Coraline (in 3D)

A Neil Gaiman kid’s story animated by Henry “Nightmare Before Christmas” Sellick?  I was always going to love this.   The big surprise to me was that I actually did love it.  I’m terrible at ruining a movie with unrealistic expectations.  Wolverine is a classic example:  I knew it was going to be a pile of crap, but I still secretly hoped that it would be great.  I even lowered my expectations on purpose so I would be pleasantly surprised that they were surpassed.  Sadly, Wolverine failed to meet even those artificially lowered expectations – didn’t even get up to their kneecaps.

So it’s gratifying when a film takes my unreasonably high expectations in its stride and delivers.  Coraline Jones finds a door in her house that opens onto her Other House – strangely familiar, but more exciting and ultimately more sinister, than her real house.  Coraline is a dark and fantastical fable with matching character design and animation.  There’s not a whole lot they did wrong here.  I don’t really get 3D, though, I’m not convinced it adds anything at all.  Certainly not when the story, characters and action are as strong as they are here.

(500) Days of Summer

I also had high expectations of this film – I adore Joseph Gordon Levitt, and am rarely disappointed by his films or, in the very least, his performances  (Mysterious Skin, Brick, 10 Things I Hate About You). Although different to much of his previous stuff, this film too is a corker.

(500) Days of Summer is an indie-pop song of a movie.  It’s Belle and Sebastian made celluloid.  It’s lively and bright and sweet and funny and literate and a bit cynical and a bit melancholy and completely lovely.  The writing and direction bring a fresh voice and eye to a well worn “first love”-type story that flits backwards and forwards through the highs and lows, beginnings and endings of the relationship between an indie-boy (who’s in love) and a indie-girl (who isn’t).   It avoids cliché and saccharine-ness very nicely until the end when it morphs (disappointingly, but mercifully briefly) into a standard Hollywood rom-com.

Putting a book together contains a bunch of steps, most of them painfully dull. Re-formatting pages for print, doing cover art, and fixing the inevitable typos that appeared as we rushed to get a page out every week (ok the cover drawing is a bit fun).  My favourite part of the process is fixing up artwork. It’s a luxury that i’m not often afforded in a webcomic where there’s a weekly deadline and i need to move onto the next page. As we’ve worked through the pages in prep for March’s book launch Jen’s been instrumental in helping me get a bit of clarity and making suggestions as to where we can improve readability.

Below you can see an example of these improvements. The script called for Martin to deftly step out of the way of the fight after being bowled over however the web version doesn’t really make that clear. I hope that in the book it’s a lot clearer and improves the story that we’re so proud of.

Melbourne folk! Block out the 3rd of March for the launch of the last issue of The Time Being as well as a whopping FIFTEEN  other local comics. I’ll have more details closer to the date but this is comics event of the year so you don’t want to miss out.

Meanwhile here’s the final cover to issue 4

2011 was a big year for me, in March I was married, I became an uncle to a handsome boy AND a set of gorgeous twin girls and work had a restructure which saw me doing a lot less fun projects as we found our feet, and the comic was featured a cast of thousands… Throughout this hectic period I overworked myself.

In fact I’ve been taking half my annual holidays for the last few years not even aware I was doing it. There always seemed to be something going on which meant I couldn’t get away.

So towards the end of the year I began to really feel all this and in December began to have a couple of panic attacks (my first ever yay!) and feel a bit depressed, perhaps even with a capital D. I began taking Fridays off and felt thankful it coincided with Arran doing guest strips so i could even rest from the comic for a few weeks.

It’s apparently pretty common with the art community that we can have black spells, I guess going back to Van Gogh’s ear cutting incident, but I’d never really experienced something like this, I’ve always been pretty light hearted.

Then I had a couple of chats. One with Ben Michael Byrne from Kranburn fame and we discussed our art processes and what drove us and he mentioned that on his next project he was putting as much effort into each panel as he does currently for each page and how it was all about pushing himself to be better and how good it felt. The other chat was with Katie Houghton-Ward. I managed to buy an incredible piece of her art as a gift for my wife and while picking it up I watched her work, her fingers never stopping. She spoke of how quickly she got bored and how she loved being creative. You could see she needed art like a drug.

And I picked up the tablet again and began to draw, and write and discovered that even though Arran’s fantastic guest trip meant I didn’t have to draw as much as I do usually, I needed to. Drawing helped clear my mind. I wasn’t stressed about work when I was drawing, in fact I barely thought when drawing, it was all about the next line, the right composition, the right colours. My wife talks to me and is lucky to get a response. The world slips away and my emotions are all about whether THIS panel is right or this page is a success.

Towards the end of 2011 I was considering ending Sawbones. It’s almost six years of drawing and it doesn’t pay my bills and taxes my time and the business/publishing side of it bores the crap out of me but I’ve discovered Sawbones keeps me sane so 2012 is going to see me push myself even harder. It’s already started with me writing this arc but I’ll be trying even further to mess with the formula. It that means occassionally the look of the comic changes for an arc into something you don’t like I sincerely apologise but I hope that the results are a better comic. On the business side this time has also refocused me but more of that later.

Thanks to Ben and Katie for the inspiration. I’m still getting some black days but comics makes EVERYTHING better.

Also, enjoy: