Le Dernier Cri had a poster hanging in the local Quick (a McDonalds-like fast food place) telling all of the families eating their burgers to “fuck off rape rape rape.” I wish I had a photo of that to share, but here are some quick Angouleme 2011 notes below… (more…)
Helen McCarthy’s book The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga (Abrams) comes packaged with the NHK TV documentary Secrets of Creation shot in 1985, four years before Tezuka’s death. It’s one of the best cartoonist documentaries I’ve ever seen. (more…)
Lee Falk’s The Phantom is widely credited as being the first superhero with blank pupil-less eyes. Is this true? I don’t know. Maybe a more educated Comics Comics reader can name a pre-Phantom pupil-less pulp hero. Falk said he got the idea from Greek statues. (more…)
Stills from the Sundance June Directors Lab. Top: Thomas Jay Ryan. Bottom: Mageina Tovah and Liam Aiken.
There’s a new website for the animated movie I’m doing. Ray Sohn designed it. It’s a shared production blog. Expect to see: storyboards, character model sheets, production drawings, background paintings, frames, animatics, color separations, some writing, original cartoons for the site, videos we like by other people, and I’m posting a drawing from my sketchbook every weekday on it. Check it out and you will get the idea.
Michael DeForge, Brandon Graham and our own Frank Santoro do some fun comic shop talk with Robin McConnell on the latest Inkstuds podcast. Consider this a CC-approved way to procrastinate from whatever life is imposing on you right now.
oddly appropriate LLC Books Aeon Flux book cover
From a 1998 Animation World Network article by Peter Chung:
Here is a list of my personal favorite comics stories in no particular order. My choices are based as much on mastery of narrative form, as on originality of conception. Each of them appear to have been impelled by an inner vision; they are not comics inspired by other comics, but rather by dreams, obsessions, yearnings.
1. Baptism, Makoto-chan, Fourteen by Kazuo Umezu
2. Savannah by Sanpei Shirato
3. Mighty Atom, No-man, Phoenix by Osamu Tezuka
4. The New Gods by Jack Kirby
5. The Airtight Garage, Arzach by Moebius
6. The Incal Saga by Moebius and Jodorowsky
7. The Tower, The Hollow Earth Series by Schuiten and Peeters
8. The Jealous God, Envie de Chien by Cadelo
9. Be Free! by Tatsuya Egawa
10. Hard-Boiled by Geof Darrow and Frank Miller
Pope/Ware collage
Just a lazy Saturday post here. Frank came up to Brooklyn to hang out. We spent a couple hours at the great Time Machine yesterday and dug up some fun books. I really wanted to get a beautiful Planet of the Apes coloring book I saw there. They’re all archived online as PDFs here. Of course it’s better with the faded, toothy yellow paper, though. (more…)
Stern Writing Workshop Handouts
Stewart Stern, Rebel Without a Cause and The Ugly American screenwriter, now 88, uses “splat” (inspired by this Feiffer strip) regularly to describe any obstacle in life. Stern: “Our lives are made of Splats, and our personalities are shaped by the way we go through Splat.”
A documentary on his life is even titled Going Through Splat.
Stern does a writing workshop where he gives you a starting line and you continue it, writing whatever pops into your head. Starting lines include: “The secret about me/myself that might come out if I confront Splat are…” or (my favorite) “Now, as I plunge into the vortex of Splat, the burning core of all of my hopes and dreams, I see, hear, taste and feel…”
In The Anime Machine, Thomas Lamarre has a smart, cute way of describing the difference between full and limited animation: “Drawing the movement (full) vs. moving the drawing (limited.)” Limited animation is sliding planes of drawings, done by moving a drawing a little bit, taking a picture, and then again. This has created so many interesting, inventive ways of communicating depth on a two-dimensional playing field- as opposed to moving through space like in Pixar animation or Tekkon Kinkreet environments where the drawings are somehow (I have no idea how) mapped onto three-dimensional spaces for the camera to move around in.
The most common example is when a camera zooms out from a drawing and objects in the foreground slide from the sides to the center of the frame. Obviously, this doesn’t happen in real life; nothing is flat. We’d see the side of the objects as we move past them. But our brain fills in the gaps and it creates the illusion of moving backward in space. This is aided by our acceptance of live-action camera zooms, which flatten the picture plane (like in Barry Lyndon.) (more…)
I’ll be touring my BodyWorld book in April and doing conversations with different people at some of the events. I’m hoping to record a few of these, like the ones with Paul Karasik and Chris Ware and Frank Santoro, to post here on Comics Comics. It depends on how embarrassing they turn out.
Info under the cut…
