COMIC BOOK DRAWING MISTAKES

I love the drawing mistakes on old comic book covers. Here (above) a tiny car drops off a dead man who, if he were standing upright, would be taller than the door. His girl, who has a gigantic left leg, backs up to a miniature staircase. It's all goofy, but it works...for me, anyway. 

I don't mind mistakes when they're funny.

I guess that's why I like early comics. They're full of mistakes! How do you like the hand in front of the girl's face or the inappropriate (and no doubt unintentional) grab?

The most frequent mistakes had to do with perspective. Lots of early artists had trouble with it.  What do you think of the panel above? The shooters in the foreground appear to be standing on ladders.

I'm glad editors let them get away with it. It meant that artists felt free to try drastic angles. Sure there were artists who didn't make mistakes, but that's because they played safe and avoided shots that were hard to draw. That's cheating the reader.

The best artists eventually figured out perspective but their later work never had the guts of their earlier stuff.  Even famously smooth DC artist Carmine Infantino (that's his work, above) had trouble with perspective when he first started out. I like his early work better. 

Stunning Exorcist-type head turns (on the bald guy, above) were often combined with bad perspective. The guy in blue appears to be standing on a stack of telephone books.

It's my belief that gutsy but primitive art prompted writers to write better stories, but I guess making the argument for that would require a separate post.

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BTW: I've got a lot of work to do around the house so my posts might be a bit irregular for a month or so. I'll get on a normal schedule just as soon as I'm able.

COMIC BOOKS VS. ILLUSTRATED KIDS BOOKS

I've been busy today so I had to reprise an older article to stay on schedule. I hope nobody minds. I think you'll find the subject interesting:

Before I begin this piece I want to apologize for ripping into kids book illustrator Lane Smith so hard in a previous post. I deliberately chose his least-appealing book so it wasn't a fair appraisal. Sorry Lane! Maybe I can make up for it by illustrating this new piece with the best book my local library had (above) by another artist, Mark Teague. It's a pretty appealing book, I admit, but I have to criticize it to make a larger point.



The point I want to make is that books of this type are trying to compete with comic books and they can't. In a comic book the picture of the two kids above would have rated a single panel on a single page. In Teague's big, expensive picture book, the kind that only has a few pages, it gets an entire two-page spread. All that for a picture of two kids talking on a porch? That seems odd to me.

Kids picture books always give too much weight to minor events and too little to major events. There simply aren't enough pages to tell a good story correctly and the artist is burdened with the necessity of trying to make each page, no matter how trivial in content, an artistic masterpiece. Is that really what kids want?

  Any one of these Carl Barks comic book panels (above) might have been a full-page illustration in a Mark Teague book, but all that elaboration would have gotten in the way of the story. My experience with my own kids is that kids definitely want stories, but the expensive illustrated books aren't geared for that. They're geared to deliver a simple artistic impression. Kids want stories but the expensive picture books we give them deliver objects of art instead.


Mark Teague is a really talented guy but he's working in a medium...thin illustrated kids books...that doesn't tell stories very well. I bought a couple of Teague books for my kids when they were still young, and all these years later I still have them. They're almost in mint condition. The hardcover Cochran Barks collection, on the other hand, is falling apart from my kids frequent reading. What does that tell you about what kids like to read?

One last point: we all have favorite illustrated books that we actually did read often when we were kids. My admiration for those old illustrators knows no bound because they managed to entertain in such an uncongenial medium. I'm glad I had those books and the illustrators that created them deserve a lot of credit. Even so, it's my belief that really young kids would learn more and have more fun if the bulk of their illustrated reading favored cheap, well-done pulp comics rather than pricey illustrated books.