The Comics Bureau

Check out this great anim­a­tion by Jacques Khouri, Time & Again;

This is the story of a man’s daily life and how it is bor­ing and quite repet­it­ive. Pro­ject developed under the con­text of my sequen­tial art stud­ies. It is a study of the visual dis­course of anim­a­tion films.

Jacques also gives us a look behind the magician’s cloth here.

Check out the new web series ‘The Unclothed Man in the 35th Cen­tury A.D.’ by Dash Shaw (of Bot­tom­less Belly But­ton fame)

The Unclothed Man in the 35th Cen­tury A.D is an ori­ginal anim­ated web series based on graphic nov­el­ist and comic book artist Dash Shaw’s latest book of the same title, set for release in Novem­ber, 2009 after the web series premiere on IFC.com. Shaw’s anim­a­tion has been widely praised for its eclectic style, innov­at­ive design and emo­tional depth.

Above — Epis­ode 1: Black Hole Mouth

This has been doing the rounds recently, but I thought I’d post it up any­way. From Mon­sters & Rockets;

Nobody who has read Richard McGuire’s 1989 comic stri­pHere has ever for­got­ten it. (Ori­gin­ally prin­ted in Raw: Vol. 2, Num­ber 1, it’s more recently been reprin­ted in Ivan Brunetti’s An Antho­logy of Graphic Fic­tion, Car­toons and True Stor­ies and in the eighth issue of Comic Art. ) A truly mind-bending work, the strip jumps around in time but not in space, show­ing us vari­ous events occur­ring on a little patch of land over the course of bil­lions of years.Here is form­ally dar­ing but also sur­pris­ingly mov­ing, drop­ping us into ran­dom moments in the lives of the people who have called “here” their home.

I’ve been a big fan of the strip for years, but I had no idea that it had inspired a short film. This is appar­ently a stu­dent work, but it’s hardly ama­teur­ish. To say it’s per­haps half as good as the ori­ginal is not a bad thing when the ori­ginal is this great. Still, I strongly sug­gest you read the ori­ginal on this site before watch­ing the film. You’ll never look at your home in quite the same way again.

Craig Fisc­her over at Thought Bal­loon­ists writes up an inter­est­ing art­icle on Osamu Tezuka’s film influ­ences fol­low­ing what sounds like an enjoy­able read of Natsu Onoda Power’s God of Com­ics: Osamu Tezuka and the Cre­ation of Post-World War II Manga (2009)

Most inter­est­ing to me, though, was Power’s claim that “images inspired by deep-focus cine­ma­to­graphy are par­tic­u­larly char­ac­ter­istic” of Tezuka’s car­toon­ing in Met­ro­polis (God 56). I’m more than a little obsessed with deep focus, and in this post I want to explore and expand on Power’s claim. I’ll begin by defin­ing deep focus and sum­mar­iz­ing Andre Bazin’s per­cep­tual and philo­soph­ical argu­ments for its import­ance; then I’ll look closely at Power’s examples of deep focus in Met­ro­polis. Finally, I’ll ques­tion if it’s accur­ate to talk about a comic (by Tezuka or any other car­toon­ist) hav­ing depth of field in the same way that a film does.

As pre­vi­ously men­tioned, I could watch time lapse foot­age of people draw­ing ALL DAY if I was allowed. Any­way, here is Jeff Smith of Bone fame ink­ing a panel;

Con­tinu­ing this run of video posts is this delight­ful piece by Chad Pugh on Vimeo;

This piece inspired the login illus­tra­tion that vimeo com­mis­sioned from me for their redesign earlier this year; it is still in use through­out the site. The video is a con­densed time lapse of screen­shots over a sev­eral month period. Total phys­ical draw­ing time is close to 40 hours and I’d add an equal amount of time for concept time and ready­ing the print. A screen­shot was taken every 5 seconds, which actu­ally res­ults in a full 18 minute video, but I shrunk it into a video under 7 minutes for entertainment’s sake.

I would watch timelapse videos of people work­ing all day if I could. Lit­er­ally all day.

From Richard Cowdry’s Love the Line comes this superb Wind­sor McCay film/animation: