Madinkbeard

4th Blogiversary

DerikB — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 13:00:18 +0000

Today, after what seems like months of build up, is Primary day in Pennsylvania. It’s also my 4th blogiversary.

Here are a few bits and pieces from the past year that might entice you to visit the archives:

On American Elf: “Comics is often spoken of as an art of subtraction or omission. What is left out in the breakdown of panels is as important as what is put in. American Elf is notable for what it does leave out: almost any reference to the repetitious moments of life, to the everyday…”

On Yukiko’s Spinach: “Boilet uses a number of tactics to create the first person perspective. He composes his panels in such a way that we see through his (or rather the author character’s) eyes. The compositional focus moves around in the panels like the unsteady eye of a human. For instance in these three panels we see Yukiko at dinner but unlike many comics (or film/tv) where we might see a steady unmoving view of the character as she talks, Boilet shifts the composition to recreate the appearance of his gaze wandering to her breasts, her face, the leg of a woman at the next table (Yukiko almost completely cropped off panel), the wine glasses…”

On Gray Horses: “Larson’s style is especially pleasing for the way she represented a plethora of normally unseen phenomena, such as sound, light, wind, thoughts. She uses traditional comics icons in singular ways that are evocative and effective…”

A list of ways music is represented in comics.

On Syncopated 3: “This displays an issue that should be considered in the genre of comics reportage. Conventional reportage offers only a few images and lots of text. Analysis, arguments, and other elements of reportage are in many cases difficult to convey with images, or at least narrative images of the conventional sort (what about graphs, charts, maps, etc.?). I think comics reportage may require thinking outside the constraints and conventions of fictional narration. Non-fiction in comics (particularly autobiography) is often broken down and drawn in a similar way to conventional fictional narrative, and that is probably to its detriment.”

On The Three Paradoxes: “In the end, the book as a whole embodies the theme too well: it exists between two gaps, neither her nor there. With all these building up of levels of narratives to showcase the theme of non-movement, the book itself doesn’t go anywhere. It’s fallen into a gap between form and content. The stylistic and thematic build-up is a grand display of virtuosity that feels empty once one delves beneath the surface.”

On Exit: “The high contrast is very noir-esque. Black tends to predominate on the page, aided by the use of black margins and gutters. The expansive blacks wipe out detail, leaving shapes. Similarly, detail is whited out like holes in the darkness. The art isn’t always as severe as I make it out to be, but that is the overwhelming feeling. Kanan’s style shifts through the volume (certainly due to the period of time over which it was drawn), sometimes as severe as that, sometimes using a few spare lines. Between the black and white is the hatching that acts at various times to provide depth, texture, tone, and structure to the images.”

On Trains are Mint: “As an autobiographical comic it is a refreshing change from the relationship comic (a la Jeffrey Brown), reminiscence of youth (a la Chester Brown) or the day-to-day slice of life (a la Kolchalka). For Trains Are Mint is as much about East as a person as it is about the places he walks through. In both cases it isn’t about much at all. I love it.”

On Floating Weeds: “Ozu makes much use of fore, mid, and background extensively. Something I noticed in particular is the use of a foreground object (often walls and buildings) to act as a screen behind which character enter and exit the frame. This tends to tighten the spaces in which the characters act.”

On Gasoline Alley: “In the endless everyday, there are always the days where we step outside the repetition, if only to find a new repetition in variety. Weekends bring a different repetition than our weekdays, and so does Frank King step outside the story and art of the Gasoline Alley dailies for the Sunday pages. The Sundays are both visually and narratively outside the dailies’ range, yet they maintain a certain sense of repetition, even in their stylistic and formal variance from the dailies.”

On Cotton Woods: “…it occurred to me how much Cotton Woods is like a superhero comic. Instead of fighting crime with amazing powers, Cotton plays ball with extraordinary skill. No one steals home as often, gets as many home runs, hits as well, or fields as successfully as he does to beat the enemy/other team. His sidekick Cyclone is not quite as amazing, but he’s close, lacking only the same intelligence as his partner. He’s got a regular, small cast of supporting characters, a few revolving opponents, and he even has a uniform. It’s probably a stretch, but it reads in that same black and white, simple answers style of older superhero comics.”

On The Golem’s Mighty Swing: “A few of Gotto’s visual tropes make their appearance–the large foreground baseballs, expressive silhouettes, and the scoreboard as a narrative method–but Sturm shows the game in a much different way. In a 100 page comic book format, Sturm has a lot more space to work with than Gotto’s four panel dailies. We see the result of this in the way parts of the game slowly unfold. An early at-bat by Mo lasts more than 3 pages (25 plus panels).”

You might also check out my Panels & Pictures columns at ComixTalk from the past year.

With that said, blogging will be slim through May. I have too many other projects going on right now both comics and non-comics related. Though I’ll try to keep updating my Notes blog and Things Change will be updated (albeit once a week instead of twice a week).

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Tags: anniversary, best_of

Panels & Pictures: Text

DerikB — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 13:06:38 +0000

My latest Panels & Pictures column is up at ComixTalk. Titled “Text in Comics”, I made an illustrated list of uses of text in comics. Some of it may be familiar from readers of this blog, as I borrowed from a few past reviews. This surface look at the topic has got me thinking more about text and will get me looking a little closer at the comics I read.

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Tags: panelsandpictures, text-in-comics

Conference Blogging: CIL2008

DerikB — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 01:12:10 +0000

I spent the early part of this week in Arlington, VA at Computers in Libraries 2008. As in previous years I drew presenters, you can see my sketches at my Flickr account.

More comics writing next week.

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Tags: cil2008, sketches

H2 by Mitsuru Adachi

DerikB — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 20:31:59 +0000

H2 by Mitsuru Adachi. 34 volumes 1992-1999. Scanlation by Mangascreamer (vol 1-29 (so far)).

H2 is the only baseball manga I could find scanlations of which weren’t stuck in an annoying online interface. Mangascreamer has done an admirable job in getting out 29 of the 34 total volumes of this series. I’m eagerly awaiting the last five, which says something for the quality of this manga.

H2’s protagonist is Hiro a teenage pitching prodigy who quit baseball when a doctor told him his elbow could be permanently damaged if he didn’t stop pitching. He decided to go to a high school that has no baseball team at all and when the story starts he is joining the soccer team. His best friend is Hideo a hitting prodigy who goes to a high school with a prestigious baseball team. Hiro’s other close friend is Hikari, with whom he grew up and who is dating Hideo (Hiro introduced them). She also has aspirations to be a sports journalist.

Hiro soon discovers his doctor was a fraud and that he can pitch. He joins up with a girl named Haruka (yes, all four main characters have similar “H” names, and yes it is confusing at times) who is manager of the school’s baseball club. With his catcher friend Noda (who was also misdiagnosed by the same doctor, coincidentally enough) they form the club into a real competing team. Over the course of the series many other characters are introduced and play differing parts in the tale, sometimes for a chapter or two, other times on an ongoing basis across many volumes.

The primary end goal of the series is for Hiro, star pitcher, to face Hideo, star hitter, in the Koshien, which is the high school baseball national tournament. Covering three years of time (at least I assume based on what I’ve read and what’s left to read), we follow the two friends and their team’s ups and downs.

Adachi does not only focus on the baseball. He also intertwines a classic love quadrangle amongst the four primary characters as well as numerous side stories for various teammates, opponents, and family members. While a single baseball game may take a whole volume (or more, volumes 13 and 14 are almost all just one baseball game), sub-plots are always intertwined between scenes of the game. Long stretches between major games will also focus on the interpersonal drama of the characters more than the sport. Adachi achieves a successful balance and integration of the two.

This is solid genre work. Adachi maintains interest and suspense throughout with small and large narrative arcs: individual games, the larger Koshien goals, smaller subplots in the drama/romance, and the larger question about the various character’s relationships. Once I started reading, I was hard pressed to stop; Adachi always leaves some question unanswered, some moment in suspense. Though in the end, there is not much left in one’s mind when the reading has stopped. A week or so after finishing the last scanlated volume, the story nor any real themes stick with me. This is not necessarily a bad thing, just to say, this is quality entertainment but not much more (narratively or thematically, at least).

H2 is a shonen (boys) manga so the characters are not very complex and the romantic subplots operate on a surface and clichéd level. Though it is to his create that Adachi manages to create a complicated love quadrangle that does not rely on character’s acting with absurd levels of jealous. All four protagonists care for each other and act with a certain regard for the feelings of each other, including those who might be considered competitors for another’s attention. Adachi also scatters the work with mild fan service (in this case, gratuitous bathing suit or panty images) where not even a slight attempt is made to work into the story (except a very few cases where we see this adolescent sexual interest through the eyes of one of the boys).

