Well There's One Thing to Know About This Earth

I'm struggling with this weird form of writer's block right now. It's not necessarily that I don't have anything to write about, but that I don't know how to do it, and am not necessarily sure I want to bother anyway. Though my illustration work is going in what I think is a good direction, working on comics is just exceedingly frustrating right now. Something about all the left-brain thinking necessary to constructing characters and plots is really turning me off at the moment... I just feel like drawing and feeling what's right instead of forcing myself into analyzing everything meticulously and trying to have everything so glued-down. Oddly, I feel like there are few people at school that I can talk to about this kind of thing, which makes it all the more frustrating. Even Nathan Pretzelberger stuff is getting hard to work on... things generally just don't seem that funny to me after what I've dealt with the last few months.

I need to find other people's work that I'm really genuinely interested in; start feeling inspired, start feeling like art matters again. Like I'm not just throwing more dirt onto a hill. It's frustrating that I find so few comics that interest me these days, though that's probably due to not looking hard enough / in the right places more than anything else.

I did have the privilege of reading Shaun Tan's The Arrival, an amazing piece of art that manages to both be profoundly beautiful and speak (I should think) universally--a difficult balance to strike. As time goes by I'm noticing how much potential power there is in "silent" sequential work.



Maybe removing the idiosyncrasies and crudeness of language makes artwork speak to us on a more visceral level, somehow. Chris Ware's got some great examples of this, like the God comic in the big red ACME collection and (especially, to me) the old Quimby the Mouse strips. I've always thought that one of the advantages traditional literature has over sequential art is that a writer is capable of leaving so many more blanks for the reader to fill in on their own (the act of which is one of the primary reasons we connect with a piece of art, I'd suggest)--but maybe comics has the ability to do something similar, just in its own unique way. Anyway, what I'm really trying to say with this paragraph is: go buy The Arrival as soon as you can. And read it.

I'll post some recent work when I get back in Savannah--this computer can't seem to handle .tifs or .psds correctly for whatever reason. I'll try to do a rundown of my process for my illustration final too, which should be fun for a lark, and hopefully interesting to at least one of you out there. In the meantime, I'm resolving to read a lot more than I have been--especially short stories. Anybody have any recommendations?

My kingdom for a scanner!

My art goal over winter break is to finish next quarter's Nathan Pretzelberger strips, which will keep me from being forced to work on them (or more likely, decline to work on them in the interest of other work and then feel bad about doing so) during school. As I am apparently stuck with three studio classes this coming quarter, as well as for the following two quarters I will be at SCAD, it will also assist in preventing me from going any more insane than I may or may not already be. I've got a couple of weekends for getting stuff done, but I'm having trouble getting myself to work for more than an hour before / after work during the week (generally about a panel's worth of pencilling for a snail in winter like myself). I'm finding that it's hard working in a house that feels like it must be a consistent 55 degrees--makes me wish I was back in Savannah.

Anycrap, to that end I've been spending a lot of time dicking around in my sketchbook these days; mostly working out new character designs for the Nathan strips. I'm introducing Nathan's rival this quarter (the OTHER future greatest sequential artist in the world, natch), something I've had floating around in sketchbooks for a while. His dealie is that he possesses both the most obnoxious, irritating personality in the universe, but is also quite artistically talented (which he loves to make clear in subtly arrogant ways that are superficially self-deprecating). Obviously, every person in the strip, other than Nathan, thinks he is perfectly wonderful. I've tried to make his physical appearance the embodiment of irritating. If it is the case that he closely resembles yourself and/or one of your friends/relatives, apologies in advance :( But not really.



I've also had to come up with a bunch of relatives for Nathan's extended family, who will be in a Thanksgiving-themed strip (a little late, but I do not care). My favorite is his teenage cousin who refers to everything she dislikes as either "gay," or one of a surprisingly large number of more offensive synonyms thereof. Sometimes I wonder if I'm getting a little iffy with some of the jokes I want to use in a strip that runs in a school-funded paper; whenever I do, though, I just remember Jonchad's Frm_Bhnd.Thrst and Ben Passmore's chocolate and vaginal flavored presidential candidates and immediately start to relax. If you don't know what I'm referring to, you may be better off, depending on when you last ate.


Finally, I'm working on a new header for this very blog (as may be noticed in a few of the above images). The text title was always supposed to be a placeholder, but I just haven't gotten around to sprucing things up around here until now--it might be nice to play around with the layout a little bit too. I ain't too much good with th' HTML an' nunnathat, though... web design skills sure would be nice to have right about now.

The Nathan thing is cute and would probably look fun after a little work, but putting him in the title of something like this lends him some sort of prominence in terms of my artwork that I decided I don't want him to have. Sorry Natey.

Oh, and let me just mention that Achewood has been absolutely hilarious this week. More so than usual, even. For shame if any of my Sequential Art brethren are not reading this regularly!

One Spring Morning

And so, this is my submission for SCAD's 2007 anthology, "Pantomime." 2 - 8 pages, grayscale, no talking allowed.

Not a lot left to say about it at this point. As previously stated, I'm pretty satisfied with the result as a whole.

I can't believe there's only two weeks left in this quarter. Where does the time go?

The windshield was broken, but I love the fresh air you know

2nd place in the ACP contest... I have to admit I'm a little disappointed, but hey! Any sort of recognition is nice.

A few updates:

Finally managed to finish my anthology submission. I'm excited to see the final version of that book--I think there's going to be a lot of real good stuff this time around. I'll try to get the story online sometime soon (probably at the end of the quarter when I get some spare time). Feeling much better about this one than any of the other (relatively) longish work I've done in the past.

I'm annoyed with myself for not being able to do more than 3 (4, if you count the five page strip for whenever the next comixtravaganza is) Nathan P. strips this quarter, but the anthology and classes just had to take precedence. Though it's probably a ridiculous goal what with working full-time, I'm going to try to finish next quarter's batch over winter break (or at least make some manner of dent in that pile).

Better cut this short, though. I have pictures of flayed pigs and intestines to print. More on that later.

Holy Guacamole!

So apparently, Jessica Clary (Assistant Director of Student Media at SCAD) submitted a few of my Nathan Pretzelberger strips to the National Associated Collegiate Press Pacemaker awards in cartooning. I was e-mailed this link today:

http://www.studentpress.org/acp/winners/cartoon07.html

:D

Everybody keep their fingers crossed for me... winner gets announced sometime in October. Eek!

The time has come to speak of many things

Right now I'm pretty much in the home stretch of Summer break--School starts next monday, and before I head back I plan to finish inks on the last 5 pages of my submission for SCAD's next anthology. Though it's not saying much, I'm more happy with this story than any of my prior works for SCAD's collections--the ideas all seem to be pulling together really well and just fitting. You know? My drawing is still nowhere close to where I'd like it to be, but I can tell that it's getting incrementally better, and I'm happy with that progress.

All the cool kids are posting pix of their drafting table, so I'm excited to jump on the bandwagon:

My trusty CD player and the downtown library's collection of audiobooks have been getting me through many a grueling night of painstaking work. Many thanks to Al Franken and Ann Coulter for all the laughs! Page 7 of the comic is currently in process there, as you'll notice.

This is another page from the comic. 37 panels... no, not joking, though at this point, I'm pretty sure that I wish I was. As a preemptive response to anybody who inevitably attempts to draw any comparisons between my chosen method of storytelling and that of that "Chris Ware" hack: shutup. I can draw small if I feel like it. I hate you.

Sadly, due to unforseen circumstances, there will be no Nathan Pretzelberger strips in the first or second issues of the District, though after that, with the blessing of the dear lord god and a little luck, the strips will run uninterrupted until the end of the quarter. In addition to schoolwork, I'll have to make 8 (or so?) Pretzelberger strips and tone all 8 pages of the comic this quarter... it'll be an interesting challenge. I expect to run on very little sleep this quarter, so, to all my classmates at SCAD: If you say hi to me and I punch you in the nose, just remember that it is your own fault. You jerk.

And one last thing:





Thanks to my parents for their generous birthday gift ( not to mention the wonderful Stephanie, faithful friend and my insider at Circuit City :D )

That Toddlin' Fuggin' Town

So, something like 85% of the reason that I wanted to go on a weekend trip to Chicago with my family this summer was to see Francis Bacon's Figure With Meat at the Art Institute (An additional 14% was seeing Quimby's Comics). Imagine my joy when I arrived and discovered that they decided--and presumably it was a decision calculated purely to piss me off and ruin my trip--not to have it on display.



:-(



On the bright side, they did have three Ivan Albright paintings on display, which were incredible. I still swear I'm going to see a Francis Bacon in person someday before I die--Since Triptych 1973 is apparently in a private collection somewhere, it'll hopefully be Three Figures and Portrait at the Tate Museum or (I was hoping...) Figure with Meat.

Oh, and the pizza really wasn't all that great, either. I must be some type of yahoo or something.