Original Art Sundays No. 359: pin-up page: Blue Wild Abandon

 Taking a day away from the big story. It's my birthday today, and I felt an impulse. Yeah, the graphic memoir is important and I like doing it, but as anyone who's worked in nonfiction (even creative nonfiction) knows, there are certain constraints. Some things HAVE TO BE RIGHT, which can stall the creative drive. Plus, have fun with your art!

There's this character who has been popping into my sketchbooks and ideas in various forms for years. She's starting to take shape, but she's elusive! It started with the title van Dyke Parks song from Clang of the Yankee Reaper. The song includes the line "out in the blue wild abandon." I was charmed by the line and thought it would make a great character name. Eventually, she tied into the random sketches. An idea tickled me. I came to see that was the name of that character, and finally the story takes shape. I did post a sketch of her during Inktober this year.

I won't say a ton about the story here, other than that it's an homage to a favorite Western, Have Gun Will Travel. I particularly like the moral challenges in the episodes written by Harry Julian Fink, and I hope to capture that tone and energy in Ms. Abandon's stories.

I thought about making this a book cover, but soon realized that it was an old-school pin-up page, like they used to do in 60s Marvel comics. So fun, so exciting!

So many decisions! I have a very specific look for her. I need to work up some model sheets. This is very close, but not quite it. Her assistant is Marilyn, the robot who also debuted in this year's Inktober scrawling. That's vital. The assistant character in the source series is Kim Chang, called Hey Boy for much of the series. While the show made a genuine effort to overcome the racism of the era, it's still there, and Blue's helper cannot be such a character. The robot with a personality is also a tired trope, but I have schemes to make Marilyn a fresh character.

So much fun playing in Photoshop on this. I want to do some hand painted pieces of her, but that's another day. The first book is plotted and preliminary character sketches are in place. The book will be B & W with color covers. And there may be paper dolls in her future....

Mostly conventional tools on this. Bristol, pen and ink, brushes, erasers, straightedge, a little whiteout. It turned out well.

Next, back to the memoir.

Original Art Sundays (Tuesday) No. 163: Surrealist Cowgirls, p. 19

Posting a couple days late due to scanner access issues, yet again. Once the Fall semester begins, my access will improve. Then as long as I can be professional enough to get the work done, all will be well.
Now, the page before the big fight:

I really like this one.
I did some minor edge clean up and cleaned up the blacks a bit in Photoshop. Otherwise, it's all hand work.
Panel One, the full negative effect, was fun to do. I know I could have just drawn the panel conventionally and done an Invert in Photoshop, but what fun is that?
Panel Two, with the whole gang, was also a challenge. By putting Whalliam in the back, I organized them into a tight group, ready for attack. Also, once again, Louise shows insight and initiative in calling for Tolcanan (finally called by name), who's been following our intrepid troupe all this time. This is important since she's sometimes seen as an airhead and a bit of a victim. No simplistic characters, even in a silly story.
Panel Three offers some big hints at Tolcanan's true self, but does not tell all.
Trying to keep the four motifs going here: surrealism, whimsy, Westerns and tension.
Next: Who is Tolcanan? And the big Magic Gunfight, Part One!

Best Comics of 2012 No. 2: Doug Wildey's RIO

Again, back to a book of reprints.
But there's so much new work here, and the old work is reprinted with such skill, it all feels new.

 

A bit of background:

Doug Wildey was a real life cowboy and adventurer who just just happened to be one of the best damn comic artists to come down the pike. While he's drawn and written war comics, The Saint comic strip, Tarzan, Archie, romance, mystery and horror, he's best known for two things: creating Jonny Quest and doing spectacular Westerns.
Oh, he was also the inspiration for the character of Peavey in The Rocketeer. Creator Dave Stevens was a friend and a huge fan.
Some of his work, like his characters for the short-lived Atlas/Seaboard line in the early 1970s, Kid Cody and the Comanche Kid, had short runs with sad distribution- odd in this particular case, when you consider that the Atlas company was started and run by Stan Lee's brother Larry Leiber.
After Wildey's strip Ambler folded in 1974, he returned to work on his Western magnum opus, Rio.
The first of three published graphic novels (at the time called "continuing stories") appeared in Eclipse Magazine no. 1, August 1983. The sequel appeared in Eclipse Comics, the followup anthology. This story was later reprinted by Comico, another spectacular 80s comic company that died too soon. A third story was later printed by Dark Horse as two single comics.

