Comics/ Manga Style

 

Doing comics is a quite recent thing for me.  But had been cartooning and doing single panel cartoons for decades.  Have a collection of my original comics/ manga to download for free.  

It was reading all of "Valerian and Lareline" by writer Pierre Christin and artist Jean-Claude Mézières and the 6 volumes of the amazing "Orbital" by writer Sylvain Runberg and artist Serge Pellé, that set me off wanting to try something along those lines in 2017. Some 8 years ago now.  My Terraform is that work, but what I discovered doing that is drawing the same fairly realistic character over and over, and making it color, actually isn't my thing. It took about 3 months to do 15 pages on parts of the weekends. 

I love Masamune Shirow's APPLESEED and GHOST IN THE SHELL, but that isn't the style of thing I would want to draw myself, knowing how long it takes. Complicated action scenes with complicated characters and machines.  Otomo Katsuhiro the same deal. Inspiring but not what I want to do myself.

I always considered drawing my first and longest love, but my career in engineering and software development with a large focus on reuse and not wasting time has lead me to a different approach and style. 

More like Mizuki Shigeru. Simple reusable characters on complicated backgrounds. The way Flash vector animation was done.  Toriyama Akira's Dr Slump is closer to my approach. Jokes are also important to me. It has to be funny, at least a bit. Life is far too serious without it.

I don't mind drawing something complicated once, like a background, or reusable set piece but to do it over and over, slightly different, just awakens my engineering brain that says "that is too inefficient and a waste of time, do it differently, make it a subroutine".

So I have. I make a series of reusable characters and parts for a comic, so a character doesn't have to be redrawn all the time.  Having characters mostly standing and talking helps a lot too. Can't leave out the influence of AMERICAN SPLENDOR there either.  I have had little to do with your standard MARVEL or DC American comics, SUPERMAN, BATMEN etc. The closest being a few issues of SPAWN around when the movie came out. So material about doing comic lettering the American way, is of zero interest to me, and it just seems Japanese MANGA is just so totally different in that regard anyway.  Upper case only text just seems so illiterate to me. 

I have used NARRATIVE CAPTIONS a lot too in my comics. Very effective for me.

I recently re-watched the 1966 surfing documentary THE ENDLESS SUMMER.  Filmed in color in soundless 16mm, the documentary relies heavy on the comedic entertaining narration and music added in post production.  When he initially travelled around showing his film, he played records while he talked live.   So the narration is captivating as it was worked out during many live performances.   

So my own comic/ manga style comes out of my approach to just doing things, and not wanting to draw the same thing over and over again. 

Music + Comics is also something I have worked on for a few years now that I find fulfilling.

Getting an Idea, Making it, Recording it, Improving it, then Listening to the music Out and About. Simple Things that make me a Happy Camper:

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology