This week Tim travels just south of Tokyo to Yokohama to meet up with Chris Taylor (“Sketchfro”), creator of Relic Hunter: Riven, and James Stacey of Black Hook Press, which publishes Japanese translations of US and UK graphic novels. How do you prepare for conventions? Did you do comics differently back home? What’s different about tabling at German comics events? Why did Chris get in an argument with Archie Comics? That and more!
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Michael Bangert’s Viking Sky Kings features a guy looking for work to support his wife and child. Each scene is a slice of life… but maybe a bit too thinly sliced. How do these slices fit each other? The site navigation of this Web comic is not helping matters… Tim and Mulele try to piece things together.
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What are some advantages and disadvantages of comics as a medium? How can you show lack of motion in a comic? Is the lack of sound in a comic ever an advantage? How do you keep yourself going when you’re afraid that your work isn’t good enough? This and more this week with three Tokyo-area artists: Grace Mineta, who’s having considerable success with her Texan in Tokyo comics and YouTube channel: Pei-in Wu, a Taiwanese artist who’s juggling comics with a day job; and Yu Ohmura, who self-publishes comics about his travel experiences.
Some samples of Yu Ohmura work:
On the left side of the photo below is the girl falling in the snow, described by Yu during our discussion of showing movement (or lack thereof)
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The daily strips on Dakota McFadzean‘s site are darkly humorous, or sometimes just dark. (Folks gets eaten!) On this week’s show, Dakota talks about how doing daily strips has helped him as an artist, surviving Cartoonist Boot Camp at the Center for Cartoon Studies, why kids stop drawing at a certain age (and why we should encourage them not to stop!), and more.
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In John W. Allie’s The Non-Seen Chapter 1, a little girl finds an old book at the Salvation Army store, written in a strange language. Eventually she figures out how to read it and meets an earless cat. Tim and Mulele’s ears detect an interesting story here, but it’s a bit hard to hear over the needless noise.
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Lifehacks, by Ovi Demetrian Jr and Jen Hickman, is “a modern noir detective story about a hacker turned private investigator.” While the story idea and the art seem solid, Tim and Mulele have to put in some on-mic detective work to understand just where it is our main character works…
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Kumar reports on the three comics shows he attended while in Canada last month: Toronto Comic Arts Festival (where he spoke on a manga translation panel), East Coast Comics Expo (where he had a table), and Vancouver Comic Arts Festival. (Click below for photos) |
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Then Tim and Mulele discuss Jason Brubaker’s “Sithra: Book One”. Brubaker recently quit DreamWorks — yes, that’s right, QUIT DREAMWORKS — to follow his muse, which prompts Tim and Mulele to think about their own career hopes, in comics or otherwise. |
Continue reading #454 Kumar Across Canada
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Love, science, and geekery intermingle in Kyle Sanders and Elisa Wikey’s Carbon Dating. Tim and Mulele run some experiments.
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Nao Yazawa and Mokutan Angelo join Tim in what will hopefully be the first in a series of group discussions with Tokyo-based comics creators! Topics include Tokyo’s annual International Comics Festival, comics in Brazil, things an artist asks the audience to overlook, effects of traditional Japanese drama on manga and anime, and more!
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Anthropomorphized cats in a Pulp Fiction-style shootout; a tiny man found sleeping in the grass; two people hiding in an abandoned restaurant during some catastrophic event. These were some of the one-page, where’s-the-rest-of-it scenes in Ian M‘s Square 11, discussed on Critiquing Comics last year.
This week, Ian tells Tim what he was going for in those scenes, about his autobio comics (including Square 12, “Alone in Kyoto”), things that work better in comics than in other media, and more.
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