We’re heading off to Chicago for the Diamond Retailer Summit, so things will be a little sparse here for a bit, but I’m sure the kids can take care of things.
§ Cartoonist Eric Shanower (Age of Bronze, Oz) is the San Diego Opera’s unofficial official cartoonist, and the SDO just posted his sketches of a rehearsal of Aida. For an artist known for his meticulous artwork, it’s fun to see him do some more spontaneous stuff.
§ Kevin Cannon’s Far Arden is a modern comics classic, and the followup, Crater XV is just as manicly heartbreaking. Cannon also teachers cartooning. And here’s an informative essay by his studiomate Zander Cannon on one of the great secrets of the comics: The White Halo!
We’ve all seen that some cartoonists like to put a thin white halo around their characters to set them off from the background. As a younger cartoonist, I always considered this cheating, because obviously your character will stand out when you literally separate him or her from the background; the challenge is to compose your drawing well enough that you don’t have to resort to such trickery. In the ensuing years, I found that this mode of thinking was rather shortsighted, because I realized that the white halo is not just a function of laziness, it replicates three things that are hard to communicate in comics.
§ As a New Yorker, I’m kinda proud of how everyone from the Yankees on down stood in solidarity with Boston, a great city with which NYC enjoys a mostly for fun rivalry. here’s the story of Chris Weyant’s New Yorker cartoon, which exemplified this solidarity.
§ Speaking of cartoons, the new Universal Uclick GoComics app allows you to read tons of comic strips for FREE, including Peanuts, Doonesbury, Garfield, The Boondocks and even Calvin and Hobbes. But no Far Side. The app is good on phones and tablets for all major operating systems.
§ Michael Avon Oeming almost drew Katana for the New 52. that would have been wildly inconsistent with the “superhero modern” look of the rest of the line, but it would also have looked amazing.
