Cartoon for Ali Farzat
Ali Farzat is a great Syrian political cartoonist. Recently he was kidnapped by paramilitary thugs (believed to be working for Pres. Bashar Assad) and brutally beaten. They deliberately broke both of his hands.
(click for larger version)
I was going to write a long tract about the metaphorical dimension of this horrible attack, but it’s all pretty obvious, really. Farzat spoke Truth to Power and met a fate similar to so many who do. I’ll just add that Farzat’s cartoons are awesome, and he’s obviously a man after my own heart, my very favorite type of political cartoonist. Google him some time. It’s purely visual storytelling – no patronizing labels or captions, none of the gags based solely on dialogue or wordplay which have made our own editorial pages so trite and boring. What’s even better, Farzat seldom caricatures specific individuals. He rarely, for instance, draws the tyrant Assad. Rather, he seems to draw “types,” the archetypal plutocrat, politician, pauper, or proletarian. This is such a great way to de-emphasize transitory “personality politics” and keep the focus where it should be, on the long-term conflict of classes.
By the way, on the off-chance that somebody wants to read my cartoon right-to-left, here’s the Arabic version:
Get well soon, Ali. Get well soon, Syria. Ash-sha`b yurid isqat an-nizam!
Titanzer Fan-Art!
I drew some fan-art for my friend Kevin Wilson’s giant-robot webcomic Titanzer!
The image depicts the titular titan, Titanzer, having his ass handed to him by the immense evil alien robot Inert, whom I internally refer to as “Fisto Punchalot.” In the foreground is Titanzer’s distressed owner/operator, has-been celebrity Johnny Yamamoto.
In addition to being a fun and hilarious guy who draws a great webcomic, Kevin is also the person who lent me a button machine to make promotional buttons for Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment. Below are the three designs:
Check out Titanzer everybody, and DON’T! GET! FISTED!
Calico Jack Guest Comic
I did a guest comic for my friend Patrick Devine’s comic “Calico Jack,” which reassures us that in the 26th century there will still be punk rock, piracy, and (apparently) floppy disks! The more things change, huh?
The comic re-depicts an incident from issue 2, page 13. Jack has obviously taken some creative liberties in the retelling. Capt. Miller is nowhere near as villainous or confrontational in the original story, despite working for an organization, the Federal Union, whose initials are “F.U.”
More Figure Drawing w/ Periscopers
Glad I used ink this time instead of my usual scratchy 4H pencil. Without light, form is meaningless.
Read MoreLife Ain’t No Ponyfarm Fan-Art
My friend Sarah Burrini is visiting Portland this week, all the way from Cologne, Germany! She has a great biweekly webcomic in German AND English called “Life Ain’t No Ponyfarm” which I recommend you check out, especially if you “sprechen zie Deutches.” I decided to honor her visit by drawing some of her characters.
There are a lot of auto-bio webcomics out there, let’s face it. But “Ponyfarm” is exactly the type of auto-bio comic I can really get into i.e. one that is full of lies. Though Sarah herself is the main character, she is only sometimes the focus of the story – the other characters are Ngumbe, an elephant who wants to be Miles Davis, “El Fungo,” a hot-headed Mexican mushroom, and Buttercup, who is just an adorable pony.
Here’s the color version – I sorta rushed this, but I sense the potential for greatness.
Super-Old SNitLoE Sketches
This week my dad is visiting me here in Portland, OR. Even though we’re having a blast, hanging out with him is definitely slowing down the process of preparing the book for print. However, his visit is not all bad news for SNitLoE fans: in the dark recesses of my old bedroom back in New Orleans, my parents uncovered an ancient dusty sketchbook which contains the earliest known sketches of the Savage Nobles. Check out this ancient history:
The one of Kafir, I think, is the oldest. “A lot of surly teenagers think of themselves as being imprisoned by their parents,” I thought. “But what if a guy’s actual parents were his actual jailers.” Then I drew this image and it was the springboard for creating the entire character. I kinda wish I’d kept the earring!
The early Tonya and the early Theo were both modeled on baristas that I knew. There is one even older drawing of Theo somewhere, which I can no longer locate.
The less said about my drawings skills in the spring of 2009, the better.
Read MoreSuper-Old Character Sketches
This week my dad is visiting me here in Portland, OR. Even though we’re having a blast, hanging out with him is definitely slowing down the process of preparing the book for print. However, his visit is not all bad news for SNitLoE fans: in the dark recesses of my old bedroom back in New Orleans, my parents uncovered an ancient dusty sketchbook which contains the earliest known sketches of the Savage Nobles. Check out this ancient history:
The one of Kafir, I think, is the oldest. “A lot of surly teenagers think of themselves as being imprisoned by their parents,” I thought. “But what if a guy’s actual parents were his actual jailers.” Then I drew this image and it was the springboard for creating the entire character. I kinda wish I’d kept the earring!
