Peter Laird's Palblog

Eastman and Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in a lot of ways defines my childhood, just not the "Eastman and Laird" part. Now as an adult, finding Peter Laird's blog Palblog is forcing me to look back at why I liked the Turtles, and what defined them to me. I read the Archie comics not the original series, watched the cartoons and movies, and bought all the dumb stuff, particularly the toys.


Going to a toy store and grabbing a figure you hadn't seen before meant more than that one single new toy, it meant ten new toys. Flipping over the packaging always meant new mutants and Shred-Heads to be discovered, sometimes from the comic series but sometimes something created just for the toy line. Even before seeing the toys in person, I would imagine them while I played and even have big build up scenarios leading up to their arrival, saving my allowance just waiting for Triceraton to terrorize my room.


Small details like the bugs crawling all over the figure "Scumbug" changed the way that I drew and the way I played. Growing older I wanted to see the more "adult" version of these characters, and began collecting the original TMNT series comics but actually found them to be dull. The universe portrayed in the Archie comics seemed full. There was an entire world of other monsters who weren't so monstrous, and not every story revolved around the Turtles. The world the figures lived in still seemed more interesting to me than the city the Eastman and Laird Turtles fought in.

Peter Laird's Palblog makes me think he also got more into the world of the Archie mutants more than what he actually started. The world of the Turtles grew and grew, so he had to populate it. Seeing his sketches for toys that were released adds almost a metaphysical feeling to the figures you owned, filling you with a non-ironic kind of nostalgia that sends you onto eBay willing to spend any amount for a Panda Kahn figure.


The little boy in me sees the figures that weren't produced and can only think of what I would've done if I had them as a child. It's almost unfair some of these will never see the light of day, drawn with notes on how they'd work and more often than not pictures of the accessories.


Laird is open and it seems like one day all of his sketch books will be documented on his site, from TMNT anatomy studies to pictures of Luke and Chewbacca fighting storm troopers. His honesty about his career is stunning in an industry where artists hide the fact they once illustrated Barbie picture books, talking about how much he was paid for newspaper illustrations and how much control he actually had over the Turtles.

The only thing I can compare Palblog to is finding an old sketch book from childhood and discovering all of your super hero drawings. The imagination of who you were when you were 7 is something that once lost can't be regained, but Laird's blog brings that feeling back. It puts me into my mother's back yard digging holes and sitting on the basement steps thinking of new animals to become mutants, it simply gives you glimpses of a world you lost.

NON-COMICS PEOPLE TALKING COMICS: Armond White on Spain's Che

Pointing out each and every screw-up by a non-comics print or internet publication covering comics is a real fun pastime for us comics fans, but it's just as well that those times when mainstream coverage of comics is good, that we point it out.

Armond White, awesomely argumentative film critic for the New York Press reviews the Stephen Soderbergh film Che and sets-up a quick contrast between it's hyper-objective, intellectualized indulgence and O.G status comics legend Spain Rodriquez's "graphic novel" Che: A Graphic Biography.

The heading for White's review is "Steven Soderbergh’s indulgent Che opus can’t compete against a comic book" which is both White's critical opinion simply stated, and also, a heading that mocks the "good for a comic book" contempt those popular press articles about comics all too often have. White's sort of mocking the dim-witted aspects of Soderbergh's Che--"even a comic book is better than this movie!"--at the same time, the dim-witted critics praising the movie (and writing "comics ain't for kids anymore" articles), and teasing you with a quick explanation of the brilliance of Spain's Che:

"In Spain Rodriguez’s new comic-book novel, Che: A Graphic Biography (Verso), a poignant narrative interruption recounts Rodriguez’s own memory of living through the Cuban missile crisis. It makes Che’s significance personal and immediate. Soderbergh doesn’t bother; he’s above the personal revelations of Latin American political drama as risked by Alex Cox’s Walker and Pontecorvo’s Burn. Neither rabble-rousing politician, humanist historian or trailblazing artiste, Soderbergh’s a Pseud."

Wolverton's End of Days

Since it was mentioned in my other post and these pictures are way scarier than any horror movie that's on TV tonight, here are Basil Wolverton's end-of-the-world illustrations. The originals were in black and white and are preferable to the colorized versions by Wolverton's son, they these'll do.

