I’ve spent 3 years working on a graphic novel about jazz music, and this made me discover and appreciate many musicians I didn’t know (or didn’t know well) before. Still I can’t say that I’m a Jazz addict, even while drawing Gietz!, most of the time I would listen to completely different music, like The Cure or some chiptunes. At one point I felt the need to find some flavour of contemporary Jazz that was somehow more in line with my taste. I dicovered a whole new world!
There’s this current in Jazz which is called Dark Jazz, or Doom Jazz which is a mix of dark athmospheres, weird soundscapes and e-piano. There’s two great bands I would recomend: Bohren and the Club of Gore and The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble. Check out the videos below:
Another great band I would recommend is Movits! Those Swedish guys created the perfect mix between Django Reinhard, Swing and Hip Hop. I’ve been listening to this a lot while drawing Gietz! It perfectly fitted with the mood of the comic, and was energetic enough to fuel my motivation!
I had another terrible week. A week where I had no time ad all the wonderfully superfluous things like, among others, updating my blog. Maybe I have to accept the things as they are and renounce one and for all to the idea of posting here regularly… but whatever…
It’s no news that I don’t read a lot of comics anymore. I prefer to inspire myself with other media, like for example novels. I’ve stumbled over a couple of really interesting readings lalely, which I’d like to talk about here.
The first one is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a book that take the original novel by Jane Austen and turns it into something you’d actually want to read (as the book itself states). Apart from the illustrations, which are just plain lousy (why do they pay people like that to illustrate a book, while talented people have a hard time getting commissions?) and the fact that the book is no easy reading, it’s a great experiment and great fun to read most of the time. The author keeps the original plot and linguistic style, adddins a bit of zombies, gore and martial arts here and there. While this novel is not perfect (sometimes it can be tiresome to read, due to the old fashioned language, and the there’s some problems with the storyline here and there) I highly recomend it!
Another book I’d like to talk about it In Cuniculum by Lapin. Unfortunately this one’s only available in English, but since It contains several illustratins by me, (attention: subliminal advertising) I though I’d talk about it anyway. Lapin has a highly imaginative and surreal way of writing, the short stories that make up In Cuniculum are sometimes shocking, sometimes fascinating. One way or the other, Lapin knows how to surprise you and the book is a great read I hope he’ll get it translated in the future!
He awoke tied ten feet off the ground to one of the poles in her act, his head aching, and, the worst of it, his coat missing. A spotlight came on, blinding him. Shielding his eyes he spotted her, in penumbra, a tightrope away, her long, shapely legs glitzy in tights stretching out from under his coat. Then the spotlight took to her completely. And she stepped out, onto the rope, her balance out-of-this-world, loosening a button with every step she made, until, by the middle of her act, she was done with it. He marvelled, as his coat fell.
Libellule polacche strozzate dal gas.
Cigni ungheresi morti di inedia.
I forti tori dell est, decimati.
C’e’ puzza, ed un vento abominevole, mentre l oca dagli anfibi neri fa il verso all acquila.
E nell anfratto schifoso e osceno dove medita, anche il diavolo distoglie lo sguardo davanti all orrore.
Anni dopo a Norimberga, 17 oche vengono giudicate, impiccate, fatte a pezzi e bruciate nei loro stessi forni.
Vittime… carnefici….specchi distorti.
C’e’ gente che giura che tra una sentenza e l altra si e’ sentito piu’ di un quack, provenire da dei giudici dal becco giallo.
Note
The hundred word stories are back! There have been time when I thought that never again I would find the strength to draw a line. But probably I just needed to focus on something completely different (like synths and making some music) Giètz! has put my mind and body to great fatigue. Drawing a graphic novel is alway hard, but when the product of your efforts feels like something alien, it’s even worse. I still think that in the end I did a decent work, and that Giètz! is an interesting project, worth being made, and that I needed to be working on it. It’s been a great experience. Nonetheless, now more than ever, I know what path I want to be travelling on, so it’s great to see that my lust for drawing is coming back again!
From his ninth storey window the city lights, on and off, created a mosaic against the night. He swigged neat whiskey from a tumbler, staring in at all those well-lit apartments. In rooms and kitchens, against curtains drawn, he could see the cut-out silhouettes of people having their parties. Women, their necks thrown back, mouths agape, laughing their heads off; and men, hanging up their dinner jackets, loosening their neckties, smoking short-cropped cigars. He smoked one himself, raised his drink. Let them have their fun with the lights on, for later, in the dark, he knew it would be murder.
Notes
This is the first Detective Noir story by Ryan Licata, the first one he wrote, (I had published the second one, Detective Noir et la Chatte, already some time ago here). It was his idea that the detective should looks somehow like me. I will do the whole bunch in the next weeks, they make up a nice little series inside his hundred word stories.
Sorry, still none of my regular posts. But in the meantime here’s a small preview of a comic I’ve been working on lately. It’s about the fathers of goth rock Bauhaus and it will be published in the upcoming anthology Guida illustrata al frastuono più atroce #2 by the Italian punk comic group Lamette. I really like the vintage film touch I managed to give to this panels. Basically it’s the “Dog Show technique” adapted to b/w. The text is a variation on the Bauhaus hit Bela Lugosi is Dead. That’s why it all looks like some old horror movie.
In the beginnig it was just a medium sized black hole in the ground, some kind of well, they thought. Farmer Rossert and his younger son Eldebun had been looking at it for most of the afternoon trying to get a clue on its origins. At one point it started to become more two-dimensional, like a flat black disk sitting on the grass and spinning nervously on itself. Farmer Rossert picked up a small stone and threw it into the hole. He never should have done that.
notes
It’s been some time since I last posted one of my own stories, actually I only did it once inepisode #1. Well, today I wasn’t in the mood to work on anybody else’s stories, so you’ll get this one.
I coniugi Mario e Laura Piovano, di Serravalle Scrivia, in provincia di Alessandria, avevano cercato per molto tempo di avere un bambino senza, purtroppo, ottenere alcun risultato. Su consiglio del Dottor Alberto Miniati, primario della clinica San Michele Arcangelo di Cadelbosco di Sopra, provincia di Reggio Emilia, grande luminare che aveva seguito tutti i loro infruttuosi tentativi, decisero di intraprendere l’estenuante percorso dell’adozione. Dopo dieci lunghi mesi, ricevettero finalmente la comunicazione che un bambino era stato loro assegnato. Grande fu la loro sorpresa quando scoprirono che non si trattava affatto di un bambino, ma di una strega di nome Nocciola.
Notes
I’m finally back with some hundred word stories! I was really starting to miss them. The author of this first story of 2010, is yet another new entry in the project (I get quite some requests lately, and that’s great!). I’ve been drawing people in suites for so much time now (Gietz has something to do with is, in case you wondered), that it becomes quite automatic for me to draw a tie on a male character…
This is perfect timing: today is Thursday, and tomorrow is Christmas… so I couldn’t resist to the tentation of publishing a properly Christmas-themed story. I hope that this little tale, written especially for this occasion by Ryan Licata, may help you evade, if only for a second, from the claws of Christmas madness…
And of course… Merry Christmas to all of you people and thanks very much for having devoted a bit of your time to read this blog, in the past year.
Nobody Writes to the Fat Man by Ryan Licata
Albtraum stood outside the fat man’s room with a pair of darned socks and a hot water bottle. The elf nudged open the door and peeked inside. By candle light he saw his old friend over by the window, the four glass panes frosted over, sitting in nothing but his y-fronts. “Leave everything over on the bed, Albtraum.” He placed the things down with deliberate slowness, then, light of foot, stepped just outside the door to watch as Santa began to trace upon each of the frosted panes the names of all the children whom no longer sent him letters.
