I have all the previous editions of the Best American Comics Series and I almost passed on this one because I had been so underwhelmed by the previous years’ editions. However, I decided to ask for it for Christmas yet again, hopeful that this year’s edition would be the one that finally got it right. I have to say it was better than previous years’ but still a little lacking in content.

The biggest problem with the Series is that the editors are forced to select too many excerpts of longer works that either don’t make sense of of context or provide a sampling of what is surely a much stronger work in their entirety. It’s a lot like watching nothing but previews of movies instead of the real thing. Certainly the excerpt from Joe Sacco’s Palestine captures little of the grandeur and scope of that large work. Same thing with the Chris Ware piece. I’ve not read Jeff Smith’s Rasl; given the portion that appears here I’d like to, but the few pages given offer a nice teaser, although I gather from reading the overviews that this portion of Rasl is a poor representation of what Smith is up to in the series. And perhaps this points to a larger problem with the selection process: given space constraints, the editors may only be able to pick those portions that can stand on their own, rather than the best and most compelling parts of that work.

Even so, there is no question that this is some of the best work out there. Kate Beaton’s Gatsby cartoons are a hoot. Peter and Maria Hoey’s cartoon is one of the coolest experiments in design since “Rabbithead” from the first volume. Of course, there are a few things I don’t care for – the Hernandez brothers work always leaves me cold, the Fear and Fire excerpt was a head scratcher, and I was repulsed by the title character of Abbey’s Road.

I have to admit, though, that I’ll probably continue to buy the books in this series, hoping that one year they’ll come up with a volume that stands on its own as a wonderful collection.

And for fun, here’s some rare Bill Watterson that I grabbed off of the platypuscomix site:

Here’s a picture from Watteron’s early illustrating days:

Here’s a sample of a rejected strip called “Critters.” I’ve never seen this before.

And finally a couple of cartoons from a talk he gave at the Ohio State University in which he railed against the syndicates. It was given at the Ohio State University and I’ve seen the transcript somewhere. Watterson famously created the huge Sunday strip after he came back form hiatus, a strip that no one could break up to fit into the regular space. Most newspapers were forced to accommodate Watterson, such was his power.

The rest of the rare stuff can be found here.

One of the first books I read when I was trying to learn the art of cartooning was Mort Gerberg’s “Cartooning,” which is pretty old now, but includes a great chapter on what it was like to submit gag cartoons to magazines. Cartoonists took their work around on a specific day (I believe it was Wednesday) and worked the circuit from The New Yorker to the Saturday Evening Post, to Playboy and then on down to the lower level specialty magazines. Rejection was common and the close-knit group of people who aspired to earn a living selling cartoons would then commiserate at a bar, swapping cartoons and ideas around.

Of course now the gag market has all but dried up, with most of the magazines defunct and only the New Yorker and Playboy really dedicated to maintaining it as a key part of the magazine (Hefner was an aspiring cartoonist.)

I was surprised then to see that the old method is still the best way to get in – go to the office on Tuesday with a bunch of samples and meet with Bob Mankoff who will probably reject everything that you have to offer. However, this time there’s really no where else to go; it’s one stop shopping with your drawings. Of course you could post them online as Sturm did, and hope that they find an audience or even better someone who is willing to pay you for them.

I still harbor dreams of getting into the New Yorker, but really am too busy to think of ideas and am not sure that I can sustain the level of creativity and humor that it takes to really have a go at it. One cartoonist mentions trying for 25 years to get in; I read that Roz Chast always has to deal with the feeling that the newest cartoon will be her last; that she will run out of ideas. Perhaps there’s also a little bit of hero worship going on as well; I look at the cartoonists’ work that I admire and feel like I could never do something as good as what they do (while acknowledging that they probably submit 50 or so drawings for every one the magazine accepts.)

Here’s one of Sturm’s cartoons:

I thought this one was pretty funny, and definitely a New Yorker type of drawing. But Mankoff rejected it, saying that the desert island idea was overdone. Oh well.

I came up with the caption for this cartoon before I came up with the idea for the drawing: Kiana would be sculpting a famous piece of artwork. After asking a few people for the name of a famous sculpture, Michaelangelo’s David seemed like the most likely choice. If you don’t know the sculpture, you don’t get the joke and it just looks like she’s a really good artist. So David it was!

The first obstacle I encountered was how to draw the statue to make sure that it was immediately recognizable for what it was. I didn’t even attempt to draw it freehand. Rather, I printed a picture of it off of a google search and traced the body to make sure I had the proportions exactly right (the hands, if I recall, are a little oversized.) At any rate, the picture I had was good for the body, but did not have enough detail of the face and hair for me to use. So I had to find another picture of the head and trace that, then use Photoshop to combine the head and the body seamlessly so I could then trace it one more time with a non-repro blue pencil for the final.

Of course, the second obstacle was the fact that David wasn’t wearing any clothes and this was intended for classroom use. Even though David probably appears in textbooks that students use as an example of a masterpiece, I didn’t think I could get away with it. So I threw a pair of jeans on him. Now he looks like an Abercrombie model. I figured it would be a good in joke for those familiar with the original.

I’m still not sure it works unless you know the original statue. It would then just look like she’s sculpting a hot guy, some sort of perfect boyfriend or something. But I hope it works either way.

I’m also really proud of the coloring job. Not only did I get the shading pretty close to what I wanted, but I think the shade of blue works perfectly. I don’t think I used any grays for colors in any of these drawings, preferring instead to use a color with some gray in it that fit the color palette and adjusting the opaqueness when necessary.

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Now I’m fascinated by Watterson as a painting recluse, one who knew it was time to leave when he was at the top of his game. He fought the system valiantly and successfully, increasing the size of his Sunday strip and refusing to market his characters into cheap plush toys or T-shirts (the fact that I still see Calvin pissing on car logos indicates how much potential money he gave up.) The fact that Calvin and Hobbes was consistently good during its run is testament to the fact that Watterson know when it was time to hang it up. It still remains one of the crowning achievements of newspaper strips.

So here are some early Watterson strips, before Calvin, when he was doing cartoons for the Mark Twain Journal,

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-bxPfq3FfhZ0/TcAV6lme3iI/AAAAAAAAOos/GidGHppMaWQ/s400/04BillWatterson_MarkTwain_PuddnheadCalendar_100.jpg

INK. from Amanda H. Cook on Vimeo.

Here’s a cool short video on Jeff Stahler, the editorial cartoonist for the Columbus Dispatch, which is where I live.  He explains the process he uses to create an editorial cartoon using a Donald Trump cartoon; this doucmentary must be hot of the press because I remember the cartoon from a week or so ago in the paper. 

As always, its interesting to see cartoonists work and explain their process, and I’ve always felt Stahler was one of the best cross hatchers out there and you get to see him do that (although there no great mystery there- cross-hatching method is pretty easy to figure out.)  Stahler is old school – he does the coloring on the computer, but his drawing and inking is all done by hand and scanned in.

Stahler appears to be working from home, and says that he scans his roughs in and sends them to the editors, who then email back comments.  Long gone are the days when editorial cartoonists had to work in the office of the newspaper.  I read an amusing anecdote about Berkely Breathed in his most recent Bloom County collection where he mentions putting something in the mail to meet a deadline.  Those days are long gone.

Stahler also does a daily panel strip in addition to his editorial work, and I’m amazed that he’s able to get both done.  Or rather, I’m amazed that he’s able to come up with two good ideas in one day when so many cartoonists have trouble coming up with one (Jeff Amend, I mean you.)

Stahler always been one of the guys whose work I follow religiously, so I found this to be a fun little 8-minute film.

The guy that did it is Anton Emdin, who provides a couple of videos on his technique along with some written advice on his blog.  Videos!  What a great idea.  One of the best things about it is Emdin shows you how to warm up, which is something I’ve never really done.  Also, it was interesting to watch someone’s hand close up to see the SPEED at which quality inking should be done.  It seems that Emdin gets a much looser line than I do simply because he works a little quicker and perhaps a little bit of the stiffness of my finals is due to that.

A lot of the advice that I’ve read about inking is here.  If you are interested in learning how to ink using traditional tools (and you should be, it’s fun!) check it out.

Here’s one of the videos:

So of course I decided to take a shortcut.  Sure, it would have been better to work at it until I drew a good cello, but I figured this would probably be the only time in my life I would need to draw one, so there was no harm in doing what I ended up doing.

There’s an animation term called “rotoscoping” which is essentially taking a film of a human being doing something – running, dancing, whatever – and then tracing their movements to create the cartoon.  That’s kind of what I did.  I did a google search for “girl playing cello” and found several fetching results – apparently, there’s an interest in scantily clad women playing this particular instrument in come hither poses.

The picture I settled on was this one:

And I should probably give a little background on her since she was kind enough to let me use her picture with no permission whatsoever.  Her name is Layne McNish and she plays the cello (duh). She’s a freelance cellist in New York City.  You can reach her at lmcnish14@gmail.com.

Anyway, so what I did was blow up the picture to the size that I was intending to draw. I printed it off and traced just the cello.  Then I drew Katie (the girl in the cartoon) around it, then did a quick blue pencil sketch over it and inked it.   Here is the final:

The proportions were a little difficult to handle.  I faced the challenge of making the cello look like a cello yet having it be wielded by someone who did not have regular human proportions.  Yet I had to make sure that, relative to the body, the cello didn’t look small enough to be a viola or large enough to be a contrabass, all while acknowledging the fact that Katie’s head was always going to be larger than a normal human’s.

I am very pleased with the final product, especially the pose.  I copied the arm and hand position from other pictures of cello players I found online and did the legs to resemble a younger girl’s posture.  It really captures the persona of Katie that emerged as I created her character through several drawings – involved, bubbly, yet a little gangly.

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I just finished the book “Scorchy Smith and the Art of Noel Sickles” which I received for my birthday, and the fact that my birthday is in January will tell you how large this book really is.  I became interested in this book for a couple of reasons.  For one thing, I’ve been really into story strips for a few years now and this one looked promising – good artwork and coming from the golden age of contnuity strips.  I also enjoyed the fact that everything was in this book – the entire Sickles run was here, unlike other strips whose collection spans several books.  Plus, while I’m waiting for the Terry and the Pirates books to be reissued so I can pick up number 4 in that series, I figured this would tide me over.

First off, Sickles is a heck of an illustrator, someone who completely mastered a type of artwork that you rarely see anymore in the age where photography seems to be the medium of choice for advertising.

Apparently, this guy could work in just about any media.  His drawings for “The old Man and the Sea” have the feel of quick pen sketches, but are well composed and energetic nonetheless.  This is a guy who was extremely talented at a time where the demand for this type of work was steady.  He would probably go underutilized today.

However, the real draw for the book is Sickles’s run on “Scorchy Smith,” a strip that limped along until Sickles got a hold of it.  The book included some of the strips before Sickles took over, and it’s amazingly bad.  The story arc involves a land takeover of a mine, something that perhaps was interesting during the Gold Rush, but certainly had to have been of limited interest to most people.  All of the characters look about the same so it’s darn near impossible to tell anyone apart, and the dialogue is clumsy, especially in a dialogu heavy strip in which one character explains the intricacies of the mining process.

Once Sickles took over, he had to maintain the look and feel of the strip, at least for a time (just as artists do today when they take over a strip) but you can see Sickles gradually getting better as an artist and introducing his own tools and style.  Sickles was a huge influence on Caniff (and vice versa) and it’s pretty easy to see why in these examples:

All of a sudden you had an artist on the comics page making dramatic use of black ink and zipatone to achieve a terrific amount of depth and drama.

Comic fans have longed to see these in print for years, many putting the Sickles run of “Scorchy Smith” on their top ten lists of either strips that people wanted to see reprinted or just top ten strips period.  It’s a terrifically handsome book and a wonderful collection of an artist’s entire career.  However, I have to admit that “Scorchy Smith” left me a little unimpressed, and I was kind of glad to be done with it.  The atwork, of course, is superb, and worth every penny.  But here are my problems:

1. I found the characters to be pretty flat.  It never seemed like Scorchy had a distintive look - he was a pretty bland good-looking guy whose appearance never quite settled in while Sickles was on the run.  Sickles did get better at drawing distinctive characters as his run went on, particularly the bad guys.  But I never felt like Scorchy had any defining personality traits, nor a really good sidekick that stuck with him.  It seemed like Sickles always tried to find someone that Scorchy could pal around with, but never settled on one he liked.

2. The dialogue.  Too many of the characters speak with a foreign accent, painstakingly rendered in prose.  This may have been fine when you were reading the strip once a day, but reading through this volume several strips at a time, the German and French and what have you accents really started to wear me down.  Well done accents will add color and character while still preserving an effortless reading experience (this is, after all, the comics page), something that Caniff did really well with Connie.  Not so here.  I found myself wishing for an adventure in the Midwest simply to get a break from the accents. 

3. The planes are underused. The one defining feature of Scorchy that is really interesting is his background as a pilot.  This figured into a lot of the plots, but is still, in my opinion, underused.  I would have like to see more globtrotting (not just have the plane be the way to get wherever the storyline was going to happen) and a few more conflicts that involved aircraft directly.  I guess when I head about the book I assumed much of it would concern planes, so maybe I am a victim of my own expectations.

Certainly, though, I did enjoy reading it, and it’s head and shoulders above anything else out there now (Mark Trail, Mary Worth.)  I have always felt like the story strips in their heyday contained some of the best writing out there, and I still consider Al Capp to be one of the best authors period.  it was, if nothing else, a captivating look at a guy who briefly graced the comics page and changes the game for the three years he was there.

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Honestly, I couldn’t bring myself to complete it.  The concept was okay, the drawing was fine, but it just looked to sweet – the sort of drawing that tends to pop up in textbooks and other books for kids that is sure not to offend.  It had a classic feel to it that was a little dated.  No one builds snowmen like this anymore.

So I ditched this idea for something a little more fun and something I could be more proud of.  Here’s the final:

A snowball fight!  Much better, and much more likely for kids to actually do.  I don’t want to present a sanitized version of winter for the kids.

Anyway, I liked the final drawing and two months later I still do.  I wish I would have added more snowballs and I’m not keen on the guy on the right’s arm, but I tried to capture the feel of an actual war – you know, being in the trenches and all that.  And I do think the cartoon has some depth to it, a quality I’ve really been working on with this set of drawings.  Much better than the snowman idea at any rate.

http://www.comicteacher.com