Showing posts with label
In the Studio: Visits With Contemporary Cartoonists.
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Showing posts with label
In the Studio: Visits With Contemporary Cartoonists.
Show all posts
Todd Hignite’s In the Studio: Visits With Contemporary Cartoonists puts me in mind of Ron Goulart’s valuable 1975 book, The Adventurous Decade: Comic Strips in the Thirties. As Hignite picks the creative brains of today’s cartoonists at the top of their game — Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Jaime Hernandez, Daniel Clowes, Seth, Chris Ware, Ivan Brunetti, Charles Burns and Gary Panter — Goulart tracked down writers and artists who launched a new approach to newspaper strips.
Goulart talked to — or found professionals who had worked with those who’d since died or vanished into obscurity — Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates) and Noel Sickles (Scorchy Smith), Chester Gould (Dick Tracy), John Dille and Dick Calkins (Buck Rogers), Hal Foster (Tarzan), Roy Crane (Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy), Harold Gray (Little Orphan Annie), Ham Fisher (Joe Palooka), Will Eisner (The Spirit) and many more. It’s chockablock with discussion of technique, inspiration and opinion, and you still can find copies in hardback and paperback.
The Adventurous Decade, in turn, makes me think of — hold on, this isn’t too much of a stretch — Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists. Born in 1511, Vasari studied painting under, and became friends with, Michelangelo in Florence. The Michelangelo.
As time went on, he gathered notes on other Florentine artists, which he published, in two editions, in 1550 and 1568, to much acclaim. (Influential ArtNews magazine has long called its briefs section “Vasari’s Diary.”)
Vasari’s subjects included, along with his pal Michelangelo, Titian, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Donatello, Fra Angelico, Botticelli and Fra Filippo Lippi, among others.
All three books serve as receptacles of great artists musing on great work — theirs, their contemporaries and their predecessors.
Read my earlier posts on In the Studio here and here.
I hadn’t thought of that before.
In his interview in Todd Hignite’s fascinating In the Studio: Visits With Contemporary Cartoonists, Chris Ware shows the work of Japanese cartoonist Suiho Tagawa, “my fourth-favorite cartoonist who’s no longer alive.” Tagawa in the 1930s produced big, wide-open-vista colorful pictures that depicted multiple characters in myriad scenarios — all in one image.
“This,” Ware contends, “is the course comics should’ve taken before they got sidetracked and transformed by the language of cinema in the 1930s.
“As near as I can tell, the Japanese understanding of art is almost a sort of simultaneous reading and seeing, where ours is purely seeing ….”
I hadn’t considered the notion of cartoons having been hijacked at some stage by a movie-form — i.e., a sequential form, with dramatic camera-like angles — of storytelling. (My guess is Ware would name as the chief culprit Milton Caniff, who made the most of a cinematic look with his popular Terry and the Pirates.)
And I hadn’t ever thought about that being wrong.
See my earlier post on this book here.
And you can see Ware display his Gasoline Alley collection in a video interview by Chicago NPR radio station WBEZ here. (I always meant to try to finagle a visit to Ware’s house when I also lived in Oak Park, but it never happened.)
More on In the Studio to come.
One of the best things about In the Studio: Visits With Contemporary Cartoonists is how the likes of R. Crumb, Jaime Hernandez and Seth tell you what and who their influences were and what struck them about those earlier works, then — bam — you can see a sample of that inspiration juxtaposed with the work of the artist.
Crumb, for example, waxes on about the strong crosshatching used by 19th century newspaper illustrator Thomas Nast (the guy who drew the image of how we’ve come to see Santa Claus, among other achievements), and there’s a sample of a Nast 1879 Harper’s Weekly magazine cover on page 19. On page 20 are two black-and-white pieces by Crumb, and we can see for our own eyes how Crumb took the cue.
Hernandez mentions a 1952 cover for the comic book Canteen Kate he especially liked, drawn by Matt Baker. It’s reproduced on page 142, showing a closeup of smiling, plucky Kate herself, hair tussled. On the previous page is Hernandez’s own 1986 Love and Rockets number 15 cover, depicting an equally close image of Rena, one his characters. She, too, is joyful and her hair is even more mussed.
Seth cites illustrator Doug Wright — in particular Wright’s choice of “beautifully evocative” color — who worked from 1948 to 1980. Chris Ware acclaims Frank King’s “masterpiece” Gasoline Alley, deeming that newspaper strip “a 50-year-long comic strip novel that captures and distills the ineffable passage of time through the regular touch of an artist’s pen to paper.” Everyone familiar with Ware’s own books knows of his consuming interest in measuring that “passage of time.”
More to come ….
