Malaak, Angel of Peace

V20

2012-02-07T11:15:00.000+02:00

Apologies for this delay due to life demands that were frankly impossible to ignore. All the more frustrating to me because this is such a key moment of the story in my eyes. I can say that I have just been given an imperious reason to complete the comic as soon as possible, so I have a lot of incentive not to let such delays happen again. The next page is being colored and shaded and so should be on schedule. Critiques welcome as usual!

And here's the sketch page:

V18-19

2012-01-13T14:20:00.000+02:00

What this is will be revealed in upcoming pages, but I just wanted to mention that I had no idea this was there when I started on this volume ;) The idea came suddenly as I sat in Paperchase's coffeeshop during my last stay in London. Can't imagine the story without it now!

There is still some work to be done on the shading, but I'll be all tied up for a few days starting this afternoon so I wanted to get this up before I disappear. Also I may replace/add to the symbols later, as I have more interesting ones scribbled on a piece of paper back in Beirut.

Sketch page:

V17

2011-12-25T08:00:00.002+02:00

This is one page that was only added because I needed pages 18-19 to fall on the same spread, but it turned out to be a valuable addition – not only does it look good, it also addresses a number of things in passing (this is for you comickers struggling with conveying extra info without turning it into an exposition scene:) where the cannons seen from the outside are, why they're silent while Malaak and Amer are inside (they're not!), why they don't encounter them on their way up, and why they don't do anything about them. Oh and the fact that some time has passed since we last saw them, during which they wandered into several dead ends "offscreen". All in 4 panels, with the next 2 preparing the next page...

Creepy cliffhanger notwithstanding, happy Christmas!

As a bonus today, this lovely fan art by Ally Rom Colthoff (aka Varethane), author of the webcomic Chirault which you may want to check out!

V16

2011-12-18T08:00:00.020+02:00

It's terrible to have a crush on a comic character, let alone two of your own creation! *cough*
Hope the heat and sweat are conveyed, maybe I should give a slightly redder tinge here...

V15

2011-12-10T11:54:00.000+02:00

As promised, a new page at last! So Amer begins to show us what he can do...
Hope the effects are alright, these are still the bane of my existence. Sketch page:

Ebooks release for volume 3

2011-12-04T16:48:00.000+02:00

This is the last update of this kind for a while: the next post will be a new page or two, promise! The volume 3 e-books are available, and they contain no less than 46 pages of extra contents! It will be a while before volume 4 is done, because I need to translate it to French first.
Dark Dreams is available for download in English here or in French here.

Ebooks release for volume 2

2011-11-27T13:05:00.000+02:00

I had a big burnout this week so the new pages are still pending, but most of the work was already done on the volume 2 ebooks, so I finished that up today and uploaded them. Again they contain 36 pages of extra contents: sketches, fan art, location photos and "outtakes", not to forget Adrian and Tareq's word of the day.
This volume is available for download in English here or in French here.

Ebooks release for volume 1

2011-11-19T20:06:00.000+02:00

Still on a roll regarding the revision of past issues of Malaak, I'm excited to announce today that volume 1 is now available as an e-book in both English and French. This may interest all Malaak readers, even if you already have the books, as the digital format allowed me to include as much unpublished extra contents as I wanted. For this volume this turned out to be 30 pages of bonus stuff! These consist in sketches galore, a selection of fan art, location photos with commentary (sample page below), "outtakes", and finally a schtick by Adrian and Tareq, to recur at the end of each volume with different dialogue ;)
I'm still hard at work on this, so the other volumes should follow. For now, this one can be purchased and immediately downloaded in English here or in French here.

Meta stuff

2011-11-14T10:41:00.000+02:00

I thought I'd pause in the donkey work I've taken upon myself to give you some insights into what I've been doing for Malaak this week, aside from getting a new page up. This will probably interest comic makers more than the average reader!

First I have to explain the situation I was having to deal with. For each volume of the comic, all the original .psd files were kept, that is A3 pages with all the layers preserved. There was also a flattened version, sized down to A4, that was used in the inDesign document where the book was laid out, for printing purposes, as it would be quite insane to work with and send the fully layered ones to the printer. Of these there was a French version, and an Arabic version (even though these are not published, I've been working on them for some time.)
That's 4 versions of each page for each of the 4-eventually-to-be-7 volumes of Malaak. Simply mental, as I realized when I needed to retouch old pages and found the task was multiplied by 4. My retouching, then, turned into a monumental rehaul akin to the widening of the Victorian sewage system, but one that will make things vastly simpler (and less memory-consuming) for me in the future:

- First, the retouching proper. In the first 3 volumes I treated night scenes in a way that was turning out too dark. In vol. 4 I figured out a much better treatment, so I had to go back and apply it to all past night scenes.

- In vol. 1 and the first few pages of vol. 2, I miscalculated the margins, so that they were much too narrow in print. Also, because I fixed that in subsequent pages, I now had an inconsistency across the series. I had to go and reformat those first 35 pages so their margins would be the same as what I'm working with now. This meant completing all their bleeds, because the inside of the page would shrink, leaving white areas past the old bleed. This was particularly difficult with the first 15 pages: due to a hard drive failure back in 2007, I lost their layered versions and only had the flattened pages to work with. Urgh!
This retouching was done on the originals. For some of them I saved the older version as well, just in case.

- Each page was then flattened except for the text and sound effects, resized to A4 and 350 dpi (the way the printer takes them) and saved in a different folder. The originals are now sacred and untouchable while it's not a problem if something happens to the smaller ones. To save myself having to open a file to check its specs in the future, the folder name says everything I need to know: "final 350 A4 flat RGB"

What I'm now doing is recreating all the text in the InDesign documents, before stripping it from the Photoshop pages. I had to come to terms with the fact this is the only way I can use the same image, most of the time, for all 3 languages I work with. It'll also make translation much easier in the future. The reason I had stayed away from that before was because it presented some problems, which I had to solve first:

- French takes up more space than English, so there was the occasional need to increase the size of the speech bubble, and the font I'm using didn't have any accented characters, so I had to add them with a brush in Photoshop. Solutions: An extra effort to be more concise in French!! Also, reducing leading when needed is hardly noticeable, but helps fit more lines in. As for the font, I did what I should have done long ago: opened the bloody thing in Font Lab and created the missing characters myself before exporting it as my own version of it. I couldn't treat most sound effects in InDesign because they're often inserted between layers of artwork, but translating them is really optional, so I let them be.

- Arabic needs a lot more work. Here I have to translate the sound effects, but I also have to flip the pages so that the reading direction is correct. A lot of the time it's not straightforward flipping: I have to go back into the page to flip back any written details, such as shop signs or graffiti, so they still look right. Also, some well-known locations, such as the Corniche in vol.1, just can't be flipped without looking wrong. I can't help people driving on the left side and Malaak's "tattoo" moving to the right side, those are things Arabic readers will have to deal with, but it's far better than having to force yourself to read in an unnatural direction, as happens with cheaply published manga in the West.
Anyway, I realized that I don't have that many pages that need reworking. Most of them can be simply flipped in InDesign itself. Those that need reworking and sound effects can be saved as a different file: it's still much better than to have all the pages duplicated.

There remains one "detail" to sort out for the Arabic: I'm not satisfied with any of the fonts around, none of which are suitable for a comic book (the couple of handwritten Arabic fonts out there were seemingly made by monkeys), so I'm developing my own. I have the most qualified adviser anyone can ask for, but this will probably take forever. So that's holding up any release of the Arabic. In the meanwhile, I'm nearly done reformatting the English and French.

Finally, another reason why I'm fixing everything up is to release these volumes as ebooks in all 3 languages. What's the point of ebooks when they can be read online for free, you may ask? Mostly, it's for people who want to support the comic but can't afford ordering physical copies (those darn shipping costs.) But there is a tremendous advantage to them: bonus contents. Vol. 1 alone, which is already done, has about 20 pages of sketches. I have a lot more in mind for the rest. I can't include such material in print due to cost, but there's no limit to what I can add to an ebook.

End of verbosity and back to the grind!

V14

2011-11-13T08:43:00.000+02:00

A bit of a Batman moment, teehee. Malaak doesn't actually harm human fighters, but they don't know that.
Starting to get used to shading the cave-like interior, and finding it rather fun now.

Here's the sketch page:

Self-publishing tips: Offset printing (pt 2)

2011-11-09T08:45:00.228+02:00

Continued from part 1, which covered resolution, color space, page size and position.

Number of pages:

While diversification of printing techniques means this is no longer always an issue, it remains an issue to be aware of when printing with offset. I am talking about the fact the number of pages in a book needs to be a multiple of 16. This is due to the way offset printing, which makes use of large plates, works:

These signatures of 16 pages are bound together to form a book of 32, 48, 64 etc pages.

Based on the above, let's clarify: to get your money's worth, the number of pages needs to be a multiple of 16, because you're paying for 16 pages at a time anyway. The plates represent the biggest part of the cost, and one 16-page signature in full color requires no less than 8 plates (1 for each of the 4 CMYK colors for each of the 2 sides of the sheet). No matter how much or how little contents there is, a 16-page signature must be produced using these 8 plates*. Therefore, a 36-page book and a 48-page book cost the same, which is 3 signatures, but the 36-page one is wasting 12 whole pages. They won't show up as blank pages because the printer will remove them, but if you're printing 1000 copies, that's 12,000 wasted pages you paid for! If the number of pages isn't a multiple of 4, however, there will be blank pages by necessity.

*There are ways to reduce this, for instance by having every other page blank or a single color, or using special plates, but this really requires working with the printer and I won't attempt to suggest them here – if interested, it's as simple as asking your printer "What can I change to cut printing costs?"

This is why it's important to have an inkling of how many pages your story will take up. If it runs just a little over a multiple of 16, it's worth condensing it a little to save you a whole signature's expense. If it falls a little short of one, plan for bonus contents to fill up those pages. Make sure to take metacontents into account, such as the title page (this can eat up to 4 pages) and anything else that needs to be included (in my case, the language notes on the last page). Comic pages plus metacontents should be equal to a multiple of 16.

If you're publishing a series, planning is even more important as it's a good idea to keep all volumes the same number of pages. If printing cost varies greatly from one to the other, they will have to be priced differently, and also, if page count i.e weight varies, shipping cost will also vary. Believe me, you don't want to have this kind of complication within the same series when you sell it on your website or send it to bookshops.

This is assuming you're not an eccentric billionaire making comics in your spare time. When expenditure is not an issue, such rules can be ignored...

Margins and bleeds:

In a printed page, the inner edge gets eaten up by binding and the outer edge by cropping. Exactly how depends on binding type:
- Saddle stitch is when the book is folded down and stapled, as is the case with floppies. Note I don't recommend this at all because it looks so cheap, but if your book is too thin for other types of binding, you may have no choice. In any case, this is what happens with this binding:

Notice how much more of the inner pages get cut than the outer pages. If your margins are just enough, they may look fine on the first pages, but near the middle of the book they'll get very thin and some of the art may even be cut. On the other hand, the inner margins are fine throughout, as this binding allows the book to open almost flat at any page.

- Perfect binding is when pages are glued together to the spine and the cover wraps around that, allowing for a title to be printed on the spine if thick enough. The glue can be reinforced by sideways stapling, but that is quite hidden. It looks cleaner, more professional and makes a much better impression, but can only be used starting from a certain thickness (more on that under Paper considerations). With this binding:

The damage to the outer margins is much less, because pages are put together in smaller signatures (fewer are folded together). On the inside, however, there's a slight cut just to remove the thickness of the fold, and a full 0.5 cm eaten up by glue and by the fact you can't open the pages fully without breaking the spine. This is where the inner margins need to be given ample space. My advice would be to always aim and work for this type of binding: a graphic novel has nothing to gain from saddle stitch, and if it's too short or flimsy for perfect binding it may not be worth the expense of offset printing – best wait to have several chapters and print something more substantial.

- Let me also mention hardcover binding, though this is not usually affordable without a successful Kickstarter campaign or some other funding. This is the king of commercial bindings, with signatures stitched together so the book is flat and even when closed, and opens neatly anywhere.

The outer edge of the pages is cut but as signatures are 16 pages, there isn't a dramatic effect as with saddle stitch.

This was so you can visualize how to plan margins depending on future binding. Before getting down to preparing them, we need to discuss bleeds. A bleed is when the artwork extends to the edge of the printed page. This is not a necessity, plenty of comics and graphic novels keep away from it, and they can ignore this bit. However, if your artwork bleeds, then it needs to bleed beyond the edge of the page. Cutting is never completely accurate (we've seen how binding influences where it falls), and if the art doesn't extend enough, you can end up with a very unsightly white line on the edge of the page. The industry standard for bleeds is 3 mm (at least on my side of the ocean): that's 3 mm added to the size of your printed page, on each side that will be cut. To clarify this, let's create a page template that you can then use for all the pages in your comic. If you work on paper, this is still useful for calculating measurements.

Decide on your margins. There’s no set rule for their size, but they should not be thinner than 1.5 cm. 2 is better, and they can be much broader to create a certain effect. If at a loss, examine comics of the same size as yours. How wide are the margins, and do they seem right, or too thin, or too much?

There's one more step to complete! This is the page at printing size, but we want our template to be at working size. This is where you increase the size of your template by going to Image > Image size and entering the value that works for you, for instance 150% or A3. The reason we started with final size and worked backward is that it's a headache to calculate what a margin should be on the larger size so that it becomes 2 cm when reduced. I made the huge oversight, when I first started, of adding my bleeds to an A3 page, so that they were much too thin once scaled down – but I never realized until the book was completed, and I had to go and rework them all!

Once you have this template done, you can create all your pages from it and know they will be correct when rescaled. Don't forget to create a template for even-numbered pages, by flipping the canvas horizontally (this will reverse the guidelines as well.)

Choice of paper:

One of the prime advantages of offset is that you have the full range of paper at your disposal, including metallic paper if you so fancy! Visit the printer or at least ask for samples, because even supposedly "plain white" paper comes in a variety of textures and coating. There's no right or wrong here, you need to choose based on your own vision of the look and feel of your book. I imagine many people won't want to go so far and just want simple white paper, but be at least aware of this: the standard paper types of the book industry will come at least as uncoated, coated, semi-gloss or glossy. Uncoated is like your average printer paper, fine for novels but not recommended for color work as the surface is rough and the ink will spread a little. Coated is better for fine printing, but dulls colors. Glossy is the finest but the shiny pages are distracting and they take fingerprints like nobody's business. Semi-gloss is the best compromise and will keep your colors vibrant without attracting attention to itself.

Now an important consideration is the paper weight, and this is where sitting with the printer can really pay off. What is too thin, and what is too heavy? It would not be useful for me to give numbers, because that varies subtly with the nature of the paper, but as an example, I use 135gsm paper for my comic's contents, and 250gsm for the cover. At first I used heavier paper for both, but with the second volume my page count rose and what was a beautiful balance became very heavy and problematic. Here are things to think about:
- Heavier paper: it looks better, makes the book feel more valuable. It also makes it heavier, hence higher shipping costs. It also makes it thicker, so it's quickly too thick for stapling, but by the same token it allows you to use perfect binding with less pages. Finally, thicker books mean they take up more space wherever you're stocking them.
- Lighter paper: if it's too light it feels flimsy and cheap. But if you have a lot of pages, it can make the book lighter and less onerous to ship and to stock. It can force you to use saddle stitch if your page count is low.
A printer can upon request (if they're good with clients) make a mock-up of your book using blank paper of the weight requested, so that you can see exactly what it feels like, how thick it is, and how much it weighs. This way you can conceivable tailor a book to look as good as possible while remaining within a certain weight category, if most of your sales will be by mailing the book yourself. For the cover at least I can say that 250 is almost ideal for a softcover: lighter than that and it doesn't feel like a cover, heavier and it can create problems during binding. Always have your cover laminated to give it that quality finish that will also protect it.

Finally, think of the planet.

Some printers have converted to eco-friendly printing processes. They use water-based inks and plates that degrade without poisoning the environment. These printers may be a little more expensive, but that is something we owe. In the end, our work is not a necessity, and no matter how many people derive pleasure from it, printing it remains a little act of vanity that consumes paper and energy. The least we can do is give a little extra to limit the harm we do in the process.

V13

2011-11-06T18:11:00.001+02:00

Oh boy. I thought the organic backgrounds were going to save me a lot of time, but what I saved coloring, I put into shading! Looking good though, this is much more fun to draw and shade than manmade things.

Sketch page:

Self-publishing tips: Offset printing (pt 1)

2011-11-03T08:45:00.004+02:00

Comic authors today benefit from increased choice in terms of how to publish. Digital publishing, aka the way of webcomics, are the obvious nearly-universal choice for both those who wish to print at some point an those who don't intend to. Print-on-demand (PoD) similarly makes it possible for everyone to make their work available as a book; despite its many limitations it's better than no possibility. Digital printing and various means offered by copy centers also present opportunities for enterprising artists to print small runs of books at a relatively modest cost, with more control over the final product than PoD allows. But the most exciting development, as far as I'm concerned, is that today sites like Kickstarter give everyone a chance to access good old offset printing, which this post is dedicated to. Here I list a number of things to know, do and avoid in order to make the most out of offset printing, based on my personal training and experience printing comics and other books with various printers (with a lot of trial and error.)

Why bother with offset in the first place, given its cost and the fact you'll have to stock the books? Because nothing out there matches the possibilities and quality it offers. You get to pick the paper type, weight, color, size and to control the quality of the result. If you fancy it, you can include inserts, die-cuts or special inks. It also is far superior printing to anything else out there for books. It all depends on how much you see your final product as a beautiful object to be kept. It is also necessary if you have a mind to get your book into bookshops (but that's a matter I won't go into right now).

If there's even the remote chance you might go the offset route when your comic is completed, it is best to work for offset from the very beginning.

Resolution:

Never work under 300 dpi. That is the lower limit of what is acceptable for a good printed result, despite the fact PoD accepts resolutions as low as 150 dpi (which tells you something about the relative quality of PoD!) Many recommend working at 600 dpi, which is a good idea for a black and white comic, but unnecessary for color (the printer will just convert it down), especially if it's more than your computer can handle. My printer, for instance, recommends I give him 350dpi files, and the result is incredibly sharp, much sharper even than I can preview on my screen.

Never ever work at a low resolution and size it up before printing. That's an absurdity, it completely misses the point and you'll end up with ugly artifacts as if you'd taken a jpeg from the net and sized it up. If you decide to print a comic you've created at low-res you will have to redo it for it to be suitable (as I had to do with my senior year project – the lesson sticks!) So don't get into that bad habit. Always work in high-res.

Color space:

We probably all know this, but in a nutshell: light-based color is worked in an RGB space (Red, Green, Blue), while pigment-based color requires a CMYK space (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black). This means that a comic made to be seen on a screen is in RGB, but to be printed, it needs to be in CMYK.
What to do about this? There are 2 possible approaches:

• Work in CMYK from the beginning. This is fine if you're not publishing online; you'll notice some Photoshop features and filters are disabled in this mode, but this should not be a problem because you'll be working with paper in mind. However, if like me you want to have your pages available online and they need to look as good on a screen as they will on paper, this is not ideal: CMYK pages tend to look duller on-screen, even after the automatic conversion to RGB when saved as .jpg or whatnot.

• Work in RGB, so you get all the benefits of that, and convert before printing. This can work, but don't, seriously DON'T convert your pages to CMYK yourself. You will have no idea what you've done to your work until the printed book arrives. Such a conversion will add black to all your colors. In the best case scenario it'll mean the colors are not what you intended, but if your work is dark to begin with, this can be disastrous. Since you're working with a printer, there is no need whatsoever for you to do this yourself. Send the printer your flattened RGB files as .psd* and let their professionals convert them as needed. They will apply the necessary profile and make the needed adjustments so that the printed page is as close as the one on your screen as it possible can be. By the way, you're getting charged for "color correction" even if you try to do this job yourself, because they always have to do something to your files before sending to print.

* Leave the text on a separate layer. If it's black on white, they'll want to strip it from all channels other than black, so that it prints solely as K. Otherwise, it'll print as 4 colors and the slightest registration error will make it fuzzy.

If you really want to do this yourself and have managed to convince the printer not to bill for color correction, at the very least you need to ask them for a color profile. You will have to convert your pages to that color profile, not to plain CMYK, for the conversion to happen with the least possible loss.
This profile (something.icc) should be saved where you won't misplace it. To apply it, open the file you wish to convert and go Edit>Convert to Profile. Select your profile and you'll be asked whether to flatten the document. I recommend flattening so that any blend modes you have don't go all funky on you. Save as a copy, and review the page for anything that may need re-saturating (that will usually be light effects, as they suffer the most from losing the white of a light source for the white of paper).

Finally, whichever way you went, I highly recommend requesting hi-res color proofs for a few key pages. This is the only way to see, on paper, the exact colors as they will come out, and so to catch any problem before it's too late. Printers may or may not charge for these, but this is not something I would try to economize on. You may not need more than 3 or 4 pages: the cover, the darkest and lightest pages in the book, and maybe a random one or one from a sequence where color scheme is particularly important.

Page size:

As a rule, comic artists who work on paper always draw at a much larger size than will be printed. This is only logical, as there's a limit to how fine one can draw and ink, and the scaling down process is very favorable to any kind of line work: small defects disappear and the whole is tightened. This also applies to artists who work digitally, despite the zooming function that makes it possible to work at a very small scale.* Working at 150% or 200% of your final printed size can really sharpen your result – if that is what you desire, of course. Another distinct advantage is that you never know when you're going to want a larger version of a page, either to sell as a poster, or to exhibit, or other unexpected things. I've had to exhibit pages on a number of occasions by now, and I was really glad to have applied this policy from the beginning.

* This can actually cause real problems. Technically, you may end up drawing too finely for your chosen printing method. Visually, we're not supposed to see small details clearly: as objects shrink or become more distant, so the amount of details in them drops for the human eye, and it looks very odd when that is not observed. On paper it happens naturally due to the limits of drawing at a tiny size – on a digital canvas, one must be careful to keep the overall balance in sight at all times.

Page position:

This is where the publishing platform influences the very writing of the comic (and only one of the ways in which is can.) As this is not applicable online, it tends to become a lost art, but the importance of page position returns to the fore when a webcomic makes it to print and lacks this consideration. In a book, a page is never isolated, but is either on the right or the left side of a spread. A story is enhanced by proper planning of this, and weakened by its neglect. A basic rule is to keep cliffhangers at the bottom of the right-hand page (recto, or odd-numbered page), so that the reader doesn't discover what happens before they turn the page. All surprises and, if possible, changes of location, should go on the left-hand pages (verso, or even-numbered). The turning of the page acts as a cut, which is why in a similar vein some things are best kept within a spread, which works as a unified time and space – especially if those moments take up just 2 pages. Splash pages are particular instances where you have no choice at all, you have to work it so the previous page is odd-numbered. This planning takes place at the writing and sequencing stage, and I often find myself having to condense a sequence or expand one because certain pages absolutely need to be odd or even. Commercial comic just insert ads where needed, if they even take that into account. If you're taking your webcomic to print and find yourself with some awkward page positioning and nothing you can do about it now, consider inserting a pinup or some other nondisruptive full-page art (more creative solutions are possible!) – just make sure to insert it somewhere the pause makes sense, such as at the moment of a change of location.

In part 2 we'll continue with number of pages, margins and bleeds, and choice of paper!

V12 & encounter

2011-10-30T09:00:00.018+02:00

I have to start by sharing a wonderful event, feel free to skip to the new page if not interested!

Yesterday I had the privilege, and I'm not using the word lightly, to attend a performance by Luc & François Schuiten at Beirut's Lire en Français. The brothers created a while ago a series of graphic novels, Les Terres Creuses, set in fantastical locations like Les Cités Obscures, which François creates with Benoît Peeters. The 4th album of Terres Creuses proved problematic to create as a graphic novel, so they decided to experiment and they presented the contents to us, for the very first time, in a format that wove together slides of studies done for the work, live narration, live improvised music, and live drawing that was projected alongside the slides. The performance was titled Les 8 Sages de Verda, and the finished drawing was the key to the mystery of how 7 wise men can hide an 8th, in an ending that made my jaw drop. That hour and a half was a complete trip to different worlds where architecture follows very different rules, and there was magic in the room.

Afterwards, the two authors signed their books, and I mentioned to François I had seen him in Algiers earlier in the month as I was a guest at FIBDA too. His face light up and he asked to see my work! I whipped out a copy of Malaak (never go to a book fair without a sample of your work) and received unexpected, but very welcome critique, praise and encouragements. He was delighted to meet a Lebanese comicker. He also convinced me that digital coloring didn't serve my work ("Either refine it or give it up.") and that I should learn lettering and not use fonts ("La bande dessinée, c'est le texte et l'image!") Not that I can apply it at once, being in the middle of a series, but I already know that in future work, my technique is going to change radically based on the various feedback I received from people I really look up to. Computer coloring will be the first to go, everybody knows by now how much I hate it :P

Anyway, here's your new page!

Say goodbye to sunlight, because it's going to be a while before we're outdoors again...
Also I'm about to find out how subtle my readers are, with this moment of misunderstanding between Malaak and Amer.

This page underlined for me once more how much it paid to travel... Where, might you ask, did I find such perfect, organic-looking stairs? I found them in Sri Lanka:

They're located in Mihintale, the place where Buddhism began on the island, and that's also the reason they look so beautifully worn – they've been used for over 2000 years by monks climbing up to the meditation rock (the rails are a recent addition.)

Sketch page:

V11

2011-10-23T09:49:00.024+02:00

Oh Nryz, you are so evil.
Shockingly enough, this is not fiction. It's not often mentioned, but those who were close to the Lebanese wars are aware of this happening: unidentified parties taking advantage of the openness and simplicity of village people, at the time, to "recruit" fighters. Here's one account I heard: "These men came to the village and befriended us and we ended up having dinner. Next thing I knew, I was sitting behind a machine gun, shooting all night like a devil without feeling scared or tired. I never found out on whose side I was fighting nor whom I was shooting at."
I was also told that many who survived this unimaginable experience suffered the effects of those drugs, such as addiction, for rest of their lives. It would be naive, I think, to believe this practice started or ended in Lebanon.

Regarding the composition, it's quite experimental for me to leave so much empty space, not to mention this central motion, but the moment it came to mind it wouldn't leave anymore...

Sketch page:

V10 and interview

2011-10-19T09:07:00.000+02:00

Yes we are finally back on track, and you'll be glad to know I'm not going anywhere till mid-January so there's a chance of getting back into a real groove. As you can see, I have already resumed my despicable cliffhanger habit. Has a bri2 ever looked so sinister? (meaning the pitcher)
Here's the sketch page:

In the meanwhile I've done an interesting interview with Joanne Renaud exploring my rolemodels, first attempts at comics, and thoughts on various current things, and I'm up on her site as Artist of the Month. Here's an extract:

What media do you like to work with?
I like to play with media a lot, it’s a bit of a signature, but for consistency reasons I am pretty conservative within Malaak itself. I love the clean inked line, but I also love the texture of watercolor; I enjoy the flat technical feel of vectors (as seen in my Driving in Lebanon strips) but I also like to introduce three-dimensionality via solid objects photographed to look like they’re sitting on the page (used throughout cedarseed.com). It all depends on the subject matter. I work all this in digitally because it makes my life easier, but I prefer the physicality of things – I only ink on paper for instance, not on the screen, because without the feel of the pen sliding on the paper that would become a chore. And whereas in comic I keep a practical approach, bearing in mind future production, in other areas of my work I like to play with paper, gilding, beads and other odd media!

Read the whole thing here! And don't worry, more from me by Sunday...

FIBDA 2011

2011-10-18T07:58:00.003+02:00

Part of a fresco by tattoo artist Aurelio, created live on the premises

As my flight landed the evening of the opening of this 4th edition of FIBDA, I missed that again, and would only reunite with my fellow comickers over breakfast the next day. Fortunately, my friends from Armenia, Agata Baldayan and Irina Mryan, found me at the Rome airport as we were on the same flight to Alger from there, and that was a happy reunion!
As an aside, any airport that has a Fabriano shop and whose announcements include "The Holy Mass will be celebrated in terminal 1 at 12:30" is worth the detour.

Just so you know, this post won't cover everyone who was there nor all the events, as there was too much going on these 4 days for anyone to catch. A partial(!) list of guests can be found on the FIBDA site.

Cage elevators for the win at Al-Safir hotel.

Early the next morning I began discovering who had returned to the festival: Hector Sonon from Benin, Manuel Picaud, Maximilien Leroy, Brandon Jerwa (currently making a film, Untold Tales of the Comic Industry) with plenty of backup this time as I would find out later, and Laurent Melikian, fellow early lark, whom I'd also met in Armenia and highly encouraged to meet me again in Algeria. I was also delighted to see Paul Gravett had made it there, who had attempted to come last year but had the same visa problem I had (i.e. we never applied for one!) except I'd slipped through the net – not that I recommend anyone try that stunt...

After the first conference, regarding the role of comics in peace and reconciliation in Africa (which sounds more promising than it is, sadly,) I met the rest of the American contingent: Paul Benjamin (who writes for a bunch of titles and games out of Uzbekistan, believe it or not), John Layman (whose current series Chew has now hit the bestseller list) and Steve Lieber, the artist of the bunch, of Whiteout fame (among others, and his latest book Underground looks awesome) who spent the festival drawing for everybody present while the rest of us tried very hard to get to people's sketchbooks before he did.
I was very amused that the US paid for their trip and accordingly put them to work teaching in schools and kept an eye on their movements. My opinion alone, but to me it was strangely reminiscent of -- oh, never mind.

Brandon: Why do you always draw the same girl?
Steve: She holds still!

John, Paul and Brandon, getting intensely immersed into French

Steve Lieber gracing my sketchbook with a Whiteout touch

As my next "guest artist" said: "How do you go after that?"

Every morning Steve would come down to breakfast early with what is best described as a camper's backpack, except instead of a sleeping bag and dried fruits and nuts, it contained original pages, art supplies and dried fruits and nuts. Someone had done his homework and read my food review on last year's blog entry!
As for the trio, hanging out with comic writers means bathing in snappy dialogue. I laughed a lot. I won't repeat the things that made me, because I want to stay friends...

Paul also gets kudos for being Hommos Wars-literate

From Alberto Jiménez Albuquerque, one of our Spanish talents

Native doing calligraphy, sideways and without looking :|

Native Maqari, American Nigerian living in Paris as far as I could make out, was completely insane and had us all picking up our jaws within a few minutes of sitting down. He didn't sketch but drew directly in ink using bits of wood (making it look like the wood was alive and would keep drawing on its own if he let go of it), a technique, he said, he picked up from the calligraphers he trained with, and that aspect of his work was no less astonishing (see him at work here). As for my own calligraphy, which I was often sketching for, he claimed it was unquestionably "graffiti", which all things considered was probably a great compliment.

Another outrageous old friend was the inimitable Pahé, back to terrorize Algiers once more, as demonstrated by this cartoon he drew for me. He did give me a chance to request something tamer:
- Joumana, je te fais du Pahé?
- Vas-y, lâche-toi!

I'd rather not translate, thanks.

I was impressed that Pahé had not only completed and published his book about Gabon president Ali Bongo (titled Ali 9, Roi de la République Gabonaise, no less), but also that, instead of being harrassed or arrested for it, he was invited over to the palace and the President, now a fan, wrote a foreword for the next edition. And I thought politicians as a species had no sense of humor!

I was looking forward to hearing Benoît Peeters speak again as I'm a big fan of his work both in comics and about them. The conference, a sort of biography of Tintin via Hergé and vice-versa, was one I already attended in Beirut in 2009 but well worth hearing again (at the time I wrote a full account of another talk he gave the same day.)

Benoît Peeters telling us about Tintin et la Traversée du siècle

A little later, it was Paul's turn to speak, presenting a panorama of the best graphic novels in history through his soon-to-be launched book, 1001 COMICS You Must Read Before You Die. When I say soon-to-be launched, I meant very soon, as he flew back to London the very next day
for the release! It was an enticing talk and several of us took advantage of the presence of an advance copy to dive right in.

Agata and Irina studying Paul's advance copy of 1001 Comics You Must Read

Paul Gravett and Rachid Alik (organizer) not-posing

Note Rachid's Lebanese t-shirt! Shoo? = Wôt?

Peeters gave another talk that evening, this time with his lifelong creative partner François Schuiten, and together they plunged us into the world of the Cités Obscures (Cities of the Fantastic) which they created, one of the most memorable (and highly non-linear) series in franco-belgian comics.

Benoît Peeters and François Schuiten presenting their epic series Les Cités Obscures

Steve still sketching, this time for Marine Blandin...

... author of Fables Nautiques

One guest was making portraits of everyone in his
field of vision. Brandon was not sure how to take that.

Here with Halim Mahmoudi, author of Arabicot

Sandrine caught in the act of sketching me

Irina checking the resemblance

On Saturday morning, someone from Marvel comics was supposed to give a talk, but he didn't make it so Laurent took over and presented a history of superhero comics (a smaller version of which had been presented in Armenia), starting in the US then moving on to superheroes worldwide, ending with the latest title which was my own Malaak. Brandon, Steve, Paul, John and I then sat to answer questions, which took a whole hour: to our delight and despite the rain, the conference room was packed with young (and older) readers very eager to have a chance to get answers straight from the horse's mouth. There was one moment of sad cultural difference when, asked a barrage of questions all at once, Paul answered "42!" and us panelists were left cracking up while the audience looked on blankly...

Eduardo Pinto Barbier's capture of our panel on superheroes

I had a signature scheduled for Malaak IV as well, and I was touched to see that some people remembered me from last year. Also signing were two contributors of Toktok, a new comic magazine from Egypt of serious quality that I was glad to discover. Then, free of obligations, I sat to do the traditional portrait sketching of visitors. People line up and you draw quick portraits of them until you're too tired to carry on. It strikes me as a very useful and very important exercise in facial features: you will learn more about differences in physiognomy, eye and nose shapes, hairlines, etc from an hour of such sketching than from anything else. And it makes people happy. Also, I was armed this time with a really big black marker (that had been used for the cartoons below) and I never knew that the pressure of having no room for mistakes would pull accurate portraits out of me. Another good exercise.

Political cartoonists setting up shop where they can offend the most people

Raphaël Drommelschlager drawing portraits

In the meanwhile, Aurelio was suffering to finish this monster that took
two days more than he expected. I hope they kept it!

Finally done and able to attend to fans

Jose Muñoz was one of the major guests

Finally I'd like to mention the revelation of the festival, to me: Daniel Bosshart and his astonishing trilogy. He was so kind to give me a copy of the second volume, Alberto, for which I am ever so grateful as the series is for now only published and distributed in Switzerland (by Edition Moderne) and it will be a crime if nobody out there picks it up to make it available worldwide! These 3 books took altogether 15 years to create and they're entirely wordless. All is expressed is the astonishingly detailed, slow unraveling of the characters' inner life through changes in their surroundings, either real or imagined. There's no need for me to say a lot, I'll just share a couple of spreads.

Observe how every one of the myriad details in each room transforms, how every movement is observed fully. There is so much love in this work! Daniel promised me he'd look into getting a website up with his art, so it can get out there. I'm sure he could even offer some pages enlarged as posters.

And to finish this FIBDA blog, a surprise! I was wondering why a couple of people had asked me if Malaak had Algerian connections, and I found out why:

Malaak's strange hair wrap is REAL!

The kardoun is a long ribbon that is wound tightly around the hair to straighten them, a very old Algerian tradition. That is absolutely awesome. I have now witnessed the real-life version of something I wasn't sure was physically possible XD

Unexpected break

2011-09-30T10:28:00.001+02:00

Apologies for this unplanned break in my posting schedule (though I did ask for it by posting 2 pages at a time): London didn't allow me to work as much as I planned, and now I'm off to Algeria again for another edition of the international comic festival, which promises to be enormously fun and interesting. This means updates will only resume after that trip. Part of the break, I must say, was due to my wanting to make absolutely sure that the sequence of events for the rest of this volume is as awesome as I envision it to be, so I'm taking extra time exploring the story into volumes 6 and 7... As usual it'll be worth it ;)

For now I leave you with this handsome Barkshamash by period illustrator Joanne Renaud!

V8-9

2011-09-03T13:38:00.000+02:00

I took a lot of pleasure in making these two pages which take place in my favorite pâtisserie and feature some of my favorite people! And oh do I love drawing cakes!

I have a tip to share regarding these: indoors scenes are different from outdoor scenes in that artificial lighting gives a cast to the whole thing. To achieve this effect in Photoshop, all you need to do is fill a layer with the desired color and set it to the Color blending mode. Its opacity should be between 10 and 30% so that it's not perceptible, and you can tweak the cast using the Hue/Saturation palette till you get the feel you want. In the pages above I used a yellow layer on 20% opacity. Note that this technique can be used for any scene to pull together the whole color scheme; even a low opacity layer will make the color palette look more harmonious.

There may not be an update next week because London has not left me a lot of leisure to pencil new pages!

Sketch pages:

V6-7 and a review

2011-08-28T10:00:00.003+02:00

Today I'll start with a feature Malaak received on FLEEN, which I hear doesn't usually review this kind of comic. I'm very pleased because although brief, it's unusually astute, seeing beyond the superhero story. Read it here.

Sketch pages:

V5 and gift art

2011-08-21T11:15:00.000+02:00

I don't think Malaak saw that one coming, did you? (and no, I wasn't going to always post 2 pages a week!) Page sketch:

I also have some adorable gift art to share today, by the talented Sarah Petrulis aka Feralgrinn:

Chibi Nryz

Chibi Barkshamash

V3-4

2011-08-14T14:00:00.000+02:00

Again, drawing and texturing bits of Beirut is fun when I can take my time with them :D As an anecdote: the "Abed" graffiti (already seen in part 4 just before Adrian gets caught) is real. The "asofa" correction was a joke from one of my readers, which I slipped into the finished pages just before printing part 4 ;)

Since I got into the habit of preserving the sketch layer of a page instead of discarding it while I work, I thought I'd post those as well for each new page update – I know many of you enjoy them. The pages are collected in an album on the Malaak Facebook page for the moment, until I think up a way of presenting them on the website.

V1-2

2011-08-06T15:38:00.000+02:00

Malaak V is go! I'm so excited about it, I'm way ahead of myself with the pencils. I have a buffer of inked pages so that my upcoming London trip doesn't interrupt the updates, but I hope you appreciate the care taken in the coloring of these first two pages – taking it easy pays!

Taking a well-known neighborhood and "redecorating" is loads of fun ;)

I'm not entirely convinced about the special effects in the 2nd page (unfortunately the puff of smoke one would normally see in a situation like panel 3 doesn't translate well) so I'm keeping them this way provisionally – will revise if I can figure out a better way.

And it begins!

2011-07-24T15:45:00.000+02:00

Page 1 as a sketch, to revive the tradition of teasing my readers ;)

Launch of malaak IV

2011-07-13T10:38:00.000+02:00

It was another lovely launch this weekend at my favorite venue (Café Younes, where much of the comic was made). Here are the highlights for those who couldn't make it!

First visitor of all, my crazy friend Sarah

Amin Younes gets the first crop!

Editorial cartoonist examining my sketches and Younes manager examining the sweets

The special touch: the best macarons in Beirut, fresh from Le Gustav!

Mr LeGustav and Miss RagMag ;)

The ever-present @merwada!

Newly-engaged @mallydobb spotted the creator of Toilet Genie among my guest artists

Hark! A deviant!

Happy extra (one volume late!)

A devoted supporter made her way to the launch on crutches...

Nina the Terrible, scarier in person than her alter ego Nryz

Long-time friend and colleague Lina G, and her mother

Young fans too absorbed to pose

Still absorbed!

Happy author

And last but not least, @mich1mich and @lemondedejimmy

And now the clock is ticking as I write enough of part V to start putting up pages...

A Lebanese comicker in London

2011-07-10T07:59:00.000+02:00

This blog has been quiet entirely too long! But I have been, as usual, all over the place, and today is the big day for Malaak IV as it's finally launching, both in print and in the iPad app, which was updated for the occasion!

Today though I wanted to take advantage of a morning of no-longer-running around to blog about my recent encounters with the comic scene in London, which were exciting to say the least. My involvement in any of these couldn't have without the kindness of Paul Gravett, aka the Man at the Crossroads and Peter Stanbury, aka the Man in the Emerald Fez, who surely deserve to be characters in a mystery graphic novel to do those names justice ;)
But I have to say, what I have said before, that I have yet to meet anyone involved in comics who isn't friendly, open and enthusiastic!

The first event I attended was the June edition of Laydeez Do Comics, a wonderful monthly forum that reminded me of Geekfest, except dedicated to comics, particularly those with an autobiographical dimension. LDC was set up by artist Sarah Lightman* and illustrator Nicola Streeten in 2009 to discuss selected works, but by now is more oriented towards having guest speakers of all kinds - established graphic novelists, academics, young potentials... They also invite a different guest blogger each time, to write about the event. If I lived in London, I would be a regular! I hope to catch future editions; their Facebook page is the place to catch all news and what others have written about the meetings.

* See her also in this Women in Comics mini-documentary.

The guests of the June 20th meeting were Andrew Godfrey, who draws an ongoing comic about living with Cystic Fibrosis, Katie Green, working on a graphic novel about her recovery from anorexia, Charles Hatfield, professor at California State University, and myself.
Andrew and Katie have already written their own accounts of the evening, as did Mike Medaglia, a London-based Canadian cartoonist (see his FB page) who was the night's guest blogger (artist bloggers are extra awesome because they draw events instead of snapping photos – see Mike's brilliant portraits!) I recommend them all to get a complete picture of these encounters.

Andrew Godfrey was the first speaker, and described for those of us unfamiliar with it the difficult genetic disease Cystic Fibrosis which he lives with, and the breakthrough he had in terms of dealing with it artistically when he discovered performance artist Bob Flanagan, who used it freely for his comedy stand-up routines. This put him on track for creating his comics about living with CF, turning the difficulty and indignity of it on its head thanks to humor. The roughness of the art style felt perfectly appropriate, a reminder to the reader that though funny, this was not casual, and when Andrew expressed a dilemma about it the audience reassured him that it really should remain this way. More on my thoughts below.
His blog Graphic Engine is packed with comic news and reviews, and hopefully we'll see more of his work on there in the future!

Katie Green shared some of her illustration work including extracts from her lovely Green Bean zine, but in particular she presented for the first time her graphic novel-in-progress, lighter than My Shadow, recording her experience with anorexia, reaching the edge of the abyss, and then succeeding in making a slow painful recovery complicated by abuse along the way. It was clearly difficult for Katie to speak in public of what is still a painful subject 10 years after starting to recover, and she confided that in her case at least, getting it all out on paper was not cathartic at all but reliving difficult times. And yet she still has a few hundred pages to go before the book's release in 2013! She's working in a style that will make the book very approachable by teenagers who may be the most vulnerable to eating disorders, and also, I found, the child-like feeling of the art only emphasizes the helplessness one must feel against this "beast".

It was particularly poignant and impactful for me to listen to Andrew and Katie's talks, both not only speaking but immortalizing on paper such personal and difficult experiences. I had never heard of Cystic Fibrosis nor do I know anyone who suffers from an eating disorder, not, I'm sure, because they don't exist in Lebanon, but because in our society, they would be kept under wraps, families dealing in the strictest privacy with anything they deem too personal, or presenting an image of weakness. Even those who may discuss their disease or story of abuse relatively openly with their friends, may hesitate to commit them to print and publish them. I know I wouldn't; for all my writing and drawing about life during the war, I realize now, I never really open up about how the whole thing affected my inner life or my family's. In a small country where everybody knows each other, one always tries to control the image they project, because once it's out there, it will return again and again. But this is no way to spread awareness, and comics, with their popular appeal, are in a unique position to bring awareness of diseases, psychological issues, abuse, and so on to a large audience. Katie, whose book is not even completed yet, already reports that she's hearing from people who are heartened by the knowledge that one can recover from anorexia. Doubtless Andrew has (or will have) an audience that feels differently about themselves or about CF-suffering acquaintances thanks to his testimony. Both of their work belongs in the lineage of medical comics and they will fill a needed niche there where they can help others. This makes me wish more Lebanese artists, instead of being fixated on the war (yes, it's a national trauma, but how long are we going to let it hang over everything we do? And I realize I'm not innocent here), would pick up their pencil to tell the story of more personal and immediate issues.

Click here for a podcast of Andrew and Katie's talks.

Next came Charles Hatfield, whose passion for the field made me wish I was a student in California. A scholar of comics, author of Alternative Comics (now on my wish list), Charles teaches English class where the focus is often on comics or graphic novels, reading them, appreciating them, and homework often consists in creating comics, "even with stick figures" if necessary. Charles fully appreciates the enormous potential of comics and how they can draw on as many disciplines and studies in life as one wishes. His work is instrumental in completing the transition that sequential art is still going through now, from a reviled medium not taken seriously by "serious people", to being accepted by institutions on a same level as literature or art. We certainly could have discussed the questions he raised for hours, but we were running short on time and so it was my turn to get up and present Malaak.

As the forum is interested in the autobiographical (and I'm still surprised they looked twice at my superhero comic), I started by describing the context in which I grew up, as it defines the premise of Malaak: Lebanon at war, then under occupation, then liberated and immediately attacked again. I always underestimate the impact our lifestyle of the time has on foreign listeners, and I never quite know what will stand out most in their minds. As usual I forgot some of what I wanted to say and blurted out things I hadn't thought of saying, such as "for us kids it was simple: bombs, no school, no bombs, school", and that was what stuck!
For this presentation I dwelled a bit on things that wouldn't bear explaining to a Lebanese audience: the symbolism of the cedars from which Malaak is born, the glimpses of the National Museum as it stood when combats ceased, and such small details I insert in the storyline and let people notice for themselves. It was also immensely refreshing to speak to an audience that looks at the artwork and knows exactly how much work it represents, something people who never held a pencil (99.9% of my countrymen) take for granted entirely.

After this we all ran to have a quick curry, and I was sad to have to head home before I could really get to know anyone – curse London's silly Tube schedule!

As this is already long, I'll go briefly over the other two events.

The Comica Social Club gathers on the last Wednesday of every month: around 100 comic creators or academics or lovers, catching up on news and projects, showing each other their work, and sometimes getting special treats – this time round, Paul brought an advance copy of the long-awaited Habibi by Craig Thompson, and the enormous Alan Moore: Storyteller. I was entranced by the former and excited by the latter, and both went straight on my wish list. There were more people than I could meet but a few familiar faces from LDC: Nicola, Mike, and German artist Andy Bleck with whom I spent a long moment brainstorming on possible abstract comics based on Arabic calligraphy.

Alex Fitch trying out the Malaak app

I was particularly excited to meet illustrator and comic artist Barnaby Richards. Unexpectedly, Barnaby lived in Lebanon as a child, from 1980 to 82, and he recently started writing, then drawing his memories of those years, memories embroidered and sometimes created by the highly imaginative child he was. The result is the promising Beetroot, the most creative take on Lebanon I've seen in a long time. Our meeting seems to have motivated Barnaby to complete his project (and myself to bring some old ideas out of the closet to parallel with his), but when he said he really wanted to go back to Lebanon now, we suggested he wait till Beetroot was finished, so as not to contaminate his memories!

I was at the gathering at 6 and thought I would leave around 8, but it's not till 10 that I tore myself away to make my long way home. I saw them all again one last time on the 30th, at a talk and book signing by David B for Black Paths, English version of his latest work, published by SelfMadeHero. With my Franco-Belgian comic background I had naturally long heard of David B. who in addition to being a celebrated author is also a founder of legendary L'Association, and I never imagined I would end up meeting him in London, at a talk in which I managed to slip at the very last minute (very Lebanese of me). But the world of comics is smaller than one imagines, and in London I found a staple between the worlds of American/English comics and French comics, which themselves, in my experience, wove into places as far apart as Armenia and Algeria. I absolutely can't wait to be back in any of those places, until our local scene ceases being a series of isolated attempts not interested in each other and becomes a proper scene to speak of.

David B. speaking with Paul Gravett

In-between volumes

2011-06-01T12:28:00.000+02:00

After the completion of each book, it has become tradition for me to sit down and carve a stamp for signing that book, based on the theme-symbol of that particular volume :)
(And every time I start a new volume I wonder what symbol I'm going to be able to come up with for it!)
By the way, I carved this in rubber I bought in Tokyo for this purpose and was stunned: it's invisible to the naked eye, but the surface of it has a microscopic texture clearly designed to retain ink evenly and deposit it with perfect coverage. I have never seen anything like it! Will these guys ever cease amazing me?

For days now I have been preparing all my pre-order packages, only a fraction of which you see below... It has included making a lot of companion sketchbooks and sketching a lot of original drawings. I believe everyone will be pleased with their goodie bag!

And finally, only this morning, the books themselves arrived! Ah the smell of a freshly printed comic! All 1000 copies of Malaak IV are right here and I have to find room for them in a house already packed with a few thousand of our books:

I'm very happy with the way colors turned out in this volume, more than I have been since vol. I. Also I am as usual amazed by how sharp printed comics look. For instance, on the screen, you can only make out a slight different in style between the present and past scenes, but in the book the difference is stark, as I intended it, with the pencil strokes of the line art clearly evident.

I have been busy all day contacting press and reviewers to get the word out; if you know a reviewer who'd be interested in hearing about this, please drop me a note!

Yerek Dzuk, 4 "fishes" of Armenian comics

2011-05-30T09:49:00.001+02:00

I haven't yet been able to complete a blog post on my experience at the comic festival in Yerevan, but I'm eager to present the collective known as 3 Dzuk ("3 Fishes"), 4 comic artists who have taken up the challenge of organizing the event in addition to their day job and their comic work: Agata Baldayan, Liana Grigoryan, Irina Mrian and Hasmik Hovhannissyan (aka Ag, Li, Ir, Has).
Their energy and dedication to spreading sequential art in their country was inspiring, and I'm hoping here to give them a small measure of the recognition they deserve.

From left to right and ignoring the 2 intruders in the center: Irina, Hasmik, Agata and Liana

Q: Who are the 3 fish (who are actually 4) and how did they come together?

A: In 2004 Agata and Liana decided to make a drawn story for teenagers about the problems of teens, their feelings, their interests… Though we knew nothing about comics and the only examples of comic art that we saw was manga in internet, and both of us fall in love with it. We started to draw, very long, without any knowledge of comic art, just inspired by manga. Then a year later Irina joined us as scenarist and we begin to call ourselves 3 fishes and made a small collective which started to think about publishing for children and teenagers. Then in 2008 Hasmik joined as scenarist and artist but we still call ourselves 3 fishes and D’Artanian :)

What are the comics you have done or are working on now?

In 2007 we published our first comic book for teens, it was colored manga, which was called “Pentagon”. The story was about 5 friends, who live in Yerevan, studied in school and have different interests and problems. Also we published a magazine “5+” for children under 12, with different topics and 2 page comic story about Armenian farm and animals.

In 2009-2010 second story of “Pentagon” was printed in “Word of Life” magazine part by part.

In 2008 we started to cooperate with LOLO magazine where we draw 2 comic story about LOLO – the character of magazine and “3 friends”. We do it till now.

In 2010 another comic story was started to be published in LOLO magazine, it was “Noemi”, 2 page story about a 5 years old girl. It also is still ongoing.

In 2011 we published a small 8 page comic story which called “3 secrets”, we draw it during BD master classes. It’s published in “Happy Train” magazines for kids.

How do you work together? Does each one of you have a role?

Most of the time we work together. Irina makes the scenario, Liana, Agata and Hasmik make the drawing, storyboard, coloring…

We have a lot of projects now but unfortunately we cannot be fully involved in all of these, because all of as are working and comic art is a second job for us…

Can you tell me a bit about your experiences as comic writers and artists? Were you supported by your family and colleagues, or did you have to fight to do what you like? How do people respond when you say you make bande dessinée?

Comic art is very new for Armenia and for all post Soviet Union, because we didn’t have comics at all and for 70 years no comic books were published. This is why people most of the time don’t recognize comics as art or way of telling stories but only like caricatures and some illustration for kids only.

We are lucky because we do have a great support of our family members and colleagues, who always suppots us when we want to make something in this area. But of course there is some kind of fight when we need to prove that comics can be educational, kind of art, a wonderful way of telling story and find some support from sponsors, some magazines and publishings at last….

The reaction of people is always different, some of them think that it’s a stupid thing, some of them think that it’s caricatures only, the other that it’s only for kids, the other that comics will replace books…. And the others really like what we do. So very different reactions…

What difficulties do aspiring comic artists face in your environment?

The most and the biggest difficult is the fact that we don’t have publishing houses and publishers who are interested in comic books. We don’t have an opportunity to present a project to publisher and to be printed. We have to do all by ourselves and then it’s really hard to sell them after printing…

So the only chance to be printed is to be published in a magazine, but even here you have to make them believe that comic is cool!!!!!!

What is your role in the comic festival in Yerevan? How did you get involved?

In 2008 during “First international comic art festival in Yerevan” organized by APBDA (l'Association pour la Promotion de la BD en Arménie), we participated in contest and presented about 5 works.

In 2009 we participated in master classes organized by APBDA and became members of APBDA and that year we suggested the organizers to help with organization of next festival.

In 2010, during “Second International comic art festival in Yerevan” we took all organizational work in Yerevan.

In 2011 we organized master classes in Yerevan for 20 Armenian artists and “Comic Art Firework”.

In 2012 we are going to have a BIG BD festival, because Yerevan is designated World book capital in 2012, so we will have a one-month festival with different events

What is the most important thing for you to achieve in the near future, regarding your work in comics, or comics in Armenia?

We have several projects about printing comic books.

We really want to make a magazine only with comics by different artists.

We have to publish a collective book from master classes with 18 stories about Armenia. Also we will have an Armenian exhibition in Angouleme during the BD festival 2012.

Of course there's the big BD Festival 2012 in Yerevan

And so on :)))

Anything else you want to add that I forgot? :)

We love comics!!! And happy to know you :)

Yes and we dream to make a small publishing house “3 dzuk”.

IV Cover & launch date

2011-05-02T14:23:00.000+02:00

I'm happy to unveil the latest issue's cover, ahead of schedule:

I can also announce the launch date: the event will take place on July 9 at Café Younes in Hamra.
I will announce it again as we get closer to the event and via several channels, as usual. In the meanwhile I have a pdf copy for review should anyone know journalists or publications that might be interested in covering it – let me know!

Below is a look at the work process on the cover, not including previous, discarded ideas. After giving up on a few I thought of using elements from my High Ones design, in particular the two that were here relevant. And oh look, they make a circle!

Figuring out what the characters should be doing without overloading the image took the most time. There's little action but a lot of reflection and revelation in this volume so Malaak was best looking thoughtful.

Barkshamash looked rather lame though and I didn't like having him so evident, or having both of them look thoughtful. I tried having him shoot energy as on page 18, but the contrast between them was too jarring. Eventually I decided to only half-reveal him, while hinting at fire, with a pose that would demand a harsh lighting effects (we all know how much I love complex shading.)

First color attempt... The first 3 covers leaned towards a dark blue-green that is associated with Malaak, and here I really hesitated to break the continuity by "contaminating it" with the red-orange (not fond of complementary contrasts), but it added something striking.

A bunch of adjustments were suggested, so I revised the color of Malaak's top, the typography, the central background...

And then in the end returned to some of the colors in the previous step, because it just looked a lot more attractive! The final result is what you saw at the top of the page.

Malaak in Dubai

2011-04-29T06:38:00.000+02:00

I had a really great evening yesterday at Geekfest Dubai, which was not in my plans until last week but was made possible by Alexander McNabb from Fake Plastic Souks. Having mentioned I was heading to Dubai for the weekend, he nabbed me (pun intended) and got me to present both Malaak and my Kickstarter campaign at the event.

Due to crunch time and the need to get pages to the printer, I had to leave even thinking of my presentation till I arrived in Dubai. I get so bored of repeating over and over how the idea started and what it's about that I decided to go another route and just present the characters as if they were people, extracting some interesting panels rather than projecting pages out of context (anyway Alex had the brilliant idea to print off several pages and tack them all along the way to the screening room) and just making it fun. I was trying to keep it short but now I wish I'd thrown in a few more slides. Judging from the response (I think it was the "this was Malaak's reaction the first time she tried on her suit" slide that won everyone over ^_^) I should really get to work on an animatic clip with this approach, that I can put on youtube as well as use for such presentations.
After that I explained Kickstarter, despite my own campaign having already reached its goal, in the very genuine hope that someone will feel inspired to start a similar site for this region that needs it so grievously, given the total absence of any kind of aid to young creators.

