Mumbling Mynah

Isotope Award winner

2008-11-03T09:55:00.000-08:00

Ochre Ellipse #2 is the proud recipient of Isotope Comics' annual minicomics award. Much thanks to James Sime and everyone at Isotope!

Deleted scene

2008-07-27T23:12:00.001-07:00

Bonus material from Ochre Ellipse 2, this page ended up on the cutting room floor.

Finally finished

2008-05-05T21:34:00.000-07:00

The second issue of Ochre Ellipse is done! It took me long enough! Roughly two years of work, including the long bouts of procrastination and self-doubt which might befall any man. The cover is below.

Yes, I seem to have ripped off The White Album. Inadvertently, I might add—various circumstances of trying to print cheaply led me to this, and I didn't realize the likeness until it was back from the printer.

This issue is a far more formalist work than my first (humanist?) issue, or anything else I've attempted previously. Various cartooning conceits were tried, some more successfully than others. Isometric perspective, for example, was a frustrating beast to grapple with, often leading to less-than-satisfactory compositions and stale page layouts. It did not work on a page of talking heads (and how!)--those are difficult enough to begin with, let alone when the cartoonist has hamstrung himself. But other cartoonists I've talked to were particularly taken with the isometric word balloons, and told me they were stealing the idea (the book is released under Creative Commons, so go nuts, guys).

The page below is sort of my favorite. I originally had an idea also for a short comic (which I still might do) which would be an entire relationship told through "talking" graphic design as shown here. It would start with receipts for romantic dinners, champagne labels, etc., and end with...um, divorce papers? Not sure. Actually, I don't know if I can really improve on products talking to a receipt. (Patting myself on the back here. I'm allowed some small immodesty.)

Of course, I'm not a total pioneer, though. Off the top of my head, I ripped off an issue of Concrete by Paul Chadwick (but moreso, Nude Descending a Staircase); as well as one of my favorite movies, The Taste of Tea. I'm sure I'm guilty of more, besides.

Oh, also! It's $4.00, and should be added to the Family Style catalog this week.

Eddie Campbell's rules

2008-03-07T12:54:00.001-08:00

There is a wealth of "how to" comics information over at Eddie Campbell's blog (he of From Hell and Bacchus fame). Topics range from the high-level and abstract to the mundane nitty-gritty of which paper to use. My favorites (so far—I've been working my way through) have been on word balloon placement and on the holdover of filmic notions in comics.

Link

What's he building in there?

2008-02-19T12:59:00.000-08:00

Kevin Huizenga has been posting some tantalizing bits and pieces of what he explains is "a top secret project" over at his blog The Balloonist. Something post-apocalyptic? Looks great, can't wait.

Links here, here and here.

FFFFOUND!

2008-02-06T11:37:00.000-08:00

I was lucky enough to score an invite to the sincerely awesome image bookmarking site FFFFOUND! I've since spent too many hours browsing the stuff other users have saved and forming my own scrapbook of internet flotsam, which, looking it over, seems to show a pretty well-unified sensibility. My page is here. The site seems to be in an interminable private beta, and I wish I had more invites to give away, but I don't. For those less fortunate, there is the somehow less cool vi.sualize.us.

Body Horror

2008-02-04T12:47:00.000-08:00

I just watched David Croneberg's 1986 film The Fly. Hoo boy. What a gnarly movie. I have to admit that I am a big wuss, though: I couldn't watch it all in one sitting, and in the end, I was only able to finish it by playing a video game at the same time so that my attention was divided. I found The Fly very similar to Tetsuo: The Iron Man, another film to which I had similar reaction, years ago, and also couldn't watch all at once. Both films are about a man progressively turning into something else (In Tetsuo, the main character becomes a machine).

Why such a strong reaction? Well, in these films we identify with the characters portrayed, projecting our own identities on to them. Because we can see ourselves in them, we want them to be safe and to succeed against the odds. But both of these movies function as a reversal of standard tropes of the horror genre. The hero isn't just being pursued by the monster, the hero is the monster. That's much scarier. It gets much worse when sex is added in and becomes an act of violence. Yikes.

Nevertheless, I have another Cronenberg film, Scanners, in my Netflix queue. Am I a glutton for punishment or what?

Humor

2008-02-03T18:23:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking a lot about the science of humor. There was a New Yorker article a few years ago that started me in this direction, discussing, among other things, attempts to determine the world's funniest joke and world's funniest animal (a duck).

The other day I turned up a link to a Smithsonian piece by Steve Martin. Martin talks about his early experiments with an audience's expectations of comedy. The result is that the audience doesn't know quite when to laugh, but they expect that something funny has occurred, and there is a buildup of tension that they want to release. Steve Martin, in my opinion, is an interesting comedian because he seems to be one half of a comic duo; a funny man without a straight man. He is absurd but without a yardstick of normalcy except the one we bring ourselves--Bugs Bunny without Elmer Fudd, let's say.

One tip I gleaned from the article: "My routines wove the verbal with the physical, and I found pleasure trying to bring them in line. Each spoken idea had to be physically expressed as well." There is something here that can be directly translated to comics, but I'm not entirely sure how yet.

