THE WATERWORKS

This post open for comments

Toronto. October 2007.

Probably will be a different experience than my last trip to the city in 1976. My legs were shorter then and the walk from the CN Tower to Casa Loma to the hotel was murder. But it was Dad who got freaked out as we went up the elevator in the Tower.

Hadn’t been anywhere in a while. Spent the past couple of years after going back to school to finish off my degree with my head down working first as a freelancer, and now as an art director for a magazine publisher in Calgary. So when the RGD told me I had won the salary survey grand prize I booked the plane and the time off work.

No, I won’t make a report when I come back. This is personal time. I just want to hear designers talk. Good designers doing good work. Because we all get so wrapped up in our own work experiences and it’s easy to ignore the wider landscape. And it’s easy to become flat and uninspired in the face of deadline pressures. You reach for those solutions you know will work because you’ve done variations on them for years, and you know you can deliver them on time and on budget. Not every one of us gets to work on our dream projects, or even something large enough to really make an impact on our society.

Thankfully, all the speakers I saw have been able to work on the larger stage, and it was good to just sit there and be their audience, to see what inspired and drives them, and the passion that came out as they talked about their work. Just to remember that such work is possible is often all we need to hear to keep us focused on why we become designers in the first place. And no one said, “We used blue because the client’s wife likes blue,” or “We had the logo smaller, but the client wanted it bigger.” I was grateful for that.

Read more »

This post open for comments

Introduced at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, the View-Master came into its own during the stereo photography (or 3D to you movie and comics fans) craze of the 1950s. It is easy to forget that the View-Master was once a successful mass-market product akin to today’s VCR and DVD player. It was family entertainment. Millions of reels have been sold and a collectors’ community thrives today even though View-Master is now owned and marketed by Fisher-Price as a toy for toddlers.

Click on the image below to download a PDF copy of my View-Master tribute poster (1mb). For personal use only.

The illustration was created in Adobe Illustrator with scans of vintage material added. The isometric cutaway of the Model G stereoscope was built, in part, with Hot Door’s CADtools plug-in for Illustrator.

This post open for comments

Captain Canuck was, for my generation, one of the best comics experiences a Canadian could have. Created by Ron Leishman and written and initially drawn by Richard Comely, the book floundered until artists George Freeman and Jean-Claude St. Aubin came on board and gave us a book that equalled, and often surpassed, American product.

There have been subsequent versions of Captain Canuck, but the original issues 1–15 and the Summer Special, published between 1975 and 1981, are what many consider to be the only Captain Canuck worth remembering.

What you see above is a diorama, an early promo for the series, apparently pencilled in part by Comely and completed by Freeman. I’ve coloured this one and you can download it (or a black & white version for you DIYers) here:

Colour PDF 6.4mb

Black & White PDF 1.8mb

There are complete instructions inside the files.

This post open for comments

Triumph-Adventure-Comics #5 Jan 1942, Better Comics v3 #7 Dec 1944/Jan 1945, Rocket Comics v2 #5 Nov/Dec 1943.

Canadian comic publishing flourished during the Second World War due to an embargo on foreign paper goods as part of the Wartime Measures Act. This virtually eliminated the American comics from the Canadian market until the end of the war. I have set up a website devoted to these important pieces of Canada’s pop culture history:

Golden Age Canadian Comics

You’re welcome to visit and download the comics. To reduce bandwidth demands, I request you save the images to disc and view them offline rather than viewing them multiple times online. This will also allow you to view the pages at a larger size.

You can go to these sites for histories on this era of comics:

Beyond the Funnies

Guardians of the North

And there’s a Yahoo group devoted to Canadian comics with a lot of good people there sharing their knowledge and collections. It’s free to join:

Yahoo Canadian Comics Group

This post open for comments

Craftint doubletone paper (DuoShade is another brand) is one of those things an ink illustrator had in their toolbox before the advent of the digital toolset or even rubdown tone systems like Zip-a-Tone. It wasn’t cheap and it gradually fell out of use. Howard Chaykin uses it quite often, though he prefers the graphite/charcoal pattern over the hatched lines I’ve chosen to work with here.I’m a digital guy these days, but I prefer to use my computer as the greatest separations tool ever devised by man. So I wanted to recreate Craftint and use it now, because I could never afford it when I was younger and it’s a great way to build up tone.

Craftint had two patterns on it. Apply one chemical to it with a brush or pen and the first pattern was revealed. Use another chemical and the other pattern came up. It required careful planning and tone management, because once the tone or tones were revealed your only option was to take it to white or black. Erasing and reapplying tone was impossible.Photoshop overcomes these limitations with unlimited undos and redos.

Read more »

This post open for comments

First Issue Special #8 (first appearance of Warlord), Warlord v1 #11, Warlord v2 #1, Warlord v2 #5.

If you blinked, relatively speaking, you probably missed it. Beginning in February 2006 with an April cover date, DC revived The Warlord. This time around the book lasted 10 issues. (The original had 133 and went through a number of ups and downs during the run.)

Written by Bruce Jones, the new series was a re-conception of the character, taking it away from its Burroughs-influenced, sword & sorcery roots. Personally, I was really looking forward to this, even though it would not be Mike Grell’s Warlord, because I’ve always liked Bruce Jones’ work. His Ka-Zar the Savage (with artist Brent Anderson) was fantastic, and so I hoped he would bring the same richness to this book.

Unfortunately, what we received was a book that was flat and uninspired. Half the time the story did not make sense and as a reader I was not drawn into it in a convincing way. The reworked existing characters were unsympathetic and shallowly conceived, and the new characters seemed out of place.

Read more »

This post open for comments

I recently attended ConVersion here in Calgary and found a fellow selling old SF pulps in great condition.

This is the oldest, from 1939, long before we had the photo quality we get now from probes and imaging systems. So the depiction of a Jupiter-like planet and the cast shadow across the rings really caught my eye. And the understated, modern typography gridded out makes this composition sing. Just a few months earlier, they had been using the more decorative type design that had been prevalent through the Teens and Twenties.

Read more »

This post open for comments

Here’s the progression from rough sketch to final piece. If you view the images outside this post, you can see them at full size.

If you’ve read the very first entry here, you know that I first published Three as a mini comic in the mid-90s. I sold them through the mail for the most part, and I also sent review copies to anybody I could think of in those last couple of years before the internet changed everything. So here are the reviews which resulted from those efforts.

FIT TO PRINT NO. 569 BY CAT YRONWODE.

Published in The Comics Buyers’ Guide #1186, August 23, 1996.

The Global Gazette #1: I received this 24-page mini comic for review back in late 1995 and it slipped to the bottom of the pile, which i regret, because it is worthy of mention. Hopefully copies are still available‚ and if the world is just, there will have been further issues published in the time since i dropped the ball on the first one.

Read more »

This post open for comments

This was a short Q&A done in late 2004 that Sébastien Dumesnil asked me, and many others, to respond to. He is currently finishing production on his film Adventures into Digital Comics.

I’ve been drawing comics since I was 15. Went to art school and took graphic design in the mid-80s with an eye on doing comics professionally. Eventually worked at the tail end of the black & white boom of the late 80s/early 90s. Self-published my own mini-comics in the mid to late 90s. Got back into design when I got into computers in the mid 90s. Became a magazine designer and art director before going back to school for the 04/05 year to finish off my design degree. Comics were put on the back shelf while I built up my design career. I hope to expand that part of my life once I’m back in the working world. Currently, you can find many of my stories on my website.

First of all, we want to know what, for Scott, a comic book is and which ideas he likes to explore.

Read more »