Just trying things out

After the 'cardiac event' and the graphic story I made out of the sketches I made when in ICU I felt I really wanted to do graphic stories again. But I didn't want to go back to the traditional ways of a template of frames and pen and paper. I didn't see how to do it from scratch on the computer. But did I really needed to start from scratch? Didn't I have oodles of sketches that I had made on hoof? Why not give them a platform too? I started some try outs. While recuperating from the heart attack I had made some sketches of the place where fate had struck. Around that time the subject of a meeting of the Achill Writers Group of which I was a member was 'The Visitor'. My colleague Dan MacDonald had written a poem about death as the visitor. I asked him if I could use his poem for a graphic story. He agreed. His poem is about him confronting death while I made a parallel story in pictures of death stalking me. I did have to rework the existing sketches to a great extend though and I had to make two additional drawings. In the meantime I was wondering what to do with the Morocco book that was ready to go to the book designer. The fact that it would be twice the size of the Syria book sort of put me off. Why not break the book up into different parts and making the parts into graphic stories? If I did that, did I have enough drawings?

From analogue to digital and back again

By the time I got into professional cartooning I already had a Mac, a flatbad scanner and knew how to use Quark Express for DTP. Life changed completely in the late nineties with the introduction of Adobe Photoshop and the Wacom tablet. As a cartoonist and illustrator working solely for clients I rarely did comics. If I was asked to make graphics for a manual I still did it in pen and paper. All the afterwork I did in Photoshop using an A3 Cintiq Wacom tablet. By the time I was ready for a career change hardly any of my work got printed. Everything was digital and increasingly 'made for' tablets and smartphones. I noticed that most of the artists in my acquaintance who made graphic stories still made them for the printing press. Although most of the work in creating the graphic story was done on the computer. Initially I did the same. When by 2013 I seriously got into Urban Sketching I reverted totally to pen and paper. By that time there was already excellent software available for making quick high quality sketches on an Ipad or any such tablet or even a smartphone. Maybe it was for sentimental reasons, or even financial reasons or just plain laziness that I went back to the sketch block. I don't know. Although in prioritizing my expenses an Ipad never featured large. In any case the sketches I had made in Syria were made into a proper book that was published in 2015. The beautiful lay-out had been done by a colleague that knew how to use Illustrator and Indesign something I never took the time to master. In 2015 I was also preparing to put the sketches I had made in Morocco into a book and I had already written 98% of the text. But something was nagging.

The Life of Alie Snoek

In the late eighties I approached the poet/writer/magazinist Sjuul Deckwitz with the request to 'do' something together. It resulted in the graphic novel 'Alie Snoek mijn leven' (The life of Alie Snoek). Originally it appeared page by page in the magazine of Dutch comic/actor/play-write Paul Haenen. Later it was collected into a book. Ali Snoek was the first project I did together with somebody else. Later I would work together with another cartoon artist but never with a poet/writer. Because Sjuul Deckwitz at the time had a very distinct and original style of writing, I left the initiative to her. She wrote the text and I would make it into a graphic story. She communicated with Paul Haenen about when the next deadline was, wrote a little story about something in the life of Alie Snoek and dropped it into my mailslot. We never communicated about either the graphics or the story. It turned out to be gas! I thought Sjuul's stories absolutely brilliant. And she liked my renditions. I never found it difficult to turn her text into images. After the first page (on view here The Death) I never kept to the literal story. I let the drawings tell a parallel story to the text. From the beginning I left the text intact and wrote it under the frames in full. No Balloons. No frames within the action frames. It worked! Of course it wasn't a totally new way of telling a graphic story but to me it was. However it was also the last graphic story I did. I got very much into the business of cartoon making working for clients and earning good money. I had nor the time or the inclination to continue with 'free work'. Until I went to Syria and started 'Urban Sketching'. But that is another story.