It can be "entertaining and enlightening" to look at similar words/objects/scenes as drawn by different artists. The following pairs of images are from "Benny Beaver," which appeared in Casper, The Friendly Ghost #1 [1949], and "Ecology Beaver," which appeared in Comic Art #9, by Tim Hensley [2007].
Opening Panel:
Gnawing:
Holding a book:
On his dam:
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Cartoon Ecology
Friday, January 22, 2010
Abstract Ditko
Those interested in Steve Ditko and abstraction in comics should check out this post by Andrei Molotiu and the comments on the Abstract Comics blog.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
I Shoot Myself Being Interviewed
Here was an exercise in disorientation. It seemed I could either concentrate on speech or filming, but neither at once. The result at least follows in the online clip tradition of puppy antics. Witness Lisa Hanawalt, Paul Hornschemeier, Sammy Harkham, and John Pham under similar duress here.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Richie's Ledger: Money Sex Power
Money Aura
The single-mindedness of Harvey Comics' characters -- Little Dot’s obsession with circles, Casper’s desperation to find a friend -- is matched only by the intense repetition featured in the design of Harvey comics. Nowhere is this better seen than on the cover of Richie Rich Bank Book$ #32.
Symbols for money – dollar and cent signs – appear 13 times, gems 6 times (9, if you count the 3 in "Richie Rich" in the upper left corner), and “Rich” appears 10 times. Add to this a glittering gold bank, a wad of bills in Richie’s hand (certainly not fives or tens), 2 bank books, and a very large account book in the shape of a dollar sign, with dozens, perhaps 100s of dollar-sign shaped pages (that's at least 34 representations [symbols, words, objects] of wealth).
A house ad for Harvey Comics in the issue ratchets up this financial frenzy even further.
During the month this comic came out (August 1977), Harvey released 13 different Richie Rich titles: Vaults of Mystery, Cash, Jems, Riches, etc . . . But as the weeks passed, the value went up for the "giant" comic in the final column: week one was Millions; week three Billions, and the final week culminated with a wealth so vast it couldn’t be named with a word that corresponds to something: Zillions (even the Zs echo the shape of a dollar sign.)
If the comic has a hero with riches beyond measure, the perfect antagonist must be a threat to this wealth, which was built on the energy of the workers. His antithesis:
It's no wonder that on the first page Richie expresses the capitalist-hoarder's worst fear -- a workers' revolt:
"Gasp! Have the estate workers gone crazy?"
Luckily, things are not what they seem. The workers are only carrying out Mr. Rich’s orders, no matter how crazy they are.
And what are we to make of the cover's exchange between Gloria and Richie, or perhaps more accurately, between her and his money book? Given that Richie Rich is a children’s comic, it might seem crude to suggest that the account book and its placement are sexually suggestive.
But children’s books are usually written by adults . . . If the characters were adults, we might say:
The phallic shaped book represents the male’s totemic power; he uses his superior access to wealth (his ‘inheritance’ as a male) as a form of seduction. The male occupies the literal ‘seat of power,’ sitting in a purple chair ( the color of royalty, which in the US means Rich People) and he is positioned in a Masonic mystic triangle formed by three gems. And the female is off to the side, looking on excitedly and admiring his ‘account.’ His masculinity is a form of exaggeration and ornamentation (gems even have their own tassles), like a male bird’s mating dance. Gloria’s face and hand gestures communicate her surprise at, and her appreciation of, the phallus/book’s ostentatious size and shape, saying, ‘I’ll bet I know what kind of book that is.’ She is responsive to the ritual display he enacts for her benefit -- and for us, as he looks at the viewers, for we are the third party in this love triangle. Had she placed a 'bet' as she suggests, she would have won. She certainly knows what kind of book it is in a literal sense: a book that records and displays the Rich family's riches. But does she know what kind of book it is in a symbolic sense? Like the superhero comic, the children’s humor comic can often explore an erotic power fantasy, playing out a cultural script about gender, money, and desire -- a sexual economy that the child (Richie, Gloria, the reader) intuits yet cannot articulate.
But they're not adults; they're just kids in a kid’s comic . . .
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Gallows Humor Exhibit in Detroit
You know the year is off to a good start if I'm searching for myself on Findagrave.com; I'm listed more than once! I also have a small drawing in the exhibition "Funny/Not Funny" at the University of Michigan's Work-Detroit Gallery: January 22, 2010-February 26, 2010.
Monday, January 11, 2010
The Smartest Kid in China
Courtesy of Tim H. comes this link to a flicker set of 54 photos of Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan ("Traditional Chinese Edition").
Friday, January 1, 2010
Friday, December 25, 2009
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
A Book of the Decade: Ice Haven
There is a panel in Daniel Clowes’s “comic-strip novel” Ice Haven in which a boy named Charles tears up a paperback copy of The True Story of Leopold and Loeb.
It’s a moment of real anxiety for Charles: he believes that if he is found with the book, he will be linked to a murder he didn’t commit. Giant beads of sweat hover over his head; his hands and arms are drawn multiple times to simulate the act of tearing; and the word “SHRED” appears twice above torn pieces of the book. Charles’s head is as big as his torso. His mouth—like that of many comic characters drawn in profile (Little Lulu, Henry, Charlie Brown)—is nowhere to be seen. The panel is funny in the way we expect a cartoon drawing to be—full of exaggerated effects. But because Clowes has carefully unfolded the plot and put Charles in a web of troubled relationships, the reader experiences the force of his anxiety.
Many graphic novels distance themselves from their “funny page” origins: to be legitimate, the argument goes, comics need to imitate as much as possible the realism of film. Clowes, however, reveals no discomfort about the seriousness of his predecessors.
Applying a warehouse of cartooning techniques in traditional, unusual, and poignant ways, Clowes again shows himself to be the foremost practitioner of the literary comic.
Ninety pages long and composed of 37 stories, Ice Haven has at its center a crime story—the kidnapping of a boy. But around this plot nearly a dozen others circulate, some of which have little or no connection to the crime. The method of narration, too, constantly changes. Some stories are told in the third person,
others by one of five main characters who function as first-person narrators. Some speak directly to the reader,
one narrates through letters,
and another rambles aloud—is he talking to the reader or to himself?
For visual inspiration Ice Haven looks to the Sunday funnies, in which different genres of strips drawn in distinct styles sit side by side, combining in the reader’s field of vision (in a way film frames never could) to create a kind of imaginary cartoon world.
Clowes draws on his knowledge of American comic-strip techniques to vary word balloons, lettering, and coloring to reflect the different modes of narration. A vignette with Leopold and Loeb (whose crime haunts the novel as it did Clowes’s Chicago childhood)
features a classic big-nosed style of cartooning on beige pages meant to resemble faded newsprint; a story about a prehistoric resident of the town of Ice Haven borrows the look of The Flintstones; and the vignette “Our Children and Their Friends” mimics the ground-level, static perspective of Peanuts.
The result is like a prose novel written by a dozen different authors. Taken alone, each of the stories might remind you of a cartoon you’ve seen before. But much of Clowes’s innovation lies in the interplay of styles.
The technique succeeds because of Clowes’s obvious affection for a range of genres and formats that cover the history of American comics. His use of these forms is never clichéd, like the work of so many literary and cinematic postmodernists who engage in genre-hopping. Instead, Ice Haven evokes the pathos that can make such genres as, say, detective fiction compelling. Recalling Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Clowes’s PI Mr. Ames desperately seeks but fails to find a satisfying relationship, in part because he unwittingly lives out hardboiled clichés: his desire to rescue troubled women makes him blind to the troubles in his marriage.
Even stilted genres such as teen romance are mined for genuine emotion. Like the heroines of the romance comics Clowes read as a child, the teenager Violet is sympathetically portrayed as a victim of family problems who yearns for marriage as an escape. She is both an idealist who sings songs from musicals and a self-absorbed stepsister who is cruelly unaware of the devotion she inspires in a younger brother. On Ice Haven’s back cover are portraits of its “cast of characters” with an exhortation (written by Clowes): “You will feel as though you know them!” The exclamation point might make the line seem ironic, but it’s not.
Clowes has found a home for his writing in Hollywood, but Ice Haven is decidedly unlike a film. Its pacing often seems a conscious reaction to the rapid-fire editing used in so many current films, TV shows, and video games. Mainstream comics rarely go too long before crowding pages with dozens of motion lines emanating from flying superheroes or frenetic teens to compensate for lacking film’s action; Clowes embraces the medium’s stillness. We are asked to examine each character and each panel carefully, looking for subtle shifts in facial expression and wondering what happened to the characters between the panels. We must contemplate them and our own responses. In scenes in which Charles stands still, nearly silent, holding the same blank facial expression, Clowes gives the reader information through other, subtle details: the speed at which Charles bounces a tennis ball, for example, conveys his emotional state as he reacts to other characters’ speech.
You always need to read Clowes with a kind of attention that comic strips have rarely demanded, or even wanted.
On repeated readings, Ice Haven’s crime plot recedes into the background, revealing the book as a story about its peculiarly American namesake (its name on the title page is lettered in stars and stripes) and a kind of Midwestern melancholy, where people wander the streets and talk with neighbors but rarely understand each other. When the poet Random Wilder meets Vida Wentz (the granddaughter of his poetic rival), she awkwardly delivers a prepared speech about her admiration for his writing, handing the poet her self-produced zine. The pompous Wilder accepts it with appreciation, but when safely indoors, tosses it aside: “Hasn’t one Mrs. Wentz done enough damage to the world of letters? Must her befouled lineage carry forth the tradition?” He later reads it and is deeply moved, so much so that he “can’t bear to have it in the house”; unfortunately for Vida, she finds it when searching through his garbage—she has been stalking him. Such strained, disappointing encounters are at the heart of Ice Haven. When characters offer a friendly greeting to the convenience-store clerk, Kim Lee, they get silence and a blank stare in return,
and when a “throng of Ice Havenites” crowd the street to learn about the crime, few of them even look at each other. Only two female characters are able to escape the pull of the town’s melancholy: as the comic ends Violet leaves her distant husband for Hawaii and Vida follows Clowes to Hollywood to become a writer and “the biggest whore ever!!”
In Ice Haven’s second panel Charles reads a manual entitled Do It Yourself.
Perhaps this is Clowes’s reference to the DIY ethic of the 1960s underground “comix” movement in which cartoonists such as R. Crumb, Bill Griffith, and Art Spiegelman exercised almost complete control in the creation of their comic books. The vast majority of comics are today, in contrast, corporate products. The art, writing, coloring, lettering, and book design are done by different hands, a team assembled by and subservient to a corporation’s editorial apparatus, whose primary concerns are the marketability and licensing of characters. Clowes is Ice Haven’s auteur, taking responsibility for every aspect of his book: he even hand-lettered all the mundane publication information and chose the kind of paper.
The only mark that Clowes didn’t make himself is the back cover’s mechanically generated price code, which he incorporates into his design by putting it into a hand-drawn word balloon spoken by Clowes’s shill, a cigarette-smoking comedic bunny who hypes the book. It’s not surprising that the most important graphic novels (which include works by Clowes, Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, and Chris Ware) have been created in this time-consuming and solitary way. Clowes even prefers to be called a “cartoonist,” a term that evokes a vision uncorrupted by collaboration and connected to past masters such as Charles M. Schulz, George Herriman, and Frank King.
Even those who see comics as an important art form often worry that the medium will always be limited in its ability to express the nuance we expect from great films or literary fiction. In his manifesto Modern Cartoonist, Clowes writes that the graphic limits of the form are not something to lament but to exploit. One of our earliest experiences with art, he writes, is drawing cartoons—so reading intentionally cartoony comics such as Ice Haven can conjure up our childhoods. The town’s comic-book critic, Harry Naybors, offers a more abstract, but equally compelling explanation of comics’ appeal: “While prose tends toward pure ‘interiority,’ coming to life in the reader’s mind, and cinema gravitates toward the ‘exteriority’ of experiential spectacle, perhaps ‘comics,’ in its embrace of both the interiority of the written word and the physicality of image, more closely replicates the true nature of human consciousness and the struggle between private self-definition and corporeal ‘reality.’ ”
In a self-referential moment, Clowes has Naybors explicate the cartoon world he lives in; he notes that Clowes has a reputation for misanthropy. Ice Haven refutes this claim. The book’s final story features 12 nearly identical panels—a young boy lies almost motionless on his bed—interrupted only by occasional short lines of dialogue.
It is in this kind of stillness that Clowes’s humanity—his tenderness toward the loners and misfits that populate Ice Haven—comes through. Ice Haven demonstrates, perhaps more so than any other graphic novel, the great range of the medium. Clowes’s comic is complex, absurd, funny, touching, and profoundly cartoony.
[This essay first appeared in the Boston Review, Jan. 2006. The text has been changed slightly, and images have been added.]
It’s a moment of real anxiety for Charles: he believes that if he is found with the book, he will be linked to a murder he didn’t commit. Giant beads of sweat hover over his head; his hands and arms are drawn multiple times to simulate the act of tearing; and the word “SHRED” appears twice above torn pieces of the book. Charles’s head is as big as his torso. His mouth—like that of many comic characters drawn in profile (Little Lulu, Henry, Charlie Brown)—is nowhere to be seen. The panel is funny in the way we expect a cartoon drawing to be—full of exaggerated effects. But because Clowes has carefully unfolded the plot and put Charles in a web of troubled relationships, the reader experiences the force of his anxiety.Many graphic novels distance themselves from their “funny page” origins: to be legitimate, the argument goes, comics need to imitate as much as possible the realism of film. Clowes, however, reveals no discomfort about the seriousness of his predecessors.
Applying a warehouse of cartooning techniques in traditional, unusual, and poignant ways, Clowes again shows himself to be the foremost practitioner of the literary comic.Ninety pages long and composed of 37 stories, Ice Haven has at its center a crime story—the kidnapping of a boy. But around this plot nearly a dozen others circulate, some of which have little or no connection to the crime. The method of narration, too, constantly changes. Some stories are told in the third person,
others by one of five main characters who function as first-person narrators. Some speak directly to the reader,
one narrates through letters,
and another rambles aloud—is he talking to the reader or to himself?
For visual inspiration Ice Haven looks to the Sunday funnies, in which different genres of strips drawn in distinct styles sit side by side, combining in the reader’s field of vision (in a way film frames never could) to create a kind of imaginary cartoon world.
Clowes draws on his knowledge of American comic-strip techniques to vary word balloons, lettering, and coloring to reflect the different modes of narration. A vignette with Leopold and Loeb (whose crime haunts the novel as it did Clowes’s Chicago childhood)
features a classic big-nosed style of cartooning on beige pages meant to resemble faded newsprint; a story about a prehistoric resident of the town of Ice Haven borrows the look of The Flintstones; and the vignette “Our Children and Their Friends” mimics the ground-level, static perspective of Peanuts.
The result is like a prose novel written by a dozen different authors. Taken alone, each of the stories might remind you of a cartoon you’ve seen before. But much of Clowes’s innovation lies in the interplay of styles.The technique succeeds because of Clowes’s obvious affection for a range of genres and formats that cover the history of American comics. His use of these forms is never clichéd, like the work of so many literary and cinematic postmodernists who engage in genre-hopping. Instead, Ice Haven evokes the pathos that can make such genres as, say, detective fiction compelling. Recalling Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Clowes’s PI Mr. Ames desperately seeks but fails to find a satisfying relationship, in part because he unwittingly lives out hardboiled clichés: his desire to rescue troubled women makes him blind to the troubles in his marriage.
Even stilted genres such as teen romance are mined for genuine emotion. Like the heroines of the romance comics Clowes read as a child, the teenager Violet is sympathetically portrayed as a victim of family problems who yearns for marriage as an escape. She is both an idealist who sings songs from musicals and a self-absorbed stepsister who is cruelly unaware of the devotion she inspires in a younger brother. On Ice Haven’s back cover are portraits of its “cast of characters” with an exhortation (written by Clowes): “You will feel as though you know them!” The exclamation point might make the line seem ironic, but it’s not.
Clowes has found a home for his writing in Hollywood, but Ice Haven is decidedly unlike a film. Its pacing often seems a conscious reaction to the rapid-fire editing used in so many current films, TV shows, and video games. Mainstream comics rarely go too long before crowding pages with dozens of motion lines emanating from flying superheroes or frenetic teens to compensate for lacking film’s action; Clowes embraces the medium’s stillness. We are asked to examine each character and each panel carefully, looking for subtle shifts in facial expression and wondering what happened to the characters between the panels. We must contemplate them and our own responses. In scenes in which Charles stands still, nearly silent, holding the same blank facial expression, Clowes gives the reader information through other, subtle details: the speed at which Charles bounces a tennis ball, for example, conveys his emotional state as he reacts to other characters’ speech.
You always need to read Clowes with a kind of attention that comic strips have rarely demanded, or even wanted.On repeated readings, Ice Haven’s crime plot recedes into the background, revealing the book as a story about its peculiarly American namesake (its name on the title page is lettered in stars and stripes) and a kind of Midwestern melancholy, where people wander the streets and talk with neighbors but rarely understand each other. When the poet Random Wilder meets Vida Wentz (the granddaughter of his poetic rival), she awkwardly delivers a prepared speech about her admiration for his writing, handing the poet her self-produced zine. The pompous Wilder accepts it with appreciation, but when safely indoors, tosses it aside: “Hasn’t one Mrs. Wentz done enough damage to the world of letters? Must her befouled lineage carry forth the tradition?” He later reads it and is deeply moved, so much so that he “can’t bear to have it in the house”; unfortunately for Vida, she finds it when searching through his garbage—she has been stalking him. Such strained, disappointing encounters are at the heart of Ice Haven. When characters offer a friendly greeting to the convenience-store clerk, Kim Lee, they get silence and a blank stare in return,
and when a “throng of Ice Havenites” crowd the street to learn about the crime, few of them even look at each other. Only two female characters are able to escape the pull of the town’s melancholy: as the comic ends Violet leaves her distant husband for Hawaii and Vida follows Clowes to Hollywood to become a writer and “the biggest whore ever!!”In Ice Haven’s second panel Charles reads a manual entitled Do It Yourself.
Perhaps this is Clowes’s reference to the DIY ethic of the 1960s underground “comix” movement in which cartoonists such as R. Crumb, Bill Griffith, and Art Spiegelman exercised almost complete control in the creation of their comic books. The vast majority of comics are today, in contrast, corporate products. The art, writing, coloring, lettering, and book design are done by different hands, a team assembled by and subservient to a corporation’s editorial apparatus, whose primary concerns are the marketability and licensing of characters. Clowes is Ice Haven’s auteur, taking responsibility for every aspect of his book: he even hand-lettered all the mundane publication information and chose the kind of paper.
The only mark that Clowes didn’t make himself is the back cover’s mechanically generated price code, which he incorporates into his design by putting it into a hand-drawn word balloon spoken by Clowes’s shill, a cigarette-smoking comedic bunny who hypes the book. It’s not surprising that the most important graphic novels (which include works by Clowes, Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, and Chris Ware) have been created in this time-consuming and solitary way. Clowes even prefers to be called a “cartoonist,” a term that evokes a vision uncorrupted by collaboration and connected to past masters such as Charles M. Schulz, George Herriman, and Frank King.Even those who see comics as an important art form often worry that the medium will always be limited in its ability to express the nuance we expect from great films or literary fiction. In his manifesto Modern Cartoonist, Clowes writes that the graphic limits of the form are not something to lament but to exploit. One of our earliest experiences with art, he writes, is drawing cartoons—so reading intentionally cartoony comics such as Ice Haven can conjure up our childhoods. The town’s comic-book critic, Harry Naybors, offers a more abstract, but equally compelling explanation of comics’ appeal: “While prose tends toward pure ‘interiority,’ coming to life in the reader’s mind, and cinema gravitates toward the ‘exteriority’ of experiential spectacle, perhaps ‘comics,’ in its embrace of both the interiority of the written word and the physicality of image, more closely replicates the true nature of human consciousness and the struggle between private self-definition and corporeal ‘reality.’ ”
In a self-referential moment, Clowes has Naybors explicate the cartoon world he lives in; he notes that Clowes has a reputation for misanthropy. Ice Haven refutes this claim. The book’s final story features 12 nearly identical panels—a young boy lies almost motionless on his bed—interrupted only by occasional short lines of dialogue.
It is in this kind of stillness that Clowes’s humanity—his tenderness toward the loners and misfits that populate Ice Haven—comes through. Ice Haven demonstrates, perhaps more so than any other graphic novel, the great range of the medium. Clowes’s comic is complex, absurd, funny, touching, and profoundly cartoony.[This essay first appeared in the Boston Review, Jan. 2006. The text has been changed slightly, and images have been added.]
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Friday, December 11, 2009
Self-Storage
These were drawn over the years for Giant Robot group show grids and are parked here in the spirit of blog as self-storage unit. I think the kanji says, "Piss off!" I copied it out of a Japanese-English phrasebook.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
American Boyhood from 1830-1885
The University of Tennessee Press has just released Boys at Home: Discipline, Masculinity, and 'The Boy-Problem' in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. I began the project around a decade ago, while a graduate student at the University of Virginia. A few chapters have been published along the way, but I feel a sense of relief and satisfaction that the book is finally in print.
A few related things:
1. An old Blog Flume post that has images from boys' books of the period, some of which appear in the book.
2. An uncorrected proof of part of the introduction (it's close to the final version).
3. An excerpt from the UTP's promotional copy:
. . . Ken Parille seeks to do for nineteenth-century boys what the past three decades of scholarship have done for girls: show how the complexities of the fiction and educational materials written about them reflect the lives they lived. While most studies of nineteenth-century boyhood have focused on post-Civil War male novelists, Parille explores a broader archive of writings by male and female authors, extending from 1830-1885.
Boys at Home offers a series of arguments about five pedagogical modes: play-adventure, corporal punishment, sympathy, shame, and reading. The first chapter demonstrates that, rather than encouraging boys to escape the bonds of domesticity, scenes of play in boys’ novels reproduce values associated with the home. Chapter 2 argues that debates about corporal punishment are crucial sources for the culture’s ideas about gender difference and pedagogical practice. In chapter 3, “The Medicine of Sympathy,” Parille examines the affective nature of mother-daughter and mother-son bonds, emphasizing the special difficulties that “boy-nature” posed for women. The fourth chapter uses boys’ conduct literature and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women – the preeminent chronicle of girlhood in the century – to investigate not only Alcott’s fictional representations of shame-centered discipline but also pervasive cultural narratives about what it means to “be a man.” Focusing on works by Lydia Sigourney and Francis Forrester, the final chapter considers arguments about the effects that fictional, historical, and biographical narratives had on a boy’s sense of himself and his masculinity . . .
Monday, November 23, 2009
Mechanicals
Here is unused artwork by Daniel Clowes for Victor Banana's album Split. I think I may have pasted these up around the same time the Neil Smythe CD was being mastered. The Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron soundtrack had sold well enough to break even, so, drunk with power, I assumed I would be able to release a whole line of products. There's a panel in the Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron book this reminds me of--a character admonishes, "I'm sick of everybody using my store as a through street!" Since the formats are now forgotten, I've posted these templates for any old-timer who wants to make a cassette for their big rig.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Abner Dean's Notebook, Part III.
[Part one and part two . Click on images to enlarge. The commentary in italics below the cartoon is Dean's.]
__________________________________________________
Nearer to the heart’s desireAs long as there’s anyone making a more beautiful mud pie in a column of sunlight in the heart of despair -- there’s hope. Hope for a world reconstructed. Nothing has to be the way it is. Only the earth has continuity (or what we consider continuity in relation to our limits) -- man is not complete -- nor are his mores. He and they are changing. There is a slow and bloodless revolution in progress. None of our concepts or constructions are necessarily permanent. Out of a good mud pie may come a new world.
It would be easy to read this drawing as a condemnation of the character in the sunbeam, who seems completely oblivious to the suffering around him. (He looks at the dog, not at the parade of people). In this way, he seems to share the sense of self-delusion often possessed by Dean's main characters. But here, as elsewhere, Dean's comments show an appreciates for those who try to imagining new ways of seeing, thinking, and making art. Even if the result appears comical (an ordered mound of dirt and water), it shows a desire to imagine -- and to try to create -- a better reality, one that can have positive social consequences.
So rather than coming from above, it is as if the beam of light emerges (like the flower) from the mud pie, a comment on the generative power of art, and its ability to illuminate social realities in an abstract way. Perhaps Dean is telling us it's not that the main character ignores the suffering around him, but that the others overlook the hope in their midst.
[In the third to the last sentence, Dean writes (gradual) in a different pen above "and," suggesting that he may have wanted this sentence to read: There is a slow and gradual and bloodless revolution in progress.]
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Unintentional Connections
I was reading a '70s issue of The Avengers and I thought about Ivan Brunetti. In his excellent book
he points out "some common pitfalls," one of which is "unintentional connections" between images in different panels: 
A page in The Avengers #152 [1976] (pencils by John Buscema) seems to have this problem:
Two connections -- the leg in panel 1 'joining' the arm in 3, plus the torso in 2 'jutting' from the hip in 1 -- create some visual confusion and impede a clear reading of the fight scene.
On the first reading, the connections felt like a flaw to me, but looking at the sequence again, I'm not so sure. When you take in the page as a whole, they give the fight a sense of circular motion. Or they're a result of questionable planning. . . [The cover of the issue is by Kirby and Ayers]
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