TCAF, the Toronto Comics Art Festival has come and gone for another year. I had amazing time meeting lots of great people and I drew over 100 Awesome Spirit Animals for people over the weekend. I also did a presentation on doing comic and drawing games, with CTON a fellow Owl cartoonist. Here’s a bunch of photo highlights of the festival. BTW, the first spirit animal is my own, and the first several are done for my comic friends and peers.
I’m going to be at the Toronto Comics Art Festival
Saturday May 5 9am-5pm
Sunday May 6 11am-5pm
It’s FREE to get in because its at the 789 Yonge St, Toronto Reference Library
It’s a great event because everyone exhibiting there is either a cartoonist, or a small press publisher. Hooray for comics!
I’ll have some mini-comics for sale, and I will be doing drawings that will be super fun. On Saturday at 3pm I’ll be teaching/playing comic games with CTON in one of the lecture rooms. Come out and say hi!
I did these Monster Valentines for the Jan/Feb issue of Owl Magazine. If you can’t find a copy, you can just email these to your Valenstein.
and this was one of the three backings for the cards.
For the fall season I drew these 6 images for Torontoist‘s newsstand column. They were to be applicable for a variety of news topics and sing of autumn. I decided to use icons to riff on the many ways in which we communicate.
According to Sturgeon’s Revelation, 95% of everything is crap. So while you’re seeking help to get your webcomic out of that 95%, realize that 95% of critique requests are not very well done either. And if you’re one of those helpful critics, that you might be in that 95% too. Most people are not good at receiving, asking for, or giving constructive criticism. So here are a few methods to make the process less painful, and more useful, on both sides.
Combining Scooby Doo and Doctor Who seemed like a fairly natural notion. I can picture Tom Baker offering jelly babies to K-9 to get him to go into a particularly scary situation. And the TARDIS seems like the ultimate Mystery Machine. I figure they’ll add Adric like Flim Flam, after the show jumps the shark. My age is showing, in that I chose to draw the 4th doctor, rather than one of the more recent ones, but that again works well with Scooby Doo. Plus Matt Smith doesn’t have a dog companion. Although it is funny that the Doctor now travels with a nurse (Rory the Roman). (click images to enlarge)
I also went nostalgic with my choice of X-Men to draw. This is the cast of the mutant heroes I read as a teenager. While many artists have pointed out that Dave Cockrum’s characters often have flared boots and shoulders, this was the first time I realized he also didn’t draw pupils. Kitty Pryde (added later to the team) and Professor X (added earlier to the team) are the only ones. When the rest are in costume and powered up, they are blank white (except Cyclops’ blank red). It’s like the whole team is Little Orphan Annie.
If I can get them done in time, I’ll have them available as prints at the Toronto Fan Expo the last weekend in August. I may or may not make it all 4 days of the con, as I have a brand new baby boy that requires a lot of attention. Saturday and Sunday will be the best days to catch me if you’re heading down and want a print or sketch or caricature or high five.
Most adults are able to carry multiple versions of characters in their head. James Bond is Sean Connery, Roger Moore, and Daniel Craig. But when the creators and fans of the stories insist that all incarnations are the same person, that becomes a challenge for some people. Rather than accepting there can be multiple versions of one character, a Rashomon-style approach, some fans would prefer that the stories bend over backwards to accommodate all of the versions of the characters and their adventures to be part of one long narrative. This comic essay hope to explain why this mind set persists in the comic book world of superheroes.
Note that when I say “comics” I am generalizing, and referring to mainstream superhero comics.
What is buy-in?
When someone complains about a comic not matching continuity they are reacting to a conflict between what is presented and what has previously been presented. This break in the reality of the series brings the reader out of the work. Let’s start by looking at how that works:
Readers accept premises stated at the beginning of the story, no matter how outlandish. If they don’t, they put the comic down and move on.
As I mentioned in my post on How To Be Funny, one panel gags are less about being funny and more about communicating an idea with clarity. With no real space to explore rhythm and timing, it’s hard to make belly laughs. That being said, there is a real fun to the limitations of the format, like writing a haiku or sonnet instead of free verse.
Here is a gallery of strips I’ve done that are inspired by the TED lectures. While I draw and colour my comics, I like to expand my knowledge by listening to smart people talk. Sometimes it’s audio books but a lot of time it’s online lectures, and TED has some of the best on the web. (I also enjoy TVO’s Big Ideas). TED brings together experts on topics as varied as music, fungi, language, biomimicry and gives them 20 minutes to distill and communicate their best ideas. There is little room for rambling and throat clearing. It’s almost an in media rez approach to academic lecturing. I think it’s a perfect subject for me to try to further distill into a one-panel comic. Some of lecturers also use one-panel gags to communicate their ideas, so it could be a self perpetuating situation.
I actually did some of these comics as more polished pieces first but felt the scratchy approach to the strips put less pressure on the punchlines to be funny, and allowed them to just summarize. When I do gags that are first and foremost supposed to be funny, I feel comfortable with this more finished art style.
In addition to the one-panel gags you see in the Comics For Kids page, I’ve also done some for Torontoist. I’ve used one-panel gags as a sort of journal of observations during an event. I did one for our trip to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally To Restore Sanity, for the Toronto Maple Leafs’ 2010-11 season and for Toronto’s all night art Festival, Nuit Blanche.
Last weekend’s Toronto Comic Art Festival (TCAF) was amazing. Great creators. Great organizers. Great audience. This was a panel I was on with my favourite and funniest comic friends, Jay Stephens, Eric Wight and Steve Manale. We made some comics with suggestions from the audience. The festival is getting really good at programming and making space for kids thanks to Scott Robins.
