Satisfactory Comics

Doodle Penance: "create your own supper character"

2009-07-12T18:06:00.007-04:00

This week's Doodle Penance is a little rushed on my end, because I've already got a lot to do today, and I wasted a bunch of time this morning reading reviews on The A.V. Club for no reason.

Someone came to our site this week looking for "create your own supper character."

I didn't have time to ink or color this week, but I'm sure you can see where I was going with this.

Click to enlarge, if you must. It's what it looks like: Poultry Man, Greens Lantern, and Bread Tornado.

Mike? What have you got this week?

—Also drawn in haste, but with love; this week, I have a culinary homage to Bryan Lee O'Malley: Knives Chow.

Bonus Partyka Notebook Doodle

2009-07-06T13:53:00.010-04:00

Judging from the rockets' red glare, the month of June must be over, which means our stint as guest artists on the Partyka website has come to a close. We're followed, over there, by the awesome stylings of Chadwick Whitehead. And while the "Daily Drawing" feature remains a splendid place to pause in your web perambulations, if you want to see us there, that boat has sailed.

We managed to color one set of lecture doodles that didn't make it into the "Daily Drawing" rotation. It's from an ICAF conference a few years ago—apparently I was feeling doodly during some of the presentations.

Mike did a nice job with those various odd elements, and since we're not constrained by Partyka's dimensions here on the blog, I thought I'd give you a few close-up views, as an extra bonus. As usual, the details raise more questions than they answer.

Isn't he adorable? Is that the real Batman, hit with a reverse-aging ray, or is it just a kid dressed for Halloween?

How did Puny Hulk get up a tree? Why isn't he beefier? Would Hostess Fruit Pies lure him down?

What was I listening to? Why was I so fed up? Wasn't I learning something anyway? Is that supposed to be some mutated version of Kirby's Mokkari? Does a yellow Apokoliptian turn red when he's angry? Or does that furiouth faith jutht thuggetht a thith?

doodle Penance: "model sheets beard"

2009-07-05T12:28:00.008-04:00

This week's "Doodle Penance" comes from someone who reached our website looking for "model sheets beard."

I'm sure that this anonymous googler would have had more luck clicking over to Jon Dyer's beardstyles chart, or his Quest for Every Beard Type. But we here at Satisfactory Comics try to provide a service, so we're going to provide some doodles of beards today.

In the past, there has been some conversation about which comics characters have the best beards. My intent here is not to provide criticism or evaluation—Indeed, I haven't even mentioned the best beard in comics—but merely to display a small gallery of styles. My gallery here is limited more by my own doodling time than by the range of possibilities.

Here we see a couple of fine beards from Fantastic Four, around issue 48 or 49.

Here are a couple of fairly obscure 1960s Marvel villains with excellent and distinctive facial hair.

And here are a couple of comics characters who just let the whole beard grow.

One's dour, and one's beery, but they worship similar old gods.

The other thing I ought to use this Doodle Penance for is to give Mike, once and for all, a model sheet for my own beard, since he can't seem to remember how it works. He's not the only one. I had a conversation (by email) with a cartoonist friend who said he'd never seen my beard, even though we've met up at least five or six times since I started wearing a beard two and a half years ago.

For the record, this is how it grows out of my head.

Mike, what have you got this week?

—Isaac, I have doodles of six different beard styles. Most of these are absent from Jon Dyer's chart in the precise forms shown here, though there are similar styles, to be sure. We start with a style that I have often wished to see on modern faces but which I have thus far seen only in ancient statuary and hieroglyphics: the Pharaoh.

Next, a style whose variants were sported by such well-known figures as Whitman, Tolstoy, and, especially, Marx: the nineteenth-century intellectual.

Next, a style that would not be entirely out of place in the cartoon world of Gustave Verbeek's Upside Downs, though it misses the point somewhat in looking the same whether upright or topsy-turvy: the symmetry.
Then we have a "style" that might better be described as a disorder, and which might well be worn by one of Grant Morrison's pirates of Manhattan (from Seven Soldiers of Victory). Alongside Nobeard and Allbeard, there'd be this guy—but what would you call him? His beard style is called the negative.
This penultimate style is based on a description I heard of a linguistics professor whom, sadly, I never saw with my own eyes. "Forked red beard" is what I was told, in a nutshell. A darker model below portrays the Cambridge linguist.
Last and probably least, we have the Cates, also known as "Mind the gap"—least because, despite its admonishing alias, I failed to recall that there should be a space between the two halves of Isaac's mustache. The beard proper, however, is fairly accurate in this blockish rendering, if the beard may be construed as separate from a detached mustache.
Looking at this erroneous rendering, I can see why Isaac keeps his mustaches divided: there's something shady about that character above, though I can't quite put my finger on it. At any rate, them's my beard models. Further evidence, if any were needed, that I have kept clean-shaven as long as my chops have needed razoring.

Kirby Kachina

2009-06-29T23:57:00.003-04:00

Yesterday's "Doodle Penance" post got me so fired up that I didn't stop doodling.

I was looking at those photos of the mini-kachina statues* and couldn't keep myself from drawing this.

Tell me you wouldn't subscribe to a comic that starred that guy. Or featured him as a regularly recurring villain.

Let's call him Tokomaq, since "The Living Dynamo" is already taken.

All right, all right...

*I bought the pink-headed one that sort of resembles a dressed-up "Angry Charlie," by the way.

