OVENHEAD 2003

I found this guy rooting around in some old back up discs from 2003.

Good Ol' Ovenhead. I want to draw him with a whole pie in his jaw basin.

More soon....

Writing vs. Art

So yesterday I willingly slogged through some comics. Afterward I got on ye olde twitter...

I guess the writing in the comics I just read was good, but can I honestly say that when there was basically no point to having art at all?

— Jason Latour (@jasonlatour) January 26, 2012

What followed was a series of posts more or less decrying the lack of harmony between art and writing in comics. Posts made out of frustration, sure, but hopefully less from the view of a comics creator channelling his grief and more so as a reader who just can't catch his high.

Look, I know the playing field. As a reader I can accept that all the things I take interest in aren't going to be masterpieces. As a creator I know that every story fights a never ending battle against entropy. I don't need all comics to exhibit some prodigious hand in glove writing/art hybrid. I simply want both art and writing to be an active part of the story I'm reading. I need them to be. Because the absence of that means there is nothing comics do even half as well as a movie, or a video game or a painting or a novel.

For better or worse I believe the comparisons to those other mediums dominate our creative process. Movies are a particularly sloppy analogy, but with the onus on more complex and engrossing stories, movie production is the mind set that's taken foothold. I doubt anyone would argue that more ambitious stories are a bad thing. It's simply that those ambitions have grown in large part without consideration for the practical concerns of crafting visual stories, let alone comic books.

What movies do very well is recognize that no story is fully conceptualized on the written page. A movie script doesn't define the actions, the sets, or the look of a story past a point. Visual considerations are not an afterthought and there is plenty of room left to work those things out before production begins. They accept that no writer, no matter how great, can fully anticipate the problems that arise converting words to images. They accept that there are a very small number of artists who can come into the last step of the story process and make any sort of real contribution.

Drawing a page, creating a visual world, is as equally complex as crafting a script. Until that's acknowledged at the (pre)production level you'll continue to see a wider divide in the art and writing on the average comic. You'll see artists become less and less invested in giving their all, and writers increasingly concerned about compensating for the artist's lack of interest. I think it's that simple. After all, if the contribution art makes to your story is an afterthought then why is it drawn at all?

More soon...

5 Minutes Figures

Pen, paper, 5 minutes each.

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Eat Me (Drink me)

Don't know how you'd drink a rabbit. More soon...

Undead?

Yesterday I put what I hope to be the final nail in the coffin on BPRD: THE PICKENS COUNTY HORROR. Keeping a sharp stake ready just in case...



It was a real dream to get to play in Mignola's sandbox and to work with such talented people as he, Scott Allie & Dave Stewart. I'm eternally grateful. If you're interested the first issue is in the new PREVIEWS (Order code: JAN120072) or you can just ask your retailer to order it.

More soon..

Geezer

"Geezer" is a great word.



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Out with the Old?

In 2011 I had 275 pages published. 202 drawn. 7 colored solo. 74 written and hand lettered. I think I did one or two illustrations too. To many of you that may not seem like much but it's significant to me because it probably accounts for at least half my total published work. Of course many of those pages were done prior to 2011... but for 2012 I've already drawn 60 pages, and written at least 22 more.

So thanks to everyone who's supported, challenged and inspired me. I'd name you all but I'd be afraid I'd leave someone out. No promises but this year the tortoise is gonna try to pin his bunny ears back and leg it out.

More soon...