Cloud 109 - The Eighteenth Instalment

Further homage to that incredible game Dungeon Master, the most successful and innovative game of it's generation when it first appeared on the Atari ST in 1987. The FTL (Faster Than Light Team) were all in their twenties, in fact at least one of them was going through college at the time.
Interesting to note that Nancy Holder wife of the game's producer Wayne, who wrote the script for the manual (which is really useful as you stumble through those dungeons) went on to become a successful writer with several TV shows under her belt including "Buffy The Vampire Slayer", "Sabrina The Teenage Witch" and "Smallville".

All of which is only of passing interest to Gina, Cary and Rabby as they have much more pressing issues to deal with...

Woody's Apprentices - Ralph Reese

One of the enjoyable aspects of Warren magazines throughout the 1970's was the sheer unpredictability of their content, during the previous Goodwin Golden Age you did after a while know what to expect, which would essentially be a stunning Frazetta cover with Gray Morrow standing in from time to time with some superb covers of his own and contents mainly scripted by Goodwin and art by Ditko, Morrow, Torres, Crandall, Orlando, Grandenetti, Mastroserio and Toth.

All good stuff!

But after a while as with EC comics some ten years earlier, you became accustomed to the formula, with the succession of young artists and writers all developing their skills in the pages of Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella during the seventies, pretty much anything could happen. It was therefore a lot less predictable in terms of a reading experience, some of the stuff was truly amazing, some wasn't but it was never boring - that's for sure.

When Ralph Reese's wacky and off the wall strip "Warmonger of Mars" appeared in the Mars themed issue of Creepy 87, it was more like stumbling through a time portal and reading one of the Kurtzman era Mad comics with art which conjured up Woody's "Flesh Garden". Hardly surprising as Woody had scripted the story, Wood's appearances in Warren magazines were fleeting to say the least as James Warren was on Woody's ever expanding list of comic book editors and publishers that he regarded with contempt if not outright loathing.

Reese had in fact been closely associated with Wood from the mid sixties onwards, as by the age of sixteen he had pretty much left home and still nurturing dreams of pursuing a career in illustration had hove'd up at Larry Ivie's apartment. Ivie who was a comics devotee of extraordinary enthusiasm had managed to blag himself a variety of comicsville gigs including scripting Frazetta's solo story for the debut issue of Creepy. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of comics and a collection to back it up, including a considerable quantity of EC comics. Reese now occupying a piece of Ivie's apartment floor space, was particularly impressed with the ECs and with the work of Wallace Wood in particular.

Coincidentally one of Ivie's current jobs was acting as Wood's assistant inker on Captain America. Which in Ivie's case amounted to ruling panel borders for Wood. Nothing else was required, however such was Ivie's missionary zeal that he entirely neglected to fulfill this function, rather he devoted himself to obsessively reworking the costumes and shield of the Cap and Bucky so that they would be identical to their 1940's incarnations rather than the, to Ivie's mind, pallid redesigns that had occurred when they were revived by Lee and Kirby a few years earlier.

Needless to say Ivie's tenure with Woody was not going to last that long but not before he had the opportunity of introducing the homeless and penniless Reese to Woody, who having left home himself at a very early age was generous of spirit and also generous of means to anyone that had the talent and inclination to assist him in the never ending cycle of batting out artwork to meet impossible deadlines and could endure working in a gray haze of tobacco fumes, could digest junk food and sleep on a small floor space and engage with Wood on all matters pertaining to comics, psychology, music, women and the vicissitudes of life in general.

Reese took to this demanding life style with enthusiasm and energy and his tasks from when Woody hired him at the relatively generous wage of fifty dollars a week rapidly upped from drawing panel borders, to backgrounds, inking, scripting and acting as Woody's sounding board cum ideas man as they strove to meet the omnipresent delivery dates which so governed life in the studio which they shared with Wood's other assistants such as Dan Adkins and Wayne Howard.

To give you an idea of how well Ralph Reese absorbed the ideas and working practices of his mentor, here's a very early sample of the eighteen year old Reese's work from the first issue of 'Web of Horror', plus the story I mentioned earlier from Creepy 87.

As they say Enjoy!

And a tip of the hat to Mr Door Tree whose excellent Golden Age Comic Book Stories blog has got me out of a hole as my three copies of Web of Horror are still MIA.

Tales of Pirates and Outlaws

Yesterday's post which looked at Mervyn Peake's amazing illustrations for Treasure Island, did mention in passing the work of N.C. Wyeth who had also illustrated Stevenson's text some thirty plus years earlier.

Wyeth's illustrations are in a very different vein to Peake's and really it is pointless to even speculate as to which are the strongest. Peake's works are very dark and brooding and emphasize the almost visceral terror of finding yourself as a nine year old boy having to overcome the perils of the very threatening environment that surrounds you. When you look at Peake's illustrations you are seeing the world through the eyes of Jim Hawkins - hence the atavistic sense of terror that suffuses these great works.

Wyeth's approach which was entirely in keeping with the expectations of the audience he was communicating with is entirely different. Here the world of Treasure Island is presented as spectacle on a grand scale. These illustrations you are viewing as an onlooker rather than a terrified participant. Wyeth who was working during a revolution in print technology was able to see his paintings reproduced via the huge breakthrough in colour lithography which in effect liberated illustrators from the misery of having to have their work re-interpreted by engravers and presented as an approximation of the original artist's intent in black and white.

The development of cheap and accurate colour lithography created new opportunities for publishers and the resultant expansion of affordable books and mass circulation magazines meant that the career prospects of talented artists such as Wyeth were very promising indeed.

Not that illustration was as accessible a career option as it later became. One of the pioneers of the school of heroic fantasy illustration that was to provide such a powerful inspirational touchstone for Wyeth was Howard Pyle. Pyle was of the previous generation of illustrators whose work had literally been liberated from the confines of monochrome engraving and Pyle it was who was destined to become Wyeth's mentor and champion when the older man invited him to join the alumni of his recently opened school of illustration in Wilmington Delaware.

Few were chosen to attend this most prestigious of institutes, all the artists who studied there went on to become successes in their own right but out of all the people who studied there N.C. Wyeth seemed to be the most favored of them all, his work being frequently singled out for praise by the ever demanding Pyle. Stylistically he was perhaps the closest to the great man and in common with all the fortunate few who studied at Pyle's purpose built studios he was guaranteed work by the time he had completed his studies as introductions and subsequent commissions to the art editors of mass circulation and illustration hungry magazines such as McCall's, Scribner's and Colliers were all part of the training that the young artists received.

The market that Pyle and Wyeth were catering for was one who were devoid of other demands on their hunger for visual stimuli, there was no television, cinema was in it's infancy and not much beyond the novelty stage and the theatre and music hall were for many at best just an occasional treat, there was therefore an unsatiated demand for stirring adventure and serializations of classic texts such as Robin Hood and Treasure Island with subsequent book editions featuring newly commissioned colour artwork by the new and rising stars of illustration were in great demand.

So here for your further delectation are some samples from that bygone era the first four being examples of Howard Pyle's artistry (including the superb "Dead Men Tell No Tales" - the captain and the mate have just bumped off the three sailors who have helped them hide the treasure. The mate is just checking the corpses for signs of life, but the captain still has one loaded pistol while both the mate's are empty - is he going to shortly be joining them?) and then a look at an early Howard Pyle illustration and it's subsequent re-interpretation as an engraving (culled from the excellent Visions of Adventure published by Watson Guptill) and then the rest of the samples are by N.C. Wyeth from "Robin Hood', "The Black Arrow" and (of course) "Treasure Island".

Peake's Treasure Island - A Disquieting Vision of Childhood Fantasy

Many of the classics of children's literature adhere strongly to the principle of putting the child at the heart of the story. For books such as "Emil and the Detectives", "The Silver Sword", "The Jungle Book", "The Chronicles of Narnia", "Oliver Twist", "Moonfleet", "Children of the Oregon Trail" and "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" children ultimately achieve a degree of control of their destiny through their own fortitude and resourcefulness. The need for children to feel they can at least exert a degree of control over the very big and uncertain world into which they are entering is a developmental essential and is a traditional dynamic for most children's books.

There is no greater exemplar of this maxim than Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island". The tale of the cabin boy Jim Hawkins overcoming the machinations and vicissitudes of a band of cut throat pirates, is a dark and uneasy tale and a story that has been visited and revisited by generations of illustrators.

When Mervyn Peake commenced work on this classic tale in 1947, he and his young family had just moved to the island of Sark, a place he had fallen in love with when he had lived there some fourteen years earlier. The work he produced was distinguished by it's dark and brooding atmosphere. In contrast to N.C. Wyeth's powerful and romantic illustrations, Peake's vision is altogether darker and is very much the vision of a child beset by the threats and dark forces that the likes of Blind Pew, Ben Gunn and the charismatically amoral Long John Silver embody.

With his eldest son Sebastian modeling as Jim Hawkins and inspiration provided by the rugged beauty of Sark, Peake's illustrations for this classic text remain amongst the most powerful yet produced. The influence of many of Peake's favorite illustrators of yore such as Dore, Cruickshank, Phiz and Hogarth can be detected in the fine line cross-hatching and stippling he applied to these often macabre and disturbing visions of the lawless society into which Hawkins has found himself cast adrift.

Here then is a selection of some of the illustrations that appear in this book, the good news is the complete edition is still in print.