I enjoyed Ken's previous post about Weird Mystery Tales #3 and was surprised to see a Kirby photo-collage in a horror piece. I had seen Kirby use the device in other genres before, so I'm not sure why it seemed unusual. I might have been thrown more if it had been a romance yarn, so that evening, in a hypnogogic state and ever trying to think up ways to pad out the pagination of my Mome story for book form, I decided to try my own. Kirby seemed to always use planets, but the only round images I could find were tape spools. The end result is mostly a page that took two days to complete instead of a month.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Musilage
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Kirby’s Mind and Weird Mystery
See a 'new and improved' version here: http://www.tcj.com/category/columns/grid/
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Monday, June 1, 2009
När Clay kommer hem från ett biobesök är världen omkring honom plötsligt annorlunda, och den blir alltmer kuslig. Bland mutanter och konspirationsdårar, bland människor med skaldjur i ögonen och hundar utan kroppsöppningar söker han efter en kvinna ur sitt förflutna.
Som en sammetshandske smidd järn är en fascinerande, gåtfull, mardrömsliknande, kanske obehaglig serie, inte utan släktskap med David Lynchs filmer. Stämningen understryks av Daniel Clowes’ säreget precisa stil med inslag av 50-tals-retro.
Daniel Clowes ’är en av de senare årens kultgestalter bland serieskapare. Som i ett sammetshandske smidd i järn var hans genombrottserie.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Clowes's Next Book
Monday, May 4, 2009
Monday, April 27, 2009
Windowsill (from vector park)
Patrick Smith, a great artist I've been a fan of since his comics appeared in the first issue of the Ganzfeld, has launched a new flash based game that you can download (at least partially) for free.
Lots of other neat virtual toys are available at Vector Park.
Check it out, lots of surprising and beautiful work.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Saturday, April 4, 2009
The Austen Reader / Pride and Prejudice #1
Who is the audience for this . . . ?
The cover, modelled on fashion magazines like Cosmo, makes it female-friendly, with the promise of romance, bling, and summer dresses. And Nancy Butler, the scripter of this Austen adaptation, says it's specifically marketed to female readers. Yet inside the covers, the women are drawn and colored in a way that calls into question the female-friendliness. Rather than emulate the look of Austen's characters as found in popular BBC and film adaptations, the (male) artist and colorist create women who resemble porn 'actors,'
with spray-on tans, drowsy bedroom eyes, full lips covered in lip gloss, frosted hair, and 2000's style haircuts (with Mary's retro shag). Note at the center of the panel Lydia's open mouth, the position of her hands directly below, and the way her eyes (and no one else's) look directly at the reader. This oral sex fantasy makes the real audience clear: heterosexual men.
These visual traits are the hallmark of women and super-heroines produced for male readers by mainstream comics companies. And if it is intended for women, the ads are an equally odd choice. Here's a two-page spread that moves from Austen's Regency England to The Marvel Universe in one blood-splattered gesture:
The best panel to panel transition in the comic.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Ditko and "Word v. Picture"
In The World of Steve Ditko, Blake Bell recounts a story about the editing of Ditko’s Static, which appeared in the first three issues of Eclipse Monthly in 1983. Dean Mullaney altered Ditko’s script for the episode in #2 because he felt it was “too wordy, and visually unappealing.” (Bell agrees with Mullaney’s assessment, noting that Ditko’s debt to Ayn Rand “continued to have an impact on the quality of the storytelling” (145).) Ditko rejected the changes, and the story ran as he intended.
Mullany’s criticism reflects a common belief about comics storytelling: comics is primary a visual medium and so the text must always be dramatically subordinated (at least in terms of the amount of space it fills per panel) to the image. But I think the intensity of Ditko’s sequence visually depends upon the fact that, moving through the first three panels, the words take up an increasing amount of space as the image area decreases (with the fourth panel echoing the first):
The third panel brings the focus solely on the image of Mac’s calm, yet intense eyes, surrounded by his philosophical argument:
To lessen the text would be to lose the visual effect – the art would read differently, featuring more of the character and diminishing the focus on the eyes (a Ditko hallmark). The words function both as a visual frame and as dialogue; the image becomes an extreme close-up because of the text, not because of the “camera-to-subject” distance, a uniquely comics effect.
Here is the passage in context. Ditko frames the part of the conversation that takes place on this page with parallel long shots with full figures (panels 1 [figures are stationary] and 7 [figures in motion]):
It’s true that pages four and five of this story are relatively ‘text heavy,’ but the pages before and after return to a much more conventional word/text ratio. This fact gives the story a kind of rhythm clearly intended by Ditko, one in which conversation-heavy pages are followed by action sequences:
If we look at Ditko's independent comics in the period, we find a real diversity of text/image ratios. In many ways, page 5 from EM #2 is an exception, that like Ditko's text-minimalist pages (e.g. 1985's "The Expert"), demonstrates the considerable attention he paid to the issue.
It seems that Mullaney was not thinking of Ditko as a cartoonist and designer, but as a writer whose characters spoke too much for the tastes of 1980s comic fans, who Mullaney likely believed (and was certainly right), wanted more action than dialogue. Readers often come to Ditko with narrow expectations about how the comics page should look and strict rules about the visual balance between word and picture. They often wish that Ditko remained “faithful” to the corporate storytelling principles that governed his mainstream work, especially his 1960s Marvel comics. Although I enjoy this work, his independent comics (and his Charlton work with Joe Gill) reveal an artist constantly expanding comics’ visual and verbal aesthetics. And you can look at the word-picture ratio on pages by artists such as Kevin H. and Ivan Brunetti and trace a formal lineage back to Ditko:
From Brunetti's Schizo #2.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Charles Burns: Soto Pelle
So there's a massive exhibition of Charles Burns' work, Soto Pelle, in Italy right now hosted by the BilBOlbul international comics festival. "The exposition will show more than 100 works, among comic tables from Black Hole, sketches and illustrations realized for magazines and books during the last thirty years."
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