willdinski•com

The above is a deliberately obscured detail of my new painting. Why didn’t I show the entire thing? I’ll tell you why. Because you should see it in person! That’s why.

Featuring the art of:

Todd Balthazor, Pat Callahan, Will Dinski, Katy Ellis, Sarah Hedstrand, Danno Klonowski, Pete Lochner, Lisa Luck, Chrysa Otto, Cory Speets and Nicholas Straight.

A limited edition Imaginary Friends mini-comic, drawn by members of the Minnesota Cartoonists Conspiracy, will be for sale the night of the show.

@

Infinitea Tea House
2827 Hennepin Ave. S
Minneapolis, MN 55408
(612) 871-3900

This art show is organized by Nicholas Straight. Nicholas is the nice fella who put together the Ghost show from last year.

So stop by and check out all the artwork. My piece was framed by Frame-Ups, so I’m half-way hoping it doesn’t sell and I can hang it in my living room.

Also, a tip to all those seasoned gallery hoppers: Infinitea doesn’t sell booze. Just fancy teas. (But I’ll have my flask of honey liquor if you need something to spike your Earl Grey.)

This last weekend was Springcon in St. Paul. It was fun. But I spent most of the time drawing the above comic. 2D Cloud wrote a little something about the show. I took some photos. Tom K’s are better, though.

Recently, I got on the horn and had a conversation with Robin McConnell for his podcast, INKSTUDS. It’s a Canadian podcast. But that doesn’t mean it’s in French or anything, so feel free to give it a listen.

Thanks to Robin for having me on. I’ve been listening to INKSTUDS for a while and it was a real honor to be a guest. Also, I look forward to checking out his new book:

I thought it would be a good idea to take a moment and thank all of those people who have had such encouraging things to say/write about my new book, Fingerprints. I’m flattered by some of the good press it’s received.

Particularly, I’m surprised because Fingerprints is such a strange story. It’s certain to alienate some readers. However, there are a number writers who really took the time to write thoughtful and insightful reviews.

So here are the reviews/press that I’ve been able to dig up. In no particular order:

mnarts.org (artist bio)

ampers.org (An audio interview)

minnpost.org

Optical Sloth

Guttergeek (TCJ)

Booksnob

Parabasis

The Onion AV Club
The AV Club wrote a review, but they didn’t like it very much. On the other hand, I hear they just fired a guy for writing a review of a comic book that he never actually read. So they ain’t perfect either. I’m going to assume it’s the same person who wrote the Fingerprints review. It’s my blog; I’ll believe what I want.

Indy Comic Review

FA, The Comiczine

Avoid the Future!

Publisher’s Weekly

USA Today

Portland Mercury

Superheroeen

Sacramento News & Review

Comic Book Resources

Paper Darts

Panel Patter

My favorite might be this one. It’s a review in another language, so Google had to translate it for me to read it. It wins simply because of how funny the translation makes the book sound.

There’s so many great things about this excerpt from the review:

“… his assistant is out on his own to offer the world a discovery as revolutionary as bankruptcy.”

Indeed.

So I’m starting to draw a new story. The main character should look very much like the fella in the above page. I didn’t really want to start drawing the story until I had a good handle on how this guy was going to look. Historically, I always end up redrawing the first two pages of a longer story because I’m still figuring out how the character is going to look. Here the story is less important than the need to draw André in every single panel doing different things.

As I write this, which is a good three months before posting to my website, I’m waiting for one final proof from the printer. The endpages on Fingerprints is a red paper (I think made by the same company that does the endpages for the Harry Potter books) with red ink printed on it. The printer is a somewhat concerned that the red color won’t turn out well. So I’m going to look at a draw down of the ink on the actual paper. Oh, hey. There’s the FedEx right now:

Looks good. Let’s print.

I think my favorite part about working on Fingerprints was creating a new cover. I tried a number of different directions:

Option A was discarded pretty quickly. And so it came down to option B and C. While, I liked option B quite a bit, I wanted to have a more “designed” look to the cover. A cover that might actually encourage people to pick up the book and look at the artwork inside. Option C also provided more opportunities to try out multiple printing techniques like metallic inks, spot UV and a cloth spine. In a way, I wanted to try and have the cover be as opulent as possible yet intrigue you to dig below the surface. Or read more. Luckily, I’ve been fortunate that Top Shelf has been incredibly encouraging and understanding of some of my more indulgent design ideas.

Also, it’s been fascinating working with a Chinese printer. One thing that we’ve been doing that I’ve never seen before is what they call a Wet Proof.

For my day-job, I work in printing. Every week I’m sending off printing proofs to clients or going to press checks. Usually what happens is the client gets two proofs. One is for color and another for position. Both these proofs are made on an inkjet printer and are relatively inexpensive. However, they’re excellent way to give you an accurate look at what the final printed piece will look like.

I guess in China, they prefer to make plates and print up a press sheet as a proof:

So it’s an literal copy of what the final printed piece will look like on the actual paper. I hear that this is done for a lot of other comics. Personally, I found it completely unnecessary  and somewhat inferior to inkjet proofs. It’s cool. But making any color changes becomes cost prohibitive and because they only proof as many pages as can fit on a press sheet, I don’t get to see how all of my colors have converted to the printer’s workspace.

On the other hand, getting a wet proof for the cover was AMAZING:

I had no idea what this thing was going to look like. A spot UV over a metallic ink? It sounds cool, but I had no idea if it would look good. I was totally preparing myself to be surprised when the book arrived. It might be crazy, but a little bit of risk/mystery makes the creative process a whole lot more fun for me. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But because we made a Wet Proof, I got to see exactly what it looked like.

I should also say a thing or two about the Epilogue. This seemed like a nice opportunity to show a little more of the aftermath of Dr. Tatsu’s crazy contraption. In my mind, I kind of wanted to write a “Dr. Tatsu in Mexico” story like it was an Eddie Campbell Bacchus tale. She’s in hiding and on an adventure. Fortunately, that just didn’t make sense, but the idea of Tatsu and her new friend running off to Mexico intrigued me.

It kind of wrote itself, and I’m pleased with how it turned out.

And that seems like a good place to end this series. It’s strange to go back and revisit all the work that went into this one story. I had thought these blog posts would have been more linear and specific about the actual process of making Fingerprints. But my memory really isn’t that good, so they ended up as more of a collection of ideas. These are the things I was thinking about and concerned with as I gave myself up to the process of creating. The process has always been the most fulfilling part of comics for me, so revisiting and writing about it has been satisfying.

Of course, if you’re interested in reading Fingerprints, you can pick it up from Top Shelf Productions or at finer comic shops in your area. I’ll have copies too. Maybe I’ll just get a back-pack and carry them around with me.

I’ve been asked a number of times, “How do you get a book published by Top Shelf?” Sometimes, I wonder if they’re really asking, “How did you get a book published by Top Shelf?” I usually just shrug my shoulders as though it was an accident and maybe Top Shelf thought I was someone else.

Every comic I’ve done, I’ve sent to Brett and Chris. I think, mostly because they encourage that sort of thing. I’m always hearing about this cartoonist or that cartoonist who has just received some sort of encouragement from Top Shelf. They must spend their entire day just answering mail.

So I sent them Beautiful, Cool & Irreplaceable, and then at MoCCA Brett told me that he’d be interested in publishing it. Do you remember that scene in Arrested Development where Gob and Tobis sell Michael on their idea for Gobias Industries? Then, when Michael seems interested the pair fall completely silent and awkwardly walk away backwards out of fear of saying something that might change Michael’s mind? I’m pretty sure that’s what I did.

The major difference between the mini-comic and the final product is the title. As much as I liked the original title, it wasn’t the sort of thing anyone could remember besides myself. I hit my head against the wall for a while trying to come up with new titles. Alternate titles that were considered included: Plastic, Shallow Sutures and Fingerprints. Fingerprints won out, although I think Shallow Sutures would have been alright as well. I’m a sucker for alliteration.

Also, early on we considered printing the book as more of a pamphlet. In this format the five-row grid would have been intact. In the end, we decided on the two-row, graphic novel format and never looked back.

Once all that was decided, I set to work coloring the book. I considered writing an entire blog post about the process of coloring Fingerprints. But, you know … I really don’t have much to say about it. Coloring is a really intuitive process for me. Probably the only process that I don’t over think. The less said about it the better. I used Photoshop. And a Wacom tablet because my wrist started to hurt.

Probably the most satisfy part of converting to Fingerprints was getting another chance to redraw some of the more god-awful looking drawings I had done. I wanted to redraw the whole thing, but knew that it would really only be marginally better and not worth the time. But some of those panels? Shit. I can draw better than that.

I also needed to fix a few consistency issues in the character design. As I’m drawing a book, and I’m sure this is true for everyone, my characters “evolve” and solidify into what becomes their final look.

It’s funny to note that early on in the book, the angle of Dr. Finger’s nose wasn’t quite right.

It was very gratifying to fix it.

Look at this! I did another one of those really unusual watercolors. I’m calling this one Slow Pitch.

In other news, I was a guest recently on the new Geek Report podcast. The Geek Report is basically Bud Burgy, Ted Anderson, Lance Ward, and Athena Currier sitting around and talking about Geek culture with a slant towards comics. I’ve always thought of myself more of a Nerd than a Geek, but I suppose that’s just splitting hairs.

We recorded the episode (or is it webisode? podisode?) very early in the morning at the KFAI studios. I must say I had a really fun time. It felt like we were just sitting in someones living room chatting. You can check it out on their website.

Athena was hiding herself behind her microphone, so I couldn’t get a photo of her. Sorry Athena!

I must also mention that I was interviewed for a MinneCulture radio documentary about indie comics also recorded at KFAI.

Britt Aamodt put it together and really did a first-class job. She managed to take all the random things I blurted out and put them together so that it sounded like I have the natural ability to string together two thoughts without forgetting where I am.

That’s the magic of radio.