some new images from Power Out

So I've been happily updating Power Out since I've been here in France. Here are some of my favorite panels so far.

So I went to cartoonist /  friend Lucile Duchemin's African dance class yesterday to do gestural figure drawing with cartoonist / recovering pyromaniac Laure Clémandsaud-Madia. Happy with the results, I filled over 70 pages of my sketchbook!

There's something fantastic about doing quick gestural drawings. I think my favorite part is that you don't have time to think. I'd like to take more time to meditate, but I always make an argument against it - I have work to do, I need to draw! Drawing quickly, and mindfully, in its own way is a kind of meditation.

Here are some results:


It started off with Lucille's beginner's class. This felt easier for drawing, since the motions were slower and more repetitious. You could anticipate the movement better.



For a forty minute break, there were break dancers. They are so hard to draw! They move so fast and there's very little predictability to their movement. There was one guy who had a real slow, in control pop / lock type movement, it was fun to watch.




 

Laure made it into this sketch

The last class was an advanced African dance class. Everyone was moving much faster! Very difficult, but their were some great gestures.



 

If you're on facebook, you can check out the whole album here.

Health Care Reform!



The book I completed with Jon Gruber - Health Care Reform: What it is, Why it's Necessary, How it Works - has been out for almost a month now, but today is an especially important day because Jon Gruber - the MIT Economist who authored the Massachusetts health care plan and advised Obama and congress on the national Affordable Care Act - is delivering a speech at the progressive think Tank Center for American Progress about our book. Accompanying that speech is a three minute animated primer for the book - featuring illustrations by me! It's pretty cool - check it out here:

A few notes on the book - I've heard some criticism that the book is too "pro" health care reform. This criticism is kind of silly, though - of COURSE the book is pro health care reform, it is written by the person who authored the bill! My personal opinion is that we need a more integrated solution, something that takes advantage of the size of our population and the risk pooling that size allows, similar to what we do for veterans. But Gruber acknowledges the political realities in the book, explaining exactly why the bill is constructed the way it is.

I need to make a quick shout-out to someone important - I didn't do all of the art chores on this book alone. While I may have thumbnailed  and penciled the book, I only inked a portion of it. Blue Delliquanti helped immensely with inking, the backgrounds in particular, and I couldn't have met the books slightly ridiculous deadline (145 pages from script to finish in 4+ months) without her help. She is a rising star in comics - keep an eye out for her.

New Pages at MTV

So you might already know that Power Out is being serialized on MTV Geek. New updates happen every Thursday. I've made a lot of changes to the book, and you start seeing new pages in this update. In fact; I think somethinig like the next 40 of 42 pages are entirely new material.


I'm a little nervous because I'm certain some people won't love the changes. I even took out a couple of scenes I really liked. Broadly though, I think it's a big improvement, particularly when taken as a whole.

You can read this interview I did with MTV last week that explains the changes, I think it's one of the better, if not the best; interviews I've done.





In this update you start to see one of the bigger developments with this update: Justin and Carrie's relationship. Through all my edits, I began realizing that this was the book, that Carrie's letters were the times in the book where everything really seemed to crystallize. The framework of the relationship is the same, but there's just more tension and tenderness.

Am I the Rob Liefeld of Indie Comics?

Do comics have to look good? Does that matter to anyone?

I've been having a bit of a comics-conscience-crisis of late. This was sparked by a lot of things - my studio-mate Julie Maroh's brilliant looking holiday card, seeing the aisles and aisles of gorgeous french comics at Chapitre, and reading an American indy comic - I'm chicken shit and am not going to say which one - that was so impossible to look at that I gave up three pages in.

Julie Maroh's work is undeniably stunning

I started wondering whether art really mattered at all. I found a review of Dash Shaw's massive Bottomless Belly Button - and this was just a customer review on Amazon - that said that readers needed to meet the comic at it's own terms.

What other medium could you ever possibly read something like this? Music? Definitely not fiction ("you have to meet the style / prose / language at its own terms????) Perhaps movies, but only when describing a fun piece of junk.

So, if art is graded on a curve in a comic, what universal standards of quality are there? Storytelling? Characterization? I also read a glowing review of a different indy book from a prominent critic that, as an aside towards the end of the review, said the characters were two-dimensional.

I'm worried these laissez-faire standards will push comics further into the ascending colon of the art world. Maybe there's nothing wrong with this - I don't know. I can't help but have a lot of skepticism about the art world's relationship with comics - when somebody sells a single issue for $40,000, maybe I will change my mind.

A Dash Shaw piece where he adapts an episode of the reality TV show Blind Date. If this type of high-concept work is what critic Tom Spurgeon calls "The Future of the Comics" I'm not sure where my role is.

And maybe it's my own snobbery. I don't know how people can read a long, bad-looking comic. I just give up after a few pages - my eyes get tired.

And hey, I understand that standards of beauty vary, but to me it's obvious when there is genuine craft involved - you get absorbed in the world, it becomes believable, and the characters and story are free to really "live" in the reader's mind.  And I'm not talking about classical standards of beauty. It doesn't need to be a complex, or highly detailed, or even elegant style. It just has to have a style. Box Brown, James Kochalka, and Kevin Huizenga are quite capable artists that nobody is going to confuse with Moebius, but their work is visually harmonious and appealing. Through the power of their pictures, I can connect with their stories.

Great work from Ganges

So who's a bad comics artist? Well in this world of relativisms, one thing that's absolute is that Rob Liefeld is terrible - or at least, it's ok to say Rob Liefeld is terrible.

When I was 13 this was the most awesome thing ever, and I can still see it's charm.

Rob Liefeld is THE touchstone of bad art in comics culture. It isn't just superhero comics fans that bash Liefeld, it's the indy folks - maybe even especially the indy folks. But why? I really don't know. Is it because we have to meet superhero artwork on different terms? Is there any indy style that is trite, or cliched? Does my own work, which draws more than a few things from Clowes, fall into that cliche? Am I the Rob Liefeld of indy comics?

Is there any connection between our elevation of contemporary artists who's art we have to meet on their own terms and these massive, gorgeous, expensive omnibuses of super-talented and totally-deceased artists like Schultz / Barks / Ketcham? Or is it just cheaper to print these books after the artists are dead?

Anyway, enough indignant ranting. Power Out goes live tomorrow on MTV Geek. New stuff! I will be talking about it tomorrow.

Power On?

So some (I hope many) of you might be asking - what ever happened to Power Out?

I was working on the book earnestly in the beginning of the year when a golden opportunity landed in my lap - illustrating Jon Gruber's book on Health Care reform. Paid jobs in comics are rare rare rare, so I put Power Out aside and spend the summer working on Health Care Reform.  I wasn't sure when / how I would return to Power Out - I certainly wasn't making any money off of it (or I should say, what little money I made didn't cover the costs of printing the books) and unless I was prepared to live in my parents' basement for an extended period I wasn't sure when I'd get the book done.

But extremely talented cartoonist / journalist Sarah Glidden encouraged others to apply to a program she was doing in Angoulême called La Maison des Auteurs. I didn't think I would get it but hey, now I'm in France, working alongside some of the most talented cartoonists I've met, finishing up Power Out. And just my luck, mtv.com/geek is serializing Power Out in January, just to add a little more of a kick in the pants to finish it promptly.

This was a fun commission

You may have noticed I've tinkered with Power Out quite a bit - perhaps too much for some folks' tastes. There was a point when I was working on it in 2010 when I realized the story had gotten away from me, I couldn't really say what it was about with ease, and there was no bridge to the ending I envisioned. I hired Tucker Stone - a guy who's perspective on comics is consistently spot-on - to edit what I had and try to make a more focused work. I love what we came up with, even if it meant I'd have to go back and rework a huge chunk of the first two chapters. It's stronger work now, and I owe a great deal of that to Tucker.

So what's going to change? I'd certainly say there's more character development with Justin. He had a tough line to walk originally - he was a unique character but also served something as a cipher, which is a bit discordant. Now he's got harder edges, and since it's a little more clear why he's the way he is, I'm hoping he will actually be easier to identify with, if not someone the reader can substitute themselves for. Carrie plays a larger role, particularly in the beginning which makes sense because she plays a more important role in the end. Most importantly, the central theme of the book - the pleasures and perils of relationships, and the danger of disconnecting (Justin) or engaging too wholeheartedly (Carrie) is clearer while not quite being on the nose.

Anyways, I'll be pimping this come January, along with Health Care Reform. Yay. I kind of hate self-promotion while understanding how important it is. But I hope you like revisiting Power Out along with me, and please don't hate the changes too much!

My carte-postale for MDA

So Angoulême is pretty great so far.  Still getting comfortable (and working off jet-lag). My french still sucks, but hopefully I'll get better fast. I've met a lot of very cool and exceptionally talented artists. And I mean a LOT - there's tons of cartoonists and animators here. I'm going to start working on Power Out again tomorrow, but figure I'd post some pictures of where this all is going to happen.


La Maison des Auteurs (MDA) where I'm working. It's a pretty amazing facility, and I'm sure I'll have more photos of the interior soon. Very talented people work here.



I live above a tattoo parlor a block from the MDA. I have no idea how old the building I'm living in is, but I'd be shocked if it wasn't at least 400 years old.



Here's the staircase leading up to my apartment. It gets really dark at night, and there's lights but since it's France and they don't waste electricity, you turn on the light and then you have only like ten seconds till it's pitch black again. I'm afraid I'm going to completely eat it running down the stairs at some point.



This is the square in front of MDA. They used to impale people here in the middle ages.



this is the Hôtel de Ville, or olde city hall as Americans would call it.