laura_seabrook | Entries tagged with comics

I finally saw ANT MAN yesterday. I liked how, though the AVENGERS series of films is mostly based on the ULTIMATE version of the Marvel universe, this one is more based on the original MU. It's about (mostly) the second Ant Man rather than the first. But at the same time lots of elements, like Yellow Jacket, come from that and are reused in different ways (in the comics YJ was an alternate persona of Hank Pym, who had "emotional issues". There's a number of clever references, like one to "Tales to Astonish" which was the comic Ant Man first appeared in!

Also, there's the standard Stan Lee cameo (but you have to really watch) and not one but two teasers at the end (the second not only links into the film but obviously into Avengers: Civil War).

( Hidden for vague spoilers )

Like a lot of others I know, I liked this film. In the comics Ant man always seemed to be a "steal" of DC's The Atom, but here he seems to be his own man. Mind you I was always a fan of The Atom - and disappointed that he first appears as an Iron Man clone in the last season of Arrow. Maybe the success of this film will mean we'll see Ray Palmer using that dwarf star remnant properly now!

While I was out I read some of HOW TO READ DONALD DUCK (which is even online in PDF format), a critique on how strange the comic adventures are, including: no mother or father, but only uncles/aunts and nephews/nieces; and everyone outside America are either infantile natives, or decadent survivors of a long dead culture.

I can't help but notice a certain heteronormative chauvinism creep into the socialist critique (for example, all the males in Donald Duck are described as "eunuchs" because we never see them marry or have children of their own), but it may just be the translation . Also, it seems odd to refer to "Disney" as the creator of the strip when really Disney was the Publisher rather than writer or artist.

A thought occurred to me on the bus, that the World of Donald/Mickey/Goofy et al, was actually a CLONE WORLD, perhaps created after some devastating pandemic. Donald's nephews for example are really his CLONES, and he in turn is a clone of SCROOGE McDUCK. The nephew/niece status is just a convenient term to disguise that. This also explains the general lack of women when adventures happen overseas - the USA had more money to make clones so it cloned a more even balance of sexes (not genders as there are probably no queer characters in the world).

Don't know if I should argue that in the exegesis though - so glad I mostly read Harvey and Dell and Gold Key when young, instead of Disney. ;)

Came across this today:

It's Garfield, with the main character removed. Funny but also disturbing at times.

First roughs for a comic page I was asked to do. Was not familiar with the characters so I made avatars with their costumes in SL for composition. There are still bits of anatomy, chains and feathers missing, and tones have yet to be added.

Crossposts: http://laura-seabrook.livejournal.com/1484122.html

When I do it right, this is what Art makes me feel like.

Crossposts: http://laura-seabrook.livejournal.com/1437216.html

It seems that Jean Giraud (a.k.a Moebius) died on the 10th after a long illness. And who was Meobius you ask? He drew this, among other things:

For most of the 80s I read Heavy Metal magazine and it featured his work - initially The air tight garage of Jerry Cornelius. Cool stuff.

He will be missed.

Current Mood: sad
Crossposts: http://laura-seabrook.livejournal.com/1372792.html

I need an opinion of fonts and balloons. Which is better?

original

modified

Crossposts: http://laura-seabrook.livejournal.com/1272942.html

Discovered a link to this on my forums. Am going to enter as a an individual internet participant.

Crossposts: http://laura-seabrook.livejournal.com/1270421.html

Each year I am keen on both of these events. The following is copied from the relevant websites, and is open to anyone regardless of geographical location.

Drawing Day - June 4, 2011
One day a year, the world stops to remember that joy we had when we first picked up a pencil and created our first piece of art - that's what Drawing Day is all about. The goal for Drawing Day is simple - to create enough drawings to make some noise worldwide for the sake of art. 2008 was the first year of this initiative. Our goal is definitely a long-shot, but we continue to aim for 1 million drawings worldwide. We have no precise measure to know if we reach this goal. If we come close we will all definitely know. Even if we reach 10% of our goal in the first year of this initiative, it will be a great achievement but we will continue aiming for the magic million. Simply draw, then submit drawings to our website or any of our participating websites.

Comikazi Challenge 2011 - weekend of 11th June (a long weekend in most of Australia)
The Challenge is to create a comic in 24 hours, in whatever medium you're comfortable in. Use ink, computer graphics, paint, magazine photos, crayons; use paper, bristol board, wacom tablets - it doesn't matter. Every year we have around 60-80 participants and some absolutely amazing stories keep coming out of the challenge. No. Seriously. Have a look for yourself! The site hosting the challenge (Pulp Faction) takes in anywhere from 170,000 to 200,000 page hits during the challenge period every year (sponsors, that means your banners were viewed approximately 22,000+ times during a normal event)!

Current Mood: hopeful
Crossposts: http://laura-seabrook.livejournal.com/1186213.html

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: The Stranglers

I was on OTAKU and came across this on one of their forums. It's a "one-off anthology for women in the Australian Comics scene". Are you a woman in the Australian Comics scene? Then why not contribute?

The deadline for contributions is DECEMBER 2010 and the web page for it is here.

Found a link to Superdickery in a comics forum.

It's been making me laugh for almost an hour naow.

Just a couple of links to two sites that list tropes and cliches that tend to turn up in writing, including comic writing.

The first is TV TROPES which is "a catalogue of the tricks of the trade for writing fiction". I've linked to this before. There is an extensive list of entries which include examples from comics, manga and anime (as well as TV, film and so on). I found this to be hilarious to browse through. For example,

Put On A Bus is "a character is written out of a series in such a way that they can easily be returned later, if the producers so choose. They are Put On A Bus " and an example of this from comics is "Between the late 1960s and his return in the early '80s, J'onn J'onnz, the Martian Manhunter of the Justice League, went off to find "New Mars" with the rest of the Martian people. This has since been retconned — along with the existence of other Martians in general. "

Turkey City Lexicon is a much smaller list detailing overused techniques and shortcuts in SF stories. However, a fair number of these also overflow into comics. I particularly like...

"Plot Coupons" (The “hero” collects sufficient plot coupons (magic sword, magic book, magic cat) to send off to the author for the ending); and
"Signal from Fred" (the author’s subconscious, alarmed by the poor quality of the work, makes unwitting critical comments: “This doesn’t make sense.” “This is really boring.” “This sounds like a bad movie”).
"Card Tricks in the Dark" used to be a staple of comic plots at DC in the 60s - Gardener Fox (or some such) would pull out some amazing bit of trivia that only he and the hero knew, and use it to unravel the plot of the villain.

I also just came across Superhero Nation: how to write superhero novels and comic books but haven't had a good look at it yet. The Five superhero plots that need to die page looks amusing.

The collected volume of the Clone War Saga for Ultimate Spiderman turned up in the local library, and I naturally borrowed it. I wasn't reading Spiderman much when the first clone saga unravelled so I can't really compare this to it. I must say though that I thoroughly go into it. All this is probably old hat to everyone here, I really liked Spider Woman in it.

( Spoiler under cut )

So I was impressed. I borrowed another collected volume as well and that one was titled "War of the Symbiotes". Haven't read it yet and of course the first guess would be Venon vs Carnage, but in the Ultimate continuity that seems unlikely, though there's probably an even chance that Spider Woman will be involved. I'll have the fun of finding out soon.

Current Mood: pleased

Also see Matt Howarth's Attic.

Doc Rat is a "furry" strip by someone I vaguely knew a long time ago in Perth Fandom:

Probably old news, but (from pinknews)...

A comic book featuring an all-LGBT team has gone on sale.

Spandex is set in Brighton and features trans crime fighter Liberty and Diva, a lesbian equivalent of Wonder Woman, as they take on various villains, including the 50ft Lesbian who attacks the city's seafront.

Other characters are the Adam Lambert-lookalike Neon, twins Butch and Mr Muscles, Glitter, Prowler and Indigo.

Series creator Martin Eden, who made The O Men, said: "Gay people in comics are fairly under-represented, but this new comic aims to address that. Spandex introduces a whole bunch of fabulous new characters who are set to take the comic world by storm."

"It's a fun, experimental comic, full of drama, comedy, romance and action… all done in the best possible taste."

A 120-page graphic novel is set to be released next year but for now, fans will be able to buy Spandex Shorts, a mini series introducing each character.

Current Mood: drained
Current Music: Interpol - [Turn On The Bright Lights #04] PDA

Just read the Wallsend Library copy of Life Sucks, which from the cover looks to be an expose of Clerks' style ennui of the night shift. It wasn't until I turned page 51 that I realised what the "twist" was! Well written and well worth a read.

I also read the library copy of THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST NEW MANGA #3. Just as good as the previous two (both of which were in the local libraries) and this one is in COLOUR!!! I intend to follow up some of the strips featured in this as well.

Current Mood: cheerful

I have a set of photos about the Zine Fair at Flickr.

Current Mood: satisfied

Yesterday I printed three 24 page comics for This Is Not Art Zine Fair. Two comics reprint two of my web comics (one about Real Life, the the other from Second Life) and the third is all new material.

In part, all three were done to test a number of ideas I had about the two graphic novels I'm doing for my Masters in Fine Art. I needed to see if writing a script first, and using half-tones, would make a difference to how I produce comics. While the conditions under which I did that weren't ideal (three months of work and preparation reduced to 2 weeks due to illness and other problems) I think I did get a result.

Normally I don't write scripts for my comics. Individual stories tend to be either short or "made up as I go". In the first case it's all in my head and tends to come out naturally. In the second case (especially for one of the web comics I do) that hasn't been a big issue as it's led to a few surprises, but it has been an issue for another when I just ran out of plot! And of course if I try and draw a 100+ page graphic novel without a script, then it's not going to be very coherent is it? I used Zhura (an online service).to write the scripts as I didn't have to install anything and could access it anywhere I got get net access. Once I started I found that describing what went into each panel, dialogue, et cetera, forced me to organise things, and once written I knew exactly what had to be done where. Rather than work sequentially then, I was able to do panels in a more convenient order and source photo references easily.

This might be an obvious thing to everyone else, but a major difference for me. I have much more confidence now that I will get those graphic novels done.

Current Mood: artistic

Profile

laura_ess

August 2019

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Base style: Refried Tablet by zvi and Aaron B. Russell
Theme: Teals by krja

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jun. 8th, 2025 12:01 am

Laura Seabrook's Ramblings

Stuff about Laura and her friends

Entries tagged with comics

Ant Man

How to Read Donald Duck

Garfield minus Garfield

1st roughs

Making Comics Music

R.I.P. Jean Giraud (Moebius)

an opinbion pls

24-Hour Comics Day 2011 is October 1st!

Cominup in June...

Comikaze Challenge soon!

Chicks in Comics

Superdickery

Anti-cliche writing links

Ultimate Clone War Saga

Bugtown

Doc Rat

Gay superheroes star in new comic

Two comic Books

Photos from yesterday

New Comics from Me