Inktober Week 4

Inktober Week 4.

I missed one day. That first drawing of The Punisher is in memoriam of Steve Dillon, a terrific comic book artist who passed away that day.

Happy Batman Day

Today is apparently "International Batman Day." There is also a "Wonder Woman Day," dedicated to raising money and awareness for domestic violence programs. It would be awesome if "Batman Day" was for victims of gun violence, but as far as I can tell, it's just a day for DC Comics to remind everyone how awesome Batman is.

The illustration above is a recreation of the cover to Batman Family Number 4. This comic is dear to my heart because it's the first comic book I can remember. I have the distinct memory of my father coming home with this comic for me. It was 1976. I was 4 1/2 years old. I don't think it was the first comic book I ever saw because I remember thinking "Cool! A new comic!" rather than "what's this?"

Somewhere in my mother's house I still have it, now tattered, missing its cover and several pages. A few years ago, I came across an intact copy at some comics show. I bought it, but didn't actually re-read it, because I'm sure the contents are not great. I remember bits and pieces of the stories. The Batgirl story had criminals after a guy who was going into witness re-location program and at the end he had plastic surgery to get a new face, a concept which blew my four-year-old mind. In the Robin story, he was running around in the snow at Christmas time, and at one point mentioned how cold he was in those short sleeves and green hot pants. Fatman was clown who spoofed Batman. I don't remember the Phantom General story, but the internet tells me that he was a Nazi war criminal with a hypnotic monolcle.

There was also a truly awesome spread of fan costume redesigns for Robin.

Unfortunately, the scene on the cover - three rogue Santas in a toboggan cold-cocking Robin and shooting at Batgirl on her Bat-sled - does not actually occur inside. This comic is dated April, so would have been on the stands in Spring or early summer. I have no idea why it would have had a Christmas theme.

The God of Pinball

This weekend is the MoCCA Arts Festival, and my buddies Allan Dorison and Ken Wong have put together a post-show after party and art show, and I'm in it. The theme is "Modern Pinball." What does that mean? Come to Modern Pinball NYC at 362 Third Ave on Saturday the 5th and find out! Admission is $10 - with a discount if you use the code “CB-ORIGAMI”. That'll get you unlimited pinball machine play from 6 PM to 2 AM and there will also be live figure drawing sessions in the back room. It'll be fun.

This is my contribution . . .

Here's some step-by-step . . .

Spider-Man: Turn On The House Lights

Tonight one of the longest and strangest theater stories finally comes to an end ... Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark is closing. The story of the making of the Broadway musical adaptation of Spider-Man was more convoluted and strange than the Clone Saga, with its massive budget and cost-overruns, rockstar composers, its famous director who was eventually fired, extravagant scenery and special effects that landed more than one performer in the hospital,  and a year+ long preview period, lawsuits, and more. The show actually was selling fairly well, but costs so much to operate that it could never make its investment back.

I saw the show - at least, a version of it, during its long preview period - I think just a few months before Julie Taymor was fired. It was terrible. I say this as a theater person and as a comics fan. It pretty much failed on all fronts. I guess my favorite scene is this big battle on top of the Chrysler Building, which should have been the climax of the show, but instead was the end of Act One. And I liked watching Patrick Page as the Green Goblin. Imagine Jack Nicholson's portrayal of the Joker, but even hammier. The character didn't make much sense, like most of the show, but at least he was fun to watch, unlike most of the show.

One thing that struck me about this scene is that it follows the climax of the first Sam Raimi movie, changing the Manhattan Bridge to the Chrysler Building as the thing off of which the Green Goblin throws Mary Jane, and Spider-Man diving to save her. Because of that film, most people think that that is what happened in the original comic stories. But as comics fans of a certain age know, what actually happened was that the Goblin throws Peter Parker's girlfriend Gwen Stacy off the bridge, Spider-Man shoots a web to catch her but the sudden jolt snaps her neck. Given the multiple injuries and near-disasters in this production, that plot development might have been a little too close to home.

For those unfamiliar with Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, that blue spider-woman in the background of this drawing is Arachne, who was some sort of spider-goddess who turns Peter Parker into Spider-Man to serve as her avatar/champion. At least, I think that's what was going on. The narrative was not particularly clear on that point. The scenes with Arachne were actually pretty cool, but it was like they'd been imported from another show. It was clear that what Julie Taymor really wanted to do was a show about Arachne. Actually, that might not be a bad idea, for her to just go off and do a big spider-goddess puppet-opera somewhere. But she probably just wants to forget about all things spider-related at this point. I hope all the actors and stagehands involved in the show pick up new gigs pretty fast, though something tells me they probably won't miss working on this particular show besides the paycheck.

IRON MAN

The new Iron Man movie opens today. I probably won't get a chance to see it until next week, but I'm pretty excited for it. I never cared much about Iron Man in the comics, but I've liked the movies a lot, mostly due to Robert Downey Jr.'s performance.

One thing I did always like about Iron Man was the way his armor was drawn back in the sixties by Don Heck and Jack Kirby. Later renditions of the suit featured sculpted musculature, which often made him look like he was just wearing painted-on spandex like the rest of the superheroes. The original versions were bulky and barrel-chested. They were also covered with bolts and rivets. It really looked like a guy in a suit made of metal cans. More recent versions really play up the tech that would be involved with such a suit, and have lots of parts and joints. It looks cool, but it's hard to draw.


The Iron Man suit was in constant flux in the early years, before settling on a streamlined version that lasted from the late 1960's through the 1980's. I'm partial to this version, with the face-plate with the pointy ends sticking up and the grill over his mouth. I also liked the little transitor-radio-like antenna he had on his shoulder. Who needs wi-fi?

Another thing I liked about the older depiction was the way you could see his eyeballs behind his mask. I just discovered that there was in fact a rationale for it . . .

Watch out, Mr. Doll!

I also liked how lo-fi his armor was. I'm sure at the time this seemed space-age, but today it's amusing to see how proud Tony Stark was of his armor that ran on magnets, transistor radios,  gyroscopes, and batteries.

Also note how much storage he's built into his suit, including a first aid kid into his boot. That Tony Stark thinks of everything!

I started my Iron Man sketch in pencil, and then inked and colored it in Photoshop. Here's the earlier stages:

Memento Mori

You might be asking yourself, why is this girl chilling with a skeleton?

Well, here’s the thing. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been attending a class at Spring Street Studio. That’s one of the places I usually go for drop-in figure drawing sessions, but this is actually a class (sorta), focusing on human anatomy. These drawings are from the first session I went to. Minerva Durham, the instructor, had us draw the full female figure posed with a skeleton, explaining to us that this type of image was called “Memento Mori.”

Memento mori is a Latin phrase which translates as “Remember you must die.” It supposedly derives from ancient Rome, when military generals would, during their victory parades, be trailed by one of their slaves who would be tasked with repeating this phrase to him as a means of reminding him that although this was his day of glory, his eventual death might come at any time. I can imagine that that would be a job a slave would secretly relish. “Remember you must die, muthafucka. Thas right.”

As an artistic genre, it initially came to prominence in Christian art and architecture, as a humbling reminder of the transience of earthly existence.  As the early Christian theologian Tertullian wrote in Apolegeticus: "Respice post te! Hominem te esse memento! Memento mori!": "Look behind you! Remember that you are but a man! Remember that you'll die!" Tertullian was a real buzzkill at parties. You will see this theme in much creepy Medieval and Renaissance Christian art, including cadaver tombs, chapels made of bones, portraits of people holding skulls, and the genre of danse macabre. Here’s some examples:

Hans Holbein, 1538

Hans Memling, 1485

 

Thomas Smith self-portrait, ca. 1680

This class exercise did not have any theological point; it was merely to get us to visualize the placement and movement of bone structure in the figure. But I had never heard of this phrase or this whole category of artistic tradition. If only I had received training in the arts at an elite Ivy League school, then I would know these things!             Oh, wait . . . No, the visual arts program that granted me a degree didn’t teach me about momento mori. But they didn’t teach me human anatomy, either, so there you go.

 

By the way, she was not posing with a model skeleton. Rather, there was a second model, an older man, who we were  to visually translate into skeletal form. I believe he was the same as this model, who I drew in a sketchpad some years ago.

 

Speaking of Death . . .

Two days ago, Joe Kubert passed away at the age of 85. Every comic book reader must know who he is. He began drawing comics professionally at the age of 12 in 1938, the year Superman debuted, and was still working to this day. In fact, a new anthology of his work had just been announced a few weeks ago. So he had been an artistic presence in American comics for literally its entire history, and if you’ve looked at a rack of comic books at any point in the past 74 years, you’d have seen his work. There are still a few guys from the Golden Age years who show up at conventions to sell sketches and prints and memorabilia, but I can’t think of anyone else from that period who is still actively working.

Kubert had a very distinct style. Even as a child, before I was really aware of individual artists, I could identify a Kubert cover. His compositions were dynamic and fluid. His figures were classically idealized – tall and muscular men and curvaceous women – but his sketchy linework rendered them sinewy and organic. Even his superheroes seemed more grounded than those of other artists. For this reason, he seemed more at home with more realistic genres, particularly the war stories with which he became most identified. Some of the earliest comics I remember were drawn by him. I distinctly remember these covers of Tarzan, as well as the cover to the deeply weird “Super Dictionary.”

I never really had a lot of Kubert work in my collection. By the time I was really into comics, he was mostly doing war comics like Sgt. Rock and Enemy Ace, which weren’t my thing. But I always really dug his art when I saw it. In recent years, he had written and illustrated a couple of graphic novels. I thought his writing was, well, not so good, but they were still great to look at. Like I said, he was still going strong producing material, and there was no public indication that he was in poor health, so despite his age it was a surprise to hear the news of his death. Rest in peace, Joe Kubert, and momento mori, everybody.

Hell On Wheels

Out of the thousands of comics I've read in my life, I've only read one Ghost Rider comic. It was in Marvel Treasury #18, in which Ghost Rider teams up with Spider-Man to fight a motorcycle-riding criminal named The Orb. The Orb's appearance was perhaps even freakier than Ghost Rider's flaming skull; he had a giant eyeball for a head.

I've never seen the 2007 Ghost Rider movie, starring the inimitable Nicholas Cage, either. I don't remember it having been a hit, but apparently it was successful enough to spawn a sequel, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance.

Nicholas Cage has not aged well.

Ghost Rider is Johnny Blaze, a stunt motorcyclist who makes a deal with the Devil to become a super-powered motorcycling vigilante. There's not much to recommend the character beyond his visual design. And it is an awesome design! Ghost Rider is one of a subset of superheroes who received their powers from the Devil, including Spawn, Etrigan The Demon, and Hellstorm. One might think that using Satan-derived powers to fight evil would be a big conflict of interest, but maybe Satan has a slack legal team.


You know whose legal team isn't slack? Marvel Comics. Over the past two decades, the value of superheroes as intellectual property has skyrocketed exponentially as they have been licensed for video games, merchandise, and especially to Hollywood. The Batman and Spider-Man films showed that superheroes could become the basis of massively lucrative franchises, and 1998's Blade showed that even an obscure character could provide fodder for a successful media adaptation. As major media alchemy has turned these old leaden characters into gold, companies like DC and Marvel have faced legal challenges by the characters' original creators, or their estates, trying to get a portion of the profits generated by these characters, or complete ownership of the characters outright. None of these efforts has been successful. The courts have fairly consistently found that these characters were created under work-for-hire conditions, meaning all rights to the characters and stories are owned by the corporate publisher. Marvel's paychecks to their freelancers included a 'legend of assignment' printed on the back; by signing their check to get paid for their work, writers and artists would also be signing a contract waiving all claims to ownership.


The latest lawsuit has been by one Gary Friedrich in an attempt to claim ownership of the Ghost Rider character. Friedrich was the original Ghost Rider writer in 1972 and claims to have been the sole creator of the character, though editor Roy Thomas and artist Mike Ploog dispute that characterization. Friedrich never really had a chance of winning; writers and artists with much stronger cases have failed. Probably he was hoping that Marvel would offer a quick settlement to avoid a lengthy lawsuit and negative publicity.

Gary Friedrich was wrong. Marvel fought and, of course, won; the judgment coincidentally coming down just days before the new Ghost Rider movie opened. But Marvel didn't just defend themselves. They also counter-sued Gary Friedrich. Friedrich had been attending comic book shows, promoting himself as the creator of Ghost Rider and selling prints of the first issue of Ghost Rider and other artwork. Marvel sued him for copyright infringement and won a settlement of $17,000 in compensation for his revenue of sales from unlicensed material. In addition, he is prevented from even saying that he is the creator of Ghost Rider.


At any comics show, and all over the internet, you will find artists selling image of characters whose copyright they do not own. Some are aspiring artists, and some are current working professionals. This is a a way of garnering attention for the former and a significant supplementary income for the latter. And at every comic con you will find elderly men selling prints of characters they dreamed up decades ago, for which they were paid a modest page rate and which have earned their corporate publishers millions. These prints are clearly unauthorized merchandise, but for the most part companies like DC and Marvel have turned a blind eye to the practice. Until now. Many of these artists are now, understandably, shitting their pants. Marvel executives Dan Buckley and Joe Quesada have assured them that there's no reason for them to worry: "We in no way want to interfere with the creators at conventions who are providing a positive Marvel experience for our fans. We want fans to speak and interact with the creators who wrote, penciled, inked, lettered , colored or edited their favorite stories. Part of that positive interaction is that a fan can walk away with a signed memento or personalized sketch from an artist." But there is nothing to stop Marvel from cracking down on the practice at any time, especially now that Marvel is owned by Disney, which has sued nursery schools for having murals of Mickey Mouse on their walls. 


Friedrich may have forced Marvel's hand. Maybe he refused a settlement, gambling that he could obtain full ownership. And once in court, Marvel may have felt compelled to counter-sue in order to enforce their claim of copyright. Still, it's hard not to see Marvel's action as a very blunt warning to writers and artists, past and present: don't rock the boat and you can sell your memorabilia, step out of line and expect a call from our Legion of Lawyers. 


Legally, Marvel is in the right. Friedrich's Ghost Rider comics were done under work-for-hire, and he did later explicitly sign away any claims to copyright (He signed an agreement waiving any claims to ownership of the character in exchange for being considered for further freelance employment ... he was never actually employed by Marvel again.). And the prints he sold were unauthorized merchandise (not to mention, they were prints of other people's art.) 

But still ... Marvel is a hugely profitable entertainment company, now a subsidiary of an ever huger corporation. Gary Friedrich is a lone old man, in poor health, unemployed, bankrupt, and reportedly on the verge of losing his house. Forty years ago, he had an idea for a character. Over the past few years, he made $17,000 selling drawings of that character. The first movie of that character grossed over $230,000,000. Could not Marvel have passed along some small percentage of that to Gary Friedrich? 


Around the same time that Friedrich was writing Ghost Rider for Marvel, Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams created a villain for DC Comics named Ra's Al Ghul, and Len Wein created a minor supporting character named Lucius Fox. These characters were created under the same work-for-hire conditions, but when they were used in Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins, O'Neil, Adams and Wein were all compensated. DC Comics has its own fraught history with creators' rights, but here they did right. Len Wein also created Wolverine, the most popular of Marvel's X-Men. He has said he has received more payment for creating Lucius Fox than for Wolverine. 

Which IP do you think is more valuable?

Gary Friedrich's situation is unfortunately not unique. Every year, there are reports of older writers and artists who are in financial straits at the end of their lives, as the characters they created generate more and more revenue for the companies that own them. There had been a Paypal donation site set up by writer Steve Niles to raise funds for Friedrich, but I can't find it now. However, there is still The Hero Initiative, a worthwhile organization that helps comics creators in need.

Krampus!

I can't believe I never heard of Krampus before now. I just heard of him last week, and since then I've heard him mentioned like five or six times.

Krampus is the anti-Santa Claus. Whereas I was told that naughty children only received a lump of coal from Ol' Saint Nick, in Alpine folklore they are visited by Krampus, who whips them with sticks and chains, throws them into a bag or basket, and drags him to his lair to be punished and/or eaten.

Here he dispenses his Yuletide vengeance upon three class naughty children from the comics. Re: Dennis the Menace, unlike the current sanitized comic strip, he was originally just as much of a little shit as Bart and Calvin.

Captain America!!!!!

So I saw Captain America: The First Avenger on Friday. I liked it a lot. I think Marvel has been very smart with this series of movies; they're all pretty good as stand-alone action movies, while simultaneously building up to the big Avengers movie. That's not an easy trick to pull off. Captain America: The First Avenger may be my favorite superhero movie of the summer, which is saying something, since both Thor and X-Men: First Class were really good. I seriously think it should be an Oscar contender for all the production design categories.

I haven't seen, and probably won't see (unless it's free on TV), Green Lantern. The only good things I've heard about that one are from people who saw it and said it wasn't as bad as they expected, given all the terrible, terrible reviews from critics and fans alike. It used to be that I would see a superhero/comic book-related movie regardless, even when I expected it to be bad, just because. It really says something about the power of film in our culture that so many people crave having their favorite books, plays, comics, games, cartoons, et al adapted into live-action films, as though that somehow conveys some sort of cultural status on the original material.

For example, two years ago, I attended an academic conference about the 19th century militant abolitionist, John Brown (no relation!). After two days of discussions on the historical legacy of John Brown, the abolitionist movement, the political and economic culture of antebellum America, and the nature of political violence, the final panel was an interview with Russell Banks, author of a fictionalized account of John Brown, Cloudsplitter. It's a bona-fide Great American Novel, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Banks is in general one of our greatest living American writers. During the hour-long interview, he briefly discussed his interactions with Hollywood in optioning the novel. It's in 'development,' which of course only means that someone paid a lot of money for the rights to make a movie that they may or may not actually intend to make someday. The audience was almost all serious academics and historians, amateur and professional, yet during the Q&A session, almost every question was about this hypothetical movie version of the novel. These academics at Yale University were even floating casting ideas just as comic nerds dream-cast superhero movies. They were just soooo excited to see a big-budget movie about their favorite historical figure.

By the way, the general consensus was that John Brown should be played by Tommy Lee Jones, who was excellent in Captain America: The First Avenger. So ... Captain America! Go see it.


Here's the scan of the pencils, and the digital inks.