Just as busy coming out of MoCCA as I was going in, but I thought I should take a quick stab at the traditional "wrap-up" post. I had a great time, as always, and the cool April weather was a definite improvement over last year's swelterfest. Met plenty of interesting people, old friends and new acquaintances (and new friends and old acquaintances). I had prior engagements at non-MoCCA parties Friday and Saturday nights so I missed that whole scene, but I hear Frank Miller knows how to party.
By the way, apologies to anyone who read my little restaurant guide and got psyched for Vietnamese sandwiches only to discover that Baoguette are apparently closed on Sundays now. If it helps, I was similarly caught unawares and sorely disappointed. (And between DeFonte's and Saravanaas I still ate pretty well.)
Having a table to myself this year (rather than splitting it as I did last year) gave me a little less time to peruse the rest of the show--the lovely Mariel Isaacson was gracious enough to man the table for a while, but I felt bad leaving her alone for too long and the show is just so damn big! For example, I never did find the Partyka table, which means I apparently missed a new Matt Weigle mini... grrr. But sales were decent: I even sold out of both issues of EGG on Sunday. (Admittedly, that's partially because I accidentally left half my stock of EGG #2 at home.)
I did still manage to get some great stuff, most of which I haven't had a chance to read yet, but early favorites include the gorgeous newsprint anthology "POOD" (featuring what might be Connor Willumsen's best story yet, in my humble opinion); "Beard" by Pranas, "Little Wolves" by James Hindle, and "Big Empty Space" by Victor Kerlow.
ANYway. Proper design post coming soon.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
MoCCA 2010 Restaurant Guide
My good deed for the day: since MoCCA moved up to the armory last year, folks seemed a little lost when it came time for lunch. But actually, that neighborhood has some of the best food in the city! So let a local give you the lowdown:
--My personal favorite eatery in the area is DeFonte's of Brooklyn, just a short walk away at 3rd ave and 21st street. Their hot roast beef sandwich, which comes with fresh mozzerella, wafer-thin fried eggplant, and beef jus, is just about the most delicious sandwich you'll ever eat, with the possible exception of their "Nicky's Special" (ham, capicola, salami, fried eggplant, provolone, hot salad, marinated mushrooms, lettuce, tomato, oil & vinegar). One sandwich is probably enough to feed two people, but you're not going to want to have to share.
--Just across the street from the armory is Baoguette, (Lexington between 25th and 26th), a banh mi (Vietnamese sandwich) place that seemed to be the big hit of last year's show. I've only had the classic banh mi there, (pork, ham, pate), but I hear good things about their catfish sandwich, too.
--If you want a quick sit-down place, I'd recommend Saravanaas, katty corner to the armory at Lexington Ave and 26th. Great vegetarian South Indian food, dosas, etc. One of their Thalis, which are kind of like the world's greatest sampler platter (and not for the faint of heart, spice-wise), will MORE than fill you up for dinner, but are cheap enough that you don't need to feel too bad even if you can't finish everything.
--The justly world famous Shake Shack is also a short walk away in Madison Square Park, but be prepared to wait in line for an hour if it's even a slightly nice day. (Seriously. Check the "Shack Cam" if you don't believe me.) If you do go, order two burgers (or a Shack Stack--deep fried cheese-stuffed portobella atop a cheeseburger) rather than bothering with fries--one won't quite fill you up and you certainly won't want to wait in line a second time!
--On the opposite end of the burger spectrum (i.e. giant burgers in a dark pub), you could do worse than a short jog over to Molly's Pub and Shabeen, at 287 3rd ave between 22nd and 23rd. Fair warning: shield your eyes when exiting or the shock of the sun may just blind you.
--Finally, if you're really looking to splurge, I've yet to be disappointed by Gramercy Tavern on 20th between Broadway and Park Ave south. You can probably get out of there for lunch for around $40 if you don't go crazy on wine.
Feel free to show your appreciation for these fine suggestions by buying some of my comics. ;)
View MoCCA lunch options in a larger map
--My personal favorite eatery in the area is DeFonte's of Brooklyn, just a short walk away at 3rd ave and 21st street. Their hot roast beef sandwich, which comes with fresh mozzerella, wafer-thin fried eggplant, and beef jus, is just about the most delicious sandwich you'll ever eat, with the possible exception of their "Nicky's Special" (ham, capicola, salami, fried eggplant, provolone, hot salad, marinated mushrooms, lettuce, tomato, oil & vinegar). One sandwich is probably enough to feed two people, but you're not going to want to have to share.
--Just across the street from the armory is Baoguette, (Lexington between 25th and 26th), a banh mi (Vietnamese sandwich) place that seemed to be the big hit of last year's show. I've only had the classic banh mi there, (pork, ham, pate), but I hear good things about their catfish sandwich, too.
--If you want a quick sit-down place, I'd recommend Saravanaas, katty corner to the armory at Lexington Ave and 26th. Great vegetarian South Indian food, dosas, etc. One of their Thalis, which are kind of like the world's greatest sampler platter (and not for the faint of heart, spice-wise), will MORE than fill you up for dinner, but are cheap enough that you don't need to feel too bad even if you can't finish everything.
--The justly world famous Shake Shack is also a short walk away in Madison Square Park, but be prepared to wait in line for an hour if it's even a slightly nice day. (Seriously. Check the "Shack Cam" if you don't believe me.) If you do go, order two burgers (or a Shack Stack--deep fried cheese-stuffed portobella atop a cheeseburger) rather than bothering with fries--one won't quite fill you up and you certainly won't want to wait in line a second time!
--On the opposite end of the burger spectrum (i.e. giant burgers in a dark pub), you could do worse than a short jog over to Molly's Pub and Shabeen, at 287 3rd ave between 22nd and 23rd. Fair warning: shield your eyes when exiting or the shock of the sun may just blind you.
--Finally, if you're really looking to splurge, I've yet to be disappointed by Gramercy Tavern on 20th between Broadway and Park Ave south. You can probably get out of there for lunch for around $40 if you don't go crazy on wine.
Feel free to show your appreciation for these fine suggestions by buying some of my comics. ;)
View MoCCA lunch options in a larger map
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
It's that time again... (MoCCA 2010)
The 2010 MoCCA Art Festival is this coming weekend, and once again I'll have a table set up, selling my comics and prints. In addition to most of the comics and prints I've sold at past shows, this year's MoCCA will feature a bunch of exciting new comic stuff:
--EGG: Hard Boiled Stories #2,* featuring 3 crime stories drawn by three fantastic artists: "Cold Feet" drawn by Evan Bryce, "Lost & Found" drawn by Ming Doyle, and "The Platform" drawn by Victor Kerlow. (If you already purchased the old minicomic versions of either "Lost & Found" or "Cold Feet" that I've had at previous shows, remind me of that and I'll give you a discount on EGG #2)
--"Dental Hygiene and Secret Identities," a new kid-friendly/humor/silent/autobigraphical minicomic written by me and drawn by the amazing Rachel Friere.
--"The Deserter," another departure for me, an action-packed mini about a demon living amongst regular folks, drawn by the great Dan Duncan.
--Hopefully one more minicomic, "Sense Memory," assuming we can get it finished in time, illustrated by the talented Jeff Faerber.
--And if you ask nicely, I may even give you a sneak peek of a few of Jhomar Soriano's gorgeous pages for the coming-soon-from-Top-Shelf-Productions Liar's Kiss.
So if you're anywhere near New York this weekend, come on by the 69th Regiment Armory between 12 and 6 this Saturday or Sunday, and say hi! Admission is a low low $12 ($20 for both days), and for that money you get not just me (exciting as that will surely be), but also such greats as Jaime Hernandez, David Mazzucchelli, Frank Miller, Paul Pope, Kyle Baker, Kate Beaton, Al Jaffe, R. Sikoryak, and literally hundreds more!
*By the way, if you're not able to make it to NYC, but happen to live in the San Francisco or New Orleans areas, I recently sold some copies of EGG #1 & 2 to Comix Experience and Crescent City Comics, so ask for 'em there! Or for the rest of the country, there's always Indyplanet...
EDIT: MoCCA-goers may also appreciate this restaurant guide.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Dental Hygiene and Secret Identities
So you've all been reading my "Your New Favorite" posts at Geekweek, right? Well, this week's is a particular favorite, as it gives me an excuse to post this recently completed comic I did with the great Rachel Friere! It's a total departure from anything I've done before--it's comedy, it's all-ages appropriate, it's silent, it's even vaguely autobiographical--and as such I'm really quite taken with it. (Also because Rachel really knocked it out of the park in the art department!) Here's the story in it's entirety, in black & white... if you're going to be at MoCCA this year, I'll be selling a minicomic version of this, in color... assuming I find the time to color it between now and then.
Anyway, I hope you like it as much as I do--let me know in the comments section!
Anyway, I hope you like it as much as I do--let me know in the comments section!
Monday, March 8, 2010
CHE
The first consideration for me in designing Steven Soderbergh's CHE was trying to figure out how to make a design for this film, as opposed to a design promoting Che Guevara the man, or Che the cultural icon. The iconic image of Che, originally a photograph by Alberto Korda but used and reused by so many artists and designers, is one of the most recognizable images in the world. The idea of Che is well known, but the film's project is to "humanize the icon"... which makes the icon the logical starting point.
It became clear to me pretty early on that we had to tackle that head on, to show the image you recognize, tweaked just enough to show that this isn't going to be exactly what you expect. We settled pretty quickly on the idea of reproducing the classic Che icon with Benicio del Toro's face in place of Che's. It seems like an obvious idea—so obvious, in fact, that I was shocked that it hadn't been used for the original theatrical campaign, apart from one rare French teaser poster—but effective, nonetheless.
The question, then, was how to execute that? The visual inspiration for the set design came from two sources: first, the color palate Soderbergh uses for the map sequences that open each of the two films:
And second, from Cuban and South American poster art:
Using a simple high contrast, street-arty style, I threw together a Che graphic pretty quickly, then tried a couple possible layouts:
But really anything fancy was just obscuring the central concept: that the face in the icon was Benicio del Toro's. The simpler the better, then:
The next question (or, really, a concurrent question) was where to go from there? CHE is broken up into two films, Part I and Part II, which meant I was going to need three covers: one for each film plus a slipcase.
My first thought was to treat each cover as a separate poster, drawing from some of the wildly varying styles of Cuban and South American revolutionary design. This proved a little too ambitious to execute... I never quite got anything that cohered well enough to be worth showing to anyone, but for you, loyal blog readers, I'll show a few. Stealing blatently from some of the examples shown above, I came up with these:
I have to say, I remember these being a little worse than they are, for the most part... I recall being really embarrassed by these at the time, for whatever reason, but a couple are alright on their own. Regardless, I couldn't find a way to make them cohere into a unified set, so I set all those aside to narrow the focus down to one style with three variations: expanding the icon to incorporate Che's early days in Cuba, in the more traditional 26 July movement uniform (before he started wearing the beret, at least in the film), and the end of his life in the Bolivian jungle, with long scraggly hair. It also gave me the opportunity to really highlight the colors, which quickly became the anchor for the set. Here's the two individual covers:
That basic concept was holding together pretty well, but then it came time to tweak the cover image. Soderbergh liked the concept, but wasn't happy with the execution of the slipcase cover—he had a number of comments, but the one that I remember most is that he didn't like the way I drew the lines on del Toro's forehead, which made it look like he smelled something funny. So over the course of a couple weeks, I tried a series of tweaks, some minor, some major, some alright, some really really bad. The difficulty was in trying to find a balance between conveying the right emotion, (defiance mixed with vulnerability), meshing well with the hair and hat from the original Che icon so it doesn't look too cobbled together, and just plain looking like del Toro. I did a lot, most of which got saved over at various points, but here's a few that survived:
You'll also notice I tweaked the red from the first round--which seemed just TOO obvious--to a subtler red-orange color, which I thought sat nicely next to the individual covers. Finally, we ended up here As I recall, the highlights in his eyes in that last version we what finally made it click):
And so we had our package. From there, I tried to find interesting ways to incorporate photographic imagery, icons like maps and stars, and of course the colors of the film, while not getting trapped into repeating the style of the covers over and over again. Normally my menus and packaging are a little more regimented; on this I tried to include as much variety as possible. Here's a few favorite menu pages, for example:
And... there you have it. (See this is why I don't like to include menus, etc in these posts... so much more dramatic to just end on an approved cover, don't you think?)
