Diary Comic: Up & Down

Here’s another quick diary comic. More style than substance I’m afraid; nothing really to report this week. I read a lot of Chris Ware last night, so that’s mostly where I’m coming from. New Root Hog soon, as well as an exciting design project after that.

Ed Emberly Odyssey Comic

This week our assignment was to do a four page comic with “odyssey” in the title completely in the style of Ed Emberley. His piece-by-piece instructional drawing books have made drawing whole worlds easy for generations of children. I presented it to my class in booklet form, but here’s my story, “A Summer’s Day Odyssey,” complete with the note on the back cover.

My First Mini: Bat Tweets!

I wanted something that I could sell and trade at SPX in Bethesda next weekend, so I’ve whipped up my first mini one-shot comic-ish thing and it’s called Bat Tweets! What would Batman and his cohorts do with the latest in micro-blogging? That’s going to cost you a quarter to find out! Available Now!

Also, I just got a iPod Touch, and I’ve been messing around with Brushes, the program that people use to paint with. The current New Yorker cover was done with Brushes. Here I’ve taken the avatar drawing for BatGuy09 as it appears in Bat Tweets and painted over it. Not exactly a painting, but I’m intrigued by the results.

De Stijl Lego Sculpture

So I’m back at home, and last night I took out some legos because I wanted to do something with my hands. I took everything apart and put all the colors together and this is what I had:

These are the colors of Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. He was influential not only in painting but also design, and he owns these colors:

Above is “Composition A.” I decided to make a version with legos. I had two yellow flat pieces that together formed a 32 x 32 lego unit square. Here’s where it gets nerdy. I took the image you see above and laid a grid over it in photoshop:

Note the Icon Factory icons in my dock. The lines didn’t match up exactly, but I was able to figure it out and start laying down the legos:

As you can see, I wasn’t able to keep the level the same throughout or have the black lines from the original painting. However, I’m pleased with the final product, which was best captured with the camera’s flash on. Maybe next time I’ll try something more difficult.

Just How Healthy Is The New Yorker?

The rumor mill has been churning recently about the health of one of my favorite magazines, The New Yorker. There’s no question that almost all magazines are hurting, especially those owned by Condé Nast, but the question remains as to how badly The New Yorker is being wounded by this recession.

While interning with the production at The Atlantic, I’ve learned about the way that specific issues of magazines can by compared through analysis of their advertisements. There are two specific measurements that are particularly telling: the ad-to-edit ratio and the ads in the beginning of the magazine. Each magazine has a specific balance of ads and editorial content that it strives for in each issue. The most expensive ads are in the beginning of the magazine. For an anecdotal, qualitative approach, I’m looking at two issues of The New Yorker.

May 18, 2009: This is most recent issue of the magazine. Of 86 pages, only 13 were ads, at 15.1%. The rest was editorial content, taking up the remainder of 84.9%. Some advertisers request that their full page ads are in the first 20% and other request placement in the first third, so I looked at which ads were place in the first 25% of the magazine. In this issue, there was BMW, Fidelity, Verizon, RoC, and their “showcase,” which has a lot of small ads in it.

July 21, 2008: The famous “terrorist fist-jab” cover. This magazine comes to us from a past where the print media looked far less dead than it does at this moment. Though we were officially in a recession last summer, every sector of media was riding the wave of interest in the Presidential Election. So, was the magazine in better shape? The first sign is that the magazine had over ten more pages, clocking in at 98. 23 pages were ads, giving the issue 23.5% ad content and 76.5% edit content. In the first quarter appeared: Citi, Embassy Suites, Mercedes, Chevron, Vanguard, Westin Hotels, Verizon, Express, and two spreads — Exxon Mobil and Bridgestone.

This is obviously not an exhaustive study, and it would be difficult to draw conclusions from this data alone even if it was taken from magazines over a period of several years. I even pulled out another issue from 2007 and it fell in between the two looked at here on both counts. However, it is interesting that these two issues diverge so greatly.

Simulacra & Slackline

UPDATE: I got in to CCS! I’m going in fall!

This weekend I completed part two of my application to comics U. As you can see above, it is a stylistic departure from my previous work, and I’m extremely pleased with the result. The resulting two page whimsy is called Simulacra & Slackline, and it’s available here in PDF. It shows intersection of casual tight rope walking and thinking about Baudrillard. Wish me luck.