My Finest Work to Date

I drew this about five years ago for my sis, The Adventures of Super K, college student by day, crimefighter by night.

This is super funny...

...and comics related, so I'm still on topic:

http://garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com/

i used to watch the garfield cartoon on saturday mornings with my sis. And then the one that took place on a farm afterwards. I don't remember the name of that one. I think the main character was a pig.

Interesting article in the Times this morning about a comic book, called The Search, being used to teach German 8th graders about the Holocaust:

The Anna Frank Haus in the Netherlands put it together by joining a team of experts with Eric Heuvel, a Dutch comic artist, whose previous book about the war in the Netherlands was distributed to 200,000 schoolchildren there. Some 20 classrooms, grades 7 to 10, here in Berlin and in North Rhine-Westphalia, are testing the new book. There are versions in Dutch, German, Hungarian, Polish and English.

“It would not have been possible as a history text 10 years ago,
when people here assumed comics were only for those who couldn’t read properly,” Ms. Harms, from Reprodukt, the comics publisher, said.

The visual style of “The Search” is clear, simple, pastel-colored, in a classic Belgian-Franco comic tradition. “Less is more,” Mr. Heuvel, the artist, said in a recent telephone conversation, acknowledging that he pilfered liberally from Tintin’s inventor, Hergé. “We spent endless hours making sure that the Nazi costumes were kept to a minimum because boys can glorify these things.”

Thomas Heppener, director of the Anne Frank Center in Berlin, said, “There was also a lot of discussion about color.” Black-and-white, he noted, is now a cliché of art and movies about the Holocaust. Color is less melodramatic. “And you know the trees were still green at Auschwitz,” he added.

It’s a bright autumn day in the book when Esther’s parents are rounded up and sent off to die. The comic is more heartbreaking for being understated and cautious about violence. Ruud van der Rol, one of the writers, explained: “There are no piles of bodies, because we knew from experience that this could block children from dealing with the whole subject. Also — and we had endless conversations about this — we decided not to show Hitler as a beast or inhuman because the Nazis, after all, were human beings. That’s the point. Anyone can be a perpetrator or a hero. The choice is yours.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/books/27holocaust.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin

New Stuff

two plates I'm working on:

going for a tourist snap shot sort of thing.

Parc Zoologique

Here's a newsprint proof of the litho I printed yesterday. I colored it in last night with color pencils. Kinda looks like a coloring book picture huh?

Cherry Blossoms

This Is What My Subconscious Looks Like Today

I spent some time yesterday morning going a couple piles of the random things I clip and collect. I found this illustration by Paul Davis that I cut out of some old book I bought in an antique store. (I added the type in the weird space I cut out) I can't find much information about Paul Davis, but I like his folksy style. I wish the colors came up better here, they're very rich.

Kinda cranky and discombobulated today. I spent 5 hours yesterday adding tiny dots to a print until my eyes went funny. After all that I'm looking at it like, eh? it's ok. I haven't made anything I REALLY like in a while and it's making me blue. I'm worried I don't know what I'm trying to say. I suppose you can't force it, but I find myself putting off doing any work.

I guess the best thing to do is just to work through it. So I'm gonna go to the graphics center after closing tonight and have some me time with the press. Sometimes the best stuff I do comes immediately after the stuff that I plan and plan and doesn't work out. Life seems to be a series of happy accidents.

I'd love for this blog to be about the creative process, maybe help me work things out. But my process doesn't really feel like a process and more of a whiplash stop start stop start. Anyway, it's bugging me.

Samurya Jesus

I'm not really into manga, but I saw this in the NY Times today--a manga bible (sorta) by Ajinbayo Akinsiki called Son of God. I had a comic bible (comic as in the drawings, not as in hilarious. I do not really find the Bible hilarious at all) when I was little, but it was much less creepy than this manga bible looks. But I do sorta like the idea of a samurya Jesus.

Here's the article:


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/us/10manga.html?ref=design

Go see this!

An image from Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis based on her graphic novels of the same title.

The drawings in the movie are absolutely beautiful.

All the textured backgrounds are giving me ideas for my own projects--maybe trying charcoal, pastels and paints to get a richer image, especially since shading and crosshatching with a technical pen is not my forte.

In No Particular Order...

Some rough images from Justin and my recent comic project.

A Collage

Pins and Needles

Who's gonna take California??

The End