ZX Page 3: Evolutionary Determinism

As per usual, read past pages leading up to the new for momentum.

As I post page 3, I have drawn up to page 8. It goes well. I will make a post about the process that I'm keeping to while I make my first seriously long-running comic, but it'll be some time from now.

Strangely I don't feel I have as much to say about these pages right now as I used to about my older pages, mainly because there hasn't passed enough time since the moment of creation and of presentation. These are hot out of the oven as it were, and I'm as excited as I am optimistic. Nervous too.

What is and what seems to be, disambiguation (perhaps) as the Mondays pass us by.

Helm
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Moon Tarot (A Wayward Process Post!)

Alright. And now for something a little different. I have uploaded a video capture of my working on the above image:

You may download it directly (~50 megabytes) by clicking.
If the video doesn't play, it may be you're lacking the codec I used.
It is the Techsmith SC codec, which you may get from here.
It is tiny, just a simple exe installation and then run the video again, it'll work.

If that all sounds like too much hassle, you may instead watch the video on Vimeo, here.
But at the expense of definition, size and quality. Such is life.

It took about 2 hours to draw the image, it has been condensed at 10 minutes by being sped up. The music is the track First Narrows by Loscil, from the same-titled album. The program I'm using is Manga Studio EX 4.0 which I'm truly sorry Techsmith, I stole from you. If I ever become well-off I swear I'll buy it for real.

I like time-lapse videos of people drawing because it pleasantly removes the period the artist employs between thinking of a concept and actually rendering it on the paper. It also removes minor backtracking errors or undos (you can catch a big undo where I use the spraycan on the big rock and the remember "oh wait, it'll be a tattoo, you can't use this sort of grain!") so the end result is wonderfully automatic. In the future with our chemically augmentated reflexes and brain power, this will be how we will draw. We shall think it and behold, there it shall be.

So, about the piece. My friend Blazej Dzikowski has decided to get a second tattoo. I usually don't accept offers to do tattoo drawings. It is, as I'm certain readers who also draw will testify, something of a regular occurrence to be asked by people that barely know you to draw them something inane like a big Sepiroth from Final Fantasy rocking out on the electric guitar to get tattoed on their lower back. Shallow judgments aside (for all I know Sepiroth might mean a lot to them! Also, their lower back!) I am primarily not keen on the implied responsibility involved into making something another person will carry on their skin for a long time. However I do not have a lot of friends like Blazej so I asked about the details of the piece.

It's that Moon Tarot card. Here's some reference we dug up: 1, 2, 3. The prevalent themes are of course the naturalistic environment, the high tide water (along with the variable crustacean), the two towers (signifying distant judging civilization or perhaps bygone subservience?) and the dog and wolf, the one housebroken and trained, the other fundamentally wild, giving into their instinctual urges. When Blazej explained to me what the image means to him I told him I'd try to do a rendition, because most of all I felt I could understand the point of it (or to be exact I could understand his understanding of it and how it differed from my own complentary one). The one on top of the post is the initial version. His concerns over readability and relative sizes of the forms led me to alter the image in the following way:

As this would wrap around his arm. I think the distant dual towers also probably capture the underlying meaning of the card better than the fancier pillars of the first version. He seems happy with this image and I'm happy that he's happy, it's a fitting gift for him, just now a father. Responsibility coupled remembrance of internal desire, yes.

Best to you, Dominika and the child.

-Helm

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This House (Part 4: Infinite Ingress)

Page 4 out of 4.

No catharsis.

Let us now employ the Holistotron. Steel yourselves, humans.



Ids and superegos and fragile here and nows mediating between wound and aspiration. When are you outside, when are you inside? When is when, where is where? Humans with limited scope, short-sighted and myopic, probably for the best. The psychoarchitecture we surround ourselves with remembers everything but never tells anything but lies. Common houses we use and abuse and we expect them to extend the courtesy of privacy but there is nothing a human makes that doesn't become a human too. A growing resentment for what a city in its bare essence is, it shows in everything we do in these large grey buildings. We are not meant to stack, there is a hybris there, we are meant to stay to ground lest some think they are above some others. The existential 'penthouse suite' never amounted to anything more than to a scope of further, richer, cubically expounded despair.

And from broken, armless crosses, locusts.

-Helm

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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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Memorybot Part 4: THE REVENGE

Here's the last page.

I'm proud of the visual communication here of the mindwipe, it's not exactly the easiest thing to convey without a stupid-ass panel reading "and this is how the robot got the relevant part of his brain erased". This isn't the golden age anymore, thankfully, we can trust the viewer to understand the action just by showing it, right? Right?

I guess it would have been easier if the screen read something silly like 'R U SURE U WATN FULL MEMORY WIPE Y / N ?' but nerds will be nerds and I had my nerd friend Ghormak write me some c64-like BASIC code that would theoretically clear some memory. Well... all the memory, really. Let's pretend ZX is running on 20 internal c64 chips in parallel and has different memories stored on different ones. Also the irony of a robot named ZX64 running on c64 processors. I will have none of it on the ongoing vendetta between Spectrum and Commodore users, both machines have their strengths. It's just a shame the c64 has many, many more of them. That's the final word on this, now, you hear?

I think this page works and I wouldn't really change much about it. This is also a byproduct of this art being closer to today than some of the other stuff I've posted so it's not that I've changed radically as an artist since.

Here's some more Ptoing slave comments on the coloring:

Page four was frustrating as I accidentally saved the resized .jpg into the photoshop file when I was almost done, and that would have been of course totally useless for print, so I had to start over. Still I am happy with the outcome especially the psychedelic colours in the middle panel as well as the three last ones, which in a way echo the colours of page three.

The only rationalization going on here is how I colored the last panel as well as the background in the last three panels, which I did in a way to guide the eyes as well as focus on where important stuff was. If you look at how ZX is shaded in the last panel and think a bit about it, it makes no sense whatsoever as far as realism goes, but at this point Helm has indoctrinated me with his "Screw Realism" credo, that my compulsions never stood a chance.

On a side note, the text of the pseudo code in the first panel is made with the C64 charset. I actually fired up WINVice (a C64 emulator) and typed the stuff in there and then printscreened it and adjusted it for the comic as needed. So many interesting facts, no?

Very notable is that Helm did not do any adjustments to the last two pages, he saw them and was happy. (The last 3 panels are a very good example of his inconsistencies. Note the eye positions of ZX)

In closing I have to say I really enjoyed colouring this comic and I am looking forward to colour more of Helm's comics in the future. Tho one thing I learned is that I never want to colour comics professionally unless I really have to.
Thank you for bearing with me and my ramblings. You are released now.

Hehe, c64 charset... nerds will be nerds.

An interesting point to note is that the comic has some internal symmetry. Page 1 ends with a 'hello' and an embrace, page 4 ends with a 'hello' and a handshake :(

Oh about handshakes, I guess I should say that whereas most people think them old-fashioned I am a firm believer in a firm handshake upon meeting someone. ZX takes from his artist in this amongst other superficial character traits (like being AWESOME ALL THE TIME).

Page 2 is all words words words and panels panels panels and page 3 is all about silence and few panels, that's a contrast bookended by symmetrical pages more or less (for instance page 1 and 4 all end on three vertical panels of close action, so on). I like playing up the forms of comics, I hope I don't constrict the actual happenings inside them with my such concerns.

Closing thoughts on the comic's abstract: "Man, imagine how harsh digital, perfect memory would be if you were a heartachey robot" was the initial thought that came to me while I was taking a shower/touching myself. I stepped out and kept a single doodle note of ZX running a big cartoon magnet all over his forehead and saying "fuck you, bitch" and the idea stewed from there to something a bit more human, heh.

