Saucers and Shirts

This week I entered in a design competition for Threadless, a pretty cool company that makes all kinds of T-shirts. The challenge was to turn a script by the wonderful Neil Gaiman into a comic on a T-shirt. This shirt is the first in a series of 4 that tells a longer story.

Here's the script:

Front:
That day, the saucers landed. Hundreds of them, golden,
Silent, coming down from the sky like great snowflakes,
And the people of Earth stood and stared as they descended,
Waiting, dry-mouthed to find what waited inside for us
And none of us knowing if we would be here tomorrow
But you didn't notice it because

Back:
That day, the day the saucers came, by some coincidence,
Was the day that the graves gave up their dead
And the zombies pushed up through soft earth
or erupted, shambling and dull-eyed, unstoppable,
Came towards us, the living, and we screamed and ran,
But you did not notice this because



Here's what I made of it.

You can vote for my design here: http://atrium.threadless.com/CBLDF/submission/the-horror-3/



P.S. here's the full script by Neil Gaiman:

Shirt 1, Front:That day, the saucers landed. Hundreds of them, golden,
Silent, coming down from the sky like great snowflakes,
And the people of Earth stood and stared as they descended,
Waiting, dry-mouthed to find what waited inside for us
And none of us knowing if we would be here tomorrow
But you didn't notice it because

Back:
That day, the day the saucers came, by some coincidence,
Was the day that the graves gave up their dead
And the zombies pushed up through soft earth
or erupted, shambling and dull-eyed, unstoppable,
Came towards us, the living, and we screamed and ran,
But you did not notice this because


Shirt 2, Front:
On the saucer day, which was the zombie day, it was
Ragnarok also, and the television screens showed us
A ship built of dead-man's nails, a serpent, a wolf,
All bigger than the mind could hold, and the cameraman could
Not get far enough away, and then the Gods came out
But you did not see them coming because

Shirt 2, Back:
On the saucer-zombie-battling gods day, the floodgates broke
And each of us was engulfed by genies and sprites
Offering us wishes and wonders and eternities
And charm and cleverness and true brave hearts and pots of gold
While giants feefofummed across the land, and killer bees,
But you had no idea of any of this because


Shirt 3, Front:
That day, the saucer day the zombie day
The Ragnarok and fairies day, the day the great winds came
And snows, and the cities turned to crystal, the day
All plants died, plastics dissolved, the day the
Computers turned, the screens telling us we would obey, the day

Shirt 3, Back:
Angels, drunk and muddled, stumbled from the bars,
And all the bells of London were sounded, the day
Animals spoke to us in Assyrian, the Yeti day,
The fluttering capes and arrival of the Time Machine day,

Shirt 4, Front:
You didn't notice any of this because
you were sitting in your room, not doing anything
not even reading, not really, just
looking at your telephone,

Shirt 4, Back:
wondering if I was going to call.

Into The White, part 3

In this latest and final installment of Into The White I’d like to show you how the white space between two comic panels can be used as an artistic device. I started this essay with a little theoretical introduction to comics in general and the white space in particular. The second part was an exposition of how people in other media had tackled this white space artistically. In this third part I’d like to show how it can be done in comics, more specifically in my comics.

I’d like to show you. 

But I can’t. 

Well at least not yet. While looking for material for this post I became aware of a tiny problem :  Not only has what I’ve been trying to describe here never been done in comics properly, I haven’t really done it either. Yet.

I’m currently working on something that is supposed to be about the white. It’s also about words and images.  It’s also about a host of other things, ideas and emotions, lest you get the impression that it’s merely a formalist exercise. This 'something' is my second graphic novel, it’s called Untitled.

 

Untitled is the story of Emma Veldman, a recently graduated art historian who’s writing a book on an artist named O.  O is best known for his traffic signs, paintings on metal that look like actual traffic signs but of course aren’t, sometimes he transforms existing artworks into traffic signs as well.

Highlights from the history of art (fragment), 1999

Interpretation prohibited, 2003

The point of these images is that they’re stripped of any visual redundancy or beauty, the only thing that’s left is a message. At least that’s how Emma interprets O’s work, others think he’s just having a laugh. There’s some truth in both views. O is obviously a follower of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol in that he’s as much a conceptualist as he is a joker. The man himself is a bit of an enigma, no one knows his actual name, he refuses to talk to serious journalists, only giving interviews to tabloids where he only discusses his personal and social life. There’s even some doubt as to whether the man who appears in the media as O is the same person who makes these artworks, or if it’s even one single person who makes them.

Enough to write a book about, one would imagine, but trying to interpret someone who doesn’t want to be interpreted can be quite difficult, which is what a large part of this book is about. Untitled starts as an ordinary prose book, it's the book that Emma is writing. When we enter the world outside of Emma’s book it changes to a normal comic with balloons and such. As the story progresses there’s a constant shift between Emma’s book and the world outside, between prose and comics. Gradually these two strands start interweaving and start imposing themselves on one another.

Since I talked about Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves last week, I imagine it’s pretty obvious where I got the inspiration from.  Another, more glaringly obvious piece of theft from Danielewski is my copying the wormhole footnote I also mentioned last week. In my case it’s not a footnote that keeps going on but it’s a block of pure white that burrows itself through the story. It starts when Emma fills out an application form for a certain society (I’ll keep this in the dark since I don’t want to give away everything) and runs through the story until she receives her membership card. It's a big thing for her but it's never put into words, the block of white functions as a visual signifier that it’s constantly on her mind. Also it’s a really cool trick. 

Three pages, the first one is the application form. In the following pages you can see the white hole it leaves behind. I've kept it small and illegible so as not to give too much away.  

 

There’s a point in the story where it all get a bit more complex, or Danielewski-ey if you like, it’s also the point where the white comes in big time. I just haven’t gotten to this point yet. So instead of an overview of work already done this series of articles has actually become more of a mission statement. Which is probably for the best, I suppose it’s not a great idea to post the climax on the internet before your story’s finished.

I know I’ve failed utterly in constructing a convincing dissertation on this subject, in fact I don’t think I’ve even been able to pin down what the subject is. However I hope the examples I’ve given at least provide a hint of where I’m going. It’s the idea of stretching the hole in time to a point where it becomes timeless, becomes poetry, or magic or something. It’s the point where the small strip the reader has to put his interpretations in becomes a sea of white where everything's possible. That’s where I’m heading.

Into the white...

Into The White, pt.2

Some time ago I reviewed a Belgian book “De Kleuren van het Getto” (The Colors of the Ghetto) by Aline Sax and Caryl Strzelecki. It’s a book for young adults about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in WWII.  The review (in Dutch) is pretty glowing but not just because I admired the tasteful way the authors handled the subject matter. What I liked most was their use of white space.

Last week I talked about the gutter, the white strip in between two comic panels that signifies a hole in story time.  When reading a comic you have to bridge that gap yourself. As I said, most readers don’t think twice about the white in between the pictures. What impressed me about Sax and Strzelecki’s book is that they obviously had thought about it, and used it in a very effective way.

The text says: Until the day I waited.. ...and waited... ..restlessly waited... 

This scene describes a point in the story where the main character is waiting for his sister to return, fearing that she’s been caught by the Nazi’s but fearing what the Nazi’s could do to him even more , hence his inactivity. This probably doesn’t come across too well, taken out of context like this, but it’s quite a gripping scene. The tension is made tangible by their use of so much white (well, black in this case), if we accept the idea that the white is a hole in time then this scene, where every word and every picture floats in a sea of white, seems to last forever. A sentence, a pause, a sentence, a picture, a sentence, a pause. The rhythm makes the wait unbearable, as the main character slowly realizes that his sister is lost forever the readers’ heart breaks a little as well.

A very impressive feat, but it’s not really a comic*

From Mark Z. Danielewski’s bestselling novel House of Leaves, also not a comic.  A masterful novel that consists of several different texts that are combined in very inventive and complex ways. The core of the book is a horror type story about a photographer who moves into a house that seems haunted, for want of a better word, he discovers extra rooms, corridors and strange noises. He starts to explore these mysterious corridors and films them. This film is seen by an elderly professor who becomes obsessed with it and writes pages and pages of notes about the house in the film. These pages are then found by  a guy who presents these pages to us, the reader, and adds his own footnotes, interpretations and autobiographical details.  That’s the story in an oversized nutshell; as you may have surmised from the example above, it’s not an easy book.

All these different strands of story, asides, footnotes and lists texts are presented on the same page, in different fonts or sometimes in  different colors. Somewhere along the line those stories start to interweave and bleed into one another and the lay outs start to become more and more inventive and expressive, it also becomes a very complex read where you don’t know which strand of text you’re following half the time. One of the most interesting features about the example above is the text that is boxed in.

It’s a footnote that presents a seemingly endless list of architectural elements. The footnote actually burrows a hole through the page. Here’s how it looks when you turn the page, it goes on like this for about twenty pages.

Later on the typographical holes start getting bigger, the page starts decomposing, collapsed in on itself much like the house it describes. Here the white becomes a graphical analogy for the darkness that swallows the characters.

The full text of this sequence is: A life time finished between the space of two frames

The first time I looked at this book I knew immediately that this was something comics could, and should do. If there’s one art form where the arrangement of the page affects the story, it’s comics. If there’s one medium where the void that Danielewski so artfully employs is ever present, it’s comics.

So why aren’t we doing it then?

Well, that seems like a suitable cliffhanger.

See you next week.

*  The book is actually sold as a graphic novel but it contains mostly prose, interjected by pages of illustrations, just like a traditional illustrated book. There’s been some discussion on whether or not it deserves to be called a graphic novel.  I’d say it probably is because it uses a very important comic technique in a way few other books do and it’s also a hell of a lot better than most books that are passed off as graphic novels these days.  Also I couldn’t care less about such distinctions.

Into The White

On time in comics

part 1

Time in comics is an odd thing. It’s also one of its most interesting aspects. In most media time is basically what it is: time. In comics, time is space.  No time actually passes in comics, we just make you think it does by using words and pictures on the space of a page.

Or, in fewer words:  this panel:

seems to last longer than this one:

simply because it takes up more space. The length of the panel evokes the feeling of longer stretch of time.

The example above is from Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, it's the bible for anyone even remotely interested in how comics work and everyone should own a copy (link)




 Here's another exerpt from McCloud:

Comics is basically the art of putting two pictures together. To read comics is to make a connection between those two pictures. Or, as McCloud puts it:

"I may have drawn an axe being raised in this example, but I'm not the one who let it drop or decided how hard the blow, or who screamed, or why. That, dear reader, was your special crime, each of you comitting it in your own style."

Now this is where it starts to get interesting, in between the panels. The white between two pictures is like a hole in time which the reader has to fill up with their own imagination.

Of course this is nothing out of the ordinary, when reading prose one is constantly filling in blanks and even when watching a movie ones brain is constantly making connections between seperate pictures, soundtrack and whatnot, even though you may not be aware of it. What makes comics different however is that here you can see the holes in time, they're there on the page. Maybe that's why comics often have a hard time creating a convincing imitation of reality, because you can always see the joints.

Having said that, for most comic readers filling in those blanks feels almost as natural as watching a movie, they pull it off without thinking, like blinking their eyes. But that doesn't change the fact that the white is there in plain sight. It's as  part of the vocabulary of comics. This means it can also be manipulated.

My current interest, and the subject of this post I guess, is taking something that seems quite natural and make it less natural. In other words, I'm looking for a way to turn something that's invisible into art. 

But more on that in next week's lecture. See you then.

Schrijvertje

Een kort verhaal dat ik nog op de plank had liggen. Oorspronkelijk bedoeld als inzending voor een ‘Beeldverhalenwedstrijd’ maar in de eerste ronde al gesneuveld omdat het ‘onbegrijpelijk of moeilijk leesbaar’ zou zijn……

Bij dezen dan maar als eindejaarstraktatie voor mijn trouwe lezers. Ik wens iedereen alvast een mooi 2012  

Werk in uitvoering

remcowetzels.blogspot.com gaat verbouwen!  Na rijp beraad is besloten onze blik te verruimen naar een internationaal publiek. Dit betekent dat dit blog niet langer in het Nederlands zal verschijnen maar in het Engels.

Hierover is lang gewikt en gewogen: Ik houd van de Nederlandse taal en beheers deze beter dan het Engels. Bovendien vind ik dat de Engelse taal erg veel te onpas wordt gebruikt door Nederlanders die interessant willen doen tegenover andere Nederlanders.

Anderzijds is dit blog opgezet om een groter publiek te bereiken, en in het Nederlands is dat bereik nou eenmaal beperkt. En die beperking is nergens voor nodig. Nu alleen hopen dat de huidige lezers van dit blog niet massaal gaan afhaken vanwege mijn taalverraad.

Next: Een nog niet eerder gepubliceerde strip (die niet vertaalbaar is) en daarna gaan we de wijde wereld in.

Wacht niet op de violen

Een tijdje geleden werd ik benaderd door relatiecoach Heleen Kramer om illustraties te verzorgen bij een soort zelfhulpboek.   ‘Wacht niet op de violen’ is een boek met tips voor mensen die wat hulp nodig hebben bij hun zoektocht naar een partner.  Hierin worden emotionele vraagstukken behandeld, bijvoorbeeld het omgaan met een negatief zelfbeeld, maar het bevat ook praktische adviezen, zoals 'Trek eens iets leuks aan' of 'Houd in je woning rekening met een intrekkende partner'.   

De illustraties zijn luchtig en vriendelijk geworden, sommige van de behandelde onderwerpen zijn ronduit deprimerend dus een vrolijke toets was wel op z’n plaats. Aan de andere kant moest het natuurlijk ook weer niet te lollig worden; de lezers van dit boek zullen het onderwerp zeer serieus nemen en daar moet je als illustrator natuurlijk rekening mee houden.

'Speeddating'

Stilistisch gezien is het een beetje een variant op de autobiografische stripjes die elders op dit blog te vinden zijn, maar dan ietsjes strakker, met dikkere lijnen die ik direct heb afgekeken van Marc Hempel. Iets maken op basis van de ideeën en verwachtingen van een ander, in plaats van wat in mijn eigen hoofd zit, is een relatief nieuwe, maar bepaald niet onprettige, ervaring.  Het resultaat mag er zijn, al zeg ik het zelf.

 Voor de eenzame harten onder mijn lieve lezers, “Wacht niet op de violen” is te bestellen op http://www.silda.nl/page3doe-workshops.html