Family Man page 158!
Okay, those of you who scoffed at the mild semi-nudity in previous weeks of Family Man pages, this time you really DO need to be concerned for your employment.
Sorry it’s late (APE tripped me up a little), but I didn’t want to just crank this one out. Beyond that, I won’t say much about this week’s page; sorry. It’s up to you, kids! And I’ll see you next week, possibly with a multiple-page spread. (ooh la la)
Folks waiting on me for commissions and/or products, never fear, tomorrow I’m back behind the retail wheel and will be sending out pictures and grammar labels galore.
LASTLY: After I wrap this chapter up I’ll be putting together an incredibly belated podcast; I’ve been avoiding doing one in the strange certainty that there nobody could possibly have any questions left to ask me that weren’t just Family Man plot spoilers, but who knows. So if you have a burning question, throw them my way in the coming weeks, and I’ll answer as best I can in mp3 format!
Before then I’ll also be posting about some of the other projects I’m working on right now, so maybe folks will get intrigued about those.
{wp version}
Page 140 of Family Man now online!
No wild tip-offs in this page: but some useful insight into who the Rector is. Also: lots of dead stuff! Yay dead stuff!
Next week: what the Rector was doing in between Universities. (Wild tip-offs: possible.)
Notes for pages 131-140 will go up this weekend, per tradition. Rather than spending my evening seeing Star Trek a second time with my friends, I spent it researching the history of wig-powdering and Reform theology. I can’t tell if this makes me more, or less, of a total dweeb.
Other news: I am finally well(ish), so shipments of Bite Me! are now going out at a regular clip. I hope to work my way up to present-day on domestic orders very soon, and then send out stuff to all you international types in one big orgy of customs forms.
Thank you to everybody who’s ordered the book! It’s been a lot of fun sending it out into the world.
New page yaaaaaaay! I am being horribly cruel with my little teaser up there, I know. It's been an intense week, and I'm a little punchy.
I've spent most of this week frantically teaching myself how to watercolor, by which I mean alternating in five minute intervals between being utterly hypnotized by my apparent mastery of the pretty colors and saying "DAMMIT" a lot and wanting to lie down for awhile.
But, behold, I have twelve pieces for my joint show with Ms.Moen!
The opening is this Thursday from 6-10 at 328 NW Broadway #113 here in Portland.
The upshot to my first week post-layoff being so crazy devoted to this stuff is that I haven't had time to flip out yet over my sudden ejection from the increasingly small slice of America that is employed in a normal fashion.
It is a pleasant irony that I have so much going on in my life that suddenly dropping about 40 hours (counting transit) a week from my schedule has not yet resulted in any free time, merely the anticipatory loss of income. I managed to sleep a full nine hours last night, and woke up at 7:30 this morning feeling like a girl-shaped rainbow.
But now that the show is ready to open, my next project is getting ready for the Stumptown Comics Fest, where the Bite Me! book will be on sale for the very first time! I am also in charge of panels again this year, and you'll be able to catch me interrogating Spike for public amusement.
Along with that, I'm planning a revamp (no pun intended) of the Bite Me! website. It's already been updated and moved to bitemecomic.com, but between now and April 26th I'll be setting up a store for all online book and merchandise ordering.
The book won't be the only thing for sale - remember those commemorative spoons? They're totally being shipped to me in a giant box, and will part of the exciting deluxe package available for a reasonable surcharge to the already inexcusably low price of $15. There are only 100 of these babies!
How can you resist.
As of the sale date, I will also be hosting the comic on my own server, so it is no longer available solely through the deep dark back archives of Girlamatic. It will still be available for free reading online, because this is the New Economy where I hope that I'm charming enough to make up for the increasing scarcity of, you know, scarcity.
After that I'll be moving on to the Family Man website, porting over to update primarily through Comicpress/Wordpress for ease of viewing.
And, you know, the actual making of the comics will be in there, too. I've got at least three things just banging at the oven door. But that's kind of a given.
I'll see you soon with news and photos from the gallery opening this Thursday!