Whereas I don't think it mirrors anything real very completely, what with none of us being robots, it does have something to it if you ever have been in love and you acutely remember parts of that relationship. For a long time you think you'll never forget, that there won't pass a single day that you won't think about that person and nothing anybody else tells you makes you change your mind. Eventually you forget, but this comic is about tough choices and the very blurry line between bravery and cowardice in interpersonal relationships. There is also the sad suggestion of the deterministic repeat, of something having happened just to happen again and again, ourselves looking at ourselves making the very same mistakes, kicking and screaming and crying but still saying 'yes' at the right times and 'no' hardly if ever. I mean, who knows what happens after the last panel, here? Perhaps she never explains what just happened, perhaps she pretends she was 'fixing him' and they meet all over again all the time she's secretly hoping, yearning that things won't play out as they did last time. For all we know... this has happened many times before. Always the same pseudocode, always the same last words

I love you so much.



-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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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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Europe After the Rain

I am really fond of this one. I think it works on a lot of levels. I don't look at it and think I could have done it better, even 2 years later. I guess in some ways the whole run up to now was worth it even if it was training for this sort of comic. Now what's left is for people to leave me comments about how this is much worse than say, the rice pudding comic and throw me into existentialist despair.

This comic came out without much in the way of birth pains. I remember I made this in Wales while on vacation and I was at the time quite depressed. The situation was however tolerable because a lot of dear friends were about. In fact one of them, Petter, was the one that penciled a panel of this comic (I'll let you guess which) and I received much feedback while making it by quite a few more friends (as we are given to travel in big, multicultural packs). On one hand it was a weird experience for me to have to explain what the comic I am making is about while making it over and over (since most of the comics you see here were made in a state of flux. I didn't 'run them' by anyone, really) on the other hand it helped me appreciate the feedback loop and how it fuels creativity. Look at it now I feel a certainty of intent in this one, which is good.

I am happy with the second panel. The expressions work well I think, and the parallel hatching was a good idea to shade faces. A lot of the time in the past I used to crosshatch a lot and make sleek, almost oily, Neal Adamsesque shading on flesh. It turns out I grew gradually sick of that sort of oily, perfect muscle, I found how it is fitting only for superheroes and supermodels, both equally dehumanizing subtextual guises. I should have looked at masters such as Moebius sooner and seen how the geometry of the body is so subtly accentuated by parallel hatching, relative to the lightsource or - if a wearisome effect is desired - at a 90 degree angle to it.

On the fifth panel, the board on the burning barrel reads in misspelled Greek "here was work # 21".

For you, the lovers of comic theory: Look at the last panel, how it is borderless, how its darkness spreads on the margins of the frames above. How it foreshadows an end and how in lacking borders your brain interprets it as stretching to forever, how it just feels longer than the other panels. Pay attention to how, as western readers, you approach the panel from your left, and as you're coming to terms with the starkness of this field, as you are trying to look upon the whole of this city, the whole of the mausoleum, your eyes fall upon the last ladder, inviting you to exercise your own singular freedom.

The issue of determinism is one a lot of the future comics of this blog will touch upon not only because poor Helm was sad when he was making these comics, but also because I survived them, my sadness, and my life. The fundamental issue of Freewill cannot be examined by my comics in a way that is novel since I never had that sort of brilliance, but perhaps they will serve to shock with intimacy - as comics are want to do - the reader into appreciating the question of it fully. At first it seems as such a non-issue, but its ramifications run deep in how we define (and counter-define) ourselves as citizens, consumers and humans. It is one of the few philosophical issues that still excite me and which I find vital to communicate and I do believe this, amongst a few comics to come attempts a useful commentary on it.

The next update will probably be another PROCESS post, where I will explain how I work completely digitally as of late, what with this expensive Cintiq my father bought for me. I hope that finds my readership in agreement. Speaking of you guys, I want to thank you for both reading my work and most importantly for your comments below the entries. As I was discussing with HS in private a few days ago, some of the comment threads give us hope because they are in our common view, the ideal comments: undeterred by the deeply ingrained cynicism of the internet as a communicational medium, human and candid. They make the blog worth existing. I don't mean this as some sort of fluff complement, they really do, this whole exercise is one of essential communication, not about showing off. I am trying to validate the existence of old work, which I never felt arrived at its destination. By posting your thoughts and engaging in dialog with me and between yourselves you are helping me believe in the merit of my own work. I sincerely thank you.

- Helm
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