More Companion Pieces Preview

Here are a few more images that will end up, sans grey shading, in an essay comic about my youth. I hope to post it soon, but I thought I'd share these as I'm pretty happy with the results. These two images and two from my previous post's all came from thumbnails that were less than an inch square and I think they look as good in a larger format, which shows how simple works well for comics.

Emerald City Comicon 2011

Mark Brill (in hat and earphones), Chris Lange, Jon Macy
and Jeff Krell man the PRISM Booth on Saturday.

I skipped a week of posting, but I have a good excuse for myself. This weekend I attended the 2011 Emerald City Comicon at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle, Washington. I mainly volunteered for the PRISM Comics booth, which is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting LBGT (Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay and Transgender) comicbooks and creators. Jon Macy also was in town, with several other creators I'm pleased to have met.

Zan Christensen (standing) organized the booth and I have to thank him for allowing me to volunteer. Thanks, Zan! I had a great time, I met many different people and even hooked up with my friend Maxxwell Mcguire.

Here are some more highlights of the event that I photographed:

Me and Jon Macy model my T-shirt design.

Maxxwell shows his fandom spirit.

Chris Lange poses with some X-men.

Review: Comic Artists on the Web

I mentioned Matt Feazell in my last post, but encounter artists all the time on the internet.  Some have posted a huge body of work, while others, like me, seem to be just starting out.  Here is a short list of some artists I've encountered recently and enjoyed.
 

Introspective Comics by Ryan Dow 

  

Hark! A Vagrant. Comics by Kate Beaton 

  

Stop Paying Attention by Lucy Knisley 

  

So Super Duper by Brian Andersen 

  

Bang a Left by J. Tana Ford

Urban Buzz by Ned Hugar

Perhaps the most amazing thing about these artists is that they share their stories as they make them with little  expectation that you might benefit.  I wish I could support them all, only I am in a similar boat, creating without any guarantee of financial support outside of the products that I offer on my website. Go read and then if you can, help out by buying their stuff.  It is worth it just to help us all keep the faith.

Review: Breaking the Glass-Ceiling of Syndication

Curbside Boys: The New York Years by Robert Kirby

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



With Gary Trudeau publishing his forty year retrospective this year it is hard not to be impressed by syndicated cartooning. Charles Schultz is the only other syndicated cartoonist that comes to mind who has a more impressive collection of work, but there are many who have benefited from syndication, becoming national bestselling cartoonists, despite breaking conventions in the system. All the same, writing for mainstream newspaper media seems a breeze compared to the challenges faced by Gay and Lesbian cartoonists who also want to tell their stories.

I learned about Robert Kirby's "Curbside" back in the mid-ninties, years after I'd begun collecting gay comicbooks. I was immediately impressed, because his formula of telling simple stories about relationships between gay men was something I'd attempted to do at the same time, but never found my voice or stride. Robert had something I didn't have, which is a real drive to be published in as many newspapers as he could manage.

The Gay press media landscape has changed over the years, but there has never been a syndicate, that I know of, that have helped the careers of gay cartoonists in the same way that Trudeau, Schultz and other mainstream cartoonist careers have. Kirby and others who want to see their work in print have to hit the pavement and talk to editors first hand, convincing them to make room in their papers to publish their comics. And I know first hand that newspaper editors will make room for paying advertising long before they will print cartoon strips.

Ultimately it depends on the artist and his own discipline to regularly produce quality work and send it out. So the real heros in the cartooning world are people like Kirby, who syndicate their own strips to unsympathetic editors, often for no immediate compensation. Nowadays, newspapers are finding it difficult to maintain their readership. Here in Seattle, we no longer have dedicated gay and lesbian owned bookstores where you know you can find the major gay newspapers. Instead you have to rely on adult bookstores and bars where these things are left on faith that they will get into the hands of the people who need them.

But because Robert Kirby did all this work in the early nineties, he eventually found publishers like Cleis Press who were willing and interested in collecting his strips into published books. "Curbside Boys:The New York Years" is the second such collection. The first collection is incidentally selling for about seventy dollars at Amazon.com, although I would like to point out Mister Kirby is not getting any money from these used copies.

This second collection is a complete story, where the protagonist and his roommate meet, fall in love and then move on. It stands on its own more than anything Trudeau or Schultz ever wrote. Having read the original "Curbside" many years ago it is difficult to compare, but this feels more mature and studied than his earlier strips.

I really enjoyed seeing young men struggling to connect with each other in these stories. Nathan and Drew, the main characters seem fickle twenty-somethings and yet like all young men, vulnerable to the opinions and reactions of others. Their relationship counterpoints the supporting characters lives, Kevin and Rain who break even more stereotypes about black men than I've seen before or since in a gay comic strip. All the same, the drama is difficult to sustain within the context of six to eight panel stories.

Kirby returns to the story-telling techniques that worked for him in earlier strips, bringing back his own "greek chorus" character modeled after himself. He keeps the same squared nose on this character from earlier strips, which helps clue the reader into the fact that this character can directly editorialize for the cartoonist. All the same, he returns to telling the story rather than spending a lot of time with back-story, allowing the characters to tell their own stories.

"Curbside Boys:The New York Years" is a must read in the lexicon of gay comic books. The themes are adult and there is a lot of male sex, but the images are clean and appealing. Anyone who happened to pick them up might keep reading because the emotions and situations are universal.

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THREE, edited by Robert Kirby

THREE #1 by Robert Kirby
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Existentialist realism, that is, the examination of the self in relationship to the environment we create for ourselves is entirely the realm of the self-confessional comic story.  I think since the nineteen nineties when the self-confessional comic book boom really hit its stride, the genre has matured.  I love this type of comic book because it often breaks traditions and challenges readers expectations.  We have come a long way from the talking-head confessionals of the nineties and yet in any story that deals with human emotions, especially isolation, the talking head, where the author and artist both address the reader directly, persists as a dynamic feature of the genre.  So it is always wonderful when a comic book creator works especially hard to avoid the simplicity of talking heads.


Robert Kirby has brought together in THREE, the first issue of his new anthology series, two other storytellers with very differing skills from his own.  Eric Orner is only less familiar than his comic strip character "Ethan Green".  In "Weekends Abroad" he speaks with a personal voice rather than that of his popular "nebbisher" character.  We encounter personal stories that you might hear if you met him casually at a cocktail party. But they are not simply stories to fill the uncomfortable silences between sips of your drink.  Instead he decorates them with scenes and environments that really bring them alive and outside the flat page.  I am pleased to see his art has moved beyond the static and ironic talking heads of his early strips.  In every location his story goes, from the Hebrew school of his childhood to the outskirts of Tel Aviv, you get the very clear sense that he's been there and he's bringing you along with him.


Joey Alison Sayers's, "Number One" takes a different tact and focuses less on place and time, instead opting for relationships.  I have to admit I am less familiar with her previous work, but I did find it quickly online and am pleased I took the trouble to find it.  She has a wonderful sense of humor and she uses that quirkily in her portion of THREE.  The effect is unsettling within seemingly static panels filled more with space and emptiness than detail. This unsettled feeling counterpoints the easy reading of her brightly colored and breezy storytelling.  My feeling after reading is that I just overheard a series of conversations over the fence between a next door neighbor and her hired workers.  Sometimes the most compelling stories are things you'd rather not know about first hand.


Perhaps the most confrontational story in this anthology is editor Kirby's own offering, "Freedom Flight".  His approach to storytelling for me has always been a little self-conscious and here he is elaborating a story he has hinted at before in other strips.  But he does what he can to help you follow the twisty thoughts of his main character with little formal motif-like arrows that repeat like punctuation throughout the telling.  These curvy and staccato, swirling lines echo the same lines that make up the legs, arms and clothing of all the characters. These are pointers to the dissolving nature of the character's relationships.  That dissolution is both isolating and freeing, so much so that some conscious direction is seemingly needed to connect them on the page.


I like his artwork because even in the tiny panels he gives himself to carve out a story, there is a cohesive design that pulls it together on the page.  He also has a keen eye for arresting images.  Molecular patterns that swirl around his main character and then dissolve into shadows and shading on the remaining page, a street map that illustrates an urban neighborhood and then becomes the pavement where his character walks onto the next page, and a handicapped dog missing a front leg that seems to fade away into silhouette and then disjointed pieces, even as his owner enters the panel with even more curvy lines to retrieve him.  I would like to see more visual real estate given to these small visual moments, because they help to frame and arrange the themes of Kirby's stories.


