I promise not to link to every nice review about the book, but Tom Spurgeon’s is the first substantive take on the book and he does a better job than I ever could of explaining it and what I hope is its appeal. It’s heartwarming, even for grouchy ol’ me, to have my work, and that of the cartoonists, so well discussed.
"I know! Let's wreak vengeance on the forces of evil!", B. Kliban, 1973
And…. we’re back! Phew. You may now resume your lavish praise of this site. Or at least begin the backlash. Maybe everyone was too busy thinking about Jim Lee to worry about us. I hope so. Anyhow, on with the blogging.
Weird Science 16, 1952 (original art)
Wally Wood’s life and art exist in the space between two comic book stories. The first, “My World”, published in Weird Science no. 22, 1953, was written by Al Feldstein as a tribute to the 26-year-old Wood, who drew it. In the story, an unseen narrator describes his daily experience of reality juxtaposed with panel after panel of spectacular fantasy scenes, consisting “. . . of great space-ships that carry tourists on brief holidays to Venus or Mars or Saturn . . . My world can be ugly . . . Landing at night and entering my cities and killing and maiming and destroying . . . My world is what I choose to make it. My world is yesterday . . . Or today . . . Or tomorrow . . . For my world is the world of science fiction . . . conceived in my mind and placed upon paper with pencil and ink and brush and sweat and a great deal of love for my world.” The final drawing of the comic has Wood smoking a cigarette at the drawing table and looking a bit wan. It’s an evocation of the celebrity of Wood-the-cartoonist published by William M. Gaines’ EC Comics, home of Mad, and the publisher for which Wood did his most famous work.
Twenty-two years later, Wood, having long since broken with Gaines and Feldstein and by then a cautionary tale to his peers, wrote and drew “My Word” for Big Apple Comix. It is again a breathless narrative complemented by stunning drawings, but this time it’s a trip through a hellish New York. A furious Wood closes his introductory monologue with “Anyhow, since I have three pages in this mag, I’d like to comment briefly on the universe.” And off he goes. After some muggings, some light S&M and the requisite pile of shit, Wood, apropos of nothing, leaps on art: “That mysterious process by which one’s fantasies enrich the lives of others… and the pockets of publishers. But it is worth it, for there are the fans.” And here we see a naked boy prostrating himself saying, “Do what you want with me! Kick me! Fuck me! Shit on me! I love you! By the way, your old stuff was better…” Wood closes with a distorted version of “My World’s” final panel: A squat alien at the drawing board, smoking and saying, “My word is the word I choose to make it, for I conceive it in my mind and put it down on paper with a lot of sweat and love and shit like that, for I am a troglodyte. My name is spafon gool.”
(more…)
The other day I received the kind of email that I always dream of, to be frankly nerdy about it. Herbert (“The Wigglemuch”) Crowley was the most mysterious cartoonist I documented in Art Out of Time. And he mostly remained so after publication. But two weeks ago a woman in Zurich identified herself as Crowley’s niece and sent along some pictures and info about Crowley and said she’d be in NYC in a week and would I like to meet with her. Well I did, and we met, and, yes folks, there is a Herbert Crowley archive. Not a huge one, and not quite enough to fill out his entire life, but quite a bit, including voluminous sketchbooks, a scrapbook, passports, and more. Now, when I published Art Out of Time, I knew nothing, not even birth and death dates. I know a whole lot more now, and as I learn yet more I’ll update you, my tiny, tiny public. (more…)
We Win!
Animator Ben Jones and shopkeeper Sammy Harkham beholding an advance copy of Art in Time. Look for it May 1! Event info and plenty of goodies to follow. Watch this space.
Special CC correspondent Mark Newgarden reports in about his recently unveiled mural at Bill’s Bar and Burger in NYC:
This little mural was part of a four person installation at Bill’s curated by David Scher, painter, drawer, sketchbook wizard and sometime restaurant designer.
David, Dawn Clements, Katie Merz and I were asked to punch in at 2:30 am for two consecutive nights this past Dec. The big idea was total improvisation; BYOB (bring your own brushes). We had no solid idea what we would be doing, which wall we would be working on – or even what color paints would be on hand. No sketches, no plans, no forethought. Just caffeine, adrenaline and a ticking clock. This is pretty much 180 degrees from the way I usually approach things. What the hell.
Nobody from the restaurant seemed to be expecting muralists. The walls weren’t primed. There was some vague rumor that we would be painting on the ceiling. I walked behind the bar looking for a screw driver and was chastised to stay away from the liquor. David’s filmmaker friend showed up with some of the world’s brightest lights and most expensive video equipment. There was no coffee.
Dawn annexed the stamped metal wall in the back, Katie took the big landscape format to its left, David grabbed a corridor near the men’s room and I got an 8 x 8 foot square right next to the kitchen door. Everybody went to work. And everybody was good.
Go there and see.
I basically approached my space like a big telephone doodle pad. The carnivore theme was pure wish fulfillment; I’ve been off red meat for a while and was now decorating its shrine. We drew & painted til dawn, came back the next night and did it all over again. There was a smiling hostess and brewed coffee for part two, but titanium white was in precious supply. The back door flew open and shut all morning long as food deliveries and freezing snow blew in. We expired around 9 am.
David went back a third night for mop-up and sent me an email the next day: “Yours is the big hit, the staff loves it. One of the cooks was explaining it to me. I can’t do justice to his poetic exposition, but it was something like this: “The Americans are attacking the hamburger like Pearl Harbor.” I’ll buy that.
BILL’S BAR & BURGER
2 Ninth Avenue @ 13th Street
New York, NY 10014-1204
–Mark Newgarden, February 1, 2010
Friend of CC and PictureBox stalwart “Jocular” Jon Vermilyea is opening an exhibition of prints based on his popular “Goblin” t-shirt images for New York apparel company Mishka.
Go give him a squeeze for us!
GOBLIN
A print series by Jon Vermilyea
MISHKA
350 Broadway
Brooklyn, NY
Opening party Thursday, Janurary 28th, 7-10 pm.
Well, not really. But he has complete his four-part interview with Brian Heater. It’s a great read and a good way to pass this rainy Monday.
Jesse Marsh drawing for a Tarzan coloring book, circa early 1950s.An exciting artifact popped up on Golden Age Comic Book Stories yesterday: The only interview with Jesse Marsh published (and perhaps the only one conducted?) in his lifetime. It’s from a 1965 issue of ERB-Dom. Most of this information has been absorbed into his biography, but I didn’t know that he worked on The Flintstones! I’ve been looking for this interview for a long, long time and didn’t even get it before Art in Time went to press. Alas. Anyhow, here it is. Enjoy.
Alex Raymond (1909-1956) made a certain kind of drawing that drove the boys wild. His Flash Gordon strips are the height of lush eroticism in comics (lush as compared to Burne Hogarth’s spiky cocks and taut flesh in his highly sexed Tarzan strips), his lines not finding any form, but creating it – becoming the substance of the image itself. Like a pulpier Franklin Booth, he seemed like he couldn’t help but draw the air that swept around his characters. Sometimes criticized as not being great comics qua comics, his stuff nevertheless worked best on the comics page, where sequences of drawings forgive the occasional clunker and where he could push even further than was commonly done in the pulps.
A gloss on his biography finds Raymond’s initial break in 1934, when, he debuted an astounding three strips: Dashiell Hammett’s Secret Agent X-9 (he only stayed on until 1935) and the more successful Sunday-only Jungle Jim and Flash Gordon. Flash, of course, would make his name, and he carried on until 1944, when he joined the Marines and served as an artist and designer until 1945.
Meanwhile, King Features had assigned Austin Briggs to Flash Gordon, so the company offered Raymond a strip of his own. Conceived and written with editor Ward Greene, Rip Kirby was born in 1946. Kirby is a gentleman detective complete with a golf hobby, a butler, and a bespectacled gal Friday who is not quite a lover. Kirby is moral and stern, but not without a wry sense of humor and, of course, a weakness for dames. None of the pulp madness of contemporaneous crime novels lurks within his psyche. Nope, he’s the public side of the post-WWII world: cosmetically sound and mostly sexless, all the better for him to be able to move through his various storylines while remaining mostly unruffled.
Anyhow, as you may know, IDW recently released the first volume in a comprehensive Rip Kirby reprint series. Some 300 pages of seriously high quality work reproduced beautifully. I’ve been waiting a while for this book, having only recently come to Raymond via Wally Wood, really, and following on my sudden, distressing, and then comfortable, and then soothing conversion to the many virtues of Hal Foster. It’s kind of like rediscovering the Grateful Dead as adult. You’ve passed through an unfortunate period of rejecting things your adolescent brain thinks aren’t appropriately “sophisticated” and then you come back around and realize that none of that fucking matters and your standards were mostly specious. Meanwhile you’ve made an ass of yourself rejecting all this great stuff. Well, fuck it, that doesn’t seem to be a problem for the younger kids out there (and lots of other older smart people), bless them. And I’m sort of mortified it was a problem for me. But we’re all idiots sometimes, even if those times last years.
Back to Raymond. With Rip Kirby he introduced a drawing style highly influenced by the classy illustrations found in Good Housekeeping and elsewhere – a moderate, well crafted realism that emphasized solidity and modesty without the flash and drama of the pre-War generations.
Foster was dramatic and stagey and Caniff overtly filmic and grotesque. Raymond wanted to bring a sense of fidelity (and here I mean something akin to a hi-fidelity audio recording – a highly polished simulacra of the “real” but without all the messiness of actual palms-in-the-dirt realism) into the mix – he relies on standard close-ups, over-the-shoulder shots, and crowd set-ups and avoids expressive angles and obvious dynamism. He keeps the figures rooted in the kind of photos you’d find in magazines. Nothing too far out. It’s a kind of media-based realism rooted more in images of America than any kind of documentary impulse.
For the first month of the strip Raymond uses his Flash Gordon fine line style, but a month later the art gets thick and brushy. Not Caniff brushy, but more like Al Parker brushy, and that’s where it gets really interesting.
Raymond the aesthete (though not Raymond the storyteller) always seems like a hedonist, and these ink-heavy images look like they were fucking fun to make – big, juicy strokes like long honks on a saxophone (side note: I’m currently reading Larry Rivers’ autobiography, in which he has much to say about honking, which is a subject I think Frank relates to more than me, but I find interesting nonetheless) and in stark contrast to the rather pallid stories.
So, here is also where I can see Raymond’s profound influence on comic books – minus his finicky fine line style, this stuff has a surface sheen and a visceral feel that I can imagine comic book guys (many of whom hoped for strips) imitated. No hysterics here, but lots of detail and respectability.
The middle panel looks like every villain in every 1950s comic book. Except drawn to utter surface perfection. Not a line out of place. Not a move made without consideration. And dig that background stroke.
Of course, the comic book guys were saddled with lurid stories – so there you have a powerful combo: Attempts at “respectable” drawing in service to the down-and-dirty. I can see all of 1950s Ogden Whitney unfold, and Wally Wood baroque compositions, as well as John Romita, not to mention Russ Manning, and so many others. Those guys understood in a way that I bet Raymond did too, that taking that kind of technical drafting facility and cutting out the showiness of it – forcing it into the time and space constraints of a daily strip – can make it work as cartooning. The less Raymond put in – the more he feinted at realism but dove at cartooning – the more successful he is.
This realism is stunning in its facility, and the marks are beautiful, but the far more rushed drawing below kinda reads better as cartooning (um, Toth anyone?).
I haven’t said much about the stories. After all, it’s a comic. There is a blackmail storyline, there’s one about counterfitting; there’s a missing model in London; there’s even a kind of island adventure. The villains are stock and so are the situations. Kirby himself isn’t too interesting. But they move right along – I can happily sit and read them as the strips move through the basics of a plot. But really, that doesn’t matter. Rip Kirby isn’t a classic – not in the way that Mary Perkins on Stage is, or Terry and the Pirates is. I get the feeling Raymond wasn’t that interested in the “literary” end of things, so you can’t go looking for the kind of visionary experience you might have with Chester Gould or the feeling of a unique voice from Caniff. It’s an oddly impersonal strip, really. It’s all in the drawing – and that in itself is enough in this case. It gives me everything I need from the strip. The pleasures derived from Rip Kirby are unique and worth pursuing.
Judging by this first volume, Raymond’s greatest success with Rip Kirby was, in a way, inspiring the likes of Stan Drake (who was with Raymond the night of his fatal crash) and Leonard Starr, both of whom would marry Raymond’s “realism” with a sense of melodrama straight out of Douglas Sirk and snappy, well observed stories filled with moral ambiguity and undercurrents of fear and sex. The two ongoing Drake and Starr reprint series, The Heart of Juliet Jones and Mary Perkins on Stage, respectively, are my favorite finds of 2009 (the best source for info on these guys is the now defunct web site. The Look of Love). More on all of this another time.
