Archive for February, 2010
This week’s covers are courtesy of PANELista Craig Bogart. Craig writes:
“Seven comics I was promised would be worth buckets of money: I’m not sure why I was surprised this past MidOhio when I saw Flash #1 and Animal Man #1 for just a buck or two apiece. Those used to be pricey issues. I came in late to the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League, so that first issue cost me about $15 when I bought it. I see it on ebay now for $2.00. Not much Marvel here, only because they had sunk so low by this point I had defected to DC.”
(Have a favorite series of your own? Or an artist? Character? Submit your own set of 7 covers by sending me small files (i.e. 72 dpi for the web) to ferret at ferretpress dot com and include “7 covers” in the subject line. Also, let me know if you have a blog or website you’d like me to link to.)
This guy, Willy Pogany, is literally the first artist I ever liked. Click on all these images to make them bigger. Seriously. They look so much better that way.
I remember a set of books called something like “My Little Bookhouse.” There were 10 or 12 of them, all hardcovers, and all themed. The earliest volumes were geared toward very young readers, and contained mostly Mother Goose rhymes, Aesop’s Fables and simple folk tales. Somewhere near the double digits, there was a volume with a painting of a castle and a procession of knights on the cover, and this one was my favorite. It was full of classical myths like the story of Perseus and the journey of Odysseus, legends like the story of the Ring of the Nibelung, and all sorts of tales about King Arthur and the Knights of Camelot. I was able to read fairly well by kindergarten, but I can remember looking at the illustrations in these books even before that.
While I liked almost all of the art, the artist whose work I loved the most was Willy Pogany. All of his pieces were very simple, elegant black and white line drawings but they were just beautiful. And he got to draw almost all of the monsters, from the Medusa that Perseus beheaded…
…to the monstrous children of Loki in the Norse myths…
and that was a big deal to me. At the time, I didn’t know who he was and I forgot about him as I worked my way through junior high and high school. Some time during my undergraduate years at Bowling Green State University, while doing some work in the library for a project on children’s books, I came across a copy of the book The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles.
I paged through it, saw Pogany’s classic illustrations, and was thunderstruck with a wave of nostalgia that knocked me off my feet. It’s hard to describe that feeling really.
Willy Pogany was a Hungarian illustrator working primarily in children’s books during the first half of the 1900s. He was incredibly prolific and created some real masterpieces in his time, including fully illustrated versions of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Richard Wagner’s Tannhauser, Parsifal and Lohengrin. He passed away in 1955 but left behind and impressive body of work that included beautiful black and white as well as full color drawings and paintings. Take a look at some of these stunningly gorgeous pieces from his illustrated versions of Wagner’s operas…
I’m not sure how much of the person we become is innate in us from birth or is a product of our environment. I don’t know how different I would have been if I had seen the messy scratchy illustrations of Jules Feiffer first instead of the clean line work of Willy Pogany. All I know is that those illustrations made an indelible impression on me, one which has never really disappeared entirely. I still thrill – absolutely thrill, personally and emotionally and reflexively – to his work.
About 6 months ago, when I began working on my project to create one illustration for every page of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, fellow Panelista Steve Black sent me an email in which he basically called me out and wrote that he thought I was capable of producing much better art than I was currently making. It wasn’t a douche bag move at all; it was actually something that only a good friend could have done. Steve wasn’t overstepping any boundaries with me at all. We had a great exchange, and while I was able to share a little more about what I was trying to do with the Moby-Dick pieces, he was able to refine and strengthen his critique, and we came to a good understanding. Steve’s words have stayed with me since then.
I still dig the Moby-Dick stuff a lot, but the very nature of the project (one illustration per day, made in an hour or less, and so on, for 552 consecutive days) has a real effect on how finely polished the images will be. Those pieces are rougher, more random, more experimental, and more wide-ranging. But I keep coming back to Steve’s words, and in a weird way, to Willy Pogany.
See, Willy Pogany is the one guy who I’d kill to be able to draw like. I don’t mean I’d like to swipe him, I mean I’d do almost anything for his command of line, form, composition, and elegance. But you know, in spite of more or less imitating all sorts of other comic book artists like Kirby and Marder and sometimes even Simonson throughout my years of making art, I’ve never worked toward what I’d really like to accomplish. A lot of that has been, I’ll admit, a fear of failure. If I never try to clean things up and draw like Pogany did, I’ll never fail at it. But I know that’s really stupid and pathetic. So lately I’ve been thinking, why not? Why can’t I be that good? Or at least try to be that good? I’ll be dead eventually, and if I died tomorrow would I regret not challenging myself to make the kind of art that I love the most? Definitely, yes.
So take a look at Willy Pogany’s art, and please let me know…any advice? I know Andy told me to draw and draw and draw and draw and I believe that. Looking at what Pogany could do, I have no doubt he had piles of sketchbooks all over the place. But what else? Any advice on this kind of clean line drawing? I think it’s fascinating that in so much of the early, black & white stuff I love by Pogany, there is only a single thickness of line. No heavier weights of line at all. It’s all done with composition and linework. I can see echoes of it in the art of Paul Smith (especially his X-Men stuff)…
Herge…
and Yves Lombard…
and even Sergio Aragones with his single pen approach.
So help me out and I’ll share the results as I work on this. Pen suggestions? Practice suggestions? How to make this work in black & white? How to make this work for comics as well as it does for static illustrations? Any feedback at all will be deeply appreciated.
Because Marvel’s doing a “Deadpool variant” cover on almost all their books, for no apparent reason other than to feature Deadpool. Oh, and I guess sell a bunch of extra comics.
For what it’s worth, the crasher squirrel cover is one of the few that I find to be funny, but maybe that’s my geeky Internets meme appreciation side talking.
I mean, if you’re going to do variant covers (which I’m no fan of), I guess it’s at least cool that they’re having some fun with it. But Deadpool? Really? A Rob Liefeld character is still this popular?
By the way, you can see the crasher squirrel/Deadpool on www.marvel.com if you enter this code:
up up down down left right left right b a [enter]
This image reminded of that one joke from Dumb and Dumber:
Harry: Ooh, look at the buns on that one…
Lloyd: Yeah, he must work out.
Art by Dale Eaglesham, from Fantastic Four #576.
This weekend’s crossover combat special is Hermes vs. The Eyeball Kid:
Weird? Unusual? Surreal? Look, all you need to know is that it’s by Eddie Campbell. 3-issue series, plus lots of appearances in Dark Horse Presents. Go find a copy and enjoy!
Well, it looks like the free commenting service that I had been using, Haloscan, is no more. I started using them because at the time I set up this blog, Blogger itself did not offer a comments feature. But Haloscan was bought out by some pay service, and is being shut down. I can export all 8000+ comments from this blog, but there’s no way to import them as of yet. Sigh.
This means I really need to get my butt in gear and do the long-in-the-wings port over to WordPress. In the meantime, I’ll try and turn on the Blogger commenting feature. Hopefully it’ll work as a stop gap.
A few months ago, I raised hackles by casually dismissing the work of Roy Thomas. Turns out I was wrong about that, I was attributing to him some crappy comics by Paul Levitz and Gerry Conway.
***
My first exposure to the Justice Society was the early-1990s revival, where they’re shown as these aging workhorses. I was a big fan of the 1999-2006 series, which depicted them as the elder statesmen of the DC Universe. So I was looking forward to reading the 1970s version, which kept the flame alive for my generation.
It’s really kind of not good.
Writers Paul Levitz and Gerry Conway try to bring back that goofy Golden Age stuff, but it’s pretty stale.
Then, they try to show the JSA as real people with real problems, but then they all come off as kind of unpleasant. Here’s Wildcat, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder:
I knew from the 1999 series that Wildcat and Power Girl had some kind of rivalry, but in the 1970s version it’s pretty explicit. Wildcat’s just sexist, as are the rest of the Justice Society.
Here they are rooting for her to get her comeuppance from a group of mole men.
The Star-Spangled Kid tries to take her side, but he does it in an “I’m trying to get in your pants” kind of way. Or maybe a stalker way. Anyway, ew.
I guess I got to give them props for making Power Girl a feminist, but she’s such a man-hating ball-buster that he may as well not have bothered. If your conception of feminism begins and ends with “don’t call me babe,” you should probably look for a new angle.
The series spends a fair amount of time trying to bring our WWII-era heroes into the present-day, and it mostly falls flat. Here’s the Golden Age Green Lantern struggling with Nixon-era cynicism.
Endless angst, attempts at relevance, desperate attempts to revitalize the crappy comics from your youth … I think the cancer that’s killing comics starts right about here.
Paul Hornschemeier Interviewed by Royal Jelly from John Orlow on Vimeo.
Longish interview with Paul Hornschemeier. Honestly it’s a weird one. Paul appears to be walking around his townhouse. Or the guy holding the camera ambles around stalker style. Casing the joint. I tapped out after 8 minutes. He’ll be coming to S.P.A.C.E. in April. Paul will, not the stalker camera guy.
Matt’s 7 Covers last week reminded me of the Hawkmoon comics, and how one of the series featured painted covers by one of Young Dara’s favorite cover artists of the 80s and 90s. So, this week I’m featuring 7 covers by Dave Dorman. He was a mainstay of indie publishers, especially Dark Horse, doing a ton of movie-related comic covers. His ultra-realistic paintings don’t do as much for me anymore, but I still have fond memories of his work from the past. And the few times I met him at conventions, he was very personable and down to earth.
Anyway, here are 7 random covers, from a variety of different books he has worked on:
We’ve touched on the subject in the comments of a couple posts below: here’s preview artwork from Marvel’s new “Astonishing” line of new-reader friendly books.
Once in a while, when Pitchfork isn’t masturbating over the new Of Montreal album, they post something cool. This is a pic from Wayne Coyne’s house. If I had the means, this is probably the house I’d live and create in. You can see the architect’s work here.
On my breaks, I occasionally check out houses around town and came to a similar conclusion: you have to move either outside the city or in a bad hood to have the freedom to shape your property. I mean create a space with little legal entanglements and fees.
I mean, really love Spider-Man? That’s good, because Marvel’s solicitations for books shipping in May are online, and it looks like there’s exactly 582 Spider-man books coming out.
Ok, so I exaggerated. But just a bit. Here are the Spidey books coming out in just a single month:
ASTONISHING SPIDER-MAN/WOLVERINE #1
ULTIMATE COMICS SPIDER-MAN #10
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #631
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #632
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #633
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL #37
THE MANY LOVES OF THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #1
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN PRESENTS: AMERICAN SON #1 (of 4)
SPIDER-MAN: FEVER #2 (of 3)
PETER PARKER #3
WEB OF SPIDER-MAN #8
SPIDER-MAN MAGAZINE #11
Marvel Adventures: SPIDER-MAN #2
SPIDER-MAN: THE REAL CLONE SAGA HC
SPIDER-MAN: THE GAUNTLET VOL. 3 – VULTURE & MORBIUS PREMIERE HC
SPIDER-MAN NOIR: EYES WITHOUT A FACE PREMIERE HC
MARVEL 1602: SPIDER-MAN PREMIERE HC
SPIDER-MAN: THE COMPLETE CLONE SAGA EPIC BOOK 2 TPB
SPIDER-MAN: RED-HEADED STRANGER TPB
And that’s not even counting all the Age of Heroes and Avengers books he’s appearing in. Is there a Spider-man movie coming out that month that I’m not aware of?
THE MANY LOVES OF THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN? Really? I thought Peter Parker was supposed to be a nerd who is unlucky in love. This looks more like THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN: SMOOTH PLAYA’
I do dig this Chris Bachalo cover for ASM #632, though:
And even though I haven’t read a Spidey book in decades, I think I’ll pick up the SPIDER-MAN: FEVER limited-series. It’s written and illustrated by Brendan Friggin’ McCarthy! Are you kidding me? How could I possibly pass that up? If you like your comics served up with a side of doped-up, acid trip surrealism, “The New McCarthyism” is the guy for you. (Loved, loved, loved his covers on Vertigo’s Shade The Changing Man, though his art here isn’t nearly as tripy.)
Newsarama just posted a preview of my Ghostbusters one-shot for Valentine’s Day. Not the highest quality scans os Salgood Sam’s artwork, but you get the idea. Also, here’s a look at the couple of different variant covers, by artist Nick Runge:
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(*sigh* yes, I know, I know…I’m not a fan of variant covers either. But unfortunately I don’t make the business decisions…)
By the way, the book was supposed to have shipped to stores last week, to coincide with Valentine’s Day, but it got held up in customs. It’s officially hitting stores this week (17th), except for most of the East coast. Here’s where the story takes a tragic twist: the truck from Diamond Distributors that had all of IDW’s books on it for the East coast stores was involved in a very bad weather-related accident. My understanding is that the driver(s) are in critical condition in the hospital. Needless to say, it’s a very unfortunate event and I hope that everyone involved pulls through and makes a full recovery.