research

[egypturnash]

Last night I got my butt out of the house for once and went out to hook up with eselgeist, kanawinkie, and abecat to go see Scott McCloud lecture. mister_wolf and a friend were there too. His whirlwind tour of every state in the entire US is here right now.

Mostly, his lecture was a hour-long encapsulation of the themes in his new book, Making Comics. I picked up a copy of it and got it signed. I read it in the signing line, once everyone else had left, and on the way home. He's got a lot to say in it; it's a good book, you should get it if you have any thoughts of making comics. it's not revalatory the way Understanding was but maybe that's just because I read that book when I was much less aware of the processes.

Reading through it, I focus on some of the things I'm conscious of in my work right now. Doesn't everyone?

One of the big excuses I have for not starting that Major Comics Project of mine is backgrounds. The Drowning City is a specific place, damnit, not a generic Big City - it's a distorted version of New Orleans in the 1970s and 80s. It's not a major character in the story, but there's a mood, and a distinct look. I got ahold of some reference, and have been flipping through it, trying to absorb details, realizing things like how heavily atmospheric perspective plays into any view of that humid place.

McCloud has some analysis of the differences between American, European, and Japanese comics in Making. One of the things he points out as being a hallmark of European comics is a sense of place - a creator from there is far more likely to have an element of detailed backgrounds in every panel, a very definite location. I've been aware of this lately myself, as I reacquaint myself with some of my European influences and think about my own projects.

Back in animation school, one of my classmates told me he thought I had a really European style, in his eyes. Learning to love Kirby's work as an adult has, I think, made my style much more "American". But looking through European comics, I was always aware of the casual integration of setting into the art that I've really avoided most of my life.

I've got too many excuses for not starting this damn thing. I'm still unsure about the method I'll use - it wants to be all painterly but I really can't paint, digitally or physically. I experiment with tricks to get some of that in my work but it takes so much time to fake it. Maybe I should just let go of some of my default rules and do something crazy like let the physical roughs shine through in the final art for a change; that would provide the raw kineticness of my inner vision of this without the additional delay of a year or two learning to fucking paint. I've been sitting on this for six years now already, as life gets in the way.

And the story's constructed in such a way that if I do learn to paint in the time I'm doing it, well, I can just do a chunk of it that way.

But right now, life is in the way of wanting to Do Comics: I need to pull on some clothes and go get some Coke, then sit down and get in the groove on making a canine version of Donna Summer sing about being hungry for scraps from the Thanksgiving table. Buying the full version of Animslider last night should help that; the free version helped streamline Flash workflow a lot, and the full version isn't restricted to quickly sliding through just seven frames.

(Addendum: Mentioning AS Pro made me decide to hunt around the official MacromediaAdobe extension site to see if people had written other UI plugins to fix the broken UI. Unfortunately, said extension site is a perfect example of why you should not build a website in Flash: the browser back button never works any more even though it all looks like a normal webpage, no control over links, navigation by tiny, hard-to-see Flash sliders. Ye gods, it's frustrating to dig through.)

Comments

[ineffabelle]

I <3 <3 Scott McCloud.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Someday I should read some his actual comics as opposed to his comics about comics.

Heavy Meta

[ineffabelle]

I loved DESTROY! It was hilarious.

My buddy G swore by Zot! but I've only read an issue or two he had lying around.

Heavy Meta, part II

[ineffabelle]

(oops, accidentally hit reply)
... but his meta-comics are what really got to me.

[mmsword.livejournal.com]

That really must be a strange legacy to have. Being famous for writing comics about comics. No other field really has quite the same postion, which is a shame. There needs to be more songs about writing music.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Well, there's books about writing. *grin*

And more than a few books on art processes are entirely hand-lettered...

[mmsword.livejournal.com]

It's a start. Still, we need more metatextual super stars.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

Let me know if that book is worth reading. Stacey picked it up for me last week but I find McCloud an insufferable twat and generally find reading his books to be a teeth-grinding experience.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

This one is the book that people were expecting after Understanding Comics instead of Reinventing Comics. Understanding is an attempt to define and break down the elements of the medium of "comics"; Reinventing is a lot of bitching about the old systems of publishing it and pondering what the Web could bring; Making is about the kinds of decisions you have to make on the road from 'idea' to 'finished comic'.

Like I said in the original post, the book wasn't the revelation that Understanding was. Understanding made me really start being able to read comics from a standpoint of consciously analyzing the way the story was told; Making builds on a lot of the same concepts.

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

How well does McCleod's book cover scripting? When I'm not slaving over homework in grad school, I'm writing up something that should be done as a comic or, I can only dream, as an animated series. I'm just outlining things right now, trying to figure out where the plot's going, but I'll need to actually script it at some point so an artist can make sense of what I've got.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

He goes over it some, lightly touching on the different amounts of script different people might give to an artist, but there's only a few pages - it's mostly about the visuals.

[grrrowly.livejournal.com]

He's coming to GA Tech for some bizarre reason, instead of say SCAD or the Art Institute of Atlanta. Kinda annoying. I think his reasoning is that he's come to SCAD in year's past, but still... there are plenty of newer students like me who haven't gotten to hear him. D:

Still... why a tech school? Blah.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Day trip!

Hey, he did the same lecture at MIT earlier. He mentions he's an engineer's son in the part of the talk where he gets into his 'four kinds of creators' theory; he's definitely got an analytical approach to comics.

[kamenkyote.livejournal.com]

I agree that MC is not as big a deal as UC and I think the book could easily be half as long again. It's almost like a really good glue that exists between books about drawing, the DC scripting book and inking book and the like. All those skills are nice, but MC shows you what to do with those skills once you have them.

As for "Drowning City," I can't help but push and say that starting to do it will help a lot. Just setting aside a certain amount of time per day or week that's devoted to doing the comic will get the ball rolling. Likely, it'll take years to do the whole story, if you're looking to do it as an album. Even if you have to revise before it's all done, taking those first steps are really important.

*push* :"D

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah - "Making Comics" is as much about analyzing why you'd want to do something as how you'd go about doing it. It's still mostly a book of comics theory, like "Understanding" was - just one with more discussion of how to apply this, and lots of references to the better books on the various skills involved.

I need, and want to get "Drowning City" off the ground. But first I have to get this paying work out of the way, damnit. I've been procrastinating all day instead of that, and that's a habit I really need to figure out how to kill. Because I can't go work on my own stuff when I have paying work hanging; that's an admission that I'm definitely putting work off.

So you need some inspiration?

[read-alicia.livejournal.com]

So, beat that.

Re: So you need some inspiration?

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Hee. This made me laugh for a minute or two!

(Mmm, beignets.)

[paka.livejournal.com]

Maybe you can't paint, but do you need to?

You use enough posterized color in your stuff that it wouldn't be hard for me to imagine you doing a black and white comic with maybe 2-3 shades of gray, and that sounds like something that would still work with the sort of mood I think you're talking about.

Not that I have any credit here. I still have yet to draw up that damn wolf comic.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

The images in my head for this have always tended towards chaotic and painterly. I need to find some kind of compromise that means it's actually doable...