James Kochalka's The Sketchbook Diaries

These are a bit of fun, if not particularly informative on a life or interesting. It was meant to be informative to the author, but as he points out a few times, it isn't. There's really to many meta moments of wondering what to draw or a moment revealing that the last few days had a little bit more invention in them than usual to do so. He seems to focus on the moments of non sequitur, perhaps liking the moments of nonsense the best or perhaps his life is all nonsense. Even when there's some event going on like a vacation, the format of a single moment from each day (mostly, there was at least one set with the same date) does not lend itself well to any sort of story arcs and has certainly not been approached as such.

Still, I did find one comic to be particularly informative about an element in Magic Boy & Robot Elf.
This makes the pieces fall into place a little. Really.

It's also rather representative. They're actually all online here if anyone wants to see more.

More water brushes!

I got some new Kuretake water brushes in the mail today. Previously I only had the Kuretake "petit set" that consists of a brush with a very small reservoir that folds into itself to protect the brush when stored. It's a set because it also comes with a little water bottle for filling the reservoir when needed. This has been a good set for tossing in the bag to add a little color to sketches when out in the wild.



The new brush pens come in three brush sizes. They also come in two lengths, I chose the shorter ones because they fit better wherever I put them and the barrel would hold plenty of water for my purposes anyway. The small brush is the same size as the one in the petit set. The medium one is as long as my Pentel pocket brush pen, but a little wider and the same size as my Kuretake brush pens loaded with paint. The small one is narrower than the pocket brush pen. The large one is slightly larger than the Pentel color brushes I have, it's really quite large.

These new pens have a bit more to their mechanism than the petit one. In fact, they look all around suspiciously like the loaded brushes. This makes me think I could probably load them up with something with more staining power than water and it would be alright for the most part. Here all the water is forced through the brush to get to your paper or wherever you want it to go.

So far I have tried the small one out for a few strokes. Like the petit, it will dribble if squeezed hard enough as there are grooves to allow water out near the top of the brush. However, in usual operation without hard squeezing everything reliably passes into the top of the brush. Like with the petit, I sometimes felt like the water was flowing too quickly so I guess the different structure doesn't have a different result.

Alec: The King Canute Crowd

Sometimes one just has odd thoughts. As I was reading through Eddie Campbell's Alec: The King Canute Crowd it struck me that this was a man with a ruler. But even as the thought was forming, I knew it was wrong. Most people have rulers, this is a man with a T-square. This is someone who sits down at his drafting table, set at the perfect angle, slaps down the T-square to line up his paper and then tacks it down with masking tape on each of the four corners just like you did for junior high school drafting*. Which means that when I saw a picture of the man in a "ready to work" pose sitting next to a drafting table with paper taped squarely in the middle, I was not at all surprised.

Of the book itself, the art generally has a traced quality to it, although it does still seem to "live" a bit more than photo comics seem to manage. The art is nothing that would catch my eye and get me to pick up the book. The layout of each page is usually meticulous using that T-square although when the atmosphere calls for it he'll throw in a few hand drawn panels too. The art also frees up as the story calls for it.

On the other hand, the story telling is top notch. If that was something you could tell at a glance, it would inspire me to pick up the book. It is well timed. As it is (mostly?) autobiographical, some stories can be told with just the middle since how the people got there and what they do after is entirely ordinary and can be covered well with hints. When this isn't so, or when the interesting events go on for many hours or days, he picks the segments of time that are shown very well such that the reader is not left confused by what was left out or bogged down by too much detail yet still feels like the whole story is told.

Later in the book, though, there is the sense that the stories are from further and further in the past. A glace at the dates confirms this. The stories become more encompassing and more and more is being told in each page. This has the unfortunate effect that the moments do not seem as well picked or even as much like moments. It becomes summary toward the end instead of the crisp story that is told in the middle.

* Too few people actually have drafting in junior high school or at any other time.

Tricked

The book Tricked by Alex Robinson is an exquisitely crafted piece of drama. Each character is crafted with a unique and interesting background and set to proceed down the tracks laid for them as they make their way inevitably to the final crash when they all meet. This little world is built with such detail that the tracks become quite clear. By the end, the only question in this reader's mind was would he take the "easy way" out when the final crash came.

It's taken me a while after reading it to figure out why exactly I didn't care for such a well crafted book. The characters do seem to be drawn each with specific differences to set them apart visually, but can you really fault the author for that? Was it the fact of a secondary target for the final "act of violence"? Perhaps a little, but this was certainly not all of it.

