No. It's not even Iowa.
Showing posts with label Daniel Clowes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Daniel Clowes. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Sunday, July 29, 2012
A smile is something special, but honestly, ribbons are readily available almost anywhere
Just re-reading Ghost World yesterday. The part where Enid regresses emotionally while listening to one of her childhood favorite songs is very touching. It's a very fatherly gesture for her dad to drag out her little turntable and put the single on her bed. Does anyone listen to 45s anymore? I had a stack when I was a kid, but most of them were outlaw country by guys like Waylon Jennings. I especially like the
panel when Enid wakes up in the morning still in her beanbag chair with her hair sticking up all over the place. I'm almost completely bald and look like some kind of effeminate mirror universe Ike Eisenhower, so of course I'm jealous even of someone's terrible morning hair.
Anyway, I'm doing a deep study of the way Daniel Clowes draws eyes and hands. You have your slender Alex Toth fingers with prominent fingernails, your dynamic yet claw-like Gil Kane hands that seem rippling with muscles, and then your Dan Clowes hands which are largely featureless. They're not perfunctory, though. They're typically well observed in whatever pose he chooses to place them.
Eyes vary. Weirdo comedian Joey McCobb-- is he for real, or is he simply a hack with an outsider gimmick?-- has wrinkly cartoonish eyes, kind of pointy and football shaped. Visually, he reminds me a little of Peter Lorre. Very little. Mostly just the eyes. Enid and Rebecca have more nuanced eyes, at least at the beginning of the story. Eyelids, lashes, little lines underneath to show the roundness. Eyes protude slightly. There's at least one panel later in the book where Enid's eyes are simply a curved arc above and below, but they're somewhat obscured by the drawing of her glasses frames.
I could be mistaken. I'm writing my impressions the next day, at work. It will be interesting for me to go home this evening and see if I really saw what I remember seeing, or if I'm just making things up in my head.
As an artist myself, I've never settled on a particular way to draw eyes. Sometimes I want to do sort of abstracted, simplified shapes with full outlines, but other times I go nuts with the detailing. I change frequently depending on who happens to be influencing me that day, or if I've seen someone new I want to rip off.
Jaime Hernandez has a simple yet convincing way of drawing eyes, the footballish upper and lower arcs, with rounded irises in the center. The top arc can be flattened and thickened, with a few strokes for lashes. Interestingly, in a fairly recent story arc, he chose to use the "injury to the eye" motif regarding Hopey, a character whose motivations I often think about. But prior to that, she spent the story "Election Day" (Penny Century #5, June 1999) hiding her eyes behind dark sunglasses, so much so one of the minor characters mentions thinking she's blind. At the end of the story she lifts the sunglasses while staring at herself in the mirror, revealing deep lines under them and some kind of enigmatic unhappiness. What's going on in that head of hers? Hernandez generally characterizes her as someone not given to introspection. The eyes are expressive, but they tell us nothing.
His art is slick and appealing, believable yet not exactly realistic. Steve Rude has a similar approach, but the character he's most associated with usually wears a visor. No eyes. When I picture a Rude face, I imagine narrowed eyes drawn as horizontal lines, squinting, the body straining, twisting and moving. Action eyes. Some of his aliens have big round insectoid eyes. Good for science fiction, not so much for earth-bound romance comics-- which is a genre I'm very interested in working in. I like to say "social realism," but if I'm really being honest with myself, I'm writing romance comics. They'll never see publication, but it's fun to churn out scripts full of emotional torture for my shabbily realized characters.
Alex Toth and Mort Meskin sometimes drew eyes as little slashes of black ink, or maybe a line up top and then a dab of ink below for the iris. Very simple and effective. Alex Toth is my primary influence for drawing eyes, but like Clowes, Hernandez and Rude, he employed different methods. His sketchbook pages, which are frequently just big piles of faces and heads, show all kinds of approaches. Some of them are extremely simple, just quick enclosed triangles and ovals.
Simply put, there's no one right way to draw eyes. Do what works best for you, what's appropriate for your characters. Above all, observe real emotions and learn to draw them. If you're good at acting on the page, more than likely you're rarely drawing eyes the same way twice anyway.
And work on those hands while you're at it.
panel when Enid wakes up in the morning still in her beanbag chair with her hair sticking up all over the place. I'm almost completely bald and look like some kind of effeminate mirror universe Ike Eisenhower, so of course I'm jealous even of someone's terrible morning hair.
Anyway, I'm doing a deep study of the way Daniel Clowes draws eyes and hands. You have your slender Alex Toth fingers with prominent fingernails, your dynamic yet claw-like Gil Kane hands that seem rippling with muscles, and then your Dan Clowes hands which are largely featureless. They're not perfunctory, though. They're typically well observed in whatever pose he chooses to place them.
Eyes vary. Weirdo comedian Joey McCobb-- is he for real, or is he simply a hack with an outsider gimmick?-- has wrinkly cartoonish eyes, kind of pointy and football shaped. Visually, he reminds me a little of Peter Lorre. Very little. Mostly just the eyes. Enid and Rebecca have more nuanced eyes, at least at the beginning of the story. Eyelids, lashes, little lines underneath to show the roundness. Eyes protude slightly. There's at least one panel later in the book where Enid's eyes are simply a curved arc above and below, but they're somewhat obscured by the drawing of her glasses frames.
I could be mistaken. I'm writing my impressions the next day, at work. It will be interesting for me to go home this evening and see if I really saw what I remember seeing, or if I'm just making things up in my head.
As an artist myself, I've never settled on a particular way to draw eyes. Sometimes I want to do sort of abstracted, simplified shapes with full outlines, but other times I go nuts with the detailing. I change frequently depending on who happens to be influencing me that day, or if I've seen someone new I want to rip off.
Jaime Hernandez has a simple yet convincing way of drawing eyes, the footballish upper and lower arcs, with rounded irises in the center. The top arc can be flattened and thickened, with a few strokes for lashes. Interestingly, in a fairly recent story arc, he chose to use the "injury to the eye" motif regarding Hopey, a character whose motivations I often think about. But prior to that, she spent the story "Election Day" (Penny Century #5, June 1999) hiding her eyes behind dark sunglasses, so much so one of the minor characters mentions thinking she's blind. At the end of the story she lifts the sunglasses while staring at herself in the mirror, revealing deep lines under them and some kind of enigmatic unhappiness. What's going on in that head of hers? Hernandez generally characterizes her as someone not given to introspection. The eyes are expressive, but they tell us nothing.
His art is slick and appealing, believable yet not exactly realistic. Steve Rude has a similar approach, but the character he's most associated with usually wears a visor. No eyes. When I picture a Rude face, I imagine narrowed eyes drawn as horizontal lines, squinting, the body straining, twisting and moving. Action eyes. Some of his aliens have big round insectoid eyes. Good for science fiction, not so much for earth-bound romance comics-- which is a genre I'm very interested in working in. I like to say "social realism," but if I'm really being honest with myself, I'm writing romance comics. They'll never see publication, but it's fun to churn out scripts full of emotional torture for my shabbily realized characters.
Alex Toth and Mort Meskin sometimes drew eyes as little slashes of black ink, or maybe a line up top and then a dab of ink below for the iris. Very simple and effective. Alex Toth is my primary influence for drawing eyes, but like Clowes, Hernandez and Rude, he employed different methods. His sketchbook pages, which are frequently just big piles of faces and heads, show all kinds of approaches. Some of them are extremely simple, just quick enclosed triangles and ovals.
Simply put, there's no one right way to draw eyes. Do what works best for you, what's appropriate for your characters. Above all, observe real emotions and learn to draw them. If you're good at acting on the page, more than likely you're rarely drawing eyes the same way twice anyway.
And work on those hands while you're at it.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
I did it! I ordered Ghost World!
I know you're fascinated by this Ghost World saga and relieved to know I'll have a brand new copy sometime in the next two weeks thanks to my good friends at Amazon Japan and Sagawa Transport. I also ordered New Mutants Classic volume 4, two Marvel Masterworks Uncanny X-Men books and John Byrne's Compleat Next Men 1. What a dork!
Along with those I sent for Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank and On the Beach by Nevil Shute. I'm not just a sucker for comics about disaffected youth and mutated super-beings with soap opera-ish personal issues but also for the nuclear combat toe-to-toe with the Russkies. I'm a big fan of the apocalypse. When you grow up party to a murder-suicide pact involving you, your government, its chief ideological rival and every other higher order of life on the planet, you tend to find such concepts as missile gaps, fallout, mega-deaths and half-life fascinating and fun. My first words were, "Mein Fuhrer! I can valk!"
So I've read On the Beach multiple times, but I read Alas, Babylon only once, when I was a child. All I remember about it is someone gets blinded by staring at an atom bomb blast. Probably some punk teenager. Teenagers are always staring at things.
I remember that, and Chef Boyardee's Little Pizzas, which were a staple of my summertime diet in those days. The rich, probably artificially-flavored with chemicals later proven to be carcinogenic tomato taste of Chef Boyardee's Little Pizzas is forever linked in my mind with Alas, Babylon and the novelization of George Lucas's early film THX-1138, my copy of which apparently had a few pages missing. I assume the movie has a happy ending like most of Lucas's other films, right? I stole Alas, Babylon from my older brother who read it for a high school class and THX-1138 came courtesy a used book sale at the public library.
Holy moley, I'm like Proust with brain damage.
Along with those I sent for Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank and On the Beach by Nevil Shute. I'm not just a sucker for comics about disaffected youth and mutated super-beings with soap opera-ish personal issues but also for the nuclear combat toe-to-toe with the Russkies. I'm a big fan of the apocalypse. When you grow up party to a murder-suicide pact involving you, your government, its chief ideological rival and every other higher order of life on the planet, you tend to find such concepts as missile gaps, fallout, mega-deaths and half-life fascinating and fun. My first words were, "Mein Fuhrer! I can valk!"
So I've read On the Beach multiple times, but I read Alas, Babylon only once, when I was a child. All I remember about it is someone gets blinded by staring at an atom bomb blast. Probably some punk teenager. Teenagers are always staring at things.
I remember that, and Chef Boyardee's Little Pizzas, which were a staple of my summertime diet in those days. The rich, probably artificially-flavored with chemicals later proven to be carcinogenic tomato taste of Chef Boyardee's Little Pizzas is forever linked in my mind with Alas, Babylon and the novelization of George Lucas's early film THX-1138, my copy of which apparently had a few pages missing. I assume the movie has a happy ending like most of Lucas's other films, right? I stole Alas, Babylon from my older brother who read it for a high school class and THX-1138 came courtesy a used book sale at the public library.
Holy moley, I'm like Proust with brain damage.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Is it that time again? Time to re-read Ghost World?
Ghost World. You've seen the movie. You've read the book. So have I. Let's form a club, okay? We'll meet in my tree fort out back and read Ghost World over and over again, and act out the scenes and we won't let anybody join we don't want to join!
That's a stupid idea. Sorry. But the feeling I should read Ghost World one more time is growing deep down inside, a brilliant idea which somehow sprang from the exact same place as that stupid one. To read Ghost World again requires the purchase of Ghost World, which I can easily afford. I have a battered pre-movie version back in the States. Yes, I was into Ghost World before it became a movie. I'm not bragging or trying to pose as some hipster cognoscenti. It's a matter of chronology. Time and setting.
Ghost World just crept up on me in a melancholy, mysterious fashion that seems completely fitting. It was the way back when, during that time we called the mid-90s because we were in the middle of a decade that started 199 and finished with a number somewhere between 3 and 7, Bill Clinton was president, Kurt Cobain had just died and I was in college for the second time, studying art, spending a lot of free time between classes at the student bookstore. I kept finding Ghost World on the shelf among the humor books for some reason. I guess because a lot of them were cartoon-based. Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County, The Far Side. College faves. And, for some reason, the trade paperback of DC's Camelot 3000, which they probably still have. Every once in a while I'd pick up Ghost World, scan a page, get some kind of misjudged message from it and suddenly feel very alienated.
Which wasn't an unusual feeling. I lived in a party dorm with a series of the most mismatched roommates possible-- first an Eagle Scout/Eagles fan/outdoorsman who littered the room with belongings and food, and over the course of our semester together completely coated the mirror with his sebaceous eruptions but objected my my beard shavings in the sink; then two jocks who pledged frats, one of whom would bring his girlfriend back to the room for strangely chaste yet very loud make-out sessions early in the morning after Date Night or whatever event it was her sorority sponsored that weekend. That I was drunk or high myself most of the time did nothing so smooth our relations.
With 8 a.m. studio classes and an amateur 24-hour a day casino open in the room next door, I developed a hyper-sensitivity to noise which led to several confrontations with other students, culminating in the most excruciating one of all. When you can't ask someone to please close her door or at least make sure she's actually inside her room when she wants to enjoy loud music without being asked later that evening by your RA to fill out a form stating you're not a racist, then you have no place in dormitory life.
But I've always been an Enid Coleslaw. Too smart to accept life at face value, too stupid to do anything about it. It's only in the past few years I've dropped at least some of my cynicism and contempt for pop culture and tried to embrace it. Probably as a result of over-exposure to post-modernism, where ironic enjoyment of the kind Enid and her pal Rebecca Doppelmeyer specialized in has become mainstream. Mass culture has appropriated our outsider stance, leaving us with nowhere to turn except sincerity. Like Enid, I even had a somewhat more popular best friend who shared my sense of alienation and otherness, with whom I could heap mocking scorn on such daring targets as America's Funniest Home Videos and generic dance music. Like Enid, I left town to start a new life.
Unlike Enid, my Rebecca turned out to be even more dysfunctional than I was. Instead of growing into a beautiful young woman, he died of an accidental overdose in 1999, in a hotel room, on a business trip. So maybe I was Rebecca after all and all my Enid-isms-- so Enid I even to this day occasionally wear ugly plastic rimmed glasses and occasionally have for years and years and years-- were just a pose. Well, I don't know what to think about that. I guess I'm just one more of those people.
By the time we buried that guy, I'd finally read Ghost World. Multiple times. Flash forward two years and I was so excited about the movie. I watched the trailer at work-- a private office, a souped-up Mac with the fastest Internet connection available at the time made that possible-- then went with friends to the little shopping center theater where the movie played. Liked the parts that captured the disconnected, ambivalent tone of the book, felt a little let-down by the emphasis on jokes and linear plot. Good performances. Kinda want to see it again, too.
Yes. It is decided. Today, I order Ghost World. After all, if I do produce my own comic, I need something to rip o-- I mean, provide inspiration.
Oh, yeah. I also relate to Clowes's original "Art School Confidential" short story. Hilariously accurate, perfectly acidic take-down of art school. The movie, on the other hand? It stinks. Maybe I need to read that story again, too, while I'm at it.
That's a stupid idea. Sorry. But the feeling I should read Ghost World one more time is growing deep down inside, a brilliant idea which somehow sprang from the exact same place as that stupid one. To read Ghost World again requires the purchase of Ghost World, which I can easily afford. I have a battered pre-movie version back in the States. Yes, I was into Ghost World before it became a movie. I'm not bragging or trying to pose as some hipster cognoscenti. It's a matter of chronology. Time and setting.
Ghost World just crept up on me in a melancholy, mysterious fashion that seems completely fitting. It was the way back when, during that time we called the mid-90s because we were in the middle of a decade that started 199 and finished with a number somewhere between 3 and 7, Bill Clinton was president, Kurt Cobain had just died and I was in college for the second time, studying art, spending a lot of free time between classes at the student bookstore. I kept finding Ghost World on the shelf among the humor books for some reason. I guess because a lot of them were cartoon-based. Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County, The Far Side. College faves. And, for some reason, the trade paperback of DC's Camelot 3000, which they probably still have. Every once in a while I'd pick up Ghost World, scan a page, get some kind of misjudged message from it and suddenly feel very alienated.
Which wasn't an unusual feeling. I lived in a party dorm with a series of the most mismatched roommates possible-- first an Eagle Scout/Eagles fan/outdoorsman who littered the room with belongings and food, and over the course of our semester together completely coated the mirror with his sebaceous eruptions but objected my my beard shavings in the sink; then two jocks who pledged frats, one of whom would bring his girlfriend back to the room for strangely chaste yet very loud make-out sessions early in the morning after Date Night or whatever event it was her sorority sponsored that weekend. That I was drunk or high myself most of the time did nothing so smooth our relations.
With 8 a.m. studio classes and an amateur 24-hour a day casino open in the room next door, I developed a hyper-sensitivity to noise which led to several confrontations with other students, culminating in the most excruciating one of all. When you can't ask someone to please close her door or at least make sure she's actually inside her room when she wants to enjoy loud music without being asked later that evening by your RA to fill out a form stating you're not a racist, then you have no place in dormitory life.
But I've always been an Enid Coleslaw. Too smart to accept life at face value, too stupid to do anything about it. It's only in the past few years I've dropped at least some of my cynicism and contempt for pop culture and tried to embrace it. Probably as a result of over-exposure to post-modernism, where ironic enjoyment of the kind Enid and her pal Rebecca Doppelmeyer specialized in has become mainstream. Mass culture has appropriated our outsider stance, leaving us with nowhere to turn except sincerity. Like Enid, I even had a somewhat more popular best friend who shared my sense of alienation and otherness, with whom I could heap mocking scorn on such daring targets as America's Funniest Home Videos and generic dance music. Like Enid, I left town to start a new life.
Unlike Enid, my Rebecca turned out to be even more dysfunctional than I was. Instead of growing into a beautiful young woman, he died of an accidental overdose in 1999, in a hotel room, on a business trip. So maybe I was Rebecca after all and all my Enid-isms-- so Enid I even to this day occasionally wear ugly plastic rimmed glasses and occasionally have for years and years and years-- were just a pose. Well, I don't know what to think about that. I guess I'm just one more of those people.
By the time we buried that guy, I'd finally read Ghost World. Multiple times. Flash forward two years and I was so excited about the movie. I watched the trailer at work-- a private office, a souped-up Mac with the fastest Internet connection available at the time made that possible-- then went with friends to the little shopping center theater where the movie played. Liked the parts that captured the disconnected, ambivalent tone of the book, felt a little let-down by the emphasis on jokes and linear plot. Good performances. Kinda want to see it again, too.
Yes. It is decided. Today, I order Ghost World. After all, if I do produce my own comic, I need something to rip o-- I mean, provide inspiration.
Oh, yeah. I also relate to Clowes's original "Art School Confidential" short story. Hilariously accurate, perfectly acidic take-down of art school. The movie, on the other hand? It stinks. Maybe I need to read that story again, too, while I'm at it.
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