I don’t read enough manga (particularly shonen manga) to say how much Adachi’s work is similar to other manga artists, but to my eye it is not stylistically unusual. While reading, I started noting pages that were interesting to me for one reason or another, and for such a long work, going through these examples is probably the easiest way for me to discuss the work.

One thing I noticed with his page layouts is a tendency to divide a page in half and then break those halves into small panel groupings. Often a half page is broken down into one quarter page panel next to two eighth-page panels, usually with the larger panel coming first followed by the two smaller panels. This layout is repeated so many times it becomes a convention of equivalence to the American use of a 6 panel grid, a kind of irregular regular layout.

(Remember to read all these pages right to left! Excuse the low quality, it comes from shrinking down the scanlation pages (which look great at original size). Click for a better look.)

Like in many manga, Adachi uses a lot of establishing panels that set the scene and backgrounds. Almost every chapter starts with at least one (if not two) page that is solely used to establish the scene. In many cases this allows for backgrounds to be dropped out of subsequent pages so the focus stays on the characters. The page above is a nice example of a briefer establishing page. It starts with a mysteriously abstract image that becomes a reflection on water under a bridge then we see Hiro running by.

Similarly, the above page is a a scene shift. Moving from the ballpark where Hiro’s game is going on (in the previous page) to a dorm where Hideo and his teammates are watching that same game (on the next page). I’m not sure what it is about panels showing clouds, but I always read them as a kind of time stoppage. As if the clouds force us outside of the relentless forward movement of time. Adachi uses this device often throughout the series and it almost always reads with that same sense of pause.

Another type of establishing sequence is this two page time shift that passes from one evening to the next morning. Again we see that reflection on the water as an almost abstract panel.

This half page is a good example of one of the baseball action scenes. The use of the speedlines and the progression fragmentation of the actors in the scene are typical. Moving from two characters to one to part of one (macro - mono - micro to borrow from Neil Cohn) forces the reader to provide the appropriate context. In this case it’s rather clear (the glove in the third panel being the first baseman’s as the runner is forced out), but at other times it is less so, particularly when dealing with characters that are secondary to the plot and hard to distinguish from one another (often the case with Adachi’s character designs).

This scene, at a tense moment in a long running game, shows Hiro (super pitcher and, of course, a great hitter too), hitting a home run off his rival pitcher (one of the few characters in the whole series that comes off almost completely negative). The whole world drops away at this moment. No announcers, no sound effects, even the crowd (in a visual metaphor) disappears on the third page (the subsequent page returns them to the stands cheering). Nice placement of the ball in the bottom of that third page, too, as it travels down and off the page.

Here is an slight but effective stylistic change. This pitcher (another rival) is being seen for the first time, and his amazing speed is visually heightened by the use of denser more frenetic speed lines in the background and more line work to render the character. A highly effective strategy.

This page is a strange one. Two panels are almost completely black except for a kind of abstract light. I’m just not sure what to make of it. Do the black panels represent some kind of subjective viewpoint (the sky past that sign we see in the middle panel?) or an abstract emotional representation? It does add a mystery to the page (I’m actually still a little confused about the birthday day subplot). Or perhaps, like the home run scene above, this is an image of the world falling away, the whole world except a small point of light that hovers on the margins, the enlightenment of Haruka’s solution to the mystery?

Another baseball example, where we see whirlwind sequence of strike-outs, which go by so fast it’s almost impossible to follow along. Adachi only rarely slows down to focus on pitch by pitch action. A lot of his baseball scenes focus more on the psychology of the players. This is very much character based action. He takes the time to introduce opposing teams, at least one player from each, and gives them some small subplot or background that adds to their mental state or performance during the game. Like other baseball comics the focus remains on big plays and big stars, but Adachi works to blend all this with the characters’ life off the field. Since he works so many games into the series, each one can have its own unique focus.

