Somehow I managed to get a page out this week, despite resembling a fried egg thanks to some wicked jetlag. Probably I’ll want to redo the whole thing in a few weeks, but I’ll resist the urge for the time being and instead devote my time to catching up on that whole sleep concept.
Next week – the second to last scene in Chapter Two! We’ll give Luther a break from self-absorbed agonizing and check in with the lady. I also realize that I forgot to work up a set of notes for pages 140-150, so I’ll try to put those together as well.
I’m gearing up for SPX in Bethesda at the end of September, and trying to cook up something Family Man related to have on sale there. Requests are welcome! August has been an utter rump for selling anything, so anything I make will be in a wee little limited special batch. Perhaps a kooky little print celebrating the end of the chapter.
And there we are! Yes, this shan’t be the last we see of subjectivity reality in this comic; it shan’t be the last, at all. Scads of it, coming right up.
I also learned a lot about bats over the course of making this page. A lot. About. Bats. I also made a lot of completely unnecessary investigations into the nocturnal mammalia of Western Europe circa 1768; you’d be surprised at what wasn’t lurking in the shadows back then.
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I’ll be in London this coming week for absolutely no good reason, other than my delightful grandmother providing free housing and the ladyfriend being able to come along and it being London and me still being able to take on decent-paying corporate freelance work and realizing that these elements are unlikely to continue to converge indefinitely.
The airfare was a lump to swallow, so I’ll mostly be making it through on cheap pasta at the flat and cups of hot water begged off of Caffe Nero employees, but it should be a memorable time for three ladies. And I’ll get to ogle some of the things I had to skip out on last year due to there being, you know, a lot of London. (Sir John Soame’s Museum, I am looking at you)
Expect to hear little of me between the 14th and the 23rd! Unless you are in London, in which case, you will probably be inundated with rumors and visions.
Now where the hell did I stick that damn Oyster card.
In the Extremely Cool department:
My work is part of the new Monsters of Webcomics exhibit at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco! I sent in a series of images that takes this page of Family Man from dissociated layout doodles all the way to the final version, including the original, hand-drawn inked page. This happened to be the page I was working on at submission time for the show, so it’s really representative of my typical work-through, rather than the extra measures I go through for a more glamorous page.
I’ve never displayed my “process” anywhere before, so it’s a reasonably neat glimpse into my diseased mind. The other artists in the show are all irredeemably fabulous: Jesse Reklaw, Kate Beaton, the Foglios, Dorothy Gambrell, Nick Gurewitch, my dear friend and housemate Jenn Manley Lee, Chris Onstad, and Spike are all in the lineup.
It opened this past week and will be up through December 6th – in conjunction with, oh my childhood heart, their major exhibit on the art of the Disney film Sleeping Beauty, a piece of magnificent artistry that’s always blown Tiny Dylan away. Having work displayed within a five mile radius of that work is exciting enough to forestall several of my major bodily functions, so being just a few walls over is kind of nuts.
My thanks to Andrew Farago and the good people at CAM for inviting me in on the show!
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Meanwhile I’m gearing up for a week’s visit to London, which means that in order to avoid thinking about how much I hate transatlantic flights, I’m mucking around in my brain over the difference between what I’m calling Mythology of Place versus Mythology of Character in modern narrative forms. To that end, riddle me this, dear readers:
What’s your favorite epic locale/setting/set piece from…
A movie? (example: Cloud City in Star Wars)
From a comic? (example: Atheia in Bone)
From a prose novel never adapted into film? (example: the attic room of carvings in the Gormenghast novels)
From a prose novel that has been adapted into film – but NOT the film’s take on that setting? (example: the Weasley residence in the Harry Potter books)
From the film version of a prose novel? (example: Rivendell in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings)
From a game? (example: the temple in Shadow of the Colossus)
And…why?
And we’re back to the boys.
This is one of those scenes that I really wish I could post all at once, because it’s a difficult one and it will probably make somebody mad if skimmed or decontextualized. Wait for the rest of the scene before you fire off an e-mail or get into a scrabble in the comments section, eh wot.
For those of you who’ve forgotten some of the context from the previous scene, here’s a quick link back.
I’m going to be in London from the 14th to the 22nd, and utterly incoherent with jetlag (I’m guessing) until the 24th. I’ll see if I can’t madwoman my way through an extra page this coming week so I don’t drop an update. Wish me luck!
And lo, another page to drive you crazy. Mysterious moonlit scenes with forlorn little girls: a Meconis specialty. You can infer from this that I spent a lot of time as a child imposing mystical experiences on myself after dark.
It’s been a frustrating run for me in terms of executing the art lately; probably because I am, in the words of E.K. Weaver, “about to level up.” Making comics becomes infinitely harder when you’re going through a growth spurt or learning a new technique, and this set of night scenes definitely represents some shiny new business.
Also it’s the deepest, hottest well of summer, and clutching a hot Cintiq in a darkened room is really the province of the mad.
That’s all for this update, my dears! We’ll be seeing Luther again soon, and shan’t that be fun. Poor bastard.