Giant XXL Special Edition MoCCA Fest Blogstravaganza!

I’ve actually been drawing quite a bit over the past few days, but I’ve been doing so in Maine, where I sadly don’t have access to my scanner. Luckily, I still haven’t blogged EVEN ONCE about the wonderfulness that was my experience at MoCCA Fest NYC last weekend. So this is the perfect opportunity to do that.

Last Saturday, I intended just to “stop by” MoCCA Fest, but I accidentally stayed for about four hours. I talked to a whole bunch of artists all of whom are doing really interesting things in the intersecting worlds of comics and illustration. I also bought a metric shitload of comics:

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Keep in mind, none of these cost more than $5, and most were $1 or $2, and some were free.

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And that’s not even everything…

I’ll probably end up doing more posts on some of the comics and, especially, ideas I acquired at MoCCA Fest, but for now I just want to do a round-up of some of the cooler stuff I ended up with. (Generally the reason I have dubbed these comics “cooler stuff” is because they are in richly-printed color, which tends to make my eyes pop out of my head, in a good way, and I do most of my comics in color, so I’m always looking for tips on how to successfully make the transition to print.)

Okay! Let’s go.

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Above is just ONE SPREAD from an issue of the Comix Reader, an ongoing series of anthologies, printed on newsprint, in which each of 20 participating artists gets one page to do with whatever he or she wants. It’s committed to being fun and iconoclastic and hilarious… and it is all of those things. Also, it’s sold for just $1/issue, which means I bought all four that have been published. Aaaand I will absolutely be doing a post dedicated just to these so I’ll move on to the next thing for now. Suffice it to say that the Comix Reader is fucking fantastic.

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This one, by Kaisa Leka, is kind of important to me because its form is so interesting. Little Fish Big Fish is printed on both sides of a long accordion-style book, which is something I’m considering exploring for print publications of my own. I found it at a table dedicated to Finnish comics, and it smells like an empty crayon box, which is a bit weird but not necessarily a bad thing.

I asked the woman who was tending the table how exactly Little Fish Big Fish was printed and she said it was done on a couple long pieces of card stock, then folded and glued together by hand. Very intriguing.

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This is a tiny bit of a BEAUTIFUL comic (drawn by Ellis Rosen and colored by Sam Marlow) called HomeQuest. It’s a satire of fantasy quest narratives, especially those found in kind of your run-of-the-mill RPGs, my personal favorite genre of videogame.

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Okay in service of not making this post entirely NSFW, I am only including a small piece of the cover of this anthology which is descriptively titled Pizza and Sex. Inside you can find short comics and visual narratives by a bunch of artists, all about, well… pizza and sex. Some stories have people having sex and eating pizza; some are having sex WITH pizza; there’s also some pizza having sex with other pizza. Basically it’s hilarious, and a well-orchestrated example of a ridiculous concept that ends up inspiring some pretty excellent art.

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On a um… completely different note, Here’s a part of one of the many gorgeous pages in Molly Ostertag‘s Khutulun, which is based on the true story of a Mongolian princess-slash-warrior. (This is the same artist who does the visuals for the ongoing webcomic Strong Female Protagonist.)

I talked to Ostertag about her process, because I fell in love with her art style—specifically the really delicate-yet-bold way that she colors her work. It turns out she colors in Photoshop! This blew my mind a bit, because I am such a proponent of doing things “the old-fashioned way” when it comes to painting (for my own work; I definitely don’t look down on other people’s methods, regardless of what they are!). Not that I’m going to stop using actual physical paint any time soon, but I am super impressed with how real-actual-paint-ish many artists can make their Photoshop-painting look.

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Above is a tiny, hysterical piece of Sylvan Migdal‘s Rho. Oh uh… that link is probably NSFW. Sorry bout that.

Anyway, I was already familiar with Migdal’s work on (definitely NSFW) Curvy, which is a lovely, smutty sci-fi/fantasy adventure story. Thing is, I actually was sure that Migdal, who sometimes goes by the pen-name M. Magdalene, was a woman! Maybe it’s just because there are so many different types of queer ladies in Curvy. But when I saw Migdal at his table at MoCCA Fest, I said “Oh, I like Curvy,” and he was like, “Thanks!” and of course I immediately said, “YOU did Curvy?? I thought you were a woman!”

Everyone at the table thought that was pretty funny. Comics: defying gender stereotypes!

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You’ll notice that this last thing isn’t in color. It also isn’t really a comic. But it IS a fortune-teller about global warming. So obviously I had to buy it.

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It came in a $2 “grab bag” of comics by Hazel Newlevant.

Whew. Okay, that’s enough for now. I’ll be sure to go into more detail about individual comics at some point, as well as talk about various things I learned from talking to all those artists, other than what I briefly mentioned above. More soon!

Manic Pixel Dream Girl 1 drawings: second draft

I’m currently in the later stages of completing Manic Pixel Dream Girl 3, so it’s a nice time to look back at MPDG 1 and see how much my process has (or hasn’t) changed since then.

In this post I’ll talk about the second draft of drawings I did for MPDG 1. In case you don’t remember or you didn’t read it, you can find my post on the first draft here. And now, onward!

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My “complete” second draft for MPDG 1 actually only goes as far as… ALMOST the end, but not quite what the end ended up being. So there are seven “frames,” the first of which is above. I’m really impressed with my own organization… Since this, I’ve gotten a lot LESS strict with myself about creating “official” drafts. There are good and bad things about that, and I actually want to write a post about that later this week, but for now I will stop being openly agog at my own former drafting abilities.

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The image above is pretty close to how that part was in the final version. Only I originally envisioned my reaction as progressing horizontally, like it is in this draft. That’s kind of a pattern you’ll notice. I’m so used to reading comics in print that it’s easy to forget, in the draft stage, that I’m not drawing for print; I’m drawing for the internet, which means the mechanic by which readers read is scrolling, not page-turning. And as I think I’ve mentioned before, I try to model myself after amazing especially-for-the-internet comics like this one by Hallie Bateman and this one by Emily Carroll. (You should read that second one aaall the way through to see what I’m talking about!)

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Again, the gallery of influential game ladies started out horizontal, and then I changed it to a staircase to fit the verticality of the medium. I do kind of wish that I could have allowed for the image of me looking at the gallery with my back to the reader, though. I like that (which I had in most early drafts) better than me walking down the stairs, but oh well.

To be fair, I probably would have liked the one of me walking down the stairs better if I had done a better job drawing myself walking down the stairs…

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I was originally going to include a much wider range of my own childhood, time-wise, than I did in the final version of MPDG 1. Above I highlighted things about me that were symbols of my “uncool” social status; from left to right, the picture of me is aging from about 8 to about 14. In the end, to keep things clearer and simpler, I made the series more or less chronological, with minimal (and pretty straightforward) flashbacks (flashforwards? I don’t know.). Anyway, the first installment only covered from the age of 8 or so to 11.

It works (I think) that the kinds of things that single you out as being “different” when you’re a child tend to change as you grow up. So what alienated me from my peers at 8 wasn’t necessarily what did it by the time I was 14. Ditto for 18, 22, etc. Categorizing things the way I did above would have smoothed over some of those changes, so I’m glad I didn’t end up doing it that way.

For the record, the final series is organized like this: Part 1 is 2012 then flashback to ~1997-1999 (elementary school); Part 2 is 1999-2002 (middle school); Part 3 is 2012 then flashback to 2002-2006 (high school); and Part 4 will be 2006-nowish (college & after). So structurally, 1/3 and 2/4 are similar, but visually 2/3 and 1/4 are more similar. (Or will be, in the latter’s case.)

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The “prim and perfect” other girls were always more or less how they are above. In the final comic, I added a contextual scene with a couple of them in a bedroom decorated how I imagined “normal” girls’ bedrooms were decorated back in the late nineties. I don’t think I actually ever went over to a “normal” girl’s house as a child (I had one or two close friends who were almost as weird as I was), so it’s all just conjecture, even now…

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I have no idea what the above clearly-not-finished frame was supposed to be!

Oh wait I think I do. When I started writing MPDG (as a whole, not in parts), one of the incidents that stood out in my memory was this: The other girls were always talking about the Spice Girls, and my only exposure to them was when I heard them playing in a mall or a restaurant or whatever. I’m still kind of bewildered as to how the other girls even found out about the Spice Girls, or that liking them was the “right” thing to do as girls.

Anyway, I pretended I liked the Spice Girls, or at the very least that I knew who they were and what their music was like. Once I sat on the end of my bed (I’m pretty sure that’s what’s in the frame above) and wrote in one of those journals that was more of an activity book that a secret of mine was that I was “the Spice Girls’ biggest fan.” I had maybe ever heard like one of their songs maybe twice. It was insane! Why would I lie TO MYSELF to make myself seem girlier or more normal or whatever? But I did.

I struggled for a long time with how I would incorporate that anecdote into MPDG because I felt (and still feel) like it was emblematic of so much of how strong and internalized those young feelings of alienation can be, and were. Finally, I found a way to imply the story without beating the reader over the head with it, or telling it in a blow-by-blow style like I just did in the last couple paragraphs. Here’s what I ended up doing, and I’m really proud of it. I think the particular experience of translating that memory from rambling to subtle has been one of the most important lessons for me in storytelling, and how different comics are as a medium from straight text.

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You’re probably tired of reading this by now, so it’s a good thing I’m at the last panel.

This is again mainly an example of something I ended up changing from primarily horizontal to primarily vertical. I also didn’t include the ending in this draft, which may be because I wasn’t sure what it was going to be yet? Or maybe I was SO sure I didn’t feel the need to storyboard it. I don’t remember.

Anyway, there it is! The second draft (and first FULL draft) of Manic Pixel Dream Girl, Part 1. Hope my lengthy explanations have been helpful rather than irritating and/or tl;dr. Till next time!