Oh the things you find in olden comix :–|
Yet, I can't look away. The rabbit hole that is ComicBookPlus has sucked me into its darkest bowels and is giving me terribly sinister ideas 😈.
Noon, and I haven't drawn any pages yet. Jotting down ideas in a notebook this morning. Zoom interview with the Getty Museum in a bit, after which it's back to the drawing board.
Inbox at 15, mostly notifications. Been a while since I last laid eyes on new human faces.
It was a little over a year ago when I reached out to a few indy comix makers to form a collective, whereby we would release 8 monthly titles in PDF format via one dedicated platform, effectively resulting in 2 comix releases per week.
The idea seemed to have been met with great interest, initially, but then it—for whatever reason—just fizzled out.
Given that we practically haven't seen any new comix releases since the outbreak of COVID-19, seems to me like a collective of this sort would've been a really great thing to have around right about now.
Of course, I understand that digital-only releases will never suffice. Quality Collected editions would've been printed, and made predominantly available as direct-order specialty items via our platform. I understand the risk in attempting to bypass the traditional distribution structure, but from the looks of it... that structure has already more or less collapsed now anyway. And y'know, even if not, I'm not so sure it's a bad idea to be a producer of niche specialty things that can't easily be found in all the shops (a'la The Folio Society for books, or heck Allbirds for shoes).
I wouldn't attempt anything like that again though. Managing other people can be... uh, difficult. I'd rather build something that hinges entirely on my own singular output as outlined in Comix Engine 10. That way, if it fails or derails in any way, well then at least it's my fuck up alone (Will maybe start work on it in tandem with THE SOLAR GRID given that I now have the time and have managed to up my production speed).
Still, I think the other idea is a good one for whoever has the managerial bandwidth to pull it off.
9:10AM now. Woke up at 6:00AM after [finally] getting a good 9 hours of sleep! Will package and ship a few orders in the next hour, before getting back to the drawing table. And also have an op-ed to chip away at later in the day. Let's go.
8:20PM, still awake. Attempting to wind down with some of the wife's “pregnancy tea” (it's fine, it's just raspberry and spearmint and other herbal notes). Immersing myself hard in the comix zone. When I'm not drawing pages, I'm either reading comix or reading about comix.
These I printed and assembled from TCJ.com, an immense resource. It's an old habit I picked up way back in my teens, when the only quality reading material on comix-making could only be found online. It was very hard to get books then, at least for me anyway. And even with the abundance of books available today, I think the really good shit is really just the modest crumbs sprinkled throughout the crevices of the internet.
Regarding the reading material pictured above, it may be awfully historic, but there's still lots to draw from even in the wildly different landscape of today.
When I started to fall asleep at 9:00PM last night, I thought to myself: okay great, my body's finally going to make up for lost sleep from the nights prior.
Nope, by 12:00AM I was wide awake. It is 2:00PM now and I have yet to crash.
I think my body's just training itself to deal with the first few weeks of impending fatherhood?
On the upside, finished a page and it's only 2 o'clock, so plenty of time to get started on (and finish) the next.
Just about barely finished penciling a page, pretty loosely at that. Was planning on getting two in the can, but several hours were lost to trying to efficiently pay for and print USPS shipping labels directly through the online shop without jumping around between various applications or dealing with excessive amounts of copy-and-paste. It's either a case of no one having yet designed an intuitive enough system or my having reached an age where I may require millennials to explain shit to me.
I prefer not to ink on the same day I pencil. Only because it requires a slightly different setup given the change of tools: ink, brushes, water instead of just pencil and eraser. So I'm trying to work towards a system of 2 pages a day for penciling followed by a day for 2 pages of inking.
Minus weekends, that would give me 20 pages of finished comix a month. Of course in my case I still have to letter them, so add 4 more days on top that.
In the past, it would simply be impossible to plan things this way, because I'd constantly get invited to fly out to give talks or workshops or put on an exhibition, any of which could take up an entire week at any given time. Now that all of that is gone for the foreseeable future, I can (and should!) operate purely on the basis of a steady producing-from-home/online-retail existence. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Not getting a whole lot of sleep tbh. Maybe 3-4 hours a night at most, which is unusual for me. It's not like I feel tired or crazy stressed or anything, at least not obviously.
