MORE EARLY NEWSPAPER STRIPS

Here's (above) a newspaper comic from 1896! I've blogged about this artist before, but I can't help doing it again...I guess I just can't decide whether I like him or not. Good technical draughtsmen were abundant in the 1890s, so the primitive drawing style must be deliberate. Maybe readers regarded this artist the same way we regard Edward Lear or Steinberg now, as primitive and sophisticated at the same time. 

Be sure to click to enlarge all the pictures in this post.

Ahhhh...refreshed at the fountain of Herriman (above)! Here he is caricaturing Opper's style.

Newspaper cartoonists back in the day must have been under a lot of pressure to come up with funny poses. This artist (above) doesn't seem to have a knack for that, but you gotta give him credit for trying. 

Slapstick was king in those days (above). I wish it was today. 

Herriman again (above). I love the guy in the white suit, who's standing in profile. I also like the guys on the lower left and right.  

I like the way this artist (above) lays out his page. He finishes the gag but still has space to fill at the bottom, so he ends the page with a bunch of random afterthoughts. Artists were free to pioneer new formats in those days. Sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn't. 

I'm amazed at how common plagiarism was in those days. How do you like the Dick Tracy rip-off above?

Here's (above) an interesting one. Helen Kane had just lost her lawsuit against the Fleischers (the judge claimed he couldn't see the similarity between her voice and that of Betty Boop), so she decided to stake her claim on her personna with a comic strip character of her own that looked just like Betty. It didn't do very well, and Helen Kane slowly slipped out of the public eye.

BTW: I heard a contradictory story, that Kane lost her lawsuit because it was determined that she had stolen her character from yet another singer. I have no idea what the truth is. 

Thanks to Allan Holz from "Stripper's Guide" for the comics. A link to his terrific blog can be found in the right sidebar.

DORE'S WONDERFUL FORESTS

This should be a treat for the artists who come here: rare Dore illustrations from  Chateaubriand's 19th Century novel "Atala." According to Wikipedia, the book was written to debunk the European idea that American indians were noble savages. Maybe it does...I haven't read it...but most of the illustrations I saw seem to say the opposite. Dore portrays America as a majestic Garden of Eden, and the indians as its ideal inhabitants.

Actually I'm glad that Dore added his own take to the story. Whatever the truth about native Americans, the portrayal of this country as an Earthly paradise is a useful one.  This is nature the way we'd all like it to be. It's a partly Utopian vision that should spur us on to make it a reality.

American swamps (above) really are like this in places, except Dore neglected to mention bugs. In real life the two women sitting on the water's edge would be buried under a mound of army ants and mosquitoes.   

Gee, this picture (above) fills me with memories of happy times around campfires at night. Fortunately places like this aren't that rare. You can find lots of places like this in America, some of them not far from cities and towns. Sometimes I wish it were against the law to build in or even near primeval forests. Maybe we shouldn't even build nature trails and roads there. We should just let it alone. 

Or not. I'm always amazed that Yosemite and Seqouia National Park look so unspoiled, and that in spite of the kazillion plus tourists who go there every year. How does the park service manage to pull that off?

I wish I knew the story of Atala. This looks like two "Noble Savages" wearing togas, taking a swim in America's life-giving water. Geez, Dore was so sentimental.

Seeing these pictures reminds me of the way Africa used to be portrayed in the media. When I was a kid sub-Saharan Africa was portrayed as being mostly jungle, like the kind you see in Tarzan movies.  But was it? The Africa I see on TV these days seems to be mostly grassland and scrub. What happened to the African trees?

THE AMAZING JOHN MARTIN (1812-1875)

Arguably the greatest British landscape painter of the Romantic era was John Martin. He liked religious themes inspired by The Old Testament and Milton's "Paradise Lost."

Romantics interpreted his pictures as depictions of the landscapes of the inner mind, along the lines of what would later be associated with Freud and Dali.

Here (above) Martin depicts Macbeth but for some of his contemporaries he seemed also to convey the majesty and tumult of the inner mind. How, reasoned the Romantics, could man ever be happy as a slave or as the victim of a life of quiet desperation when his true mission is to heroically wander the vast inner landscape of the mind?

That sounds like an Eastern concept...did Indian philosophy affect the West in the 19th Century? I guess it did...look at Schopenhauer.

To judge from the pictures, Martin unconsciously sees man as a tragic, Wagnerian figure. We're warriors who will spit in the eyes of the gods if need be, and that's why they're interested in us.

It's odd to think that a hundred years after Martin's lifetime the pendulum would swing the other way and man would in some places be perceived as a hapless statistic, possessing only an outer life.

Here's (above) a picture that influenced Ray Harryhausen. Ray was a huge fan of Martin and Gustav Dore.

Americans will no doubt react to Martin with the feeling that they've seen that kind of statement before. Well, that's because they have. Our high style of Western painting derives from American painters like Thomas Cole, and Cole was a pupil of John Martin's, Over here Martin's grandiose style was put to the service of awe-inspiring landscape and the extreme Romantic philosophy was deleted. This adaption is a style that perfectly fits the American wilderness.

By the way, the picture above is by Bierstadt, who I assume was a pupil of Cole. As with most of the pictures in this post, it would benefit from a substantial enlargement. I wish I could have found a larger, high res version.

ME AS OLIVER HARDY

Thanks for all the comments concerning my computer problems. It's nice to know that I'm not the only one who has them. I just finished a fix and it seems to work better now. I'm too tired to post but just so I don't appear to be dead.....here's a doodle of me as Oliver Hardy. Whaddaya think?

TZVI EREZ: ALLEGED CROOK WHO PLAYS LIKE AN ANGEL

What do you think of this three minute clip from "The Well Tempered Clavier?" I love it! The clarity, the sensitivity to what Bach seems to be saying, the fun...it's a terrific recording! The thing is, the Canadian pianist who made it is believed by the police to be a crook!

 It's alleged that he used a Ponzi scheme to cheat investors out of 27 million dollars. He runs a printing business and is accused of telling investors that he had big contracts that never existed.  He might have  gambled the money away playing internet poker. The case was never brought to court because the state couldn't afford the resources it would have taken to prosecute it. Amazing!



Well, the guy's personal life doesn't seem to influence his playing. Give a listen to this fast, Glenn Gould-style rendition of an earlier part of the Well Tempered Clavier. It's incredible! For me this is a must have CD.

NEW FACES TO DRAW (AND A FEW BODIES)

Ever the friend of our fellow cartoonists, the Theory Corner staff once again presents a tableau of thought-provoking models to draw. Let's start with Richard Widmark (above) who was a terrific psycho villain when he was young. 

A skinny, giggly sadist with a weird hat, a low class dark shirt, and a loosely hanging raincoat...what's not to like? Widmark enjoys intimidating people, and even though he's a sociopath you grudgingly like him...well, in a way. He enjoys his work, and that makes him magnetic.  

   

Basil Rathbone (above) was a great Sherlock Holmes, but he was an equally great villain. To judge from the picture above, he had it in him to play psycho-villains of the Widmark type. The look on his face seems to say, "Thanks for the favor, Pal! I come into your office to rub you out, and you save me the trouble by backing away, right out an open window. You even leave me your cigarettes!"

  

It's fun to draw women sitting (above) when they're wearing short skirts. Most women in this situation don't know what to do with their legs, and they try to hide them under purses and couch pillows. It's kinda cute.

There's one pose that's that all sitting women try to avoid, and the lady above has just taken it. It's the deadly fork pose where the legs descend in open parallel, and from an angle that makes them look oddly small and out of proportion. They look like marionette's legs.

I like the seam on the couch.

This wise woman (above) avoids the fork by taking a deliberately stylized, closed leg stance, with body thrust forward. 

Poor Victor Mature got stuck with this puppet suit (above) in one of his films. Man, one faux pas like this undid all the image building cultivated in his last half dozen gladiator films.

In real life I love to draw conversations between two people who seem to come from different worlds (above). The clash of human types is one of my favorite themes. 

GOD SAVE THE AMERICAN STATES

The videos here are all from the excellent HBO series on John Adams that aired a few years ago. I'll talk about these films in a moment, but first a word about the holiday.

I was tempted to celebrate the Fourth by putting up a bunch of pinups of beautiful girls in stars and stripes bikinis...tempted, but I just couldn't do it. It seems to me that the holiday is too serious for that. I intend to celebrate with raucous beer and barbecue like everybody else, but first I'll remember with gratitude the people who made possible my happiness in this country.

Some people are quiet souls who could thrive under any system that was at least minimally tolerable. I envy them, and I wish I could be like them. Unfortunately I'm a goofy and sometimes silly romantic, the kind of person who foolishly provokes the powers that be and ends up being killed for it, or spending his life in jail. My type of person needs the American freedoms; I can't survive without them. Thank God I was born in a time and place that tolerates my kind of person, and allows me to find my own way.



Here ( the video immediately above) are three clips from different episodes of the Adams TV series. They show Adams' stormy relationship with Benjamin Franklin. They were both good men, but they just couldn't get along. It underlined the question that was on everybody's mind in the late eighteenth century: can temperamentally different people and states ever combine into a functional  republic?



Here's (above) an exquisitely awkward sequence where newly-appointed ambassador Adams meets King George III for the first time. Adams is awed by the sophistication and grandeur of the English court, but is mindful of the equal grandeur of the American ideals he represents.

Well, here's a glass to the Founding Fathers, and their powdered wigs!