Comics in the 21st Century

Webcomic posting! I don't read them a lot, but I do love Perry Bible Fellowship, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Horribleville, and SUPER MEGA COMICS. (No idea why I like that last one). The concept behind this is 'closure.' There has been a story arc going in some of the postings I've made, and this concludes it. It feels like a webcomic to me. I should have used expressive linework, but as the text implies, I just ran out of time for anything. Hey look, it's the smiley face from the first comic, uncrumpled! Higher resolution available upon request!

Additionally, because we were supposed to review what we've read this semester, here is a pretty full list!:

Understanding Comics - Scott McCloud
The Arrival - Shaun Tan
Little Nemo (Various) - Windsor McCay
Flash Gordon: Vol. 3 - Alex Raymond
The Complete Terry and the Pirates Vol. 1 - Milton Caniff
A Right to be Hostile - Aaron McGruder
Jack Cole and Plastic Man - Art Spigelman
Tintin (Various) - Hergé
Donald Duck (Various) - Carl Barks
A Contract with God - Will Eisner
The Spirit (Various) - Will Eisner
The Book of Mr. Natural - R Crumb
Need More Love - Aline Kominsky-Crumb
The Book of Genesis - R Crumb
Maus (Vol. 1 and 2) - Art Spigelman
King - Ho Che Anderson
A Drifting Life - Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Phoenix (Various) - Osamu Tezuka
Buddha (Various) - Osamu Tezuka
Astro Boy (Various) - Osamu Tezuka
Mushishi - Yuri Urushibara
Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi
Ghostworld - Daniel Clowes
Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth - Chris Ware
Skim - Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki
Watchmen - Alan Moore
Sandman (Various) - Neil Gaiman
Arkham Asylum - Grant Morrison
Kingdom Come - Mark Waid and Alex Ross
Johnny the Homicidal Maniac - Johnen Vasquez
Perry Bible Fellowship - Nicholas Gurewitch
electric sheep - Patrick Farley

I probably have read others that I cannot recall right now. It was a semester not shy of text and picture. Hopefully I can keep up the pace in the future. And draw more. And all that.

Oh, and by the way, the posting immediately before this was supposed to be the original Week 14 posting, and this current posting is the re-do. I didn't feel like rewriting and redrawing a comic from earlier in the year, and instead I just planned this out and corrected any spelling /grammatical errors from every posting that needed them. I think that's fair, no? I hope you've enjoyed reading my posts, I tried to make them entertaining.

webcomic

i am very talented

Reconsidering the Superhero/Alan Moore

Yes. I really loved this comic. It made me appreciate the movie less (which I always viewed as maybe a 7/10). So yes. How amazing. Anyway, I decided to try out Alan Moore's style (rather... Dave Gibbons' style) with his characters holding a try-out for recruits. The first is Batman/Bruce Wayne. (Not to spoil anything for you, but did you know they are, in fact, the same person? Who would have guessed?) He is not eligible for any number of reasons. The second one is "Dr. Manattan," who is just Dr. Manhattan's doppelgänger, cleverly disguised with a pair of goofy glasses and a false nose (I should have given him a mustache). I guess he technically joins the team. And the third is Alan Moore himself, represented as a lunatic. I loved drawing this. It took longer than usual. I just wish I did a bit better of a job. But, oh well. As an aside, The Comedian is alive and somehow younger again. Don't ask! Higher resolution available upon request!

Women's Comics

This comic of mine probably comes off as a bit rude. The style has been simplified to reflect the writing (though don't you think those colored lines are great?) and, believe me, my tone has nothing to do with me being sexist or mad at women. This is an (obviously, I hope) unrelented Stephanie Meyer bashing, calling out Twilight and its fanbase. I know lots of women of all ages who seem to think she's the best writer to have ever graced this planet. And seeing as how she has ruined literature (with her 'books'), film (with her movies), and music (with her movies' soundtracks), I figure it's only a matter of time before she ruins art. Whoops, it looks like she's ruining that too! This comic page I made, despite all that, is empathetic to the demographic of girls who DON'T like her work. Thank goodness there are some of them. Higher resolution available upon request!

Comics as Contemporary Literature

Finally, my own style. Oh no! My own style! How abut that skeleton, right? Scary. I've returned to my roots and brought back the smiley face from the very first comic I made for this class. The difference this time 'round is that this comic reveals a lot about the creative process. Almost all of it, in fact. I feel like I'm giving free advice to illustrators, and that I should be charging for this. It's valuable knowledge. "Concept is not execution. Ever." The same could be said of music or sports or anything at all, I guess. Notice the color wheel around my circled self? No? Well now you do. Higher resolution available upon request!

EuroComics/Hergé

Since I decided to, some time ago, draw a comic page in the style of Carl Barks and NOT Hergé, and seeing as how this week I'm to make a comic in respect to the style Hergé CREATED, I've decided to take advantage and make a comic about Tintin. I finally came up with a good enough concept to make it work and be funny. By the end of it, you can see that Snowy isn't interested in the well-being of Tintin at all, but rather, he was just hungry the whole time. I assume Tintin and the guard become good pals, but he never is allowed inside those city walls. Where are those walls? Russia, probably. Anyway. I hope you can see that it was modeled after Hergé's work. I'm happy with the end result. Higher resolution available upon request!

An Introduction to Manga/Osamu Tezuka

Evidently, I can't draw this week. I feel awful. Anyway, I love manga. Truthfully, it's what propelled me into drawing at all (I don't read it any more, but I loved Naruto and Dragonball Z and all the other Shonen Jump crap I was fed when I was younger). And I love Tezuka. Astro Boy was never my favorite thing of his, certainly I enjoyed his series Buddha more, but this one is more popular, so I parodied it. Astro discovers what it means to be human! And it's not good! Alternatively, I was going to reveal that Nicholas Cage was his real father (since he voiced Dr. Tenma in the 2009 CG fliqué I will never see) but that seemed too obscure, like everything else I write. Done (poorly) in pen and brush ink. I tried to get some realistic machinery going there in the background, but eh, this week is a failure, and I know it well. At least the joke is there. I love how Astro completely loses the gleam in his eyes. Higher resolution available on request!

Stereotype and the Ethics of Representation

Uh-oh. No styles to mimic. I hope I got the likenesses down well enough. I had considered doing this whole thing with the racist stereotypes I represented at the bottom, only having it revolve around their respective world leaders (Obama as the blackface one, of course), but that ended up being too obscure. In this version, Seinfeld's joke ends up being NOT a joke, as a 1940's cartoonist ends up drawing out what is essentially Minoriteam, minus the genius of Jack Kirby's influence. Somehow, that's less obscure than the world leaders gag. Little known facts: Dave Chappelle is indeed a Muslim. The 1940's cartoonist is portrayed by Casablanca's Humphrey Bogart. And I don't like Carlos Mencia, but it was either him or George Lopez (or Antonio Banderas) and I wanted a contemporary fat man to be a part of this. Higher resolution available upon request!

The Legitimation of the Comics/Art Spiegelman

This comic made history. This comic has shown us the viewpoint of Art, his father, and a whole consortium of people along the way. Everyone is flawed, and everyone is angry it seems. Selfish. It's a classic story retold in a not so classic dynamic. And it's perhaps the most important piece of comic book literature to date.

I ended up learning a lot from this. The art itself didn't impress me much at all. Though, it did have a very full understanding of composition and general rules to drawing, it just wasn't as refined as everything else we've examined up to this point. It didn't need to have any of that in order to be compelling. It was all about story.

It's interesting that Art criticizes everyone, including himself, in this piece of work. It's hard for the audience to develop a really strong emotional connection with anyone, and that's part of the beauty of his writing. You are merely a spectator in this partially fictitious world of cats and mice and dogs and pigs (etc etc). The representation of animals across this also takes away the all-too-used 'human element,' further eliminating typical writing traps and clichés and leaving us with an enthralling substance, and a fantastic hand-me-down recount of one of the most shaping events in modern history.

In my own rendition of this style, I give one explanation of Hitler's early behavior, where he may or may not have been inspired to rule due to said event. I'm talking of course about his rejection from art school. It didn't end up being as funny as I wanted it to be (I try to make these amusing, but it's just morbid), but it did become an interesting story in itself. The drawing pictured is actually one of Hitler's, back when he was 17/18. What a different world this would be if he went on to be a nobody artist. History is certainly shaped by strange means. Higher resolution available upon request!

The Influence of the Underground Comix/Robert Crumb

To make myself very clear, I don't like R Crumb's work. I think it's very crude and disgusting, and he is perhaps more of a fine artist than an illustrator, so it's hard for me to relate on that level. On the other hand, I think he's brilliant and cunning, and I fear I would relate to him more than I would be comfortable with if I met him in person. Not to digress, I think I nailed his work. I have depicted him as he depicted himself at the end of his Book of Genesis (a very lengthy read of which I was already familiar). I have also depicted myself, looking as ugly as possible (a key aspect of his work, I feel). I used a brush pen and a few PITT Artist Pens of varying sizes to get whatever effects I got, concerning line weight and wooshy background spatters. I think I worked a bit more dynamically than he usually does, as another hallmark of his style is a certain degree of rigidity, which I broke by the third and fourth panels. All the same, I love how this one ends. Tasteless enough, Mr. Crumb? Higher resolution available upon request!

The Emergence of the Graphic Novel/Will Eisner

Eisner certainly has a distinctive style. His handling of the shadows I found to be the most challenging, and I ended up using a brush pen and a fountain pen to try to get his full effects. I'm not displeased. Though, I think I used too much yellow. You can see (I hope) that I've tried to replicate his most famous work and style, a la Spirit. In my rendition, I retell his origin of the Octopus (where he did look like a nerdy white guy, as I've depicted). The key difference being that I've opted, post accident/button press, to have him look like Samuel L. Jackson's portrayal in the recent movie, directed by Frank Miller (as opposed to the ever-shadowy figure from the comic series). I like how I ended up handling the first and last panels (that shrug just makes me happy), and although everything could use more work, I have spent many hours on this already. Higher resolution available upon request!

A Brief History of the Comic Book/Carl Barks

Uploading these images on a faster computer connection seems to solve my problem of not being able to upload anything at all. Aside that. The first comic laid out on a whole page! His style was surprisingly difficult to replicate, and I am aware I could have done a much better job. The truth to that is that I did put in a good amount of hours working on this, and I'm happy with the end result. How about that yellowed effect, eh? I'm sure you like it as much as I do. Moving on. I noted in his work the expressive figures, line weight, interaction of characters, and use of space all being very key to making his work... well, work! In my adaptation of these elements, Donald picks up on the idea of reverse psychology, leaving his nephews in the basement never to be heard from again (probably). Higher resolution available upon request!

A Brief History of the Comic Strip/Winsor McCay

No problems uploading this one! The concept for this was a stolen one from Perry Bible Fellowship (horrible of me, I know, but I give credit when due). It just seemed so much more appropriate here. I love this comic. Stylistically, it's simple and beautiful. The colors are nigh magical and his linework is outstanding. It is a comic giving an excuse to be visually fantastic, and I'm just fine with that. I just wish I could do him proper justice. Oh well. The idea, as I'm sure you've gathered, is that Nemo falls from the sky, wakes up, and lands on himself as if he wasn't actually having a dream. Paradoxical. Surreal. Higher resolution available upon request!

Comics Theory/Shaun Tan

Right! So, trying this for the dozenth time. I suppose I must be having internet issues, as this whole blogspot thing isn't working as nicely as I expected it to. Anyway, making a wordless comic: Surprisingly difficult! Especially when you are limited to 3-4 panels (I was never good at that direct 'beginning-middle-end' scenario) but I'm happy with this. Yes, that's supposed to be me. Throwing a failed drawing towards the creature from The Arrival. It amused me (if no one else). Higher resolution available upon request!