The Comics Bureau

Optical Sloth has a big post on Kevin Huizenga’s work. I love his work, and think that he is doing some of the most inter­est­ing work in com­ics at the moment. Head over to his web­site, fol­low his blogs, read these inter­views and buy all of his books. Just buy them, you won’t be disappointed!

Smith mag has a col­lec­tion of dif­fer­ent artists takes on Har­vey Pekar’s head.

To toast Harvey’s 70th birth­day, the Pekar Pro­ject posse blew the horn to assemble this sur­prise gal­lery of freshly drawn Har­vey Heads. Our magic num­ber was, nat­ur­ally, 70, but so many artists heeded the call that we’re now at 90+ noggins—and the heads keep rolling in. Take a stroll through this illus­trated salute to a beloved Amer­ican ori­ginal, and join us in wish­ing Har­vey Pekar a very happy birthday.

News comes from Nic­ola and Sarah, the ‘Lay­deez’ that do com­ics of the next meet­ing on the 22nd January;

Our Feb­ru­ary meet­ing is on Monday and we hope you will join us for Kiriko Kubo’s present­a­tion of her work. This will be fol­lowed by a dis­cus­sion of ‘Fun Home’ by Alison Bech­del.  This month’s guest blog­ger will be in attend­ance, we have a 10 minute present­a­tion lined up and cook­ies, tea and wine. It should be good!

Get down there! It doesn’t even mat­ter if you aren’t a real ‘Lay­dee’, they will make excep­tions for gentlemen.

I’ve just done a small update to the site to let those hip young things with fancy Apple products view the site with an iPhone-specific tem­plate. Let me know if this has any kind of knock-on effect, but it shouldn’t have any effect on the major­ity of people.

Thanks!

Gone are the days of strug­gling with a big dusty old tomes of PHP & MySQL to make a content-managed site to show off your com­ics. CMS sys­tems such as Word­press have put eas­ily updat­able sites into the hands of any­one with an inclin­a­tion to use them. Comix­talk rounds up some of the pop­u­lar Word­press Web­comic plu­gins.

Word­press has come to take a fairly dom­in­ant pos­i­tion in web­com­ics pub­lish­ing in recent years with good reason.  Word­press is a fant­astic blog­ging solu­tion with an act­ive devel­op­ment team and it’s not a tre­mend­ous stretch to lever­age it for com­ics.  So which comics-specific solu­tion should you use for turn­ing Word­press intoWeb­comicpress?

The Daily Tele­graph has a story about Jacob Rush, an eight year old Den­nis the Men­ace fan, prompt­ing an admis­sion from DC Thom­son that Den­nis has been redrawn to com­ply with the rules of broadcasting.

It was felt we should have Den­nis look­ing the same in the comic as he does on TV to stop people get­ting confused.

We thought that a lot of people might not have seen Denis before see­ing him on TV and if he looked dif­fer­ent in the Beano comic then they might not real­ise it was the same.

Hmm.

Jacob said: “I don’t like the new Den­nis because he doesn’t have his cata­pult or water pis­tol any more and he’s not men­acing enough. I want to see the old Den­nis back.”

Nevs Cole­man over at Bleed­ing Cool writes up an enlight­en­ing art­icle on work­ing in com­ics retail. Solid advice.

Hon­estly, I can’t say this enough, read EVERYTHING. Try and at least skim-read every comic that comes in every week when you get a chance. It’s entirely pos­sible that Sophie Howard will want to come in and­dis­cuss the nuances of the early issues of John Byrne’s run on Super­man with you, One day. For the rest of the day, you’re deal­ing with ques­tions about a medium that’s over a hun­dred years old that’s pump­ing out roughly a thou­sand new items every week. And people will have ques­tions about all of it. About why they can’t seem to find Milo Manara’s work in Eng­lish to what happened to Big Num­bers to when is the new League of Extraordin­ary Gen­tle­men com­ing out to what happened in Amaz­ing Spider-Man last week to Are the EC paper­backs still in print to I’ve seen this thing called Freakan­gels on the Inter­net do you have it to Do you want to buy my run of 2000AD’s off me to….

If like me you have ever wished that you could have 3,856 stor­ies in a single book, you are likely to be wait­ing for Jason Shiga’s ‘Mean­while’ with baited breath.

“Mean­while” begins as our young hero in dire need of a bath­room, knocks on the door of a mys­ter­i­ous recluse. His man­sion is in fact a won­der­ous labor­at­ory filled with amaz­ing inven­tions: A mind read­ing hel­met, a dooms­day device and a time travel machine (although it can only go back ten minutes).

Which inven­tion will young Jimmy play with? YOU, the reader get to decide in my branchi­est and most com­plex inter­act­ive comic to date. “Mean­while” works via a net­work of tubes con­nect­ing each panel to the next. Some­times these tubes split in two giv­ing the read­ers a choice of which path they would like to fol­low. Some­times these tubes even lead off the page and onto tabs stick­ing out from other parts of the book.

Head over to Ori­gami Yoda to read an inter­view with Jason;

Q: Can you explain how Mean­while works? Nearly 4,000 pos­sible story com­bin­a­tions? I can’t wait!
A: Mean­while works via a series of tubes that con­nect each panel to the next one in sequence. Some­times the tubes lead right off the page and onto a tab on another page. Some­times the tubes branch off and the reader can choose which dir­ec­tion they want the story to unfold. It sounds com­plic­ated but once you hold the book in your hands, it makes more sense.

The fig­ure of 3,856 pos­sible story com­bin­a­tions is a bit of an under­es­tim­a­tion. The fig­ure didn’t include storylines where you enter the incor­rect code, or storylines that end in an infin­ite loop. There’s lit­er­ally an infin­ite num­ber of story com­bin­a­tions if you include storylines that have repeat­ing panels.

Then imme­di­ately head over to Com­ic­BookRe­sources to read up fur­ther on the book;

Branch­ing stor­ies can be more dif­fi­cult to write than their lin­ear coun­ter­parts, and the phys­ical design of “Mean­while” also plays a role in how the story is per­ceived. “One of the most chal­len­ging parts of cre­at­ing a branch­ing story is man­aging the tradeoff between giv­ing the reader lots of choices and restrict­ing the expo­nen­tial growth that fol­lows from all those choices,” Shiga said. “One prob­lem I had with Choose Your Own Adven­ture was that the stor­ies were typ­ic­ally very short. Fight­ing Fantasy had longer nar­rat­ives, but the tradeoff was that they ten­ded to be more lin­ear. Two books that really com­bined the best of both strategies was ‘House of Hades’ by Steve Jack­son and ‘Escape from Ten­opia’ by Edward Pack­ard. Both of them presen­ted a geo­graphic area that the reader could explore in their own way. I almost see those books as being closer to the parks of Fre­drick Law Olmstead than to any other authors.”

And if that wasn’t enough for you, an endorse­ment from Scott McCloud should tip the scales a touch.

Alex Cor­nell, writ­ing for ISO50 col­lects a huge num­ber of strategies that cre­at­ive types use to over­come cre­at­ive blocks. Khoi Vinh, design dir­ector of NYTimes.com

Lots of read­ing and lots of sketch­ing. The read­ing part is a long-term strategy: con­stantly con­sum­ing ideas, influ­ences, details, angles, meta­phors, sym­bols, etc. and stor­ing them in the back of your brain so that later on — some­times much later on — you have a rich cata­log of start­ing points to draw upon. The sketch­ing is a way to activ­ate all of that back­ground inform­a­tion when faced with a prob­lem in the present: the act of draw­ing, of giv­ing visual expres­sion to many dif­fer­ent ideas in short order helps you sort through all of those ran­dom ele­ments and to make unex­pec­ted con­nec­tions between them. The key is to sketch quickly, without get­ting caught up in the exe­cu­tion or tech­nique, that way you stay in the realm of con­tent, without get­ting bogged down in form.

Have a read through to see how every­one else deals with the inev­it­able. Fant­astic stuff.

From the splen­did folk over at Tabella Pub­lish­ing come a couple of books by Øivind Hov­land, a Scand­inavian artist whose approach to illus­trat­ive storytelling is simple and precise;

Even if you only have one small image at your dis­posal, a story can still be told. And that, in a nut­shell is my aim, to tell a story using whatever means I have.

Trail and Error, pub­lished in 2008 is the story of Jean Bab­tiste de Bomber­aque, an adven­tur­ous chap from the early days of avi­ation. Essen­tially a book about determ­in­a­tion and ambi­tion, it depicts the tit­u­lar tri­als and errors of the young aviator’s career. For­bid­den Planet write up an inter­est­ing review;

Trial and Error is incred­ibly short for a graphic novel, it’s just 32 pages long, but since each double page is actu­ally a very clev­erly designed single flow­ing image, the action start­ing on the left and flow­ing, without panel bor­ders, over to the right in a single sweep­ing move­ment – it’s effect­ively  just a 16 page story, with no dia­logue and even very few cap­tions. But that doesn’t mat­ter since Øivind Hovland’s art does all the storytelling we need, all lush, thick blacks to begin with, and later, as the dreams of flight really begin to take off, more and more dom­in­ated by white as the sky begins to fill the pages, free­ing us to fly with Jean Bab­tiste de Bomberaque.

A Day in the Life of Alfred, pub­lished in 2009, is the story of routine and isol­a­tion. Using a very lim­ited palette, Hov­land depicts the story some­what non-traditionally, using maps, sym­bols, col­our and char­ac­ter. The book is not just a story, it is an exer­cise in the inter­change­ab­il­ity of text and image. This can feel like you have ‘missed’ some part of the story some­how, but it does bear up to repeat read­ings. Again, here is a For­bid­den Planet review;

And that’s it, book over, reader left ques­tion­ing. Did I miss things? Was there more there than I’d seen? I can’t work out whether that feel­ing means it hasn’t quite worked or it def­in­itely has – is it bad to feel like I’ve missed some­thing, is it good that get­ting to the end made me go back and study the book’s pages with a more ques­tion­ing eye?

I’m com­ing down on the side of good. When I went back I was look­ing for the pat­terns, look­ing for the details I’d missed, look­ing at the art to spot the con­nec­tions, the trig­gers to Alfred’s troubles. And as I read it again, and again, and again (it’s only 50 pages and maybe 500 ish words after all) it got bet­ter each time.

Much of Hovland’s work is sparsely nar­rated but lav­ishly illus­trated. In format, both books are sim­ilar to children’s books. Don’t let this ana­logy fool you though, the storytelling shows a deft­ness and sub­tlety of visual nar­rat­ive that bears up to repeat read­ings. You don’t so much ‘read’ Hovland’s work as take in each ele­ment of the type, image, com­pos­i­tion and nar­rat­ive. Great stuff. Go and buy it all immediately.