WHAT THE BABY BOOKS DON'T TELL YOU

I've had two kids of my own, so my knowledge of this subject comes from first-hand observation. I claim magisterial authority on this subject...which is baby skin.

As you know, babies cry a lot for the first 6 months, then at the very minute they reach the seventh month, they immediately stop crying and act like cute little toddlers. The six months of crying is very trying for parents, and you have to wonder why nature would produce behaviors that are so potentially alienating to the baby's caregivers. I can't answer that, but I do know why parents put up with it. It is...amazingly...the quality of the little kid's skin.

Baby skin is the most pleasing thing to touch that you'll ever feel...well, apart from the obvious other pleasing sensation. Words can never adequately describe how soft and silky and alive it feels. No mink, no ermine, no fox fur can compete. It's the supreme experience for the sense of touch.

They say that the skin is an organ, just like the heart, but it doesn't seem that way, especially when it's dry and leathery like it is in adults. On a baby though, it's manifestly a fully functioning organ with a life of its own. The books say that it carries out complex respiratory functions and regulates some of the internal organs; It might even alter the electric field around it to produce a pleasing sensation in adults. I'll add that it also churns out fragrant oil...addictive fragrant oil.

Yes, I said "addictive." Once you're hooked, if you don't touch that baby skin a zillion times a day you get depressed. No wonder adults get addicted to dangerous drugs...we're designed to be addiction prone so that we can be good parents.

 So imagine that... your own baby addicts and manipulates you, and maybe you do the same to him. There you both are, manipulating each other and, amazingly, enjoying it. It's kind of nice to know that you're part of nature, flapping your wings and strutting around just like beetles and birds do.

Now here's the surprising thing...I've already made the point that living baby skin is like a flower that lives to attract bees. It'll do anything it can to attract its parents. What you may not know is that nature has built you to be vulnerable to that attraction, and that this attraction is partly located in the finger tips.

 It's as if the skin contains sensors that you don't even know you have. They lay dormant til your baby's skin is first touched then they snap to wakefulness and you find yourself wanting to pick up the baby all the time and make silly sounds to it. That's true even if it's crying, and even if it puked on you a few minutes before. That sensitivity in the fingers is there even if you're a brick layer with tough, gnarled stubs for fingers; even if you're only feeling the baby's skin through pajamas.

So, that's one reason why having a baby is so much fun, even though it's admittedly  stressful fun sometimes. I'll only add that, for this to work, the baby has to be your own baby, or one that you have a strong emotional attachment to.

MY FAVORITE CLASSIC FONTS

As you can see from the sculptures carved into Trajan's Column (above), the Romans were not always nice guys....

...but they were superb letterers. That's (above) the lettering at the bottom of the column. Thick and thin, serifs...wow, the Romans knew all about things like that. I assume the absence of space between the words is decorative and formal, and not the way writing was usually done (Stephen disagrees... read his correction in the comments). 

Amazingly the Roman fonts are still with us, not only in the ubiquitous Times New Roman, but in in a host of adaptations like the ones above. 

One of the most interesting of all modern fonts is Helvetica. It began life in Switzerland in 1957, in fact the name is a Latin form of the word Switzerland. It's the Calvin Kline of fonts, something that's simultaneously simple, elegant and avant garde. 

My book on the subject, "Just My Type," says: "The font manages to convey honesty and invite trust, while its quirks distinguish it from anything that suggests overbearing authority; even in corporate use it maintains a friendly hominess." 

Here's (above, top) my other favorite font, Futura. It's controversial because it only seems to work for capitalized titles. Whole paragraphs of it seem a little harsh. If I have the story right, somebody decided to make a version of it that favored paragraphs, and that's how Verdana (above, bottom) came to be. The problem is that Verdana only looks good in paragraphs. Verdana titles are lackluster and anal retentive. What a dilemma!

Stupid me, I would use Futura for the headlines and Verdana for the prose, but for some strange reason a lot of people don't want to do that. Forced to make a choice, most moderns prefer Verdana, so now Futura is on the endangered fonts list.

Ikea recently made the headlines when it switched it's official title to Verdana. Protesters picketed, talk of boycott was in the air. ...it was reminiscent of the public outcry when Classic Coke was taken off the shelves.

Interesting, huh? 

'REALLY BUSY!

ANOTHER WALLY WOOD POST (I COULDN'T RESIST!)

Weeeeellll...here we are with Wally Wood again! I hope you'll indulge me with one more post about about him...this time about the subjects he chooses to draw.

Of course Wood didn't write his own stories in this period. This one was ably written by Ray Bradbury. Ray packs the story with great visual ideas and Wood, as usual, adds a bunch of his own. Sorry I had to crop out some of the dialogue in order to fit everything on the scanner.

How do you like Wood's vision of the future? We see the robot servants, the hole in the floor that reveals that the apartment is probably on the 50th floor, the plants that grow through the bookshelf, the planetary models hanging from the ceiling...it's a feast for the eyes. The guy in the story hates it, but Wood and Ray can't hide their love for it. This is an important point, and I'll come back to it.

Here's (above) an excerpt from a story by Feldstein which contains lots of favorite Wood subjects: monsters, gorgeous babes in fantastic settings, and rockets flown as casually as people ride automobiles now. This is the stylized future the audience craves to see.

Other comic book artists draw the same things, but view them as background for the story. For Wood the atmospheric elements are the story. He figures that plot and character are the writer's job...it's the artist's job to provide mythic, aspirational subtext and unforgettable images. Wood isn't just an illustrator of other people's ideas, he's a partner.

Another point I want to make is that Wood always chooses to draw things which have romantic connotation. By way of an example, take a look at the picture above. The oddly-scaled hamlet is arrayed around the rocket like Plasticville houses under a Christmas tree. The houses look tiny like they were put together with glue. It's an appealing image for people who grew up with toys like that.

Come to think of it, look at the picture of the spaceship interior (above, right). It's loaded with gizmos. Every boy in that era had a fantasy that he was the master of high technology and could use it as no other generation had before to explore the universe. Wood took that fantasy and expanded on it. He validated what we felt and cheered us on.

Maybe at this point you're thinking, "So what? All the sci-fi artists of that time did that." Well no, not really. For contrast I thought I'd put up this impressive panel by Wood's friend, Al Williamson. It's a terrific drawing, but it's...well...generic. The architecture isn't caricatured and no point of view is expressed. It illustrates the story and nothing more. And the characters...they're just well-drawn standards.

There's nothing standard about Wood's EC characters (above). They're iconic, but that's not the same thing. There's not much acting in these poses, but a great deal of attention is given to the mythic, timeless qualities the characters are trying to project.

Nifty, eh?

BYW: Animation Resources recently put up some great scans of EC horror covers. You can see them at:  http://animationresources.org/?p=6882

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.