Space Travel Before It Was Cool

Some of my favorite science-fiction stories are about space travel. Now, there are obviously a lot of stories that fit into that sub-category, but my favorite ones are about space travel before mankind could actually do it. Think about it: now that humans actually can live and work in space, or on the moon, how might that have influenced the fiction writers and illustrators of today, as opposed to before the concept really began to take form in the 1960s?

Science-fiction movies and TV shows of the time before the NASA program had a much more simplified concept of space suits, rocket ships, aliens, and technology. Novels and comic books showed space travelers as pretty basic explorers, wearing jumpsuits with domes attached to the head and a small breathing apparatus. Planets very distant from a sun would simply be cold, as opposed to housing liquid methane, and planets close to the sun might be kind of hot, rather than instantly-boil-your-face-off hot.

I've always viewed these kinds of stories as a bit more 'pure' in their imagination. Though the NASA program--and others like it--have become a spring-board for a great number of fantastic ideas, science fiction stories preceding space travel had a tendency to focus more on the 'fiction' as opposed to the 'science.' A lot of this quality has been lost because audiences today simply can't stretch their disbelief as much as they used to: for many decades, space suits must be depicted as bulky, multi-layered, vacuum sealed costumes, in order to keep out the harmful environments that all people know exist in space.

In this sketch, I tried to imagine a space suit of someone walking around on Saturn's moon Titan--a moon extremely distant from the sun. One of my goals was to imagine the suit as if it would have been imagined in the 1950s. The man is wearing a flight suit, with a few attachments for the airless, freezing, icy environment.

It's *cough cough* Abstract Art

From Here to Eternity? Gone with the Wind? Casablanca? Pretty Woman? None of the above.

Leonard Starr's "Mary Perkins: On Stage" is a soap opera newspaper comic strip from the sixties. Starr's work is incredibly detailed and rendered very realistically. He put tons of effort into not only making his characters unique, but his backgrounds as well. So, a panel like this is rather unusual for him, with the background completely obliterated by radiating lines. So why would he abstract a background?

Abstracting a background is one of the things that comics can do that is rather unique to the art form. Film can drop focus on the background, but anything more than that and it's a little alien to the medium. Comics have the luxury of letting the artist establish an environment, and then, when necessary, abstracting it--or holistically dropping it--for the sake of drawing focus on the characters. There are actually several reasons to do this, and several ways. The reason I'm focussing on is when a scene's emotion needs to be the central focus. Notice how the lines are radiating from the couple, as if their kiss has so much energy it's affecting the world around them. In this other example, a panel from Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson's "Secret Agent Corrigan," Adrienne's shock at what Burke just said is emphasized by the jagged and disrupted brush strokes around her. In my example, the woman's sadness is emphasized by the darkened background.

You Have to Admit: It Sells.

Trends come and go. In my very few years of life, even I have seen people's 15 minutes of fame rise and fall. For anyone getting into any form of entertainment, this idea must be evident in their minds. What is popular today will change in a week, a month, a year.

That being said, anyone getting into any form of entertainment should pay serious attention to the trends of their time. Regardless of whether they themselves like those trends or not, they have to admit that popular things sell better than unpopular things.

Take for example, comic book creator Jim Lee. He is easily the most popular superhero comic artist of the day. He isn't producing anything now that I know of, but many popular artists that are producing mimic his style in various ways. When he does a comic--or even just a cover--that comic WILL sell.

Lately, I've taken this fact into account. I would never say that Lee is my favorite artist or that he's a comics master, but I have to admit that his art looks really cool. After paying close attention to what he does, I've decided that it's in his rendering (adding of details through shadow, line, or texture) that he interests fans. I have a--loosely--similar drawing style to him, so I've begun to make attempts at mimicking some of his methods. This example is part of a Green Lantern pin-up that I pencilled.

Disclaimers:

1) Just because it's popular doesn't mean it's good.

2) Just because it's popular doesn't mean it will fit with your particular style.

3) Copying someone else's art isn't okay. If that artist is popular, people will totally see that your copying.

Copernican Revolutions

I've been putting of posting this week not (only) because I'm lazy, but mainly because I haven't been drawing much; I've been writing. Writing is a horrible experience, unless you enjoy pacing, sitting at a computer, talking to yourself, and thinking of what eventually becomes pointless ideas, for hours, and in the end have only a sentence to show for it.

One of the best helps I've ever gotten is Robert McKee's book "Story," which is one of the Bibles of screenwriting, and a very good tool for writing fiction in general. What helped me a lot this time around was his setup of character depth and how characters affect one another.

First of all, character depth is not a handful of character attributes that might be oddly put together. And it's not a character being committed to one idea far over all others. A character becomes interesting when he or she has inner conflict of ideals. If a man claims to be brave, but in a crisis is cowardly, then you're onto something. If a woman is known by all others as being useless and uninteresting, but her closest friends see that she has an amazing talent that can easily take her to the top of the world, then you've got the beginnings of a story.

Going off of this, a well-constructed story has characters that bring out specific qualities in the protagonist. Around certain characters, a person is happy and attractive, but around one very important secondary character, they become depressed and repulsive. In this approach, a writer designs characters around the protagonist like a miniature solar system. It can be said that a minor character's job is to force the protagonist to reveal a contradictory quality about themselves.

For the story I'm working on, I have a character who originally created a business because it's his passion. But a national company's competition makes money scarce, and he meets a publicist. This publicist is all about marketing and building hype, and the character gets so caught up with the newfound fame ("finally, recognition for what I do!"), that he doesn't have time to do the work that he originally loved. That's the basis, and there's a lot of development that I've done with it, but I'm not sharing it because then you won't read the comic!!!!

Who Wears Plain Clothes Anyway???

This is a much more general topic than the post regarding patterns following fabric folds. Here, I'm going to talk about just putting patterns on peoples' clothes. I'm not going to attempt to claim what is in style and what isn't, mostly because I've been uncool for most of my life. But look around you at what people wear. Many people have patterns, logos, and textures on their clothes (of course, as I write this, my roommate sits across from me, wearing a plain white t-shirt).

Al Williamson is another favorite artist of mine. I've been looking at a lot of his Flash Gordon work recently, but one of my favorite panels he's ever done is this one from "Secret Agent X-9." Part of it is the framing and poses. But I always come back to this as a great example of

throwing in some texture on some clothing can help an image so much. Think of it this way: in most comic book artwork, you have stark white areas, and stark black areas. Most of the time, you don't have any grey tones. But one way an artist can sneak around that is by creating different textures. It's kind of an "indy" thing to throw in lots of textures, but a mainstream comic can retain its style by just adding in one or two textures--probably on the most important elements of the image.

I also shamelessly note that there's really no way Williamson could have made these textures follow the contours of the clothing the characters. Anyway, my panels owe their inking to Angela Falvey, who gracefully took on the task of putting up with my desire to have textures.

Her deviant art site is www.kuroko.deviantart.com

Everything I Needed to Know about Clothing Folds...

Out of the infinite things I could have learned from the European comic artist Guarnido, I pick clothing folds for this entry. Just to let you know the level of awesomeness I hold his artwork in: a fellow artist and I talk about Guarnido's comic Blacksad in pretty much every conversation we have. The guy's an artistic genius; I highly recommend everyone to read the Blacksad books. Artists should study his work not just for clothing folds, but character design, expressions, and action choreography.

Anyway, clothing folds are something I really enjoy drawing. I've been told that maybe I focus too much on them, but I'm okay with that for now. The great thing about well-placed clothing folds is that in action or in an important gesture, they can help lead the eye, or simply emphasize an arm or leg's direction. Think of it this way, it's a bunch of completely necessary lines an artist can put on a figure that can point exactly where the artist wants the audience to look. In the case of this panel, I took into account that I wanted to draw attention to the hand, and also the fact that drapery must obey the law of gravity. Had the gesture been more forceful, the folds would have been straighter and more direct (like in the Blacksad panel). But since it's a sweeping gesture, there is more of a curve to everything about the figure.

Seriously Peoples, Seriously

This is possibly one of my biggest pet peeves about many artists today. I'm sorry I couldn't find a better scan of this page (by Jim Lee and Scott Williams, from a Batman comic), but look closely at the guy in the foreground of the last panel. Look at his jacket. Does it seem at all strange to you that the pattern on his jacket is perfectly, geometrically correct? Do you think it's a little odd that the pattern doesn't move and bend with the folds and curvature of his sleeve, you know, like it would in real life (think about it, if the lines are moving downward at his shoulder, wouldn't they bend and come toward you since his arm is bent and the hand is pointed toward you)? Isn't it blatantly clear to you (now that I point it out) that the artist(s) just drew that pattern right over the area of the jacket, without regard--or maybe even blatant disregard--to form or anatomy?

Okay, I'll calm down. My annoyance roots from when I saw this illustration by one of the coolest artists of the 20th century. JC Leyendecker was one of the primary cover artists for Saturday Evening Post (along with, of course, Norman Rockwell). He also had some amazing advertisements for Arrow Shirts and Collars, one of the classiest clothing lines of the time. The reason why I love this picture so much is because of the patterns on the men's jackets and the center man's hat. Those patterns behave with the curvature of the fabric, and it makes the image completely authentic. This is an incredibly minor detail, and an artist has to go way out of their way to do it (and really have to bend their mind around time and space to figure it out, sometimes). But when you compare this illustration to the one in the comic panel above, which one strikes you as more believable?

I'll never claim to be as awesome as Leyendecker. And I'm not too certain that many comic artists could either. But even if the pattern you put on an article of clothing isn't entirely correct, I'd rather that than a digital overlay that is painfully obvious.

If you're curious about my drawing, be sure to check in on my friend's webcomic www.fizzlebit.com for when the finished art is put up.

Comin' Atcha

My favorite artist of all time has to be Jose Louis Garcia-Lopez. He's just awesome. I had so much trouble figuring out which picture to use as the example of his work, because just about everything he does is amazing. The only reason I chose this picture of Superboy is because it's a very similar pose. My goal is to have all of his work someday. Anyway, as a comic artist myself, I try to pull ideas from him. One of his most characteristic traits is how he has figures behave in perspective. What this means is that characters on the 2-dimensional page look as if they are in 3-d environments. Theoretically, most any good artist does this, but Garcia Lopez does it in sometimes very extreme, and other times very subtle ways (other artists to look at would be Jack Kirby and Neal Adams).

I just did a page yesterday, and this panel is very much in this style. In this case, the hand that breaks the panel walls helps lead the eye into the next panel (to see the context, you'll just have to buy the comic!). Generally, though, having figures whose hands or feet are coming at the reader pull the reader into the image. It's like characters are literally popping off the page.

Lettering

Will Eisner is one of the greatest comic artists of all time. There, I said it. Now that that's out of the way, I can explain one of (out of a great plethora) the reasons why I hold to this. Eisner had a record for making the title of his books a part of the image (as opposed to imposing the words right on top of a separate image, as is customary). Having backgrounds and characters interact with the title of the book is not necessarily restricted to comics, but it is something that I've seen more in comics than film (some film examples might be the opening credit sequences in North by Northwest, The Great Muppet Caper, and Panic Room).

Some comics have even gone so far as to have the characters be so self aware that they acknowledge the existence of their captions and word balloons. The juxtaposition of word and image is so familiar to comics that something like what Eisner does can be used on a more regular basis, I think.

Under the (Pre-Raphelite) Influence

This painting on tin plates by Burne-Jones, Morris, and Faulkner is technically sequential art. The Pre-Raphelite brotherhood was all about reigniting interest in the older (and in some cases forgotten) romantic stories. One thing that I've noticed about several other artists of this movement--Rossetti, for one--is their use of patterns as backgrounds or design elements. Though not a common practice in today's sequential art, it can be a useful tool to create interest in the gutters (the space between the panels). It can also be an interesting addition to a piece that has some sort of tie to medieval art, which was what the Pre-Raphelites loved to do.

In this detail of my work-in-progress, I decided to give it a shot. While the story is ultimately not one connected to medieval art, it's more of an ode to the Pre-Raphelite movement. The piece also has Celtic roots, so I figured that a Celtic knot might be appropriate. Though, a fair warning to artists that might try to do Celtic knots in their work: it's time consuming and very difficult to wrap your head around!...though I suppose that's the point.

The Down-shot

In cinematography--the art of filming and framing for film--one of the most effective ways to create isolation, or just to establish a whole lot of an environment, is to view the scene from high in the air. Perhaps one of the most famous examples of this is from the classic western film High Noon. I recently saw this movie for the first time (finally) and noted that the famous shot had so much weight because the film built suspense incredibly well.

Joseph Mascelli talks about how to use this idea to its fullest extent in his book The 5 C's of Cinematography: "Very high and very low angles will present the most drastic effects, and should be utilized only when highly dramatic results are required. More subtle angling should be employed as a matter of course on every possible type of shot...Players should be positioned so that they present a three-quarter view to the camera, and travel in diagonal lines, whenever feasible. Furniture and other props should be cheated, if necessary, so that they are turned at an angle to the lens. The background should be filmed at an angle, rather than flat on, to produce diminishing compositional lines." (Mascelli, 45)

A slightly more contemporary example might be from Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. I think my favorite aspect of this is that Bruce (center) is still painfully lonely, even though his friend and butler Alfred is there with him. Alfred, though, fades to the background because of his position in the scene (amidst the rocks and trees), and the giant crack in the rock directs the eye straight to Bruce.

My mimicry of this principle is for a design sketch for a panel in a project I'm working on. My focus was using the contrast created by shadows to keep the attention on the character in the center.