The Last Strip in Hyperspeed
This is a video of Lynn Johnston drawing her final comic strip, supposedly edited by her son Aaron, and the clearest indication that Lynn and her son Aaron have finally patched things up, since Aaron has not been mentioned in years. Aaron's editing seems to have been to speed everything up, eliminate Lynn's dialogue, and then do moving versions of the final product. For those of us wanting to observe the art process, it was a little difficult. I can understand why someone might want to eliminate Lynn's conversation, but that was the part of the video I had been looking forward to. So Aaron, thumbs down on this editing job from me.
The video of the art confirms what I have often suspected:
a. We see Lynn Johnston pulling out an old collection for reference, lending credence to the idea that she borrows jokes from her old material. The case in point for the final strip was the number of squeaking / creeking bones jokes she has done in strips before.
b. We do not see Lynn Johnston doing any kind of layouts. She draws straight from the first panel to the last panel in order and doesn't go back. This explains all those strips where something would be introduced in a later panel that did not appear in an earlier panel where it should have appeared. Unlike the old days when Lynn was shown writing her strip ideas up in a notebook before she drew them, we don't see a single reference to that notebook. It gives me the impression she is making it up as she goes along, lifting ideas from her old strips, which is certainly the way most of her last strips in 2010 came across.
c. Sometimes she draws the dialogue first and sometimes she draws the head first. So many of her artistic issues have to do with drawing a head without sketching out the body. I have seen several of her strips where the head size did not match the body size, and this confirmed it for me. As for the dialogue, it’s not a surprise either. Many times I have guessed that Lynn drew her characters to fit around her dialogue and not by what made sense, and this confirmed that too.
d. She doesn’t erase and fix anything. I didn’t see that eraser pop out even once.
e. Back when Laura Piché was inking the strip, the website made a big deal about how Laura had to put on gloves to avoid smearing the ink. Not a single glove on Lynn. I have a feeling she required Laura to do something she would never do herself.
f. What I did not know was that Lynn had pre-marked panel templates to choose from when making her strips. This certainly explains why so many of the Sunday strips in particular had panels which I described as a repetition of the previous panel. If she only has 4-5 panels worth of material, she is obliged by her template to draw in 10 panels of material, instead of taking advantage of the opportunity to expand the size of her drawing. While this may have been a time-savings for Lynn, it certainly cost her in terms of artistic creativity.
This video confirmed everything I have suspected about Lynn’s art after looking at it carefully over the last few years. And of course, the big insult is that someone coloured the final strip, but do we get to see a video of the colourist? No. The strip magically appears in colour, as if from nowhere.
The colourist is Kevin Strang. Great job, Kevin.
The video of the art confirms what I have often suspected:
a. We see Lynn Johnston pulling out an old collection for reference, lending credence to the idea that she borrows jokes from her old material. The case in point for the final strip was the number of squeaking / creeking bones jokes she has done in strips before.
b. We do not see Lynn Johnston doing any kind of layouts. She draws straight from the first panel to the last panel in order and doesn't go back. This explains all those strips where something would be introduced in a later panel that did not appear in an earlier panel where it should have appeared. Unlike the old days when Lynn was shown writing her strip ideas up in a notebook before she drew them, we don't see a single reference to that notebook. It gives me the impression she is making it up as she goes along, lifting ideas from her old strips, which is certainly the way most of her last strips in 2010 came across.
c. Sometimes she draws the dialogue first and sometimes she draws the head first. So many of her artistic issues have to do with drawing a head without sketching out the body. I have seen several of her strips where the head size did not match the body size, and this confirmed it for me. As for the dialogue, it’s not a surprise either. Many times I have guessed that Lynn drew her characters to fit around her dialogue and not by what made sense, and this confirmed that too.
d. She doesn’t erase and fix anything. I didn’t see that eraser pop out even once.
e. Back when Laura Piché was inking the strip, the website made a big deal about how Laura had to put on gloves to avoid smearing the ink. Not a single glove on Lynn. I have a feeling she required Laura to do something she would never do herself.
f. What I did not know was that Lynn had pre-marked panel templates to choose from when making her strips. This certainly explains why so many of the Sunday strips in particular had panels which I described as a repetition of the previous panel. If she only has 4-5 panels worth of material, she is obliged by her template to draw in 10 panels of material, instead of taking advantage of the opportunity to expand the size of her drawing. While this may have been a time-savings for Lynn, it certainly cost her in terms of artistic creativity.
This video confirmed everything I have suspected about Lynn’s art after looking at it carefully over the last few years. And of course, the big insult is that someone coloured the final strip, but do we get to see a video of the colourist? No. The strip magically appears in colour, as if from nowhere.
The colourist is Kevin Strang. Great job, Kevin.
posted by howard at 11:01 AM
5 Comments:
I'm less disappointed in her failings as an artist than I am in not having her explain away those failings; I wanted her to try to justify all her bad decisions so I could point out her flawed logic. Case in point: her need to litter the page with unsound effects. As I've demonstrated in the past, she doesn't actually need to have them there to get the point across but distracts us with their redundant presence anyway. What I'd like to have is an explanation.
Typical that she doesn't give credit to Kevin Strang. Before viewing the video, I did wonder how the question of "how the color gets there." Now I see that the answer is--she doesn't. It just appears all of a sudden. I wish I knew that trick! ;)
DreadedCandiru2,
That is the missing part. Why this particular story for her last strip? The creaking bones and creaking tricycle joke she has done before. There was no element of the creative process before the drawing or after the drawing. A video of her drawing the final strip of the modern era with an explanation of why she put in what she did, would have been a lot better choice. This ending was nonsensical. It didn’t even feature the main character of the whole comic strip.
aprilp_katje,
Typical that she doesn't give credit to Kevin Strang. Before viewing the video, I did wonder how the question of "how the color gets there." Now I see that the answer is--she doesn't. It just appears all of a sudden. I wish I knew that trick! ;)
Well, now you have just given me an understanding of why I may have gotten the response from Lynn I did, when I asked her about the colourist for Farley Follows His Nose and Lynn claimed she did all the art. Maybe this is one of the Elves and Shoemaker kind of situations, where the shoemaker goes to sleep and the elves make the shoes for him. Maybe Lynn puts her art in a magic place, where it comes back coloured. Meanwhile, someone else takes the work to Kevin Strang, he colours it, and then puts it back in Lynn’s magic place. That way she wouldn’t know Kevin Strang exists.
It’s a nice thought; but I have seen a photograph of Lynn with Kevin Strang, so…
Hello again,
I know it's been awhile since you updated your blog, but figured this would be the best place to get your attention to my latest blog entry which I'm sure you and others in the FOOB commumity would like. Feel free to take a gander:
http://sundaycomicsdebt.blogspot.com/2010/10/for-better-or-for-cerebus.html
If there's anybody else there who'd like to take the monumental task of analyzing Cerebus alongside FOOB, be my guest. After all, it's ONLY 6,000 pages.
Of course, the fact that no reviewer who's tried to analyze the book one issue at a time have never made it past the first book doesn't bode too well for anybody out there.
http://cereblog.org/
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