'After Smith': The Intercorstal In Bremen

Regular readers will be aware that recently I travelled out to Bremen (which is in Germany) to hang and present 'After Smith', a set of Intercorstal pages all based on comics written by John Smith for 2000AD. It's just over a week since opening night, and with that in mind I wanted to relate, like some kind of society diarist, the ins-and-outs of everything that happened.

The reality is, I doubt you'll want to sit through 3,000 words of me saying how much fun I had, so I'll stick to bulletpoints, and if you get bored halfway through you can skip to the next one! It's the internet age, and I live by TLDR, and I'd understand if you do too.

Projektraum 404 from the outside

• Bremen is LOVELY. I mean, it could just because I was seeing it through the filter of Gregor (the owner/curator of Projektraum 404) and his group of friends. But I had a great time. A lot of it was spent wondering the streets with my fellow exhibitor Florian, who I embarrased a fair amount by taking pictures of geographical and social features. There're bikes everywhere, and once I'd learned that I was standing on their bit of the pavement all the cyclists stopped being rude to me. Seriously, if you have a free weekend, I'd suggest spending it in Bremen. It's aces. I hope to go back soonish.
• Opening night on the 11th was really fun. (I almost said it 'was a blast' but I don't really feel comfortable with that yet, I just don't think I'm the sort of person who 'has a blast' anywhere). I reckon about 40-50 people turned up. I'd prepared a book of the original 2000AD pages I'd worked from for After Smith and was forever coercing people into using it to compare my pages against. I also scared a few non-English speakers with over-excited 'youawrights' ("You all right?" but condensed) , which I use as a form of greeting but clearly sounded like nonsense to German ears.

  

  'After Smith' on a wall.

• Florian and I were scheduled to give an artist talk on the 13th, which I think we were both quietly dreading. After kind of sorting out a projector, and making sure our selected images looked OK-ish, we quietly waited for everyone who'd said they'd come to materialise... 2 people did. So, in one respect, it was an abject failure. In another though, I had a great time ('having a great time' was pretty much par for the course, mind you). I got to wang on about comics to my heart's desire, and the food served by Kulturkueche was mindblowing. 
• I've mentioned Florian - he's a French artist, who lives in Brussels. He's currently working on a 16-chapter comic, which is loosely about time travel, and includes a man becoming a new dimension when his time machine goes wrong. It's FANTASTIC (and also in French) and you should at least do yourself a favour by going to his website. For Abstrakte Comics 2, he'd also made a gigantic 'empty' comic which enriched everyone's lives.

  

  Florian's 'empty comic'. Probably the half-way pint between sculpture and comics?

• The gallery, Projektraum 404 was in many ways my home for the weekend. It's based on the first floor of a house owned by a lovely couple called Jan and Julia and run by Gregor Straube, who I've mentioned. It's ambitious, fearless and also has a jam-packed calendar thanks to Gregor's work. I can't thank everyone involved enough for inviting me out and putting me up, and also putting up with me.
  
• On the subject of 'putting up with me'. If there's one thing I've learned about myself from my trip is that if I'm allowed to talk unchecked, I'll usually end up eulogising about comics. Gregor and Florian both learned the magic phrase 'You're doing that thing again' but not everyone who turned up on opening night had that luxury, and I wanged on about 2000AD and John Smith to an extent that might be surprising... except from someone who'd just spent three months putting together an exhibition based on how much I love 2000AD and John Smith.
• I also put up 24 pages from Intercorstal 2 which went across really well. People were able to take each page on its own merits, and people looking at them didn't constantly have me directing them to 'the book of originals'. I'm increasingly excited about '683', which is the natural step-up from Intercorstal 2, and is so far more cohesive.

  

  Intercorstal 2 up on a wall

I'll leave it there, now. If you're still here, and don't know what 'After Smith' is, you should go HERE or better yet just download the free PDF, with an introduction to my madness courtesy of Tom Whiteley.

Page 9 from 'After Smith' based on a page from 'Killing Time' originally by John Smith and Chris Weston.

