Stuff I've Done--2

Health Consequences of Comics
It was 1959. I was ten years old, happy, and healthy. Especially happy, because I was clutching the latest issue of Cosmo, the Merry Martian. This offbeat comedy title had captured my young heart. I was sure it was the funniest comic I'd ever read. As soon as I got home from the drugstore, I fled to my favorite reading room (the bathroom) and while doing the ol' Number 2 I spread the comic on the floor in front of me so I could savor every panel.

Then it happened. I wish I remembered what the joke was that set me off. All I remember is letting out a huge explosion of laughter. And I barfed.

Like I said, I was healthy. There was no logical reason I should barf. But barf I did, and my mirth became heartbreak. There on the floor before me was my Cosmo comic under a big pile of vomit. I would never know how the story turned out. I left the comic lying there while I cleaned up, then I carefully rolled it up. Holding the book at arm's length I carried it outside and dropped it sadly into the trash can.

Of course Mom asked me what happened. "I threw up on my Cosmo, the Merry Martian comic," I replied truthfully.

Mom valiantly tried to find something wrong with me, but I was completely symptom-free. It was a one-time event. I never again laughed so hard that I barfed. It must have been something about that comic.

[Sidebar: Cosmo is one of those pleasures that was really great when I was ten years old. It didn't age well. At my advanced age I still chortle over Carl Barks' Scrooge McDuck adventures, but when I read a reprinted Cosmo story, I was disappointed at how lame it was. Oh, well, at least my health's safe.]

Image stolen from Don Markstein's Toonpedia.

Corriere dei Piccoli

A window onto a past window onto the past
This weekend I was excited to receive a gift of 38 tearsheets from Corriere dei Piccoli, the legendary children's supplement to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. A friend had owned them forever, forgetting just where they came from; having no idea what to do with them, he gave them to me! From hints in the articles I gather they were originally published in late 1933 and perhaps early 1934.

The pages were from two series of educational color pages illustrated by an artist whose signature I can't make out. The first series, "Come vestivano" ("How They Dressed"), pictured costumes from different regions and historical periods. Most of the subjects were Italian, though topics included things like "Costumes of the French Revolution" and "Costumes of Characters in The Three Musketeers." The example below presents Italian dress in the late 1300s. The text characterizes the "trecento" as having planted the seeds of modern united Italy. The drawings are rather nice and are given plenty of space.
The other series, closely related to the first, was "L'oriente favoloso" ("The Fabulous East"). Like the first series the pictures concentrated on costuming. The text presented general information about various Asian countries and their culture. This example discusses India, with an emphasis on how the caste system creates strife between classes and ethnic groups.The reverse sides of these pages provide an interesting glimpse into Italy of the 1930s. The pages are divided between a long article on some kid-related subject (this one is about "The World of Toys") and display ads. The ads are a mixed bag: many are directed at the kids themselves, but most seem to be aimed at their parents. In the sample below we find ads for a meat extract, a salt solution for soaking tired feet, a dentifrice (available as liquid, paste or powder), and a supplier of uniforms for the several Fascist youth organizations (flags and badges, too!).I have a particular fondness for Corriere dei Piccoli (roughly, The Children's Courier), because through it I was introduced to the world of European comics. In the late 1960s an Italian deli near my university stocked a handful of Italian magazines, among them CdP. Though I didn't know it, by that time CdP was in its final decline after running over half a century (the supplement began in 1908). It had long ago transformed from a newspaper supplement into a glossy weekly magazine of some 60 pages. Most of its comics were translations of Belgian Tintin features: Bruno Brazil, Bernard Prince, Michel Vaillant, etc. Being ignorant, I assumed at first these were Italian series. Only later did I discover the Belgian connection. 48-page adventures were serialized several pages per week. Occasionally a special issue would run a long story in its entirety; for example an adaptation of The Great Locomotive Chase by Argentinian cartoonist Arturo del Castillo.

Though a minority, original Italian material appeared, too. It was in CdP that I first encountered Aldo di Gennaro, Giorgio Trevisan, irrepressible Benito Jacovitti, and above all the incredible Dino Battaglia. Even Hugo Pratt popped up from time to time, though I didn't appreciate him until later when I discovered Corto Maltese.

During the time I was reading Corriere dei Piccoli signs of change appeared. The biggest change came in 1972 following a reader referendum. The venerable magazine's title was changed to Corriere dei Ragazzi. In 1908, piccoli, like its English equivalent children, was commonly applied to all pre-teens. But by the 1970s youths found the term demeaning. Ragazzi carried a connotation similar to kids in English. (Interestingly, children/kids went through a similar process in America about the same time.) Interior pages began appearing in black plus one color rather than full color. Going through a succession of editors, cost-cutting, and format changes, CdR finally limped to a conclusion in 1985. By that time I'd lost track of it.

