Ludovic Debeurme doesn’t have a script or an idea of the full storyline before he starts to work on a book. Rather, he starts with visuals and characters and allows for digressions.This way of work helps him to make connections that he otherwise wouldn’t have made.
Hilary Allison came in one day beaming because she’d cracked the Nib-Holding Industrial Complex’s iron grip on her student budget, and I encouraged her to throw a post together about it for you, dear readers. This is what she came up with.
Sunward is the unusual story of a guy who’s had his gravity reversed: instead of falling down, he’s falling up, and in fact the only thing holding him on planet Earth is a blade of grass. His two friends work to help him out, but are baffled by the problem. I loved that this mini initially came across as cute and innocent, but when you get reading, the basic underlying problem is not pussy-footed around: if the guy relaxes his grip, he’ll fall into the sun, an likely die long before he gets there.
Recently, I was a guest at a comics teaching conference in Finland. As far as I know, it was the very first of its kind; attendees and presenters all taught not reading comics, but making comics. I’ve never had the chance before to compare teaching methods and philosophies with such a diverse (and large) group of peers. It was eye-opening (and I wish there had been some such conference before I finished DWWP!). It was so full of valuable information, in fact, that I’m going to divide this report into several parts, and run the next parts over the next week.
I feel very strongly that I have a responsibility, in fact, to young artists trying to break into the business. So, when I am putting together an anthology, I now make a point of including someone whose work hasn’t been published before (or, at least, not in any kind of significant way). It’s a karma thing.
Digging through old photos is fun, but I also realized there are lots that have some comics, cartoonist, or comics scene relevance, so I decided to start posting them on our Flickr feed. I don’t expect the project to go quickly, but there’s a lot we’ll be doing over the next few months. Here’s the first set, from waaay back in 2000, when I was invited out to the DNC 2000 (in LA) by the LA Weekly to do a comic strip every day for their special “LA Weekly Daily”.
While looking for examples of full color comics that we might use in DWWP2, I discovered that what I often think of as great coloring has less to do with the approach to an individual panel than with its larger context: the page, the spread, the work as a whole.
Comics are a narrative medium, akin to prose, film, and video, not to painting and illustration. Comics are made to be read. When you put up a grid of 16 pages on a wall, some too high to see clearly (and certainly not comfortably), you thwart the basic nature of comics. When you excerpt five random pages out of a 250-page story (probably because they’re the ones with nice big illustration-ey splash panels), you make it impossible to really experience the work.
