Hippy, capitalist, guru, grocer: the forgotten genius who changed British food — Really interesting long read on the Guardian, which I feel I will be returning to time and time again.
Penciled 2 pages of TSG today and packed up the remainder of my belongings in the old garage. Booked a mover for tomorrow morning, which should mark the end of my interaction with a big part of my previous life (one of my previous lives anyway). It feels like I've started a fourth life in many ways (or entered a fourth phase of my life if you will). Looking forward to having an out-of-town friend crash at mine tomorrow and through the weekend. First such occurrence at the new [not quite finished] home studio.
Inboxes at a combined 97, which I'm trying to get through tonight, along with the RSS feed which is now at 192. Too much, may have to eliminate a couple blogs from the feed.
The forum, Restricted.Academy is now being resuscitated, and I'm looking into an alternative to substack for the newsletter, Restricted Frequency.
And I really need to update Ganzeer.com. Not sure I've added much material since early '22!
And that is the last TSG script in the bag. The chapter is coming out at 48 pages, quite a lot, but certain scenes need to breathe and as much as I'd like to be done with the thing sooner rather than later—something a smaller page-count would certainly help achieve—I just can't find it in my heart to condense it much further. It's mad and beautiful and gloriously demented and I cannot wait to draw it all.
One time I went to pick up my kid from daycare and the minute he saw me, he started crying. Not because he didn't wanna be with me, but because he was in the middle of putting a puzzle together and he wanted to see it through before leaving.
I saw that and knew exactly where he got it from. Working on this last THE SOLAR GRID script and finding myself incapable of stepping away from the thing and doing other very necessary things, like, y'know eating or exercising or going through my inbox or, or or.
Terrible habit.
Smoking is another one I seem to have picked up in recent months, which is funny because everyone knows it's something you start as a teenager, not in your 40's for fuck's sake.
On page 30 of the last THE SOLAR GRID script & thumbs. Need to wrap everything up in 10 pages or less (I never did abide by corporate comicbook specs, potentially to my own detriment). Feeling good about it though.
Temperatures dropped drastically the other day and hot water still isn't running and I need to drop something off at the post office and also box a bunch of things up in the old garage.
A ways into book 2 of Isaac Asimov's THE FOUNDATION TRILOGY, and enjoying it a great deal. Finding aspects of its ideas to be quite ahead of its time (and in some ways ahead of this time even) except for the fact that it has so far been a big sausage fest. Seriously, not more than one female character appeared in the entirety of the first book, and even then only in a couple pages.
But I do appreciate the long view of the story, unfolding over several hundred years with no character appearing for more than a single chapter or two. Quite unconventional in that way.
Huge LED artwork I had manufactured just arrived. It feels significantly larger in my small abode than I had anticipated. Between the piece itself, the box it came in, and the plant I knocked over during the unboxing process, the serenity of my space and the writing I have been embarking on have thus been sufficiently disrupted.
Reminder to self not to make or buy anything new at all until I'm done with my godforsaken graphic novel.
Winds so strong I woke up to find the back door of the house blown wide open. Subzero temperatures expected next week, the annual freak weather incident apparently. Will have to bring all my plants inside, some quite large, and live like a crazy plant daddy for a while.
Scripting/thumbing what may be the most difficult 10 pages of comix I've ever had to conceive of, the last 10 in the very last chapter in THE SOLAR GRID.
I recall upon releasing the very first chapter way back when, and it was considered strange and eccentric. I think this last one will make the first one seem hella conventional (and maybe even boring?) by comparison. Shit gets weird, not because I want it to necessarily, it just kinda happened this way. Will try to wrap these up today, eager to get back to penciling pages.
A few years ago, I was so attracted to the idea of developing comix the same way one might've gone about making a French New Wave film; conceiving of the story as you're working on the actual pages. In essence, thinking of the making of the comix page itself as part and parcel of the writing process. Comix as writing, there's something quite sexy about that. But now I wonder if it might be better to actually write the whole thing out first. Not outline, but properly write the whole thing.
Not so sure about scripting it out though, that might be too boring and time-consuming of an endeavor. Perhaps write it all down in prose like one might go about any prose story. I'm sure there's an argument to be made that if it's a good prose story, it must be good in comix (with necessary adaptive measures employed). Although the opposite isn't necessarily true; can't imagine MAUS or SCOTT PILGRIM or anything by Chris Ware working strictly in prose. And that's a good thing, doing with comix what only comix can do. Which probably means that by going prose first, you're likely to come up with something that may not tap into the full potential of the comix medium.
But it would be the safer thing to do, having your entire story fully locked in before drawing anything.
17 pages into script & thumbs for the very last installment of THE SOLAR GRID. Listening to the characters and letting them take control rather than force anything that really shouldn't happen.
Endings are the most sensitive part of any story, especially ones that've been 8+ years in the making.
Another thing that stood out to me from HITCHCOCK TRUFFAUT; apparently, a great many films from the silent era were based on plays. That is fascinating, because dialogue tends to be the core story engine of playwriting, whereas silent filmmaking is concerned, you have to do without dialogue altogether, save for a handful of title cards.
It's got me thinking about adapting plays to silent comix and all the different changes one would have to make along the way. Changes that would inevitably alter the plays rather drastically I think.
Woke up in the middle of the night and decided to crack open the volume of HITCHCOCK TRUFFAUT that's been jeering at me unread from my shelf for a while now. A few pages in and I was prompted to beam Mernau's DER LETZTE MANN on the projector, which both Hitchcock and Truffaut express their admiration for. First minute into this 1924 silent film and I was hooked! The framing and shots are just absolutely gorgeous, and the story intense, told entirely without words got me thinking about the big vacuum left unfilled by the absence of silent visual storytelling in today's world. The potential to reach people across borders regardless of language or culture is immense, especially if phones/social-media were to be utilized as the delivery mechanism. But that would necessitate coming up with short ultra-condensed narratives of about one minute or a minute and half tops. Which in itself is something of an attractive limitation.