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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
That’s right, my ICC comic is now live over at Cartoon Movement – click here to read it and please share it around the internets.
For a behind the scenes look at my process and how the project came together, check out this blog post. If you’re new to these parts, scroll over the headings above for a drop down menu to previous online comics, or sign up for the newsletter below for access to the “special features” part of my site.
Ray Krone’s tragic true story continues. To read from the start, hit “previous” twice won’t you.
I’m back, after an extended hiatus in south america (sketchbook pages and an interview to follow) and a blistering sprint finish with several different pre-xmas deadlines before that. One of which was a short story featuring the snippet of panels above, chronicling miscarriages of justice in the american legal system. Another, out next week, is a second interactive piece for cartoon movement. More about it in the “news” section, just a scroll away, down below the fold.
Work on Alcatraz continues as I near the finish line, now that I’m well into colouring the inked pages. You’ll have to check out the “Extras” page from the tabs above for a glimpse of the finished pages as they come off my drawing board – but for that, you’ll need to get the passcode, which you can only get from the latest edition of the Archcomix newsletter (next one drops on Monday). Simple.
All this and I haven’t even mentioned my next big project, focusing on human trafficking in SF. I’m currently researching and doing interviews, and should have something for you in a few weeks. I’ll post separately about it soon.
In the build-up to a bumper deadline December, it’s been all hands on deck at Archcomix HQ, as the inked bristol slowly piles up on my desk. So as a taster to hold you over until next month when I can reveal what I’ve been up to, here’s a pencil (run through an iphone filter) of John Giles, the (anti)hero of my Alcatraz comic for the National Parks Conservancy Trust. See the Alcatraz page for more details. If you’re interested in how the pencils turn miraculously into inks, then check out my new time-lapse video on you tube by scrolling down (new users to the site: news is below the “fold”, under this here header announcement, and free comics are accessible through the drop-down menus above and via the buttons in the sidebar to the right).
I’ve also added some recent sketches to my flickr stream – check them out and follow my photostream here. And just in time for the festive season, check out my prints section and order some original artwork for the art lover/comic artist/discerning aesthete in your life – all come signed (with dedications optional).
As promised above, here is a link to the Yiddishkeit slideshow detailing my process of turning a comics script into finished pages, including using visual references, digital colouring in photoshop, thumbnailing, all that good stuff. Here is the Kickstarter campaign to erect a statue in Harvey’s native Cleveland.
Many thanks to Sterling Warner at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose for inviting me to talk about my work and comics journalism in general on Wednesday. It was great talking to the next generation of visual storytellers afterwards and I hope that some of them have made it here to the Archcomix online HQ – if so, welcome! Be sure to browse comics using the drop-down menus at the top of the page.
Meanwhile this week Alcatraz continues to rumble ahead, with the finish line now finally in sight; a new animation-based project involving Vietnam is in the works; I’m building another interactive piece, this time on the history of the International Criminal Court; pencilling some pages on a potential legal academic graphic novel; working on the follow-up to my crisis comix for Marketplace; AND laying the groundwork for my follow-up to last year’s Borderland, which will tell the story of trafficking in the US. Oh and the Stanford Graphic Novel Project! More about that on the soon to be re-launched”teaching” page – stay tuned for updates.
Last weekend I was invited to talk on the process behind my 50+ page collaboration with the late, great Harvey Pekar on Yiddishkeit, a comics anthology that collects and celebrates the forgotten gems of Yiddish culture, published by Abrams Comics Arts in September (from which the above pages is taken). Many thanks to Paul Buhle for organizing the event, and for fostering my involvement in the project from the outset! Paul is a one-man non-fiction comics powerhouse, responsible for other comics histories covering topics as diverse as the history of the SDS, The Beats, Studs Terkel’s Working and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of American Empire. I had no idea about the historical connection between Yiddish and marxism in the early twentieth century – Paul’s reasons for initially studying the language and its literature in the first place was to gain access to the wealth of material on working class movements in the US, which were predominantly written in yiddish. If such things pique your curiosity, then I recommend “the unrepentant marxist” blog, which features one of the most insightful reviews of Yiddishkeit out there.
If you scroll down to the “news” section of this site, you can watch a very brief video (you’ll need to pause it, as each slide only pings up for a few seconds in the “convert to movie” mode of powerpoint) that’ll give you a visual journey of the process I went through in turning Harvey’s script into print-ready comics pages. Plus some other Kickstarter-based drives to honour the beloved everyman of comics. Here are just a few of Harvey’s handwritten script pages, so you can see what I started with. I especially love the “jewish man” and “horse” labels on the last page.
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That’s right, my comics interviews with various partipants in Occupy Oakland is now live at Yes! Magazine. Check out their slideshow here, or enjoy the fully interactive version here.
That not enough for you? Then you’ll want to peruse the latest pencilled pages from my current hush-hush project, now uploaded to the “Extras” section. Don’t know the password? For that you’ll have to subscribe to my newsletter. Them’s the breaks.
The latest Archcomix newsletter is out now: click here to read it online or . Find out more about the Global Forum on Human Trafficking from this set of live sketches, visit the updated trafficking page or check out some of the new pages from the tabs above.
New visitors, welcome! Be sure to browse the comics using the tabs at the top of the page.
Click here to read my latest comics experiment, gleaned from a series of interviews I did at the Occupy Oakland protest on Thursday night. Something of a change in how I normally put work together, I skipped thumbnailing and dived straight into transcribing the interviews to let the subjects speak for themselves. I sprinkled in some interactivity too to keep/force readers to engage with it – and added some audio into the mix while I was at it. See what you think – it’s also been posted on this occupy portraits site too.
You’ll also notice that I’ve added a Multimedia page along the top, where you’ll find videos, animations, audio recordings and links to my most recent interactive visual storytelling experiments.