Wildey worked on two more Rio stories that never saw print. Until now.
There are a total of five stories in this book, plus some brilliantly handled supplemental material.

The new volume, a delight for those of us who love books (more on that below), is printed almost entirely from the original art. The colors are so much more vibrant than in the original printings. I suspect Wildey was working in color marker and watercolors over inks, based on the markmaking visible on some pages.

Rio is a mystery man, a reformed outlaw pardoned by President Grant, an ex-lawman, making his way in a matter-of-fact manner. He doesn't bemoan his fate. He just lives it.

The stories are classic Western stuff: buffalo hunts, railroads, mining, gambling, and a cast of supporting characters including incredibly fleshed out interpretations of Jesse James, Doc Holliday, and the Earp Brothers, who act like real jerks this time around.

Here's a choice bit of the Jesse James story.

In this story, Wildey shows contempt for the hypocrisy of the "civilized" people in the West. After Jesse is exposed and forced to leave town, it is revealed that the late sheriff had a clandestine arrangement with Jess to protect the town in return for safe haven. After gunslingers and ne'er-do-wells invade the town, the righteous folk who drove Jesse out beg Rio to help them. Given their shabby treatment of both Jesse and him, Rio simply rides on.

Two of the tales in this book are incomplete, and are presented in their state at the time of Wildey's death in 1994. Below are samples from those stories.

Even in this rough state, the quality of the art, writing and overall storytelling is readily apparent. I'm particularly charmed by the silhouette of the dog following Rio in the last page, the one that ends the stories in the book.

The book also contains some lovely portrait work of the title character.

The design of the book itself deserves comment. One of the challenges of reprinting older material is getting it right, and this is an arena in which IDW shines. While their Artist's Edition series is out of my price range, I do drool every time one is announced or released. One of the local stores (sadly, one that never seems to have a sale) has a copy of the Simonson Thor volume, and I get to visit it longingly every time I stop in.
But the Rio volume is comparatively affordable, especially if you do as we cheap bitches do and combine discounts until it's 30% off. Still able to patronize local comic stores and save a buck at the same time- yeah!
Rio, the Complete Saga is very well designed. The border elements on the above plates are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The above front cover scan doesn't show it, but there are decorative elements on the cover that reinforce the tone of the book. See this more complete image of the back cover for an idea of what I mean.

 

The right choice for a typeface. Nicely handled background pattern. Edge stripping reinforced by faux straps, simulating an old trunk. Clipped corners simulating an old school photo album (ask your mother or grandmother about those!).
And that's just the cover. The inside is even more striking, as alluded to in the above pages.
When choosing the Best of... annually, I try to avoid the traps to which many other such lists seem to fall prey. I don't list what I think are the most important, artistic (whatever that means) or profound books. I don't care about cutting edge stuff, unless it's well done. And I am SO bored by adults who deliberately try to draw like little kids!
What I care about is a book that will continue to pull me back to it a year, two years, five years or more later.
Since I've been reading my copies of the original Rio albums since they first came out, it's clear to me that this is such a book.

Tomorrow: The Best Comic of 2012.

Oh, and here's Wildey's interpretation of Jonny Quest, from a Comico miniseries offering his interpretations of classic TV episodes, just because it's so cool!

 

Best Comics of 2012, No.4: Cow Boy

Most of this year's list to date is material that revisits past glories of comics in new ways.
While I respect this material a great deal, there's still plenty of noteworthy new work.
Case in point: Cow Boy.

This is one of the funniest and saddest books I've read in years.
This is the story of a boy roaming the West trying to bring a bad man to justice.

 

Problem is, the bad man is his father. And he rides grim, alone and lonely, with a child's vision of the West tempered by the perceptions of the adults he meets along the way.

And, of course, he finds, captures, and confronts the father.

The book confronts the challenges of parent/child relationships in a way that's all too real, but takes nothing away from the child's perception. It also doesn't become a therapy session. It's just honest, and you  know I'm a fan of honest.
 The creative team of Nate Cosby (Jim Henson's The Storyteller) and Chris Eliopoulos (Pet Avengers, Franklin Richards) is well versed in the fantastic comic involving children or children's material.
I'm a sucker for profound emotions, clearly expressed without pelting the reader with bags of saccharine or venom.
Arachia did their usual beautiful job on the production of this book. As of this writing, there is no TPB edition, and while the price tag of $19.95 is hardly outrageous, it might do the disservice of keeping it out of the hands of some younger readers, which would be a real shame.
Cow Boy plays on many Western tropes- it reads as part Spaghetti Western, part John Ford, and has hints of the dying West that are echoed in Jarmsuch's Dead Man. But none of this is so overbearing as to make the story too unrelenting for kids or impressionable so-called grownups.
This also echoes Don McGregor and Gene Colan's Ragamuffins strip from Eclipse in its attempt to understand the feelings of a child, though not quite so pedantic.

In looking at this work, be mindful that it was printed and colored from Colan's pencils. So if it looks a bit soft, that's why. A flawed experiment by today's standards, but remarkable for the pre-digital age.
Of course, I can't read any comic that deals with the world from a child's point of view without recalling one of my all-time favorites: Sheldon Mayer's Sugar and Spike!
A refresher: Sugar & Spike are neighboring babies who speak baby language and have their own view of the world. If this sounds like Rugrats, it should. The animation studio Klasky-Csupo freely stole the idea from Sugar & Spike.
In the cover shown below, note the presence of Grandpa Plumm. All babies, regardless of species, speak baby talk. And Grandpa, being in his second childhood, communicates fluently in baby talk, but adults see this as senility. Also, his cowboy regalia is on point with today's theme!

 

Ahem.

Back to our book.

There are a couple framing stories in Cow Boy, unrelated other than by tone. It's reasonable to assume they're set in the same, or a similar, world.

One of these, depicted below,  deals with a lady gunslinger and her penguin sidekick, or is it the other way around?

This is the work of Mike Maihack, whose other delightful work can be found at this link.
This is a style I've often wondered about cultivating- not this specifically, because it's Mike's but something looser. My own work is so, ahem, informal, that I sometimes think forcing it to bend to  taut precision works to its, and my, determent.
Hm. I guess I just need to let go a bit more.
Food for thought, but Cow Boy will certainly inspire me, and any other creators who are still open to the paradox of insightful innocence, to consider it.
Tomorrow: put on your masks as we jump to another planet for Best of 2012, No. 4.

Best Comics of 2012, No. 7 (tie): Fashion Beast and Lone Ranger: Snake of Iron

Spoilers abound below. Take heed.
Every year, I come up with a tie.
Usually, this is because there's a worthwhile book I've omitted and I can't decide between it and another. Inevitably, this happens after I've begun posting the entries, so no going back and renumbering.
This time out, the tie is between two disparate works.
First up, Alan Moore's Fashion Beast. It's a bit unfair to call it Alan Moore's work completely. Based on a truncated film collaboration with rock and fashion impresario Malcolm McClaren, this is the story of androgynous boys, girls and those seemingly in-between, desperately scrapping for a place in the arbitrary world of fashion in the early days of a nuclear winter.

The book is co-credited to McClaren, and the adaptation is credited to Antony Johnson, who has adapted several other Moore works for Avatar Press, and who wrote Wasteland for Oni Press.
The art is more than sufficient. Facundo Percio gives us a full world with drastically alternating visions of beauty and despair. Another Avatar staple, his past work includes Warren Ellis' Anna Mercury.
The story owes no small debt to Beauty and the Beast. The mysterious master designer and his minions are clear parallels to the Beast and his castle lackeys. There's also a parallel to the villagers hunting Beauty, this time in the form of an angry politicized mob attacking our heroine.
As to the heroine...
At first we're given to presume she's a cross dresser, or a drag queen, possibly a pre-op or non-op transsexual.
However, we learn in issue 3 that she's female.
We learn this from an acerbic dresser, very dykey but of undisclosed sexuality as of issue 3 (again, I'm a couple issues behind on this).
So it's a world of dry wit and desperation, coupled with hope and legend. The latter two run a bit thin, and the urgency runs high.
So many mysteries yet to unfold. We've met the true gender of our heroine, Doll (or have we?), and we may or may not know something of the elusive sharp witted dresser. Here's Doll in action from issue one!

 

In the follwoing sequence (sequins?), Doll is confronted by the mysterious designer.

Doll stands proud and defiant on the runway. No tie in to the stream of thought, I just found it to be a cool page!

Even in the hopelessness and nihilism, there are many kinds of beauty to be had here. I'm reminded of Moore's Halo Jones (oh, for him to finish that one day!), and can't help but wonder if Doll will save the world through fashion.
A very different kind of woman dominates the second book discussed today: a camel riding explorer of the American West.

I've made no secret of my admiration for Dynamite's Lone Ranger series, espeically the 25 issue origin series. While I've been less pleased with the current run, largely due to the new artist being less satisfying to me then Sergio Cariello, the stories are still strong.
But the miniseries have really picked up the slack.
From last year's Lone Ranger: Death of Zorro to the current Snake of Iron, these shorter cycles are more satisfying than the current longer arcs. Tighter action, stronger character development, and better stories overall.
This outing offers Tonto and Scout (Tonto's horse, in case you've forgotten) rescuing a train in a storm. Meanwhile, the Ranger is serving as protector for a headstrong young woman, the aforementioned explorer.
While this may seem an absurdity, there was a US Camel Corps in the American West, and it's been revived in Texas, primarily for education and entertainment. Camels played a relatively small but still significant role in "taming" the American West. Some, however, regard this as myth, even invoking the infamous ghost camels. This ties into the "ghost horse spirit" that dirves the Kiowa to jump the reservation, one of the key plot points of this narrative.

Our heroine, and camel, encounter a threat!

I like this story a great deal.
This is surprising, in that I don't usually much care for Chuck Dixon's writing- too much machismo, too much smug, all that self-important "guy" swagger leaves me cold and full of contempt. But here, he's written sympathetic characters in a wide variety of situations, and even the most absurd aspects of it have a gravitas that make it worthwhile.
While i enjoyed Dixon's work on Birds of Prey, his Man With No Name reeks of testosterone, and he will always be remembered as the writer who broke Batman's back in the Knightfall storyline.
But then there's his successful adaptation of The Hobbit (as far as I know, the only official comic adaptation of Tolkien to date). And there's this. So perhaps I've been too harsh in my judgment of his work.
There's some wonderful insight into Tonto here, and while the story risks racism at times, it manages to retain the complexity of all characters, even in the cliched scalping scene shown at right. Scalping was not as widely practiced as often assumed, and is not the sole province of native Americans- ancient Celts also practiced scalping- but Dixon is accurate in the locale and timeframe of use of the practice in this story.
Artist Esteve Polls is Spanish, and began working in European adventure books in the early 1990s. In addition to drawing some Gene Simmons written comics (!), he's done other Zorro and Lone Ranger work, including the aforementioned Death of Zorro series.
Oh, yeah, and he drew this.

I mean really. How cool is that?
Since I'm posting this a day late, I'll post the next installment in Best of 2012 later today.
Ah, the slings and arrows....

Original Art Sundays No. 102: oddment: Damn, she's good

One of the advantages of moving is also one of its drawbacks. You have to go through all your stuff.
Again and again.
In so doing, I found some comic pages I'd forgotten about, like this one.

This page has a few things to recommend it, and a few issues.
I like the barbed wire borders. I've had a fascination with the look of barbed wire since it was used as a plot device in an episode of the brilliant, neglected Western series Branded in the mid-1960s. Those who are into the Coen Brothers may recall a reference to this series in The Big Lebowski.
I also like the warm grays. I scanned this as a color piece, since the grayscale preview cooled out the warm grays.
What I don't like:
The layout is ambiguous in a few ways. First, the viewer needs more of a frame of reference to get that it's her hand, not his, drawing the gun in Panel Two. Second, the angle of the shot in Panel Three makes it appear that she's shooting herself. Changing that to a POV a la The Great Train Robbery would have made it more clear, I think.
Finally, the direction of the primary light source is unclear in the final panel. Cast shadows from the watering trough and her opponent's hand at rest imply light coming from behind her and to her left, but the edge lighting on her right side is inconsistent with that notion.
The last niggling detail I like on this page is the name on the undertaker's sign: Mortimer Titian. Think about it for a minute.
I have an experimental page from years ago put aside for next week, and an eight-page story, complete, for the week after. Hang in there, faithful readers. I want to tell new stories as soon as possible!

Top 10 Comics of 2009: # 9: The Lone Ranger #18

How far have we come, if the most exciting books are about the oldest characters?
Dynamite's Lone Ranger series (and its offshoot mini, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, which had a very satisfying circus story for its last issue) have been full of sensitive, insightful writing by Brett Matthews, Joe Kubert-esque art by Sergio Cariello (a very nice guy I met  about 3 years back at San Diego- I'll post the Lone Ranger and Tonto sketch he did for me when I have scanner access again) and some of the best coloring I've seen in comics in a LONG time.

This story is the start of a new arc, and has the stuff in it I like about this comic, the thing that others seem to dislike. It's quiet. the characters have very real conversations about things, while things happen, before they happen, and afterward. The dialogue is sparse and heartfelt. The book takes its time making its points, which makes the ensuing mayhem all the more powerful, even if you do have to wait two or thee issues for it. To me, this is very pragmatic writing. In real life, things don't happen to people at a breakneck pace. With rare exceptions, something huge happens, you have some time to live and reflect on it, and something else happens. The accelerated cataclysms of the superhero world are rarities in human reality. And to see that reflected in contemporary narratives of a character created over 7 decades ago is quite refreshing.
And Tonto is an amazing character here. Centered, self-aware, skilled, and unwilling to suffer fools gladly, even the Lone Ranger himself, who is often a fool in this book- not in a mocking way,  but impetuous. In this storyline, the Lone Ranger is a driven young man whose impulsive nature befits his age. Strong character portrayals all around.
There are some elements of this book I'm not mad for. The romance involving the title character's brother's widow feels a bit forced, despite the new direction it was given in the issue following this one. And I'm so tired of multiple covers, which appear to be done for every issue of every Dynamite book (I couldn't say for sure, since I only read one or two other books of theirs- the Project Superpowers line leaves me cold).
But even with all that, this is a very strong book. I can easily see Matthews' Lone Ranger uttering one of my favorite Harlan Ellison quotes: "If you want consistency, look for it in the grave. I'm just a flawed, miserable human being, doing the best I can."
Tomorrow: #8 on the hit parade.

Original Art Sundays, No. 9: Surrealist Cowgirls, p. 8

After midnight on a busy (and mostly successful) day, so technically it's Sunday.
This was a very late-night page, got a burst of energy on this one. I rather like the layout, with the shape of the cave echoing the top of Sparth's head.
Popped some heavy blacks and messed around with fonts more than I should. It works, but you really have to click the thumbnail to see it properly.

Ah, yes, the superhero Western

I'm usually not much on the whole mash-ups thing ( do we even still say that?), but this was too much fun.
Mind, there have been some decent superhero Western comics.
There's Denny O'Neill and Jim Aparo's mini-epic for Charlton, Wander (okay, more of an SF story than a superhero, but still elements).
The original Ghost Rider comes to mind. A Western supernatural superhero (say that three times fast!).
The Western Batman, Zorro, is a perennial favorite. His current incarnation from Dynamite is quite strong, with subtler characterizations than might be expected.
The most appealing to me remains The Lone Ranger.
There's DC's Vigilante and El Diablo, Marvel's flawed by ambitious Red Wolf, the SF superheroine Dawnstar in the Legion of Super-Heroes, and arguably, the Man With No Name revisioned by Vertigo as Preacher.
I feel like I should have something quite profound to say about all this, but it's late. Let's just tickle the idea for tonight!

Original Art Sundays #5: Surrealist Cowgirls, p. 4

Here we go with another Cowgirls page!
At the time I was doing this one, I'd done three pages in two hours and was starting to feel a bit rushed. No excuses for the work, just reporting in.
The story is a mish-mash of a couple stories I'd been kicking around for years. I really wanted to avoid the "Scooby-Doo panic moment" but there was no way around it. Besides, even though it's a cornball, it's kind of fun.

Original Art Sundays #3: Surrealist Cowgirls, p. 2

The Cowgirls are great fun. I get to draw whatever comes to mind, really let loose, and find out who the girls are as I go. They always surprise me.
My one regret is that I have such a wild time doing them that I rush the art!

Original Art Sundays #2: Surrealist Cowgirls, p. 1

This is page 1 of an 11-page story I did as part of the 24-hour comic challenge this year. I made it for 14 hours.
These are some of my favorite characters. I haven't done any work on them for years. It's long overdue!
Next year, if I do the Challenge again, as I hope to, I won't work full size! Most everyone else in our cadre was working on rather small sheets. Sean Lynch was doing his usual lovely dry brush work.
This work is fast and sloppy, but with the time constraints, all I really cared about was the energy and the wild ride, as subsequent pages will show. I always want to do the best work I can, but my primary focus with this was having a wild, joyful mind come through on the page.
That, and I wanted to get as much done as I could as fast as I could!
next week: page 2!