Bill Slavin's "Elephants Never Forget: Chronicling the creation of a graphic novel"

What a Circus!

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Slavin) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 16:49:00 +0000

I was feeling a little bit like Otto, the amateur clown, yesterday as I participated in the OLA mass book launch! This is my pencil drawing I was doing this week for p. 75 of Hometown Otto.

I was part of CANSCAIP's mass book launch at the Ontario Librarians Conference in Toronto yesterday, promoting my book Big City Otto. 35 authors (with a smattering of illustrators) got up on a noisy little stage in the corner of a cavernous hall down at the Metro Convention Centre, and competed to have their voices heard over the noise, bustle and collective yammering of a book trade in upheaval.

The whole event left me feeling a bit bewildered. Not that I'm pointing fingers at the wonderful CANSCAIP staff and volunteers that made this event possible - it was a noble attempt to give authors a chance to try to get word out about their books. And we were all willing participants!

But it did get me thinking about the duality of the creator's life, the making and selling of books, and how that balance seems to be sliding more and more towards the point where we have to become hucksters for our own creative output. There was a time when this was the publisher's job and I've been in the biz long enough to remember that. But as book sales dwindle and the way the word gets out around books changes on a daily basis, authors and, to a lesser extent, illustrators have had the responsibility for the success of their book fall more and more upon their own shoulders. Or perhaps shouldered it themselves out of a sense of desperation.

A lot of it centres around publishers pushing their creators to establish a presence on the web, through Facebook and Twitter, networking and connecting with fans and the industry. A great deal of time and effort goes into this communication and much of it ends up, in my opinion, to going out to a closed loop of like-minded individuals.

Some are well up for the task of self promotion, but many are being asked to do something they are simply not hard-wired to do. Many creators, due to the introspective and solitary nature of their work, are, quite frankly, lousy at it, and shouldn't be feeling they have to do this. It is why there is a publishing industry in the first place - because it has been a long-recognized fact that the people who create books are not those best-suited to sell them. But whether publishers expect this of them or not, the people who make the books children read are being driven to wanton acts of self-promotion in a desperate bid to get their books "out there".

From a personal perspective I was struck with this odd duality that seems to be expected of us these days. The contrast between what I see as my real work - creating books - and this other odd job, selling them. Most of my days (and I'm lucky, because I still make the major amount of my dwindling income by sitting at my drawing board) involve working away, pencil in hand, in some sort of alternate universe populated by an elephant in a trench coat or — as you can see by the attached pencil drawing — a clown costume. The hours slip by as my mind inhabits a space out of time, and nothing intrudes upon this peaceful act of creation other than the need for an occasional bite to eat or cup of tea. This is my job.

And then, occasionally, it is punctuated by this frenetic attempt to let the world know about this book you have poured your heart and soul into, where the ego gets put on the line and the hard reality of learning that no one will ever care as much about your work as you do comes crashing in around your ears in a deafening cacophony of insecurity and not particularly useful self-questioning.

In the cold hard light of day, once more sequestered in your solitary world, the question arises - how is this productive and why would you choose to identify with that part of your work? And the answer, as you pick yourself up and dust yourself off is so evident that you wonder why it need even be asked as you go back to your job. Your real job, of creating books.

Drawing with Character Part 3:

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Slavin) — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 21:52:00 +0000

The Practical Bit continued …

2. Thumbnails

I've spoken in previous posts about the value of thumbnails but I will repeat it here. I find the thumbnail process invaluable in character development. At this stage, unburdened yet with the encumbrances of detail, one can often capture with a few quick lines a facial or body expression that can serve as a valuable reference when you come to final pencils. Don't labour over character at this point, but equally, don't move on to the next frame until the current one has captured the essence of expression that you desire.

Here is a thumbnail I did for p. 53 of Hometown Otto. You can see how I've worked out points of view, lighting and - most importantly - the faces and body language that I want to communicate in my final. The tentative approach of the hidden animals, the wacky look on the goose, the pathetic look on the calf are all sketched in at this point.

And here is the final pencil that I completed last week. A few things have changed (for instance I have added bits of junk that the animals are emerging from), but the essence of the page is very much what I had first imagined. I will constantly consult my thumbnails as I work through my final roughs, just to make sure that I don't stray too far from those initial - and I think best - impressions.
This page also contains my favourite line in the entire book, from Giselle the Goose, recent escapee from a paté de foie gras factory- "I've got a dodgy liver thanks to those criminals!"

Drawing with Character: Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Slavin) — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 22:48:00 +0000

The Practical Bit …

Okay, picking up from the last post, once you have taken ownership of the story, inhabited the characters fully and approached your work armoured in integrity and honesty, (whatever that means!) there are a number of very practical tools in the illustrator's paint box that can help you tell the visual story you want to tell and invest its characters with, well, character.

1. Character Sketches

Whenever I begin a story, I always spend a little time doing some character sketches for the main characters. As I work fairly impetuously, often those characters come out whole cloth. Others I work through a bit more until I've got what I want.

This is a very important process and you should spend as much time as it takes at the beginning to make sure that you are comfortable with your characters. Be sure to know them in a number of different guises - surprised, angry, sad. Even in attitudes that aren't necessarily going to be used in the story, as this will help you to more fully inhabit the character and make it three dimensional (character-wise) when it comes to working on pages.

These are my character sketches for Pedro, a panther that befriends (sort of) our two heroes in Hometown Otto. You can see how I'm working my way through this character, ditching the first couple of head sketches and getting more of a feel for him on the third try. About this time I think I actually went and took a look at what a panther looks like, flattening the forehead and raising the snout higher on the face in sketch four. I try Pedro out in a variety of expressions, trying to capture the friendly yet self-serving and somewhat shifty character that he is (and as are all cats!) You can double click on these images if you want to see them larger.

These are some character sketches I did for Snake (an evil - or at least not so good - carny). Again, you can see me working through the character, eventually returning to something closer to where I had begun. When my editor read my manuscript for Hometown Otto she thought Snake really was a snake so that was a good point of departure for this character. I made him long and sinewy, with snake skin boots and snake tattoos. The tattoos became simplified as I developed him, realizing early on that I didn't want to have to draw anything that elaborate over a multitude of pages!

I'm not shy, as an illustrator, about reaching for archetypes when I'm creating characters. A case in point would be the other day when I was sketching up some ideas for a small town sheriff for Hometown Otto. My small town sheriff archetype would have to be Rod Steiger from “In the Heat of the Night” and as I already was working with a bit of a spoof on the movie anyway, I went to Google's Image Search and pulled up a few pictures of Rod Steiger. These then shaped the basis for my character sketches.

Not shy of reaching for archetypes, when I needed a southern U.S. small town sheriff, Rod Steiger from The Heat of the Night, came to mind.

Drawing with Character: Part One

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Slavin) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 20:41:00 +0000

The Heady Bit …
I was writing up some notes for a presentation I will be making at the Packaging Your Imagination conference in Toronto on November 5 and I thought the observations around visual character development were worth repeating here. Although this particular talk is more directed to picture book illustration, much of it applies equally well to character development in graphic novels.

So here you go!

One cannot talk about character development without talking about the story in its entirety.

As an author/illustrator ownership is obviously not an issue. But as an illustrator of someone else's story, ownership is key.

You need to remember that you are a 50% partner in the relationship, and, for the duration of your work on the project, 100% owner. Only by fully embracing the story as your own can you give it the life and verve that will come from the tip of your pencil, brush or stylus.

Think of the story as your story, the book as your book. This isn't to cut the author out of the process but rather to put yourself in a mind set that will allow you to give your very best to the story. Because at the end of the day, your responsibility isn't to the author but rather to the story itself. You as illustrator are not simply a third party mediator between author and reader but a bonafide story-teller in your own right. And your story is the drawn one.

To really portray a character effectively you need to inhabit the character fully. You need to crawl right into its skin and peer out through the eye holes. This is the case whether it is a person or dog or cat or pig or whatever. You need to move beyond thinking of the character as separate to yourself, a third party entity.

This will help not only with character development but also the drama of the story. And again, the two are inextricably linked. There is an elation in inhabiting the character. As illustrators we are blessed with the opportunity to travel through our imaginations, do things we would never dare do, all from the safety of our own desk.

Draw on your own experiences fully in the process of this possession. This will be easier with a character that is sympathetic to your own personality but in this respect we all have to be fairly versatile actors, and usually there is something within ourselves that we can dig deep and latch on to when we put pencil to paper.

It is said that when an athlete watches a film of someone doing their sport, in their mind all the same signals are being sent out as if they were actually doing the sport themselves. Or something like that.

So we have to be the athletes of the drawing board, feeling in every fibre of our being the same thing that the character in your story is feeling. And in doing that the character will emerge.

Whatever you do with your character, stay honest to the story. If your character begins to act and react at odds to the written word then you will loose credibility to your audience and do a disservice to the author. Read the story well, and in the process of inhabiting the character make sure that the character you are inhabiting is the one that the author has written.

One of the most gratifying comments I have received is when an author says that they feel as if I have crawled into their head and put their thoughts on paper. It is not of course the author's head one crawls into, but rather the story that has sprung from that author's head.

If you try to be too clever, too sophisticated or generally start drawing with other motivations then simply to tell the story, then you are in danger of taking the visual tale somewhere that does the story discredit.

Next time: The Practical Bit!

Launched!

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Slavin) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 21:05:00 +0000

We had a great send off for Otto on Saturday, October1. In the company of friends, fans and relatives Otto and Crackers set sail on the Great Graphic Sea, hopefully to populate far-flung shores with multiple copies of his book (hint, hint)!
The launch, at Titles Bookstore in Peterborough, Ontario, was replete with five (count 'em!) different kinds of peanuts, free Gator Jus and comic sampler give-a-ways. I had the pleasure of reading from Big City Otto ( I blew up the pages real good!) talking a bit about the process of creating the comic and doing a bit of sketching for my loyal fans.
And what graphic novel gathering would be complete without at least one fan arriving dressed as her favourite character!

Otto fan in costume.

Doing what I do best.

How to read from a comic 101.

One of the best parts about doing a book!

Big City Otto Book Launch!

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Slavin) — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 13:32:00 +0000

On Saturday, October 1, 2011 from 2 to 3 p.m. I will be launching Big City Otto at Titles Bookstore, 379 George St. N., Peterborough, Ontario. This will be part of the Culture Days events in Peterborough, and will include drawing demonstrations, Q & A, free peanut-related refreshments, spot prizes and give-aways. I hope you can join me.

"Slavin’s illustrations recall latter-day Will Eisner for the urban realism, rumpled figures, and the appealing personalities he packs into the large cast of quirky human and animal characters." - Booklist

Drawing Birdy

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Slavin) — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 02:33:00 +0000

So I'm back at my drawing board this week. After a two month hiatus between thumbnailing my new Otto book and beginning the pencil roughs, I'm once again splashing about in the balmy waters of pencildom, happy as a duck.

As I was sketching out an early sequence in the book (shown below) I began thinking about this character Birdy and where she came from. Like authors, story illustrators find their affection growing for certain characters as they work them through, and for me Birdy is one of those. Motherly and kind, she brings our heroes in out of a nasty downpour and brews them up a nice cup of tea. They end up staying the night in her cozy little caboose in an abandoned railyard, and when they prepare to leave the next day, she is talked into joining them on their travels.

But where did this character Birdy come from? It was only when I was sketching her up for the third or fourth panel that it suddenly occurred to me she was a little old Scottish lady I ran into in England's Lake District. Thirty years ago.

The story goes like this. My partner of the time and I had just stepped off our bus in a small Cumbrian village, and were standing staring about, probably looking somewhat lost, when a little voice near my left elbow asked us where we were staying. I discovered the voice's source, a little old wizened gnome in rubber boots and Macintosh, with a load of firewood in her arms, and told her we had no idea. To which she answered, "Well, come along then," and turned and started hoofing it across a field. We grabbed our heavy packs and scrambled to keep up with her as she nimbly hopped over a downed fence, with no idea where she was taking us. Eventually we ended up at her B&B.

It was along time ago, as I say, but my memory of her is still fresh as the day it happened — her mater-of-fact taking us under wing, the old saggy four poster bed heaped with comforters and replete with hot water bottle. And especially the mountain of food she piled up for us for breakfast. And I remember her telling us her story, how she was "brought South" by an English lad when she was a young girl, lured across the border by young love, by a husband who had had the audacity to up and die and leave her alone away from family.

And it was today that I realized that that is who Birdy is, that I'd drawn a tribute to a long-forgotten memory. But in this story, because it's mine to do with as I please, this time she goes home.

Otto and Crackers meet Birdy on a wet night. My unconcious tribute to
a little old Scottish lady I met thirty years ago.

"How to Draw Otto" Videos

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Slavin) — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 14:20:00 +0000

Lately I've been messing around with creating a "How to Draw Otto" video. I ended up with two, a short, speeded up version:

And a longer, guided tutorial version:

Let me know if you like them. I will be posting them (hopefully along with others in the future) on their own "How to Draw" page, accessible through the Pages bar above.
Enjoy!

Very excited …

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Slavin) — Tue, 31 May 2011 22:07:00 +0000

I just received news today that advance copies of Big City Otto are now in at my publishers. For the uninitiated, these copies are those sent ahead of the slow boat from China (or wherever the books are being printed - but probably China) to be sent to reviewers, bloggers and persons of influence. If I'm lucky I might even get one myself!
As the book gets closer to its release date the publicity and promotional machine begins to go into high gear. In addition to the sampler that I mentioned in my last post, I also have a stack of promotional post cards in my hot little hands to distribute to the four winds.
And if you really can't wait for the book, here is a link to a 16 page preview that Kids Can has posted on their web site. (Just click on the image below.)

Enjoy!

Click on image to go to preview.

Bits and Pieces

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Slavin) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 21:01:00 +0000

Here are a few bits and pieces I'm working on these days as I wait around for my editor to get back to me with comments on the second book in the Elephants Never Forget series (Hometown Otto).

Here's a self-portrait I was asked to do, to be included in a promotional sampler
of Kids Can's fall graphic novels. It will also have a few spreads from Big City Otto,
so keep your eyes peeled for it!

Above: Some first round character sketches for Birdy, a retired dancing bear
that helps get Otto and Crackers pointed in the right direction. There are a lot more
characters in the second book, and I want to start to get a feel for them before
I get into the actual thumbnailing of the story.
Below: Sketches for Harriett Tubby, a pig that our heroes meet who is running an underground
railroad escape route for mistreated farm animals. She is based on the remarkable Harriett Tubman,
who was famously pictured with gun in hand as she led escaped slaves north to freedom. A the moment
I have opted for a broom, but that may change. Any suggestions?

Wrapping It Up

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Slavin) — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 18:23:00 +0000

This week I was finishing the last bits and pieces of the graphic novel – title page, end papers and cover. It all went down to the publisher’s yesterday and this morning I woke up unemployed!

As we all know, you must, MUST not judge a book by the cover. But yet, as an illustrator, I know how important it is to get the book cover as right as possible. This will be the reader’s first encounter, and along with a brief flip through and perusal of the jacket copy, will be the deciding factor as to whether your book gets read.

Whenever I do a book, I always prefer, if possible, to do the book cover last. By then I’ve had time to think about the book, what it’s about, what its essence is, and hopefully, have some ideas that can be distilled down to something that is eye-catching and, more importantly, captures the story.

When we were kids I think we were all frustrated by covers that were clearly done by someone who hadn’t read the story – small details that we knew were just dead wrong. But it doesn’t mean that the illustrator can’t stray from the text a bit because, as a cover, you’re not simply reflecting a part of the story, but rather something that is emblematic of the entire story. Also, there needs to be a tie in with the title, so that the title and cover image make sense as a whole. So what ends up on the cover might be a particular scene that captures the essence or it might be a constructed scene that doesn’t actually appear in the book itself.

Finally, the cover is something that most publishers are pretty hands on with. They may let you run fast and foot loose in the interior of the book, but when it comes to covers they will want their say. This can lead to multiple versions or, if you’re lucky or inspired, you may nail it on the first go.

Below are the three versions of the Big City Otto cover that I went through, along with the final art. I’m happy with where the cover ended up, and feel that it is a fairly good representation of what you will find between the covers.

Here is my first quick sketch for the cover, executed a few months ago. I wanted to communicate a "lost in America" feel, hence Otto with suitcases, looking like a newly arrived immigrant 40's style straight off the boat. And as the Alligari Boys feature prominently in the story, I wanted to include them in a menacing role. I elected to go with an all black background with a single pool of light, trying to give the whole thing a film noire retro look.

My editor Tara Walker came back to me with the comments that although she liked it, she felt that it didn't really say "Big City". She suggested some buildings in the background. In the meantime I had begun to think that the first one wasn't animated enough and that it might be fun to show the scene immediately after Otto had unwittingly helped the Alligari Boys knock over a convenience store. I've taken the title copy to a more finished state, distorting the Baddaboom typeface that I had used in the interior for sound effects and loud shouting. I've also dropped Esperanca's name off the cover (by mutual consent!) as her involvement in other book work had taken her away from a major role in this project (she still gets a writing credit on the title page). I liked the hand-lettered effect for my name, which I had first used in the title bar of this blog, so I went with that, and added a city skyline in the background to communicate "Big City".

Here's the third go around. Again, Tara was encouraging (as editors have to be!) but said that she felt that the second attempt didn't really focus in very effectively on Otto and that she preferred my first take but with more city. I could see her point, and took another look at this to see how I could incorporate that. It occurred to me that if I flattened out the perspective a bit and went to solid black for the mid-ground, I could make the somewhat tricky transition from a three quarter bird's eye view in the foreground to looking up at the city skyline in the background. I also thought it would be fun to actually have Big Al emerging from the sewer hole to reinforce the "alligators in the sewers" theme that runs through the second half of the book. (You will notice that Big Al's cigar has disappeared in the second and third versions. Smoking on the cover, even by a bad guy who's height has clearly been compromised by this activity, was an absolute no-go.)

And here is the final go. Tara circulated the third pencil around Kids Can Press and it received enthusiastic approval, with the only concern being that too much of the title was obscured by Otto - an easy fix.
I'm really happy with the retro feel of this, the contrast of the red type against the black background. Synchronicity even played a part as I had accidentally added a coarser dither to the colour in Photoshop, but realised that I liked the effect, which mimicked the coarser colour screens of earlier printing processes.
In the end I think the cover has accomplished exactly what a cover needs to do. It right away says "Big City" in both name and image, reflects one of the major dynamics of the story (the interaction between Otto and the Alligari Boys), and shows Otto as a bit at sea and innocent in a foreign environment. This was one of those covers that doesn't show an actual scene in the story, but captures its essence. And it was truly a collaborative work between my editor Tara and myself, who's sage comments helped lead me to exactly where I think this book cover should be.

Done!

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Slavin) — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 18:16:00 +0000

Spoiler Alert! As you can see by the final panel of Big City Otto,
neither of the principle characters is knocked off in Book One.
Not to say it isn't touch and go at times!

I coloured the last of eighty pages yesterday. That’s eleven months of steady work doing the final art, almost three years of planning, months of thumbnails and editing. Or, to put it in a more visual way…

Not that it’s all done. I have a cover still to work out, and a title page, and text and art have to be married in InDesign. Things need to be proofed and corrected. But as of today, the book, for all intents and purposes, is done.

Looking at the stack of boards that comprise the inked portion of a project this size, I find it’s a formidable pile of art. When I go to schools and speak to the kids, this is something I always do, show them the physical evidence, the stack of thumbnails, pencil roughs and final art that comprise this thing we call a book. Try to make it real for them. Because for a lot of kids, and adults, too, they’ve never really made that connection between the labour involved, the creation of art, and how that translates into a pile of paintings.

There will never be a coloured version of this book to show kids, at least not as finished art. And I think, as I now struggle to find the room in my ever dwindling studio for yet another stack of art, that a lot of young illustrators and those of my generation who have made the switch to digital don’t have to deal with this space issue. They also won’t have that stack of art to show aspiring artists, that opportunity to wow them with the sheer volume of what you have produced, and in a way, I think that’s too bad. In fact, as more and more books are delivered digitally, that physical manifestation of the artist’s work continues to dwindle. And I wonder, when there is no original art anymore, no books as we have known them, how will we continue to value something that has become so abstracted? But maybe I worry too much.

In the meantime, I’m going to revel in the pleasure of a job well done, and start to ruminate about Book 2 in the Otto and Crackers saga. And on the upside, as my sister in Saskatoon has helpfully suggested, “Esperança will be glad to see the end of this project too so you don't have to make elephant jokes together all the time.” At least not for a while!

Available now while quantities last! Your very own Otto bookmark. Lovingly printed on Coated Two-side 90 lb. Cover Stock and accepted as legal tender in Pugganooga, this remarkable piece of memorabilia can be yours for only
$19.95 (+ shipping and handling)

Offer not valid in Pugganooga.

Final Laps

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Slavin) — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 15:38:00 +0000

This was a pen and ink illustration I did a few years ago but it seemed to fit the theme!

My mother used to say, “If you don’t have something nice to say about someone, don’t say it all!” Words to live by, and I’ve tried to expand it to include “interesting”, “intelligent”, “informed” or “funny”, and then broadened the whole prescription to include most of what comes out of one’s mouth. It makes me a poor choice for a cocktail party companion as it puts severe limits on mindless banter.

As I start on the last bits of Big City Otto I’ve sort of dried up regarding what to be writing about in this blog. Nothing seems to resonate, and unlike my illustration work, I’m actually feeling a bit blocked. My partner Esperança attributes it to the whole project drawing to a close and she may be right. Or maybe I’ve talked it all out.

Last summer, in the early days of starting this blogging project it was the opposite, with ideas for posts stumbling over each other in their hurry to barge their way to the front of the queue. And I’m sure more things will come along in the future, as the book winds its slow way through the production stages to finally emerge sometime late next summer as a published work. But for now, things are just quietly winding down.

