Alex Robinson's Blog, page 119
May 5, 2012
"The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as..."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Sirens of Titan (via blakecrone)
May 2, 2012
I am currently reading And So It Goes, a biography of Kurt...
I am currently reading And So It Goes, a biography of Kurt Vonnegut by Charles Shields. It’s a very interesting experience: I’ve been reading Vonnegut’s books for more than half of my life, some a few times over, and since he includes a lot of autobiographical material in his books I felt like I knew a lot about him—more than I know about some of my friends.
I’m not very far into the book (I just finished the bombing of Dresden) but I’ve already learned a ton of new stuff, especially about his childhood and early family life. If you’re a big fan of his work you should definitely check it out.
One interesting aspect of the book is that he really didn’t become KURT VONNEGUT (beloved author) until he was in his 40s. Prior to that he went from career to career, supporting a large family, struggling to get make it as writer and generally feeling like a loser. I admit I took some solace in this.
I also think it’s peculiar that he titled the book And So it Goes when, as Linda Ellerbee (who also had a book with that title) pointed out, Vonnegut’s phrase as just “So it goes.”
May 1, 2012
This Saturday I'll Be At the Wild Pig Show!
If you’re in Piscataway, NJ this Saturday and are looking for some comics-related fun why not swing by the show and say hello? I’ll have all my books for sale, as well as some original art and the Box Office Poison #78 mini-comic.
[image error]
The Ink Panthers Show: Episode 129 - 50 Shades of Grey
[image error]
The Desert Panther, Tony Consiglio, creeps once again into The Lair, this week to perform a dramatic reading of the erotic smash-hit Twilight fan-fiction book, 50 Shades of Grey. If any Books On Tape producers are out there listening, please hire Tony to narrate your recordings. Especially…
April 30, 2012
April 29, 2012
Best Facebook post ever!
Best Facebook post ever!
My haul from the MoCCA Art Festival. I went to the show for a...
My haul from the MoCCA Art Festival. I went to the show for a few hours and mostly walked around, since I didn’t have anything new to sell. It’s a very different experience, since I’m normally commerce is my main priority at such events. It was nice to be able to walk around, though I wasn’t as social as I would’ve liked. Oh well.
One unsettling thing was that a bunch of people I talked to commented on the fact that it had been a long time since I had put anything out. I wasn’t sure how to take this. On the one hand it’s, of course, nice that people even noticed, but it also felt kind of like telling someone “Wow, you’ve really put on a lot of weight, haven’t you?” or “Hair’s getting a little thin up top, huh?” (both of these are also true in my case). If I’m going to keep going to shows (I’m considering going to SPX) I really need to come up with a neat, simple way to handle this rather than babbling on about writer’s block, how I’ve started a new book, etc.
Here’s something I thought was interesting: I was talking to Pat Lewis, who put together the Our Broadcast Day mini-comic (to which I contributed a four-page Madmen story) and he mentioned that the show seemed to mostly be new people. This echoed the way I felt at SPX a few years back—it was like being in high school except most of the people you knew are gone and there’s a new batch of kids excited about entering comics. This is both inspiring and melancholic.
April 26, 2012
Advice to Aspiring Cartoonists
Periodically, I’ll get an e-mail from an aspiring cartoonist asking for guidance regarding becoming a cartoonist. Here’s a reply I recently gave:
As for offering you advice, I’m happy to answer some questions but I’m afraid I don’t have the time to do much in the way of extensive criticism. The best advice I can give you is to be productive. Do a 24 page comic and when you’re done you should have a good idea of what areas you’ll need to work on. Start posting your stuff on a blog or other website and solicit opinions. Go to a comic convention, or at least comics shop, so you have an idea of what else is out there and what other people are doing. But above all else: produce. There’s an old comics cliche which is true: each of us has 10,000 bad drawings in us and the only way to get good is to get them out of the way.
Not the most original advice but I do think being productive is the single biggest thing you can do to improve. I don’t really like looking at people’s art at shows (for one thing I’m not good at giving people tough advice and, more importantly, why do you care what I think?) but one thing that always stands out is when someone has lofty goals for a graphic novel and then they show me some character designs and the first four pages. This is like saying “I’m working on an opera, would you mind if I played you the first minute and a half?”
Produce. Produce. Produce. Produce. Produce. The reason the 10,000 page cliche works is that you can’t produce that much and not improve. You’ll actually improve a lot faster, most likely, but it’s nice to convey what a long process making comics is and how much patience you’ll need. Someone who doesn’t have enough raw talent will most likely give up in frustration after 1,000 or 500 or 20 bad drawings.
I drew this when I was about 13. It’s a long road.
April 25, 2012
I contributed a four page MadMen pastiche to Pat Lewis’s...
I contributed a four page MadMen pastiche to Pat Lewis’s anthology Our Broadcast Day: Comics About Television Shows. It debuts this weekend at the big MoCCA Art Festival. More info: http://patnlewis.blogspot.com/2012/04/mocca-bound.html
April 23, 2012
Ink Banthas podcast
As promised, here’s the link to our latest podcast, the all-Star Wars episode in which we talk about Star Wars.
