1888
Posted by johnamor | Filed under Art, Work
The gears’ve started to turn on the Victorian horror project with punk 
swing pioneer Wolfgang Parker.
Haven’t shared much about it on the journal for very specific, very delicate reasons. I’ve said it before, but I’ll slap you in the face with it again anyway — can’t let anyone in on any juicy details or the terrorists win. Nyaha! Deal with it. But no yeah, I’ve just recently completed my share of the work for the initial stages of the project, so here’s hoping something clicks and bursts into flames. The good kind of course.
Balanced out with the high-octane, pulp approach I’m using for JENNY STRANGE, I’ve subdued my camera and physicalities for this project as I wanted it to feel… real. Or at least as real as a drawn piece of work can be, given that my work is intrinsically cartoony. Coated my style with a Mignola-Fegredo luster, which I’m hoping I pulled off without having to dampen too much of my own spices. Yes, I totally just compared myself to a sprig of basil. Fairly happy with the results.
Vague enough for you? Good.
Anyway… so that’s that. Worked pretty steadily on this one.
Blame it on the season.
Tags: comics, horror, punk swing, victorian era, wolfgang parker
Grid Talk
Posted by johnamor | Filed under Research
My good friend Derrick Fish and I recently got online to critique each other’s new artwork and talk about random shit. This is what happens when artists try to trade ideas…
Amor: So since you’ve got WELLKEEPER in the works, and that’s pretty much horror-fantasy, I HIGHLY recommend getting the first trade for Locke and Key. I stake my nerd cred on it. It’s got the most clever paneling I’ve seen in years. Gabriel Rodriguez is a bastard.
Fish: Now THAT’S a tough one for me. After years of doing a comic strip, I’ve all but forgotten how to lay out a page in anything but a grid.
Amor: Not necessarily a bad thing though, right? Grids work. But no… I don’t mean L&K does overlapping shit. It’s also mostly grids in that, but the angles and figure placement, man… fucking brilliant.
Fish: That’s also what I’m thinking of. My staging is bland compared to the stuff I did just out of high school, and that’s not good. I’m getting a little of my groove back on “The Line” setting the camera at more than just eye level, but I feel like it’s a muscle I haven’t flexed properly in too long. I want to find a good balance between interesting and clear. I don’t want camera work SO clever that it kicks readers out of the story, or so straightforward that it puts them to sleep.
Amor: I understand that. It actually pisses me off when people do all these “clever” angles when they’re just doing a conversation scene, like with the camera in-between the first and second knuckle… and looking up at the subject. Whatever, man. It’s just… pedantic to me.
Fish: Haha! It draws attention to itself. Is the knuckle important? Why are we looking through knuckles?!?
Amor: Because we caaaaaaaan!!!
Fish: Now, maybe the person talking is a bruiser and his knuckles are battered… but if the conversation is between Aunt May and Mary Jane… Why be clever just to show how clever you are?
Amor: Exactly.
John Amor and Derrick Fish
Fish: In film, a good example of this was in “Panic Room”, where Fincher kept zooming the faux camera through every crack in the wall for a “Wooooshy” shot.
Amor: See… on the street… away from you and your fancy films… me and my boys just call it the Mortal Kombat effect.
Fish: Elaborate…
Amor: “Wooooshy” is too technical a term for us, good sir. MK the movie would have these two-minute cut scenes where we’d circle a CGI castle and then whoosh in through the window or some shit. And I appreciate that they were trying to imply scale and grandeur, but it totally sucked me out of the movie.
Fish: OH MY LORD, I know what you’re talking about. God, that can get irritating.
Amor: It sorta happened in King Kong, but Jackson caught himself, I think. He was all, “Shit… I’m totally Mortal Kombatting this fucking bigiature scene.”
Fish: Indeed. And I LOVED King Kong but he totally did that. “LOOOOOKKKK…. a big WALL!!! Wooooosh!!!”
Amor: YES!!! Ah well…but you summed it up, why be clever just to show how clever you are? Fuck you and your astute summations.
Fish: My thoughts on that are if you can’t make a move with your REAL camera, don’t make it with your digital CGI camera. It just SCREAMS “COMPUTER EFFECT!!! NOT REAL!!!” That’s one of the millions of reasons I loved Iron Man. No Mortal Kombat camera wooshes.
Amor: Oh oh… Crystal Skull.
Fish: WOOOOOOSSSSHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Amor: Hahaha!
Fish: Especially when Sam Witwicky becomes fucking Tarzan. Yeesh!
Amor: I know, right? Then the whole fencing-on-two-jeeps sequence. I felt sorry for that scene. You know a movie’s bad when you actually feel an undeniable amount of lurid sympathy for it.
Fish: Spielberg’s first idea was to shoot it with the same techniques and practical effects that the other three were made with and Lucas talked him out of it. That was a cool enough IDEA, but ruined in the execution. I SOOO wish Spielberg would have gone with his first instinct.
Amor: What’s funny is I could tell the color palette was off… and I’m practically colorblind.
Fish: Hahahaha! There was too much “Here’s reality” and “Here’s CGI.”
Amor: It felt like the Mummy.
Fish: Indeed. And not even the FIRST Mummy when it was still kinda under control. But the shitty Mummy Returns with the video game Scorpion King. I’m trying to think of other good comic book examples, but movies are so much easier.
Amor: See… I feel like there’s a rule about CGI. If it’s gonna be for something simple like… a tidal wave or a big car crash… then it better be good. If it’s gonna be bad… then at least make the creature or robot design fucking awesome.
Fish: Indeed.
Amor: We’re such nerds.
Tags: cinematography, comic paneling, crystal skull, dandy and company, derrick fish, locke and key, mortal kombat, panic room, wellkeeper
Unclean
Posted by johnamor | Filed under Rants, Trash
Three Days Ago…
There is something in my gut, and… it doesn’t like me very much…
Why can’t I get warm? I killed the AC over three fucking hours ago, and the fan isn’t even on. The goddamn windows are sealed shut. I. Am. Under two thick blankets! I can barely even breathe from how sealed off this room is — Why can’t I get warm??? This thing in my gut… it’s trying to kill me. It’s winning and I don’t know how to stop it. My joints ache too… possibly because I’ve spent the last few hours lying motionless, thinking about the thing in my gut that’s been trying to kill me. It’s fine unless I move, at which point it starts to try and kill me all over again. So I’ve lain very still… and pondered… waiting for either death or for the thing in my stomach to lose interest and move on to less life-loving bodies than my own. It hasn’t done either yet. So I lie very… very… still. Why. Can’t. I. Get. Warm.
And then a mosquito flies past my face. And I shiver even more violently, chilled by the breeze of its wings.
Yeah, it gets bad.
And then the trips to the bathroom start.
Today…
Haven’t been sick in months — not once since this whole working-at-home thing started back in September; and I don’t say that to make it seem like I think I shouldn’t get sick because I’m indoors for weeks at a time… no no… I say it because I go out ONCE… one motherfucking time in almost a whole entire motherfucking month… and I get the motherfucking plague handed to me.
In a glass.
Irony can be a bitch and a half. See, earlier this week, after getting a fair amount of work done, I broke down under peer pressure (from myself) and decided to have some drinks with some friends. Night had attendant drama, as is characteristic of such things I suppose, but at least the food and the company was good. It was just beer for the night. And it turns out even that was too good for a guy like me.
Turns out ice is best when it’s clean.
Tags: plague, sick, sick as fuck, stomach flu
Strange Days
Posted by johnamor | Filed under Work
First official post at the new site? Should come as no surprise that the first blab is about a new project, yeah? But first!
OVERTHROW, what I like to think of as mine and Justin Jordan’s love letter to NEXT WAVE (stylistically anyway), is looking to be headed to full-on pitch stages pretty soon, so I’ve still got my manties in a bunch waiting on that. He got to be a whore at the NY con about the project, so that’s pretty sweet.
Anyway… not being completely sick of each other just yet, Justin and I are working on a new comic entitled JENNY STRANGE. It’s pretty much my first attempt at doing something ZUDA-worthy; and to be totally honest, the landscape format to the page took quite a bit of getting used to. For those of you who’ve been under a rock this whole time, Zuda is DC’s virtual slush pile. That probably makes it sound dirtier than what it actually is, but suffice it to say it’s a webcomic… monitor-conscious… page browser… thing. (It’s two in the fucking morning, give me a break… and no, I’m obviously not the writer in the tandem) Buncha guys get weblished, buncha other guys vote for who gets to stay online and finish their story. Bam.
I’m pretty excited about JENNY coz I’ve been jonesing for a strictly pulp book for a while now. That and GEN13′s vibe had a pretty huge impact on me as I was getting serious about comics in the 90s (yeah, I know). Little bit of Doc Savage thrown in there as well. Aesthetically speaking, I’ve been pouring over some recent Ultimate Spider-Man stuff and even some BRIT to harness the right vibe I want to wrap my art in for the project, but that coupled with the landscape format is taking a bit of doing. Anyway, that’s all on that for now. I plan to go into gory details about the zuda page orientation and the attendant storytelling mindfucks, but that’s for another post. Till then, keep ‘em warm, ladies.
Tags: comic pitches, i like your chaint, Justin Jordan, Overthrow, page layout, pitching, storytelling, work ethic, zuda
Tres Komikeros 21
Posted by johnamor | Filed under Work
Tags: avatar, brian michael bendis, christian bale, comics, crossed, cyberpunk, dark reign, DC, g.i. joe, garth ennis, hotwire, jaycen burrows, jonathan hickman, Marvel, nick fury, Podcast, radical, secret warriors, stefano caselli, steven pugh, super heroes, warren ellis, zombies
25 Random Things
Posted by admin | Filed under Trash
1.) I work at home, drawing all day. (It’s all downhill from here.)
2.) I drink too much coffee just to be lucid enough to work. Nothing screams FOCUS more than being on the verge of getting stomach ulcers.
3.) I stick post-its on the outside of my bedroom door; they act as status messages saying “On deadline, do not disturb” or “Sleeping, go away.” Today it is simply “Not sleeping… but go away anyway.”
4.) I’m told that I start talking in a weird quasi-Australian-Irish accent when I’m drunk.
5.) My project files are organized into three neat piles: “To do”, “Almost done”, and “You owe them money at this point.”
6.) I used to work in AOL’s Billing Department.
7.) My friends are convinced I am Holden Caulfield running Rob Gordon’s record shop. But instead of records, it’s comics. And instead of a winter cap, it’s a beanie.
8.) I have a sad habit of getting involved with women who don’t live in the same island as me. It’s not a commitment issue, that’s just the way it’s been for absolutely no reason at all.
9.) A girl once stopped going out with me coz according to her “I cursed too well.” I still don’t know what that means.
10.) I wear two leather straps on my left forearm. One for luck, one as a symbol.
11.) I got bitten in the ass by a great dane once, but I didn’t drop the beers I was carrying and made it back to the party with a single stream of blood running down the side of my leg. Rock.
12.) I used to play rhythm guitar and sing lead vocals in a college band.
13.) My specific friend circles are a mix of high school buddies, local comic artists, local musicians, and plain old nerds.
14.) Jin-Roh made me cry.
15.) I own a comic book tracing the early life of Pope John Paul II.
16.) I have a degree in Political Science, and that’s why I’m an artist. What?
17.) My right thumb is shorter than my left thumb.
18.) I will murder you in Counter-Strike.
19.) As a child, I would spend entire afternoons looking at bugs through my uncle’s microscope.
20.) I work best when I have someone or something important to ignore. So I sometimes hit my mail, click the inbox, then work without lifting my head again for hours.
21.) I sometimes say things just to push buttons.
22.) I don’t like you.
23.) I have gone ape-shit fanboy over many bands over the years, but the one constant favorite since even before high school has been Third Eye Blind.
24.) I listen to everything but reggae.
25.) I’m hungry.
Tags: 25 random things, meme, shway
