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The Tale of Three Flowers and Scarlet Rose

Hi guys sorry it’s been so long since I last posted, but there is more to come for this series. I will also be sure to post and update this and will post a link so you all can read it I hope you all enjoy reading it. Also there will be links if any of you want to buy any of my art prints.

https://www.popcomics.com/stories/the-tale-of-three-flowers-10648

https://www.artpal.com/BlackWhiteAngel

#angellynnhaley #The Tale of Three Flowers #The Tale of Three Flowers Scarlet Rose #scarlet rose #comics #original characters #original character #original story #comic series #pop comics #artpal #links #comic update #update #Watercolour Illustration

5/09/2019.

today was studying day! i’m slowly trying to get my groove back after the holidays + the trip and boi it is hard 😩 i tried to make myself the blackest coffee ever known to existence but even this didn’t wake me up enough to face the Watson-Glaser test properly 🥴 who those of you who do not know, it is a critical thinking test often used by law firms for recruitment. as i would like to apply to a couple of open days or opportunities this year, i feel like i need to start getting the hang of it, especially since my French baccalaureate was centered around sciences and not law 📚

also, if you haven’t recognised it, my little Pop comics is Sabrina Spellman ⚡️ my best friend and i are obsessed with the Netflix show and he give it to me when i moved 🧳

after this morning session, i decided to walk around a bit, especially since it was so sunny ☀️ i feel like St Paul’s Cathedral is impressive from every single angle 🤩

as always, i’m already half asleep while writing this, and i’ve been listening the “Jazz for Sleep” playlist on Spotify 🎷 would highly recommend!

goodnight 💛

#lawblr #studyblr #inspiration #law #student #study #studying #working #douceurdumatin #coffee #black coffee #sabrina spellman #pop comics #london #uk #st pauls cathedral #law exam #open days #first year opportunities

ART SPLURGE 3!

Even more of my fave art from Hitsville UK. You can buy the complete seven issue series from https://johnriordan.bigcartel.com

#hitsville uk #comics #music comics #pop comics

Pop Comics #5: Astonishing X-men #3. Is Clarity Enough?

This article originally appeared on my patreon, which you can subscribe to for as little as one dollar a month. As a patreon subscriber you get to see these and other articles sometimes weeks before everyone else. Subscribe now.

Pop Comics is a series of articles I am doing on the most popular comics according to Comixology’s weekly top 10 list. This week I am writing about Astonishing X-men #3 which is written by Charles Soule, penciled by Ed McGuinness, inked by Mark Morales, colored by Jason Keith and lettered by Clayton Cowles. Astonishing X-men #3 is basically like...a game of Heroclix between The Shadow King and Professor X. The comic starts out with Old Man Logan climbing through an icy astral plane whining about how in an alternate past he killed all the x-men yada yada. There’s a side game where Professor X is trying to get Logan to something or other, without the shadow king knowing.

Meanwhile in, London(you can tell because it says so you see)…

Psylocke, Bishop, and Angel are protecting the X-men in the astral plane from alarmed local authorities. Of course the London police are pretty concerned about the X-men being there--which, I’m thinking of all of the other times the X-men have fought some huge battle or tried to do similar things without the authorities ever really showing up--and so...good on the London police. Eventually the x-men send Angel out to try and calm the situation, but the police shoot him with a razor net or something. Angel starts to wig out but eventually refrains from doing anything; instead he offers to do some kind of hostage swap where an officer goes down to the roof and he goes into their helicopter--which doesn’t seem like a good idea on anyone’s part. And of course, it turns out it’s not. As Logan is taken over by the Shadow King, awakens, and promptly kills the police officer who has came down to talk to aforementioned x-folk. The comic of course ends at this moment.

That’s probably the strongest image from the comic as well. It really captures the distress of the dude, and the sort of dark elf appearance of possessed Logan kind of accentuates the “uh oh-ness” of the moment to a sufficient degree. On the whole, it’s a solid comic to be honest. Everything that happens in it is very clear. You are told very overtly who people are, where they are, and why they are there, so even though I am reading this in issue #3 I know exactly what is happening. In that way it is a very functional workmanlike comic that meets the quota of being a thing that came out this month and appropriately updates the story of your favorite characters. But let’s say you weren’t an X-men fan. And just wanted to read a good comic--I don’t know that it is that. McGuinness figures aren’t that dynamic to look at, and kind of just look like pictures of toys more than they do flamboyant characters locked into an extradimensional fight that defies the laws of reality. I think X-men: Heroclix is an adequate description of how all of the characters look. Which again, is fine. But I mean if you’re an adult, maybe you should be buying those 3A figures instead? Just sayin. I think the main thing that was interesting to me reading this, was the parts with Logan in the astral plane which are meant to take place in a very snowy cold creation of Logan’s imagination.

The story tells us that Logan has made this place for him to traverse because he likes pain. So in theory this is like the worst snow that Logan can imagine. His idea of painful snow. But the depiction of this is very lacking. There’s this blue gradient easing you from the whites to the blues in the sky sometimes into black, which is very soft. And while it denotes coolness, does it really hit as COLD? Add to this, there aren’t very many snowflakes. Logan himself is not even bundled up, just wearing a normal jacket, bare hands, exposed white tank top, some jeans. The choice to keep Logan in this costume undercuts one’s ability to visually apprehend this as a cold place, because dude isn’t even zipping up his jacket. And then there aren’t many physical signs on Logan himself that he is in snow. His hands look frostbitten a little bit on the very first page, but never after that. None of the snow is really sticking to him. And then there’s not much of an attempt to show the scale of him trudging through an endless snowy battle towards a fortress in the distance. As an idea that is very epic and if I just told you it was a snow comic where Logan killed his way through all of his old enemies on the astral plane--I think you’d picture a really rad comic--but there’s nothing like that in this. Compare all of that to Barry Windsor-Smith’s snow in Weapon X:

Which, it’s not fair to compare anyone to Barry Windsor-Smith in comics(though it is worth using his work as a measuring stick to ask for more from artists)--but I think there are some basic principles here that if they had been implemented would have really turned up the volume on Astonishing X-men #3. First of all, note how much snow is flurrying around on the BWS pages. There’s not even space for a colorist to run in here and drop gradients. What is the point? The snow has a physical force in these panels that impacts the figure within it. The environment is impacting what it contains, which creates a much richer sensation as a reader because you have to recognize the impact of this environmental force--wherein the astonishing pages you an just glance over it. Look at how the snow is stuck into Weapon-X’s hair. And look how it freezes to his face. This is the same character! And we are led to believe in Astonishing X-men #3 that that snow is the worst that the same character as BWS has drawn can imagine?? It defies belief.

The great thing about setting something in the astral plane is that the rules of reality don’t have to apply. So everything can be extreme. Everything is the mental dream or nightmare of the image. The most insane unreality. So to set something there, and then to be so boring that you don’t even draw more than a few snowflakes is insane. There are more snowflakes on these two pages in Weapon X than the whole of Astonishing X-men #3. It’s all just lumped into the colorist’s hands, and I know we live in an age where colorists are considered so important--but I don’t think that the best artists in comics are worse than the average colorist--so I don’t get where the trust comes from. The artist should be leading the way not laying back in the cut letting the book live or die based upon the colorist ability to finish up the environments. There are very few colorists who have that level of skill. Like I could see if you were working with Dean White who was going to paint the whole thing for you--but in this case it seems lazy and rushed. Which is crazy--because if you rock it correctly, snow issues should be pretty low on the workload! You can leave so much white! Also--having the word balloons a whiter white than a lot of the snow...doesn’t help visually! These problems with the setting continue into the London parts of the book, which...don’t really evoke London. I mean...I assume the buildings that are drawn there are actually there. But the buildings don’t look any different than NYC, and the London Police and their superiors don’t really have any kind visual signifiers that make you think they are not American. Which is fine. It just means as a reader, that aspect of the book has no weight to it. So what we’re left with in this book is everything is hinging upon how dramatic the writing can pit the stakes between these action figures. My other thing, which is a more general taste thing is “floaty panels”--they are all over here:

I call them floaty panels, where panels are just stacked randomly over each other and then over a bottom image, and then somehow you call it a day, and say “composition”. To me it’s goofy. Like look at the above page. The most background image is Angel starting to freak out, and the panels are basically placed down across his wing. That image is kind of the dramatic underpinning of the whole page--so from a logical point of view it make sense to then visually have that actualized. But all you’ve really done is covered up art and crowded out the most dramatic moment. It’s a taste thing, but I feel that if this page had been on a grid, and the last long rectangular panel was just this unclouded image of Angel about to go nuts--it would have hit harder. Also there’s never any attempt to try and make Angel flying around these helicopters look cool. He literally could still be standing on the building in that first panel and you wouldn’t bat an eye. The bald dude literally looks like he’s just peering out his office door telling people to get to work. But then you look at it, and are like “where would you even show the cool panel of Angel hovering dangerously between these armed helicopters? There’s no space?”

Also...I don’t get it...the net cuts his wing? Perhaps showing this dangerous knived net would have helped? Or just have someone use a gun? Maybe it’s because the story needs a reason for Angel to go crazy, so the net has to cut him? The way that it’s done, it’s the same problem as the Logan stuff in the Astral plane; you are being told by the story that there are stakes, but those stakes aren’t really being shown with any kind of weight. And weightless stakes are not the best thing when you are talking about stories largely about characters that everyone knows can’t really progress beyond their static movie IP stage. But again. This isn’t a bad comic. It’s just very focused on clarity and the mission of conveying a plot. a plot. Without offering much beyond that. Which I think a lot of editors in comics see as a goal to shoot for. Philosophically I think clarity for its own sake is just treading water. Just because you can see something doesn’t mean it’s worth looking at. Rather than clarity, I think value should be a larger goal. How do I create value in you looking at this thing? Because you can have two images of a chair, right? But which one is the one you are drawn to? Is it the one that just looks exactly like a chair? Or is it the one that makes you really examine the chair, and think about your own internal image of the chair to compare? And I mean there are an infinity of things that can spin out of a chair. And that’s just a chair. Surely the astral idea of snow from the perspective of a man like Logan can be more interesting than even a chair. Or we should at least ask for it to be.

#My Writing #Sarah Horrocks #Astonishing X-men #Pop Comics