If you wonder why I ink

Work in progress, of course. Click for bigger.

I get a real zen effect from inking, especially over tight pencils that don't leave much to improvisation. There's still artistic choices to make but they're few and far apart, mostly it's minute decisions about how to represent a texture or a surface and most of that's down to practice and subconscious whim. I can let my mind wonder and sort stuff out (and there's been some stuff to sort out the past week) while my hands keep active. It's good therapy. I've missed inking by hand.


I won't be erasing the pencil work beneath this after I'm done inking. It's very rarely that I let both hang together but for this piece I think it'll suit it. Usually I prefer to clean erase the final inks so that I can look at my professional and sharply inked result and pat myself on the back. But as I said there's been stuff I had to sort out in my mind the last few days and I think it's fitting that I let everything show this time. Art should reflect the emotional context around its creation. A sacrifice's not exactly something to be neat about anyway, right?

Look at the marble stone surface, that textural embellishment, one could say, is meaningless and for a comic artist that must give priority to storytelling structure and composition foremost, perhaps even superfluous (as it it might distract the eye from the relevant action). Resting in an uneasy place between fine art pretension and nitty-gritty comic craftsmanship, that sort of inking flourish has come to define my approach. It's a representation of my inner workings I suspect, every time I try to simplify my linework I feel empty inside. Every time I try to go the extra step and do proper chiaroscuro I feel inadequate and as if I'll never finish a single drawing, ever. Sometimes friends and readers comment on all the little crosshatching stuff that's going on in my drawings and remark to the effect that they'd never have the patience to do that themselves. At those times all I can think about is some other people I'm aware of who do more with simple black and white than I could ever hope to. There's degrees of patience, guys.

Some people are blessed with great determination. I've met artists who have been honing their draftsmanship with the drive of a single-cell organism. For as long as they remember being alive, they've been drawing. There's seventeen year olds on deviantart that can represent reality in their drawings ten times better than I ever could hope to. Going around on the internet browsing fine art sites is a humbling experience for most people hovering in that middle space between confident abstraction and full-on rendering mastery.

Comic artists often excuse their shortcomings by saying they focus on storytelling and/or characterization and perhaps that's true some of the time. For me, if I were to be frank, I never had the patience to be a fine artist. I've never spent more than twenty hours on a single piece of art (more like ten hours on average) and I can't see myself changing in the future. I didn't choose comics as a medium because they serve my strengths, comics chose me because it's the only thing I was capable of doing with my talents, peculiarities and temperament.

Sure, I can spend a year making a comic (I just did. It took about 900 hours of work, that's about three solid hours of drawing per day) but it's a variable loop: Idea, rough pencils, tighter pencils, inking, lettering, attachment to the storyline, go at the beginning and repeat until done. It suits me because I'm never stuck doing the exact same thing for longer than 10 hours or so. I record music in the same way, I'll compose rough segments, put down some guitar tracks, then do some drum sequencing, then some orchestration and keyboard work, then some guitars again, then some vocals, then add or change a compositional part, then pester other members to do their vocals or bass lines or whatnot, it's never a grind.

As I grow older and thankfully advance in my effort to accept myself for what I am, I'm more and more okay with that I'll never be a real fine artist and that I'll need to keep rotating my efforts in my various areas of interest if I want to get things done. I'm frankly not exactly sure how that'll pan out in my professional life, but at least in my own head I feel more and more comfortable being a jack of all trades and master of none. Society constantly pressures for specialization. An artist I knew once said 'specialization is for ants'. Perhaps that's too harsh but I'll take from that that specialization doesn't have to be for everyone.

What do you do, reader? How does it reflect on your attention span? Does it fulfill your desires or have you come to terms it never will completely? Do you spend more than ten hours a day toiling at a particular thing regularly? How's that like? Which are the zen aspects of your craft or work and which are the brain-hurty ones?
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Interviewed

I have been interviewed about my pixel art (mainly) and comics at 8bit today. Click on the image above to traverse to the wonderful world of the 16 color machine palette, of 4 channel sound, when 256k of memory weren't 'enough for everybody' but more like manna from the techno-gods. Some added thoughts after the jump.


Sander van den Borne, who did the piece and conducted the interview comes from a demoscene background. For the readers of this blog, 'demoscene' might be a completely new word so here's in a nutshell what it is: When personal computers became affordable back in the 80's a lot of introvert children learned to do code, graphics routines and compose music on them in the privacy of their own bedrooms.You know at least one of these people if you think about it. Some employed these skills to make computer games, and back in that time it was entirely possible to make a hit game on the microcomputer just by yourself in your bedroom and become a professional game programmer once it got picked up by a publishing house.

Others employed their technical skills on these microcomputers to crack the protection of games put out by the companies of the time, so they can be copied freely from the original disks to backup floppies. They would then put these games on underground BBSes (the precursor of the internet, in a way) for other people to download, or just disk-trade them away. If you're over 30 and have an interest in videogaming you've probably played something that has been cracked by one of these people. A 'scene' solidified around this application of getting games for free, which still is very much alive today. Everything that you download and play on your PC illegally has been cracked by someone that belongs to a group with a fancy name like 'Razor' or 'Fairlight'. If you check you'll see they've usually put their name somewhere, be it in the filename, a small demo in the cracker utility, something.

Some of these active teenagers back in the day were also making crack intros to the games they cracked, it all started pretty lowbrow will just some scroller sending out greetings and admonitions to other scene people, but as more people got involved the crack intro scene spawned a very competitive sub-scene in more elaborate intros, with music and fullscreen graphics and code routines that seemingly defied the paltry limitations of the 8-bit machine they were working on. Look at this for a standout example of that aesthetic of the era. This is by the demoscene group 'Crest'. The machine this is running for natively - and from where the video and audio data is captured - is a commodore 64. These demos came in competition in large demo-parties, where they were ranked by the popular vote.

Sander van den Borne is a person that has experienced the demoscene first-hand for a quite relevant period. You can see the collection of his work here. It is especially worthwhile, if you're interested, to watch the demos and look at the graphics he's done chronologically so you can see how the aesthetic zeitgeist of the early 90's was definite for the demoscene, and how he - amongst others - has tried to move from there to more individual approaches. Look at this, for example. I have respect and admiration for Sander and it's a privilege to be interviewed by him on 8-bit today.

I was marginally involved in the commodore 64 demoscene, which is still going almost 30 years after the release of this particular 8-bit machine for a time, because I had taken to doing graphics with the limitations of its main two visual modes, hi-res (square pixels, 320x200 screen, only two colors from the machine 16 color palette on every 8x8 cell at a time) and multicolor (every picture element is two pixels wide, only 3 colors from the palette plus one global color that is the same for the whole picture). I made these pieces of artwork because I am fascinated by limitations, as I explain in the interview. I did not get involved in the social aspect of the scene and as such I cannot talk about its conception of my work from the inside. From the presentation and interview it is my understanding that some of the work I've done for that machine has been of interest to some.

I do a lot of pixel-art, some professionally, some not, using a lot of limitations that are more fabricated than the c64 ones. I do not post about pixel art on this blog because I'm trying to not make it into a 'everything Helm has done, is doing and will ever do' blog. Perhaps it's a mistake to not go that way because then I would be able to post almost every-day with the various bits of creativity I channel to pixel art, to music, to the critique process. I kinda like the idea of this blog being 'pure' though, I don't know. What do you think, should I post more about my other creative endeavors besides comics?


Edit: keep in mind that if you say 'yes' you might be subjected, some days, to my imaginary stillbirths such as this edit.

-Helm
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Small Shames, part the first

This is new. There will probably be a catalogue of similar pictures for the next few weeks.

I have talked before of how I am resolved to rid myself of my social shames and apprehensions. I am trying, but often I find myself failing. I am keeping a recollection of when this happens. What I want to avoid is that familiar effect where you do (or do not do, more often) something and that makes you feel shame, but as time passes you rationalize it and end up finding some lame reason for what you did, you feel at peace with it. I make these now and I make them as well as I can so I will not have this opportunity to ever lie to myself.

When I have a number of them I will have them silk-printed stickers and place them in the heart of what has made me feel these shames in the first place: downtown Athens. It has taught me to hate and fear other people and this will be one thing I can do to have a bit of a proactive revenge. The ultimate goal of such endeavors is to act rightly in the moment and not to just make stupid art after it, though. Self-coaching. I will let you know of how that goes.

Keep reading

-Helm

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Psychocartography

Mandatory check after the jump this time, friends.



Some creative zooming might be required to achieve both a holistic view of this page and its individual parts.

Unlike the spread posted below, this more recent pile of secrets still hurts. Revisiting this in detail to re-letter it reminded me of the acute psychological condition I was in when it was made. There is a honor in remembering it seems but there also is a sadness. Perhaps a couple of years from now the emotions that fed this will be crystallized more into a picture and less into a mirror.

With this page, my backlog has all but been depleted (there's like 3-4 pages I didn't deem good enough to post and a 18-page 24hr comic which I'm not terribly fond of either). This means I have achieved what I set out to do with this blog initially, which is to give a permanent digital home to work that I felt had been perhaps misrepresented in initial publication (this is a fancy way of saying that nobody that would want to see most of these would be able to where they were published).

This blog as an experiment has been very successful. The communication with you readers reinstilled a degree of self-confidence in me and I even put out the Asides Bsides book on that strength. I thank you sincerely for this. Even if we were to be done now, I would still rank this whole endeavour as probably the most important thing I've attempted in the past couple of years.

As I do not want this to be done though, I think it's time for to consider further options. Naturally it is impossible to keep the rate of posting I have on this blog now the well has run dry. I am currently - albeit slowly - making some more short comics. I have at least 3 4-5 page stories I need to tell in this period and I am assembling material for them at a discrete pace (you may detect from how I write here that there is a chance that I might abandon making comics after that. This isn't because I seriously think there will ever come a time when I throw the towel, more that I find it psychologically supportive to think of a future without any hardcoded certainties). The initial plan B was that when I would be done with my past work I would continue to post my new pages as they appear, here. I intend to do so, but I urge readers to not expect updates in the usual rate of once every 3-4 days anymore, as comics take a long time to be made. (Actually, comics can be made quite faster if I were employed to make them, but seeing how I am not, my own conscience sets the pace). I say this because it seems there's about 50 people visiting every day... take the bookmark from your daily folder and put it in your bi-monthly folder, please :)

I put the question to you, kind readers and humans, on the material of future posts. Should I post only when a page is completely and utterly done, or would you also be interested in work-in-progress (along with a hefty amount of comic-theory-ramblings) posts that might make less sense/spoil the end result ? Naturally if I can post WIP-stage work it means I will post more often (while still not at the past pace) but at the expense of the novelty of a finished page.

Also, on the strength of positive reception both here on the blog and for the book I recently put out, I am thinking I want to work making comics as a professional again. I think the Greek market cannot provide for me even barely reasonable compensation for the sort of work I do (at least not through the current channels) so it might be the time that I should start looking for opportunities to be published abroad. How exactly to do this, I am not certain. Any ideas are welcome. I suspect the first thing to do would be to make a bio / portfolio section on this blog with some standout pieces from the archives here and a few words on who I am and what I am willing to do to survive. This only makes sense because I don't expect an editor stumbling on this page to have the time to read the whole blog to tell what I can do, and seeing how I don't post my most recent work on the top of the blog they might be confused further. I'll do this soon.

If it were up to you, which pieces (let's say up to 4 stories) from those on this blog would you select for such a purpose?

Ah, well. I'm feeling a bit sad now. Was it really just 6 months with this blog? It felt longer, it felt busier. Felt like I had more purpose than usual. I'll try to go with this feeling.

- Helm
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Secrets

This came to be about 6 years ago. Here is the relevant background information:

After failing at high-school and repeating my final year, I had to make some choices as to what I wanted to do with myself. Especially now being, what they told me was, an adult. My father was gracious to provide for my going to a private higher learning school to study comic, cartoon & animation, which at the timed seemed pretty much the only thing I would be interested in doing. It was either that or English literature & philosophy, for which with my certain... academic discontent, I certainly would never made the grades for, or some sort of music school. I didn't look into the particulars of the last option because I felt ill-equipped for it at the time, a hunch that probably saved me a lot of frustration.

Anyway, I did go to comic school and the whole experience was mixed. What was not but instead completely wonderful was that I met the wonderful people with whom I put out the Free Your Line fanzine later on. For the first time in my life, I felt as if I belonged to a friendly peer group. This comic was my first serious stab at the medium. It was published in the first issue of Free Your Line. Before this, I read a lot of comics but I didn't actively try to make them, I was one of those kids that just 'drew pretty good'.

At the time I didn't need so much to communicate through the art forms I practiced as I needed to express certain inward movemets. The form of this comic in fact directly follows several personal resolutions I had arrived to to frame my music about the same time. The main premise was a complete abandonment of the common methods of communication and instead a complete focus on self-expression for the purpose private reflection. I make it sound fancy but I think the impulse towards this sort of artistry is a very common one in teen-aged creative but introverted people. At the time, having no education on the history of aesthetics and therefore no clue on how often this theme repeats, I felt what I was doing was novel. It is useful perhaps to say that whereas I have since then gradually but surely taken my comic-making towards traditional storytelling, my music remains very much based on those premises and is really never to change.

Effectively my early music along with my early comic work such as this served as psychoanalysis. I was at the time very maudlin over several issues which I felt I could not discuss with anyone. So I created a monument of secrets both through music and this sort of comic work and I let it reflect on me. There is a very interesting vantage that one can create this way. Art longs for Arete, as the ancient Greeks would say. When one creates art they are expressing an infinitely capacious version of themselves, one not shackled by the psychological ills that might torture them in their life, one that is perfect. And to have this perfect form speak to you is an eventful process. Depending on how this art reflects on the artist I believe it can push him towards greater despair, or the opposite, guide him out of it. I was fortunate in that both music and early comic work lead towards the latter.

I was not interested in publicizing this work and only did it at the time because of two fake reasons and a real one. The first fake one was that my close peers at comic school were impressed and wanted the comics to go in the fanzine. The other was that I opined that even on an academic level "art which doesn't seek to communicate" should be exhibited so as to make it known that such art might exist. Hiding under this bullshit the real reason was that I felt an almost illicit thrill at the idea that something so completely incomprehensible to outsiders, yet so deeply meaningful to me could be read by hundreds of people. This feeling did not come from a sadism I think, towards the reader. It came from the ever-slight possibility that they could somehow peer behind the curtain and notice the real emotion that was in the heart of all of this. It was after all, an attempt at communication.

