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Saturday, November 11, 2006

black hole

It's holiday here, so no work at the library for this girl. Cette fille is doing a bit of online 'shopping'. I wondered if I could obtain an inexpensive copy of Zoot Suite by the Langridge brothers over at eBay. Saw one for like...three bucks several weeks ago. No, no. Long gone. Everything else is ten dollars and media mail shipping at six plus dollars (the point of media mail is that it is cheaper, and from New York, for this size book, it would be about a dollar and a half - piss on these online seller prices then). So then I start looking for other Langridge gems and see Fred the Clown...and instead of shelling out some clams, I decide to double check our library collection and by jove we do have it (must be new - don't remember ever seeing it there). So I am doing the happy dance. And I start looking around at Amazon and seeing bunches of awesome graphic novels.

So I stumble upon Charles Burns' Black Hole, and a picture of one of his panels is included with the review and it goes a little something like this:



And I realize that the other night when I was experimenting with line for the comic jam that my hands (the right-hand hands) look like his drawings! Love that! Had never looked at Burns before.

I'm trying to figure out what I wanna do next in art. You know....last week was pretty boring. I was bored. Uninspired. Uninterested. Wrick says do what you love, therein you'll find the excitement. Of course, I know that, he knows I know that, but I thought about it some more and even though last week I just wasn't in love with anything......I got Haddock's end of the comic, and I became excited about that and remembered again that ever since I was a kid I've been in love with comics. Doesn't mean I know a whole hell of a lot about them, or have studied, or even know many folks in the field (through browsing their works). But...I've always wanted to be a cartoonist. Nowadays you've gotcher graphic novels. I love these mediums.

I don't care if I have to trace and copy to learn, and draw 'til my hand turns blue......and I can at least right now let go of any big expectations that I'll ever turn out anything I really like or need approval for (ha! ha! ha!). But I do notice that the more I draw, the more I like looking at different styles of drawing. I would always pass up the comics and graphic novels that looked scribbly ('unskilled'??!!). For aesthetics...I mean, I prefer Breathed's Opus, or Michael Manning, the disturbing but beautiful stuff.

I think I'm finding that beauty in scribbly lines now. I mean...okay, check this out. It's Matt Brinkman's whacky world. Click the Contents at the top to go to his text-only menu, or click Next to advance to the next panel. The more I look at his drawings the more I love it. And part of that is because since I've been drawing this year and trying to put it together and see how things are put together....I can appreciate the skill needed to convey something accurately in pictures and...it's difficult to capture things with minimal lines. Not that his sketches and panels are minimalistic. But if you look at this one:



Check out the shoes/feet on the guard. They are just lines, with nary a shadow or shading to suggest depth or roundness and yet....you know they're round because he's given you enough information in the right places for your brain to go, 'that is a three dimensional foot, all righty!'

I'm gonna go check out more stuff. And then draw some stuff. Anyone want to jam on a comic with me? We could send panels back and forth...it is this kind of stuff that fuels my imagination. One of the things that I feel as a stumbling block for me is...storytelling. I'm okay but not great at it. It's fun when there is someone else there to surprise you when you see what they've done in a panel, and then you take it somewhere else.

Oh and by the way...WEEDS is a killer chronic show. It's fookin' hilarious.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's so funny V. After I finished watching the final season of Six Feet Under and there was nothing worth watching on TV anymore, I went to the video store and rented the first season of Weeds......

eroica said...

*small voice*
i might be a little bit keen on doing some comic jamming with you...?

Victoria Koldewyn said...

Vera - that is...so cool! I smoked the first two episodes, more tonight.

froggy! I will send you something with the zine, I'd love to jam with you!! Well I've a few different ideas but any which way - it's be great to jam.

eroica said...

great!
this'll be something totally new for me...

Etayne said...

that sounds like fun .. but I don't think I can draw well enough... would give it my best effort, though.
::;waving:::