animation, comics, exhibits, events, etc!

Michael Carlisle examines the world “outside” sequential art to find… more sequential art.

Hey, it’s been a while.

Before I head off to HAR 2009, return to NYC, and become wedged uncomfortably between Thesisland and Teachingville, I want to share one short thing. I’ve stated that comics are remarkably good at instruction. When I attended The Last HOPE this past July, I saw the first release of Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone‘s project Citizen Engineer. What a great setup: provide free hacking videos, then sell the parts to build stuff. Recently, they’ve done one better.

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Members of the Sequential Art Collective (including executive boardsters Matt. Murray, Allan Dorison, Jennifer Babcock and key supporter David Wasserman) were pretty busy this past week networking, geeking out and just being general nuisances at the San Diego Comic Con.

Left to right: Matt. Murray, Jennifer Babcock, David Wasserman and Allan Dorison.

For those who aren’t friends of ours individually on facebook (where most of these pics were originally published), below are some highlights from our exploits.

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In Die By the Pen, Jared Gniewek discusses what feeds his fires as an author of comics, screenplays and radio dramas.

As writers, we are by nature introspective creatures. We always know what we think about things. Sometimes it takes a ridiculously long time to get there, but we tend to arrive at opinions. We have too many or two few of them — depending on your spiritual elevation.

This is wonderful, if we couldn’t tap into what we think or believe,  we wouldn’t be very good at laying down the words. We’d be paralyzed with not only what to write but how to write it.    Introspection is one of our great strengths.

So too is the opposite: empathy.

Sometimes our characters don’t represent our own world view, but being empathetic is crucial to their creation and execution. We need to honestly “feel” them. If we can’t treat those with whom we disagree with the weight they deserve, then how can we treat our characters as living potent beings… And we must!  Characters are as real as we let them be and believe me when I say that the more crystal a character is in your mind the more potency it emerges onto the page with.

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