Things to Come...

Alright, here we are folks, last blog post of 2012! Blogging it out right down to the wire, apparently. 2012 was a pretty solid year though, hey? Had a lot of fun, did a lot of living, and got a lot of things done behind the scenes.

"But wait a minute," I hear you say. "What's with all this 'behind the scenes' nonsense you keep talking about, ya big phoney. All 2012 long, all I've ever heard from you is 'got a lot going on behind the scenes,' or 'getting a lot of pages done, I just can't share 'em yet'! Well you know what? I'm SICK OF IT! You're all talk, Rosen! ALL TALK!"

To which I respond: "Hey, watch your mouth buddy! That's certainly no way to start a conversation! Comics take a lot of time! Also, your face is dumb!" All of which being said... alright, okay, so maybe you have a point. I'll admit, I've been spending a lot of the past year talking a lot of game. Doing a lot of tell and not a lot of show. Which doesn't really help anyone in the end. But hey, don't you worry! Because that time hasn't been spent doing nothing! And 2013 is looking to be a whole other beast for your pal Josh. No firm dates in place yet, but there'll be something of some sort before the year's through. And it's gonna look a little like this...

Craig Thompson

So I went to see Craig Thompson talk at the Toronto Underground Cinema a couple days ago, after a friend reminded me about it last minute. This was possibly a bit of a deal for me.

Reading Thompson's "Blankets" for the first time was a big part of what originally got me thinking about making comics more seriously (I'd been producing my webcomic for about a year at that point, but had never considered pursuing comics as an actual career prior to then). So he's always been someone I've admired pretty strongly.

What struck me the most about seeing him talk, however, was less the impressive nature of his work (though there was certainly a great deal of that) than the relate-ability of it. This is someone who, historically, I've always put on a bit of a pedestal. I love his work, but it also always seemed so unattainable. So I was a little surprised to find myself nodding along to his talk about exertion and process, and the slog of working on a longer piece. "Yeah man, yeah... I know how it is."

Then afterward, met up with some friends to go see Dark Dark Dark and A Hawk and a Hacksaw, which was pretty rad as well.

Also! Something I forgot to mention in my last blog post! But my friend Bryan has just started putting a huge chunk of his old comics online these past couple months! If you like comics (as presumably you do) then these are some comics worth reading. Especially the Onion Head stuff. So you know, maybe go check it out!

CCS Awareness Week

Hey all, just wanted to make a quick shout out to the fact that this past week was CCS Awareness Week.

For those of you who maybe just recently stumbled onto this blog and aren't, perhaps, in the know, the Center for Cartoon Studies is a school focused entirely on the study and production of comics, and it's where I did my graduate studies for the past two years. I was, of course, making comics before going to CCS, and had I not gone there, there's still a chance that I might have continued to make them today. CCS is the place that got me militant about making comics though, the place that put my face to the wall and said, "Look! This is what comics are! This is what they're about, and this is what they demand of you!" And faced with said metaphorical wall, a young(ish) Josh, full of hopes and dreams, was forced to either embrace it or turn away. And so he embraced it. He embraced it, and he ingrained his ink-stained fingers into the coarse brick of it as hard as he could.

CCS also taught me about not being alone in this insane pursuit of this oddly specific artistic medium. There are others, just as dedicated, all pretty much universally amazing in their own unique ways, many of whom I can't now imagine not having in my life to some degree. CCS also gave me the tools to sustain all this, and to approach this art form with a far greater competency than what I'd possessed before. Essentially I'm trying to say that CCS was a pretty great place for me. And I've since graduated, and have started to move on towards that next big question mark on the horizon. And lord knows how that's gonna go. But I also know that I wouldn't be able to approach that horizon without nearly the same confidence I have now had it not been for CCS. So you know. Be aware.

"Edwitch" in Retrospect

So here's something that I've been meaning to make a post on for awhile now, but haven't had a chance to with moving and work and life and all that craziness. But it's been long overdue, so I'm doing it now. I want to talk about Edwitch.

Edwitch is my old webcomic, which I produced and kept updated on a fairly regular basis from about summer 2005 all the way up to fall 2008. That's a little over three years, in case you're counting. And its now been about three years since. I recently got the site back online however, and this is significant to me, and I want to talk about it. Edwitch was the story of a witch living in a city. And it was about magic and spooky things, and it was about having friends in bands. And it was about feeling like an outsider. And it was about wearing the exact same silly outfit every dang day.

I'm going to try not to get too caught up in nostalgia for a moment, and I'm going to talk about my decision to get it back online, despite it being "old work" and despite it no longer updating. Edwitch was my "training comic." I went into this thing knowing nothing, and... it probably shows, especially in those early strips. It originally started out as just something I posted to livejournal just for fun, and I'd only expected people I knew to be reading it. But, it grew. And I grew (and people started reading it, which initially freaked me the hell out). And I started to learn things, like how shading can add depth, and how adding backgrounds to panels makes them look better. It taught me discipline too, it's the comic where I actually started to develop some cartooning muscles. And I want to put that out there.

There are reasons for this. Part of it is me wanting to be able to point at this and say "Look! Look how far I've come! I didn't know what I was doing then, and look at me now!" Part of it is also me wanting to show how I got to where I am presently. I like the idea of showing the blood and sweat that go in to honing a craft, and allowing others to actually trace the learning curve. Because, personally, I'm still learning things, and I'm still putting things I'm learning up for people to see. So if you're going to show it, why not show the whole spectrum? It's owning up to your roots.

On top of that, though, there's another reason for me wanting to get Edwitch back online. There's the fact that I actually still love this comic. I really, really do. I mean, the comic... it was very much a product of the stuff I was into at the time (some of which I'm still into) and the stuff I was going through and thinking about at the time (some of which I'm still going through and thinking about, though perhaps to a lesser degree). And looking back, there are definitely some parts where I can't help but now think "ugh, why did I make that decision? I can't believe I ever thought that was cool." Yet despite this, it still came together. And the end result was a comic that is still fairly close to my heart.

I love the characters. I love their story, and the directions it went in. I even still love some of the stupid jokes. I love the themes that it explored, because they are all themes that I care about, and themes that I will likely continue to explore in my work as time goes on. Rereading Edwitch now, I can see ripples coming off it, ripples leading off into things I know I'll be working on down the road. Edwitch is an example of the type of story I like to tell. And the type of story I'll tell again.

So here is my point: my old webcomic is back online. It's there for you to read now, if you want to read it. It's a bit rough around the edges, but I like it anyway. And maybe you will too.

Edit: Also, for extra ridiculousness click on the little drawing of a dude saying "comix" at the bottom of the Edwitch site. ;)

Thoughts On Color

So you know what I've been really into lately? Color!

I feel that in the past, coloring drawings has mostly been more of an obligation for me than something I generally enjoyed. I mean, don't get me wrong, I do like when things are in color, and coloring has never been a huge chore or anything. I've even often been fairly happy with the end results. But until recently I've never really gotten into the act of coloring a drawing the same way I've gotten into the act of drawing it. And now that's started to change.

There are probably multiple factors that contribute to this shift, but I feel like one of the big ones is the fact that I've been getting really into Dave Stewart's coloring on BPRD. In the past, when coloring something, I've known that you probably want to have a baseline color for the object, and a darker shade of that same color for the underside and the parts that might be covered in shadow. Stewart takes this a couple steps further though. It's not a matter of just base color and shade - he'll often have a base color, a shade, a darker shade, and a separate shade for the light reflecting off of it. On average there is always at least three different levels of shades to an object at a given time! And this is different then using a gradient or anything like that too. Each level of shading constitutes a solid object unto itself. This is shading in layers! And it looks awesome!

Yes, I realize this is pretty much just an interesting shading technique. But it strikes me as embodying an approach to coloring that makes a lot of sense to me. It's like sculpting with color! Coloring by degrees. And it makes the whole coloring process a much more deliberate affair. I think the reason I haven't enjoyed coloring as much in the past is because all I've been doing is putting color on the drawings - which themselves are already completed. I haven't been sufficiently involved. With this approach, however, it's not just adding color, it's adding something to the drawing itself! You're adding further depth to it (both figuratively and literally). And the act of coloring thus becomes something closer to a continuation of the act of drawing, not just flatly coloring it in, but giving further life to it!

Anyway, I'm not sure if that fully makes sense or is exciting to anyone else. Maybe I'm just pointing out something super obvious, that I'd somehow never noticed before. But still it's exciting for me. And it makes me actually want to color things more. So I figure that overall, it can't be all that bad a thing.