^{This post was originally published in July 21st, 2023 on my now dead Substack blog}

Thanks for taking the time to read my little art-journal-creative-process-thingy <3 This first one is a little longer than it will usually be, so if this seems a bit daunting to you, worry not. I hope it provides something interesting to you, or is at least a fun read while you wait for your date at a café, or commute to work, or have your breakfast or night read or whatever. Please bear with me as I find my groove with these first few. Chances are the groove is already here and I just needed to start typing…So let’s get to it.

#1 

Table of contents:

1. Hi, hello :3 TLDR

2. Page turns can be fun!

3. Recommendations

4. Byee

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Hi, hello :3

A few things inspired me to start writing a newsletter, but the big one is that I’m awfully uncomfortable with social media. It’s just not natural to me, it never was. It always came down to either showing my work as an online portfolio thing - which is easy to do and requires not much commitment, or making it about me and my life in a way that I was never really ok with. And when you mix the two well, then you have started content creation, and that’s another job all by itself and one that I’m not interested in performing. In other words: I could never find the balance between building a virtual persona and displaying my work in a way that invited meaningful conversation. I think it’s really hard to create that kind of space and make it feel inviting and some artists do it really well, but I think you need to get it, and I don’t think I get it.

In addition, I was never comfortable with exposure. I’m white and grew up as a boy and I’m self-conscious enough about my image to know that I always had some pretty privilege, so to me there was always this respect thing (and I say that with my nose pointing high up to the skies in self-irony), that it had to be about the art and not about my appearance or my skin privilege or my discourse. I think some of it is fair - about not wanting to take up too much space and not wanting to bring just more of the same to the table - and some of it is bullshit; after all, the art also reflects those aspects I listed so the content was always gonna be as interesting as whatever I had the capacity to bring to the table as a person anyways. And that’s A LOT of overthinking and need for control in a way that is impossible and…it all culminates in a feeling of discomfort around social media.

It has changed a lot of course since I’ve been out as a trans woman; I do get to be even more self conscious about my image and there’s some fear that comes with exposing my once-again pubescent body. But it also became less about me and more about sharing positive representation of, for example, someone going through transition in their late 30s, or also a trans person that’s fairly successful working in an industry that is still trying to get rid of its misogynistic habits, etc etc. And it’s a sort of representation that I will be very welcome to provide for younger generations of trans people or what have you.

On the complete other hand, when I go to events (mind you, I’m pretty selective about the ones I go to so experiences might differ) I don’t mind the exposure because the work - and everything surrounding it - becomes center stage, and the exchanges I have on those 2, 3 days of said event are so much more interesting and long lasting than whatever virtual spaces have provided me, ever. Which sure, it definitely is a testament to the kind of work I do and the kinds of conversations it invites. But then I go home and I’m not able to replicate that online, and that always frustrates me.

The thing I always turned more often to for inspiration is long form analytical media (video essays, newsletters, independent magazines) one (1) because it takes me back to a time when the internet was less dominated by commercial noise and more by people with shared interests and two (2) more often than not those things will give me that itch to write, to draw, to create more, and to talk about things that come up in the process, so…I guess I wanna create another space for those feelings to exist, and this here is that. Because my body and wallet can’t support me going to events all year long, and I don’t live in a city where I relate that much to its comics production (a topic for another time) but I wanna keep the spirit going in the meantime.

TLDR,

I don’t know how to manage virtual spaces but there’s stuff in comics and creative work/life that I think I have a unique viewpoint about and that could spark some interesting conversations that I often have in person at events but fail to replicate online. Or at least I’d like to try, and this is a first step. Hopefully it doesn’t just stay in the limbo. And, in any way you feel like interacting with this, I hope you enjoy yourself.

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Page turns can be fun!

I’ve been working on this secret project of mine that involves a lot of dream sequences and fun little scene cuts and different storytelling tidbits, and I think I’m gonna be using a lot of the pages from the pitch I assembled as examples in the next issues of this newsletter, since I’ve been trying to push my storytelling skills forward with these and therefore good food for thought has been coming out of them.

And lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Satoshi Kon’s movies - as I tend to think a lot about his work all of the time, but precisely about his match cuts that help amplify the very oniric feel that his own movies bring (here’s an great video from Every Frame A Painting about exactly that) and how I could explore that in a comic in other ways than the usual; changing matching images panel-to-panel, sometimes playing with panel size and border and sometimes switching the scene entirely but keeping everything else - panel structure, blocking of elements and maybe visual aspects - the same to match them somehow but cut to the next scene. But that way, the images are closer to each other and can be compared, they don’t exactly feel juxtaposed. Then I thought, what about using a page turn?

