Original Art Sundays No. 367: Sharp Invitations: Esther's Hands, p. 9

 Here we go with the next page.

When we left our adventure, our heroine (me) had just been introduced to- indoctrinated in?- Tolkein.

Read on.

Lots to unpack on this seemingly simple page. In the first panel, there's a quiet family moment. The younger brother reading the comic, a youthful me with a Beatles haircut reading a teen magazine, sporting the disaffected demeanor of a 14 year old. It felt light, so I added textures to the couch and a holding line to define the corner of the room. One of my Beta readers pointed out that the line also establishes division between me and the rest of the visible family.

The second panel went through several revisions. I had settled on a tight close up of Mother's eyes while she read, but I went with a profile shot of her instead. The scope of a stack of books and a random texture for a background got the message across more clearly. The randomness of the stack foreshadows later events in Mother's life. In a caption, I was able to allude to the passing of years with just a few words. This is an old comic artist's trick. How do you draw an army of 10,000 advancing soldiers? You draw two generals talking. One of them points off panel and says, "Look, here comes an army of 10,000 advancing soldiers!" Of course, if you're Al Williamson or Wally Wood, you just draw the furshlugginer army, to quote Harvey Kurtzman (yay, early MAD!). Yeah, I know it's a Yiddish word that he appropriated and that's not quite the right meaning. I'm okay with that. Hey, if it's good enough for Harvey....

The skipped years will show up in the next chapter, the one on my Father.

The final panel is subdivided. I was looking for a better way to convey an old school phone call. I like the visual device of a phone cord as a panel divider, but I've used it so many times, going back to the Tranny Towers strips (I haven't forgotten about my mad scheme to get those ancient scrolls back into print. Soon, my pretties....).  The device of isolating each speaker within a larger panel seemed to serve. I toyed with the idea of adding weight through a background texture in the white space between the circles, but it proved distracting in tissue overlays, so I again concluded that less is more. Another possibility considered and rejected: dropping the holding border. I also thought about doing a little arrow text box to call out the early 80s perm I briefly sported, but it seemed distracting and redundant. The perm also foreshadows my first tentative steps to being more publicly femme.Technical considerations: the shape and position of word balloons was embarrassingly bad. I was able to move things around in Photoshop with relative ease.

All told, a simple quiet page that advances the story. 

Tool list:

• Papers: tracing paper, various sketchbooks, Canson Bristol board
  
• Pencils: Lyra 2B graphite stick, 4B lead and holder, 2B Ticonderoga classic, tech pencil and 4B lead
  
• Erasers: kneadable, vinyl eraser, Click eraser
• Hand Tools: 6" and 14" straightedge, triangle, T-square, French curves
• Inking tools: Dr.Martin's Black Magic ink, nib and holder, Princeton Deerfoot 1/4" mini detailer brush (love this brush!), Escoda Kolinsky no. 4 brush, Richeson Kolinsky  no. 2 brush
• Markers: Micron 0.25, 0.6, 0.8, 1.0 and Copic 0.25
• And of course, Photoshop

Next page: come out, come out....
 

Best Comics of 2012, No. 9: Daredevil by Mark Waid

As much great work as they've produced over the decades, I've not been a huge Marvel fan for the last couple decades.
A couple recent titles have bought me around a bit on this.
The first of these is Mark Waid's current run on Daredevil.

Everybody knows Daredevil by now: blinded by a radioactive isotope while saving a blind man about to be hit by a truck, young Matt Murdock assumes the mantle of Derdevil to avenge the death of his boxer father at the hands of The Fixer.
Sort of Batman meets Kid Galahad with a dollop of Shakespearean tragedy,  later supplemented by Miller with noir and manga pastiches.
I've been a fan of Old Hornhead since the early issues. I recall reading the Wally Wood stories, and the Romita and Colan followups, when they first came out.
I stuck with the character. I was captivated by the Miller run and some of the followups, but lost interest.
I returned sporadically. The Marvel Knights runs by Joe Qeusada and David Mack were particularly successful, and the Bendis/Alex Maleev run was spellbinding, if derivative of Bendis' noir themed independent comics.
Heck, I even liked it when DD was interviewed for Rolling Stone in no. 100.
So I know my Daredevil.
But I've not read it for a few years.
I think creators got carried away with the maudlin/tragic aspects of the character. While these were always present, there was more of a soap opera aspect to them in the 60s and 70s. I blame and credit Frank Miller for bringing out Matt's Catholicism as a focus of the character.
At any rate, I'd walked away and didn't pay attention when Waid began writing Daredevil in July 2011.
More fool me. I should have known better.

I love Waid's Astro City, and his "Unthinkable" storyline in Fantastic Four is some of the best superhero stuff ever. I'd like to see him revitalize his Potter's Field, but I'm pretty sure he's done with it.
In the current Daredevil run, Waid and artists Chris Samnee and Marc Checetto successfully meld recent events in the Marvel Universe with the tone of the original stories, without being condescending or overly impressed by their own cleverness. There's no wry "this is a comic" wink to the reader here, only well-crafted adventure.

The stories incoproate contemporary versions of staple characters, including Dr. Doom, Spidey, the Punisher- heck, the whole crowd, pretty much. The central storyline involves a flash drive made of unstable molecules from a stolen shred of a Fantastic Four uniform. This drive contains information that could take down any or all of the most powerful criminal organizations in the world, collectively called Megacrime.
Daredevil has it and everyone wants it.
The art is highly reminiscent of the Wood/Layton run, from issues 5  to 11, still one of the highlights of the character's run, especially issue 7, the battle with Namor.
I see that quality in the current Daredevil run.
No Earth shattering, cataclysmic "the Marvel Universe will never be the same!" bombast here. Just a solid, intelligent adventure.
I read a review of Star Trek: Insurrection in Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine. It warmly talked of the film as a clever chance to spend a couple hours with old friends.
That's kind of the way I feel about the current Daredevil run. Since I'm reading it in trades, I'm a bit behind the floppies storyline. I've read through Book 3, which culminates with issue 15. The current issue is no. 22.
But I don't expect the issues I've yet to read will disappoint.
Tomorrow: No. 8 in the Best Comics of 2012, a book which will never leave its house.

Comic Book Legal Defense Fund: MN Field Report on Free Speech

The spiffy "new: CBLDF logo, a couple years old now!

I've been procrastinating this post for a while, but with San Diego ComicCon right around the corner and the 4th of July fading into the past as I prepare for the second wave of summer classes, I don't want it to be too long overdue. And in light of the CBLDF auction scheduled for that huge event, this seems the ideal time to correct the oversight.
Back in May, I volunteered to run the booth so the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, of which I've been a supporting member for the past decade plus (skipping one year when I was too broke), would have a presence at the MN Comic Book Party, AKA SpringCon.
I'd like to offer a summary of the event.
The first day I was aided by longtime friend and fellow comic book geek Jesse Haller.  Jesse and I have countless discussions on the nature of comics, and endless fun dishing comic book gossip. Jesse was great about creating an effective setup, putting his retail and merchandising experience to work to make the booth shine. He also covered the booth for a couple hours while I had lunch with our mutual friend Frenchy Lunning!

As to the booth itself, it took a while for some of the patrons to figure out what the deal was. But very soon, after the initial burst of people mad to get to the comics (our booth was right by the door!), things settled down and people stopped to talk about the work of CBLDF, and to contribute to the cause.
The degree to which some patrons didn't get it at first was made clear by some folks asking for deals on our books!
Since I wasn't sure of the demographic, I just told the CBLDF people to send stuff they thought apropos. I quickly saw my mistakes. Here's how the event went down:

• This is a family-friendly Con. The items for kids and the small ticket items sold out. 
• Lots of folks buy art at this Con! Some of the limited edition prints would have gone over well.
• Neil Gaiman remains very popular here. The signed 1st printings of The Graveyard Book sold out. IN light of that, if we run the table again, including some of the limited edition prints might be a good idea.
• While we had ample stories of the big cases that CBLDF has helped with, there are many smaller instances that get overlooked. The owner of B & B Comics in Bemidji told us of the organization's help in quieting a "concerned parent" irate over a Frank Miller poster. I also knew from past conversations that Tyler Page, whose strip Nothing Better is linked to screen left, had assistance from them with a rather odd legal threat he received over the content of his strip.

Camille, Lady Liberty and Diana!

Day Two saw me aided by Manga fan and aspiring veterinarian Camille McAloney. Her enthusiasm and ability to engage people really helped our sales and communication efforts!
Both days were made for me on a personal level by encountering so many old friends, quite unexpectedly, including one of my favorite former students and the gent who first hired me to teach! Seemed like every time I looked up, there was someone else I knew! That was so positive, just what I needed coming off a rough year.
But it wasn't about me, it was about the cause.
We raised right around $600, give or take, at the table. And SpringCon gives a significant portion of its art auction proceeds to CBDLF as well, so the organization made a decent piece of change for The Cause.
CBLDF has been in existence since the Friendly Frank's bust in the early 1980s led to Greg Ketter and Dreamhaven throwing The Irish Wake for the First Amendment, an event which I was privileged to attend. This was a direct precursor to the CBLDF. Among hundreds of subsequent cases, they defended a comic book store owner who was arrested for selling  an adults only comic book to an adult.
The mind boggles.
While the problem has diminished a bit, there remains a huge need to protect the rights of comic book creators, publishers and retailers from people who engage in censorship, which is, in the words of Mark Twain, "telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it."
And just for fun, here's a SpringCon attendee in the role of a Wally Wood EC Comics spaceman!

Original Art Sundays (Wednesday) No. 97: Tranny Towers, Chapter 18

This post was delayed by a writing deadline that ate two days more than I expected, and the extra sleep required thereafter.
Here is Chapter 18! As always, click on the image for a larger version.

A couple things about this page:
First, it's necessary for plot development. The lead up to the big event, as it were.
Second, doing a dialogue heavy page and keeping it visually interesting is always a challenge.
And I didn't have a copy of Wally Wood's classic 22 Panels That Always Work on hand to swipe from!

Third, the strip is quite dated. While some households still have land lines, few of them have cords, which is what makes the gag work here.
All that said, there are things about this strip that work well for me. The dialogue taking up the center of the page while still having a panel flow and taking place in two distinct locations is a nice touch.
Next week: Surrealist Cowgirls, It Does This, page 8!