WALLY WOOD'S SCIENCE FICTION

Wow! Wally Wood: the man deservedly called the king of science fiction comic book artists! I thought it might be fun to take a few panels and examine them closely to see if we can figure out what the Wood Magic consists of.

Here's (above) a panel from a Weird Science story by Ray Bradbury: "Mars is Heaven," Look at the cartoony walk on the Edward character. Wood had the amazing ability to be cartoony and serious at the same time. And the poses...I wouldn't say they were especially nuanced or well acted...but they're just right. How come? What is Wood doing here? This is worth discussing and I'll try to devote a whole post to it later on.

Back to the panel: right away you see that the perspective is off kilter. The viewer's eye seems to be at Edward's belt line, so all the belts worn by characters of the same size should be the same height...but they're not. The foreground character named John should be bigger and taller in the frame, but...he's not either.

Is this a serious problem? Not in the least. It allows Wood to fill the panel with characters that are simultaneously distant and close at the same time. It gives him the ability to have that cluttered look that fans like, and still let the composition breathe. It's great !

Here's (above) some more cartoony poses. To judge from the human figures the viewer's eye is at knee level, yet the porch across the street is shown on a downshot. How do you like the way the foreground stairs are cheated? How do you like the steps across the street that spill over onto the tarmac? Look how tiny the houses are. Does it work? Of course it does! It's wonderful!

I love the way Wood is obsessed with clutter. Did he pick that up from Kurtzman and  Jack Davis, or did it have some other origin?

Here's (above) the same panel minus the top caption and word balloons. Now the clutter really reads! Geez, it's like an an explosion in a black string factory. So how come it all holds together?  The small amount of white space on the right helps, but that's not enough for balance. What is the hidden factor that makes this panel work so well on the page?

For the answer, look at the panel preceding this one, the one that contains the word balloons and top caption...Wood needs more blank white space and he steals it from the word balloons! Even the formal lettering in the balloons seems to make a nice contrast. In other words, he uses the word balloons, which were probably lettered by someone else, as a structural element.  Is that cool, or what?

Okay, we haven't laid bare Wood's deepest secrets here, but it's been fun thinking about it. Geez, you could do a whole post just on the calligraphy of his line. 

NEW DISCOVERIES IN ASTRONOMY

There's (above) the good 'ol Milky Way. Not much new to say about it, you say? Just the opposite. So much has been discovered about it in the last year and a half that it's doubtful that anyone will regard it in the same way again.

For one thing, what you see in the sky is not the disk of the galaxy seen edge on. Actually, that's not visible to us...too many dust clouds in the way. What you see in the night sky is an arm of the galactic pinwheel that's between us and the main part of the disk.

  We're on a spur (above) of the Carina-Sagittarius Arm...or is it the Orion Arm? I can't remember. Anyway, the the band you see in the night sky is that arm, not the denser part of the galactic disk.

I'd imagine that some part of the Earth should be able to see the arm on the other side of  us, the Perseus Arm, but maybe not. You never hear about a second band in the sky. Maybe it's always daylight here when we face that arm, I'm not sure.

Recently it became apparent that we're a bar galaxy (above). We're also a spiral, but the spiral emanates from either end of the bar, not from the center of the pinwheel. Nobody knows what caused the bar.

Our own galaxy is surrounded by 20-25 dwarf galaxies. Two of them are colliding with us at this very moment, but they're small and don't have much of an influence on things. I haven't been able to find a good graphic to illustrate this, but here's (above) a picture showing the impact of a dwarf galaxy colliding with our galactic neighbor, Andromeda.  Look at the hole that's been opened up in Andromeda's outer ring.

 Talking about rings, our galaxy is now known to be surrounded by a ring of stars.  It's believed to have been caused by a collision with a large galaxy several billion years ago.

I added this one (above) after receiving a comment about it from David Carley. This is an artist's rendering of a ballooning some 25,000 light years tall, above and below the galactic plane. The bubbles appear to be made up of gamma rays, possibly from the black hole at the galaxy's center.

Here (above) are the stars at the center of our own galaxy. They're orbiting a super massive black hole. It may be only the size of our Earth, but it's a million times as massive. The stars whirl around it at super speed...3 million miles an hour...but oddly enough, only a few are sucked into it. In fact, against all odds, this has been shown to be a  fertile area for star formation. Nobody knows why. Many will remain in orbit, but an equal number will be cast out at blinding speed, becoming rogue stars.  Rogues sometimes have tails like comets.

Nifty, huh?

GIRL WATCHING (COMPLETE VERSION)

Last night I had dinner at Steve's and the conversation turned to beautiful women we'd seen at restaurants. It happened that two seasoned girl watchers were in attendance, and they generously agreed to share their knowledge with the table.

What follows is an explanation of the code they use to discreetly communicate with each other when a beautiful woman enters the room. Sorry the doodles are hard to read: they were done with a fine point Bic pen.  Maybe enlarging them will help.

BTW: Sorry the drawings got so sloppy. I rushed them so I could get some sleep. 

Also BTW: Many thanks to the men who shared their secret code with us. 

GOTTA SLEEP!

I'm sorry!!!!!!!!!! I should have a new post up now, and I'm too tired to type. I'll post tomorrow (Monday) around lunch time.

A NEW WALLY WOOD BOOK!!!!!!!!

 By the time you read this it's probably too late.  You may as well shoot yourself because you already missed your chance to buy the most important comic art book of the decade: "Wally Wood's EC Stories: Artist's Edition." 

The artwork above isn't in the book, I just led with that because it's the best sample I could find of an original Wood page. That's what the book is: full size scans of Wood's original EC stories; the sci-fi stories, not the parodies he did for Mad. I swiped this scan from Pappy's excellent comics site: "Pappy's Golden Age Comics Blogzine."

http://pappysgoldenage.blogspot.com/2010/12/number-855-v-vampires-heritage-auctions.html

Here's (above) the book cover. Geez, nobody did outer space like Wood! I found out about it from Viagri artist Milt Gray who jumped on it as soon as he discovered it. It arrived in the book stores on Wednesday and sold out immediately. Rumor has it that no further editions will be forthcoming. We may never see its like again. 

Here (above) it is. It's huge. The pages are the same size as the original artwork, and they're all in color.  What it is, is scans of the original art as it exists today. There was no attempt (Thank God!) to clean it up. The zip tone and chemical toner has turned brown, but that won't bother fans a bit. I'm told that you can see all the error corrections and scratch-offs. 

The price is $150.00, which is dirt cheap considering the quality of reproduction. It's already selling for more on e-bay.

*Sigh!* 

RANDOM THOUGHTS ON ARCHITECTURE AND ENGINEERING

This post was inspired by the pictures in a miscellaneous file that I keep adding to. Just for the heck of it, I think I'll free associate on some of them and see if anything useful comes of it. Don't expect anything practical. Free associating means you jot down the first thing that comes to your mind, practical or no.

Okay, the two pictures above for example.....I like low, slanted, beam roofs. I'll bet everybody does. So why don't we see more of them?

This (above) would be an almost ideal work place for somebody like me. I'm impulsive so I could use lots of table space with different projects going on at different locations around the room.  It would be nice to have my books handy, too. I'd probably arrange for awnings to regulate the sunlight.

I like to see touches of bas relief sculpture (above) on homes and offices.  Modern materials and casting techniques make this cheaper and easier to do than it's ever been.

Here (above) stairs are shunned in favor of a steep, carpeted, curving ramp. That's kinda neat. Maybe ramps and stairs should be side by side.

What the heck is going on in the background of this picture (above)? It looks like a conference table is sitting on a pile of dirt. Whatever it is, it makes me wonder if it a large living room might contain a section of small, carpeted hills and valleys.

I continue to believe in using the Disneyland Express (above) as a model for real urban transportation.

Maybe moderately tall buildings (above) should be designed to be scalable by the public on one side. 

I've always liked the idea of letting kids (above) drive kid-size cars. I can think of a bunch of reasons why that wouldn't work, but we're free associating, remember? What if there were special roads just for kid cars? What if the only kids who could drive on them were mechanically-inclined kids who built or maintained their own funky cars? That's one way to nudge kids into engineering careers.

We need to figure out how to reward kids for being smart or handy with their hands. We need to make the idea of being skilled look like fun.

 Should we train animals to drive cars? No, that's silly.

We should ask the skilled engineers what they think should be done to encourage kids to go into technical careers. We should take what they say seriously.

I wish private philanthropy would pay more attention to rewarding talented kids. Why not make a sail boat and crew available for the members of kid science, engineering and agricultural clubs? It doesn't have to be as big and impressive as the ship in the photo above. Bill Gates, are you reading this?

Believe it or not, an awful lot of homes sit on ground that used to be a pond or a small lake. A 24-hour a day pump under each building keeps the land so dry that lots of people who live in the area don't realize how potentially wet the place is. Maybe we should allow some of those ponds to reassert themselves. If the soil has a lot of clay to retain the water, and the water could be kept moving (to keep mosquitoes out) we might get a first class pond. Maybe we could stock it with fish.

Aaaargh! Everything here is probably impractical. Well, like I said, we're free associating.

"DOUBLE INDEMNITY": THE OLD AND NEW VERSION COMPARED

  

That's (above) part of the opening title of the original 1944 version. Behind the letters the shadow of a mysterious crippled man walks slowly, inexorably toward the camera. We never see his face. Who is he? Why is he crippled?  The music whips us into a frenzy of excitement. Just who is this man?

After the titles we fade to the city at night and a car careens recklessly through the streets. Other cars screech to a halt to avoid hitting it.

The car pulls up to the entrance of an office building. A mysterious figure with his back to camera...a new figure, not the man with crutches...gets out and lumbers up to the locked door. It's noir...everything is in shadow.

The stranger's knocking summons the night watchman, who recognizes him and takes him up to his floor in an elevator. The watchman tries to make idle small talk but the stranger, still with his back to camera, deflects it.

Okay, let's see how the 1973 remake (above) handles the same opening. This time there's no careening car, no shots of the city at night. An unidentified man makes his way to the door of an office building at night. I hesitate to call him a mystery man because we see his face the whole time.

So, where are the shadows? Granted, it's a TV movie and they probably had to shoot the cheapest way, but noir IS cheap to shoot. Some scenes in the original noirs were shot with a single light source. I guess the producer just didn't care enough.

Generic titles appear over the man as he walks into the lobby. Without shadows the lobby's architecture is revealed. It's that bright, optimistic style that was so popular in that period...something totally at odds with the dramatic nature of the story.

The watchman (above) doesn't walk over to the door. He just sits there and watches the stranger sign in. People in this film do a lot of sitting.

Back to the old black and white film: the stranger gets off the elevator and looks down into a sort of courtyard that contains empty desks where clerks work during the day. Your first impression is that he's looking down into hell.

 Now we see the stranger's face for the first time. It's on a long upshot. He hobbles along the upper floor like a rat skulking in the rafters.

We watch as he painstakingly lets himself into his barely-lit office, and with great effort  sits down. From the way he moves it's evident that he's been shot. The downshot tells us that this is a man who has the attention of the gods. They're watching him, waiting to see what happens.

 He turns on his dictaphone and begins to dictate his confession. We learn that he's an insurance salesman who helped a woman kill her husband for the insurance money. Now he's been shot and has only a short time to live.

Notice the dim light. With only minutes to live, he himself is an insubtantial shadow at the threshold of the nether world. We're watching a soul painfully pass out of this life into the great unknown.

Back to the seventies version: we fade out from the stranger standing in front of an elevator in the lobby, to him walking around his desk and painfully sitting down. The lighting is typical TV lighting. No nether world, just brown light, if there is such a thing.

Aaaaargh! That's all I have time for. Which version do you prefer?