Movie site Little White Lies has announced the winner of its latest competition, in which readers were asked to condense a favorite film into a six-frame comic strip. The winning entry by David Rigby–a highly-detailed Zombieland (pictured above)–along with other notable submissions (Total Recall, American Psycho, and Adaptation among them) are now available on the Creative Review site.  While it’s fun to compare each result to your own recollection of a particular movie, it’s also interesting to think about what each artist decided to include and, perhaps more important, what to leave out–a key step not only in creating comics, but also diagrams and PowerPoint decks.

I am happily perusing an early Christmas present to myself: Masterpiece Comics, a collection of R. Sikoryak’s mash-ups of comic strips and world literature.  Some examples:  Rex Morgan, M.D. + Macbeth = “Macworth.”  Ziggy + Candide = “Candiggy.”  From more recent times, Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butthead + Waiting for Godot = “Waiting to Go.”   You get the idea.  At first glance, it looks like Sikoryak is simply layering literary plotlines atop uncanny copies of famous cartoons.  But the Masterpiece collection is more than that.  Each classic tale has been carefully matched with a comic that shares its core sensibility, and the clever pairing emphasizes what they have in common, while at the same time creating something new.  In “Good Ol’ Gregor Brown” (above), Gregor Samsa from Franz Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis wakes up as a bug in the Peanuts world of Charles M. Schulz.   Samsa and Charlie Brown are separated by time and place, but the futility and sad humor are the same.  It’s just one of many examples that make you think, “Of course!”  My only disappointment is that this volume is a little on the slim side– only 64 pages– but that’s only because I wish there was more to explore.  Guess I will just have to wait for the next one (“Coming soon! Virgil! Chaucer! Flaubert!”)

See also:

R. Sikoryak’s web site (http://www.rsikoryak.com/index.html)

Here is Virtualization in Plain English, a marketing video for Intel made by Common Craft.

Keep track of that necktie.

Today is polling day in Afghanistan. One document created to aid the process is Your Vote. Your Voice, a 25-page manual that uses graphic novel techniques to teach “adult learners about  issues, candidates, and appraisal of elected officials’ performance.”

It is printed in Dari and Pashto.

(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)

Madness! Magic!  Heroic quests!   No, it’s not the latest release from Marvel, but rather Logicomix, a graphic novel on the nature of mathematical truth.  According to the book’s web site:

[Inspired by the epic story of the quest for the Foundations of Mathematics,] this was a heroic intellectual adventure most of whose protagonists paid the price of knowledge with extreme personal suffering and even insanity.  The book tells its tale in an engaging way, at the same time complex and accessible. It grounds the philosophical struggles on the undercurrent of personal emotional turmoil, as well as the momentous historical events and ideological battles which gave rise to them.

Told from the perspective of logician, philosopher, and pacifist Bertrand Russell, the book weaves together the trials and tribulations of thinkers such as Frege and Wittgenstein while exploring topics as diverse as logic, the institution of marriage, and predicate calculus.  The web site is worth a look, particularly its Behind the Scenes section, which includes information on the team’s approach to character research and examples of pages in production.

…one afternoon, he opened a test version of a program called Microsoft Bob for children and new computer users. The welcome screen showed a cartoon dog named Rover speaking in a text bubble. The message appeared in the ever-so-sedate Times New Roman font.

Connare went to work on creating an appropriate comic font for Bob. Not long after a Microsoft product manager included his creation as a standard font in Windows and the spread of Comic Sans began. The spread of efforts opposed to it soon followed.

Connare retains a wry appreciation for his most famous work:

“If you love it, you don’t know much about typography,” Mr. Connare says. But, he adds, “if you hate it, you really don’t know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby.”

One reason for that is McCloud’s playfulness. Even as he unpacks his thesis, he tells stories, plugs in cross-references, and puns on his own ideas. When he gets to talking about comics he uses simple, but effective animations and symbols to highlight concepts such as directionality, space, and time.

Ah, but maybe this is too easy. He’s a comic artist, talking about comics, and his examples are comics.

Not true. When McCloud is talking about ideas, he is equally creative. Except for one key sequence, there are almost no words on his slides. Instead, McCloud offers visual references — a picture of Jung when talking about Jung, a sequence of Ray Charles, Albert Einstein, Wernher Von Braun, and Thomas Edison as he describes his father: ”a blind genius rocket scientist inventor.” He also uses simple, but effective symbols such as an eye to symbolize science, “where what we see and can ascertain are the foundation for what we know.”

(hat tip to Garr Reynolds at Presentation Zen)

The text version is good too.