The Week – 20 July 2018

Jul20
by on 20 July 2018

TALKING:

This week I was interviewed by the lovely local comic book podcast, The Capeless Crusaders, specifically hosts David Barrie and Amy Nunag, in an episode focusing on independent comic creators. I had the pleasure of being one of two guests on the episode, the second being Scott “Fuzzy” Joseph who was promoting his book, The Warren Hope.

It was a lot of fun to be on the show, and one thing that came up at the end was my history playing Dungeons & Dragons, which is a very short and loose history indeed. I mentioned my basic arc as a player through any role-playing session starts earnestly enough with the desire to get caught up in the communal imagined narrative before giving way to me hanging back and watching everyone else play while I draw what happens. After bringing that up, I figured I could dig through my hard drive and see what old D&D drawings I could dig up.

My smoky-gray dice that I’ve had since high school but have sparingly used.

Early on, I mostly just drew characters as heroically as possible or moments that stood out in particular. It was mostly about the drawing rather than trying to capture any of the story that may have been going on at the table.

“Viln”, a dwarf from a campaign played in 1997 or ’98.

An unfortunate turn of events from 1997 or 1998.

A half-elf character from a game around 2000.

The only time I really played an extended game of Dungeons & Dragons was in 2009, which was the game and character I mention in the interview. In this game, I drew fewer portraits. I also didn’t really draw important moments. Instead––referencing another element brought up in the interview, I found the humorous or quiet moments more enticing to draw.

A character (not mine) named Frarank bringing the business.

A dwarf character (not mine) named Thorgrimm breaks his hammer.

A child skeleton attacks a member of our party.

Thorgrimm is a little nervous about some of the merchandise in a store.

My character (name forgotten) accidentally steps in way over his head into a particularly deadly situation.

A particularly gregarious mayor welcomes the party to town.

One of our party meets a vicious, but heroic, end.

The party happens upon a suspect scarecrow.

Portrait of Frarank.

Portrait of Thorgrimm

All of this to say: I don’t want to play D&D despite the fun bits of creativity it yields. Though this seems like a lot, these are bits that pop up through dozens of hours of gameplay, and that’s what I remember more than the actual “fun” part of playing tabletop role-playing games. They are a genre of gaming that I should love, but I don’t have the staying power for it. So, I admire it from afar now, and that’s probably the best place to observe it from, for me.

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The Week – 06 July 2018

Jul06
by on 6 July 2018

READING:

source: Gallery 13

  • Roughneck by Jeff Lemire

A mere month ago I lauded a Jeff Lemire project on “The Week”, so I feel like I’m cheating a bit by mentioning him again. Truth be told, I’ve had Roughneck in my hands for awhile (since it was published in April), but I never felt I had an adequate excuse to sit down and read a big book like this––I had too much to do. With Independence Day falling in the middle of this week, I found myself with an entire day to just chill out and read. It’s nearly 300 pages, but it goes by fast––I read it in a sitting––due to Lemire’s cinematic storytelling and composition.

This cuts to the essential difference between graphic novels and prose novels. Reading Roughneck will take you a few hours and will feel like it, if faithfully translated, would take the length of a short film. A prose novel of a similar length could easily be a season of a tv show, in comparison. When relying on the blend of imagery and text, the amount of story you can tell gets squished down tremendously in a graphic novel. What could easily take a page––hell, a paragraph––in a prose novel could take up four or five pages in a comic. So, due to my literary background, I don’t deny that there is an inherent disappointment that comes with reading graphic novels––meaning long form comics released as a single volume (not just a collection of individual issues)––because their plot content is so much less than a traditional novel; however, what we gain from having visuals and the rhetorical tools graphic novelists have at their disposal yields a much different result than what a prose novel brings. A graphic novel begs you to really look at the images, study the faces, the changes from panel to panel––those were choices made by the author, notice them, come up with an understanding as to why those choices were made and how it aides the story being told. But, like any book, that’s only if you want to. There’s nothing wrong with just reading from cover to cover and saying, “That was fun!”

A comic about “gritty” subjects but told with gentle sincerity sums up Roughneck––and Lemire––in a nutshell. Source: Gallery 13. Click to enlarge.

Roughneck sits close to the other Lemire work I’ve mentioned, Royal City. Like the latter, it’s a family drama but much more focused and condensed. It’s a study of a character named Derek Ouellette, a retired professional hockey player who was pushed out for throwing a few too many punches on the ice. So, now, he just drinks, lives in a storage closet of an ice rink, and tries to be left alone. This all changes when his sister shows up one night, a sister he hasn’t seen in years, and she’s got her own problems to deal with.

This book kind of blends a few things I’ve talked about on The Week: obviously, it takes one part Royal City and blends it with a healthy dose of, believe it or not, The Last Alaskans (the show about people living in the Alaskan Wildlife Reserve. What’s nice to see is that Lemire’s also using a limited color palette in this book, relying on color for deliberate purposes and moments, something I related to quite a bit.

By the end, I found Roughneck to be very sincere and earnest, reminding me not only why I enjoy Lemire’s work, but also reminding me of the qualities I want my work to have as well.

HELPING:

It’s pronounced “Saw.” Source: Taurus Comics. Art by David Jaxon.

Local Sacramento creator, Kyrun Silva, is holding another Kickstarter to bring the second issue of his newest superhero series, Xob The The Lightning Wielder to life. The first issue was fully funded and turned out to be a really strong opening. It’s a superhero comic rooted in Hmong culture and mythology (Xob is the Hmong god of lightning). With his previous series, Shaman’s Destiny, Kyrun conducted the duties of both writer and artist; with Xob, he designed the characters, wrote the scripts, and got the phenomenal artist David Jaxon to draw it. It’s a sharp book and I’m a little jealous. Here is the pitch for the comic:

Xob the Lightning Wielder is an ongoing superhero series about Tracy Lor. Tracy has been infused with the power of the Hmong lightning deity, Xob. Given super human strength, flight and the ability to wield lightning into various forms.

Her world becomes more complicated when Danny, a shaman, tries to steal her powers. He attends to use her powers to stop Lord Eklips from escaping the Dark Realm and conquering our world. Now the two must work together to take down Eklips and his horde of dark demons.

I’ve known Kyrun for a few years now, even featuring a character of his on a Sketch Friday (in response to which he drew Long John), and he’s a genuinely inspiring creator. His enthusiasm for the medium is infectious and watching him get better and better from year to year is harrowing for me, a guy who admittedly doesn’t really push himself artistically too much.

Sketch of Kyrun Silva’s character, Xob, drawn at the TGPC Expo.

For $5, you get a physical copy of Xob #2 or digital copies of both #1 and #2 (there are two options at this level). This is, I believe, the third Kickstarter campaign after two successful runs, so you know Kyrun can deliver the goods in the end. At the very least, it’s a novel concept presented beautifully––and it’s really fun! I highly recommend giving this a chance: XobComic.com

LONG JOHN UPDATE:

Chapter 3 is updating smoothly and next week brings this first scene to a close. So, next week would be a wonderful time to start spreading the word since there will be about ten pages up for people to read instead of having to slog through a mere two pages a week.

I’m not working on Chapter 4 quite yet; there are some other small projects I’m going to dabble in just to get them out of my system and spread my wings a little. One of them, however, is Long John-related:

What could this be?!?

I’m not going to say what it is.

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The Week – 29 June 2018

Jun29
by on 29 June 2018

WATCHING:

Source: Netflix/RTÉ/BBC

  • The Fall

I’ve mentioned before that my mother spent her career working as a correctional counselor in a medium security prison, which allows me to tell the joke that I was basically raised in prison. While she did, indeed, take me to work often when I was a child, the only real effect her job had on me was that talk about crime, convicted criminals, and criminal behavior was one of the earliest contextual languages I learned when I was young. To that end, I have an instinctual affinity toward crime drama and true crime because those things were all standard answers to “how was your day” for my mom.

This has played out in numerous ways, from binge watching crime documentaries to finding the My Favorite Murder podcast (SSDGM!) to becoming entranced by the Golden State Killer case that recently closed (some of the crimes took place mere streets away from where I live in Sacramento––horrifying). True crime is more of a draw for me than fictionalized efforts, though some break through. I quite enjoyed Netflix’s Mindhunter series (albeit based on historical events), for example.

Most recently, however, my household has been entranced by the Irish-English crime series, The Fall, available through Netflix. It’s a tautly written crime series that presents a story in parallel: the show follows the lead investigator (played by Gillian Anderson) who is hunting a serial killer (played by Jamie Dornan) while simultaneously following the serial killer himself. It’s not the standard structure that follows the investigator only to break away for shadowy asides into the dark and dreary machinations of the serial killer; instead, the serial killer is a character who has a story that he’s working his way through.

It’s a fascinating tale over three series of about six episodes each, and it’s the closest my wife and I have come to binging a show in a very long time.

LONG JOHN UPDATE:

Long John is in its third week of updates and we’re deep into the first major scene of the chapter where Long John is dealing with Juan John and his pursuers at Lady May’s cabin above Lundy. So far, the feedback to the chapter has been very positive, which brings a lot of relief. Please let us know your thoughts about the chapter so far! I’d love to hear your feedback.

While ostensibly an interview about the Free Comic Book Day event (first Saturday in May), this interview (which starts at about 37 minutes into the episode) with Cracking the Vault podcast (the official podcast of Empire’s Comics Vault, my local comic shop) host, Tony Asaro, actually went into some interesting and thoughtful directions for being only about fifteen minutes long.

What I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten more open about talking about the comic with people is that the intersection between my day job and my comics is stronger than I thought. Tony’s a great interviewer and it was a blast to talk to him about comicking.

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