Rod McKie Illustrations and Cartoons

Sorry, been ill

2011-12-16T15:11:00.002Z

May be a repeat of the 2009 stuff. Yucky, but back soon.

Of Death and Music

2011-09-26T11:13:00.004Z

So I'll be posting some drawings soon. I'm writing a story about a DJ in Edinburgh, in the 1970s, which has some actual people in it and some fictional ones, and lots of real places- and its skeleton is the legend of Orpheus.

The legend of Orpheus is well-known. In Greek mythology, Orpheus was a troubadour from Thrace. He charmed even the animals. His songs diverted his attention from his wife Eurydice. Death took her away from him. He descended to the netherworld, and used his charm to win permission to return with Eurydice to the world of the living on the condition that he never look at her. But he looked at her-

Hello.
Hello.
- Do you know who I am?
- I do. - Say it.
- My death.
Good.
From now on you will serve me.
I will serve you.

Up to Speed - stoopid Rod

2011-07-25T22:54:00.006Z

Lummy; it never occurred to me (until now) to post something. Here's what's happening; I've drawn some of a story set in the 1970s disco scene in Edinburgh. I've drawn Flash Harry and Roxy Callaghan, and the beginning of the story, which features some pubs and many of the clubs; but I can't post any drawings because I've packed them away for safe-keeping...I know; dumb!

I'll fix this as son as I can, because I'm away for anther 5 weeks and I can't go that long without doing the work. I've kind of decided to start work on another section of the story, and I'd really like to post the work in progress; not least because it lets me see if it's working out; but I have no tools with me at all. Not even the wacom. I honestly deserve a good slap.

The only thing that is making it all worthwhile is watching my minging wife slob around complaining about me leaving her clothes behind. If I didn't have her to look at, with birds in her hair and her baggy tramp clothing I wouldn't be having any fun at all.

Be Very Careful What you Publish Online

2011-06-16T23:56:00.002Z

That's a given; right? I mean we all looked over the twitpic copyright announcement where they seemed to be claiming the rights to the "photos" (including artwork), posted onto their site.

And we are all aware that despite insisting that their own online material is copyright protected, newspapers and magazines have published drawings they "found" online claiming they thought the work was "in the public domain".

But there is another area you have to be wary off, that's the area of creative license. Be sure about what rights you are giving away, and be clear in your own mind what rights you are keeping. The reason I bring this up is because publications like the "United Kingdom Comics Creator Introduction..." exist, without you knowing anything about them:

The "Publisher's" Synopsis

Editorial Reviews - United Kingdom Comics Creator Introduction From the Publisher
Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Colin Macneil, Leah Moore, Arthur Wyatt, Eric Bradbury, Emma Vieceli, Dave Follows, Chris Bunting, Steven Appleby, Charles Peattie, Robin Smith, Mick Anglo, Joe Berger, Robert Nixon, David Law, Lee O'connor, Michael Molcher, Larry, Davy Francis, Scott Goodall, Richard Piers Rayner, Graham Higgins, Rod Mckie, Pete Loveday, Tom Kerr, Tom Frame, Gina Hart, Scott Gray, Hunt Emerson, Daniel Vallely, Tom Gauld, Mike Pearse, Reg Parlett, Simone Lia, Bob Lynch, Phil Hall, Ken H. Harrison, Reg Bunn, Timothy Birdsall, Russell Taylor, Henry Matthew Talintyre, Lawrence Goldsmith, Pete Nash, David Austin, John Dallas, Eric Stephens, Henry Seabright, Kenneth Norman Lilly. Excerpt: Colin MacNeil is a British comics artist, best known for his work on 2000 AD and in particular on Judge Dredd and other stories within his world like Shimura and Devlin Waugh. ... More: http://booksllc.net/?id=12627511

http://www.bookadda.com/product/united-kingdom-comics-books/p-9781157502142-1157502148

This print-on-demand publication, by US company Books LLC, gathers information from the internet, from sources like Wikipedia, and makes that information available to subscribers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Books

The Metro actually did a piece on this practise earlier in the year, but it kind of slipped under the wire:

http://www.webcitation.org/5x4KWQJeT

Now there will be some people who think this is okay because it's "exposure". It's not okay. If you didn't intend your information to be harvested in a list, or a book, it shouldn't be. Also, if you post illustrations and these people publish them, particularly in the US, you will technically be in breach of contract if you subsequently sell the "First North American Rights" after that happens.

Contradictory Advice

2011-05-26T18:18:00.005Z

When the advice seems to be contradictory, such as "finish what you start" and "don't get married to an idea", you have every right to wonder if there isn't some other rule-of-thumb that needs to be applied to tiebreak the situation. What I think these seemingly conflicting pieces of advice, both of which you'll find on this blog, mean is "finish working on whatever you are working on at the moment". In other words if you feel you are running out of steam after half a page of a comic idea, try to stretch it to one full page, that's finishing what you started, and it can always go in your portfolio. It is never a waste of time, at the very least the simple exercise of drawing always improves your drawing skills. And if you have sketched up a character and written a little note beside it, try to work it up to a synopsis; I mean who knows, it may be that after that exercise it develops legs again.

As for "not getting married the an idea", that really is just a warning about the nature of the business. You are, after all, in the ideas business, and you need to keep churning out new ideas. Unless the project you are working on is a real labour of love that you will continue to produce for yourself even after picking up a paying gig; put it away in a drawer. Again, you just never know, it might be that 6 months down the line you'll open the drawer, look at that project and it'll look good to you all over again.

So, what about putting these ideas into practise? Well, hat's a wee bit more difficult, especially when you can easily imagine yourself completing everything easily and on time. Well, you have to take stock, I'm afraid, you just have to, there is no avoiding it, even if it means admitting that you are only human. It is also a very valuable exercise because, in case you haven't noticed it is happening, you will soon find out if you have become an obsessive, slightly manic, gibbering wreck; which is, by the way, what you will become if you continue to try to work on everything all at the same time.

One project I have in the drawer at the moment is Mandrake Falls, which I hope that one day Dwight McPherson and I might finish together, along with a colourist (I hope). The plot, Dwight's, is still strong, the title is great, and the thing looks good, think (see below); but it is an idea, I think, that will profit from being in the drawer for maybe 3 months - which, coincidentally, is exactly the size of my backlog; although that may even be an underestimate.

Extracted from Mandrake Falls, copyright Dwight McPherson and Rod McKie, 2011.

Sam Klempke, Cartoonist and Time Traveller

2011-05-19T20:41:00.008Z

I'm drawing a little something after watching Sam Klempke's time lapse movie of his life. The film is a 7 minute digest going right back to the 1970s, and it intrigued me because I don't have any film of me back then; not many of us do, but I can revisit those days through the filter of imperfect memory by drawing a comic strip. Interestingly, Sam never drew caricatures of himself as he saw himself at the end of every year, which might have been nice, but it's a captivating look at the passage of time. Anyway, I've posted Sam's movie here and I'll post the comic in the next blog post.

In the Meantime, Here is the Spite.

2011-04-17T18:25:00.005Z

I think spite is often overlooked as a reason for doing things. I've decided to learn Gaelic for spite, and I'll probably speak only Gaelic at times to annoy people.

Not really, I actually fancy learning it for a couple of good reasons, and since Easter is almost upon us, and it's Sunday, and I was listening to these things anyway, I thought I'd post a couple of Gaelic Psalms. The language, when lined-out like this, or call and repeated in song, sounds ancient and rooted, and I like that. It sounds, to me, like Native American song, which is always going to seem cool to we fans of old Saturday Matinee cowboy shows who supported the alleged bad guys.

TV Tornado

2011-03-06T22:32:00.002Z

TV Tornado (City Magazines Ltd, Edited by Mick Anglo) was a fantastically exciting comic. It was really in tune with all the new and exciting things that interested young readers like me. It combined the newest most exciting TV shows, The Invaders, The Man from Uncle, movie characters, Tarzan, Saturday Morning Matinee shows, Flash Gordon, and comic strips from the newspapers and American comic books, the Phantom, The Lone Ranger, and Magnus Robot Fighter. It was what my small group of friends and I spoke about as we read the comic together on my doorstep, in the playground, and it was the first comic that we knew, just knew, lots of other people must also be reading. It was a comic for our times.

In fact, it was so current that rather than hating it, many parents, like my dad, a big fan of the old Lone Ranger radio and TV shows, and the new Lone Ranger and Tarzan TV shows, and all the brilliant new US sci-fi shows; loved it. Even my non-comic reading friends (of which there were many) liked it because it also featured their TV favourites in comic strip form, the Green Hornet, and Batman and Robin, which in turn turned their attention back to the comic books that spawned those TV shows.

To be honest my dad was such a fan of the Garth and Angus Ogg comic strips, it wasn't difficult to get him to read comics, but for other comic strip-sceptics, young and old, there were partially illustrated popular adventures in TV Tornado, such as The Man from Uncle and The Invaders, that could tease them in.

I've included this advert for a couple of reasons. One is because it's just brilliant. Another is because I had those boots, and I loved them. I never once had any practical use for them, but I thought they were great and it seemed like these were ideal footwear for Scouts.

My two absolute favourites from TV Tornado were The Phantom, and Magnus the Robot Fighter. The Phantom was ubiquitous, it still appeared as a Saturday Matinee serial, it was a regular comic strip, it sometimes had entire issues of Alan Class Comics devoted to it, and now here it was in TVTornado - and it was still hugely exciting.

I loved Magnus. I loved the way it looked. I loved the colour comics from Gold Key (Gold Key comics always had fantastic covers) and I loved the line drawings in TV Tornado. Years later I would discover who drew it, but back then I was really taken with the shapes, the way the panels were filled, and with Magnus's hair.

Blank Slate, Blazing a Trail

2010-12-23T18:49:00.024Z

I started out to write this by grabbing a couple of books from the bookshelf: The Piers Plowman Tradition, ed' Helen Barr, Theory and Cultural Value, Steven Conner, British Writers of the Thirties, Valentine Cunningham, and Modern Literary Theory, eds Philip Rice & Patricia Waugh. I was going to include ideas about the notion of dangerous literature, the way "graphic novels" are viewed as cultural artifacts rather than works of art, publishing cliques, and the literary Canon, and literature as an ideological form, and how all these ideas relate to graphic novels today. Then I looked at my collection of Blank Slate books, and thought about the scans of the artwork from inside those books, and I realised that if I started going on and on and on about all that "stuff", we just wouldn't have the opportunity to enjoy the books themselves. Which really defeats the entire exercise, doesn't it?

So let us start with what matters; the books themselves; the covers, the work on the page, the drawings, the paintings, and the words. And the differencse between the individual books. The difference between the works Blank Slate is producing is very important. The eclectic mix of their books puts me in mind of, and it might just be because the stark black and white cover of Darryl Cunningham's Psychiatric Tales puts me in mind of the logo, Stiff Records, during the birth of Punk. Although, having said that, I don't think it's just a superficial resemblance, to me Blank Slate is part of a Punk movement; they are, arguably, the Sex Pistols or the Clash of British publishing.

My main fear for graphic novels in the UK was, as I made clear in this blog-post in 2007, that the creative talent here in the UK would have to continue to go abroad, or self-publish, or create comics rather than books, because the gatekeepers of literature in Britain have no idea what this new artform, the "graphic novel" is. Oh, they are perfectly happy to reprint successful graphic novels like Persepolis, or Ghost World, but they are not really prepared to encourage new talent over here. And that, as I recall from my time as a DJ, is a situation analogous to the music scene in Britain in the late 1970s when the major music labels and the BBC music shows and chart compilers (there were 2 number 1s and the BBC didn't play punk) just didn't "get it".

And what is it they just "don't get"? Well, it is, apparently, the often symbiotic nature of words and pictures in a graphic novel, and the possibility of the continuing movement of narrative and description through, sometimes, the illustrations alone.

Which brings us neatly to the work of Oliver East. I have to admit that to someone used to just reviewing or reading words on a page, looking at Oliver's books might be something of a culture shock. His pages sometimes look like Medieval English tapestries, the panel borders hinted at with trees or fences or roof tiles or dialogue or leaking into one another. It is often a landscape one second civilised and the next primitive, as his story continues its movement of narrative and description through the words, word and picture combinations, and even through illustrations alone.

Like most works of art, East's stories can be enjoyed on a number of levels, but if you are willing to make the effort, they can be very rewarding indeed. I like to speed-read on my first run at a book, and what struck me when I first flashed through East's work was, as I have mentioned, the tapestry-like look of the work, it's autumnal colours often merging town and country into one landscape. It also reminded me of allotments, of cities and towns, viewed from the windows of a train flashing through the countryside - occasional blinding me as the sunlight made me look away. This is, I think, where a book like East's Proper Go Well High, for instance, works so well, there is such momentum in the visual narrative, that the train journey is almost a stream of consciousness, playfully distorting the pace of the written words, slow then fast, then trailing off. I think I've read this book about six times and counting.

I've mentioned the "differences" in Blank Slate's range of books; of course there is a range of titles with traditional mainstream publishers, but that range is more genre than anything else - typed words are typed words, after all. But traditional large mainstream publishers do generally publish a wide range of illustrated or picture books, and that is often not the case with independent publishers who publish graphic novels. Some independent graphic novel publishers insist that all their titles look like they've been drawn by Frank Frazetta, or by some superhero comic artist, so whilst they may publish a range of titles, they publish a range of titles that all look alike. I can think of a number of independent publishers who would not have published Darryl Cunningham's Psychiatric Tales simply because of the way it looks (like me he draws very flat) and I'm betting there are more than a few who would have been too timid to publish it because of its content. But it is proving to be a solid ambassador for Blank Slate because it is a little gem of a book.

I like Darryl Cunningham's drawings. As you can see from my terrible lo-res scans they are legible even at this tiny blogger-friendly size - that's not easy to accomplish - and it is something that will become increasingly important as this book is ported to other mediums. The drawings, black and white line with solid black used as a colour, are tremendously effective and I don't know if it was a conscious decision (rather than a financial one) to use this format to illustrate the often black and white issues around mental illness; but it was undoubtedly the right one.

This is a thoughtful and tender work, sometimes at odds with its less than tender subjects. I love the page above, one panel of which is being used for the cover of the US edition of the book, it pulls back from its subject making him small and human as it does so.

I think that is what is at the core of this book; is its humanity. It's a study, and not simply a superficial one, of a difficult subject, handled with care and despite the fact that black and white artwork can often be brutal, with tenderness. Psychiatric Tales will, I think, one day, be seen to be as important a graphic novel as Mom's Cancer by Brian Fies.

In addition to publishing new work, Blank Slate are introducing some established overseas cartoonists to Britain. The story of Sparky O'Hare, Master Electrician, by German cartoonist Mawill, is incredibly silly, but great fun. Mawill makes no excuses for a world where the central character is an electrician who happens to be a Hare, and nobody seems to notice, except to crack the odd joke about his funny looks and his lack of height. There aren't enough little quality pocket books like Sparky O'Hare around; it's a marvelous little book.

I remember, a few years ago, that Patricia Storms asked the question "why are graphic novels so bleak, obsessed with autobiography, and so lacking in humour?". When we tried to put our heads together and come up with an answer, the best we could do was suggest this was maybe an attempt to establish the artform as "serious"; especially in the eyes of those who regarded graphic novels as picture books. It was, and remains, a very good question. It must look to outsiders as if cartoonists really are a bunch of whiny bitches; too insecure to lighten up and have some fun. Although it is worth bearing in mind that the cartoonists are not publishing the work, they are simply producing what the publishers are willing to publish. It would seem to be the publishers themselves who are insecure about the work.

I think printing Sparky O'Hare shows that Blank Slate have no such insecurities; they love comics and it shows. There is no better example of that than Nigel Auchterlounie's Spleenal comic. This collection, in a book for "over 18s" is a joyous little foul-mouthed smut-fest that delivers a thick compendium of the sort of comics one used to find in the old skin-mags. It's uproarious fun. It's not Nigel's "Ulysses", but it's a great read and its full of marvelous drawings. There just isn't enough of this stuff being printed.

I'm delighted beyond mere words that Blank Slate has reprinted Belgian cartoonist Randall C's Sleepyheads in its original format. It's a gorgeous production, and a marvelous book. The comics, stand-alone and also linked by themes of dreaming and the sea, and by a story that comes and goes like the tide itself, manages to combine both the playful qualities that Blank Slate are not afraid to embrace, and a deeper level of meaning. Each chapter, or vignette, like "The East", printed below, is like a little masterclass in cartooning. The position of the text, the shape of the word balloon tails, and the body language of the actors, controlling the languid pace of the story:

I could go on filling this page with scans, but I'd urge you buy this book and see it for yourself. There is, for instance, a page in chapter two of Sleepyheads, The Sea, where the protagonists are discussing that song of clouds that for me boarders on the sublime. I can't recommend it highly enough.

European Comics and the British Renaissance

2010-11-16T12:01:00.038Z

I don't think it's an exaggeration to describe the publication of some recent comic books, or graphic novels on this side of the pond, as at least a sign of the possible beginnings of a British Renaissance; with publishers Blank Slate Books and Self Made Hero blazing the trail. With the release of Ian Culbard's adaptation of doyen of horror H. P. Lovecraft's story At the Mountains of Madness, Selfmadehero has added another title to its library of graphic adaptations, and to Culbard's personal triumphs, which include a complete set of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novels, and Wilde's Dorian Gray. With Culbard's distinctive style, which looks like a cross between ligne claire and Batman anime, Selfmadehero are producing work that, I believe, would sit comfortably alongside some of the best Bande Dessinee.

Another adaptation that will soon swell the Selfmadehero ranks, and will surely fatten the section allotted to them on our personal bookshelves, is be Rob Davis's adaptation of Don Quixote, by Miguel De Cervantes.

You'll know from my previous blog-posts on adaptations here, that I have some pretty strong views on graphic-adaptations, and I'm very pleased to say that Rob really is my kind of illustrator. That is to say, one who is really interested in, and is familiar with, the text he is interpreting - to say nothing of his endless agonising over line and colour. Indeed, his Dinlos and Skilldos blog and his Twitter feed are a testament to the amount of work he is putting into the delivery of the novel. That attention to the text, and constant theorising about the craft, is also a facet of Ian Culbard's work, and he spoke about it here, on Selfmadehero's site.

Over at Blank Slate Books, the emphasis is on new original material, and their stable of creators includes European cartoonists Mawil and Randall C. At the moment, many of Blank Slate's titles are more Marcinelle school than Ligne Claire, but that is probably down to happenstance rather than design. Like Selfmadehero, as their catalogue grows, they will no doubt publish a mixture of styles. A statement of their artistic intent, and vision, I think, was their decision to publish Randall C's Sleepyheads in the same oversize edition that was printed in Holland.

What I hope for from Blank Slate (who by the way make Fantagraphically-beautiful books), and Selmadehero, is that they will one day be custodians of a catalogue of work as varied as that of Cinebook in France. The French company has grown to the extent that it now publishes somewhere in the region of 40 different titles. In mainland Europe, and in France in particular, there is an enormous range of Bande Dessinee, in a huge variety of styles and genres.

This often comes as a surprise not just to those who were previously only aware of Tintin and Asterix, but even to those more knowledgeable souls aware of Blake and Mortimer, Adele Blanc-Sec, Largo Winch, and Black Sad. Whilst it is true that Bande Desinee are not as all-pervasive in French culture as manga is in Japanese culture, you won't find Bande Dessinee about fishing, for instance, comic books are regarded with great affection as the 9th Art and the sheer amount of titles is still a real eye-opener.

One of the great strengths of the comic book market in France, is that from spy thrillers to vampire tales, and from zombie stories to historical dramas, there is a bande dessinee title for almost every reader. In this respect the French market is almost as varied as that of Japan, and it is in this area that we in the west, in Britain in particular, are sadly lacking either the vision, the scope, or just the imagination, to create fiction that doesn't have some autobiographical basis. While the Franco/Belgian market has the Bourne Identity-inspired XIII, created by Belgium's Jean Van Hamme and William Vance for Spirou before earning its own BD. And while Japan has Takao Saito's Golgo13, serialised in Shogakukan's Big Comic Magazine before making the move to its own massively popular manga title, we in the Britain have only the memory of old Modesty Blaise strips (which French BD readers love).

Of course unlike France and Japan we have no studio system in Britain, and we have no anthology publications like Spirou and Big Comic to attract a readership and create a demand for the single titles. That will make a difference, but unfamiliarity with the weekly serials does not necessarily deter the avid comicbook fan. Titles like The Chimpanzee Complex will appeal to fans of comic books and science fiction, even if those readers have never read the stories in serialised form.

Another reason for publishing modern contemporary fiction in a graphic format is that when a genre, like horror, and like vampires and zombies in particular, becomes popular enough to attract major funding from movie and TV studios, a Britain creator, studio, and publisher, will actually have a product that makes money. Worthy as some of our autobiographical tales are, they are unlikely to attract the sort of audiences The Walking Dead or 30 Days of Night bring in. No doubt though, part of the problem for British creators is where exactly do they try to place a graphic novel, let alone a series of graphic novels, about vampires. Currently, the only answer, it seems, is "in the US".

I have always believed that large mainstream publishers in the UK would avoid graphic novels like the plague, because of the way the businesses are run. They will probably be happy too reprint success stories from other shores, but they won't break the habits of a lifetime and invest in new product. With luck, the new independent companies that are bravely stepping in to fill the void will publish some daring new fiction alongside the re-imaginings, adaptations, and autobiographical works - making the new British scene more like the French, with no "mainstream comic book/indie comic book distinctions. And with luck they will be rewarded with some monster hits and monster pay-days.

Words and Pictures

2010-10-06T16:23:00.004Z

Phew.

I'm a little behind again. It irks me because I have two projects I want to begin. Meanwhile, I want to finish Johnny Morte. Well, as much as I can, definitely #1.

I just finished the art for a short story. I sort of crammed it into 11 pages - could maybe have used 15, but it has a lot of talking heads and I was getting itchy feet; or fingers. These things always take longer than you expect. My advice would be, if you are doing all the artwork on your own, to allow one day per page.

The writer, Anthony Abelaye, didn't intend it as a graphic story, so it's big on atmosphere and short on action; but don't be fooled, it still took some drawing. Writers and illustrators take note, the shortest story, or poem, can take some drawing as the ideas are uncondensed - a sentence like, "he looked across the vast expanse of the alpine landscape" takes only a couple of words but a lot of drawing. Actually, the computer-related simile that came to mind was that stories are like Zip files, made smaller, and tighter, for delivery to the reader's brain - where of course the reader supplies the pictures. An illustrated version is like that story unzipped, expanded, and laid-out for all to see. Of course you need to edit sensibly, imagine drawing a passage of running Orcs from Lord of the Rings, you could potentially fill an entire book with just Orcs pounding around the Shire.

Turf Wows

2010-09-01T17:47:00.006Z

Turf (Image Comics) by Jonathan Ross and Tommy Lee Edwards, was always going to be well drawn. Tommy Lee Edwards is the western equivalent of the very best mangaka - he draws like an angel. Whether or not it would be well-written was open to question, despite Jonathan Ross's love of comics and his extensive comic book collection, Wossy was very much an unknown quantity in that respect.

So if you haven't picked up Turf yet, and a lot of you have as each issue sells out pretty quickly, let me put your mind at ease; Turf is as much fun to read as it is to look at; and that's saying something. Note to self: do not, do not, ever, look at Tommy Lee Edwards artwork while you are drawing a project yourself you will only become as depressed as Salieri looking at a handwritten Mozart score.

Make no mistake, Ross has written something pretty special here, at times verbose, occasionally clichéd (seemingly, but that's part of the joke), it is a story that teases and tantalises and even dares the reader to spot the joke, or to consider the juxtapositions too, too, coincidental.

Set in Prohibition - era New York complete with bent coppers and the Holland Floral Company -this tale centres on virtuous, intrepid female reporter, Miss Susie Randall, Society Reporter for the Gotham Herald and her sidekick, photographer, Dale.

Told in dialogue, in illustrations, in the yellow-coloured exegesis of the omniscient narrator, and in the thoughts of the protagonist, sometimes all at once, Turf makes some other comic books out there look like they are grid-locked in the slow-lane with the "special" kid taking the wheel for the first time.

Right from the start it is clear that the narrator knows more than he or she is telling, or the drawings are subverting the narration and exposing what the narrator is not saying (both of which are pretty fucking sophisticated possibilities for a comic book). The story of the "disappearing" Hancock family, who "sell" their stately home to the leaders of the Dragonmir Clan, and who we can clearly see being buried in shallow graves, sets the tone for the playfully macabre narration.

While all this is going on, Tommy Lee Edwards is drawing up a storm. The vintage cars and clothes and architecture are a delight, of course, but what astonishes me is how he captures the noise of the period, the industry, without resorting to in-your-face sound effects. There is one panel where a beer, or Canadian blood, shipment is being unloaded, and you can just sense the noise. And then there's the flying, that is noiseless, it is a gentle raising in the manner of Peter Pan and his Lost Boys - these are masterly effects that appear effortless, though doubtless are not..

I absolutely love the page where The thoughts of Susie Randall take over the narration, a point only made clear by the position of her in the centre of the page - and only crystallised upon turning the page as this wandering thought joins the think balloon above her head. This is a perfect example of the writer and the illustrator working very closely.

Throughout, there are little authorial conceits that tease and please, when Susie Randall chastises Dale with "you might as well be drinking blood" we can see Stefan surveying the scene with a drink (more than likely blood) in his hand. And the words "...outer space" actually cut to a "meanwhile in outer space" scenario where a spaceship is about to collide into this vampir/gangster epic as the bootlegging Squeed, fresh from stealing from the more civilised Mantii, crash into the story.

