Here’s the slidecast of the presentation I did in Second Life today at the “Mini-Morph: A Second Life Web Comics Comic-Con and Conference.” Presentations were focused on comics in the classroom and comics courses. So I made this presentation about using transformative constraint to get non-drawing students creating comics. I recorded this audio the evening before the presentation as a practice session, so it differs from whatever I said at the actual event.
March 18th, 2009
October 8th, 2008
More constraint presentation follow-up
Issac asked for clickable links, so I’ve added links to all the works I cited (or used) in my presentation to the post that has the audio version. I’ll also add, that Mike Wenthe made my day in his post where he refers to me as “cartoonist, critic, and comics theorist”.
Issac also commented:
It’d be interesting [...]
October 3rd, 2008
Freedom within Boundaries – Presentation
I spoke in Second Life at Met@Morph, the first annual Web Comics Comic-Con and Conference, on Friday October 3rd (today). My presentation was called “Freedom within Boundaries: the Theory and Practice of Constraint in Comics.” I only had 20 minutes so it’s a fairly shallow look at the topic. You can see the slides here [...]
September 19th, 2008
Categories: Comics, Constraint
Presenting on Comics and Constraint
I’m going to be presenting in Second Life (?!) at Met@Morph, the first annual Web Comics Comic-Con and Conference on Friday October 3rd. I’ll be talking about the theory and practice of constraint, with a focus on comics. My part is at 2:30pm EST. I’ve never used Second Life, so we’ll see how it goes. [...]
September 7th, 2008
Categories: Constraint, TV and Film
Series and Repetition
To the extant that these fictions work through a limited number of motifs, they pointedly critique the notion according to which true filmmakers are those who refuse to repeat themselves. For Rohmer, the art of the film director lies not in the search for new subjects, genres, or tones but in orchestrating now subtle, now [...]
March 6th, 2008
Categories: Comics, Constraint
Gary Gygax RIP
Those of you who know who E. Gary Gygax is have surely already heard, and those who don’t know wouldn’t care, that he died the other day. Gygax is forever linked to the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons as one of the co-creators (the most famous and recognized of them). I owe a lot to [...]
November 12th, 2007
Categories: Comics, Constraint
Panels & Pictures: Constraint
My latest Panels & Pictures column is up at ComixTalk. It’s called “Constraint” and is a pretty general overview of the idea of constraint with a bunch of comics specific examples. If you’ve been reading this blog, you’ve probably heard it all before.
August 4th, 2007
Constraint: Stolen Birthday Present
While I haven’t been posting here much, I have been working on some projects. One of them is an idea I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, I’ve tentatively called it the “Stolen Birthday Present” constraint.
As I read more and more archives of comic strips (so many excellent ones to choose from these [...]
July 18th, 2007
Categories: Constraint
What is Constraint?
[This is a preliminary definition.]
0. I will attempt to define my conception of a constraint as used in relation to artistic works, focusing on the literary, though there are certainly applications for film, music, painting, etc. Contrary to what much literary criticism and theory has tried to assert, I don’t believe literature or the study [...]
June 9th, 2007
Categories: Comics, Constraint
Constraint reprints searching
A few links for this week.
a) Tom Hart’s Hutch Blog: MATT MADDEN’S FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS TO ME: Matt Madden is playing Von Trier to Tom Hart’s Leth as they recreate The Five Obstructions for a week of Hutch Owen strips. This is one to watch.
b) Celebrating Short Stories in Comics c. 1970’s-1980’s with commentary by Dave [...]