The Comics Bureau

If you have a twit­ter account, I’m sure that you will have come across Axe Cop recently. If not, drop everything and sprint over to the Axe Cop web­site. Writ­ten by Malachai Nicolle (age 5) and drawn by Ethan Nicolle (age 29), Axe cop is the col­lec­ted adven­tures of Axe Cop;

The AXE COP saga began on a Christ­mas visit to see my fam­ily. My Father, a man with very healthy loins, has man­aged to pro­duce a vari­ety of chil­dren, ran­ging from me, a 29 year old comic book artist, to my 5 year old brother Malachai, a 5 year old boy genius, with four other sib­lings in between. Dur­ing the visit Mal­chai was run­ning around with his toy fire­man axe and he said he was play­ing “Axe Cop.” He asked me to play with him, and I asked what my weapon was… so he brought me a toy flute (actu­ally a recorder). I told him I would rather be Axe Cop then Flute Cop, and he seemed just fine with being Flute Cop. The story that fol­lowed became more and more bril­liant, until I couldn’t con­tain myself and I had to draw the whole thing into a one page comic.

From there the saga con­tin­ued, and over the course of my week-long visit we cranked out the first four epis­odes of AXE COP. I pos­ted the com­ics to my blog and on Face­book and they got great responses. I decided to give AXE COP a home on the inter­net here and attempt to con­tinue the saga as often as I have time to draw them, and I can get Malachai to write them.

The writ­ing pro­cess is basic­ally just me quizz­ing Malachai as he devel­ops the saga. I’ll just try to pry all the details out of him and write them all down until some­thing like a com­plete little story has been formed. Everything in AXE COP star­ted in Malachai’s head, all I do is sort it out and draw it.  Here is a video of the writ­ing process.

Get your­self over to Little White Lies and have a look at the com­pet­i­tion brief they are run­ning, inspired by the upcom­ing Kick-Ass Movie.

What you need to do is to con­dense an entire movie into just six black and white pan­els. Shouldn’t be too much hassle for any­one famil­iar with plot structures…

Read up fur­ther, down­load the tem­plate and enter the com­pet­i­tion quickly! The dead­line for entries is the 12th Feb!

Matt Brady, over at War­ren Peace writes up a couple of knock-down art­icles on Didier Lefevre & Emmanuel Guibert’s The Pho­to­grapher. The first is a par­tic­u­larly insight­ful review;

While this is Lefevre’s story, told dir­ectly from his per­spect­ive and mak­ing heavy use of his memor­ies and accom­pan­ied by hun­dreds of the pho­to­graphs that he took, French car­toon­ist Emmanuel Guibert is the one that really brings it to life in com­ics form, cap­tur­ing the like­nesses of every­one Lefevre encountered and mak­ing the land­scapes and vil­lages seem like real, lived-in loc­ales. The pho­tos are inter­spersed through­out the pages, such that they often seem like com­ics pan­els among the rest of the illus­tra­tions, but Guibert fills everything out, mak­ing the char­ac­ters seem to move and live in the way that static pho­to­graphy can’t. But he does this without being showy, stick­ing to muted col­ors and subtle fig­ure work. It’s only when you look closer that you real­ize the great work he does, cap­tur­ing real­istic ges­tures, move­ments, and facial expres­sions, and put­ting just the right amount of detail into the folds of cloth­ing and the objects in the back­grounds, such that the art­work doesn’t stand out from the pho­tos, but also emphas­izes the way they can more fully cap­ture real­ity. It’s all per­fectly paced and put together for the best flow, pro­pelling the eye across the page without call­ing atten­tion to itself.

The second is a short ana­lysis of one sequence from the book;

This is actu­ally nearly four pages of com­ics, with two pan­els per tier, but I sep­ar­ated them and laid them out hori­zont­ally to demon­strate the way Guibert makes the whole thing work as one long walk through a detailed land­scape. It’s pretty gor­geous, like one of those scenes in a Woody Allen movie in which two char­ac­ters have a con­ver­sa­tion while walk­ing down a Man­hat­tan side­walk and the cam­era just fol­lows them, never look­ing away. But what struck me was how well the chan­ging land­scape matches the mood of the scene; at the begin­ning, when the con­ver­sa­tion between Didier Lefevre, the pho­to­grapher of the title, and Juli­ette, the leader of the human­it­arian mis­sion to Afgh­anistan, is lim­ited to a fairly benign sub­ject, they are cross­ing smooth ground:

This of course goes without say­ing, but if you don’t already own a copy, sweep your com­puter from the desk and run out without a coat or shoes to get a copy of this book. I’m sure I’m not alone in stat­ing that this isn’t just a comic book. This is a mas­ter­class in the sub­tleties of visual storytelling.

An inter­est­ing 119 year old art­icle about the rise of the ‘comic paper’ by David Ander­son that appeared in the Magazine of Art vol 14 in 1891.

For some reason, I also some­times take Scott McCloud’s Under­stand­ing Com­ics for gran­ted. Shaun Hus­ton, over at Pop­Mat­ters writes up a great appre­ci­ation of the book. If you haven’t read Under­stand­ing Com­ics yet, leap away from the com­puter and hunt down a copy immediately.

There is vir­tu­ally no recent work in com­ics the­ory and cri­ti­cism, in Eng­lish at least, that does not ref­er­ence or owe a debt to McCloud’s writ­ing on the nature of the medium. No other work, not even his own, has yet to emerge as a suc­cessor or equal influ­ence to Under­stand­ing Com­ics.

The reach and appeal of McCloud’s ini­tial foray into com­ics the­ory is, I think, partly a res­ult of its form: Under­stand­ing Com­ics is a comic about com­ics. On one level, this is simply cool, but its sig­ni­fic­ance is deeper than that.

The decision to make the book as a comic has the effect of mak­ing it invit­ing to a range of poten­tial read­ers. I sus­pect that many people who think of them­selves as being oth­er­wise dis­in­ter­ested in mat­ters of the­ory have picked up and read, or at least skimmed,  Under­stand­ing Com­ics. For aca­dem­ics, the cool­ness of McCloud’s text appeals because of its nov­elty, and the fact that few lit­er­ary crit­ics, human­it­ies schol­ars, and semi­ot­i­cians have the skills or the pro­fes­sional sup­port and encour­age­ment to pro­duce a sim­ilar work of their own.

Alex Gard­ner writes up an inter­est­ing review of Refresh, Refresh an adapt­a­tion of a prize win­ning Ben­jamin Percy short story by Dan­ica Novgoro­doff and James Ponsoldt.

This is a book that pos­it­ively demands that I keep my big-fat-critic-mouth shut. Say any­thing to sug­gest that the book left me any­thing but emo­tion­ally drained, in fact, and this book will kick my god­dam ass. So I will try very hard to say noth­ing about the fact that I found the book emo­tion­ally manip­u­lat­ive and at times even bul­ly­ing. I won’t men­tion that I never came to care about these lost boys of W’s war, or that I found Novgorodoff’s visual adapt­a­tion of the story some­how hit­ting more wrong notes than not in its des­per­ate efforts to cap­ture the jagged anger and empti­ness of the place and the broken fam­il­ies left behind.

Head over to The Com­ics Journal audio archives to down­load MP3s of inter­views with folk such as Chester Gould, R. Crumb, Walt Kelly and Charles Schultz.

Wel­come to our online archive of excerpts from The Com­ics Journal’s archive of audi­o­tapes, which were used to record inter­views and pub­lic events and col­lec­ted over the course of three dec­ades — quite pos­sibly the most extens­ive oral his­tory of the United States com­ics industry in existence.

Thanks, Down­TheT­ubes for the heads-up on this pro­ject; Win­dow Works.

