Only in a World of Sequential Art

24 frames-a-second? No, I prefer thinking in panels-per-page myself. More flexible.

Poetry or Prose? No, I can choose between romantic or constructivist, photo-realistic or cartoony, impressionist or classical as I build my story (or afterward). More variety that way.

"I really think comics are more fun when they play to their strengths, and do the things that movies can’t do, and go to places in the imagination where movies can’t go. Let’s take up the type of storytelling that movies daren’t do, you know? Why are we conforming to Hollywood storytelling styles and losing sales when we can do anything? ... Comics begin with a guy, with a pencil and an imagination, or a guy at his word processor, and after that anything can happen. And so rarely does."
~ Grant Morrison interview in Comic Foundry, final issue, Spring 2oo9 (& readable here)

Comics are not 'movies on paper'. Nor are comics 'visual literature'. Those statements aren't strictly speaking wrong, they are close to the truth-- a version of it. But comics are something else entirely and to limit them by what other media can't do is... just limiting.

Josh's recent post about investigating form and a recent conversation with comicsmith Jason Little at the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival has got my brain flowing with old academic thoughts. "More academic than usual," I hear the multitudes scream? Yes, more academic than usual.

Can you imagine the distinct world of the comics medium?

the opening pages of the Luna Brothers' "Girls" #1
Image: A young man in the throws of orgasmic physical pleasure. Image: A young woman lays with her clothes in disarray. What just happened? Not what you think.The magic of comics is in the 'sequential' part of sequential art. Two images in sequence create a moment of time, but a moment made up of two frozen images can create particular illusions other mediums can't. A momentary trick that makes the status of the Lunas' main character painfully obvious. The second panel is a close-up. He holds a pornographic magazine and not a woman's love, as he wishes he did.

the faux-prose at the end of "Watchmen" #1-11 and "Superman: Earth One" and probably thousands of places
Whenever a comic visually displays something with text in the fictional world in such a way that it can be read as if it were actually prose, something unique has happened. A film that zooms in so close that the viewer can read some text on the screen would be awkward and slow the film's pace to horrible effect. (It was common in the 1940s, sure, but it was awkward.)

In a comic, the reader can stop to read the text as if it were prose, give it a quick scan, or choose not to read it at all and simply accept it as another two-dimensional prop existing in the world of the comic (at peril of missing out on part of the story, of course).

the typewriter sound effects in Jason Lutes' "Berlin" #3
The "tak" "takketa" "takka" sounds coming from Kurt Severing's typewriter transform suddenly into snippets of words being pounded out by the writers across the street, at least in Severing's imagination. All in typewriter font.

Environmental onomonopeia becomes a representation of a character's perception of the world in the very image of the environmental element's effects on paper! Or something like that. Either way, it's beautiful. Almost as beautiful as the moment where musical notes in the air become birds in flight.

the entirety of Jason Little's "Jack's Luck Runs Out"
The WHOLE THING is drawn in an imitation of the classic playing-card illustration style, everything from the characters and their props in the foreground to the environment of Las Vegas in the background.


The same stiff poses, the same blank stares from your game of 52 pick-up, but now in the service of a disturbing narrative about vacuous gamblers, show girls, con-men and the spiteful things they do.

the 'thought balloon-storm cloud' in Brendan Leach's "Pterodactyl Hunters in the Gilded City"
As a young man walks the streets of New York City circa 1904 turning over and over in his mind the current events of his life (like we all do) snippets of the last conversation he took part in dance around his head, mixed up like a tiny abstract poem surrounded by rough, uneven, random lines.


Comics can use any visual art styles or tools, any design elements, any written languages, and any typographic fonts the creator chooses! These examples I've given are only a fraction of the tricks and experiments out there that could only have been done in a comic.

Can you imagine the world of sequential art? A world where time exists frozen forever in snap shots, yet feels animated in sequence? A world where text can be read like prose, but the story can be told in bold visuals like film? A world that moves without motion and speaks without sound.

I can, and it is so damn beautiful.

~ @JonGorga

About Your Paper Renewal?

I wrote an editorial not a long while ago subtitled "The Death of the Great Prints" about the distinct possibility that within our lifetimes all comics publishing will be mainly digital in nature. Every single last publisher will have either taken a leap of faith into the digital ether or perished gasping in trying to sell a physical object to a market that's no longer there.

BUT...

At least one publisher is making that great leap BACK into print. There were about 150 issues of the original print comic-book since the inaugural issue of "Dark Horse Presents" in 1986. The company made a dramatic change when Dark Horse partnered with website MySpace.com to create "MySpace Dark Horse Presents" and there were 36 issues of the MySpace version of the anthology. The last one hit the web in July 2o1o and now, starting in 2o11, "Dark Horse Presents" will be a print comic-book once again after 3 years online. Editor Scott Allie said: "When we launched "MDHP," MySpace was the world's leading website, at a time that you could actually have a clear-cut world's leading website, and we felt that we had the opportunity to do something exciting and new. MySpace was the perfect place to get tons of attention" and publisher Mike Richardson said: "We were excited about [it] because it took comics to a much larger audience". Comics will be available (still for free!) on Dark Horse's website here.

[via Newsarama and CBR/CBR]

Presumably, the company thinks that without one website reigning supreme they would do better to bring the successful anthology back to its paper roots. Simultaneously, some independent creators have begun to take back the printing press as a means of disseminating underground comics, which is, of course, how they did it back when underground comics were called comix.

About two months ago the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art (@MoCCAnyc) held a panel discussion about the comic-strip as a form and how it stands now in a world of newspapers closing down. The panel was called "The Future of the Traditional Comic Strip in the Era of Dying Newspapers". The solutions as presented were two-fold: become a webcomic or join together in a collective. Or both.

Yes, tremendously cleverly comicsmith Bill Roundy makes a comic called "The Amazing Adventures of Bill" that is posted as a webcomic (available at the previous link) and a newsprint comic-strip in a publication called "Coffee Talk", available in various Brooklyn locations. The newspaper comics-section without the newspaper. Brilliant, really.

"Dark Horse Presents" and "Coffee Talk" aren't the only comics enjoying the old musty smell of paper. Several examples of other comics utilizing newsprint were held up by "Coffee Talk" mastermind Tony Murphy at the MoCCA event: (1) a copy of New York City comic-shop Desert Island's local comic, a large-format newsprint comic called "Smoke Screen" and (2) a copy of Brendan Leach's comic: "Pterodactyl Hunters in the Gilded City" (the subject of one of my recent interviews here on The Long and Shortbox Of It), with a cover mimicking an old-style newspaper front page. Printed on newsprint.

Now I had this editorial all planned out in my head up until this point:

Both comics companies and individual comicsmiths have made a move away from the digital realm and back to newsprint. Plain, simple, interesting. Right?

That was before these double announcements from the day before the recent New York Comic-Con (@NY_Comic_Con):

DC Comics (@DC_NATION) will in January 2011 reduce the baseline prices of their entire line of 22-page comic-books from $3.99 back to $2.99.

and an hour later:

Marvel (@Marvel) will lower SOME of the prices of their comic-books from $3.99. Called a "partial move away" from $3.99, Marvel has stated that they can afford this because of the money they're making from their iPad app's digital comics sales.

[via CBR- DC announcement/Marvel announcement] (I really recommend taking a peek at CBR's DC article as they actually breakdown exactly which DC comics will now be $2.99.)

I was in the room at the "DC Nation" panel at Comic-Con where a huge screen displayed a defiant Wonder Woman in the famous 'Rosie the Riveter pose' with the famous statement "We Can Do It!" replaced with something like: "HOLD THE PRICE LINE!" DC Comics SVP and Executive Editor Dan DiDio also made it clear that although this means the back-up stories DC added to the books last year when the prices were raised are disappearing, the characters and stories in them will not.

What does this mean?

Well, obviously, it means we all get to save a little money on our monthlies AND more importantly it means when I recommend a monthly comic to YOU the readers, or to a friend in person, there will be a bit less 'sticker-shock' when we all say: 'Damn, comics used to be 10 frickin' cents!' In fact: 10 cents, 12 cents, 15, 20, 30, 35, 40, 75, $1, $1.25, $1.99, $2.99... I believe this is the first time in the history of the American comics industry that the baseline price has gone DOWN.

But, in the long run? What does this mean for paper?

I'm not sure if it's a vote of confidence in the format or a signal of its demise. Since people have been clamoring for the prices to go back down and the Big Two are giving them what they want, it shows that the big companies care about what their paper customers want. Theoretically they can now give it to them because, according to Marvel SVP of Sales David Gabriel, "We found that in a week's time, the download of the day-and-date [digital iPad app] comics were a little bit less than what [New York City's] Midtown [Comics] orders. They're one of the top retailers in the country, so it gives you an idea of where we're at." So are they giving the comic shop-pers what they want as a temporary appeasement as they phase them out? Meanwhile the guys like Brendan Leach and Tony Murphy are printing on the cheapest paper they can find to keep their decidedly not-corporate costs down.

It seems that if anything can be said about the entire comics industry in America from Marvel Entertainment right down to free comics newsletters at this moment, it's that while there is an ongoing serious flirtation with the digital format, paper still has a major, although changing, place in the distribution of sequential art.

~ @JonGorga

Talk Over Balloons: comicsmith Brendan Leach

Among the independent comicsmiths I became acquainted with at Big Apple Comic-Con, only one of the few who really stood out I asked to do an interview, and his name is Brendan Leach (@iknowashortcut), a recent alumnus of the Masters of Fine Arts Illustration as Visual Essay graduate program at the prestigious School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Will Eisner taught at SVA. As did Jerry Robinson. (Although, I believe in the undergraduate arena.) It is one of the few, almost definitely the oldest, places in the United Sates one can get an education in making sequential art. NOT illustration, but illustration in the service of "visual essay", usually expressed as sequential art storytelling. There is a difference. It's definitely the only place you can graduate with the amazing David Mazzucchelli for your MFA thesis advisor.

Our early interviews here on The Long and Shortbox Of It have been with a writer and an artist. This time, for our third interview, we give you a true comicsmith: a man trained to do it all.

Jon Gorga: I'm here tonight at Soup n' Burger in New York City, Lower Manhattan... Lower Manhattan isn't quite accurate. Near Astor Place.

Brendan Leach: Below Fourteenth Street.

Jon Gorga: Below Fourteenth? It flies? It flies. Cool. I'm conducting the first recorded interview for The Long and Shortbox Of It with Brendan Leach...

Brendan Leach: Hello.

JG: ...artist and writer of "Pterodactyl Hunters in the Gilded City" a very cool indie self-published comic. So jumping into the trenches, which is how I like to do interviews: How did you come up with the brilliant idea of having the cover be a mock newspaper?

BL: It was just practicality. I knew I couldn't make a mini-comic on a Xerox machine because of the ink washes in the art. So I realized I had to get it printed. The cheapest way to print anything is newsprint. And I said: Newsprint's okay because it's set in a time period when newsprint-- newspapers were the main form of news and media. And then it just made total sense: Why would I do a cover that was anything but a newspaper? I researched newspapers from the time period. Also, I could use the text on the cover to jump-start the setting and the story. So it just made sense on every level.

JG: How many of these great little blocks of text are actual reprinted period newspaper columns? These are from 19o4? You copied them and blurred them out?

BL: Everything. I copied the 19o4 front page from the day after the General Slocum ship sank in the East River.

JG: I haven't even heard of it.

BL: It's an insane bit of history. A bunch of people got on a boat, most of them were from a congregation, kind of around here, more like Sixth Street. There's a church, near where all the Indian restaurants are, there's a little plaque that commemorates it. They all got on this boat to go sightseeing up-- I guess it was the East River because they got about as far as Heart's Island-Riker's Island up there. There was a fire on the boat and it started to sink.

JG: I see. It is here, it's legible in one place: "Slocum Catastrophe Recalls A Like Disaster".

BL: The crew was not trained in what to do in a disaster. The life boats were painted to the deck. Everything was wrong so nobody survived, basically. Because there was no preperations for an actual disaster. The life preservers were rotten and falling apart, couldn't get the boats off the deck. So everybody died in the fire.

JG: And you would have a proper amount of concern similar to your plot, which is, by the way, a delightfully cool concept of pterodactyls terrorizing Lower Manhattan and the story of two brothers in an ongoing rivalry who work for the 'Ptero Patrol'. Would it be pronounced PE-ter-OH Patrol?

BL: No, it would be ter-OH Patrol I think. It's a visual alliteration. You'll never say it, but you're reading to yourself so it looks like alliteration.

JG: Now, the brother's rivalry is pretty unique in that you never quite see why Declan (is it pronounced DAY-clen?)...

BL: It would think DEH-clen.

JG: ...why Declan resents Eamon other than some of the surface-level stuff: that Eamon is kind of a hero, but we don't really see their past, we don't really see them growing up. I was wondering where the inspiration came from for these characters to be in a rivalry and what you think about their motivations for the rivalry.

BL: Do you have a brother?

JG: I don't.

BL: I have a brother and I love him to death, we have no tension between us, but on the few things that we both do, that we're both into... he's my older brother so the main motivating factor is to do it better. He's a little bit older, he always did it first. You're always playing catch-up and I just exaggerated that feeling that I assume everyone has. And I have a good relationship with my brother so it's not that odd.

JG: That makes sense.

BL: So I imagine, if you're in the same line of work and you're already stressed out because the line of work's not going to last, as the pterodactyls get fewer and fewer. I imagine there's a high amount of stress where the older brother is interested in getting rid of them, the younger brother never really had a chance to hunt them, so there's a lot of animosity connected right there.

JG: It's one of those cases of a human being groomed, in a way, for something that all of a sudden then becomes obsolete and the pain of that.

BL: Yeah. Absolutely. 100%.

JG: I love this page (what is this, the third page?) the first time we see a pterodactyl slain.

BL: Maybe fourth.

JG: It's really gorgeous and the image of this pterodactyl falling through the sky then landing right in front of a pharmacy on a downtown Manhattan street, dead as a doornail. It's pretty hilarious. It's hilarious as well as sad, but maybe more than anything striking. You've got a really interesting technique in what I assume to be a sort of a riff on the idea of a thought balloon: as Declan walks down the street in Manhattan, you're seeing a textual representation of his thoughts like a thought balloon, but they're kind of smudgy, they're kind of wavy and you can see particles of the previous conversation that he just exited. So I was wondering if you could talk about where that came from and how you perceive it, and (if you can imagine me doing air quotes) how you 'read' it.

BL: Maybe it's not exactly like this, but this sort of thing is done all over comics where there's something buzzing in somebody's ear. Not exactly the same, but you ever read "Night Fisher"? R. Kikuo Johnson? It's a good little book. They live in Hawaii and this kid tries drugs. They're smoking meth at one point. His ears are buzzing from doing it. He keeps drawing these hornets. Not really flying around, but just floating next to the chracter's ears. So you just know what's going on: his ears are buzzing, he's got that feeling in his head and it's not really a part of reality.

JG: Kind of the equivalent of the flies around the trashcan as Scott McCloud writes about in "Understanding Comics", an iconic representation of something. [NOTE: This phenomenon has been called "emanata".]

BL: So you know there's thoughts going on inside his head. Even in a movie it's kind of hard to depict. You have an actor making scowling faces and you're like: 'oh that guy's thinking, I know he's thinking'. But in a comic it seems like this is a much better thing because his head is literally buzzing. You just need to know he's conflicted, he's got a lot going on in his head. There's literally a lot going on around his head.

JG: Come to think of it, what you've done is combine the thought balloon with the old 'storm cloud'.

BL: Exactly. It's the 'Charlie Brown storm cloud'.

JG: That's really cool. We're kind of going chronologically through the comic, since that's the easiest way for me to just say 'Oh yes, that's something I wanted to talk about!' I love that their father is painting a New York City sky with pterodactyls in it because it's his world and it's his world that's dying, and he's trying to capture it through memory.

BL: Yeah, that comes from talking to my adviser about: 'I got these characters that have got to say a lot of stuff, I don't want to have a page of just heads moving'. So he said: 'Well, what are they doing while they're talking?' In the time period and the tenement they live in, he's a retired guy so maybe he's drawing. What would he draw? He'd draw the pterodactyls!

JG: Cool. One of the things-- one of the very, very few things --that didn't work for me was the few times where you draw something twice to reflect speed, old-school like The Flash or Spider-Man in a mainstream superhero comic. Quite honestly, my first reaction was that it was a printing error and then only after I saw one of the pterodactyls do it, did it finally became clear to me.

BL: It's two moments in time.

JG: Yeah that it's the classic: The Flash moving at super-speed that we saw a million times, Carmine Infantino-style. But a human doing it somehow just felt really unnatural, and I overheard you talking about the way the comic was done, which we'll get to in the next question, so I thought it was a left-over from that process.

BL: You didn't like that? I get a lot of compliments on that. More on the pterodactyl one.

JG: The pterodactyl one works.

BL: I see what you're saying. I used it because, like you said, it happens all the time in comics with the Flash and everything. You're just trying to do as much as you can on a page, in each panel and when things are happening fast sometimes it's hard to notice things.

JG: I really want to know a bit about the process because I overheard you talking about the ink lines versus the washes, and that you literally created two layers and had to match them. Which must have been a PAIN IN THE ASS.

BL: It was an extra DAY of work.

JG: ONLY a day?

BL: Yeah, once I got the system down.

JG: Explain the process as best you can since this is recorded. There'll be some images accompanying the interview.

[A left, a preliminary drawing for "Pterodactyl Hunters" similar to the ink-lines layer.]

BL: It's not even that difficult to describe. I did a pencil draft first, very rough, then a tighter draft of pencils, and I did the pencils at the size that the final art would be drawn. So I could take the pencils, put them on a lightbox, take the nice paper and work with the solid black ink directly onto the nice paper, straight from the pencils on the lightbox so there's no penciling done on the final art. I use watercolor paper. So that's all straight ink and then I ink the whole book in just the black ink. And then took a second separate sheet of paper over the ink on the lightbox and I did the wash on top of that.

JG: I did figure that you would need to have the ink first and then the wash. But you had them on separate layers.

[A left, the final panel as it appears in "Pterodactyl Hunters".]

BL: They're on separate sheets of paper. So the way the art looks in the book doesn't exist on any 'original art'. I have 36 pages of ink-line and 36 pages of wash.

JG: Yeah, I suspected that was true. Here's another gorgeous page. I had at one point imagined that you had literally drawn them entirely separately and them combined them in Photoshop.

BL: Because I did them on the lightbox, I did them in InDesign. The file sizes were exactly the same and the original art is the same so when I put them into InDesign they just fit perfectly, I didn't have to adjust them.

JG: That's what I would screw-up: the file sizes. I also noticed that at several points, you really smartly have text that can't quite be read because of distance, creating a great aural effect, an off-camera sound. And that's something I noticed in the work of someone that I know you drew heavily from: David Mazzucchelli. Was it something that was suggested to you, was it something that you realized through his work or was it something that you came to separately? To create this text that's background text, so to speak? Illegible text that represents a sound that can barely be read? Heard. Ha. Synesthesia. Tough.

BL: No. No, it wasn't suggested to me but it's something I definitely picked up from reading, you know, not only Mazzucchelli's work, but I guess in more modern comics it's pretty common. You think about, not replicating other media, but trying to achieve effects that comics can give that other media can't. But they relate: if you were reading a novel, the author can just write 'this character said something that couldn't be heard' and you know what's going on, and when you're watching a movie you hear the muffled sound so you know they're saying something but you can't hear it. So how does that happen in comics? The small balloon that is far away that you can't read.

JG: I have seen it done differently. I've actually seen empty balloons.

BL: I think I've got some empty balloons in here.

JG: Do you?

BL: I think so. But not full-size.

JG: Tiny buggers?

BL: Maybe they're not totally empty.

JG: At any rate, the end is intentionally ambiguous because we don't see what should be the final beat. You end just before the conclusion, you end before the final action beat. So I presume that's a case of 'leaving it up to the reader'?

BL: Right, because getting up to it is the interesting part of the story. He's got to get to the point where he can make this decision and he gets to that point. The best parts of a story are what gets left out, right? You know, you build it up... It seems to me any reader in any medium is going to like what they think more than what I think, you know? So I made all the other choices, but this thing, the ending, it ends the way YOU think it ends! It ends without a decision.

JG: If I ask you, in your imagination, which decision does he take, you going to give me the deflection?

BL: I would like to give you the deflection.

JG: You absolutely have that right to, as the creator, to leave the ambiguity! But I'm curious as to what you'll answer-- we have a disclaimer about spoilers, I don't know if you know that-- does the character take the shot, in your imagination, in the next beat that isn't in the comic?

BL: I've been asked this before. When I think about: If I were to continue this story, how would I tell the story in order to continue? You need to know what happened. If I was to continue the story, I STILL wouldn't let you know what happened until the end of another 36 pages. But in my mind, I think he definitely takes the shot but... he takes the shot, he pulls the trigger but you don't know if...

JG: Oh, that's great! Ambiguities within ambiguities! Great.

BL: I think he would have the courage to pull the trigger, but he may or may not have the tenacity to hit his target.

JG: Cool! It's a great hanging moment, because the last page is another gorgeous one. So part-and-parcel of that, is there a possibility of a continuation: a "Pterodactyl Hunters 2"?

BL: Man, I've thought about that and it was always: THIS was the story. It's really not about pterodactyls it's about the brothers, that relationship. And the story of that relationship, what's interesting to me about that relationship is already in this 36 pages. And I like it as a one-shot. To get things picked up by a publisher, sometimes they be 90 or 100 pages long. So this is not really going to get published the way it is because it's too long to be short and too short to be long. And I've thought about doing two more 36-page chapters.

JG: Continuing the story of the brothers, giving ambiguity about what happened in this moment perhaps?

BL: Actually, I imagined there'd be a chapter before when their father is more like their age, and they're kids and there's more pterodactyls, and there's more action. And it would have to be a different story with a different emotional tone. And then a story set maybe twenty years after this story, when it's the late 20s almost the 30s, the world is more modern, and what would happen after that. But those aren't important, what was important to me, was that this story is about things becoming obsolete, at a time when things are changing. 19o4 is when New York City is really turning into a modern place: they built the subways in 19o4, they started the sewer system, the fire patrol's getting organized, the unification of all the boroughs either just happened or it's about to happen. It couldn't have been set at any other time, to me. So it's about those changes. Major changes happening. Everyone has to change. When it's not a choice: It's happening, things are changing, can you do it? And that's what, to me, this story's about. And another chapter or an earlier chapter doesn't really fit for that.

JG: If you do create more, this story will still be the hinge, so to speak, just as it's the hinge moment in New York City's history?

BL: Right, or they would be totally different and have a different emotional process.

JG: The final question I have for you is, again, related to that one: What is the next project? What's coming for you? And what do you want the Long and Shortbox readers to know about?

BL: I have some short comics that I'm working on for some anthologies. One is for "Ferocious Quarterly". The Twitter account is @WeAreFerocious and the blog is fe.rocious.com. I've got a short comic in that which is set in a small town, contemporary times-- more character based. I've got a comic that I'd like to work on about greasers in the late 1950s. That one I haven't really worked-up yet.

JG: Oh, that sounds cool.

BL: I've got some things in the hopper.

JG: Always a couple plans on the back burner that could be moved to the front burner at some future point.

BL: Looking for outlets to publish it or make some mini-comics. Nothing so concrete yet. I really wish I had a better answer to this! I've got a lot of stuff in the hopper.

JG: That is, first of all, better than nothing and, second of all, exciting to me because I really liked "Pterodactyl Hunters". And hopefully exciting to our readers who may or may not have checked out "Pterodactyl Hunters", yet! If you know me personally, I'm probably going to put this in your hands pretty soon because I think it's really awesome. I think that mostly wraps it up. Thank you Brendan for making the time, for doing this for The Long and Shortbox Of It.

BL: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

JG: Absolutely. And thank you guys for reading.

__________________________________________
You must seek out "Pterodactyl Hunters in the Gilded City". All you have to do is send Brendan a little bit of moolah ($2.00 I believe) or if you live in New York City just go to any comic-shop in Brooklyn OR ask Brendan what other stores across the nation are carrying the book.

Brendan's website is at iknowashortcut.com

You really should do yourself the favor and go check his stuff out.