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;

James Sturm, dir­ector of CCS, con­ducts an inter­est­ing exper­i­ment; he quits the internet.

As the dir­ector of a small school, I have a lot of legit­im­ate reas­ons to be online. Every day, I am com­mu­nic­at­ing with stu­dents, staff, vis­it­ing artists, board mem­bers, and alumni. I stay in con­tact with school pat­rons, found­a­tion officers, and elec­ted offi­cials for devel­op­ment pur­poses. I am work­ing on graphic nov­els and children’s books with car­toon­ists who are scattered across the country.

But essen­tial online com­mu­nic­a­tion has given way to hours of com­puls­ive e-mail check­ing and Web surf­ing. The Inter­net has made me a slave to my van­ity: I mon­itor the Amazon rank­ing of my books on an hourly basis, and I’m con­stantly search­ing for com­ments and dis­cus­sions about my work. I fol­low the Knicks on a daily basis (per­haps my most shame­ful admission).

I can com­pletely relate to this, but it has seemed to divide opin­ion, so read through the com­ments as well.

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.

Comic Book Resources have an inter­est­ing post on the rise of digital com­ics and how they may affect tra­di­tional com­ics business.

The the­or­et­ical rise of digital com­ics changes the game, but doesn’t kill it. The first point brought up in the pod­cast was about pub­li­ciz­ing the com­ics con­ven­tion, much of which is done today through the local comic shops. Without those local comic shops, where do you advertise?

How about the digital comic shops? (Long­box, Graphic.ly, Pan­elfly, etc.) As a tech­no­lo­gical bonus, those ser­vices will have ter­rific demo­graphic inform­a­tion in their data­base. There’s no reason a smal­ler local show wouldn’t be able to advert­ise to only those users of a given ser­vice in its own area. So if you’re run­ning a dealer show out of the Hol­i­day Inn in Boise, those digital shops should be able to only show your ads to people within an hour or two of that ballroom.

This art­icle makes some inter­est­ing points that’ll be explored in an upcom­ing art­icle on the Long­box system.

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?

I’ve let the dust settle a bit before post­ing up any­thing need­lessly reac­tion­ary regard­ing Apple’s new iPad. For those of you that have inex­plic­ably not heard of it, the iPad has pro­voked the full range of reac­tions from lust to indif­fer­ence. Here is a quick roundup of what us comics-types have been talk­ing about;

Pub­lish­ers Weekly speaks to pub­lish­ers about the pos­sib­il­it­ies of digital pub­lish­ing and distribution;

Top Shelf pub­lisher Chris Staros said, “It’s prob­ably going to have a sig­ni­fic­ant effect over the long term, as many of the things we pub­lish can now be read in a com­par­able size to the actual phys­ical books.” Top Shelf is already at work on applic­a­tions for the iPod and the iPad and Staros believes the device will spur sales of phys­ical graphic nov­els, not­ing that the “art object nature of graphic nov­els will keep them in print for many years to come, and, in fact, it’s very pos­sible that the digital deliv­ery of them may even increase the demand for prin­ted ver­sions. Time will tell.”

Infoworld have a fairly tech-heavy set of eight ques­tions that Apple won’t answer;

Fam­ously tight-lipped, Apple often views the press as an exten­sion of its mar­ket­ing effort, treat­ing all but a favored few to a sad­istic game of hard-to-get. When Apple extends this silence bey­ond a product’s razzmatazz unveil­ing, it’s usu­ally meant that the product in ques­tion could not deliver the func­tion­al­ity journ­al­ists have asked about. With that in mind, unanswered quer­ies about the iPad may imply that the iPad is less “magical” and “revolu­tion­ary” than Jobs suggests.

Tech­land talks to Douglas Wolk about his thoughts on digital com­ics;

Me, I like phys­ical things. I strongly prefer hav­ing com­ics that I can not only read but give away or lend or sell or drop in the bathtub. It’d be great to have easy access to a com­plete digital archive of comics–and wouldn’t it make sense for continuity-minded pub­lish­ers to post apro­pos links to things that tie into their new com­ics each week? But, you know, comics-bootleg blogs and Rap­id­share effect­ively do that anyway.

I think that the paper/pixel debate will con­tinue to roll on regard­less, but I also think that there can be a tend­ency to think in very polar­ised terms — ALL paper or ALL paper­less. I’m pretty sure that whatever we end up with will be a hybrid digital/analogue com­ics eco­nomy. I’ll be post­ing up fur­ther thoughts on this topic soon, includ­ing some thoughts on the long-awaited-baited-breath Long­box system.

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’ve shif­ted the site’s RSS feeds to feed­burner so that I can track stats and other nerdy tech-talk.

The short ver­sion of this post is; Update your rss feeds!

Tom Hum­ber­stone, editor of the superb Sol­ipsistic Pop, writes up a fas­cin­at­ing piece about get­ting the smell of Solop­sistic Pop #1 right.

The first book had to do a lot of things. It had to estab­lish itself as a per­fect venue to view and dis­cover the lead­ing altern­at­ive comic artists based in the UK. This book had to look like it would be at home on a shelf in Water­stones and Art/Design book stores. These com­ics needed to be prin­ted prop­erly. On good paper­stock. Exposed to litho­graphic plates for max­imum qual­ity. The col­ours needed to be just right. Everything needed to be just right. Going through Lulu or any other POD com­pany wouldn’t be enough. I knew we needed to find a reli­able, reas­on­able, and respec­ted print­ers who could offer their own thoughts and feed­back on the pro­duc­tion. Someone we could a build a strong rela­tion­ship with for future volumes.

Addi­tion­ally, I wanted to give a nod towards the humble but sim­il­arly beau­ti­ful ori­gins of small press com­ics by fea­tur­ing two hand stapled mini-comics. There’s some­thing to be cher­ished about pho­to­copy roller marks and mis­aligned crop mark­ers. I didn’t want this book to sug­gest oth­er­wise. Sol­ipsistic Pop is about try­ing to look for­ward to the future of Brit­ish altern­at­ive com­ics, but by doing so, the past and present also needed to be acknowledged.

Need­less to say, Sol­ipsistic Pop is an excit­ing bound for­ward that occa­sion­ally glances over its shoulder, but I’ll write up a more suc­cinct review once I’ve stopped sniff­ing it.

If you don’t have your own copy yet — Get over here and get one! Still not got one? Get over here and pre­view it. I should state that the online pre­view lacks the olfact­ory stim­u­lus of the prin­ted version.

Flash­back Uni­verse writes up a fas­cin­at­ing art­icle on the illegal com­ics down­load mar­ket. It looks like Long­box has a lot to live up to…