Another Campbellian motif

S an Diego Convention coming up. One week from today I shall be on my way. Look for me there. I should be standing in the usual place in the Top Shelf set-up. Pick up a copy of The Black Diamond Detective Agency or have a look at some of the original art, or just come around and say hello and get me started on some yarn or whinge. If there's a tall handsome kid standiing where I should be, that'll be my son.
Meanwhile, I found three pages of of Black Diamond pencil roughs that survived my working methods, so here are some more notes on working methods and on mucking about with the script.
Normally I made a rough layout in pencil same size as the finished page was to be drawn. The purpose was to pencil the lettering which I would then trace onto an overlay. Occasionally, but not normally, it would be necessary to deal with some aspects of the drawing at this stage. These layouts were very rough and I would then go on to use the page for colour testing and for leaning the heel of my hand on. They didn't usually survive even until I'd finished the art for the page. Occasionally there would be one or two where the layout almost amounted to a sketch that could be interpreted by somebody other than myself. I'd throw those aside for keeping, but there really were only a handful of them. Here's a finished page and its preparatory rough. I wanted to keep that white background clean, so I worked this one out more thoroughly than usual, though many looking at it would not, I'm sure, regard that as a finished pencil drawing.


I've just noticed the lettering in the rough is in upper case. That's odd. While this is the first page in the book, I drew it in the middle of the whole job, not at the beginning. I went back and inserted this page (in fact the opening three page sequence) to try to solve some psychological difficulties in the script. I had plunged into te thing just presuming he was wearing glasses because his sight was not 100%. After meeting with the Hollywood guys I realized this was wrong and in fact this was a whole logical issue not addressed anywhere in the text. For narrative reasons he needed to be wearing tinted glasses later in order to pass himself off in disguise, so I had to construct a whole psychological reason for it. Hopefully I turned their character into a neurotic in the process; when he clobbers the detective on page 24 in order to escape, he steals the poor guy's glasses, which also wasn't in the original. And of course, the stolen pair of glasses is just one more thing that doesn't work, and he has to chuck them away. Just another nutty Campbellian motif. It will be interesting to see how that works out in the movie.
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Couple of links from Nathalie in comments yesterday:
US Publisher Turns away from Cartoon Nudity. Children's book author Rotraut Susanne Berner refuses to remove the willy, so book will not now be published in the USA. --America! The world is laughing at you!
Internet connects reclusive Nobel laureate to readers — and the world. International herald trib. on Elfriede Jelinek.
Jelinek, 60, has been posting chapters of the new book, "Neid" (German for "Envy"), as she writes them. The first two chapters of the work she describes as a "mixture of blog and prose"

A couple of Harry Potter links via comicmix:
Harry Potter and the man who conjured up Rowling's millions. her agent Christopher Little, profiled in The Guardian.
Potter Publisher Predicted Literary Magic- profile of US editor Arthur A. Levine of Scholastic.

old link (2005) rediscovered (via Dylan Meconis)-Terry Gilliam bitter about Potter:
"I was the perfect guy to do Harry Potter. I remember leaving the meeting, getting in my car, and driving for about two hours along Mulholland Drive just so angry. I mean, Chris Columbus' versions are terrible. Just dull. Pedestrian." On his contemporaries in film directing, Gilliam also said, "I saw 'War of the Worlds' and I thought, Steven Spielberg is a man who makes brilliant scenes but can't make a movie anymore."

The Apu travesty Guardian- 16 july-
A promotion for The Simpsons movie exploits a crude racist stereotype that insults South Asians living in the United States. (thanks to mick Evans)