The Lazy Inkpot

Comics, Zines, Drawings and other things people ( and sometimes I) make Personal art stuff: @flojalife .

[bande-dessinee]

Tac au tac (1972): Jean Giraud (Moebius/Gir) et Hugo Pratt affrontent 4 onomatopées imaginés. [x]

[flojalife]

Paquita La Del Barrio “Odio y Desprecio” marigold tote bags. First run completely sold out! 2nd run Preorders going through Friday October 28: flojalife.bigcartel.com

[thelazyinkpot]

Have a handful of these left for those of you still shopping for presents!

[austinkleon]

The New Yorker uses a strange kind of DRM on their archives — they layer PNG files over JPGs, so if you right click and save as, you just get this weird ghosted PNG (see above, left) But if you’re savvy, you can grab the JPG beneath, and when you layer them in Photoshop, you sort of have to bump them around to get them lined up right, and that gave me the idea of making really simple animated GIFs using just the PNG layer over the JPG background. Sort of cool. (These are from William Steig’s feature “A la recherche du temps perdu” in the September 26, 1959 issue.)

It’s funny how stuff like this makes one want to fiddle with IP MORE than if you just put the whole images up…

Filed under: animated gifs 

[fehyesvintagemanga]

Yamagishi Ryouko

[monsterism]

Isabella Mazzanti, Carmilla

[johnnytwentythree]

Charles Burns - December 5th, 2015

[thelazyinkpot]

Currently

[vintagemanga]

SHINTANI Kaoru (新谷かおる ), Desert Rose / Suna no Bara / デザート・ローズ / 砂の薔薇

[thebaxterbuilding]

Virgil Finlay.

[dubdobdee]

Baba Yaga house

[tomewing-blog]

I had a massive nightmare age 7 about the Baba Yaga house. Now it seems it was as scared of me as I was of it.

[ealdwyne]

[stagandserpent]

"Hag Crown" (2011)

[torontocomics]

kuš and Videofag present The Last Match May 7th – 12th Opening Reception May 7th, 7:00pm-9:00pm Videofag, 187 Augusta Avenue, Toronto, ON Free to Attend

An event of The Toronto Comic Arts Festival

Since 2009, the Latvian comics magazine kuš! has invited international comic artists to draw their interpretations of “the last match” on paper snips the size of matchbooks. At this size, these little artworks are easily collected in just a few tiny boxes – BUT – when exhibited together as The Last Match, the collected drawings are taken out and hung on matchsticks, showing that together you can make something big out of something small.

The Last Match is made up of contributions from more than 380 artists, from over 52 countries. This international exhibition has traveled from Riga to Lisbon, Linz, Lucerne, Leipzig, Erlangen, Haarlem, Tbilisi, Prague, Poznan, St. Petersburg, Bologna, Graz, and Ljubljana, and it’s making it’s Toronto/Ontario/Canadian/North American debut with TCAF! We’re so excited!

Co-presented by Videofag in Kensington Market, The Last Match will be up from May 7th-12th. There will be an opening reception on May 7th, from 7:00-9:00pm, which we highly recommend attending. With so many pieces, you’ll want to spend time with it all!

The exhibition is being brought to TCAF thanks to the kuš! editors David Schilter and Sanita Muižniece, and will be accompanied by a matching wall painting by Patrick Kyle. For more information on The Last Match, as well as photos of it from previous showings, please visit the kuš website.

“Matchmonster” illustration by Oskars Pavlovskis.

[kushkomikss]

See you at TCAF!

[fried-chickn]

[purtie]

☆ indie/pretty ☆

[renee-french]

for the upcoming “Hagelbarger & That Nightmare Goat” book.

[ungoliantschilde]

[ungoliantschilde]

Jean “Moebius” Giraud in black & white.

[davechisholmmusicandcomics]

Moebius making everybody else look like trash!!!

[flojalife]

'YA PA QUE' An oldie for yall. First in the ~FLOJA LIFE~ series. Translates loosely to ‘Why bother now. What’s the point”.

[captainmwai]

[bendiswordsforpictures]

A study in panel borders: Inspired by this awesome post about making comics quickly, I took a look at some comics I own to get some sense of different kinds of panel design choices.

I came away feeling like I’d learned a little less than I’d hoped, but here are some takeaways:

* You can get away with smaller panels than you think * Extremely weird comic panels CAN work, but when it fails it looks painful and forced. * Simple is not bad. * There are actually a LOT of possible combinations.

Specific notes:

Scott McCloud uses a 4x3 sliceup of the page, and it’s four VERTICAL slices and three HORIZONTAL ones, which is weird because it makes the panels, on average, LESS square. This works with the particular comic really WELL though, because he draws himself in closeup, talking, a LOT.

DAR and Narbonic both are webcomics mashed into book format, but both worked surprisingly well as page layout in the end.

Blacksad is REALLY variable and the page layouts are hand-crafted on a per-page basis. No speed gains here, but perhaps a message that full custom has its place.

The Resonator is fairly formal but never *too* rigid with panel choices. Lots of narrow or tall panels, which works as a way to alternate between big establishing shots and dense dialog. Very tall panels for single speaker, long ones for two-person dialog or to combine a lot of text and visuals. In general, Resonator is print-native and has TINY text…

Ultimate X-Men is a fun read but the panel design is a disaster. Almost none of the choices of graphic design work at all. Occasionally an establishing shot hits home, but in general the layout is trying WAY too hard.

Watchmen. Formalism raised to the ultimate. It’s precise, it’s a 3x3 grid, it’s piss-on-a-plate-with-no-spills precise and that’s fine, for two reasons: one, everything is about time, and two, it gets the panels the hell out of the way of the story.

Augustus is an example of what Ultimate X-Men was trying to do, except it succeeds. Lots of variation, but on average very orderly. Kind of strikes me as the sort of thing you “have to be GOOD” to pull off well.

[drdavidmrmack]

Panel design is one of the most fun parts of making comics for me.  Creating the structure and rhythm and timing of the page… based on the flow of the story and characters, is where the real magic happens for me.  

It is that wonderful in between place where the script first takes shape into the visual.  And the arrangement seems to spring from the flow of the script (often with dozens of layouts for possible solutions for each page) and the infinite possibilities always surprise me.  Sometimes it is a matter of simplicity, and sometimes it is a matter of contrast.  And it always seems like problem solving.  It’s a puzzle where ideas first get their visual blueprint onto paper in terms of making that new dimension of “time” in making image have sequence and suggesting the pace of that sequence… encrypting it into the design so it will only live, only be unlocked, inside the readers mind.  I don’t consider the page the actual art.  I consider the real art, the real “happening” of this art form, as taking place inside the readers mind when what is encoded on the page is turned into movement and reality in the stage of the readers mind.  And each person decodes that a little bit differently, and the same person experiences the same comic differently when read at different stages in their life, based on the life experience that they bring to the reading.  The comic page is a navigational tool, a road map, an atlas, but it is very different from the actual geography that the atlas is meant to point to.  That magic that happens in between the panels, is what happens in the readers mind, and it is such a joy to craft a page and panel layout that you hope makes the most of that catalytic effect. You are using imagination in the layout to trigger the readers imagination which will be activated by the panel layout. and in turn make the panels move and sing. 

[spx]

This is some dead sea scrolls level knowledge right here.

[davechisholmmusicandcomics]

This is fantastic!