ZX page 4 : Doubletalk

Again, read the whole sequence from the beginning for proper pacing.

This is chapter 1, done. So far the chapters I've drawn are mostly 3-4 pages each, so it's a good point to recap.

At the discreet mention of several readers, I'll be trying to write more about these pages, even if they're fresh. I will not talk about the storyline directly as I think that can only be achieved when it's over and done, but I will talk about the formalist aspects of making these pages, again. A lot of readers seem to enjoy the talk about how comics work under the hood, and I do also. From the comments of the previous page:

Storytelling is the vital concern here, not for it to be drawn too flashy or for the sequences to be distracting with smart tricks. I spend most of the time thinking how the page flows and about timing. Comics are a brittle medium and when they're broken a lot of people don't realize they are, they just revert to experiencing them not as comics, but as a series of disjointed images. They don't realize why they aren't enjoying the narrative, even though they might think the drawings are good and the story itself is good. The gel that holds everything together in comics is the subjective perception of time and how the artist handles it. A comic first and foremost must have good tempo and sequential interest, the rest is secondary. Yes, even the 'great story' one might have had in mind and his great characters and great plot twists. All these come after.

I realize these are the things people that do not draw as well as others say to rationalize their faults as draftsmen... so be it. There's still truth in that. I never wanted to become a painter or an illustrator.

Also tangentially, I remember talking with a Greek comic artist of great repute (and deservedly so, I'd say) about 5 years ago when I was still an unknown in the Greek comics field and we were discussing this or that (I think it was Andrea Pazienza's work) and he said he hated it and put it as an ultimatum "you don't switch styles in the middle of the story/page". I remember how much I disagreed with that finality then but I couldn't exactly put it to words why (besides that I adore Pazienza's work, personally). His argumentation rested on that style-switching pulls the viewer out of the story and makes them remember they're reading a comic, which was bad, in his opinion.

Let's look at these pages now, years later, and note how often I switch rendering styles (almost from panel to panel, actually) and how little - if at all - it impairs the reader's engagement with the story.

There is an unexplored level in making comics in that area, between style and rendering and storytelling, that not a lot of comic artists have delved into. Most like to find their own style and keep to it for all their time as an artist, fearing both the challenges of communicating the charges of a style switch and possibly how unmarketable a comic is when it doesn't have a stable 'look'. Hopefully nowadays where people are making comics for various other reasons besides selling them to publishers, we'll see more experimentation with altering the viewer perception of the physical on a panel-by-panel basis.

Look at the first panel with the 'many lines form shapes' rendering, think of why I choose to involve the reader emotionally so much with a busy panel of outside a car, and how the next panel inside the car is mostly clear and clean, almost if as if awash with a comforting inner glow: inside the car they feel safe and comfortable, it's their familiar zone. Outside the darkness spreads with the night, a sea of possibilities slithers...

Third panel, 'quasi psycho' is punctuated by the steep darkness to the side of the Marathon Dam because a grim predition it might be.

Fourth panel, watch how words come between the co-protagonists, a light and a darkness faded with the uncertainty of grays. It is almost as if Stephan doesn't surely believe what he's saying there, isn't it? Smaller lettering, a smaller voice, for a small lie? Sideways glance into the wound. Check out how these long horisontal panels that touch the borders of the page seem to take forever, as compared to the short staccato panel where ZX made his statement. ZX is a direct robot.

Centerpiece panel of the girl, this is Stephan's memory viewer, look how the background (of the cafe interior) is skewed like a cubist painting. Isn't memory of places something like that? Do we remember places in perfect geometry, or do we cut and splice infinite times every second, different vantages, different details, trying to keep abreast the core of the memory. Which in this case is Mary.

Last panel is prefaced with a long vertical raster effect, to convey the time it takes for Stephan to reply. When asked difficult questions, Stephan takes some time to reply, but he always does. The terms might not be certain, but he's trying to commit to even them, by at least voicing them.


On other news, I am working on page 11. It goes well. I am a man with a purpose.

Please comment and discuss on the goings on as you desire.

