A New City (page 4)

Final page.

This comic as you see doesn't have a high concept aspiration (well at least for me!) but yet uses a very labored upon method to get where it's going. I was at the time (this was early 2005) of the opinion that the 'smaller' the idea you wish to convey through comics the grander the method you should use. The reasoning behind this is simple: were this to be drawn in 3 panels and with stickmen, what reader would give it the thought they are giving it now as it is, 4 pages drawn as meticulously as I could at the time?

What? "Absolutely" I hear you say. Variations of "yes, given specific circumstances" the more meticulous amongst you correct. You are wiser than past me then, reader. There have been many comics (or pieces of art in general) dealing with small things in small means that still have a very real and strong impact on their readers. In fact, one of my favorite poems is a single phrase. But I am a man of extremes and that above extreme position pleases me with its sharp juxtaposition. I have wondered why that is and I have come to the theory that it's because they define a life in pleasing contrasts. I know this is dangerous, please perhaps keep in mind that I also realize its danger controls it somewhat!

I have since revised my position on the matter because I realized that the idea in this comic, although perhaps coming from a lower part of the body than the brain (somewhere in the gut, perhaps) is not a small one. It is a big one which still moves me very much. It might seem banal, the 'big cities are bad' concept, but it doesn't matter to me. Something inside me is wary of these utilitarian monstrosities, these mazes of concrete information. The city is not ones friend, it is there to facilitate impersonal commerce, inhuman trafficking, the only humanity that occurs in it is accidental, a glitch in the system, to be eventually purged. The 'old city' here (or as the ideologue who penned the title of this comic would have it, a 'A New City') is a crumbled one. Its purpose has crumbled. It is desolate and stark. What is left when the symbols shatter? A new way! The function the Bald Sci-Fi Dude (tm) gives to it is the exact contrast of its past. What is more human that a discrete place meant for personal relaxation, right in the bygone, unbeating heart of one more of these ugly multi-story towers that reach futilely towards something more than a humble sum of base pleasantries?

(Please make a note if you felt as if you were metaphorically looking at these old cities with a refreshing sense of relief that they are now in the past and thankfully gone, replaced by something better and more human. Keep that emotion in you and remember that they are still here and you're right in the middle of one. I am not trying to make a joke, keep that emotion close, it is a useful one.)

I cannot tell you how much I enjoy that panel in the page before this where we can see from the crumbled wall from the low vantage, along with our protagonist, in the insides of a few buildings. The disarray of the furnishings and items, like a heart attack it slew the beast from inside. It is very comforting to draw such things.

I do not like much the art in this comic anymore (I remember being very proud of it at the time) but I really appreciate the sentiment as much, if not more, as when I drew it. It has helped me have a meaningful dialogue with myself addressing an enduring unease with my place as a middle-class citi-zen which a culture of post-modernity has shielded me from... Shielded the comfortable-yet-somehow-discontent middle-class child-ape (= myself) from scratching that glaring wound, through sheer obfuscation of methodology. It broke down philosophy until one's tools were as meaningless as their emotions. "Wallow in semiotic self-pitty and most of all consume! Feel guilt and consume! Consume and feel guilt!" it cries. But this cannot go on forever, can it? Humans are problem solvers. Even when you close your eyes and you see inside you so much ugliness that is uncountable, at the very same time some withered vestigial appendige is trying to flex its elitrous wingspan to a promise of something more. Humans are problem solvers and humans use tools to solve their problems. It is the same with language, philosophy, art. We broke it, and now we're putting it back together in new ways. I am excited to be alive in 2009 because it will be soon now that something new will come.

The method proposed in this comic is a socially cowardly one (personal retreat, usually the comfort of the wealthy), but it is not obfuscated. It is clear in its intention and in that clear place (somewhere in the gut) good intentions lie.

- Helm
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A New City (page 3)

God these irregular panel borders are driving me insane!
Digital watercolor ends here, we're left with black and white. I promise, it makes sense. This concludes in a couple of days.

Happy March :D

-Helm
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A New City (page 2)

Page 2 out of 4. You can tell I was inexperienced here by how random the panel border rules are and how much the camera moves around. From the side, to the left, from above, toads view... a mess, really, heh. I wanted to be EXCITING with the camerawork. Much like a film director I know now that if the scene is low-key, then the camera-work should be low-key.

You may notice the comic-tone work ends when he leaves the city and this watercolor thing starts in its place. There is a reason for this to be explained soon enough. Keep reading and keep communicating!

