I thought I’d share some of the drawings by Osamu Tezuka that I referred to several times to try to work out doing nature with ink. All three of the main pictures I’m showing here are from his Buddha series. The one above is from Volume 8, the last one. Now, when I look at that I’d call it fairly realistic. But when you start looking at the individual parts we can see how he’s combining abstract patterns and textures to construct it.
This painting is from David Mack and Brian Michael Bendis’ Daredevil story Wake Up. I happened by Mack’s table at the New York Comic Con last year and liked the art on the Kabuki books he had out on his table. At first I wanted to do a Kabuki painting for the analysis, but as I was looking for one I realized that he sets up a rhythm and visual language that builds on itself. It’s a case of the individual parts being strong, but the sum being more than those parts. Eventually I settled on this image from his sketchbook series Reflections because it seems more self-contained. Then again, I haven’t read much Daredevil so maybe I’m just not bringing outside context.
It doesn’t happen often that I buy a comic based on the strength of a cover, but Locke & Key is an example of a comic that I knew nothing about before I saw it on the shelves of my local shop. I picked it up and flipped through it on the strength of this cover. I thought it looked interesting, but put it back on the shelf. A few weeks later, though, I noticed another cover that was just surreal and slightly disturbing without being overtly horror. Just my cup of tea. I picked it up again and saw that the guy crawling out of someone’s head was literal, not just metaphor. I’ve been reading it since. I decided to do this cover because it was the first one that did the job of making me notice the series.
Strangers In Paradise is a long-running series, now complete, by Terry Moore. His artwork is among my favorite in comics, so it’s past time that that I get to one of his pieces. (I almost chose one of his Art Nouveau covers, but I picked this one instead since I did an analysis of Mucha so recently.)
Terry Moore did the inks, with colors by Brian Miller.
While I’m not that familiar with the comic overall, I do know that the main character, Catherine Allingham, is a detective with only a few months to live. This cover doesn’t illustrate a specific scene but instead sets a tone and a mood. Its purpose is to catch the eye (stand out from the other covers) and give us a hint of the kind of story we might find inside the pages.
This is a page from an upcoming issue of Starstruck. There’s a lot of history to this story – see the Starstruck Wikipedia entry for more. Michael Kaluta did the pencils and inks. What I’m going to focus on here, though, is the recent color work by Lee Moyer.
To understand this picture we need to know a few things about it. First, it’s a two-page spread in a comic. Second, the story at this point is about a schism in Promethea. Promethea herself used to be a young girl, but she was taken into the lands of imagination where she became, essentially, a spirit of imagination and story. Over the centuries, she could manifest through physical people and become a super hero of sorts. In this story, she has unknowingly begun manifesting through two people, one on each side of the Crusades.
This is the cover for the issue of Fables titled “The Last Castle,” a prestige issue that tells the story of Boy Blue’s last stand against the forces of the Adversary as the fables were driven out of the Homelands. Fables is a great comic that uses characters from classic fairy tales. Shown here are Boy Blue (grown up from the Little Boy Blue nursery rhyme) and Red Riding Hood on the horse. The goblins are the army of the Adversary.
I picked this image partly because it’s a nice example of a conceptual illustration. It’s not showing just one specific scene but rather combines three scenes to give an overall sense of story. That’s a technique I’d like to work on and improve.