Today's Exciting Tales! in the East Tennessean:

All of these things are true, though of course, people who know me and know my work really well will realize that I am personally responsible for the first two.

...Heh.

Thursday sees the second Distinguished Gentlemen strip, of course.

Met with my advisor today about Embrace Infection, showed him the seven finished pieces. He seemed to talk to me longer than any of the other students, and it was mostly about the concept of a loose narrative, which is what I'm calling this stuff. He suggested some minor changes to make to a few of the pieces, then told me to keep cranking them out and not to be afraid to be even more outrageous. Excellent.

I got a Droid X2 smartphone and have been learning my way around it. Obviously, one of the first things I downloaded was the ComiXology app and a nice big slate of free comics. It's a bit exhausting at times, but reading the comics one or two panels at a time is a very interesting thing. It's got me thinking about how page layouts are affected by it. For instance, a big, beautiful two-page spread by JH Williams III would not translate all too well. However, something simple, on a 6-or-9 panel grid would be pretty much perfect unless the artist is playing around with symmetry between panels and such, the way Dave Gibbons did for the Fearful Symmetry issue of Watchmen. There's a lot of push and pull, and I wonder just much professional artists think about the differences between the physical book and the screen on someone's iPhone, yeah?

It's fascinating stuff, but still: nothing beats having the thing itself in your hands, being able to flip between pages, smell the ink on paper...Er, right. I'll shut up now.

[Brett]