2007 Review: 5 Originality vs. Ripoffs

As the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive completes its second year in operation, it's time to review the accomplishments of the past year. Here's a countdown of the ten most important subjects we've covered in 2007. See if your list matches mine. (View the complete list.) Click on the link to read more on this topic.


NUMBER 5: ORIGINALITY vs RIPOFFS

Ethics may not be the first subject that comes to mind when you think of the challenges facing cartoonists, but it's an important issue. I addressed the students who read this site and gave them some useful advice on thinking for themselves in an article titled...

Originality vs. Ripoffs: Chaplin's Shadow
April 25th, 2007

This may just be the most important single article we've ever posted here.

Go To Number 4 on the list of Top Ten Subjects of 2007

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
.

Stumble It!

Wash Painting 2: More Happy Accidents

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 8 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great art instruction posts.

In case you missed my previous post on this subject, take a look at Wash Painting Part One: In Praise of Happy Accidents.


All of the images you see in this and the previous post come from two issues of Colliers from 1934. Every week, the staff artists had to quickly produce striking images to accompany the articles. Speed was of the essence. Wash painting was a quick and beautiful solution.


One week, an artist might be illustrating a romance...


The next week a Western adventure...


The technique lent itself to both realistic depiction and cartoony stylization.

If you haven't checked them out yet, make sure to take a look at our previous posts on mid 30s Colliers illustrations and late 40s Colliers. There's a wealth of great images in old magazines like this.


Many thanks to Mike Fontanelli for sharing these with us. He has a stack of Colliers with Earl Oliver Hurst covers that he will be bringing by soon. I can't wait to see those.


Here's the rest of the Famous Artists lesson on wash painting. Let me know in the comments if you give this lesson a try.



FAMOUS ARTISTS ON WASH PAINTING PART TWO: Step By Step Through Paintings By Dohanos and Whitcomb









One last thing... Often when people speak of transparent water colors in animation, they refer to it as an "old fashioned" technique...


But there's nothing old fashioned about watercolor painting. Check out the great watercolors by Archive supporter William K. Moore...


Bill paints people he finds on the streets in Bogota, Columbia. Browse through his blog and be amazed at his keen observation and boundless imagination. This man paints a painting every day of his life! That makes him a hero in my book.

If you enjoyed this post, see... Wash Painting Part One: In Praise of Happy Accidents, Mid 30s Colliers Illustrations, Late 40s Colliers, Lawson Wood: The Monkey Artist, Complete Guide To Cartooning On Magazine Cartoons Part One and Part Two.

Also check out these lessons from the Famous Artists Course... Chad's Design For Television, Willard Mullin on Drawing Animals, Fundamentals of Composition Part One and Part Two.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

Stumble It!

Wash Painting: In Praise Of Happy Accidents

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 8 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great art instruction posts.


Archive supporter, Mike Fontanelli brought by a stack of mid-1930s Colliers magazines for us to digitize. Colliers was the "Rolls Royce" of weekly magazines for many years, employing some of the greatest illustrators in the business. (Check out our previous postings of mid 1930s and late 40s issues, as well as our posts on Lawson Wood and Earl Oliver Hurst.) In browsing through page after page of beautiful wash paintings, I was struck by how rare it is to see illustrations like this any more. That's just plain wrong.


In our digital age, programs like Photoshop have replaced brush and pen. But Photoshop doesn't come close to the flexibility and variety that water painting can provide. And in the hands of an experienced artist, a brush can knock out a finished painting much faster than with a computer. It just takes advance planning, concentration and an experienced hand.


Look at the beautiful compositions in these examples. The artists were working from a carefully constructed drawing, and they worked out every detail before paint touched paper. The light source and the value scale are precisely controlled to make the image "mesh" in your eye. There's no wasted effort or extraneous detail. The paintings themselves were executed very quickly.


That's the exact opposite of the way that a digital image is created. Instead of making all the creative decisions up front, the digital artist makes those decisions as he paints. In Photoshop, it's typical to build up the illustration in layers, stacking up planes that can be shifted around as needed. The composition evolves, created in sections and joined with blurred seams to connect them. This evolutionary process may result in an image that is acceptably complex, but it doesn't lend itself to creating a strong or unified statement.

Recently, I saw a cityscape background from an animated feature that had been created by cutting and pasting pieces of images together. The light came from six different directions. The perspective changed from one part of the image to another. If you looked at any one small section, it looked OK, but the whole didn't work together. The overall impression was cacophony. Worse yet, the image looked terrible if it was reduced in size or resolution. The scale of the overall composition and the degree of detail was uniform across the entire image. When you resized or reduced the resolution, it all turned to mush.

Contrast that with these beautiful wash paintings... The overall composition reads no matter how small you make it, and there's a lot of variety between sharp details (in the faces and hands) and loose brushwork (in the fabric and backgrounds). This keeps your eye focused on the important part of the composition. But there's an even bigger difference... Even when enlarged many times, these paintings still look good because of what watercolor painters refer to as the "happy accidents". Any digital anomaly or seam between layers in a Photoshop image will stand out like a sore thumb, but a loose brush stroke, a bit of paper peeking through the dry brush, or a bleeding bit of pigment can look beautiful. The accidents are natural looking.


I figured there might be a few of you out there who will be sitting at home with your belly full of turkey this weekend needing a diversion... a project to sharpen your art skills. Here's a lesson from the fabulous Famous Artists Course. Pull out your brushes and some lamp black and give it a try. Have fun!

FAMOUS ARTISTS ON WASH PAINTING PART ONE: The Fundamentals Of Wash Painting








For The Rest Of This Lesson, See... WASH PAINTING 2: MORE HAPPY ACCIDENTS



If you enjoyed this post, see... Mid 30s Colliers Illustrations, Late 40s Colliers, Lawson Wood: The Monkey Artist, Complete Guide To Cartooning On Magazine Cartoons Part One and Part Two.

Also check out these lessons from the Famous Artists Course... Chad's Design For Television, Willard Mullin on Drawing Animals, Fundamentals of Composition Part One and Part Two.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

Stumble It!

Cartooning: Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part Seven

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 8 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great info on the history of cartooning told through the careers of great artists.

Magazine Illustration by Jan Balet (See Lief Peng's Flickr set for more images by Jan Balet.)

We continue our series of posts on Gene Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning with the second part of the section dealing with Magazine Cartooning... I'm afraid I don't have much information on these artists. If you can contribute a fact or two, please post them to the comments below.

MICHAEL BERRY
Michael Berry contributed pretty girl cartoons to Pictorial Review, Esquire, Liberty and The New Yorker.






JOHN RUGE
John Ruge's elegant girl drawings appeared in Colliers in the late 40s and Playboy in the early 50s. His comic about an Irish Setter named Clancy was also popular.




RALPH STEIN & STAN HUNT
Ralph Stein was the author of a collection of pinup girl art titled The Pinup From 1852 to Now. He wrote the Popeye newspaper comic in the 1950s, and was an avid classic car enthuiast. Stan Hunt was a regular contributor to The New Yorker. He attended the New York School of Art and apprenticed under Willard Mullin. He passed away in 2006 at the age of 77.




RICHARD SARGENT
Richard Sargent contributed images to Pictorial Review and The Saturday Evening Post.




JAN BELET
Jan Belet was a childrens book illustrator who also did artwork for several women's magazines.




RICHARD TAYLOR & FRANK OWEN
Richard Taylor was a cartoonist for The New Yorker and Playboy. Frank Owen was a cartoonist for The Saturday Evening Post He was the one who came up with the original story idea for the Disney's cartoon, Morris, the Midget Moose.



THE IMPORTANCE OF CARTOONS IN ADVERTISING
By Don Herold


A STUDY IN LAUGHS



ROY DOTY

Over the past half century, Roy Doty has been a cartoonist and illustrator with over 60 children's books to his credit. He was awarded a Reuben by the National Cartoonist Society in 2006. See RoyDoty.com to see what he's up to lately.




Many thanks to Marc Crisafulli and David King for sharing this great book with us.

If you found this post to be interesting, see... Gene Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part One: The Men Behind The Newspaper Comics, Part Two: How To Get Ideas / Studies of Comic Strips and Part Three: Single Panel and Sports Cartoonists, Part Four: Editorial Cartoons & Comic Books, Part Five: Sketching, and Part Six: Magazine Illustration

Also see... Nat Falk's "How To Make Animated Cartoons" Part One: The History of Animation, Part Two: The Cartoon Studios, Part Three: How Cartoons Are Made, Part Four: How To Draw Cartoons and Part Five: How To Animate. Also, see... Willard Mullin on Animals.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

Stumble It!

Life Drawing: Pogany's Sketchbook

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 8 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great art instruction posts.


Drawing is a language, and it requires building a vocabulary to be eloquent. Students should carry a sketchbook with them wherever they go and draw everything they see- from people's heads in a late night coffee shop to fireplugs on the street. Everything you draw becomes part of your dictionary of imagery in the future.

Cartoons are about things that aren't real- pure imagination. But even here, it's important to have balance... A friend of mine, Louise Zingarelli once told me, "You can't draw crazy things until you can draw perfectly straight. Wonky perspective all over isn't weird or interesting- it's just ugly and dumb. You've got to have both, working right against wrong... just like working warms against cools in colors."

Recently, we featured the book, Willy Pogany's Drawing Lessons. Pogany was a children's book illustrator who specialized in fantasy subjects. At the end of the book, after the lessons, he presents a selection of his work sketches. Pogany was particularly eloquent, with a huge library of shapes and forms in his head. He also had an amazing sense of balance- making the fantastic seem real. This is truly great draftsmanship.


















This classic book is still in print. Pick up a copy at Amazon for your reference library.


If you found this post to be useful, see Willy Pogany's Drawing Lessons Part One

For more art instruction posts, see The $100K Animation Drawing Course, Fundamentals of Composition Part One and Part Two, Chad's Design for Television, Willard Mullin on Animals, Incorporating Natural Forms- Haeckel's Artforms in Nature, and Originality vs Imitation: Chaplin's Shadow.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
.

Stumble It!

Life Drawing: Willy Pogany's Drawing Lessons

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 8 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great art instruction posts.


Willy Pogany was one of the most important book illustrators and designers of the first half of the 20th century. His Rime of the Ancient Mariner and books based on Wagnerian opera are masterpieces, to say nothing of his editions of Mother Goose, Alice in Wonderland and Faust. While other illustrators were confining themselves to an occasional tipped in plate buried among page after page of identical text blocks, Pogany broke the mold, designing elaborate pen and ink illustrations that surrounded the text, ornate capitals for the beginning of each page and calligraphy that turned the words into art. He is probably the artist most responsible for establishing what we think of as modern children's book illustration.


He was also an author and teacher, with three books covering drawing, oil painting and watercolor. Today, I am presenting a section from his book Willy Pogany's Drawing Lessons titled...

FIGURE SKETCHING

One of the most fascinating subjects to draw is the human figure.

The fine proportions, beautiful modeling and delicate balance, and the infinite variations in movement and repose are such that there is no other living thing to compare with it.

Through countless ages artists of all races have drawn, painted and modeled the human form.


If you have never done any figure drawing, I would suggest that you start to draw the human figure in its simplest pose with little or no foreshortening. This is an upright standing position with arms close to the body and feet together.

Make up your mid before you begin, how large you want your drawing to be and mark on the paper the total length desired. Your drawing must be exactly the size that you have indicated on your paper.

Your next step is to draw a straight vertical line connecting the two marks. This will indicate the imaginary line of gravitation running from head to foot.

Now mark the center of the body by dividing the vertical line into two equal parts. Mark your proportions.

Draw in the oval of the head.


Measure the width of the shoulders compared to the length of the body. Draw in the shoulder line. Do the same with the hips.

To measure, use a pencil in your outstretched hand, first getting the width, then measuring vertically the number of times the width goes into the total length of the body. Now proceed to draw the masses of the chest, hips, legs, etc.


To check on your drawing, watch the shape of the background that surrounds the figure. See if these "left spaces" (or negative shapes) correspond with the outline of your drawing.

For instance, whatever the position of your subject, watch the shape and size of the space between the arms and the body; between the tilted head and the shoulder; between the two legs, etc, etc.

These will be your left spaces. Special attention to them will be of great help in making a correct drawing.














This classic book is still in print. Pick up a copy at Amazon for your reference library.


For more art instruction posts, see The $100K Animation Drawing Course, Fundamentals of Composition Part One and Part Two, Chad's Design for Television, Willard Mullin on Animals, Incorporating Natural Forms- Haeckel's Artforms in Nature, and Originality vs Imitation: Chaplin's Shadow.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

Stumble It!

Cartooning: Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part Five

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 8 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great info on the history of animation told through the careers of great animators.



We continue our series of posts on Gene Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning with the section on the fundamental skill that at is the root of all pictorial art...

SKETCHING
Introduction by Gene Byrnes


WILLIAM VON RIEGEN
"William Von Riegen, with his studies of figure drawing, claims that this type of exercise gives him a looseness and freedom of line that he couldn't get in any other way. Von Riegen is an outstandingly talented young man in the field- an especially fine artist." -Gene Byrnes






FINE ARTISTS
In this section, Byrnes does a fine job of clearly showing the link between fine art and cartooning.




HEINRICH KLEY
"Heinrich Kley as a pen and ink artist is in a class by himself. I know of nobody who ever had the freedom of line with a pen that could compare with Kley's. Each of his drawings is a little masterpiece." -Gene Byrnes







ROGER VERNAM
"Roger Vernam's animals are good examples of on the spot sketching. In his book published by Harper, entitled Drawing People For Fun, he sketches people from all walks of life." -Gene Byrnes



GORDON GRANT
"Gordon Grant, the world renowned marine artist, whose work appears in dozens of art museums, works in oil, watercolor, and pen and ink. Whenever he has any spare time, he uses it to sketch. His sketches on the following pages were taken from his private sketchbooks and were done on a trip through Brittany. They were accomplished with a fountain pen and no preliminary pencil work." -Gene Byrnes






HOWARD BRODIE
"Howard Brodie's portrait sketches were done in Germany when he was an artist correspondent with the United States Army. His drawings of the G,I. the battle scenes, and the action that he portrayed while he was in the Army have made him famous." -Gene Byrnes



FURTHER READING
In his blog, Temple of the Seven Camels, Mark Kennedy has been offering sage advice to beginning animators about the value of carrying a sketchbook with you wherever you go. Make sure to read the whole series...

Carrying A Sketchbook Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four


...And don't miss his posts on Ronald Searle's Secret Sketchbook Part One and Part Two; and Ken Anderson's Africa Sketchbook

If you don't have The Drawings of Heinrich Kley in your library, get over to Amazon right away and order it. As Gene Byrnes says, no cartoonist should be without this book!

Many thanks to Marc Crisafulli and David King for sharing this great book with us.

If you found this post to be interesting, see... Gene Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part One: The Men Behind The Newspaper Comics, Part Two: How To Get Ideas / Studies of Comic Strips and Part Three: Single Panel and Sports Cartoonists, and Part Four: Editorial Cartoons & Comic Books

Also see... Nat Falk's "How To Make Animated Cartoons" Part One: The History of Animation, Part Two: The Cartoon Studios, Part Three: How Cartoons Are Made, Part Four: How To Draw Cartoons and Part Five: How To Animate. Also, see... Willard Mullen on Animals.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

Stumble It!

Theory: Chaplin's Shadow

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 8 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great art instruction posts.


The Legendary Charlie Chaplin
Recently, controversy has erupted in the blogosphere over artists who directly copy other artists' work (See the articles on Cartoonist Todd Goldman, Family Guy and Jerry Mouse and The Great Ripping Friends Rip-Off.) The issue of exactly where the dividing line lies between "homage" and "ripoff" is open for debate among fans, but today I want to speak to the artists out there... and in particular, aspiring animators. For you, this subject is more than just idle chatter.

Every day, an artist makes thousands of decisions. These decisions affect not just the piece he is working on at the time, but his entire creative output. It's important to understand why you're making the decisions you make, and to strive to work your problems out for yourself; not just apply someone else's decisions as a substitute for your own. Truly great artists refuse to even copy themselves... Take Terry-Toons animator Jim Tyer for instance. He never approached the same situation with the same animation twice in his entire career.

There are consequences to the decisions we make as artists. Sometimes in the heat of creativity, right and wrong can become blurred by practicality and commercial demands. It's up to you to balance those competing pressures, but as the old saying goes, "Virtue is its own reward."

It's hard to not react with bias to current examples of imitation, but time can lend clarity. I'm going to tell you about two performers who were popular nearly a century ago. One of them you know. The other you don't. The reason for that is in the decisions those two artists made. -Stephen Worth


Edgar Kennedy and Charlie Chaplin
CHAPLIN'S SHADOW
In 1916, Charlie Chaplin signed a contract with Mutual to produce 12 comedy shorts over a year and half's time. He was paid the unheard of amount of $670,000 for the shorts, and was given unprecidented creative freedom. We now know that the end result of this deal was a package of slapstick shorts that represent the most influential comedy films in the entire history of cinema. But back in 1916, it was just a LOT of money being paid to a relatively untested artist.

Here is an anthology that pulled together articles from Judge magazine during this seminal period in movie history...



In the pages of this anthology is this article on Chaplin's deal with Mutual. Although the form of the prose is quite different from what we read today in entertainment magazines and blogs, the apologies for appealing to the unrefined masses, complaints about big budgets, and stories about movie-star ego trips are the same sorts of sniping we read in reviews today. What this writer didn't know was that Chaplin was on the cusp of breaking through as the single most important filmmaker of his time.



Now that the stage is set, I want to introduce you to "The Shadow"...

Billy Ritchie worked alongside Chaplin on the English Music Hall stage, performing as the drunk in the classic sketch, "Mumming Birds", just as Chaplin did in his vaudeville days. Chaplin's biographer, David Robinson described this sketch like this...

The setting for "Mumming Birds" represents the stage of a small music hall, with two boxes at either side. The sketch opens with fortissimo music as a girl shows an elderly gentleman and his nephew- an objectionable boy, armed with peashooter, tin trumpet, and picnic hamper- into the lower O.P. box.

The Inebriated Swell is settled into the prompt side box, and instantly embarks upon some business of a very Chaplinesque character. He peels the glove from his right hand, tips the waiting attendant, and then, forgetting that he has already removed his glove, absently attempts to peel it off again. He tries to light his cigar from the electric light beside the box. The boy holds out a match for him, and in gracefully inclining to reach it, the Swell falls out of the box.

The show within the show consisted of a series of abysmal acts... The acts changed over the years, but some remained invariable: a ballad singer, a male voice quartet, and the Saucy Soubrette, delighting the Swell with her rendering of "You Naughty, Naughty Man!"

The finale was always "Marconi Ali, the Terrible Turk- the Greatest Wrestler Ever to Appear Before the British Public". The Terrible Turk was a poor, puny little man weighed down by an enormous mustache, who would leap so voraciously upon a bun thrown at him by the Boy that the Stage Manager had to cry out, "Back, Ali! Back!" The Turk's offer to fight any challenger for a purse of £100 provided the excuse for a general scrimmage to climax the act.

Ritchie came from the same basic background as Chaplin, so when Chaplin began to rise to fame, he was a natural choice to put out film comedy shorts to compete. Henry Lehrman, who was previously a director at Mack Sennett, hired Ritchie to star in a series under his "Lehrman Knock-Outs" banner. The comparisons with Chaplin were inevitable. Ritchie used the same costume that Chaplin wore in "Mumming Birds"... the bowler hat, bamboo cane and tattered suit that became famous as the Little Tramp costume.

Here is an interview with Ritchie made around 1916...




The author of this article makes it clear that Ritchie's career has one foot planted in his own shoes, and the other in Chaplin's. But it didn't last... When Chaplin's Mutual Shorts were released, they were a sensation. They blew Ritchie out of the water. Lehrman was forced to change distributors to Universal in 1917, and the quality of the films took a nose dive. Two years later, Ritchie was attacked on the set by an ostrich, and never recovered. He died from the injuries he sustained in 1921, leaving his wife without financial support.


Chaplin imitator, Billy West
Billy Ritchie wasn't the only Chaplin imitator... Billy West and Charles Amador also traded on the image of the Little Tramp; and a cartoon series produced by Gaumont in Europe exploited the character as well. Chaplin sued to protect his creation, but ultimately his own success and brilliant creativity plowed his imitators under better than any legal writ.

Ironically, Chaplin never sued his old comrade, Billy Ritchie. And after Ritchie's death, he took pity on his widow and gave her a job as his costumer. She prepared the Little Tramp costume for Chaplin's performances, just as she had for her late husband.

The history of film is full of stories like this. Here are Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo...


...remember them? No? Well, that's because they didn't last either. Petrillo was quoted as saying, "I hold the record for being the world's youngest has-been."

In time, surface similarities like the hat and cane cease to matter. Audiences didn't love Chaplin for his costume. It was the spark of genius in the creator that made the Little Tramp immortal. You can't steal genius. You may gain a short term benefit from ripping off another artist to further your own career, but you'll pay for it in the end.



The moral of this cautionary tale is to be true to yourself. The business has no shame. The audience won't sue you for ripping off someone else's idea. You need to develop a conscience for yourself. No one is going to do it for you. You owe it to your muse.

Here's an interesting post on a similar subject at John K's blog.

If you found this article interesting, see... The Application Of Inspiration / How To Properly Use Reference / Incorporating Natural Forms / (Visual) Literacy / Why Do We Need An Animation Archive?

If you want an incredible insight into the mind of a brilliant filmmaker, you will want to get the DVD of Unknown Chaplin. Using never before seen outtakes, these three programs reconstruct Chaplin's creative process from the ground up. This is one of the greatest documentaries ever made. Check it out!

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

Stumble It!

Cartooning: Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part Four

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 8 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great info on the history of animation told through the careers of great animators.



EDITORIAL CARTOONS AND COMIC BOOKS
We continue with the section on editorial cartoons and comic books from Gene Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning. This installment features a gallery of Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoons, features on C. D. Batchelor and Bill Crawford, and a cursory look at how comic books were edited.

EDITORIAL CARTOONING
By C. D. Batchelor
Clarence Daniel Batchelor started as a staff cartoonist at the Kansas City Star. He worked as a freelance illustrator for a time before joining the New York Daily News in 1931. He worked there for 38 years as an editorial cartoonist, He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937 for the accompanying cartoon of a young man labelled "Any European Youth" being propositioned by a skull faced whore representing war, captioned... "Come on in, I'll treat you right! I used to know your Daddy." (Click on the image to see at a larger size.)








WILLIAM CRAWFORD

As I went to Google to research this blurb on editorial cartoonist Bill Crawford, the first listing I found was a short article in today's New York Times. Sadly, Crawford passed away yesterday of pneumonia at age 68.

Crawford was a master of the medium. He was awarded the National Cartoonists Society awards for best editorial cartoon of 1956, 1957, 1958 and 1966; he was awarded the Silver T-Square Award in 1977; and he served as president of the organization in 1960. His cartoons first appeared in the Newark News, and later were syndicated to over 700 newspapers around the country. He is survived by his wife, Claire, as well as a son and daughter.




COMICS MAGAZINES
By Whitney Ellsworth
Whitney Ellsworth started out as an assistant artist at King Features, working on strips like Dumb Dora and Tilly the Toiler. He was chief editor at DC Comics during the golden age of Superman, Batman, The Spectre, and The Green Arrow- but Superman was the series he was most closely involved in. Ellsworth wrote many of the story outlines for the comic books, and in the early 50s, he wrote the pilot episode of the Superman TV serial, Superman Meets The Mole Men. He retired in 1970.





It's interesting to compare the editorial script to the finished artwork provided here. The only thing the artist used was the basic situations, a few details and the dialogue. The staging of the panels and the pacing of the action from panel to panel had to be completely reworked to function visually. It's surprising that Byrnes gives this section on comic books such short shrift. Ellsworth focuses on the technical and editorial aspects of the comic book business, and barely mentions the artists who actually create them. Perhaps if Byrnes had gotten Joe Shuster, Bob Kane or Jack Kirby to write this section, it would have been a different story.

Many thanks to Marc Crisafulli and David King for sharing this great book with us.

If you found this post to be interesting, see... Gene Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part One: The Men Behind The Newspaper Comics, Part Two: How To Get Ideas / Studies of Comic Strips and Part Three: Single Panel and Sports Cartoonists

Also see... Nat Falk's "How To Make Animated Cartoons" Part One: The History of Animation, Part Two: The Cartoon Studios, Part Three: How Cartoons Are Made,