Lecture Doodle: a Robot with a Sense of Fear

Well, I went to another lecture this evening, and while I was listening to the presentation I filled about half of a notebook page with random, silly doodles.



I liked that robot doodle enough to color it. Enjoy:



I don't have much to add to that. See you in a few days.

Doodle Penance: "new haven postcards"

This week's "Doodle Penance" post originates in a search that I've seen a few times in our Google logs: "new haven postcards."

And, to tell you the truth, there's already a perfectly adequate post on the site here about postcards of New Haven. I still have batches of them for sale, too, if you want some. But apparently that didn't satisfy this Google searcher, so we're going to draw some more.

So: if you've driven up Whitney Avenue in the past couple of years, you may have noticed that Yale has installed a life-size sculpture of a torosaurus outside of the Peabody Museum of Natural History. It's really pretty cool.



What you may not realize is that every year on October 29, zealous Elis adorn the torosaur with a nude male mannequin:



The mannequin usually stays in place until some time in the afternoon of October 29th. Police and museum officials have been lenient about the running gag, chuckling that a college just isn't a college without a few traditional pranks.

Edit: I couldn't resist tinkering a little with the color in my doodle. This isn't much better, but it does at least get the background to recede a little bit. I encourage anyone with better color sense than me to tell me what I did wrong with this drawing. Click to enlarge; leave a comment down below.



Mike, what have you got?

—Well, Isaac, I thought I'd contribute an image of one of my favorite spots in New Haven, the banks of the Mill River near the Orange Street bridge. The missus and I took frequent walks down to this calm oasis at the end of our neighborhood, and we loved that a mere twenty-minute stroll could bring us to a spot where it was possible to see nary a building nor a wire (though the sound of the nearby streets was always audible).

Of course, we also had to be careful on our walks owing to the occasionally unruly animal life. I once got bitten by a dog (prompting Becca to shout indignantly to its owner: "Your dog bit my husband!"). More worrisome, though, was the genuinely wild life, such as the most famous denizen of the lower Mill River; of course I mean Millie, the New Haven Crocodile:

While Millie could indeed be fearsome if caught unawares (or hungry), she was as much to be pitied as feared. No Connecticut native, this creature belonged in the Africa from which she hailed and for which she pined (that tear should show how much she misses the Nile). I myself am no native of the Elm City, but I do catch myself pining for it on occasion, huge reptiles and all. And with this living relative of your statuesque torosaurus, I conclude this postcard salute to New Haven!

Tardy Penance Penance: Super Friends

Doodle Penance is going to be a day or two late this week, because Mike's in transit and I'm scrambling to end my break on a productive note.

So, in lieu of the usual goofery, here's unusual goofery.



That's our friends Rachel and Nick, drawn as superheroes for a silly booklet Mike and I designed as a sort of wedding favor for them, more than three years ago. The color is new.

Happy Birthday, Mike Sterling

Today's the birthday of Mike Sterling, the inimitable author of Progressive Ruin, one of my favorite comics blogs.



If it's the last time in your life that "XL" fits you, Mikester, wear it well.

Other brithday tributes to Sterling here, here, here, here, and here.

Oh, and also here, albeit tardily.

Pogo at the Center for Cartoon Studies

One nice thing about being on spring break is that it frees me up to do some of the sorts of work I don't have time for during the regular workweek. For example, today I took a drive down to the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction to give a little guest lecture in Steve Bissette and Robyn Chapman's "Survey of the Drawn Story" course.

This week's class was on the subject of autobiographical comics, and I brought in a few images that I thought would helpfully complicate the easiest or most straightforward way of thinking about autobiography. (In essence, I was trying to suggest that although a lot of people think autobiography is about "expressing your true self" or "getting yourself onto the page," it's actually much more a question of telling interesting stories, just as fiction is, and that this requires a certain distance between the writer as narrator and the character or person being written about—a kind of retrospective awareness of the difference between present and past selves.) Here's a six-panel picture of that, from my lecture slides. Please click to enlarge this clever sequence from Eddie Campbell's After the Snooter:




(Those images really aren't formatted for the blog, are they? They looked better in Powerpoint. Really, please: click to enlarge.)

Anyway, the class was a lot of fun, and discussion after my talk got pretty interesting. It's always cool for me to go down to CCS And meet the new crop of cartoonists there, because I'm always sure some of them are going to draw great things in the next decade or so.

And look what smiling, happy, interesting students, even after three hours of lecture about comics arcana:



(Again, click to enlarge, so you can see Steve Bissette way back there in the back, on the left.)

But I wouldn't drive all the way to White River Junction without taking in the sights!

Actually, the drive was beautiful this morning: the trees and mountains were still frosted like a gingerbread house from a snow we got a couple of days ago. And to tell you the truth, I have so much fun when I'm at CCS that I probably would drive down for no reason other than dropping in on a class. But there were sights to see.

For example, no one should visit White River Junction without doing a status check on Alec Longstreth's Basewood Beard. Here's what Alec looked like at lunch today:



Alec gave me the new issue of Phase 7, which is a travelogue about his trip to Angoulême this year. I'm halfway through reading it, and it's good. If you're comics-curious, you owe it to yourself to check out a few of Alec's comics. He's for real.

But the thing that got me wanting to drive down to White River Junction in the first place was an exhibit at CCS (closed to the public now, but Robyn let me have a peek) of Walt Kelly Pogo strips from the collection of Garry Trudeau.

Prepare to be envious, Mike.

It's a nice exhibit, though sort of small one—there are less than thirty strips up, but I didn't count them. (Maybe it's more like twenty?) I learned a few things right away. For example, I never knew that this old joke, which I probably got from my wise-ass uncle, is originally a Pogo joke:



By the way, you can click any of these pictures to enlarge it, as usual, and in some cases that'll mean beautiful scrutiny of Walt Kelly's linework or lettering, so you may enjoy doing that.

I also enjoyed looking at Kelly's pencils. Since he penciled in non-photo blue, his pencils are still there on the board, under the ink, for anyone to see. It's interesting to see panels where he clearly reworked poses or action a fair amount before inking:



And it's also interesting to see how much more compact than his pencilled dialogue his finished lettering sometimes turned out to be:



It was also interesting to see the character designs in a strip from 1948, before Pogo and Albert and friends had settled into their more familiar appearances.



But mostly it was just nice to soak up a little of the master craftsmanship. I'll post a few images (mostly of Churchy) without further comment.










Thanks to Robyn Chapman, Steve Bissette, and the people at CCS for the invitation! I'm always glad to drop in down there.

Doodle Penance: "rorschach mask pattern sewing"

Well, it seems like everyone and his dog is talking about Watchmen this week, and apparently our Google search logs aren't inoculated against Watchmania either. This week's "Doodle Penance" comes from some crafty type who was pointed here in a search for "rorschach mask pattern sewing."

As is often the case, I was initially befuddled by this search. Fortunately, I have read and taught the graphic novel co-created by Dave Gibbons quite a few times now, and I'm pretty familiar with its visual motifs.

Casting my mind's eye back over the details of Watchmen, I remembered a panel that seemed to be the one this googler was looking for. Oddly, I haven't been able to find it online or in a quick cursory glance through the book. So, since this is doodle penance anyway, I went ahead and drew it from memory. (You can click to enlarge.)



Mike's off on a trip, so he won't be able to post stories of sewing his own Rorschach mask when he was in junior high, but he has already alluded to it. (And that's probably what our googler originally saw.)

Lecture Doodle: a Robot with a Lot on His Mind

Yesterday I attended a lecture, and my idle hands turned out to be a doodle's playthings yet again. No surprise there.



You can click to enlarge any of the images in this post.

For some reason, I'm charmed enough with that robot that I decided to color him.



The process of coloring in Photoshop, even with flat colors like these, is a little painstaking, but I've done it enough now that it doesn't take too long. The trick is to set up a separate layer (set to "darken" instead of "normal") over your linework, then use the angle-lasso tool to circle each field of color, then paint-bucket each color into its place.

Last week's doodle penance saw me fiddling around with the "Pixelate—>Color Halftone" filter on my finished color layer, in order to imitate the benday-style coloring in one of Lewis Trondheim's books. Doing that with this colored doodle left me with this:



But I wanted to do a little more fiddling. On this version, I tried using the Color Halftone pixelation setting with only the magenta channel of the CMYK color. It still isn't quite "coloring like a little old lady from Bridgeport," but I like the effect.



You'll want to click that image to enlarge it, so you can see the effect I'm talking about.

That's all for now. Just some stupid procrastination. Don't I have exams to grade?