A Storytelling Exercise with Random Brushstrokes

Last night, Matt Madden described a new and interesting storytelling exercise on his blog.

Since Mike and I were having one of our rare meetups this afternoon (this time, in White River Junction), I thought it'd be fun to try a variation on Matt's exercise. For each of these two short comics exercises, Mike and I passed the page twice: once after we'd drawn the random blots or spot-blacks, then again after we'd drawn images in pencil around the other guy's spot blacks. If we'd had three or more people, we could have run this exercise without passing the paper back to the first person.

For this first one, Mike made the original brushstrokes.





(As usual, you can click any of those images to enlarge it.)

I think my drawings presented some storytelling challenges, in that they didn't really have a consistent "protagonist" or scene—those sunflowers really came out of nowhere. But I also thought it was sort of against the spirit of the exercise to plan a story, and I was trying hard to thwart my own inclinations toward story-building.

This other exercise seems to have turned out as more of a story. The initial blots are mine.






This was a pretty fun exercise to try, and I think Mike and I might do it again some time, just because it's a good limbering-up exercise for comics-making. Our thanks go to Matt Madden for the idea.

Eighty Characters in Silhouette (again, props to Mike Lynch)

In my challenge to Isaac at the end of last Wednesday's post, I was really curious to see what he'd do if he drew eighty characters in a small space as opposed to a small period of time (not that I begrudge him his own take on the cartoon sprints!). Since I happened to have a blank postcard handy, I thought I'd take up my own challenge. I had planned to just drop the card in the mail to Isaac, but since the ink was smearing I thought I should scan it in case it's obliterated by the time it reaches him; and once a doodle is scanned, there's really only one appropriate fate for it. So here are my silhouetted versions of Mike Lynch's eighty characters, drawn not in fifteen minutes but in 10.5 cm x 14.8 cm:


(You may click to enlarge, if you wish.)

I accidentally squeezed nine characters into the first line of my would-be eight-by-ten character grid, so I took extra space at the bottom right for my self-portrait silhouette. That self-portrait replaces the redundant "hydrant" on Mike Lynch's list; a silhouette of Isaac replaces the redundant "robot" as the first item on the third row. I nearly created my own redundancy by drawing Batman's pointy head for "superhero" as item seven on the top line, forgetting that Bats would have his own slot later on row four, item 3; so I added a few blobs and strokes to turn Batman's head into Wolverine's, with a few adamantium claws snikted for good measure.

Cartoon Sprints, part 2

Well, that wasn't fun.

I just took Mike's challenge and tried to draw eighty things in fifteen minutes. There's probably a better way for my pal to remind me that I'm not a natural cartoonist, but this was a good one.

Here, however, to my embarrassment, are the results, drawn by Sharpie into an 8" x 10" grid:


(If you don't click, it won't enlarge. You might prefer that.)

I tried not to look at Mike's results to closely before I did this, so I wouldn't just be copying his work. Maybe it would have been better if I'd done that.

Sadly, I didn't even finish in the prescribed time. It took me nineteen minutes. I still had fifteen assorted squares left on the page when the time ran out (I didn't do them all in order, though I think the first three rows went in before the rest of the grid). Some of the drawings are plainly terrible. I am ashamed of the runner, the ballerina, both hydrants, the guy with a beard, the mean kid ... ugh. There are some drawings where I can barely tell what I was aiming for.

The two drawings I like best:



I leave it to Mike to pick out, in the comments, any other seeming nuggets of "satisfactory" in this otherwise crummy mess.

Cartoon Sprints (with props to Mike Lynch)

A couple weeks ago I saw an item on ¡Journalista! about a cartoon exercise that Mike Lynch had given to students in a cartooning class: to draw 80 characters in 15 minutes. You can read about the exercise at that preceding link, or you can click here to go directly to the finished product.

I'd like to know more about Lynch's class than he reveals in this particular post: how old are the students, for instance, and--more relevant for this post--how many of them took part in this cartooning exercise? Because it appears to have been a collaborative eighty characters in fifteen minutes, and, you know, that wasn't what I was expecting when I saw the link at ¡Journalista!

