My goal for the first part of this year is to learn the fine art of web design and to be a good father. Wish me luck.
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Archive for ‘December, 2012’
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I am actually writing these posts weeks in advance, which is a switch for me. At first I was trying to write the sorts of things that I thought people wrote in blog posts, but that quickly became dull. I really miss the Livejournal days and the endless writing that I used to do, so I thought I’d try that again.
I have a facebook and twitter and such, if you are interested in the endless minutae that I wonder about every day. In this format I think I’ll try to get back to writing bigger and more complicated things, but I have a bad record with statements of intention, so I wouldn’t count on that. In any case, I have decided that every post of Feef should be accompanied by words, especially since Feef is such a slow story (at a panel a week, I’ve already penciled the first two years, so once I have a comfortable lead expect faster updates. I just have a kid on the way, so I’m scheduling much further in advance than before). Hopefully this will cause my brain to keep the subconscious routine open that generates blog posts. It’s interesting, because when you do something all the time, it gains momentum. It’s exactly like leaving a Firefox window open in your mind. Here’s to hoping for consistent inspiration.
Merry Christmas, which it will be by the time some of you read these words, and after for most of you.
This one was by Gewel and me. It was made to amuse one of her teachers, a man whom I have never met and probably will never meet, but I hope he likes it. I am also not sure how this works on the internet, because it is very, very small on the internet.
You would laugh if you knew how long this took to put together.
It turns out that the most “American” car in America is the Toyota Avalon, which is like 85% assembled in Georgetown Kentucky, lord only knows where the parts come from.
I guess the first thing this means to me is that I owe Martha Layne Collins an apology. She was governor of Kentucky in the early 80s, and she actively enticed Toyota to come to Georgetown. If one assumes that the economy is doing something positive and that slightly better cars are better for the environment than slightly worse cars and that our entire car culture is not propelling us into a confrontation with this generation’s General Winter, by which I mean that if every step towards cars is a step towards our own doom, then there is no good step in that direction, but if there is such a thing as a good step in that direction, bringing Toyota to Georgetown was it.
If nothing else it gives Central Kentucky a leg up in the inevitable robot wars to come.
So I’ve been studying Jack Kirby lately, because I really like some things about him. Not a lot of things, definitely not all of them, but some of them. I had a comic that I was working on for the Next Issue of Rocksalt that needed a giant knock’emout punch for the antipunchline (that’ll make sense when you see it, the comic is sort of based around the idea of reading it out of order so that the first thing you read gradually becomes something different as you get around to reading the rest of it, sort of playing upon the expectation that a comic should be read from left to right versus the reality that comics are read from the most eye-catching panel to the next, occasionally modified by that aforementioned expectation, so if you make a central enough image you can sort of make people read it over and over again while they read the rest of the panels in a sort of jagged order), and I needed the most rockin’est punch that could exist, which is of course Kirby…
…I’m just breaking up the paragraph here for readability, I’m still on the same subject…
….so I became interested in that most central and pressing question of our time, is Kirby’s anatomy realistic? In the process of making this drawing, I actually took a million reference photos, photoshopped them together, and drew over actual human anatomy in fragments to get this result, and then I had to go back even farther into cartooning (and away from the model) to make it work, so no. Kirby does not depict realistic anatomy. He depicts plausible anatomy, which is better.
So I finally got around to it and started to study Jack Kirby. I think I sort of get it, a little better, now, mostly, sort of. One thing is that he liked to fill every inch with texture, to the point where it doesn’t even look good. So far I’ve noticed that he was really, really good at outlining bones and muscle groups with hard, flat planes. So that pretty much puts the kibosh on the idea that he didn’t know anatomy. You gotta actually know where the bone goes to put that precise squiggle there, and if it works any other way I’d like to know about it.
Crossposting has been quite wack for this series so far, I swear to you I’m working on it, I desperately need to take a course in web design and get this stuff on track. In the mean time, here are the nine panels of Feef that I’ve published so far:
True Blood is the most consistently well-acted TV show I know of, or at least it was for the first two seasons, I heard it ain’t as good, but whatever, you know what I mean.