Saturday, July 4, 2009
Chiffon
The current issue of The Believer (The 2009 Music Issue) has an essay I wrote in praise of The Lawrence Welk Show, a program I've watched since a child. Part of it is available here. The beautiful cover artwork is, as always, by Charles Burns.
Ditko and the Beauty of Abstraction
Although Steve Ditko’s art has always been, in a large sense, representational, his work features some of the most highly abstract cartooning seen in mainstream comics. This is especially true in "The Dimensions of Greed," a story in the anthology Time Warp #3, (March 1980; DC). If we removed the human figures from these two pages (which appear side-by-side in the comic), the context for understanding the ‘objects’ and the narrative spaces you are seeing would disappear:
Ditko's version of an imaginary Martian machine owes less to contemporary science fiction and more to familiar cartoon abstractions. Take this panel for example:
There’s a giant 'paint splat' surrounded by a fuzzy 'lightning bolt':
Even though a cartoon 'paint splat' has a representational connection to an actual one, here that connection is severed, for the nature of the object is unknown - it's just a gesture, a play of form and color. In the standard cartoon idiom, a splat would represent an action; here it may be an action or just a thing: in other words, in the grammar of this scene it could be either a subject or a verb.
Some 'cobweb'-like figurations:
Many shapes suggest a flower seen through the fragmented prism of a kaleidoscope:
At first, it’s almost hard to perceive these two creatures in the panel as life-forms--if that’s what the green shape (a rabbit/fish?) on the left and the red one on the right are intended to evoke:
In this three-panel sequence, the narrative aspect itself is almost abstract, seen in the panel-to-panel transformation of the shapes that make up the door:
In this panel, a character appears to comment ironically on the issues of representation and recognition; it’s obvious to Dick and Leo that it’s a city, but we might not think so if they hadn’t told us:
Perception depends heavily on context.
Ditko’s art in "The Dimensions of Greed" employs a play of distorted shapes and heightened exaggeration; and like this story, much of his work has an unrecognized sense of humor and playfulness. While many of the stories he draws grapple with ‘heavy’ themes (crime, justice, moral and psychological dilemmas, etc.), Ditko’s art often recalls the comical traditions of cartooning. And it looks like it would be fun to draw -- There's often a real feeling of joy to his art.
In this page from "Escape" (reprinted in Space Adventures #11, 1978; Charlton), Ditko's abstraction takes a more minimalist and geometrical approach. Underneath a highly stylized city (again, so abstract that the reader might not recognize it as such without textual clues), a man runs in the first panel:
He says, "It looks like a street" but it’s just a series of circles or ovals floating in space. The next panel introduces, as the ‘ground’ of this world, a triangle and a cross, as well as two yellow triangles and other shapes created by the panel borders and the lines that define the purple cross and triangle:
The last panel above features a different kind of abstraction: Ditko literally abstracts (in the sense of removing) almost all sense of the physical context in which the figures ‘stand’ (except for the small shadow under a foot). The art in this story is sparse to begin with; but this scene takes that a step further, as each consecutive panel has less visual information.
Note how the floor of his "home" changes shape in the story's final two panels: a square surrounded other four-sided irregular shapes a series become all squares—and the oval shape of his room itself seems to become square:
What's that big black ink area in the lower corner? Is it intentional or a Charlton printing error? [It oddly extends below the plane of the panel borders into the margin.] Either way, it fits with the abstract strangeness of the images.
So often, Ditko is not interested in representing, in either a literal or conventional way, what the writer asks for; and this tendency is part of what makes his work so singular; he seems to rewrite the narrative as he draws it, making the finished story far subtler and stranger than what’s suggested by the script. Ditko is one of the few artists who can consistently take a mediocre script and make something special from it. And too often readers focus on Ditko's thematic concerns and not his formal innovations . . .
Saturday, June 27, 2009
The Comics Revival!
Jack Chick, the beloved and notorious evangelical pamphleteer, believes that souls can be won for Jesus through the ministry of the humble comic book. He understands that cartoon drawings printed on newsprint and held together by staples possess an almost magnetic power. You have likely seen Chick’s comics, left mysteriously by the faithful at bus stations, roadside casinos, public toilets, and laundromats. While waiting for your clothes to dry, you happen to notice, say, The Only Hope or The Death Cookie -- You read it and are never the same -- You Believe. How is it that something so ephemeral can be so transformative?
The Buenaventura Press shares Chick’s missionary zeal (if not his orthodoxy), feeling deeply that there’s something special about this folksy format -- it’s not just another ‘content delivery configuration.’ Addressing young cartoonists, Adrian Tomine recommends that they ‘Start out small. I know it's tempting to take that big book contract the first time it's offered, but it might be better to hone your skills in a less ostentatious venue.’ What ‘venue’ is ‘less ostentatious’ than the comic book? Think of the great artists who began there, aided by appearing in a format beneath notice, one that allowed them slowly and carefully to perfect each of the many disciplines (writing, drawing, lettering, acting, costume design, etc.) that together we call ‘cartooning.’ Think of Art Spiegelman’s Maus or Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World, visionary comic book stories first and only later bookstore-friendly graphic novels.
It’s ironic that the rise of the graphic novel is hastening the demise of the comic book, when the former is just a long version of the later, sans staples. But what respectable store wants to stock flimsy pamphlets with a limited shelf life and low profit margins, when it can proudly sell a sturdy, substantial Graphic Novel (a comic legitimatized by a binding and high price)? While mainstream comics (the kind featuring super-powered, lycra-clad buffoons) limp painfully toward their death, decades past their mid 20th-century heyday, economic forces threaten to kill ‘alternative comics’ (the kind released by Buenaventura Press), whose discriminating followers brave trips to the seedy part of town to purchase them in ‘specialty shops.’
Unconcerned with fleeting trends or the material conditions of the market, the enthusiasts at the Buenaventura Press have their eyes fixed solely on the aesthetic merits of the comic and the artists they publish. Emanating from the grimy yet luminous cartooning mecca of Oakland, California, the BP is engineering a Comics Revival, a modest yet bold endeavor to revivify the comic book. They might be foolhardy to think they can overcome the economic downturn, but BP’s business savvy, undergirded by a fervent, almost religious idealism should give us hope that the form we love will continue, and perhaps even flourish.
***
At the appearance of these humble pamphlets, town after town, and city upon city shall awaken out of their lethargy, night organizations for reaching the great masses shall be extemporized, as if by magic; and better still, the quickening impulse of the cartoon shall be imparted unto myriads, so that multitudes of readers shall be converted within the space of a few years, and cold hearts shall be fired with a burning desire to know the Comic Book.
{The above is a 'press release/ faux manifesto' I wrote for the Buenaventura Press's Comics Revival; they will be publishing a number of pamphlet comics in the coming months; see here . . .]
Monday, June 15, 2009
Musilage
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.
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
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