094: Stuck on you
Here we are, continuing, as one does, unabashedly towards our 100th comic. Will there be fanfare and, as the French say, tohu-bohu, or will the event pass quietly, lost to all, unimportant, except in the annals of our own, personal histories. We will spend a moment, sipping a celebratory scotch, and think of you, dear readers, somewhere out in the dark under the black night sky, waving a solitary, sparkling flame in celebration of our achievements. But here I get ahead of myself. We’ve comics to go yet before we cheer.
I should admit, and I’ve never tried to deceive you, that Theo has been pretty much solely responsible for the comics you’ve seen since our rebirth. He’s been writing them, drawing them, inking them, and breathing life into them. Me, I’ve been posting them, and acting like a general administrative guy, which is important in and of itself since how else would you ever see them. Except for the boobie comic. That one was mine.
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the kind of comic I want to create. La Casa has been a journey - no, an experiment, really. It’s been a ride. It’s been something, anyway, but a lot of times I don’t know where to go with it, and I don’t know if it’s the story that I want to tell. There are thousands of comics out there, all of them telling stories, all of them with their own worth and audience and humor, and I’m happy that ours has been one of them, but at the same time I somehow want to find a way to make our comic different. I want to find the story that will be our comic, the characters that will drive the story, the merge between art and writing that will, at the very least, be uniquely ours. I’m really not talking about popularity, just the idea that in creating content and putting it out there for people to see, one has a responsibility to make that content … worth something. To somebody.
We start with a dream, and one by one pluck down the stars to light our path.
March 17th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
The artist here,
Just for the record: I love writing and drawing my own stuff, but I really like drawing for Ahniwa’s writing. Right now my process is: I sketch out a couple characters inside a set of three boxes and then do the dialogue according to what it appears they are describing through gesticulation and facial expression.
What this does is a) limits the scope of the comic and b) keeps me in safe territory with the art, in that I KNOW I can fucking draw it.
One of the reasons I took so long actually drawing Ahniwa’s ‘Boobie’ comic was that I couldn’t conceptualize what the damn birds would look like when I drew them nor could I quite figure out how the setting would be…set.
What I like about being the ‘artist’ (and what I hate about it) is that if I can’t conceptualize something immediately, I get a massive case of ‘artist’s block’ and my art gets moved to the back burner for 6 months while the readers become bored and move on.
The way that Ahniwa and I used to set up the strips was as follows:
1.He and I would meet in a bar.
2.We would order drinks.
3.While I would sketch on a piece of paper, he would start talking to me about a funny idea or a character he wanted to depict and I would draw it.
4.He would come up with funny dialogue to insert.
5.A comic would magically appear the next day.
I liked this process because if I couldn’t conceptualize something to the point of wanting to give up, Ahniwa would either tweak the idea or give me some kind of reference to work from. That kept me motivated to draw some of the crazy stuff that appeared in the first iteration of the comic.
I love the comic in its current form and would be happy for that to continue, but as Ahniwa pointed out this comic is supposed to be about us growing as artists and that’s where I stand on it. As long as he’s willing to write for it, I’ll continue to draw as best I can.
Ok, that being said, this entire entry was supposed to be a massive apology for the comic not having shading and looking generally like crap. But just now I realized that on the web page it doesn’t look half bad and I shouldn’t be apologizing for trying to fiddle with my technique anyway.
(edit: that last panel still bothers me.)
Finally, if you (Ahniwa) want to write comic 100, please do. All storylines I’ve been working on are over as of Wednesday and if you want to do another strip with boobies, I know how to draw them now!
-T