What are the Elements of a Successful Comic Strip?

Matagal na rin ako naghahanap ng kasagutan sa tanong na ito. Sa totoo lang, wala namang makakapagsabi kung magugustuhan ng mga tao ang comics mo o wala lang sa kanila... unless, gumawa ka ng mga 15-25 comic strips at ipa-basa mo sa mga kamag anak mo. Masdan mo ang reaksyon nila. Mas oki na ang kamag anak dahil nagsasabi ng totoo kesa mga kaibigan na bobolahin ka lang.
Pero may elemento ba talaga na kinakailangang gamitan para maging successful ang comic strips mo? (I'm using tagalog since the comics I'm making is in taglish anyway). Eto ang mga iilan sa mga napansin ko:

1. Gumamit ng ruler. Oo na, meron mga hindi gumagamit ng ruler pero makikita niyo na may sukat at maganda ang pagka free hand nila. So most likely may ruler itong ginamit sa pagpencil.

2. Same concept applies for balloons. Iwasan mag free hand kapag ganito ang kalalabasan:

3. Umiwas din sa mga jokes na "copied" or ang characters mo ang nagkukwento ng joke. Lalabas na hindi mo na kailangang gumawa ng comics. Mag joke book ka na lang! (oist! marami nito)
4. Mahirap... talagang mahirap magdrowing. Matagal na akong hindi nagdodrowing nang simulan kong gawin ang Callwork. Dadaigin pa nito ang Alamat ng Panget ni Apol sa kapangitan ng mga drowing ko lalo na nun simula. Marami ring hindi nakakatawa na script. Pero, hindi ko alam yun noong ginawa ko ang comic strip ko. Nalaman ko na lang na super hindi nakakatawa nang ipa- basa ko to sa ate at nanay ko. Dapat open kayo sa ganitong mga kritiko. Paglaruan ang script. 'Wag magisip masyado ng tamang spelling o grammar. Isipin niyo lang kung papano nagsasalita ang mga tao sa paligid, yun ang ilagay niyo. Mas ok kasi kapag may word play o makatotohanan ang dialogue.
Marami din akong pagkakamali tulad ng figure drawing. Mas ok magpractice nito kapag may oras. Yun nga lang, sorry na lang sa mga busy na tulad ko... medyo matagal ang improvement ko sa area na to.
5. Matapos nun, if you want to stick to your topic, magisip pa kung paano ang presentation. Dito magaling ang Kikomachine at Pugad Baboy. Nakakahanap sila ng nakakatawa sa mga sitwasyong normal.
6. Huwag abusuhin ang concept na "simple" tulad ng Peanuts, Dilbert at Cathy. Oo simple ang approach nito, maganda. May "space". Pero please lang, huwag abusuhin dahil lang tamad kayo gumawa ng background... kung kaya pinasasalita niyo na lang mga ulo ng karakter niyo.

7. Infomercial pa ang ginagawa niyong comic strip? Nakakawalang gana kasi magbasa ng ganito kahabang script...
8. Maging creative sa paggamit ng font/ lettering. Iwasan din ang masyadong maliliit na letra. Sa standard size na newspaper comic strip, (3x10 inches) usually 12-14 font size ang gamit.

9. Ipa- basa ulit sa mga kamag anak ang na revise mo nang script at drowing. Ganyan talaga kapag nagsisimula... Itapon mga strip na hindi nakakatuwa. Wag manghinayang. Sa huli, kapag na master mo na nag flow ng comics mo, kahit wala nang taga basa, ikaw na mismo makakapagsabi kung pasado ang comics mo o hindi sa audience.

10. Ngayon, meron ka nang 15-25 comic strips na sa tingin mo ay perpekto na at pasado na sa mga audience mo, subukang magsubmit sa mga newspaper. Hindi ito nagbibigay ng feedback kapag na reject ang iyong comics. Mas ok na sigurong tumawag at humingi ng feedback. O kaya't kapag personal mong kaharap ang editor, sasabihin na kagad nito ang mga mali sa comics mo. Kapag hindi nakuha ang comics mo, revisit mo ulit lahat... Baguhin ang script, o kaya ang concept. Mag iba ng topic. Kapag kumbinsido kang maganda ang comics mo, magxerox ng maraming kopya at ibenta sa officemates at kakalase o kaya sa Komikon. Siguro mga 20-40 copies muna. Hintayin ang mga reaksyon. More or less kapag may natanggap kang fan mail, isa itong senyales na magiging successful ang comics mo. Ituloy-tuloy mo na. Kapag wala ka pa ring fan mail or anything( reviews, good and bad) most likely sinasabi na sayo ng tadhana na ihinto na at sinasayang mo lang ang panahon mo sa paggawa ng comics.

Blankets by Craig Thompson

I finished this within a day and it was the last copy in Powerbooks Alabang. It's not something like Persepolis or Maus but it is something that will get readers hooked on. Yes, it's fun and exciting read about the author's first love and childhood. Very honest, appealing, just damn bautiful. I highly recommend this especially to non comic book readers. Unlike Maus or Persepolis, the graphics here are beautifully drawn. Especially the ink style.
"There are some wonderful characters in the book, including Laura (Raina’s mentally-handicapped sister), Craig’s various fundamentalist pastors through his youth and Craig’s brother Phil. I loved the part when both boys were fighting one night (by peeing on each other), the part when Craig and Phil spend time together when they’re both graduated and out of high school, as well as many other scenes. It’s very much a mosaic/collage novel (very postmodern), and I found myself turning back a page often, just to make sure I didn’t accidentally skip a page – only to find out this was a jump the author intended, often strengthening the theme he was exploring. At any rate, go to the library, grab the book and spend a few hours in the illustrated life of Craig Thompson." -(pomomusings)

Super Hero Comics dead?

I read this from a blog. Well... there are two different point of view here. read below:
Steven Grant declares the super-hero dead dead dead:
"it's patently clear to anyone studying market history that the fans are disinterested too. They don't buy new superheroes. They don't want them. Maybe it's economics, maybe they've been burned too many times to come back for what might be more, maybe they're waiting for Something Truly Different and don't feel like spending more on what are basically variations on themes they already buy, but reasons don't much matter. They do not buy them, and haven't for a long, long time.So even logical ways of introducing new superheroes are right out the window. Theoretically (and ignoring all issues of creator rights for the moment) the best way to intro a character would be in an existing top character's book. Let the readers get to know the new superhero that way, then spin him into his own book. That should work. It doesn't, even with characters readers respond well to, like The Silver Surfer....The superhero genre may not be the Titanic, no icebergs in sight, but everyone's still just rearranging deck chairs now. That's how the companies want it, because they're no longer marketing creations. They're peddling brands. Branding is everything now, and it's almost always more profitable to cash in on a long-established brand than to create, develop and market a new one. The superhero as brand name might be with us until the end of time, now, but the superhero as expression of genuine creativity is pretty much dead.

Steven's argument is fun both because it's so devastatingly true...and because it's completely wrong. Yes, yes, Marvel and D.C. and the handful of smaller comics companies peddling traditional super-heroes are so creatively bankrupt that you wonder how it's possible that the "creatively" doesn't just disappear from that formulation. Neither of them has had any success introducing new characters in forever, and it's equally clear that the don't have any idea what to do with the ones they've got other than continue an unending soap-opera playing to fewer and fewer true-believers. That's absolutely right.But the reason it's right isn't because nobody likes super-heroes. People love super-heroes. Here, for example, is a partial list of some of the most successful super-heroes introduced in the past twenty odd years.Ben 10Sailor MoonCaptain UnderpantsBuffy the Vampire SlayerEdward (from Twilight)Neo (from the Matrix)all those folks on HeroesYou get the idea. The concept of a character with some combination of unusual powers and abilities and/or a secret identity and/or a costume, maybe, is hardly dead. On the contrary, it's been essential to some of the most successful media properties of the last couple of decadesSo the question then becomes, not why are super-heroes unpopular, but why are the super-heroes parlayed by Marvel and DC so darn unpopular? Why can everybody and their idiot cousin create successful super-heroes except for the companies that spend all their time, 24-7, writing about super-heroes?Well, when you look at the successful super-heroes above, you notice a couple of things:1. Almost all of them are genre blends. That is, they're super-heroes and something else — fantasy in Sailor Moon, sci-fi in Ben 10, satire in Captain Underpants, goth horror in Buffy and Twilight. That doesn't make them less about super-heroes — pulp genres cross-hybridize all the time (detective and romance, for example, mix so often it's become positively indecent.) But what it does do is make them more creative. Steven says:

Don't forget, the original context of the superhero was a poverty-stricken America heading into World War II. Superheroes were basically a big pep talk, later a big jingoistic pep talk as the country went to war. The earliest superheroes, cats like Superman and Batman, were hardly law-abiding citizens, but the '30s weren't a great time for staunch belief in the law. The notion that anyone could stand against presumed widespread corruption, could stand for a higher, nobler morality, that was heady stuff, especially at a time when whole nations seemed to be going nuts. Didn't last long; before long, and once war was declared, superheroes were mostly chatting up the policeman as Our Friend and how all good Americans should follow the rules, take their vitamins, say their prayers, collect tin and aluminum and buy war bonds and that was a message the time was ready for, but it was no coincidence that the end of the war was almost an end of the superhero. It was the end of any semblance of relevance for the superhero.

And yes, sure, there's something to that: superheroes started in a certain time and place, and they had to change to continue to be relevant. But...that's how genres work. Tolkien started modern epic fantasy as a response to WW II. When WWII was over, fantasy was less relevant...so folks like Ursula K. Le Guin came along and did something else with it that made it speak to changing gender roles and race and other stuff that made sense to the people of the time. That's how genres work; they're not carved in stone. You pick them up and do something new with them that's grounded in tradition but makes sense for a different time and place.And that's what folks do with super-heroes too. Buffy shows how to use super-hero stories to talk about contemporary high-school and girls coming of age. Captain Underpants shows how to use super-hero stories to talk (or at least snicker) about contemporary elementary schools. The Matrix uses super-heroes to talk (dumbly but popularly) about modern paranoia around technology, among other issues.The only ones who can't figure out how to gracefully use super-heroes to talk about anything that matters is the big two. And maybe, you know, that does in fact have something to do with the fact that they're using the same damn heroes from 40 to 70 years ago. Though, on the other hand, Smallville manages to update Superman effectively, and the Batman cartoons are fine.... I don't know. Maybe, on second thought, DC and Marvel are just catastrophically stupid.2. The other thing about all of the most popular super-heroes is that they come complete with their own worlds. That is, the super-heroes aren't just random folks who happened to gain super-powers and then go off to fight random evil stuff. Rather, the super-hero's powers, their missions, and their enemies are all part of a single story and a single world. One of the most satisfying parts of Twilight is the geekily thorough way in which Stephanie Meyer apportions powers and weaknesses to her vampires and werewolves and such, and then has those powers drive the plot in particular ways (there are always incredibly intricate plans to stop the mind-reading Edward from picking up thoughts he shouldn't hear, for example.) I don't know much about Ben 10, but I do know that his powers and the DNAliens he fights are all tied together in a single backstory.All of which suggests that people do like reading super-hero stories...but they most of all like reading stories. Folks are willing to suspend their disbelief if you give them a reason to — but DC and Marvel don't even bother. Their titles just assume, pretty much, that all these various randomly powered, disconnected super-folk are running around, fighting similarly disconnected super-villains. In some ways, the lust for crossover that we've seen in recent years is an effort to get around this — to provide the narrative and the rationale that most people reading a story naturally want. But it's too much of a mess, and mired in too much backstory, to actually be all that interesting to anyone beyond the small core of true believers.________________________
On the one hand, you might argue I guess that Steven's tendency not to see the super-heroes all around him is of a piece with the status quo among the big two; that is, if they could only start to think about super-hero stories in different ways, maybe they wouldn't be so perpetually shitty. Perhaps they could finally start telling stories somebody cared about, and maybe even come up with some new heroes that were different from the old heroes in ways which would allow them to appeal to a broader audience.But really, I think that's too harsh on Steven and not sufficiently harsh on DC and Marvel. The truth is, DC and Marvel seem pretty thoroughly irredeemable. Steven was right; they're creatively D.O.A. They're going nowhere and changing nothing, and the chances of either of them ever coming up with an exciting, marketable new concepts is roughly the same as the chances of a monkey crawling out of my butt and handing me a power ring. So, yeah, I think it's important to recognize that super-heroes are still popular, but not because doing so will help DC and Marvel. On the contrary, I think it's important because, until you realize that super-heroes are doing just fine, you can't really understand how truly lame Marvel and DC are."

Another Comics Festival!

Yup there will be a comics festival entitled, "San Pablo Komiks Festival". This will happen on Dec. 6 2009 in Lions Club Sampaloc Lake, San Pablo Laguna. A lot of comic artists will also be there aside from the komikero group. It will be like a celebration sort of thing and it is open to everyone. Yup it is quite far but think of it as a vacation... with us! Yey! It is a 2-hr drive from Alabang. For information and directions, please go to the official website.

Whinning

Translation:
Clover: Calls, calls, calls again! Please, I don't wanna see that demon today... I hope sup Ken is absent. Auto-in again. My PC is too slow! Wanna throw this out of the window!
Oli: You're full of whinning. I'm sure resignation will come next!
Clover: wow, you're so good. You yourself have full complains!
Cathy: so, let's just all resign! That is cool!

Sputnik in Cubao

Has anyone of you been to Sputnik Cubao X? They sell books, action figures and comic books that are hard to find. No, they don't carry Callwork but I'm planning to consign my books there in the future. As Ruel de Vera puts it in, "It is Diagon Alley and the Mos Espa Spaceport at the same time." Me and Borge already talked about visiting this place sometime. read the featured article about Sputnik here: Inquirer

Congrats to my frineds, Gio Paredes the creator of Kalayaan, Macoy Tang the creator of Ang Maskot and Opersyon and Josel Nicholas of Bear for the successful book signing last Saturday night.

Carrer vs. Profession; Climbing Your Own Mt. Everest; Midlife Crisis

It's been a while since I posted some real blog entry. The truth is, twitter has become so convinient for me that I don't need to do blogs anymore. It's short and fast. Anyway, the reason I'm writing this now is because a good friend of mine texted me last Friday night. He told me how hard it is to be happy. He said he is already 37 yrs. old and still "just" a teacher and how lucky I am that I have a career. But what is career really? Isn't it that when you're a teacher you have a profession? Unlike me who only happens to have a career but NOT a profession? (Since I'm "just" managing a call center). I asked him, "Isn't teaching what you always wanted when you were still a kid?" It is a profession since it is something that you studied so hard in college and now practising. Unlike me, everyone can work in a call center. We are not particular what course that person graduated. Am I correct? So I think that IS the difference between a profession and a career. If ever you are reading this, here is some thing for you:

On another note, do you guys know what your Mount Everest is in life? I started to become aware of my Mt. Everest when I read this back in 2006. I think it was sent by Ariel Atienza. Aware or not, admit it, we all have our own Mt. Everest to climb in this life. One note, to be able to achieve your Mt. Everest, there should be two jobs that you are currently holding. One is the "sexy" job and the other is your "cash" job/ business 'coz like the word states, you're just doing it for income. The "sexy" job/ business is the passion that will bring you to your Mt. Everest.

"As soon as you accept this, I mean really accept this, for some rea­son your career starts moving ahead fas­ter. I don’t know why this hap­pens. It’s the peo­ple who refuse to cleave their lives this way– who just want to start Day One by quit­ting their current crappy day job and moving straight on over to best-selling author… Well, they never make it"

To all my friends, here is the link to that, " Climbing Your Own Mt. Everest" and you have to read this whole and not just the bullet points.

Alamat ng Panget ni Apol StaMaria

"Gagawa ako ng pinaka pangit na comics sa buong 'Pinas". Siguro ito ang naisip ni Apol nang simulan niya ang "Alamat ng Panget". Sa sobrang kapangitan, talahgang napakaganda ang kinalabasan nitong komiks. Kakaiba ang approach nito at kaka aliw siya. Sobrang maaalala mo kung pano ka magdrowing-drowingan nun kabataan mo pa. Go with the flow lang ang story and art. Isa sa pinaka nagustuhan kong kwento dito (dahil compilation to ng maraming kwento) ay yung bata na gustong lumabas sa telebisyon at niligaw ng lola para lumabas sa "eye to eye". Yun nga lang, wala nang "eye to eye" na palabas. Isa pa sa natawa ako ay yung cyborg robot na nakahubo na sumasayaw.

Personal na ipinalimbag ni Apol ito. Siya ay nagtatrabaho na sa advertising company. Nakilala ko si APol noon pang college sa fine arts at magaling na talaga siya lalo na sa pagdrowing ng graffiti. Cute din ang girl pren nito noon pero di ko alam kung sila pa hanggang ngayon. Anyways, Super laugh trip itong komiks na o kaya kung napadaan kayo sa Sputnik, Cubao, bumili na kayo. Or else mag antay na lang kayo sa next Komikon (summer pa) para makabili nito dahil hindi ito available sa bookstores. More power to you Apol! Aabangan ko ang mga susunod mong komiks. Mabuhay!

Using up Leave Credits

One reason I have been delaying the comic strip upload is because it is so ahead with Manila Bulletin. I'm hoping that I will be able to publish strips that were just recently published in the paper. Synchronization kung baga.