Malaak, Angel of Peace

V21

noreply@blogger.com (Joumana) — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 06:35:00 +0000

Answers at last!!
Please note I'm in the process of moving house (yes this comes as much as a surprise to me as it does to you) so there's a chance I'll miss next week's update!

Sketch page:

V20

noreply@blogger.com (Joumana) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:15:00 +0000

Apologies for this delay due to life demands that were frankly impossible to ignore. All the more frustrating to me because this is such a key moment of the story in my eyes. I can say that I have just been given an imperious reason to complete the comic as soon as possible, so I have a lot of incentive not to let such delays happen again. The next page is being colored and shaded and so should be on schedule. Critiques welcome as usual!

And here's the sketch page:

V18-19

noreply@blogger.com (Joumana) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 12:20:00 +0000

What this is will be revealed in upcoming pages, but I just wanted to mention that I had no idea this was there when I started on this volume ;) The idea came suddenly as I sat in Paperchase's coffeeshop during my last stay in London. Can't imagine the story without it now!

There is still some work to be done on the shading, but I'll be all tied up for a few days starting this afternoon so I wanted to get this up before I disappear. Also I may replace/add to the symbols later, as I have more interesting ones scribbled on a piece of paper back in Beirut.

Sketch page:

V17

noreply@blogger.com (Joumana) — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 06:00:00 +0000

This is one page that was only added because I needed pages 18-19 to fall on the same spread, but it turned out to be a valuable addition – not only does it look good, it also addresses a number of things in passing (this is for you comickers struggling with conveying extra info without turning it into an exposition scene:) where the cannons seen from the outside are, why they're silent while Malaak and Amer are inside (they're not!), why they don't encounter them on their way up, and why they don't do anything about them. Oh and the fact that some time has passed since we last saw them, during which they wandered into several dead ends "offscreen". All in 4 panels, with the next 2 preparing the next page...

Creepy cliffhanger notwithstanding, happy Christmas!

As a bonus today, this lovely fan art by Ally Rom Colthoff (aka Varethane), author of the webcomic Chirault which you may want to check out!

V16

noreply@blogger.com (Joumana) — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 06:00:00 +0000

It's terrible to have a crush on a comic character, let alone two of your own creation! *cough*
Hope the heat and sweat are conveyed, maybe I should give a slightly redder tinge here...

V15

noreply@blogger.com (Joumana) — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 09:54:00 +0000

As promised, a new page at last! So Amer begins to show us what he can do...
Hope the effects are alright, these are still the bane of my existence. Sketch page:

Ebooks release for volume 3

noreply@blogger.com (Joumana) — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 14:48:00 +0000

This is the last update of this kind for a while: the next post will be a new page or two, promise! The volume 3 e-books are available, and they contain no less than 46 pages of extra contents! It will be a while before volume 4 is done, because I need to translate it to French first.
Dark Dreams is available for download in English here or in French here.

Ebooks release for volume 2

noreply@blogger.com (Joumana) — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 11:05:00 +0000

I had a big burnout this week so the new pages are still pending, but most of the work was already done on the volume 2 ebooks, so I finished that up today and uploaded them. Again they contain 36 pages of extra contents: sketches, fan art, location photos and "outtakes", not to forget Adrian and Tareq's word of the day.
This volume is available for download in English here or in French here.

Ebooks release for volume 1

noreply@blogger.com (Joumana) — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 18:06:00 +0000

Still on a roll regarding the revision of past issues of Malaak, I'm excited to announce today that volume 1 is now available as an e-book in both English and French. This may interest all Malaak readers, even if you already have the books, as the digital format allowed me to include as much unpublished extra contents as I wanted. For this volume this turned out to be 30 pages of bonus stuff! These consist in sketches galore, a selection of fan art, location photos with commentary (sample page below), "outtakes", and finally a schtick by Adrian and Tareq, to recur at the end of each volume with different dialogue ;)
I'm still hard at work on this, so the other volumes should follow. For now, this one can be purchased and immediately downloaded in English here or in French here.

Meta stuff

noreply@blogger.com (Joumana) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 08:41:00 +0000

I thought I'd pause in the donkey work I've taken upon myself to give you some insights into what I've been doing for Malaak this week, aside from getting a new page up. This will probably interest comic makers more than the average reader!

First I have to explain the situation I was having to deal with. For each volume of the comic, all the original .psd files were kept, that is A3 pages with all the layers preserved. There was also a flattened version, sized down to A4, that was used in the inDesign document where the book was laid out, for printing purposes, as it would be quite insane to work with and send the fully layered ones to the printer. Of these there was a French version, and an Arabic version (even though these are not published, I've been working on them for some time.)
That's 4 versions of each page for each of the 4-eventually-to-be-7 volumes of Malaak. Simply mental, as I realized when I needed to retouch old pages and found the task was multiplied by 4. My retouching, then, turned into a monumental rehaul akin to the widening of the Victorian sewage system, but one that will make things vastly simpler (and less memory-consuming) for me in the future:

- First, the retouching proper. In the first 3 volumes I treated night scenes in a way that was turning out too dark. In vol. 4 I figured out a much better treatment, so I had to go back and apply it to all past night scenes.

