ONE LOVELY DRAWING, part 51

This extraordinary drawing by John Cuneo has already been selected for inclusion in both of the upcoming annual collections of illustration art: The Society of Illustrators' Annual of American Illustration and the American Illustration Annual.  So why bother reproducing it here?

Because the drawing is immense but the annuals will reproduce it at a size that makes the figures look like an ant colony and you'll miss the entire point.   Here are some details worthy of your attention that you won't see any other way:



Cuneo is the only contemporary illustrator I can think of who draws animals on a par with the great A.B. Frost or Heinrich Kley.

This dog hanging from the ceiling shows Cuneo's strong sense of design:

I've been critical on this blog of the type of loose drawing that results from shortcuts or a careless attitude.  On the other hand, I think Cuneo is an excellent example of loose drawing with genuine strength and substance behind it.  You can really tell when an artist has paid his or her dues.

There are dozens of faces on this drawing, and some of them are freaky scary:

 

 

As with many of Cuneo's drawings, this one is rich with oblique references and dark symbolism.

I think this is a major work, but you'd never guess it from the tiny reproduction in the Annuals.  That's why I'm performing a public service by sharing some details here. 

COMIC-CON 2016: SIMPLE vs. SIMPLISTIC

At Comic-Con this year, I was struck by the number of prominent cartoonists who lectured on the virtues of simplicity.

Jim Davis, who presides over the Garfield empire, said that he tries to limit his strips to 25 words or less, and to get to the punchline in fewer than ten seconds.   Davis said that if readers spend longer than ten seconds, they might guess the punchline ahead of him.

Note that there are no backgrounds or details to distract the reader.  Davis also said that by using three nearly identical drawings, he spares readers the effort of thinking about transitions or shifting perspectives. 

Garfield was custom made for a low effort, short-attention-span audience, which means it is wildly successful.  In his talk, Davis impressed me as extremely bright and sophisticated.  His marketing strategy seemed similar to the strategy of cigarette companies that genetically modify tobacco plants to make nicotine more addictive.

Kate Beaton, creator of the popular webcomic Hark, A Vagrant! was another advocate for simplicity.
 

Like Davis, Beaton tries to minimize the number of words (which is good because she has little enthusiasm for punctuation, lettering, and sometimes spelling).  When it comes to drawing,  Beaton said, "I used to be self-conscious about my art.  The more I worked and tried to make it look finished, the worse it looked." Then she heard a story that made her realize she didn't need to work so hard.  According to the legend, illustrator Quentin Blake once had to rush an assignment and turned in quick, unfinished sketches which his art director liked even better than Blake's finished work.    This helped Beaton accept that her simple, casual sketches could be enough.

Beaton writes that her drawing process is "simplistic."  I agree with her, but I suspect she meant to say "simple."  ("Simplistic" means superficial, facile or oversimple. )  I think Beaton's real strengths are verbal-- her distinctive voice about historical characters and her thoughtful (and occasionally heartbreaking) stories about her home town. One might wonder why she chose an essentially visual medium to convey her ideas.

I love loose, naive drawing.  Some of the greatest drawings are the ones that have attained child-like simplicity.  Simplification is a wonderful discipline because it forces an artist to prioritize-- to continually sacrifice the lesser in favor of the greater until only the greatest is left.  But I fear that today's comics are flooded with mediocre drawing because the fashion is to view visual quality as expendable, a "lesser priority" which can be painlessly sacrificed in favor of the text or concept. 

In truth, this sacrifice hasn't hindered the success of Davis, Beaton or other mega successful cartoonists.  The New Yorker, with its literary emphasis, has become a cheerleader for these priorities.  Much of today's audience is incapable of distinguishing loose drawing from sloppy, careless drawing.  Like Beaton, they haven't mastered the difference between "simple" and "simplistic."
    

This trend isn't a tragedy on the level of climate change. However, it does suggest  that most art in today's strips falls short of the distinctive drawing that once made comics a great visual art form. Perhaps comics are evolving into a primarily literary medium with drawings serving a subordinate role as a mere lubricant for the words.

COMIC-CON 2016: THE LARGE AND SMALL OF IT

A sketch of a pebble may be a greater artistic achievement than a full color painting of the Grand Canyon.  An allegorical picture with grand ambitions about social justice may be inferior to a picture with no ambition beyond capturing a clump of grass.

You can just never tell.

I'm reminded of this every year at San Diego's Comic-Con, where the smallest, most informal art is nestled in the crevices between elaborately staged multi-million dollar corporate art.  This year in a quiet corner of Comic-Con I came across this small (5" x 8") sketch by Wilbur "Pete" Hawley on a ratty, torn piece of tissue paper:

This is a preliminary rough for an illustration for the American Greetings card company.  I admire  his selective use of dark accents and the variety in the width of his line  (contrast the sensitive line describing this cheek with the brisk, full lines shaping the hair on the back of the head):

Even without the wrinkles and bone structure that most artists rely on to convey facial expressions, Hawley managed to create marvelous expressions in an integrated unit.

Note Hawley's use of smudges and a heavier line to create volume

Remember, these were Hawley's notes to himself-- this was a preliminary sketch to work out how Hawley might paint the final version.

Leif Peng wrote, "If God bestowed The Magic Cute Pencil upon any one illustrator of the twentieth century it must surely have been Pete Hawley.  Cute wasn't a formula Hawley had worked out and applied to his drawing style... it was as natural to him as breathing."

Pictures of cute babies were scarce at Comic-Con.  Far more of the artwork focused on inter-galactic battles between armies of muscle bound super heroes.  Popular artists hawked limited edition archival giclee prints of photo-realistic paintings from fancy 3D displays.

But for me, Hawley's battered little sketch on crummy paper was stronger than much of the juiced up, overwrought art  on display in the exhibition hall.

That's part of the miracle of drawing.

ONE LOVELY DRAWING, part 50

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Mort Drucker and asked him about this drawing for the MAD Magazine spoof of the movie, The Heartbreak Kid.

There are 35 faces in this crowd.  I always assumed Drucker kept the world's largest reference file of face photos:

 

But Drucker explained that these were "spontaneous faces" he made up as he went.  I asked where the great variety came from and he answered,  "I like to notice people's faces.  Sometimes when I was on the subway or sitting outside the dressing room at Loehmann's waiting for my wife Barbara to try on a dress, I'd see an interesting face and say, "Hmmm, I can use that."

How do you make use of your time on the subway?   

I don't know of another cartoonist today who pays such attention to the variety of the human face.  To the contrary, as I've complained in the past, the trend seems to be toward generic, simplified faces with little content or individuality.  This seems especially true of cartoonists and illustrators who pride themselves in their editorial content.

Talking with Drucker, I was struck by the pleasure he takes in the humanity of individual faces.  That may be a difference between an artist who focuses on the human and artists who focuses on abstractions about humankind.

RICHARD THOMPSON (1957 - 2016)

 

The brilliant Richard Thompson, an artist of immense gifts and creator of the last great comic strip, Cul de Sac, passed away today.

I've written about Richard several times on this blog, always inadequately.  I've written about his courageous decision to end his strip in 2012 when Parkinson's cruelly stripped him of his god-given gifts, and the book about his art that was created as an homage to Richard by fellow artists such as Bill Watterson, Peter de Seve, John Kascht and Nick Galifianakis. 

As I wrote in that book:

Richard's lines wobble like an infant learning to walk, teetering to the right and to the left of what the laws of perspective and anatomy might require. His shapes are askew as if they were lured from the straight path by a more fun place to play.  Yet those same lines are applied with such exquisite precision, his drawings would be diminished by any variation.  His beautiful ungainly pictures place him among the very top artists in his field.  

You can view an excellent documentary about Richard below.  His extraordinary gifts deserve your attention.



In the final stages of Richard's illness, he sat immobilized in a wheel chair barely able to whisper a single word.  Still, some of the most talented and famous cartoonists and illustrators came from far and wide just to sit in his presence.  They were a boisterous group, sitting around Richard's messy kitchen table (littered with Richard's crappy diet of Cheetos, orange soda and corn nuts) drawing sketches, laughing and telling jokes.  But the instant that Richard attempted to say something, all noise ceased.  Everyone turned expectantly to Richard and strained to hear his few squeaked words, which were consistently the best part of the conversation.

Even ravaged by Parkinsons, he was always the funniest man in the room.

  

COMIC-CON 2016: PHIL HALE

  
One of the most exciting developments at San Diego Comic-Con was the world release of Phil Hale's new book, Let's Kill Johnny Badhair.   The book brings together Hale's brilliant series of paintings of  a solitary, half dressed figure battling a machine in front of a bright blue sky.

Hale painted the same subject nearly eighty times. Yet, there’s nothing redundant about these pictures.   Each new painting was a fresh experiment.  Each battle had an uncertain outcome.

These are what composers call “variations on a theme.”  They allow the composer to explore a concept’s full potential by using multiple, even contradictory approaches.  They gave Hale  the freedom to give his character different roles, to kill him off and bring him back again in a more profound state, one that could grow and mature along with Hale’s artistic powers.

Hale was kind enough to invite me to write an essay for this book.  Here is an excerpt:

Hale’s artistic growth through these variations is obvious for all to see.  He didn't want a formula he could repeat to make his job easier. To the contrary, he struggled with each new painting the way Jacob struggled with the angel, wrestling through the night and refusing to let go until the angel blessed him. Sometimes he won and other times he didn’t, but neither outcome was permanent.

The clash between man and machine has inspired many legends,  from John Henry’s race against the steam drill to John Connor’s struggle with Skynet.  You might say it has become a central metaphor for our time.  Like all great metaphors, the clash between man and machine offers both strength and flexibility. Its imagery is strong and clear while its message is flexible and ambiguous, permitting a wide variety of interpretations. For example, a clash between man and a machine might represent humanity’s clash with modernity, but it might also symbolize sterile efficiency against organic imagination. We might reflect on it as a statement on the endurance of the human will when flesh is pitted against metal; or the value of a soul in a conflict with the soulless; or the conflict between order and disarray.

Hale has developed his own, striking version of the metaphor: a ballet in the sky between Badhair and a sinister metallic conglomeration of sprockets, blades and cables. The two characters leap up together, they twirl mid-air, one advances while the other retreats. The paintings are powerful, even savage, and yet at the same time they are riddled with ambiguity: sometimes it seems one combatant has won, but that lasts only as long as the next painting. The stakes seem high-- perhaps the very highest-- but it’s never quite clear what they’re battling for or who the victor will be.

I love the way Hale sets his stage with a universal background: an eternal blue sky with no distractions or clutter that might limit the scene to a particular time or place. For all we know, these battles could be taking place on Mt. Olympus or in some dystopian future. They could take place over centuries or in a nanosecond. The combatants could be enormous in size or microscopic. The sky gives us no basis for measuring any of these things; it's the perfect backdrop for a clash of big ideas and ambitious icons.

Hale flew to San Diego from London for the release of his book, which was published by Ashley Wood's publishing company.  

It was a pleasure to see Phil again, to talk about our favorite illustrators, and to be reminded of his great sincerity, his intellectual curiosity and his passion for growth.  The wonderful compilation of badhair paintings in this book reminds me of his past accomplishments, but it is clear he has many themes, and many variations ahead of him. 

ONLY THE CARTOONISTS PREVAIL

Mort Drucker

On this date in 1925, the famous Scopes "monkey trial" began in Dayton, Tennessee.  High school teacher John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching evolution in public school. 

T.S. Sullivant

The lawyer for the World Christian Federation blasted evolution for suggesting that humans were descended "not even from American monkeys, but from old world monkeys."  The lawyer defending Scopes, Clarence Darrow, told the court his goal was "preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States."

Richard Thompson

Scopes lost his trial, but nobody ever seems to lose this battle permanently.  For nearly 100 years, the argument has raged in different forms.  More than a dozen other states attempted to impose similar laws against teaching evolution.  Scientists, theologians, teachers, government officials, clergy and bureaucrats all clashed bitterly over this issue. When the opponents of evolution began losing ground, they switched tactics and attacked anew in the name of "creation science."

It was the generals who proved most persuasive.  Following the Soviet Union's 1957 launch of Sputnik, the US government became so alarmed by the state of science education it passed the National Defense Education Act.    The resulting textbooks included the theory of evolution, but even that didn't stop the resentment.  Texas newspaper editorials and church sermons angrily insisted on the right of Texans to disbelieve science.

The only group that seems to make out well in these kinds of protracted disputes are the cartoonists. At least they get to have fun drawing cool pictures of monkeys.  So in commemoration of the Scopes trial,  here are some of my favorite drawings of apes:

From the great Walt Kelly:

The brilliant Mort Drucker drew dozens of wonderful monkeys in his story about Mighty Joe Kong in MAD no. 94:

 

From Peter de Seve:

And for those who enjoyed last week's panels from Prince Valiant, here is another elaborate (although somewhat stiff) image from Hal Foster: 

And finally, the weirdest of them all, from Gary Larson: