Saturday Revue January 7: Tangled River

Blast Off Into The Future With 

Worlds away and millennia hence, a young girl is trying to become a woman. It isn't easy for Tanya either. Technology brought from Earth is breaking down. School is boring, boyfriends on the settlement are rare, and her best friend may be dating AN ALIEN. And to top it all off, this settlement's last link with Earth has just been cut off. What a way to grow up!
Tangled River is the creation of the entity known as Snowshadow, and can be found at this link. 

The Rating

Looks like the educator gave you a B minus, Tanya. Not bad, but we've got some work to do.

The Raves

It was the writing that first captured my attention in Tangled River. This is one of those comics that truly captures the voice and thought processes of a young teen. Too many writers write either college students passed off as teens or impossible dolts, but Snowshadow has written young characters that are both relatable and believable. Tanya, the dutiful girl trying to be brave, is well balanced by her best friend Licorice, the wild girl who needs to learn some introspection. 

and they live in a well built and immersive landscape that is described through the actions of the characters. Pulling off a truly immersive world experience isn't easy, but Snowshadow gets very close to achieving it.

Both art and writing riff on the Golden Age Comics, with simple, classic storylines and an almost clinical approach to anatomy and color. Everything is direct, supremely clear and distinctive, with an interesting use of color. If the creator was going for nostalgia they've nailed it; you can practically feel the foolscap paper between your fingers.

 The Razzes

Unfortunately, if it hadn't been for excellent writing, I might well have gotten bored and wandered off. Why? Because the art had very little visual draw. It was well done, it was accurate...and that's all it was.

The Comic Color Is As Flat As The Paper

To a degree, color is a stylistic and subjective choice. But there are things to consider, and one of them is whether your color draws the eye.
There was a time when all comic color was flat, back in the Golden Age, but this wasn't intentional. According to Scott Beatty, "Printing before the advent of computers used two processes for separating colors into CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black). One process was to shoot separations from the photograph or artwork with a stat camera, ending up with four pieces of film that could be stripped together onto a larger project. The other process, used by comic book companies to color their black line drawings, was to use overlays.
The technique was to use three pieces of acetate lined up on top of each other over the artwork page, each representing C, M or Y. Usually this acetate was rubylith, a product still used in screen printing today (to print on material and other substrates). Where the reddish film was cut away from the acetate ink would not print. Where the film was left ON the acetate, the camera negative would leave a blank spot, and ink would print."
This created good solid color, but it wasn't all that good at shadows. So, you ended up with work like this classic Batman (mis?)print. Hence the 'classic' look. Now, it's all well and good to go for the nostalgia of the style, but we're digital these days. We can do more than our forbears could, and if we want to catch a reader's eye, we have to. Right now the color palette of Tangled River is so muted and the shadows so pale that the eye wanders.
For example, this firelight scene.

It's fine. That's all you can really say; not anatomically incorrect, right angles, everything is...fine.

But let's do better than fine. Here's what can be done by simply upping the contrast a bit.

already, the eye is more attracted to the image. Now try adding some shadow. Shadow is how the human brain understands something is 'there' in the world, and shadows in art add weight and reality to objects. Without it, a deep part of your brain whispers 'that isn't really there, is it?' and this unspoken instinct colors your ability to be interested.
I timed myself for 5 minutes adding some very quick and dirty shadows with the Dodge/Burn tool to this image in Gimp, and got these results:

Five minutes shading and upping contrast to go from visually fine to visually fascinating. It's time worth spending.

The Reader Is An Observer, Not A Participant. Camera Angles And Focused Eyes Can Help! 

I had the same problem reading this comic that I used to have reading superhero works: the camera angles left me cold. Now, establishing shots are important, don't get me wrong. A good artist makes sure there are establishing shots to ground the reader in the world. 

But when every shot seems to be taken at one remove, a sense of distance grows up in the reader like a weed. We don't feel involved in even the most interesting scenes. This isn't helped by the fact that even the characters seem disinterested; often, their eyes aren't really focused on one another.  When drawing eyes, focus on focus! NImportant gives us a good example: the eye really should focus on the object it's viewing.

2)Less Perfection, More Emotion. Nobody Wants To Read About Mannequins

Thanks to Melaredblu for help on this infographic

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Try this.

These are issues that crop up again and again, and are behind the sense that the art is good but not great. The characters seem more like posed mannequins than people. For more help in this area:

Anybody know who did this lovely tutorial?

• read up on lines of action in animation
  
• do some life drawing. It can be as simple as sketching in a coffee house
  
• push your poses. Exaggerate things! 

The Revue

Not a bad first try at all. I look forward to seeing where it goes!

Independence Weekend Review #2: Greenshift

Shift Yourselves! It's Time For

The world isn't going to hell in a handbasket. It's arrived. Now, what are you going to do about it?
That's the question Greenshift, the creation of Andrew Rodriguez, poses . When you're handed a choice of evils, what do you do?
You become something of a devil yourself.

Buckle in and hang on, it's going to be a bumpy ride.

The Rating

Sassy, stroppy and smart. Okay, you got my attention.

The Raves

The feel of 'Greenshift' can best be explained like this: remember Hey Arnold? 

Okay, great. Now imagine that something very, very, VERY nasty happened to Arnold's city. Wait a hundred years, and what you might get is Green Shift.

Sure it's a mess, but it's home!
The story revolves around Max, a scrounger who lives on his wits and thinks on his feet. Max is all show, and so is Greenshift. This is the quintessential 'show, don't tell' story. We get no boring backstories, no lengthy expositions. Instead we get a world that speaks for itself and a character who we don't need a backstory for. Every action Max makes expands and enhances his personality, and every detail shown fleshes out the world around him. It's a masterfully realized tale, without an inch of wasted page space.
That isn't to say there isn't room in Greenshift for fun. It's the sassy humor that made me think of this as an adult and apocalyptic 'Hey Arnold'. The snarkiness is the perfect response to the heavy handed authoritarian forces who control Max's world, and a nice showcase of humanity coping even in the most dire of circumstances.
It's easy to despair in Dystopia. When your choices are what will kill you outside the wall (on the left) and what will crush you inside the wall (on the right) it'd be tempting to just lie down and give up.

but Rodriguez's creation is diametrically opposed to despair. It's a scrappy, feverishly energetic world full of characters who WANT TO LIVE, whatever that takes. No matter what the world throws at them, Max and his friends are not giving up and not backing down. They trick, they taunt, they write on the walls and they keep bouncing back every day. They dig through trash to find things to sell and sing on street corners. They flip the bird to the authorities and they push the envelope. And they keep trying to find something better. No matter what the world thinks, they know they're alive, and they're fighting to be free.

The color pallette is a perfect choice for the world portrayed, its hues at once intense and slightly skewed. The facial expressions and fluid body language of the main characters are delightful. Those eyebrows! And the backgrounds are wonderfully detailed, fully realized and organic, sometimes pretty intensely. There's a tactile sense to the drawing style of Greenshift, in the most disturbing of ways: seriously, you can almost smell the trash and the exhaust. Some interesting experiments were done with photomanipulation, and it was done well enough that I had to look twice to realize what media was employed. That's harder than it looks; I was impressed.
 And as a last note, the easter eggs all through the scenes are truly snicker worthy.

The Razzes

One thing I'd like to see worked on: while the body language of the main characters is well realized, a lot of background characters end up with stiff cylindrical torsos and rather wooden poses that detract from the appeal of large scenes. Often the faces will be perfectly rendered, but the body will have a rigidness that the clothing doesn't hide. Every character needs to be fully realized, or the discrepancy shows.

The Revue

Carry on my wayward son, I can't wait to see where this is going next.

Backstage Pass June: Daniel Sharp

Hey, Guys! We Got You A Pass!

Let's Go Backstage And Meet Daniel Sharp!

So Dan, tell us about yourself!

Rockwell had it right 

I'm a husband, father, and MD/PhD student (school forever!). In my "spare" time I write our comic, volunteer as the Scoutmaster for the Boy Scout troop my church sponsors. 

Main Project

 The Demon Archives, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi story featuring powered armor and snarky AIs. 

Other Hobbies And Obsessions

 Alongside the classics of reading and video games, I guess, I recently discovered/decided that table top gaming (a la Dungeons and Dragons) is actually a rather enjoyable way to spend time with friends. So I run and play in a couple of games in person and even online with distant friends.

So, tell us about your early experience. How did you fall in love with telling stories in pictures?

  So, first off, I am not an artist. Horribly rendered stick figures are my forte. I am a writer, and work WITH a talented artist, Sebastian Piriz (http://sebasp.deviantart.com) to make our comic.

