I Am A Comicker: a blog about creating comics and manga

San Diego Comic-Con 2009 Con Report: Part II

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Hsieh) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 23:21:00 +0000

Friday: Our brains must've been really baked by the sun because we decided to try and bring the kids down to the con. Stupid, I know, but we figured at least we'll get some fun photo ops. The Zuda booth was busier than ever and Haden was enjoying looking around the DC booth. We had been showing him Justice League episodes and he knew the names of all the DC characters by the age of two. He also got a big kick out of the Lego booth and the giant statues scattered around the con. They offer child care services upstairs, but at about $10 an hour we decided to skip it although it is a great idea for people with toddlers. Haden got worn out pretty quickly though and ended up passing out on the lobby floor. Classy. Our newborn Darwin did fine at the con although it was difficult to navigate the sea of conventioneers with a baby stroller... Most people have their attention constantly distracted by flashing screens or cleavage-revealing costumes, not to mention the people who were actually wearing costumes that significantly impaired their vision. We nearly had a full-on collision with a woman wearing a deep sea helmet... Anyone know what character that was? In hindsight we will try to leave the kids out of the con until they are older. By the way there's a kick-ass Children's Museum just across the street from the convention center that we ended up going to the next day and it is a great option for a place to take kids.

Between wrangling the kids in the afternoon, I did manage to visit with some of the old gang from AP. It's cool to see that they're still doing well after all these years, since they were the ones who gave me my first break back in the day. I was also happy to see Adam at the AP booth as well, and he's doing some awesome work on Empowered for Dark Horse so definitely check that out if you haven't yet.

After the hectic day, we really needed a break from the kids. After a great sushi dinner with friends, we hit the Hyatt bar for some drinks. my friend Dave had a chance meeting with Dave Gibbons which was awesome, too bad I was busy chugging my scotch and missed it!

Saturday: I was running low on batteries in the morning and from the looks of it the rest of the con was feeling the same way. Things picked up by the afternoon and it looked like all the heavy hitters were out for autograph sessions. Among the celebrities I spotted were Mark Hamill and Peter Mayhew (if you don't know who he is, congratulations on having a real life). Also saw some of the cast of BSG and the cast of Boondock Saints 2, but the real congestion was caused by the TrueBlood cast (I still haven't seen the show yet but like I said, never underestimate the power of pretty vampires). I didn't feel like waiting in line for anything, and also didn't end up spending money on anything. It might have been just con overload or maybe I should've worn a sign around my neck that says "Grumpy Jaded Old Man". Went by the TokyoPop booth specifically to buy MBQ but the girl at the booth didn't even know what I was talking about... Oh well. Kids, get off my lawn!

The highlight of the day was collecting more sketches for my sixty-second sketchbook from some of the other fine Zuda artists. I started the book back when I wanted to get some drawings from all the great guys that I worked with on Scanner but didn't want to put them out with doing crazy detailed sketches so I started getting sketches from everyone with a time limit of sixty seconds. It turned out to be a fun thing for everyone, and I hope the Zuda guys got a kick out of it. If you're ever in the company of a bunch of artists, it makes for a fun drinking game.

The con ended on a somewhat sour note for us since we had to drive out early Sunday morning to make it to New Mexico to visit family. I was already bummed to miss the Sunday webcomics panel hosted by Zuda, but then a mixup with hotel reservations meant we had to skip out on the second half of Saturday as well. It was probably just as well because I probably would've been too hung over to drive if we had stayed. All in all, it was exactly the kind of crazy, intense, and ridiculous experience that only Comic-Con can offer. We're probably masochists, but we'll be back next year!

More photos from Comic-Con!

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Hsieh) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 19:22:00 +0000

San Diego Comic-Con 2009 Con Report: Part I

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Hsieh) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 21:52:00 +0000

Hangin' at SDCC: Me, my boy Haden, Juan (Re-Evolution),
Dan (Azure), and Gus (Re-Evolution).

San Diego Comic-Con is finally over, and I'm sure tons of exhausted industry pros and fans are glad to be home and no longer surrounded by the incredible sea of pop culture stimulus that is the "big one". I used to be a regular at SDCC in my self-publishing days in the mid-nineties, back when it was a relatively quaint little gathering of comic fans, before the Hollywood blockbusters and video game tie-ins made their way into the heart of the beast.

I had mixed feelings as I prepared for the trip, since this time I'm going with my wife Melissa and two baby boys in tow, driving all the way from Texas to the coast. Melissa had decided that we should rent a condo by the beach and it was a very nice move on her part, as we enjoyed the ocean breeze and our toddler Haden loved playing in a virtually-limitless sandbox. Growing up as a pasty nerd who didn't know how to swim, I always had a healthy fear of all those perfectly tanned Baywatch bodies on the beach. However, staying by the beach this time, I realized that life is short and there are certainly much worse ways to live your life than out by the ocean, baking in the sun and forgetting your troubles.

Wednesday: One of the problems of staying out on the beach is that getting down to the con can be a pain in the ass. I decided to stop by Preview Night quickly just so I could get my badge and take a peek around. After taking care of the kids, I got down there a little late and the convention floor was already jam-packed. The exhibitor booths by the major companies looked even more massive than the last time, like huge monoliths with multiple eye-screens blaring at you. I was suffering sensory overload pretty quickly so I scuttled my butt out of there, hoping to save my energy for the upcoming days.

Thursday: The Zuda crew has a nice setup in the DC mega-tent, and it was cool to finally meet people in person. I was scheduled to sit alongside Juan and Gus from Re-Evolution and they are really awesome guys. We were immediately bombarded by people looking for sketches so we went to work. One little girl wanted a sketch of Edward from Twilight so I obliged, even though I had to look at her Twilight photo book in order to capture Robert Pattinson's sparkly vampire goodness. I knew Twilight and TrueBlood are popular but it was quite something to see it in person at the con. I guess you can never underestimate the power of pretty vampire boys and girls. I've always wanted to do a vampire story also but somehow I think my take on it would be a lot darker than what the tweens would be into. After my time at the Zuda booth was up, I caught up with my friend Dave that I had worked together with on Scanner and we had lunch. He's been coming to SDCC regularly the last few years, and hopefully will have some cool stuff coming out soon from Image and other companies. We ended up bumming around the con the rest of the afternoon, catching up with other friends and acquaintances in the small press pavilion which was a little less insane than the majors area at the center of the storm. I've always been surprised by how quiet some of the small corner booths can be while the big booths had people packed in like sardines. It really is a game of survival of the fittest and SDCC mercilessly illuminates that principle in its harsh fluorescent lights.

I'll have some MBQ with my Peepo Choo

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Hsieh) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 03:39:00 +0000

No, this blog is not going to be just about Devil's Wake and Zuda-related promo-ganda. No siree. This particular post will be about another artist. Maybe some of you have already heard about this guy, but I found him completely by accident: browsing my fine local Half-Price Books (where, surprisingly, books and comics can be bought for a pittance of half the cover price), I found volume one of Felipe Smith's MBQ. Published by TokyoPop several years ago as one of their OEL manga line, its a frantic and fantastic depiction of fast-food life in America, done in true manga style. Writer Jason Thompson has written an insightful review of MBQ on his blog which I would recommend reading if you are unfamiliar with Felipe's work.

I'm excited to discover that Felipe has made good on his talent and is now publishing for Kodansha, one of the largest publishers in Japan. I remember vividly the one time that I met with Kodansha editors at one of the San Diego Comic-Cons in the nineties (Yes, I'm an old man that remembers when grunge was the crazy new fad that all the kids were into...) Anyway, the Japanese editors were very nice when I showed them sample pages from my comic Athena, but the very first question they asked has always stuck with me since then:

"What is your character about?"

Now, before you jump out of your jammies and tell me that its not a very surprising question, let me say that by that time, I've been to numerous "talent searches" and talked to numerous professional editors and artists. I had always heard a variation on the same theme: Work on your anatomy and backgrounds, tighten those pencils, practice still life drawings and just plain get better at drawing, dammit. No one, not a single person that I talked to, had ever asked me what I was interested in creating comics about. What kind of stories do I want to write? What kind of characters?

To me, that single question showed the incredible gulf between the industries, especially back then when "manga" was still a dirty word whispered in back alleys where third-gen VHS fan-dubs of Maison Ikkoku were traded. The American industry wanted artists first and foremost, the next Todd McFarlane or Jim Lee that can sell millions of copies of Generic Man based on their art alone. The Japanese industry wanted storytellers, people who had something to say with their stories and their art. They wanted comickers.

Its not surprising that talents like Paul Pope and David Mazzucchelli began to get published by Japanese companies back then. Idiosyncratic creators whose creations are unmistakably theirs. Its not a revelation to say that I was nowhere near as good as those artists then, and I never made the cut with Kodansha. I did leave the meeting, however, with an armful of gift manga and an inspired attitude to create comics that is my own.

