8 Crotona Park Story (cont.)

Hello everyone,

This project is a work-in-progress, and so the evolution of my style and my development as a comic artist are necessarily visible, on display. This time I'm experimenting with some changes . . .

First of all, the horizontal format that I've been using is really suited for comic strips, whereas I'm writing a graphic memoir. Most graphic novels are in vertical format, so as of this post I'm shifting to vertical. I enjoyed working vertically: it gives me more flexibility with size and arrangement of panels, and their flow from one to the next.

Also I'm using a computer font this time (hand-lettering is extremely time consuming!).

And whereas comics are traditionally in all caps, I'm trying out upper and lowercase.

And finally, since I'm looking at continuity from one page to the next, I'm dropping the title panel that each strip had before . . .

I'm hoping my use of particular colors, amid the basic black and white, will be sufficient to distinguish the flashbacks from the more contemporary scenes. RED alone indicates Murray's time as a Marxist (in these strips the 1930s); I'll add GREEN when he starts working with ecological ideas; and finally the additional YELLOW indicates the "contemporary" period actually starting in 1986 when I came along. Notice that he carries all these colors on him: the red and yellow in his suspenders, the green in his shirt.

Since you've had to wait awhile for a new strip, I'm posting two this time.

By the way my article "Bookchin Breaks with Anarchism" is now online at http://www.communalism.org/; it is also forthcoming in print in the anthology ANARCHISM FOR THE 21st CENTURY, ed. Gambone and Murtagh, from A.K. Press.

Salud! More next month!