Now for the style discussion.

There are so many fabulous art styles for storytelling out there and there is a rich history of masterful execution. I’m going a different direction (and perhaps down a dark alley). As I have alluded to in prior posts, I will be using CGI for the core of my graphic novel visualizations. There isn’t a lot of precedent here, though there have been attempts. While I would not want to say that past attempts have failed, I think it is safe to say that hand-drawn comics and graphic novels still account of the vast majority of books out there. I have to draw a clear separation between computer assisted imagery and full CGI, however. First of all, computer assisted imagery in the form of digital painting is extremely common, in fact, the league of master digital artists out there is, in my mind, unapproachable. I can’t even begin to list their names but a trip to the CG Society, Concept Art World or Concept Art.org will give you a taste of the lofty realms these guys inhabit. Even though I will likely be employing the digital tablet and employing lots of post production enhancements, I will be generating all my character imagery and settings in 3D wireframes. Even though this is not unprecedented either, it is fairly unusual since it is so time consuming and expensive to do.

The magic, however, is in the final rendered image, and software greatly influences this. Different rendering engines produce a different look and feel for the art. The trick is to suspend the reader from saying “this is CG” throughout the whole book, which frankly, most of what I have seen does exactly that. But please, I do not disparage these attempts as many of their images are stunning, but it doesn’t take much to break the bubble and this makes my task all that more daunting.

On my site you can see some attempts at this styling, though I don’t necessarily feel that any of these examples is quite on the mark (at least right now), though some of them are close.

I have two clear objectives in my style: 1. cinematic feel, 2. realistic detail.

The style of my art is going to be ultra important, so I’m going to keep this thread alive. In an upcoming post I’ll note what some of from the world’s comic book scholars have to say about the issue of style.

On the more “scholarly” side of things, I’ve touched on the interplay of design and culture in previous posts. Here are some more direct thoughts on the subject.

The purposeful, systematic and creative activities that surround the work of design are based on our cultural requirements. They have changed over time. The stresses and requirements of the information age are profoundly different from the industrial age, or an agrarian society. Along with that, our human story has changed. What we find meaningful and our expectations for design have changed with that culture. Design and culture are, in fact, inextricably woven together constantly evolving producing new artifacts, data, entertainment, transportation, medicine, governments and behaviors to name a few. This interdependency between design and culture continues to evolve leaving a history from whence we can pluck an artifact or inventive solution to discover the design narrative, and the cultural influences that launched it into existence.

This design-culture universe continues to expand and inform our lives, our design and our narrative. The relationship is significant. What we design affects the culture. Technology can initiate formidable societal changes. Do these developments follow some cosmic algorithm? Are they purely reactionary to time and economic urgency? Or, do we have a choice about what can and should be made?

Pulling the thread on this idea, there is the connective relevance beyond my graphic novel project and into design practice and the way we think as designers. Are we too bound up in the client’s parameters, or the aesthetic edge? Does the world need a better looking can opener? What about a can that doesn’t need a can opener?

Although I have not revealed the storyline for my graphic novel, I am prepared to reveal a little about the setting. As you guessed from the title it is set beyond the near future — 148 years to be exact. The city is Hong Kong. Without going into too much backstory, this is where the global government is located. Countries, as we know them, are gone. New Asia is the broader amalgamation of  the Asia of today, Europe and the former United States. The city has evolved through building continually upward. The “road car” is gone, replaced with the air version. With the advent of air taxis and all manner of flying craft, the top of the city is the new facade. Instead of entering at the bottom of a building and riding up and then to rooftops that are essentially abandoned places, the world becomes reversed. The show is at the top and so is the money and prestige. The layers as it were start at 150 stories and work their way down. Under 25 you find yourself in a city of disrepair and darkness. The bottom city is a place of crime and poverty, even in 2159. And while mankind has made quantum leaps in technology, crime has managed to keep pace in new and creative ways. Much of it legalized. But that’s going too far for today’s blog.

At any rate, the top world is where you will find all the advertising, the glamour, the enticements. Every rooftop now has a docking zone or an airlock (it gets windy up there) for patrons to offload and play. Lots to think about.  More to come in the August synopsis.

A week or so ago I wrote about how comics are particularly different from just about any other medium. I tried to illustrate this by showing, in the words of Scott McCloud, that “Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, (1993:8)” fine-tuning by the artists hand, and deliberate planning by the writer can use visuals carry the weight of paragraphs of exposition. Don’t get me wrong. Reading pages, paragraphs, or sentences of exposition are probably my favorite part of fiction, better in some cases that the evolving storyline. Why? Because, when it’s done well, you can see it in your incredibly opulent imagination. In comics, which we have come to agree in this blog is what a graphic novel is when it’s not being self-conscious, the burden lies heavily on the visual. In this respect, sequential art shares something with the movies. But as the prolific, acclaimed writer of comics Alan Moore says, a film moves at a predetermined pace, “…if I’m watching a film I’m trapped in the rigid framework dictated by the film’s running time. I must immerse myself in the flow of the film and hope I’ll pick up on enough of the constant flow of details to make coherent sense of the story at the end.” (2007:5). This brings to light the idea of time and how only comics, thus far, can address it in a wholly unique way. On the comics’ page as the panels flow from one image to the next, we can capture time, past present and future within the same viewspace. Ah, but with a DVD, I can go back and forth as well. Yes, but currently that is still a linear experience. I cannot see them all at the same time and because they are all in front of me on the comics’ page, I am getting a unique and particularly different experience.

Add to that the multi-modal braining that is required to interpret image and word along with the leap between panels (the gutter, the gap, the whitespace) the “closure” required to bridge what is happening from image to image is yet another example of the otherly nature of the art form. And this is by no means an exhaustive list of what separates the comics medium from the rest of narrative form — just another one.

McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding Comics. New York: Paradox Press.

Moore, Alan. 2007. Alan Moore’s Writing for Comics. Rantoul, IL: Avatar Press.

Let’s face it, I came to Ohio State to make a graphic novel. For me, it was the epitome of holistic design and a realization of “epic integration.” In the professional world, I was forever battling to make clients and decision-makers embrace the idea as it applies to brands and their stories — experiences. Over the years though, so much of your design sensibility becomes second nature, intuitive. What seems obvious to you is not obvious to everyone else. Thankfully the faculty prodded this out of me and as a result there was the discovery of design fiction.

Through design fiction, idea-objects gain knowledge mass and a sense of credibility. But design fiction is more than just constructing a set of plausible constraints through which a design might exist. Bleecker states that drama is of great importance. “We can put the designed thing in a story and move it to the background as if it were mundane and quite ordinary — because it is, or would be. The attention is on the people and their dramatic tension, as it should be.” (Bleecker, 2009:37) Thus, design becomes that invisible collaborator with culture in making life seem as real in the future as it is real for us now.

In fact, science fiction has a long history of introducing new technologies and artifacts that go on to become real world devices. The gesture-based interface of Minority Report or the multi-storey videos of Blade Runner are only two examples.

Evolutionary geneticist and science lecturer David Kirby calls these props “diegetic prototypes” (Kirby, 2010:1) “Film-makers and science consultants craft diegetic prototypes and enhance their realism by creating a full elaboration of the technological diegesis which includes any part of the fictional world concerning the technology. Through their actions they construct a filmic realism that implies self-consistency in both the real world and the story world.” (Kirby, 2010:46).

While design fiction can be used in filmmaking to create acceptance of a concept or idea as some kind of future product placement, that is not its greatest potential. “A particularly rich context, a good story that involves people and their social practices rather than fetishizing the object and its imagined possibilities — this is what design fiction aspires to.” (Bleecker, 2009:27).

Playing around with these concepts makes for a very rich exploration into a future design. Stay tuned for the story synopsis, characters and more – coming August 2011.

References:

Bleecker, Julian. 2009. Design Fiction: A short essay on design, science, fact and fiction. Online. http://www.nearfuturelaboratory.com

Kirby, David. 2010. The Future is Now: Diegetic Prototypes and the Role of Popular Films in Generating Real-world Technological Development. Social Studies of Science, 40/1; 41–70, February 2010. http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journals

The Urban Dictionary describes otherly as “Different in a specified manner or in the manner of that or those implied or specified.” We might suffice to say, particularly different. This comes up as discussion for today’s blogging as I am ankle-deep in the 356 pages of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. After just completing my screenplay and not yet ready to hit the “convert to screenplay” button in Celtx, I am feeling envious of the traditional novelist’s ability to wax on about the way things look or the clothes people wear. In the prose novel, the author can call attention to these things overtly and more easily. In effect the author can say, “Pay attention to this. This is what it looks like. It has meaning.” In my effort, the graphic novel, while I do not  have the advantage of the same deliberate and unavoidable syntax of pure prose, I have the decided advantage of showing what it looks like. Because I intend on adding, strategically vivid detail, I can be as obsessive about the visual as the author is about the description, limited only by my command of the visual language. Of course, even in a graphic novel, I am afforded the opportunity to add words. There is nothing stopping me. Indeed, you will find pages of pure prose exposition or backstory in some of the most renowned graphic books. In my mind, however, if you have to apply a belt and suspenders either one is overkill or something is not functioning properly. So, if I’m not careful, I run in the danger of having the audience miss it entirely.

Ah, but therein lies the challenge. In the aforementioned Gibson novel, the presentation case of a particularly snobbish and, well, bitchy designer, Dorotea, is described thus, “On the table in front of her, perhaps a millimeter too carefully aligned, is an elegant gray cardboard envelope, fifteen inches on a side, bearing the austere yet whimsical logo of Heinzi & Pfaff. It is closed with one of those archaic fasteners consisting of a length of cord and two small brown cardboard buttons” (10). I see it clearly. So, how would I show it? Exactly as it looks, of course, and then close up, maybe, camera low to the table with Dorotea’s slightly out of focus knees in the background. Maybe if it is of particular importance, it could be a separate panel absent of words and any other possible distraction.

Therein lies a specifically different, otherly aspect of the graphic novel (there are more for another day). In Robert C. Harvey’s The Art of the Comic Book- An Aesthetic History, he states, “Only in comics can the field of vision be so manipulated: the size and arrangement of images control our perception of the events depicted, contributing dramatically to the narrative effects produced” (162). Just one of the differences, I thought I’d mention today, an advantage perhaps for for a visual artist, and serving to separate the medium from the prose novel; not necessarily superior to, but particularly different.

As promised, I am passing on the results of my survey that many of you participated in via Survey Monkey a few weeks ago. I did not get nearly as many responses as I had hoped for. It was the week before finals and a lot of people here must have been too busy to to get to it before it expired. Thus, far from conclusive, it satisfied the assignment, and as with all research, it just leads to new questions. Herewith, the executive overview. The whole idea was to test comic scholar Scott McCloud’s assertion from Understanding Comics, that readers have more difficulty “filling-in” the gutter (the gap) between panels (the frames) when the artwork is more detailed. He also says that people identify more easily with a cartoon figure than a realistic figure. I found this somewhat hard to swallow, so I set out to test it. As you know there were two, very short stories; one in cartoon fashion and one using CG renderings. Essentially, they were intended to tell a similar story.

The first question asked participants to tell what happened in each story. There were various responses for each, but for story 2, the realistic one, people were able to read much more detail into the character and his predicament. In question 2, participants were split equally on which story seemed more “real”. For question 3, story 2 was clearly the winner in conveying more emotion. It was also the preferred story to “continue reading” for question 4, though there were a fair number who would like to have read both. If you’re into the nitty-gritty details on every question you can download my project summary report via this link.

While I didn’t put Scott McCloud on notice with conclusive research, I got enough of a response to at least put his theory in the “subjective” category. Thanks to all who participated.

Inspiration comes in many forms. This week I have spent slammed by the flu and fever. Today was probably my most lucid. Perhaps that has something to do with it. At any rate, I am reading David Carrier’s The Aesthetics of Comics and though a touch on the academic side for me, I may be grasping (fully) for the first time the true integration of the word balloon and the image. Scott McCloud and David Carrier are in agreement: they are one. To my friends who may casually follow my blog from week or month to month, I’m already introducing jargon that is foreign but now very much a part of everything I am doing; these are conventions, the constructs of the comic medium. Carrier, who spawned this inspiration writes, “Awareness not just of the words balloons contain but also of their purely visual qualities is part of our experience of comics.” In other words, in the comic medium, the visual style of the word balloons may carry as much subtle narrative as the picture. This pushes hard on the notion that several typefaces may have to be designed for this comic, not only for the world in which my characters inhabit, but also in the way they speak. Surely, the audio of comics is part of the design of each panel. The “rat-a-tat-a-tat” of the machine gun that sweeps across the panel is integral to the image. Thus, audio becomes a visual cue. Should each character have their own typeface? Is this too disconcerting for the audience? I think not. From what I have seen the graphic novel reader probably scores a 10+ on the visual literacy scale.

Stuff to think about. The saga continues.

I guess Halloween is a good time to post on the curse of the blog. I can’t believe it has been over a month since my last post. I was pretty delighted to see that my cordial glass design was so well received on Yanko Design. Despite some initial naysayers, it was in the top 3 for September visits and added 10x the monthly hits to my website. In addition, it was picked up by another eight or ten global design blogs. All in all pretty amazing — for me anyway. I have been working on a handful of other projects from concept designs for my LayerCity project, to a general atmospheric piece, some character designs, as well as a design  for a new modular hotel. On top of that I’m trying to re-acclimate to Maya, which I have been away from for at least five years. The program has changed dramatically and it was uber sophisticated back then. On top of that there’s my day job. So maybe you’ll understand why I’m not posting much these days. I think I will be focusing on the hotel project for the time being and hopefully have something to post soon.

Until then, here’s a preview of my LayerCity project a post-apocalyptic outpost the size of Manhattan — maybe a story there,too.

A post-apocalyptic outpost the size of Manhattan

That’s the update for now, Happy Halloween!

Just finished these and thought they were good enough to post.

Comments welcome.