Austin Kleon (Posts tagged comics)

The Little Nun strip by Mark Newgarden

These were strips Newgarden drew in the late 80s/early 90s for The New York Press. Here’s what he said about them in an interview with The Comics Journal:

I was really trying to work with a lot of self-imposed limitations: No dialogue, pantomime strips with no close-ups, or very few close-ups. No “camera” moves. They were influenced a lot by [Ernie] Bushmiller, [Otto] Soglow too, who did The little King. It was always pantomime, the Little King character, anyway. He would only have the other characters talk. But in The Little Nun, no one’s allowed to talk. It’s all pantomime. You rarely see that stuff anymore. It’s a relatively hard thing to do. It’s not an easy thing at all.   You almost have to draw like Bushmiller or Soglow, you have to be crystal clear and ultra simple in your drawings to make them read. A lot of people still have trouble reading pantomime strips. They are not used to looking at the pictures that closely. They’re used to reading it from balloon to balloon and then going on to the next thing.

They were hard. They took a long time. I did all The Little Nuns on gridded graph paper and it was like a lot of math. Slavishly making minute changes—the kind of stuff Bushmiller did as second nature. But it was a lot of slow work with rulers and Rapidographs and drafting stuff. 

I have loved these strips ever since I saw them in the Chris Ware-edited McSweeney’s 13.