Now here’s one of the reasons I shelled out five books for a subscription to Metafilter, posts like these leading me to blogs like Busty Girl Comics and cartoonists like Rampaige. I love the artwork on these cartoons, it reminds me of Chynna Clugston’s art on Blue Monday, loose, somewhat manga influenced and cute.
For all the annoyances the internet can bring you daily more faster and more often than traditional media could, you have to thank it for something like this. Fifteen-twenty years ago a series of cartoons about the real problems large breasted women face would at most have been a self published mini comic, maybe getting half a paragraph in a TCJ column, mostly gone unnoticed otherwise. That’s progress.
I guess the first thing I would say is, I understand how you feel. I have certainly felt that way about things. I would say I understand that kind of an emotional response to something that meaningful. I think it’s all fair game. I’ve read some pretty nasty things said about myself, for example. I can deal with that. There are times when I wish some of these guys – because I think some of them know better – I wish they would take a moment and stop and think. And instead of referring to a man like [veteran artist] Joe Kubert as a scab or a disgrace, you might want to stop for a minute and think with this diverse group of talent involved with the project, maybe there is more to the story than they know. Maybe there are reasons people are willing to work on this. Maybe its not as clear cut as a lot of people think. I’m speaking about this from a distance. I was never in the room, while anything went on, but maybe there’s just more to the story than people think.
To be fair, the difference between working on Before Watchmen, where the originally creators were –legally!– screwed out of their rights and the primary creator has strongly stated his disdain for these prequels and working on your average DC or Marvel company owned titles, where said screwing was done decades ago and most of the original creators are safely dead or bought off, is one of degree not kind. And you certainly cannot fault somebody like Joe Kubert for doing any of those Watchmen prequels. He has worked all his life with the constrains of American commercial comics publishing; this is just another assignment for him.
But that doesn’t mean Darwyn Cooke should get away with his passive aggressive complaining here. He is more than just a hired hand on this project, he has been an active propagandist for DC and its actions, happy to be a cog in its machine (as John Byrne once was at Marvel). He’s somebody who has the kind of talent, opportunities and reputation to do anything he wants to do in comics, but choses to be a company man, working on endless revamps (Catwoman), adaptations (Parker and re-imaginations (New Frontier, doing the same thing as Roy Thomas’ The Last Days of the Justice Society and James Robinson’s Golden Age, but in a slicker art style).
He isn’t the first cartoonist to be happier working on other people’s creations of course, but he does combine this lack of creativity with an aggressive public persona as company spokesman, attacking Alan Moore for being annoyed about the Watchmen prequels, lending himself and his prestige to these attacks, revealing himself to be, well, kind of a douche.
Darwyn Cooke is a slick but limited imitator of better artists, somebody who will at best be a footnote in comics history in fifty years time, while Alan Moore is one of the greatest writers working in comics of the past fifty years and certainly one of the most principled ones. His attacks on Moore are as a fly buzzing a giant: harmless, but that doesn’t mean you don’t want to swat the fly anyway.
Genius, Isolated: The Life and Art of Alex Toth
Dean Mullaney & Bruce Canwell
324 pages
published in 2011
If you’re not a hardcore comics nerd you’ve probably never heard of Alex Toth, one of the greatest cartooning geniuses American comics have ever seen. That’s because he never really had a comics series or character that he made his own, but instead had his art scattered over hundreds of seperate assignments for dozens of publishers, often wasted on formulaic, throwaway stories. His true genius lay in his approach to the art form, the way he stripped down cartooning to its essentials, never putting down one more line than was needed. Once you see his artwork you can understand why he’s so revered by his peers, a true “artists’ artist”, but first you needed to find his artwork, which has long been difficult to find other than by hunting through back issue bins.
This has changed in the last decade or so, fortunately, as the American comics field in general has become more aware and interested in its heritage, leading to a flood of high quality reprint projects as well as art books/biographies focusing on individual artists. Toth has had some attention paid to him before, but with Genius, Isolated: The Life and Art of Alex Toth, the first of a trilogy of books devoted to Toth’s life and career there finally is a book that does true justice to Toth’s genius.
I got Genius, Isolated: The Life and Art of Alex Toth last week and have been losing myself in that book and Toth’s art ever since. The page about is one example, seeing that reproduced in a huge format on crisp, clean paper where you can savour each detail makes me giddy with excitement. You cannot help but love Toth’s sense of composition, the ease and elegance he lays out a page, places his panels, places his figures within the panels, always drawing your eyes to the next element. But there also the figures themselves; just look at how the sergeant stands in the middle right panel, or the three legionaires in the bottom left one. Not to mention the line work and the use of black. It’s no wonder that this story, when it came out back in 1950 immediately became a guide and inspiration for almost all other cartoonists working in comics. It’s the perfect example of a style of comics storytelling, a distillation of everything the great comic strip cartoonists like Noel Sickles, Frank Robbins or Milton Caniff had taught Toth, everything he had absorbed looking at their art.
It’s just a shame it’s used in service of such a pedestrian story.
Which could be the theme for Toth’s entire career. He never really had a series or character he was synonymous with, but moved from assignment to assignment, taken meticilous care on each, whether it was Black Canary or Hot Wheels. And that’s a disappointment when you start reading those stories reprinted in Genius, Isolated, rather than just drool over the art. The writing is so dull, or bland or actively bad that it makes the art worse. Comics has always been an unequal partnership of writing and drawing, with good art more able to overcome bad writing than the other way around, and Toth was the greatest example of this.
There is always a tension when talking about comics between story and art, where I sometimes feel that despite our love for it, the art often loses out to the writing. For us fans and critics who ourselves can’t draw our way out of a paper bag, it is after all so much easier to talk about the plot and script than to talk about the nuances of artwork. We’re used to talk about the former, often lack even the vocabulary to talk meaningfully about the latter. A book like Genius, Isolated: The Life and Art of Alex Toth rubs our noses in this deficit. You have to talk about Toth in terms of his art and not worry too much about the banality of the stories he used it on.
Five comics I can always turn to when I’m feeling down or unwell.
1. Asterix. Humour, adventure, incredibly lame puns and it takes the side of the barbarian resistance against the empire. What’s not too like?
2. Gaston Lagaffe. The world’s worst office boy, who spends his entire day avoiding work, experimenting with new, horrible recipes (sardines in apricot jam being one favourite) feeding his equally horrible seagull, inventing new Heath Robinsonesque machines to do things for him he’s too lazy to do himself, or playing battleship with Jules-from-Smith’s-across-the-street over the phone, when Jules is in New York with his boss…. It’s no wonder Gaston never made it in the US, a country where people keep working even if they’re no longer paid.
3. Giles annuals. A year’s worth of gentle satire about the issues of the day, as seen through an unforgettable cast of horrible grans, put-upon fathers, stoic mothers and way too clever kids, with walk-on parts for whichever celebrity that was in the news just then.
4. Tintin. The world’s most viriginial boy reporter and his much more interesting friends going on adventures around the world. Tintin makes the world cozy and orderly.
5. Calvin and Hobbes. It’s a magical world. Let’s go exploring.
Jean “Moebius” Giraud died today, not entirely unexpected as he was seventytwo years old and was apparantly suffering from cancer, but it’s still a blow to anybody who likes comics. His influence on French comics cannot be underestimated. Together with Jean-Michel Charlier he first created arguably the best western comic ever, Blueberry, which spawned hordes of imitators and kept the western comic genre alive and relevant in Europe when it was dying in America. Then there was his science fiction work, both in comics and as a storyboard artist for various movies, including Alien. He was one of the people (together with Jean Claude Forest, Paul Gillon and of course Jean-Claude Mézières) that from the sixties onward has shaped our vision of what the future should look like.
It’s almost impossible to do proper homage to such a creative genius, so instead I’ve found some videos showing off his drawing skills, with bonus appearances by Joe Kubert and Neal Adams in the top one. All are — unsurprisingly — in French.
