Webcomic Review: Johnny Wander

Yuko's webcomic is fun. It's clean, simple, well drawn, funny, and pretty random with a mix of autobiographical slice-o-life anecdotes and a string of recurring characters. She describes it as:

Johnny Wander might be about life after college, being a kid, growing up and all the people you meet and all the things that happen in that brave new world.

Or it might be about something else entirely.

Webcomic Review: 69 Love Songs

69 Love Songs Illustrated is not necessarily a webcomic, but it caught my interest. It's the product of a group of about 30 or so London illustrators who, over Twitter, decided to bond together in mutual admiration of the Magnetic Fields and attempt to illustrate all 69 of the band's love songs. Each submission is different, ranging from short comics to collages.

Kickstarter.com

Alice at VINI turned me on to Kickstarter.com today. It's a funding platform for independent creative projects. Basically, you submit a proposal for a project you need money for, set a funding goal, and site visitors can become "backers" and pledge donations to your project via Amazon. If you reach your funding goal within the time limit (between 1 and 90 days), you get 95% of the money pledged; if you don't, you get nothing and none of your backers are charged. It's still in beta, but I they're accepting proposals. I think I'll be putting something together soon.

CHECK OUT THESE PROJECTS:
Reading With Pictures is a project looking to get comics into schools via one big compiled textbook. They made over $4,000 over their $10,000 funding goal.








Fresher than Fresh is Kansas' first all natural snowcone stand. They're raising funds to renovate their snow cone trailer.







Almost Super is the third book by Matthew Buckley. He's more than halfway to his $5,500 goal to pay for self-publishing. He's giving away first edition prints at the ridiculously cheap price of one per $10 pledge. His first chapter is available for download as a PDF. I'm in the process of reading it now: it's smart and quirky.

Serpent Feathers: Chapters 1&2 on sale!

Chapter 1 & Chapter 2 are now available for purchase! They are 6x9in, softcover books printed through Lulu.com, so they're high quality. I'm giving them away at $9.99 each + shipping.

Visit my Etsy Shop to buy!

FIVE CHARACTERS!

So, since I missed nearly a month of class for surgery, I feel like I have been working non-stop to catch up and keep up simultaneously. I am still so utterly behind it's disheartening, the most in Illustrated Story II. I feel as though I am finally making headway though, as I've at last finalized and fully developed my five characters, so I can begin actually writing comics about them!

Here they are (click to embiggen):

History of Type

This is an assignment on a reading about the history of type. We had to condense around 5000 years of typography and written communication into 15 steps, so I chose to do a comic instead of the standard bulleted list, albeit that would have been far easier and I may have slept more last night if I had.

New Character

I really didn't like Benny, so I made up some new characters. This is the first of many. He's a little Chinese war vet. I'm still developing him.

Illustrated Story: Comic 01

This is my first character of the semester, Benny. She's a morbidly obese waitress in a truckstop diner off Exit 42 in Arkansas. All of her thinner (yet uglier) sisters got married off and never finished high school, but she never found a mate, so she graduated and now works at the Eat-N-Go and reads books at home. She's secretly very intelligent but ashamed of it because she doesn't think men like that. She wears sweet ass cateye glasses she stole from her grandmother's house when she died but has never worn them in front of anyone. She was raised traditional Southern Baptist but is beginning to question the role and validity of religion through her evening reading. She's like a dainty, thin woman trapped in a huge bulging body--small hands and feet, delicate features, very pretty in the face, very graceful, eats like a bird, it's almost as if she's accidentally fat.


[ click to embiggen ]


& here's the first comic of the semester. I'm not sure how clear it is, but not bad for a few hours of work, methinks.


[ click to embiggen ]

Kate Beaton

Kate Beaton is an illustrator / comics artist whose blog I've been following for close to a year now. She's got a real clean, whimsical style and a work ethic that I'm damn envious of. Like most comics artists, she writes autobiographical strips from time to time with anecdotes from her life, like owning a finicky cat, working an office job, and dealing with a family who doesn't always understand her. The real unique thing is that she's got a degree in history, and writes mostly about historical figures and the real stories behind the misconceptions, but with contemporary slang and good comedic timing. She posts pretty frequently, so bookmark her livejournal and check back every few days; you can find it here: Hark, A Vagrant!. She's also just published a book of her favorite historical cartoons that you can buy here: Never Learn Anything From History.

About Me

So I bought a pack of moleskins the other day firstly because it was the first day my debit card has been reactivated with real monies on it and I was standing in Art Center giddy to spend some of it, but specifically to draw daily comics in. Here's one:



[CLICK TO EMBIGGEN]

I've done a couple others but I hate them so I'm not showing you. :P

I fucking hate doctors office waiting rooms.

Last time I went to the doctor:



Today's visit:



[CLICK TO EMBIGGEN]

I was exponentially more sick today. I can't even remember the last time I felt that shitty. I had to drive all the way to Germantown, was thirty minutes early for my appointment, waited an hour, finally asked the nurse when I was going to see a doctor (via pen & paper, my voice was totally gone), waited another thirty minutes, got my temperature and weight taken, sent back to the waiting room, waited another twenty minutes, finally saw the doctor where I ended up crying because it had been 36 hours since I had eaten, slept, or had a smoke, then got two shots in my ass, & drove promptly to Sonic.

Eclipsed

So, for Illustrated Story last week, we had to read a short story and adapt into comic form, rather, sequential narrative.. since it's not very lighthearted subject matter. I've been scouring the internet for a copy of the story, but to no avail, so until I get around to scanning it, here's the comic:



14x17" Bristol board, ink & ink wash.

Octopus Ink or IBS?

4 panel Comic due today in class, far from completion:



I feel like this has become some odd parallel between octopi and people with Irritable Bowel Syndrome, or intense gastrointestinal problems. Poor lil' inker. I'll be posting the completed version sometime between now and Tuesday.

Seven Deadly Sins

Assignment 2 for Illustrated Story was to create a narrative, again with no words, that alluded in some way to each of the seven deadly sins: sloth, lust, avarice, envy, gluttony, wrath, and vanity. While brainstorming, I dilluted the sins down to basic selfishness, neglect, and self-absorption. I figured if I had one person to embody each of the sins, they'd have a lot in common as far as guilt goes, and if they were for some reason all together in one room, it might be them dealing with it individually. From there, the dots connected, and I've sat in on enough NA meetings to accurately portray the scene. Here's the revised version, post-critique.

So tomorrow I turn in my first assignment for Illustrated Story. It was to teach the viewer how to do something visually, without text whatsoever. I decided to waking up in the morning, with a bit of a twist. It ended up being more of a narrative rather than an instructional how-to. I like it anyhow.