009 - #blogjune 006 - The Sound of Silence

"If it's a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on."  - Alfred Hitchcock

*In case anyone thought it "could be, could be not or couldn't rightly say" - the left panel is from Asterix!

One of my favourite words in the "English" language is onomatopoeia - .
As a cartoonist, or comic book artist, putting sounds into words is an important element of the story telling process. What word do you choose to portray certain sounds. It can sometimes be quite a tough choice, because certain words COULD conjure up a different experience of sound from person to person. So, one hopes to make a sound decision.
Most people will be familiar with most of the common variations of comic book sounds, your POWs (incl. KAPOW), BAMs, ZAPs and BOOMs. And my personal favourite WHAM... Ok, yes - also because I was a big fan of their music in the 80s *smile*

Reading a comic is mostly a silent event - in these colder winter days, sitting in the warmest spot in the house with maybe the sound of thunder and the rain on the roof. So, the story itself needs to be able to create convincing sound effects enabling us to (as Scott McCloud described it so well) "LISTEN WITH OUR EYES"
We can all appreciate a good BANG...

Both Scott McCloud's "Making Comics" and "Understanding Comics" are amazing books.

People having grown up up with Tintin books will be familiar with the exploding mushrooms in the story of the Shooting Star. Those BOOMS are quite subdued compared to some of the other exploding sounds in comics, especially the American super hero ones. It's can also be an issue with different languages. For instance the Dutch word for BOOM is BOEM (because BOOM actually means TREE in the Netherlands) - then it is >BOUM< if you’re French, or >BOM< if you’re Swedish and >BUM< if you’re Italian!

I like it when they get creative and make up words that aren't your normal stock standard variety of usual comic book sounds... From simpler words like WHUMP, KRAK, and BUDABOOM .. to the more complicated versions like:

TWAFWOKK, SKRATOOM, KRAKA-KWOOM, KKRAKKA DOOOUM, BRKERBRABOOM or KRRKKKOOOOOO...

All these remind me of the great sounding words imitating the sound of thunder from Finnegans Wake by Irish writer James Joyce - like this one:
Pappappapparrassannuaragheallachnatullaghmonganmacmacmacwhackfalltherdebble-nonthedubblandaddydoodled.

Some of these panels were taken from THOR comic - the God of Thunder!

008 - #blogjune 005 - Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people 

what they do not want to hear.” ― George Orwell 

From an early age I've always been fascinated by the statue of Liberty. The first time I saw it, was when it was sticking out of the sand in the German spoken version of "Planet of the Apes." (Der Planet der Affen) That image, the surprise ending, that shocked many people at the time, has been cemented into my mind for eternity.

Imagine having Lady Liberty walk through the streets, or her head suddenly taking up a parking space!

Ever since, I have collected pictures from magazines of the statue (at some stage I had them all on my wall as a kid) and each time it featured prominently in a movie it reached out to me. In "Ghostbusters II" the statue walks through the streets of New York, in "Cloverfield" the head gets thrown down the NY streets and for many years I had a postcard of the original "Escape from New York" movie poster on my wall.

Lady Liberty doesn't just have a cameo in movies - also in my other favourite medium (comics) there's plenty of appearances. On covers of Spider-man, Mad Magazine and more recently the latest Lucky Luke album. The latter is a GREAT story in which Luke comes across the French sculptor, Bartholdi, who’s touring the West with a strange sculpture: a colossal hand holding a torch. In fact, it’s part of the now famous Statue of Liberty, and Bartholdi is raising funds towards its construction and transport from France. Now wouldn't THAT make a GREAT movie? I know the adventures of Lucky Luke did get made as a french movie about ten years ago, but maybe America is now ready for its own version and THIS story would make a great introduction!

There was even a superhero named Lady Liberty, she was a member of Force of July, a team of agents working for the American Security Agency in the DC comic universe. She went through a few different versions over the years.

Funny enough, with my interest in the Statue, I have NEVER actually been to New York. I have seen a few blow-up versions in my day, found the smaller version in Paris (that I used to believe to be the smaller original!) and several LEGO versions in the Legoland theme-parks. One of these days I WILL get my hands on a Lego set that will let me build my own miniature version of the statue.

In my workroom I have an awesome plastic copy of her head, I believe it was from an X-men play-set and since recent days a cute smaller statue that friends send me after their trip to New York. What is it exactly that attracts me to my second favourite tall green lady? Is it the hope it gave people who came to America, to start a new life? Is it how she stands for liberty and justice? I guess all of the above.

Oh - by the way, my favourite tall green lady is of course the SHE-HULK ;)

007 - #blogjune 004 - ROCKET MAN

"A typical smart phone has more computing power than Apollo 11 when it landed a man on the moon." - Nancy Gibbs

In my fast collection of comic books, there is one book that holds a VERY special place in my heart. It is probably also one of the oldest books that I have had for the longest time. A bundled book of TINTIN stories. It that belonged to my father when he was young. The copyright info states 1947 to 1954!

The insides do have some severe signs of aging, due to acid fingers and prob some destructive powers of me as a toddler. I think at some stage I must have been un-supervised and expressed my early creative skills with a blue pencil right in the corner of one of the pages.



The book itself consists of four Tintin albums, The Broken Ear , Destination Moon,  Explorers on the Moon and a couple of stories about Jo, Zette & Jocko. The latter are some other characters by the late great Hergé that most people would never have even heard of.
It's the adventures of Tintin on the moon, that REALLY resonated to me as a young Dutch boy. To imagine that these stories were created before the first ACTUAL moon landing. So much of it is pretty accurate and it inspired me later as a teenager to even create a moon surface from chicken wire,  papier-mâché and cement (!) to have a surface for my Tintin figurines to play on. I WISHED I had photos of that! But those days we didn't have camera phones and you didn't waste you film on anything but events, birthdays or family back then.

These rocket pages were very inspiring growing up.

Now, it is easy to just snap a few photos of my treasured book, featuring my favourite rocket man Tintin and add it instantly a blog online potentially for the whole world to see.  Still to this day my complete Tintin album collection resides proudly as inspiration on my office book shelf and a special Tintin themed corner is on permanent display in the living room.   .

006 - #blogjune 003 - Ain't about the uh cha-ching cha-ching

“Business, you know, may bring money, but friendship hardly ever does.”
- Jane Austen, Emma

One of my earliest memories of money is drawing some of the dutch banknotes at primary school age. I copied a 10, 25 and 100 note. Sadly the 100 one got lost over the years, but I still have the other two, I found them the other day and compared them to the real thing. For a young little Dutch boy, they weren't that bad really. Not that they would have fooled any shopkeepers nor do I believe it would count me as a counterfeiter.

Drawing has always been a major part of my life. Most of my drawings ended up in school newspapers or as cards for family and friends. Mostly work that was done out of love and the passion for creating. When I was asked by a friend to supply some small drawings for a computer magazine he was publishing I was really excited to actually get paid for the first time for my cartoons. 

Somewhere among my fast archive of paperwork, archive boxes that have shifted around so many times there is a copy of that magazine. One thing I really need to still do is work on a better archiving system for all my memories, because they are the best bits in life that money can't buy. I WILL be in need of one other valuable commodity: ... TIME.

I know it is in there ... somewhere...

005 - #blogjune 002 - It ain't FAIR

For me, blogging kinda started at an early age, I guess. When I was 7 years old at the Nicolaes Beets Primary school in the town of Rijswijk, Holland. The teacher would instruct us kids to write down our "adventures", so we could practice our handwriting and story telling skills from an early age.

To be fair ... Blogging comes from the word WEBlog - so, I guess it was just plain LOGGING. Keeping a log book of our earliest experiences as a child.

Like this entry, from May 1975:

"Been to the city. We had "poffertjes" (Dutch Mini Pancakes) and after that we went to the fair."

The dutch word for FAIR is KERMIS - to me it has so much more meaning than the English version. It's more like large parts of the city turned into this cosy little theme park, With attractions - food stands and just a special atmosphere that as a kid makes an even bigger impression.

"I went into some kinda octopus attraction. When you go up and down it gives you a tummy ache. I also went into a place called Mickey Mouse, a mice city. In this mice city I saw Isaac. I saw Jeroen as well and Coby."

The entry ends with an illustration of the actual attractions. I googled and found an actual old photo of the "octopus" ride from that time. I do remember the city of mice, but was amazed to read back it was actually called Mickey Mouse. These days Disney would have jumped onto that with a giant copyright lawsuit.

There are no photos of me at that age, at  any of these kinda events. Children these days have so much more to look back at later, with parents logging every step of their lives placing photos on social media. I sometimes think it isn't fair that a large chunk of my generation (and those before) have so little photographic memories of their younger years,
But than - having the ones we DO have including old notebooks, THEY make it all just so more special.

004 - BONUS BLOG - Journals

Journals.

When I was nine years old I traveled with my wonderful grandmother to Canada and America. That year, 1977, is when I started my first ever journal. Since then I have kept regular hand written journals - sometimes with large gaps in between.  It is, however, such a joy to grab a volume and look back at 40+ years of memories. Places I have been to, people I have met. The good times, the bad times - pages filled with dreams and hopes - stories about friends and family.

Most of them are in Dutch, having grown up in Holland and only having moved to New Zealand in 1992. Some I have started to translate over time, but time is limited and do you spend some if it re-wording your life in English or focus on the "here and now" and write new chapters...

- new stories....

My passion project is to create a comic book version of my life.
To take these 50 years of memories and somehow condense them into five volumes, that cover 10 years of journals each. By the time I get to it there will probably be a 6th volume!

003 - #blogjune 001- Time to dust of the cobwebs

Never ever had I come across the hashtag "blogjune" before. So I got seriously intrigued by the shear mention of this literary movement on a tweet by Hawera librarian, Cath Sheard. A shard of information, shared on the last day of May. Was this just a thing for librarians? Had I stumbled onto a secret blog club, that prepared pieces of prose and/or poetry on personal computers each year. Were there any rules? Was this like "FightClub", with its first rule: "Never blog about #blogjune." I could not trace back any origin of the event.

On Twitter I did find someone called @seanfish, who started blogging many years ago and participated in the #blogjune phenomenon since 2011… So, for at least over 8 years, this blogfest had been slumbering online out of my direct sight. What else could have I been missing... is this a symptom of FOMO…  I was already late to the party known as #inktober. As a cartoonist/illustrator, it had been on my radar - but I didn't join in till last year. No more standing on the sideline, let's jump right into the deep and ride this wave from the first of June to Sunday the 30th. THIRTY days!

In the words of American documentary filmmaker, Morgan Spurlock, "Try something new for 30 days." Writing though, isn't something new to me. I have written stories and comic strips since primary school. I have worked for many publications, writing movie and gear reviews and other articles. Heck, I have kept some form of journal, visual and written (by hand and digital) for over 40 years. Sadly, last year I accidentally managed to delete seven years of digital journals, only then to find out my back-up had been corrupted as well. I wish some of that would have been blogged. Even JUST one month of each of these lost years… They would have been stored online, protected from sudden erasure.

My collection of handwritten journals.

Blogging itself isn't new to me either, I have started a few in the past. But with no reactions, no views, that soon became an dying art. There are some of my blogs out there in cyberspace that even I can't find and or don't remember the password for. Really, the new thing to try would be to keep this up, consistenly for a whole month.
I read somewhere that the ideal length for a blog post is 1600 words (about seven minutes of reading). I think 444 will be enough for my first attempt. I still need to resurrect one of the old blogs in order to upload this new endeavour. 

The epic eRiQ blogging epos of 30 days of June...