Artists commentary on "Directions" by Neal Von Flue

Pre(r)amble-

 

A few words in my defense

I don't think my work speaks for itself. Not entirely. So here, I'll attempt to explain them more fully and give you a rounder view of my process (both mental and technical.)

Now, you may disagree. You may think these comics say things on their own, and furthermore, an artist shouldn't have to explain his or her work to a viewer. This is a valid point as well. Let me say it this way, If you see things in these comics that I don't mention here, you are NOT wrong. a lot of my work is a sort of "setting up the viewer" to draw his or her own conclusions. Often times, I don't have a particular message and statement and only want you to draw your own conclusions or apply these things I've made to your life.

 

Background

Now that I've started out by contradicting myself, let me state a few things about the process behind these particular comics.

I like to work under constraints. Sometimes the constraints are visual, sometimes in terms of story. There are a number of constraints I used in this series, most notably:

  • The titles themselves reference the four directions
  • The scrolling of each comic goes in its particular direction
  • Flash interactivity
  • The use of song lyrics

Every comic in this series had to have all of these present in some fashion. These constraints began from the simple idea to make four comics named after four directions. Then came the challenge of making each comic scroll in each direction. As the individual comics began forming, song lyrics creeped into the mix, and finally I've long been interested in the interactivity possible with Flash in a long form environment. This, to me, facilitates the idea of a "spatial" narrative (as opposed to our usual fare of a story that starts at A and goes straight to B. More on that later, I'm sure...)

 

 

How it's all gonna go down

Below I'm going to discuss how these constraints played out in each comic, as well as get behind some of the themes that (to me at least) are conjured up or come through in the making and/or reading of these scrolling monstrosities.

I hope you find some of this information useful to your deciphering of these comics, but I also hope for two other things. One, I hope this commentary helps to bridge the gap between an artist and his/her readers. This is one thing the web does well (or can do) and the idea comes up in these comics a lot (see below). We have begun the process of bringing the artists closer to the reader's "money" by cutting out middle-men like distributors, printers etc... What we haven't done yet (apart from blogs and message boards) is bring the reader into the artwork. More interaction with out compromise of the mediums integrity. This is something I attempt with these comics (especially "LEFT") and with this commentary. Much the same way a DVD commentary (a maybe overused analogy?) gives us insight into a previously hidden and secret process, thereby bringing us closer to the work.

I also like to promote the idea of web comics as serious art. Web comics have the advantage (over print) of not having an almost 100 year social stigma of being "non-art". Let's use that to our advantage and get serious criticism regarding artists who are passionate about the medium of web comics, and disregard work that follows in the footsteps of a self professed "child's medium". I'm gonna stick my neck out, please feel free to step on it in the name of art.

 

 

What we've got so far

 

You now know two important things about me.

I ramble, and I use parentheses. (a lot.)

On with the show...

 

 

Down-

"Down" was the first one I made.

To the left (obviously) is a thumbnail of the whole piece. I spend a lot of time looking at them this small...It gives me a better idea of the flow of the entire piece. That's important to me cause I'm what you would call a "metapanel artist", most of the time ... I think it was Eisner who came up with the idea of the metapanel. It's the idea that the entire page design is as important as the individual panels its comprised of (I'm sure I'm butchering his definition.). At any rate, I like to make metapanel webcomics. Big, scrolling, open, flowing comics with no discernible panels. I guess you could call it "collage" or "gutter-less" or even "crap", (but bully on you , if you do...)

 

"The monsters who tie me down" has been sitting in my sketchbook for a long time. As a matter of fact you can see it as an entry in my online sketchbook from quite a while ago...So when I was looking for something to relate to the direction 'Down', I remembered the sketch and resurrected it. This immediately put me into a story idea or discussion topic for the comic. (see, isn't working backwards great?)

The actual phrase came from a song a friend of mine wrote. Incidentally, this was the birth of putting lyrics into each of the comics. But this is the only one in the series that isn't famous, so I guess I kinda cheated you a bit, if you were looking for the song portion of this one...( if you do know the song, you get a big hurrah from me.) His song is more about desolation and hearts breaking, but he said he didn't mind if I stole a bit and blew it out of proportion. So umm, thanks Chris...

 

Right off the bat you get some interactivity in some small way with the first section.(the part that says "truth be told, there are probably more than 3"). I included this because I felt that limiting the monsters to three excludes too much and also may exclude you , the reader, if you didn't have these problems but had some other ones, (like say, webcomics addictions, per chance?)

The only other bit of interactivity is further down with the contrasting sky/ground shots. This part runs along with the surface narrative. as a side, it's an interesting idea to make all the spatial parts of a webcomic irrelevant to the reading experience of the surface narrative. By that I mean you can have a whole comic that reads well by itself, and at the same time have a whole series of clickable spatial elements that propel the story along, but aren't critical to your understanding of the surface story....Am I explaining this right?

The monsters are "Guilt" "Ennui" and "Fear" and are quite plainly representations of some of the things that keep me from attaining my goals and moving ahead to be the person I want to be. (I think you'll notice that's a pretty common theme with me...)

This one ends with the notion that you can draw yourself "Up" and away from the monsters that tie you down. That hard work at your craft (hence the squares resembling comics on the right side) is the only thing that will release you from the monsters.

When all is said and done, this comic is fluff. The only monster stopping me is myself, and creating these cutesy gothic representations of my pschyological issues with success only serves to trivialize the very problems that eat away at me daily...

Or not.

 

Up-
The biggest challenge in "Up" was figuring out a way to get you to start at the bottom right of the page. If you're not aware, everything in a web browser (including the sequence in which images load) starts in the upper left corner. So in order to move you down to the bottom of the page I devised a little (quick loading) and sometimes humorous, path to follow. I dropped an anchor link in the path after a while, for you fast connection people...

When I was working on this comic, I wrote in my LiveJournal a bit about my process, So I'll just copy it over here, for those who haven't read it.:

See, it works like this...
I get this rough concept, like real rough ... Somewhere along the lines of: "Hey I can do a comic about the word "UP"...and, hey! I can make it scroll upwards!"
Now, let's let that sit.

Next thing that happens is usually some visual style or clue enters my life, and often concurrently with the concept...y'know like I get a copy of Gray's Anatomy. Now I'm doing all these sketches of flayed open body parts, muscles and sinew, in a real tightly rendered style... I'm seeing them colored, Maybe in some burnished browns/sepias, with bright red and blue viens...

then my brain starts to stick these two things together and build what could be considered a story (or at least a rough narrative), similar to juxtaposing images, I juxtapose the two thoughts and see what kinda thing happens in the "gutter"...

At this point I usually get a few lines of dialogue or narration, which may lead me to snippets of words I wrote in my sketchbook years ago, or a phrase I have on the back burner...the "story" begins to develop.

Usually from here I start to construct it ... I've found I need to see it layed out before I can really comprehend whether I'm going in the right direction... this requires a certain amount of drawings, and stuff that seems connected to the germinating story so far... (This also requires Photoshop, which I don't have right now, which is the real reason I'm writing this, instead of doing it)

The construction is a process of making images look interesting and trying them out with the bits of words I have so far ... these usually play back and forth at this point and there is a healthy dose of culling my hardrive and saved images for background pictures/grunge/shit to put on "overlay"... (If you were to look at my stuff, you'd prolly see the same elements used over and over again...) I constantly export and test the comic in various stages, to make sure it looks and reads right. And in this construction phase usually comes the ending, if I haven't got it already.

The entire piece gets finished up, and shown to my wife. She gives me excellent feedback on what works and what doesn't, I can explain my reasoning's and she can explain how someone outside of my head would read it. This usually results in one or two minor changes, (and on many cases, she has saved my ass for extreme embarrassment..)

That's pretty much exactly the process behind this one.

The interactive elements of this comic came from something in my sketchbook. I've long been interested in taking two unrelated narratives and sticking them together to see what happens in between (real scientific, huh?. Later I struck upon the notion of making each section "flippable" in order to mix and match the individual pieces. I hope in some way this had the effect of having a kind of "control" over the work. Although i think it would have to be a bit longer to carry that idea well.

The song featured is The Beatles Helter Skelter, mostly because I liked the contrast of the lyrics (about going up and down on a slide). Later I was listening to the White Album and realized in Me and My Monkey they say "Your outside is in, and your inside out, so come on... " That would have been perfect. Maybe too perfect...

 

Left-

"Left" was probably the hardest one to make for two reasons. One being the design problems (starting someone off on the right, again, is hard) but also because of the subject matter. I've never done a comic that one would consider "sexy" or even anything about sex. I guess you could say I have hang-ups about it (Although, I've found out, no worse than you people...)

This comic was drawn quite literally from right to left, having no clue where I was going until quite a bit in. The self portrait on the right was a rip-off of a panel from my series "10:30to12". The middle section "heats up" until we come to the leering vegetable face (I am, without a doubt and beyond words, embarrassed to admit I don't remember the name of the original artist) This is the face of repression. At this small size you can see the opposition of red and blue, freedom and repression, at odds in the comic. The "success or sex excess" part serves to bolster these opposites (as well as blur out a bit what were some fairly graphic drawings.)

While making this comic Ifound myself engaged particularly strongly (most likely because the themes were unexplored for me) and I wanted a way to bring that sensation to the reader. From that came the Flash bit on the end, whereby with a series of clicks, (each one getting more suggestive) I attempt to engage you further. The final piece to this was making an area where I could record your reactions. As I said in the begriming of this page, I'm particularly interested in bringing the reader into the work. It's also a handy way to gauge how repressed I am...LOL

The prince lyrics were added last as a way to bring in the idea of repression being based in "nurture" as opposed to "nature"...

 

Right-

"Right" was done about a month after the others and, in some ways, its shows. It's similar to "Up", in that it's two unrelated narratives, stuck together in order to see what happens. First we have a joke, related to "right" only in it's punch line, and second, a dream I had.

First off, the joke. I heard it from my father-in-law and thought it quite funny. Thinking about making comics about directions, I scribbled it down cause the punch line could possibly be related in some way to directions, and that's just the kinda stuff I do.

The dream came the night after I built the joke section. So in the morning, I tried to relate it to my wife and family, in order to not forget it. I figured I was gonna attach it onto the joke section, and see what happened. In the morning I had worked out exactly how the whole comic was going to be done. By the afternoon I was stuck on the part where I try and get the baby out of the wall (you know how dreams fade through a day? No matter how much you want to remember them? that's what happened to me...). I spent an hour or so struggling with where to take it next, straining to remember how the dream went In the end, I opted for recording how I was forgetting it, instead of how I remembered it. The lyrics were added after searching for a while with the string "lyrics with right in them" as I had no clear idea which would work. I struck upon Tom Waits. The lyrics is from I'll shoot the moon from his album "The Black Rider". I thought the use of "right" as well as "baby" was good enough to include it (well, it was either that or the Go-Go's..."Can you hear them, They talk about us. They're telling lies, Well, that's no surprise. Can you see them See right through them...")

The idea of making it cyclical, with a link at the end of the comic taking you back to the beginning,came out of the need to marry the two narratives a bit more. So I built the guy in the joke part to relate to the dream and the dream part to end in frustration and (hopefully surprisingly) take you back to the joke...

 

After word-

So now you've read a bit about my process, motivation, impetus and goals for this series of comics. I hope there have been some things that made it worth spending a dollar on. And I hope you have found, in some fashion, new ways of looking at my work. (or at least you found in entertaining in a "Springer show" kind of way

As I said at the top of this, if you have found things in these comics that I didn't mention, remember you are right too.Not only that, but you have an obligation to tell me about it.

Thanks for reading this,

Neal Von Flue

Recallifornia, 10/07/2003