TOMMOROWLAND: A REVIEW

I love this film. It's not without major flaws, and at times it veers too close to corporate hype, but the film has soul, and is a bracing manifesto for a positive future. Some people say it's a film Walt Disney himself might have made, and maybe they're right.

It even displays Walt's knack for picking out charismatic young stars. Raffey Cassidy, the girl in the film, has the same kind of magnetic appeal that the young Haley Mills and Annette Funicello had. Little boys are going to go nuts for this kid. But having the right star is only the beginning. You need a director and writer who know how to bring out that star quality, and Brad Bird was able to do that. He does a good job with George Clooney, too.

Now where can I find posters of that amazing futuristic city?

MEMORIAL DAY

Memorial Weekend is here and I thought I'd celebrate by reviewing the pledges people make in the different armed services. Some are beautiful and inspiring, others are less so and, in my opinion, could use a little help. See what you think.

I'll start with my favorite, the "Airman's Creed (above). I'm guessing that a professional poet wrote it. I love the romantic description of an airman as: "...guardian of freedom and justice, / My nation's sword and shield, / Its sentry and avenger."


Much less interesting is the Army's Non-Commissioned Officer Creed (above). It's hard to imagine any NCO getting misty-eyed over lines like "I will fulfill my responsibilities inherent in that roll," and vague terms like "moral courage" and the need to take "appropriate action." The creed feels like it was written by a bean-counter.

The Navy Seals' Creed (below), on the other hand, is full of inspiring ideas, it's just too long. It needs to be cut by at least a third:

All of the sentiments above are worthy, but a creed requires compression in order to be useful. I thought about drawing a line through parts I'd shorten, but that seemed disrespectful, so I thought better of it.

I do like the lines about "the ability to control my emotions and actions...sets me apart from other men." The entire last paragraph (above), the one beginning with "I will never quit," is wonderful. Anyway, here's (below) the rest:

Wow! "We expect innovation," "The success of our mission depends on me," "My training is never complete"...these are very interesting ideas!

CARICATURES OF...GUESS WHO?

Here they are: more caricatures of me! NO, NO...I'M NOT A NARCISSIST! I just thought  artists might find these useful because they're drawn in so many different styles.

Okay, what do you think of this one (above) by Amid? I like the way the nose and muzzle leap out of the page.

For comparison, I just took a wide-angle picture of myself. Even on that setting I couldn't get the muzzle anywhere near as big as Amid drew it...and yet his version works fine.

Haw! I'd just gotten a haircut (above) when I happened to meet John. The caption reads: "The New, Improved Ed!"

Above, another of my haircuts, also by John. I think he lays in wait in the bushes outside barber shops.

Mike did this one (above). I mentioned that I tried a new brand of soap, and this was the result.

Above, me with dog ears. By John, of course.

Me. Mike. Gee, this is a beautiful drawing!

Above, me drawn by Katie. Yikes! There's that "V" shaped head again!

Last but not least: me on a pizza-stained place mat. Artist unknown.

RANDOM EDDIE DRAWINGS

 What the heck was this sketch (above) for? Was it for this Theory Corner site? I only remember that I started to copy Tee Hee's Kate Hepburn then changed my mind and drew it the way I like to draw women.

I made her a mystery woman..."Madam X."

Above, Ghengis's horse remembers the good old days before he and his master split up. 

These sketches (above) were for Disney's "Nightmare Ned." In this dream Ned lives in a dollhouse and invites his tormentors, The Evil Twins, in for a cup of tea.

Yikes! Looking like it's been stepped on several times, here's (above) more panels from the Ghengis storyboard.

COMIC BOOK STAGING

I'm reading Mike Barrier's new book about the Golden Age of Dell comics. It's pretty impressive. I could happily blog for a month on subjects I've already read about and I'm less than a third of the way through. 

By way of a sample I thought I'd expand on Mike's discussion of rhythm in the Carl Barks duck stories. The opinions and the examples (badly scanned; sorry about that) are mostly mine but it's all informed by things that Mike wrote. Read it and see what you think.

   

Barks was expert at compressing a story into just the right number of panels. Read the page above where Donald's fishing boat sinks to the bottom of the sea then is yanked out by a whale and deposited on land. In the hands of a lesser storyteller that might have taken two pages at least. Barks does it in one. 

Here's (above) a detail showing the first two panels. Donald is pulled into the upside-down boat, then the cables go slack, then the boat is lowered into the water...and none of that is shown! All the information I just mentioned is implied in just one drawing that shows him already in the boat and shows the boat already submerged. 

Barks gets on with the plot and doesn't burden us with inessentials.

Above, another detail showing the second two panels. The ship settles on the bottom, the cabin floods, the ducks stress out, and the snagged whale doubles back. Amazingly, all this information is contained in only two panels!!!

One more detail: the whale doubles back pulling one of the cables with it. This could have been a large upshot panel showing the massive whale passing overhead. Instead it's handled in one simple side-shot. Imagine how flamboyantly Sterenko or Buscema or manga would have handled this. Not so with Barks. He tenaciously regards the whale's turn-around as just one more plot point.

Don't get me wrong. I don't mean to understate Barks' achievement here. He's established a powerful rhythm in the page and he rightly doesn't allow himself to digress with a  beauty shot of the whale.

Good page rhythm didn't exactly come natural to Barks, he had to figure it out. Here's (above) an earlier Barks story where the rhythm didn't work at all. So how did Barks make the change? The book hints that he got some help from Floyd Gottfredson. Mike quotes Barks account of a meeting they had:

Sorry for the crude scan. I didn't want to hurt the book's binding by pressing it on the scanner so I allowed the edge to blur. Anyway, Mike's interpretation of Gottfredson's advice was that Barks should give greater emphasis to the psychological aspects of his stories. Barks presumably did and the tighter focus might be what improved his staging.

Talking about Gottfredson, what do you think about his staging? I'm a huge fan of the man but I'm slightly put off by the Tin-Tin type regularity of the layouts. Even so, an artist who had difficulty with backgrounds could find few better influences .

EDDIE DRAWINGS

Here's part of a doodle script I did for a film that was never made. We were between shows at Spumco and John allowed me to write this while we were were waiting for the next thing.

Doodling is a great way to do a script for first-time, try-out characters because you quickly find out whether the characters work visually. In this case the girl character worked fine, but the guy didn't.

MORE EDDIE CARICATURES

Here's more sketches that other artists did of me, starting with one above by John K. The man's incredible! He's always trying new techniques!

Bruce did this one (above). That's me in the middle. His Kent Butterworth on the extreme left is definitive and so is his Art Vitello. That's Art holding the cup of coffee.

Also in the picture: Rich Aarons, Ken Boyer, Girard Baldwin and Art Leonardi.

 What's going on here (above)? It's a John caricature, that's obvious. It looks like an Arab cab driver, or rather a camel driver, is taking me to L.A. while I count money for some reason. I have no idea what prompted this.

How do you like the camel driver's socks and sock garters?

Here's (above) how I draw myself: suave and slim with lots of hair. It's a lie I know, but I can't see myself any other way. 

  

Haw! Nobody else draws me as suave. I don't see how they can fail to see it. Above, an anonymous unsuave sketch of me geeking out over Chaplin. 

This one (above) was done by my daughter in McDonald's. She sees me as having an  immense stone face which is home to colonies of bacteria and scabs. Yikes!

CLIFF MAY: ARCHITECT [EXPANDED]

Living in California has convinced me that the most interesting parts of a modern house are the roof and the patio. Get the roof right and the design of the home under it just follows naturally...or at least it seems that way when the architect is Cliff May.

May was known as the inventor of the modern ranch house. It's a style that combines cowboy ranch hand and Wright-style modernism with traditional Japanese, Mexican and Mediterranean styles. May was largely self-taught so he disregarded orthodoxy and just combined elements he liked.

Here's (above) a small Cliff May courtyard. He could have paved it with grass or gravel but he gave it a smooth, hard, light-colored surface similar to the one inside the house. That makes the courtyard an extension of the living room, following Frank Lloyd Wright's dictum: "bring the outside in and the inside out."

 Wow! A sort of indoor picnic table (above)! I like to spread out when I work so this would make a perfect working space for me, and with the substitution of chairs for the benches, it's also a perfect dining table.

BTW, how do you like the dynamic sweep of this room? It's so cheerful, so optimistic, so American in the best sense of the word.

May wrestled with modernism and made it cozy. I can't stand the depressing factory-style modernism that we associate with Bauhaus. This (above) is modernism done right.

May was a developer as well as an architect and he tried to bring low cost modernism within the reach of the common working man. For that he had to rely on prefab parts but that proved to be difficult because, as a pioneer, he was the only buyer and couldn't benefit adequately from economies of scale. Not only that but different suppliers worked to different standards. Some nearly went broke and May had to start a loan business to keep them afloat. The projects put grey hairs on May and were reportedly "not fun."

May's reward for his labors was Mandalay, a home he designed for himself near his favorite city, Los Angeles. The house was mostly demolished by a new owner but bits of the old structure remain. Here's (above) a picture of May's interior court yard which contains some of his books.

Nifty, eh? Why isn't May better known?

BTW: A friend expressed no interest in May and said he didn't see what was so special about him. I was astonished. For his sake I'll put up a couple of examples (below) of how other lesser architects handled the modern ranch idea.

Here's (above) one example: it's not horrible but it's modern only to cash in on a trend. There's no philosophy here, no awareness of how a space can be enclosed in an exciting and stimulating way.

 Here's (above) squares with built-in awnings (Yawn!). Once again, it's modern just to cash in on a trend. This architect was told that large windows and plain, flat walls are the latest thing so that's what he did. Cliff May, on the other hand, started with a question: "How can I excite the person who lives here? How can I challenge him to be a better man?

Okay, 'nuff said.