Comics and stuff

Quick drawing of Bass Robot! Around 2005ish...

It has been a while since last time I wrote to this blog. I think I have been looking for some new inspiration and actual reasons to release anything (I´ve alse been very busy). But now here is something that got me very excited again!

Here´s a short story to give some explanation: About 5 years ago we moved to our first self bought house from the former rental flat. When packing stuff I decided to put all my old drawings and weird stuff into a huge cardboard box. The box ended up to an outhouse storage and was completely forgotten there. Last autumn when we sold the previous house I found this box again and thought that I should propably just throw it away without even opening it (since I seemed not to have been missing all the stuff). I had totally forgotten that all the old drawings and specially my self drawn comics where inside. Fortunately my wife said that I should at least look into the box - and what a revelation that was! I honestly didn´t even remember how productive I used to be, specially when I was a teenager!

Anyway, the box was filled with really strange gadgets, memorabilia, stuff that can´t be described and most importantly, hundreds if not even thousands of pages full of old material from my youth. So now my scanner is in heavy use basically every evening after work just to quarantee I would not make the same mistake again.

I have also been thinking what to do with all this stuff that has never been released anywhere and only handfull of people have seen (I don´t know if anyone is even interested), but since I´m actually strangely proud of the shear amount of productions I have now available, I´ll try to push at least the most interesting pieces here.

If you have been following Everything Everything before you have propably noticed the earlier comics and graphic design in various places, like as the covers of the various mixes. I really like making all these things, but I´m definitely an amateaur in the field. Everything is basically done for just a momentarily fun. Some of the older stuff however was made with very serious mind set. I remember that I used to practice different kind of techniques constantly and I did have strict aims to get my stuff released some day. As a first example of my old comics I present here a 12 page beginning for a self published magazine that was never finished. I´ll explain the reasons why this never got where it was supposed to go.

First of all, this was made in 1996 and I was just 16 years old back then. As a teenager I had very short attention span and got bored with projects very easily. This I think is one of the finer examples of my style around that period, you can find several influences from my graphic heroes! I actually admit here in the text that my biggest inspiration came from Kosuke Fujishima for this particular episode. You can find traces for that by just looking the backgrounds that are unnecessarily detailed and made strictly with ruler in hand. Also the main character has manga style face. Other obvious influences come from Simon Bisley (other characters, the very black ones) and Jamie Hewlett (all the small things blocking the pictures, some of the composition and little bit for the main characters attitude). What makes this episode one of my favourites is that the style is actually surprisingly coherent.

The biggest problem here is that, although I do like writing and creating complicated plots, I at least uset to love drawing much much more! This often (alomost every time) resulted the storyline being improvised while drawing ahead (at the final page in the huge bubble the main character actually apologizes that this whole introduction was just improvised and she promises that the following story will be written in advance. Obviously it never got done).

The other problem was that I was still developing my style. Quite often I realised that I had changed the way I draw the characters, or background in the middle of the story and decided that I should discard this one and make the next story complete with this new style. This resulted to numerous useless pages of half done stories that were just piled somewhere and basically forgotten. Fortunately there are few stories that are actually complete, though these tend to be much older stuff and therefore less mature.

Ok, so here it finally is, the story I draw when I was 16! It´s called "When I Met Myself". I´m not going to translate this because the story is simple and quite dumb, but there are few jokes that still make me laugh! And some of the pictures are pretty good and I still like few compositions here and there. Few last pages doesn´t have final ink in the bubbles.

About  this picture, I remember that my pen broke and it spilled some ink over the paper. So improvisation created the horrible scene here.

Krazy Kat - possibly the greatest comic ever!

It was some time during the early 90´s when I first encountered the translated version of Krazy Kat at the local library. They had suprisingly educated and well curated selection of intelligent comics there. Though I was more into American mainstream and European classics back then. But then again, I had also fallen in love with Calvin & Hobbes (which is by the way really heavy contender for the best comic category) that was also widely available in finnish. I realised the similarities between the philosophical and surreal sides of Krazy Kat and the fast paced but still slow tempo of Calvin & Hobbes later when I had matured a bit.

The other shared quality with these two was the use of landscapes as their narrator. Landscape could create perfect timing and really strong moods for both series. This resulted the themes to be taken into really strong situations where surrealistic and unpredictable events could get proper effects. What also helped was the language. Krazy Kat is one hugely underrated mythical poetry - an epic that should be lifted next upon such masters as Homer.

Ok, so why I am writing this now is that I just bought this a moment ago: Krazy & Ignatz 1919-1921: A Kind, Benevolent and Amiable Bric.  It´s a collection of sunday pages ranging three year period of adventures of Krazy Kat and her (or is it his) arch rival and secretly loved one Ignatz mouse. This is now 8th album of Krazy stories I have. First three were Finnish translations (that are actually very well done, thanks to Soile & Heikki Kaukoranta whom have done great things for Finnish Comic culture by translating so many excellent works of art past 40 years) and the rest are recent English re-publications done by Fantagraphics.

Little something about the basic story line: Krazy Kat tells about the life at Kokonino Kounty located middle of Arizona desert and close by the Mexican border. The inhabitants of said kounty reflect early 20th century American life very precisely but always quite satirically. The main characters are Krazy Kat, who is a warm hearted and naive person strongly in love with Ignatz mouse, the cunning villain who hates Krazy and shows the hatred by throwing bricks to her noodle. The third party is offisa P. Pupp, a dog in the police force that admires Krazy and keeps pushing Ignatz into jail after forementioned brick tossing. These three form the triangular basis for most of the events but they get company from the varied group of essential and interesting side characters. The list is long but here is some of the most important fellows: Joe Stork, the purveyor of progeny to prince and proletariat, ms. Kwak Wakk who delivers rumours along the characters, Bum Bill Bee who comes and goes but is never on the way to nowhere, Walther Sephus Austridge, Kolin Kelly, the baker in bricks and so on... everyone have their own important role in the life in Kokonino and everyone interfere everyones life from time to time.

Here is two examples of 1922 Kat pages:

It´s important to realise that these represent only the early period of Krazy adventures. The works continued without break till middle of 1940´s, almost 40 years. George Herriman, the artist behind all this kept evolving the art and the style through out years and while most of the early works are black & white, the final years were coloured.

Krazy´s world is open for everything. It´s a surreal realm where modern inventions come and go and doesn´t leave a mark, but merely work for the purposes of the ever caring narrator. It´s wonderfull to notice the love of lifes mysterious things and surprising events that may or may not occur. There is always something strange going on. For example, the Mexican Jumping Bean, Willie Mendoza tries to conquest Kokonino from time to time and while mr Austridge may solve the problem by swallowing the intruder, the soon to be laid egg will cause havoc among the local justice system. Background changes basically in every picture that makes the world flexible for the plot to wander into territories that would otherwise be impossible to reach.

There is actually quite a lot of writings about Krazy Kat. These new publications include very well written research about various issues of the comics history and other such things. These include the racial issue of Herrimans heritage, the love of the Mexican life and Indian culture, the problems with the original publisher and their news papers that thought Krazy was too complicated series to most of the American papers (it was Hearst that published the comic and Randolph Hearst was the person who quaranteed Krazy Kats succes by forcing the papers to include it to their pages), tha other cultural phenomenas that followed (i.e. the Jazz Pantomime, etc.) and so on... I highly recommend to read these trough!

I also recommend the Fantagraphs publications for anyone who sometimes wants to indulge themselves with intelligent stories of mindbending graphics! These are extremely well made with much much love and time sacricficed!

Corto Maltese - Theatrical adaptation

Yesterday I went to see a theatrical adaptation of one of my favourite comics - the adventures of Corto Maltese, written and drawn by Hugo Pratt. This was something I had been looking forward since the first time I heard Q-Theater @ Töölö, Helsinki, was going to make the effort!

Yes, well... Corto Maltese truely belongs to top ten of greatest comics ever along side with several legendary creations such as George Herriman´s Krazy Kat. I have been enjoing these since my childhood when I found the lot first time from the local library. It´s funny how the first readings were so strong events since the books are far from being easy to being understood. Corto Maltese has always had such multiple and parallel levels of ingredients that every single reading has opened new views to the experinece. As a youngster it was the adventurous elements that got my interest (and also the sophisticated drawing that is so simple and comlex at the same time), but later on when re-reading the classic albums I noticed the deep and intellectual side that was so inadvertently embedded inside the story with such a strong emotional content that yet again I was astonished of the sheer quality of Pratt´s work!

But about the play itself - It is again good to notice that when done with love and care it is possible to make very good adaptations from very difficult material. It´s important to realise that the play presents only a part of Corto Malteses saga and some parts may be a bit hard to understand if you are not familiar with the original material but these things have been fixed effectively by importing parts from quite a lot of books to make clear some of motives of Corto! There is parts from at least six adventures total and the whole does work well. For a random watcher the greatest problem propably is the amount of sideactors that play important roles in different era´s of Cortos life and therefore some events may seem a little bit strange (most notable the appearance of Pandora). But it doesn´t matter as long as everything seems to support the needs to move and dream on... My only true critique considers the somewhat hectic events during the first half as I think the comics most important factor always was the serenity and slow philosophical thinking. Fortunately there is some excellent slower moments in the play that downshift the movement!

The Acting and the use of space is yet again excellent! Tommi Korpela as Corto Maltese is just so real and like a mirror image of Corto that the dobbelganger theme is inevitable (and suits part of the play wonderfully). Jani Volanen does really strong role as Rasputin and the rest of the crew doesn´t crumble behind! Kreeta Salminen as Venexiana has so romantic and hot aproach that you just can´t keep your eyes of her!

Oh, two things that buggered me a little were the use of music and smoke. I personally think that some parts with Hard Rock and Techno just didn´t fit in that well, but overall the soundscapes were good. There was also quite a lot of theatrical smoke and smoking of cigars that almost made me cough at times. Even though it belongs to the world of Corto Maltese it seemed a bit too much some times.

Anyway this is highly recommended!