Remembering Salamandastron

Well some of my friends have been posting tributes to Brian Jacques, and I can’t really not join in. Here’s a painting of the cover of my favorite of his books.

I don’t know, something about badgers protecting their treasures in a mountain sure caught my imagination in elementary school. I also remember really loving this cover as a kid. I think as children, when we’re least likely to understand the technical qualities of the art we like, we especially appreciate what strikes us as sublime. But maybe that’s for another conversation.

On a technical note, I’m trying to apply recent things I’ve learned about watercolors/colored inks/ink washes/opaque white here as well as theory about color value from my prof. Alec Longstreth. I still have some things to learn for sure, but it’s getting more fun, which is probably a good sign.

Reporting Projects Abound!

Hey there true believers! I’ve been messing around with colored India ink. It’s really fun stuff, and I’m really happy to be able to apply color with a dip pen. If you add water it’s like watercolor. If you add brush-on white-out it’s like gauche. Anyway, here are some drawings I did of each of the subjects I’m working on currently.

Highest priority for me right now is a 22-page story about apple cider. It’s a profile piece about a local orchardist and his struggle to keep his New England farm financially viable in the 21st Century. This story is more quiet and poetic than the kind I’ve told before, and I think it’s coming out nicely. I really enjoyed researching on the finer details of apple growing.

I’m also working on a story about ski jumping. People actually do this winter sport here in the Upper Valley. I’m going to follow local high-schoolers through their season this winter. New jumpers will take to the hills for the first time and seasoned upperclassmen will aspire to find glory at the State Championships this February.

Finally, on the periphery right now is a freelance job for a local paper (my first!). They want a page on the parenting challenges inherent to ice fishing. As I find out more about it, the potential for a longer story is obvious. I wonder how long I’d actually be willing to wait out on the ice while the mercury freezes in the bottom of the thermometer. And while I might not be able to go out there to be on deadline for this story, I think I’d like to go watch it once this season.

Splitting, a Dream Comic

This little ditty is for an assignment in Thesis Seminar, currently being co-taught by the powerhouse duo of James Sturm and Jason Lutes. We were to dash out a quick four page comic based on some part of a dream we had. Premise aside, I worked quickly, often penciling and inking the same page in one sitting. I actually like parts of this quite a bit. This is not autobiographical. And although I don’t have any real plans for the print publication of this exercise, it gives me something to share with you, my dear readers. This is about as creepy as I get, so enjoy it.

Larger versions can be found on my Flickr.

Ode to Medieval Madness

As the girlfriend and I approach two years of dating, I find myself in the middle of a passionate new romance. With Pinball! I’m not going to tell you the amazing story of how my professor acquired a pinball machine, or the ridiculous backstory on this game, including a cast of voices full of Second City-ers like Tina Fey.

I just wanted to say that I really love playing this game. There’s something so physical about pinball that video games can never quite approach for me. And because this game is so close to my studio this year, I play it most days, usually more than once. I’m not even that good! This game is just so much fun, so visceral, that I willingly plop down $.50 a play. I’m cheap — I should be saving this money for my laundry. But no, I LIVE for Multiball Madness.

I have a lot of actual things to write about next week, I swear.

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.

New Comic: Fool’s Rice

This assignment was about using outside inspiration, and the plot points were dictated by random flips in a reference book. In my case, Zingerman’s Guide to Good Eating. It’s a little nothing of a comic, but I hope you enjoyed the whimsy. The physical size is a piece of copy paper folded “hotdog style” as my roommate Kevin would say. The second “page” of comics here is actually a two page spread, and I struggled with how to present it, so click to see it bigger. For your additional edification, dear readers, a photo of the pot rendered in such loving detail above: