Infinite regress

AKA 'hark an anthropologist'...

Swimming

With apologies to Bastien Vivès, and general thanks to Swim Smooth.

I've been thinking about how to approach writing short stories, by which I mean 5ish pages or less. If the best way to get good at comics is just to do them, over and over (and try and actively learn from each one), then making lots of shorter stories should be a good start. But I find them pretty hard to formulate, it's tricky to be concise but still offer something worth reading (come back in - hopefully - a few days to see if I've had any degree of success so far!).

So I was interested to see an article in the Guardian this week where they'd challenged a number of writers to make 'twitter fiction'. Most were actually pretty shitty results (looking at you Geoffrey Archer... pretty much anytime shit is involved, actually), but Ian Rankin's made me laugh:

Reminded me of the Hemingway six word story, perhaps the ultimate in conciseness: 'For sale: baby shoes, never worn'. 

I thought about doing an 'introduction' post, but there's not much to introduce: I'm John Newns, I like comics, I try to make them too. That's about it. So:

Over the Summer I took Frank Santoro's correspondence course - absolutely fantastic. I'd made a few bits and pieces before this, but the course changed how I look at making comics (and other things) at a basic level. The immediate result is the little melodrama below. It's scrappy in lots of ways but I'm pretty proud of it, flaws and all, which is a rare occurrence for me. Voilà: