A Precise Sequence of Events

This one was pretty late in my employment for the paper and I felt I had gotten the hang of this sequential storytelling thing enough to try to redraw one of my earliest comics. Sadly the first version I don't think I have anymore but it was largely unspectacular in comparison to this. This comic was heavily scripted when it was first made, a couple of years earlier than in this final version. I even know exactly what the record playing was supposed to be (Variations for Strings, Winds and Keyboards by Steve Reich) where this is taking place (Marousi, suburbs of Athens), that this is an African mask in panel 4, it is mid-day and the protagonist had for his solitary dinner meatballs. I think this sort of over-orchestrated background detail is the product of first-time performance anxiety. I had read somewhere how much reference material Alan Moore used to prepare for his pencilers and to what excruciating level of detail he would explain each panel to them that I somehow got it in my head that if I wanted to do comics, I had to do the same. Carelessly overlooking that I was in fact, both the writer and the artist for this strip and I didn't have to convey my intuition to anyone else.

Nowadays unless there's very specific reason to do otherwise, I really don't 'model' as extensively, at least for a single page's worth of material and I honestly don't think there's any loss of information or communication for it. I guess I learned an important lesson in balancing through making all these single pager comics. I wonder how it'll hold up if I ever do an oh, 150 page story (which would take me 5 years or something the way I work).

This is a very formalist comic, very self-aware of how it works. Probably the most of all my comics, actually. That is both to the benefit of having remade it once after making it first and because it was riding at the top of my active period as a working artist for the paper, so my eye was sharp so to say. Here's some things of interest for you lovers of comic art theory:

1. Panel 1: Note the isometric view used, conveying a mood of orderliness and cleanness. Perspective - especially harsh - is for emotional situations. When all in order, treat it like a little sim-hospital-city-whatever game. Everything taking as little space as it can, ideally represented. The fat lines with only parallel shading and not much 'ink dirt' further connote this but without going for an 'abstract reality' infomercial super-squeaky-clean look.

2. Panel 2, 3 : Cutting from establishing shot straight to abstract details of the house. However note that the details are not picked out of thin air. The glass features on the table in panel 1 and the record player is in secondary focus on panel 4. You can almost feel the pace of the camera as it focuses and de-focuses on details. By panel 5 you have an inner feeling of the place. Also note the establishing of vertical paneling without a clear distinction if you're supposed to read from bottom to top or top to bottom as it works either way.

3. Panels 5,6,7,8 : Parallel action. Even, tempered motion. Imagine the Steve Reich playing in the background. A private little choreography, everything in its place. Note the lack of printed sound-effect. Did you miss it, as the reader?

4. Panel 9: Repeat view. Same mindset. Everything is tranquil, sedate even.

5. Panel 10: Finally a 'classic' establishing shot. But you felt you knew the place from before by now, didn't you? This is almost now, a 'second visit', you are comfortable here now, this is a home away from home. Neat apartment and all.

6. Panels 11, 12, 13: Again read in either order, the man is about to open but fixes his top button on his shirt before opening, to be all perfect looking. Door opens, note absurdly small gap betwseen panel 13 and the first action panel, 14, to connote the briefness of time that passed from one to another. Nearly instantaneous.


7. Whole of the middle strip: Violence that escalates, fragmented inking style perspective shot to fit a murder, but juxtaposed to neat panel cuts, as if the mentality of the person experiencing this is still calm. Reprise of detail panels from strip 1, glass falls, record screeches to a halt, everything is ruined, or is it?

8. Panel 24 : Orgasmic elation. Note the lack of shading in this panel. First piece of actual sound is not a word, but a visceral sound. The first suggestion that something sexual occurred is here.

9. Panel 27: Humanist rendering for the inquiry as to the other persons' state of mind. This could be read as the equivalent of 'was it good for you too?'. There is shame here, there are mixed emotions, and mixed emotions need more rendering. Think of the moment before sexual climax, how single minded you are, how the only thing that matters is what is going on. And then think exactly after the climax how the atavistic emotion drains away and leaves you thinking a million of small different things that mix into a multifaceted emotion that can go every which way. Protagonist replies off-panel as this panel isn't about him at all in the end.


10. Panel 28: Freud would be proud of me.

11. Last panel: Well I don't have to explain this, do I.


Anyway, there's a lot that could be said about what I am trying to achieve with this comic. I'll try to be brief because this is long to begin with. Think of how many things the modern human animal does in place of having sex, think of sports, or academia, or even argumentative discussion and how strongly it is tied with the need of insemination and/or dominance. The comment is on comfortable lives bubbling with a sickly undercurrent of primal atavism, the desires that the animal has cultivated for millenia and that the human in all his arrogance thinks that in 4,000 years of civilization he has now erased. Proven by war and atrocity time and time again false, humbled by his own secret desires, ridden in neuroses and constantly at odds with himself. The machine that looks inside its own gears and can from this only gather 'I am lost'. Think of the silly games we play to rationalize our desires and how we codify this playacting as if to appear intellectual when truly base. I will beat you up to fuck you, and this makes us special, but if I were to fuck you to fuck you, this makes us animals.

That movie (also book) 'Fight Club', much adored by idiots who misunderstood it and much maligned by haughty intellectuals that misunderstood it equally, touches upon similar themes. Note the orderly furniture and perfect, serene angles presenting them everywhere in my comic.

A final structuralist note: a comic is not an animation, or a movie, or a poem or a book, or most importantly a painting. But it borrows from all these things to create if I may be allowed a smarter form than any of the others mentioned, or to be clearer a form that allows for smart things far more invitingly than film with its linear time-frame burdens or a book with its inability to convey spatial dimension or with a painting that can only hint at a sequence of events. However from paintings I try to borrow a wonderful effect from the cubist school, where essentially they theorized that one cubist painting of something attempts to show an ideal space form of the subject, to show it 'from every angle at once' so to speak. I try to do the same with a sequence of events when I make pages like these. You can stand a bit back, stop looking at each panel in particular and look at the page on the whole and it's a kaleidoscope of the then, the now, and the after. If I learned anything at all from having to do single page comics for that period of time it was exactly this. People that have 300 pages to tell a story that could be said in 10 pages are misunderstanding the medium, I posit. Then again if you draw 300 pages everybody thinks you're cool and if you draw 10 you just appear lazy, right? An artists' job is the same as of a lumberjack's.

- Helm

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DER PROZESS TEIL ZWEI

Hello. I'm going to track the thought-process behind the drawing of a panel for a yet-inexistent comic. This panel:

(click on all images in this post for proper sized versions)

I am working completely digitally here. My brain is digital too. I am made of nothing but cables and microchips.



The very first thing that has to be considered when one sits to pencil a page of comics is what it's going to be about. As this isn't a page and is in fact, a wordless panel, I need to let you know what I am going for emotionally and in terms of storytelling beforehand so you can tell if I succeed or fail. I stress that though the rest of this comic is only in my head right now, I drew this thinking as if it existed and I know what page goes before it and what comes after it. I stress this because drawing pretty pictures is meaningless in a comic if they don't emote something, and they don't do it in sequence. Leave the single-image-life's-work-masterpiece stuff to the painters, guys. Of course I may say that because I have a short attention span and could never put 40 hours in a single image like they do.

Anyway. Here the story is that this scoundrel swordsman in this pulp fantasy harbor city has it conveyed to him that a dancer in an ill-reputed inn has lost 'a valuable piece of property' of vague definition and is will reward the man that recovers it. So he sets off to meet his to-be-employer and inquire as to what exactly this property is and more importantly, how much to get it back. This is the panel when the swordsman barges in on the dancer's private quarters, startling her somewhat. I want the human figure to convey both a small shock, some apprehension and the dawning realization that this is a man here for the job and not for some other purpose. I also want the woman to be a somewhat tired person, for other reasons.

So I fire up the Cintiq and put down 'blue pencils' in Manga Studio Ex 3 layer. I use a 1200 dpi a4 page format as a default. The way I work is like so: I make the main desktop screen have a full view of the piece I'm working on and zoom in with the Cintiq to work on detail. This way I can always check if what I'm doing works on the macro level without ever having to zoom out too much from the micro level. It's a relatively fast and precise method. Manga Studio has page-rotation and other handy things that make the Cintiq a joy to use, especially if one maps useful shortcuts to the sidepanel keystrokes. I usually only map 'UNDO' to one of them, but I'd map a whole lot more if Manga Studio and Cintiq didn't sometimes mess each other up and totally forget their respective settings. Just having to bind 'UNDO' a lot to the same key has wore me out, as far as extensive Cintiq customization goes.

That strong hori line is the line of sight of the barging swordsman with whom I want the viewer to relate for this event. Naturally there'd be a panel before this with his hand on the door or whatnot so the narration works, but imagine this for now. We can see from this that the swordsman (and the viewer) is standing upright entering into the room where this woman is sitting down. This creates an immediate effect of dominance over her which is useful if you want to set an emotional mood for an encounter.

I used to be pretty mad about drawing accessories in 'establishing shots' like this one in the past. I guess it was mostly an overcompensation for my skills as an artist. I'd put everything in that shot, but I now think just a few items of importance make a more balanced view and they do not clutter the flow of reading as much. The box with the candle on it plays a part in the story so it's useful and it's excusable that it's rendered as much as it is. The bit of table we see is good because it tells us the person in the room was recently eating, and therefore on private time. The hint of a mirror and bed in the background just flesh out a living space a bit more. Believe me, I could have made this to be much, much more busy if I wanted to show off, but showing off is for illustrators that only have ONE panel to tell a story. For example I'd texture the carpet with something like this which is just... not something a sane human being would attempt.

If you're wondering why the heavy rendering on the female form for such a preliminary sketch, it's because I suffer from this condition called can'tdrawomenitis and it pays to be more careful than with anything else in the scene. I didn't use reference for the pose and though this will hurt the quality of the physiology in the final piece, there is a return for it: a bit more individual style, a bit more 'wrong' that I am comfortable letting in there. If one uses photo reference too much all his drawings will tend to look like fashion models in 'perfect' poses. I heavily dislike 'perfect' poses because they're calculated and held for the photographer. But here I want an 'in-between' not a 'key-frame' (in animation terms) because simply the woman was interrupted. She's trying to put on her 'seductive allure' face but not quite there yet.

Here I've blocked out the lights much more and finalized the crop and the topology in the scene. Usually for an establishing shot one should use proper vanishing points and whatnot but this is such a 'close' shot that I feel I can fake it without too much SCIENCE. I don't want the place to look too sterile anyway. I've dressed (sadly) the girl, though barely so (happily) and worked on some preliminary texturing to know what I want to achieve with the final inks.

Now the exact way I go about texturing a part of an image usually is more impressionistic than anything else. Meaning I don't always try to texture a rug with a naturalistic ruggy texture or flesh with flesh-friendly crosshatching and whatever. I go for an emotional effect first. However here, because this is a process post and a process picture I tried to stand mid-way between impressionism and application. I'll discuss this more in the next few paragraphs.


Here for example I am mid-ink. Check out how much I've deviated from the underlayer in the construction of the girls' face. I don't usually do this, but it's me, drawing a woman. My disease, I hope you don't think worse of me.

You can see here why the time-honored practice of tinting the pencil layer blue is useful for inking. The blue shows below, but the ink registers to the eye clearly on top. Though a remnant of the 'the penciler pencils, the inker inks, the colorist colors' production chain American Mainstream comics method era, I am quite partial to it because it allows me to focus on what I want to do on every step. I mean, when I pencil - to paraphrase Dave Sim - I am a penciler. When I ink an inker and when I letter a letterer. I do not want to be thinking about pencil art judgment calls when I am inking, nor do I want to think of what I am going to change on the inks when I put the lettering down. Whereas overspecialization is for ants, thinking like a specialized craftsman when you do something as specific as inking helps.

You'll notice I'm shading the flesh with horizontal strokes. This is an emotional effect. I've found that parallel lines for shading people makes them appear mid-move. Also if the lines are close-knit (as are these) and especially if placed on the face, they give the character a sort of tired look. Vertical lines are the best for this effect, but I preferred horizontal lines here because they unbalance her more and they accentuate the light-source.

Also, for kicks, check out a surreal Platoist zen space midway version.

So let's look at the final piece for a minute:


Click here for computer shattering big version.

As you can see I try to create a pure binary bitmap copy for printing (binary bitmap means in computer lingo just black and white, 1, 0 per pixel, no shades of gray in between) which at this day and age isn't very needed because even the cheapest digital black and white prints you can get are grayscale. However I do this because a) it pleases me and b) when you have to print comic tone, it really still matters if you want to avoid moire patterns. I didn't use any comic tone here, though. I used ink pens and the airbrush for the noise patterns where applicable. I try to take special care to 'bridge' between the airbrush and the inkwork because I don't want my art to look like two different things pasted on top of each other. You tell me if it works or not.

As you can see I skewed the rotation on the goblet-holding arm to signify a bit more shock. I wanted to also put some tendon tension on the neck (as the body does this when you're surprised) but the lighting conditions didn't react favorably to it so I took it out.

So how different it is working digitally to real life penciling and inking? Once you get the hang of it, not very. The biggest - and sincerely most important difference - is that you have a very easy way to apply WHITE on BLACK, not just the usual reverse. This makes you work looser without fearing you'll place a line that will just destroy the piece (the benefits of undoing on computers taken into account) which is for all intents, a good thing. Secondarily, if you work at a large enough resolution (like m e and my crazy 1200 dpi) this also means you can zoom in at a crazy degree and do one-pixel detail work that is pretty impossible to do in real life, unless you work at a huge canvas and/or have the steady hands of surgeon. Speaking of this, you should know that most comic artists work in canvases two or three times bigger than the printed result. An a4 printed page's original is a3 at least most of the time. There's two reasons for this: one is that this way when you shrink down for printing, details become minute and errors cannot be seen anymore. Most artists like this effect (I like it too). The other is more psychological: the original for an artist must be BIG so you can hang it on a wall or sell it and it must look like a real piece of art. I don't get this psychological effect and I don't really think my originals are amazing pieces of art worth a million or anything. I have them all stacked on one shelf in my bookcase. When I am in lack of time for a project, I have been known to work at print res (meaning, an a4 page will be printed as a4) and I don't think my work loses anything for it.

But this is a problem in digital art for me, because I can zoom so much I never know when to stop detailing. This picture for example, is a bit overdone perhaps. A good thing to do is to decide internally before you start working at a picture at what the smallest pen size you're going to use will be. This is made with pens all the way down to 0.5 which is overkill for any print version for a 1200dpi image, heh. A good place to stop is 1.0 or even 2.0 if you're not doing an establishing shot panel. Remember: from one point and onwards, not even the sharpest eye can see the detail work you did nor will they even care to try.

So a few words about comic tone, which I use a lot sometimes, and not at all at others, heh. Manga Studio is great for it, it's one of the biggest selling points, I guess. As this piece doesn't have any applied I'll show you how I handle it over a drawing eric did:



And here's the tones I put on it:



Again this is quite overkill but I was trying to help eric with options for toning. Again though this might seem like a regular grayscale pic at 72dpi that internet images display, it is made out of pure binary bitmap black and white at the original res and will print perfectly without any gray tones and/or moire patterns.

A lot of people prefer flat tone that says 'comic book'. I really like rubbing out white from a flat tone to shape volume better, it's the funnest thing for me and I'd do it professionally for other people's tone if they hired me, heh. Though it's usually a big no-no to put one comic tone over another, I really couldn't care less. Pile it on, I say!

So that's that as far as 'how does Helm draw with his Cintiq' goes. Would you like to see more Process posts? I could do one about a full page, with all the formal considerations that go in making a sequence of events flow, now that I've sorta covered the actual craftsmanship of drawing. Your voice will be my guide.

-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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Love Is More Than A Three Letter Word

What you see here can summarily be described as a guilt trip comic. After last weeks existentialist one I felt kinda bad for deviating so abruptly from the program so I made this one. It's one of the very last attempts I were to make at keeping it proper and probably for the better for the well was running well dry.

Not to say that I hate this, I think it's a pretty good comic and it touches on things that most introvert internet denizens can empathize with. I wouldn't exactly call it a comic based on personal experience (though I do love rice pudding, especially with cinnamon on top, so very, very much) but there's been so much of that theme around me it's hard to not feel as if I've not lived it anyway. For the record I've had two relationships that started out on the internet thus far, one was completely disastrous (though illuminating in various ways) and the other the most significant relationship I've had yet, so I can't preach either condemnation or support of internet dating. It seems to me the odds are pretty much the same as in real life for it to work out well. It's also I guess interesting to note that when this comic was made more than two years ago, I was in the middle of the first internet relationship (which were to go south really, really fast, if it hadn't already, can't readily remember) and now that I write this I am well in the second relationship that is going wonderfully. Spirals of progress towards a predetermined direction!

Speaking of rice pudding, you must understand it has a hilarious name in Greek. 'Ρυζόγαλο'. It's really not the type of word you'd want to say when trying to hit on somebody but the actual line "hey baby, what do you say I buy you some rice pudding?" is one from real life, uttered in all seriousness by some... rural Don Juan.It's been an inside joke ever since a girl friend told us how it happened to her so that's where half of this comic comes from.

The other half is Sarantis Vahaviolos. All Greek names probably sound the same to you savage foreigners but this is again a hilarious name, phonetically. Let me make up a reasonable similar one in English to get the effect... hmm... "Eugene Bottum", perhaps. Something like that. The first name is something that makes you think of some really old man and the second suggests a layabout, a sluggard, a waste of time of a man. There's a story behind this name: A close friend of mine used to go on-line in a time far more virgin to internet trolling (that is, about 12 years ago?) and frequent romantic interest chat-rooms. He would pretend to be Sarantis Vahaviolos (for extra hilarity) of the proud lineage of the Barnetts (highly respected British family, supposedly) who would completely earnestly search for true romance on the cold, harsh internets. A lot of hilarious chat logs came out of that and the name-persona was liberally adopted by our circle of internet friends whenever we wanted to describe someone who would do anything to get a woman to love him.

Little did we know that apparently Sarantis Vahaviolos (or to be precise, someone with a similar name) was a real person that met an interesting end. One day my father came to me with a press clipping that has since then adorned my bedroom wall. It's in Greek so trust me if I don't take it down and scan it, it's real. It reads:

"Greek-American soldier lost his life in Iraq. 21 year-old Steve Vahaviolos from New York. The soldier was stationed in Iraq six weeks ago and killed along with three officers when the tank in which they were in fell off a canal in the area of Al Abar."

So uh, I guess, that's the true end of Sarantis, or Steve, whichever you prefer.

On the implementation level this comic is somewhat of a mess mainly due to how I could not then -and I still cannot with great confidence- draw women. I tend to default to the same model when I do it just because I find it difficult to get them down (I find a solid strike to the back of the neck helps). Besides that it works pretty well I feel, some pretty 'true' panels (like the girl in bathroom one. I love drawing bathrooms!). That one is a bit of commentary to teenage boy mentality where women are these pretty magical butterfly fairies that never fart or swear or do anything bad which I've always found funny and touching.

The comic is littered with 'cool guys' being 'cool', and I am pretty sure you can sense the disdain on the ink. I have an almost pathologic disgust for the 'stud uniform' and what annoys me even further is how effective it is.

The panel where he meets Maria for the first time is easy on the shading. Take that as emotional elation. I still like that panel, probably the best on this page. As far as the ending goes, I can only say: bad random. Well okay, if pressed I can make the case of how this whole 'American dream' twist towards the end desperately needed an absurdist upset because it's sickening but that would be after-the-fact rationalizing, really. I just found it funny! Rice pudding! The most benign thing in the world! The panel where he takes out the dark-haired woman annoys me to look at, mainly because she's is modeled after an actual person I was once acquainted with. Also this is the panel where I first started to regret giving my characters 'cartoon four fingers' because that pointing hand looks really grotesque! By this time I've also mostly regretted how I had decided to stylize ears too at the beginning, but oh well!

If you haven't, you should really give rice pudding a try. It's wonderful. And completely safe.

-Helm

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