Rodanof42

ungoliantschilde:

some of Darwyn Cooke’s “the Spirit” splashes and covers.

Good advice: Make your comics and put them online, then make more then keep doing that without stopping for at least 2 or 3 years before you expect ANYTHING in terms of recognition or readership. 

This accomplishes several things. 1) It keeps you from viewing your work as precious. Don’t obsess over one piece, draw and redraw, correct and perfect it all while never posting it. You get better by making MORE comics. Not by making the same comic over and over. 2) It gets you accustomed to the cycle of creativity. Have an idea, refine it, make it, put it up, repeat. 3) It gets you accustomed to taking and responding to feedback and criticism. The more work you post the more readers you’ll get and the more opinions you will start to receive directly or indirectly about your work. 

More good advice: ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS be kind. Be kind online, be kind in person, be kind to your readers, be kind to your fellow artists, be kind to the world. This is important above all else because 1)Being an online persona means YOU are the product you are selling. If your product is a total dickbag, the only people who buy it will be total dickbag enthusiasts. 10 years down the road and you realize all of your readers are assholes and you’ve hand picked them because of how you acted. 2) Your peers talk about you when you aren’t around. They decide who to work with on collaborations, who to bring in on new opportunities and who share hotels/booths/wonderful experiences with at conventions. Word will get around SO VERY FAST if you are not a nice person and you will start to wonder why fun projects keep passing you by. 3) Can anyone honestly come up with a reason to NOT always be kind? When looking for a default behavior, you can’t do much better than this. 

Even More good advice (lightning round): Don’t worry about merch. Worry about making good comics. Dont worry about getting more readers. Worry about making good comics. Don’t EVER compare your perceived success to that of your peers. You don’t know their situation, or how they came about what you think they have that you might want for yourself. Just worry about making good comics. Never envy your peers money, readers or success (sounds a lot like the last one right? That’s because it’s super important.) Instead, envy how hard they’ve worked and try to emulate that. Also, just worry about making good comics. Don’t try to find success by doing exactly what another artists has done. We all have different paths to success and you’ll do better finding your own rather than copying someone else (in art as well as in business). Also just worry about making good comics.

The worst piece of advice I ever got: Get an invitation to the cool kids table, i.e. Get in with this certain clique and you’ll be instantly welcomed into the secret world of webcomic success. This secret club, community, group, whatever you want to call it DOES NOT EXIST. I spent too many years waiting for artists I admired to take notice of me that I eventually started to obsess over making them like me. Spoilers, it never happened and I had nothing to show for all that worry and grief. I gave absolute strangers power over my mental well being that they didn’t even want and certainly didn’t deserve. Don’t worry about making “powerful” friends. You will make more friends in this industry by BEING a good friend first. Offer help, offer support, share your audience with artists whose work you admire. Be honest, be genuine and be kind. Repeat that 1000X in your head every day until it’s the only thing you even understand anymore. 

By the way, the person who gave me that terrible advice was me. 

dailyfantastic:

FF #79:

I absolutely adore this four panel sequence. Ben realized that in order to save Alicia hehad to permanently become The Thing, and these four panels convey that sense of forced acceptance and regret so wonderfully.

Last Friday, the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at Ohio State University opened an incredible pair of exhibits featuring the art of Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson and Cul de Sac creator Richard Thompson, and I don't think I have ever wanted to go see an art exhibit more. Curators Jenny Robb and Caitlin McGurk have assembled an incredible collection of original art from Calvin and Hobbes organized by season, as well as Watterson's actual tools of the trade, featuring hilarious commentary by the man himself. Unfortunately, like many people in this world, I am nowhere near Columbus, Ohio.

The good news, however, is that the filmmakers behind Dear Mr. Watterson, a documentary about Calvin & Hobbes and its impact, were in attendance snapping pictures so that the rest of us could live vicariously through them. Check out a few of our favorites below!

