Doodle Penance: "rob rockley"

We had some pretty good options for Doodle Penance this week, like "comics thesis without tear" (if only that were possible!), "hellboy craig parody," "''matt wiegle' cute," and "where can i get a mickey mouse t-shirt were mickey's face is a skull." Lots to choose from! And somehow we settled on "rob rockley."

I'm fairly sure that the page this anonymous googler landed on was the post in which I showed my sketches of the characters in Tom K's Mapjam story, whom I'm planning to use in my own story for the third round of the Mapjam.

I gave the three characters punlike names, which you'll catch if you read them out loud to a vegan in your grocery store's produce section.

As it happens, I've been thinking about the Mapjam more this week. I've been stealing a few minutes here and there to work out a new script and set of thumbnails for my story, since I've neglected it for almost two years now. I figure that if I draw a little bit on it every day—even if it takes me a month to draw a whole page—I'll have a story ready before the end of the year. Mostly I've been trying to figure out the look of the girl I'm calling Delilah, and her Paw, who doesn't appear in Tom K's story.

But hey, why not do a little pinup of Rob Rockley, the beefiest of the muck deacons?



Mike, can you tell me which cartoonist I was thinking of while I drew this? And what have you got this week?

—Hmm, Isaac, hard to say. That guy looks so much like Tor Johnson...Maybe you were thinking of Eric Powell of The Goon? Nah, that's probably just the overalls...I'm not sure. Sorry.

Anyway, here's my doodle:


In time, I did remember all by myself that "Rob Rockley" was your name for the figure on the far right, with a design by Tom K; but first my mind turned to similar-sounding figures like Rob Riggle (far left) and Bob Rock (middle); so here's a doodle portrait of the three of them joined at the torso, with stalks of raw broccoli in the background. Something about the finished three-headed bust made me think of a family photo, hence the frame and label.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Doodle Penance: "12 reasons for penance"

This week's Doodle Penance is brought to you by an anonymous Google-searcher who found our site when looking for "12 reasons for penance." That strikes me as an unusually specific and limited request, in terms of the numbers. Having been trained in guilt for many years in graduate school, I can think of many more than a dozen reasons to be penitent. Still, we're happy to oblige...

Since we're both pretty busy this week and the blog hasn't been hurting for content, Mike and I decided to divide up the dozen reasons. Here are my half-dozen:



(You may click if you want a better view of my looming guilt.)

These are all reasons specific to my guilt as a cartoonist or a comics critic, and they are all guilts that derive from inaction (or from the opportunity costs of my other actions), rather than the many bad things I have done.

Let's see... First, there's poor Matteu, whose last "weekly" strip got drawn early in May of last year.

Then there's the Mapjam, which is a project with some real potential. Why has it taken me two years to draw a three-page story? What would it take for me to get that thing underway again?

Oh, and the essay on Alan Moore's collaborative practice, which I've been meaning to edit a little bit and deliver to the good folks at Secret Acres—two days' worth of work, tops, which I've been postponing for more than a year and a half. Let's let the Moore essay stand in for all of the many essays I haven't written, including that nearly-finished thing that Mike and I were working on about comics and set text.

Then there are the blog posts I have planned but not written. That's a different category of guilt, since not writing them doesn't really hurt anyone but the blog. Still, I am wondering why I still haven't written the third of my three "Swansea Find" posts, which is supposed to be about Dudley Watkins's Desperate Dan. I was in Swansea back in July. How long could it really take me to write that post? And when am I going to post my other finds from the Joe Stinson Collection, for that matter?

And then there's the general woeful matter of squandered time. Could I have back all the time I wasted on, say, Civilization? (And that's not even to mention the egregious, awful time-squandering of summer 2007.)

And, finally, the most painful failure: I've got a book to write, and it's not exactly writing itself these days.

Writing this post was a little more painful than I meant for it to be. Now, if you'll pardon me, I'm going to spend the rest of the day grading papers as fast as I can and staying as far from the internet as I can.

...With that in mind, Isaac—this is Mike writing, now—I will refrain from sending the usual e-mail alert when I have completed my half of the proceedings and posted it to the blog; far be it from me to enable more guilty feelings in your day!

I don't think I care to get quite as specific as you did with the rehearsal of one's own personal failings. Not because mine aren't legion, but because I don't trust myself to stop before it gets too maudlin or icky (see, there's a perfect example of what I mean right there!). Indeed, I have depersonalized my doodle, as well, relying on abstract iconography for the most part, so I'll have to decode it in prose after this image:
What we have here is almost a mini-narrative of regrettable deeds, misdeeds, or failures to act, though in several cases the ill could just as well be a good were it reconsidered or redirected. From top left to bottom right in usual reading order:

1) Correspondence. I don't stay on top of it as I should.
2) Finances. I should really keep my eye on the ball more carefully and more often.
3) Inattention. The images here are meant to suggest "out of sight, out of mind," though that's one of the worst attempts at a drawing of a brain I have ever committed.
4) Skewed values. The item on the left of the scales is the earth, complete with its moon. The item on the right is a single person and his comfort. (I wonder who it could be?)
5) Reliability. There's an old saw about the dependability of oaths written on water. Note how the ink immediately leaches away into an indistinct blur.
6) The insufficiently-examined life. Hence the question mark for a head.

In the case of the original doodle, the medium is indeed the message, for I sketched it out on one side of a still-unopened envelope that instructs the recipient, "Please respond within 4 weeks." I can't remember when it arrived, but the other side of it furnished the drawing surface for a doodle penance post from January 4. (In defense of the recipient, the instruction might have been more persuasive if the senders had seen fit to identify themselves.)

And now, having indulged in this self-flagellating exercise, I repent of our having chosen this topic for Doodle Penance. Henceforth, let the good times roll!

News About the Mapjam

Some breaking news about the Mapjam project:

In the last day or so, I have heard from Matt Wiegle, of Partyka, whom you may know from such excellent minicomics as Seven More Days of Not Getting Eaten and from Lindsay Nordell, a cartoonist who was once a student of mine and has an excellent story in an issue of Backwards City Review. And both Matt and Lindsay have agreed to contribute to the Mapjam.

This means that we've got nine cartoonists lined up for the next round of stories, and I'm really pretty excited about it. The tentative deadline is about a month away, and although I'm sure a few of us will miss that first deadline, I'm kind of hoping I'll be able to get my story done in time.

I've started some doodles, and since one reader recently took me to task for having so much text, here are some pictures.




Yes, I'm drawing those awesome minor characters of Tom K's from last time. And yes, I am considering naming them Ross Ellery, Ron Utz, and Rob Rockley. (That will, at least, amuse Mike.)

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.