Stijloefeningen Debuts at STRIP Turnhout

The Dutch language edition of 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style will be debuting at STRIP Turnhout, the venerable Belgian comics festival which takes place on December 13-15. I was planning to be there but I have a good reason to stay home that weekend--more news to follow there...

[This is an advanced draft of the cover, but not quite the final.] Read more...

The Adventures of Sara & Julia featuring Prof. P. Brain

While I was living in Mexico City between 1998 and 2000, one of my jobs was to tutor two young girls in English once a week. It was fun but always exhausting, I had to constantly come up with activities that would keep the attention of two ten-year-olds for a whole hour. Sometimes I was reduced to watching them play video games and begging them to at least explain the rules to me in English. Eventually, I decided I would have them write a comic. The deal was that every week they had to write one, four-panel episode. They had to decide what was going to happen, then write the dialogue and narration. I would then take home their notes and ink the page for the following week. Here's the first installment:

I bleached my hair around the fall of...1999 I think. The girls loved it and called my hair radioactive, although how that led to the character of Prof. P. Brain I can't quite recall. To continue a bit with the story: I'm missing a few pages (see below) but as I remember, Prof. Brain's two test monkeys get loose and knock off his glasses so, unable to see, the professor accidentally sends Sara and Julia into the time machine instead of the monkeys. When given the chance to travel through time, the girls chose... 18th century Connecticut (!?!?) where they eventually make friends with a girl their age:


Now we must switch to VH-1 Behind the Music mode: "But then, on November 16, 1999, tragedy struck...!!" Walking home from a different English class in a nice part of town, I was mugged at gunpoint while waiting for my bus home. It happened very quickly, and I didn't lose anything irreplacable--except, that is, for the original pages and the last few installments of the Sara and Julia comic! They were included in one of the "five folders containing materials for my English classes" underlined below in the police report excerpt. I reported the crime in detail to a man sitting with a typewriter (working in triplicate, of course) in a VW microbus converted into a makeshift clerk's office in the parking lot of the Lomas de Chapultepec police station. He dutifully translated my experience into charmingly stilted bureaucratese. If you can read Spanish at all, click to enlarge:


The comics I have here are from photocopies I had luckily made earlier of some of the earlier episodes. Otherwise, all that was left was one of the thumbnails the girls created for a later installment, where Professor brain finally realizes his mistake:

No one knows whatever happened to Sara and Julia in olde Connecticut (although I'm pretty sure things turned out OK). We got sidetracked on to other activities and then I moved to New York in March of the next year.

Just recently I got an e-mail out of the blue from Julia and then Sara--in flawless English, I might add!

(Professor P. Brain, Julia, and Sara, Mexico City, 1999) Read more...

¡PLOP!

From the sketchbook files...
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Plug: New Fábio Zimbres Comic

Fábio Zimbres is an undiscovered treasure. He's been doing great stuff for years, mostly published (if not self-published) in his native Brazil. He had a great piece in Rosetta #2 but is otherwise mostly unpublished in English. I've been a fan for years so I was very excited to receive an amazing package in the mail recently. It's a joint comic book and CD set called Música para Antropomorfos. The music (and impetus for the project, I think) is by a sort if indie metal band called Mechanics, also Brazilian. Straight out of the envelope it looked like this:


Removing the belly band and the CD (a clear jewel case covered with Fábio's drawings), I found a lovely and strange cover for the almost-200 page book:


What's even cooler is the cover comes off and unfolds, Jimmy Corrigan-like, into a poster of a massive city scene:


Best of all, this is all ultimately irrelevant, because what's truly great is the comic itself. I don't even know how to start describing this very beguiling tale of two cities--walking cities, to be exact (as far as is possible): they are the two "men" on the cover, SP and SF, "walking fortresses".

My plan is to get Fábio to e-mail me some pages (up here in NY Fortaleza Andante) so that I can post some of the art, which varies according to the part of the story it's telling, and at that point I'll try to talk some more about the story and why I think this book is so great--it's easily one of the most compelling books I've read in quite a while.

BUT before you hop on to Amazon, I must disappoint the majority of you by telling you it is in (occasionally dense) Portuguese. Part of my hope in posting about this is that if I get all of you salivating enough, maybe someone will set about translating and publishing this great new work of comic art. Read more...

A Few Sketches

Here are a few sketches of the two characters in a 32-page comic I've been vainly trying to find the time to finish these last couple of years... (The comic itself will be in B&W and will look most like the subway sketch and the second sketch of Ana: chunky brush line and a lot of black.)





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