Along with
It's free, so come drop by and say hello!
Page 110 of Family Man now online!
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Oh, Luther. Somebody hand the man an inhaler, or something.
Meanwhile, check out this not completely unentertaining interview with me over on Comixtalk. I haven't had that haircut since 2005, but I was so amused that I let them keep it up.
Apparently the Navy commissioned an educational manga about one of their nuclear aircraft carriers, which is about to be deployed in Japan. The response was huge.
My father notes, "no fools in the US Navy."
STARS AND STRIPES
10 JUNE 08
Navy Officials Pleased With Japanese Response To USS George Washington Comic Book
Allison Batdorff and Hana Kusumoto
YOKOSUKA NAVAL BASE, Japan — The lengthy line of manga fans snaking down the Highway 16 sidewalk Sunday meant one thing to Navy Cmdr. David Waterman — they had "broken the code" in communicating with the Japanese public.
The first hour was manga madness for "CVN 73," the Navy’s 200-page comic starring the USS George Washington. The aircraft carrier is scheduled to arrive in Yokosuka this August and will be the first nuclear-propelled ship forward-deployed to Japan.
Sailors handed out about 800 copies of "CVN 73" in three hours in the manga’s first day of distribution. More will be handed out at upcoming open base events, said Waterman, a spokesman for Commander U.S. Naval Forces Japan.
"The response has been phenomenal," Waterman said. "People told me that if we passed out a brochure or a tri-fold, they wouldn’t read it. But with a manga, we’re speaking their language."
"CVN 73" puts a positive spin on ship life, safety and U.S. Japanese relations through the eyes and experience of fictitious Japanese-American sailor Jack Ohara. About 30,000 copies have been printed, the vast majority in Japanese. The title comes from the ship’s hull number.
The format appears to be perfect for tackling "points of contention," Waterman said, as the ship’s nuclear plant is the flashpoint for local citizens groups worried about ship safety and environmental impact. Thousands of signatures have been collected calling for a public vote on the issue, but Yokosuka city government defeated the measure twice in two years.
Questions about the George Washington had Hiroharu Kitamura leaving his Yokohama residence early so he could get a copy of "CVN 73." The 64-year-old was one of the first people in line hours before the event started.
"I have concerns about the nuclear carrier," Kitamura said. "Manga is one effective way (of getting the information out). It looks good and easy to understand."
Marie Matsuka, 29, said the manga medium triggered her interest in the issue.
"I decided to learn about [the USS George Washington] because of this," said the Yokosuka resident.
While one blogger christened the Navy comic "propamanga," Matsuka and other manga-goers said that whether or not they agree with the carrier deployment, reading the manga gives them a better idea of the Navy’s mind-set.
"It’s good since I can learn about the U.S. military’s perspective," said Yokosuka resident Shintaro Yoshida. The 29-year-old also wanted to show his father the manga because his dad likes military ships, he said.
Creating a manga for the military does present challenges, said "CVN 73" authors/illustrators Harumi Sato and Hiroshi Kazusa, who autographed copies Sunday. The pair also did a manga for the Japan Self-Defense Force, they said.
"It’s difficult to obtain information," Kazusa said. "With the George Washington, we were limited as to the details and a lot of things we could not get."
The manga’s fire-fighting scene is coincidental, Kazusa said, as a very real blaze on May 22 currently has the George Washington in San Diego, Calif., undergoing assessment and repairs. Though the fire’s cause is yet undisclosed, a Navy report issued Friday said the fire was "primarily electrical in nature" and that it damaged about 80 spaces on the ship. The fire has already delayed the aircraft carrier’s swap with the USS Kitty Hawk, the 47-year-old ship the George Washington is slated to replace, and could have other impacts on both of the ships’ schedules this summer.
Kazusa said he was surprised at Sunday’s turnout by both the size and demographics.
The Navy’s target age for the manga was 10 to 30 years old, but senior citizens made up a sizeable part of the crowd.
"I expected to see more young people," Kazusa said.
But 68-year-old Yutaka Yamada said he wanted "CVN 73" for himself as a collectible, but he’ll let his children borrow it, he said.
"This will be a treasure after a few years," Yamada said.
(link to article on S&S)
I'll post a higher res version this afternoon, but for now, the Mercury's online version is pretty legible. I did script and layout/early pencils, and Bill did all the final art. There are more in-jokes and cameos in this thing than there are licks in a Tootsie roll pop. I enjoy abusing authorial privilege.
And with this feature, I've made it into five of Portland's papers in some form or another! This town is going to be totally sick of me by the time I hit my fifth anniversary.
My mom was really excited about that candle snuffer.
(it was pretty cool.)
Granted, the formula is much easier to achieve when you're talking about a general bookstore - as long as it doesn't have that feeling of a sucking, hyper-sanitary, pre-packaged void (ie, as long as it's not a chain store, whose only real advantage is low price and the ability to avoid the employees), most places either have to work very hard, or specialize in something completely outside of my realm of interest*, to be unappealing.
And of course I live in Portland, which features Powell's City of Books. Powell's is still by leaps and bounds the most spiritually engulfing bookstore of my entire experience. The only other time I've stepped into a comparable environment was visiting the Notre Dame cathedral for the first time, in high school; in short, it's the sort of institution whose existence signals a peak in the history of civilization. My rule of thumb for identifying these things is: would the Romans be impressed? In this case, I'm pretty certain that Marcus Aurelius would fall weeping to the floor in the Red Room.
And there have been other, less monstrous but equally sustaining bookstores, from Seattle to Paris. I have not yet lived somewhere that didn't have at least one decently-stocked section that could get me through life, even if that decently-stocked section was the one devoted to my department's mandatory semester course reading.
The comic book store, however, is frequently a tale of treachery, disappointment, and compromised morals.
The comics sections in even the best "normal" bookstores are themselves frustrating - they shelve stand-alone graphic novels by title rather than author (in the Hawthorne branch of Powell's, you have to look on three! different! shelves! to find Craig Thompson's Blankets, Carnet de Voyage, and Goodbye, Chunky Rice), they have giant wedges of untouched manga and DC/Marvel sitting next to a picked-over GN section now reduced to an R Crumb sketchbook and a collection of American Splendor with a bent cover, they categorize it as "Graphic Novels / Humor" because, really, if you're looking for Palestine and can't find it, Garfield collections will probably be the next best thing for you.
This is all kind of frustrating, but the insult of the actual comic book store generally goes deeper.
Although it's kept me in the basics for over a year now, I will never, ever forgive my closest shop for having the poverty of spirit to put graphic novels in plastic bags. Plastic bags are for dead things - accident victims, frozen chicken, and back issues of titles that have already been collected in trade. A completed book is a breathing, active, self-sustaining thing that needs fresh air and regular contact.
Even the more decent stores - I was brought up on the worthy Zanadu in Seattle - betray with two to three of the following sins: humiliating store-front displays (generally heavy on the enormous sculptures of hand-painted DC Universe tits), or roped-off porn sections, or enormous wads of unrelated merchandise, or complete lack of logical organization, or actually being a gaming shop. On the indie side of the spectrum, the sins range from only carrying minis drawn on the backs of napkins by depressive junkies, to not actually appearing to SELL anything so much as existing to provide a place for several trendy employees to sit at a desk, wear screenprint t-shirts, and stare at you while listening to Iron and Wine, to having a massive porn section that is NOT roped-off.
Last night a number of us trundled through the crowds of smoking hipsters downtown to take a gander at Floating World Comics, about which I can heartily say that the only thing which caused me momentary distress is a system of organization best described as "This artist is connected to THIS artist through collaboration and/or influence/artistic goals, and therefore we shall shelve them together for your edification." There's a tidy display shelf of current, individual issues on one wall, but the rest is books, books, books, books, books, and the farthest afield they go from comics is a section of art and design books that nearly evoked tears, or at least drool.
It's still a very small venue, and it's in Chinatown, in the gallery district, in a Soviet-bloc style building, which means it could be there for thirty years or five months. But it's done a really lovely job at stocking a canon of books that very nearly covers everything that's good, fun, progressive, smart, diverse, and attractive about comics. I'm pretty certain that I could pick any person off the street and, if they could be forced to read a comic book, I could find one in that eensy store that would ring their bell.
I have no bloody idea how this medium ended up taking over my brain and my social life, and I frequently have moments of clarity in which I realize that this is a really self-destructive thing to get into and that, should the apocalypse, the inevitable decay of an unsustainable peak in Western civilization, or a bad day in the pop culture mood occur, just about everything in this fucked-up little medium will go pwif. And then I will lead a much more acceptable life starving for another art form and/or actually contributing to the concrete society.
But! It was just gorgeous to walk into this little shop, with a bright odd mural on the outside wall, to see books breathing openly on the shelves and tables, ones that are an intimate part of my internal life and ones that I've been meaning to take in and ones I have never heard of and ones that I probably wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole but whose existence I'm nonetheless grateful for, and to think: oh. right! THAT's why.
And you know, I'm pretty sure Marcus Aurelius could find something he'd like, too.
---------
*still tricky, since if it involves words printed on paper, I can be talked into it. Advil warning labels? Fair game. Only child hellooooooooo.
I'm trying to assemble a folio that shows my "process", mostly for people looking for storywork. For me this turns out to be weirdly tricky - it seems in review that I'm kind of like a heat-seeking missile fired on a emergency special ops mission, or a straight male on a shopping trip: fast, focused, and largely untraceable. I think it, I pencil it, the client almost always takes it within the first two rounds, then I finalize it. One piece of paper. Look ma no hands!
Even in my personal comics work I do very little prep-work. My thumbnails take the form of a tiny scribbled box filled with lightly sketched-in layout panel shapes, drawn on what will be the back of the final page. Hell, I wrote Bite Me literally page-by-page, scrawling the dialogue above that little box, occasionally adding brackets to separate the dialogue into panels, and then flipping it over and away we go.
Now I script a certain ways in advance on the computer and use Bristol paper for projects where I need a longlasting original, but still. The knowledge that some people script their ENTIRE BOOK, then thumbnail their ENTIRE BOOK, then rough pencil their ENTIRE BOOK, then pencil THEIR ENTIRE BOOK, then ink THEIR ENTIRE BOOK, then shade THEIR ENTIRE BOOK...it's like trying to explain the entire process of designing, building, driving, and maintaining a motor vehicle to a pony.
The place where I do willingly spend work-up time is in character design, particularly faces and their signature expressions. The only reason I ever started drawing, and kept it up, was to make the characters in my head that much more solid, and then to tell their stories in the most controlled, defined way possible. In comics I get to be the writer and the director and the actors and the camera crew, and I like to spend quality time in casting, because I'm going to be looking at these people for awhile.
The reason why I'm still not a very good illustrator is the same reason why I don't like writing short stories - the people get short shrift at the hands of the form. It's like having to focus on eating an intricate, chilled hors d'ouevre when you are sitting three feet away from a hot turkey sandwich.
And to be fair, even though I talk about being all about the character process, I still won't do more than three or four preliminary drawings - even of a main character, even for a full-length book - before sawing in. It's all in the head, and my inner nine year-old doesn't want to share it until it's so perfect that I can skip the group critique process and jump right to the "praise" stage.
I am bloody impatient, in other words, and I rely on the resources of my good brains and gradually improving autodidact drafting skills to support that temperament.
So I'm trying to focus more on extending my process, both in terms of length and in offering, thus providing some more mature results and giving collaborators and clients an easier entrance into the task. Since I'm stepping up to doing this at a professional level, it's time to be a big girl and share my toys, at least with the people who are financially supporting me.
So, in the spirit of sharing, and of procrastination. Where do you spend your time in your work? What parts do you try your best to skip? Are you trying to change? Have you changed over time? Do you need feedback at every step, or do you play by yourself?
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quirkybird- Dylan Meconis
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