The early Tonya and the early Theo were both modeled on baristas that I knew. There is one even older drawing of Theo somewhere, which I can no longer locate.
The less said about my drawings skills in the spring of 2009, the better.
Deciding on a Cover
SNitLoE was always meant for print, even before I started posting it online, and now that I’m done drawing the story I’m wasting no time turning this ungainly webcomic into a beautiful paperback book. One important part of this will be designing the cover. I’ve always imagined a cover similar to the image currently on the facebook page, which I also use on promotional cards. It’s the band standing in the desert with their instruments, Tonya’s fist in the air. I drew that picture almost a year ago, so obviously I’d redraw it nicely for the book cover.
This afternoon I messed around with a couple other designs. Please vote! Bare in mind that these are very loose sketches – the exact layout and colors will probably be different, so just vote based on the general idea of the cover.
1.) Original 2.) Blue New Mexico
3.) Abbey Road 4.) Face Window
5.) Thirsty and Miserable 6.) Upturned Van
[poll id=”2″]
There is something about designing covers that draws artists towards symmetry. Do a Google Image Search for the phrase “graphic novel cover” and see how many of them display strong bilateral symmetry. While the interior of a comic may be full of dramatic dynamism and daring diagonals, covers are often comparitavly static images. I think this is because, while comics are supposed to convey the passage of time, covers often show a frozen moment, or a representation of a state of being rather than a narrative event. Look at the amazing similarity between these covers by two of my favorite young comics artists in Portland, Sarah Oleksyk and Dylan Meconis. It’s pretty remarkable.
Remarkable!
Kafir Tahrir
Today I posted the last page of the comic! This page is respectfully dedicated to the Uni-Ball™ “Vision” Fine-Width Pen which died heroically in its creation.
When I wrote the first draft of SNitLoE in the spring of 2009, the enormous march on Washington described in the final scene was just wishful thinking on my part. I was irritated that all of my generation’s righteous outrage during the Bush years had ultimately proven so impotent, and that when we finally did mobilize for a cause, the cause was getting a Democrat elected president instead. The DC protest I marched in during the Troop Surge of ’07 was well attended, but shamed by the epic crowds at the Obama inauguration. A nasty spiritual concoction, equal parts naive triumphalism and cynical despondence, utopian escapism and hoarse-voiced fury, seemed to soak us children of the 80s, and I feared we would soon sell out just like the Boomers. So I made a comic about it. (Sorry, Boomers – you know I love you!)
How could I have guessed that two springs later young people all around the world would rise up and fulfill my leftist fantasy? The crowds I’ve drawn on the Washington Mall don’t seem so unbelievable after Syntagma, Madison, and Puerta del Sol. Maybe I should have named Kafir “Tahrir” instead!
VJ Day in Times Square… With Dinosaurs!
My friends and teachers over at Periscope Studio have a weird and wonderful weekly sketch challenge. This week’s theme is “World War II and Dinosaurs.” After seeing Ben Dewey’s pitch-perfect propaganda piece and the extremely creepy entry by Cat Farris, I knew I had to jump on the bandwagon. WWII-Dinosaurs are surely destined to succeed ninjas, pirates and zombies as the omnipresent emblem of the ironic pop-cultural zeitgeist, and let no one say I wasn’t into them before they were cool.
By the way, this really is just a sketch, not like like the gorgeously rendered and researched finished pieces that often pass for “sketches” at Periscope. Way to set the bar impossibly high, guys.
Read MoreHeat Rises
Boy oh boy did it feel good to draw something other than Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment, I can’t even begin to tell ya. This comic is for the “Summer” issue of Stumptown Underground and draws heavily on my own personal experience living in Brooklyn 4th-floor walk-up apartment during the summer of 2007.
Following the lead of Benjamin Dewey, here are my thumbnails (more like toenails!) for those of you interested in my, ahem, process. A big, special thanks to everyone at Barry Deutch‘s Graphic Writers’ Workgroup for looking these over. They gave me the idea to add the scent-lines on page one, and the idea to make the protagonist black. Guys, if you read this and notice I didn’t take your other suggestions, it’s not because they were bad! It’s because I’m stubborn!
Aside from personal experience, my main inspiration for this comic was Will Eisner, the man who evoked New York City, in all its glitz and gristle, better than any cartoonist ever has or ever will. Eisner’s short-story anthology, “New York: The Big City” undoubtedly did more to get me into comics than any other book. Will Eisner also drew the world’s most beautiful picture of a pile of uncollected garbage. Look at this:
Without any irony, I can call that beautiful. I can only dream of one day handling graywash the way Eisner did.
