The Ritual

The Internet has made an enormous difference to the way I work. To me, going online is like getting my favourite newspaper every day, but a newspaper that I have edited myself, by putting all my favourite subjects from all the available sources together in one publication - and with no darned Sudoku.

I am not just passively reading either, I am saving entire pages, cutting and pasting articles, gathering current information and information about future events and information about the history of illustration and cartooning. I am studying circulation figures, reader demographics, news and events and information about markets and publishers and agents and freelance opportunities and even gossip. It is a ritual that has proved so rewarding and valuable to me that I have made time for in my working day.

It begins here for me, at my homepage, and just to be sure I am focused, I ask myself 'where do I want to go today?', and every day the answer is the same, with some variations as I am corralled off to links that are flagged up by the sites I regularly visit. I always back-click though, and follow the same path that ends with me checking my email and then heading toward the drawing table. However long my online adventure takes, I simply tack on to my working day.

What I'd like to do it now, while I'm clear in my mind of the role I think the people on my daily list play, is make a list of the sites I visit every morning, here. The reason I want to make this record is that I have begun to realise (yes, I am that slow) that the people responsible for these sites are actually living resources.

This is especially true of those among them who work in cartooning and publishing. If you take, for example, Tom Spurgeon, you have someone who worked on a syndicated comic strip, worked for a leading publisher and produces a blog dedicated to comics and cartooning and illustration. Others on the list have similar credentials and I think when you have someone like, for instance, Fantagraphic's Dirk Deppey, the man behind the Journalista blog, at your disposal, you would be foolish not to take advantage of his knowledge and his efforts and his contacts. The fact that you are online and not at a party or a convention, and not traditionally face-to-face and perhaps even an ocean apart, should not stop you from networking, because that is, after all, what this is. It's fun, but you are also adding to your knowledge the whole time, so its constructive fun.

Cartoonists who also blog, and reveal the processes they use in making their cartoons, and introduce readers to new ideas and the work of old and new cartoonists and just, in general, take the time to enthuse about the job are to be prized, I think. The fact that you can find out, almost daily what popular cartoonist Mike Lynch has on his mind, would have been invaluable to me as a beginning cartoonist and even today I learn all sorts of new tips and tricks from his blog. That syndicated cartoonist Sandra Bell Lundy is willing to share the process of working on her successful strip Between Friends, and to let us know her thoughts and ideas means that we readers, and especially those of us who are thinking we might one day want to try making our own comic strips, now have some access to a world that has often been shrouded in mystery, with,'keep trying' the only advice we were privy to.

Finding a successful author/illustrator online may not be so surprising these days. I mean, publishers now regularly create Internet presences for their authors, with nothing more than signing dates on them and a great deal of puff for products and very little sign of the creator concerned, but successful cartoonist/author/illustrator Brian Fies, the man behind the multi award-winning book Mom's Cancer, has never been that sort of online presence. For years now Brian has supported cartooning on and off the web, and has added his valuable insights to the possible directions that cartooning and graphic novels may take in the years to come. His blog is among the best, and most lively, reads on the web. And a fellow cartoonist/author/illustrator and sometime publisher, Eddie Campbell, the man who illustrated Alan Moore's From Hell and wrote, amongst other titles, The Fate of the Artist, also illuminates and informs with his blog, and some of the artwork he shares is simply stunning.

I categorize The Pulse, Fleen, Same Hat, Comics Should be Good, Drawn, Newsarama, etc, as information givers. These are sites were I go looking for information on what is new and happening and every time I arrive on these sites I think I'll have a quick read and leave and I end up spending hours because there is so much going on. They are valuable resources, but they are just such darned good reads that I sometimes forget myself and When that happens I simply have to shift my day to accommodate my 7 hours of drawing.


The following day, I am eager to find out what is going on. I'll be honest with you, I thought that by now I'd be fed up thinking about cartooning, but the living resources that make-up the comics community on the Internet have given me a new lease of life, So, no piccies today, just a heartfelt thanks to those who take the time and effort to ensure that cartooning remains vibrant and relevant.

Dirk Deppey
Mike Lynch
Tom Spurgeon
Heidi MacDonald
Same Hat
Comic Foundry
Comics Should Be Good
Drawn
Sandra Bell-Lundy
Brian Fies
Eddie Campbell
Fleen
Newsarama
John Freeman's Down the Tubes

The Spanish are Coming!

Some of the really great 'British' comic artists were from all over Europe. After Spanish illustrator Jesus Blasco stopped drawing The Valiant's Steel Claw strip, the Rosi Studio in Rome took over the job with Giorgio Cambiotti pencilling the work, Sergio Rosi inking and Massimo Belardinelli drawing backgrounds. While Britain did have a thriving comics industry, Fleetway/IPC employed some of the world's finest illustrators to work for a range of titles from Mandy to 2000AD.

I often wondered, when I was working for IPC, why so many European artists, particularly Spanish ones, sent their work over here and I suppose, with hindsight it was because our comics industry was so unique, with our anthology titles allowing cartoonists to draw one page every weekly issue, or a dozen pages, depending on the job at hand.

These days our comics industry in about on its knees, with very, very, few surviving titles and the Beano turning up on a recent 'loathed by kids' list. And whilst the comics industry across wider Europe has always been a little bit of a non-starter, they have always had a history of producing graphic novels, particularly France where Tintin, Asterix and Gaston Le Gaffe, et al have always had an eager audience. Today, in Italy and France in particular, graphic novels are doing good business, on the back of the surge in popularity of manga.

One French title, that is actually drawn and written by two Spanish artists, Juanjo Guarnido, and his old college friend, Juan Diaz Canales; Blacksad, is a perticular favourite of mine. The story is all comic-noir, detailing the cases of Private Eye John Blacksad - a black cat, and the other characters are all anthropomorphic animals too, which may not be to everybody's taste, but I don't think this masterly work should be enjoyed only by furries - it's way, way to good to be enjoyed by only a genre market.

Full of action and intrigue, Blacksad's cases involve corruption, murder, blackmail, racial tension and suicide:

Blacksad is lush, the stories are intricate and involved and the artwork is up there with all the great European and Spanish artists that graced the pages of the British comics scene over the past few decades. To be honest, to me, it's a 'wish I'd thought of that' title because while the artwork looks demanding, and shows the animation background of both these artists, it looks like the sort of work a cartoonist would be happy to do and proud to have done.

I have to admit I was a bit wary of Blacksad at first, but the drawing won me over instantly and the story carried me through. I think a good word to describe Blacksad is beguiling; yes, that'll do.

Monster will Astonish you

Monster will astonish you.

It is another example of the sort of manga that manga fans will point you at when you say 'I don't like manga'. It works to, because, as we discussed in another post, quite often the people who say they 'don't like manga', actually just don't like a particular form of manga, and Monster is most assuredly not THAT sort of manga.














In the Coen Brothers recent movie version of Cormac Mcarthy's novel, No Country for Old Men, the protagonist can't live with the knowledge that he didn't take water to a dying man, so he gets out of bed and reverses that decision. This choice has enormous repercussions for him. A similar moral dilemma causes a similarly serious set of problems for Doctoer Kenzo Tenma, the protagonist at the centre of Monster, Nokai Urasawa's epic story of a man who sets out to undo the evil he has unwittingly unleashed upon an unsuspecting world.

As you will have guessed from even that short description, Monster is a complex tale, it has a demanding narrative that requires a good deal of work from the reader, for which the reader is rewarded over and over again. The illustration is lush and detailed and the architectural drawings of Dusseldorf, where our story begins ,and where Doctor Tenma is working in the Eisler Memorial Hospital, and Prague, are quite spectacular.

(*Once again I will have to be respectful of the fact that some of you are currently reading Monster. These manga scanlations were made some time ago by Manga Screener who removed them as soon as the project was optioned in the US -I will attempt not to put in any spoilers. I'm actually not going to put some of the covers here because the descriptions on these (unlike the US covers)give key elements of the plot away, but they are so well designed, and amusing, that I can't resist posting one or two).

From the very beginning of the story, which Urasawa informs us is a horrible, or horrifying tale, the pace is relentless. There is no messing about, right from the start the lone adapted quote from the Book of Revelation, which has been changed to 'Johannes' Apocalypse', quickly catches our eye and the reader is at once aware that the shadow of the Beast has been cast over the text. Something awful will happen here, sooner or later. And then, as quickly as a superhero pulls his pants off and flies away in his tights to save the world from a baddie, we have moved from Doctor Tenma's apartment room and his relationship, to the operating theatre, where we are elbow deep in blood, and on to a confrontation with an angry patient and then to a crime scene and then a near crash and then another operation and then a broken relationship and then murders galore and... Throughout all this there is a constant dialogue of ethical dilemmas, of moral mazes and pondering on the human condition. By the end of volume one it is apparent to us that the good doctor, with the very best of intentions, has delivered a Monster to the world; and his own problems have only just begun.

Okay, I'm not kidding here, I'm not using hyperbole, the Monster anime took my breathe away. I sat open-mouthed at episode One, from the pseudo Gregorian chants of the beginning credits, to the credits at the end, ushered out by a freaky illustration from an imagined children's book (read the manga) and a haunting melody from David (ex-Japan front man) Sylvian. I watched it all over again, immediately, then watched the opening credits a third time:

I have a theory about why I may have reacted so strongly to this, it's because it's an adult animation - unashamedly so. I don't mean 'adult' in the sense of restricted content, but adult in the sense that it is a work of animation, made for an adult audience. This seldom if ever happens in the West, if you think about it. Fritz the Cat was aimed at 'adults', but it wasn't exactly intellectually stimulating, and it was smutty and it looked like a kiddy film - it's easy to see why Crumb hates it. Almost all of the animation that has claimed to be for an adult audience marginalised that audience by being genre material first, such as 'sci-fi' animation, or restricted content, or just a lot of drinking and swearing - usually by animals.

The Lord of the Rings animation, by the same studio that brought us Fritz, only marginally had adults in mind as a target audience, and whilst The Triplets of Belville was great fun for all, including adults, it too had a lot for kids to love because it was aimed at the entire family. In fact, almost all recent animation, including TV animation like The Simpsons and Family Guy, and even Adult Swim, still have their weather-eye on kids; and of course the lucrative toy tie-in. I particularly hate this because it allows the apologist-critics to indulgein double-think and add the caveat in their reviews that shows like The Simpsons 'really aren't for kids' - so they have the excuse they need towatch the lowly art of animation, and still snear at the cartoon medium.

Perhaps King of the Hill is the closest attempt at animation geared more at the parents than the kiddywinkles, but it is still full of kiddy-appropriate fun, and it looks like a kids show. Monster, on the other hand, looks nothing like kiddy-friendly animation, and the beginning credits will get the little ones diving behind the sofa quicker the Doctor Who's W00000-OOOO theme:

I am awed by Monster. Not just by its size, it is, after all, a tale spread over 200 plus pages in every one of its 18 Volumes - but also by its vision and its scope, and its author's trust in the abilities ofhis readers.