Alphabeasts: M is for Mugato

This week's Alphabeasts creature is dear to my heart despite of — nay, perhaps because of — its intense dorkiness. It's not just a guy in a white gorilla suit. No, this is gorilla suit with a few horns and a tail stuck on!



This must be the week for goofy alphabeasts!

Maybe you're not familiar with the mugato. This video clip will tell you all ye need to know.



Maybe you would prefer the sort of cartoon that isolates a creature from its natural environment, without that mysterious grainy background. (And if you're the first to tell me, in the comments below, where I got that background, then I'll happily send you a couple of alphabet minicomics for free.)

If you want to see its feet, in other words, or if you just want it bigger, here's a picture from my working files.



It took me a while to work out a pose that would allow me to show off the mugato's goony face and the row of ridiculous dinosaur-style spikes that run down its back. Here are some of my notes, on the back of an envelope.



Next week: another possibly apocryphal mid-century etymological surprise.

Doodle Penance: "8 scenes comics using pronouns"

This week's "Doodle Penance" is going to be unusual, because it's also sort of a trivia contest for you, our devoted (or casual) reader. The term that inspired this comes from someone who was searching for "8 scenes comics using pronouns."

Below you will find eight panels that feature ambiguous pronoun reference, or unclear antecedent.

I leave it to you, Dear Reader, to identify the things to which the pronouns in the following panels refer. (Mike and I have redrawn the panels, or else it wouldn't be a Doodle Penance, and at least one of the panels has been edited to remove the referent.)

For each item in this quiz, the correct answer will be "D: None of the above." Your task is to ferret out and state the actual, specific answer. You can put your answers in the comments section, or you can email your replies to isaac dot cates at aya dot yale dot edu, if you're worried about giving a good answer away.

The person with the most correct answers by the end of the week, or the first person to get all eight, will win a prize from the Satisfactory Comics back-issue archives.

UPDATE! A winner has been chosen! Stay tuned for an answer key!

Here are the questions:


1.


A. Spiro Agnew.
B. Alfred E. Newman.
C. The artist who put my eyebrows on the horizon line.
D. None of the above.


2.


A. Having my horns tickled.
B. Awesome old folklore.
C. Ron Perlman's singing voice.
D. None of the above.


3.


A. Passing my Classics final.
B. Setting all forty-eight VCRs.
C. Applying antiperspirant.
D. None of the above.


4.


A. My pet anole.
B. My new composition for panflute and timpani.
C. My hairstyle.
D. None of the above.


5.


A. A copy of Playboy from the '70s.
B. The Special Edition of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
C. A big bag of Cheetos.
D. None of the above.


6.

A. The collapse of Lehman Brothers.
B. The skyrocketing cost of ink.
C. The rise of furrydom.
D. None of the above.


7.

A. The hatching of a tyrannosaur egg.
B. The blooming of a hybrid tulip.
C. The reconciliation of Alan Moore and Paul Levitz.
D. None of the above.


8.

A. The publication of The Collected Pogo.
B. The creation of heart-friendly Krispy Kremes.
C. The musical adaptation of the film adaptation of the graphic-novel adaptation of a postmodern mystery novella.
D. None of the above.

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.

Elfworld Title: And the Winner Is...

Way back on December 9, 2007, I announced a contest to name our work-in-progress, this story about a magician's apprentice who runs into trouble over a cartographic commission. We didn't exactly receive a flood of submissions, but we did get several great suggestions from two of our faithful readers, Shira and Adam, and I pledged a couple of prizes for whoever provided the winning suggestion.

Unfortunately for Shira and Adam, I also warned them that we might end up using one of our own titles after all, and that's what we've opted for in the end. Ladies and gentlemen, a little over six months after we started this story (!), I present its title:

By now Isaac will have dropped that graphic into the appropriate space he left blank on the top left of page 1, thereby completing the line art and lettering for our postcard-format publication of this story. (The postcards still need to be colored, but that's another task for another day.)

Now: even though we have turned down the title suggestions of Shira and Adam, I'm so grateful to them for their active participation in this collaborative comic that I'm going to honor those pledges for prizes after all. So if you're still reading after all this time, let me know if you'd rather have an ultra-rare copy of Tales from the Classroom or your own commissioned artwork from the world of "Stepan Crick and the Chart of the Possible."

Name our story and win a prize!

Now that we're almost done with our tale, we're really starting to feel the need for a title. Isaac thoughtfully left a space for one back on page 1, but that space is still blank, and we're having a hard time filling it ourselves.

It's not for lack of ideas; instead, we have too many! Of course, this confusing profusion of possibilities fits the underlying theme of our story: just as the shadowfolk resist the creation of a map that would fix their shifting contours into one shape, so too we don't want to decide on a single title that would foreclose all the other likely titles.
At least, that's what we've been telling ourselves. The other possibility is that none of our proposed titles is really satisfying enough to stand on its own, and each only seems plausible because it alternates with a bunch of other okay-but-not-great options.

Which brings me to our invitation to you, our readers: we appeal to you to come up with a better title than the ones we're working with! Use the comments to offer up any ideas you have. We do not guarantee that we will settle on a reader's submission for our title, but if we do, I will express our appreciation by sending you your choice of either the ultra-rare Tales from the Classroom or a finished drawing of the character(s) of your choice, up to a group shot of five figures. Still not interested? Well, we'll be really grateful! How about that?

Just so you know what you're up against, here are some of the potential titles we've been tossing about:

The Uncharted World • Unsettled Territory • The Unmade Map • A Map of the Possible • The Chart of the Possible • Stepan's Story [working title] • Vague Terrain • Border Dispute • Shadowy Cartography • A Map of the Invisible

Tales from the Classroom

I'm working on inking our "I Saw You" anthology submission, but I thought I'd go ahead and fulfill the promise I made last week and make a post about Tales from the Classroom, the collection of teaching case-studies that we drew for the Graduate Teaching Center at Yale over the summer of 2003. Here's the cover, which is loaded with little gags and fun details you may not be able to make out in this photo (though you can click it, like any of the images in this post, to enlarge it). Notice the way we used the Mike Mignola theory of triangular composition on this one:

Can you spot Zombie Mike and Isaac? If the GTC prints a second edition of the book (and they've been talking about doing that), I'd like to recolor the cover. Now that I know a little more about Photoshop (I don't think I had ever even used it then), I could probably make that color look a lot better.

Tales from the Classroom is a collection of seven stories or scenarios about problem moments in the classroom, drawn from real teaching experiences by graduate students at Yale. Everything in the book was adapted from prose "case studies" written up by the people who experienced the events. (These studies were fictionalized with respect to names and disciplines, but the events remained the same.)

Our idea with Tales from the Classroom was that, if prospective teachers learn well from reading and discussing prose case studies, wouldn't they gain even more from reading comics, where they could observe gestures, facial expressions, spatial relations, and so forth? Judging from the response we've received from this book, that's certainly the case -- though more often than not, people just want to talk to us about Millie and Charles.

Several of the cases lack closure (which is why I think of them more as scenarios than stories) and they often end with questions designed to promote conversation. Often, this takes the form not only of "What should I do next?" but "What did I do wrong?" or "How did I let this happen?" -- and we did our best to load the stories with clues as to the origins of the problems that finally come to a head and drive the teachers to seek help.

Here's an example of a truly awkward moment that the grad student in question probably could have headed off, where one of his freshmen starts to act on the crush she has on him:

(I've rearranged those panels slightly from the way they appeared in the original book, for your convenience.) If you read that story, our hope is that you can see how James could have prevented this situation, or what in his teaching style led to this predicament.

Here's a couple of sequences from the longest story in the book, a scenario that's not only about teaching but about the advice you can give to other teachers. In this one, Carl is an art history T.A. whose section seems to be going really well until he gets to the very end of class. The discussion is very lively, intense and interesting, right up until he asks the question that's supposed to connect the section's activities to what's been happening (on quite a different track) in lecture.

Animated discussion ...

... that leads to awkward silence?

Things actually get a little worse than just awkward silence before the end of this story, since this question and its subsequent discussion manage to offend one of Carl's students in a way he didn't anticipate. The whole thing is being observed by a grad student from the Teaching Center, and the questions at the end of the case aren't just about what Carl should be doing, but about what the observer feels it's fair to tell him.

Strictly in terms of cartooning, doing this much adaptation of "talky," dialogue-heavy narrative gave us plenty of chances to experiment with layout, and we had a lot of fun with that. Here's a sequence with the aforementioned Millie the Mumbler, a case-study from a foreign-language classroom, where one of the students simply will not participate at an audible volume:

(Obviously, I was taking a page out of Chris Ware's playbook for that one; imitation is supposed to be the sincerest flattery.)

Here's a nice little sequence of "scene-to-scene" transitions with very little change, from a piece called "Joe the Dreamer," about a student who sleeps through most of a summer Italian class, and what to say to his classmates when they mock him behind his back (but in front of the instructor). Again, I've rearranged the panels, and again, you really have to click to enlarge:

... And here's another contest! I'll send copies of two Satisfactory or Elm City Jams comics to the first person who correctly identifies (in the comments on this post) all four jokes in all four of Joe's t-shirts!

For those of you who don't win the contest, however, I'm also posting, below, the entirety of the case study called "The Silent Critic," which features Charles, the Creepy Colleague, a fellow T.A. who so gets under the narrator's skin that the narrator starts to doubt his own teaching and his own ideas. You'll want to click these images to enlarge them, naturally -- but the whole thing ought to be readable.





I don't have enough copies of this book to sell them, but if you'd like to get one of your own, I suggest that you follow the "Contact Us" link on the Graduate Teaching Center website and pester Bill Rando or one of the GTC staff about bringing out a second edition. It's high time this book was in the hands of more people, I think.

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.

Satisfactory Comics #4 (Jun. 2003)

In some ways, #4 might be my favorite issue of Satisfactory Comics, at least for sentimental reasons. We had a lot of fun writing it, and I think it's the first issue where we really felt happy with our cartooning and storytelling. It's even more kid-friendly than our first three issues, and at the MoCCA festival I often suggest it as a purchase for parents who have brought their children to the show. (There's precious little at most small-press comics shows that's suitable for young kids, and I think comics-loving parents are often grateful for a suggestion.)

The story follows a boy named Sam, who runs away from home because his parents don't share his love of strong odors. He meets up with a tophat-wearing skunk and a bescarfed opossum ... ah, yes: here they all are:

Together, they run into a few different troubles, but the main threat is a group of horned ogres who have a machine that turns people into more ogres. This army of monsters seems ready to swarm over the whole world, so the Parliament of Owls instructs the trio to stop them by destroying the machine.

The skunk has a real way with words, and as a character he was extremely fun to write. If you click on this image to see the page a little larger, you'll see a tongue-twister that we wrote especially for the occasion, as Sam and his friends get caught in a thicket of thistles:


The real high point of this issue, I think, is the center splash / spread, in which our three heroes meander through a large swampscape. I'm not sure whether you'll be able to make them out in this image (you can click on it to make it bigger), but there are lots of fun details here, including cameos by Man-Thing, Swamp Thing, and the Thing, numerous fun swamp critters, and even one of the cannibal mermaids.

Those two pages took a long time to draw, as you might expect, and a long time to ink. They were the last two pages we inked, in fact, and after Mike finished pencilling his last page, we turned the swampscape sideways so we could both ink on it at the same time. (We were working on a card table that was elevated on a few platforms made of dictionaries and phonebooks, in the living room of my funky, dusty old apartment.) Once the un-inked area was down to a certain size, we brought a piano bench into the room so we could sit side by side and ink in the same area simultaneously. Now that's collaboration!

In fact, the swampscape has one of our favorite "inside" jokes in it: a moment where Walt and Skonk greet five frogs on a log:

The first person who correctly identifies each of those five frogs in the comments section will get a free Satisfactory Comic of his or her choosing! They're all comics frogs (swiped from other cartoonists and not some other medium), but that's the only hint you'll get. Plus: the first person who explains why the frogs' speech balloons (and Walt's) also count as an inside joke (or reference) will ALSO get a free Satisfactory Comic of his or her choosing. It's a contest!

Here's another post about a couple of the other fun features of Satisfactory Comics #4.

This issue, like the other early issues, costs $1.75 postpaid via Paypal, $1.50 by check, or $1.00 in person. Unlike the first three issues, however, it's twenty pages long! Here's the button:

Contributors to this issue were asked to give us a noun or a noun phrase that they would enjoy seeing in a fable or an adventure story. We worked all twenty nouns (which ranged from "possum" and "grandfather clock" to "a selfish and tired life") into the story, as dutifully as we could. The friends who gave us these nouns were Jesse Reklaw, Jeff Seymour, Josephine Yun, Forrester Hammer, Jacob Edwards, Rabbi Jim Ponet, Grace Meng, Lisa and Steve Bagley, Erica Merchant and Jon Lewis, Steve Newman, Tom O'Donnell, Susan Cates, Rich Berman, Dave Gortler, Avery Foster, Chris Cessac, Catherine Rockwood, Liza Graham, and the Honorable Danny Boggs.