profile

25yrs/ m/ aries/ year of the dog/ animation major/ illustration minor/ nicks: rurounibug; baskerville

tabulas links

indoglish

September 18th, 2005

We call it sequential art

. . . to avoid sounding like nerds.

Our excuse is that it includes storyboards, but so far no one has so much as breathed a whisper about storyboards. Heh.

If I was going to drop a class--and I might, because I'm dying under this semester's workload--this would be it. For a couple of reasons. First being that I don't need it, while all the other classes are pre-reqs for other, more interesting things. My advisor put me down for it so I'd have an easy class to make up the last few credits I needed to be full-time. He said it would be an easy, book-based class.

My ass.

This class kills. It takes heaps of time because we have to invent stories and charachters and so forth.

It bothers me because by all rights I should love this class. And I don't. I dread it all week. I always thought of myself as a comic-book person, but I know none of the artists that come up for discussion.

I don't think a lot of the books brought in as 'cool examples' are really that impressive. I don't know who played Hellboy in the movie. I liked Constantine. I'm not too fond of Batman. And could certainly live without Superman. I don't agree with a lot of the opinions the rest of the class has on what makes a good charachter/story/movie.

And I keep wondering why there are no girls in this class. -_-;; Some female presence might result in a critique day that doesn't involve ten pencil boards about getting drunk and vomiting on passers-by.

I'm not sure if I'm more mature or just a fag.

Whichever, this class has me totally insecure about my charachters and stories. I hold my inventions very dear. Some of them have been in my head, in one form or another, for years. What if no one think they're as cool as I do? No one was terribly impressed with my first work, though I admit I didn't put nearly enough time into it and it was unfinished.

Argh.

My style is really more manga than how-to-marvel-style. Largely, I suspect, due to the rampant presence of manga in Indonesia. American comics are in color and therefore more expensive to print. The stories tend to be more shallow, and you only get about twenty, thirty pages an issue, as opposed to manga, which run at 100+ pages a volume. And, printed in black and white--and still very presentible on bound newsprint--its cheaper. More bang for your buck.

Then theres the fact that the japanese stories and humor translate very well into the Indonesian. (Manga is mainstream there--everybody reads it the way everyone in america reads, say, the sports page.)

Manga-style just looks right to my eye. I'm trying to do the more naturalistic US-style, but my hand refuses. Eyes get bigger, chins sharper. It took me two hours to pull off a close-up face shot, and it still looked manga.

And I wouldn't bother to try so hard, but its obvious the teacher knows next-to-nothing about manga, and doesn't think too highly of it anyway. As shown in his comment, "All these books drawn in the same style."

I hate this class.

I don't like most US comic heroes.

And Sephiroth is not girly.

Either my style and taste is just more asian, or I'm just a fag with thing for bishies, but not liking comic-book class is killing my self-image. This is what I do dammit. And I've never before felt like my idea of 'cool' wasn't cool enough. But manga-style, even manga-ish style drawings and humor don't hold a candle to tales of beer and vomit.

Apparently.

Did I mention I hated this class?

I should draw you guys some manga, because you would appreciate it. Or at least the effort. I <3 you folks.

rurounibug ; 01:26 AM|3 replies

tagboard

blogs and journals

fiction

the layout