No, what I expected to see was Mike Lynch's single-handed effort to crank out eighty characters in fifteen minutes--which averages to one character every eleven and a quarter seconds. Mind, I enjoy the drawings his students produced--no doubt about it, they're fun to look at--but I was hoping for something more, well, athletic, pell-mell, even desperate. So I did what I expected Lynch to have done, and I drew 80 characters in fifteen minutes. Here's the first dozen:



Now, it would be a real challenge indeed not just to draw eighty characters in fifteen minutes but to have to dream up eighty different characters along the way, so I decided to use Lynch's list, which he has thoughtfully included in his blog post. (You may note that two items--robot and hydrant--occur twice on his list. Lynch has already noted it himself, so there goes your No-Prize.) I also soon realized, after warming up with a few practice sketches, that there was no way I could draw eighty characters that quickly if I also had to read their names, so I enlisted the help of Becca Boggs, who read me the names of the characters in turn and warned me when I was taking too long (already with the cowgirl, #5) and reassured me when I had made up lost ground (by the skateboarder, #70). By the second dozen I was getting pretty sketchy indeed:



Lynch describes the exercise as a useful way to train cartoonists to draw lots of different kinds of things. It's true that I haven't spent much time drawing baseball players, truck drivers, businessmen, or angry waiters, as pictured in the third dozen:



On the other hand, I've drawn plenty bunnies, Martians, fish, and fire hydrants (really!) over the years, to say nothing of Batman. And one somewhat frustrating thing about this exercise is that eleven and a quarter seconds doesn't allow a lot of room for invention or witty rendering. That may sound like a somewhat feeble excuse for the resort to visual cliché in these sketches, but I think it's in keeping with what Will Eisner says about stereotypes in Graphic Storytelling: not every imaginable Martian is going to have attenae, say, but if you want to communicate the idea that a humanoid is an alien then a pair of attenae will get the idea across pretty quickly and pretty consistently--more so than a portrait of J'onn J'onzz would (for civilians, at least).

Most of the items in the fourth dozen were pretty straightforward:



It occurred to me while drawing the TV that the rabbit ears are another case of antennae functioning as reliable cliché: fewer televisions nowadays use them, what with cable, satellite, and such, but if you don't want your scrawl confused with a drawing of a microwave they're useful. I was thinking of Mr. Natural while drawing the guy with beard (#45), though that might not be apparent from the hasty result. Probably the trickiest item on this page was #47, specified as not just a car but a "cool car," which required both more thought and (barely) more drawing. (I almost made it the Batmobile, but time was a-wastin' and I figured fins would suffice without further Bat-paraphernalia.)



With the alien (#50), I faced the dilemma of not repeating my Martian. I still resorted to antennae, confound it. The penguin (#51) is dedicated to Carl Pyrdum in memory of Chilly Willy. The Presidential candidate (#53) surprised me somewhat by being influenced by Hillary Clinton (don't look too hard for a resemblance)--perhaps because she seems to be the most determined candidate of late. About the crook (#59) I will note the clichés of garb--dark cap, striped shirt--by way of observing that the reliance on stereotyped imagery caused me to draw a mugger (#8, first picture above) that looked nothing like the assailant who actually mugged me a year ago, save for being male and armed. In other words, even when I had real experience with one of these characters, cartoon convention prevailed over lifelike rendering. (I suppose the same could be said for the lightning bolt, come to think of it.)

Anyway, I'm almost done here. Sixty-one (a cactus; the label got cut off) through seventy-two:



Mike Lynch's students definitely draw a better Spongebob than I do, at any speed. I'm flat embarrassed by that ostrich; a much better one can be seen in Satisfactory Comics #1. And hydrant #2 (drawing #72) makes no effort to look any different from hydrant #1 (drawing #33). Snoring (#69) is dedicated to Alex Lifeson's wife. Paperboy (#72) is dedicated to Patrick Denker.

