I draw the webcomic Manly Guys Doing Manly Things and work on cartoons you might see on TV sometimes.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
So hey let’s talk about an awesome comics dude who deserves more attention. Blastoff is a shop that just opened in the fall right around the corner from my favourite little hipster coffee shop that I live in on the weekends, so it’s become entirely too easy for me to drop my disposable income for the week there and spend the rest of the day lounging on couches at Republic of Pie and reading comics (If you’re anywhere near NoHo, I promise it’s a pretty great way to spend a hot summer day. Or a cold winter one. Or really, any time you feel like coffee, pie and comics, but I digress)
The store is bright and inviting, everything is accessible, a bunch of the shelves are organized by genre and writer instead of strictly by company so you don’t need to know what you’re looking for to browse and find something you might want to read. They also give a ton of shelf space to things that aren’t strictly big name Marvel and DC cape stuff. In fact, the first stuff you see when you walk in is a wall of inviting small press and independent stuff laid out neatly with with the covers on display and a kid’s section full of everything from Adventure Time and My Little Pony trades to Bone and Usagi, furnished with a table and fancy little regal leather chairs for kids to sit at and read.
I was fortunate enough to be there a couple weeks ago when a dad brought his little five year old son in to get him his first comic. The Owner/ manager/ man behind the counter Jud Meyers was super committed to finding this kid something he could get excited about, taking him through the kid’s section and letting him look through things, asking him who his favourite heroes were (which netted the amusing response of “Michael Meyers” and made his dad look embarrassed) and when they found the comic that he wanted, he gave him one copy in a bag with a board so he could “know what it feels like to be a real collector” and an extra copy for free to have all the destructive fun a five year old could possibly want with a comic book. And this wasn’t an unusual special occasion thing, I was looking up the shop to find out more about it and ran into this interview he did on free comic book day
Although free comics will be given away all day, shop owner and dealer Jud Meyers told Patch last year that he makes sure all year long that no kid leaves his business without a complimentary issue.
“I have more comics than I can possibly ever do anything with in a lifetime. I’m giving them away,” he said. “In my store, no child ever walks out without a comic book.”
This is the kind of retailer the comics industry needs, and it’s why I go out of my way to support brick and mortar stores even though Amazon is usually a faster and cheaper alternative. We need these people excited about the industry and excited to pass on their hobby to people who don’t have enough experience to know what they’re looking for. People who are just a walking encycopedia of comics know-how who want to introduce people to new books they don’t know they’ll enjoy yet.
If you’re in the NoHo/Burbank/Sherman Oaks area I strongly suggest checking the store out, but even if you aren’t you can follow Jud on twitter or keep up with their vintage comics blog. Jud also did an interview about his approach to selling comics and his Eisner Spirit of Retail award over here on youtube that’s super uplifting and worth watching. They also donate a portion of their proceeds every month to a different charity, which you can keep up with on their website.
I always thought this approach to composition they took in Punisher Max was really interesting, they barely ever use vertical breaks in the panels and the effect is a story that reads almost like a widescreen movie board. Almost all the visual pacing comes from the height of the panels in relation to each other. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, and it’s not difficult to find examples vertical breaks, but this format was used for the overwhelming majority of the series until Steve Dillon and Jason Aaron took the helm.
SO HEY my animation pal Evon is a part of this rad comics anthology you can throw your dollars at over at kickstarter! They’re getting super close to their goal and there are still two weeks left to pitch in! Not only are they selling these crazyfine comics, they’re also offering sketchbooks of production art and t-shirts and all that fun stuff.
The cashier at the comic shop looked very concerned when I bought these two comics together.
I got the last Punisher max and a six Sailor Moon box set last week when I went out shopping. I usually end up coming home with like, a walking dead compedium and a volume of Skydoll, something like that.
I think one of the shops I regularly visit only thinks I’m getting the cutesy stuff for myself, I picked up some Blacksad once and the guy at the register asked if it was for my boyfriend.
I heard you like chimps who look like pimps so here’s a reminder that Julius is not to be liked.
Reblogs are always appreciated!
you know what was a good little horror comic short
jenifer
!!! i forgot this existed until you mentioned it!!
Oh, they made a movie (featurette?) out of that. It was in the Masters of Horror series, used to be on Netflix but apparently they took them all down.
(Source: bolto)
Wow, yeah, the detail on this camera is way superior to the iPad.
So does Tim Gunn just come over and shoot the shit with you if you ask him nicely?
loserlilly replied to your post: My creative process, apparently
I was actually going to ask you how concrete your scripts usually are, but this seems to have answered that.
If it’s something quick and self-contained like MGDMT, I plot out the panels and text at the same time, so my “scripts” just look like this;
If it’s a short story or something like that, I draw thumbs with story beat notes beside them to kind of remind me of what’s going on in different panels or dialogue or whatever.
If it’s long-form stuff I brainstorm really loosely, write down plot points on things like post-it notes I can scoot around as need be, write chapters in point form if I still need to better solidify how I want them to go, and then do really detailed screenplay-style scripts that I use for making my thumbnails.
(That screenplay software is Celtx, by the way, it’s lovely for scripting)
I never feel like the first pass at dialogue sounds natural enough, because at the time you write it down you’ve just been stewing over it in your head. Even if it’s the first thing you think of, you’ve had more time to consider about it than a person would reasonably have in conversation. People need to breathe and people need to think, and usually the pacing on either of those things doesn’t seem right unless you’ve had a chance to write it down, clear your head, and then read it again at normal speed. Once I have my “final” draft of a script, I’ll start reading it from the beginning. Any time I stop myself to correct something or revise a line, I’ll start from the beginning again, just to make sure I know what the story flows like in “real time”
Let us take a moment to remember that having an idea for a story, or even an entire story plotted from start to finish in your head does not, in itself, make you a writer. It does not make you a writer any more than thinking about a nice image in your head makes you an artist. You are not a writer until you actually write those ideas down and come to understand that transferring words from your head to a piece of paper and keeping them intact and engaging can be exactly as challenging and frustrating as doing the same with images.
