World Historical Comics

Crawford cum Clarke

2012-02-07T17:36:00.000-08:00

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This early Feldstein era satire on children’s books, published in MAD Magazine #42, 1958, caught my attention for the delegation of Bob Clarke to imitate the painting style of Little Golden Book illustration, typified by the likes of Mel Crawford.

Crawford’s contemporaneous adaptation of animated cartoon properties from UPA and Hanna-Barbera for Little Golden Books, remain much loved by animation industry stylists in Burbank, California, the hub of American mainstream TV animation. John Kricfalusi and others once close to him, all seem to share a love for such children’s book aesthetics. From this center of second generation TV animation professionals the influence expands into lesser known figures of the succeeding generation.

Clarke has a sense of contour and simplicity which make him the most stylistically modernist of the Mad stable at the time. This in addition to his lovely monochrome washes make for a good fit to approach the watercolor techniques of Crawford and his ilk.

While having a reputation for being ‘nonconformist’ in the era of Red Scare conformity, in MAD one often finds anti-communist and anti-union gags under Feldstein’s editorial definition. It doesn’t take too much imagination to speculate shrewd small business owner/publisher Bill Gaines was hostile to the organization of labor, as his artists were all flexible free-lance labor, going project to project (the entire industry was structured along these lines), and the success of MAD was beginning to make increasingly wealthy men of Gaines and Feldstein, who had 3 years earlier (from the time of this pieces publication) faced financial ruin consequent to the attacks on the comic-book industry from right wing moralists.

This is it.

2012-01-31T17:17:00.000-08:00

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Borges expressed in one of his famed essays with which I was once so well versed, when writing about a moment in literature which made impress upon him, such a minor moment would, he expressed, doubtless fail to be considered a high point of literature. What Borges was attempting to make us aware of are those moments of reading, those intimate, idiosyncratic moments of interpretation and effect which connect us with a text. The founding of a personal relationship with a work that speaks to us, eludes our analysis, and sits in quiet beside the clamorous hurrahs of the anthem, the epic, and the obvious.

I present here, above, a single panel from Floyd Gottfredson's (sic) early Mickey newspaper strip which seems to epitomize my ineffable delight in the world of cartoons, and likewise, I doubt it will be considered of the greatest moments in cartoon history.

(But it is…)

addenda/erratum:

Continuing my slovenly scholastics, I was happily corrected in the comments by none other than the estimable cartoon scholarship of Mr. David Gerstein, editor at large, who informs me that Gottfredson, whose long tenure on the strip I took for granted, was not the artist on this early specimen, pictured above, but is the work of Win Smith. Smith apparently present from the beginning of Mickey's appearence in newspaper form, as the inker of the first handful of dailies which were drawn by Mickey co-creator, Ub Iwerks, according to author Jim Korkis.

This image comes from the Eternity Comics titled Uncensored Mouse reprint, ca. 1989.

Modernerkunst, ham'n'eggs...

2012-01-21T12:57:00.000-08:00

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Cartoons flourished in Modernism in the way Rimbaud, Lautreamont and Jarry were precursory luminaries for the metaphysical and cultural rejections of the DaDaists and Surrealists, - so too was the comic-strip, with its graphic reductionism, its cerebrality and tendency to work in abstract notation rather than symbolism and normative perceptual representation, links it directly with paintings’ avant-garde which itself gravitated to the graphic, and eventually threw away, entirely, the methods advanced in Western painting since Giotto and the advent of the Renaissance.

Initially looking in the graphic importations of primitivism, from Greek earthenware to African sculpture and Native American totems, so too was there found comity in painting with the editorial cartoon and comic-strip.

Street life, socio-economic documentations, vices and mores under scrutiny, such has been the mein for both editorial cartooning and the great socio-critical painters of the ilk of Goya and Hogarth.

Many painters of this period began as cartoonists and had brushes with commercial art, - Thomas Hardt Benton, who began cartooning for provincial publications when quite young, and adorned letters to his mother with wonderful cartoon figures done in the ‘Buster Brown’ style, and the more accomplished syndicate strip artist and high modernist kin to Die Brucke & Bauhaus, Lyonel Feininger, whose turn-of-the-century newspaper strips, Wee Willie's World and The Kinder-Kids are masterpieces, whorls of imagination.

I find I prefer Feininger’s comic strip work, and other graphic illustration, to the paintings which firmly established him in the canon of old Modernist painting. Feininger is most appealing and as solid a genre painter as ever there was a genre painter belonging to any particular school of painting.

Much of Feininger's early graphic and commercial work has surfaced on cartoonist blogs and in the pages of that great and worthy publication, Comic Art, outta St. Louie, which exhibit so much wonderfully strange narrative imagery, that by comparison, Feininger’s landscapes and nautical pictures belie their utterly dispassionate formal rigidity.

Kirk's Works

2012-01-14T09:16:00.000-08:00

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The title for this post is taken from a book published in 1980 by Heresy Press collecting the work of so called Fantasy artist, Tim Kirk. My brother acquired a copy somewhere around 1982, introducing me to this work by an artist who really was an artist internal to Fandom- a copious cartoonist for various fantasy and science fiction fanzines from the middle 1960’s through the 1970’s, and winner of multiple Balrog Awards... haw. Editor George Beahm takes pains to preserve and make the career of Tim Kirk comprehensive in this loved volume. Beahm also has to his credit a successful effort to collect and publish Vaughn Bode’s bawdy and murderous strip, Deadbone, and compiled the Vaughn Bode Index.

Despite Tim Kirk’s accomplishments as an illustrator for hardbound editions of the works of the likes of R.E. Howard, Fritz Lieber, Lord Dunsany, and Frank L. Baum, and the 1975 Tolkien calendar, Kirk’s Works is filled with drawings for a variety of (pulp) fantasy fanzines. So much so, as to suggest these drawings were the dominant output of the artist.

At this time such fanzines were generally poorly produced, low print run, and served an eccentric cultural minority. They served as the threshing floor for young talent in the area of comics and book illustration, (Bernie Wrightson’s earliest published drawings can be found in fanzines of this vintage.) They were an insider’s coin, circulated by mail-order and through conventions. In other words, there wasn’t a great deal of money in them.

Musing over his tattered copy of Kirk’s Works 30 years later, my brother and I wondered what became of Tim Kirk, whose era had passed. An era where, arguably, fantasy fiction had broader popular appeal, when the earthy offshoot of hippiedom turned to Anglo-Saxon paganism, Led Zeppelin sung of Tolkien’s lore, Jethro Tull sported the work of Brian Froud, and Black Sabbath proclaimed “Fairies wear Boots!” We imagined Tim Kirk romantically broke in his obsolescence, living god knows how. A quick look on the net showed quite the contrary. Tim Kirk is alive and well. He now does industrial design for the architectural facades of theme parks, and my guess is, he’s pretty flush. Flush enough, for methinks many of his colleagues have problems paying their heating bills.

Of Mr. Arthur Suydam...

2012-01-01T18:08:00.000-08:00

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Art Suydam is now famous for several generations of comicdom fans, managing to surprise those of us who’ve followed him, off and on, for the last 30 years. In fact, at no other time has this artist/illustrator achieved such popularity than for his blotchy and impressionistic macabre cover paintings for the hyperbolic Marvel Zombies title of recent years. I discovered him when I was 9 in an advertisement for Heavy Metal magazine t-shirts that his Mudwog characters modeled in the early issues of the magazine. Later, Neal Adams’ Continuity pub reprinted the Mudwog stories Suydam painted with an exquisite admixture of Frazetta comicbook work, and storybook illustration which styled a kind of cartoon Victorianism, - and they were especially sexual, often one was unable to distinguish the faces of the principal characters from their genitals. P.C. Comics gave Suydam an early nod by devoting a short run anthology to his independent work, and Marvel’s Epic Illustrated, created to cash in on the Heavy Metal craze, printed Suydam’s epic Cholly and Flytrap, the first few installments of which are priceless.

Pages, below, of Cholly & Flytrap from Epic Illustrated, ca. 1981.

Suydam’s monochromatic comics achieved the kind of elegant linear shading which Berni Wrightson, a close cousin to Suydam at one time, in their Frazetta school enthusiasms, achieved in the pages of Warren magazines.

Suydam consistently creates panels which frame the subject by the radical foregrounding of an object. He is a great composer, yet one often has to puzzle him out in these early pieces. They are exquisite one moment, crude or vaguely inept at another. Yet they are very unique, though Suydam displays a range of influences from Heinrich Kley to the Frazetta of Famous Funnies, and Vaughan Bode.

post-scriptum

Suydam is most probably problematic, in my view, when it comes to race, where stereotypes and old racial iconography is used with no evidence of self-consciousness, but is banally set forth in the corners of his panels. This is a subject never taken-up, so far as I know, and perhaps deserves expounding in a follow-up post. Another day, perhaps. For our purposes, he has a wonderful aesthetic, which we stop short of imbuing with an essential evil.

brush & wash sketches on bristol, 2011.

2011-12-16T18:07:00.000-08:00

cartoon sketchbook, 2011...

2011-12-06T06:38:00.000-08:00

* This sketch became the working 'models' for my short tongue-in-cheek video piece, CONFLICT.

video: WRECKER PECKER

2011-11-30T11:26:00.000-08:00

A longshot at something a bit more substantial as a short, I present WRECKER PECKER.

WRECKER PECKER caps a series of works which exhibit preoccupation with miltary actions and their socio-cultural counterparts, -from the inane mutilations of Occupation, to the metaphysical violence of Remmy Rancid is the Anglican, & the naively idealist and propagandist serial adventure of Doc Vassage. WRECKER PECKER speaks of the symptoms of the derelect veteran, and the foresaken survivor.

I thought of this as a 'fake' CGI piece, primitively manipulating levels, again from the limited number of distortional fields in my old CS2 version of Photoshop. Much like puppetry.

Written by me, voiced by me, character sculpt and design, scenics, 'animation', et al., ...de moi.

video: Porter & Socius, a fragment.

2011-11-27T06:24:00.000-08:00

In the same reductionist spirit of cliche as that of our last video post, a piece entitled Conflict, I offer here another fragment. This time we set our sites on the 'Funny Animal' genre.

cartoon sketchbook, late Autumn, 2010...

2011-11-22T05:40:00.000-08:00

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cartoon sketchbook, Autumn, 2010 continued...

2011-11-07T16:58:00.000-08:00

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(This last sketch is an unconscious portrait, thus not a deliberate caricature, of a couple of producers I work with...)

cartoon sketchbook, Autumn, 2010.

2011-11-06T11:53:00.000-08:00

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***

* The brash young Thad Komorowski, with whom I was corresponding at the time, as 'The Wolf' giving a hanky wave to a portly little giesha wearing a scruffy beetle mask, or sum such.