At the time I rejected the few chances I had to explain anything about this comic and others I made like it. In fact when an acquaintance told me that she found the comic very 'poetic' I expressed a violent distaste and throttled any further attempt at what I felt was an easy and comfortable reading of my work with the harsh tone that belonged to a very anxious and troubled past version of me. I regret that sort of thing because I realize now that most of what this comic is about is plain and evident, if not in plot then certainly in universal emotion to anyone that has ever lost someone, has been unloved and is very anxious for their life to truly begin. Those are the emotions that fueled this comic and it took me a few years to realize that it is not in any fundamental way different from any other comic I had since made, even when I moved towards less capricious forms of storytelling. I am always surprised when people tell me it means something to them though, not so much because I think that is impossible but more because I always thought it would take more effort to get to the bottom of it. I guess it doesn't, I guess the many secrets I put into this to exorcise them, are visible to the kind-hearted.


Most artists are very embarrassed about their early steps. I don't feel that way about this, I like it a lot still. It has helped me with a difficult time and as an artifact of perseverance, I can show it to you.

-Helm
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This House (Part 3: The Fissure of Consciousness)

Page 3 out of 4.

This is Theofilos.

Again, not much to say until we're done. Which will be in a few days.

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Technodrama

This is the comic I made for this year's festival. I don't know how big the screens you guys are using so it might be that the text is difficult to read, or you have to pan around horizontally... I really hope not. This is a byproduct of the format I used for this page. I uh, I printed this on A1 size (84x59cm). Keep in mind most comics are printed A4 or smaller. Sadly I didn't take a picture of it in the show as I 1) don't carry a photographic camera with me and 2) don't hang around my exhibit due to shame that I'm still trying to eradicate.

Also I guess this would be needed so you get both the macro and the micro view of the piece as the people in the show did. Pay attention to overarching elements in this thumbnail, they help with understanding the comic.

And yes, about understanding the comic. Hm, this is my most recent work and it's riding on this wave of post-analysis I've been indulging in lots on this blog so everything and I mean everything in this comic is calculated to support a thesis on instinct, determinism, id/superego clash etc etc the things we've been discussing here for the last 5 months. As such I have a very lucid idea about what I've done but not so much if I've accomplished it in the eyes of other readers. Now I could preempt you and tell you what it's about and so on but I'd rather if you'd feel compelled to read it carefully and make up your own mind. I just say these things to urge you to trust me that it's not just a 'whacky' collection of events, it will reward patient and exploratory readings.

On the technical level this page is an exploration of the digital way to make comics, as it was made at 1200 dpi in A3 size (that's a lot of pixels) completely in Manga Studio 3 Ex within the course of 13 days or so, about 3-4 hours of work a day. The work I'd otherwise put into 4-5 pages of comics went into this single page. The reason I went this way was because I wanted to make a comic that felt like a plot of a whole 2 hour movie in a single page. Sorta like a trailer. Condensed storytelling. I wanted to see if it was possible. It is. Successful? You tell me. Just keep in mind that there could be like, heh, 10 pages of comics between each panel.

The theme of the show was the number '13' (and obviously, bad luck). The format of the comic uses 13 panels, and the top part of the page as far as layout goes is the exact 180 degree rotation of the bottom part. The theme is very vaguely bad-luck-ish but that's as far as I tried to stick to it. I don't think '13' makes for good stories, personally, so I decided to veer off-path just as much as I needed to tell a good story. I am content with this to the degree that while I was preparing it on a piece of paper I brainstormed a lot of little quirks and ideas I wanted to put in it and after I was done I counted and realized about 80% of them made it in and not in a disruptive way. It felt 'right' to put that sort of effort in a single piece of art.

There are some bits of text here that do not translate very well. There is a 'gag' in the naming of the characters (especially the name of the father) which is also pertinent to the storyline but you'd have to have done some sort of Hellenistic studies I guess to get it. I'll just spoil that little bit because most of you have not read about ancient Greek drama theater. All the characters in this comic are named after marginally related characters in ancient Greek dramatic theater. All that is, besides the father figure. To draw a useful parallel to Shakespearian drama: imagine this comic where everybody's named stuff like Tristian and Benvolio and Martius but there's one dude inexplicably named Burt. Completely outside of the drama paradigm. I wonder why... hmm.

There's also a few other plays on words that do not translate, but nothing that spoils the story, I think. It's just a shame you heathens can't read Greek.

Also, here's the variation page that was put up right next to the main page. It reads "Variation for Impatient Readers". It's a joke about how people really just skim over the text in the comics presented in these festivals. On that panel that I didn't have a clean background to leave I just threw in an upside-down Manos Antaras as his severe stare seemed to fit the stark emptiness.

There is a surrealist painter involved in the original comic. First one to note in the comments who he is and how he's exploited cruelly by me, gets my admiration. Obviously, besides this, I welcome all communication and well-meaning critique as this is very new and it would be very applicable for me right now to better my art.

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Enter Vast Dominions, Welcome to My Dream (part the first)

Sorry for the pompous post title, I enjoyed the synchronicity of listening to Savior Machine while writing this post. Perhaps you could listen to them while you read it also, wouldn't that be nice? We are not the same person and we will never know the inside of another but here, let's pretend!

