Archive for BC Holmes

“all those letters that you wrote to yourself but could not address”

January 16, 2013 BC Holmes Comics No comments

Over the last few days, I’ve been trying to get my head around digital lettering. At one level, this doesn’t seem like a hard topic. I mean, I’ve been dropping words on computer screens for a long, long time. But I’m really interested in figuring out what people in the comics industry are doing: what are typical workflows? Best font sizes?

DC Comics Guide to Coloring and Lettering

To get some insights into the topic, I picked up a copy of The DC Comics Guide to Coloring and Lettering by Mike Chiarello and Todd Klein. I must confess that I was pretty disappointed. A big part of what the book has to say about lettering is about the debate between hand-lettering versus digital lettering. And I suspect that that conversation is kinda dead. Ah, well. The book is from mid-2004: it’s interesting how quickly dated it’s become.

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Thought for the Day

January 12, 2013 BC Holmes Uncategorized No comments

An Ontario Superior Court judge has taken the novel step of granting a divorce to a same-sex couple over legal objections from the federal Crown.

Madam Justice Ruth Mesbur ruled that same-sex civil partnerships from foreign countries that don’t permit same-sex marriages can nonetheless qualify as marriages under Canadian law.

It was the second time in the past year that the federal government has adopted a restrictive position on same-sex marriages.

In an interview Friday, one of the ex-spouses, Wayne Hincks, expressed anger that the federal Crown strung out a costly, emotional process by injecting itself into the case.

“The Attorney-General of Canada intervened in my very private matter and caused it to be stretched out, almost bankrupting me in the process,” Mr. Hincks said. “I eventually had to leave Toronto with no protections, no financial support to acquire my rights and no social network to rely on for personal support.”

The divorcing couple both have Canadian citizenship. They moved to Toronto in 2010, a year after their civil ceremony took place in London, England.

Britain does not permit same-sex couples to marry. Instead, it has a separate legal regime for same-sex couples that involves a civil partnership ceremony.

— “Ontario court grants same-sex divorce”, The Globe and Mail

Most weekends

January 7, 2013 BC Holmes Uncategorized No comments

I feel like this is me, most weekends:

Thought for the Day

January 4, 2013 BC Holmes Trans No comments

Never having passed as female as I’d grown older I’d finally given up trying. Besides, it seemed somehow counter-revolutionary, as the new transgender politics is increasingly built around exactly the kind prominent social visibility and defiant non-passing that my doctors at the Cleveland Clinic assured me would signal the failure of my gender transition surgery.

In fact, my political identity for 30 years has been built on the foundation of my being visibly transgender, from the day I donned a Transsexual Menace NYC t-shirt and flew to the Brandon Teena murder trial in Falls City, Nebraska.

[…]

With adolescents increasingly taking androgen blockers with the support of a generation of more protective, nurturing parents, public transsexuality is fading out. And I don’t mean only that in a generation or two we may become invisible in the public space. I mean rather that in 10 years, the entire experience we understand today as constituting transgender—along with the political advocacy, support groups, literature, theory and books that have come to define it since transgender burst from its closet in the early 1990s to become part of the LGB-and-now-T movement — all that may be vanishing right in front of us. In 50 years it might be as if we never existed. Our memories, our accomplishments, our political movement, will all seem to only be historic. Feeling transgender will not so much become more acceptable, as gayness is now doing, but logically impossible.

In other words, I may be a gender dinosaur.

— Riki Wilchins, “Transgender Dinosaurs and the Rise of the Genderqueers” The Advocate

I think Wilchins is raising some interesting points, but I think that her conception of ‘we’ is a bit narrow: she’s talking about an American (and perhaps as broad as North American and European) middle- and upper-class.

Going digital

December 29, 2012 BC Holmes Uncategorized One comment

I’m currently on vacation. Which, y’know, is pretty awesome. I spent a coupl’a days in do-nothing mode, sitting on my couch and watching movies. Which is about all that I’m capable of when work has drained me somewhat.

But now I’m in pet-project mode: I want to focus on something interesting. My pet project has been about going digital on the cartooning stuff. None of the instructors I’ve had have been terribly positive about computer-based art. Anthony (my primary instructor during my cartooning programme at George Brown) didn’t quite poo-poo digital art, but fundamentally believed that one had to learn how to draw using traditional tools before learning digital art. He also felt that most of the computer-produced art that he’d seen was very flat and lacked expressiveness.

