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Well, there is nihilistcanary.com aaaaaaand that is about it. The rest of my artwork is probably not worth seeing. I guess there is herzogthevile.com, but that has never been finished and is fairly cringe-worthily inconsistent. We might come back to it one day.
As for the harmonica tune, it is a custom work that Michael Rubin composed for Hobo Lobo. The filename is loboHarmonicaProcessed.mp3 but that is an extremely utilitarian and not particularly sexy name, so I hereby christen it "The time has come, the Lobo said". In my overall concern for the production of everything I have not bothered to stop and wonder what the name of the tune was. It was inspired by the Walrus and the Carpenter sea shanty from Disney's Alice in Wonderland, maybe it would be easier to find sheet music for that? -
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Thanks!
I picked up programming by tinkering—about a dozen years of tinkering at this point. Reverse engineering is a second nature to me. Some of it just for fun, most of it I've been paid to do.
Chrome, Safari (both out of the box) and Firefox (with plugins) let you look at the front-end code and see what the scripts and style sheets are doing to it. They format and color everything nicely for easier reading. You can learn a lot by just opening up any neat things you find out there and examining how others have done it. Soon you will get a hang of HTML and CSS with it.
I don't actually know Python, so I can't say where to begin learning it. The Lobo server-side stuff is built in good ole reliable PHP for which you needn't go further than php.net. Some people say PHP is really confounding due to the utterly random function namespace, but that has never bothered me while I was learning the language. It is one of the easiest server-side languages to deploy nowadays, it is universally supported, it has a pretty large community, etc. Before you get into it, ask other people what they'd suggest. Ruby and Python are popular PHP alternatives nowadays. I really can't talk about their strengths at length since I have not programmed in them. Their evangelists would say this is why I am sticking to PHP.
As far as client-side scripting, I got into that game relatively recently. For my first foray into JavaScript, I spent an absurd amount of time trying to force all these disparate browsers to properly recognize a hover event on a dropdown. I shortly gave up writing raw JavaScript and moved on to jQuery. It helps you by standardizing a bunch of stuff and making coding faster. If you get to know CSS well, moving into jQuery will be relatively straightforward. api.jquery.com is a thorough reference. JS has some pretty weird behaviors and you would be well served to grab one of those O'Reilly pocket references or cookbooks before you get into that part of it.
I've tried to leave a fair bit of comments in the Hobo Lobo JS—so that may be interesting to look at—although I don't profess it is any kind of paragon of proper JS coding practices or anything like that. In fact, it could be way, way cleaner.
When you start coding weird things, you will stumble over problems and bugs and ignorance. When this happens, run to stackoverflow.com and ask fellow developers for help.
Hope that gets you started. -
Get on killing some of those tabs, soldier. Thanks for the compliments.
Man, that is one broad question.
Stylistically, I'd have to say André Franquin (http://bit.ly/intNVF), Honoré Daumier (http://bit.ly/lZIsIs), David Levine (http://bit.ly/kArE9F), and the Lucas Arts artists from the 1990s (Steve Purcell, Peter Chan)—these are the peeps that influenced my drawing style the most.
Fine-art-wise, I hold in high regard Neo Rauch (http://bit.ly/kjk7Pd), Marcel Duchamp (http://bit.ly/jMWgZM) and Maurizio Cattelan (http://bit.ly/mPM9Rk). Generally, my starting point for a lot of stuff more often are movies. It may not be a direct painting of a movie still, though that happens too, but a scene in a movie will start the ball rolling. Not much of the stuff on nihilistcanary.com is movie-derived; I have a whole earlier half-baked body of work that for the most part is, plus some better works in progress that are.
Writing-wise, when stuck between a writer's block and a hard place, I can open any Vladimir Nabokov novel and read a random paragraph. That usually gets the ball rolling.
Hobo-Lobo-wise, the influences are mixed and all over the place.
Jonathan Swift and wonkette.com are on the list, their influence will become more obvious the deeper we go.
Jacques Tati is also there, semi-tangentially. He shot his films with no close-ups and negligible dialogue, fleshing out the story mostly through pantomime and the environment—his movies demand to be seen on their own terms. His example shows this is doable. Thus, Hobo Lobo is not quite a comic, there is relatively little dialogue and a lot of narration and if you come to it now and take what is there as just warmup before the action, you might be missing on something. I recently cobbled together this brief guide to watching Tati, if anyone's interested: http://bit.ly/mQ6OoE.
Ron Gilbert needs to be on the short list too, for his pioneering of a kind of casual anachronism in the Monkey Island games. It is an ingenious and seldom used method of concocting a fantasy world out of a period, giving it a degree of abstraction and metaphor. And it allows me to not care too much about carefully fitting a period—or use said period for emphasis where applicable. I guess Mel Brooks does this too to a point. He is a lot more winky about it, tho.
I think that about covers it. In excruciating detail. -
"San Antoan" is what all the rural Texan honkies call San Antonio. I should really change that. There... changed. I don't think anyone calls it "San Toño", but by god they should.
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I try to do it at least once a week. Sometimes I just can't make it because life interferes. Sometimes i manage to do two updates in a week.
You can always follow the rss feed: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/HoboLoboOfHamelin
Or eavesdrop to my twitter feed for updates :
http://twitter.com/#!/MrHoatzin -
I answered the how-long question, below, so let's talk process.
I tear sheets of canson biggie into 4-inch strips—so that comes up to 100 pixels per inch from the paper to the screen. I use a light table for registration of all the different layers, five in total. I have drawn a grid on a mylar sheet that helps me center the panels while drawing.
I tried drawing everything with a Wacom at first. It turned out I could get more interesting looking things faster with pencil. All the smudging and erasing and different graphite sticks with different graphite loads and erasers that do interesting things—working with happy little accidents—it's so much more intuitive by hand than in Photoshop, even after years of using Pshop for hours every day. I do some cleanup with the Wacom after the fact, very little, tho. I have never used tablets before Hobo Lobo, so that may have something to do with my preference.
I scan everything and turn all the drawings into masks on black, flat color layers and with a tablet, in another flat color layer paint in all the light areas behind the linework.
All of this is assembled together in five long smart objects (with pre-baked layer position layer comps which allow me to align the different layers while working on individual panels and get the idea for how well everything is working together), sliced, saved-for-web, uploaded and assembled in this custom admin I put together to make my life easier.
The whole story is three-quarters written. I do another pass at editing when the art is ready, just to make sure it all works well together.
Generally I find it easier to not think about the other aspects of production while I am working on one—concept/planning, writing, drawing, programming, none of these really mix well.
So that is what the process looks like, in a nutshell. If you want any clarifications on specific bits of it, ask. -
Hey thanks!
As for how long stuff takes, it depends. If I am feeling it on a given day, and I am happy with the composition straight off the bat, and I haven't thrown some sort of ridiculous task my way I can crank out two to three panels in one sitting (a whole day on a weekend) with another afternoon to scan it, clean it and cut it apart in photoshop. It is actually quite beneficial to do multiple panels at the same time—at least partially—as that keeps the compositions coherent and reduces the need to rework finished panels.
Ridiculous tasks that slow the whole deal down are things such as animating a crystal ball, or devising a jQuery effect that pops an absolutely positioned object into its center rather than the default top left coordinate (as is html's wont) with a correctly calculated bounce easing so that it doesn't wobble weirdly, or programming a slideshow using said effect. These things add anywhere from about a day to an afternoon to the proceedings.
So far it looks like a whole page of the "comic" takes me about a month to a month-and-a-half to crank out. -
I once called a coworker a bitch. We were talking about how badass she was and I said, "Yeah, you're a real bitch." She went from escalating the bantering mock-bravado to aghast in a fraction of nothing. It was startling.
This was a crowning jewel on the short list of affronts against good peonism. The other two were writing with a magic marker on a promotional sign "THE BEST SOUP IN THE WORLD" and being dismayed by a regular customer's purchase of the Bill O'Reilly for Kids book. She wasn't even the one who reported me to the authorities, it was someone else who was in line behind her who didn't like me grimacing at the thought of Billo indoctrinating our youffs with ghostwritten inanities.
That particular store was lauded as the second worst-managed Borders store in the nation, what with its second worst turnover in the entire chain. At the time it was ruled by a mannish, seven-foot lady with a pegleg who reminded me of Agatha Trunchbull. I kindof liked her, even though she was incompetent. Then she fired me.
Their current chapter 11 is giving me a bit of a schadenfreude. -
Sewing books from scratch.
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Mysterious Hoatzin’s Bio
Certified by an accredited institution to engage in art-making.