This is material made originally for the 2006 Babel comic art festival here in Greece. This is an annual festival organized by the people who put out the same-named comic magazine. Both the festival and the magazine enjoy a rich history and culture and they've been absolutely fundamental at increasing awareness of 'comics for adults' in Greece. It was the first time I was asked to participate and participate I did. The theme for the show was 'Dream, Perhaps?' (a reference in a collected work by M. Manara when we was still making amazing, beautiful, insightful pieces of art and not just ass comics). My entry is emphatically a dream (as stated in the introductory page). I took a few liberties which I'll discuss further on, but on the whole the dream experience is unaltered.

Exactly because this is a dream, there are some visual language tricks that I try to recur a lot so they become familiar though always odd and (hopefully) unsettling, what with the squiggly lines that signify beat pauses... and also I am trying to make the textual elements become textural as well, much like G.P.Russell, whom I respect very much (check how in the first panel they obey perspective). Also the hard black line for the stare at the last panel.

I've been discreetly placing these curvy lines in so many comics of mine since we put out the 'Free Your Line' magazine (on the third issue of which I also put this story) as a bit of an inward homage. The name of the fanzine might have come to us as a jest but I tried to take it as a lateral concept, the idea that one 'frees his line', that he doesn't define his work by the standard of others. I place the squiggly line a lot by my signature even when I'm not using it as a visual language piece as a little respect to that circle of friends and what they mean to me.

When this went to the festival some snide comments by other artists were conveyed to me about the quality of the paper I had used. You cannot see here but the original (which I gave to the show as opposed to photocopies) was inked on very cheap paper with the result of the big black border in the intro page - which was hand-inked, there's no floodfill bucket in real life, as sadly, there's no undo - had visibly 'scarred' the paper. The black in places and was generally not completely opaque, the handwork was visible. In the version you are looking at of course I have ran sharp Levels in photoshop so the black is black black, but this is not because I agreed with these comments and was ashamed by the paper or the 'hand-doodled' effect. I believe a piece for a festival should be shown in the format it was made, imperfections and all, it's not just a comic story to be read, it's an artifact to be examined. The Idea Space comic can wait for when it's publicised in print, I see no reason to pretty up the original when I'm showing the original, nor do I really see the reason to buy fancy expensive paper for work that'll be harshly thresholded for final print anyway. What, will better paper make the comic better? That sort of 'professionalism' makes me wary of professionals. The sort of people that keep their doodles and serious work alike in perfect carefully plasticized folders named after each month of each year. Just make the thing and it's done, it's made, you can move on.

Oh well! I will return with page 3 (of 5) in a couple of days.

Also, it is now 2009. I have made some resolutions of my own that aren't very easy to explain... it's perhaps because I don't usually make resolutions that when I've decided to do so they became quite involved and multi-layered... the gist of it is that I'm leaving behind the shames that I've got left, slowly but surely. I will try to stand more bare until I am naked, slowly but surely. I will take what I desire because this life is mine and I owe no shame to anyone man or institution or belief. That sort of thing, it might sound abstract and distant but it's not, it has to do with every single day that'll come. It'll be interesting therefore, this year, the 25th year of my life. I can't tell if it will be a good year for it but I can hope. I hope for me and I hope for you.

We could obviously not start then in any other way than with a short story about what makes simple things worth it, by a suspiciously monosyllabic faux-prehistoric giant bird.



-Helm

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A Broken Chain is but Circles that Met

Not one follows the other, but yet?...

Though the form of this comic seems a bit obtuse I believe once it has registered, its meaning should be self-evident, so I will not try to make the latter any plainer. I will however note the formalist effect in hopes that someone who has missed it may get at least that answer in this text: the comic can be read continuously clockwise or counter-clockwise and the meaning remains intact and is known to all humans.

This was kind of a difficult page to make and to some degree I feel it as a failure. On one hand I wanted there to be humans in the panels but not faces of humans, and then there's the basement panel where we see a person with dramatic lighting on his face, where someone with ill intent would mock him for being all 'emo-goth depressed' which really wasn't a context I wanted to indulge. On the other hand, I wanted the narrative to be completely seamless going round and round and it turns out that's more difficult to achieve than just to consider. The translation to English hurts it just a bit but too.

The four places in the four panels are ones I've been to and I believe I've had similar thoughts to the ones in the comic there as well. Especially the hotel room in panel one, it will be make a reprise appearance in a future comic. Hotels are really depressing.

It was in fact, in a hotel room that I first tried making my first comic (and perhaps funnily - though privately - that moment is referenced in my very first comic for comic school. We'll get to that). The two pages I inked are now lost but I have a clear recollection of what it was about and what it was inspired from. I was about 16 and my father had taken me to Pyrgos, in Ilia (original home of the olympic games to give you dirty savages some frame of reference) from where our family holds, for some vacations. He went out one night and I was really lonely inside the hotel room. I suppose it's telling of my disposition that instead of perhaps wondering around the public sections of the hotel (including a swimming pool) to make some travel acquaintances, I instead chose to hole up in the room and read my Battle Angel Alita comics. Ah, Yukito Kishiro was an amazing influence on me not so much in how I were to go on to draw like, but in the patience of his work. The craft that it took before one were to call a page finished. Whereas I have since deviated a lot from my 'ideal meticulous' style (probably to psychologically freeing effect!) the form is still there and the superego will not be happy until I have achieved similar robustness one day.

So, the comic I had started then was the perfect capture of my 16 year old psyche. It was a dude and a lady, dressed in futuristic jumpsuits, going into a garage and taking this Akira-esque superbike and then hitting the road in some silent, cyclopean metropolis threaded together with suspended motorways. Low shots from the pillars to the roads, high shots of the bike on an endless travel. Pure escapism. I drew it with my dad's 0.1 and 0.8 rapidographs!

I remember being excited seeing 'something I made' still be there after I had conceived it. Perhaps an instant addiction occurred. I looked at it a lot - though I didn't show my father. I was secretly ashamed of my comic because of perhaps, the naivety of it? or the sexuality inherent in artistic creation (for what is it than a birth of sorts)? Perhaps I just thought it wasn't drawn well enough to show.

I kept the comic in a drawer for some time. Now I don't think it's in there anymore, I think at some more volatile time between 16 and 18, I might have thrown it away. Perhaps it's still there, I don't really want to search my deep drawers that much. I believe I learned a very important lesson making that comic: that when you think you can't do something, if you go ahead and do it, the end result might be better than you expected. I sadly forgot that lesson and didn't make any more comics for a while, but once I went to comic school I had to get over my 'conceptual pessimism' really fast.

- Helm

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Robotboy

This is pretty much my favorite page from the newspaper batch. I think! I don't have much to say about it directly. It was a lot of work to draw but I think the visuals serve to the textual flow here pretty well. I'm not much of a writer (or at least I don't feel like one) and, let me be candid here, I don't feel like much of an illustrator either. This is a reason I am a comic artist. My drawings might not be stellar or my writing sublime, but I'm an okay combinatorial artist between the two. That's what most comic creators have going for them, being reasonably decent at two different crafts.

Enough about me, how about that robot boy. Have you noticed what a sad image it is, a vacant playground? An even sadder one is a playground with just one child there, alone. Steel yourself for the cruelty that follows is immeasurable, child.

For the lovers of comic art theory, note the open background panel that pervades the whole picture and on which the comic finally culminates on. The whole page is a cubist painting in this way, different viewpoints at the same time. Not so much literal time passes as spatial dislocation, until the end panel pulls it all together with a final symbolist reference.

A word about the robot symbol. This is a variation of the popular DESTROY ALL HUMANS! Red Robot. I think it was popularized by Diesel Sweeties, I am just now searching on Wikipedia about it. When I adopted it there was no Wikipedia. Usually it's portrayed like an emotionless destructobot bent on total human devastation (besides Bob Ross, who gets to live) but when I looked at its big red face with huge yellow eyes I just see a little kid so there you go. I've drawn this red robot a million times, it's not a pop culture reference anymore. It is mine, but in the interest of disclosure, I thought I'd mention it.

On other news, process post soon. Ptoing helped me with this wonderful little banner for the blog:



which I've attached as my signature in the forums I frequent. I don't know what else to do, so I've reverted to 1930 marketing practices "USE BRIGHT COLORS TO CATCH THE ATTENTION OF THE VIEWER" heh.

-Helm

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Deep Inside the Earth

I'll start with the customary "how did this ever see print in a large newspaper without a long history and audience in comics?!" Now that the interrobang is out of the way, this is a comic made under peculiar circumstances. To not go too far into it, at the time my sense of priorities was somewhat unreal, I wasn't seeing the meaning in a lot of things, generally perspective was skewed. I took my time with it and I made certain it worked like I wanted it to work. It breaks various narrative rules to the point where it might be a bit unreadable as a comic, but at the time I didn't care about that. There is a case to be made about interesting art being created when the artist has a disregard for common wisdom about how his art form of choice works, but that goes only as far as you as a reader finds this particular comic to be interesting. Frankly I'd be surprised that people would see this and feel any impulse to read it.

There is a common concept in comics that if the words overpower the images, the reader skips text or skips page. The vice versa doesn't apply as such, but if a page has no text or very little text, most readers read it VERY FAST, which is a good communicational tool for the aware comic artist. Generally more than 30 words per panel (given a print size of about a4 or smaller and a regular typeface size) is a good limit, and if possible, that text should be broken up in favourable places in the panel, not infodumped on the top or whatever. This comic breaks this rule in a big way, ripping word from image at the seams, making this less a comic and more "prose with some pictures behind it". Or is it "pretty pictures with some inconsequential text on top"? In any case, I was aware of this and chose this particular harsh juxtaposition to serve this story when I made this in 2006. I do this a couple more times in the future in these series, with variable degrees of effect.

There were artistic concerns here. The whole page is mostly drawn with a pentel inkpen, I generally avoided my usual 0.1 marker scribbling. I didn't want the images to look packed with detail. In the visual arts there is a distinction between 'detail' and 'visual information'. The difference is that detail may carry information but it also may not, and just be there to pack up the image, to inspire awe to the viewer... the "oh wow, look how many little lines!" effect. I do this occasionally because awe is a useful tool for a comic artist if they can pull it off. But here I wanted the information to be there, but not so much detail. The trees read as trees, sand reads as sand, rock reads as rock. There isn't anything "playful" about this, it's a very unappealing page by design, artistically. There are no elaborate cloud patterns, no cute little creatures amongst the rocks and grass, nothing distinctively alive and relatable. The effect I was going for - and I really hope it comes through - is not of 'nature as the natural state of man' but a nature that is alien, distant and which has irrevocably sworn off the human. This theme of discontent is the one that is echoed in the text. What would you feel if you were to leave civilization behind only to find nature rejecting you harshly, not letting you in? You thought you were a natural being but you are spoiled by your years as a human being. The breeze doesn't seem soothing after a month sleeping on the ground, the trees do not mellow you with their shade but are forever there, quiet and together, against the one who absconded from his own. We think we are alone amongst the crowd but there are other, far more fundamental types of loneliness.

I often entertain fantasies of leaving, going somewhere far away and leaving everything behind, everybody forgetting my name and who I was. I don't know how common this is. These moods hit me most when I am unhappy, which is reasonable if you think about it. This comic was made during a bout of sadness, and in a way it simulated my impulse to leave and go far away. It simulated it and it also simulated its probable outcome of marginalization, of alienation even in the animal state a natura. Is a sad man less sad when he is running away into some cheap primordial fantasy of vast plains and trees and nothingness? It is pitiful that one would choose to return to his human ways just to retain some semblance of sanity through communication and expression, even more pitiful that he would have nowhere to send his messages. Pitiful, and unambiguously human.

The human state of self-awareness is inherently pathological. There are ways a living mechanism can break and become evolutionary deadwood. They are the exact same ways through which a living mechanism lucks out on a new characteristic that advances it in the food-chain. Genetic mutation is an 'error' in this way, the results of this 'error' are painted as favorable or unfavorable strictly in the practical terms of whether the mutated creature seems to survive better or worse. Self-awareness for the human is an evolutionary variation that was in this sense, excellent in keeping humans alive and in control and thriving. However there exist pathologies that are special to the thinking, feeling being that are completely alien to your cat, or even more, to a cockroach. These pathologies will brand us evolutionary deadwood. These are existential concerns, or to say, they emerge from the human ability to discern between itself and its environment and to plot a theoretical end to his life by comparing to outward death. Your cat doesn't know it will die, nor does it know it is governed by chemical impulses nor does it really "know" anything, because it is not self-aware. Your computer doesn't "know" anything either in the exact same way. Every day we breed small, inward deaths inside us through the knowledge of the outward death, through comparison and contrast with otherness. Fantasy and reality in constant, brutal friction. The same tools that enable us to overcome are the ones that destroy us. This self-awareness creates an illusion that somehow the conscious, that small part of a very complicated, interfacing mechanism that is a human being, is 'in control', is holding the metaphysical rudder of the being and makes free choices, unaffected by each and every fiber of its mechanism. Pathology. This comic is yet another examination of this pathology in action. For what is more broken than the machine that has been given the ability to say 'I am broken'?

-Helm
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Magic

I made Johnny attempt this with computer fonts but it didn't work so I went ahead and did the English lettering by hand. Two years after this was made, I am not glad to revisit it, which I suppose was the initial reason I tried to get Johnny to do it.

I don't have anything to say about this, besides perhaps to restate my amazement that such a page could somehow find its way into the 'funny comics' part of a major Greek newspaper. At the time I suppose I had half a mind to quitting and I guess this was my way of pushing it? This is perhaps an important page to note for when we reach the end of the material and you see on what page I was finally let go. An interesting contrast for sure.

In private conversation all through my time with the paper a recurring topic of discussion with Mike was "who reads us anyway, and do they understand us?". I am fascinated perhaps, by what an impression such a page would made in a thoroughly 'untrained' audience, but it's more probable that they looked at it once and skipped it because it didn't immediately make some sort of sense.

This was by far the fastest comic page I have ever drawn for this job (something like 4 hours all things considered) and also by far the hardest.

-Helm
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Royal Ballet School

Most of the people reading this blog lead comfortable lives, I certainly do. Just by having a private computer and an internet connection, a certain economic stability seems presupposed. Urban city life is an easy, streamlined one. But it is also dehumanizing. You can do most of the things you need without leaving your home. A relatively painless dayjob can be secured and one can find themselves supporting their existence indefinitely. The job might wound their pride and they might not be fulfilling any other essential instinct but that of survival, but it seems safe, and safe is difficult to stray away from, although it doesn't feel great, it feels, okay... It seems that early life is channeled and controlled and goals appear to be set without your consent (those of academic accomplishment and whatnot) and once all this runs its course you are left there in the middle of your young life, around 20, 25 without any definite goals set by others and you have to decide what you are willing to risk for a more essential life. There is no more 'leveling up' to do on the course set by some elder constant rule-set, you have to change genres, it's no longer an RPG, it is an adventure.

