This was important enough not to bury as an edit to the original posting.
According to Gabe in today’s Penny Arcade (scroll down to the second item), this year’s Child’s Play raised $590,000 in cash and toys for childrens hospitals around the world.
Damn, it feels good to type those words.
Ryuko Midori of The Green Avenger has added a new dimension to webcomics criticism: sexiness!
Most surprising bit: Ghastly keeps the tie and pipe even when doing a Chippendales routine. Somewhere, J.R. “Bob” Dobbs is slackishly weeping in envy.
Scariest bit: “A rugged, blurry man, Mr. Rosenberg has hair that models would kill for, and a beard that has killed many a man with jealousy. His gaze seems to say, “I know why you stare, and it is because I am so very handsome.” Why has this man not been contracted to model for the covers of romance novels yet? Harlequin must be KICKING themselves.”
I smell a new signature quote. Bravo, Ms Midori, bravo!
Once you’ve mastered the art of Legibility that my cohort is illustrating for you (at great length, no less), you can start to hope to reach the act of sheer magic that is Jenn Manley Lee‘s Dicebox.
The artwork in Dicebox is simply exquisite, and it’s no wonder. Her process could only be described as insane did it not produce such amazing works. Notice that she casually mentions printing bluelines on Bristol. She goes from sketchbook to computer back to paper and then back to computer again! And then takes the time to create customized color palettes for each of her characters and it still on average only takes her 14 hours or so to create a page! No wonder Dicebox was nominated for an Ignatz Award, but it’s really too bad she didn’t win.
The artwork is only half of what makes Dicebox so very very well done. The other half of the story, if you’ll forgive me, is the way she tells the story itself. Each chapter seemingly illustrates only the middle part of the events that take place. Most chapters picks up several days or more after the end of the last chapter. Granted, some of this is merely a device to skip endless pages of sitting in a spaceship travelling around. But there’s still the sense that important moments in the lives of and in the relationship between Griffen and Molly have occurred. These are real people, with real lives that go on whether you’re watching or not. They eat, and bleed and fight and have sex. (so, yeah. Not safe for work.)
This is a comic that could survive on just the artwork or just the story. But together, they are just sublime.
But the most important and stunning discovery I made at Chouinard, one that has been shared by every artist, cartoonist, painter in history … was the ability to live by the single line — that single honest delineation of the artist’s intent. No shading, no multiple lines, no cross-hatching, no subterfuge. Just that line…. That is rule 1 of all great drawing. There is no rule 2.
— Chuck Jones, Chuck Amuck
There is nothing you should pay more attention to than line. How thick? How thin? Long continuous swoops, little sketchy bits, how black to make it? All of these are important, and any of them can serve the artistic vision, but keep in mind that your line will probably affect the overall look and feel of your strip than anything else. Pick a line and commit to it, keeping in mind that all those characteristics of your line are working for you or against you.
If the line is overly sketchy, disconnected, or too light, it causes a sort of cognitive dissonance. Something deep down in our brains (probably something to do with hunting antelope on the open veldt) keys in on breaks from regular patterns. Sketchy, incomplete lines make your brain stop and go, “Wha?” If that’s what you wanted to accomplish within your story structure, great. Check out Alex Robinson’s Tricked for a good example of this; no, it’s not a webcomic. Read it anyway. But if the line isn’t intended to convey that “Wha?” moment, it just makes things tough on the eyes.
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That is all.
Update: Jeff’s fame spreads to MSNBC, with links to both the toon and the TopatoCo boutique.
So your New Year’s resolution is to start a webcomic. Congratulations! Be sure to send a link, and we’ll take a look. But before you get started, there’s something that you ought to pay attention to if you want anybody to read it: you have to make it easy to read. Just like legible handwriting used to be the gatekeeper for reading prose, legible art is the gatekeeper for a comic project.
There are lots of elements to an art style, all of which are outside the scope of what we’re going to be discussing here; go read Comics and Sequential Art or Understanding Comics if you want to work on the mechanics and fundamentals (in fact, everybody reading this should go read them anyway). We also won’t be looking at color (I’ve been reliably informed that my sense of color is such that I shouldn’t be allowed to dress myself), or strip design where the art isn’t a main focus. If your goal is to be the next Ryan North, you’ll have other stuff to work on.
