The Old Masters of Comics

I began picking up GREEN LANTERN CORPS back in the '80s not because I was a fan of Hal Jordon, or because i was following the creative team on the book, or because I had heard good things about it.  No, I picked it up because of an artistic in-joke.

The cover of GREEN LANTERN CORPS #208  was rendered in the style of a 1930s Soviet propaganda poster.  It depicted an alien in a GL uniform carrying a red banner bearing a revolutionary slogan in Russian and leading a group of heroic proletariat up a hill.

This was back during the Reagan Era, remember, and the image was not something I expected to see on an American comic book.  The reason for it made sense, though.  The story involved the alien Green Lantern, Kilowog, who had come to Earth and was having difficulty adjusting to American culture.  He was persuaded by a smarmy Russian agent to visit the Soviet Union, where he was tricked into helping the Soviet super-hero program and creating the Rocket Red Brigade.

The cover of this issue, by artist Joe Staton, was a spot-on pastiche of the kind of stylized poster art produced in Russia before Stalin decided that Modern Art was Western and Decadent.  I had seen that kind of artwork when I studied Art History in college, but had never expected to see it on a comic book cover.  I don't know how many other comics fans got the reference.

  

That cover led me to look for other artistic homages.  CAPTAIN ATOM #8  was based by the Michelangelo’s famous sculpture, the Pietà , depicting Mary, the mother of Christ, cradling his lifeless body in her arms.  Except this version had Captain Atom being held by a Canadian terrorist named Plastique, which come to think of it, is probably kind of blasphemous.  They ran a similar cover with issue #44 with Captain Atom and Plastique’s roles reversed..

  

SECRET ORIGINS #10 was devoted the the Phantom Stranger, a mysterious, mystical character in the DC Universe whose origin – even his real name – had never been revealed.  So this issue featured four different possible origins, each by a different writer and artist.  The cover, based on an M. C. Escher print, had four Strangers standing on different faces of a strange architectural form in space.

Homages to specific artistic works tend to work better as comic book covers than stylistic ones.  GREEN LANTERN CORPS #208 worked for me because the artist could easily capture the stylized art and limited palette of that type of poster.  A couple issues later, in #210, they tried to give the Red White and Blue equal time by featuring Green Lantern Guy Gardner on a patriotic-themed cover that was supposed to be in the style of Norman Rockwell, but to my eye it didn’t quite come off as Rockwellian.

  

About a decade later, the JSA comic did better with its cover to issue #54 depicting Superman and Power Girl serving up a Thanksgiving dinner at a table where members of the Justice League and the Justice Society are gathered.  This cover worked, partially because it was based on a recognizable, iconic Rockwell painting, his “Freedom from Want” from his “Four Freedoms” series; and because advances in printing and coloring techniques permitted a more painterly approach to the cover, which better evoked Rockwell’s illustration style.

    

Since the main theme of the comic was heroes from the 1940s acting as mentors to a new generation of heroes, Norman Rockwell is a natural source of inspiration.  We see something similar in following issue, JSA #55 featuring the hero Wildcat sitting on the lap of a department store Santa.  I don’t think this was based on a specific Norman Rockwell painting, but Rockwell did plenty of Santa illustrations.  The circular background motif evokes the covers to the Saturday Evening Post.  An earlier issue, JSA  #34, does the same thing, depicting Golden Age character Johnny Thunder and his Magic Thunderbolt along with his present day successor, Jakeem, in the kind of folksy, slice-of-life vignette that Rockwell excelled at.

Usually, when comic book creators reference other artists, they limit themselves to iconic images from other comics, such as the cover to ACTION COMICS #1, or the image of an anguished Superman holding the lifeless Supergirl in CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, or the dejected Peter Parker walking away from a trash can in which he’s tossed his costume from AMAZING SPIDER-MAN; and these are all classic, recognizable images, worthy of homage.  But I love it when these artist go back to the Masters.

Toil, Labor, Sweat, and Art

Who we are as a culture, as a people, has always been determined by our willingness to work. Those who drive cars do not do so with magic beans to fuel their vehicles, but gasoline pumped from the ground, in vehicles made from steel and other materials, mined from the ground. Every thing we do, comes from labor. And so does art, but especially so, when the art reflects our reality, of labor.



Artist Diego Rivera
Migrant workers

“. . . when the farm workers strike and their strike is successful, the employers go to Mexico and have unlimited, unrestricted use of illegal alien strikebreakers to break the strike. And, for over 30 years, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has looked the other way and assisted in the strikebreaking. I do not remember one single instance in 30 years where the Immigration Service has removed strikebreakers. . . .The employers use professional smugglers to recruit and transport human contraband across the Mexican border for the specific act of strikebreaking . . .”
Cesar Chavez



Elmer Brown
WPA Cleveland Mural

“Labor is man's greatest function. He is nothing, he can do nothing, he can achieve nothing, he can fulfill nothing, without working.”
Orville Dewey



Dorothea Lange
Sloss-Sheffield Steel and Iron Company

“Labour was the first price, the original purchase - money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased.”
Adam Smith



Dorothea Lange
Migrant Mother

“Naked a man comes from his mother’s womb,
and as he comes, so he departs.
He takes nothing from his labor
that he can carry in his hand.”
King Solomon



Soviet Union Agriculture worker Propaganda poster
"Day after day, life becomes even happier!"

“For as labor cannot produce without the use of land, the denial of the equal right to the use of land is necessarily the denial of the labor to its own produce.”
Henry George



Boris Jeremejewitsch Wladimirskij
Miner

“All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.



Vladimir Il'ich Malagis
Steel Workers

“The workers asked only for bread and a shortening of the long hours of toil. The agitators gave them visions. The police gave them clubs.”
Mother Jones



Lee Lawrie
Atlas

“Human history is work history. The heroes of the people are work heroes.”
Meridel Le Sueur



Yevgeny Vuchetich
Let Us Beat Swords into Plowshares

“Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.”
Thomas Merton



Lewis Hine
Power house mechanic working on steam pump

“Such hath it been--shall be--beneath the sun The many still must labour for the one.”
Lord Byron (George Gordon Noel Byron)

Comic Book Inker of Note: Vince Colletta

If you look online you will see a variety of different opinions regarding former Marvel and DC inker Vincent Colletta. Some of the views come from fans and some from people who dislike his work or the man behind the work. The fans usually refer to the amazing volume of work by Colletta, as he worked many books each month, and did so with speed. The non-fans usually point to the same thing, that his work is sparse compared to other inkers, and suppose that it was due to the speed in which he worked. Fans say he was a rescue worker at the publishers, saving books from being late. Non-fans suggest that they’d prefer late and better work. Vincent Colletta’s claim to fame beyond speed is his work with Jack Kirby and some romance comics from earlier eras. Being that you are reading this, you likely wonder what I think about his work. It is a normal thought. Jack Kirby was the first artist I could identify by sight and know that his work was good. When I became more sophisticated in my views I grew to dislike the inks done to his pencils by Vincent Colletta, while I never felt the same towards any of his other inkers. I did not assume then, because I didn’t know, that it was speed, I simply didn’t like it.

But I appreciate that the person of Vincent Colletta worked hard, however the end result, because amongst other things, I realize art is about taste. I am not a fan of the work, and while I’ve heard a large amount of stories about Colletta by many of the artists in comics who I know, I do not suppose them all to be true. There are many other things I could say, but few have to do with his work, or even much the man himself. Most are arguments about the legacy of his work, and stories about the man. And of course there are debates online about things almost nobody witnessed first hand. So like him or not, Vincent Colletta was an inker who should be remembered for many good things, and perhaps some less than good things. Beyond that is not my point.

Two different considerations of Vincent Colletta’s work

Reasons to dislike Vince Colletta and his work

Reasons to like Vince Colletta and his work

Two different views:

Len Wein, Writer at DC and Marvel, on what he enjoyed most about working on Luke Cage: "Getting to work with the wonderful George Tuska, before Vinnie Colletta got his hands on the pencils and ruined them."

Jim Shooter EIC Of Marvel Comics : “He (Frank Miller) ended up getting a small job from Western Publishing, I think. Thus emboldened, he went to DC, and after getting savaged by Joe Orlando, got in to see art director Vinnie Colletta, who recognized talent and arranged for him to get a one-page war-comic job."

Search his work on the comic book data base

Hunger

What is the point of writing if nobody reads your work? What is the point of anything if there is no response to it. A great artist can do the most perfect painting known to humanity, but if nobody sees it, or appreciates it, there is something lost.

Therefore, popularity is important even when quality should seem more an absolute, and definable. You might like something, but it doesn’t make it good, but if nobody likes something, the ability to judge its impact will leave it forgotten or ignored. An artist told me to never stop working, that hunger, depression, fatigue are all good, if it means that the work will survive and be born. But we don’t live in a society that accepts, loves, or nutures the arts. We live in a society that commodifies the arts or ignores them based upon its own needs.

Starving artist is a cliché term referring to the fact that artists and creatives in general who commit to their work rarely make money, but to become the best in what you do, you must do that. You must make a choice as a creative, to do it for the work, whatever the reward, or to do it for the reward, and if there is none move on. All of the arts are peopled by talented creatives. But there are also people who succeed because of marketing what they do to the people who will respond... An artist who does not see that money is part of their work will starve.

This is not all to say that a creative should not do one or the other, or both. It is to say, that, for the world to appreciate the work, is to redeem the effort. To buy the work is to redeem the creative artist. Support a living creative, buy their work.

The Art of Video Games

Tasked with restoring an afflicted sapling to its former beauty, you bring it to life with a swirl of your paintbrush. The sapling bursts with light, a melody of soft pink flowers blooms on its young branches, and lush green meadows breathlessly sweep away the cursed countryside, returning vitality to the diseased landscape.

The story of the video game, Okami (Wii) is told through cinematic cut-scenes and a visual presentation designed to mimic the style of traditional Japanese artistry -- specifically woodcut and watercolor paintings. This unique look is complemented by cel-shaded graphics and the result is beautiful. The word picturesque accurately describes the setting as Amaterasu (main character's) runs through the spectacular, giant-sized locales, all seemingly straight out of a painting.

Compare this:


To this:



Indeed, the first one is an in-game screenshot of Okami, and the second is concept art for the game. They are both beautiful, aren't they?

Okay, let's head on over to my favorite place: Zelda.

In-game screenshot:


Concept art:



Yeah, it isn't as close as Okami is, but it is still portrayed nicely.