So that’s it. I just wanted to give the heads up to anyone following my adventures (both of you!) or those who may stumble on this blog in the interim, that it might be a wee bit quiet here. Eventually it will all probably be rolled up and put on some sort of more official “Bill Slavin” page as a link that the present URL directs you to. (That’s presuming I actually join the 21^st Century and make myself a web page.)

In the meantime, I hope that what you’ve found here has been at least a little bit interesting, and possibly informative, and, dare I say, funny. And, in the spirit of the season and true to my mother’s wise words, short on naughty and long on nice.

Happy Holidays!

Blowing Things Up

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Slavin) — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 20:52:00 +0000

Page 62, inked final, of Big City Otto.

I realized, as I was inking Page 62 this week, that I love to blow things up. Not literally, of course – I’ll leave that to the professionals, fanatics and inspired lunatics that seem to populate our world these days. But when it comes to putting pencil to paper, I love blowing things up.

I always have. Most boys do. It’s why their earliest art is filled with vast and complex panoramas of huge battle scenes, planes going down in flames, limbs severed, blood spurting. I was as guilty as the next.

One of the less gruesome battle scenes that filled my childhood sketch
books. From Zok the Caveman, drawn when I was 8.

And when I wasn’t busy blowing things up on paper, I was out playing complex wargames with my friends. Armed with homemade weapons (my parents refused to buy me guns), my wooden commando knives lovingly shaped and sharpened on my father’s grinder, heavy machineguns created from gasoline cans, wooden submachine guns and rifles, we would do battle for hours on my friend’s farm. In the back forty we had constructed a trench system, complete with barbed wire, sandbags and roofed bunkers, on a sand slope that would have been the shores of Lake Ontario in some bygone era but now became the beaches of Normandy, fought over time and time again. Or in my own homemade bunker in a sand pile next to our house I would spend hours in solo combat with the Nazi aggressors. As Harry Pearson puts it, in Achtung Schweinehund!, his hilarious homage to toy soldiers and growing up in the 60’s, “To me, the Summer of Love was a six-week school holiday filled with Stukas, swastikas and bazookas.”

Some see this as a boy’s morbid fascination with war. The art of destruction. But I think it’s something else. I think it is a boy’s love of action. There is nothing more action-packed than play battle (not war, which is famously and drearily long periods of inaction punctuated by brief moments of sheer and utter terror). Take out the actual dying and carnage and you can begin to see the adrenaline-stoked fascination with the running, jumping, diving for cover and shooting. Today’s first person shooter computer games serve the same function - without the exercise.

For some of us, we never out grow this fascination with pure, unadulterated action. For some it takes the shape of contact sports, or racecar driving or mountain climbing. And for the less adventurous it may take shape on paper.

I’ve said before that to truly inhabit my drawings I have to, at some level, actually be living those things that go down on paper. It’s one of the greatest pleasures of my work, the opportunity to inhabit worlds, do things that I would never be able to do in real life. And never do I more fully inhabit that action-packed world than when things are blowing up. Gravity no longer becomes a factor, items become air borne, everything disperses from a central point on the page. There is exhilaration there.

Which is why you will never see me creating a more serious graphic novel. The idea of drawing panel after panel of people indulging in intense conversation as they work out or relive their less-than-exciting lives won’t be what I’ll be drawing. I’ll be the kid with the water gun, down in the shallow end of the graphic novel pool, blowing things up!

Milestones

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Slavin) — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 19:56:00 +0000

When I penciled my last pages this week I realized I was saying good bye to Cajun Joe. It was a bit sad to think I wouldn't likely be drawing him again as I bundled him into a paddy wagon. But never say never. Here's my penciled rough for Page 79 of Big City Otto.

So congratulate me. I finished penciling the last page of my book today.

That’s not to say that I’m done. There are still twenty pages waiting to ink and colour and then all of the compilation at the end, but none-the-less, a milestone has been reached!

I won’t make the same mistake that I made when, after months of work, I finally finished the thumbnails for this story. I remember sitting down in a comfy chair on my back porch, cracking the spine of the big black sketchbook that contained all my labour and reading through the story from start to finish.

I was done in fifteen minutes.

It reminded me of the time a friend and I decided we were going to bike around the coast of Cornwall. We rented a couple of old clunker three-speed Raleighs, hoisted our army-issue backpacks onto our backs and set off. For two days we crawled up and down the indented coast, clawing our way out of one fishing port after another as we followed the undulating coastal road. On the third day we woke up exhausted, packed the whole thing in and caught a train back to Plymouth.

In fifteen minutes we whisked by all those hard-gained miles and were back where we started. Fifteen minutes. It was a bit like that.

I have to remind myself that it isn’t the single reading that justifies all the work but the cumulative hours and hours of all those readings by adoring fans that make it all worth while. That and the fact that there’s nothing I would rather be doing in this world than drawing comics.

And this is merely a slender eighty-page volume. At the moment I’m working my way through Craig Thompson’s graphic novel, Blankets. Six hundred pages of beautifully rendered black and white drawings. Now there is a labour of love!

Really, these comic book artists should be canonized. Not me – I’m taking a bit of time off to pursue a childhood dream – but I’m thinking of those who have made a career of it, pouring their hearts and souls into pages and pages of drawings. Don’t think for a minute many are getting rich on it. Personally I think comic book artists are the great unsung heroes of contemporary art. The very best are the modern day counterparts to artists like Durer, Rembrandt, Doré and Goya - consummate draughtsmen who could render beautifully and prolifically. Today’s comic book artists keep alive a tradition centuries old – the art of drawing. And they continue to stretch and explore the boundaries and possibilities inherent in visual story telling.

So take a bit of time the next time you read a graphic novel. Take a moment to get beyond the words and into the visual story that the artist has laid out for you. It’s a sumptuous feast, not to be bolted down quickly but savoured and appreciated. And remember that it was a remarkable amount of work that made that meal possible.

They deserve to be congratulated.

Negotiating the Minefields of Political Correctness

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Slavin) — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 21:50:00 +0000

Pencil rough for p. 65 of Big City Otto. This is the version you won't see in the book with offending lyrics, keg-shaped GatorJuice container and the pending-lawsuit logo still present.

This was one of those weeks where you really wonder whether it’s all worth it.

I never pick up my pencil to draw thinking, “What would a kid like?” Instead I trust in my inner twelve year old and simply put those things down on paper that make me laugh. As a result I sometimes forget that I’m doing a comic that’s ostensibly for kids.

I think comics can work at a number of different levels and, like the animated films we see in theatres, are filled with bits and references that only an adult audience is going to get. But for some reason we set the bar a bit higher for children’s books, probably because they have to run the gauntlet of administrative approval in order to get into schools, rather than simply the court of public opinion. But I’m also very aware that I am the product of a different generation, growing up on a steady diet of Bugs Bunny cartoons and Asterix comics. So my compass for negotiating all of this may be a bit rusty.

I don’t blame my editor, who's the best of the best. In this case she’s merely the messenger for an industry that is concerned over possible lawsuits or books being rejected by certain markets. She suggests these should be my concerns as well, (which they are not) and says the worst part of her job is when she has to come to authors with these sorts of requests. In the end it’s a fine dance between the publisher’s needs and what I feel is right for the book. But sometimes the comments continue to baffle me.

