Archive for Comics

Queer Eye for the Holmes Inc Guy

June 14, 2013 BC Holmes Comics No comments

I heard, once, that the cast of the TV show, Bewitched used to actively conspire to put queer subtext and themes into the show. I don’t know why that story has always stuck in my mind; mostly I just like subverting heteronormativity in media.

The other night, the Holmes, Inc. class did more pitches. People who are solely-writers have basically finished their major deliverables, and have some time to kill, so they’re being given a new task. Each of them gets to write up a one-page text item (such as, for example, a diary entry) about a member of Holmes, Inc. There are seven solely-writers, and seven main characters in Holmes, Inc., so if each writer tackles one character, everyone gets a moment to shine. And last night was the night the writers pitched their ideas of what they’d write about. Me, I’m not a solely-writer (I’m a writer-artist! Go me!), so I don’t take part in this.

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Layout Homework

June 2, 2013 BC Holmes Comics No comments

One of the things that I did last night was my layouts for my “Penciling the Page” class (which used to be called “Layout for Comics”). The class is primarily about how to assemble a script into a visually interesting comic page. We’d just finished a class about different panel “tricks” that can make your page interesting.

Our homework assignment, then, was to create a page that used 7 of those tricks. As for story, the requirement was that this be a 2-page story, as follows:

  • Page 1: a pair of characters are trapped inside somewhere.
  • Page 2: using a prop discovered in the environment, they escape.

Here are my thumbnails.

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Explosive Decompression

June 1, 2013 BC Holmes Comics No comments

One of the things that’s weird to work with in the Holmes, Inc. class is the extremely compressed story-telling. In many ways, this writing feels like Golden Age comics: full stories are being told in a small number of pages. The folks who are doing both writer and artist duties have 5 pages to work with; people who are solely-writers or solely-artists have 7 pages. That’s not a lot of story-telling space. And, in particular, I find this degree of compression makes it hard to give things nuance.

And one of the consequences of that, is a reliance on story-telling shorthand. Characters are simply “bad guys” or people who give us information. Cute kid. Evil, but less-than-effective henchmen. Kidnappee. Mm.

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Pitch Night, Holmes Inc. #4

May 9, 2013 BC Holmes Comics No comments

Last night, was another Pitch Night. Each of the writers for the Holmes, Inc. class had to come with three pitches for a story. After we presented the three ideas, Ty would typically eliminate one of the three (but not in all cases) and then the class would vote on which of the remaining two pitches they liked better. As the night progressed, Keiren was also keeping a running tally of which characters were being represented to ensure the book had sufficient balance and coverage of the principal cast.

It was interesting to see the different styles that the creators brought to the table. Some people wanted big, bold stories with giant monsters and/or larger-than-life villains. Others wanted time travel, or alternate dimensions. Some stories were leaping off from stuff in a previous book (Book 3, in particular, ended with a cliff hanger). I can’t think of a single story that was pitched solely as a mystery. Partially, I think, the story-pitching session brought out people’s love of playing with comic book tropes.

Another thing that interested me was the way past classes had such a presence in the room. People in the room were fluent with a rich backstory of the universe that had come out through past iterations of this course: the history of the evil Chaos family, and the significance of the ARTI suits and so forth. I think I’m one of only a couple of people for whom this is the first time taking this class, so I was coming at this a bit new.

I was also the last one to pitch, so by the time I was pitching my stories, we’d already run the gamut of monsters and time travel. I’m sure that my ideas seemed banal in comparison.

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Inking experiment 1

May 4, 2013 BC Holmes Comics No comments

I tried my hand, this weekend, on a particular technique for digital inking using Illustrator. I started with a pencil sketch by Jack Kirby (published in one of the Jack Kirby reader books).

Original Pencils by Jack Kirby

I scanned the image and popped it into Illustrator, then saturated it with blue, to make it easier to differentiate the pencils from the inks. I downloaded a specific Illustrator template from Cartoon SNAP, and tried out their inking brushes. Here’s an image in progress:

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Holmes on Holmes, Inc.

May 2, 2013 BC Holmes Comics One comment

Comics classes are keeping me on my toes, these days. I finished up my “Drawing the Human Figure From Your Head” class on Monday (excellent, excellent class, by the way… I’ve taken both life drawing and constructive drawing during my cartooning program, and this class really clicked in a way that the other classes did not). Both this class, and the one before it (“Heads, Hands and Faces”) went at a bit of a breakneck pace — my head was full by the end of each night.

Holmes, Inc. issue 1Last night, I started the intense workshop class, “Holmes, Inc.” There are something like 15 of us, and the end result of the class is gonna be an anthology of stories involving the “Holmes, Inc.” agency — the descendants of Sherlock, Mycroft and Dr. Watson. Last night, Ty also suggested that they’re a bit like the S.H.I.E.L.D. of their universe, too, which made me go, ah, yes, of course! This will be the fourth issue of Holmes, Inc. — each of the other three is available for free (as in beer, not speech 🙂 on Drive Through Comics. There is a lot of variation in style and experience in the various stories, but they’re fun to read, running the gamut from egotistical displays of deduction to monster-fighting to moral quandaries.

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Inking

April 28, 2013 BC Holmes Comics No comments

My latest quest is to figure out digital inking. I really like working with india ink, and I like the look of a well-inked piece. Part of my problem is that I’ve reached a certain skill level with pen and ink, and I’m resisting having to relearn: I want my skill with digital inking to be immediate!

There seems to be two main schools of digital inking: the brush school and the pen school. Here’s a pen example:

And here’s a brush example:

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Cho draws Le Guin

April 4, 2013 BC Holmes Comics No comments

I’ve mentioned that I’m a fan of Michael Cho’s work — I like the simple, retro-comic-y style he uses. He recently took a stab at drawing Ursula K. Le Guin, which was interesting to see. I’m not sure that it’s the best likeness that I’ve seen him do, but I do like how he shows off his process.

Digital Painting Class

February 24, 2013 BC Holmes Comics No comments

At the beginning of the year, I signed up for a Digital Painting class. As I mentioned, I picked up a Wacom tablet over the holidays and wanted to learn how to use it. The class itself is fairly short — a mere 7 weeks — and the focus has been pretty narrow. Our primary exercise in class has been to create a portrait from photo reference. For my part, there’s been a bunch of stuff that’s new to me. I mean, heck, I’ve never really used Photoshop before January, although I’ve done very basic image manipulation with Gimp.

So. New tablet. New Photoshop. Recall that the very first thing I drew with my tablet looked like this:

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More on comic book lettering

February 23, 2013 BC Holmes Comics No comments

I’m continuing to practice different things related to constructing comics. As a simple lettering exercise, I decided to re-letter my final assignment from my cartooning programme.

In this case, I’m retaining the original hand-drawn caption boxes, but I’ve whited-out the original uneven hand-lettering and plopped in some new lettering. I’m using a 12pt font — specifically a font called Digital Strip by Blambot. 12pt is closest in height to the original hand lettering. (To be clear: that’s 12pt on the original art size of 11″ x 17″) I’m also using a bit of Engravers MT on page 4. In almost all cases, the computer lettering is more compact than my hand lettering, so the caption boxes are sometimes a bit empty-seeming.

There are things about Illustrator that I find irritating and more complex than necessary. Like, why do I use different tools to add path points and remove path points? Inkscape feels ever so much better at this to me. But whatever. A tool’s a tool.

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