The Work Journal of Artist John Amor

The Zuda Challenge (Part II)

If you’re just blowing in, this is the second in a series of posts documenting the tribulations I went through in adapting to a widescreen-format comic.  Co-conspirator Justin Jordan discusses the writing aspect of the challenge here.

So I’ve been dissecting some of the most recent and highly effective double-page spreads I’ve seen to try and decipher what logic the artists might’ve been operating on.  Reverse-engineering, if you will.  I figure if I stare at these babies long enough I may be able to extract remnants of whatever special cut of LSD the penciller was on when thumbnailing, and use then-acquired zen state on projects such as JENNY STRANGE.

Because hey… like Thomas Edison probably always said, “When in doubt, steal from the best.”

In Ultimate Spider-Man #124, Immonen uses the top half of the page to establish the environment and mood of the scene, taking full advantage of the panoramic view.  The tall narrow panels of the lower half splits the events into tense, almost choking, moments.

Similarly, in Crossed #1 Jacen Burrows splits the spread into a top and bottom half.  The top however is employed as an illustrative piece to essentially convey a definitive shot of the story’s backdrop, whereas the smaller panels below shows us the actual characters and pushes the story forward.

In Secret Invasion #1, Leinil Yu went with a three-tier spread to initially wow you with a shot just packed with characters.  The second tier features mostly talking heads, whereas the final tier is pretty much gravy to just tense you up for whatever comes first on the next page.

So without getting too technical and shit, what strikes me the most as the widescreen format’s strength is the panoramic advantage as the splashes just look more cinematic, allowing the reader’s eye to wander more and discover things.  Never doubt the power of Where’s Waldo.

Something to think about.

This series of posts concludes with me showing my JENNY STRANGE pages, which I did as I studied the above artists.  So it’ll be a healthy exercise in accepting my apparent density.  No doubt my girl would have a thing or two to add about that.  Fun for the whole family, I guess.

Post-Iconic

So do I sound like a bigger douche than usual if I say that I feel like comics grew up with me right around the last yelps of my college years? No? Yeah? Kindasortamaybe. Sure I missed the really important stuff, given that I’m only twenty-five… but I think what so many call the Modern Age ended right around the time I left university, and comics became this new animal that was just rife with this manic purity and self-awareness that I got sucked back in after a withdrawal from the medium around the mid-to-late nineties.

When I think of the Golden Age (late thirties to early fifties), I think of the invention of the superhero and the birth of the icons.  I think of comics catching on as portable war-time pamphlets egging troops on with stories of good winning over evil. After all, comics were the iPods of the forties… if iPods indirectly conditioned you about the dangers of radiation and the terror of atomic energy… but no yeah, you get the idea.

When I think of the Silver Age (mid-fifties to early seventies) grounding the tales in science more than magic, what with everyone obsessed with nukes, I think of space cop Hal Jordan replacing mystic Alan Scott.  I think of the Fantastic Four.  Heroes became more flawed, and we got Spider-man.  Art became a bigger factor, and we got Kirby.  DC started becoming the legacy universe, while Marvel grew into the Wild West.

The Bronze Age/Dark Age (mid-seventies to the late eighties) saw a growing appreciation for serious real-life issues being filtered through the comic lens.  Schwartz took over for Weisinger to scale Superman’s ridiculously near-infinite powers. Speedy on speed.  Minority heroes.  The Dark Knight Returns.  Watchmen.  Vertigo.  The picture of justice became less and less stark black-and-white, but a thick muddled gray.  This was when I started.

And then came what I like to call the Image Era—the nineties. Not to point any animosity on Image the company or anything, but I feel like the term really captures that decade’s mood as well as the perceived superficiality of the medium at the time.  Superman’s death.  The Spider Clone Saga.  Inter-company Crossovers. Amalgam?  Need I go on?  It felt like a very events-for-events-sake time. This was when I stopped.  Sure, feel free to call me out on the occasional Gen13 and Battle Chasers splurge in the middle of it all, but hey man…. hormones.

Then when it felt to me like comics were all but tits up, someone lent me the trade for Grant Morrison’s  X-Men run.  And all at once, it all felt right again. Fresh again.  New again.  Like the first time I heard the Beatles.  And it wasn’t so much that Morrison was simply introducing new ideas—no, he completely and respectfully was building on old ones, expanding the mythos, broadening the scope.  And up until then, I had felt like no one had really even tried to do that in a while.  Then we got Identity Crisis and things just started to happen. Brave things. Fists in your fucking face things. The Authority. The Ultimates. Planetary. All-Star. Civil War.  And I wasn’t sure if it was Bendis’ DD run or Last of the Independents that made me say it out loud, but comics had grown its fucking balls back.

When the boys and I drink, I tend to bring up how exciting comics are right now… and how this is probably the most energetic time for the medium since the Golden Age.  A new Golden Age, if you will.  It’s always fun to watch people play when literally no one is afraid to break their toys anymore—Steve Rogers is dead!  And there are real efforts to make things like that mean something now, and that to me makes this a fascinating ride.  The one term mentioned more often than “superhero”? — “status quo.” There is a fearlessness about creators today that make them unafraid to really torture their characters. But at the same time, what I love most about this era is that creators, on the whole, respect the creative lineage enough to make sure that how they piece their heroes back together absolutely earns them the way in which they broke them.  Here’s hoping it keeps up.

The Zuda Challenge (Part I)

The JENNY STRANGE package is graduating to the clean-ups phase.  Digitally unsmudging my pigeon poo inks and random coffee stains now.  And I mean that literally.  Sure, I love comics, and I love art, and I love the creation of comic art… but I honestly doubt I will ever enjoy clean-ups.  Coupla buddies once offered to shoot a video of my pencil-to-ink process (like them Gnomon cats, but with zero production value), and I knew these fuckers, y’know? And I knew they liked watching highway police chases and car crashes and train wrecks unfold on TV, y’know? So…ha ha ha!  Rain check, you bastards.

So JENNY’s for Zuda, and that’s DC’s webcomic… ongoing contest… thing.  I honestly still have no idea what to call it without having to say it’s a slush pile, but Zalben went with that on an episode of the now-defunct The Stack on Pulp Secret.  The Zuda browser fills most of your screen with a landscape-orientated comic page.  This was a challenge to me because up until now I’ve only been working on standard comic page/portrait orientation.  Switching gears to landscape had me rethinking my panel design, sweet spot positioning, and pretty much the entire flow of the page itself.

The standard comic layout, given how I’ve gotten used to reading, allows for a simple Z-shaped flow to the reader’s eye; and this way, no one really has to worry about the last panel (bottom-right of a typical page) attracting too much attention as you read toward it, simply because it’s in the very bottom of the page and thus it is literally the last panel your eye travels to.  Put simply, it is read last because it is seen last.

Now because comic pages are typically broken down in such a way that the last panel is usually either the “period” in that page’s sequential sentence, or the ellipses leading off to the next sequence of events (the next page), the intuitive positioning of the last panel is tantamount to the effective flow of a sequential page.  And of course, better flow equals better comic… and that never hurts.

Which brings me to the tough part about the Zuda pages with their landscape orientation — Suppose your script calls for you to lay out the page into two rows of panels: a top row and a bottom row.  Now let’s say there are three panels up top and two in the bottom, with the second bottom panel being the big plot event happening on the page.  It’s problematic because said big-event panel is right underneath the build-up shots.  Yes, I’m aware I could be bitching about a moot point, seeing as how most Zuda readers are probably “professional” comic readers and I’m just a jackass, but doesn’t it annoy you when you flip a page and your eye is accidentally drawn to the big twist/event right away, and so you feel you just got cheated out of what would have been a great build up?

And of course I’m aware that the Z flow still applies to the landscape orientation since it’s still western media, but I found the intricacies and challenges of the tilt to be fun and interesting to talk about, especially since, unlike the ever-dashing Derrick Fish, I have little to no experience with the strip format.

I’ll share some JENNY STRANGE pages in a coupla days as well as take a look at how some professionals play with the landscape orientation, and maybe then get told off on how I’m just talking out of my ass. Till then… keep ‘em warm, ladies.

Unclean

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.

Integrity

Toughest part about getting comic jobs when you’re still starting out as a penciller/inker is getting people to pay attention and appreciate your style. More often than not, especially when you’re still learning the ropes (like I am), some of the writers you’ll want to work with will have a specific art style in mind. They may have a unique sci-fi concept, but in their minds they picture it as being drawn by Charest or Hughes. They may have an absolutely new fantasy epic, but are completely mentally locked into having it look like Joe Madureira drew it.

Where does that leave you as a newbie? Do you change your style just to land the gig? Or do you stick to your guns and absolutely refuse to abandon your artistic identity even it means passing up a project you really, really want to do? It’s a pretty thin line, but it’s incredibly tough to cross either way. And that’s all without even bringing up the dough yet.

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Eno Card says, “Simply a matter of work.”

Huh.

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Fuck it. Ain’t budging.

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As good as done with the first issue of MASK of MANOLO. As far as I know, issue two ain’t supposed to begin production till mid-November or so, so that allows me time to shift gears for a bit and work on other stuff that have had to be placed on hold. Pin-up commissions, other books, and the like.

Make it swift, man. Make it swift.  Right across the jugular.

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Another tough thing I’ve noticed about actually doing the work already is this: It may take you only one day to do one clean page of comic book art, but what happens when you have to do it for days in a row, sometimes for seven days out of a week, week after week, until you do all twenty-two or more pages?

Short answer: If you don’t take it a day at a time, it will will destroy you.

Granted, of course, that I’m not exactly the most disciplined guy around, but there is something to be said for being too lazy to even sleep. I shit you not. But yeah you know what I mean.

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A toy convention is being put together by some local enthusiasts, and Santini and I were approached to spearhead the artsy-farsty side of things. Two “featured artists” if I may be so bold. Unfortunately I’m not gonna be in town for said shenanigan, but we’ll see how it evolves into something more awesome, considering I won’t be around to fuck it up. I still have a hand in it though, so HAH! Suck it!

The Tape is Now the Music

It’s pretty damn easy to be deemed a workaholic when you have a habit of juggling anywhere between four to five illustration projects at a time. Whether or not I can deliver on all of them is yet to be seen. I’ve kept most people happy so far, so let’s see how long I can keep that up. Big smiles make food happen, after all. I think it was Remender who said on Twitter that you shouldn’t worry when projects don’t push through, that is after all why we overcommit. He went on to say that it’s when projects all push through that you should start sweating bullets. I didn’t know how true those words were until this past week.

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Random oblique strategy card says: “The tape is now the music.”

Hnn.

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Skyped with a coupla artist buddies last week about finding focus in their respective arts and how to avoid the demons of distraction. You wanna get into animation? Great. You wanna do game design? Do that. Just fucking make sure you actually do the work. And no matter how hard it gets, don’t let it be about the money. Because the fact of the matter is, if you don’t quite love what you’ve made your artlife out to be, the money will never be enough.

Let it be about the work. It’s not just lead on bright fibers, it’s your soul on a medium. You can’t put a price on that.

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Fuck you, Counter-Strike.

Fuck you, Call of Duty 4.

Fuck you, Quake III Arena.

“I can’t quit you.”

Aaaaaaaaand… back to work.

The Comic Book Club on Kirkman

Most of my friends know that I enjoy listening to podcasts and watching video reviews about comic books. A coupla weeks ago, I emailed the guys on the Comic Book Club (formerly The Stack guys on Next New Networks). Since everyone from Millar to Bendis was talking about Kirkman’s recently released mission statement about comics, I was interested about what the comic book club guys had to say. Here’s the video of the episode they decided to answer my viewer mail in, it’s the second question asked in the show:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYY6bYnG98Q&feature=related]

You can catch more Comic Book Club shows here and download an mp3 file of the Kirkman message here.

Shapes

Remember that X-Files episode “Shapes”? If it was a FRIENDS episode, it’d be called “The One with the American-Indian Werewolf.” No, really.

Yeah. Anyway…

So I have a couple of pages of my Thor set done. Asgard was a bitch, but I think I pulled it off… after a fashion. Posting those when page three is in the can. Here’s the thing though: I get about half way through the loose pencils of page three when I start feeling like my art style is becoming contrived. Choked even. I prop it up on my desk, take a step back, and I swear I feel like killing something. Then I flash back to what a friend said about the faces of the characters in my Next Wave set. Apparently I have this bad habit of, maybe not changing characters’ faces, but changing the styles with which those faces are drawn from different angles. D’ya get me? And she was right!

I start to remember that in the nineties, as I was just starting to get serious about my sequential art, I needed to really have a solid foundation in drawing the face from different angles. But instead! Me being the total hack that I am, I looked at so many of my favorite artists for reference that I subconsciously incorporated too much of their face styles into mine. Madureira’s distinctive side views. Hughes’s front shots. You get the picture. Along the way, not only did I become some sort of clone — WORSE! I became a mishmash of different styles that were in constant flux and conflict with each other. I became some stylistic ersatz Frankenstein.

I can draw, sure. But it’s not me drawing.

So I tear my third page into bite-size bits (It takes a while, it’s 11×17 after all) and spend three days finding it—finding the convergence of everything i have ever absorbed from every artist I have ever admired. Fine, it probably didn’t all happen in the past three days… they might have simply been the culmination of this, for lack of a better way of putting it, artistic digestion. And it’s still happening to me.

I craft a sort of mission statement for my style, realizing that since my influences are mainly of the cartoony sort (Madureira, Campbell, Pearson, Drucker, Frezzato, Ramos, Immonen, and Adams), it makes no sense to contrive it with the “serious” sensibilities. All this time, I’ve been trying to do a Jim Lee piece with Campbell’s hand, know what I mean? Yes, I know I’m no J. Scott Campbell, but come on. It’s a metaphor.

I remember some concept art videos I saw. Some cool Gnomon shit. And I remember the importance of creating strong, defined, and unique silhouettes. And then I wake up and see that my strengths have always been in shapes. Spheres. Cubes. Cylinders. The whole shaboodle. And I’m focusing these insights into a conscious effort to create a style that is more cartoony than my past work, but not overboard. Coz the way I figure it, the only real way my stuff is gonna look consistent from page to page, panel to panel, is if it’s really my stuff. It’s high time I ditch my crutches and grew some sea legs. So there, as far as figure and face work goes… I’m going with this more rubbery, animated feel. The serious sensibilities will be maintained only in the other details. Shadowplay (Mignola), camera placement (Hitch), figure dynamics (Frazetta), that kinda stuff.

That said, here’s some of the stuff I just did. And I love ‘em.

Peter Parker

Thor (current style)

Thor (Shitty older version)

Logan

And lastly.. Logan and Emma

I am happy now.

On with page three.

Noise

It’s always there. Waiting. Mountain lion to your biker. Housefly to your warm apple pie. Mousetrap to your… mouse. I’m talking about distractions. They seem to be in cahoots with Murphy’s Law as to the absolute right time to strike and cripple my progress train.

I won’t be able to do the last page of my Next Wave sequentials quite yet coz I got assigned a bunch of tasks by this company I’ve been working hard to get into. I used to tell my college professors I’d get by just drawing whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, that was before I had bills to pay. It’s not a comic-related job, this, but it’s the most promising illustration gig in town I could find. Managed not to make too big of an ass of myself at today’s meeting. Hope they bite. Also, if all goes well, I may be able to land an arrangement that will allow me to work from home a few days out of a week. Fuck-Win-Yay if that pushes through.

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I drink milk from a Bud Light glass.

Hardcore.

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I’m wondering if the 11×17-inch standard working size for comic pages is really mandatory. I’ve drawn on 8×11.5 (half the size above) since I started drawing sequentials seriously at the age of twelve, and it (to me anyway) comes out looking fine. I like to think I do details well enough. I don’t go all David Finch or Platt anyway, I tend to do simple bold lines a la Immonen or Ringo (bless you)… so maybe I can get away with working on paper slightly larger than actual print size. Should remember to ask an editor about that.

Anyway, yeah. I have to take a quick break from the NextWave stuff for dayjob reasons for a bit.  But I already have some studies for the monster who will appear in the last page. And i’m quite happy with how that turned out. Chaz is busy coloring a piece I drew for some Steampunk fairytale contest thing we’re participating in purely for shits and giggles. Santini’s drawn his half of our collaborative piece. Viking Vemp and I are still planning our joint drawing. More on these and the final NextWave page in a couple of days.

Hopefully. Hope hope hope.

The Bastards are Back

It doesn’t hit me till the drinks arrive that this is the first time the boys have all gotten together again in, what, three, four years? The old days with the band never did seem very simple seen through the juvenile goggles we had then. God were we stupid. But this is now. We have better goggles now. We’re less stupid now. Primer’s back from North Carolina, which makes SuperPinch (and that’s pronounced Japanese style, SUPAH PINCHU!) and FlimFlam civil enough with each other to want to come chill with me and Fizzy. We drink. We laugh. We make fun of each other and piss each other off, but then we remember that Primer’s only here for the month, so we laugh and let everything slide. It’s a good night.

SuperPinch is an expectant baby daddy. Fizzy’s started up this fencing school, and judging by his students’ gear I had to sit beside in the back of his car, I’d say he’s pretty serious about it. Fucking swords poking my ribs. FlimFlam’s the only one left still pursuing a band career, but it’s a showband. Fuck that. I tell him he rocks. He laughs. Primer’s finishing a degree in ‘puters. If he stays smart, in a few years, he will help fit the world in people’s pockets.

I draw comics.

Beer brings giants together.

I’m reminded of the time co-genius Matt and myself drank ourselves silly at three in the afternoon in a little store down the street from my house. We had just come home from night shifts, were overpaid, and hated our jobs. So yeah. We drank. So much so that we made the clerks nervous till we hit our ceilings and started talking seriously. This is when INSTRUMENTS started forming. This is when we decided what we wanted to do.

Beer makes things happen.

More on that later.

I’m in a weird place with my Nextwave pages. I already know how it’s all going to look, so I’m not too excited by it. That’s not a good sign. No, it isn’t. Which begs to ask whether I should receive scripts a page at a time to keep myself interested. But then that blows pacing sensibilities. Fuck fuck FUCK! But I don’t know. My heart’s a bit out of it, so I’d rather not even try and end up with something I know I’ll hate. I know something resoundingly Romita will boom outta the clouds one of these days and tell me, in an echoey Brooklyn accent, to just fucking do the pages. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Until then, I fail.