Ty hasn’t taught us anything related to computers — he seems to draw and ink using traditional media, but he uses tools that Anthony would have turned his nose up at (markers! Pen brushes! Oh noes!) Ty also seemed to think that it was pointless to learn hand-lettering because nobody hand-letters these days. (I notice that Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? seems computer-lettered, whereas Fun Home looked hand-lettered). And Ty’s Bun Toons often include digital colouring and probably a bunch of other computer tweaks. So he seems more pragmatic about the use of computers than Anthony ever did.

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Final Thoughts on Writing for Comics, Part 2

December 27, 2012 BC Holmes Comics 2 comments

I meant to make a post about how my final class for “Writing for Comics, Part 2” went — I was pretty pleased with the final class, and I can’t help but wonder if my complaints about class number 6 had more to do with me and my state of mind than it had to do with the contents of the class.

I think that one way to evaluate the overall course is to look at what I got out of it. And there, I think, I hafta confess that I got some pretty good tools for putting together a whole comic script. Here’s what I have today:

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Reading Meme

December 26, 2012 BC Holmes Uncategorized No comments

I’m totally stealing this idea from [personal profile] wild_irises and [personal profile] redbird.

logo for the WWW Wednesdays meme

The meme asks: What are you reading now? What did you just finish reading? What do you expect to read next?

What am I reading now?

I’m reading Redwood and Wildfire by Andrea Hairston. I bought a paper version of this book at Wiscon which I haven’t actually opened, but I’ve been liking reading books on my iPad Mini (which I love — have I mentioned that?) so I bought an ePub version from the Aqueduct web site. I love Aqueduct’s no-nonsense way of selling epubs and wish I could see more of that. I’m not very far into the book, and don’t have any opinions about it.

What did I just finish reading?

Well, on Monday I bought a handful of graphic novels — the first two collections of Rachel Rising by Terry Moore, the hardcover collection of Greg Rucka’s and Matthew Southworth’s Stumptown and Warren Ellis’ newuniversal. Strictly speaking, I finished Rachel Rising last, and enjoyed it, although it feels a touch busy. My big frustration with his Strangers in Paradise series was that nothing ever got resolved — I have that fear about Rachel Rising as well. But his beautiful black and white artwork certainly encourages me to keep going. I just wish that the main character, Rachel, was more visually distinct from Katchoo.

Just before those graphic novels, I finished Among Others, which I’d started in the early part of the year, and then put down for a surprisingly long time. So that’s the last non-graphic-novel book I read.

What do you expect to read next?

Boss 1 loaned me a copy of Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant which is non-fiction. The conversation that we had that lead up to the loaning interests me, so I’m looking forward to checking it out. But the title makes it sound like something I’m gonna hate. We’ll see. I also just grabbed Anna Karenina off of Wikisource, because I’m all obsessive like that. And I have a dead tree version of Liar that I haven’t touched yet.

I am in love, and you can’t ask why about love

December 25, 2012 BC Holmes Uncategorized No comments

Omigod. Hours ago, I watched Anna Karenina, and I’m completely in love with this movie.

Holidays

December 24, 2012 BC Holmes Uncategorized No comments

I like this card, created by Michael Cho in 2009:

Happy Anti-Life everyone.

2012 Films

December 23, 2012 BC Holmes Uncategorized No comments

Films that I saw in 2012 that I really loved:

Pariah is, I think, the best film that I saw in the year. The line Alike says, toward the end of the film — “I’m not running; I’m choosing.” — still stands out to me as one of the most simple, and yet powerful, lines I’ve seen delivered in a film the last number of years. In many ways, the film caught me off guard. I knew that it was going to be a queer coming of age story, and it touched on most of the standard tropes of that kind of story. But it was so slice-of-life-y that when the trope-y moments arrive, they just cut to the bone.

The Gatekeepers — which I saw at the festival — was an amazingly good documentary that interviews the 6 most recent still-living heads of the Israeli Shin Bet agency. The director gets them all to talk about their views of the Israeli-Palestine conflict and, given their jobs, what they have to say is really quite eye opening.

I also really enjoyed Take Shelter. In many ways, it follows a well-tread formula: man is having dreams of the end of the world. Are they real, or is he having a breakdown? I thought that this film did an interesting job keeping you guessing about which of those outcomes was going to be shown as “real.” (I haven’t really gone to look for it, but I’d be interested in any critique of how the film treats mental illness) A big part of what worked for me in the film was the dialog. There was something very real-seeming and fresh about the dialog and the delivery of that dialog.

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