So Dov DID send me a postcard from France. A Moebius postcard no less!
Dov’s travels have taken him from his ancestral homestead of Gay Paree to London where he will be staying with the Grandmother of a friend from high school. Kind of creepy.
-Ben
Well, sportsfans, no word from Dov this week. I think he’s starting in France. Can’t you just imagine what he must be doing right now? Maybe he’ll send a postcard.
Our writing collaboration (the way I see it anyways) goes like this:
1. I feed Dov raw material like hibachi chef.
2. Dov produces the first draft in segments (usually turning out 5 pages of manuscript every ten days or so). This is a lot of heavy lifting, so I have to give him the props for his plots..
3. I give feedback and we begin to choose our battles over which jokes get changed to what. We fight tooth and nail over lousy puns and tasteless language. Sometimes we’ll seek the opinions of arbitrators. Then what happens is everybody agrees with one of us, but the other STILL doesn’t think it’s funny. Fuck it.
We usually do the art with full text on the boards, so whoever does the pencils gets first say. This is where the final blows over semantics are struck. Whichever of us scans the artwork just takes off while the getting is good and starts lettering the book with the computer while the other does some really tedious task. I always try to scan the pages, that way we get to see MY jokes FIRST.
Anyways, for all you nerds out there, we stole a line from ‘Ferris Bueller’ on this page.
Enjoy,
Ben
Dov is abroad, he’s doing something in Europe. Finding himself. I don’t know. He would sometimes mention wanting to write a novel, “probably about my life”, so we’ll see. In the meanwhile, I’m going to put up pages from the current BenVsDov comic.
The work on this book both follows up and moves beyond our previous collaboration on “Dingleberry Blues” (http://benvsdov.com/dovs_comics/db_index.html). We plan on sticking to poop-themed titles until the ideas stop coming.
We’re going with a Cerebus-style production assembly on this one; that’s to say that Dov draws the figures and I handle the backgrounds. We’ve been drawing and writing together since elementary school and ‘TP&TP” is our most elaborate scheme to date.
A page a week!
–but I’ll give you three to start things off…
-Ben
An aspect of my approach to comics is “comics as a transmission of personality” (I think this is an idea seeded by Evan Dorkin, either in conversation, or gleaned from his awesome Dork #7…can’t remember). In animation (but not so much in comics) artists are consciously focused on the acting-quality of their character; HERE, in these comics, the artists focused on the INTER-acting (see how that works?) qualities of their characters–kind of like improv-theater. Summer 2007.
These first two examples were commissioned by Pearl Paint. Or, at least, they were done by me and my manager, Joe Vega, while on the job.
This first one features my character ‘Clint’ from ‘Clint and Rosebud, those freewheeling tramps’…
In this second example, Joe leads. This one is pretty nerdy and includes a quotation from “Star Wars”…
This five-page comic was done by Dov and myself the day before I got the worst sunburn of my life. I drew ‘Feldstein’ and Dov drew the other character…
—————–
OOOhhh!! Dov is really kicking my ass here! First he calls me out on my lousey spelling and THEN his final panel makes great use of a wide-shot, the negative space adds a great comedic tension! Time for Feldstein to get down to business…
The goal with all these comics was for the artists to communicate only on paper (”paporily”?). However, when I study the first five panels of the page above it’s pretty obvious that we MUST have done a little verbal-coordinating once Dov drew panel two (note how he hid my horizon line with his character’s mustache and then, later how the third horizon line breaks to accommodate the nail-biting panel.)
—————–
It ends a little (ahem!) abruptly, but we had alot of fun trying to get our theoretical point across: That despite the content of the strip, some of my sillier comments above and even the name of our own website, art done in tandem isn’t a competition. It’s about teamwork, not one-upmanship.
-Ben