Thanks

Mar 04

lamezone:

C O M M I S S I O N S

http://i.imgur.com/rhNcn.jpg

if you are a person who just really wants some standard pricing, here are some base estimations!!!

for a simple sketch with minimal coloring, around 5$ for one character,

a little extra for additional characters/complexity/lotsa props or etc

for a simple hand drawn sketch, about the same probably skewing a little higher because its hard!

something like that colorful fancy ru’mel picture would be closer to $50, depending on how many characters, how complicated, etc etc.

for posters or comics or anything else, talk to me and we can figure it out.

these are just estimates, it may be more or less, it all depends on what you are after! ill do my best not to let anyone feel ripped off.

you can pay before, or after, whatever you are comfortable with, but if its above 30 bucks id like to get half up front please!

i love you

Mar 03

THIS WEEKEND

novicomics:

A PRESS RELEASE

NOVI Magazine
PO BOX 8228 
Austin, TX 78705

Contact Ao at novicomics@gmail.com

For immediate release, reading and disposal:

AUSTIN, TX

NOVI MAGAZINE ANNOUNCES NEW PLATFORM FOR COMICS ON SMARTPHONE DEVICES.

Our publication, NOVI MAGAZINE, currently features comics interviews and articles. Our final form will be a monthly comics anthology magazine for Android and OS X smartphone devices.

While companies like ComiXology or Graphic.ly adapt comics pages to the phone screen’s resolution, we want to forge an original, highly-customizable comics format specifically for phones. Our publication will experiment with gifs and layouts to provide a unique comics experience. Webcomics revolutionized sequential art in the late 90s and early 2000s. We want to bring the same level of innovation to comics through cellular devices.

The NOVI app is currently in development. We are slated to have a working demo to be ready by New York Comicon in October. As we are an Austin-based company, we plan on exhibiting the final product by November of 2012 for Austin Wizard World Comicon.

NOVI is committed to making comics ethically and responsibly. We want to utilize the advantages that phones offer advertisers and channel that revenue into paying interesting artists fairly for their work. Phones are becoming a platform for advertising that will soon eclipse television ads in value and viewership.

Smartphones are becoming a ubiquitous, essential item for most people. We at Novi are guessing that more people will read awesome comics if they are easy to access and an excellent value for their time.

To that end, NOVI Magazine will host a “curated pop-up shop” at Staple! filled with minis, issues, books and prints from creators we’re hoping to work with when Novi assumes its final form. We’ve rounded up some of our favorite up-and coming artists to ship in some items we’ll be selling at the 2012 STAPLE! Expo. Our featured artists are:

Jane Mai [Brooklyn, NY] @janemai_

KC Green [Easthampton, MA] @kcgbooks

Kris Mukai [Brooklyn, NY]@krismukai

Roman Muradov [San Francisco, CA] @bluebed

Mickey Zacchilli [Providence, RI] @spideretc

Kevin Czapiewski [Cleveland, OH] @kevinczap

Brandon B [Vermillion, OH] @a_tragic_gyro

Adam Smith/Matt Fox [Little Rock, AR] @wetblackghost

NOVI MAGAZINE is a publication of comics and words about comics. NOVI is based in Austin, TX.

Feb 16

Part 1 of a 2 part thing by friend Connor Shea over at NOVI. Real hype for this series.

novicomics:

FREED FROM THE EARTH: POSTHUMANISM & POSTMODERNISM IN THE MANGA OF HITOSHI TOMIZAWA (PART ONE OF TWO)

“When you start getting used to it… that’s when things get scary.” – Kumi (Alien Nine)

FIRST CONTACT

It was a few years ago that I first encountered the comics of Hitoshi Tomizawa online. After downloading and reading his series Milk Closet from a popular scanlation site, I was blown away – not by his artwork, characterization or storytelling ability (all of which I found off-putting, if not outright bad) but by how fucking weird the whole thing was.

And so, despite my misgivings about Tomizawa’s formal chops as a manga artist, I found myself hooked. I wanted to read more, of course, but mostly I just wanted someone to explain to me what the hell was going on. Unfortunately (but perhaps understandably), his work is not very popular here in the States, and the most I could find online at the time was a short Wikipedia article. It provided a list of his works and connected him to the Japanese art movement self-branded as “Superflat,” but little other information was available. Critical discussion of the artist or his manga (in either comics or fine art spheres) was practically nonexistent. This remains much the case today (with one notable exception) and is why I felt compelled to write about the reasons his comics are so fascinating.

In October 2011, Jason Thompson published an article in his column “House of 1000 Manga” on the website Anime News Network discussing Tomizawa’s series Alien Nine. This article (in addition to providing additional background information on Tomizawa) is an intelligent and succinct examination of both the manga and a few of the fan theories which have cropped up around it. And while the whole article is worth reading (and I might suggest you do so before continuing), I am going to focus on the final idea he brings up: “the metamorphosis of humans into another form of life” or posthumanism and how this rather optimistic idea is related to the darker theme of body-horror (e.g. many of Cronenberg’s films or Hitoshi Iwaaki’s Parasyte) (Thompson). In an interview, Tomizawa describes this as “the theme of symbiosis [which] appears in all of my work, regardless of genre” but in a more generalized form, the common theme of his work can be described as the integration of individual humans into some outside system: biological, societal, political or all three (Tomizawa). Specifically, this integration results in a trade-off between the power gained from the transformation and the confusion and horror which results from the loss of identity that this change necessitates.

HOW TO COLONIZE SPACE

In this way, the story “How to Colonize Space” is an excellent introduction to Tomizawa’s work. At 24 pages, it’s a short read, and is available online. In it, a space transport vessel is terrorized by a string of mysterious murders. The culprit is revealed to be a former human, whose current alien body was forced onto her for the purpose of space colonization (hence the title). As a caption box explains on page 14, “humans have to evolve if they want to live permanently outside Earth” and in this story, the evolution was deliberately effected by humans themselves. However, the space colonist is resentful of the change forced upon her. While it was necessary for these colonists to “give up their human form” in order to adapt to a system naturally inhospitable to humans (i.e. space), in this process she lost her original identity: both her human body and the prospect of a life involved in something other than space exploration (Space 14).

HOW TO COLONIZE SPACE PAGE 20 

Thus she begins to prey upon normal humans, having become more powerful than them and no longer feeling obliged to follow standard human morality. The story ends with her death at the hands of another modified space colonist who, in contrast, retains some aspect of his humanity through a continued loyalty to the human race.

OTHER WORKS

Only two of Tomizawa’s six series have been published in English (Alien Nine and his short, early work Treasure Hunter Jubei) and the publisher of both, Central Park Media, stopped publishing manga in 2009, leaving the titles out of print. In addition to Milk Closet and “How to Colonize Space”, a scanlation of Battle Royale II: Blitz Royale, Tomizawa’s commissioned sequel to the popular Battle Royale manga, can be found online. Untranslated pages from his remaining two series Propeller Heaven and Tokumu Hokokan Yumihari (or “Special Task Force, the Battleship Yumihari”) are also available online, but since I cannot read these I won’t be discussing them.

In some form, the conflict found in “How to Colonize Space” is at the core of all of Tomizawa’s works. It is central to both Alien Nine and Milk Closet and can be subtly read into Blitz Royale. In Alien Nine, three children are forced to join a school organization called the “Alien Party” and form symbiotic connections to aliens called “Borgs” which protect but also slowly and irrevocably alter them.

ALIEN NINE VOLUME 1 PAGE 15 

In Milk Closet, children mysteriously start warping to parallel universes. There, they come into contact with alien life-forms who consume and recreate them, destroying their original bodies and replacing them with more powerful alien duplicates (Milk Closet).

MILK CLOSET VOLUME 1 PAGE 77 

Just like the first manga, films and book to which it’s connected, Battle Royale II: Blitz Royale features a middle school class abducted and placed on an island by the military. There, these children also lose their original identities: trading their school uniforms for military fatigues, they are empowered by the guns and “combat drugs” given to them but also controlled by the collars placed around their necks and the threat of said collars exploding.

BLITZ ROYALE VOLUME 1 PAGE 66

VOLATILE REACTIONS             

Common to all these stories is that the characters are forced into their transformations by outside forces. And while characters’ reactions to their metamorphosis vary considerably, a recurring one is crippling terror.

ALIEN NINE VOLUME 1 PAGE 25 

Fear, of course, is a natural human response to both the unknown and the possibility of bodily harm. Body-horror has traditionally combined both of these fears along with confusion between mental and physical identity to produce emotional charge and Tomizawa’s manga run parallel to this tradition. While not following many of the genre tropes of horror, (Tomizawa has suggested that he would like Alien Nine to be considered a “legitimate science fiction story”) many readers still find Tomizawa’s comics to be disturbing (Tomizawa). The strange juxtaposition of cute, manga-style children and intense, alien violence almost seems calculated to provoke such a response from his audience.

            But horror is not the only possible response. The children in Milk Closet, for instance, express gratitude towards their alien symbiotes for “sav[ing] [their] lives”, although it is debatable how much of their consciousness survived the destruction of their original bodies (Milk Closet p.129).

MILK CLOSET VOLUME 1 PAGE 129 

And while the views of the humanist colonist from “How to Colonize Space” are never explicitly stated, he seems to have accepted the burden and duty placed upon him with the realization that “if it weren’t for people like [the modified colonists] mankind would’ve been sentenced to extinction” (Space p.21). Perhaps the most unfortunate reaction, but a realistic one, occurs in Blitz Royale when the children angrily turn against each other, unjustly placing the blame for their predicament amongst their own ranks.

BLITZ ROYALE VOLUME 2 PAGE 77 

           

Alien Nine, for all the problems related to the shallow characterization of its three leads, provides excellent contrasting examples of different possible reactions to confrontation with an alien system and loss of human identity.

ALIEN NINE VOLUME 1 PAGE 87 

Yuri’s reaction to alien contact is extremely negative; she considers aliens to be gross and “hate[s] looking at them and touching them and talking to them” (Alien Nine p.19).  She is comfortable and complacent in her traditional humanity, both with regard to her body and to her role in society (e.g. watching television in her free time, wanting to be a bride when she’s older). Out of the three members of her school’s “Alien Party”, she is the weakest, becoming paralyzed with fear during most of the fights.

ALIEN NINE VOLUME 1 PAGE 107  

She is also the only member of the Alien Party not to fuse with her “Borg”, thus retaining her humanity and never having to face the questions of identity the others characters do. This proves to be a liability however, as her lack of integration with her Borg causes it to lose control and attack her friends at the end of the first volume and, later in the series, allows her to be targeted and manipulated by a rival alien faction, the “Sunflower Clan”.

ALIEN NINE VOLUME 1 PAGE 79

Kasumi deals with her alien interaction in a neutral and mature way. Neither attracted to nor repulsed by aliens, she volunteers for the Alien Party because it exempts her from having to become Class President again, a duty she resents for its burdensome responsibility. She seems to value the power of the Borg, as well as her inclusion in the Alien Party, for the independence it grants her (although, ironically, these things eventually make her more dependent on others). Her approach to the challenges she faces is level-headed and logical, leaving most of the fighting up to her Borg but assisting where possible.

ALIEN NINE VOLUME 1 PAGE 116 

She fuses completely with her Borg midway through the series after being killed by an especially dangerous alien. After this point, she reveals that she had shared with Yuri an attachment to her identity as a human, staring at her new, alien form and lamenting that “[she’ll] never get a husband now” (Alien Nine vol.2 p.190). It’s also at this point that she decides that she must “protect Yuri” from becoming alien, not wanting Yuri to “feel the way [she and Kasumi] do” (Alien Nine vol.2 p208).

ALIEN NINE VOLUME 1 PAGE 83

It is not certain, however, that Kumi and Kasumi feel the same way. From the very beginning, Kasumi’s reaction to the aliens is positive to the point of being exuberant. Multi-talented and full of energy, Kasumi’s multiple hobbies evince a personality eager to plunge into uncharted territory with the self-provided assurance of not just success but excellence. With this adaptable attitude and the skill to support it, she is the most powerful member of the Alien Party, not only performing her required duties but also enjoying the performance.

ALIEN NINE VOLUME 1 PAGE 120 

It should be little surprise then that she is the first of the trio to compromise her original identity. Strangely attracted to an alien visitor known as a “Yellow Knife”, she is consumed by it and trapped in its body until being freed by Yuri and Kumi. Although she looks the same after coming out and is still able to work with her Borg, it is revealed that her body has become a host for the slain alien.

ALIEN NINE VOLUME 2 PAGE 83

Kasumi never seems to experience or express regret related to her symbiotic relationship with not just one but two different aliens and the fact that she has the abilities of both the Borg and the Yellow Knife proves itself useful. But her divided loyalties also complicate things, such as when she attacks Kumi for killing the original Yellow Knife.

            Across this spectrum, the risks of both accepting and refusing change are laid out. And they are both risks. Humans don’t really have anything to gain from their subsumption into the aliens’ systems. But neither do the humans have the option to not participate, to not make a choice. The alien presence changes the rules of the game and the humans are forced to either risk extinction through refusing to adapt to the new system and being unable to compete or risk extinction through changing so much they can no longer be considered humans.

THE POST-HUMAN

Of course, this is only how the situation would be viewed from a traditional humanist perspective, which is not how Tomizawa constructed his story. In interview, Tomizawa stated that, for him, Alien Nine is about “looking at things from an alien’s point of view, not a human’s point of view” (Tomizawa). His aliens have a “very uncomplicated logic” and, from their perspective, the Earth and its inhabitants are just another resource to be utilized (Tomizawa).

ALIEN  NINE VOLUME 3 PAGE 113 

Whether their presence is helpful or harmful to humanity is largely beside the point.

            As it would also be to a post-human fully integrated into an alien system. For most humans, loyalty is a virtue and betrayal is a sin, but what does it matter if you’re no longer human? Here, the horror of subjective immorality is contrasted with the power of freedom from that morality. Earlier, I brought up the question of whether the children in Milk Closet retain enough of their original identity to truly express an opinion on their symbiosis with the aliens. But it is just as debatable whether the question even holds relevance to them anymore, in their post-human state. In Milk Closet, Tomizawa’s answer seems to be ‘no’. The children don’t choose to be afflicted by the “Liesl Syndrome” which causes them to jump between the story’s multiple dimensions. But once they are, they make the choice to survive and help others survive by joining with the aliens they encounter, po-faced appendages known as “Tail Creatures”. And as the story progresses they don’t just absorb individual beings (both human and alien) into their system, but also entire dimensions.

MILK CLOSET VOLUME 3 PAGE 128 

This culminates in their creation of a “Grand Universe”, which does not have the risk of collapsing like the universes they originated in and thus ensures the future survival of those fortunate enough to be included within it. And while the characters do experience moments of doubt throughout the story (Milk Closet vol.2 p.162 & vol.4 p.9), overall, the process is portrayed positively. Rather than focus on the loss of the individual, Milk Closet glorifies the power the whole gains beyond that of its parts. The individual identity is not lost so much as transcended.

MILK CLOSET VOLUME 3 PAGE 5 

Individuality is even denigrated in both Milk Closet and Alien Nine as being a condition of loneliness, not independence.

MILK CLOSET VOLUME 1 PAGE 133

ALIEN NINE VOLUME 2 PAGE 37 

Even Alien Nine’s Yuri, who hates and fears aliens, is most terrified by the sensation of loneliness psychically imposed upon her by the Yellow Knife. Tomizawa suggests that the retention of individuality is not only a weakness but prevents the attainment of true happiness.

            On the other hand, Blitz Royale shows the influence of its outside system (i.e. the government) as an entirely negative influence. However, it also insists on the necessity of working within that system, even to rebel against it. The main character, Makoto, is kind-hearted and eager to help her classmates but her focus on herself as an individual prevents her from being able to do so.

BLITZ ROYALE VOLUME 2 PAGE 98 

It is only through her transcendence of self at the end that she has the chance to fight back against the military. And in order to enact this transcendence, Makoto must use the very power gained from her military transformation. Distraught by the deaths of her friends, Makoto begins ingesting heavy quantities of the “combat drugs” provided them, drugs which, in addition to preventing fatigue and pain, alter the mental state of the user. Then, as death closes in around her, she shoots herself, not in a selfish act of suicide, but in a selfless gambit to escape the control of the collar around her neck.

BLITZ ROYALE VOLUME 2 PAGE 185 

It is only by doing this that Makoto survives and is able to make her vow on the last page to “[not] let anybody else die” (Blitz Royale vol.2 p.199). It cannot be ignored that she is now fully part of the government’s system, with the military either accepting her rebellion or having planned for it from the beginning (calling it “Operation Antagonism”). But from both the perspective of her original identity’s desire to help others and a desire to survive regardless of form, Makoto made the only logical choice.

           

HORROR & ATTACHMENT

In all of Tomizawa’s work, normal humans are faced with the inevitability of change and must make decisions about how to act when their previously held conceptions about themselves and their environment no longer apply. The horror in Tomizawa’s manga is found in the presence of the unknown and death (whether literal or figurative, in loss of selfhood and identity). But the true source of that horror is the characters’ attachment to the past. The most successful characters in Tomizawa’s manga are those who abandon this attachment, accept the change forced upon them and utilize whatever ability they have within the new system. Of course, Tomizawa’s readers (myself included) may have trouble in completely accepting this post-humanist viewpoint, involved as we are in our present humanity. But when confronted with manga such as these, perhaps we too may be transformed.

            I’ll close this first essay with a quote from the film Jacob’s Ladder, itself quoting Meister Eckhart, a Christian mystic whose philosophy shares similarities with Buddhism:

“The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won’t let go of life, your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they’re not punishing you, they’re freeing your soul. So, if you’re frightened of dying and you’re holding on, you’ll see devils tearing your life away. But if you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.”

by guest columnist Connor Shea.

Feb 02

Forgot to reblog this: an interview I did with Osaka-based CCC member Ryan Cecil Smith, who is a fine man and a consummate gentleman. 

novicomics:

CULTURAL EXCHANGE: AN INTERVIEW WITH RYAN CECIL SMITH

Ryan Cecil Smith is an Osaka-based cartoonist who’s part of the Closed Caption Comics cartoonist collective. His recent work with the beautifully risograph-printed SF Supplementary File #2 (An “interpolation comic” that’s proudly stamped with a subtile of “Storytelling of the Future”) has blown many of us away— friend of NOVI William Cardini interviewed him about the artistic process behind SFSF#2 on the exact same day I did.

We spoke over Skype across 9 time zones yesterday about his catalog, his job as a JET program instructor in Japan, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and more. Ryan was an incredibly good sport for taking the time to do this interview with us, as we probably made him miss his morning coffee.

NOVI: One of the things i really wanted to get down was the timeline of all your releases. so what came first, the CCC stuff? Or did you put out your own minis?

RYAN CECIL SMITH: Well, I put out my own minis first, when I was in high school. Like, in 2003 and 2004. We started CCC in my sophomore year— most of ours’ sophomore year in college. We all met each other in first year, and at some point we all decided that we wanted to get together and started it then. We made more books later but we started it in our sophomore year.

NOVI: How many minis do you think you put out before moving as CCC?

SMITH: Probably not so many. Probably around five? Because that would be one a year, or maybe two a year.

NOVI: I got your CCC#9 here in front of me. You know, when I first picked up the SFSF comics, it took me a while to realize that you were the same guy. You use a lot of tones in your CCC#9 contribution, and you don’t use any in the SFSF minis.

SMITH: Yeah, that’s right. Well, I was just trying something different.

NOVI: So when did the first SF comic come out?

SMITH: That was last year, and it debuted at TCAF. I drew it in March.

NOVI: Would you clarify for me about doing the SF Supplementary Files as minis versus just doing an SF#2?

SMITH: My vision for SF is that it would be a straight series. You know, a normal comic series that connects. But I also wanted to make— not like a universe, but I just wanted to be experimental and to do things that were kind of related.

But I didn’t want to break up the story of SF, so I kind of made these comics on the side to go with them, that I thought was cool but didn’t fit into the story. And SFSF#1 was an excuse to do that, and it was also done for a comics festival in Osaka.

SFSF#2 is the same thing. It’s not actually in the universe— it’s not characters from the SF universe, or the comic, but the spirit is the same. It’s close to the spirit of why I’m doing SF. I think it’s really exciting, and that was done for Brooklyn [Comics and Graphic Arts Festival] in December of last year.

So SF#2 I’m working on this year, and that’s kinda the continuation of the story.

NOVI: Is that targeted towards a TCAF release as well?

SMITH: Yeah, it’s kinda just targeted towards whatever! [Laughter.] Whichever convention is within the right area, you know what I mean?

NOVI: I actually haven’t gotten a chance to pick up my own copy of SF#1 yet, and that’s something I’m going to work on ASAP. Looking around on your site, I came across this other project you’re working on, called Two Eyes of the Beautiful. Can you talk to me about that?

SMITH: I was doing that before SF. I did those in around 2009. I did two of them—I did Two Eyes of the Beautiful #2 around the next year. I’ll tell you about that one—I was doing that one when I was first looking at comic books in japan. I mean, I guess it’s always like this, but I knew nothing about anything when I came here. I didn’t know how to find a bookstore, or a comic book store. I didn’t know anything about what they were like in Japan.

I had no idea, so I would just go to this local comic book store. I’d walk by, and just look around [at the stacks.] There were so many books, that I would just pick any one of them. I was pretty good at picking out good ones based on the covers. I actually found Umezu Kazuo’s books just by the cover design. And the production design, which was really amazing. They totally stand out, with a completely different aesthetic. The quality was so good, and the drawing was really something else.

So I picked up this book by Umezu Kazuo called Senrei, which means “baptism.” I couldn’t read it at all, but it was amazing. What I did— Two Eyes of the Beautiful isn’t exactly what’s going on, but it’s what I think was going on. So in Senrei, the book by Umezu Kazuo, it’s about this woman who has this disease. She has a baby, in order to kill it, and the story goes on and on and on.  But I thought there were two little girls, and I didn’t know how many women there were. But I managed to peice together a pretty good story, so I told that. It wasn’t exactly the story, but it was fun and weird to do. 

NOVI: Sounds kinda like the Voltron anime, where the guy didn’t know the stories behind two different animes so he cut them togeather to make his own show.

SMITH: Oh, I didn’t know that, but that’s the same thing. I’ve never actually seen Voltron, but I bet it’s really good. I bet it works really well.

NOVI: I haven’t seen it either, but apparently it’s a classic. I guess that kinda leads into another question that I wanted to ask you: what’s your background in terms of visual stuff that you were intrested in and looking at when you were growing up?

SMITH: It’s good how you phrased that question, because I often get asked about my influences in terms of comics. I didn’t read comics at all growing up as a kid. Well, I read a little bit, but I really liked cartoons. Like, saturday morning, and every morning. It was “Ninja Turtles.” I probably learned the most visually from “Ninja Turtles.” My early drawings— I would do comics when I was really little. I knew then, but [especially] when I look at them now I go, “this is totally ‘Ninja Turtles.”’ The humor, the Ninja Turtles way of talking.

So yeah, just mostly cartoons when I was a kid.

NOVI: So where are you actually from? I read somewhere that you were from Dallas at some point?

SMITH: No, not Dallas, but I’m from all over. I was born in Los Angeles— well, around Los Angeles, in the suburbs. I grew up in Tennessee a little bit, and I went to high school in North Carolina, in Charlotte. I went to University in Baltimore. Since I’ve been all over the place, I don’t really think of any of those places as “where I’m from.” That’s where I met the rest of the CCC guys, in University. They’re all my best friends; we’re all in different places now but we’re still connected through Closed Captioned Comics.

NOVI: Alright, I got another question about the comics. You talked about how you found the material for Two Eyes of the Beautiful. Did a similar experience draw you into Queen Emeraldas for SFSF#2?

SMITH: It’s pretty similar. The way I’ve found out about a lot of artists that I like—same with Queen Emeraldas’s Matsumoto Leiji and Umezo Kazuo—is just by going to cheap used bookstores and picking up stuff off the shelves. Looking at it and deciding what I like. That’s how I found Matsumoto Leiji. For Umezo Kazuo it was totally raw and by chance. In Matsumoto’s case, I knew he was famous, but I didn’t know a whole lot about it. I was a little bit more informed when I found Matsumoto Leiji and when I did SFSF#2.

NOVI: I think Mark’s interview with you covered most of what you’d want to say about SFSF#2. Alright, one thing that I’d just want to know out of personal interest: is there any sort of English-speaking comics scene in Japan?

SMITH: I don’t think so. Or I don’t know. Probably, I am not 100% super excited about fostering and searching for that scene. If there was one, I don’t know so much about it. I haven’t looked super hard, so I don’t know if there is one really.

What there is a big scene for is zines. It has a different meaning here than it does in Japan. It really doesn’t mean comics. It includes comics a little bit, but zine culture is pretty big. I live in Osaka, and in Osaka and Tokyo there exists pretty significant zine culture. There’s a lot of people who do that, and who’ve gone to zine events. And that’s really awesome. And there’s a few English speakers at that thing, but it’s not overwhelming. In those cases it’s mostly a fifth of the people there speak English. Which is pretty— well, it’s more than usual than for most things.

NOVI: That’s very interesting. About Japan: you talk a lot on your tumblr about working as a JET instructor. Can you tell me about what you do?

SMITH: My official title is “Assistant Language Teacher.” I am one of two foreign English teachers at my high school through the JET program. It’s a goverment program to hire foreign English teachers with the aim of hiring and sending teachers to areas that wouldn’t normally get served by that sort of thing. Especially rural areas. It’s mainly for cultural exchange. My job is a teacher, but the reason for the program is more cultural and not very based on classroom stuff.

So what I do in my daily job and life: I used to go to two schools, I now go to only one school. I have a few classes every day. It’s pretty lax teaching. I just do conversation and communication based stuff. And cultural lessons. It’s not a very hard job, if I’d have to say. I feel like half of my job is being friendly to every student. I feel that it makes my school very happy if I talk to every single student. If I work really hard at school making a lesson or teaching, they don’t really care, but if I keep being friendly they like that.

NOVI: I saw on your site that you kind of incorporate comics into your teaching approach?

SMITH: I do, but I think that in the last year I’ve kind of abandoned that. Not forever, but now I only do it when I can use it. I used to try and force it more, and I found that it didn’t really work.

I’ll tell you an example: I tried to use some western comics in the classroom for reading, because as a Japanese learner, comics are a really great way to study English because you don’t have to read an entire block of text. And there’s pictures and context to help you. Obviously you have to learn the foundations normally, but they’re a really great way to practice.

Comics are a great way to learn, but it took me to figure out that my students don’t care about western comics. It’s really funny, because if I teach them using comics—no matter what kind of comic; alternative comics or any sort of comics I find—they’re just like, “what is this?”

But if I give them an English translation of Dragonball, then they’re a lot more motivated. And that’s old. Dragonball or [Detective] Conan or anything Japanese. It kind of bugged me that the cultural sharing was not there, so that was surprising. Plus, any sort of challenge is pretty unusual to my students, and is pretty unusual for the other teachers to see. So for a while I kind of have to force it.

Comics are a great tool for personal study, but I haven’t found a way to use it effectively in the classroom.

NOVI: Here’s a question which may or may not even be accurate with regards to what you were doing— it may just be the age of the comics you’re working from, but I feel that there’s kind of this thing going on in the alternative comics scene where more and more people are starting to appreciate what shojo manga has really done. And it’s really shojo-y, the SFSF#2 comics. But I’m not sure if that’s just the style people were using in the particular time frame that Queen Emeraldas was drawn in.

SMITH: Well, Matsumoto Leiji, at least in Queen Emeraldas’s case, it wasn’t a shojo manga. It ran in a shonen magazine, so it’s interesting that you would say that. Although I wouldn’t say that it’s a particularly gender specific story—he has heroines, and I could talk about the gender positions in the comic—but as for shojo, the way he does the spreads and his layouts, with a majestic and grand way of showing things, makes a heavy atmosphere. Which is more familiar with shojo manga readers. And yeah, that kind of atmosphere is kind of rare in boys manga. I don’t think anyone Japanese would call it shojo, but the heavy atmosphere doesn’t seem like a shonen comic type of thing.

NOVI: I think that the Risograph printing of SFSF#2 really hits you hard in those full-bleed spreads.

SMITH: Yeah, I like it! I told Mark that when I chose that section of the manga for SFSF#2 that those spreads and sequences in this part of the story just blew me away. So your reaction is my reaction to that stuff; I felt the same thing.

NOVI: You said that you had something to say about the gender stuff in Matsumoto’s comic. And also, the reason that I asked about shojo in particular was that in my initial round of research for this interview I found that Two Eyes of the Beautiful was also about girls, so I thought that there was a shojo thing going on.

SMITH: Well, Two Eyes of the Beautiful is an example of the same kind of gender mix. In Matsumoto Leiji’s case with Queen Emeraldas, most of it’s scifi shonen manga. I wouldn’t call any of his stuff shojo manga, but I think it’s very much for both genders.

