The beauty of Papercraft

Now this isn't really comics, some would say it isn't even really illustration, more like a mixture of both and toy making thrown in, but it is something that always fascinated me. When I was growing up I loved to get creatures or character masks from the back of cereal packets - to the extent that we'd stomach some things we didn't really care for - give up the Ricicles for Rice Crispies just to get the Rhino to make from the back. Ah, the sacrifices of childhood. So, I'm mentioning this as we are thinking about doing a point of sale display bin for the next Mawil book we will be doing - which is a translation of 'Meister Lampe' which will be called 'Sparky O'Hare Master Electrician' in the UK(more on this soon). It's a little book and we thought it might be cool to have a box that could sit on the counter (well actually Mawil's encouraging us) so we need to imagine and make a box which will look attractive and interesting - it's all Papercraft of course, probably today's most usual use of the art of paper and card folding.

But it wasn't always so. In my little bit of research on the web I came upon this article on Papercraft on the great Irish illustration site Scamp. It's got a bundle of links to some great examples of modern and much older Papercraft - it makes me want to print them get them stuck to card and go ahead and build them. Some of these are brilliant - the Bert Simmons ones a little mind boggling in their complexity - make them for yourself or have some fantastic fun with your kids (oh and it's cheap so you will have money left over for the brilliant 'Sparky O'Hare' when it hits the shops).

4 from the Weekend

You work around comics all day, you speak to people about comics all day but when exactly do you sit down and read them - all too rarely. Still I do try to relax with a few over the weekend so I'll try and do some short reviews weekly of the stuff I read, what I thought of it which might give you some idea of the stuff we like and don't like so much at Blank Slate. Here's the 4 books I read this weekend.

The Programme - Pete Milligan/C.P. Smith - DC/Wildstorm

I kinda quite liked this. I've always had a bit of a soft spot for Pete Milligan, after producing some of the ground breaking comics of the 80's and 90's he still seems to be a font of decent ideas and continues to show a deft craft as a comics scriptwriter, perhaps only being slightly overshadowed by Grant Morrison's rising star stopped him being seen as one of comics most significant writers (or maybe he is). Or perhaps it was his at times wilfully non commercial, experimental material - anyone remember Paradox or Rogan Josh? Without revealing too much of the plot, this is basically a Bourne movie but with super Bourne's on each side, as a Soviet sleeper cell of super-beings emerge from mothballing at the hands of a soviet scientist for whom the war with the west can never end. In turn the US brings their super-beings back into service. Lots of super-antics ensue, plus some heavy politics and psychology for good measure. C.P. Smith's art is so clearly photo-referenced that it's a little hard to critique in any way. Not my bag, but it does the job with a certain elegance. Just a mention for Jonny Rench's colouring job: I normally find the muted Vertigo type palette used on many DC books pretty much a soul destroying experience to work through, but here Rench works pretty much within that range, given that the art would probably look better uncoloured in the first place, and produces something which almost tends towards psychedelic in the way he uses it - I liked it quite a bit. I'll be buying the next volume of this.



The Number 73304-23-4153-6-96-8 - Thomas Ott - Fantagraphics

If you have followed Thomas Ott through previous books there won't be anything here that really surprises - apart from the fact that this is one long story rather than a number of short ones as in most/all? his previous books. It's always a little difficult to judge the art as by how I understand the craft of 'scratchboard' art - lines scratched through an ink layer to reveal the white clay lines beneath (if you want to be overpowered by the work that must go into Ott's work take a look at this brief explanation of the technique) - you will just be amazed by the sheer technical profficency of the whole thing. Ott's art has always, for me, had a certain understated beauty and here I think he has reached a peak, each panel looking like a photograph manipulated through a photoshop filter, composed as something which should and does exist on its own terms as a minature work of art. That they then also combine to tell a story just adds to your admiration for the artist. The story itself is reasonably simplistic - if neatly composed - following the concept of something like Luke Reinhardt's 'The Dice Man' - the numbers leading the protaganist to decisions already, in effect, made for him by fate, just as the throw of the dice decides decisions in Reinhardt's book. It has a lovely circular motif which means somewhere the events of this book are always being made - maybe one day starring you. The book itself has the usual understated stylings of an Edition Moderne Ott book (EM are Ott's Swiss publisher and the books originator), classic black and white interiors and covers, heavy hardback cover stock and heavy internal page paperweight with an unusual semi-gloss finsh. All in all a beautiful book. If you like Ott already you will enjoy this latest wordless outing if you don't, or don't know his work, take a look - the longer storylength might just convince you even if the mastery of the art doesn't.



Burnout - Rebecca Donner/Inaki Miranada - DC Minx

Ok, straight off i'm obviously not the target market for a line of books aimed primarily at teenage girls but from the start I've found the Minx line pretty enjoyable, this one was no exception. Rebecca Donner's script has all the elements for a decent story put together by a kind of shorthand, teenage girl lead character, troubled home live, out-there best friend, eco conservation worries and a hot lead boy/boyfriend. Of course most of the characters are ciphers - perhaps most noticeably the young male lead is painted in overly broad strokes - but the story holds together pretty well, and a number of complex issues like conservation over commerce are dealt with in an understandable and even-handed manner. The art is functional rather than inspired, but if you are making the jump to this from Manga there is nothing to scare you here. The book isn't an object in and off itself, so the print and finish aren't a big deal but I did feel sometimes that some folios of the book saw the printers setting the black levels a little inconsistently, sometimes they were vibrant at others overly muted - maybe it was an art decision rather than a slightly sloppy print job. The ending is a bit pat, but overall given the 'packaged' format the Minx books have to comply to this, as for most of the line so far, is better than you might expect.



Sky Doll - Barbara Canepa/Alessandro Babucci - Marvel

This is the first comic released as part of a new collaboration between Marvel and french publisher Soleil to try and bring some of their more popular works to english readers in translated form. The story concerns a 'doll' (think something like Pris from Bladerunner crossed with Leeloo from Fifth Element and you wont go far wrong) who runs away from her life of enforced slavery/drudgery. Somehow she seems linked to a previous religious war where one of two godesses was exiled and banned, could she be a reincarnation of that more benign lost spirit? I wish I could say I cared enough to keep reading and find out but for the most part I just didn't. The art has an amazing skill to it and many panels are packed with background detail - mostly lost here in what I presume is a size around 25 - 40% smaller than it originally would have appeard in France - but at times I found the storytelling more than a little confusing. The word baloons I presume could not be resized and often the 'new' English words simply don't fill them, leaving huge areas of dead space in some panels. The colour scheme again may suffer from the reduced size, its obvious subtelty at times more confusing than enlightening, but I found it hard to like much. The story seems crammed with elements from Silverberg SF novels and parts Bladerunner, Fifth Element and many other SF movies, it seems laboured at best - this is 44 pages long and Soleil apparantly pride themselves on the 'depth' in their storytelling - I was bored about 15 pages in and 44 pages seemed like forever by the end. The worst part of the whole thing though is the inside front cover where we are given a 'Welcome to the world of Soleil'. I know if you are doing the marketing on a project like this you need to talk the reasons for the project up, but the mutual backslapping here had me cringing. Seemingly Sky Doll is award winning - despite it's obvious craft in the artwork - I found it a soulless and close to totally uninteresting read. Maybe the other Soleil titles to come will be better - not holding my breath though.

I Wish I'd published this

It's perhaps less and less likely to stumble on some great, undiscovered comics artist of the past than it was a few years ago - Dan Nadel has unearthed most of them :-). But Jack Daniel was new to me. I spent some of last weekend wandering around a massive boot sale with my girlfriend and her parents who were visiting from Germany and were keen to fill their car for the trip home with loads of old British tat. Well I suppose at least to them it was different tat. Surprisingly I actually found something I wanted to buy - 4 volumes of Hawk Books reprints of excerpts of what they call 'Eagle Classics' which I imagine they released off the back of their success with Dan Dare books in the late 80's. For the most part they are what you expect from Eagle, highly detailed art in the style of Bellamy or Lawrence or humour work, but one of the books 'Riders of the Range' includes artist Jack Daniel's (yeah I know - believe me it doesn't help when looking for info via Google) take on the cowboy strip, and it's something of a revelation. 

Unfortunately the reproduction in the book is pretty poor, a lot of the fine line is gone, and the colour even if it was a singular interpretation (and it looks very much like it was) is badly skew-whiff, so bad in fact that some of the best pages aren't even worth scanning. What comes through however is how 'modern' the line is for someone working in one of the more traditional British comics. I think you can see in the panels scanned here the almost impressionistic style of the soldiers on the fort ramparts, the pared down, angular cut of the faces, the use of heavy cropping in the panel where the indians are leaving. Look at it enough and you would think that Daniel spent some time looking at Harvey Kurtzman or early Bernie Krigstein. I'm not sure a quality reprinting of Daniel's work would find a market - I personally doubt it - but he does seem, even from this small glimpse, an artist very much worth reclaiming as a UK great. I'm sure Steve Holland knows much more about him and what else he worked on, as this book only mentions 3 'Riders' stories and a 'Kit Conquest' newspaper strip. Look for more 'I wish I published' as I try to make sure I update this blog regularly. If you have one send me your info and perhaps I'll feature it.

THE NEXT BOOKS

So we got the first two books out and we got them into some stores and more will follow as we get on top of distribution. So it's time to agree with some artists to release a few more. This is the hard part - we always knew what our first two books would be - we knew they would be all risk and that we were simply happy to be starting and publishing them. Now, however, I have to think about doing more, taking more financial risk, looking for work I really want to publish, making deals. I suppose I could sit back 6 months and see how the books sell, see if it's something that has a long term future but i've decided to go the opposite route and just get more stuff out there. 

I think that there is no way a company can even be really seen to exist until they have 4, 5, 10,even 15 books out there - you just simply aren't big enough for most distributors to care about, and by big I don't mean the number of sales you are generating, more the illusion of size having a number of books in print creates. I've always felt that once you have a list you actually have something to sell people on trying to sell. You have taken a level of risk that at least shows that you are serious about trying to make a company that might work. Am I deluded about this? Many seem to be able to plough a separate furrow releasing small numbers of books over time and growing slowly and organically - Fanfare in the UK might be a very good example of that, a sedate schedule of releases of material which is universally of a high quality of art or craftmanship.

So I won't wait for sales figures, or the lack thereof and proceed to stick a little more of my money where my mouth is. We have agreed with Oliver to do the next volume of Trains are...Mint, which will be called 'Proper Go Well High'. Oli has big plans for the series and he intends to expand his storytelling horizons a bit with this new book. It will in effect be what would have been issues 5-8 of Trains are...Mint but now as a book. I'm expecting we will do it in a nice hardcover as we did the first. The artwork for the teaser Oli has on the preview site shows his artwork continuing to improve - I think it looks like it will be excellent again. I've also just had the Manchester Evening News on wanting to do a piece on Oliver for the paper - I just sent them a review copy. If it comes of that will be great for the book I'm sure and I'll repost it here. I'll try and let you know a bit more about what we have planned with other authors in the next couple of weeks or so.