Week 3

It's all Grssk to me.

Just a triumphant little comic up top today, as I thought I would also share a longer, more laboured-over short story below (22pp full colour (!))

This is a piece I wrote last year for the Fantagraphics NOW anthology series.

Recently both my story and the anthology itself were nominated for Eisner awards. You can buy the anthology here (it’s worth doing for the other great stories, two of which were also nominated for Best Short Story!)

The Eisner awards are often referred to as the ‘Oscars of Comics’, which I love because it serves the double purpose of being immediately understandable and also diminishing the awards by association.

The Perth Bell Tower: The Eiffel Tower of Perth

Outside of my small group of cartoonist friends nobody knows what the Eisners are and nor would I expect them to. I went to a typography conference in Barcelona in 2014, and what stayed with me most was the sight of celebrity typographers signing autographs and getting stopped in the street for photos. It seemed ideal: to be famous for exactly three days a year, then retreat back into your perfectly kerned life. I imagine they return to homes with Swiss-grid floor plans, eat only foods with pleasing ascenders, and fall asleep beside partners whose silhouettes echo the soft geometry of humanist sans-serifs.

The other thing I remember from that conference was an Arabic type designer showing examples of beautiful-looking Arabic type that was completely illegible. It came from designers who didn’t speak the language, trying to twist the shapes they saw without understanding what the symbols actually meant. A lot of it was an attempt to mimic the style of Latin alphabet logos, but the result was something completely void of meaning.

Apparently this is a particularly egregious example, which tests the limits of legibility in Arabic.

Something like this came up the other evening at the night markets. It’s so funny seeing the ‘Greek writing' they often use on food trucks:

It wasn’t this exact one, but it’s a good example

They often use an upper case sigma for the ‘E’s’. The only problem is that a sigma makes an ‘S’ sound in Greek. So a sign like this always make me go ‘What the Grssk?!’

The thing that makes this maybe a little sad is that the people doing it are probably Greek. Bastardising their own language for the expectation of others.

Anyway, I’ve been nominated for an Σισνερ award. The awards go down at San Diego Comic-Con on July 25 and I have not been invited on an all-expenses trip. More like the Logies of Comics, amiright?

The story is called ‘Pig’. You can read it below. It was published in Fantagraphics NOW #13. Please buy it if you like it.

Let me know any thoughts or questions you might have and next week we can discuss it if you like and I’ll go through the process I went through to make it, which was quite unusual for me, but fun. And maybe surprisingly involved a 3D modelling software and lots of drawing while I was supposed to be working.

Read ‘Pig’ here.

If you read it, I have a question for you: Would you get the transplant? I’d also be very curious what you took from it, the ending particular, if anything.

This Week I Learned…

In another form of language confusion a friend excitedly told a few of us that the Nintendo character Mario, whose most well-known catchphrase is “It’s-a-me, Mario!” is not actually saying “It’s-a-me, Mario!” but "Itsumi Mario," which means "Super Mario" in Japanese. This sounded to me like a cute coincidence perhaps but almost certainly some A-grade bullshit and it turns out it is. Someone tweeted it and some people (Amberly) believed it. Then she said: “What, so Mario is just a racist caricature?” which beautifully raises the question ‘Can you be racist to Italians?’ Feel free to discuss in the comments.