drew weing dot com

Eleanor’s drawing lots of tiny pictures on post-its for the post-it show Giant Robot does every year, now there are abandoned, half-finished post-its stuck all over the house.

I’m busy fleshing out and finalizing my lesson plans for the week-long comic book class I’ll be teaching next week. Last year taught me how thoroughly you have to explain all of the taken-for-granted steps of making comics. For instance, you can tell kids that if they make a mistake, just fix it with some white out! But if you don’t tell kids to wait until the very end of doing the inking, and to erase all of their pencils first, you’re going to end up with some messes. Or to not draw to the very edge of the paper.

If you’re going to be at Heroes Con, I’ll be bloviating about comics “craft” and “process” on a panel with Roger Langridge, and Jim Rugg, Friday at 4:30. And I will have a preview copy of Set to Sea on hand, though it doesn’t go on sale till next month.

I’m going to be in Charlotte in about a week, doing the Indie Island thing at Heroes Con. Unless things go awry, I’ll have a preview copy of Set to Sea to look at! But not to sell, just yet.

I’m working my way through Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life (Tatsumi’s a manga artist with a career that stretches back almost to the beginning of the medium – especially known for pioneering more adult manga in the 60s and 70s.) He presents himself as a dopey, broad-faced naif – though of course, since he’s the artist he’s calculatedly making the decision to present himself thus. His avatar has a strong family resemblance to the naif-types that appear in his 70s stories, who inevitably get drawn into an inexplicable world of strange compulsions and degeneracy. I like the relationship arc he has with his brother, who I didn’t realize was also a manga artist – I’m sure you can imagine how that played out in their childhood.

The life of a mangaka as a neverending grind; the small questions of style that become the basis of bitter factionalizing; the exhaustive presentation of stories made in terms of publication details and page count (the content of the stories is usually only briefly mentioned): I find it weirdly inspiring. I know several other cartoonists who’ve said the same. We’re a weird, masochistic lot.