Derik Badman's Journal

Finished another comic this morning, took quite awhile. I'm still learning the application, but also, not totally sure of what I am trying to do. Today's doesn't feel totally satisfactory to me. Maybe I'll have time tomorrow to make a new/better version of it.

Reread Robert B. Ray's The Avant-Garde Meets Andy Hardy this past week. In it he argues for new ways of writing/talking about films, drawing from the repetoire of, mostly, Surrealism and their descendents. It's the type of book that is hard to... summarize... but is always inspiring to me. It makes me want to try new forms when I write criticism. Though I don't think I've ever been very successful at that.

Somehow came across this old interview with Aidan Koch in the Paris Review that has some good stuff in it:

It’s easy to compare comics to movies, but with drawing you’re selecting what people see all the time instead of giving them a whole frame of imagery. I’m taking that to an extreme, and I think that helps the play between watching a narrative and experiencing a narrative—you don’t necessarily know whether something is just what someone else is seeing or whether it’s something that’s happening emotionally. I’m trying to manipulate those things into a more encompassing experience, so that it’s more about internalizing your own experience or relation to it than just having a scene playing out in front of you.

...

The reader has to do a lot of work.

Yeah, that’s been a mild critique of my work. Some people are irritated by not understanding what’s going on, whereas others are excited by that, excited to reread it and try and figure it out. Part of the point is that there is not necessarily a definitive view, so the more you read it, the more you might pick up on other details and see how they relate to each other.

You frequently paint without outlines, so that the color provides the form.

It’s nice to have options for how to depict things, depending on what’s going on. Having the same level of information all the time constrains your view. I can change the way I represent something to give an idea of it without actually having to show it. Readers automatically associate things if you give them hints. If I showed a bunch of things in a row, you wouldn’t necessarily know if they’re related or how they’re related, but the minute I give concrete information, you’d see connections or resemblances.