These images were flat-out stolen from Wolvertoon.com, but I've seen them posted a ton of other sites. A book of these and other Biblical images has been talked about and teased for awhile now and that would be great to see because, as Monte Wolverton's site mentions, this is not the complete set (and they seem out of order, image four seems like it should go way earlier...).

Required Halloween Reading: Basil Wolverton's Gateway to Terror

Basil Wolverton's work has always been known as grotesque (one of the turning points of his career was winning a "draw the world's ugliest women" contest). Somehow though, these aspects never got out of hand as Wolverton's work had the fun and immediacy of all cartooning, if a bit more damaged. When he was drawing goofball sci-fi adventures like Spacehawk or boxing comics with Powerhouse Pepper the elastic faces and dark-darks made it more unreal and outrageous, but when Wolverton directed his pen towards the genuinely grotesque, as he did in his mind-blowing religious work like his depiction of the apocalypse or in these Twilight Zone-esque horror tales, the results get under your skin and the atmospheric lines become palpable.

Each of these stories follow the horror anthology "twist ending" outline almost to a fault. There's some good, smart storytelling going on here, but without Wolverton to illustrate them, well they wouldn't have been hunted-down and reprinted by Dark Horse more than thirty years later (Gateway is a reprint from 1988).


The "trick" for lack of a better word, of Wolverton's art here is to lull you into a kind of stupor of appreciation, where you forget about the kinda silly storytelling or rather, just let it sort of play out, and get caught-up in the sheer weirdness of the art. His lines are never ever straight, they're straight enough, but they always wiggle around a bit, and it makes even the simple contours of a room into a panel that you hold too close to your face and fall in love with. In another sense, at least in these horror tales, the bordering-on-sloppy artwork foreshadows the chaos to come. And when something crazy or creepy or scary happens, Wolverton's art is at its best as he draws every ugly detail but still in this zany style. Not quite the same, but a little bit like Rick Geary's work as Jesse mentioned, where the fun, cartoon-ishness of it makes it feels scarier and weirder. Look at the frame below from the titular story and the way Wolverton draws flesh slipping of a face:


Wolverton's people too are over-the-top and ugly, but they're ugliness comes from real-life. Every weirdo or creep looks like a weirdo or creep you could see or have seen in real-life. Old people say dumb stuff like "I wouldn't want to run into this guy in a dark alley", well, Wolverton draws pretty much everyone in a way that makes you think that. The brilliance in doing so is that since these are horror stories, you expect the villains or "bad guys" or whatever to be monster-like. Instead, they're just a little uglier, a little more crack-eyed, and wrinkled than everybody else, grounding it in a little bit of reality.


In "One of Our Graveyards Is Missing!", everyone's in a panic and looking stressed-out because somehow, the town graveyard's just a giant pit now, but a mysterious man seen near the graveyard moments before it disappeared has a particularly horrifying presence. His presence isn't that scary on its own, but how he enters the story and his context aid Wolverton's drawing and the story's atmosphere. The same weird feeling you get when you've read about a crime that's been committed and then you see on the news they've caught the guy. You're not sure if he's scary as shit because you know the crime he committed or if he's scary outside of that too.

But the story that's like, palpably horrifying and icky-feeling, is "They Crawl By Night". The story's about a guy who hallucinates night-time visits from these gross, crawling crab guys and then it turns out, hasn't hallucinated it at all (again with the trick horror comic endings). A great deal of this story happens at night and so, the interiors are darker but because Wolverton's work is all line and ink, the panels aren't necessarily darker, they've just got more shadow and even more lines which adds an eerie unreal feeling. Something I can't exactly describe makes these images come to life in that sense that you begin thinking about crab guys sneaking into your bedroom at night and say, lift your feet off the ground or close the nearest door to you.

Belated B-Day Wishes to Joe Kubert

Joe Kubert turned 82 yesterday, we forgot. Happy Birthday, Joe!

***Here's a Madman pin-up that doesn't seem to already be on the internet. Madman hatched from an egg with this weird God-like Tor with an Amish beard character hovering over-top? Awesome and sort of what Mike Allred's series is all about.


