one panel cartoon

So, for my illustration class we have this weekly sketchbook assignment where we are given a word, and we have to illustrate it, drawing upon an image we select as inspiration.This week's word: spirituality. I chose a Bill Mauldin cartoon from Up Front as my touchstone, but the only similarity between my piece and his is that they are both one panel cartoons. I can't say that this is very good, but I wanted to share:

And at last,

Fucking finally.

inking exercise

A little while ago, I posted this drawing. I decided to practice my brush skills today, and so went hunting for a suitable pencil drawing to victimize. The results:



Totally effed up the hat and his hands, but I like the results in the drapery.

hey bro

Two Exercises

I have recently decided to start trying the exercises in Jessica Abel and Matt Madden's Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, the wonderful new comics-art textbook from First Second. Since I have this blog thing, and part of the point of it is to show people stuff I do, here are two results that I like:


(Draw a person staggering)


(Draw a person running)

If you're old like me,

you might find this as funny as I did. (From Lady, That's My Skull)

Palookaville #19

So I have no idea why I keep buying Palookaville. Issues of this title are released so infrequently that I completely forget where I put the previous one by the time a new one is out. If I valued my sanity, I'd just wait until all of the Clyde Fans strips are collected. But I can't. Each issue is such a beautiful object. Seth may be one of the two or three best brushes in comics. Each line has that wonderful plasticity, that amazing "this can't be done by a human hand"-quality that he has absorbed from the best of the New Yorker guys. His design sense is perfect. Each page is a sublimely balanced composition. And nobody can rock one-color like Seth. Melded perfectly with this formidable graphic talent is a staggering storytelling ability. Clyde Fans has been one of the saddest things I've ever read. Seth has this way of making quiet, tragic moments searingly intense. He is such a master of the minimal moment, volumes conveyed in a single, virtuosic gesture. The last six pages, in which Simon Matchcard sits on the bed in his mother's room cataloging the objects around him are breathtaking. In five pages of 24 panels each, Matchcard considers the clutter of a lifetime and the memories attached to each part of it. His mother is senile, and the rest of this issue has shown Simon and his brother Abraham committing her to a home. Each object is simply but fetishistically rendered, and the accompanying narration assigns each its place in the mosaic of Mrs. Matchcard's life. Whoah Seth.

Scott Pilgrim makes life better

That is Scott Pilgrim. He is a character written and drawn by Bryan Lee O'Malley. His exploits are the substance of (to date) four digest-sized comics albums, and they are really some of the best work in any media being published today. I was working out this really extended metaphor where Chris Ware is analogous to Henry James, Ivan Brunetti to Kafka, and Joe Sacco to John Dos Passos (and all of these comparisons hold up when you think about it, sort of), but I couldn't come up with a comparison in the modernist pantheon for O'Malley. There just really isn't anyone like him. Substantially, Scott Pilgrim is feather-light. Video games, early 20s romance, rock and roll. In-jokes and goofy dialog. It's just something about the execution. O'Malley's brushwork makes his cartoony characters graceful and poignant, and he has a knack for including subtle differences that render his very simple faces instantly identifiable. His writing is dead-on, giving each of the cast members a depth and presence that extends beyond the page. And the jokes! It's just so perfectly pitched. I'd quote something to try to convey that, but the writing is so intricately bound up with the expressions of his characters, in the context of the ridiculous fight scenes and endless hanging out in bars and late-night taco joints. So really, what I'm saying is that I'm telling you that Scott Pilgrim is really, really good, but I can't tell you exactly why. It's just something magical. And when the next volume is released, like next year or whatever (I predict that I will reread the entire series at least twice in the interim) it will be like my birthday.

sketchbook page

So here is a page from my sketchbook, pencil roughs for something I'm sort of half-assedly working on, cleaned up in the GIMP. I'm pretty amazed at how cleanly I managed to crop and paste heads around.

Q: Why is The Web Good?

A: Because John Campbell is on the web.

Seriously, the web is good because things like his Stevie Might Be a Bear would only be available as tiny mini-comics that only his friends knew about in the town where he lives otherwise. Thank you internet.

well it was wednesday, and so i went to the comic book store (like i do) and i got some things and i thought i may as well write a little about them

The BOYS #16 So, The Boys is something I basically feel guilty about picking up every month. It is so much Garth Ennis at his very worst, dick-jokes, decapitation gags, sexual degradation--in other words, Ennis writes like a eight year-old boy on sugar overload after sneaking in some early '90s USA Up All Night. And yet. And yet. There is a heart here that keeps me coming back. At his best--his Hellblazer run, War Stories, some Hitman, Dan Dare--he has a real knack for capturing pathos and human dignity in his characterizations. Apart from Billy Butcher, who is shaping up to be yet another writer-from-the-British-Isles Brand HARD MAN^TM, the characters in this title are fairly well-written. Wee Hughie's blossoming (and no doubt, tragedy-bound) romance with a young superheroine is almost delicately written. The odd relationship between the Frenchman and the Female is actually developing into something almost touching. I'm still going to feel a little cheap every time I pick this title up, but I somehow keep doing it.

The Twelve #3 So the idea here is to dust off a couple of (well, twelve) WWII-era superheroes, mumble something about the Nazis having had them in suspended animation for 60 years, and plonk them down in the present. Well, in the Marvel Universe present, I suppose, but the Hulk hasn't stopped by yet. It's a cool idea, yeah, but with J. Michael Straczyski writing it could have just been another chunk of superhero soap opera, only with people getting called "Fella" a lot. Because dudes from the '40s call people fella. And, yeah, there's some kind-of-silly writing going on here. But Chris Weston is drawing it. And that makes it okay. Chris Weston draws a guy wearing a stupid costume, yelling about, i don't know, Zombie Masters or something, people shut up and listen. His rubbery faces and nice fabrics give the whole thing a certain gravitas. (Chris Weston draws people like they are animatronics, but with real fabric.) So yeah, this is working out for me.

Justice League: The New Frontier Classified So I will buy a book of Darwyn Cooke drawings of toast, maybe with the toast having little witty hard-boiled dialogs in speech bubbles. Darwyn Cooke is probably my favorite guy who does superheroes, and one of my favorite storytellers in the medium. This is a nice coda to The New Frontier, Cooke's glorious exploration of the major DC comics characters of the Silver Age in the context of the actual historical events of the time that spawned them. The first story, "The Greater Good" is basically a long Batman-Superman fight scene, with Wonder Woman acting as peacemaker, and how can you hate on that? The story also explores the murky morality at play in Superman's status as an avatar of Americanism. He really gets the big three DC characters, what makes them work and what makes us like them. And I love the way he draws Wonder Woman. The second story, "Dragstrip Riot" is a well-scripted teen hot-rod movie pastiche, starring Robin and Kid Flash, drawn by David Bullock. It's a nice attempt to break out of the main New Frontier style while remaining within the basic tone of the era. The last story, "Mother of the Movement" is a well-meaning attempt to confront the misogyny of the era, featuring an outraged Wonder Woman and a game Black Canary taking on a Playboy Bunny Club. This is the only dud in the book. Wonder Woman is scripted pretty flatly, coming across as obtuse and shrewish, and well, it's just a short gag strip that doesn't work out, although the J Bone art is nice, as usual.

Young Liars #1 David Lapham writes stories about interesting, mostly sympathetic if somewhat (scratch that, really) dangerous people to whom BAD THINGS ARE GOING TO HAPPEN. His Stray Bullets is basically a book about how being in danger of getting killed is pretty exciting, and Young Liars promises more of the same. Fights, chases, shennanigans, all drawn and scripted by David Lapham. This is going to be so good.