We’ve fallen behind a bit with blogging about meetings recently – hoping to catch up over the next wee while…
19th February 2019
The meeting was held at Nottingham Hackspace and was advertised as “The Panel Show”, with all NDC members invited to “Bring along your favourite comics thing and let us know why you love it.” Here’s Dorothy’s report:
Many thanks to everyone who brought along their favourite comics pages for discussion. Here are snippets from the evening.
Nat was looking at ways of showing feeling and intensity in The Sculptor by Scott McCloud.
As the intensity of feeling increased, the picture expanded to fit the entire page, with the comic suddenly losing its margins. Do printers and publishers cope with this? Yes! It was a problem in the olden days, but not now.
- Nat: ‘the intensity is being turned up on the visual grammar until it is overwhelming’
- Matt: ‘Comics representing states instead of simply things’
Further recommendations from the audience were:
- The Gardens of Aedena and The Goddess, by Mœbius
- Voodoo Child: The Illustrated Legend of Jimi Hendrix, by Martin I Green and Bill Sienkeiwicz.
- The 5thBeatle, by Vivek Tiwary, Andrew Robinson, and Kyle Baker: the art changes when the Beatles are discovered; and each Beatle has a different artwork to represent him.
- Ruins, by Peter Kuper: the speech bubbles reflect the sound of the person
- The Sculptor, by Scott McLeod: so much to discuss here. It’s a cliché in a good way, and a story. There’s a Faustian pact, Pixie Girl, tortured artist….
‘expressing a truth through fantastic means’
Ida said that the Manga comic Yotsuba by Kiyohiko Azuma ‘changed the way I read’. [Lots of info here if you read Japanese!]
Yotsuba is an adopted 5 year old who becomes slightly more cartoony when she is being mischievous. Azuma draws a cartoon Dad with a moustache scribbled onto him. The cartoon is ‘real’ and the moustache is clearly added. Clever!
More ideas:
- Use comics to learn another language!
- And look out for the British Museum’s manga exhibition coming up later in 2019.
Dan picked the spread from Goscinny and Uderzo’s Asterix in Spain where Asterix accidentally invents bullfighting. This was masterfully done with minimal colour, so that the red cloak that literally falls into the ring is the main splash of colour as it takes up different shapes. The background drops out as the action and movement take over in the repetitive scenes that are so hard to get right; and really do come to life here. Steff pointed out that, ‘This is more theatre than TV’ with big gestures.
Other recommendations:
Lee showed us the panels from Scott McLeod’s Understanding Comics: the book that had blown his 12-year-old-mind and made him think for the first time about art.
His choice of page showed a drawing of a painting of a pipe (Magritte’s The Treachery of Images), but we were looking at a projected view of one of many copies of a drawing of that painting of a pipe.
And so we moved on to the moments when art spoke directly to us:
- Batman: No Man’s Land, where there is no Batman a lot of the time, so that all the other characters and scenery come into focus.
- The moments when characters suddenly speak to their makers, like Grant Morrison explaining to his creation, Animal Man: ‘Yes I’ve been tormenting you. Want to try the real world?!’
- And a take on Where Do You Go – What Do You Do – The Night After You Save The Universe from Howard the Duck.
‘I’d really just like to write something that I’d like to read’, as the creator of The Fantastic Four said.