Came across this NASA illustration of the Andromeda galaxy's core structure, as it was understood in 2005:
illustration by NASA, ESA and A. Schaller (for STScI) (source)
The caption reads:
This artist's concept shows a view across a mysterious disk of young, blue stars encircling a supermassive black hole at the core of the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy (M31). The region around the black hole is barely visible at the center of the disk. The background stars are the typical older, redder population of stars that inhabit the cores of most galaxies. Spectroscopic observations by the Hubble Space Telescope reveal that the blue light consists of more than 400 stars that formed in a burst of activity about 200 million years ago. The stars are tightly packed in a disk that is only a light-year across. Under the black hole's gravitational grip, the stars are traveling very fast: 2.2 million miles an hour (3.6 million kilometers an hour, or 1,000 kilometers a second).
Also in 2005, the supermassive black hole at the center of Andromeda was estimated to be between 110 and 230 *million* solar masses--quite a bit bigger than A*'s ~ 4 million! So it can definitely sling stars around faster than our own galactic core can.
In 1993, Hubble had imaged Andromeda's core, revealing what appeared to be a two-lobe structure:
It's the darker of the two lobes that is actually the true center containing the supermassive black hole; the bright lobe is thought to be "a disk of stars in an eccentric orbit around the central black hole." Keep in mind though that the red filter used for that photo would not have captured the bright blue stars at the galactic center, which would explain why the core looks comparatively dim.
In 2000 (I think?) the Chandra X-ray telescope had taken a crack at Andromeda's core:
The intensity of the X-ray source in the center revealed what almost had to be a million-solar-mass-class supermassive black hole in there, while various other X-ray sources around it were attributed to X-ray binaries: stars being sucked into nearby compact objects such as white dwarfs, neutron stars, or black holes; "infalling matter releases gravitational potential energy, up to several tenths of its rest mass, as X-rays."
("Andromeda" was also the name of a mysterious central character in the 1961 BBC miniseries, "A for Andromeda": radio signals from "a distant galaxy" gave instructions for constructing an advanced computer, which in turn created a humanoid organism, played by Julie Christie. Sounds interesting! But! "As was common practice at the time, the BBC's copies of the serial were junked after broadcast and the bulk of the serial remains missing to this day." Jeez!) ~~~~~~
An interview with me about working on A* just went up on the Evan Yeti Community Blog, in which, among other things, I reveal my plans (in hindsight, maybe I shouldn't have revealed them just yet... >_>) for galactic domination via webcomics.
Evan Yeti is also the name of (warning: sound) a webcomic made by the interviewer, concerning the adventures of a yeti (aka "abominable" snowman) named Evan.
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An engineer friend sent me a link to (PDF format) Lockhart's Lament, an article admirably advocating teaching math as an art, rather than just a bunch of formulas to memorize and use on meaningless numbers. It was written (my source is this) by mathematician and teacher Paul Lockhart in 2002, and I have to say that if I had been taught math the way he's proposing...I'd probably remember a lot more beyond basic algebra than I do now. :P
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I've been reading the beginning of Gary Martin's The Art of Comic Book Inking that a miraculously wonderful reader got for me off my now-empty A* Amazon Wish List, and it's starting to become clear to me, even hilariously so, that what I'm doing on A* these days is almost the exact opposite of traditional comic book inking. For instance, one particular pet peeve of Martin's is inkers who get exterior line weights wrong--using thick lines to delineate the side of the figure illuminated by the light source, and thinner lines on the shaded side. And--today's A* page being a prime example--I seem to do that almost all the time, to a ridiculous degree. I have no idea why! I kind of like it that way, though. :P Maybe because it sort of creates a tension with the heavy black shadows on the interior of the figure? Or probably just because I have no idea what I'm doing! :D
And there's a passage where he says of working with a brush that you shouldn't, for instance, use it to draw a nostril in a single stroke; rather, you should outline the nostril, then fill it in, as this will help you preserve the shape established by the pencils. And I had to sort of chuckle to myself at that, since I'm going straight to ink and skipping pencils, and a single stroke is like the only way I ever draw nostrils.
Not that I am saying I'm doing things the right way; in fact, it's kind of nice to know I'm doing them exactly the wrong way. It's easier to break the rules once you know them, so I'm finding this book quite interesting! Seriously though, I guess the way I'm working now--straight off with ink on the blank page--has a lot more in common with painting than with traditional comic inking. I did a good deal of painting (way) back in college, so I suppose that's probably why this method feels much more comfortable to me. Except that sometimes I find myself reverting to an inking/illustrating-style arm position--resting half the palm on the table or drawing board--which I really shouldn't do because somehow I mess it up and lean on it or something and it makes my forearm and wrist sore. What I *mean* to do is to have the whole arm off the paper, like a painter does when working on a canvas. Sometimes I get this right but it seems like I have a tendency to relapse into resting it on the drawing surface when I'm doing a whole lot of (relatively) detailed little lines. Hm HM Hm. Well some day maybe I will figure this all out.
Man! Today was a pretty awesome day thanks to A* readers. :D First, I was surprised to find a package on my porch as I went out today, 'cause I couldn't recall having ordered anything recently. And I hadn't, but it was the last item from the A* Amazon Wish List: Gary Martin'sThe Art of Comic Book Inking. Man! That's three out of three wish list things A* readers bought for me. :D Thanks to this latest lovely wish-fulfiller, and those of wishes past. :DD (More about the book below.)
And then an A* reader who just happens to live right down the street from me (what are the odds??) had me over for ice cream. Yep! All the other webcomic authors are jealous now, I bet. (So if you live near a webcomic author, do invite them over for iced cream--they will probably be pretty happy about it.)
It's a lame kind of thank you to all my lovely readers but um well I've had this sketch laying around for a while now 'cause I was too lazy to get it electronicized, but now I have done it! Behold:
That was from way back when I got some Copic Multiliner markers and kind of went nuts with the tiny lines and cross hatchings in this sketch. I filled in the larger black areas with a brush. I think I decided after this trial that I wouldn't do *quite* that much crosshatching again; you can get kind of an olde stylee engraving effect with a ton of crosshatching, but it also sort of freezes the subject in place as the linear energy is all crossed over itself.
Oh yeah I wanted to talk more about ice cream! No wait about The Art of Comic Book Inking! Based on an initial skim-through, it's an even niftier book than I'd suspected. The first part goes in-depth about the nuts and bolts of inking, and then it goes into loads of examples of actual penciled comic pages, each inked by a bunch of different artists--and each of them then discuss in quite a bit of detail what their idea for the inking of that page was, exactly what tools they used on it, and how they did the whole thing. Each different inking gets a full page picture and full page explanation, and it's easy and quite interesting to flip between and compare the results. And then, the last part of the book is taken up by folded-over full-size comic Bristol boards with the same pencil examples printed on them in "non-photo" blue, so you can have a go at inking them your own self, if you want! I dunno if I'll do that, since I'd rather spend that time on my own stuff, but it's neat to see what a standard penciled comic page kinda looks like. One of the pages is even a Jack Kirby drawing! It doesn't have that fine subtle shading that I talked about seeing in a video of other work of his yesterday, though, so I dunno if that shading I thought I saw was real or not. I'll have to see if I can find some good photos or scans of his work online that have it--maybe I was just imaging it. :P
It seems like at least partially a Marvel Comics-produced effort as it focuses on Jack Kirby's time at Marvel, and isn't reluctant to pile both him and Marvel to the ceiling with praise, but there are still some interesting things to be found in there. I hadn't known Kirby worked in animation and strips early on, for instance, and you get to hear about how he worked, what his peers thought of him, and so forth, oh and they have some interesting insights from other Marvel artists, including some whose work I like a lot--people like Walt Simonson and Neal Adams.
Although his "blocky" style certainly looked as though it followed the geometric construction techniques described in Stan Lee and John Buscema's well-known 1978 guide, How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, to hear the eyewitnesses in this video tell it, Kirby, legendary for churning out five or whatever full comic pages in a single day when necessary, appears to have drawn with little or no preliminary layout phase--just going straight from blank page to final pencils, and not necessarily doing those in any sort of structured order, but maybe putting in a hand here, a head here, and so on until they all connected.
That explains why his proportions were sometimes a bit loosey-goosey, and eh well it sounds kind of like how I'm drawing A* now, frighteningly enough. Come to think of it in fact, on today's page I drew the shoulders, then the hands, then the arms in between them--all directly in ink with no preliminary sketching, of course. >_> I can't say I recommend drawing this way (and I'm unbelievably worse / slower at it than Kirby, certainly!)...but it is kind of fun. ;)
Kirby, mind you, mostly worked in pencil, leaving the inking part to be completed by others as he churned away on more and more pages--which, from the looks of the many penciled pages they show in this video, is in some ways a real shame, because his pencil work has a really gorgeous, subtle range of tone in it that was ENTIRELY lost in the flat and minimalistic inking that was usually laid over it; just look at his pencil renderings of the Thing (the orange rocky guy in the Fantastic Four) in there, for instance: almost every little flat facet of his body is carefully shaded in a slightly different tone of gray, yielding a really great volumetric effect--pretty much reduced to black and white by whoever would come along and ink it, no doubt. Jeepers.
Oh, and all those times in the video that people say Kirby invented that "Kirby Krackle" bubbly energy effect--well, he very well could have come up with it on his own, but similar patterns had been used by others to illustrate space energy in comics well before Kirby popularized it in the States.
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I have some other artists I've been wanting to talk about for a while so I may as well do it now! I've mentioned Travis Charest's "Spacegirl" before--a single wide black and white panel science fiction comic :o--and some time after that I found his blog, which is conveniently called Travis Charest's Spacegirl. There you'll find links to semi-recent continuations he's made in his Spacegirl story, new stuff about what he's working on these days, and links to other slideshows of his work, including a fascinating compilation of his art from the Weapons of the Metabaron graphic novel, as well as some of his older work on Jim Lee's Wildstorm Comics series, WildC.A.T.s.
But not...a whole lot else. See, Charest's career took an unusual twist when, in 2000, just as his hyper-detailed, bold pencil and ink work had been getting him noticed in American comics, Charest...moved to France. From what little I know of European comics, they emphasize a rather more fantastic artistry than one finds in the typical American superhero comic style, and I suspect that's what attracted Charest, whose style was starting to go beyond the norm over here. So he went to France, started work on the latest graphic novel in this "Metabarons" series...and seven years or so later, he had about thirty pages done.
That's about a page every three months--not exactly a Kirby-esque page rate. :P If you look at the Metabaron art in his slideshow, you'll see that it is incredibly detailed, but still, that isn't going to keep a publisher satisfied at the rate of one of those pages every ninety days. So the second half of the book was finished by someone else (the difference in art was explained away--apparently somewhat awkwardly--as a flashback sequence or something), and Charest came back to the States, where he's finally started working on a few comic pieces here and there.
Charest's weapon of choice is the Rapidograph technical pen, and finding that out was what got me interested in the things, as I thought gee it would be super if I could get so detailed and cross-hatchy like he does. And his ink wash, like he did with Metabaron, is done with "Rapidograph" ink, which I *think* is probably Ultradraw like I tested recently. Even so, the slow, patient movements the Rapidograph requires are not for me, as I discovered, so I have to admire what he can do with it all the more. Hopefully he'll keep Spacegirl going too!
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In my ink device investigations I had someone mention to me that artist Jae Lee had inked with a razor. That mystified me for a while--how would you get ink flowing down the blade? :o--but I guess maybe what that meant was using the blade to shave away bits of black inked paper surface, to create white blast effects and the like, as demonstrated in this video. Maybe?
I can't say I found a definite example of that Jae Lee's work online, but I did find a pretty neat sequence that he did almost entirely in a stark black and white silhouette style. Punchy!
