The Carnival #2 - A Panel In Process & APE SF

Working away on getting The Carnival #2 to press for APE in San Francisco on October 3rd & 4th! Wanted to document the creation of a panel early on in the process, in case there is some idea that comics are easy and simple. Perhaps for some, but not for me...

Thumbnail stage - here is where i write most of the story, on these stupid little sheets of printer paper and some thin Copic SP markers. rough little squiggles aren't they?












Then I sketch the page out full size on tracing paper in very rough, quick form. I'm trying to capture some of the energy of the initial sketch and at the same time, capture the angle that i see in my head, not always an easy thing to do.

A second piece of tracing paper over to make the work more concrete, add guide lines for the anatomy on the face, draw through the figures. From here, if i can see the drawing in my head, I'll pencil this on the final page.

















In this case, the lighting was important to get right, so i pulled out the trusty copic Multiliner pen, and a thicker marker to work the shadows until i got the right. I'd prefer to waste a few more square inches of the tracing paper than have to rework the thing on Bristol in the supposedly final stages.

The second issue of The Carnival! coming to APE in 2014! Alex Sheikman and I will be at booth 724. I will be there on Sunday only (owing to them scheduling the Con on Yom Kippur), but Alex will be there selling Dark Crystal work and his sketchbooks both days!

Below is the rough for the second cover...

The Carnival: New Cover Pencils

Working hard to have part 1 of my new book ready for APE 2013 in San Francisco. If you're going, please be sure to stop by table 824 and say "Hullo!" to Alex Sheikman and myself.

Here are cover pencils to the new book, and, as you can see, I started to ink before I remembered that i hadn't done the scan, so a few errant inked lines are already on the page. Let me know what you think!

In Review Of: Parker: The Martini Edition by Stark & Cooke

With an almost jet black cover and spine, and the embossed figure of parker himself, the cypher of a criminal, on the front, we see the perfect analogy for the anti-hero: he is embossed, stuck forever in fabric of the book, but it lacks detail, lacks anything other than the outline and basic details of who he is. It tells us nothing about what motivates him, nothing about his comings and goings, nothing about his past or future. Its is both timeless and of its time.

We live in a banner time for crime comics. And, like the pulp era before, a time of anti heroes born out of a time of horrible economic disparity where the poor are on the streets and the rich live like robber barons, we find solace in the man not afraid to live in fear of his mortgage being ripped out from under him by Bank of America, or of losing his job to China; he is a criminal with a moral code of being true to himself in all that that means. We admire him because he's not afraid even as we recognize what a bad man he is. As Cooke continues to work on adapting the Westlake Parker novels for comics, it is easy to take for granted just how good these books are.

The Martini Edition hardback version of the first two adaptions does a great case for making sure that you not only get the story but get the art as well. reproduced right around original size, you get to really see the unyielding swath of ink that makes up the actual weight of Cooke's art. As well, you get to see more of the texture in the monochromatic treatments that Darwyn is working with. They're not overlays dropped in on the computer but actual brush strokes and marker strokes.


I have the two original hardbacks, as well as the larger one shot "The Man with the Getaway Face", and it was IDW publishing Getaway in the larger format that convinced me how much better Cooke's art would be at that size. There are plenty of considerations of why this is, mostly address above, but here is a small one that was bugging me: the lettering that Darwyn uses simply doesn't reduce as well as the rest of the artwork. not that it was unreadable, there were very few dropouts or close-ups on reversed out lettering, but it lacked a certain crispness really makes reading the books enjoyable.

The Hunter is good. The Man with the Getaway Face is good, the Outfit is superb. Cooke feels full of himself and is settling in enough to change styles three different times within the book, each time taking a chunk of the story and decisively changing his approach both storytelling wise and illustratively. This is only happens with creators that really are feeling at the height of their powers, and it is here.

The new story, The Seventh, picks up stylistically where the Outfit leaves off, and there is no mistake about it, this is not a little filler story, just one more brilliant little bit of Westlake/Stark crime noir that both thrills us and makes us quite happy that we're not living in that world. One small quibble: on the bottom of the pages, we have the story title carried over, and pages 322 & 323 both have "The Hunter" on the bottom, when they should have "The Seventh" like 326 & 327. Its a typo, but you think that someone would have caught it.

The extras? A gallery of Cooke pieces and notes on different movie Parkers, as well as an excellent Comics Reporter interview with Cooke, Spurgeon and Ed Brubaker. Its freely available online, but the sort of thing that might be hard to find 10 years from now, and so worth having in print.

And one final, appropriately labelled Parting Shot: a one page passage from Butcher's Moon, one of Westlake's favorite pieces of prose, and a full bleed black and white illustration that kicks as hard as anything Toth ever drew up.

All in all? Well worth the price of admission in just about every way. As always, one wonders if and when the crime story gets above itself. Its highly likely that the crime story prefers to drink its booze in dark, seedy dive bars instead of brightly lit TGI Fridays, and prefers to be published in dog-eared paperbacks as opposed to deluxe edition. Screw it, I want to read it in this edition. Fortunately, it has no say in the matter.

And yes, I made myself a vodka martini before starting on this review.