Who
is... Donna Barr? Donna
Barr has been drawing since 1954, writing since 1962, published since 1986,
and publishing since 1996.
She has a Bachelors' Degree in German, and
is a veteran of the United States Army (1970-1973).
Readers worldwide
follower her THE DESERT PEACH, STINZ, BOSOM ENEMIES, HADER
AND THE COLONEL, among others.
She is recognized by her peers as
a pioneer in the field of drawn books and their use in new technologies of distribution
and reproduction. She is a contributor to the world's largest webcomics site,
moderntales.com, and its affiliate
sites.
She achieved her lifetime career goal in 2004 when her life's
work -- past, present and future -- has been accepted as part of the San Diego
State University's Library's Special Collection, and will be available to students
and professors for research, and to the public for exhibits.
She can
be emailed at barr at stinz dot com (remove spam barriers). She answers. Keep
the sentences short.
Wondrous thing which you probably already know, but which makes me happy every time I think about it: Linda Medley'sCastle Waiting is coming back! Everybody put on bells and little bird-skin hats and dance with ribbons and scented flames upon the earth.
Warning: recently learned how to really link stuff, and it's almost as much fun as prepress. I'm part German, and Germans are addicted to footnotes and what the hell ARE links anyway but hugely expanded footnotes? Plus ca change...
I actually do love prepress. I love working with InDesign and pdf files and fooling around with Photoshop. Daniel Pinkwater called me a nerd. Proof of nerdness with a Paint-by-Number shot. Oh no! All those people who used to work up paint-by-number paintings for the masses have to do it with Photoshop now!
"Funny Nazi" is a tagline at Amazon. I kid you not. When you hit it -- and you know I did -- you get four linked pages.
No, I wasn't looking up "Funny Nazis." Give me a LITTLE credit. Although I have been known to google "hot nazi booted boys," and got THIS close to the Bawidamann site. Would it be totally non-virtuous to do art in the same style but with BOYS? We're talking obvious as Sendak, as in the Melville Pierre, Or The Ambiguities version. The kind of stuff they don't allow at Deviant Art, because American straight boys are scared of stiff meat. Taking orders for full-scale paintings now, 50% up front, Paypal preferred.
But to get back to the comical fascists: what happened was Amazon sent me a Spam informing me that 'allo 'allo was available on dvd. The Strong Women were the ones used the tagline.
I never claimed Nazis were funny (and I'm using the Wikipedia reference so I don't have to go into the history and ramifications of the term myself.). Oh, okay, they were -- and are -- stupid, pointless, fearful, isolated, weak-minded, testosterone-poisoned. However, I think the shit-storm they kicked off can be to-die-for funny in too many places, if only because it gave humans one more reason to act like the dorkweed monkeys that we are. I am not making up any of that stuff in my books, thank you. I'm not that original. For those of you who wonder where I got that dialogue, a lot of it came out of your mouths. It's the Answered Prayers syndrome: never ever open your mouth or act like an idiot or a stereotype around an author because we have less devotion to personal secrecy than the NSA. If it made us laugh, you are going to be immortalized.
Recently I've been whipping the Booksurge and the Lulu horses. When Lulu came up with free automatic upload, I started teasing Booksurge about it: "Nya nya nya, you guys are losers!"
When Booksurgedirect made it possible for everybody from Baker and Taylor to Amazon -- and yes, even comics retailers -- to get books for as much as 50% off direct, then I went and made faces at Lulu. ____________________________________________________________________
My stuff: FINALLY I have figured out how to balance webcomics, paper books, color or black and white and do it all with one page of original artwork. It involves Photoshop and fiddling with selections and tolerances, and what looks like a black-and-white ink-wash look. It means keeping the color values down so the ink lines stand out; that means that everything ends up with a rather Manga look to it. Stinz in a light magenta-and-royal-purple World War Two German uniform produces a rather 18th century Viannese army look.
Why did I put My Reich in magenta uniforms? Because I'ma da artist and I get to.
