and you missed it…

Tried out the UStream earlier today, with some drawing and some photochopping. Not sure if it worked right. Nobody was there to watch anyway.

Still gotta put it all together in IC but I should have a comic soon.

HyperSketch

Drew this while testing out the Hypercomics Webcast thingy. Still thinking through how to make hypercomics work for me with my pen on paper techniques.

And Penguin’s got Steve covered

Steve wrote in the comments over here:

This feels a lot like google maps, that would make for a fascinating interface for a global comic

Well Penguin Book’s We Tell Stories Has got your back my man, here’s a story told through Google maps. Not a comic per se, but you could certainly argue that it’s composed with words and pictures.

Actually all of those Penguin stories are worthy of a bigger write up here, it seems… (At least we found plenty to talk about when they first came out!)

An Incomplete Manifesto

Just the raving madness of a man who can’t sleep because of all the ideas in his head. I’ll type this up sometime tomorrow. Until then, enjoy my handwriting!

Hypercomics: An Incomplete Manifesto

1. Hypercomics will never take itself too seriously and become pretentious and snobby.

2. The very nature of making comics, sequential art or visual language- whatever term you choose to use- is labor intensive.  Therefore, why waste time making comics that will be universally loved and accepted by a mass audience?

Instead, Hypercomics will make work that matters to the artists and both content and form will follow the interests of the artists.

3. Definitions are to be tested, tweaked, refined and even proven wrong.

Just because Scott McCloud says it is so, does not make it so.  It just so happens that Scott is a nice guy who is rooting for artists to innovate with the medium.  He writes well and in great volume, but just because he is the only intellectual mind wring eloquently about comics, does not mean that his theories should not be turned on their proverbial heads and smashed into new theories.

4. Webcomics do not need to be confined to grids or “pages” as in print comics.

True, the web is a great place to distribute comics that work just as well in print, but the web is also a place where comics can be published that would be impossible to to print and still be legible due to their shear sprawl and scale.

Circular comics should be tried (see 5 Ways to Love a Cockroach)

McCloud’s “The Right Number” is another example of the web’s potential influence on comics.

Hypercomics shall seek to try every alley of presentation that the web has to offer.

Defining Hypercomics

So should we try to come up with some kind of working definition for Hypercomics?  I’m not quite sure what one is.

I think the definition should be fluid at this point, but I just want something to hold on to while I try to develop new work.

Time Lapse Comics

This is old news, but it’s probably the closest to experimentation I’ve gotten with comics. This playlist contains all of “season two” from the Fabricari Video Podcast. I’m gonna do some test runs with the web-cam this weekend and see if I can’t get to drawin’ some live comics by next week.

Exploring Romare Bearden’s Work Using Flash

Romare Bearden

I know this isn’t quite a “comic”, but I thought it might be a good jumping off point for someone. You can explore this collage with the little Flash program. Its pretty cool!

Plunging In

Hey! I didn’t really want to be the first to post work up here, but I got so excited that I couldn’t help myself.

First, I’ve been working on this circular comic for about a year now and I finally got the pencils done for some of it. Neal inspired me to add little tangents and I gave that a try, so go check it out over here.

Next is a comic that I originally was going to do as a print accordion comic like my “mouse cheese cat” book.

I haven’t even finished mapping out the whole thing yet, but here’s the roughs for the print version below:

misunderstood minotaur rough draft

And here’s a link to a little bit of what I did with IC Viewer. . . Very very rough. . . eventually all the paths will loop back to some other place and poor Theseus will be perpetually lost in the maze.

testing waters…

Got this link the other day: http://www.realitycpu.com/

You could say it’s a blend of a Homestarrunner video game and Castlezzt, but more interactive.