And finally, the last eight, including robot #2:



So that's it. It's an instructive exercise, that's for sure. For more attractive visual results, I think it might be worthwhile trying to fit eighty characters not into a confined period of time but into a confined space: how small can you draw eighty characters while keeping them recognizable and attractive? My model here would be the amazing Tom Gauld, who has already pulled off this stunt in various ways. Maybe Isaac would like to give that one a try?

Shuffleupagus

Every issue of Elm City Jams has contained a few pages of Shuffleupagus, a cartooning game invented by our pal Jesse Reklaw. It's easier to play than to explain, but let me try:

Technically, you need five people to play, but we've done it with four and even as few as three. You'll also need your drawing gear and a supply of blank cards.

(I've heard of people playing with 3" x 5" index cards, but we use 2.5" x 4.125" pieces of bristol board, because those will compose into the right dimensions for a standard mini page at the end, and because bristol board is nice and sturdy.)

To get ready to play, each cartoonist should take two blank cards and draw one character and one setting. We tend to orient the characters vertically and the settings horizontally: that gives more room for details in the settings, and it gives room for a full-body sketch for the character.

Here's a bunch of settings from out of our deck, by me, Tom O'Donnell, Mike, and Tom Hart:

... And here's a batch of characters, by Mike, Tom O'Donnell, myself, and Mike again:

(It's important to draw all of the character, since you'll want details like the shoes or hooves to be consistent. It also helps if your drawing suggests a personality, either by appearance or gesture; you may also want to indicate scale, or to discuss it with your fellow cartoonists later, before you start drawing.)

Then you collect two stacks of cards and shuffle each. Now you're ready to play.

Four people draw in the first part:

1. Pick one character and one setting. (If you have five people, the person who designed the character can sit out for the first part.) So you might have something like this:

Or like this:


2. Each person then gets a blank card and draws the character doing something in the setting:


3. These four images, when they're inked, get shuffled into a "deck" of five, with a card that's marked "start / end." (Here's our battle-scarred start/end card:)


4. Now you need five people to play the second part of the game. Everyone gets another blank card.

5. If all five people can sit around the same table, then deal the five-card deck into the spaces between them. (This is the part that's easier to do than to explain.) Whoever has the "start/end" card on his left is going to draw the first panel of the strip, and the strip reads around to the right from there:


Another way to think of this is that the four cards you drew in the first round are getting placed into the even positions of your nine-panel grid, like this:


And the task of the second round is to connect these four panels into a story, or at least into a coherent sequence. In-betweening can be a challenge, especially if the characterization (or costume!) isn't consistent in all four panels, but that's part of the fun.

Here's a finished product, visible for the first time. This is the Shuffleupagus page that Mike and I did with Adam Rosenblatt and Ben Towle right before SPX in the fall of 2006. (This will appear in a fourth issue of Elm City Jams if there ever is one.) You can, as usual, click on this image to bring it up to legible size.


It's interesting to imagine what this little story would have looked like if the initial four panels had dealt out in a different order. (In-betweening from my panel 2 to Ben's panel 6, for example, would have been pretty easy, in a different story.)

If you found my explanation confusing, here's a link to another description of shuffleupagus by a different cartooning group. Ben Towle's "Three-Cent Pup" drawing group down in Winston-Salem seems to be having a good time with the game, too: here's a link to one of their shuffleupagus jams. You'll notice that the Three-Cent Pup folks don't limit themselves to nine panels.

It's a fun game, and if you know a few cartoonists, I suggest you try it out!

By the way, if you have fewer than five people, you can still play the game. If you have four people, just have the first person who finishes in the second round jump over into the "empty seat" you create when you deal out the cards. If you have three, let one person double up in the first round, then two people double up in the second one.

Satisfactory Comics #7 (May 2007)

The newest issue of Satisfactory Comics contains sixteen stories, most of which are two pages long. (There's a lot in this issue, so this post is going to have to be kind of long. Please bear with me, or just skip to the bottom for the Paypal button.)

Each of the stories we drew for this issue begins with a "seed sentence" provided by one of our friends and readers, and Mike and I used a different collaborative method for each of the stories in turn. For some of them, Mike pencilled my script; for others, vice versa. Sometimes we alternated panels without discussing the direction of the story; sometimes we hardly passed the page back and forth at all. Clearly, this is the most various issue of Satisfactory Comics yet.

Since each of the stories was being built differently, we aimed for a variety of tones and artistic styles, as well as a variety of subject matter. (Some of the people who picked the comic up at MoCCA this year seemed surprised that it was the work of only two artists.) This issue runs the gamut from bleak tragedy to loony parody, from eerie surreality to sci-fi epiphany, and from gnomic allegory to straightforward anger.

Here are a few clips from the stories that our readers seem to be liking the best:

It's not only our academic friends who appreciate the gags in "Commuted Sentences," in which Mike caricatures eleven famous authors (Emily Dickinson is not pictured) under twisted versions of their famous first sentences.



Several readers have told us that "Sinister City" is their favorite piece in the book -- the story of a foreboding dream, which I wrote with single-syllable words,* and which right-handed Mike illustrated and lettered with his left hand. (That challenge was one of three offered to us for this issue by our friend Tom Motley.) I can see why people find it interesting: something about the combination of details gets under your skin a little bit.

*(If you want to nitpick, it also contains the word "brother," which was in the seed sentence.)



A few other people have told me that they really like my rant about popular misconceptions about evolutionary theory, which begins with me complaining about how many people don't seem to distinguish (correctly or at all) between monkeys and apes. (I then ramble on to Bishop Wilberforce, Darwin's pigeons, the Guillermo del Toro movie Mimic and the nonsense that justified the sequels to Jurassic Park. Clearly I'd been stewing about some of this stuff for a while.) For this strip, I pencilled after Mike's thumbnails, then Mike inked and lettered the piece.


The issue also includes a choose-your-own / multiple-path strip set in a graveyard, a poem about necrotizing fasciitis drawn in stylistic tribute to Tony Millionaire, and pieces about an immortality cult, a murderous tattooist, a genetically engineered kelp farmer, a philosophical astronaut, and the end of the world.

The issue also includes a couple of stories we drew solo -- the most tenuous sort of collaboration, in which you're only thinking about the judgment or the editorial presence of the other part of the team while you work. Here's a panel from a story I wrote and drew by myself, about a gang of teenagers improvising a role-playing game in their suburban neighborhood:


Because we were doing so many different things in this issue, we got to try a lot that we hadn't done much before. For example, here are a couple of panels from a story in which we used the method of Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky-Crumb's Dirty Laundry Comics: each of us drew and wrote one of the characters in the strip, making it up as we went along.


Having a lot of short pieces also let us try out some tones or themes we might not have drawn out in a full-length comic, like the piece about the end of the world and maybe the last man on earth. I don't think we have tried anything quite like this before:

Yes, it's hard to see in that left-hand panel, but the moon is broken into pieces on Henry's world. The first person to identify the source of that shattered moon in the comments for this post will get a free comic (this one, or any back issue).


Some of the stories try to pack a lot of thinking into very little space -- so our storytelling is more compressed here than it sometimes is. How much of the concept of this piece can you get from a single panel?

...because we only had six panels to work with, in that one.


Something I haven't mentioned yet about this issue is that we did it all in one weekend of intense drawing: most of it was done in a single marathon thirty-hour session at Mike's apartment in DC, from the morning of May 17 to the afternoon of May 18. (After taking some time to rest, we finished the cover and the text pieces on the evening of the 19th. Then I went back to New Haven and did some "post-production" work.)

Here we are, at the end of that process, as revealed in the comic's final story:


If you want a copy of Satisfactory Comics #7, you can buy it at our Storenvy store.

There are also people we should thank: first, Jon Lewis, whose excellent minicomic Local Stations inspired the storytelling approach in this issue. And, of course, the friends who contributed those seed sentences: Scott Downes, David Rosen, Sean Singer, David Quammen, Matthew Salomon, Craig Arnold, Anna Chen, Jeremy Dauber, Gerry Canavan and Jaimee Hills, Tom Motley, David Mikics, Ken Chen, Cathy Leamy, Francine Blume, and Mandy Berry.

_______ Are Always Fun to Draw (Sept. 2005)

Some time a couple years ago Mike and I were talking about doing a series of drawings of things that we simply found fun to draw. I think the initial idea was that we'd each do a page from some sort of master list, then put the results in a new Satisfactory Comics in the unspecified future. Then it started to seem reasonable to invite a few other cartoonists in on the project. And before long this little thing had ballooned into a book in its own right.

Here's what went into it: I polled twenty-two cartoonists (including Mike and myself), asking for lists of forty things that each given cartoonist considered to be "always fun to draw." As these came in, I collated them into one big list, putting things closer to the top if they got named by multiple cartoonists. Eventually, I had a "master list" of the thirty most popular items (each of which had been nominated several times), plus a long addendum with interesting things that had been named less frequently.

Each of the twenty-two participating cartoonists then had to draw, on a single page, the thirty most popular items, plus at least ten items from the rest of the list. Just to give you a taste of this, the top ten items were as follows: skulls or skeletons, dinosaurs, robots, octopi or squid, space aliens, cats, monkeys or apes, rockets or spaceships, demons, and fish (especially in goldfish bowls) -- so you'll see those things, plus at least thirty more, on every page.

A couple of people -- most notably Sam Henderson -- tried to include every (or nearly every) item on the list. Others, like Bill Kartalopoulos and Ben Towle, drew up a grid and filled precisely forty boxes. Some people let the cartoons sprawl over an empty space (like Scott C. did), and some put all the elements in a single scene: Karen Sneider's epic battle is hilarious, and Avi Spivak's midnight monster mash is full of crazy energy. Tom Motley turned his list into a hidden-pictures image, with some things literally in the scene and other things hiding in its negative space.

I made mine into a poem, a little primer verse about the Fun-To-Draw alphabet.

That's probably too small to read, even when you click on it, because it's a pretty detailed page. (I like to work at a pretty minute level of detail.) Here are a few of my favorite couplets, presented a little closer to ths size at which they were drawn:





Mike's page in _________ Are Always Fun to Draw is a complete scene, also full of fun details. His self-portrait (one of the required items) drifts downstream in an overturned umbrella (another required item), looking out warily over a crazy variety of other things:


For my money, a big part of the fun in this image is in the details -- things that are too small to show up well in that jpeg. Off in the distance, an angel whistles while a demon burns up a zeppelin:

...and just below that, two flying reptiles (one historical, the other mythical) confront each other with alarm and consternation:

I'm telling you, the book is at least as much fun to look at as it was to draw.

You can see a few of the other pages in Shawn Hoke's review of the book, but let me also bring in a few of my favorite samples or selections. Lindsay Nordell outlined her page as a series of "inconclusive battles" -- like Abraham Lincoln vs. Sherlock Holmes, or like these two:


Some of the pages are just beautiful, like the one provided by Bishakh Som. (This small sample doesn't quite include the monkey DJ that might be my favorite part of the whole image.)


And what could be more fun than the doodly spread contributed by Scott C. of Doublefine Action Comics? I've moved a couple of items around, here, to make it fit more neatly in a rectangle, but this is less than a quarter of his page. You're looking at a gun, an umbrella, a turtle, a demon, an eyeball, a bat, a viking, a car crash, a drunk cowboy, a sperm whale, Hunter S. Thompson, a self-portrait, and a volcano.


See what I mean? Fun.

Contributors to this book are Scott C., Shawn Cheng, Carlos Commander, Jacob Edwards, Avery Foster, Sam Henderson, C Hill, Damien Jay, Bill Kartalopoulos, Shana Mlawski, T. Motley, Lindsay Nordell, Adam Rosenblatt, Joe Sayers, Katie Skelly, Karen Sneider, Bishakh Som, Avi Spivak, Ben Towle, Tim Winkelman, and Mike and myself.

If you'd like to own this little book of fun, you can order it from our Storenvy shoppe.