comicsworkbook: comicsworkbook: inkstuds: Connor Willumsen...

comicsworkbook:

inkstuds:

Connor Willumsen has a wide variety of comics. When preparing for this interview, both Brandon and I were surprised by how he approaches comics from such and exciting directions. His most recent work in print, Treasure Island can be found from Breakdown Press. He also has a short piece in the 3-d Studygroup anthology and a great short comicwith Studygroup bigwig Zack Soto, about Damo Suzuki. We also discuss the comic he did about his brief period as a marvel artist.

Connor Willumsen

arecomicsevengood:

Brian Nicholson:The Inkstuds interview with Connor WIllumsen, conducted by Robin McConnell and Brandon Graham, goes a little better than my own interview with the dude that ran on The Comics Journal, although I’m glad that I was able to provide “research material” in a way that enables this to be so casual and rewarding.

One thing that Connor e-mailed to me, while I was interviewing him, was a little parenthetical aside about how he had just had the idea that companies like Marvel should just get rid of pencillers entirely and have the colorists draw the books. I didn’t really know how to work it in because it broke the illusion of linear time I was trying to create. It comes up here a little bit as they discuss the notion of the clean black line as originating out of printing processes and how Connor prefers (when he’s doing full-color work) to not include the black line at all, although he finds it much easier to draw that way.

I would argue that the reason for the black line to dominate in comics is because of how close it is to handwriting, and that’s what I like about drawings, is this sense that you’re reading them as graphics. I like those prints Brian Chippendale did, around the If N Oof era, where the would draw on a few different sheets of paper and then silkscreen each as a layer, causing a discontinuity in the drawing of each figure, but a noisily thrumming composition once completed. I thought about how interesting it would be, to see a painted comic by someone with synesthesia, if they took the time to call attention to the way they saw words and letters having colors as they committed their lettering to paper. This idea seems related to how I think Brecht Evens painted comics are the most successful, for the way he draws his figures in a single color and then matches their dialogue to that. (I was also given a Simon Reinhardt comic that does a similar thing with matching the color scheme of a character to their word balloon but with more of a limited palette, silkscreen-influenced approach.)

I also thought about this argument for synesthesia existing, essentially in everyone, and not being a hoax or myth but a result of real neurological happenings, which is that, if you close your eyes, and wave your hand in front of your face, you can still see the outline of that hand. You can see your body, because of the network of nerves. It would be interesting to know if people who have suffered damage to the spine can sense their lower limbs so visually with their eyes closed. I thought then about drawing and painting both, how each tie the hand to the mind’s eye in yet another way.

Connor Willumsen:^^ Brian Nicholson expands on our convo about line and colour. ^^
I like the thread of thought that couples contour line drawing with handwriting. Drawing-cum-script. Some contemporary written languages–Chinese for instance–are comprised of pictographs that literally depict the physical object that the word represents, but those depictions seem to be less strict in terms of representation, probably because they are more frequently paired with ideograms, which visualize abstract ideas, than a “drawing” might be. I feel the urge to differentiate script and depiction but it’s not necessarily appropriate. I usually and casually suppose that the visually common and specifically strict idea of closed-contour drawing that’s used today (especially in comics) to represent a mass is a habit formed by the an archaic industrial print process and is essentially nostalgic, but when I think about it there is a lot of obvious pre-industrial precedent for that form of depiction which seems just as strict. And now I’m thinking that the best examples of “open” or “broken” contours in Art History are written pictographs used in language or glyphs that sort of evolve beyond the literal and physical, where the ideogram, or abstraction, carries more of the weight of meaning. Does anyone know of any other interesting examples of open-contour drawing in pre-industrial history? Like where the fill bucket would be usless?