'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.

Mr Soft

A little while ago I was posting WIP's and other information about some illustrations I'd done of the character Mr Soft... well, here they are. The zine they were done for didn't get printed for the same reasons many of these things don't and there's no hard feelings.

I've posted the final black&white versions, with some info about Mr Soft himself at the Abstract Comics blog: http://abstractcomics.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/mr-soft.html

And I've posted the cropped colour versions to my Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.502982049774027.1073741831.203955136343388&type=1

SO to keep things interesting, what I'm posting here are the rough, untouched scans, which have their own charm. They were made on A3 paper, if that helps make sense of them at all.

The Intercorstal: Butcher's Park

I've finished the sixth installment of The Intercorstal -- here's a video of it while I get a PDF sorted.

I've also posted to the Abstract Comics blog, where I've been characteristically modest about it, but I think it's some of the best work I've done in ages.

Twitter Art Exhibit 2012

Here's my submission to the 2nd Twitter Art Exhibition, being held in Moss, Norway, in April 2012. It's being organised by David Sandum, with all money from sales of artwork going to The Women's Crisis Center in Moss. Full details of the submission and event can be found HERE: http://davidsandumart.posterous.com/call-for-artists-2nd-twitter-art-exhibit-in-m

There wasn't any particular theme, but I thought it'd be cool to work on some advice that Bryan Lee O'Malley (creator of Scott Pilgrim) posted on his twitter feed:

I'm past knowing whether I followed that advice or not, but I was thinking about it while I worked on the page. Once I've had a chance to think about it a bit I might be able to make some sense of it in the context of my other comics work. As it stands, though, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, and regular readers of this blog will know how terrifyingly rare it is for that to happen.



Abstract Comics: The Blog

I've recently been invited by the incomparable Andrei Molotiu to contribute to the Abstract Comics Blog, which is a massive honour for me. The Abstract Comics anthology from Fantagraphics is one of my favourite things, so to be able to get invovled directly with the blog is really exciting. (Thanks to Mike Getsiv for the nudge).

So far I've stuck three articles up, about The Intercorstal, naturally. Here they are:

Intercorstal Page 57 Raw Version : http://abstractcomics.blogspot.com/2012/02/intercorstal-page-57.html
Overview of Intercorstal:Witches: http://abstractcomics.blogspot.com/2012/01/intercorstal-witches.html
Details of Pages 47, 48 and 49: http://abstractcomics.blogspot.com/2012/01/intercorstal-pages-47-48-and-49.html

On Page 51. Some process.

I've just posted Page 51 to The Intercorstal blog. It's very chicken based, and that's only really half on purpose.

I was flicking through the sketchbook I'm currently using for pages of The Intercorstal and found some sketches I did of the Stepney City Farm's animals as prep for the Paul Foot Jigsaw Madness flyer a few months ago. There was a page with three sketchy chicken heads on there, all faulty in one way or another (the drawings were faulty, not the chickens) and I thought it would be interesting to use my own sketches as a base for a page, considering I've used so much else recently (P&O brochures and postcards in particular). This is what it look like to start with:

Then I drew a grid over the top of it and set to work. When I was working on the grid I used some smaller, square frames having been really impressed with the layouts in P. Craig Russel's adaptation of The Sandman: Dream Hunters which anxietydescending got me as an early Christmas present. It's pages like this one, courtesy of Comic Book Resources, that I was thinking of:

http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/preview2.php?image=previews/dccomics/vertigo/dreamhunters/SNDDH-2.24.proof.jpg

And then, yeah, I laid into it. Normally I'd work on The Intercorstal while watching TV or a film, but since moving house I've now got a desk to work at, which is much more comfortable, but there's no TV. As background I put on Alan Moore's reading of Unearthing which helped a lot, but there came points when I naturally needed to take breaks to free up some ideas. These ideas came from stuff I had lying around, and their influence is much clearer in this page than in others (which is why I thought it might be interesting).

 
Here's a run through of what's in there, other than the chickens, that didn't come directly out of my brain:

Top-right panel: There's an eye-shape near the inner border which I took from a Sandman toy that Anxietydecending bought me a while ago.
Centre-left: In the top-left corner of the frame there's a hand holding a box (you can only see the bottom of the box) which I copied from a photo I had of a Communist Chinese statue of a worker -- the dimensions are true to the sculpture.
Bottom-left: A set of lips copied from a photo of a Chinese statue of Marilyn Monroe.
Middle two on the bottom row: Details from the aforementioned Sandman toy.
Bottow row, right-hand side: A line drawing based on a photo of the view through my mum's patio windows. This was the last frame I completed, and I thought the relative simplicity made a nice contrast to the rest of the page while still being full of Intercorstally shapes.

This is the first time I've gone into this much detail of my process on an Intercorstal page -- if you've got this far I'd appreciate any feedback on whether this is something you'd like to see more of? There are still patterns and shapes and characters in this page that I could wang on about, as there are in all the Intercorstal pages, so if there's any interest whatsoever I'll try it again for Page 52.

New Intercorstal Pages and other news

I've added five new pages of the Intercorstal to the Intercorstal Blog, going back to the old numbering system.

The Intercorstal Page 48 - this was originally done as a cover for 'Elipses'

Reverting to the old system has made me realise that these five pages are the first 'old school' ink pages for over a year. Although I've produced a lot of other pages for Collider, Valentine, Witches and About Town they've all used photographs or other illustrations as a base. (I'm not including 'Cloud City', the series of postcards I did, as I'm still not sure what to do with them...).

My target of 96 pages is fast approaching -- the latest 'old school' page is number 49, but that numbering doesn't include all the 'special' pages I've done over the past year. With the amazingly patient AnxietyDecending, I'm hoping to collect what we've got so far as a very limited edition called 'Elipses'. I hope to then use that to weed out weaker pages or trends in the completed pages and then kick off toward Page 96.

As well as this type of page, I also recently won a box of USA ephemera from a giveaway by Kye Sanga on Twitter and have said I'll make a comic out of that, and I'm also working on a comic made from a ten-year old copy of Empires Sexiest Movie Stars.

Wayne Hemingway Process

This illustration of Wayne Hemingway was done for an article at Amelia's Magazine about 'Vintage at Goodwood'. It started off as a portrait done in the same style as my recent ones of Alan Moore and John Stonehouse, but Amelia suggested I try using colour... two hours of the paintpot tool in Photoshop and this is what we get. I don't know what possessed me to go with such a lurid blue... all the other coulours are relatively tame (well, except the reds and pinks in the words). Below are the original black and white ink drawing, and the photo I worked from.

Newstuff July2010

It's been a very long time since I last posted anything, and it feels like I've got a lot to update...

I've done some more illustrations for Amelia's Magazine, the best of which is one of Seasick Steve, above. I don't know why I did him in green, but I think it looks cool.

I've also sent a picture of John Stonehouse to Magpie Markets as part of Cut-Click's travelling mailart show. It took me ages, and I loved it, but for some unknown reason I didn't scan it, just took the crappy photo presented below. I'm hoping to do a lot more of these in the future.

Oh, aand in very exiting news, Cut-Click's first printed issue is on sale here: http://cutclick.bigcartel.com/ and it's AWESOME. Really.

I've contributed a panel to Abstract Comics's ABCOLAB2 project, which didn't take very long but was very fun to do:


Aaaaaaand I've posted three new pages to The Intercorstal!

The Intercorstal News Update 16th April 2010

A few days ago I reached an important milestone in the 'Intercorstal' comic project -- I finished my 32nd page, which leaves me exactly a third of the way through my 96 page target! The fact that the 96-page-target was totally arbitrary is both a source of great pride and tragic woe in my life.

Other than a feature over at the superlative Abstract Comics blog, reception to The Intercorstal has been lukewarm, to say the least. These are three of the possible reasons I've come up with:
1) People don't like it because it's very rough around the edges, poorly done, unproffessional... etc. I'm not sure whether that's true, but it's a very real possibility.
2) People don't 'get it' -- a comic set in the gaps between space and conciousness which has a repeating set of motifs at its heart in place of characters, which has no easily discernable plot is possibly not something that most people will spend time with if its intentions aren't entirely clear -- especially on the internet, where it's so easy to pass things over.
3) I've not explained the project enough, or left enough information about it around, hence (2).

Despite the lack of public reaction, I've decided to be beligerant and carry on regardless. An unfinished comic which nobody likes is worse than a finished one, in my opinion.

Also, I've started collecting text to use as dialogue/exposition, by both letting my own mind wonder free to find short sentences and phrases and by jotting stuff down as I hear it in the street. I'm now researching the best way to deploy this text, in particualr finding ways for it to randomise, and I'm also thinking about how I'm going to go about getting it printed up.

If anyone's got any opinions on the project, I'm either emailable (gareth@grthink.com) or you can use the comments fields here, at the Intercorstal blog, or over at deviantart.

New Intercorstal Pages

I've finished three new pages for the Intercorstal, which I'll upload properly soon -- for now, here's just one of them.

UPDATE: Somewhat later in the day... Here's the other two: