Picture Poetry

Pause for station break: we’re here at Cosmic Monkey Comics until 10 AM tomorrow for the 24-Hour Comics Drawpocalypse! Come visit us anytime!

David Chelsea is currently working on his TENTH 24-hour comic. As far as anybody knows, that’s a world record.

For this one, he’s drawing on isometric graph paper, which gives his panels a nice visual style - like old-school video games, or some Chris Ware. “I like isometric … as a visual motif. It basically represents looking down on things from an infinite distance. All the faces of the cube are foreshortened equally.”

“Of course, I’m a great believer in the importance of perspective… but I’m also a great believer in straight parallel lines. … What I’m trying to approximate here is the view of a stage production from the perspective of a patron in a high balcony watching through opera glasses. … It imposes some restriction, which is nice — nothing so far that I haven’t been able to work around.”

The story he’s drawing tonight is about a couple who purchase a sex chair [no link for that one, you can google it yourself]. It was actually suggested by his New York Times “Modern Love” illustration assignment this week — he’s hoping that spending a day (and 24 pages) with the concept will be good preparation for when it comes time to do the piece

Does David, the world champ, have any tips for 24-hour comickers? Brother, you asked for it.

Go off caffeine, then go back on. I take my first cup of coffee about 1/3 of the way through. I also brought some chocolate-covered espresso beans for later.

Triage. Don’t take on too much. This sex chair thing was a last-minute substitute. I had an earlier idea that grew into a story too large for 24 pages. Stories never get smaller.

6 panels a page is a lot easier than 9. The first 24-hour comic I did, the pages were basically three panels. It’s perfectly legitimate to cheat and take shortcuts. This is kind of a holiday from taking it seriously — of course, I haven’t done a “serious comic” in about twelve years.

If you come in with a predetermined story, you can wind up finishing the story with extra pages to go. Build a little flexibility and air into the story so you can end on a really nice note.

Some of the best pieces of advice I ever got: If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly. And furthermore, creativity precedes inspiration. You have to develop the ability to produce competent work efficiently, so that when that great idea finally does strike, you can make it happen with the execution it deserves.

[quotes are reconstructed, not exact.]

[also: this Mad parody of Chris Ware? Hilarious.]

Pause for station break: we’re here at Cosmic Monkey Comics until 10 AM tomorrow for the 24-Hour Comics Drawpocalypse! Come visit us anytime!

[sorry for the bloggus interruptus guys, I took a few mingle breaks and then we had a halftime check-in chat, about which more later.]

For now, an IM conversation:
DOUGLAS WOLK: how’s the Monkey scene?
ME: hopping!
ME: especially for 11pm
DOUGLAS: how many people are 24-houring?
ME: we had almost 24 people sign up
ME: and we’ve had around 20 here pretty much constantly, though not always the same ones
ME: some give up and more rise to take their place
ME: apparently cartoonists are H.Y.D.R.A.

Picked up the first volume of Kazuo Umezu’s The Drifting Classroom here at Cosmic Monkey while taking a break from the 24-hour grind. Not sure that 200 pages of screaming children is the best way to escape the intensity of a cartooning marathon, but this series has been so well-regarded that I’ve been meaning to give it a look. Soon we’ll all look like Kazuo Umezu anyway.

Thoughts on the book soon, hopefully.

Pause for station break: we’re here at Cosmic Monkey Comics until 10 AM tomorrow for the 24-Hour Comics Drawpocalypse! Come visit us anytime!

Chris Dowling has momentarily “run into a wall.”

His gorgeously rendered story has a bit of H.P. Lovecraft to it: a mysterious evil force begins spreading from organism to organism, from a mushroom growing in a skeleton’s eye socket into the belly of a chicken, to the man who eats the chicken, and so on.

Chris has made a few comics here and there when not working his job at a coffeeshop. This is his first 24-hour comic; he’s trying to force himself to loosen up, but also paradoxically to make his pencil work more complete (he normally uses loose pencils and does the majority of the work in the inking stage).

He currently has no web site, which is a tragedy.

~ ~ ~

Meanwhile, Steven Wilber is working on a story about a little guy who wakes up in the morning and is having a good day– until he witnesses a murder, and then things go crazy. He admits this plot may be slightly influenced by the unfolding events of the day…

He’s working without dialogue, using only images inside word balloons (a new technique for Steven). Partially it’s because he has “terrible handwriting,” but he’s also found that “you can do a lot of visual gags that way.”

Steven just moved to Portland from Spokane, where for four years he drew a comic strip in the student newspaper of Eastern Washington University. His background there was in film, but like many film students he secretly loves comics.

Steven’s profile will be rising considerably next week, for reasons I can’t go into yet. Keep an eye out!

How are you feeling about your progress, Steven?

I’m surprised that I’m this far. I’m only an hour behind. I thought I’d be on, like, page 3 by now … I think it helps that I’m making it up as I go, because I’m not wasting time obsessing on the way I had it in my head originally. Also, I’m really impressed with everybody here and what awe-inspiring artists they are.

Pause for station break: we’re here at Cosmic Monkey Comics until 10 AM tomorrow for the 24-Hour Comics Drawpocalypse! Come visit us anytime!

Cosmic Monkey hosted a release party last night for the previously-mentioned Rose City Rollers comic book. So store owner Andy Johnson is running on about 3 hours’ sleep… and this is before the all-nighter to come.

So he’s losing his grip a bit. I know how he feels.

This isn’t an awkward-looking frame captured from the middle of an otherwise-normal conversation. This is the face he was holding for a solid minute.

In more adorable news, Stumptown Comics Fest coordinator Indigo Kelleigh showed up and brought his daughter!

Pause for station break: we’re here at Cosmic Monkey Comics until 10 AM tomorrow for the 24-Hour Comics Drawpocalypse! Come visit us anytime!

Pause for station break: we’re here at Cosmic Monkey Comics until 10 AM tomorrow for the 24-Hour Comics Drawpocalypse! Come visit us anytime!

Pause for station break: we’re here at Cosmic Monkey Comics until 10 AM tomorrow for the 24-Hour Comics Drawpocalypse! Come visit us anytime!

The unfortunately chewing Jacob Mercy is up to page seven! Or he was when last we spoke; time is kind of slipping away from me.

His 24-hour comic is an autobiographical story “about girls.” Critics are calling it “a powerful and staggering narrative,” and by “critics” I mean “Jacob Mercy.” His paper outline is pretty empty, but apparently the mental outline he’s constructed is rock-solid.

Never one to be caught with his Wiki down, Jacob has brought a pocket PC along to use for looking up references. “I couldn’t remember which dialogue of Plato had the discussion about Aphrodite.” (it’s the Symposium, §§180-181.) Apparently making love with boys is okay, but it pales in comparison to other kinds of love.

Jacob’s actually sounds like quite the interesting exploration of human attraction — “why we like what we like.” Do people imprint themselves on early fixations? He describes it as “half Harvey Pekar, half Alan Moore. It’s autobiographical and pretentious.”

Then we got sidetracked into a discussion of Pekar vs. Bechdel and the patriarchy inherent in traditional dramatic structure. This conversation will either get really interesting or really sad at 5 AM.

4:02PM Musical note: And now the Andrew Oldham Orchestra’s bizarre, portentious cover of “The Last Time”, later sampled by The Verve for “Bitter Sweet Symphony“?! Nice!

3:10PM Just finished babbling into a boom mike for Shaun Huston’s documentary on the Portland comics scene! Obviously as a documentary subject I’m of the “shotgun” approach. Hopefully there’s a second or two of useful footage in there.

3:17PM I have to say, the musical selection so far has been pretty impeccable. Lots of Sinatra to start with, but in the last couple hours there’s been plenty of James Brown, Chuck Berry, and girl groups. Now it’s an old-school punk rock cover of Elvis’s “Kissin’ Cousins”?! All right all right all right.

3:25PM Oh dear. Apparently Pete Soloway’s been into this butthead thing for quite some time.

Pause for station break: we’re here at Cosmic Monkey Comics until 10 AM tomorrow for the 24-Hour Comics Drawpocalypse! Come visit us anytime!

The dynamic Pete Soloway is currently working on “a story about a guy with a butt for a head.”

It’s actually a wordless comic, so he’s gonna have to communicate a lot of emotional subtlety with that butt. “It’s gonna be an awesome story. Butts are funny.”

Neighboring artists wryly suggest that Pete had butts on the brain, considering that he just finished working as a colorist for the Rose City Rollers comic. Butts are quite important to roller derby, I’m told.

How much of this book does Pete have planned? “My plan stops around page 12, so we’ll see where it goes from there. Maybe I’ll just stop and do another comic.” Maybe about another body part.