Make no mistake; this writer will take your feet from under you, if he needs to. The clever titles all appear to have layers of meaning, Turf #2; Aliens with Dirty Faces, is clearly a play on the title of the gangster epic Angels with Dirty Faces, and perhaps also a play on the theory in some circles that the biblical Angels might have been aliens.

This tale of the sibling rivalry at the head of the Dragonmir Clan, as one brother vies to wrest control of the City from the mob, is a glorious blood fest. It is a tale of the tearing off of heads, with "...who the fuck are you gangsters" juxtaposed with "...the heck are they reporters". This is sassy writing; it is a His Girl Friday for the modern era. I mean, come on, the gangster Eddie Falco helps the aliens who help him by blasting the vampirs, and meanwhile, "The Old One" mentioned in the vampir prophecy is awakened and is clawing his gnarly way out of the ground, and we hope, against hope, that the truly vile beast O'Leary gets wacked -- that's bang for your buck, mate.

It is slightly unbelievable, I admit, that in this tale of vampires and aliens that nobody is a simple cipher, that they are all characters made with fleshed-out words and pictures, but it is true. And if you want to see some masterly drawing to match the masterly script, look no further than The cutthroat razor scene - that is a page full of tension, for the reader, who can see more than the central characters as the scene unfolds- how the hell did Tommy Lee Edwards do that?

Turf #3 Badfellas will be out later this month, and I can't wait to see just what the hell is going to happen next.

http://twitter.com/WOSSY

http://twitter.com/tommyleeedwards

Turf, copyright, 2010, Jonathan Ross and Tommy Lee Edwards.

Johnny Morte comic has its own blog

2010-08-30T15:39:00.001Z

Having finally settled on the look of the comic and its characters, I'm racing ahead with the production of the new Johnny Morte comic book. It's now over on its own blog, here: Johnny Morte Blog.

The Things you Didn't Know you Didn't Know...about Charles Front

2010-08-01T18:48:00.029Z

My Dad said, when I visited him a few weeks ago, "that thing Rumsfeld said about the 'unknown unknowns', the things 'we do not know we don’t know'; it's starting to make sense to me". I can't remember the context he (my Dad) said it in, but despite the fact that it made me laugh, it does make sense, dealing as it does with the philosophical concept of the unknown known. The Slovenian philosopher and critical theorist Slavoj Žižek describes it as "that which we don't know, or intentionally refuse to acknowledge that we know...". Which, if you think about it in the context Rumsfeld was using it, WMDs, really suggests that he might just be admitting that he "sort of knew" there were no WMDs, but kept it from himself. Oh heck, talk about a digression; let's get back on track.

Yesterday, Saturday July 31st 2010, I was looking through The Times and I spotted a big story about ex-Oasis front-man Liam Gallagher's new clothing line, and shop, Pretty Green (which, being an old Suedehead/Mod I'm into, by the way), and right there, staring me in the face, was a new twist that just impossibly, through sheer serendipity, segued into my blog post about the illustrator Charles Front. You see the logo for Pretty Green is a bit of a Beatle-hat tip to Charles Front, whether those concerned know it or not.

You see, Charles Front was the young illustrator who designed the lettering on The Beatles Rubber Soul album. Back in 1965, Art Director Charles Front was asked by Bob Freeman, the Beatles' photographer, to create artwork for a new album sleeve; Rubber Soul. Front's design, squeezing the words Rubber Soul into a shape that resembled the drip of rubber from a milked- rubber-tree (an early example of playful bubble-shaped lettering) quickly became a template for the poster art of the period, and would slowly, very slowly, influence the design of more creative forms of typography over the coming decades.

A cursory glance at the Beatles album designs around, and even after Front's design, reveal that whilst album covers became increasingly innovative, vivid, and colourful, the typography was more often than not less adventurous. And the fact that the influence of that iconic design can still be detected today, with very few people knowing a great deal about the designer himself, speaks volumes about the quality of the work.

This is where the "not knowing what you don't know" part comes into the equation. If you look at the work of the cartooning-godfather of graffiti art, Vaughn Bode, with no knowledge of the Rubber Soul design, then the only illustrator who produced typography that could have influenced today's Urban Art, beginning with the bubble lettering, "Softies", of PHASE2 on the streets of New York in 1972, is Bode. Indeed Bode, who used balloon lettering in his strips Deadbone, in Cavalier Magazine in 1969, and later in Cheech Wizard, is acknowledged as an influence on that movement.

When you look at the lettering on Rubber Soul again though, and think of the popularity of the Beatles, then it is not impossible to imagine that Charles Front's iconic Rubber Soul font, might also have been an influence on that Art form. It is, I would suggest, a possible cultural influence that you had no idea you knew existed.

Although other artists who worked with the Beatles are better known, you will surely be hard-pushed to find more t-shirts, logos, key-rings, and the like, out there devoted to a Beatle-related image, than the Rubber Soul typography designed by Front. In fact it is pretty rare to see an album typeface, other than the later YES designs, take on a life of it's own in this fashion.

Indeed, the only other really daringly playful use of typography on a Beatles album, can be seen on Magical Mystery Tour, released in the US in November 1967, and that album also uses bubble writing, but in a more conventional way. And whilst Peter Blake's cover for Sergeant Pepper (Jun, 1967) is pretty spectacular, the lettering is incorporated into the drum in the image and is therefore, more or less, pretty conventional.

I would argue that nobody who worked on the Beatles's album art played the kind of daring game that Charles Front played with the text, in fact very few artists of the period seemed to have been daring enough to try. Even the late Heinz Edelmann, brilliant creator of the hallucinogenic landscape of Pepperland as art director for the 1968 animated Beatles film Yellow Submarine, who like Charles Front also produced artwork for albums, never produced typographic design as innovative as his album cover art.

Outside the Beatles hit-factory there was also a dearth of daring typographical design, and even the great Andy Warhol was producing covers with unadventurous lettering.

One of the few artists who who worked on album art, and who did experiment with typography, including bubble-lettering (most famously on Keep on Truckin' (1968))alongside colourful, playful, artwork, was Robert Crumb, who, coincidentally, worked alongside Vaugh Bode back in the day. Again though, Crumb could be a little conventional with the typeface, and it is surely a little fanciful to see that big upturned shoe sole that appears in much of Crumb's artwork, as slightly reminiscent of the shape of Charles Front's Rubber Soul design.

If you search for "Rubber Soul" on Google, and check out those images you will see some evidence of the influence of Charles Front's innovative design. You will also see little or no mention of Charles Front, the man who created the design. I took some advice in regard to the copyright of the Rubber Soul font, and of the design in general, those in the know, Nate Piekos and Daniel Poeira, are of the opinion that Apple would be responsible for establishing rights. My feeling though is that there is certainly a case for moral rights belonging to Charles Front, and of course it very much matters what his original deal with the company was. In the meantime, it would be a nice gesture to acknowledge Charles Front as the original creator of what is very clearly a popular design. I mean, how many people have seen their artwork adorn a Beatles cover, countless t-shirts, influence Urban Art, and act as a backdrop for The Righteous Brothers? Respect.

As a caveat, bear in mind this post makes no mention of the many books Charles Front illustrated, and the fact that while you were young you enjoyed his drawings on Jackanory. Now there's a thought, you saw his work in books, on TV, and sitting there in your big brother or sister's or even your parent's record collection. It was influencing you, and you didn't know it. More things you didn't know you didn't know about Charles Front.

The images here are copyright their respective copyright holders. If you have any questions, ask me.

Werewolf Cubs, Peeping Toms and the Little People

2010-07-29T15:35:00.006Z

I liked being a Wolf Cub. When I was just a Cub, I longed to be a Wolf Cub, and when I was a Cub Scout, I felt the wolf part was missing. The move up to Scout was short-lived because I was about to turn into a real monster; a teenager, and I was no longer interested in becoming a Sixer. I never gave the religious aspect of the movements I joined, the Cubs, Scouts, Boys Brigade, and Scripture Union, a moment's thought - not even when being a member of Sunday School was mandatory. I did understand the guilt though, for instance, when Akela came round and said "clean white handkerchief", and you tricked her by showing her the white lining of your pocket, you would apologise to God, in your mind, just in case he really was all-seeing. As for Wrighty's older sister, everyone tried to spy on her through the frosted glass of the bathroom window. She told us when to be there, and it was always disappointing, depending on how strong your imagination was. Often a large group turned up, and we played five-a-side football instead of straining to figure out what exactly we were looking at.

Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot

2010-07-27T00:22:00.003Z

John Callahan is dead, he died on July 24, 2010, aged 59. I'd like to say just that John Callahan was a brilliant cartoonist and that he died too soon; without mentioning his disability, but that disability helped make him even more remarkable to a big whiney hypochondriac like me. He was, quite simply, one of the bravest, most daring, funniest, cartoonists ever to wheelie around planet Earth. If you didn't know his work before now, look it up.

Obituary

Nice little Dutch TV documentary on Callahan

Photoshop Woes

2010-07-26T23:58:00.003Z

You may remember I cut back on the blogging when I was ill. Actually I cut back on everything, except blankly staring and drooling; did a lot of that. As a matter of fact I was very zombie-like; total slackjaw. Anyway, I've been very slow to get back to work and in theory that would be okay; if the people who are supposed to honour their contracts did so - BASTARDS! But that's not really the way of the world so I'm having to do stuff again aren't I?

Anyway, I eventually migrated everything to the laptop, including 2 Photoshops (one is old but has all my filters), a Paintshop Pro, Manga Studio Ex, etc, etc...then that blew up, or at least the bios went nutzoid (technically speaking), so I loaded some stuff onto an older laptop whilst waiting for the new one to arrive, but now the new one has arrived and I'm not at all sure we get along. It's all that java-ed-up new Windows and I can't be bothered loading it up with everything all over again and hunting for the passwords to 100 filters, so I'm still on the older model - slumming it with Photoshop CS2. Aaannnddd, whatever my settings were on CS3 on the other laptop, I sure as shit don't remember them now, because I just can't get a good reduction with this thing.

I'm drawing a few things but here's a panel from the Wolf Cubs page and you'll see what I mean about the crappy reduction. This was scanned it at about 300 dpi, then drawn with a Wacom tablet and then reduced to 100dpi to put here and the quality of the reduction isn't impressing me at all. Any and all ideas about what my settings should be "nearest neighbor" "bicubic" etc, will be most welcome:

That's actually better than I've been getting. Hmmmmm. What is going on?

Update

2010-07-23T15:37:00.002Z

I'm writing a post that requires research, that's why it's taking a while. Not that I don't thouroughly research everything, you understand, it's just that, well, it's complicated. You'll see what I mean when I post the piece. It's on some of the work of illustrator Charles Front.

The late, great, Harvey Pekar

2010-07-23T14:47:00.006Z

As you are aware Harvey Pekar died. I did a blog-post on Harvey and his work with Ed Piskor, (click here to read it) and Ed kept Harvey up-to-date with matters of the interweb, so I like to think he was aware that people like me, over here in boring old mainstream comicsville UK, did appreciate him. I'm sad he has gone. Harvey Pekar was a one-off. Harvey used his own income as a filing clerk to pay artists, including his friend Robert Crumb, to draw his autobiographical stories, which he then had printed, and then distributed himself. He had a unique vision and he kept right on producing work in a medium he felt was far greater than most people could imagine. Harvey believed that every ordinary guy, like him, was a superhero and that comics could be profound. When he was asked why his stories focused on ordinary subjects like driving downtown to buy a bagel he would reply "ordinary life is pretty complicated stuff".

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocomplex/2010/07/american-splendor-harvey-pekar-.html

I didn't actually discover Harvey Pekar through his comics. Oh, I was aware of them, and even had one or two in my collection, but I only really learned properly about his work by watching a film called Comic Book Confidential, a fantastic documentary featuring the work of Charles Burns, Harvey and Crumb, and Lynda Barry, and others. The comics featured just blew me away; I had never seen anything like them. The show featured Harvey's story about being addicted to blues and stealing sides (records) from a radio station. The drawings from the comic, by Crumb, were inter-cut with Harvey reading the story in his famous raspy-voice. I'm not exaggerating when I say it changed all my ideas about what comics could be. It's on iTunes, here.

When I did finally get my hands on a bunch of Harvey's work, including American Splendor, the scales fell from my eyes; I knew, absolutely knew, that the impression the Comic Book Confidential documentary had made on me was not fleeting, I wanted to create work like this, and what's more, I knew my attempt to do so would fall short, and I knew that falling short of this measure was okay, because this was something special. There are a lot of salutes to Harvey on the web this month, and they are all heartfelt; he meant a lot to everyone involved in cartooning. The comic book world now has an enormous Harvey Pekar-sized hole in it; that hole will never be filled.

Weathercraft and Nutwood; world's apart?

2010-06-01T08:36:00.055Z

Firstly, let me get some thanks in; to Jim Woodring for being awesome, to Fantagraphics for okaying the use of Jim's artwork, to Helen Ayres for also being awesome and scanning and sending pages from her Rupert collection, and to the Daily Express (and to Mary Tourtel (1874 - 1948), and Alfred Bestall MBE(1892-1986)) for Rupert the Bear.

This post is actually something that developed as an idea from two ongoing dialogues over at the Cartoonists Forum; which I thought were worth developing over here, and which I also think might interest more than just cartoonists.

It just so happened that the latest studies that suggest the thoughts of "creatives" mimic those of schizophrenics, broke at the same time that a cartoonist I know was asking for critiques of his drawing style. So the two threads were running simultaneously, and along with others on the board I was commenting on both. My suggestion on the critique thread was that whilst cartoonists like me appreciate the way he draws (in an old-fashioned style with characters that could have walked straight out of the pages of the Beano or the Dandy in the 1950s), for me there has to be some kind of philosophy behind drawing like that today; a mission statement if you like, or a manifesto. I explained that the cartoonists I like, who draw in a variety of styles I would describe as "old-fashioned", such as Al Columbia, Kim Deitch, Johnny Ryan, Tony Millionaire and Jim Woodring, all have a good reason for doing so. There is, in short, substance behind the retro-style.

As for creatives and schizophrenics being similarly wired, well, this is where the two threads dovetailed into one another; you see I have often looked at the work of some cartoonists, maybe a single-panel gag, or a comic book or comic page, or a graphic novel, and thought, "how the hell did he, or she, make that creative leap"? So it comes as no surprise to me that some "creatives" might be wired differently, but you know, not all "creatives" under that broad umbrella "creative" are actually very, well...very "creative". You see, you simply don't need to be wired to the Moon to create a conventional web comic, and you certainly don't need to have any incredibly imaginative ideas to create gag cartoons for the Sun, spot-illustrations, most daily comic strips and most editorial cartoons. However, as I have already said, there is no doubt in my mind that "some" cartoonists, in addition to being very talented and technically gifted, are also able to make the sort of huge creative leaps that others can only admire from afar. But do they really create their unique work as a result of some uncontrolled, chaotic, and fractured process?

That's when I started thinking about really unique work, the product of really wild imaginings, like Jim Woodring's latest book, and first graphic novel, Weathercraft.

The work, which centres on the evolutionary and spiritual journey of Manhog, is breathtakingly original, and looking at it just brings home to me how timid many of us in this business are. More often than not we try to find a niche, which for gag cartoonists is drawing basically the same characters in every gag so that even without our signature the "reader" can spot our cartoon, or we try to get any regular drawing gig that might be going, whether we believe it has any integrity or not. Make no mistake, even if a cartoonist does manage to come up with a singularly good idea, even as a result of different wiring, it still takes a huge amount of courage to keep producing that work and to cling to that particular vision, especially if that vision is a little peculiar and unlikely to have mass appeal. But what if this "schizophrenia hypothesis" is actually true? What if, in addition to dedication, single-mindedness, talent, and technical ability, you simply cannot create work that has any significant cultural impact, unless you also have that mental "factor-X" - the ability to tap into the dark recesses of the mind from which some people sometimes never return. That is a scary thought. That is surely too big a risk to take.

Of course now I was really worried because if the schizophrenia hypothesis is accurate, if it is indeed true that really unique, exceptional, work requires not only considerable learned skills, but also a way of thinking that is limited to only a very few people out there, then how can people like me, who sometimes teach classes in cartooning, possibly continue to teach? What are we meant to say to would-be cartoonists - that they can maybe have a career in cartooning providing they stick to making generic, unexceptional, art? Do we say, you can draw magazine cartoons but you will never be Charles Addams, you can create panels but you will never be Mordillo, you can create a comic strip but you will never be Herriman, if you do manage to get a book deal, you will never be Jim Woodring? It's a worrying thought, and I wasn't alone in thinking along these lines; another cartoonist, Bren, wondered "(if )not all creativity is equal...(can) a person increase how creative they are"? Of course this cuts straight to the chase, even if the schizophrenic hypothesis is true, is it possible to learn a more creative way of thinking?

So put all that to one side for the moment, and consider this related problem, how to describe Jim Woodring's work to someone who hasn't seen it? Honestly, it's not easy, words really don't do the work justice. Usually, in Woodring's work, there are no words. There might be Frank, an animated bookend, a Manhog, Pupshaw and Pushpaw, melting backgrounds, rocks that become porous and things, more things, spirals and teeth, and ears and frogs; and shapes and swirls. There are things that grow and shrink...and sometimes eat themselves.

You see the difficulty, or at least hear it? Or how do suggest to people who have no concept of such a thing that if they had perhaps, during some LSD trip, or similar,stared at the Paisley patterned swirls on an Axminster carpet and watched them grow and grow, and grow, all over the room and over the dog and the dog had licked itself and then left the room dragging the carpet and all the shapes and colours with it that it was maybe a little like that...that words fall short, that words fail...

Okay now bring it back from the side to which you put it before reading the last paragraph. You see, when I was struggling to describe Jim Woodring's work I happened upon a parallel that gave me cause for hope. It suddenly dawned on me that the one shared comic experience that at least sort of comes close to Woodring's work, to a British person who was unfamiliar with it, would be the old Rupert the Bear panels from the Daily Express, or better yet those from the Rupert annuals. Of course they would have to imagine the sugar-coated world of Rupert the Bear slightly differently, but not hugely, most of the drawings and the creatures from Nutwood would be quite happy in a Woodring setting - and many of Woodring's characters could easily be transported into Nutwood; which is a crazy thought.

It was a surprising revelation. It certainly blind-sided me. I don't think about Rupert the Bear that often. I think the last time I thought about Rupert was when I was looking at the marvelous drawings of Tobias Tak. And it really got me thinking, what on earth do these two wildly different comics, created decades apart, have in common that makes me think one, a children's strip, is good groundwork for viewing the other, a surreal wordless fantasy for adults that the cartoonist, Jim Woodring, has perhaps dialled in from the Twilight Zone? I mean to say, if your only experience of Rupert the Bear is the modern animated series or the modern CGI show, or Paul McCartney's Frog Chorus music video, then suggesting any similarity between these works is probably bewildering you right now. But for those familiar with the real Rupert the Bear (and the original claymation, see screenshots below)and the stories containing elements of folk tales, of forest people, of briary creatures and fairy folk, and of people trapped in a body not quite fully human, those people will find a resonance in Rupert that is mirrored in Jim Woodring's exploration of the universal consciousness of archetypes.

To be fair, at first glance a purpose-built comic strip created by the then News Editor of the Daily Express newspaper's wife, with its public (this means private in the UK) school ethos and its subliminal reference to the ranking system of the British army, has nothing in common with the surreal world of Jim Woodring; apart from anthropomorphism that is - oh, and some spectacular artwork first from Mary Tourtel, and then Alfred Bestall. But there are similarities, and I believe those similarities occur not just because they both contain elements of folk tales and fairy tales, they do, but because we are looking at two perfectly contained universes. This is not simply the creation of an alternate universe in which the characters appear, there is a marked difference for instance between the world's Rupert and Woodring's characters inhabit, and the world Peyo's Smurfs smurf around in.

The unnatural Smurfs live at the foot of your, or my, garden, not somewhere between a Grimm-like forest and faerie land. The Smurf's scurry off, and end up running from the menace of the sole of your shoe as you walk by, they are that nonthreatening. There is no menace in the Smurfs, none at all. Rupert on the other hand is a boy who has been transformed into a bear; he is human-sized, his human hands betraying his half-transformation. He is a bear like the transformed bear in the German folk tale The Singing Ringing Tree, and we all know that although he looks soft and cuddly, that he is, after all, beneath it all, a bear. And Rupert's friend Bill the Badger, as the old claymation series made clear, is also a human trapped in an animal skin, just as Woodring's Frank is (the drawing of the artist's hand checking out Frank's teeth is very unsettling). They, Rupert and Frank, are us, left in the woods too long, clinging to some human affectations, like the animals of Stevie Smith's poem Mrs Blow, and fighting our increasingly feral nature. I think, with The Smurfs or any similar idea, the forest, the wood, is simply wallpaper, it is not the landscape of the dark forest of our childhood memories, it is simply there and unexplored, and since the characters are not really part of it, they have no roots in our psyche. In Woodring's work the forest landscape is almost as important as the characters, it can be worn like a cloak, or manhandled and manipulated like taffy, or entered into literally, there is a notion of the sublime here as man and nature meld. Likewise with Rupert bear, we remain aware that like a real bear he can melt into the camouflage of the wood, in a moment by removing his clothes (remember Rupert is not really white, he only became that colour due to ink shortages). And if Rupert's family does have a little cottage in the woods, it is just that, a little cottage in the woods, like the one inhabited by the three bears, and they certainly had a plan for the little human Goldilocks. With both Woodring's creation and with Tourtel's, but not with Peyo's, there is something else going on. It's not that Peyo's work isn't great work, it is, but it works only on a surface level, it lacks the subtext that Woodring's work clearly contains and that Rupert, perhaps as a subversion of the author's intention, also contains.

At least as important for me as this shared mythos, which even on a subconscious level suggests non-chaotic planning, is that I can see in Jim Woodrings creation of Weathercraft, and in the tales of Rupert Bear, tremendous craft. I see marvelous draughtsmanship, commanding line, expert storytelling, a link with the history of illustration and folk art, and a hint of the menace that underlies every fairy tale. With the Rupert stories, I never really read the words, or sometimes I did and then I looked at the drawings and I made up my own stories, and my own stories were huge, much bigger than the tiny stories in the paper, or even the books and much darker in spirit. And with Woodring's wordless stories I do the same mind-wandering trick, but with less effort on my part, as the author has kindly added the depth and the darkness for me.

The real joy of this for me is that we have two very different creations' here, on the one hand we have Rupert, a commercial product, designed to please as many of one newspaper's readers as possible, and to offend none. It is hard to imagine a comic beginning more unpromising created, as if it were a confection, like a bonbon: The Editor of the Daily Express, R.D.Blumenfeld, was instructed by the paper's owner, Lord Beaverbrook, to produce some competition to Teddy Tail, a comic strip appearing in the Daily Mail, and the Daily Mirror's, Pip, Squeak and Wilfred. It just so happened that the News Editor of the paper, Herbert Tourtel, was married to Mary Caldwell, a trained artist and an illustrator of children's books, and he suggested his wife for the task in hand; and that's why Mary sat down and created Rupert the Bear for the Express.

The first Rupert the Bear story, The Adventures of a Little Lost Bear, appeared on 8th November, 1920, illustrated by Mary, with little captions under the drawing provided by her husband. In the beginning, the little fellow was quite erratic, showing up only occasionally, but Mary really hit her stride in the 1920s; during that period it is generally accepted that Rupert's adventures became more imaginative,with Mary introducing more magic to her folk and fairy tale-inspired stories, introducing the mystical "wise old goat" and whenever necessary, a fairy or two, to sprinkle some magic in Rupert, Bill Badger, Algy Pug, and Beppo's path. The character's increased popularity saw Mary's stories appearing in a string of reprinted collections and Rupert's adventures also appeared in the Daily Express Children's Own, a pull-out supplement from the paper. Mary continued to draw Rupert until her eyesight began to fail in 1935.

After Mary retired from the strip in 1935, the Express recruited the renowned Punch and Tatler illustrator, Alfred E Bestall MBE (1892-1986), who also had experience illustrating books for Enid Blyton, to take over the job of writing and illustrating Rupert for an initial period until they found a permanent replacement for the strip's creator. That "initial period" extended until he retired thirty years later in 1965, and saw the introduction of the familiar, regular, two-panel newspaper format of the strip. By the time he hung up his pen, Bestall had written and illustrated almost 300 Rupert stories for the daily paper, and for the now highly-prized Rupert the Bear annuals, which have appeared every year now since Christmas 1936, expanding Rupert's world and introducing new characters like Pong-Ping, Tiger lily and her father, Bingo, and the Merboy.

And on the other, we have the work of the leading surrealist cartoonist working today, Jim Woodring. His self-publishing creation, Jim, an anthology of comics, dream art, and free-form which Fantagraphics picked up in 1986, six years after its creation, spawned Woodring's celebrated, wordless, surrealist series Frank, who also features as a cast member in Weathcraft.

A self-taught cartoonist, Jim Woodring has extensive experience in almost every aspect of the craft, in addition to spells in animation, Woodring created a comics series for children, has worked with Harvey Pekar on the celebrated American Splendor Comics, worked on the Aliens and Star Wars comic books, and along with F. Solano Lopez adapted the movie Freaks for the comic world. His wonderfully inventive much sought after toy designs sold in vending machines in Japan (it just doesn't get any cooler than that), and his paintings are very much in demand.

In December 2006 he became one of the first group of United States Artists Fellows and in 2007, his work featured prominently at the Centre National de la Bande Dessinée et de l’Image in Angoulême, France, as part of the international comics festival. Woodring received an Inkpot award at the 2008 San Diego Comic Convention, and was awarded an Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship in 2008. He also illustrated the front cover, endpapers, and the song 'Toy Boy' in would-be cartoonist, singer-songwriter, Mika's 'Songs for Sorrow'.

Of course the actual content of the "text", even when the text is wordless, is poles apart. Rupert bear lives with his parents in a cottage in the middle of Nutwood. He invariably sets off on an adventure by undertaking some errand or other for his mother and ends up in some fantastic adventure, along with one or two of his "pals", Bill Badger, Pong-Ping, Algy Pug, or others, and aided the magical inventiveness of the Wise Old Goat (can't help wondering what the far-right in the US would read into that). Woodring's stories on the other hand contain pain, torture and little random acts of violence. The air can be populated with souls (jivas) resembling children's spinning tops and the sky and the earth can be ripped down and knotted together.

These works, Weathercraft and Rupert, should be poles apart, and yet they have much in common; both are brilliant ideas, both are brilliantly drawn, both "exist" in fully imagined worlds, worlds familiar enough to be like the world we know, but different enough from the world we know for magic to happen. It may be a fanciful notion on my part, but I can see much more craft in these two magical comic creations than chaotic meanderings, and I'm relieved. I'm relieved partly because I can suggest that rather than becoming a little bonkers, the beginning cartoonists I teach just have to read widely and work exceptionally hard at creating their own world and then populating it with their creations, and that then, they just might create something as otherwordly and lasting as Rupert bear, or as otherworldly and beautiful and new as Weathercraft.

Goscinny, the Legacy

2010-05-23T21:14:00.011Z

So, whilst the marvelous Adelle Blanc-Sec is, hopefully, working her way toward our cinema screens over here, Le Petit Nicolas, the creation of the late and much-missed Rene Goscinny, and cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempe, is already available on Blu-ray DVD from Amazon, France.

The adventures of Nicolas, who has been around now for more than 50 years, are translated into more than 30 languages, and the free exhibition at the Hotel de Ville, Paris, last year (2009) to mark the creation's 50th anniversary, where children visiting were given an activity book and a pencil so they could draw their own pictures of Nicolas, drew tens of thousands of visitors. Like Goscinny's other creation, Asterix the Gaul, Le Petite Nicolas is, it would seem, both iconic, and an Ambassador for the Ninth Art (cartooning) in France.

It is no surprise that Le Petite Nicolas has remained so popular in France and further afield, for so long. In addition to the stories being wonderfully illustrated by Sempe, the stories are beautifully written by the man who also brought Lucky Luke and Asterix to life. Goscinny is credited, within these stories, with perfectly capturing a child's narrative and this is not simply hyperbole. With what appears to be a few deceptively simple techniques, like the exuberant run-on sentences of an excited narrator, Goscinny has, for many, created a snapshot of what it is or was like to be a boy trying to understand and fit into the crazy world around him. For someone like me, who is interested in autobiographical comics (and by autobiography I also mean the sort of made-up autobiography that creates Holden Caulfield in our minds eye), Le Petite Nicolas is a real treat, and a real education in how the simplest of drawings can be made more evocative with a well chosen word or phrase.

We don't really have any equivalent to Le Petit Nicolas here in the UK, unless you think Janet and John (actually Alice and Jerry and licensed to the UK as Janet and John) fits the bill. Actually, that's not as wild a comparison as it sounds, while the Government here, in the 1950s and 1960s, tried to educate the proletariat with the whitest, most uptight, "middle-class", oh-so-very English role-models you have ever seen, children in France were being enchanted by Petite Nicolas and his family, friends and acquaintances; including Clotaire, bottom of the class, Alceste, who eats all the time, Eudes, who is very strong, Geoffroy, whose is very rich, teacher's pet, Agnan and Rufus, whose father is a policeman.

Interestingly, the first Nicolas story ever published, on 29 March 1959, appeared in Sud-Ouest, which those of you who read the Adelle Blanc-Sec piece below will recognise, and that story appears in the new Petite Nicolas collection, The Balloon and Other Original Stories, alongside a treasure-chest of nine new stories that Goscinny's daughter Anne discovered and put together with new drawings by the still-brilliant and ever youthful Sempe.

The new Le Petite Nicolas movie actually reminds me of two things and they are rel event to this discussion, one is that there was a movie made about Posy Simmonds semi-autobiographical story of school days (in fact Rosemary herself scripted it), The Frog Prince, which took place largely in France, and also that Posy's graphic novel Tamara Drew has been made into a movie. Now, despite the fact that these events have happened about 20 years apart, that might look like a great stride for comic/graphic novel/children's book creators here, but I don't think so, I'd remind you of three things: unlike Le Petite Nicolas, The Frog Prince was not a graphic work, unlike the universally recognisable experience of Nicolas, Posy's tale was a tale of a privileged private-school upbringing, and unlike Le Petite Nicolas, with it's many, many, readers, Tamara Drew was a comic strip that appeared weekly in The Guardian, which has a daily circulation of only 283,063, with the usual percentage breakdown of that figure that actually bothers reading comic strips.

Whilst I don't think it is very difficult to imagine Le Petite Nicolas, the movie and DVD, doing good business in France and even further afield, because of the way its creators "grew" their audience, I see it as a huge leap of faith imagining that Posy's as usual very middle-class, very English, re-imagining of Thomas Hardy's "Far From The Madding Crowd" will be in the cinemas for very long, if at all, before it hits the DVD shelves. Moreover, whilst Le Petite Nicolas is based on a 50 year-old idea, and a romanticised view of French childhood, it is more modern than the idea behind Tamara Drew. I don't think it's a coincidence that the country that actually celebrates its cartoonists, has a vibrant market in comics and graphic novels, and supports creator-owned work, understands better the business of cartooning and the journey of the cartoon, along with its intended audience, from the page to screen.

The Extraordinary Adelle Blanc-Sec

2010-05-03T22:41:00.034Z

So yesterday, before I recieved some good news regarding the comics business in the UK, for a change, I was kind of stoked at the prospect of seeing the new Luc Besson movie, based on Tardi's BD (that's "graphic novel" to you mate) Adele et la Bete, featuring the extraordinary adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec. On the other hand, I was getting really wound-up all over again, about the opportunities that the British comics industry, IPC and DC Thomson, pissed away. I'm afraid that every time I see an almost organic journey from comic page to graphic novel to the movie screen, as I see often in Japan, and increasingly now in mainland Europe, I see the sort of billion dollar industry, employing a great many people, that our narrow-minded, antediluvian comic-producing giants could have helped create here - had they not been so mean-spirited, insular, and unadventurous. Instead of a billion dollar business, and a vibrant creative community working in the sort of studio system that sees Golgo13 thrive in a variety of media in Japan, or sees Asterix pump millions into the French economy, we have nothing, nada, zilch. And we have a generation of talented cartoonists who simply cannot find work; on this side of the pond at any rate.

Anyway, that's just how it is and is an interesting, if somewhat depressing, exercise to look at the similarities and differences in the comics business (such as it is/was) in the UK and in France. According to Wikipedia, the first story in the fictional universe that Adele Blanc-Sec inhabits, featured Lucien Brindavoine, and was serialised in the comics anthology Pilote in 1972 (there is a bit more detail here at the excellent Cool French Comics site). Pilote, first published in 1959, was a bit like a familiar British anthology comic, except that instead of being produced by a bunch of middle-aged old farts who didn't write or draw, it was the brainchild of Rene Goscinny, Jean-Michel Charlier, Albert Uderzo and Jean Hébrard. The same team that had earlier created a very progressive comic strip insert for newspapers, Le Supplement Illustre, and who had also teamed up to produce cartoons for a magazine published by Radio-Luxembourg. Pilote's biggest draw was the almost instantaneously successful Goscinny and Uderzo collaberation, Asterix the Gaul.

In 1960, the comic was bought by Dargaud publishers and Pilote took on a new lease of life, albeit with Goscinny still at the helm as Editor-in-Chief. New series such as Charlier and Moebius's Blueberry appeared, along with Achille Tallon by Greg. Pilote was fun and a comic book fan's dream, there was something to please everyone, a mixture of sci-fi, adventure, and humour, and in 1968 Morris's Lucky Luke, which began in Spirou in 1946, made the jump to to pages of Pilote. And just as Lucky Luke and Herlock Sholmes crossed the channel to appear in British comics like IPC's Chuckles, some British pages, like the late, great, Frank Bellamy's Winston Churchill graced the pages of Pilote.

The first appearance of Adèle Blanc-Sec, as a comic strip, was in the French regional newspaper Sud-Ouest in 1976. A collection of those strips was published by the Casterman Publishing House, and they also appeared in Casterman's comic, A Suivre, which ran from 1978 to December 1997. Like Pilote, and like Spirou, Tintin and Metal Hurlant, A Suivre presented the work of some of the world's premier comic book creators including Hugo Pratt, Jean-Claude Forest, Moebius, and of course, Tardi.

Set in Paris, in the years before and after World War I, Tardi's stories revolve around the investigative journalist, Adèle Blanc-Sec. On the face of it, it sounds a bit hackneyed, it is after all a familiar European comic trope, the picaresque tale. But as we have discussed in a much older post, the same can be said of Corto Maltese and Tintin and Largo Winch, it is the characterisation, the plotting, the singular magic of the draughtsman's pen, the degree of craft, that makes them all so very different. Take Tardi's reason for placing Adele either side of WW1, for instance; "Her feisty nature made it impossible to provide her with a place in the war. She would not have been allowed to fight, and could no more have settled for being a nurse, than she could have remained home rolling bandages". This is a creator talking about a character that lives and breaths, that could be put in an artificial situation by her author, but who would surely subvert her creators intention.

A cursory glance at some of the titles of Adele's adventures, goes some way to informing you that you will be heading for territory that Tintin did not breach; and that our heroine does not hesitate to lift the veil between this world and the next: Adèle and the Beast, The Demon of the Eiffel Tower, The Mad Scientist, Mummies on Parade, The Secret of the Salamander, The Drowned Man with Two Heads, Monsters All, The Mystery of the Abyss, The Infernal Labyrinth.

There is no point really in messing you about when it comes to the artwork and the story, this is Tardi for Heaven's sake, he is the Western equivalent of a mangaka, not just a seasoned professional, but a master illustrator and storyteller. The books are lush, and the stories are fabulous fun. To be honest, the sooner Fantgraphics gets round to publishing its English translations of this work, in that particular Fantagraphics way with those elegant covers, the better. There may be other, more experimental, titles in the Tardi library, but these extraordinary adventures are what I want to curl up with and you will too.

And there we have it, the progression, in an almost organic way, of a comic strip to the screen. It is almost identical to the route taken by many Japanese comics. Adele began in one publication, picked up a regular readership, was printed in a collection, developed a larger weekly readership, sold more collections, and then became a movie. Along the way a young cartoonist perfected his craft and made a living, printers and colourists were employed, merchandising made jobs for people in other industries, publishers and their families were happy, and film companies and soon DVD companies and the like, all found work from one little idea that was nurtured and encouraged. It is beautiful when it works.

Of course here it never did work, because the comics publishers kept "all the copyright" and regularly killed the characters off, and in many cases the cartoonists difted away from the business. And now, what do we have left, not a lot, well, not a lot at present, which is where the good news comes in. Titan (our old friends from our Garth post) will soon be publishing CLINT in the UK, and who knows, maybe, since those involved, including Mark Millar and Jonathan Ross, know about comics, and the comics business, and movies, and marketing, and manga, and merchandising, and the history of comics, maybe we will have a second bite at the cherry over here. Now that would be something.

So, the movie, by Luc Besson, The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec, will it be any good? I'm the wrong person to ask, I love French movies, and well, it's raising the profile of graphic novels and cartoonists so it will have to really stink up the room for me to hate it. And that seems unlikely, frankly, because it has fun written all over it, the leading lady is gorgeous, it has a mummy, a pterodactyl, and I get to vicariously smoke as Adele sparks up - I'm in heaven mate.

The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec, the official movie site.

Ah Phooey...but there is Bagge.

2010-04-13T23:15:00.004Z

Blew my New Year's Resolution; didn't I. Darn it! Anyway, I should be back on track soon as a good few posts are finished and just waiting to be sent up here. This is a little quickie about one of my favourite cartoonists; Peter Bagge.

You'll remember I interviewed Peter for my Cartoon Fiend blog, and you may also remember that reading Peter's tales of Buddy Bradley from Hate Comics pretty much kept me sane while I was ill, so it'll come as no surprise that I'm stoked about Fantagraphics new Hate Annual #8. Which must be available about nowish.

You'll find some preview pages on the excellent Comic Book Resources site, right here.

Mind Blowing Manga: Tezuka's MW

2010-02-25T23:54:00.009Z

You know, there are books that really blow your mind, for a variety of reasons. It may be down to the style of writing, or the transgressive nature of a character, or the sexual frankness of the story, or even the unreliability of the text itself. It is not often that comic books do this. I can think of maybe only one or two authors in comic-land who experiment with the sort of knowingness (I don't mean this in a pejorative way, I mean the self-referential knowingness that allows an agreed and enjoyable experimentation between the reader and the author) that one routinely finds in other genres of writing, in the UK and the US; that would be maybe Alan Moore and Charles Burns.

The creators of manga on the other hand, routinely blow your mind. Italian comics can, and Franco-Belgian comics sometimes do; but manga makes a habit of taking characters and subject-matter and just stretching the narrative possibilities to their very limit. Take Osumu Tezuka's MW for instance, while Stan Lee exposes a character to Gamma Radiation and creates, Frankenstein-like, the sympathetic Hulk, or an irradiated intermediary that creates the likable angst-ridden teenage Spiderman, Tezuka's irradiated protagonist becomes an unlikeable, sadistic, guilt-free, murderer.

Commonly described as "the god of manga" Tezuka, the creator of around 150,000 pages of manga, is best known in the West for his creations Astro Boy, Black Jack, Simba the Lion, and Phoenix, less well know, amongst non-aficionados, is his work Adolf and MW. With MW, Tuzuka created a manga style that still looked like the mainstream manga that Yoshihiro Tatsumi and the Gekiga movement so disliked, but which dealt with the sort of adult-orientated themes that the lending libraries of Osaka championed as a new wave.

Originally serialized in Japan's Big Comic, in the 1970s, MW was published in English translation by Vertical Inc. in 2007 and the Japanese movie version of the story hit the cinemas in 2009. It is the story of Michio Yuki, a banker and the son of a famous Kabuki family, who leads a double life as a kidnapper and murderer. The man to whom he regularly confesses his crimes, his surrogate conscience I suppose, is the Catholic priest Father Garai. As boys, the two men seemingly survived a leak of poisonous gas (MW) at a military base on Okino Mafune Island; only to discover some time later that the gas had driven Michio criminally insane. The two men are bound together by this episode, by their relationship forged in the Confessional, and by their shared homosexual relationship. At its core, MW is a story of government cover ups, religious conflict, homosexual love, murder, female impersonation, political machinations, torture, and ultimately the possible extermination of human kind.

Now here's the rub, and it brings us back to one of the Western creators' of comic-lore I mentioned in the first paragraph, Alan Moore. The thing is that whilst the comic version of MW will definitely blow your mind; the movie version probably won't. Moore has several times over the years tried to hammer home the truism that comics and movies are two entirely different art forms, and they are not necessarily compatible. This is certainly true and obvious when it comes to MW. It is one hell of a comic book, but it is pretty much unfilmable, without ruthless and necessary editing. It's understandable really, given the projected target audience, the money a movie has to make today, and the possible future TV release, it was unlikely that this very transgressive landmark in manga could ever make it, faithfully, to the big screen. If you come to this manga only through the medium of the movies, you will have no idea what all the fuss was about. Do yourself a favour - buy the book!

Happy New Year

2010-01-01T15:14:00.008Z

Yaay! Happy New Year. I resolve to be less autistic this year.

Also, touch wood (touches head) I resolve to make more blog-posts in 2010. I'm looking forward to it, as I have what I think is some pretty exciting subject atter. For instance, I'm planning to do a piece on Berlinoir (great title), a series published in French and German, and set in a parallel universe where Berlin is ruled by fascist vampires, by Tobias E. Meissner and Richard Kleist:

Also, I think a revisit with Billy Bat is in order. This seems to be one for Noaki Urasawa fans only as the project has met with nowhere near as much enthusiasm as his earlier works:

I'd like to take another look at Soil, as well. Soil is one of my favourites and I'm looking forward to see how it is developing. We are up to volume 5 or 6, so there is plenty to enjoy:

We will also take a look at some new manga. There are some marvelous new publications out there, and a lot of them need to be brought to the attention of western publishers so that we can get them over here. Tabata Yoshiaki and Yugo Yuuki's Wolf Guy, Ookami no Monshou , suggested for mature readers, is just the kind of hokum I love, and I know you'll enjoy it too:

I know I'm excited. I hope you are. Let's just hope all that enthusiasm doesn't wain by January 12. Hahahaha :)