mercurial/fond

One of the plusses of being able to draw things is that you can draw things for gifts, and everyone goes home happy.  This is a scan of the huge Bob Gibson drawing I did for my mom’s birthday today.  It’s 19 X 24 which is big for me.

She recognized it as Bob Gibson without me even mentioning it—which tells you what kind of Cardinals fan she is.

Witch Prism Dragon Style

So I made my own handwritten font to use digitally.  The process made me think I was still in 1996 and trying to use the internet with an AOL CD.  I had to scan in my lettering into photoshop.  Then chop each letter up into it’s own file.  Import each of those files into inkscape(a program I’d never used before)—get them all sort of set up vectory wise(which I’d also never done before)—then assign each letter to a glyph with the inkscape text editor.  Then convert it to a TTF file with onlinefontconvertor or whatever.  THEN download that font back to my computer.  Install it.  Open up photoshop to test.  See that it had somehow mad whenever I pushed the space bar—this three line down Q shoot out—so it took me about four hours of noodling on that problem.  I eventually downloaded type light which made this process a little less painful to play with.  Then none of my changes were showing up.  So it took me a bit to figure out I needed to restart my computer.  And then after I did that fix some more things—and here we are.  I forgot to make an apostrophe.

Anyways.  I did all of this because the standard fonts in photoshop don’t look right.  And I didn’t want to take someone else’s font.  Plus I wanted this handlettered originally anyways.  So this was the best way to get handlettered letters AND still have uniformity of style/size/space across the comic.  So this should make my stuff a lot more readable.  So now the process of re-lettering my witch comic can start.  I’m actually going to do some rewrites first, and then do all of that.  But yeah.  I should be done this week with the whole thing.  Which is pretty cool.

With enough distance I can take some pride in that I taught myself how to draw, color, letter, use photoshop, use inkscape, ink—and all that shit.  6 years ago all I had was an english degree and the panic of no one to draw my comics.

I was listening to Jen Kirkman’s awesome podcast and she was talking about how it takes about 15 years to sort of get to the spot she is at in comedy—which she described as sort of working class comic.  I think about time tables like that a lot.  Because I think in comics most people make their best stuff about ten years into their career from when they start writing or when they start drawing.  So I sort of gauge my personal progress against that metric.  And for me I start my clock at when I started to actually draw comics—which was two years ago.  So look out for me in what…2021.  That actually kind of plots out to how I’m seeing my trajectory and the stories I have planned.  I have about my next 4 years of comics pretty much mapped out in my head.  And each project is both the project itself, and about gaining the skills I need to make the work after that.  I’m also in an interesting spot right now where more people are starting to notice my work—and I’m starting to get more job offers related to my work.  Which is cool, but adds a complication in the sense that I’m in such a transitory phase right now—moreso than I will be in a year I think that it makes me a little skittish about taking on really high profile work that’s going to be seen by an audience larger than my sort of core current audience—I don’t want to get pegged down to what I’m doing currently I guess, particularly when it is things that I am more collaborating on.

But at the same time.  I’m well below the poverty level.  So those judgements are difficult.  But in the end, I just sort of think about it more in terms of “will this project teach me something and make me better at comics” and just sort of go from there.

I actually evaluate a lot of things in my life that way.  Like, “if I go out to eat with these people, will the amount of enjoyment I get from their company be greater than what I’ll gain by putting in more work on my craft” Which is kind of a fucked up way to think, and is probably the front half of the road that ends in crazy comic artist town.  But there was a quote from I think Steranko that was something to the effect that to do comics you kind of almost have to give up on everything else.  The time and dedication it takes to do it, requires that you either be alone or have relationships that understand that space and time thing.  It’s like how religious people put god before family.  My chart is comics instead of god.  Which I think probably the two saddest mediums to dedicate one’s life to are probably comics, and stand-up comedy.  They are both in the end, sort of solitary artistic pursuits for the insane, with very rarely any kind of reward.

Anyways.  FONTS!  Whoa.

This is all of the pages of my still untitled comic—fully colored.  This week I’ll work on a title ha.  The thing to understand though is that these pages are fairly big.  I sized them off of like european albums I had around my desk at the time(it’s the same size as my Anita Live book—like 9 X 14ish I think).  So the colors I think will really pop at that size, and the number of panels per page will also work better at that size.  This definitely felt like the right move when I read Fantagraphics Jodelle book, and saw how much the color really popped at that size.  I mean it would anyways.  But when you get a slab of electric yellow that’s the size of your fist or something—I dunno it’s cool.

Also I attempted to sort of have the colors build, so that the like last 10 pages of the book are really incredible visually.  And I think that comes across when you see it here.  Though I was kind of fighting that yellow through a lot of the book.  I’m pretty proud of the art side of it.  It’s my longest hand-drawn work that’s just one single story.  And I tried to sort of stick to one particular style.  I ended up growing a ton while doing it.  If you see the first few pages against the last few—there’s definitely an improvement.  Plus a lot of this project was sort of trying to understand Crepax—and I think I do now.  So the next book will hopefully be even better.  After I get this lettered and re-written a bit, I’m going to take two months off to just hardcore retool everything about what I do artistically.  Which is what I was planning to do before this project came along.  But it was kind of a dream opportunity to work with some people I have always been really inspired by in terms of my aesthetic so I couldn’t really pass it up.  But now I’m looking forward to hard core change of everything I do. 

I was actually thinking I may end up having a second volume of Hecate Snake Diaries this year as well, which will just be more sketchbookish stuff from this time off.  But I don’t know.  We’ll see.  If I do it will come out in August again, because I’m all weird about that kind of thing(I’m a crazy person)

Two pages left to color!  Woo.  Though to be fair, one of those pages I’m redrawing(the first page).  But I’m hoping to be done at the end of this weekend.  Then it’s re-lettering/rewriting.

Three pages left to color.