What
have been your personal cartooning/comics highlights of 2012?
I
did a political cartoon for which I drew a caricature of John
Key, which made me feel like a "real editorial cartoonist". Political cartoons aren't really my thing, but it was fun for
the context of it. He was the easy part. I wanted to draw an
authentic rendition of the corner of Sunset and Vine for the
environment, so I even Google mapped it. It got too
complicated until I finally said “fuckit”, and just drew the
street signs and some hills behind them. The hills are probably even
the wrong shape, but I think I captured Key's gleeful enthusiasm.
Does
rediscover count? Near the beginning of the year I started this Carl
Barks frenzy, going into this total vacuum for a few weeks during
which a disproportionate part of my waking hours were spent thinking
about Uncle Scrooge. I also spent a lot of time reading Schultz.
Another highlight was corresponding with Herr Seele about getting one
of his Cowboy Henk books. He was concerned that the book was in
Dutch, but there was no adequate way to articulate to him that his
cartoons are so wonderfully executed that they need no text.
Sometimes you can become so sycophantic that it's better to play it
cool and not go overboard.
What is something non-comics that you have enjoyed in 2012? (i.e. movies, film, prose, ballet, opera, fine art, exhibitions, etc)
I
spent a bit of time at auctions this year, overcome with panic
whenever works by the late Sir Peter Siddell were on the floor. His
work has been a mild obsession for me since I was at high school, so
it was an opportunity to see some of the lesser known paintings and
other works that aren't held publicly.
Have you implemented any significant changes to your working methods this year?
Not
really, I've been working the same way since 1995, with a brush and
ink. I did go from doing everything on the page to drawing panels
separately and assembling them using Photoshop, but I don't like that
so I switched back. I prefer to have a page of original art that is a
standalone piece of work on its own outside the “post production”
environment, so prefer to keep it all on paper.
What are you looking forward to in 2013?
I've got some renewed interest in the children's stories I've been
working on, so any non editorial comics or illustrative work will be for young
readers. I've been working out how to translate the stories and books
to moving image, and have seen a hybrid stop motion/2D drawing video
that I quite liked, so might adapt that format for my own stuff. A
video of me reading my children's book, Mr. Gloomingdale's Downpour,
has had a decent amount of views on Youtube for something that's not
about cats squeezing each others' blackheads while wearing top hats,
so adapting that will be one of the first experiments.
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