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Archive for October, 2010


…and Oregon City!

Off to Oregon City shortly for Friday evening’s kick-off talk at the Clackamas CC 24-Hour Story Jam!

[Edit to Add: If that link goes to the wrong place, know that my hosts tell me it’ll be at 6:30 pm at Niemeyer Center]

Back home and to regular blogging Monday. Have a great week(end)!


The Day in Review

Two more 24-Hour Comics Day links to consider, now that this year’s event is in the rear-view mirror.

Sean Michael Robinson offers a thoughtful look at the phenomenon, his own experience in Seattle, and improvisation in comics here.

Pay special attention to the paragraph on our daily impediments to focus and see if you can’t relate. “Iron swimsuit” indeed…

Meanwhile, the video (from 2008) in this blog entry about 24-Hour Comics Day in Amsterdam, just made me smile from ear to ear.

You don’t need to know Dutch to recognize the language of creativity, camaraderie, and comics. Wish I could have been there.


Two More to Watch Out For

Two more artists coming onto the radar this week: Hellen Jo and Liz Suburbia.

Hellen Jo has a great-looking piece at Jordan Crane’s What Things Do which might not be new, but it’s new to me, so it might be to you.

Hellen Jo’s artwork is all pretty new to me actually. Haven’t read a lot yet, but I like what I’ve seen. (link via Tom)

Meanwhile, Liz Suburbia has a cool comic running on both her LJ and at her new site.

According to Wood on Friday’s comment thread, I linked to a page of Liz’s several years ago but her stuff has grown by leaps and bounds since then.

Again, because time is short this week, I’ve just begun to read it all, but I like what I’ve seen so far.

Not sure why I’m lumping these two together, except that they’re both relatively new to me, both good, and both of them draw in a way that vaguely reminds me of Brandon Graham for some reason.

Also there’s a lot of great new talent out there and once in a while, I have to double up.

[Edit to Add: Stupid me, there’s actually a date on Hellen’s piece. 2008]


Portraits, Pop-Ups, Prognosticators, and a Proof of Concept

Well it turns out that if you want to make a photocomic, being a great photographer doesn’t hurt. Who knew?

Seth Kushner’s Culture Pop (not to be confused with CulturePulp by Mike Russell) features photocomics of real life characters. Click on the chapter numbers to surf from person to person. It’s pretty cool.

This being Friday, a few odds and ends:

A couple of cool not-comics books in the mailbox this week. I’ve just started diving into Kevin Kelly’s new book What Technology Wants but it’s a fascinating read already. And Andrew Farago’s first book is out, a handsome new Loony Tunes Treasury, with all sorts of fun sproingy extras in it.

Finally, Mike Leung offers a little proof-of-concept experiment mixing words and pictures:

An adaptation of Swift’s Modest Proposal that gives the reader control of the story progress via common-sense scrolling, can be as light as you can make your image files. and needs no commercial tools to publish other than what it takes to post digitize artwork online.”

Have a great weekend!


Are You Reading The Meek?

You should be. It’s good.

(Not safe for work if you start from the beginning, but nothing too extreme).


Sick Day

Enjoying a visit from Mr. Kidney Stone this morning.

A short visit, I hope.


More Art from the Vaults, and a Question

Here are just a few of the hundreds of “notecard faces” I drew each morning back in the mid ’80s as daily warm-up exercises.

Bigger versions here.

I’m not sure exactly when these were done, but assuming it was in 1986, I’m curious about something: Are there readers of this blog who weren’t even born when I drew these?


Not Comics, but Cool…

A lot of you may have already seen this experimental Arcade Fire “video” by Chris Milk (it’s been out at least a month) but if not, definitely give it a spin. Don’t be shy about giving them your old address, it’s worth it.

Then check in with the latest Chrome Experiments and consider how some of these new tricks might be applied to comics, so I can retroactively claim this was about comics afterall.

[via Billy Poulos]


THIS WEEKEND:

The official site.

34 States! 19 Countries! One Challenge.

Can you climb the Mount Everest of Comics?