Grawlixes: How these @*#%!$ things became a symbol for cursing

What the #$@!% are these?

Vox: Known as the “grawlix” — a term invented by Beetle Bailey cartoonist Mort Walker — this string of symbols is almost as old as comics, extending back to the early 1900s. Comics like The Katzenjammer Kids and Lady Bountiful were truly inventing the art form and, in the process, had to figure out a way to show obscenities to kids. Enter #*@!$ like this. The grawlix performs a censorship function while, at the same time, revealing that something naughty is going on.

See also

• Vox: Where the “comic book font” came from
• Blambot’s comic lettering tips
• Untranslatable words — Fourteen detailed illustrations that convey moments and ideas which no single English word can describe.

Better Letterer

Comic lettering tips from Nate Piekos, who has created some of the industry’s most popular fonts and has used them to letter comic books for Marvel Comics, DC Comics, Dark Horse Comics, and Image Comics.

See also

• Blambot’s Comic Book Grammar & Tradition — The majority of these points are established tradition, sprinkled with modern trends and a bit of my own opinion having lettered professionally for a few years now. The majority of these ideas have been established by Marvel and DC, but opinions vary from editor to editor, even within the same company.
• How the comic book typeface developed
• Comic Neue: A more palatable Comic Sans

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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights by Zen Pencils, a website where inspirational quotes from famous people are adapted into cartoons by Gavin Aung Than.

another beautiful story: In our latest episode, we speak to Melbourne based cartoonist Gavin Aung Than of Zen Pencils. ⋮ “A lot of people think I’m just living an exciting life, thinking of ideas and drawing, but being a cartoonist is a lot of hard work”. And while it may be hard work for Gavin to continually push out good quality comics, the cartoonist reveals in this video why his readers feedback, has in-turn made him find his calling.

• Bill Watterson: A cartoonist’s advice — The Zen Pencils comic most popular with readers.
• Theodore Roosevelt: The Man in the Arena — Gavin’s favourite quote.

Bill Watterson

Theodore Roosevelt

Tetris: The Games People Play, by Box Brown

Alexey Pajitnov had big ideas about games. In 1984, he created Tetris in his spare time while developing software for the Soviet government. Once Tetris emerged from behind the Iron Curtain, it was an instant hit. Nintendo, Atari, Sega—game developers big and small all wanted Tetris. A bidding war was sparked, followed by clandestine trips to Moscow, backroom deals, innumerable miscommunications, and outright theft.

In this graphic novel,New York Times–bestselling author Box Brown untangles this complex history and delves deep into the role games play in art, culture, and commerce. For the first time and in unparalleled detail, Tetris: The Games People Play tells the true story of the world’s most popular video game.

See also

• BoxBrown.com & follow @boxbrown on Twitter
• Complete History Of The Soviet Union, Arranged To The Melody Of Tetris — The food on your plate; now belongs to the state
• The flawed concept of “good vs. evil” — The philosophy of Hayao Miyazaki, a comic by Ashley Allis

How the comic book typeface developed

Where the “comic book font” came from

Vox: So…why does all the writing in comic books look like that? Vox’s Phil Edwards looked into it and found an aesthetic shaped by comics culture, technology, and really cheap paper.

See also

• Todd Klein’s website — I’m best known in comics as a letterer, which I’ve been doing since 1977, working with writers like Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Bill Willingham and many others, and collaborating with a host of artists.
• Comicraft & Blambot, purveyors of fine comic book fonts.

• Comic Neue: A more palatable Comic Sans — Free and in the public domain.
• Female superheroes with proper costumes — Michael Lunsford’s fully-dressed redesigns of superheroines.
• How the 2016 Olympic font was created — “Our prompt was that the font had to be an exact replica of the letters in the logo”

The Other Side

Three theories of how liberals and conservatives think, compiled by Nicky Case.

I’m posting this in large part because I like the format. It’s more interesting than just a text screenshot or tweetstorm when posted on social media, and it looks good in a blog post. I also appreciate that it’s explicitly public domain to encourage sharing.

It’s not a proper infographic, it’s not an essay and it’s certainly not a comic, but it is a little of all of these things.

See also: other posts tagged ‘politics’.

App Review Guidelines: The Comic Book

[PDF on the Apple.com developer site]

(via The Loop)

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I’m really not sure what the point of this is. The art is excellent, but it’s making zero use of the comic medium to make the guidelines any more accessible. It’s the exact same legalese, with pictures.

Compare/contrast with Scott McCloud’s excellent comic book introduction to the new Google Chrome browser:

The Chrome comic explains why the engineers made certain choices, how these benefit users, and demonstrates important concepts visually. While the Apple comic has a very different subject matter, it still completely fails to use the medium to show rather than tell.

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Update: I mentioned this on Twitter, and Scott McCloud himself responded…

Hrm. It's kinda like @RSikoryak's iTunes Terms of Service comic—without the irony:https://t.co/C8KiY2Tipj#teachablemoment

— Scᴏᴛᴛ MᴄCʟᴏᴜᴅ (@scottmccloud) July 1, 2016

I remember hearing about that project, but it had slipped my mind.

iTunes Terms and Conditions: The Graphic Novel

The complete, unabridged legal agreement, as drawn by R. Sikoryak.

after Jim Steranko

after Curtis, Bradley, and Edgington

after Charles M. Schulz

after Mike Mignola

after Will Eisner, Jules Feiffer, and Jerry Grandenetti

after Hergé

after Don Heck and John Romita

after Katsuhiro Otomo

after Edward Gorey

Scott McCloud

after Moebius

after Ian Boothby and John Costanza

See also

• Lighten Up – the subtle racism of shifting skin tones in comics
• A detailed look at Apple’s new San Fransisco typeface
• Apple’s “1997” concept video from 1987

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Lighten Up, by Ronald Wimberly

Continue reading on The Nib →

(via Matt Bors)

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Ten characters in 100 styles, by Jaakko Seppälä

‘Akira’ fan made live-action trailer

The Akira Project is a crowd-sourced, non-profit project meant to create a live action fan trailer of AKIRA, the renowned manga-turned-anime film from the late 1980s

(via Wired)

xkcd PSA on free speech

xkcd 1357: Free Speech:

Alt text: I can’t remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you’re saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it’s not literally illegal to express.

Plus I saw this pretty perfect tweet by @gracepetrie on the same subject at around the same time:

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Comic Neue

Comic Sans wasn’t designed to be the world’s most ubiquitous casual typeface. Comic Neue aspires to be the casual script choice for everyone including the typographically savvy.

The squashed, wonky, and weird glyphs of Comic Sans have been beaten into shape while maintaining the honesty that made Comic Sans so popular.

Comic Neue is free and has been released into the public domain by Craig Rozynski.

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By Grant Snider.

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Amazon Storyteller is a smart new tool that creates storyboards automatically from uploaded movie scripts.

The project is currently in beta, but can automatically identify scenes, locations and characters from a script that has been uploaded to Amazon Studios, the company’s division for developing exclusive movies, comics and television shows. It then “casts” these objects from a library of assets that includes “thousands” of characters, props and backgrounds.

Nick Summers, The Next Web

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The Philosophy of Hayao Miyazaki, a comic by Ashley Allis.

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I’ve been enjoying LARP Trek, a fairly new webcomic by Josh Millard that has the crew of the Next Generation Enterprise (circa season 3) roleplaying a game set on Deep Space Nine – as dreamt up by Geordi.

The two most recent strips have been particularly good. There’s no roleplaying here as the characters take a time out and Worf chats to Data:

When I read the dialogue I hear the character’s voices perfectly.

Full track from Hans Zimmer’s Man of Steel score

Sounds like the music from the Man of Steel trailer to me. It’s not nearly as bold as John Williams’ Superman theme, but I like the mood. The drums are certainly very exciting. Zimmer’s Batman theme never grew on me however — even now I can’t recall it — though if I’m honest when I hum the Williams’ Superman theme I tend to transition into humming Star Wars.

(via Collider)

See also: Zimmer on John Williams’ Superman Theme – uk.ign.com

Judge Minty

Judge Minty is a short film based on a minor character from the 2000AD strip, Judge Dredd.

Good production values, excellent score.

Apple bans Saga issue from iOS

Update: A statement from David Steinberger, the CEO of
comiXology, has revealed that in fact Apple did not ban the comic. “As a partner of Apple, we have an obligation to respect its policies for apps and the books offered in apps. Based on our understanding of those policies, we believed that Saga #12 could not be made available in our app, and so we did not release it today.” Though I’m still curious to know exactly what happened. I’ve also read elsewhere that Saga has included a hetero-blowjob before (I’m behind in my reading – I like the graphic novels) which contrary to my view below does seem to make this a hypocritical decision – whoever made it.

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There’s a lot I like about Apple products, but I utterly resent that they keep pulling this censorship crap.

As has hopefully been clear from the first page of our first issue, SAGA is a series for the proverbial “mature reader.” Unfortunately, because of two postage stamp-sized images of gay sex, Apple is banning tomorrow’s SAGA #12 from being sold through any iOS apps. This is a drag, especially because our book has featured what I would consider much more graphic imagery in the past, but there you go. Fiona and I could always edit the images in question, but everything we put into the book is there to advance our story, not (just) to shock or titillate, so we’re not changing shit.
Brian K. Vaughan’s statement on Apple’s Banning of Saga

People have been quick to cry ‘homophobia’, but I’m not convinced that is the case here. The image is explicit even by Saga’s standards, and it wouldn’t be any less so if a woman featured. Say what you will about Apple, but they’ve been pretty vocal supporters of equality.

Concept art: The 1997 ‘Hulk’ movie that never happened

Benton Jew’s full-figure rendering of The Hulk

Much more on ComicBookMovie.com:

Conceptual illustrator, Benton Jew, had the privilege of working on not one, not two, but three live-action Hulk films: Jonathan Hensleigh’s defunct Hulk film (1997), Ang Lee’s 2003 film, and Louis Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk (2008).

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Dresden Codak — Caveman Science Fiction

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Supergirl

Wonder Woman

Elektra

Michael Lunsford’s fully-dressed redesigns of superheroines, via Buzzfeed.

Fully awesome. DC, Marvel and the rest need to reboot with designs like these now.