The inconsistency principle
My new favorite thing, my first collab with Kelljin, why lettering is very complicated, and a sneak peak at the beginning of issue 2...
Hope y’all had a safe holiday and still have all your favorite fingers and important skin attached. I’ve been tending to an algae bloom in our little fish tank, seeing some breathtaking art at the DeYoung, collaborating with Yiğit Çakar on our early Soviet, dystopian sci-fi book, and learning way too much about dandelions.
My new favorite thing.
I am amazed I only just heard about Oblique Strategies, the card deck created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt in 1975. I know they make some real fancy-looking decks and I’d love to get my hands on one, but for now, I found a free PDF version and spent a lazy weekend morning clipping them down. It was very meditative.
This weekend some friends took Kelljino and me to the DeYoung, where we were lucky enough to behold Kehinde Wiley’s exhibit An Archeology of Silence. People like to throw adjectives like “breathtaking” around, but in this case, it really fits. There’s not much else I can say, and pictures really wouldn’t come close to doing his portraits and sculptures justice, so if you live anywhere near San Francisco, it’s well worth a visit.
Just outside the museum though, we came across this delightful piece, which I definitely heard before I saw…
From the DeYoung’s website:
With its female form crowned by a beehive head home to a colony of honeybees, Pierre Huyghe’s Exomind (Deep Water) is an artwork in constant formation. The work favors an open-ended condition, subject to natural elements, in which artist and nature are coauthors. The beehive embodies a form of self-organizing intelligence common in nature. Also called “swarm intelligence,” it has informed concepts of emergent and collective intelligence in the social sciences and inspired such terms as “hive mind.” Natural forms of swarm intelligence have also served as models for the design of artificial intelligence systems. Huyghe’s work functions like a living algorithm: its evolution is driven by its colony of worker bees, who scan the environment and mine it for nectar like a line of code harvests data.
I do wonder how the bees feel about this blatant exploitation of their creative labor, but I have a feeling they are a very well protected colony (and there’s certainly plenty of pollen to harvest in Golden Gate Park). It’s not exactly smart to hive so close to the ground, so the museum has to actively protect the colony from rodents and other predators.
Our first collaboration.
I realized this weekend that not many people have seen what might be the first ever collaboration between artist/colorist/letterer extraordinaire Kelljin Heyer and yours truly:
I think this was one of K’s first digital portraits, along with one of my first experiments in frame decoration. Most of the pieces came from the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse (and yes, I was extremely careful about cutting up these circuit boards).
Lettering is hard…like really hard.
And letterers are notoriously under-appreciated for what they bring to the table. Fonts, speech balloons, placement…these choices are not simple and have an outsized effect on the end product. Next time you’re reading a comic, notice the lettering. Good Old Neon, Fonografiks, and Otsmane-Elhaou are a few of my personal favorites. And having seen Kelljin work for hours creating different custom fonts for our Skingirl characters, I have a new appreciation for the level of craft, creativity, and patience that goes into it.
You can see in the bottom right that part of my job is to help decide the placement of the word bubbles. This is not easy when you’re as verbose as me and the art you're working with is as beautiful as Chris Winter’s. It feels wrong to cover up any little detail, but sacrifices must be made. This is a very real lesson in visual story-telling. The more words you use, the less visual real estate you have for the art. So those words really need to count. Luckily, in a future issue of UNSKIND, you’ll be able to see every piece of the process, so you lucky subscribers will get a glimpse at every detail in these panels, even what’s behind those bubbles.
And while Kelljin is hard at work lettering, I’m working on the script for issue 2. I have a very clear idea of our ending, and I’ve filled so many pages full of character and setting notes that I know will probably never fit anywhere. But it’s fun to do and makes it feel less like I’m pulling this story out of my ass and more like I’m scratching away at sediment, slowly revealing some long lost infernal mythology.
Oh! I forgot to mention Arkam Asylum: a serious house on serious earth by Grant Morrison and illustrated by Dave McKean. The lettering in that book is wild!
Gaspar Saladino’s work elevates the characters’ voices off those pages, like some strange fever dream, or collective incantation. You can hear the Joker in your head, which is more terrifying because we as readers have conjured him from some dark part of ourselves (and he sounds much much scarier than Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger [RIP] or Joaquin Phoenix).
Do you have a favorite comic letterer? Let us know in the comments.
That’s it for this week. Appreciate ya.
God Save America, D.M. Sayres