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Paper Anniversary

: Comics :

My first mixed media comic, presented to Joan almost a month ago as an anniversary present:

Click thumbnail for full size (996 x 800, 216kb JPG)

Ink, colored pencil, construction paper, tissue paper, and parchment on bristol board

Posted by c2 at 05:08 PM • Permalink • Print this entry • Comments (2) • Trackbacks (0)

Comics trivia answers

: Comics :

Here are the answers to last week’s comics trivia entry:

Posted by c2 at 05:00 PM • Permalink • Print this entry • Comments (1) • Trackbacks (0)

Comics trivia

: Comics :

Tonight, DuBourg High School held its trivia night as a fundraiser for the seniors’ Project Graduation lock-in. One of the categories was Comics. Dustin, who was at a competing table, shot a challenge at me: “I will be very disappointed if you don’t get a perfect 10 on this section.”

I didn’t. (Neither did he.) It was all trivia on current comic strips, and I haven’t picked up a comics page ever since Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes left. Stuff like, “Who is Sally Forth’s boss” and “Who is Brenda Starr’s husband”. And really obscure stuff like, “Where was Snoopy born?” (Bonus points if you answer these in the comments.)

(By the way, Calvin and Hobbes is the last great comic strip of the 20th century, and probably (and sadly) the last great comic strip ever. Sure, Boondocks, Opus, Wiley, and Rose Is Rose are all inventive and push the envelope, but C&H was truly in a league of its own, descended from Peanuts and Krazy Kat and Little Nemo.)

So, okay. Here’s a quickie comics trivia quiz that I would actually do well on:

1. Todd McFarlane of Spawn and Spider-Man fame debuted as an artist on what DC comic?
2. What famous phrase did Walt Kelly’s Pogo utter?
3. Who was the first villain to appear in Fantastic Four #1?
4. What is the name of the metal that is bonded to Wolverine’s claws and skeleton?
5. In the movie Pulp Fiction, what classic comic strip characters appear on the t-shirt Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) wears?
6. In Bloom County, what was the original band name for “Billy and the Boingers”? Also, who was in the band and what instruments did they play?
7. Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird created which comic book characters as a parody of (and homage to) Frank Miller’s Ronin and Elektra?
8. Who is Robin’s secret identity/alter ego in The Dark Knight Returns?
9. Jack Kirby, Bob Kane, Wally Wood, and Jules Feiffer all worked at whose studio in the 1930s?
10. For how many issues did Dave Sim’s Cerebus run?

I’ll post the correct answers in a comment next week (if nobody gets them).

Posted by c2 at 10:44 PM • Permalink • Print this entry • Comments (11) • Trackbacks (0)

Of jet planes, light years, and lullabies

: Cacophony :: Comics :

Joan and I have performed a little ritual now for over a year.

On our first date in Denver, we cuddled up on a park bench and sat in silence for a little bit. Joan made a face, and I asked what she was thinking. In a low voice, she sang:

I’m leavin on a jet plane
Don’t know when I’ll be back again
Oh, babe, I hate to go

It was my last night there. We had barely known each other a week, and we could hardly believe that we’d actually found each other. We could hardly believe that we were about to put a thousand miles between us.

The following day, from the terminal, I left the chorus of “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane” on her voicemail. So every time for a year now, we’ve dialed the other to sing it, right before the flight attendants request that we shut off our phones.

For a year, the distance has defined much of our relationship.

There’s the comic above, which I gave her as a present for her birthday. I also wrote her a lullaby (2.2 MB mp3) which I first sang for her over the phone.

We’ve persevered in spite of the distance. And today, for the last time, she sang the chorus of “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane” to me from the terminal. In six weeks, the distance between us will shrink by no less than 830 miles.

It’s still scary. But it’s right.

Posted by c2 at 06:37 PM • Permalink • Print this entry • Comments (6) • Trackbacks (0)

The Spirit

: Comics :: Criticism :

Will Eisner, the most innovative comics artist you have never heard of, died yesterday at 87.

My first exposure to Will Eisner was in the Manhattan (KS) Public Library, where his graphic novel A Life Force sat on a nearly empty comics shelf. I checked it out and renewed it several times, struck by Eisner’s masterful storytelling. He shattered page- and panel-layout conventions without detracting or distracting from the essence of his story. He linked individual stories together, weaving the characters of 55 Dropsie Avenue through each other’s lives. He put it all in a historical context—immigrant Jews and Italians in the Depression-era Bronx, WWII looming overhead, unions and the Mafia—all boiled down to a very human, very accessible, very personal level.

I never knew how big he was until much later, when Cerebus and Bone and Sandman became part of my regular diet. I never reazlied, then, that without Eisner, Jules Fieffer and Art Spiegelman and Scott McCloud could not exist.

He was the Orson Welles of comics. Go, now, to Amazon.com and buy something by Will Eisner. There’s A Life Force. There’s his incredibly influential Comics and Sequential Art—which besides dissecting the language of comics, has some beautiful individual pieces in it, like his “Hamlet on a Rooftop”. There are his Spirit collections, his groundbreaking A Contract With God (the first graphic novel ever), his semi-autobiographical works.

There is no other artist in comics history who worked so feverishly to elevate the medium of sequential art. Read something by him, and remember him.

Posted by c2 at 11:44 AM • Permalink • Print this entry • Comments (3) • Trackbacks (0)

codi & cody

: Comics :

I recently finished a new webcomic, codi & cody. It's about two codependent worms who live in a tequila bottle, and it's dynamically generated. Hit reload a few times; it's never the same thing twice.

The idea came to me a few months ago. The problem was, the pitch/premise of "two codependent worms who live in a tequila bottle" is essentially a one-shot. If I turned it into a series, it'd look a little too much like Matt Groening's Akbar and Jeff from Life in Hell.

I realized early on, while writing the dialogue, that these two worms never really communicated. Their arguments are so circular that rearranging some of their phrase sets never seemed to make much of a difference. That's when I decided to ask Jason to build me a randomizer in PHP, using a MySQL database for the text.

I'm not sure there's anything else quite like this on the web, in the comix media, anyway. Plug it for me, willya?

Posted by c2 at 09:09 AM • Permalink • Print this entry • Comments (11) • Trackbacks (1)

Comix Curriculum Vitae, ‘93-’96

: Comics :

Over the past couple months, a lot of people have been asking me about the status of my beanbag central comic. I haven't touched it since July last year. And right there, on the front page, I claim it's "a biweekly (or so) webcomic."

I guess I've taken a pretty liberal reading on the "or so" part of it, huh?

My excuse is that it simply takes too long. I can't commit to a bi-weekly comic as long as I'm teaching, especially when it's cartooning for free.

Also, just today, I noticed someone was searching for some of the old comics I used to have posted on this site. (I see you in the activity log there, all of you, doing your bizarre searches for comics and people's names and bands and musical theatre and sex positions. Weirdos.)

The comics haven't actually gone anywhere since I retooled this site as a blog; they've just been hiding away in a little corner of the beanbagcentral.com server. So, for those of you who're that desperate to dig through all my cartooning work, here's my Comix Curriculum Vitae, from 1993-1996. Two warnings:

1. There is some really ugly second- and third-generation HTML up ahead, from back in the day when Netscape 2.0 was king.
2. Some of these comics are just bad. It's downright painful for me to read a few of these. But they're all included here, for good or ill.

Posted by c2 at 03:29 PM • Permalink • Print this entry • Comments (11) • Trackbacks (1)

beanbag central: inside the beanbag

: Comics :

I actually got this one out relatively early. Be proud of me. I made a deadline.

The idea for this comic is actually a recycled idea I used in CultuRe Trap several years ago. That time, Edgar the Dragon was the one who got beaned in the head with what looked like a safe (but in "reality" was a piano—or was it an anvil? i oughtta look through my archives). It's funnier with The Sonic Sunflower, not only for continuity's sake, but also because he's inherently lankier and thus more expressive as a cartoon character.

Yeah, I guess I cheated a lot on this one, which is probably why I got it out so early. There's a stock photo (courtesy of our friends at Getty Images), recycled images from last comic, and a recycled plot from ages ago. The execution in this one is a lot better than the original CultuRe Trap, though, and I'm very pleased with the pacing.

The horrible pun at the end ("Ain't technology GRAND?" get it? "GRAND"??? HA! i kill me) was entirely by accident. I swear, I didn't even realize it until I posted it. And it's not like it's completely accurate either, since the photo is of an upright.

Posted by c2 at 10:24 PM • Permalink • Print this entry • Comments (5) • Trackbacks (1)