British TV ist Krieg!

To Mega Television:

A HUGE DEBT OF GRATITUDE

Thank you everyone! The show is quite incredible. It is truly one of the coolest collections I've ever seen- running the gamut from heavyweights and pioneers like Milt Caniff, Will Eisner, R. Crumb and Basil Wolverton to little/un-known artists and equalizes everything into a community of comics.

It is so humbling to be a part of it!

I will post some thank you gifts and goodies here from my book. But for now I just want to extend my deepest gratitude and love to everyone who has helped me with this book, especially Tucker for his feedback and guidance, to David Wojnarowicz, and Kathy Acker and the other artists who inspire so much in me and who left us way way too soon. My Mom for helping me realize my full potential.

William Blake was and is a major inspiration for my work, but especially this book. The title is from his work, as well as the basic idea of fiction created through images. Sometimes I feel like he is the wellspring we all form out of, and like Saturn, he will devour his children one by one when we are done...

Last: especially Reginald, who I love with everything I have and am and wouldn't be anything without him.

Thanks for reading this blog every once in a while, too!

Dave Sim vol. 4; Dave's Not Here Right Now

Okay, let's get down to brass tacks: Dave Sim gets lazy. I mean, I get it. Taking three decades of your life and putting it into a public project, it's understandable. We all get lazy. Dave Sim can be one of the most expressive and insightful cartoonists, and he can turn around and be one of the laziest and ugliest. I have cringed at some of his character drawings. Pages later he has the mastery of some of the funniest faces in the business.

Hey, it happens.

But somebody who was along for almost the entire ride NEVER got lazy. His name was Gerhard and his artwork is simply stunning:

(please click on all these to see the full monty)

Behind Sim's stiff and studied art is a lush, immaculate and enticing world. There is such a sense of place in Cerebus, and it is ALL because of Gerhard's art.

Gerhard sort of appeared and disappeared. I haven't found any info on what he did prior to Cerebus. Two years after the series finished he sold his shares to Dave Sim. I haven't seen any mention of work he did since the completion of Cerebus. Like some stranger in an old western, he rides into town and leaves with the sunset without a trace. And nobody mentions his name, it is always eclipsed by Dave Sim's mad genius.

When he began working on Cerebus the equation was suddenly complete. It became iconic and inviting in this incredible way. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud talks a little about the super-cartoony character in a world of detailed rendering and how that juxtaposition invites the reader even further into the comic. I won't get into specifics, but Cerebus is one of the comics where that is absolutely true.

Compare this. It is all (early) Dave Sim:
To this... All Gerhard:Yes, the draftsmanship gets better and better with both of them, but even late in the game, Dave Sim would simply draw crap and it really sticks out over Gerhard's "backgrounds."

Now this is where I think the weirdness begins. Why do so many comics artists have this chasm between characters on this screen of a stage, the "background" just filler for their characters? I feel this too in my work. I'm not saying it's a particularly bad thing. Many greats couldn't be bothered with anything but white space behind their characters... and it works! But are we so vain and bored with the world around us that we treat it as noise? It's a weird phenomenon and so prevalent in many types of art (in music, we favor the voice, the singer over everything, flip through a magazine and see elaborate frames for bodies, dance of course, etc).

What Cerebus does is a little different. It creates and awkward space with its confrontational ugliness both spiritually and physically.

This misogynist zip-a-toned aardvark and other characters are ugly, sometimes honestly, sometimes just poorly drawn. So Cerebus creates this weird inversion that forces you to stop looking at the characters and go further into the world. You find yourself politely staring at the wallpaper or averting your eyes. You shouldn't point or whisper.

Later as the series was nearing its end, Gerhard began taking photographs and using them for the covers. Perhaps this is mistaken for laziness, but photography is no simple feat (this is before digital, keep in mind). This was out of his element, and with all the variables that could go wrong with light, exposure, framing and so on, it was probably more difficult that cranking out more cross-hatching and architecture. I think this is actually more of the awkwardness, the confrontation. It was a weird landscape photograph in muted colors in the midst of flying fists and space races and mutants. It was anti-comics. It was elegiac.

It was no longer trying to tell you something.

Sweet, Chaste Fabric

Leonardo da Vinci could draw fabric like nobody else. A lot of those old masters and classic artists could hold their own in other arenas, but da Vinci is the reigning title belt ruler for all eternity.

This is my study of Bronzino, who was no slouch. Definitely check out the exhibit at The Met, it will blow your mente (that's Italian for mind!)

Please check out my new webcomic THE BROKEN LIGHT

Dave Sim vol. 3

So we've been dumping on the guy for his views. But please click on the picture below and see WHY we're spending so much time talking about his views. His art is incredible, especially his use of tone and shading (if you go back and look at early Cerebus, then Gerhard's backgrounds, then his stuff now, you may find where he may have picked up a thing or two).





This is from his new series, Glamorpuss. It is so bizarre, and just as polarizing among his fans as his worldview was among comics fans. In a nutshell, he redraws ads and pictures from women's fashion magazines and gives the history of photorealism in comics. Admittedly self-indulgent, but the history stuff is (at least for me) fascinating.

The polarization comes from doing these fashion spreads (replete with industry jokes, rants and send-ups) and studies of golden age photorealistic comics greats along with studies of their work. Check it out if you get a chance, it is puzzingly amazing and amazingly puzzling...