Hogarth on Foster
by Dan Nadel
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Burne Hogarth interview with Gary Groth, The Comics Journal #166, 1994:
“[Hal Foster] is one of the great geniuses of the comic strip… one of the great things he did was to bring the human figure from the great achievements and virtues of Renaissance art, the whole of the empirical figure, down into that small space of a panel, and he made it live; there are damn few people who could ever do that. … I began to realize that what I was doing, what [Alex] Raymond was doing; we were developing a whole new syntax of the figure. By that I mean taxonomy–the organization of all actions. No one had ever done it human history, no one! Not even Winsor McCay, because he always had that gravitational feel of the perspective of the great city forms, and the little figures that he did were rooted, again, down onto the bottom line of the panel; they were walking and standing on firm ground, he seldom lifted them up and let them soar, even though he had the chance in Slumberland to do that.”
This seems like as good a description of the virtues of Foster as any, whatever hyperbole might be in play. Foster leads directly into Kirby in the sense of dream-like figures in play, in motion — these moments of sublime force on a page.
Labels: Burne Hogarth, Hal Foster, Winsor McCay
Cool post Dan. This makes me think of how so much “mainstream”/genre/whatever comics are rooted in bodies and figure drawing, more so than Japanese adventure comics. American superheroes wear tights- they’re basically naked. It’s a showcase for figure drawing. In manga, even when it’s tights, the emphasis is so much more on the character’s psychology, their faces, or on their costume/clothing/mecha- what’s covering their bodies. That’s a generalization… probably false… just a thought… Jeez, Comics Comics is so serious now!
That’s a great interview with Hogarth, which I just read recently. Two highlights:
1) The discussion of Silas Rhodes, who helped found SVA with Hogarth. They had a falling out, and Hogarth ends the discussion of Rhodes by saying, “suffice it to say that my cherished hope is tht I live long enough to see him dead and buried … and I’ll piss on his grave!”
2) Gary’s prodding questions about the sexuality of Tarzan, his androgynous look and the fact that when he’s naked his penis is always carefully hidden from view, which provokes an interesting response from Hogarth and an anecdote about a fan who was willing to pay for a painting of Tarzan fully in the buff with his manhood in view.
A question for Dan (and others): how influenced was Kirby by Hogarth. I know Kirby often talked about Foster, but to my eyes Hogarth seems an even stronger influence. But I’ve never seen any reference to Kirby even mentioning Hogarth.
Loin clothes and penis viewing in comics is a touchy subject. What was underneath Magnus Robot Fighter’s flap? Who knows. Jimbo, our generation’s closest Tarzan equivalent, is known to have a penis which he is modest about, but certainly not afraid of. We’ll bring Specialist Sargent Panter in on this discussion.
As for Kirby: He always named Foster, Raymond and Caniff, and less frequently, Hogarth. I agree that Hogarth’s elastic dynamism seems an obvious (if less convenient) influence. His whole approach to the body in motion anticipates Kirby’s. Anyhow, whatever else, Hogarth himself certainly saw his influence on Kirby and seemed both alarmed by and possessive of it. From the same interview:
GG: I think less was taken from Foster than from you because the superhero idiom is characteristically bombastic and dynamic, and there was to Foster’s work an austerity and a dignity and a reserve.
BH: That’s right. Because when I came on the scene, I revised the whole concept of the Tarzan character, and a great many people began to follow me. There were people already beginning to pick up on the things that I did, and were then beginning to parrot these things in terms of the earliest comic books. And those earliest comic books, as a matter of fact — I’ll talk about Foster, Raymond, and myself — were the main instigators of the syntax o the whole comic book industry in terms of that they picked up. But they drew my style.
———–
A few paragraphs down:
BH: Ask Kirby. Did you ask Kirby yet in an interview where that came from?
GG: No.
BH: Well, just go ahead and ask him. Where did the syntax come from? Where did all those figure attitudes come from? That’s what I mean by syntax.
GG: Well, how do you feel about watching your figure syntax debased in this way?
BH: All I can see is that it is a life kind of progression. It’s like life adding to life. Nothing comes from its own accord, and I deeply respect people like Raymond and Foster and…
———–
It goes on a bit from there. Hogarth, along with Kane were so important to TCJ for so many years, but now that influence seems to have disappeared entirely due in part to the medium’s allergy to intelligent writing and due in part to Hogarth’s bombastic attitude, which, while I enjoy it, I imagine turned off a lot of readers who were not feeling generous or willing to overlook his rhetorical flourishes.
Then again, what do I know? Maybe there’s still some secret society discussing the figure in motion. What is the repository for all this past knowledge? Hard-to-find magazines and comments sections. Sigh.
Dan – Very astute observations regarding Hogarth’s thoughts on his influence on comics. Who wouldn’t be flattered by the integration of one’s approach? Who wouldn’t have reservations about the imitation of one’s style? The successful integrators of the Hogarth approach (within the 1940s Sunday Tarzan pages and spelled out in Dynamic Anatomy, 1958) were some of his younger peers (Kirby, Kane, Colan, Buscema) and his even younger students (Wood, Williamson, Krenkel, Andru, Esposito, Perlin, Sinnot, Ayers, Trimpe, Barry, Frazetta,…to name a few). Indeed, many of the creators of the Silver Age are the children of the Hogarth school (now known as the SVA). The imitators are numerous but less effective visual storytellers (Adams, Byrne come to mind) and they gave Hogarth pause because their work lacked substance and narrative competence. The figure in motion, the Hogarth figure, pervades the superhero comic today and he lived long enough to have misgivings about that pervasion. Perhaps Alex Raymond was the lucky one.
Yeah, it does seem like Hogarth is disappearing from history. But perhaps a good reprint of his Tarzan work would solve that problem. I think Hogarth’s Tarzan was pretty crucial for superhero comics, for better or worse.
It’s interesting that some of Gary Groth’s best conversations were all with older, somewhat cranky autodidacts: Kane, Hogarth, Donald Phelps, Kenneth Smith, Crumb. The one exception is Toth who was too cranky even for Gary — or who couldn’t handle Gary’s push-back.
William Blake and William Rimmer were masters of the naked figure in flight and not bound by gravity 75 years or so before Burne Hogarth’s knotty twizzlers.
Well, having Gary Panter post a comment here has just increased our coolness level by 100 fold, if not more.
Panter’s comment reminds me of an old Canadian joke. Our first Prime Minister John A. Macdonald made a witty comment which got printed in the newspapers. Then it was pointed out that the British Prime Minister Pitt the Elder made the same comment nearly a century earlier. The response was “John A. Macdonald might not have been the first one to make that comment, but he was the first CANADIAN to do so.”
Burne Hogarth was the first guy IN COMICS to draw naked men in flight and not bound by gravity. Not much of an achievement but still … we have to take our small victories where we can.
I never noticed until just now that this particular “knotty twizzler” Tarzan image was appropriated for the cover of British hippie-rockers Mighty Baby’s debut album. Have a look at this rather lysergic take on Hogarth:
http://tinyurl.com/y9zczct
Hogarth was a brilliant guy, but he always had an inflated view of his own importance. The adventure artists of Kirby’s generation were never his children; they’re the offspring of either Foster, Raymond, or Caniff. You may see Hogarth licks here and there, but his work didn’t affect younger artists very profoundly.
Kirby’s artistic daddy was the Alex Raymond of Flash Gordon, and he achieved his Bloomian anxiety of influence with the Sixties Marvel work and the Fourth World. The fluidity of his action is built upon the work of Segar, Caniff, and Crane.
Kirby talked about the dynamics of his work in a shop-talk interview with Will Eisner.
Notice Kirby is describing two kinds of realism.
Kirby isn’t interested in the literal realism of a photograph. What Kirby wants is to achieve the same kind of powerful emotional impact found in real and to a lesser degree reel life.
Kirby is interested in emotional realism. He decided to heighten the intensity of the printed page in order to approach the intensity of real life. A flat printed image attempting to look like a photograph is a watered down reality. Kirby describes himself as a “human camera” not a camera. He’s not a mechanism that captures images as they are, but a man who is trying to capture “events” as they are.
Eisner: Were you conscious of page layout?
Kirby: I suddenly found myself intellectualizing.
I found myself competing with the movie camera. I tore my characters out of the panels. I made them jump all over the page. In the service of trying to get a real fight. I wanted to transmit the power of men in the ring. I couldn’t do that in a static way. I had to do it in an extreme manner. I drew the hardest positions a character could get into. I had no time to put fingernails on fingers. I had no time to tie shoe laces.
I made an impression of things. I would draw as dramatically as I could. I felt I was a human camera trying to get events as they actually were. I was very sincere about that.
I was trying to get at the guy, who was trying to get at me.
I began to remember people from my own background, and I began to subtly realize they were important, and that I wasn’t ashamed of them. I was no longer afraid of myself, and I began to see them as I should have seen them from the beginning
This was a long way from Long Island. I was still trying to get to Brooklyn. I heard they had a tree there, and the tree was different.”
This is attached to an old post going back a bit, but I just ran across this.
It’s a quote from Hogarth which also connects to Jeet’s “Kirby was the 20th Century” rumination.
Hogarth’s language is as absurdly mannered as his art, but he is articulating an interesting idea.
Hogarth: “In an age off the exaltation of the primitive, the demiurgic and the Dionysian, Jack Kirby’s forms take on an archetypal quality with their unrestrained energy, brilliant freneticism and synoptic modes of violence. He is the contemporary era unleashed and personified.”