This sequence is notable for the slight confusion inherent in the scene, a confusion which not only adds suspense but an element of realism, as you might get this same confusion (did he catch the ball? didn’t he?) when watching a real baseball game. The layout and composition of the top three panels add to the effect. The ball in the first panel is placed right above the player’s glove in the second panel, which adds an impression that he will catch it. The third panel continues the player’s motion across the page and by taking us to the edge cuts off an immediate apprehension of where the ball went. Panel four shows the crowd roaring, but shorn of any text one is still in the dark. Only as one notices the small white circle in the field of gray that is the last panel do we realize the player missed the catch.

Overall, this should give some idea about the style of H2. It’s the best, most entertaining baseball comic I’ve found so far (which isn’t saying all that much I guess since I’ve only found a few), and the one that seems most interested in the game as a game. Of course, it does have the advantage of length, which none of my other baseball comics have. This is one of those manga that you think would make a great release in English. There’s gotta be crossover manga-baseball fans that would gobble this up. It’s quality material.

Previous Post in my baseball comics series: Satchel Paige by Sturm and Tommaso
Next Post in my baseball comics series: ???

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Tags: baseball, Manga

Pettibon Abstract Comic

DerikB — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 14:11:15 +0000

Baseball month isn’t over yet, but due to other obligations, my post on H2 is delayed a bit. In the meantime here’s something I found recently. This is piece by Raymond Pettibon from Raymond Pettibon: Plots Laid Thick (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona : Distributed by Actar, 2002). This one’s for Andrei.

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Tags: abstraction, abstract_comics

More on Definitions

DerikB — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 14:00:28 +0000

My latest ComixTalk Panels & Pictures column is up: Definition Redux. I returned to last month’s topic, in response to Neil Cohn, and following some citations from an article he mentioned. It ended up being longer than I expected, but that sets me up with more time for next month’s topic on point of view, which is requiring some more research than I originally expected.

So, while I’m at it, I’m looking for recommendations of comics with interesting use of point of view/perspective, such as Daybreak or that Bob Powell story in Art Out of Time (both already suggested by Tym Godek), or an interesting use of narration (the first thing that comes to mind is that Chris Ware short with the narration that is not directly narrating the images).

Baseball month will hopefully return later this week, but it may have to wait until next Monday. We’ll see how time goes.

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Tags: definitions, panelsandpictures

Sturm on Baseball Comics

DerikB — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 13:38:36 +0000

A brief quote from James Sturm in an interview with ALA’s (that’s the American Library Association) Booklist:

Booklist: In Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow and The Golem’s Mighty Swing, you produced suspenseful and exciting baseball sequences. What would you tell a student of cartooning who wanted to create the same effect?

Sturm: Try to capture the feel and rhythm of the game and pay attention to its subtleties. Of course, it helps if you like baseball. But I would also recommend looking at Japanese baseball manga. American baseball comics have been pretty bad, always halting and truncated. The Japanese get it right; they let baseball unfold at a leisurely pace.

I may not get to my baseball manga review by next week, but I’ll probably have one of those halting and truncated American comics to review in the meantime.

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Tags: baseball

Satchel Paige by Sturm and Tommaso

DerikB — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:51:41 +0000

Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow by James Sturm (writer) and Rich Tommaso (art). Jump at the Sun/Hyperion, 2008. 90 p., $9.99.

This week’s baseball comic is another work from James Sturm, this time in conjunction with Rich Tommaso. I’m assuming Sturm is writing and making the breakdowns, while Rich is providing the drawings/compositions. Though neither are credited with any particularly duty, the drawing is clearly not Sturm’s, but the breakdown of the story into panels is reminiscent of his other works.

I’m never quite sure how to critique a children’s books. I’m not the intended audience, and I don’t have a lot of background with similar books (I read when I was a kid but not a ton of children’s books and not so as I remember them). This book is, like it’s predecessor in this series Houdini: The Handcuff King, written for children, and not as relevant, in my opinion, to the adult reader. Either way, I’ll do my best, though I can say, right off, that I’m not overly impressed.

I have to start by noting how deceptively titled and marketed this book is. To consider this a book about Satchel Paige is an over statement. To say that this book “follows Paige from his earliest days on the mound though the pinnacle of his career” and that the “author and artist share the story of a sports hero who defied the barriers of race to play the game on his own terms,” as the back of this books does is misrepresentation. This is not a biography of Satchel Paige, who is widely considered one of the best pitchers ever in baseball, nor is it a book about his defying of race barriers.

The bulk of the story belongs to and is narrated by a black man from the south name Emmet (a name which one only infers because his son is “Emmet Jr.”). In 1929 he heads off from Alabama and his life as a sharecropper to play in the Negro Leagues, with one of the all black baseball teams, and tries to earn enough money to support his family and buy a home that isn’t a shack. The main focus of the first part of the book is a baseball game that Emmet’s team plays against Satchel Paige’s team. Emmet manages to score a run off the young superstar but ends up permanently damaging his knee during his slide into home.

The second part of the book takes place over a number of years from 1930 through 1943, as we learn a bit more about Emmet’s life after his injury. He gives up baseball, doesn’t talk about it, and becomes a farmer, trying to support his wife and child in a place that is still controlled by wealthy white men. We see his struggles as the twin white sons of the old landowner exert their power over him and physically intimidate him and his son to keep Emmet, Jr. out of school and working in the fields. During this section we see, less a baseball game than a baseball exhibit, where the twin sons, on their way to join a minor league ball club, hit home runs. This section will provide some historical insight for the younger reader, who might (probably) be unfamiliar with certain aspects of post-slavery repression of blacks in the US: lynching, segregation, and general intimidation through wealth and power.

The third part of the book features a 1944 baseball game between Satchel Paige’s All-Stars and the local white all-stars in Emmet’s town. This scene is explicitly singled out as an example of a black man standing up to and beating a white man(men). Paige strikes out both white twins and one other white player. This example is a kind of a life lesson for the protagonist’s son (”Another first for Emmet, Jr.: Seein’ a black man sass a white” (69)), and rouses Emmet himself from a long silence to his son about his baseball days. They go home and Emmet shares stories with his son. Emmet’s narration references remembering “the type of man” he is, and hoping that his son will remember “who he can be” (85). This is accompanied by Emmet giving his son the baseball which Paige gifted him back in 1929 when he hurt himself. This provides an “uplifting” ending, but I don’t feel that this sense of “who you can be” is really earned. The issues that provide the focus in the second part of the book are not addressed nor do we see any indication how Paige’s striking out a few white men really changes anything for Emmet or his son beyond them bonding over baseball. It’s a simple and simplistic moral to the story, one which is probably suited for an audience of children, but feels hollow to me. In comparison, Sturm’s The Golem’s Mighty Swing’s thematics of identity and spectacle appear much more sophisticated.

One of the most interesting formal aspects of this book–which, somehow, I only noticed after a few readings–is that there is not a single word balloon in use. For some this would actually disqualify Satchel Paige’s identity as a comic, but for me it shows an example of an interesting narrative tactic. The main story is narrated by Emmet in the present tense, though the narration itself shows a certain retrospective view on the events (not unlike the narration in The Golem’s Mighty Swing). Emmet reports all speech and provides commentary on actions. One unusual use of the reported speech comes late in the story where one of the white twins yells a racial slur at Paige during his at-bat. The narration of the man’s words are written in extra large letters, but still maintain their place at the top of the panel where one finds the narration throughout the book. The narration often doubles the images, as if either Sturm or Tommaso were not sure of the images’ ability to tell enough of the story (or maybe it’s a tactic to make the reading easier for a younger reader). Almost every panel contains narration, only the occasional action panel is left silent. The textual narration carries the greatest weight of the story, and it would be nice to see a little more reliance on the images. For the most part the visual narration is as much Emmet’s as the text. I don’t think we need to have his story completely scrolled out as text.

Click for larger.

This sequence showing Paige striking out one of the twins, provides a good example that doesn’t need so much narration. The pitcher set-up and then the three repeated panels of a missed swing say just about all that needs to be said and is a great way to not only show the strike out but also show the speed with which it is accomplished: bang bang bang, you’re out. The umpire seen in panels 2 and 4 helps communicate the information and let us know that the image is not just a static sequence.

Two pages stand outside Emmet’s narration. Both show a montage of images in black and gray (as opposed to the rest of the art’s black and light olive) with typeset text that provide some extra narration about Paige’s activities. These two pages are the entirety of what might be considered biographical information on Paige. Otherwise he appears more as a mythical figure pitching in the two baseball games that bookend the story. These two pages are an odd fit for the rest of the book. They are clearly not coming from Emmet and mostly serve to give some credence to the idea that this book is about Paige.

Reading this volume back-to-back with Sturm’s solo baseball book, it’s hard not to make comparisons with not just the story but the art. Tomasso’s drawing is stiff and awkward in comparison with Sturm’s. The figures seem ill-suited to the action of the baseball games. His style is simpler and more abstracted than Sturm’s, though it has a certain charm that just feels poorly fit to this historical tale. This isn’t to say it’s all bad, there are some well-composed images, interesting figures, and use of lines and sound effects to convey the action of the game. The sequence below shows some of these conflicting aspects. The first panel is a well-done action panel with a dynamic sound effect, but the second and third are more problematic. The fielder in the second panel looks terribly awkward and the composition of the image focuses completely on that figure (he’s so centered). The third panel is just a bit confusing narratively, as the figure (I assume that is Emmet) seems to be running at top speed. Based on the background, he is running back to the plate from first. If the ball were called foul, why is he running like that with some much effort?

Click for larger.

The baseball scenes themselves are not particularly exciting or different than what is seen in Golem. With the subject of Paige, there is a natural focus on the pitcher/batter conflict, which was missing in Cotton Woods. The panel pacing is well done, particularly in scenes where Paige himself uses time as a tool against the batters. We see Paige tying his shoe, walking around, joking with his fielders. In his at-bat, early in the book, against Paige, we similarly see Emmet try to take back some of the pacing of the game (see the sequence below). This is one of those moments you see a lot in a baseball game: the little batter’s rituals that are performed in endless variations. These panels also show a bit of the redundancy of the textual narration.

Click for larger.

All in all, not a great comic nor a great baseball comic. I can’t speak for its effectiveness as a children’s book, though I wonder who this would appeal too. I’m not sure we get enough of a sense of Paige’s greatness to make him the mythic figure he needs to be for this book to really work for a younger audience.

Next week, I’m hoping to have a review of the baseball manga H2 by Mitsuru Adachi. Or at least a review of some part of it as the scanlation hasn’t quite reached all 34 volumes, and I don’t think I’ll even get the 28 that are scanlated read.

Previous Post in my baseball comics series: The Golem’s Mighty Swing by James Sturm
Next Post in my baseball comics series: H2

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Tags: baseball, pacing

Links for February 24th through March 6th

DerikB — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:30:04 +0000

Some reading for February 24th through March 6th:

Comics & Cinema: Stories and Storyboarding - DB Dowd on film, comics, a strip by Caniff, and a page by Herge.
Poem of the Day: Harry Mathews, “The Maoist’s Regrets” - Stephen Frug shares the poem and links to all the borrowed lines.
Big Brother With a Bleeding Heart - Noah Berlatsky on V for Vendetta and Watchmen.
HAROLD GRAY: AN APPRECIATION - Great post on Gray and Little Orphan Annie.
Matt Madden’s blog: A Pantoum Comic - Check out Matt’s pantoum based on one of Tom Hart’s short comics.

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Tags: comicstrips, comics_criticism, Constraint, harold_gray, little_orphan_annie, mathews_harry, oulipo, to_blog

Gary Gygax RIP

DerikB — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 17:19:20 +0000

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 the works that arose from D&D.

The majority of my friends and our activities were D&D (or some other role-playing game) based throughout my pre-teen and teen years. I met one of my best friends because we both played the game, and while we haven’t played the game in years, we’re still friends. I’m not sure what we would have done in high school if we weren’t playing D&D.

You could say my comics reading goes back to D&D as the first comic I (or rather one of my parents for me) bought was Dragonlance #2 from DC Comics, based on a D&D product. I quickly moved on to X-Men and then to indies, but that, probably really bad, fantasy comic was what first directed my attention at comics.

I’d hazard that my interest in rules (constraint) in relation to narrative goes back to D&D. What is D&D but rule-based collaborative narration? Structures and rules have stuck with me. Even my first (sad) attempts at writing were fantasy stories based on my D&D characters (thankfully I moved away from that before I got out of elementary school).

I haven’t played D&D in a few years, keeping a group together and all the time for preparation was just more than I wanted to deal with, but I still have a few books and polyhedron dice in the closet. I’ve moved on to other activities, but I owe a lot to that game and, thus, to Gygax. I don’t know what he was like as a person, but I hope he knew what an effect he had on so many people (dorky/geeky as we are).

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Tags: collaborative_narration, Constraint, d&d

Madinkbeard

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