Year: 2009

A couple of steps in, drawing is all about excepting that your first drawing isn’t your last one. Getting to a good drawing if your not doing the same drawing over and over again involves work. making a mess is work.

Abstract comic, with the book out , off the top of my head it’s the best looking book of the year, I’m finding myself thinking through the issues around doing comics outside of the narrative. By taking out the typing and representation you really have to look at what it is that make comics interesting. Fiddling with shapes is really what drawing is in a primal way and to generate the shapes and play with the flow across a grid is the start point for me of comics.

Carabella explores the research capabilities of the Internet.

And the artist/flash guy begins to define the aesthetic of exploring the grid of comics panels in a way that you can’t on paper. Time becomes fluid when showing the panels and I’m playing with it now. I’ve figured out that I just like comics, not drawing characters, not Batman/Superman/Spiderman, not doing autobiographical stuff but just the form of putting pictures in boxes. Now with this I’m beginning to see what it means when the boxes are fluid, I want my screens to end up at a fixed image of pics in boxes but I want to see how you set up the boxes effects the story and the emotion of the pages. This is the starting challenge.

I’m reading Hayao Miyazaki’s Starting Point 1979-1996. In discussing the difference between Asian manga and European tradition he talks about how Asians see in line, Europeans see in light. Culturally it’s just built into the foundation of art that one side sees line, one side see light. Modernism brought line and shape into Western culture. Perhaps Matisse instead of Picasso brought line into the culture. Cartooning uses line because of printing but when it gets serious it paints with pseudo-light. At one time with the limitations of printing comics could be almost abstract, flat colors for a whole figure, in the digital age the reverse for the serious comics is true they must be rendered and rendered and rendered.