Let’s have a contest! Are you good with faces?

I’m back from my mini-vacation and now I’m packing to return to PA. This means some creativity is required in dealing with some of the things I’ve acquired here this summer. I have this lovely poster of the Chris Ware mural on top of The Pirate Shop, and let’s just say it’s in much better shape than the original.

I’ve been sketching — not literally but pretty closely — from these amazing photos from the Farm Sec. Admin./ Office of War Info. If you are the first reader to match each sketched-face with it’s original photograph here, (LINK FIXED!) I’ll mail you the poster for free! (Match the letter of the face with the number of the photo, and leave it in the comments.) I’m also pleased that you’ll have to look through these pictures. The sooner the better, because I leave tomorrow night!

Briefly: A Perspective Study

After the crushing length of the last post, I wanted to break up the rhythm of this blog a bit and do something shorter. Our insanely-bearded professor, Alec Longstreth, recently gave us the best perspective lecture I have ever seen. He super-imposed perspective lines over normal photos, and by the end it was so obvious that the exercise had been become mundane! For homework, we had to take one of our own photos that clearly shows 1, 2, or 3-point perspective, light-box/trace the perspective lines, and then do an illustration off of it. So here’s the photo I used:

It’s a picture I shot in Berlin, at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. I didn’t write about it at the time, but it was an intensely powerful place to be. As you walk into it and the stone rectangles surround you, it really is disconcerting. Anyway, here it is with some perspective lines on top of it:

The yellow line is the “horizon line;” which is really obvious in this photo because the rectangles become flat and straight on. The other colors are the three planes of perspective. You can see on the right that the red line tapers in a little, and isn’t just straight up and down like it would be in 2-point. So I “light-boxed” (with a piece of plexi-glass on my lap and a desk lamp on the ground pointing up) these perspective lines onto a piece of bristol and drew this:

Please resist the urge but enlarge if you must, it looks much better smaller. I might get around to coloring it at some point — I kinda like it.

Stan Campbell: A Golden Age Case Study

When we think of the Golden Age of comics, we tend to think of the first generation of superheroes, beginning with Superman in 1938. The end of this era is disputed but it definitely has something to do with the 1954 Senate Hearings and the self-implementation of the Comics Code Authority. Here are some basic things everyone should know about the Golden Age: At their height in 50s, comics were a mass medium. Titles had circulation in the millions, and nearly every child and G.I. read comics regularly. Also, there was a tremendous diversity in genres. There were many, many people toiling anonymously or near anonymously to create comics because the profession was held in such low regard. Comics drew from pulp magazines, and have always been closely tied to radio and television. Comics were youth culture long before Rock n’ Roll gyrated its way into caucasian pelvises. Anyway, here’s a page of comics, don’t bother reading it, just kinda bounce around the pictures.

Isn’t there, well… something about the art? Look at that guy in the bottom left, what a mug! I was reading a lot of crime comics in research for my Golden Age project (more on that soon, I promise!) and I came across the above story in Crime and Justice #18 with a credit of “Stan Campbell.” Now, it was probably just a credit for the pencils, but in the Golden Age, some artists did everything short of production — Fletcher Hanks wrote, penciled, lettered, and inked (and maybe did the color separations?) for a whole book every month! So, I started looking for Stan Campbell stuff, and …

Holy Cripes! I found this awesome excerpt of Space Western on Flickr. Go ahead and read it, I’ll wait. Both Space Western and Crime and Justice were published by Charlton — which was often considered the lowest paying and often worst quality publisher — but there is a big difference in the pacing and tone between the two stories. I googled Space Western and found two free Space Westerns to download, which can easily be read with the free program Simple Comics. Now I was in pretty deep. Besides the faces, illustration like in the panel above threw me for a loop. WHO WAS THIS GUY??!!

Here’s the thing about many Golden Age creators, there is absolutely no biographic information available. To be fair, all of this digging has been on the internet, and I haven’t had time to start digging deep into Charlton, but it seems that Stan Campbell exists only as “penciller” in the history of comics. I DID find this great resource, which seems to be the best listing of everything that he worked or could have worked on. At this point I began downloading things from this list, and I came across this issue of Dell’s showcase title Four Color featuring Mandrake the Magician. This issue came out in 1956, after the Code had thinned the herd and only the non-controversial titles that employed Campbell were left. Here, in Four Color, Campbell had a whole 36 pages to tell just two stories. Crime and Justice #18 had packed in four! Take your time to read these two pages, clicking to magnify:

Now, I know it’s not perfect, but Damn! There is some great cartooning here! Campbell may not be an advanced draftsman, but I think his caricature/figure drawing is excellent, as well as his contrast of background and foreground elements. I mean, just look at that spotlight hypnosis on the first page! His clarity and style remind me of other greats from his time, such as Basil Wolverton and Burne Hogarth. So, are you sold? Do you want to see more of Stan Campbell? Well, you can’t. There’s nowhere you can buy Campbell’s work. However, I’m confident that eventually someone will publish a reprint of every single thing that Stan Campbell drew.

Special thanks to Steve Bissette for background info on the Golden Age through his Survey of the Drawn Story class. All images © Charlton and Dell comics. Some of these might be public domain but these are all just used for review anyway.

My Take on Felix the Cat

Our cartooning assignment last week was to do a two strip autobiographical take on a specific old newspaper comic. I was assigned Felix. After reading a whole book of the ’20s strip, I really grew to like the little guy. I decided to put myself in his world and not the other way around. I’m pleased with how it came out. See if you can find the one spot where I forgot to fill in the pattern. Apologies to Otto Messmer.

and…

Sometimes I Like Knowing My Way Around This City

I was there today, all wrapped up, near the National Portrait Gallery. Above was more or less my vantage point. The video and audio was out of sync, it was nippy right around freezing, and the moving around in the crowds afterwords was trying, but I was there, and it felt important. And at the same time it was a little surreal. For those of us that largely became politically aware in the last eight years, I think things will be disconcerting for a while. The new Whitehouse.gov is already evidence of that. We’ve had our post-election breather people, let’s lean forward and read the news again.

The Cuban Missive Crisis

Here’s a new comic. It’s a little different from some of the other stuff I’ve done: mainly it’s fictional. Click on the picture to see it larger.