Fear Not Of Comics

Mos Def has this track called “Fear Not Of Man”, you can hear it at youtube, but there's a part of it where he's just talking about hip hop, and I always think that you can take out “hip hop” and put in “comics” and it still makes sense.

This is the bit...

Listen.. people be askin me all the time,
"Yo Mos, what's gettin ready to happen with Hip-Hop?"
(Where do you think Hip-Hop is goin?)
I tell em, "You know what's gonna happen with Hip-Hop?
Whatever's happening with us"
If we smoked out, Hip-Hop is gonna be smoked out
If we doin alright, Hip-Hop is gonna be doin alright
People talk about Hip-Hop like it's some giant livin in the hillside
Comin down to visit the townspeople
We are Hip-Hop
Me, you, everybody, we are Hip-Hop
So Hip-Hop is goin where we goin
So the next time you ask yourself where Hip-Hop is goin
ask yourself.. where am I goin? How am I doin?
Til you get a clear idea
So.. if Hip-Hop is about the people
and the.. Hip-Hop won't get better until the people get better
then how do people get better? (Hmmmm...)
Well, from my understanding people get better
when they start to understand that, they are valuable
And they not valuable because they got a whole lot of money
or cause somebody, think they sexy
but they valuable cause they been created by God
And God, makes you valuable
And whether or not you, recognize that value is one thing

Official Trailer!

So, with a little bit of hard work, a touch of swearing, a tiny aspect of luck, and a whole butt-load of ingenuity, I have managed to get The Official Trailer to The Young Offenders up at youtube.

And here it is.



The music you hear is "Tokyo Drifter" by Chris Public. He's better known (to some) as Lo-Ki from BTK, the fresh young Canadian Hip-Hop group from late 90's Toronto.

I'm a huge fan of Chris Public. The band BTK has been a huge inspiration on me, my writing, my lifestyle, my marijuana consumption, my comics, and like, my soul, since I first heard the Peppyrock single, during my last days of High School.

As much as it is an honor and privilege to get to create my own comic with Peter Severinson, that I get to combine the whole works with one of the most incredible musical artists I've ever heard, just makes it all the sweeter. I can't thank these guys enough. Hell, I don't even know if I thanked them at all.

Anyway, enjoy the tunes and the foreshadowing. I'm sure, if you're reading this, then you've already read most of the story, but that ain't the point. The point, I think, is to create something that's to be enjoyed.

Goings throughs the motions.

Here kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty!

Struggling to upload. Nothing too major, just fudging around with trying to get a high-quality video posted up to youtube. I'm trying different ways to make it happen, different methods of moving files around, different extensions to save them under, different ways to get the best visuals popping as I can.

It's a bit of a task. It's a nice time to get some laundry done. It's a very yellow point in october.

Still can't believe we're moving out of this neighbourhood! Surreal! Only 10 days to gooooooooo!

Turn, Churn, Burn, Spurn

Savage Henry Lee says, "Look out behind you - radioactive man!"

Drama to follow!

Thoughts on the first printing of the first issue of my first comic.

The rain is just pouring down right now.

So, as you've seen from the photo, I picked up my copies of THE YOUNG OFFENDERS the other day.

A nice thing about the printing job we got, was that it was done by a local organization, right in the heart of East Vancovuer, where the story takes place. The guys even recognized some of Peter's buildings. If you know East Van, you know where you're at.

Interestingly, on the way over to the printers, I saw these 4 kids. They were sitting out on the steps in front of a closed down business, and they were smoking crack. 4 kids, between the ages of about 15 and 19, sitting outside on the side of the road, on a nice Friday morning, smoking crack.

I really wanted to go back and give them copies of the book, saying that they were a big part of what we were writing about, but... I left them to their smoking. They'd been giving me the junkyard-dog eyes anyway.

Yeah, the rain is pouring down right now. It smells GREAT!

You ever have somebody you don't like do something nice for you? Sucks, huh? Puts you in a weird morally compromising position.

Anyway, though I'm not entirely satisfied with the means of obtaining it, I have managed, for the first time in about 10 years, to get my hands and eyeballs on the comic book poster which massively inspired The Young Offenders, and me.

It's a poster by Darick Robertson, and it's of The New Warriors. The New Warriors were a mid-90's comic about kid's with superpowers, in the Marvel universe.

The image of these strange kids standing in a dark alley, filled with strange powers and youthful anger, has been in my mind for years. The poster's called “All They Want To Do Is Change The World.”

The poster came to me in the mail, the same day I got home with the printings of The Young Offenders. Having the book, and the inspiration for the book, showing up on the same day? It was a nice feeling. A powerful feeling. A feeling like something is happening.

No headphones during action sequences, dammit!

OK, so page 3, and one of my first/favorite references. I never get tired of explaining this, I guess because I'm an enormous geek.



In this panel, The Spaz is listening to, and singing along with, a song performed by Mos Def & The Roots. The song is called “Double Trouble,” and is a reference to the duo Double Trouble, who were a part of the Funky Four Plus One.

All of these things, from Mos Def, through the Roots, on to the Funky Four Plus One, are awesome. Purely awesome. I was introduced to the Funky Four Plus One through the movie WILD STYLE!

But there's more to it than that. Isn't there always? The lines themselves are from RUN-DMC's song, “King of Rock.”

Let the Poppers pop,
And the Breakers break.

Now me, I take that as, “Let that pop music shit burst, and let the makers of real music take over.” I could be wrong – It's just an interpretation. But it's my interpretation.

It's funny – If you listen to Mos & The Roots on the song, it's not a very up-beat ass-kicking tune. It's a very “laid back and feeling groovy” sort of song. Not the sort of thing you might want to be rocking on your headphones if you're about to jump into a giant fight with riot control cops. But that's The Spaz. He takes it easy. He smiles. He has fun. Hell, he's so fast he's untouchable and strong enough to bounce back from just about anything.

Double Trouble was one of the first tunes that really inspired The Young Offenders. I was listening to it a lot when I was first coming up with the characters, long before I met Peter. One of the best bits, not what Spaz quotes, is when you get toward the chorus...

“Either stand tall or just sit the fuck down!”

Yeah.



To me, that's what The Young Offenders are all about.

10 years old and she's already public enemy #1!

It wasn't an intentional thing, but in this panel Dot's silhouette really reminds of the Public Enemy logo!

Location, Location, Location.

The Young Offenders takes place in Terminal City, a fictional approximation of Vancouver, BC.

When Peter and I started The YO, we took a long walk around Vancouver's East Side - the Main and Hastings and East of there sort of area. It's the worst place in the city for homelessness and heroin addiction and all that fun stuff. It's also a beautiful part of town.

There's wonderful old buildings in the East Side. Big old houses that've existed for almost a hundred years. Hastings has tons of great apartment buildings, built out brick and now home to millions of bedbugs.

It's sad seeing such a great part of town looking so run-down, but on the other hand, it gives the neighbourhood an awesome sort of character. Really, slums tend to just have so much more personality than nice parts of town.

Looking at The Young Offenders – Page 01

Ah, the first page. A quiet shot. Serious men talking in the darkness. Not a hint of the youth-based super-action set to erupt.



When I first started writing The Young Offenders, oh-so many years ago, I made a few choices that I would probably never make again. One of those, was to let a minor character narrate the entire first chapter.

This is a technique I've seen used in Japanese comic and cartoon storytelling. You introduce the sidekick as the main character, and then introduce the main character through the perspective of the sidekick. In the case of The YO though, I went with the villain's sidekick.

It's not that I regret telling the story that way – it's just a storytelling method I use, that I won't use again. Part of that's just because this seems like my definitive use of the technique, so I feel like it'd come off as a little too repetitive if I tried to drop this kind of introduction piece into something again.

What's also interesting (to me) about the first page of the series, is that it takes place outside of the neighbourhood that the rest of the series takes place within. There's a sense of opulence and class to the first page, which is all that much more removed from the ones to come.

I like how this page shows no motion, but has motion to it. A man sits, and a camera slowly zooms in on him. His eyes flicker around. He's emotional, on-edge.

Darkness surrounds everything.

SHL

Blogging Straight Outta East Van!

I've run a few blogs over the years – too many, probably.

One of my latest blog projects (blojects) has been at comics2film.com, where I've kept a running series of articles on all sorts of random nonsense. Lately though I've been finding that my ambivalence towards comic-to-movie transitions has been showing, making me look like the bored hooker at the party.

This ain't that though, and here ain't there.

So, don't expect to see a lot of comic-movie news here, or reviews. I hate writing reviews. I love writing comics, and I love writing about comics, and I'm pretty sure that's what this blog is going to end up being about.

Why another blog? Why now? Well, I'm just trying to find new, better ways of communicating with my (potential) audience. I don't just want to write comics for myself – I want to write comics that I enjoy, but I also want to be able to share them with a larger group of people.

I've really been bouncing around the net these days, looking at the different sites for promoting web comics. Drunkduck, comicspace, comicsomethingelse, comicfuckingshit.

Some of them are pretty cool, like DrunkDuck keeps bringing me back, but a lot of the ones I've been too are pretty bizarely laid out. As well, I have a hard time seeing how some of them are going to actually generate new readers for the book. Admitedly, at several sites I've already seen a few dozen hits come in, but... They're so many thousands (millions?) of comics on-line. How do reach the people who might actually want to read yours?

Well, anyway, those are some of the thoughts that pushing this blog forward. How can the reader help me get from reader 1 to reader 10 to reader 10,000?

Anyway. Woo. Blogness!

Your super-awesome pal,

Savage Henry Lee

And your other super-awesome pal -

THE SPAZ!!