Hindsight

Macbeth is coming in just a month. The official release date is Feb 10th.  You can pre-order it with your local/favorite indy bookstore or on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s, etc. I will sign all pre-orders placed with Politics & Prose, and you can order signed copies directly from me starting a few days after the release. The eBook should also launch on Feb. 10th on most platforms.

To whet your appetite, I have set up an official product page (with interior preview) here. And now, I’m going to give you a look at the process I used to create this book…

As usual, I sketched the rough layouts using Adobe InDesign. This has the advantage of being super-easy to edit as I go along (as well as later, after I get feedback), being able to quickly move things from one page to another, use type and object styles to control document-wide formatting, and have a single master file. The main disadvantage is that the master file sometimes gets too big. I’ve learned various tricks to deal with that but it can still be a little tricky to manage.

After sketching and editing the rough layout, I printed each page in a light yellow and drew over it with pencil.

I scanned the drawings back in, used a b&w adjustment layer to get rid of the yellow lines, then did a greyscale value painting on a multiply layer over the pencil art.

I added textures I had created with ink washes on watercolor paper, then I added local colors and effects.

Sound effects go on their own layer so they can be removed or changed if the book gets translated into another language.

Finally, I dropped the art back into InDesign and drew clean borders and speech balloons.

– Artwork copyright 2014 by Gareth Hinds, shown by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press, Somerville MA –

On Friday I went to see Shakespeare Theatre Company’s The Tempest. This is a really GREAT production of one of my favorite plays, directed by Ethan McSweeny. It’s the best Shakespeare play I’ve seen so far in DC, and one of the most lavish Shakespeare productions I’ve seen, period. It’s up ’til mid January and I HIGHLY recommend it. More details and sketches below, though you might want to stop reading now to avoid spoilers.

Incidentally (and in the interest of full disclosure), I am doing a workshop with STC about adapting Shakespeare to comics  on Dec 21st at 4:30pm.

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Those who aren’t on my mailing list may not have caught the fact that I’m currently working on a graphic novel adaptation of the works of Edgar Allen Poe. It seemed imperative, therefore, that I see Nightfall with Edgar Allen Poe by Molotov Theatre Group at DC Arts Center. It too is an adaptation of several of Poe’s stories, performed in a small venue on an intimate scale, and both my wife and I enjoyed it very much. It leads off with The Raven, which is pretty good but probably the weakest of the pieces. The strongest is their rendition of The Tell-Tale Heart, which features some truly impressive makeup and brilliant choreography. Unfortunately I believe this run is now over, but perhaps it will be reprised at some point.

Here are a few sketches I did during the performance (some minor spoilers).

The playbill credits the following:

Elliot Kushner – Poe

Matthew Marcus – Edgar, Policeman 1

Adam Adkins – Roderick Usher, Policeman 2

Stacy Whittle – Madeline Usher

Yoni Gray – The Raven, Sante

Jen Bevan – Lenore, Old Man

Eric Coble as scriptwriter, Mark Kamie as Director, Gregory Martin as composer/sound designer, Jen Bevan as choreographer and costume designer, Pete Vargo on lighting, Brian McDEermott on set design, Production Stage Mgr Katherine Offutt, Alex Zavistovich Board President and Fights/Props/Effects, and Emily Gray as Run Crew / Props Mistress.

Excellent job, all!

I was in Boston last week for a couple of school appearances. It was a super-short visit but I had about 2 hours of free time one afternoon, so I went to one of my favorite places, Mt Auburn Cemetery, to do a little painting.

Pond sitters

Glorious maple near the offices

Click here for previous drawings/paintings from Mt Auburn.

I painted these in Artrage. The first is from memory of one of the beaches on Little Cranberry Island, Maine. The second is a sunset view from my porch (have I mentioned I love my porch?).

This week, amazingly, I sold two paintings I did for Dragon Magazine back in… wait for it… 1992. I can hardly believe it. It just goes to show, you never know when your art is going to make money. It rarely happens when or how you expect, but there you go.

For the third year I joined the excellent painting workshop held at the Dock gallery/restaurant in Islesford, on Little Cranberry Island, off the coast of Mt. Desert Island in Maine. Henry Isaacs and Ashley Bryan do a wonderful job with this every year, the restaurant feeds us like kings, locals let us stay in their beautiful homes, and it’s always a great group of folks to paint and socialize with.

Here’s  recap of 2012 and 2013.

The workshop started off with the traditional day of fog, then turned sunny and beautiful for the rest of the time. I worked almost exclusively in gouache. Most of these are painted on 5×7″ watercolor postcards.

Quick painting of some lovely flowers we got at the Takoma Park farmer’s market.

This weekend I went on a bit of a graphic novel binge. I went to Politics & Prose mainly to buy Brian Lee O’Malley’s new book Seconds and I walked out with a giant pile of books I needed to own. I read each of these in about 2 sittings, and I recommend them all.

The most unexpected was Matt Smith’s Barbarian Lord, which caught my attention for its beautiful cover and unusual trim size, then kept me reading in the store until I had to know where it was going. I’d say it’s 2 parts Conan (the premise, character and general story archetype), 1 part Beowulf (the poetic conventions of Old English / Icelandic verse plus several direct allusions), and 1 part Bone (the visual style). Parts of the story are narrated by animals whom the humans can’t understand, which I think is genius, and the dialog reads like it was penned in the days of Hrothgar. (Image from this preview.)

It should come as no surprise that Seconds is awesome. O’Malley has a unique genius for manipulating the comics medium to produce something that is oh-so-cool and yet heartfelt and emotionally real. In Seconds we lose the video game storytelling devices that were SO funny in Scott Pilgrim, but we still get a snarky narrator, who happens to be — well that might be a minor spoiler, so let’s just say the choice of narrative voice is genius. Am I overusing that word? I can’t help it, O’Malley, Yang and Guibert are some of the giants of the current comics scene; they are geniuses. Anyway, so here’s Seconds in a nutshell: Katie is a chef who wants to open a new restaurant because the current one is boring and she doesn’t own it. Of course opening a restaurant is no easy task, and Katie feels like everything is going wrong. Then this happens: Then a great deal of strangeness and character development occurs. It’s Groundhog Day meets Chef with a side of 11/22/63 and just a sprinkle of Anathem and Paranorman. (Images linked from this review.)

Likewise, there was really no question that I would love The Shadow Hero. While I will go on record as saying that the lack of author notes in Boxers & Saints annoyed the heck out of me, nevertheless everything Yang writes is brilliant. To continue the cooking imagery, Yang mixes together immigration, Chinese gangs, superheroes, kung fu, and some wonderfully broken family dynamics into a yummy and satisfying… uh… turtle soup. Sonny Liew illustrates it in a style that effectively conveys character, humor and action, with a slightly vintage look.  Protagonist Hank Chu just wants to work in his dad’s shop, but his mom decides he needs to become a superhero. But how can he get super-powers? Mom will find a way… (Images linked from this review.)

How the World Was by Emmanuel Guibert is a sort of prequel to Alan’s War, illustrating Alan Cope’s memories of his childhood in California. Guibert’s work makes incredible use of two techniques. First, his art is stunning in it’s simplified realism. With a few deft lines of a water dropper he precisely depicts the faces, clothes, body language, and every detail in the settings of this very real time and place. Second, having put you there, he tells the story with the minimum amount of drama, letting the ordinariness of life hit you with more impact than the biggest superhero battle. Heck, he even breaks narrative tension at certain points when it starts to develop! It’s a bit like the way Wes Anderson deliberately breaks all the rules of cinematography, except in the service of realism instead of whatever you call the off-kilter-ness Wes Anderson loves. Guibert’s rich visuals and realistic storytelling also remind me of Mariko & Jillian Tamaki’s This One Summer (another book I highly recommend!). The following quote by Guibert from an interview about The Photographer has stuck with me — in fact it makes me a little misty every time I read it: “No speeches, no violins, no spilt blood. Drama is often something which hasn’t the appearance of a drama: just a child lying on a bed, silent and still, but who won’t get up anymore.” That’s the kind of drama of which Guibert is the master. (Images borrowed from this review).

Also last week I read Box Brown’s Andre the Giant GN biography. This is a must-read if you have any affection for Andre or the history / shenanigans of ’80s pro wrestling. Like Guibert, Brown goes for a very quiet tone, but the art is more cartoony — the book is about the idea of Andre the Giant, what he means as an icon as well as what his personal life was like. As you read it you kind of feel like you’re hanging out at a bar with a bunch of Andre’s friends, reminiscing. By the way check out these photos of Andre! Here’s a page showing how Brown explains the theatrics of pro wrestling:

I went to a movie yesterday, and there was an advertisement before the trailers for an organization/event launched by Glenn Beck to take down Common Core. It’s called “We Will Not Conform”.

I’m definitely not an expert in Common Core’s principles or implementation, but I know a bit about it through my wife’s work with one of the people who created CC, and I know that those two things — principle and implementation — are not the same.

The Principles of CC are sound in my opinion. They mostly have to do with using texts in a more integrated way than “read and regurgitate,” understanding how knowledge scaffolds and what kids need to know to be college-ready.

Because the “what kids need to know” part of the standards boils down to “quite a bit, actually,” there has been an inordinate amount of focus put on testing whether kids know what they’re supposed to at each stage. which sounds sort of reasonable in a vacuum, but in the real world it often translates into schools making teachers “teach to the test,” which sucks in SO MANY ways.

I believe CC can be implemented in a good way, but I’m sure it’s a bit harder, and requires forward-thinking administrators to make it work. And I’m worried that may be too big an ask from our educational system as a whole. What do you think?

Did I make it sound like Glenn Beck was just against testing? No, not only that, he and his supporters believe CC is a tool of the liberal intelligentsia to indoctrinate everyone’s kids throughout the country with liberal values. Yep. Again, I think the political content can be separated from the basic CC principles, but on the other hand, it seems quite possible that he’s right. Most of the people writing content for CC are probably using the latest consensus ideas about climate change, American history, multicultural literature, tolerance, and so on. If CC makes it harder to shelter your kids from all of THAT, then is that a good thing or a bad thing?