Apologies for not posting here lately. I’ve been working mostly in my sketchbook, currently about to finish book #73. I post some sketches at Instagram.

For about a year, my neighbor friend Federico and I have been participating in a monthly comics jam called Melt-Thology which takes place from 7-9:30pm on the third Tuesday of every month at Meltdown Comics in Hollywood. Basically folks show up, quickly draw a 1-page comic, pay $3, and the next month you receive the printed comic with all those comics pages.

I want to explain my comic a bit. Annotate it, if you will.

The title “Diegetic Panelization” I stole from a YouTube video that explains an Alan Moore comic book. The video was created by someone who goes by the name of AllyourbasicGerrard – who I credited (but, oops, spelled the name incorrectly – one r shy of correct.) Diegesis is a fun concept to think about… as I understand it, it means narrative stuff that the reader/viewer can see/hear/experience, but that the people in the narrative don’t. Stuff like the musical score of a movie, or the panel borders of a comic. Characters who interact with diegetic elements are said to have diegetic awareness… which is somewhat like breaking the fourth wall. In this comic, the characters have diegetic awareness – they grab the gutter, wrap word balloons around their arms. (Unfortunately when I do this too much, it just looks like they’re standing behind a four-pane window… so I would need to break a few fewer rules to make it look more comicsy.)

I also credited Henrik Drescher, an artist/illustrator who I have been into for a couple of decades. I enjoy reading his kids books to my 3-year-old. The style of the figures slightly resembles Drescher’s work… though not all that much on second look.

I credited Harvey Kurtzman, too. He was a brilliant comics artist/writer who employed some tricks where characters sometimes will reach across one panel into another.

I should have credited Scott McCloud, the comics artist/writer whose meta comic Understanding Comics got me thinking about the comics rules that I am playing with in this comic. I was happy to see that McCloud re-tweeted someone who tweeted my comic.

Lastly, after I did this, I noticed a couple more unconscious influences… or perhaps I am just seeing too much depth in my own stuff:

One is the sort of Gothic couple – from the Arnolfini Portrait or American Gothic. The couple in my comic is a sort of fallen version of those.

Second is what I would call a flop ending. Often, in comic humor from Kurtzman to Peanuts to Mad to a zillion other places I think, the gag ends with a character flopping over (with feet up) in humorous disbelief. The man in my comic, especially with his foot in the air, echoes some of these flop endings.