When you can't get what's in your head, out there.

I started drawing cartoons and submitting them to publications when I was very young. I think, in retrospect, that it was a good time to start because at that age it seems so implausible that anyone will actually buy your work that rejection is nothing more than what you expect. The really surprising thing is when someone actually wants to buy one of the drawings.

The first one to appear was I think, in the Sun. It may be that Accountancy Magazine was the first publication to buy a cartoon from me, but it was published monthly, so the Sun was the first to publish one of my cartoons. What surprised me was the revelation, when I actually had in my hand the newspaper in which my first published cartoon appeared, that what was important was not the drawing, or the humour, or the payment that would most assuredly be coming my way, but that my signature wasn't there. I had put it on the right, below the drawing and it had been cut off. I really wanted my name to be there, however small, however illegible. You see, I really did want to be part of the history of newspapers, albeit in a very small, very minor way. I wanted my name to be on a document that I knew would be housed for posterity, as one copy of all British publications were, in The Scottish Library.


Of course, over time my mindset changed, and then I got married, and then our kids came along, and went to school, and our bills grew, and cartooning actually became a job, and the money became important. At that stage there was a disconnect between the cartoons I liked, and the cartoons I drew. I wanted to create work like Clair Bretecher or Jules Feiffer, work that was intelligent as well as funny, but I just wasn't that smart. Oh, I tried, but I hadn't really been around that long and my ideas about people and politics and life in general weren't very sophisticated, and so there developed a fracture, between what I wanted to create, and what I did for a living.


So there I was, dreaming of tilting at windmills, looking at work that I admired and not really knowing why I couldn't make myself create something like it. Of course I know now that there were many reason why I couldn't do it, and I know now that the very act of trying to drive myself to produce it simply compounded the problem, but back then it was always in the back of my mind that whatever I did just wasn't good enough. It is not a healthy way to think, I know, but I was young.

Anyway, one of the magazines I loved and hated in equal measure, because it reminded me how limited my cartooning abilities were/are, was Heavy Metal. More than the superhero comics and the indie comix I collected, because I could convince myself that Ditko and Kirby and Crumb, were all one-offs, Heavy Metal was a constant reminder of just how many talented "one-offs" there were out there.

I mean to say, honestly, just look at that line-up from one issue in 1978, Moebius, Druillet, Forest drawing Barbarella for goodness sake. I really loved the magazine, but it was so infuriating, because I just couldn't see any way to make the leap from the sort of cartooning I did, to this sort of thing. To be completely honest, I had no idea how some of drawings were created. It would be another couple of years before I would figure out Richard Corben used a spray gun. In this issue, for instance, Francois Schuiten's Going to Pieces actually awed me, here was cartooning that was also clearly art. Here was a complete narrative, without words, for adults and children alike, that was so perfect, so realised, that I would just sit and stare at the drawings, and I had no idea how anyone could make illustrations like that happen.

Not that it made a whole lot of difference when I did understand the techniques and the media involved. If anything it was probably more frustrating to see what a cartoonist like Chantal Montellier was able to produce with simply a pen, ink and paper; and of course a brilliant imagination (the piece is eerily prescient, I think). In fact Montellier's 1996 is one of my favourite comics because it is so visually striking and the story always makes me laugh. No wonder the similarly striking artwork of Jaime Hernandez would be so resonant in my later years - when, of course, I sit in front of Love and Rockets thinking "I can never be this good".

Copyright; Metal Hurlant and the various artists and writers detailed on the contents page above.

Snyder, Robin Snyder...Ditko Squad

Great excuse to show one of the most brilliant Ditko covers of all time

I'm going to throw this open because I'm being pestered by Robin Snyder who keeps asking me odd Ditko-related questions but never gets right to the point.

I think he overestimates me, and perhaps because he himself has worked with Steve Ditko assumes that I to would think it pretty normal to just, maybe, drop him a line. I have to say Robin, when Neil Gaiman is almost paralysed with fear at the prospect of talking with Mister Ditko, you underestimate the esteem in which the great man is held if you think it would be that easy for me. So to clear things up, no, I have not spoken to Steve Ditko; I cannot speak to Steve Ditko: if Steve Ditko spoke to me, my heart would stop.

The matter that Robin is so exercised about is the Mister A story that appeared in Witzend that I have put on the blog here. Robin is of the opinion that it is a copyright matter. And that is where our opinions differ. Robin appears to believe that showing the publication here is tantamount to publishing the thing, or republishing it. I disagree.

http://rodmckie.blogspot.com/2008/06/wally-woods-witzend.html

The original post here, is clearly a post about Wally Wood's publication Witzend. Wally Wood's Witzend, as one of the commentators on the post pointed out, is an important self-published publication, that many people have never seen and have no knowledge of. It was published 30 years ago by Wood himself. I have posted almost, but not quite, all of the publication on my blog, including the entire Mister A story (not the only one on the www, by the way), from that Witzend, for the purpose of study.

Several things strike me, the copyright vested in the work relates to the work Witzend, in its entirety, it does not relate to individual stories and great though the Ditko story is, it is simply part of this copy of Witzend. Another issue may have had no Mister A adventure, or 4 two-page stories, or a written story. If it was necessary to obtain copyright, and I don't believe it is, the copyright would only need to be obtained from Wally Wood or his surviving representatives; not every contributor. Secondly, this is not the copy of Witzend in its entirety, it is part of the publication, so although all the pages of Mister A are on display, every page of the full publication is not. Thirdly, this is a little blog, and the piece is here for study under fair use and fourthly, if Steve Ditko asked me to move it; I'd probably do so anyway because I'm such a fanboy, the moment I recovered from shock.

As far as I'm concerned, the thing meets the criteria of fair-use, and it is clearly on a blog where the practise of cartooning and the study of that craft is discussed and debated. I might be wrong, so I'm going to switch off the little button that allows me to stop you lot from telling me what you think (the nerve). If you have a view let me know.

What's in a name? Let your inner-Otaku speak.

I have always been in awe of people who work, in any field, in anonimity. In the Art world it's pretty rare, unless of course it's a selling point, like Banksy being a real 'underground' tagger (oh yeah).

But there are practical occassions when cartoonists have done this, in the past in particular, for instance when one worked for one of the big two comics publishers here in the UK, one may well have been 'discouraged' from working for the rival publisher. The same was true of DC and Marvel at one point, I'm sure. Which brings me to my first question, 'when is Pat Boyette art, not Pat Boyette work'?

Seems like an odd query, I know, but when Steve Ditko left Charlton comics, Pat Boyette took over some of his stuff (there's a pair of drawing boots to fill), I am now informed. Now, I have a particular comic here that I have puzzled over for years, it's Ghostly Tales #43. I'm totally sure that the first story, where the art is credited to Pat Boyette, is in fact by the great Steve Ditko, it positively reeks of Spider Man and Doctor Strange and just too many Ditko touches for it to be a ghost work - I think.

However, just to be contencious, I'm contrasting it with an uncredited Ditko page, again from Charlton, this time from The Many Ghosts of Doctor Graves; and just for good measure, with another story where the artwork is credited to Pat Boyette. Now, for years I have just assumed that for contractual reasons a bunch of artists worked for Charlton on the fly, and used the psudonym, Pat Boyette, but I read on another site that Pat Boyette was real and worked for Charlton, so I'm confused and bewildered, so I'm throwing it open to you, here is the artwork for you to subject to close-reading and content analysis (you may begin, now:>):

I'm sure this is Ditko because nobody could ghost him this well, and surely nobody ghosting him would go so far as to include Ditko's almost trademark patterning in the work:


I mean, this uncredited page from The Many Ghosts of Doctor Graves is clearly by Ditko and not a ghost artist, precisely because of such detail:

And whilst this form of crosshatching might easily be used by many cartoonists, it adds to the feel of the work and the weight of line and the characterization that a comics fan; a geek, if you wish, can easily recognise.

So now we turn to the second work in Ghostly Tales #43 that is credited to Pat Boyette, and we can see that whilst it is really good art, with it's own style (I know people who prefer it to the Ditko style), it is clearly not drawn by the same hand as the earlier story:

Again, let me be clear, I really like the artwork on the second story, but which of these, if any, is drawn by Pat Boyette?

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While we are all here talking about Ditko, I thought I'd show you this; it's a fantastic example of the man's pencil and artwork from one of my favourites, The Creeper (which I purloined from Dial B for Blog, a great site):