Acme Cut See Shoe

click to enlarge

pluri-readability
oubapo
experimental comics
bookmaking

Lo-Fi "Infinite Canvas"

I found an alternative pattern for the traditional accordion book that creates a vehicle for telling several stories from the same images or text. I made a little wordless comic using this book.

According to the Oubapo America website this type of project can be categorized as pluri-readability (comic that can be read meaningfully in more than one way). It also may be considered coverage (requiring manipulation of the page to enable new reading)
Here it is unfolded. It has images on both sides and each page has an image on the top and bottom much like a playing card.

You can go through it linearly, like a traditional book.

Or you can fold the pages out to create thousands of different story combinations.


The drawings are pretty crude, since I was just playing around with it, and I'm not happy with all of the image choices I made, but I'll probably be posting the various readings of the book in the coming months.

It would be interesting to see a variation of 5 card Nancy with this format.

pluri-readability
oubapo
experimental comics
bookmaking

Buck the System! Vote Bull Moose in 2006!

Birdsworth now has Vote Bull Moose 2006 shirts available for purchase! Get 'em while the election's still hot! Show your disdain for America's current political situation by affirming a party that hasn't existed for almost a hundred years. Available in several colors with styles for both the gents and the femmes. Look at this fine shirt, also available in white and light blue

birdsworth
Bull Moose Party

New Graphic Poem up!

Its the first Monday of the month which means that I have a new piece up on Graphic Poems.

Its another Color Sonnet, but this one has a more painterly twist to it.

Enjoy!

webcomics
graphic poetry

Two Strips This Week

Did you notice there were two strips up this week? If you didn't, you'd better get over there and scroll down to the second one!
webcomics

Coming Soon: MSGeeWhiz T-shirts!

Spearmint Pork pictured above. As available in Olive Mint.

Inspired by the arificial sweetener storyline.

birdsworth
webcomics

And now for something slightly different

In the middle of August I sprained both my wrists and kept reinjuring them before they could really fully heal. So last week I had to wear these little braces on my hands and I was unable to draw during that time. This week I got my first cold of the season and spent most of the time watching "Fistful of Dollars", "For a Few Dollars More" and reading Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" before dozing off at the late hour of 9 pm.

I've been working ahead on My Life in Records and the plan was to keep going but with slightly less intensity since school has started, but these two setbacks have slowed things way down. I'm only about a week ahead, so at some point, I'll probably have a missed update on the comic. (frown)

I'm pretty proud of this particular one that I put up this week. It is more of the style that I plan on using once I complete Book One which will be four chapters long.

I went home to gather reference material for this story and realized that I had remembered the name of the record incorrectly. Its actually "The Best of the Best for Kids" instead of "Kids Under Construction," for those of you who try to buy each album as I mention them in the strip. So far every one I've mentioned is out of print. Eventually I'll start talking about records that everyone's heard.


I saw that Bill Gaither is singing at the University of Illinois this fall. Maybe I can track him down and he can sign my record.

In other news, Gilead has written a nice review of my Color Sonnet and other graphic poetry.

webcomics
My Life in Records
graphic poetry
pynchon
Bill Gaither
Clint Eastwood

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.



webcomics
Ovid
experimentalcomics
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
experimentalcomics
webcomics
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

New Site design

If you looked on the site on Thursday, you got a glimpse of the new design I have for the website. I couldn't get all the kinks worked out, so I've put the old one back up. If you didn't catch it, you can see part of it at the test site. LOTS of bugs still to work out.

Prologue Redux

I've gone back and redrawn a few panels in the Prologue. I rescanned the panels that remained and fixed the contrast to make them more readable. You can see the difference pictured here.

No Strip this Wednesday

Wow! I finally got around to tweaking the blog part of My Life In Records!

Sorry, there's will be no strip this Wednesday. My dream of updating twice a week will not come to fruition at the present time. I'll have to be satisfied with updating on Fridays. I have a new look for Black Bunny. I was going to wait to experiment more with the look of the comic once the current chapter ended, but I just couldn't wait. I'm going to play around with the coloring and when I get it the way I like it, I'll probably go back and re-color the old stuff. I'm already redrawing some of the earlier, clunkier artwork.

In the meantime, the real reason why I'm not updating as frequently, is I am trying to make a more polished record of some demos I've made over the past several months. If you're curious as to what this sounds like, head over to my music site, www.grantthomasonline.com and have a listen. Or head over to Birdsworth to see the marriage of indie folk rock and webcomics!

Chapter 2

Bert and Ernie: Side by Side (1985)

Read Chapter 1 Bert and Ernie: Side by Side

Prologue

Read Prologue

We're Moving!

This comic is moving to http://mylifeinrecords.comicgenesis.com