Rich and Strange Aeons

comic craft watchlist

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 02:31:33 GMT

I re-read Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics recently. Still good stuff on some elements of comics (mostly; one late chapter, with various hypothetical comic artists, doesn't do much for me.) Inspired by it, I thought I'd make a list of some things to look for when reading comics or manga with more attention.

Point of View: does the comic (and its "camera") closely follow one person, a few people or hop around a lot?
Thoughts: does the comic try to depict interior thoughts at all, and for whom? Girl Genius, as far as I can recall, almost never used thought bubbles, apart from one or two comedic moments; it's pretty much 3rd person objective. El Goonish Shive (EGS), uses thought bubbles frequently, for any character it feels like. The manga Blue Star On That Day shows Umi's thoughts pretty liberally, but only Umi's: 3rd person limited.
Transitions: out of McCloud's categories of X-to-X panel transitions (moment, action, subject, scene, aspect), which apply? Or is it hard to tell? (A lot of what I read has little action, in the superhero sense, and lots of talking, but I guess continuing a conversation without camera-shift is action-to-action.)
(edited to add) Words and Pictures: are images simply illustrating the words, are words simply providing sound effects for pictures, do they parallel each other? Or do they complement each other, providing more than either alone?
Panels: are panels just a bunch of rectangles, like this EGS page? Or rather funky, like this Dresden Codak page? Many manga use a lot of diagonal lines, and sometimes characters occluding multiple panels, like this sample. Note how the girl is standing in front of the 2nd and 3rd panels, and in the lower left a hand and cell phone are floating above the plane.
Words: are there different styles of word balloons and fonts? And do words stay in the balloons? They seem to mostly do so for Western comics and webcomics, but manga likes to add in free-floating words as asides or minor statements, like here
Thoughts: how are they shown? This page shows multiple styles all on one page: thought bubbles, free floating words, a different bubble ("Speak of the devil"). It also happens to show a couple examples of 'Expressionist' mood backgrounds, like the vertical lines in the top right, or the "fingerprints" of the middle panel. From Blue Star, there's also thought as banner, co-existing with a thought bubble.
Time: are there any tricks with time? McCloud shows how a stretched moment can be done with multiple panels, or one extra-wide panel. There's also having a 'beat' panel where a character just looks croggled, or says or thinks "....."

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more Sandman

Sun, 04 Jul 2021 06:25:24 GMT

I've re-read through the end of Brief Lives. Still good! Uh, spoilers.

( Read more... )

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an Endless question

Tue, 29 Jan 2019 03:10:37 GMT

There are only six shrouds in the chamber beneath Litharge. Why?

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Andy Weir webcomic surprise

Sat, 31 Mar 2018 23:27:47 GMT

Holy fuck! I just learned that the author of the Martian is *also* the author of the webcomics Casey and Andy and Cheshire Crossing", which I'd enjoyed years ago.

Edit: Cheshire is pretty solid, if abortive. I remember enjoying re-reading Casey, but I think it must pick up somewhere further down the line; the early strips are hit-or-miss gags.

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Is Marvel Comics killing itself?

Wed, 31 May 2017 03:32:53 GMT

https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/527127/ argues it is, with excess titles and crossovers, frequent relaunches (for the ephemeral junkie hit of boosted #1 sales), and rotating artists. I follow very little DC/Marvel, but I did get into Runaways... which exhibited the latter two phenomena: rebooted numbering, making it hard to tell what volumes to get, and changing artists.

I hadn't thought too much of the latter, though grumbled; Sandman got a different artist every volume. But that might have been deliberate choice on Gaiman's part; I'm sure some history of Sandman would tell us. I think other Vertigo comics like Books of Magic or Lucifer had much more stable art (though how Lucifer was drawn within his comic varied quite a lot. Blond? Redhead? Who can say. But then, he is a cosmic entity.)

I'm disappointed to learn that even Ms. Marvel (the Muslim heroine) got a reboot treatment.

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Butter, yogurt, Digger

Sun, 21 Aug 2016 15:38:36 GMT

I've been buying butter in small tubs, so I can leave it out to get soft, and not mess with sticks in a tray. I'd been buying Plugra. Last time I bought Kerrygold, and after leaving it out it was practically turning into butter soup, in temperatures not as hot as they had been. It claims to be naturally softer, because it's from grass fed cows. It doesn't say that grass means more Omega-3 fats, but that's usually the case, and O-3s have lower melting points than O-6 (maybe why deep sex fish use them.) So, that checks out. And O-3 would mean marginally healthier butter.

Question remains whether it's "naturally softer" enough to not be annoying to spread straight out of the fridge.

***

Yogurt making continues, and my latest batch is like the best-set I've ever made. I went for maximum laziness, simply filling the mason jar with milk and sticking that in the oven (heated by pilot light); no pre-heating of milk, no heating of the oven to get the temperature above 106 F. I did add a bit of yogurt from the Trader Joe's tub, in addition to the yogurt already in the jar. I left it incubating for a while, 13 or 15 hours, I think. Came out not very sour, and a mix of semi-solid and stretchy-goopy, vs. my more common "solid on top, fermented liquid beneath" or the "totally separated curds and sour whey" of previous late-generation attempts. I am pleased, if unsure about being able to replicate this.

***

I re-read the webcomic Digger for the first time, a couple days ago. It really is good! Serious story but also hilarious in many places. Pseudoniece G' seems to be liking it, too.

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I re-read the webcomic Treading Ground last night, for the second or third time. Much quicker, only 251 strips, vs like 750 pages. It's a lot cruder and I'm not mentioning it to 13 year old pseudonieces. But funny in its own way. It also had advice on cutting meat with dull knives (apply pressure and speed) which has served me well since first reading it.

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webcomic rec: El Goonish Shive, by Dan Shive

Thu, 21 Jul 2016 18:40:24 GMT

I got into this comic in late May, I don't remember exactly why. In short, I liked it a lot, and have re-read various stories out of it several times, and even sketched a bit of continuation fanfic. So, big hit here.

Why do I like it? I guess the usual for me: interesting and sympathetic characters, funny lines (and images) while having a somewhat serious tone (so, like Bujold and Cherryh at times, though much lighter than either), somewhat interesting stories and worldbuilding.

How to describe it in an interesting way? Eh... Like many other webcomics, it's modern day + weirdness, I guess you could put it under urban fantasy. High school students in this case, dealing with magic, alien tech (also magic) and their lives. The soap opera content is actually pretty low; the kids are pretty sensible, and Shive isn't big on darkness or angst.

Special theme: transformations, especially genderbending ones. This strip argues that if magic were real and general, transformation magic would be huge. I believe it.

Also, the government shown has generally been knowledgeable and helpful, along with having a good excuse for covering up magic.

The title doesn't mean anything really, it's just a title.

As with many webcomics, it starts off pretty rough, in both art and writing. Page #2: "There will be moments in this comic where it will be particularly obvious that I began writing it when I was a young man shortly out of high school. This is one of those comics." I would say the comic has found its voice, though not its art, by the end of "Sister". If you can take a lot of in media res, then you could start at the beginning of that. Further back, 'story' starts happening with 'Goo'.

Reasons not to read it: it's ongoing, and not super fast. I think the last year or two of our time covered a day or two of comic time (granted, very busy days.) There's a reason I got tempted to continuation fanfic, after catching up.

Comic has been going since 2002, but the archives don't feel *that* deep to me. Not like a daily regular such as Sluggy Freelance.

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Discoveries

Fri, 13 May 2016 00:53:14 GMT

Lightly microwaved cherry tomatoes explode in warm sweetness when you eat them with pasta.

El Goonish Shive is a good webcomic.

A Miracle of Science is still a good webcomic, and unlike EGS it's long over.

A Borrowed Voice is a surprisingly good crack-premise Tolkien fanfic.

A bunch of new Madoka AMVs, which I've added to my list. I'll link to just one. Warning: spoilers for series and Rebellion.

Years ago, I proved the sin(A+B) identity from first principles while lying in bed. I think it took 40 minutes. The impressive part is that I'm usually more of a symbolic/numerical thinker than a visual one, I still slide my fingers to manipulate supply and demand curves, so doing finicky geometry in my head, no paper, was pretty impressive. Last night I thought about it again (and again in bed), and solved it much faster; I think I found a simpler solution, though I can't be sure. Alas, the margins of this blog post... or rather, I've never invested effort in learning how to make pictures on line.

The Renaissance art hallway at the MFA was more interesting than I expected, especially in the half that's largely maiolica.

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Asterix and Donald Duck

Tue, 10 Sep 2013 04:40:44 GMT

Hub Comics in Union Square is like a Lost World of comics. Old EC comics collections, non-standard manga I've never heard of (largely Osamu Tezuka titles), Donald Duck collections, giant art books... it's also where I bought Aya, though I didn't see those this time around. What I did buy was the second Asterix collection (3 books for the price of 2) and Carl Barks' Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes, itself a collection of several stories.

Asterix... I catch lots of puns I missed as a child. OTOH, it wasn't all that funny. And there's some pickaninny/golliwog art, though not played for laughs, it's just how the occasional black side characteri s drawn. By a French artist in the 1960s. Considering American comics at the time, maybe it was a plus there were any blacks at all...

I've never read much Duck stories -- have a vague memory of some Scrooge tales -- but this one was pretty good, actually. More engaging than the Asterix puns and cliches. Had one black American, some Africans, and some South Sea islanders. The latter just looked human. The Africans looked cliched, but had been screwed over by Scrooge. There's commentary in the back by several artists, who note Barks's complexity and humanity in such matters. And he was drawing/writing for Disney in the 1940s. I suppose there's a matter of perspective: the natives in the titular story look goofy and have adopted the Southern mannerisms of a past visiting professor, but the commentary says they're neither savages nor noble savages. This may be rosy. OTOH, it's a story about a duck trying to chase down square eggs, so seriousness level meh.

One of the stories had the "sunken ship raised by ping pong balls" invention mentioned in this Cracked article.

At any rate, I feel more likely to buy more Duck stories than Asterix.

I do wonder about the translation effect. Asterix has (or had) *lots* of puns. Names, Gaul and galling, others... it's kind of like the Cyberiad: lacking knowledge of the source language, you can't help wondering how creative and liberty-taking the translator had to be.

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Sandman comic panels

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 21:57:41 GMT

I recently read The Sandman Papers, most of which were interesting though some were "oookay, academics can be weird." Then last night I re-read Preludes and Nocturnes... and then, inspired by one of the papers (on The Tempest) and Scott McCloud, I went back and looked at the paneling. What's square, what's not, what's borderless? First I was looking at "The Sound of Her Wings", where we meet Death, and... well, I noticed a lot of variation, but not a lot of pattern. Tended to the rectangular, but borders were often simply missing, or present only as part of the park bench. One page the background color was pink, except for one panel where it was blue.

I also found myself wondering if the final page, where Dream scatters his bread and joyfully hears the sound of (pigeon) wings, is actually a hint of his decision to commit suicide. Most of the comic is about what Death does, after all, and there's that poem about welcoming death. Then "She has responsibilities. I have responsibilities", which sounds like he's finding comfort in getting back to work again, but then... the wings, as if the pigeons are a foretaste of the sound of *her* wings at the end of it all.

Anyway. After that I went looking at the chapters in general, and I think I saw more of a pattern. The first issue is pretty whacked out, panel-wise, including lots of circular panels, usually as facial closeups, especially if seen through an eyepiece, the glass cage, or a scrying ball. There's lots of "panels on top of backgrounds", and curvy panels, and diagonal borders. Of course, the whole issue is largely "magical".

Then the next issue, Dream in the Dreaming with Cain and Abel, hardly has a rectangle anywhere, it's all curvy borders. Most of Constantine's issue is standard rectangular panels, diagonalizing or warping a bit when the dreams get heavy. That seems to be the basic pattern: everyday stuff uses traditional panels, dreaming stuff uses curves, some stuff in the middle uses diagonals.

I also saw one part where a unified scene was nonetheless broken up by diagonal gutters, for not obvious reason. (Unlike Spike: Shadow Puppets, where an otherwise unified 'picture' of a diner is broken by a gutter in the middle, and on the left Spike is coming out of the doorway of the diner and in the right he's moved across the street, so there's a temporal function.)