Maybe I'm internalizing?
Finished up all things future child's room today, which doubles as the guestroom (because we plan on making our guests de facto babysitters obviously).
For a lot of people who work from home (I mean pre pandemic), hosting guests is often umm, undesirable, because it can very easily lead to cramping one's style. And while that's true, I love having guests crash at mine, even when the wife and I were living in a tiny studio apartment in Los Angeles, one that practically had no walls and thus no privacy, we always had folks come stay with us! And those are some of the highlights from our time in LA really. Probably a function of having had to relocate so often for a number of years now, always landing in a new place with no friends or contacts. So the only way to have any friend time really is to have long-standing friends come and visit.
Nobody ever came to visit us in Denver though.
I guess no one I know is into skiing. I have picked my friends wisely.
I'm assuming that one day people will be able to travel again, and stay for extended periods of time in houses that aren't theirs.
That would be nice.
Watched the old TMNT movie from 1990 btw and y'know what? It was really great to watch a proto Marvel movie* made entirely using practical effects and shot on real sets built out of brick, wood, and gravel and littered with real trash and real filthy puddles that actual people trained in martial arts got to roll around in (and teenage Sam Rockwell!). Even all the extras that are there just to get beat up are, y'know, actual live people! Imagine that.
Fine Eostre day, I say. Fine Eostre day.
*Fun action flick based on a comicbook sprinkled with a good dose of drama, high stakes, heart and littered with the comedic relief of one-liners? The DNA of the current Marvel movie formula is written all over TMNT.
Walking in a crowd? What is that?
Its odd how far-fetched things like the above feel right now (the above being an excerpt from THE SOLAR GRID, btw)
Today is break-from-drawing day (although I admit getting a couple hours of inking in first thing in the morning). Newsletter went out last night. Organized around the garage and set up my new USPS scale and QL-1100 Thermal Label Printer in the space for a more streamlined order fulfillment process (ah and also added the final coat in future child's room).
Didn't manage to get any exercise today but I'll get to it tomorrow, which is totally free save for packing and shipping orders, cookin' us a slamming cherry tart, and giving myself a little reading time.
Back into the production metronome on Monday.
Thinking I might try and revive my youtube channel in a few weeks time. I've got some seldom mentioned finds I'd like to talk about.
“The line between subject and object blurs in Colla and Ganzeer's clever illustrated chapbook, a narrative formed by prose poems.”
What a lovely review for our unusual little chapbook in Publisher's Weekly.
I think I have it.
The publishing model will deliver 3 product types: a monthly PDF, a quarterly print publication, and finally an annual hardback graphic novel.
Here's the breakdown:
2 pages: cover and back cover
2 pages: cover and back cover
2 pages: cover and back cover
The idea is to have a single vehicle that would act as the incubator for a regular output of graphic novels. The annual publication being a prestige hardback collecting all the comix put out throughout the year in one single volume. The story would have to be written with 8-page episodic serialization in mind, but with the intent of it adding up to one complete story by the end of the year.
Following year, a completely new story is begun.
All the other stuff going into the monthly/quarterly releases (the prose and whatnot) would remain exclusive to those releases, never seeing print in the annual (because they'd be completely separate from the graphic novel anyway). In terms of production quality, the quarterly would be on the opposite spectrum of the hardback; floppy newsprint.
May have to rely on Kickstarter to fund the annual hardback, but all the work for it would be finished anyway, so it would be super low risk for anyone pledging.
All the output would predominantly be made available through a webshop, delivered directly to readers' doorsteps (or hard-drives in the case of the PDFs), which would at best relegate them to lowkey cultish objects (but the systems surrounding retail distribution have been pretty broken for some time anyway, right?). Media-mail within the US would cost less than 2 bucks per delivery. It gets pricey with international orders which could cost up to $25 a pop.
Can probably cut stockists a 20% off deal when ordering 20+ copies, but I'm not entirely sure how lucrative an arrangement that would be for them.
Listen, I've been haunted by visions of my own little publishing outfit for years and if I don't take a shot at it sooner or later I'm going to die miserable and depressed. First gray hair spotted on my chest last week. One week after having turned 38. Better get this thing going before I hit 40.
I like the idea of getting lowkey cultish print things in the mail. I mean, if Bryan O'Malley or Alison Sampson or Jeff Lemire were making weird photocopy (or riso!) comix that you could only get directly from them? Shit, I'd pay good money for that!
I've never cared much for the Fantastic Four. But you have to understand; my formative comix-reading years were the 90's. I started off by reading my older brother's comix, which was mostly stuff from 80's, and before I could totally comprehend much of the dialogue, it was mostly the pictures I was reading. And y'know, compared to 80's X-Men or Ghost Rider or Firestorm... the Fantastic Four just looked a little... meek.
I'm a big believer in seeking out the influences of your influencers though, and both Alan Moore and Warren Ellis have—on more than one occasion—raved about the effect early Fantastic Four had on them (and on the medium as a whole really). So, upon coming across a discounted copy of ESSENTIAL FANTASTIC FOUR, VOL. 1, I snatched it up and read the entire thing during my recent time off in Mexico. And friends, let me tell you... them eccentric Englishmen did not lie.
I could not for the life of me put the book down, and just devoured one adventure after the other. It's obviously goofy as hell, but also... wild? I mean, some of the ideas in there are still just crazy imaginative even by today's standards. The complete lack of inhibition is awfully infectious! There's a scene where Doctor Doom pulls the Four's tower out into space using a magnetic apparatus! And later you have the Submariner hopping between speeding asteroids to make it to Doom's spaceshuttle! Let me say that again: The Submariner (deep sea prince) hopping on asteroids in space!
But the purpose of this post isn't to sing the praises of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four. Too many people have done that already, I'm just [super] late to the party.
One of the things I'm concerned with is devising methods to make comix at great speed. And Jack Kirby isn't only the king of comix, but you can also count him as king of the 1000mph club (before there was ever a 1000mph club). It is said that he did about 5-6 pages a day in the 60's. He slowed down a little in the 1970's during his stint at DC, churning out something like 15-20 pages a week (which is still a whole a lot!). If I could sustain an output of half that number per week, I would be so very, very proud of myself. And so it only made sense to carefully study the king's panels and see if there was a code to be cracked. One thing I noticed is that the Kirby reused a lot of the same (or close to the same) panel compositions and figure poses, often within the same issue, multiple times! Here's a rundown of some of the ones I picked up on.
(The last one isn't pointing, and it's from late stage Kirby's SPIRIT WORLD, but it operates on the same basis.)
(Last example from late stage Kirby's SPIRIT WORLD.)
(Last example from late stage Kirby's SPIRIT WORLD.)
(Last example from late stage Kirby's SPIRIT WORLD.)
(Last two examples from late stage Kirby's SPIRIT WORLD.)
(Last image from from late stage Kirby's SPIRIT WORLD.)
It's likely that every speedster has their key go-to panels that help them burn through pages without having to spend too much time overthinking things. Wally Wood had his notorious 22 Panels That Always Work, for example.
I'm lead to believe that most comix artists today don't necessarily employ such techniques, but most comix artists today lead a miserable existence and/or collapse on a regular basis.
Wouldn't be a bad idea to go back to basics and pick up a thing or two from the oldschool masters who built the foundations of the entire medium to begin with.
Important to note, of course, is that Kirby neither inked nor lettered his own work. Still, that doesn't take away from the achievement of 15+ pages of strictly pencils on a weekly basis.
If one inks and letters their own work, but wants a little exercise in Kirbyism, perhaps go a few weeks doing only pencils with the goal of trying to achieve that same benchmark in a comfortable enough fashion. Once achieved, then you can get to inking and lettering, see how long those tasks take, and then include that in your calculations of how long a page takes. If one can make it anywhere close to 6 pages a week, fully inked and lettered? Well damn, that would be one hell of an achievement, wouldn't it?
And hey, no harm in eventually outsourcing those tasks to collaborators you can trust and rely on.
(This, by the way, is all addressed to myself more than anyone.)