Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment

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    Monsters and Dames

    April 27th, 2011 | by Everett

    When I was first began drawing this comic in 2009, I was already a huge fan of James Gurney, the creator of the Dinotopia books and the author of the greatest art blog on the internet today, bar none. James very often employs miniatures, which he sculpts himself, to help him get ideas for his fantastical paintings, particularly ideas about lighting. Here are just a few examples – I could post dozens more and they’re all equally astounding:

    After reading his superb book Imaginative Realism: How To Paint What Doesn’t Exist, I was determined to adopt this practice. I was barely confident in my ability to draw a human being from various angles, much less a totally fictional creature of my own invention. But I knew that the alien/kachina was going to be a big part of the story, and that I’d have to draw him many times. So I busted out the plasticine and managed to crap out this little number:

    A lot of the animal’s proportions changed between the initial model and the final artwork (first appearance, Page 86), so I didn’t end up referring to it all that much. But constructing the model nevertheless helped a lot – it forced me to visualize the creature as a three-dimensional being and not just a series of lines. I brought the model with me from New Orleans to Portland in a shoebox – it has completely fallen apart.

    P.S. Seriously, if you an artist reading this, even if you think my art sucks, you should absolutely read Imaginative Realism. If you are in Portland, I have two copies and will happily lend you one.

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    Oh %@&$! It’s THOSE Guys!

    April 15th, 2011 | by Everett

    Just as one more reminder that I am not making this all up as I go along, I’d like to point out that the two soldiers who saw through Tonya’s thin ruse were, in fact, present at the Las Cruces concert on PAGE 13!!! No accidents, people. This is season one of LOST, not season six.

    Since I knew the characters would have to be recognizable later, I tried to make them look “distinctive.” But since my art in the spring of 2009 was pretty shaky, my solution was apparently to draw a black version of Ernie from Sesame Street and a man with a triangle for a nose. It was fun trying to update these napkin-doodles into the chiseled specimens of military valor you see today.

    In vaguely related news, I have now chosen THE OFFICIAL COFFEE of SAVAGE NOBLES IN THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT. New Mexico Pinon Coffee. This is seriously some of the most delicious s*** I have ever tasted, and I brew coffee for a living. Er, I mean, as a hobby, when I’m not making my fortune drawing comics.

    While I don’t necessarily think you should order coffee off their website (that is a might big carbon footprint for a mere Cup o’ Jose), you should definitely see if your local grocery stocks it. I know here in Portland you can get it at Trader Joe’s.

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    April Fool’s Page

    April 11th, 2011 | by Everett

    This was the page I posted on April Fool’s Day and took down the following Monday, preserved here for posterity! Right click for a larger version. Don’t worry, the real ending will be much better!

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    Going Off the Rails on a Crazy Train

    March 25th, 2011 | by Everett

    Though beardless Theo’s confrontation with the railroad men is one of my favorite parts of this story, it’s definitely an example of a place where I could have done more research. The problem was not a scarcity of reference material, but a superabundance of it. The train dorks of America have amassed so much great information out there on the history of U.S. railroads that, rather than choosing some of it, I opted to read none of it… besides, I had a comic to draw!

    (a cool map of the now defunct Santa Fe Railroad, from 1891.)

    One unfortunate result of my laziness is that the fictional railroad described in SNitLoE is frankly preposterous. At the end of the 19th century, Lubbock, TX was still not even a spot on the map, nor was Tuscon, AZ much better. It is true that a hypothetical railroad between these two nowhere towns would indeed pass approximately through the Las Cruces/ White Sands area, but why would it? An actual ladder into the sun would be more useful.

    “I’ve listened to the preachers, I’ve listened to the fools, I’ve watched all the dropouts who make their own rules.” – Ozzy Osbourne, “Crazy Train,” summarizing my comic.

