Even among fans of his comic art masterpiece, Little Nemo in Slumberland (a group of whom I count myself an ardent member), few people are aware of the editorial cartoons of Winsor McCay.

During his stints as cartoonist for The Cincinnati Enquirer and The New York Herald, and through syndicated work for the Hearst papers, McCay did a remarkable series of editorial and allegorical cartoons. More social commentary than topically editorial, they were anti-materialism, anti-laziness, anti-drug and pro hard work and duty.

The best thing about them, of course, is that they were wonderfully drawn by one of one of the best draftsmen in the history of cartooning and comics.

In 2005 Fantagraphics published a terrific collection of McCay’s black and white work, Daydreams and Nightmares: The Fantastic Visions of Winsor McCay, 1898-1934 (more here), that is unfortunately out of print, but can be found used for essentially original cover price ($20).

In addition to McCay’s social commentary/editorial cartoons, the book includes pages of his early strips like Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, A Pilgrim’s Progress, Day Dreams and Little Sammy Sneeze. (Sunday Press published wonderful large-scale version of the latter, with color; my article here.)

Only a smattering of McCay material is online, but the generous and enigmatic “Mr. Door Tree” has published a number of McCay’s editorial cartoons on his blog Golden Age Comic Book Stories. Be sure to click on the initial images to see the large versions of the drawings.

Wonderful stuff.

[Link via BitterOldPunk on MetaFilter]

Bill Watterson, the artist and writer of Calvin and Hobbes, to my mind the best late 20th Century comic strip after Pogo ceased publication in 1975, is almost as notable for the things he didn’t do as for his actual accomplishments.

He didn’t accept the idea of merchandising his popular characters to the hilt, and resisted his syndicate’s constant pressure to do so, allowing only the publication of book collections of the strip and calendars. No stuffed characters, no Hobbes dolls hung upside-down with suction cups to the inside of station wagon windows, no notebooks, sticker books, T-shirts, TV specials or Burger King soda cups. Just the strip, pure and simple.

And it was pure and simple, a classic humor strip, brilliantly written and wonderfully drawn. He didn’t overcomplicate it, try to make it too topical or stretch it beyond its natural limits. When he felt the strip had run its course, Watterson retired, and again resisted any desire on the part of the syndicate to keep it alive artificially and milk it into oblivion.

Watterson himself did not seek the spotlight, preferring to let his characters do the talking, and rarely gave interviews. There was a brief interview with Watterson published in yesterday’s Celveland Plain Dealer (which I believe is his hometown newspaper). The interview was conducted by email, and is very short and not particularly revealing, but worth noting just as an event.

You’ll see it marked as the first in 20 years, but that discounts the question and answer with fans that his book publisher, Andrews McMeel, conducted in 2005 to promote the release of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes.

The cleveland.com site has also posted a selection of rarely seen editorial cartoons by Watterson from his stint with Sun Newspapers in the 1980’s. Unfortunately, as in the images above, the reproductions in their slideshow have apparently been poorly resized and lost some of their original line quality.

At any rate, it’s a good excuse to stop, pick up a Calvin and Hobbes book you haven’t read in a while, and be reminded that “there’s treasure everywhere”.

[Via Daring Fireball]

Nate Simpson is a concept artist who has worked in the gaming industry since 1993. He has worked for companies like The Dreamers Guild, Taldren, GoPets Inc. and Gas Powered Games.

His credits include leading the art team for Demigod, a 2009 game from Gas Powered Games and Stardock, from which you can see an image in the Concepts section of is web site.

According to a short note on his site, Simpson is “…currently taking year off to learn how to make comics”. Judging from the sample pages he has posted, particularly those in the section of his site for “New Comics“, which are for a an endeavor Simpson calls “Project Waldo”, he is learning quite well indeed.

Simpson’s comic art sensibilities are distinctly European, having a feeling in keeping with some French and Belgian comics artists (which is a Good Thing in my book).

When clicking through the galleries on his site, click on an image to make it larger and then step through with the arrows. Much of the appeal is in the rendering and contrast between levels of line weight in the inks. This is again more in keeping with European (or Japanese) comics than mainstream American comics, in which line weight is frequently varied throughout the delineation of every figure.

You can find even larger images, including inked pages prior to the application of color, on Simpson’s blog, which is named for and devoted to Project Waldo.

His tagline for the blog reads “Follow along as I learn how to make a comic by making a comic. I hope you’re not in a hurry.”

Those who aren’t in a hurry, and can take the time to go back to the beginning of Simpson’s posts and follow through, will find a good deal of insight and valuable information that he has accrued in his learning process, and offered up in the course of the past year.

The image above shows page two of the story, along with detail crops below of inks and final color from the lower center portion of the middle panel. (See the original large image on Simpson’s blog here.)

