There are a few buzzwords around that alternately amuse and irritate me. 'tropes' for instance sounds to me like something we should eat, perhaps with sausage. Sausage and tropes. Another is 'arc' as in 'story arc.' Did my good friend Charles Hatfield use it intentionally when he was writing about the story arc of the character Noah in Habibi?
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Phil Elliott and Paul Duncan interviewed about Second City, a comic from twenty-five years ago. Phil used to hand separate the colours on these covers (and also for the covers of the comics I myself made under the Harrier imprint). That means he would cut zipatones and overlay them on four transparencies. I have always wanted to ask him what exactly went into that shade of blue on the clock face (given that the blue at the top edge is pure cyan).
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14 Punctuation Marks That You Never Knew Existed. "Where have you been all my life, the Interrobang‽ Less so, the Asterism, despite the awesome name. How many of these did you know already? Be honest"
"Yes, that chapter reads like a lost Eisner work, particularly Noah’s arc from naive optimism to icy pessimism to renewed faith."Noah's arc? That's the Round table discussion of the book at the Comics Journal. Wee Hayley Campbell is in it and holds her end up quite well in the company of Hatfield, Mautner, McCulloch, Heigele, Hart.
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Phil Elliott and Paul Duncan interviewed about Second City, a comic from twenty-five years ago. Phil used to hand separate the colours on these covers (and also for the covers of the comics I myself made under the Harrier imprint). That means he would cut zipatones and overlay them on four transparencies. I have always wanted to ask him what exactly went into that shade of blue on the clock face (given that the blue at the top edge is pure cyan).
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14 Punctuation Marks That You Never Knew Existed. "Where have you been all my life, the Interrobang‽ Less so, the Asterism, despite the awesome name. How many of these did you know already? Be honest"
Labels: the bloody English language
posted by Eddie Campbell at
15:43
10 Comments:
Tropes amuse me. But I can see how too many usage of the term can get annoying.
'Trope' is perfectly valid if you are using it within the application of rhetoric to analysing a work. Along with the much abused 'paradigm' or 'irony', these words are used by fuckers who have half an idea of them left over from a course on creative writing. I believe that if you use the term 'story arc', you should be taken behind the chemical sheds and shot. That 'Second City' cover is gorgeous, though. I reckon 100% magenta with a 50% screen of cyan for that blue.
Eddie, apparently you are one of those to have 'transcended the comic book medium' and sit a top the giddy heights of the graphic novel. Or summat. Nice plug, whatever.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/gallery/2011/oct/30/ten-best-graphic-novels-in-pictures
Ben Smith
If "trope" or "paradigm" or any other weasel-word is used by anyone who's advocated someone illustrating for free (which includes deferral, which never pays squat), then any review using "trope" or "paradigm" or any such weasel-word is worth less than the cost of the paper (or pixel) it's "printed" on.
Ah, Interrobang. Years ago in the library I was working in, I found a book with this very title and a bright orange cover, published 1970. It's filled with beatnik / hippy Christian cartoons and poetry. I love it and I can't recommend it highly enough. It's by one Norman Habel - can't find any samples online, but it's all over the various Amazons.
It's solid cyan with (probably) 10 or 20% black.
Surely that's 100% cyan with about 20% magenta ?! (interrobang)
I hope Shirley reads this blog.
Mind you, it looks darker at the top, maybe that's where the tiny amount of black is.
Nah, forget that - if there is magenta, it's less than 20%.
That Phil bloke probably knows what he's on about better than I do.
It does look a tiny bit warm, though.
I'm so not helping.
Arf! it was Phil that did the coloring (at least I'm presuming it's Phil Elliott as there's no link to trace it to his website), so whatever he says! it's a very cool blue, so i'd fall on the side of no magenta. i guess it threw me because at that stage of the work a colorist wouldn't normally go putting any new black into it, though one of the attractions on Marvel covers in the really early '60s is that they would actually do that, putting in extra grays all over the place, making for some rich coloring effects.
I don't know how many people are of a mind to be interested in this sort of thing, but - at the Comico blog there are a few quite technically detailed articles about flat colouring in comics. (interior pages, not covers)
Of particular relevance is the one about Murphy Anderson (the very same) adding low saturation black screens (10 and 20%) to the traditional US comic-book process, as well as shifting about the standard percentages and adding a screen between 50 and 100% for the C, M and Y inks.
This is in the mid-80s, I suppose on the cusp of full photo reproduction of colour art in the US. As far as I can make out, the UK had been doing that since at least as far back as the 50s (Frank Hampson, swoon), albeit limited to a few pages per comic.
Anyways, here's the thing about Murphy Anderson's snazzy colouring scheme, as deployed by Comico:
http://www.co2comics.com/blog/2010/09/28/the-comic-companytrue-colors-part-3/
And, here's the category with more similarily themed entries:
http://www.co2comics.com/blog/tag/flat-color/
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