I'm interested in reading more on the subject, and Martin's recent Memoir, Born Standing Up, is on my reading list. What else is out there?

Aside: Jeez, it's been a long time since I posted here.

Hand-in-hand

2007-03-25T21:28:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been matching up certain musical artists with their authorial counterparts to form literary soundtracks. Smog goes well with Raymond Carver. John Cale seems to go hand-in-hand with Paul Auster. Somehow the moods and sentiments, the zeitgeist of each seem to sync up perfectly, without effort. What else? Brian Eno with Graham Greene? Pavement with Trinie Dalton?

Some links.

2007-01-18T07:42:00.000-08:00

A recent rediscovery: My Receipts at sorabji.com has scans of several years' worth of receipts, along with other neat resources, such as a worldwide directory of payphone numbers.

Also: package design analysis.

And, for the heck of it: every book Art Garfunkel has read for the last 30 years.

I am a bad blogger.

2006-12-11T03:21:00.000-08:00

Also a bad student, cartoonist, writer, and boyfriend. I am good at looking at the internet, however.

the cover

2006-04-17T12:42:00.001-07:00

I was too lazy when I wrote my last post to scan the cover for Ochre Ellipse, but here it is now. Somebody at APE said it looked like something by Souther Salazar, which is cool I guess, but actually what I was trying to do was copy some children’s drawings from an old issue of Highlights I found at SCRAP.

I will add this and a couple other things to the Family Style catalog for online purchase soon, but I want to redo the whole thing in PHP first, and I don't really know what I'm doing yet. For now, if you want one, just leave a comment here or email me. It's $3.00.

afterthoughts

2006-04-17T04:39:00.000-07:00

Now that the first issue of my comic is completed and the creative process is over with, I would like to take a moment to share some of my thoughts about it. Overall, I am very happy with the way it turned out. The printing and the covers came out great, and I get real pleasure just from holding a copy in my hands. And now that it’s behind me, I feel much more creatively open-minded, so to speak—I can do whatever I want right now instead of putting it all into one thing.
I think that the comic suffered somewhat from the fact that I constructed it episodically, while I really wanted it to read straight through as a single narrative. The transitions from one part to another seem clumsy and unsubtle to me. There were some sections that didn’t make it in, and some concepts I couldn’t really figure out how I wanted to communicate them. For instance, in addition to having a story in which my character grows and becomes giant, I wanted to do one in which I shrink to a tiny size and have some adventure a la The Incredible Shrinking Man. That didn’t happen, but I did hint at it on the last page.

I mentioned to a friend a couple months ago that I would probably just work on it for a while and then publish whatever I had done up to that point, which is pretty much how it worked out.
Ultimately, this issue was supposed to be about childhood, and I don’t think that really came across. Perhaps I was too subtle. For your edification, a brief guide to the symbols I attempted to employ:

mynah=me (Jonas)
clouds=nature/truth
airplane=society
migration=growth
giant=child/puberty
growing/shrinking=growing/shrinking

Discuss.

Try drawing your teacher while they're lecturing; see if they notice.

2006-01-31T00:36:00.000-08:00

It's funny, but over my winter break from school, when I had all the time in the world to be working on writing and drawing and comics, it's then that I was lazy and had no creative energy and I procrastinated contiunually. Now that I'm back in a new semester, I'm full of new ideas and putting my old ones into action finally. Something to do with having structure, or the energy I get from riding my bike there every day. Who knows?

Additionally, I tend to doodle a lot in class. These are actually from last semester, but you get the idea.

forthcoming

2006-01-14T06:32:00.000-08:00

For some reason, I almost never discuss something I'm working on with anyone. I don't know whether it's because I fear early criticism, or simply that I want the work to stand on its own, without people having a preconceived idea of what it is. Francois on the other hand, will speak readily and at length about his (or my) upcoming projects with almost anyone who's willing to listen. Is one of us more right than the other? I don't know, but I've decided that maybe my reticence should be tempered somewhat by openness. With that in mind:

My upcoming self-published comic is entitled "Ochre Ellipse," a phrase I chose solely for its intrinsic beauty. I'm not sure how long I'm going to keep working under that title; right now I have a three-issue "story arc," so to speak, in mind. Themes to be discussed: youth, growth, inevitability, determinism, puissance, power, control, truth, honesty, nature. What I want to do is to build up a sort of lexicon of symbols which represent each of these ideas, so that they would be well-known to the reader in the same way that the tropes of a "Peanuts" strip are familiar, immutable constants.

One way I want to do this is to lay out a series of charts or graphs of different types to explain each metaphor. I did something like this in my comic about myself for the "Family Style" zine:

I've been reading Edward Tufte, and trying to understand the best way to display and design information. But can you chart an abstraction? Can you graph a metaphor? And if so, what's the best way? Am I on the right track?

emeth!

2006-01-06T01:01:00.000-08:00

sketchbook

2006-01-05T22:06:00.000-08:00

sketchbook

2005-12-24T15:45:00.000-08:00