In any case I was approached after the presentation by several people with heartwarming enthusiasm in the project, and interesting things may come out of this, but hush for now. I was also really pleased to talk to three young men who'd gotten very excited over the displayed pages and were motivated both to read Malaak and to go forward with their own comic ideas.

Also everyone thinks to think I'm mad for giving away so much for free. The paradox is that I derive a decent income from the very things I give away, so my thinking behind this should really be the subject of a long and detailed blog post (now added to my overlong list of things I really want to do when I don't have to urgently do something else.)

The questions were much more interesting than what I'm used to, and I was amused that two separate people expressed surprise at "how much good stuff was coming out of Beirut." I stand by my belief that disorder and uncertainty breed creation: when things are solid on the outside, the Muse has little room to play and little need to. Intense emotion, one way or the other, is the midwife of art: Malaak herself was finally born out of my anger and grief in the 2006 war, after several years of remaining an unripe embryotic idea in a corner of my mind. Those emotions are no longer present but by now the story flies on its own momentum.

But anyway.

Thanks to everyone who attended for your interest and encouragement, I didn't know just how much fun this would be! Here's a sketch that may be part of the cover to conclude this post:

IV42 (last page) and gift art

2011-04-26T09:25:00.000+02:00

Not good!!

Another volume ends. I hope you enjoyed the ride! I hate "to be continued" stories too, but this storyline really required two volumes to really develop. Vol. 5 is going to be more exciting than I can say right now :D

In Yarze, not too far from Beirut, there's a monument that was erected shortly after the war: whoever was commissioned for it thought it would be very deep to stack a bunch of tanks on top of each other and let them stand there, bristling with cannons, for posterity. I was in my early teens at the time and it remained in my mind as the most disturbing thing I'd seen since the fighting ended. It directly inspired the nightmarish vision above.

As for the overall shape, at first I was leaning towards deformed, blocky architecture at first:

It wasn't really what I was aiming for. When I returned to it last week, I wondered instead what would happen if you gave a bunch of primal-minded creatures a lot of concrete to build with (concrete and Beirut go like peanut and butter), and came up with something close to a termite mound...
The location, as mentioned at the beginning of this volume, is Sassine, and I was faithful to the details down to that leaning lamppost that makes me giggle and those hideous yellow and black stripes they inflicted on the sidewalks.

I'm always sad to finish a volume, but I'll still have things to update the blog with – some long-overdue articles, short strips if I can make the time, and of course the progress on the Kickstarter rewards. Once again, the special offers are up until May 22 only and then will not be available again, so don't forget to pledge for yours!

If you'd like me to share more sketches or bacground info, do let me know! Once the book is printed, I'll be able to say when vol. 5 will begin...

With perfect timing, I got this lovely gift art yesterday by Amy Clark Anderson. Enjoy!

IV41

2011-04-25T09:26:00.009+02:00

Heh, I had almost forgotten how to draw Malaak in costume! We haven't seen much of it during this chapter. But I know what's happening in the next and I'm rubbing my hands already *evil laugh*

Get ready for the last page...

IV40

2011-04-24T07:36:00.011+02:00

OH EM GEE!

Uh... The return of Nryz on Easter day is purely fortuitous and was not calculated, lol.

2 pages to go...

IV39

2011-04-23T07:32:00.000+02:00

Ayayay, poor Adrian :(
If anything doesn't look right to you please let me know, I have to do all my fixes very soon to go to print.
And 3 pages to go!

IV38

2011-04-22T09:03:00.000+02:00

4 pages to go!

With this page I thought I'd share the photos I used as references for the backgrounds. They're from a library of around 800 photos so far that I've collected around Beirut for this purpose.

IV37

2011-04-21T08:36:00.002+02:00

I think we left Adrian on his rooftop long enough, eh? Don't be mad at me for the delay, I was putting it to good use: ALL remaining pages are already flatted and shaded, so I only have the last stage of coloring (which is also the most unpleasant) to do.

Beirut's wire jungle finally comes in handy ;)

It won't be obvious unless you compare, but I'm trying a new approach to coloring night scenes, which works rather better. So I have to revise older ones consequently, some are WAY too dark. I have already started revising older pages for final adjustments before printing, and there's a change worth mentioning on page 3: the name Ushumgallu is gone, replaced with Nahash-Shamîm. The former was a general reference to a "great dragon" taken from Mesopotamian mythology at a time where it was the closest I could get to what I wanted. But I invested in rare archaeological books recently and only yesterday emerged triumphantly from one of them with the Phoenician word for the winged serpent I had envisioned, so that took its rightful place. (I intuited there had to be winged serpents in our mythology before I actually found out there were indeed :O I will write about this lost history when the comic's safely off to print).

5 pages left! And remember you can pre-order this volume and enjoy exciting extra rewards by pledging on Kickstarter.

Malaak pre-orders & rewards on Kickstarter!

2011-04-16T17:21:00.001+02:00

The High Ones

You saw this as a work-in-progress a few days ago; now I'm unveiling the final result at the same time as my Kickstarter campaign. Kickstarter is a great pre-ordering system I am using to finance the printing of volume 4, and I hope that all of you with an interest in the finished volume will take a look, make a pledge if you intended to get a copy, and spread the word as much as possible :) Pre-ordering gets you great discounts on the books as well as several special gifts based on your pledge, so it's a much better deal than waiting till it's printed. I won't go on at length about this here, please check the link to see what awaits! You also get to see me talk, so feel free to point and laugh, it's ok :P

So what does this have to do with this artwork? This is in fact a limited run silkscreen print that is offered as one of the rewards, a rare representation of all four High Ones together. I wanted a subject related to Malaak but not comic-based to the extent that it would only appeal to a small crowd. This idea was a very sudden inspiration as I sat down to order food during a recent work trip. It went something like "Ok, let's think of that silkscreen design now – ah, thank you." Guess all it takes is to ask nicely...

Malaak is counting on you! If you have any questions, I'll be right here, working on those last pages...

Sneak peek, of sorts

2011-04-04T16:50:00.000+02:00

This incredibly obscure thing (I'm afraid of looking away and never finding the thread again) is the underlying grid to a very special item I'll be offering exclusively as part of a Kickstarter campaign for publishing volume 4 of Malaak. More details very soon, but if you're curious you can read up on Kickstarter here!

IV36 & announcement

2011-03-31T10:40:00.000+02:00

6 pages to go and I'm hard at work on the pencils, so they should go quickly. In parallel I have put the publishing process in motion: getting a cost estimate from the printer, thinking of a cover and title, and possibly launch a Kickstarter campaign for it – more on that later.

Now for an announcement I was keeping to myself until all was set. Malaak will be exhibited at the 3rd edition of the Festival de la BD et de l'Image, which will take place in Yerevan (Armenia) in early May, and I am tagging along. I am positively bursting at the idea of going back to Yerevan, which I visited in 2008 only a couple of weeks before the first edition of the festival, and I'm thrilled to bring the comic more to the attention of the Franco-Belgian world of comics. I truly can't wait!

IV35

2011-03-22T10:58:00.000+02:00

I better get some comments on this page! I've been waiting to drop this bombshell for a couple of volumes!

What makes me awfully pleased with myself is that, as far as Arabic speakers are concerned, this connection was hidden in plain sight from the start, but it was very sneaky of me. Amer (عامر) is a common name, understood to mean "one who has built, established", but it also means "one who resides", and as such is an established word designating a resident jinn, i.e a jinn who lives with people...

(But if you google it you have to spell it "Amir", because I altered the spelling on purpose. Ha.)

Also, you're seeing right, Barko's hair and eyes did darken after the "incident". People might have noticed the resemblance if they'd always been black like Amer's...

And with that, only 7 pages to go 0:)

IV34

2011-03-21T06:41:00.000+02:00

8 pages left!

I know it's not fair to make you wait to post what amounts to a single panel, but p35 is not far behind, I'm almost done with it. Originally this was supposed to be the last panel on p33, but I started feeling like I couldn't do the scene justice without giving it a full page, so what was previously a 2-page scene became a 3-page scene... messing up my calculations, but I figured it out so no harm done. Also don't think that splash pages like this one require less work since they're a single panel... You have to make up for it by making it spectacular, otherwise it's a waste of space.

Before I share some close-ups, let me mention again that the first mailing-list-exclusive activity has begun, and there are gifts involved. I will announce it again with the next page I post, so if you want in on it make sure to click the "subscribe via email" button on the right.

Now here's a closer look at some details. The Star of Ashtart:

I did not make up this object, it is a historically recorded artifact, though we don't know what it looked like exactly: a "sky-stone" that was kept in the temple of Astarte in Tyre (Sur), and that was said to have been brought there by the goddess herself. Without the shadow of a doubt, it was a meteorite stone: those were worshiped everywhere, and in the Middle East specifically they were consistently used to signify the divine, and in that context are referred to as baetyl ("house of god".) As an example, the stone on which Jacob laid his head when he had the famous dream of the ladder and angels, is thought to have been a baetyl. In any case, let me not digress too much here, this may be the subject of a future Themes article.

Here's a better look at Yodashtart at work:

Next page will finally reveal Barkshamash's fate!

IV33

2011-03-10T17:32:00.000+02:00

(I had to make some changes to p32 so I'm posting it again with p33)

Sneak peek and SICAF

2011-03-05T07:31:00.000+02:00

Just so you know I'm working on these new pages, I give you a sneak peek:

We have officially entered the final countdown for this volume, with page 33 being the first of the last 10 pages... Mailing list subscribers are getting their first perk for the occasion, check your emails... (It's not too late to subscribe, the button is on the right.)

Other than that I'm again sitting on a couple of announcements, but I should have myself sorted out next week to spread the news. Let's just say Malaak's world domination is only beginning ;)

I've also been asked to post about SICAF, which I'm happy to do!

The 15th Seoul International Cartoon & Animation Festival (SICAF) is running its 6th International Digital Cartoon Competiton and they'd really like to get more entries from Lebanon (though of course everybody's welcome). Webcomickers, digital illustrators and animators should find this interesting. Registration is open till April 22; click on the posters below for all the details (you can also check the official website).

IV32

2011-02-17T08:00:00.001+02:00

IV31

2011-02-11T08:00:00.001+02:00

(In case you wonder, the "oh, crap" is a Hellboy tribute. I just couldn't resist, though I may change it yet.)

IV30

2011-02-05T08:49:00.003+02:00

I'm off to Tanzania on Tuesday with the family, but rushing to get some pages ready so they can be posted during my absence. We're about 10-12 pages from the end of this volume, I'm pleased to say!

IV29

2011-02-01T08:33:00.003+02:00

I'm in-between two trips again but seeing to it that you won't be left without updates ;)

I'm not entirely happy with the last panel, but I need to look at it with a fresh eye again later. I really need to thank Jade Macalla here for his excellent stock and reference photos that make my life a lot easier for weapons, soldiery gear, gun/sword fight action etc. He even very kindly shot multiple angles of his kickass boots for me when I decided those had to be the ones Adrian wears.

In case you missed it, check out the Malaak app for iPad, I still welcome feedback and ideas for expanding into the world of touch technology :)

Malaak now live on iPad!

2011-01-18T10:59:00.006+02:00

It's here! After much trial and error, and toil by my kind developer Stephan Pulver whom I thank here, Malaak for iPad is now available for download for free. To get it, go to the app page and click "Available on the App Store".

Why make it free? Because, for the moment, the app doesn't contain anything that you can't already find on the website for free, except the awesome experience of flipping through it on an iPad. Also, we're very proud of the tooltip feature: tapping on Lebanese words in the pages brings up a little pop-up explaining them. No more scrolling to the bottom of the page or flipping to the end of the book to read language notes!

This is the first app of the kind either of us work on and we are really counting on user feedback (though I realize iPads aren't that common yet). If you install it, please let me know what you think, anything that doesn't work for you, anything you think would be a good addition... I'm open to the possibility of making a paid app with special, iPad-only features, so if anything of the sort comes to mind, I'll be happy to hear about it. Please think of leaving a rating or review as well!

Go on, download it and enjoy! I truly believe the iPad may give birth to a whole new branch of comics!

Tropes: Decompressed Comics

2011-01-12T15:56:00.004+02:00

Tropes are storytelling devices. This series of articles on how to use or not use them in comics was first published in my Comics & Cartoons Weekly on deviantART.

Decompressed comics

This trend that began, in the West, in the late 90s/early 00s thanks to Warren Ellis's The Authority, is now so taken for granted that it feels necessary to point out to young authors that they don't actually have to follow it.

Decompression is a cinematic practice, introducing numerous silent shots to slow down the pace of a comic, build up tension or introduce a mood.
It is also used as a more creative way of establishing a shot, or transiting from one scene to the next, than the old text labels ("Next morning", "In the meanwhile, on the other side of town..."). Decompressed scenes very much give the feeling of real-time experience (as close as possible), such as when, in a movie, the camera travels into a scene, sometimes even from the character's own point of view.

Like every tool however, it can be used poorly. For one thing, just because it's available, doesn't mean it has to be used. It's not a mark of coolness to go cinematic where there's no reason to. For another, using decompression to pad out thin plots is just sad. Big publishers are sometimes guilty of that, but in their case, that implies forcing readers to buy 10 volumes for an amount of "story-meat" that would have filled no more than two – not very nice at all. Marvels' Secret Invasion was criticized for that, stretching out a few hours of comic-book time over a year. It made business-sense for them, of course, but when it comes to independent comics it's more likely to translate into boring and losing your readers. Just because your art can redeem your poorly done pace, doesn't mean you should be content with subpar writing.

So here's a quick, but not definitive, check list of when decompression works and when it doesn't.

Good decompression:
- Establishing a scene, as it pulls the reader into the place and the mood of it, gives them to "look around" and be where the characters are.
- Suspense, as there is no shortcut for buildups, they have to be... built up. It is well-worth, even indispensable to invest a whole page or two, or more, into a decompressed sequence when the suspense is a keypoint in your plot. Naturally, you can't have this more than once in a single story, at least not in a similar way.
- Transition as mentioned above. Obvious examples: Rather than stating "The next morning", a few panels showing the sun rise over the location; Rather than stating there's been a change of location, fade out of one and back into the other by drifting out away from the scene, or zooming out, or on the contrary zooming in very close and then out again to a different scene, etc... Movies are rife with such ideas. Text labels are not necessarily a disgrace, however. When a more clipped pace is required they fill their role beautifully with minor "customization" to fit the context.
- Some storylines are made to be entirely decompressed, and that's how this device came into existence in Manga in the first place. Stories that are not so much about action as they are about characters, introspection, or about places; stories that do not follow the problem-resolution-conclusion model but instead aim to pull the reader into an experience, have everything to gain from this format and would be poorly served by a more condensed treatment.
- Providing exposition instead of doing so through much text or talk. A story set in an unusual location, for instance, whether a little-known place or a fantasy setting, can tell us much about that place by making us wander through it a while before the plot steps in. People may react negatively to a wall of text, but will most probably be interested and stimulated by the visual discovery of something new.
- Slowing down the pace after a very intense scene. When making a comic we have to remember we are not perceiving it the way a reader will: their perception includes the speed of narrative, and one does get mentally out of breath if the pace is frantic without breaks. The reverse is also true. Contrast!

Bad decompression:
- Slowing down the pace where it should be quick, such as during action scenes.
- Making the story much longer than it needs to be in the hopes of making it look like a fully developed one.
- Abuse of splash pages and spreads. They really lose their impact very quickly when overused, or when used for moments that were not worth it.
- Visually uninteresting panels. Unless you're specifically trying to convey that a place is very dreary and dull, this is missing the point. I don't mean to say that the panels should be busy and filled with details, but the eye should not be invited to skip them by lack of something there to keep it. That would defeat the purpose of slowing down the reader and letting them absorb the mood.
- Using it without knowing why, just because you see others do it. You are not a sheep. Do things because you have a reason to do them.

IV28

2011-01-09T06:48:00.003+02:00

Don't look at me like that, this hurts me more than you! I'm pleased the pace is picking up, however. The next 2 pages are already pencilled.

A note about the "hidden ones" (red and orange trailing thingies): these were drawn freehand on paper with a brush pen, to obtain this texture. They were then imported into Photoshop, separated from the background and filled.

IV27

2011-01-06T19:02:00.002+02:00

The last cliffhanger brought me death threats, so I hurried to finish a new page.

Somehow I don't think that's going to make things better...

IV26

2011-01-04T11:38:00.003+02:00

IV25

2010-12-28T20:11:00.002+02:00

Naturally the year had to end in a cliffhanger, teehee.

Happy new year everyone!

IV24

2010-12-20T01:00:00.003+02:00

I like Dream Plane pages because they're so quick to do ... Definitely good when you're trying to catch up. I think a lot of people were waiting for this moment. How long was Malaak going to accept Amer's attitude without question?
I was very busy updating the site this weekend, making sure it was perfectly presentable and functional as I expect some increased exposure in 2011. If you drop by the front page you'll notice a streamlining of the menu, easy-to-find RSS and mailing list buttons, and a return of the FAQ page. New readers now have somewhere to go for a gentle introduction to the comic and to the site, and journalists/reviewers can find a press kit with basic questions and high-res resources.

Trope: Naming characters

2010-12-19T07:21:00.006+02:00

Tropes are storytelling devices. This series of articles on how to use or not use them in comics was first published in my Comics & Cartoons Weekly on deviantART.

Naming Characters

To be honest this isn't truly a trope – it started as one but ended up as the sum of my thoughts and advice on the matter. I'll start by general points to keep in mind and end with my own personal approach. This is written with comics in mind, but it applies to writing for any other medium, too.

• In real life, homonyms are rife. Back in school there were 4 Karim's in my class, as well as 2 Samer's, 2 Zeina's, 2 Joumana's... You get the point. In a comic, this is best avoided unless it's a plot point (eg. J.K. Rowling's Barty Crouch, in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), or a potential gag. Basically if you're not going to flaunt it, avoid it because it gets very confusing.
If you have tons of characters and it's inevitable that some share first names (for instance if your story is set in 18th century England, where only a handful of Christian names were shared by the entire population), at least refer to them differently – use family names or title, or even nicknames, so there is no possible ambiguity.
I ignored this rule for this page of Malaak, but these were one-off characters, so I could allow myself the whim of having "Noor and Noor" together. I might reuse one of them but not both, so the risk of confusion is null.

• Equally confusing, though, is using the same initial or same number of syllables for different names. Readers may mistake one for the other and not even know why, but if you have a James and a Jason, or Robert and Bob, or Lois Lane and Lana Lang (alliterative names used to be very popular in comics, now they just look quaint), you're going to have people occasionally stop and backtrack because they skimmed the name and got the wrong character. While this may not be a terrible problem when you're using common names, if you're building a fantasy or alien world full of entirely original names, it becomes a critical consideration because readers already have to memorize the new names, and register the subtle differences between them. Karamerek and Kiratelek, for instance, start and end with the same sound and have the same number of syllables. People WILL stumble. The same goes, unfortunately, if the culture you're writing has a prefix or suffix system for names – like, all names are preceded by Bel- or Ga- or en in -ru. Cognitively, we rely on the beginning and end of a word to recognize it. It's no good if the middle part is unique. It's much easier to tell apart Karamerek from Starameroff than from Kiratelek, as in the example above.
Of course, it's impossible to give a unique number of syllables to every name. In Malaak most of the names are two syllables: Malaak, Tareq, Zeina, Layal, Yeraz, Hassan... Longer names just happen to be rare in our culture. But notice that I stay away from alliteration among those names. They are all quite distinct visually and phonetically.

• Speaking of alien world, do keep your invented names pronounceable. If you have one character with a hard-to-pronounce name, they'll stand out, but if your whole alien culture is made up of X'ezstra and Qk'ezik, your readers will save themselves the headache and go read something more user-friendly.

• First names can't be copyrighted, but nobody can counter the power of association. You can't create a teenage character called Harry and not expect people to believe it's a reference to Harry Potter. This goes for real life as well – I met a powerfully built, 6'6 guy called Clark and I'll let you imagine what everybody calls him. On the other hand, if your character is a middle-aged executive, you could quite safely name him Harry. So it's a matter of being aware, and possibly submitting the name to a few people before making it final, in case they catch weird associations or unintended puns you missed. Over a decade ago I was writing a fantasy story and I named a tiger Cherk. It was my brother who pointed out: "Did you mean to refer to Shere Khan?" I had never noticed the similarity!
Of course, if the homage to a famous character is deliberate, it's another matter.

• Let your choice of names make sense. To use J.K. Rowling's example again, her books are a wonderful example of thoughtful naming. If you examine the great variety of character names in her magical community you notice that Muggle-borns have "regular" names (Dean Thomas), full-bloods "wizardy" names (Draco Malfoy) and half-bloods are often a mixture (Nymphadora Tonks). Pick any name in the book and you can figure out something of the character's background or make an educated guess, which is an astute observation of the status of names in real life. By the way, in real life very modest families are as prone to using grandiloquent names as families of status, in this case as a kind of compensation (but not in all cultures, as some believe grand names attract evil spirits. I will have details on this in part 3.)

• When it comes to foreign names, please, for heaven's sake, research local names before creating a foreign character. Don't make up something that vaguely sounds right to you. Don't borrow names from famous people (like Marvel's Fabian Cortez, or another character named something Bonaparte). Rather, hunt down someone from that country on whatever online community you're a member of, and ask them for a list of popular names and likely family names. Yes, some first names are insanely popular in their respective cultures, but characters bearing "stock foreign names" (Ahmad, Jose, Boris) should be reserved for comedic stories, or for stories that have a large number of characters (and therefore of names) from that culture. Be aware that many countries have a high incidence of Western names: in Madagascar, where people have amazingly long names, they never use them with foreigners, but instead adopt for their benefit delightfully old-fashioned French names like Hippolyte and Jacquot. On top of this, countries that share a language do not necessarily share a name pool. British first and last names are very distinct from American names, even if the difference is often one of spelling; those names t exist in both countries do not do so in the same proportions. Hence the importance of talking to someone with an insider's view. In some places, both first and last names are connected with religion, and NOT in the obvious ways. A practicing Arab Christian family may have a child named Abdallah ("servant of God") while a secular Muslim family may name their kids Nadine and Carlo. These are real-life examples. By properly researching names you won't only do justice to the complexity of societies, you'll also contribute to the slow but necessary dissolving of the cultural stereotypes that writers perpetuate without even meaning to. For a long and detailed overview of naming habits around the world, see the upcoming parts 2 and 3 of this article.

• Meaningful naming is more appreciable when it's not downright cliché (although one must note that clichés are always desirable in comedy). "Adam" for a character who's going to bring about a new start for humanity is really old (pun intended). Before going to watch the movie 2012, I jokingly told a friend "Bet there's a character named Noah who's among the only survivors." Well guess what!! Emma Frost is a less than subtle example, as is Otto Octavius who becomes Dr Octopus ("Guy named Octavius winds up with eight limbs. What are the odds?" ) If you want your character's name to be prophetic and foreshadow a plot development, you may want to make it less than obvious to preserve your suspense, while giving your most observant readers something to be smug about. The astronomy-literate for instance would have figured out Sirius (the dog star) Black at once.
On the other hand, misnomers can be quite effective for hilarity or to blindside the excessively observant readers who delight in spoiling you plot.

• You can get away with almost any character name by making it an appropriated name, i.e. a nickname the character adopted after his friends or enemies or the press started calling him/her that. Many superhero names have retroactively been explained by this device, including Superman, Wonder Woman and Plasticman.

Now, a bit about how I go about naming characters, for Malaak: Angel of Peace in particular.

• I look for meaning. Malaak means "angel" and came up early during my initial brainstorming of what a Lebanese superheroine could be called. It fit my concept perfectly, but if it hadn'tt sounded good, I might have passed and kept looking, since the lead character at least needs something catchy. Yeraz means "dream", here for no particular reason related to the character herself, but as a hint of where the story in general was heading (and you never know, I haven't decided Yerz's fate yet.)
I never explain meaningful names unless specifically asked, they're kind of an Easter egg for readers to enjoy finding. I can tell you that one of the characters right now has something about them hidden in plain sight in their name. But nobody so much as wondered so far, and I can't wait for the big reveal ;)
Other meaning-based names in the comic are those from the scenes set in 525 BC. The high-ranking "priests" (not really what they are, but I'm not elaborating on this here) have long names that refer to the "deities" they serve, and they are meant to be ritual names acquired during initiation, not their original birth names. I made the names up based on the little resources available about the Phoenician language: Yodashtart means "hand of Astarte", for instance, Azmilqart "Strength of Melqart". Barkshamash is "Blessed by the Sun". In contrast, Kesep ("silver") and Mirr ("myrrh") have mundane meanings, reflecting their lower degrees as novices.

- I am society-aware. Tareq and Zeina, the first secondary characters to appear, have extremely common, almost stereotypical names. This is exactly what they were meant to be: representations of the typical young Lebanese male and female (at least at first; both grow with the story). They're also neutral names as in they don't denote a specific religious sect. (In this country, most of the time, if you know someone's name you can tell their religion and even their village of origin). When I had only 2-3 characters, I did not want them to stamp the story with any given social or religious group. When I added a handful more characters however, I deliberately gave them names that were the contrary of neutral, as I now had enough people to express the diversity of our society in a balanced way: Raffi and Yeraz, (Armenian), col. Ibrahim and his daughter Layal (Sunni), Hassan (Shia), Pierre (Christian; not named yet but he's there)...

- I don't try to have full control. Adrian and Col. Ibrahim were both named by Adrian's real-life model. Hassan, Kamal, Nour are all homages to the real people they were modeled after (Doctor Kamal being my brother). In this and in other aspects of the writing, I leave room for it to run wild, because that's what life is: random and uncontrollable. It just adds something to the writing, when it's not all governed by a single mind.

If you're looking for deeper info on the subject, I recommend to you my 5-part overview of naming habits around the world: Names and Naming.

IV23

2010-12-16T14:38:00.003+02:00

We're finally back on track and have officially passed the halfway mark for this volume. I know the story jumps back and forth a lot as it's really meant to be read in one go, so if you're confused please go back a few pages.
Again, I encourage readers to join my mailing list as subscribers will occasionally get special offers :) To subscribe, send me your email address or send a blank email to malaaknews-subscribe@cedarseed.com.

Gift art in the meanwhile

2010-12-09T06:07:00.004+02:00

Don't let the state of the blog fool you: I am neither dead nor inactive. I'm hard at work on 3 new pages, following my return from Japan which was itself followed by things that kept me busy. In the meanwhile, other than the shiny new Facebook page I made for Malaak (much handier than the original group – is it me or is FB making groups obnoxious on purpose, to phase them out?) I offer you some lovely gift art to peruse until page 23 is ready to post.

Yeraz by Sarah Petrulis:

Griffon by Sarah Petrulis:
Various by Psamophis:
Griffon by Liz Jackson:

Adrian by Liz Jackson:
Chibi Guardian by Gaia Gandolfo:

And how have my dear readers been?

IV20-22

2010-10-29T10:16:00.002+02:00

Don't forget to vote for Malaak!

I made it! Before I vanish for a couple of weeks, I'll leave you with 3 new pages. Enjoy!

Halloween special!

2010-10-26T05:52:00.003+02:00

I'm working hard on getting a page or 2 up before I'm off to Tokyo, but in the event I don't manage, here's a Halloween special for my readers! It's also a vote incentive: to download the full-size wallpapers for your desktop, vote for Malaak and you'll have access to the secret URL :D

Can you recognize them all? ;)

FIBDA 2010

2010-10-18T21:00:00.008+02:00

I'm back from Algiers, where I attended FIBDA 2010, Algeria's International Comic festival. Malaak was part of the official selection for best album, so I was invited as a candidate for the award and also to sign my books alongside other authors. I had a grand time and this massive post is an attempt to put together the strongest moments of the event and introduce you to the people I spent the week with. I had intended to blog daily, but as net access was very difficult, I will forgo chronology and just throw stuff together. For pretty photos of the city itself, keep an eye on my Wild Garden blog.

Before moving on to the festival account, I wish to mention that this experience has persuaded me to create a French version of the Malaak website and post the French translation of the comic there. I realized that the French-speaking, English-lacking world is not limited to France but includes an enormous part of Africa and the Maghreb, which is a lot of people I'm de facto excluding right now.
J'insère ici une note à l'adresse de mes lecteurs francophones: Cet expérience m'a persuadée de créer une version francophone du site de Malaak et d'y mettre les pages de la BD en français. J'ai réalisé en effet qu'une énorme partie de l'Afrique et du Maghreb, sans compter la France même, n'est absolument pas à l'aise en anglais, et les exclure n'avait jamais été mon intention...Si vous avez des commentaires ou suggestions n'hésitez pas!

The main thing I retained from this experience is that people involved in comics are really awesome people, friendly, open, interested in each other's work, eager to sit and get to know the new people no matter how inexperienced they are (there are notable exceptions, but none of those was present.) This was especially true because we came from so many different places, and the worlds of European, Middle-Eastern, African and American comics were brought together possibly for the first time – there was even a Cuban comic artist who'd never left the island before.
To be there among so many was both humbling and validating. Validating because you're there as an equal, you've been flown in because they consider your very presence to be a contribution to the festival, and humbling because there are so many beautiful, gut-wrenching, or otherwise amazing projects to discover, by people still at the very beginning of their comic journey, that you feel very small and forgettable. And inspired to push yourself much further, really!

There were quite a few of us and I never got to meet everyone, but here are a few people I was lucky enough to spend quality time with.

One of the first authors I met was also one of the greatest: Jacques Ferrandez, whose Carnets d'Orient are well-known in Beirut, Lebanon being the subject of one of the volumes. He is an accomplished "bédéiste" who needs no introduction in the franco-belgian world, as well as a heartful, wonderful man. He's also so invested in Algeria that the Algerians embrace him as one of their own.

At the table in the background, with his wife, is Baru, another great name whose path I was lucky to cross.
Jacques autographing my copy of his Retour à Alger:

Fabien Vehlmann (on the right) is the new writer for the well-known series Spirou et Fantasio, which happens to be the sole Franco-Belgian comic series whose characters belong to the publisher, and so are passed on from one writer-artist team to another (like American comics). But Fabien also writes his own series, including the current Seuls, a story about a group of children who wake up in a city where everyone else has vanished, and have to survive all alone. I got hooked on the first volume, all the more so because he's teamed up with my idol Gazzotti, the artist for Soda. Fabien and I discovered we had quite a few things in common, and he's extremely funny. Gotta find a way to get him over to Beirut! In the meanwhile I'm savoring his blog, alas reserved to those with a fine mastery of the French language.

On the left is Redouane Assari better known in Algeria as Red One, the nom de plume under which he authored stories of incredible graphic quality, specializing in motor race cars and the like. He's reappearing now after a long disappearance, and I should point out the interesting fact that in "civilian" life he was a dentist!

At the extreme right in this picture is Josh Neufeld (@joshneufeld), author of the striking AD: New Orleans after the Deluge. We shared a highly unusual experience at a newspaper, which I'll go over in detail below. With the mic is Etienne Shreder (did you just think what I think you just thought?) who was here to share his remarkable story of curing himself from alcoholism by beginning to make comics. Next to him is Francis Groux, another lovely gentleman who happens to have founded the festival of Angoulême among other achievements such as climbing Everest and creating a national comic competition for inmates that turned out to have therapeutic effects.
All the way on the left is our indefatigable moderator Mohamed Bensalah from the University of Oran.

I didn't yet talk about my colleagues from Lebanon, on the left below: Amal Kaawash, from Palestine, known for her character Meiroun, and Lena Merhej, editor of the collective Samandal, who is currently deepenign her knowledge of sequential art in Germany. Lena and I both had our names respelled Algerian-style as MerheDJ and MedleDJ, which was funny enough in itself, with the added twist that some people were confused by the similarity of our names and thought we were sisters. With us came the writer Sahar Mandour, not pictured here but usually spottable at a distance by her shock of curly hair (yeah yeah I'm not one to speak.)

On the right is Maximilien Leroy, whose book Faire le Mur was awarded Best Album for this year. I approve the choice wholeheartedly, having grabbed and read a copy early on during the festival. I don't want to get into a review here but I may do so later – I truly hope it will be translated into English soon. This is a silent scream to be set against Joe Sacco's intense investigative work. An interview with both he and Amal over the topic of the Middle East conflicts in comics can be found in French here.

Pahé below is a natural phenomenon. Don't let the photo fool you, he only behaves as long as he's drawing something. A ferocious wise ass, I would not like to be on the receiving end of his political satires. I'm quite glad to be on his good side though. Very cool guy with an amazing knack for cartooning. Here he's signing volume 1 of his autobiography, the bizarre story of a kid born in the depths of Gabon whose life ended up adapted as a cartoon show on a French tv station. (And he made me blush)

This is Didier Kassai, Central Africa, posing with pages he finished overnight at the hotel. According to his roommate Pahé, Didier manages to get his original pages stolen before every festival, forcing him to work late into the night during the festival to get some re-done in order to have something to show.
I think churning this out overnight deserves a medal in and of itself o_O

Below is Hector Sonon, from Benin, who now lives in Denmark where he is tall enough to blend in. Hector is a machine. If you lose sight of him for half a second you will find him at whatever flat surface is available, sketching madly for anybody who asks. My pal Didier in the background is wondering what he might be eating in secret.

Finally, the four graces: Joelle Ebongue from Cameroon , Gihèn Ben Mahmoud from Tunis, Joelle Esso from Cameroon too, and me.
But there was also Eduardo from France/Brazil, Japhet from Cameroon, Kash from the Congo, Paul Grist (@mistergrist, author of Jack Staff) from the UK, Nana Li (@LiNana, artist of Twelfth Night in the series Manga Shakespeare) from China/Finland/UK, Brandon Jerwa (@jerwa, writer for DC Comics) from the US, Nigar Nazar from Pakistan...

On the day of the opening, a handful of us – Lena, Josh, Sahar (the intruder!), Amal, Pahé and myself – were taken to the offices of Algérie News with a mission: replace all of the photos in today's issue with cartoons and editorial illustrations. We set about the job with zeal and in the knowledge that we'd have to miss the opening ceremony. On the other hand, we enjoyed wifi at the office for all that day. Someone finally got her twitfix...

The opportunities presented by being surrounded with cartoonists were not lost on me, and I set about getting souvenirs from my new friends. You don't have to ask twice from people who breathe through their pencils.

Kash from Congo and Hector from Benin

Japhet from Cameroon and Didier from Central Africa

Fabien from France and "Red One" from Algeria

Josh from the US and Pahé from Gabon

Amal from Palestine and Jihene from Tunis

I caught a few colleagues on paper... Unfortunately too late to get the whole set:

My turn to sign books!

One evening we were taken to a restaurant that took so long to reach I started wondering if we were being kidnapped... I found myself seated next to Paul Grist who turned out to also be vegetarian, and as we waited and waited over an hour before food arrived, a thought crossed my mind: "I have a sneaking suspicion they're going to proudly serve us a stuffed sheep."
I shuld have kept my mouth shut. The evening became an endless source of gags... Sorry for the extremely crude scribbles as I tried to jot them down as fast as possible.

"Who's going to eat all this??"
(On the tag: "Guest of Honor". You need to be an Asterix reader to get this one...)

Below: "I left my machete at home!!"

Since we had to hike over and down to the esplanade mall to go to the bathroom, I looked around for a jeweler and sure enough found a small shop that made highly tasteful traditionally-inspired jewelry. I picked up a few items the first day:

From left to right: The Cross of the South (Kabyle), the symbol of the free man (Amazigh, which includes the Tuaregs among others), and the Judeo-Islamic Khamsa/Fatima's hand. The charming young man keeping the shop was interested in the festival but couldn't escape during opening hours. I returned the next day to treat myself to more items and pick up a few gifts, because the work was so lovely:

These are all variant designs on the Cross of the South, and they make me drool as much as did the Ethiopian crosses. Some day, somehow, I have to base a project on these series of "cross" designs.
Anyway, an hour later, a few minutes away from leaving for the airport, the young man suddenly appeared at the bookshop. He'd closed the store for half an hour, to take a look at the exhibits and get an autographed book from me. What a nice way of ending this fantastic adventure :) My heartfelt thanks go to Dalila, Rachid, Mr Chikhi, and all the volunteers – Farid, Tewfiq, Riad, Yasmine,... who went sleepless for so long to make this happen and make our stay comfortable!

IV 19

2010-10-07T19:56:00.007+02:00

Don't forget to vote for Malaak!

What's that in Kesep's ears?? you may be wondering. Here's a close-up:

Just a detail I picked up while working on our book on glass: rather scary earstuds introduced by the Egyptians (they couldn't work their rough glass paste very finely).

It makes for a nice extra (authentic) detail... Kind of tells you Kesep's a bit of a tough, none-too-subtle guy!
The history buffs among you may have figured out what SR is and remembered that water was indeed a problem, being unavailable on the "rock".

IV 18

2010-10-07T08:40:00.006+02:00

Don't forget to vote for Malaak!

Page 18 was delayed by an unexpected trip to London as well as by the fact it turned out to be a lot more trouble than I expected. I'm starting to curse the day I decided to adopt a looser style for the parallel narrative; rather than being easier to color and render, it demands a more painterly style that I humbly admit throws me completely. Also the "mess with things till they look kind of right" approach for special effects is... meh.

Anyway, I thought you might like to see what the background was based on:

And although the sketch is up as a vote incentive, I'm posting it here as well to keep, because it looks particularly nice:

Goodies for my readers

2010-10-06T16:22:00.006+02:00

Don't forget to vote for Malaak!

I really love giving away fun and exclusive little extras to my readers, this tendency being curbed only by the cost of producing said extras. Still, there are a number of things one can manage on a very small budget. I've been polling people for what they would be excited to get and based on their answers, and on what I had at hand, I prepared the following for my upcoming booksignings. They also get included with mail orders (to soften the pain of the shipping expenses), and what you get depends on how many volumes you're picking up.

Bookmarks! Everybody who loves to read loves bookmarks. I give these away freely, they carry the comic's website URl so they work as promo items as well.

They are nice and large as well, small ones are easy to lose. I prepare these on A3 sheets, 10 to a sheet then I then have laser-printed on 220g paper at my local copy center, so they're beautiful quality and cost next to nothing to produce. The only headache with these is to make up my mind on the designs, really! In the future maybe I'll make them character-based, one per character, so they can be collected.

Vinyl stickers! These go on almost any surface - I am definitely sticking one of the large ones on my windshield!

I got acquainted with vinyl during my design studies (we all did) and I've been using it regularly since, though in a rather subverted way since that's not at all what it's for. Awesome material, water- and fade-proof. It lasts as long as its glue holds. Only proper for monochromatic designs, of course, but it's also economical. A 50x50cm sheet costs around $8 to cut where I do it.

Mini stickers!! These area bit of a luxury and I don't know who really would use them, but I couldn't resist moo.com's awesome sticker printing services, they're so adorable. I reserve these and the vinyl stickers for people who buy or order 1 or 2 copies – one set of each for 2 copies, or the one you prefer for 1 copy.

Moo.com is a wonderful online printing service that makes business cards, mini cards, postcards, and stickers. I've made stickers with my MiniFu and my Pâtisserie icons and now I'm trying them out for this purpose. Most products are too pricey for giveaways, but a sticker book with 90 stickers in 15 sheets is just $9.99 and you can have up to 90 different designs. So, I gladly succumb to temptation, and you might too.

Sketchbooks! This is my favorite item and it took the most work. I reserve it for those who get all 3 volumes of Malaak: a handbound, 16-page booklet filled with selected "Work sketches and unused drawings"

It was way too hard to make the hundreds of sketches I love fit into 16 pages, so I made a different booklet for each volume. Another collector incentive ;)

They were printed on my home printer so other than black ink, the investment is mostly in time. That's a lot of pamphlet binding!

I'm taking all of the above to Algeria for my signature session there and I can't wait to see how they are received.

There were other great ideas for giveaways that I've had to leave aside for the moment, but that I'd love to look into in the future. I share them here for inspiration:

- Mini comics were a very popular answer and that's something I've been wanting to explore for a long time, mini storylines or even strips to be homeprinted and given away with the full books.

- Buttons came a close second. In Lebanon they're not really in the culture, but in the US people wear and collect them. The only problem was having them made, not feasible from my location at this point.

- Small posters and prints: Love this idea, but I need to produce some art for it. I'm a bit tired of reusing art from the books themselves and I'm sure fans would like to see new stuff as well!

- Postcards: I was sold on this idea when someone suggested they are often put up on lockers and in cubicles. Production cost's a bit of an issue but I can as well make them mini prints and not worry about them being mailable.

- Sketches: Guess it's an obvious possibility, everyone loves a personalized sketch. Travis of The Bean mentioned he uses pre-printed, customized sketch cards, which strikes me as a really cool idea, especially because it implies engaging with the person who's standing there watching you sketch for them. Best done when you don't have a ton of people queuing, though.

- Character collectible cards with info about the characters: That's for hardcore fans, I think XD In a few years perhaps...

Did I miss anything?

Trope: Deus Ex Machina

2010-10-03T13:57:00.003+02:00

Please remember to vote!

Tropes are storytelling devices. This series of articles on how to use or not use them in comics was first published in my Comics & Cartoons Weekly on deviantART.

Deus Ex Machina

"Deus ex machina" means "god out of the machine", and refers to situations in Greek theater where a god was lowered onto a scene with a crane to resolve everything. In today's storytelling, it is "an outside force that solves a seemingly unsolvable problem in an extremely unlikely (and, usually, anticlimactic) way. If the secret documents are in Russian, one of the spies suddenly reveals that they learned the language. If the writers have just lost funding, a millionaire suddenly arrives, announces an interest in their movie, and offers all the finances they need to make it. If The Hero is dangling at the edge of a cliff with a villain stepping on his fingers, a flying robot suddenly appears to save him." Source: tvtropes.org

In real life, we call it a stroke of luck or, if it's amazing enough, divine intervention. In fiction, we call it cheating! Sure, the writer is the "god" of his or her world, so to speak, but it's not supposed to show. When it does, the reader is yanked out of the story and reminded that someone is pulling the strings, and not so skillfully at that. It's already described as "unbelievable" in life, and it's all the more un-believable in a story. It also, often, robs the lead character of their achievement: how disappointing is it when your hero(ine) has arrived to the final battle, and instead of pulling a moment of awesomeness with all that they have learned along the story, triumphs not by their abilities but because the big villain tripped?

There are numerous examples where the DEM was used successfully, or subverted, but in most of them the script was intentionally written around it, as opposed to it being thrown in for lack of a better idea at a sticky point in the plot.
An example of straight DEM is Batman, who is, or at least was in the past, a repeat offender, seeming to always have a gadget on him to solve any situation. The writers abused the character's inventiveness so that it became a readymade explanation for the presence of that particular gadget, no matter how ludicrous it became in the end . By now it is completely inappropriate for the more serious angle under which Batman is written nowadays.
The same usage of right-gizmo-at-the-right-time, however, works in the James Bond movies because the grand unveiling of each episodes' gadgets is a ritual part of the movies, which have to be understood as tongue-in-cheek on all levels. The more a story takes itself seriously, in the sense that it draws the reader into an experience from which he must not emerge till the last page is read, the more damage a Deus Ex Machina inflicts on it.

Here are some questions to ask yourself as a means of scanning your plot for DEM:

- Did you solve a situation by introducing something out of nowhere? (See examples in the description above).

- Did you introduce an element early in your story to solve a situation that arises later – but fail to tie this element with the frame of the story in a way that looks natural? For instance: your character acquired a tool at the beginning of the story, that ends up saving the day in the end – but there was no particular reason for him to acquire it in the first place. So the tool is floating in the story and what's more, by bringing it to the reader's attention (through its acquisition out of the blue), you announced loud and clear that this thing would save the day. (There's something to be said for making the readers feel intelligent because they guessed what was going to happen. I don't however, think it's a good thing when it also makes them feel the writer is witless.)

- Did you solve a situation using circumstances or characters that belong to the very setting of the story – but in a way that is contrived and not believable? For instance, to use an example from the site: "the local militia bursts in and shoots the villain. Maybe it was established earlier that the militia protects the countryside, but for them to somehow divine that there is a fight going on at this isolated farm and to burst in just in time to save the day is a Deus Ex Machina."

- Does your resolution rely entirely on one character's particularities, so that it only works because the situation involved that person and no other? For instance: the bank robbers pick one hostage to shoot, not knowing that they picked the very person that can't be killed by bullets? (If the character volunteered, knowing his ability, it would improve the story by removing some of the "luck" element.)

In the end, since this is not an exact science, what works and what doesn't is really to be judged on a case-by-case basis, so getting feedback on your plot before you start drawing may save you much regrets. The definite rule to be derived from this is: Avoid injecting "luck" into your plot as much as possible!

IV 17

2010-09-17T10:01:00.005+02:00

Don't forget to vote for Malaak!
Don't think that just because the amulets are covered by the speech balloons, means I didn't have to render them fully, lol. I work the art behind the balloons fully in every page, should I ever want prints without them.

Here's also the latest crop of gift art: the Hippocamp, Zeina and Tareq by Monni.

IV 16

2010-09-13T05:01:00.004+02:00

Don't forget to vote for Malaak !

That's a lot of eyes! To take note of all the different designs I could find, I was peeking suspiciously inside cars and shops for a few days, especially shops that sold the stuff. I love blue glass and I think I went a little overboard with the rendering. It doesn't show here, but here's a close-up:

See the glass effect and the light on the wall? I'm going ot regret this when I have to redraw them for several panels, LOL.

Announcements galore

2010-09-11T05:15:00.006+02:00

Don't forget to vote for Malaak on Top Web Comics, a new incentive is up!

I've been sitting on some seriously exciting announcements and I can finally spill them without fear of jinxing it!

• Malaak will be part of an exhibit dedicated to Lebanese comic artists at the Lucca Comics Festival. Large prints of the pages will be on display as well as original inks and sketches. I don't yet know if they plan on making the books available there, but if you're headed to the Lucca festival don't miss Malaak!

• Another Malaak-themed art exhibit is in the works, to take place in Beirut in October. I might not be able to attend it myself, however, because...

• ... I am a guest at the Festival International de Bande Dessinée d'Algérie, which will take place in Algiers in October. I was invited as a comic professional and am fully taken in charge; my plane ticket arrived in the mail this morning. There will be a signature session so I am taking a stock of books and preparing some giveaways. I'm particularly excited because the festival being concerned with the Arab world, it will bring up the role of a strong female character in the region's popular literature and that's something I want to pursue.

• Speaking of which, I did a really interesting interview with a US journalist for a pitch to a feminist magazine in DC – if it falls through I'll post it, but I really hope they take it. I'm rarely asked questions worth answering at length.

• I will be talking about Malaak on LBC's Helwe w Murra next Friday, sept. 17 at 4:30.

• Finally, Virgin asked me to launch the French version of Malaak vol. 2 in the upcoming Salon du Livre . The launch will take place on the 29 and I take off the very next day for....

• ... a trip I'd been daydreaming about and finally booked: I'm going back to Japan! I stayed in Tokyo in 2000 and 2004, and I've been longing to be there again ever since.

It's my birthday today and it's off to a great start :D Here's some wonderful work I received recently:

IV 15

2010-09-07T07:09:00.005+02:00

Don't forget to vote for Malaak – keep me in the top 100!
Language notes:

Zaroob: Narrow streets or passages
Trumba (on the map): Petrol station (from an Italian word)

This page was so easy to color I almost feel guilty. It wasn't a necessary page, originally I hadn't planned it in the script at all, but I really didn't want what comes next to be on the right-hand page. When I post it you'll understand why I want it to be discovered when the page turns ;)

I had fun giving the building façade a worn lool, but I almost forgot the wires, which would have been heresy.
Why all the wires, you may wonder? Simply put, the State doesn't provide enough electricity. Rather than facing 3 to 9 hours of power outage every day, everyone who can afford it subscribes to a private neighborhood generator, and that means wires all over the place to connect to that.

That odd spotted texture is, of course, bullet holes, as you can see in the picture of the building I based myself on:

And here's my sketch of it, before it got cropped and inked into the layout:

The anecdote about the building door having no glass is straight from my childhood. There was no point in locking the gate because you could just step through the (vanished) glass wall.

IV 14 + fan art

2010-09-02T06:30:00.000+02:00

Please remember to vote for Malaak on Top Web Comics

Some readers have been trying to figure out these past scenes in terms of historical context. As mentioned previously, this specific scene takes place in 550 BC, but it's somewhat of an alternative history, so some things will not fit what you history buffs may know about that period. Displaced details are not due to lack of research ;) In the future I will discuss this remote backstory much more openly and it'll all make sense, and I'll finally get to show all my studies and sketches for it.

I know it doesn't show very well on the screen, but these pages are treated very differently, with a sketched look and brushed colors. I'll be eager to see them printed! Only about 30 pages to go :P

This week I have two adorable pieces of gift art to share. The first was actually commissioned by me from Deri in Portugal, who makes the most amazing felt dolls with detail to die for. Her specialty is historical dolls and she's incredible. Look at these two!!

Next piece is by Jessica Hymas, for a swimsuit-themed art exchange. She draws a gorgeous Malaak!

IV 13

2010-08-24T11:22:00.004+02:00

Don't forget to vote for Malaak on Top Web Comics. (sorry, the site is broken so I haven't been able to update the incentive!)

One good thing about being both writer and artist, is that you can rework those dialogues until the balance of text and image is achieved.... That said, these few pages are unusually wordy for me, as I generally lean towards avoiding walls of text.

IV 12

2010-08-21T06:34:00.003+02:00

Don't forget to vote for Malaak on Top Web Comics.

Do I need to add a little box that says "550 BC", or can I count on my readers to figure it out? The problem is, though it may help here, where there's a long time between pages, in print it may look silly and annoying to have these reminders every few pages...

Comics that inspired me: Asterios Polyp

2010-08-20T11:49:00.004+02:00

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Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli made a lot of noise when it was published last year, and you can find dozens of reviews over the net, but after reading it myself I felt compelled to give my point of view on the matter, as someone who not only reads comics and graphic novels, but has an interest in making both.

Graphic novels usually try to make the medium disappear behind the story, and comics do so to an even greater degree with highly glossy graphics. Even when the fourth wall is broken, the page and characters themselves are seldom visually deconstructed. In contrast, every page of Asterios Polyp shows the nuts and bolts of the medium.

It's a story that's very comfortable moving around its chosen medium and not at all tied down by inherited concerns with consistency or "concealing the puppeteer." Let me emphasize however that what makes it brilliant and not a mere exercise in deconstruction is that there is a clear, quiet but compelling, well-written story and that the sequential art serves that, and not its own sake. When Asterios and Hana meet, they take on 2 different drawing styles to explicit how different they are. When they get together, their style is unified, but anytime there is estrangement between them that is expressed visually by the split of styles reemerging. When someone asks Asterios a question and he's not sure what to answer, a die-shaped thought bubble appears with a different possible answer (yes/no/uh) on each of the sides, remarkably limpid way of communicating his indecision.

The layout is entirely flexible, adopting when necessary the look of a user manual or a textbook before returning to a sequence. All this flowing so naturally we risk to forget that this is no small feat. Conceptually speaking, it is the equivalent of modernism breaking away from the neoclassical architecture the Western world was enslaved to, to adopt forms consistent with and unique to the newest building materials where capitals and cornices no longer made any sense. I find it very interesting, but I don't know if the author intended this, that the main character is an architect, just like Ayn Rand's character in the Fountainhead, who called for just such a shift.

In addition to this, Mazzucchelli's style is strikingly aesthetic. He shifts effortlessly between ligne claire and un-outlined flat shapes, monochromatic and fully colored pages.

In my opinion, this needs to be read by all comic creators, though not so much by casual readers.
To make things more interesting, here is a negative critique I ran across while preparing this issue, though I don't personally relate to the poster's points.

Step by step: The Making of a Page

2010-08-11T03:02:00.002+02:00

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Each comic artist (I like to say“comickers”) has his or her own personal work process, even though it is rare, in this comic industry, to find someone who handles every step of it from script to finish.
Most publications are the work of a team, with a specialist assigned to each of the main stages: writing, layout, pencils, ink, color. It looks simple, but in reality there are steps within steps, depending on the comic itself: inserting speech bubbles, texturing, shading, special effects....
As an independent comicker, I handle all aspects of my story. I invite you to a quick walkthrough of my work process, which has its peculiarities. It’s not a course in making comics, but you may find some useful tips along the way.

You can also download this presentation as a pdf.

STEP 1 Synopsis

Before anything else, I write down the scene and dialogues. The horrible handwriting means I am trying to catch up with my ideas as they hurl themselves on the paper! Since I’m the only member on this team, presentation doesn’t matter: I didn’t even bother describing the panels here, only the dialogue. If I have a brilliant idea I’m afraid I’ll forget, I do write a description, and even make thumbnail sketches of what I see in my mind’s eye. When a team is involved, the writers put much more presentation work into this step, describing the most important elements of each panel, their “camera angle”, even the atmosphere and attitudes they need the artist(s) to pull off. Anyone who is then handed such a script would know exactly what to do.

Several weeks may elapse before it’s time for me to draw a scene after I’ve scripted it. This gives
me a fresh outlook on it and I often rewrite it or the dialogues. I divide the text where I feel a page should end and a new one begin. A page should always end in a logical pause or a cliffhanger, especially when it’s the right-hand page. For scenes that require an extra oomph, a spread (2 facing pages) can be planned as a single unit (known as a splash page). What this all means is that the left- or right-hand position of a page is also an important decision, which I have to make at this stage, because I may have to expand or shorten parts of the synopsis to make pages fall where I want them to.
I then use brackets to break down each page further, into what will be the panels. This is also a matter of feel and depends on the mood and tempo of the scene. For instance, if a question is
asked by a character and answered by another in the same panel, you have a regular conversation. But if the answer comes in the next panel, a pause is implied – the second character was slow to respond. These are very subtle details, but they are the key to storytelling.

My brackets also help me see at a glance if I have too many or too few panels on my page. The
European format I use would theoretically allow me up to 12 panels, but it’s a good idea not to go to that extreme unless some of them are really tiny. I’ve seen pages in American comics with one single panel, but I feel they are weak unless used only for exceptional scenes. I keep to something between 8 and 10 for average pages, spread on 4 rows. Naturally, I break out of that partially or completely as the story dynamics require.

STEP 2 Sequencing

This is the birth of the comic proper. Sometimes I know exactly how the page should flow, others I have to sweat for a long time until I can decide on how to sequence the story. Most of the time it’s somewhere in between – there are specific moments I want on the page, and the rest needs to be worked around them, bulding up to them or otherwise giving them the spotlight. In this
example (p14 in vol.2), the page culminates in its last panel, where both the character and the tension are fully charge and ready to explode. I can already see that I’ll want to make it larger in the final layout.

This is where the magic of the panels is wrought, each individually and all together as a composition. Many things have to be considered: pace, legibility (leading the eyes through the panels in the correct order), variety (in the sizes and proportions of the panels but also in the “camera angles”), energy (a page can be serene, speedy, explosive, overbearing...) relation to the previous and next page, etc. I also scribble the dialogues in to see how much room I should expect the text to take up.

It usually takes more than one attempt to finalize the sequence. The first draft is mostly for me to get a general idea of what I can do and whether I have a good number of panels. If there are too many, I shift some over to the next, looking for another point where I can logically break the flow. If that’s not possible I may simply eliminate some. Inversely, if the page is too empty, I may bring panels over or insert some. Such changes must be done without weakening the elements
mentioned above in this page or the next, so they come with much hair pulling.
Some comickers prepare their sequencing very carefully, down to the study of light in each panel. It’s a smart thing to do when you’re going to draw and ink it on paper, where there’s little room for mistakes and fixing them. Personally I just capture the essential elements in each panel at this point, because I proceed differently and don’t have to commit to the layout yet.

STEP 3 Layout

This is where my work process gets really unconventional.

When I first started creating comics, in pre-computer days, I followed the steps Hergé (father
of European comics and one of my first inspirations) used for himself. On a large piece of
low-quality paper, I prepared the layout and pencilled everything (a conscienciously messy
operation). I then transferred my final lines, using tracing paper, to a sheet of watercolor paper
where I had prepared a clean layout of the panels. I inked it with much trepidation (mistakes
were not redeemable) and then erased the pencil lines. Finally I colored it using artist’s ink. It’s
a method that has its advantages, but on the whole it was constraining, time-consuming, and
forced me to take irrevocable decisions early on in the process.

Nowadays I prepare the layout in Adobe Photoshop, based on my sequencing, using shapes.
The document’s actual size is A3 plus bleed margins, defined by guidelines (the reason I use
A3 while my printing size is A4 is to leave the door open to possibilities of printing large pages
as posters should I ever need to). Using the Shape tool, I create boxes to stand for the panels.
Problems that were not visible in the rough sequencing now appear, such as monotony in
panel sizes or aligned gutters. These must be avoided, and if I can help it I also avoid having
a large panel that is exactly half the page’s height or width, as that’s a bit like having your horizon line in the middle. I also input the text in its actual font and size, to make sure it doesn’t take an unexpected amount of space. It’s often necessary to rewrite it more concisely or resize panels to leave room for the illustration. I highly recommend doing this now, not after the
page is drawn – surprisingly, mainstream comics often leave the text for the very end, and
you can tell it’s been pasted on. It should be integrated to the composition, not added as an
afterthought. It should also be kept to a minimum, or you will create a conflict between the
flow of the images and the stops created by the text. The more dynamic a page, the less the
eye should be forced to stop and read. As much as possible, I show instead of telling.
Knowing all this, I toy with the panels’ sizes and positioning until I like the balance and movement of the whole.

This page showed a passage from normal narrative to an action sequence, expressed by the
diagonal slash across the second half, which also frames dramatically the final panel in a triangle – although this will all need to be finetuned when the pencils are added.

STEP 4 Pencils

Now that I have a close enough idea of my panel sizes, I start the “penciling” proper – except it’s not, because I use a ballpoint pen now. I pencil on my A3 sketchbook, bearing in mind the ratios of the panels, but not following the layout because I simply can’t. When carried away by the
energy of the illustration, the last thing I want to do is break my momentum by worrying about
borders. This is the main reason why I dropped the traditional way of penciling a page. I can use the entire sketchbook page if drawing something particularly dynamic, but I do have to be careful: things that will be very small on the page need to be drawn small. This is because detailing changes with the scale, and if I draw something way much larger than it will end up, I may put in too many details – and then while inking I’ll have to improvise the simplification. It’s better to be aware of this right now.

When I’m out of sorts or not properly “tuned in”, my drawing is unmistakeably flatter, my characters stiffer. When that happens, even if I’ve put much work into a pencil, I’ll drop it and do it again, until I capture the life I wanted in it. These pages are going to be around for many years, so it’s worth putting in the extra effort.

Once done, I scan all the pencils and insert them in my layout, each as a separate layers with the blend set to Multiply. Now I can make the panels and their contents work together by scaling,
cropping, moving, in a lengthy process of trying different solutions until it looks right. I often drop panel frames at this point to give the page another dimension: this happened with the 3rd, 5th and last panel here. I may veer away from my original layout: on the second row, where there was supposed to be a single long panel, I not only flipped the image but also divided it into two panels continuous with each other. It just felt more logical to see Malaak waiting before we see what is coming towards her, and adding a gutter creates a pause, slight as it may be – a better
alternative in this case to adding a panel to show the wait. I broke the diagonal into two frames that aren’t completely aligned, looking for the most dynamic combination of shapes I could use then. I made some pencils break out of the frames, as I often do, for different reasons. In panel 6, it’s simply dynamic and it expresses well her movement to escape the bullets shot at her – and it fills a problematic empty space in that corner of the triangle. In panel 7 on the other hand, the eye is led through the gun fire to her, through her body’s curve and out her foot to the next “frame”, which isn’t even framed. Note that I sketched that foot directly in my Photoshop file. There are often corrections to be made in the sketches, as well: a head that’s too large, characters placed too far from each other, a face that just doesn’t look right that I have to redraw digitally...

STEP 5 Speech Bubbles

When I’m sure I don’t want to make anymore changes, I flatten all the pencils on a single layer, load all my shapes as a selection and stroke them on their own transparent layer.

I can now add my speech bubbles. I could equally well do this after inking, but you never know
if something unexpected comes out of their placement. I use the Pen tool and draw the circular shapes first, adding the “mouthpiece” afterwards. This way the shape keeps its consistency.

Much can be done with speech bubbles, little of which is used in this page. When you plan them into your composition, you can make them act like a layer, that may slip behind characters or
objects or cover them, depending. A bubble can protrude from a frame (panel 1), which helps
breaking the grid, share a side with it, or create an opening in the frame where it is tangent to
it, so that the white of the bubble and that of the gutter are connected (I use this frequently in other pages). They can be stroked with a varying width for extra dimensionality. That’s not even going into the expressive potential of the bubble, where one can get super creative –just keep
in mind that making them legible is the priority. On this page alone there are 4 different bubble
shapes: the default “broken ellipsis” I use, the Jinns’ rough speech, the “burst” bubble that signals shouting, and in the last panel, a more angular one meant to show a change for the harder in her tone of voice.

Note that I keep them as compact as possible, and they are carefully placed to contribute to
meaning and to directing the eye properly. You don’t want something to be read before an action when it’s supposed to follow it, or vice-versa. Their placement must also be aesthetic in relation to the frames and characters. The rule that goes for the placement of drawn elements also goes for speech bubbles: tangents and near-tangents must be avoided, and replaced by slipping one
element behind the other (panel 1) or moving them further apart (panel 7).

Presently I load the bubbles as a selection and stroke them, as well, on their own layer.

STEP 6 Inking

I don’t ink digitally. I need the same physical freedom to ink as I do to sketch, so I print out the whole page (over 2 or 3 A4 sheets, since it’s A3-sized) and tape it to my work surface. Over it I
tape a single sheet of tracing paper, and set to work using Faber Castell Ecco Pigment ink pens. They are my favorite because their tip is closer to felt than plastic, making the inking an almost sensual experience and allowing for less mechanical lines.

Why, you might ask, don’t I just ink over the pencils and scan that in once and for all, instead
of printing them out again? The reason is consistency. My pencils are all over the place and not
proportional to each other. Some will have to be shrunk to 20% of their size on the final page,
others will be enlarged. If I inked them first, then scaled them haphazardly, the line width would be widely inconsistent throughout the page. The amount of detailing would be equally inconsistent: a tiny figure could end up more detailed than a larger one. Since the page has to work as a single composition, it must also be inked as a single composition. My way ensures harmony of the whole, which will eventually shrink quite gracefully onto paper.

The inking has two stages. First I just ink the sketched lines, using different pen thicknesses according to how close the subject is to the “camera”. I err on the thinner side there, because the second stage will thicken most of them. This first stage of inking looks like this:

Then I go back over everything, introducing variation in the line width (compare with the above). There’s more than one way of doing this. I learned to thicken lines where there is tension, especially in a body in action; others do this where there should be shade. I do a little of both: my concern is for it to look good and dimensional, and to lead the eye where it should be. I don’t use the Pen tool and Stroke Path method (if you don't know what that is, ask me below) because good lines require a knowing eye, not a computer’s blind execution of a command.

I scan my tracing paper, again in several parts, and knock out the white background. I can then
place it neatly over the pencil, delete that layer, and then retouch where necessary. Some portions of frames or bubbles have to be deleted. Once I’ve made sure the lineart is perfect, I merge the lineart, frames and bubbles into a single layer. I need to do this to make coloring as hassle-free as possible.

STEP 7 Coloring

Rather arbitrarily, I consider this to be divided in two stages:

Flats: This is pure “donkey work”, just clicking away till all the flat colors are in place. I have
my colors on a separate layer underneath my Lineart layer. The process is basically selecting
all the shapes on the page that need to be filled with a given color, and fill them on the Color
layer. I created a Photoshop action so I can do this without repeating useless clicks endlessly.
The digital coloring process is fundamentally different from coloring on paper in that you need
all your lines to close neatly, in order to be able ot select and fill a color surface. On paper, you can have your lines as loose as you want and it won’t affect ow you color them later. On screen, loose lines mean a lot more work. I believe this technical detail has defined the graphic style
that dominates mainstream comics today.

Textures: A few touches of texture add visual interest to the page, and makes up for the simplicity of the lines. A recurring example in this comic is my use of manipulated photos as backgrounds (not in this page though). In order to integrate them to the illustration, I reduce them to greyscale, increase the contrast, and colorize them with the Brush tool – the limited palette makes them blend in better with the rest of the page. The texture in the dark margins here actually is a photo, but used as an abstract, indistinct, “something-there” that is much more dramatic than a flat hue. Other textures, such as the brickwork in a wall, can be photographic, or they can be created using Photoshop brushes (like the flowery bush in the second panel, to the
left). The simplest texture to create, but which is enough to add depth when used smartly, is the gradient fill. I use it frequently where I don’t want a background but a flat color is just too flat.

STEP 8 Rendering

I’m not sure if this is an industry term, but this is how I refer to the final steps of applying shading and highlights, and special effects if applicable.

I use cel shading, meaning hard-edged shading, because it’s so much faster to work with, and
my style is simple enough to agree with it. I have brought up the time factor before, but it’s essential to accept the fact I can’t spend forever on each page, and look for ways to work quickly that won’t look rushed. So with a hard brush, I paint in the shadows directly, on a separate layer which is set to Multiply. The opacity varies between 40 and 60%, depending on how harsh I want the shadows on that page. In general, I paint each shadow in the color of the area I am shading. It’s another quick fix but the result is very pleasing. For night scenes however I use a single dark blue, as the little shadow there is there would have to look flatter. There’s much room for experimenting and I’m learning as I go. I always use soft brushes for highlights though. It just looks too cartoonish if they are hard edged.

Special effects, like textures, can be created using simple brushes. I don’t use premade Photoshop brushes – the most useful are those that are most versatile. There are less than 10 brushes I use for everything. Tweaking the brush presets, flow and opacity gives me all the range I need.

For Malaak’s energy bursts, I use the Colour Dodge and Linear Dodge layer modes a lot, and
often use several layers on top of each other until I like what I see. Sadly, there is no tried and
true way for me to do it: I have to try different combinations for each page, as the background color and value affects the result of the blend modes...

Other small elements that may be added at this stage are sound effects, speed lines, bursts,
blurs... The more action, the longer the list! Quieter scenes are as much a breather for the reader as they are for the character – they certainly are for me!

That’s a wrap for this walk-through, as the page has reached its final state. The complete process, uninterrupted, would take 2 or 3 full work days, but it usually spreads over 2 or 3 weeks. Drop me a comment is this has helped you in any way :)

IV 11

2010-08-07T17:04:00.006+02:00

Don't forget to vote for Malaak on Top Web Comics.

I'm excited today because I've been accepted into SpiderForest, a webcomic collective that accepts new applications only twice a year. One more motivation for me!

A lot of my delay hinged on this page. As I mentioned a few times, I can't finalize the whole script ahead of time – I have a general idea where the plot is going, but the details of it only become clear a few pages at a time. This conversation here could have gone several ways, each of which would have changed the story slightly. When I finally decided, the next 5 pages or so became accessible to me so their script is ready, but beyond that it's vague again. It sounds bizarre, but I now quite a few authors similarly feel almost as if they weren't writing the story at all!

Vocabulary notes:
3eyn = "eye", which in this context is a blue glass amulet against the evil eye... and other things
Shu sarlik = "What's up with you?"

*sigh* And now back to more strenuous coloring and rendering...

IV 10

2010-08-05T14:22:00.002+02:00

Don't forget to vote for Malaak on Top Web Comics.

Simple-coloring no-special-effects pages are as rare in this graphic novel as they are quick and painless to color, lol.
I ♥ Wushu.

Finnicking, Fan art, Formspring

2010-08-02T05:42:00.000+02:00

Reminder: click to vote for Malaak and see the new incentive.

I'm having a bit of a hard time designing a certain symbol to my satisfaction (I won't say what it's for, you'll find out very soon), and I share below my various attempts so far. The jury's still out on which I will opt for, though...

I hope you enjoy seeing these, because I have about 70 more to design for the purpose I have in mind :P

Here's another really elaborate piece of fan art, courtesy of fellow comic artist Gary Pope:

Finally, you'll notice on the right side of this blog a new box. Formspring is a cool gadget of a site through which you can ask questions and both they and the answers can be published. Very useful for authors and creators who can info about their craft in a way that's not hidden in a private email.
Feel free to use it for questions about Malaak, comics in general, technical questions, other stuff I do, – anything. Answers will published, but you can ask anonymously. I may or may not respond to personal questions, depending on appropriateness!

Tropes: Exposition

2010-07-30T05:23:00.003+02:00

Please remember to vote!

Tropes are storytelling devices. This series of articles on how to use or not use them in comics was first published in my Comics & Cartoons Weekly on deviantART.

Exposition

"Exposition is a literary tool that is used to give information to the audience through dialogue, description, flashback or narrative." Source: tvtropes.org

Exposition is an essential part of many stories. It's almost inevitable that, at some point, some kind of critical info will have to be imparted, either to the reader or to the characters or both. This can be done in many ways. Skillful exposition will inform the reader without them noticing they are being filled in, but done poorly it can break the flow of the story. The worst thing you can do is an Information dump.
An infodump is an exposition sequence that is way too long, throws too much information at the reader in one go, and consequently stops the story completely for the duration. If it happens in the introduction, before the story even begins, then you're asking the reader to wade through a ton of material before they're even sure they really want to read the story! Very risky unless this is done in an attractive format. Star Trek came up with its Captain's Log for that, which presents the advantage of having the exposition done by the lead character and in a way that makes sense in context.
It's particularly easy to end up with infodumps in literature, where one can get carried away with the writing, but they can readily take place in comics, where they can take various forms:

• An endless conversation between two characters, which can result in a visually boring scene because nothing actually happens while they're talking. It's best not to have such a long dialog in the first place, but if inevitable, make sure to keep a visual interest by varying panel sizes, camera angles, perspective; have something interesting taking place in the background, close up on the characters' body language, etc.

• An "illustrated story" where the exposition takes the form of a sequence of vignettes with a narrative voice in a box. This is much less dynamic than comic narration and produces a feeling of distanciation to the narrative – which is exactly what is happening, as the characters themselves are distant from it. If it stretches across too many pages, the level of engagement drops enormously. Keep it short and visually amazing.

• A block of text, saving the trouble of drawing it all, and seemingly a painless way of getting the exposition out of the way – but in sequential art that stands out quite awkwardly. It's downright silly when the long speech issues from the mouth of a character who is in the middle of an action, for instance in the process of delivering a jump kick. Writer Chris Claremont is infamous for his absurdly long dialogues at times like this. Alan Moore on the other hand did pull off the text passages in Watchmen, where chapters are separated by pages of pure prose. In his case, they are not a pause from the story but an additional dimension to it, offering a mixture of new details and a different perspective on events already covered in the previous chapter (a curiosity catcher), taking place at points where the story has already paused and we're taking a deep breath before the next chapter.

If you find yourself committing an infodump, the first question to ask yourself is, "Do I need to explain all this at this point in the story?" You may be able to spread out the info along the story in smaller chunks, less noticeable and easier to digest. Perhaps you can simply use a lot less words and still convey what needs to be conveyed (think of this: if you were hanging out with someone and they asked you how something, how would you answer? Try this verbally and you'll find your answer tends to be much more concise than it would be in writing, because you have less time to think and you automatically select the most important bits.) Another possibility is for part of the information to be conveyed non-verbally, through things the character sees, body language, whatever is appropriate. As an example, let's say we have the following two panels of a boy talking about a date. Panel 1: "I had a date with Jenny." Panel 2: "She's dreamy! I'm so in love! I can still feel her lips on my cheek where she kissed me!" All of panel 2 is redundant. All you need is one panel of the boy saying "I had a date with Jenny", with a dreamy, soppy expression, fingers lightly touching a spot on his cheek, and you've said it all without needing to say it. No medium is as expressive as comics, and this expressiveness should be exploited to the full.

Now if you've examined your exposition and found that you really can't condense it or redistribute it, you need to consider ways of making it entertaining, to really suck the reader in. If you can't help the change in pacing, go all the way with it instead, making it a different experience through a change of style and/or medium as well. Parallel narrations can be very compelling if applicable, meaning that for the duration of the exposition you show both the current story and the backstory unfolding side by side, ideally in a way that there's a relation between the two at any given moment. Other than that, it's really all up to your creativity and having a good feel of how your story flows/what you can allow yourself to do with it. If you look closely at any comic or graphic novel that you consider to be good, you can probably spot within it well-done exposition to be learned from.

A specialized type of poor exposition is the Intro dump, where you introduce a truckload of characters in a very short space of time. Have you ever walked into a party and been introduced to 12 people in a row? You probably only remembered the first couple of names. A comic is no different. When a reader learns a new character's name, they also need to find out why this character is worth remembering before another one calls upon their attention. This isn't to say that you should start with just one character and wait several pages before daring to bring another one in, but do start small and introduce the rest at an organic pace. This insures that readers develop interest in each of them; this connection between reader and protagonists is highly desirable.

There are a few well-established devices used to make a character launch into an explanation. A favorite is to make a character arrive in the midst of a situation and ask: "What's going on?" Simple, but unquestionably natural.
But many devices are beginning to verge on caricatural by now and can almost only be used tongue-in-cheek, unless the writer gives them a new polish. This is the case of As You Know, where one character explains to another something they both know but the audience doesn't. If there is no good reason within the story for the characters to discuss whatever it is they both know, this sounds poor. In Scrubs, for instance, the presence of interns, which is perfectly normal, is conveniently used to make doctors explain procedures for the audience's benefit. In CSI on the other hand, the detectives keep explaining rudimentary forensics to each other for no good reason at all.
Also poor is the Postponed question – a characters asks a question that they would logically have asked a long time ago. It is only asked now because the viewer or reader needs to hear the answer now.
Captain Obvious, a character who is made to point out things that are already obvious to other characters as well as to the reader, is in definite disgrace by now. This trope was so rampant in Silver Age comic books that today instances of it are usually accompanied by another character responding "No kidding!" It was already rather noticed in the 70s, where an episode of Star Wars has Han Solo snap at C3PO: "I'm glad you're here to tell us these things!" Similarly dumb but surprisingly endurant is the habit of some superheroes to explain how their powers will protect them – undoubtedly for the benefit of new readers but completely maddening for everyone else. Cyclops: "Only my ruby-quartz visor can contain my optic blasts." Rogue: "Ah cain't touch another human bein', or mah powers'll absorb their thoughts and abilities." It almost sounds like they have a hard time remembering them doesn't it? How about this example, thought by Random while being blasted into a puddle: "What's happening? Mutant power to randomly deflect any other mutant power thrown at me isn't working!" *groan*
A character may be present whose raison d'être is to ask questions in the audience's place. This can be a child, a newcomer, someone with no expertise among a specialized crew, or even the Watson, named after Sherlock Holmes's chronicler, who was there to provide a bridge into the detective's mind. All these, when used wisely, make for smoother exposition than having a character who is a full-time Mr. Exposition, that is he (or she) exists solely to explain things to the protagonists, whether they really need the explanation or not.

Whatever you do, avoid Expospeak! This is the funny way in which characters often find themselves speaking when they're in the middle of an exposition. Suddenly they sound like they're reading an essay, which is exactly what their lines are, as the writer was so intent on the exposition s/he overlooked the fact people just don't speak that way. A simple way of avoiding this: read your dialogues out loud, or have them read to you. If it sounds unnatural, revise! People usually speak in shorter sentences than they write, using more familiar words, with a high likelihood of idiomatic expressions

As a final piece of advice I would add: Don't be afraid to not explain everything. Outside plot-essential points, there is nothing wrong with letting a reader wonder about things s/he sees in the world you're drawing. The sense of wonder comes from not having all the answers.

IV 8-9

2010-07-26T01:03:00.002+02:00

Reminder: click to vote for Malaak and see the new incentive.

I just have to mention the irrelevant fact that these two pages were finished during a Pirates of the Caribbean marathon, during most of which my new parrot friend was perched on my shoulder...
Page 9 was an answer (among other possible ones) to the question, How to convey this info (the passage of time, what both sides were up to, Malaak's own thoughts on the matter) without showing it (which would take several plodding pages) and without relying heavily on those little boxes I use as little as possible? The notebook page, with newspaper clipping to create a transition and scribbled sketches, appealed to me for experimental reasons as well. Note also that these two pages work as a spread – I plan my sequencing with the printed book in mind, so p8 would only be revealed after the page is turned, with p9 next to it.
But if my handwriting is too terrible, please tell me, so I can hire someone else's...

Fan art interlude

2010-07-24T07:07:00.003+02:00

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Life has been in the way again, so while I finish coloring the two pending pages, here is some awesome fan art to enjoy:

Rohayna's original image is posted here.

Atramina's original image is here.

I commissioned the two ink drawings below from Emilee, whose highly idiosyncratic style caught my attention:

She 's currently taking up a challenge of 100 ink drawings for $10 each so you can contact her if you want something for yourself.

I need to re-integrate the Gallery into the new website structure, as it got set aside in the process :) Though I don't know if anyone noticed! Does anyone ever check the gallery for extra art and fan art?

Comics that inspired me: Soda

2010-07-12T10:44:00.000+02:00

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SODA, by Philippe Tome (writer) and Bruno Gazzotti (artist), is a prime example of art and writing of the type associated with Spirou magazine, aka the Marcinelle school.

David Solomon, aka "Soda", left his small town of Providence to move to New York, where he joins the NYPD. He never told his mother, however, as her heart is delicate and she already lost Soda's father in the line of duty. He let her believe he was the pastor of a small parish in the Big Apple. Things get complicated when "Mam" follows him and moves in with him. Soda now leads a double life, leaving home every morning in his pastor garb and changing into police attire in the elevator. Such is the backdrop of the police adventures that make up this series, a successful interweaving of hardboiled plots and poking fun – at the plot itself, at the characters, at the authors even (a timid-looking photographer, representing the author himself as he prowls NY gathering research, can be found in each album, usually suffering some kind of misadventure).

The art is a major strength of the series. Gazzotti proffers a very pronounced style that is also completely unhesitant, and although the style is cartoonish, it is built on clear volumes that I for one envy immensely. It takes me entirely too long to read any of the albums in this series, and then I have to go and read it again because I was so busy taking in all the details that I forgot to pay attention to the plot. There is nothing generic in Gazzotti's drawings: everything down to the knuckles of each character has its own identity. The background of the action is alive with details and indeed "extra plots" that are suggested, and how else could it be in a city such as New York? Every individual on the street is different, and a number of stories are taking place around you at any given moment. This, the authors have rendered lovingly in every issue, as if the story was just a pretext to draw the city's mad diversity and diverse madness – not as a depressing social commentary, as seems to be too often the case these days, but because they are fun and endearing and you have to love it the way it is. Will Eisner would be thrilled.

If I had to pick one thing to be learned from this series, it is how much richer one can make one's comic when giving the background and secondary characters proper attention. Spending time endowing each element with its own personality, its own story, really pays in the end, and ensures readers will enjoy revisiting each page more than once to step into the world you are creating.

IV7

2010-07-08T04:04:00.002+02:00

Reminder: click to vote for Malaak and see the new incentive.
Missed a few pages? Go to vol. 4 - all pages.

If you wonder about the fireworks, then you're not familiar with Beirut, LOL. And I type this during the World Cup, which demonstrates like nothing else and for a month nonstop, how crazy the locals are about things that go boom. As for the old VW vans, I saw them a while ago in some war photos and they stuck with me. Even in the midst of rubble and half-consumed by fire, they keep on looking absurdly cheerful. They fit the Brigade, whose every component is patched together of whatever can be found – men, uniform, equipment and vehicles.

The composition of this page gave me an enormous headache, as I simultaneously wanted Malaak's figure to dominate it and needed to fit the following three frames in, that could not be reduced to a single row. So there was a lot of moving things around in my photoshop file before reaching a satisfactory arrangement. This happens even when I'm sure of the page layout, so in order to stay flexible, I apply a habit picked up in my animation days: I work in layers. Backgrounds are drawn separately from characters, and groups of characters like the procession above are similarly deconstructed:

This saves me a lot of tearing hair out and redrawing, when I have to revise my layout decisions!

IV 6

2010-07-03T18:00:00.000+02:00

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I won't lie, I was happy to get the crowd scenes and fancy lighting over with. In the third panel, getting some colors to peek through the bluish darkness was not a straightforward operation; I added a layer the color of the margin color over the color layer, but it took some playing around with the different blending modes to get it right. In the end, it was setting it to Multiply and 70% that did the trick. The lighting layer is a light blue set to Linear Dodge and placed on top of the former, but under the line art layer, otherwise it would affect it.

I actually made a mistake the first time I sketched this panel, getting the characters perspective wrong. They looked like they were seen from the level of someone standing among them instead of from above as I wanted it. The advantage of adjusting sketches digitally was that instead of redrawing the whole thing I just drew faceless bodies int he correct perspective, and re-placed the faces over them (the faces being upturned towards the viewer weren't affected by the angle).

The final panel on this page tells a long story in two details (or at least I like to think so): the sign that reads "shelter", that can still be spotted on some buildings, with a poster announcing a gig in that now-subverted shelter – a very Lebanese thing to do...

There is a scene I had wanted to include on this page, but after drafting and re-drafting pages 6-7 several times, had to resign myself to the fact I couldn't fit it, and forcing it in would take away more than it would add. So here's an outtake!

Tropes: Always Chaotic Evil

2010-06-27T11:30:00.001+02:00

Voting reminder, a new incentive is up!

Tropes are storytelling devices. This series of articles on how to use or not use them in comics was first published in my Comics & Cartoons Weekly on deviantART.

Always Chaotic Evil

This is when a story contains an entire race of bad guys, a common case of bad writing. Not a case of relativity where each side thinks they are the good guys and the others are bad – no, these people know they are evil and may even brag about it. The whole culture somehow agreed to all serve the same evil purpose (because it's easy in real life to make a mass of people agree on one thing, right?)

This was seen so much in the past, in all media, and the trend has not quite disappeared, though nowadays [open] racism is decidedly out of favor, so the evil races tend to be alien and no longer human*. One thing worse than having an entire evil race, is to have an entire evil race with one or two "good" exceptions. This is patronizing at best, and no way to create three-dimensional characters.

[* Exception made for Nazi Germany,which seems to still be a convenient nest of evil to use, as there is a not-so-unspoken consensus that this is noncontroversial to the vast majority (not that I agree or disagree with this, but from a storytelling perspective it's getting old).]

In this day and age, with the world at our fingertips making us all much more aware of shades of grey, it is nearly impossible for any writer to get away with such a characterization unless it's framed in a convincing way. Without drifting into politico-social issues, the question that interests us is: How do we avoid Always Chaotic Evil when our story tends to head that way? The simple answer is also the answer, I think, to most writing-related questions: look at real life and historical examples. There are plenty of reasons why a human group can be perceived as, or seem to act as, a single-minded entity, without actually being one. These real-life situations may inspire you solutions to fit your story.

• An example that deals with perception is that of the biased narrator: Any chronicler who ever wrote about his nation's enemies, from Julius Caesar to WW2 Russian columnists, has demonized them and so that it becomes impossible to think of them as fellow human beings. A story explicitly told from such a subjective point of view can get away with any amount of this, provided you make it very clear that this is a case of biased narrator. 300 makes use of this approach in its portrayal of the Persians.

• Another example where a population can, as a whole, be unsafe to outsiders is that of a population under dictatorship. Such regimes imply secret services so that it is highly dangerous to speak against the regime or have any contact with its enemies (cf. Myanmar, Stalinian Russia). An outsider has to take care not to speak against the regime, and an "enemy", if found out, would be promptly "disappeared" – as would anyone they dealt with. This is a real-life situation where the danger has nothing to do with personal evil. Plenty of plot-driving tension can be derived from such a reference. Looking into religious taboos, caste systems, propaganda, tribal warfare etc can also yield different approaches.

These were just suggestions off the top of my head. The most important thing is to take a careful look at your story if you think you may have erred in this direction, and do what's appropriate for your plot.

IV 4-5 and Top WebComics

2010-06-22T14:24:00.002+02:00

I did some promotional work for the comic this weekend, and among other things entered it in Top Web Comics, where people can vote on their favorite online comics to get them more exposure. The website allows comickers to upload "incentives", that is surprises that are revealed once you vote. Best of all, you don't need to register to vote! You can vote every day if you want to, but what I'll be doing is to include a reminder whenever I post a new page. The incentives are worth it (they are of various kinds, keeping them a surprise) and they're not getting posted anywhere else... Click here to vote today.

And now... Showtime!

(Language note: Ya ret the girls were there = Wish the girls were there)

This spread features my good friends from Bleak, while we wait for them to rock Beirut for real... I'll introduce them: Anton fronting, Tim on guitar, Rachel on bass, and Yvonne on the drums. You can listen to a demo of this song, and more of their stuff, on their Myspace or Facebook pages.
I had so missed Adrian and Tareq and their antics!

Speaking of bravado, I'm never doing something this crazy again =P I browsed photos of Beirut nightlife to get a feel of the crowd, what they'd do and wear, toning it down to PG... Some readers will recognize the venue as a basement shelter, though I meant to make it a lot more rundown and humid-looking – that'll be something for the correction stage.

Memo to me: Add the posters... I knew I was going to forget something :P Plus i'm an idiot and stuck a speech bubble right in the fold – will fix that later. And those guitars probably need to be plugged in somewhere... Anything else? Heh.

And this is going to be a bravado spread

2010-06-15T15:34:00.004+02:00

I thought I'd share a sneak peek of the "pencil" and inked versions, to keep you waiting while I color...

I do have a bunch of amps and other things I barely understand to add to the scene, though. Happily I'm ~~shepherded~~ assisted in this by someone well placed (the guy with the mike).
It's fun to have real people in your comic. They get really involved in how they should be represented, and indulging them in a way that enriches the script, rather than taking away form it, is a stimulating exercise (largely because someone else is as invested in it as you are).
It also highlights the fact I'm surrounded with people stranger and more interesting than any comic book character...

The Encyclopedia of Lebanese Comic Books is launching

2010-06-15T05:38:00.007+02:00

Here's some happy news for the Lebanese comic scene: The Encyclopedia of Lebanese comics is finally out! And Malaak's in it! I don't have the book myself yet but I'll pick up my copy at the launch. I wish it were in English so it could be enjoyed by comic enthusiasts elsewhere (since, to be realistic, the number of Arabic speakers who appreciate comics is puny), but it's a milestone without a doubt and Henry Matthews has been working on it for years. Here's an interview of Matthews from 2008, while the work was in progress>

Malaak IV pages 1-3

2010-06-13T14:59:00.007+02:00

Long overdue, but for very good reasons I promise, the 4th chapter finally begins.

If you're bewildered as to why we're transported in the 6th century BC all of a sudden, then you're right where I want you ;)I know some of you at least are already putting clues together...

As hinted at earlier, I wanted a slightly different treatment for the parallel narrative, and I went the "clean sketch" route, as you may notice from the looser lines and coloring. I'm not 100% happy with the result, mostly because so far it's been a counterintuitive way of working for me, meaning longer finishing time and much trial and error and grinding of teeth. I'll just have to stick it out for the few pages it represents. For pages 2 and 3 it was simple enough, I laid down the basic lines with a pencil and then carried on with my usual ballpoint pen (which I do not recommend for this, really. It leaves too many little accidents in the lines that you then have to get rid of). Page 1 demanded serious construction so I had to complete the full scene and then use a light table to redo my clean sketch. except I no longer have a light table. I used to, and I schlepped it from home to my first studio to my second studio, and never used it once. When I left that last studio I didn't bother bringing it back.

Who needs a light table anyway when you have a window and masking tape?

Guest stars

2010-05-15T19:26:00.003+02:00

Big contrast with the previous sketches? You have no idea ;) Oh I'm having fun with this.
The first 3 pages are pretty much ready for coloring and they're going to take everyone by surprise. I'm still on a penciling roll though so I'm working on pages 4-5 while it lasts.

Taking my time is paying off. I also took a decision that I hope I'll manage to keep: Tuesdays and Thursdays will be dedicated to the comic. They're the only days where I don't have to go somewhere in the morning (I do have a 7-9 am TJQ class on Thursday but it's so early it doesn't count), so I can immerse myself in work that requires immersion, as this certainly does.
I have no idea how people can commit to finishing a page a week. If it works for them, kudos, I'm impressed, but I know I would take so many shortcuts to make that kind of deadline (it's how I manage the tightest deadlines for work), and that would rule out any kind of experimentation and artistic growth. Maybe it's me.

New characters

2010-05-03T06:33:00.003+02:00

Penciling has started on volume 4 :) These sketches show the alternate style I'll be introducing for certain scenes in this chapter, i.e. they are the finished lineart, no inking will be done on them. I'm enjoying that style, though it takes a lot more careful – caring even – sketching. Despite the demand and outside pressure to get a move on this as much as possible, so I can keep up my pace of 1 volume a year, it's important to me that I take my time with this. It has to become better and better, which won't happen if I don't take the time to explore the best I can do for each and every panel.
The good news is, I'm off to London tomorrow and I expect much writing to get done during the trip :)

Get set... go!

2010-04-11T19:37:00.003+02:00

I scripted and sequenced the first 4 pages of part 4 today and it feels great. I was really unsure where to take it for a while (I knew what needed to happen in it, but not how to tie them together in a plot), but now the thread has arrived, so it's just a matter of letting it unravel. Some of these scenes are more ambitious than usual and will be a nightmare to pencil, but if I can clear my work schedule so I don't feel rushed, I can enjoy them and they'll turn out the better for it. I was particularly worried about my "parallel narrative" that required some special research on its own, but now I decided to "just do it", things are falling in place easily. I'm going back to London next week and all I plan on doing by day is sit in one café after the other, writing and sequencing and designing my new characters.

The real difficult part of making a comic, in my experience, is precisely this: the writing and sequencing. It's a huge step from the events you loosely see in your head to their precipitation into something precise enough to be narrated visually. Really, it's like trying to grab smoke at times, at least for me. Only when enough elements have matured in the ether, is the whole thing dense enough to start falling into place. Yet one has to keep in mind the entire chapter at all times, so that in the end it works as a whole, not a succession of scenes. I keep a relatively simple narration, but I pull my hat at people capable of constructing highly complex interwoven narratives (I'm looking at you Alan Moore, David Mack, and co.) – I don't know how they manage to keep their thoughts and notes organized, in order to arrive at that product.
Anyway, once you have the sequenced pages (the storyboards), the rest –penciling, inking, coloring– is a cruise. It takes time and skill, but you just can't go wrong anymore.

I started a small tutorial on different methods of sequencing a page a while back. I hope I can complete it sometime soon, it would be really useful to people who have a hard time finding a work method that suits them.

Thought process

2010-04-10T18:13:00.001+02:00

A glimpse at some material I'm preparing for vol.4 and beyond. I'm dying to talk about all this background stuff that's in preparation, but it would be a massive spoiler :) I'll just keep posting intriguing extracts.

Part 3 launch photos

2010-03-30T15:22:00.006+02:00

One fan actually turned up in a Malaak (or rather Amer) t-shirt!

Absentees sending their parents to collect the goods...

Colleagues and friends... one of whom was carrying her sword on her way to class and wouldn't let security take it away, LOL!

A villain in the flesh!

"Amer" verifying the product before giving his quality-approved seal

Forward!

2010-03-30T11:50:00.005+02:00

Now that Dark Dreams is launched, I am free once more to turn my attention to the next episode, as well as updating the website. In particular, as I realized I didn't even have a bio page for myself (being only too happy to disappear behind my work most of the time), I'm going to add something that looks like an author page, as an excuse to talk about the graphic novels and comic series I enjoy, as well as resources that have been useful or inspiring to me. Sounds good, yes?

Also, while the script for part 4 is slowly getting woven, I already made some decisions regarding the art.
Some aspects of my work process need to be sped up, particularly as the story and visuals get increasingly complex. Reforming my approach to backgrounds will help – they don't need to be inked, if the sketches are clean enough. Keeping them loose would actually provide a welcome contrast with the foreground. Besides this I can afford having less panels per page at this point. I doubt the next chapter will fit in a single 48-page book (sorry!) so I don't have to economize pages so much.
I can't wait to start penciling...

Last reminder: Malaak launches today!

2010-03-26T05:37:00.003+02:00

Malaak in NOW! Lebanon

2010-03-25T09:16:00.003+02:00

Faster than a militiaman’s bullet…
Talking to Lebanese comic creator Joumana Medlej
Farrah Zughni, March 24, 2010

Comic books fans can count Beirut among legendary cities like Gotham and Metropolis – staging grounds for epic battles between good and evil – thanks to Malaak, a superhero comic series created by Joumana Medlej.

From Gemmayzeh’s glass café to the National Museum, Medlej features local spots throughout her work and reinterprets realities from the nation’s civil war, such as militia-ordained curfews, to have new significance in the protagonist’s struggle against jinn and other fearsome creatures. NOW Lebanon sits down with the 30-year-old artist, born and raised in Beirut, to talk about her influences and techniques prior to the launching of her third Malaak issue on March 26.

Read the full interview in NOW! Lebanon.

5 days to Launch

2010-03-21T07:02:00.001+02:00

10 days to Launch

2010-03-16T05:58:00.002+02:00