The Metamorphosis Comic

Sometimes I wish I was all smart and more well read and had read some of the ancient classic literature, like the Odessesy. We read a one page excerpt of the Ilyad and watched a really old film version of Oedipus in world lit sophemore year in high school. My senior year, we read Lysastrata in AP English. But other than that, my knowledge of classic literture is pretty spotty.

Derik Badman piqued my curiousity with his experimental webcomic, Maroon and his latest project, Things Change, looks pretty promising. He says its based on Ovid's Metamorphoses. I've never read it, but so far I've still been intrigued. Its a bit like my viewing of O Brother Where Art Thou without reading the Oddessy. He is using visual rhyming a lot in an early sequence about a relationship remembered from both points of view. Derik writes a lot about the formal side of comics compositions in his companion blog, Mad Ink Beard, and you can see him applying a lot of his theories to the comic.

But its not art for art's sake, or stylistic excercises, the story is being told well and though its pretty early in the run, I'm very interested in where it will be going.



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Ovid
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Derik Badman

Pivotgram

Last night I was out for pizza with my wife and Matt from Webcomicker. He started telling me about a form of writing called Pivotgram in which the last letter of each word is the first letter of the next. Today I decided to make a pictureless comic based on this concept. It's an experiment with infinite canvas, too, so there's some scrolling involved, too. If you click around the site a little, there's few more of my graphic poems, but I'm not too incredibly excited about any certain project yet. They're mostly excerises at this point. View the poem here.

I had so much fun, I think I'll make one with pictures soon, too.



pictureless comics
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pivotgram

Chapter 3 starts today

Chapter 3 of My Life in Records starts today!

Graphic Poems and other experimental webcomics

Derik Badman over at Mad Ink Beard is doing some interesting things with experimental webcomics. He has been applying the principles of poetry to the comic format with some interesting results. So far he has come up with comics haiku and comics pantoum. I found this so interesting, that I'm trying to make my own comics sonnet and one in free verse that I'm releasing on November 26. (Can the more astute readers of this blog figure out why I picked that release date?)

I also started a Comixpedia wiki entry on what I am calling Graphic Poetry. We have the graphic novel to make longer narrative works in comics form, and we've probably always had graphic poems, too, but I am interested in seeing what cartoonists can do with this idea of visual rhyming and poetry applied to comics.

Be sure to check out Derik's other experiments, such as pictureless comics as well as his latest bi-weekly strip, Things Change.

And look forward to a few graphic poems from me. . .

webcomics

Piperka

I was introduced to webcomics by the Webcomicker, who is a guy I actually used to live with. Since he introduced me to them I've started my own comic and we've collaborated on a fixed art strip written by him.

But I have been hesitant to really dig into reading webcomics, mainly because once I find one that I'm sort of interested in, I get intimidated by the sheer volume of the archives that I'd have to read in order to get myself caught up with the story. This is compounded by the fact that I usually go for longer narratives rather than the traditional newspaper-style gag-a-day strips, so there's usually a great deal of plot to get caught up on once I actually stumble onto them.

Once again, Webcomicker has saved the day. He wrote about a site called Piperka where you can "subscribe" to comics and anytime you sign in, it tells you how many sites have updated and how many strips have been added to each site since your last login.

The best feature is that you can sign up for a comic with a big archive of strips and set the bookmark at the beginning. Then you can read through them at your leisure stopping and starting when you like and you can reset the bookmark for the strip you've just finished reading, thereby never losing your place! (Much like using a real bookmark in a real book. You know those things with several hundred pieces of paper bound together. The bookmark goes inbetween the pieces of paper so you can come back and read where you left off.)

So go over and discover some comics (like mine) that intimidated you in the past because of their vast archives.

Now if they could only set this up for television, so I can figure out what in the world Lost is all about.

webcomics