I am no better than the corpse, for these pages are food for me. Seriously, I haven’t seen a stlyle even remotely similar. You convey such thought and action with so little… I envy you. Your doing with images what I wish to do with words… but I let my creations die on the page, become corpselike in of themselves. Now all I have left are husks of old ideas, the skeleton of a story, gathering dust in the crypt that is my imagination… entertaining the dead with the stories of others… my muse must hate me…
Hey, don’t worry! I’ve lost count of all the ideas I’ve had that haven’t been fully realized yet. I think of them more as projects I’ve set aside for the moment than as stuff I’ve abandoned. This is actually the first comic I’ve ever made that’s longer than about 12 pages. Before, I could never find the drive or (I thought) the skill I needed to keep going. I set this comic up so I would have to practice — just five characters in a minimalist setting, over and over and over again. Funnily enough, once I had constrained myself in this way the project become very freeing, and, I would hope, successful (I mean, you can see my drawing get a little better as the story goes along).
I recently learned of a French group called Oubapo, the Workshop of Potential Comics. They believe in constantly experimenting with the medium on the basis that true creativity comes from constraints, or self-imposed “rules.” Or, to put it more poetically, as Oubapo’s direct ancestor Oulipo (the Workshop for Potential Literature) would say, “We are rats, building the maze from which we propose to escape!”
Everything I’ve done is because other artists were able to inspire me. Original as I try to be, for instance, I know this comic wouldn’t exist without The Twilight Zone, 9, The Pagemaster, and a whole host of comic books I couldn’t even begin to list (some of them share titles with TAID pages). If my work can do the same for you, I’m honored. 🙂
I whole heartedly agree with that Oubapo group you mentioned, except until now I only really thought of it in terms of video games… I’m constantly searching for games like Dark Souls that have heavy constraints, but the possibility for brilliance as a result of those constraints… when everything is so open ended, I feel overwhelmed by the sheer multitude of possibilities… I never thought of applying a philosophy like that to art or writing. I think you just gave me an epiphany…
To put a background to this, I am a bit of a philosopher when it comes to video games. They encapsulate an idea that is very endearing to me, that there is a world of people that aren’t really aware that their existance is merely an illusion, but at the same time, how could they not? I mean, who looks down and can’t see they’re feet? It’d be maddening if anyone started to bring attention to this fact. The balance would be trying to work it to your advantage, using the broken and forgotten rules of your virtual rule to make yourself a god. The Elder Scrolls series has this woven into it’s world very subtley, and hints that some of the gods actually acheived this to become gods in the first place. Death becomes meaningless when you can reload your save. And if you are aware of when this happens? You are immortal. But I digress…
The point is, perhaps I should start applying some of this philosophy to writing, make some rules to follow, something that limits the words on the page, not just the plot. How the story is constructed is just as important as what is being told… Thank you for this realization.
And as for your comic…
I think the raw nature of the work (the, ah, unpolished qualities) sort of fit with the story. Yah, he’s the artist, but who says he was really an amazingly good one? And as the art improves with the story, it stands as a visual representation of the character’s own growth as they struggle to exist without their creator.
The Exquisite Corpse is such an awesome villian, though. He is the purest form of evil, omnipresent, hungry, not bound to the same rules as the rest of us. Alien and scary. And yet, he is as much a victim as anyone else, for, what will his hunger be when all is devoured? If he succeeds, he won’t even have the sweet release of death from his own drives. There will be nothing left, but himself in his own privatly built hell. And, he can do nothing but work towards that hell for the same reason it will be hell for him in the first place.
I am no better than the corpse, for these pages are food for me. Seriously, I haven’t seen a stlyle even remotely similar. You convey such thought and action with so little… I envy you. Your doing with images what I wish to do with words… but I let my creations die on the page, become corpselike in of themselves. Now all I have left are husks of old ideas, the skeleton of a story, gathering dust in the crypt that is my imagination… entertaining the dead with the stories of others… my muse must hate me…
Hey, don’t worry! I’ve lost count of all the ideas I’ve had that haven’t been fully realized yet. I think of them more as projects I’ve set aside for the moment than as stuff I’ve abandoned. This is actually the first comic I’ve ever made that’s longer than about 12 pages. Before, I could never find the drive or (I thought) the skill I needed to keep going. I set this comic up so I would have to practice — just five characters in a minimalist setting, over and over and over again. Funnily enough, once I had constrained myself in this way the project become very freeing, and, I would hope, successful (I mean, you can see my drawing get a little better as the story goes along).
I recently learned of a French group called Oubapo, the Workshop of Potential Comics. They believe in constantly experimenting with the medium on the basis that true creativity comes from constraints, or self-imposed “rules.” Or, to put it more poetically, as Oubapo’s direct ancestor Oulipo (the Workshop for Potential Literature) would say, “We are rats, building the maze from which we propose to escape!”
Everything I’ve done is because other artists were able to inspire me. Original as I try to be, for instance, I know this comic wouldn’t exist without The Twilight Zone, 9, The Pagemaster, and a whole host of comic books I couldn’t even begin to list (some of them share titles with TAID pages). If my work can do the same for you, I’m honored. 🙂
I whole heartedly agree with that Oubapo group you mentioned, except until now I only really thought of it in terms of video games… I’m constantly searching for games like Dark Souls that have heavy constraints, but the possibility for brilliance as a result of those constraints… when everything is so open ended, I feel overwhelmed by the sheer multitude of possibilities… I never thought of applying a philosophy like that to art or writing. I think you just gave me an epiphany…
To put a background to this, I am a bit of a philosopher when it comes to video games. They encapsulate an idea that is very endearing to me, that there is a world of people that aren’t really aware that their existance is merely an illusion, but at the same time, how could they not? I mean, who looks down and can’t see they’re feet? It’d be maddening if anyone started to bring attention to this fact. The balance would be trying to work it to your advantage, using the broken and forgotten rules of your virtual rule to make yourself a god. The Elder Scrolls series has this woven into it’s world very subtley, and hints that some of the gods actually acheived this to become gods in the first place. Death becomes meaningless when you can reload your save. And if you are aware of when this happens? You are immortal. But I digress…
The point is, perhaps I should start applying some of this philosophy to writing, make some rules to follow, something that limits the words on the page, not just the plot. How the story is constructed is just as important as what is being told… Thank you for this realization.
And as for your comic…
I think the raw nature of the work (the, ah, unpolished qualities) sort of fit with the story. Yah, he’s the artist, but who says he was really an amazingly good one? And as the art improves with the story, it stands as a visual representation of the character’s own growth as they struggle to exist without their creator.
The Exquisite Corpse is such an awesome villian, though. He is the purest form of evil, omnipresent, hungry, not bound to the same rules as the rest of us. Alien and scary. And yet, he is as much a victim as anyone else, for, what will his hunger be when all is devoured? If he succeeds, he won’t even have the sweet release of death from his own drives. There will be nothing left, but himself in his own privatly built hell. And, he can do nothing but work towards that hell for the same reason it will be hell for him in the first place.
That post absolutely made my day. 😀
Well then, post more pages, and you’ll have better days, I assure you.
;D