The Intercorstal: After Smith - where I'm up to

"The Intercorstal: After Smith" is a series of artworks reinterpreting comic pages written by John Smith. It will be exhibited at Projectroom 404 in Bremen from 11th September - 4th October 2015.

As announced* in my previous blog post, last month, I'm working on 10 pages for an exhibition which uses The Intercorstal to reinterpret** comics originally written by John Smith for 2000AD. Here's a quick update on what I've been up to. I've broken it down into steps to make it as easy for me as possible -- it's not necessarily chronological.

1. Spent a disproportionate amount of time trying to find the exact right shade of purple marker to use. Eventually I settled on 'Mulberry'.

2. Read and re-read an incredible number of comics to find the exact right pages to steal. The 'Final 10' has changed innumerable times. The last one's still not 100%. There's no set criteria for what makes a page 'right' but I wanted to cover as many artists as possible, make sure each page would work as well when reworked as an Intercorstal one, had made a palpable impact to me at some point in my life, and to look good on its own merits. The final 10 all meet at least 2 out of the 3 final criteria.

3. Measure each page, and calculate how much bigger it needs to be to fit an A3 page. There are probably computer programs that could that for me, or settings in programs I already use, but I did it all with a ruler, a calculator and a notebook. I suppose it felt more 'honest' to do it that way, as a part of me is still worried that 'stealing' pages for The Intercorstal is still somehow inherently dishonest. (here's a blog I did a while ago explaining why I 'steal' pages at all)

2 pages of Simon Harrison's work on 'Revere' get copied and measured.

4. Asked Tom Whitely, whose blog 'Suggested For Mature Readers' is at least partially responsible for the Intercorstal taking this route***, to write some notes on who John Smith is. He's exceptionally good at writing about comics.

5. I've used my calculations and measurements to transfer the layouts of 9 out of the 10 pages to A3. I've even done the black and Mulberry areas. This is probably the most important part of the project, as it's the actual work, but I've not got very much to say about them yet. Here's 8 of them laid out on my living room carpet:

Looking at this now, the one from New Statesment is very obvious, as it's a totally different format to the others.

 6. Made a very rash decision to present Tom's writing using a layout stolen from the illustrated text story 'Touched By The Hand Of Brendan', which was illustrated by Mark Buckingham,l appearing in the 2000AD Sci-Fi Special 1991****. I desperately wanted to include Tyranny Rex in 'After Smith' somewhere, but I couldn't find anything that really met the criteria from point 2 (above) quite as well as TBTHOB, and it also makes a handy way to present whatever Tom comes up with. This decision has of course increased my workload somewhat. Here's the cover drawn up, without any text yet, next to the original cover:

Aaaaand that's it for the moment. All I have to do now is the actual really hard work of turning the blocked-out pages into finished work, with all of the squiggly lines, dots, circles and stripes that entails.



*'announced' seems like a very grand word to use. Being naturally predisposed to humility and/or humble-bragging I'm still not really comfortable with it. But it's the correct word to use, I think, and can't think of a better one.
**'reinterpret' doesn't feel like it covers the ground I need or want it to. But it's the correct word to use, I think, and can't think of a better one.
***Without it, I'd never have read 'Still Life', which means I'd never have done this.
****Someone's typed the whole thing out here, if you're interested: http://homepage.eircom.net/~okku/tyrannyt.htm

2000AD® JUDGE DREDD® AND ALL OTHER CHARACTERS ARE REGISTERED TRADEMARKS, © REBELLION A/S, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Announcing - The Intercorstal: After Smith

On the left: Winwood and Cord in Killing Time (An Indigo Prime story) Part 5 Page 1. Art by Chris Weston, written by John Smith, Letters by Tom Frame
On the right: Prep page done for my reinterpretation.

"The Intercorstal: After Smith" is a series of artworks reinterpreting comic pages written by John Smith. It will be exhibited at Projectroom 404 in Bremen from 11th September - 4th October 2015.

A few months ago I was approached by Gregor Straub of Projectroom 404 in Bremen to participate in a series of exhibitions running this year that cover the Abstract Comics movement. Obviously, I agreed, and then set about worrying about what I'd exhibit.

With time to worry, I continued work on The Intercorstal 2, which naturally ended and turned into The Intercorstal 683 (which I'm still being a little coy about sharing). The last page of The Intercorstal 2 was a reinterpretation of a page from Revere, which ran in 2000AD in the 90s, and is one of my favourite comics of all time. On posting it, Tom Whiteley, who blogs at the superlative Suggested For Mature Readers, mentioned on Twitter how good it would be to reinterpret Revere in its entirety. I think he was only half-joking.

That thought merged over time with my thoughts of continuing the After Wainwright series that I started for the Lakes Comic Art Festival and then coalesced into paying tribute to one of the writers that has the most effect on my life - John Smith.

It's impossible to quantify the effect Smith's writing has had on me, both as an artist and person. I very much doubt The Intercorstal would have existed had it not been for his influence, although I hadn't actually realised when I started it. I joked recently that my entire 'swirly line style' is a subconcious attempt to recreate Winwood's hair as it appeared in Killing Time, which is probably more true than I'd like to admit.

So, 'After Smith'. I've selected 10 pages from his work for 2000AD based solely on how much I liked it and how much the series it appeared in had an effect on me. The selection also covers a number of my favourite artists, including Chris Weston, Sean Phillips, Edmund Bagwell, and Simon Harrison.

As prep, and so that I can be sure the whole idea's not going to fall apart, I've completed two half-size pages which I've included here, alongside the original pages I've worked from.

As the project continues, I'll be adding WIP images to Twitter (where I'm @grthink) and hopefully adding updates here where I'll try and go into more detail about why I've chosen particular pages/series and why I like them so much.

If you're around in Bremen during September, I hope you'll take a look.

Splundig Vur Thrigg.

On the left: Still Life Page 7. Art by Sean Phillips, written by John Smith,
On the right: Prep page done for my reinterpretation.

2000AD® JUDGE DREDD® AND ALL OTHER CHARACTERS ARE REGISTERED TRADEMARKS, © REBELLION A/S, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Americorstal

Here's some photos showing the process for my Intercorstal-ised version of the iconic first page of Judge Dredd: America. They're running back-to-front, from my finished image through the various iterations ad finishing on Colin MacNeil's incredible original (the scan of which I've nicked from here: http://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/3892533.html)

If for some baffling reason you've not read America, you can buy the collected edition here or alternatively it's only £1.99 as part of Hachette's Judge Dredd The Mega Collection

Here's my final version, now officially known as 'Intercorstal 2 Page 26'

Starting to fill in close details.

Got bored, doodled with a brush pen for a while.

Picking out/inventing shapes.

Blocking out the black areas. Picked this up from a tip by Henry Flint. For me, it makes the page feel half-done from the start, so less of a scary empty page. Also, it helps start the page balancing.

Here, in the first stage, I've just blocked out the major shapes. If I'd spent any time working through details here I'd never have made my way back.

Dreddcorstal

While I was volunteering at London Super Comic Convention I started to think about putting a proper Intercorstal comic together -- a single issue, 30-odd pages, of pure Intercorstal comic work. And I realised that the Intercorstal, on its own, as proud as I am of it, would be a VERY hard sell to a mainstream comics crowd -- the sort of people who spend money at cons and shops.

Figuring I'd need to anchor The Intercorstal to the rest of the comics world with something, I fell on the idea of doing Intercorstal-style portraits of comics characters, and making a small book of them -- buoyed up significantly by how proud I was of the mummy I did for my Secret 7s entry.

Here's the first step toward that -- everyone's favourite fascist lawperson, Judge Dredd. I'm still not entirely happy with this -- I think it works in its own way, but really I'd like it to be more dynamic, which will probably involve finding a more dramatic angle and pose. I'll have another go once I've done some Crosby & Syd pages and had a punt at Batman. Here's some photos of how I went about the finished image, in case you're interested.

