Original Art Sundays No. 283: The Third Sharp Invitation, p. 5

 Here is the penultimate page of this crucial but comparatively short chapter!

Thoughts:

My body never looks better than when I draw it! I don't know if that's false advertising or wishful thinking.

Text is crucial on this page. Economy of words is vital here. As I tell my writing students, communicate more with less and trust your audience to fill in the blanks.

I don't have to worry about not having enough black on this page! The background is sparse by choice. Originally, I thought of doing a grayed back collage of previous moments from the story, but the more I played with the idea, the more it seemed both contrived and visually confusing. Dramatic collage in comics is very difficult to pull off. Jack Kirby's collages were ambitious but clumsy, at least to my eyes.

On the figure, I could have done more internal inks, shadows of body contours and such. I usually do such on draped figures more than on nudes. Now that circumstance are conducive to it, it might be time to get back to a figure drawing co-op. You learn so much from drawing the human figure!

Reversed lettering is a challenge. There are three basic approaches, and I've done all three. You either ink around the individual characters, use white ink after filling in your blacks, or just use the lettering tool in Photoshop. I opted for the third, using the Comic Craft typeface The Sculptor from the Scott McCloud book I so revere.

Not sure if there are one or two more pages to this chapter. It's set up for one, which will serve as prelude to the Curt chapter (already 19 pages posted on that one).

Overall, I'm pretty satisfied with this page!

Materials:

• Canson Bristol Board
• Lead holder with no. 3B leads
• Various erasers
• Tech markers: Micron numbers .01, .03, .05, .08 and 1.0
• Sumi-E black ink
• FW Acrylic White
  
• Crow quill nib and holder
• Brushes: Royal synthetic angle flat no. 8, Blick round synthetic no. 6, Sceptre Gold sable/synthetic no. 0, Tight Spot for corrections

Next: the conclusion and lead-in to the big chapter, already in progress!

Photoshop

Read on, comics fans!

This Saturday is Read Comics in Public Day! It's also Jack Kirby's birthday, which is no coincidence.

This event is one of those groundswell things. Since comic readers have historically been perceived as  less than literate, despite the posturings of the Simpsons' Comic Book Guy, who now has his own comic book, this event could be an opportunity to dispel preconceived notions about comic readers. We're not semi-literate slobs or social misfits. We're just people who love to read- an increasing rarity. According to the American Booksellers' Association, book sales are paradoxical. While people are ostensibly buying more books, independent stores are closing, and there's no evidence that people are reading the books they buy. Nor do the figures note what types of books are being sold. The largest sellers remain cookbooks and the Bible.
Bottom line is that, according to the US Census Bureau statistics, April 2010 book sales of $917 million are at their lowest level in 8 years.
And comic book stores are not immune from this disturbing trend, as evidenced by the recent closing of one owned by filmmaker and comic lover Kevin Smith, and by the closing of the great Forbidden Planet in England.
Eau Claire Comics and Collectibles, in Eau Claire, WI, the first store to sell my work, is also gone.
We are blessed here in the Twin Cities to have a comics community that supports no less than a dozen comic stores, but I fear for their future as well.
Possibly that's a sad but realistic outcome.
The economy is either improving slowly or doomed, depending on what the economic seers had for breakfast. Unemployment appears to have leveled off around 10% and may or may not rebound. That leaves many people with little, if any, disposable income.
So if we are in an inverted Maslow model, where the hierarchy of needs is worked down to the basics rather than up to self-actualization, I fear that books and comics will not be very high up most people's lists of necessary purchases, at least for a while.
And as is the case with any art form, continued involvement is crucial to comics' thriving.
We've overcome much of the 30s - 60s stigma about comics, partially due to the snobbery associated with the "graphic novel", but we need to be visible. We need to be seen loving our comics, proudly.
Hey, if it's good enough for Bogey, it's good enough for us!

"Hi, Jack." "How's it going, Frank?"

I cannot say anything about this image.

Frank Zappa with Jack Kirby.

The King of Comics and the Duke of Prunes.

So many possibilities.

Thanks to the great Scott Shaw! for posting this on his Facebook page.

Original Art Sundays, No. 21: The World in Love, pp. 22 and 23

So close to the end of the story.
The big problem with these pages is that the grays are so soft.

The third eye stuff is a bit of a giveaway as to where I'm coming from on this, but it's more of a loose metaphor for awareness of one's own power.

Also, I know that it's tactless to laugh at your own lines, but the line "Oh, go eat a bug" just cracks me up.
I was a bit embarrassed by the rendering of the Mother figure in last week's pages, but then I was researching something else and was reminded of this Jack Kirby page.

Much as I love The Prisoner and Jack Kirby, looks like the arms get away from him from time to time too!

next week: The end of the beginning.

It's a Ms. Tree to me....

Spent part of the afternoon with my casual buddy Terry Beatty and his son Kirby. I mean really, what else would a comic artist and comic hound name his son but Kirby?
The purose of the visit, aside from interrupting Terry's work drawing the next book in The Road to Perdition series, was to get him to sign my friend James' four (!) bound volumes of The Complete Ms. Tree in four hardbound volumes.
A quick word about binding. people are starting to get into it as a way of archiving collections, and organizing the content to your liking.  You assemble the material in the order you want it bound, send it to a book bindery that specializes in such things (and there are a few), and for a reasonable fee, you get back a book made of your comics. Some just send them in. Others remove ads, reorder stories, take books apart, order custom die stamps for the books' covers, and make dustjackets for them. It's about having books you want to read instead of comics shoved in a box because there's no other practical way to store them.
Well, Terry thought I was just bringing over some old TPBs, and he was blown away.

He was so delighted that he said James almost didn't get them back! As a fellow collector, James would appreciate the sentiment.

I hope.

But that's the thing about Terry. He's one of us.

 

He invited me to take a quick look at his studio, replete with 50s mini-bar holding his computer, all the cool Harryhausen statues and Big Little Books, all the comics we both love. It's rare these days that I have this kind of in-person time with someone else who really gets comics, especially someone around the same age, so it was too much fun.

And Kirby is a trip! Great little dude!

So much has happened in the past year. I've wondered a bit if my rekindled interest in my comic archive/library/collection/mausoleum was a way to avoid facing some of it. Lord knows this binding thing has eaten some time of late.

Maybe, but I doubt it.

My rekindled passion for comics is awakening other dormant passions and disciplines. I think it's there for me, and not me for it. To me and those like me, comics are akin to Jim Morrison's description of making music, a pure expression of joy.

It's hard for some people to understand how anyone can get that excited about a stack of comic books. I get that.

They're just not one of us.

Party on, Terry and Kirby!