Posted by Devin Parker

My Digital Illustration One class is pretty neat, but it requires a lot of focus on my part. The teacher ran us through the basics of Adobe Illustrator and did a critique of our last homework assignment, showing us a lot of tricks (his computer screen was projected up onto the wall in front of the classroom). Unfortunately, he's pretty soft-spoken and while he asks if anyone has any questions, he's not really a "take charge of the room" kind of teacher. In some ways, I appreciate that - the class doesn't get bogged down in lectures if he catches someone fooling around - but it's really difficult not to fool around while he's talking about something I already know. I'm sitting at my own superpowered iMac with the Internet only a mouse-click away, and plenty of personal projects I can access from my own Student Server (a personal cache of memory I can access from any computer at school). That's a lot of temptation for someone as easily distracted as I am. He showed us some examples of work that other people have done in Illustrator, and the comic art examples I saw (as well as some of the instructional illustrations that looked a lot like that artwork you see in passenger jets - you know, the little fold-out diagram of what to do in case of a water landing and so on?) inspired me to really apply myself once again.

I have to keep reminding myself to make every homework assignment apply directly to what I want to do. For some reason, when we did our first assignment, I chose to illustrate a skunk shrimp. Why? I'm not entirely certain. We began the assignment by creating three signs to designate the different levels of a parking garage, using easy-to-remember icons; much like the signs in an amusement park parking lot. Without really thinking about it, I went with a marine theme. I think it was because one of the tools on Illustrator allows you to make a spiral, and the finished effect reminded me of a nautilus. The three levels I created were Nautilus, Shrimp, and Cthulhu. Then, we had to take one of the black-and-white icons we created and make a color picture based on the icon, only this color picture was supposed to be of the item or creature in question in their natural habitat. Instead of doing the cool, interesting, comic geek thing - making a picture of Dread Cthulhu - I made a picture of a skunk shrimp. Hm. I guess I'm more mysterious than I let on.

Our next assignment is to do something on the theme of coffee and the culture that surrounds it. I made a point of writing down that this one was going to be a comic panel.

I've been reading a lot of Usagi Yojimbo lately (not to be confused with Urusei Yatsura, which I keep accidentally calling it). It's a series by Stan Sakai, a Japanese guy who has lived most of his life in Hawaii. It's about a samurai rabbit named Miyamoto Usagi (based on the historical Miyamoto Musashi, legendary swordsman and author of The Book of Five Rings) who, when his lord is killed in war, becomes a wandering ronin. While on a surface level it's a "furry" (previously known as "funny animal") comic, once you get past the fact that everyone is an animal you see that it's an immersive introduction to feudal Japanese culture. Not only are the stories and characterizations excellent, but Stan is very reserved in the way in which he uses panel layout, and in how he depicts action. It's very simple, almost the polar opposite of the loony, over-the-top, in-your-face exaggeration of the typical Image comic. That's something that strikes me as particularly ironic, since the Image types are usually trying very hard to be grim-facedly serious, while Stan uses a very cartoony style to depict the life of Usagi along the warrior's path.

I also borrowed the last two books in the Bone series from the library, and so was finally able to finish the series. It was what you might expect from a fantasy epic, in that there was a big siege and a climactic battle against the Dark Lord, per se, but of course, it stood out from other fantasy epics for all of the same reasons the entire series has - its unique combination of extremely cartoony characters and situations with the mythic tropes of Tolkien-style heroic fantasy. It sounds awful when I type it out here, but Jeff Smith made it work. The ending was not exactly what I expected - it made me sad, but in a good way, because I cared about the characters and things didn't go the way I was hoping it would for them - and while I don't think I'd mind seeing more Bone comics, I think Jeff would do well to just let it be the end, period. The odd thing was that he snuck in a couple of pages at the very end of the book which reflected his real-world political views through the mouthpieces of his characters. I have to say that it really annoyed me, but I need to figure out if I was annoyed because I disagree with his view (and find them annoyingly typical of an artist), or if it was because he introduced such blatant real-world commentary into what was supposed to be a fantasy setting.

Of course, I need to decide that because some of what I want to do essentially will be the same thing. I want to create fantastic stories, but I also want to talk about Christ. Is it that context plays the most significant role in whether such a thing works? Or would someone that disagreed with what I was saying be annoyed by its inclusion in my comic no matter what? I mean, I want to do historical fiction and historical fantasy, so it's entirely sensible that Christianity would come up. In the comic I'm talking about, it wasn't out of character for Phoney Bone to make the comments that he did, it's entirely like him. But still I was bothered. Is it that when I'm reading something as escapist as Bone that I don't expect or want to be confronted with something partisan?

As a sort of contrast, reading Usagi Yojimbo has encouraged me to behave better. Silly as it may sound, I must admit that when confronted with a moral choice the other day, the first thing that popped into my head was "What would Usagi do?" (I'm sure you're all concerned that my moral compass may be based on a fictional anthropomorphic rabbit rather than Jesus Christ) What can I say? It was my immediate reaction, and a second later I analyzed the thought. Comics can have a positive effect on people. That's a good thing to remember.

Okay, gotta go. Marilyn's been on her back all week with a herniated disc, and I need to see that she hasn't fallen on the floor or been witness to a murder that she witnessed through the window.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 20, 2005 at Thursday, January 20, 2005 . You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments feed .

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