Today on the site, Frank Santoro continues his series on Risograph printing in comics, interviewing the undersung John Pham.
Tell me about this legend I've heard: you created your own brushes for your process? You may be giving away trade secrets with this answer - however, I'm curious: Can you walk a layperson through your process of "Photoshop and the risograph talking to each other" or at least the process that Ben Jones refers to in this interview?
It's pretty simple and 100% super boring. I basically examined scans of a lot of my wet-media-type pen and ink drawings and tried to reproduce them faithfully as Photoshop brushes. I have sort of an insane comics process in that I can only take sips and fragments of work time whenever I can because of my ridiculous day job and personal life. I do a lot of the work digitally wherever I may be. So it's important to me to have Photoshop tools that still feel like I'm drawing using a rapidograph or hunt 102 dip pen on bristol board ... and now you're falling asleep.
As for how I get the color mixing and "airbrush" effects, it's all a combination of adjustment layers (which I learned from working in animation); a p-shop airbrush set to "dissolve" (which I learned from Dan Zettwoch who I think might've gotten it from Chris Ware) and converting all my solid colors to diffusion dithered bitmaps. It gets a little involved and would probably require its own sort of tutorial lesson, but that's essentially it. And of course these are just tools and techniques anyone can learn - what you do with it is something else entirely.
When I got my first GR it really was much more of a challenge getting my files and my Riso to talk to each other, and I think that's what Ben's referring to. This was about 6 years ago and I had to do a lot of experimenting and trial and error to figure it out. The solution ended up involving connecting my RIP (even getting the RIP was a challenge) with an older version of my Mac's OS (which had to be run through an emulator), with the appropriate postscript driver file. All really exciting stuff! But it worked, and that's the workflow I ended up using for the first issue of SCUZZI and Epoxy 4. Anyone out there still awake?
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
I've been enjoying Gloria Rivera's guest posts at Comics Workbook, including her most recent, a guide to the comics her parents read growing up in Mexico.
I’ve been meaning to write something about these comics since I found out about them a year ago. Before this I never knew my parents read comics in their youth. They both grew up in Mexico (b. 1964 and 1966) in small pueblos, and left their houses at 14 and 19 to work.
I was so curious as to what interested them enough as kids to capture their attention week after week. What captivated them had to actually interest the town as a whole in order to be read. They explained that children in the pueblos were poor and could only afford an issue here and there, and swapping comics with other kids was the only way they could finish the adventures. Even more removed – they paid to read to whichever child in the pueblo had the issue they needed to read next.
For Vice, Nick Gazin talks to Lawrence Hubbard about Real Deal.
VICE: What's it like to have this hardcover collection of your comics after all these decades?
Lawrence "Raw Dog" Hubbard: "What's it like?" It's a feeling of euphoria, of validation. Thinking of all of the hard work, hours of drawing and creating Real Deal and wondering, Does anybody give a shit about this?All of the times me and H.P. McElwee took Real Deal directly to the people, the fans, they loved it! But at the same time when we went before the gatekeepers of the industry—publishers, distributors, shop owners—they said, "No! Why don't you come up with a new superhero?" The best way to look at this is to never give up! If you love something and have a passion for it, stick with it! And whatever happens will happen!
