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Colorful sex with Jason Little – Comics for Beginners Podcast episode 20

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Jason Little is a Brooklyn-based indie comics creator, most famous for his Bee books, such as Shutterbug Follies. Although his style is colorful and uses clean lines, the books are NOT for kids – something the US audience seems to disagree with. Besides having the most impressive sideburns I’ve ever seen, Jason is extremely talented and eloquent speaking. Take a listen and see if you agree, and check out Jason’s work at http://www.beecomix.com and on his blog http://beecomix.blogspot.com.

Also in this podcast: news and more news! For tutorial videos and more on how to write and draw comics, go to https://www.comicsforbeginners.com/

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Shia Labeouf rips off comics creator Daniel Clowes – then continues to rip off everyone else

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"It's all good, man. It's art"
“It’s all good, man. It’s art”

I’m sure you’ve heard of Lawless and Transformers star Shia Labeouf digging a hole for himself by now – the hole just keeps getting bigger!

27-year old Labeouf’s short film Howard Cantour.com which premiered at Cannes last year, was later revealed to include uncredited dialogue from Daniel Clowes’ comic Justin M Damiano. Labeouf apologized on Twitter in a seemingly heartfelt and eloquent fashion, which appears to have been lifted from Yahoo! Answers. When he apologized online to Alec Baldwin over a dispute on Broadway, he blatantly copy/pasted bits from an Esquire article, and in a recent e-mail exchange with Bleeding Cool’s Rich Johnston, Labeouf continues his rant against copyright and continues to plagiarize, quoting Picasso, Lawrence Lessig and Kenneth Goldsmith – all without mentioning the source.

His bizarro defense for stealing from Clowes include nuggets of wisdom such as:

Authorship is censorship
Should God sue me if I paint a river?
Should we give people the death sentence for parking violations-
You’ll not only have less parking violations but less DRIVERS.

Er…

As an artist and a writer, I find the discussion of inspiration versus stealing interesting. But honestly, the man who was the son of Dr. Jones in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls seems to have finally lost it. Or maybe he never had it in the first place.

Or as @FadedYouthBlog wrote in reply to Labeouf’s tweeted apology in the sky (see below): How do you manage to out-douche yourself each and every time?  It’s like a talent!

PS: I hope I have quoted and credited everyone correctly in this article. If not, let me know and I’ll fire up my skywriting plane.

Self publishing – print or digital?

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I’ve had several people ask me about self-publishing and the pros and cons of digital comics. I am by no means an expert here, but luckily the very talented Becky Cloonan just did a post on this very topic!

Cloonan is an Eisner-award winning artist and writer of creator-owned books such as Wolves and Demeter. In her recent post she breaks down her self-publishing experience, beginning with the toils of living with boxes of comics everywhere and constant runs to the post office:

The time it started taking out of my schedule was almost too much as well. One full day a week was spent filling orders, putting envelopes together, and mailing them out. I’d enlist my friends’ help carrying boxes to the post office. It got to be a bit much, and honestly I remember almost giving up a few times.

I did some self-publishing here in Denmark some years back and remember that state of constantly putting books in envelopes and orinting invoices. A luxury problem, for sure, but I hadn’t calculated shipping costs in my cover price, so it actually ended up costing me money every time I sent off a book! Between that and retailer discounts, I think I lost quite a bit of money on a fairly succesful book. I still have quite a few boxes in storage and no real plan to unload them. Putting money down for print and handling distribution is NOT something I feel like doing again any time soon.

Today I would definetely prefer digital over print, if I was to self-publish. The cost is lower and distribution is completely hassle free. Cloonan was lucky enough to get into the digital publishing platform Comixology, which makes it even easier and it’s still valuable to have a big player involved that can help handle logistics and marketing.

Cloonan continues to describe her experience with digital publishing:

DIGITAL COMICS! Yay, I have no idea what I’m doing! Submit was perfect for me, I got to choose the prices of my books, and they held my hand through the whole process. Now I know how to buy ISBNs like a boss, and format digital books. They did some great promotion for DEMETER too, and really pushed the book as part of the Submit launch! I have nothing but praise for ComiXology.

To read the rest of Cloonan’s run-down, go to her Tumblr. For me, the conclusion would be, if I can get digital distribution taken care of through another vendor, I wouldn’t mind digital publishing (Bonus info: You can buy my book, The Devil’s Concubine on Comixology as well. It’s not self-published, but I still get a cut, so… Appreciate it!), but I think just putting a book online as a web-comic and build the audience for a print or digital copy is really a better plan. I have way too much on my plate right now to bother with selling and shipping books.

What are your thoughts on self-publishing? Anyone have experience they want to share? Let’s hear it!

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Related post: Are printed books going away?

 

Sandman the movie

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joseph-gordon-levitt-sandmanJoseph Gordon-Levitt, who recently played a major role in Chris Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, has signed on to work on another comics adaptation – this time as a producer and director. He is teaming up with screenwriter David S. Goyer (known for Blade and Nolans Batman trilogy) to produce an adaptation of Neil Gamain’s Sandman, the acclaimed Vertigo comic, for Warner Bros. and DC Entertainment. So far there’s no word on wether Gordon-Levitt will be in the movie as an actor, but perhaps we’ll see him as Morpheus himself? He certainly has experience with working inside a dream through his role in Inception and has proved himself a very capable director with this year’s Don Jon.

Sandman is yet another graphic novel of epic proportions to be transported to the screen in recent years. The adaptation of Alan Moore’s Watchmen got massive critizism, not just because Zack Snyder was directing, but simply because many believed it sacrilege to tamper with the perfect genius of the source material. So far there doesn’t seem to be flame wars going on concerning Sandman, but what are your thoughts? Is Sandman “unfilmable” or can Hollywood do it justice?

5 great online resources for comics creators

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online-comics-resources

You can spend hours, days, even months scouring the web for information or resources on how to make comics. Here are five good places to go (other than this site, of course!)

Jimzub.com

Comics writer Jim Zubkavich (Samurai Jack, Skullkickers) dishes out a ton of great advice for aspiring writers and artists, both on the craft and the business side of comics. I interviewed him for the podcast at New York Comic Con 2013 on why he creates these tutorials and gives away all this valuable information – and trust me, it’s gold.

Blambot.com

A good comics font can be hard to find – and even harder to create from scratch – but the folks at Blambot have done the hard work for you! Their fonts are not all free. Some are license, so you pay a one-time fee, usually $20-25. A good deal for something you could end up using daily.

iFanboy makecomics podcast

Short podcasts about the craft, featuring Andy Schmidt (no relation!) of Comics Experience. The podcast sound quality isn’t always great, but there’s a lot of food for thought for creators, both newbies and seasoned pros. I sat on a panel with Andy at this year’s SDCC and he was every bit as smart and nice in  person.

Remind blog

Writer/artist Jason Brubaker shares his experiences and tools for creating his comic reMIND. Brubaker started the site Making Comics as well, where I did a few guest posts, but I would recommend going to remindblog.com first and devouring all you can.

Posemanics

A great online resource for artists who don’t have access to life drawing classes is pose maniacs.com. There are tons of reference models on the site and a timer function for doing 30 second sketches from random images. There is even an app for it and the resource is FREE.

Q & A at TAW

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TAW-students-making-comics

As you may know, I taught a comics course at the Animation Workshop in Viborg, Denmark last week. I’m planning a podcast about the course, that will probably go up later this week, but I also got some questions from students that I thought I would answer here. Perhaps there is some value in it for the Comics for Beginners community.

Q: When you’re working on a comic, don’t you ever want to change or ditch your story completely?

A: Yes, absolutely! Every time. But if I listened to the voice inside my head that tells me it’s not good enough, chances are I’ll never finish anything. I may decide NEVER to use this pen again or NEVER to make that same story mistake, but rarely do I change horses in the middle of the stream. That doesn’t mean I have no sense of self critique (at least I hope not), I just try to act like a pro and get it done. And whatever I learn, I take with me to the NEXT project.

I talked a bit about my collaboration with writer Chris Miskiewicz. I feel very fortunate to have met Chris and we get along very well creatively, with complete respect for each other’s work and a common goal to make the end result even better. When I described our working relationship, I got this question:

Q: How do you find a partner like that?

A: It’s probably different for everybody. First off, you don’t meet anybody if you just stay at home at your drawing board. You have to get out there. I met Chris at the MoCCA Festival in New York and we got along instantly. AND I liked the work he did. He lured me in with a smaller project, a short comic for his Everywhere! anthology on Act-I-Vate. Doing a little something together is probably a good idea to see if you’re on the same page. Test the waters. Meeting in person (and getting drunk together) is also something I would very much recommend, as it just takes the relationship to a whole other level than an online friendship. It frees up the communication.

Another question that was asked was about making a living as an artist and starting out:

Q: When did you decide to become an artist?

A: I didn’t, really. For a looong time I didn’t even ALLOW myself to think it was possible. I didn’t know anybody who made a living drawing, and my parents certainly didn’t either. So like the good parents they were, they persuaded me to get an education and/or a REAL job. Well, I botched thatcompletely. Never got a degree, but was working on illustration, comics, fanzine production while pretending to be a good student at the university and later the school of architecture here in Copenhagen, Denmark.  It wasn’t until I met Peter Snejbjerg (artist of Books of Magic, Starman, Preacher and numerous other US books), that I realized being an artist could be a profession and not just a hobby. Starting at Gimle Studios alongside Peter and a bunch of other pros made me what I am today. If not for them, I probably would have given up. So finding a peer group and a studio spot was key for me. AND running out of money, so I HAD to make it work!

It was a great experience to meet all the talented young  people in Viborg. Thanks to Aske, Fie, Kristian, Muir, Bob, Maria, Emil, Cathrin, Siri, Jacob, Eydi, Jam, Albert, Mathilde, Line, Clara, Julie, Nilas, Mette and Sofie for the opportunity to offer some guidance. Soon I’ll be asking YOU for advice!