Strange Animals / 2023 / #3: Down the Layers
Hey folks! Hope you’ve been well here in newsletter-land.
Sometime last week marked three years since the first Covid lockdowns in India. Three bloody years, can you imagine?
My niece was 12 when the lockdowns started, now she’s finishing high school. So many friends have had babies, so many people lost loved ones. We’re still dealing with the psychic shock of that time, each in our own ways. So many people have attempted to draw a line under that time and move on to whatever the next era is, but lots of us are still in pandemic time, and for good reason. We’re still reckoning with what the next little while looks like.
And I don’t just mean that personally. In terms of industry – both my own and that of my friends – I’m seeing people trying to figure out how to integrate this massive change and move on.
In comics, I feel we had a giant, unavoidable illustration that the way we have chosen to do work – in monthly instalments to specific deadlines – is both limited and arbitrary. This was certainly true for me, and based on the responses to my newsletters from the last couple of years, for a lot of industry veterans. We discovered that the way in which we were overworking ourselves to hit deadlines was not only unsustainable, it was also unnecessary. Not only in the larger scheme of things, but even within industry parameters. A lot of my friends got time to rethink stuff and re-engage with their work with a clearer picture of how they wanted it to look.
For myself, this looked like working much less – about a week per month – and spending the rest of my time relaxing, recovering, and learning new things. For others, it has simply meant keeping aside more time for leisure and their families, and making that a non-optional part of their day.
All of this is also going to lead to big changes in how we do things in the coming years. For one thing, if we know that we don’t have to hit a monthly release schedule regardless of who’s drawing the pages, we can figure out more formats in which single artists can do full books at high quality. (We already have Image’s “4-5 months on, 3 months off” cycle, but I think we’ll see more varieties. The original graphic novel market is picking up, and Comixology might have collapsed, but someone is going to take some lessons from manga’s digital-first boom.) We’ve had a very long writer-forward period, and I think that’s going to change quite drastically in the near future – it remains to be seen how and by which young and upcoming artists.
Outside of comics, a lot of my friends and family switched to working from home in the pandemic. This had its own positives and negatives. The positive was that a lot of people were in charge of their own schedule for the very first time – most of them had directly gone from college into their first jobs, never having had an era when the day was theirs – and realised they never wanted to go back to a 9-to-5. Several reckoned that their work – remote as it was – didn’t have to be done from a congested city environment, and moved to suburban or rural areas where there was a lot more space, and some actual nature and shit. Others, though, came to find that not having set office times could mean that they were working all the time – either because of bad management from above (“You don’t even have a commute anymore!” and “We know you’re not really working all day!), or because of Parkinson’s Law.
A lot of them are now confronted head-on with just how exploitative corporations can be for their quarterly growths, and how little “this company is a family” actually means in real terms when it is your employees that need things, and not the corporations.
I think the common factor in all of this is simply contrast – sometimes it takes being dragged outside a system for a little while to understand the nature of the system and what it was doing to you. Fish, water and so on.
This is, of course, only a little of what has been happening in the world, but it has been something I have been experiencing and observing with a lot of interest.
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Work-wise, let’s see. The 20th Century Men trade is out in May, and its final order cut-off is in a couple of weeks. So if you’d like to buy this book, it’s a good time to let your retailer know. Here’s a poster with some nice stuff people have said about our book, with bonus hanging hog:
w0rldtr33 #1 is out soon – April 12th. This is the first issue of what is intended to be a longform novel in comics form. Fernando and Jordie are on fire in this book, and it’s some of James’s smartest writing. We did an 8-page prologue for the Image+ anthology last year, which James has posted to his newsletter, alongside some of the (many) amazing variant covers we’ve got.
Lettering-wise, we’re doing something very fun with this book on my request.
I’ve spoken here often about how I draw inspiration from artists who letter their own work, particularly the many modern artists who do their own sound effects. I think this allows for two important things: 1. The artist gets to control how the design of the sound effect works with the panel. 2. The colourist gets to colour the sound effect, which means it can not only fit the palette of the page, it can also mesh organically with the texture and grain of the page as a whole – it really feels like it’s part of the art.
So I’ve wanted for a while to be able to draw sound effects on black-and-white lineart and have those sent to the colourist so they could colour them with the art. Over the years, I asked various teams if I could do something of the sort, but either because it was impractical, or not a good fit for the book, it never ended up happening.
With w0rldtr33, Fernando has been working pretty far ahead, and I’ve been receiving his thumbnails with the rest of the team, and I noticed that he was roughing in sound effects in the layouts, making sure I’d have space to play. And since we working ahead of time, I proposed this method – I would draw sound effects over Fernando’s art, and paste that into the pages as a layer that Jordie could then work on.
The whole team was into the idea, and I think the results speak for themselves! Here’s a few of my favourites (sticking to non-spoilery panels):
This last one that follows was important enough for James that he added a link to a YouTube clip in the script with a recording of a dial-up connection from the ’90s. And here’s the thing – I grew up with that sound. I got my first computer in 1999, and we had a dial-up connection for at least the next three years, before we switched to 64kbps “broadband”. That dial-up screech is an indelible memory both of the unlimited possibility of the internet, and of hiding my fervent online explorations from my parents.
So I went method with this one, listening to the sound over and over in a darkened room and making sketches, until I landed on this, inspired by the sound itself, and partly by James Stokoe’s sound effects from his Godzilla mini-series, and the sound effects Karl Kerschl and I were doing on Isola which were all mood and no readability.
Here’s what the result looks like:
This also inspired our treatment for another sound effect later in the issue, but I’ll leave you to discover that for yourselves.
We’ve continued this into issue 2, where both Jordie and I are getting comfortable with what the other is able to do, so we’ve pushing harder in different directions. In fact, I just got a page back from Jordie where she’s really played with the sound effects in issue 2 to astounding effect.
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I’d usually post an essay here (and I had one planned), but this has run pretty long already, so I’ll send the next newsletter a little sooner, with some important lessons from my drawing journey over the last many months.
See you folks soon. Bide well!