A Story of Coincidence and Chance

Thought for the Day

Fri, 17 May 2013 21:06:37 GMT

Here’s the thing: People fucking despise trans women. Often the nicest thing they can thing of to say to trans woman is “gosh, you are so little like a trans woman!” Being trans is something to avoid, to exclude, to escape, at worst to nobly bare up under.

But I’m done with it. You can be trans or cis. You can be super femme, you can be ultra butch. You can be straight or queer. You can have people saying you’re a transcendent beauty who just stepped off a Renaissance canvas, you can have people saying you’re a stomach turning monster. You can be a light in the world who every person you meet loves and devotes themselves to, you can be an awkward storm cloud who drives everyone away.

– Vivian Taylor, I’m A Trans Woman And I’m Not Interested In Being One of the “Good Ones”

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Pitch Night, Holmes Inc. #4

Thu, 09 May 2013 16:15:52 GMT

Last night, was another Pitch Night. Each of the writers for the Holmes, Inc. class had to come with three pitches for a story. After we presented the three ideas, Ty would typically eliminate one of the three (but not in all cases) and then the class would vote on which of the remaining two pitches they liked better. As the night progressed, Keiren was also keeping a running tally of which characters were being represented to ensure the book had sufficient balance and coverage of the principal cast.

It was interesting to see the different styles that the creators brought to the table. Some people wanted big, bold stories with giant monsters and/or larger-than-life villains. Others wanted time travel, or alternate dimensions. Some stories were leaping off from stuff in a previous book (Book 3, in particular, ended with a cliff hanger). I can’t think of a single story that was pitched solely as a mystery. Partially, I think, the story-pitching session brought out people’s love of playing with comic book tropes.

Another thing that interested me was the way past classes had such a presence in the room. People in the room were fluent with a rich backstory of the universe that had come out through past iterations of this course: the history of the evil Chaos family, and the significance of the ARTI suits and so forth. I think I’m one of only a couple of people for whom this is the first time taking this class, so I was coming at this a bit new.

I was also the last one to pitch, so by the time I was pitching my stories, we’d already run the gamut of monsters and time travel. I’m sure that my ideas seemed banal in comparison.

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Inking experiment 1

Sun, 05 May 2013 01:21:49 GMT

I tried my hand, this weekend, on a particular technique for digital inking using Illustrator. I started with a pencil sketch by Jack Kirby (published in one of the Jack Kirby reader books).

I scanned the image and popped it into Illustrator, then saturated it with blue, to make it easier to differentiate the pencils from the inks. I downloaded a specific Illustrator template from Cartoon SNAP, and tried out their inking brushes. Here’s an image in progress:

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Holmes on Holmes, Inc.

Thu, 02 May 2013 15:57:33 GMT

Comics classes are keeping me on my toes, these days. I finished up my “Drawing the Human Figure From Your Head” class on Monday (excellent, excellent class, by the way… I’ve taken both life drawing and constructive drawing during my cartooning program, and this class really clicked in a way that the other classes did not). Both this class, and the one before it (“Heads, Hands and Faces”) went at a bit of a breakneck pace — my head was full by the end of each night.

Last night, I started the intense workshop class, “Holmes, Inc.” There are something like 15 of us, and the end result of the class is gonna be an anthology of stories involving the “Holmes, Inc.” agency — the descendants of Sherlock, Mycroft and Dr. Watson. Last night, Ty also suggested that they’re a bit like the S.H.I.E.L.D. of their universe, too, which made me go, ah, yes, of course! This will be the fourth issue of Holmes, Inc. — each of the other three is available for free (as in beer, not speech on Drive Through Comics. There is a lot of variation in style and experience in the various stories, but they’re fun to read, running the gamut from egotistical displays of deduction to monster-fighting to moral quandaries.

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You always take the weather with you…

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 13:02:47 GMT

CBC Weather has a different definition of “high” than I do.

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Cho draws Le Guin

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 12:51:55 GMT

I’ve mentioned that I’m a fan of Michael Cho’s work — I like the simple, retro-comic-y style he uses. He recently took a stab at drawing Ursula K. Le Guin, which was interesting to see. I’m not sure that it’s the best likeness that I’ve seen him do, but I do like how he shows off his process.

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Uniform lines

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 17:02:23 GMT

I’m playing with my Red Exodus cover today — I’d like to finish a good first version of it. Two things are tricksy. First, getting a certain amount of smoothness of line has taken practice. Oh well; we learn by doing.

The second thing is that I needed to do a bit of research about Soviet military uniforms, which has been harder than I wanted. Even though my story takes place in an alternate-history in which the Soviet Union is still around in 2013, I wanted some amount of accuracy about Anatoly’s uniform. What does an Army captain’s uniform look like, precisely? What insignia indicates “officer” and “captain”? I’m not one of those people who normally pays attention to military uniforms (unless we’re talking about the gold braids on the Star Trek uniforms!) and I’m sure that there’s lingo that would make this search easier; I just don’t know any of that lingo.

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Digital Painting Class

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 22:36:36 GMT

At the beginning of the year, I signed up for a Digital Painting class. As I mentioned, I picked up a Wacom tablet over the holidays and wanted to learn how to use it. The class itself is fairly short — a mere 7 weeks — and the focus has been pretty narrow. Our primary exercise in class has been to create a portrait from photo reference. For my part, there’s been a bunch of stuff that’s new to me. I mean, heck, I’ve never really used Photoshop before January, although I’ve done very basic image manipulation with Gimp.

So. New tablet. New Photoshop. Recall that the very first thing I drew with my tablet looked like this:

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Oh Ty…

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 14:24:17 GMT

Your naiveté is so quaint.

Do you remember that part in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” where Dr. King talks about the difference between “negative peace” (the absence of tension) and “positive peace” (the presence of justice)?

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That Wednesday Thing

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 14:33:14 GMT

What am I reading now?

I’m currently reading a book about the CIA called The Master of Disguise by Antonio J. Mendez. It’s a non-fiction biography. It’s okay, but not riveting.

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No News is Good News

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 03:26:26 GMT

I’m loving my current class — a drawing course on heads, hands and faces. Over the last four weeks, we’ve been slowly but surely improving our understanding of these body parts.

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Thought for the Day

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 19:39:38 GMT

Here’s Scrabble’s dirty little secret: the game is really about maximizing points and space to yield the highest return. Someone who has memorized all the acceptable two-letter words in the formalized dictionary will do much better than someone who knows how to use ‘paletot’ in a sentence. You can forget about neologisms like “eponysterical” or archaic remnants found only in the OED. Scrabble rewards efficiency, memorization and fortune, while remaining ambivalent to creativity, imagination and verve. Maximize property value, minimize artistic expression.

It’s about capitalism, basically.

– Michael Stewart, “Scrabble’s dirty secret”, rabble.ca

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“all those letters that you wrote to yourself but could not address”

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 05:43:37 GMT

Over the last few days, I’ve been trying to get my head around digital lettering. At one level, this doesn’t seem like a hard topic. I mean, I’ve been dropping words on computer screens for a long, long time. But I’m really interested in figuring out what people in the comics industry are doing: what are typical workflows? Best font sizes?

To get some insights into the topic, I picked up a copy of The DC Comics Guide to Coloring and Lettering by Mike Chiarello and Todd Klein. I must confess that I was pretty disappointed. A big part of what the book has to say about lettering is about the debate between hand-lettering versus digital lettering. And I suspect that that conversation is kinda dead. Ah, well. The book is from mid-2004: it’s interesting how quickly dated it’s become.

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Thought for the Day

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 13:22:16 GMT

An Ontario Superior Court judge has taken the novel step of granting a divorce to a same-sex couple over legal objections from the federal Crown.

Madam Justice Ruth Mesbur ruled that same-sex civil partnerships from foreign countries that don’t permit same-sex marriages can nonetheless qualify as marriages under Canadian law.

It was the second time in the past year that the federal government has adopted a restrictive position on same-sex marriages.

In an interview Friday, one of the ex-spouses, Wayne Hincks, expressed anger that the federal Crown strung out a costly, emotional process by injecting itself into the case.

“The Attorney-General of Canada intervened in my very private matter and caused it to be stretched out, almost bankrupting me in the process,” Mr. Hincks said. “I eventually had to leave Toronto with no protections, no financial support to acquire my rights and no social network to rely on for personal support.”

The divorcing couple both have Canadian citizenship. They moved to Toronto in 2010, a year after their civil ceremony took place in London, England.

Britain does not permit same-sex couples to marry. Instead, it has a separate legal regime for same-sex couples that involves a civil partnership ceremony.

– “Ontario court grants same-sex divorce”, The Globe and Mail

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Most weekends

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 03:16:52 GMT

I feel like this is me, most weekends:

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Thought for the Day

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 14:37:34 GMT

Never having passed as female as I’d grown older I’d finally given up trying. Besides, it seemed somehow counter-revolutionary, as the new transgender politics is increasingly built around exactly the kind prominent social visibility and defiant non-passing that my doctors at the Cleveland Clinic assured me would signal the failure of my gender transition surgery.

In fact, my political identity for 30 years has been built on the foundation of my being visibly transgender, from the day I donned a Transsexual Menace NYC t-shirt and flew to the Brandon Teena murder trial in Falls City, Nebraska.

[...]

With adolescents increasingly taking androgen blockers with the support of a generation of more protective, nurturing parents, public transsexuality is fading out. And I don’t mean only that in a generation or two we may become invisible in the public space. I mean rather that in 10 years, the entire experience we understand today as constituting transgender—along with the political advocacy, support groups, literature, theory and books that have come to define it since transgender burst from its closet in the early 1990s to become part of the LGB-and-now-T movement — all that may be vanishing right in front of us. In 50 years it might be as if we never existed. Our memories, our accomplishments, our political movement, will all seem to only be historic. Feeling transgender will not so much become more acceptable, as gayness is now doing, but logically impossible.

In other words, I may be a gender dinosaur.

– Riki Wilchins, “Transgender Dinosaurs and the Rise of the Genderqueers” The Advocate

I think Wilchins is raising some interesting points, but I think that her conception of ‘we’ is a bit narrow: she’s talking about an American (and perhaps as broad as North American and European) middle- and upper-class.

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Going digital

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 19:19:59 GMT

I’m currently on vacation. Which, y’know, is pretty awesome. I spent a coupl’a days in do-nothing mode, sitting on my couch and watching movies. Which is about all that I’m capable of when work has drained me somewhat.

But now I’m in pet-project mode: I want to focus on something interesting. My pet project has been about going digital on the cartooning stuff. None of the instructors I’ve had have been terribly positive about computer-based art. Anthony (my primary instructor during my cartooning programme at George Brown) didn’t quite poo-poo digital art, but fundamentally believed that one had to learn how to draw using traditional tools before learning digital art. He also felt that most of the computer-produced art that he’d seen was very flat and lacked expressiveness.

Ty hasn’t taught us anything related to computers — he seems to draw and ink using traditional media, but he uses tools that Anthony would have turned his nose up at (markers! Pen brushes! Oh noes!) Ty also seemed to think that it was pointless to learn hand-lettering because nobody hand-letters these days. (I notice that Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? seems computer-lettered, whereas Fun Home looked hand-lettered). And Ty’s Bun Toons often include digital colouring and probably a bunch of other computer tweaks. So he seems more pragmatic about the use of computers than Anthony ever did.

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Final Thoughts on Writing for Comics, Part 2

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 23:04:37 GMT

I meant to make a post about how my final class for “Writing for Comics, Part 2″ went — I was pretty pleased with the final class, and I can’t help but wonder if my complaints about class number 6 had more to do with me and my state of mind than it had to do with the contents of the class.

I think that one way to evaluate the overall course is to look at what I got out of it. And there, I think, I hafta confess that I got some pretty good tools for putting together a whole comic script. Here’s what I have today:

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Reading Meme

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 20:31:22 GMT

I’m totally stealing this idea from wild_irises and redbird.

The meme asks: What are you reading now? What did you just finish reading? What do you expect to read next?

What am I reading now?

I’m reading Redwood and Wildfire by Andrea Hairston. I bought a paper version of this book at Wiscon which I haven’t actually opened, but I’ve been liking reading books on my iPad Mini (which I love — have I mentioned that?) so I bought an ePub version from the Aqueduct web site. I love Aqueduct’s no-nonsense way of selling epubs and wish I could see more of that. I’m not very far into the book, and don’t have any opinions about it.

What did I just finish reading?

Well, on Monday I bought a handful of graphic novels — the first two collections of Rachel Rising by Terry Moore, the hardcover collection of Greg Rucka’s and Matthew Southworth’s Stumptown and Warren Ellis’ newuniversal. Strictly speaking, I finished Rachel Rising last, and enjoyed it, although it feels a touch busy. My big frustration with his Strangers in Paradise series was that nothing ever got resolved — I have that fear about Rachel Rising as well. But his beautiful black and white artwork certainly encourages me to keep going. I just wish that the main character, Rachel, was more visually distinct from Katchoo.

Just before those graphic novels, I finished Among Others, which I’d started in the early part of the year, and then put down for a surprisingly long time. So that’s the last non-graphic-novel book I read.

What do you expect to read next?

Boss 1 loaned me a copy of Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant which is non-fiction. The conversation that we had that lead up to the loaning interests me, so I’m looking forward to checking it out. But the title makes it sound like something I’m gonna hate. We’ll see. I also just grabbed Anna Karenina off of Wikisource, because I’m all obsessive like that. And I have a dead tree version of Liar that I haven’t touched yet.

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I am in love, and you can’t ask why about love

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 02:28:26 GMT

Omigod. Hours ago, I watched Anna Karenina, and I’m completely in love with this movie.

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Holidays

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 04:46:43 GMT

I like this card, created by Michael Cho in 2009:

Happy Anti-Life everyone.

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2012 Films

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 02:07:56 GMT

Films that I saw in 2012 that I really loved:

Pariah is, I think, the best film that I saw in the year. The line Alike says, toward the end of the film — “I’m not running; I’m choosing.” — still stands out to me as one of the most simple, and yet powerful, lines I’ve seen delivered in a film the last number of years. In many ways, the film caught me off guard. I knew that it was going to be a queer coming of age story, and it touched on most of the standard tropes of that kind of story. But it was so slice-of-life-y that when the trope-y moments arrive, they just cut to the bone.

The Gatekeepers — which I saw at the festival — was an amazingly good documentary that interviews the 6 most recent still-living heads of the Israeli Shin Bet agency. The director gets them all to talk about their views of the Israeli-Palestine conflict and, given their jobs, what they have to say is really quite eye opening.

I also really enjoyed Take Shelter. In many ways, it follows a well-tread formula: man is having dreams of the end of the world. Are they real, or is he having a breakdown? I thought that this film did an interesting job keeping you guessing about which of those outcomes was going to be shown as “real.” (I haven’t really gone to look for it, but I’d be interested in any critique of how the film treats mental illness) A big part of what worked for me in the film was the dialog. There was something very real-seeming and fresh about the dialog and the delivery of that dialog.

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Untalented

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 04:09:20 GMT

So there I am at the sports bar, surrounded by televisions. I sooo love being surrounded by televisions. Televisions barfing out sports.

But one of my colleagues recently resigned — he’s one of the long-time folks, so there’s a do. At a sports bar. I show up because it’d be crass not to, but it’s basically a social event, and I kinda suck at those. I figure I’ll show up, put in twenty minutes of face time and then sneak away.

“You know that there’s no hockey on, right?” one of my colleagues says to me, to make conversation. I figure the sports-themed surroundings have infected him.

“Hockey. That’s the one with the sticks, right?” I reply, dryly. I’m accustomed to people rolling their eyes at me.

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Conversations with my annoyance

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 03:31:06 GMT

I’ve been trying to think through why it was that Monday night’s class annoyed me as much as it did.

Perhaps it all boils down to jarred expectations. I went away and did what I thought was our homework: I took my selected pitch, I fleshed out the characters and considered the stuff that I’d need to address in a first issue, and developed a story that, I felt, gave a useful introduction to the setting, the characters, and the overarching themes, and also had a bit of action/adventure for fun. I broke down my story into a story map — I know exactly what’s happening on each page. I’ve already had to hack and slash some of the stuff that I wish I had room for. But I was really happy with the story and wanted to feel good about it a bit.

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Man, that was really irritating

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 03:40:52 GMT

After being so excited to get to class tonight, actually attending pissed me off. Mostly because I feel like we were asked to do a bunch of prep that never got used. And I think I’m going to hate next week — it sounds like we’re being asked to work out partial scripts in class. I’m beyond the point of wanting to toy around with structure and skeletons; I want to do the hard work of actually bringing the story to fruition now, and I doubt that working that out in class is a productive way to do that.

Bah. I want real homework.

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