WITCH KNOTS by Ira Marcks

IN OTHER NEWS:

My favorite mainstream comic stylist, Jim Lee, has traveled back to 1996 and designed a relevant costume for Wonder Woman. Ok.

I haven’t opened a Marvel comic in over 10 years but the brief glimpses I get into the industry tell me it is mostly irrelevant. Is there such a thing as Pure Culture? You know, the things that fuel each generation of innovative upstarts. A fresh, new snowflake on the top of a mountain. Today’s comics, relevant or not, exist as a monument to pop culture. A symbol of fresh new ideas.

But soon enough that perfect snowflake is rolled into a giant snowball. That snowball be contaminated by tree branches, rock and mud as it moves lower into warmer temperatures. Melt the snowball into a raging river full of all kinds of frantic motion. Follow that river as it turns into muddy stream. That water sitting in the run off ditch on the side of the road? That is the limp remains of a magical idea and it is all around us.

If you are a young cartoonist living in New York’s Capital Region:

I am teaching three week long cartooning workshops at the Capital Region Art Center and Hudson Valley Community College. We’ll be doing all kinds of fun stuff like: developing stories and experimenting with different styles of sequential art. Some of the curriculum is based on the scholarly works of Jessica Able, Matt Madden and Scott McCloud. Even if you are already good at creating comics, it’s important to step back and analyse your craft every once in awhile. Check out iramarcks.com for more details or contact me directly – iramarcks(at)gmail.com.

I’ll tell you right off: I enjoy the new Francis and the Lights record. I like that I can share it with you using Muxtape’s portable HTML5 album player. It lets me easily share the full experience of the record.

Give it a try.

Notice the embed button in the lower right. Unlike most of the web, this feels like a real, self contained, digital object. I’ll tell you- I’m mostly unhappy with the way WITCH KNOTS is experienced by it’s readers. If you ask around, I’m sure most cartoonists feel like I do. We want a way for people to view our work un-mangled by feeds and blog archives.
I think comics need a HTML5 player too.

I think it’s about time I mentioned my all-time favorite blog: BibliOdyssey. In short, it is the ultimate collection of high-res eclectic illustrative history. Subscribing to the feed is akin to enriching your vocabulary through ‘word a day’ desk calendars. You may not recall most of what you take in, but slowly the experience of obscure subject matter and long dead style will make you a better person.

Have you ever seen the interior of a nineteenth century Indonesian Book of Magic, written on bark and folded like a concertina? Yes you have!

I recently noticed that Tumblr has revised the format their archive page.

It makes my photo blog more enjoyable.

I’ve enjoyed shipping out copies of my self-published Witch Knots Collection over the last few weeks. It’s good to see the names of people who enjoy my work. If you’re intending to order a book from me, do it soon, I’m running low!

I’d like you all to know that I’m reinvesting the money from the books to cover printing and shipping costs of Witch Knots to potential publishers.

The Converse PLAY blog recently posted an interview with me and my collaborator Michael (aka The Few Moments) on the Illustrative Score project we did last year. If you keep up on my posts, you’re probably tired of hearing about this project. Well, we did our best to not repeat statements from previous interviews. In fact, I mention WITCH KNOTS, my band called RESTYS and my teaching career. So, yeah, I’ve got a band and it has nothing to do with cartoons.

When I’m on a roll I’m afraid to stop. As I’ve shown you in a previous post on my TECHNIQUE, I adhere to a tight template when drawing WITCH KNOTS. It was awhile back that I decided I wanted to move the dialogue to the bottom of the strip but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I waited till Part Two to make the change. So here we are, BIG DEAL. It might seem arbitrary but it is a big deal to me. I’m very sensitive to the ‘readability’ of my comics. On that note, let me know what you think of the change OR of the way the comic reads in general.

Also: Thanks to those of you who let me know that the BUY NOW button was missing from the new WITCH KNOTS PRINT COLLECTION. It’s up and running now. Order today, supplies are limited.

Hey, did you know #112 marked the end of the first WITCH KNOTS story? That’s right. Let’s celebrate:

WITCH KNOTS – The Printed Collection is hot off the press!

While sorting back through the 112 strips this print edition, I took the opportunity to reflect on my story. Over the 9 months I’ve spend with this comic, the vision and characters have changed. I found a number of things I wished were different/clearer/better. You’ll be pleased with the adjustments I made and I think you’ll find the physical edition of WITCH KNOTS to be a very different experience.

Here is an example of a revised panel:

And here is the book’s page layout:

It was very satisfying to get to this point with WITCH KNOTS. The comic is designed to be held and put on a bookshelf. Enjoy and share it with friends.

Part Two begins on Friday. See you there!

FUN FACT: Over the last few years I have been a regular contributor to the seminal horror pulp; Weird Tales Magazine. I do a piece called The Harvey Pelican Catalogue. It’s study on Sanity and it’s correlation to Order presented in the format of the Sears and Roebuck Catalogue from the 1800s. ANYWAYS.

I will be joining my friends at Weird Tales during the Steampunk World’s Fair this weekend in NJ. I’ll be at the Weird Tales booth all day Saturday with the HOT NEW WITCH KNOTS BOOK! At 6pm I’ll be doing a talk called ‘Excerpts from the town of St. Forget’. I’ll be reading chapters from an experimental radio play I’m working on set in St. Forget (the fictional town WITCH KNOTS is set in).

If I don’t see you this weekend, I’ll post some select transcript from my talk and then we can talk about the WITCH KNOTS BOOK I casually mentioned earlier.