ZX page 40: Energetic Disassembly

This one took a long time. I am considering it colored for the cover too, don't know. Perhaps something else might come to me after I'm done with the comic proper.

Also a new thing I did this time I let the pencils show underneath the inks, I almost never do this as I consider it sloppy but I wanted a few more rough edges here and there on this piece, and the extra rendering level really. I tried to keep the pencils relatively tight just for this reason which increased the workload. It was a full-time week for me, an artist that isn't even paid to do this. Oh well, you're only 25 and living in the good graces of your father once, right?



Which reminds me, I won't be 25 for long, heh. Oh well, good spirits, now. Like every time I finish a page. But will this making comics thing work out at the end? I don't know!

This chapter is the last one, by the way.

-Helm
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ZX Page 39: And then she says

Chiaroscuro, they call it I think? From darkness to the light, something like that.

I wonder how many times in my life I've been inappropriate without realizing it.
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ZX Page 38

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ZX Page 37

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ZX Page 36: All our maps are lost in the wind

There's not much more to say.

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check out the little bio post on the side!

Click for manly size

This was pretty fun to draw. I'm pretty backwards some times, this post should have been one of the very first on the blog, don't know how my mind made sense of avoiding it for a year.

I also wonder if I should directly link to a few 'choice cuts' of comics as we discussed, straight on that neat little contact.html . Robotboy, Memorybot, Europe after the Rain, Metal Gear Mike, I guess. I think just the 'comics' full tag would work for potential employers, seeing how the ZX pages (which I'm most proud of) will be on the top when sorted like that.

If you want to link me to someone that wants commission work or something else, you now can!

-Helm
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early heavy metal memories

Those guys are scary

Over at Invisible Oranges there's been a vibrant comment space on the subject of first records to get readers into Heavy Metal. I interpreted the question a bit more openly and besides listing of records I also mentioned formative heavy metal experiences. Here's the relevant bit below:

"[...] My second HM experience was a year or so later [when I was aged six] where my mom let me go to the close-by playground on my own for the very first time, in Crete and there were two teenager metalheads there (must have been early 1990, remember, at that time only delinquents and misfits listened to Heavy Metal in Greece, the traditional 10 year delay in music vogue from America to most European countries) all decked out in denim and leather and chains with long hair. I looked at them shocked. One turns to the other and says "hey, do you see my friend here? He likes to eat little boys like you" His friend grinned devilishly. I ran away crying. When I collected my six-year-old courage, I found a piece of wood and returned to the playground to 'beat them up' (I don't know man, I was six) but they had left."

I had some free time earlier today to pencil the memory (well... reconstructed, 20 year old memories are very foggy but the gist is there), when I'm done with the comic I will endeavor to return to this one and ink it as well. The past couple of days have been a bit of a downer but it was pleasant to do this one and with rejuvenated feeling I return to the ZX comic :D

-Helm

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ZX Page 19: Interlude

A layer of ordered grain on top of an ink layer, and then addition and detraction of grain on a different layer on top with an airbrush. This one prints a lot darker than I see it on the screen, I suspect a gamma issue. Hopefully when I do the final prints for the book I'll be able to screen-correct.

Oh, things will be going a bit sideways.

-Helm

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ZX page 13: Downtown Athens

This is a composite trace from a few photographs of down-town Athens, assembled in a way that suited my aims. I mean, the vantage that looks towards the Parthenon doesn't have these exact buildings below it, but these exact buildings are the ones I found most pleasing from my trip to Google Image.

Talking about Google Image, man what a useful thing for artists that need reference. Back before it most serious artists had tons of magazines stacked in a corner, fashion, IKEA catalogs and the like just to have a reference archive. That's probably gone, now, the ever-constant process of digitalization.

This page was really tortuous to draw because I kept feeling like I wasn't making any progress, right up close to when I was almost done with it. Can't explain it very well.

-Helm

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Small Shames, part the second

When I showed this to my friend Graham Lackey last night he said "I like that these small shames are so small, because they are perfectly relatable, and perhaps seeing a small thing like this given time and care in art airs it in a useful way."

The single-panel page is the perfect format for an examination of a single moment, because its timespan is negotiable. Like a nagging memory that keeps coming back to you in inopportune moments, its importance and interaction with the whole only as severe as your subconsciousness demands. Small shames aren't small because we hide them under the carpet, where they accumulate to something bigger. Their denominator is the same. The phantasmal perfect lives of the perfect people we like to use as an excuse do not exist. Even worse, we like to extrapolate from the comfortable "dude what are you bitching about, there's children dying in the third world and you're worried you ignored a taxi driver?" because against that Spectacular misery ours seems farcical. Then we go on to loathe ourselves for feeling self-loathing.

-Helm


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Small Shames, part the first

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

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

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

Keep reading

-Helm

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This House (Part 3: The Fissure of Consciousness)

Page 3 out of 4.

This is Theofilos.

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

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This House (Part 2: Higher Sphere)

Page 2 of 4.

Heh, not much to say about this now. When it's all complete perhaps.

