Alright before the comic here for you non-Greeks a bit of contextualization is required.
In Greece, the newspaper medium is in deep crisis. People just don't seem to read papers as much as they used to and regardless of the whys, the way papers have deemed it practical to respond is to bundle with their edition various 'gifts' for the reader, to entice them to buy the thing for the other thing. One can spot the various problems in this practice pretty much instantly (and how they will eventually result to complete disassembly of the newspaper form), but I'm not here to discuss that right now, I'm here to discuss a penis.
When I went to work for this paper where the material of this blog was originally printed in, they were bundling pretty mundane v-cds and dvds of old movies (Godzilla Versus Killer Pollution, yes)or tv-shows (Bonanza... seriously) and indeed, the temperamental success the newspaper had experienced at times was directly relative to the quality of the bundled-in material.
So at some point it seems readership was lower than usual and they decided to put some soft-core porno in with the paper and see how that goes. I guess it went well? I'm not sure, I did not follow the print run numbers. I was beginning to feel a bit uneasy even then for the reasons you'll see in the comic below, but hey, it's just soft-core, it's people pretending to have sex, more hilarious than vulgar. A few months later they started giving hardcore porn with the paper, stuck a "forbidden to minors" sticker in the front of the paper as a point of 'edginess' and then it sorta became a real issue for me. If I were some sort of established entity in the print media where my name would not be associated with the various transgressions of a publisher it would be a non-issue, but this was my first wide public work and a statement seemed required from my point of view. The statement is below:
Now, had this piece seen print, I would have continued to work with this paper - though perhaps things would have gone south sooner rather than later - judging my opinion clearly voiced. However this page didn't see print. They ran something awful by an in-house graphic designer playing comic artist for that day I guess and in the awfulness of that specific page (a pastiche of 'political commentary' ridiculousness, imagine a caricature of a wealthy man with the words 'government' written on his hat pocketing a symbolic bag of money, seriously) I saw exactly how little my work was understood or appreciated and what instead was expected from me. I received no phone call before the page was pulled nor was I immediately let go. I suspect that had I sent a different page next week (with more people with 'government' written on their hats) I'd have gotten paid as usual. However I did not send anything nor did I deem it fit to discuss the issue since they would not discuss it with me and in that way my run with that paper ended.
It seems I was correct to think comics ware unappreciated to begin with at the paper because a week or so after I stopped working there they let go the two other comic artists doing work there for them and I felt sad and responsible, especially for my friend Mike who needed financial stability at the time more than I did. However responsibility lies with the employer who chooses in the end what he wants to run in his paper. If they wanted to pretend to be a classy paper and then bundle porn along with it to desperately try to sell it somehow, then they dug their own grave as far as I'm concerned. The whole premise of ethical responsibility is that you can't have your cake and eat it too. And in any case I'd rather not be done the 'favor' being printed if it is without the understanding and support of my employer.
After I left the paper I didn't feel like making comics for nearly 6 months. Dry spell ended when Vavel festival came about and I did some pieces for them and for our fanzine (Free Your Line) but generally since then my rate of production of pages has drastically slowed. On one part, I am not being paid to make comics anymore and that does have its effect, believe me, especially when you've just grown used to considering yourself a 'professional' and then the rug is pulled under you and you realize that not only you're not considered such by your employer but they don't consider you worth basic human decency.
A big reason I took two years to get this blog together is because I believed the material to be worthless. It's been a slow climb back to being reasonably happy with it and of course it's due to the feedback I've gotten by you, dear readers and humans. Thanks! I am still very adverse to putting myself in a situation where I have to justify why my work is good or what exactly it is that I am doing because of the newspaper experience. Sadly, international readers, this happens more than you'd expect because Greece is a culturally retarded country, where any humanist venture one attempts has to battle against deeply ingrained inertia in the distrustful public. Greece has fallen to a self-fulfilling prophecy: we have been systematically robbed of decency by demagogues and thieves, liars and marketers, in every aspect of our every day lives. Professional domains, personal, political, emotional all jeopardized. The Greek has been degraded and conditioned to accept his degradation as stable truth and 'nobody is better than the worst'. Nothing good can happen here and nothing good we will allow to happen here but we will still complain how nothing vital and positive, happens although we ourselves do not allow for decency and humanity in any aspect of our daily lives. But we mock. We mock everything, we mock the good with the bad and to hell with everything. Our country is our dumpster, our internet is our dumpster, our inside is filled with garbage and nothing. I'm kinda rambling, but this is on my mind a lot lately.
Anyway.
The material you've read so far along with a boatload of comic strips also done for the paper (of varying quality! I'm not much of a strip artist, I find) is slowly being compiled in a print version which I'll shop around to various publishing houses here in Greece. I'm going to see my last page printed at least. I don't look forward to being treated like a visitor from outer space by most publishers I'll meet, but eh, I'll deal.
So, the bigger reason for making this blog has been fulfilled. Now I'll go even deeper back in time and start posting my very first comics made during comics school, where I met the wonderful people with whom I were to start the 'Free Your Line' fanzine. An altogether different part of my life, one which doesn't terminate at 2006 but instead is vital and ongoing to this day. More on this soon. Who knows, perhaps we'll even reach the material I'm doing RIGHT NOW! Such futurism, such promise! We shall raise our dream machines into the sky!
Well, soon. It might be a week or more because I'm still making my new page for the Vavel festival. I'm 35% done, heh. It's taking forever. I think it's good, I can tell because it's one of the few times I'm actually having fun making a comic (it's usually pretty tortuous!).
- Helm
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Hello ZX!! We'll be seeing more of you!
This is pretty much one of the few intellectually suspect comics I've done. Two years ago when I had finished it I thought it was good but there was a nagging feeling about it which cumulated into a pretty specific concern once I found the words to explain it: It's too perfect. I don't mean the rendering, far from it. Actually while lettering this in english today I got a strong urge to redraw the whole thing. The problem is the situation presented, especially the top row of the initial flirting it just too... scripted. Real people don't talk like that, real life is not an episode of FRIENDS or some other such piece of shit excuse of a television show. People don't always know what to say and promptly. As anyone that had flirted even once knows, it's really stupid to try to be prepared for the conversation and run it in your head since it rarely if ever goes as you'd expect so you'll have to improvise... and that's alright. That's what I should have made, not this stilted exchange of stand-up comedian material.
Thankfully the two middle rows of panels spare us of the actual bits and pieces of conversation the couple engages in, giving them at least some ambiguous space on which the reader might project a bit of humanity instead of faux-perfect nothings. The last row is more humanistic, especially the subscription receipt panel is a nice metaphor for premature ejaculation. The whole point of the comic was, initially, not to have a super-cool 'best day ever' fantasy-dating comic (though sadly it's more this than anything else) it was to convey this particular feeling of insecurity one gets when they might meet a new person, strike it off very well initually only to experience a strange fear of abandonment right there in the midst of it all. You promise you'll date me for a while, right? You won't run off? That sort of thing.
So yeah, if I were to write this today I think I'd plot it differently. What I'd definitely keep is the middle shot of the dam on Marathonas at night. It has more humanity in its silence than the rest of the comic.
-Helm
P.S. The older, newspaper comic material is three or for updates away from drying up. I shall proceed to the 'b-sides' material shortly after, featuring pieces I have done for the Free Your Line fanzine and elsewhere. The material up to the point of three or four updates to come is being collected (along with a boatload of comic-strips I have not posted here) in a physical edition, on paper and all. It'll be in its original Greek language. I am wandering if any of my international readers would be interested in getting such an edition in the mail, even though it'll be in this crazy moon language. Do write in. I will accept mailed undergarments as compensation, by the way.
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Hello. A word by Richard Green:
I have been requested to write on this comic. In doing so I hope that Helm will return my puppy, or at least most of it.
This is probably a great way to avoid when designing a comic. I sat down with a piece of paper. I divided it into a grid.
I drew a man drinking. He walked away. In the midst of his journey I got bored and made him climb a building.
He reached his destination, something I decided on whilst drawing him climbing up the building.
By accident, symmetry. Spontaneous order had emerged.
I enjoy the fact that the comic is mirrored. In the first and sixth lines, we see this man in his primary world. He sits and drinks. He is not surly, self pitying or even drunk. He lives a blameless if meaningless existence.
But he can leave and enter that as he pleases. In the second and fifth lines he does so.
And in the middle he breaks from that world into something more. Just for a moment he entertains a diversion before returning to the task at hand.
I'll also write a little on the art Helm has built over my rather Spartan drawings.
I did not envisage him living in a squalid urban hellhole. The whilst drawing the first two lines I imagined him drinking in a suburban licensed club. The establishments of choice for blameless substance abuse (and garden variety gambling problems). It was only outside that there was a need for an external environment made of straight (and easily drawn) lines. He entered a concrete jungle.
And of course Spider-Man doesn't climb the sides of bungalows.
Because, as I envisaged it, he was climbing like Spider-Man.
Spider-Man is everyman, with powers, and so is this man. He is Spider-Man in middle age, Chris Ware's Spider-Man. He exists betwixt lost dreams and despair.
This is not to be depressing. It isn't depressing. The everyman is not an indulgent Byronic hero, intent on theatrical tragedy.
He endures, in some form.
And existence is the purpose.
And a few words from me, your tyrant:
Animation is not like comics at all. Often you'll find people who like comics also like animated films. I don't, particularly. I think that impulse comes from when we were children and you could show us any sort of drawn anything and we'd shit our pants. I find animation is in love with setting things to motion and how that motion is conveyed whereas comic art is in love with perfect sequences of events as portrayed in concert, on an inclusive context. I understand these are pretty dry distinctions but if you were to sit down with a comic artist and an animator and discuss with them why they went their separate ways through life, in the end the picture could be summed up as such. Personally I find myself quickly bored with something that is bouncing around on my screen and though as a child I did watch my share of cartoons I suspect I was bored of most of them even then. I'd much rather spend time looking at a single page of comics for a hour than watch an episode of Tom and Jerry. Don't judge me, that's just how I am! For me there is something really brilliant and beautiful in a well-done comic page. It's a finite number of viewpoints into a finite number of situations and effects but 'between the gaps' there is the promise of a whole, timeless and perfect world. Any medium where the tyranny of linear time dictates pace and direction somewhat loses that, for me.
So why am I saying these things? Because the comic at hand 'A Story by Richard Green' is very much made to appear like a short animated film. It is even made in a similar way. Static backgrounds were drawn (6 of them), then a character with little shading and simple forms, easy to animate, was superimposed on a different layer on top of these backgrounds, moving. Not talking or thinking but mainly moving from a place to a different place.
Why did I make a comic that looks like an animated film since I don't really care for them? Because I wanted to harness that boredom I felt when waiting for something to happen while some cartoon hero was squishing and deforming and whatever else. I wanted a pretty tortuous pace. As a comic, this whole page could be summed up in three panels (first and last being first and last and the middle panel him climbing a building, as a matter of fact). The whole middle time is watching and waiting. From one drink to another, the diversion of the spider-man climb signifying the mundane realism of any means to such an end. That was the feeling I got from Richard's original draft comic and I tried to serve it as best I could. I wasn't going for depression as a theme so much as for some sort of existential tiredness, punctuated by a sharp digression.
Oh, also, of interest is that this comic is not taking place in Athens like most of my comics (even if not mentioned so, at least conceptually). It's taking place somewhere in Australia because that's where Dick is from. I didn't do this on purpose, I just realized.
-Helm
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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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Heehee! Yus! This is sora a continuation of the other Gnawite comic, though probably the least effective of the two due to being wordy. I still like it though and perhaps more importantly at the time it was a good release to be able to do this instead of something 'heavier' (like what follows it!) The last panel is a bit of self-commentary because I was getting kinda tired at this point. This tiredness was to lead lead to... interesting things.
The Yus bird is strangely a bit of a small-scale social phenomenon in the circles I frequent. First of all whenever anyone sees a Yus comic (there were many before this, not done for the paper. Perhaps once I'm done with this batch of stuff I'll post all the random other comics I have done) they start compulsively saying 'Yus'. I've heard a lot of different pronunciations! So what about the Yus bird, it's a very simple - perhaps to a fault - character. He sleeps on a huge cactus, he has amazing powers of persuasion and he only has one expression (well, almost). I don't see any reason for him to be as widely loved as he is but then again, what do I know. I do draw him compulsively though.
Don't ask me what 'Yus' means, by the way. I do use it as a variation of 'yes' but it seems pretty open-ended to me, really. A person going by 'Jixby Phillips' uttered it about 6 years ago on a website called I-mockery and I adopted it and for some reason thought it should be said by a large green bird so there you go. It's kinda depressing in some ways how the easily the most recognizable thing I've made is what amounts to a grumpy pokemon.
The Gnawites have mad ping-pong skills.
Oh by the way, the new Process Post is slowly coming together. Still making the art. It's going to be a lot of text to write!
-Helm
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I kinda forgot about this one! It was published between Conan the Librarian and Tooth Prince. I guess I must have skipped it because it didn't really need Johnny's help for translation so I went right ahead and bugged him about Tooth Prince.
It's also a comic I don't have much to say about. The Gnawites are characters that were invented more or less in a game I played with a good friend of mine, Sven Ruthner. He's known as "Ptoing" on the internet (yes, I know, awesome sound effect name!) and we've had a long friendship on the basis of a mutual admiration of pixel art. We are both administrators in Pixelation which is where you want to go if you want to upgrade your pixel skills, and we collaborate on various things all the time. For instance he's coloring the cover for the Asides Bsides book! You could do worse than marvel at his wonderful artistry here and there!
So, the characters come from this little collaboration between us where one would draw an 64x64 tile on a big checkerboard and then the other would draw an adjacent one and so on. This:
(click for real size) is when we gave up. You can clearly see the evolution of the Gnawite there (the first one drawn is the one biting on his arm I think, and the one I used as definite reference is the one launching itself out of the cave). I really liked them so I featured them in the comic you see above a few months later. They represent the base ID instinctual drives, they're like mischievous children without any sort of parent-inflicted morality, so the strips show how they interact with the world. Mostly by being bastards, but look! Towards the end! How nice they are to the sad Yus Bird (heartbroken at the time). The challenge was to give them a bigger emotional range than is suggested at the collaboration above. It turns out their faces are made well to convey emotion. If you notice (this is the only point of pride for me technically on this page) the two Gnawites are distinguishable at all times from the shapes of their faces and facial features!
I'll explain what the hell the Yus Bird is on some later entry. A concise description is that it's a bird and it says 'Yus' only and that'll have to do for now.
I enjoy this comic for how it loops to where it started, giving off the sense that this sort of carefree life loops indefinitely, the Gnawites never grow up, there is no future and past, there is only a long now and the now is full of happy.
-Helm
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