First pencil draft. Had a few books open as reference, in particular Henry Flint's work on Trifecta. Carlos Ezquerra is always a constant influence whenever I try to do Dredd, too. But I suppose that's the same for everyone.

Corrected pencil draft - shaved a bit off the helmet, tidied a few other bits up. Was also very unhappy that I'd gone with (what I consider) a rookie Dredd mistake, which is to hunch him all over, and you can see here where I drew his shoulders back in where a normal person's would be. That decision was also informed by Flint's drawing of him in particular Dredd strips, where he's in meetings with senior Judges and stands silently, statue-like.

Jumping ahead a bit -- I traced over the pencils onto A4 Bristol Board, losing all the work I'd done on the eagle but that's how it goes sometimes. At this stage I really wasn't feeling it, because the bits that haven't been filled in yet throw off the composition. Was working on faith that once the rest had been done it would look alright.

I'd worked some swirl into the helmst to stop it being too flat, and had been very careful not to overwork the mouth/chin bits. When I cam to fill the body, I was aware that just going in without a plan would make it look too layered and, again, flat, so broke it up into sections which (very) loosely described the abstract shapes that make up his chest.

Bit more filling.

Um, more filling.

Final furlong. Once I'd cracked these bits, added a little texture to the metals left over (eagle, shoulder pad, zipper) and scanned. Then bumped levels, paint-potted the line work to make it look fuller -- IRL the inks are enough, but even with the contrast bumped the inks look too thin and reedy after scanning) and did a few touch ups, and voila, the finished image that's up the top of the page there.

Intercorstal VS Still Life

Working on The Intercorstal can be difficult. There's a need to constantly re-invent or reuse, and although certain elements and patterns crop up often, there's no set way to go about the creation of the comic, and it always feels like I'm making it up as I go along. It's a tiring process, and with the obscurity the comic exists in, it's not often as rewarding as I'd like.

To help me along, I hit upon the idea of re-purposing pages and layouts from the narrative comics that I love, and it's an approach that's worked pretty well so far. To this date, I've stolen layouts from Kevin O'Neill's 'The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen', Sean Phillips and Duncan Fegredo's work in 'New Statesmen', Will Simpson's 'Tyranny Rex', Chris Weston in 'Indigo Prime: Killing Time' and Sean Phillips again with two pages from 'Still Life' (those paying attention, and in the right know, will notice that a lot of those comics were written by John Smith for 2000AD, and that's not really surprising knowing my tastes, although it actually wasn't intentional).

The amount actually 'stolen' from each of those artists is debatable, I guess. Mostly it's just layouts. I doubt that unless I pointed it out every now and again anybody would be any the wiser. But it's interesting, and I felt like sharing. In particular, I wanted to show off a particular page, for a few reasons:

1. It's an accidental collaboration with my 4yr old son. I love making stuff with him - he's not got any kind of patience for completing an image, but he does have the best ideas. For instance who else would suggest a Fiat 500, Lego Mr Freeze and C3-PO as decorations for the birthday card of an 82yr old granny?

2. I wanted to draw some attention to the comic it's worked from. I wasn't really aware of 'Still Life' by John Smith and Sean Phillips -- it was in the Revolver Romance Special in 1990, when I was 10, so it passed me by when it first came out) (Revolver being a short-lived 'mature' offshoot from 2000AD). I only found out about it from Tom Whiteley's superior blog "Suggested For Mature Readers" where he wrote a perfect review of it, and also made it available for download. It ruined me when I first read it, and continues to haunt me now, months later.

3. I wanted to show off a bit of process again, for my own gratification. And I also wanted to maybe highlight this particular page, because I think what's great about it might get lost with only casual observation.

So, here's the page I bit from, by Sean Phillips:

It's an intensely, and genuinely, intimate page, which is so rare in any media, let alone comics. So I felt that if I was stealing and re-purposing pages, this is one I had to use. I started by sketching out the rough shapes, getting the perspective approximately right, giving the right feeling of weight. And then... well, then I got scared. It felt like too much to take on, and I left it to one side while I worked on other stuff.

And then Bill came along while I was drawing, and wanted to help. I balked at him 'helping' on any pages I'd already started inking, so let him at my pencils of this, and he attacked the page, ruining one of my pens and leaving this behind: (this scan was taken after I'd already started working back on it - you can see where I started by working into the edges of the bath):

And then I liked it enough that I started working further and further into it, until finally I had this:

Which I then did this to, getting the final image:

And...yeah, that's it. But hopefully it's clear now (why I feel it needs to be clear, I don't know) why I'm working in the way I am. The latest page I've started is based on one of the classic Ditko Spider-Man pages, although whether anyone will know by the time I'm done with it... well, I guess that'll be up to whether they've read this, I suppose.

Describing Mr Soft. 2nd Attempt.

Languishing in my draft posts is my attempt to describe why I've been creating interprative illustrations of Mr Soft. I doubt I'll be publishing it. Instead, here's some source material, taken from "The Complete New Statesmen", written by John Smith. The photo is an illustration by Brendan McCarthy, which I've taken as my cue for my project.

Excerpt from "The Pre-Pubertal Man", taken from "And He The Mother Of Them All".

    Lonnie waved up at Mr Soft with a tiny hand, shiny with amniotic fluid, and gestured for him to sit down.
    "So," Lonnie said, "what can I do for you?"
    "I want a disease, Lonnie. A Kurtzeimer retro."
    "You aren't thinking of hitting Harlem again, are you?"
    Mr Soft shrugged, and scribbled a skull-and-crossbones in the air with the tip of his crook. Lonnie laughed, the speech module turned it inot a funny rattling sound, like gravel in a tin can.
    The laughing must have been uncomfortable for the woman, though, because she moved in her sleep, moaning softly."

Reptiloid-thing sketches

 Here's something a little different...

As many people know, I've got a bit of a 2000AD obsession going on, partly because of the general surge in interest becasue of Dredd 3D coming out. Mostly, though, I'm experiencing something of a semi-mid-life crisis, and falling back in love with the things I loved during my youth. Eventually, I'll get around to writing and posting my love-letters to Revere and Indigo Prime.

But, anyway. As part of the 2012 Thought Bubble Comics Festival, 2000AD are running a competition to win a chance at paid work in the comic. All that has to be done is to illustrate a 3-page Future Shock (the script and detail of the comp are here: http://thoughtbubblefestival.com/events/2000ad-portfolio-competition/). I thought I'd give it a go, to stretch myself artistically as well as indulge myself 2000AD-wise.

Unfortunately, I'm unlikely to actually enter -- I'm really busy with my real-life job and The Intercorstal, and I've just picked up another fun little project, so I've not got the time I'd need to focus on it. And even if I did start and finish the comic properly (which is difficult because I've not done anything like that before...) I don't think I'd be able to get up to Leeds to attend Thought Bubble anyway.

I quite like the sketches I've done so far, though -- working out how the alien characters in the script work physically, and also trying to work in some personality. And this, here, is those sketches.

Puppets etc

 

So, I've been having a bit of a crisis of confidence over the past couple of weeks. Don't know what brought it on, particularly -- one minute I'm bobbing along perfectly happy with my place in the world, the next I'm getting all moody and weird about not being able to draw or something. I think part of it comes from my re-found love of 2000AD and the fact that I've been comparing myself to Simon Harrison and Edmund Bagwell and Chris Weston.

But anyway, pretty much out of nowhere I signed up to do some illustrations for Amelia Gregory's review of The Devil And Mr Punch and did the two illustrations posted here. And I'm totally happy with both of them. They were both done pretty superfast, and without much fuss, which meant I was going by instinct throughout. Reviewing them critically now, there's stuff I would have done differently, but there always is, isn't there. Go Team G, I guess.