Last week I drew two comics pages. I tried to get three done but I ended up only having the stamina to pencil the third page.
Here’s the second page of the FISTS comic that I drew last week (you can see the first page here):
This comic and some other, older FISTS strips (from college!) will be published in issue #14 of the humor zine Smear Campaign.
Back when I was in college I drew a comic for the Daily Texan (UT-Austin’s paper) called Fists: Free For All. My original premise, inspired by Krazy Kat and not too different from my current ATTACKS series now that I think about it, was to have each strip end with (or revolve around) one character hurling a gloved fist on a stick at another. Although I quickly abandoned that concept, I did, over the years, develop a set of regular characters and images that I kept coming back to, like the previously mentioned flying fists, a weird metal bat creature, the cigar-smoking frog, masks, and suited men who had to hold up their own lower jaws on a stick. After I graduated from college and got into Fort Thunder, my style changed pretty rapidly, and abandoned all of these characters except for, of course, the cigar-smoking Frog.
However, this past week, my buddy Natalia Ciolko asked me to do a two-page comic for the next issue of her zine Smear Campaign, and she was already reprinting some old FISTS strips, so I decided to do a whole new one.
Here’s the first page (I’ll have the second one up Friday):
At MoCCA Fest 2009 I started thinking about cartooning as a craft distinct from comics that I don’t practice that much. I’ve only developed a couple of ways of drawing cartoon faces that I slightly modify and draw over and over again. Scratch that, actually I just have one:
Mark’s face.
It’s pretty simple, really. Rudimentary, actually: one straight line, one Z, and then some wiggly lines for hair, beard, and so on.
I think that it was flipping through the Sam’s Strip book and looking at all of Jerry Dumas’ really elegant cartoons, but for whatever reason, I came to the conclusion that, perhaps, one straight line, one Z, and at least nine wiggly lines just wasn’t a true expression of cartooning expertise.
So, I began drawing cartoons of Frank Santoro and Gary Panter while I was waiting for their panel at MoCCA to start (for a great overview of that panel, be sure to check out this squally showers post).
Here are my two favorite likenesses:
(Paraphrased quotation from Gary Panter added later, after the panel had started. Another awesome thing that he said: “The future will be like terminator except the robots will look slick like tennis shoes.”
via hypebeast.)
Anyways I think that I’m gonna spend some time developing my cartooning chops. Looking at Sam’s Strip also got me thinking about doing a weekly comic harking back to the pure idea behind the daily newspaper strip:
Six panels where the same thing happens over and over again in different ways. I’ve always wanted to do a strip like this but I’ve always been stalled by what is, for me, the core of it all: the repeated action.
I tried it out with my Daily Texan strip, “Fists.” The idea was that someone would get hit by a gloved fist on a stick every comic, an idea that owes its existence to Ignatz’s brick.
Of course, nothing about that comic ended up being standardized except for its iconography, which I still like and want to bring back some day:
Like the materials-based sculptures and performances that I used to do, this iconography is something that I came up with back before I got so heavily influenced by Fort Thunder. So many ideas, so little time. We’ll see how much of this comes to fruition, I’ve got a looooong to-do list.
