A 24hour comic! (Page 5)

Page 5 of 5.

Oh my, the yellow page. Everything happened (down to the Super Mario stand-in taxi driver) like in the comic. The actual drawing here is a bit rushed in places but I... was in a rush. To feed, to clean up and finally to sleep were incandescent bright priorities at this point, not a silly comic. You're not supposed to make a full story in a single day now I know.

I'm not aware if it's customary in heathen lands for taxi drivers, especially when they pick up people from commute stations, to try to fit in as many people as possible and then entertain their brains by trying to figure out the optimal route that hits all the drop points, but in Greece it's something of a high art. Although of course, completely illegal. I have sheldom taken taxis when I travel abroad because as I've found, they're too expensive. Your savage, heathen lands happen to have developed and trustworthy public transportation systems in place that suit the populance and therefore you don't resort to taxis a lot. In the highly magnificent pillar of civilization that is Greece, if after the train ride (which is dependable but smelly) I wait for the bus to take me home, I might be waiting anything from 30 minutes to three times that. Completely up to the drivers whim. I dislike that position so I customarily spend the 5 euros for the cab ride from Kyfisia to Drosia (which is "wherever the hell home is").

And yeah, the dude in the front got of literally 100 meters later from where he got in. I guess the slight rain and his expensive suit wouldn't mix. This should have been an observation panel in itself really, but, much like a panel needed between 'I headed home' and the fucking toilet that would establish what 'home' was, I was too tired and cut corners. Perhaps a few more panels of the small-talk that occurred between me and flirty mcsexy eyes over there would be prudent because it was interesting how I assumed the role of THE GREAT OBSERVATOR. I noted everything she said with her friend, her bag, her clothing, how she laughed. I judged and spared with the kindness reserved for heart-struck fools. I wondered how our love would be and her body's contour on my satin sheets high in my castle of solitude soon to be renamed. All in all, I should have made another page. But. 24 hours. Tired. Not a robot - sadly. No, wait, not sadly! I'm happy to be a human being, to have tender fleshy meat-thing emotions that when upset can send me spiralling out of daily control and into patters on slow but assured psychological self-destruction.

:(

I hope you liked the comic and you don't feel too irritated by proxy. It was a turning point of me definitely towards the better, so it's an experience that - besides the occasional milking for comics and party conversation - is actually pretty important to me, in all its mundanity. Honestly, I could have gone on narrating from that point onwards to today (it would take about 3,000 pages of comics, I think) and it would be a consistent call-and-response model. Echoes of the choices I made during that time resonate to everything that happens to me today. I wouldn't make that comic because I don't think that when I die and St. Peter asked me what I did with my life I should answer 'oh I made an existentialist comic starring myself working through adolescence to maturity'. It's just not the right thing to say. The right answer is:

"I did everything I desired.
I became a human being.
I live forever."

So, yes, still working on that.


P.S. My friend Esseb (yes I know, what an informative website!) also attempted this, and it turns out I didn't mess up as much as I thought! Some of the outfits are ridiculous but I needed them to be different from each other!


P.S.2 Tomorrow I will have at least 100 of the 500 books I'm printing. If those run out during the festival (which, here's hoping, will happen) I am sure from the 21st to the 23rd or 24th, I can run back and get more. Excited about the festival, excited about everything. Yet another good day with brilliant and kind sunlight. I hope everything is well in your life too, reader.


-Helm

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A 24hour comic! (Page 4)

Page 4 of 5.

The whites here were put in photoshop after the fact, as while I was drawing this the deadline was looming and I decided to just finish the story and do the highlight work later. It didn't take more than half an hour later on at home with photoshop, but you'd be surprised what strange judgment calls you make on what is worth doing after 20 hours of drawing or so.

If you notice this page is generally more discreetly drawn, it is because I switched mostly from the pentel brush to a regular 0.2 and 0.1 pigment marker. This is my usual style really, the brush is something of a new thing. So when I revert to markers, there's instantly more control. I still used the pentel for the SEAS OF UNCOMFORT and the EMOTIONAL RAIN effect. A half-empty pentel + textured paper = lots of interesting dry brush effects one can try.

I am really fond of the 'longing stare' panel. The little Beholder thought bubbles are a nice visual trick I think that really explain the mentality in question.

Sadly for anyone who might to reassemble the girls in photoshop, I think I kinda confused myself at some point so it might not work out completely. Still the point carries through, I hope.

Kyfisia is just an Athenian suburb, 'high-class'. It is my stepping stone from downtown Athens to home (I live in Drosia, even further out, "with the wolves" as we say). It takes me about 30 minutes to get from Athens to Kyfisia with the train, spanning about 15 stops along the way. I didn't think it would be possible to meet her again given that she'd probably get off at any point between these 15 stops, so this is why the inner conflict quickly turned academic. I should have explained this point a bit more clearly in the comic but I was getting tired and my storytelling was deteriorating. I hope it still makes sense without the extra knowledge of how the Greek train communication system works.

Robert Mitchum is a bit of an inside joke between myself and Thanos in that he encapsulates all there is about being a man. I made this once and it sorta stuck.

On other news, as far as I know book is being printed (will call to be certain tomorrow), I am planning a NEW COMIC (it's basically subverted pornography). I found out Manga Studio 4 EX was out and successfully stole it (I swear if I ever become rich enough I will pay you the 300 dollars, SmithMicro software) and it has a very really really interesting new features I'm going to try in the next few days. I'll wrap up this comic in a couple of days from now and then Vavel festival is going to happen so expect a stopgap post with pictures and reflections on the event (I hope you don't mind). Then it'll be back to posting comics and also perhaps a few comic theory posts about the comic I'm going to make next. Actually, this is something I want to discuss with you... usually I don't really talk about the comic I'm making in detail until it's done. Would you be interested in following and providing feedback to the process of creation before it is finalized? Keep in mind that this is a cost/benefit thing. On one hand the mechanics of the comic are laid bare and you won't be 'surprised' by it when you read it in the end. On the other hand, the mechanics of the comic are laid bare and you will get a good glimpse at how they work. Also you will be implicated quite directly through feedback with making a comic better. How's that sound? Let me know in the comments, along with any questions or observations about the page above.

I am in good spirits today. The weather outside is beautiful too.

-Helm

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A 24hour comic! (Page 3)

Page 3 of 5.

Well the book is being printed so everything is fine on that end. I will have it in my hands on the 21st, it seems. That's fortuitous because the Babel comics festival starts on the 22nd. Kinda excited.

About the comic, this is where the paneling starts to become a bit more sedate because the brain didn't feel up to fancy designs anymore. The band that formulated after the demise of Nick's earlier effort still exists and plays and records today though by design its material is not something to share publicly. That band however is pretty much the 'other half' of my artistry and it takes a similar amount of my time as do the comics. It being very private is a different sort of experiment to what I'm trying to do with my public art. I think a lot of artists have a more private and a more open side even if they don't strictly differentiate the two by different art forms. It's kinda strange when an artist dies and slowly the work which for whichever personal reason they had deemed unfit for publication, slowly leaks out there. Kavafis, a Greek poet comes to mind. Do people feel a degree of shame when they peruse something that wasn't intended for them? I certainly do.

As before, ask questions and you will receive honest answers.

Also, since I guess most readers don't follow all the comments I'll state it clearly here: Due to a recent adverse situation, I would please advise commentators-to-be to not abuse their anonymity. A great way to do this would be to register with blogger to begin with, and make your profile link to something of yours. I really enjoy wondering through the links found thusly and this sort of communication is imperative to what I'm trying to do.

- Helm

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A 24hour comic! (Page 2)

Page 2 of 5.

The printer dude was supposed to call me today to let me know he made a test scrap print of the Asides-Bsides book so I would travel to his office and check it out and give him the okay along with a down-payment, but he never did. I like Greece a lot, but this sort of stuff I really don't understand. You're a professional, and you want my money and you said you'd call and then you didn't. Although you know there's a very very tight deadline (21st of this month). What am I supposed to infer? I'll never understand what causes this sort of negligence. Well, I'll call myself (I mean, I'll call the printer dude myself, not I will call myself on the phone, I set a hard limit to my solipsism right before that) tomorrow and have it sorted out. The book will be printed even if it's the last thing I do (this week).

On the comic, this is the first 'good page' of the five in my opinion, I reigned in the highlights (applied white guache with a little brush directly on the colored paper -- no undos!) and generally started drawing a bit better (also this page is funnier I think!). It was a pain in the ass to clone-brush all that text away in photoshop to re-letter it for you heathens, but at least having reread it now I remember the very pleasant feeling at the table with the other artists working on their own 24hr comics. On my left there was Thanos and on my right there was Panpan. It was really good times. I would do it again given a similar symmetry.

I find the turtleneck + expression hilarious. I hope I'm not the only one.

Let's keep going with you asking me questions instead of me preempting them like usual because I'm still a bit busy with the printing stuff to ramble on for hours.

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A 24hour comic! (Page 1)

Alright alright. Page one of five. I don't have much time I gotta go out to pick up my black cat from the doctor (his masculinity, it has been destroyed!) and then I have to bumrush the printer dude to get my book on its way to being done so we'll talk more about what's going on here later. Here, let's try a different idea! If you want some clarification on anything that's going on in this page, why don't you ask me in the comments and I'll be back later tonight to explain? Yes! Reader participation! Yes!

-Helm

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Protected from Reality

This was made to express a pretty specific thing, and it was for me pretty interesting to see how it sorta went over a lot of people's head. It's exactly because it's not a high concept that I was puzzled about how some didn't seem to get it. As a test, keep in mind right now, after having read it (I hope you read the comics before the texts below them, if not there's something very... special about you) what you understood from it, and then let me know in the comments if it differed from my initial intention.

Which was: I kinda severely dislike people who claim to be 'realists'. In the name of that realism they tear down any attempt others make at embellishing their personal story with something spicier that their narrow version of 'reality'. 'Real' for them means 'empty'. Drama is forbidden, even the smallest pretension is to be ridiculed as harshly as possible, analysis is for fags, ambiguity is not an excuse for interpretation but quite the opposite, it doesn't even exist. Things are clear-cut. You know they type. The one to tell you stuff like "why are you wasting your time?" when you do things that might seem inconsequential but which you love anyway? Well yeah, that's her. There's many reasons why this sort of personality profile comes to exist and it wasn't so much the scope of the comic to investigate them as it was to mutter a passive-agressive "fuck off".

This story hasn't happened to me personally, but I have a lot of experience with that particular type of person so I didn't feel it out of bounds to do the story. As usual, I don't take a very strong stance because being heavy-handed about these things is kinda crass, but nonetheless I do believe the stories we invent about ourselves are true, they interface with truth and our lives become all the richer for it. This is a life-giving process, and don't let anyone tear it down. There isn't one safer way to view reality and regardless of the gravitas with which others will attempt to make you 'come to your senses' and view life through their eyes, they don't know anything you don't. The last action in this comic is a symbolic dissension to the most common and damaging human practice: that of counter-definition. Looking at what others do and doing the same or the exact opposite (it doesn't matter which). Of course there's a lurking pathology to overdoing it with the storytelling but again, that's a different comic for a different time and I'm glad I don't have to tag every entry in this blog with "psychopathology".

Oh, by the way, that's Giakoumis again. I guess that's his latest pop-art relationship that doesn't lead anywhere? In any case, there is some self-injection going on here (as with the other Giakoumis comic) but it's not so much in the main character (whom I didn't even originally create, friend Greek comic artist Dustbin did) but with the backgrounds. That's my room, that is my cat and yes, these are my knives. My privacy, it is shattered.

On the artistic end, I enjoy this comic even today. I like the sharp lines and the mostly clean spaces. There is some distortion in the faces but not nearly as bad as some other stuff I've done (wait for the next one). Before you sit down to draw something representative of reality, you always think you don't have the skill for it and it'll come out looking wonky and unconvincing. It almost always turns out that if you sit and do it instead of worry about it, the end result will be held together by some 'x factor'. It's not that I draw reality well, it's that I trust my artistic intuition in that the end result will not bother the eye and will support the story. Though my ambition doesn't end there, that is the bare minimum a comic artist needs to be able to tell a story with his visual tools. To trust their hands to draw every part okay enough so it doesn't fall apart on the whole.

Every time I sit down to make a new page, I have to convince myself that I can do this all over again.

So, the next post will probably be a Digital Drawing & Inking process one. I have all the art ready, it'll be a huge text to write but eh, I do enjoy doing it. Hopefully you guys and girls will find it informative or in the very least, you'll like the belabored panel I drew for it.

