MW meets MW at SPX

Just a quick note, an aside from the would-be Elfworld-proceedings:

This past weekend the Small Press Expo (SPX) took place in Bethesda, Maryland, not far from where I live now. I enjoyed visiting with friends and cartoonists who came down for the convention, including occasional SatCom collaborators Shawn Cheng, Tom K, Bill Kartalopoulos, Jon Lewis, Karen Sneider, and Ben Towle, not to mention my buddy Isaac himself. Smart and generous minicomics artists were in full effect!

But I also enjoyed the chance to talk for a while with some major artists of the reg'lar-sized comics variety, notably Gilbert Hernandez of Love and Rockets fame and Matt Wagner of Mage, Grendel, and assorted DC Comics fame. For a while now I have felt that I might not have stopped reading comics for ten years if the proprietors of my hometown nerd store had seen fit to recommend titles like L&R, Hate, and Eightball when I began to grow restless with Detective; my introduction to Beto's work was sadly belated. But at least I was reading Matt Wagner's work back then, and I think it has had a greater influence on my cartooning than I usually recognize.

My enthusiasm for Grendel was shared with my high-school pal David, and probably it was our short-lived effort to tell our own Grendel story that shifted my cartooning ambitions from comic strips to comic books (in the long run, a smart move for this cartoon hobbyist, as the outlets for amateur minicomics seem more accessible to me than those for amateur comic strips—at least since I won't be launching any comic-strip websites). In fact, David inked my pencils before Isaac ever did, though no more than a single page of Grendel accosting the reader with a plea to "Bring back the Primer"—Comico's erstwhile showcase for fledgling cartoonists, where Wagner himself launched Grendel twenty-five years ago.

Which brings me back to this weekend. Wagner attended SPX in part to promote a silver-anniversary book dedicated to the art of Grendel, and that gave me the chance to thank him, fanboyishly, for the stirring example of his comics on my impressionable young mind. And one of the impressions that Wagner made, even back then, was that steady work can improve one's skills dramatically. Compare the first few issues of Mage with the last, and you'll see a quick development in Wagner's confidence and command. He addresses this himself in the last paragraphs of the introduction to his newly-published Grendel Archives, containing the first few stories of his flagship antihero:

It is my sincerest wish that readers will find a certain inspiration in these pages and come to feel, as I do, that they stand as a true testament to the powerful potential of the creative spirit. Despite any negative response I might have encountered in the press, my own primal urge to express myself in this medium led my efforts onward and upward. I knew that if I opened my mind both to criticism and to craftsmanship, it would lead me to new perspectives and enable me to further develop my skills. It is in the act of making art that one truly becomes an artist.

If I could do it, so can you.

Never falter and never look back.


Except to regard how far you’ve come.

If Wagner comes off as slightly pretentious toward the end, there, I'm prepared to cut him some slack: tone can be hard to manage in prose, and by his own admission he's not great at writing ("—or at art; I'm great at putting them together," to quote him from a panel yesterday afternoon). In person, Wagner impressed me with his easy affability and lack of self-importance. If I have any quibbles with his encouraging declaration that the way to become an artist is simply to make art, it's that he throws up another roadblock when he says "[n]ever falter and never look back." I think that Isaac and I have both learned a lot from our errors and failures along the way, and we've learned from them in part by gritting our teeth and looking back at them, in all their embarrassing clumsiness. Not all of the useful criticism of our work has come from outside, after all. That said, Wagner's surely right that one shouldn't dwell overmuch on past shortcomings—not when there are still more comics to be made.

And on that note, I will next post when I have some thumbnails to share for page 8 of Stepan's story!

Script (Tentative) for p. 7

I was going to email this to Mike, but then I realized that I might as well release it for general kibitzing. I'm going to forego the thumbnails for the single big panel that is p. 7, and jump right into the pencils, for reasons that will become clear. The text in the page is all in captions that sort of slide down the page, sometimes askew, Joe Sacco-style.

Here's the script. Each paragraph is a new caption.

QUICKLY—ALMOST BEFORE I
CAN THINK—EVERYTHING
BECOMES A CHAOTIC BLUR.

WE'RE OUTNUMBERED, BUT I
CAN'T SEE HOW MANY OF THE
SHADOWS ARE OUT THERE.

THE JUNKMEN HANDLE THEMSELVES WELL—
TOSSING SWORD-BLOWS AND KICKS OF ALL KINDS.

BUT THE SHADOWS
KEEP CLOSING IN.

I'M TRYING TO
CAST A SPELL—

BUT I DON'T HAVE
MANY THINGS AT HAND.

QUICK—

WHAT IS THE ESSENTIAL
NATURE OF A SALTCELLAR?

—OF A WHEEL?

—OF A GREEN BOX?

—OF REINS?

EUREKA!

I GRAB THE REINS AND USE
THEM TO BIND ONE OF THE
SHADOWS TO MY WILL.

BUT I'M TOO LATE.

DESPITE OUR EFFORTS, TWO
SHADOWS GRAB ARNTHAM
AND HIS MAP—

—AND ABDUCT HIM INTO
THEIR INVISIBLE WORLD.

Now, at least, Mike knows what happens on p. 7, so he can start planning p. 8. And I'm packing in a lot more than three Duchamp references for Tom: the phrase "kicks of all kinds" is from a Duchamp title, as is "Green Box"; also, Duchamp apparently sometimes referred to himself as "the Salt-Seller" (Marcel Duchamp = Marchand du sel), so there's a pun in another one of my random objects...

... and there will be more references, at the visual level, for which you'll have to wait.

Tom Motley's Constraints to Us (pp. 7-8)

I've been sitting on these for a few days, so they wouldn't get in too far ahead of our completion of the preceding two pages, but I think the time has come to post them. These are the fiendish constraints created for our next two pages by our friend and frequent collaborator Tom Motley.

"These are simple, maybe even mundane," he says. "But when you put them together, they could be tricky. The pages so far are feeling a bit compressed, so let's let some air in...

"1. One of the two pages must be a single full page panel.

"2. At least one of the other panels must have no borders.

"3. At least one panel must have pictures instead of words in the speech or thought balloons.

"4. Three panels must link together to form a pan sequence (a continuous background chopped into panels). These panels needn't be adjacent.

"5. There must be three or more subtle allusions to the work of Marcel Duchamp."

Oh, he says they're simple, but in fact they combine in some pretty devious ways. Notice that if I choose #1 for my page (p. 7), I can't use #2 or #4, so I have to leave those for Mike, and I have to take #3 and #5 for myself. One choice is all I get!

I'd have a tiny bit more freedom if I took #2 and #4 for myself—I could choose which of #3 or #5 to foist on Mike—but I've got a plan for how to work the other combination.

...And if you look at my pencils for p. 6, you'll see that I've already built in a couple of allusions to Duchamp that I'll only have to repeat visually on p. 7. By the way, I have some really rough thumbnails for that one already, but I think I'm just going to jump to the pencils in my posts.

Page 5, inked

Well, it's been three full weeks since Isaac posted the last finished page, but here at long last is page 5, more or less finished (you may click the image to enlarge it):

A couple of corrections are in order (stray or wobbly lines here and there, and I still need to suggest the "ring for service" label on the countertop sign in the first two panels). And having just seen a prime version of "the Bagge" by Peter Bagge himself, in the latest issue of Apocalypse Nerd, I am well aware that my distorted version of John the constable in panel 2 is woefully pedestrian. Sorry, Ben! Still, this version should suffice until the final clean-up before publication.

And really, we are planning to finish this, and not too far off our notional schedule, either. Isaac and I have both had a couple of very busy weeks, and this comics-making activity of ours is strictly extracurricular. But Isaac wisely factored in an extra week in our schedule when we started back in August, and now that the fall Jewish holidays are over I have a lot more working hours per week again—so I should be able to get things back on track once I see what's happening with page 7. (Wishful thinking? Wish me luck!)

But before we get there, Isaac's got to finish page 6—so I'll jump back to his just-posted pencils of that page to see if I can offer any useful comment. ("You come, too!" as Frost might have said, were he a blogging cartoonist...)

Page 6 pencils (obstructed story)

Well, I have some pencils done for p. 6 of that Elfworld submission now. I have already made one change since drawing this: the label on the side of the coach is going to end with "SALVAGE" and not with "JUNKERY."

There are going to be a lot of spot blacks in this page, because it's set outside in the dark. If you see a little "x" floating in an otherwise empty field, that means the whole field will be black. (Probably I don't have to explain that convention to most of you reading this, but who knows? I want to be reader-friendly, even for the uninitiated.)



Please click on that image to make it legible, then let me have any critiques or suggestions you can come up with. I want to start lettering the page some time late today or early tomorrow, so I'll really appreciate speedy comments.

They are the Eggmen...

I'm still working on my pencils for page 6 of the Elfworld submission, but I just made a few funny notes that I thought I'd share...

I wanted to make sure I knew what the junkmen look like, before I started putting them into my page, and I only had a single image of each one. So I drew a few quick doodles to get more familiar with them.

I think I would read a story where these guys were the stars.

Type the what huh?

Hi, folks. I am still swamped with other stuff, though I still have that page out on my art table to be pencilled, and I will get it done this weekend one way or another. After that, I'll post Tom Motley's constraints for pages 7 and 8, and my thumbnail for page 7. It's all on that back burner somewhere.

Meanwhile, just to show that I haven't disappeared from the world, here's a little post. Earlier today, Bully, the Little Stuffed Bull, had an indecipherable captcha. (Those are the strings of letter that Blogger makes you type before you can put in a comment, for example: they're designed to thwart spam engines, not regular people.)

Well, Bully, I've got you beat. A few days ago, before I could comment, I was asked to type this:


My first thought was, "Is this something from On Beyond Zebra?"

Then I thought that first cluster of letters looked sort of like a Space Invader. Or maybe one of the Martians from Sesame Street. Yup yup yup yup yup.

UPDATE: Nope. Nope. Nope. I think maybe it was reminding me of some freaky letter M with eyeballs—I'm having a vague memory here, and it's giving me the creeps, actually. The closest I could get with a cursory look at the YouTube was this animation...

...but I think I'm remembering something else: an angrier M, yellow, a puppet of some kind? I'll keep looking.