Simpson puts a great deal of detail into some elements, leaving others open to be carried by the application of color. His background landscapes have more in common with Bruegel’s landscape drawings than with mainstream comics.

The color itself is in the style of European comics albums, bringing to mind the work of Moebius in particular (when he is coloring his own work, not handing it over to someone else to bury under inappropriate Beltran-like over-rendering, but I digress; that’s a topic for another post).

Word is that Simpson has gotten expressions of interest from some publishers, but there are no specifics yet, and it has now been a year since his first post on the Project Waldo, and he is only up to page 8 (out of how many pages total, I don’t know). It looks like those of us who, like myself, are looking forward to reading the finished story, will also have to not be in a hurry.

In the meanwhile, whether in concept art or comics, Simpson is a artist to watch.

[Via Drawn!]

Stephen Bissette is an American comics artist known for his drawings of monsters and dinosaurs and his work on horror comics titles, in particular for several award winning series of DC Comic’s Swamp Thing with writer Alan Moore.

The home page of Bissette’s site serves as a blog, though there is also a specific blog section called MYRANT, and he also maintains an archive of his old version of MYRANT.

There is a Gallery of comic pages, though they are too small to really see his drawing style unless you engage the “Full Screen” mode at lower left of the slide show. There is also a gallery of his original art for sale on ComicArtFans.com.

The current site also includes a new online comic series, King of Monster Isle, and there is a Comic Archive of some of his previous online comics and sketches.

Bissette currently teaches classes in drawing and comic art at the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont (see my 2007 post on the Center for Cartoon Studies).

A series of videos from two of Bissette’s CCS lecture/demos are viewable on YouTube (images above, links at the end of this post), in which he demonstrates various comic rendering and inking techniques, including markers, brush and pen. He also shows techniques for working back into inked drawings with white out dispensers and by scratching with razor blades.

The demos include segments in which Bissette works on two of his illustrations for Joseph A. Citro’s The Vermont Monster Guide (more info here). A shorter series of video demos are here on his web site.

[Video link via Lexington KY Comic Creators Group, King of Monster Isle link via Paleoblog]

As I pointed out in my 2007 article on Cover Browser, comic book covers have a singular focus: to make you notice the cover, pick up the printed pamphlet or booklet to which it is affixed, slap down your hard earned dollars, and run home clutching it to your chest, cackling maniacally with glee at the prospect of the brain tantalizing wonders that lie within.

OK, well maybe you just put it in a bag, but the main part of that is the slapping down hard earned cash part; and covers have long been considered a crucial element in selling comics (as with any printed material), to the point where specialized artists are often called in to do the cover instead of the art team who created the actual story, and art directors often sweat and fuss over them and ask the artists for repeated revisions.

Comic book covers inherited their traditions in attention getting, sometimes lurid, imagery from the pulp magazines of the early 20th Century; but the art of making arresting comic book covers has become more subtle, and modern “grabbers” often utilize themes and styles that would have been unrecognizable to the sensibilities of the pulp artists and many of the comic cover artists of the late 20th Century.

Here is a list from Kevin Melrose, of the ROBOT 6 blog on Comic Book Resources, of his picks for The 50 best covers of 2009. As always with “best of” lists, it’s a jumping off point for discussion and conjecture, but serves as an interesting cross section of modern comic covers. The covers shown in the article can be clicked on for larger versions.

You also view his list of The 25 best comic covers of 2008.

For a dive into history, check out Cover Browser (see my article on Cover Browser).

(See the article for cover credits on the images above.)

Ordinarily, concept art for film is created as a means of visualizing scenes before they are staged and filmed; giving directors, designers and production companies a guide as they develop the components necessary to actually bring the scene to to the screen.

However, according to Borys Kit of The Hollywood Reporter, this is a case of specialized concept art being utilized at a much earlier stage — to sell the film idea to the studio.

Producer Lionel Wigram had the idea for the action hero take on the Sherlock Holmes tradition, but felt that a written story treatment wasn’t sufficient to get the idea across to the studio executives.

He contacted Gregory Noveck at DC Comics and asked for a recommendation for an artist who could help him convey the idea visually. Noveck suggested John Watkiss, an artist with experience in both comics and movie concept art (see my previous post on John Watkiss).

Working together they created a comic book like pamphlet with illustrations that got across a visual and dramatic punch that sold the movie to the studio. (The comic-like format led to rumors for a while that a Watkiss-illustrated Sherlock Holmes graphic novel was in the offing, but unfortunately that was not the case.)

Watkiss used dramatically staged ink and tone drawings, heavy with chiaroscuro, to convey both the mood and action intended in the production.

The drawings themselves are an unusual style for concept art, but work beautifully for the purpose (and would have made for a terrific graphic story).

Many of the original illustrations are currently on display, and for sale, at Gallery Nucleus in Alhambra, CA, in an exhibit called The Art of the Motion Picture: “Sherlock Holmes” by Jon Watkiss, that runs until January 18 2010.

If you haven’t seen the movie, you might consider some of the images plot spoilers.

[Via io9]

Anyone who has read my previous post about comics art great Al Williamson, knows that he is high on my personal list of adventure comics artists, but I have to admit that even I was surprised by the new book from Flesk publications, Al Williamson’s Flash Gordon: A Lifelong Vision of the Heroic, that collects all of his art for several comic book incarnations of Alex Raymond’s iconic space hero.

I had seen a few of the the stories collected here, but by no means all. The 5 or 6 collections I have of Williamson’s work hinted at even more terrific Flash Gordon pieces by Williamson, with short excerpts and individual panels, but until I got this collection I didn’t realize how consistently amazing his Flash Gordon work was.

In terms of his wildly imagined and intricately detailed science fiction settings, it easily rivals his stunning work for the classic EC Comics stories from the 1950’s, but the sophisticated renderings of figures and faces from some of the later stories bring with them the elegance of his work from the Secret Agent Corrigan strips.

In many ways, Williamson was the inheritor of Alex Raymond’s role as one of the artists who carried the superb draftsmanship and refined pen and ink techniques of the turn of the century illustrators into the 20th Century world of adventure comics

The book collects three periods during which Williamson worked on Raymond’s most recognizable character, from the King Comics stories of the 1960’s, the 1980’s adaptation of the campy motion picture (of which it was by far the best aspect) and the easily missed Marvel Comics miniseries from 1994, as wall as including much supplementary and related art in its 256 pages.

I have Williamson’s 1980’s Flash Gordon movie adaptation as published by Golden Books, in which the printing is terrible and the art is lost in sloppy over-saturated color and poor reproduction values in general. I didn’t realize how beautiful the art for that story actually was until I saw the same story printed here in it’s original glorious black and white.

This kind of comic art, when printed in black and white, is like having a book of classic pen and ink illustration that happens to tell terrific pulp adventure stories.

If you look at the pages in the book you’ll see that in many places the black areas are shades of dark gray rather than solid black. This is not because the quality of the printing is in any way off; Flesk Publications is a small niche-publisher devoted to creating superb editions of books about classic illustrators and comics artists, and the standards of book design and printing from Flesk are always high.

Those areas are, in fact, not quite black because the quality of the printing is superb, and the majority of the art has been reproduced not from stats or mechanical copies, as wold be the usual procedure with this kind of collection, but from brand new scans of the original artwork, allowing you to actually see the tones of ink as laid down by the artist! Wonderful.

Mark Schultz, who acknowledges being tremendously inspired by Williamson’s work, was instrumental in working with John Fleskes to assemble the book, and contributes the major essay. There is an interview with Schultz about the collection on Newsarama.

For admirers of great adventure comics art (and I obviously include myself here), Al Williamson’s Flash Gordon: A Lifelong Vision of the Heroic is one of the must have books this year. It can be found in better bookstores and comics shops, or ordered from Amazon and other online bookstores, as well as directly from the Flesk Publications.

For more on Al Williamson, see my previous post.

Unmasked is a Halloween themed cover and four page comic story (two double page spreads) for the November 2nd issue of The New Yorker, by Chris Ware.

In a fashion Chris Ware fans have come to expect, the hilarious but subtle cover leads seamlessly into the story, a poignant look at generational and family relations, told in his sublime graphic style.

Ware constructs comics in the way a fine woodworker might construct an inlaid box, crafting each element with refined precision, interlocking elements that might seem unrelated to form a unified whole. Notice the parallels between panels in the second two-page spread, the interweaving of the panel designs with the exterior and interior of the masks and the repeated theme of the phone, carried forward form the cover. Also take note of Ware’s superb control of color and his interesting abandonment of perspective for isometric projection in many panels.

Also note that Ware manages to tell a complete short story in four pages, something many contemporary comics writers can’t seem to do in 6 or more 24-page issues.

Beautiful work.

[Via Daring Fireball]

Al Williamson is one of the unsung greats of comics art. Well, perhaps “undersung” is a better word (if it is a word), in that those aware of his contributions are usually great admirers, but his work is not as widely known among contemporary comics readers as it should be (not by a long shot).

Williamson occupies a unique place in the history of comics, acting as a kind of bridge between the dazzling full page newspaper adventure comics of the early 20th Century (and the traditions of the great 19th Century pen and ink illustrators that they embodied) and the modern comics upheaval and revolutions of the late 20th Century.