- In vol. 1 and the first few pages of vol. 2, I miscalculated the margins, so that they were much too narrow in print. Also, because I fixed that in subsequent pages, I now had an inconsistency across the series. I had to go and reformat those first 35 pages so their margins would be the same as what I'm working with now. This meant completing all their bleeds, because the inside of the page would shrink, leaving white areas past the old bleed. This was particularly difficult with the first 15 pages: due to a hard drive failure back in 2007, I lost their layered versions and only had the flattened pages to work with. Urgh!
This retouching was done on the originals. For some of them I saved the older version as well, just in case.

- Each page was then flattened except for the text and sound effects, resized to A4 and 350 dpi (the way the printer takes them) and saved in a different folder. The originals are now sacred and untouchable while it's not a problem if something happens to the smaller ones. To save myself having to open a file to check its specs in the future, the folder name says everything I need to know: "final 350 A4 flat RGB"

What I'm now doing is recreating all the text in the InDesign documents, before stripping it from the Photoshop pages. I had to come to terms with the fact this is the only way I can use the same image, most of the time, for all 3 languages I work with. It'll also make translation much easier in the future. The reason I had stayed away from that before was because it presented some problems, which I had to solve first:

- French takes up more space than English, so there was the occasional need to increase the size of the speech bubble, and the font I'm using didn't have any accented characters, so I had to add them with a brush in Photoshop. Solutions: An extra effort to be more concise in French!! Also, reducing leading when needed is hardly noticeable, but helps fit more lines in. As for the font, I did what I should have done long ago: opened the bloody thing in Font Lab and created the missing characters myself before exporting it as my own version of it. I couldn't treat most sound effects in InDesign because they're often inserted between layers of artwork, but translating them is really optional, so I let them be.

- Arabic needs a lot more work. Here I have to translate the sound effects, but I also have to flip the pages so that the reading direction is correct. A lot of the time it's not straightforward flipping: I have to go back into the page to flip back any written details, such as shop signs or graffiti, so they still look right. Also, some well-known locations, such as the Corniche in vol.1, just can't be flipped without looking wrong. I can't help people driving on the left side and Malaak's "tattoo" moving to the right side, those are things Arabic readers will have to deal with, but it's far better than having to force yourself to read in an unnatural direction, as happens with cheaply published manga in the West.
Anyway, I realized that I don't have that many pages that need reworking. Most of them can be simply flipped in InDesign itself. Those that need reworking and sound effects can be saved as a different file: it's still much better than to have all the pages duplicated.

There remains one "detail" to sort out for the Arabic: I'm not satisfied with any of the fonts around, none of which are suitable for a comic book (the couple of handwritten Arabic fonts out there were seemingly made by monkeys), so I'm developing my own. I have the most qualified adviser anyone can ask for, but this will probably take forever. So that's holding up any release of the Arabic. In the meanwhile, I'm nearly done reformatting the English and French.

Finally, another reason why I'm fixing everything up is to release these volumes as ebooks in all 3 languages. What's the point of ebooks when they can be read online for free, you may ask? Mostly, it's for people who want to support the comic but can't afford ordering physical copies (those darn shipping costs.) But there is a tremendous advantage to them: bonus contents. Vol. 1 alone, which is already done, has about 20 pages of sketches. I have a lot more in mind for the rest. I can't include such material in print due to cost, but there's no limit to what I can add to an ebook.

End of verbosity and back to the grind!

V14

noreply@blogger.com (Joumana) — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 06:43:00 +0000

A bit of a Batman moment, teehee. Malaak doesn't actually harm human fighters, but they don't know that.
Starting to get used to shading the cave-like interior, and finding it rather fun now.

Here's the sketch page:

Self-publishing tips: Offset printing (pt 2)

noreply@blogger.com (Joumana) — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 06:45:00 +0000

Continued from part 1, which covered resolution, color space, page size and position.

Number of pages:

While diversification of printing techniques means this is no longer always an issue, it remains an issue to be aware of when printing with offset. I am talking about the fact the number of pages in a book needs to be a multiple of 16. This is due to the way offset printing, which makes use of large plates, works:

These signatures of 16 pages are bound together to form a book of 32, 48, 64 etc pages.

Based on the above, let's clarify: to get your money's worth, the number of pages needs to be a multiple of 16, because you're paying for 16 pages at a time anyway. The plates represent the biggest part of the cost, and one 16-page signature in full color requires no less than 8 plates (1 for each of the 4 CMYK colors for each of the 2 sides of the sheet). No matter how much or how little contents there is, a 16-page signature must be produced using these 8 plates*. Therefore, a 36-page book and a 48-page book cost the same, which is 3 signatures, but the 36-page one is wasting 12 whole pages. They won't show up as blank pages because the printer will remove them, but if you're printing 1000 copies, that's 12,000 wasted pages you paid for! If the number of pages isn't a multiple of 4, however, there will be blank pages by necessity.

*There are ways to reduce this, for instance by having every other page blank or a single color, or using special plates, but this really requires working with the printer and I won't attempt to suggest them here – if interested, it's as simple as asking your printer "What can I change to cut printing costs?"

This is why it's important to have an inkling of how many pages your story will take up. If it runs just a little over a multiple of 16, it's worth condensing it a little to save you a whole signature's expense. If it falls a little short of one, plan for bonus contents to fill up those pages. Make sure to take metacontents into account, such as the title page (this can eat up to 4 pages) and anything else that needs to be included (in my case, the language notes on the last page). Comic pages plus metacontents should be equal to a multiple of 16.

If you're publishing a series, planning is even more important as it's a good idea to keep all volumes the same number of pages. If printing cost varies greatly from one to the other, they will have to be priced differently, and also, if page count i.e weight varies, shipping cost will also vary. Believe me, you don't want to have this kind of complication within the same series when you sell it on your website or send it to bookshops.

This is assuming you're not an eccentric billionaire making comics in your spare time. When expenditure is not an issue, such rules can be ignored...

Margins and bleeds:

In a printed page, the inner edge gets eaten up by binding and the outer edge by cropping. Exactly how depends on binding type:
- Saddle stitch is when the book is folded down and stapled, as is the case with floppies. Note I don't recommend this at all because it looks so cheap, but if your book is too thin for other types of binding, you may have no choice. In any case, this is what happens with this binding:

Notice how much more of the inner pages get cut than the outer pages. If your margins are just enough, they may look fine on the first pages, but near the middle of the book they'll get very thin and some of the art may even be cut. On the other hand, the inner margins are fine throughout, as this binding allows the book to open almost flat at any page.

- Perfect binding is when pages are glued together to the spine and the cover wraps around that, allowing for a title to be printed on the spine if thick enough. The glue can be reinforced by sideways stapling, but that is quite hidden. It looks cleaner, more professional and makes a much better impression, but can only be used starting from a certain thickness (more on that under Paper considerations). With this binding:

The damage to the outer margins is much less, because pages are put together in smaller signatures (fewer are folded together). On the inside, however, there's a slight cut just to remove the thickness of the fold, and a full 0.5 cm eaten up by glue and by the fact you can't open the pages fully without breaking the spine. This is where the inner margins need to be given ample space. My advice would be to always aim and work for this type of binding: a graphic novel has nothing to gain from saddle stitch, and if it's too short or flimsy for perfect binding it may not be worth the expense of offset printing – best wait to have several chapters and print something more substantial.

- Let me also mention hardcover binding, though this is not usually affordable without a successful Kickstarter campaign or some other funding. This is the king of commercial bindings, with signatures stitched together so the book is flat and even when closed, and opens neatly anywhere.

The outer edge of the pages is cut but as signatures are 16 pages, there isn't a dramatic effect as with saddle stitch.

This was so you can visualize how to plan margins depending on future binding. Before getting down to preparing them, we need to discuss bleeds. A bleed is when the artwork extends to the edge of the printed page. This is not a necessity, plenty of comics and graphic novels keep away from it, and they can ignore this bit. However, if your artwork bleeds, then it needs to bleed beyond the edge of the page. Cutting is never completely accurate (we've seen how binding influences where it falls), and if the art doesn't extend enough, you can end up with a very unsightly white line on the edge of the page. The industry standard for bleeds is 3 mm (at least on my side of the ocean): that's 3 mm added to the size of your printed page, on each side that will be cut. To clarify this, let's create a page template that you can then use for all the pages in your comic. If you work on paper, this is still useful for calculating measurements.

Decide on your margins. There’s no set rule for their size, but they should not be thinner than 1.5 cm. 2 is better, and they can be much broader to create a certain effect. If at a loss, examine comics of the same size as yours. How wide are the margins, and do they seem right, or too thin, or too much?

There's one more step to complete! This is the page at printing size, but we want our template to be at working size. This is where you increase the size of your template by going to Image > Image size and entering the value that works for you, for instance 150% or A3. The reason we started with final size and worked backward is that it's a headache to calculate what a margin should be on the larger size so that it becomes 2 cm when reduced. I made the huge oversight, when I first started, of adding my bleeds to an A3 page, so that they were much too thin once scaled down – but I never realized until the book was completed, and I had to go and rework them all!

Once you have this template done, you can create all your pages from it and know they will be correct when rescaled. Don't forget to create a template for even-numbered pages, by flipping the canvas horizontally (this will reverse the guidelines as well.)

Choice of paper:

One of the prime advantages of offset is that you have the full range of paper at your disposal, including metallic paper if you so fancy! Visit the printer or at least ask for samples, because even supposedly "plain white" paper comes in a variety of textures and coating. There's no right or wrong here, you need to choose based on your own vision of the look and feel of your book. I imagine many people won't want to go so far and just want simple white paper, but be at least aware of this: the standard paper types of the book industry will come at least as uncoated, coated, semi-gloss or glossy. Uncoated is like your average printer paper, fine for novels but not recommended for color work as the surface is rough and the ink will spread a little. Coated is better for fine printing, but dulls colors. Glossy is the finest but the shiny pages are distracting and they take fingerprints like nobody's business. Semi-gloss is the best compromise and will keep your colors vibrant without attracting attention to itself.

Now an important consideration is the paper weight, and this is where sitting with the printer can really pay off. What is too thin, and what is too heavy? It would not be useful for me to give numbers, because that varies subtly with the nature of the paper, but as an example, I use 135gsm paper for my comic's contents, and 250gsm for the cover. At first I used heavier paper for both, but with the second volume my page count rose and what was a beautiful balance became very heavy and problematic. Here are things to think about:
- Heavier paper: it looks better, makes the book feel more valuable. It also makes it heavier, hence higher shipping costs. It also makes it thicker, so it's quickly too thick for stapling, but by the same token it allows you to use perfect binding with less pages. Finally, thicker books mean they take up more space wherever you're stocking them.
- Lighter paper: if it's too light it feels flimsy and cheap. But if you have a lot of pages, it can make the book lighter and less onerous to ship and to stock. It can force you to use saddle stitch if your page count is low.
A printer can upon request (if they're good with clients) make a mock-up of your book using blank paper of the weight requested, so that you can see exactly what it feels like, how thick it is, and how much it weighs. This way you can conceivable tailor a book to look as good as possible while remaining within a certain weight category, if most of your sales will be by mailing the book yourself. For the cover at least I can say that 250 is almost ideal for a softcover: lighter than that and it doesn't feel like a cover, heavier and it can create problems during binding. Always have your cover laminated to give it that quality finish that will also protect it.

Finally, think of the planet.

Some printers have converted to eco-friendly printing processes. They use water-based inks and plates that degrade without poisoning the environment. These printers may be a little more expensive, but that is something we owe. In the end, our work is not a necessity, and no matter how many people derive pleasure from it, printing it remains a little act of vanity that consumes paper and energy. The least we can do is give a little extra to limit the harm we do in the process.

V13

noreply@blogger.com (Joumana) — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 16:11:00 +0000

Oh boy. I thought the organic backgrounds were going to save me a lot of time, but what I saved coloring, I put into shading! Looking good though, this is much more fun to draw and shade than manmade things.

Sketch page:

Self-publishing tips: Offset printing (pt 1)

noreply@blogger.com (Joumana) — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 06:45:00 +0000

Comic authors today benefit from increased choice in terms of how to publish. Digital publishing, aka the way of webcomics, are the obvious nearly-universal choice for both those who wish to print at some point an those who don't intend to. Print-on-demand (PoD) similarly makes it possible for everyone to make their work available as a book; despite its many limitations it's better than no possibility. Digital printing and various means offered by copy centers also present opportunities for enterprising artists to print small runs of books at a relatively modest cost, with more control over the final product than PoD allows. But the most exciting development, as far as I'm concerned, is that today sites like Kickstarter give everyone a chance to access good old offset printing, which this post is dedicated to. Here I list a number of things to know, do and avoid in order to make the most out of offset printing, based on my personal training and experience printing comics and other books with various printers (with a lot of trial and error.)

Why bother with offset in the first place, given its cost and the fact you'll have to stock the books? Because nothing out there matches the possibilities and quality it offers. You get to pick the paper type, weight, color, size and to control the quality of the result. If you fancy it, you can include inserts, die-cuts or special inks. It also is far superior printing to anything else out there for books. It all depends on how much you see your final product as a beautiful object to be kept. It is also necessary if you have a mind to get your book into bookshops (but that's a matter I won't go into right now).

If there's even the remote chance you might go the offset route when your comic is completed, it is best to work for offset from the very beginning.

Resolution:

Never work under 300 dpi. That is the lower limit of what is acceptable for a good printed result, despite the fact PoD accepts resolutions as low as 150 dpi (which tells you something about the relative quality of PoD!) Many recommend working at 600 dpi, which is a good idea for a black and white comic, but unnecessary for color (the printer will just convert it down), especially if it's more than your computer can handle. My printer, for instance, recommends I give him 350dpi files, and the result is incredibly sharp, much sharper even than I can preview on my screen.

Never ever work at a low resolution and size it up before printing. That's an absurdity, it completely misses the point and you'll end up with ugly artifacts as if you'd taken a jpeg from the net and sized it up. If you decide to print a comic you've created at low-res you will have to redo it for it to be suitable (as I had to do with my senior year project – the lesson sticks!) So don't get into that bad habit. Always work in high-res.

Color space:

We probably all know this, but in a nutshell: light-based color is worked in an RGB space (Red, Green, Blue), while pigment-based color requires a CMYK space (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black). This means that a comic made to be seen on a screen is in RGB, but to be printed, it needs to be in CMYK.
What to do about this? There are 2 possible approaches:

• Work in CMYK from the beginning. This is fine if you're not publishing online; you'll notice some Photoshop features and filters are disabled in this mode, but this should not be a problem because you'll be working with paper in mind. However, if like me you want to have your pages available online and they need to look as good on a screen as they will on paper, this is not ideal: CMYK pages tend to look duller on-screen, even after the automatic conversion to RGB when saved as .jpg or whatnot.

• Work in RGB, so you get all the benefits of that, and convert before printing. This can work, but don't, seriously DON'T convert your pages to CMYK yourself. You will have no idea what you've done to your work until the printed book arrives. Such a conversion will add black to all your colors. In the best case scenario it'll mean the colors are not what you intended, but if your work is dark to begin with, this can be disastrous. Since you're working with a printer, there is no need whatsoever for you to do this yourself. Send the printer your flattened RGB files as .psd* and let their professionals convert them as needed. They will apply the necessary profile and make the needed adjustments so that the printed page is as close as the one on your screen as it possible can be. By the way, you're getting charged for "color correction" even if you try to do this job yourself, because they always have to do something to your files before sending to print.

* Leave the text on a separate layer. If it's black on white, they'll want to strip it from all channels other than black, so that it prints solely as K. Otherwise, it'll print as 4 colors and the slightest registration error will make it fuzzy.

If you really want to do this yourself and have managed to convince the printer not to bill for color correction, at the very least you need to ask them for a color profile. You will have to convert your pages to that color profile, not to plain CMYK, for the conversion to happen with the least possible loss.
This profile (something.icc) should be saved where you won't misplace it. To apply it, open the file you wish to convert and go Edit>Convert to Profile. Select your profile and you'll be asked whether to flatten the document. I recommend flattening so that any blend modes you have don't go all funky on you. Save as a copy, and review the page for anything that may need re-saturating (that will usually be light effects, as they suffer the most from losing the white of a light source for the white of paper).

Finally, whichever way you went, I highly recommend requesting hi-res color proofs for a few key pages. This is the only way to see, on paper, the exact colors as they will come out, and so to catch any problem before it's too late. Printers may or may not charge for these, but this is not something I would try to economize on. You may not need more than 3 or 4 pages: the cover, the darkest and lightest pages in the book, and maybe a random one or one from a sequence where color scheme is particularly important.

Page size:

As a rule, comic artists who work on paper always draw at a much larger size than will be printed. This is only logical, as there's a limit to how fine one can draw and ink, and the scaling down process is very favorable to any kind of line work: small defects disappear and the whole is tightened. This also applies to artists who work digitally, despite the zooming function that makes it possible to work at a very small scale.* Working at 150% or 200% of your final printed size can really sharpen your result – if that is what you desire, of course. Another distinct advantage is that you never know when you're going to want a larger version of a page, either to sell as a poster, or to exhibit, or other unexpected things. I've had to exhibit pages on a number of occasions by now, and I was really glad to have applied this policy from the beginning.

* This can actually cause real problems. Technically, you may end up drawing too finely for your chosen printing method. Visually, we're not supposed to see small details clearly: as objects shrink or become more distant, so the amount of details in them drops for the human eye, and it looks very odd when that is not observed. On paper it happens naturally due to the limits of drawing at a tiny size – on a digital canvas, one must be careful to keep the overall balance in sight at all times.

Page position:

This is where the publishing platform influences the very writing of the comic (and only one of the ways in which is can.) As this is not applicable online, it tends to become a lost art, but the importance of page position returns to the fore when a webcomic makes it to print and lacks this consideration. In a book, a page is never isolated, but is either on the right or the left side of a spread. A story is enhanced by proper planning of this, and weakened by its neglect. A basic rule is to keep cliffhangers at the bottom of the right-hand page (recto, or odd-numbered page), so that the reader doesn't discover what happens before they turn the page. All surprises and, if possible, changes of location, should go on the left-hand pages (verso, or even-numbered). The turning of the page acts as a cut, which is why in a similar vein some things are best kept within a spread, which works as a unified time and space – especially if those moments take up just 2 pages. Splash pages are particular instances where you have no choice at all, you have to work it so the previous page is odd-numbered. This planning takes place at the writing and sequencing stage, and I often find myself having to condense a sequence or expand one because certain pages absolutely need to be odd or even. Commercial comic just insert ads where needed, if they even take that into account. If you're taking your webcomic to print and find yourself with some awkward page positioning and nothing you can do about it now, consider inserting a pinup or some other nondisruptive full-page art (more creative solutions are possible!) – just make sure to insert it somewhere the pause makes sense, such as at the moment of a change of location.

In part 2 we'll continue with number of pages, margins and bleeds, and choice of paper!

V12 & encounter

noreply@blogger.com (Joumana) — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 07:00:00 +0000

I have to start by sharing a wonderful event, feel free to skip to the new page if not interested!

Yesterday I had the privilege, and I'm not using the word lightly, to attend a performance by Luc & François Schuiten at Beirut's Lire en Français. The brothers created a while ago a series of graphic novels, Les Terres Creuses, set in fantastical locations like Les Cités Obscures, which François creates with Benoît Peeters. The 4th album of Terres Creuses proved problematic to create as a graphic novel, so they decided to experiment and they presented the contents to us, for the very first time, in a format that wove together slides of studies done for the work, live narration, live improvised music, and live drawing that was projected alongside the slides. The performance was titled Les 8 Sages de Verda, and the finished drawing was the key to the mystery of how 7 wise men can hide an 8th, in an ending that made my jaw drop. That hour and a half was a complete trip to different worlds where architecture follows very different rules, and there was magic in the room.

Afterwards, the two authors signed their books, and I mentioned to François I had seen him in Algiers earlier in the month as I was a guest at FIBDA too. His face light up and he asked to see my work! I whipped out a copy of Malaak (never go to a book fair without a sample of your work) and received unexpected, but very welcome critique, praise and encouragements. He was delighted to meet a Lebanese comicker. He also convinced me that digital coloring didn't serve my work ("Either refine it or give it up.") and that I should learn lettering and not use fonts ("La bande dessinée, c'est le texte et l'image!") Not that I can apply it at once, being in the middle of a series, but I already know that in future work, my technique is going to change radically based on the various feedback I received from people I really look up to. Computer coloring will be the first to go, everybody knows by now how much I hate it :P

Anyway, here's your new page!

Say goodbye to sunlight, because it's going to be a while before we're outdoors again...
Also I'm about to find out how subtle my readers are, with this moment of misunderstanding between Malaak and Amer.

This page underlined for me once more how much it paid to travel... Where, might you ask, did I find such perfect, organic-looking stairs? I found them in Sri Lanka:

They're located in Mihintale, the place where Buddhism began on the island, and that's also the reason they look so beautifully worn – they've been used for over 2000 years by monks climbing up to the meditation rock (the rails are a recent addition.)

Sketch page:

V11

noreply@blogger.com (Joumana) — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 07:49:00 +0000

Oh Nryz, you are so evil.
Shockingly enough, this is not fiction. It's not often mentioned, but those who were close to the Lebanese wars are aware of this happening: unidentified parties taking advantage of the openness and simplicity of village people, at the time, to "recruit" fighters. Here's one account I heard: "These men came to the village and befriended us and we ended up having dinner. Next thing I knew, I was sitting behind a machine gun, shooting all night like a devil without feeling scared or tired. I never found out on whose side I was fighting nor whom I was shooting at."
I was also told that many who survived this unimaginable experience suffered the effects of those drugs, such as addiction, for rest of their lives. It would be naive, I think, to believe this practice started or ended in Lebanon.

Regarding the composition, it's quite experimental for me to leave so much empty space, not to mention this central motion, but the moment it came to mind it wouldn't leave anymore...

Sketch page:

V10 and interview

noreply@blogger.com (Joumana) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 07:07:00 +0000

Yes we are finally back on track, and you'll be glad to know I'm not going anywhere till mid-January so there's a chance of getting back into a real groove. As you can see, I have already resumed my despicable cliffhanger habit. Has a bri2 ever looked so sinister? (meaning the pitcher)
Here's the sketch page:

In the meanwhile I've done an interesting interview with Joanne Renaud exploring my rolemodels, first attempts at comics, and thoughts on various current things, and I'm up on her site as Artist of the Month. Here's an extract:

What media do you like to work with?
I like to play with media a lot, it’s a bit of a signature, but for consistency reasons I am pretty conservative within Malaak itself. I love the clean inked line, but I also love the texture of watercolor; I enjoy the flat technical feel of vectors (as seen in my Driving in Lebanon strips) but I also like to introduce three-dimensionality via solid objects photographed to look like they’re sitting on the page (used throughout cedarseed.com). It all depends on the subject matter. I work all this in digitally because it makes my life easier, but I prefer the physicality of things – I only ink on paper for instance, not on the screen, because without the feel of the pen sliding on the paper that would become a chore. And whereas in comic I keep a practical approach, bearing in mind future production, in other areas of my work I like to play with paper, gilding, beads and other odd media!

Read the whole thing here! And don't worry, more from me by Sunday...

FIBDA 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Joumana) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 05:58:00 +0000

Part of a fresco by tattoo artist Aurelio, created live on the premises

As my flight landed the evening of the opening of this 4th edition of FIBDA, I missed that again, and would only reunite with my fellow comickers over breakfast the next day. Fortunately, my friends from Armenia, Agata Baldayan and Irina Mryan, found me at the Rome airport as we were on the same flight to Alger from there, and that was a happy reunion!
As an aside, any airport that has a Fabriano shop and whose announcements include "The Holy Mass will be celebrated in terminal 1 at 12:30" is worth the detour.

Just so you know, this post won't cover everyone who was there nor all the events, as there was too much going on these 4 days for anyone to catch. A partial(!) list of guests can be found on the FIBDA site.

Cage elevators for the win at Al-Safir hotel.

Early the next morning I began discovering who had returned to the festival: Hector Sonon from Benin, Manuel Picaud, Maximilien Leroy, Brandon Jerwa (currently making a film, Untold Tales of the Comic Industry) with plenty of backup this time as I would find out later, and Laurent Melikian, fellow early lark, whom I'd also met in Armenia and highly encouraged to meet me again in Algeria. I was also delighted to see Paul Gravett had made it there, who had attempted to come last year but had the same visa problem I had (i.e. we never applied for one!) except I'd slipped through the net – not that I recommend anyone try that stunt...

After the first conference, regarding the role of comics in peace and reconciliation in Africa (which sounds more promising than it is, sadly,) I met the rest of the American contingent: Paul Benjamin (who writes for a bunch of titles and games out of Uzbekistan, believe it or not), John Layman (whose current series Chew has now hit the bestseller list) and Steve Lieber, the artist of the bunch, of Whiteout fame (among others, and his latest book Underground looks awesome) who spent the festival drawing for everybody present while the rest of us tried very hard to get to people's sketchbooks before he did.
I was very amused that the US paid for their trip and accordingly put them to work teaching in schools and kept an eye on their movements. My opinion alone, but to me it was strangely reminiscent of -- oh, never mind.

Brandon: Why do you always draw the same girl?
Steve: She holds still!

John, Paul and Brandon, getting intensely immersed into French

Steve Lieber gracing my sketchbook with a Whiteout touch

As my next "guest artist" said: "How do you go after that?"

Every morning Steve would come down to breakfast early with what is best described as a camper's backpack, except instead of a sleeping bag and dried fruits and nuts, it contained original pages, art supplies and dried fruits and nuts. Someone had done his homework and read my food review on last year's blog entry!
As for the trio, hanging out with comic writers means bathing in snappy dialogue. I laughed a lot. I won't repeat the things that made me, because I want to stay friends...

Paul also gets kudos for being Hommos Wars-literate

From Alberto Jiménez Albuquerque, one of our Spanish talents

Native doing calligraphy, sideways and without looking :|

Native Maqari, American Nigerian living in Paris as far as I could make out, was completely insane and had us all picking up our jaws within a few minutes of sitting down. He didn't sketch but drew directly in ink using bits of wood (making it look like the wood was alive and would keep drawing on its own if he let go of it), a technique, he said, he picked up from the calligraphers he trained with, and that aspect of his work was no less astonishing (see him at work here). As for my own calligraphy, which I was often sketching for, he claimed it was unquestionably "graffiti", which all things considered was probably a great compliment.

Another outrageous old friend was the inimitable Pahé, back to terrorize Algiers once more, as demonstrated by this cartoon he drew for me. He did give me a chance to request something tamer:
- Joumana, je te fais du Pahé?
- Vas-y, lâche-toi!

I'd rather not translate, thanks.

I was impressed that Pahé had not only completed and published his book about Gabon president Ali Bongo (titled Ali 9, Roi de la République Gabonaise, no less), but also that, instead of being harrassed or arrested for it, he was invited over to the palace and the President, now a fan, wrote a foreword for the next edition. And I thought politicians as a species had no sense of humor!

I was looking forward to hearing Benoît Peeters speak again as I'm a big fan of his work both in comics and about them. The conference, a sort of biography of Tintin via Hergé and vice-versa, was one I already attended in Beirut in 2009 but well worth hearing again (at the time I wrote a full account of another talk he gave the same day.)

Benoît Peeters telling us about Tintin et la Traversée du siècle

A little later, it was Paul's turn to speak, presenting a panorama of the best graphic novels in history through his soon-to-be launched book, 1001 COMICS You Must Read Before You Die. When I say soon-to-be launched, I meant very soon, as he flew back to London the very next day
for the release! It was an enticing talk and several of us took advantage of the presence of an advance copy to dive right in.

Agata and Irina studying Paul's advance copy of 1001 Comics You Must Read

Paul Gravett and Rachid Alik (organizer) not-posing

Note Rachid's Lebanese t-shirt! Shoo? = Wôt?

Peeters gave another talk that evening, this time with his lifelong creative partner François Schuiten, and together they plunged us into the world of the Cités Obscures (Cities of the Fantastic) which they created, one of the most memorable (and highly non-linear) series in franco-belgian comics.

Benoît Peeters and François Schuiten presenting their epic series Les Cités Obscures

Steve still sketching, this time for Marine Blandin...

... author of Fables Nautiques

One guest was making portraits of everyone in his
field of vision. Brandon was not sure how to take that.

Here with Halim Mahmoudi, author of Arabicot

Sandrine caught in the act of sketching me

Irina checking the resemblance

On Saturday morning, someone from Marvel comics was supposed to give a talk, but he didn't make it so Laurent took over and presented a history of superhero comics (a smaller version of which had been presented in Armenia), starting in the US then moving on to superheroes worldwide, ending with the latest title which was my own Malaak. Brandon, Steve, Paul, John and I then sat to answer questions, which took a whole hour: to our delight and despite the rain, the conference room was packed with young (and older) readers very eager to have a chance to get answers straight from the horse's mouth. There was one moment of sad cultural difference when, asked a barrage of questions all at once, Paul answered "42!" and us panelists were left cracking up while the audience looked on blankly...

Eduardo Pinto Barbier's capture of our panel on superheroes

I had a signature scheduled for Malaak IV as well, and I was touched to see that some people remembered me from last year. Also signing were two contributors of Toktok, a new comic magazine from Egypt of serious quality that I was glad to discover. Then, free of obligations, I sat to do the traditional portrait sketching of visitors. People line up and you draw quick portraits of them until you're too tired to carry on. It strikes me as a very useful and very important exercise in facial features: you will learn more about differences in physiognomy, eye and nose shapes, hairlines, etc from an hour of such sketching than from anything else. And it makes people happy. Also, I was armed this time with a really big black marker (that had been used for the cartoons below) and I never knew that the pressure of having no room for mistakes would pull accurate portraits out of me. Another good exercise.

Political cartoonists setting up shop where they can offend the most people

Raphaël Drommelschlager drawing portraits

In the meanwhile, Aurelio was suffering to finish this monster that took
two days more than he expected. I hope they kept it!

Finally done and able to attend to fans

Jose Muñoz was one of the major guests

Finally I'd like to mention the revelation of the festival, to me: Daniel Bosshart and his astonishing trilogy. He was so kind to give me a copy of the second volume, Alberto, for which I am ever so grateful as the series is for now only published and distributed in Switzerland (by Edition Moderne) and it will be a crime if nobody out there picks it up to make it available worldwide! These 3 books took altogether 15 years to create and they're entirely wordless. All is expressed is the astonishingly detailed, slow unraveling of the characters' inner life through changes in their surroundings, either real or imagined. There's no need for me to say a lot, I'll just share a couple of spreads.

Observe how every one of the myriad details in each room transforms, how every movement is observed fully. There is so much love in this work! Daniel promised me he'd look into getting a website up with his art, so it can get out there. I'm sure he could even offer some pages enlarged as posters.

And to finish this FIBDA blog, a surprise! I was wondering why a couple of people had asked me if Malaak had Algerian connections, and I found out why:

Malaak's strange hair wrap is REAL!

The kardoun is a long ribbon that is wound tightly around the hair to straighten them, a very old Algerian tradition. That is absolutely awesome. I have now witnessed the real-life version of something I wasn't sure was physically possible XD

Unexpected break

noreply@blogger.com (Joumana) — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 08:28:00 +0000

Apologies for this unplanned break in my posting schedule (though I did ask for it by posting 2 pages at a time): London didn't allow me to work as much as I planned, and now I'm off to Algeria again for another edition of the international comic festival, which promises to be enormously fun and interesting. This means updates will only resume after that trip. Part of the break, I must say, was due to my wanting to make absolutely sure that the sequence of events for the rest of this volume is as awesome as I envision it to be, so I'm taking extra time exploring the story into volumes 6 and 7... As usual it'll be worth it ;)

For now I leave you with this handsome Barkshamash by period illustrator Joanne Renaud!

V8-9

noreply@blogger.com (Joumana) — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 11:38:00 +0000

I took a lot of pleasure in making these two pages which take place in my favorite pâtisserie and feature some of my favorite people! And oh do I love drawing cakes!

I have a tip to share regarding these: indoors scenes are different from outdoor scenes in that artificial lighting gives a cast to the whole thing. To achieve this effect in Photoshop, all you need to do is fill a layer with the desired color and set it to the Color blending mode. Its opacity should be between 10 and 30% so that it's not perceptible, and you can tweak the cast using the Hue/Saturation palette till you get the feel you want. In the pages above I used a yellow layer on 20% opacity. Note that this technique can be used for any scene to pull together the whole color scheme; even a low opacity layer will make the color palette look more harmonious.

There may not be an update next week because London has not left me a lot of leisure to pencil new pages!

Sketch pages:

V6-7 and a review

noreply@blogger.com (Joumana) — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Today I'll start with a feature Malaak received on FLEEN, which I hear doesn't usually review this kind of comic. I'm very pleased because although brief, it's unusually astute, seeing beyond the superhero story. Read it here.

Sketch pages:

V5 and gift art

noreply@blogger.com (Joumana) — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 09:15:00 +0000

I don't think Malaak saw that one coming, did you? (and no, I wasn't going to always post 2 pages a week!) Page sketch:

I also have some adorable gift art to share today, by the talented Sarah Petrulis aka Feralgrinn:

Chibi Nryz

Chibi Barkshamash

V3-4

noreply@blogger.com (Joumana) — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 12:00:00 +0000

Again, drawing and texturing bits of Beirut is fun when I can take my time with them :D As an anecdote: the "Abed" graffiti (already seen in part 4 just before Adrian gets caught) is real. The "asofa" correction was a joke from one of my readers, which I slipped into the finished pages just before printing part 4 ;)

Since I got into the habit of preserving the sketch layer of a page instead of discarding it while I work, I thought I'd post those as well for each new page update – I know many of you enjoy them. The pages are collected in an album on the Malaak Facebook page for the moment, until I think up a way of presenting them on the website.

V1-2

noreply@blogger.com (Joumana) — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 13:38:00 +0000

Malaak V is go! I'm so excited about it, I'm way ahead of myself with the pencils. I have a buffer of inked pages so that my upcoming London trip doesn't interrupt the updates, but I hope you appreciate the care taken in the coloring of these first two pages – taking it easy pays!

Taking a well-known neighborhood and "redecorating" is loads of fun ;)

I'm not entirely convinced about the special effects in the 2nd page (unfortunately the puff of smoke one would normally see in a situation like panel 3 doesn't translate well) so I'm keeping them this way provisionally – will revise if I can figure out a better way.

And it begins!

noreply@blogger.com (Joumana) — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 13:45:00 +0000

Page 1 as a sketch, to revive the tradition of teasing my readers ;)