I haven’t written a post about the stimulusresponse side of life for a little while, and it occurs to me that I’ve been doing a bunch of these All-Caps Comics and might try and say something about them. Also, while I’ve been gathering some more thoughts of Modern Warfare 2, I haven’t jumbled them into any order, so.

So, I’ve been drawing a series of comics called “All Caps Comics”. They came about because one day, while writing my (theoretically) daily poetry, I decided to write it with the caps lock on just for the hell of it. I forget why exactly, but the effect of writing that way was to drain emotion out in a really strange way. Everything became a kind of direct broadcast from my brain, generally without much nuance.

And it’s a voice I liked quite a lot, so I pursued it. And, poetry being poetry and poetry being mysterious, the poems came out as odd conversations between two invisible protagonists. They talked about all kinds of thing, usually ending up in some kind on blunt non sequitur or inappropriate statement.

At the same time, I was getting bored of the things in my special bin (folder on my desktop) of ideas and sketches. Ideas have their time, and then they rot. That’s one of those things on the Cult of Done manifesto which, though I don’t agree with all of it, has some good general points. So anyway, I turned to these all caps poems as a way of generating content for new comics, since I’ve become obsessed with the idea of producing comics (or other things) as often as I find humanly possible. Preferably at least every two days, say.

And hence, the All-Caps Comics I’ve been doing, in which I take one of the poems and then try to make it into a little comic of people talking to each other. It’s been a bit of an adventure and the entire time I’ve been searching for some reasonable style for representing the strange flatness of the poems, while keeping it interesting to look at (as in, for there to be some kind of point in making it a comic at all).

I kind of suspect that these comics too closely refer to my own stupid inner thoughts and impulses, and thus come across as more or less incomprehensible to other. Well, that’s pretty much life. My feeling is basically that if I think too much about what might be rad for other people, I’ll be screwed and not draw anything at all.

Better the devil inside than the devil in the audience.

The newest comic I’ll be posting on stimulusresponse a minute or two after posting this post was one of the very few things I lost in my latest harddrive failure a couple of weeks ago (The Future of Food). I’d drawn up the entire thing in the morning, meaning it hadn’t been saved in the nightly backups. (Since then I’ve taken some good advice and work on my “current projects” inside a DropBox folder. Easy.)

Anyway, having lost it, I was reluctant to do it all over again for a while, but today I plowed through the process and got it together. And it was kind of interesting to do that, because it was a bit “meta” in the sense of observing how I was going about things. In particular, although I kept the panel layouts, a couple of minor bits and pieces got changed for the better (I think) compared to the lost version.

Those bits and pieces relate to communicating what’s going on in the comic, because in demoing it to a couple of people I got divergent opinions on what the final panel (a plate of peas spelling out “fuck you”) meant. I noticed that when I did the comic this time, I added in a kind of cue to make it clear that it was the food machine insulting the user, rather than the other way around – by adding in a little speech thing to kind of create a sense of timing. I also made the vegetarian’s voice more irritating, so it seemed more “fair” that the machine would react badly. Ah, these little manipulations.

Anyway, that all seemed interesting to me because in recreating something I’d already made I was more alert to some of the subtler issues of making comics that I ordinarily totally ignore in favour of whatever I can be bothered with at the time of creation. Not that this means I’m likely to “think harder” with future comics, but it was fun seeing it does make a difference.

Carrying on with my process of drawing poems as comics I put together one based on a poem about an alien attack. The poem itself is pretty brief, and I think I even posted it here at one point: “When the aliens attacked / They came in ships shaped like raisins. / It’s embarrassing, but we thought we’d kick their asses / Because of that one, slim fact.” Lends itself to illustration, really.

Various fun things came up during the process. The first of which was how to do more than just literally draw the stanzas of the poem. Going with a need to do comics with less text, I wanted to draw the implied consequences of the poem (ass-kicking by the aliens) in a really extended way… to kind of overdo it, or get across how comprehensive it was. So in some ways the comic is mostly a drawing of all the white space after the poem.

Then there was epic drawing and redrawing as I tried to draw skylines and make them look like they were being zapped by alien rays. It’s almost depressing how hard that was, but I think the solution of having them kind of disintegrating along the edges of the beams and just gone further in worked out alright. Probably a bit of a cliche, but from my less-than-amazing-technical-drawing-skills perspective, I was happy.

Finally, the question of how much of the text of the poem to include. I originally thought I’d have it drawn in more numerous panels with the poem serving as captions as it went along. Then I had the whole poem just sitting like a lump at the top. And then an editor of mine suggested dropped the second stanza altogether and effectively let it be implied by the first panel. Which, really, is what comics should do in the first place, right? It also allowed me to run the first stanza on as a single line and to just make it a title for the comics, rather than part of a poem. Though then it introduced the problem of making sure the people pointing at the raisin spaceships looked like they thought they could kick their asses. Not so sure if I nailed that one, but it’s good enough.

So, just goes to show, even a rather simple comic which intensely basic composition and so on can involve plenty of agonizing behind the scenes. Is that a good thing?