#small redraw of that magazine page | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

angelharness · 4 years ago

Text

ns/fw tag is junkbox, blacklist that tag if needed

somehow this evolved into. frank getting railed. was just thinking about how there’s virtually no sub frank content and then this happened. gender neutral reader, could be interpreted as a strap-on or otherwise.

WARNINGS: smoking, brief descriptions of blood

FRANK MORRISON / THE LEGION

When Frank picks you up for your typical Friday routine, he’s tense. More so than usual, enough that you can notice it, despite being so acquainted with his usual taut air. You’ve just come from dinner with Susie and Julie at the only karaoke bar in the area, still a ways from Ormond, cheeks bitten by the cold and the crescents of ice caught on your lashes.

Stuffed on crisp fries and more than one refill of Shirley Temples, you’re a little groggy and just want to get to his house to pass out in bed, but through your coma-esque fogginess you see Frank’s fingers tighten on the steering wheel. His eyes are almost unfocused, and you feel his dad’s old Ford Mustang begin to veer slightly as he begins down the route to his place.

You’re staring at the highway in front of you, but as the car inches over the dotted white line of the road and reaches well into the next lane over, you grab for Frank; a bad idea, he snaps to reality with a jerk in his shoulders, and the wheels screech and whine when he tears the steering wheel suddenly to the side. You gasp for a moment.

Frank swallows, readjusts his grip, and redraws into the proper lane. You look over at him, worried, and though he glances back fleetingly, his focus still resides elsewhere.

“Frank, do we need to pull over?” you suggest, somewhat meekly. Frank was never a good driver, liable to concerning cases of road rage, but it’s out of character for him to be so out of focus. As you expected, he takes offense to your comment, as well meaning as it was intended.

“Fuck, I’m fine, okay? Can you just—” His grip tightens further, you can hear the stiff creak of the worn leather furrowing intensely between his fingers.

He twitches when you reach a hand to rub his shoulders. As you graze down his side with a gradually increasing pressure, he jolts beneath his heavy denim jacket. He careens inward, retreating from your touch, but in the moments after, falls back into the space between you two.

You rub his hip comfortingly; Frank begins to loosen up, though his hands remain rigid, defined by furrowed veins across his straining knuckles. Your hand rests on his thigh, where you rub gentle circles. He tightens up again once more, then finally relaxes, and though there is no audible indication you can feel an exhale of relief as his limbs unstrain.

He slouches back into the driver’s seat chair, but you still see him spare you glances, less frantic but still with meaning.

It’s been a period of fluctuating silence now. Only taking his eyes off the road to struggle open the center console, retrieving a suspiciously brown box of his favorite Classic Filter Kings cigarettes, he rummages further for his lighter but resigns his attempts, the unlit cigar fixed between his fingers as he returns to the wheel.

“What’s wrong, Frankie?” you push. Your hand moves inward on his thigh. You can’t tell if it’s a gasp, but his mouth snaps open then shuts just as quickly, eyelids fluttering in fluster.

“Can we talk about it when we get back to my place?” he replies. His voice comes out smaller.

When you pull up in front of his foster parents house, the sprawling display of Christmas lights across neighbor’s lawns projects in smears of color down the windows of the Ford Mustang. His house is dark, an unfitting, unwelcoming silhouette between the neighborhood's jolly spectacles. Its windows stare back like dark, unfeeling eyes.

Frank draws into the empty driveway. His parents are always out at night, though you never borrowed to ask, thankful for its convenience. He alluded to them being out of town this weekend, though.

As Frank is now newly-nineteen, they don’t especially care much for whatever pursuits he undergoes in the privacy of his room, as long as that means he isn’t out late and getting into trouble with the law (which still makes up all of his time otherwise). You’d barely talked to them at all, actually—when Frank first brought you home, of course with the intention of sex, they hadn’t said anything at all, despite his foster mom spotting you as he rushed you up the stairs to his room.

He practically kicked you out afterward, just in time for dinner, which you guess had saved you from any uncomfortable introductions. You would rather not spend an awkward evening at the dinner table, shifting under the judgemental, wordless glares of his parents.

The car doors slam and the two of you trudge up the driveway to the door. Despite his parents' evident indifference, he’d always insist on entering from the back door closest to the stairs when they were home to ensure as minimal confrontation as possible. It’s in their absence that he hurries inside, eagerly pulling you along, breath heavier in cold plumes of crisp winter air.

The door shuts, he flips on the living room lights, a sad Christmas tree blinking to life wearily in the corner by the front window.

“The usual?” you start with a slight smile. Sex was never routine, actually, but you can tell when he needs to destress. Your relationship, never technically made official but by all other means definite, started with a teen-aged, carnal fiercoity. These escapades mellowed out and became sparser in your months together, now your time is spent in a more intimate, personal affection. To an outsider (such as Joey), they might think that that flame has lessened, but in fact you prefer the genuine romance that has developed in sex’s absence.

He’s rolling the cigarette anxiously between his fingers, gaze fixed elsewhere.

Frank is not shy. He feels so rawly and with a strengthness that wards off those who have not developed the acquired taste of his intensity.

Here, though, in the doorway of his house, breathing deep first, then shallow, he is small.

“In the car,” Frank mutters. His brows lower, frustration forming between his eyes. It’s an incomplete sentence but said with finality. He wants you to figure it out.

In the car.

You step forward and slide your hand down his arm.

“Frankie?” you say, and while it is said with understanding it comes out teasing. He parts his lips. He grabs your shoulders and pulls you into a vigorous kiss. Parting for desperate breaths but still so fervent. It’s not the intensity you are familiar with. It is, in some aspect, resigned, from a place of surrender. He’s warm, despite the December night you’ve entered from.

You’re starting up the stairs even as his hands clench at the fabric of your shirt. There’s the cold slide of zippers as you shed your jackets and stumble into his room. Blind, preoccupied with heavy kisses, he swats at the doorway to his room, finding the end of his door and slamming it shut after you.

The lights come on next. His room is as messy as usual; what clothes he couldn’t manage to cram into his drawers he’s instead kicked under the bed. It smells of old weed, never a smell you would get used to. His collection of army and pocket knives remain perhaps the most organized aspect of his room, mounted on his bedroom wall in a thick frame. Torn magazine pages are plastered about on the wall; various models in bikinis, and though a joke (he claims), it’s still the subject of teasing from Julie.

Frank tugs you along, falling back into his bed, guiding you to straddle him. His face is so red. He looks away, worrying his lip between his teeth.

“Please,” he manages.

It’s the first time you’ve heard that from him, in any context. It’s so bizarre you nearly laugh, but this is also just so rare of an experience you don’t want to risk embarrassing him, in which case surely this occurrence would never present itself again.

He’d always been the one in control. Perhaps steered by his own collecting frustration, he fucks roughly and uncaringly. That is not to say he’s ever hurt you, but he’s never entirely there in the moment. He’s there for the feeling, but his mind is so many places at once you’ve never felt so alone in an inherently mutual act. His intensity carries over into his hands and touches, strokes which barely pass as such. Bruises and scratches are expected, though they heal fine enough on their own. Biting, too, wherever on your neck he can sink his teeth into it while fucking you.

Your hands must be cold, or he’s just nervous (both, you decide), as the muscles in his chest twitch when you run your fingers firmly down his bare chest. There are plenty of scars, varying in color, in recency. Old, faded scars juxtaposed by those more recent and a painful red. There are dark bruises up his forearms where he scratches subconsciously when anxious. You kiss up the bruises there, caring, sweet, but intensifying when you rise to meet his lips.

Frank was never treated kindly. Beyond that, he never opened himself up to kindness; paranoid by a history ridden so distinctly with hurt and mistreatment from those expected to care for him.

In your time with him you’ve slowly introduced intimacy. Genuine intimacy, loving kisses and compassionate touches. You like to think he’s calmed down over the years. You see that in your time alone, where he’s come to allow himself to relax and trust you, your intentions, your love for him, but you never see it otherwise. With others, he’s still Frank, still ambitious and self-destructive, careless perhaps in the desire for hurt, for what he thinks is punishment. You wonder how much of it is an act. He keeps it all hidden well behind unyielding eyes.

You run your fingers through his short hair, moving your kisses to his neck. Instinctively, his hands claw at your back, nails sinking in bare skin for security. If he’s so jumpy at just this, you’re not sure if he’d be able to handle much more.

“It’s okay,” you promise, murmuring into the crook of his neck. Somehow, it’s hot, even as snow gathers on the outside ledge of his bedroom window. Your skin is pricked with goosebumps but your neck burns up to your cheeks.

He says your name, eyes squeezed shut, a shy request for more. The kisses on his neck escalate, and you graze your teeth on the sensitive flesh experimentally. He pulls you closer. More. You sink your teeth in. Dark blood beads around the marks, and when you retract you gently dab away the red. More bites, he yelps shortly but his breath becomes distinguished and desperate. He’s still pulling at you.

“Is this ok?” you pause to ask. He nods his head and moves impatiently beneath you.

He usually is relatively silent when you do get around to fucking, and in the times when he’s not he rambles on and on, names, some degrading and others loving and some both. Teasing, too, the most relentless teasing.

Seeing him so oddly vulnerable, your hands clasping his wrists to the bedsheets, that almost drunk blush bright across his cheeks. It’s weird, so weird, but it feels incredible, too.

Pants come off, his boxers you pull down. He’s making the faintest whining, but you can’t tell if it’s out of anticipation or anxiety. You check in again and he responds a little annoyed, urging you on with rising impatience.

“Fucking christ, come on,” he finally spits, grinding pointlessly against nothing, and yet there’s immediate regret in his eyes when you grip his thigh in warning. His foggy eyes lurch to look down at the hand inching up his inner thigh. Frank is taken aback, but still you feel him move against you, pushing into your touch to ease the burning want even if slightly. You let him go.

He shoves the cigarette on his cluttered dresser, sitting up to stretch past his nightstand, but when he turns back to you you guide him to lay back down. He lays expectantly and swallows his nervousness. You take his cock in your hand. Another taut intake of air and dizzy mumbling.

“Yeah,” he urges in response to your inaction.

You start at a steady pace but quicken soon enough to meet his impatience. Hearty strokes, he pushes into your touch, needy and hot, the whimpering now very much audible. He jerks his head back across his pillow and looks down at you through half-lidded eyes, a twitch to his lips. You stop to admire the piercings on the underside of his shaft. He snarls, you jerk him sharply and he shuts his mouth with a surprised sound. Faster now, his mumblings evolve into barely restrained moans.

“Good boy,” you say encouragingly, “Such a good boy.”

“Fuck. Fuck!” His hands slide from your back, marked with the red imprint of fingers, and instead he tangles the sheets tightly in his fists, twisting them. He’s panting.

“Oh,” you muse. He groans shakily. “Do you like that? Being called ‘good boy’?”

He can only make a sound in reply. Possibly above admitting it, but when your strokes slow, he nods. You stroke faster.

Internally, you store this revelation in your head to tease him about later. Right now, you find yourself oddly warm at this nickname.

Again, “Good boy, what a sweet boy.”

He ruts into your palm and you see the glint of what might be tears stinging his eyes. He’s burning, so flushed, so needy. He relents and falls back into himself. It’s an entirely new intimacy to see him like this.

He releases with an audible shutter, chest heaving an extraordinary amount for such an act. You’ve jerked him off before without a fuss, though again in those moment’s he was still demonstrating complete control, usually with a hand knotted in your hair. Exploring that loss of control you just find so exciting, though. You’re incredibly turned on and possibly more embarrassed than he is.

You both take a moment, his breathing evening out again. You cup his cheek and run a thumb along the frame of his face, rough with scars and bruises. You kiss the light scar that runs through his lip, humming sweetly. He exhales hotly, eyes heavy and half-lidded, murky with lust.

“Fuck me,” he says suddenly. You think for a moment he’s regained his signature brashness, maybe previously lost to emotional exhaustion—no, though. He grinds against your thigh, searching so urgently for relief. You like withholding it, like watching him squirm and sputter for words, to flounder in this new sensation, flustered and aching but also groggy in his own befuddlement. But lost to an overwhelming yearning, he severs contact with the shame he’s constructed to keep him from intimacy and vulnerability, concepts still very new and scary.

Funny how new emotions manage to be Frank’s greatest, most incapacitating fear; you’d more readily believe he would kill a man before he would ever let himself be emotionally vulnerable.

“How do you want me to?” you ask. You are incredibly nervous but manage to function with the rush of acute longing thrumming sweetly in your veins.

“I—I dunno,” he mumbles hotly to the side. The unpatterned fabric of his bed sheets furrows in his clenched fingers. He glares needles at the wall, far too embarrassed to look at you as you move above him.

“What if you just relax and I’ll take control this time?” you offer, dropping the teasing note in your voice. You gently rub his shoulders, unwinding the muscle there, coaxing him into relief, the unclenching of self where he had not realized he had been tensed. He releases a breath, closing his eyes, and says with it, “yeah.”

“Tell me if you want me to stop,” you remind him. He stares at you almost timidly, eyes angled through his blond eyelashes.

Shifting to a fitting angle, you lean in to kiss along his jawline, then taking his face in your hands, kissing up the bridge of his nose, at his chin, at his cheek, at his lips once more.

He makes a sound beneath you.

“Mmph.” Though short and exhaled almost bluntly, it’s content. A moan comes after but he silences it, drawing in his bottom lip, squeezing his eyes closed again.

Properly pushing into him, rocking up against him. He squirms briefly and resituates himself before unclenching again and following your slowly building thrusts.

He brings an arm up over himself, to shield the bedroom lights or to avert the further embarrassment of seeing you stare. Frank tucks his face into the junction in his elbow.

“You don’t have to be so gentle.”

He manages a glance your way. It’s not a dare, not said to badger you or push buttons he knows all too well.

You sink in further and watch his chest hitch, testing broader thrusts. When his breathing normalizes, you push the remaining width deeper, now comfortably situated snug in his hips. You let the both of you adjust, then return thrusting with newly-realized confidence. Moaning, his fingers seize the sheets again and twist them.

Mumbling incoherently as you fuck into him, he shakes, jerking. You lose yourself in the feeling, tight pleasure in your belly. He encourages you even as his face burns red ear to ear.

“More,” he asks, and more you give him. It’s almost too much. Like winding up a chain with a crank, the ecstasy tightening his core wrenches him suddenly into undoing; pleasure, striking and raw, racking his body in release.

If he could have been any redder his face might have well been solid crimson, already stained with pink and a few stray tears. You catch your breath with him, staring at him, beautiful and unraveled.

You lay down beside him and somewhat hesitantly ask, “Did I do ok?”

“Yeah,” he says with the mildest smile. He still glances away, scrambling to recover his composure before looking at you again.

Frank cleans up and retrieves a new set of boxers and his discarded pants. From his nightstand he withdraws another pack of cigarettes, this one nearly empty. You give him a look when he reaches for his blocklike lighter, cups his hand carefully around it, and lights the cigarette, taking a long drag. He returns to your side, laying next to you and shifting to allow you to rest your head on his chest.

“Your room’s a fire hazard, Frankie,” you joke. He pinches the cigarette between his fingers, exhaling a gray-white ribbon of smoke.

He stares at the undecorated bedroom wall across from the bed, the only wall in his room not graffitied in some manner. He seems to contemplate speaking, turning the words over in his mouth with his tongue.

“It—it felt good,” he admits, and the dark flush reappears at his ears and cheeks.

“Oh?” You scoot closer. “You looked really cute,” you tease, “I wish I could’ve taken a picture.”

You throw an obvious glance over at the clunky camera that he tossed uncaringly onto his desk. It looks virtually unused, but now certain thoughts start a smile across your face.

He shoves you but is smiling. He presses the cigarette into the ashtray behind his bed-side lamp, the smoke eaten suddenly away.

You take the moment to kiss up his neck again. Squirming, he bites back a laugh. You cradle his face with a loving hand, guiding him to look back at you.

“I love you, Frank,” you remark, suddenly serious. Frank, for a second, looks worried, but is reassured by more kisses on his cheeks.

“Yeah,” he replies—returning the gesture in his own manner. His lips meet yours, though a moment later you part and laugh, nose wrinkled. "What?” he shoots back, seeming confused. You only shake your head. Smoke just really isn’t a palatable taste.

Eventually, you pull away and maneuver over him on the bed to stand, snagging your own clothes.

“You leaving?” he asks, and it might be disappointment. You shake your head as you ball up your shirt and pants. “No,” you reply. You push your hair from your face; “I need to wash up.”

“Unless, ah, you want me to leave,” you say, too nervous to turn around and look at him. You were completely prepared for him to kick you out after the fact, an expected conclusion but never one you looked forward to.

There’s no response, despite the shuffling of sheets, then he speaks.

“You can stay if you want to.”

It would sound displeased to anyone else, but you, fluent in his terminology, know it’s a genuine invitation.

“Can I take a shower first?” you ask with a well-meaning laugh. “Yeah, that would be nice,” he replies. You doubt he meant it, but it came out as an insult, and you cackle back at him. Confused at first, he realizes, opening his mouth to clarify, but you’re the one to speak first.

“So that’s what you think of me, got it,” you joke further. He grabs a pillow out from under him and launches it your way. You retreat from it and take cover in the hallway, still giggling to yourself, and almost prance to the upstairs bathroom.

You look away from your own reflection in the mirror, flustered again, suddenly, by the image of him beneath you still recent in your thoughts.

God.

#junkbox #frank x reader #frank morrison x reader #dbd #dbd x reader #dbd frank #dbd legion #legion x reader #reader insert #x reader #horror x reader #slasher #slashers #dbd imagine #harpy writes

118 notes · View notes

goldenkamuyhunting · 3 years ago

Note

i dont really know how to word this, but is there usually such big changes from magazine to tankobon for other authors? i only know of small changes to art usually, but i know for gk entire events were rewritten so i wonder how common that is! thank you!

Well...

it really depends from author to author.

For example Takeuchi Ryōsuke and Miyoshi Hikaru do make small changes to the volume version of “Moriarty The Patriot”, which might include changing test or redrawing pages and other mangaka here and there also had added one page or two to their volume version (if I don’t remember wrong this happened to "Tokyo Ghoul”, “Pandora Hearts” and “Tsubasa RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE”, “Attack on Titans”).

Matsushita Yoko basically redrawn “Yami no Matsuei” for its volume release.

“Umineko no naku koro ni” Episode 8 instead only had minor but relevant changes.

“Bastard!!” by Hagiwara Kazushi did an even weirder thing because they decided to make a time skip between vol 18 and vol 19 and recover the not released arc only later.

Of course my knowledge of manga authors and the changes they apport to their works is incomplete. I hardly sit down and check both versions for other manga, more often than not hear it from other people.

Still, in my limited experience, I’ve hardly met someone as devoted as Noda at making such an amazing volume release. Not only he corrects panels or add/change dialogue, which is still in the accepted range of changes, but he can end up adding a lot of new pages to the point he adds to the story or changes it.

He’s really dedicated to make this story the best it can be.

Said so, if someone has info about authors equally as dedicate as Noda please, share. They clearly deserve all our praises.

#Ask

5 notes · View notes

littleeyesofpallas · 4 years ago

Text

Was chatting with a coworker the other day and two things crossed my mind...

that I've been at this weeb shit so long that I forget what I just sort of take for granted and what might not be commonly known little factoids, and

that VIZ's attempt at a monthly Shonen Jump magazine has been gone so long most people probably never saw them. (nevermind the old RAIJIN Graphic Novels that tried the same thing)

So, here's some fun little things you might not have known about manga if you've only ever read English publications and/or digital scans...

For one, there's the matter of print formatting... In general, Japan actually uses their own standards for print that tend to differ from those in the US; The JIS(Japanese Industrial Standards) series A and B. Magazines like the typical anthology format manga are printed in JIS B5, which is comparable to the US Letter standard, or the ISO A4.

This was the same format that RAIJIN Comics printed in as well, and although I don't have a copy of the old English Shonen Jump for reference, if memory serves they printed in the same format as well in an attempt to really sell that "authentic" manga feel. Sadly, I don't know that the effort or attention to detail was much appreciated. Neither published a volume comparable to a Japanese weekly or even monthly serial magazine, though --not by a long shot. But this might not be the most practical for comparrison, since there actually just isn't much of an English language equivalent format. (unless you count actual magazines that happen to include comic illustrations or miniscule comic strip segments)

Despite the mammoth size of a serial magazine, Japanese tankoban are actually smaller than the North American equivalent. But notably the Japanese small book format isn't just a matter of contending with nearest print standards... What I believe is the JIS B40(although I could be wrong) tends to be the standard print size of small books in general, not just manga, and it's a print size that is only marginally smaller than VIZ's standard size manga, but with the very particular benefit of being deliberately portable. The small difference in size is the difference between a Japanese manga fitting in my coat pocket where as the English equivalent can't.

(I realize I photographed a copy of Shonen ACE, and not Weekly JUMP, but I measured a copy of Weekly JUMP for the thickness and not the copy of ACE; the copy of JUMP was around 506pg, while the copy of ACE was 570pg. Those are both older though, and the most recent digital copy i have of Weekly JUMP actually had around 520pg)

And I don't think it's always addressed just what a difference there is, culturally, in how Japan approaches the print medium. It's kind of an old cliche by this point, and I don't know how accurate it's remained in the past decade or so, but the quintessential image passed around between comic nerds has always been the Japanese bullet train; A place packed with commuters all passing their transit time with isolated preoccupation with music and/or reading, with manga being the king of this time killing arena. And its not just about sheer popularity driven by interest, American comic vendors have long envied the sheer accessibility of manga in Japan.

Here in the U.S. we used to have a thriving newsstand retail scene for comic books, and a kind of similar ease of grab and go comic purchase, rather than the explicitly niche interest driven "direct market" model that has been slowly but surly strangling the comic market ever since. But in Japan serialized manga has remained in relatively quick, impulse friendly, arm's reach of readers on the go. And what lubricates that business model more than anything is price.

I still remember a time when VIZ dominated the English manga market by offering at $7.95(and am I crazy or am I remembering a time when it got down to $6.99?) but now'days it's settled on a low end of $9.99. You know how much the recent vol.29 of My Hero Academia goes for? ¥484. That's less than $4.50.

You know how much that big ass magazine with 500+ pages and 21 different series goes for? Do you think it's more or less than the little pocket-size tankoban? Did you guess something close to ¥290? That's less than $2.75. But how does something bigger in both page size and page count managed to sell for less???

There are a few secrets to that, but one is that the things are packed to the gills with ads. But that's the boring answer. The other feature contributing to keeping an accessible cost on weekly/monthly manga is something we don't think about much in the U.S.; it's the paper and print quality.

The nice little books are printed in what you might expect as far as starch white paper and clean black inks, but those big honkin' phone book(do people still know what phonebooks look like??) size magazines are printed on cheap recycled pulpy newpaper with typically rough print jobs. This is most noticeable in the quality of solid blacks, and when scanning the texture of "white" space.

(I tried to take individual photos of different series chapters to show off the fact that the paper is differently colored... but my phone's camera seems to be smart enough to auto balance that kind of thing when there's no other context to anchor it to. (It doesn't help that it's night and my lights have a harsh yellowing glow to them.) but on th left you can still kind of see the different paper colors; this particular issue alternated every 3 chapters between pink-ish, green/gray, a kind of off-white/gray, and sepia, but I've also seen blue-ish, oranges, and a different shade of yellow different from the sepia-ish one.)

Back in ye olden days when it came to fan scanlations, more slapdash teams and projects would often stumble over levels in photoshop (too much black and the pulpy paper texture shows up as grainy shadows, but too far white and the edges of lineart get crunchy and ugly) but those who had more robust readership and a regular streamlined flow of work, we'd actually go in and touch up the solid blacks and whites by hand. We'd also redraw art to erase overlaid text so the type setters could lay the new English in over top.

(Weekly Jump: Left, Bleach tankoban: Right)

They do however keep a few coveted color pages in better quality paper and ink. In contrast, the standard quality tankoban actually don't include color pages at all, and just print what had been color pages in grayscale. There are also all kind of irregularities between publishers and special editions and such, but on the most basic level this difference in quality both keeps serial prices down, while also incentivizing tankoban purchase.

In the U.S. we might still have the draw of an ad-free reading experience in our TPB, but the print quality between a biweekly issue and a TPB are basically the same. Incidentally, even though manga are generally drafted at a much larger scale than even the serial magazine proportions anyway, the scaled down size of the tankoban also serves to sharpen the image. When put side by side the nice clean tankoban print looks noticeably better than the serial.

Now'days the English scanlation scene seems to be conducted almost entirely through ripped digital releases (at least as far as I can tell with popular, regular weekly titles) which is great for quality, frankly, but it does kind of lack the charm and personal touch of a band of amateurs finding round about solutions to a convoluted bootlegging pipeline. But obviously I'm a little biased.

[edit]: Oops i posted this without really ending it in any sensible ro conclusive way... I feel like ive lost sight of the point since i first drafted this but I guess its mostly just me pining after if we could just get super cheap, disposable quality, bulk manga in that classic Japanese magazine model to work here in the states. I already tend to sell manga in big runs, even at $9.99+, and frequently I'll have customers put volumes back, or clearly want the next volume but just can't afford it and wait to come back. If I could sell these customers more volumes, and more importantly more titles, at the same price, I would love to. I would love to see these things fly off the shelves. I would love to see people keeping up with multiple series. I would love to see someone look at a 44vol long series and actually feel like that's a number of volumes they can afford.

5 notes · View notes

actualbird · 5 years ago

Photo

K.K. Slider, holding a glass of bourbon in one paw and cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading wolves who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing; he had been silent during much of the evening, except now in this private club in Flufferly Hills he seemed even more distant, staring out through the smoke and semidarkness into a large room beyond the bar where dozens of young couples huddled around small tables or twisted in the center of the floor to the clamorous clang of rolk-rock music blaring from the stereo. The two wolves knew, as did Slider’s four furry friends who stood nearby, that it was a bad idea to force conversation upon him when he was in this mood of sullen silence.

(rlly love the trend of redrawing album covers with kk slider and wanted in on that action but i cant draw so i made this magazine spread. all text is from “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” by Gay Talese, just animal-ified, except the last page where i got tired and just pasted the bee movie script.)

#bird edits stuff #animal crossing #kk slider

46 notes · View notes

votederpycausemufins · 5 years ago

Text

Red: ch 3 Berries

This story is also posted on Ao3

Chloé visits Marinette’s home and designing happens.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Chloé did her best not to look nervous as she approached the Dupain-Cheng bakery. She may have been invited, but going to her former rival’s home was different to say the least, not to mention she was on Sabine’s bad side as far as she knew, and Marinette mom was someone you did not want to be on the bad side of.

Chloé took a breath before opening the door to the bakery. The bell chimed and Sabine looked over. “Hello welcome to- oh, hello Chloé.”

The blonde was surprised at the unexpected warmth in Sabine’s voice. Her best guess was that Marinette had told her mother that Chloé would be visiting, but it was still surprising there wasn’t a hint of anger in Sabine’s voice.

Marinette came down the steps, nearly falling. “Chloé you’re here! Come on up!”

Sabine turned to look at her daughter. “Would you like me to bring any treats up? I’ve got a fresh batch of strawberry crumble.”

“Oh that’s perfect Maman! I’m actually designing a line based on different berries!”

“You will have to show me when it is finished.”

“I will Maman.” Marinette replied with a smile before dragging Chloé upstairs all the way to her room, which was tricky on the ladder.

Chloé looked around the bedroom. The place was very… pink. In the one episode of Fill my Shoes, Chloé had seen Marinette’s room appear, and it looked pretty much the same, but the area around her computer looked different. “It looks empty over there.”

Marinette briefly looked upset. “I’m uh… redecorating that area.”

That’s right, Chloé recalled, that’s where Adrien’s pictures had been. Another sign about how Marinette liked Adrien, but of course she didn’t anymore after what he had done. “Well maybe you should put your sketches there.”

Marinette tilted her head as she looked at the area. “You’re probably right. Could you grab my sketchbook?” Chloé didn’t move and after a few seconds staring at the wall, Marinette turned to look and the blonde. “Oh right, you’re not Alya. It’s fine if you don’t want to help.”

“No, I would grab it for you, but not only don’t know where it is, I also still remember last time I tried taking it.”

Marinette covered her mouth. “Oh that’s right! I completely forgot!”

“Here is it Marinette!” Tikki came flying over dragging the sketchbook along in the air.

“That looks heavy” Chloé commented, grabbing it from the kwami to give to Marinette.

“Just a little. I’m stronger than I look.”

Chloé gave a nod as Marinette carefully took out some pages. “Those don’t look like some of your best work, why bother putting them up?”

Marinette shrugged. “I guess I’m just paranoid with everything that’s been happening. It’s better if I put out the worse stuff in case someone tries stealing it.”

“That’s pretty clever. Like with your signature that looks like a design.”

“Yeah, I started designing them with that after Adrien’s birthday.”

Chloé’s eyes widened. “So that scarf was made by you! Of course his father wouldn’t wouldn’t give him a present like that. Ugh, he’s as bad as Hawkmoth sometimes.”

Marinette gave a small laugh. “I actually thought he was Hawkmoth until he was akumatized.”

“Right. So, you said you’ve been doing some designs?”

“Oh, yes!” Marinette smiled and opened her sketchbook to near the back. “I’ve finished blueberry, strawberry and raspberry. I’m still working on cranberry.”

Chloé looked at the designs. She had to admit, they did look nice. “These mainly seem more feminine. Anything a bit more masculine?”

“Well, the berry theme seems more oriented to dresses and other ‘feminine’ styles.”

Chloé studied the designs for a little bit more before handing the sketchbook back. “Maybe counterpart outfits, like bilberry and bramble berry.”

“Oh! That’s a good idea! What about strawberry and cranberry?” Marinette asked, grabbing a pencil and quickly writing some notes.”

Chloé pauses, thinking for a bit. “Well currant for cranberry, but strawberry is a bit harder. Maybe… lychee? Do you know what that is?”

“Yes, my uncle has made some recipes with Lychee, though not too many. It’s mainly for deserts. But that’s a great idea for the counterpart to strawberry!”

“Now if there were only something yellow.” Chloé said quietly, though loud enough Marinette heard.

“Well, bananas are classified as berries actually.”

“Look, yellow is okay, but actually picturing a banana is a line I will not cross!” Chloé states firmly, crossing her arms.

“That makes sense. And I know it’s not yellow, but I may have made a design or two for you. I’ve done at least one for everyone in the class. Well except Lila.” Marinette gave a quick shrug and grabbed a different sketchbook. “It’s got some purple in it, but I could recolor it if I make it.”

Chloé took the sketchbook that was handed to her. It looked… nice. The design had her with a long sleeved dress shirt with the cuffs slightly rolled up. Over it was a vest like shirt. It was a light lavender and in the middle there was a white and purple diamond design. The pants were a simple middle grey tone. The shoes were the same color or a little darker with lavender and white accents in the same diamond pattern.

“This is… amazing. Can you make this for me actually?” Chloé looked up from the sketchbook. “But change the colors. The purples make yellows and the white in the designs can be lavender.”

Marinette looked shocked. “Wait, really?”

“Well various magazines say changing how you dress can help change how you act.”

“Alright, I guess I’ll redraw it with those colors. I might change the design to better fit them, so if I do, I can send you a picture! But wait…” Marinette turned to look at Chloé after turning to her designing area. “I don’t have your phone number.”

“Ugh, that’s right… fine, give me a piece of paper. Just make sure you get rid of it once it’s in your phone. I don’t want anyone else getting it. Adrien and Sabrina are already enough. I want to block Adrien, but it might be suspicious.”

“You could just do it anyway.” Marinette suggested.

“No, no. It could make him worse. Besides, who knows if it could be useful in the future. Now, let’s stop talking about him. So, you’re working on those berry designs?”

“Right! Designing!” Marinette grabbed her sketchbook but fumbled with it, somehow managing to smack it, flinging it towards Chloé and hitting her in the face.

“Dupain-Cheng!” Marinette flinched at the yell. “How are you so graceful as Ladybug and so clumsy as you?!”

Marinette gave a small sigh of relief that Chloé wasn’t being mean then listening as the blonde continued. “Look, we’re friends now I guess, so I’m not going to be too mean outside of school. But at school I will be mean. I have appearances to upkeep.”

“Is that why you acted mean when you invited me to your table?” Marinette raised an eyebrow.

“Yes, exactly. I’m known as a bully, especially yours, and if I was suddenly just nice, it would be worse than half nice.”

“I guess, though you don’t really have to pretend to completely like me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?!” Chloé glared at Marinette before her eyes softened. “Oh, you mean that. Look I’m still getting used to having a real friend. Which we have only been for a day.”

“Maybe, but you’ve been nicer to me than anyone else in our class in the past week.”

Suddenly Tikki flew away and hid as the trapdoor opened to Sabine. “Here are the treats girls.”

“Thank you Mme. Dupain-Cheng.” Chloé thanked Sabine and took the platter from her.

“I’m just glad Marinette has someone coming over again.”

Chloé nodded and took the treats over to Marinette as Sabine went back down. As the designer picked up one piece, Chloé picked up another. “To new friendships I suppose.”

“Right, to new friendships.” Marinette nodded, then pressed her piece against Chloé’s for a moment as if they were clinking glasses after a toast before she took a bite.

Chloè took a bite of her own and was amazed at how it tasted. She barely ate anything from the bakery if she could help it, but she had to admit, everything they made was delicious. “This is amazing!”

Marinette laughed. “It must be if you’re talking with your mouth full.”

“Oh shut up!” Chloé said, failing to stifle a laugh, proceeding to playfully push Marinette a little. It took her back to their first year of school together. Well it wasn’t quite school. It was a day of daycare while their parents were working together on something. It was the first and last time they were together before Chloé really started to act like a bully. Just before her mother left for her nearly permanent move to America.

“Thanks Marinette. For letting me have the chance to be your friend.”

Marinette gave a small smile. “I’m glad you’re willing to change.”

The two gave a quick hug before continuing their time together, eventually losing track of how late it was getting, leading to Chloé calling her father to say she was staying over, which was fine since tomorrow they didn’t have school.

Chloé was surprised to find that Marinette had some Queen Bee pajamas, though she seemed to have a set for each of the heroes. Marinette dressed herself in what was likely her regular pajamas. The designer then set up a place on the floor with plenty of blankets and pillows. “There, I can sleep here and you can have the bed.”

“Thanks Marinette.” Chloé smiled before getting into the bed. They were just getting situated and ready to sleep, when out of nowhere, there was a knock on the door. The door to the balcony.

#miraculous ladybug #marinette dupain cheng #chloe bourgeois #lila rossi #ladybug and chat noir #miraculous ladybug salt #tikki

40 notes · View notes

thecrowmaiden · 7 years ago

Text

“Competitive Hand-holding.”

Kind of a pre-Kacchako/vaguely hinted at Kacchako fic, where due to a dare and a bad pick up line, Ochako ends up getting Bakugou to hold her hand. 1200 words approx, flufy and silliness. Partially inspired by this pick up line. (And of course by Sai. Because let’s be honest, I wouldn’t even think of Kacchako things if not for her.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It started because Mina found a book of intentionally bad pick-up lines.

All the girls were sitting in the common area of the dorms, doing homework or talking, when Mina arrived and gleefully showed them the book. When no one made any objections, Mina started to read out the most amusing or absurd examples at random as she flipped pages. As time went on they got progressively worse, until they got so bad that Kyoka threw a cushion at Mina’s head.

There was no real feeling behind it though, and the cushion fell well short.

“Oh come on,” Kyoka grumbled, covering her face with her own magazine, “no one would actually say any of those!”

“Why not?” Mina was giggling as she went through the book yet again, trying to find the ones most likely to make her classmates groan. She stuck another sticky-note, helpfully supplied by Momo’s arm, onto a page so she could find it later and burst into another fit of giggles.

“Why not? Maybe because you’d sound like an idiot?”

“You’re just a scaredy-cat,” Mina retorted, but with the same lack of feeling as the earlier thrown cushion. “I’d use some of these!”

“I am not a scaredy-cat, and you don’t count.” Kyoka turned to Ochako, who had been laughing at some of the most terrible pick up lines. “I mean, would you say any of these to an actual person?”

“Well…” Ochako fidgeted a little over being put on the spot, and shrugged. “Probably not.”

Kyoka, about to say some variation of ‘I told you so’, was cut off as a wadded up sticky-note suddenly bounced off of Ochako’s knee. Mina was leaning over the couch, grinning from ear to ear as she waved the book back and forth.

“What if someone dared you to? Think you could manage?” She asked, and that was all it took for Ochako’s competitive nature to kick in.

“If that’s the case, no problem!” She pumped her fist in the air as Kyoka sighed, and jumped up. “You’re on!”

In the interest of fairness, and even as she made her opposition to the dare clear, Momo wrote all the boys names (except Mineta’s) on the back of individual sticky notes lightly in pencil and stuck them to the table. Because as Kyoka pointed out, given free reign Ochako would just pick Iida or Midoriya and be able to laugh it off. Mina picked her favourite five pick up lines and wrote them down as well, lining them up across from the ones with the names. All Ochako had to do was pick one of each at random.

She went for the pick up line first, and breathed out a sigh of relief. It was pretty tame compared to some of the ones Mina had been laughing over. She could easily say it.

Hey could you hold this for me a second? *give person your hand*

Ochako felt nothing but confidence—until she turned over her choice of name. Mina shrieked, Tsuyu blinked, and Momo made a small, sympathetic noise.

Katsuki Bakugou.

Suddenly, the whole thing was a lot more daunting. But before Ochako could wheedle her way into a redraw, the target in question came into the room flanked by Kaminari and Kirishima. The girls immediately fell silent, drawing Kirishima’s puzzled attention, but Bakugou continued on toward the kitchen as if the girls weren’t even there. He pulled a bottle of water from the fridge, and turned to leave again.

Mina clucked softly like a chicken in that moment, so Ochako steeled her nerves and walked over to Bakugou. Ignoring Kaminari trying to get her attention and Kirishima’s questioning raised eyebrow, she stuck her hand out under Bakugou’s nose and planted her other hand on her hip.

“Hey, could you hold this for me for a second?”

And the silence was palatable when, against all odds, Bakugou did.

Kaminari looked as if he was concerned for her sanity and jealous she hadn’t asked him in equal parts, and Kirishima looked as if he wasn’t sure quite what to do. Bakugou looked unconcerned however, staring at their linked hands as if to ask ‘now what?’ although with at least one more expletive in the enquiry.

So Ochako just grinned, and fought down her blush as she let her arm relax so they looked less like they were shaking hands and more like they were a couple on a date. The thought made her breath hitch for some reason, but she shook it off.

“Thanks, Bakugou!” She said brightly, and gave his hand a gentle squeeze. Behind Bakugou, Kaminari looked like he might start to sputter. He was certainly throwing off sparks.

At that point, Ochako expected that Bakugou would drop her hand. But he shocked her again when he just squeezed back, staring her down with what was a neutral expression for him. He didn’t look embarrassed even as she felt her own face heating up again.

No one else spoke, she would be surprised if anyone actually even breathed, and Ochako shifted her hand a little so it was more comfortable against Bakugou’s calluses. His fingers loosened around hers ever so slightly, and it was then that she realized that the look on his face was one of challenge. It was if he was daring her to pull away, as if it were a point of pride that he wasn’t going to let go first.

So she tightened her own grip in response, and saw the slightest twitch around his eyes. His mouth lifted in a smirk, and Ochako couldn’t help but grin back. She wasn’t even sure why they were holding hands anymore, only that she wasn’t going to be the one to lose what he had decided was a fight.

Just as she found herself thinking that as calloused as they were, his hands were still rather nice to hold, Kirishima cleared his throat.

“Hey, dude, you’ve been holding her hand an awful long time—”

And Ochako didn’t think she had ever seen anyone as confused or concerned as Kirishima at Bakugou’s response, and she tried to give him what she hoped was a reassuring look.

“You think I can’t fucking handle it, hair for brains?!”

~***~

“So...what do we do?” Kirishima whispered, hovering just out of arms reach of the couch where Bakugou and Ochako had finally fallen asleep watching a movie. Their fingers were still loosely entwined, and Ochako had looped her foot over Bakugou’s ankle at some point.

It was impossible to separate them without waking one or the other, and their classmates were unanimous in their desire to prevent that from happening while they were still tangled up. Even Bakugou wouldn’t be oblivious to the implications of it, and Kaminari had spent ten minutes of slowly lowering the volume of the TV before turning it off just to be safe.

As they watched, Bakugou muttered something and pulled his hand from Ochako’s sleep-slackened grip. And Kirishima’s sigh of relief and Mina’s sigh of disappointment were both choked off halfway when, instead of moving away, Bakugou’s newly-freed hand wrapped around Ochako’s shoulders.

“What do we do now?” Kaminari moaned as the two on the couch snuggled closer, and Mina gleefully held up her phone.

“Take a picture, of course!”

#kacchako #my writing #for sai

726 notes · View notes

exitinertianovella · 4 years ago

Text

THE HISTORY OF 3-D COMIC BOOKS

The following article was written and first published by Daniel L. Symmes in 1982. We have updated some text and added newly restored 3-D images utilizing our unique anaglyph restoration process so bring your glasses to view the classics!

There were fifty 3-D features produced and shown in Polaroid 3-D during the Golden Age. Ironically, there were fifty 3-D comic books as well. Unlike the movies which had peaked during April through December 1953, the comics had a much shorter life span. Here is their story.

In the summer of 1953, as the 3-D movie craze was approaching its crest, 3-D printing began to flood the newsstands. Anaglyphic 3-D advertising appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, London’s Picture Post and the Wisconsin Waukesha Freedman. “Stars and Stripes,” the newspaper for U.S. soldiers stationed overseas, stuck a pair of glasses in a special issue and printed a 3-D article featuring a still from THOSE REDHEADS FROM SEATTLE. The folks back home got an even bigger thrill with the first issue of 3-D Movie Magazine, which ran an ultra-dimensional photograph of Marilyn Monroe dancing cheek to cheek with Walter Winchell. Popular Science Monthly included a 3-D article on how to run a buzz saw. Thriftily, they left out the glasses and instead showed readers how to make their own using filters of gelatin and food coloring.

All these publications were printed from stereo photographs using techniques that had been developed decades earlier. Some were even printed by American Colortype, a firm that been in the 3-D printing business since the 1920’s. But when hand-drawn 3-D comic books hit the newsstands in early July 1953, the world saw something new.

Mighty Mouse was the first to appear, in an action-packed comic full of meteors and nasty cats from outer space. The added dimension opened a world of new directions in which the little mouse could fling his enemies. Published by St. John Publishing Company, by special arrangement with Terrytoons, the 3-D Mighty Mouse provided the first public demonstration of a process invented by Joe Kubert and Norman Maurer, two young comic book artists. Kubert and Maurer were friends from childhood in New York, where they had shared an early passion for cartooning. Each had started taking commercial work before the age of twelve.

In 1950, Kubert joined the Army, and, while stationed in Germany the next year, he came across a German movie magazine with red and blue anaglyphic photographs and glasses. He was immediately struck by the possibilities for using the effect in comic books.

After his discharge from the Army in 1952, Kubert approached Archer St. John –an innovative young publisher—with ideas for some new comic books, including one based on the character Tor, which Kubert had developed while in the service. St. John was interested, and the two entered into a co-publishing arrangement. Kubert handled the writing, drawing, and production; St. John paid the bills; and both men shared in the profits. It was a good arrangement for a young artist at a time when most people in the field were drawing for a low page rate.

With high hopes for the success of his new character, and with the knowledge that he was now in a position to test 3-D comics, Kubert asked Norman Maurer to join in the venture. Maurer was living in California, married to the daughter of Moe Howard of the Three Stooges, but with some coaxing he was persuaded to move to New Jersey, where Kubert had set up a studio.

In the early spring of 1953, the two began to draw for St. John. They started with a book featuring Tor and a cartoon version of the Three Stooges. While strolling through Times Square in late April, they had noticed the huge crowds lined up to see HOUSE OF WAX at the Paramount Theater. They set out to draw and manufacture a high-quality 3-D comic book at a price competitive with the full-color ten-cent comics that were then the standard. With the help of Norman’s brother Leonard, who had an interest in science and mechanics, they attacked the problem. They determined where to have the glasses made and how to insert them in the books. They chose printing inks to work with the colored filters of the glasses and developed a simple and efficient method of making drawings. It was in this crucial step of preparing the drawings that they brought real innovation to the field of comic books (although their claim to the invention would later be challenged in a patent dispute.)

Film animation studios had long worked with acetate cells as a labor-saving device. Using the cells, only certain parts of the artwork had to be redrawn for each exposure, and other acetate layers could be easily shifted in measured steps to yield the effect of motion. It required only a small leap of the imagination to create stereo cartoons with the acetate cells, as the various layers could, without too much trouble, be spread apart in space and photographed using normal stereo techniques. Tru-Vue had made 3-D cartoon strips since the late 1930’s using this method, and even comic-book companies, including E.C. Comics, had experimented with the process, but found it un-economical. The obstacle lay mainly in the way comic-book publishing was organized; the artwork was prepared at the publisher’s office or in the artist’s studio, and the camerawork was done by the printer. Either time-consuming, elaborately lit setups had to be made at the printer’s, or the publisher had to invest in camera equipment.

Kubert and Maurer neatly bypassed the problem by putting two sets of carefully placed peg holes in the acetate sheets. Using their keying system the printer could photograph all the layers sandwiched together as a flat piece of art, then easily and accurately shift the second view of the stereo pair. The artist had only to leave some overlap in the background layers-so that gaps wouldn’t appear after the shift-and create an opaque backing for the foreground objects-so that the background wouldn’t show through.

Kubert and Maurer named their system the 3-D Illustereo Process, hired a lawyer to file a patent for it, and formed a company – the American Sterographic Corporation – to sell licenses. They decided to give St. John first shot at the process, after which they would make it available to other publishers. They prepared two sets of sample pages – one set featuring the new character Tor, and the other a Three Stooges. A fellow artist, Bob Beane, drew a third set, using halftone shading, of a bathing beauty at the beach. (Beane moved on, in the 1960’s, to head Wilde Productions, a major animation studio.) The three sets of samples were brought in to show Archer St. John. St. John went wild for the idea, just as Kubert “knew he would.” He loved it and wanted to go into production immediately. But rather than using Tor or the Three Stooges, St. John decided to try Mighty Mouse for the first test, as the little mouse had built up a loyal following over the years. St. John presented Kubert and Maurer with a book that had already been drawn, that was ready to go into production as a color comic, and asked the enterprising pair to convert it to 3-D and get it on the newsstands as soon as was humanly possible.

The two artists returned exhilarated to their New Jersey studio. Three days and three nights later, finished art in hand, they flew to Washington, to the plant of a printer outside the circle of New York trade talk. There they set up story boards, supervised the camerawork, and followed the book through a rushed production. The first printing of a million and a quarter copies arrived at newsstands on Friday, July 3, barely six weeks after the original meeting with St. John.

Despite its price of twenty-five cents, on racks full of ten-cent comics, the extra-dimensional Mighty Mouse was an astounding success, a virtual sell-out. Children loved the effect of putting on the Mighty Mouse Space Goggles to discover a magical world growing from the book’s pages. Spaceships flew through space; explosions scattered flying debris; and asteroids came at the beleaguered hero from all directions.

When the sales results started coming in, St. John saw a bonanza in the making. He wanted to convert everything on his list into 3-D. Kubert and Maurer were assigned to produce 3-D editions of Tor and the Three Stooges, and a staff was hired to redraw existing comics. By the end of August, St. John had produced five more 3-D comic books: the October issues of Tor, The Three Stooges, Little Eva, The House of Terror and a new satire comic, Whack.

Tor had made his debut in the 2-D September issue. He was a super-strong, super-handsome caveman of a million years ago, who carried a cave monkey, Chee-Chee, on his shoulder. In the 3-D issue, he continued his exploits, battling dinosaurs and evil cavemen with his strength and wits. Torchlit caves that fade into a murky distance, rocky outcrops, lunging prehistoric beasts, and Tor’s active club, all provided opportunities for the artists to show off the graphic potential of 3-D drawings. In the first story, Tor is captured by an ugly clan of cave people and sacrificed to a “killer beast,” a Tyrannosaurus Rex, which he manages to spear with a giant stalactite. In other stories he wrestles a giant turtle, escapes a destructive fire, and gives the reader a tour of his world, where “might is right,” and “your life can be decided at the whim of a breeze…sniffed by the giant dinosaur.”

Tor met more human enemies in his next issue – giants, madmen, and tyrants – and Kubert tried out a variety of panel arrangements, from tall, thin segments, to a two-page center spread, dubbed a “Panelrama.” Through skillful blending of planes – a Brontosaurus in one drawing stretches through four levels, the breaks in its neck, body and tail visible only with careful scrutiny – Kubert created a sophisticated stereo world.

As might be expected, the Three Stooges found zanier adventures. Their 3-D panels are crammed with sight gags and oddball graphics. Kubert and Maurer had drawn two Three Stooges comics in 1949 for Jubilee and had started the series up again with St. John in 1953. The 3-D October issue is almost too much for the eyes to take; every frame is crammed with the calamitous adventures the boys get themselves into. In the first story they take a roundabout trip to the moon, along the way crashing a junkheap of an airplane after deducing that its propeller is the cause of a draft. The Stooges also make a showing as medieval knights in diving suits – Moe wearing an Ike campaign button – and end up in the water beneath the Olden Gate Bridge. In the November issue, also in 3-D, the Stooges are given title to Belly Acres Ranch and discover gold there – in Moe’s teeth. Despite the obvious silliness of the stories, Kubert and Maurer clearly put a great deal of effort into the artwork. The depth in most panels was broken into five or six levels, and great care was given to every detail of draftsmanship.

The House of Terror proved to be St. John’s only venture into the 3-D horror line, but not because the book lacked grisly effect. Though the cover is less than forbidding, young readers in 1953 must have known they were in for a treat when they donned their glasses and looked into the gleaming eyes of Satan on the first page. “Picture of Evil,” “The Violin of Death,” “The Curse of Khar,” “The Devil’s Chair” – the story titles themselves are spine-chilling, and they are presented one after the other without so much as a Dubble Bubble ad to ease the tension. Evil curses, twilight mists, and walking corpses abound here, made even more chilling in 3-D.

Whack, St. John’s answer to the just-founded Mad from E.C., contains spoofs of Dick Tracy (“Keyhole Kasey” by Chestnuts Mould), and Mickey Mouse (in “Mouse of Evil”), a love story featuring Scowboat Sadie, and a story about Maurer and Kubert titled “The 3-D-T’s”. In the last tale we get a rare glimpse of the two artists drawing 3-D comics, or rather driving their workers to draw them. The last panel of the story is inscribed, “The End, thank goodness,” the final touch added by an exhausted slave to 3-D.

By August 1953 St. John was moving heavily into 3-D and had more than thirty people at work redrawing all the artwork on hand into acetate sheets. Kubert and Maurer had also moved ahead with plans for licensing the Illustereo process to other publishers, though their lawyers were still troubling over the patent application. Power Publishing Company had purchased the first license for a 3-D comic to be called “The Space Kat-ets,” and E.C. Comics had expressed an interest. But in a disturbing turn for Kubert and Maurer, other publishers were preparing 3-D comics without consulting them.

National Comics was unabashedly proceeding with a large-format 3-D edition of Superman. After the success of Mighty Mouse, Jack Adler, the production manager at National, was asked if he could put out a similar book. Without a second thought he said yes, secure in his memories of the MacyArt books from his childhood that there was no great secret to 3-D printing. After a careful inspection of the St. John Mighty Mouse comic, Adler figured out for himself the method used to shift the layered drawings to produce the two stereo images, and instructed his staff artists in the technique.

Superman, in startling 3-D Life-Like Action came out in September 1953 in an edition of over a million copies and proved a huge success. Though the stereo effect was far from elaborate – four levels of depth is the maximum – the star of the book was Superman, and National had cast him in some classic stories, including "The Origin of Superman."

Harvey, too, published a 3-D comic in September; the now-classic Adventures in 3-D, which featured Harvey’s own “True 3-D” process. Inside the front cover, the publisher described the “many years of research and experiment” that had been spent on the process in order to produce “a sensational TRUE-LIFE depth.” Actually, the idea had come to Harvey just two months earlier, after the competition’s success with Mighty Mouse, but Harvey had indeed come up with some new tricks.

Sid Jacobson, an editor at Harvey, saw a golden opportunity in a 3-D comic book aimed at older children, a market Harvey was already serving with a series of mystery and adventure comics. Jacobson, Leon Harvey, and Warren Kremmer figured out the basics of the process, then went a step further by finding an artist who could make drawings that receded into the distance evenly, without being broken into flat planes. (In fairness to the history of 3-D, it should be stated that this sort of drawing dates back at least as far as Professor Wheatstone in 1838; and sophisticated stereo drawings had been made though the 1840’s; also, a very simple example of a pole stretching from in front of the page to well behind it appeared simultaneously in the second 3-D Three Stooges comic.) A careful look through the pages of Adventures in 3-D reveals some unusual effects: a spaceship that spears back into the page, a leopard that leaps out toward the reader, and on the first page the work “THREE” angling back through the center of a “D.”

For the artwork Harvey hired Bob Powell and Howard Nostrand. They were shown how to prepare the acetate layers and were offered twice the normal page rate for their work. The two split up the assignment, each handling two stories in the first book. Powell, assisted by Marty Epp and George Siefringer, worked in a studio in Oyster Bay, Long Island. Nostrand, twenty-two at the time and a former inker for Powell, had just set up his own studio in nearby St. James. For the background drawings the artists used a material called Craf-Tint, which, if wetted with a special fluid, gave shading in vertical lines and, if treated with another fluid, produced darker cross-hatch shading. The acetate they used was untreated and would accept only a very thick, sticky ink. Nostrand, an extremely talented inker, remembers most clearly the aggravation of working with this special ink: “It was like tar,” he recalls, and the artist had to wear cotton gloves to prevent smudging. They were given a tight deadline, and Nostrand often spent nights drawing on the acetate while his wife whited in the backs of his finished sheets.

When it was completed, Adventures in 3-D was an exceptional comic. The stories led the reader through some nice twists of the imagination: time travelers fought among themselves; the reader became a monster in one sketch; and every story featured an unexpected ending. The artwork remained consistently strong, and the “True 3-D” touches helped to break up the cardboard cutout look.

Harvey stepped deeper into 3-D with the December issues of True 3-D (a sister publication to Adventures in 3-D), 3-D Dolly, Harvey 3-D Hits (featuring Sad Sack), and Captain 3-D, a new character drawn by Jack Kirby. Harvey had high hopes for Captain 3-D, a superhero able to travel in “unseen dimensions,” invented by one of the kings of comic book art. Early in his career, Kirby had joined with Joe Simon to create Captain America, and he had since come up with a stable of successful characters. Harvey contacted Kirby in the summer of 1953 and asked him to develop a hero to lead the 3-D boom. Captain 3-D was the result. Passed down through the generations in the Book of D, Captain 3-D came to life when viewed through the ancient glasses, fulfilling his mission to battle the forces of evil.

Unfortunately, by the time the Captain reached the newsstands, Harvey was discovering the fragility of the 3-D comic-book market. St. John, as the first publisher in the field, was also the first to discover how easily success could evaporate. After the incredible ninety-nine percent sale of Mighty Mouse, St. John had plunged headlong into 3-D, with five October issues, and seven November issues, all with editions of more than a million copies. But sales, instead of gathering momentum as expected, began to dwindle instead. The second batch of comics, the October issues, yielded sales of only seventy-five percent and fifty percent, and the third batch, the November issues – which appeared with National’s and Harvey’s first efforts – showed miserable sales of thirty-five percent, twenty percent, and even ten percent. That drove St. John from the field. The final December issue of Mighty Mouse was a parting gesture. For St. John, a small business that had made a massive commitment to 3-D with huge print runs and a special staff of thirty artists, the financial losses nearly proved fatal.

Harvey managed to slide through the fall without serious damage, but there are signs that they, too, beat a hasty retreat from 3-D. Their November Adventures in 3-D and December True 3-D issues sold exceedingly well, each more than ninety percent, but the company viewed those results warily. They had taken on eight extra artists to put out four December issues, but that was their peak month. In January and February they published only one issue each of Adventures in 3-D and True 3-D, an ad for a second Captain 3-D that never appeared, and a pair of ten-cent comics, The Katzenjammer Kids and Jiggs and Maggie, which each included a single 3-D story, but no glasses.

Behind the scenes, there was a heated legal battle between Archer St. John and William Gaines over the patent dispute. The December issue of Whack published a satirical version that was not far removed from the truth.

The withdrawal of three publishers from the field did not mean the end of 3-D comics – not quite. A number of other publishers were �� busily preparing to give the idea a try. In December 1953, twenty-three new 3-D comics hit the stands, more than any other month: 3-D Love, Jungle Thrills, Indian Warriors, Jet Pup, Sheena the Jungle Queen, Katy Keene, Felix the Cat, The First Christmas and a number of children’s cartoon books were released and all met with rapidly declining sales and interest.

3-D Love, and the January 1954 3-D Romance were the only 3-D comics made for older girls. Both were published by Steriographic Publications, a company formed by Ross Andru and Michael Esposito, and both are filled with surprisingly sophisticated stereo graphics. Inner thoughts and feelings are given a hovering presence in the distant background, flings in the city show up in a crazy collage of champagne bottles, dancing couples, neon lights, and maracas layered into diminishing space. The stories are sometimes unexpectedly sordid. A Viennese beauty marries an American soldier only to discover when he brings her home to Ohio that he is – horror of horrors – a factory worker! A gigolo’s life is ruined, his heart broken, when he falls for a gigolette. A career woman lies and cheats her way to the top only to be stuck with a man who is as sly as she. Alcohol, full moons, treachery, and tragic endings swirl thickly through these, the scarlet ladies of the 3-D comics.

Sheena the Jungle Queen was a heroine tailored – or untailored – to the interests of adolescent boys. Her full figures and skimpy leopard-skin outfit must have had great appeal among junior high romeos. In a reversal of the Tarzan-and-Jane syndrome, Sheena had her Bob, a handsome klutz who required constant rescuing. Sheena’s jungle reign began in 1937 and ran until 1953. The December 3-D issue was her last appearance, and she fought her way through it in a parting blaze of glory, dodging spears, swinging through the trees, and breaking up a slave ring. Sheena’s disappearance in 1953 coincided with a growing movement toward censorship of the comics. Her shapeliness aroused the indignation of worried mothers and forced her into early retirement.

In another memorable one-time appearance, Katy Keene put on a fashion show in her only 3-D comic, published in December 1953 by Close-Up, an imprint of Archie Comics. Bill Woggon, her artist, was asked to work up flat art for a special 3-D issue, which would be redrawn for 3-D in Archie’s New York office. This Woggon did, fitting Katy into costumes submitted by readers from all over the country. From her dresses down to her underwear – and even to her boyfriends’ cars – Katy appeared as her readers wanted to see her. (Had she had veto power, she might have escaped appearing in a Jolly Green Giant suit, but Woggon had the final say.)

From the flat line art, Bob White, at Archie, prepared the 3-D version of Katy Keene. His treatment is limited to three levels, crude work compared to St. John’s or Harvey’s comics, but he did come up with an interesting effect by leaving plain areas of red and blue for sky, walls, and decoration. The colored areas certainly make the book the most attractive to look at without filters, but seen through the glasses, colors take on a neon look, as one eye sees white and the other black. The red-and-blue patchwork technique is hard on a reader’s eyes, but it does liven up Katy’s surroundings.

The flurry of 3-D activity in comic-book publishing during the summer and fall of 1953 did not go unnoticed by American gum-card manufacturers, who were looking for enticing ways to sell gum to the same children who bought comic books. Before the end of the year, the young adult had three 3-D gum-card series to collect: a set of antique automobile cards, from Bowman, and two sets of Tarzan cards from Topps, showing the stories from the new movies, Tarzan and the She Devil and Tarzan’s Savage Fury. While the Bowman set only contained a handful of actual 3-D cards mixed in with color images, the Tarzan cards were extremely well produced, printed on a bright, coated card stock. They remain among the finest examples of anaglyphic printing. The drawings, by an artist whose name has since been lost, made fine use of stereo imagery within the restrictions of the small card size.

By January 1954 publishers were drawing back from 3-D. St. John and National, as we have seen, made their last attempts in December 1953, and by January, Harvey was experimenting with limited 3-D issues at the standard ten-cent cover price. In the same month Atlas – an imprint covering the work of a number of publishers – tried their hand with a pair of over-size, full 3-D comics at the bargain price of only fifteen cents – complete with two pairs of glasses.

The two Atlas titles, 3-D Action and 3-D Tales of the West, offered rough, tough tales of war and adventure in limited – three level – 3-D. The western book served up gunfights, brawls, Indians, and all-American patriotism. In one scene Big Jim Fraser stops a band of raiders from attacking a work party on the transcontinental railroad by punching their leader and giving the rest a speech. “He told them about the Railroad and about their country! He told them about his dream and their future! They listened – ‘That’s what this Railroad means! It means commerce and industry! It means America will be great…There will be schools here, great cities, happy families, and good living…’” When the moralizing ended, the raiders signed on as members of Fraser’s work party.

3-D Action presented championship boxing, Russian spies and combat adventure from Korea. In one leathery story Sergeant Socko Swenski explains how to take a Korean hill, first blasting the “Reds” on top with howitzers and mortars, then charging up with bayonets. When the “scummies” run, the bombers are called in to finish the job. As a final touch, “some G.I. pulls a flag outta his shirt and hangs it on a battered tree!”

These were pre-Vietnam times of American bravado, of patriotism frenzied by fear. The Russians had exploded their first atomic bomb in 1949, and while Americans dug bomb shelters under their lawns from coast to coast, the cold war stakes rose. In November 1952 a U.S. test of the hydrogen bomb destroyed the atoll of Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands, and just nine months later the Russians exploded their own H-bomb in Siberia. In October 1953 Senator Joseph McCarthy launched an investigation of the U.S. Army, which he suspected of Communist subversion. And in the national climate of fear and suspicion, the comics too came under attack – not as Communist propaganda, but as corruptors of youth.

The two Atlas comics seemed to be making a conscious effort to remove themselves from the line of the coming attack, and , indeed, they each carry a tiny star on the cover with the legend “conforms to the comics code,” an early indication of self-regulation and self-protection by the comic industry. During the spring of 1954 popular outrage against comic books reached a fever pitch. In April, in response to “thousands of letters,” a US. Senate subcommittee investigating juvenile delinquency began to focus its attention on comic-books. In the same month, Frederic Wertham’s book, Seduction of the Innocent, was published to a great hue and cry.

Wertham’s book is difficult to read seriously today, as its assertions are often wild and unfounded – that Batman and Robin, for instance, were homosexuals and that Wonder Woman was a lesbian sadist – but at the time it was read with great concern by parents across the country. A pre-publication excerpt in the

Ladies’ Home Journal generated a flurry of letters, and women began to form censorship committees to blacklist comics and convince newsdealers to carry a more limited selection.

In the middle of the dispute, hoping it would all die away, sat the comic-book publishers. One of the prime targets among them was William Gaines, the originator of horror comics in the 1940’s and the last to publish 3-D comics in the spring of 1954.

Gaines’s father, M.C. Gaines, had been a comic-book pioneer in the 1930s; by some accounts he created the standard comic-book format. After World War II the elder Gaines formed a new company, Educational Comics, popularly known as E.C., which published a wide range of material from Bible stories to adventures of the superheroine Moon Girl. William Gaines inherited the company in 1947 and, after a period of searching, began to turn the business on its ear with some radical innovations. In 1950 he launched Crypt of Terror, The Vault of Horror, The Haunt of Fear, Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, Two Fisted Tales, and Crime SuspenStories, in what he described as E.C.’s “New Trend” in comic books. Their success can be measured by the flocks of imitators that followed over the next few years.

Gaines had assembled some of the finest artists and writers in the industry when he launched his “New Trend” line – Graham Ingels, John Craig, Albert Feldstein, Harvey Kurtzman, and Wallace Wood. When the comics went into circulation they attracted even more artists to E.C. – among them Bernie Krigstein, Will Elder, Jack Davis, Frank Frazetta, Joe Orlando, George Evans, and John Severin. The comics they produced stood out from the competition like the apple in the Garden of Eden, and in the end caused almost as much trouble.

In 1952 E.C. introduced Mad, the invention of editor Kurtzman, and it swiftly grew into the wildest success story in the business. Gaines had turned his company – and the comic-book industry – around and onto a new track in the space of three years.

It is not surprising that Gaines wanted to try 3-D when it came along, nor is it surprising that he pursued a course different from that of his competitors. He had long been interested in 3-D, even outside his business. He was one of the early owners of the Stereo Realist camera, and when 3-D movies started coming out, he went to every one, wearing a pair of specially made prescription 3-D glasses. In 1952 Gaines and Al Feldstein experimented with 3-D comics, using stereo cameras and three-dimensional setups, but they couldn’t devise any practical production methods. Both men recognized the breakthrough Kubert and Maurer had made when Mighty Mouse was released, and E.C. purchased a license from the two innovators for the production of two comic books. As part of the agreement, Will Elder was sent to New Jersey for training in the Illustereo process.

The first, Three-Dimensional E.C. Classics, included stories by Wood, Krigstein, Evans and Ingells, redrawn for 3-D from their original appearances in Mad, Weird Science, Frontline Combat, and Crime Suspenstories. Classics is an odd assemblage of the whacky and the mysterious, containing both a Mad-style story by Wallace Wood about a voluptuous vampiress – the only woman in all of 3-D who rated an extra plane for her bust – and an elegantly drawn Krigstein tale, “The Monster From the Fourth Dimension,” in which deceptively simple graphics evoke the plain, open feeling of a Midwestern farm invaded by a gruesome time-traveling blob.

The second E.C. comic, Three-Dimensional Tales from the Crypt of Terror, is more consistently horrible. Stories by Davis, Elder, Craig, and Orlando have been redrawn from Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror, to give the reader a chain of grisly 3-D thrills. Davis’s contribution, “The Trophy,” is a perennial favorite in its flat version. Equally macabre are Elder’s story, “The Strange Couple” – which at the end sends the reader spinning in an angst-producing cycle of repetition – Craig’s piece about a true batman, and Orlando’s “The Thing from the Grave.”

All the stories in the second volume are introduced by the Crypt Keeper, E.C.’s famous M.C. of horror. He delights in serving up a nasty bill of severed heads, partly decayed corpses, and bloodthirsty fiends in a dank milieu, shaded to a heavy grayness by the E.C. artists.

NOTE - New information has been discovered which dates the release of the two EC 3-D comic books to mid-October 1953.

The E.C. comics provided an appropriate finale to the brief flurry of 3-D comic publishing – a fitting last gasp. In April 1954 the national mood of suspicion about comic books provided Gaines with more serious worries than the failure of his two forays into 3-D. In that month he was called to testify in a special televised hearing before the U.S. Senate subcommittee investigating the causes of juvenile delinquency. Gaines’s testimony followed that of Frederic Wertham, author of Seduction of the Innocent, and the senators were clearly eager to get political mileage out of grilling a horror-comic publisher. The New York Times, in a front-page story, described Senator Estes Kefauver asking Gaines if he considered in “good taste” the cover of one of his publications “which depicted an axe-wielding man holding aloft the severed head of a blonde woman.” He replied, "Yes, I do - for the cover of a horror comic. I think it would be in bad taste if the head were held a little higher so the neck would show with the blood dripping out." Senator Kefauver responded: "You've got blood dripping from the mouth." Gaines came off poorly in both the interrogation and the news accounts.

After his television appearance, sales of Gaines’s comics plummeted, as newsdealers steered clear of the poisonous publicity. During the spring and summer more citizens’ groups came out against comic books. The activists included the Women’s Club Federation, the County and Prosecuting Attorney’s Association, and the American Legion. In September 1954, comic-book publishers responded by forming the Comics Magazine Association to enforce a “comic code.” As one of its first actions, the group banned crime and horror publications.

Comic books as a creative medium disappeared under this censorship, and the industry was not to recover for many years. William Gaines was forced to divest himself of every title except Mad, which he put into a longer non-comic-book format in order to sidestep the critical eye of the association. He is still saving the artwork he amassed for a 3-D science-fiction comic, completed in 1954 but never published because of the pressures of the marketplace. (The fanzines Witzend and Squa Tront eventually presented the unpublished science fiction stories. Unfortunately, they were only released flat.)

Just as 3-D comic books were dying on the stands, several publishers began issuing full-color comics with a 3-D effect. The first company was the American Comics Group and their process was called Truevision. Appearing in Eight issues of Adventures into the Unknown, two issues each of teen comics The Kilroys and Cookie, several issues of Lovelorn and Romantic Adventures and one issue of Commander Battle and the Atomic Sub, Truevision consisted of letting characters and objects slip out of the restraints of the panels and into the area surrounding them. At the same time they had the artists render the background less distinct, like something seen at a distance, while the colorist saw to it that only the close-up main characters were in full color.

Other publishers quickly jumped on the bandwagon and released several comics with 3-D effects. The Magazine Enterprises art by Frank Bolle utilized in Red Mask and Tim Holt was similar to the Truevision comics except they retained white borders around the panels. The Deep Dimension comics Crime and Punishment and Black Diamond were drawn by Alexander Toth utilizing layered halftone screens to make faces and figures more dimensional. In addition, the artwork was presented in a curved panel, simulating the widescreens commonly seen in many theaters in 1954. PictureScope Jungle Adventures was a black and white coloring book with artwork by Jay Disbrow. Each page featured a single panel with a 3-D effect image.

By the summer of 1954, just like the stereoscopic movies which had inspired their creation, 3-D comics had all but vanished. Mad featured a satirical look at the 3-D fad in their June 1954 issue. When the dust had finally settled, Harvey had such a huge stock of comics in their warehouse, they were still selling copies in 1960 through ads in Famous Monsters of Filmland.

Today, the original 3-D comics are highly collectible. Many of the issues can still be found for reasonable prices, especially the early ones that were printed in such large quantities. Our cover gallery will show you every issue published in 1953/54. Get out your Three Dimension Space Goggles, shop around and have fun! A very special thank you to the following individuals for their help with this article: Peter Apruzzese, Hillary Hess, Lawrence Kaufman, Greg Kintz, Greg Theakston and Jack Theakston.

Original Article: http://www.3dfilmarchive.com/home/images-from-the-archive/comic-books

0 notes

displaydistribute · 7 years ago

Text

Aesthetics of Circulation: Along The Black Rim /發行流通的美學：沿黑環而行

Editorial piece from Display Distribute’s 『CATALOGUE』, 2017, pp. 4-11.

展銷場的《目錄》導論，2017年，第4-11頁。

In 2009, the anonymously produced Black Rim/Nigra Rando/黑环 zine debuted its first but ostensibly only issue. A black-and-white affair, those who were able to get a hold of its limited copies obtained a slim, photocopied pamphlet, folded down the middle and simply stapled. Others likely encountered it as a PDF download, or merely as a relay of information from someone who had read it. Just shy of 40 pages, the publication comprised a comprehensive list of resources for the Asia-Pacific Anarchist, reported instances of uprising and rupture from countries across the region and ambitiously set out to track “capital’s process back and forth across the Pacific Ocean”.［1］ By tracing the changing world system, as it professed, Black Rim sought to identify and utilise discrepancies in the world order towards other, perhaps more liberatory ends. While it appears that the publication never made it past the first issue, its legacy persists through a few disperse and tattered copies, along with now dated but persistent weblinks. Insisting on an low-fi mode of transference and distribution that might be seen as participating in, and interrogating, the smooth and supple spaces of global capital, Black Rim exemplified its ambition through form. Its non-profit, open source and multitude-authored existence, along with its premature and mysterious disappearance, gives one both the cause for and authority of conjecture.

2009年，匿名編輯製作的刊物《Black Rim/Nigra Rando/黑環》發行了它的創刊號，看來也是唯一一期。黑白二色的風格，有幸得到這本限量發行刊物的人，到手的是一本薄薄的影印手冊，對折騎馬釘裝幀。其他人則更多是下載了它的PDF電子版，或僅僅是從已經讀過它的人那裡��到些信息。這本只有36頁的刊物收錄了亞太地區的無政府主義活動的大量素材以及相關國家有關事例的興衰，而且還野心勃勃地追循了「環太平洋的資本流通」軌跡。［1］通過追循這一變動的世界體系《黑環》意圖指認並調用這一世界秩序中的差異，從而追求其它更開放自由的替代模式。儘管這本刊物在發刊後就嘎然而止，但憑它僅存的零散破舊的幾本與雖過時但仍舊可用的在線鏈接，其精神仍在流傳。這種低保真的轉移與分發模式或可被視為對作為一種平滑空間的全球資本的參與和詰問。《黑環》以其形式：非盈利、開源、集體書寫彰顯了其志向，而它神秘的未完待續的消失亦引人推測。

As one of the “collectively-run not-for-profit bookstores” advocated by Black Rim’s editors, the rediscovery of this artefact charting an unmapped solidarity has led to its re-issue, alongside other print selections recommended by practitioners in the nebulous web of critical, self-organised initiatives across Asia and Southeast Asia. Like Black Rim, Display Distribute’s own parasitical imprint “SECOND(hand)MOUNTAIN(fortress)” aims to facilitate a one-to-one encounter, a discursive intimacy in print form. The dialogue of concepts, inspirations and ruminations upon reading itself are embedded within this production.

作為《黑環》的編輯們所倡議的這種「集體運營的非盈利書店」的志同道合者，展銷場試著以重新發現這本大作來描繪一種輪廓未明的團結形式，並因此再次出版了《黑環》以及其它一些來自亞洲與東南亞的自我組織的實踐者推薦的出版物。一如《黑環》，展銷場的「二(手)山(寨)」旨在促進一對一的相遇，一種寄託在印刷上的絮語親密。閱讀本身所引發的概念回響、啓發與反思都存於這本書的生產中。

Cuttings on the Shop Floor / 落在商店地板上的邊角料

Like the previous edition, the second issue of 『CATALOGUE』is a conceptual index of themes, authors and initiatives——ultimately, a distributed map of relations. As both a commodity-oriented project (we sell books!) and a logistical one (see: LIGHT LOGISTICS), however, its business plan hardly adheres to the usual protocols of contemporary entrepreneurship and operations management. In fact, one may locate within the work a sense of failure——financially, temporally and otherwise——but this is only when evaluating according to capital-driven margins of success. In an alternate lexicon, ‘failure’ reads stubbornly as the will to resist and indeed a stealing of time. It is la perruque that compels the office worker to make zines on the company copier after hours; it is the stuttering of syntax that prevents the streamlining logic of signification to kick in; it is these fissures of global capitalism that reveal the rapidly disappearing subjectivities of labour.［2］To acknowledge that our souls have already “descended onto the shop floor”, paraphrasing Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, means that we——art workers, activists, middle-class creatives and migrant labourers——cannot yet fully withdraw and must instead commit to redrawing the parameters of work and perhaps biopolitical life itself.［3］

如前一期的《目錄》，此次的第二期是一本主題、作者與項目的概念索引，終極形式，是一張展銷通路的關係網。作為商品導向（我們賣書!）和物流導向（參見：「後勤」慢遞項目）兼有的項目，我們的商業計劃很難說遵循當代企業與運營管理的通用守則。事實上，觀者可能還會從中察覺到失敗感，不論是時效上還是收益上的折損，當然此處採用的評判標準仍是資本主義式的、基於一個項目的邊際利潤式的成功。但換一種說法，「失敗」可以被解讀為一種抵抗，一種實際上偷取時間的做法。正是la perruque（假髮）迫使辦公室職員使用公司的打印機在下班後製作zines；正是對語法的結結巴巴防止了意義流水線般邏輯的闖入；也正是這些全球資本主義的裂縫，揭示了勞動力快速消失的主體性。［2］我們的靈魂已經「墮落到商鋪地板上」（模仿Franco ‘Bifo’ BERARDI的用法）——這句話意味著我們這些藝術工作者、行動主義者、中產創意工作者和移民勞工，都不能完全脫離資本社會，而只能重新建立對勞動和生命政治自身的概念。［3］

Zine as Semi-Autonomous Region / ZINE作為半自治區

Speaking from here (residing in the ‘world’s factory’), it is precisely our intimacy with the means of production, coupled with a confrontation with certain top-down limitations of representation (such as censorship) that enables the beginnings of a sub-narrative. Independent publications evidence the unique circulation patterns endemic to, and emerging from, a particular socio-political, economic and environmental climate. If we read zine and self-organised publication-making as a tactical response to, and rejection of, the subsuming of print culture into various outlets of digital media—a gesture towards preserving the affectivity still to be found in the hand-to-hand passage of printed matter——we must further attempt to tease out what a new independent publishing culture might be. In its etymology the term ‘zine’ derives from an economy of means, being literally clipped from the end of the glossier and bulkier ‘magazine’, in turn stemming from the French magasin, meaning warehouse, store or depot.［4］ Thus at its root, the zine contains the impulse to stockpile and contextualise——people, objects, and things——and it would seem that what defines it is less an attitude or an aesthetic than a web of relations facilitating modes of discourse, information-sharing and circulation.

從我們所身處的這間世界工廠來看，恰恰是我們所熟悉的生產方式和所面臨的某些自上而下的對表現形式的限制（如審查制度）讓我們擁有了開啓一種亞敘述的可能性。獨立出版讓我們看到了一種相適應的、也是產自於特定社會、政治、經濟與環境生態的獨特發行流通方式。如果我們把雜誌與自組織出版視作出版文化被數字媒體吸納時的一種策略性應對與拒絕——這表明瞭我們仍相信一對一傳遞印刷品是可以保存情感的��那我們也就必須努力梳理出一種獨立出版文化的全新可能。從詞源上看「zine」一詞源自「一種經濟實惠的做法」，從字面上講，它像是從亮麗厚重的「magazine(雜誌)」上裁下來的尾巴，後者源自法語的magasin，原意是廠房、商店或倉庫。［4］所以究其根源，zine包含著衝動去儲存、去在情境中一再解讀——人，物事，定義zine的並非是一種態度、一種審美，而是一種能形成對話、信息共享與流通的關係網絡。

Queering Distribution / 酷兒發行

In considering the ubiquity of printed matter, we have made a selection of publications whose formation and mode of passage position them as sub-generative vehicles wielding the potential to, as Hito Steyerl proposes, recode or rewire “existing networks, circumventing and bypassing corporate friendship and hardware monopolies”.［5］『CATALOGUE』 is also a Reader’s Digest, yet another anachronism through which an attempt is made to give weight to overlooked narratives, and more seriously to reconsider the types of bodies and frictions rendered invisible by the deceptively smooth transmissions of the Internet. Quoting economists J.K. Gibson-Graham, queering distribution is therefore an endeavour to, “unsettle the consonances and coherences of the narrative of global commodification”.［6］The publications presented on the following pages provide both a mapping and archive of these dissonances from various perspectives here in the Asia-Pacific. Sociopolitical issues, unfinished chronicles and word play serve as nodes marking the convergence of new alignments and affinities. While bearing the sentimentalities of a mail-order catalogue, this small-scale piece of printed matter also serves as a personal invitation. We are calling for comrades in what is called “the undercommons”; we are looking for other haptic lines amidst the hegemony of post-Fordist synaptics. To participate in this ‘Black Op’ is to consider telling another kind of story, with the acknowledgement that we are all suffering at the same time that we are implicated. For now, we ask you merely to read——to read as an active and discursive act. And it is perhaps in taking on this operative that a walk around the ‘Black Rim’ may lead to another encounter.

如今，印刷媒體無所不在，我們特意選擇了那些非主流的刊物，其模式與形式有潛力——一如Hito STEYERL所說——能重編、重寫「既有網，繞過商業友誼與硬件壟斷」［5］《目錄》也算是一本《讀者文摘》「不識時務」地做著努力，強調被忽視的敘事，更嚴肅地重新思考互聯網令人迷惑地平順傳動中所掩藏起來的實體與不可見的摩擦。引述經濟學家J.K. GIBSON-GRAHAM的說法，酷兒發行是一種試圖「攪亂全球商品化敘述的和諧與連貫」的行動。［6］此次收錄的刊物即是亞太地區多種不和諧之聲的地圖和檔案。社會政治議題、未完成的事件敘述和言語遊戲都能作為節點，標記新陣營與新關聯的聚合。這本飽含深情的商品郵購目錄，其小量印刷也意味著一種私人��請。我們召喚Stefano HARNEY和Fred MOTEN口中「地下共同體」的同志夥伴，在後福特主義霸權中尋找突觸。［7］參與「黑行動」就是講另一類故事，帶著覺悟承認我們都在煎熬、我們都牽連於此。現在，我們僅僅是請你閱讀，把閱讀當成一種主動的交流行為。或許接受這趟行動，繞著「黑環」行走，你將走向下一個不期而遇。

— DISPLAY DISTRIBUTE; New Territories, Hong Kong; August 2017

— 展銷場; 香港新界, 2017年8月

Footnotes:

［1］ The Editors, Black Rim / Nigra Rando / 黑环 Issue #1 (March 2009) 3.

編輯部，《Black Rim / Nigra Rando / 黑环》第1期 (2009年3月) 第3頁

［2］ Michel de Certeau describes la perruque as a deviation from the prescripted use of company resources: “The worker who indulges in la perruque actually diverts time (not goods, since he uses only scraps) from the factory for work that is free, creative, and precisely not directed toward profit. In the very place where the machine he must serve reigns supreme, he cunningly takes pleasure in finding a way to create gratuitous products whose sole purpose is to signify his own capabilities through his work and to confirm his solidarity with other workers or his family”. See: Michel de CERTEAU, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkley: University of California Press, 1984) 24-26.

Michel de Certeau構思的「乾私活」（la perruque）可被視為對既定的公司資源使用准則的篡改：「乾私活的員工其實從工廠調取的是時間而不是物資，因為他只用單面廢紙），這行為免費、有創意、而且恰恰不指向盈利。在這個他操作的機器才享有最高統治權的地方，他狡黠地找到了樂子：製造無端的產品，其唯一的目的就是彰顯他製造產品的能力，同時這行為還夯實了他與其他員工或他家人之間的團結。」參見: Michel de CERTEAU，《日常實踐》(伯克利：加州大學出版社, 1984年) 第24-26頁

［3］Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, drawing from Bifo, Paolo Virno, Giorgio Agamben and other thinkers, illustrate the contemporary inextricability of our capacities and exploitedness as labourers from the production of our sociality as human beings. In other words, subjectivity, subjecthood itself, and perhaps even our souls, are dictated by the state and science of capitalism. For further reading see: Stefano HARNEY and Fred MOTEN, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study(New York: Minor Compositions and Autonomedia, 2013) 87.

Stefano Harney和Fred Moten通過繪制Bifo、Paolo Virno、Giorgio Agamben以及其他思想家，描繪了當代，我們人類在社會生產中被視為勞動者，其生產力會受到剝削的不可避免的現象。也就是說，主體性，主體本身，甚至我們的靈魂，都受控於資本主義的形態與規律。延伸閱讀請見：Stefano HARNEY與Fred MOTEN《潛規則：數據規劃與黑研究》(紐約: Minor Compositions與Autonomedia，2013年) 第87頁

［4］ Egie IGHILE, “One for Alpha’s Bet”, Alpha’s Bet Is Not Over Yet: The Reader, eds. Jamal CYRUS and Steffani JEMISON (New York: New Museum, 2011) 1.

Egie IGHILE，「One for Alpha’s Bet」，《Alpha’s Bet還沒完：讀本》Jamal CYRUS與Steffani JEMISON編 (紐約：新美術館，2011年) 第1頁

［5］ Hito STEYERL, “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?”, e-flux journal, #49 (2013) www.e-flux.com/journal/49/60004/too-much-world-is-the-internet-dead/ (accessed June 2017).

Hito STEYERL，「过剩世界：互联网死了吗」，《e-flux journal》第49期 (2013年) www.e-flux.com/journal/49/60004/too-much-world-is-the-internet-dead/ (於2017年6月)

［6］ Quoted by Deborah COWEN, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014) 223.

Deborah COWEN，《物流必死：全球贸易中的暴力》(明尼阿波利斯: 明尼苏达大学出版社，2014年) 第223頁

［7］ Stefano HARNEY, "Hapticality in the Undercommons", The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics, ed. Randy MARTIN (London and New York: Routledge, 2015) 173-179.

Stefano HARNEY，「觸碰潛規則」《Routledge藝術與政治專刊》 Randy MARTIN編 (倫敦與紐約：Routledge，2015年) 第173-179頁

2 notes · View notes

harvey17124018 · 7 years ago

Text

Project essay

Harvey

Westwood

28 November 2017

Harvey Westwood.

Graphic communication

Beginning of the project will put into groups where we chose individual poems to analyse and pick apart under the categories of summary context meaning syntax Synaptics and structure this small project I chose the poem meeting at midnight by Robert Browning this poem shortly describes a man’s journey to get to his love through secrecy. In this short analysis I learnt how not just the poem can influence My design stuff for context where the poem was written in June 2016 at the same time that same-sex marriage was starting to be legalised in America this puts a twist on how we may receive this poem has not been a poem between a male and female but maybe of two men or two women. Learning different ways to approach a brief allows me to come up with different ideas and find inspiration.

After this I’ll began the first of my two briefs which was international poetry day I was to design an aid to interactive poster advertising a selected Poet learning what I have from the previous poetry task I set out to look for a poem to deconstructive and was I came up with the poem Valentine by carol ann Duffy this poem is about how one person presents and onion as a valentines present to there other half and the poems context is of our how they describe the onion to be this beautiful and romantic item. To start this project I wanted to look at the onion in a lot more detail I started by doing some simple sketches of an onion and start describing and thinking of ways to be using this item in the form of design. What are gathered from the poem was that the onion was converted to romantic items such as a rose and the moon I wanted toIncorporate this into my design I initially thought of editing a flower to look like it was blossoming and onion or two rearrange the night sky so that the moon was an onion on further thought looking at this I didn’t want to make too much of an artistic approach to the way that I was designing this work knowing that my skill set my photo shop was intermediate are not experts I do not wish to bite off more than I can sa incorporate this into my design I initially thought of editing a flower to look like it was blossoming and onion or two rearrange the night sky so that the moon was an onion on further thought looking at this I didn’t want to make too much of an artistic approach to the way that I was designing this work knowing that my skill set my photo shop was intermediate are not experts I do not wish to start editing or making something that wouldn’t look professional. Otherwise I looked at researching was experimenting with wordlists where I described the onion in which I found the word layers this point was very important to me because I found that I could use this word in particularly to revolve around how I wanted to design. Shortly after this we did a small project where we used the risograph printer, within this project we use the scrap piece of paper and material to make a quick and simple collage design which we would then scan in to the risograph Printer to get a feel for how it works and what are the facts and designs they can create. What I gathered from this technique was that the printer allows you to merge different layers of design and colours where you have stuck down the photo and some text may look like they don’t belong together but through the riser graph they have merged in a duotone print. This immediately made me want to incorporate what I’ve looking into with the National poetry Day poster. When designing to use the riser Graaf what I forgot to consider was how the dark colours within the photo get turned to complete black when transferred through the printer my designs came over the contrast and therefore lacked context as to what the images were. After this I proceeded to look at different ways to approach this brief fixated on this duotone style breaking image down to two tones.

As the middle to the development stage of the project I made scamps using a simple read technique where I arranged three assets of type and one of image the type would consist of the poem name the poets name and the word onion then I would also include a photo of an onion edited with a euro to own filter After creating these initial designs and they’re just like in text I thought there was something missing and that the design felt a bit shallow and empty large spaces of colour and shape came with no context of a reason. Looking back at research I came across F you K yo after creating these initial designs and they’re just like in text I thought there was something missing and that the design felt a bit shallow and empty large spaces of colour and shape came with no contacts or reason. Looking back research I came across Fuku’s work from this I saw that text within a column arrangement worked well when being next to large shapes I then moved on to scampi out where I would arrange this text I found that if I wrote out the poem in paragraphs I could then columnise this within the poster. This led to my final design which worked of three tones yellow blue and white the palate was designed to keep very simplistic. I was happy with how the final piece going out, in the future I would of liked to of proceeded with this duotone design and maybe looked at different colour pallets to see how that would’ve worked.

Another project that run alongside this national poetry day project was an editorial piece where we designed A cover page and two double page spread for a magazine called architect. Working in class we deconstructed double bass friends that had been made by other companies such as Vogue and others. From this I learned that in editorial design I had to use the grid method as my backbone. When looking at other peoples work I clearly saw that the grid method of 3 x 3 was where most of the text and image sat on. After this I went out on a shoot around Birmingham photographing buildings and other key bits of architecture and construction I loved for clear lines within the photos of maybe the angle of a rooftop need to align other bits of design to these lines within the photo this way the photo with seamlessly work with the huge blocks of time I found to be difficult as the viewer couldn’t really tell that the text was lining up with the lines with in the photo after this I went for a different approach I worked with: structures where I would edit my photos to work with them and then the text would line up after that into columns of the own. With this I focused on experimenting and learning how to use drop caps avoiding mistakes by leaving out a widower at the end of the paragraph and also working with point Size and type hierarchy. This project I feel enlightened me to a completely new world of design I now have a new found respect for editorial design. If I had more time I would reshoot taking more photos and work on using lines with in photos that lineup with my arrangement of type within double page spreads.

Other tasks that I had throughout this five week period were the type Anatomy is more task took up 2 to 3 hours where I looked at key terms describing the anatomy of type such as counter serif leg spine and more. This knowledge will benefit me more when I come to designing my own typefaces in the future. After that we then received letterpress blocks where we had to measure out the individual letters and redraw them as accurately as we could. This allowed me to look at how angles and curvature is strongly influence the way the typeface is read. We also did another project where we focus our attention on storytelling through drawings and scams and how they can be useful when designing already knew the stamps were very important through the design process but this project was based on finding different ways to scamp, we sketched out single drawing that showed story. This was to show how mood boards and scans could be used to plan out ideas and also teachers want to include when stamping and making mood boards.

In the future I wish to learn more about different printing methods. I also wish to explore more photographic designs and do more club different briefs with other members of his garden such as illustrators and photographers. I have seen is introduction to visual communication as a brief insight to different parts of design.

1 note · View note

myrtlecornish · 5 years ago

Text

15 Effective Tools and Services You Should Pay Attention To

One of life’s pleasures is discovering when some small action taken yields a highly positive, or even a game-changing outcome. A web designer could spend many hours creating a modern website with old tools. A single new tool or a single new service could cut the time required to do so dramatically and produce an even better result.

There’s no shortage of tools or services that could make a difference. The problem is that there are many hundreds of them. There are far too many to devote the amount time it could take find one that might make your day or prove to be a game changer.

One or more of these 15 top tools and services could easily make your day; which is why we suggest you give each one a good close look.

That said, may your shopping experience be a happy and profitable one.

1. UXPin

UXPin provides designers with a set of advanced prototyping features perfect when designing for all screen sizes. UXPin has also been built for great collaboration, making it possible for everyone on the team to jump into one design and work together in context and in real-time.

These features include:

Easily accessible built-in libraries for Material Design, iOS, and Bootstrap

Hundreds of useful icons, interactive elements, and animated states

Vector drawing tools that enable designers to effectively draw and combine vector shapes to create icons or illustrations

The ability to save code components; thereby eliminating the necessity to redraw patterns over and over

HTML import, in which a web page or page section can be imported to UXPin to support the prototyping effort

Team members have ready access to these and other features in addition to being able to exchange design-related information and feedback with team members and project stakeholders in real time.

Click on the banner to learn more about this powerful labor-saving tool.

2. BeTheme

You’ll find more than a few real time savers among BeTheme’s 40+ core features that range from a huge library of customizable pre-built websites to layout generators, page builders, grid options, and much more.

This multipurpose WordPress theme is fast, flexible, and is an ideal choice whether you’re an experienced designer tasked with satisfying a large clientele or you’re building your first website.

A sampling of Be’s many core features includes:

A library of 500+ pre-built websites. These cover the major website items, 30 industry sectors, and a host of popular business niches.

The powerful Muffin Builder page builder/editor.

Shortcodes, a Shortcode Generator, and a Layout Generator

A Header Builder

A wealth of color, font, and special effects options.

BeTheme is responsive and requires no coding. Click on the banner to browse Be’s library of pre-built websites and learn more.

3. Mobirise Website Builder

The ability to save time and increase productivity often requires breaking with traditional tools and techniques, and sometimes certain services. With respect to tools, the Mobirise website builder exhibits some key differences from traditional website builders.

Mobirise is an offline website builder. You can download it and get started building a site right away.

Mobirise is free for both commercial and personal non-profit use; no strings attached.

A wealth of design aids includes 3000+ website blocks, 200+ home page templates, and 75+ homepage themes.

Google AMP and Bootstrap 4 guarantee your websites will be crazy-fast and totally mobile-friendly.

A host of sliders, tables, calls-to-action, forms, tabs, progress bars, and other goodies.

Mobirise is worth a good, close look. Check it out by clicking on the banner.

4. Uncode – Creative Multiuse WordPress Theme

Uncode is a creative multiuse theme for creatives who need a tool of like this to best serve their needs. Uncode is ideal for building portfolio, blogging, or magazine-style sites or websites for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and startups.

Uncode’s many features include –

A powerful frontend editor, an advanced grid system, and adaptive image system

400+ Wireframes Sections

WooCommerce and WPML compatibility

The showcase is definitely not to be missed. Click on the banner to see it.

5. LayerSlider

What you get with LayerSlider is a very comprehensive multi-purpose animation builder that powers millions of sites every day.

LayerSlider is responsive, device friendly, and it features a variety of layout options to work with.

Animated page blocks can be used to build even a complete website if you choose.

Everything is drag and drop with an ever growing set of templates to work with.

Click on the banner to discover additional features.

6. Dr. Link Check

This service searches sites for broken and malicious links. It checks for proper URL formatting, server response time, SSL certificate validation and more.

You can schedule automatic checks on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

You’ll be provided detailed information about real or potential problems via email.

Search results are available for export to PDF or CSV formats.

Dr. Link Check detects and highlights problems before serious damage is done.

7. Slider Revolution

Slider Revolution 6 is truly a powerhouse website content builder. It could really be a game changer if your websites have begun to exhibit a certain degree of sameness that you would love to break free of.

Create sliders, carousels, and content modules galore, and even full websites.

Create exciting, dynamic solutions to everyday design problems with Slider Revolution’s cutting edge designs.

Dig into the 2000+ royalty-free media assets to find something for every need.

8. 8b Website Builder

Here are three good reasons to give the 8b website builder a closer look (there are of course more!).

8b is new and super easy to work with thanks to its slick, modern interface

You can work with 8b on your desktop, your mobile device, or both

8b is free – at least for the moment.

Other reasons include fast Google ranking and lightning-fast website performance, plus your websites will always be 100% mobile-friendly.

9. Stockfresh

Spending hours looking for a special type of image and paying too much for it once you find it is not a good way to save money; or save time for that matter. Stockfresh is a stock photo agency that can do both.

Stockfresh has an inventory of millions of photos and images

The material offered is broken down into 30 categories

Prices are competitive

There are more offerings to come

10. XStore | Multi-Purpose WooCommerce WordPress Theme

XStore is a king-size WooCommerce theme that has managed to make e-commerce easily. If you’re looking for a potential game-changer you may not have to look further. XStore’s key benefits include –

A single product page builder

A page importer

Plugins valued at just over $300

More than 90 good-to-go shops

Plus a few more useful, time-saving goodies.

11. Heroic KB – Knowledge Base Plugin

Many sites have decent FAQ pages, but they are definitely in the minority. FAQ pages have in fact become somewhat old school, especially when compared to what a powerful knowledge base can do to boost business.

With the Heroic Knowledge Base plugin –

Customers can get good, solid, accurate answers to their questions 24/7

Website owners receive useful article feedback and actionable analytics

Plus, Heroic Knowledge Base integrates with your theme right out of the box.

12. Rank Math

You can totally stress yourself out trying to make your website as SEO friendly as possible, and “as possible” isn’t always good enough. Maybe, it’s time to let Rank Math do the heavy SEO lifting for you.

Rank Math, with its cool, clean and simple UI can provide

Automated image, WooCommerce, and Local SEO solutions

Content Analysis for SEO

Sitemap and redirection solutions

Click on the banner to learn more about this powerful and effective SEO tool.

13. Movedo Theme

This premium quality theme by a top-rated author, in addition to featuring a clean modern design to work with, holds more than a few surprises in store for its users – including

Easy import functionalities

Responsiveness and flexibility,

A knowledge base with a quick search option that’s designed for easy browsing

Out-of-this-world parallax and special scrolling effects

Quality 24/7 support

Summing it up – Movedo rocks!

14. WHATFONTIS

If you’re having a string of sleepless nights because you’ve come across just the right font for a particular need, but you don’t know its name or where to find it, we suggest turning to WhatFontis for help.

This amazing pattern recognition-based font identification service can

Exactly identify your downloaded sample font

Find close matches

Find a satisfactory alternative that’s available at a lower price or for free

Or, all the above.

15. Goodiewebsite

Goodiewebsite is a frontend development platform that connects business owners and web designers with highly competent, experienced web developers. This service is best for –

Small or local business owners who want to establish or improve upon their online presence

Startups wanting to provide a testing platform for their ideas

Web designers seeking a development partner

Goodiewebsite specializes in 1-10 page websites, WordPress websites and simple eCommerce sites.

*****

Any website building tool or service that can help you speed up your workflow or save you money is worth a close look. Some of the tools and services you’re currently using have performed well in the past but are getting a little long in the tooth. You might be more than just pleasantly surprised if you were to put one or more of the above 15 top tools and services into play. As they are among the very best choices for their respective types, any one could prove to be a game changer for you or your business.

The post 15 Effective Tools and Services You Should Pay Attention To appeared first on WebAppers.

15 Effective Tools and Services You Should Pay Attention To published first on https://johnellrod.weebly.com/

0 notes

thejustinmarshall · 6 years ago

Text

Anya Miller On Climbing, Cancer, And Creative Strategy

NOTE: In 2018, I started recording interviews with creatives (writers, filmmakers, podcasters, photographers, editors, etc.) in the adventure world. I’m publishing the highlights of those interviews monthly in 2019.

Everyone finds their way into adventure storytelling in a different way, but Anya Miller’s journey to working on film projects, creative campaigns, and podcasts for Duct Tape Then Beer is definitely one of the less straightforward ones: It started with a career in architecture, then bedbugs, then cancer, then a mid-career internship making the same salary she made as a lifeguard in high school, then a job at a big design and creative firm, then finally going to work with two of her longtime friends, Fitz and Becca Cahall. Oh, and lots of climbing, snowboarding, mountain biking.

You’ve probably seen something Anya had a hand in making, even if you didn’t know it. As the Director of Brand and Creative Strategy at Duct Tape Then Beer, she does a little bit of: creative strategy, art direction, graphic design, film production, story development, photo editing, and whatever else needs to be done as part of a small team that makes two adventure podcasts (The Dirtbag Diaries and Safety Third, and films like Follow Through and Paul’s Boots.

Duct Tape Then Beer’s client list includes a lot of the biggest names in the outdoor industry: REI, Outdoor Research, Patagonia, The North Face, The Access Fund, Protect Our Winters, National Geographic, Black Diamond, Chaco, Arcteryx, Subaru, and others. I’ve been lucky to work with Anya on a short film project and see how she works (and how she draws), and why Fitz and Becca invited her to be part of their creative team.

I asked Anya to sit down for an interview a few weeks ago—here’s our conversation, edited for length:

ON GROWING UP IN CHATTANOOGA I’m the youngest of four kids. I was born in Canada in a small town called Hespler, Ontario. I have two sisters and a brother, and they are the best. My siblings really shaped my ideas of what I thought was cool, what I wanted to do with my life. Be good at school. Be Good at sports. Be able to talk with anyone with curiosity. I always wanted to do everything that they did. My brother says that my super power is absorbing other people’s super powers. I think of it more as just learning from rad people.

My parents were divorced when I was five — it was a really rough relationship and so I was a pretty stressed out kid. When I was twelve, my mom decided to move from Canada back to her home town of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Moving to the South was probably one of the best things that happened in my life because it put me in a more nature-focused place. In Canada, we lived in a small old town with stone buildings and neighborhoods full of kids. Getting outside meant going to the local school and hitting a tennis ball up against a giant brick wall, cruising on bikes in the street or watching my brother and his friends skateboard in the Taco Bell parking lot. When I moved to Tennessee, we moved in with my grandmother, Gigi, who was like a second mom to me. She lived on a small acreage that had been part of her family farm for three generations. She lived and passed on the same plot of land where she was born — so land was important. There were tomato plants, frogs, lightning bugs, fresh mint and magnolia trees — space to just run around. We were close to a lake, so I would run down there to feed ducks and swim.

There were a lot less kids nearby, so I spent a lot of time with my sister Michaela and Gigi outside — working in the yard, playing checkers and drinking sun tea. Moving to Tennessee really set a different tone for the rest of my growing up and for my life.

My family was not an outdoor adventure family at all. My mom was a single parent with four kids, so she got us into as many organized sports programs as possible to deal with our energy levels and probably just to free up some personal time for her.

I did gymnastics, played soccer and tennis and eventually got into diving. Those sports were great for strength and discipline, but I experienced a lot of injury in high school, specifically in soccer. It seemed like I was working really hard athletically, only to then be at the mercy of some overly aggressive hack on the field.

I broke my leg the summer before senior year of high school and basically was just done with soccer — I hated every bit of it at that point, so I washed my hands of team sports. My sister was a pro cyclist at the time and gave me her old aluminum Trek 1500 and I started riding all the time. It changed my idea of distance and freedom. At this point, I was figuring out where I wanted to go to university. I hadn’t ever even been west of the Mississippi at that point — but somehow I thought that I where I wanted to be.

[photo by Anne Cleary]

ON MOVING OUT WEST There was an image — and this does not sound that deep at all, but it was an image the old rubber-banded Patagonia Capilene packaging. Steph Davis was climbing some crack. I had never rock climbed in my life and I didn’t know who Steph Davis was at the time, but what I saw was just a super-strong female and she had chalk on her face and her hair was whipping in the wind. Didn’t look perfect, looked like she was trying hard in a wild place, and I wondered where she was. I was inspired by her, but I was also inspired by the place and the sea of rock she was moving through. I’d never been to a place so arid or stoic.

None of my family lived out west then. All of my siblings were either still in Canada or in the southeast. I just thought the west seemed amazing. I was the last of four siblings at home, and I made no secret of the fact that I wanted to go far away, not have a support network and just see how it would go.

I remember sending away to University of Colorado and getting this information packet that had a VHS tape in it. I wish I still had it! It was so ridiculous. It had 80s synth music and this dude rollerblade shredding around the campus, giving a sort of tour. It wasn’t a causal rollerblade tour. The guy was getting rad on campus and pointing out different buildings! As I said, I was kind of a stressed out kid in school. I made straight A’s and was valedictorian. From that rollerblading video, I guess it seemed like CU was a good place for a stressed out, sometimes-too-serious kid to go.

So I applied the School of Environmental Design and Architecture, and went.

ON DRAWING I can’t remember not drawing. I was always drawing things. In hindsight, I probably just should’ve gotten an art degree. But I think when I was making the college decision, all of my siblings were sociology majors or history majors, which can be cryptic majors to develop a career from. I think I went into school with a practical driven idea that I would know exactly what I was going to do when I got out of school if it killed me.

Considering the different programs that CU offered, it looked like their environmental design program was good. It focused on sustainable architecture and reuse of old buildings, which I was interested in — my mom collected antiques and love making old things new. Plus, I thought architecture was practical. Theoretically, that major equals a decently clear career path after school. Maybe almost too clear of a path — it can be hard to stray from.

I was always drawing as a kid. I remember getting Calvin and Hobbes cartoon books for holidays. I’d go through the pages and duplicate all of the cartoons, hundreds of them. I didn’t trace them — I just redrew them identically, right down to the word bubbles and writing. I did that with Snoopy, Garfield and Far Side comics, too. I really liked cartoons in general. They were funny, they had a dry sense of humor that reminded me of my brother. He cultivated my sense of humor, for sure. He helped explain some of the more complex cartoons and cultural concepts in them.

I would draw on my own, too. For hours at a time. Sharks and birds. My own hands. I’d look at magazine covers and draw them. Time magazine’s person of the year. National Geographic — that woman with the crazy aqua eyes. There were a bunch of skateboard magazines sitting around the house — my brother was a skateboarder. I’d try to redraw the Thrasher logo, which is a really tricky logo to redraw, by the way! I liked looking at that stuff because it seemed raw and cool, for whatever reason.

ON FINDING CLIMBING My first time climbing was on Flagstaff in Boulder. The granodiorite up there is this weird conglomerate rock — it is pretty grippy until its little embedded pebbles get polished. I remember just thinking how cool it was up there. It was so accessible! And at that point, it was pretty quiet there. I lived close to the trails, so I could jog up Flag. I loved that I could go whenever I wanted to. Even at night. I didn’t have a car in university. I didn’t have a car in high school, either, so I fell in love with things that I could do right out of my door with little equipment or support from anyone.

Climbing wasn’t like skiing or snowboarding — you needed a good chunk of money and a car to do those things. Climbing, and bouldering in particular, was something that I could walk out my door, do on my own and have complete control over my experience. With team sports, I couldn’t control my experience. It felt like other people could injure me. At least I had (kind of) had control over whether I hurt myself.

The transition from bouldering to tying into a rope was pretty quick for me. I ended up stumbling into a really good group of people that were better climbers than I was. Probably within the first few months of climbing, I drove with them out to Wild Iris. I remember not really understanding the concept of grades that much, just deciding what I wanted to try based on aesthetics and the encouragement of my friends. I’d say, “That thing looks good! I’ll try that.” It was really important to me to know that my friends believe in me. They did, and I got better quickly.

It was within the first month of climbing that I wanted to try to lead something. Everything about the sport was exciting — I just wanted something of my own. And it seemed like something I could have, in terms of just being able to develop my skills at whatever pace I wanted. I climbed so much (and probably so badly) when I started that I constantly had injured fingers and weeping skin.

[photo by Anne Cleary]

ON HER FIRST JOB After graduation, the job market was okay. I wanted to stay in Boulder for a little bit. Right out of school, I got a job at a small, residential architecture firm. They were modern and fun and also did a bit of branding and graphic design for the buildings they made. That rollerblade video was full of shit — I worked my ass off in school. I could have gotten a job at a bigger, better-paying firm, but a smaller shop felt more ‘me’. A lot of people in my class were going to giant corporate firms down in Denver or other cities, but I was more interested in smaller scale residential design — and I was more interested in working closely with clients and staying close to the mountains.

That shop was a safe place to escape to after being intense (again) throughout school. I didn’t want to jump into a high-intensity job. There, I got exposed to graphic design, brand design and architecture. They did a lot of the drawing by hand, which I loved. Right then, things were teetering on being all computer-based. Eventually, we did take all drawings into the computer, but all of the concept iteration was hand-drawn. All of the renderings were hand-drawn, which I got to do and loved.

ON LEAVING BOULDER The person I was dating at the time is now my husband, and I think after about a year in Boulder, Charlie and I were pretty ready to take off. We decided to take a trip to South America, go to Chile and Argentina to go snowboarding and skiing down there.

We were at a resort called Las Leñas, which has an amazing zone of lift-access / assisted backcountry. One day, Charlie and I were riding separately. It was really crap conditions and I kind of got off my line and was a bit lost. I saw these people just beyond me on this plateau with sastrugi all over it. It was sunny, but windy, like hard-to-move type wind. And I remember seeing a few people and thinking, “They look like Americans,” I screamed out to them, “Hey, can I ride with you guys?”

So we basically get together on that random plateau in Argentina. Maura Mack, her husband Jason, and Adam DesLauriers. We rode a shitty, icy line together and had a hilarious experience in super bad conditions. We got down and decided to go get beers and hamburgers and meet up with their buds, Lel Tone and Tom Wayes. Charlie joined us at the end of the day, and we all went to a hot spring and had non-stop, hilarious conversations. They felt like our people and they told us we should move to Tahoe. A week after we got back from Argentina, we decided to go to Tahoe and check it out. They set us up with a place to live, I got an architecture job, and Charlie started working at Granite Chief, tuning skis. Plus, it was only a short drive from Bishop. I was sold.

ON MEETING FITZ AND BECCA CAHALL That first year in Tahoe, I spent a lot of time in this really tiny climbing gym, if you could even call it that. The Sports Exchange in Truckee. It was really just a used gear shop that had a room in the back with some holds on a woody. But I spent a ton of time there, looking for friends like those I had left in Boulder.

There weren’t a ton of women climbing in there. I saw Becca Cahall — she was strong and I decided, “That girl’s gonna be my friend.” I like to say that I ‘picked her up in the climbing gym’. We started talking, I met Fitz, and Charlie and I started going over to their place in Kings Beach every week for dinner. Becs makes a mean lasagna. It’s amazing at that point in time in my life how much time I had — or made — to connect and chat with people.

We started climbing with those two. At the time, I think Fitz was in the very early stages of starting The Dirtbag Diaries and he was doing a bunch of writing for print publications. Becca was often gone during the summers, doing field biology work in Oregon. And Fitz and I would climb a good bit together in the summers when she was gone. The friendship really started from there.

They moved to Corvallis, Oregon, for Becca’s graduate program. From there, they moved to Seattle. Charlie and I were still in Tahoe, but we kept in touch with those guys and saw them whenever they came through. We were in Tahoe for just over seven years and I was working at an architecture firm there. I was getting really tired of designing 3,000 square foot “cabins” for people from the Bay Area. Architecture was barely providing a living in a mountain town that’s difficult to make a living in. But it wasn’t really filling me up creatively.

Charlie was tending bar, skiing a bunch and tuning skis — at some point, he wanted more of an intellectual pursuit. He started looking around at programs to get his MBA. He was interested in getting into the creation ski clothing and technical outerwear. We were poking around for schools for him — we chose Seattle because of its creative opportunities and proximity to mountains. He had also grown up in Washington, so family was a draw. It was a huge benefit that Becca and Fitz had already made camp here.

Charlie got into the University of Washington and I found a really great position at a firm called Graham Baba Architects. I basically walked into a dream job in an outrageously bad job market. So it just seemed like everything fell into place. Then I found myself in the city. I never really thought I would live in a city, but all of a sudden, I was.

Pretty soon after we moved to the city, I convinced Charlie to take half of a year of his MBA program and in France. So I took an eight-month sabbatical from the architecture firm, even though I hadn’t really been there that long. I spent the season climbing in Fontainebleau. We lived in the 11th in Paris, and traveled around to Italy and Switzerland to do some climbing and snow sports.

ON CANCER When we got back from Europe, I ended up getting a rash all over my body. I thought I had developed a food allergy, so I went to a doctor and I went to a naturopath to get tested for food allergies.

She said, “No, sweetie, you don’t have an allergy. You have bed bugs.” They were pretty common in France at that time, come to find out. She told me how to get rid of them and offered to do my annual exam while I was there (she was a nurse practitioner, too). She does a breast exam on me and she says she feels something. A lump. I could tell she felt like it was bad. She said, “I think you should go get this checked out.” For whatever reason, I just knew there was something wrong. I hadn’t been feeling well, but I couldn’t really attribute anything. Had I not brought those bed bugs back from Europe, I might not have found the tumor. I fucking love bed bugs.

So the very next day I got in for a biopsy at one of the cancer centers in Seattle, and it came back as Triple Negative Breast Cancer. That’s an invasive form of breast cancer. All at once and very quickly, things slowed down for me and sped up, if that makes any sense. I went through a series of tests to see what the extent of the cancer was — full body scans to see if it the cancer was anywhere else. Waiting for those results was terrifying. I was trying to figure out my course of treatment, and just trying to understand and grapple with everything.

I was whisked into chemotherapy, and that was a crazy, awful chunk of treatment. It stops all fast-growing cells — like cancer — from producing in your body. That’s why your hair falls out — your hair is fast-growing cell. I decided to take some control and shave my head before my hair really fell out. It just seemed like a helpless situation.

Can you believe that I had a wig made of my own hair? I had it made, and then I never wore it. Not once. It just sat on this weird styrofoam head in the corner of the bedroom the entire time. It was like this weird little animal sitting in the corner. I don’t know why I had it made. Like a security blanket, I think. When I put it on it felt like I was lying about what I was going through.

Chemotherapy just makes you feel acid washed from the inside out, but it’s what they said was the best and only treatment for my cancer type. Afterwards, I had surgery to take out the tumor, followed by radiation. You don’t fight cancer, you just weather it.

ON DECIDING TO SWITCH CAREERS Coming out of cancer, I realized that architecture wasn’t what I wanted to be doing. I wasn’t happy on a day-to-day basis. At that point, after all the cancer stuff, I realized I could pull the plug on architecture and not feel bad at all. I deeply realized that time is short and that I didn’t want to spend a single day doing something that I didn’t love. So I started looking around for other things.

I sat down with my pen and paper, as I usually do. I drew out my problem. I basically tried to draw an infographic of the things that I liked about architecture and the things that I didn’t. I mapped out all of the tasks that I did in between the beginning and end of an architecture project, starting from the first client meeting and ending with them moving into their new or redone house.

Overlayed on the project timeline, I drew an up-and-down heartbeat line. It trended up when I loved the project tasks, and it would go down when I really didn’t like what I was having to do. This line didn’t correlate to difficulty of task — all jobs have hard parts that need grit to get through. True. But this helped me understand what I didn’t like and why.

When I looked at my infographic of my life, it seemed like such a small portion of every project had a loving heartbeat line. The ratio of I love this to I really don’t was just not enough. This visual helped me communicate with people that I was having coffee chats or meeting with, exploring new careers and positions. I could point to the graphic and say these are the things that I’m doing in every project that A) I really excel at and B) fill me up emotionally and really satisfy me as a professional and a creator. Clear, insightful visuals are so key to having good conversations.

I met with a guy who worked at a brand agency. He said, “You really seem like a creative strategist or a brand strategist.” I said, “Okay cool — what is that?” Basically, a strategist makes creative plans and develops foundational ideas that give meaning and inspiration to projects. Strategy helps teams of understand and fulfill creative goals. I wasn’t sure I understood it at first, but I finally had a job title to search for online. I didn’t even know that job existed.

So I started looking for jobs as a creative strategist. I came across an internship that was being offered. This job was definitely aimed at someone ten years younger than me. It was at brand and design firm here in Seattle called Hornall Anderson. Basically, I took my infographic and my architecture portfolio into the interview. I got the job.

[photo by Ken Etzel]

ON HOW BRAND STRATEGY RELATES TO ARCHITECTURE Essentially, I figured out that creating a house or a space for somebody to use is really similar to creating a brand. In the beginning of an architecture project, you meet the people that you’re going to be working with, the people that will live in that house. You understand how they want to live, the types of spaces they’ll need for their specific lifestyle. You understand the land they have to build on, whether it’s really hilly or flat. You understand the adjacent buildings and you decide how you want your building to respond to those around it. Stand out? Fit in? Be crazy or subdued? Be earthy or modern? You consider budget and you consider the builders that will actually create building. You chart a creative course.

At the end of the day, that planning process that I learned in architecture can be applied to almost any creative project, especially brands. You take a brand. You look at the landscape — where is it going to sit? You understand the brands that sit around it. You consider how your brand is going to respond to, compliment or go against those adjacent brands. You learn about the people that will be ‘living in that brand’ — the people that are running it and the people that will be purchasing its goods. You set a creative intention that helps develop a solid plan for your building or your brand. Or solid plan for making a film. Or an advertising campaign. Or an event. Whatever that is, there can always be a front-end structuring and creative process that helps you launch into ‘making’ in a considered, intentional and (hopefully) unique way.

ON DOING AN INTERNSHIP IN THE MIDDLE OF HER CAREER I got the internship and it was three months long — terrible pay, of course. But I learned a lot. I had also been in the professional world for ten years at that point. I got hired the day my internship ended, and started working as a Brand and Creative Strategist.

The internship was definitely a proxy for going back to school. I’d definitely recommend it. That job gave me amazing experience and mentors. There, I was able to develop my own techniques of working through brand problems with large teams. Strategists shape clear creative ideas so that it is easier for multiple people to express them.

ON JOINING DUCT TAPE THEN BEER I worked at Hornall for several years. It was the type of agency that had ping pong tables and kegs of beer and free cereal for breakfast. All of those things meant that they wanted you to never leave! I worked a ton, my climbing dropped off. I felt pretty unhealthy. Creatively, I was producing a lot of awesome stuff, working with big brands and talented designers — but eventually it felt a bit soulless. You can only use your intelligence and creativity to sell potato chips for so long.

I wanted to be climbing more. Through those first six years in Seattle, I was of course hanging out with Becca and Fitz. We loved talking about professional and creative stuff. I was always tracking on what Duct Tape Then Beer was doing. One night, I went over to their house and held a little facilitated visual Post-It party to chat with them about creative goals, what they were working on and what they wanted to be. At this point, they had positioned themselves pretty squarely as a film production company and of course The Dirtbag Diaries were still going strong.

When I was at that large agency, I saw people making films and content for brands in categories other than the outdoor industry. I saw how campaigns were being created and how solid, unique creative was being monetized. Basically, I wanted to help Duct Tape expand what they offered. People were coming to Duct Tape saying: We want a film. And then Fitz and Becca would ask: What do you need a film about and why? The brands rarely had good or solid answers for these questions. Maybe they didn’t actually need a film — maybe the brand actually needed a perspective.

Essentially, Duct Tape Then Beer had been creating emotional, unique perspectives for brands and expressing them in films. The value though, for the first years, had been being placed on the film outcome rather than the strategy and thinking that needs to be done before a good story is told.

youtube

ON WHAT SHE DOES AT DUCT TAPE THEN BEER Fitz and Becca told me they thought they could hire me. That was a big deal. I was really wary of working with good friends. I had always kept my personal life and work pretty separate. I just didn’t want to ruin our friendship by working together every single day, or having weird professional interactions with folks that I love so much. Eventually, those guys just talked me down from the ledge. They said their first priority was keeping our friendship solid — and they thought we could make some really cool things together. They said we would only work with brands and strengthen and nurture connections to the natural world. They said I could go climbing. That was it. I ended up leaving the big agency and joining Duct Tape to develop a brand strategy offering so that we could answer the brand questions before the topic of the creative output was even addressed.

Before a creative expression (film, messaging, campaign) is ever decided upon, we crystallize emotional ideas that will elicit action. How will we express an emotional idea? Maybe a film. Maybe a podcast. Maybe new headlines or messaging that gets rolled out over a few years. Maybe a social media campaign. Maybe an event. But we always start with clear, emotional ideas.

There aren’t many projects that come through Duct Tape Then Beer that I don’t have some sort of hand in. But you could say that about all of us — we all touch every project. Our skills overlap and are complementary. I make all of the pitch decks. I don’t like to admit that I am a writer — it was always so hard for me — but it has flowed as I’ve gotten older. If it’s a story that Fitz discovered, he’ll write it up and then I design a compelling story deck — sometimes with infographics — to get our ideas across. I do a lot of strategy work for us internally and for our clients. I do the graphic design and edit the photos that come out of our office, functioning as the art director and social media person. But my official title is Director of Brand and Creative Strategy.

Our podcasts need a good bit of overarching creative strategy. We don’t just haphazardly assort stories and guests. We look at culture and we try to understand what’s going on and try to actively seek out stories that express complex, emotional topics in today’s world. I’ll work to help shape this topic mix.

At the helm of Duct Tape, we’ve got five full-time people. We are all seasoned creatives and high-functioning human beings that love to contribute and work hard for each other. I think that’s what makes project good — when several smart people contribute in a considered way.

youtube

ON SNOWBOARDING VS. SKIING I snowboard. I skied when I was tiny in Canada a couple of times. Since being in Colorado, I’ve been a snowboarder. More and more, I stay out of resorts and am loyal to my splitboard and to snow that makes no noise. I’ve had three torn ACLs on one leg. I’ve torn my meniscus three times. So yea, I ride snow that makes no noise. Luckily, soft snow is usually easy to find in Washington.

ADVICE It was scary and hard for me to leave behind a profession that I’d put a lot of time and energy into. But I knew, deep down, that I didn’t enjoy it. My advice? Take some time and be really honest with yourself about what you like doing (and why) and what you don’t like doing (and why). Because every job is going to have something that sucks about it. Really anything worth doing is going to be pretty hard at some point, so the answer, “I don’t like doing this because it’s too hard,” is bullshit.

But I do recommend that process that I went through. Visually mapping out what filled me up emotionally and what depleted me emotionally. Visualizing that was so helpful. And clear. And it helped me realize what I wanted to be spending my time doing. Continually revisiting those two questions: What do I like doing and why? What do I not like doing and why? Continually revisiting those has been the most helpful thing for me over the last ten years.

The post Anya Miller On Climbing, Cancer, And Creative Strategy appeared first on semi-rad.com.

from Explore https://semi-rad.com/2019/05/anya-miller-on-climbing-cancer-and-creative-strategy/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

0 notes

olivereliott · 6 years ago

Text

Anya Miller On Climbing, Cancer, And Creative Strategy

I asked Anya to sit down for an interview a few weeks ago—here’s our conversation, edited for length:

[photo by Anne Cleary]

So I applied the School of Environmental Design and Architecture, and went.

[photo by Anne Cleary]

[photo by Ken Etzel]

youtube

The post Anya Miller On Climbing, Cancer, And Creative Strategy appeared first on semi-rad.com.

0 notes