Showing posts with label Craig Thompson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Craig Thompson. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Autobiographies, Health Care Reform and the history of superheroes

It's a little tricky when you have to spread pages out over a few weeks, because that's just how long it takes to get updates finished, but hopefully this is a worthy payoff for the "where there's smoke" line from page 67. In any case, onward they go, avoiding the villain.

Drawing people sitting in a car, and climbing out of a car ... what a challenge! Something I'd never done before (which you can probably tell) and obviously something I didn't spend any time practicing in a sketchbook before I published.

Here's page 74!


Dr. Casey Miller, Dr. Howard Bolam and Evelyn escape from an unknown assailant in Escape from M____.
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Graphic novel news
A couple different types of posts this time to share. In particular, we have a post articulating the transformation of graphic novels from the tales of super heroes, when the world needed heroes to route for during fascist regimes, to a different type of medium that tells all kinds of complicated tales, not just those about superheroes. And of course, graphic novels have an accessibility and acceptance that make them excellent media to translate difficult subject matter - as seen in a graphic novel on Health Care Reform (which I've probably mentioned more than once). Then there's the autobiography, which is a classic narrative form, but lending it to the graphic novel medium is a new stylistic choice, which we hear about in our final update.

Check it out!

Graphic Novels Get Bloody Good
derekberry
Word Salad

With the advent of e-readers, graphic novels are better than ever, some even interactive. Books can be cumbersome to carry and only avid comic fans buy every issue of a comic. If it’s sent straight to an e-reader, though, it is much easier to deal with. I’m certainly looking forward to buying some graphic novels for my Nook tablet to see how it might enhance the experience.
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Deciphering Health Care Reform With Jonathan Gruber
Rachel Solomon
http://kuow.org


The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was passed by President Obama last year, and polls still show most Americans are against health care reform — though many don't understand how it works or what's at stake. This worried economics professor Jonathan Gruber, who consulted with both the Obama and Romney administrations on health care reform. Gruber decided to write a graphic novel to break down the massive, 900–page bill that's changing our country's health care system.
Click to read more.


This Alternate World
David Chislett
bookslive.co.za


... I am enjoying retracing my steps back into this place. This after all has been a long journey: One that was born over an idle conversation in a car on the way back from the Oppikoppi festival with journalist Therese Owen and promoter Bill Botes. Those ideas evolved around a graphic novel that fused a definite past with a fictional now to create a metaphorical city of ideals and extremes.

After pursuing those thoughts for a while I realised, graphic version or not, there still had to be a novel to illustrate! So rather than work through that process, here I am, writing up a large book about my home town, its people, my friends, and my ideas about the world.

Click to read more.

Friday, December 23, 2011

700 pages of bad sidekicks on Planet 999

Strippin' again!

A little radio, some more Lost Season 2, and I've got a couple different projects to work on, especially a "secret" one that I'm not really revealing any details on, but should be pretty awesome when it's ready. I'm still writing it - and then the artwork might take a little while, but this one I'm looking for a quick single publication. I'm really excited for it!

Here's Page 67 of "What happened in there?" and I'm introducing a quick setup for the "where there's smoke there's fire" lesson that's going to play a bit of a role later on in this act. Sometimes I fear the pages get posted so far apart (it just takes a long time to find the time to get down to publishing pages) that remembering the finer details in the story and script are lost by the time they're useful again - which is why I encourage re-reads!


Dr. Howard Bolam finally catches up with Ian Escutcheon, but their meeting is cut short by an devastating interruption in Why, what happened in there?
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Graphic novel news
Got a few fresh links about writing good sidekicks, OR avoiding writing a lousy Robin character. There's also a neat photoblog to check out that's more of an interesting concept than a graphic novel, but .. it appeared in my google results so now it's in the blog. Also read an interview with someone who wrote a almost 700-page graphic novel. Check it out!

How to Write a Good Sidekick
B. McKenzie
superheronation.com



A bad sidekick aggravates readers and weakens the story. Over the past 20 years, the two-live action Batman movies with Robin have averaged 29% on Rotten Tomatoes. The four without Robin have averaged 82%. Here are some tips that will help you write a sidekick that will excite readers rather than make them want to stick their brains in a blender.
Click to read more.


Presidential Landing on Planet 999 (The Graphic Novel that you write)
unknown author
beckermanphoto.com



This is just a photo blog of New York City, which is cool, and the idea that it's something of "graphic novel" created by the many, sometimes-anonymous contributors makes it all the more interesting. The extraterrestrial motif is fun, too.
Click to read more.

Former Milwaukeean pens graphic novel masterpiece
Molly Snyder
onmilwaukee.com


Graphic novelist Craig Thompson
OMC: "Habibi" is almost 700 pages long. Did you set out to write a graphic novel this lengthy or did it just naturally evolve into such a long novel?

CT: I started out with modest goals and expectations. I thought it would be between 200 and 300 pages, but then it spiraled out of control. But this is a necessary matter of working. If you knew how much work something was going to be from the beginning, you'd never get started. Simple goals got me going, and then letting it spiral was part of the pleasure.

One of the drawbacks of the comics medium is that it's too abbreviated.
Click to read more.