It became clear to me pretty early on that we had to tackle that head on, to show the image you recognize, tweaked just enough to show that this isn't going to be exactly what you expect. We settled pretty quickly on the idea of reproducing the classic Che icon with Benicio del Toro's face in place of Che's. It seems like an obvious idea—so obvious, in fact, that I was shocked that it hadn't been used for the original theatrical campaign, apart from one rare French teaser poster—but effective, nonetheless.
The question, then, was how to execute that? The visual inspiration for the set design came from two sources: first, the color palate Soderbergh uses for the map sequences that open each of the two films:
And second, from Cuban and South American poster art:
Using a simple high contrast, street-arty style, I threw together a Che graphic pretty quickly, then tried a couple possible layouts:
But really anything fancy was just obscuring the central concept: that the face in the icon was Benicio del Toro's. The simpler the better, then:
The next question (or, really, a concurrent question) was where to go from there? CHE is broken up into two films, Part I and Part II, which meant I was going to need three covers: one for each film plus a slipcase.
My first thought was to treat each cover as a separate poster, drawing from some of the wildly varying styles of Cuban and South American revolutionary design. This proved a little too ambitious to execute... I never quite got anything that cohered well enough to be worth showing to anyone, but for you, loyal blog readers, I'll show a few. Stealing blatently from some of the examples shown above, I came up with these:
I have to say, I remember these being a little worse than they are, for the most part... I recall being really embarrassed by these at the time, for whatever reason, but a couple are alright on their own. Regardless, I couldn't find a way to make them cohere into a unified set, so I set all those aside to narrow the focus down to one style with three variations: expanding the icon to incorporate Che's early days in Cuba, in the more traditional 26 July movement uniform (before he started wearing the beret, at least in the film), and the end of his life in the Bolivian jungle, with long scraggly hair. It also gave me the opportunity to really highlight the colors, which quickly became the anchor for the set. Here's the two individual covers:
That basic concept was holding together pretty well, but then it came time to tweak the cover image. Soderbergh liked the concept, but wasn't happy with the execution of the slipcase cover—he had a number of comments, but the one that I remember most is that he didn't like the way I drew the lines on del Toro's forehead, which made it look like he smelled something funny. So over the course of a couple weeks, I tried a series of tweaks, some minor, some major, some alright, some really really bad. The difficulty was in trying to find a balance between conveying the right emotion, (defiance mixed with vulnerability), meshing well with the hair and hat from the original Che icon so it doesn't look too cobbled together, and just plain looking like del Toro. I did a lot, most of which got saved over at various points, but here's a few that survived:
You'll also notice I tweaked the red from the first round--which seemed just TOO obvious--to a subtler red-orange color, which I thought sat nicely next to the individual covers. Finally, we ended up here As I recall, the highlights in his eyes in that last version we what finally made it click):
And so we had our package. From there, I tried to find interesting ways to incorporate photographic imagery, icons like maps and stars, and of course the colors of the film, while not getting trapped into repeating the style of the covers over and over again. Normally my menus and packaging are a little more regimented; on this I tried to include as much variety as possible. Here's a few favorite menu pages, for example:
And... there you have it. (See this is why I don't like to include menus, etc in these posts... so much more dramatic to just end on an approved cover, don't you think?)
Friday, March 5, 2010
A Correction
I was just looking over that interview I linked to yesterday (because I'm vain, apparently), and realized that I unintentionally dodged one of Rob's questions: he was asking about the bands I claimed to design logos for in high school and I misinterpreted that as a question about the bands I've done posters for recently. So, lest anyone think that I'm trying to hide my sordid musical/design history, the "logos" I was referring to were doodles in my sketchbook for Pearl Jam, Nirvana, etc--I remember being particularly happy with a Stone Temple Pilots logo where all the letters connected to each other in complicated ways--and of course my own high school band, Truman's Kitten. (Not to mention it's earlier incarnation, The Two Lips, or spin-off, Stogieman & the Inbreds.) Maybe I'll see if I can't find some of those old flyers or something to post up here, just for giggles...
Good times.
Good times.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Another interview
....over at Light & Shadow, Boston University's film and culture review blog. In case you don't get enough of me on this blog.
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