I am the Bringer of Chaos (meanwhile, I make comics)
An edition about the idealization of the creative process and over-the-top characters
HELLO AND WELCOME TO A NEW EDITION OF MY NEWSLETTER!
Hi, friends! December is here, so you need to begin to prepare your house’s defenses against the evil Santa Claus.
Meanwhile, some updates and thoughts.
NEW COLLABORATIONS!
Recently Mad Cave publishing wannounced my collaboration with the series Galaxy of Madness, a Sci-Fi comic-book created by Mike Oeming and Magdalene Vissaggio.
https://aiptcomics.com/2024/11/22/scoop-galaxy-of-madness/
WORKING WITH LITTLE IN THE MIDDLE OF CHAOS
Today we have a “Smarty pants Victor’s thoughts” section. I apologize. You can read this imagining me with a wall of bricks behind me, in an amateur stand-up club.
I love these stories about writers who book room hotels to focus on their first draft of their movie script. Honestly, I'd rather spend that money on Criterion's Showa-era Godzilla blu-ray pack.
Or an anecdote (I can't remember the author) about this famous writer whose family always knew when he was struggling with some chapter of his latest novel (thanks to this steellike glaze creative people we own) and then his home suddenly fell into a solemn silence.
So cute…
I was born in chaos, raised in chaos. When I was living with my family, my brothers didn't give a shit about my concentration. My parents watched TV full-volume without considering my creative process.
I can observe in a lot of instagram or twitter accounts what I call “the idealization of the process”. Like you need to own the best environment or the best tools to make great art. You know, these photos in social media with the expensive laptop and a glass of bourbon, and if it’s possible a framed poster of classic cinema slightly blurred in the background. Usually people who tell you how great their creative process is are not creating. They are busy telling you on social media.
I worked on a second-hand plywood study desk for more than a decade before owning my own studio. And before this, in my room, in my parents’ home. And I was so creative like now, even more because owning a house has made me soft and now I need some level of silence.
The same with the tools. I see comic-books or webtoons made with the support of complex 3D programs for the background and 30 different brushes of the Clip Studio.
And the “Japanese brush pens porn” can be hilarious. And I love them, but I don’t need one specifically to draw the branches or other to ink the stones.
(Meanwhile, I’m considering the idea of doing a comic only using a Sharpie pen.)
And you don’t need to be in the best spiritual condition. Ok, if you don’t live in a warzone, it helps. But you can write or draw because everything around sucks. I made this during Covid and made so much that I still have a lot of unpublished stuff (including two almost finished graphic-novels) in my virtual safe.
So forget the idea of a mystic trance to receive the blessing of the Muses. You basically need to barf a lot of stuff that you will fix later. But the point is having material you can work with. That’s the first and hardest step. With scripts is the first draft. Drawing comics we have the pencils (if you work directly with the page) or the storyboard. And it can be bad. In fact, it will surely be terrible. Believe in a man who drew an OGN about a one-hand fighter and drew her two arms in a lot of the panels.
But it’s done: The rest of the process is cosmetics and make-up.
(And don’t forget to correct the excess arms during the inking process.)
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BETTER CALL THE COUSINS
Maybe I'm the last horse crossing the finish line, but until recently I didn't have the chance to finish the last season of Better call Saul. You can say no fiction is 100% perfect but in my opinion this show could be nearly perfect.
I'm not going to sell you the virtues of the show. If you saw it, you know them. I want to write about a little detail of the story I really love: I love how very different characters with different levels of authenticity live together.
Let me develop this a little:
In BCS we have characters like Kim with a remarkable complexity (I was wondering why the broadcasters aren’t fighting like rabid animals to get Rhea Seehorn her own show when I discover she’s filming a new show with Vince Gialliam right now) . Her personality and evolution is written with sensibility and subtly. The rest of the cast, Jimmy, Mike, Nacho… are wonderful, but for me Kim is actually more human and real than some real people I know.
And then we have the Salamanca cousins who are basically two bad guys from a Golgo 13 anime.
In Golgo 13: The Professional you have these two brothers killers, Gold and Silver, who face the super-hitman Golgo. These are over-the-top characters, like everything in this wonderful action franchise. Well, the cousins could be heirs of these characters. They could be Golgo rivals. Every time they appear, the realistic premises of the show vanish and we enter in an action (almost superhero) territory. Gus from Los Pollos Hermanos (how I hate this name and how clearly nobody in charge of this show understands Spanish really well) could be a character more near a Kingpin from Daredevil than one of the drug lords of The Wire.
And it's astounding how characters apparently coming from different kinds of story or genre work in the same show. The show works in different levels, from the realism-costumbrism to the most pulpy-genre fiction… And this happens basically because it’s so well written (in spear of the lack of research when a Spanish character talks which also happened in Breaking Bad).
Ok, I think it’s all for today! I don't know if I will write any newsletter for the rest of the year, apart from my usual Holidays greeting card. If not, see you next year, I hope you have a good end of 2024 and beginning of 2025!
Take care!
Victor
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