In the Extremely Cool department:
My work is part of the new Monsters of Webcomics exhibit at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco! I sent in a series of images that takes this page of Family Man from dissociated layout doodles all the way to the final version, including the original, hand-drawn inked page. This happened to be the page I was working on at submission time for the show, so it’s really representative of my typical work-through, rather than the extra measures I go through for a more glamorous page.
I’ve never displayed my “process” anywhere before, so it’s a reasonably neat glimpse into my diseased mind. The other artists in the show are all irredeemably fabulous: Jesse Reklaw, Kate Beaton, the Foglios, Dorothy Gambrell, Nick Gurewitch, my dear friend and housemate Jenn Manley Lee, Chris Onstad, and Spike are all in the lineup.
It opened this past week and will be up through December 6th – in conjunction with, oh my childhood heart, their major exhibit on the art of the Disney film Sleeping Beauty, a piece of magnificent artistry that’s always blown Tiny Dylan away. Having work displayed within a five mile radius of that work is exciting enough to forestall several of my major bodily functions, so being just a few walls over is kind of nuts.
My thanks to Andrew Farago and the good people at CAM for inviting me in on the show!
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Meanwhile I’m gearing up for a week’s visit to London, which means that in order to avoid thinking about how much I hate transatlantic flights, I’m mucking around in my brain over the difference between what I’m calling Mythology of Place versus Mythology of Character in modern narrative forms. To that end, riddle me this, dear readers:
What’s your favorite epic locale/setting/set piece from…
A movie? (example: Cloud City in Star Wars)
From a comic? (example: Atheia in Bone)
From a prose novel never adapted into film? (example: the attic room of carvings in the Gormenghast novels)
From a prose novel that has been adapted into film – but NOT the film’s take on that setting? (example: the Weasley residence in the Harry Potter books)
From the film version of a prose novel? (example: Rivendell in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings)
From a game? (example: the temple in Shadow of the Colossus)
And…why?
And we’re back to the boys.
This is one of those scenes that I really wish I could post all at once, because it’s a difficult one and it will probably make somebody mad if skimmed or decontextualized. Wait for the rest of the scene before you fire off an e-mail or get into a scrabble in the comments section, eh wot.
For those of you who’ve forgotten some of the context from the previous scene, here’s a quick link back.
I’m going to be in London from the 14th to the 22nd, and utterly incoherent with jetlag (I’m guessing) until the 24th. I’ll see if I can’t madwoman my way through an extra page this coming week so I don’t drop an update. Wish me luck!
And lo, another page to drive you crazy. Mysterious moonlit scenes with forlorn little girls: a Meconis specialty. You can infer from this that I spent a lot of time as a child imposing mystical experiences on myself after dark.
It’s been a frustrating run for me in terms of executing the art lately; probably because I am, in the words of E.K. Weaver, “about to level up.” Making comics becomes infinitely harder when you’re going through a growth spurt or learning a new technique, and this set of night scenes definitely represents some shiny new business.
Also it’s the deepest, hottest well of summer, and clutching a hot Cintiq in a darkened room is really the province of the mad.
That’s all for this update, my dears! We’ll be seeing Luther again soon, and shan’t that be fun. Poor bastard.
Heat.
O wind, rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,
rend it to tatters.
Fruit
cannot drop
through this thick air–
fruit cannot fall into heat
that presses up and blunts
the points of pears
and rounds the grapes.
Cut the heat–
plough through it,
turning it on either side
of your path.
Hilda Doolittle
Last weekend my loose conglomeration of affiliated nerds gathered ourselves together and attended the third performance of Trek in the Park‘s public recreation of classic original series Star Trek episode Amok Time (also known as “The One Where Spock Is Horny”).
It was the kind of wonderfully silly communal event that makes me so happy to live in Portland. When the guy playing Chekhov gets applause just by saying “Yes, Keptin!” in the appropriate tone, you know that you’re in for a good time. (He later upped the stakes by nailing the Montalban-as-Khan accent in the preview for next summer’s promised episode, Space Seed.)
I was raised with Star Trek, and I was raised with skit theater, so the whole thing felt immensely correct. I took as many photos as I could bear to, given how much willpower it took to look away – and one nice video of the first fight scene, which the cast executed with consummate shirt-ripping skill.
So bravo to Adam and Amy Rosko and all their fellow Trek in the Park contributors. You put together something genuinely sweet, communal, and delightful. If you need a spare actress who’s also good with graphics and web design, call me, and I will buy you all popsicles.
The crowd reactions are almost better than the action itself.