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Daily Comic Panel Slow Read #2

Black Widow #4 by Chris Samnee and Matthew Wilson p. 9 panel 4

This exercise was inspired by a tweet I read (possibly by Tonci Zonjic). The idea was to slow down your reading and just look deeply at one particular panel of a comic for about 15 minutes in order to really study its construction. I thought this would make for an interesting daily exercise for 2017.

Chris Samnee is the closest equivalent that today’s superhero comics have to the great 20th Century masters like Alex Toth and Al Williamson; artists who knew exactly how to light a scene and render that atmosphere realistically yet expressively with brush and ink. Using stark chiaroscuro lighting to properly silhouette a figure is harder than it seems. What I love about Natasha in this panel is that she is not completely in shadow. The light especially on her legs and hands shows how complex and realistic her pose is. It reveals the gesture of her thumbs along with her hands cradled around that life-giving cup of coffee.

Her silhouetted figure is perfectly balanced by the abundant detail in the background. Our eye is drawn first to her–probably thanks to that bright red hair–but our attention travels to the right to explore the setting she has woken up to find herself in. Samnee doesn’t overwork any of the objects in the room but with just some loose lines he gives it all life and a lot of use, down to the stacks of dishes in the kitchen and bowls by the desk. The tea kettle by the window is a nice touch to connect with the coffee in her hands.

My favorite detail in the room is the tiny duck Iosef seems to have painted on the canvas resting on the top of the desk.

Matthew Wilson’s saturated use of red in her hair stands out against the more subdued military greens and the drab browns, reds and grays in Iosef’s shack. The soft pastels outside the window create an inviting respite from the interior.

Is Natasha looking in the direction of Iosef or is she looking out the window? I like that we can’t really tell. Her head may be cocked slightly so possibly she’s eyeing both.

chrissamnee

Considering these damn books take hours, days! WEEKS! to draw I personally love the idea of taking some extra time to soak in what’s on the printed page. Thanks for the kind observations, Rich! I’m looking forward to reading more of these :)

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Gipsy Danger is go.

sashayed

You guys, you must stop doing this. You must. We cannot keep yelling at you about it because it makes us so angry, and we are already angry all the time, about real things, like how our lives are turning into a real world Handmaid’s Tale, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haha ha ha ha ha ha. We cannot keep spending our energy being mad at mediocre men for writing mediocre books that inexplicably win awards and that people tell us to read, for some fucking godawful who knows reason.

So men. My guys. My dudes. My bros. My writers. I am begging you to help me here. When you have this man in your workshop, you must turn to him. You must take his clammy hands in yours. You must look deep into his eyes, his man eyes, with your man eyes, and you must say to him, “Peter, I am a man, and you are a man, so let us talk to each other like men. Peter, look at the way you have written about the only four women in this book.” And Peter will say, trying to free his hands, “What? These are sexy, dynamic, interesting women.” And you must grip his hands even tighter and you must say to him, “ARE THEY, PETER? Why are they interesting? What are their hobbies? What are their private habits? What are their strange dreams? What choices are they making, Peter? They are not making choices. They are not interesting. What they are is sexy, and you have those things confused, and not in the good way where someone’s interestingness makes them become sexy, like Steve Buscemi or Pauline Viardot. Why must women be sexy to be interesting to you? The women you don’t find sexy are where, Peter? They are invisible? They are all dead?” He is trying to escape! Tighten your grasp. “Peter, look at this. I mean, where to begin. ‘She could have been any age between eighteen and thirty-five?’ There are no other ages, I guess? Do you know what eighteen-year-olds really look like, in life? Do you know what forty-year-olds look like? And not that this is even the point, but why are these sexy, dynamic, interesting women BOTHERING with your boring garbage ‘on the skinny side of average’ protagonist? Why did you write it like this, Peter?”

And maybe Peter will say at last, “I don’t know.” Maybe he will be silent for a long long long time, and then maybe he will say, “I guess it’s scary and difficult for me to imagine the interiority of women because then i would have to know that my mother had an interiority of her own: private, petty, sexually unstimulating, strange: unrelated to me and undevoted to my needs. That sometimes I was nothing to my mother, just as sometimes she is nothing to me. That I was not at all times her immediate concern.”

“I know, Peter,” you can tell him gently.

“I don’t want to know that my mother as a human being with an internal life, because to know that would be to risk a frightening intimacy with her,” Peter will say, maybe. “Because to know that would be to know that she was only a small, complicated person, no bigger or smaller than I am, and I am so small. To know how alone she was. How alone I am. How alone we all are. That my mother survived with no resources more mysterious than my own. She gave me life. My God: she gave me life. How can I pay her back for that? How can I ever, ever give her enough to repay her for my life, every day of my life?” He will be sobbing probably. “I am frightened of her. I am frightened of dying. O God. My God. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.” Drool will run from his mouth as he cries. The way babies cry. He will be ashamed. You must hold him. You must say, “Shh, Peter. Shh.” Wrap your man arms around him. Hum into his thin hair as your own mother hummed once into your own sweet-smelling baby scalp. Kiss him gently on his mouth. There. You did it, men. You fixed sexism. Thank you. You’re the real hero here, you men, and your special man powers, for making art.

fozmeadows

Put this in the Smithsonian.

oeming

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUqorJBiY-o)

So there’s a FINAL FANTASY... movie? The trailer is very video-gamey (which, I suppose, is unsurprising), but the production design looks great.

I’ve had this song and this video stuck in my head for weeks. “Can you do it” by Charles X. Gorgeous video, great song.

rant-land

Originally published to Twitter by @jasonlatour on 03/25/15

ca-tsuka

Legend of Korra animation by french Studio La Cachette for Nickelodeon 25th anniversary.

brianmichaelbendis

Hi. I always have all these ideas in my head for characters and stories and I find it hard to express them, or write them, or draw them. Part of it is I'm afraid that anything I do will be rubbish, and there's so many mediums I feel overwhelmed.

it will be rubbish. so free yourself of that fear.

everyone makes rubbish. gaiman, sorkin, shakespeare. they sit down and write and its crap. they just don’t show you that part.

so sit down and write. it’ll be crap and then you’ll try it again and again and revise and polish and think it over and teach yourself and train yourself and you’ll figure out another angle and rinse and repeat and before you know it you’ll be a writer.

that feeling will never go away but you’ll be living your dream and i can tell you first hand its worth it.

here’s one of my inspirations for just getting to work. read this amazing transcript of the raiders of the lost arc story conference. they had good ideas and shit ideas and they sat down and worked it out.

http://maddogmovies.com/almost/scripts/raidersstoryconference1978.pdf

Venom by Jeffrey “Chamba” Cruz.

wannabeanimator

Composition in Storytelling | Channel Criswell

“In THE ROAD WARRIOR, a dangerous stunt involving a massive tanker had the crew taking many precautions. Stunt driver Dennis Williams was told not to eat 12 hours before the scene was filmed so there would be fewer issues in surgery if anything were to go wrong.”

- Did You Know Movies on the development of MAD MAX: FURY ROAD

That is frigging Hard. Core.

I’m in love with this panel from Bastien Vivès’s POLINA. The page (and, really, the book) as a whole is beautifully made, but the elegant simplicity of this one panel knocked me out. The gesture, the combination of thick and thin lines, the way the setting is suggested without having to be completely drawn, all of it is just so masterfully done.

“Adam” - Part one of a short film created as a tech demo for the Unity engine.

cinephiliabeyond

Here are several photos taken behind-the-scenes during production of Michael Mann’s Heat. Production still photographer: Frank Connor © Warner Bros.

Michael Mann’s crime thriller Heat was a project whose development path started all the way back in 1979, but when it finally hit theaters in 1995, it seemed obvious that it was well worth the wait. Even though it’s probably the easiest to categorize it as a thriller, since what lies at the heart of the film is a cat-and-mouse game of a hard driven criminal and an almost supernaturally dedicated police officer, Heat is one of the most revered movies of the nineties specifically because of its complexity with regard to its subject and themes. Anyone curious enough to want to know what Heat would look like as a straightforward crime thriller, just get your hands on L.A. Takedown, the television movie that Mann made as a pilot for a TV show that never got past that one episode. As Mann put it himself, L.A. Takedown is basically a simpler, much shortened and thematically far less complicated version of Heat shot only in 20 days. To see what makes Heat such a spectacle to behold, compare it to its predecessor: equally justifiable as seeing the picture as a stylistically supreme thriller with grandiose performances from Pacino, De Niro, Kilmer, Sizemore and Voight is to watch it as a powerful study of human beings, the frailty of their relationships, the burden of their haunting loneliness and painful disconnection with the rest of the living world.

Now almost mythological conflict at the center of the film was based on a real-life story that occurred back in the sixties, when a Chicago police officer Chuck Adamson caught and killed a notorious criminal called Neil McCauley. Adamson, whom Mann considered a close friend, created the TV drama Crime Story, as well as served as a writer of many episodes of Miami Vice. To what degree Mann was inclined to breathe in a strong air of authenticity to the story can be seen not only in his conferring with Adamson as a consultant, but also in the fact that not a single scene of Heat was shot on a soundstage. Instead, Mann used over seventy real Los Angeles locations, specifically asking his crew to find places that had never been featured in movies before. In order to prepare his crew for the scenes whose sense of realism was crucial for the film, Mann even hired a professional consultant under whose guidance the crew went through months of rigorous training with real weapons. The result is a dark, jittery film of an almost documentaristic sensibility, decorated with Mann’s crafty writing, dedicated character development, Elliot Goldenthal’s score and Dante Spinotti’s captivating visuals that further accentuate how the lead characters function as living islands among people who surround them.

The film has also gained historical value thanks to the unforgettable diner scene, where Pacino and De Niro, for the first time in the history of film, appear together in the same shot. But as entertaining as it might be for film buffs, Heat is too accomplished a film to be celebrated solely on such a trivial fact. “Though people characterize it as a crime thriller, that’s the last thing it is, at least in my mind. Its plot is driven by a crime story and a police story to a certain point, and then it breaks into a kind of chorus. In that chorus, we see slices of these different people’s lives,” Mann explained recently. This is the strength of Heat: that it pushes boundaries, explores far beyond the limitations of a genre it refuses to be contained by. Mann’s Heat is one of the quintessential films of the decade.

Michael Mann’s ‘Heat’: A Complex, Stylistically Supreme Candidate for One of the Most Impressive Films of the Nineties