We will discuss certain design choices that make it easy for your reader to tell what’s happening on the screen. Along the way, we’ll have some examples from current and past strips; we will make no judgment if the strip is good or bad. The only question is, does that particular panel demonstrate some characteristic that makes it easy to scan visually?
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One of the more interesting works of journalism being produced these days is the Arcata Eye Cop Log. It’s always a good read, and it produces at least one chuckle every week. But when you purchase the books, and read them in one big sitting… the schadenfreude and sheer volume of human stupidity just piles up and exponentiates and you find yourself laughing at almost everything – even stuff like “2:27 p.m. Child Welfare Services relayed toxicology tests on a newborn baby to APD. Methamphetamine was detected in the infant’s urine.”. It’s tragic – but in situ it becomes hilarious.
Stephen Heintz‘s Acid Zen Wonder Paint is much the same way. Taken individually, you might only laugh at one or two panels. But as you start to work your way through the archives, you build up to a state of hysteria. The jokes are inane, absent, juvenile and sometimes bizarrely cruel. Did I mention juvenile?
But as you read through the comics and as you read the comments, it starts to melt your brain and you remember what it was like to wander out of your dorm room at 3 am after finishing that paper you should have started three weeks ago and finding a couple of guys in the tv lounge who had spent the whole night smoking pot and you start having the funniest conversation of your life.
Since AZWP is really only worth reading in batches, it’s probably good news that he’s going to update twice a day – at least for this first week of the new year.
Here’s that comment that Jeff avoided so assiduously: we’re pleased to review PvP Alive!, the first of a promised series of animated interludes. Hey, remember the original Spider-Man cartoons? Strip out the color from that bad boy, add in a few frame transitions, involve fewer Canadians in the creation, and that’s a pretty good approximation of Kristopher Straub’s “Blamimation”. The story (Skull can’t sleep so he bugs Brent; alternately wacky and sexy hijinks follow) is also arguably better than what came out of my TV when I was a wee sprat.
But this is the thing: in college, I was part of the creative team of a weekly comedy show at the campus radio station. Forget being able to pace a visual gag (something Kurtz and Straub know a little bit about) … writing funny for the radio is hard. The best you can hope for is that you come up with some in-jokes between friends and not too many people call up the request line to tell you that you suck. From their voices, it’s clear that Kurtz and Straub are having a good time (and if you drink as many beers before watching PvP Alive! as SK & KS did before recording it, you’ll enjoy it too). Really, that’s the only criteria that you can use to judge this little venture — they’re enjoying themselves, and if they keep up with the threatened further episodes, they’ll likely get better. If they get better enough, they might make Tim Buckley reconsider his price points. Now that would be funny.
The following item is hot off the presses and posted entirely without comment.
Scott Kurtz wrote:
PvPonline.com, in association with Nightlight Press is pleased to start off 2006 with a bang.Since the strip started in 1998, PvP readers have been clamoring to see their favorite characters BROUGHT TO LIFE on their computer screens. Well, thanks to some ingenious technology, that possibility is a reality TODAY!
To bring PvP ALIVE! to life, I consulted with world renowned “Fantastician”, Kristofer Straub about finding an affordable and efficient way to bring PvP ALIVE! on a regular basis. Kristopher has recently been tinkering with a new media called BLAMIMATION that he’s been looking to try out on a new project.
And so, PvP and Nightlight press is proud to present the first of many episodes of our brand new feature: PvP ALIVE!
Well. Okay.
One comment.
Scott may have had too much eggnog this season.
Everyone else is talking about this (or should be).
So we will too.
Nothing Eric says can be trusted anymore.
Seriously, though. Jon is paying me to say this. So don’t take my word for it.
Think for yourself about what this means. And then consider that this is pretty much exactly where Eric has wanted to be, and probably a good part of his motivation for doing WebSnark in the first place. He’s admitted all along that he wants to make money off of webcomics – and that he tried to do it the “normal” way and failed. So then he started “snarking”.
And now he’s getting paid for it.
So am I.
In beer.
When I get the very rare opportunity to get to New York to collect.
Jon Rosenberg made me say this.
But, still. Think for yourself.
Why is this a good thing for webcomics journalism?