It is challenging to create a satisfying and whole reading experience in only thirty-one pages of a comic book, which is why most superhero comics serialize a much larger story.  It keeps the readers coming back.  When you share that space with other artists it can be distracting and I have to admit the variations between the artists and stories kept me from jumping into reading this volume several times.  But once I did, I discovered this anthology offers far more heart and soul for your money than any superhero comic can.  Ultimately, I think it is well worth the investment and I will be looking out for the next issue with great anticipation.


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Paula and the Purple Rayz

I promised a post about Paula and the Purple Rayz, another of the projects Kathy Sprague and I developed.  We originally devised this storyline as a comicbook, but after doing Loren & Sylvia I realized it would take me more time than I was willing to commit to develop the layouts.  So I suggested to Kathy that we turn the script she'd written into a radio play.  It was a small success at the student run radio station on campus at the Uof I, in Moscow, Idaho.  We invited all our friends to contribute voices for the various characters, deliberately playing against gender to hilarious effect.

I was assigned the voice of Pricilla Syben, the band's manager.  During our first recording I had a mild cold and began to loose my voice, which was perfect for her "Hollywood" character.  Subsequent recordings I did my best to give Prisilla the same husky quality to her voice, which wasn't easy. Over the seven episodes Kathy wrote and produced, we developed a loyal following of listeners, both on campus and within the larger community.

The storyline was pure word play and invention as all the characters had names beginning with the letter "P" (save Cinder Lou), frequenting cities from Prague to Puyallup.  At one of the celebratory parties after an early recording session we asked everyone to bring a food that began with the letter "P".  So there was a plethera of potluck potatoes, pineapples, peanuts, "pork porridge" and Pabst Blue Ribbon.  The basic idea was a mix of Wonder Woman's origin story and Jem and the Holograms, one of Hasbro's attempts to work with Marvel, which also produced the animated GI Joe and Transformers, only rather than the cheesy pop-music you encountered in Jem, we decided the band was a punk garage band.

Here is Paula's mother, Pollytah, Queen of Paradise Island saying two of her most popular lines.  Kathy and our friends would often repeat these catchphrases as if we were the Queen-mother, arm raised and voice modulated in a faux British accent.  These two drawings are not my original designs.  Instead our friend Ari Burns had attempted to copy my style and came up with the Grecian dress and pointy headdress.  She was intentionally aping the Statue of Liberty.  After seeing Ari's version I drew up these two images, based on her design.

It took me quite a bit of drawing to come up with suitable characters. I filled my sketchbook with page after page of just character head-shots.  Here is the villain character, Pineapple in a series of quick sketches, playing with how Kathy described him, a cross between the Cheshire Cat and The Joker from the Batman comic books.

Here are some quick sketches I did for the members of the band, who were all women.  Up in the left corner was a sketch that brought a strong reaction from Kathy, so I labeled it so that I wouldn't use it by mistake.  One of the running gags in the storyline is that anyone listening to the band is transformed, playing off the hysteria in the Sixties that Rock and Roll music was changing the youth of America into sexually liberated fiends.  Here is a quick sketch of Sylvia as if she were a member of the audience.

More Loren & Sylvia pages 16-17

So, here Erma's girlfriends, Roxy and Tabo, interact.  Blatant homophobia from people who thought they were tolerant of gay people is a theme both Kathy and I have experienced in our lives.  I can still encounter it from my family members sometimes, which is quite unfortunate.  All the same, I am happier that I feel I can live my life more openly now than when I first came out as a gay man.

One other point about the characters, in the final panel Uncle Chuckie comes in the front door.  He is Sylvia's landlord.  I don't remember if Tia Marge and Uncle Chuckie were related, but I think we had decided they came from opposite ends of the family.  I suspect that they don't really like each other, but I suppose that will have to be revealed later.

I'm sorry to leave this on a cliffhanger.  Unfortunately Kathy and I didn't write more script after this point and this is all the artwork I created.  There is more story to be told, but you will have to wait until I get to the point of creating more pages.  Part of why it has taken me this long to post these two final pages is the last page, seventeen, was unfinished.  I feel like I rushed it to get it to post, so the lettering is perhaps not my best work.

After all, it has been nearly seventeen years since I've visited this and my lettering hasn't improved in all this time. I may have to figure out a font that will go well with the artwork and re-letter the whole thing.  Some of what I want to add is a prologue, introducing more facets of the characters involved.  At one point, I jotted down some ideas for a dream sequence where Jared appears as the Sphinx of Egypt and my idea at this point is this dream will include some of the other characters that Kathy and I first experimented with.

I'm going to go back to posting pages directly from my early sketchbooks.  There is quite a bit of development of characters for a story line called, "Paula and the Purple Rayz", which was our riff between early Wonder Woman comics of the thirties and forties and the late eighties "Jem and the Holograms" animated television series.  Kathy and I talked about developing it into a comic, but before we got too far with that Kathy was inspired to write a radio play, which she produced through the student radio station at the University of Idaho.  We enlisted all our friends to play the different voices and it was a lot of fun to record.

More Loren and Sylvia pages 13-15

I just completed a web remodel for Jon Macy, which is why there's been no activity here...and not because I'm making any excuses for finding my time filled.  I do admit it allows me to plug his new edition of Teleny and Camille, although I am likely to do an actual post about it once I've posted everything I have for Loren and Sylvia. Anyway...

Here we meet Erma's new beau, Randy and get to see Eiri and her sister go at it.  Both Kathy and I have younger sisters, so you can imagine how we've fared in these situations.  Eiri, of course, thinks she's protecting her sister, when in fact she's exhibiting her sublimated homophobia (irrational fear of homosexuals for any of you unfamiliar with the term).

Also Genise and Sylvia make up for the moment.  I think this all speaks for itself.  Poignant but ironic relationships are the most difficult.  We also get a better look at Erma's friends, Tabo and Roxy.  We will see more of them next time.

More Loren and Sylvia pages 10-12

I took a week off posting more Loren and Sylvia for the Comic-Con in San Diego.  No, I didn't attend...I hear it was quite the event as it always is, but I was actually busy camping in the mountains and since there has been little commentary or interaction here (thanks for your comment, Carolyn!), I figured I was safe while many of the comicbook geeks are out of town. I doubt many of them are reading here...:P

There's not much to say other than the introducing of even more characters.  I think this was a problem with Loren and Sylvia, the list of characters began exploding exponentially as the party scenes kept getting wilder.  We get to see Adam, Tia Marge's beau hitting on Wayo, Sylvia's co-worker.  Remember from the "crab" chart, they've already done "the nasty".  There's another musical reference, and I really can't remember if we named all the kids that show up at this party.

Eiri's sister, Erma is here with a new boyfriend Randy and two girlfriends.  Randy brought along a couple of friends, including the mo-hawked punk.  It may be a problem to name them all correctly as I didn't keep copies of the scripts and I haven't spoken to Kathy in many years, assuming she kept them.  I think in the long run it doesn't matter as what was written is soon to run out.  I don't have immediate plans to add anything new, although I've begun to assemble notes I've made over the years and I do hope to have something more complete as a premium eventually.

More Loren and Sylvia pages 7-9

Other influences include the master of the panel comic, Charles Schultz and the editorial strip, Garry Trudeau.  Here we are introduced to a role call of "Loren and Sylvia" characters.  Besides Uncle Chuckie, who is mentioned but doesn't appear until later in the story, there is Adam, who is Tia Marge's beaux.  He is primarily a background character, but we wanted to show that even Tia Marge, who is clearly much older than most of the other people in Loren and Sylvia's lives, has a sexual life and the good sense to be knowledgeable of her partner's sexual behavior.

Perhaps the biggest enigma presented here is Sylvia's liaison with Genise.  You can assume they were highschool sweethearts of a sort, but there is still plenty of emotion between them.  But I don't want to spoil what happens next with too much information, so I'll stop here.

Just one more comment about background material, though.  I've peppered these scenes with references of music we were listening to at the time.  Can you guess what they were?  The first person to post all of them correctly in a comment will be eligible for a complimentary copy of the premium comicbook, when it is done.

More Loren and Sylvia pages 4-6

Sylvia is a complex character and not simply because she emphasizes her recycled bonmots by brandishing her beer bottle.  She sees the world through her own uniquely-colored lavender spectacles. She wears her pink flamingo sweatshirt not only because it is a practical piece of clothing, concealing more than revealing, but because it declares her affinity with things absurd and otherwise termed "gay" (it would be teal with puffy pink ink if this were in color).  Eiri, too is a lesson in contradictions.  She personifies that rare creature: the semi-butch, leather-coat-wearing straight woman.  In a more innocent age she would have been openly bi-sexual, without really experiencing anything more than trading kisses with girlfriends at slumber parties, you know, the ones Sylvia never got invited too.  We get to see her in action reprimanding her sister later.

Jared is on the other hand a deliberate stereotype, the misogynist self-aggrandizing queen.  If it isn't about her, she hates it.  I perhaps needn't italicize those pronouns, but how else would you identify an adult man who behaves like a fearful self-loathing child, verbally sparring with anyone who cares to cross her and speaking archly in case anyone is overhearing.  Loren exhibits some of these characteristics (smoking in bed, indeed!) but his focus is just on daily living and getting laid, a bit like most of us.  Being college age, he still hasn't given up the trappings of childhood: a poster of a dead hero, a favorite blanket with whimsical animals, airplanes on his curtains (were they there when he moved in?) and Mickey Mouse alarm clock; symbols of the adolescent emerging into adult life.

The juxtaposition of all these personalities I think come together well on the page, but there are consequences to all actions; what develops here will de-evolve in the next few pages.  I was always referring to other gay comic books when I was drawing this, Jerry Mill's "Poppers", Howard Cruse's "Wendel" and Jeff Krell's "Jayson", so naturally the stories that I personally experienced are repeated here in Loren and Sylvia.  You may see the similarities too.

More Loren & Sylvia pages 1-3

Here are some of the elusive pages that have never before been published.  I will post as much as I drew back in 1990, when I was last working on this. I'm not making any promises, but I have some notes which expands the story to include some "adventure" characters that Kathy and I developed.  Because they don't really fit with Loren and Sylvia, they will likely appear in a dream.  I also have sketches of versions of the Loren and Sylvia characters that were intended for potential dream sequences, so this is not so much out of the ordinary.

In these pages we are introduced to Jared, Sylvia's awol roommate; Erie, their straight friend who has a sister living with her; Genise, Sylvia's on-again-off-again girlfriend and notorious neighborhood bi-sexual; among many more characters.  The story has a lot going on behind the scenes, but I think it is an accurate portrayal of the lives of college age students learning about sexuality.  Of course, Sylvia is old-hat at it, but later she does find her desires acknowledged.  Oh, wait! I can't give away secrets too early!

I packed a lot of little bits of information into these drawings and some artistic bits.  You can find collage clippings scattered in the background as artwork and posters, reflecting the modern environment Loren and Sylvia inhabit.  These are pretty subtle reminders that these characters have lives beyond the panel.

Loren and Sylvia Pages 5-9

Lorraine is based on various women friends both I and Kathy roomed with at different times. We never did get along well with these women as there always seemed a big gap between our values and theirs. I suspect they didn't get that we were gay and what that meant, but that's perhaps my own prejudice.

Here we meet Sylvia's friends, Spencer and Tod, which were based on a gay couple we both knew. We also see to what extent pot smoking was common place in our lives. We intentionally never brought attention to the bong and what they were doing with it.

There is a lot of psychology in Sylvia's move to the door when Loren arrives. Also too much story telling. I really did come out after seeing "Kiss of the Spiderwoman".

I really wanted to show more of Loren's relationship with Vince, but for the sake of story telling we cut to the drama. I think some day I will have to write in the romance section.

The last panel is a story that Kathy told several times before we decided to include it in the comic. It is a good closing joke. Middle America is so naive and ironic.

Loren and Sylvia Pages 1-4

First four pages of Loren & Sylvia. Written by my friend Kathy Sprague and drawn by me, Nathan Kibler. The characters Sylvia and Loren are drawn directly on ourselves and the supporting characters are all based on composites of our friends, but the stories are mostly reactions to the culture of the time in a small college town in Idaho. This is autobiography with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

Kathy and I were friends, but we thought the idea of "kissing cousins" was too perfect to pass up. I still wonder why we never did any back story for Loren and Sylvia's childhoods.

Wayo is a composite of several friends. He's mostly a supporting character, but he shows up at a party later in the unpublished section I will post at some later date.

I lived with Kathy for a time and rented the basement bedroom from her and her brother, who also lived with us. It was a good sized room and I enjoyed living with Kathy. It was also an official fallout shelter, thus the sign on the wall...