Today I met up with Portland Urban Sketchers for a recap of the recent symposium in Portugal. We got on the topic of comics, and I found myself again feeling like there is so much beauty in comics that never makes it out into the world at large, because if you aren’t in the “comics community” then generally there is just no delivery system for you to discovery great comics that suit your interests.  Well, here are a few comics that I think should be of interest to most urban sketchers.

Isaac the Pirate is an easy first choice – if you don’t believe *me* when I say this is a great comic for urban sketchers, then believe Enrico Casarosa, the originator of the SketchCrawl!  This comic has beautiful, atmospheric art which changes in style and medium depending on the mood the author wants to set.  On top of that, the protagonist is an artist, who has to contend with the world’s reactions to his art as he tries to draw in the field (and sometimes for pirates) – any urban sketcher will immediately sympathize with him!


Craig Thompson’s Carnet de Voyage is a visual travel journal, mostly drawn from life but including his own cartooning style.  Be amazed at what he can accomplish with the Pentel Pocket Brush Pen, and then be equally amazed that his style remains impeccable after his brush pen is lost and he has to turn to inferior tools.  This is a travel journal kept during Thompson’s research trip for his long-awaited graphic novel Habibi.

Matt Sundstrom’s web-based sketch journal Drive Into The Sun follows his journey across country along the Oregon Trail. Matt does good work, and the presentation and concept are very inspiring. Matt has also done a book of Portland drawings.

Anyone have other favorite graphic novels or comics that include beautiful urban sketches?

My weekend started with Friday night’s Drink & Draw (Like a Lady),  a mixer for lady cartoonists.  I spoke with friends Molly, Gabby, and Virginia, and met Sarah and a few others.

Saturday morning Portland Urban Sketchers met up at Taborspace, which is an awesome volunteer-run donation-based cafe in a church up on SE Belmont.  Then we trekked up to the Tabor reservoirs to sketch.

After lunch a few of us headed over to the Oregon Convention Center to attend Stumptown Comics Fest. Alanna, Deb, and I sat in on the Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School costumed figure drawing session which was themed after graphic novel The Goon. I was very happy with these, which were made using my cheap-but-great Reform 1745 semi-flex fountain pen filled with Noodler’s #41 Brown.

After that, I hit a lot of the panel discussions and lectures at the comics fest which was great fun. I kept my hands busy with sketches when I wasn’t taking notes. My sincere gratitude to all the speakers I saw – Thomas James, Tom Orzechowski, Larry Marder, Carla Speed McNeil, Evan Dahm, Barry Deutsch, Jenn Manley Lee, Kel McDonald, Zach Hudson, Scott Kurtz, and Kris Straub. Whew!  I had a great time at these panels and wish it could have gone on for many more days.

After Stumptown Comics Fest, I feel renewed excitement about making comics and am thrilled about all the great people I had the pleasure to interact with. I spoke with personal friends, favorite artists, Mike’s awesome gaming buddies,  local urban sketchers, potential new urban sketchers, and some brand new-to-me artists just starting to get their name out.

Stumptown Comics Fest always leaves me feeling like I know where I belong.  These are my people.  This is what I want to be doing.  Well, this and urban sketching!

Edit:  In my notes, some names are spelled incorrectly and I think the quote I attributed to Jenn Manley Lee actually came from Kel McDonald.  Oops.

Welcome to the new year! I’m happy to report I’m starting the year with sketching, welcoming friends into my home (which has been too rare in the last year), cooking, and lounging.

While I sometimes complain about the difficulties of working full time, I feel very grateful right now to have the income. Lack of time will make it hard to get some of my 2011 goals completed, but lack of money could put the kabosh on MOST of them.  Many people wouldn’t be able to make a list like this because the primary objective of acquiring food and shelter would take all their energy.  In fact, my family is mostly in this position, which is why helping them out is on the list. I am lucky to be able to put so much art and (gasp) some travel on this list, and I know it… despite the continuing yearning for more time and more money.

That said, here’s what I’d like to accomplish this year.

• Attend at least 18 sketchcrawls, and hopefully more
• Complete approximately 24 pen reviews
• Collect completed urban sketching into a zine/issuu, including a narrative about the experience
• Draw for and participate in the Dill Pickle Club/Portland Urban Sketchers collaboration at the Sisters of the Road Cafe in February
• Attend the urban sketching workshop with Matthew Brehm in March
• Finish paying back my debt by the end of March and commence building savings and travel fund
• Continue helping support my family
• Continue improving skills/knowledge at work
• Visit friends in San Francisco
• Complete another “The Month in Comics”-type project, though it may need to be altered to fit a full time work schedule
• Travel to an exotic location for a sketching vacation (such as Portugal for the 2nd Annual Urban Sketchers Symposium)
• Read up on science fiction classics and explore collections of science fiction short stories, making notes for potential illustrations and comics
• Draw boats
• Collaborate with Mike on a comics project
• Bring rice and bean salads into our regular cooking routines
• Complete NaNoDrawMo 2011
• Commute by bike or foot during the summer again
• Continue to improve physical health with exercise and diet
• Forage for mushrooms with friends
• See my stepdad, who has been in prison for almost two years now
• Bring my mom up to Portland for a visit

And some things I’d like to manage if we can find the time off work, and the extra money:

• Visit my dad and stepmom in Florida (perhaps on the way to Portugal)
• Visit Mike’s dad and stepmom in Kentucky
• Take an excursion on a Tall Ship, and sketch the SHIT out of that ship (probably the Lady Washington on a 24 hour trip along the coast)
• Travel to San Francisco with the Portland Urban Sketchers in June
• MORE COMICS

There’s too much there to be managed with my work schedule and budget, but better to aim high than low, right?

Bring it on.  I’m off to attend the year’s first sketchcrawl!

Mike and I completed our first pulp adventure comic in August, and it’s finally online. Enjoy!

La Nina just uploaded this photo of me and Mike tabling at the zine symposium. Also note our new mascot, the Soft Scientist bear!

(Disclaimer: I’m no expert in Mayan writing! Look elsewhere for scholarly data. I widely referenced Ancient Scripts: Maya.)

For one of my daily comics in May, I emulated the visual style of Mayan glyphs.

In real Maya glyphs, each square is a word made up of one or more symbols. Each individual symbol within a word can indicate a number, royal title, sound, or meaning, and you put them together to build compound words.  So, for instance, this glyph meaning “day”

is part of the glyph meaning “plate”.

Presumably, if you didn’t put that symbol for “day” on the plate, the image might be ambiguous or could be pronounced wrong thus signifying a different word.  Put together enough of these symbols (many of which are Mayan gods with complicated portraits) and a single word can be quite complex.  This just means “he/she grabs”…

The directness of the images remind me of some of the cleaner, more symbolic cartooning styles, such as that of John Porcellino or Clutch McBastard.

In my comic at the top of this post, I correlated each square (a Mayan word) to a comics panel (representing, generally, a moment instead of a word).  Instead of making a word out of sounds and meanings, I’ve made a moment out of things and actions.

Here are some further experiments.

(1) Woman drinks too much alcohol, ends up sick with headache for 3 hours
(2) Woman drinks too much coffee, stays up all night building future tech
(3) Bear eats 3 donuts, dies happy
(4) Anxious fish swims upstream in a river, evades fishermen
(5) Mike goes out biking despite threat of rain
(6) I write this blog post but don’t have coffee yet, and the cat’s still asleep

I feel like there’s a lot more room for fun here – if more ideas can be quantified into small, simple “add on” images, I could pack more into a single glyph. But that’s all the time I have now. Anyone else want to jump in?

I’m going to post reviews for at least a few of these over the coming weeks, but for now, here’s a list of all the zines we acquired through purchase or (mostly) trade. Thank you, creators! I’ve already been enjoying this year’s collection quite a bit, and I hope you’ve enjoyed a publication of mine (whether as Geminica or with Mike in The Soft Sciences.)

• it’s not what it looks like – La Nina
• what we comics about when we comics about comics - La Nina
• Dingaling Bros! Fakum and Failey! Three-Ring Wircus! – Skylaar Amann
• The Dreaming Crucible - Joel Shempert
• Milkyboots #11 - Virginia Payne
• Food Stamp Foodie #1 -Virginia Payne
• Papercutter #13 and #14 – Tugboat Press
• Be More Awesome – E. E. Dumas
• How To Share The Joy or Getting Others Enthused About What You Do - E. E. Dumas
• Unemployment for Fun and Profit - E. E. Dumas
• My Friends – Gabby Holden
• The Life and Death of the X-Ray Cafe  (Oregon History Comics) –  Dill Pickle Club, Sarah Mirk/John Isaacson
• Never Knows Best #1 and #2 – Trey Reis
• Sagittarius Manifesto, Two Weeks in Berlin #1 – The Blue Grapefruit Press
• Clutch #22/Invincible Summer #19 – Clutch McBastard, Nicole Georges
• Double Knots – Golden Spun
• (Untitled) – Jessica and Michael
• Awesomness! – Jonah Underwood, Nickle Garden MEDIA & 60 Tons of Battle
• All Things Ordinary #2 and #3 -Derek Neuland
• 10 Years of the Portland Zine Symposium – Portland Zine Symposium
• Growing Wings – Faith McKay
• Zine World #29 – Underground Press
• I Wipe My Butt with the Bible – Sam at The Blue Grapefruit Press
• Letters from Liars #1 and #2 -Androo Robinson
• Weekly Blackbird – Corvus Distribution
• Sex Zine – Julia Gfrorer, Brodie Kelly
• Ariadne Auf Naxos #1, 2 and 3 - Julia Gfrorer
• Flesh and Bone - Julia Gfrorer
• King-Cat Comics & Stories #71 – John Porcellino
• Emily Dickinson was a Fucking Ninja #249 – Mara Williams
• Make Your Own Darn Game, Fantasy Edition - Buttersword
• Free Society Libary No.6 –  Essays on the Social Problem by Henry Addis, June 1898 (Corvus Distribution)
• I Love Soda – Rebecca B.
• Piscataway Philadelphia Portland, a zine about friends – Sarah, Rebeccca, and Shelley
• Little God of Make-Good – Michael Whittier
• You Are Here – Carolee Gilligan Wheeler, Maureen Forys, Michael Whittier, Michael Wertz, Marissa Falco
• A New Declaration of Independence and Other Writings by Emma Goldman Anarchist – Corvus Distribution

Also, I will count among this batch a zine I received in the mail shortly before the symposium: The Pamphleteer from the excellent Wonderella Printed.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by our table at the Portland Zine Symposium! I was happy to receive continued interest in Ancestors of Hair Metal and am working on my Etsy shop with the intention of adding related items including t-shirts. What a great stack of traded zines I brought home, too!

As part of The Soft Sciences, I’ll be launching a new webcomic in about a month, and will announce that here when it takes off.

There are other new projects, as well.  Dangerous Aromas was our project all summer; now that that’s printed (and will be available online shortly), expect to see a lot of action here and at The Soft Sciences as Mike and I turn our attention to online projects, and as my urban sketching frequency kicks back into high gear.

During May 2010, I committed to making a comic (ostensibly a “journal comic”) for each day of the month.  Some fabulous comics-making friends joined in. The month was a success – lots of great work got done, and Mike and I both made it to the end!

How I managed to keep going:

• Being part of a group was half the job.  I got excited about seeing new work come up in the flickr pool, and felt like keeping that going was important enough to bust through the dry spells.  Support from friends was also sometimes enough to reverse my mood right when it needed it.
• My partner participated, so on nights when I was lazy,  seeing him working on his comic made me grudgingly pick up the pen as well.
• We kept our social calendar fairly sparse for the month.   Whenever we did go out after work, it was quite challenging to get the comic done, so we didn’t do it often.  This project was a top priority!  Hopefully our friends still like us a little.

What I learned about comics-making and my own creative habits:

• That dull, depleted  feeling I get by the end of the work day is hard to resist, and if I don’t fight it, the rest of the evening will consist of snacking and watching X-Files reruns.  However, it only takes a little bit of fight to reverse the tide – just a first step towards trying to stay active makes all the difference.  The results might not be great every time, but it’ll always be better than mindless nothingness.  After fighting back my dullness each night just long enough to get a comic done, I never woke up the next morning and thought “if only I didn’t make that comic last night.” Even when the results were not good, nothing was lost for it, and the occasional payoffs made the gamble feel worthwhile. I still managed to watch plenty of X-Files.
• Artmaking has a payoff percentage.  For me, it’s maybe at around 30% – it takes 7 embarrassing drawings for me to generate 3 that feel somewhat rewarding.  So the crappy 70%? Totally necessary.  This fact feels much more tangible and manageable now, after The Month in Comics.
• The content of your life is what you make it.  Both Mike and I occasionally wished we’d done something more remarkable during the day, to spice up our comics.   Occasionally it was actually the deciding factor when we couldn’t decide between laziness and action.  I found myself following trails of interestingness in my own head very purposefully, looking for the juicy middle in days that often were dominated by a beige work cubicle, the gym, and the need to get the dishes done before the jungle of dirty dishes made approach to the kitchen sink impossible. Turns out even though my walk to work is a relatively small portion of the day, if I kept my eyes open, something would always be there to be found & drawn.
• When you look for beauty, you find it.  When you can’t even get yourself to look for beauty, well, there’s the struggle, and that’s worth something too.

The image above links to a flickr set of my 31 comics.  These will be published as a zine which will be for sale at the upcoming PDX Zine Symposium in late August.

Man, am I glad to have done that, and am I glad to be done!

The Month in Comic #24

Originally uploaded by geminica

For the last 20 years I’ve been interested in Mayan glyphs and wanted to find some angle for playing with them, but all I’d done so far was to occasionally copy a few shapes to try to get used to the forms.

Mayan glyphs are solid blocks comprised of 1-5 separate words, so my initial idea was that each block would have a main scene but also a few qualifiers – for instance, the coffee mugs in the first panel, indicating that I was in fact drinking coffee as I fixed bugs at work. But these are daily comics, and I had to go fast. Next time!