Roger Langridge, the brilliantly off-kilter UK cartoonist that I wrote about back in 2006, recently posted to his blog some comics that were done for Nickelodeon Magazine, in which he draws on his fondness for the great classics of newspaper comics to re-cast Sponegbob Squarepants in the mold of Winsor McCay’s and Little Nemo in Slumberland (image above, bottom), George Herriman’s The Family Upstairs (above, top) and Krazy Kat, Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates; and others like Peanuts and Buck Rogers.

Don’t miss the chance to lose your day being delighted and diverted by the rest of Langridge’s blog, The Hotel Fred, as well as his website and the assortment of comics therein.

[Link via io9]

Ah Pook is Here (originally Ah Puch is Here) is a collaborative graphic narrative by writer William S. Burroughs and artist Malcolm McNeill. I was tempted to say “experimental graphic narrative”, but using the word “experimental” and the name William S. Burroughs in the same sentence is redundant.

Named for Ah Puch, the Mayan Death God, the never-finished book was to be part comic, part illustrated book. The comic story segments were drawn as a continuous panorama (top three images above, with detail below), a format inspired by the Mayan Codices, which can be thought of as graphic narrative or a kind of comic book.

McNeill worked on parts of the panorama out of sequence, emphasizing the non-linear narrative and in keeping with the story’s time-travel theme. (For more on McNeill and the project, see my previous post on Malcolm McNeill.)

McNeill didn’t know Burroughs or his work when they first started collaborating; initially without meeting, on a project called The Unspeakable Mr. Hart.

The story, which ran in the English magazine Cyclops until it folded, was eventually expanded into the book project. McNeill and Burroughs began collaborating directly, and worked on the “word/image novel” on and off for seven years before it was abandoned for lack of funding (in the 1970’s, “graphic novel” was a not a widely recognized term or a viable marketplace option).

Burroughs’ text was published by itself in a more conventional form as Ah Pook is Here.

A good deal of art was created for the book, however, and some of it is on display McNeill’s site and on a site devoted specifically to the Ah Pook is Here project.

There is an interview with McNeill online, conducted by Larry Sawyer, that includes larger versions of some of the images from the project, as well as some other examples of McNeill’s art.

McNeill has written an account, not yet published, of his collaboration with Burroughs titled Observed While Falling.

McNeill did a year and a half of research for the Ah Pook is Here project, combing through the Mexican Cultural Library in London and researching the artwork of Frederick Catherwood, a real-life Indiana Jones with a paint box (see my post on Frederick Catherwood).

Other artistic influences seemed to be less from mainstream or European comics and more from art history, in particular the horrific visions of Hieronymus Bosch, shadowy gothic art, mid-20th Century book illustration and the deep chiaroscuro of the Baroque, lending the panels a unique visual tone.

There will be a show of artwork from the project, The Lost Art of Ah Pook is Here, at Salomon Arts gallery in New York (Tribeca) from November 14 to December 14, 2008.

[Note: sites linked here contain some NSFW images]

Just a quick note that there is a new extensive exhibit of works from demented genius cartoonist and underground comix pioneer Robert Crumb at the Institute for Contemporary Art here in Philadelphia.

I’ll write a post about the show, and Robert Crumb, in more detail after I’ve had a chance to see the exhibit, but I wanted to give a heads-up about it now for those within traveling distance.

The ICA site has a list of events and public programs related to the show, including tours, a showing of the film Crumb, and a lecture by cartoonist Charles Burns.

The exhibit is called “R. Crumb’s Underground” and features over 100 works. It runs until December 7, 2008.

Harry Grant Dart was an American illustrator and comics artist active in the late 1800’s and early 1900s.

He worked for the Boston Herald and then the New York World, where he eventually held the position of Art Editor. He was one of the newspaper sketch artists who sketched important events for newspapers prior to the use of photographs (see my post on The Illustrators of La Domenica del Corriere). He also maintained an outside career as a magazine illustrator, working for titles like Life and Judge.

As a cartoonist Dart created a comic strip called The Explorigator, about a an airship staffed by a crew of adventurous kids. Meant to be a competitor for Winsor McCay’s spectacular strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, The Explorigator only ran for 14 weeks in 1908.

There aren’t a lot of resources on Dart that I could find, but there is a treasure of an archive of The Explorigator on the Barnicle Press site; sadly, not in color, but still a stunning example of this detailed, beautifully drawn and wildly imaginative strip.

The strip featured Dart’s penchant for drawing fantastic Victorian era aircraft, which also showed up in his other illustrations, like the image above (large version here on Flickr), done for a magazine called The All-Story.

I love the fact that he’s given us a liberated, fashionably attired Victorian era woman pilot, years before women could vote.

There are a number of strong communities of comics art (those of you in the expensive seats read: “graphic storytelling”) in various parts of the world, each with its own stylistic leanings. Some, like Japan, France and Belgium are more familiar to us here in the U.S. than others, like Italy, the UK, South America, China, Korea and the Phillipines.

Unlike comics artists in China, Korea and most other countries in the Western Pacific rim that produce comics, artists in the Philippines took their primary influences not from Japanese Manga styles but from Spanish, South American and North American influences.

In the early 1970’s established artists from the Phillipines, many of them with with their own studios and publishing endeavors, like Alfredo Alcala, Nestor Redondo (a personal favorite), and Tony De Zuñiga began to do work for American companies like Marvel, DC and Warren.

I don’t know the details, but it may have had a lot to do with the crackdown and sanitization of the comics medium that resulted when the Marcos government declared martial law and began to outlaw or control all mass media in the country.

In the U.S., the Filipino artists’ unique styles and intense, detailed rendering brought them the immediate attention of publishers and readers, and had a dramatic impact on the American comics artists working at the time.

The elder Filipino comics artists (in the Phillipines, is was “komiks”, as there is apparently no “C” in the alphabet), soon began to bring some of their younger contemporaries into the American market. One of the most notable of these was Alex Niño, who would become a star comics (and komiks) artist in his own right.

Niño illustrated over 300 stories for publishers in the Phillipines; and in the U.S. did work for Marvel, DC, Warren, Byron Preiss and Heavy Metal magazine.

Drawing on influences that ranged from his fellow Filipino artists to golden age pen and ink illustrators like Franklin Booth and Joseph Clement Coll and science fiction illustrators like Virgil Finlay, Niño created a synthesis of pen and ink styles that he used to propel his highly imaginative flights of fantasy.

His work ranged from quietly elegant renderings to over-the-top, wildly stylized fantasies that had some of the manic energy of American underground comics.

His rendering style combined the calligraphic thin-to-thick line work common to American comics with the intensely textural rendering of pen and ink illustration, to unique effect.

In the late 80’s and early 90’s Niño’s decorative style and fertile imagination led him to doing production and design work for Disney Studios, contributing to feature animation like Treasure Planet, Mulan, The Emperor’s New Grove and Atlantis.

Auad Publishing, who I have mentioned in the past as the publisher of terrific books on Franklin Booth, Alex Toth and other illustrators and comics artists, has just released The Art of Alex Niño, a 160 page labor of love into which Auad had crammed page after page of Niño’s lavishly rendered illustrations, drawings and comics pages, including several complete short stories.

The book covers a wide range of Niño’s styles, and includes a healthy sampling of color work (perhaps a quarter of the book). As much as I enjoy his color work, it was in his black and white work, particularly in the Warren magazines, that I think Niño was able to utilize his drawing and rendering strengths, and his dramatic sense of page design, to best advantage.

The Gallery of Niño’s work on the Auad site is small, and the is no official site for Niño or large single repository of his work in the web that I’m aware of. I’ve tried to line up some other resources for you below.

In his role as one of the main analysts and thinkers on the subject of the comics art form, and the author of several widely acclaimed books on the subject in which he discusses the medium in the medium, presenting his thoughts in the form of graphic narrative; Scott McCloud has in the process become the the foremost proponent of an unsung aspect of the visual storytelling medium — its astonishing ability top convey information as well as tell a story.

The comics medium has been utilized for informational purposes for a long time, notably by the government, military and in industrial applications, where the combination of images and words can convey information more clearly, and often more rapidly, than words alone.

Rarely, if ever, has it been used at the level exhibited in McCloud’s books, Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics and Making Comics. There he utilizes comics as an informational medium with a grace, artfulness and intelligently structured approach to the graphic narrative that brings it into a different category, more akin to first rate essay writers than the prosaic uses of comics for instruction that preceded him (there are some exceptions, of course, like Larry Gornick’s Cartoon History of the Universe, but McCloud is working at a different level). See my previous post on Making Comics.

Google has now put McCloud’s expositional graphic narrative skills to use to introduce and explain the concepts behind their new open source web browser, Google Chrome, in the form of a 38 page comic book.

Presumably there are print versions of this, but you can read it online from Google’s site (and also on Blogoscoped, where it appears with a numbered page index). My one disappointment is that McCloud has conceded to the demands of print format and arranged the pages vertically, instead of fitting them to the horizontal format of the omputer screen, which is where I will wager the majority of people will wind up reading this, even though it was intended for print.

There is also a brief article on McCloud’s site about the project.

Google, apparently feeling the need to rebuff any attempts by Microsoft to use their browser market dominance to lead web users away from Google to their own search engine, has jumped into the open source browser fray, occupied by Firefox and others, with a new offering. (”Open source” means a computer application in which the underlying code is not proprietary, and can be worked on by anyone with the skill and interest to contribute, and is not “owned” in the same sense as a commercial product.)

They have gone to lengths to explain what they are doing, and how, and what they are doing differently. Normally these concepts are pretty abstract, and not that easy for an outsider to grasp; much like the concepts behind, say, graphic narrative, and how it is both similar and different from other mediums.

So Scott McCloud was an obvious and superb choice for the task. Even if you’re not particularly interested in why or how Google’s new browser works, it’s worth checking out McCloud’s graphic exposition, simply to see how it works. Look at the way he has seamlessly blended images and words to convey these abstract and sometimes technical concepts. It’s so smooth that, like his books, you have to intentionally step back to notice the process.

Like most artful of writing, it doesn’t intrude on your conscious impression of the work, but carries you along without your awareness. You almost learn in spite of yourself, a fascinating example of the power of words and pictures working together to tell a story, and/or inform and educate.

Chris Sprouse is an American comics artist whose clean elegant drawing style lies somewhere between the open line styles of European comics and the more heavily rendered styles common in American mainstream comics.

Sprouse is most noted for his work on Alan Moore’s Tom Strong, a comics series that combined some of the best elements of Lee/Kirby stories for The Fantastic Four, the early Challengers of the Unknown comics and the Doc Savage pulp novels.

The series was wonderfully fun and beautifully drawn, and Sprouse was the perfect choice to bring it to life. It was, in fact, designed around his predilections. Moore fashioned all of the titles in his ABC comics line around his co-creators strengths and drawing styles. In Sprouse’s case, that meant lots of high-tech gadgets, spaceships, and a robust family of characters. Sprouse garnered two Eisner awards for his work on the series. The image above shows one of his covers for the series in pencilled and finished form.

Unlike the tendency on the part of a lot of superhero artists to go over the top in trying to make their characters look “super”, Sprouse stays grounded in a more naturalistic portrayal of people, giving his stories an extra feeling of realism, in spite of the delightful degree of lively stylization in his drawing style. His figures, in particular, have the kind of power-under-the-surface feeling you see in athletes, as opposed to the too-musclebound-to-do-anything-but-grimace style all too common in superhero comics.

Sprouse has also worked for other major comics companies on titles like Legionnaires, Supreme and Midnighter. He drew a Star Wars story for Dark Horse, Star Wars: Splinter in the Mind’s Eye, and an under-appreciated science fiction graphic story called Ocean with Warren Ellis. His most recent project was Wildstorm’s Number of the Beast, written by Scott Beatty.

As far as I can determine, Sprouse does not have a web site or blog, so I’ve dug up what resources I can find. There is an unofficial gallery of his work on Comic Art Community.

Addendum: Johnny Bacardi was kind enough to write and let us know that Sprouse does, in fact, have a blog. (Thanks!)

I mentioned in my recent article on Giovanni Bellini that our perception of artists is often altered by the gravitational lens of closely associated artists, the more well known artists often eclipsing those who are less familiar.

When I first encountered Austin Briggs, it was in collections of his work on the Flash Gordon newspaper comic strip from the mid-20th Century. In that context, my encounters with his work elicited disappointment because I was looking for work by the strip’s creator, Alex Raymond, who I was dazzled by (and remain dazzled by, more on Raymond in a future post). I thought Briggs was “OK”, but few comics artists can stand up to Alex Raymond without being somewhat dimmed in comparison.

It wasn’t until some years later that I discovered some of Briggs’ magazine illustration art, for which he is actually better known than his comics work, and I had that “Woah! Wait a minute!” reaction and reassessed my opinion of Briggs out of Raymond’s shadow.

Briggs had worked as Raymond’s assistant on Flash Gordon, took over for him on another of his strips, Secret Agent Corrigan, and eventually succeeded him on the daily and then the Sunday Flash Gordon strips.

In the mid-1940’s Briggs moved from comics into magazine illustration. This was a time, up through the 1950’s, that was in many ways a sort of second Golden Age of American illustration (or a “Silver Age” if you will), in which artists like Al Parker were taking illustration into a post-photographic style, the representational aspect of illustration was de-emphasized and concept and design came to the fore.

Briggs straddled that transitional period and worked in both a straightforward style, that might be considered part of the Leyendecker/Rockwell tradition (and puts me in mind of Harry Anderson), and a more modern design oriented style, more akin to Al Parker.

My knowledge of illustration from that period is pretty weak, and there are not many resources for Briggs on the web. However what those resources lack in number, one of them makes up for in depth.

Leif Peng, who has become a web champion for many unsung heros of mid-20th Century illustration, has some terrific resources for Austin Briggs, including an extensive Flickr set and blog posts (and here), as well as a shorter sampler set on his site.

In the Flickr set in particular you can get a feeling for the range of Briggs’ style, from his polished renderings of a 1950’s (1956?) Chevrolet, or post-war air travel, to his striking line and color illustrations for The Dollmaker, his wonderfully energetic pen and tone drawings, this steamy scene from Good Housekeeping, and the stunning blend of illustration and design in this illustration for the Saturday Evening Post, shown in the image above, bottom.

Briggs was one of the founding members of the Famous Artists School and was elected to the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 1969.

Antonio Caparo is a Cuban born illustrator currently living and working in Toronto, Canada.

Caparo studied graphic design at the High Institute of Design in Havana and devoted much of his early career to design, but gradually sifted his focus to illustration.

He has a muscular, energetic style that uses texture and tonal contrast to make his images pop off the page. They are at once realistically dimensional and freely stylized, sometimes in a cartoon-like direction. The result is a visual charm that immediately draws you in, and invites you to linger over the image.

He often opts for a muted palette and dark base tones, allowing him to give theatrical emphasis to key elements with passages of more intense color and lighter values.

Caparo’s images are often accented not only with textural variety, but with visual extras, incidental characters and little details.

I’ve found little information about his overall technique, but I know that some of his images are digitally painted, if only from their presence in his gallery on CGSociety.

There is also a Antonio Javier Caparo gallery on the new Tor Books site that I mentioned in a recent post, and a more extensive one on Shannon Associates, along with a brief bio.

Caparo has also done some comics work, notably for the American version of Heavy Metal magazine, and apparently still keeps his hand in as a graphic designer.

Outside of the online galleries mentioned above, Caparo doesn’t appear to have dedicated web site, but he started a blog just last month.

His latest book illustration project is The Magic Thief by Sarah Prineas, for which he created characters, places, animals, decorations, a typeface and maps for both the book and an interactive minisite devoted to the book on the Harper Collins site.

John Watkiss has created visual development art for films like Disney’s Tarzan, Treasure Planet, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Fantasia 2000, Skycaptain and the World of Tomorrow and the proposed Sandman. In his movie related career he has done work for Twentieth Century Fox, Dreamworks, Francis Ford Coppola and Ridley Scott Associates.

Watkiss has also had a career as a comic book artist, doing covers and interiors for D.C., Marvel and UK publishers on titles like Batman, Conan, Deadman and Sandman.

If that isn’t enough, Watkiss also is a gallery artist. His subjects are frequently images of women painted in a modern style but in costume and compositions influenced by Victorian painting.

You can see a mixture of his film development and gallery work on his blog, though not much of the work for comics. There are unofficial galleries of his comics work on ComicArtFans and Comic Art Community.

On his blog, there are some visual development paintings for a prospective Sandman movie on this page. Despite the huge red “SOLD” across some of them, clicking on them still takes you to viewable images (image above, bottom).

Watkiss has taught anatomy and other art subjects at Royal College of Art in London, as well as other schools. He is the author of several books on anatomy. These don’t seem to be available through the usual online bookstores, but can be ordered directly from the sidebar of Watkiss’ blog. Watkiss has a drawing approach that combines fluid linework with strong underlying geometry, reminiscent of George Bridgeman or Andrew Loomis. Students of figure construction may see a similarity to Burne Hogarth as well.

The books had a dedicated site at one time, and there was also a site devoted to his gallery art, but he seems to have dropped those in favor of the bog.

There is still a site dedicated to his gallery art, a different one, The Works of John Watkiss at seventhsealproductions.com, I don’t know if it is directly connected to Watkiss or not. Here you will find his Pre-Raphaelite influenced paintings of women in (and out of) classical gowns and idyllic settings. These are my favorites of his, in which subjects and styles we are used to seeing rendered with a high degree of finish are given a lighter, more gestural approach.

There is a YouTube video of a “Levi’s spec ad featuring John Watkiss” that Marcel Duchamp fans in particular may find amusing.

A new solo exhibition of Watkiss’ work from all three aspects of his career opens on August 2nd and runs to August 10, 2008 at Gallery Nucleus in Alhambra, California.