I did this for our IT department at the Law School. It’s one of those ideas I didn’t have to think about very much: if you walk around a law school at finals, you don’t see students doing much but tapping away at laptops.
A rough sketch for the general idea:
Start cutting and pasting stuff into Photoshop from Google Image Search:
Draw a (slightly) tighter sketch:
Carve:
Then see a much better-executed idea in the NYTimes:
Before my mom came down from Ohio for Thanksgiving, she was going through some family photographs and unexpectedly came across these postcards my great-grandfather Frank Davis sent from Austin and San Antonio to his daughters, Eleanor and Matilda, in 1929. At the time he was a state liquor inspector in Ohio, and we think he traveled to Texas for some type of conference or convention.
Have not had time to see much of this town: but like it as as far as I have gone. Spent until 4:30 today on trains. You Kiddies be good while Daddy is away for tomorrow is Mother’s Day. Be especially good to Mother.
– Daddy
Eleanor this is the seat of learning for the state of Texas. They have some wonderful schools here. The most friendly people that I ever saw.
– Daddy
Sister this is a pretty country. But a lot of Nationalitys [sic].
– Daddy
The comic strip is the definition of quotidian: it comes out everyday, you read it on the toilet, it just weaves itself into your everyday life. It’s about little details. It’s not about grand sweeping dramas. Graphic stories are able to show incidental life without having to describe it.”
— Alison Bechdel on the everyday in comics
I’m passionate. I’m disciplined. I play a lot…[When I sit down in front of a blank piece of paper or a blank computer screen,] I do a mark on the page, whether it’s virtual or actual paper. Once there is a mark, there’s no fear of not drawing something. It’s a funny thing, but it works every single time…
The way I work nowadays usually is…I don’t really draw a lot….I’ll go months without drawing, but I do keep a notebook…and write down dreams or ideas I have for stories. I just kind of keep filling in those pages and six months or eight months or twelve will go by and I’ll start to panic and I’ll say, ‘I’m never going to do another King-Cat,’ and then at some point…all this work that didn’t really make a lot of sense the day previously, it all just kind of comes together and I’ll think, ‘Ah, this is what the next issue’s going to be,’ and I’ll sit down and I’ll write the stories. I’m a person who allows myself some leeway. If a mistake happens in a comic or I sit down and draw and it takes me off on some tangent I didn’t anticipate, I’m open to following that wherever it may go. But I do usually have it pretty well thought out. But at this point I just see the comics in my head before I ever draw them. So when I have that thing kind of put together, I’ll draw intensely for a period of a couple weeks or a month or so. My comics are so simple, it’s a lot of work that goes into them before the drawing point, but when I actually sit down and draw them it actually goes pretty quickly. And then I’ll put it together, sit down with the pages, edit things and try to make an issue kind of cohesive. Nowadays, it’s still a kind of random thing for me, but I do try to kind of have the issue be a cohesive thing, like an album where these are independent songs but if you take them as a whole they’re a unified expression.
— John Porcellino
I am more greatly moved by people who struggle to express themselves….I prefer the abstract concept of incoherence in the face of great feeling to beautiful, full sentences that convey little emotion.”
— Daniel Day-Lewis
This is a small, poor-quality .jpg of a drawing I did of Lynda Barry last year. When my Powerbook crashed, I lost the original artwork forever. When I heard about Stanford’s VectorMagic online vectorization tool, I thought the Barry piece might be a good way to test it out. A bit of background for folks who aren’t familiar with the whole vector art thing:
Vectorization (aka tracing) is the process of converting a raster image to a vector image. Raster images are pixel-based, whereas vector images are represented by geometric shapes such as lines, circles and curves…This site converts bitmap images to vector art – it’s an online auto-tracer. Just upload your image and we will vectorize it for you. Vector art is useful because it allows you to scale an image without making it blurry or pixelated.
With about two minutes max of fiddling, this is what the program spit out:
Pretty decent results — you can tell a bit of detail on the lettering has been lost, but it’s pretty amazing what kind of detail it will retain based on just that “cruddy” jpeg:
You’ll notice that the vectorization simplifies all the curves and shapes, which almost makes the woodcut look even more convincing — definitely slicker. With a little cleanup on the lettering in Illustrator, I think it’s as good, if not better, than the original.
As Eddie Campbell pointed out, the new Comics Journal #286 features a 5-page essay and 37 color Sundays of Otto Soglow’s strip, “The Ambassador”, which first began life as “The Little King” in the pages of the New Yorker:
In the middle of 1930, Soglow introduced a new character that would launch the next stage of his career, an unnamed and silent King who trudges through his daily offices in a daze, longing for any excuse to step away from it all, even if just to pick up the milk at the castle door. By 1931, the “Little King,” as he came to be known, was a regular feature in the magazine’s pages, caught up in absurd rituals and ceremonies and longing to break away to the open road. The joke, for those who cared to look for it, depended primarily on Soglow’s long-running theme: In a society in which individuals are imprisoned by social categories like class, gender and sexuality, everyone is wearing costumes that fit as poorly as the King’s crown. Our little king no more belongs on the throne than Bill’s unnamed colleague belonged in the sewer. The King always jumped at any excuse to join the staff in the kitchen, to slide down the banister, even, in the last Little King cartoon for the New Yorker in 1934, to join the people in rioting against his monarchy.
But the King would not escape his crown so easily. Soglow’s Little King cartoons had attracted the attention of William Randolph Hearst, who determined to have Soglow and his King for his own empire. Hearst had become increasingly interested in silent comics, having acquired Milt Gross, author of the pioneering silent graphic novel, He Done Her Wrong (1930), and launching Carl Anderson’s largely silent Henry in 1932. The resurgence of pantomime comics in the early 1930s is an interesting phenomenon in its own right, especially given that it coincided with the rise of sound film. Just as the movies learned to talk, comics began to experiment with what they could accomplish without words….
…the New Yorker had another year on its contract for the character. And so Soglow was asked to create another title as a kind of placeholder until Little King could at last complete his move from magazine to newspaper. Appropriately, Soglow created his forerunner for the King’s arrival in the form of an Ambassador, and he used his first newspaper strip much as a diplomat might utilize a fact-finding mission to lay the groundwork for a royal visit. Soglow had worked almost exclusively in magazines up to this point, and the newspaper format was both exciting and somewhat overwhelming, as the early, somewhat stiff pages suggest. The Little King had appeared only occasionally in his years at the New Yorker, and now he would be expected to appear weekly. And so the Ambassador — a barely disguised version of the King himself — served as a stand-in, a place for Soglow to develop the character and his potential and to explore the possibilities (color, movement, scale) of the new medium.
I really, really love Soglow’s work, so I thought I would share a few of the original Little King strips that ran in the New Yorker.
The Little King sliding down a banister:
The Little King running away with gypsies:
The Little King losing a golf ball:
It’s worth noting that several of the strips were broken up and presented across a two-page spread:
And that several of them can be quite tender. Here, The Little King sheds a tear after being snubbed by a janitor:
And here, he contemplates the moon while the queen sleeps (I can relate):
Much of the development of Soglow’s style is explicitly attributed to his association with the New Yorker:
Harold Ross had founded his magazine in 1925, and Soglow began contributing the very next year. Ross wanted the comics in his new magazine to have a very different look than those of its illustrated predecessors: magazines like Puck and the original Life, with their Victorian crosshatchings and labored captions. He wanted the art in the New Yorker to serve as a visual representation of the modernist style he wished to capture, and he encouraged his cartoonists to reduce their work to the absolute minimal number of strokes and words.
The match was a good one for Soglow, who was at this time experimenting with “eliminating lines that I felt weren’t necessary.” Soglow’s earliest work for the New Yorker showed the influence of his fine-arts training and a rather conventional approach to the magazine comic, but quickly, under the influence of Ross and the artists at the magazine, Soglow began to develop what became his signature style: sequential comics, single-line drawing and minimal text.
In the very last Little King strip that ran in the New Yorker, the monarch riots along with the people:
And whether you noticed or not, if you’re a regular New Yorker reader, you get a dose of Soglow’s drawings every week: while Soglow was with the New Yorker, he drew every one of the small drawings that appeared at the beginning of each Talk of the Town article, and the magazine has been reusing the drawings ever since his death (over 25 years).
Soglow’s obituary from 1975:
Further reading:
The Comics Journal – Otto Soglow and The Ambassador (excerpt)
We All Go Soglow: a bunch of good scans of Soglow’s work
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