Sidenote: I was long impressed by how long and dense the first issue feels, and wondered if it was from the sheer fast pace of changes, like the ending of the third arc in Twelve Kingdoms, which feels (pleasantly) like it's a lot longer than 22 minutes or whatever. At some point I discovered it actually has more pages than a standard issue.

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Cracked, crime, comic books

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 00:45:22 GMT

I did a bunch of reading on Cracked. I thought it was neat.

comic book inventions
Donald Duck Minecraft
Spider-Man inspired ankle-tracking
Captain Marvel Jr., Elvis
http://www.cracked.com/article_20379_5-important-things-you-wont-believe-comic-books-invented.html

Donald Duck inventions
Inception, Raiders of the Lost Ark, ship raising with ping pong balls
(noted by Dutch Patent Office)
methylene (CH2)
Scrooge -> Tezuka -> manga
http://www.cracked.com/article_19021_5-amazing-things-invented-by-donald-duck-seriously.html

infrasound behind ghosts, dread and sightings (I knew of infrasound causing dread, but not that it was implicated in causing visual effects.)
http://www.cracked.com/article_18828_the-creepy-scientific-explanation-behind-ghost-sightings.html

http://www.cracked.com/article_19455_5-common-crime-fighting-tactics-statistics-say-dont-work.html?wa_user1=4&wa_user2=Weird+World&wa_user3=article&wa_user4=recommended
fake confessions; composite sketches suck; lineups suck (pressure to
pick the best match even if wrong, or the one the cops think did it)
"The U.S. is the only modernized country to throw people in jail for
writing bad checks. In no other civilized (or even pretend civilized)
country will someone go to jail because he couldn't pay a $215 fishing
license fine. And then we have the perpetual drug war, which has added
around 200,000 people who wouldn't see jail time in Europe"
crack/cocaine difference is based on fraud and perjury

drug dogs have lots of false positives and pick up handler racism
car chases kill
"In fact, at least a third of all fatalities in high speed chases tend
to be innocent bystanders, just going about their day. We're talking
over 360 people per year, just flat out run over by cops and robbers who
watch way too many movies."
drug free zones are so extensive dealers stay near schools
red light cameras reduce side collisions, increase rear-ending by more
dry counties have more drunk driving fatalities and more teen drug use
http://www.cracked.com/article_19937_the-6-most-popular-crime-fighting-tactics-that-dont-work.html?wa_user1=5&wa_user2=Science&wa_user3=article&wa_user4=recommended

celebrity conspiracy theories
Michael Jackson chemically castrated -- voice never changed
Jefferson Asperger's
Elvis constipated, Hitler poop fetish
http://www.cracked.com/article_19552_5-insane-celebrity-conspiracy-theories-that-make-sense.html

http://www.cracked.com/article_18666_5-ridiculous-attempts-at-crime-fighting-that-worked.html

And unrelatedly, Fox hates Bill of Rights
http://imgur.com/a/WbQjn/noscript

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Tapas Candi Mouser trains anarchists really random

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 03:59:35 GMT

Got a new friend to accompany me to a tapas bar on Beacon. I'd felt intimidated about going to a dark bar on my own, probably for no good reason. Well, if it's dark it's hard to read on your own... Decor was interestingly overdone, food was decent but expensive, conversation was great.

I've belatedly realized that for all the chairs I've accumulated, none of them have arms. The recliner did, but I abandoned it in Bloomington as half-broken and thick with internal dust. It would probably be good if I could rest my elbows on arms rather than the computer table. It would probably be good if I had a lower table. Sign, spending money on furniture, I don't wanna...

I read a new webcomic: http://candicomics.com Clicked on an ad, got caught up in the archives. I don't know why, it's basically collegiate soap opera, albeit with superpowered animals on the side.

I read my third Vampire Hunter D novel, and my first Lankhmar book (the second one, Swords Against Death). Fun.

US formally accused of torturing Bradley Manning
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/12/bradley-manning-cruel-inhuman-treatment-un

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/03/spock-must-die-the-first-novel "so bad it's good!"

I read http://www.aspousa.org/index.php/2010/10/electrification-and-expansion-of-railroads-as-a-response-to-peak-oil-by-alan-s-drake/ and the longer http://www.aspousa.org/index.php/2010/10/a-citizens-guide-to-an-oil-free-economy-chapt-1/ on how we could cut out a lot of oil by upgrading our rail system. Electrification for $1 million/mile, double tracking and different-grade crossings. Not High Speed, but faster and more reliable and blending semi-high speed passengers with higher speed freight. Electric rail would use 1/20th the power of trucks, a heavy truck does the road damage of 5000 cars, authors estimate $700 billion high end for the project.

Also of interest to me:
World Trade Organization (WTO) rules allow a nation with a long term
structural trade deficit (and the USA certainly qualifies !) to place a
unilateral tariff on all “non-essential” imports so long as the proceeds
from the tariff are used exclusively to reduce the structural trade
deficit and there is no preferential treatment in the application of the
tariff.

I've thought of a tariff to enforce trace balance, but had assume it would require flouting the WTO.

I've always had trouble getting left-anarchists to describe their ideal vision of the world, and when they do I've had trouble telling it from democracy + looser property rights. Today a couple of leftists on RPG.net, one of them quasi-anarchist, agreed with me.

You should listen to an Anarchist and a Trotskyist debate the need for
a revolutionary state sometime. It's hilarious.

Both will solemnly outline their vision of the ordering of society
immediately after a revolution. Both will tell you all about how
decision making will take place through a structure of workers councils
and neighbourhood councils, sending delegates up to broader regional
bodies, and so on. In fact, you will have some significant difficulty in
finding actual points of disagreement. But in the end the Trotskyist
will tell you that this is a state and the Anarchist will tell you that
this is not a state.

One of them joked that came down to whether you preferred red or black flags.

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Webcomics: Skin Horse and Narbonic

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 04:26:08 GMT

A couple nights ago I started in on the Skin Horse archives, and finished yesterday and added it to my comic list.

After that, I figured I should give Narbonic another shot... like the third shot. Should see where Artie came from, right? I got past the really early art, but, I dunno, still don't care much. Partly not caring about the characters, partly all the interruptions of fan art or haiku or now, fan fiction. And I'm getting it easy, 5-6 strips a page normally... except when the funky stuff starts, then there's a splash/title page, and another page per part, and I just want to get back to the story, such as it is.

Oh right, a comic jumping menu bar. I should use that.

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Media news: Avatar comic

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 00:38:20 GMT

http://www.darkhorse.com/Books/18-604/Avatar-The-Last-Airbender-Volume-1-The-Promise-Part-1-TPB

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?602154-Avatar-The-Last-Airbender-The-Promise-Some-spoilers

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links: superheroes, Harry Potter, and the GOP

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 01:09:59 GMT

FUN

US only so far, and seemed like you'd have to go find the ticket yourself to buy it, but nice and fast: http://www.google.com/flights/

CEOs in comics, inheritance vs. 'earning'. http://www.juliansanchez.com/2011/09/21/ceos-in-comics-villains-earn-heroes-inherit/

Problems with so-called sexually empowered superheroines: http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?594227-The-problem-with-sexually-empowered-superheroines
Also http://www.harkavagrant.com/nonsense/strongfemalessmall.gif
200 questions chemistry e-book: http://questions.sci-toys.com/

Love as anti-Horcrux in Harry Potter: http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?594106-Harry-Potter-Magical-Theory-Horcruxes-and-Anti-Horcruxes

NOT FUN

Zeno's Paradox of US politics http://seawasp.livejournal.com/284468.html

Jewish professor accused of anti-Semitism for use-mention failure http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3431

GOP makes huge gains among young and poor white voters http://pewresearch.org/pubs/2067/2012-electorate-partisan-affiliations-gop-gains-white-voters

Bachmann may be anti-vaccination in general? Haven't checked. http://www.filibustercartoons.com/index.php/2011/09/15/upcoming-republican-slogans/

Make your own "Death Eater for President" jokes.

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