More on “Mentors & Monsters”

Friday’s Lecture Accompanying An Exhibition of Art from the SpiderBaby Archives Will Deliver Revelations!

Original art by George Woodbridge and Al Williamson from “The Age of Mammals” story from the Classics Illustrated World Around Us (No. 15) title The Illustrated Story of Prehistoric Animals (November 1959).

As announced here yesterday, this Friday, I’ll be presenting a short introductory lecture on the new art exhibit “Mentors and Monsters: Selections from the Stephen R. Bissette Collection,” the latest gallery show at The Center for Cartoon Studies, comprised of rare comic art from the SpiderBaby Archives.

I’ll be speaking Friday night, gracing the First Friday Opening Reception on September 3rd. The gallery will be open to the public from 5-8 pm, and I’ll be presenting my “official” gallery talk at 6pm.

(If you can’t make it this Friday, keep in mind you can see the “Mentors and Monsters” exhibit on Saturdays, 10am-2pm, now through October 16 at The Center for Cartoon Studies Gallery, 94 South Main Street, White River Junction, VT.)

What will that lecture offer? Well, let’s see if I can provide a little preview for you.

As noted, CCS co-founder James Sturm curated this exhibition, sitting down with me earlier this year over part of my collection of comic art by some of my all-time favorite cartoonists. James and I talked about why I had collected particular artists, and what James ultimately assembled for this exhibit were works by some of the key artists who were formative influences on my own work, including Jack Davis, Jack Kirby, Joe Kubert, Harvey Kurtzman, Alex Toth, Sam Glanzman, Al Williamson, Bernie Wrightson, and others. He also elected to incorporate pages by some of my immediate contemporaries (Cam Kennedy, Don Simpson, June Brigham, Art Adams, Bill Sienkiewicz, etc.).

One page of art I insisted keep a place of honor was the original from the comic I taught myself to draw from: the 1959 Classics Illustrated World Around Us issue, The Illustrated Story of Prehistoric Animals (here’s the cover). It was a comic I literally wore out a copy of (the binding completely fell apart from the days and days of obsessive study and copying exercises), prompting my mother to (reluctantly) buy an additional copy from Towne’s Market in Essex Junction, VT (in walking distance from our Jackson Street home at the time). After all, 25 cents was a lot of money in 1959!

Panel by George Woodbridge and Al Williamson from The Illustrated Story of Prehistoric Animals (November 1959). Note the use of zipatone; the lower strip has become detached from the artwork, as the original self-adhesive has given up the ghost. That’s a bit of repair work I’ll have to see to one day, if I can find an adhesive that won’t discolor in time!

This comic is burned into my brain cells on a molecular level. I have probably spent more time with this comic than any single comic I ever owned. As a four-year-old and five-year-old, I labored over my childish copying of every panel of many pages in this book. It was a doorway to a whole new world and way of being in the world for me, the vehicle by which I taught myself the rudiments of drawing dinosaurs and comics.

While I would love to one day find (if I could afford it!) a page from Al and George’s dinosaur pages for the comic, I’m extremely grateful to have found anything from the comic at all, much less such a beauty of a page!

Williamson was one of the cartoonists who thrived in the EC Comics stable who found it difficult to find work after the 1954 purge of the industry, which particularly stigmatized the EC artists. Still, Al produced over 400 pages for Atlas/Marvel editor Stan Lee between 1955-57, and subsequently did some terrific collaborative work for Classics Illustrated, including this pop science title (a seminal work for my generation of dinosaur-loving kids) and the full-length Classics adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel First Men In the Moon (#144, 1958) that Williamson and Woodbridge illustrated with Angelo Torres.

Note: I recall Al Williamson once telling me (back in the 1980s) that fellow EC and Classics Illustrated artist George Evans also worked with him on this story, but I can’t find any evidence of that, and it may be that either Al or I have misremembered which “George” he worked with. With Al’s passing, I can’t confirm or correct that memory.

There’s another World Around Us page in this exhibition: a Graham Ingles original from the Classics Illustrated The World Around Us (No. 7) title The Illustrated Story of Pirates (March 1959), which I also had as a wee lad. Ingels was another of the EC Comics crew, a vet of the sf pulps and Golden Age sf comics who became renowned for his distinctive brushwork (handsomely evident here) and his iconic, horrific renditions of the walking dead. Like the other EC artists, Ingels found few editors willing to employ him after the 1954 purge; this was among his precious few comics freelance jobs after the EC era.

So, what will I be blathering about Friday night?

Other than this kind of personal anecdotal stuff, I’ll be bringing attention to the historical context of all the pages on display—who did them, who they were working for, what the context of that publisher and title was, what that might mean in the grand flow of comics history—as well as discussing some of the techniques on view, if you only knew what to look for.

For instance, check out this panel (below) from the Woodbridge/Williamson Prehistoric Animals page. It’s a fairly straightforward sihouette shot of Cenozoic mammals stampeding in a torrential downpour. It’s most likely the panel they spent the least amount of board time on, since it doesn’t involve the kind of detailed pen-and-ink work they lavished on other panels on this page (and other pages in the comic).

Ah, but look closer—and see graceful, elegant magic a vet like Al Williamson was capable of with minimal effort. Yes, you can actually see his brush strokes on the original (preserved in this direct scan from the art), and the finesse of his brush line. Sweet. But look how important what Al leaves out is to this panel—the elimination of detail denotes movement as well as darkness and the lightning-lighting, just as the direction of his brush strokes creates and emphasizes the frantic movement of the panicked animals, further enhanced by the directional strokes of the trampled grass, all adding to the ferocity of the captured moment.

But check out that rain. It’s a simple enough technique, and one Al told me once that Wally Wood had taught him: render the directional lines (here, indicating the force and diagonal torrent of rain from above) with your brush as boldly as you can, then, after the ink has tried completely, using a single-edge razor blade, scrape into the inked lines in the same direction, tearing up the surface of the paper itself.

Here, Al used the razor-blade to create the pattern of rain. Brilliant!

This also shows the deft hand of experience at work. There’s nothing timid about either those brush or razor-blade strokes: they are speedy, confident, and quickly accomplished. Vip! Vip! Vip! Note, too, the perhaps counterintuitive direction of the brush and blade strokes. Smart stuff, this.

And easily missed, too, unless your attention is brought to this panel, so easily missed amid such a handsome page.

Wood usually used this technique for explosions and/or fire, as had Roy Crane in Wash Tubbs and Easy decades earlier. What is delightful here is Al’s straightforward adoption and adaptation of this technique to render the movement of water—rain—with such direct energy, such utter simplicity of effect.

Wally Wood used the technique in different ways, as did Al over the years. Consider these examples from T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents (artwork I don’t have in my collection, so it’s not in this exhibition, but I can’t resist following through here on the application of this technique), in which Wally Wood used the same technique to very different effect, scraping with the wider edge of the single-edge blade to create a wholly different special effect in these explosive images, including a Dynamo cover (which I’ll share a closer scan of, for a clearer view of the razor-blade technique), and two action panels:

Again, these Wally Wood pages are not in my collection, and not in the exhibition—but they will be in my lecture! I’ll be making these kinds of associations, using these types of additional illustration materials, Friday night.

Come, look, listen. You might even learn a thing or two…

Chris and Matt and I will be doing a full podcast about the exhibition later this month; we’ll keep you posted, and get the link up once the show is recorded and online!

Hope to see you there!

“Mentors & Monsters”

An Exhibition of Art from the SpiderBaby Archives!

A majestic panel by George Woodbridge and Al Williamson from the comic I taught myself to draw from at age four! This is a detail from “The Age of Mammals” story page from the Classics Illustrated World Around Us (No. 15) title The Illustrated Story of Prehistoric Animals (November 1959).

This Friday, I’ll be presenting a short introductory lecture on the new art exhibit “Mentors and Monsters: Selections from the Stephen R. Bissette Collection,” the latest at The Center for Cartoon Studies, featuring some key and favorite pieces of comic art from the SpiderBaby Archives.

I’ll be speaking as part of the First Friday Opening Reception on Friday, September 3rd. The gallery will be open to the public from 5-8 pm (come and meet the new CCS class and our now-senior Class of 2011, too!), and I’ll be presenting my “official” gallery talk at 6pm.

(If you can’t make it this Friday, keep in mind you can see the “Mentors and Monsters” exhibit on Saturdays, 10am-2pm, now through October 16 at The Center for Cartoon Studies Gallery, 94 South Main Street, White River Junction, VT.)

CCS co-founder James Sturm curated this exhibition, sitting down with me back in the spring and picking my brain as we poured through the majority of my collection of comic art by some of my all-time favorite cartoonists.

What James ultimately pulled for this exhibit were works by some of the artists who were formative influences on my own work, including Jack Davis, Jack Kirby, Joe Kubert, Harvey Kurtzman, Alex Toth, Sam Glanzman, Al Williamson, Bernie Wrightson, and others, including some of my contemporaries (Cam Kennedy, Art Adams, Bill Sienkiewicz, etc.).

I’ll be offering some preview peeks and insights this and next week here at Myrant, so see you back here in a few hours!

Gorgilla strikes! Jack Kirby (pencils), Dick Ayers (inks) from Tales to Astonish #18 (Atlas Comics), April 1961, from the story “Gorgilla Strikes Again!”—an iconic Stan Lee/Kirby/Ayers collaboration from the now-classic (then reviled) pre-Marvel Silver Age monster comics.

Hope to see you there!

Working on some N-Man stories this and next week; and working on my own take on the venerable Mothman.

I’m not taking this approach, but couldn’t resist sharing my personal favorite pop Mothman: Frank Frazetta cover art for High Times magazine, circa May 1980.

Smokin’!

Help Wanted

EC, Kurtzman, Davis, Hernandez Bros. Fans, Help!

We’re preparing the first Center for Cartoon Studies gallery exhibition from my collection of original art, and I need some help identifying story titles, comics titles, issue numbers and such.

The lack of time and easy access to some of my comics library has made the final three pages going up tough to tag—so, calling all Myrant readers! Help me figure out which stories these are from, and the particulars (title, issue number, date/year of publication).

First up: I think this is from “Hagaru-Ri!”—scripted and laid out by editor Harvey Kurtzman, executed by the great Jack Davis; a Korean War story from Two-Fisted Tales #26 (March/April 1952). But I can’t lay hands on my copy to verify this, or correct my misidentification. To quote Kurtzman, “Help!”

I’d also welcome any particulars knowledgable Korean War buffs might have to offer about the battle Kurtzman and Davis were dramatizing in this story (I think it was the 1950 rescue of two trapped U.S. Marine regiments from a mountain pass that led to Hagaru-ri, but without having the full story at hand, I’m loathe to state that with any certainty). Thanks to anyone able to offer some insights!

Second and third up: My set of original Fantagraphics magazine-format Love and Rockets back issues are out of reach; given the plethora of reprint paperbacks on my shelves, I’m at a loss to identify where these originally saw print. Anyone, please? Again, I’m asking for original story (or chapter) title, issue it first appeared in (date/year), and thanks!

The show opens at The Center for Cartoon Studies the first Friday in September, and I’ll be delivering a slide lecture and fielding Q&A afterwards.

We’ll have the particulars up soon—hope to see some of you there!

Fanzine Fearbooks

A Look Back

Circumstances of the past two weeks have kept me away; I’m going to be getting back into the blog swing o’ things beginning this week, and ramp up for September.

[Bissette circa 1980; Photo compliments of Ezra Veitch]

Back in the day—meaning, like, the 1970s and ’80s—I got my foot in the door like most cartoonists: with fanzines. In my case, though, it wasn’t comics fanzines that lit my fire or offered venues for my early scribbling and writing: it was horror and monster movie fanzines!

I was one of those kids who used to send my 25-50 cents plus postage to the addresses in Famous Monsters of Filmland and Castle of Frankenstein for some of the monster movie zines diehards were self-publishing. By the time I graduated high school (1973), I’d even screwed up my courage enough to start sending artwork to some of ‘em.

I wish I’d held on to more of them; when I moved from Vermont to New Jersey to attend the Joe Kubert School (in the fall of 1976), I got rid of a lot of some of my books and zines, and when I made the move from New Jersey back to Vermont in 1979, I got rid of more of ‘em.

I’d initially held on to the zines I most loved: my complete Little Shoppe of Horrors, Black Oracle and Japanese Fantasy Film Journal collections, my spotty runs of Photon, Gore Creatures and the like. I found new homes for all but the few I had artwork in after my move back to Vermont. I held on to most of my newsstand monster magazines (including vintage Famous Monsters, a complete sets of Castle of Frankenstein, Modern Monster, Fantastic Monsters, Cinefantastique, etc.), and I’ve often been very glad I did—there’s a lot of material there never available in any form anywhere else.

My January, 1973 portrait of Boris Karloff as the Monster in The Bride of Frankenstein, one of the few pieces of fan art I still have; I was a senior at Harwood Union High School at the time, living in Colbyville, VT. In the era before easy access to photocopiers, any art I sent to fanzines was the one and only original, and they never came back. Those were the risks, and we knew it.

Only a couple of the early fanzine publishers ended up publishing any of my art submissions: Greg Shoemaker at Japanese Fantasy Film Journal (God, I wish I’d held on to all those! I’ve since found a couple replacements, but miss that run, the first serious English-language fan study of the Toho and other Japanese sf/fantasy/horror films) was the first, if memory serves.

I’ll talk about the others another time, and provide some proper scans of the work that saw print.

I still submitted art to some movie zines while at Johnson State College (1974-76) and while at the Joe Kubert School (1976-78), my last ambitious submissions being to Ted Rypel’s excellent The Outer Limits: An Illustrated Review fanzine. I did three pieces in all for TOL:AIR, and if memory serves, two of them did see print before the zine folded up shop—a scratchboard portrait of “The Zanti Misfits,” and a coquill board rendering of the crab-like parasites of “The Invisibles.”

My best submission to TOL was never published; I still have the original art—a massive scratchboard portrait of Robert Duvall as the human/alien hybrid of “Chameleon”—here in my flat files, and intend to make use of it in something in the next couple of years.

The final issue of The Outer Limits: An Illustrated Review, a lovely cover by someone other than me—once I lay hands on my copy, I’ll post the name and copyright for the artist. [Fanzine cover photos in this post compliment of Timothy Paxton.]

I never quit submitting work to genre fanzines: my artwork appears in the first-ever and the most recent issues of Tim and Donna Lucas’s excellent still-howling The Video Watchdog, and I’ve occasionally written articles and reviews for Tim and Donna over the years.

It was the late great Charlie Balun who prompted me to really work at writing original material for genre zines, beginning with his venerable Deep Red, and that led to my submitting work over the years to terrific zines like Video Watchdog, Mike Dobbs’s stewardship of Animato! and his subsequent zine Animation Planet, Craig Ledbetter’s ETC (Euro Trash Cinema), Charles Kilgore’s Ecco, Chris Gore’s Film Threat (when it was still a fanzine), and many others.

I ended up doing artwork for some of these, too. I did a few covers for ETC, and Film Threat sported the only legal reprint of Steve Perry and my cult movie mall horror comic story “Kultz” (originally published in Epic Illustrated #6). I drew all the covers for Ecco’s latter issues, and those were a lot of fun to do—Charles (nom de plume for the real man behind the throne, whose secret I will preserve to my grave!) always had great subjects to springboard off of, and ample visual materials for reference and/or collage purposes.

I also painted the cover art for Tim and Donna’s first self-published book, The Video Watchdog Book, which I’m still mighty happy with, rough and ready canine collage that it is. I only dreamt at times of doing the cover for Tim’s ever-forthcoming Mario Bava book; now that it exists, I need dream no longer. I didn’t do the cover, but I was hardly needed (it’s among the most handsome movie books ever published, ample evidence of Donna’s considerable art direction skills).

My writing for Fangoria and Gorezone emerged from that period, but other than the occasional (very occasional, alas) piece for Video Watchdog (one of which was nominated for a Rondo last year), that chapter of my writing for the sheer pleasure of it seems to be more or less behind me—save for Myrant, mind you.

That’s no coincidence. Zine culture has been supplanted by online culture in a multitude of ways, and while it’s an amazing new world, much has been lost, too.

Many of my favorite websites are long gone; entire legacies of worthwhile efforts have evaporated into thin air.

But I still have many of my favorite fanzines in my collection, and still have copies (at least one of each) of the many I contributed to over the years. Like the book covers and illustrations I’ve done over the past three decades, this is a body of work unknown to most of those who write me about my work in comics; to many of my friends and associates over the years, that work was considered a major distraction, unimportant, a joke.

But it was always vital and important and a pleasure for me—and that was all that mattered, really.

It’s a sizable body of work, and it includes interviews with some of my creative heroes (including Ray Harryhausen, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Phil Tippett, among others) as well as articles about films that entertained me, shook me, and even changed my ways of seeing the world.

I’ve been chipping away at preparing that body of work for book-format collections, and I think it’s finally safe to say some of that will start seeing print in 2011. I’ll keep you all posted, but suffice to say—soon, it will be in print.

And as time continues to demonstrate, that will last longer than anything I’ve got up here on this blog.