…I’ll have to be content with this impromptu movie I made when I was supposed to be grading. It’s great what you can do with action figures and too much time on your hands. If you see me at a convention, ask me about the Bug-tastic Ant-Man story I’ve been writing in my head since graduate school and I can bore you to tears. It has Swarm, the Wasp, the Beetle and a whole gaggle of Giant insects from Marvels 1950s monster comics. All this and the answer to burning the question how DOES Ant-Man shrink?
Today I went into Mrs. Kidd’s second grade class to talk to Jack’s class. They are doing a unit on dinosaurs and so I spent an hours talking about about dinosaurs and comics. We started with how dinosaurs got me into comics. While on a family vacation to Dinosaur National Monument my parents bought me a copy of Marvel Team-Up #19 because it featured Stegron the Dinosaur Man fighting Spider-Man. I didn’t know squat about Spider-Man but I knew a horde of cool dinosaurs when I saw them. I read that comic until the cover fell off and eventually became interested in Spider-Man. As a big nerd, a super-hero with a science nerd alter ego was very appealing.
As part of their activities, I give them a four panel grid featuring Wrinkles the Wonder Brain responding to something. I used to start with a completely blank set of four panels, but a high percentage of the kids were often stymied by what to draw. I’ve found that having a predrawn element gives their imagination something to play off. Below is a scan of Jack’s comic. In it, a stegosaurus rolls up in a ball brandishing its plates like a whirring buzz saw. For fans of Godzilla movies (and the boys and I watch one every Saturday night with an orange cream soda), this maneuver is reminiscent of how Anguirus mounts an attack.
Note the effective use of sound effects (”boing”), speed lines, icons (the puzzled question mark in panel 1) and word balloons and dialogue all in the service of healthy cartoon mayhem! To say I’m proud would be a gross understatement.
I’ve been doing Weight Watchers for the last 60 days or so. Apparently, like John Candy in the movie Stripes, I had swallowed a lot of aggression during stressful semesters of teaching. Aggression and lots of Cherry Pop-Tarts. Anyway, when I started the process the Wii fit informed me that, based on my height and weight, my Body Mass Index (BMI) placed me in the “overweight” category. Now, I understand that the BMI is a problematic metric on many levels but I am not a frail old person (yet), a hyper-muscular athlete (ever) or child (not physically at least), so it works for me as a something to shoot for. Well, I am happy to inform the entirety of the intranets that this morning the Wii said I am now “Normal!” It was a thrilling moment for me. No one has ever called me normal before. Below is a graph of my weight over the last two months. I even included a trend line (I’m particularly proud of that lovely r squared value)!
All kidding aside, I do feel a lot better. I have more energy which comes in handy in my ongoing attempt to keep up with the boys
Lisa likes to take pictures and she does it well. I like insects. Every once in a while we join forces: I find bugs and she takes pictures. I have several of these lovely shots and it seems selfish of me to keep them to myself, so I’ve decided to periodically post them. Today’s photo was taken while we were on sabbatical. Max and Jack spent a week at an art day camp at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. While the boys were creating sarcophagi and animal artifact mobiles, Lisa and I wandered the gorgeous IMA gardens and grounds looking for creepy crawlies to photograph. We found these beetles down by the river behind the museum. This male relentlessly chased the female all over this flower, desperately clinging to her as she tried to get away. I think it made Lisa think about our courtship.
I’ve been wordier in discussing these strips than I had initially intended, but I guess that just reflects my intrinsic desire to dissect things. It does remind me of a conversation I once had as a graduate student with an undergraduate student working with me. This student asked how I made a comic strip and I explained the process or coming up with an idea, writing/editing the dialogue, laying out the art, lettering, penciling and inking. When I was done, she looked at me and said, “Wow. You put that much thought into it?” I was stunned. I guess she thought that I just sat done and started drawing my stream of consciousness. Or, maybe she was suggesting that the comics don’t read like they involve any preparation. Anyway the answer is, yes, I think about it that much. That said, there isn’t a lot to say about today’s episode.
It’s only the 4th strip in the series and we’re already hobbling along on bad Cow-related puns like Commissioner Borden (Borden milk. Borden rhymes with Gordon. Like in Batman? Get it?). Looks like I was channeling a lot of Batman action this strip. Its very subtle, so if you don’t spot the references let me know. Except for Commission Borden, most of the bovine equivalents of Batman gear are never actually used again. There is no stately Dairy Manor, Cow-Boy lives with his mom and dad and we never see the Cow-phone or Milk Mobile again. Although, I really like the bendy straw exhaust pipe.
We put together a little impromptu movie tonight after school. Every member of my family gets into the act. Guess this means I’m married to a movie star. Not too many people can look that good holding compost!
For more of our videos just search “drnyuki” on yourtube and you should get the complete list. Personally, I’m partial to the Ant-Man vs. Swarm video, but that’s just because I like bugs.
When I give talks about science comics, I am sometimes asked about the medium I use. I am pretty unsophisticated. I start with a pencil underdrawing and then trace that with India ink. I use Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph pens and a brush pen for inking. This allows be to use varying line weights and to taper the line when necessary. Once the ink has dried (or has been blotted as in the video below) I erase the underlying pencil work with a Pentel Hi-Polymer white eraser. This means I essentially draw each page twice. My comic pages are 10in x 15in and I draw them on Strathmore Smooth Bristol (300 Series). For those interested in seeing the process, here is a time lapse video I created showing how I draw Wrinkles the Wonder Brain from Optical Allusions.
