Castle by David Macaulay

I love David Macaulay. When I was about 11 or 12, I received a pile of David Macaulay books for Christmas from my parents. They were Pyramid, Cathedral, Underground and Castle – all about how the edifice or structure at hand was built. My adult self is able to identify each as an album-sized, perfect bound 80-page book. My younger self just knew them as awesome.

I pored over each of them at length, absorbing pertinent details and memorizing facts. I read all of them multiple times, but I think Castle was my favorite, for two reasons. First, it’s one of the books that has survived multiple moves, meaning that some instinct has made me hold on to it. Second, it was about castles, which featured prominently in the AD&D-soaked imagination that held my brain in a fog during those years.

The interesting thing about my fascination with AD&D at the time was the sourcebooks – the articles about imaginary places. Castle was exactly like those articles and sourcebooks – with better pictures and a narrative that fitted with my interests. (In case it’s not clear, I really do feel that I was the ideal audience for these books.)

The great part about the books (all of them shared certain characteristics, so it’s fair to point out that they all used them well) was the use of cross-sections.

Observant readers might note Macaulay’s art style. To my eye, it’s very similar to the comic book creators of the day (1977), which adds an extra dose of familiarity. I also like the way that the people are static, but give the impression of movement. Because of this cartoony + action style, I count David Macaulay as a sequential artist that has influenced me.

In addition to feeding my love of planning and process and cross-sections, these books showed a different way of presenting sequential art – something that I’ve always found worthy of replication. The three panels below show the art from pages 33, 47 and 65. Note how the size of the town grows and and how the text is presented next to the images, as extended captions.

The other Macaulay book that is worth picking up is Motel of the Mysteries – a story about an archaeologist who discovers a motel that was buried in a mudslide and mistakes it for a necropolis.

In the course of looking up the links for the books, I discovered that Macaulay has a new set of books out – Ship, Mill, Mosque, City (Roman), and Unbuilding (which is the story of the unbuilding of the Empire State Building). Of course, I am enough of a fan to spend ten minutes reading about each book and figuring out how much it would cost to buy them all.

Needless to say, Macaulay comes highly recommended.

The Dreamer by Will Eisner

I picked up The Dreamer by Will Eisner in Midtown Comics in New York City on Sunday (that would be the 3rd of May for those that want to be precise about such things).

I’ve been working my way through the Will Eisner library for a number of years now and I’m always interested to run across something new that is more off the beaten path. The Dreamer is very far off the beaten path. It’s basically a story of how Will Eisner “broke into” comics in the late 1930s – just before the outbreak of World War II. In only 48 pages, he manages to squeeze in the creation of Eisner & Iger, Superman, Batman, Wonderman and The Spirit and all of the personalities and artists that were involved in their origin stories. For people who like these kinds of fictionalized glimpses into the history of a subject that they are devoted to, this book is solid gold.

Mind you, it was published in 1986, ~50 years after the events depicted in the book. This means that two things are present in abundance – a foreknowledge that everything will work out for the main character and the fact that Eisner’s trademark layout style is very well established, making this look like every other Eisner book – creative layouts made with a genuine effort to make individual pages look distinctive.

In fact, one of the interesting things about the book is that each page is more or less self-contained. The conversation on the page advances the story in some way, but still manages to present a complete thought (usually a joke). Another great thing about this book is that the story explains exactly why Eisner is able to produce such a cogent history of the pre-war comics industry in New York City – because he did a of high-volume of work on deadline, and practice makes perfect.

Will Eisner wrote a lot of books on a lot of subjects and most of them are reviewed elsewhere. The thing I’m trying to learn from him as a creator is how to pace each page to keep the story flowing. His layouts also make great inspiration for how to make a static page look interesting.

Signal to Noise by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean

I found this book when I was working at the Barbarian Book Store in Wheaton in 1992. I picked it up because I was a full-on Sandman devotee and would pick up just about anything with Neil Gaiman’s name on it. In the Spring of 1993, Gaiman signed my copy. I have since misplaced this signed copy.

Since that time, I have come to realize that Dave McKean’s fingerprints are more obvious in the work than Gaiman’s, which is interesting because it shows much more about my shifts in taste and perspective over the years than it does about the work itself. Last year I was browsing in Big Monkey Comics in DC when I ran across the reissued anniversary edition, which I picked up. As I mentioned, I still don’t know where my original copy is and I really wanted to read the story again – and look at the art.

My perceptions aside, there are some notable differences between the editions. There is new material in the newer edition, for example – a handful of two-page stories at the beginning of the book and a coda at the end of the book that was written in 2000. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The story is fairly straightforward: the main character is a renowned film director who has just found out that he is dying of cancer. Instead of seeking treatment, he throws himself into writing his last film – a film that he knows he will not be alive to see filmed. The film is about the apocalypse that didn’t happen in 999 and the act of writing it becomes a means for him to deal with his impending death.

The story was originally serialized in The Face – a British fashion magazine – and in between chapters, McKean added two page inserts that sampled text from the original script of the story. These chapters add an element of noise to the story, enhancing the thematic power of the whole book. The subject of noise comes up periodically throughout the story as well, most notably in this page (which I still see as a masterwork of layout and design).

You may have noted that the page is done entirely with overlapping photographs – well spotted. A majority of the story is made using McKean’s now-trademark mixed media process. With this work, though, he used a lot of photoreferenced material, as well as a good amount of straight photography.

A friend of mine read this book and told me that she could see exactly where I got my inspiration from. And she’s exactly right. These days, I wear the fact that I am heavily influenced by Dave McKean on my sleeve, but that does not change the impact that the book had on me when I was taking my first, tentative steps into graphic design in college.

Below is another page from the end of the book, showing how the panel breaks are often subtle. It’s an approach that I’ve drawn from more than once, to varied effect.

Overall, you should find a copy of this book and give it read. If you are a Neil Gaiman fan and you do not own this book, you are doing yourself a disservice. This is doubly true if you are a Dave McKean fan.

The Rabbi’s Cat by Joann Sfar

I picked up this book on Sunday at Big Planet Comics in Georgetown in a big stack of other books. I knew Joann Sfar from his work with Lewis Trondheim on the Dungeon series and I was absolutely willing to take a chance on this book entirely due to that content. To be honest, this was one of the last things I threw on the pile, but I’m very happy at the impulse buy.

As you would guess from the title, the entire book is about a rabbi and his cat. What is less obvious is that the entire book is told from the point of view of the cat, who does many cat-type things through the course of the book. He also gains the ability to talk, which is far less cat-like (in my experience).

The book is told with six panels to a page without exception and most of those panels contain a caption at the top edge and some occasional dialog. The art is fairly straightforward line art, beautifully colored. Sfar does a fantastic job of knowing what level to draw the various scenes at. Most are rough thumbnails, although he does occasionally knuckle down and produce some amazing panels like the one below. Other times, he pulls back and produces a more impressionistic style – whatever is most appropriate for the panel at hand.

The story itself is set in the 1930s in French Algeria, where Arabs and Jews are living together under the oppression of the French. There are some very nice set pieces describing the casual bigotry of the French and the relative lack of enmity between the Arabs and the Jews (even pointing out that they often share the same last names). The majority of the story, though, is about the rabbi and his students, friends and family.

This story takes the rabbi and his daughter to Paris, where the rabbi (and his cat) learn about how Algerian Jews fit into the larger, more cosmopolitan culture. Above it all, however, is a very simple understanding that life can be very good if you let it be. Sometimes all it takes is music to make the characters happy. Sometimes it just takes food. But for a deceptively simple conceit, the book produces some seriously profound ideas that are both entertaining and endearing.

If you like stories about family, cats or just want to read something that will make you smile repeatedly, I would highly recommend this book. But don’t take my word for it – the back cover tells me that it won the Jury Prize at the Angouleme. There’s even a sequel – which I’ll probably get around to buying one of these days.

The Book of Leviathan by Peter Blegvad

I swear that I picked up The Book of Leviathan by Peter Blegvad at Gosh Comics in 2002, but the book has an American pricetag on it. It was an odd find, but I consider it one of the best things I’ve ever stumbled upon.

According to the introduction, these were originally released in the Independent on Sunday, a London newspaper. I find this odd because – although Leviathan is a “gag-a-day” strip – it doesn’t feel like a comic that one finds in the newspaper. By that, I mean that Leviathan is more clever than funny, which makes calling it a “gag-a-day” strip seem like a serious misnomer. Here, try one of the strips and see what I mean.

The majority of the strips in the book are just like that. With only a few rare exceptions, they each stand on their own – defendant only the reader’s ability to know that the baby in green is Leviathan. There are obvious comparisons to Walt Kelly, Gary Larson, Berke Breathed, Garry Trudeau and Bill Waterson to be made, but the Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes are probably the closest in tone. The pages are filled with play of all kinds – wordplay, playing with the format of the page, playing with the reader’s expectations. There is a kind of delight that comes from turning the page and not knowing what’s next.

From a purely aesthetic point of view, the book itself is very nice. The pages have a nice red on the edges and the design is very tactile and immediate. If you are the kind of person who doesn’t understand the question “why would you buy a hardback book,” then you might enjoy the Book of Leviathan. Readers who enjoy something fun and clever as a mental snack would absolutely enjoy this. Unless you don’t.

Tangents by Migelanxo Prado

I want to say that I found my copy of Migelanxo Prado’s Tangents in a second hand shop somewhere, but it is equally likely that I purchased it from a vendor at a club or directly from the NBM table at Small Press Expo. Either way, I do know that my copy came with a tear in the front cover, which is why I got it for a reduced price. I’ve seen Prado’s work around (most notably in A Streak of Chalk), but this was new to me so I picked it up.

Prado is a Spanish artist who you may know from the Dream story in Endless Nights. Tangents was originally written in Spanish and the translated edition that I have was published by NBM, who had a nice line of translated European comics a few years ago. If you are dilligent, you can find their stuff in better comic shops.

Tangents is an anthology of eight short stories and each was drawn with crayons, chalk and ink – but the use of each varies from story to story and they are visually distinct. His use of color is fantastic throughout. I like the autumnal, sunset look of this story.

The common thread linking all of these stories is that they depict a scene in the sex lives of the characters. In most cases, this scene is a turning point in those lives, giving the story a degree of depth and meaning. In some cases, though, the writing is not the best; I’m not sure if this is due to the translation or if the artist just wasn’t good at writing dialogue. Also, there is a distinct lack of word balloons under the dialogue itself to provide contrast, which makes reading the words more cumbersome than it needs to be.

That doesn’t matter all that much, though. The art does a very good job of telling the story through body language and the like. There is enough information gleaned from the the captions and dialogue to provide context to the sad faces and dejected people. This is helped by the fact that entire pages of each story are done entirely without captions or dialogue. And Prado is very good at facial expressions.

One of the interesting things about the book is the nudity. This is to be expected due to the subject matter, but it should be noted that this is not a book for children. All manner of secondary and primary sexual characteristics are depicted, without modesty – which suits the tone of stories told about two people at their most intimate.

What I found most interesting was the fact that Prado chose to depict foreplay right up to the point of intercourse and then suddenly gets shy at the last minute and flash to a panel of discarded clothes. If intercourse is shown, it is usually from a distance. Maybe there is something to be said for the last minute shift in context to provide juxtaposition.

This is not an uplifting book by any stretch of the imagination, but the art is fantastic and it’s a perfect example of how to do sequential art about normal people. Stories about sad naked people work really well in comics form. Go figure.

A review

Kier over at Durosia.com gave Oceanus Procellarum a very nice review.