Pages

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

The Best Popeye Panel Ever!

I've been selling minis and posters at the UC Davis Campus and reading the new Fantagraphics Popeye collection (3rd volume) to pass the time.

And I found this...



Picasso always did like the funny pages...

The staff has been very kind at the UC Davis campus, and its been nice to meet everyone. I've even sold a few mini comics! (Usually the posters and prints do better than the minis) It's been seriously windy but my signage has been holding out well. UC Davis has been so kind as to provide an actual living cashier complete with cash register in exchange for their small percentage of the profits! All the cashiers (3 shifts worth) have been very friendly.

I'm 3 pages shy of my new 13 page wordless strip, and since I won't be getting much done this week, it might be a little while till you see it here. I've been putting everything I've got into this one, and have been slowly eking it out at the rate of about a page a week. I don't think I've ever worked so hard on a funnybook story before.

4 comments:

  1. hey there buddy. Thanks for the kind words on my blog. I guess the new approach is the result of a week long art slump. Each piece I worked on recently, whether commercial or sketchbook work, has not been feeling quite right and was causing quite a bit of stress. One of my good friends, Vikki Chu (www.vikkichu.blogspot.com) has been a big inspiration , especially watching her work..which is lightning fast. Plus, I always enjoyed watching George Pratt draw...the fastest drawer I have ever seen. :)

    I am really digging your popeye piece man. I always wanted to ask you how you'd feel about an art exchange. You know...exchange some originals (some small sketches or something). :) let me know.

    That comic of mine has been on hold for a while, that's why I have not been sending you any panels. Again, going through a slump has an effect on everything I do :(


    Keep in touch and e-mail me about the exchange if you are interested :)


    -best,

    -Tin

    ReplyDelete
  2. I DID NOT DRAW THE ABOVE POPEYE PANEL. I'm sorry if I gave any impression to the contrary--THIS POPEYE PANEL WAS DRAWN BY E.C. SEGAR IN THE NINETEEN THIRTIES.

    I love Segar's work and this panel to me is a minor work of brilliance. But, alas, not mine.

    This said, in any trade of originals with you TIn, I would likely come out the better side of the deal.

    Though I take greater care with art intended for showing or framing, my original comics and illustration work is much abused with white-out, and there's only a little of it that I'd feel comfortable sharing. Also a lot gets altered on the computer, more so than you might guess. Mostly a lot of substitutions--stuff drawn on other pieces of paper and pasted in. Lately I've been drawing my figures separate from my backgrounds and on multiple pieces of paper.

    And Tin: I envy your speed. At the rate you crank out awesome sketchbook pages, either you draw much much faster than I do or you don't do anything else BUT draw. I don't know how you do it.

    I'll get back to you on a trade.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hey buddy..sorry about the Popeye misunderstanding :P

    And btw, thank you so much for all the great links to the various comic artists. They were just the inspiration I needed at a time when I'm shifting through styles and experimenting with new drawing methods.
    Regarding my massive sketch dumps:
    :P
    I have no life..other than art..and yes I do try to draw as fast as I can. I have pretty much cut out all social interactions from my life and the teaching is the only thing that keeps me sane by communicating with fellow artists on a daily basis. I feel like I have been given the 'rare' opportunity to make a living doing something that I love, so I figured I would give it my very best and dedicate as much time and effort towards it as I can.
    It is not always a good thing, however. Each one of my relationships in the past few years has tremendously suffered due to my obsession with art and I find myself trying to only hang out with people that want to go out and draw. So the results you see carry a lot of heavy burden. It is difficult to maintain a balanced lifestyle when the profession has such isolated nature at times. (Unless there is people on your side with the same goals and intentions). Richmond, VA is a small city. People come and go and true friends are more like pebbles in the shade that rarely see the light of the day.

    That's why I decided to really not rely on anyone but myself...not depend on anyone but myself...

    anyways..I'm getting carried away here :)

    basically..I just draw all darn day :P


    I am getting ready to shoot some references and start working on the first panels for the comic pages you wrote.

    I'll be in touch this weekend

    -Tin

    ReplyDelete
  4. No problem! I'm flattered that you would even THINK that I could draw as well as Segar! One of the greatest cartoonists of all time!

    And you're probably doing exactly what you're supposed to be doing right now. You've got your whole life to figure out the rest of it! Right now sounds like a good time to get really good at what you do best. And it sounds like you really enjoy it, even if it does have its drawbacks!

    Check out Tin's profile to see his extraordinary output--drawing to Tin is like breathing.

    The Segar post is the first new piece of art I've posted in a while, so I can understand the confusion. As I've mentioned before, I'm working on a longish (for me) 13 page comic strip that has a lot of difficult and tedious stuff to draw in it. At the moment I'm drawing wallpaper for a bunch of scenes that have wallpaper in them. I'm being immensely anal with this one.

    And Tin is referring to a comic book idea that I plotted--Tin is going to draw it, I'm going to plot and write the dialogue, so Tin is in fact a much more active collaborator than say, someone who's drawing a comic from a full script. It's a humor sci-fi sort of thing, though I'm more into the idea side of sci-fi than the gadget side of sci-fi. But it's not all THAT cerebral--ideally it's going to be a fun, action packed breezy read.

    I have no idea where this will lead or if it will even materialize. Comic books are a big commitment, especially to those who have the much more difficult task of drawing them. I've started other collaborations before that have fizzled out by no fault of either party. Usually it was because the artist ended up having to commit themselves to actual paying gigs, something for which I could hardly blame them.

    Collaborating on comics was something I'd been wanting to do for a while simply because I draw very slowly and I have more ideas for comics than I can conceivably draw in one lifetime. I love the medium more than any other and though I've done a fair amount of prose writing, it just isn't the same.

    I admire Tin's work a great deal, and if this works out, it's going to be a blast!

    ReplyDelete