better, especially from a freind, and he and Miller were friends.
The Spirit is a pragmatic man involved in Capra-esque morality plays. while these times may seem at odds with such an outlook and such a hero (decades ago, James Garner seemed to me to be an ideal choice to play the Spirit), I suspect that the moral compass of the country is swinging to a sort of pragmatic optimism. The Spirit would fit right in, given the chance.
This page from a Paul Chadwick Spirit story shows that it's possible to be realistic and still maintain a character's inherent humanity and decency, traits that seem to have eluded Miller in this outing.
It's just a darn shame that Frank Miller let his ego interfere with his reverence for the character.
Miller's failure to create a substantial work out of an iconic comic character will in no way help public perception of comics as worthy.