** These two became onlookers in my experimental short, Of Late, Minoa.

*** The mouse with top-hat also used as the model for a character in Of Late, Minoa. The critter became an analog for class accession and possession.

'Comics' Journal

2011-11-05T13:52:00.001-07:00

'Comics' Journal...

2011-11-01T05:49:00.000-07:00

Big Feature: Doc Vassage & His Hearty Mujahidin

2011-09-28T06:47:00.000-07:00

Continuing in our topical vein of US military mischief, religious violence and culture clash, I present this pulp hero farce which puts an ersatz Doc Savage in Afghanistan at the behest of the State Department to equip and train the Mujahidin to harass the Soviet occupation of that country; - a' la Lawrence of Arabia, (T.E. Lawrence and his voluminous apologia to the Arab people: The Seven Pillars of Wisdom) an association of which a friend has reminded me.

I appropriated images of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Mujahidin resistance, and altered them via a series of filters. I then animated them in the same wise as I manipulated my drawings of the characters in the tale, and the previous two films or videos, posted below. Though I was just trying to come up with cheats to accomplish these shots which are meant to denote historical anecdote, my brother reminds me that they also have a connection with Ralph Bakshi's analogous use of WWII footage and Eisenstien films to accomplish battle sequences in his film, Wizards.

Big Feature: The Anglican

2011-09-11T05:34:00.000-07:00

The following piece continues my socio-political and now metaphysical ruminations which began with the military mayhem of Occupation, (see two posts below) and now fills out in a comicbook epic of religious myth and political violence.

The Anglican from Kirk L. Nachman on Vimeo.

Produced 2011.

NOTICE: GEORGE KUCHAR DIES.

2011-09-08T07:33:00.000-07:00

I’m grieved to report the death of underground, avant-garde filmmaker godfather extraordinaire, George Kuchar. A luminary for John Waters among others, George taught film at my alma mater, The San Francisco Art Institute, for decades. I never studied with him, however his presence among the faculty spread beyond the film department. My then girlfriend studied with him, providing a story and some great takes acting for a Kuchar class production, The Story of Ruthie. My friend and early collaborator Nate Longcope studied with George, and it was Nate who first encouraged me to work in video. In this wise I feel I have some connection with him. George was 69 years old. A great loss for us all! Bless you George.

BiG Feature: OCCUPATION

2011-09-04T15:18:00.000-07:00

Shifting gears, I'm going to present some of the artwork I've been doing over the course of the year. This blog began as a place to show my work, and eventually became whatever it appears to be today.

Sure to gather a few snores in the Theatre of the Obscure, without further ado, here's... OCCUPATION!

Occupation from Kirk L. Nachman on Vimeo.

The piece represents a departure for me technically. Finding I didn't possess the temperment for the still superior form of hand-drawn, full animation, after attempting to learn such in my first handful of animations, no pun intended. Last March I developed a crude homespun version of cut-out animation, via Photoshop, augmented with the limited vocabulary of distortional fields which my outdated version has at it's disposal. I can only imagine this is the broadstroke approach that lead to Flash animation. I painted the figures with brush and wash on Bristol and drew the backgrounds on draughting mylar. I swiped the score from 80's merchandising cartoons and my brother blasted them out with his audio gear! I ran the Photoshop composites through Stop Motion Pro.

Signature Gags and the Rehash…

2011-08-28T11:38:00.000-07:00

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After artists, artists of any stamp, gather a certain vocabulary, whether a concept or strophe or motif, a gag, or simply a style or form, it is given over to repetition throughout the duration of the artists creative life. This is perhaps a platitude, but one confirmed time and time again. With Tolstoy, the onset of the obdurate spirit in Russian culture is a fixation throughout his short works. In Chico Marx, it’s the witty rejoinder “That’sa watta you call finesse!” - card game jargoning used often by Chico in the Marx Brothers films and even on his wife after a long night of gambling.

I offer these from Kurtzman’s early MADs...

Furthermore...

THE UNKNOWN KRICFALUSI

2011-08-21T07:15:00.000-07:00

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Kricfalusi had a thing for the black and white 6 panel gag cartoons printed on the inside front and back covers of the old DELL Four Color comics which focused on the early Hanna Barbera characters, (he emulated this format in his short lived Spumco Comic Book from Dark Horse). These must have held an epiphany for him creatively, and they certainly reveal the cleanest view to the drawings which went into these more often crummy comics. This sort of epiphenomena in certain artists has always intrigued me, like Goodman Beaver for the mature Crumb, or Graham Ingels for Berni Wrightson; something which shapes a searching and developing creative mind, not mere discipleship, but a relationship which changes and furthers that which gave voice to it in the first place.

What Kricfalusi fans and sycophants may not be aware of is a little gag page entitled Cave Nudes which was submitted to Crumb’s Weirdo anonymously and printed in Weirdo issue number 9, and has been steadily reprinted for 28 years. It is obviously Kricfalusi’s work, and there’s some great inkwork in it. It wasn’t intended to be published when Kricfalusi drew it, I’d imagine, because it is a sophomoric cartoon fuck fantasy, and we learn from the editor that the comic was put up as a prank from an HB artist to hassle the studios producers. But there are tell-tales more damning than the qualities in the drawing, which alone would be ever ready for disputation.

The first bit of evidence is the fact that the time of publication coincides with Kricfalusi’s stint at Hanna Barbera, and the office antics of the situation suit him too. The nom de plume of the page’s artist is put forward as Billy Bunting, a Kricfalusi name incarnated into several characters, it seems.

Kricfalusi has an exquisite signature areole and nipple, as does Wilma in the Cave Nudes page, and these characters by Kricfalusi ,above. One could do a book on the various interpretations of the nipple in comicbook erotica and smut... you could do that, sure.

Ersatz Wolvertoons

2011-08-14T08:05:00.000-07:00

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As Basil Wolverton turned from the zany extremes of his grotesque caricature, first found in the MAD comics of the early 1950's,* to pursue biblical illustration which bore more resemblence to his 'straight' science fiction comics, a popular taste for his heights of nausea and silliness flourished in everything from Ratfink to Topps gum cards and shitcake humor comics like the abysmal toss-off Plop - D.C.'s attempt, I speculate, at realizing Wally Wood's POW, a MAD-like humor title which Wood tried to sell to Jim Warren. Wood did a series of exquisite renderings for the covers of Plop, where his idiosyncratic anatomical style was never so cleanly and clearly articulated, and they go forward in the manner of Wolverton's caricatures, (Wolverton also contributed artwork for the covers of Plop) -like Wood's pipe-smoker, below.

Norman Saunders, of Pulp painting fame, (examples above) found himself commissioned by Topps to do a series of cartoon grotesques forming the letters of the alphabet, and Wolverton is again the reference point of the commission.

Fun, fun, fun, - and J contemplates his crotch, who also contemplates him.

finis

* Although similar caricatures of Stalin and FDR, for example, may have appeared in editorials as early as the late '40's.

The Fleagle Collaborations

2011-08-07T07:53:00.000-07:00

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The infamous Fleagle gang of Brooklyn was composed of a group of friends all of whom happened to be cartoonists, illustrators, - artists, more or less, as you like it. Being in Brooklyn gave them proximity to the publishing industry in the city, and a love of pulps and comics determined their arena. Frazetta, you know him, the prodigious and athletic scrapper. Roy Krenkel, the lifetime disciple of pulp painter J. Allen St. John, (the Delacroix of the pulps); and Al Williamson, the youth with a sense of finery in his line, made up the core of these collaborations. The group also included the unassuming MAD longtimers George Woodbridge and Angelo Torres, (what Orlando was to Wood, so Torres was to Mort Drucker) among others.

A famous comic historical anecdote tells us of the early fifties, in the fabled EC heyday, where little Al Williamson began to receive commissions for EC’s science fiction titles and shock titles and turned to his buddies to relieve deadline pressures, and the collaborative nature of cartooning revealed itself yet again. The boys were jamming and they didn’t even know it. Earlier, Orlando and Wood were jamming up on the West Side. These are the quiet collaborations which laid the floor for the famed Zap jams of the late sixties and ever after.

The effect of these collaborations on their comic artist successors has been great, because those they influenced were pretty great: inspiring a series of devotional pages from heavies Dave Stevens and Bo Hampton, the latter who tailored a whimsical rewrite of the Williamson-Frazetta collabo’ Two’s Company from Weird Science No. 21, published in the indie house Pacific Comics’ title Alien Words, in the early eighties. The entire creative output of Mark Schultz (Xenozoic Tales) can be attributed to these stories, (albeit, together with the science-fiction work of Wally Wood and Frazetta’s romance comics and Famous Funnies cover work.) Ultimately, Schultz, like his elder colleague and Frazetta schooler Jeff Jones, turned to painting and N.C. Wyeth. Frazetta’s Squeeze Play, given over by Williamson, from Shock Suspense Stories No. 13, was so poured over by the young Art Suydam that comparative analysis between the two would be in order, but we’ll save that for later.

Much has been written on the subject of the Fleagles in comics’ journalism, and commented upon in the Frazetta documentary film, Painting with Fire, (haw-haw!)… nevertheless incomplete, I’ll repeat them with these image selections above, and including the exquisite splash panel from Williamson-Krenkel’s story Food for Thought, from the post-code Incredible Science Fiction No. 32, below.

Not Brand Echh pedagogical pages

2011-07-22T05:08:00.000-07:00

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In the late nineteen sixties, Stan Lee and the Marvel creatives decided to publish a self-parodying comic modeled on the original Kurtzman MADs… out of nostalgia , a sense of homage, or to exploit a potential market in satire of the establishment, which counter cultural influences prevailed upon pop-culture at the time-?

Let our faithful scholars record the truth of it! I, however, will say, it is due to Marie Severin, who not only worked on the original MADs, but had the stuff in her blood, that the venture, passing under the title Not Brand Ecch, was as good as it was, and it was pretty good.

Here, in the image above, Severin channels her brother and Kurtzman stable staple, Johnney Severin, augmented with a heavy dose of sweet, damned Wallace Wood. Its wonderful stuff, - the foreshortening in the hands, the mania, the cube-y teeth.

When I was a wee laddie and discovered Not Brand Ecch in the backissues, rare and fairly valuable, I was impressed with this satire, below, on the [comic] artist, which raked the veneer of the happy square cutting out clean work for a complete bum with shitty tools, because I had shitty tools, hand-me downs from my brother’s estimable cache, I figured I was headed in the right direction. Of course, to insiders, this portrayal of somewhat bohemian hackdom held more veracity than any adolescent is bound to savor.

To round out the lesson in a future in comics, first, the lifestyle and trappings of the comic artist, thence moving on to hard line formula, a’ la John Buscema’s How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way as typified in the page below, and incidentally makes terrific sport of the sort of rules of thumb found in Preston Blair’s how-to manual, and in layout seminars all across the San Fernando Valley.

*

The reductionist and labor saving tricks joked about in these panels actually come but a few degrees from identifying completely with the principles encouraged in the cartooning and animation industries, save under the admonition that such principles produce greater effect, (not that they are a dodge or trick.) This duality seems to me one of the more interesting dialectical moments of the little philosophy of cartoon making.

* Notice the real demographic of comicbooks, not children, but that bastion of robust non-conformists, the high school drop-out! What better dreamy bunch to populate the ranks of hackdom!

Harvey Kurtzman’s Aesthetic Parabola

2011-07-12T04:34:00.000-07:00

The discussion in animation and cartooning circles surrounding the form of their art will point to Harvey Kurtzman’s work as exemplifying perfect adherence to a certain set of aesthetic principles with which the members of these circles quite naively if not dogmatically believe ensures them of producing good work. That is, [character] construction, composition or layout, - hierarchy of forms, asymmetry, line of action, etc., these familiar headings were indeed practiced by Kurtzman to the letter in his early comic strip work, and continuing into his role as art director and story man, (Kurtzman did exhaustive layout drawings for all his comic stories which he imposed on his artists to follow strictly).

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This is where the dichotomy of Kurtzman’s formal sensibilities comes into view. It is true, in Kurtzman’s drawings, whether they are of a preliminary nature or as polished artwork, there is force, economy, and a lack of self-consciousness. Compositions are sparse and effectively composed, clear and bold.

However, once in the hands of his illustrators, from Davis to Wood, and Elder, et al, Kurtzman clearly encouraged a sense of congestion, texture, side-gags, (perfected by Elder) and near confusion. In the early MADs carrying through to his long running and labor intensive Annie Fanny, Kurtzman, as art director, transgresses the principles he exercises in his own work.

It is true, the very simple compositional superstructures underlying this intricate tableau are never thrown out by Kurtzman, but neither were they in the work of Jackson Pollock, necessarily, which points to the effectiviness of his paintings, - they are astonishingly well composed despite the volatility of attempting to manipulate the drip; - raw balance. But I digress.

So, I must chortle when Kurtzman’s name is invoked honorably as testament to the narrow exercise of these tried and traditional aesthetic principles when clearly his tastes, moreover his vision, motivated him to bend them to breaking.

2011-07-05T16:35:00.001-07:00

Hail to the Olde Republick!

2011-07-04T07:07:00.000-07:00

But know, ye citezenry, that the ol'republic is dead, and the National Security State stands in her place, where shills are her governors and bankers her high priests. Bow yer head in sorrow to the republic folks, for narrow self interest has replaced enlightened self interest, and the fuedal barons of free world trade pose as patriots while further crippling our middle class with union busting and the imperatives of the next movement of global capital.

2011-07-02T05:59:00.001-07:00

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Tyler Rowland: Closet Box space at Box 13 in Houston

2011-06-24T05:31:00.000-07:00

Tyler Rowland

The Birth of James Lee Byers, 2011, installation.

My dear friend Tyler Rowland, and last vestige of my connection to das kunstwelten,
made this elegant piece, another in an ongoing meditation and predilection of Rowland's to focus on various art historical heavy hitters, Lee Byers, the subject of this installation, comes more contemporary than previous delving into Duchamp and Courbet. The artist writes of his piece below.

"The installation is an homage to the artist James Lee Byars. It is a child's tuxedo (with top hat and blindfold) made from my sacrificed adult tuxedo and it is housed in a small closet which I built on-site within the Closet Box exhibition space. It is up until July 23rd if anyone finds themselves in Houston."

For more information about the piece please copy and paste

http://closetbox.weebly.com/current.html

2011-06-23T05:09:00.001-07:00

The calculating sentimentality of Jim Shaw

2011-06-18T07:24:00.000-07:00

Reading Philip Jose Farmer trying exuberantly, if thinly, sadly emptily, to attempt to commingle his love of pulp fiction with the banned writers of Grove Press, (yes kiddies, there was a time when William Burroughs and Henry Miller were deemed officially obscene and editions were impounded at the shipyards and in our backyards) in a piece of comparative writing (The Fourfold Vision-1973) like an adolescent firmly holding to what he knows is an irrational position, a stalwart belief in Santa Claus. That is, Farmer tries to convince us in an egalitarianism of letters, to make peerage of the sensational hacks of the pulps and their alleged betters. Farmer, like me, wants to defend and elevate his bastard children, or his shameful fathers, and he wonders, even though he’s supped the richer tables, if he isn’t merely one of the bastards himself. It is in this wise I see the work of Jim Shaw. Shaw, a middle Boomer, generationally, a Midwestern American kid ripe for Silver Age comics and then the peak of co-opted and commercialized psychedelia, earned an MFA from Cal Arts in the late 1970’s, working in the familiar modes of contemporary art: post-minimal, conceptual stuff, in multi-media installations. Shaw’s early magnum opus My Mirage, evokes all that aforementioned loamy American pop in this body of work which occupied Shaw from 1986-91. A heterogenous group of paintings, drawings and videos devoted to a single fictional, coming-of-age narrative of a kid called Billy. It would be obvious to ask Jim, “Are you Billy?” – of course, we all lose in the negative or affirmative, so let it hang, don’t fuck with it. But the content of the work, the references to comicbook icons Steve Ditko or Murphy Anderson, Wally Wood, Big Daddy Roth, underground cartoonist and hippie graphic guru Rick Griffin, pulp and gum card painter Norman Saunders, all bespeak an intimate, discerning and very specific, authentic, relationship with this material. Something stinks, howe’r, like the cynical and oblique cultural critique which informed the pop art of a generation before Shaw, he is too sophisticated to embrace fandoms objects cleanly, but neither can he let them go, with more love hours than you can imagine evident in his false, albeit conflicted altar to pop effluvia. Something conflicted when Shaw brings these unmentionables into the contemporary art sphere, simultaneously removing himself from them and relishing in them in a sublimation as indulgent as it is unneccesary. Like so much rhetorical gymnastics which prime any other work of art in the market and the academy, so does Shaw require his Billy narrative, like a pseudonym, or an author employing a protagonist subterfuge to express his own quandaries and desires.

top to bottom;

My Mirage Logo #3, 1989.

Devotional Art, 1987.

Bubblebum Cards, (Fronts), 1990.

Space, 1989.

(All excerpts from the greater body of work entitled My Mirage.)

2011-06-11T08:21:00.000-07:00

top: Kaethe Kollwitz, charcoal, 1933.

bottom: Adolph von Menzel, pencil, ca. 1890's.

My McDonald's...

2011-06-05T19:14:00.000-07:00

(For those following my now infrequent posts, I retracted the last post, an essay titled Cartoon Metaphysics and Metaphysical Cognition, after some conversation and further reading convinced me I didn't have the proper grasp of Kant's Transcendental Dialectic.)

Hi! Everything Okay? : The enigma of Brendan McCarthy

2011-04-16T11:02:00.000-07:00

(click on images)

In the early eighties my brother began to bring home titles from the first wave of the indie comic book publishing boom: P.C. comics, Eclipse comics, Eagle comics, Comico comics. Imports of the British comic scene, a baroque, twisted and ardent limn on the 30 years of the American comics that preceded them, - and perhaps response to the contemporaneous continental efforts of Metal Hurlant, - 2000 A.D. stories began to be distributed in the U.S. under their constituent title characters. Among the artists and writers of the 2000 A.D. stable, the enigmatic imagination and comic-historical alterations of the art of Brendan McCarthy surfaced for US readers with P.C.’s Vanguard Illustrated, then Eclipse’s Strange Days, a three issue run of post-apocalyptic-punk-rock-future-noir, written by Peter Milligan with McCarthy and comic book artist Brett Ewins, bearing a manifesto which claimed the aegis of Phil Dick, Steve Ditko and John Lennon, (with a heavy dousing of Kirby and Mad Max). It was 1984, I was 12. Of course I could articulate none of this then, but I was transfixed, and like everything in the eighties, it promised the future was now.

I’d forgotten about Strange Days and McCarthy for some 20 years until the now cancelled DC project, Solo, devoted an issue to McCarthy, the latter resurfacing in comics after many years hiatus himself, picking up where his Freak Wave had left me, still peppered with whimsical motifs, parody, amusingly static narratives and mock-philosophic squibs, such as no other comic has ever delivered. Toward the world of comics, McCarthy is irreverent with an uncanny reverence… which is how it should be.

I really adore McCarthy, who is also known as Ditranko. Since the DC Solo issue, McCarthy has been quite active in comics again, evidently. You can see examples via his fan-site-blog: The Strangeness of Brendan McCarthy………………………. thestrangenessofbrendanmccarthy.blogspot.com

* Collage of McCarthy's work from Strange Days and Vangaurd Illustrated.

Bro Show

2011-04-03T06:10:00.000-07:00

My brother, Russell Nachman, has mounted an exhibition of his work, primarily water colors exquisitely rendered on rough paper, at Lmak Projects, on the Lower East Side, 139 Eldridge St. @ Delancey in Manhattan. They are something to behold!

Palimpsest II 28, 2011, watercolor on paper.

You can see more of his work via the link in the sidebar.

Marginal Masters: Max Oppenhiemer and Georg Scholz

2011-03-29T15:20:00.000-07:00

1910. 1911. I found these paintings by one Max Oppenheimer in a catalogue from the Neue Gallery, that wonderful little museum in an old Rockefeller mansion just up from the Met. There you can get caffe und schnitzel and take in the collection of Seccessionist, Social Realist, and Expressionist paintings and artisanry of greater early 20th century Germania... you can almost hear the mannliche mutter call out desperately "Else! Else Beckmann!!" These portraits, above, by Oppenhiemer from 1910 and 1911, respectively, are truly exquisite. I wonder if history didn't favor Oppenhiemer as it did Klimt, Kokoshka, and Schiele because the former was more conservative than the latter in the new direction. I want to say the influence of Schiele in Oppenhiemer's portrait of one Heinrich Mann, dated 1911, is plain enough. By this year, Schiele would have already entered his mature phase, and yet as early as 1908, Schiele was producing very able but unremarkable academic work. 1921-22; detail. 1920. Another marginal figure of the German Avant-Garde is the Social Realism of Georg Scholz, above. Aesthetic cousin to Dix and Grosz, Scholz never experienced the attention Grosz and Dix enjoyed. His work isn't as visceral, perhaps, and psychologically dimensional as the others, but its sense of character and its socially critical positions certainly make peerage of Scholz among these famed painters.

Steadman: journeyman’s gestures.

2011-03-22T13:25:00.000-07:00

It seems cartoonist Ralph Steadman had the opportunity in the years 1977-78 to travel. Commissioned by magazines to make drawings of his impressions of the local color of his given location, much like Hefner sending Shel Silverstein on behalf of Playboy magazine to experience Europe in the 1950’s, Steadman replaces Silverstein’s hedonism with the political. Visiting the Middle East and East Asia, Steadman produced some of the finest work I’ve seen of him.

These plates were published in BBC Publications’ Radio Times in February 1978.

Urban congestion and the Asian marketplace astonishingly captured in these drawings of Hong Kong by Steadman. It is interesting that the Cultural Revolution had the proximity of Hong Kong capitalism to observe and eventually incorporate, following the Chinese reclamation of Hong Kong from Britain in 1997, the logical point of departure, or at least a moment of significant momentum for the capitalization of the Red Chinese.

Uncle Mikey School Redux

2011-03-15T05:39:00.000-07:00

Preamble It has happened: the standard bearers of the Golden Age of animation, the sanguine subscribers of the “Illusion of Life”, with their complacent aesthetic certainties, the staggering rigor of their no less frivolous scholarship, and moreover the preponderance of their critical surety, have driven me into the hands of those they most object to. The animation conversation turns me against my own preference, my own sensibilities, my own inveterate nostalgias and championing, into the arms of those shabby sans culottes that constitute the Adult Swim phenomenon. With the asinine and cheap humor of the latter, the poor taste, the egregious insult of their provisional animation, and their flight from anything resembling veneration for animation tradition, I celebrate them. From the notebook-doodle naiveté of the drawing of Super Jail and Squidbillies, to the generic alternative-comix graphics of Frisky Dingo and Mongo Wrestling Alliance, - anything that contrasts the overwhelming influence of the Spumco school style, which remains ubiquitous across the cable television spectrum. Anything that Warner Bros. zealots don’t accept as in the realm of their considerations, I embrace thee. In the spirit of this turn of feeling, I reissue an older post where I hope to establish something I call the Uncle Mikey School of Animation……………………………..

Around the time of the release of Heavy Metal (1981), the animated film based on the nudie fantasy illustration magazine of the same name, another Sex, Drugs and Rock’n’roll animated feature emerged: ROCK AND RULE. Within this feature, a cartoon-within-the-cartoon has always delighted me. It’s called The Uncle Mikey Show, and it sports a certain satiric nod to kiddie television animation by melding, in an aesthetically degenerate little cartoon, slapstick violence and a patronizing ‘Howdy Doody’ moral fibre. While questioning the children if they can indeed make the most basic distinction between good and bad deeds, Uncle Mikey is given to a hideous series of distortions and pulsing, single frame bubblings, - all of which professional standards of full commercial animation would forbid, and artisan animators deride. Whoever animated this probably never had as much fun, and release, in animating for the rest of their career.

The Uncle Mikey Show is prophetic in the sense that, some 28 years ago, its satire would become an aesthetic and spiritual precursor to commercial television animation like today’s Super Jail and Squidbillies. However, despite their crude drawing style, and cruder animation, neither production replicates the pulsing anomalies of Uncle Mikey.

ADDENDA: It so happens, with the addition of veteran animator, John Celestri, to the blogosphere, I've obtained the identity of the artist responsible for the Uncle Mikey Show-!! According to Celestri, who animated on all Nelvana's significant early productions, a fellow by the name of Mike Merrill designed and animated the Uncle Mikey Show, and Celestri concurs with the prophetic character of the Uncle Mikey Show with contemporary hipster animation, as it were.

Easter (video)

2011-03-01T06:05:00.000-08:00

The Easter Bunny, (pagan corollary to Christ on the day of Ressurrection's celebration) is an apostate and a member of the cult of genius. Somehow, when meditating the mortal aspects of genius, his apostacy comes to be redoubted as he runs headlong into oblivion.

Hope you enjoy... EASTER....

Easter from Kirk L. Nachman on Vimeo.

Of Late, Minoa; a short film

2011-02-01T05:04:00.000-08:00

Of Late, Minoa from Kirk L. Nachman on Vimeo.

Water Foul loop

2011-01-25T06:17:00.000-08:00

Being a neophyte in video production, indeed in animation, I continue to improve my skills and knowlege, but also that most important element of presentation.

Myself, and the curator of the last show I participated in, determined it best to cycle my Water Foul vignettes playing in succession in a continuous loop. I recently recut them in this fashion, and present them here, again, (I first posted the vignettes individually on the blog around mid year, 2010).

Hope you enjoy...

Water Foul loop from Kirk L. Nachman on Vimeo.

"...I've Been" - Silent Version

2011-01-18T19:11:00.000-08:00

Here is an alternate version of the "...I've Been" fragment from the so called Two Excerpts, viewable below. It's done in negative monochrome and is silent with animated dialogue plates.

There is some additional animation of the character which does not appear in the original version.

Musicians are encouraged to give it a quick score.

"...I've been..." silent version from Kirk L. Nachman on Vimeo.

"Aesthetics are dwarfed. Alexander Woollcott, the writer, was at Disney’s one time and he saw a pencil test and he flipped out of his head and said, “My God, why aren’t you showing this?” In those days, they had a negative, it was a white line with black and it even enhanced it more. And he just flipped out of his head. He said, “Why aren’t you showing the public this? This is magic!” He dug it, he understood it."

- Emery Hawkins, (from an unpublished interview by John Canemaker made available by our Young Turk, Thad Komorowski.)

This quote from Golden Age animator great, Emery Hawkins, brought to mind the savor of all the experimental cinema by the likes of Hans Richter and Marcel Duchamp in the early nineteen twenties, and the famous photo of Bob McKimson in front of a negative image of Bugs Bunny, inspiring thus the aesthetic direction of the silent rendition above.

Two Excerpts

2011-01-11T05:38:00.000-08:00

Looking for material with which to animate, I decided to look to the correspondence of a friend, himself a cartoon made corporeal, and took a couple of excerpts from missives from him over the last decade.

From ideological raving to beleagured depression and ennui...

It's a fragmentary thing, more an overproduced excercise than anything, I suppose.

Nevertheless, I hope you'll enjoy ...*

Two Excerpts long play from Kirk L. Nachman on Vimeo.

Eating Cycle test print

2011-01-04T14:05:00.000-08:00

Here's a couple beats of an eating cycle from a piece I've been working on, of late....

Update: I added a few more beats...

Eating Cycle from Kirk L. Nachman on Vimeo.

2010-12-21T05:37:00.000-08:00

Remember those who will be in a vacuum of unimaginable pain this holiday season.

Last Week for Group Show: Escape Artist

2010-12-12T07:56:00.000-08:00

(click image to read details)

It's the final stretch for Escape Artist, a group show curated by Brad Greenwood at Here Center for the Arts in SoHo, NYC.

I'm happily told showgoers have found themselves distracted enough to sit and watch my little animated vignettes which loop on a monitor in a perfect little corner of the show.

Again, my eternal gratitude to Brad and Kristin for their continued support of my work.

Cartoons and Liberal Society

2010-11-27T18:00:00.000-08:00

Intolerant power structures still find the cartoon a threat worthy of murder or political expunction, as you please. Today, Islamic zealots threaten the lives of cartoonists, as well as filmmakers and writers. Threatening an interesting and integral facet of what we know as a secular democracy or an Enlightenment Republic: the unfettered critical powers of the free press. This is well understood.

In the first decades of the new Republique Francais, during the class struggles which erupted following revolution and the attempt to reorganize the structures of power and governance, France was rich in cartoonists which, with the free press and the advent of lithography, performed acts of political criticism. The most notable artist in this capacity was of course, Honore Daumier, who was eventually raised to enjoy the esteem of Painter in French society.

The lithographer Boilly, perhaps less pointedly, turned his skills of caricature upon society’s mass in literary strokes, as did the engraver, and classics illustrator, Gustave Dore.

Boilly

Generations later, British cartoonist Ralph Steadman, illustrator of the works of Hunter S. Thompson, holds a political knife in his work.

Steadman's depiction of right-wing, Southern presidential candidate George Wallace.

Steadman on Apartheid.

Steadman on Arabian oil and wealth.

Those familiar with Steadman's work know of no other political cartoonist in the world of print of the last 50 years who has mustered as much violence, formally or stylistically, and in what invigorates the two, than Ralph Steadman.

We have no contemporary record of what Steadman might assay of the current situation between the West and the Islamic world. However, in the final years of the1970’s, after the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) compounded the continued use of commercial airliners for acts of terrorism, (obversely, the PFLP would consider such acts a strategy of revolt)* when in September of 1970 they hijacked 3 airliners, and before the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran would depose the autarky of the Shah, whom the US instated in 1948, and employees at the US embassy taken hostage, Steadman would visit the Middle East and do drawings ofthe local color, as a sort of travelogue. There is no position taken in these drawings.They are the life studies of the artist, not the political position of the cartoonist:

For Steadman, perhaps, the Middle East is too difficult a place to engage politically.Perhaps, he needed to draw it to signify the impossibility of his ability to politicize it.

* An interesting contrast between the PFLP and today’s more pronounced Islamic Terrorist organizations, is the theocratic nature of the latter, and the assumed secular, marxo-leninist ideology of the former. One assumes the PFLP sought the parent power of the USSR, - as did Nasser’s Egypt, initially, as did the entire coalition behind the 1967 war - to counterpoise Israel’s US backing, whereas the Islamic radicalism of today seeks to manipulate the spiritual contents of something which is transnational, rather than international, metaphysical rather than directly socio-political, and seeks to replace governance for Rule.

Of equal interest is the fact that neither the 1970 PFLP hijacking nor the hostage crisis of 1979 in Iran resulted in any hostage deaths. Whereas Islamic radicals of the last decade resolved to commit an act of mass murder and succeeded in the deaths of thousands.

CRUMB, minor characters

2010-11-17T05:08:00.000-08:00

The spark of ’67 gave the Underground enough momentum to finish out the seventies coasting. By the onset of the eighties, Crumb’s fanzine quality slick, Wierdo, attempted to find itself in the post-political malaise and made to take the assault on McCarthy America pop-iconography out of the discourse, and carry on with an endless meditation on sexuality and neurosis in the ham naiveté of the Underground’s anti-aesthetic style, (that is to say, Crumb is the only contributor who could draw worth a shit, for the most part). A surprising editorial turn, considering Reagan’s

America

was just warming-up.

Crumb has produced so many original characters, of various degrees of fame, but they ultimately diminish only into the figure of Crumb himself, more character than them all. We know Fritz, of course, and the once ubiquitous Mr. Natural, Angelfood McSpade, and the Snoid (some of us know how snoids are born, too). Some of us might remember the serene confusion of Shuman the Human. Yet, I want to focus on a favorite of mine who goes mostly forgotten, as far as I can tell, who seems to represent Crumb himself as he attempts to navigate his way through the eighties in the pages of Weirdo, - Doggo the dog. The diminutive to a bold and obnoxious protagonist exemplifying everything grabby and superficial about that decade, this dog tells me everything about Crumb’s mental state and social relation, and I barely have to pay attention to the narrative.

Shortly after this period, Crumb would enjoy the critical favor of Robert Hughes, who would speciously declare Crumb, Our Living Brueghal!, to the popular press, whereupon Crumb severed ties with his Underground compatriots and relocated to the South of France, like a post-impressionist.*

For me, the comparison is either stylistically superficial or reaching in its conclusions.

*It is clear Crumb owes more to Billy De Beck, E.C. Segar, Basil Wolverton, (the entire stumpfoot style of early American comicstrips) and the art direction of Harvey Kurtzman for Mad issues 24-29, which, in turn, Kurtzman modeled the aesthetic on fin de siecle magazines like Puck and Judge, the latter carrying with them the ornate line work of the engravers’ repertoire. One might equally say these figures, en toto, owe a debt to Pieter Brueghal, The Elder. For Crumb’s satire, we can thank The United States of America, and his own bad self.

Horvath, Segar, and ryakuga:

2010-11-05T05:21:00.000-07:00

(click on images for scrutiny)

I love the bold diagonal hatching in this marvelous character sketch by Hungarian born Ferdinand Horvath, part of a series of designs Horvath contributed to the famous Mickey short, The Brave Little Tailor -: “…I was all alone …”

The Hatching in Horvath reminds me of this page by famed creator of Popeye, E.C. Segar, above, a page of studies where the articulating power of the mark is nowhere better demonstrated. Unselfconscious and bold, with a quaint humility, (sounds like twaddle talk, but I mean sincerely…) within such a small economy of line, line creates light, volume – space! And all of this is completely elementary to drawing, but no less magic for it.

In this drawing of Segar’s I see the entire oeuvre of Philip Guston; (Guston would be painting murals in the manner of the great socialist Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, Orozco et al., at the time Segar would be bangin' out Popeye at the board, 20 years later the clubfoot would take hold of Guston.)

I’m likewise reminded of this piece by Japanese artist Masayoshi, below, done in the ryakuga style of antiquary Japanese drawing, which translates as abbreviated drawing.

It seems to me the reductive spirit of Segar's landscape elements in the sketch above continue the reduction of the economy of line in Masayoshi's drawing.

The Japanese are a culture better given over to graphics and abstraction than the mimetic naturalism of the aesthetics of the West. It is therefore easily explained why comicbooks and animated cartoons, being a species of graphic art, have proliferated there, and are more integrated with the broader culture, with more range in subject matter produced, in general.

(I should thank Michael Sporn and Bob Camp's blogwork for bringing Horvath to my attention.)

GROUP SHOW: Escape Artist

2010-10-18T06:09:00.001-07:00

(click to read info)

I'm happy to be participating in artist/curator Brad Greenwood's newly curated group show, being held with the fine people of Here Center for the Arts:

Escape Artist.

Please join us if you happen to be in NYC!

I'll be contributing my Water Foul (animated) vignettes, (video).

My immense gratitude goes out to Brad and Kristin of Here for their continuing support of my work.

Art Is Art, and Water Is Water*

2010-10-13T05:44:00.001-07:00

Those of us outside the art form are rarely conscious of the fact that the finest vintage of the American animated cartoon (1929-1963) were made by men**, regular Joes who played cards, the ponies, drinkers and smokers, and all around wise asses, sometimes pathetic, tragic. In many examples of the medium these qualities show through, and the inevitable formula of the fable, sometimes not without a frank wisdom, would play through their productions.

The cartoon is something entirely aesthetic, if one doesn’t understand this first, if one rationalizes or relegates the art to one cultural category, on to the next, (e.g. edifying child’s fare or juvenile distraction; kiddie entertainment or the literature of the semiliterate post-adolescent in need of vocational training) as I say, those who forget the essential aesthetic portent of the animated cartoon are lost from the conversation, and we wish them well.

The finest vintage of these productions were populist in nature, but whose artists were born out of some remnant of the European Academy in their artistic training. Their satire was populist, crass and slapstick, and rudely parodied the corridors of taste and sophistication. As popular entertainment they collaborated with the production of war propaganda and found bread and butter in the world of advertising commodities. They are democratic and yet may exact both racial malice and clumsy revelry with cultural misunderstanding.

They are in constant dialog with dialectics and not causality, fate and never chance, metaphysics and eschatology and never death (nonbeing). They are about calamity, desire, vice, antagonism and cruelty. They represent the sweetly mundane moments of life as accurately as high literature articulates ones mind on the page before it. In sum, they are more interesting and layered a subject, and an art form, than about anything you’re going to find at Documenta in Kassel.

Cartoons are a medium. What informs them is what counts. Any example of cultural production is an avenue of critical interest.***

*Our title derives from a line of Groucho Marx in the Marx Brothers production, Animal Crackers, where Groucho converses with an art aficionado who, it is revealed, was formerly a fishmonger, saying “…but we must remember art is art! …then again, water is water.”

**If I may employ this term without immediately coloring the context of this piece with a desperate old male chauvinism. I mean to underscore the modesty and lack of grandiose posturing which characterized this class of artists, as well as their age, which is not to say their time, but their actual age in years. Whereas today the industry is populated with hosts of fetishistic homunculii, occasioning both sexes, ages indiscernable from a behaviorable standpoint.

***Anyone familiar with any critical theory written in the last 60 years which has a relationship with Marxism will readily see many flags raised by populism and the Right, mass consumption, mass manipulation and the consequences of advertising in late captalism, to name a fundamental few. Clearly as mainstream and mass art form, animated cartoons reflect the national-cultural temper, which does not conceptualize dialectically, but credulously democratic, nor does this body conceptualize critically, in any advanced sense. Love of cartoons is subjective and verily ineffable. Nonetheless, I have tried to present a segment of their history at some remove, with an aim to objectivity, despite the run of objectionable attributes this history contains. It is precisely those attributes which make them interesting on a cultural level, and a critical level, outside of love of the subject.

Beat Populism

2010-10-01T14:36:00.000-07:00

Something which is not emphasized enough in criticism concerning the writers of Beat literature is their ties with low, popular art forms, beyond the vanguards of Jazz music. That Kerouac was solidly rejected by the literary establishment, was one of the first writers to receive television media celebrity status with numerous talk show interviews, (most notably, the Steve Allen show) which often included readings, gives indication of the popular presence of the Beats most accessible figurehead. Or that Burroughs would frame formally his stories toward the sleaze novelette market, tailoring Queer and Junky, powerful autobiographical works, into the commercial format of sex-thrill books, the latter in whose multitudes one never finds writers of Burroughs’ caliber. To say nothing of the direct ties in Burroughs’ writing to detective pulps and science fiction most evident in works like Exterminator, Nova Express and the Ticket That Exploded, and of course the western in The Place of Dead Roads. No one would glibly claim Burroughs to be a writer of genre fiction, but there is where he takes root.

To further elucidate this connection of Beat literature and American popular culture, or mass art forms, I’m happy to cite in it’s entirety this commentary Kerouac published in the July, 1959 issue of Playboy magazine, where sad old Jack proves to be one of Fandom’s famous funboys! It’s all there: praise of Americana, with all its naïve optimism, with his clumsy syncretism of Catholicism, Islam and Buddhism, Kerouac is pascifist, Unitarian, and hip. But he sings of matinee mystique and newspaper flavors. In defending Beat against its once popular reception as something off, nihilist, degenerate and potentially violent, prurient, Kerouac hearkens to youth at the moviehouse.

(click on pages to read)

Is it any wonder then that as I entered the dimming of my teens, I made the shift from the local comic shop, one door over, literally, to a narrow little space where Tom, who is the son of someone, opened up The Beat Bookshop, with all the Black Sparrow pubs, Grove Press and City Lights pubs. Any wonder that I found the Beats where my high school instructors had emerged from the proving ground of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poets-?

The Beats, with all their implicit low genre roots, were midwife for me into the world of art and literature.

The 2nd Generation Television Animation WALL OF SAINTS!

2010-09-26T06:02:00.000-07:00

Character Studies on Brown Paper: concluding HB variations

2010-09-20T18:12:00.000-07:00

Returning to Dell four Color No. 1067/ Yogi Bear No. 1, 1960, we reach the end of my character studies of Hanna-Barbera to date.

Francis Picabia says...

2010-09-17T18:48:00.000-07:00

"Taste is tiring like good company."

NOTICE: GOLD HILL S.O.S.-!!

2010-09-10T14:37:00.000-07:00

The worst blazes in a lifetime, at the very least, ravage the hills outside Boulder, Colorado, West ways. The flames threaten a little mountain town beloved to me, and my wife, Gold Hill, where we make near annual pilgrimage to partake of the finest Huevos Chile-Verde served at the Gold Hill General Store, and walk down the sloping road to Gold Hill’s charming frontier cemetery, (cemetaries are places of life and memory) and sit amidst the grasses.

As yet I’m heartened to hear reports that, although outlying homes in the township have been destroyed, the old town itself has been preserved thanks to the efforts of the Gold Hill Fire Dept. and their Chief, who made comment on regional news indicating that Freak Power in the Rockies is not dead –(H.S.T., R.I.P.)-! “We help one another… that’s why we live in the mountains where the pavement ends.” quoth the man.

The barren little hill in the background, above R. , is Sugarloaf Mountain, which burned 20 years ago, and still remains free of trees to this day. It is seen here from Gold Hill Cemetary. 20 years ago I planted saplings along its slopes with an old friend who would eventually marry in Gold Hill 12 years later. At that time I also befriended a boarder-bro who acquired the old Gold Hill Fire-Truck, a great beast of a double-shifter with a helluvah winch, and drove us around Boulder… I’m getting’ all sentimental. Apologies.

It ain’t over yet, with only 30 percent of the total fire contained. Keep up hope and preserve Gold Hill!!

Character Studies on Brown Paper: Middle Period HB variations.

2010-09-05T06:04:00.000-07:00

These sketches derive from Gold Key's Top Cat no. 20, 1966;

and Gold Key's Fun-In, no. 4, 1970.

Character Studies on Brown Paper: HB variations continued.

2010-08-28T05:13:00.000-07:00

This group comes outta Gold Key's The Flintstones, Bigger and Boulder, of 1962. A nice double size comic with a cover by the venerable Mel Crawford and I believe a "Cave Kids" story by Hank Ketchum, or one of his ghosts.

2010, colored pencil on brown paper.

Francis Picabia says:

2010-08-27T05:25:00.001-07:00

"Many artists devote their time to their painting,

I ask myself why are these people so fond of bad company."

Character Studies on Brown Paper: HB variations.

2010-08-21T05:42:00.000-07:00

2010, colored pencil on brown paper.

This group comes outta Dell Four Color No. 1067, or Yogi Bear No.1, 1960 - to those in the know.

Francis Picabia says:

2010-08-20T07:44:00.001-07:00

"Art is the cult of error."

Character Studies on Brown Paper: MGM and HB variations.

2010-08-14T05:01:00.000-07:00

Here are several recent drawings by yours truly, engaging in some "John K. Curricula", (although, it occurs to every kid with the desire to draw to copy from comicbooks...) These are less copies from source material, as they are loose studies with variations introduced with the aim to develop different characters. As poor as the artwork in most animated cartoon comicbook derivatives is, they still bely the basic construction and design, and in some cases some good poses, of the characters they emulate.

2010, colored pencil on brown paper

From Dell Giant No. 6, Winter Fun , 1957; and Dell Giant No.44, 1961.

Francis Picabia says:

2010-08-13T14:17:00.001-07:00

"Success is a liar

Liars love success"

Tragic, Dick. - or, On Richard Williams.

2010-08-07T05:54:00.000-07:00

Richard Williams, whose fascination with animation emerged as a child with Walt Disney, (Williams visited the Disney studios as a lad and had a great opportunity to view the inner workings of a trade he aspired to quite early) would, after a detour, return as a young fellow to Disney’s point of departure: that animation could reach beyond the nonsense fanfare, beyond the slapstick, and satirical cartoon short subject, in the populist sphere, and become something, as a medium, able to carry more ambitious narratives, more literary ones, to the point. So the elevation of animation’s charge began with Disney in a certain direction, and similarly, but perhaps toward a more sophisticated end, Williams attempted to further it. It is worth noting, Ralph Bakshi, from an aesthetically different direction, and from the ass-end of the spectrum of class, seeks to elevate animation in the manner of raw social document. And I believe the relationship between Bakshi and Williams is more significant than this comparison, but I’ll get to that later. Williams, in the handful of documentaries devoted to him throughout his career, explains that he abandoned animation as a precocious teenager and turned to painting. He later explains that he couldn’t abide by the artworld, in effect, as he describes it, being the monkey of a haught bourgeois. And so Williams returned to animation seduced by its very technique, - its fundamental ability to make pictures move, to make drawing dance and speak. He say’s, reaching to explain himself, “If Rembrandt were alive today, he’d animate.” Williams’ aspirations with animation thus culminated, in their earliest outing, with the short film The Little Island, of 1958; - a simple fable, a “critique” of the fixed idea.

The film wins Williams the English equivalent to the Academy Award. He finds himself, through the economic necessity to finance his personal animated projects, that is, his art, working in commercial advertising, and eventually becomes himself a very successful petit bourgeois, building an impressive facility which would eventually boast studios in both London and Los Angeles.

This is a fact which Williams never ceases to apologize for throughout the successive documentaries done on him. At every opportunity he reduces commercial work to drudgery and an unfortunate means to an end. The fact that he has a staff boggles his mind. One thinks the image of the solitary painter, the bohemian in a room, remains very much with Williams the idea of the artist, which he has had to turn away from, perhaps chagrined, perhaps with sadness. We cannot doubt his sincerity, but we cannot ignore a degree of pride and satisfaction, even if furtive, with his business successes. But with them, he begins to visualize his great, one work, an epic feature with all the historic and fantastical attributes of a vast Disney production, with which he will invest every profit, with which he will call to his side some of the greatest historic talents who developed the medium, (Williams, like Bakshi, surrounded himself with animation’s Golden Age veterans.) Sprawling over twenty years, this film, The Thief and the Cobbler, has yet to be completed to the satisfaction of its creator. Beginning in the middle 1960’s as a film devoted to the Islamic character, Mullah Nasrudin, The Thief, as cognoscenti shorthand the film, grew from heady historical fiction to a popular fantasy, now ever more loosely rooted in the old cultural mythology of the 1001 Nights. Something animation in it’s many forms has never tired of working within, - the fantastic classics. Moving from the wonderfully philosophical parable, in Nasrudin, of “The Substance of Bread”, where a panel of philosophers grasp at the simplest and most elusive of ontological definitions, - of the essence of things, - Nasrudin is chucked out of the film by Williams after creative differences with his early collaborators, and is replaced with a narrative far closer to a Disney adaptation of a classic story.

More than twenty years from that beginning, Williams’ success on a commercial project (Who Framed Roger Rabbit, of 1988) kindled interest in the unfinished magnum opus from various Hollywood studios. Late funding came into play and set in motion a kicking about of the film between studios in the early 1990’s, resulting in the film being stripped from Williams’ control and assigned a new director, with the production relocated to South Korea for finishing animation and the conversion of the film from an optic choreography of dynamic movement, to a run-of-the-mill animated musical.

Following release, reviews were understandably poor, for by the time the studio process and executive ownership took this personal enterprise and fucked it all to nothing, there was not much of a film worth admiring. All the transcendent scenes - animator Art Babbit’s dying messenger chiefly among them, horribly compromised.

This is the tragedy of Dick Williams. The little sequence, “The Substance of Bread”, from Williams’ first conception of his unfinished masterpiece, comes closer than anything to bringing animation to something truly high-minded. The undoing and revisualization of the film as The Thief, I believe, actually roll back on Williams and his lofty intentions for animation, and simply puts him in league, as an independent, as an emulator of Disney. He craves the approval of all the master animators under his hire. He learns their ways, he befriends members of Disney’s “9 old men”, and he shapes his great undertaking along the lines of a Disney studio feature. One begins to put the sophisticated ambitions of Dick Williams into context, and they reveal themselves as the pretenses of a restless artist whose true arena was popular, commercial filmmaking.

One of the people who worked on the The Thief, has edited a cut of the film, filling unfinished and/or unpolished sequences with battered prints, pencil tests and even storyboard layouts, to give some approximation of a cut of the film which Williams intended, and it is a marvelous experience to view. The raw pencil tests and uncomposited footage which this cut uses on its DVD menu alone is exhilarating.

Look for The Thief and the Cobbler, Recobbled Cut.

And support the petition for the finishing of this great unfinished animated epic: http://www.PetitionOnline.com/thiefcob/

Critic Critiqued: On Michael Barrier

2010-07-30T07:12:00.000-07:00

In the wake of the death of God, Nietzsche concluded that we all live by our own prejudice. That is, we judge and mount our own authority with little more than an empty claim. It is in this sense that we can understand a figure like Michael Barrier, elder statesman of Animation History. In light of a great paucity of serious critical writing on the subject, Barrier is animation’s most stentorian of critics. Out of the dead silence of any serious discourse as regards the medium of animated film, Barrier makes his claim, with valiant journalistic enterprises, (the early magazine chronicling animation currency and history, Funnyworld, of the 1970’s) to the estimable post of contributing editor to the Smithsonian Book of Comic Book Comics.

Barrier is a devote of Disney, and arguably one of the studios most assiduous documentarians. Barrier is truly at home in the gaudy neo-classicism which has served as the prime aesthetic course for the studio in its most important developments. But why this former Beltway legal rank & file is entrusted with shaping the opinions of what passes for an attention worthy cartoon is questionable. In the hands of this snobbish pseudo-sophisticate the everyday populism of the medium seems fundamentally at odds with Barrier’s character. Nothing about the man yields a sense of humor, or a broader conception of art history beyond the brief history of 20^th century animated film, let alone the language of the street. In a review of Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards, in 1977, Barrier fails to see the virtues of Vaughn Bode in the canon of American cartoonists, (astonishing, really.) He’ll safely champion Ralph Bakshi’s Heavy Traffic as heraldic, however, when Barrier’s critical nerve fails him, he underscores Bakshi’s box-office failures when confronted with the formidable content of Coonskin. He calls Bakshi’s brilliant pastiche and collage in Wizards a “kitschy” “grab-bag” (no doubt Barrier thinks Schwitters and John Heartfield a couple of fools)* and lays at the feet of a low-budget fantasy film implicit critical expectations that Disney has never managed to satisfy, itself. One often thinks Barrier would equate watching Disney literarily equivalent to reading Goethe.

Descend into the depths of absurdity and read Barrier’s debate with John Kricfalusi, which formed after the latter offered his “adult” works to Barrier for review, in 2003. We can’t fault Barrier for wincing at the tasteless, but he does reveal himself enough of a prude, semi-Victorian cheese as to be more worthy as the subject of a good Chuck Jones class satire than as its reviewer.

So let’s look past the Oxford University Press provenance, and ask for his credentials, straight-up. Once given, they will reveal the only cartoonish aspect of the man, - we’ll find he drafted the document up himself.

* That Barrier should characterize Bakshi’s aesthetic decisions here as such is curious, while most prominent art theorists reserve the entire province of the American Animation Industry to be a species of kitsch.

VIDEO: wATER fOUL: sHORT fORESHORTENED

2010-07-24T05:10:00.000-07:00

Capping this first run of video vignettes is the first piece to actually be produced. It is the piece which was the proving ground on which I developed my do-it-yourself, homespun approach to production.

It plays out as a bit of nonsense for the sake of figuring out the formal nature of a piece of animation. Here is.... Short Foreshortened....

Short Foreshortened from Kirk L. Nachman on Vimeo.

Below is the pencil test for the above piece. I was animating rather blindly, with no real understanding of exposure sheets, or the rule of thumb regarding the number of drawings necessary to complete a general action, etc. I didn't grasp timing.

The pencil test was shot on 1's at 24fps.

I did however board my speech and action, (which was further and further stripped down in the process of arriving at the piece above.) Having a character deliver some speech which is an actual quotation from a North Beach poet bartender, and the first line of Genet's Querelle, which a friend had rather obliquely and pretentiously used as a senior quote. It's gibberish.

I then unconsciously followed Preston Blair's suggestion that one, after having laid out poses in advance, strings those key poses together with inbetweens, that is, one animates.

In many ways I think the pencil test is a more interesting work than the fully produced piece.

Bakshi: AntiDisney

2010-07-20T05:35:00.000-07:00

Receiving interest in my thoughts on Bakshi from the comments, I post an older attempt to write something on the maestro...

There are few works of modern or late twentieth century art that I am aware of as compelling and dimensional as Bakshi’s Coonskin. It is a raw cry for social justice, whose problematical shortcomings and critical handicaps make it all the more enthralling. Viewing it today is still, after many views, a difficult wager. All of Bakshi’s great early experimentation, the translation of the gritty urban film into the animated feature, culminates in Coonskin. As does Bakshi’s radical and maverick movements within the field of American animation.

Any familiarity with the major studio cartoons of the war years and their employment as propaganda will note the demonization of Nazis, (a virtue expropriated later by Bakshi in Wizards) but also, in the most confoundedly delightful and virtuosic examples of the medium, speak the bigoted populist currency of Jim Crow and the Yellow Peril. Bakshi will impose a critique through the social consciousness notably defining his generation (that of 1960’s counterculture and the civil rights movement) upon the very material he was raised on, the medium he has embraced, and whose legacy still ran his studio (his primary animator, the very means of all his early pictures, Bakshi admits, was Hollywood golden age veteran Irv Spence). There are a number of Hollywood shorts which I feel are essential to understanding the internal development of Bakshi, and the cultural and phenomenal development of a Bakshi. I’ll enumerate them further on. In Bakshi’s Coonskin, you have the subversion of Disney’s Song of the South, the tales of Uncle Remus. Disney sanitizing the injurious, imposed iconology of black America as represented in and by the broader white culture. What Barthes would term a mythology. In Coonskin, a’ la Fontaine, the tale is told, during an attempted prison break, by the beautiful Scatman Crothers, whose profile fills the screen through an orange filter in the opening titles, as he sings a minstrel song which brazenly recounts the historical social station of the African American. Bakshi believes in the value of caricature, and has the ethical stamina to leave nothing out of its sites. Therefore he does not abandon the appearances and language of representation which informed the banal racist register of the animation of his youth, he utilizes the very same to work far in the other direction toward a confrontation which leaves no evidence of the ideal. Coonskin is a curse to the darkness, which isn’t the tangible surface of the flesh, but a terrible nihilism which hasn’t surrendered to moral indifference. The film’s major narrative deals with accounting for all the forms of oppression and repression Uptown upon the black community (Mafia, Crooked NYPD muscle and the distribution of narcotics, bogus evangelical revolutionaries etc.) and through symbolic vignettes of a greater national/historical nature, Bakshi limns his subject; (one in which the tragic fate of the Black Panther party is luridly portrayed). Bakshi is crude, debatable intellectually and ethno-culturally - ( Bakshi is not black, but an immigrant Palestinian, pre-Israeli, Jew, raised in the mean streets of Brooklyn),- to be the mouthpiece of this well intentioned scream.

Coonskin is often in poor taste and the writing verges to and fro from being a critical instrument of consciousness, to a perpetrator of the harmful old efficacy of the language of racialized caricature turned to malice. But this is to speak with the political caution which Bakshi had the conviction to break.

Watching Bakshi is as Plato’s dialectically confounding pharmakon: at once poison and cure. The lack of objection from the N.A.A.C.P. for Coonskin has been documented, however the condemnation of Coonskin by Reverend Sharpton’s C.O.R.E. destroyed the credibility of Bakshi as a socially critical voice, and he turned to fantasy. And Wizards is the gorgeous fete where fantasy was infected with social consciousness. Like the memory of the easy propinquity of the swastika and the American animated cartoon (i.e. through a multitude of examples of W.W.II era anti-Nazi propaganda, thus, a medium readily converted to propaganda) Bakshi reiterates in 1977, stamping an imposing swastika across a Tolkienesque, luddite cautionary tale, where mythology confronts science, or at least conceptually, mythos confronts techne.

Wizards is something of a thesis film, as well, with Bakshi’s polystylistic use of Eisenstien footage from Alexandr Nevsky, and Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will given straight quotation-: a second order of signification is given to the relationship between the animated cartoon and the methodology of propaganda when Bakshi has his antagonists rally around the resurfacing of a copy of Triumph of the Will.

In Wizards, a mainstream film, Bakshi slips in a reminder and a symbol of papal cooperation with fascism, where his mutant hordes, mindless initiates to the second incarnation of the 1000 year Reich, are blessed by a rotoscoped , and demonized (quite literally) pope among whose regalia a swastika is embellished, whose eyes glow yellow with blackened horns embellishing his papal headgear. (our illustration, below, comes from a preview cut, and the swastika, clearly evident in the film, has been obscured for the television audience.)

A hellish pope is a figure in the fundaments of western literature, of narratives of perdition (Inferno), where Dante had condemned popes on the basis of theological and moral abuses. Here perhaps Dante is quite close to Rimbaud’s rebellion from Catholicism: one the critical-faithful; the other, a rebellious and theatrical apostacy fraught with contemptuous blasphemies and rich sacrilege.

Perhaps Wizards is the collective cultural memory of inquisitions, pogroms, holocausts. But this possibility of meaning is testament to the vehicle Wizards provides in the ostensible demography of the children’s film. The last violence Bakshi could muster to the marketplace, and have his studio survive. He had a window of 4 years to use a language forbidden to the dimension of his concerns in his culture, (the language of animated cartoons). And he proves that the medium has not been outstripped, but has come to bring the kind of consciousness and nausea that only our most profound artworks have ever produced. As for the nay-saying cognoscenti, I answer you: He "ripped off" Wally Wood, only minorly. He "ripped off" Vaughan Bode’s Cobalt 60 and Deadbone along the lines of character design, and some environmental design, nothing to the detraction of Bode. And his use of Crumb was entirely provisional. I believe his work more important than the cumulative effect of all those artists.

VIDEO: wATER fOUL: On Frogman's Watch

2010-07-17T05:14:00.000-07:00

Our third installment of animated vignettes, On Frogman's Watch, boasts my first tracking shot, and is really a play of atmospheric elements in an old multi-plane sense.

Light on characters, the Frogman is the viewer, as we see the days (un)eventfulness pass before the visor of the Frogman, which opens the world to our view. Day into night.

Water Foul concept and art registered WGA.

On Frogman's Watch from Kirk L. Nachman on Vimeo.

VIDEO: wATER fOUL: KUROSAWA

2010-07-10T05:47:00.000-07:00

Continuing with the animated "theatrical sketches" I've been working on, I present "Kurosawa", which I made somewhere between February and March of this year. The title derives from the director whose shot inspired the sequence depicted here...

It's my first attempt at, an admittedly hamhanded walk cycle and perspective reduction of a figure moving through the landscape.

Hand animated and produced in the computer via photoshop and Stop Motion Pro.

Water Foul concept and art registered WGA.

Kurosawa from Kirk L. Nachman on Vimeo.

VIDEO: wATER fOUL: aUDITION

2010-07-03T05:51:00.000-07:00

Here, for your viewing pleasure, is an animated vignette I did, nearly all by myself, over the course of last winter. (Pencil Tests were posted, dating back early in the new year). It will be the first of a series of posts of animated "theatrical sketches", so to speak, I've made over the last 8 months or so.

The animation feels a little like that old ratcheting crank that jerky animation recalls, but then I'm a novice animator, and improving as I go.

Hand animated and inked. Produced in the computer with Photoshop and Stop Motion Pro.

Credits at the end of the piece.

Water Foul concept and art registered WGA.

Audition from Kirk L. Nachman on Vimeo.

Notes on the vid:

This vignette represents an attempt to deliver a performance, and to give a character to expatiate a world view, which this soliloquy from Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, read by Dylan Thomas, serves as our audio track, and is recontextualized with our character, who delivers the text presumably on stage-set or street corner.

The Case Against Bakshi

2010-06-27T11:23:00.000-07:00

Many may not know of Bakshi, or that there’s a case against him. But there is, and it seems worthless even and especially now. It stems from his interest in the comix underground, and it fouls with one Robert Crumb. We give no quarter to Crumb’s acute megalomania when Bakshi’s exploitation-era animated adaptation of Crumb’s Fritz the Cat displeased Crumb so, finding it a complete corruption of his precious creation, setting the heinous goof on a campaign to malign the name of Bakshi by grandiosely killing off what is in truth a marginal cartoon character, and spreading unflattering accounts of Bakshi’s personal character in interviews and lecture circuits, and documentary film.

This series of events was rumored to have put off Vaughn Bode, who in the early 1970’s, it is rumored, was having development meetings with Bakshi for some project, as well.* Bode’s son, to this day, maligns Bakshi for riffing on Bode’s Cobalt 60 character and rendering him Necron 99, the assassin in Bakshi’s 1977 fantasy film, Wizards.

Cobalt 60 cover by Vaughn Bode for Wally Wood's Witzend.

Bode’s influence is apparent in Wizards, stylistically speaking, but I think there is ample evidence to shew that accusations beyond the clumsy generality of screaming “rip-off!” have no basis as regards Wizards. And Bode friend and collaborator, underground cartoonist Larry Todd, claims if anyone was taken for a ride, aside from Bode, it was equally true of Wally Wood, and he didn’t seem to care, in the only instance on record I’m aware of where he speaks about Wizards.

Todd

“Sure, he ripped Wizards off from Vaughn. But he ripped Wally Wood off just as much. Sure, you can see Barbara Bode in that princess character. But he made her look better than Vaughn ever did.”

- Larry Todd, quoted from The Comics Journal, Vol. 5, 2005.

“Then came Terrytoons, where I wrote a story (no money) for a proposed TV show I called Wee Hawk (Bakshi used the name later in Wizards) and did some presentation drawings, which they paid for… and then Terrytoons folded.”

-Wallace Wood interview in Vanguard publishing’s Wally Wood Sketchbook.

-Wood's Wizard King story from Witzend.

We can speculate that Bakshi was hip to Wood’s proto-indie comic publication Witzend, where Wood not only printed his personal fantasy-epic World of the Wizard King, Witzend is also where Bode’s Junkwaffel and Cobalt 60 found early publication, - one could say the subject of Nazism in Bakshi’s Wizards sprouted from Bode’s Wehrmacht lizards, who spoke like the American G.I.’s in Vietnam, in his Junkwaffel, - to do such therefore ludicrously giving Bode the market on the Second World War, let alone political allegory.

-A page by Wood for Warren publications' Creepy magazine.

It must be said that Wood was also doing fantasy story commissions for Warren magazines which shared a good deal of the fantastical vocabulary that World of the Wizard King has, and Wood also tailored his elfin world for a potential animated series for Terrytoons, approaching Bakshi, who had taken over as director of the facility, one of the oldest extant animation houses on the East Coast, at the time.

-Proposal artwork for Terrytoons by Wood.

Proposal artwork for such a series has been published in recent publications on Wood and Bakshi, and it looks like Bakshi had other artists move forward with similar concept art on Wood’s foundation, as is evident in Unfiltered, the Life and Art of Ralph Bakshi. It is conspicuous, in the latter publication, that nowhere is Wood’s name associated with the development of a fantasy cartoon, and the art from Vangaurd’s Wood sketchbook is printed and credited to another artist in Unfiltered, tho’ the designs in some cases quite obviously come from Wood. There’s implicit dispute here, however we can say concretely, we can’t even pin Bakshi on one count of petite larceny, for appropriating a name which is most likely licensed to the estate of Terrytoons, as Wee Hawk is the result of a paid commission to Wood by way of Bakshi’s hire, (evidently Wood also followed Bakshi to Paramount and did similar proposals, until Paramount animation closed down.)

Conceptual artwork, above, by Mike Ploog for Wizards. Although Wood’s junior, Ploog had cut his chops, like Wood himself twenty years earlier, in Will Eisner’s studio.

Obsessed, as a kid, with things that could stylistically fall in with the aesthetic and genre “mash-up” of Wizards, I was thrilled to find this Pogo story by Walt Kelly in the Pogo Poop Book, which sets a Fascist bureaucracy within a medieval, “Sword & Sorcery” milieu.

Jeff Jones painted this cover, below, for a forgotten fantasy novelette from 1969, Kandar, by one Kenneth Bulmer, which could quite easily work as reference material toward the design of Wizards. Is Bakshi ripping off Kelly and Jones or may we attest to a collective vocabulary in the ether?!

AFTERWORD:

It occurs to the author that there are many cases against Bakshi, the most portentous being the controversy surrounding his masterpiece, Coonskin. All we can say is, those who fail to recognize not only that Coonskin is pro-black, and a hardened portrait of the history of racial injustice in America, (NOT a celebration of it) are either complete fools or are agenda driven and disingenuous.

*- The Comics Journal, vol. 5, 2005; Ftnt 4, pg. 73.

Independent Television

2010-06-25T16:39:00.000-07:00

Independent television is/was superior to cable programming. As a reliquary of the history of television it beat cable, most significantly because it had limits. It also oriented the viewer locally, via local advertisers, in the broad scope of mass entertainment. It was limited, clear.

Mallarme once wrote something to the effect of: what counts is in integers, the rest of it is a succession of zeros signifying greater quantities, on the one hand, but like the zeros which signify them, equivalent to nothing.

These programming mattes were found by me as a kid behind an old picture frame. I believe it's a sound conjecture they once served an independent television station to announce a broadcast of war classic Guadal Canal Diary, before being used to back a framed photo. The third is a chroma-key blue card, for old school compositing.

I thought then they were pretty magic, for an inexplicable reason. And I still do.

Diary of a Scenic continues...

2010-06-17T15:49:00.000-07:00

Brick wall is white bead foam carved by the designer's crew and painted to fool your eye, by me.

Staircase is made of plywood and 1" x 3" furring strips, painted by me to look like old, rusty metal. Only the piece of conduit used as the top rail was metal; aged-out by me to suit the rest.

These I-beams were fabricated out of MDF with plywood buttons for rivets, textured, painted and aged by me.

That's the trade!

Urban filth sets are fun, and yet this one stays pretty clean, ... and that's Fashion for you.

OUTLAND: diary of a scenic

2010-06-13T05:57:00.000-07:00

Scenery makes my pay, but rarely my day...

This set is skinned in Homosote insulation board and painted by me. The arm-supports are plywood, PVC pipe and foam, painted by me to resemble worn metal and concrete.

The transparent walls are welded steel frame stretched in shrink-wrap. I had nothing to do with them, but they're pretty beautiful.

This was a good one.

WALLY WOOD DIED FOR YOUR SINS

2010-06-06T05:50:00.000-07:00

Abandoned paintings:

2010-05-29T06:03:00.001-07:00

Continuing with the subject of works which are lost or never come to fullness, I present several oils, painted in the summer/fall of 2007, which were abandoned* by me, unfinished.

It happens to me really when I start to get somewhere...

After turning from these I found solace in sculpture for the next few months.

These pieces, above, followed the finished paintings of the same year, - titled American Standard, Decommission, and Stormcoming, - found in the labels in the sidebar under "oil paintings".

* Natheless, I kept these pictures in their unfinished state, and did not destroy them.

Destroyed

2010-05-26T05:59:00.000-07:00

Beginning to feel eclipsed by my interests in the works of others, I here return to my modest own...

It is always considered portentous when a work is documented but is ultimately destroyed by the artist. It is taken as the most profound of gestures when an artist decidedly annihilates a piece of his excrement.

In this case, my folly pushed this miscellaneous little drawing from 2005 to destruction...

That is, I made a series of bad decisions in working on it after the state of it as presented here. I violated it with a clear coat, giving it a gaudy sheen, rather than an elegant glaze. I mounted it on panel, when it was a better thing left to it's original state, ( a piece of museum board). And I spattered white plastic compound in the margins of the composition, which revealed itself as totally diffident in it's execution.

COMIC-BOOK ALL-OVER

2010-05-22T12:18:00.001-07:00

A term which emerged during the ascent of Yankee Avant-Garde painting in the late 1940’s and 50’s was the “all-over” painting. A term which meant to affirm the idea of painting as a segment of the world, a surface, a detail of ontological reality, or a field, rather than a window into the illusory, which is what all representational painting, in all it’s styles and ideological/aesthetic guises, had been up to that point.

Artist Oyvind Fahlstrom betrayed a love for the graphics of the comic-book cartoonist, and began to fragment or reconstitute comicbook imagery into a tableau of decorative abstractions. Below, the panel breakdown of the comic page is overrun with congested graphic fragments, pinioned by the repetition of Bob Kane’s cape of The Batman, in this detail of Fahlstom's painting Sitting...

Sitting…; 1962, tempura on paper.

Fahlstrom clearly recognized the ecstatic celebration of line to be found in Harvey Kurtzman’s MAD, as this devotion to the former, below, confirms. It even feels like Kurtzman, the great conductor of the diverse inking talents of Davis, Wood, Elder and Severin.

Feast on Mad; 1958-59, India Ink on paper.

Nearly forty years later, artist Sue Williams’ inclusions into the 1997 Whitney Biennial prompt comic-book all-over painting a decided step toward the definitive “all-over” painting: Pollock’s numbered paintings.

Williams made her debut in the national art press earlier in the decade for a series of crude, confrontational paintings of the “men-are-irredeemable-pigs” variety, sporting violent sexual content. Absorbed into the intellectual vogue of the politics of identity, Williams was then and there critically established in the artworld.

By the middle of the decade, she had flipped her work on its head. The paintings became able, aesthetic, cartoonish, and attended by the vagaries of abstraction. Bits of cartoon anatomy, half-thought renderings executed like hand-writ Farsi, expanded in an indeterminate field like a blur of repression.

Large Blue and Orange, 1996; oil and acrylic on canvas.

Large and Itchy, 1996; oil and acrylic on canvas.

Hannes Bok: Symbolist of the Man in the Street

2010-05-19T18:36:00.000-07:00

"If you don't mind living in an attic, you can be Hannes Bok - that's fine. I admire him tremendously; not only his work, but his fortitude. He had a lot of guts. He wouldn't compromise, wouldn't cooperate with art directors, if he believed he was right. He effectively killed himself through malnutrition and other factors."

- Tim Kirk

Hannes Bok's work littered the covers of pulp periodicals of the wierd-fantasy variety throughout the heighday of the pulps, and then on the dust-jackets of the first editions of pulp storytellers such as R.E. Howard, and William Hope Hodgson. It is so unique among the ranks of pulp artistry that it even further differentiates itself from those whose work already stood out from the common coin -: artists such as the exquisite Virgil Finlay and the odd naiveté of Frank R. Paul.

He worked from the method of glaze painting perfected by Maxfield Parrish, replacing the latter's doughy classicism with a simplified, late 19th century Symbolist tendency - equal parts Rousseau and Redon, if you will. With a grandfather in Fuseli...

I'm only sorry I don't have more examples of his work on hand, as there are pieces I'm aware of, here unincluded, which are remarkable. Look for him.

Notice: We've lost Frank.

2010-05-11T06:52:00.000-07:00

So he leaves us, and all that seems meet but the finest elegy, is to quote what a friend, poet and scholar, often remarked: "We've lost alotta good men."

In the junk-space of fandom, he did it all.

Frazetta will always be remarkable for being one of the first from the commercial art sphere to have His paintings go the monetary value of an academically endorsed piece of blue-chip fine art. And even after this achievement, he mounted no pretense to stretching canvas, but continued in the illustrator's mode of modestly sized pictures, painted on canvas board. Bless 'im.

American Violence

2010-05-08T18:22:00.000-07:00

Philip Guston; untitled, 1968.

Jean-Michel Basquiat; untitled (Now's the Time), 1983.

Carroll Dunham; untitled, 1995-96.

George Condo; untitled, 1983.

Milton Avery; Oregon Coast, 1947.

An Aesthetic Genealogy:

2010-05-04T12:11:00.000-07:00

World Historical Comics

Crawford cum Clarke

This is it.

Modernerkunst, ham'n'eggs...

Kirk's Works

Of Mr. Arthur Suydam...

brush & wash sketches on bristol, 2011.

cartoon sketchbook, 2011...

video: WRECKER PECKER

video: Porter & Socius, a fragment.

cartoon sketchbook, late Autumn, 2010...

cartoon sketchbook, Autumn, 2010 continued...

cartoon sketchbook, Autumn, 2010.

'Comics' Journal

'Comics' Journal...

More video: CONFLICT (a 'bumper' or sketch)

Big Feature: Doc Vassage & His Hearty Mujahidin

Big Feature: The Anglican

NOTICE: GEORGE KUCHAR DIES.

BiG Feature: OCCUPATION

Signature Gags and the Rehash…

THE UNKNOWN KRICFALUSI

Ersatz Wolvertoons

The Fleagle Collaborations

Not Brand Echh pedagogical pages

Harvey Kurtzman’s Aesthetic Parabola

Hail to the Olde Republick!

Tyler Rowland: Closet Box space at Box 13 in Houston

The calculating sentimentality of Jim Shaw

My McDonald's...

Hi! Everything Okay? : The enigma of Brendan McCarthy

Bro Show

Marginal Masters: Max Oppenhiemer and Georg Scholz

Steadman: journeyman’s gestures.

Uncle Mikey School Redux

Easter (video)

Of Late, Minoa; a short film

Water Foul loop

"...I've Been" - Silent Version

Two Excerpts

Eating Cycle test print

Last Week for Group Show: Escape Artist

Cartoons and Liberal Society

For Steadman, perhaps, the Middle East is too difficult a place to engage politically.Perhaps, he needed to draw it to signify the impossibility of his ability to politicize it.

CRUMB, minor characters

Horvath, Segar, and ryakuga:

GROUP SHOW: Escape Artist

Art Is Art, and Water Is Water*

Beat Populism

The 2nd Generation Television Animation WALL OF SAINTS!

Character Studies on Brown Paper: concluding HB variations

Francis Picabia says...

NOTICE: GOLD HILL S.O.S.-!!

Character Studies on Brown Paper: Middle Period HB variations.

Character Studies on Brown Paper: HB variations continued.

Francis Picabia says:

Character Studies on Brown Paper: HB variations.

Francis Picabia says:

Character Studies on Brown Paper: MGM and HB variations.

Francis Picabia says:

Tragic, Dick. - or, On Richard Williams.

Critic Critiqued: On Michael Barrier

VIDEO: wATER fOUL: sHORT fORESHORTENED

Bakshi: AntiDisney

VIDEO: wATER fOUL: On Frogman's Watch

VIDEO: wATER fOUL: KUROSAWA

VIDEO: wATER fOUL: aUDITION

The Case Against Bakshi

Independent Television

Diary of a Scenic continues...

OUTLAND: diary of a scenic

WALLY WOOD DIED FOR YOUR SINS

Abandoned paintings:

Destroyed

COMIC-BOOK ALL-OVER

Hannes Bok: Symbolist of the Man in the Street

Notice: We've lost Frank.

American Violence

An Aesthetic Genealogy: