Party Principles
A preview of illustrations to come.
From The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie:
The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it. The first program to write is the same for all languages: Print the words
hello, world. This is a big hurdle; to leap over it you have to be able to create the program text somewhere, compile it successfully, load it, run it, and find out where your output went. With these mechanical details mastered, everything else is comparatively easy.
So it is with a project like The Socialist Book of the Dead. After reading a lot of comics1 and trying quite a few things for a couple of weeks, I have determined:
I hate drawing on a tablet. This isn’t just a matter of not being particularly skilled at it. The tactile and spiritual difference between pencil on paper and “pen” on tablet is like the difference between a good brie and spray cheese.
However, this project will take me until the end of time if I hand-draw and hand-color everything.
Besides, coloring on a tablet is pretty great. You can do all kinds of wild stuff in Krita to add various shades of character to a drawing made by hand and digitized.
Provisionally, the process for this book will be to draw it in pencil, including the lettering. Yes, the young’ns are purchasing typefaces from Comic Book Fonts and inserting them into the art files via keyboard. There’s a place for that. This project isn’t one of them. Lettering is drawing.
I’ve decided not to ink the pencils. Instead, I’m finishing to a degree that I wouldn’t if I were inking, scanning the drawing, opening it in GIMP, blasting the hell out of the contrast, and using Color to Alpha to drop the white to transparency. I then Select All, Copy, and Paste into a Krita document.
In Krita I clean up the drawing, but not too much. The junky look works better than precise lines, I’ve decided. I’m even leaving hints of the Ames guide. I then add layers under the drawing, one black, another Communist Red, and hit it with chalk brushes in various opacities until the result looks like a badly wiped intaglio print, with the colors slightly misregistered. This style is pretty close to what I’m looking for: schematic, yet grimy. Just like your country under a planned economy.
The subject above is Khrushchev delivering the so-called Secret Speech. The completed comic will appear in this journal shortly.
Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.
Our next title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Confessions of an Old Jewish Painter by R.B. Kitaj. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.
The next exhibition in the Dissident Museum is Suddenly, A Tree Appeared: Three Comics Artists Look at the Landscape.
Namely, Woman Rebel by Peter Bagge, Pablo by Julie Birmant and Clément Oubrerie, Buñuel: In the Labyrinth of the Turtles by Fermín Solís, Will Eisner: A Comics Biography by Stephen Weiner and Dan Mazur (nice work, Dan!), A Contract with God by Will Eisner, and parts of Pyongyang by Guy Delisle.
🩷 Ames guide 🩷
The grime is good, Franklin. I suppose it's easier to do than putrefaction, which would be more appropriate but perhaps a bit heavy-handed, for practical purposes.