Self-actualization in the midst of ease of sustenance is elusive. We want a lot of things but our willpower isn't enough to go after them. A lot of the time we are left with unrequited dreams lingering in the back of our heads for many years. There is a specific point in life when if you haven't gone after a particular dream, it appears almost farcical that you ever had it, taunting you with its impossibility. Inching towards that point, we feel a peculiar combination of shame and pride in still indulging ourselves in its fantasy. There is no deeper concept or anything more fanciful to this comic than an illustration of this.

Oh, also, last panel: that is my room. Also, a few panels above, that is my kitchen (and cat). You have metaphysically visited my house now. You were good guests.

-Helm
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Tooth Son of Regional Dimensions

I like and dislike this one at the same time. Naturally when I saw this in print without a single word from my publisher it really cemented my belief that truly anything went in terms of content. I half-expected to be fired for this one! This is chronologically then the first page I did for them without a single joke. Plus the comic offers no real resolution (well no overt solution to be more exact) and on top of everything else this is one of the first public comics I did mostly in "Helmspeak". What I mean by that: it is my belief that human beings go through life cultivating their personal story at ingress. We like stories so much because we view our own selves as stories. We write our own stories using very personal symbols and terms, lingual or otherwise. Recurrence is the only thing that signifies what is just backdrop and what is symbol. Our story longs to be communicated, but it cannot be easily conveyed due to being written in an idiolect so personal as a fingerprint. There is a tenderness to the process of unraveling the symbols, a reader that just reads such a story as a series of cliches will never hope to approach the personal language of the creator. For them a door is just a door and a dog is just a dog at all times. They serve to continue the plot, plot plot endless plot. The real story is in the cracks around the plot.

There are a few ways to get the reader to read your story and not just a story in what you make. To just harsh infodump that idiolect and hope the reader, after the initial shock, makes the effort to sort it (Ulysses by J. Joyce comes to mind) is perhaps one way to achieve this, but it would take the talent of a Joyce. Another, which I started to incorporate into my more 'serious' comics at around that time, is to infuse an otherwise linear and communicative story with bits of idiolect and then just repeat them in later stories while always meaning the same things by them and hope that the reader will start to pick up on what you're trying to do. In the case they did, there is a second reading in some of my comics. In case they would not, I hoped the narrower view of the comic still held up.

In a way then, this comic along with a few others to follow are the dictionary of terms of Helmspeak. What is the difference between what I am doing here and the sickly regular practice of dropping pop-culture references everywhere that a lot of comic writers indulge in? The difference is that these references are not meant to ignite that spark of recognition in the reader that construes familiarity for intimacy. I find that shortcut crass and for the most part unethical, from an artistic standpoint. It's much the reverse: the initially incomprehensible symbols serve to ignite a slow-fuse connection between artist and reader. In time, through consistent repetition perhaps a more significant connection is created there, puzzle pieces fall into place.

This process - at least to my capability - seemed half-faulty and I do my self-criticism in the very last page I were to publish for the paper. A lot of 'personal' symbols were instead read as pop culture references (lyrics of songs, Lovecraft contraptions, poetry). It was very strange for me as a creator to have inadvertently sparked the "ah! I know this!" reaction in readers while trying to do the exact opposite. It might seem you know this, but you really don't! Look at it in a new context, I tried to say. It is therefore meaningless to underline the references in this comic now and explain their deeper significance because all things considered, I still have a belief in this process and it is a subconscious one that cannot be examined through questioning the readers overtly. If by the end of the run of this website you feel you closer to a complete stranger that has made these comics, then it must have worked on some level.

Metaconceptual concerns aside, I have to say I am uncomfortable about the subject matter of this comic nowadays. On one hand it comes from a real place emotionally, on the other I simply have no first-hand experience with homelessness and I never will, probably. Is my vicarious approximation of how such a life might be in good taste, or even needed? I lean towards probably not. I did not write many comics after these which required a large leap of faith in terms of experience from my own life inside the lives of others. The "shell" of this comic, from prime emotional material to the formalist shape of panels and rendering is far better than the actual story I decided to dress it with, I feel.

A note about the next update: I intend to post a series of photos and explanations about how these comics were done, from conception to rough penciling, to finished art and whatnot. Would such a thing be of interest to the reader or should I just carry on and post the next comic instead? Please leave comments to steer me in the right direction. And if you do, I'd also enjoy some critique on the form of this blog. Do you enjoy the explanation text after the comic? Should I be posting just the comics and let them speak for themselves? Am I being needlessly obtuse with the text? Whereas critique on the comics themselves is less useful nowadays (as they are 3 years old or so) critique on how I am handling my material in the blog is very much timely.

Thank you in advance for reading and commenting.

-Helm
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