Nov 13 2007

The DarkWing Returns

I occasionally participate in the Newsarama Art Group over on the Newsarama forums. The general idea of the group is that each week an active member of the group gets to pick a subject for the group to draw the following week, with the chooser rotating through the list of active members each week. I’ve been too busy to post there in a while, (alas, even missing the week where the subject was MODOK) but I’ve had a bit more time of late and so I popped in to see what the upcoming subject would be. As luck would have it it was my pal, and fellow CCCGer, Adam Casey’s turn to choose and his choice was Darkwing Duck.

I actually don’t know a heck of a lot about the character, but based on the name and costume, I attempted a Frank Miller/Klaus Janson riff on the character, which is harder to do than one might think. I don’t think I really pulled of the stylistic aping very well, my clunky brush line probably being the main culprit.  I did, though, I think capture the patented Frank Miller sliding-down-the-arm bicep, which you can see in full effect if you reference the page in Dark Knight Returns that I’m swiping from here.

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Nov 12 2007

Sketchbook 11/11

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Nov 11 2007

Old Skool: Stately Thunderchild Manor

Way back, lo many years ago, before I was a starving artist, I pursued even less-green pastures and was a starving musician. I, along with two of the other three members of the band I was in, Come on Thunderchild, purchased a circa-1910s house in Cornelius, NC (known among us locals as “Corntown”), which we used both to live in and as a practice and recording studio.

I recently heard from a friend and Davidson classmate from those heady days who’d dug up some old pictures of various goings-on from back in the day, some of them at the house/studio, known at the time as Stately Thunderchild Manor. She’s posted a bunch of them to her Flickr account. Mostly they’re just a bunch of liquored up folks doing liquored up stuff, but I thought this pic was pretty cool:

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This is the interior of our practice studio. It was originally a bedroom but (If I remember correctly) the walls, and windows beneath, were covered in several layers of sheetrock, then over that, several layers of carpet obtained from a “contact” at a local carpet warehouse who would let us know when large scraps became available in the dumpster behind the store. The exterior-facing walls also had some added noise insulation courtesy of a bank of food-service size egg palates (on the left) that the guitarist collected via his day job at Davidson’s Soda Shop.

The Manor was the (in)famous site of the Thunderchild Halloween party, which drew several hundred folks from the surrounding area, as far away as Charlotte, and was mentioned disparagingly at least once in the sermon of the church across the street. We eventually got tired of taking the minor decorations up and down each year, and as you can see our shiny pumpkin and crepe paper are still in evidence here. The guillotine and mock electric chair and other large items had to be stowed or returned, however.

The Manor is currently occupied, and beautifully restored, by the onetime guitarist of the band and his wife. I believe it’s now on some sort of local register of historical places. Had there been such a thing when I lived there though, I’m certain The Manor would have been on a local–if not national–register of disreputable places.

Nov 02 2007

Spx Finds – pt 2

(If you don’t know what the heck “SPX Finds” is all about, see the original post…)

Urban Legend – Bradley Day

Mini-comic series, 8 1/2″ x 5 1/2″, ~36 pages each, B&W interiors, color covers

Autobio comics, particularly autobio minis, are often the subject of a fair bit of scorn. What I find interesting about these sorts of criticisms, though, is what it reveals about the popular stereotype of the autobio comic. As Johnny Ryan’s hilarious send-up strip of autobio comics, “Every Auto-Bio Comic Ever Written,” (which I can’t seem to find a scan of anywhere online) exemplifies, when folks think of autobio comics–good or bad–the stereotype brought to mind is usually that of the the bitter, confessional, warts-and-all, semi-whiny/semi-ironic autobio book–let’s call it “the Joe Matt model.”

Often exempted or overlooked for whatever reason–maybe just because it’s not as easy a target–is a whole other school of autobio comics that’s had just as much influence on the genre as the Joe Matt model: the James Kochalka model. Bradley Day’s Urban Legend falls squarely in this latter camp and is a pretty good example of this sort of mode, the “daily comic” or “sketchbook diary.”

In addition to a few overt references to Kochalka, Urban Legend shares with Kochalka’s dairy comic, American Elf, a number of features that to varying extents are the key hallmarks of this comics-making mode, most notably its strip-a-day requirement as well as Day’s drawing himself non-literally, as a “bigfoot,” as similarly Kochalka draws himself as an elf-like creature. Interestingly, though, unlike Kochalka, Day draws only himself this way–the rest of the characters are drawn as regular humans.

Each issue has a nicely done, and often clever, wrap-around cover. Here’s one I thought was particularly nice–both in its color choices and in overall composition. Based on the strips inside, I’m assuming this is Fripp Island, South Carolina:

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Even the drawing here is a bit Kochalka-esque, although Bradley Day’s color artwork appears to be done with actual paint, rather than being done in black ink and then colored in Photoshop.

I generally enjoy reading diary comics day to day online; for me, they function better as a short, regular, revelatory trip into someone’s life than as a continuing narrative that one reads cover-to-cover, and that would be my preferred mode of reading Urban Legend as well, I think. That being said, Day’s cartooning is nicely done throughout. He plays with panel arrangements quite a bit, with some days as single panels and others as multi-panel strips. All are done with black pen and ink wash. The tone throughout is usually either matter-of-fact, or overtly funny, but relaxed and not self-conscious–and neither cutesy or twee as can sometimes be the case with these things.

As with most diary comics, I found that with Urban Legend the whole is more than the sum of its parts. While some strips are insightful, or poignant, or funny, they’re not all going to be. The point, though, is what the completed “diary” represents in terms of the ritual, discipline and challenge involved. And, if you’re lucky, you’ll get a few really good strips out of the whole deal, which Urban Legend does. Here’s one example I really liked:

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No website was listed, but Bradley can be contacted at bradleysasquatch [at] gmail [dot] com.

Nov 02 2007

Sketchbook 11/02

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