Black & White Again

Comics are in color too, but I prefer the black and white variety.  Thomas Ott makes stories using scratchboard, rectangles of white material covered with India ink.  The artist scratches to reveal the white underneath – once a popular medium for newspapers since it is so easy to photograph and print.  The image above, from Ott’s Tales of Error, is a wonderful example of the way light can be made to shine out of pure black.

Ott’s stories in that book are full of little O’Henry plot twists and Twilight Zone effects, but I felt they fell flat more often than not.  His images, from what I have seen on the Internet, are all similarly focused on the bizarre, the grotesque, and the plain ugly.  His wordless “novel”, The Number, however, is very successful.

In a series of beautifully designed pages, the bizarre story of a prison executioner is unraveled as he is led on to his doom by a series of numbers on a slip of paper dropped by a murderer sent to death on the electric chair.  At first, the numbers, popping up in unpredictable ways in his life, give the man luck, but that’s gotta change!  Here the man, and his new girlfriend, return home after a successful go at the roulette wheel, using the numbers as a can’t-lose system.

The end of the tale isn’t surprising, but the way that the logic is worked out to its predestined conclusion is nice, and the drawings are wonderful.

Another favorite B&W scratchboard example is Peter Kuper’s comic adaptation of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. The expressionistic style of the stark black and white compositions works well with the story, and it is very true to the spirit and humor of the tale.  (Yes, Kafka is funny! )

Finally, a black and white image done with pen and ink, and reproduced in the newspapers of 1925 – a Sunday panel from Krazy and Ignatz, by George Herriman.  I have dipped into these before because they are celebrated widely as a high point of comics, a great 20th century achievement in art and satire, and a deep poetical statement about…well, lot’s of things.  At first, I was merely amused, but found them a bit tedious.  Now, however, having followed them a bit, as Sunday readers would have, I can say that the more I read, the more seduced I am.  They have a unique atmosphere and sensibility:  surreal, dadaist, poetic, satirical, slapstick, and always composed with sophistication and wit.  One never knows what will come next.

The plot line of the series is quite simple:  Ignatz Mouse lives for nothing but to throw bricks at the head of Krazy Kat.  Officer Pup tries to stop him, but usually fails.  Kat seems to take the endless attacks as a sign of true love, because when a brick hits someone else in one strip, he is very jealous.  I’ve not fathomed all the motives of Ignatz yet.

Sounds like a dada version of a Greek tragedy.  Here the Kat muses on the nature and source of time in a typically arid and otherworldly landscape.

Here Ignatz thinks he’s come upon a source of bricks to last him for a near eternity of head-smashing attacks on Kat.

To the left of me, to the right of me!!

Socialists, communists!  To the left of me, to the right of me!!  We’re lost!!!

Yep, earlier this election season, there was a deep-pocketed fund manager in Austin, Texas making his dissenting voice heard on the bailout package with cartoons depicting Bush and Paulson as agents of a Stalinist takeover!

In their last debate, McCain asserted that Obama wants to give us a health care system like the ones in Canada or England.  You know, those impoverished, third-world, communist tyrannies we know and love…Heavens to Betsy!  Today, in the NYTimes letters there was this gem:

I think Mr. Obama is a socialist who will change the very foundation of our nation. That may appeal to some, but the reality is that socialism does not work.

Socialist indeed!  My father wishes he were a socialist the way I wish there really were two cultures in our country now.

How deep must we go to plumb the depths of ignorance of history and politics to reach bottom in this letter writer’s mind?  Still, I’m happy to see how shaken up the credit crisis has gotten people.  At least they’re asking, “How does our country work?”

Uncle Joe’s bailout

Stalin is much with us these days.  At left, a crude cartoon published in yesterday’s NYTimes lampooning the proposed bailout that was voted down later that day.  It was paid for by someone in Texas who seems to own a venture capital business.  Today, he ran another one that was a crude parody of the famous Iwo Jima flag raising, with Bush, Berneke, and Paulson raising the flag of communism on American soil.

Also in today’s paper, an article about a fellow in Georgia who makes a tidy living by impersonating Joe himself.

And on my home front, my latest acquisition.  From Regency  political cartoons and satires to deadly serious state propaganda.  A limited edition printing of the report on the first Five Year Plan of the USSR, completed in FOUR years, under the glorious leadership of Uncle Joe.  With a little help from slave labor.

The cover says “Stalin.”

Dedication page – meant to be given to a loyal Party member

The Great Leader

5/4, Five years accomplished in 4!

Worker Soldier

Lenin is still No. 1

When I look through these pages, I feel a tremendous sadness.  The forced collectivization was on.  The mass murder of the kulaks was in full swing.  The Ukrainian famine had wrought its horror.  The Gulag was growing apace.  The Great Purge was but three years off, to be followed by the cataclysm of the Nazi invasion.  All under Stalin’s watch.  No hint of that in these stirring pages…

A colleague of mine is Russian.  She smells the paper and the ink, and is transported back to her grandfather’s library…

Les Chics

I just purchased the page from Richard Sala’s “Chuckling Whatsit” on which this panel is found. I love the two hip, NYC-type art collectors out looking for “finds” in the junkstores of the hinterland. Sala is a genius.

Black and White

The drawing above is by the artist Heinrich Kley, an academic painter who turned satirist. I owe my rediscovery of him – I’ve seen some of his images before – to Richard Sala, who like me, enjoys his drawings and mentioned them in an interview. (He also intimates that his heroine Peculia is inspired by Louise Brooks.)

Kley’s drawings can be grotesque, bizarre, and hilarious. (Here is a site with a nice gallery: The Art of Heinrich Kley). The tension and sinuosity of his line – so typical of Art Nouveau – is fascinating. Click on this thumbnail to see a short animated tribute to him that I created from some of his drawings, a sequence that may have inspired some animators at Disney.

There’s no end to the wonders of black and white drawings, woodcuts, and engravings from this period, some of them a source of rich inspiration for comic artists today, as well as others of course. I find the work of Frans Masereel particularly arresting. Both he and the American Lynd Ward, created early forms of what some now call the “graphic novel.”

On Paper…

Pencil, pen, crayon, charcoal, on paper…create a world of meaning – where? In our minds.

In the book/film, Black Robe, the story of French Jesuit missionaries in Canada in the early 17th century, there is a passage in which one of the priests demonstrates the power of writing to the Algonquins. They have no equivalent tool in their culture. He takes aside one tribe member and asks him to whisper his name into his ear. He writes the name on a piece of paper and then hands it to another missionary who is standing some distance away. The second man speaks the name of the Algonquin and all the tribesmen are amazed. How did the name travel across space? There was no sound, no hand signs. Somehow, the name was captured in the scratches of black on the piece of paper!

Works on paper take the ideas and images of the creator and capture them for us to see, so that we can digest them in our minds. I have always thought about this a lot, this is what art is (and not just on paper) but lately I’ve been thinking about it on paper because of my preoccupation with James Gillray and comics. If you doubt that last connection, click on this thumbnail and examine this work from 1800 by Gillray: “Democracy: or a Sketch of the Life of [Napoleon] Buonaparte.”

Could not this have been produced, just this year, by Gary Trudeau of Doonesbury fame? (Many versions of the image were hand colored.)

For a superb social history of the English satirical print in the time of Gillray, I recommend the immensely enjoyable and beautifully produced book, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in 18th Century London by Vic Gatrell. You will even get a history of laughter!

The history of comics, and its relationship to art and ideas is wonderfully presented by Scott McCloud in his book, Understanding Comics.

Of course, the title is a nod to Marshall McCluhan’s Understanding Media, which is the inspiration for his text, although I think McCloud is better at explaining his more clear and sensible ideas than was McCluhan. Perhaps too, McCloud is a fan of the book that I never tire of promoting,

Prints and Visual Communication, by William Ivins. This book delves into the fundamental philosophical issues of just what reproduced images, i.e., prints, are, and what they do to us and for us. It tells us how they became ubiquitous – the movement towards mass reproduction of photographs in periodicals is the epic challenge motivating the ‘plot’ of the book – and lets us imagine what the world would have been like before this earthshaking change.

Meanwhile, these panels are from the comic tale, “One of the Wonders of the World,” by Richard Sala. This is, perhaps, my all-time favorite. I hope to post more on comics, with more examples, later.