To close things out, here’s my number one summer jam. There are a lot of songs that remind me of summer in New York City (i.e. pretty much any track on Sublime’s self-titled album, a perennial campus favorite on the first warm day of the year), but this song by is actually about summer in New York City! Read my comic again while listening to this!
Read MoreSavage Nobles Philly Snapshot
Here’s the larger version of the picture I drew for Tonya to find on Greg’s desk – a classic example of something that looks like virtually nothing on the shrunken-down webpage, but will look detailed and cool in the final printed book.
It was actually kind of touching to draw this… it’s the last time I’ll get to draw the band together as a group in this comic, and actually it’s the first time since page 31. The skyline in the background is supposed to be the Savage Noble’s hometown of Philadelphia, PA.
2028 Tonya Sketch
When I wrote the script for Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment back in the spring of 2009, I specified that in the final scenes Tonya should be wearing “a sort of ninja-guerilla-superhero-Zorro costume.” It became my task two years later to interpret what the heck I meant by this, so before drawing page 170 I did a preliminary costume design:
Even though this was a pretty rapid sketch, I’m pleased with how it turned out. The outlandish costume and hair is a good foil for Sen. Greg’s new straight-laced look. The posture is believable and the proportions are a lot more naturalistic than one can usually expect from me. I’ve actually had to be a consciously cartoonier in the finished artwork for the sake of consistency.
My main regret is that at some point while drawing this the ol’ hormones must have taken over, because I made Tonya look sexier than she’s really supposed to be. (What’s with those gams? And isn’t she supposed to be 43?) I always intended Tonya to be a proxy for the reader, a sympathetic punk rock everywoman with real life dreams and problems etc., and I think making her a super-hot babe gets in the way of this. I worry that on certain pages of the comic, especially as my own knowledge of constructive anatomy improved, I probably lapsed into some unwarranted horndoggery, and if so I apologize. That’s also a betrayal my own principles: DC and Marvel’s ridiculous body imagery and unrealizable physical ideals, both masculine and feminine, were a huge part of what repelled me from reading any comics whatsoever for most of my righteous teenage years… and a desire to smash these norms is part of what brought me back to comics in my mid twenties.
Read MoreSenator’s Desk
I’ve learned so many interesting, random facts while researching this comic. Did you know that all United States Senators have the same desk!? That’s right! In 1909, the carpentry firm S. Karpen and Brothers manufactured 125 identical mahogany desks for the opening of the Russell Senate Office building. (Why 125 is something that baffles me. There were 46 states at the time, 92 senators. Were S. Karpen and Bros. anticipating that sixteen new states would eventually join the union? But if so, what was the odd-numbered desk for? Or did they think suspect their incredibly sturdy desks would gradually break over the centuries-long history of our glorious republic?)
As soon as I discovered this, I knew I had to draw the desk properly. Alas, my attempt at “mood-lighting” on page 168, though moderately successful, resulted in most of the wood being blacked out in shadow anyway. Here are my preliminary pencils, where you can see the form of the desk a little better.
By the way, I’m only sporadically accurate about these things. For instance, I don’t actually know if the capitol dome AND the Washington monument are visible from any window of the Senate Office Building – I suspect they are not. I am indulging in that same cinematic shorthand whereby the Eiffel Tower can be seen out any window in Paris or Peter Parker’s crummy Manhattan apartment still has a breathtaking view of the Empire State Building. This is called poetic license, and I fall back on it every time I don’t feel like doing research.
Seriously, identical desks!
I Am So Great
I just finished what I consider to be a particularly good page of Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment, maybe one of the best. Not counting thumbnails, I did the entire page from start to finish in one day – actually just about 7-8 hours if you subtract all the time I spent singing in choir, hackey-sacking in the park, applying online for unemployment compensation, and queuing at the Department of Health and Human Services.
(please click the image to see the full-sized version!)
Though I am pleased with almost every aspect of this page (the page layout; the blocking of the figures; the human anatomy, gesture, and costume; the sweet but not saccharine tone, lightened by a little humor; the foreshadowing of Manaka’s concerned glance) there are, as always, things I wish I could do better. Pro-inker Gary Martin, who graciously carved me a brand new anus while reviewing my portfolio at this year’s Stumptown Comics Fest, wants me to focus on my line weight. So although I was already trying to use heavier lines opposite my light source, I’m trying even harder now – it worked pretty well on Theo’s face in panel 4. I don’t necessarily want the uber-slick look of some of Gary’s (admittedly amazing) inking for my own comics, but even if I ultimately opt for a smudgier/sloppier treatment, it’s still a skill I should have under my belt. Some of my lines, I think, are still way too thin, and I am still struggling with ways to create grays – my crosshatching is hopelessly haphazard and 165 pages later I am still smearing my drybrush all over the place inadvisedly.
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