Monthly Archives: September 2011

PvP throws down the gauntlet in the “iPads do not make good cartoons” argument

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As pointed out by reader Drezz Rodriguez, Scott Kurtz has been very rapid in responding to the allegations that Steve Jobs has ruined cartooning. From his blog:

Is the whole world going nuts lately? Cartooning is over 100 years old and it’s going to survive shifts in technology and business models. I think that the digital revolution has made cartoonists a little soft. yes the web has made it easier to distribute comics to a mass audience. But the art of cartooning is still really hard. It’s still a decade worth of drawing and writing and self-examining every day to start to become good at it.

I’m sorry it’s hard. I’m sorry that Television sets are now flatter and harder to represent. But your JOB as a cartoonist is to represent and reflect the times in which you as an artist live. That’s the basic tenant of the art form. There are a lot of cartoonists out there whining about how the world is making it impossible for them to be successful. It’s getting laughable.

I actually think that the cartoon misses the point a little, since Pappalardo’s original post talked about how all technology, no matter what the application, starts to look like flat rectangles, and the phone that Scott drew is obviously not a flat rectangle.

But there you go: Scott Kurtz is going with the “Evolve or Die” argument.

One Punch Reviews #52: Wulffmorgenthaler

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Having read my share of Scandinavian comics, I’ve come to the conclusion that the folks up North are way more comfortable with nudity than my relatively South East Asian upbringing. That seems topsy turvy to me somehow. My heritage is from an equatorial nationality, and my ancestors lived on a waterfront fishing community. Shouldn’t people who live on a tropical island be the ones more comfortable with running around in the buff, not those pasty white people who hail from the land of ice and show?

Apparently not, as Denmark’s Mikael Wulff and Anders Morgenthaler’s webcomic Wulffmorgenthaler can attest. (All links here are assumed NSFW.) It received a one month run in the Politiken national newspaper, got adapted on Danish channel DR2, and became the subject of animated shorts broadcast on MTV Europe.

And yes, at least in the earlier strips, nudity is a matter of fact. People in the comic walk around with no clothes on, sometimes for reasons that escape me. One that really baffles me is a couple that’s naked while robbing banks. How does that help? Wouldn’t running around starkers leave DNA everywhere for police to collect? And how does being naked have to do with the punchline, which is “Women be shopping”?

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Technology, comics, and you

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Tom Pappalardo, cartoonist behind The Optimist and Broken Lines, put together a humorous piece about how modern technology — while very convenient — makes cartooning so much harder. From his humorous (yet true) piece “How Steve Jobs Ruined Comics“:

Cartooning is, to me, an art form of simplification. The artist uses a minimal amount of lines to communicate characters and place to a reader. Mouths are often oddly-shaped black holes. Cartoon evolution often does away with lips, body hair, elbows. Eyebrows are reduced to lines. Eyes become dots. A background might be a line indicating where the floor and wall meet. Maybe a squiggle of distant trees, or a cloud. Maybe just a flat field of color. Cartooning is also about communicating an idea in the briefest terms possible. It is literally a shorthand form of storytelling. If you’re making a comic strip, and that joke takes place in a restaurant and the setting is important to the joke or narrative, you damn well better explain that as quickly as possible in the first frame so you can get on with what you’ve got to say. In short, in cartooning things need to be made apparent.

In many ways, technology—especially consumer-driven technology—has been striving for the same thing as cartoonists for years now. Simpler, smaller, more streamlined. Minimalist. Removing as much of the object as possible, leaving only the key components (in technology’s case, the interface, the screen). Steve Jobs led the way for elegant and simple device design, and it’s a beautiful thing. But a cartoonist might reach a point where representing something in a super-simplified style when the object itself is already super-simplified becomes increasingly difficult.

…

People interacting with multi-purpose devices aren’t doing anything, at least nothing particularly visual. They are sitting or standing, moving their eyes, maybe tapping the screen, maybe swiping. They might be doing something crucially important to the narrative of the story you’re trying to tell, or the joke you’re trying to set up, but in appearance they’re just… standin’ there. It forces the storyteller to drop a big dialogue hint to clue the reader in, like:

“Hi! I was just calling to leave you a message…”
or
“This Bluetooth headset is so comfortable I barely notice it!”
or maybe
“My, this is a wonderful video I am viewing on my portable media playback device!”

As interfaces with technology continue to become smaller, thinner, less obtrusive, less noticeable, and less identifiable visually, creative artists will have to continue to adapt and improve their visual communication skills. I look forward to seeing these forward-thinking solutions to these incredibly important challenges, so I can steal them. HA-HA! Some day soon even the small electronic devices will disappear, and this tyranny of the black rectangle will come to an end, leaving visual storytellers in an even more challenging environment: A world of people laughing, talking, and staring off into the middle distance as their neural implants amuse, entertain, and sell them things. That will make drawing stories about them very exciting, indeed.

Check into his site for the rest, which includes some fun illustrations.

(h/t ComicsAlliance)

The many faces of Moon Over June

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Do you like … faces?

Do you like … um … uniquely drawn adult webcomics?

Face aficionados come in all shapes and sizes, but I wager that none are more passionate about faces than readers of adult webcomic Moon Over June. (Not Safe For Work.) That’s why there’s a Not Safe For Work Tumbler called Moon Over June Faces. (motto: “Moon Over June Brought Expertly To Life”). The goal: replicate the facial expressions found in that webcomic as best as you can.

Observe.

The original:

The expert life reproduction:

A webcomic frequency chart?

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From the folks at Slacktory comes this odd little thing: a webcomic frequency chart. The X-axis represents years active, while the Y-axis represents number of strips. Up in the top right corner (most years active, most strips) stands PvP, while newer interlopers, like Rice Boy and Hipster Hitler, are anchoring the lower right left.

I’m… not quite sure what this chart supposed to be telling me. That some comics update more frequently than others? I guess? That no one’s crazy enough to be in the upper left quadrant, because that means putting out something like 3000 strips a year? That for all the faults PvP has, Scott Kurtz at least works hard?

Gary Tyrrell at Fleen (from where I found a link to this chart) offers this conclusion:

My only comment here is that it seems to take the “frequency” part a bit loosely, as lengthy hiatuses and interruptions seem not to have dislodged comics like Achewood and Megatokyo from their original frequencies (approximately five and three days a week, neither of which does so now), nor credited those comics that have upped their frequencies (Girls With Slingshots, say).

It does, however, show how useless averages are, as occasional behemoths (50+ panels in a Diesel Sweeties, say, or a thousands-of-panels Dr Mcninja page really have very little effect on the overall averages. I will pay a dollar to anybody that adds in standard deviation and variances to this chart, and another dollar for skew and kurtosis¹.

Soooo… yeah.

The Webcomic Overlook #184: Cucumber Quest

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The artwork for Gigi Digi’s Cucumber Quest is so adorable that you start to wonder why this isn’t a webcomic that has a hundred different kinds of t-shirts on display in its virtual storefront. In an alternate universe, shirts sporting different kinds of Cucumber Quest characters would be seen on the racks at the local Fuego, on iPad slipcases, on backpacks, wallets, and purses, and on a baby’s disposable diapers. Cucumber Quest characters would give Hello Kitty and My Little Pony a run for their money.

Cucumber Quest is filled with cute rabbits with big fuzzy faces and rounded ears. Ms. Digi’s art makes you just want to cradle their soft, huggable heads of our two principle characters, Cucumber and Almond. You want to nuzzle their hair affectionately, which no doubt carries the refreshing fragrance of fresh cut vegetables or the faint sweetness of roasted nuts. Ms. Digi doesn’t ink the outlines and renders her characters in soft tones and brush strokes (or whatever passes for brushstrokes in the computer art world), which increases the adorability by a factor of squee.

Some cute touches slip your attention initially, but when you catch on, you can’t help but smile. One character named Carrot, for example, has hair that’s bundled up to look like carrots. Cute! But then you notice that another character named Dame Lettuce has lovely locks that look like lettuce leaves. And then you notice Sir Bacon’s coiffure, which looks like little strips of everybody’s favorite savory breakfast. The visual and verbal cues engages senses beyond the visual. It’s hard to see and read about Sir Bacon without also imagining the smoky, alluring aroma of sizzling pork fat. In a way, the food’s characteristics subliminally add to his personality.


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Crabcake Confidential: Never Mind The Bullets

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Windows Internet Explorer 9 — which all the cool kids call IE9 — debuted April of this year triumphantly with exciting previews and press releases and parades and a strong undercurrent that, yes, everything had finally changed!

OK, not really.

I have a hard time remembering when Internet Explorer was still relevant. The IE/Netscape Wars of the late 90′s, maybe? That was a war that Microsoft won. By bundling Explorer for free with Windows while Navigator was still something you had to buy at the local CompUSA, IE jumped to something like 90% of the browser market. It was David vs. Goliath, and Goliath not only beat David, he put on a fancy hat and coat and did a little jig on David’s dead body.

In recent years, though, IE’s been slipping due to increased competition from Mozilla, Google, Apple, and other smaller players. At the time IE9 debuted, it had slipped drastically to 46%. IE9 was designed in part to reverse the trend with exciting new features like … I don’t know … pinned sites? Whatever that is?

Perhaps I’m being blase because IE9 is only available for Windows Vista and Windows 7. All my computers at home are Macs. Thus, I pretty much run all web applications on either Chrome, Firefox, or Safari. No IE9 for me, though not by choice.

To show off the capabilities of IE9, Microsoft produced a webcomic in collaboration with Parisian studio Steaw Web Design. The comic was a short Wild West vignette called Never Mind the Bullets. It was directed by François Le Pichon and Jeremy Thomas, illustrated by Kevin Hamon, coded in HTML5 by Sebastien Doncker, and written by Antoine Laroche.

Again, there’s no way I can view this using the clearly mind-blowing capabilities of IE9, so I’m going to use Google Chrome instead. The comic worked for the most part, but I am going to point out some areas where, I imagine, IE9 was supposed to excel. Let’s take a look, shall we?

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