The trouble for me was that no one seems to change and grow. There is personal growth happening. As we meet her, one character has decided to find out who her father really is, but we meet her after she finds that he's not really dead and has traveled to the city to meet him. That's background to the character, the story does not follow this growth since it has already happened.

Perhaps the rock star who sees every woman as someone to hit on is growing. It could be, I suppose, but a whirlwind marriage doesn't really seem like much of a change. Seems more like a fling with legal consequences to me. Wait another three weeks, see if he's not cooling to his new wife and looking for another hot flash of fresh love. Nothing about it really seems lasting.

It's possible Robinson's just set it up too well. Everyone was simply too well motivated so that every turn seemed natural and each decision essentially already made. This left for me the sense that each path was simply being followed. The figures played out a disaster. Maybe some of them will learn and grow as a result, but that's in the future.

I want some sort of progress or learning, a challenge that is overcome. None of that happened, so at the end the story felt empty to me.

Some 92 years ago

The poor newspaper reader of old, trained to read single stories in long columns probably didn't know what to think of the comics pages of the time. Still nicely aligned in columns with a picture above a paragraph, but the reader was expected to read across the page instead of down. No wonder they needed to put in numbers to tell the reader the order of the panels. It's interesting how little thought many cartoonists today put into how their layout is communicating the order of the panels when they get creative about layouts.

It was certainly a different medium around the turn of the last century, as seen in this (London) example. Still really an illustrated story rather than a comic. One can certainly be glad that the need to verbosely explain what is clearly drawn already has passed. However, I was particularly delighted by one of the strips in the linked post which seems to particularly work with the form of the even by today's sensibilities.

The comic that's caught my attention is Burglar Bertie (direct link to one of the two examples from above) which occupied the back of this sheet. Instead of stating what's in the picture, this one has been done in the form of a letter to the editor. It is a nice touch that gets in all the key words that make the images unambivalent to the reader of the day yet does not seem to insult the intelligence outright for the reader of today who thinks the picture didn't need so much explaining.

The Banquet

I have just finished watching Hamlet in Chinese (Mandarin). Well, it was called The Banquet and is now called Legend of the Black Scorpion for a re-release, but you start to notice as it hits the main events of the play. The players changed roles in places, a death prescribed to one took hold in that one's opposite instead of that one's counterpart. A few made it out alive who did not even make it to the final bloodbath in the original. Er, I think. There was still quite a bloodbath to be had.

A few of the pieces of Hamlet included felt a little bit of a stretch, but perhaps that's because I had realized by those points in the movie. The moment that lead to realization did fit. It was the play within a play, which has become rather common, but then you remember the dead emperor and the o'er hasty marriage between the emperor's brother and his widow and you realize what this particular play will be about.

I think the old title fits it better. It did, in a strange way, encompass the events in a way that was easy to describe. It served as a good metaphor for the film. The new title is just designed to make it sound exciting and thus encourage purchase. It has far too many contemplative moments to be trying to sound as something so obviously dangerous outwardly. This is devious, the danger hidden. The scorpion just happens to supply the poison.

That Salty Air

The ocean will at once seem familiar and easy to know, with waves rolling along in regular time, and seem wholly mysterious, with dark waters just a few feet below the surface and storms hiding over the horizon. It is usually slow and sometimes gentle, but it is persistent. Within it there are always currents flowing. They gently carry a child playing far down the beach and the waves push him in to a slightly unfamiliar shore when he's finished playing. But sometimes he plays too far out and those waves pull him further instead. Sometimes the currents pull the swimmer under and far down into those deep, dark waters.

The ocean takes the foolish and the unlucky in equal measure. The ones left may raise a fist and a voice at it, but they know it will do no good. The ocean cannot listen and understand. They can affect it no more than the sand and seashells. They may want some sort of revenge upon it but it has the ultimate defense: it moves like water.

Which is why it does not seem surprising to me that the author of That Salty Air does not come from an ocean town. This is a tale of revenge upon the ocean, or rather upon creatures of the ocean in proxy for trying to hurt that which cannot be hurt. Hugh, the main character, is shown as one who reveres the ocean until he receives a letter informing him his mother has drowned in it. Maddened with grief he forgets the responsibilities of his life and wife. She finally brings him back to his senses, but when the sea shows itself to be a fickle and unpredictable thing, he manages one more bought of crazy anger.

This was a tale more of a man who showed himself quite foolish and ultimately got off quite lightly. Sometimes you do. The sea is fickle.