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Wednesday, February 27
UNSPEAKABLY COOL: DREAM OF THE RAREBIT FIEND
by
Lloydville
on Wed 27 Feb 2008 11:39 PM PST
The
fourth of the four coolest books published in the last few years, like
two of the others, collects the work of Winsor McCay -- in this case
the extraordinary strip Dream Of the Rarebit Fiend -- but unlike the other three wasn't put out by Sunday Press Books. Privately published by Ulrich Merkl, it
includes all of the strips from the series -- those not reproduced in
the book itself are supplied on a DVD that comes packaged with the book.
The book is gigantic and presents the strips, published between 1904
and 1913, in their original size. It also has a wealth of other
illustrative material showing McCay's sources and documenting the
enormous influence his images have had on America's visual culture,
especially that of the movies.
The draftsmanship of the strips is stunning, the visual imagination
exhilarating. Its central gag involves the dreams of people given
indigestion by eating Welsh Rarebit, making it a kind of run-up to
McCay's masterpiece strip Little Nemo In Slumberland, which illustrates the dreams of a restless little boy.
Merkl's book, published in a limited edition, is available at his web
site -- it's expensive but worth every penny. It lovingly documents a
brilliant and endlessly enchanting work of popular art.
Check out my reports on the other three coolest books of recent years:
Little Nemo
Little Sammy Sneeze
Walt and Skeezix
Thursday, February 21
PIERROT'S EMBRACE
by
Lloydville
on Thu 21 Feb 2008 08:23 PM PST
Guillaume Seignac
was a late Victorian painter (he died in 1924) who mostly turned out
undistinguished but sometimes amusing imitations of Bouguereau.
His draftsmanship could be flabby and his images didn't have the
über-photographic authority of his master.
The image above is different, though. It has an odd suggestive
power, almost perverse, that's rooted in theatrical gesture. I
find it haunting, for reasons I can't quite put my finger on.
Wednesday, February 6
A PUNCHINELLO FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Wed 06 Feb 2008 05:33 AM PST
Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (1727-1804) was the son of the great painter and master of the fresco Giovanni
Battista Tiepolo. Domenico painted and did frescos as well, but
his most amazing work was series of drawings featuring the commedia dell'arte character Punchinello, done towards the end of his life.
The series comprised 104 pen and wash images which explored the
character in unexpected ways. Domenico showed him in childhood,
in the kitchen cooking polenta, imprisoned, and finally dead and buried
(see above.) Indeed, Domenico treated Punchinello as an early
version of Krusty the Clown, but with a depth of feeling that
transformed him from a stock figure of the comic stage into an image of
everyman, a clown of Shakespearean dimensions.
The drawings are free, almost casual, but incredibly beautiful.
The series was sold and dispersed in 1921 but in 1986 77 of them were
collected and superbly reproduced in a book, which is out of print but
still available, for a price, through online booksellers. It's
well worth tracking down.
Friday, February 1
FLETCHER HANKS
by
Lloydville
on Fri 01 Feb 2008 11:43 PM PST
Fletcher
Hanks is sometimes called, with a kind of affectionate awe, the worst
comic book artist of all time -- sort of the Ed Wood of the comic
book. Like Wood, he was bad in an earnest, reckless way that
grips the imagination.
Fletcher's drawing style was crude, his stories simple and
brutal. They have a way of penetrating straight to the unconscious.
Not much is known about him, except that he was an abusive drunk who
terrorized his family and then abandoned them in 1930, that he stopped
drawing comic books in 1941 and that he froze to death on a park bench
in New York City sometime in the 1970s.
But the work remains, saved by a few collectors of wildly obscure comics and now reprinted in a new book called I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! It is a cry from a twisted heart and in some weird, unfathomable way both brilliant and important.
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