BYOpenWOrkShOp

emerging Comics

This collection is Copyright © 2012 by Open Workshop. All stories and artwork is printet with the permission of the authors and artists.

Open Workshop is supported by The Danish Film Institute and Viborg Municipality.

Edited by Tom Kristensen

Cover artwork by Tom Kristensen 2012

Set in Adobe Myriad Pro

Cover font Slightly altered I want my TTR!© Dan Zadorozny 2001

Pagination set in EvilGenius BB © Nate Piekos 2006

No Part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronical, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the creators.

All rights reserved.

Introduction by Per Kristensen 1

If Comics Were Films by Martin Bruun Pedersen & Jonas Andreassen 2

The Playwright by Lars Kramhoeft & Tom Kristensen 4

Corazón by Per Kristensen & Tom Kristensen 10

What’s so special about those Funny-books? By Lars Kramhoeft 20

Sunbed by Martin Bruun Pedersen 24

MoCCA by Tom Kristensen 32

Denmark’s first comic for iPad by Erik Barkman 35

Made Flesh preview by Lars Kramhoeft & Tom Kristensen 37

The Flight of the Mighty Ironbolt preview by Lasse Rasmussen 43

Black and Blue Preview by Lars Kramhøft & Kristian Bay Kirk 46

emerging ComicsThe tip of the iceberg

Welcome! The magazine you are now holding in your hand shows some of the work of new talents on the comic stage in Denmark. They are people with a story to tell and a great visual way to tell it. As you will see from the comics in this magazine, something interesting is brewing in Viborg. But this is really just the tip of the iceberg.The comics you see here originate from a creative environment called Open Workshop in Viborg, Denmark. It’s an artist residency where everybody can apply to develop or produce an “animation-related” project, and that includes comics! Open Workshop is a bustling, international talent centre with 40 artists at present! We provide facilities, materials, and equipment, so that people can realize their own fantastic project. Everything is possible!That’s not all, though. There is a new education in the pipeline at The Animation Workshop (the mother institution of Open Workshop): a professional bachelor’s degree in COMICS. I’m not kidding! 8 artists will be accepted every two years, and after three years of hands-on studies and one semester’s internship, graduates are ready to work as full-fledged comic book artists, graphic

novelists, storyboarders, developers of visual concepts and graphic universes, and all the other ancillary job functions in this field. It’s pretty amazing!Well, back to the magazine at hand – the tip of this iceberg of creative awesomeness. The content in Emerging Comics is as diverse as the artists themselves. From the unfortunate tale of Thaddeus Stirhammer in The Playwright, and the strange and cautionary story Sunbed, over the crazy 1-panel comic strips If Comics Were Films, to the historical Corazón in which yours truly played a part. Did you ever wonder what MoCCA in New York is like? Emerging Comics brings you there through Tom Kristensen’s travel comic MoCCA. In this magazine you will also see previews of the web comic Flight of the Mighty Ironbolt, the noir-style Black and Blue, and Made Flesh. Made Flesh was originally developed specifically for iPad, but the preview here is for the printed version. You can even read the interview with Tom Kristensen by the comic magazine Nummer 9 about Made Flesh, as well as Lars Kramhøft’s article about the magic of comics What’s so special about those Funny-books?Please enjoy!

Per KristensenOpen Workshop coordinator

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If Comics Were Filmsby Jonas Andreassen and Martin Bruun Pedersen

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Chile 1973

It’s time.

Let’s go yousocialist pig!

Where are your union brothers now, campesino?

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My brothers? Escaped. I hope.

What happened? It’s all falling apart.

Popular Unidad, What we have built...

...worked so hard for...

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Did Allende really kill himself as they say?

I don’t believe it! They killed the president!

Destroyed by Pinochet and the military!

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The people will revolt. They cannot silence

all of us.

Chile could be democratic, fair, prosperous!

It must be!

Where are you now...

Caravana de la Muerte. The death squad.

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“Hello handsome“

it was all it took...

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Or, do they really still make comic books?

By Lars Kramhoeft

Earlier this year I was in New York for the annual Museum of Comics & Cartoon Art Festival (MoCCA). I was couchsurfing with a lovely finish girl who was kind of enough to invite Igor Norohna and I to a party at her place one evening. She incidentally lived in the part of New York formally known as Clinton, which of course any real comic fan will recognize by its less flattering handle, ”Hell’s Kitchen”. At one point during the party one of my host’s friends asked me what my business in New York was, and I told her about MoCCA. Yes, I even went so far as mentioning that I myself was in the business of making comics. To this she replied something along the lines of

”Oh, I didn’t know anyone still made those.”

I’m sure you can imagine that a casual statement like that can be cause for reflection for someone who to a large degree has devoted his life to reading -and creating comics. Why is it that some of us seem to think comic books is the absolute pinnacle of popular entertainment when most everyone else thinks they’ve long since gone the way of dinosaurs, conical bras and UFO-sightings ? And why indeed, do some of us spend hours upon hours

making them? You can’t really talk about comics these days without addressing the proverbial elephant in the living room; the fact that comics simply aren’t selling like they used to. It’s really, really hard to make a living making comics these days. Back in the 90s an issue of Spider-Man could sell 9 million copies. Nowadays it’s a miracle if a popular title like Justice League sells 200.000 copies. Or how about this; I can remember a time when as a kid you could walk into any gas station and be greeted by a many-colored miasma of enticing comic-book covers. Nowadays you’ll have to dig through several magazines about Iphones to get to a dog-eared copy of Donald Duck. So again, why? Why don’t we just forget comics and leave them to die like pandas that refuse to copulate?

Maybe because we believe comics still have something truly unique to offer.

Reading a comic is a solitary, almost intimate experience. You can’t bring your friends or a hot girl (provided you know any) to read a comic. Comics are flat, static and silent. Like the overlooked, geeky girl with the glasses in the back of the classroom they sit quietly and wait for you to ask them out, in which case they will reveal their rich inner worlds to you. Theirs is a mysterious realms of ink and dreams waiting inside the humble medium of the paper to be activated by you, the reader. Like all reading, you must sit down and concentrate to make this happen. You

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must use your imagination and let your brain fill out the empty space in the gutter between the panels. That’s where the real magic happens – whether it’s the most intimate moments tapping into your own memories, or your very own big-budget Hollywood blockbuster starring Wonder Woman and Batman. Computer Graphics might have made actors fly and swing between buildings on strands of web, but rest assured, the Spider-man in the comics, the way I see him, is waaaay cooler than anything that will ever swing across a screen. Like in a book, you decide the pacing. You can stop at any time and let yourself be absorbed in a single image, or you can speed up the process if you can’t wait to see what happens. You can flip back and forth through story-time at your leisure. Not confined by the dimensions of the screen, panels can change size and shape to reflect whatever happens within them. Time and space can be manipulated in ways film can only dream about (only just recently has the medium of film, thanks to the advent of computer graphics, become able to recreate what comic book artists created more than sixty years ago).

Comics create worlds that are entirely their own.

Worlds and characters designed from scratch, limited not by actors, locations or budgets, but only by the imagination and skill of their creators. And as you read a comic, activating the magic embedded through blood, sweat and tears into

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the page, the story also becomes yours. And comics can give us the best of both worlds – the juxtaposition of the written word and the image. That’s why I always felt like we don’t so much READ a comic, as we EXPERIENCE it.

As a creative person it’s also hard to think of a more appealing medium than comics. Really, all you need to make the magic happens is paper and pens. If you have access to a Xerox machine and a stapler, you can even mass-produce your creations and force your friends and family to buy them.

It’s the perfect DIY medium. even you could do it. Like I’ve said, comics can be compared to the geeky, quietly brilliant kid at school. She didn’t get on the cheerleading team and she wasn’t elected queen of the prom. In a world full of noisy advertising, bug-fuck hysterical music videos and hyper-realistic video games, does a medium like this really stand a chance? Digital comics could be the way to go. Writer Robert Kirkman once said that he didn’t care if kids would one day read comics on screens implanted in their wrists – as long as they read comics, and I have to agree. In her book “Quiet - the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking”, which has been on the best-seller list in the US, author Susan Cain predicts a new trend that values the ability to commune with one self, to reflect, analyze and stimulate one self.

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If this holds true, maybe the quiet, less boisterous medium of comics also stands a chance at a revival? Or maybe one day, when civilization crashes and we run out of electricity, people will no longer be able to recharge their tablets, smartphones and laptops, and will have to look elsewhere for the escapism of imaginary worlds and stories.

Or maybe we just have to continue doing what we doing – and develop some confidence that we actually have an amazing medium on our hands.

Comics are going to change, and there’s no telling how they are going to look or how many people will be reading them fifty years from now, but I know they are here to stay. The medium has too much potential to ever die out. To be perfectly honest, I would continue to make comics even if it was just for my own sake. All I can do here is try to convey a bit of the sense of wonder I feel when I pick up a new comic. And encourage you to give that same sense of wonder a try. Since my friend and colleague Martin Pedersen’s ground-breaking announcement (or possibly statement of complete and irredeemable anti-social behavior) in 2009 to produce a graphic novel instead of a bachelor film on his third year as a Computer Graphics Artist, The Animation Workshop has spawned a number of high quality comic book projects.

Something is stirring in the underground. Apparently the rumors of our death have been highly exaggerated. And we do still need all kinds of new comics – stories for boys and for girls, for children and for grown-ups. Comics that explore new ground as well as comics that

stay true to what made them so great in the first place. Next year The Animation Workshop carries out its plans to start a bachelor in graphic storytelling (and don’t let the fancy name fool you folks, I promise you, it’s all about comics!). Here’s hoping that some of these new-comers will create works that will convince future generations that comics are still capable of creating magic and are worth reading. And that the work my friends and I at Open Workshop have done through the past couple of years will help pave the way for a new wave of international quality comics. It’s almost as if it’s just waiting to happen, isn’t it?

SUnBeDby Martin Bruun Pedersen

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Denmark’s first comic for ipadShortened Interview by Erik Barkman

Comic creators Tom kristensen and Lars kramhoeft are concocting the first danish comic specifically made for tablets.

Made Flesh is a horror comic with artwork by Tom Kristensen and script by Lars Kramhoeft. It is also the first Danish comic created specifically for the purpose of being read on an iPad. An outline is forming in a Danish context of an innovative fusion of comics and animation…

First and foremost: Why a comic for ipad? What can the ipad do that paper can’t?

Tablets have the ability to integrate animation, sound and music and that provides a lot of opportunities. Furthermore, Tablets have the touch navigation which makes the reading experience more tangible compared to web comics. The new iPads have a gyroscope incorporated that measures the movements of the iPad on 3 axes, and I would very much like to investigate how to use this in a comic-related context.

Briefly describe the ipad-specific tools that you bring into play in Made Flesh

One of the “tools” I’ve used in our prototype is for instance the hijacking of the navigation. It’s a form of animation that I saw in the Korean web comic Bong cheong dong ghost and it works quite brilliantly. In addition, I used a zoom effect on one of the scenes. I was inspired by Scott McCloud’s web comic The Right Number in which the whole story is being told through zooms. I thought that it might be an effective way of giving the reader a sense of being submerged into the story - or into the psyche of a character. Finally, there are a lot of flashbacks in Lars’ story so I have used an animation of images shown rapidly after another in order to underline the change in scene and time.

It would be immensely exciting to create the navigation to follow the story arch. For example, when the protagonist is depressed the navigation would go downwards, and when he or she is happy the navigation would go up!

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The challenge with these sorts of projects is to find new ways of interactive storytelling with pictures without losing the power of comics. Where do you think the happy medium can be found?

That’s a good question. I don’t think I have found it just yet. The prototype became quite frugal when it comes to the interactivity, partly because of troubles with developers, and partly because I didn’t want it to become a cheap computer game nor an animation film. However, I do think I can push it a bit further. The goal must be to create comics that maintain the importance of the story and pictures and at the same time are capable of expanding the reading experience.

Originally published on Nummer9.dk

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preview of Made Flesh - the print version

by Lars Kramhoeft & Tom Kristensen

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preview

Despite that comics have always been on the backseat when talking about media popularity, recent years have seen a boom in products inspired from this weird mix between pictures and words.

But while movies and games based on comics can do surprisingly well (Take “The Avengers” for example), it’s quite another challenge to start a comic from the get-go. This, I believe stems from the risks, publishers of hard-copy comics have to take in our competitive world. That’s why it’s exceedingly rare that you

FLIGhT OF The MIGhTY IrOnBOLT

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find people making a living solely based on their comic craft.

And as many creators today still fight a never-ending battle to have their hard work financed by economically hard-pressed publishers, a new exciting trend has grown out on the internet that might give comic creators some well-needed solutions.

Web-comics – digitally distributed comics, mostly updated once a week and (almost always) for free no less – have millions of readers and span all topics imaginable. Combining what essentially is absolute artistic freedom with ease of access, web comics have the potential to become

the new powerhouse of sequential storytelling.

The problem, I believe, stems from the fact what web-comics have in ease of access and lower costs, they lack in quality. I want to change that. I first and foremost believe in the power of riveting story-telling – I want to work hard to engage the reader in the characters and worlds I aim to present and make them experience the widest palette of emotions possible. With Flight of the Mighty Ironbolt, it will be my humble charge to give you a lovable sci-fi universe and an opportunity to get swept up in my adventure.

...Continues

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Flight of the Mighty Ironbolt details the travails of Dominique DeJarnette, a French-Asian woman who’s inadvertently thrust into the position of great importance.

In the future, as cryogenic research – the research into freezing humans and later reviving them – reaches its last stage.

Dominque, the daughter of an affluent diplomatic couple, volunteers for a 6 month test.

The test is more or less a media stunt, only needed for some last moment tweaks before cryogenics are greenlit for practical use in deep-space exploration.

The test goes well – or so she thinks. As she awakens from her sleep, she soon learns that she’s not on Earth anymore. Onboard a deep-space Ark vessel, she encounters Custo, a robotic advisor, companion and caretaker who cordially informs her that her 6 month sleep has in fact lasted 30.000 years. Earth has been destroyed and humanity is hidden and scattered throughout the galaxy on huge Sleeper Ships; Ships that she has been charged to find and activate.Charged with this heavy burden, Dominique is forced out into a galactic trek of epic proportions alongside the colorful and devil-may-care alien crew of the Mercenary Ship, The Mighty Ironbolt.

Taking inspiration from classical titles such as Firefly the sci-fi game Homeworld, Indiana Jones and Star Wars, I hope to invite the reader into an exciting and harrowing adventure through a vibrant and messy galaxy.

You can follow the development of this web-comic on my development blog below:

http://flightofmighty.blogspot.dk/

By Lasse Rasmussen

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Preview:Black and Blue by Lars Kramhoeft and Kristian Bay Kirk

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