How Taran stole the April fish

Man, I was all set to do a joke update today, sketched out the art and everything. And then, about 3 weeks back, our four month old daughter who used to sleep through til morning began waking once or twice during the night. (I feel sucker punched, here.)*

Sigh.

I really enjoy April Fool’s, look forward to smirking through out the day (example, our IT guy announced a way to reduce costs and energy usage through limited email access: Last names starting A through M will have email access 6:30 AM through 1:00 PM. Last names starting N through Z will have email access 1:00 PM through 7:30 PM.) And I was totally stoked that this year’s was on a Wednesday, my regular update day. But between the day job, freelance, baby care** and the 5 hours of sleep per night AND baby’s first shoulder dislocation this past Friday AND AND a sudden computer upgrade… just not meant to be. Not with me enjoying it, which is the whole point.

I was contemplating going with a simple “screw comics” post, but I already did that and caused unintended heartburn for some folks. And I don’t think I’m in the right mental space to pull that off, all things considered.

And I told Patrick I got this week so no update from him either, I’m afraid. Entertainingly enough, my original April Fool’s prank was to present a slick, hyper stylized, action and boob packed comic as Dicebox’s new direction. Kinda redundant now.

As penance, and a way to rev back up into Dicebox as I complete other obligations*** I will be attempting to post something in the Dicebox Process Journal at least six times a week for the month of April. I will start tonight with a one of the cleaned up and colorized sketches. And this weekend I’ll share some concept art for Book 2 that I was originally planning to share today a balm for goofiness.

Oh, and updates to Dicebox here on out: Patrick and I will be alternating every other week until he’s finished, allowing me time to ramp up fully as well for hime to wrap up this epic. And they’ll be truly Wednesday updates again! With as much material as we can manage in two weeks time.

See you on April 15th with the beginning of Dicebox Book 1: Part 9: Out of a Molehill. No fooling.

*What she really wants is to sleep in the bed with Kip and me, something I gave her a taste for when traveling–hated the crib arrangement, room temperature and we were in a king sized bed. It’s also part of her biggest growth spurt yet, not just size but mental activity and physical ability. And it’s the fact that she can now roll and hoist herself along and over things that has me firmly vetoing her sharing the bed with us. Which means a good couple of hours every night getting her to settle and go back to sleep. In her own bed/bassinet.

**By which I mean breast feeding. I produce at least a quart everyday for our little monkey girl and, man, what a time consuming, exhausting enterprise that is. Looking forward to weaning, tantrums and all. I’ve seen it compared to a part time job, seven days a week and boy they’re not kidding.

***And wean the Kid.

Vicarious thrills

So there’s been a mild broo-ha-ha in some of the circles I travel and lurk in over this month’s Comixpeida cover (not work safe) for there sex and violence issue.

There has been some rants and inspired responses (also not work safe), but I think what gets to me is the fact that it’s statistically inaccurate. Statistically speaking that should be a guy humping his iMac.

I mean, I know why this was the most, uh, natural choice for the artist and editors. I mean beyond the whole object and objectifier debate. I don’t even think it’s all about the “male gaze.” No, it’s that in the heart of every male, there reposes a drag queen. (The fishnets gave it away.)

Comics A Go-Go

24 Hour Comics Day coming up on April 24th, this Saturday! You knew that, right? You know what a 24 Hour Comic is, don’t you?

Many cartoonists are joining the fray, including a few of the Girlamatic artists–editor Lea Hernandez has set up a LiveJournal for the sole purpose of documenting the progress of any and all Girlamatic artists participating in this event.

Which won’t include me. Why? Cause I’ve done a 24 Hour Comic and once is enough. Pity I had to do three of the damn things before actually completing one within 24 hours.

But even more exciting for me is the 24 Hour Comic anthology that just came out, because it includes a story from Paul Winkler, who was part of that Old Comics Making gang of mine. Yay Paul!

I took part in two 24 Hour Comic jams with Paul, which I talk about a bit in a post here. And actually, Paul is going to be doing his fifth 24 Hour Comic this Saturday at Jim Hanley’s Universe, I believe.

Actualy, Paul was kind enough to post some advise to in order to successfully complete a 24 Hour Comic to the Zwol forums:

I figured that since I’ve done four 24-hour comics over the years, and got 2 of them done in under 24 hours (and went way over with the other two), I might give a few words of curmudgeonly advice to the first-timers:

Try a simpler style than you’re used to.
Being cartoony is not only fun, it can be a lot faster. Take liberties.

Beware of heavy dialogue.
Lettering is slow, especially if your lettering is as bad as mine. On the other hand, lettering may be faster than drawing something complicated. Do one or the other, rarely both.

Shading is for people who have time.
Gray is for wimps!

Do you really need that background?
Get in the habit of thinking about it again for every panel.

Use really fast tools.
No muss, no fuss. Inflexible markers are good. Brush markers are tricky when you’re exhausted, and they dry slow. Real ink is for people who have time. Big fat markers are your friend. They prevent you from getting finicky.

Is the drawing vaguely legible? Great! Move on!
You can come back to it later. If there is no later - oh well, good thing you stopped when you did.

Go twice as fast as you think is necessary.
You might think, “I do an average of 6 panels a page. I need to do a page an hour. Therefore I have 10 minutes per panel.” Nope! Something will slow you down. In fact, many somethings will slow you down. You can’t predict or prevent them all. If you are just barely keeping up with where you need to be, you will suddenly find yourself way behind and it will only get worse. I did that on two of my 24-hour comics. They both went way overtime. It hurts your morale too, makes it harder to get all the way to the end.
The solution is to get ahead and stay ahead. Think you need 10 minutes a panel? Make it five.

