An Egon Schiele Homage of Mine

I’ve been going through some of my old artwork to pull pieces for a show I am having at Barbara Mendes Gallery (opens July 17th 2012 – facebook event here.) I came across this piece which I still like, which I figured I’d share here (though I don’t plan to include it in the show):

Michelle Mascarenhas and Self Portrait, ink and watercolor on paper, 20 March 1999, about 9″x12″

It’s a portrait of Michelle, my girlfriend at the time, done with inspiration from this piece below. 

Faulty Multi-Panel Pans 2: Motion-Logic Inconsistencies

Three panel polyptych from Action Comics No. 467, January 1977, art by Curt Swan and Ted Blaisdel, published by DC Comics – see explanation below

It’s Joe’s second installment in his nitpicky critique of comic book multi-pans (aka super panels or polyptychs.) Recently I posted about gratuitous gutters, today it’s a look at motion and how it lines up across panels.

It’s very common for multi-pans to be used to show motion. As a character moves across a landscape, a polyptych can hold the background steady, and show characters multiple times traveling from one location to another. With characters in motion, artists include motion lines to show where they’ve come from. Sometimes the motion lines, position, and background don’t quite all line up consistently. 

Faulty Multi-Panel Pans 1: Gratuitous Multi-Pans

Why is there that white gutter between the dragon’s head and Iron Man? I don’t know. Gratuitous multi-pan from Iron Man No. 130, January 1980, art by Bob Layton, published by Marvel Comics

I wrote earlier about comic books’ mutli-panel pan sequences, which can also interchangeably be called super panels, polyptychs, multi-pans. I’ve been compiling this still-very-very-incomplete chronological index of super panels. For a really broad-brush review: These multi-pans arise early in comics history, are expored sporadically by some early comics masters, largely fall out of favor from the 1950s–1960s, then re-emerge with greater frequency in the late 1970s–1980s.

For this post, I want to explore some questionable multi-pans. These aren’t necessarily 100% wrong. Some of these are the work of masters, others are from comic artists whom I have less respect for. Right now I’m an artist who barely dabbles in comics, so I may not be all that qualified to critique these… but I’ll put my opinion out there nonetheless. Ultimately the decision on how to portray something in images and words is an artistic decision… it’s up to the creator… not the critic.

I am planning to do a series of three post explaining three different types of questionable multi-pans: (I’ll go in retroactively and update these with links.)

1. gratuitous multi-pans
2. motion-logic inconsistent multi-pans
3. cheats

In super-hero comics in the 1980s–1990s, multi-pans became fairly common. It wasn’t as if they were in every page… but lots of artists used them… often… whether they actually made sense or not. The multi-pans that I call gratuitous are ones where the gutters (white space between panels) could be removed and the panel would work just fine. 

My Long Beach Symphony Orchestra Rehearsal Sketches

Long Beach Symphony Orchestra rehearsal 15 November 1993, ink on paper

When I used to live in downtown Long Beach, I got season tickets to the concerts of the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra. LBSO, under conductor JoAnn Falletta, was excellent; they probably still are. Back in the early 1990s, in my opinion, they had a great balance between more familiar traditional classical music, plus contemporary and premier pieces – sometimes Latin American and other overlooked composers whom I hadn’t been familiar with.

One day I received, in the mail, one of those donor letters that asks if I have overpriced stocks or vacation homes that I would like to donate to LBSO. I wrote that, even though I don’t have extra homes lying around, I am an artist, and I think tossed in a photocopy of a drawing I’d done of a string quartet, and mailed it back. I’d done this with this type of solicitation before and hadn’t heard back… and didn’t really expect to hear back.

But, this time, I did. 

Sweet New Dupuy and Berberian Monsieur Jean Comic

Panels from Dupuy and Berberian’s The Singles Theory – left to right Monsieur Jean, Clement, Felix, and their old friend and party host Veronique

I was excited to pick up Dupuy & Berberian‘s latest hardbound comic book The Singles Theory – available in English in the U.S. for the first time this week.  I confess that I am a huge fan of Monsieur Jean – a sort of urban French everyman comic book protagonist – created by Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian.