Enthusiastic Blasphemy

Merry Christmas!

In Progress - Jerome and Cuthbert

Finals are weighing heavily on this fragile soul, but fear not. I still have time to produce artwork of...finished...quality. Just that this particular artwork is for school, not you, dear reader.

Be content with this rough, which I may end up painting or elaborating on. These two happy fellows will be some of the characters I continue to follow in my comics career; I think they'll have reoccurring roles in my digitally-produced series of square illustrations and simple comics, Enthusiasm, which starts in June.

Jerome loves tubes of all kinds, and Cuthbert has horrible skin problems. They are also mine. All mine. Copyright Alex Fukui 2009, that is. If one of you pitches a cartoon show with Jeremiah and Catburn, there'll be such a whooping in it for you.

Not that anybody would steal them at this fragile, ugly stage.

Quickie - Aw Baby

Baby lost his legs in 'Nam, he has a warrior's gaze, it's nice and sweet and saccharine with just a hint of glaze. He is quite flat and lifeless, on the picture plan he sits, whilst deep within his perfect mind he throws a thousand fits.

The little face on baby's chest speaks ill of hollandaise, so suck on baby's bottle, and join the merry craze.

Have you ever?...

Have you ever been stricken with the horrible feeling that you're never going to grow up? That there's nothing left for you to gain or mature into, either because you've lost all functionality or have hit the ceiling? That you still think and act like the same selfish pig you were in high school, and you always will because there's nothing in your life to push you forward and no reason to look for something to push you other than messy orgasms, delusions of grandeur and bloody meat to shove in your undeserving and always hungry maw? That everything you try tends to push you over the same cliff into the same sharp rocks, and everyone who helps you does the same no matter their intent? That no collective effort will ever be worth it because nobody cares about anyone but themselves, and at the same time no individual effort will be worth it because at the same time the individual means nothing? That human respect and dignity are shallow lies we whisper to ourselves, and every emperor is as naked as the day they were born?

Go and lick rocks, then smash your teeth out with them. Draw out the blood with syringes and spatter it all over the faces of your idols. Suck it off of their ivory skin and swallow it down; there's no reason it should go to waste; you're ingesting most of the blood anyway.

Be RATIONAL, friend. Hold exclusive discourse with your senses and masturbate reality with your firm grip on it. That's no trap, at least until what reality contains explodes all over your face.

Quickie - Enthusiastic Skullchucker

Shh! You gotta watch this part. In this version, Hamlet rips off his shirt and hurls the skull like a shotput at the castle. It barrels through the stone walls, then kills Claudius in mid-coitus with Gertrude, knocking off his head and replacing it. Gertrude doesn't notice until the cigarette.

Thoughts on Scripting for Comics...Words!

So, guys, I'm trying to learn how to script comics. And I'm going to be spending a semester in Ireland, and I'm going to spend most of this time developing a larger project (if all goes according to plan). So I'm going to start laying out stray thoughts about it here.

How does one script for comics? With careful scrutiny and resource, particularly if one is writing for oneself and more so if one writes for others. If one is choosing to rely on words, one doesn't want to lose or scrimp on anything that could help make one's job easier.

I find the more direction a script has, the easier it is to follow. I also find reading a script form gives one a little bit of a better sense of pacing, general action and story structure than thumbnail layouts might, if only because thumbnails usually leave out smaller details while including distracting larger ones. You can layer things into a script that you can't layer into a simple thumbnail.

But thumbnails are vital for that other part of comics, though, the staging and acting, the composition, the logic of space and fleshing out of the verbal ideas in the clearest manner. The expression and gesture lies here, the sway and flow, the harder parts to pin down in words.

In short, pure writing is vital for an objective assessment of the narrative and ideological part of making comics. Thumbnails are vital for the more subjective aspects of composition and staging. Using both in tandem can, in theory, result in a highly streamlined process similar to the relationship between an actor and director.

What many hope to find through the process of comic scripting is the simplest way to DESCRIBE a complicated story - to find the logistics of it, and hopefully without losing the essence of it.

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I'll continue this train of thought later by diving into some things I'm picking up about visual writing processes from film, particularly from directors Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Akira Kurosawa.

The Ascent, a 24-Hour Comic

This is a photo of my new girlfriend. Her name is Lucinda May Harper, and she's 24 pages long. Yeah, breath her in.



Quite a catch, huh? I met her at a sleazy function called the Minneapolis 24-Hour Comics Challenge. It was love at first sight. I think I can hear wedding bells in the distance.

The great part for you is that she's got a lot of sisters. If you want their numbers, I can hook you up. Just send me a wire.