Zuzu & Zim Against the Evil Eye
Brainstorming. You can see I've been too exposed to young men and their zombie-voodoo superhero comic books. It doesn't take much to set me off.
Idea. Zuzu and Zim need an adventure. Can they muster superhero powers? Can they tell a good story, worthy of the "graphic novel" genre?
Evil eye. Could be an excuse to explore our house full of amulets and talismans -- many of them designed to ward off the Evil Eye. The charm scanned into my cartoon above is from a Berber (Morocco) necklace and is known as the Hand of Fatima -- very protective! "Protection against" seems like a kinder-gentler form of superheroism than killing monsters, evil geniuses, and space aliens.
Zuzu & Zim above is a pencil sketch "cut out" and colored in Photoshop. I tried to trace them in Illustrator for a harder line but I got too embroiled in the technicalities and my drawing started looking dead. Hand-drawing is a meditation. Illustrator drawing is a puzzle. I was going to hand-ink the drawing, but the pencil sketch itself has some liveliness.
1.3.2009