Let things happen.
You may find that in your rush, and your increasingly tired state, you start drawing differently, or thinking differently, or seeing differently. Don’t fight it. Be willing to go places you’ve never been, and don’t try to force the direction! You’re not making a magnum opus, you’re participating in an experimental artistic process. Something interesting will come, and it will probably not be much like what you envisioned when you started.

All good advice.

For the curious, here’s a link to the first 24 hour comic, Scott McCloud’s A Day’s Work.

And, what the heck, a couple more: Kip’s second 24 Hour Comics, The Star, and one done by Barry Deutsch, Filling the Hole.

And speaking of Barry we’ll be joining me on Girlamatic with his new narrative series, Hereville come May 6th! As he is another of the Old Gang, imagine my delight at that!

Look natural

Friday evenings is traditionally when I give myself a break, catch up on some reading, both on on paper and on screen. Tonight I remembered to check out this month’s Nervy Girl, Portland’s once paper, now webzine feminist magazine. (Hopefully soon paper again, as that is where they will make true revenues with advertisers.) One of the things I read was one of their regular columns, Damaged Goods, this month’s installment being “Men are for MACH3, Women are for Venus” by Jessica Hoffmann.

It’s basically a compare and contrast of the language and attitude of the Gillette Company’s marketing of safety razors for women as opposed to men. Here’s great example of that difference is given by Hoffmann in her column:

On the “Experience Venus” page, I learned about how Venus can give me “oh-so-touchable legs.” And I got the inside scoop on some features special to the Venus system, including the super-simple blade-change function—“No fiddling. No mistakes. Blade-changing made simple. Click. That’s it. Just open the refill and click on the handle. You couldn’t do it upside down if you tried. Phew.”

Phew indeed. The MACH3 site’s version? “Open cartridge architecture makes rinsing and cleaning the MACH3Turbo blades easier than ever; the single-point docking system … makes it virtually impossible for consumers to accidentally load a cartridge upside down.” Architecture? Docking system? Thank goodness they didn’t try those 50-cent words on the girlies.

All this dredged up memories for some research I did for a column I wrote for Anodyne about hair as gender signifier. Specifically, an 1991 article by Susan Basow “The Hairless Ideal: Women and their Body Hair” and the role that the Gillette Company played in popularizing the shaving of female skin back in the 1920s.

The following is a quote by Susan Basow from a post she made to a Women’s Study List in 1995, which sums up :

In my research, I found that in the U.S., prior to 1915, very few women removed underarm or leg hair. Then Gillette began “The Great Underarm Campaign” to get women to shave with their new safety razor. The ads emphasized “smoothing” the underarms and had a racist tone (to make skin “white” and “fashionable” at a time when waves of “dirty” “old-fashioned” immigrants from Eastern Europe, Italy and Ireland were flooding the U.S.). In the 1920s, the female “look” was a boyish and youthful one (the flapper), but this is also when women had won the vote and were leaving the domestic sphere for the public one. Ads emphasized the importance for women to manage their appearance in order to be sexually attractive to men. Leg shaving didn’t become popular til the 1940s, and coincided with the shortage of silk stockings due to the war (and the consequent bare-legged look). Ads emphasized attractiveness, neatness, cleanliness, and modernity. Given that women were behaving more like men (in terms of jobs and education), the gender lines became drawn on women’s bodies: men are hairy, therefore women must be hairless. Legs, leading as they do to the crotch, also have a sexual association. Shaving them can be viewed as a means to socially control (modify) women’s untamed sexuality.

Basow also surveyed 420 women on their personal and cultural attitudes on hair removal among women:

The major reasons for starting were because “it was the thing to do.” The major reasons for continuing were because it makes women feel “feminine” and sexually attractive.

I admit it, I do shave—very irregularly, mostly on what can only be described as a whim, sometimes for a grooming effect. I still find it amusing that some people identify feminists by their hairy legs, as if hat was a side effect of a condition. Ah, if only it were that simple—don’t shave your legs and you have instant enlightenment on a philosophical belief system.

I have to say, the Gillette ads have always annoyed me, even without probing very deeply into their “culture.” On the whole, I was much more impressed by the blades in The Seven Samurai—a movie which I just saw for the first time tonight.

Fish Stories

Before I ever blogged, or even thought of doing the same, I was a Sex and Gender columnist for the now extinct Anodyne Magazine, what used to be a pretty promising arts and culture monthly. I used to also be the Sex and Gender Editor and the magazine’s Art Director as well as layout artist and occasional reviewer. But it writing my column “Gender Stew” that I got my cultural commentary ya-yas out, as well as the couple full articles I did.

Ever since Kip and Barry posted pieces they had originally written for Anodyne, I’ve been thinking of doing the same. Kip posted his wonderful article entitled “Why You Don’t Read Comics” while Barry posted on his experiences on being a cross dressing duck. Actually, I used to share S&G editing and column writing duties with Barry.

What follows is the first column I did solo, probably not my best piece, but I still like it. And I think it goes some ways in explaining why Colymbosathon ecplecticos amuses me so. As with most magazine pieces, I had to cut some verbiage to make it fit, but that draft is lost on some crashed hard drive. In attempt to be true to a piece of published writing I did six years ago, the only alterations I’ve made was to fix some tenses and articles that suffered from last minute cuts made by editors who had been up for 30 hours at that point, though I did include a couple of footnotes in an attempt to fill in some of the blanks.

I also had to gray out the clip art I had picked to accompany the piece behind the text, originally done by Paul Goold for Life magazine before being collected by Dover Publications:

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