The Week

Jan12
by on 12 January 2018 at 12:00 AM

This week was a busy one marked by the hitting of a solid and sturdy wall by the end. So, most of this week’s media revolves around getting out of a funk (or wallowing in it). With that in mind, with all that has been going on (the most of which––is that a saying?––has been prepping for the new semester of school), this week is going to be rather light fare.

LISTENING

Heartless by Pallbearer. Source: Profound Lore Records

  • Heartless by Pallbearer

It’s no secret (though it’s often a surprise) that I’m a heavy metal fan. My brief brush with internet fame due to my art getting shared by Twisted Sister all but solidified that for the world. However, as much as I love Twisted, when it comes to heavy metal for my general listening pleasure (and I’m burned out on Twisted Sister), my tastes run much darker or, to use the parlance of the genre, doomier (I made that word up, but I’m an English teacher, so it’s legal). Actually, my tastes are very specific. I like grungy, chunky guitars but melodic vocals. I like slower metal but not droning repetition. It’s an aesthetic established by my love for Dawnbringer who not only checks all of those boxes but they established the boxes in the first place.

I actually found Pallbearer through a guitar magazine (I’m a guitar nerd, too) and loved what I heard on their newest album, Heartless. When it comes to this type of music––Dawnbringer included, to an extent––the importance to me is less the lyrics and content of the songs but more of the overall tone everything creates. Pallbearer’s album creates a sound that is a mixture of heaviness (the instruments) and wist (the vocals) that keep it from being a complete wallow in teen angst and more a tour through a set of emotions I experience a lot while drawing: utter despair and mournful hope.

LONG JOHN UPDATE

On Wednesday, the cover for Chapter 3, “Making Smoke” was unveiled on the website, along with a bit of behind-the-scenes information.

*crosses fingers*

This week, I really started feeling the weight that comes with the knowledge that the end of the chapter is right around the corner. With that, a negative aspect of my creative process really came to light (causing the dreaded “wall” mentioned at the beginning). In my writing classes, we spend some time talking about a thing called “writer’s block”, a phenomenon most of us have experienced but ignore its actual cause. We tend to define writer’s block as a state where ideas are lacking, where we’ve drawn a blank or our ideas are blocked by unknown plaque.

In response to this, I have my students read a wonderful article by Donald Murray called “Write Before Writing,” in which he discusses writer’s block actually being a result not of obstruction but of exhaustion. We can’t write because our brains are tired doing the same old thing, our go-to processes that “always” work…until they don’t. In most cases, it can be solved by simply trying something different––whether a different tactic or simply doing your normal thing but in a different place.

Knowing this, whenever I hit my wall I know what I have  to do (something different), but it doesn’t stop the anxiety, which is my oldest and fiercest enemy, an enemy I have no defense against. I often make the joke that I’m an artist that hates drawing. A more accurate way to say it would be that I’m an artist who is scared to draw. Every time I sit down to draw a page, I freeze. Even when I have the page thumbnailed out and I know exactly what to do––there’s still that hesitation, that fear.

This double-page spread has sat blank on my desk for two days.

I always push through it and I know that this anxiety will always creep up at the start of a page, but that never helps. To this point, I have drawn almost 400 pages of comics over my 10 years of comicking, almost 100 pages of Long John at this point, and there are no Long John pages that I think are bad, but still––even with all that work behind me––I still get scared. It will pass, but the feeling never leaves and, as the end of chapter 3 quickly approaches, may even get worse. But I’ll get there. I know that much.

In other news, Long John, Volume 2 will be back in stock shortly, so expect a bundle of volumes 1 & 2 to go up on the store post haste and at affordable prices.

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Chapter 3 Cover Reveal

Jan10
by on 10 January 2018 at 12:30 AM

So, here it is, promising a new chapter of Long John with its release, the cover to Chapter 3: Making Smoke.

The cover to Long John, Chapter 3: “Making Smoke.”

The most immediate and noticeable difference is this cover’s step away from the graphic, simple, design-focused images of the previous two books. The main reason is that inspiration struck me unlike, I think, any cover I’ve done in the past. Though I do make visual art, I am a little boring because I don’t often dabble in the realm of either interpretive art nor graphic design. At my core, I’m a storyteller with the stuff I draw and what I like to draw is the stuff that shows what’s happening. Sometimes I get a little wild, but not often enough to really say that I like bringing in abstract ideas into my visual storytelling, which is at the heart of most covers (well, of the covers I like, at least).

All D. Bethel-designed covers so far. It’s clear it took some time to figure out proper sizing. Click to enlarge.

But this idea came out of nowhere one day (I think while I was watching my students do peer workshops, actually), and I quickly doodled down the idea of a daguerreotype (more specifically, a carte de visite, a popular early paper photograph) of The John posse but with the middle torn out so the “before” Long John remains unseen and, in his place, is the current Long John of the comic. It works thematically for the chapter and provided an interesting visual element. The daguerreotype portion was inspired by images that popped up during my research of the period, where a surprising number of outlaws––as a means to thumb their noses at the law and “civilized” society––would openly flaunt their status and go get professional portraits taken. The most famous of these is the portrait of Butch Cassidy with his Wild Bunch, which he would (and this may be apocryphal) send to law enforcement once he escaped their chase.

Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch gang sitting for a portrait, inspiring Chapter 3’s cover in the process. Source: Wikipedia.

Overall, I’m pretty proud of the final cover. The hardest part was getting the colors right, but when those fell into place, the rest was easy. Unlike the comic––where I make sure that the entirety of the art is on the physical page––I’ve always been digital-forward with the covers. While all the elements on this cover are hand-drawn, they were drawn as two separate pieces. First, I drew out the flashback portrait of The Johns in its entirety, including Long John in his original clothes (which he has yet to be seen wearing in the comic and never will be). On a different, loose sheet of paper was the angry “modern” Long John. I created the tear in Photoshop and pieced the two together. It was probably a longer, more frustrating process than drawing the entirety on a single piece of paper, but something about drawing the original Long John––the “before” Long John––felt important to me. It was almost as if I felt like that Long John deserved a cover, too, if in the end he still remains unseen.

Mock up comp (left), first pass at colors (right).

Now, all that needs to be done is finish up Chapter 3. As the video at the top says, I’m aiming for its debut Free Comic Book Day in May, but––who knows––something could always pop up and delay the process, though I don’t see what would do that.

With all of that said, I hope you enjoy the cover and I can’t wait to show you more of “Making Smoke.”

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The Week

Jan05
by on 5 January 2018 at 12:06 AM

The first week of 2018 is locked down and production of Long John, chapter 3 is well underway. To keep focused and motivated, the following have been used as aids. It was a wild week, personally, as the social media for my favorite band, Twisted Sister, posted the drawings I did of the band for previous Sketch Fridays. It was a humbling experience, to actually interact (as much as it was) with the fan base of that band––an activity I generally stayed away from, mostly because my love of the band was so personal and private and, most importantly, started after the band had broken up (the first time). The response was completely positive and it warmed my heart knowing I had made something that “true” TS fans liked. It was so popular, it got me to join Instagram.

LISTENING

Source: Stitcher

I’m an admitted True Crime fanatic. Luckily for me, the world of podcasting has also been bit by the True Crime bug since, at least, NPR’s first season of Serial. My True Crime romance extends far back before the podcasting Renaissance, however, as it is actually a nostalgic venture. When I stepped back to realize how much of this stuff I was listening to and watching (through podcasts, documentaries, etc.), I fretfully wondered, “Why do I like this stuff?” The answer was something personal––it reminds me of growing up.

My mother is a retired correctional counselor from a medium security prison, meaning many of her cases ran the gamut from those who committed fraud to many who committed murder. Listening to podcasts about crimes and cults and murder takes me back to my youth, when my mom would tell me about her day, and it warms the heart a little because that language––speculation, compassion, and analysis––is the first contextual language I learned to speak.

Stitcher’s Heaven’s Gate podcast is fascinating for the same reason that American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson fascinated me: it was a look back at a big story that I remembered happening. What makes the podcast fascinating is that the host, Glynn Washington, was raised in a cult himself; so, the podcast is as much about taking a rational, historical look at the Heaven’s Gate cult as it is Washington rationalizing his own childhood. For those whom such a conceit worries, don’t; the podcast focuses more on the subject than the host. I’m riveted, either way.

READING

I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but I’m excited to receive this and literally can’t wait to dive into this text; so, this week it’s a more of a “Want to Be Reading” rather than a “Currently Reading” subtext.

source: Kodansha Comics, art by Yukito Kishiro

  • Battle Angel Alita by Yukito Kishiro (Deluxe Edition, Kodansha Comics, 2017)

The anime of Battle Angel was a foundational text for me. It was actually a collection of two thirty-minute episodes, a straight-to-video adaptation of Kishiro’s manga (Japanese comic, for those who don’t know), and it was unlike anything I had ever seen before. Ostensibly owing to the aesthetics of something like Blade Runner, Battle Angel was different in that it (for one) took place during the daytime and it was dirtier and more fully fleshed-out. The world of Alita (the protagonist, called Gally in the original Japanese) was thoroughly developed even though it was told through insinuation and context clues. It was a story of class and identity, of growing up, of love. As a whole, the stories were a seamless blend between Sisyphean struggle and earnest hope that––especially in the ’90s––was a different take on a dystopian future than I was used to seeing (usually, it was all grimdark action).

With the announcement of the live-action film adaptation coming this year, I decided to look around and see what the availability of the original manga was. I had the first two original US printed volumes of the comic (the ones the anime was based on) and I saw that the wonderful publisher, Kodansha, had released “deluxe” versions of the Battle Angel Alita comic in 2017; so, without hesitation, I picked up the first volume of the hardcover edition and am eager to crack open its pages and dive back into that world again.

LONG JOHN UPDATE

I accidentally lied a little last week; it’s next week that you should expect a cover reveal for chapter three. I will, however, reveal the title for chapter three, if anything because I’m sick of typing “chapter three” all the time. Chapter three is a bit more of a straight-forward chapter than the previous two––less heady and ponderous, more action-packed and violent––and the title follows that trend from the more obtuse chapter titles used before. So, in the steps of Chapter one’s “Sunza” and Chapter two’s “Bird’s Eye”, we now have:

That’s not the cover, but it is an important moment from the upcoming chapter. I’m nearing the end of drawing “Making Smoke”, so I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel and we can keep moving forward. Come back soon for more info and, until then, that was The Week.

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