Adpating comics for the web

I've already posted on part of what I'm going to write here a while back when I compared webcomics and their layout to translated manga, and English adaptations. I'll just come back to this a bit later.

I've been reading Will Eisner's "Comics, a Sequential Art," and have been putting my readings in parallel with my webcomic. Will Eisner analysed, like quite a few other comic book experts like Thierry Groenstein and Scott McCloud, the sequence and design of comic books. When you look into the design of a single page and it's sequential art inside that defined space, webcomics work in the same way. The pages in most webcomics can be read following the "right to left, up to down" occidental reading method.

I've illustrated this by adapting a couple of sequential pages of a speechless comic into an animated .gif picture. This experimenting has allowed me to explore and visually demonstrate quite a few differences, similarities, obstacles, and adaptation techniques of printed comic books to webcomics.

I have adapted these 2 comic pages into the following .gif:

The images in the comics have been organised in the .gif file in the logical sequential reading order. This brings me swiftly to two points: adapting printed sequential art to the internet, and digital medium sequential artwork representations which cannot use digital technology that cannot be reproduced in printed form. That sounds really long, but what I mean by that is that there's quite a few ways to adapt a printed comic into a digital sequential art form, but only one way to go adapt it the other way around.

In the digital world, the tools are infinite to tell a sequential story, and mixing the media to create a digital comic book, say like mixing the layout of the comic, but adding animation to some of the page and images allows for a whole new storytelling method that cannot exist (without a substantial budget, resources and research) in a physical print form. All I'm saying here is that by digitalising comic books, many more options are given to us a part from the printed sequential form.

Now if one has a look on my webcomic browser and remembers the previous post I have written about webcomic browsers, which can be summed up easily by: webcomics favour people revisiting the website to newcomers by placing the latest page/comic in the place of honour. On my webcomic, while placing the 2 directly sequential pages which should/would be following each other in an order that would make the most logical sense. Therefore adapting this to a new medium causes some logistical problems (as I like to call them). This is just worth pointing out seeing as I already discussed quite extensively the reasons for my browser setup on my website. One has a choice to make, and generally, like most choices each decision contains pros and cons. The pros outweigh the cons, but the frustration of not having a perfect system is there: what if I put a few sequential pages on my webcomic, and people read the end before the beginning because of the browser setup? Nothing is perfect.

Pictures of my spray paint

I think I've already written quite a lot about my spray painting. I just had the idea of adding some more comic books to my paint job, mainly because it fit so perfectly, creating my stickman revolutionary group mixes reality and 2D stickmen, allowing for the comics to really leap out of the page.

Stickmen merchandise hits the... well I made a Tshirt.

 made a stickmen comics tshirt. But why? I have to say, I'm quite ashamed to mix this seemingly shameless promotional campaign with art and design. I am quite terrified to mix business with art because that's what I've been taught to do in my under-graduate course.

Is it truly a shameless promotion? Well, it is a bit, but not with the intent of selling anything of making money, it's more of a satirical artistic take on promotional campaigns. I really enjoy trying to bring live to my stickmen in my webcomics. Everything is promoted these days, so why not my campaign to acknowledge stickmen as real people? It's really on the line of taking comics to people on the street, like my spray paint. I guess creating any public art is a form of publicity, by definition at least. So my remorse goes away, and I just treat my t-shirt and its promotion as a playful way to promote not just my website and my webcomics, but just any webcomic, and taking them to viewers in a free way (I only have one t-shirt for now, and it's not for sale).

Here's 3 of my flyers:

I made a mistake in my first flyers which I corrected . The mistake was I forgot to put the neck of the stickmen inside the t-shirt, so that's been settled...

My comic #100 & the Church of the Flysing Spaghetti Monster

Iain asked me "why do you put the email address on the bottom of some of your comics?" My answer is simple: when I write a comic about someone else I send them a copy of the comic, and just in case I write down the link to my website if they want to check things out.

The other reason I put the address of the website on the comics is when I make promotional posters. I put the address of the website on my comics cause it can be used as a promotional stunt, but mainly it's a form a signature.

Why am I explaining this now? Well for the first time I actually got an answer from someone I didn't meet in person, and of quite high profile. My comic #100 on my website is about the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, so I sent a copy to the creator of the church and got a reply. That was good enough to put a grin on my face, knowing that someone liked what I did and thought it to be topical. Bobby, the creator of the church thanked me for my contribution and said he would put the comic up on the church's website.

http://www.venganza.org/ - Church's Site


What is the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Well I do admit it is a bit of an intellectual underground movement, but I'll fill you in. In America, in the state of Kansas, home of Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, a law passed: they had to put a sticker in front of biology books saying that evolution is just a theory and were bound to teach creationism as the other explanation of life on Earth... So as a reply to this, Bobby decided he would present the school-board with his explanation of life on earth, and to cut it short, he believes in a flying spaghetti monster. If the creationism gets into science, well then he should get to dress up like a pirate, right? It's a religious thing in the church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

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

Application to "WHAAM!" residency

I recently spent quite a bit of time working on a residency proposal for a comic book residency opportunity. Outside the pay of £3,000 plus expenses for a 3 week job, applying was a good experience in itself. Being a very new art practitioner, I had never done this type of application, and it has been over 5 years since the last comic book competition I participated in. So this was quite a lot of work, and I was sure I wouldn't get a place, although I gave my application 100% of my capacities. I think it's not a bad application for a first try.

I did pass the textual 350 word limited written proposition onto a few other eyes and tried to get as much feedback as possible. I worked the most on this part of the proposition, refining every word and developing the 350 words to the full literary capacity my underdeveloped writing skills.

The main trouble of this proposition was only 3 images could be submitted with the proposition. I constructed my proposition around comic book design, mainly applied to digital comics. Therefore I had to submit artwork that reflected the ideas in the textual proposition. 3 was a horrible number, I could've done 2 or 4 seeing as I mainly work in 2 styles. So "which style should I choose for the 3rd piece of art?" was my main trouble. I decided for another digital comic done on computer because it probably fitted slightly better into the whole proposition.

After one email saying they were reviewing my proposition, and a second one saying they had quite a lot of proposals to go through, I finally got one rejecting my proposition.

Please find the proposition here:

For this firstsite residency I would like to consider comic book design and its essential role in comic book narration. My intention is to bring to the residency opportunity various methods of comic book designs and how they can enhance story-telling and demonstrate that design is an integral part for effective comic book narration. Within the scope of "comic book design" I am looking forward to the opportunity to be able to work with various artists and authors to draw more attention towards grids, page layout, functionality, and overall harmony between text, images and story-telling.
The scope of activity including design would involve considering the overlooked importance of design in comic books, and webcomics. This would involve workshops in which the public could tell different stories and layout stories in various ways by using cut out speech and thought bubbles and combining with comic book artwork in order to create various layouts, grids and designs to tell different stories or to explore the many possibilities of comic book design and its impact on narration. In order to do this I also have specific authors I would like to view the project alongside the work of artists such as Chris Ware, Hannah Berry, D'Israeli, Harvey Pekar as well as French comics and comic book authors such as Enki Bilal and Winshluss, and refer to webcomics such as Cyanide & Happiness, XKCD, and White Ninja to illustrate online web design.
On a more specific note, I would like to bring forward the importance of design in webcomics, the new era of self-published comics. Webcomics have allowed the birth of comics based solely on simple design, simple layouts, simple story-telling and simple artwork; but in order for these webcomics to be effective comic book medium, they need to emphasise on design and story-telling, to compensate for amateur artwork. Thus webcomic artwork does not push forward excellent artwork but charm, and intuitive and logical design. Looking at this new era of digital and computerised comics would allow analysis and evaluation of the strict impact of sole design and simplicity on the comic book world.

And here are the 3 images that went with the proposal:

This comics is very reflective... but as the following one illustrates, that is what I do... Yes. No secret, I write about what happens to me, and by submitting this I thought I put my cards on the table.

My comic book creation process

When I create comic books, I have to say that I don't always know how things are going to turn out. I generally have an idea about a subject, or I just think of something I'd like to comment on and then there can be 1 of 2 ways I go from there:

1. I put pen to paper straight away and improvise everything: I make up the text as I go along and the drawing, and try to do the most logical and intuitive layout design. I cannot say I truly improvise everything, I simply start at the top left, just thinking about what space I need for the text, and then every new item laid out on the page is created considering what has come before, but not thinking about what will be coming next. These designs are generally the simplest and have an easier less calculated flow.

2. The premeditated comic book design is not the simplest, especially now that I'm working on letter format paper, and not A4. The designs born from this are very calculated: everything has its place and have been positioned in many different places before pen is put to paper. All be it, I don't do a physical draft of my comic book designs, I do everything in mentally, picturing how things would look in different places and how the design and layout can enhance the story, or how I can maximise the impact with a calculated and thought through design.

The saying "read if you want to write" works very well with comic design. After reading comics, the logic of design appears and the "rules and exceptions" of the logic of telling a comic book story seems to become second nature. Most of it is based on the easy logic that we read text right to left and top to bottom, so that's how a comic book is designed to be read, each part of the comic being like a different paragraph. The notorious exception to this deign logic involves putting arrows leading from one square to the next ordering the squares out of their natural reading chronology and guiding the reader. I have done all I can to avoid doing so; I like to work with the layout and design and make them so simple and logic that their cannot be ambiguity on where to read next, and therefore no need for arrows.

The tools I use for the simple black and white comic designs are simple: paper and black ink fountain pens. Nothing is brought through the computer. Making everything by hand stops making comics using ctrl+c and ctrl+v (copy and pasting). Comic books like Cyanide and Happiness tend to just copy and paste every character and their body parts onto each different comic. By doing so the comic book loses personality, clumsiness, and ultimately charm. Webcomics are not renown for the artistic prowess in their execution, they mainly play on good and simple design, and charm and character. I cannot deny that in my case charm and character means mistakes and imperfect lines.

My wokstation:

More dual medium: mixing realities

Here's a few more dual medium (picture and graphic tablet drawn stickmen) That I've been experimenting with.

I really like the brush effect done on this one. It looks a lot like the 1.5 mm fountain pen I use in my hand-drawn comics. On the opposite, there is the following picture done with a the basic brush from Adobe Illustrator.

 

Artwork: black and white space

Here's some of the black and white very simple stick figure designs I've been working on. I have added a personal tone by narrating as myself and talking about my personal life. It's still a bit new to me doing autobiographical comics. Actually, publishing comics about myself is what is new. I've been working on comics which are more personal, and which are very much inspired from Harvey Pekar's American Splendor. Writing about myself isn't the hardest things but making everything public is actually quite complex on a personal level.

Don't take that so litteraly!

There the ones who put it up!


Yeah... You can get anything out of anything if you look hard enough


They should make those signs clearer. Drinky Crow got confused as well. A suicide hotline doesn't mean they should try to stop you from committing suicide, foot fetish hotlines don't try to get you out of your foot fetish.

The infamous to-do-list for the first semester!

Lists work well with me, so lets start doing one.

Comic ideas to exploit:
-God's Second Chance : continue working on the stickman based comic. As the comic evolves the style should evolve as well. This is the perfect way to work on the merging of hand-drawn comic books with the digital/computerised ones.

-Long John Willbert McLeod, hobbo : short stories based on the everyday man: a mentally ill homeless man. The work on Willbert will be mainly by hand and will allow to explore the traditional hand drawn techniques and what work is needed using this to narrate stories effectively. This the technique I think will be most effective to analyse what the most efficient comic design is.

-1001 Uses for a BB-Gun : I have to say, it does what it says on the tin. I was thinking of using a very user friendly digital comic book program. This would give me a very good view of how easy it has become to create a comic book from scratch with no particular artistic or design skills needed.

-You have a geek! : purely computer based comic book illustrating traits which would help one recognise the infamous geek. This will me done in the opposite way of my hobbo comics: purely digital (if possible). This comic book will explore the purely digital format for comic books.

Here's a taster: