Zettelkastening Comics

I was interested to read Numenius’ blog post from yesterday. I am drawn to movable pieces, whether written or drawn, and wonder how this might help in construction of a comic.

An important feature of a comic is that there be sequential panels, whether or not anything is written on them. But the number of panels, their size relative to each other, and even where they appear (cliffhangers work better if positioned at the bottom right hand of a recto page, at least in Western traditions, for instance), can all be worked through if ideas and panels are assembled as movable pieces.

I have a lot of index cards and at least three projects currently in the works on cards, held together with rubber bands. None of them is very large which helps. But this is giving me a lot of ideas about how to work, specifically with how to structure thought.

From Guinea Pigs to Hummingbirds

Yesterday was the last day of August. I had promised myself to complete a (rough!) first draft of my Mister Ginger comic by the end of the day, and I more or less did.

I now have a new task, one whose deadline is September 24th. I’ve been invited to submit a 6-page comic for another SAW anthology entitled Field Notes. I’m going to take some of the hummingbird drawings I did and arrange them thematically on six pages. This book is going to be even smaller than the last one, so my plan is to have one large panel per page.

At left is some of the doodling I’ve been doing for the title page. I am toying with versals. Since I’m going to be working at least at 200% I was playing with larger paper, which is definitely a challenge.

Below are the postcards I painted last Birdtober from which I am drawing the material for this comic. Nice to have most of the research for this project done and dusted.

Sailor Fude

I’ve been working on the ancillary characters of the Mr. Ginger story. Slavic people tend to have round faces and large eyes. This is a gross oversimplification but I was looking for faces online that I could draw quickly to try and approximate this.

Because I’m going to be working at double size, I needed a thicker line than my Pilot Metropolitan could give me. My Sailor Fude pen has a bent nib which allows for four different line weights. Working on hot press watercolor paper is hard — the ink needed a bit of coaxing — but I like the effect. It’s sort of cartoony without my intending it to be so.

I will also be trying Bristol board but I’m thinking this might work well. Still unsure about whether to hand letter the text. (Or whether to hand letter it, digitize it, and set it that way…)

Flow

A prompt from SAWgust yesterday was to depict our Flow, our Process. This is my attempt to depict mine. It’s not very efficient.

I’m trying to get as much done as I can on Mister Ginger before Sunday night, and it’s slow. Paper is definitely faster, but if I do it digitally it’s a lot easier to edit. It doesn’t mean I don’t have bits of paper all over the house.

One thing is, my deadline is self-imposed. I have no idea what I’m doing with this thing other than giving a copy to Mister Ginger’s former owners. But I do have time to get this right, or as right as I can.

Material

The good folks at SAWgust have been providing prompts daily to get us thinking about our process. I’ve sometimes answered prompts but I’ve ALWAYS thought about them; they’re very interesting. Today’s was #material: what materials do we use and why? I decided to draw it on one of my materials that isn’t pictured here (Procreate on my iPad). And it’s all from memory, since Winston was sprawled across the kitchen table where these materials all are.

Last night I had a call with Mr. Ginger’s owner, and hoo boy there is a lot more to this story. Good and bad. The good: Mister Ginger is still alive and well and living in Kharkiv (and he has a girlfriend); the bad: this has been traumatic for him, retelling this story for me. But A. did say that he thought Mr. Ginger helped him through some very hard times, which is great to hear because it’s the actual punchline — simply giving comfort to people in a war zone is heroic enough.

Matching the Medium to the Message

On Saturday I attended the SAWgust halfway point call. I had a question about how others organized their composition process if the final was going to be analog; mostly I work on paper then go digital. But for this Ukraine project it seems analog is a good way to go.

I’d done some sketches with a fountain pen but it has a fine nib and when reduced down it maybe too fine a line. I looked for and found my Sailor Fude pen, a fountain pen with a bent nib that can give you at least three different thicknesses. I think I can get this to work. I still have some fine-tuning to do but am pretty set on this course.

Someone said they just redrew and redrew panels until they were right. Someone else said when using watercolor they used a camera rather than a scanner. Another helpful suggestion was to write the names of the materials, paints, brushes and pens on the back of the work so if you revisit it a year later you have some hope of matching it.

Meanwhile it’s looking like I might do the whole section before the invasion in full color, moving to monochrome afterwards except for the guinea pig… The paper is Deleter A Comic Book Paper size B5, which is not as thick as Bristol board, takes a good wash, and is very pen-friendly.

Almost a Real Guinea Pig

I’ve now completed a very incomplete first draft of the script for my Mister Ginger comic. There will need to be quite a bit of work on the script and also on the drawings… but to help with the latter, I ordered a plushie, pictured at left, and set about doing some sketches.

Drawing live guinea pigs is obviously better, but a) I don’t have one, b) if I did, the cats would kill it, c) if I go to the pet store, the animals are almost at ground level which makes it hard to get anything other than a bird’s eye view. So this plushie, while not perfect, at least allows me the luxury of placing at eye level and even higher, this way and that, 3/4 view and from behind. I am still drawing on reference photos but this will allow me to stage the drawings in my comic better.

Designing a Cape for a Guinea Pig

The Ukrainian coat of arms features a trident (“tryzub)”) that dates at least as far back as King Volodymyr (980-1015). It was redesigned following Ukraine’s independence in 1991: gold on a blue ground, as in this Ukrposhta stamp “The first anniversary of the independence of Ukraine. State Coat of Arms and State Flag of Ukraine.”

Working on my Mister Ginger comic has given me a lot to think about, particularly this prompt: “how does your character see themselves? how do others see them?” and it occurs to me that this guinea pig thinks he’s a hero, where the people around him see him as a lovable, cuddly pet. But if he gets a cape… even if it’s only a bandana, what does that change?

I am still very much in the beginning stages of all this but am pondering what defines a “hero,” what is “heroic,” and whether simply giving comfort to people in a war zone counts. I think maybe it does.

Guinea Pig Studies

I’m working on a new comic, one that features a guinea pig that had some big adventures during the Russian advance on Kyiv in February 2022. (Since this is based on a true story, I’d like to make the guinea pig at least somewhat recognizable!) We owned a couple of guinea pigs as kids but that was a long time ago plus neither was the smooth-haired variety like Mister Ginger, so I’ve been doing some online image research (anatomy, though there is precious little available about musculature) and different poses, including some video I took at a PetSmart in Brunswick, Maine on Monday.

Getting the guinea pig to look “right” as a somewhat drawn-from-life animal is essential before I can turn this into the plucky heroic character of my story, and today was a bit of a test to see how far I’ve come. The ears are completely eluding me: you don’t want them upright (too much like a capybara), you don’t want them small (too much like a rat), you don’t want them big (too much like a chinchilla) and in fact in many photos of guinea pigs you hardly see them at all. It’s definitely back to the drawing board tomorrow, but I thought I’d share some progress sketches… There is a new PetSmart in town that might have some live guinea pigs, which would be a great place to start.

Travel Comics

I’ve been participating in the Friday Night Comics workshops offered by the “Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW)” for some time, though I’ve missed the past few. Tonight we were invited to make a page of a travel comic, led by Corinne Newbegin. I chose my recent trip to the East Coast to visit my now 92-year-old mother and spend a couple of days with my birding friend Linda. I have missed spring migration on the east coast for many of my trips there, and this was a great opportunity to address that.

Wistful, though. Would I ever see mum again? I hope so. I’m going back on Tuesday, leaving Numenius in charge of the cats.