"Scubadive / No"

I posted a new short romance comic here. It's another comic drawn on big paper with a lot of color, continuing my quest to make comics that work both as reading experiences and gallery-ready "paintings" or "posters". Having actually had some work hung a while back in New York was pretty instructive that way. Noticing what seemed to work and what didn't. Panels of continuous action have to be BIG to really read correctly from a few feet away, too big to really fit on the paper I'm using for these. Disjointed, more experimental narratives, where you take in the page visually without getting any story from far away and then close in to read it, seem to work better. What that means is putting a bit of a barrier between the words and the pictures, making sure they still interact but aren't essential to one another the way they are in Kirby/Crumb physical action comics.

I have to look at a lot of fashion advertising layouts in my day job, and there are certain tricks companies like American Apparel and H&M use -- hitting you with the look of the clothes before drawing you in to read the text about them -- that seem pretty applicable to comics. I also just got a ton of 1960s Playboy magazines in the mail, and ads from that era use the same trick pretty consistently, on products from liquor to stereo equipment to pipe tobacco. I always tend toward wanting to draw silent comics just because the allure of trying to communicate everything you want to say with drawings is so powerful. People really do want to read some words on the page, though, so trying to make fake fashion layouts and more collage-style comics is a good mix, I think. I also tried to mix in a little bit of gag strip timing, with a "punchline" at the end of the pages just for fun. Enough talk. Go take a look!