Funny Misshapen Obstruction

Once again I put my comics students through the obstruction exercise - inspired by Lars Von Trier's film The Five Obstructions, I had students re-draw a comic of theirs with some restriction specific to them. These included not using panel borders, using different materials than they normally do and limiting dialogue or text. I felt it would be only fair that they be able to give me obstructions as well. They chose to have me draw with a panel layout that wasn't a grid, use animals not people, use pastels and draw it big. They also tried to get me to draw more cars but I nixed that one. I chose to redraw this two page sequence from Funny Misshapen Body, and started out by thumbnailing a non-grid layout of how I could re-draw the pages.


I wasn't going to go buy pastels just for this, so I used colored pencils, and drew on some standard issue Dark Horse comic art board. I didn't have a lot of time to work on it, but I think it turned out okay, and more importantly it was interesting to get outside my normal comfort zone. I don't think working like this would work for me in general, and the effect of having an entire book of pages like this wouldn't feel right for my autobiographical comics, but it's something that'll probably sit in the back of my head and be of use somewhere down the road.

Busy

It's been a busy two months, most of which I've spent finishing up the artwork for my next book with Chronicle, which should be out next year for Father's Day. It's been a lot of fun to draw, but I'm glad to have most of the pressure off for it. Meanwhile, I've been teaching a comics class at The School Of The Art Institute Of Chicago again. This past week's exercise was for the students to try and duplicate a panel from a comic, and then re-draw it again in their own styles or without trying to copy directly. I did a quick example of this panel from Uncanny X-Men #192.

Drawing On Comics Week Eight

Week Eight's exercise came after watching the Lars Von Trier film The Five Obstructions. I gave the students each two "obstructions" which they had to follow while re-drawing their midterm comic stories. To let them have their revenge on me, I let them give me obstructions. They chose to have me re-draw Be A Man with no text, no characters and no panels. I picked seven pages and the cover to re-draw, making a little minicomic I handed back to them the following week. Here's one of the obstructed pages.
In other news, the new issue of Filter magazine features a full spread and spot illustrations by myself for an article titled "Televisionaries," about kid's TV shows like Yo Gabba Gabba, Pee Wee's Playhouse and Fraggle Rock. And if you missed it coming out at your local comics shop a couple weeks ago, Marvel's Strange Tales Vol. 2 #2 included a four page X-Men story I wrote and drew. I'm taking baby steps toward fulfilling my childhood dream of being the regular penciller on Uncanny X-Men.

Drawing On Comics Week Five

For this week's class I wanted to get the students thinking about how they balance text and image, how they spread out dialogue and how they use narration. The exercise I came up with was to have the students adapt an excerpt of prose into comics form. In retrospect I maybe should've provided the prose to be used, but even with all the different texts being adapted, it was still a good way to investigate these issues. Here's the example I brought, from my cover artwork for the Penguin Graphic Classics Edition of Ethan Frome. I'd probably tackle this adaptation much differently now if I was doing it over.

Drawing On Comics Week Four

Borrowing from the inestimable Ivan Brunetti, this week's first exercise in class was to draw as many comic/cartoon characters from memory as they could in fifteen minutes. Here's my relatively weak results. It's a fun exercise but harder than I expected, and the idea here was to show how characters can be recognizable even when they aren't reproduced exactly, and how in comics the visual image of a character is such an important part of who a character is, as well as how characters can accumulate baggage over time. The second exercise was to draw a comic developing a character using as many of these methods of revealing character as possible (I'd come up with most of these before class, but the students actually added a couple I hadn't specified):
1. General Appearance (costuming, facial features, etc)
2. Facial Expressions (Batman always seems to be scowling)
3. Mannerisms (body language, like Beatle Bailey's slouch)
4. Narration (usually third person, but not necessarily)
5. Dialogue (how the character speaks, like Rogues southern drawl)
6. Lettering (an alien's speech might be lettered differently)
7. Thought Bubbles
8. Actions (the character's behavior)
9. Reactions/Interaction (how the character responds to environment or other characters)
10. Reactions of other characters (how other characters respond to a character)
11. Coloring (Asterios Polyp is a good example of this)
12. Framing (how a character is framed within a panel, the adults in Peanuts being shown waist down, for example)
13. Style/line quality (how a character is drawn can make a big difference)

Drawing On Comics Week Three

For week three's exercise in my comics class I had the students re-draw panels from comics, first trying to replicate it exactly, and then switching up materials and styles. The idea was to get the students to think about how materials are related to style, and how style can affect content. For an example I tried redrawing some John Romita Jr panels from Uncanny X-Men #192, but after trying to replicate the panel accurately a couple times I had a hard time changing styles much. Fortunately the students did a much better job at that than I did.

Drawing On Comics Week Two

In my first class, I had the students work on six panel, one page jam comics; the twist was that each one had a title already, and the students had to make the completed comic fit that title. This worked to varying degrees, as the usual inherent non-sequitur quality of jam comics kept taking over. For week two, I talked about pacing and time in comics, and drew twelve one panel comics. Students had to pick one and draw their own version of it. Next they redrew it as a two panel comic, and then as a three panel comic, and then a four panel comic, without adding or taking out any significant information. Next they would draw it as a single page, and then as two full pages, without the strict expectation of not adding anything. I tried to make each original single panel something that could be expanded out fairly easily, but still have it where the ideal number of panels could vary. The idea was for the students to think closely about how to breakdown their comics, and get a sense of how varying the number of panels and splitting up information can affect how the comic reads.

First Day Of School

Tomorrow's my first day of school. I'll be teaching "Drawing On Comics" at The School Of The Art Institute, where I got my MFA eight years ago. The usual instructor, Christa Donner, isn't able to teach the class this semester, so when they asked me if I could take over I said why not. I have to admit I'm a bit nervous, never having taught before, but it should be fun and interesting. Fortunately I've received a lot of helpful words from fellow SAIC instructor and Top Shelf cartoonist Jeremy Tinder. Here's the cover to my syllabus, a 16 page zine I'm putting together.