David Chelsea's Blog, page 32

M.K. Brown Is Stranger Than Life

Even in the present post-sexist age, I may be the only male cartoonist who credits a female cartoonist as a major influence. Of course, I wasn’t always aware of this…

David Chelsea is reading:

Stranger Than Life: Cartoons and Comics 1970-2013

by M.K. Brown

Most cartoonists I meet nowadays grew up on Marvel and DC, but my taste was formed by MAD, ZAP, and the 1970s National Lampoon. The Lampoon is best remembered for its stable of writers, many of whom went on to write for Saturday Night Live or to become successful screenwriters (one of them was John Hughes), but they had an equally excellent stable of cartoonists, including Gahan Wilson, Bruce McCall, Shary Flenniken, Charles Rodrigues, Randall Enos, Jeffrey Jones, Edward Gorey, and Neal Adams (who also was also a top artist for DC, though I didn’t know he worked for anyone but the Lampoon until years later), but the one who really rocked my world was M.K. Brown.

It is hard to describe M. K. Brown’s drawing style to anyone who has never seen it. Certainly, she is the SQUISHIEST cartoonist I can think of; the figures and objects in her drawings always seem about to mash and fuse together like cookies baking on a tray. Everything and anything in her panels- rocks, furniture, houseplants- jiggle with life, and little distinction is made between living and inanimate objects- one of her characters, Earl D. Porker, Social Worker, spends his life being nagged and ordered around by the furniture in his apartment.

Finally, more than forty years after her work first started to appear in print, M. K. Brown has had her comics work collected in one volume by Seattle’s Fantagraphics Press. The book is Stranger Than Life: Cartoons and Comics 1970-2013. (A second book devoted to her strip AUNT MARY’S KITCHEN is promised). For me, this is the Comics Event Of The Year. In my personal Pantheon Of Comics, M. K. Brown is in the Top Four (the other cartoonists occupying spots are Winsor McCay, R. Crumb and Rick Geary).

Not M.K. Brown.

One detail sums up what I respond to in her work. It comes from the story THEY CAME FROM SPACE, which appeared in ARCADE magazine in 1976. Note the crescent moon. If every cartoonist from the beginning of time turns turns the inner edge of the crescent into a face in profile, M.K. Brown is going to be the first to put a face on its OUTER edge.

Another detail from this story surprised me: until I saw the signature on this strip, I had no idea that “Mary K. Brown” was a woman. I actually thought this might be a Lampoonish joke on the artist’s part, and it wasn’t until I started to see references in print to M. K. Brown as “her” that I came to believe it (Another female cartoonist named M.G.Lord once said she went by initials not to pass as a man, but because her full name was Mary Grace Lord and she didn’t want to come across as a religious fanatic). Before that I had vaguely imagined the cartoonist as looking like the cowpoke character Beans Morocco- no more than a shadowy profile under a broad-trimmed hat.

Some cartoonists use their work to broadcast their personality to the world, and others hide behind it. M. K. Brown definitely falls in the latter category, which may be why she is not more widely known. Her work was included in the feminist cartoon anthology TWISTED SISTERS, but she has little in common with that sisterhood other than gender; the other artists in the collection (Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Julie Doucet, Phoebe Gloeckner) are all about strident autobiography smeared in menstrual blood, while she plays it close to the vest. A story called SELF-PORTRAIT purports to be autobiography, but presents such a muddle of contradictory information and tall tales (“I was born in Hamburg, Germany, before the War” “Actually, I was born on an Indian Reservation”. “The truth is, I was born in Connecticut.”) that it can’t possibly be taken at face value.

Teen David channels M.K. Brown

The publicly known details of her actual life are scant. Wikipedia lists her birthplace as Connecticut, but does not provide a birth date. It was rumored among Lampoon fans that she was, or had been, married to fellow cartoonist B. Kliban (of CAT humor book fame), and Wikipedia confirms this. A few photographs surface in the new book, which show that she does not look much like the “White Girl” character that sometimes seems to be an authorial stand-in. A mutual friend once had dinner with her, but had little to say other than she was “elegant”.

If it is difficult to imagine who her influences could have been (there was a similar kind of squishiness to Dr. Seuss, as well as in animated cartoons of the period like YELLOW SUBMARINE and THE POINT) it is equally difficult to see her influence in later cartoonists. Roz Chast and Bill Griffith contribute essays to the new collection, but I can’t see that they’ve taken anything from her.

I, on the other hand, blatantly ripped off her work as  as a young cartoonist. My teenage sketchbooks teem with M.K.Brownish doodles. Note the scribbled foliage and the hands with fingers fused to form paddles.

This sequence from a 1975 Piggola strip has all the hallmarks: the skewed smiles and squinty eyes on the human characters, the misshapen coffee cup and salt shaker, the preoccupation with houseplants, and the ultimate metamorphosis. Brown’s characters were always turning into other things, including a woman stung by poisonous flying ants who becomes a pig. Well, the only thing M.K. Browner than that would be to turn a pig into a houseplant:

 

These panels from my recent all-ages comic SNOW ANGEL are another attempt to evoke her style, though I didn’t push the strangeness as far as I could have- it occurs to me that if M.K. Brown had drawn the story, instead of a little girl dressed as as angel, Snow Angel would have been an angel-shaped depression in the snow that stopped criminals by tripping them up.

M. K. Brown’s last National Lampoon story appeared in 1981, and in the years since she’s largely left comics behind for fine art, the occasional New Yorker carton, and children’s books, two of which, Big Goof and Little Goof and Let’s Go Swimming With Mr. Sillypants, I used to read to my own kids.

Just once, I had a brief encounter with someone whose M. K. Brown obsession exceeded my own. While still in high school, I was already having comics published in two local papers, The Portland Scribe and The River City Sun, and someone wrote to ask me to contribute a strip to his humor zine. I don’t remember his name, but I think he was another high school kid living out in the suburbs- Lake Oswego or Tigard. Eventually I got a copy of the issue with my strip. The editor himself seemed to be the only other contributor, and the issue included a strip by him which was a TOTAL M.K. Brown ripoff- something about a farm boy going out in the morning to feed the family herd of clams. I rather dismissed this at the time- I had moved on somewhat from my own heavy imitative phase, and for all I knew, the woods were full of young cartoonists slavishly copying her style. The issue is nowhere to be found in my files, but I would LOVE to see it again. Nameless M.K. Brown fan from the 70s- are you out there?

Stranger Than Life: Cartoons and Comics 1970-2013

by M.K. Brown (Author)

Paperback: 248 pages

Publisher: Fantagraphics; 1 edition (March 13, 2014)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1606997084

ISBN-13: 978-1606997086

Hey, and if you’re going to buy the book ANYWAY, how about clicking the Amazon Associates link below? It will help put my kids through college:

Immersive Panorama: The Comics Convention.

There’s been a bit of a change of plan- or more like a total collapse of plan- since the last time I posted about this project, three paintings in spherical perspective on bowling balls created to be auctioned online by Space Object Gallery. Their curator, Mary Wright, died last weekend. My condolences go out to her family and friends (I myself never met Mary- we corresponded entirely by e-mail).

David Chelsea is reading:

Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee

by Bee Wilson

Comics Convention, Acrylic painting on bowling ball by David Chelsea, 2014.

Since Space Object was pretty much a one-woman operation, this does seem to leave plans for the auction up in the air. Still, I am hopeful that these pieces will find a market- and at this point I welcome offers from potential galleries or buyers.

In the meantime, you can immerse yourself in the first piece, a view of a typical comics convention. Just follow this link to an immersive 360° panoramic version on my Flickr page.

In this spherical painting I closely followed my panoramic drawing of two years ago, which is based on sketches I made at the late lamented Stumptown Comics Fest (in case you haven’t heard, the very indie-oriented Stumptown was recently absorbed by the very fanboyish convention Rose City, which is not expected to take on any kind of Stumptown coloration as a result. What do you get when you cross Rose City Comicon and Stumptown Comics Fest? Rose City Comicon.).

I did make a few changes- I added more cosplayers to the scene, including one dressed as my superhero character Snow Angel, and another wearing my nonsexist redesign of Power Girl’s peekaboo cleavage window. I also added my signature in the form of a convention badge.

Many thanks to Tom Lechner for his panoramic conversion. Watch this space for immersive panoramas of the other paintings in this series, as well as news of any future auction or exhibits.

Comics Convention

Rebecca on Antiques Roadshow

Big News! Rebecca created an animated promotional spot for Maloy’s Jewelry store (where Eve works), and it premiered last Monday on Oregon Public Broadcasting, before and after Antiques Roadshow at 8pm. Portland people should be able to catch it for the next few weeks flanking Roadshow.

A longer version with music by Ben is on YouTube.

David Chelsea is listening to:

It’s a Scream How Levine Does the Rhumba

by Various Artists

Watch This Space

Comics Convention

Life Drawing

Video Store

Three bowling balls to be auctioned at Space Object in early May. Details forthcoming.

Video by Milan Erceg

GIF conversions by Jacob Mercy

David Chelsea is listening to:

American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

by Deborah Solomon

Work in Progress: Bowling Balls

Me holding a bowling ball at Wizard World Con in January

As I said in my last blog post, I will be appearing at the Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle at the end of March selling copies of all of my books, drawing sketches, doing on-the-spot perspective critiques, and all the other stuff I do at cons. I will also be bringing along the project that has been preoccupying me for most of the year: a series of three spherical cartoon paintings on bowling balls which nicely combine two of my main interests, comics and unusual forms of perspective.

David Chelsea is reading:

The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe

by David I. Kertzer

Each of the paintings depict a typical contemporary scene: a comics convention, a figure drawing session, and a video store. I originally conceived of them as installments in my very irregular Anapest comic strip series, so in each of them the dialog is rhymed.

The video store painting may already be a period piece. In doing visual research I turned up many images of empty and derelict video stores, and also video stores festooned with signs saying GOING OUT OF BUSINESS SALE, HALF OFF, and the like.

The figure drawing painting is based on a drawing of Spring Street Studio in New York City which I blogged about two or three years ago. The Comic Con painting is based on a panoramic drawing which I blogged about here.

My working method involves painting over a lightweight rubber bowling ball in acrylic. I plugged the holes with acrylic molding paste. I applied perspective lines using my own method of spherical perspective with six vanishing points; one for each point at the compass as well as up and down (the method is explicated in chapter five of my book EXTREME PERSPECTIVE!) . The painting was done with a combination of craft acrylics (the kind used for painting dollhouses) and Daler-Rowney acrylic artists ink.

Feel free to drop by my table at artists alley where all three will be on display. Afterwards, they are to be auctioned online. Information about that will be in a future blog post.

In Two Weeks: Emerald City Con in Seattle!

The Emerald City Comicon (ECCC) is an annual comic book convention taking place in Seattle, Washington. Originally taking place at the city’s Qwest Field (first at West Field Plaza, then at the Event Center), the venue changed in 2008 to its current home at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center. In 2011, the show expanded to a three-day event.

Attendees- don’t forget the dress code!

The convention features a wide array of activities and programming including industry guests, various discussion panels, celebrity signings and photo opportunities, prize drawings, and costume contests. It features a large and lively Exhibitor’s hall with comics retailers from across the entire Pacific Northwest bringing a large stock of modern and vintage comics, as well as other products such as statues, action figures, models, etc. CCG, RPG, and tabletop gaming is supported in specific areas of the convention center.

David Chelsea is listening to:

The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides







This year, for the first time ever, it features me, doing the sort of thing I usually do at conventions, meeting fans, signing books, drawing sketches, doing on-the-fly perspective critiques. I’ll be bringing copies of my latest comics SNOW ANGEL and EVERYBODY GETS IT WRONG!, along with some work in progress, most notably the project I’m working on right now, three spherical paintings on bowling balls, among them an adaptation of this panoramic comic:

Look for me in the Artist Alley section at table MM-20. I’ll be sharing space with Jacob Mercy of the webcomic PIZZA GUN.

Emerald City Comicon

March 28-30 2014

Washington State Convention Center

800 Convention Place, Seattle, Washington

March 28 – 10:00AM to 7:00PM

March 29 – 10:00AM to 7:00PM

March 30 – 10:00AM to 5:00PM

Saturday: Clash Of The Titans At Wizard World Portland!

My second-favorite Vonnegut

As I mentioned in my previous post, I will be at Wizard World’s Portland Comics Convention this coming Friday, Saturday and Sunday, signing books, selling original art and meeting fans (mostly other people’s, but I’m happy to say hello to anyone). I’m also booked for a panel this Saturday on Independent Comics, moderated by the esteemed writer and editor Danny Fingeroth, and with a truly stellar lineup of my fellow creators: Mike Allred, Shannon Wheeler, and Jonathan Hill.

David Chelsea is reading:

Friends with Boys

by Faith Erin Hicks

My second-favorite moon

SATURDAY JAN 25

3:00 – 3:45PM TITANS OF INDEPENDENT COMICS WITH MIKE ALLRED, SHANNON WHEELER, DAVID CHELSEA AND JONATHAN HILL

Danny Fingeroth

The model of comics creators, tethered to one or two major publishers, working on adventures of corporately-owned characters is no longer the only game in town. Many of the top talents in comics work either exclusively on their own material, while others work both sides of the street, alternating independent work with mainstream assignments done in their own unique styles. Here, speaking about how they have forged their own paths, are some of the most distinctive creators in comics today: Mike Allred (Madman; X-Statix,) Shannon Wheeler (Too Much Coffee Man; Villain House,) David Chelsea (David Chelsea in Love; Everybody Gets It Wrong!,) and Jonathon Hill (One of the Johns; Americus.) The panel is moderated by Danny Fingeroth (Rough Guide to Graphic Novels.) (C120)

Shannon Wheeler

I am flattered indeed to be called a Titan of Independent Comics; Titan is my second-favorite moon (after our own) and The Sirens Of Titan is my second favorite Vonnegut novel (after Cat’s Cradle).

Mike Allred

PORTLAND COMIC CON

JANUARY 24-25-26, 2014

FRI-SAT-SUN

Jonathan Hill

LOCATION

Oregon Convention Center

777 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.

Portland, OR 97232

David Chelsea

SHOW HOURS

Friday, January 24, 2014 – 3pm – 8pm

Saturday, January 25, 2014 – 10am – 7pm

Sunday, January 26, 2014 – 10am – 5pm

Come See Me At Wizard World Portland

Sorry for the somewhat late notice, but my first convention appearance of the year is coming up next weekend. Like the Chicago convention I went to last August, this is another Wizard World event, this time in my hometown of Portland. I’ll be there next Friday, Saturday and Sunday, signing books, selling original art and meeting fans (mostly other people’s, but I’m happy to say hello to anyone).

David Chelsea is listening to:

The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Wizard World, Inc. produces Comic Cons and pop culture conventions across North America that celebrate graphic novels, comic books, movies, TV shows, gaming, technology, toys and social networking. The events often feature celebrities from movies and TV, artists and writers, and events such as premiers, gaming tournaments, panels, and costume contests.

Wizard World isn’t just about comics professionals signing autographs- they have actors there as well. This convention’s celebrity attendees include Stan Lee, Summer Glau, Neal Adams, William Shatner, Bruce Campbell, Ron Perlman, Robert Englund- and that’s just the ones I’ve head of!

PORTLAND COMIC CON

JANUARY 24-25-26, 2014

FRI-SAT-SUN

LOCATION

Oregon Convention Center

777 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.

Portland, OR 97232

SHOW HOURS

Friday, January 24, 2014 – 3pm – 8pm

Saturday, January 25, 2014 – 10am – 7pm

Sunday, January 26, 2014 – 10am – 5pm

Ask Mr. Perspective: Three-point Three Ways.

Fumitaka Kotani writes from Japan:

Hello. I bought your book “Perspective! for Comic Book Artists” 3 years ago, and I have drawn many drawings using your guide book, but still I can’t understand the three-point perspective part, especially when you say “lines can be used as horizontal line and each grid can be used 3-ways”.

David Chelsea is reading:

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

by Andrew Blum





In this section after you say that, you show 5 examples, bedroom,bathroom,laundry room, bed+bath+laundry room, and one more example (I can’t understand what I should say to describe 5th room). What I can’t understand is what you are trying to show in this part. All rooms look the same to me. Could you tell me what you intend to tell in this section?

Page from PERSPECTIVE! I could have been clearer.

Dear Mr. Kotani,

I agree that this particular section could have been clearer. What I meant by using each grid three ways, is that with three horizons and three vanishing points, there are three ways to position the grid with a horizon at top and a vanishing point at the bottom, and therefore three different angles of view one can get from a single drawing.(the green circle represents a 60° cone surrounding the center of vision). The drawing at bottom shows how I draw the same object from three different angles using the grid.

The idea is to save the extra work of constructing three-point perspective grids by using the same grid multiple ways. However, my newest book, EXTREME PERSPECTIVE!, eliminates the need to construct perspective at all, by including a disc of computer-generated grids which can be used a background element in digital drawing or printed out as hard copies to sketch over. The book has appeared in English, Korean, and Japanese editions.

Thank you for your letter,

David Chelsea.

This particular letter gave me an opportunity to try something new. Ordinarily I would have either drawn the diagram for him on paper or in Adobe Illustrator, which has infinitely stretchable lines and endlessly expandable visual area that make it ideal for perspective construction. However, instead I decided to draw it start to finish in Photoshop, which is the application I use for most digital art. I will outline the steps I used in a later post.

RIP, Peter O’Toole

Panel from an as-yet unpublished project, 2013

David Chelsea is reading:

Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 (Film and Culture Series)

by Thomas Doherty