"Make Me a Bat": Teaser

This image does not appear in the comic I am making for Halloween.

Well, maybe on the back cover.

"Make Me a Bat": Outtakes

I'm almost done with the little comic that I'm making for the Trees & Hills Halloween Comic Swap. I ought to be able to take it to Kinko's on Tuesday.

While I work on the layout, here are a few outtakes — not exactly a "deleted scene," but some versions of a costume that I didn't wind up using.







I think this is going to be a fun little comic.

New Halloween Comic, Early Stages

You probably won't hear much more about this until it's finished, but I'm planning a little micro-minicomic for Halloween. Probably it'll take a little more time than carving a pumpkin in some crazy way, but I can't seem to stop myself.

Here are some early doodles toward a character design. I worked out a script last night. One hint about that is all you get.





When the comic's done, it should be a good size to hand out to kids on Halloween along with (or in lieu of) candy. If you get trick-or-treaters, and want the comic, I'll figure out a good price for a "bulk bundle" that I can mail in time for distribution. When I have a few done, I'll put the word out here on the blog.

What motivated me to do this, when I've got essays write and papers to grade? My own foolishness, obviously, but also a really fun-sounding project that Colin Tedford announced yesterday on the Trees & Hills blog.

And what is "Trees & Hills," you might ask? Colin's doodle from my robot sketchbook will answer that question:



Thanks, Colin. I'm looking forward to this.

More SPX minicomic reviews tomorrow!

A Preview of Coming Attractions

So after a long dry spell cartooning-wise, I've been trying to get a new project under way just a little bit at a time. To encourage incremental progress, I have decreed that my personal calendar will be observing the Twelve Days of Comics, because I started the project on Christmas day and plan to work a little every day until Epiphany at least (though as of January 7 I may have to cool it as other obligations threaten to swallow up all my time, as opposed to merely most of it). At any rate, progress has been encouraging enough so far for me to risk jinxing everything by posting a teaser image of me with my materials before me and my baby in my lap:

Yes, I am cartooning at the kitchen table, because I still haven't set up my art table in the study, because there are still too damn many boxes of books in the way. (There is an alarming shortage of shelf space in our new house.) No, I did not produce the images visible in the sketchbook while dandling Miss Thing there on my knee, though I confess that after this picture was taken I did indeed attempt to draw a few figures in ink while still cradling my daughter in my left hand. Kind of tricky.

And yes, the comic open before us there is an indispensable element of the piece I am working on at present. If all goes well, I may have more to tell before too much longer. (I'm sure that Isaac at least is a little curious...)

Beaumont Fletcher, Critical Detective

Hey, here's another color portrait of one of our old characters. I mean, it's sort of a color portrait.



To find out what makes Beaumont Fletcher sweat, consult the comics sestina in your copy of Satisfactory Comics #6.

Skele-Tut's Trip in Space

I've made a little more progress on that promotional image. It's going slowly, but the work is mostly pretty fun.

This afternoon, I daubed a few digital shades onto our old pal Skele-Tut, who is still lost in space...



To find out what Skele-Tut is staring at, consult your copy of Elm City Jams #2.

All Hail the King of Fleas!

I've been working on some color portraits of some of our old characters, for a piece of promotional material—nothing fancy, but sort of a fun way to spend some procrastination time.

I'm particularly happy with this image of the King of Fleas.



To find out more about the King of Fleas, you can consult your copy of Satisfactory Comics #5.

A Joke About Abecedarii

This might only be funny to you if you share Mike's sense of humor, but I cooked up a funny little device that I'm planning to run (at very small size) on the frontispiece and the corresponding blank page at the back ("backispiece"?) of the micro-mini ABC that I'm preparing for the MoCCA Festival.

Basically, it relies on a few of the most hackneyed connections in the "A is for Apple" genre...


Then, when the images reappear (after the actual meat of the book), new labels give the images new names and assign them to new letters of the alphabet.

I imagine it would be fun to put one of these together for the whole alphabet, coming up with three or four different solutions that relied on different levels of the lexicon, different degrees of specificity, or different languages. But I have two micro-minis to prepare, plus the next Matteu strip, so I don't think I'm going to engage in any more elaborate wordgames today.

Matteu (13-15)

For the next Matteu strips, Mike took advantage of the page break to move the story forward by a few minutes without showing them to us. (This is obviously something we're going to have to do from time to time, so we won't have to be drawing this story for twenty years.) I think the transition has done a lot to increase the tension of the story, even if the central conflict still hasn't really emerged.

Here's this week's installment of Matteu's story:



(As usual, I hope you'll click to enlarge and read.)

As you might be able to guess by looking at the last date (which seems to be Mike's date of composition, since he emailed the final copy to me just a few days ago), this brings us to the end of the three-strip pages. Now it's my challenge, I guess, to get another strip of this story done before this time next week, to keep up the regular updates.

Now's a great time for you lurking readers to pitch in and kibbitz a bit. Ask something about where the story is going: we may not know the answer until you pose the question.

Matteu (10-12)

I'm done coloring the images for the postcard version of our Elfworld submission. Once I get them back from the printer, I'll set up a post to sell them through the website; they'll also debut at MoCCA next month.

And, in what I hope will be my final wrangle with Photoshop for the week, I've put together the next page of the Matteu story. Things are starting to get tense, now, with a real conflict emerging, sort of...



(Please do click the image so you can read it.)

You may notice the cameo Mike and I are making in that first panel. Two free sets of the Stepan postcards for the first person who can identify our clan costumes! (Use the comments section and your knowledge of the comics Mike and I grew up reading.)

This is around the time when the chronological gaps between tiers started to get kind of long. I think more than a year passed between my two strips on this page. This is what you get when you mix comics with academia, I'm afraid.

I Wandered Lonely as a Crowd

I'm still coloring that Elfworld story, but I'm finally working on the last page, which is also the first page. You may remember that the first page is set in a bazaar. There's quite a crowd there.



This makes the job of coloring the thing very complicated. I wish I could say that I'd picked up enough facility with Photoshop to make this sort of thing quick and easy; alas, it looks like this page is going to take me about an hour per panel.

Why, a marketplace like this is enough to give a person agoraphobia! (Sorry. I'm sure Mike would have said it if I hadn't.)

I'll post more of the Matteu story tomorrow, by which time I should actually be finished with these postcards.

Color Update on the Stepan Story

I've been coloring the pages out of order, skipping over a few that I thought would present problems, and I just finished my fifth one -- which is p. 7. I think that means I'm halfway through with the work, or at least nearly there.

The page I just finished, as you may recall, is the one that swipes its layout, more or less, from Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase. I thought I'd try doing that page with a flat version of Duchamp's palette, leaving some of the painting visible in parts of the background.



What do you think?

Miniature Dogsbody

Page 6 of the Stepan story has a lot of tiny details in it. (It's my own fault. I know.)

Here, for example, is a very, very small image of Kalbi, sitting on the back of the stagecoach.



This is enlarged around 4X for your viewing pleasure.

Matteu (7-9)

So far, these Matteu pages haven't garnered much comment, but I'm going to keep posting installments at least once a week, hoping that Mike will lob the ball back into my court some time soon so we can get a nice volley going.

Without further introduction, here are the next three Matteu strips:

(Click-to-enlarge.)

... Apparently we got pretty interested in that business about horses. But now we're getting into the city itself, and I'm sure the plot is going to start moving forward. I can just feel it in my bones.

Notice the weird timing on this batch. I drew the middle tier as a response to a pencil version of the first tier; Mike inked both the first and the third tiers of this page on the same day.

Stepan's School of Hard Knocks

Well, I'm working on the color version of our Elfworld submission.

It feels like it's going to take forever, but I actually have some time to devote to comics for a change, so here we go. If I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, I'm sure I'll make visible progress soon.



Or, in the words of a captcha letter combo I got this evening,


But actually I am having fun with this, though it's terribly slow. Working on page 2, I've noticed a few things I hadn't seen yet, including a piece of Stepan's costume that disappeared pretty quickly (when I started drawing him, I guess -- oops!) and a pun (of sorts) that Mike slipped into panel 6. It's a real pleasure to go over Mike's pages and find all these little details. I'll post the next page of the Matteu story tomorrow.

Continuing Color Cuandary

All right: based on some feedback to the first post about Kalbi's costume, I've made some tweaks. Does this meet with everyone's approval?



Also, how about this color combination for Stepan? It's a little different from what I was showing Mike earlier today.

Kalbi's Kostume: Kolor Kwestion

So, I have finally started to color our Elfworld submission, "Stepan Crick and the Chart of the Possible", which I'm hoping to have ready as a set of ten color postcards in time for the MoCCA festival in early June. (I'd better get to coloring! The postcards will take some time to arrive!)

And already I'm at a quandary. I can't decide how to dress our dog-headed boy, Kalbi. Could you help me decide between these options?

Originally, I'd wanted to put him in purple, or in purple and blue, so I tried this out.

Option A

Mike said he liked that version, but a little bird on my shoulder kind of convinced me that I might want to try something else.

And so here he is again, in a sort of burgundy tunic:

Option B


And then there's the possibility of a sort of compromise:

Option C


I'm not sure which one of these looks best. If it helps you to know, Stepan is mostly dressed in green. Arntham, of course, is all in black.

Matteu (4-6)

Our pal Carl Pyrdum anticipated, in the comments on last week's installment, the next turn in the Matteu story: the peculiar fellow in the black robe, whose name turns out to be Karel (spooky!), explains his headgear:


(Click, of course, to make larger.)

As you can see, we moved away from the idea of developing a language for the Mihkra (Mike must have been having a Tolkien moment or something when he started that). You can probably see some jostling between me (even-numbered tiers) and Mike (odd-numbered tiers) on other matters, as well: what's to become of that horse, for example, when neither of us really likes to draw horses?

You'll also notice the first significant gaps between drawing times for the tiers: apparently, we waited almost a month between strips on this page. Those were not the first delays, nor the longest, by any means.

We welcome speculation on what might happen next, though I believe that was all decided back in 2005 ... or 2006? What's this story going to be about? It's still hard to say, isn't it? (We sure didn't know.)

Matteu (1-3)

Back in the summer of 2005, Mike and I started drawing two stories that both involve a scholar named Matteu. In both stories, set ten years apart, he travels to a walled city somewhere in the hinterlands. That's as much as we knew about the stories when we started, and I don't want to spoil any future revelations (or revisions) by trying to describe what he discovers there.

This project has been really slow in the making. Although we were originally planning to draw one strip of each story each week, swapping stories every week, a lot of other things have come higher on our list of priorities, and Matteu keeps getting postponed. (If we had kept up with the original plan, we'd have about a hundred pages of story now. As it is, we have almost ten.)

Because we're both a little embarrassed about the glacial pace at which this piece has been moving, we've decided to create a spur for ourselves with the blog here. We'll be posting one of the stories (the first visit to the town) here in weekly installments. The other story will continue to grow at the same pace, but will remain invisible to the internet for now. Until we catch up with new work, I'll post the story in pages instead of in individual strips. (The weekly unit of progress is a strip or a tier, not a page.)

Here are the first three strips:

(I recommend clicking to enhance legibility.)

The inspiration for this form of collaboration, by the way, was the Josh Neufeld / Dean Haspiel concoction Lionel's Lament, for which the pair of collaborators alternated two-panel tiers in a six-panel grid, working on the story in two halves simultaneously. It's a pretty fun jam, and Matteu's story has been a lot of fun for Mike and me, as well, though I don't think you'd ever guess that Matteu and Lionel shared much in their origins.

I hope you'll enjoy getting up to speed on Matteu's travels, and that you'll stick with us long enough to see the new material, which is just a few pages away.

Page 10, Inked

Getting through the end of the semester is never easy, but I always try to submit my grades on the same day that I give my last exam, so I can get back into the other things I always have to neglect at the end of the term. (For example, there's the MLA paper on Chris Ware and "the grammar of diagrams" that I'm delivering on Thursday; I still need to write that.)

But now that I've had a couple of days to recover from the end-of-term grading marathon, I have been able to put a few minutes into redrawing Ipthorin in one panel, then a couple of hours into inking the page. It's not the best cartooning I've ever done, but it is finished (I think), which is what matters.

Please, I beg of you, click on this image to see how our story ends.

I invite you to notice that I have not merely satisfied Jesse's remaining two constraints—as long as you count the middle of the second tier as a panel, it's the third silent panel in a row; the third panel on that row is mostly swiped from Jesse's recent and awesome Bluefuzz minicomic. Not merely, indeed, for I have also chosen two constraints from each of the preceding four sets of constraints and nodded to these in individual panels: the Corrigan and the Reverse Corrigan; the shop-sign and the Passion of Joan of Arc; the Ditko and the Segar (also a little nod to the J. Chris Campbell in the transition to the last panel); a borderless panel and a reference to Duchamp; even (why not) a panel of pure silhouette. You can see signs of me planning this stunt on one of the thumbnail pages I posted back in November. I'm surprised no one commented on that.

We're planning to leave the whole story up on the website for a little bit longer, but we'll pull most of it down when we start coloring the pages and printing them as postcards. When that happens, you'll have the option to buy a copy of the story, either all at once in a single envelope, or serialized to you (or the recipient of your choice) in the mail one page per week.

Meanwhile, please enjoy it in black and white for free, while it's here. I encourage you to use the comments section to discuss overarching themes in the story. For example: what view does this story take of potentiality and the realization of a single potential? What does that imply about the authors' apparent unwillingness to "grow up"?