-Helm

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A New City (page 1)

Page 1 of 4. This is quite old. Sorry for delay between it and last post, it took me ages to translate, as you can see.

-Helm

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Technodrama

This is the comic I made for this year's festival. I don't know how big the screens you guys are using so it might be that the text is difficult to read, or you have to pan around horizontally... I really hope not. This is a byproduct of the format I used for this page. I uh, I printed this on A1 size (84x59cm). Keep in mind most comics are printed A4 or smaller. Sadly I didn't take a picture of it in the show as I 1) don't carry a photographic camera with me and 2) don't hang around my exhibit due to shame that I'm still trying to eradicate.

Also I guess this would be needed so you get both the macro and the micro view of the piece as the people in the show did. Pay attention to overarching elements in this thumbnail, they help with understanding the comic.

And yes, about understanding the comic. Hm, this is my most recent work and it's riding on this wave of post-analysis I've been indulging in lots on this blog so everything and I mean everything in this comic is calculated to support a thesis on instinct, determinism, id/superego clash etc etc the things we've been discussing here for the last 5 months. As such I have a very lucid idea about what I've done but not so much if I've accomplished it in the eyes of other readers. Now I could preempt you and tell you what it's about and so on but I'd rather if you'd feel compelled to read it carefully and make up your own mind. I just say these things to urge you to trust me that it's not just a 'whacky' collection of events, it will reward patient and exploratory readings.

On the technical level this page is an exploration of the digital way to make comics, as it was made at 1200 dpi in A3 size (that's a lot of pixels) completely in Manga Studio 3 Ex within the course of 13 days or so, about 3-4 hours of work a day. The work I'd otherwise put into 4-5 pages of comics went into this single page. The reason I went this way was because I wanted to make a comic that felt like a plot of a whole 2 hour movie in a single page. Sorta like a trailer. Condensed storytelling. I wanted to see if it was possible. It is. Successful? You tell me. Just keep in mind that there could be like, heh, 10 pages of comics between each panel.

The theme of the show was the number '13' (and obviously, bad luck). The format of the comic uses 13 panels, and the top part of the page as far as layout goes is the exact 180 degree rotation of the bottom part. The theme is very vaguely bad-luck-ish but that's as far as I tried to stick to it. I don't think '13' makes for good stories, personally, so I decided to veer off-path just as much as I needed to tell a good story. I am content with this to the degree that while I was preparing it on a piece of paper I brainstormed a lot of little quirks and ideas I wanted to put in it and after I was done I counted and realized about 80% of them made it in and not in a disruptive way. It felt 'right' to put that sort of effort in a single piece of art.

There are some bits of text here that do not translate very well. There is a 'gag' in the naming of the characters (especially the name of the father) which is also pertinent to the storyline but you'd have to have done some sort of Hellenistic studies I guess to get it. I'll just spoil that little bit because most of you have not read about ancient Greek drama theater. All the characters in this comic are named after marginally related characters in ancient Greek dramatic theater. All that is, besides the father figure. To draw a useful parallel to Shakespearian drama: imagine this comic where everybody's named stuff like Tristian and Benvolio and Martius but there's one dude inexplicably named Burt. Completely outside of the drama paradigm. I wonder why... hmm.

There's also a few other plays on words that do not translate, but nothing that spoils the story, I think. It's just a shame you heathens can't read Greek.

Also, here's the variation page that was put up right next to the main page. It reads "Variation for Impatient Readers". It's a joke about how people really just skim over the text in the comics presented in these festivals. On that panel that I didn't have a clean background to leave I just threw in an upside-down Manos Antaras as his severe stare seemed to fit the stark emptiness.

There is a surrealist painter involved in the original comic. First one to note in the comments who he is and how he's exploited cruelly by me, gets my admiration. Obviously, besides this, I welcome all communication and well-meaning critique as this is very new and it would be very applicable for me right now to better my art.

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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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Enter Vast Dominions, Welcome to My Dream (part the third)

Page four out of five.

Yes that's what my dreamself asked the other, I can't account for how stupid it is... it sorta makes sense in dreamlogic, I think. How can you and I be here together? Perhaps this is subconscious residue from when I had watched early in life the Back to the Future movies and where if you occupied the same space with your older/future self, the universe exploded or something. I guess the child Helm took this bit of the cautionary tale very seriously to the degree that this was my first concern in my dream, when meeting my other.

But his answer, his answer. What a strange answer. Who is he keeping company to - or perhaps, supporting, urging on? What is he feeding? And where is here, exactly?

You might notice that paper cut over the name of the person whom the other is talking about. The purpose of it is twofold: The most important thing is that I woke up with a very vivid recollection of the whole dream, but I couldn't remember for the life of me the name he told me. I think it was a woman's name but that is as far as I go. I cut that bit of paper out of the page not only because I couldn't remember but because it is a valuable communicational device here. When I make art that predominantly talks to myself (usually it is music, but sometimes it is comics. And a dream comic, after all, is psychoanalysis) I attempt to shape it in such a way that it might serve me, serve my evolution as a human being further. I have figured since an earlier age that if I am going to talk to myself through art, it might as well be a worthwhile conversation. In a way I infuse my super-ego aspirations through my art, a perfect, final Helm is talking to the mundane, faulty real Helm and trying to urge him on the right path through existence. Nobody else's art is as useful to me as my own, because if I do a honest job of it I can look at it again years down the line and it's still relevant, still urges me in the right directions and it still makes me feel and remember. I can't ask more from art, much less my own.

Following this line of thinking, the creepiest thing about this comic is the super-ego/id merge going on. If I use my comics as chambers for self-betterment some times, what does it mean to meet this... thing, in my dream, and to have it tell me this unsettling declaration? I have interpreted this dream in many ways since I made the comic and I will spare you because nothing is more tedious than people explaining their own dreams. Recounting them is fine if they're interesting, explaining is another. My hope of future understanding what it meant is captured through the harrowing bottom four panels where the dreamspace Helm 'remembers' what id-machine wants him to remember. At the time this seemed more like an excuse to draw the pretty pictures, but for me nowdays that part is the most courageous of the comic. Dream of death, yet awake, that sort of thing. The carved out spot has been filled with different names in the last 2 years.

The further choices made in the comic stem from this remembrance and understanding. We will talk about that tomorrow.

Oh, yes, the second reason for the tear in the page was this: I wanted the actual artifact on show, the pieces of paper on which the comic is made, to accentuate their role as artifacts, I wanted a harsh metaphysical break from the story so the reader would be shocked out of narrative. I wanted him to be curious and I wanted him to be reminded that that is a piece of paper with lines of ink on it, what is behind of it? Why would someone do that? What is he missing and what is the reader reading missing? That sort of thing.

The funny byproduct of my doing so is that when I delivered the piece in an envelope to the Babel people, a week later a person in mid-panic called me to tell me that my art has been damaged. When I let him know that I did that and it was intentional, he let out this huge sigh of relief. In a way this was the most feedback I got for these artistic choices because as far as I can tell nobody that saw or read the comic decided to let me know how that little gimmick worked for them while I was on the festival.

Tomorrow this story ends.

-Helm

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Currency Gives A Second Chance

Well this is the last page from the newspaper comics, for real now! I will probably do my most recent 24hr comic nex--- wait wait! READER PARTICIPATION TIME:

Dear reader and human, would you rather I post next:

• My most recent 24hr comic (5 pages) chronicling my dire highschool existence, failing at school, getting in a band, DENYING MY NATURE and throwing up

• My very first 'serious' comic (2 pages) completely incomprehensible to anyone that isn't me, made in two feverish nights that I still somehow feel begrudingly nice about

• An illustrated recounting of a dream (5 pages) where I meet my id/superego meld and I am very distraught with the secrets he tells me

Please write in and let me know. In lack of votes I will default to posting horrible doodles nobody cares about as punishment! (not really.)


About the comic itself, it's one of the few color comics I've done, and completely in photoshop for that matter. There's a bit of a blunder with one caption (see if you can guess which) that misleads the eye instead of helping it along to the next desired panel and I certainly rushed the last panel (deadline). I think the idea is humourous still, even if I do say so myself. This blog is constantly about me saying so myself and I'm sorry, but it ain't like anybody else will ever write my biography, so... you know.

-Helm

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Memorybot Part 4: THE REVENGE

Here's the last page.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love you so much.



-Helm

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Memorybot Part 3

Here's page three. Not much to say about this so let's take the opportunity to listen to Ptoing about the coloring process!

Hello, ptoing here. I'll have to write some words about the colouring of Memorybot, seeing as how Helm said I would without me knowing. Since we are awesome friends he knew tho I would do it, so here we go.

Memorybot is the first (and so far only) comic I finished colouring and it was a very interesting experience. It's not like I am a huge defender of literal colour, as in everything gets the colour it would have in real life, but Helm pushed me when it came to using emotional colours. He constantly poked me about it and it was a very fruitful outcome for me which I learned a lot from. So here goes thanks to you Helm, cheers for poking my brain.

The most interesting thing was to come to a colouring style which worked and respected the lineart, without being too simple (Straight colourfills Helm could have done himself :P). When I was exploring at first I thought about and tried colouring all the lines, like the trees and clouds in the first panel of page one. This turned out to be extremely tedious as well as taking away power from the nice lineart, making things mushy.

So in this regard using it here and there for background elements was a good choice I think, clouds with black outlines would have looked odd - or at least I think so. Tho black outlines for clouds are fine in a strictly black and white comic as soon as you add colour I think it looks wrong in most cases.

I will go on about the 3 pages in a bit more detail now, who knows, perhaps someone will find it interesting. Page one was the hardest to colour for me, simply because it was the first and it also has the most touchups from Helm. He adjusted the colours in the last panel and also tweaked some other things. This was great learning for me and it is also notable to be said that this collab worked so well because of the mutual respect for each others work. I had no problem with Helm going over my colouring as he also had no problem with me editing some of his lineart, mainly for cleanups.

Helm did welcome my cleanups tho he thinks that in some cases I am too anal about stuff like this, and who knows, perhaps I am, I have some compulsions when it comes to art (especially digital art) and small details jump into my eye and cling onto my brain, I can't help it. A perfect example of this is the wandering poster on the first page. The green one which is just above ZX's head in the first panel - it moves down during the course of the page. Actually looking at it I just realised that the whole bench seems to be moving in the last 2 panels, if you look where it is in comparison to the wall behind it.

But enough of me rambling about how Helm does not care for consistencies like this a lot. It's his right, it's not like they have an impact on the storytelling. So as far as emotional colours go, page one does not have much going on, apart from the last 2 panels, which were partly (mainly) Helms work as far as colour adjustments go.

On page two things get a lot less literal, more emotional, with the first panel, the establishing shot, being coloured in the colours that actually represent the actual surfaces they are (does that sentence make sense?) Then especially from panel three onwards things get purely emotional. Here one very important thing to note is that not many of the decisions made were conscious, I just did what looked good to me and made sense to me in the context of the comic.

The cold blue on the robot to show the distancing from the girl, who in panel three is an odd cold pink, no clue why, but the colour somehow works for me as far as some rests of hope as well as anxiety about what is to come, what ZX is going to say to her. Then in the next panel her face is turned to sad blue tones, followed by their hands, which I coloured as if it was a statue made from stone. A gentle touch of lovers not to be made eternal, or something.

In the last panel ZX turns is shown as a harsh, abstract monolith to finalize his statement, and show it's severity. This is what I think Helm was trying here, and I think it works. The colouring here is held simple and the red, well, to add some dreadful atmosphere.

Helm did some minor adjustments on this page as well, nothing as major as on the first tho.

Onto page three, my personal favorite. It is a very intimate scene in my opinion - the closest the two get to each other. I really liked the stark contrast of the bottom bit and I felt the page needed just as stark colouring. There is really not much more to say here, I just did what my instinct told me to, zero rationalization here.

(to be concluded)

Thank you Ptoing, for being forced to comment on my blog. I will let your family & dog go unhurt now.

Ptoing wrote more about page 4 but I'll post that section along with his final thoughts next time, when Memorybot concludes. Here's the b&w pervert version for those of you that share my kinks.


I think this page is good. I rushed a few bits here and there on the big panel, but the end result holds up well enough and is pretty astounding in color. Ptoing is right on the money above where he says this is the closest they'd ever get. A sin against nature, such a wrong way to love, please take me apart, put me back together again.


-Helm & Ptoing


P.S. This page is signed ''07" so it was as I thought. I started this comic in the last days of 2006 and continued it in January.

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Memorybot Part 2

I take advantage of page flip to change settings. Film can do this also but not as effectively. Recent films that trained viewers in fast scene changes but it still creates some dissonance unless the director is one of the really talented ones. You can mess this up in comics as well (for example if you change scenes on pageflip but you don't do an establishing shot in the first or second panel and just assume people get that we're not were we where before). As of late I've been considering infinite canvas comics a lot and I'm trying to think of ways to have the power of page change without having actual pages to do it with. Something will come to me. Anyway, I mean to say, the change of a page is a very useful tool for the comic artist. It invites the participation of the reader to carry the story along, at their own page. The characters aren't going nowhere until you're good and ready. That more relaxed idea of how art should be paced is in start contrast to music or cinema where the time is strict and linear and if you're not paying attention you just missed something. This is why I think comics are the best medium to tell stories where smart little details and subliminal characterization make a difference.

Let's also look at the black and white version.

The painting in the futurist cafe in the first panel is a reference to Complexification. (Click on start applet to see the art of the future). This isn't so much a pop culture reference (as I don't think Complexification is pop enough yet!) but more an actual world-building point, I really do believe such algorithmically generated pieces of art will be much more vital in the future than now. Also, if you care to check out the older ZX story with the dam and the depth computation, you'll note that they're also at a show where Substrate is featured. Their opinion there on the art differs from mine as the artist, heh.

When I was drawing the black and white version of this I was actively trying to restrain my propensity towards adding little scribbly mid-tone details with a fine marker because I was thinking 'let the coloring do it'. And it did, I'm really happy I didn't overload it more than I did, although Ptoing - whom I'll have explain his process of coloring in the next post - probably suffered around the little details even as it is. I don't have much experience in making artwork that relies on color because I don't really like color comics much, heh. At least not the more literal color type. We'll discuss this later.

The exchange of words here is very calculated (I'm sorry) on the part of ZX. This isn't because he is a robot so much as it is how we all try to be robots when we have to give these sort of justifications for our actions. We think that if we figure out the exact way to phrase the hurty thing we need to say, perhaps we'll control the outcome, contain the drama and minimize the hurt. It is the testament to my emotional inexperience that in this comic, the next page to this isn't that of an emotional outburst, of the vital drama needed to diffuse an awful feeling. Instead I make the girl passively 'understand'. Things don't usually work this way in real life, yet I do not think this is a point of insincerity for me as an artist here because at the time this mode of resolution I thought was the best one. I was still holding on to being a robot as best I could.

The 'how we differ' panel is one of the best I've ever drawn, I think. I look at it and I think I did alright, as a comic artist, even if that's all I ended up doing.

Note in the black and white version how the eye on the girl on the bottom left panel is off and how Ptoing fixed that for me in the colored version. I've since learned to draw eyes a bit better but they're still totally the biggest problem I have with faces, especially with girls. I am satisfied with her weary expression though.

Next page will come when I get Ptoing to write his piece about the colors, could be sooner rather than later, as it's a silent page and I don't have to translate anything.

On other news, Vavel page is 70% done. I've worked more on this single page that I've worked on 4-5 regular pages of comics. It's a monster. It also is right on the verge of being completely nonsensical. I hope I can keep it together.

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Memorybot Part 1

More ZX romantic adventures! Page 1 out of 4.

I made this for the 'Free Your Line' fanzine, for its third - and best, in my opinion - issue. It was done in very late 06, in fact around new years eve if memory serves. Ptoing was around, as were other friends, I was visiting Germany I think. God, how can my memory of things be so much like an old man's?

If you note something different about this comic, something vibrant and rich in hue, that's Ptoing's fault. He did the colors. I really like them, most people seem to too.

As I had 4 pages to tell a story that could possibly be told in a single page like those of the newspaper, and as a sort of cleansing from that sort of format, I took it very slow here, mostly establishing setting and mood, letting smaller things do the talking than my usual verbose narrator who is sadly a necessity if you want to tell a story with a lot of plot in very small space. Therefore the pacing is very deliberately slow. Note how I use the right wall in the first panel as space to place a story title and such, luxuries one doesn't usually enjoy in single-page format due to space. The eye traverses lazily through the opening shot, playfully diverted by the separate-perspective point cobblestone. A vague sense of futurist Europe somewhere (in fact half-way inspired by Stockholm and Thesaloniki). I never understood why the near future needs to be all SUPERPIPES AND FLYING CARS... well, the flying cars I can understand, what I don't see is why when the 'FUTURE' is here, everything old is to be immediately discarded. So I didn't. This comic might take place in the future sometime but I still left in streetlights and free press vending machines and the tired stones of an 'old city center'.

Furthermore, as before, I do not treat the abilities a robot very much like a robot... somewhat half-way. He has an internal clock... but he has to roll up his sleeve to know what time it is, heh. I like that middle space between magical realism and just flat out nonsensicalness. I'll get Ptoing at the end of the comic to talk about his color choices and such. Let's look at the black and white one as well:



First of all I made the mistake of inking this on hard bristol board (because that is what I took with me in Germany. I am really ghetto as far as tools and means go, as I've mentioned before). So all the lines I've put down are with generally bigger tipped markers than I enjoy just so I didn't get lots of break up. It turned out to befit the color a lot more than my usual more flimsy lines.

Note on panel 3 and 4 how I use guiding arrows to help the reader along. Most experimental comic artists would scoff at such'medium breaking immersion' tricks as naive but I kinda like comics going 'hi, we're comics! :D' a little sometimes, if they're kind about it. I could have used some other visual clue as to how to read such a panel configuration (usually with word balloons or the actual things in the panels being drawn in such a way as to visually flow up and then downwards) but I had to juggle a few other considerations that kept me from this. Namely, I wanted the fast motion. I wanted the first two panels to appear to take a considerable amount of time between them but then when he checks the time to see if his date is late (she is, by 8 minutes) I wanted the action to be abrupt. This works by keeping the art in the repeated panel pretty much the same (eye discards same information and just reads the different parts, much faster than the whole scene changing. Combine this effect with small panels and you can have a comic where the reader feels compelled to read 3 panels a second). So the pacing is sloooow and then an abrupt peak, and then again slow on the fifth panel (low shot always seems to take more time than eye-level because the reader has to visualize the pan that got the 'camera' that low, and how it'll also take some time to reposition. We think spatially, like ground animals) and the last two panels are again, fast after that bit of hesitation. These are pretty much cinematography tricks, but hey, comics are a smart medium and should take whatever becomes them from elsewhere without having delusions of being anything they're not. Vague line there but I'll pretend I'm safe from making 'movie comics' for now.

I'll post the next page in 3 days or so. Take the intermediate time to praise Ptoing for his wonderful coloring work.

- Helm


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Oh No, Pornography!

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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Europe After the Rain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Helm
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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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Intergalactic Infidelity

That was the second piece I did for the gig, it was made a couple of days after the first but before I made my pitch to the paper, so both of these were not informed of the proper size of the paper's... uh, paper. From the next piece you'll see me adopt a more 'squareish' aspect ratio for the pages to accommodate for the shape of the printed edition.

I have a soft spot for this one though it also suffers from slight untranslatability. For example in the line about M'nnrgh the dodecapus where Kostas threatens to mop the floor with him... the Greek pun is lost as there's an expression we have that literally translates to 'I will beat him like an octopus'. The expression comes from the common fisherman practice of actually beating an octopus against a wall or floor to soften the tissue up before letting it dry. So that doesn't work, sadly.

Also the Ano Liosia location funny is probably lost to non-greeks. Ano Liosia is a very slummy location in downtown Athens, very dirty and cramped and generally an exhibit of all the worst aspects of urban decay. Not the place where you'd expect a spaceport to be built in the heavily 70's affected future that the comic goes for. The Ano Liosia joke is a recurring one as you'll eventually see. For American audiences one could substitute naturally, for New Jersey and have that joke work.

Which brings me to a small discussion of what I had in mind when I was making these: I had the notion that a many-panel comic such as this shouldn't serve just as support for the end-panel punchline, but that every individual vertical strip of this should be a smaller tiered joke in itself. Hence the octopus pun, the 'he's had his eyes on her' for the Yogsothothian entity and the Ano Liosia pun in the third strip. And yes, these were supposed to be 'so bad that they're good' as puns, heh.

Three years from then I find the actual drawing technique quite weak, but I am happy about the conceptual design. Since then I have made many full-page 'funny comics' and I have not strayed from the 'tiered jokes' approach. It seems a waste of space to do a huge setup for a joke that can essentially be told in 3-4 panels without losing any momentum, so why not actually use every 3-4 panels for a smaller joke that builds the atmosphere cumulatively?

The only panel I like in terms of drawing technique is the cross-hatched distraught spaceman one in the beginning of the third strip. It's a good idea to use ink rendering to express emotion rather than just to convey texture and naturalism.

Again, I am indebted to Johnny for putting in the effort in the lettering, like the 'WIFE WHAT are y--' bit or the shaky 'Heelp'. Believe me, if I were to do the new lettering I'd probably have flaked out and just slapped Comics Sans on these and called it a day.

-Helm

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