As Captain Gould stepped onto the planet’s surface, he felt a bit lost and, perhaps, afraid.
I posted this sketchbook drawing to Instagram a while back (in the mean time one of the folks who liked it passed away, RIP NB), but since social media is definitely an ephemeral instant in life online, I decided to publish here. I’ve always wanted to do a children’s science fiction book. Something whimsical, yet with an edge of menace to it. I really liked those sorts of books as a kid. Wonder with a dash of apprehension.
A space explorer discovers video. And it’s quite excellent.
I once was a video artist and a teacher of video and even a scholar of video. I’ll post some selections from my writings on video and film in a short while, but here I want to comment on the relationship between comics and time-based media. Obviously, both video and comics have a spatial and a temporal component to them. The frame for video is the spatial part – what happens within the frame moves across the space of the frame – and the duration of the video is itself time captured in a medium. But, comics have a special relationship with space as the page can be designed to use the space in ways similar to graphic design and web layout. And time, while seemingly artificial in comics and graphic novels (the gaps between panels for instance and the page turns), is actually psychological and perceptual (and real) in that time passes for the reader in real time outside the constraints of the page and the story.
I say this not to over complicate things, but rather to refute the notion that I’ve encountered often that comics are sort of a storyboard version of movies and that movies are more sophisticated in some way. Movies are of course simply comics with a bigger team of creators and a larger budget for props and sets.
And when I was a kid there was a book called All in Color for a Dime and movies cost a buck or two. So, there’s that. And video art? I loved the plastic tape in cartridges that I had to fiddle with endlessly so that it could roll back and then sync up the machines and make a cut. If it was a mistake, so much the better.
There was a frustration and yet a pleasure in the physical nature of video prior to the digital era. I get that physical aspect from drawing with pen and ink and even from drawing with a stylus on the iPad. While digital video is much easier to work with and much more flexible, I find the intangible virtuality of it off-putting. But others seem to excel at that form of video. Good for them.
At 7 PM, the alarm goes off and he gets up and wanders outside. It’s just now getting dark and there seems to be a foul stench in the air. What is that? But that’s just another thing that makes the city so memorable. The stench. Of urine. And of lying, and deceit, and the forfeiture of the lives of others, for our own gain. It’s too late already. He decides to walk over to Harv’s place and see if there’s still a game on. Games are fun. If not deadly.
An exercise from Ivan Brunetti’s Cartooning book. I used it last semester in my Visual Communication course. It’s a way to loosen up with your tools. I highly recommend his book. It worked well with students of all levels.
I drew this with my finger as the Apple Pencil replacement. I like the intuitive feel that you get from the app. Not a lot of control, but quite a bit of expressive potential.