Here's to dear old Corriere dei Piccoli, to which I owe a great debt...if only for introducing me to Battaglia and Jacovitti. As for also introducing me to I Puffi... well, we can't win 'em all.

Storytelling--1

Plus That Script!
In an interview given many years ago, Alex Toth advocated that comic artists should "plus" a script when converting it into drawings. The term comes from animation, and refers to enriching a story by inserting visual bits--background details, poses, actions--that don't appear in the script.

It's similar to what happens in movies. If a scene features two actors talking, the actors seldom just stand there and yak at each other. They'll perform some sort of business that tells something about their character while adding movement to a static scene. For some reason, though comic artists frequently enliven scenes with interesting camera angles, they often don't go much further.

Recently I re-read two stories that showed what a master Toth was at plussing a scene. One was from the 1970s, when he was drawing romance stories for Charlton; the other is a Dell movie adaptation from the late 50s. Before looking at the Toth panel, let's look at a typical dialogue exchange from another story in the same issue. The penciller is Charles Nicholas.
This setup tells the basic story well enough, but the eye-level camera and static poses lend the scene a generic look. The impression isn't helped by the casual background. This room has no personality; it could be any room anywhere. Now let's look at how Toth illustrated a dialogue exchange that could easily have been presented in the same way:Not much happens in this panel. The narrator (a movie star) drives away while her friend and the guy they both love discuss her departure. But the panel is exciting because everything Toth draws gives the scene a unique personality. Instead of a generic house Toth has created a "Bel Air mansion" appropriate to a temperamental movie star. He stages the scene in deep perspective. Matt strikes a dynamic pose we understand without needing to see his face. The star is driving off not in some generic car but an expensive Porsche. Its cockpit is crammed with luggage. All the smaller background details--the shadow of palm trees, the cobblestone street, the tile roof--shout "Southern California Richville." This scene has individuality, and the story is better for it.

Creating well-thought-out backgrounds is a great way to plus a script. Consider this panel from the Dell adaptation of Clint and Mac, a youth-targeted mystery-adventure set in London. It's easy to picture the script for what might have been a throwaway panel. Smith, the guy in the trench coat, returns to his apartment expecting to meet his accomplice Toby. Smith calls out but Toby isn't there. Here's how Toth interpreted the scene:
This panel is an entire book about Smith. As written the character is a typical bad guy without much depth. But when composing this scene Toth asked himself, "Who is Smith? How would he live?" So we see a cheap, impossibly cramped room with wet laundry hung over an old-fashioned stove to dry. A couple of magazines are thrown onto the rumpled bed. He's not a total slob, though: while his clothes are tossed over a chair, his dishes are done. Smith (like Toth) is apparently a car fancier: other than the calendar his only decoration is a print of an old automobile. The blind is pulled halfway down; Smith dislikes either the sunlight or prying neighbors. Smith has become a real person. This is what plussing a script is all about.

Still one might ask, "Is there a point to this?" It's a fair question. After all the Clint and Mac panel really was incidental to the story. Its basic idea could have been got across in a simpler way. Is Toth just showing off? Comics as a medium are admittedly less involving than movies. People tend to read them quickly without scrutinizing each panel. However I believe that, just as happens in movies, thoughtful plussing subliminally adds to a reader's experience of the story, allowing him or her to take away from it more than was originally there.

Technique Talk--4

The Need for Speed (continued)
In the last post we looked at speedy Frank Godwin fighting the Deadline Doom in some old Connie strips. We agreed that speed is king in the commercial art world.

In my day the undisputed kings of speed were the Filipino comic artists. Almost to a man they could produce quality finished work at dazzling speed. Alfredo Alcala, Nestor Redondo, Fred Carillo, Tony de Zuniga, E.R. Cruz...the list goes on and on.

When these guys stopped working for comic books they moved to the better-paying animation industry as designers and storyboard artists. That’s where I got to know--and admire--many of them. One artist I especially enjoyed talking to was Abel Laxamana. Out of all the Filipino artists I knew Abel was the only one inclined to intellectualize about comic art. In one of our discussions I asked him how Filipino cartoonists came to be so damn fast.

Above, Abel Laxamana

He explained that during the heyday of Filipino comics (the 50s and 60s) there were plenty of comics published, but the pay rate was abysmal. To make even a modest living an artist had to produce lots of pages. You either learned to be fast or you sank.

Interestingly, this situation shaped the entire culture of Filipino comics. Though the pay was low publishers demanded a high standard of artwork. Face it: when you have to live up to guys like Francisco Coching and Alfredo Alcala, you’d better be good.

Above: The Man, Francisco Coching

This was the origin of the Filipino studio system. An established artist, eager to make more money, contracted with publishers to deliver more work than he could possibly do himself. To keep his commitment he hired assistants, often newer artists who hadn’t yet cracked the big time. The veteran artist paid his assistants from the income and took a percentage for himself. The assistants got plenty of experience and dreamed of the day they’d be good enough to approach publishers personally, overcommit on their own contracts, hire their own assistants, and take their own percentage.

Above: Nestor Redondo

The publishers didn’t care whether artists used assistants, but they did insist that the art delivered to them look like the veteran artist’s work. Thus it was critical that assistants learned to imitate closely the master’s style. Out of this system arose the Filipino National Style.
Americans often criticized Filipino artists for “all looking alike.” Like all generalizations this was simplistic; Filipino artists had individual styles just like all cartoonists. But like all generalizations, this one had a grain of truth. The similarity between Filipino artists’ styles was greater than that of artists in any country except perhaps Japan.

At the root of this phenomenon was, of course, the studio system. If you’re assisting Nestor Redondo, you learn to draw like Nestor Redondo. Later when you become a lead artist yourself and establish your personal style, you’ll still show a strong Redondo influence. Inevitably you’ll pass some of that influence to your assistant, and so on.

Above: Fred Carillo

Once I asked Fred Carillo for his Secret of Speedy Drawing. To him the key was visualizing exactly what you would put on the page, then drawing it directly with a minimum of wasted movement. While visualizing would mean a second or two spent not drawing, the time taken to make the drawing time would be cut dramatically. Fred pointed out how I (and so many other artists) wasted time figuring out what to do on the paper, sketching, scribbling and redrawing. His approach was like alla prima painting: visualize the stroke, put it down, and leave it.

As I said last post, speed drawing reveals just how good you really are. The downside is that no matter how good you are, to stay ahead of the game you make compromises.

Above: E. R. Cruz

Instead of researchiing a car you draw a generic car, or re-use stock characters. Perhaps all your characters start looking alike. This was the Achilles’ heel of E.R. Cruz, a speed demon among speed demons. He had one young-man face and one young-woman face; if there were two young men in a story it was difficult to tell them apart. And finally, as Abel once suggested, when you wanted to slow down and really take time on a piece you might find you don’t remember how.

All the same, if you want to see top-grade comic art done at speeds that would make an American’s head spin, check out the oeuvre of Coching, Alcala, Redondo and their brethren. It’s amazing.

The art in this post was found at the website museum.alanguilan.com. This guy's collection is incredible; you mustn't miss his site if you appreciate great comic art.

Technique Talk--3

The Need for Speed
While working on a Connie collection recently, I encountered an example of a capable artist pushed to the wall by deadlines. Frank Godwin was known as both a prolific and a reliable craftsman. He always seemed to be doing several things at once: magazine illustration, his own comic strips, ghost work on others’ strips, book illustrations, agency work. But in 1938 work seems to have gotten the best of him.

Godwin always drew Connie quickly. Even when at the top of his game he worked in a fast, calligraphic manner quite different from the lush style he used years later on Rusty Riley. But during the course of four short stories we see him working faster and faster until, it seems, he is overwhelmed.

At the beginning of the period, Godwin looks like this: fast, but taking time to work up his figures and putting thought into staging and atmosphere.Gradually his drawing speeds up. Figures are sketchier, often looking as if Godwin has drawn them directly with the pen. Backgrounds (admittedly seldom of much interest to Godwin during this period) become little masterpieces of indication. Check out the last panel.By the time he starts the third story line, the strain is beginning to show. Finished panels still appear occasionally, but backgrounds are often reduced to a couple of lines or vanish altogether. Godwin begins cheating with head shots and talking airplanes.By the fourth story Godwin is desperate. Almost every panel is a head-and-shoulders shot, and backgrounds--well, just take a look at this sequence, which opens at a Central American airport, then moves to the hero’s hotel or wherever he’s staying.Alas, the effort is in vain. The last week of the continuity is ghosted by another artist, and the following story is entirely ghost work.So what happened? Illness? Taking on too much work? Too much partying? Of course we’ll never know. But the story told by those ever more rapid drawings started me pondering the role of speed in comics.

Anyone who’s been in the business knows that speed is king in the art world. Speed trumps quality: a mediocre artist who makes every deadline is more valuable than a supremely talented artist who’s unreliable. Interconnected demands of clients, publishing schedules, busy printers, and overloaded distributors don’t leave much wiggle room. You want to survive as an artist, you have to be fast.

An interesting thing about working fast is that it strips you down to your basic abilities. No time for reworking or redrawing; you wham it down and leave it. Your good points stand out and your weaknesses jump up and down screaming. Looking at this Connie speed session one sees just how good a draughtsman Godwin was. Even at breakneck speed he still draws beautifully--he just draws less.

In my next post I’ll talk a bit more about speed, represented by the record holders of speedy comic book production: the cartoonists of the Philippines’ “golden age” of comics.

Marking time

Where You At?

It's been too long since I posted here. Life has been a bit too interesting...spent a couple days in the hospital after going to Emergency with what seemed to be the big Heart Attack. After countless tests and investigations it became clear my heart was fine--thank heaven! I seem to have experienced the notorious Acid Reflux (which American TV viewers know intimately thanks to endless commercials). Its symptoms can resemble the Big One but it's considerably less serious. So I'm taking my medicine like a good boy and paying closer attention to my diet. I can take a hint!

More soon.

George Tuska, Comics Artist

Why Weren't the Tuska's Looser?

Lately Ger Apeldoorn has been posting a retrospective of work by George Tuska, one of the underrated comic artists of the 50s and 60s. Ger has a fine collection of both newspaper and comic book pages. I strongly recommend taking a look.

Seeing this work reminded me about an aspect of Tuska's work that puzzled me ever since my unsuccessful trip to New York in the 1980s seeking work from Marvel. Art director John Romita gave me photocopies of pencilled pages to ink as samples. He chose work by the tightest pencillers, so I went home with covers by Gil Kane and Jack Kirby, and interior pages by the Georges Perez and Tuska.

(At left is a page from Iron Man #8, in which Tuska got a better-than- average ink job from Johnny Craig.)

Tuska was the regular Iron Man penciller. He was almost always inked by Mike Esposito. Like most fans back then I found the book capable but dull--a judgement often applied to Tuska's work in general. Personally I'd always had a soft spot for Tuska, having grown up with his Buck Rogers newspaper strip. In college a collector friend introduced me to Tuska's crime strips for Lev Gleason. I gained a new appreciation for the artist. The crime comics showed a skill range that wasn't always obvious in Buck Rogers. Still, based on his Marvel art and his occasional appearances at Harvey and Gold Key, I'd concluded that Tuska was a competent artist with a somewhat simple, cartoon-oriented style that didn't belong in superhero comics.

(This page from Crime Does Not Pay is typical of George's Lev Gleason work, though some other strips were heavier on backgrounds. Two Gleason trademarks: some guy hit some other guy once a page, and the #@$%! dialogue was so heavy there was little room for the art.)

I wasn't ready for what I saw in his Iron Man pencils. They were beautiful! The first surprise was how fully they were rendered, sometimes almost to the point of being tonal drawings. Many pages, especially the "street clothes" pages, featured elaborately worked out light and shade. The action pages burst with both enthusiasm and careful drawing. The stuff knocked me out. I diligently (though unsuccessfully) tried to do them justice. One page I especially liked. Tony Stark was out of costume and floating in the East River. A tugboat rescued him, after which he returned home to maunder awhile. The lighting on this page was worthy of the finest Caniffist. Several months later the comic came out. That wonderful page had become a bland nonentity indistinguishable from the other equally lifeless pages in the issue. It wasn't like Esposito pulled a Colletta and ignored Tuska's pencils. The backgrounds were complete and the shadows were still there, but somehow all the life had been sucked out of them. Looking back I wonder if it was even possible to do them justice in ink.

(This pencilled panel, lifted from Kurt Busiek's website, is from later in Tuska's career. It's nice, but looser than the ones I remember.)

I came away with a new appreciation for Tuska's craft, but I was also puzzled by the disparity between these pencils and the way Tuska drew when he inked his own work. The assembly-line specialization of American comics encourages the presumption that "nobody can ink his own pencils." But whether an artist's inks are weak or strong, stylistically they usually resemble his pencilling. In Tuska's case it was almost as if two entirely different ways of thinking informed pencils and inks. Inked Tuska drawings were two-dimensional: postery, outline-driven, cartoon-like if you will. The Tuska pencilled drawings were three-dimensional, driven by light and form--illustration-like you could say.(This Scorchy Smith daily from 1959 is inked in the Buck Rogers style Tuska also used for his solo comic book work.)

A couple of years ago I found Tuska's official website, run by a relative or a friend or somebody with access to the artist. It was my chance to hear the artist's own thoughts about his differing styles. The webmaster passed my question to him and I received a cordial reply. Unfortunately my enquiry must not have been as clear as I thought, for Tuska answered an entirely different question. I felt it would be rude to press the issue, so I didn't write back. Now I'll never know.

I wish I had copies of those pages. Back when I did them, in the days before scanners, it was a big deal for a starving fanboy to find a copy shop and pay for oversize copies. I returned the copies with my inking samples and that was that.

(Postscript: I must confess that seeing those Iron Man pages prejudiced me, probably unfairly, against Mike Esposito's inking. This surely isn't fair to a major figure in the history of American comics, but when one starts out as a fan it's hard to shake the fannish propensity to judge artists by unrealistic standards.)