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    Hopi Hairstyles

    February 18th, 2011 | by Everett

    Hopi women have such awesome hairstyles! Last winter in New Orleans I picked up a used coffee table book about the contemporary Hopi reservations in northeastern Arizona to use as visual reference. In addition to architectural, fashion and phenotypic information, I was particularly concerned with finding a “look” for Theo’s friend Manaka. I wasn’t even to the table of contents of Hopi by Susanne and Jake Page when I met this beauty staring right back at me:

    She’s too young for Manaka’s character, but the look is there, if I could only capture it. I had seen similar, and even more elaborate, hairstyles in historical photographs of Hopi women:

    As cool as these swirly braids look, I have a hell of a time trying to draw them from different angles. Expect a considerable amount of “Mickey Mouse ear syndrome” as Manaka’s hair migrates over the surface of her head.

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    Kuleshov Komics

    February 12th, 2011 | by Everett

    The Kuleshov Effect is a phenomenon in cinema whereby audiences perceive facial expressions differently depending on context. In the 1910’s and 20’s, Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov designed an experiment that involved a sort of movie collage: A shot of a bowl of soup, followed by the impassive face of handsome actor Ivan Mozzhukin reacting to it; then a shot of a little child in a coffin, followed by Mozzhukin’s face again; finally a shot of a beautiful and seductively dressed woman, and Mozzhukin’s reaction. Audiences praised Mozzhukin’s brilliantly subtle acting, his nuanced expression of hunger, restrained grief, and boiling lust. But as you probably have predicted already, each reaction shot was exactly the same – the same footage every time.

    Alfred Hitchcock explains the same phenomenon in this video:

    HOW DOES THIS APPLY TO COMICS?

    On the one hand, comics artists, and cartoonists in particular, have an obsession with, almost a fetishization of, facial expressions. From the simplest distillation of an emotion into a few carefully-chosen lines, to an elaborately rendered portrait of a distinct countenance, we all seem to strive for the most evocative faces possible. Some people have actually insisted this is the single most important storytelling mechanism for a comics artist, more important even than body language. The ridiculously great facial-expression guide by Lackadaisy artist and comics samurai Tracy Butler has been making the rounds on the internet, and deservedly so. She’s got the art of drawing facial expressions down to a science (or maybe the science down to an art – I’m not sure.)

    But on the other hand, comics are not single images like a painting, but an arranged series, like a movie. Because we tell our stories through sequential juxtaposition, *ahem, puts on green plaid shirt and opaque full-moon glasses*, why exactly do we need the perfect, nuanced facial expression every time, when, at least according to the theory of the Kuleshov effect, a perfectly neutral face will do? An incredible amount of emotion can be imparted into a blank face given the context that comics can provide. Sarah Oleksyk took this to its sublime extreme in one of my favorite single comics panels of all time, from book five of her series Ivy:

    Here, perhaps the biggest emotional turning point of the entire series is represented a 3/4-rear shot. What is Ivy thinking? Oleksyk doesn’t say. She only asks what YOU think she’s thinking.

    Two years ago, when I started this comic you’re reading now, I had not heard the term “Kuleshov Effect,” but I knew I was interested in the comics possibilities of blank, ambiguous facial expressions, and I used them a lot. This was particularly useful since I was still learning how to draw.

    I’ve come a long way in my artistic abilities since then, and I like to think I’m capable of much more convincing, expressive faces that are interesting in themselves. But sometimes I worry that I’ve thrown out baby Kuleshov with the bathwater. I try to remember that sometimes, rather than telegraphing emotion so obviously, the right thing to do is to let the reader fill in their own subtext.

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    My Next Project

    January 26th, 2011 | by Everett

    Since legions of my fans are always asking, “Everett, what are you gonna work on when you’ve finished Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment?”, I thought I’d give y’all a sneak peak:

    “The Li’lest Nobles” will tell the story of our favorite anarchist garage band as BABIES! When their wagon becomes mired in the sandbox, the only way to be home by dinner is through the POWER OF IMAGINATION!

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    Patience While Our Site Is Being Improved

    January 21st, 2011 | by Everett

    In mid-November, Steve Lieber, whom I know from my time as an intern at Periscope Studio, gave me some really solid advice. Emphasis on solid. Starting from about today’s page, I made a real commitment to constructive anatomy (that is, to building characters out of boxes, spheres and cylinders before adding their muscles, clothes, nose-rings, etc.).

    I don’t know why this commitment was so slow in coming. “It will feel like you are wasting time,” predicted Steve, “but you are really saving time.” He’s certainly right about the first part – drawing all those shapes that will be covered up by clothes or even cut off by the panel borders certainly feels futile while your doing it… but I couldn’t be happier with the results.

    But besides general laziness, I can think of one other reason why I might have been hesitant to construct my mannequins in three dimensions: I was worried about losing the “gestural” quality, the flowing curve of motion through the body so praised by animators (not that I really have this down either, but anyway). Sometimes thoroughly solid, constructed anatomy can end up looking a little stiff, just as hip, flowing cartooning can look totally malproportioned and flat. You’ll see plenty of examples of both problems in this comic, but I’m striving for a synthesis of the two like that achieved by “the greats.”

    So while some of the drawings in the ensuing pages may seem a little rigid and awkward, I feel that by about page 120 (I’m pencilling 128 right now) I am back in a good place. All I’m saying is, I hope you don’t have a communicable foot disease…

    …because those pages are gonna knock your socks off.

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    Comix Not Ded

    January 11th, 2011 | by Everett

    I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the broad appeal that “punk” characters seem to have in comics. I already knew that, on the face of it, my writing a story about a garage band full of pissy youngsters was not unique. But I’ve only just become aware of how extremely non-unique it is. Just to take two examples from comics by cartoonists I have met since living in Portland in March:

    Patrick Devine, who works down at the IPRC, gave me a copy of his zine “Calico Jack,” which mixes punk ethics/aesthetics with dilapidated spaceships in a way that calls to mind the subject matter of Jaime Hernandez’s “Love & Rockets” series, except that in my case I read “Calico Jack” first.

    Steve Fuson, a regular contributor, with me, to Stumptown Underground, has a little series called “the Nihilist Club” whose assaholic skateboarding “protagonist” really takes the “hero” out of “anti-hero.” Reading it gave me a little shock, both because Steve is himself a very genteel person, and because his auto-bio webcomic,  “Me&Ering,” is about as tame as that genre can be.

    So why do so many comics artists feel drawn to this material? Is it because, as lonely losers who spend the best years of our lives hunched over a desk drawing imaginary picture stories, we idealize the opposite lifestyle of undisciplined mayhem and direct political engagement? Because we are boring milquetoasts who rebel vicariously through kick-ass rock stars and impossibly cute manic pixie dreamgirls? Because, impotent onanists that we are, we can only soothe our whimpering civic consciences by dressing up our flat solipsism in virtuous black leather and valiant mohawks?

    Don’t answer that!

    Obviously, there’s a very strong “indy” comics heritage informing most of us, one that has traditionally focused on marginal social groups (though usually not too marginal). What better suits the “warts and all” approach of these comics than the ugly truths of the underground music scene? There’s a lot of philosophical  overlap between comics and rock, and you could write a whole book on the parallels between, and interconnectedness of, the two worlds.

    But the mere fact that spiked collars and electric guitars are a comics cliche (and they definitely are) doesn’t negate their artistic potential. Heck, we’ve been churning out hundreds of comics a year about superheros for the past seven decades! And I’m not even going to dwell on the similarly hallowed legacies of TV shows about cops and lawyers, novels about writers who can’t write and painters who can’t paint, or songs about how, like, totally in love I am. These things are popular for a reason!

    I think rebellion movements are interesting, not just entertaining, and I can’t overstate that the righteous anger of youth is very important, as well as, on occasion, pathetically hilarious. It’s pretty apparent by now that something in us needs to read about the hero punching out the villain. I think it’s equally true that we need to read about the teenager screaming at the cop.

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    Tonya Pop-Art Pin-Up!

    December 27th, 2010 | by Everett

    Even though I haven’t been posting new pages during the year-end holidays, I’ve still been drawing like a maniac. I took a break this morning from inking the fairly intense jail-house drama of Kafir Shahrok to draw this frivolous SNitLoE tribute to Mr. Roy Lichtenstein.

    Very exciting adventures coming up in 2011 for the Savage Nobles, and again, I’m sorry to have left everyone in the lurch. Although I hold my brush and palette in my hands, you know my heart is always with you!

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