In the case of Umezo Kazuo and Baptism, that story is really interesting to me because he was hired to work on—and by the way, I learned this from Ryan Sands and the Samehat! website, where the’res a long interview about Umezu Kazuo—Kazuo was hired to work in girls comics magazines! Even though he was this dude who drew all this grotesque horror way of making comics.

He was hired to work on girls comics, and was told to not include any boy characters. So I thought that was so awesome. I’d never seen anything like that. Because most of our horror comics and horror movies in America, and maybe abroad, is that they’re mostly a boy thing, or a date thing. We have a history of misogynist horror movies too. So I’ve never seen anything like this, where it’s really grotesque horror, with a girl’s audience.

There are some translations of these kind of comics, but I don’t remember the publisher. They’re really interesting. If you look up his stuff on Amazon lists, one is called Faces, one is called Insects, and one is called Reflections. They’re collections of all these short stories, and they’re really good. [These collections are published under the name Scary Book and are put out by Dark Horse -Ed.]

In Two Eyes of the Beautiful, and most of Kazuo’s girls horror stuff, you can talk about gender and you can talk about girls, but there’s nothing sexual about any of it. Which I though was really cool. I guess because I’m kind of used to sexuality in horror movies being exploitive, and there’s nothing like that in Kazuo’s comic. I love it, I think it’s so cool.

Ryan Cecil Smith is planning to have SF#2 ready by TCAF in May. You can purchase his comics at his website ryancecilsmith.com 

Jan 28

Jan 27

[video]

Jan 26

Daily texan comics blog. -

So I used to write about comics for the Daily Texan, but they finally figured out that I can’t write worth a shit, so they made me an editor instead. Here’s an interview i did with a local austin cartoonist who made it big on kickstarter. Aaron whitaker is a cool guy and he will apparently be at STAPLE!, a convention the first weekend of march that you are going to.

I don’t know if I’ve linked to it before, but I’m writing for a tumblog/digital magazine about comics called NOVI. Here’s one of the editors, Jona, breaking down the structure and pacing of the first half of Jason’s The Left Bank Gang. Worth your time, as it turns out to be about (*spoilers*) boners at the end. 

novicomics:

COMICS BREAKDOWN: JONA ON JASON’S THE LEFT BANK GANG

Look, I’m going to be perfectly honest here, I’ve had a few drinks. You don’t need to know this, but I felt that full disclosure was necessary before we proceed. I do not promise coherence. Cool with that? Awesome.

So, I wanted to do a quick breakdown of one of my favorite books, The Left Bank Gang by Jason. If you don’t know Jason, or haven’t read this book, I suggest you go out and take care of that right now…

It’s cool. The whole thing is only forty six pages. I can wait.

Okay. Ready?

Great. Let’s get to it.

 

**Obligatory spoiler alert**

This book is basically the original Midnight in Paris. It features Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce living in France, but as cartoonists (instead of writers) in the mid 1920’s. It’s presented in Jason’s signature “animal people” style, with consistent 3x3 conventional grids, and an immaculate sense of pacing. In short, the whole thing reeks of Jason, and I love it. I mean, seriously. All literature has been replaced with comics in this universe. What’s not to love?

The story starts with Ezra walking about in the street. He passes a beggar, ignores him, and subsequently bumps into Ernest Hemingway. I may be stretching this a little—or maybe I’ve had one too many alcohols—but I think it’s kind of interesting how Ernest and that beggar have the same character model. Jason only has so many models (a few dogs, some birds, cats, etc). He constantly re-uses them, and, often, the similarity between these characters is either the butt of a joke, or a major plot point in the story. Either way, I’ll get back to that bum in a bit.

So, Hemingway and Ezra meet up, exchange a few words, and part ways. Later, Ezra meets up with Scott and, later, James. Really, the first three pages serve to establish the world and introduce the protagonists. It’s quick, effective, and shows Jason’s sense of pacing.

Quick aside – I used to not get that term… “pacing.” What does that even mean? That the story is not ever boring? What does it mean to Jason? Reading his stories, I’d say his sense of “pacing” is very mathematical, with story beats happening at approximately even intervals. I’m not sure he does it on purpose (there’s no way of telling outside of asking him), but he seems to push for a major twist or development every six pages or so.

Take the first three pages for example. The first time I read this book, I felt confused. Then, he spends three more pages really letting that concept sink in. We get to see the authors working on their comics, what getting published is like, and so on and so forth. I was having a pretty good time with it. And then, all of a sudden, we are introduced to Zelda Fitzgerald, and the first words out of her mouth?

Well, excuuuuuse me, princess. I was having a great time thinking that all great American authors loved comics as much as I. But no, you just have to come in and move the story forward.

How dare you.

So she complains, and berates Scott, and asks him to “pour [her] a drink,” and we can see that he’s torn between her and his work, and we see Hemingway’s struggle with his work, and his fear of failure, and he fails to draw a woman at a café, and we meet Gertrude Stein, and there’s a bit of a meta humor about comic design, and Hemingway is shown to be having nightmares about World War I, and we meet Hadley, who loves him very much and manages to lull him to sleep in a true and honest, loving embrace.

That’s six pages. It’s funny, but no fun. The whole thing smells of existential crisis. I don’t want those lives. These people seem lonely and detached. They all want something, but they aren’t sure what it is. It’s relate-able, but frustrating. They even come off as a little pathetic. 

 Then, on page thirteen, we are introduced to Zelda’s lover, Edouard.

 

This page is funny, because it shows something that readers can’t discern from Jason’s simplistic art style; that Zelda is a stone cold fox (dog person), who can give anyone a boner. I mean, she literally gives her neighbor something to jerk off to, despite the fact that her sex noises fucking woke him up in the middle of the night.

This is important because of reasons. Number one being that this is page thirteen. I don’t mean this in an “oh-no-the-number-thirteen-is-so-symbolic” way. I bring this up because this is approximately a fourth (Left Bank is 46 pages long) of the story. Going back to that whole pacing thing, this is Jason advancing the plot at regular intervals.

Let’s test this theory. The halfway point should be around page 23 (give or take a page). That means that he midpoint of the story is…

 

To reiterate, I’m assuming that you read the story and that you know that this whole thing is about these great authors suddenly deciding to rob a bank, because pages six through twelve showed just how much they need something to validate their lives (namely money). So, what is this page? This is when the antagonist makes a move against the hero. It’s is when the whole plan is doomed. It’s a change of fortune. It’s a point halfway into the overall arch that changes everything.

It’s a major story beat.

That’s why I love page thirteen so much, because it sets the stage for the rest of the book. By page twelve we already know the characters. If the story ended here, we could just call it an interesting exercise designed to delve into the minds of these cartoonists, etc. etc. etc. And that’s true, but that’s not a story. That’s a vignette. Jason’s trying to tell a story.

So, we get page thirteen. More things happen in these nine panels than in any other page of this book, and the whole thing is about dicks. It’s brilliant.

This story is about these writers trying to prove themselves, right? That’s kind of the major theme set up by the first twelve pages. So, why not spend the next six pages talking about dick sizes? Well, not right away. Jason has to take us out to dinner before popping the question.

We’re not THAT easy.

Well, maybe a little…

I love that this happens, because it’s a true story. F. Scott Fitzgerald really did ask Ernest Hemingway if he thought his “manhood” was “adequate.” The fact that Jason has turned this into the major driving force for one of his most celebrated works is a testament to his writing.

I mean that in earnest (haha, pun). They spend like six pages just talking about their literal and figurative dicks, trying to figure out if they really are big enough.

 

These guys are just big balls of walking insecurities. So much so, that six pages later, Zelda uses her boner inducing powers to seduce yet another man… Ezra.

 So, by the time we reach page 23, every aspect of this tragedy has been meticulously set up. If I wanted to get really technical about it (and I do), I would draw a crappy chart that looks sort of like this:

 

It’s a traditional three-act structure. There’s a catalyst on page six; a first plot point on page twelve; a midpoint on page 23; a low point on page 36; and a climax on page 42. It’s all very symmetrical, with major developments happening at evenly spaced midpoints, which are just changes of fortune for our heroes.

The main one happens at the actual midpoint of the story (page 23), where Zelda, the arbiter of penis sizes, decides to manipulate the robbery. That separates the story into two halves.  

The first half has a midpoint of its own. It happens in the transition between pages twelve and thirteen, when we learn that Zelda has a lover.

The second half, too, has a midpoint (page thirty six), where Scott sits alone after Zelda abandoned him (the low point).

These last two form the beginning and end of the second act, which is all about the characters trying to confront their insecurities. Conversely, the first act was about the characters becoming aware of these insecurities in the first place.

Since this story is about men trying to prove that they have “manhoods” of acceptable sizes,  we can confirm that Zelda showing her discontent right on page six (halfway into act one) serves as the catalyst to the whole story.

And the climax? Well, it brings Zelda’s story to an end after she gets shot.

Again, all of the major plot points are changes in fortune for our heroes, but they all revolve around Zelda. This serves to ground the story and give it a coherent direction, despite the fact that there are multiple protagonists in a world so different from our own.

Everything else is just Jason doing his Jason thing (the stuff we all love); all leading to that sad, sad ending…

A panel that bookends a story that started with this image.

I love Jason comics. I could talk about this book forever, but now I am tired. Good night. I hope that all made sense.

-Jona

Dec 14

novicomics:

IT’S A KIND-OF PLACE: A PARTYDOG INTERVIEW
 

I’m proud to present an interview with Partydog, whom I believe is one of the most exciting cartoonists putting out work on the internet. I’ve been lucky to work with him, publishing “The Body is a System,” his first print comic, last year. Partydog’s part of the wave of young cartoonists pushing the boundaries of where digital (“web”)comics can go, and especially where his audience will fallow him. He’s got an unconventional, yet delightfully homegrown (in that late-90’s-geocites way) methodology of releasing content— stories are started and put on hiatus as Partydog’s interests are drawn to starting or continuing other works. Currently, he’s juggling between four stories on his website Lamezone.net— “COSM,” a dark, sprawling horror comic, “Badplace,” about demons and ghosts fighting over a particularly important air conditioning unit, “Wildcat,” a Clowes-ian Wilson-esque character study told in unchronological order, and “Extraordinary High Quality Amazing,” a Lynchian and esoteric exploration of… something. All of which roughly take place in Puke City, something of an opressive Yoknapatawpha where most of Partydog’s work is set.  

This is something of an introductory interview, and we didn’t discuss much past cursory commentary on his body of work, and some personal history. A tiny bit hypes Microwave Planet, his upcoming first “issue” of post-webcomic material, which drops on Friday. Much of it is just spent figuring out which comics dropped when. At the end we had to rush a bit—we spoke over Skype in the wee hours of the morning, not soon after Partydog’s move out of his native Kansas into temporary asylum in the wild jungles of the Pacific Northwest. 

 
NOVI Magazine: I think I told you at some point, but I was introduced to your work through someone posting “Asscastle” on a webcomics thread on Something Awful [a popular humor forumsboard.] The comic’s ruthless dismissal of conventionality and aggressive use of color immediately stood out. Tell me about the genesis of “Asscastle,” which I think you once described to me as “a terrible excuse for a porno.”
 
Partydog: Did i say that? That sounds like something I’d say. I think I had like an idea for some kind of like, porno Disney film or something. I don’t know where it went from that or how it ended up where it did. There was a point where I noticed it was getting attention.  I think from then I really pussed out on the level of sexuality in it, but something must have worked because that’s still the most popular thing I’ve done.
 
I think I had just the ending figured.  I just went towards that, coming up with it as I went. I never really plan stuff out, I just see where it goes. There was a lot of analysis of it afterwards as being a story about accepting my sexuality or something. While that wasn’t a conscious thing, I guess that makes sense.
 
NOVI: I think “Asscastle” was being posted on the Something Awful as you were making/posting pages. When the board asked of the comics’ origins, someone reverse Google-image-searched the images to a FurAfiinity [a furry fandom site] account. Is this where you were originally posting “Asscastle?” Also, around what year was this? Sometime in 2009? 
 
Partydog: Yeah, I think someone from there probably posted it to SA. Someone linked the thread to me and I think I kind of freaked that I was about to be like made a target or something.  Then I saw they genuinely enjoyed it and I felt a lot of pressure not to mess that up. And yeah, I think 2009 was the time.

NOVI: This was before most of your work was collected on your website, correct?
 
Partydog: That was before lamezone.net. I decided I wanted a place that I could like, actually link to someone! [Laughs.] A roomate had convinced me to sign up for the FA account, which was good because getting feedback got me to actual produce stuff regularly. But I was kind of done doing that, its sort of a place where I don’t think a lot of people would be huge into what i was doing. Actually there were a fair amount of people there really into it, but all I had was an FA and a DrunkDuck page for “ffff,” and nobody is going to take anything there seriously.
 
I think I started Lamezone shortly after I finished “Asscastle.”
 
NOVI: Anyways, despite debuting on a website for rater niche website, the comic went kinda-sorta viral, on a level which sadly never peaked through the underground. That doesn’t mean some who read it weren’t immediately moved by the piece, even those who didn’t know what they were getting into. One commenter in a thread commented something along the lines of: “it’s too weird to jack off to and too hot to… never mind, but it’s good.” In a reddit thread, an anonymous poster (who has not made another post on reddit with the same handle since) posted an almost 2000 word response to the comic. He wrote at considerable length about the protagonist’s home life. How much of “Asscastle” was, indirectly or not, a response to these connections, which were popping up as you were still writing and drawing the comic? Was that personal level of connection always there in the comic?
 
Partydog: Well, I’m sure the connection was there but just I didn’t really think about it. I mean, I grew up in a really homophobic environment and did have to cope with the fact that I’m gay as hell. Theres a lot in there i could probably connect to my life if i tried. That 2000 word response seems pretty accurate. Theres one for “Smokes” too, same guy i think, and it actually pointed out some stuff to me about myself I hadn’t really thought about. After that I’m always worried I’m saying stuff with my comics.
 
NOVI: Let’s talk about your environment. You’re about my age, around 21 something, right? Where did you grow up? 
 
Partydog: Yeah, 21. I was born in and lived my whole life in Topeka, Kansas. I don’t want to give the impression that it was hell, but it was definitely not a great place for me personally. There was absolutely no culture or artistic community, and homosexuality was definitely not OK there. I think they were debating whether to get rid of a law making sodomy illegal since they couldn’t enforce it anymore, but they voted to keep it on the books as, like, a message. My family is full of very nice people but I had to listen to a whole lot of gay bashing. When my co-workers found out I was gay, everyone would eat at a different table at lunch. It was totally silly. I’d hear people talk about it when they thought I wasn’t around. nobody ever directly said anything to me about it though.
 

NOVI: Tell me about growing up in Topeka. What do your parents do? Did your household support or otherwise nurture the arts? What was your earliest, or at least most distinct graphic memory? I guess another way of phrasing “distinct graphic memory” would be: with what did you first notice the “style” or design of something, that made you go, “Oh, there’s something happening here.” 
 
Partydog: My parents were split up as long as i can remember, and i primarily lived with my mom, who is a nurse. She wasn’t really interested in art, but my dad paints, is in a band, and is a writer. Not professionally though, he was working at a cable company a while, and now he’s back in college. I’m not sure what he’s aiming for, he’s mentioned trying teaching or pursuing his art as a career. As for earliest or most distinct memory, I can’t really remember anything all that interesting from early in my life.
 
I was drawing comics since a really young age, but I don’t really know where that was coming from stylistically. i think i just kind of drew. there were a few phases where id kind of rip off some stuff for a while, like try to draw some licenced character and imitate the style, but as for my own personal comics I really don’t know where it came from. I didn’t read comics or anything, I just wanted to make them. The earliest I can really remember seeing something that directly inspired me is, uh, first in middle school, I had this huge phase with the show Invader Zim. I just entirely ripping that off a while.
 
But i think in terms of like forming my own thing, around high school I started getting really into music, and one day I found the album Untilted by Autechre, and something about the cover really struck me. Its like, this flat color and then there’s this kind of abstract mass aligned to the right. The use of negative space and the abstraction really influenced me for some reason, Im pretty sure i tried to replicate the thing a lot to figure out what about it was so striking to me. The rest of The Designer Republics stuff, I got really into that too. They did another Autehcre cover that was just entirely one flat color, but it was still immediately striking and recognizable. I got really into minimalism and the use of color. Also, weirdly enough, Adult Swim DVDs kind of did a similar thing like that. The third season of Space Ghost’s cover I think was a huge influence on my color palette. Its this green that I really like.
 
 NOVI: So when did “ffff” start up? When you were in high school?

 
Partydog: Nah, I think that was around 2008 or 2009.
 

NOVI: Are there any earlier works on the internet? I’m still not sure of the timing of “ffff” and all the Puke City stories. Were the “Punk” and “Arfe” stories on the internet prior to lamezone.net? Which did you draw first chronologically? 
 
Partydog: “ffff.” was the first. The Puke City stories other than “Asscastle” all came after. There weren’t any other series around then, just like one-off junk shared with friends and stuff like that. I think after “Asscastle” i did “Arfe” and started up lamezone.net for the rest? I can’t really remember. I’m pretty sure that’s how it went down.
 
NOVI: This was in 2009-ish then?
 
Partydog: I think lamezone.net went up in 2010. I wanna say like March, but I may be completely wrong here. [Laughs.]
 
NOVI: A lot’s happened since 2010, man. Anyways, let’s talk about “ffff.” I think I remember the first comics: were they digitally minded strips from the beginning? Were you digitally drawing your comics then?
 
Partydog: Yeah, a lot are done in MS Paint, some in like Flash I think. Later ones are in Photoshop. They vary a lot in quality. But yeah, all digital.
 
NOVI: It’s a very rugged aesthetic to me, especially in the first few strips. Was going digital a reaction to something, or just the lack of access to a scanner? 
 
Partydog: My friend had a tablet, and it was awesome, so I got one for Christmas or something. I was just getting to learn digital art really when I was doing that, but the early ones were also pretty rushed. I wasn’t taking it very seriously. Well at first I wasn’t anyway— I think I started really trying with it more as it went on, but until the more recent ones I’ve gone back and done later I think I was pretty careless with the art anyway.
 

NOVI: Well, when the first color pin-ups show up, the work becomes immediately recognizable as yours. You mentioned The Designer Republic above; they’re most known creating advertising and packaging for major brands. There’s that tendency towards pop and iconism. I think you’ve brought some of that to your work, at least that tendency towards world building. When did the characters in “FFFF” and “Asscastle” begin to inhabit a shared space? Was the reccuring character of Death involved or was he brought into the picture later as a conscious axis for what would become Puke City? 
 
NOVI: I think in “Asscastle” I sort of brought Death back, just because he is one of my favorites, and I needed to use death in “Asscastle.”  I figured, “Why not just use the Death character I’ve already got?” It’s now like a Jay and Silent Bob kind of thing where he has to show up at least once in every comic I do. I was doing that with the gas-n-glug a while too but I think its missed a few.  
 
Puke City was a series from the start, so it was all part of the same universe. After that it was kind of like, “Why not keep everything part of the same world?” I mean, any elements of it that don’t work for what I’m doing I can just stay away from. Like in “Smokes,” I really think any mention of Ghostzone or Badplace would entirely not work there, so i just don’t bring it up. And I really like having this world to build on, that there’s a place to start from and expand. It’s just something I really personally like, bringing back characters in minor or major roles, setting everything in the same city, just creating this universe. At this point starting something outside of that world feels like a waste.
 

NOVI: There’s definitely that sense of being tied to a community, and to a physical place in all your comics. The afterlife in the cosmology of Puke City seems to be the only ride out of town, even the dead characters still hang around enough to come back and have a reunion every Halloween strip. How much of that is from your own personal sense of communities?
 
Partydog: There weren’t really any communities in Topeka. [Laughs.] Later on I kind of formed some relationships and connections, but not until really late.
 
NOVI: Well, the way the Puke city strips use color seems to tangibly invoke your characters the only tangible part of the environment. Much of it is often completely abstracted, and almost un-interactable in its crudeness. I guess what I’m saying is that your comics really focus the art in expressing these relationships, enough of which in the context of Puke City seem to form a loose community.
 
Partydog:  The characters and relationships are definitely the focus, and the world is kind of a background force which is either completely passive or actively malevolent. I kind of abstract it to keep the characters the visual focus and to kind of separate it as a different thing. also its just really fun to draw weird looking sketchy buildings with impossible proportions.
 
NOVI: It’s funny that you describe Puke City as a sort of force. If I’m not mistaken, the character of Dildom Andes, which you described to me as the lynchpin of “Extraordinary High Quality Amazing” is something that comes from that world and into the lives of the characters living there. Is that somewhat true? 
 
Partydog: He’s a really vaguely defined character. A lot of that comic is pretty unexplored, because I think it would really destroy a lot of it if it explained much. You can see him as just delusional, and everything in there as a hallucination, or you can see him as a kind of force, or whatever you want, that’s not really what Im interested in looking into in the comic. It comes from a weird place. I think it can come off as just a bunch of nonsense, but the whole thing makes a kind of sense to me. I think more than any of my other comics that one just goes entirely for what makes sense of me, like entirely on impulse. I just follow an idea and don’t worry about if its going to make any kind of literal sense.

 
NOVI: It seems like Andes is more in control, or at least casts more perceptive on the environment than any of the other characters. 
 
Partydog: Yeah definitely. If taken literally he has some kind of godlike powers. In any case he kind of seems untouchable.
 
NOVI:  “EHQA” is definitely the most experimental, and as you say, the most what-makes-sense-for-me of your comics. I was surprised then, when you told me that you had collaborated with other artists in the making of some of the more stylistically, uh, intense pages. How did that come about?
 
Partydog: There are a few pages in there that were entirely created by other people. Their idea, their art. I’d just kind of work with what they did in the narrative, if you can call it a narrative. If it kind of felt out of character or like it didn’t really fit, I’d just find a way to kind of work it in there. But I think everybody did a pretty good job of keeping with the feel. Theres also a lot of pages that have got excerpts from instant messenger conversations pasted all over them.
 
“EHQA” is kind of broad enough that i can do whatever i want in it really. its kind of alternating the easiest and the hardest comic to make.

NOVI: Let’s talk about another collaborative effort: “Anarchy Anarchy Anarchy” began as a project between you and your ex-boyfriend, right? What were you guys responding to with that? 
 
Partydog: The internet. It’s a response to the internet. Youtube comments, DeviantArt,stoners, teenagers, etc.  I cant speak for him but I didn’t really see it as a hateful thing, its just kind of lighthearted mocking of that stage of growing up and all the embarassing stuff people end up putting on the internet forever. I dunno its got a clear defined but kind of broad target. its sort of hard to pin down the exact thing.
 

NOVI: The internet seems to have defined your style of layout for your comics; that whole “infinite canvas” thing expanded your comics’ pages vertical length to be one impossible for conventional printing. How does your experience with your preferred medium shape what you did with The Body is a System? 
 
Partydog: Well, as for the canvas length, I was kind of working in that series-of-equally-sized-squares thing at the time, so it wasn’t really too hard to adjust that method. The pacing though I had to kind of mess with, used to just kind of using pages as scenes, kind of pacing things like a TV show or a movie or something. With each page being a already determined length, I kind of had to watch what each page ended on.     
 
In terms of thinking about it being a physical printed thing, I think I really didn’t think about that much. Not as much as I should have. The whole VHS aesthetic could have come out a huge disaster, the ghost-image thing and the layering could have come out badly if it hadn’t been printed right. Luckily that didn’t turn out to be a huge problem.
 
NOVI: From past conversations I’ve had with you, I know that you don’t begin drawing with much of the finished comic structured out. How much of TBIAS’s action was in responce to this need to watch your pacing? 
 
Partydog: I think it mostly just effected it on a kind of page by page basis, like making sure each page ended on the right note and that action didn’t get int erupted too badly between pages. I just kind of start off with a vague idea, some points along the way, and maybe an ending. The comic sort of ended up taking just as long as it was supposed to to reach its ending by chance. I was aiming for 24 pages, and around there it was kind of wrapping up, mostly by luck.
 
NOVI: Speaking of pacing, I almost completely forgot to bring up one of your most popular comics, “Smokes.” I was incredulous when you told me that you did it almost completely off the cuff. How much intuition guided your pacing of the story? Did you even begin with the end in mind? 
 
Partydog: I didn’t have the end in mind, or really any other details. I started it knowing the characters, and where they would start out, and the direction they were sort of headed. Everything else just kind of developed as I went. When I saw the direction things were going, I kind of planned things out according to that, vaguely. I would start each page not knowing how it was going to end, which is how I usually work. Sometimes I’d come up with an idea for a scene, and try to kind of head towards that, but that’s about it.
 

NOVI: “Smokes” ends at 50 pages. That’s a pretty round number. Were you consciously shooting for that at any point in the process? 
 
Partydog: I think it was winding down around that point, so I just kind of wrapped things up. Theres a few pages near the end that could have been two pages that I just kinda kept together. That comic is sort of rushed at the end, I probably should have taken more time on it, but i was kind of ready to be done. [Laughs.] Or more likely, I was excited to get to the ending.
 

NOVI: Something else I’d like you to comment on: around the time you started working on/finished TBIAS, you started working on a new “soft focus” look to your linework. I think it first popped up in one of the Dog Comics and “Wildcat.” It’s a really cool effect, later to be put into use as a metafictional device in “COSM.” What is that softness? Does working in Photoshop direct you into making some of your own filters at some point in the game?
 
Partydog: I just kind of started getting into a trend of messing with filters around then. I don’t really remember how it came about. I don’t really have a single method of doing it, after finishing a page I’ll just kind of mess around with it until I’m satisfied with the result. Sometimes I end up messing with that a lot longer than the rest of the comic, and I’ll get so burnt out on the image i have to take a break from it. Because I’m so familiar with it at that point, I can’t tell what i need to do with it to get the look I’m after anymore.
 
NOVI: It’s put to spectacular use in “COSM,” quite possibly the most colorful, yet from the very get go the most “serious” story you’ve started into on lamezone.com. How much of “COSM” is already planned out? It doesn’t seem that you’d be the type to open “COSM” with something that might be called an overture without some end goal in your sights. Also, you’ve mentioned that you consider “COSM” to be a spiritual sequel to TBIAS.  Is “COSM’s” digital and explicitly metafictional format somewhat related to that? 
 
Partydog: “COSM” is more planned out than usual. It’s not yet to the real kind of starting point of the main narrative, but its close. I think its going to go in a direction it doesn’t really seem like its headed yet. Or maybe it does.
 
It is a sequel to TBIAS in a way, but I think that its more like that’s a new aspect of the world of Lamezone that I’m exploring now. It’s in Microwave Planet too, in that hole-faced guy especially, and the entire TBIAS aspect of the Lamezone afterlife, the spiritual or cosmic world or whatever.
 

NOVI: It truly pains me to use this term, but from what I’ve seen of Microwave Planet, the scope of things has greatly increased. Or maybe it’s just that a whole lot of things happen: more characters, more stories within stories, more horror stuff and more dramatic scenes. Is this a direction you originally intended to go in when you decided to do an “e-book,” as you once put it? Did the “graphic novel” feel of an issue have something do to with it? 
 
Partydog: When I started I had no idea. Then I started “Ru’mel” as a kind of kids show parody thing and everything else branched out from there. It all started coming together and ended up whatever it is now. The horror I think is from feeling like I can experiment more with what I really want to do. I felt more comfortable doing serious stuff after “Smokes” and “Cosm.” I wanted to aim higher than I have before.
 
NOVI: It definitely feels like the beginning of a new period with Lamezone. Issue one’s barely off the (metaphorical) presses and you’ve already started talking about issue two. can we expect a annual, or even quarterly Lamezine, in addition to updates to comics on Lamezone.net?
 
Partydog: I’m not sure, it depends how well it does. The site will keep being updated in any case for sure.  But the zine, if it doesn’t sell well it sort of defeats the point of the format and release method. Why not just put it up free you know? But I hope it goes well, because I think this method works really well for me.
 
 
NOVI: I think that that’s all the questions I have for now. It’s almost 4 in the morning and I can’t remember if I had anything else to add. I guess one thing: recently you moved out of Kansas, and when you did, you tweeted about having to show your work to your parents. What ended up being their reaction? 
 
Partydog: I haven’t shown them. My mom looked at TBIAS though. She asked me if I think I’m going to hell and said she was worried about my soul.
 

Lamezine issue #1, Microwave Planet, drops this Friday on Partydog’s website http://lamezone.net

I interviewed Partydog for a thing me and some friends are putting together we’re calling NOVI. NOVI itself is in a weird hiatus zone cuz of the holiday season. It’s gonna be pretty sweet after that tho

Sep 27

CC writes on retarded comics -

hi. this isn’t me, but instead its a passionate thing from a dear friend about something that really sucks and concerns yr dollars. economy. dollar dollar bills yall