A lot of times I draw comics that don’t go anywhere. This was one of those comics. Thank you very much. Your mother.

This one’s from 2009, I was moving toward doing something but…I don’t remember what I was trying to do. Gosh, I love comics! :3

xoxoxo

Do remember: House of Twelve Monthly is available at ComiXology for your reading pleasure. The first issue is free so go get it!

-Ayo2011.

I drew this comic a long time ago. It says “Decision ‘08,” because that was an election year. And also, this was that long ago.

[Press (A) To Talk] brand comics didn’t go very far with me, but that’s okay. I had fun making them.

xoxoxo

-Ayo2011.

For those of you just joining us (in Western Civilization), there has been a past of some level of acrimony between white European-descended people and black African-descended people. Rumor has it that this hostility continues to this very day. The above panel is from a well-regarded comic called The Adventures of Tintin in which we see the title character being carried about by crudely-drawn black Africans. Today, such images are generally frowned upon and not encouraged.

This man is not amused by what he sees in that comic book. Can you blame him? The Africans in Tintin in the Congo, along with several other of the books in the series are depicted as barely sentient slabs of black ink with few individual characteristics and little sense of humanness. The depictions are harmful both in the visual sense of how Africans are drawn and how they are written. In Tintin and many other early comic books, black persons lack personhood on the page and that ties directly into the extreme degree to which blacks had been pushed out of society and treated as “there-but-not-there” by the white mainstream of society.

In later years, we would see a retreat from such imagery in mainstream comic books, but there was a cost. After some point in history, comic publishers began to feel it not wise or politically inopportune to allow such images in their products. What ended up happening, however, is that black characters largely vanished from many comic books.

And eventually they returned, drawn more naturally, and even starring in their own adventures here and there. But what I find particularly interesting is the way black characters fell from being marginalized figures in society to non-existent for a period in time. And to be sure, to this day, black characters, major or minor, are fairly rare in Western comic books, given the relative population; particularly since many Western comics are set in cities–where blacks tend to live.

I was reading through some old racist comics (because I like old racist comics) and suddenly I felt a burst of lightning; at one point in time, black people were acknowledged in Western comics, followed by a period in which they weren’t. Granted, the portrayal of African people was usually condescending to say the very least–but it was an acknowledgement. There was an awareness of different people, persons different from the white authors and their intended audience. There was a very crude attempt at indicating that Western society is comprised of various cultures. Subcultures that operate within as well as without the white base of power.

And this is where I get into trouble:

I actually like some elements of the racist depiction of black figures in old comics. It first happened to me years ago, I believe in 2003 when I was reading Jim Woodring’s The Frank Book featuring his strange fantasy monsters. Here’s an example of Woodring’s designs:

I kept feeling uncomfortable when I saw Pupshaw and Pushpaw in the pages of Frank due to their graphic similarity to old racist comic strips. Woodring’s iconography is borne of the early Twentieth Century cartooning style. Then it hit me all at once: this is good design. Damn good design!

These are my sketches. I’ve been toying with this idea mentally and decided to lay it out on paper to see how it works in reality. The idea that I came across as I went through Woodring’s work is that the images derived from old comics are very graphically powerful–but not for their political and social implications alone. These images are powerful because they use strong, solid and bold black shapes, detailed with white slivers cutting the ink into recognizable planes. It doesn’t reflect the reality of having dark skin, but it makes a figure stand out and be bold against any graphic background.

In Woodring’s work, this graphic power is harnessed and allowed to run free because it’s used on characters that don’t even approach being human. It’s removed enough from the original context to avoid being hurtful to people. But what if I wanted to bring this graphic approach full circle? What if I wanted to bring it all the way back around to being about humans again. And what if I wanted to take the concept further and use it to show dark skinned humans not as creatures, but as beautiful, stark and striking figures on their our own? WHAT IF I WANTED TO DO THAT?

I’m a blacksmith.

Something that Liz Baillie told me about the type of dude who sees you drawing in your sketchbook in public and asks if you’re an artist. She said she wanted to tell those dudes “No, I’m a fucking BLACKSMITH!”

King City versus Kick-Ass.

In the pages above, both the King City and the Kick-Ass scenes begin with a primary character walking past some parked cars. I don’t know what exactly it was about that visual that appealed to me so strongly but both pages left a powerful impression on my memory. In the case of Kick-Ass, I actually recalled the scene more vividly and with more detail than actually exists in the page. Going to go walk past some parked cars now and have a psychic experience.

Setting the scene.

Art teachers make a big deal in instructing their students to draw from natural life to learn the fundamentals of the human figure before allowing stylization or cultural conventions to dictate the way they draw. In other words, the student should draw from live models, not from comic books. The teachers also instruct their students to draw real environmental settings and settings. However in my experience, they pursue this point with far less specificity. In fact, where we can see endless days of nude figure drawing for the art student, when it comes to inanimate physical settings, teachers focus a lot on mathematical perspective.

Don’t get me wrong; this is a good thing because it instructs students to see the underlying mathematic principles that are integral to reality as well as encouraging the student to draw from Informed Imagination. But I have to be honest, I think–and maybe this was just my school experience–that the life-drawing of physical settings got short shrift.

Fundamentally, I feel that humans are more comfortable with humans. I’ve noticed that many people can’t muster the same fervor for environmental settings that surround, nurture and inform the characters that they have for the characters themselves. Or in simpler sentence structure, people can’t stop ignoring the backgrounds.

When it comes to me, I’ve let my environments slide to the wayside. Back in my Little Garden days, I would spend as much of my drawing energy and my emotional and psychological energy devoted to drawing the grass and the trees and the rivers as I spent drawing the humanoid monsters that populated my imaginary forest. There wasn’t a sense of separation of figure and ground in my work then. When I started moving toward conventional comics storytelling, this sense of harmony with the world was one of the first things that disappeared. So I’m trying to get it back.

This doesn’t have to be attached to the idea of natural mathematical perspective, by the way. Look at the work of John Porcellino, Julie Doucet, Megan Kelso, Chris Ware and the like. These artists use any range of technique from flat-layer-overlap to isometric perspective to pull their character’s worlds into view. What I’m talking about isn’t necessarily a demand to dig up the rulers and protractors, but a plea to artists out there to join me in remembering to give as much attention to the settings  as we do to our living characters.

Artwork (c) Marvel Entertainment, DC Comics, Wildstorm Entertainment, Brandon Graham, Pete Lazarski, Mark Millar + John Romita Jr, Mike Mignola, Sarah Oleksyk, Greg Rucka + Matthew Southworth, Steve Engleheart, Zan Czyzewski, Rachel Edidin + Jen Vaughn, BT Livermore, StudioCanal S.A., Brian Wood, Bill Willingham, Gabby Schulz (aka, Ken Dahl–who I saw at the coffeehouse today) and me: Darryl Ayo Brathwaite.

@darrylayo

Hi readers,

I’m on vacation from work, recuperating from Small Press Expo which was this past weekend. Lots of travel, lots of talking, lots of eating (lots of buffets) lots of talk about the future.

I caught up with Katie Skelly’s Nurse Nurse, met Frank Santoro, got some of Steve Engleheart’s COYOTE from him, bought Galen Longstreth and Maris Wick’s BEAUTIFUL “Yes, But,” Bought Maris Wicks and Liz Prince’s very funny “Duddits,” jammed comics with Anthony Clark, Josh PM Frees and Jamie Baldwin, and the evil Madeline Flores.

I don’t have a convention report. I’m sorry to start naming names, I feel bad about the hundreds of people who I’m not going to list here. If we talked, THANK YOU, I love you.

Also, thanks to Leigh Walton who let me draw in the Tintin sketchbook. And of course super thanks to my pilot and con-roommate L. Nichols! Thanks to BT Livermore, my other essential con-roommate!

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Images from:

Marvel Entertainment, DC Comics, Matt Fraction + Gabriel Ba, Liz Suburbia, Katie Skelly, Brandon Graham, JP Coovert, Galen Longstreth + Maris Wicks, Chris Roberson + Mike Allred, Darryl Ayo Brathwaite and whoever took that photo.

@darrylayo

From X-MEN LEGACY # 238

It’s bizarre to think that X-MEN LEGACY is the same sequence of comics that began with Chris Claremont + Jim Lee’s 1991 X-MEN #1 relaunch. Same also, as Grant Morrison’s NEW X-MEN. This title has been through some changes. Now, with “LEGACY” added to the name, it begins a new era which is actually interesting. This iteration of the title is billed as focusing more on the mutant “students” and less on the superheroics. Although there’s plenty of danger and things exploding and shadowy villains. The concept is closer to that of the old NEW MUTANTS or the OTHER “NEW X-MEN/YOUNG X-MEN” series (yes, it’s confusing, deal with it). All in all, teenage superheroes, I’m in.

Speaking of teenage superheroes:

YOUNG AVENGERS: CHILDREN’S CRUSADE # 1

This is an angsty miniseries about a group of Avengers fans who coincidentally line up, powerwise with the standard Avengers. They’re about to make a name for themselves but it turns out that one of them is too powerful and could basically accidentally kill everybody in the world (or something).

Junior Avengers on the run!

Jim Cheung is brilliant at drawing the adventures of teenage superheroes. I was first introduced to his work in the later days of X-Force (the original X-Force, before Peter Milligan transformed the title into something else). Every page in this comic is gorgeous. The story hasn’t wowed me or anything, but it’s whatever. I’m just here to look at the pretty page and panel designs.

Speaking of “X-Force,”

let me pause for a quick appreciation of Kyle and Yost’s most recent iteration of the title. This one is called “Sex + Violence.”

Lucky shot.

Anyway

Teenage superheroes are a fun bunch of ideas. First you have superheroes, for the action junkies and sci-fi nerds. Secondly, you typically have the nerdy fun that goes with the grab-bag of superpowers that is typical of team books. Thirdly, and most importantly, TEEN DRAMA!

It is important that teenage superheroes are not just shorter regular superheroes. It’s important that they are kind of arrogant, kind of stupid, and kind of wrong-headed. They may get into trouble with the best of the pros (your Superman, Batman, Captain America, etc), but they have the added problem of being shortsighted in that way that only teenagers can pull off while still being kind of endearing.

But on the other hand:

I read this Teen Titans comic where the Justice League shows up and tries to basically smack the Titans around and it is horrible and nauseating. The idea was that the Teen Titans would meet on weekends (they have SCHOOL, you know!) and hang out and fight crime. Real wholesome. But the Justice League “hadn’t authorized” one of the Teen Titans, so they showed up at their house to give them a spanking. All I can say is that Wonder Woman is a dick.

Well, no, Nightwing is a dick.

I still have teenage emotions about the hypocrisy of adults.

To close us out,

Here’s an action panel from the ORIGINAL X-Force # 20 from 1993.

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All images (C) Marvel Entertainment, (C) DC Entertainment, (C) Matt Fraction+Gabriel Ba, (C) Darryl Ayo and (C) Andria Alefhi.

@darrylayo

So we are going to be having a big ole ZINE FEST right here in North Brooklyn this Saturday! The event will be at:

PETE’S CANDY STORE
709 Lorimer Street, between Frost and Richardson.
Take the L train to Lorimer or the G train to Metropolitan. They are, in fact, the same subway station. SHOCK!

3PM TO 7PM!

There’s only a small window of time with which to examine zines and shoot the breeze. Arrive promptly! Also, watch as I drink exactly one (1) beer. IT’LL BE CRAZY!

Here’s the FaceBook page if you’re into that sort of thing.

But Andria, the organizer, also wrote up a post on her own blog, explaining why you should come and party with us.

Who’s going to hanging out and talking to you?

Andria Alefhi – We’ll Never Have Paris (http://neverhaveparis.blogspot.com/)

Paul Assimacopoulos – Strangers Gate Books (www.strangersgatebooks.com)

Darryl Ayo – Little Garden (www.letsgoayo.com)

Joseph Carlough – Displaced Snail Publications (http://www.josephcarlough.com/)

Matt Carman + Kseniya Yarosh – I Love Bad Movies, Oh My / Oh No (ksen.tumblr.com)

Alexis Clements – Dance Away Your Debt, Your Own Personal Apocalypse (http://www.alexisclements.com/)

Marguerite Dabaie – The Hookah Girl (hookah-girl.margoyle.net)

Tea Fougner – Pygmalion, Different Comics (http://www.antagonia.net/)

Alan Grow – The Devil Made the Dinosaur Bones

Katie Haegle – The La-La Theory (http://www.thelalatheory.com/)

Andrew Hoepfner – All Kinds of Bees (http://www.facebook.com/andrew.hoepfner)

Lola Batling – Sweet Angel, Suicide Kiss (http://stores.lulu.com/inkigirl)

Josh Medsker – 24 Hour Zine (http://twentyfourhourszine.blogspot.com/)

James Molenda- FOUND Magazine (www.foundmagazine.com)

L. Nichols – Jumbly Junkery (www.dirtbetweenmytoes.com)

Rachel + Sari – Hoax Zine, You’ve Got a Friend (http://hoaxzine.tumblr.com/)

Redguard – Absent-Cause Zine (http://www.absent-cause.org/)

Kenan Rubenstein – Drought, Tick, The Oubliette (http://www.underthehaystack.net/)

Esther K Smith – Purgatory Pie Press (www.purgatorypiepress.com)

Joe Younglove – Oculomotor

So come on down this Saturday and get ready to get your face rocked off.

KAPOWWWWWWWWWW, son!

@darrylayo

It’s time to look at some comic books.

The best discussion about comic books these days is happening at the following locations:

Aaron Diaz’ Dresden Codak blog

David Brothers and friends’ 4th Letter blog

Brandon Graham’s Royalboiler blog

Comics Comics

Scans_Daily 3.0

I am very pleased with the level of analysis and detailed focus on the comics medium, coming from these persons and groups. David Brothers’ in-depth studies of “7 Artists,” “6 Writers,” “5 Series,” etc have opened my eyes on some great work being published right now, in the broad daylight of the comics industry. Forward one of Brothers’ articles to a friend; his lengthy but fascinating critiques can serve as a wake-up call about what’s going on in these funnybook pages. Aaron Diaz’ new Tumblr blog attacks from another direction. Sitting in his artist’s chair, Diaz posts his precise opinions of what works in comics and why; illustrating with examples of his strip as well as other cartoonists. The post on focal points alone makes this blog one to subscribe to.

I’ve been writing and drawing. It can be hard to divide one’s attention between the necessary tasks (going to a day job) and the desired tasks (making comics). My reading material/fuel has changed considerably over the past few months but the objective remains the same. These mid-week/hump-day breaks to pick up comic books have invigorated my brain cells in a way that hasn’t happened in a long time. All in all, it’s a change.

Now Wednesdays are like having a tiny weekend right in the middle of my work week. I strongly prefer to get at least a couple of new comic issues each shipping day because it calms my screaming mind. Perhaps it’s a simple consumer’s endorphin release. Whatever it is, it feels good to read new stuff so I do.

The best thing is talking to other people who have read the same comic and are bursting at the seams to talk about it! I miss seeing that enthusiasm in comics fans. Indie comics dudes tend to be more than happy to read and quietly absorb a work. I want to hear noise, chatter, discussion, arguments, LIFE!

On Serialization.

The serial nature of these comics is the best part. Slightly before I took the full plunge back into issue-buying, I was working on ideas for a serial comic of my own. What I quickly realized is that there’s a certain joy to reading a piece of a story at a time. The audience reads an issue or chapter, if you will, and even if they breeze through it relatively quickly, there is this period of re-reading that happens. I certainly did this when I was a kid. Reading and re-reading the issue/chapter over and over until the next issue comes out. This repetition puts readers very emotionally close to the material. Hardcore fans’ notorious attention to detail and needlepoint memories can easily be attributed to this system of close re-reading of material that they only have incremental access to.

I have found that I am far less likely (though this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule) to revisit the pages of a book-format comic than I am with a series of issues. In fact, for the most part, the books that are collections of issues are the primary exceptions to this tendency of mine. But as I said, this is not at all a “rule,” nor should it be looked at as evidence for any solid conclusion.

Writing it all down.

As I’ve said before, one of my concerns with the comics medium is a devaluation of the writing aspect. It seems to me that in mainstream comics, the “writer” tends to be working at the orders of the editorial department of a given company. Even in this era of superstar writers, this appears to be the case. In independent and literary comics, we have the problem of cartoonists who’ve trained to draw but hardly gave writing a second thought. This isn’t an indictment of anybody in particular and I’m not saying this even applies to “all” or “most.” I just sense problems.

Speaking of writing, I like jokes.

Character-driven jokes, plot-driven jokes, random “filler” jokes, cheap jokes, cruel jokes, puns, I wish I could laugh with more comic books. Or at least crack a smile! Obviously, I don’t expect EVERY comic to have a funny bone. Some comics are downright life-and-death. But for the comics that feature extended narratives, long-standing characters, you’d think somebody would be able to say or do something worthy of a rimshot.

All images are taken from (C) Marvel Comics, (C) DC Comics, (C) Wildstorm Entertainment. Creative people involved were Zeb Wells + Chris Bachalo, Brian Michael Bendis + John Romita Jr., Brian Wood + Rebekah Isaacs, Peter Milliagan + Giuseppe Camuncoli/Stefano Landini, Daniel Way + Carlo Barberi, Peter David + Sebastian Fiumara.

@darrylayo

I grew up on the X-Men. I started with Jim Lee’s 1991 X-Men #1 and kept reading after he left the book. Maybe a year later, I picked up on X-Force through back issues that my godbrother had. I wasn’t a fan of the X-Force art, but I really loved the characters. A bunch of angry, younger X-guys living inside a mountain and fighting bad guys. I started buying X-Force when they got a better artist (Greg Capullo) and ditched Cable. It was a fun time. Those were some of the most important comic books for me, ever. This past month, I’ve been going back and re-buying those Greg Capullo X-Force issues and soaking up the memories. Sure, there were better comic books at the time (X-Factor), but this was always where my heart was.

A few years later, I discovered Akira, also thanks to my godbrother. Akira felt like the X-Men concept enhanced by a more plausible set of scenarios. All of the superhumans in Akira are psychokinetics with various specialties. I really liked the idea that the superpowers came from a single extra-natural concept rather than the (rather creative) hodge-podge of weird powers which defined the X-Men. In Akira, I could see how different characters would use this same powerset in very different ways, according to their personalities, personal strength and circumstances. Just like in real life, there are different kinds of strength or intelligence with various applications thereof.

My godbrother and I conspired to make a comic masterpiece that was a rough rip-off of Akira with some X-Men-style soap opera drama. Oh, the notes we had! I hope those notes did not survive the years, they were even embarrassing when we were teenagers. Anyway, as an adult, I periodically have the idea to revisit this theme and do an X-Men/Akira-inspired comic book. And then I saw Warren Ellis’ Freak Angels, which basically did everything that we wanted to.

I really love Freak Angels, I read it every Friday (or Saturday if I’m too busy…look how cool I am). It’s one of my favorite webcomics as well as one of my favorite currently running comics of any kind. The thing that gnaws at my insides is how much I wish I threw my hat in the “psychic teenagers” genre sooner. Because I feel like anything that I do now will be placed directly in the shadow of this work, specifically. It has the same sort of blend of Akira/X-Teams concepts that have been chewing the insides of my brain since the 1990s. Not one or the other, but a descendant of both.

While I was writing this post,

I was talking to my pal Sarah Oleksyk who tipped me off to this highly relevant blog post that she wrote the other day. Honestly, you can stop reading my post now and just click over to Sarah’s.

Regarding the page up top:

I am drawing this thing digitally, but I messed up the formatting, so I’m going to start over. It’s just the rough pencil phase, so no big deal whatsoever. This is a storyline that is still being fleshed out. It’s a story in which the setting plays a crucial role in the conflicts. Writing takes so long!

Here’s a sketch page for a similar comic that I’m trying to flesh out. This one relates to the same world and circumstances as the above-mentioned story, but at a slightly different point in life.

I know that I misspelled “malefactor.”

Although now that I know how it’s spelled, do you think there would be any confusion about the type of comic it is? Title “Malefactor.”

Thanks for listening!

@darrylayo

New York Mining Disaster 1941 – The Bee Gees

I haven’t posted in a while. Those photo comics are fun but they are more work than I thought. I hung it up for a bit in order to focus on writing. Those of you following my Twitter may have picked up that I’ve been spending the past two weeks writing. I’ve been sharpening my craft by focusing on fanfiction–the X-Men, if you must know. It’s some of the best fun I’ve had in a long time. Something about playing with other people’s ideas and creations opens up a door in my head and allows me to truly cut loose. Perhaps it’s due to tapping into something outside of myself–larger than myself–that makes it feel so very exciting.

Why I have trouble making comics:

Comics have to be exciting. Comics cannot be boring. I don’t want to hear that “comics can be any-which-way” stuff. Boring comics get thrown into a large pile of refuse at my house. And I’ve made a LOT OF BORING COMICS in my days. I still do. The panel above? Boring. The rest of the strip that it’s from? BORING. Part of me thinks that I’ve got to get it out of my system. Part of me knows the truth. The truth is I’ve been running in place for years.

How come?

I am a trained artist. I taught myself the best that I could as a teenager and when I went to college I majored in illustration. No mistake about it, drawing well takes a great deal of time and is mentally taxing. It’s FUN! But it’s difficult. Through all of this, I have fallen into the mistake that so many of our comicky brethren have: spending so much time on the crafting of the comic that the crafting of the intangibles (story, character, etc) are lost in the shuffle. It’s my instinct: I want to draw a comic, so I sit down and draw one…without having an idea of WHAT to do, so any ole thing will suffice. In that sense, I’m an incomplete cartoonist. I’m unable to reach my potential because I haven’t taken very much time to fully engage the other half of the process. I’ve taken a couple of writing classes, but no deep, intensive personal study.

I know that many other cartoonists suffer the same affliction. The drawing tends to be what we love and so we throw ourselves into producing for the sake of production but don’t really have a full mind behind the work–or a full heart.

There is a traditional aversion to collaboration in the indie/alternative comics world. Cartoonists who draw stories written by other people are derided as “just illustrators.” Meanwhile, fifty-billionteen minicomics come out every convention that center around personal grooming habits, really basic vignettes and other nonscenes and nonsense.

A series of coincidences led me back to reading mainstream comic books on a regular basis. It has been almost a decade.  But the difference between the professionalism that I had grown to accept as normal within the indie comics scene and the professionalism that exists in the mainstream is night and day. I don’t just mean DC and Marvel when I say “mainstream,” but I also mean Image, Dark Horse, Oni Press, IDW, Boom, et cetera. There’s something very driven about this work and after a decade of fumbling in the darkness, their clarity of purpose feels like a glass of ice cold water on these New York summer days.

I don’t know, I wish there were more people talking about comics without talking ABOUT COMICS.

-Darryl Ayo