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.
Download readable slides (1MB pdf)
Credits for Images by Slide:
1. Steranko, Jim. Strange Tales #168 (Marvel, 1968).
2. Little Lulu detournement by Ken Knabb.
3. Art: Schulz, Charles. The Complete Peanuts 1959-1960 (Fantagraphics). Text: Lefebvre, Henri. “The Everyday and Everydayness.” Yale French Studies 73 (1987).
4. Ayroles, Francis and Herge. Oupus 2 (L’Association).
5. Marsh, Jesse. Tarzan 19 (Dell, 1951). (Whoops this one got left out accidentally.)
6. Marsh, Jesse. Tarzan Annual 4 (Dell, 1955).
7. Powell, Bob. Cave Girl 13 (Magazine Enterprises, 1954).
8. Marsh, Jesse. Tarzan 14 (Dell, 1950).
9. Art by Ernie Bushmiller from Nancy. Remixed by Bill Randall. More on Five Card Nancy from Scott McCloud.
10. Damn, I didn’t take notes for where the images came from. Someone on Flickr. Sorry. Text by me.
11. Peter, H.G. Sensation Comics 14 (DC, 1943).
Much credit goes to Thierry Groensteen’s “Un Premier Bouquet de Contraintes” in Oupus 1 (L’Assocation, 1997) for some of these ideas.
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5 Responses to “Transformative Constraint in the Comics Classroom”
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I quite like how this came out, especially the Schulz/Lefebvre and the “Reframing” page. It’s funny, these kinds of transformations in comics, even when R. Sikoryak does them, strike me as works of criticism. And there’s probably a Kirby biography waiting to be pieced together from his entire oeuvre, panel-by-panel.
[...] presenting today in Second Life I also put up an art show and talked about the work. Here are some screenshots I took. The avatar [...]
Thanks, Bill. During the q&a after the actual presentation I ended up talking a bit about the idea of the work as criticism. I read something in a book about Godard’s Alphaville recently discussing his use of the film as film criticism.
The idea with comics deserves some further attention. I have a post started somewhere.
The Lefebvre seemed somehow perfect for Linus. He’s always the philosophical one in Peanuts.
Ah, Alphaville. Godard’s always been a favorite of mine– he wrote that he saw writing about movies and making them as part of the same act. His video works especially push the idea, as they allow more pliable images. Not sure what an analogue for video in comics would be, though. Minis?
(And I remember someone on TCJ’s old board sketching out a version of Everyman with Charlie Brown as the title character.)
Probably webcomics would be a closer analogue.