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 os 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.]

Long time readers of Lines and Colors will know that I have a particular fondness for pen and ink drawing; a medium with a long history and many great practitioners but one that is assigned little glamour in this day of inexpensive color reproduction and computer imagery.

Melissa B. Tubbs is an Alabama based artist who takes inspiration in the woodcuts of Albrecht Durer and the traditions of past pen and ink artists, an finds particular delight in the patterns of light and shadow created by sunlight cascading against the details of architectural forms.

Her pen and ink drawings are rendered in textures and tones created in finely detailed crosshatching, used in places almost like washes. She utilizes them to give her architectural elements visceral textures of stone, brick, wood siding and other building materials. She also has a nice feeling for the textures of bark and leaves, flags and drapery and cloth awnings.

As you browse back through her blog posts, be sure to click on the images for the larger versions. Some of the older posts, in particular, feature linked images that are large enough to get a feeling for her hatching technique (image above, with detail below: Hunt Memorial, NYC).

Tubbs is represented by the Stonehenge Gallery in Montgomery, Alabama; and her drawing of Carnegie Hall in NYC will be featured in the drawing collection Strokes of Genius 2: Light and Shadow, by Rachael Rubin Wolf, to be published in October.

[Via EmptyEasel]

Cheeming Boey draws on styrofoam coffee cups with a sharpie pen.

Those of us who have a tendency to doodle on whatever surface is handy may not think that surprising, but the degree of skill and work that he puts into his unusual medium is outstanding.

His subjects range from cartoons to detailed stippled portraits to elaborate decorative drawings inspired by the style of Japanese prints.

The drawings use the entire circumference of the cop, connecting with themselves in a continuous band. The flicker set of his cup drawings features them set against a mirror and also often includes multiple views of the same cup.

There is a photo sequence of his process and a video as well.

Boey’s cups sell in galleries for $120 to $220 and are sometimes placed in plastic cases. There is an article on him on the OC Register.

You’ll often hear disparaging remarks about unorthodox art materials, particularly when they’re not “archival”. I dont’ know about the Sharpie ink, but Boey’s styrofoam “canvas”, as any eco-warrior will tell you, will last for a long long time.

Addendum: The Sharpie blog has an interview with Boey

[Via digg]

Inspired in part by Ed Ruscha’s photogrphic series of “Every Building on the Susnset Strip” and Matteo Pericoli’s panoramic drawings in his book Manhattan Unfurled, artist Paul Heaston decided to draw every building on Main Street in the historic district of his hometown of Bozeman Montana.

Some of us who have never been to Bozeman think of it as a literary location, having been the setting for part of Robert Pirsig’s remarkable Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and a surprising number of other cultural references, including being the nominal location of the Star Trek: First Contact movie (co-written by Bozeman native Brannon Braga). It is also the site of Montana State University and is apparently rich with other colorful points of history.

Heaston focused his interest in the historic architecture of Bozeman, the town’s Main Street, from Grand to Rouse Avenues, and as a challenge to himself, drew every building on every block in that area, on both sides of the street, from direct observation in his Moleskein sketchbook (which he apparently filled exactly, without intending to). The project started in October of 2008 and just wrapped up on May 10 of this year.

It’s interesting to note that the seasons changed over the course of his project, giving it in interesting dimension of time as well as space.

Heaston’s approach, is an immediate and direct drawing in pen (that I assume is a fine point marker like a Pigma Micorn or Staedtler, though I didn’t find a mention of drawing instrument), with a casual feeling, even while enjoying the portrayal of surface textures. He even seems to have a cavalier disregard for making his architectural lines straight.

In some drawings, he winds up with what looks like curved perspective – like a photograph through a wide angle lens (which some have suggested is truer to the way we actually see than traditional “straight line” perspective).

The casual feeling of his drawings brings to mind the sketchbooks of Robert Crumb and Chris Ware.

I came across Heaston’s Bozeman Main Street Project on Urban Sketchers, where he is a correspondent. There is an article about the project, as well as one about its completion. The entire project is posted as a Flicker set.

Heaston has a web site with galleries that include other drawings and graphics, as well as his oil paintings. The latter are largely a series of gestural, painterly standing portraits, that are informal both in composition and the sitter’s (stander’s?) attire.

Heaston also maintains a blog, three letter word for art, on which you will find many other sketches and the stories behind them.

Perhaps you’ve seen his unforgettable drawings in the introductory animation for the PBS Mystery! series (animated by Derkek Lamb); perhaps you’ve seen one or more of his over 75 published books; or perhaps you’ve somehow encountered stray examples of his wonderfully eccentric pen drawings, filled with enigmatic figures in long coats or longer dresses, as likely to hold a knife as a croquet mallet (though either could be equally suspicious of being a murder weapon), and children of questionable intent and even more questionable future; and, of course, perhaps you’re already a devoted Edward Gorey fan.

Gorey himself was something of an enigmatic figure, considered eccentric by some, with a perhaps undeserved association with grim, morbid or horrorific work, when in fact his work has always been whimsical, with just a twist of macabre humor.

Gorey’s wonderfully retro drawing style, at times spare, but often filled with luxurious swaths of pen and ink texture, lends itself perfectly to his off-kilter view of the world and the charming denizens with whom he populates it.

His small, utterly charming and disarming picture books (which you may or may not consider children’s storybooks, depending your thoughts about books in which terrible things happen to the children involved), are wonders of wordcraft as well as spellbindingly drawn. The seemingly simple haiku-like captions make you pause, and pause again, while a slow motion laugh arises, ghost-like, from the bottom of your brain pan and finds its way to your mouth as you stare.

Gorey is sometimes associated with Charles Adams, the two were acquainted and shared the same literary agent as well as admiration for each other’s work. An association I like to make is with the wonderfully off-kilter cartoons of B. Kliban, who I’m certain must have been influenced by Gorey, (as he was by Saul Steinberg), and who, in turn, was a prime influence on the Far Side’s Gary Larsen (along with Gorey, Adams and Gahan Wilson – it all comes around, folks).

Gorey said his fascination with the macabre began at age 5 when he discovered Bram Stoker’s Dracula, was “scared to death” and began to teach himself to draw. Though he worked in Doubleday’s art department for years, his own book ideas were rejected by publisher after publisher until The Unstrung Harp made it to press and began a string of successful titles.

He later did set designs for the Broadway version of Dracula, in which the entire sets were large reproductions of his pen drawings, intricately detailed castle interiors and drawing rooms; and entirely black and white, except.. one object in each set was brilliant blood-red.

You can now buy a fold-out and fold-up toy book version of the sets as Edward Gorey’s Dracula: A Toy Theatre: Die Cut, Scored and Perforated Foldups and Foldouts.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a major repository of Gorey’s work on the web, so I’ve gathered some scattered resources below, though most of them are not representative of his best work..

If you haven’t exposed yourself to Gorey’s brain-tweaking and eye delighting books, I might recommend Amphigorey, an inexpensive collection of several of his small books (which was followed by several other collections in similar format). There are, of course, many other titles.

If you live within reach of Southeastern Pennsylvania, you can still catch a terrific show of Gorey’s originals, Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey, at the Brandywine River Museum until May 17, 2009. (Here is a review of the show, and background about Gorey, from the Philadelphia Inquirer.)

The Edward Gorey House, in his former home in Yarmouthport, MA, is open to the public on a regular basis.

Addendum: Michael Connors of Morguefile has written to add this link to reproduction of Gorey’s Gashleycrumb Tinies, his “Alphabet Book” (delightful!).

For lovers of all kinds of art, the internet just keeps getting better and better.

Grandma’s Graphics is a little treat that popped up recently with some vintage public domain illustration. Though some of the images aren’t of as high reproduction quality as one might like, it’s still worth a look, even if it’s just to familiarize yourself with some art you might not have seen, and seek out printed copies of better quality later.

The collection, mostly pen and ink of course, given the eras, includes some of Harry Clarke’s intricate penwork, and illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Through The Looking Glass by Sir John Tenniel (above, top) and Harry Rountree (above, bottom), one of the few who doesn’t wilt in Tenniel’s presence when tackling Lewis Carroll’s flights of fancy. (See my post on Sir John Tenniel.)

I love the fact that the Colouring section includes two of Tenniel’s more intricately detailed (and non-coloring book like) illustrations, including the image above (larger version here). (You can see my own nod to this particular drawing by Tenniel in this cartoon from my book of Dinosaur Cartoons.)

[Link via Illustration Inspiration]

I’ve mentioned before my fascination with scratchboard, that magical inverse of pen and ink, in which light areas are scratched out of a coating of ink on a clay-covered board (and sometimes a white surface is scratched away from a black-coated board), producing a line drawing with some of the characteristics of pen and ink and some of the feeling of woodcuts (see some of my posts involving scratchboard).

Tm Foley is a Michigan based illustrator who worked for a long time in variations of traditional scratchboard technique, and moved over to digital illustration in the late 90’s.

Foley has found great freedom in the combination of his scratchboard style and computer color, a flexible alternative to the traditional methods of applying color to scratchboard drawings, which is usually a difficult, messy and often frustrating process because of the surface dust created by the scratchboard technique.

Foley’s color scratchboard illustrations have the visual charm of scratchboard lines with the added punch of well applied color. The other ingredients in his visual mix, a fertile imagination and strong drawing skills, have combined to garner him a roster of clients that include The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, Barrons, Highlights for Children and others.

Foley also maintains a blog, Illustratorium, where you you can find an archive of his illustrations, arranged by dated posts, or by subject categories. You can also find a few of his illustrations in other media both here and in his iSpot portfolio, as well as some of his scratchboard style work in black and white.

Chinese artist Yu-Tang Yang draws intensely intricate pen and ink drawings of landscapes, in which his detailed approach creates evocative representations of the visual textures of trees, bark and grasses.

This approach is particularly effective in his depictions of winter forest snow scenes, like Bewildering (image above, with detail, larger image here), in which the white of the paper becomes the smooth surface of snow covered ground.

I’m not certain I have a correct grasp of his artist’s statement about Realistic Penart, but I come away with the impression that he feels his approach has as much in common with the way paintings are composed as they do with traditional pen and ink (bringing to mind Franklin Booth’s reputation for “painting with a pen”), and holds the practice as worthy of comparison to painting.

Yu-Tang was born in Chung-chuen in northeastern China, and though showing artistic ability at an early age, he failed the entrance exams to art college twice. He worked for a time on a farm camp during the Cultural Revolution, later went to work for a design firm; and eventually set out on his own as a freelance artist.

He went to Japan to study, was deeply impressed with the training, and delved into his intensive research in to pen art. He returned to China and began his series of drawings of the Chinese landscape. He published two books on the subject, Detailed Analysis of Penart Technique and Collection of Penart.

There is a gallery on the artist’s site, with works arranged by year. (The images are slightly marred by watermarking, but it’s not too intrusive.) There is a less extensive, but easier to navigate (and non-watermarked) gallery on the Art Renewal Center.

You will often hear the phrase “big shoes to fill” applied to the task of filling a role formerly held by someone whose accomplishments were significant and difficult to achieve.

Illustrator and comics artist Gary Gianni put on some big shoes when he stepped into the role of illustrator for Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant newspaper comic strip.

Hal Foster (who will certainly be the subject of a future lines and colors post) was one of the three or four greatest newspaper comics artists in the history of the medium; and, to my mind, should be on the list of all time best pen and ink artists.

Gianni took over the illustration chores on the strip from John Cullen Murphy, who was Foster’s assistant, and had taken the reins on the strip when Foster retired in 1970.

Gianni’s previous work included illustrations for versions of classics like Moby Dick and Kidnapped, and he created graphic novel versions of Tales of O. Henry and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. He also worked for mainstream American comic book companies on titles like Indiana Jones and The Shrine Of The Sea Devil, Batman: Black and White (for which his story won an Eisner Award in 1997) and The Monstermen Mysteries, which ran as a backup feature for Mike Mignola’s Hellboy.

The Prince Valiant Page is a new book from Flesk Publications (see my previous posts on Flesk Publications) that showcases Gianni’s work on the strip, and also offers a glimpse into his background.

The book is written by Gianni, and offers an insightful look into his working process, and his collaboration with Mark Schultz, a terrific artist himself, who handles the writing on the current strip.

Gianni talks about his admiration for Foster, as well as other great pen and ink artists like Joseph Clement Coll and Franklin Booth, an admiration that is evident in his refined ink drawing style.

In the process of describing how a modern Prince Valiant page is created, including the use of models and reference, we get to see a number of pages of Gianni’s pencil drawings before they were inked. These, though not meant as finished art, have a wonderful tonal quality that is very different from the final ink drawings.

I have to admit that I didn’t have a proper appreciation for Gianni’s work prior to seeing this volume; partly because I had not seen much of his other illustration and comics work except in scattered examples, and partly because of the terrible job that modern newspapers do of presenting their comics.

One of the things that newspapers do to render their comic strips ineffectual, particularly those few remaining adventure strips, is to print them too small to allow for any real visual excitement. The original Prince Valiant pages, like those of Little Nemo in Slumberland and many other comic strips in the early 20th Century, were sized to full newspaper pages. (See my post on Winsor McCay.)

As time went on, and the role of newspaper comics as one of the major forms of home entertainment was superseded by movies and then television, newspaper editors (or more likely, owners and accountants) continually reduced the size of newspaper comics. In an age where home video screens and computer monitors keep getting bigger and bigger, this is a trend that, if continued, will eventually result in microscopic panels; which will undoubtedly help in the efforts of newspapers to remove all entertaining content as their circulation drops.

Prince Valiant is now down to 1/5th of a page at most in the newspapers, but several of the Gianni & Schultz strips are printed in the book as fold-out pages, doubling the book’s 9×12″ (23×30cm) size; nice and big, though still far short of a full newspaper page. It’s enough to let Gianni’s work shine, and make you wish for a volume of the strips at this size.

There is a collection of the Gianni & Schultz strips, Prince Valiant: Far From Camelot due in the (presumably near) future, but the Amazon pre-publication listing doesn’t include that book’s dimensions.

You can see a recent Prince Valiant strip on the King Features site, but you apparently can’t see the current one, or search the archives, without getting a membership of some kind, in an effort to… well, I don’t know why; I guess as part of the continuing effort on the part of newspapers and syndicates to discourage reader interest.

In the meanwhile, we have this beautiful volume to appreciate Gianni’s work. The Prince Valiant Page can be ordered directly from Flesk Publications in either hardback or limited edition signed, slipcase hardback. The book includes a foreword by Hellboy’s Mike Mignola and an introduction by Robert Wagner, who played the character in the 1954 Cinemascope movie.

Flesk has done their usual superb job of showcasing the art, jamming the book cover-to-cover with wonderful examples and using the highest production values. It certainly makes you wish newspapers would treat their comics with half as much respect.

Gianni and Schultz continue their work on the Prince Valiant weekly strip, trying to give us a taste of the former glory of newspaper adventure strips within the restricted confines of their 1/5th of a page.

It’s a valiant effort.