Oct 15 2012

V is for Vladimir Harkonnen

I’ve had this guy in mind for “V” since the very beginning…

V is for Vladimir Harkonnen – from Dune by Frank Herbert

I’m pretty happy with the way this turned out; I think it’s one of my stronger AlphaBooks drawings. I did the initial sketch for this one right after Ahab (I was considering “B is for Baron…” but decided that wasn’t legit) and it seems like I was doing a better job of really pushing myself in the character design department earlier in the project. Maybe I can salvage a bit of that for these last few letters.

I first read Dune as a young whippersnapper–a few years before the David Lynch film version came out–so my mental images of the characters were in place before the now-pervasive film-based ones had settled in. Baron Harkonnen is a telling example of just how influential the look of the David Lynch Dune is: if you do an image search for “Baron Harkonnen” pretty much every image of him will have red hair. I’m pretty sure, though, that this is never mentioned in the book and is something that’s just become “canon” after the red-headed Kenneth McMillan version from the film.

The David Lynch film adaptation has a sort of “beautiful disaster” appeal to it, but honestly none of the visual adaptations have matched the look of the novel in my brain. The combination of the houses/royalty bit and the vaguely mid-eastern motifs from Arrakis give me the impression of 19th century Orientalism, and that’s the look I went for here.

The coolest Dune visuals I’ve seen are these amazing character designs by Moebius for the Alejandro Jodorowsky film version of the book that never got made. Even they’re a little bit too superhero-ish in places, but they’ve definitely got the feel of courtesans, of ornateness. Here’s the Moebius version of the Baron:

Next week: “W”…

You can find all the AlphaBooks entries to-date at the AlphaBooks tumblr: http://alphabooks.tumblr.com. You can also follow many of the entries as they’re posted in real-time by following the #AlphaBooks hashtag on Twitter on Mondays.

Oct 11 2012

I’ll be at The Boone KidsCon at Watauga Public Library

If you’re in the High Country of N.C., mark your calendars! I’ll be a guest at the Boone KidsCon at the Watauga Public Library on Saturday, October 20th. You can read the details in the newspaper feature below, but briefly: I’ll be appearing there with Rachel “Rei” Haycraft. In the morning there’ll be a closed session where local Girl Scouts can work on getting their “Comics Artist” badges, then later in the day there’ll be all ages/kid-friendly comics and cartoon events for everyone. Come one, come all!

Read all about it here…

Oct 08 2012

U is for Uther Pendragon

“U” was a tough one for sure. There aren’t a ton of literary characters whose names begin with “U,” and even fewer of those are from books I’ve actually read. But, here’s what I settled on:

U is for Uther Pendragon – from The Story of King Arthur and His Knights by Howard Pyle

Uther is of course the father of King Arthur. He’s pictured here begging Merlin to cast the Magical Booty Call™ spell that will transform Uther into the likeness of his enemy Gorlois in order to get it on with Gorlois’s wife, Lady Igraine. He is, to quote another well-known knight, Sir Mix-a-Lot, “Begging for a piece of that bubble.”

Uther of course appears in all sorts of different books and poems. I attributed him to the Pyle book because it’s the one version I’ve actually read. I have to admit, though, that the version of the Arthur stories that’s most stuck in my brain is the 1981 John Boorman film, Excalibur. As a youngster, I particularly enjoyed the Uther/Igraine scene because 1) it showed two people having sex, and b) it showed two people having sex, one of whom was wearing chain-mail.

I think I’ve got solid choices worked out now for “V” and “W,” but “X,” “Y,” and “Z” still have me stumped.

Next week: “V”…

You can find all the AlphaBooks entries to-date at the AlphaBooks tumblr: http://alphabooks.tumblr.com. You can also follow many of the entries as they’re posted in real-time by following the #AlphaBooks hashtag on Twitter on Mondays.

 

Oct 02 2012

The Formal Inventiveness of Kids’ Picture Books

Last week I got involved in Twitter back-and-forth with a few folks (Alan Haverholm, Eric Orchard, and whomever operates the Hooded Utilitarian’s Twitter account–Noah Berlatsky, maybe?) about the differences–or lack thereof, argues Noah–between cartooning and illustration and it got me thinking about children’s books.

I don’t have some big, overall point here vis-a-vis the formal distinction between comics and illustration… but one thing I’ve noticed during the myriad hours I’ve spent reading to my daughter is that children’s book illustrators seem to do a lot of formal experimentation–and they seem to do it in a fun and lighthearted way that’s a lot different than the sorts of things that come to my mind when I think of formal experimentation in comics.

Here’re a few examples:

Rupert – by Mary Tourtel

I’m not sure exactly where Rupert falls out in some Scott McCloud-esque definition of comics… but I really like how Rupert presents a single story, but offers two different ways to read that story. You can choose to either read the little rhyming couplets beneath each panel or you can read the non-rhyming prose below.

Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse – by Kevin Henkes

There’re lot of kids’ books that do this, but I enjoy how the author/illustrator here is fine with just mixing up elements of comics with the more standard children’s book layout. Sometimes there’s prose under a big image, sometimes there’re sequences of images that you read as comics, sometimes there’re in-between things like word balloons within single illustrations. The only thing similar to this I can think of in comics is Posy Simmonds’s work, which mixes up blocks of straight prose with comics sequences.

Press Here – by Hervé Tullet

This one’s a little difficult to describe with just page scans, so you’ll have to check out the video. Each page of the book asks you to perform some action–pressing something, tilting the book, shaking the book, etc.–and then the following page’s illustration seems to have “responded” to that action. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s amazing.

William and the Magic Ring – by Laura Robinson

This is another one you kind of have to see in action… but basically, you have to read the book in the dark via flashlight. Each page has a few lines of the story at the bottom, but the illustration that accompanies it is an elaborate cut-out that you shine the flashlight through, projecting the illustration onto a wall or the ceiling.

The Adventures of the Three Colors – by Annette Tison and Talus Taylor

I did a whole blog post about this one a while back, but you can see the basic idea of the book from the images above. The story is about a boy trying to paint with only three colors and the book uses a series of images printed on transparent overlays to basically show you how CMYK printing works (although it’s never really stated as such).

Anyway… I could go on with other examples (and I haven’t even gotten into pop-up books), but you get the idea. There are of course lots of inventive things going on with comics–a recent fave of mine is Jason Shiga’s amazing Meanwhile–but I think it can be helpful sometimes to look outside of one’s medium for inspiration. There’s a lot of cool stuff going on with children’s books, people!

 

Oct 01 2012

Illustration: Medeski Martin & Wood

I try to keep my music-related ramblings to a minimum on this blog, but if you follow me on Twitter, you probably know that I’m a bit of a music-obsessive. I subscribe to a lot of music blogs, but one of my absolute favorites is Aquarium Drunkard, which you can find here. One of the features they run occasionally are “Lagniappe Sessions,” in which they invite musicians to do a few covers of their favorite songs just for the site. The most recent one features Medeski Martin & Wood and I supplied the illustration:

Here’s the full MMW post. The band covers “Suspicious Minds” by Elvis, “What I’d Say” by Ray Charles, and “The Pocket Knife” by PJ Harvey.

The original art for this is for sale here.