#11 - hung over (02-97) 



"Bullshit. He's just being pathetic to get sympathy. If we stop listening, he'll find something else to talk about."

sparrow's fall in a nutshell, right there. but people kept listening, so . . .

of course, these episodes weren't titled when i wrote them. i added these titles in 2000 when i was first trying to build a website. some of you may have seen it. it was a monstrosotiy, and an example of how not to put comics online. online comics should be easy to read and, if possible, easy to load; in an effort to make sparrow's fall easy to load, i in fact made it impossible to read. a further irony: i never finished building the site because the process of dissecting each page into easy to load snippets became an incredibly boring, time-consuming, monumental task . . . at one point, i fiugred out that sparrow's fall, amazing as it might seem, was approximately one 1 millionth of the internet, which, though a trivial number, indeed is quite large considering how many sites in fact existed, even in 2000.

it was one 1 millionth more than i wanted to deal with, tell you me.

moving on. number eleven here i was happy with. the front porch is drawn convincingly, both close at hand and at a distance. the wash is mostly controlled without tearing up the paper too much. there were only two ambiguously bordered and arranged panels, both related to roasting hot dogs and marshmallows, and the final panel was a hint of things to come. that panel, of course depicting snowfall, was created with our old friend wite-out. i really have to recommend wite-out for these situations; as i have said before, white ink is treacherous and globby, more of a sludgy paint than an ink. wite-out is designed to run smoothly and evenly, which is just what you want it to do. unfortunately it doesn't really work well (read: at all) in a nib.

there were other nib-related problems here. obviously i've used too wide a nib in the panel where nips it pitching papers in the fire--or the ink was running out of the nib too quickly, which certainly also is possible. (another reason to use microns.) but all in all, it is the second most successful comic in the early part of the series; i rank only 1997 as better.

why the armchair, you ask? i'm not sure. people keep all kinds of odd things on their porch, and an armchair seemed right for the scene: once there, i durst not remove it, because it was now part of the continuity. i made a great effort,and still do, to retain all elements i put in. i'm sure i fail at it a lot, and the floor plans seem to morph uncontrollably, but i do try. however, i think it finally got too moldly and nips threw it away; it appears to have vanished lately.

and yes, there's symbolism on that second page. i'll let you figure this one out on your own.






 

Posted: Wed - April 7, 2004 at 06:50 AM             |

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