Whoa, two days in a row. Guess whose on Spring Break?
Today in the Cow-Boy Chronicles we have the thrilling conclusion to the origin of Cow-Boy. With some surprising revelations. To me at least. I had completely forgotten until rereading this strip that the radiation had unlocked Cow-Boys latent mutant powers. Guess I was really laying it on thick with the whole goulash of super-hero origins. I just had to drag a veiled X-Men reference into the mix. One has to wonder how a human is carrying around a gene for cow-ness, especially since the two species are separated by a multi-million year chasm of evolutionary time. One might argue that any gene conferring cow-specific attributes must have arisen after the primate and bovine lines split. In fact, based on the available evidence, it looks like a character like Cow-Dog would have been more plausible scientifically. I should have done my homework.
In the first panel we see my first tentative steps toward actually using cross-hatching. It is only fair, since it was all the rage in mainstream comics in the 1990s. We also learn that Cow-Boy’s secret identity looks just like Hank Spelunker, the star of Spelunker, the daily strip I did as a graduate student. I won’t inflict any of that strip on you, but rest assured that I did not maintain that element of continuity. Cow-Boy eventually became a member of the Spelunker cast and frequently interacted with Hank. It just goes to show the seat of the pants nature of making a comic strip while trying to study, teach and do research.
In panel three I was going for three things. This first is I wanted to be gross. Mission accomplished with the battle udder. Never mind how the milk is dispensed. How long does that stuff keep before it goes bad? Second, I love the gender-bending aspects of a boy assuming the female characteristics of a species. I mean, Spider-Man could be modeled after a boy spider, but a cow is always female. Finally, a nod to the absurdity of a high school kid building something as advanced as a battle udder or industrial strength spider webbing. Yeah, I used to read a lot of Spider-Man.
The puffy clouds at the corner of the panels were an experiment in depicting a flashback panel. Not only are they superfluous and probably ineffective, but they also make cropping and copying difficult on the copier. In the final assessment, they weren’t worth it and I don’t think I ever used them again.
Finally, Cow-Boy has an Bovine-Sense. OK, fine I was obsessed with Spider-Man when I was growing up. Happy? Anyway,a lactating boy allows me to squeeze one last gross thing in before the end of the strip. This would put most people off their feed, but if the image of lactating boy dressed like a cow has only whetted your appetite, you can follow your curiosity to this Wikipedia entry on real-world male lactation. The suggestion is clear: Cow-Boy must have also been on some kind of hormone treatment that interacted with the radiation and his latent mutant cow-ness ability. Hmm. I’ll have to give that some thought.
Did I mention I’m on Spring Break?
This week we Hosler’s rediscovered our love of Rube Goldberg devices. It has been a long, lasting love even if we don’t write as often as we should. Although Goldberg intending his “time saving” devices to be commentaries on an increasingly technologically dependent society (and I get that), I also see them as meditations on the the intrinsic creative aspects of both art and science.
Max and Jack can trace their fascination with these devices to the Road Runner cartoons I’ve forced them to watch since a very early age. This supplemented their intrinsic interest in how things work. To fuel that interest I got this excellent collection of Goldberg strips.
They so inspired Max that he began constructing his own elaborate devices. Here’s one he did when he was six. I used in a talk I gave about science and art.
Goldberg (trained as an engineer) is especially interesting to me because he represents another interesting science/art hybrid like Santiago Ramon t Cajal or Osamu Tezuka. Anyway, our interest in wacky machines was reawakened when I came across the following OK Go video for their song “This too Shall Pass.”
That blew our minds and we watched it a zillion times. We even downloaded the song. The next day (this is the synchronicity part) I made my monthly trek to the Comic Swap in State College where I discovered Jason Shiga’s “Meanwhile” (FYI, I also picked-up the terrific European comic album “My Mommy is in America and She Met Buffalo Bill”). As he mentions here, Shiga was inspired by a choose-your-own-path comic in Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics.”
I didn’t tell the boys about “Meanwhile” for awhile because I wanted to check it out for myself. Frankly, it is insane. Wonderful and fun, but clearly the work of a deranged mind. The amount of work it must have required fills me existential dread. The story snakes through the book, constantly splitting-off, offering the reader alternative storylines full of secret codes, adventure, disaster and, on one path at least, a happy ending. I’m glad I took some time with it before I told the boys about it, because I haven’t seen it since. Everyone should buy this book.
See? Crazy. Each panel is connected to the next by a thin tube that sometimes splits and can take you forward or backward in the book depending on which one you choose.
As I type this, I am also reminded of similarly complex animations I saw recently on the blog Drawn! If “Meanwhile” left me feeling inadequate, imagine what I felt like after watching these…
parkour motion reel from saggyarmpit on Vimeo.
videogioco-loop experiment from milkyeyes on Vimeo.
Lisa’s cousin Jason and I have started a Sunday Challenge designed to motivate us in our ongoing comic endeavors. Jason is developing a webstrip and I am trying to finish a story about beetle that I started almost seven years ago. Jason is in stil in the development stages, planning the look and feel of the strip as well a the personalities of the characters. So for it looks great and he has terrific character touches that will make for a funny, interesting comic. As soon as he’s ready for other people to see his stuff I’ll let you know. In the meantime, check out some of the work he’s done on his blog.
My beetle project is called Age of Elytra and I am really excited about it. I will be posting one panel from my weekly page challenge. I have removed the text because I really don’t want to give anything away. Perhaps this will whet the appetite of the 3 people reading this post! I would be interested to now what you think.
