More studies after great crime cartoonists – Munoz, Raymond, Toth, Tardi, Eisner. Brush and ink in sketchbook. (I’m working from The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics, ed. Paul Gravett – definitely worth getting if you’re interested in crime comics from various eras.)

Studies from Munoz and Sampayo’s great SINNER. “An abraded gourd” is how I’d describe PI Alack Sinner’s head – there’s no Chester Gould-esque division between streamlined good guys and monstrous bad guys here; everyone’s equally ugly and worn-down in their version of 70′s New York City.

• An excerpt from a comic by Eleanor Davis in MOME 22. (See her sketches for it.)
• Sam Hiti has a (occasionally NSFW) Tumblr.
• I like this art by Elise Gravel.
• From last summer, but worth re-reading: Gabrielle Bell’s “Manifestation“. (Included in Best American Comics 2011.)
• Shaenon Garrity has been writing prose science fiction lately; her story “Librarians in the Branch Library of Babel” is a funny riff on Borges.

This week’s links to art I liked …

• Mattias Adolfsson gives us a tour of one of his grand cityscapes.
• An existential gunfight from Jiro Taniguchi’s Hotel Harbour View.
• Peter de Seve draws Miss Havisham and other Dickens characters.
• Two examples of art-as-reportage, showcased by D. B. Dowd. Love that Sasek illo.
• Mike Lynch draws his Prince Edward Island vacation.

More art and design links …

• Check out the amazing web design (& beautiful illustrations) for the Sketchtravel project – a sketchbook that was passed from artist to artist over a 4.5 year period. Proceeds from the auction of the sketchbook (featuring art from Peter de Seve, Tadahiro Uesugi, Hayao Miyazaki (!) …) will go to charity. Reproductions of the sketchbook are also available.
• Eleanor Davis shares some sketches for her comic in the final issue of the Mome anthology.
• A beautiful cover for the New Yorker by Arthur Getz. (From here.)
• Artists draw covers for Philip K. Dick novels at The Divine Invasion. Proceeds go to help Dylan Williams’ (RIP) family pay medical expenses.

Re-reading Jack Kirby’s 1974 OMAC series, I find I’m less interested in the supermuscled protagonist than I am in his weird employers/backup team, the Global Peace Agency. You know, the guys who hide their faces with orange “cosmetic spray”, wear suits with little capes, and (personally) use no weapons stronger than knockout gas and sarcasm. They’re everywhere in the series – one in the foreground dryly urging OMAC to go out and get some super-criminal, while in the background swarms of them prep his super-vehicles and super-weapons. It’s a weird reversal on the standard “faceless henchmen” concept – these are the good guys, interchangeable and inhumanly efficient. But they still have more personality than OMAC.

Some nice art from around the web …

• On the blog of illustrator Pep Montserrat, art from his book Un Dia a Gracia. If I understand correctly, it’s a commissioned sketchbook depicting his Barcelona neighborhood. Some beautiful line and paint work.
• Via Sam Hiti on Twitter, a video of bande dessinee artist Hermann (Jeremiah) at work on a painted comic.
• Richard Thompson fills us in on his theory of Little Kid Expressionism</>.
• Images of some Ezra Jack Keats art on exhibit at The Jewish Museum. If you’re like me and have seen some of these only in faded old library books, their verve will really surprise you. (Here’s an accompanying book.)
• A Tumblr devoted to Blade Runner.

• Via @leifpeng on Twitter, Jack Davis-illustrated Topps cards. Judging by #10, I’m not sure if Larry & Raymond were really friends.
• Shaenon Garrity draws a childhood heroine.
• On the Aqua Velvet blog, Nikki Gittins’ type project NEW YORK, NEW YORK. Great use of cutout shapes and photography.
• The great Sam Hiti draws cowboys, shoes, and legs.
• Character designs for Jason’s upcoming book, ATHOS IN AMERICA.
• Eleanor Davis’s graceful and evocative New York Times illustration. (Her site.)

Gus and His Gang by Christophe Blain
First Second

Vampire Loves by Joann Sfar
First Second

This is a quick examination of some color, drawing and design techniques used in two great bandes dessinées. I’ve kept Vampire Loves close to my drawing table for some time now, trying to glean some ideas and inspiration from Sfar’s art. More recently I picked up Gus and His Gang and that’s also been both enjoyable to read and to look over, saying “How did Blain do that …?” Both artists have versatile, energetic, and very “cartoony” art styles, in the best sense of using all the tools of caricature, exaggeration, and symbolism that are available to cartoonists. They are Big Guns and worth close study. Some other artists in this vein that I enjoy, but didn’t have time to fold into this post, are Kerascoet and Emile Bravo, both of whom have some work available in English (and probably a much vaster amount in French.) I hope you’ll look them up!

Cinematic

Blain is a nimble and energetic artist, going from high-energy scrawls to inky silhouettes, often in the same panel. He has a great grasp of how to use contrast to dramatic effect. In the first panel, Clem rides into town, looking like he weighs a hundred tons compared to the scratchily-depicted people and stagecoach in the background. Clem’s bright blue shirt and orange hair contrast strongly, adding energy to the figure, while the background is rendered in closely-related earth tones. It’s a brilliantly lit outdoor scene. In the second panel, Gus and Grattan wait for Clem in the stale air of their hotel room. The wall decorations and chair are barely sketched in; the window is a few scratches of ink to indicate the light pouring through the mullions. Contrast (and size) is used to put Gus in the foreground.

And let’s not leave out Blain’s character design skills. He plays up that ridiculous nose on Gus every chance he gets—one sequence shows a very literal “Gus’s eye view”, a vignetted panel with the nose zooming from the foreground into the distance—and yet it doesn’t distract from the story; it gives a window into Gus’ character. Gus is a successful train robber with nerves of steel, but that nose precedes him everywhere he goes.

Emotional

Here we have a beautifully simple panel from Vampire Loves. Depressed vampire Ferdinand has knocked himself out (he tried to fly and sulk at the same time, and crashed into a tree), and as a result is resting his head on the panel border. His friends are driving him home. A black fill stands in for the car interior and the night outside; Ferdinand’s grotesque noggin is a simple (but interesting!) grey shape with three lines to indicate facial features. It’s those two parenthetical eye marks that do the trick; he’s as vulnerable as any sleeping person, hardly a terrifying creature of the night. (The overall effect is almost woodcut-like, fitting for a story about a vampire.)

In the panel from Gus and His Gang, normally cool-as-a-cucumber stick-up man Grattan is shaking in his boots for fear of standing up a lady (with the added complications that she’s married to a judge, and Grattan is currently a deputy sheriff, past robberies notwithstanding.) The wobbly outlines of his body fill with green fear, which fulminates into a cloud that starts to fill the alleyway. The shadowy alleyway is toned in ominous red, and the patch of sunlit street behind Grattan is essentially white, which makes it appear warm in contrast to the green, and bright in contrast to the red of the alleyway. Hard-ass Clem, in the foreground, blends in easily to the alleyway, its red tones sneaking into the black silhouette of his body. He’s in his element.

Transitional

Here the color change signifies a change in location and in scene. Ferdinand is accompanying a Wailer spirit, who can pass through walls, and who can bring Ferdinand with her if he cooperates. They’ve just escaped from some villains in the dark-green room, and the orange lighting in the next panel marks a change to a lighter tone in the writing, too. Though that’s kind of a simplification; Sfar is really good at mixing-and-matching moods, leavening scary bits with humor, adding horror to the mundane, etc. He’s also got artistic range: compare these panels, with the frenetic hatching and spindly black shapes, to the panel above.

Design

These are some of my favorite panels from Vampire Loves. These are both sort of pauses to breathe in the momentum of the story; in the first panel a ladies-man Werewolf is about to pounce, in the second Ferdinand is pondering just before he launches into the next sequence, with the Wailer. The characters are in repose, for just a moment. That wonderful smoke cloud adds interest (and characterization) to the first panel. And the high angle and patterning add visual interest to the second, while also emphasizing Ferdinand’s loneliness. The brighter yellow-green of the Wailer heralds the action to come. Even without the color, these would be beautiful panels.

Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District
Pantheon Books, 2000

The Jew of New York
Pantheon Books, 1998

The central joke in “The Beauty Supply District” is neatly summed up by this gem from Carol Lay‘s old Frequently Asked Questions page:

Q: Where do you get your ideas?
A: I buy them in enormous rolls from Hammacher Schlemmer.

The Beauty Supply District—another picturesque corner of Ben Katchor’s New York-like city—is a little warren of shops where art and design ideas are sold over the counter. Towering geniuses of the art world make furtive visits to punch up their paintings, atonal compositions, and what have you. Commercial manufacturers stride in with less trepidation, aiming to put a new gloss on their line of olive products.

Actually it’s not so much ideas that are being purchased; it’s authority. The folks behind the counters don’t really have any advantage over their customers other than impenetrable jargon. But they’ll give them something to take home: a half-inch reduction in diameter, a different shade of green, a suggestion to paint the train facing the opposite direction. The customers are all too ready to grasp at the proffered straw. There are plenty of funny signs on the storefronts (TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM, WELTSCHMERTZ, UNDERSTATEMENTS MADE TO ORDER) but the one all the merchants stand behind is NO REFUNDS.

“The Beauty Supply District” is a short story at the end of Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District (hereafter referred to TBSD.) The rest of the book collects individual Julius Knipl strips, usually one-offs, but sometimes forming short story arcs when the extra space is needed to dig into an idea. Knipl is our stand-in and guide; he tramps around the city and encounters various weird businesses, organizations, and people who bend his ear about weird businesses and organizations.

The District is a good example of Katchor’s skill in creating a sort of mundane surrealism. It’s just far enough off the axis of reality to be funny (before cracking the book, I figured it would be about cosmetics), but not so far off that you can’t practically smell the ozone from one shop’s “two-dimensional aluminum contour extruder.” The world of Julius Knipl mixes fedoras and cell phones, bubblegum removal services and Mud Magnates. A touch weirder and the whole thing would bend into parallel world science fiction.

Katchor’s characters deal in digression. Their default mode of communication is a monologue, spoken either directly to the reader or to a companion who seems to be barely listening. Sometimes the speaker is dispensed with entirely, and we get a series of narrative captions that serve the same function. One spiel leads to another. In one sequence we go from a shopkeeper talking about his son failing a class in aesthetics, to the son falling asleep during the lecture, to the lecture subject’s adventures, and then back out of the nested anecdotes to the shopkeeper again. It’s seamless, too; Katchor’s sonorous narration in this TED video is perfectly captured on the page, carrying us from scene to scene with few bumps.

The characters spend most of their time musing about ephemeral things becoming concrete, and vice-versa. A man happily contemplates the arrival of his new shoes, ordered out of a catalog solely on the basis of a brand name and description; until they’re actually delivered, they’re his ideal shoes. (Of course, they pinch.) A series of strips focuses on a new, wildly successful service: Misspent Youth Centers, which allow patrons to exchange their contemporary money for the same amount in vintage bills—from whatever year they felt they threw their money away on something stupid. (So the shoe guy will likely be a customer in a decade or so.)

Droll wordplay—and sign lettering, see the panel above—is a primary weapon in Katchor’s arsenal. A failed park project for lovers is named “Hymen Plaza”; a store in the District sells “hot Frankfurt School auras”, which scans just enough with me to register as funny. His dialogue lettering—see panel at left—is no great shakes technically, but it fits perfectly with the workaday city Knipl inhabits.

In fact I’d say it’s the strength of Katchor’s authorial voice that I find the most appealing about his strips. The writing goes with the art goes with the lettering; it’s all of a piece. If the pages featured dialogue lettering that was anything other than functional, they would look off. The scratchy ink lines and grey wash evoke all the things found in an urban environment, without getting bogged down in detail. The city people are pleasantly homely, and seem right at home in the grey city. I don’t have any problem believing that they work as security guards at the Heating Pad Institute, or as salespeople for perfume that smells of burnt toast.

Occasionally Katchor throws a curveball, where the absurdity takes an abrupt turn into violence. In The Jew of New York, the pressures of making a living eventually drive several characters violently bonkers; in TBSD the bad guys are just another element of the cityscape, popping up where you least expect them. (But they’re still Katchor characters: “Some of us have more to get off our chest than just phlegm,” deadpans a pipe-wielding thug.)

The Jew of New York deserves an essay of its own, but the short version is this: if TBSD gently satirizes our cultural obsession with consumer goods, TJNY takes it into the street and beats it loopy with a hickory switch. While it’s still funny, it’s a darker book than TBSD. TJNY is set in 19th century New York City and takes inspiration from historical events and trends, but as with Knipl’s world, it quickly goes off in absurd directions. For example, the impresario that wants to carbonate Lake Erie and pipe it into every home.

The book follows the episodic format of the Knipl strips, but hangs together as a complete story. Buttressing and commenting on the narrative are fake pamphlets and posters (on the dollar values of ‘night soil’, or advertising DR. EMIL VINYACK’S COMPULSORY HOTEL & LUNATIC ASYLUM). The inside covers feature a brochure and map for the proposed carbonated water system, worth a closer look for the listing of strange organizations that Knipl will probably run across, top hats and all, almost two centuries later.

Archives of various Katchor strips (including Julius Knipl and samples from The Jew of New York) are available on his website at http://www.katchor.com/weeklystrips.html. His strips for Metropolis magazine appear on their website.