I have a request to make also: if you know someone whom you think would enjoy the comics and texts on this blog, do let them know that it exists. This might seem like it should go without saying, but I know that whenever other artists reminded me of this, I usually thought of one or two people more I could let know of their art. The reason I ask for this is because I think I've pretty much exhausted my methods of getting the word out there for the blog (which were, pretty much, posting in the message boards I frequent about it and tagging my name in MSN. Pitiful, I know). I don't use myspace or facebook (I find them pretty perverse) and whereas I don't have as much of a problem with livejournal, I can't readily make a profile and socialize there for the purpose of plugging my own comic, just seems disingenuous. So, word of mouth seems like all I have going for me now. Let people know if you want and also if you think there's any other way to make the blog reach its audience I might not have thought of, let me know!

-Helm

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Escape from Mortal Coil

I like this one lots. I made it at Mike's house. It also stars a futurist grittier Mike. At the time we were both working for the paper and Mike was gracious enough to let me sleep over from time to time in his apartment in downtown Athens. As I was starting to feel a bit morose for various reasons, it was good to not be left alone for weeks at a time. Plus, it was a creative atmosphere, working along with a friend, critiquing each other and such. I have very fond memories of that time -- thank you Mike! So this comic came out good.

Besides the slight case of cantdrawomenitis, I am very pleased with the characterization of Helen here. There's not really much to say about the formal considerations of the strip. I went with skewed panels to try my hand at how Manga arists structure their pages, and it's cute enough, but not something I'm going to do lots. Perhaps it's worth noting that I did away with any sound-effects for a few reasons. This is a comic where the outer world is about to fall sharply in dissonance with the inner world. Or to put it in better terms fantasy is about to clash with experience.

I believe the death of a loved one is as tragic as it is most of all because an outside world intrudes on the plans and concepts we had laid out in our inner world, and reconciliation - as Slavoj Žižek would say - between fantasy and experience cannot be a head-on collision, the wound is too great. Our modern lives are so comfortable, we're left to our fantasies most of the time, we are not disturbed. When we are, it has to be a sideways glance into the wound, through mythos and art and song, to soften the blow of the disparity. Almost everything else unfortunate in our life's story, we cushion with these devices, we give it meaning and some consequence in the ongoing 'plot'. Death as a far-away concept is very often dressed up with romance and existentialism in art, but the personal death, that of someone very close resists any attempt to be chipped away with our tools, it will not be sculpted into a statue of beauty and quiet acceptance.

Enough about that. I am also very pleased with the sixth panel. That point of view is tricky and it sorta worked without much effort and redrawing so when I look at it I remember feeling good about myself and that I had probably leveled up a little as a draftsman if I can pull off difficult shots like that without much preparation. Of course I was wrong, it was just a fluke. Still can't draw women.

On other news, Scotch devised a little javascript for me, and you can see the fruits of his labour in action here, and there. Ack! My privacy!!

-Helm
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DER PROZESS

Click click click for huge privacy-shattering version!

This is where the magic happens!

I am easily the most ghetto comic artist I've met in Greece. I don't even have a proper drawing table. That's right, I draw hunched over a pad I place on my lap, sitting in that torn chair. It's a hilarious story, I'm sure I'm going to laugh my way to the hospital for back surgery when I'm 45.

Pay no attention to knives, they'll be explained later on. Let's treat this like a mid-90's FMV adventure game and just click on that toolbox hotspot right now.


(if you actually clicked there for real, I applaud your instincts!)




This is all the comic artist needs in my humble opinion. Let's see, we have an antique chess piece cardboard box that belonged to cartoonist dad for Karma boost. Rubber erasers (4). Mechanical plotting pencil and extra bits. Whiteout for erasing bad inking judgment. If you cannot see it, it never happened. Itty bitty nosed Faber Castel pigment markers. These are pretty much my sole tool when I do traditional comic work. Yes, every curvy, variable-width line in all the comics I've posted so far had been faked with a .01 pigment marker. That's just how my brain works. Or worked, as it were, since then I've bought the beauty next to it, a wonderful little Pentel Indian ink brush which serves me well. Also pictured are replacement inks for it since I go quite heavy duty on them. Last but not least, a screwdriver. Men are not men if they do not have tools, and I am a man, hence I have tools.

I will cover the digital end of making comics much later on. I am nowadays pretty much all digital. All of me, I live in cyberspace and I am made out of (50) bright Greek polygons and/or wireframe depending on the processing power of your 8-bit computer.

