Don Quixote and the Truth of Colour

Quixote sneaks out first thing in the morning, so early the sky is green.

I'll start with a mammoth digression (hang in there):

My good friend/Landlord/illustration mentor, Mike Charlton, and I once spent an entire lunch break arguing about truth in colour. We sat on his porch looking out over sunny Salisbury with him taking up his post-war rationalist opposition to my post-acid arty position, we pointed out shadows and highlights and bickered about their true colour. The conclusion he drew, in his usual acerbic manner, was that I either had a visionary eye for colour or I was just making it up. Now we weren't arguing about the existence of fairies or aliens, but the insinuation was the same - his argument was that the colours you see in Van Gogh are not what he sees they are an invention of the imagination. My argument (and yes, Mike, I'm still here making it!) is that art is about learning how to see so you let other people see too.

Hmmm... you can see the weight of Mike's case about me being full of shit - he's the one who made me see art as a job rather than some airy fairy mission to understand. The irony is Mike would use colour in a visionary way, but he'd just say he was doing what worked best for the picture not what the world really looked like to him.

I can't help wondering how much the arrival of photography impacted on how we see and what we believe about 'how things really look'. It is an aspect of seeing (with one-eye) that tells us so much, but not everything.

What has this got to do with cartooning, you ask, is he about to launch into a tirade against comic artists who trace photos for a living? Well, no, this is just a preamble to me showing you a few panels from Don Quixote Volume One. And the thing that you'll probably notice is the colours are a bit wangdoodle.

I've long found myself with a foot in both camps when it comes to drawing comics - out and out cartooning, with its possibilities for the pictures becoming graphemes, on one side and more 'realistic' action comic art, with its attraction of turning the mechanics of light and shade to schematics on the other. But with colour I don't see that dichotomy. Hopefully the drawing doesn't show the constant wrestling between cartoony and realisticy as a problem.

Don Quixote has given me the opportunity to put all of my ideas into practice - the book is all about perception and deception after all - I may well fall flat on my face like Quixote does, but I love the idea of being either a visionary or full of shit. Comics let you do that, and there's an audience for both.

This follows the big panel at the top of the post. It's later in the morning on the same day. the heat is in the land already, but the sky is still waking up.

It's late in the day when he arrives.

That night at the inn and Quixote gets in a scrap. The night in this case is ochre, I wanted the night to feel warm.

Daft idea this - I tried to mix my colours of warm night with my green morning to give a symbolic lighting. It's a portentous moment and I borrowed the composition from those famous knight getting dubbed illustrations of yore. Of course the pomposity of the whole thing undermined somewhat.

And off he trots. It's another day and another green morning.

This last one is representative of the whole of chapter two where all the backgrounds are bright yellow. It's a hot day, ok? I have a feeling the look of this chapter may have been influenced by the old Kia-Ora ad.

Solipsistic Pop Launch

Solipsistic Pop 3 is printed, the free gifts and stickers are ready and the date for the Launch party has been announced. Tom Humberstone has done an amazing job putting this together, I have pdf of the book and I think it's the best British anthology I've seen.
The stories are varied, but with a central theme built around being readable to all ages and having the flavour of D.C.Thompson comics of the past. My own effort (two images above) is a fairly dark autobiographical thing, but all the stories have a different tone without ever clashing.

Something I've come to realise since starting this blog and joining Twitter is just how many ridiculously talented cartoonists there are in Britain, many of them unpublished, and this book reflects that. I'm just glad I'm around and making comics now.

Below is the flier for the Launch Party, it features some artwork from David O'Connell's strip (yes, the book is that good!). I look forward to meeting the other contributors and other jolly comics' folk.

British International Comic Show

I'll be at the British International Comics Show in Birmingham on the 16-17th of October. On the Sunday I'm sharing a table with Warwick Johnson Cadwell and selling my wares. I've designed this Doctor Who poster to sell and will also be selling posters of some other work I've done in the past year (see below). I've had some Doctor Who postcards and greetings cards and other goodies printed up, plus I'll have original artwork from Doctor Who, Roy of the Rovers and Judge Dredd for sale. Hopefully I'll see you there!