For instance, here are a few things I learned this week:

1. Gangstas aren’t gangsters.

I actually almost get this one, but I was still surprised when any direct reference to “gangstas” wound up on the cutting room floor. I’m no fan of gangsta culture and believe that it is wreaking a terrible toll on disenfranchised black urban youth and should not be glamorized or re-enforced. But in my comic I honestly thought I was satirizing white suburban youth who emulate the culture, and am ancient enough to still believe that satire can be a powerful force for good. (See previous post, Alligata Gangstas). But I guess ten year olds might not get satire, although I’m suspecting more likely it's adults without a sense of humour.

2. No drinking allowed!

Loose women have never been my forté so at least I avoided that pitfall! And even I knew that Otto is an innocent at large and probably shouldn’t be seen indulging in under age drinking. But I hadn’t realized that even oblique references to drinking must be expunged, even when the binging is on energy drinks and junk food. (Maybe you have to be fifty and a victim of clean living before you can contemplate the fact that binging on junk food can lead to hangovers!) So the keg-like container for the “GatorJuice’ becomes a giant pop bottle and next-day head aches become tummy aches, and slowly I can see that all references will have so completely disappeared that what I thought was a relatively innocent joke will be lost! Sigh. Deep breath …

In a pathetic attempt at rebellion I drew the line at ridding my junk-food-hung-over heroes of their “queasy bubbles” over their heads, arguing that they weren’t only cartoon short hand for inebriation but also for tummy trouble.

3. … Or smoking!

I found out that good guys can’t smoke and apparently this can extend to bad guys if the audience is perceived as being too young. Big Al was able to keep his cigar, (it was suggested that it not be lit but I happen to like drawing smoke) and I honestly think that his stunted growth makes him a poster child for NOT smoking. But you won’t see any sign of a cigar on the book cover. Non-negotiable I’m told.

I could go on, but these were a few highlights. Threat of lawsuits, real or imaginary, have already seen my arch villain, “The Man in the Ten Gallon Hat”, become the “Man with the Wooden Nose”. And probably none of these changes on their own are going to make or break the success of the book. But bit by bit they do chip away at the original cohesive concept and do, at the cost of not alienating any markets, end up creating something that’s less than it could be. And in the end we’re left with a degree of self-regulation that maybe gets so good at anticipating the market’s response that it stops taking the chances one needs to take to create something of value.

Not that I’m trying to do important art here. But fo' shizzle, jus' 'cause I’m drawin' talkin' elephants don’ mean my book's for ankle biters! I just happen to like drawin' talkin' elephants, dawg.

Next week (or sometime in the future): A cautionary tale about the Comics Code Authority and its effect on the North American comic industry.

Winsor McCay – Something from Nothing

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Slavin) — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 21:28:00 +0000

I took the week off from Otto to do some odds and sods including this rough
for Know Magazine on Winsor McCay. It got me to thinking …

I took a break this week from working on my comic to do some other stuff that had wandered across my desk. One of those things was a bi-monthly installment for Know Magazine, a children’s science magazine that I have a regular gig with, producing a one-page comic called Great Moments in Science. This month’s issue was on animation and I was given the choice of a piece on Walt Disney or the lesser-known Winsor McCay.

Like a shot I opted for Winsor McCay, (as Disney already gets far too much press!)

For those of you who don’t know, Winsor McCay was a cartooning and animation pioneer who created the first commercially successful animated film, Gertie the Dinosaur. He was also the creator of the comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, a strip that still stands head and shoulders above most because of its beautifully designed panels and intricately realized artwork.

But while researching the history of his early animation attempts, two things struck me. The first was that, prior to making his film, McCay used to entertain audiences in Vaudeville shows where he would speed draw characters and tell stories. I found this interesting, the whole idea of producing visual art as live entertainment, because in some ways this is an idea that really has come back to the forefront via the Internet and Youtube. There are a plethora of visual-art-as-live-entertainment videos out there, one of the most striking examples being the evocative sand drawings of Ukranian artist Kseniya Simonova.

On a personal note, I’ve been toying with the idea of filming my drawing of one of the pages from Big City Otto and putting it out there for people to take a peak at. I’ve already made one failed attempt (as I got into my work my head gradually impeded into the frame until all you could see was a giant bald spot!) I figure now that this will be something I will tackle when I have finished the first book and have some more time on my hands. And I will wear a hat.

But I want to do this because I know people love to watch others draw. I do. It’s that magic of pulling something from nothing which is - just that - magic. When I visit schools I usually do a bit of drawing for the kids and you can hear a pin drop when I’m in the middle of doing that, the kids are so engaged in watching me work. I remember once sitting by a roadside in the Azores with my wife Esperança, and the two of us were sketching some Portuguese cottages. A group of country kids came up and started watching us and for more than an hour they just stood there in rapt attention, not uttering a word, until their mother, worried they were bugging us, called them home. It was remarkable.

Which leads me to the second thing I discovered while working on this one-page comic. I thought that it was interesting that when Winsor McCay created his first film, Little Nemo, the audiences didn’t really understand what was going on up on the screen. They thought that the animation was created somehow with wires, filmed in real time. But it wasn’t just a failure to grasp the technical aspect of it, a succession of drawings flowing together to create the illusion of movement. When you think about it, those first animated films really had done something truly remarkable. For the first time in human history the images in a person’s mind had been taken out of their shell and made to move and interact in front of the audience. Today’s audiences, glutted with special effects, take all of this for granted, but those very first audiences were simply baffled by something that had arrived in their world that they had never experienced before. In a sense it was the next quantum leap from when a caveman picked up a stub of charcoal and captured a beast from the fields and placed it on the wall.

Winsor McCay had created something from nothing.

Mr. Parrot Pockets

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Slavin) — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 21:47:00 +0000

If Pluto’s a dog, what’s Goofy? It was this sort of question that should have plagued my generation growing up, but in all honesty, I think most of us just took all those anthropomorphic inconsistencies in stride. We all knew how it worked, the clothes made the man –er – dog –er –man/dog, and an unclothed animal was, well, clearly an animal. Speech balloons or the absence thereof sealed the deal.

It’s that sort of interior logic that allows an elephant to wander unnoticed in the streets of New York City. On first landing Otto obtains some stolen clothing from the unclaimed baggage area, and after that, clothed only in a fedora and trench coat, he is now mistaken for merely a largish human. At least by the less-than-curious occupants of a big city.

The parrot is taken at face value because we all know parrots can talk. So it’s a small leap of logic that allows Crackers to have a conversation with a bartender. And other animals can always recognize and communicate with one another, despite the presence or absence of clothes, because of the universal bond of animalhood. Or something like that.

Okay. So it doesn’t make sense. It’s why I love this medium called “comics”. The reader is a willing accomplice in a suspension of disbelief. But dubious logic aside, the real challenges in anthropomorphism from a cartoonist’s perspective are simply those created by an animal’s physical characteristics. Crackers’ wings transform relatively easily into large fingered hands when necessary, but Otto creates more problems. I mostly imagine him as a person in over-sized oven mitts (without thumbs) which allows him to grapple with most things. Catching cabs, (literally) blowing his nose, holding a bowl. I’ve even managed to squeeze a pointing finger out of him, but not easily. (Fortunately elephants are one of the few animals that walk the same as humans, not tippy-toed but flat-footed, so at least his knees bend the right way, anthropomorphically speaking!)

Parrot wings morph fairly easily into hands but the large saucer-like foot pads of Otto create challenges for even the simplest gestures, like pointing.

Then there are the Alligari Boys, alligators so acclimatized to life in the big city that they have taken to wearing human clothes. Big Al has even elected to go for patent leather shoes! But again, although their claws are more easily adapted to being hand-like, I did run up against the problem of their arms being too stubby and low down on the body to easily reach their snout. Mostly not a problem other than when they’re shushing Otto, like the image below …

The stubby legs and long snouts of the alligators make hand to mouth gestures a bit tricky. It could only be managed by a hunching of the shoulders and getting the alligators to bend into the pose.

But it’s the inconsistencies around anthropomorphism that can be the most fun. Maps mysteriously appear and disappear in Cracker’s plumage, but when he pulls out a bill to pay the cabbie, Otto really takes notice. His realization that Crackers is carrying around cash leads to the following exchange, as jet lag and the frustration of their search for Georgie finally blows the top off their collaborative efforts.

The inked drawing for p. 52 of Big City Otto that I was working on this week. The bottom right panel is one of my favourites in the book, as Otto and Crackers square off eyeball to eyeball.

Elephant Thumbnails

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Slavin) — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 21:50:00 +0000

Above you can see the thumbnail and subsequent pencil rough for p. 62 of Big City Otto. I'm constantly referring to my original sketch in order to capture the spontaneity and energy as I work on my finished pencils.

In my on-going education and elucidation, I can say, unequivocally, that elephants do not have thumbnails. Toenails, yes, and lovely ones at that, but the lack of thumbnails is inexorably hinged to the lack of thumbs which creates no end of troubles for an illustrator who needs his elephant to, well, hold things. But that remains for a future post – the visual pitfalls of anthropomorphism!

In talking about storyboarding, or thumbnails, I’m really reaching into the vault here, as this was a process started over two years ago. Much of the original storyboarding for Big City Otto (book one of Elephants Never Forget) was done on a trip to the Azores, my partner Esperança’s birth place, in the summer of 2008. It was a memorable trip for the fact that most of my two-week stay on those beautiful islands was spent in the hospital waiting room, while Esperança attended to her mother who had become quite ill a few days after our arrival. Fortunately I had the Otto manuscript and my sketchbook in hand, and the visual story just poured forth over that time and the weeks following when I returned home. I remember it as a golden summer spent sitting and drawing on my back porch while the weather held. It was a very creative time, working with nothing more than pencil and sketchbook, liberated from art table and computer screen, and really just letting the creative juices flow. It was the cliché of the artist’s life and so far from the reality of what it usually takes to make a living as an illustrator.

The months of work spent on those thumbnails was all speculative work, something that is familiar to the writer but less so to the illustrator who usually has contract in hand before pencil goes to paper. But the fruit of those days’ labour was a fully-realized manuscript complete with sketches, and I honestly believe that this lead to the subsequent acceptance of the story for publication.

When I speak of thumbnails here I’m really referring to the art of storyboarding, or getting the story down in small simple quick sketches. It is at this stage that I’m working out points of view, lights and darks, where the text will likely fall and how the action will be communicated over how many panels of storytelling. The thumbnailing is always the most creative part, in my view, of the entire process, a chance to tackle the bare bones of the visual narrative without getting hung up searching for references or fine-tuning the drawings. That all comes later, once I settle into the pencil roughs, many of which I’ve reproduced previously here in the posts of this blog.

But the thumbnails are really the heart of the whole thing. It is where I get my hands deep into the clay of storytelling, and in those thumbnails lies the energy and compositions for my later drawings. I refer constantly to these small sketches as I work on my pencil roughs. When I stray too far from those original imaginings the picture starts to loose its energy, gestures become wrong, angles of view too acute. So I constantly find myself returning to those very first spontaneous sketches to bring myself back on track, to those sketches that will serve as a road map for the months and months of hard work that still lie ahead.

Toilet Humour and Brainstorming Otto

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Slavin) — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 16:43:00 +0000

Above is the pencil rough for Page 36, part of the scene described below. One of the wonderful things about doing comics is that the usual restrictions of reality aren't a hindrance. This means it's completely acceptable for an elephant to be stuffed into a port-a-potty and then hoisted to the top of a high-rise. In fact, not only acceptable but actually rather funny.

I’ve talked a little bit in an earlier post about how the idea of Otto originally emerged (http://www.billslavin.com/2010/07/star-is-born-imagining-otto_9811.html) but thought some of my readers might be interested in the brainstorming process that leads to ideas getting organized and on paper.

Most of the first book of Elephants Never Forget was written episodically. That is to say, once the arc of the story had been established ( Otto and Cracker's journey to America in search of Otto’s kidnapped pal, Georgie the chimp) most of the rest of the story was constructed from a series of scene ideas. These ideas usually came up and were fleshed out in brainstorming sessions conducted during regular evening walks with my partner Esperança Melo. Most of the best ideas were Esperança’s and would usually come from a conversation that went something like this:

Me: So, Otto and Crackers find themselves adrift in this huge metropolis, looking for his pal Georgie. What happens next?

E: Otto might get stuffed in a Porto-Potty.

Me: What?!!

E: A Porto-Potty.

Me: (dense) Why a Porto-Potty?

E: Well, he’s in the city and he has to go to the bathroom somewhere, and an elephant in a Porto-Potty is funny.

Me: (thinking now this isn’t such a whacky idea) Okay. Poop humour is funny. But why would there be a Porto-Potty?

E: Well maybe it’s on a construction site.

Me: (more enthusiastically) Yeah. And maybe he has to go to the bathroom because he ate a box of prunes or something.

E: That would have happened sometime sooner.

Me: Sure, like when Otto and Crackers first arrived in the city. Remember, he was hungry the whole time on the airplane and on the baggage carousel, so he may have done something ill-considered like eat a box of prunes. Maybe from an early morning delivery van when they first get into the city proper.

E: (still with the Port-a-Potty) It would be funny if the Port-a-Potty is being lifted up on a platform by a crane …

Me: What??!!

E: It would just be funnier if it all happened while being suspended from a crane.

Me: (hesitantly) Oookay. That might work. Sort of a Buster Keaton high-wire act?

E: Exactly,

Me: (gears churning) And actually that could work quite well, because once he gets out of the Port-a-Potty he would be way up in the air, and maybe for the first time gets a glimpse of how huge the city is! Like a great concrete jungle – an obvious metaphor for an elephant, don’t you think?

E: (uninterested in my elephant metaphors) Sure. Whatever. And maybe he sees an organ grinder and his monkey below in the street and thinks that it’s Georgie.

Me: That could work.

E: It would be really funny if he ran into a monkey on the street who was part of a flea circus.

Me: What??!!!

This is typical of our collaboration around the writing, with Esperança coming up with the wackier and more original ideas, forcing me to then think out of the box. Then I run with it, taking all the good stuff, writing up the scene descriptions and dialogue and figuring out how it fits into the narrative as a whole.

There are many ways of writing for a graphic novel, some highly descriptive, others sketching things out in the broadest strokes possible. Because I have the luxury of being both lead writer and illustrator, my scenes and even panel breakdowns can be fairly loose allowing me to fill in the details later. I will speak more about this in another post on storyboarding the book.

At any rate, all of the discussion on our walk (other than the flea circus bit, which made no sense whatsoever!) led to this written scene:

High Wire Scene

Panel

Caption: Hours later …

Scene: Otto and Crackers walking down the street despondently.

Crackers: Cripes! We’ve been searching for ages!

Otto: I gotta go.

Crackers: Go? Now? We just flew 3000 miles to get here and you gotta go?

Otto: No, I mean go! You know–

Crackers: Ah, jeez! This ain’t the jungle, Otto. You can’t just go anywhere.

Scene: Now walking past construction site. There’s a Johnny-on-the-spot present. A construction worker has just left it, buttoning his pants and whistling.

Crackers: See that little house? You go there.

Otto: It seems a bit small …

Scene: Otto trying to get through doorway. Crackers pushing from behind, head under Otto’s behind.

Otto: It would be much easier if I could just-

Crackers: Don’t even think about it!

Scene:

Otto is now inside. Crackers is pacing out front, with back to toilet. A crane is lifting a chain that is attached to the four corners of a skid that the toilet is standing on.

Crackers: Just let me know when you’re done.

Otto: Okee-Dokee.

Scene: The toilet is now lifting up. Crackers still has his back to it.

Otto: I’m feeling much lighter.

Crackers: Just hurry up, would ya?

Scene: Crackers is still facing away then turns, doing classic double take. The toilet is gone.

Crackers: I told you not to eat all those- Whaaa-?!!

Scene: From below, Crackers (in shadow) looking up startled as a sky crane hoists the platform with the toilet up into the air, towards the top of a skyscraper under construction.

Crackers: Otto!

Scene: Crackers chasing after platform. Otto still inside.

Crackers: Otto! Otto!

Otto: I’m coming! Just a minute!

Scene: Crackers now fluttering outside door. (Flush! coming from toilet.)

Crackers: No, Otto! This is bad! You gotta get outta there!

Scene: Door opens. Otto steps out.

Otto: So what’s the -

Scene: Otto jumps back, hugging toilet. Toilet tilts on platform.

Otto: Aaargh!

Scene: Toilet tumbles off of platform. Otto is following it, flailing, but Crackers has grabbed him by the tail.

Otto: Aieee!

Scene: Otto is pulled back onto platform, and grabs chain, shaking. Platform is tilted dangerously to one side.

Crackers: Steady, big boy. Steady. Just make your way over to the middle here …

Scene: Otto has made his way to the center of the platform. He’s looking out on the panorama of the city below.

Otto: It’s huge! Like a massive jungle, but made out of- umm …

Crackers: Concrete?

Scene: Close up of Otto. We can see a tear in his eye. Crackers looks on with concern.

Otto: Sniff! We’re never going to find Georgie, are we, Crackers?

Crackers: Sure we will, big buddy.

Otto:(Crying inconsolably) No we won’t! It’s hopeless! Boo hoo hoo!

Crackers: Easy, big fella. You gotta get a grip.

Scene: Otto suddenly wiping away tears, pointing excitedly at a tiny figure below. The whole platform tilts dangerously again.

Otto: Wait! I see him! There!

Crackers: Where?

Some Thoughts on Visual Literacy

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Slavin) — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 15:03:00 +0000

Below is a bit from a talk I did a couple of years ago at the Saskatchewan Reading Council conference in Regina. I think I alienated half my audience and bored the other half (note to self – don’t try to do any heavy-thinking at a luncheon key note) but I think the thinking is good enough to share here and ties in directly to the value of graphic novels in libraries and classrooms.

The adage goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” But I think there are few things in this world less well understood then the art of visual communication. My profession uses pictures, an even older form of communication then the printed word, and the basis of most of the world’s alphabets. For us visual artists, words are the new Johnny-come-lately, and although expedient and easy to use, still viewed with suspicion.

Going back to pictures, we can remind ourselves that there are and always will be many ways and means to communicate. Every pre-literate child begins their relationship with books through the pictures in picture books, “reads” the stories through those pictures and uses them as a spring board to understanding those arcane marks on the page we call words.

Because, as we all know, the pictures are the first key to a story in the preliterate mind. Like those massive and age-darkened canvases that loom out of the shadows on the walls of ancient churches and cathedrals, a picture book’s illustrations are there to bring alive and communicate a story to an audience that is unable to read.

I think at some point many of us lose our ability to “read” the visual, slip into a sort of visual illiteracy in a sense, as we attach more and more importance to the words that symbolize things, and stop truly seeing the pictures that may accompany those words. I constantly see evidence of this – from the fact that children often recognize what is developing in the narrative of a story, by reading the visual clues, before the adult does, to picture book reviews that give only a cursory note to the illustrations or fail to mention them at all. I’ve even read reviews that attribute entire portions of the narrative to the author that were only told in the illustrations and were the illustrator’s contribution to the book, a case where the reviewer is so blind to the role the illustrations play in telling a story that they didn’t realize part was being told in the pictures.

I remember reading a short story once, by C.S. Lewis, I think. In this story he describes a series of passing images, amorphous and indistinguishable blobs of shape and colour, with no real discernable pattern. At the end of the piece you discover it was a trip in a car, seen through the eyes of someone who has become so separated from their ability to actually see, that this is what their visual world had been reduced to. I think we are all born with the ability to truly see, but as we start to order and make sense of all of this stimuli entering our brains, we slowly prioritize and discard, give names to objects, and in naming them, stop seeing them for what they truly are. So a “chair” becomes the archetype of a chair, the word “tree” becomes a substitute for all trees in their many and varied guises, and in the end we rely heavily on a literal shorthand for this visual world around us, and stop effectively seeing. We all do it, even artists, but I think the artist, by constantly exercising this part of his brain, perhaps holds on a little more to the ability to actually see as we did when we were children.

But in this world we all live in, bombarded constantly with visual imagery, perhaps we all need to relearn, in small ways, how to see properly. It could well be that today’s children and even their young parents are one of the most visually literate generations this world has seen – children raised (some might say gorged) on a banquet of imagery, from television to computer games. Comic books are being read, not so much by children, but by a generation well into their twenties and thirties. It’s the same generation that is driving the computer game industry. Pictures are no longer just kids’ stuff.

How to Colour Otto or Everything I Know about Photoshop

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Slavin) — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 18:25:00 +0000

Okay, kids, time for a tutorial. But before I get started, I just want everyone to know that I'm no expert. But I do have one golden rule, and if you can remember this then ninety percent of your grief will be solved.
Golden Rule #1: If you can't do what you want to do, you are either:
A On the wrong layer or, more likely …
B Have something selected somewhere. Hit deselect and try again.

Unlike many of my younger brethern and sistern who have had computer art hard-wired into them along with their mother's milk, I had to learn the difficult way. I started out colouring on the ICON computer (a footnote in government attempts to develop a made-in-Canada computer industry back in the late 80's) with a palette of four colours at my disposal. Eventually this increased to 16 (oh, the liberty!) It was pre-scanners and the screen resolution was about one pixel to the inch.
My preference has typically been to do my art on my board since then, so my knowledge of Photoshop pretty well begins and ends with what I need to know to colour my comics. But I have developed a system that works well for me (I can colour about two pages on a good day) and I really do prefer the computer for colouring comic art as it adapts well to flat colour, allows me to play around with some graduated screen effects that would be difficult to achieve on my art board, and the undo lets me experiment with colour with impunity.
I've done a series of screen captures as my work progressed, and I will comment on these in the captions below each image.

Here is my working desktop, with swatch and layer palettes out. I've imported the scanned-in ink line work which I've done on my art table and cleaned up in Photoshop. The scanned text has been removed (I glue on blocks of text at the rough stage to determine balloon sizes) but in this case I have kept it on a hidden layer (line copy) so I can place it for the final screen shot.

My layers are always organized this way and the names are pretty well self-explanatory (Whoosh! is the special effects layer). All are transparent with Line at the top so that no colour covers it up, and a White layer on the bottom to rid myself of the checkerboard pattern in transparencies.
The Swatch palette has a number of preset colours, many dedicated to Otto and Crackers to maintain colour consistency throughout.

I begin by blocking in my backgrounds. This is a nice chance to introduce some gradated blocks of colour to add mood and ambience to what will mostly be flat coloured art. This scene is at night so I have elected to go with a subdued, nighttime-like palette.

Next I block in colour on my Colour layer. It can be seen in the above image that this mostly consists of outlining the areas that I wish to fill and then using the fill tool. The beauty of using layers is that the underlying colour does not interfere with what you do on this layer, and any mistakes in filling can easily be erased without damaging your background.

Here is the page with all of the colour now blocked in. I'm not worrying about any sort of shading at this point. You will also notice that I have introduced a second background layer. This is because I realized, as the colouring progressed, that there were some more shading effects that I wanted to bring to the background and it was simpler to work on a higher layer to do this.

And here is the final page. Shadows and highlights have been layered on in the Colour layer, mostly by the simple expedient of selecting the colour throughout (say, Otto's coat) and then using a big fat pencil to block in shadows without worrying about spilling over into other colours. Small effects are brushed in on the Whoosh! layer, edges cleaned up, and then the scanned text reintroduced (in actuality this text will be placed via InDesign, but it gives a better sense of the final page with it in place).

And that's everything I know about Photoshop.

Alienation and an Angry Monkey

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Slavin) — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 01:00:00 +0000

I was thinking this week as I worked away on colouring my next batch of pages how even in a graphic novel like this, that’s ostensibly for kids with no pretensions about being “important art”, you still have the opportunity, at times, to tackle some of the big questions.

One scene in particular got me mulling this over. It was the one below, just after Otto and Crackers met Django, the organ grinder’s monkey. It was a volatile meeting with Otto snatching Django up off the street and giving him a gigantic elephant hug, thinking at first that he is his long lost pal, Georgie, before unceremoniously dumping him when he realizes his error. Django is a bit miffed …

P. 41 of Big City Otto

When I wrote up the Django character, I modeled him after your stereotypical Brooklynite, rude and to the point, but deep down a big-hearted guy. But Django is also an angry monkey, with a chip on his shoulder the size of a toaster. The anger is that of a multi-generational denizen of the city who still gets asked, “Where you born, cute little fella?” Of course, in our modern-day multi-cultural society, we almost all come from somewhere else, recently or a few generations back. Although Django’s response is meant to be funny and over the top, it’s also trying to touch, in a small way, on an important issue, that of the alienation of immigrants, the children of immigrants and especially visible minorities.

Now enough sermonizing. Cue the dancing bear!

Alligata Gangstas

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Slavin) — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 21:59:00 +0000

Pencil rough for p. 56, where we meet Shorty Pants.

Sometimes things just seem to arrive as a gift from heaven.

I knew from the first that sooner or later Otto and Crackers would tangle with some alligator types living in the sewers of New York City. And that they would be bad. (I mean, really, has there ever been a good alligator character? They look bad, they smile bad, they act bad. They are the ultimate bad %&* character!)

However whether this would simply be a back alley encounter, switchblades drawn and tensions high or something more significant, I wasn’t sure. But as the story evolved, scene-by-scene, it soon became clear that our heroes’ encounter with the Alligeri Boys would be the main thrust of the story. So bit by bit they started to take form — Big Al, the diminutive (of course) classic Sinatra loving, zoot suit wearing gangster. Cajun Joe, retired Alligator Wrestling Federation champion, tough and wiry but with a heart of gold. And then there was the third Alligeri Boy.

I knew he was going to be a gangsta rapper, or at least wanna-be rapper, one who Cajun Joe outs right away as just a “suburban gator”. Like the weekend punks I used to run into at Lee’s Palace in Toronto, dressed to kill but always back home to mamma before the last subway. But he needed a name, this suburban gator, and being a big lad my partner Esperança and I, with a nod to Tarantino, knocked around the idea of calling him Shorty. But we already had the little Big Al, so the name still needed to go somewhere else.

Being of a generation that fails to find wearing basketball shorts three sizes too big and hanging around your knees can be anything but funny, when Esperançca suggested Shorty Pants I just about busted a gut and still do every time I draw him.

So now he had a name but how to draw him? I freely admit my knowledge of rap culture is next to nil. So I went to one of my nephews, an expert on all things, and he filled me in on the lingo, what’s cool, what’s not, etc.. And then he suggested I hang a big clock around his neck, like Flavor Fav of Public Enemy fame.

Now I’m old enough to have another iconic clock ticking in my brain and this one is related to the crocodile (close enough!) in Walt Disney’s Peter Pan, and I’m thinking, “That’s it! An over-sized alarm clock slung on a gold chain around Shorty Pants' neck!” And so it was, like manna from heaven.

Tic-toc-tic-toc …

In Praise of Asterix

noreply@blogger.com (Bill Slavin) — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 15:07:00 +0000

I was in my local library the other day when I was thrilled to notice the librarian checking in a brand new stack of Asterix books. It’s one of the wonderful trends in libraries these days, the introduction of comic book art, and it’s terrific to see these old chestnuts being discovered by a new generation for the first time.

Among the collection were Asterix and Cleopatra and Asterix in Britain, my first (and second) Asterix books that I ever owned. Asterix and Cleopatra was brought back to me from England by my brother and sister-in-law in 1970, which makes my dog-eared and bedraggled copy now 40 years old and possibly one of the first in English translation to reach Canada. I went on to read and collect almost all of the Asterix books, the start of a lifelong passion for the work of Goscinny and Uderzo’s diminutive Gaulish hero Asterix and his over-sized friend Obelix.

It’s almost a cartoonist’s cliché to say that he was influenced by Asterix. But I can honestly say that I really learnt to draw cartoons by studying these books. The ink stained page of Asterix and Cleopatra shown here is proof of that, one of a long line of ink bottles spilt in my pursuit of mastering drawing with pen and ink. I loved Uderzo’s drawings, and Goscinny’s wit (the books Uderzo penned after Goscinny’s death never were quite up to scratch, in my opinion) and it would be a blatant lie to deny their influence on my work.

I think it probable that I have unconsciously borrowed from them more than once as the lines and images of those books were so hard-wired in my pre-pubescent brain. Their movements, dialogue and interaction have taken the form of archetypes in my imagination and it’s to those memories that I reach first whenever I start working on a new panel. You simply have to look at my own creations, Otto, the lovable but slightly dim-witted elephant and his clever little pal, Crackers, to see the resemblance.

Not that Asteix and Obelix were the first pairing of this sort. There is a long and venerable line of big and little pals, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Gilligan and the Captain and Ren and Stimpy, just to name a few. So my dynamic duo is in good company.

But yet, when I look at Otto breaking into the zoo in the page that I was inking this week, I can’t help but think that Obelix has gone through a few similar doors in a similar way in his illustrious career. So thank you Uderzo and Goscinny for inhabiting my imagination.

Inked p. 45 of Big City Otto. No mistaking the Asterix influence here!

As an aside, a few years ago I had the opportunity to meet and spend some time with Anthea Bell at Serendipity, an international children’s literature conference held every four years in Vancouver, B.C. Anthea is another member of my pantheon of heroes, the small and silver-witted translator of all the Asterix books into the English language. Most of the puns are hers, as are many of the voices we read in translation. I don’t really even know how Asterix reads in French as her translations of the text are all I’ve ever encountered!

Anthea Bell, the English language translator of Asterix, my partner Esperança Melo and me (a fan!) at Serendipity in 2007.