***One aspect of Kubert's work that seems to be forever overshadowed by his ridiculously consistent and brilliant illustration, is his writing. One foot's firmly planted in the over-excited language of old comics, but Kubert's writing has a hard-edged poetry to it too, like the writing of old crime and pulp novels, from which of course, a lot of the "comics" style of writing came from in the first place. He hits a sentence or two in every book that's perfectly written and his narration especially, always has an odd, complicated interaction with his images. He's a great, ego-less storyteller, so often, just by the art, exactly what's going on is really clear and as a result, his narration adds a strange, emotional level to what's going on, it's more than informative and it's more than internal dialogue too. Here's a pretty hilarious caricature of Kubert:


***
Kubert's writing often has a resigned inevitability to it and his art's fairly realistic, but he has a brilliant imagination, best exemplified in the weirdo creatures and monster he creates. Similar to the stuff I was blabbing about above--the tension between the words and the image--the creatures seem even more alive and surreal because Kubert's writing generally go for realism.

Powerful Panels: Tomb of Dracula #2 by Gene Colan

About the only constant in Tomb of Dracula is Gene Colan's artwork. Writers came and went--especially early on--but he's there from #1's clever re-telling and updating of the Dracula story to those late issues when for some reason, Dracula and the Silver Surfer are hanging out. Like so many of the post-Kirby/Ditko 60s and 70s mainstream artists, a superficial look at the art leads to the assumption that it was all very similar. This wasn't helped by pop artist Roy Lichtenstein's immediate appropriation of comics art, turning it into kitsch before it ever really go to breathe, but the real excitement of the era's art lies in the details; subtle differentiations between artists, what they did to make an end-run around the brutal, bottom line demands of comics. Colan's work stands out for being a little darker, with thicker lines, more black and a penchant for Ditko-esque, quasi-psychedelic imagery to punctuate a scene of action. This is what made him ideal for both Howard the Duck and Tomb of Dracula.

Of course, in a lot of ways, the two series weren't that different. There's a over-the-top edge to Tomb as the series navigates being really fascinating and scary and a little goofy and over-the-top too. And the series was smart to not shy away from that absurd stuff because putting Dracula at the center of the comic basically sucks him of all his mystique and turns him into a melodramatic, old-as shit weirdo.

On the the final page of issue #2, in the panels building up to the issue's end, Dracula sees dawn approaching and makes his way back to his coffin. Main character Frank Drake though, isn't even concerned with Dracula because he just had to kill Jeanie, his girlfriend who got bit at the end of issue #1. There are other moments like this that cuts Dracula down to size or like, temporarily demand him irrelevant to the narrative. In the first issue, Drake thwacks Drac in the head with a silver make-up compact and we get a pretty hilarious close-up of Dracula angrily holding his temple.

Here, Dracula has a giant, villain-like speech and no one cares: "Know this Frank Drake--you've won but a battle...in the final analysis, the game is mine--as it always has been--will always be--Mine! Forever mine!". I won't get snarky and make fun of comic book melodrama, but what is strange there is how Dracula has to tell him that "in the final analysis", Drake will lose. It's weird and obsessive and sort of confounds his own threats. It's like how in the song "My Way", Sinatra talks about how "the record" will "show that [he] did it [his] way". The record?! This rugged individualist guy is going to defer to "the record"?

But again, this whole scene isn't about Dracula, it's about Frank Drake, whose whole life just got fucked the fuck up. He stabs his girlfriend and then watches her melt from the very dawn light that Dracula split to avoid. Colan, in the first of the three panels directly above, shows her melting by little dashes of ink, like particles of life spreading and dissipating. Some real E.C Comics style stuff, especially her swirling word balloon, but she's not screaming in terror, even in these final moments, she tries to comfort Frank, telling him, "It's better this way...I don't hurt anymore...". The next panel goes wide and we see Jeanie as a disgusting mess on the floor. Drake sobs and his best friend--and the guy Drake stole Jeanie from--Clifton Graves holds tight to a curtain, in his own way equally shocked. There's nothing really "comic book" about this frame, it's just real. It's clear something very horrible happened, but their posing is awkward and realistic and not melodramatic. The narration reads like the action slug in a screenplay, succinctly and vaguely poetically describing exactly what we see in the frame--"Drake sinks to his knees..."--and then adding a note about "understand[ing] the full meaning of futility..."; for that frame at least, it's some black and white, sad-bastard Scandanavian movie contemplating "the full meaning of futility".

And then the comic does something very odd. For the final panel of the issue, it goes to an exterior shot of Big Ben and a horse statue with rays of sun peaking out, as the narrator pontificates on "revenge". The image and the narration have no obvious connection and it has little to no relationship to the previous panels either. Showing Big Ben and the statue is not working on some symbolic level and so, there's no direct correlation between what's happened and where the comic book leaves you. It's almost like the horrible scene we just experienced was too much and the comic had to leave the room with two grief-stricken guys and a melted girlfriend in it and get some air.

By the way, the Gene Colan Tribute book comes out tomorrow and although it's $9.99, it's probably worth picking up. If not for the bunch of Colan-illustrated stories and artist reminisces, for the fact that the money made on the book will go towards Gene Colan's medical bills. All roads lead back to Robert Kirkman's silly "vlog" manifesto thingy as of late, but this book's a pretty good example of a big evil comic book company helping out one of their aging slaves...

Joe Kubert's Tor: "A Prehistoric Odyssey"

i. Procuring the Initial Goods
Right now, Joe Kubert’s Tor: A Prehistoric Odyssey is my favorite monthly comic. I purchased issue #1 on a whim, in a very awkward situation. During the time when I was trying to find Beanworld back issues and graphic novels, I visited my hometown comic store, Superior Comics in Dover, Delaware. As the middle-aged, borderline autistic sales clerk is looking up Beanworld issues on some irrelevant comics message board, I fumbled for something to buy on the new release shelf. Ultimately, I decided on the first issue of Final Crisis because Grant Morrison was writing it and the first issue of Tor (“The Outcast”) because I liked the art. I was just happy to just get the fuck out of there without feeling bad about not supporting the store. I never finished Final Crisis and didn’t read Tor #1 until about a month ago, when I read that issue and the next three in one shot; I couldn't wait for the next issue--#5, “The Sacrifice”--and was additionally dissappointed when I found out it came out the week following Labor Day, delaying its release to Thursday. Thursday also happens to be the day when I am in class for almost the entire day from 8am to 5:30 pm. I sat through my last class that day knowing that Tor #5 would be waiting at my apartment!

ii. The Inner-Workings of Issue 5
Upon reading, I concluded that it is my favorite Tor issue yet! Judging from the blue tinge in the stones on the cover, I half expected that there may be something happening with ice. 100% Incorrect. Tor four ended with a cliffhanger; Tor was being held hostage by these violent troll dudes. In addition to his hostage status, the trolls were also detaining his buddies, charcoal chic and baby friend troll. In this issue, it becomes apparent that the trolls were baiting a group of raptors to the tied up friends with fruits and vegetables. When the raptors appear, Tor tricks them into biting him free from the vines binding him. Once he’s free, he frees his buddies and then, fights off these raptors. While fighting, the trolls, who are hiding in the tree above, drop a club to assist him in his fight. There is an internal problem within the troll clan; the shaman leader says that Tor is evil but the lower class trolls think he can’t be evil if he endangers himself for others. The lower class trolls push the shaman out of the tree. After defeating the raptors, the remaining trolls want to know if he will be their leader. Tor makes it clear that the job is not for him. The issue comes to a final cliffhanger when Tor, charcoal chic, and baby friend troll start their journey beyond the mountains, back to Tor’s home, when a shadow large enough to block out the sun comes over them.

iii. Tor on the Cover of Tigerbeat
There is only one more issue left in this series and that sucks. I’m excited to formally find out what this huge-ass thing is because Kubert’s monsters are great and always fit perfectly with the plot. More subjectively, I’ll be sad to see the series end because Tor is one sexy dude with great fashion sense. His little loincloth is just ratty enough to be bad-ass instead of homo and his boots…HIS BOOTS. The boots are great because they are like sacks around his feet with straps that keep them tied higher on his leg; high-top moccasins. The only thing I can liken them too is some Tatooine desert shit. Furthermore, his muscles are not TOO muscular; he’s ripped but it’s in proportion to his body and doesn’t give focus to just his arms, but I digress...Kubert’s writing is essentially what makes Tor attractive. Writing the comic from a third person point of view helps to look at Tor objectively. Kubert’s writing as well as Tor’s actions indicate his intelligence and capability. Males inevitably take on perceived roles in communities (i.e. social roles) which is one way that females judge the quality of males. Tor does, in my opinion, the best thing which is to differentiate himself from the group in a positive way and he does, by being a smarter, more efficient outsider. Looking at things from this perspective is something I learned in my behavioral ecology class and I think I can find some truth in it but I think that’s for another discussion.

iv. Goon Babble For Goons
Kubert is a great artist and thus far, his style works cohesively throughout issues of Tor. It has enough lines to be truly “action packed” but doesn’t add an extra level of distracting detail. He keeps his colors within a spectrum and collectively, its all very tonal. Green and brown being the most prominent colors in the comic, they are always used in dull shades. The greens never seem to have more than about 15% yellow and extra white. Likewise, the brown shades go light on the red which overall, adds to the cool tone of the colors. As I am considering the color theory of Tor, I’m finding it interesting to consider how the colors are connoted with being old or prehistoric. It seems to me that throughout the four issues, the covers have been increasing in blue hue. The first cover has brown stones around the outside and a very warm, reddish-brown tone. Not only do the stones change in color from issue to issue, but also the actions in the center of the stones becomes increasingly busy. The increased levels of whites used in the color scheme, is what I think, is key to keeping the colors “old”. As we age, pigment leaves our hair. As clothing is washed and worn, pigment fades. Maybe this is obvious but I think it plays a major role in setting the stage for the “prehistory odyssey”.

v. The "Special Features" Are Very Special
In a few of the issues, there are these really incredible, mixed-media type splash pages/dream sequences wherein Kubert extends the art of Tor beyond just really great comics illustration. I call them the "special features". The “special feature(s)” of issue #5 are full-page, mixed-media drawings of Tor’s fears. I’m going to go ahead and make a maybe stupid guess about what he uses in these pictures. I think that these are drawn directly on the light brown colored paper using ink for the fine lines, watercolor for the paint, and white conte crayon for the white highlighting.
I think that the aspect that I really like most about the drawings is they don’t hide the complications and connectedness of fears. Fear is essentially foundationless (maybe this is just goonbabble, now). Things become increasingly scary as you realize their connectedness to other details and this seems to be expressed though the gelling of the drawings within the frame In combination with the words, the fear is truly represented. The drawings also serve as a great contrast to the art, color, and frame-full pages that make up the rest of the issue.


vi. Joe Kubert Is An O.G
September 18 marks Kubert’s 82nd birthday and A Prehistoric Odyessy may just be the last thing he ever produces. Born in 1926, he moved to Brooklyn, NY from Poland with his family shortly after he was born, arriving just in time for the depression. He was lucky enough to be born into a family that encouraged his drawing abilities and he landed his first gig when he was almost twelve years old, making 5 dollars a page. In 1976, he was started his three-year technical school for cartoonists. In 2008, it’s just hard for me to imagine a man of 82 years having such a steady hand. Maybe that is ageism but it just seems phenomenal to me that someone who is so old would still have such a passion and understanding of his craft. Kubert certainly won’t die having copped out on anything.

xxx. BONUS FEATURES

a. TOR IN FASHION
Givenchy Boots from the Autumn/Winter 2008-2009 runway collection that are similar in overall shape and idea, Tor's less structured moccasin boots but still strappy


You know...sometimes you see a bitch and you like, "damn, why her headband all down?" Then, you may be like...well, Chloe Sevigny's headband was like that in Vincent Gallo's Brown Bunny. But really, it's TOR. And he had a REASON. His shit was MANGEY. Anyhow, next BONUS feature.

b. MONIQUE'S SEXIEST TOR PANELS