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Last week saw the launch of the 4th incarnation of the Stanford Graphic Novel Project, which I’ve had the fantastic opportunity to work on for 3 years. The latest book, From Busan to San Francisco, is based on the true story of a young south korean girl who is trafficked to Los Angeles before ending up in an asian massage parlour in San Francisco. It’s a testament to the determination, hard work and enthusiasm of the talented students we had on board that the final product looks so professional! (Even if I do say so myself). All this in just two semesters! Ok, so 2.5 really – and a ton of elbow grease/hours staring into an assortment of Macs around campus. The usual graphic novel glamour. If you’re an educator, publisher or book critic then drop me a line for a review copy.
From Busan to San Francisco from Dan Archer on Vimeo.
Two (and a bit) semesters in the making, I’m pleased to announce that the new stanford graphic novel project is almost here. The story is based on an SF Chronicle piece, “Diary of a Sex Slave” that ran in 2005, highlighting the plight of a trafficking victim who was tricked into coming to the US from Korea, ending up in brothels masquerading as massage parlours in LA and San Francisco.
The course, now in its third year, offers 20 students the chance to write and produce a graphic novel from scratch over two (fast-paced) semesters. We split them into a team of writers, thumbnailers and artists, then switch some of them into scanning/colouring and eventually layout in indesign. You can check out previous years’ graphic novels here. This year’s book weighs in at 160 pages and relies on extensive picture reference and documentation passed on to us from the original reporter, Meredith May, at the Chronicle. It’s a big evolution from Pika Don, the previous graphic novel, which only featured single tone spot colour. As you can see from the sample page below, this year we went for 3-tone gradations of colour to fill out the line work more. More soon.
Sample page showing the US/Mexico border crossing
In case you couldn’t make it to Litquake on Saturday, here is the live recording of Lucas Laredo and Anna Rosales’ talk about their experience of being part of the Stanford Graphic Novel team. As you’ll see, they did us proud. Nice work Lucas and Anna!
I’m back in Cali after an xmas jaunt to the UK, hence the lack of recent updates, and it’s all kicking off. I’ve just finished next month’s Bash piece on Nigerian beggars, and am putting to bed the latest issue of Archcomix, which contains all of my recent non-fictional work. The Chile strip will be picking back up now, so be sure to stay tuned. I’m aiming to get it all done and dusted by Jan 28th. Fingers crossed.
I’ve joined the Stanford Graphic Novel Project as a TA of some description, where I’ll be contributing my artistic insights into what will be the follow-up to the highly successful Shake Girl graphic novel they made during last year’s class. Today’s assignement was a crit of Nick Abadzis’s Laika, which blew me away. Fantastic storytelling, great characters, excellent use of colour – well, why don’t you just read my 2 cents below:
For a story that is so tightly paced and heavily research-driven, there is a great looseness to the style of the book. Abadzis’s use of two techniques – drybrushing (using a paintbrush caked with dried ink to create a jagged, scratchy line) and drawing with a china marker (again, leaving a crayon-like mark) are both clearly visible on the cover and lend a real hand-crafted, impressionistic feel to the book. Both of these rely on being combined with colour to bring them to life, and the first sequence of Korolev’s escape from the Gulag shows just how crucial colorist Hilary Sycamore’s contribution to the book was. One subtle effect is the use of colour in the page background (in between panels) to reflect the change in temperature and mood – from the bleak black desperation of the first shot of Korolev, which gradually lightens with the presence of moon, until changing to normal white when he arrives at the inn. In a nice parallel, characters or backgrounds are reversed to their black and white negatives in moments of extreme emotion – such as p.14 when Korolev comes close to death, or p.143 when Yelena is told about Laika’s tragic fate.
Abadzis seems well aware of his own weaknesses, hence the scarcity of large panel close-ups on chracters’ faces – one such jarring example being the old lady’s face on p26. However, when he gives up on accurate representation and instead aims to convey raw emotion, the faces get really interesting – see Mikhail’s anger on p37 or his demagogic Dad’s on p.31. When he does go in for a close-up, Abadzis ramps up his use of blacks and the grease pencil, like p.14, 119, 137, although I think he’d have been better off preserving the consistency of his ‘less is more’ style for the sake of heightening the drama.
Certainly, page layouts carefully consider their setting – p11’s vertical panels to emphasize the starry sky and the expanse between Korolev and the moon; p82 horizontal format and rhythmic ‘to and fro’ contrast of Kudryavka and the technicians testing for G-force, and of course the dream sequences. But one original addition that crops up a few times is Adbadzis’s use of overlapping panels, which work as a full-stop/periods, overriding the authority of the page breaks to jump space/time: p.20’s change of scene from Antonina and Mishin’s chat to Korolev’s meeting with Krushchev; the p.38 jump from Mikhail being outside to his decision later that night to drown poor old Laika; or to show the time lapse in p.147 when Laika’s being operated on. He quickly builds up a visual vocabulary so that we know immediately that a circular, non-bordered panel is a window into Laika’s dream-state (p. 88).
I felt the book started strong, but lost some of its power in the build-up to the launch as it sacrificed its characters to the needs of the plot. The wordless episodes early on where the emphasis was on Kudryavka’s character as she experiences the world around her – foraging for food after surviving being dumped in the river, or experiencing zero gravity for the first time (p.91) – really stood out as we watched the dog’s personality come to the fore against a really rich, vivid background.
Above Panel from Laika by Nick Abadzis, courtesy of First Second Books
