Guilty Pleasures: Will Eisner's Women

Will Eisner (1917-2005), businessman and philosopher-practitioner of cartooning, was an important innovator in that corner of the illustration world. His Wikipedia entry is here. I mentioned him here in conjunction with my visit to the comic strip museum in Brussels.

My guilty pleasure having to do with Eisner is ogling the beautiful girls he included in his works. Most are found in his famous Spirit comic book insert for newspapers. Some are shown below, as is a character he created for a U.S. Army publication dealing with equipment maintenance that I used to read in my army days.

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Book cover featuring a Spirit femme fatale.

Eisner was especially good with eyes.

Apparently the head required some tweaking here.

The Spirit and a babe are stranded on a desert island so small there is no room for the obligatory palm tree.

P'Gell, featured in a number of Spirit episodes.

Here she is again.

A one-off by Eisner for a friend.

PS The Preventive Maintenance Monthly is covered by Wikipedia here. Above is a recurring character, Miss Connie Rodd. Without her, PS readership would have been drastically fewer.

Let me explain her name to non- English speakers and others not familiar with piston-driven motors. It refers to connecting rods that link pistons to crank shafts. Her first name, Connie, is a diminutive of Constance, and the extra "d" on the last name creates an actual last name found here and there.

In the first image of Connie, she is all dressed up, something unusual. Normally Eisner had her dressed in army fatigue clothing as seen here. Note how skillfully Eisner depicts her gestures in the bottom image.

Gonzalo Mayo's Intricate Comics Pages

I don't follow the comic book / graphic novel field very closely. But I do have a rough idea regarding how long it can take to draw and ink a page. Simply put, the more detail in the artwork, the longer it takes to complete. Then there's the matter of a project's budget. If plenty of money were available, highly detailed drawing is possible. But a small budget implies that artwork will be pretty simplified -- unless the artist is willing to work for starvation wages (in terms of piecework).

When I sometimes flip open a graphic novel and get beyond the elaborate, carefully done cover, what's inside can be sketchily done digital art. Disappointing, but understandable.

Which is why I marvel when I happen to encounter the detail and quality of drawing by practitioners such as the Peruvian, Gonzolo Mayo (his web site containing a sketchy biography is here). How did that happen? (Comics mavens, feel free to fill us in in Comments.)

Mayo is perhaps best known for his work dealing with a character called Vampirella. She has a body that, as the saying goes, won't quit. And her clothing barely covers what is expected to be covered. I consider her ridiculous, so I don't think I'll post any Vampirella images (you can make the effort to Google on her and feast your eyes, if you must). Below are page images of Mayo's work, at least one of which contains a Vampirella surrogate. Click on the images to enlarge.

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Okay, so I changed my mind. Here is an image of original art for Vampirella #79, page 10, from 1979. Miss V is depicted in a fairly restrained mode here.

Semi-splash page for Merlin.

Two pages from Creepy # 62, May 1974.

From El Cid in Eerie, c. 1975.

Roy Crane's Two Shades of Gray

Aside from Lyonel Feininger, I find it hard to come up with the name of an important fine artist who drew comic strips. After all, comic strips are highly constrained in terms of technology, spatial requirements, marketing channel considerations and other factors that can lead to their being ignored by fine artists and even by illustrators.

But lessons -- some, not many -- can be learned from comic strips. Consider value, the painting term referring to areas of light, dark, and intermediate shades on a painting. Value, in most cases, is the basis for an image's composition. Traditional art instruction sources suggest having one of a painting's preliminary studies deal with values, and a limited number (say, three or four) of them at that.

Roy Crane (1901-1977) was an influential comic strip artist who, as his Wikipedia entry indicates, evolved his style to a point in the 1940s that he could make use of areas of solid black, white (the un-inked newsprint background) plus two shades of gray. Earlier, he used black, white and a single gray shade, the latter based on a uniform benday screen. He found three values to be too limiting for his taste, so later adopted Craftint. That provided two levels of shading -- the lighter one simply parallel lines and the darker one a crosshatch of other parallel lines set at a right angle to the former. This blog post deals with Craftint and its eventual demise, using Roy Crane as an example of how it was made to work.

Artists wanting to sharpen their values awareness might consider the work of Crane and perhaps some other comic strip artists who made use of shading technology.

The examples below are from Crane's Buz Sawyer strip. He liked cute puns for names of some of his main characters. For instance, Buz Sawer = "buz(z)saw" and Wash Tubbs = "washtub." Click on the images to enlarge.

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Buz Sawyer - December, 1944
This strikes me as the best of the examples of Crane's Craftink work shown here. These are panels from successive daily strips. Not how he forces readers to rotate the page half a turn to display the Douglas SBD dive bombers at work.

Buz Sawyer - November, 1949

Buz Sawyer - January, 1950
More daily strips from a few years later.

Cliff Sterrett's Expressionist Comics Settings

Cliff Sterrett (1883-1964) was one of those "lowly" comic strip artists whose work is worthy of attention from art historians and practitioners.

His Wikipedia entry is here, but is skimpy regarding his personal life after getting into cartooning and sketchy about his signature strip, "Polly and Her Pals," that ran 1912-1958. However, it has its own entry here. An appreciation of his work that contains a number of Sunday panels is here.

The various links above assert that Sterrett's work was influential among members of the comic strip artist fraternity. This had to do with the bold design of his panels and the Expressionist-Deco character of setting and background details. For example, he often included somewhat sinister clumps of skewed, gabled houses that remind one of the sets used in the 1920 German expressionist movie The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Polly was one of the first of the young women comic strips that thrived in the 1920s and later, but it seems that her father eventually became the lead character even thought the strip's title remained unchanged. Below are examples of Sterrett's work. Click to enlarge.

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Brussels' Comic Strip Museum

For some reason, Belgians are very fond of comic strips. So of course Brussels has a museum, the Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée dedicated to that field. The Web site for the museum is here.

I had a few spare hours on a recent visit to Brussels, so hiked over to it. It's on a nondescript side street, but the building itself, the former Magasins Waucquez store, is an Art Nouveau design by architect Victor Horta.

The displays were nicely done but, as would be expected, featured comics and artists familiar to Belgians and unfamiliar to Americans. One plus was that I learned how to pronounce the name of the most famous Belgian strip -- Tintin. It's not tin-tin as in the metal tin. Nor is it tin-tan, where the final "n" is nasal, French. It is tan-tan with the nasal "n." So there.

First, some views of the building.

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Shown here is the first floor (the second floor, if you're American). Note that Horta's Art Nouveau décor is comparatively restrained here.

The street level floor, with a comics display that includes a Citroën 2CV.

Looking up towards the first floor and the skylight ceiling.

The ground floor again, the entrance at the left and the museum shop taking up most of the view.

You might have noticed that the first two photos included promotional material for a current exhibit dealing with Will Eisner, a major player in the American comics scene and widely considered the inventor of the "graphic novel" comic book genre.

I enjoyed very much seeing workups and finished art for some of Eisner's graphic novels and pages from his comic strip, The Spirit. Below are a few snapshots of the displays, the first three of graphic novels, the last of a 1950 Spirit strip. You'll see some reflections because the material was in display cases or otherwise behind glass.

1930s Spaceships

What should a spaceship look like?

Back in the Moon exploration era, they came in two types. One was a conical re-entry vehicle, the other a boxy arrangement with spindly bits attached. The latter didn't need to be streamlined because it wasn't intended to enter the atmosphere. The space shuttle had to operate both in the atmosphere and in airless space, so its design had to be keyed to the former environment. The same can be said for shuttle-like vehicles currently in the planning and testing stage.

So following a period when spaceships were often portrayed as the space-only style, we seem to be returning to the science-fiction spaceships of newspaper comic strips and pulp magazine covers. Not precisely so, of course, but in the spirit of being able to rocket away from Earth to land on Mars or wherever using the same vehicle.

The early Sci-Fi magazines did their best to emphasize or at least incorporate science in their stories. I've been reading some books (originally appearing in Amazing Stories magazine) by Philip Nowlan that served as the basis for the Buck Rogers comic strip that was launched in 1929. The second of these, "The Airlords of Han," goes into enough detail regarding anti-gravity and other 25th century technology that the flow of the story suffers greatly.

Once Sci-Fi comic strips appeared, scientific pretensions were at best subliminal and gee-whiz adventuring was what such strips featured. Nevertheless, if the characters needed to dash around the solar system, they had to have spaceships and cartoonists had to come up with what they looked like. Here are some examples from the 1930s along with a few from the 1940s.

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Amazing Stories cover by Frank R. Paul - 1928
Paul was a pioneer Sci-Fi illustrator, so his spaceship concepts surely influenced Dick Calkins, the original Buck Rogers comic strip artist.  I'll guess that those yellow dots along the side of the ship represent portholes for passenger cabins.  If so, then where is the space for the motor and its fuel needed to generate that huge blast of flame rushing out the stern?

Buck Rogers aerial taxi - October 1930
Yes, it isn't a spaceship. But the Buck Rogers strip includes all sorts of futuristic conveyances ranging from this taxi to aircraft to interplanetary vehicles.

Buck Rogers - June 1931

Buck Rogers - March 1932

Buck Rogers - 1932

Flash Gordon - 1938
Five years after the Buck Rogers strip was launched, Flash Gordon appeared. Alex Raymond, with both arms tied behind his back, could out-draw Calkins, so it's no surprise that his spaceships look sleeker. Calkins' late 30s spaceships still look clunky.

Flash Gordon - 1939

Brick Bradford - 1944
Brick Bradford, drawn by Clarence Gray, was 1930s Sci-Fi strip that lasted many years while never attaining the popularity of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. I had a great deal of trouble finding examples of Gray's spaceships on the Internet, the example above being the only one.

Buck Rogers c.1948-49
Rick Yager began drawing Buck Rogers Sunday strips in the 1930s and by the mid-1940s was the sole artist. Shown above is a sleek spaceship from a Sunday strip.

Noel Sickles' Scorchy Smith Evolution

The appearance of a comic strip usually evolves, especially in the early years when the artist is gaining understanding the characters he created and experimenting with presentation techniques. Perhaps this is less evident nowadays as newspapers shrink their page counts and page size, resulting in noticeably smaller, harder to view comic strip print formats than, say, in the 1930s when comic strips and sports pages were important circulation drivers.

Creating comic strips was and is a demanding task, making the artist a slave to his drawing board for years and sometimes decades on end. If a strip becomes successful in terms of the number of newspapers subscribing, the artist is likely to hire an assistant or two to do some of the grunt work such as drawing and inking backgrounds. In some cases, the artist might simply focus on creating plots, hiring another artist to "ghost" the images. For example, ace fantasy artist Frank Frazetta ghosted Al Capp's "Li'l Abner" strip for several years.

Then there is the case of the original artist abandoning the strip and another artist taking over. When Alex Raymond was killed in a car accident, his "Rip Kirby" strip was taken over by John Prentice who was skilled enough to maintain its general appearance. George Wunder replaced Milton Caniff on "Terry and the Pirates," and followed Caniff's pattern fairly well aside from drawing faces with oddly-shaped noses and other features.

An important artistic succession in terms of the the history of American comic strips and their appearance had to do with the "Scorchy Smith" aviation-related comic strip. Its creator, John Terry (brother of Paul Terry who created the Terrytoons animated cartoons) was dying of tuberculosis and had to abandon it. Its syndicator, the Associated Press, wanted to save the strip because it was fairly popular. So staff artist Noel Sickles was asked to take over.

Details regarding this along with many examples of Sickles' illustration work plus all his Scorchy Smith panels can be found in this outstanding book.

It seems that Terry could hardly draw and that Sickles was extremely skilled at depicting nearly everything. For the first few months of ghosting Scorchy (no one was sure if Terry could return to work, but assumed that he might), Sickles gritted his teeth and mimicked Terry's style, even signing Terry's name. Within a few months it became clear that Scorchy was now Sickles' strip, so he began a careful stylistic evolution away from Terry's crudely done panels to a bold style that influenced other comics artists working on strips dealing with real people as opposed to cartoon characters.

Below are a few panels showing Sickles' progression. In later years (he worked the strip for about three years), Sickles played around with other styles, though his core draftsmanship shone through.

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By John Terry - 27-28 November, 1933
Terry's work is so poorly done, I'm surprised that the strip survived at all.

By Sickles (signed Terry) - 15-16 December, 1933
When he had to, Sickles could imitate Terry pretty well.

By Sickles (still signed Terry) - March 17, 19, 1934
By this point, Sickles is still signing Terry's name, but the images are much better. Note the female character who introduces herself as "Bunny." Sickles is including his pal Milton Caniff's wife Esther (who was usually called "Bunny") in this episode.

By Sickles - May 28-29, 1934
Sickles began signing his own name as of the April 2, 1934 panel. By May, we find a huge transformation from the Terry product. Note the varying perspectives and use of chiaroscuro brushwork replacing stage-type views and pen drawing. Caniff picked up this general style and applied it to Terry and the Pirates in masterly fashion.

Walt Kelly's Pogo Brushwork

The Pogo comic strip by Walt Kelly (1913-1973), whose life was cut short at age 60 by diabetes, was beloved by many.

I read it some when I was young, but had trouble following it. Plus, I suppose I wasn't intelligent enough or sophisticated enough to appreciate the politics Kelly injected into the strip. Even today, I think Pogo would have been better had it stuck to the foibles of life and personalities because injecting politics upsets or angers a good deal of one's potential audience.

That aside, Kelly's cartooning style was marvelously inventive. I show some examples below that I grabbed off the Web so that readers unfamiliar with Pogo can see what I mean. For instance, note Kelly's use of a variety of typescripts in the second image. Also observe the outlines of the panel boxes; hand-drawn and bold. Most of all, consider Kelly's combination of strong brushwork and body action for his subjects -- this probably thanks to his days working for Walt Disney.

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Self-portrait

Kelly's use of type

Albert and bird

Original art with non-reproducing blueline workup