The Comics Bureau

I should have pos­ted this long ago, but being a very slack blog­ger means I didn’t. What makes it worse is that not only am I a con­trib­utor, but also helped Jim out in a tech­nical capa­city, util­ising my wordpress-wrangling skills. My apo­lo­gies. Anyway;

Com­ical Animal has launched! Head over right now to see some rein­ter­pret­a­tions of vin­tage funny animal strips by Rob Jack­son and Francesca Cas­savetti, read an essay on The Mouse by the head keeper him­self, Jim Med­way and a host of ori­ginal funny animal strips by the likes of Gary North­field, Dave Shelton, Lizz Lun­ney, the affor­e­men­tioned Jim Med­way and myself.

As if this wasn’t enough, you can spon­sor an animal (just like a real zoo) Spon­sor­ship so far comes from Good Grief com­ics in Manchester, which you should all check out and Blank Slate Books, which has pub­lished books by Com­ics Bur­eau favour­ites Oliver East and Darryl Cun­ning­ham, and is there­fore auto­mat­ic­ally also a Com­ics Bur­eau favourite.

Need­less to say, you all need to sub­scribe to the mail­ing list to be informed of upcom­ing funny animal activ­ity, con­sider con­trib­ut­ing if you have a funny animal strip of essay idea that you are eager to share and finally, con­sider donat­ing money to keep it going.

Com­ical Animal is a labour of love, and it would be great to see Jim recoup some of the costs of web­space etc. You can either adopt an animal as an indi­vidual or a busi­ness or simply paypal over what you con­sider to be a fit­ting donation.

Why are you still read­ing this? Go there NOW!

There has been plenty writ­ten about the latest Sol­ipsistic Pop recently. I par­tic­u­larly liked this writeup at Avoid The Future;

Some­thing that becomes more and more appar­ent when read­ing through this volume is how much more fluid it feels in terms of con­tent than its predecessor. Humberstone has done a com­mend­able job as editor, find­ing the elu­sive alchemy that gives an antho­logy the bal­ance between over­arch­ing cohes­ive­ness and styl­istic variety. Diverse in art and nar­rat­ive approaches, Sol­ipsistic Pop 2 really feels like a gate­way into the often unseen spec­trum of com­ics tal­ent in the UK.

Have a look through the list of con­trib­ut­ors and their web­sites here.

I’ll be post­ing up a more detailed roundup of some of the talk sur­round­ing the immin­ent arrival in the UK of Apple’s iPad soon, but for the time being, head over to Boing­Bo­ing to read their hands-on review of Marvel’s iPad app;

First impres­sion: I like it. Scrolling is intu­it­ive, brisk, and eleg­ant. I’m amazed at how smooth. The store inter­face makes sense to any­one famil­iar with iTunes and App store. Flip­ping and read­ing, one lumin­ous full-color page at a time, I do not miss paper. When zoom­ing deeper into single frames, to scroll frame-by-frame, trans­itions (with “anim­ated” option selec­ted) feel almost cine­matic— but some­times zoomed-in art is not as crisp and high-res as I’d like (it var­ies by title). Unless I’m miss­ing some­thing, no way to view two pages at a time, as you might with a paper comic. I didn’t miss that detail, but oth­ers might. And some com­ics were designed and drawn by the artist with that view option in mind. I’ll be inter­ested to see how the app and the con­tent avail­able for it evolve.

If you like Miyazaki, check out his book ‘Start­ing Point: 1979–1996′. Dash Shaw over at Com­ics Com­ics has a short review.

I had already decided to spend my future draw­ing pic­tures, so I was try­ing to draw ones filled with grudges and spite. Yet, as I didn’t have a con­crete blue­print for my future I was filled with anxiety.

As we grow from child­hood into youth, this anxi­ety grows expo­nen­tially, and we worry about how on earth we should live our lives. Our anxi­ety forces us to look for an anti­dote that will rid us of this feel­ing as quickly as pos­sible. We want to find that some­thing will help us grab our own chair in this world and sit in it.

I chose manga as a weapon to fight against anxi­ety, and, as I men­tioned, at first I drew gekiga, story-oriented manga. Just about that time I saw Hak­u­jaden (The Tale of the White Ser­pent.) For me, it was a kind of cul­ture shock. I began to have doubts about gekiga…

I’ve pos­ted about this before, but thought that Greg McElhatton’s review of Willy Linthout’s ‘Years of the Ele­phant’ deserved a link.

Linthout cre­ates Charles Ger­mon­prez as his alter ego in Years of the Ele­phant, a busi­ness­man in his 50s liv­ing with his wife Simone, whose son Jack has just leapt off the roof of their apart­ment build­ing to his death. There’s no warn­ing, no sign that this is com­ing, and Linthout appro­pri­ately starts the book with a one-page strip as a typ­ical day is sud­denly shattered by the arrival of police at the door bear­ing the bad news. As Charles is reel­ing from the shock, we get the title pages and intro­duc­tion, almost like the open­ing cred­its after a teaser on tele­vi­sion. In some ways, Years of the Ele­phant starts with a punch to the gut and never relents from that moment on.

It’s dif­fi­cult at times to read Years of the Ele­phant, to see the grief, des­pair, and even delu­sions that Charles goes through in the days, months, and years that fol­low. Jack was Charles’s only son, and the loss quickly turns into a linger­ing specter that refuses to let go. Some scenes look at first to be played for laughs, as Charles tries to save the the pave­ment that Jack’s chalk out­line was upon, or when the click­ing noises of a breath­ing appar­atus are believed to be a mes­sage from bey­ond the grave for Charles. The laughter, though, is almost a hys­ter­ical giggle more than any­thing else. As Charles goes through what appears to be a series of men­tal break­downs, his pre­cari­ous grip on real­ity slips bit by bit. What might ini­tially look to be cop­ing mech­an­isms rap­idly turn into dan­ger­ous delu­sions, ones that help Charles avoid the sad­ness that threatens to over­take him, and as a reader you begin to won­der at what point things will turn back to nor­mal for Charles. Except, of course, in some ways that’s the big mes­sage of Years of the Ele­phant; it will never be “nor­mal” again for Charles. The sui­cide of his only child is most likely going to haunt him for the rest of his life, even if the degree to which it does so might change over time.

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!

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?

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.

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.

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.