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Mark and his Sarah Palin animated nemesis in action
Last Wednesday I was delighted to see that my suggestion of Mark Fiore as a visiting lecturer to our weekly Knight Fellowship seminars became a reality. In case you didn’t know, Mark recently won a Pulitzer prize for non-print based journalism (the category’s only a few years old) – he specializes in animated editorial cartoons, which he puts together in Flash.
Not only was it heartening to see the love and respect he had for the masters of animation (Hanna Barbera, Mel Blanc), but also really impressive to see how he pulls together an entire 2-3 minute animated short every week. Just when I thought making comics was labour intensive, he’s working with voice actors, doing lip synching (keyframe by keyframe – no flash tweening here thankyouverymuch), the lot. Even better was the chance to check out, and see how he builds it up, layer by layer. Here’s one of the many clips he showed us:
Who knows, I might even give a short animation a try – watch this space. That is, if I get a chance in between thumbnailing my latest version of the prototype, which I’ve been working on with fellow fellow Sahar Ghazi. Speaking of Flash, I’ve also stumbled across the perfect prototyping tool for future iterations, involving everyone’s favourite frame-by-frame interface. So long as there’s no code involved, I think I’ll be fine…
I also had a great chat with Dominic Price (one of the developers of the Cloudpad web app from Nottingham University) this morning, who talked me through downloading the code for the latest iteration and the steps I need to get it up and running so I can start bending the code to suit my project’s nefarious needs. To do that, I have to figure out what type of server the Stanford webspace runs on, and some other essential info I’m at a current loss to mention.
A brazilian comicsphile feels the inky pull towards a page of Archcomix
Congrats to Augusto Paim for organizing the Comics journalism conference in Brazil at the Porto Alegre Goethe Institute. I wasn’t there in person sadly, but some of my artwork made it through the ether- check out this photo from my comic on Chagos, a panel of which is above, back in the days when I used to watercolour. To read the whole comic, click here.
More details are now out about my upcoming talk on comics journalism at the Miami Book Fair, so those of you on the east coast looking for some thanksgiving sun prime your diaries for 4pm this Sunday. Get the full skinny here. I’m sharing the panel with war correspondent David Axe, writer of War is Boring, which was then turned into a comic by Matt Bors. (Wars might be, but coups definitely aren’t).
For an update on my Knight fellowship project at Stanford, click here.
Yet another busy week, though I’ve managed to claw some hours back to sit down at my drawing board and hammer out some more hardhats pages. What is Hardhats, you ask? It’s my graphic novel about the May 1970 NYC riots led by construction workers who were protesting against the rising anti-war student movement/New Left. Check out the Hardhats page for more info. Why is that the longer pause between pages, the more hatching and detail you put down on the said pages? Above is a sneak preview of a sample panel from Hardhats, which I’m 3 pages away from completing the first part of, including a brand new prologue.
One of Israel’s largest business dailies is running a feature piece on the story behind Borderland, the human trafficking comic that Olga Trusova and I put together over the last year. Practice your hebrew with the original piece here, or read the slightly odd-sounding-but-basically-intelligible google translation here.
I’ve downed webtools recently to finally make time to pick up my drawing tools, and am pushing ahead with Hardhats pages for my latest graphic novel project. The first part will be done and ready for release by this time next week – I’ll be posting previews in the Hardhats page of the site over the coming days.
More software jiggerypokery today with my first forray into Processing, a data-viz tool aimed at amateur programmers/artists/designers who haven’t got hours of eyeball-searing coding experience. Check out this example for an interactive version of the image above – opens in a new window and play around with moving your mouse around the rectangle, as well as holding it down and moving it. Download this incredible freeware from: www.processing.org
Checkout this video from Soso ltd, a design/multimedia collective who specialize in real-time data viz/performance. In the video below they analyze conversations as they happen to give you lucky viewers an updating feed on the semantic breakdown of each speaker’s language use. More on them and what I’ve been up to in the past week over at the Knight Project page.
The Long Conversion from Sosolimited on Vimeo.
Once again, another hiatus means another prototype – this time with an all-singing, all-dancing javascript component. I can’t take much credit for building the framework (big thanks to the folks at Imageflow for that), but it’s certainly a step in the right direction for a more user-friendly platform that throws panels into greater relief. Now all I need to do is add a vertical scroll and additional pop-up functionality. Check out the prototype here and leave your comments. More info over at the Knight Project page in the morning for the full skinny of what I’ve been up to.
(Most of) the Stanford Graphic Novel Project (L-R): Chris Bautista, Katie Pyne, Sam Julian, Anna Rosales, Lucas Loredo, Topher Lin, James Lipshaw, Guillermo Huerta
Last night saw the star-studded launch of the SGNP’s latest opus, Pika-Don, from which the above splash page has been artfully cropped (excuse the low res). Veteran readers will know exactly what this is about, but for those of you who don’t it’s the graphic retelling of the story of one of the world’s few double atomic bomb survivors, Tsutomu Yamaguchi. Use the search bar up top to find my original post which has all the details.
Thanks to all of you who came out to support – a video featuring interviews with the students as well as my co-Instructors Adam Johnson and Tom Kealey will be online soon. As will a link to where you can get your hands on a copy.
The other big news is a major breakthrough in my Knight Project – my first working prototype is up and ready for testing. Ladies and Gents, I proudly present…Newspanels. Have at it!
I’m pleased to say that all of you who pledged your support for our Borderland human trafficking comic will be receiving your comics very soon – hopefully by the end of the week (domestic) and sometime next week for the internationals. The comic looks fantastic, even if I do say so myself, and was well received at the Alternative Press Expo last weekend. For more on that, scroll down to read my full report.
Here’s another taster from one of the stories to give those of you who aren’t familiar with it an idea – more online at the Borderland page.
Me, Olga and an Ogre in a tutu
A big shout to everyone who came by the Archcomix/Center for Cartoon Studies table at Alternative Press Expo this weekend. Copies of the hot-off-the-press Borderland comic (which arrived nail-bitingly late last week, just in time for the con) flew off the table, hotly followed by the second print run of the Honduran Coup: a Graphic History, now with newly amended Honduran Spanish translation (thanks to Fabiola Maldonado). Although I didn’t get much time away from manning the table, I managed to see the Dan Clowes interview panel as well as hang out with fellow comics activist Gan Golan, who has put out an amazing looking new graphic novel that takes the aesthetic of vintage superhero comics to explain the recession and current economic crisis. When else would I bring myself to pose with costumed superheroes? Ladies and Gents, I present: The Adventures of Unemployed Man. It’s actually out tomorrow from Little Brown, so beat the rush and get a copy as soon as you can! I also had the pleasure of hanging out with
My kind of superheroes (Tights optional)
Matt Bors and David Axe – otherwise known as the War is Boring team – as well as Susie Cagle, fresh with issue 2 of her Microcosm-published mini, 9 Gallons, to chew the comics journalism cud. In amongst the weekend’s hectic cocktail-party-conveyor-belt-atmosphere of pitching my work to anyone in the vicinity of table 276, I also found the time to read Ken Dahl‘s truly awesome Monsters, at last collected by Secret Acres into one volume. It’s about as approachable and confessional as herpes lit could be.
More on last week’s events at Stanford, plus a new comic and a breakthrough in my Knight Project, once I get some sleep.