-Helm
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ZX Page 3: Evolutionary Determinism

As per usual, read past pages leading up to the new for momentum.

As I post page 3, I have drawn up to page 8. It goes well. I will make a post about the process that I'm keeping to while I make my first seriously long-running comic, but it'll be some time from now.

Strangely I don't feel I have as much to say about these pages right now as I used to about my older pages, mainly because there hasn't passed enough time since the moment of creation and of presentation. These are hot out of the oven as it were, and I'm as excited as I am optimistic. Nervous too.

What is and what seems to be, disambiguation (perhaps) as the Mondays pass us by.

Helm
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ZX Page 2 : A Friendly Robot Ear

Here we start to meet two thirds of the main cast a bit more up close and personal. It is useful to have the ability to produce holograms from the palms of your hands when trying to convey highly specific stereotypes. Perks of being a robot, I guess.

I generally suggest that every Monday when I post a new page, you read the last few pages again so you can keep the pacing of the comic in mind.

Feedback is greatly encouraged, as always.

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ZX : Start Here.

This strip has a peculiar history. It was a test strip I did for a paper that wanted to hire me (which never called back, hah!) and it would be one in a series of human interest cartoons without any overt continuity.

Its origin is hilarious (well, to me at least). I was browsing Mangatraders and reading the synopses of the series. This has been a pass-time for two reasons. Besides finding new manga to read, I just tend to find the synopses really hilarious. This strip is an improvisation on the synopsis of Caramel Milk Tea, which I never plan to read.

"Nozomi, a high school student, did not believe in love at first sight. But it happens that she is in love with a cafe clerk. Immediately she declares love to him. But because he gives her the cold shoulder, she is disappointed in love. Now she begins to work part-time for the cafe where he is working."

It just cracks me up. Anyway, as you can see I've been mostly faithful to that script, though my Mary isn't a high-school student, more college age I think.

The interestingness about this strip happened after I drew it and showed it around, though. A few people liked it, some were kinda confused about what there was to like in it (which I suspect might be why I never heard back from the paper, heh) and a few were all 'well... what happens next?' which I really didn't expect but I suppose I should have, given how it's a synopsis of a manga that actually had a continuation after the opening premise. I took it just as a study in absurd determination but here's what happened next... as the days passed (and I waited to hear from the paper) I started to visualize my own continuation to the strip. After giving up on the paper, and due to a beneficial synchronous discussion about what I want to do in the future with comics with a close friend, Basilis Sakkos, I decided to actually draw 'what happens next'.

What happens next will not be a series of 3 or 4 panel strips each, they'll be full pages which is my preferred format. However it will be a long story (I estimate about 50 pages) and there will be left turns in both pacing and methods used to achieve what I want to do. I've effectively turned a simple quasi-funny comic strip into the launching pad for a story that is very important to me and which I had hesitated to commit to for the last 2-3 years, although I've been constantly thinking about it. I now have the means and I have the desire to see it through. I know that I do because I've already drawn the next 4 pages that come after this strip you see, within the timespan of two weeks.

So, readers and humans. Every Monday you can look forward to the posting of a new page. I intend to create two pages a week and post one a week. If I ever fall behind, I will never do so worse than one page a week, so you may rest assured that I will meet the relevant deadline. Given that I am shooting for (but might deviate from) a 48-50 page story, the next year on this blog will be populated with the story of ZX, I hope you look forward to it as much as I do.


P.S. I might get Johnny to do a pleasant redesign - mainly recoloring - of the blog soon. Don't be shocked when you come here and it looks nothing like it did before!



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Excuse the downtime.

ZX painting by my good friend Graham Lackey.

I almost got a job doing comic strips at a paper and then didn't and I was waiting to post good news and now I can't. Disheartening, so that's why I haven't touched the blog for a while. After the jump there is the alter apars, though. Might want to click if you're the optimist type. Otherwise this blog post is half-empty.

The good news is that... I have started... a long-format comic. I am on page 3. I will start posting on the blog when I have 5 pages. I aim for 2 pages per week drawn and one page per week posted on the blog - so I have extra pages for when I have to take vacations and whatever, the summer is coming up.

