Category: Toons

Nobody Return to Codak

April 29, 2008 / Brendan

How come everybody’s all like “ooh, Dresden Codak” and “so awesome Dresden Codak” and “put your Dresden in my Codak” and yet I’ve never heard a single mention of Nobody Scores? The only reason I found out is because its creator personally came to my table at Stumptown and I had to ask him what he did. And it’s great! Full-color, long-scrolling strips with apocalyptically gleeful jokes that never descend into self-parody or fanservice. I love transhumanism as much as the next guy (the next guy being Dresden Codak), but I also love transplanted Indiana Jones gags and runes (and, for my North Carolina crew, The Björk Dojo).

It actually reminds me a lot of Return to Sender, in visual style and whimsy, but with a less sympathetic bent. Oh, and also with like five times the archive length.

Have I even posted about my webcomic pull list in the last few years? For my own records, in secret and arcane order: Starslip Crisis, Achewood, Scary Go Round, PvP, Narbonic: Director’s Cut, xkcd, Octopus Pie, Shortpacked, Penny Arcade, Darths and Droids, Gunnerkrigg Court, Basic Instructions, Chainsaw Suit, Three Panel Soul, Thingpart, Bob the Angry Flower, A Softer World, Wonderella, and Raymondo Person and Dresden Codak whenever they’re updated. And don’t think I don’t hit Checkerboard Nightmare pretty often too. Just in case.

Brendan painstakingly imitates a Photoshop filter, third in a series

January 23, 2008 / Brendan

I will probably never love another episode of television as much as I love Battlestar Galactica, season 3, episode 9, “Unfinished Business.” And not just because it has images like this:

I’ve spent at least the last year and a half (actually, more like seven years, since my undergrad Drawing I class) being obsessed with this limited-tone art style. I called it “rotoscoping” once, and Lisa and Will jumped on me because there’s no animation involved, so I have to admit that it’s actually what people call “tracing.” But selective tracing.

As was likely very obvious to anyone in my family, and as I only realized yesterday, my playing around with tone is blatantly derived from my uncle John’s painting and wood engraving work, especially his portraits of my grandfather (which he often combines with layered collage). Mr. Olmos there has some features similar to his, like the disappearing eyes which Ian and I inherited. I hope I get to look that craggy eventually. Right now people are still asking me what my major is, despite the obvious gray in my hair.

I almost forgot to mention that this is the first thing I’ve ever inked with the brushes I bought in 2003, and although it was a lot slower than my usual pens, I completely get why cartoonists get so excited about it now. There’s a feeling of dynamic control over the line weight that you just can’t get with pens, even the brush pen with which I inked a lot of later Xorph strips. (Not that there are actually any distinct lines in the finished images below. Good.)

So I made a picture and it’s a wallpaper if you want it: the images below link to 1600×1200 and 1600×1000 (widescreen) jpegs. There’s also a browser-sized version if you just want to zoom in a bit.

PS Can Battlestar Galactica be back on now plz

Update 2008.01.26 0001 hrs: Naturally, UJ has a much more cogent post on the subject (the art, not Battlestar), along with one of the portraits I was talking about.

Contractual obligation

October 5, 2006 /

I know I lied the last time I tried this, but if you are one of the first five people to email me in response to this post, I will draw you a picture, about yourself. Seriously. Also you can post this in your own journal if you want.

Update 10.05.06 1649 hrs: Time’s up! Scott, Maria, Ken, Josh, Hillary and Jon will be getting drawings. Someday. I know that’s six but the last two got theirs in at exactly the same time.

July 22, 2005 /

My guest strip is up at Checkerboard Nightmare!

YAAAAAY!

December 30, 2004 /

Apparently the Xorphorum is dead. This doesn’t mean a great deal to me, as I haven’t read or posted there in months. I know how to fix the problem, but since email and the LJ feed comment threads pretty much fulfill my desire for discussion of my work, I don’t have any real motivation to do so–except for the thriving Acid Zen Wonder Paint fan community which has grown there. It would be pretty callous of me to leave them homeless.

So I’m probably going to delete all the fora but that one and turn over ownership of the whole kit to Stephen. I’d be happy to host the AZWP forum in perpetuity, but it’d make more sense (and give Stephen more control) if it were hosted under his domain. Then again, moving the forum would mean starting it over from scratch–user accounts, posts, everything. Hmm.

Stephen, what do you think?

December 17, 2004 /

I’ve talked about syndicated comics versus webcomics before. I am excited and pleased by the accelerating collapse of comic strip syndication; like Matt Boyd (whom I quoted in that post, and whose writing makes me doodle our names together on my binder), I am interested in watching it die.

So it’s very, very funny to me that today, I received an unsolicited mass email–yes! spam!–asking me to “help save The Norm,” a syndicated comic strip whose creator just cut himself loose from King Features. It’s also kind of conflicting.

On the one hand, Michael Jantze is doing what I believe all syndicated comics should and will do to survive and prosper–taking back his rights from a syndicate and using the web as his primary distributor. I want to laud that kind of behavior. On the other hand, Jantze is the same guy who infamously took the syndicates’ side in the “Is Print Dead” forum at last summer’s Comic Con, so seeing him thrash the way Penny Arcade did a few years ago fills me with vicious glee.

I should add that the spam email did not appear to be sent to me by anybody directly associated with thenorm.com, but rather by a fan named Adam who probably shouldn’t be abusing his company address like that. I think this only makes the situation more pathetic.

Anyway, as I and a great many other people knew would happen, PvP is now being published for free five times a week in the Philadelphia Evening Standard. Penny Arcade, a strip which once nearly died in its aforementioned thrashings (at the hands of a kind of neosyndicate), is on track to raise more than $300,000 for this year’s Child’s Play. On the subject of who’s winning, for once, Websnark and I are in complete agreement.

December 13, 2004 /

Mr. Burns, referral-log ninja, writes in with corrections:

“My point about writing vs. art is that good

writing can excuse bad art — and I won’t trash art in a webcomic,

typically. Just not my thing. The exception is when the art fails to

execute the strip properly (in other words, if you can’t tell what’s

happened or the viewer gets the wrong impression). That would get the

same critical response as bad writing would.

The theoretical reverse is also true — if a strip has bad writing but

gorgeous art, I might well read and snark on it too, and if I did, it’d

likely be to extol the art, not slam the writing.”

I stand corrected. By those corrections.

One thing I should have mentioned in that post was that it is a typical failing of critics to respond badly, even childishly, to criticism of their own work. That’s a trait wholly absent in Mr. Burns, who always responds (and I do mean “always responds”) to discussion of Websnark with equanimity and grace.

First non-sports post all week

October 20, 2004 / Brendan

In January, Dave Barry will go on hiatus for the first time in thirty years. It’s uncertain when or if he’ll be back.

I’ve been meaning for a while now to write about Dave Barry and Izzle^2 Pfaff, among other things. Skot Kurruk, who writes the latter blog, is somebody who was obviously–like me–raised on Dave Barry’s humor; he appeals to me even more because he plays to my fetishes by using theatre terminology and cuss words. His posts read a lot like columns, and include a connect-for-bonus final punchline. He even has the same cumulative effect as Dave Barry: one entry will make you smile, but by the fifth or sixth you’ll be snorting in your cube, desperately trying to conceal your laughter by shoving a hand up each nostril. Okay, that’s just me.

So read Izzle^2 Pfaff, is my first point here. I have others.

I started reading Dave Barry columns not long after my introduction to joke books, in probably the fifth grade. Yes, I’m the kid who read joke books, and recited everything in them to my friends and family, usually multiple times. It is surprising that I survived middle school.

I thought that these books were hilarious, and the obvious parallel that I drew between them and Dave Barry was the Platonic punchline, the kind of thing that usually gets followed up by a musical sting (“ba dum dum CHHHH” is a sting, not a rimshot; if you call that a rimshot, you don’t know what a rimshot is). I deduced, subconsciously, that this was the root and source of all humor. Anything can be made funny with a punchline, I thought! If I make punchlines, I will be funny!

It is for this reason that I was stalled in the humor department for a long, long time. I was not a funny person, and I honestly didn’t understand why. I am only now overcoming this: I still don’t consider myself funny, but I am getting funnier.

My slog toward freedom from punchlines has been long and difficult, but along the way I was fortunate enough to discover webcomics. People talk a lot about how webcomics are revitalizing and expanding sequential art, but not so much about the boundaries they push in humor. Think about it: there is nobody on earth who is doing what Chris Onstad is doing with Achewood, a humor and pathos with no individually funny elements, built entirely with rhythm. Granted, everybody at Dumbrella is doing some of the same things, but nobody else has Onstad’s easy mastery of the method. Chris Onstad is the John McCrea of comics.

Before I read Achewood, though, I was reading Penny Arcade, by a couple of guys who are–let’s say the Ramones of comics. They have double-handedly inspired about 70% of all the comics on the Interweb right now. Like the Ramones, they took a short form, stripped it raw and made it different; like the Ramones, they made a lot of boys believe that anybody could have a smash hit with just a few ingredients and a lot of heart. (This is not true, which is why most webcomics feature two sarcastic guys and die after a month.) They are not entirely punchline-free, but a single Penny Arcade strip is often jammed with more lunacy than lesser comics can fit into their fourth panels all week.

And before even Penny Arcade, I was reading Checkerboard Nightmare, the first thing I’d seen that managed to satirize the entire concept of punchlines. I’m going to mix allegories here and call Kris Straub the Jon Stewart of webcomics: the only guy who’s capable of calling out, duelling and deflating anyone in the medium, including himself. The kind of writer who’s so sharp that he gets attacked for not being an impartial journalist–then has to remind his attackers that he never made any promises to be either.

The non-webcomic thing that had the biggest impact on the way I perceive humor was Project Improv and its spinoff, my own improv troupe, Street Legal. I’ve pretty much parted ways with PI (for that matter, they’ve pretty much parted ways with themselves), but I owe Ken Troklus and Rebecca Grossman a lot for pointing out to me that punchlines are not funny–connections are.

Dave Barry (remember? I was talking about Dave Barry?) has stated in print that he is a big Achewood fan. It’s almost bathetically symbolic to me, now, that he is taking an indefinite break from column-writing, and that Achewood is moving from the Chris Onstad’s local copy shop to a real publisher. I still read Dave Barry’s columns every week in the Washington Post, and it’s taken Achewood and over a decade to make me realize that punchlines are the smallest part of what he does.

October 2, 2004 /

The comic story Stephen wrote and I drew for HONOR, the 2004 Fake Middle Names Collective comics anthology, is finally on the interweb! Please enjoy A Modest Proposal, and share it with your friends and legal acquaintances.

August 11, 2004 /

“So let’s say it does wreck newspaper comics. I’m on board with that. I want to punch a hole in the boat. I want to see the whole thing flush like an animal carcass down a toilet bowl, and the carcass is on fire.”

Matt Boyd

Brouhaha brews between the big and the bitter! Tycho actually has the best summary of the whole thing, so read that too, but here’s the bullets:

Scott Kurtz has a very popular daily webcomic, PvP. Not the most popular strip in existence, but vastly more popular than most other webcomics–popular enough that he lives on its ads and his print deal with Image.
Now, he wants to see his comic in newspapers.
Many newspapers aren’t doing that well, because not as many people read newspapers as used to do so.
To reduce costs, these newspapers are continuing to cut print space and funding for syndicated comic strips, something they’ve been doing aggressively for over a decade; some newspapers (like the Philadelphia Enquirer) have asked syndicates (like Universal Press) for a year of free strips, or demanded (like Knight-Ridder, which owns 31 large papers) a price reduction in strips across the board.
Scott has siezed on this opportunity to leverage his strip’s popularity, offering PvP, free of charge, to multiple newspapers and newspaper conglomerates. It’s a smart deal for him–he gets huge exposure, and he’s already doing the strip anyway–and for them–they get a new-to-them comic with an established audience for free.
Newspaper cartoonists who are aware of this are rabidly hating on Kurtz, while secretly urinating in their Depends.

Now, Scott’s success in this arena is hardly guaranteed. Newspapers are paranoid about comic strips, generally preferring the most sanitized, humorless pap available, as a sop to their demographic (which, I’m sorry to say, skews more and more to “old” and “boring”). This is why things like Cathy and Marmaduke and (hideously) Family Circus continue to exist. PvP has cussing and violence in it sometimes, and it might get angry letters, and it’s four inches of column space that could be used to squeeze in another ad.

Regardless, there are going to be alt-weeklies and college papers that take him up on it. They’re all going to profit from the deal. And Kurtz won’t be the first webcomic to jump to newspapers, but he will be the first one to do it for free, and bigger papers are going to look at that and start asking questions.

“Hey,” they’re going to ask, “why are we paying thousands of dollars for comics that could be generated by a monkey on lithium? Why are we getting exactly the same comics as everyone else, when we could be making exclusive deals to get a comic nobody else in the region has? Now that the Interweb allows millions of people to read any paper they want, can we use comics to leverage our success in that arena?”

The answers might be “because, because, and no,” but they will ask, and that’s a change. You remember the last time things changed in the newspaper comics industry? In a good way?

Me either.