Continue reading…

rraaaarrl:

Master of Us All

Doom wears a cape over his cape and a crown over his hood.

atlasobscura:

Why are these animals in a 16th century manuscript wearing jet packs? That’s the mystery Mitch Fraas, Scholar in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ Kislak Center for Special Collections, set out to decipher. It turns out the truth is a bit macabre, but the illustrators obviously took some whimsical joy in depicting these rocket cats and birds. Fraas told Atlas Obscura more about these fire-fueled cats:

Just about a year ago, a friend sent me a link with a picture from one of our manuscripts here at Penn. I gaped… was that really a picture of a cat and a bird propelled by rocket packs!? This seemed pretty unlikely for a 16th century manuscript, but within a week I had turned up another half dozen examples of similar illustrations. So, what’s the deal with these rocket creatures?

All of the illustrations here come from early explosives and warfare manuals copied and re-copied with alterations between the 16th and 17th centuries. The immediate originator of the idea behind these cat and bird bombs was Franz Helm of Cologne, an artillery master in the service of various German princes who likely served in campaigns against Turkish forces during the mid-16th century. He wrote a treatise on siege warfare (Buch von den probierten Künsten) and artillery that circulated widely in manuscript, but was not published in print until 1625.

Keep reading on Atlas Obscura for a full explanation of these rocket cats from the 1600s!

Oh, good. I meant to make a post on this but forgot. Now I don’t have to.

Q: Who do you find more psychologically interesting, the Joker or Lex Luthor? -- Jordan, via email

A: You know, it's weird. As much as you see Superman and Batman together in stories where they're continually contrasted against each other, full of endlessly terrible first-person narration about how "Clark likes pancakes because he can't understand what it means to be vulnerable" but "Bruce always told me Alfred makes the best French toast, he has so much trouble trusting others" or whatever, their arch-nemeses don't often get compared with each other in the same way. They team up from time to time, sure, but usually the focus is just on their common goal of murdering the good guys, so you don't get too much there. That said, I like both of those characters a lot, and after thinking about it, I've come to the conclusion that as the World's Foremost Batmanologist, as someone who has written extensively about the Joker and his relationship with Batman, it's definitely Lex Luthor.

Boom. Y'all just got swerved.

Continue reading…

bigredrobot:

graemem:

Yes, please.

Oh heck yes.

Yessssss

When the first volume was released more than a decade ago, David Beauchard's imaginative autobiographical comic L'Ascension du haut mal ("The Rise of the High Evil"), the English title of which was simply Epileptic, critics praised it to the heavens. It eventually won an Ignatz award for Outstanding Artist in 2005.

The story, which focuses on the family's attempts to cure his brother's epilepsy, and how the struggle with the illness led the artist to dig deeply into a fantasy world of mythic creatures and ancient soldiers, has been adapted into an animated film helmed by director Christophe Gérard which appears to nail the look and feel of the comic.

Continue reading…

The Demon #1


Mister Miracle


?


Forbidden Tales of Dark Mansion #6


Spirit World #1


Spirit World #1 rough


The Demon #15


Forbidden Tales of Dark Mansion #6


2001: Treasury Edition


Spirit World #1

mendelpalace:

I was up late last night and when I was digging around the archive on here I started thinking about Jack Kirby, specifically Kirby and horror comics. Kirby never really gets talked about much in regard to horror, it didn’t seem to be his bag usually. I mean he did Black Magic in the 50s, plus The Demon and the Spirit World one-off and a few other things, but horror is pretty far down on the list of things he’s known for. As cynical and world-weary as Kirby could be at times, there’s an optimism in him that probably is antithetical to doing full-on horror comics.

But looking at Kirby pages on their own I sometimes get this sense of an uptapped vein of horror in the King, particularly from his 70s stuff when his style got wilder and weirder. Amorphous terrors, distorted forms. Faces frozen in anguish or melting into nothing. Abstract, crackling energy. The way he morphs the human form at times seem like it could descend into straight-up body horror if pushed even the slightest. Even in his more optimistic comics there’s often something eerie, uncanny creeping in the corners. 

You can maybe see a bit of the Kirby-as-horror in Mike Mignola’s comics I think, though of course he’s developed a style all his own. 

I don’t know: late last night, tired, In my head I imagine there’s a world of comics by Kirby that dives even deeper into this imagery and that gut level feeling I get looking at some of his stuff. Just kinda extrapolating whole comics from certain imagery. If I had the time and the talent I’d maybe take a crack at putting pencil to paper and try to capture that feeling. 

Sorry if this isn’t particularly compelling or coherent, I just needed to do a brain dumping. 

Take two minutes to watch what is likely to be the scariest short film you’ll see this year.

I admit, I yelped out loud at least once.

Seriously watch this, but do it, you know, with the lights on

the-sheriff:

Ken Anderson and Ollie Johnston - "best snake gag ever".

>More RH related posts.

I don’t know, man, but once you realize there are millions of people out there who actually believe a giant leopard with seven heads is going to rise out of the ocean at literally any time, you start to understand why they don’t give a fuck about climate change

hexgoddess:

thelilnan:

I was watching Pokémon: Indigo League on Netflix and the Pokédex called Kakuna a “transitional Pokémon”

and then suddenly this happened

YES

My signature Pokémon is a transgender Crobat, and I am totally behind this.

Awesome things about St Christopher? You mean besides the fact that he’s a motherfucking werewolf

Okay, to be fair: he’s not technically a werewolf, as in a guy who changes into a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright. He’s a cynocephalus, which means “dog head,” because he has a dog head.

To be additionally fair, he’s not always depicted as a cynocephalus. It is typically in Eastern Orthodox iconography that we see him that way, though a German bishop who wrote a life of Saint Christopher described him as coming from a race of cynocephali. But even the people who would scoff at the idea of Christopher being a dog-headed man describe him as a giant or ogre, so there’s that.

To be fair to a degree that I usually am not, the origin of the confusion probably comes from the similarities between the words Cananaeus (man from Canaan) and caninus (doglike). But this is boring. Let’s go with the dog-head version.

SO:

With or without the dog head, there was a giant of a man named Reprobus (this word basically means “asshole” [not in the anatomical sense]), who was a servant of the king of Canaan. But being a big strong fellow, he grew tired of serving a king who he felt was too wimpy perhaps for his taste, so he set out to find the strongest king…IN THE WORLD!

He eventually finds a king reputed to be the mightiest and joins his service. But then one night a minstrel performs for the king and speaks the name of the devil, at which point the king crosses himself. Reprobus goes, “Goddammit, you wuss, now I have to go find this devil guy you’re so scared of.”

So Reprobus wanders the desert trying to find the devil so he can be his servant. As it happens, he comes across a band of marauders, the chief of whom claims to be the devil. Reprobus is like, “Great!” and joins this band of evil knights. (Jacobus de Voraigne takes this chief at his word that he was the actual devil, but it’s possible Reprobus was an idiot?)

Either way, the band of criminals eventually make their way to a road that has a cross by it, and the devil freaks out and Reprobus is like, “SON OF A BITCH”

And so anyway Reprobus makes his way to a hermit who can teach him to be a Christian. He’s like, “Are you sure Christ is actually the greatest king there is, like for real for real?” And the hermit is like, “Yes, totally.” And Reprobus is like, “You better be fucking right this time.”

And so the hermit teaches Reprobus about Christianity and Reprobus asks how he can best serve Christ. And the hermit says through fasting and prayer. And then Reprobus says, “Okay do you have anything less boring and shitty”

And that’s how Reprobus got the job carrying people across a river. There was no bridge, and people had died trying to ford the stream, and so it fell to Reprobus, a giant at the very least and a giant werewolf on the more awesome end of the scale, to carry people across on his shoulders.

One day a small child appeared at the river’s edge and asked to be carried across. Reprobus loads him up and starts walking across. But something goes terribly wrong: the river starts to swell, and this kid is just heavy as shit. It takes every ounce of power in Reprobus not to drown in the middle of the river. But he makes it.

He dumps the kid of and says, “Holy shit you almost killed me. I doubt if I carried the whole world on my shoulders it would have been any heavier.” And the kid says, “Um, actually, you carried not just the world, but the one who’s got the whole world in his hands.” At which point he ripped off his mask to reveal he had been Jesus this whole time and then he flew back to his home planet. (It is at this point in the dog-head version of the story that he is given a people-head as a reward.)

Anyway, that’s why we know him now as Christopher (i.e. “dude who carried Jesus”) and not “Asshole.”

So he goes around converting people etc until he decides to go to Lycia, where Christians are being martyred, so that he can comfort them. Naturally, being literally the biggest Christian in the joint, he is captured and brought before the king. When Christopher refuses to bow down to pagan idols, the king sends in two beautiful ladies to seduce him. And Chrisopher converts those ladies ALL. NIGHT. LONG.

Anyway, the king cuts off his head. His boring old person head.

Saint Christopher is one of the most popular saints in all of Christianity, so there’s a lot more to learn about him. Of course, you don’t have to take MY word for it. 

Here is an unrelated photo of Karen Gillan:

calamityjon:

Locas II : Maggie, Hopey & Ray
Love & Rockets
Fantagraphics (September, 2009)

I have a lot of friends who love comics, collect comics, even write about comics and who have never read a single issue of Love & Rockets. It’s a brutally shocking omission - imagine being an aficionado of Westerns and never having seen a John Ford film, or blogging about manga without having ever cracked a single Osamu Tezuka volume - unthinkable, right?

Love&Rockets represents probably the greatest American work produced within the comics medium ever, but it’s kryptonite to the uninitiated. The most common concern I hear from folks is that there’s so much of it, and I dig - there are literally thirty years of stories which build upon an internal continuity in two distinct storylines from individual authors collected under a single volume, plus ancillary stories which are thematically united but independent from the core storylines, AND both books happily dabble in magical realism, introducing the absurd and unnatural in equal measures with the quotidian and the narrative.  

BUT trust me, no one expects you to absorb all of that on page one; you just pick a story and start reading - there are excellent guides out there, like Fantagraphics’ “How To Read L&R”, but I honestly feel you could pick up any volume and immerse yourself in that particular arc right from the git-go, the stories are just that appealing.

And then? Then you’ll have literally thousands of pages of more comics to enjoy. It’ll be like finding an album that blows your mind and then discovering the musician who recorded it produced fifty more, each improvising on its core themes in a new and exciting way…

Love&Rockets is a comic you owe yourself, particularly if you’ve ever waxed philosophic or raged online about indy titles, creator ownership, auteurship, literate comics for grown-ups, breaking the corporate mold, comics not dependent on franchise, varied and deep depictions of women, strong female characters, representation of the female form, questions of race and identity in comics, gender and sexuality, comics driven on character and relationships rather than spectacle - that’s all in here, and more. 

There’s more I can tell you to prepare you or try to sway you - the differences in Beto’s and Jaime’s storytelling, the premises of Hoppers and Palomar, where Birdland fits into the whole shmear - or in the best case scenario you can just discover it for yourself…

Yo, you should read Love and Rockets.

If you weren’t aware of it before the past few weeks, even a passing interest in the recent Internet comics community likely informed you of the medical-expense-related plight a high-profile pair of comic book creators have been experiencing . First, there was Stan Sakai, the creator of Usagi Yojimbo, in dire straits because of an extended hospital stay for his wife, Sharon. Then there’s Bill Mantlo, the co-creator of Rocket Raccoon, who was severely injured in a skating accident 22 years ago and has required full-time care ever since. (He’s been under care for two decades, but Rocket's appearance in the forthcoming Guardians of the Galaxy movie has brought him back into the public eye.)

Both of these men have had to turn to donations from fans and colleagues to help with their considerable expenses, and those people have made admirable efforts to help these creative artists whose work has brightened their lives. Generosity is a good thing. But it shouldn’t have to be this way.

Continue reading…

"The happiest moment of my life was when my daughter was born. The second happiest moment was when I made this jacket."

Sweet Spandy, we love you.

elvisomar:

Edward Gorey Illustrations from a 1960 edition of War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, published by Looking Glass Library.

Yes. That’s right, you heard me right the first time.

A Word About The Creator of Rocket Raccoon:

charlotteofoz:

So the Guardians of the Galaxy trailer was sweet. We all love Rocket Raccoon. He’s a raccoon that shoots a gun, after all! Who could say no to that?

But he didn’t spring, fully formed, from the ether, despite what people may think happens with artwork on Tumblr. He was…

IMPORTANT.

vaginal-erection:

same

Nope. And we probably won’t — I have an intense hatred of the Garbage Pail Kids in all forms. I once said on Twitter that, if given the opportunity, I would punch the creator of Garbage Pail Kids in the dick, only to be informed that the creator of the Garbage Pail Kids is Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of MAUS.

I STAND BY IT.

(I do not really want to punch him in the dick, this is an exaggeration)

"I was coming home from basketball practice, and I was supposed to pick up laundry for my dad. But these two guys were arguing outside the laundry so I stopped to watch them, and one of them pulled out a gun and shot the other one in the head. I turned and ran as fast as I could until I got home to my dad."
"What did your dad say?"
"Let’s wait until tomorrow to get the laundry."

If, like me, you are sitting at home reading Tumblr on Valentine’s Day night, maybe you are looking for something to do. So here is a post about Valentine’s Day.

I might have written about Lupercalia, the ancient Roman celebration that was held around this time of the year, but Warren Ellis has ruined that forever. So instead I will talk about Saint Valentine.

SAINT VALENTINE FACTS

• He died on February 14
• That is literally all we know about Saint Valentine

OKAY WAIT

• He was probably Roman
• There are three different dudes he might have been. Or maybe one or more of these dudes was the same dude. We do not know.
• One was a Roman priest. The other was an Italian bishop. The third was probably in Africa at some point. The first two are (mostly, probably) buried outside of Rome. No one knows anything about the third one except that probably he was in Africa.
• It is possible he was imprisoned for performing Christian marriage ceremonies in a time when it was not cool to let Christians get married. Yes, breathe in that irony for a second.
• He might also have been performing marriages at a time when it was believed that single men would make better soldiers than married men, because married men would be all worried about their wives.
• Either way, the emperor got real mad and cut his head off after hitting him with rocks and clubs did not work out.
• Or it is possible that he was jailed for proselytizing and then converted his jailer by curing the jailer’s daughter of blindness, but was still executed by the emperor.
• Some stories say he left a note for the formerly blind little girl on the day of his execution that was signed, “From your Valentine.”
• The last thing I just said is HELL OF SPURIOUS 
• Despite these obvious retcons to try to associate him with latter day traditions, the fact is, the association of Saint Valentine’s Day with courtly love began in the time of Chaucer, because it was believed that mid-February is when bird started getting mad rutty.
• No, seriously, here is a line from Chaucer’s Parliament of Foules (i.e. Fowls [i.e. birds]): For this was sent on Seynt Valentyne’s day / Whan every foul cometh ther to choose his mate.
• Anyway, a skull that might be his skull is in a church in Rome. It has a crown of flowers on it.
• It looks like this:

Pretty, pretty romantic.

Anyway, happy Valentine’s Day. I hope you learned something, and I hope tonight you get exactly the amount and combination of p, v, t, a, m, h, f, or a-p you want, no matter how many times you might have to repeat one of those letters, even if the amount you want is zero.

Look, there are a lot of contenders for this title. By definition, relics are MAGIC SKELETONS. Sometimes underwear, or hats. They’re all at least a LITTLE weird.

I considered the Mandylion, which was a towel on which Jesus’s face appeared after the ghost of Jesus wiped his face on it because a guy was sad he couldn’t do a good job painting Jesus. I also considered the amount of Mary’s breast milk that was being passed around in the Middle Ages (a lot) (John Calvin said about the sheer volume of this relic that “Had the virgin been a cow her whole life she could never have produced such a quantity.”

But, no, man. There’s only one that can be number one.

The Holy Prepuce.

Go ahead, google “prepuce.” I’ll waiNO I CAN’T WAIT IT MEANS FORESKIN

This is Jesus’s foreskin.

According to an apocryphal infancy gospel, when Jesus was circumcised, an old woman put his foreskin in a box of oil. This box of oil was eventually what Mary of Bethany (until recently conflated with Mary Magdalene) used when she washed Jesus’s feet with her hair.

Anyway, an angel gave the foreskin to Charlemagne at the Holy Sepulchre, and Charlemagne gave the foreskin to the pope when he was crowned Holy Roman Emperor.

The pope put the relic in the reliquary in the Lateran basilica, but it was stolen during the sack of Rome in 1527. The German soldier who stole it was imprisoned in the Italian village of Calcata, and he hid the relic in his cell. The village was subsequently plagued by strange storms and a fog made of perfume until the relic was uncovered in 1557, where it was the subject of many pilgrimages.

However, there were as many as eighteen different relics that claimed to be the actual Holy Prepuce all over Europe. The arguments over who had the real foreskin of Christ got so heated that in 1900, it was made a sin punishable by excommunication to even talk about the Holy Prepuce (whoops).

The Holy Prepuce appeared in visions to several female saints. Saint Bridget of Sweden saw an angel appear to her who put the foreskin on her tongue and she experienced multiple orgasms. Saint Catherine of Siena claims that Jesus appeared to her and give her his foreskin as a wedding ring.

Here is the experience of a nun named Agnes Blannbekin:

Crying and with compassion, she began to think about the foreskin of Christ, where it may be located [after the Resurrection]. And behold, soon she felt with the greatest sweetness on her tongue a little piece of skin alike the skin in an egg, which she swallowed. After she had swallowed it, she again felt the little skin on her tongue with sweetness as before, and again she swallowed it. And this happened to her about a hundred times. And when she felt it so frequently, she was tempted to touch it with her finger. And when she wanted to do so, that little skin went down her throat on its own. And it was told to her that the foreskin was resurrected with the Lord on the day of resurrection. And so great was the sweetness of tasting that little skin that she felt in all [her] limbs and parts of the limbs a sweet transformation.

Most of the claimants to being the real Prepuce were destroyed during the Reformation or the French Revolution. The most famous, though, the Prepuce of Calcata, lasted until 1983, when it was stolen. There are doubts about whether any Holy Prepuce still exists.

My preferred theory, however, about the fate of the foreskin of Christ comes from the 17th century Vatican librarian Leo Allatius, who claimed that, like Christ himself, the foreskin of our savior had ascended to the heavens, where it was transformed into the rings of Saturn.

Think of that the next time you gaze into the night sky.

“

“Do what you love” disguises the fact that being able to choose a career primarily for personal reward is a privilege, a sign of socioeconomic class. Even if a self-employed graphic designer had parents who could pay for art school and co-sign a lease for a slick Brooklyn apartment, she can bestow DWYL as career advice upon those covetous of her success.

If we believe that working as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur or a museum publicist or a think-tank acolyte is essential to being true to ourselves, what do we believe about the inner lives and hopes of those who clean hotel rooms and stock shelves at big-box stores? The answer is: nothing.

”

-

Do what you love, love what you do: An omnipresent mantra that’s bad for work and workers. (via bakcwadrs)

Yeah, my inner life today is no richer than it was when I worked at Steak ‘n Shake.

I don’t think we should measure the value of a person’s professional life by whether they have esteemed or lucrative work. The best formulation of professional value I’ve come across is from Tim O’Reilly: “Do things that need doing.” 

Stocking shelves? Needs doing. Serving food? Needs doing. Collecting garbage? Needs doing. Editing wikipedia pages? Needs doing. Figuring out how to maximize fees on checking accounts? Doesn’t need doing. Engaging trolls on the Internet? Doesn’t need doing. Volunteering at animal shelters? Needs doing.

Ultimately, for me at least, the measure of work’s value is not expressed best by money or love. The question is whether something that needs to be done is getting done.

slutdust:

glowcloud:

hiphopfrightsplaque:

"We live in a world where losing your phone is more dramatic than losing your virginity"

Um ok but I don’t recall my virginity having 16 GB of memory with all my contacts, music, photos, calendars, and apps or costing over $200.

my phone is an expensive and important material object and not a useless social construct put in place to shame and commodify women

Plus I remember where I lost my virginity.