ntang (ntang) wrote,


...I slept surprisingly well last night. As in, it was the best night of sleep I can remember getting for a while, and I woke up at 9 am of all times... freaky.

(This seems meandering - and it is - but it's going somewhere, I swear.)

I think just blabbing at LJ helped. Sorry for the whining, it happens sometimes.

Last night I went to the comic book store; I go sometimes, but rarely buy. Comics are too expensive nowadays. Anyways, I went there, and I bought. When I do buy, I'm extremely price-conscious... I tend to get big, expensive books, but big expensive books that are actually much cheaper page for page than those rinky-dinky 24 page, $2.95 comics you see on the stands nowadays. For instance, I bought one that was $25 - but it was an inch thick. I've also stopped reading the superhero comics that I grew up with - they were great then, but now they just bore me. The best writers and artists don't want do to them anymore, unfortunately - I think it's a great bunch of fun when a really talented artist and writer get together to work on a superhero book, but I think most of them think of themselves as too good for it nowadays. They're becoming artists, not just the people that churn out "funny books". It's a shame, in some ways, but it's great in others - because they see themselves as working on a valid artform and a valid means of expression, they're willing to take all kinds of risks and do all sorts of interesting things in an attempt to express themselves.

That inch-thick one I finished this morning, and it was really interesting. It was well written, well illustrated, all black and white, with very strong images (some comic artists are all delicate lines and huge amounts of niggling details, but things get lost in the flood of scribbles and lines - some are bold and strong, sacrificing details for strength and drama in the form and line... either one can work, depending on the situation). It's called Jinx, and was written and illustrated by Brian Michael Bendis, and was really excellent. One thing he seems to be most concerned about is the dialogue in his comics, he will write and rewrite a scene to make the dialogue sound real, and he will have his friends actually act out the parts and listen to them, see if it sounds like something someone could say, etc. It really comes across, as his dialogue can sometimes be hard to read, but it sounds like the stuff someone would actually say, not the sort of expository monologues you usually get in comics. (He actually had a "making of" thing in the back of the book, where he talks about some of the techniques he used, some of the inspiration he had, random thoughts on making comic books, etc.)

So anyways, it got me to thinking. I've tried to tell my story before, via LJ, and I was always unhappy with the results. It came out sounding too much like a dime store novel, not something that was real or useful or gripping. Something was missing, even when I did get the writing down right - and I'm thinking, it's missing the visual. So I've decided that I'm going to play with writing an actual comic-book-style version of my story, where I combine the visual with the written word, hopefully in such a way that makes up for any lacking I have in either aspect, and that can really compliment each other and fill in the gaps. I think also rather than focus so much on it as a "historical overview", like some of entries have been, I'll pick moments in time and get them down on paper. Little episodes, to show what happened, put the changes up on the page, show my growth and changing and such, rather than just talk about them in a detached manner.

I haven't made any definite plans, but I'm getting ideas. I think a lot of my stories would work a lot better put into panels and with drawings and such accompanying them, and hell, I used to call myself an artist - I went to school for this shit, at least theoretically - and maybe this is what I needed to pick up my pencil and pen again. I needed something worthwhile to work on.

So I think that's what I'm going to do. I may post bits of it from time to time, probably friends-only, but we'll see. My dad's got a scanner, so I can get the work I do in, and the dialogue and snippets of text will probably show up in here.

Why am I doing it? I dunno. Everyone needs to look back sometimes, get a bit introspective... I just feel like putting it down on paper. Why are all of you keeping journals in the first place? It's really not that different, I'll just have an illustrated journal.

So, that's that. I need to start digging up old photos of myself as a child, the better to use not only as reference but to incorporate into the art directly. I'm going to keep it mostly "straight" art - no weird techniques, as I feel that until you really know what you're doing with plain old drawing, those things just distract, and are used as a cop-out. A lot of comic book artists just plain can't draw, and they use funky techniques and weird angles and such to make up for it. I don't want this to be an example of that. If I can't express it with my pencil and pen, I'll just do it over, and over, and over again until I can.

So there ya go. Onwards.
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