“If I could write better than I can, perhaps I would have tried to become a novelist and I might have become a failure. If I could draw better than I can, I might have tried to become an illustrator or an artist and would have failed there. But my entire being seems to be just right for being a cartoonist.”
This delightful relic from 1963 accompanied Glenn Bretthauer’s How To Make Money With Simple Gags: A Complete Course in Gag Writing!, the cover of which can be seen below. One spin, and you too could be riding that G-Nib of success to the big paycheck in the stars.
(PS. Do not try to google “gag master”)
via Kevin H
I always think of style as something that’s the distance between what you want something to look like, and what your hand and brain make it look like unintentionally. And there’s quite a gap there, and there’s some interesting stuff in that gap.
Tom Wolfe drawing of Andy Warhol, from “Tom Wolfe’s Lesser Known Career as a Cartoonist”
Tom Wolfe, who died on May 14, had a lesser-known but not-so-secret passion: He loved to draw caricatures and cartoons with the same incisive, sarcastic wit that came through in his written social commentary. His pictures were inspired by the turn-of-the-century German Jugendstil (“youth style,” or Art Nouveau), graphic artist provocateurs who regularly outraged both bourgeois and aristocratic Junker classes by poking holes in their masks and debunking their pretensions in the notorious weekly satirical journal Simplicissimus (also known as Der Simpl in the 1940s). He also owed a debt to his favorite visual trickster, Ronald Searle, whom Wolfe praised as a “giant of the graphic netherworld” on the front page of a 1981 Times Book Review. Wolfe surprisingly identified as much as a cartoonist as he did a writer, and many of his drawings were captioned.
Filed under: writers who draw
Saul Steinberg subway drawing
Street level, 3 levels of the subway, 5 stories of the skyline all in one amazing drawing
Speaking of Steinberg and the subway, here’s another favorite:
Filed under: Saul Steinberg
“You can’t keep recycling what’s happening.”
In a recent interview with The Guardian, cartoonist Ben Katchor was asked why his comics don’t look like anybody else’s. His answer is a great case for stealing old stuff:
[B]ecause I was looking at 17th-century draftspeople and not comics.[Nicolas] Poussin, and Rembrandt, and the whole other world of anything but commercial art. I grew up reading comics, but then I discovered a whole other world of picture-making. They didn’t all make comics, but they made heavily narrative pictures. Poussin was a philosopher-painter, he wasn’t just a painter, so there was a big literary angle to these images. So I looked at that. That’s what was always interesting work.
You can’t keep recycling what’s happening. The critique was that I didn’t like how most comics were drawn and I had to draw differently than they did. If you don’t have a critique of what you’re doing, you may as well not do it. Just go on and be an apprentice to somebody and do what they do. That’s a pretty deadly direction to go in. Robert Crumb was looking at Albrecht Dürer, and looking at Doré and these incredible draftsmen of the 19th century. He was looking at early newspaper comics.
Katchor’s latest release is a re-release of his book Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay.
Filed under: steal like an artist
Tom Hart, Rosalie Lightning
This is a comic book about the unexpected death of Tom’s daughter, Rosalie. I read the story as Tom was drawing it and posting chapters online, but I didn’t read my copy of the paper book until this week, because I didn’t know if I could handle it. Of course, I could, because it is so great.
Here’s a little intro video that Tom did that explains the background and shows a lot of great images of him working:
Tom kept a Tumblr blog while he was working on the book that you can go back and read—if you go to the archive, you can get to the first post, and work your way forward, watch the book take shape. You can also read Tom’s posts on his blog about dealing with Rosalie’s death.
(On first glance, because my son and I watch so many videos and read so many books about musical instruments, I thought that panel in the top right was a guy playing an upright bass—a fitting mis-seeing, as you’ll see later.)
A lot of the book is about Tom and Leela’s grief, of course, but it’s also about looking and seeing…
…and using images (ones both made and seen) as a way of understanding the world around you:
Tom and Leela go for walks and signs like “fire lane” take on new, horrible meanings.
He also looks back to movies and stories he experienced with Rosalie:
The book is also about moving — moving out of New York city to Gainesville, Florida, so they could get out of debt and have a better life for Rosalie…
And then trying to move on after her death.
I have a blurb on the back of the book, but really, Dylan Horrocks (himself a terrific cartoonist) probably says it best:
Rosalie Lightning is a landmark book: the culmination of Tom’s craft and his whole approach to cartooning as a potent, personal, intimate artform. It’s viscerally powerful, deceptively simple and direct, honest and heartfelt and generous. There are layers of complexity and depth in this book, and a raw intensity that won’t be denied. It’s a book about why we live and why we make art. I know the subject will frighten some people away, but there’s really no need. It’s the most loving, joyful, real comic I’ve read in a long time.
Highly recommended. Will be in my top ten this year.
The World of William Steig by Lee Lorenz
Ach! This is a wonderful, sadly out-of-print book. It was released in 1998, when Steig was still alive, and Lorenz does a terrific job of covering the full range of his career.
Steig is so fascinating. His parents were socialists and encouraged him to become an artist because they thought it was an honorable profession that let you could earn a living without exploiting anybody. Everybody in the family was an artist — there’s a great painting above done by Steig’s mother, and stories in the book about the whole family getting together to paint.
Steig’s output was ridiculous — he started out doing pretty run-of-the-mill New Yorker style cartoons, and then started doing his symbolic drawings, which still look fresh and amazing to me. Later on, he had a terrific run of children’s books, including Shrek. (The book is so much cooler than the movie.)
“I often ask myself…what would be the ideal life? I think an ideal life would be just drawing.”
—William Steig
Brick notes:
Highly recommended along with his other books.
Filed under: my reading year 2016
John Porcellino’s process of making comics
All the above images were taken from John Porcellino’s great tumblr: @johnporcellino
John’s one of my very favorite cartoonists — if I had to describe his work, I might call it Midwestern Zen. It’s been a joy to watch him put together the latest issue of King-Cat.
If you’re unfamiliar with his work, there are several collections in print, including King-Cat Classix, Map of My Heart (one of my favorite book titles ever), and The Hospital Suite.
He’s also the first creator I’ve ever supported on Patreon. (His goal: “Allow me to break past the US Federal Government’s 2015 Poverty Line for a single person.”)
Check him out, throw him so dough. He’s one of the good ones.
Filed under: show your work
mutant-what-not
