The Rainbow Orchid

Any plans for the Bank Holiday weekend?

If not, you have one last chance to read Garen Ewing's The Rainbow Orchid, which goes offline shortly.

The Rainbow Orchid is an adventure strip, in the ligne-claire style, following the adventures of Julius Chancer as he hunts for the eponymous flower.

Unsurprisingly (given its quality) The Rainbow Orchid has found a home at Egmont Books, which is to publish it in August, so Ewing plans to reduce its online presence to a preview/promotional website for the book.

Ligne claire is a popular style in francophone comics - and many readers will be familiar with it from Herge's Tintin books - and it is particularly suited to webcomics, where its elegant, unfussy imagery makes for great readability.

While we're at it, here are a couple other of my favourite ligne claire webcomics. Les McClaine's Johnny Crossbones and David O'Connell's Tozo the Public Servant.

(via Forbidden Planet)

Darwyn Cooke's The Hunter

If the preview is anything to go by, Darwyn Cooke's adaptation of The Hunter, the first of Richard Stark's Parker novels will be a bit tasty.

Previously adapted by John Boorman for his 1697 film, Point Blank, the story has hard-boiled pedigree and the artwork is beautiful. Can't wait.

Destination Earth

Here is a wonderful, evocative promo for the American Petroleum Institute, from 1956!

(via Internet Archive via Jon K?)

Review: The Legend of Mother Sarah

Sarah’s search for her children leads to a startling discovery

I’m not well read in Manga (though I loved Ranma ½ and Oh My Goddess!), but even I know of Katsuhiro Otomo, the creator of Akira. So it was with interest that I read The Legend of Mother Sarah: Tunnel Town, one of Otomo’s lesser known works.

Mother Sarah is set in a distant future, in which warfare has left the Earth irradiated and uninhabitable. A radical group, Epoch, has managed to tilt the planet’s axis and expose new land for settlement.

The titular Sarah scours the scattered settlements looking for the children she was separated from during the outbreak of civil war for control over the new Earth.

While the questing plot is familiar within the genre, Mother Sarah explores some unusual themes. For example, I can think of few comics that deal with motherhood or feature women in middle age (except as supporting characters).

Apart from delivering the occasional ass-kicking, Sarah’s special ‘power’ is her ability to offer motherly guidance to the two young people she befriends in Tunnel Town, a mining colony run by the fascistic government and operated by slaves/prisoners of war.

Sarah is a catalytic character; the actual protagonist is a young soldier in the totalitarian regime, who longs to prove himself to his seniors, and the young girl who looks up to him.

The squalor of war is more well-trodden ground in comics, but Sarah herself, while vaguely sympathetic to the Epoch faction and opposed to the fascists, is unconcerned with the political claims of either. Seldom are the Epoch freedom fighters portrayed in a more flattering light than the greedy fascists.

Sarah eschews explicit moral or political stances for a more general sense of compassion for all war’s victims.

Although the storytelling of Mother Sarah is simple and direct, which would seem to make it ideal for younger readers, it is super violent; everybody gets shot in the face. (There is also one panel of porn in the middle of the book, which is random.)

The artwork took a while for me to get used to. It is black and white and very low key, which allows for high detail, but could wash out the compositions. I was surprised to find the result was a flawlessly smooth read; the eye was not arrested every couple of panels or even pages, but was allowed to 'scroll' through the story easily. This is the first time I have really paid close attention to the 'cinematic' effect of Manga that Scott McCloud speaks about in Understanding Comics.

Mother Sarah may not be a classic, but it is highly original in its conception and immaculate in its production.

Cartooning v Illustration

Is it necessary to be a good draughtsman to be a good cartoonist? I’m not sure. Graphic style (pen, brush, digital and stroke) and draughtsmanship (perspective technique and design) effect storytelling in Comics in a way that is unique to the medium.

I believe that concept and plot are related by observation of realistic drawing rules (ie. perspective, depth cues and foreshortening); emotion and character by expressive line (and/or colour) (ie. emanatae, abstract visual elements).

In the little treatise-cum- instruction supplement to the last issue of Comic Art, Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, Ivan Brunetti says that the minimum job of cartooning is to convey the visual characteristics necessary for us to recognise drawings as symbols.

Brunetti illustrates - see what I did there? - with an exercise in which one draws several everyday subjects (a car, a cat, a castle, yourself) a number of times, in successively shorter periods (2 minutes, 1 minute, 30 seconds, etc.), forcing one to strip down images to their essential elements.

As Brunetti says:

“...When we really have too little time to ‘think’ about the drawing we get closer to the ‘idea’ or essence of the thing being drawn. Here we begin to see the universal, latent, symbolic, visual, mnemonic language that is comics.”

Brunetti argues that the goal of cartooning is to reach a compromise between the drawing that satisfies its fictional requirements to occupy space in the visual world of the comic and its function as a symbolic element of the story (ie. the drawing must ‘feel’ physically solid and be ‘readable’ as a symbol).

Jessica Abel and Matt Madden seem to agree. The first exercise they set in Drawing Words & Writing Pictures suggests that one tries drawing stick men. I think cartooning owes a lot more to the discipline of design than is commonly acknowledged and that, in many senses, comics stand or fall on this strength.

Is it necessary to be a good draughtsman to be a good cartoonist? No, it's not necessary, but to be a good cartoonist without being a good draughtsman requires exceptional storytelling. A reasonable storyteller with strong drawing skills is unlimited in terms of storytelling. Lots of amateur cartoonists fail because they want to tell stories beyond their drawing ability.

It’s perfectly valid to criticise comics on the basis of their art; perhaps it is the most valid basis for criticism. As Dez Skinn writes in the introduction to Comic Art Now, comics are and have always been about the artwork.

Review: Peculia

Will Peculia ever find the frightful diversion her heart desires?

I love the bargain bins and sale shelves of bookshops. In this hyper-marketed age, any opportunity for randomness and chance is worth taking and the second hand shop is abounds with both.

Among the remaindered, crease-covered and unwanted I have found many rare treasures: Sin City: The Hard Goodbye, The Land of Nod Rock-a-Bye Book, tomes about Japanese Crests and digital illustration.

So it is fitting that a recent sifting turned up Richard Sala’s Peculia, which itself is a kind of reverie on serendipity. Sala is a comics artist and an illustrator who has specialised in what I would describe as a kind of gothic surrealism. He has published several graphic novels and worked on the Lemony Snicket film a couple of years ago.

Peculia concerns the eponymous heroine's barefoot, nocturnal meanderings in the lands around her gothic mansion. Although she meets the hideous, perverse and ghoulish during her adventures and missteps, they offer no trouble beyond her capable manservant.

Peculia's adventures have the same strange dream logic as Jim Woodring's Frank stories. The stories are elliptical and allegorical in style, without being clearly about anything. Whether menacing or erotic in tone, they firmly emphasise the atmospheric, stylised artwork.

Sala's style has become fairly recognisable in recent years (although Sala was clearly ahead of the trend); it has traces of German Expressionism and woodcuts, it is illustrative and expressive, rather than graphic, with a soft, hand-drawn feel. However, Sala is also a really excellent draughtsman, whose style and content are inseperable.

Lovely picture: Kid Acne

Kid Acne is an old favourite of mine, but I've not written about this multi-talented artist/illustrator/musician before. Maybe because I'm jealous. He is an illustrator, grafitti artist and rapper/musician.

I love his style: simple, sweet, obsessed with Amazon women.

Check out a little portfolio of his work here.

Comics are rubbish

Last week, for the first time in over a month, I went into my local comic shop. Ever the optimist, I always anticipate shelves full of fantastical bounty (despite frequent disappointments), but on this occasion the offerings were truly pitiful.

Of course there were all the classic graphic novels and collections - the ones I keep meaning to get around to: the complete Zot and Bone, various collections of Love & Rockets, Queen and Country and The Age of Bronze - but the regular monthly comics were expensive and boring.

To be fair, they may not be boring comics, but they looked dull. Many of the comics I browsed looked generic, lacking in passion. It seemed like all the artists had been to the same school; lots of competent (some excellent) draughtsmanship, plenty of technical polish, but little style.

And style is important. In comics it might be the most important: it is the story.

I’ve always found that if I respond to a comic’s artwork, I’ll give its story a chance. Conversely, I seldom get into a comic if I don’t respond to the artwork. This means a) the artwork must be good (draughtsmanship competent, style compelling) b) the story must be as good or better than the artwork.

Why is this a big ask? Frank Miller, Dave Gibbons, Paul Pope are all celebrated because of their distinctive styles.

The only ray of light I found, in the gloomy basement of the comic shop, was the new Hellboy comic: The Wild Hunt.

Hellboy has now been running for over a decade. The series has not only produced a couple of interesting spin-offs (BPRD and Lobster Johnson), but sustained it’s high quality on several levels: engaging stories, a rich cast of characters and atmospheric artwork that totally ‘belongs’ to the story.

While Hellboy himself is a great character, who wrestles with questions of fate/destiny, free will and human (er, demon) nature, it is Mike Mignola's amazing artwork that brings this world to life.

Hellboy has managed to stay interesting because of its characters and story and exciting because of its artwork. (It's perfectly possible to present 'dramatic' events in totally dull way. Look on the shelves of the comic shop, if you don't believe me.)

I never thought Mignola could be replaced - he’s such a unique stylist and by far my favourite comics artist - but Duncan Fegredo is faithful to Mignola’s style, without being slavish. Mignola continues to write the stories and the comic is every bit as good as ever.

As for the rest... just as well Drawn posted a list of the best comics of 2008 - which I may investigate - or I’d be really depressed.

Lovely picture: Kali Fontecchio

I haven’t written one of these posts in a while. Let’s go!

After seeing Kali Fontecchio’s work at Sketch Theatre (via Scamp) - and drawn in, I admit, by her awesome name - I went to her blog and spent ages looking at her work. It's amazing.

Fontecchio is a recent graduate from Otis College of Art & Design in California (Kim Gordon, from Sonic Youth went there) and now works with cult animation... er, person, John Kricfalusi (of Ren and Stimpy fame).

Fontecchio has a unique style that is tricky to pin down. She blends classic Walt Disney, Loony Tunes, satirical cartooning and greeting card schmaltz together in a compelling (disturbing!?) way; there's an interesting interview with her here in which she cites Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy as influences.

The sketch above is a good example of Fontecchio's style (though there is loads on her blog): sweet, beautifully rendered, but with something askew. Her cartoons are either cute to the point of grotesqueness or grotesque to the point of cuteness.

Review: The Horror of Collier County

A good try, but this tale of suburban paranoia lacks meat (cadaverous or otherwise).

It is unfair, perhaps, to judge a book by what it is not, rather than what it is. This is the fine line that criticism treads. No Platonic ideal of what a Graphic Novel should be guides the reader, but expectations are always there. The physical object itself creates them, even without reading it, by its titles, titles, pictures and graphic style, its volume, the feel of its pages.

Rich Tomasso’s The Horror of Collier County starts promisingly, when the car of a young, single mother is beset by alligators. This sets the stage for a mild mystery, in which the young woman investigates the strange hostility of her mother’s neighbourhood, with the help of a friendly local. In fact the Strangeness of Collier County might be a better title for the comic.

To my mind The Horror of Collier Country (its very title suggestive of HP Lovecraft and John Collier) promised a surreal, post-Buffy world, stalked by demons, zombies, unnameable evils, perhaps. Although Tomasso does a good job of building a creepy atmosphere, there is little payoff for it; the undead, unearthly or incomprehensible make few appearances.

This is a brief story in a minor key, which is fine. Unfortunately the relationships between the characters lack depth and drama and with the weird elements being so low-key, the story feels a bit flat. I wanted more background.

Having said all that, Tomasso has a sweet graphic style - redolent of Dan Clowes and Jay Stephens - both economical and free. Notwithstanding a few narrative glitches, The Horror is paced and designed well, with the occasional splash page making good impact. Bearing in mind that The Horror was Tomasso’s first graphic novel, the quality of the artwork alone would encourage me to read more of his work.