Doodle Penance: "make your own kirby character"

2009-06-28T16:14:00.005-04:00

Today's "Doodle Penance" asks a question similar to one we've answered before. This time, the google query we missed was "make your own kirby character."

I said before that Ed Emberley is probably the first place to stop for these "how to draw" questions, but there's a big gap between Emberley's design sense and Jack Kirby's, so let's try to approach the question of Kirby's character design. It's a huge topic, actually, and looking at Kirby's monster comics will certainly give you a different set of examples from the ones you'd see in The Eternals or The Demon.

But let's try to generalize, working mainly with Kirby's best-known work, in the superhero genre.

Even here, there's more than one type of Kirby character:

(Not pictured: alien legionnaires, terrified bystanders, buxom dames with faces like dinner plates, crusty old guys, eldritch freakouts, etc.)

Let's suppose you're thinking about a heroic character, someone on the periphery of your main tale, but a fellow you could trust with interstellar patrol duty. You're going to need some headgear, and here you have plenty of options.

In general, I try to think of kachina designs when I'm thinking about Kirbyesque design elements.

Good design motifs include raised discs, sunbursts with triangular teeth, branching horns or forks, rectangles the shape of a Pink Pearl eraser, and shiny parts. As ever, spot blacks sell the drawing. Don't be afraid to lay down the ink.

It's tempting to put just as much design insanity into the rest of the costume as you see in the hat. But I think that simplicity is a good rule here. Remember that when you start drawing this guy, there's going to be a lot of bending and folding, and a lot of distortion due to perspective. A simple bodysuit, maybe with a few bold patterns, is what you want here.

So your next step is to start assembling the various parts. Try to keep a design "theme" going: if there are dots or circles in one place, bring them back again elsewhere.

Here's a fellow I came up with, and a hastily colored version of him in a more Kirby-style pose. Anyone have a name for this guy?

Mike, what do you have this week?

—Why, I have my own Kirby character, of course. Like you, I was puzzled at first by the sheer variety of Kirby designs available, but I decided to stick with what I know best, which is Kirby art from the first hundred issues of Fantastic Four as reproduced in cheap black-and-white editions, so here's my quick black-and-white drawing of a would-be Inhuman named Handy:

I worked from a few typical Kirby design principles:

1) Avoid drawing ears where possible.
2) Put the character's initial on the costume, even if character is from outer space or otherwise unlikely to use the Roman alphabet.
3) Hunch 'em up.
4) Shady characters have wide mouths.
5) Squared-off digits.

And since I was thinking of the Inhumans:

6) Exaggerate one trait or physical feature.

The only problem with my choice of exaggerated feature, Handy's hands, is that it's easily mistaken for the extreme foreshortening also typical of Kirby poses. But I assure you that his hands are not meant to be that close to you, the viewer: they're just big-ass hands.

Doodle Penance: "rob rockley"

2009-06-21T15:45:00.007-04:00

We had some pretty good options for Doodle Penance this week, like "comics thesis without tear" (if only that were possible!), "hellboy craig parody," "''matt wiegle' cute," and "where can i get a mickey mouse t-shirt were mickey's face is a skull." Lots to choose from! And somehow we settled on "rob rockley."

I'm fairly sure that the page this anonymous googler landed on was the post in which I showed my sketches of the characters in Tom K's Mapjam story, whom I'm planning to use in my own story for the third round of the Mapjam.

I gave the three characters punlike names, which you'll catch if you read them out loud to a vegan in your grocery store's produce section.

As it happens, I've been thinking about the Mapjam more this week. I've been stealing a few minutes here and there to work out a new script and set of thumbnails for my story, since I've neglected it for almost two years now. I figure that if I draw a little bit on it every day—even if it takes me a month to draw a whole page—I'll have a story ready before the end of the year. Mostly I've been trying to figure out the look of the girl I'm calling Delilah, and her Paw, who doesn't appear in Tom K's story.

But hey, why not do a little pinup of Rob Rockley, the beefiest of the muck deacons?

Mike, can you tell me which cartoonist I was thinking of while I drew this? And what have you got this week?

—Hmm, Isaac, hard to say. That guy looks so much like Tor Johnson...Maybe you were thinking of Eric Powell of The Goon? Nah, that's probably just the overalls...I'm not sure. Sorry.

Anyway, here's my doodle:

In time, I did remember all by myself that "Rob Rockley" was your name for the figure on the far right, with a design by Tom K; but first my mind turned to similar-sounding figures like Rob Riggle (far left) and Bob Rock (middle); so here's a doodle portrait of the three of them joined at the torso, with stalks of raw broccoli in the background. Something about the finished three-headed bust made me think of a family photo, hence the frame and label.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Just a Little Doodle by Tom Motley

2009-06-20T12:30:00.005-04:00

A couple of months ago, our cartoonist pal Tom Motley posted a doodle on his blog that I wanted to color. There was something about the combination of light fantasy and creepy intensity that I wanted to spend another ten minutes with, I guess.

Anyway, Tom said I should go ahead and color it, and this morning, with a few idle minutes to spare, I finally did:

Check out Tom's work, if you haven't. He's one of the good ones.

Doodle Penance: "what do you think of center for cartoon studies"

2009-06-14T12:39:00.008-04:00

As it happens, this week's "Doodle Penance" term is just as appropriate to the events of the week as last week's was. (I promise that I'm not making these up. But I do get to choose from more than a hundred search terms each week, so it's not hard to find something that seems like it'll work.)

As I mentioned in my last post, Mike and I met up on Friday in White River Junction, the home of the Center for Cartoon Studies, and Mike got his first tour of the Schulz Library,* the Colodny Building, and the other facilities of the school. (Thanks again to Robyn Chapman for showing us around!)

And, as it turns out, this week someone came to our blog in a search for "what do you think of center for cartoon studies."

Mike had a really amazing experience in the Schulz Library, which I hope he's planning to blog about when he gets home from vacation. (He took pictures of a rare illustrated book, and I'm going to say no more about that now, except to note that its title is an anagram for the blog.)

Anyway, he was impressed, all around. Mike's reaction to the school can be summed up thus:

(Click to enlarge and read.)

If you haven't read Hicksville, to which Mike is alluding here, it's not too hard to find a used copy, and I hear that Drawn & Quarterly is bringing it back into print (with a gorgeous new cover) next year.

Here's my response to the same Google prompt. (The coloring is a little haphazard, but I was in a hurry this morning.)

If you don't know why I'm being interviewed with a robot, a snowman, and a piece of fruit, then clearly you've never applied to be a student at CCS.

(Thanks in advance to Minty Lewis for not complaining when I totally poached her pineapple.)

*If you're interested, here's a video tour of the Schulz Library, recently uploaded by Chuck McBuck:

At about 2:19 you can see (in the center of the frame) a boxed collection of Tales from the Crypt that I donated to the library, and toward the end of the tour I can see (from the position of Jon Chad's Shortstack and the missing rubber band on Bizarre Love Triangle) that this tour as filmed after Mike and I were there on Friday.

A Storytelling Exercise with Random Brushstrokes

2009-06-12T23:52:00.005-04:00

Last night, Matt Madden described a new and interesting storytelling exercise on his blog.

Since Mike and I were having one of our rare meetups this afternoon (this time, in White River Junction), I thought it'd be fun to try a variation on Matt's exercise. For each of these two short comics exercises, Mike and I passed the page twice: once after we'd drawn the random blots or spot-blacks, then again after we'd drawn images in pencil around the other guy's spot blacks. If we'd had three or more people, we could have run this exercise without passing the paper back to the first person.

For this first one, Mike made the original brushstrokes.

(As usual, you can click any of those images to enlarge it.)

I think my drawings presented some storytelling challenges, in that they didn't really have a consistent "protagonist" or scene—those sunflowers really came out of nowhere. But I also thought it was sort of against the spirit of the exercise to plan a story, and I was trying hard to thwart my own inclinations toward story-building.

This other exercise seems to have turned out as more of a story. The initial blots are mine.

This was a pretty fun exercise to try, and I think Mike and I might do it again some time, just because it's a good limbering-up exercise for comics-making. Our thanks go to Matt Madden for the idea.

Doodle Penance Special: "mocca"

2009-06-09T11:44:00.006-04:00

This week's "Doodle Penance" is late because it had to wait for me to get back from MoCCA. (Don't get me started about the joys of flying out of JFK.) Usually for each week's Doodle Penance we comb through the search terms that led people to our website, find something that hadn't appeared on the site heretofore, and draw it as best we can, to satisfy the searches of subsequent googlers.

This week's search term of choice was "MoCCA."

Given where I was this weekend, I thought I could get some help with this one. Here are some doodles I collected from various cartoonists at MoCCA this weekend, illustrating the search term "MoCCA."

Jesse Reklaw shows us what the crowd looked like for most of the day both Saturday and Sunday. It was a busy show, and the floorplan in the new venue was really good for foot traffic. There really were massive crowds, and a lot of people means a lot of potential sales. I heard from many people that they'd sold a lot of books this year. Jesse had big piles of Ten Thousand Things to Do at the show. I hope he sold a lot of them.

Jon Lewis offers one of the cardinal rules of attending small-press comics shows. When you're walking past someone's table, judge their work, not the desperation in their eyes. Jon had an awesome new book called Cultists of North America, and the Gods Who Regard Them. I'm not sure how you can order copies of that one, but I'll let you know if I find out.

Julia Wertz, our editor for the I Saw You... project, offers one of the key rules for enjoying the MoCCA experience from the cartoonist's side of the table:

Julia was selling new copies of the second volume of Fart Party.

And Scott C. offered a good rule for MoCCA and for life in general: crush your enemies, see them driven before you, etc.

Of course, the most noteworthy thing about this year's MoCCA Festival was the new venue, the 69th Regiment Armory building at Lexington and 25th, which Calvin Wong (whose table was adjacent to ours) characterized as looking something like Thunderdome:

That image, like all of the pictures in this post, can be clicked and enlarged.

One main difference between the Armory building and the Puck Building was the cavernous size of the venue: all of the exhibitors were showing their wares in the same room. But even more notable, from an exhibitor's perspective, was the Armory's total lack of air-conditioning. By mid-day on Saturday, the room was tropically sweltering, and it didn't cool off overnight. The only water fountain in the building was broken, and all of the drink machines sold out before midday on Sunday. It was purgatorial.

Zander Cannon calls it: the place was face-meltingly hot.

Or, as Dennis Pacheco shows, health-threateningly hot.

Damien Jay illustrates a commonly circulated theory, that eventually all the rising sweat would reach the three-story vaulted ceiling, condense, and rain back down as some kind of special nerd oil, anointing us all with New York City's humid benison.

For Alec Longstreth, as usual, MoCCA was all about the comics. Looking closely at his doodle, you can see some of his picks for the most exciting debuts of the show: Julia's new Fart Party volume, the tenth issue of Papercutter, the second volume of The Mourning Star by Kaz Strzepek, Minty Lewis's new collection of P. S. Comics, and Alec's own new Phase 7 #014. They're all excellent books, and I am seriously excited to read the ones I haven't finished yet.

... But for many people, the "buzz book" news of the show was, without a doubt, the early-release copies of David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp
that Pantheon brought to the convention.

The book looks totally incredible, and absolutely worth the wait. If you weren't at the show, pre-order a copy.

When I explained the premise of "Doodle Penance" to some people, they were under the impression for some reason that we deliberately misinterpret the search terms that send people to our site. Of course, nothing could be farther from the truth, but that didn't stop Partyka's Matt Wiegle ...

... who was selling a totally fun new book called Monsters and Condiments.

Our table-neighbor Sam Sharpe wrought a variation on a similar idea, demonstrating that Arabica and Action Comics #1 are two great tastes that don't taste great together. Sam had a new mini at the show, too, These Yams Are Delicious, which Zander Cannon pronounced "the best minicomic of all time," or something along those lines.

I keep using the first-person plural pronouns, and that's because I was sharing a table with a couple of other people: first, Mike's former student Cee-Cee Swalling, who provided this summary of her experience at the show...

The other person behind the table was our friend and oubapian ally Tom Motley, who seemed to get distracted toward the end of the day on Sunday...

(For some reason, Calvin, Sam, and Damien's table seemed to draw a particularly cute crowd. I'm not sure how that works.)

Motley had a new issue of True Fiction called "Made Out of 'Mac,'" and I presume that it may soon be available in his store over at Squidworks. I'll let you know if I hear differently.

For me, in the end, the show was as much about giving away free postcards as it was about selling minicomics. If you came to the site because you picked up one of the postcards I was offering, I hope you'll stick around long enough to see our summer sale, which offers comics delivered cheaply to your door or mailbox.

As for Mike, well, that little piggy stayed home.

Poor Mike! But think of all of the sweating he saved himself! (Seriously, Mike, if you want consolation, read Evan Dorkin's post about the show.)

We're guest artists at PARTYKA this month

2009-06-09T10:55:00.006-04:00

We are honored to be this month's guest artists for the Daily Drawings feature at the website of the Partyka collective, a group of talented and award-winning young artists whose numbers include one of Isaac's former students, Shawn Cheng (The Would-Be Bridegrooms; The Monkey & The Crab), and Shawn's college pal Matt Wiegle (Seven More Days of Not Getting Eaten; Is It Bacon?). You may have seen their drawings of Isaac himself for the postcard announcing his 2008 move to Vermont, but you are hereby urged to see some of their other drawings as well, as featured on the Partyka website or in some of their beautifully rendered comics.

The Partyka site doesn't just showcase the work of its members; for years, now, it has also featured the work of guest artists, fellow travelers in the worlds of comics and drawing. Our contributions this month feature a typically collaborative approach with material that is somewhat more haphazard than usual. Our series of images, called Satisfactory Lecture Doodles, began with a selection of doodles that we absent-mindedly sketched into our various notebooks during classes, conferences, and meetings during grad school and after (which of course meant we had YEARS of material to draw from). Please note that none of these images was intended for later viewing, not even by each other; indeed, I think some of them predate not just our collaborative interest in comics but our very acquaintance. Each of us then sent his own favorite doodles to the other guy to color digitally. The titles of the finished color images reflect the original circumstance of the particular doodle; thus yesterday's drawing, which you might think is called "Terrible Threat!", would appear in the catalogue as "Plenary Lecture."

Keep checking in on the PARTYKA website later this month for further thrilling images such as "Driving Directions" and "Modern American Literature." And for your convenience, here's a glimpse of the first image, the unforgettable "Faculty Meeting":
(You can also check out some later images in the series by clicking the first link in this post, but where's the fun of that?)

PS: And while you're here, don't forget our BIG SUMMER SALE, featuring both comics work and sketchbook projects by this month's Guest Artists at PARTYKA.

I'll Be at MoCCA

2009-06-04T13:04:00.004-04:00

Everyone seems to be announcing their plans, so let me say quickly that I'll be at the MoCCA Festival this weekend. If you didn't already know that, you might not have scrutinized the programming schedule yet. First thing on Saturday, I'll be talking with our friend the comics scholar Charles Hatfield about Jack Kirby's "Technological Sublime." I'm really looking forward to that.

I'm also splitting a table with our friend the cartoonist Tom Motley. There aren't any new Satisfactory Comics publications for this year's MoCCA, but I'll have copies of Satisfactory #7 and #8 with me, plus a lot of promotional postcards that will, I hope, send more people to the site and our big summer sale. We'll be at table 809, all the way across the hall from the main entrance.

As usual, you can expect a photographical report from me within a couple of days of my return to Vermont.

The True Face of Satisfactory Comics

2009-06-04T00:12:00.002-04:00

Behold...and tremble!!!

Some t-shirts temporarily offline

2009-06-02T16:23:00.004-04:00

I've learned that a couple of our images weren't printing well on the Zazzle shirts, so I've taken some of the t-shirts in our Zazzle store offline temporarily. They should be up and running again in a few days.

This guy, however, should look better than ever!

Walt Kelly Demon by SatisfactoryComics

The Ten Doctors by Rich Morris

2009-06-01T22:56:00.006-04:00

Like many a young nerd who watched PBS back in the day, I was once a pre-teen fan of the BBC science-fiction classic Doctor Who, featuring a long-lived, time-traveling alien from Gallifrey, a canny Time Lord known only as the Doctor, who moved through space and time in what looked like a '60s-era British police call box and who could regenerate his body when catastrophe threatened him with death (which coincidentally tended to happen whenever an actor was leaving the title role). So taken was I with the program, and particularly with the seemingly definitive performance of the great Tom Baker as the fourth incarnation of the Doctor, that I briefly took up knitting in order to begin my own version of the fourth Doctor's trademark extra-long scarf (I never finished), and for many years I wore a version of the fourth Doctor's trademark hat (which sadly went up in flames in a car fire during college).

More to the point of this blog, I even made a bunch of Whovian doodles back in the day. Here are some selections from a page full of Fourth Doctors, K-9 robot dogs, and TARDISes I drew in fifth or sixth grade:

I even made a pitiful stab at Chris Ware-style toy construction (long before I ever heard of Chris Ware) with these notes on how to make a model Dalek out of washers, dowel, and a container of Dry Idea deodorant, while the Fourth Doctor himself could be fashioned out of dowels and cotton balls:

Anyway, time travel to my own misspent youth is profitless, especially when I really started this post to shout this joyous news from the laptops: not only has Doctor Who been revived in a successful and entertaining new BBC series—which I think is fantastic—but Rich Morris, Who-fan and cartoonist extraordinaire, has now completed his mammoth feat of comic-strip fanfic, the 247-page magnum opus The Ten Doctors, featuring all ten incarnations (thus far) of the Doctor:

You can read the first nine pages here, and you can download the whole shebang here. I still haven't read the whole thing myself—I've read it off and on since last spring, checking in every now and then to see how much further the story has advanced—but I'm confident that Rich Morris has kept the mix of humor, action, and convincing characterization intact to the end. His cartooning is sharp—sharp enough to make for compulsive reading even though most pages are scanned direct from pencils, with no ink or color—and his caricatures of the various actors are economically recognizable without designy cheating. This story has appealed to fans of both the classic Doctor Who series (1963–1989) and the revived series (2004–present), whether or not they are familiar with all ten iterations of the Doctor (usually termed "regenerations," though that seems off for the First Doctor). If you've enjoyed official BBC Doctor Who adventures, chances are you'll enjoy these, too—and it's one of the only ways you'll ever see ten Doctors together in one story.

Doodle Penance: "manga fleas"

2009-05-31T19:32:00.008-04:00

I'm in a big hurry tonight, so although this week's "Doodle Penance" derives from a search for "manga fleas," I've taken a bit of a shortcut. Figuring that Mike would also be drawing at least one Manga Flea, I have only drawn one Manga Flea myself.

I really don't like drawing in a manga style, and I am not even going to pretend that this is an approximation of any real manga styles. It's really not my bag. Also, I am not much of a caricaturist, so I can't make any claims that this looks like the original.

Mike, I leave it to you to to display and explain your own doodle, per our usual practice.

—Isaac, that could be manga, maybe: it's got huge eyes, spiky hair, and Hello Kittys stuck all over it. It's manga enough.

Me, I decided to go with the bloodsucking variety of flea (though yon bass player showed up on the Google Image search along with the parasite, unsurprisingly). Here's my manga flea:

I had had grandiose ideas about drawing a whole slew of manga fleas in a variety of styles, since I own manga from such diverse artists as Osamu Tezuka, Goseki Kojima, Hajime Ueda, Keiji Nakazawa, and others, but since Isaac told me he had tossed out his doodle really quickly I figured why bother. Now I see that his quick doodle is a lot more elaborate than mine. But mine is at least based on an image from a genuine manga-ka, the great Rumiko Takahashi, because this is the image I flipped to at random when I opened the first book from my big stack of manga, a Japanese original of volume 34 of Urusei Yatsura:
So okay. There's a little genuine manga drawing for you. And since Lum there (cowering in the lower left-hand corner) has cat ears, maybe she has reason to watch out for manga fleas. Mrrrow.

A Link to Click

2009-05-28T22:39:00.004-04:00

Nothing major to report, but here's my review of Beth Ann Fennelly's most recent book, Unmentionables. It's a good book. If the review gets you interested, here's a link to a place where you can buy the book itself.

Designing an Unpleasant Character: Charles

2009-05-28T14:09:00.006-04:00

Over the weekend, when I was working out a design for the "Charles" t-shirts, my first sketch wasn't as good as I wanted it to be. I didn't realize it until I'd inked Charles, but he looked a little too genial, not quite so repellent, as the original Charles whose body language and "default facial expression" made our narrator so uneasy.

Here's my original sketch.

He looks like a pretty homely fellow, but not totally unpleasant. You could imagine that once you got to know him, he'd even be fun to go get pizza and beer with. After a little consultation with a reader, I was able to come up with a second version.

I think you'll agree that this second version seems a lot less pleasant. You'd hardly even want to follow this guy into an elevator. Over the past few days, as I open my notebook, I've been really curious about what makes for this version of Charles seem so much nastier (and truer to the original concept). The basic design is essentially the same, except for the addition of nostrils, and the facial expression isn't very different either.

Setting them side-by-side, I think the clearest difference that emerges is how he's holding his mouth. After that, though, is a subtle matter of his face's shape. The second Charles's face bulges lower than his cheeks. He's jowly. This seems to imply that his face has settled into that expression over years of smirking. The first Charles looks ten years younger, and his higher cheeks suggest that he might smile under different circumstances. (In fact, he looks more like he's smiling.)

Overlapping the two images brings out a few other contrasts:

1. Second Charles (in green) has different body language: his shoulders are much more hunched up, or he's slouching more. Again, that connotes more gravity or more resignation.

2. Second Charles is less symmetrical. His hair is lumpy and off-center; his mouth is held over to one side.

3. Second Charles's eyes are smaller and closer together.

4. The gap between eye and eyebrow is greater on Second Charles, so his facial expression is more extreme. There's no chance that he's playing around here: that's real scorn, slight regard, and contempt.

There was really no question which of these two deserved to be colored and presented on merchandise. Here's to constructive criticism and revision!

...and what She found there by Cee-Cee Swalling

2009-05-26T16:47:00.009-04:00

Unlike Isaac, I have never taught a course in comics-making, though I have occasionally included comics projects as an option within a creative-writing unit in more general literature classes. Well, I gotta kvell: a student who produced a short autobiographical piece for my introductory literature course back in fall 2006 recently completed her BA in Literature with a creative-writing senior capstone thesis, and her medium was the minicomic. So here are a few panels from ...and what She found there, the debut work in comics of Cee-Cee Swalling.

At first, Cee-Cee had thought about adapting Alice in Wonderland into comics. Cee-Cee was in my comics class back in fall 2007 when guest speaker Paul Karasik gave a terrific lecture on various literary adaptations into comics, which included some discussion of the classic MAD adaptation/parody of Alice, and I know Cee-Cee had explored some other prior comics adaptations of Alice as well. Ultimately, though, she chose a different tack: autobiographical material filtered through the language and images of Lewis Carroll's two Alice books.

The current edition of ...and what She found there includes four stories, three of which are based on episodes from Cee-Cee's life, from childhood to summer 2008, and a fourth of which abandons autobio but keeps the conceit of using Carroll's work to reflect contemporary American concerns. Her adaptive methods vary from story to story. Thus, the opening story uses the exact language of the poem of Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee to narrate a scene from Cee-Cee's childhood squabbles with her little brother:

The story takes a surprising but effective turn with the sudden arrival of the "monstrous crow" from the poem, which takes on a very different form in the comic as the symbol of a family health crisis. The new context that Cee-Cee brings to the poem adds a surprising depth to it without dismantling the poem's playful tale of youthful quarreling.

The second story, adapting the great poem "Jabberwocky," is not drawn directly from Cee-Cee's life. Instead, it adapts the poem by splitting its text between two parallel timeframes: a quasi-medieval portrayal of a young knight who confronts the literal Jabberwock monster alongside a contemporary depiction of a College Democrat who casts a vote against the metaphorical Jabberwock of the McCain-Palin ticket. Here's the big battle scene in the voting booth and in the tulgey wood:

(There's a full-body portrait of the Jabberwock on the previous page of this story.)

The fourth and final story, "Off with her head!", offers still a third kind of adaptation—more of a riff on a theme than a direct translation of Carroll's plots or language. Here, Cee-Cee examines how both she and her mother seemed at times to exemplify the behaviors of the imperious queen of Carroll's books, even as Cee-Cee herself sought release in the fantasy worlds of reading and the imagination. She writes in her own voice, though with numerous visual echoes of the Alice books. Her method in this story seems closer to that of Alison Bechdel in Fun Home: allusive, intertextual, and reflective about the role of reading and referentiality in coming to understand oneself:

All in all, I think it's work that Cee-Cee should be proud of, and I am proud to have followed this project from its earliest stages. She's still expanding it, I'm told, and with any luck she'll have copies to hawk from a corner of the Satisfactory Comics table at MoCCA in a couple weeks' time. In the meantime, or if you can't make it to MoCCA, by all means visit her blog at ceecendesist.blogspot.com, where you can read the first versions of several of these stories and some other comics work, as well.

Doodle Penance Postscript: More than one way to skin a rat

2009-05-25T20:07:00.008-04:00

In yesterday's Doodle Penance, I noted that would-be imitators of Chris Ware's cartoon wolf might need to scalp a famous cartoon rodent. I did not name that rodent, but I thought it might be interesting to note some other cartoon rodents, questionably famous, that bear a resemblance to my example.

First, there is the astonishing appearance of these giant rats in Osamu Tezuka's early manga Metropolis (inspiration for the 2001 anime):

They're monstrous, all right, but no mistaking their ultimate source, as their scientific name reveals:

Chances are that Tezuka's work here was itself an unrecognized source of inspiration for me in my doodle, given the fate of the giant rat in these panels:

There's even a final panel where the head dangles ready for further scalping:

It's a pretty remarkable ripoff of M.M., but perhaps less so than Foxy, the animated character from the first Merrie Melodies cartoons who resembles M.M. in almost every detail apart from the bushiness of his tail and the pointy tips on his round ears. If you haven't yet laid eyes on Foxy, you should really click on that link. Seeing is believing, though it's hard to believe that Disney was able to tolerate the rival character.

My last example of a seemingly-scalped cartoon rodent is good old Mickey Death, the skull-headed curmudgeon whose adventures were chronicled by Eric Knisley and Kevin Dixon.* I first encountered Mickey Death in a free paper I picked up somewhere in the Triangle (either Durham, N.C., or Chapel Hill, I forget which) back in the early '90s. You can read about M.D.'s exploits here, or try to snag a print copy of the collection Mickey Death and the Winds of Impotence from lulu.com here (it's cheap as free)—or perhaps you could do as I did and buy a copy direct from co-creator Eric Knisley, should you be lucky enough to find him at a con.

*Click here for a Boing-Boing roundup of images of skull-headed Mickey clones, where a nice drawing of Mickey Death is the second of eight such images (so far).

Doodle Penance: "how to draw ware wolf"

2009-05-24T22:12:00.011-04:00

This week's "Doodle Penance" is the product of a search for a fairly simple bit of information: "How to draw ware wolf."

I think I know what this Googler was looking for, and as usual I'm surprised we haven't talked about it yet. I mean, Doodle Penance has featured information about lycanthropy before, but we've never mentioned the most important connection between contemporary cartooning and the children of the night.

I refer, of course, to the fact that Chris Ware, author of ACME Novelty Library among other fine cartoon publications, undergoes an eerie transformation under the light of the full moon. Here's a little bit from his sketchbooks that describes the process:

I bet you didn't realize that several panels in "The Graveyard of Forking Paths" were swiped from Chris Ware, did you?

Mike? What have you got this week?

—Well, it so happens that Chris Ware has already drawn a wolf in his characteristic circular style, as seen in his Fairy Tale Road Rage contribution to Little Lit (click here to see it), so I thought I'd simply show how to draw that. That Ware wolf looks more or less like this:
Now, you can tell at a glance that most of this image is easily reproduced using the Ed Emberley inventory method. Almost every element can be found among the simple shapes below:

From left to right, that gives you the basic shape of the skull; the oval nose with its small circular highlight; the "therefore" symbol (three dots) for the wolf whiskers; the squashed C (or "Pogo nose") for the snout; the medium circle for the eye; and the leafless black tulip for the pupil.

However, these simple shapes will not suffice for the most complicated part of the Ware wolf: the black cap of the fur, ears, and cheek. Frankly, that shape is too hard to draw unless you are actually Chris Ware himself. Fortunately, there is a work-around. Simply capture a famous cartoon rodent and scalp him, then pluck off the ears to leave the roots of the ears to serve as convenient wolfish tufts, thus:

You can simply discard the remainder of the rodent in a convenient receptacle:
This method works well to provide the necessary impossible-to-draw shape, but it has its own "drawbacks" (if you'll, heh heh, pardon the pun!). As with any tissue graft, there is the risk of rejection by the host, so you'll need to administer a strict regimen of immunosuppressant drugs to avoid afflicting your drawing with the hellish outcome of a scalp-rejection:

And that's how to draw Ware wolf!

T-Shirts with Charles (the "Silent Critic")

2009-05-24T20:52:00.006-04:00

These are the last t-shirts I intend to design this weekend. I've received a couple of requests for a shirt featuring Charles, who appears in Tales from the Classroom, in the story "The Silent Critic." You can read that story in its entirety if you follow the link there.

Here are a couple of classic Charles utterances, which I think you'll agree are worthy to adorn your torso:

This shirt is temporarily offline, until I jigger a couple of things in its design.

Charles: Administrative Processes by SatisfactoryComics

"I really admire your facility with administrative processes," he says.

Charles: A Lot of Effort by SatisfactoryComics

Also, the more multi-purpose backhanded compliment, "I can see that you put a lot of effort into some of this." That's about the best he can muster.

Enjoy the shirts, wear them in good health, and please let me know if you have any other requests.

New T-Shirt Designs; T-Shirt Sale

2009-05-22T12:48:00.005-04:00

It looks like Zazzle is having a Memorial Day weekend sale. All their t-shirts are 10% off.

In honor of the sale, I've designed a couple of other t-shirts, and I'll try to bring another couple online before the end of the weekend.

Satisfactory Comics Logo (black) by SatisfactoryComics

The Dark Abbess T-Shirt by SatisfactoryComics

Kellyish Demon Shirt by SatisfactoryComics

Again, these are available in lots of sizes and colors.

When you check out, you have to type MEMORIALSALE in the space for a discount / sale code.

Don't worry, not every post this month will be about the way we're selling out. But I figure as long as we're going to have a Zazzle store, it might as well have a few different things in it.

Our Contribution to "Covered"

2009-05-21T11:01:00.022-04:00

If you're clicking over to our blog from the "Covered" project, I hope you'll stick around to check out our big summer back-issue sale and maybe some of our ridiculous "Doodle Penance" posts.

(And if you haven't heard of "Covered," I highly recommend it as a cool place to see people manipulating and laying claim to the powerful imagery of other people's comics covers.)

You might be curious to know how we chose our contribution, and why our image looks so little like the original Walt Simonson cover for Batman #366. We actually worked up two submissions for "Covered," and the one they ran was our version of the cover of the first comic book Mike ever bought.

The way we did these was typically peculiar and unnecessarily difficult.

The main thing is that each of us was, sort of like Pierre Menard, duplicating an image he had never really seen. First, we both picked covers that the other guy hadn't seen. Mike drew a set of pencils from the original cover of Batman #366...

(All of the images in this post will enlarge if you click on them.)

... and I then inked his pencils without consulting the original image:

... and then, still without consulting the original, I colored my version digitally:

I was trying to stick pretty close to the flat colors of the Superfriends cartoon there. I wanted to stay pretty cartoony in my inks as well, figuring that would be a good way to "own" the image and make it look more like our work than the original.

Have a look at the original, by comparison:

Simonson's image has a little more kinetic energy in it—a subtle change in the position of Batman's right leg makes a lot of difference in the balance of his figure, I think—and my Joker is a little bit chunky. And of course I didn't quite figure out the light and shadow on that weird building. But I think our version gains in legibility what it loses in energy.

(Mike would like me to point out, here, that the cover of Batman #366 is unique in the many-decades-long run of Batman in having a never-repeated logo for the book's title, integrated into the drawing almost in the manner of one of Will Eisner's Spirit titles. Mike has also heard that this cover existed before the story it illustrates—that the drawing by Walt Simonson was so cool that the editor ordered a story created to back it up.)

Our other cover-of-a-cover, which you'll see only here on the blog, started with drawings of Jack Kirby's Forever People #6. That's not the first comic I ever owned—my childhood copy was part of a big pile of Fourth-World comics given to me by one of my dad's friends when I was about six years old. But out of that Kirby-at-DC stash that had such a powerful effect on me as a kid, I thought this one had one of the coolest covers.

I started with a quick thumbnail, to see whether the image would work in my simplified style:

Then I did a set of pencils in my notebook and sent them over to Mike, who had never seen the original image:

(Already I am losing some of the energy and drama in the thumbnail.)

Then Mike did an admirable job inking my simple scribbles:

... and then he put some colors on them:

What's strange—and I still can't really believe we can say this—is that the original Jack Kirby cover of Forever People #6 seems more subdued.

I'm not sure how successful either of these "covers" is—I mean, I don't think either of us should consider quitting his day job in an effort to unseat James Jean or whoever—but I have to say it was a ton of fun to put some time and effort into aping Simonson and Kirby. I won't say it has been a long time since I last copied drawings by Kirby, but this is probably the most careful I've been about it, and as an exercise I certainly recommend it.

SUMMER BACK ISSUE SALE

2009-05-20T23:32:00.007-04:00

We've been getting a fair amount of traffic lately, and in order to make some room in my closet I've decided to offer a big silly sale on back issues of our minicomics.

Here's the deal: with a few exceptions,* and as long as they remain in stock, you can have any three issues of our minicomics for just $5.00, postpaid. This is a pretty big bargain. It's actually a little below cost for me in almost every configuration. But the comics will make me happier in your hands than in my closet, so please don't worry about the small cost to me.

(*I can't include the elaborate Satisfactory Comics #6 or the Mapjam in the sale because the stock of those comics is so low and I know I'm never going to reprint them, but I'm still willing to sell them at regular price or as part of the "Complete Package" deal if you want to go all out.)

Feel free to browse through the selection of back issues over in the sidebar, or consider some of the three-issue value packs I describe below. I don't think you'll be disappointed, and you won't be able to get these comics cheaper anywhere. (I'm not going to bring most of the back issues to MoCCA this year.) Click on this button (or the one at the bottom of the post) and let me know which issues (or which "value pack") you want, and I'll get them in the mail to you speedily.

If you'd just like a sample of our best work, you can't go wrong with the issues in the Story Sale Pack. These three issues have some of our best writing, and some of our most satisfying world-building work.

If you've got a small comics-reader in your life, we commend the Kids' Sale Pack to you. Every issue of Satisfactory Comics is kid-safe (though that's not true for Elm City Jams), but these three stories are particularly good for kids — they're the ones we hand to parents who pass our table at MoCCA.

If you want to see how we do jam comics, order all three issues of Elm City Jams in the Jam Sale Pack, and get a free copy of our Treatise Upon the Jam as a bonus.

If you just want to see how bizarre our imaginations can get, try the Crazy Sale Pack: there's some weirdness in these issues that will put any week's Doodle Penance to shame.

If you like comics but aren't too sure about me and Mike, try our Guests Sale Pack. In those issues, you'll see contributions from people ranging from Jon Lewis to Scott C., from Tom Hart to Bishakh Som, from Tom Neely to Lark Pien, from Sam Henderson to Joey Sayers. Seriously: we've been lucky enough to work alongside a real cavalcade of minicomics stars.

If you're a fan of Matt Madden, or if you came here from Derik Badman's site, you might want to check out our Constraints Sale Pack, in which we find dozens upon dozens of ways to make comics more difficult for ourselves.

If you're Scott McCloud, you might want to try our 24-Hour Comics Sale Pack, in which we try on three separate occasions to finish a comic in a single day. Did we make it? $5.00 gets you an answer.

If you came here from the Got Medieval blog, you might like the Medieval Sale Pack, which features a faux-Medieval fantasy setting, a Middle-English alphabet poem, and the Death Song of the Venerable Bede.

You can also put your own value pack together. Just name the three comics you want, and if I've still got 'em, they'll be on their way. If you want more than three comics, just send me an email (isaac dot cates at aya dot yale dot edu will ring me up) to work out a deal.

Three comics for five bucks, postpaid. I think you'll agree it's a good value.