Athena ended up lasting fourteen issues, a fact that I'm still proud of. Various factors in my life kept me from pursuing comics full time after that. I guess that a part of me will always wonder, if I had the tenacity to keep going, would it be possible for me to draw fifty comic pages a month in Tokyo like Felipe Smith? Would I even want to? I don't know. All I know is that I wish Felipe the best of luck and if you haven't checked out MBQ yet then you should. And if you happen to be in a Japanese bookstore, pick up Morning 2 magazine and check out his new work Peepo Choo. It looks awesome, from what I can tell.

Devil's Wake Part II: Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Hsieh) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 02:59:00 +0000

In this post I hope to follow up on the progress of Devil's Wake and answer some of the questions regarding changes to the story after the monthly contest.

An often-asked question from people who read the original December entry titled Aeon of the Dead is, why the name change? In fact, that was not the first name change the story went through. I had originally submitted the story under the title Blades of the Damned, a rather obvious title but for whatever reason I thought it had a good ring to it. However when I was accepted into the contest, I was informed by Zuda that the name had been taken as the name of an item in World of Warcraft. Darn those clever video game designers! In order to get the story into the December contest I only had a couple of days to decide on a new title, and I ended up with Aeon of the Dead, which I liked because it added a futuristic sci-fi feel to the zombie genre. Although I was a little reluctant to use the "...of the Dead" cliché, I decided that it may help to have an genre-specific title to gather votes from fans of the genre, plus the relief that it passed the Zuda legal department was enough for me to forge ahead with that title.

After the comic won the contest in December, I thought the name-change saga was behind me, but I was wrong. Under closer scrutiny of the legal department it was decided that the title was too similar to Aeon Flux, so it was deemed necessary for me to change the title once again. Actually this time around I was somewhat glad to change the title, as I had already developed the story into something rather unique (or so I hope) and I wanted a name that stood more on its own rather than being simply a twist on a familiar convention. I had several days to come up with the new title, so I racked my brain and made a very long list, out of which Devil's Wake came up as the clear winner for myself as well as passing the legal department's standards.

As I mentioned before, as my title was going through more name changes than Prince, I had also been developing the story. This resulted in numerous rewrites and changes in story direction. I had originally intended for the story to follow a movie screenplay story arc, focusing on the main character's journey. However, this simply did not work very well with the format and I was unable to tell the first arc in a satisfying manner in sixty pages, and the slow buildup required for movie writing didn't seem to fit the pace necessary for this type of delivery. After scrapping over a hundred pages of thumbnail layouts, I eventually settled on an ensemble style cast and a focus on quicker-paced episodic adventures. The unfortunate result of this is that the synopsis on Zuda is now out of date, but a new synopsis has been submitted and should be on the site soon.

I tend to believe that everything happens for a reason, so even though the journey is never easy, and in fact feels something close to walking through Mordor barefoot, I always try to keep myself on the sunny side of the street and hope that the final destination will be worth it in the end.

Devil's Wake Part I: The Beginning

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Hsieh) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 06:24:00 +0000

I mentioned in my last post that one of the primary reasons I began this blog is because I'm working on a new comic again, so this post is just to give a little background info on it. Some of you may be reading this because you've seen the comic, Devil's Wake, as it is currently running on the Zuda comics website. For those of you who have not seen it, Zuda is the new webcomics imprint of DC Comics, and they have a very unique system to search for new talent: Every month they select ten entries from the submissions that they receive, and those ten comics are posted on the Zuda website for people to vote on. Other than the fact that they are all eight-page comics with a web-friendly "landscape" layout, the comics themselves differ wildly in style and genre. At the end of the month, one comic is chosen by the number of votes to be the winner and receives the grand prize of a sixty-page web publishing contract to continue the comic on Zuda.

I stumbled upon the Zuda site completely by accident while surfing. I can't even recall exactly how, perhaps through a banner ad or some link on a blog or forum, but I was hooked immediately by the diversity of the comics on the site and the unusual nature of the monthly contest. Somehow feeling strangely motivated for the first time in a very long while, I decided to pick up my pen and work on an entry for Zuda. I had a few stories brewing in my head, but the one that seemed the easiest to introduce within eight pages was the story that became Devil's Wake. It was basically a strange mixture of all the things that I love and enjoy: post-apocalytic stories such as Mad Max and Terminator, zombie movies from the Romero and Raimi classics to the neo-zombie resurgence of 28 Days Later, as well as the iconic Westerns of Sergio Leone and Samurai films of Akira Kurosawa. As I worked on the story I also mixed in a liberal amount of manga style action and offbeat humor, probably influenced by works like Blade of the Immortal, Bleach, Fullmetal Alchemist, and Cowboy Bebop. I went through a number of rewrites for the first eight pages, and choose to focus on only the main character and establishing the setting in those pages. I still feel that it was the best choice considering the overall arc of the story, but on hindsight perhaps it didn't necessarily work well within the format of the contest.

Once I had decided on the story and layouts, the next major decision was the style of art. Most of my art that I've done previously were traditional media: Brush and ink, watercolors, etc. I even used a lot of zip-a-tones bought from Japan in the first run of Athena comics, endlessly cutting and pasting those sticky little dotted patterns onto bristol boards. However I did eventually succumb to the ease of computers and by the end of Athena, all the tones and post-production work were done on the computer. It was not until working on the film A Scanner Darkly, however, that I truly became comfortable with drawing entirely on the computer. Considering that the art will be delivered in a completely digital way via the web, I decided that it would be fitting to try and create my art in a completely digital way as well. I discovered and researched the realm of digital painting, which I think offers the individual artist with an unprecedented level of efficiency and speed when it comes to creating full-color art and can still feel warm and personal when done with skill. Armed with my Wacom tablet and Photoshop, I went to work.

Two months and much trial-and-error later, I finished the eight-page submission right on Halloween eve, the deadline that I had set for myself. To make a long story short and to wrap this rambling post up, my comic appeared in the December 2008 Zuda contest, and thanks to my awesome supporters, I won by the skin of my teeth against some very fine comics. Of course, this is only the beginning, so to be continued...

Random thoughts about comics, manga, and other fun stuff from a pop culture addict

noreply@blogger.com (Dean Hsieh) — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 18:18:00 +0000

So I'm finally starting a blog. Even though I've thought about doing so for years I never got off my lazy butt to do it. My primary motivation for this is that I'm drawing comics again, after a long self-imposed hiatus. I had a brief fling with a comics career back during college and shortly after, when I worked for some small independent companies and also self-published my own comic called Athena. During that time, I used to write small columns about the art of comics in the liner notes of the issues or on our raggedy website. It became a fun thing to do, often more fun than doing the comic itself. So, since I'm drawing comics again, I decided to pick this habit back up since it seems to help me organize my own thoughts on the unique art form of comics and I hope that some people out there will enjoy it as well.

I guess I should start things off with the name of this blog, which kind of happened by accident. I stumbled upon this entry in the Urban Dictionary for "comicker". I had heard the term before, most prominently used in the Japanese how-to series named Comickers. I had no idea that it had made its way into pop culture so much as to become an entry in the Urban Dictionary. Then the example sentence they used for this entry hit me like a bolt of lightning: "I am a comicker".

Language is a funny thing, and you can tell a lot about a culture or society by its language. What words are often used and what words are non-existent can paint a fairly accurate picture of what that particular society considers important or not. Since I'm semi-fluent in Mandarin and have a working knowledge of Japanese, I can see that the differences can be huge. One of the most important words in Chinese, xiào, can be roughly translated into filial piety. The fact that there's no commonly used English word to describe that idea shows how little the concept is valued in American society. Another example is the Swedish word lagom, which has no equivalent in our culture of excess but can be loosely defined as "perfection in just the right amount". One last example from our own backyard is the recent proliferation of American terms used for sexy older women: cougar, milf, etc. Just a few decades ago, the idea that older women could be found sexually desirable by younger men, and even become sexual predators, was probably considered inconceivable by the general public. Now new words must be invented to describe something that is becoming increasingly commonplace.

Anyway, I've always had a major gripe with the lack of a broad term in English for a comic creator who writes and draws the comic. In Japanese, they are called mangaka, with the suffix character -ka indicating a person's profession. Therefore, a person who makes manga is called a mangaka. Simple, no? Here in the West, the common practice of dividing the task of creating a comic into distinct writing and art duties has forced a separation of terminology into "comic writer" and "comic artist". So, for those of us who feel the compulsion and need to write and draw our comics, we're left with clumsy terms such as "comic creator" or "comic writer and artist", or even worse, a confusing misnomer such as "cartoonist". So, I'm all in favor of this new term that describes the profession with elegance and simplicity.

I am a comicker.