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raightforward as the strip s measured drift from gag a day to adventure the early strips are very much of the big foot cartooning style that was omnipresent in the 1920 s when the strip began as the strip moves towards more of an action adventure angle the cartooning and character designs start to change to reflect this but the transition is never fully complete nor completely linear often you ll see realistically drawn characters that would feel at home visually in something like terry and the pirates interacting with a goofy cartoony horse that s straight out of e c segar s thimble theater this is one of the things i personally love about the strip it s a work that was being made while the visual language of popular comics was very much in flux the art form was still finding its feet as crane was crafting the strip it s never been reprinted well this is the big one in my opinion as per the very beginning of this post what crane is known for visually as a cartoonist is his mastery of craftint technique which he employed only for the daily not sunday strips and only after about 1937 this run of crane s work has never been reprinted in a way that showcases his incredible and to this day unmatched skill with craftint there have been efforts to reprint his work most recently fantagraphics did a best of collection called hurricane isle and other adventures the best of captain easy and wash tubbs while beautifully produced the latest story included is from 1932 well before crane was employing craftint the equally beautiful captain easy fantagraphics collections are must buys but are obviously the sunday strips which also didn t utilize craftint prior to that in the late 1980 s nbm s flying buttress classics library did an 18 volume complete reprinting of the dailies unfortunately these are long out of print and extremely expensive if you can even find them more to the point re craftint though they re printed at about 75 of their original size and the print quality while good for the time is pretty iffy in a lot of spots and really doesn t adequately showcase crane s craft here s a best case scenario showing a 1941 panel scanned from an original newspaper clipping l vs the nbm reprint r the nbm books were presumably sourced from newspaper clippings bill blackbeard was the series editor but as you can see here some sort of 80 s era contrast threshold type manipulation or perhaps the reproduction photostat process itself has increased the richness of the solid blacks at the expense of the craftint effects and to make matters worse the quality varies widely with much of the work looking more like this unfortunately a new version of the full run of the strip is unlikely the appeal is just too selective at this point not to mention the ubiquitous for the era racial visual stereotyping of asian characters scattered throughout on craftint you can find tons of information online about what craftint is was but in reference to roy crane in particular here re some specifics of what this tool technique is and why crane is still the go to example of what can be achieved with it crane s embrace of craftint had a marked change on the quality of his cartooning particularly in his ability to set up images with a distinct foreground midground and background and specifically his use of craftint to emulate atmospheric perspective backing up slightly here s a good close up example of a crane original utilizing standard black india ink in conjunction with the two hatching patterns created by craftint a here shows use of single line hatching and b shows the addition of a second set of parallel hatching lines at 90 degrees from the first these patterns emerge via the application of two different fluids to the craftint board the crane image of the plane above shows a fairly standard use of craftint that numerous artists employed as seen here in these angelo torres panels from mad magazine here the artist has drawn what s essentially a complete image for each panel in india ink then afterwards has used the craftitnt effects to indicate local color value as with the sky and road in the first panel and the clothing and motorcycle parts etc in the second and suggest a light source the left side of the diner entrance in the first panel and the left side of the truck in the second the addition of craftint is an aesthetic improvement over just a black and white image and it helps define objects indicate light source and indicate local color that said these images would also function as complete illustrative images without the addition of the craftint crane sometimes particularly with talking head panels used craftint in this fairly straightforward manner as below and similar to the torres images above the later craftint era panels have a more polished look to them than just black and white line art of the pre craftint crane panels as with the torres panels though the crane panels on the right are complete black and white images even without the addition of craftint and would function with or without it the craftint here is simply an aesthetic addition where crane s use of craftint becomes truly remarkable though is when he employs it as an integral part of the illustration usually as a way to establish environments with distinct foreground midground background elements via emulating atmospheric perspective here s that stunning example from a few paragraphs back but a bit larger notice how crane s using black linework and spot blacks for the foreground elements house fence trees figures curb but using solely caftint for the midground houses and the sky behind them single hatching pattern for the latter crosshatch pattern for the former unlike the former examples of craftint in this crane panel and in his best craftint work the craftint effect is integral to the image remove the craftint effect and you lose visual information the background would disappear entirely without the craftint here s another striking example of crane using the same technique but in this case also perhaps suggesting fog as seen in panel three of the strip at the very top of this post crane would often employ just a spot black silhouette as a foreground and a single pass of craftint as a background a toth like paring down of an image to its most elegant components here s another such example crane would also exploit the painterly aspect of craftint unlike the more commonly seen zip a tone screen tone in which a dot pattern is printed on an adhesive sheet that s then cut out with a razor and applied to paper the two craftint patterns appear via an activating fluid that s applied with a brush hence the ability to get paint like effects from it here s a beautiful example with the two craftint patterns creating the reflections in the water roy crane created a detailed scrapbook called how to draw buz sawyer his later newspaper strip that had an extensive section on his craftint technique unfortunately the only way to get a complete copy of this scrapbook is to request a copy in person from the syracuse university manuscript collection where he donated his effects including letters the scrapbook etc you can though see excerpts from it over at mike lynch s blog more reading on roy crane as mentioned there s unfortunately not a wealth of easily attainable information out there about crane here though are a few resources from the scrapbook how to draw women from the scrapbook roy crane s mexico sketchbook jeet heer on the u s government role in crane s buz sawyer the comics journal 302 interview with roy crane how to draw buz sawyer captain easy soldier of fortune the complete sunday newspaper strips out of print nbm flying buttress complete wash tubbs and captain easy out of print share this share facebook reddit tumblr twitter pinterest comics 6 comments jan 01 2025 comics stuff of note in 2024 and what i read by ben in general so clearly my new year s resolution for 2025 should be to post more as i ve only done two other posts since my what i read in 2024 write up that said i ll try to make this year s round up a little more robust and less of just a list than last year s although i will if for no other reason than my own internet record keeping list anything i read this year but didn t comment on explicitly at the very end of this post creating copra michel fiffe with copra wrapping up in 2025 it seems appropriate that in 2024 fiffe put together this amazing history of copra self publishing how to book it s one of my favorite books of 2025 for sure i wish the art school where i teach would issue one of these to every incoming comics student and require them to read it it s not just a great how to on nuts and bolts things like page panel layout production etc it also digs into the financial minutiae of self publishing vs working with a publisher and other practical concerns and as one would guess given how beautifully put together copra is it s a beautiful book production wise i think the only way you can get one of these is via fiffe s etsy shop but there still seem to be copies available comics swipes ed phillipe capart i can t remember how i got wind of this great little book and i do mean little it s about 3 x 2 5 inches but it was one of my favorite purchases of 2024 it is exactly what it purports to be each spread in the book shows two images one is the source the second is a panel from a comic that s the swipe unfortunately it looks like it s sold out happy hunting comics exhibits 2024 was an absolutely banner year for exhibits of original comics art my three favorites among those that rebecca and i saw in roughly chronological order moto hagio at angoulême i did a whole post about this one which you can find here but needless to say this was an absolutely stunning show as little as five or six years ago it was incredibly rare to see shows of original manga pages in the west but with the continued fervor for manga in france the angoulême festival has really taken up the reins here and run with it every year i ve been and including the upcoming 2025 show there ve been at least two huge shows of manga originals what a delight joann sfar at the musée d art et d histoire du judaïsme winter 2024 in france was truly a abundance of riches exhibits wise on the way back from angoulême we spent a day in paris and there were literally more exhibits than we could get to ultimately we wound up passing on a posy simmonds exhibit although there will be a simmonds show at angoulême in 2025 in order to get to the big joann sfar show and it did not disappoint the show was on three floors if i m remembering correctly and was a career spanning retrospective i m partial to sfar s work on donjon and thankfully there were tons of pieces from that on display including several drawn by christophe blain one of my absolute favorite working cartoonists sfar s color work is often traditional watercolor directly on the page which afforded a rare opportunity to see a lot of color at an exhibit of comics originals comics 1964 2024 at the centre pompidou i ve been to tons of comics exhibits here in the u s canada multiple shows in france in japan etc and i ve never seen anything like this tour de force at the pompidou this summer it s notable obviously for its scale all five floors had comics stuff on them and scope including comics from the u s canada europe the uk and japan just as laudable to me though was that this was a show of comics art at one of the world s most respected museums and there was a notable absence of any sort of introductory verbiage explaining or justifying why they were doing a major show of comics art just as you d not need to supply any explanation for why you re exhibiting impressionist oil paintings the curators here simply took it for granted that comics is an important art form as dan nadel noted in his write up of the exhibit in artforum the exhibition was successful in part thanks to what it didn t do no toys costumes or figurines no pop art no content warnings for the often difficult images no this is what a comic is didactic material there were no apologies in this show and no equivocations the curators trusted that the public had enough experience with comics that they could simply present the material for viewing there s a beautiful catalog french and english versions but you can also see some of the pictures i took on my ever expanding thread on the show over at bluesky jim curious and the jungle journey by matthias picard this is i believe the third in the jim curious series and this installment is just as fun and visually stunning as the previous two these are beautiful wordless 3 d comics that are i assume intended for kids but they re absolutely enjoyable for grown ups mostly because of the gobsmackingly beautiful art and well done 3 d effects the general conceit of each story visually is that the first few introductory pages are normal but once the titular jim enters some new world the sea the ocean etc the pages become 3 d unlike a lot of 3 d comics the art and imagery here are designed with 3 d in mind and with the 3 d as an essential part of the narrative my favorite 3 d comics second only to the o g mighty mouse three dimension comics so glad to see a new installment this year r i p bic velocity color ballpoint pens and now some sad news from 2024 bic has apparently discontinued the color versions of my absolute favorite ballpoint pens for drawing i started messing around with ballpoint pens for drawing four or five years ago and intially would pick up pretty much any variety of them i happened upon and throw them into my art box to try out you can see some of my sketchbook goofing around with ballpoint over at my instagram page over the years i honed down my toolkit to what i thought were the very best pens and hands down my favorites are the bic velocity color pens sadly it looks like as of 2024 bic is no longer making the velocity pens in any colors other than black and blue the traditional colors for writing which seems like a baffling decision since the creamy blendable ink in these pens that make them amazing for drawing must make them terrible for actual writing rip bic velocity p s don t be fooled by the bic gel ocity line of gel pens they are obviously gel pens not ballpoints antsy sucko by tim fuller i m a sucker for the ol comics with the original dialog replaced gag my all time fave is truer than true romance a classic of the genre and this one is a hilariously solid example based obviously on mid century nancy and nancy and sluggo comic book stories antsy sucko capitalizes on the inherent absurdity of the setups and visuals of the originals and plays them up further for laughs the production is nicely done as well the paper patina off register printing etc is all preserved and the new lettering blends in perfectly i picked our copies up directly from the creator at space here in columbus but you can get either a digital or hard copy here when we wer...
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