June got a little hairy as Jad came down with dengue fever and had to be hospitalized for almost a week.  I had flown down to keep her company as best I could, but the beginning of the rainy season had taken a bit of a toll on me as well — nothing quite as serious, fortunately, but I ended up not getting to stay with her at the hospital as often as I would have wanted, lest I got sicker and became a liability.  That said, my evenings at the hotel were still miserable, but hardly anything compared to Jad’s ailment which, we later discovered, is nicknamed “bone breaking fever.”  They really went out of their way to sugar that one up.

I had bought her a copy of Arnold Arre’s MYTHOLOGY CLASS, and she says it at least took her mind off being sick, if only for precious increments.  With prayer and a whole lot of soldiering on her part, she made a full recovery in a week and celebrated by attacking a happy helping of roast pork.

Brought my flu home with me.  Nothing a week of antibiotics couldn’t handle, but because they were pretty potent peyote-type shaman juice, I couldn’t draw quite as fast as I wanted to because I was getting tremors like a caffeinated mouse in a church bell.  So yeah, work went ouchy.

I hate flu season.  All better now though.

*****   *****   *****   *****   *****

A month after Zuda ended its monthly competitions, they announce that the site itself was shutting down.  PRs and official emails indicate that it’s a decision straight from the higher-ups, made in conjunction with DC’s whole digital initiative.  And while long-running series such as HIGH MOON and BAYOU will be migrated, the newer ones had to be cancelled.  Oh well, them’s the breaks.  More recent interactions at least have DC doing right by us creators, as far as ownership and fair compensation goes.  And I’ll leave it at that.  Heh.

Still talking to Gabe and Matt about Comixology and Graphic.ly.  But I’m currently committing a lot more of my time to 1888 — the first issue of which is nearly half done, as far as line art goes.  Bricks and dead whores, baby!  That’s my suggested alt title, but I don’t think Wolfgang will go for it.  Will keep pushing.  Don’t stop believing.  Heh.

*****   *****   *****   *****   *****

While I was stuck in bed, I got to read a whole bunch of stuff.  Too much in fact, that I’ll just post them as little blurbs instead of my usual “Reading: insert artsy fartsy title here” journal entries…

Scalped (Vertigo)

Sure, Jason Aaron’s Indian Reservation Noir is well into it’s fourth year, but I just got a chance to check it out.  Much like with IMMORTAL IRON FIST and PREACHER, I was late to the party.  But you know what?  I’m glad I was.  Because I don’t think I woulda been able to stand the 30-day wait between issues on this fantastic series.  Someone tell me why this isn’t on HBO.

-

100 Bullets (Vertigo)

Now this series has been done for a while, but I finally got around to picking up the first three trades coz I’ve been on a weird crime comic spree as of late.  I apologize in advance for the pun, but it’s… hit and miss? As much as the revolving cast keeps things interesting, it also works against the narrative because you cant really invest in anyone.  But I’ll gladly stay in my seat for Risso’s art alone.

I Killed Adolf Hitler (Fantagraphics)

There’s something about the deadpan delivery of this comic that makes it a lot more touching than you expect it to be.  Whatever you’re guessing it’s about based on the title, you’re really only half way there.  The majority of the book is delivered in an 8-panel grid, so there’s a visual immediacy to the story itself, because the pacing really isn’t the point.  And when you get to the end, you’ll get that it’s really a love story more than anything else.

Switchblade Honey (AiT/Planet Lar)

The captain is an asshole and the crew is a mishmash of crack addicts and psychopaths.  Meet the people who will save you from super advanced aliens who see you as nothing more than germs with shoes.  Angry Star Trek.  Warren Ellis.  Go.

The Tres Komikeros podcast will be taking a break after episode 52, which is scheduled for recording this July 17th… coincidentally the same day Jonas Diego is running a 24 Hour Comic Day Challenge.  So we figured… one more show for this season?  We’ll all be at our desks for a whole day anyway.  Fuck it, let’s record a 24-hour podcast.  And that, my friends, is how big decisions are made.  With half-assedness and lots of cursing.  Come listen.  And learn yourself a thing or two… even if it’s only “don’t do it.”

Amor: So the idea for this volley came from our initial chats to eventually collaborate on a comic, with the intention of chronicling the foolishness that the project began with.  I guess we can say for now that we are slowly working on a comedy comic together and safely leave it at that.

Tyler: I love the secrecy. We ARE working on a comedy comic together and I will leave it at “Hurray!”

Amor: To get the ball rolling, let me ask you this — what are some of your favorite funnies in mainstream comics?  As a comedian, your standard for junk like that might actually be pretty high, no?

Tyler: I love the comedy in the first half of the Bone series. It’s so fun and innocent and does such a good job of making you fall in love with those characters. I loved the joke-to-page ratio of the Formerly Known as the Justice League series from 2003. Peter David always manages to sneak some smart jokes into X-Factor. Early Invincible was really fun. Starman had some great jokes and was also an amazing series. Having some level of comedy, just like the real world, makes a comic a fully rounded experience.

As a comedian, I don’t think I have a higher standard for what is funny, it’s just more exposure to it. It makes me crave original humor. You can only hear so many Aquaman-is-useless-on-land jokes before you think “Check. Got it. Let’s give him a hand made of water, that’ll do it.”

Is there a difference on the artist’s end when it comes to comedy? Do you have a special joke pen?

Amor: Man, I wish I did.  Not a lot of illustrators will freely admit it, but the skill to render the wide range of emotions needed to make a comedy comic work is pretty challenging to develop.  Pros will tell you to look in the mirror, yeah well that doesn’t necessarily make it universally simple.  You mentioned Formerly Known as the Justice League as one of your favorites — my love for the BWAHAHA stuff goes back to the JLI, when I used those books as a gateway drug from Archie.  Kevin Maguire’s a complete genius at conveying the emotions needed to make Talking Head Books work.  Other favorites of mine include the genre-bending stylings in Next Wave, and the fourth-wall breakage of any Adam Warren book.

The Aquaman jokes are all good at the start, I guess… but after a while it gets stale and overdone, which really only makes it attributable to lazy writing.  And since no character would actually freely mock Aquaman to his face, it’s really just the writer mocking the character vicariously — know what I mean?  Which brings up the relevance of voice…

Tyler: Well, to be fair, there are ways of mocking Aquaman to his face. He speaks very little French, for one.

Voice. I love talking voice. Voice is essential to good storytelling. When you think of all of the most distinctive, popular characters in comics, what they have in common is a clear voice: Wolverine, Captain America, Batman, Deadpool, Joker, there are others. These are the characters that jump off the page: you can almost hear their “voices” as you read, especially the bubs.

But giving voice to a character is hard. It’s a combination of language, attitude, worldview, accent, emotion, motivation and on the artist’s end, design, look, movement and a ton of other small details that make up the character. It’s so easy to miss one or two of these or over-emphasize others and then the character ends up out of balance and bland or fake.

Aquaman is a good example of this. In many writer’s hands he just doesn’t have a strong voice: he just seems like an underwater superman. Or dying secretly dying with an octopus face. But you look at a mini-series like Peter David’s Aquaman: Time and Tide and he has a clear character, a strong voice and it’s just amazing work. It’s a must read, even though he’s just a bâtard poisson muet…. you know what I mean.

Amor: Hehah! Indeed, I do.  In contrast to that though, something that annoys me a lot, is when a writer will inject too much of himself into a character.  And though it may still be funny in the context of the story, certain characters simply don’t say certain things.  In Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men, Wolverine tells Armor to step up her game or else she’ll be transferred to Excalisuck, or something to that effect.  That’s a funny joke… but Wolverine doesn’t say that.  Xander says that.  Buffy banter does not a good X-comic make.

Tyler: Yeah, definitely. Wolverine is not great with banter. He’s got a great stand up comedy act though. Sort of a gruff Carrot Top.

Every writer brings their personal take to the character but the best writers explore the voice through the character rather than laying their personal voice on top of the character. But Wolverine saying “Excalibullshit” would be pretty cool too.

Either way, I hate you.

The big misconception very early on, and I’m guilty of this myself, is that the finished art is supposed to be painfully faithful to the reference material — which, of course, isn’t the case; otherwise you’d be better off simply photoshopping the images into the panels or going full-on fumetti.  No, the ideal way of using the reference material is to stare at it, absorb it, digest, and then put on paper what you, as an artist, believe to be the key components of what you saw.  Sure, that sounds easy enough, but what you learn very quickly is that what you leave out is just as important is what you put into the drawing.  There is such a thing as over-rendered.  Temper it.

To draw from Asterios Polyp, as something is recalled, the brain has a chance to refine it.  In that sense, every memory is a re-creation, not a playback.

Why all this talk about the use of reference and such?  On my desk is a stack of authentic crime scene photos from the Autumn of Terror.  Wolfgang and the 1888 team just recently ran a successful funding campaign over at Kickstarter and everyone’s stepping into place to get the cogs running on the book.  The bastards have done it!

***** ***** *****

Went to the mall the other week to get sleeping masks for me and Jad coz we’re going to bed at sunrise more often these days.  It’s frustrating how them clerks don’t know if they sell them along with the bed linens or in the cosmetics section.  Turns out it was in neither and I found them in the toiletries.  Go figure.

***** ***** *****

PLUCK chugs along once a week at Zuda.  Lately got to draw a splash page showcasing Trugg One-Eye, as well as a sequence featuring many a half-naked lady.  Gabe White is a good man.  Home stretch for JUDAH pitch as Ian Areola joins the team as colorist.  After he colored the JENNY STRANGE pitch, I simply had to work with him again.  That project, however, is on hold as we wait for Zuda to officially post their new submissions policy, given that they ended their competition format a month or so back.  Got other pitches waiting to be worked on, so the Fort Bastard docket for 2010 is pretty much closed as far as new projects go.  You know who you are, and you are Saints of Patience.

***** ***** *****

Wedding preparations are officially underway.  It’s fun and exciting and scary and stressful, but if you can’t mentally see me dancing through this journal entry, you don’t have a soul.  Yeah.  Jocular Johnny finally got one to stick around.  Learned from what came before.  Absorbed it.  Digested.  Built something better. Built something stronger.

Like I said… Reference.  It’s good for you.

Back to work.

Two weeks to go before the pledge period ends, so if you’d like to see this scene played out, I highly recommend heading over to Kickstarter and backing the project.

Back this Project.

Once I started page nine, it had already been agreed that Gabe’s brother Matt would be coming onboard to provide lush colors for the comic.  So there’s a steady and very slow transition of me doing less and less blacks so that the line art can let a bit more color in.  Gabe is pretty hands on with the layout process and usually does his own set of layouts that I later build on, but we’ve gotten to a point in our creative relationship that we can pretty much riff on each other’s ideas very freely.  We’ll probably be moving in together soon as well.

Be good.  Go here.  Read PLUCK.

:::::     :::::     :::::     :::::     :::::

There’s been a bit of a lull in the art posting here on the journal.  I’ve been pretty swamped with the pitches I’m handling and making sure PLUCK comes out on time.  I should be able to post some really neat stuff momentarily though.  More than anything, it’s just a matter of permission.  Soon though.

:::::     :::::     :::::     :::::     :::::

I got caught up on Hickman/Eaglesham’s Fantastic Four this week, and recent reviews on the podcast have made me see more and more the Pinball Nature of mainstream comics.  I mean think about it — If you start reading a book at its five hundred and seventieth installment, there’s no logical reason why you should understand what the fuck is going on.  But I did.

What does that mean?

Two things.

First off, every time a new writer gets onto a book, it’s a soft reset.  Hickman may be following up on some of Millar’s Nu-World stuff, but really, everything else can be latched onto quite easily by any new comic reader or fanboy who has just come back to the medium after an extended absence.  The FF is still a family of explorers.  Ben’s still ugly, Johnny’s still a dick.

Second (and this is really just an expansion of the first point), nothing really changes in mainstream comics.  You can take away Wolverine’s adamantium; You can turn Superman into an electric gimp; You can kill the goddamn Batman.  But it all goes back to normal eventually.  Give it a coupla months, give it a decade (hey Bendis), but things will reset.  Now raising these two points may sound suspiciously jaded or cynical, but there’s something about this cyclical nature that’s comforting.

And this is why comics are like a pinball machine.  It’s not a question of how many pinballs you have left, or of how long you kept one ball live.  No.  What matters is where that pinball went.  What did it hit?  Where did you think you were gonna lose it?  And most importantly, How did you save it?

The answer to that last bit, of course, is that it saved itself; but you were along for a great ride.