Barks for Boxing Day

I just couldn't resist this as it's got to be one of my favourite ever Christmas comics. The world of Carl Bark's funny animal comics are oddly more true to life than any number of superheroic adventures you would normally encounter. Bark's odyssey to full time comics artists had been a long and eventful one encompassing a variety of jobs including farmer, printer, turner, mule driver, cowboy and anything else he could enviegle his way into. It was almost in desperation that he attempted to turn his hobby of cartooning into a paying job by seeking employment with Walt Disney's Studio in 1935. He joined the story department and became very adept at devising gags which would be rendered up sequentially in pencil and presented to Disney at "storyboard conferences". He eventually quit the studio and opted instead to work on a new line of comics they were developing in association with Dell. He eventually took over control of the destinies of Donald Duck and his nephews and in doing so created a rich and extended family of brilliantly devised supporting characters.

The story that I'm going to run past you today is from 1951 which is when Bark's was at the peak of his creative powers although domestically his life was a real mess with his second marriage on the point of disintegration and his wife's empty whiskey bottles shattering on the walls as he attempted to marshal his thoughts,this is undoubtedly the period when his stories were at their most inventive and character driven, particularly in this example where Donald is once again exposed to his nauseating cousin Gladstone Gander's insufferable good luck.

Johnny Craig's EC Legacy

In what's probably going to be the last posting on this blog until the New Year (we might put up some surprises over the holiday but essentially we're shutting up shop for Christmas) we'd like to offer an apology of sorts, I had promised to run past you gentle readers one of my all time favorite Christmas comic chillers Johnny Craig's EC classic "And All Through The House". The trouble is that I've been pipped at the post by fellow blogger Mr. Door Tree who posted precisely the same story yesterday. So pop across to his blog and hang in there a bit while his page loads up, he's got oodles of goodies to share with you. The interesting thing to note about the svelte looking Mr Door Tree's scans is that they must be taken from the Cochran EC Library which was the best ever incarnation of EC comics produced. Whereas I'm scanning from the excellent Gemstone color reprints, Mr Door Tree is actually sourcing his images direct from these now incredibly hard to acquire and horribly expensive books which means in this case that you get to appreciate all of Craig's fine line work and clever use of Ben-Day tones which made color on this story an unnecessary intrusion.

Anyway it's really good news because it allows me to present to you another truly stunning example of Craig's EC work "Star Light Star Bright". I'm too much of a wimp to risk damaging my Cochran reprints so you're going to have to put up with the color version, but in this case the Marie Severin color guides really work to maximum effect (I dread to think what the now stalled EC Archive editions with their horrible computer coloring would have done with this masterpiece).

Craig who has to be my favorite EC artist, was a truly masterful story teller and this story shows him at the peak of his powers, there are a lot of very clever devices by which he actually puts the reader inside the head of the protagonist of the story, the wonderfully monickered Hartley Quimb the newly appointed master of Dethmoor Asylum.

It's worth noting that Craig an absolute perfectionist in terms of his artistry was in at the beginning of EC and in the early days formed part of a triumvirate of Gaines, Feldstein and himself in directing the fortunes of EC comics from Love comics, through Westerns, Space Operas and Crime Busting Police Cases to New Trend Horror. But although he had attended The Art Students League of New York as a teenager he had received no formal art training in terms of degrees or grades and made his inroads into the comic business in much the same way as many of his colleagues by working his way up through the studio system with a break for war service.

In Craig's case and coupled with his natural diffidence this self perceived lack of formal tuition, was for Craig an ongoing source of self reproach and held back his work output as he constantly drew - erased, redrew - erased, ad infinitum. The process was painful to observe and despite the efforts of the ever pragmatic and totally driven Al Feldstein to help his colleague speed up his production by collaborating on artworking stories under the pseudonym F. C. Aljohn the fact remained that for Johnny Craig producing artwork was like pulling teeth. He once remarked that he was supposed to produce three stories a month and would be lucky if he managed one.

But it is this perfectionism and the amount of thought and consideration that Craig applied to his craft that makes his stories so powerful. A gifted writer as well as artist he was constantly seeking ways to improve and while as Gaines remarked, there seemed to be a computer in Johnny's head which further slowed down his output as page rates went up it was very much the case of someone trying to maximize the amount of time they could justify in creating comics that would be the best they could produce.

Craig's EC legacy wasn't the quantity of work he produced it was simply the quality and in that and even amongst the league of EC giants he still for me is unbeatable.

Cloud 109 - In 3-D!!! A Quick Guide to Making 3-D Comics

Monday's posting on those halcyon days of 3-D comics made me think about the processes involved in creating the artwork and how close they were to the way images are generated in Illustrator. The difference between working in Illustrator and Photoshop is best summed up by using the analogy of creating a picture through paper cutouts (Illustrator) as opposed to working with a programme (Photoshop)that in many ways emulates the experience of drawing and painting with pencil and brush, albeit cybernetically with multiple undos and layers to boot.

So I tiddled around with the first page of Cloud 109 created a new file and started shunting various elements in their own respective layers to the right (I'll do a more fulsome tutorial in the New Year) whilst retaining my original file. Thereby creating two slightly different views replicating the kind of stereo impression of the characters as they wander through the alien landscape.

I then imported the files into Photoshop and via some more technical wizardry (tutorial in January) created a green file for the right eye and a red file for the left eye using a genuine 3-D comic as my template and guide.

Then I dragged one file in a transparent layer on top of the other and "By George!" there was my page looking not unlike those fabulous EC 3-D comics from 1954!

The only downside to all this being that I can't supply you readers with the red/green or blue glasses that you need to wear. But you might still have some lurking around the house from the recent Channel 4 3-D extravaganza. If you have make sure you look at this page with the red lens over the left eye and then it should work.

"What about all of us that haven't got those fershlugginer 3-D glasses?" I hear you ask. Ahhh ... Well I've thought about that too and you guys are even luckier as you can look at the page in 3-D AND colour!!! Here's the page, just download it and open it up on your desktop and then gaze at it for a bit, let your eyes relax and gradually let them cross - at this stage you should start to be aware that there is a third "cross-eyed" image starting to happen between the two original images. At this point just hang in there and after a while this image will start to come into focus, it's a bit like looking at those old fashioned stereoscopic photos but without the aid of a viewer but it does work.

O.K that's enough technical wizardry for today, in the meantime David and I have temporarily relased Gina, Cary and Rabby from the confines of the dungeon so they can get wasted over Christmas but we will bung them back in time for you to pick up on their exploits from Wednesday January 6th.

Meantime here's a Richard Corben Santa story from Creepy, plus a one page bio which appeared around the same time.

Reed Crandall's EC Legacy

Al Feldstein's observation that when Reed Crandall entered his office looking for work at EC he fell on his knees so great was his admiration for the man's work is no exaggeration. Crandall you'll recall was one of the artists working at Iger's comic shop when Feldstein first started working there as a cleaner upper of pencils and general office boy.

Crandall's output at Iger had included a host of superheroes including Uncle Sam, The Ray, Dollman and most notably Blackhawk. Iger's chief client was Everett "Busy" Arnold and when Arnold saw his work he was put under contract to Arnold to work for him exclusively, a position he held for the next twelve years. His work was so captivating that other artists would leave their desks to watch him at work, in the end he was allowed to work from home but even when he was delivering his assignments there would be a general hubbub of excitement as he opened his folio.

Like a lot of his contemporaries his career was interrupted by a couple of years war service but his contract with Arnold continued and he swiftly picked up the traces on his return from service. By the time he entered EC's 225 Lafayette Street office in 1953 he was a seasoned veteran and ready for whatever assignment Gaines and Feldstein cared to throw at him.

One of his first productions was the truly compelling "Carrion Death" which appeared in Shock Suspenstories No. 9. He was destined to remain as one of EC's regulars until the comics ceased publication some two years later. Gaines only regret was that they didn't get hold off him sooner, reflecting that had Crandall been on board since the start his output for EC would have doubled.

Crandall continued to work in comics after the demise of EC securing a contract with Treasure Chest Comics which guaranteed him a degree of financial security. In addition to which, as well as producing the occasional comic for Gilberton's Classic Comics, he also worked for Atlas comics and then during the sixties he expanded his clientele to include the Warren line of horror magazines where he created some truly stunning work.

Sadly like several other of the EC greats, Crandall did have an alcohol problem and while it hadn't undermined his work when he was working for EC it did start to interfere with his drawing from the late sixties onwards. His last work was for Warren and it's in the pages of Creepy from the early seventies that one can detect the decline. His marriage having disintegrated he left New York and moved to Witchita Kansas to look after his ailing mother. Unable to secure work as a comic artist he was obliged in his latter years to work as a janitor and night watchman at a Pizza Hut until he suffered a debilitating stroke and his last few years were spent in a care home where he eventually passed away at the age of 58.

But when he was at the top of his game he was truly one of the greatest and this story is a mesmerizing example of that talent.

3-D-Mentia!!!

In 1954 as events were conspiring against William Gaines', he was still determined to be at the forefront of new developments in comic reading. As a result and hot on the heels of the 3-D craze sweeping U.S. movie audiences, comic publishers were experimenting with applying the same technology to the printed page. The first 3-D comic with the imaginative title "Three Dimensional Comics" had sold over a million copies the previous year and it's inventor Leonard Maurer in partnership with his brother Norman and Cartoonist Joe Kubert (yes - THE Joe Kubert) had hopes of licensing the technology to other comic publishers.

That was until the ever resourceful Gaines who was already the owner of a StereoRealist camera, made a search of patents and discovered the whereabouts of the original inventor of stereoscopic cartoons for newspaper repro, who had taken out a patent for precisely this procedure in 1936. Gaines swiftly made contact with the now frail and elderly Freeman H. Owens and bought the patent off him for the princely sum of $100.00. He then initiated a patent infringement suit against all his rivals and whilst the case was ultimately dismissed as being vexatious in the extreme the damage was done as regards the ambitions of Maurer and his partners and 3-D comics were destined to become yet another in a parade of developments which in retrospect seem more like gimmicks than real pushing of the boundaries.

However Gaines' footwork did enable him to exploit the medium with his own band of highly talented creatives and 2 E.C. 3-D comics were published. The first titled simply 3-D EC Classics was a collection of four stories from across the range of EC's output. The second collection Three Dimensional Tales From The Crypt of Terror reprised a selection of stories from EC's horror output.

A third collection devoted to the best of EC's science fiction comics was prepared but never saw print. Eventually the four stories were reprinted in the EC fanzine Squa Tront and Wally Wood's Witzend, where Wood's masterful treatment of "Spawn of Venus" finally made it's first appearance.

A note on the production process undertaken by the artists concerned is worth running past you.
The first image you can see is a page of original artwork from Wood's "V-Vampires" which was arguably the most successful of the stories to see print. As you might be able to discern what you are in effect looking at is a series of cels with artwork on each cel representing a layer with the final layer being the base board background artwork on which all the other cels are affixed.

The procedure for the artists involved was painful in the extreme.

Firstly the artist would pencil the page on an ordinary sheet of art paper with holes punched into the top margin which he would affix to an animator's peg board. When the penciling was complete he would note down next to every item drawn what layer it would ultimately appear on. You'll notice the numbers on Woody's penciled page second image down.

Then he would start tracing onto celluloid using the peg bar to affix the pre-punched cel sheet so that everything remained in register. All figures and objects on that particular layer are thus traced onto the cel.

When each layer of cel inking is complete he repeats the process apart from the last and deepest (stereoscopically speaking) which is inked up on the original sheet of art paper.

But that's not the end of the process for the artist, as each item must be rendered opaque while it's surrounding cel remains transparent. To achieve this the artist then needs to flip over each cel and paint on the reverse side of each drawn element with white paint again much in the manner of the trace and paint department of animation studios for much of the past century.

Tedious in the extreme - what!? And of course for each level (most publishers would settle for three or four but EC went for five to six), it was necessary to include loads of extra detail that wouldn't normally be required in a regular comic, the kind of detail that disappears behind objects but in 3-D comics needs to be drawn.

The final artwork was then sent off to repro where it would be shot as it was delivered and then at the next stage each layer would be shunted a bit to the right, the further away the background elements the deeper the shunt.

Then one photo is printed in red and the next is printed in green and the resultant page is viewed through those wacky looking red-green 3-D glasses and an illusion of 3-D is experienced by the viewer.


An absolute nightmare to draw but the results of the best comics and in particular Wood's "V-Vampires" is truly impressive. Anyway here's "Spawn of Venus", see if you can spot the panel where the charming street scene from the third image down appears.

Reflection of Death

We continue the ongoing seasonal take on ghost and horror stories - all part of the influences that inform the artwork I am busily creating for David Orme's wonderful Cloud 109 script. There was something that Dave Morris (author of Mirabilis) mentioned the other day about his first introduction to E.C. comics being via the Ballantine paperbacks that appeared in the mid sixties. The same applied to my experience, I can well remember uncovering a copy of the "Tales from the Crypt" Ballantine book replete with Frazetta cover in one of Hastings' many second hand bookshops and being in an absolute lather of excitement as I inspected it's contents.

The book must have been good because my dad also purloined it for an afternoon read. There were eight stories in total reprinted within, each tier of panels being printed in crisp black and white sideways on, one tier per page. There was something definitely a bit dodgy about both the style and the subject matter of the little book, which immediately consigned it to the realm of trashville as regards the way grown up society would regard such a product. Consequently and rather guiltily I loved it.

The stories were really compelling too, this was my first introduction to the work of Graham Ingles and Johnny Craig as well as Reed Crandall and George Evans. Jack Davis I was already familiar with via the Ballantine Mad reprints, but there was one other artist who was as yet unfamiliar - Al Feldstein.

The story of his that was selected for inclusion in the book was perhaps the most gripping of all, "Reflection of Death" was a truly chilling story made doubly unsettling by the strength of Feldstein's imagery, which although somewhat primitive when compared to the likes of Johnny Craig or George Evans did have a truly arresting intensity which resonated in a way that not many other comics had. I still have several panels of this story burned with great vividness into my subconscious - the story as far as I was concerned was the most disquieting tale that I had come across within the pages of a comic.

The thing I didn't appreciate at the time was that Feldstein had also written the bulk, if not all, of the stories that so gripped my attention. His entrance into the field of comic books had been like many of his contemporaries a somewhat serendipitous journey. Having won a prize in 1938 for a design of the New York World's Fair Poster, the thirteen year old Feldstein had decided to commit to a career in art but being a pragmatist had envisaged a career in art teaching. Consequently he attended New York's High School of Art and Music but it was during the Depression, money was tight and his parents could barely afford to provide him with the subway fare. He needed some kind of part time work and embarked on a series of jobs including working as a Pin Boy in a bowling alley. It was a friend who suggested that he might try his hand at working in comics and Feldstein who was too poor to have any comics of his own borrowed some and knocked out some samples, which although they didn't gain him any comic book commissions did enable him to work as an assistant at the Iger Studios where he encountered the likes of Reed Crandall, Lou Fine and Matt Baker destined to become famous as the artist who delineated the Phantom Lady, who's style and subject matter was to be a key influence on the young Feldstein.

A break for war service followed and afterwards, now married and intent on reviving his studies under the G.I. Bill Feldstein returned to the Iger Studio whilst awaiting admission to Columbia University. But marital responsibilities were bearing down on the young Al and with his wife wanting to start a family he realized that he would have to abandon his ambition to become an art teacher. This coupled with the fact that he was already earning more than a starting teacher convinced him to throw in his lot with Iger.

His weekly rate with Iger was $75.00 but when Feldstein discovered that Iger was then selling on his artwork to comic publishers for $35.00 a page, of which Feldstein could produce a page and a half per day, he swiftly concluded that all he needed to do was go freelance.

This was the route that was destined to bring him to the door of William Gaines, who was another young man with dreams of pursuing a career in teaching which had been thwarted by events beyond his control. Together they would make comics history.

Gesture Drawing (Revisited)

Essentially there are two ways of drawing a figure from imagination, the first and in some ways most sensible way is to conceive of the figure as a collection of blocks and cylinders and keeping true to the pre-designated proportions of the average human or the somewhat idealized proportions of the kind of people who regularly sashay around Manga and Superhero comics you then proceed in an orderly direction to construct your drawing. The example here is courtesy of George Bridgman's Life Drawing a book that was recommended to me by none other than Ian Gibson, who was less than impressed with my parlous figure drawing. It is I think a little less parlous these days and any success that I have achieved in this direction I attribute to Messrs Gibson and Bridgman.

Anyway lets assume that you have at least got a rudimentary feel for anatomy and that you have immersed yourself in some good life drawing books and classes aren't a bad idea either, plus most of us see people on a daily basis in one form or another so carry a sketch book and draw them whenever possible. You're building up knowledge and avoiding the trap of settling into faulty pre-conceptions of figure work.

So you've got all this knowledge tucked under your belt, now you start to work up your figures from imagination, with method one which I'll call the considered approach you continue following the constructivist building up of the figure as a series of blocks and cylinders following what you've absorbed from Bridgman. This has the advantage of putting you in the position of having to analyze exactly what it is that the figure is doing before you put pencil to paper - it really forces you to think.

But this is also the disadvantage of this approach - it is considered and it doesn't allow for you prodding your subconscious.

Method two, which is often referred to as gesture drawing is the polar opposite to the constructivism of method one. With gesture drawing you absorb the lessons of Bridgeman and then you throw the book away and scribble what you feel the figure might be doing. This is much, much more intuitive but it's also more exciting. It's not unlike being confined to bed with nothing to stare at but a damp patch on some textured wallpaper - after a while you can start to see the most amazing scenes revealing themselves and this is essentially what you're doing with gesture drawing. You are creating the opportunity to stimulate zones of your subconscious and pull forth memories and impressions which drawing in the pre-ordained manner of the constructivist approach doesn't cater for.

Pre-eminent amongst the school of gesture artists is Frank Frazetta, here's some of his drawings which shows his sense of rhythm and fluidity that suffuses all of his work and a couple of pages from his last comic book story from Creepy No 1. After this story appeared Frazetta devoted himself entirely to his painting producing a simply phenomenal run of covers for Warren, but with this story in contrast to the stories of all the other artists appearing in that issue Frazetta's piece stands out as being uncompromisingly visceral and edgy, everything is crackling with life and dynamism, even if individually some aspects of the drawing aren't as fully resolved as the Reed Crandall or Al Williamson pieces appearing in that same magazine. You can see the influence it had on a young Berni Wrightson in the following Web of Horror story, which first appeared in issue one of that magazine when Wrightson was still only twenty but clearly absorbing the lessons of the master.

Interesting how this story neatly anticipates the compulsive and addictive tendencies of on-line gamers, which in 1969 would have seemed an incomprehensible concept to most Web of Horror readers.