September 10, 2009

blog biz and Haeckel

I just updated Wordpress and the theme I was using- ComicPress- doesn’t seem to work anymore. I was thinking of getting rid of it anyway. I want to go back to something simpler. And I was getting tired of black. It really is difficult to read against. Anyway, expect things to change around a bit over the next few days.

On another note, I found a few pictures by Ernst Haeckel over at ASIFA. I was given the Dover edition of Art Forms in Nature by a housemate in college, and I still refer to the book. It’s wonderful and very inspiring. If you’ve never heard of Haeckel check out the link above. His books are at the bottom of the page there if you’d like to buy them.

August 31, 2009

Hot Campbell on Eisner action!

Eddie Campbell has a really nice post on Eisner’s years at Preventative Maintenance Monthly. He posts quite a few pictures and has links to where we can find more.

Still, some of the comments, both by Campbell and others, disturb me a bit. One commenter, Rebecca Clements, wishes more art could be like Eisner’s work in PS, “used to make things better, used to communicate.” While generally I agree with her, there is an assumption here and in the rest of the comments that information is somehow neutral. It is free of bias. I get this attitude from my students sometimes as well. Facts are facts, and opinions are opinions, and never the twain shall meet. But the “facts” that Eisner presents in PS are facts about how to maintain instruments created to kill other human beings. I don’t see that as neutral. And I don’t see that as unbiased. The art in PS serves a particular world-view and a particular political agenda. I’m sure that Eisner agreed with that world-view and agenda and maybe even Campbell does. But for us to deny that the world-view and political agenda even exist is naive. This is not to say that we can’t enjoy what Eisner and his studio are able to do on a page. It’s like “Heart of Darkness.” I actually like the story and admire how well written it is, but the underlying symbolism in the story is racist and the plot reflects the colonial beliefs of British society at the time. We just can’t ignore that. So I disagree with Chinua Achebe about “Heart of Darkness’ and with Groth about Eisner that we must condemn these artists based on our own political beliefs and expunge them from the canon. But I disagree with the idea that we should ignore insights into the biases inherent in artistic works in order to enjoy those works. I think we can, and must, do both.

But I have to say that when Campbell says he is “momentarily regretting the years [he has] wasted creating fictions when [he] could have been giving the world something useful” it really depresses me. Manuals on how to repair a jeep instead of Alec? Really, Eddie? Really?

August 21, 2009

Dover has published Lynd Ward’s Frankenstein

Well, coincidence strikes again. A year ago I posted some images that Lynd Ward did for an edition of Frankenstein. And a few months ago I got a a printing of the book through Abe books (the one I had scans from came from a library). I just discovered today that Dover publications has put this book back into print. So I highly recommend that anyone who enjoyed the images I posted go out and buy this book.

I’ll be removing the images I posted previously.

December 2, 2008

ahhhhhh-!

Pen-and-ink and gouache.

 

Also, BibliOdyssey has posted a lot of E.H Shepard’s original sketches for Winnie the Pooh. I purchased a book on Shepard a few years ago and so have seen some of these before, but it’s nice to look at such a lot of them all together.

If you’ve seen the newer edition of the Pooh books, you’ll notice that they’re all in color. If they’re not Disney recreations of the original stories, then they’re colorized versions of the original Shepard drawings. What makes them so hideous is that whoever did the color totally washed out Shepard’s line work. So the pictures are a colorful, blobby mess. My daughter was given a few of these books when she was born and every time I look at them my bile rises. I realize kids like colorful things, but kids can also admire masterful line work. I know I did as a child. These new editions deny that possibility. Luckily, you can still find good reproductions of the original black-and-white Shepard illustrations.

August 18, 2008

Lynd Ward’s Frankenstein

I’ve been a big fan of Lynd Ward for years now. The most money I’ve ever spent on a book was to obtain his long out-of-print Storyteller Without Words. You can read a bit about Ward through the Wikipedia link above, but basically he was a woodblock artist in the early twentieth century who was inspired by Franz Masereel and Otto Nückel to create woodblock novels. Today we’d call them graphic novels, but the term didn’t exist then. While I like Masereel’s boldness, I’ve always preferred the sensitivity I saw in Ward’s work. Sometimes his political views could overpower his work, but his visual storytelling was surprisingly complicated, even by today’s standards. Ward had an incredible ability to render abstract thoughts visually. For instance, the first six panels of “Prelude to a Million Years” alludes to the struggle of art to search for truth in the midst of the other aspects of culture (religion, science…), while then leading into the desires of the main character to render this platonic notion of beauty in sculpture. Simply wonderful stuff.

And out of print. Luckily, Dover is gradually reprinting Ward’s early woodcut novels, God’s Man, The Madman’s Drum, and Wild Pilgrimage.  But Ward’s other work is not readily available. Wild Pilgrimage also appears in Graphic Witness and Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels has a Ward piece. But his later work is hard to find.

About six years ago I made a exciting discovery: I found a version of Frankenstein illustrated by Lynd Ward. I loved how he depicted the monster. It was huge, with sagging yet menacing limbs. So I scanned my favorite bits since the book I found was in the San Jose State University library. Well, I just found these scans again while looking for something else on an old cd. I decided to post them here. Again, as far as I know, these images are out of print, which is a shame. Also, I didn’t know much about scanning six years ago. So these images are a bit small and not as sharp as I’d like. Still, I think they’re simply wonderful. Ward creates an incredible sense of atmosphere. And notice how he uses the shape of the illustration to accent the height of the monster and, later, its weight.

**edit, September 7, 2009** The images besides the cover and title page have been removed, because Dover has put this book back into print.

March 4, 2007

Simplicissimus

Ho-lee ker-ap! All of the poltical magazine Simplicissmus has been put on-line. Every issue. PDFs. Ready to download. Sometimes I just want to kiss the internet.

I had encountered some of the artists in Simplicissimus in various pen-and-ink books that I had bought. But I didn’t learn about the magazine itself until I saw the images that Coconino World had put up. Quite simply, Simplicissimus was one of the greatest magazines of all time. They published writers like Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke. They had comics and art by artists like George Grosz, Kathe Kollwitz, Olaf Gulbransson, Bruno Paul, and Karl Arnold. They took on (with varying success and resolve) the political leaders in Germany before and during both world wars.

Simplicissimus was a political magazine, but I can’t read German. For me, the real inspiration in the magazine is the art. The art has a German expressionist style that is much more loose and biting than the stuff that was coming out in the States at the same time. Simplicissimus didn’t just run political cartoons though; they also had full-fledged short comic narratives occasionally as well. Can you see why I love this magazine?

Here’s the Wikipedia entry.

February 26, 2007

The Golden Treasury of Myths and Legends

My two-year old daughter loves books and we read three before nap and three before bedtime. My parents have given me all my old kid’s books and it has been fun (mostly) to get reacquainted with them again. Seeing the Maurice Sendak illustrations in Little Bear was like vividly remembering a childhood dream.

Well, I just went through an unopened box and came across the 1959 book, The Golden Treasury of Myths and Legends, illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen. I don’t know who gave me the book and I don’t remember ever reading it, though I was obsessed with Greek myths at one time. But for me right now, the book really is a treasure. The illustrations are gorgeous. Bold shapes and unique color combinations. And I can’t exactly tell what media the couple used to create the images.

Well, I found a blog that has a lot of scans from the book. Yet they don’t have my favorite images, so I’ve scanned them myself. This book is long out of print and art like this needs to be seen.

February 12, 2007

Triangulation on Gluyas Williams

I first saw mention of Gluyas Williams on Kevin Huizenga’s blog. He linked to another blog, Filboid Studge, where some drawings of Willams were posted. A comment on this blog mentioned another site, GluyasWilliams.com, where a collection of works by Williams is growing. Then I discovered this collection at Barnacle Press.

Then I looked in an old Dover book I have, Treasury of American Pen-and-Ink Illustration, 1881 to 1938, and there he was again.


“Seriously, Calvin, hadn’t you better begin to be thinking about the future?”

Williams has a very simple style that is spare and yet manages to seem full at the same time. He does this through the use of full and rounded shapes, and the judicious application of spot blacks. In his one panel cartoons, he also uses a diagonal design to give the image depth. He’s one of those artists who makes it look easy, but his clarity and economy betray a master craftsperson. I also love his close attention to the thought processes of his characters. Yet when he goes into more political territory, I find myself disagreeing with his views.