Izzy Challenge #5

I got something neat in the mail this afternoon, and since it's a bit closer to the alleged subject of this blog than my last post, I thought I'd do some show and tell.

This is the new issue of J.B. Winter's Izzy Challenge, a jam / constraint-based minicomic in which Winter tries out new and experimental ideas for collaborative comics.



I'm in it. You see, back when I still lived in Connecticut and Tom Motley (who has a new blog, by the way) still lived in Colorado, we became neighbors in a list of cartoonists from all fifty states...



... Or, wait -- maybe that's not the best way to explain it.

The latest issue of Izzy is a fifty-state, fifty-cartoonist jam, in which each cartoonist drew a vacation snapshot for Izzy the Mouse as he made his way (impossibly, alphabetically) through the entire union. (Sorry, Mike, Izzy skipped DC.) Each drawing started with a cartoon of Izzy in a weird pose (drawn by Winter), and the cartoonist for that state chose a background and filled it in.

It's a fun little book, and well worth a read, if only to see what sorts of trouble Izzy gets into in Rhode Island or West Virginia. It's also cool to see Motley and me in close proximity to the likes of Matt Feazell and the J. Chris Campbell. (Shouts out, too, to my new neighbors in the Trees and Hills cartooning group, Colin Tedford of New Hampshire and Morgan Pielli of Vermont!)

Anyway, if you're interested in getting a copy for yourself, it's only a buck over at Winter's Etsy store. Pick up a copy of Noodle #2 (my favorite of his minis) while you're there!

Two New Shuffleupagus Pages

Mike was up in New Haven over the weekend, and on Monday we got together to do a little drawing. We made some big progress on a project for an anthology -- more about that in a week or so -- but we also did a little bit of jam cartooning with a guy I met at MoCCA, Jason Bitterman. (Jason is an undergrad at Wesleyan, and is around New Haven this summer. He tells me he hasn't updated that website in years, but I like to make links in these posts when I can...)

With Jason, we drew a couple more pages of shuffleupagus strips, of the sort that you can find in any issue of Elm City Jams. (If you don't know how this jam game works, I implore you to follow that first link, to a post from way back on July 28th.)

Anyway, here are the two new strips. As usual, you can click on each to bring it up to legible size.


For this one, we just happened to draw (from our deck of characters) the creepy, scared little girl with the huge eyes and the shark teeth that appeared in the post where I was describing how shuffleupagus is played. Her demise was, sadly, unavoidable.


In this one, the character and the setting had both been in our decks for ages. The little shirtless cowboy was designed by Tom Hart during one of the jam sessions for ECJ #2, and I think I drew up the dinosaur jungle when we were working on the first issue.

It's worth noting that, without conferring or even muttering anything about it, Mike and I managed to draw nearly the same image in the first round of this shuff: his is panel 6 and mine is panel 8. Apparently, addled minds think alike.

Shuffleupagus

Every issue of Elm City Jams has contained a few pages of Shuffleupagus, a cartooning game invented by our pal Jesse Reklaw. It's easier to play than to explain, but let me try:

Technically, you need five people to play, but we've done it with four and even as few as three. You'll also need your drawing gear and a supply of blank cards.

(I've heard of people playing with 3" x 5" index cards, but we use 2.5" x 4.125" pieces of bristol board, because those will compose into the right dimensions for a standard mini page at the end, and because bristol board is nice and sturdy.)

To get ready to play, each cartoonist should take two blank cards and draw one character and one setting. We tend to orient the characters vertically and the settings horizontally: that gives more room for details in the settings, and it gives room for a full-body sketch for the character.

Here's a bunch of settings from out of our deck, by me, Tom O'Donnell, Mike, and Tom Hart:

... And here's a batch of characters, by Mike, Tom O'Donnell, myself, and Mike again:

(It's important to draw all of the character, since you'll want details like the shoes or hooves to be consistent. It also helps if your drawing suggests a personality, either by appearance or gesture; you may also want to indicate scale, or to discuss it with your fellow cartoonists later, before you start drawing.)

Then you collect two stacks of cards and shuffle each. Now you're ready to play.

Four people draw in the first part:

1. Pick one character and one setting. (If you have five people, the person who designed the character can sit out for the first part.) So you might have something like this:

Or like this:


2. Each person then gets a blank card and draws the character doing something in the setting:


3. These four images, when they're inked, get shuffled into a "deck" of five, with a card that's marked "start / end." (Here's our battle-scarred start/end card:)


4. Now you need five people to play the second part of the game. Everyone gets another blank card.

5. If all five people can sit around the same table, then deal the five-card deck into the spaces between them. (This is the part that's easier to do than to explain.) Whoever has the "start/end" card on his left is going to draw the first panel of the strip, and the strip reads around to the right from there:


Another way to think of this is that the four cards you drew in the first round are getting placed into the even positions of your nine-panel grid, like this:


And the task of the second round is to connect these four panels into a story, or at least into a coherent sequence. In-betweening can be a challenge, especially if the characterization (or costume!) isn't consistent in all four panels, but that's part of the fun.

Here's a finished product, visible for the first time. This is the Shuffleupagus page that Mike and I did with Adam Rosenblatt and Ben Towle right before SPX in the fall of 2006. (This will appear in a fourth issue of Elm City Jams if there ever is one.) You can, as usual, click on this image to bring it up to legible size.


It's interesting to imagine what this little story would have looked like if the initial four panels had dealt out in a different order. (In-betweening from my panel 2 to Ben's panel 6, for example, would have been pretty easy, in a different story.)

If you found my explanation confusing, here's a link to another description of shuffleupagus by a different cartooning group. Ben Towle's "Three-Cent Pup" drawing group down in Winston-Salem seems to be having a good time with the game, too: here's a link to one of their shuffleupagus jams. You'll notice that the Three-Cent Pup folks don't limit themselves to nine panels.

It's a fun game, and if you know a few cartoonists, I suggest you try it out!

By the way, if you have fewer than five people, you can still play the game. If you have four people, just have the first person who finishes in the second round jump over into the "empty seat" you create when you deal out the cards. If you have three, let one person double up in the first round, then two people double up in the second one.

Elm City Jams #3 (May 2005)

In the third issue of Elm City Jams, apparently just to make things more difficult for ourselves, we added a new complication to each of our one-page jam strips: every page would begin with a title drawn at random, as before, and a formal constraint drawn at random from a different deck.

Some of these constraints were straightforward (if vexing), like a requirement that every panel run the full height of the page, or a requirement that the panels be shaped like something important in the panel. Some of the other constraints were more baroque, like the one we used in "Draculina vs. Wolf Lady," where each caption was written and obscured before the accompanying panel was drawn (without knowing what that panel said).

In "Kirby Speaks Through Ouija," the constraint was that we had to make use of Matt Madden's Exercises in Style, so the strip swipes each of his panels, though in the opposite order. Here's the middle tier:


Probably my favorite strip in this book is "Because of This, I Cannot Love," a sort of tribute to Lewis Trondheim's Mr. O. You'll certainly need to click on this in order to read it -- the panels are tiny -- but please come back when you're done.

The constraint, here, was that the comic had to be a thinly veiled advertisement for Doritos.

We seem, in this issue, to have added a liberal dose of blasphemy to our regular mix of profanity and scatology, so if you're offended by that sort of thing, you might want to steer clear of Elm City Jams #3. On the other hand, if you have room in your heart for jokes about crucifixion, click on this image to enlarge it. It's one of our best shuffleupagus pages, featuring a little fish-boy designed by Jon Lewis.


The whole book is full of our typical weirdness -- the sense of humor one reader has called "random and stupid" -- and in ECJ #3 you can find Egyptians fighting Hapsburgs, Death Metalca and the Apocalypse Peavey, a knight with a monkey on his arm, a monologue by Shakespeare's Iago, a nonchalant indy ninja turtle, Ape-Day, a strip about our ECJ hazing rituals, and the Venerable Bede in underoos (hello, search engines!).



The inside back cover offers a mock tutorial on building this sort of craziness, which resulted in three characters we love dearly but have yet to use in an actual comic:


Contributors to this issue inclue Tom O'Donnell, Jeff Seymour, Shana Mlawski, Harry Dozier, and Mike and myself. As usual, it's a 20-page, hand-stapled, digest-sized minicomic, and you can have it for $1.75 if you use Paypal, $1.50 if you use a check, and $1.00 if you get it from me in person. Here's that fancy Paypal button you've been waiting for:

Elm City Jams #2 (May 2004)

For our second issue of Elm City Jams, we pulled in a few ringers: we held one of our jam sessions in Brooklyn, and got Jon Lewis, Tom Hart, and Bill Kartalopoulos to add to the usual insanity provided by Tom O'Donnell, Jeff Seymour, Mike, and myself. Linnea Duvall joined us for a later jam back in New Haven.


If the first issue of Elm City Jams was a promising idea, this issue really delivers on that promise. I think it's the funniest single issue of any comic we've published. Even now, three years later, some of the strips still make me laugh, and as I was looking through this issue to try to summarize it, I was surprised at how many high-quality strips are packed into its twenty pages. When a customer at the MoCCA Festival asks for something humorous, this is the book I put into his or her hands -- unless the customer is a kid, because, like all issues of Elm City Jams, this one contains explicit language and images.


In lieu of trying to explain the contents, I have put together a little montage of panels, mostly taken out of context. Please click on this image to make it legible. It's worth a click.

You're looking at panels from "The Devil's Avocado," "Halliburt 'n' Ernie," "Damn Tree-Hugging Robots," "Don't Mess With Hexes," a shuffleupagus page featuring Skele-Tut, "Jared Fogle Kills a Prostitute," another shuffleupagus page, and Suge-Sodee, the Sugary Sodas Giant, in "A Man Who Needs No Introduction." (I'll write another post about shuffleupagus some time, though it was invented by Jesse Reklaw and we can't take the credit for the idea.)

The book also includes (not pictured) Alkibiades and his Randy Pals in "Bibulous Sophistry," the adventures of "Hezekiah Sugata, Hillbilly Shogun," some rapping by M.C. Baldeaglehead, parodies of Star Trek and Keiji Haino, and a strip so strange it could only be called "Penny Sandwiches."

If you have this comic, I think you will be impressed with the variety and peculiarity of the strips, and with their generally high level of success as jams. (It'll often be difficult to tell where one cartoonist stopped and another one picked up the page, which is part of what we aim for with our jams.)

As with all of our 20-page comics, this one costs $1.75 by Paypal, $1.50 by check, and $1.00 if you get it from me in person. Here's the button for Paypal:

Elm City Jams #1 (Aug. 2003)

Elm City Jams is a side project that emerged when we got together with some of the other cartoonists we knew in New Haven (the Elm City) to do a little bit of drawing together. The word "jam," applied to comics, refers to a comic in which more than one cartoonist has been "in charge" of what happens in the story, because they've been drawing on the same page without discussing an advance plan for what will happen. If you've read our Treatise Upon the Jam, you know that we have some ideas about this kind of collaboration, about its usefulness, and about how it can be done well or done right. Most jam comics are fun to make but a little tedious to read. Elm City Jams, on the other hand, has been praised by a number of readers for making jam strips that actually "work."

Part of our secret is that each of us really tries to bring his best abilities and his best game to the jam. We also make a real effort to "play well with others" while we're doing this stuff. For instance, here's the conclusion of "Fame and Fortress," the first strip in the book, where (in these panels) I inked Tom O'Donnell's pencils of my script idea. I daresay neither of us would have come up with these particular images on his own:


Another part of our secret in Elm City Jams is that each of the one-page strips starts with a title, drawn at random from a batch of titles we generate before the drawing session. (That's something I borrowed from Scott McCloud's "Quanto Comics," which he discusses here. Don't fill out the form, though: I'm pretty sure that McCloud's Morning Improv is on hiatus.)

Because each strip has a title before it begins, there are some narrative parameters and a vague bit of direction about where it might end; the strip can't wander at random. Since each strip is only one page, it can't wander for very long, either. If you want to try a jam comic with some cartoonists you know, I strongly recommend setting limits like these: if a jam is a game, these are the out-of-bounds lines that let you know where the playing field is.

It's hard to pull an example from this issue for general consumption, because (like the other issues of ECJ) this issue definitely contains explicit language and images. Here's a relatively sanitary one (with only some gruesome cartoony violence), so you can get a sense of how they hold together:

That's a title by Tom, with dialogue by me, and pencils by me (2 panels), Adam Rosenblatt (5 panels), and Mike (3 panels). Adam did the inking and I did the lettering. You can click on the picture to enlarge it, as usual.

Elm City Jams #1 is 20 pages, and it features the Tin Slacker, an ogre in a bikini and a bowler, M.O.D.O.K., the bumblebee Clint Eastwood, Emily Dickinson, a valkyrie, Ted and Alphonse with Charles Manson's jellybeans, the goddess Bast, and a naked man in a moose mask. Contributors are the two of us, Adam Rosenblatt, Tom O'Donnell, and Jeff Seymour. Like our other early minis, it's $1.75 by Paypal, $1.50 by check (email me for mailing information), and $1.00 in person. Again, it contains explicit language and images. Here's the button:

Also, just for a treat, here's the portrait of Mike and me from the contributor-profile page:

What is a Mapjam?

The Mapjam is a collaborative, serialized experiment in worldbuilding. That clears up all your questions, right?

It's actually sort of hard to explain, though I think it's easy to understand once you have the project in your hands. There's a map, which a group of cartoonists created in advance, and it's divided into nine sectors. In each "round" of the mapjam, each of us gets assigned to one sector of the map and tells a story set there. When those are done, each cartoonist is shuffled into a sector where he or she hasn't set a story before, and the process is repeated. Gradually, longer stories evolve out of the connections and continuations from one story to another.

For example: in the first round, our pal Adam Rosenblatt had the central sector, which features Pumpkin Jack's house. He drew Pumpkin Jack as a bear with wings:


I wound up with that sector in the second round, and started a continuation of Pumpkin Jack's story that explains why he has that name: he can make plants grow, flower, and fruit. (Clicking this picture will make it a little bigger.)

By the end of my story, Pumpkin Jack was sending a couple of other characters off on a quest that resembles something out of the Oz books, trying to find someone to patch up the calendar so that Jack (and everyone else) will stop losing a month's worth of days every year.

Part of the fun of the mapjam is watching different people pick up characters and situations that you've developed. Inevitably, your collaborators take your ideas in a direction you might not have considered. Your characters look different in another cartoonist's hands, but if the cartoonist is reading you carefully, they won't behave too differently. Here's a snippet from Mike's first mapjam story:


And here's the way these two musicians look in the hands of our friend Damien Jay:


Another big part of the fun for this project is that it has so many different imaginations running in it at the same time. New characters appear in nearly every story, and the minor details in one person's tale can become central in another one. It's hard to predict where the stories will go next. In the upcoming round, will Tom K do more with Tom Motley's "Conan Doyle, Barbarian Detective?" Will he set his story in Harm's Way, on the Random Isthmus, or elsewhere?


Only Tom K knows the answer to those questions, though I'm pretty sure that in my next piece I'm going to use these four "locals" from his terrific second-round story -- incidental characters who only appear in one panel apiece:


If you want to see more of the Mapjam, Damien's story and Tom Motley's story for the first round are both online at their own websites.

The first two rounds of the Mapjam were available in a forty-page (!) minicomic, but it's out of stock. I'll reprint all the stories when we complete the next round of the jam.

Contributors for the mapjam include Adam Rosenblatt, Tom Motley, Tom K, Damien Jay, Isaac Cates, and Mike Wenthe. The next round will also feature Cathy Leamy, and I've been talking with a couple of other cartoonists about filling the last two spots in the roster.