Tag: comics

An Experiment: Nate Powell

Nate Powell has performed in bands like Soophie Nun Squad and now sings in the melodic hardcore/metal band Universe.  He also draws comics and illustrations with his graphic novel “Swallow Me Whole” winning the 2009 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Novel.

Nate was in Chicago this weekend on a mini-tour with Universe scheduled around the C2E2 comic book convention.   During a break from signing books and talking to comic-book enthusiasts, Nate talked to me about the weekend and balancing passions and obligations in his life.

Visit Nate’s website, See My Brother Dance, to see some of his work or visit Universe’s MySpace page for upcoming shows and to hear some songs.

potshots

When my friend Leanne was passing through town last month, we went for a short hike around Lake Griffey.  While we were hiking, she mentioned that she really liked a comic called Potshots and that she was disappointed that her local paper had stopped carrying the comic.  Luckily, the comics are available on the web.  Leanne isn’t super internet-connected, so I offered to compile some of the potshots and send them to her in the mail.  I used wget to download them, but I needed to find a way to print the images many-to-a-page.

I eventually came upon using ImageMagick‘s montage command.  This worked pretty well for me:

C:\Documents and Settings\ghing\Desktop\potshots>U:\ImageMagick-6.2.6-Q16\montag
e.exe -tile 2×5 -adjoin *.gif -geometry 300×190 sheet.png

Then I could just view and print the composite images in firefox, provided I made my margins small and zoomed in first.

Potshots is pretty interesting.  The artist who draws them was once called “history’s only full time, professional published eppigramist.” The black and white illustrations with clever phrases definitely have this feeling of antiquity to them.  The sayings have a strange tone as well, that can be heartfealt but also sarcastic.   So, they come off as a weird hybrid of Family Circle and Edward Gorey.