Dan Kim

NNN was slowly building up while i was working on all my other projects... like a pile of breadcrumbs at the bottom of a toaster. Before I knew it, I had a pile of problems that seemed loosely interrelated, but I wasn't sure just what the nature of that loose relation was, exactly. There was something about the inability of language to do what I wanted, reality and fiction, artifice and reader, conflicting ideas about what (if anything) art might be good for, the difficulty of saying, the difficulty of understanding, what it takes to so much as count as being open to assessment as having said anything or not, whether a life doing comics would be worthwhile or not, etc. In any case, for whatever reason, this stuff seemed troubling enough at the time that I absolutely had to hit my head against this stuff before I could say goodbye to comics (which was my plan).

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Anyway, I hit my head on it, but I kept going anyway... and now I really want to do comics forever... ha ha ha ;w;

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Thanks, anon. Glad you're enjoying it so far. =w=

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As for recommendations, here's the general process I use:
Find: the image, the vision, the principles, the particulars, in that order.

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Assuming you already have some groundwork done (something you want to write about, a fuzzy idea and some test material you've built up), you can start sifting through your jumbled up raw materials and start looking for an entry point into the project.

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I always start with a captivating image: the scene or moment that gets me excited enough to build a world or story around it. For Vampire Bride, I started with the idea of a failed magical girl wandering after the end of the world she failed to save (the seed of Metal Fist) and played with it until I toned down the grimdark and found the comfy tone. Then I had this image of Bikky trying to live a comfy life with her vampire waifu while shutting out the dying world outside... a few of the images can be seen at the bottom of page 2:

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http://manga.clone-army.org/viewer.php?series=snax&page=2&lang=&HUDoff=

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From those few scenes, you can teas out a "vision"... it can be fuzzy, that's okay, but you gotta get an idea of what you're talking about. For example, in Vampire Bride, the vision is "a comfy world, after the end" or "it's all ending, but that's fine". The end is inevitable, but there's no cataclysm, no final battle, no big meaning, no final pronouncements or judgments -- just a world slowly nodding off to sleep, like a himehorn in a warm nest in wintertime.

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With that vision in mind, you can tease certain threads: "beyond the end", "comfy", "inevitability", "empty battles", "punching at the air", "decline without crisis"... then you can start to build things that best exemplify these threads: comfy witches that extend beyond time and space, templars fighting a meaningless battle, winter landscapes, a universe with almost no stars... a burnt out universe and a burnt out hero... but it's still comfy.

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Then you can start to design people, places, locales, etc. For ever detail, you should be able to answer why it is precisely THAT way and not some other way. And your answer must refer to something else in the world. Then you can use that answer as a jumping off point and repeat the process. Keep doing this and you'll have a dense, interconnected web of relations that make sense close up... and at a distance, they'll form the vision you set out in the first place.

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Of course, you can go back and forth from particulars to the image again and again to get clear on things (it's never so clean a process in practice) ... but hopefully that helps.

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Good luck, anon!

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Honestly, I think friendships can only persist so long as each party believes he has some advantage over the other. That is, you gotta be useful to each other. One party can't totally outclass the other in power or status. Without that minimum, all that other stuff about loyalty and trust and whatever doesn't matter one bit. Think of a hunting party in ancient times -- you want to be a good party member: shares the same goals, not dead weight, can be trusted not to betray, can be trusted to make investments into the party, his skills have good synergy with other members' skills, etc. If you're too weak, you gotta be a follower and worry about abandoned. If you're too strong you gotta lead and worry about being stabbed in the back. If you're in the sweet spot, you can be "friends".

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Alternative route: be a cutest and a best -- that's a golden ticket into nearly any circle you want (except circles with a lot of other cutests that will stab you in the back for being more a cutest than them).

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Anyway, yeah, so just work on yourself. Once you have something someone wants, you'll find that folks will just come to you. Might suck, but that's the way it is.

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- Readability
The most basic requirement.
You should be able to tell what you're looking at and how it's oriented in space.

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Google Megatron from the recent Transformers movies to see a really bad offender. Would it possible to read that character if it were a silhouette? In weird lighting? If it were seen at a distance? If it were curled up in a ball? If we say it from the back? If we were really close in and looking at just a hand or arm? Would we even be able to tell what the fuck we're looking at?

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- Clarity of vision
High signal, low noise.

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Also just one or two signals: Sophisticated spy. Tired soldier. Comfy witch.
Don't try to say that so much that the reader isn't sure what he's supposed to tune into.

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- Landmarks and Paragraph breaks
In short, grouping.
Have regions of high information density and low density.

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Batman's symbol on his check is a good landmark. So are his ears/horns. Your eye is instantly drawn -- you're supposed to be looking there -- and even when the rest of his body is blacked out, we know exactly who he is and how his body is positioned.

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A visual paragraph break is just framing and breaking up the body into more readable regions. For example, a cape with a strong collar is a classic: divides the front from the back, head from the body, divides the body from the background, and the outer part of the costume from the inside. For Bikky, I used a white cape and black under-costume with a black scarf to get the same effect. She's also divided (top to bottom): white/black/white.

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- Meshes with world
The particulars of the design should be rooted in the world and contribute to the global vision.

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Hope that helps, anon!

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