AN ARTIST'S ATTIC, part 3

Leonard Starr's attic contained dusty stacks of original comic strips with drawings of complex and subtle facial expressions.

     

 

Two frosty expressions that are very difficult to capture

 

 

Starr put a lot of effort into crafting thousands of facial expressions over the decades. Today there's not much demand for such skills. We've put them in our cultural attic, along with other unwanted artifacts.

  

 

 

Starr was able to capture the most delicate expressions, such as an encouraging gaze:

The size restrictions of the comic page didn't seem to daunt him. The smallest faces in Starr's backgrounds could be used to reveal significant feelings:

Few of today's popular cartoonists and graphic novelists even try to draw such facial expressions.  In this recent New Yorker cartoon by Ruben award winner Roz Chast...

...the faces of the three characters are  supposed to show irony, sarcasm and passive aggressiveness, yet their expressions all seem identical-- kind of a demented rage:

If not for the labels, her faces would tell us almost nothing. Like many of her peers, Chast relies on words instead of facial expressions.  When Starr wanted to convey sarcasm, his viewers never needed a label saying "this is sarcasm."

 

As I noted, Chast is hardly alone.  Several top  cartoonists and graphic artists today substitute words for pictures because their facial expressions are indecipherable:

Alison Bechdel's version of an "abject and shameful mien"

Kate Beaton's version of "consumed with lust"

Artists from Garry Trudeau to Chris Ware have mastered the art of drawing smiles and frowns, but beyond that their drawing ability cannot keep up with the sophistication of their concepts. 

I should emphasize that my point has nothing to do with a preference for loose or tight drawing. In previous generations, even loose, freely drawn faces could be expected to add value to the underlying concept:

William Steig

William Steig

Our generation does not seem to place as much value on the skillful treatment of faces. One reason may be that much of skill and accuracy in drawing can now be simulated with cheap software. If tight, observant rendering can be purchased from Adobe, it seems less admirable.


But the old sketchbooks piled up in the corner of Starr's attic help explain how he wrote and drew those faces into his strips for all those years.
 

Starr's preliminary drafts contained very specific comments about facial expressions. He noted when he wanted "wry acceptance" or a "sweet nostalgic smile." More importantly, Starr's drafts show that as he zipped along at lightning speed he was able to summon up these expressions from his finger tips.

"Modest smile"

"Incredulous"

Part of Starr's ability comes from drawing a lot.  Also, his sketchpads reveal that Starr formally studied the muscles and bones of the face.

Facial expressions are one of the rare phenomena in the universe that tie together the physical and the non-physical worlds: they are physical manifestations of non-physical emotions.  Scientists believe expressions are rooted in what makes us distinctly human.

For example, many anthropologists believe that humans developed facial expressions when our ancestors became the first (and only) primates to lose our fur and live in nearly naked skin.  According to Dr. Nina Jablonski, head of the anthropology department at Penn State, we had to lose most of our body fur to make possible the evolutionary enlargement of our brain, which is our most temperature-sensitive organ.  But losing our fur meant we could no longer use fur to communicate, the way all lower mammals do, "from raised hackles indicating aggression to coat patterns that help members of the same species to recognize each other."  Concludes Jablonski: "one might even speculate that universal human traits such as social blushing and complex facial expressions evolved to compensate for our lost ability to communicate through our fur."

Our brains and our expressions emerged simultaneously and today expressions are one of our most subtle and eloquent means of communicating feelings and thoughts.  That makes them a potentially rich tool for artists capable of mastering them.  Our current trend of replacing these important visual cues with text makes life easier for artists with poor draftsmanship skills, but it comes at a price.

When you hang around a cold attic long enough, you start asking yourself odd questions.  My question was: why do so many graphic novelists who can't draw facial expressions elect to draw faces instead of just writing about the underlying emotions?  Why choose this medium?  When we see drawings of faces, perhaps we should ask ourselves, does this drawing contribute anything to the written concept?