Still More Napkin Doodles

Isaac's recent post of his paper-towel upside-downs has prompted me to share a couple of drawings from a napkin I've been idiotically holding on to for ages now (don't fret about my hygiene, it was only used for drawing). I think I was saving it to show Isaac at some point, but it kept getting moved around and misplaced whenever he was in town. Whatever: now it has a digital form, and the treeware version can be recycled.

Nothing quite so clever as an upside-down, just a couple of funny-animal cartoons that I thought turned out pretty well for napkin art. Here is a snake:



...didn't I just say that?

And here, on the other side of the napkin, is what I would describe as a gigantic ape, were it not for the remarkably un-apelike feet that have just tromped through a city now in ruins:



These are in purple ink in the original, which adds a certain charm (while also calling to mind Grape Ape, unfortunately), but black & white scans are friendlier to the bandwidth.

And now I'm fresh out of napkin doodles...

Flash Science

I'm sure I'm not the first to point this out, but the Silver-Age Flash had a peculiar rogue's gallery. With the exception of Gorilla Grodd, I think that every one of them was a genius inventor who had come up with a handheld device that defied the rules of physics. These ingenious weapons or other specimens of strange science (or possibly magic) were then used to rob banks. The Weather Wizard could control the weather with a little wand, but he couldn't come up with a better career idea than robbery (something that can be done with a pistol).

It's hard to believe, I know, but have a look at the cover of Flash #288, featuring Dr. Alchemy.

That's the Philosopher's Stone in Dr. Alchemy's right hand. It can transmute any element into any other. In his left hand, we see a briefcase full of money. Dr. Alchemy could change that stately tree into solid gold (or solid Californium), so I'm not sure why he bothers carrying that much cash. But I'm not Cary Bates, and it's not 1980, so I don't get to write this issue of Flash.

Despite the written emphasis on chemicals and elements, Dr. Alchemy is really a magical foe, not a scientific one. The Philosopher's Stone doesn't really transmute elements; it does whatever the comic's writer wants it to do. Here, for example, Dr. Alchemy invents a new element that makes people more susceptible to hypnosis.

I was eight years old when this comic was on the newsstand, and I think I could have told you that was ridiculous. I wouldn't have been able to say then that the problem has to do with the sorts of chemicals that usually are psychoactive, or the fact that a "new" element was almost certain to be radioactive... But I think I'd have known that we were looking at wishful writing and not real science or reasoning.

And this, in my opinion, is the real disappointment of Silver-Age Flash comics. Barry Allen was a scientist, and so were a lot of his supervillain foes. A writer with a decent sense of scientific reasoning and a decent knowledge of how physics and chemistry work would have been able to make the book genuinely educational for the kids who read it. I can imagine a comic that regularly featured ingenious high-speed solutions to intractable problems, based on real physical principles—or detective-work based on the scientific method. (The current All-New Atom written by Gail Simone gets pretty close to this sometimes, but of course that's a book for today's comic-reader, not for the eight-year-olds of 1980.) Anyway, I can pipe-dream about a scientist superhero who thinks like a real scientist, but Barry Allen is emphatically not that superhero.

Consider the sequence the front cover foreshadows: Dr. Alchemy catches Flash in the park and turns him into a human cloud:

I'm not sure, but it sounds like Dr. Alchemy has just used the Philosopher's Stone to turn water into water.

Or maybe he has changed all of the Flash's other component parts into water. How will our scientist resolve this dilemma? Well, fortunately, he still seems to be able to think, even though his brain is made of water vapor.

...And he seems to be able to control the movement or the agitation of his molecules. He can even create friction between individual water molecules. He heats part of his water vapor here, so that it's even warmer, then somehow propels his "warmer upper half" toward his "drifting, uncontrollable lower half"...

... and precipitates.

Since something about this strictly physical process returns Flash to his normal chemical makeup, he's free to run off and look for Dr. Alchemy.

Probably he isn't going to search all of the caves near Central City, because if you could use magic to alter and reconstitute matter, you would have your hideout in a penthouse or a lab or something, right? You probably wouldn't shackle your "astral twin" to a cave wall in front of a TV (plugged in to a magic outlet, probably) and a life-sized cardboard cutout of the Flash.

But let's not ask the comic to work logically now. And let's not bother to ask what an "astral twin" is. My head is already hurting.

The lesson learned from this comic: superhero comics about scientists are no place to look for scientific reasoning.

Elfworld Alphabet: BCDHIJKNSTUWWXYZ

Our story may be finished, but there are still a few Elfworld-related tasks to complete. Among these is a bit of bonus content we have planned for the book edition of the story, if (as we hope) our tale is included in the second volume of the Elfworld anthology. The book's dimensions are taller than those of the postcards for which we've designed our story thus far, so to fill out the space in the bottom margin we're creating a series of alphabetical portraits of likely types to inhabit such a world of medieval-inflected fantasy.

I will spare you the details of the Byzantine process whereby Isaac and I collaborated on the creation of an extensive list of potential Elfworld personality types--mostly based on trades, à la the General Prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Suffice to say that it was fully in keeping with SatCom practice, in that it involved us bouncing ideas back and forth, exercising some individual choice about which types to draw, and requiring each other to draw certain other types. The alphabet will ultimately include the main characters from our story, as well, probably identified by name rather than occupation (though who knows? Since most of the characters are already named in the tale, it might make sense to label them by their trades, instead).

At any rate, I've drawn my allotment of sixteen non-character types, and here they are:



As you can plainly see, these characters are a Beggar; a Caitiff; a Dwarf; a Hermit; an Imp; a Journeyman; a Knave; a Nymph; a Saracen; a Tapster; an Undertaker; a Weaver; a Wodewose; "Xiphias"; a Yeoman; and a Zealot.

The Weaver is modeled on the manuscript illustration of the Wife of Bath from the Ellesmere Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, and the Yeoman more or less recalls the poetic portrait of the Yeoman from the General Prologue. The Zealot, meanwhile, is based on images of Savonarola.

As for "Xiphias," well, that's Greek for "swordfish," and I think it entered the alphabet out of sheer desperation (though "xorn" was also considered). "Xiphias" was one of the types that Isaac insisted that I draw. So it's a sword-wielding knight with fish on his shield; what else was I supposed to do?

P.S. -- I have manfully resisted the urge to employ the obvious portmanteau that combines "Elfworld" and "alphabet." It wasn't easy to avoid!

An Upside-Down (Not Incredible)

So, the other day at the dinner table I absent-mindedly drew this:


... A weird beaky-nosed mad-scientist guy with a big manic grin, a little bit muppety in his design.

He was drawn on a paper towel, by the way. That's where those dots came from. I think they add a nice element of verisimilitude, and remind the viewer of the spontaneous conditions of the composition.

Anyway, while I was drawing that mad scientist, I also drew this wild-bearded but sedate primitive chieftain.


Any publisher who wants my undying fealty would do well to reissue The Incredible Upside-Downs of Gustave Verbeek. And if you ever find a used copy of that book for cheap, you know what to get me for Christmas, because I don't actually have it: I've only ever seen a few of those strips myself, and I've found them totally charming.

Update, June 2008: I found a copy of the book at MoCCA!

Pile of Crazy Old Comics

So: I'm planning for the first few weeks of this semester's course on the graphic novel now. I'm changing the course slightly, asking the students to write a few short essays for me instead of only taking exams, because I want to get them thinking critically about their reading from the very beginning of the class.

The first of these essays is going to be a very brief paper contrasting A Contract with God (which is their first assigned reading) with a mainstream comic book published around the same time. Long-time Satisfactory Comics supporter Joe Stinson, the owner of Alternate Universe (the comics shop nearest to Yale campus), very graciously sold me a pile of old comics from the 1970s and early '80s that are, well, not all in very good shape. And some of them are not very good at all. But he sold me the whole stack for a dollar, and I think they're going to work very well for this assignment.

Before I hand them over to my students, though, I'm going to skim them and scan a few pages, to offer a few points of my own about the differences between comics then and now.

For example, here's World's Finest #237, which is dated April 1976. (I was buying and reading comics by this point, but I don't remember this comic or its selection of ads.)

Notice the speech balloon on the cover. You don't see that very much any more. And notice the recurring theme of Superman threatening his friends or ranking their safety below that of a stranger. Also notice the red bulbs at the end of the tails of those Giant Metal-Eating Space Locusts. They become important later...



...When Superman is explaining why his father Jor-El sent this weird Giant Space Bird-Mantis-Dragon to Earth (without a rocket, just in a big irregular hunk of metal), and why Superman's powers aren't any good against the locusts.

The lesson we may learn from this issue: weird stuff used to happen in superhero comics, and it happened for some weird reasons. By the way: the author of this particular opus? Bob Haney.

Midnight Sun by Ben Towle

Ben Towle, self-described "cartoonist, educator, hobo," both teaches comics and creates them. Isaac got in touch with him a while back and invited him to join us for a shuffleupagus page (he drew panels 5 & 6) and to contribute to ____ Are Always Fun to Draw (Ben's contribution just might be my favorite one to look at in that volume). Here on the website, Ben provided us with a great set of constraints for our Elfworld submission, offering a series of nods to other cartoonists, from classics like Segar and Ditko to contemporaries like Stephan Pastis (whose Pearls Before Swine gets a shout-out in one of Ben's recent blog entries). His constraints worked well for us in a crucial stage of figuring out our plot and the stakes of our story, and I've really appreciated Ben's feedback in the comments, too.

This is a long preamble to a tale. Basically, I wanted to reintroduce you to Ben Towle as a sort of SatCom fellow traveler before admitting that he is in fact much more of an explorer and pioneer, one who has blazed a trail far ahead of us by completing and publishing a fine graphic novel with SLG called Midnight Sun, just out in December and just read by me Friday night. (Check out SLG's product page--with preview trailer!--here.)

It's the story of a 1928 Italian airship expedition to the Arctic that goes awry, and Ben succeeds very well in mapping this narrative terrain. A prose note at the end describes the factual basis for the story and the various narrative tweaks that Ben introduced: some streamlining of characters here, conflating of events there, with some invented characters and scenes for good measure. The story is well-paced, well-imagined, and well-designed (Ben has some thoughtful words about its nearly square format in another recent blog post); what I like best about the book, though, is the drawing.

Much of the story takes place in the Arctic, which allows for great expanses of white space on the page and effective use of perspective to convey distance. Here's a panel where three members of the stranded party of airship crewmen decide to strike out for solid land they've spotted in the distance; they are watched by one of the remaining three crewmen who stay behind on the ice floe where their dirigible crash-landed:



But white space isn't all that works effectively in these polar scenes. Ben also makes good use of graytones throughout the comic to sculpt shapes and to alter the mood. Here's a later look at two of those crewmen who left in search of land:



What first impressed me in Ben's drawings for shuffleupagus and the Fun to Draw project was his eye for arresting black-and-white contrasts. They're in evidence in Midnight Sun, too, and one of my favorites is this image of a Swedish Air Force plane, whose pilot swoops in to rescue some of the stranded airship crew, only to end up in need of rescue himself later on:



Finally, I'd like to note that Ben draws great boots. Boots may not be the first thing to come to mind when you think of great drawing--they weren't even on the extended list of over 130 "Fun to Draw" items--but Van Gogh produced a terrific painting of boots early in his career, and Ben has a couple of panels that showcase boots as visually interesting elements that flatter the inker. Here's my favorite pair, in a panel of increasing tension for the stranded airmen:



There's lots more fun stuff to look at in this book--planes wheeling, ships steaming, a bear attacking--and I'm really pleased to see such a fine book from the pen of a fellow who not only did some inking at my dining room table once, but brought along a few beers to inspire his fellow cartoonists to loosen up and enjoy the playful part of their work. I'm glad that Midnight Sun is attracting positive notices, too, and I wish Ben lots of success with it!

Sketchbook: Snow Day Self-Portrait

So: I've been trying to make time to sketch one drawing a day with my Rapidograph. You'd think that wouldn't be so hard to do, but for me it is. And I'm learning that the technical pen is hardly the supple instrument that a pencil or a brush is, and it's pretty unforgiving when you draw without preliminary pencil sketches. In other words, my already high admiration for the masters of such sketchwork (Crumb, Ware) has only increased as I've made my own feeble attempts.

Nevertheless, Isaac has suggested that I blog some of these sketches (none of which he has seen), and since I'm overdue for a post I thought I'd share a quick self-portrait from yesterday, when I bundled up to venture out in the snow.