On other news, Greek denizens that desire to buy the book can now go to the Vavel, Solaris, Tilt or Comicon bookstores to get theirs. I'm working on finalizing an arrangement with catchthesoap for non-Athens and/or international shipping too. I've got about 10 orders pending and I'm sorry to dally, within the next week it'll be set up and explained here.

-Helm

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This House (Part 1: Outer Shell)

This is the first page out of 4.

It was made for the last year's Vavel festival (if memory serves). It is another experiment in 'comics as artifacts' and as such it's difficult for me to convey the full impression to you on the internet. You'll understand what I'm talking about when I've posted the whole thing.

This page echoes the Son of Regional Dimensions and really, this sort of gentle reminder of an attempt at continuity is as much as I think I'll ever be interested in the form. Watch a tv show for more of that. My mind skips around from idea to idea too much to settle on a recurring cast of characters. But my newest comic will be a long-running one so I'm trying to think of ways to tie smaller stories together holistically.


On other news, tomorrow I go around Athens to drop off copies of the book at the comic stores and also to meet up with a friend that runs this distro, called Catch the Soap which will help me tremendously in shipping outside of Athens and/or Greece. So if you've placed an order with me don't worry, soon steps will be taken that will circumvent my laziness to go to the post office. Check out the distro if you're interested in good music, also, as that is its primary function. I'll post a post about ordering again once the situation is finalized.

Expect updates every 3-4 days as usual until this comic is done. Then we shall go back. BACK IN TIME. To when a younger Helm -2 thought it more honest to not attempt to communicate though his comics in any sort of standard storytelling, but rather focus on cryptic self-expression as an end in itself. You know... the teenage diary sort of thing! The very first comics I really made!

(They were pretty bad)






(I still like them)

-Helm
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Sad Girl is doing alright

Click for post-apocalyptic size.

This is the girl from this one, later on. She's doing alright. She's reading about the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. She's taking care of herself. Her foot itches.

Come monday I'll go to the printers to get my Asides-Bsides book self-published. Vavel Festival starts at 20 of this month, I intend to have it there for people to buy and enjoy. After that I'll put ordering details up here in the case some of you international readers, say it possesses you to buy something in a crazy moon language and not english, want to have one.

Comics again soon.

-Helm

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What's the best way to know what's going on inside the earth?!

One of the benefits of having a website is looking at the keyword hits you get off of Google. The above illustration conveys the worries expounded in the title of this post. While a lot are funny I also feel some sort of obligation to answer these queries since they landed someone here:

Sad Robot Boy - you're in the right place dude.
Steve Vahaviolos - Oh god I'm so sorry!
Three letter greek word for love - ΓΠΩ!
Ferrero rocher commercial greek gods - Oh man, that guy
How to get into the Royal Ballet School - Lots of practise and some innate talent I'd guess :/
Explain Europe After the Rain - This dude stayed around on the blog for 3 minutes so I guess some explanation did occur.
Meaning of Regional Dimensions - Still unnamed, sorry.
Octopus Puns - At least I can say I delivered on that front.

So yes, this is a stopgap post. I've been busy doing a very ambitious page for this year's Vavel festival and it'll be a week or so until I'm done. I will resume posting after that, but I should also let you know (since I gathered all of you here so we could laugh at google results) that the material from the paper has all but exhausted itself (last page left). I do not intend to stop the blog here, so we'll readily go into 'b sides' material. Most of it is not single-page comics but rather 3-5 pager stories I was doing before around and after my time at the paper. This is good because some material is absurdly old and you'll get to see really how less of a fuck I gave about my comics being understandable by third parties in the beginning. Also it's nice because I'll get to post more recent comics which I personally feel look better because I'm a better draftsman now that I was 2 years ago, heh.

The question I want to put to you dear readers and humans is this: should I post more infrequently but with the whole story at a time, or should I post every 2-3 days with a single page from an ongoing story? This is pretty important because for example I have an 18 page 24hr comic with lots of WORDS WORDS WORDS and it really might take a while to translate such a thing. Looking at the google results it seems some 40-50 hits a day occur and I'd hate to have built up that loyalty in some of you and then just come up and switch my posting habits from eight times a month to twice a month. I know first-hand that there occurs some feeling of betrayal when an artist just stops updating their blog frequently. Regardless of the inherent pathology in that sort of consumerist mindset (shame on all of us!), I'd hate to upset anyone like that!

Keep in mind when answering - for I do want you dear readers and humans, to answer me - that if I post bigger stories page-by-page then I will also have the chance to wax theoretical on them a lot more than I would if I posted them all together, where final remarks would have to be condensed to the issues of the story as a whole. So according to your tastes for theory this should factor in.

Also after Vavel I might post the comic I'm making now and all the preparation I did for it for another process post which will go into finer details on why and how I make my artistic choices and how exactly my subconscious undermines me constantly.

-Helm

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Worse things than being late!

I did a 24hr comic this weekend, which is to say, it's not 24 pages but it's a full story done at the best of my ability in a span of 24 hours. It came out 5 pages. It'll be a while before it arrives on this blog but hey, I made it! Expect the next full page within the next couple of days.


You like to read a lot, don't you?

-Helm
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