Category Archives: comics

Resonation Points 2: Poems and Comics

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flickr photo shared by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³ under a Creative Commons ( BY-SA ) license

Yesterday, I wrote a bit about seeking out the writing of others and creating something new that honors those writers. I called it Resonation Points. This morning, I want to follow up on that with two more resonation points: one that arrived in the comment bin of yesterday’s post and the other that arrived in my mailbox.

First, Terry (who was one of those writers I focused on) responded at the blog with a very poetic comment, with all sorts of nifty phrases, and then noted that it might be a poem. “Be watching for it on Twitter,” he said, so I did, and then we had some back and forth with poetry. He wrote about it in a way that is much better than I can write about it.

This is the poem I wrote, remixing his blog comment:

Comment poem

Then, I received a postcard from Susan (some of us in CLMOOC have been spending a year sending out periodic postcards … it will become part of this year’s CLMOOC, too) with a lovely message … and a challenge that I use the postcard in a comic somehow. Well, challenge accepted!

Susan's postcard comic

Peace (get connected!),
Kevin

 

Free Comic Book Day is Nearly Here

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In case you were unaware, this coming Saturday (May 7) is Free Comic Book Day at many local and independent book stores. I usually go with at least one of my boys and grab a few titles, some of which I bring into the classroom for literacy activities in the school year. I also tell my students about Free Comic Book Day and let them know a few places where they can go.

You can check your geographic area at the Free Comic Book Day website and it will let you know which stores are participating. Each year, the crowd gets larger in our area.

Peace (in the book),
Kevin

Amid the Grids; Among these Gestures

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Lots of people this week have taken up the call by graphic artist Nick Sousanis to create “Grids and Gestures” — a comic-creating visual activity in which you move beyond a literal interpretation of your day or moment or some period of time. Instead, you let your mind wander, drawing (without words, if possible) a visual representation (that’s the gesture) of the time period (that’s the grid).

Gridgestures4

I’ve done this once before with Nick, but doing a series of them over a few days has been interesting. Sort of like our Slice of Life writing activities, but with lines and circles and smudges instead of stories and vignettes. How would you “write” your day if you could not write, but only draw? How do you represent moments of joy? Frustration? Confusion? Boredom? Love? What does those ideas look like when you sketching at the edge of it all?

Gridgestures5

My five Grids and Gestures used the same six-panel grid, and I used the Paper app for my drawing. So each has a similar feel to them (and exposes my limited artistic abilities). I tried to explored different topics, and used the title on each to indicate what I was thinking about.

It does occur to me that while I can “read” the gestures, others outside of my head (that would be you, dear reader) might wonder, what the heck is that? I wonder if how you read my grids is different than how I wrote my grids? Maybe that is the case with writing, too, at times.

Gridgestures3

There was a community question in the Twitter hashtag about whether these Grids and Gestures are really comics, or something that comes before the comics. In other words, are they incomplete ideas, only part of the brainstorming process?

Nick suggests that this method of creating art with gestures is where much of his time is spent before moving into a larger project, and that it is an effective way to gather ideas and explore the flow of connected concepts. I suggested that the grids are comics in their own way, moving ideas through inferential design and using art to represent abstract ideas.

Maybe it doesn’t matter anyway. Art is what you make of it.

Gridgestures2

If you are interested, explore the Twitter hashtag of #GridsGestures (actually, check out the link to photos only in the Twitter hashtag stream — that’s pretty cool) or check out Nick’s website and some of his amazing work.

Make your own. Share them out. Be creative. Every day.

Gridsgestures1

Peace (beyond the grids),
Kevin

 

Grids and Gestures: A Comic Make

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Gridsgestures1

Nick Sousanis, whose work as a graphic story/artist is always intriguing (see Unflattening) and interesting, is hosting an informal week of Grids and Gestures, his activity that invites you to make a conceptual comic built around time and design. Nick did a Make with Me hangout with CLMOOC this past summer, and we all did the activity. He also wrote a great piece for Digital Writing Month about the art of comics.

The image — done in the Paper app on my iPad — above is my first Grid and Gesture attempt for the week .. tracking my weekend day over time.

Here, Nick explains how Grids and Gestures works:

Give it a try this week. I’ll be doing mine, too, as I think about my days in terms of conceptual design. You don’t need to be an artist or a writer or a comic creator. That’s the beauty of Nick’s activity. Anyone can enter, at any level, and still come out with an understanding of the world.

Comics space time

Peace (inside and beyond the grids),
Kevin

Woody Guthrie Lives Inside of Me

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memecat stays positive

From time to time, I pull out my guitar and record a “corner concert” in my house. Nothing fancy. Just me and a song. Given all the noise about politics, to which I am very much attuned, I pulled out this song that I wrote, Woody Guthrie Lives Inside of Me.

While the politicians sleep
We’ll occupy the streets
Woody Guthrie lives inside of me

Thanks for watching and listening and being engaged in this crazy political season.

That man

Peace (in the songs),
Kevin

Slice of Life: Who Stole My Hour?

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(This is for the Slice of Life challenge for March, hosted by Two Writing Teachers. We are writing each day about the small moments in the larger perspective … or is that the larger perspective in the smaller moments? You write, too.)

That hour ... Gone

Not much more to say here … my hour went missing last night and now I am wondering where it went … the only good news about Daylight Savings is that Spring has to be right around the corner, right?

Peace (in the leap),
Kevin

So Long, Internet Kid — It’s Been Great Writing You (and You, Too, Horse)

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InternetKid23

This post wraps up The Wild West Adventures of the Internet Kid, a daily webcomic that I started in January as part of the #Ds106 offshoot known as #Western106 and 40-plus comics later, I am bringing the adventures to an end (for now). I decided to make this FlipBook of all of the comics in the series, and you can find the collection at The Kid’s tumblr site, too.

Thanks for reading. I hope it made you smile here and there, and maybe got you to think about genres and stereotypes (of Westerns and of Technology), now and then. I had a blast writing them. See you on the open trails!

Read the Collection

Peace (in the flip),
Kevin

PS — Wondering how I made the Internet Kid flipbook? I created a Keynote slideshow (powerpoint or slides would work), imported all of the comic images, and then saved the whole thing as a PDF. That allowed me to use the Fliphtml5 site (which requires PDF uploads) to convert it into the flippable book. Easy. But I like how all of the comics look like they are in a book format.

 

The Last Pony Ride of the Internet Kid (for now)

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InternetKid23

I am nearing the end of this two-month run of making comics for The Wild West Adventures of the Internet Kid. This has been an ancillary project for the Course with No Course — a Western-themed offshoot of DS106. It has been a ton of fun to make these comics, but I don’t know how daily cartoonist do it, to be frank. The stress of new ideas … ack …. good thing I don’t do my own art or I would have gone mad weeks ago.

Today’s comic begins the last storyline, which will stretch out over a few days and invite you to take part in the story, too. It features The Kid and a Video Game Vortex coming to town.

You can view the Internet Kid Tumblr site, where I have been posting the comics every day (as well as on Twitter, with the #Western106 hashtag). You can also use the “random” option with Tumblr, so that when you click the link below, it will take you to a random comic at the site.

Get a Random Kid

While this is the last storyline, I suspect that this pause in making daily comics is only for now, and not forever. It’s hard to give up a character like The Internet Kid and The Horse with No Name and Anarchist Annie and Question Mark and others after living with them for seven weeks or so. They’re in my head, and in my heart.

Peace (in the frame of story and humor),
Kevin

 

Twenty+ Comics In: Checking In On The Internet Kid

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InternetKid1

I’m past 20 now. Twenty-odd daily comics for The Wild West Adventures of the Internet Kid, an idea that was sparked by my participation in the open Western106 story adventure. I thought I would take a breather here to reflect on how it’s going for me, the writer (I make an appearance now and then in the comic, usually for criticism for not writing better comics or not paying attention to equity issues. Guilty as charged!).

Well, breather, plus today’s comic:

InternetKid12

So far, so good with my idea of a daily comic, although I have very little idea if anyone is reading them. A few comments and reactions trickle in now and then. I’m still more focused on the question for myself: Am I having fun making the comics? I am and so, I keep on going forward. In fact, I have at least another 15 comics in the bank, set to go forth, including one story arc that will invite readers to play a game. I also have an ending comic, for when I get there.

The way I have been writing them is in bursts. In fact, the first weekend when I had the idea for the Internet Kid, I had a deluge of comic making. I cranked out about 15 of them in a three-day weekend, just keeping up with the ideas. I won’t claim that every comic every day is great, but I hope they add a little entertainment chuckle value for folks now and then.

InternetKid8

What I am really trying to with The Wild West Adventures of the Internet Kid is to combine some of the elements of the Western genre (the cowboy, the horse, the villain) with some insights into the modern culture of technology. It’s trickier than it seems to pull that off in an entertaining way. I am often trying to make fun at the stereotypes of gender, making the so-called villain — Anarchist Annie — an interesting character, or so I hope. Her goal is to poke holes in the bias of our world. Sometimes, she blows things up to make her point crystal clear.

Attacking Annie ... Dumb move

In fact, a few of the storylines and comics are pulled directly from my reading of Participatory Culture in a Networked Era, a slow-read in the Digital Writing Month community. If you have read that book (and you should), and if you read The Internet Kid (which, of course, I hope you do), you will start to see some parallels of ideas around technology and learning and young people’s interactions in the Digital Age that surfaced there in that study of participatory culture by Henry Jenkins, Mimi Ito and danah boyd, and then got woven here into this comic.

The app I used to make comics — Comics Head — has limits, particularly to expressions of characters (although an upgrade this weekend with a ton of new art seems to open the door for adding more elements .. still checking that out). But I do appreciate the flexibility of the Comics Head app for what I am doing as a comic strip writer. (And I have not yet used the Audio element on The Internet Kid … which allows you to layer in audio tracks on top of the comic .. on my list)

I am purposefully posting the comics in different places — on Twitter with the #western106 hashtag, in Flickr in an album, and on a Tumblr site that I set up just for the comics (it turns out Tumblr is a perfect space for daily comics). Sometimes, I share on Google Plus. I also have the feed of the Tumblr site spilling into the DS106 course. I wonder if anyone else other than me uses an RSS Reader to peruse the posts going there and make comments?

Can I just give a shout-out to my favorite character in my comic?

The Horse with No Name just cracks me up. I hadn’t even thought of a horse until I had the Kid in mind, and then .. of course he needed a horse. The Kid is a cowboy. But not just any horse. The Horse with No Name (cue: America song) has his own personality.

He refuses to let The Kid ride him and the Horse even negotiates an agreement with the Kid on this matter (The Kid agrees but worries what other cowboys will think of him). Yet, the Horse with No Name remains a funny and insightful sidekick to The Kid.

I think, as the writer, I am the Horse with No Name more than I am The Internet Kid. (Maybe I have some Anarchist Annie in me, too.) This particular comic of the animals having a farmyard chat about The Kid, in particular, still makes me giggle. I love how the Horse has the tablet and the image of The Kid on it. Look at The Kid’s posture and expression. Priceless. We know who is really in charge of their partnership.

InternetKid13

Peace (more comics to come),
Kevin

Book Review: Thing Explainer

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Cover of the book Thing Explainer

What Randall Monroe pulls off in Thing Explainer reminds me a bit of what Dr. Seuss did with his early books for young readers: he purposefully uses a minimal amount of words to explain the complicated world (although Dr. Seuss sought to teach young people how to read with The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham).

In the case of Thing Explainer, Monroe limited himself to 1,000 common words, and no more (he lists them at the end of the book). That may seem like a lot, until you realize the complexity of the world he is explaining — such as computerized data centers that make up cloud computing, and the space stations, cells, and the human body, and more.

What Monroe brings to these explanations is his witty sense of visuals and webcomic ability, which are always on display at his xkcd webcomic, but here, his visuals are given full pages (the book is oversized, and I would probably recommend going with the physical book over a digital book, but that’s just me). He may only use stick people, but those stick people are hilarious in their poses and verbal asides, and they fit in perfectly with Monroe’s visual design of our modern world, told in simple language.

It’s fun learning.

My students are in the midst of expository writing right now, and I might see if I can get a few of Monroe’s drawings out of the book and up onto my classroom walls. The pencil one in particular is very interesting and inviting, and it would surely draw the attention of my students (we’ve been doing diagram drawing all year long for creative writing).

Monroe also created a “simple writer” website, for trying out yourself how to explain something in few words, using his database of common words. I popped this entire blog post into it, and discovered many words above and beyond the complexity point.

Using SimpleWriter

 

Peace (in the thing, explained),
Kevin