The problem with that is that when you’re about to turn a page, you’re looking at the odd page of a spread:

and when you turn the page, there’s a dreadful thing that happens in printed comics and whose impact I’m always trying to somehow diminish and it is that you kinda get spoiled to what the end of the next spread is going to be when you turn a page. You’re in a new page spread now, but you’ve already seen what’s coming in page 3 before you’ve even gone through page 2, because your eyes have passed through page 3 on the way there. You can make an effort not to but it’s highly unlikely that you won’t accidentally at the very least peek at a few pages with your side vision during a read. The best script writers do their best to keep that from happening by avoiding splash pages and big moments to happen on an odd numbered page, but North American monthly comics often have ads in them and it’s rocket science trying to predict which page number your big reveal is going to land on (I remember Kieron Gillen talking about how that works and I couldn’t really wrap my head around it), and even if you can there’s not much to be done about publications in other countries, so we end up with these problems a lot. And also I haven’t seen this explored enough in longer, self-contained books so I decided to have fun and try it myself.

Here’s the 4-page sequence that opens my comic (spoilers for the first pages of a comic that may or may not be published probably in about 2 years and a half or so):

(For context, the actual page 1 comes before that and is actually just a repeat of the first page)Fun, no? We have the reveal on the left page, and I think when you turn it and juxtapose those two scenes it creates such a cool contrast. And I think it also helps you care less about what’s happening on page 2 before you get there.

Another example, further ahead in the story:

Very dramatic, I know! Well, this time the matching elements - the characters’ faces looking inside/outside a window - are more subtle and are on the even page, so I had to adjust the storytelling to make it so that the second element is not spoiling us the entire next sequence but actually introducing us into it. Given, this will mostly work without much hassle with establishing scenes like this one, where there’s not really much to spoil anyway and the sensation of time is a little more flexible. But then again, if I wanna induce this dreamy feeling all over the comic, playing with time in that way would maybe enhance that feeling especially in sequences like this where we’re now back in the real world and time is expected to occur “normally” (and I quote this because, in comics, time is the reader’s time to read so normal is still subjective even though we try to infer timing as much as we can with the use of visual language).

So I wanna try that more, and with more complex scenes, and see where I can land on. I don’t have more experiments currently, but as I keep making this comic I’ll get to try some ideas and explore this even more and probably land at some interesting places. Once I do, I’ll come back here and share my results.

Also, you’re very welcome to share references and examples of this kind of page turn in the chat! I know I’ve seen this done in more experimental comics - especially in zine-like or anthology formats, but I don’t think I’ve seen it much in bigger books and I feel like there’s still more to be explored here, and new references are really welcome!

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Recommendations

This month I’ve been quite busy and not consuming many interesting things, but I’ve got some:

→ My friend Dan Goldman has started a newsletter himself called Dang Old Man. He’s great and you should follow him. Like, everywhere he goes.

→ Youtuber Maggie Mae Fish’s series Unrated on Nebula tells the history of sex and sexuality and censorship in film and it already makes it worth signing up to Nebula for (or just get a friend’s profile login and watch if that’s something out of your budget)

→ While on the topic of YouTube, Lily Alexandre’s video Why Are People Trans? made me a bit emotional, and while the bait title had me concerned for a couple weeks before watching and the actual content mostly didn’t present anything I didn’t already know (it’s all in the PhD program that comes when you sign up for gender transition), the personal insights on their own journey and the words chosen felt thoughtful. I usually avoid videos like this because I don’t wanna get triggered, but this one soothed me, in many ways. And now I also wanna show this to every cis person that doesn’t get it.

→ Also I’ll just be basic here and state that everyone is watching The Bear, so am I and you should too if you’re not. The show’s premise and format are super simple but the writing makes it intense, horrifying and wholesome like television hasn’t been in a while for me and I love it.

→ Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury season two is here, I’m halfway through it and I’m just happy that we now have an actual lesbian Gundam show instead of straight couples having lesbian romances - which were fine but come on…In all seriousness, I actually enjoyed the old ones, but this show goes beyond and I love it. Season two has more suspension of disbelief moments that feel off but I don’t really care, I’m here for the character moments, cheesy romance, cool battles, nonsensical politics, anti-war content and all of it suits me like a fancy velvet dress and an icy Boulevardier.

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BYEE

That’s all for this edition! Thank you again for signing up to this newsletter, I hope I’m making your time worthwhile. :)

Until the next one, have a great one!