…Matter 59
Penultimate page: If Annie is going to do something stupid she’d better hurry up because there’s only one more page to go in this story! (Update… turns out I’m wrong… there’s another three pages to go!)
Next update: Sunday October 13, 2019: Bugle and…
Huh… I wouldn’t guess from just reading the strip that the story was going to end with the next page. Anxious to see how you pull it off! AND to see Bugle again (another special visit 😉 )!
Cool that telepaths seem to have their place in the criminal justice system. Shouldn’t “telepathically probed” be just “T.P.ed”?
Even though it’s just one word they refer to telepaths as T.P.s (like they refer to telekinetics as T.K.s)… so a telepathic probe is T.P.P. for clarity! 😀
Seemed natural to me, both T.P. and T.K. have been used before.
I hadn’t seen T.P. but I’ve seen T.K. so it makes sense to me.
Huh… The first thing I thought of was “Trans-Pacific Partnership” 🤪😅
Well thats totally cool, then! TC! 😉
Considering what T.P. is short for regularly, that would be quite an interesting image. “We’ve toilet papered him to the legal limit”.
ha! That is actually the main reasons I went with T.P.P.!!
I wish I could give you some sort of advice or support regarding the situation with your father, but I can’t. I tend to… not ignore it, but treat it as if it is nothing out of the ordinary, when my loved ones are in the hospital. And I can’t recommend this approach.
Wishing you and your family, especially your father himself, all the best.
Thanks – basically it’s just wait and see if the treatment works. If it does, all good. If it doesn’t… well…
Both Dianne and Go!Anna seem to take it for granted that the whole Jekyll/Hyde psychiatric treatment is somehow an injustice and that Brunton “deserves”… I don’t know, the misery that only a full prison can provide? And it’s not even like they think “he’s faking it” or anything like that. They don’t dispute the diagnosis and don’t care and only wish they could push him back to his evil persona so that they could be justified in putting him in worse conditions.
It’s not a great look for either of them, to be honest. You can say, “Yeah, “But they had to see the victims up close,” but they’re both going to see a lot of victims in their career. They need to be better than that.
Yep, I don’t disagree
Really?! 😳
@Matthew: Big agreement!
Brunton has murdered people, one of them a child, and would have murdered another if Go!Anna hadn’t intervened. For all that alone, he deserves no consideration. I’m with Go!Anna and Dianne here.
This is one of those times that you have to define ‘stupid’ so the person can’t reason their way into what they’re planing to do.
I hope things go well for your father.
One of these days I’m going to gibber about the final rendering step in Magellan art, as lately we’ve had the opportunity to see pages go through b&w, first color, and final rendering a few times. I’m shamefully old-school; I clutch my old battered gear, snarl, “use the inky blacks!” for all the important rendering, let the coloring be a minor add-on, and pooh-pooh to the new-school of shiny colors and fades and glows. But … you just may be providing what it takes to change my mind.
I see what you’re saying. This, Kevin&Kell and Sam&Fuzzy are special among the webcomics I read in that they look a lot like “real” comics. Of the three, I do prefer Magellan. Somehow reminds me of Tintin. I’m young enough that I didn’t really read inky black-and-white comics when I was a child, childrens comics were mostly colored in the nineties. So for me inky black-and-white is just Modesty Blaise or Sam&Fuzzy, dramatic stuff, action-filled stuff. Or maybe manga. Sure Magellan would fit right in, but for me I think it would take away from the feeling of a contemporary and balanced universe, where not only drama and action happens but also normal life, mundane stuff, happy times, class. 🙂
I can’t help but be curious: of the three art styles in Not a Villain, i.e L.i.F.e. / the game / reality, which do you prefer (if you do read that comic)? To me, the reality art style is the one most reminiscent of the dramatic inky blacks look, yet it is the one that makes the most use of modern-style shading. The color palette is important to me, I guess. Interesting.
@08h7w, thanks for the chance to chat! My apologies for any over-explaining; I’m backstopping anything I said before just in case and to focus on colored comics exclusively.
I guess I should clarify a little that I’m not talking about black-and-white comics, but instead, the older methods for color comics on the newsstand, which defined more of the imagery through black-and-white inking before the color went on. (Good example: Chua inking J. Buscema, http://adeptplay.com/sites/default/files/buscema%20inks.gif; imagine it colored just afterwards). Not only that, but the four-color process had a distinctive “soft” outcome on the cheap newsprint, much less gaudy or dot-ridden than screen viewing or printed reproductions would indicate. So the black ink established most of where the light was coming from and the corners & rounding of various shapes (and the whole thing was softened by color), whereas today’s methods usually establish the same things using color highlights, gradient effects, and glow effects.
As an old guy, I tend to dislike the highlighted, glowy modern art in superhero comics, especially since I think it’s aping cinema and gaming, and the attempts at noir and shadowy art using modern methods look muddy and monochromatic to me. So it’s really exciting to see superhero art that uses the modern techniques without, well, without fucking it up, and achieving so much clarity and depth while appearing deceptively simple. Your Tintin comparison makes a lot of sense to me.
I didn’t know about Not a Villain, and since it’s 741 pages I might need a little time to catch up enough to answer your question, but I appreciate the reference and the conceptual challenge. It may be that I’ll like all three styles because they serve specific purposes in the story?
Chat and explanation much appreciated 🙂 Now I understand exactly what you mean and I enjoy that! Mind telling me what “spotting blacks” is? Never seen or heard that term before, I believe.
While the three styles in NaV most definitely have purpose, I find it likely that you will only like one of them. The one depicting reality very much falls victim to looking muddy and monochromatic, for large parts, on the other hand it is a post-apocalyptic world with lot’s of volcanic ash in the sky and most dwellings underwater or underground. The virtual reality called L.i.F.e. is simplistic, then again, it is supposed to be. Finally, The Game, looks like… well, once again, spot on for what it is – something to effectively capture the eyes of the people living in that world.
A comic that to my eyes has extremely good looks, maybe not in the earliest pages but quite soon, is TwoKinds. It’s not superheroes at all, it is furry humanoids and magic, but it is beautiful. The only comic that I read for the art more than for the story.
Hi! Spotting blacks is to look at a whole comics page to see the pattern of solid black shapes. Here’s a useful example: Norm Rapmund inking Aaron Lopresti – the Hulk comics page at this webpage: http://www.aaronlopresti.com/blog/2013/08/10/inking-makes-all-of-the-difference/ , direct image link: http://www.aaronlopresti.com/blog/al-content/uploads/2013/08/Sentinel1pg1inked.jpg
You can see the black fields on the three flying figures, the Hulk’s forearm and back leg (these are biggest), and among parts of the rubble. If you kind of pull back and blur a little, all these blacks create a reversed fat-bodied C plus an isolated dot at the lower right corner. Think of this shape as a kind of “rune” for the page with its own effect on the reader’s experience, either to strike at them like a blow or to guide the gaze’s direction.
I picked that example almost at random, because inkers take this very seriously even if it’s probably the most “unaware” aspect of reading comics. Spotting blacks and text-object placement are at least as important as literal layout. John Buscema’s presentation of spotting blacks in the classic How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way is outstanding and a recent book about it is Marco Mateu-Mestre’s Framed Ink.
I’ve never been very successful in inking my work with a brush or nib… and I used to to do that many years ago pre-Photoshop and scanners and internet when I used to draw B&W. The end result was always mixed and there was a good chance I’d ruin some pretty good pencils. When I got work at an educational comic book publisher I started doing more and more work in colour (inks not Photoshop) and that began to shift my drawing style from lots of black and cross-hatching, etc to simpler and more open line work. Once I started working in Photoshop for colour (not inks, which I still do by hand) my B&W art evolved into the very open line art you see when I upload an unfinished page. That drawing style, I find, gives me a better result in colouring for my work – although it obviously doesn’t suit many other styles.
I love how you use colors for the equivalent of “spotting blacks,” e.g. that Annie’s outstanding greenness can be tracked across a whole page relative to the panels’ layout.
My thoughts are now turning back to the weird ol’ 90s and three really great black-and-white comics that each added color as the series developed, sometimes as an occasional special issue and sometimes a full shift from one form to the other. They were Omaha the Cat Dancer, Hate, and Box Office Poison. (Omaha is also a good reference for thinking about Magellan’s specific open-lines style and maybe someday a topic to discuss with you if you’re willing.) I’m thinking about them because I responded very differently to the added color for each.
I never liked coloring for its occasional use in Omaha. It was fine for covers but intrusive for the pages, doing “too much of the work” for my reading eye, and something about the palette also led each page to look alike. That’s not a very standard comment because the open-line style typically lends itself well to colors as with Tintin. (Now that I think about it, I reacted the same way to the shift to coloring in Castle Waiting.)
Whereas Hate began very edgy, expressionist, with angular black shapes and cross-hatches freakin’ everywhere, and then shifted exactly halfway through its run to rather bright, TV-cartoon like coloring, with the line art adjusting over a couple of issues to suit it. A lot of readers didn’t like the change but I thought it worked really well and still find reading both very pleasurable; coloring the first phase would not have looked good, but not coloring the second phase wouldn’t have either.
Finally, Box Office Poison seems to me to backstop the same point, in that its almost geometric black fields and mixed naturalism + expressionism were great in black-and-white, and then the occasional color specials didn’t jibe with that style even a tiny bit. The coloring even messed up the impact of the art on me as a reader, as if I were trying to “do the work” of visual/image reading from two contradictory directions.
So, where all that almost free-associating typing leads me, is to think, yes, color typically goes best with open-line art, but that’s not the whole of the matter. Good coloring isn’t just “well, color in between the lines” and leaving it at that; nor is it just “keep everything complementary” which in my opinion contributes to the hazy muddy sameness. There’s a whole wealth of technique there for which the technology has been shifting rapidly for a while and is still doing so, and who knows which techniques go well with which different line styles per topic or title.
Whoa! Brain is really spinning out of control now, because I also thought about how the color covers for Dykes to Watch Out For are often really good but I don’t like it as much as an addition to the interior, sequential art, when it (rarely) appears, usually in reprints.
Take things slowly and take the time to care for yourself and your family. We’ll all be here for you, how ever long you need take .
I guess I’m not clear on what the end game is here for her to do this. He’s in jail for murder. If he’s truly some kind of split personality caused by an impact to his head (which seems to be the scenario) what exactly is dredging this personality back up to the surface with the help of a powerful telepath going to accomplish?
I have an idea (having to do with the relationship between Bugle and Go!Anna) that seems unlikely, given that the story arc is going to end next page, but I guess we’ll see then.
Given http://magellanverse.com/comic/matter-56/ I think Annie wants him at Locke island, mainly to be sure he is never getting out, because the harm he causes is pretty extreme.
Grace, I can relate. My own father passed last year in April time. We weren’t close but I wasn’t glad at his passing either. You have my support. Bets of luck for you both.