boring is beautiful

I'm not typing here much right now because I'm working on making comix.

Also, usually anytime I type something, I'll glance at the datafeed on my menu bar and notice that we've bombed a series of cruise missile launching sites defending the strait of Hormuz or some such, and I'll feel like, Hey, kids! comix isn't exactly the energy I can bring to the internet in 2026, so why pretend?   This has never been a site poppin' with Hawt Content anyhoo.

Most of my spare mental energy that isn't dedicated to my husband, my job, or my art is dedicated to a late in life discovery of Chester Gould's cartooning prowess and the weird machine that he created.

Because Dick Tracy is an engine, my friends, that never stops running.  Dick Tracy is a perpetual comix machine, created & designed to last Gould's lifetime, and beyond.  I'm only interested in the bit Gould's hands were on, of course, but fuck, that's forty years of productivity.  Piss on Dave Sim's paltry 300 issues.  Dingus cheated with all those text pages anyhow.

It's been instructive to look at on any number of levels of craft, but foremost is its gridwork and its pacing, and how the strip adapted itself to the rigors of the publishing format it was alotted.  (Also how the strip was adapted, in its anthologized & reprinted incarnations, where the strips are cut-up and re-configured to more fully fit the dimensions of north american newsstand comix.  Which changes the rhythms of the story, seemingly, though how could it?  Spatial re-orientation of integers in a numerical chain doesn't change the value of the numerical chain if you're just linewrapping the digits, and this is all a comix reprinting of Tracy technically does; yet somehow re-orienting entire tracy arcs, as Blackthorne famously did with its weekly series, wholly changes the delivery mechanism of the strip format therefore the way it hits is just. different.)  Because webcomix have returned to my mind.  And I have a thing called 'The Hero of the Fever' that I'd liked to serialize here.  So reading Tracy is helping me think through how I'd like to approach webcomix.  Because I've been here before.  I've turfed out, too.  So Tracy is guiding me by example.  Gould didn't turf out.  Go on vacation or abandon it to his art assistants.  Gould stuck to it, and he was plotting on the balls of his feet most of the time.

So yeah.  This is what I'm thinking about, most of the time.  Staring at clouds that aren't there.  You know how I get.  It's pretty boring.  But it's boring like walking the beach and observing the quality of light beaming through fog transmuting into cloud is boring.  I do it every day and it doesn't lose its lustre.

I did a little of the beach thing already.  Stretches and yoga and studying the clouds and watching ducks nap.  Did some drawing.  So it's back to Tracy.  Volume Two of the complete dailies & sundays.  Let's see if Steve the Tramp gets what he richly deserves--  I mean motherfucker spent half the first volume earning it!  Like, Steve is the heeliest heel to've ever heeled.

THE KILL HOUSE - script to pencil (1)

The name of the game is problem solving.

The script, as I found it--  because my brain is broken, yes, I literally found a script in a drawer  --is very minimal.  I assume the minimalism was the point.  There are no stage directions.  The text is internal monologue, and from it I must infer the location, the sets, the wardrobe & the action.

Easy enough, right?

Chapter Zero--  because I always start things off with a Page Zero, or a Chapter None  --is three quarters of a page.  Terse dialogue, very clippy stuff.  I guess the chapter is set on a boat.  I guess Cray is airdropping into water, then boarding the boat.

So then the task becomes drawing it.  Cray's in full gear-- no visible face, no exposed skin.  Weapons?  No.  I don't want to draw guns in general, much less on page one.  So he's empty handed until he gets in the water.  The first page should be a full-page splash, because Comix!  And I figure it should be action.  Get those blank page jitters out of the way.

So begins the problem solving.  What pose should I use?  The reference stack of comix on the desk is all Image drek, early years:  Deathblow 0, 1 & 2 by Jim Lee, Team 7 #1-4 by Aron Wiesenfeld, and the Deathblow / Barbarian story from Wildstorm! 1 & 2 by Aron Wiesenfeld..  The Team 7 stuff has all the best figurework, so I start scanning those.  Pages 1, 2 & 3 all have good figurework on Cray, so those wind up being the basis for the first two pages of my riff.  There's a deceptive amount of choreography in Wiesenfeld's layouts; I say deceptive because it's all smartly done, but gets obscured by the OCD detail bullshit.  My mission becomes, then, freeing the figures from the web of fiddly inking.

All the 90s pouches & bandoliers have to fucking go.

The tactical gear is crap, so I throw together my own.  It doesn't have to be full-on detail because the art should be superheavy on shadow.  The scenario is easy:  Cray jumps out of a helicopter, the huey banks and draws fire away, Cray dives into the water, latches onto the hull, sets up a charge.  That's the first three pages.  Page one is a fullpage splash, so one panel, no borders:  that should transition smoothly to page two, which is a montage of shots with no defined borders.  We go from looking up into the air to panning down to the water, to level with the ship.  Nice and smooth.  The only boxiness on these pages should be dialogue boxes, which is a conversation I need to have with myself shortly...

Jim Lee's Deathblow couldn't make up its mind on text boxes or dialogue format.  Issue #1 has lowercase font in the narration, slightly italicized, which doesn't match up with issue #0 or issue #2.  Both 0 & 2 are all caps block lettering.  None of which feels very appropriate.  And the boxes themselves have hand-drawn borders; for the italic lowercase font the borders are all nib-thin, whereas the other issues do the narrative boxes with thick lines.

Who fucking cares.  I'll come back to the text boxes.  My main goal is placement, at the moment.  I scribble everything out to make sure it fits cleanly.  Briefly consider doing the boxes as wholly separate from the text, the way FM often does in Sin City, off in a column of its own.  But I want all the real estate I can take, so no separate column.  Not for this chapter.  Maybe I'll do that in later chapters.

The first two pages resolved, I move from air to water.  Cray beneath the waves, affixing a charge to the boat hull.  That's the third page, three panels.  I start to separate the panels with borders, by the base of the page, so as to carry the border style over onto pages 4 & on.  Everything is nice and sharp, and the action is quick.  I decide to skip showing how Cray climbs up, because Action is the point here.

Page four gives me some pause.  If I'm skipping showing how Cray climbs up, maybe I should be even more elliptical with the action.  Part of the point of these pages is establishing character-- and how better to establish the character of your badass than by showing what Kind of badass he is?  So instead of a bunch of little panels establishing details I decide the entire scenario can be done in two.  Setup two guards looking at pooled water on the deck, completely unprepared for Cray, who's leaping to attack from behind: a nice frozen moment, action in media res.  Cut to panel two, a view from just off the ship's bow, knees-down of Cray as he tosses the ragdoll bodies of the guards over.

Boom.  Four pages, and I'm halfway through the text for chapter one, in layouts.

I go back to the beginning and start working out spotting blacks.

THE AZURE PANTRY - progress; sketching; feels

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THE AZURE PANTRY - 1: thumbnails pps. 1-10 + 1st sketches

Decent progress today.  Finalized thumbnails for pages 1-10 of The Azure Pantry.

This all looks perfectly inscrutable to you, I'm sure.  Which is fine.

After all, these aren't the comix themselves.  Those will arrive before your eyes eventually.

Bottom row:  my very 1st two sketches for the project, for panels 1&2 of page 7.