Mantle Arts and North West Leicester­shire Dis­trict Coun­cil wish to appoint a num­ber of artists, to cre­ate work to trans­form empty shops in the town centre of Coalville, N.W. Leicester­shire. Each art­work will com­pletely fill the win­dow of a shop, cre­at­ing a spec­tac­u­lar exhib­i­tion of con­tem­por­ary art.

The dead­line for this is the 11th of Janu­ary, so head over to the site, down­load the brief and get your pro­pos­als in sharp­ish. I love the idea that some of the shops that are being vacated in this eco­nomic down­turn aren’t simply being left to rot. Who wouldn’t want their small town to be turned into a huge gal­lery of con­tem­por­ary art? Bravo, Mantle Arts!

From Calvin & Hobbes: Magic on Paper is a col­lec­tion of Bill Watterson’s early strips while at col­lege for Ohio’s Kenyon Col­lege news­pa­per, The Kenyon Collegian.

I don’t think I’ve ever met any­one who didn’t love Calvin & Hobbes.

I have on occa­sion been described, or accused of being a pen fet­ish­ist. This is prob­ably true, so as a new year’s gift to every­one, I decided to write up a post about some of the pens that I use. This is by no means an exhaust­ive list, but gives a brief glimpse into the life of a pen fetishist.

Brush Pens;

I love draw­ing with brush pens, and there is a really wide range of pens avail­able, with vary­ing levels of qual­ity. I’ll go through the pens in the chro­no­lo­gical order in which I was intro­duced to them. First up;

My first expos­ure to brush pens was the Zig Graphic Twin, which has a rub­ber tip at one end and a reg­u­lar felt tip at the other. As I remem­ber it, the ink was pretty vicious — if you got it onto your fin­gers, you would have to wait for that layer of skin to die. I’m not sure if I’m a bit too heavy handed, but I used to snap the nibs of these pens all the time. They did come in a nice vari­ety of col­ours though, but they weren’t great for draw­ing with.

After real­ising that this wasn’t a great pen, I moved on to the Kur­etake Zig Brush Writer II

This was the first brush pen I used that had bristles. In ret­ro­spect, the syn­thetic bristles now feel like tooth­brush bristles — not much fun to draw with. You do get a lot of con­trol over the ink flow though due to the squeezy refil­lable body of the pen though.

After that, I moved on to the Pen­tel Brush Pen.

The Pen­tel Brush Pen is a really great pen — a really good intro­duc­tion to the world of pen fet­ish­ism. This is the pen that star­ted me down the slip­pery pen fet­ish­ism slope.

I’ve had about three or four of these pens, and have found that I some­times have to take a scalpel to the very tip of the syn­thetic brush to snip off a couple of errant bristles.

I have never had any other prob­lems with this pen though, and am prob­ably being a bit overly picky with the end of the tip.

Next, I got the Sailor Profit Brush Pen.

The Sailor Profit is very sim­ilar to the Pen­tel, but has a threaded lid, so you don’t inad­vert­ently uncap the pen in your pocket. The tip is more chis­elled than the Pen­tel, so it feels like you have more con­trol over the line thick­ness, but I did find it more dif­fi­cult to get cart­ridges. A really lovely pen though.

Shortly after get­ting this pen, I dis­covered the pen fetishist’s home page, Jet Pens. Beware though, Jet Pens are ena­blers. If you sus­pect that you may be a pen fet­ish­ist, you might want to avoid them for fear of stead­ily spend­ing all of your time and money buy­ing new and excit­ing pens. Anyway…

I found the Kur­etake No.13;

This is a gor­geous pen. It makes the first two pens in this post feel like draw­ing with filthy mops. If you match this pen up with the sable hair replace­ment tip, you basic­ally con­struct a Kur­etake No. 40…

…which is a very fine pen. A VERY VERY FINE PEN. The sable hair tip is springy, soft and gor­geous. I’m not sure what else to say without swear­ing, but this is a hel­lu­valuvelypen. Need­less to say, the hefty price-tag may anger or enrage your loved ones, but I think that this is worth it.

The only way to improve on this pen is to use a Plat­inum Con­verter with some Plat­inum Car­bon Ink, the finest, nicest ink that ever there was. For­get Noodlers (which is admit­tedly nice and comes in many more col­ours), this is the (black) ink for me. Again, rather pricy, but the smell and the sheer ‘black­ness’ of this ink is abso­lutely unbeat­able in my exper­i­ence. It works so well in these brush pens, as well as in foun­tain pens without clog­ging them, which has happened with a great deal of other inks I’ve used. This seam­lessly leads us through to;

Foun­tain Pens;

There are only a couple of foun­tain pens I want to write about, firstly the Rotring Art­pen;

Rotring make very fine foun­tain pens, king of which in my opin­ion is the Art­pen, which glides across the page like pol­ished wax. These can also take the Plat­inum Con­verter men­tioned pre­vi­ously, so ink isn’t a problem.

They have a vari­ety of nib widths and weights, so they are great for cal­li­graphy as well as drawing.

That said, I do have some com­plaints about these pens.

Firstly, they are slightly too long to fit into your pocket or stand­ard pen­cil case. This isn’t really a big moan though, they are very nicely bal­anced and sit snug in your hand while drawing.

The big com­plaint is that I have found them to be fairly incon­sist­ent. I had a 1.1 nib that has been non-stop superb, and a ‘B’ nib that has also been great, but I have had an appro­pri­ately named ‘F’ nib that would choose the least appro­pri­ate time to leak dis­pro­por­tion­ate amount of ink all over what you have been drawing.

Abso­lutely infuriating.

Next is a pen that I have a love-hate rela­tion­ship with, the Tachi­kawa School-G.

This pen feels dis­pos­able, but is refil­lable. It is designed for manga use, and has a G style flex­ible nib. You can get a superbly fine line or a line over a mil­li­metre thick. They take some wear­ing in before they are com­fort­able, but once worn in, they can be an abso­lute dream to draw or write with.

These pens do have a sig­ni­fic­ant down­side though. They are the fussi­est pens I’ve ever had. If you don’t use them every single day without fail and store them nib-down, they tend to dry out and become nearly unus­able. I’ve also had a nib shat­ter on me, spray­ing ink and tiny frag­ments of metal over a 15 cm radius, which I’m sure you’ll agree is less than ideal.

I’ve had four or five of these pens, and there hasn’t been one that wasn’t prob­lem­atic in some way or another. They do come in ‘Fine’ and ‘Extra-Fine’ though, and there is a sepia ver­sion as well that enjoys all the bene­fits and suf­fers all the prob­lems of the black.

The final pen I’d like to enthuse about is the Sailor Brush Style Foun­tain Pen.

This pen takes a bit of get­ting used to, but once you have the hang of it, you fall in love with it. The nib appears at first to be broken or bent, but this is a design fea­ture. You get the con­trol of a foun­tain pen and the vari­able line of a brush in one pen, depend­ing on which angle you hold the pen to the page.

Although I abso­lutely love these pens, I do have a couple of minor com­plaints about them. They are too long to fit snugly into a pocket, and don’t have a clip to hold them in your shirt pocket (every­one car­ries pens in their shirt pocket, right? That’s not just me is it?)

As the sur­face area of the broad end of the nib is quite large, it does some­times fall vic­tim to dry­ing occa­sion­ally, which can be worked out fairly easily.

All in all, a superb pen. I’ve been using the 55º nib for a while without any real prob­lems, and am cur­rently wait­ing on deliv­ery of the 40º nib, so I’ll be sure to answer any ques­tions about that.

Although this is prob­ably the least con­ten­tious post I’ve ever pos­ted, I’m sure someone some­where will point out some myth­ical pen some­where that I’ve missed that writes all wrongs (sorry), so I apo­lo­gise in advance if I’ve missed out your favour­ite pen. If you do have some kind of pen to add to the list, then yes, you are a pen fetishist.

Wel­come to the Pen­Lust club, your secret inky hand­shake will be sent to you shortly.