The Comics Bureau

Head over to the Pro­ject Site, where Jim Woodring is ask­ing for dona­tions to build a giant fully func­tional dip pen.

I am soli­cit­ing $4,500 to man­u­fac­ture a giant steel dip pen and pen­holder for pub­lic demon­stra­tion and dis­play. I hope to pro­mote the under­stand­ing and use of this beau­ti­ful piece of ancient tech­no­logy through a series of per­form­ances, as well as cre­ate an art object in itself.

The dip pen is a bit of fet­ish item for me (as it is for many pen users). The pen is extremely dif­fi­cult to mas­ter but ulti­mately allows for an extraordin­ary degree of expres­sion. The well-constructed pen and ink draw­ing is a monu­ment to per­sever­ance, requir­ing tre­mend­ous patience and con­trol. I am thrilled by the chal­lenge of cre­at­ing such draw­ings in pub­lic and intro­du­cing new audi­ences to the allure of the medium. The pen (nib) itself will be approx­im­ately 16 inches long, made of steel and fully func­tional. The holder will be six feet long and made of wood with a metal sleeve insert to hold the pen. Nib and holder will resemble as closely as pos­sible the actual imple­ments on which they are based.

Once the pen and pen­holder are built I will train myself to ink with it; and once I’ve done that, I will arrange at least two pub­lic per­form­ances in which I will use the pen to ink large graph­ite draw­ings on 3′ x 5′ sheets of bristol.

Get involved by donat­ing to the project.

Here’s a post from Jim explain­ing how the pen will work;

Head over to Flavorwire.com to have a look at some illus­tra­tions for Cor­mac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian;

Draw­ing com­par­is­ons to both Dante’s Inferno and Her­man Melville’s Moby Dick, Cor­mac McCarthy’sBlood Meridian is a work of genu­ine mad­ness, and one of the most viol­ent books in con­tem­por­ary lit­er­at­ure. Zak Smith (who pre­vi­ously illus­trated each page of Gravity’s Rain­bow), and five other artists (Sean McCarthy, John Mejias, Craig Taylor, Shawn Cheng, and Matt Wiegle) have taken on the daunt­ing task of illus­trat­ing every page of the grizzly tale. The styles range from haunt­ingly vivid to extremely abstract, each image com­ple­men­ted with a quote from the source mater­ial that served as its inspiration.

Dave Shelton, of Good Dog, Bad Dog fame kindly agreed to take some time out of his sched­ule to answer some ques­tions. Good Dog, Bad Dog is out now through the excel­lent DFC Lib­rary. (more on that soon) You can visit Dave’s site here and his blog here.

How would you like to be introduced?

” Oh, the usual: “Dave this is [insert name here], [insert name here], this is Dave” that kind of thing.

What was your primary expos­ure to comics?

All Brit­ish stuff to begin with. From a very early age I was look­ing at and later read­ing Brit­ish humour com­ics like The Beano, Dandy, Whoopee, Whizzer and Chips, then from around the age of 7 war com­ics like Battle and War­lord came into the mix. And my older brother got Action, whenever that was, so I read those too. And he saved them too which was the first time the idea of read­ing and reread­ing com­ics had occurred to me. I had an ini­tial reluct­ance to have any­thing to do with 2000AD, which seems odd to me now, but latched onto it after a year or two and got well and truly hooked.

What was it that encour­aged you to pur­sue a career as a pro­fes­sional cartoonist?

I hon­estly don’t know. I’d kind of thought I wanted to do some­thing art-based for a liv­ing from around the age of 13 or 14 I think but only had the very vaguest idea of what that might entail. By 19, at the end of my found­a­tion course I’d only just decided that Fine Art wasn’t the way to go and went on to do an HND in Illus­tra­tion but I don’t think I’d set my sights on comic strip work par­tic­u­larly. As the years went by I retained an interest in com­ics and the illus­tra­tion work I got ten­ded more and more to the car­toony rather than any­thing paint­erly (some of my earli­est jobs had been done with water­col­our or acrylics). I think it was just in my DNA and was bound to find its way out eventually.

Either that or I just couldn’t res­ist the lure of the glam­or­ous life­style and the fab­ulous riches…

You are a self-confessed pen enthu­si­ast. How did this start?

I don’t know really, it kind of crept up on me. I remem­ber I used to share a flat with a mate I’d been at art col­lege with, Mike Irwin, and a bloke called Oli and one time after a night in the pub Oli com­plained that Mike and I were weird because we had con­ver­sa­tions about pens. We were offen­ded by this and told him not to be ridicu­lous, of course we didn’t have con­ver­sa­tions about pens, in fact nobody has con­ver­sa­tions about pens, how sad would that be. Then a night or two later I caught myself doing exactly that and real­ised, yes, maybe I had some kind of a problem…

How does your pen-thusiasm mani­fest itself?

I own more than 350 pens. That would be the main manifestation.

Also, I will very hap­pily talk, at some length, about pens to other car­toon­ists. Or any­one who’ll listen. Or any­one who won’t.

Oh, and occa­sion­ally I’ll find myself watch­ing a film and miss­ing some of the dia­logue because I’m think­ing some­thing like “Ooh, look, that Woody Harrelson’s got a Montblanc.”

I know this can be a dif­fi­cult ques­tion, but do you have a favourite?

The Pilot DR draw­ing pen, 0.3. That’s my weapon of choice really. Oth­ers come and go and I dally with them for a while but that’s the missus.

I like the Pen­tel brush­pen and Colo(u)r Brush a lot too.

Tell us about the life of a pen.

The Life Of A Pen was some­thing I did a few years ago after a long spell work­ing almost exclus­ively on a licensed pro­ject. I’d spent three or four years draw­ing mostly in a style that wasn’t quite my own and I’d become rather jaded and wasn’t really enjoy­ing the act of draw­ing much. Any­way, that work came to a nat­ural end and I had a little money in the bank so I decided to take a little time off dur­ing which I decided to act on an idea I’d had some time before. I took a brand new pen (one of the afore­men­tioned Pilot DR 0.3s) and a brand new sketch­book and I drew with that pen only in that sketch­book until it ran out of ink so that every mark it made from first to last was all in one place. I thought it’d be an amus­ing little diver­sion that would res­ult in half a dozen or so quite inter­est­ing pages of doodles that I would post up on my blog as they were com­pleted. In fact it held out for 27 pages. But it got me fea­tured on the Drawn blog and res­ul­ted in a tem­por­ary massive boost to my blog read­er­ship. And down the line it got me a couple of bits of work too.

I also prin­ted up a few cop­ies of a little self pub­lished book repro­du­cing the 27 pages and flogged a few cop­ies of that. But the main thing was I drew 27 pages of dir­ec­tion­less, play­ful, joy­ful draw­ing and got back to a point where I was enjoy­ing draw­ing again.

What does your workspace/studio look like?

My part­ner is an illus­trator and we share the down­stairs front room of the house as a stu­dio space. It’s only rel­at­ively recently that I moved in so we’re still set­tling into how best to arrange the space and ourselves within it. The fixed points though are a lot of Ikea Billy shelves full of a mix of our books and a decent-sized wooden table that we occupy either end of (if we’re both work­ing at the same time) some­times with each of us on a laptop and look­ing ter­ribly mod­ern, some­times both draw­ing, some­times with a DVD play­ing on a laptop off to one side for us to fail to pay proper atten­tion to.

There again I some­times just work in a sketch­book in bed.

What does a typ­ical work day (if there is such a thing) look like?

There never was such a thing and, again, with mov­ing into my partner’s place and hav­ing her and her six year old daugh­ter to con­sider (which I don’t always make that good a job of), it’s now even more up in the air than before. I’ve never been one of those dis­cip­lined office hours types (though I can cer­tainly see the sense in that). I’m get­ting a bit old for work­ing through the night though so I try to avoid that these days. And I’m try­ing to think of week­ends as work days only if abso­lutely neces­sary rather than as a default. That makes me sound obsess­ive and indus­tri­ous which I’m abso­lutely not. I can be quite hor­ribly lazy and inef­fi­cient at times, but then I can turn in 16 or 18 hour days for a spell if need be. Hope­fully I’ll be able to improve and organ­ise myself a bit bet­ter as the com­ing year looks to be a bit more pre­dict­able in terms of hav­ing big long term pro­jects to deal with rather than fits and starts of smal­ler jobs that need to be done in a hurry. That’s the the­ory anyway.

Explain your writing/drawing process.

Haphaz­ard. Dis­or­gan­ised. Inef­fi­cient. Pan­icked. But ulti­mately successful.

What are you work­ing on at the moment?

I’m writ­ing the second draft of a children’s novel that I’m also illus­trat­ing. It’s for David Fick­ling who also pub­lished Good Dog, Bad Dog (both in the DFC and in book form).

What pro­jects do you have on the horizon?

More Good Dog, Bad Dog, about which I am very pleased indeed.

Whose work are you excited about at the moment?

It tends to be the dis­cov­ery of illus­trat­ors from a pre­vi­ous age that gets me excited these days as much as any­thing by any­one work­ing now — either chance find­ings in second hand book­shops and char­ity shops or stuff I stumble over or have poin­ted out to me on the inter­net. A lot of stuff from around the ‘50s. People like Aure­lius Battaglia who illus­trated the amaz­ing Fireside Book of Amer­ican Songs and a hand­ful of other Golden Books illustrators.

But also I’m a long­stand­ing fan of Ron­ald Searle, both the humour stuff from the ‘50s and the report­age work. Nic­olas Bent­ley’s eco­nomy of line is a won­der­ful thing to behold. Um, Thi­erry Mar­tin, Chris­tophe Blain, Sarah McIntyre, Jamie Smart, J H Buchanan, all the usual sus­pects like Crumb, Clowes, Ware, Jaime Hernan­dez, Posy Sim­monds. And, you know, a load of people who just aren’t spring­ing to mind right now. I’m ter­rible at remem­ber­ing names whenever I’m asked this sort of thing. Sorry.

Have you been out today?

Yes, I went to the corner shop not long ago for milk and teabags.

Need­less to say, you must now visit Dave’s site and blog, get a copy of the lovely Good Dog, Bad Dog and encour­age every­one you know to do the same!

Hey! Are you aged between 16 & 25? Are you affected in any way by the reces­sion? Can you draw com­ics? Do you fancy win­ning £1000 and hav­ing your work dis­played in the Design Museum?

Well, head over to TheSite.org to read up on how to enter and to browse the competition.

You need to get your entries in before April 30th.

The strip above is by Ste Hitchen. You should prob­ably go and check his very nice work out.

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.

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.

I’m sure I’ve pos­ted this up some­where before, but as a monday-morning-not-quite-comics link Missed Con­nec­tions NY is a great way to start your week. The Radar short film is essen­tial view­ing (see below);

Mes­sages in bottles, smoke sig­nals, let­ters writ­ten in the sand; the mod­ern equi­val­ents are the funny, sad, beau­ti­ful, hope­ful, hope­less, poetic posts on Missed Con­nec­tions web­sites. Every day hun­dreds of strangers reach out to other strangers on the strength of a glance, a smile or a blue hat. Their mes­sages have the lifespan of a but­ter­fly. I’m try­ing to pin a few of them down.

Aw, hell, while we are at it (and by ‘it’ I mean talk­ing about some­thing other than com­ics) head over to Radar’s page on Babel­gum to see the films, and then get yourselves over to Radar’s Site. Those of you that atten­ded Thought Bubble might be inter­ested to watch Epis­ode #08 — Dr Sketchy’s. I like the way Radar think.

RADAR is a series of 3 minute epis­odes that high­light innov­at­ive pro­jects and events across dif­fer­ent cre­at­ive dis­cip­lines, hangs with cre­at­ors and founders, and digs deep into pro­cess, method and par­ti­cip­a­tion. From what it is means to ideate on the fly with musical improv duo I Eat Pan­das, to the cur­a­tion of con­fes­sional storytelling in Cas­sette From My Ex and the import­ance of com­munity in the Next– Door Neigh­bor all-star web­co­mix pro­ject, RADAR provides a cul­tural com­pass for audi­ences, in order to both inform and inspire.

The Doodle­meister him­self, Jim Sizemore writes an inter­est­ing art­icle on his early career and the Speed­ball Let­ter­ing Guide. Really fas­cin­at­ing stuff, highly recom­men­ded reading.