Feel a little ill tonight - I've been undereating lately, and overcompensated tonight. Ugh.
This is right in the middle of the longest stretch of the book without dialogue - maybe 25 pages? - and has more than one surreal turn. The end of the book - which is the next part - gets a little apocalyptic. Gotta finish this up soon, though, I'm already well past 100 pages.
Met up with Paul Karasik on Friday so he could add his signature to Mazzucchelli's on my copy of City of Glass, which is in my humble opinion the best comic ever made. Karasik had some interesting comments on my artwork - I gave him a copy of the The Glacier which he initially told me looked great but when I showed him my roughs for Power Out he seemed much more impressed.
Paul was at the book store representing the Center for Cartoon Studies with a students Sean Ford and Alex Kim, and I voiced a concern about the computer facilities there, which simply put, are sub-par for an MFA program. Karasik then contributed the improvement in my artwork to its non-digital method of creation, claiming that computers were robbing my work of vitality.
I was skeptical - after all, roughs nearly ALWAYS have more energy than finished work which requires far more consistency, detail, and the demands of reproduction. But then I looked at a comparison between a page from Consumed, which I inked with a brush, and a page from the Glacier, and it does seem that there's something "magic" that the brush brings. This page feels like it has a lot of life in it, but it makes me wonder if I inked it with a brush whether it would have even more. Using a computer is very efficient, which is vital when making time consuming work like comics. Still, there are advantages to using a brush, too, not least of which is that you can display (and sell) your finished artwork a lot easier. A lot to consider after I finish the roughs and I figure out how I want the book to look.
On an encouraging note, the students told me Jason Lutes would be full-time faculty at the school next year. Besides being a great guy who probably gave me the best interview of my life, I've just finished the first installment of Berlin and can say with confidence he's one of the top cartoonists working today.
1 comment:
Interesting comments... His take could well be true, but I wonder how much is also due to a "tradition versus suspicious new technique" way of thinking. After all, graphic artists deserve economic parity as much as anyone, and if the computer allows you to earn extra time and hence extra $, the notion of purity might be elitist...
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