Orc Stain - Colours, design, and creativity,

Orc Stain is a new comic from Image Comics, probably the biggest "independent" comic book company there is. The first issue was released last month, and there's only one man behind it: James Stokoe. He created, wrote, drew and coloured Orc Stain. There's a theory amongst comic book artists that one man crews do a better job at creating comics than the classic writer/artist duo. The theory comes from quite a long series of examples, like Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Denis Bajram, and Eric Hérenguel, just to name a few. The idea is that when you work alone, there's no comprise to be had with the creative idea behind the comic book, but that seems to be a debate that has been going on for as long as "art" has been around.

Moving on from this one man crew system, Orc Stain is without a doubt in my mind the most creative American comic book released this year. I am trying not to get too caught up in my enthusiasm about this comic book. To be fair I did wait until issue 2.

Orc Stain is full of colour, the shades are incredible, and the design of every single creature and scene in this comic is absolutely amazing and represent a source of creativity which I have rarely seen in American comic books. The fact is that, by "tradition" most creative and experimental comic books have been European. American comics are still under the influence of DC and Marvel Comics. Paul Gravett, comic book publisher, curator, artist, and critic talks about this overwhelming reign of influence of Marvel and DC as a very negative movement and influence in the comic book world. The American comic book world is extremely oriented around superheroes. The industry is so caught up in the superhero business, especially with Hollywood buying all the superhero films rights. So much so that non-superhero American comics have become rare.

"Why is Orc Stain so special?" might you ask. In this comic, in addition to the design and colour work James Stokoe brilliantly created, there is a brand new imaginative world with an original story, great characters, and overall a comic that knocks down all boundaries. A one-eyed orc safe cracker as a main character is brilliantly imaginative, especially when you learn that the safes are big bear-like creatures with an ancient safe-lock system on there stomach. Need I say more?

Simply genius comic book design

I don't know how many people know the Moomins, but I just got my hands on a beautiful edition of the English translation of the original comics. This comic was started in 1945, and went on until 1993, and the design of the comic is absolutely genius.

Tove Jansson created in the Moomin comic book amazing designs and comic book flow. The use of the hose as the frame of the comic and making it lead in such a clever way from square to square it a beautiful design method allowing for a smooth flow of the story and the artwork across the page. The detail of the details create a very playful design and flow that all can appreciate.

On further extremely good design, a young artist from Brighton comes to mind: Hannah Berry. I often think of her when I am designing my own comics and thinking about the narrative flow and boundaries of my comics.

In the opening page of Britten & Brülightly, by Hannah Berry, nominated this year for the grand prize of Angoulème comic book festival, one can see a comic book page with no traditional block boundaries between the action in the comic. The text is not in speech or though bubbles, the images create their own boundaries and the flow of time is expressed in the simplest way. The simplicity of the narration flow comes through the balance of the artwork and the storytelling, allowing for the images to flow naturally and the story to be told in an original and artistic manner. Hannah Berry, as I do, uses white space to separate the the frames of the comic book and lets the natural boundaries of the images be self sufficient. The narration through images comes so naturally that one is instantly drawn into the comic book.

My "other work" page on my website and digital solutions

After the talking last Monday I took the leap and edited my website's design. I added 2 buttons on the main menu bar: one is my website email address, and the other is an "other work" button. I've added a page where I introduced my digital work and have posted 3 digital images so far.

I've been working quite a bit on my digital comics, and have been having a hard time merging the different pieces of the story together. I've tried simple uni-colour background, painting with a digital brush on the back, photo-album-like frames, lines which go with the pictures, and many many other attempts that simply did not work at all.

While reading Haunt #5, by Todd McFarlen and Greg Capullo, the men behind Spawn, and I came upon this:

It's a simple sequence of 3 squares, but they have no borders and are linked together so perfectly with the background. This comic doesn't have photographies like the digital ones I do, but it gave me the inspiration I needed to blend squares of my own digital comics together: make the background photo merge into a blurred colour related to the picture and interlink those with the other squares. My main problem with the digital comics is the redundancy of the link I use in the comics, but with this technique, every comic would be unique due to unique colours in the photographies.

Second Plans for the Live Stick

Here are my second plans for the live stickman statue. After the group presentation and a couple comments by Matt and Mark, I decided to work on a more pose-able statue, a bit like a giant action figure (to avoid using the word "doll"). The statue would be more versatile and could have many many scenario uses, and would allow to take the statue to more public places.

There are quite a few logistical problems, but I have also come up with solutions. First of, I think the articulation is quite simple, although it would be nice to have a rotation in the upper arm of the statue, allowing for more diverse poses. A screw mechanism for the arm rotation needs more research in the "technology", or should I say by a few visits to the hardware store.

As good news, the whiteboard option is really simple: rolls of disposable whiteboard are available for about £20 for 25. This will allow for a very easy creation of the speech bubble, and my new addition, a whiteboard face!

I plan to use whiteboard for the face of the stickman in order to be able to modify his facial expression, once again to allow for much more manoeuvrability.

Sketches for the stickman statue

As said before, I have spent quite a long time thinking through the logistics of creating this stickman statue and here are my sketches for the creation of it.

Prototyping prototypes

I have two research ideas that I working on. They are both in the same ideal of taking the comic book out of the page and into the real world. As I have explained earlier, I see this as the "analog" version of the webcomic. I started spray painting comics on the wall of a squat/old train shed, but it recently got fire-bombed. A trajic accident not for the artwork on the wall or the collection of garbage and rusted circular saws in the shed, but because of my neighbor's race-pigeon housing being the intended target...

Anyways, the outer walls of the shed I started "publishing" comics on is now black from the fire damage, which gives me an entire new clean-ish surface to work with. I plan on making a wall painting with stickmen as close to life-size as practically and safely possible.

Here is the script for the 1 square wall-painted comic I want to do:

Robber stickman with knife and mask mugs another stickman. He stand on the left of the scene for faster reading purposes (as I have mentioned before in other blog posts, we read English from left to right and top to bottom, therefore for faster readability of the comic the text and images should be situated logically from left to right and top to bottom). The mugged stickman stands on the right looking into his hand.

Mugger: "The money or your life!"
Mugger victim: "I'll meet you half ways. Call it £3.42"

Extremely simple scenario which brings incredibly light humor into a publicly accessible spray painted artwork. The piece will be free to see to all that pass by, making a free self-published "analog" comic.

I tend to spend a lot of time on logistical problems so I am sure everything is executed in a quick and efficient manner. I have achieved a satisfying plan of making a huge stencil with the biggest piece of paper/card I could afford. I will make a giant solid stencil out of it. In fact 3 stencils: 1 for each character and 1 for the text. I am now on the way of thinking on how to create in the most precise manner this stencil. I first thought of drawing it myself on A1 paper. I do foresee the drawing as problematic, not being anywhere used to drawing on such a huge scale, but my main concern lies with the cutting out. All in all, my colleague Mark Rae said to me yesterday that if it where him, he would do it through computers. I think that it is the best solution, especially considering that I need a vectorial program drawn image to have it cut out by a computer and I just so happen to exclusively draw computerised stickmen through Adobe Illustrator which just so happens to be a vectorial program. I plan to use this to create my stencil.

I now have to design the comic on illustrator and experiment with the best stencil techniques to create a clean and functioning giant stencil.



My second project I am also prototyping for alter is the creation of a stickman statue with a white-board/dry eraser board located in the speech bubble. This would allow for the public to add their own story and text to the statue of the stickman, and create an simple, free and playful/recreational publicly accessible comic book creator. On the internet there a dime-a-dozen free Flash programs to create and design your own comics through pre-made artwork and speech bubble tools. This would be a less elaborate and simpler "analog" alternative, bringing the Flash comic book programs to the public.

This would be a participatory and performance-like public project. Although to do this, I have to create the statue, and as for the stencil I like to plan ahead and have a clear and precise plan. The create the statue I need to choose material: re-bar or metal would be my first choice as an aesthetically and tactilely pleasing material to create a stickman out of. In addition to that, welding a speech bubble onto it would be easier and have a high production value statue feel to it. Although this would be a good approach for someone with the time and resources which I dunno posses, I find it would also be very hard to transport and impractical, therefore removing the option of a more mobile statue.

Like the stencil, I foresee myself creating the statue in 2 to 3 pieces from wood carved/shaped through a computer based vectorial program. This creation would be completely 3 dimensional and I am quite new to the creation process therefore more research on that part of the production is needed. A part from that, I have thought about the shape/form of the statue and mainly the way it would be part together: a base, a stickman and a speech bubbly made from wood and spray painted black matt or semi-gloss. The material are cheaper and lighter than metal and allow for much for manoeuvrability. In addition to this the stand would be relatively cheap to create as well as stable. For the stickman, carving him from one solid piece of wood might not only be problematic but also impractical. Therefore he could be divided into 2 pieces at the mid-section. A bolt could be placed inside the body of the stickman allowing for an easy way of putting the piece together as well as making it more transportable.

My main logistical problem for choosing wood as a material of choice is the speech bubble which would need a very solid support, therefore the positioning of it has to be carefully thought through for safety and stability reasons, and to create a solid enough speech bubble that has enough support from the main statue piece. It could be detachable and connectible through a bolt to the main piece. The centre of the speech bubble would be a modified whiteboard shaped as needed, and allowing the public to easily add their text to the scene, allowing them to add their own input to the life comic book scene.

Illustration and plans are still to be finished.

Self critic in my work

I never really realised until recently that I did quite a lot of self-critic of my work in my work. I didn't realise this because I did most of these self critic comics to express my insecurities about my work. It's also my way of being honest and saying "I'm no artist, but Hell, I'll keep doing this until someone stops me." Apart from my deep sense of insecurity, I like admitting most of my work is poor on an artistic scale, mainly because I'm aiming to explore the design perspective of comic books and not become a comic book artist.

I don't know why, but honesty about my work seems to drive me forward. For me, being honest and constantly criticising my work allows me to move forward and mainly not to become one of those artists I despise so much because they have lost all links with reality. I've been very inspired by the philosophy of Harvey Pekar and Robert Crumb, especially their work in American Splendor. "Bob and Harv" constantly critic not only their lives but also their work and life and even author/artist relationship.

American Splendor cover with Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar discussing record trades, both being jazz and blues record collectors.

One of my first insecurities and main critics is my simple use of stickmen. I have to admit that I have evolved and widened the array of expression of my stickmen, but it took Jean Louis Mourrier four volumes of Trolls de Troy to draw trolls the way they look now.

As it can be seen on the cover, every artist's style evolves with time. Mourrier admitted his style evolved and has compared his trolls to Tarquin's original trolls from Lanfeust de Troy. I met Mourrier twice at the Angoulème 2009 festival and asked him about the evolution of his style. He said that the more you work on your character design, the more they fall into shape naturally.


Stickmen comics have become more and more natural, especially the one I have done from a graphics tablet.

I have made comments on every aspect of my work, from the format of the paper, to the pickles from outer-space and different details in stickmen as well as my general narration methods.

http://www.stickmencomics.com

I started my very own webcomic. I decided, on the 3rd of January, that I would get some webspace and expand from my research oriented blog and publish my comics to the public. One month later, it was live. Now, it's all set up and running fine.

First of all, I had the idea that for the website's design to hand-draw the whole website. I do have a few words typed in, but it was mostly in case someone couldn't read my handwriting. The website is simple. That's all I wanted, simplicity and with a sensation of the website being an odd mix of hand drawn design on a purely digital publishing medium. I really like that contrast of digital perfectly solid black line and the pen drawn "black" line which had the waves, strengths, weaknesses, and swerves of black ink, being so perfectly imperfect.

The website is constructed on the basic webcomic template after studying other webcomic website designs. The main inspiration in its simplicity was XKCD. Although my website has very specific originalities which can easily be overlooked but has great impact on the actual content, impact and delivery of the webcomics. The website has only 3 pages: home (where the comic browser is), archives (to find speicific comics) and info (where I briefly explain what I am doing and leave my author's email - fnic@stickmencomics.com). The main impact of the website design on the comics is the home page on which I allocated a browser space which has a width of 595 pixels. It just happens I chose that width because it is the pixel equivalent width of A4 paper. Added to that, the only design "perk" I added to my website were the sidebars which impose a certain height for the browser. All in all, I purposely limited my publishing area for my comic books to A4 or "letter" size comics. Most of the webcomics I have viewed have their own self-imposed format, although largely favoured layout is in "strip" format, or landscape.

The technical difficulty is the viewer has to scroll down to see the whole comic. It has up sides and down sides. The main up side is that the down side of the comic isn't visible. This allows for an effective delivery of the punchline. That is a worry because the text is as important of as the art. Therefore it is important to get the viewer to read the last part of the comic last. On the really down side is that on a small screen, say a 15" with 800x600 resolution, the whole website isn't visible. I considered that, then I thought: "people who still use those screens are: 1/at work, 2/ using a very old home computer screen". Therefore I decided to continue with my project the way it was thinking that demographic of readers wouldn't exactly be those who read my webcomics.

The archive cause me a bit of grief. It was the hardest decision to take, not because of technical advise but mainly because of design practicalities and layout. The archive has to make it easy for one to find a specific webcomic quickly, which also keeping loading time into consideration. Flash could have done the job but now more and more security systems block flash. Thumbnails would have been too network heavy, and a browser would have the process too long. Thus my choice of a unique list, as used on XKCD, but organised and laid out in a more specific and user friendly way. My only question that remains is: "should I keep the sidebars and if so, should I impose a heigh limit on the table enabling a scroll bar on inside the actual archive?". I still have not made up my mind.

My webcomics can be found on my website: http://www.stickmencomics.com