the days are long and short

The future, heh.

or

Why everyone and their brother should be making comics right now.

(sisters should be involved too.)

Finishing my recent graphic novel The Chairs’ Hiatus marked the end of a bit of a brake I had taken from drawing comics. It had been nine years since I had drawn a page. In between 2003 when I did a six page short story for the Small Press Expo anthology and a year ago when I started preparations for The Chairs’ Hiatus I seemed to have completely lost the ability to complete a comic of any length.

I hadn’t lost the desire to draw comics. I simply kept telling myself that I was going to take comics seriously a little later. I was going to get back to drawing, I was going to draw a longer story, just not right now. Almost a decade alter I was still waiting.

How did I go from a full comic block to producing more comics pages in one year than I ever have in my life? As is often the case, there are a lot of parts to that answer, but the most exciting part is this:

Holly crap!

This is the time to be doing this stuff!

Now stay with me, I don’t mean “This is the time.” as in “You never know which day will be your last so you’re better take advantage of right now,” although that’s true. What I mean by “This is the time.” is that I can’t imagine a more exciting time for creating comics. This year, 2011, is such an unbelievably fantastic time to be getting into the world of comics it keeps me up at night.

In my head, I’m imagining folks already disagreeing with me. I imagine people talking about the death of floppies (traditional magazine like comic books.) I imagine people talking about how fewer and fewer books are being produced by the major comic companies. I can always imagine a million objections.

Frankly, I don’t really care much about any objection you’ve got.

I’m excited about a new frontier.

You know what I’m going to say next right? Mobile devices? You’re partly right.

E-readers, tablets, and mobile devices are unbelievable products that are seemingly everywhere and provide incredible opportunities for people who can tell a story visually. Any cartoonist anywhere can create work for these devices, and it’s quickly becoming true that any person in America will be able to consume that work from anywhere. What could be better than that?

“But wait…” I say all salesmen like. “It’s even better than that.”

I talk to people who are understandably upset that certain techniques used in print comics don’t translate well to the digital alternatives. Full-page print comics are too small to read on an iPhone, the dramatic impact of the double-page spread is lost on any device that only has one screen, etc. I myself have figured out plenty storytelling tricks that don’t appear to work the same way in these new formats. A lot of cartoonists are focusing on the things that they can’t do with these devices or can’t do the same way rather than being excited about the litany new things they never could do before.

The thing that keeps coming to mind is

The Dawn of Cinema.

When motion pictures first came to be they were simply filmed plays: static full body shots of actors walking around the frame. The filmmakers of that time didn’t start from scratch exactly, they had the entire history of drama to draw from, but they took that fledgling medium and figured out so much that we take for granted today. The science and art behind dramatic camera angles, close-ups, the emotional impact of sound, the ways color can affect the story, the incredible power of editing, and on and on. These things seem obvious now, but they weren’t back then. People experimented and continue to experiment to figure out techniques that will seem obvious years from now.

Cartoonists have a similar opportunity today. The next 5, 10, or 15 years, with the advent of millions of little interconnected screens in our pockets and on our laps, may very well see creative leaps equal to or greater than the advances that have been made in film, and I think cartoonists are uniquely suited to be at the forefront of that.

It doesn’t look like neither I or my contemporaries may ever have a monthly book in more stores than the blockbusters of our childhood. But I don’t care. I’ve loved and continue to love printed graphic novels and comic books with all my heart, but I feel like a theater director who just had the first motion picture camera dropped into his lap and told “Here, see what you can do with that.”

Library Books iPhone App

I just discovered that the Library Books app for Mac by Harold Chu has been transformed into an incredibly useful iPhone app! I’ve been a fan of the desktop app for a long time, primarily for it’s ability to automatically create iCal events for the due date of each book.

The iPhone app provides you with all kinds of neat stuff:

• A list of all the books you have on hold along with how many people are ahead of you in line.

• A page for all the books you have checked out at the moment with due dates listed.

• A list of the books you’ve returned since you started using the app.

• and best of all, the app automatically adds a badge to the apps icon when a book is approaching or past it’s due date!

It works with a surprising number of library systems, especially considering that, as I understand it, there’s no industry standard API for doing this sort of thing. The developer has figured out how to work this with each library one at a time. Most importantly for Portlanders, Multnomah County Library is supported!

“On the Road” is now mobile.

UPDATE: My first experiment with coding sites for the iPhone has only served to show me how much I really need to learn about writing HTML and CSS. I’m afraid what looked okay in the iphone simulator on my Mac looks pretty bad on an actual iPhone. That’s what I get for publishing without really testing. Live and learn. I’m still new at this stuff.

After spending several hours trying to fix the problem I’m afraid I’ve run out of time and come to the decision that the whole theme should be rewritten which I don’t have time to do. Perhaps someday.

For now I’m simply pulling the mobile version of the theme. Perhaps someday I’ll try to work it out. I apologize to anyone who installed the changes. You should be able to undo them by simply deleting the custom page named “iphone-theme” that was created.

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We pulled into the goodwill parking lot and every car in our row was white.

Another drawing done in “Brushes” for the iPhone

I woke up this morning at 5:30 with my head full of ideas for digital comics.

I was hungry so I got out of bed and walked to the grocery store which, of course, was still closed. So I headed down the street to a coffee shop where I drew this.

Drawing the other side of the room.

This is how long it’s been since I was standing in the hardware store waiting for the person who was paged to help me and thinking “This is taking a really long time. I wonder how long it’s taking.”

View high resolution

I was doing some research for a post I’ve been working about libraries and the internet, when I discovered that the audiobook download site that the Multnomah County library system uses now supports transferring to iPods and iPhones.

What this means is, if you have a Multnomah County library card and an iPod or iPhone, you can now download audiobooks to them for free for up to 14 days. After that it appears that the file is removed from your computer. It works like the physical library does, they don’t always carry everything you would like, and they have a limited number of people that can use the material at one time.

I  went thru the many steps that are required to try it out, including downloading the above application, and it does in fact work, but it’s not easy. For instance, if you’re using an iPhone and a Mac like me, you can only choose files that indicate compatibility with both devices. If the book only lists compatibility with iPods but doesn’t mention Macs you are out of luck.

Aside from it’s problems, it’s an exciting step in the right direction for libraries, and one I’m glad to see my local library taking.