The A2 Doctor Who posters are £15, the A3 prints are all £10 plus P&P on both.

Skinhead

I realise I'm not blogging as often at the moment, partly that's because I'm busy and partly it's because I'm mainly writing rather than drawing. However watching This is England '86 the other night I was reminded of some Skinhead strips I was working on in the early 90s. Can't find the original artwork, but I found this Jpeg I did for a folio at some point with a character from one strip superimposed on a one-off short. Must have used my own Doc Martins to pose for that pic judging by how old and battered they look.

Graphic Novel Within A Novel.

I set myself 144 comic pages in which to fit the 500 text pages of Don Quixote part one. I had a few tricks in mind to compress certain elements, and of course the dialogue would have to be reduced otherwise every speech bubble in a conversation between Quixote and Sancho would fill a page. Even with all the sleight of hand, pictures speaking for words and shortened dialogue I still need to cut something. What to cut?

Within those 500 pages of part one there is a short novel (40 pages) called The Novel of the Curious Impertinent* which most adapters see as prime candidate for the chop. Many argue it has no place in the Don Quixote in the first place. It's the story of a man who wants to put his wife's fidelity on trial and in doing so creates the very thing he fears.

Well, I'm keeping it. It's key to my reading of the book. What we see in the Novel of the Curious Impertinent is a scientific search for truth in love, but it's like a quantum experiment where the viewer affects the results. This is in perfect contrast to Don Quixote, who sees what he wants to see. Including the Novel of the Curious Impertinent sets Don Quixote the character into sharp relief, helps bring him to life. And it's part of the alchemy of the book watching the fiction come to life.

So what does get the chop? Well, there's a lot of hullabaloo at the inn towards the end of the book that puts a great strain on many modern readers' credulity. I'm paring it down right now. Hopefully I can lose a couple of events that have no bearing on what comes before or after. I can already feel the Cervantine Scholars lighting their torches and marching on Blandford Forum.

Oh, yeah, the picture above - that's an attempt at designing a cover for Volume One. Emma and I decided to go for something else which you'll see in good time. This cover is illustrative of the book as a whole in a quite literal way - it shows the two friends jabbering happily away to one another in a featureless landscape. The new cover will be a tad more dynamic. And it will feature sheep! What more do you want?

*The novel also has been translated as "The Man Too Curious For His Own Good" and other variations.

Don Quixote Volume One.

I'm 12 days into my allotted 8 month adaptation of Don Quixote Volume One. Before I even started drawing a pitch or writing scenes I had a few basic ideas that would define my adaptation, one of these was that we should split the book back into its original two volumes for publication. There's no reason why the two volumes can't be anthologised in the future, but for my sanity the books will come out a year apart. The originals came out ten years apart so be grateful for small mercies. It's worth noting that the end of Volume One was the end of the story and not a cliffhanger or unfinished work, so there is a natural break. I have also written an additional scene to the end of volume one that will hopefully make it seem implicit that this is a standalone book.

It's not entirely true to say I'm doing it as two volumes to save my sanity (that ship sank without survivors some time ago), there are more important reasons for doing it like this. The gap between the two original books is part of the life of the novel and is a big part of the story in Volume Two. People Quixote meets in Volume Two have read Volume One. Don Quixote lives as a book and I really don't want to create an adaptation that treats it like a revered monument, I want to demonstrate that it still lives. Or maybe that should be: the two friends Don Quixote and Sancho Panza still live.

Yeah, yeah, enough with the blather, I hear you say, we only come here to look at the pretty pictures. These are two images from the pitch. The top one is a slice of a panel, and is one of the earliest images of Quixote that I was content with (terrible pic of Sancho though). The one below was about working out his clothes (still unresolved, although Martin Brown has invited me round to look at his doublet), it then became about unusual colours of night. Realistic but seemingly impossible colour palettes fascinate me.

This post has covered one of the 'basic ideas that would define my adaptation', I'll blog about the others in the coming weeks/months, they include "Why there won't be any giants", "Thou, thee, you, ye", and "What to do with novels within novels". If you've read the book you can probably guess at some of the hurdles facing the diligent adaptor.

Right, must get back to the writing, I left our valorous knight and his squire chasing phantoms in the dark woods.

Influence Map

I succumbed to the 'influence map' meme. I'm sure I could add a few more or do a whole other one given the chance, but here it is. It's all artists, although I've sneaked in some writerly skills through the back door.

Roy of the Rovers 1993

Found a decent-ish scan of this page from Roy of the Rovers monthly #1 whilst sorting out this morning. Stuart Green, the writer, editor and co-conspirator on the plan to Watchmen-ise Roy, kept the original and this is the best version I have of it. Some of it is atrocious, but it was a long time ago and the blatant mix of bravado painter and struggling cartoonist has produced a scruffy mongrel of a page that I'm quite fond of now.

Here's The Deep Hereafter

The Graphic Novel collection featuring mine and Dan McDaid's Doctor Who story The Deep Hereafter will not be available for the foreseeable future. As I've been asked by a number of people if they can see the strip I'm putting these low res files on here for the time being. Credit to Dan for such a brilliant script and credit also to Roger Langridge for his Abe Kanegson font and to James Offerdi for letting me redo the colours the way I wanted them. So, without further ado here is THE DEEP HEREAFTER...

The Original Selfmadehero

This is my reworking of the Selfmadehero logo. Given the nature of Don Quixote as the hero who invents himself it's hard to imagine a more aptly named publisher.

Today is my official start date on Don Quixote and I have been writing most of the day. The opening scene is one of the trickiest to adapt. There's no dialogue or character interaction, it relies heavily on the author's voice. Just need to decide who the author is really...

The Doctor and Amy Pond

I've finished the inks for the Xmas Doctor Who Magazine strip and handed over to Geri for colours. I tend to be very hands on about colour work and I must be a nightmare to work with. Fortunately, Geri and I have been friends for 26 years and he puts up with me as well as anyone. I don't want to give away too much about Jonny Morris's wonderful story, so here's a brief glimpse. Above is the first panel.

This a screen shot of something from the middle of the story. Can see what it is yet?

And this is from the last page. I finished the inks for this late last night, I have the whiskers and red eyes to prove as much, and I just need to check I haven't missed anything. After a bit of a tidy up I can start work writing the script for Don Quixote Volume One...

DON QUIXOTE!

I'm very happy to announce that, as of September 1st, I will be adapting Don Quixote for SelfMadeHero. I'll be writing and illustrating the books. This was key for me as I want to bring a complete vision to Don Quixote.

I'll be fascinated to know what people's opinions are of Don Quixote, most people I've spoken to know the book, know that it is regarded as a cornerstone of western literature, but haven't actually read it. I have heard it described as 'the greatest book ever written, that no one reads'. That's a bit of a tragedy really. Even if you don't accept it's the 'greatest book ever written' it's hard to argue that it isn't the father of all novels (and I include Graphic ones!). I realise that it's a daunting book to tackle - a thousand page book written in the late 16th/early 17th century, most of us swallow hard at that kind of challenge, but it is worth it!

If I'm going to remain faithful to Cervantes' genius text I will need to make a graphic novel that is laugh-out-loud funny, painfully tragic, profound, surreal, constantly reinventing itself and featuring some of the most well-rounded characters in literature... no big ask then!

I can't wait to get started and I will post developments on this blog as I go.

Above is a sample from some of the pages I did as a pitch. I'm really glad Emma at SelfMadeHero has bought into my vision for this project and I look forward to working with the SelfMade team over the next 18 months.