Month: April 2010

Makin’ Comics

Before stumbling my way into design and typography while working on my high school newspaper — and discovering that I loved doing that stuf A LOT — my goal in life was to draw comics, which was how I passed quite a lot of my free time and a significant chunk of my time in math and science class before that. (Note: I wasn’t especially good at drawing comics, but I loved it.)

My desire to focus on comics as a profession gave my to a more intense interest in type, but I still dabbled with illustration for a while, and certainly my love for reading comics remained strong. As a designer, too, I’ve always been intrigued by how comics function visually, and how they have their own ways of being narrative. So when I stumble across good advice from talented comic artists, I always take note.

I while back I came across this piece about Wally Wood’s 22 Panels That Always Work, an incredible short guide to effective composition, drawn up by an industry veteran and apparently in unofficial circulation for years. It’s a gem. (Small version here, but you owe it yourself to check out the bigger version.)

Continue reading “Makin’ Comics”

Snaps

Passport 100415

Today’s passport photo, capturing 39 1/2 years or so of stress and strain. Of course, there’s always some kind of TREMENDOUS HASSLE lurking in the background every time I need to take another damned one of these, and today is no different. I don’t even have the consolation prize of good drama or anything, just another round of unexpected bureaucratic hassle. I love living over here, but all the passport and visa and tax and money issues give the whole experience a never-ending tinge of stress, and I’ll be happy one day when it all settles down.

But for now I have to go find someplace that takes the kind of passport photo which is valid for US passports, which naturally have totally different specs than any photo booth available in the UK, so that I can then go to the US Embassy — who are currently in possession of my passport, claiming it’s too damaged to have new pages added to it — and get an early renewal, which means I’ll also be saddled with the hideous new chip-enabled passport, for the low, low price of $100 — which I’ll have to scrape together somehow. After that, I’ll have to find out how to transfer my UK visa into the new passport, which will no doubt involve more photos and more outrageous charges. Another day, another emergency, another fee.

Tweetless

Screw it. I tried to work out a system for integrating my Twitter posts with the posts here, but it just wasn’t working. It was hard to set up just right, a pain to mess with all my RSS feeds, and the whole thing kept breaking anyway. It just wasn’t worth the hassle of getting it right, and I just don’t have the time to deal.

Even worse, the whole attempt did nothing but encourage a growing bad habit of ignoring this site and spreading my wisecracks around elsewhere. There are a number of things that bug me about places like Twitter of Facebook becoming de facto repositories for my online activity, which is why I was trying to integrate my postings a little better. For one thing, I like having all of my stuff on my site, where it can be managed and archived on — or deleted form — my server. It’s not just that I’m a bit of a nerdy control freak about my data, but after years of cultivating this space, I don’t want to surrender my online presence to the vagaries, presentation, and terms and conditions of another environment.

The thing is, though: all the action is over there now. The age of blogging as I once knew it is pretty much over, and online social interaction happen less and less across a ragtag network of personal sites, and more and more in sprawling social networks with a pretty tight control over how things work. This is hardly a recent development. Rather, it’s been deteriorating for quite some time. The barrier for entry is much lower on social networking sites, so of course people flock to them. And it’s easier to devote your energy to sites where content arises out of smaller, easier contributions from a larger group of people, rather than spending time writing, reflecting, or preparing visuals on your own site, and then trying to draw people to it to comment and interact. The ups and downs of my posting habits certainly prove that.

But I still believing in having my own place here, just as I’ve had for over a decade now. Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr and Thingbox and whatnot maybe the village squares where I lounge and chat with pals, but this is still my home, and still the longest-running single thing that I’ve accomplished. I don’t want to give up just yet and fully turn myself over to the wide open spaces of those other sites.

I want you to join me here, and I want to keep finding reasons to keep this going.