Made Out of "Mac"

I've added a few new strips in my series based on the "Hero of the Beach" comic book ads.

I'm hoping to pull together a revised collection soon.

And here's an old one that I've improved somewhat:

Anyone interested in playing around with the comics form should consider trying my upcoming Comics Inventions course, Tuesday evenings in Manhattan, along with my other classes for SVACE. So many possibilities...

A game of 5-card Nancy from Y2K Denver

At the start of the millennium, I hosted comic jam sessions at my friend’s comic book store. Among the activities we offered was the game 5-card Nancy, the rules of which can still be found at scottmccloud.com.

The guiding idea is explained by montage theory: if you juxtapose 2 movie shots or comic panels, the reader/viewer naturally presumes a narrative to connect them. This involves the audience in the creation of the story. Putting comic panels on index cards is a great way to play around with narrative possibilities.

For whatever reason, back then it was difficult getting ahold of suitable Ernie Bushmiller Nancy strips to work from. We ended up making a deck from Ivan Brunetti’s Nancy tryout strips that were published in an issue of the zine Rocktober (breaking one of McCloud's cardinal rules).

An important innovation we discovered as we played McCloud’s game is that once a strip concludes, the players should confer to agree on a title. It pulls the whole together.

I sent Mr.Brunetti a copy of the printed comic that included our use (abuse?) of his work. He was characteristically gracious. I recall him responding that his favorite was “the castrator’s apprentice.”


The ways comic panels change meaning in different contexts is something we’ll explore from multiple angles in my upcoming online course, Comics Inventions, enrolling now.

"Draw Two Panels" spinoff: The Deckless Wonder

 Here's an experiment that's been languishing in my files. I've written already of my work with Isaac Cates on his Draw Two Panels game. It inspired me to test an idea for this spinoff:

I drew two cards that pose a simple question: is our heroine dressing or undressing? Where the cards are placed in the four-panel sequence would direct the answer.

After completing the first strip, I toss a coin twice, choosing one of the original cards and one of the new cards. Then I make a new strip, placing the cards wherever they can be made to make sense. 

I'm struggling to recall the exact rules. In each new round, I toss a coin to choose one old and one new card. There should always be four cards available for each new round, from which two are chosen.

Here's an alternate game, placing the first two cards in a different order:

This procedure can go on indefinitely, though I wonder whether the story can ever go anywhere,... 

...small wonder that I stopped after three rounds. On the other hand, a story stuck in time is interesting in its own way.

This general idea of drawing comic panels on index cards and moving them around is something we'll explore in my upcoming online course, Comics Inventions, enrolling now.

Oulipo Canada Dry

Here's the latest in my series of permutations of The Insult that Made a Man Out of "Mac." This one is an attempt to create a Canada Dry. According to The Oulipo Compendium, a Canada Dry is fake constrained writing-- a work that seems like the product of a constraint, when it actually isn't.

You'll have to let me know if I pulled it off. For comparison, here again is an actual constrained comic from 2010, an N+7. Every major word and image was replaced by the seventh word of the same type (noun, verb, adverb, adjective) following it in a dictionary.

From the Archive: The Combinatoric Project (Introduction)

This is the poster I published in 2003. All the contact info is out of date.

 Has it really been fourteen years?  In the early 2000s, I created this promotional poster inspired by work on combinatorics by Oulipo writers Italo Calvino, Georges Perec, and especially Harry Mathews, under whom I was lucky to study in a workshop he gave at DU circa 1998. (Deep thanks to Rikki Ducornet for getting me invited to that one!)

The poster shows a table of 49 cartoon drawings in which the columns determine the type of character: cuddly animal, mermaid, robot, fat cat, stick man, space alien, & dork; and the rows determine their action or mood: joyful, disconsolate, lost, enraged, sleeping, dancing, & showing off. Assignments on rendering style and format cycle through the pattern and algebraic formulae determine the distribution of props.

Thus, every second image has a border or frame. The rhythm isolated figure/figure plus background/figure plus cast shadow cycles, skipping one space on each new row. Rendering styles are outline/crosshatch/high contrast/full shading, cycling skipping two spaces on each new row. Patterns are employed for every l= 5.5n-3.

The distribution of props is as follows: Pizza, l= 11n-5. Coffee, l= 12n. Milk, l= 15n-1. Letter/Missive, l= 11n-7. T-shirt, l= 13n-14. Flowers, l= 12n-2 and l= 12n-5. Party hat & balloon, l=20n. Vaudeville hat & cane, l=20n-10. Bowling ball, l=12.25n-4. Cigar, l=15.5n-11.5. Whiskey, l=15.5n-3.75. (note: all fractions were rounded down to the nearest integer) Butterflies appear every fourth prime number (counting number one as prime). A beach ball bounces down the page beginning in panel 2 and bouncing alternately 2 across/2 down and 3 across/1 down.

A clinamen occurs every l= 13n-3. The clinamen, or swerve, is an important feature of combinatoric writing. It's where you break your own rules, violating some part of the assignment.

The challenge was to find the most elegant solution to each assignment of character, situation, style, and props. A couple of examples:

#17. Lost Robot with pizza and butterflies. We see a pizza delivery robot with a bent navigational antenna delivering pizza to an empty meadow.

#23. Angry Mermaid, clinamen. She's angry because she's not a mermaid but an actress, and the sailor who netted her aboard has ruined their movie.

An attentive viewer would be able to infer similar narratives throughout the poster, were such a person to exist.

Over the next week, I'll post each of the seven rows along with their assignment descriptions, last to first so it'll ultimately scroll front to back. Check back tomorrow for row seven: characters showing off.

Here's a bit of fun. Looking back, I'm pretty sure I made at least 2 math errors. Can you find them and post them in the comments? And here's a question: the sequence directs the images but they're not connected in time. So is it sequential art? Is it comics?

The framed original drawings are in the collection of Dennis Pimple, a longtime champion of obscuro pictofiction. The drawings, as you see, are tiny.

Cartozia Tales #8: The Voyage of the Verbeekens

The following story is a recipient of a silver medal from the Society of Illustrators in this year's Short Form Comics category. It's an homage to the Upside Downs of Gustave Verbeek from 1903-1905. You read the four pages to the end, then flip the comic over and read back to the beginning. I present it here upside down and downside up, halved for web display:

Many thanks to the Society and the jury for choosing to honor my work, and to Cartozia Tales editor, Isaac Cates for daring me to try it! There will be an awards ceremony on June 17 and original pages will be on display from July 19 to August 20.

Addendum, Sept. 2016, here are the photos I snapped of the pages on the wall:

Curious how these cartooning tricks are done? I'd love to show you all the secrets! My summer courses are enrolling right now at SVA.