Brandon Graham's Blog, page 228

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How come you decided for an elephant?

I knew a couple guys who had become tattoo artists. It’s one of the jobs that grown up graffiti artists do – some of them would joke about people who came in with long lists of what the art they were going to get would mean to them– I think at the time my idea was to get an image I liked the look of tattooed on me and then add meaning to it later.

I had 2 of my closest friends design it together and one of them tattooed it. 

Maybe it was a babar thing too,

Is it true that it was a big fight to get king city from tokyopop to image? Can you talk about it?

I went into it at length on page 6 of a Comics Journal interview you can read here. 

It was a mess, but in the end it worked out well for me and got me in a better position working with Image. Sooooo I can’t really complain 

Yo Graham Where's the best place to jump in on DIRTY PAIR? Anime or manga. And which manga or anime? Thanks

Project Eden (DP the movie) is a good place to start watching the anime to see if you like it. You can watch it Here. 

I also like the tv & OAV series (I’m less into the art in Affair of Nolandia & Dirty Pair flash looks awful to me)  Flash is the only DP I would avoid– and the newer manga by Hisao Tamaki is less my scene. 

My all time favorite DP stuff is the Adam Warren comics.  I think they’re all excellent. My favorite 2 books are 

A Plague of Angels–  Set on an O'Neil colony with villains that have downloaded their brains onto plugs so they can switch bodies at will. 

And 

Run From the Future- set in another space station– this time a

a Dyson tree habitat   –where they have to catch 50 criminals in a set amount of time

Do you have an opinion on art school?

I didn’t go to school past 1 year of high school (which I don’t realllly recommend) but that certainly colors my opinion on things.

 I do know a lot of people who seemed to have gotten good things from going to art schools. A lot of friends of mine went to SVA in NY & I had a great time years back when I got to talk at SCAD in Georgia.. (they have a teacher there who takes students to shoot machine guns–saying “that if you are going to draw them you should know how it feels to use one.”

I do feel like all the information is out there to learn about art and making art-without school- it seems like the main advantage of school is the community of peers that you could meet there. 

I don’t think I could have gotten away with the career I’ve had –or the life I’ve had if I owed debt to a school. I get to live cheaply and take only the jobs I want. 

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Marvel and DC books sell better as single issues rather than collected editions, yet include extra stuff in the collections; Image books on the otherhand generally sell better in collections but put all their bonuses in the single issues. Why?

Someone who runs a comic shop could probably answer the sales questions much better than me.but I would suspect that the M/DC single issues sell better than their trades partly because that’s how those books have traditionally sold, where the modern run of Image books are a much newer market (post the arrival of Walking Dead or Saga) and the creative teams are more likely to stay on one book together for a shorter series.– I assume they would just read better in trade because of that. as opposed to an xmen series that never really ends and might have lots of fill in people in a trade, 

The only recent corporate trade I have here is a 2014 Harley quinn book – it has no back up in it just 3 pages of ads at the end.

As far as the back up stuff at Image, I guess that depends on what Image book– With Image what you put in your pages is up to you soo I assume more back up stuff would go in just because the standard issue length is printed at 28 pages but most artists do more like 20-24 pages of comics in that. Where the corporate comics have i assume a set # of ads to run–So I assume they have less space to run extra pages in issues?

royalboiler:Ursula Le Guin has excellent things to say. “I...

royalboiler:

Ursula Le Guin has excellent things to say. 

“I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art”

pastemagazine:Arclight’s Marian Churchland Talks Fantasy...

pastemagazine:

Arclight’s Marian Churchland Talks Fantasy Tropes, Androgynous Fashion & Kicking Off The 8house Anthology

8house is a lot of things that an American comic book isn’t supposed to be: a fantasy anthology with a rotating creative team, illustrated by a mix of established and new talents, with stories that refuse to hold the reader’s hand. Its first story arc, writer Brandon Graham and writer/artist Marian Churchland’s Arclight, reveals more in its solicitation text—the journey of a royal lady attempting to reclaim her body from a foreign menace—than it does on initial reading. One gets the sense that 8houseisn’t meant to be easy.

thefingerfuckingfemalefury:haruhater:Thirty years. Thirty...

thefingerfuckingfemalefury:

haruhater:

Thirty years. Thirty years! THIRTY YEARS!

Can every comic please be like Jem and the Holograms :D

I need to get this sooon