I have launched a new webcomic

I just launched a brand new-old webcomic. Let me 'splain...

Back in the late 1990s when I was a young and impressionable college student. I became enthralled with trying to create a sort of minimalist comic. The idea was not to have to draw the comic from scratch each time. The idea, instead, was that I would just need to update the word balloons. That is to say, I wanted to change what the characters say (the dialogue), not how the actual comics look (the art). Then I thought it would be neat if you removed characters altogether. What you might get would be a sort of anti-comic.

So, I came up with J. Herbin. Here was a character who was simply a passive observer in his own strip. It would have little to no movement or action. The dialogue would come in from out-of-frame. We, the readers, are overhearing an off-frame snippet of conversation just as Herbin is in the comic. I came at it as this little experiment. Would such a strip even be interesting? Could I still make it weird? Or even, occasionally, funny?

Since I had just graduated from college (where I had been a cartoonist for the school paper) and the internet hadn't really picked up momentum yet, I did not have an outlet for the idea at the time. My original J. Herbin comics only lasted a short while. I ended up putting it in a drawer and kind of forgot about it. 

I later learned about David Lynch's The Angriest Dog in the World and Max Cannon's strip Red Meat. I thought, "Hey, other people, much more well-known than me, have done this sort of thing. There might be something to this idea."

Over the last few years, while the zeitgeist kind of centered on questions of connection and isolation, I started thinking about this little minimalist anti-comic idea once again. I put it on my list for projects to launch in the new year and now, well, its here!

The first two new J. Herbin comics are up and ready to read on the brand-new website... HERE

I hope, if you are reading this, that you'll follow along each week and check out this little project. I am oddly excited about it.

An old J. Herbin comic from back in the day.

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Buy my hand-drawn Kindle book

I published a kids book for Amazon Kindle. I formatted the "improvised" comic I did a few years ago, My Secret Island. The digital version, now called The Secret Island, is now online, complete with a brand new cover.

It is the delightful tale of two unlikely friends. They offer each other mutual assistance and it, of course, comically backfires.

Grab a copy for yourself or for a kiddo between 7 and 11 years old... HERE.

My Secret Island page 10

The little improvised comic, MY SECRET ISLAND, is coming along. It is a lot of fun and pretty low pressure since I only work on it every so often in my off moments. It is fun to see where it is taking me every time I hunker down to do another page.

You can see the whole comic to this point HERE or HERE.

My Secret Island

I am experimenting lately, in an effort to improve both my drawing and visual story-telling skills. I am hand-drawing a narrative comic separate from Donnie Rocket Toaster-Face. I am not planning the story out ahead of time, but making it up, page by page, just to see where it can take me.  This is similar to how I perform longform improv.

You can see this little experiment unfold at: DribbleFunkComics.com

Donnie in the office

Lynn J.

 I must admit right off the bat, I am pretty unfamiliar with the comic strip For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston. I recognize it, sure, but I can't say I've ever "read" it. Like Chic Young's Blondie and Family Circus, it shows up, but it has stayed below my radar pretty much.

What is strange is, from the drawing side of things, I probaby should study it a bit. Johnston has an aesthetic like my own, with a style that falls somewhere between really comicky (think Far Side or Wizard of Id) and pretty realistic and to scale (think Prince Valiant or the Hernandez Brother's Love & Rockets).

I just stumbled onto her website. Despite not knowing her comic, I will say, I love her website! It is the most interactive site of its kind I've ever scene, especially as far a cartoonists go. From her daily "Coffee Talk" section where she posts comments from readers to a wonderful "behind-the-scenes" section on how she puts together the strips (she inks the eyes first in the frame!).

 

I recommend checking it out... HERE

Free August Calendar for you

 Hey, friends:

As part of my Kickstarter project to help fund getting CHOP to FringeNYC, I created a PDF calendar of Donnie Rocket Toaster-Face comics. I wasn't going to start it until September, but I ended up getting up off my ass and getting it done early. So, I have a bonus August 2012 page!

And I offer this bonus page free to you. Download, print, share, whatever.

Here's the link... LINK

If you are interested in the full 2013 Calendar, I'll have them on sale this fall via Etsy. They will be signed, limited edition and snaptastic! Drop me an email and I set aside one for you.

Anyway, Happy Summer!

Revising Hawk Season!

"Who now curates what culture is worth keeping, where does it live, and how do we find it amongst the spume of half-realised ideas and half-baked opinions? This process has traditionally been facilitated by editors and mentors, who can help a new generation polish their ideas until they produce something extraordinary. But in the age of self-publishing, that expertise and experience is often bypassed.

~ Molly Flatt

I have been re-working a bunch of comics from 2010 lately. To be specific, I have been cleaning up and putting uniform measurements to the comics that appear in my first collection of Donnie Rocket Toaster-Face comics, I Hate Hawk Season! 

The book came out a few months back, and as it is a POD endeavor, for some reason the finished version has blank pages (pages 37 and 40 to be exact). The preview copy has comics on those pages, but the final published version does not. I haven't pin-pointed the problem with these pages yet. It has something to do with being the middle pages in the book and the print-on-demand process CreateSpace uses. 

My plan is to release a 2nd edition of the book. An updated, better version. The process is giving me a chance to go back and re-edit and revise. And figure out what the deal is with the blank pages.

The fact I am doing this by myself, for myself, does not escape me as a very contemporary way of creating art products.

I came across an article called "The Cult of Creativity" by Molly Flatt. The process I am engaged in - revising my own work because I'm working without an editor or publisher - is touched on in the article. Flatt quotes James C. Kaufman, Professor of Psychology at California State University and co-author of The Creativity Conundrum...

  

"If you were a writer twenty years ago and you wanted to have your poem read by hundreds of people it would mean publishing it, which is hard,” Kaufman explains. “You’d get these gatekeepers who make sure that poem or that scientific paper is at a certain level before it’s published. But now we can circumnavigate the gatekeepers and publish as an ebook on Amazon or make a movie on your iPhone. On the one hand great, I’m not an elitist and I love this idea of democratic production; conversely gatekeepers do have a role. It forces the creator to revise, keep thinking, keep building on it without sending it off into the world prematurely. And it allows the consumer to have a certain level of trust.

Mankoff Explains New Yorker Cartoons

"What he says does have a certain plausibility, and echoes E. B. White’s famous comment: “Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.”

Many years ago, Max Eastman wrote a book called “Enjoyment of Laughter” that completely ignored White’s advice. Eastman’s basic point was that humor is a kind of play, and if you don’t understand that and accept it, you won’t enjoy it.

Play is not the default mode of life, seriousness is. But play is the default mode in cartooning. What cartoonists do is play with incongruities along a continuum that stretches from reality-based humor to nonsense, and invite you to play along with them. The place on the continuum where the invitation is placed often determines the response.

"In the diagram, A is realistic humor and B is not, but both are completely gettable, while C isn’t. C doesn’t produce that jolt that you get when you suddenly understand a joke. It’s not totally random, though. There is some method to its madness. C uses the classic triplet structure of a joke.

" The triad is “hacksaw,” “green glitter,” and “flounder”—three terms you will find together only in one place when you do a Google search, and that place is in Bliss’s cartoon. So even though the cartoon is far along on the incongruity dimension, its style of Mad-Libs humor is not completely foreign. After all, most people have played Mad-Libs.

Go read the whole article called I Liked The Kitty by Bob Mankoffover on NewYorker.com

I Still Draw Comics

Though I've slowed down to about one a month, I'm still plugging away over at Dribble Funk Comics. Head over an visit if you haven't been in a while...

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BEK

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I am studying up on comics lately. One of the great cartoonists I've stumbled onto is Bruce Eric Kaplan (or BEK as he is known). He has submitted over 300 comics to the New Yorker and I am just over-whelmed by his sense of humor and his drawing style. Really simple and his people are so funny-looking to me. And somehow, it still screams New Yorker, too.

I also found out, via Wikipedia, that he was a television writer for one of my all-time favorite shows, Six Feet Under. so, huzzah!

You can see some of his work at the New Yorker Store and read an interview about him and his 2011 book EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OKAY.

The one above is pretty autobiographical around my household.

UPDATE: Here's another pretty good interview. 

 

The look of the 4th Annual Big Sexy!

So, besides leading a workshop, hosting a Monologue Jam and performing as part of Fun Grip in the 4th Annual Big Sexy Weekend of Improv, some of the groups I'm affiliated with were sponsors of the event. In particular, my webcomic DribbleFunkComics.com was on the list. I ended up designing and drawing the marketing materials for the festival and I was really pleased at how everything came out.

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This is the "teaser" poster I made. I later added troupe names and sponsors to it.

 

The poster and the badges

I also designed the tickets for each show that were run off on different colored paper

My poster design was run off on t-shirts and tote bags as well...

I took my inspiration from the Post Magazine cover called "Leapfrog" by Norman Rockwell.

The awesomeness that is 3eanuts.com

Okay, this is brilliant. Much like the awesomeness that is Garfield Minus Garfield (don't get me started on Garfield...) this 3eanuts website takes it to another level. Basically, it is the classic Charles M. Schulz comics, but with the last panel removed... so instead of a joke, it ends rather stark and bleak...

I am a huge fan of the Peanuts comics and grew up reading them. I can totally appreciate this approach without feeling something sacred has been messed with. In fact, a lot can be learned from deconstructing something great like this. This might be one of my favorite ones!

Announcing Volume One of DONNIE ROCKET TOASTER-FACE!

Hot off the presses and ready for purchase at Amazon.com. Every few copies printed off comes with a blank page in the middle of the book. I don't know why it does this. just a quirk of print-on-demand, I guess. If you contact me, I'll pay your postage to send it to me, I'll draw an original comic for you and only you, sign it, and send it back. Anyway... Only $9.99... BARGAIN!

Seriously, This slim book of comics represents the weekly culmination of idea and artwork over the course of an entire year and a half. Get one. Read and enjoy. Post a review on Amazon. Accept my continuing gratitude and appreciation for your support.

Get it here!

Halloween Greetings

Didn't dress up much this year, but here's a pic from last year. I went as my comic character, Donnie Rocket Toaster-Face.