Another year, another chance. In my review of last year, I found that things had gone...pretty well, actually. There were some bad things, but there were a lot of good things. The good things edged out the bad things for the first time in a long time. For that, I'm very grateful.
I have a hard time focusing on a whole year's worth of resolutions and so I have been doing these monthly challenges. The sketchbook challenge was okay. I think it was good. The drawings themselves are not good, but having myself do this whether I wanted to or not was a good exercise. I even felt weird on the first day of February when I realized I didn't have to fill a sketchbook page on that day. My goal for February is to buckle down and finish the first issue of Murder of Crows. Click on the "Read More" button if you want to see the sketchbook pages from January.
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I wish Twitter was on the verge of implosion every day so I could log in to weebly and have my metrics say views are up 400%. (I also had someone follow me on LiveJournal, and the thrill of having someone follow me on LJ in 2022 cannot be overstated.)
I finished a sketchbook!
Kevin Conroy, the voice of Batman, passed away November 10th, which is why I have been on the Batman kick I've been on. I really loved Batman: The Animated Series, and have been watching/re-watching those episodes (there are some that I haven't seen yet). Mask of the Phantasm was a fun time; I had never seen that one before, either, which is kind of hard to believe, but it's one of those movies I never got around to.
Catwoman is a pretty solid book all around. Every time I pick it up, it's good or even great. I remembered reading this series as it was coming out, because I liked Darwyn Cooke's art - now, on the re-read, I realize this run was written by Ed Brubaker. It's really terrific, down to the lettering. There's an issue where Selina sends her roommate, Holly, out to collect some information, and Holly is looking at the East End of Gotham through a recovering addict's eyes - her thoughts are presented as captions in what I'm assuming is a handwriting font that really pulls the reader in to her point of view. I don't know if it would have been as successful, honestly, without that handwritten element:
Ed Brubaker is great at telling a crime story and he's currently doing Friday, which is a book I talked about back in this post. This particular arc was a sticky situation for everyone involved, especially Holly, and I'm looking forward to reading the rest of this run. I think there's on more issue with Brubaker writing it, though. I'll have to see what else he's done; I had never paid too much attention to or followed comic book writers until I started reading The Department of Truth. The art has to be good before I can focus on the storyline.
I was just minding my very own business as usual and my Macbook died. She just gave up the ghost. I spent about an hour texting Apple support the other day for confirmation that my laptop was 1) old ("vintage" is what Apple calls it) and 2) dead (unless I take it to someone to try to recover it). I am not sure if I have the money for someone to recover my files off my laptop, but I did have the money to buy a Chromebook, so I bought a Chromebook and we are back in blogging business, baby. If there were any business. Which, I mean, there isn't. Here's some space vixen art from earlier this month. She needs a new name before Doug Felts sues me. I can't tell if she is finally becoming a fully realized character in my brain or if she is just Alfonso Azpiri's Lorna with green skin and pink hair. Which, I mean, is fine. (Don't sue me.)
Wow I have been reading so many fun things but I can't possibly write about them at this very moment because I have to go trim my nails. They are too long to type on this tiny keyboard. Anyway we're back! If you are reading this, tell your wife to call me. The above is a panel from my sketchbook that's from 2010. When I was a kid, my parents divorced, and my dad compensated by sending me care packages full of comic books from the local store in LA. (It's actually, I found out, the same store whose owner had a comic book themed wedding back in the '90s, when things like that were still pretty unusual. I was so impressed when I found out, because there had been a photo of the happy couple in Wizard magazine.) Some time in middle school I started reading Marvel comics and collecting trading cards. Eventually my single issues were all sold or given away, excepting the single issues I have of Terry Moore's Strangers in Paradise. It's hard to justify dragging the long, heavy comic book boxes along from state to state. And even though I still read comics and still liked superhero comics, it's the Disney comics I read as a kid that really stuck in my mind. Underground comix artist Victor Moscoso talked about Carl Barks in a long interview he gave to Gary Groth of The Comics Journal: "None of the other artists that did the duck stories came anywhere near him. I didn’t know his name — Crumb told me his name. We were talking about it and he was very knowledgeable in comics, so I asked him, 'Hey, who was the good duck artist?' That’s how he was known: the good one. And he says, 'Carl Barks.' That was the first time I ever heard the name, because they were all signed 'Walt Disney.'" (I had never heard of this particular distinction before I'd read this interview - by the time I was old enough to look back on duck comics, Carl Barks was already a known name - so imagine how surprised I was when I googled, in quotes, "the good duck artist" and google just immediately returned "Carl Barks" as a result.) I was on the hunt for a couple of Christmas themed Donald Duck stories I'd remembered as a kid. This is not one of them, but it is a stellar example of Carl Barks' gorgeous lettering: I absolutely adore his lettering. It is so crisp in this story. I love the little flair on the "n" in "in" on the title card. Even the word balloons themselves are gorgeous. What I was looking for was a story called "Letter to Santa", which was originally published in Walt Disney's Christmas Parade #1 back in 1949. (This story has been republished in the collected Carl Barks hardcovers - it's in Trail of the Unicorn, which is Volume 8.) Michael Sporman uploaded the recolored version onto his blog, in two parts, so you can read this wild story if you want to - part one is here and part two is here. (There's no "next post" navigation on his blog that I could find, so it might be easier to navigate like this.) It's so good, like most of these comics are, and it's perfect for the holiday season. (I was really more of a fan of Donald than Mickey, but Mickey Mouse did have some good detective stories. I really enjoyed the Thirteen Ghosts story and the one about Kali's Nail. I don't think a lot of people understand how often Mickey Mouse has a handgun in the comics - and uses it!) Victor Moscoso is also terrific. I didn't realize how much his work influenced mine until I started re-reading Zap. As a teen, I'd scored some issues from a friend of my stepfather ("Don't tell your mother you have these," he said), so I must have had them somewhere back there in my brain. Here's one of Moscoso's pages from Zap Comix #2: Victor Moscoso is absolutely a professional and if you love art shop talk like I do, that long interview I linked above is just fantastic. I think often about his application of color theory to concert posters and his references to Josef Albers.
By the time R. Crumb had asked Moscoso to do Zap, Victor was the oldest of the underground artists and he already had a family, so it's funny to read his reactions to the other Zap stories: "...I thought the taboos were all illusions, until Crumb did 'Joe Blow.' Then I realized, OK, you can chop off a guy’s penis and eat it. That’s all right. But you can’t fuck your children. There are limits in this civilized society."
It's been a busy week! I have been energized by roller skating and being angry.
I am working on a new piece now that I will post when it is all finished. I've been neglecting my reading, but Monát sent me a book for my birthday, so I'm going to make some time for reading this week. The weather is cold and wet and it's wreaking havoc on my sinuses, so as a result it's a lot easier for me to get a headache from looking at a screen.
I'm obsessed with this video:
There might be more to this weekly roundup if Saturday night hadn't wiped me out. I made dinner and after that I was completely finished. I must've slept for over ten hours, but I didn't really sleep well the night before. The cartoon on grid paper is one that I did on the bus to and from a job interview that I declined, but they're still emailing and calling me as though I were coming in tomorrow. The crying face was doodled while I was telling a story during the museum walk zoom today. This piece above is currently untitled and I finished it before I went on vacation. I bought fancy Sequential Art Bristol so this took a long while as I actually used rulers and did a pencil laydown before. (It caused me to lie down a lot. Lying down is part of the process.) I am very happy with how it came out. Today on the museum walk we went to the Belvedere Museum in Vienna and looked at all the Klimt. We had a small turnout today, but still had some good discussions; what I thought about most was how artists like Klimt and Munch are considered "fine art", but I don't know that their works would be considered "fine art" if they were contemporary; I think they would be classified as "lowbrow" or "illustrative" (or that most damning of adjectives, "decorative"). I know this is something that is constantly being asked, but I was there looking at this little satisfying crying face doodle and thinking, "why isn't it art?" Today at the zoom museum walk we also discussed variations on stuffed pumpkins as Dr. Cath was making what I believe is Ruth Reichl's stuffed pumpkin recipe, which I had been made aware of when I had sent my BFF Kate this Ghapama recipe. Dr. Cath is cooking Thanksgiving dinner this year, which she is fine with but feels stifled about because she can't do anything truly interesting like make a garam masala turkey. I think she was just shooting off an example, but now I'm obsessed with a garam masala Thanksgiving turkey. Can you make a stuffing out of naan? I would also have some curry mashed potatoes.
I started this collage last night (and date stamped it so much that I also thought I would finish it last night), and I was treading water with it for a little while. Then today I woke up and was able to complete it fairly easily.
This kind or style of collage is not something I'm used to. And this is a small page! There is a lot of building up background in order to get it to look right. I am also pretty pell-mell about it - I didn't do much in the way of placing and then gluing, though I did for a couple of things - I just glue it and if it looks weird I glue over it with something else later. Hopefully I have already established to you, the gentle reader, how very impatient I am. I feel there's a sort of instinct about this - knowing when we have to push through to the other side, and knowing when trying to push is going to be counterproductive and we need to take a break. If I'm starting to get really frustrated because I don't know how to 'fix' something, then usually I need to get up and do something else for a little while. If I'm frustrated because I need more pictures that look orange, well, then I just gotta keep pushin' through. Sometimes I will show something to John Morgan, my art professor from undergrad, because I'll be stuck, and his advice is generally "Put it down and move on to the next one." We have to know when to advance, and when to retreat, in a way that works with our own unique way of working. Finished a sketchbook this week! Another one is on the way, although I'm nervous about it because I haven't used this type before and it's not spiral-bound (I couldn't get another one of this same kind, which I really liked). I guess we'll see how it goes! I have omitted a couple of pieces here for various and sundry reasons. My astrologer sent along something that was inspirational, and I'm keeping it under wraps for the moment. Sunday is my social day of what amounts to about five hours of Zoom meetings. My Religion adviser from undergrad, Dr. Cath, hosts a Zoom meeting in which she shares her screen and we all go on a virtual gallery tour and look at art. Last week we were at the Uffizi for The Divine Comedy Illustrated by Federico Zuccari - we did Inferno then - and today we did Purgatorio and Paradiso. It's been inspirational in several ways, mainly the sparse use of color in Inferno, followed by the brown ink washes of Purgatorio and a return to color in Paradiso, with added color in the final illustration. We've also been interested in how Zuccari defines the action in the illustrations - rather than Dante and Virgil appearing in the middle of an action, Zuccari draws them at the foot of the mountain, ascending the mountain, and at the top, all in one drawing, and often this action is occurring from right to left. Also, Zuccari depicts Dante's dreams in a circle above the sleeping Dante. The Pugartorio and Paradiso segments also have text within the illustration, which also made us all think of comics. I had written down "Philip Roth" in my sketchbook while I was reading The Creative Habit, as he's mentioned in the final chapter, and then today I found American Pastoral in a Little Free Library. Another Little Free Library find: The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai. I also ordered The Lonely City, something that's been on my wish list for a while, after Austin Kleon featured it on his blog.
Luckily, this year seems to not be flowing at the breakneck pace of last year. At least, it seems slow for now. That may also be due to spending more time working or reading than refreshing the bird website. It's a good feeling. |
AuthorArtist, essayist, divinity school dropout. Here for a good time, not for a long time. Archives
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