Author: Mark

So I have a plot of three to five paragraphs from the famous Gerard Jones, In the old days of Batman and superman I would have worked thru it page by page making elaborate layouts 4 pages at a time on tracing paper.

Whats nice about this is you can block in the whole story within the space of an hour or two because at this point there is no worry about composition, design, rhythm or drawing, stick figures are very easy to draw. It’s just events with one to two words. I’m not even hitting page counts just drawing out the story. Pg 2 I wanted to do a full page head shot.

What did I learn?
1. Gesture and faces that move actually work best with same panel size, because the figures stay locked to a reference point,. I need some way to frame and transition scenes for Carabella, both on the web and in print. Print the characters walking away from the scene becomes more obvious.

2. This becomes draft writing of a comic, more so then plots, scripts pencils or anything else, if you can make a stick figure comics with one or two lines of text all of your story becomes very solid. Plots are always driven by cool literary ideas that mayor may not work in a comic. Here do a fancy drawing of a monster, the standard draw the character with a sad smile, do a dynamic slam bang Kirby fight scene in a quarter of a page. Plots aren’t comics as there in words, with stick figures you cansee what your doing without going to finsihes and being seduced by nice drawing, it’s just storytelling.

3. Holes become obvious Carabella goes to the coffee shop browses the internet and tries to find some information she can use to forge her identity in the next page of stick figures I have four panels of rectangles representing web pages that make no sense as a storytelling device, insert paragraph telling writer toc over artists ass in the notes. That I need to go back to.

Here’s three panels of a “story”. Fantagraphics is going to do a book on Abstract Comics with Andrei Molotiu . he found me though a google search of my posting of a college drawing and asked me to color the pencil drawing.

It’s of course very odd to look back and redraw/ink 30 year old work but the issue of what abstraction is these days, what’s its’ value and how the heck do you bring abstraction to comics is a challenge. If comics are narrative then that means same size panels imply a structure but if you break a page into different layouts structures, it breaks that implication of time. Then you need the characters to carry the time from panel to panel.

But if your characters are just shape and you crop and clip like a good DEgas fanatic your shapes become not character and transforming and moving things.

It’s funny at 20 I knew it all at 50 I realize as Sgt. Schulz would say, “I know nothing I know nothing”