Very brief update from France

This is just to say I will not be posting anything until after I get back. I'm too busy and anyway I can't seem to d/l photos from my camera. In the meantime follow me (better yet, the whole group) on Twitter or periodically check the feed to the right. Read more...

Nov. 8-21: touring France with Belles Etrangères

For the next two weeks, I'll be touring France with 11 other American authors as part of the Centre National du Livre's annual Belles Etrangères festival.

A film crew came to my house over the summer and shot a bunch of footage for an hour-long documentary which will be screened in Paris on Monday night. It will be posted on line later and I'll post the link here. We're based in Paris and do various short trips with one other artist where we'll be doing readings and talking to the public at libraries and schools. I'll be in Nancy on my own, in the Pyrenées with novelist John Haskell and finally in Corsica with would-be U.S. Secretary of Postracial Affairs, Colson Whitehead. You can see the full itinerary here.

And I guess you could call this burying the lead: I've been invited to be a guest of honor at one of Oulipo's legendary monthly dinners. I'm a bit more excited than I am intimidated!
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Digital Inking

Today I dashed off a few attempts at digital inking.

I'm doing research for DWWP vol. 2 and tried out two ways of doing digital inking in Photoshop, using a Wacom tablet, for a small section about it I am writing.

For the first drawing, I scanned a panel I had already penciled for "Drawn OnwarD", reduced the layer opacity to about 30%, then made a new layer where I "inked" the pencils with the Pencil tool and one of the brush presets that gave a slightly charcoal-y (though too uniform, I think) line.



For this second drawing I did a very quick, simplified copy of the method Brian Bolland describes in some detail here: I "penciled" directly in Photoshop using my Wacom tablet. Then reduced the opacity to 20% and made a second pencil layer where I refined the drawing a bit. I faded that one too (reducing the first layers opacity to 10%--I should probably have just turned it off) and made an "ink" layer. I inked following Bolland's specs, using the Pencil tool with a brush size of 5 or 9. I did a background sketch but didn't finish it. I may go back and do that later in order to play with using the Pen tool to make perspective lines and so on.

In both cases I have deleted the pencil layers to make these finished jpegs.

I have to say I am pleased with how these turned out and also with how relatively easy it was to get a hang of the method(s). More to come...?
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Best American Comics 2009 event in Brooklyn, Thursday October 22

Come to powerHouse Arena in DUMBO this Thursday, October 22, at 7PM for a reading and signing event for Best American Comics 2009.

A bunch of contributors are going to be there as well as Jessica and me. There will be a slideshow reading featuring Michael Kupperman, Ben Katchor and other TBA. Then there will be mingling, drinking, and signing. Guest editor Charles Burns can't make it due to prior commitments but you can count on a lot of cartoonists being there, including, possibly, some big surprises. Read more...

A few Matt-related links

A new interview, a magazine debuts comics, and my first iPhone comic, all after the jump.

Many of you are already know about the Graphic NYC cartoonist portrait project.(I posted about the photo shoot here.) Writer Chris Irving has been following up with interviews and they have been posting all of it on their blog. We met for coffee and then a beer a few weeks ago and the piece went up earlier this week.




My comic "Je vais encore sortir ce soir" (I still don't have an English title for it) appears in English on the back page ofthe current issue BOMB. It's an honor since it's a cool magazine based on artists interviewing other artists; plus I believe this is the first comic they have printed.



Finally, I know have a comic you can download on iTunes. It's my story "The Others" and you can download it for $.99 and read it in Panelfly. There are still a few zoom issues in the horizontal view as of this posting but they are working on it. Not all of my comics make sense read on an iPhone or similar small screen but I think "The Others" works pretty well. I have a few others that might work--"Prisoner of Zembla" or "Six Treasures of the Spiral" for example. I'm thinking about offering those too, through Panelfly or another app. Read more...

Setting up a new comic project

I'm in the planning stages of a new comic. I'm trying to set it up so that I can make it as portable as possible.

I had this idea a while back to do a very simple comic riffing on a quote I've heard from Samuel Beckett to the effect that drama is simply a matter of characters entering and exiting through doors (NOTE/PLEA: I haven't been able to track down the original quote; if you know the one I'm talking about please post it in comments, thanks!). I decided I would try a comic where each panel was the same vestibule with a door on the back wall and doors on the side walls. I would develop a wordless story told entirely by the order and combination by which a set of characters entered and exited those doors. A visual influence for this comic was the grid-based minimalist humor comics of Lewis Trondheim (Mister O, etc) and also similar work by the still unknown-in-the-US François Ayroles. I came up with some simple characters based loosely on archetypes from my youth and started doing thumbnails, putting them in various situations, but with a general theme of a protagonist against a group that seems to be aligned against him.



I realized early on that this is a comic I might be able to "automate" more than most because of its repetitive structure. A few cartoonists I know--Jason Little and Pascal Dizin--have been printing their pencils in blue inkjet ink directly onto bristol board. It occurred to me that I could do something similar, with the added advantage that, since every panel is the same shape and size, I could print out a big pile of them, cut them into small cards (about 4" x 5") and carry them around with me to work on in my ever-scant spare time. Recently I mapped out the perspective of the room and made a very precise pencil diagram, which I scanned and made blue (Pascal taught me to convert the art into duotone, assign cyan to the whole image, and then lighten the color using curves). I'm still experimenting, but my plan is to print a whole bunch directly on bristol, then I can just pencil the figures based on my thumbnails, ink, scan, and clean up on Photoshop.



Here's a photo of what I'll be carrying around in my shoulder bag in the months to come. I'll post more about this later.

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Busy, Busy Matt

Sorry for the lack of new posts. I've been starting up new classes and reading comics furiously for Best American Comics 2010. Best American Comics 2009 is just now hitting bookstores and is getting great reviews. We'll be doing at least one big event in NYC in October, details to follow. We'll also be announcing very soon the new guest editor so stay tuned!

Otherwise, cranking away on DWWP book 2, writing, editing, doing illustrations, planning a staged re-launch of the website... an endless to-do list. Thanks very much to all of you who send us nice mails or tell us in person that you have enjoyed the first book, we need all the moral support we can get to get through this next one.

I'm slowly seeing an end point to Drawn OnwarD, my first major story (32 pages) in several years.

Some interesting travel in coming months which I'll post about later.

And so on and so forth.

Oh, and I am involved in a really exciting book deal which I'm itching to talk about but can't quite yet.
I can however mention that I recently made a book deal for a Brazilian edition of 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. That will be published by a house called Cosac Naify, a literary and art book publisher--notably, the Brazilian publisher of Queneau's Exercises in Style.

Meantime, follow me on Twitter for updates, off the cuff observations about comics, music, fatherhood, cocktails, and life in NYC. I promise I'm trying to keep the babbling to a minimum.
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