Touchdown

Hello from scenic Seoul!

Finally landed and settled after a hellaciously long flight, and my first experience with SICAF. The flight was made mildy more entertaining by a bevy of South Korean businessmen. Let me say that South Korea is not a miserable country one needs to forget the plight of. So I really have no idea what these guys were drinking for. But let me tell you: South Korean businessmen (or at least these fellas) are like fratboys after winning the Rose Bowl. To say that they took advantage of the free drinks on flight could be considered an understatement. Suffice to say, 8 whiskeys later, when the guy closest to me fell out of his chair into the aisle and began to roll around and giggle, it was time to land.

I expected someone to pick me up, but due to miscommunication no one did, so it was a hectic few hours figuring out where the hell to go. But I'm here now, and having successfully managed to master the Seoul subway system (a breeze, natch!), I'm feeling better about my situation. I still kinda feel like an idiot American for not knowing another language like everyone else here. That's something to fix. Soon.

I visited the Seoul Expo Center, where they showed me the set-up they have for The Basic Virus, and it's all very professionally done and looks great. Thanks to Hong-Kwan Lee and his minions (seriously: he snaps his fingers and guys go running) for putting in so much effort for it. Also got interviewed by the South Korean blogosphere. I hope I didn't say something that might have gotten mistranslated:

"Seoul, South Korea: Comic artist Joe Alterio sez he puts mole rats in his underpants for fun and profit."

My camera is acting weird, but hopefully it will clear up, and I can post some pix soon. Stay tuned.

The Great White APE -*UPDATED!*

or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying, and Love the Expo, as told in Three Parts.


My view for 2 days

APE was a blast, thanks to everyone who came out for it. I sold some shirts, made a lot of contacts, and bought some unbelievably weird/cool stuff. Some highlights:


I. 'Bot Building

I had decided about three weeks ago that I was going to build a robot to feature the new teeshirts I'd be selling, as well as show off some of the images from the comic. I'd made one right choice and one wrong choice in this endeavor: I was correct in enlisting Tim Lillis' help in engineering the structure. I was wrong in thinking that would take, like 2 hours, tops. D'oh.


Tim and the early structure.



Yes, that's a flowerpot for the head.



The only place I could actually paint the damn thing was in the bathroom, lest my cast chew the hell out of it. We still have red paint on the bathtub.



The final result. I like that in this picture, it looks like the robot is thoughtfully stroking his chin. I'll link to a Flickr set soon with more photos.

II. Dear Apple

In my hubris, I had assumed that the really tough part about this set was going to be the foamcore robot. How wrong I was.

Firstly, Mr. Senator, let me state I am, and have always have been, a member of the Apple Nerd set. Ever since Pop brought home the Apple IIC, I've been hooked. I admit that in the past few years, Apple's willingness to play ball with the copybarons by intergrating DRM into their iTunes files, as well as their Big Brother-like "ministore", has caused some the sheen to be lost off the Apple for me, so to speak. But it was this weekend that really made want to be more self-determinate than Apple would have me be.

I won't bore you with the technical details, but suffice to say, what would seem to be the relatively simple process of mirroring an external montior on an Apple laptop
was prohibitivly costly, aggravating, and unintuitive, mostly because Mac laptops of different models, and even different years, have different visual out-ports. Why? Because god forbid Apple uses the industry standard of a mini-VGA port. Because they're too busy Thinking Differently to actually be part of an industry standard. Heads up, Steve Jobs: if by next year I'm running Gimp on a Linux box built out of plywood, this will be a turning point. You have been warned.


III. Sketchblog - Special APE Edition
I'd love to tell you I was so busy all day long with people clamoring for my attention that I didn't have any time at all to draw, but I'd be lying.







*UPDATE!*

- Wow, I got linked to by Bonnie Grrl , of the famed Grrl.com, who called the robot "super-rad". Color me flattered and totally star struck. And here, I thought she was just a charming chick who was *very* excited about the teeshirts.

-I also got some supremely awesome link love at Suicide Bots. Wow, what a bunch of nice kids. Notice, in that picture, as well, that I'm being elbowed in the throat by my DisplayBot9000. Send help quick!

Episode 4 is up!

Episode 4 of The Basic Virus is finally up, just in time for my booth at the Alternative Press Expo that I'll be sharing with Kaiju Big Battel. Come on by, say 'hi', and pick up one of TBV's rad new teeshirts: American Apparel, in both black and chocolate brown, for the discerning hipster or robo-lover:



***

In other related news, Aida from Iceland has once again requested another look at the creation process for TBV, and I'm happy to oblige. I'll take the first three hand drawn panels of the most recent episode, and give a layer break down, because I think it will be more elucidating than any kind of long-winded explanation.

This is my first step, after typing out what I feel is a pretty close approximation of what the episode will look like in script form, though when I actually make it, it usually is altered slightly because of visual considerations. The red-boxed panels are the panels in question:



Then, I make a nice clean pencil drawings on Bristol board, and when I'm happy with the lines, I ink it with the unbeatable ...reliable, good response, and best of all, cheap as all hell:



I scan the lines as bitmap, and convert to Greyscale in Photoshop, using the Threshold tool to clean up the image. Then, on the layers below, I use the brush tools, as well as found posterized images, to create the BG and atmosphere:



And finally, the combined images with the speech bubbles as the last touch.



As you can imagine, this takes a really really long time, which I don't mind, because I think it ends up looking pretty good, but I really need to streamline my process. There's some webcomic creators that, because of their style, get to post everyday. Because of how I do things, I'll be thrilled if I can get my turnaround time to once every two weeks.

Remixology 101

There’s an apologetic reflex I think, the happens in the mind of all but the most arrogant artists when they take up their weapon of choice again after seeing something wonderful and inspiring created by someone else. After the initial thrill of imbibing that heady elixir of admiration, self-consciousness, jealousy, and inspiration that always leaves me a bit woozy, there’s a very natural fear that comes back up like a bad tequila burp. It’s the fear that you have now been ruined forever, that your mind has been permanently scarred by someone else’s superior vision, and your life will be nothing more than common retreads of other’s themes for the rest of your life. Those of normal psyches quickly banish this thought and charge ahead, confident in their own abilities. Those that don’t, blog about it.

There was an outstanding Harper’s article a few weeks ago by the untouchable Jonathan Lethem about the innate quality of appropriation in art: I read Joey “Yeah, I seen that shit” Campbell as closely as the next film student, but I have to admit, it paradoxically made my heart both lighter and heavier to find out that one of my most favorite books, Lolita, had been possibly plagarized. The article, among other examples, asserts that, consciously or not, Nabakov essentially strip-mined a story he most very likely read 20 years before. However, instead of waving the flag of crime in his face, Lethem asserts what many have deduced, and then rolled with, long ago: there ain’t nuthin’ new underneath the sun.

I don’t mull this over for unreasonable means: I’m not usually in the habit of just repeating what an article said and passing it off as my own (though, considering the topic, might be just what the doctor ordered). Last week, I was suddenly reminded of the anime film Metropolis , a cartoon released in 2002 by Tezuka that was essentially a remake of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

The path of sly reference, unwitting allusion, accidental cop, and outright stealing is sticky one. Before seeing the film, I had loved the Fritz Lang film since I first saw it at 16. With the addition of M, Lang was one of the twin giants that informed my narrative aspirations (along with Hitch, or course). Plus, it had totally awesome robots and cool models of a futuristic city.

I have kept the film so near and dear to me, that, in the back of mind, I always harbored a secret to desire to remake it, but my way: a production design project in school resulted in The Wizard of Oz, re-imagined as a Langian shiny future dystopia of Art Deco buildings, an evil newspaper magnate moll as the Wicked Witch of Western Publishing, and a robotic Prometheus as the Tinman, It was as strange and brooding day then, when, shocked at my discovery of the Tezuka release, I made the even-more shocking discovery that, after renting the film and watching it, I HAD in fact seen it, in 2002 when it came out. My robot poster series, which the comic is based on, came out in 2004. Infer what you will.

I don’t really know what to make of all of this. (The fact that the Tezuka movie, much to my disappointment, is a sub par affair is besides the point). A few points in my defense is that my conceit takes a wholly different tact than either version of the film, and I’m exploring (or plan to explore) a lot of issues that aren’t raised in the movies. However, I am writing a comic about an uprising of robots. I did name my city Cosmopolis as an intentional nod to Lang. And I do stay up late worrying as to whether people will take one look at my comic and see me as an also-ran.

On an even greater intellectual level, though, the whole thing has left me befuddled. The brain is apparently a very strange thing. Did I mean to skip over the 2002 version in my allusions? How much did the 2002 version influence me, considering that I seemingly removed the movie from my mind for a while, always going back to the Lang version? To that end, would my intended allusions to Lang (which I desire), be even stronger had not I seen the 2002 version? Are readers, especially those not familiar with Lang, put off by my apparent band-wagoneering? And in the ultimate question, in the art world, who is to say the art world is nothing but appropriation?

I’m always flattered when someone cites my work as an inspiration for theirs, so I guess I shouldn’t think on any of this too much. It sure makes it easier to pass the time at work, though.

Seoul Int'l Cartoon and Animation Festival

I woke up today to find this sitting in my inbox:

Dear Mr. Joe Alterio,

This is Hong Lee, Curator of Digital, Round Two: Comics in the Second Coming of Digital Era, a sub-event of 11th Seoul International Cartoon and Animation Festival.

I have found your wonderful iPod comic titled The Basic Virus through clickwheel.net, and we thought we *must* show it in our exhibition. Digital, Round Two is an endeavor to explore new comic language in a developing stage, especially on portable and interactive devices such as iPod, Playstation Portable, and Nintendo DS.

We think your Basic Virus as an exemplary work that demonstrates some highly new operability for comic narrative. For example, your horizontal or vertical panning sequence operated by click wheel may shed light on new tangible dimension in unfolding a comic narrative. In the same manner, we have also found sequence of fading out and panels rotated 90-degrees as the strong account for your creative and successful use of iPod.

Damn.

So I'm totally gonna do it, and see if I can fly out there to attend. Dude, I'm HUGE in Korea.

Housecleaning

Here's a few more designs for 8th Wonder. I like the top one.

In other news, the Basic Virus store is finally open. Look for new products in the coming weeks: and yeah, I know the prices are less the stellar, but they're all American Apparel. Keep an eye out for some handmade limited edition tees relatively soon, that'll be cheaper, and signed, to boot.

Also, it came to my attention that some browsers had some problems with The Basic Virus, and I think I've fixed them long enough to surivive until the big Flash change over. Ooo! Aren't you so excited! My fingers are tingling just writing this!

Episode 3 is up.

Episode 3 of The Basic Virus is here! The episodes are still arriving too far apart, but it's getting better. Dig it, and let me know what you think.

In other news, Godspeed, Mr. Takamoto. Hopefully, Scrappy Doo didn't make it to the other side.

Sketchblog 11/26/06

So I got an email from Aida in Iceland (!) who asked about my character development process, and how I decide what someone should looks like: she suggested that since I'm going to be drawing that character a great deal, I had better like them. I couldn't agree more.

For my part, I always have that great quote by Matt Groening running through my mind:

"The great, memorable characters in cartoons in the 20th century are characters you can identify in silhouette."

Above is my sketch when trying to come up with the look for Hector. Hector is...well, I don't want to give anything a way, but he's of a group of folks in the comic that have been physically altered in some way. As you can see, the guy I drew in the bottom right corner was the one I evenutally went with: because Hector is essentially a 'good guy' (albeit reluctantly), and a main character, I couldn't have him be too grotesque. But don't think that these other guys won't be showing up somewhere along the line. I especially like the guys in the upper right. My Troma love contiues to rear it's ugly head.