At the early stages of his career, Williamson fell smack in the middle, going to work for the notorious EC comics in 1952, where he was the youngster amid legendary comics greats like Frank Frazetta, Roy Krenkel, Wally Wood and others. His striking science fiction work graced the pages and covers of EC titles like Weird Science and Weird Fantasy, and influenced the generations of comic artists who were growing up at the time, goggle-eyed with flashlights under the covers, reading his lavishly illustrated tales of outer space adventures and outlandish monsters.

Prior to his work with EC, Williamson studied with Burne Hogarth, and assisted him on pages for his Tarzan Sunday newspaper strip. Newspaper adventure comics were dying at the time, however, under pressure from other forms of entertainment and economic squeezing from newspaper editors, and what would have seemed Williamson’s natural place became something of a dead end.

Though he worked within the increasingly restrictive format of small daily adventure news paper strips off and on for years, he also moved into comic books, where adventure comics went and morphed into something different in the middle of the century, and he followed them into the latter half of the century, working for the Warren comics magazines (image above, 2nd from top) and Marvel Comics in its heyday, where he was known in particular for his work on a series of Star Wars comics.

All the while he carried forward his love for the great adventure comics, and especially his admiration for the work of Alex Raymond, creator of Flash Gordon, and one of the all time greats of comics art (more on Alex Raymond in a future post).

Williamson had a chance to step into Raymond’s considerably large shoes on several occasions, taking over his spy adventure newspaper strip Secret Agent X-9, which became Secret Agent Corrigan and moved from film-noir to James Bond style adventures (image above, bottom and detail), ably scripted by Archie Goodwin. He also assisted John Prentice, who took the reins of Raymond’s Rip Kirby strip.

Williamson worked on several versions of Raymond’s star character Flash Gordon (image above, top), the strip that had obviously been such and influence on him, from the amazing King Comics version in the 1960’s to the Marvel Comics version in the ’90s (more on Williamson’s Flash Gordon work in a subsequent post).

Unfortunately, though there are scattered resources, I can’t find a major repository of Williamson’s work in the web, so it’s hard to convey the grace of his figures, the elegance of his pen lines, the chiaroscuro drama of his spotted blacks, the dynamics of his compositions or the ground breaking inventiveness of his storytelling and panel layouts. I also can’t lead you directly to great examples of his astonishingly rendered details, applied with a delicate finesse that never leaves the impression of gratuitous unnecessary fiddling, unlike so many lesser artists whose grasp of the use of pen and ink textures will never approach Williamson’s.

The only thing I can supply, apart from those resources I can list, is a hearty recommendation that those of you with any appreciation for great adventure comics art, or graphic stories told with superb draftsmanship and a subtle command of the visual language of the great pen and ink illustrators, who are not yet familiar with Williamson, treat yourself to one of the many printed collections available that feature his work.

There is a recent book collecting some of his short story work, titled Al Williamson Adventures, from Insight Studios (more here). The limited edition hardcover has apparently come and gone, and I’m unsure of the status of the softcover edition (if it’s out, Insight needs to promote it better, I couldn’t even find mention of it on their web site.)

Fortunately, there is a great new collection from Flesk Publications, Al Williamson’s Flash Gordon: A Lifelong Vision of the Heroic. This book is so terrific I’m going to make it the topic of a separate post.

It’s a common practice among contemporary comics artists to do commissioned sketches or even fully realized drawings for fans and collectors.

Often collectors will commission drawings by a number of artists on a single theme, and create over time a collection of themed works by an extensive and diverse list of creators.

Such is the case with the collection displayed on a site titled Hey Oscar Wilde! It’s Clobberin’ Time!, by a collector whose name I don’t know (email address suggests “sgettis”, presumably S. Gettis).

The collection is centered on the theme of asking each artist to portray a favorite literary figure, author or character. This collection has been in progress since 1998, and has been displayed on the web in several forms. I wrote about it in one of its previous incarnations back in 2005 as Artistic interpretations of Literary Figures.

Since then the collection has continued to grow and now includes an impressive list of artists and a fascinatingly diverse list of literary figures. You can browse the collection by either from lists in the right sidebar.

The collection includes a number of comics artists and illustrators I’ve featured previously on Lines and Colors. In the list below, the first link is to the original drawing on the Hey Oscar Wilde! site, second is to my post about the artist.

Images above: Oscar Wilde by Stephen Silver, Alan Moore by Frazer Irving, Captain Nemo by Chris Sprouse, Jim Harrison by Tommy Lee Edwards, Alice in Wonderland by Steve Rude (in Gibson Girl style), Hayao Miyazaki by Kazu Kibuishi (see my post on Hayao Miyazaki), Frankenstein’s Monster by William Stout, Raymond Chandler by Adam Hughes and George Orwell by Kevin Nowlan.

Addendum: the collector’s name is Steven Gettis. [Thanks to Dennis van Zwieten for the tip.]