Diddling
Today, my church offered up a “We’ll give you free childcare in honour of Mother’s/Father’s Day. They do a similar thing around Christmas time for shopping, but we usually have so many kid-related activities during that time, we can’t take advantage of it. During this time, the Mrs. and I did two things.
1. I had an eye examination. My wife has been saying for some period of time that she hates my glasses, and she was going to make an eye appointment for me to change them. So, it became a running joke for me that she would say this and then not do it. Finally, she did it and ended the running joke. It only took her 6 years since my last eyeglasses appointment. I know I could have made an appointment myself in that long a time, but I don’t like to mess with running jokes.
2. The two of us went to see Spider-Man 3 starring one of my favourite actors, Bruce Campbell. Actually, Bruce just had a small, but very funny part in the movie.
I had hoped that by the time I got back to April’s Real Blog, some of the other posters would have stepped up to help out poor aprilp_katje, but it appeared not to be the case. aprilp_katje had put April with Dennis North at the same place Jeremy Jones and his current girlfriend Honoria Delaney-Forsythe were operating, and so I thought doing a takeoff on the same situation with Dennis / Liz / Anthony / Thérèse would be amusing.
As for “diddling”, I was reading Metro Girl, by Janet Evanovich in which the heroine gets her hair caught in a car door handle and two policemen declare that her boyfriend must have been diddling her, and in the best Evanovich humourous fashion, she has her heroine declare that no diddling occurred. I thought the word sounded funny, so I opted to use it with Honoria. Looking at the www.urbandictionary.com definition for diddling, the range of acts to which it could correspond cover a whole gamut of acts. I intentionally leave it up to the person reading it to interpret what “diddling” means for Honoria.
1. I had an eye examination. My wife has been saying for some period of time that she hates my glasses, and she was going to make an eye appointment for me to change them. So, it became a running joke for me that she would say this and then not do it. Finally, she did it and ended the running joke. It only took her 6 years since my last eyeglasses appointment. I know I could have made an appointment myself in that long a time, but I don’t like to mess with running jokes.
2. The two of us went to see Spider-Man 3 starring one of my favourite actors, Bruce Campbell. Actually, Bruce just had a small, but very funny part in the movie.
I had hoped that by the time I got back to April’s Real Blog, some of the other posters would have stepped up to help out poor aprilp_katje, but it appeared not to be the case. aprilp_katje had put April with Dennis North at the same place Jeremy Jones and his current girlfriend Honoria Delaney-Forsythe were operating, and so I thought doing a takeoff on the same situation with Dennis / Liz / Anthony / Thérèse would be amusing.
As for “diddling”, I was reading Metro Girl, by Janet Evanovich in which the heroine gets her hair caught in a car door handle and two policemen declare that her boyfriend must have been diddling her, and in the best Evanovich humourous fashion, she has her heroine declare that no diddling occurred. I thought the word sounded funny, so I opted to use it with Honoria. Looking at the www.urbandictionary.com definition for diddling, the range of acts to which it could correspond cover a whole gamut of acts. I intentionally leave it up to the person reading it to interpret what “diddling” means for Honoria.
posted by howard at 11:45 PM
8 Comments:
Continuing our discussion from the previous entry, as for who is actually drawing the characters, I think there might be inadvertent clues in that Canadore alumni article you posted recently. Look what it says about Laura: "Laura adds background and secondary characters"; "Now, as creative director, she manages production and quality of the strips, ensures that the scans are accurate and all required elements are in place, and keeps an eye on consistency of the characters" (3; emphasis mine).
If someone has taken over the drawing of characters, my net-money is on Laura.
You are probably right. The article was written in 2005 and we also have the special introductory line of Lynn asking Laura if she can draw on a passed note, as her introduction to For Better or For Worse 5 years ago. If Laura is truly responsible for those strange-looking background characters we see from time-to-time, then it is a pretty good evidence of the quality of her character drawing. It would also explain the change in art styles which occurred in the strip about that time. It would not, however, explain the more recent remodeling of characters like April, Elizabeth, Susan Dokis, and Eva Abuya into these big-lipped, different-shaped headed looks. I think I may have an explanation for this. "Consistency of the characters" may mean that Lynn has been drawing the main characters with little detail added to them and Laura has to finish them up. This would mean the quality of the drawing would be directly related to how tight Lynn drew the character. The recent new looks for the characters could be Laura taking over almost the whole thing, as she will probably do when the hybrid is up and running.
This also makes the most sense when you look at the process outlined in the "making of" feature on the official site. We know that Lynn and Laura have all the same equipment and supplies, and that they both do penciling and and inking. The next step in the chain is Jackie scanning the art and opening it in PhotoShop to work on it further.
It's not too much of a leap to think that maybe Lynn has off-loaded all of the inking duties to Laura, and that what Laura receives is the frames loosely sketched in pencil.
That's a pretty common practice in the comic book field. A guy with whom I went to high school, works as a professional comic book artist and he is very touchy about how his art works after he completes the pencils, so many times he inks himself or he draws the figures very tightly. I remember though, he showed me pencil work from another comic book artist he was inking, and it was very vague sketches with triangles where the hands should be, with the understanding the hands would be finished by the inker. A lot of the art in For Better or For Worse has had the appearance, someone has sketched things generally, but the person following it up didn't have the skills to properly fill in hands, or how to shape the faces from panel-to-panel to make it uniform, or how to balance the eyes on face so they did not look crooked. From the alumni article and the little note "Can you draw?" it doesn't sound like doing those kinds of things are in Laura's training.
Yes--I've been reading Scott McCloud's books on comics and a few different how-to sort of guides, and I was thinking the same thing. :)
aprilp_katje,
You read Scott McCloud's stuff? You go to free comic book day? Is there anything the continuity goddess doesn't do in sequential art? I'm beginning to think we should have a comic book discussion. Maybe I should ask you what you thought of Josh Whedon's run on Astonishing X-Men.
I'm sort of slowly getting into comic books. I took out a bunch of Harvey Pekar collections and anthologies--I've read some Love and Rockets and a few Clowes books, and I've checked out I Love Led Zeppelin by Ellen Forney. Oh, and I've read Alison Bechdel's Fun Home.
As for Joss Whedon, I got the first two of his new Buffy* series, and I have a couple of Frays. I'm not familiar with his X-Men work.
*Sheepish moment--I went to Free Comic Book Day thinking that the Buffy series had just started and that there'd only be a few issues out. They were already in the teens, and the #1 was already $8.00.
I'm working up the courage to start doing my own comics. :)
The Buffy series you saw in the teens were issues which had been published within the continuity of the aired shows. If I remember correctly they ran for awhile after the TV show ended and then they were cancelled, when Whedon wanted to do different things. Then it was recently restarted, as you know.
Whedon has also been writing Astonishing X-Men and the writing has been good. One of his stories involved a Mutant cure, which was lifted for the X-Men 3 movie. The only unfortunate thing is that he is so busy, the
Astonishing X-Men come out quite infrequently.
What kind of comics are you thinking about doing?
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