The mighty Seba

We got started when I took a creative writing class from Fantasy author Brandon Sanderson back in my last year of undergrad. My brother and I had been talking about this world/story, so I developed it into a novel. While working on that, I realized that my biggest weakness was in conveying the visual feel and setting of the story, and that it would be cool to have it as a graphic novel. So we ended up contacting and hiring Seba to draw it, and have been posting it online ever since.

The interesting Nick

What media and programs do you work in to produce your project?

This doesn't apply to me as much (Microsoft Word?), but I know that Seba uses Manga Studio and Photoshop for his inks and colors, respectively. We also make use of a site called Basecamp that allows us to coordinate effectively.

Can you tell me about your typical day or strip-creation session? How does your working process flow?

 I can't speak too much for Seba's visual process. Normally what we'll do is I'll plot out the chapter, giving it to him in chunks I think fit about a page. He is better at page and panel plotting than I, so normally he'll draw a quick sketch breaking it down visually. We'll talk about it, and he'll start doing inks while I finalize dialogue. Then he'll do the colors. It's a lot of back and forth.

Can you tell me about your storytelling process? Do you prefer to script your stories, fly by the seat of your pants, or somewhere in between?

In terms of the story planning, I initially wrote a large chunk of the story as a novel. We've since passed that point, and while I know where the story is going and have major plot points plotted out, I'm letting the story and characters grow a bit organically, one chapter at a time, for the most part. It allows me to make adjustments as I see a page, or as a reader makes a comment that makes me rethink something, etc. Plus, Seba often has great ideas for the story and characters.

You explore both the future of technology and the twists and turns of human psychology with amazing skill; your understanding of the concepts is some of the best out there. How do you go about researching ideas you'd like to use in your work?

 A lot of it just started with my brother and me chatting and spitballing about what the future could conceivably be like. While there is a lot of "rule of cool" in our choices, most of it is honestly just me extrapolating off of existing tech and possibilities. I'm rather well educated (school forever!), especially in the ability to read scientific journals and whatnot, and enjoy just thinking about things. I also try to recognize my limitations and look for expert counsel on topics I am unfamiliar with. Some of this is through books, much of it is from connecting with individuals online (in topic-oriented communities like reddit, for example).

Do your ideas grow from your reading, or do you get ideas and then research them?

 A little of both? Sometimes it's "man wouldn't it be cool if Tenzin's suit could do X? Let's look for the science about that!" Sometimes it's "Huh, neat! Scientists made prototype/proof of concept for Y. Given 100 years and some sci-fi, that could totally be Z. Let's give Tenzin Z." On average, probably more of the first variety.

What are some of your most reliable research sources?

Because of my scientific education, I feel rather confident in my ability to weed thru Google and Wikipedia to find good data. Often that means finding some popular science article and then delving past it to the original source material. Similar to how I tell my friends and family to let ME put their symptoms into WebMD, because I am more able to filter out the junk and find the useful tidbits.

What’s the most difficult part of your work?

The most difficult part for me is just making time for everything. Researching, writing, managing the site, the community interaction, advertising, marketing, etc. So much stuff to do for my hobby in my "spare" time not working on my degrees or spent with my family.

How much of a buffer do you like to keep? 

 Personally, I prefer having almost a full chapter of buffer. But a lot of that is out of my hands. Seba is a full time freelance illustrator. We can't pay him enough to work on our stuff full time (plus he'd get bored, and has his own stuff), so sometimes it's hard to keep a buffer going. Lately we've been going week to week.

What message do you hope readers take away from your work?

 Hmm, I'm not sure if I have any particular message I'm trying to get across. I'm mostly just trying to tell a fun story I came up with in what I imagine is a semi-plausible future. If people want to take away something, that's on them and how they engage with the story.

That said, there are definitely some themes I guess that we're trying to hit. Things like what it means to be a person, bodily autonomy, dealing with stress/depression/PTSD, thinking about a potential cybernetic future (iBrain, anyone?), etc. Readers are welcome to take away whatever conclusion and implication they want, I'm just presenting a story with themes and events I like. I often try to actually present multiple sides to these themes, as well.

What keeps you devoted to telling the story you’re telling?

 Can't stop now! If nothing else, I need to finish the current story, and have it all printed up on my shelf someday :)

Rock On, Dan and your awesome team. We look forward to the next big bang in your story!