"Draw Two Panels": How to Play

I have finally drawn up the rules or instructions for "Draw Two Panels," the deck-driven / aleatory comics-making process I have been working on for a few weeks. Here you go:

You should be able to right-click or ctrl-click (or option-click) and download that image and print it out, if you like. If you have any questions, please post comments below; if you want to get a few of my "discards," get in touch with me.

(I have already modified my own rules, at least for the next twenty-three weeks, as I'm adding Alphabots drawings to my deck at the rate of one per week.)

Just to add a little graphic interest to this post, I'll include a sample of my current deck, created by dealing panels randomly onto the glass of my scanner.

I'm having a lot of fun with this project or process, and I'm really looking forward to the day when someone else's panels show up in my mailbox to further unsettle my random deck.

If Blogger's not giving you a large version of the image that contains the directions and constraints, try this link.

Arthurian Alphabooks: K is for Klinschor

Here's a version of Klinschor, yet another character from Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival:
 
His name appears as Clinschor in the manuscripts, but it's commonly spelled with a K in modern German, so that's my excuse for drawing him this week. Fair warning: this will not be the last time I use spelling variations to fudge my way through the Arthurian alphabet! (And incidentally, on the subject of names: Richard Wagner further changed Klinschor's character, his role, and his name in creating the part of Klingsor for his opera Parsifal; a final change for the wizardly knight came with his transformation into Corporal Klinger in M*A*S*H*. Ha, I kid! Moving on...)

Klinschor was a knight and Count of the Terra di Lavoro in Italy, but he had the misfortune to be castrated by his lover's husband. (Nevertheless, the part of Klingsor in Parsifal is sung by a bass.) Thereafter Klinschor turned to the arts of magic and created threatening traps for other knights in his Castle of Wonders (Schastel marveile), until the spells therein were defeated—or at least survived—by Gawan (Wolfram's version of Sir Gawain / Gauvain).

The technique this week is a bit of an experiment. I did a very quick pencil sketch from life, as a guide to the shadows, principally; then I put down the vellum and attempted to ink the image with a minimum of outlines, hoping to build up the shapes out of hatching (not unlike the way John Totleben might ink, though very unlike his way in the care taken and the effects achieved):
 
That turned out okay, but it lost a lot of the shadowy contrast I'd been hoping for. So I tried again by inking the pencils directly with a bias toward direct black and white opposition instead of gradations of shade (though not exclusively, as you can see below):
 
I liked that one better, overall, but just for fun I decided to lay the vellum over the original inks and see how that composite would look when scanned. And lo, that's how I got the version I submitted to Alphabooks and that appears at the top of this post. Not exactly the best of both versions, but I think the overlaid image is more interesting than either of its layers alone. And to spare you any scrolling up for a recap, here it is again just before the post ends:


Next week: a foregone conclusion for the letter L...

Arthurian Alphabooks: H is for Hallewes

With this week's Arthurian Alphabooks drawing, you may be forgiven for thinking that H is for Headdress—

Believe it or not, the headdress is closely patterned on an illustration from a genuine medieval manuscript!

—but in fact H is for the lady Hallewes, a minor character in Malory's "Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake" from Le Morte Darthur. Minor—but unforgettable, because she is One Creepy Dame. Hallewes is a sorceress who has employed her magic(ks) to create an enchanted trap for either Gawain or Lancelot, whichever, though really she has her heart set on Lancelot. And just what does she want with him? Why, to love him, naturally. And if he won't love her back, that's hardly an obstacle. Let her speak for herself:

     "And Sir Lancelot, now I tell thee, I have loved thee these seven year, but there may no woman have thy love but Queen Guenevere; and since I might not rejoice thee nother thy body on live [=alive], I had kept no more joy in this world but to have thy body dead. Then would I have [em]balmed it and cered it [=wrapped it in waxed cloths], and so to have kept it my live days—and daily I should have clipped thee [=embraced thee] and kissed thee, despite of Queen Guenevere."
     "Ye say well," said Sir Lancelot. "Jesu preserve me from your subtle crafts!"

While the whole episode takes up just a few paragraphs in a massive tome, I find that the specter of the lady's necrophiliac canoodling with a mummified Lancelot produces an outsized horror. Brrr!

*     *     *     *     *

And now, a process note or two (mostly for Isaac's benefit, as he has expressed interest or at least tolerance for these in the past). As the caption below the above picture indicates, I actually did a little visual research for this drawing, consulting a few books of medieval images to find a headdress that I thought was suitably wacky and some clothing that seemed appropriately wanton for a dangerous woman driven crazy by desire. (I borrowed the headdress and the rest of the clothing from two different illustrations, but in both cases the women pictured seemed more assertive in their desires than is often the case in illustrations from this period; if anything, the neckline of the dress in the original manuscript image plunged even further than in my drawing above.)

For the second week in a row, I tried to see what it was like to ink a vellum sheet laid over my original sketch. Oddly enough, my brush seemed to behave like a nib pen when I began (as I often do) by inking in the eyes. I remembered that Gary Martin, author of two books on comic-book inking, suggests an exercise where the inker should try to achieve brush effects with nibs and nib effects with brushes. I'd been trying to get a brushy calligraphic line out of a nib pen ever since I was a kid: my first cartooning efforts were full-on imitations of Walt Kelly, and I simply didn't know at first that he used a brush rather than a pen. (In my defense, I was seven at the time.) But making a brush line look like pen work seemed like a weird (and difficult) exercise to me. Now that I've accidentally achieved something of that effect, in at least parts of this drawing, I can see the virtue in making the single tool more versatile, and given my recent problems with ink blots from nib pens it might even be more practical to use a brush for my "pen" lines, thereby to reduce the risk of blots and smears. Still, I suspect that the pen-like qualities might be owing more to the unfamiliar tooth of the vellum surface and/or the viscosity of my ink.

I also had a more practical reason for using vellum, which is that my preliminary sketch this week was drawn not in pencil but in ballpoint pen, which is a lot harder to erase than pencil. That did mean, however, that the rough sketch survived the ink job, so for the sake of comparison here it is below (slightly blurry and rendered in grey rather than the original blue):

It's a commonplace of cartooning to lament that finished drawings lack some of the energy or spontaneity of the rough art. Well, sure, and there are ways in which this rough drawing probably does a better job of making Hallewes look crazy; but to my eye, at least, this rough version of Hallewes also looks less like a highborn lady or a credible amorous threat to Lancelot. She also looks a little too robust, so I made sure to gaunt her up a bit in the finished drawing, which accounts for her thinner lips in the inks. (As for the heavy shading around the eye sockets in the final version, it occurred to me while inking that I might want to suggest "the skull beneath the skin" in this person who, if not herself "possessed by death," wanted to possess Lancelot in death).

I kind of like the face in the rough drawing—it looks like a usable study for some other character—but, despite the label scrawled at the lower right of the picture, I don't find the rough drawing very convincing as Hallewes. So score one for the finished drawings, for a change.

Alphabooksbeasts: G is for Gurgi

I'm not so happy with this week's second Alphabooks entry. I have an old fondness for this character that probably dates back to fourth or fifth grade, but despite a lot of effort I wasn't able to get him to look right.

The problem for this week is a really hard one. The character you're looking at, Gurgi, appears in The Black Cauldron and the other Prydain books by Lloyd Alexander, which I devoured when I was in elementary school, probably too young or naïve to understand everything in the books. I remember only a few little things about Gurgi—one scene where he ducks his head down below his shoulders trying to avoid the big evil bad guy; the fact that he's always hungry and unkempt—and I haven't read those books for more than thirty years.

I'm pretty sure that the editions I read had no illustrations, so I was trying to recreate a really dim memory of how I would imagine Gurgi while I was reading about him. If you do a little Google search for him, you'll see that the Disney movie has completely colonized the visual imaging of this character, even though Disney's version probably could not swing a shortsword.

So I started this business trying to draw a faint and distant memory of an imaginary person.

Some of those were pretty close, but I wasn't happy with any of them, because although they fit the descriptions I was reading of Gurgi, they really didn't look like much like my memory. I even went so far as to work up a complete inked drawing of that bugbeary version of the guy. Maybe in some ways this one's better than the one I colored.

I do like his ape feet, and his mild resemblance to Sir Paul McCartney, but I still don't think that's close to the way I was imagining Gurgi when I was reading about Taran all those years ago.

So, at like 3:00 AM, when I should have been coloring if I wasn't sleeping, I started doing new doodles. There's some improvement here, though the pose I settled on seems really stupid in retrospect. What's wrong with just having him sitting on the ground? And why did my finished version wind up looking so mean, when these ones are cute?

Well, if I had world enough and time, I'd try another run at the guy. I wish the ten-year-old version of me had left me some better notes.

Next week: I suppose it's a pun, from a book full of puns.

Alphabooksbeasts: C is for Caliban

I've been wrestling with drawing this week's non-Donjon Alphabooks character for decades, on and off. Probably if I sit down to draw him again next year, I'll come up with something entirely different. That's in part because there's no single right way to draw Shakespeare's Caliban.

We know these things about him:

• He's half-human, having been sired on his witch mother Sycorax by the devil-god Setebos.
• He's ugly, and somehow deformed, based on the way Prospero and Miranda talk about him.
• He's capable of doing menial labor, but he doesn't like it.
• Stephano and Trinculo, when they find him hiding under a cloak, think he might be a dead fish or something. He has an "ancient and fishlike smell."

As I was thinking about designing him, I sort of vacillated between two dramatic demands the play has for Caliban. When he is cursing Prospero in soliloquy, I think Caliban has to seem genuinely malicious and a little frightening. But when he's been seduced by Stephano, Trinculo, and their bottle of liquor, he suddenly slides downhill from being the villain of the piece to being ridiculed by the ridiculous. (In this way, his character trajectory almost resembles Malvolio's. Think how fun it would be to see the same actor playing those two parts in repertory.)

You can see Caliban costumed all sorts of ways for different productions of The Tempest. In fact, he might be one of the most fun Google Image searches I've ever done. Some people really play up the half-devil heritage. Some play up the fishiness. There's an awesome-looking full-size puppet Caliban that seems to favor humor over menace. I've even seen someone trying to design a Caliban with Sendak's Wild Things as a base.

I wanted to discard any worries about actually putting a human being into the "costume," and just design the "real Caliban" that the stage actor would be trying to approximate. If I'd seen the really fun Arthur Rackham illustration before I started working on mine, I'm sure I'd have been influenced by it.

These doodles seemed a little too far in the direction of malice for me. I'd already done another version that I liked better:

There's not must malice in that version of Caliban, but I like the way he looks anyway. I especially like the distortions of his anatomy. It's fun to picture those big shoulders toting a bundle of logs.

But then I started thinking about this "sympathetic Caliban" in the drinky scenes, and in Browning's "Caliban Upon Setebos," pondering the nature of his deity and the nature of the misfortunes inflicted upon him by Prospero's arrival.

That doodle is obviously very close to what I wound up drawing. I just let him get a little more zonked out as he dug deeper into the bottle.

I mentioned at the top of the post that I've been drawing Caliban on and off for years. I was able to put my hands on a couple of classroom doodles from my first year of grad school, fifteen years ago if I'm doing my math correctly. I don't have anything to say about these; I'm just sharing them in the interest of completeness.

Next week: fowl.

A is for Almost Arthur: Abortive Attempts

Isaac expressed some interest in my process drawings for yesterday's Alphabooks image of Arthur, so I'll post them here with some comments. (NB: If you are not interested in the minutiae of my drawing decisions, you may want to skim or skip this post—there are eight pictures all told.)

I started sketching loosely while thinking generally about the scene I wanted to portray, to see what sort of Arthurian face suggested itself without my trying too deliberately to draw something before my hand started moving. I don't have a scan of the pencils that resulted, but I have two different inked versions of those pencils. The picture below was my first attempt, drawn by tracing over the pencils on a separate sheet of paper—not tracing paper, however, so my view of the pencils was somewhat spotty. Nevertheless, this first drawing probably had the tightest inking of them all, with lots of bitty lines (maybe because I was trying to reassert my control of the brush after long desuetude):

 
The eyes were a problem, as you can see, and I can't really vouch for the mechanics of that brooch-thing. (I surprised myself by including the cloak and brooch, characteristic more of a Celtic-clad Arthur than the Frenchified/Anglo Arthur better known from mainstream medieval texts.) Arthur also didn't look mad enough, or tired and dirty enough. So I tried again freehand, and made this:

This one has its okay qualities, but Arthur seems too upset and not riled up enough. And again the eyes don't line up quite right, and they were a main concern of my effort to depict the conflicting emotions I wanted Arthur to express in a single face (rage/grief, exhaustion/resolution, the like). I also think this Arthur looks too old, and a bit too hairy. So I tried another one freehand, and made this:

A head-on view for a change—not altogether satisfying in its static quality, but I was trying to figure out how to arrange the eyes, eyebrows, and mouth, which I found to be the main expressive elements (duh, because they are a lot more mobile than, say, the forehead or the cheekbones or the chin and beard!). My sense was that, in order to capture Arthur's welter of emotions, I'd have to use a bit of asymmetry, with one eye more clearly angry (with a lowered brow, say) and the other more wounded or stricken (wider, perhaps), while the two corners of the mouth might bend differently, expose different amounts of teeth, etc. I also found I kept wanting to give Arthur a busted lower lip, though I didn't always draw it that way. This Arthur probably looks too young, to boot. But note that these freehand drawings have started to get freer with broad strokes of the brush—that was going to be the way forward, ultimately. But I wasn't there yet, so I had another go at inking the original pencils—inking them directly, this time, while still trying to use them as a loose guide rather than a firm directive. Here's what I came up with this time:

So this one (#4, if you're keeping score at home) is clearly close kin to the first, though I think this one is more successful. Arthur looks a bit more bedraggled, more angrily wary and less innocently startled. The big problem with these sibling pictures was the spacing of the eyes relative to each other. I tried to make corrections in ink (more evident in #1 than here)—an effort doomed to failure! But here again there are some nice fat swatches of black brushstrokes, in defining the hair especially. (And since I was using real waterproof India ink on a bristly brush, as opposed to the water soluble ink in the cartridges that I load into my brush pen, the black looked really nice on the page.) I was almost satisfied enough with this to send it to Alphabooks, but it still has an amateurish quality that bugged me. So I tried another one freehand, and made this:

Truthfully, this was more a facial study than a full-out effort. (I think its placement on the page relative to prior drawings meant I couldn't have finished the head even if I'd wanted to.) Here I was still trying to figure out how the essential expressive parts of the face needed to work. I kind of like this piece of Arthur, though it's too fragmentary to be really recognizable as Arthur without a label. (I am aware that the same could be said of the final drawing I posted to Alphabooks, however.) I thought I was getting closer to where I wanted to be, but I was still willing to try something a little different. So I tried another one freehand, and made this:

This one didn't work either. Like #2, it looks too old and too mournful—nowhere near angry enough. (This one might work for the earlier scene of Arthur on the field of battle against Lancelot in Benwick, when his heart is no longer in the fight and when he realizes just how far he has compromised his principles in going along with Gawain to wage war against his former best friend and lieutenant; the key scene for Arthur's realization is when Lancelot himself rehorses Arthur in the midst of the battle, an act of transcendent chivalry that baffles and frustrates Lancelot's allies even as it breaks Arthur's heart. But I digress!) The other reason why this one doesn't work is that it looks too much like Uncle Jesse from The Dukes of Hazzard. That would never do!  So I tried a much different tack, and made this:

I don't really care for this one, but it helped to draw a more youthful Arthur again, and I made at least a sketch of what he might look like in a crown, though you will note that the crown was an afterthought, added after the hair was sketched in, and I wasn't prepared to commit fully to a complete design. Also, it sits weird on the head. Also, the head itself is kind of weird.

One of the problems I faced throughout, besides the problem of how to convey Arthur's mixed emotions, was getting the age of Arthur where I wanted it. I think he looks too young in numbers 3 & 7, and too old in numbers 2 and 6. I actually like a lot of the fundamentals of 1 & 4, the images based on my original pencils, but the eyes were really bugging me, and I think I prefer a more broken nose in Arthur, and a head that's not quite as square as those are (though I'm not convinced that the one I went with for the blog/tumblr/Alphabooks isn't too long in the face).

And heck, for the sake of comparison here's another look at the one I finally settled on, sketch #8:

There's a Knight of a Dolorous Countenance for you!

Makeshift Speedy Lettering Method

I haven't mentioned this here on the blog, but I just finished writing the introduction for my friend Sarah Becan's graphic novel Shuteye, which collects several years of her minicomic series by the same name. Shuteye got funded recently on Kickstarter, and I'm really excited to see the final product. It's going to be a nice-looking book.


I was really flattered when Sarah asked me to write the introduction, and as I thought about it (and about the look of the book), I decided that I would offer to letter the introduction by hand. I think it'll fit in better with the rest of the work that way, and Sarah seemed genuinely happy that I had offered to do the little bit of extra labor.

I had also been yearning to do a little lettering. I have to admit, though, that this work didn't quite wind up scratching that itch, because I had to do the final work in a sort of hasty way.

Because I figure someone might someday want a method for hand-lettering a large chunk of text that is speedy but gives competent results—like, I am not going to be embarrassed for Sarah to publish what I wound up with—let me tell you what I did.

1.) Okay, first I had to write the text. And because I do that in a word-processing program, I had a file I could work with. I set the text in small caps (which you can do as an option in Word with control-D), and chose a font that seemed to have spacing and proportions sort of like my all-caps lettering hand. I set the dimensions of the page to correspond with the pages in Sarah's finished book.



2.) I printed it, and through a process of tinkering I got it to print at a size I liked. After a botched first attempt I realized I needed to print it at about 80% size, because full-size 13-point Century looked good in the space available but felt unnatural when I tried step three.

3.) I got out the lightbox and another sheet of paper and "traced" the text I had printed. I wasn't actually tracing it. I have done that before, for different sorts of projects, but in this case I was just using the spacing of the rows as a guide, and the image shining through the lightbox as a reminder of the script I had written. I even altered the text on the fly once or twice.



It's worth noting that, at this stage, I could have opted to do the work much more neatly, but I didn't want my finished product to look like I'd been tracing something.

4.) Because I was lettering pretty fast, I wound up making a few mistakes. I knew I was going to be putting everything through Photoshop in a couple of steps, I figured I'd just write corrected versions of the same words off in the margins, where I could easily cut and paste them into place.



A couple of times it took me more than one try to get a simple word right.



(This second version shows the brightness / contrast adjustments that came during the Photoshop work.)

To do this lettering, I just grabbed the nearest pen to hand, which was my slightly damaged daily-use Rapidograph. Probably this is a weird practice, but I have a ".50" Rapidograph that I keep around for writing postcards and other stuff when I want a nice dark ink. Sometimes I use it for doodling. I really shouldn't use it for finished work, though, because the little needle inside the nib is slightly bent, and that makes it leave like a little "tail" as it approaches the page from some angles.

You can especially see the problem when I write the letter E.



I wound up having to erase each of those things individually in Photoshop; I could have saved myself a lot of work if I'd had a better Rapidograph inked up and ready to use. Anyway, on to the last "step."

5.) I scanned both pages of text, adjusted brightness and contrast, and cleaned things up. That could have taken less time than it did.

The end result: definitely hand-lettered, a little sloppy, but with good straight lines underlying the sloppiness. Lots of imperfection, which means character, and that's more or less what I was shooting when I offered to hand-letter it in the first place.



I didn't have to use an Ames guide at all, even though I was dealing with big blocks of text. I just used typing paper and a pen near at hand. And I think it still looks better than the lettering in Britten & Brulightly.

I'll print the full text of my introduction here on the blog when Shuteye is available for sale.

My Panelists Archive: On Adventures in Cartooning, for First Second's Fifth

My final post for the now-defunct Panelists blog was for our series celebrating the fifth anniversary of First Second Books. Before I get to it, let me say that I am genuinely sad that I couldn't contribute more to The Panelists while it was alive. My paying work has made it impossible for me to write much at all lately, and although I had (and have!) ideas for short essays I wanted to write, I never got to them.

The thing that I liked best about The Panelists was the real feeling of camaraderie, of shared purpose, even among scholars and critics whose tastes don't perfectly agree. Probably if you placed all the comics in the world on the table between the six of us, there would be not a single book that we would all want to take home for the top shelf of our personal canon. Things that got Charles and me fired up would leave Derik cold. The Venn diagram of our tastes would be hard to draw. But we worked well as a team, making a whole that, when it was functioning, was greater than the sum of its parts.

Early in the team's history, my image for our collected powers was of a great Voltron of comics criticism. The sad thing was to watch that Voltron try to march into battle with both its legs and one arm totally asleep. (In this image, I would be one of the useless legs.)

I'll miss the Panelists, more for its potential than for its actuality; more for what it represented to me than for what it managed to become.

Our comics culture needs more places for careful and sustained snark-free criticism, where every claim is supported with thoughtful evidence and every quibble is launched in the spirit of arriving together at a better understanding of the medium's inner workings.

Anyway, here's the last squib I managed to scribble.




The first time I taught a course on making comics, the closest thing I had to a textbook or instruction guide for the students was Scott McCloud’s then-new Making Comics. I wound up using parts of the book, skipping other parts, and generally wishing I had something that I could use all the way through the semester.

Thanks to First Second, I now have a serious alternative, in Jessica Abel and Matt Madden’s Drawing Words & Writing Pictures. Organized around lessons and exercises, DWWP moves through a series of skills that build incrementally: composition and drawing basics are followed by more elaborate lessons and work on progressively larger units, from the panel to the strip, from the story to the zine. If I find myself teaching another class on making comics, I’m sure I’ll assign it. In fact, there are patient explanations of the use of things like Pro-White and the Ames Guide in DWWP that I should probably re-examine if I ever make comics seriously again myself: there’s a lot I could learn from this book.

For the moment, however, I want to consider the benefits of a competing textbook, also published by First Second. This other book covers less ground and isn’t as thick, but it also retails for less than half the price. There are reasons I probably shouldn’t assign it, including the fact that it offers no technical instruction at all—there’s not even a mention of inking, let alone brush technique or cross-hatching—but as instruction manuals go, it has definite strengths. In some ways, it might even be more appropriate for the kind of course or the kind of students I’d be likely to teach. (I'm in an English department, not an art department, so I teach comics-making as a kind of creative writing.)

I’m alluding to Adventures in Cartooning, the how-to-make-comics manual for kids that presents itself as a light fantasy romance with a knight, a missing princess, an elf, and a dragon. A collaboration between James Sturm and two Center for Cartoon Studies graduates (Andrew Arnold and Alexis Frederick-Frost), Adventures in Cartooning offers a series of lessons in comics practice while telling a suitably silly quest story with a couple of nice twists in its conclusion. It’s pitched, I think, at precisely that age range where kids either might get into drawing stories other people could read or, without a supportive environment, might give up drawing altogether. And yet I would like to consider, here, some lessons in Adventures that the blooming late-teen college-aged cartoonist would also do well to observe:

1. You don’t have to be able to “draw well” to make a good comic (or a fun one).
This point arises briefly in Drawing Words & Writing Pictures, but so much of that book gathers its examples and its exercises from superlatively competent work that it could still be daunting for a novice or a doodler. (If your handbook is going to have guidance on feathering or drybrush technique, it’s naturally going to move a long way beyond examples of what you can do if you “can’t draw.”)


("You don't have to be able to draw, but we'll assume that you want to learn how.")

The idea that simple drawings can still tell a story is front and center in Adventures in Cartooning, which begins with a princess complaining that she “just can’t draw well enough to make a comic”—and immediately contradicted by the Magic Cartooning Elf, who shows how a few basic shapes can be doodled into the main props and settings of the story that follows.


("Anyone can draw that stuff!")

The design of the characters in Adventures is inspired in part by Ed Emberley’s Make a World: each is built out of a few simple shapes that are easy to repeat. The difference between this simple drawing (which is possible for anyone who can write letters) and bad drawing turns out to be mainly about the difference between gesture and stiffness, not the ability to render a horse that looks like a horse. Here, Adventures in Cartooning teaches by example: little more than a stick figure, the knight is still full of lively and even exaggerated motion.

2. Since words and images can work complementarily in comics, you can use descriptive words to get you out of a drawing jam.
I don’t remember this coming up, at least not in quite this way, in Drawing Words & Writing Pictures, but it’s a great point for novice cartoonists who aren’t feeling secure in their drawing chops. Some things are hard to show, but there’s no reason a character can’t name a thing like that to make its identity clearer. A small closed squiggle can become a bubble-gum wrapper; a few rectangles in the background can become a mile-high stone wall. And let’s remember that even the most painstaking draftsman is still going to rely on language for invisible effects like smell and sound.

3. You don’t have to perform fancy tricks with layout in order to take advantage of “special effects” of panel height, width, and size.
Most of the page layouts in Adventures in Cartooning are straightforward variations on a grid, but each layout is deliberate and directed at a particular effect. (Again the book sets an example for the kid (or student) without much commentary.) A square panel has a different sort of action than a panel with horizontal aspect, because a horizontal panel is better at establishing setting or motion along a surface; a vertical panel is good for ascent, descent, or growth; a row or grid of similar-shaped panels is good for showing progression; and so forth.



4. Leave room at the top of your panel.
One of my favorite moments in the book, which happens before the Magical Cartooning Elf explains the virtues of different-shaped panels, shows the knight and his horse ascending a mountain and, because of the rising ground, seeming to bump against the top of the panel. Maybe this “lesson” isn’t what Sturm and his collaborators had in mind, but I have seen plenty of panels drawn without a thought about speech balloons, then having to crowd dialogue into a tiny attic over the characters’ heads.



5. Drawing is fun, and drawing together is fun.
This might be the most important lesson in Adventures in Cartooning, and again it comes through implicitly, both in the fun of the drawings themselves and in the solution to the knight’s ultimate crisis. (Having fallen in the ocean, several knights are drowning until, working together, they draw a pirate ship they can sail away on.)


("We call this a jam.")

Little kids mostly don’t need to be told this, but the fun of drawing would probably be the hardest of these five lessons for me to convey in a comics class. That’s because the college students who need this lesson aren’t likely to take a course that requires them to draw every week, and teenagers who think they can’t draw aren’t likely to have an Ed Emberley conversion moment when they’re being graded. By the time young people have passed from the Adventures in Cartooning target demographic to that of Drawing Words, they may have been discouraged out of telling stories with pictures. It’s a tragedy Adventures in Cartooning is trying to forestall. For those lost cartoonists, a healthy dose of Lynda Barry might jolt them back to a kid’s pleasure in making worlds and telling stories. Or maybe I should just casually scatter a half-dozen copies of Adventures in Cartooning in the library’s study area.

(This post just had a couple of comments, which I've allowed to evaporate into the ether. Perhaps you'd like to add your own now.)

My Panelists Archive: Porcellino Re-Inked

My next post at The Panelists was a reply, of sorts, to Derik Badman's take on one panel from John Porcellino's King-Cat #65.




I should begin by saying that I did not undertake this experiment with the idea that I would improve Porcellino; nor was it my intent to ruin him. My dabbling with comics craft has always been mainly an effort to figure out how comics work. I mean, I draw for fun, too, but mainly I draw in order to see better, so I can write with a more complete sense of a cartoonist’s range of potential decisions. I’ve approached this Porcellino panel in order to understand it better.

Since Derik has already written about the text in this panel, I thought it would make sense for me to focus on the image. And, in the spirit of the “Covered” and “Repaneled” blogs, I thought I’d try to zero in on Porcellino’s style by changing it. So I inked the panel with a brush.



(I am not trying to say my version is any good.)

This side-by-side comparison suggests a few things, even beyond the obvious and undisputed fact that I am clumsy with a brush.

For example, looking at this pair of panels, we might say that the change in drawing tools has less effect on the words than on the images—that my version’s words “mean” in much the same way, but the lines of the drawings start to work differently, even when the lines are “the same.” To an extent, this is surprising, because as Charles and Derik suggested last week, there are ways in which Porcellino’s diagrammatic drawing functions like language, or makes it easy to blur the boundary between text and image. Still, I seem to have altered the drawing more than the text, here.

Porcellino’s minimalism relies heavily on diagrammatic signification: rather than drawing what a drum kit looks like, he’ll draw what it is, leaving out the complicated superstructure in order to show two cymbals, two drumsticks, two drumheads, and the energy around them. A face is the four or five lines that create eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. For those lines to call attention to themselves as lines, rather than as marks in a diagram—for the variability of brush lines to add “life” to the contours—seems to contradict Porcellino’s method of seeing or parsing the world that he draws.

And there’s another important difference. Look at the thick solidity of the drummer’s arm. The brush lines do a lot more than Porcellino’s pen lines to discriminate between foreground and background. In this panel, Porcellino has done some of that work by removing detail from the figures in the background (they’re small, but there would be room for a pair of eyes, at least, on each of those distant faces). But in a lot of Porcellino’s work there’s not much graphic difference between near and far. I think this contributes to the tone of his work, since the distance between near and far, in autobiography, is often also the difference between self and other. To give the environment the same line-weight as the central character is to suggest something strong about the permeability of identity, or the influence of world on self (and vice versa).

This equanimity between subject and environment is, coincidentally, even evident in a small inking decision I had to make about the direction of the energy in the lines surrounding the drummer and his kit: do those lines come from the drummer or from the crowd? (I had done this inking even before the commenter “Nate” focused on the energy lines last Wednesday.)

In Porcellino’s impartial inking, those energy lines are almost like little equals signs, connecting crowd to music rather than directing energy from one place to another. I think this has a lot to do with the sentiment and sensitivity that permeates Porcellino’s stories: his lines imply that everything is interconnected, breathing the same air.

UPDATE: In the comments section, Sean Michael Robinson (of The Hooded Utilitarian) provided an improved re-inking of this Porcellino panel, done with a nib pen instead of a brush. (See the comments below for further details.)



I think this image actually makes my points just as well as my clumsier brush-inked one: that the change in line weight affects the meaning of the text less than that of the image; that the visual distinction between foreground and background seems to undermine something important about Porcellino's tone; and that the energy lines can't "connect" the different parts of the image as well if they reveal or imply the energy's direction.

Alphabeasts: J is for Jeep

This week's Alphabeasts drawing ought to be familiar to all you comics fans. Back in 1936, E. C. Segar's Olive Oyl received a mysterious package, out of which emerged the mischievous critter known as Eugene the Jeep.



A jeep, you see, is a fourth-dimensional creature that has somehow been tangled up in the form of an African Hooey Hound. Or something like that. What he's doing here is telling me that I can't have any Christmas fun until I finish grading my papers.

There's some evidence that Segar's jeep actually did suggest the name for the motor vehicle, during World War II. I'd always heard that "Jeep" came from "GP" for "General Purpose," but apparently that may be apocryphal etymology. If it seems crazy to you that a marginal comics character would be known well enough to lend a nickname to a vehicle, remember that Eugene was also featured in moviehouse cartoons.



"The jeep is a magical dog that can disappear an' things."



I have to say, I found it a lot easier to wrap my head (or my pencil fingers) around Segar's forms, compared to Mercer Mayer's. Must be from reading all that Krazy Kat: Eugene seems to me to be a member of the same fraternal order as Ignatz Mouse.



Anyway, I was happy enough with my pencils this time around that I wanted to save them in case I messed them up. So here are a couple of "process" images, first of the stuff I erased under the inks in the final drawing...



... and then of the doodles that helped me figure out how the jeep works.



Next week: a creature you may not ever have heard of, from a very famous book.

Alphabeasts: E is for Erina

I was thinking about hoaxing up a different source for this week's "Alphabeasts," but let me come right out and admit the truth: I got this week's critter from our friend (and the organizer of these alphabet projects) Ben Towle.



You see, when I say that E is for Erina, I am borrowing a demon from his (Almost) 100 Demons minicomic, which I think mainly survives as this tag on Ben's blog. (Ben, if the mini is still in print, let me know how people can order it!)

Ben's demons represent an awesome amount of visual inventiveness, and in a way it's a shame that I'm not drawing more of them. But if you want to build a whole alphabet out of Ben's demons, though, let me tell you right now that there aren't entries for Q, W, X, or Y. (So much for that plan.)

Looking at Ben's original Erina, I was stumped for a little while about how to pose my version. This is probably the single creature in my "Alphabeasts" set about which I have the least information—just a name and a single drawing.



At first, I thought that since the opposable thumbs give the Erina more ability to manipulate the world, I'd try to make the six-limbed canine devious, tricky, and canny ...



But looking again at Ben's drawing, the erina looked to me a lot more lupine than coyotine, so I rethought my ideas about the erina as a trickster demon. And since the erina seems to be a lone wolf, not a pack creature, I thought, "What's the main personality characteristic of the wolf?"

Then, looking yet a third time at Ben's drawing, it occurred to me that the erina is much sturdier even than the largest living canine—those are some thick legs. And so, I thought, it must be pretty big. Let's have it eating a bison.



I leave it for you to speculate about what it might be defending its kill against.

By the way, Ben's demons happen to have been created independently right around the same time that Mike and I were drawing our own sets of a hundred demons. I've still got copies of our Demonstration minicomic, if you're interested in getting a copy of it...

For next week, I have a few options. What do you think I should draw for the letter F?



You've got until Friday evening to tell me.