Truffaut's Farenheit 451 Comix

Sometimes a glimpse of something is more compelling and inspiring than seeing the whole could ever possibly live up to. Italo Calvino explored this idea with his novels that end abruptly after the first channel in If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, leaving the reader's imagination floating in a kind of perpetual state of suspense and potentiality.

One of those little flashes that has stuck with me over the years is the fleeting appearance of wordless comics broadsheets in François Truffaut's 1966 adaptation of Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451.

At various points in the film, set in a world where books and the written word are banned, we see characters reading what appear to be newspapers (or perhaps soap operas?) in the form of wordless comics. They're meant to be another sign of the decadence of this future world, a usage of comics which I find disappointing and doubly ironic: it gives comics and drawing short shrift but additionally I wonder if it can have escaped Truffaut that he was telling this story in another visual-dominant narrative medium?

The one hint I've found as to Truffaut's intentions is from an interview in the Winter 1984/85 issue of Sight & Sound with Nicolas Roeg, who worked as director of photography on the film which he claimed "was a film very much to be ‘read’ in terms of images":

[Truffaut] realised that images were things to be read. Like the scene where Montag is sitting in bed with comics. Those comics were very carefully designed; they were a form of shorthand, so that the news could be read in pictures. The beauty of the language wasn’t what was important. It was like a rather intimate film where language means a lot, but we no longer have the language. So you virtually have to read the pictures. It implies there will come a time when people will still have all those emotions, but you have to read through other indications, other signs.

In any case, to me these pages are tantalizing. The art is jagged and modern, reminding me a bit of Bernie Krigstein, though there's pretty much no way he could have done job. The recent reissue of Guy Paellaert's Adventures of Jodelle from that same era makes me wonder if he might not have been the artist on these pages. If anyone knows, please let me know. The fact that the pages are wordless and glimpsed in flashes only add to their mysterious allure. I even love the washed-monochromatic color scheme. They linger in my brain like the comics I some times encounter in dreams.

And notice how they seem to show a mob forming in the last few panels?!


(It's worth noting in passing that cartoonist Tim Hamilton did a very good adaptation (with Bradbury's blessing) a few years ago.)


[Update: Someone on Facebook pointed me to this examination by critic Jessie Bi of the use of comics in the film from the French film blog Du9.]

all images are screencaps from a DVD of Farenheit 451
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Angoulême: report #2

Let me start this post by reassuring those of you who read my first report from Angoulême that things are going much better for me now, and I thank those of you that sent notes (or made comments) of encouragement. I didn't want to wallow in negativity but I did want to share frankly the frustrations I was feeling a few months ago.

Those frustrations—primarily the distractions of family life, my teaching and public speaking obligations, and the never-ending cycle of French paperwork related to setting up shop here—are still present but I have found a workable rhythm and am increasingly able to devote decent chunks of my day to drawing, writing, and reading.

I had a breakthrough of sorts shortly after that last post: the 24 hours comics day hosted by the Maison des Auteurs every year in the days leading up to the FIBD. This year I was the MC, tasked with coming up with a starter constraint that all participants were obliged to base their comics on. The constraint I finally worked up was well-received (I still run into people at festivals who mention it approvingly--I really appreciate it) and although I didn't finish my own comic in the 24 hour period I was able to do so in another seven hours a few weeks later and I was very happy with the results. You can read more about the whole experience here. What was particularly satisfying is that I quickly came up with a story concept I liked and then dove into the work (if not quite quickly or efficiently enough to finish in 24 hours). As I worked I found solutions to story problems and leitmotifs in the course of drawing and writing the pages. You can read the finished comic, Bridge, online for free here.



Though I was rather over-booked this spring I can't say it wasn't often enjoyable and even exciting: in the past two months I've been all over: In Madrid we celebrated the reprinting of 99 ejercicios de estilo with a barrage of interviews and an event at the excellent Librería El Central. I was invited to three comics festivals, in Corsica, Aix-en-Provence, and Amiens, and the latter two I was able to attend with Jessica and our kids. And I was in Paris multiple times—once even just for pleasure!

lunch with Bob Sikoryak and Jasper in Amiens

At the FIBD 2013 we inaugurated the OubapoShow and have gone on to repeat it in various forms and plan to develop it further in the time to come. It's been fun and very gratifying collaborating with my Oubapo co-members: Though I've been associated with them for years I hadn't spent time with any of them besides Trondheim and Lécroart until I arrived here last fall. I didn't know what to expect dropping in this late in the game but I've found everyone to be generous and welcoming and I feel very much part of the group, now. A highlight so far was our presentation of the OubapoShow in Paris for les Jeudis de L'Oulipo at the Bibliotheque Nationale de la France. This is a fairly long-running and popular evening event where Oulipo does readings on different themes; occasionally they invite one of the "ou-x-po"—as the associated "workshops for potential X" are collectively named—to take the stage and this was the first time Oubapo has been invited in 10 years. There was a big and receptive crowd including most of the senior members of Oulipo and the show went off without a hitch (you can watch the video here).




My initial push of public events and Oubapo-related stuff culminated in May with an overlapping series of events: the Musée de la Bande Dessinée hung a modest Oubapo exhibit from April to June and in May they featured the original art for my "History of American Comics in Six Panels" as their highlighted "page of the month". During the national "Nuit des Musées" I hosted a sort of mini-OubapoShow with Killoffer and Alex and Pierre from our occasional partners-in-crime, Éditions Polystyrène, which culminated in a diverse, all-ages game of giant Scroubabble which the museum had produced for an earlier Oubapo exhibit. I taught a 4-day masters workshop on comics and poetry forms which yielded a blogpost here about haiku comics that has caught on a bit online and even been translated by Thierry Groensteen for 9eme Art 2.0. Somewhere in there I also managed to program an evening of constrained film, including Lars Von Trier's Five Obstructions, at the Cinéma de la Cité… you can see how sometimes it's hard to get any actual comics done.

Jean-Pierre Mercier leads a game of massive Scroubabble at la Nuit des Musées in May.

But I find that the basic balance has shifted for now and I am devoting more and more time to simply drawing and writing (and editing and scanning and inking and correcting) comics. As circumstances have it, I have been able to ramp up incrementally over the last six months: I did two short strips (for the Swiss magazine Strapazin and Chicago-based Trubble Club's on-line jam comic Infinite Corpse) followed by a one-pager for Etienne Lécroart's issue of Mon Lapin, the reboot of L'Assocation's anthology title, then a TWO-pager for Josh Neufeld and Sari Wilson's Flashed! anthology of flash fiction and comics. Just now I am finishing up a 10-page comic for an Oubapo project at l'Association dreamed up by Lewis Trondheim: four of us (LT and I plus Jochen Gerner and Alex Baladi) made comics based on redrawing all the photos and illustrations (ads not included) in a single issue of the French newspaper Libération.

I'll never be a lightning-fast cartoonist but I'm feeling happy about the pace I've hit and plan to maintain it if not speed it up in the years to come.

page-in-progress for Mon Lapin

So, what does the future hold? First of all, Jessica and I were recently accepted for another two years of residency at the Maison des Auteurs (is that burying the lead?) which means things are going well here for all of us and we want to keep going. My "project" for the next two years is to produce a book—not a graphic novel but a "novella" or classic French album. I have a few different ideas for book-length works that I'll be developing and reporting on here when the time is right.
Most of the comics I finished this year won't be available for a while, especially not in the US.

One comic that has been published twice is my "Pantoum for Hiram" which debuted internationally in Colombia's Revista Larva (as "Una Madeja para Hugo" and in English in Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art



And here's what's coming up in the next year, so far:

Most significantly, there's my first long comic since 99 Ways, a 32-page comic called Drawn Onward. I don't have a release date yet but I'm excited to say that it's going to be the inaugural comic issue of the prestigious short story subscription-only magazine, OneStory (another buried lead!). 2013? Could be... Also forthcoming: news about how to get your hands on it even if you're not a subscriber.

a page from Drawn Onward

September will see the release of Best American Comics 2013 our final volume as series editors. It's been a fun ride and I'm proud of the work Jessica and I have done there.

My strip for Strapazin should be out in the fall and at that time I will post the English version here and/or on my Tumblr.

a panel from my TV show-themed strip for Strapazin 112

I did a 2-page comic called "Winter Villanelle," based on a flash fiction piece by Aimee Bender for and interesting book project called Flashed! that is due in 2014, sometime.

And early 2014 should see three publications of mine at L'Association:
Cavalcade Surprise, a short "patte de mouche" booklet done with Jessica and Lewis Trondheim
"La Fuite" my story for Etienne's Mon Lapin
"Le Coeur du Roi", my story for Journal Directeur

pages-in-progress for the Oubapo project, Journal Directeur

It's a good start, I think.
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Haiku Comics

I recently taught a workshop to comics Master's students at the École Européene Supérieure de l'Image in Angoulême, France. The subject of the four-day workshop was comics based on fixed forms borrowed from poetry such as the sestina, the villanelle, or the sonnet. (If you follow my work or this blog at all you know that this is a subject I've dabbled in a fair amount in my personal work.)

One form of poetry I have not previously played around with is the haiku. Its brevity and relative simplicity of rules made it a good candidate for a warm-up activity. So after reviewing the traditional rules and reading a few examples in French and English, the students and I spent half an hour or so coming up with quick "haiku comics".

(leer en castellano)
(lire en français)


Before starting we looked at a few examples of haiku comics that already exist to see what ways the form has been adapted to our medium. One of the things I find interesting about the 5-7-5 syllable structure is that there are a number of ways to think about how that might translate to comics.

Here are two very different haiku comics I found online. The first is by John Porcellino and you might describe it as evoking a haiku rather than adapting it faithfully: the sizes of the three panels seem to refer to the 5-7-5 structure, and the text, though not observing the syllabic rules, observe many other principles of the haiku: the present tense, a reference to nature, the obersvation of a fleeting moment. One student pointed out that the framing meta-panel could be seen as uniting the comic in a single, cosmic instant.

©John Porcellino

The next example is a webcomic by Mysh called Imaginary Encounters which uses the haiku has a base structure for a series of autobiographical one-page stories. In this case, the text is a fairly orthodox haiku (even if the subject matter, a dreamy gay travelogue, is far from traditional!) but the comics seems to mainly echo the three line structure in the form of three equally-sized tiers. One thing I particularly like about this example is the ironic counterpoint between the phrase "mountain top", a fairly classic nature reference, and the image of two lovers looking out their "mountain," the top-floor of window of a building. In another odd touch, we see that the place where they are is utterly flooded:

©Mysh

[NOTE: if you like what you see here, Mysh is currently trying to raise funds on indiegogo for a book collection of these strips. Please consider contributing here.]

We discussed other ways the syllable structure might be adapted, generally agreeing that Porcellino's relative size approach worked well.  As a counter-example: we all agreed that though a three-page comic of 5 panels, 7 panels, 5 panels would be feasible it would be too long and against the spirit of a haiku. We left it up to each student to decide which aspects of haiku to adapt and which to disregard.

some ways to adapt haiku into comics

Here are a few examples from the class:

© Elisabeth Holleville

[translation: On the mountain/amid the high grass/of your fur]

© Timothée LeBoucher

© Lise Lamarche

[translation: Along with the birds/the great crane floats/above the water.]

I also made a few attempts myself. In the first one I tried to write a traditional haiku, referencing the present, a season, a moment in time, and so on (it was easy to think about nature and the seasons because it's been a long, gray spring here and in most of France). That said, I couldn't help put a modern, pop culture twist to it, since I was drawing all this in spitting distance of the Musée de la Bande Dessinée, which has a statue of Hugo Pratt's Corto Maltese keeping watch along the footbridge across the Charente river:



You can see that I used the 5-7-5 relative panel height principle here, cutting the space from top to bottom as the eye descends.

For the second comic, I flipped it sideways, thinking that was a more natural movement for the gaze of the haiku poet, surveying the landscape around her. An unusual aspect of this art school is that it is located on a small island right on the Charente, so when you step out, as I did, to the coffee machine, you find yourself surrounded by rushing water on all sides. It is, in fact, about as haiku-inspring a moment as you are likely to find in the middle of a city. It occurred to me that it might be interesting to translate the syllable count in to drawn lines, so in this second version I drew five lines in the first panel, seven in the second, and five again in the last. I stood in the middle of the river and looked first to my left, then straight ahead, then right:



You may have noticed that I also used the words left, center, and right, in the three lines of text. The crane referred to and minimally evoked in the drawing is a construction crane over a new student center being built across the river. Of course, the association with the bird  is intentional. What's interesting is that my student Lise did the same play with "grue" (above), which as in English refers to both the bird and the construction equipment.

I drew both of these comics quickly, without pencilling or much planning, with a fountain pen on letter size (A4) paper. I had in mind an interesting detail I came across which is that a haiku is intended to be read in one breath: how can we translate that idea to drawing or looking at drawings?

After I scanned the pages, though, I had the idea that the second one might work better with a less rigid panel height, something more organic and evocative, again, of the haiku's syllable structure:

version 2

June 24 Update
I showed my haikus to Jacques Jouet of Oulipo and he surprised me by asking why the third panel of the Corto Maltese haiku had "2 x 5" drops of rain. I was confused until I went back and looked at the page again: as it happens, if you count the raindrops in that comic you'll see that the first panel has five raindrops, the second one seven raindrops and the last panel ten (or: "2 x 5") raindrops. Total coincidence, but in Jacques' honor I've Photoshopped a Jouetian variant featuring properly syllabic raindrops:



[A slightly different version of this post appeared on the Drawing Words & Writing Pictures/Mastering Comics blog]

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4 x 4: the OubapoShow post

Recently my friends in Oubapo and some invited guests put on the first ever OubapoShow at the Cité Internationale de la Bande Dessinée et de L'Image in Angoulême (oh, and up the hill there was also some kind of comics convention going on?). We all did performances, slideshows, and live-drawing events. In my case, I came up with Four by Four, a quick but tough constraint for generating four-panel comics. As a way to make it more interactive (and perhaps also to lessen the pressure on me to come up with something excellent all by myself!) I invited the audience to participate as well.
After the jump you can learn about the constraint and see all the comics audience members turned in.

Lecteurs francophones: dans ce blog je vais montrer tout les strips qu'ont fait les participants du publique (dont certains d'entre vous sans doute) de l'OubapoShow pendant le FIBD 2013. N'hesitez pas à laisser un commentaire si vous voudriez que je mets vos noms sur vos strips. Continuons en ingueliche un peu...

The challenge I proposed was based on sets of four: four panels (which I drew years back for a different project), four sets (seasons, colors, emotions, shapes) of four words each. The idea is to choose one word from each of the four sets and make a comic strip using the four panels and the four keywords, adding dialogue, sound effects, narration, etc. You can also alter the drawing to whatever degree necessary.

I handed out colored cards to random audience members (not very rigorously oubapian, I'm afraid) and had them choose the four words based on which cards they were holding. The results we came up with were:

season: summer/été
shape: circle/rond
emotion: joy/joie
color: yellow/jaune

I also handed out about 20 envelopes containing copies of the four panels and a little sheet with instructions and the four categories. While other Oubapians did their presentations I worked at a table on the side of the stage for 20 minutes, writing a strip, showing it to my neighbor Alex Chauvel to revise the French, lettering it, pasting it up, and coming up with a title using all four words.

When I was done we collected all the finished strips and brought them onstage. I showed my strip to the crowd using the overhead projector. Not my best work ever but I got some cheap laughs out of the audience (you can make it out in the opening image). While I was doing that, the other Oubapians were quickly sorting through the collected strips to find a few more to put up on the screen.

Tony Rangeul, Etienne Lécroart, and François Ayroles read through the audience's comics
Since there wasn't time to show them all, I offered to put the remaining strips on my blog, so here we are.

Merci d'avoir supporté tout ce 'nonsense'. Voici les strips 4x4 faits par la publique de l"OubapoShow. Et Bravo!


Cliquez sur le diapo pour l'aggrandir.
Et voilà. Merci à tous de la collaboration.

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Angoulême: first report

"So, are you scared?"

I knew exactly what Lewis Trondheim was asking me, even though he said it out of the blue during a dinner at our house in Brooklyn last August. I was about to take a year's sabbatical leave from SVA and move to France to do a residency at the Maison des Auteurs in Angoulême. A year-plus of theoretically open schedule to work on whatever I want and the only thing I have to do is: not screw it up or, worse still, fail to produce anything. The pressure has been on as of August 29 when we (Jessica and I and our two children, Aldara and Jasper) arrived—barely intact—at the Angoulême train station to start this new phase of our lives. (You can read Jessica's account of the adventure here.)

So: yes, I'm scared.

And to lead with the discouraging news, I've been quite unproductive these first four months, at least when it comes to producing any new comics. The nadir came when I recently backed out of an anthology project I'd said I'd contribute to. I wasn't finding enough time to work on it (though it was only a page) and when I did I was creatively stumped to a point where I just had to cut it loose because it was depressing me as well as distracting me from other projects. All of which is particularly humiliating because I thought it would be a quick amuse-bouche to get myself geared up for longer, more ambitious work.

It's a rude way to begin this residency since in fact I've produced very little of my personal work in recent years and there are all kinds of muscles and reflexes that have become dull and stiff. So the small set-backs that happen in every artistic endeavor feel more devastating right now because I feel like an awkward combination of has-been and rank beginner, trying to find a foothold.

I was fully expecting to lose a month or so to paperwork and getting the kids set up in school and that sort of thing but everything got compounded and time flew by as it tends to. All that said, here we are in early January 2013 and an end (not THE end, no, never) is in sight. So rather than linger on my failures thus far I'm planning for the open swaths of time in the coming months when I'll achieve some real momentum. (And you can bet I'll be posting about it here.)

I've had a lot of encouragement: from Jessica of course, as always, but also from friends here like Lewis, who despite his impish pleasure in making me squirm has prodded me regularly, going so far as to make me and Jessica sit down with him over the course of an afternoon (New Year's Eve, in fact) to crank out a book of drawings (about which more some other time) just to show that it could be done (well, and also because Lewis Trondheim can't help but draw and create things all day long).

I also got to have dinner recently with one of my heroes, Edmond Baudoin, and he reminded me that he didn't start drawing comics until he was 30 and had his first book published at 40—which puts me 2 books ahead of him at the same age. Now if I can keep up with him and make 60 more books in the years to come... (Not incidentally, this is one of the many reasons I wanted to live in France and in Angoulême in particular: comics luminaries come through town regularly and you get a chance to spend real time with them, not just shake hands at a festival or big city bookstore opening).

Last but not least: I love my new life in Angoulême at la Maison des Auteurs! Here's a shot of my studio, where I would happily lay down a futon and spend most of my time if I wasn't a good family man:

The MdA (as everyone calls it here)is an amazing resource, something that I'm not sure anyone could pull off in the US unless it was some kind of for-profit venture or lottery-winner indulgence. Pili and Brigitte, the director and administrator of the MdA, have done an amazing job in facilitating our move. We were both able to get well-appointed individual studios (there are also group studios for anywhere from two to six artists) and I'm relishing private space and the quiet—or the noise—in which to draw, write, and get lost in reverie. Jessica has a bit of a different take on the new set-up here. I haven't gotten to know my fellow residents well for the most part and I hope they don't think me too antisocial but with the kids to run home to all the time I have neither been able to go out for drinks much nor willing to spend much time hanging out while I'm at the studio. There's a nice camaraderie, though, and I'm forging friendships one at a time.

So I'll end with a photo I took in a moment of optimism but which now taunts me a bit. It's an empty art box I'm planning to fill with new pages in the year(s) to come. Well, it is hungry and I am going to feed it:

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A history of American comic books in six panels

Here's a new comic I did for the Colgate University alumni magazine, Colgate Scene:

©Matt Madden 2012
click to enlarge

I drew it to accompany a very good article by Professor Paul Lopes on the evolution in the US from the comic book to the graphic novel.


For those who are curious here's a list of the references in each panel:
panel 1: Siegel & Shuster's Superman
panel 2: Harvey Kurtzman & Wally Wood's parody, "Superduperman" from Mad Magazine
panel 3: an R. Crumb pastiche, featuring one of his iconic "keep on truckin'" figures
panel 4: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen (this panel is copied pretty directly from a Vietnam flashback in the book)
panel 5: art spiegelman's Maus (the panel I swiped the background from happens to appear in the article)
panel 6: the foreground figure is a Chris Ware character (equal parts Jimmy Corrigan and "Super-Man") and the background is an invented out-take from the final pages of Daniel Clowes' Ghost World

I even got featured in a mini-interview at the end of the article:

click to enlarge

[July 2017 update: if you're dropping by from Twitter, thanks! If you're interested I have a print available of this comic which I'm going to put on sale for $15 (free shipping) until July 6. DM me on Twitter if you're interested or contact me on my new site for more details.]

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Tic Tac Toe Jam--a new jam comic constraint, for two players

I'd been kicking around an idea for a jam comic based on the game of tic tac toe. Recently I invited Tom Hart to meet up with me at a café before class at SVA and give it a try.

I posted about an earlier aborted comics project that led to this idea here. The idea is fairly simple: one cartoonist is X the other is O. You lay out a 9-panel tic tac toe grid on a page and play tic tac toe, only instead of simply putting an X you need to draw a comics panel that incorporates the X in some creative way. The game proceeds alternating players until the comic is finished. (Keeping track of who wins is optional.)

Tom Xs and Os...

...while Matt Os and Xs

What appeals to me about the idea is that the constraint works at a few different levels: there's visual play and word play and there's also an unsual storytelling challenge since you're not telling a story in a linear fashion, instead you're jumping from panel to panel, alternating with someone else, and trying to mold it all into some kind of coherent narrative.

game record of the above comic

In the comic above I started with the top right panel: I drew a bald guy because that seemed O-like and had him say ""Oh" as he opened and read a letter--that seemed like a story starter. Tom did the next panel and made an X out of a stack of envelopes, deciding they were summonses. We talked back and forth as we worked but didn't always know what the other had in mind. So when he wrote "24 weeks" I couldn't for the life of me figure out the reference. I decided that six more would make 30 which is XXX--a winning game in tic tac toe. It turns out he was thinking of X being the 24th letter of the alphabet. And so it goes. With the bald guy and all those X's Tom found it irresistable not to end up filling this strip with X-Men references, though we barely even know the characters (yes, we know Johnny Storm isn't really one of them).

Our other strip took a totally different direction, as you can see. In conclusion: a bit of a silly game but the results are not bad and we had a lot of fun doing it and talking about the process. This would make a great minicomic anthology. If anyone out there ends up doing this kind of comic, please send it my way and who knows, maybe I'll get enough to put a mini together.


PS As Tom points out in the comments, what we did to save time (and ensure a nicer looking final comic) was to pencil only during the jam session (as in the pix above), then we each took one home to finish up and ink.

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Unhappy Catalog Living

Though hard to explain to visitors, their dedication to minimalism precluded ablutions and eliminations, so the bath was moved to the basement.

(photo and caption from Unhappy Hipsters; Photo: Uncredited; Dwell)

There are now two blogs out there that add narrative captions to catalog or magazine photos. An early (1995) comic of mine did something similar—you can read it after the jump.

Catalog Living takes catalog photos and adds inane captions that lean towards a silly satire of consumer culture and the Martha Stewart Era. Unhappy Hipsters, applies the same idea exclusively to photos from Dwell magazine, exposing a Ballardian architecture of alienation.

I based "Don't Wait for a Sale!" on a Sunday newspaper ad for a department store. I redrew the images, partly to learn how to control ink wash, and added new text to the copy, though I preserved as much of the original as possible. It was published in my old minicomics series, Terrifying Steamboat Stories. #4, I think.

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An Improvised Comic Activity

Here's a tryout for an activity we're considering including in volume 2 of DWWP. It's a warm-up exercise whose goal is to activate your drawing and storytelling muscles at the same time. I'm not entirely sure how well it works so I would appreciate and comments on what follows. Better yet, if anyone is inspired I would love to see a few more attempts at this exercise. I'll make the instructions as clear as possible. The copy in bold is what I have written for the textbook draft.

Materials:

Office paper

Brush and india ink (or a brush pen)

penciling and inking tools

Instructions:

Draw a six-panel grid on your piece of paper (in this case I'm drawing in a small sketchbook about 5" x 6"):


Get out your brush, ink it up, and, without thinking too hard or planning in advance, quickly make a single mark in each panel: a line, a squiggle, a blot, in different sizes and densities.

Rinse out your brush and let your marks dry.

Look at each panel and try to see shapes or parts of outlines in the marks you’ve made: the curve of a nose, for example, or the drape of a coat, a tree, whatever. Take a pencil (or inking tool) and add to the marks, drawing what you see in your mind’s eye. Do this for each panel.

You might notice that I decided panel 5 was too sparse so I made a few more brush strokes.


Now hold the page back and read the six panels in sequence. Is there a story implied there? Look for suggestions of a narrative thread and tease it out by adding to each panel: backgrounds, new figures, dialogue, sound effects. One of your marks may lead to the creation of a character who becomes your protagonist. In that case you may choose to re-draw him in other panels to give the story better continuity and flow.

The spot in the third panel and the general barren-ness suggested by the scant marks led to me sketching a figure standing alone in a sun-bleached desert. My earliest doodles (not recorded) had the mark in the last panel as a bushy eyebrow of a full-panel face (The influence of that brow can be seen in panel 2). After a while—and looking for some kind of narrative development—I realized that mark could also be a storm cloud, suggesting an opposition to the sun dominating the other panels. The squiggles I added to the fifth panel, a zig-zaggy sort of movement, then began to suggest a rain dance of some sort.


I started to ink in my outlines with a pen (Rapidograph, but it shouldn't matter for this exercise) and to embellish with a brush pen. The backwards C shape in panel 4 eventually led me to give the character a mohawk.


This being a warm up exercise, I tried to do it as quickly as possible and as you can see noted below, I did all of this in about half an hour. I had a correction pen (a really neat one I got a Muji which I'm afraid they might not stock in NYC anymore) that I used for corrections but I tried not to be obsessive about it.


Here's a scan of the finished comic. I adjusted the levels for crisp blacks but I don't think I did much if any correction to the image:

If you decide to do your own take on this exercise I hope you'll e-mail it to me or post a link in the comments field.
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