I’m just going to write about fonts today, an important part of making a comic book. It just occurred to me that I never mentioned before what font I used for my Card Players comic, and after all this is a blog about making comics so I would like it to be as comprehensive as possible. Initially, I wanted to hand-letter the comic myself but after doing the first few pages, I decided my lettering was atrocious. I’m far too impatient to write slowly and so everything comes out looking like a dog’s breakfast. I even have an Ames lettering guide that I picked up from eBay some years back but no patience to use it properly. So I decided to do all the lettering by computer, so I could tweak it as I went along, which turned out to be the best strategy.
For my Card Players comic, I used the free font ‘Chronicles of a Hero’ from the excellent Blambot website. Many years ago I used to collect free fonts and had a stack of 3.5″ discs full of font archives. Now I’m on the hunt again.
I thought I’d post here about the relatively few graphic novels I’ve read, as well as my biggest influences as far as pictorial story telling goes. I havene’t been reading graphic novels for very long and certainly not very avidly. I still struggle to see myself as a comic reader in that repsect, I have only ventured once into Gosh Comics in Bloomsbury, and the oinly thing I came out with was a compilation: ‘Clyde Fans Part 1’ as a Christmas present for the same friend who had introduced me to Chris Ware. I had been reading Ware’s oddly sized Acme Novelty releases from time to time, but nothing in them had particularly moved me. I felt far more affinity with Seth, with his nostalgic and melancholic yearning for the past which he re-imagines as a sort of near-ideal world where it wa spossible for an ordinary person to achieve true happiness. His drawing could be described as having a sort of retro, elegant, Mid-century style. So here are some of my favourite graphic novels on my bookshelf, in no particular order:
Jimmy Corrigan – The Smartest Kid On Earth (Chris Ware)
It’s A Good Life If You Don’t Weaken (Seth)
Fun Home (Alison Bechdel)
Blankets (Chris Thompson)
Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi)
Maus (Art Spiegelman)
George Sprott (Seth)
There is a trend here – the graphic novel as an autobiographical device, and I think it can work extremely well, one doesn’t have to take oneself too seriously and still produce an autobiography well worth reading!
I am eagerly awaiting Craig Thompson’s impending release of ‘Habibi’, he is an incredibly talented artist, but I don’t really see myself making any new purchases very soon. I am a much bigger fan of comic strips, having grown up enjoying a huge variety; the Sunday funnies were the first pages I read on a Sunday morning, ahead of the news and everything else. So I am collecting Fantagraphic’s excellent “Collected Peanuts” volumes, released once every quarter. I’m up to the 1970s now and there’ll be many volumes to go before I’ll have accumulated the entirety of Charles Schultz’s prodiguous Peanuts output. Other favourite comic strip artists include Sam Waterman (Calvin and Hobbes), Gary Larson (The Far Side), Dan Piraro (Bizzaro), Carl Bark (Donald Duck), Mort Walker (Beetle Bailey) and perhaps most of all, the crew at MAD magazine who were probably my biggest influences.
It’s rather strange. I’ve been using the internet since 1990 and this is my very first blog I’ve created, almost 20 years later and quite a few years behind everyone else. I just never saw any need for a personal blog but now that I’ve set up my work-in-progress comics website, I think a blog may be vaguely useful in garnering comments, posting updates and so on. I had not drawn for about 20 years, had not picked up a pen to draw anything until a few months back, when I thought I’d try my hand at cartooning again, an old hobby. I had prolifically drawn cartoons back in secondary school, a long time ago, to entertain friends and family, but that was the extent of it. I was more interested in oil painting but I even stopped doing that in the early 90’s.
But a couple of years ago, a friend bought me Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan graphic novel for Christmas. I had heard about it while driving home from work one evening, on Radio 4, when it had just been nominated for a serious literary book prize, and it piqued my interst. I remember reading it on a long plane flight back to see my parents, and suddenly, it dawned on me that one could write a serious novel in this format. I was later to discover artists like Seth and Craig Thompson, and in early 2009, when I found myself with more free time on my hands, I thought I’d try my hand at a cartoon project. I signed up for an Illustrating Comics class at Central St Martin’s, thinking it would help me hone my doodles into something more professionally acceptable, but that turned out a rather damp squib. Still, I felt more inspired to actually draw and finish a creative project that did not involve programming computers. So, in early June 2009 I abandoned my cartoon project (about a girl who goes back to her hometown, drawn in rough cartoonish style) and decided to start on a collection of short stories, each based around a painting I know and love well.
The Card Players – Paul Cezanne
My first choice was Paul Cezanne’s ‘The Card Players’ since I had a framed print of it hanging in my dining room for many years. I worked on it mostly with an A3 pad on my knees, listening to, alternately, Radio 4, Jenny Queen, Chris Pureka and the Cowboy Junkies. My neck suffered the strain, so I got an A2 drawing board and switched to working in my dining room. The living room was more comfortable but after one disastrous ink spillage on the sofa, I decided enough was enough. At least in the dining room, there was less scope for such damage. I don’t have much patience with scanning and inserting text in Photoshop; my Photoshop skills for such maneuvers are still embryonic at best, but I’m learning as I go along and it has been fun.Things will need to be tidied up a good deal before it is even presentable as a web comic, but for the time being, here it is – a dump of my scanned A3 pages. I’m up to 6 pages so far, that’s about halfway through!