How I work is this. First I do nothing for a few days and wait for an idea to come. Surely, it does, usually when I am half-asleep or in the shower. The idea can be really simple, usually one line. Let's go with the very first comic, Babis. The idea was 'man is outmoded by creepy pursuers, they go after his uncle inexplicably instead'. Then without touching a paper yet, I try to exhaust in my mind the bits of interest that could be the dressing for this central idea. If I don't have about 4 or 5 of them, the idea then is thrown in the 'perhaps a three panel strip instead' pile and I wait around more for a better idea to come.

Oh wait, let's instead go with spaceman since I happen to have his doodles scanned already.

So when I think the idea is worth it, I brainstorm the jokes and make a little thumbnail of the page and divide it into strips/panels and try to work on the rhythm. This is pretty much how one looks like:


As you can see sometimes the panels don't end up even so some restructuring has to go on. Also pictured are doodles of the head of the protagonist. I was struggling with a coherent style at the beginning of making these as you can see.

Then comes the most important step I've found in making a humorous comic page: I tape this to the wall next to the computer and I just wait a few days. I look at it and the more I look at it the more I realize where the errors in pacing are. People might think I'm lazing around not doing my job in these couple of days but I am, I really am (lazy)!

After the minor corrections I pencil the page on a big A3 board on cheap printer paper (I never found use for glossy, expensive paper. I like seeing the grain in my inking, personally). Again, this gets taped to the wall and stared at for a day. The pencilling takes anything from 4 hours to 8 hours, depends how much work there is to it and how many errors and therefore backtracking, are included.

After a day, and probably rapidly approaching the end of the week's deadline, the inking starts. I don't have any examples of penciled but not inked work from that era for a very simple (ghetto) reason: I don't use a lightbox. I ink right on the pencils, and then I erase the pencils. Madness, heresy! Don't you even love your own work, Helm? I hear the cries. I do, but I'm not obsessive about it. I don't care to leave penciled pages since I never really planned to showcase the stages or sell them or anything. I believe the 'pencil page, then inked on lightbox' is mostly the result of the industry process of American Superhero comics where the two people are different. As an indie creator I don't see the reason to get a boner over my own pencils, so erased they are once inked over. I do have a lot of pencil only pages from when I started inking digitally, but nowadays I do even the pencils on the computer so there's not even much of that left. I will post a few examples later on in the blog's life anyway.

So, the inking. It's pretty much the least interesting creatively and most zen part of the process. I know what textures and effects I want to achieve most of the time so there's not much of me sitting around stumped going on. If I were a professional in America in the mid-80's I guess they'd hire me as an inker most of all, as I believe it to be easy and mechanical a process. It just takes a long time. About 6-8 hours depending on content. Most times I spread the inking out to two 4 hour segments over two days. The reason is simple: after about 4 hours of artistic work I find my brain turns to mush and I no longer am able to make sound artistic calls. As I said in inking not a lot are included, but then you go and try to improv ink a face you had left vague in the penciling stage and... the result really illustrates what I mean with 'brain mush'. Reach for the whiteout. Erase. If you can't see it, it never happened.

So optimally this whole process is done about a day before deadline. I then do the lettering, which I find boring and unrewarding work since most of the time the comment I get is either "why don't you use a computer to do the lettering? Sometimes I can't make out what you're saying" or "why do you use lowercase and not just ALL UPPERCASE LIKE I AM USED TO FROM READING COMICS WHEN I WAS 8 YEARS OLD. I FAIL TO SEE HOW THIS LOOKS LIKE THE CHARACTER IS SHOUTING ALL THE TIME". *sigh* I guess it's also underwhelming for me because I make a lot of spelling errors (even with spellchecker and whatnot) and it's very amateurish to see these go to print. Blame my editor for not uh, bothering to read my pages! Anyway, all spelling errors to these have been fixed for the greek paperback edition.

I then scan and digitally fix whatever I messed up in the inking stage. This is usually relatively painless and amped by the nearing-competition excitement. I then at last turn the page from grayscale to an one-bit bitmap. I do this by running Levels on the page and settling the left sensor to 136 and the right one to 138. Nice and clean, no grays left. I preview the page with auto-AntiAlias by photoshop at 33% zoom and if it all seems okay, I send it to the e-mail address of the editor. No need for personal contact, I don't even have to leave my home. Paper comes out, nobody reads my comics, repeat from the top!

So that's it! Do comment and tell me if you'd like to see more behind the scenes stuff on the blog later on (like how it is to draw completely digital on Cintiq and how it is to use a black cat under the table as a heater for my legs (pictured in the first one, if you pay close attention)!

-Helm


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