MORE ABOUT WALLY WOOD

Remember this picture (above)? I put it up a week ago to illustrate the point that Wally Wood certainly loved his Ikea furniture. I kinda like it too. Thanks to Ikea, anybody can have a 50s bachelor pad at a reasonable price. 

Anyway, I thought the picture above deserved a second look. It reminds me that the young and struggling Wood was probably pretty dependant on his magazine reference. Before he worked on Mad, Wood shared an office with realistic artists Frazetta and Williamson, and was under a lot of pressure to improve his realistic drawing quickly. 

For interior backgrounds Wood seemed to prefer reference that that emphasized perspective and the blocky nature of furniture. My guess is that he chose these because he was insecure about his use of perspective and found the clarity and simplicity of these mathematical pictures to be helpful. 


I like to think that somewhere along the line it dawned on him that the simple perspectives he was using were funny. Maybe he began to laugh at his own pictures. Maybe after a point he decided that competing with Williamson and Frazetta for realism was pointless, and he broke out into pure style. 

You could argue that his handling of human characters evolved the same way. At first Wood relied heavily on magazine reference. The girl above strikes a fashion magazine pose when she points her gun.  Look at her legs and feet. That's an odd way to stand when you're supposed to be in the throws of murderous passion. 

Eventually Wood would transcend this too obvious use of reference, but a lot of people believe he did uniquely interesting work in this period, when he had a foot in both worlds, and was making a transition to something more stylized.  The reference anchored him, made his work more complex. The space patrol girl is funny in her model pose, but she's also dignified, confident, and iconic. Her contradictions make her a puzzle that we enjoy trying to solve. And it all takes place in a bizarre bachelor pad full of obsessively blocky shapes. 

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Could this (above) have been the magazine ad that Wood referenced?   The legs are the same, so is the hair style...sort of.  The model's also off balance, just like the space girl in Wood's picture. 


Anyway, this is what I'm arguing here: that first out of necessity, then by choice, Wood thrust Pepsi Generation models into outer space to encounter hideous monsters.

WARD & BETTY KIMBALL

I was about to post something else when I discovered these pictures of the young Ward Kimball and his wife Betty on  Cartoon Brew.  I immediately put my own post aside, so I could put these up instead.  They're just too good to get anything less than the widest possible attention. 

As I said, the picture above is of animator Ward Kimball and his wife Betty.  Betty recently died at age 97. I don't know if I've ever seen a photo which so perfectly conveys young love.  The two seem so right for each other, so serene in each other's company.  If Eisenstadt or some other famous photographer had taken it, it would find its way onto the walls of a major museum.  Since it's a personal, family photo I don't know what its fate will be. 

Above, a beautiful sketch, which also conveys the feeling the  two had for each other.  What a powerful medium pencil and paper is when it's in the right hands!

Ward did this sketch (above) of Betty sleeping. Very nice! I wish I could have met her when she was alive!  I'm glad the two had each other.

Thanks to Amid for putting up the pictures I swiped.  You can see the whole set at Cartoon Brew, July 4th entry:

http://www.cartoonbrew.com

IT'S JULY FOURTH!!!!!

This (above) is a short video I made a couple of years ago to express what I felt about the Fourth of July. I considered  remaking it, but after watching it again I concluded that I'm not likely to improve on it,  so here it is, in all its 2008 glory.



While I'm at it, I'll throw in this nifty opening title from HBO's John Adams series.



Last, but not least, here's (above) a brief excerpt from that series where John Adams publicly commits to the ideal of liberty. I always get misty-eyed over stuff like this.

Have a good Fourth everybody!

RECENT ASTRONOMICAL PICTURES

More terrific photos from the Cassini orbiter! I still can't believe that it's possible to see the surface of a moon circling far away Saturn. Here's (above) a giant crater on Mimas. Be sure to click to enlarge all of the photos in this post.
 

Above, another moon of Saturn,  a small one called Phoebe. Maybe it's a captured comet.
 

No doubt everybody here is familiar with the Horsehead Nebula. I thought you'd like to see it in context, framed by a ring of gas.  The horsehead is the backlit, little chess piece in the upper middle of the picture.

This (above) is M66, one of the closest galaxies. It's a lot more impressive when seen large.

This is a detail of the edge of a another nearby galaxy.  Enlargement is a must.

Above, the Rosette Nebula.

Above, the stunningly beautiful Great Nebula in Orion.

The Itokawa Asteroid...and it has no craters! What gives!? It must have been recently formed. And what are all those pimple boulders doing there?

WHERE DID THE 60S COME FROM?

"What led to the 60's?" you ask. Good question. Well, there's Vietnam, the pill, drugs, civil rights...you name it. These are the standard explanations, and they're all important, but we all know there's gotta be more than that. You don't go from Ozzie and Harriet to bare-breasted at Woodstock in just a few years unless you have a lot of history pushing at your back.

What that history is, I don't know. I thought I might free-associate a little here, just to see what other explanations I could come up with. I've tried this before and what I came up with was woefully inadequate, but maybe I'll do better this time. Here goes.......

Well, there was TV. In the 50s and early 60s adults hadn't become addicted to it yet, but kids watched a ton of it.  Most of the dramas were clear-cut, good guy vs. bad guy stuff. The situation comedies and H&B cartoons were mind-numbingly stupid. My guess is that TV kids of this era...the future hippies... grew up idealistic under the influence of the dramas, but filled with a revulsion for ordinary life the way it was portrayed on the sitcoms. 

  

Then there was the fact that lots of late 50s kids had allowances, something only rich kids had in the 19th Century. With money to spend they developed a youth culture built around the things they liked to buy, like records. 

Talking about the 19th century, let me digress for a minute to take note of the Romanticism of that era, with its emphasis on the mysterious workings of the inner mind. That idea spilled over into the 20th Century, carried there by people like Freud and Ibsen and the Surrealists.  Marxism was carried over too, only it was modified by the romantics who absorbed it and gave it a different flavor.

One result of the Marxist-Romantic synthesis was fascism.  For decades central Europeans lived under fascist or communist governments which which portrayed America in the worst light possible.  Amazingly, a lot of pre-hippies picked up on this view of ourselves and believed it. 

That's the young Paul Newman (above) at the Actors' Studio in New York.  Ibsen's theories, which emphasized character conflict and the need to bring the mysterious inner  life to the surface, ruled at that studio. 

Stories favored by this school were always about sensitive people who were damaged or made insane by the irrational demands of normal society. That seems like an odd theme to dwell on exclusively, but actors liked these stories because they were full of emotional fireworks, and seemed kind of edgy because normal society was always the villain.  


If you lived at that time, and were destined to be a hippie, you saw and read a LOT of stories where normal people were the bad guys. 

One of the most influential people of the early 60s was Alvin Toffler, who's almost forgotten now.  He wrote futurist books which predicted a right-around-the-corner society where machines made possible a twenty hour work week and an overabundance of cheap food and material possessions. Our only problem would be what to do with the spare time. 

Toffler's important because an awful, awful lot of people...including future hippies... believed what he said, and concluded that...Damn!...if unlimited wealth was right around the corner, then we should loose the work ethic, have a party, and redistribute everything. With so much to go around, it would be positively stingy to do anything else.

Toffler's book sold big in cheap paperbacks, which was the only kind of book most young people could afford to buy.  The innovative publishers who pioneered the paperback revolution were mostly left-inclined, so the books that young people read were usually limited to that point of view (Salinger isn't overtly left in this book, I just liked the picture).

Hmmmm.....anything else? No, I guess that's it. 

In spite of all I just said I don't think Romanticism, left-leaning records, paperbacks and movies, or any of the standard explanations really add up to what we saw in the 60s.  I told you I didn't understand where the 60s came from, and I don't.

Maybe there was something else, something more off the wall.  Maybe miniskirts (above) were to blame. I mean, they make a powerful visual argument for the rightness of something or other.

Maybe after the miniskirt there was no turning back. No matter how destructive the new sensibility might turn out to be, a return to the society that covered up legs was unthinkable.

No wonder the hippie philosophy spread so fast. Imagine that you were a  file clerk in an insurance company in 1964, and had an abusive boss. There he is behind you telling you what a good-for-nothing you are, and your eyes happen to wander over to the poster above, which is on the wall.  How inviting it would be to drop everything and follow the girl with the guitar!

MORE OBSERVATIONS ABOUT WOMEN (RE-WRITTEN)

WARNING: Nothing obscene here, but this post is not office or school safe.

In the era of the dinosaurs (above), most young women ran around naked. That's okay. I'm sure nobody complained. In those days, even middle-aged women were probably pretty slim and athletic.

Not so for modern city women (above). They tend to put on weight pretty early in life. So do modern men, but this post isn't about them.

  

Most modern women will eventually develop a pear shape, like Rembrandt's wife in the drawing above.

Instead of developing a gut like middle-aged men do, they develop a thickening of the entire middle of the body.  Oddly, the upper torso remains relatively thin, at least for a while.


Why is this so interesting? Because this shape puts enormous emphasis on the the genital region...it makes it the unmistakable center of interest. The whole body becomes a wide, diamond-shaped target with a huge patch of pubic hair in the center. When you consider that women reach their sexual peak at the same age they take this shape, then the only conclusion to draw is that nature desperately wants to advertise women's sexuality at this age. Why? I don't know. 

After a bit the upper torso expands as well, creating a sort of vertical barbell shape. This (above) is a pretty extreme example, but you know what I mean. The genital region is no longer the center of interest, though sex characteristics are still obvious until old age sets in.

I forgot to say that after the hips and thighs begin to expand, the abdomen begins to stretch out (above). Within reason that's sexy, at least I think so.  Boy, nature desperately wants women to stay sexy, even in the 30 - 45 year old range. Maybe older. Nothing subtle here. When the blush of youth wears off, nature rolls up its sleeves and resorts to the hard sell, hawking a woman's sex potential with a bullhorn and billboards. Interesting, huh?  


Aren't you glad you read Theory Corner? What other art site is so doggoned scientific? 




BTW: I'm aware that dinosaurs and humans never existed at the same time.

THE LAST "MAN" CARTOONIST

Like everybody else I get compliments occasionally, and like everybody else I take them with a grain of salt...at least I usually do.  For some reason, every once in a while,  a compliment gets past my guard and I regard it as a cosmic truth, a titanic affirmation that something about me is worthy of sitting in a jeweled box at the top of a golden tower studded with elephant tusks.  I have just received such a compliment. and I will now, with shameless immodesty, share it with you...... 

A couple of days ago John K remarked in a blog post on Jimmy Hatlo, that I was the last "man" cartoonist he could think of. That's "man," not "manly," which is probably a superior rank, but I'll take the compliment anyway. Imagine that. The last one. After me a whole species dies. Think of it.

Yes, according to John I'm The Last of the Mohicans (above).  I think the "man" reference has something to do with my life experience being in what I draw. Geez. He's obviously being much too generous, and everyone reading this will have a long list of much more qualified candidates, but I refuse to let truth get in the way.  I expect everybody who visits here to wipe their feet first, and wear a surgical mask lest germs reach the precious throat of this last of his species. 

I'm toying with the idea of doing a Sunday Comics page. Maybe something every other Sunday. I don't have any ideas, and I'm not sure that I know how to color and ink in Photoshop, so I might have to use crayons. Let me think about it. Whatever it is will probably look horrible, but I feel a responsibility to at least make an effort...I mean, being the last man cartoonist and all.