MEMOIRS OF A PART-TIME, FULL-MINDED, ENTHUSIASTIC CARTOONIST.
Fear, joy, hope, sweat, pain, fun, struggle and frustration:
Some doubts and many laughs about the making of Vice-Versa, Pink The Unpinkable.
Sometimes, when I sketch Vice-Versa, the head of Jiggs (from classic comic strip “Bringing Up Father”) comes out.
I love George McManus, it’s not a secret.
© George McManus. King Features Syndicate. All rights reserved.*
McManus’ brilliant use of art deco design is intimidating, nowadays. Some surreal visual solution had been very innovative at the time.
Sometimes Homer Simpson pops up. It’s a strange feeling, being a cartoonist, when someone else’s creature comes out of my own pencil.
As a consequence, many doubts rise: is my character good? Has it enough personality? Am i running the risk of sketching an ill-projected character? Has it weak distinctive features?
Most of the time, when I draw vice-versa I think about professor Sephen Hawking.
It’s well known, professor hawking suffers from a slow-progressing form of ALS that has gradually paralyzed him over the decades, he uses a wheelchair to move and some sophisticated devices to be able to communicate.
I draw vice-versa as a young tulip full of vital energy, with no possibility to walk and very little chance to move. It’s difficult to create a dynamic result when the main character (and the only visible character in my comic strips) is a static creature.
It’s challenging. I try to let vice-versa express either sense of movement either spirit of curiosity and vital mood, while being planted in his vase, standing still on his window sill .
Of course he is a flower and flowers don’t move. Trees don’t move, but Elsinore forest did.
Anyway. I experience the challenge, step by step, in my effort to find different ways to show graphically the motion. I’ve been thinking a lot and I’ve decided for a white and plain background, the blank setting is supposed to remind of the traditional stage of the Noh theatre. The stage of the Noh theatre is empty, there is only a panel called kagami-ita with a painting of a green pine tree.
It’s only an evocative suggestion, of course. Vice-versa is not a green pine tree, he is a pink imperial tulip, but the idea is quite appealing, it’s just a poetic touch I hope it will be properly understood by my reader and I hope my audience will be ready to appreciate it.
Pink notes by EKS
© 2015 EKS All rights reserved/Tutti i diritti riservati
VICE-VERSA PINK THE UNPINKABLE © 2015 EKS All rights reserved.
No part of this work and/or the same in its entirety can be reproduced and/or filed (including by means of electronic systems) for private uses and/or reproduced and/or filed (including by means of electronic systems) for the public without previously obtaining in each and any case, the explicit consent from the author.
*Le altrui immagini sono riprodotte ai sensi dell’articolo 70 legge n. 633 del 22 aprile 1941.
*Others copyright works are produced in accordance with fair use. Literary rights, including copyright, are retained by the creators and their heirs.
Pink notes by EKS 