In 1966, The Cartoonist Cookbook published a drawing and recipe from each of 45 popular comic strip artists.
The book reminds us about the snappy draftsmanship on the comics pages in those days.
For example, the talented Leonard Starr contributed this drawing of his wife trying to trick him into eating tuna fish, which he'd told her he hated:
Stan Drake contributed this sparkly drawing of his character Eve Jones:
There's no artist on the newspaper comic pages today that comes within ten miles of these draftsmen.
Even the most simplified strips such as Johnny Hart's BC could demonstrate observational powers and drawing skills.
Adams was a mere stripling at the time, young lean and out to conquer the world.
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| Bio from The Cartoonists Cookbook |
Even at that young age he exhibited the fearlessness with ink which later became his trademark:
The astonishing variety in the width of his line is not something found in nature; it is purely an invention of Adams, something he forced into the picture to great artistic effect.
The precocious Adams already had the courage and the range of a more mature talent. Look at the range of marks he employed in this one small drawing.
Flipping through the pages of the 1966 book full of talented cartoonists, this one lovely drawing stood out. It must've been obvious back then that the boy cartoonist was destined for greatness... and indeed he was.
34 comments:
I assume Adams was attempting to channel Mort Drucker here, purposely using the opportunity to throw his hat in the ring for work in the popular and better-paying humor magazines. He eventually worked for Mad imitators 'Sick' and 'Crazy', plus 'National Lampoon.' But I never saw Adams as having funny in his bones. Either personally or in his work. I think he was quintessentially a cinematic adventure and drama guy. He meant everything he said or drew, and was full of competitive will.
Here's a link to an instructive Crazy page which, down to the atomic level, is about beautiful, descriptive, intelligent drawing rather than funniness... https://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/crazy-mag2_0009.jpg
I agree. I've seen a number of Adams "funny" comic pages that try to follow the Drucker path to humor; the draftsmanship is always peerless but the drawing is simply not funny.
This raises an interesting point about Drucker's balance of "funny" and "serious." More than most caricaturists, Drucker drew realistic backgrounds and obeyed the laws of perspective and anatomy. He said a realistic context made his caricatures more believable and gave him more artistic license to exaggerate and play with features. Also, because (unlike other caricaturists) he would sometimes have to do the same face from a dozen different angles with different expressions in different lighting, he needed to rely on a recognizable background and environment to support that variety. The challenge was to prevent the realism from infecting the parody and vice versa. Adams, as you suggest, was unable to do it. It's more difficult than one might guess.
This made my illustration-fix day (week, month, etc.)! I love the way you placed Stan Drake between the more crafted solid blacks and controlled outlines of Starr's wonderfully staged drawing (no pun intended) and the wilder, more daring brushwork of Adams. Drake's dry brush spot shadows above Eve's head and behind her casually perfect hand gesture are a case study of genius in their own right. All three of them are! The Drake image just combines complementary traits from Starr and Adams that somehow make it the ultimate reference point of the photorealistic school. Taken together they're like a Charles E. Cooper Studio crash master course (I'm oversimplifying, I know) in applied comic strip shorthand.
No doubt Starr 's and Drake's inimitable prowess galvanized this brash wunderkind Adams to the heights we all know. Fascinating to see the origins of the stylistic realism that blasted the bar into the stratosphere of what could be done in comic books less than a half decade later.
I think talent can only be destroyed. It cannot be created. And it is what it is. Becoming talented at something that is not in one's nature is an attempt to change one's very being. Not going to happen. It is best to guide it where it wants to go anyway.
The more Drucker worked at his art, the funnier it got. The more Adams worked at it, the more intense and cinematic it got. Each man was urging to satisfy his own embodied sensibility and so became more themselves with time. Every Artist, unless they manage to destroy themselves or get destroyed, follows the same path.
I looked up Frim Fram sauce. Very funny.
Kev Ferrara wrote: "I think talent can only be destroyed. It cannot be created."
Neal Adams once said that there were students in his art school who were far superior to him, but they stopped working hard to develop their talent and at some point he just zipped past them. Not clear whether they got lazy or were too easily satisfied or were never truly capable of getting better, but it was clear that Adams felt he enhanced his own talent through hard work.
It's a comment I've often heard (or read ) from excellent artists--that their success is mostly a matter of dedicated study and hard work, that talent played a small or even negligible part. Without in any way meaning to denigrate the virtues of dedication and hard work, I sometimes think they protest too much, not wanting people to think that their success came effortlessly. I've seen some drawings attributed to Adams at age 16 or so, and though no doubt he did a lot of drawing by that time, they convince me that there is indeed such a thing as talent.
there is indeed such a thing as talent.
That there are obviously people with no talent at all proves that talent exists.
Adams definitely believed in talent, and believed a great deal of it was required in illustration. I saw him actively discourage people who he saw as lacking talent at conventions at his Continuity table. (I've remarked before about how tough he could be on artists seeking his counsel, but I just remembered seeing him at a convention let down a young girl who had drawn atrocious comic pages with stick figures with the utmost care and tenderness. The girl was crying and crying. And he kept on encouraging her in gentle, fatherly tones to try to do something else for a living.)
Just what talent is can be debated. I see it fundamentally as imaginative power coupled to its effective externalization.
Except Johnny Hart, they all look really, really awkward.
(that was me)
Kev, that young lady went on to become one of the most successful stick figure illustrator of today.
Vanderwolff-- An interesting point. For decades comic book artists dreamed of getting a syndicated comic strip. The pay was better, the work was more stable and came in predictable increments, the audience was more mature (and ofetn more loyal). But by the end of the 1960s, newspaper strips were losing their charm; readership was declining, compensation was declining, size of the reproduction was declining, and interesting things began happening in comic books (and later, graphic novels).
hahaha.
xopxe-- Can you elaborate on what you mean by "awkward?" The poses and facial expressions seem perfectly natural to me.
Hard to articulate... Like there's a mismatch between drawing in a style they honed very diligently in another setting, applied outside that domain. Gives the impression of rigidity, like that's the only thing they can do. In the more cartoony work the style matches the content.
You could say that the others were done tongue in cheek, like an ironic show-off, but if so they fail at that because the concept behind them is pretty lazy.
This, and the stick-figure girl, reminds me of an Alan Moore interview where he told why he decided to write comics. Something about he wanting to be in the comic world, but he saw it was chock full of good artists and he had no chances of making a name for himself. Good writers, not so much.
Alan Moore's writing outside of comics just goes to prove how the medium can conceal/is conducive to poor writing talent. He did draw - terribly. Also wrote child-porn *as porn*, by his own admission, with his even more talentless yet equally depraved ogress wife. There's a soulmate out there for everyone it would seem
@Anonymous above: That Moore can't write prose is evident from every "document" reproduced in "League of...". His texts lie dead on the page from the second or third sentence. I've never understood quite why - I generally like his comics writing, the first two LOEG volumes are fantastic.
A big fish in a small panel. No disrespect to other comics writers. Writes with his mouth full. Try Jerusalem to see the sub-joycean self-delusion that happens when he gets out of little boxes.
At the time of reading it, I thought Moore's first 7 issues of Swamp Thing (collected in Swamp Thing vol. 1) contained some of the best horror comic writing ever. I wasn't aware of the creepier side of his oeuvre.
There are inkers like this still around today, but there's no comics page or very much of a market for these skills, so don't be so quick to dismiss things that aren't in front of you. A few recommendations, if you use instagram: Joe Sutphin, Adam Koford, Marlo Meekins, Doc Shaner, to name a few.
None of the four inkers you list are anything like the artists we're discussing here.
JSL
'Creepier' is putting it mildly https://www.pastemagazine.com/books/ten-years-later/ten-years-later-alan-moore-melinda-gebbie-exposed
I guess you didn't look, because they sure are, JSL.
There is something inherently grotesque about the lack of limiting principles in the character of the obsessive. Their compulsions always lead down a dark road. Such people cannot be trusted. They cannot be trusted even to choose their own philosophical system. Because they will always choose the one that excuses and even valorizes their self-indulgence.
No they aren't. Which means you're either aesthetically clueless or involved in motivated lying.
I coukdn't find anything by Mario Meekins on insta, but the others are good artists, and Joe Sutphin's work is especially lovely and the Wallace Tripp influence doesn't hurt. But none of them ink with the same lively freedom of Neal Adams. Look at that thick fluid line of the shoulder merging into the tight strokes of the crease, and there is nothing like it in the stiff rules abiding linework of Doc Shaner, the slightly more fluid lines of Adam Koford, or the warmly generous hatching of Joe Sutphin. There is possibly another Neal Adams out there, but it isn't these three.
https://marlomeekins.blogspot.com/
But off course, he's an English writer, they're all a bit broken in the head. Lost Girls being based on Carroll and Barrie makes so much sense, I skipped it and stopped at his appropriately racist and misogynistic Lovecraftiana.
For a writer so sensitive about movie adaptations of his own work he extended little consideration to those authors with the uses to which he put their characters. The movies, anyway, just showed up how shit his stories and dialogue were (everything else he stole from ideas in science fiction & pulp), something which you can get away with in comics that rely a lot on the imaginations of readers expanding on their cues, themes and suggestions. Outside of comics his writing is, indulgent, frustrated, onanistic crud. Which he probably realises and is behind his diatribes about the medium.
Barrie might have been odd but there's nothing to suggest anything worse I know of. Carroll it seems had a sinister side.
But there's nothing like that in either man's books. Which were written for children, which makes Moore's use of them all the more sick. When he was challenged on this, he retaliated by pointing out other instances of the sexualisation of children as if that somehow condoned his.
This cognitive dissonance shouldn't be surprising from a man who wrote a paedophile Captain Hook as one of the villains of the story, and at the same time the book as a whole's main theme is underage sex (both children and teens, including a tangent that argues for parent-child incest porn) intended by the author as pornography for his readers.
Didn't know that about his Lovecraft stuff but one review criticised corrective rape being used to 'fix' a female character
Total deviant dirtbag.
Are there physical differences among individual primates? Sure. Does one monkey’s ability to radically outperform another monkey in riding a bicycle while flinging poop at people mean that the totality of this very complicated task is somehow innate to the first monkey? Surely not.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
>>>>>>Does (this mean) the totality of this very complicated task is somehow innate to the first monkey? Surely not
Did anybody say this?
~ FV
That's an inapt analogy and a confused framing of the issue.
Talent changes what is gotten out of every aspect of the artistic endeavor, from one's experience and observation of the world and other works of art, to one's physicality, to the use of implements, pigments, and media, to technical practice or theoretical study, to the targets of one's intelligence, ambition, will, and so on. Talent even changes sensibility.
Such that, effectively, talented people work with a whole other suite of affordances unavailable to the untalented, even though, essentially, the same tools are being used.
I think it’s the mystic aspect implied that irks me. Like «luck» and «inspiration», it carries with it a duality of condescension and excuse. At best, it seems to indicate some undefinable aggregate of circumstance and attributes that tend in favour of an activity.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
I think it’s the mystic aspect implied that irks me.
I don’t see anything mystical about it.
Imaginative power first requires tremendous sensitivity to not just phenomena but patterns of phenomena, like the patterns of mind and physiognomy that certain characters and types exhibit, or the patterns that light and shadow make, or the ebb and flow of conversation, the structure of suspense or epiphany, and so on. Other patterns include fodder for poetic tropes. Also unifying comprehending generalizations or abstractions, like spirit, heart, soul, mood or emotional condition, breadth, rhythm, flow, key, beauty, greatness, character, ambience, drama, gist, gesture, genre, and attitude, etc.
Along with that sensitivity requirement, one must be able to remember and digest this information such that it becomes second nature, as learned intuition. Not something that need be thought about intellectually or recalled in any effortful sense. All this gives artists what I call “a feel for the real.” Which informs one’s truth (and bullshit) detector.
To then externalize some imaginative narrative requires a performance wherein multiple learned intuitions in all their extent and sensitivity can flow out of you at once and at will. And yet naturalistically. And integrated into the narrative.
Since one cannot actually be, present, or represent something fictional, the great majority of a performance is actually suggestive. That is, it consists of effects upon the audience, not statements to the audience. Equally, the unconsciousness of a truly effective performance is also having an artistic effect on the performer. Such that the performer believes (and gives in to) his or her own performance even before it gets to the audience.
Everything that makes art good is suggested. Which is to say, it is not there. Only implied. A note is only as good as what it implies or seems to imply. Therefore talent is strongly aligned to abilities with respect to generating suites of belief-inducing implications as unified performances of previously internalized sensitive observations.
This is why talented people immediately sense the artistic possibilities in everything. Minor inspirations are everywhere because everything is being grokked for its narrative-poetic effectiveness. This is why talent changes how tools are used. A tool that is used for aesthetic or poetic implications is being used differently than the same tool used for statements.
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