I’ve been thinking about the future of comics lately. I think the challenges facing independent creators, from trying to get in anthologies, get “for hire” gigs or maybe the Holy Grail, get some kind of bigger publisher interested in our work in this economy often means you second-guess your creations, style and even “career” choice. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately, and what helps me is to remember that the art form we call comics now is part of a continum that has it’s roots tens of thousands of years ago. In the past we see the future, and vice versa. What the Hell am I talking about? Let me explain:

The fact that humans are the only living thing on the planet that not only has symbolic thought, but makes recordings of these symbols: art. About 30-50,000 years ago symbolic representations of animals start to show up on cave walls and in carved forms like figurines and stylized tools and jewelry in the Middle East, Africa and Europe, as Modern Humans spread out from our ancestral homeland, Africa. Modern humans date back to perhaps 150,000 years, but the RECORD of symbolic thought is only a fraction of that time. What this means is we had the brains, hands and bodies we have now, but symbolic thought took a long time to refine, past down to the next generation and find the richness of meaning that finally led to the first art.

How does this relate to comics? Well, when people started living in towns, growing crops and domesticating animals, people started to need to trade for goods, since not everyone grew food or hunted. People started to have specialized “careers” and craft-people appeared along with the concept of the city state. Merchants needed to keep track of sales, so the first writing appeared around 7,000 years ago. Almost immediately the artisians took hold of the writing, and at the request of the leaders started to combine them. The birth of the written word is inextricably linked with the combining of pictures and more abstract, symbolic words. These are, for all practical purposes, comics.

In ancient Sumer, in the Kingdom of Ur, we see the clearest example of this, even more than in Egypt in my opinion. For one thing, the practice of anthropomorphizing animals started here, with the “Bull Cult”. We see an amazingly modern approach to the “bull woman” here, holding an offering of wine to the gods.

That what we call comics has such ancient roots in not just art history, but the way written language itself was born, should never be forgotten by those of us that practice this art form. We continue the legacy of telling stories, effecting our fellow humans that might be too busy to write their own. We continue civilizations true prize: the heightened level of communication that art represents.

Collective Folks,

Thought I should send you my  left-wing nut blog on Conductive Chronicle, a “progressive” (or communist if you listen to Glen Beck or Sarah Palin).

I’m just writing about comics, and comics related stuff, but I try to touch on broader issues, too. Let me know your thoughts and input or ideas on what you think I should talk about.

http://cchronicle.com/author/joel-rivers/

Peace out,

Joel

I think some attention should be paid to digital art vs. traditional, old-school comics. I love the craft and steps in creating “fine art” comics with watercolor, pencil and ink-even acrylic, but we don’t always have time for that, and scanning original color art is fraught with pitfalls if you are printing later. I still am learning the balancing act between  what I’ll call “to paper” and “to tablet” drawing, but if like me you can’t just sit around all week long and draw comics, and God forbid you had a deadline or a paying client, you may need to go digital, at least partly.

The thing that we all share as comic creators, is that we’ve had to use tools made to do, say photo-retouching as in Photoshop, or making books, as in InDesign, and adapt them into making comics.  In the above pictures I’ve scanned in the penciled art for a piece I did for a client, Students of the Unusual, and am “inking” it digitally in Corel Painter X. I also colored the art digitally later, but I think there is enough to talk about regarding digital “inking” and maybe adding tones to keep me busy here. Let’s talk pros and cons: The pros include, your get to “undo” without white-out or tearing your hair out. You can move quickly and not use up expensive art supplies and get your work area and hands (and often in my case clothes) all covered in ink. The cons, well, many artists my generation and older were introduced to computers rather late, and will never be as at home drawing straight on a tablet as onto paper. Digital drawing lacks, for now anyway, some sort of tactile quality that drawing with pencil or brush on paper has. Maybe it’s more abstract than that: you don’t create anything tangible-no object. Sure, you can print it out, but you can’t touch it as you create it. This may seem like a small point, but I assure you it has a been major challenge for me. I’m close to feeling like I’m really drawing when I work in say Painter or Photoshop, but it’s taken a long time. I assume other folks will find this a non-issue in the years and decades ahead, but, hey, my first year of college we learned graphic design with a light table and a font book… there’s a learning curve for everyone who creates comics, but the path is as unique as the individual.

Happy Drawing,

Joel

Coming up with ideas is hard enough, but then you have to do the long hard slog to flush them out, bring all your skills and talents to bare and hopefully complete something. That’s the challenge to those brave or foolish (or a combination of those) to attempt a comic book project. My biggest challenge has been to keep my head above the the waters of doubt and confusion. I mean, once you know how the story ends,  you’re done, right? The truth is you’ve just begun, because you are Director, Writer, Star, Production Designer, Editor and Producer all rolled into one. This appeals to the control freak in me, but the shear amount of work and time involved is truly daunting.  My latest personal project, Geeples, is a story I started a LONG time ago, when I was a kid. It has taken me a long time to figure out what kind of story it really is and how to approach it as a storyteller. It may not take you decades to figure your story out like it did me, but be prepared for a long slog.

Have I told you I want to be an animator?! That’s a story for a different day.