Drawing From Source

In the old days when I was a young illustration hopeful - hope as they say springs eternal and it certainly needs to if you are going to pursue any kind of a creative career, we were always told by practitioners of the craft that what every illustrator required (apart from the obvious ability to be able to draw) was to start compiling a scrapbook of reference material. This they remarked would stand you in good stead for those occasions when the Radio Times (everybody seemed to work for the Radio Times in those days) would phone you up on a Friday afternoon and ask you to supply them with an illustration of Thor Heyerdahl standing on his raft Kon-Tiki navigating his way round the Polynesian Islands for first thing the following Monday. Other than your scrapbook all you really had left was a trip to the library where you would while away hours trying to find the necessary reference, before dicovering that the local school was doing a project on Thor Heyerdahl and all the books on Kon-Tiki were out.

Consequently a comprehensive collection of scrapbooks each with a particular theme such as figures in action/ figures in repose/ wildlife/ historical etc, etc was considered the best way to proceed with certainty and confidence towards the desired position of being able to supply a client with whatever subject matter they might throw at you.

I never really did go down the scrapbook route, an acute resistance to the act of taking scissors to printed matter, plus a degree of not really being able to commit which bits of colour supplements to keep and which bits to discard without having any indication of what briefs fickle fate had in store for you meant that my best resource was the collection of bound copies of Look and Learn that our parents had indulgently bestowed upon my brother and I over a period of several years. In fact as they were indexed and entirely focused on illustrative and photographic fact based content they were probably the best second string you could hope for as a practitioner of the craft of illustration.

This now seems light years ago, as all any illustrator in search of reference needs to do these days is to happily trawl the internet for whatever visual props they require. In this page from Cloud 109, the script call for a bleak low rise block of council flats as Gina and Rabby head towards Cary's gaffe to try and rouse him from the stupor that too much dalliance within the portals of Cloud 109 has cast him into. The source photo was very easy to locate and from there with a few more photos located on Flickr the three panel sequence here was very easy to assemble. There are little touches such as the discarded "Wickes" catalogues which I stumbled across in my researches, when one photographer had dryly noted that the lobby he was photographing was strewn with the things, the deliverer having given up on the project when he surveyed the state of the flats he was supposed to be canvassing for prospective sales.

There is always a multiplicity of considerations when utilizing reference material but storytelling has to be the primary dynamic to what you include, otherwise you become a slave to your reference sources and your staging of events may well be compromised without you even knowing it. The best way to avoid this kind of compromise is to at least thumbnail out your page layout before commencing the search for your reference sources.

As an example I'm going to offer up these two pages from Herge's very John Buchanesque "L'ile Noir" / "Black Island".
The first is from the original colour edition which was in print in France and Belgium until 1966 when it was entirely re-drawn for publication in the U.K. by Methuen, who had insisted that as it stood it would not be sufficiently accurate to appeal to a British readership.

As a consequence Herge's assistant Bob De Moor was sent over to the UK and with varying degrees of cooperation, such as none from H.M. Constabulary but lots from the English Tourist Board and British Rail, set about photographing locations around Sussex and beyond. The resultant book was a tour de force in terms of detail but rather weirdly the drive and dynamics of the original book had been lost in the process.

So here's the two pages - what do you think?

Into The Heart of Darkness

Well it is November, and as the days draw in there's nothing like a downbeat blog to get you all fired up for the day.

But in a way this is a continuation of yesterday's look at the life of Wallace Wood, whose battle with alcoholism ultimately ended with the poor guy blowing his brains out rather than struggling to eke out some kind of existence as a half blind cartoonist with chronic liver failure.

Despite the exacting requirements of comic strip creation, there is a surprisingly long roll call of very high profile cartoonists whose predeliction for the demon drink led to their ultimate downfall, but perhaps the most lurid of these would when compared to the likes of Graham Ingles, Reed Crandall, Bill Everett and Woody, all greats of U.S. comics "golden age" be amongst the least familiar of the names assembled.

Bob Wood was by all accounts a relatively modest talent when he entered the comic book industry in 1940 but by great good fortune he managed to hook up with another artist/ writer by name of Charles Biro and by sheer chutzpah and drive Biro with Wood assisting began to create a variety of superheroes for firstly MLJ comics and then shortly thereafter and with commendable business savvy Biro set up a deal with Lev Gleason publications by which he and Wood would take a share of the profits for the characters and titles they created.

So the team set to work with a vengeance, Biro writing, drawing and editing with Wood's assistance a string of successful titles such as "Daredevil" (the 1940's version was a boomerang wielding mute clad in a skintight costume, red one side, blue the other), "Silver Streak" and a host of spin off titles as each character spawned their own sidekick's mini series.

By all accounts the Biro/ Wood team were doing well, the volume of work was such that they were subcontracting writing and art chores to assistants who themselves would go on to even greater things. But it wasn't until a trip to the cinema by messrs Biro and Wood to see an MGM film with the lurid title of "Crime Does Not Pay" that the duo hit upon the idea that would transform their already well auspiced fortunes and push them into the big league of comic publication.

July 1942 saw the appearance on U.S. newstands of the first issue (numbered 23 for any comicbook anoraks out there as it continued the numbering from Silver Streak comics) of "Crime Does Not Pay". The premise was simple, ultra violent and lurid potted biographies of real life criminals whose lives would be inevitably terminated in a devastating hail of government endorsed hot lead, appealing to the voyeuristic needs of it's male teen target audience, while attempting to leaven the grotesque proceedings with at least a modest show of self righteous approbrium at the doings of Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, Ma Parker and John Dillinger. The issue was a sell out and sales continued to grow throughout the latter part of the 1940's when the appetite for superhero comics was on the wane.

By 1948 sales of "Crime Does Not Pay" had reached a heady one million copies a month and the comic's success had spawned an army of imitators of varying quality, each trying to outdo the other in terms of just how much blood soaked violence, they could push at their readership.

It couldn't last forever, by 1954 there was a Senate Subcommittee investigation into the supposedly pernicious effect that "crime" and "horror" comics were having on the nation's youth. A book by Dr. Frederick Wetham entitled, "Seduction of the Innocent" made the case with such an array of pseudo psychology and lurid examples of headless corpses and eyes about to be pierced by syringes that middle America was gripped by a state of near comics hysteria that threatened to overshadow the communist witch hunts being conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy. As a result of the immediate backlash, distributors refused to carry comics that in any way seemed to fall into the category of deviant and corrupting. The resultant comics were so anodyne and lifeless that even if the distributors were happy to carry them again, no one could be bothered to read them and as a result comic creators fortunes dwindled.

None more dramatically than Bob Wood's, with the comics and creative partnership now just an increasingly distant memory he turned ever more to drink and his already troubled relationships with women grew ever more dysfunctional and violent. By 1958 his only means of support was hacking out sleazy cartoons for low brow porn magazines.

During the late summer of that year Wood in a state of near hysteria hopped a cab and told the bemused cabby, "I'm in terrible trouble. I'm going to get a couple of hours sleep and jump in the river". With the admirable insousciance which so typifies your average taxi driver, the cabby responded; "Oh yeah? What happened? Did you kill somebody?" To which Wood replied, "Yes, I killed a woman who was giving me a bad time in Room 91 at the Irving Hotel. Why don't you call somebody at the newspaper and make yourself a few dollars?"

After dropping Wood off at Greenwich Village's Regina Residence Hotel, the cabby went straight to the police who went straight to Wood's hotel and finding that a man matching Wood's description had registered under the name of Roger Turner proceeded to his room where they the found Wood stripped to his undies, his clothes being so soaked in blood that the police had to borrow a pair of trousers from the hotel manager before they took Wood away for questioning.

The police then made the journey to Room 91 at the Irving Hotel and found the bloodied and battered body of a woman lying amidst a sea of empty whisky bottles. It transpired in the subsequent trial that Wood after an eleven day drinking binge had bashed in the head of his unfortunate fiance with a steam iron.

Surprisingly in spite of the severity of the attack that Wood had enacted he only received a four to five year jail sentence for first degree manslaughter, the judge explaining his relative leniency thus, "It appears to me that you and the deceased were sick persons mentally because of your drinking and the probation report shows to me that this episode was an explosion of alchoholism and intoxication".

Wood served three years before being released into a less than reassuring world, unable to find work and unable to repay the heavies who had advanced him money whilst serving time in Sing Sing he was murdered and his remains unceremoniously deposited on the New Jersey Turnpike a deeply ironic end to one of the progenitors of one of the U.S.'s most lurid comic books.

Oh yes and while we're on the subject of dark places this is where Gina, Cary and Rabby now are:

Reflections in a Golden Eye Part 2

Yesterday's look at ways of adding that vital spark of life to the characters that inhabit the weird and wonderful world of Cloud 109, got me to thinking about an earlier exemplar in the art of making comic book eyes really sparkle.

I first discovered the work of Wally Wood in the mid sixties by which time I was well and truly hooked on American comics. I'd already discovered the delights of the elegantly delineated superheros that both Carmine Infantino and Gil Kane were creating over at D.C. comics and Jack Kirby's powerhouse renditions of The Fantastic Four, Thor and Captain America, not to mention Steve Ditko's beautifully idiosynchratic Spiderman over at Marvel, but Wallace Wood had slipped past my gaze until I stumbled over a series of comics he was doing for a relatively minor publisher under the title of Thunder Agents. Beautiful work indeed everything was in your face as with the other guys but Wally's work had this extra ... well lustre would be the most apt term to describe what made his work stand out.

It started with the eyes, he would nine times out of ten draw a circle for the iris and then dot in the pupil but after that and here came the masterstroke, he would then drop in a solid black over the top half of the iris and then add a white highlight and voila! Eyes with lustre, sparkle even...

But it didn't stop there with old Woody, no siree, by the time he'd finished with you your senses were assailed with highlights, reflections and deep rich shadows creating a vision of tomorrow with such purity and conviction that you just felt that for Woody these alien and futuristic worlds were a part of his here and now.

It wasn't until later, much later in 1981 after he'd shot himself that I really started to discover what a truly tragic life he'd led for much of the latter part of his career. He was in essence so driven that he became a total workaholic, working impossible hours, churning out pages and pages of comics with the aid of a variety of young assistants and devotees, who would all pile into his increasingly cramped studios and ingest the smog of the endless cigarettes, feverishly working away on backgrounds, inking, sourcing swipe references, making cups of black coffee and occasionaly being sent out in a quest for junk food while Woody regaled them with endless banter and his own particularly cynical take on the comics industry and life in general.

The trouble was that Woody's life style and ongoing battle with alcoholism were rapidly doing him in and in the end with chronic liver failure and a stroke which robbed him of the sight of one eye he could see no alternative but suicide. A truly tragic tale but his influence on comics and succesive generations of illustrators has been profound and will continue.

Here courtesy of one of Woody's assistants Larry Hama who pieced together this Wood "How To" guide for aspiring comic artists comes the following recollection:

I worked for Wally Wood as his assistant in the early ’70s, mostly on the Sally Forth and Cannon strips he did for the Overseas Weekly. I lettered the strips, ruled borders, swipe-o-graphed reference, penciled backgrounds and did all the other regular stuff as well as alternating with Woody on scripting Cannon and Sally Forth.

The “22 Panels” never existed as a collected single piece during Woody’s lifetime. Another ex-Wood assistant, Paul Kirchner had saved three Xeroxed sheets of the panels that would comprise the compilation. I don’t believe that Woody put the examples together as a teaching aid for his assistants, but rather as a reminder to himself. He was always trying to kick himself to put less labor into the work! He had a framed motto on the wall, “Never draw anything you can copy, never copy anything you can trace, never trace anything you can cut out and paste up.” He hung the sheets with the panels on the wall of his studio to constantly remind himself to stop what he called “noodling.”

When I was starting out as an editor at Marvel, I found myself in the position of having to coach fledgling artists on the basics of visual storytelling, and it occurred to me that the reminder sheets would help in that regard, but three eight-by-ten pieces of paper were a bit unwieldy, so I had Robby Carosella, the Marvel photostat guy at the time, make me re-sized copies of all the panels so I could fit them all on one sheet. I over-compensated for the half-inch on the height (letter paper is actually 8 1/2-by-11) so the main body of images once pasted up came a little short. I compensated for that by hand lettering the title.

Lastly and in case you were wondering, Gina, Cary and Rabby are not having an easy time in the dungeons. Pray for them ...

Reflections in a Golden Eye

They say that the eye is the gateway to the soul and with the characters of Gina, Cary and Rabby the eyes are indeed the key to what these guys are feeling and they way that they react to the increasingly bizarre events that overtake them.

The style that I adopted for creating the various degrees of reality that the three teens are subject to is in all cases, flat and linear, owing a debt of honour to both the ligne claire style of drawing best typified by the Herge studios but also to the linear style adopted by some of the current crop of Manga and Manga influenced artists as well as to the guys that started the whole thing, old Hokusai and his Japanese buddies.

The advantage of this approach apart from the simple elegance it bestows upon each and every frame is that it doesn't detract from the line work which is a frequent sin comitted with mind numbing regularity by a lot of mainstream comics where the colorist will attempt to bury the artist's carefully orchestrated line and solid blacks under a sea of tone and texture. Here the prosecution would like to cite the recent Dark Horse reprints of Barry Smith's original run of Conan comics as a stellar example of this kind of computer generated vandalism.

However there is no doubt that a little bit of tone here and there does add a nice degree of emphasis to the artwork and can be very important in advancing the story. No where is this more important than in the characters eyes, which is the clue that these are indeed living and breathing entities and not just another set of 2D cliches. I know this might sound a little extreme but for me, as I am sure applies to a lot of other comic creatives, these characters are real and I am desperately concerned about their welfare, they therefore have to have that vital spark of life and it's in their eyes that you will find their souls as well as see the world that's reflected around them.

All of which is very easy to achieve using a couple of tricks in Illustrator. Firstly as we work on this close up of Gina's eyes which are fully dilated as she realises the danger she and the rest of the troupe have stumbled into, we simply draw with the pencil tool a section of the eye radiating out from where the pupil would be, using the gradient tool in Illustrator (note you need to set both ends of the gradient spectrum with your light colour and your dark colour and for this to occur you need to have changed the setting in the colour tab from the default grayscale to CMYK).

Having created the first glowing section you then just need to copy and paste using the black arrow selection tool in the top left hand corner of the toolbox and move your second radiating eye section to the second eye. Then as the final touch create highlights using the ellipse tool and make them the core colour of the iris and finally cut and paste in front (Crtl+F) scale down the highlight and change to white and you've now got eyes that literally sparkle with apprehension as a million steel toothed zombies head their way.

Cloud 109 - The Fifth Instalment

Gina, Rabby and Cary are back in The Cloud 109 chatroom after an encounter with some particularly nasty steel toothed mini zombies.

Interesting aside for those of you interested in the provenance of the characters that appear in this ongoing epic. The character of Duke is modelled on a one time band mate of younger son Tom's, Mr Jimi Riddle, whose outfit The Riddles were an overnight sensation with bookings at the best London garage band venues, a tour of Sweden looming and talk of a distribution deal with Rough Trade Records.

Sadly they proved too much of a handful for their relatively elderly managers, whose memories of the punk era were at a variance with the hyper confontational stance of Jimi and Co, who would subject their audience to varying degrees of abuse according to their mood.

Managerless, carless and abandoned in the wasteland of chavtown on sea a.k.a. Hastings, Jimi with admirable chutzpah took himself off to London's East End and cobbled together another troupe of minstrels with no less a figure than Pete Doherty's very own Drew McConnell, filling in on bass for Tom whose attention was by this time otherwise engaged with a pink haired burlesque dancer over in Brighton. Jimi's still working on the grand project as I type and I can only wish the guy every success.

While we're on the subject of graphic novel character sources; Tintin's distinctive quiff was modelled on Herge's brother Paul, whose upward rise through the Belgian Army was tempered by the frequent ribbing he was subject to, often being referred to as Major Tintin. To counteract this lamentable state of affairs Paul Remi adopted a distinctly austere military haircut and took to wearing a monocle much in the manner of Erich Von Stroheim. The resultant new look was however mercilessly lampooned by Herge via the appearance of Colonel Sponz in "The Calculus Affair".

The best fantasies always have a deep rooted resource in the here and now.

November Stones

The more eagle eyed amongst you will have noticed the figure of Mick Jagger descending the stairs in the first panel of what is page 9 of the ongoing epic a.k.a. "Cloud 109". However this is not just any old Mick Jagger, this is the Mick Jagger of late 1968 frontman for a band that despite heady success and being the coolest bunch of individuals on the planet at least as regard the collective consciousness of 1968, had been off the touring circuit and off the nation's screens for much of the previous two years apart from numerous court appearances on a succession of drugs charges.

Guitarist and all round musical whizz kid Brian Jones had been the founder and driving force behind the Rolling Stones at least until their street savvy and sharp as a stiletto manager Andrew Loog Oldham had arrived, after which it was all downhill for Brian. By November 1968 both Oldham and Jones were history, Oldham's managerial talents now being the provenance of the very shady U.S. accountant Allen Klein and as regards Oldham's record production duties, well they were now considered redundant by Messrs Jagger and Richard. Jones in the meantime was succombing to the rigours of a continous cycle of pills and booze to alleviate the pain of having lost his band and his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, now happily shacked up with Keith Richard who along with Jagger were the driving force behind the Stones fortunes.

And while Jagger and Richards who had been famously busted a year before kept a low profile, poor old Jonesy just wasn't in a state to take appropriate precautions. As a consequence of the unceasing attentions of the long arm of the establishment the hapless Jones was a frequent guest at various judicial hearings.

All of which meant that as a result touring was problematic to say the least, the convictions meant that the U.S. was out and anyway they had a barely functioning guitarist and as if all that wasn't enough they had an enormous tax bill to pay which with typical bohemian fecklessness they were ill prepared to deal with. A problem exacerbated by the alarming realization that the money they thought they had was now no longer available courtesy of some Byzantine accounting schemes set up by their shady U.S. accountant/manager.

So creating new product and promoting it effectively was the route to at least some chance of being able to continue and to this end and with the much delayed launch of the album that was to restart their career the Stones needed a TV outlet, they couldn't visit the States so UK TV was all they had and as November hove around the slot most likely to provide this springboard was LWT's David Frost Show.

The resulting performance of "Sympathy for the Devil" was mesmeric, it was only ever broadcast the once in it's entirety but it's effect was spectacular and was talked about for years after by those obsessives who soak up every aspect of a band's creative output. The general assumption was that it was yet another casualty of the practice of wiping video tape to save money that was de rigeur throughout TV studios at the time. That was until a snippet appeared on a French TV documentary some ten years ago. One or two other snippets appeared but it wasn't until about a year ago that a 21 year old Russian Physics student started networking with collectors all around the world in an endeavour to gather up all the bits and edit them together that a serious attempt was made to show the rest of the world one of those seminal moments of rock history.

So here it is, the whole performance does exist but due to the usual legal hurdles this is the most we're going to see for the moment.

Madge Crumb - Unveiled

Well, I think (hope) that I've finally got Madge Crumb the controller of Cloud 109 looking like the controller of Cloud 109 should look. Dave Morris (writer who along with artist Leo Hartas are the creators of the wonderful and epic Mirabilis graphic adventure) posted on this blog and suggested a Madonna-esque solution and the more I thought about this idea the more I liked it.

So in she goes with a hint of a wet look spiral perm, with a couple of fronds hanging in front of the eyes - as you're never quite sure where you are with old Madge, she's not giving much away and you just know that she's definitely not on the level.

I've mentioned on an earlier posting how many of the people you see in the cyber lounge scenes have generously agreed to take a little time off from their dissolute and alternative life styles to make fleeting appearances on these pages and again I've included a few work in progress moments towards the end of the process of getting this particular page together.And then once this page is up for me it's back to the dungeons with the team as things start to go horribly weird on them.