Hey guys I’m screwing around (a lot) with how my site is organized, using a new webcomics plugin that should make navigation 1000% easier for you. Sucks for your productivity (hopefully).

In the meantime, my existing strips can be found at their individual URL’s still, and the most recent ones are listed as a group here. Things will probably be in flux for a week or two while I add all my diary strips to date–there are like 80-something of them, holy cow–and then get some help with the visual side so it’s not ugly like right now. Thanks for your patience!

HEY GUYS! Okay so I am going to take your (very kind and enthusiastic) advice and start posting these as a daily/semi-daily strip. Maybe a little nicer, a little more “made.” But still with the shoddy sloppiness you have come to love! So here are the last ones like this. The next ones will look almost precisely like these, actually, but will deal more with individual moments, not just the great unwashed mundanity of my life.

And as always, you can see all of them to date here on my Flickr.

Guys, that storyboarding test was hard. I had to reshuffle the whole way I think.

So guys, I’m looking for your opinion–

Since December of 2008, I’ve been doing a regular weekly comic, what I think of as my “strip,” the one found here. It’s extraordinarily time-consuming, although I love doing it. I’m not going to stop or anything; but as I have oft-referred to, I’m about to start a lonnnggg memoir project, and posting a page a week is going to prove tricky. And possibly incredibly boring.

On the other hand, for some reason people seem to enjoy my diary comics, which I really only started doing not even three months ago because Kate Beaton suggested everyone try to do Hourly Comics for a month. Well I couldn’t do that, but I do like doing these little comics, and am slowly working around to a style that’s half hurried and rushed and half thought-out, so that even when they’re boring I’m getting cartooning practice.

So, the point: I’m thinking of trading places, essentially running my diary comics as my main strip, and working on little memoir stories (like the current “Poison Ivy“) on the side, posting them in their entirety as they are finished. I’m wondering if this is a mistake? Do I endanger the scant readership I’ve developed? If you’re reading this, you may even be that readership, so I thought you’d be the best person to ask.

The benefits to me are 1) an easier work schedule through con season (besides going to a few of them, I am one of the organizers of one); 2) a way to smooth out my process a little, make my stories a little less haphazard and more made; and 3) a nearly daily update schedule. Possibly 7 days a week, at least 5 days. So there’s that.

Thoughts? I am listening. Thanks in advance!

New diary comics dudes! You can click on any of the images to see them on Flickr, along with the rest of them going back to January 1. Or just click here to see the whole set!

I cannot overstate (so far) how much more awesome the State Employee’s Credit Union is than Bank of America. Or any other bank I’ve ever had an account at. Although SECU has now messed up my checks twice, but on the other hand I have yet to get charged for pretty much anything. OH EXCEPT THE $1/MONTH SERVICE CHARGE WHICH IS IT THAT’S ALL THE ONLY CHARGE CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? I love it.

Oh man. This week’s strip is up. Warning: it’s super-mortifying if you have allergies to ponytails with the sides sort of half-shaved, or chin beards, or any of a number of other problematic choices I made throughout my life. God only knows what I will think of how I look right now in another few years.

I’ll probably be like, “GORGEOUS!” though, actually. Gorgeous.

Well heckfire, no one showed up for my comics class this morning. I wish I could have seen myself hanging around the (locked) classroom door for half-an-hour before I left; I would have stayed asleep instead of waking up and finishing my class notes through a fugue of hangover. Well I’m awake now. Time to get productive Dharbin! Or at least continue waking up, because boy oh boy, that is a work in progress today.

I have been thinking this week about the Oscars: I just don’t get them. Is there a reason for them? I understand the awards part, but isn’t it just a reason for movie studios to promote their movies, get more people to go see The Hurt Locker or whatever?

And even that isn’t bad, that’s how our government is run too right? People spend millions AND MILLIONS of dollars to get into office, then spend their time their struggling to raise more money so they can stay in that office. Somewhere in there they make a lot of speeches cynically aimed at the stupidest and most impressionable parts of their perceived constituencies, and at least once or twice they vote for or against something. Afterwards I think there’s a party, with a lot of backslapping and cigar smoking.

But the thing that KILLS me about the Oscars is all the money that’s spent on the actual event. Not just the production costs, swag bags, all that–it’s the clothes baby, what’s the deal with all those clothes?? In a time when the entire nation of Haiti is more or less a pile of treeless rubble, sprinkled with tarp lean-to’s, and the rainy season about to begin… the best thing we as a society can do is throw a party for the movie industry.

And just to remind us of how important this party is, everyone should show up in $20,000 designer dresses or Versace tuxedoes, casually displaying their fancy shoes or handbags or dogs or whatever, as they pause to endure 2 minutes of flashbulbs on the (tented) red carpet before entering and practicing not looking directly into any of the hundred or so moving cameras.

Afterwards, they will complain bitterly about how celebrities have no privacy, how fame ruins everything, how “regular” people just don’t understand the incredible pressure.

That sounds pretty negative, I guess. But it’s gross, honestly. The idea of spending tens of millions of dollars on a big party when there are starving people literally everywhere is just nuts. Or sending a rocket to the moon for… for what? I love space, I love astronauts, NASA is like a codeword for “awesome.” But worrying about sending a manned mission to Mars when we have two very foggy wars going on, 10% unemployment, an increasingly monetized political system, and natural disasters all over the place.

Well, pardon me for saying that it sucks. But it does. SUXXXXX2000

Oh! I nearly forgot to mention that I put these three spreads up in my Flickr set, which will eventually comprise this entire 108-page or so sketchbook. You can click on any of the pictures to see them in Flickr, or here for the whole set. Hope you like it yo!

So Robert Goodin asked me to do something for the Covered art show going on this month in Los Angeles, at Secret Headquarters. Before I get into all the boring art talk, I should say that you should go; I wish I could afford to go, but Los Angeles is a long drive for me. Hopefully less long for you. You can also see all the pieces in the show on their Flickr page, along with prices and info on how you can buy them, regardless of your location.

If you don’t know, Covered is a blog Rob started around a year or two ago, which is basically artists re-interpreting classic or favorite or just weird comics covers. It’s cool. Rob gets a lot of big names, and a lot of small names, and the takes run from faithful to weird and back again. I love it.

But I had a really hard time thinking of something to do, I came down to either “The Ark” (one of the Jack Chick “Crusaders” line of comics); or the Frazetta cover to Weird Science-Fantasy, the famous one with the spaceman fighting the cavemen; or the one I did. Honestly I was about to pull out of the show; I just didn’t have any time, and I’m trying not to do non-paying work, especially since I have undone commissions for some very patient clients.

But I’m glad I did now–drawing Richie Rich was so pleasant, I can’t even tell you. Weirdly, it made me feel really grown-up–I still have most of my comics from when I was a kid, and most of them are Richie Rich comics. So the cover above is something I’ve been seeing–something that’s a part of my inner visual lexicon–for the last 25-30 years. Richie Rich might be one of the single biggest influences on my own approach to cartooning, but this was the first time in my entire life including childhood, that I ever tried to actually draw him. In effect I was using adult skills to really look deeply at something from my childhood. It felt strange and great and sad.

The thing about Richie Rich–leaving the weirdness of the comics themselves out–is his design: it’s nuts. His head is nearly as big as the entire rest of his body, he’s got these kooky cankle legs that actually seem to get larger the closer you get to his feet, and he wears an insane black suit/blue shorts/white boots combo, that’s set off jauntily by his massive red bow tie. But what really makes his design is the shape of his head, specifically the way the line of his forehead-to-cheek swoops in and out expressively. You could always tell a crummy Richie Rich artist by this line–if that line doesn’t work, the whole face falls apart. Oops I’m digressing.

Okay so anyway I started drawing Richie Rich #141. I’m pretty anal, and didn’t have a lot of time, so I did a lot of measuring and mathematizing to make sure I could fit everything in–instead of, say, having to cram in the last couple of letters in the title or squoosh the bike wheel a little to keep them in frame. Or getting most of the way done and then having to start over. I draw small, so I made it 5.75″ x 8.5″, which is around 30% smaller than the original. Then I just took measurements and divided them by 1.325 to transfer them to the smaller paper.

I basically mapped out where the different title elements would go, as well as the top and sides of the figure, assuming the bottom dimension would just naturally work fine, since there was so much negative space in the composition and I was leaving out the “detectives” subtitle. I actually ended up with too much negative space at the bottom, but by the time I realized this, I had a set of pencils I was pretty happy with, so I just decided to say eff it and go ahead.

I have a weird approach to drawing, and not at all a healthy one–when I draw things I draw their component pieces one at a time, in relation to each other, rather than sketching out the whole thing and then firming up proportions as I go. So a lot of times when I draw from some reference, whether it’s life or another sketch or something like this where I’m straight-up copying, everything looks perfect but there’s an unsettling element somewhere, like the person’s legs are double long or short or the roof of the house is pitched nearly vertical.

In this case it fortunately manifested itself as drawing Richie bigger in ratio to his bike–both the bike and Richie are more or less correct, just not in relation to one another. But that’s not the sort of thing people notice, and for some reason I liked it anyway–it fits the way I’ve skewed the point of the original cover. So, a narrow miss!

I was happy enough with the pencils, in fact, that I was terrified to ink them; I was pretty certain I’d screw them up. Especially since I’ve been using nibs for the last few months, and am way out of practice with my trusty Kuretake brush pen.

The big lines for me are the tricky ones; I always draw them first, and they always looks terrible until you start filling in the other lines around them.

Like so. This is something I wish someone who knows about it would just sit down and teach me, this thick-to-thin ration that makes certain cartoons work. For instance, the cartooning math that decrees that Richie’s head should have a big chunky “holding” line–but that nearly every other line should be of a single weight, and pretty fine at that. I drew all the non-weighted lines with a .005 black Micron pen, which is the smallest one; even as small as I draw the idea of using the Micron for the actual basic lines in a cartoon is crazy.

Anyway, I know there is some cartooning science to this, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. But I want to. I want to put my finger on that science! Because Warren Kremer, who was either the original or one of the original Richie Rich artists, and very likely the artist I’m ripping off paying homage to here, has definitely got it. In spades.

It’s like the fat lines are bringing forms out of the more mundane shapes in the background almost. But that’s not quite it either. Heck I don’t know. But it was awfully fun to ink, maybe one of the most fun things I’ve ever inked. If someone gets the license to Richie Rich and wants to pay me to ink them, I will take that money. You’ll have to get a good artist to draw them though.

Figure’s all done, next up: lettering! Surprisingly, most of my mistakes on this are in the lettering, which I got a little overconfident on. I like lettering and enjoy making it, and just sort of assumed that lettering the small stuff wouldn’t be nearly as hard as getting the big line around Richie’s head right.

Still, much as you reduce art for print to smooth out visible errors, by drawing pretty small it makes errors hard to see sometimes, because they are after all tiny.

I spent  a long time trying to puzzle out how best to approximate the original colors, but ended up ditching the blue background. I couldn’t get a Copic marker to match, and all my blending attempts were either too dull or too bright; the closest one would have meant I hatched the whole background with a blue Micron over a gray marker underlayer. I ended up just doing the underlayer and leaving it at that. Why screw it up just for the dropped background?

And there you go! I cannot overstate how much I enjoyed making this, it was the best. Seriously, someone get that Richie Rich license and pay me to do something with it. I don’t think I could compose new Richie’s in this smooth style, but I would love to be involved with something nevertheless with someone who could.

One $12 Target frame later, and it’s ready to be packed up and shipped off to Sunny California! The show starts this Friday, March 6, and will last throughout the month. Rob is putting up a new piece from the show each day on the Covered blog, so you can see them there, or if you’d like a sneak peek (and/or to purchase one OR EVEN MINE AHEM AHEM, you can check out the Secret Headquarters Flickr set devoted to the show! Okay time for bed it’s late!

Okay! This Saturday, March 6, I’ll be beginning a new 8-week class at Charlotte’s Central Piedmont Community College, and I want you or someone you know to take it. The class is titled “Constructing Visual Narratives;” if you know me you know I did not come up with that class title. I think if I were to call it something, it would be “MAKE COMICS.”

Which is what we will be doing. The Advertising and Graphic Design department, who oversee this particular Continuing Education series of courses, has generously granted me carte blanche to do whatever I like, so I’m excited about this particular class. Basically what I’m planning is to make comics every week, both in class and as homework. We’ll use the comics we make to discuss some of the basic precepts of comics theory and application; but more importantly we’ll just make a ton of comics. There is no better way to learn comics than to make them. Practice practice practice as they say.

So! There is a link to the class listing here–it will take place in Room 255 in the Central Campus’s Overcash building. The cost is $225, and I will do my best to make sure that you get your money’s worth. All you need to bring to the class is some regular ole paper and some sort of mark-making device, a pencil or pen or whatever. THAT’S IT.

Continuing my tale of itchy youth! Man, I have a lot of stories that take place at the camp I mention on this page, but I will leave those for their own cartoons later. I loved it though. My memories of school and camp and all that are mostly pretty positive; I’m always surprised by how many people hate those times in their lives. I would go back in a second, I sure would. In a SECOND!

Oh man. I watched The Bourne Supremacy last week, and it’s still on my mind. Man, it was good, way WAY better than I expected. I remember liking the first movie alright, but I read and reread the book throughout middle and high school and beyond, and knew the story well enough that I was distracted from the movie by the adaptation, does that make sense? Robert Ludlum did write Bourne Supremacy and Bourne Ultimatum books before he died, but if I’ve ever read Supremacy I can’t really remember doing so, and I know I never made it to Ultimatum. So going into the movie, I figured it was just the mediocre second chapter in a franchise, and I was looking to watch a loud action movie basically.

Which it was, definitely. But what was shocking about Bourne Supremacy the movie was how well it was told–literally, I was shocked. I’m not the most, or even the much, sophisticated movie-watcher in the world, and I kind of like it that way. I like not knowing enough about movies, so as to be genuinely transported by them, which I was during Bourne Supremacy. The story was, well, whatever–there wasn’t that much story really, just a continuation of the original superspy-killing-machine-with-amnesia plot.

But the telling! The entire story takes place on the hoof, with someone (usually Bourne) speeding or running or limping somewhere, being chased by the governments of a few nations and worse. But more than that, it’s how the director chose to show the story that made the movie so enjoyable. He moves the camera around at such a blistering speed, that you never have an opportunity to feel “placed” as an observer–it has the effect of keeping you as semi-confused and off-balance as the film’s protagonist. How easy is it for a schlub sitting on his sofa in Charlotte with Oreo crumbs on his chest to identify with an amnesiac master assassin in Berlin? I’m not really interested in violence or spies or all that, but there I was in the middle of the day with my heart in my throat. I love it!

I don’t know or understand much about cinematography, but I’ve been struggling lately in my comics with how to stage panels, how much to show, how to make the panels more interesting, change camera angles and perspectives, bring a reader into things instead of just merely reading. Watching the last big scene of the movie, the big car chase in Moscow, I was on the edge of my seat, and only afterwards realized that the reason was that I was in all the shots, I was being moved and jerked around just like the subjects of the shots. Whoever edited this scene below must have biceps in their eyeballs; I cannot imagine how long it must have taken to edit this movie.  BUT: pretty sure this scene is spoilery–it is after all the big climax. So don’t watch it if you haven’t seen the movie, or if you ever intend to.

Oh! I almost forgot, I put these three sketchbook spreads up in my Flickr set devoted to that sort of thing–I think I’m about 2/3 of the way to having that whole sketchbook up online, which is cool (maybe). I think so, anyway. Shutup.