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.
19 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.
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