The method I am using for this comic is new to me and it has me excited and working - almost like a professional artist, although I'm not being paid, what strangeness. So please be patient a bit further and then this blog will get its official second wind. I might redesign the blog a bit, also.

I am not abandoning 'small shames' at all however, they are to be incorporated in the bigger project, actually. The art in this blog post is a hint as to what the bigger project will be about.

Expect wonderful things.

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Mandy

Below the jump we will discuss old paradigms of adventure gaming and even older computer hardware, attempt to update a decidedly botched portrait and pry underneath it, at the concealed humanity of it all.



Before your PC could show you thousands, or millions of colors on the screen at the same time, it could only show you 256 colors. Some of you remember that technology having the name of 'VGA'. Some even older computer users that are reading this remember that before the VGA 256 indexed colors on screen, we had even less on personal computers (at that ancient time called 'IBM compatibles'). We had 16 colors on screen maximum on an adapter called EGA. Let's not get bogged down in the technical details of why and how, just setting a scene here.

Those 16 colors, most of them very garishly saturated and bright were not initially selected by the hardware designers with video-games in mind. They were selected so they could stand out against each other for word-processor and spreadsheet programs for which personal computers were meant to be used. However, like any computer technology the wide public ever got their hands on, they appropriated the machinery for entertainment. EGA was certainly a step up from the older CGA hardware that only allowed 3 colors from a very limited selection on the screen at one time. And even with CGA people attempted detailed graphics on the screen, most to sell computer games. Let's forget about CGA right now though and focus on EGA.

When EGA adapters were relatively novel, there was a flourishing computer game company named Sierra. They effectively had created the genre of graphical adventure games. Games in which the player's reflexes were not taxed but instead they were confronted with curious - and often sadistic - riddles which they were required to solve using collected items together in improbable ways, in order to be rewarded with a storyline, characters and hopefully a degree of pathos . Some of you reading this are more or less familiar with what I'm talking about. For those that the description doesn't spark any memory, perhaps a few pieces of graphic will:









All these games used the EGA palette, as you can see. Middle tones were faked by dithering in a checkerboard pattern between two colors. The effect is really noticeable in our sharp monitors today but back then they were much more inexact and blurry, there was a lot of pixel color bleed that they took advantage of to fake the appearance of so many as 64 distinct colors. In essence these games looked a bit more realistic back then, at the expense of crispness and sharpness. I prefer to see the dither patterns, personally, there's something charming about what they're attempting and the separate effect they're achieving in sharp monitors, which is of a curious grainy texture where pixels never let you forget they're pixels.

I grew up with these games and their art style informed everything from the stylization in my own comics, to the mostly calm 1-point perspective camera angles I use down to my selection of color. Furthermore besides a comic artist I am - perhaps it's fair even to say predominantly - a pixel artist. I draw graphics in restricted modes with few colors, preselected palettes like this EGA one or even more restricted ones, I revel in the power of the single pixel and the perfectly formed pixel cluster. My passion for this sort of odd digital art is difficult to explain to laymen, so excuse me if I don't go out of my way right now, the purpose of this article is different.

I help run Pixelation which is a critique art message board specifically geared towards helping people learn the craft of pixels so that they can help themselves discover the artistry of them also. At Pixelation, it is common for a person trying to help to edit the work of another for purposes of demonstration and for a visual aid in explaining what could be fixed and how. The edits are not taken by the original artist as they are and used, they are encouraged to use the edit as a reference point and help themselves to better their original version. An edit by a kind-hearted peer is the most useful piece of constructive critique an artist can get. I owe the few things I've accomplished as an artist to being exposed to the internet critique community and especially Pixelation almost 7... 8 years ago, as a teenager then. A very crucial age for getting your head out of your ass. It helped me swallow my pride and forget my rationalizations for when I made mistakes and just roll up my sleeves and get better by iterating my artwork, getting critique, doing it again until I was happy and the people that helped me ran out of 'crits' (which is lingo for pieces of critique). I'm not as reliant to nitpick critique today as I was then because I aim at more holistic effects with my artwork as a 25 year old than then as a 15 year old, but to get from there to here my bible scripture was CRITIQUE.

