about hole boy the process about VOID VOID annotated comments credits about the author

Designing the Character In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud argues that the more "realistic" a drawing is, the less likely we are identify with it; and the more iconic or "cartoony" the drawing, the more likely we identify with it. When we read a comic like Mary Worth or the X-Men, we take the role of watching other characters living their own lives, acting out their own episodes; but when we read Bone, Calvin and Hobbes, or Dilbert, we relate more closely with the characters and place ourselves in their shoes. (This paragraph really doesn't do his explanation any justice. If you haven't ever read it, Understanding Comics is a brilliant dissection of not only comics as language, but the nature of how humans perceive things.) I wanted to make hole boy as iconic and simplified as possible. He's basically just a stick figure, which is as simple as you can get. The big thing about his design which makes him stand out from a five-year-old's crayon stick figure is the repetition of circles. He's got this big round head, big huge pupil-less eyes (Little Orphan Annie dilated), and of course, the hole. His lack of a mouth, eyebrows, and pupils was a conscious decision on my part to dehumanize him to a certain degree. It was a welcome challenge to find new ways of expression without many of those facial cues that we're so used to recognizing. Line, Line, Everywhere the Line Any competent cartoonist who has ever inked (there seem to be fewer and fewer every day) will tell you that the nature of the lines in a cartoon drawing is the heart and soul of that comic. Charles Schulz's quirky, innocent lines in Peanuts embodies the innocence of his material; George Herriman's eccentric, scratchy style in Krazy Kat lend themselves well to his brand of "comic poetry"; Jeff Smith's clean, polished, expressive brush lines in Bone are the vehicle for his tight, animated storytelling. In hole boy, the lines needed to be honest, raw and wretching. This would prove to be a challenge for me -- although I have a very loose pencilling style, my inking is very tight. I experimented with different methods in Painter: the traditional "pencil-then-ink" technique (which lost a generation of honesty in the two-method step), inking freehand without first pencilling in a skeleton/stick figure (which proved to be disastrously messy), and pencilling without inking. The last method was most satisfactory when it came to portraying an honest line; unfortunately, it tended to be illegible, and lacked the "solidity" I desired in a solid black line. Original pencil sketch, drawn with Painter and Wacom tablet On a whim, I decided to try something completely new: take the pencil sketch into Adobe Streamline and convert it to vector art. This little experiment yielded a pleasantly surprising and bold result. Not only were the lines raw, but they were clean -- which is almost an impossible effect to achieve with traditional inking techniques. Streamline's "interpretation" of my pencil sketches added a whole new dimension to the character with its tapering and loose tolerance of the original pencil sketches. Final version, vectorized with Streamline and re-rasterized with Photoshop The Hell We Call HTML HTML as a visual medium is, obviously, very different from the traditional print medium. The big strength and weakness of HTML is that there is a window for content. The weakness of the window metaphor is that you sometimes only get part of the picture (ala scrollbars), whereas with the printed page, it's all there right before your eyes. The strength of the window metaphor is that the artist can exploit this weakness to have a virtually infinite canvas; in the print medium, you're always going to be restricted by 8 1/2" x 11", or 9" x 12", or 7" x 10", or God forbid, in the postage-stamp sized comic strip, 2" x 6". The HTML execution in the hole boy pages is based on extending the window metaphor with David Siegel's (Creating Killer Web Sites) web design concepts, including the unorthodox use of tables and single-pixel transparent GIFs. Back to top of page