The Lazy Inkpot

The New Yorker uses a strange kind of DRM on their archives — they layer PNG files over JPGs, so if you right click and save as, you just get this weird ghosted PNG (see above, left) But if you’re savvy, you can grab the JPG beneath, and when you layer them in Photoshop, you sort of have to bump them around to get them lined up right, and that gave me the idea of making really simple animated GIFs using just the PNG layer over the JPG background. Sort of cool. (These are from William Steig’s feature “A la recherche du temps perdu” in the September 26, 1959 issue.)

It’s funny how stuff like this makes one want to fiddle with IP MORE than if you just put the whole images up…

kuš and Videofag present The Last Match May 7th – 12th Opening Reception May 7th, 7:00pm-9:00pm Videofag, 187 Augusta Avenue, Toronto, ON Free to Attend

An event of The Toronto Comic Arts Festival

Since 2009, the Latvian comics magazine kuš! has invited international comic artists to draw their interpretations of “the last match” on paper snips the size of matchbooks. At this size, these little artworks are easily collected in just a few tiny boxes – BUT – when exhibited together as The Last Match, the collected drawings are taken out and hung on matchsticks, showing that together you can make something big out of something small.

The Last Match is made up of contributions from more than 380 artists, from over 52 countries. This international exhibition has traveled from Riga to Lisbon, Linz, Lucerne, Leipzig, Erlangen, Haarlem, Tbilisi, Prague, Poznan, St. Petersburg, Bologna, Graz, and Ljubljana, and it’s making it’s Toronto/Ontario/Canadian/North American debut with TCAF! We’re so excited!

Co-presented by Videofag in Kensington Market, The Last Match will be up from May 7th-12th. There will be an opening reception on May 7th, from 7:00-9:00pm, which we highly recommend attending. With so many pieces, you’ll want to spend time with it all!

The exhibition is being brought to TCAF thanks to the kuš! editors David Schilter and Sanita Muižniece, and will be accompanied by a matching wall painting by Patrick Kyle. For more information on The Last Match, as well as photos of it from previous showings, please visit the kuš website.

I came away feeling like I’d learned a little less than I’d hoped, but here are some takeaways:

* You can get away with smaller panels than you think * Extremely weird comic panels CAN work, but when it fails it looks painful and forced. * Simple is not bad. * There are actually a LOT of possible combinations.

Specific notes:

Scott McCloud uses a 4x3 sliceup of the page, and it’s four VERTICAL slices and three HORIZONTAL ones, which is weird because it makes the panels, on average, LESS square. This works with the particular comic really WELL though, because he draws himself in closeup, talking, a LOT.

DAR and Narbonic both are webcomics mashed into book format, but both worked surprisingly well as page layout in the end.

Blacksad is REALLY variable and the page layouts are hand-crafted on a per-page basis. No speed gains here, but perhaps a message that full custom has its place.

The Resonator is fairly formal but never *too* rigid with panel choices. Lots of narrow or tall panels, which works as a way to alternate between big establishing shots and dense dialog. Very tall panels for single speaker, long ones for two-person dialog or to combine a lot of text and visuals. In general, Resonator is print-native and has TINY text…

Ultimate X-Men is a fun read but the panel design is a disaster. Almost none of the choices of graphic design work at all. Occasionally an establishing shot hits home, but in general the layout is trying WAY too hard.

Watchmen. Formalism raised to the ultimate. It’s precise, it’s a 3x3 grid, it’s piss-on-a-plate-with-no-spills precise and that’s fine, for two reasons: one, everything is about time, and two, it gets the panels the hell out of the way of the story.