We're going to do a bit of critique on the blog today, I hope the readers that were hoping for a comic will not mind. I think the analytical process will be fascinating for most of you if you give it a chance however. I will spare you the really technical jargon, instead we'll be looking at the aesthetic aspect of a picture that belongs to one of these old Sierra EGA Adventure Games. Here it is:



This image belongs to the game 'Codename : Iceman'. It is one of the lesser known titles that even those of you familiar with Sierra Adventure Games might not be familiar with. You can see how it plays here. Please for the purposes of this text, do take 30 minutes out of your time and watch the first few episodes of that play-through on youtube. Especially the third one (I think) which features the girl above. If you haven't played a Sierra adventure game before it will give you a familiarity with both the mechanics and aesthetics of the games of that era. It might not be a terribly good game but it does convey these things successfully.

I tend to find the art in it very hit and miss. I think a couple of my favorite Sierra graphic artists worked on some backgrounds and sprites in Iceman (the same that made the top image from the selection of game shots above, with the tree. That's from Quest for Glory, my favorite computer game on the whole). Some of the art is of a high caliber. Other bits really are not, like the image right above which we'll be dissecting.

I'd like to mention here that this dissection is not meant with any disrespect for the graphic artist that made the original image. There are various considerations that we should take into account that would explain its various shortcomings, least of which is the possible lack of talent on behalf of the graphician that sat down to do this. Think about how limited the tools were at the time this was made, think of the memory limitations (at the time even using many of your 16 colors at the same image meant it took more memory), think about the time pressure to get it done and move on to the next asset in a decidedly graphics-heavy Sierra adventure game. I do not intend to mock the artist for his bad image, I sympathize very much. The purpose of the edit I am going to attempt below is to reach the potential inherent in the image and then discuss that potential in earnest. Furthermore, my edit doesn't invalidate the original because there are other merits in what could be considered a clumsy or ugly image. It could be said that by looking at ugly art people learn the most about themselves.

Let's look at it again and steel ourselves, though.



It's very clear this was an image made from photographic reference, though the end result is probably not very similar to the photo its based on. I would expect that the photo comes out of a fashion or swimsuit catalog in the early 80's. It's not a trace, as there weren't any digitizers at the time, at least affordable to Sierra. Perhaps a tracing grid was used but I doubt it because there's some extremely odd eyeballing mistakes like the thickness of the neck that could only be explained by using a very wide grid.

The image was probably made in the background editor in the Sierra SCI interpreter. This means that it wasn't made pixel by pixel. Instead try to think of this like very early and limited vector assembled art. In order to save floppy disk (remember those?) space, full-screen graphics (as opposed to the moving sprites and placed objects in the rooms, which were made pixel by pixel) were made with triangles or straight lines filled with a flat color, or a dithered combination of two colors. What was stored was the trigonometrical data of how the engine would recreate these vector graphics on the fly, when you entered a new room. Some explanations here(scroll at the bottom and check how this emulator is reusing the vector point data from the games to rebuild the graphics at a higher resolution than the intended one). As any of you with an inclination towards understanding technology would have guessed, it's much handier to store and compress basic math procedures that set up a room than it is to store the 8-bit color value of every pixel in a 320x200 screen (that's 64,000 pixels on every screen, folks). The drawback is that the background image pixel art, *as* pixel art, is unrefined, geometric and little attention is paid on the pixel level, which is after all where the magic happens.

Look at the image again with this knowledge. The strands of hair are line-tool straight lines, no attempt is made to use intermediate colors in the 16 color set palette to smooth them towards the black. The shadows are either flat triangles of brown on top of the lighter (and pretty garish) skin color, of they're triangles made of 50% dither of these two colors. This image was made with vectors, it was made fast and then the artist moved on on whatever else he had to do that 12 hour crunch day.

To put this in context here's some women from the Leisure Suit Larry series:


This is vector mode too.



As is this. The artist took the time and care to place single pixel level detail in the speculars. All of these are photo referenced but you can't underestimate the craftsmanship here now that you understand the tools involved



Scenery is vector mode, girl standing in awkward sports illustrated pose in front is sprite mode, because she animates. You can spot sprites in Sierra screens of that time as opposed to vectors because they animate, because there's usually little to no dithering on them and because there's a lot of single pixels placed on them, most of the time.

As we can see the tools, though difficult to work through do not mean the art has to necessary look like the girl from Iceman (let's call her Mandy for now). So back to our image:



There's so much wrong here and EGA so underused it has been crying out for a revamp by a pixel artist with more time on his hands than the Sierra artist had for a while now. So I went ahead and edited this extensively, first for anatomy, then for color usage and finally for characterization and ambience. Keep in mind I worked pixel by pixel and not in any fake-vector-mode so this image would have a hefty memory cost in an original Sierra game of the time. Whether that would be worth it or not is up to the developer's discretion.



I stress that I am not using hardware capacities they didn't have available at the time in my edit. This is the exact same palette, only I'm using all 16 colors and dithering and mixing as required.

In the process of touching this up I started to wonder about the story involved in the making of this as I'm given to being a comics artist and all. The game Codename: Iceman is a pretty base experience of being a secret agent, perhaps a bit on the pedantic side, not so much James Bond as you'd expect. The atmosphere it's going for is that late eighties Tom Clancy cold-war zeitgeist. Shallowly thrilling and action-oriented while deeply puritan and conservative, not to mention completely politically hypochondriac, bankrupted by the internal pressures of the paranoid cold war-game that was going on at the time.

As such the game plays out in a very telling two-scene format. At first you're just relaxing at your vacation, you play volleyball, you swim, you dance with and then sex up this girl that hits on you (that's our Mandy right there) who COVERTLY SLIPS YOU A MICROFILM IN HER EARRING. Then it's all spy thriller baby. You suit up, pump up and go pilot a submarine around the world trying to rescue a president US ambassador from some vaguely defined terrorists. It's worth watching the play-through linked about in youtube just to follow the zeitgeist.

This woman, Mandy, then, is completely disposable not only insomuch that our protagonist has sex with her and then never sees her again but in that she's explained away as a secret agent, herself playing you with the microfilm business. No awkwardness there, man. It's all part of The Great Game. Anything potentially human and ambiguous is swept under the rug for cold war certainties and decisive-action-or-people-die.

Then I thought of the woman the Sierra artist was copying off of from. A model, probably, from a fashion or swimsuit magazine. I thought about how her smile is stilted and how her eyes are tired, how she probably had to hold that pose for minutes until some fashion photographer extracted the desired amount of misanthropic style out of what is, on her personal time, a human being. I thought of these things as I was editing and my piece started to reflect that subconscious process, I started making her eyes deader and I emphasized the kitsch even more than the original in its simplicity did. With the benefit of hindsight, the 80's were a very strange time. The garish EGA palette does kitsch almost natively.

Not only was I done trying to pretty this up (which was the original impulse), I was then actively trying to make it reflect the theoretical humanity in the original photo-shoot that was tossed aside in all this business of making a spy thriller adventure game and getting to the submarine and solving an international crisis. It became about the model and how much she wanted to be done with this gig and go home and eat in front of the television, deeply discontent yet working, working yet deeply discontent.

After I was done with the still image, I decided to go the extra mile and animate some minute aspects of this photo-shoot context in order to satisfy this internal storyline I had by then constructed in my mind.



Look at this for a while. Furthermore, look at a crop of just her eyes:



She isn't smiling. Hold that pose but don't hold that thought, when will this be over? When will he be satisfied? I feel ridiculous but if I accept what I feel then I've wasted my life. What am I doing here?

The header of this entry, before the jump is the frame when she's flashed in the face mid-blink, her eyes closed. It's hot and white outside, but it's a cold, lonely war inside. At that exact moment, I wonder what she was thinking.

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Hey I turned 25 today

Here's a picture of my other cat, Black Thing:



Nothing after the jump.

I LIED! :D :D



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