greg smallwood 



scout out this leavenworth artist's gallery site. he's got a great comic running in the preview section of the star this month. good stuff, sort of eight ballish and sort of tomine-ish but definitely his own thing: last week's (i think it is) is here.

UPDATE: having suggested that smallwood's work bears some resemblance to clowes and tomine, i've been told i'm on crack. i suggest, despite the subject line of the email, that i am indeed right. exhibit A, general style, panelling structure and layout, use of screen, wash, and/or ziptone, etc.:




exhibit B, a sort of seinfeldian show-about-nothing storytelling method. while tomine and clowes have perfected the art of saying a lot in a very small space, i suggest that smallwood is heading in the same direction.

exhibit C, my dissenter suggests that if they were to draw a "strip" with a tone similar to Smallwoods, they would use their "cartoony" styles and use strip language. i'm promised evidence: but i feel lloyd llewellyn is pretty cartoony, and, indeed, juvenile in tone, and i find resemblances to smallwood's comics there.

most important to my dissenter's position is perhaps one of theory. he says the work is a "comic book style of storytelling crammed into a comic strip", and that clowes or tomine would do something entirely different under the same circumstances. maybe, but i'm standing by my original statement: sort of eight ballish and sort of tomine-ish but definitely his own thing. moreover, i see nothing wrong with that style of storytelling in a strip. might i list the strips that are or were like that? i don't think i need to: but not everything in the funny pages is peanuts. i don't agree with the basis of the theory: that something that is designed as a comic strip should be framed as one. in fact, the scale of the pieces in the Preview really mitigate against that. with that much room to work in, why limit yourself?

i gotta say, that's a lot of milage dragged out of a couple of ishes and a sort of.


i sense a long argument about this coming up. 

Posted: Thu - January 12, 2006 at 01:30 PM             |

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