The Cheese Triangles arc (Pt. 4)
Jack’s overdose on « cheese-triangles before bed conjures a horrifying vision of the future: the tacky, horrible, vomit-inducing mistake that was the 80s!
An Apology!
…for inflicting this week’s episode on you. But it had to be done, and was fun – in a sick, evil, twisted sort of way. After WW 2, WW 1 and the medieval eras of the Black Death – surely, there can be no more horrid a phase in human history than the 1980s?
Creating the Abomination Page
It was fun to take us out of the usual yellow and brown-hued 1970s colour palette of Between * Wars, and into the revolting eighties. I basically took the worst of the 1980s colour palette and then did my best to combine them in the worst possible ways 😀
Above: the first version, with the DUNE movie scenes in full-colour. View full-size
I’ll write more about about the creation of this comic page on My Creative Blog soon. It was an interesting one. It ended up looking good (in a hideous sort of way) but was visually very busy. I made a difficult choice, after looking at it again on Wednesday morning. I decided to make the parts of Jack’s dream that related to David Lynch’s movie, DUNE, look more black & white: I desaturated them. This separated those initial dreaming parts of the story from the full-colour, present-moment bedroom parts; thus, making it easier to understand. It also whacks-up the contrasting colour-shock of the 1980s bits!
John I. White creative blog logo
Schedule & Format
I’m enjoying this more-disciplined Wednesday schedule. I get Thursday and Friday to think about and start writing and sketching the next one! I feel more positive about it all. Let me know what you think, readers?
Comics Festival in Dublin: Exhibition!
Fête de la Bande Dessinée
‘Fete de la Bande Dessinee‘ Comic Book Festival
Last week I mentioned this Dublin comics festival which was organised by Illustrators Ireland in association with Alliance Francais and the Comics Lab The two big events are over now, but the exhibition is still up for a month, in the Cafe at the Alliance Francais building on Kildare Street in Dublin. Between * Wars comic is on display, just on the right as you walk into the cafe – along with about 10 other tremendous comic artists’ work!
** Stay Groovy, all you 1970s kids! **
– John White
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Thanks!
My parents would get these pizza kits my brothers were selling to fundraise at high school, and they’d have these little bags of oregano or whatever, and we’d call it “the spice,” and pretend it gave us prescience and stuff. It was even orange. I don’t actually know what was in it but it did make the sauce taste pretty good!
What!?!?
Phil, are you serious? We must have separated at birth or something.
I mean, I made this up – but you lived it!
Amazing.
(I just had to paste this is in here)
Over at Facebook, Gregory Schulte wrote:
“I had the same nightmare when I was a kid…
wait-a-minute, that wasn’t a nightmare, it was REAL!!!”
This is great, John. Maybe the 1980s really were some cheese triangle-induced hallucination. That would make sense.
Interesting what you say about toning down the colours of the Dune pictures. I can see how that aided clarity.
Great that B*W is on display in Dublin. I wish I could see that. I’d like to see a big print of this instalment too.
How right you are Darren, how right you are.
But now that we’re winding back the clock – is there any way that it might be prevented, with the power of prescience?
The two pages on display are ‘Stuntman’ (Hooper/Burt Reynolds) and the Starsky/Reliant Robin one 🙂
I too was thinking that this’d look nice as a large print, actually!
Great to see you here, we’ll Skype soon!
Ah, the pastels, the fashion choices. I too once wore the sleeves on my jacket rolled up like Sonny Crockett, but it was all part of the rich tapestry of life. And the spice is life, therefore, Arrakis is part of the tapestry and sandworms might indeed secrete cheese triangles.
This made more sense before I started typing.
Classic Baker.
I recall having a white jacket, and a bit of a mullet. The latter wasn’t intentional. Well, the hairdresser may have intended it, but it was probably a result of me being pressured by my sister to “for God’s sake, get your hair cut”, but then telling the hair dresser that I didn’t really want anything cut off. A tall order.
She apologised to my sister on the street afterwards.
I actually enjoyed Miami Vice. I appreciated it’s weirdness. It really did feel weird, especially late at night. And Especially with Michael Mann’s bizarre music choices at the least appropriate times. The man has no taste, but I appreciate his unique voice.