Category Archives: Books

I Love Filth & Grammar!!!

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Today, it came. Well, the first part, anyways.

Let me back up a bit. Last July (2021), I backed a Kickstarter by Shelly Bond called Filth & Grammar: The Comic Book Editor’s Secret Handbook.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sxbond/filth-and-grammar

Today I got an update. The books have been printed, but have not been shipped yet. In the meantime, the promised digital copy was made available (early!) to backers.

I was flipping through it on my phone at lunch at work. And even in those few minutes, I found three things that help with my children’s book projects, as well as with characters I am developing for other projects!

Now I am going through it and realizing there is so much more to learn… and my next projects will benefit enormously from the organization of the production process that this book teaches.

This book will have pride of place on my comics-creation shelf next to works like Kevin Tinsley’s “Digital Prepress for Comic Books”, Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics” series, the Etherington brothers’ “How to Think When You Draw” series, and Duc’s “L’Art de la BD”… not to mention all the books about actual drawing and writing.

I am so excited by this!

Filth & Grammar is by Shelly Bond
with Imogen Mangle, Laura Hole & Sofie Dodgson
edited by William Potter & Heather Goldberg
proofread by Arlene Lo
cover by Philip Bond

Off Register Press, Los Angeles, 2022

ISBN 979-8-9855622-0-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 979-8-9855622-1-7 (softcover)

Books: How To Think When You Draw (and Write)

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Kickstarters I Have Known and Loved #2

After 2018 I started following things on Kickstarter and Patreon. After pledging to a Kickstarter project to create a clock-radio using actual nixie tubes for display, I started to look at descriptions of other projects.

One such project was a series of cookbooks of art and writing tutorials by the Etherington Brothers out of England. Lorenzo Etherington handles the drawing; Robin Etherington handles the writing.

Lorenzo has a very intriguing, very traditional style of drawing. It’s very 1940’s dieselpunk, all big internal-combustion engines strapped to race cars. It reminds me of the old CARtoons magazine I used to read when I was a kid, or the original Mad Magazine, or even some of Will Eisner’s work (for examples, see Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art).

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Books: How to Draw Black People (updated)

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Kickstarters I Have Known and Loved #3

It is very good to be able to look out into the world and see yourself reflected back.

As a writer and cartoonist, I want to be able to portray and ultimately connect with all sorts of people. I have been noticing that all my people drawings tend to look like Generic White People, just as my trees tend to look like Generic Maple Trees. I have to remember to explicitly make things look different, to match the variety of people (and trees) I actually see on the street. But how to do that?

A week or so ago, I stumbled across a very interesting Kickstarter. 

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Books: Malaak

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Kickstarters I Have Known and Loved #1

This was my first Kickstarter support.

Malaak is a series of comic books by French-Lebanese artist Joumana Medlej. It describes a Lebanon invaded by demonic spirits of war, and what the ancient guardians of the land must do to defend it.

In 2011 I was looking for drawing tutorials, and I stumbled across this incredibly-detailed chart of how to draw cats. Every type and variation of cat appearance was laid out in almost mathematical precision. Who could have done this?

I followed a link and discovered Cedarseed and Joumana Medlej. And a world of new colours and ideas.

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