It's A Bird, It's A Plane... It's An Illustration Job!

About a year ago an old friend from high school approached me with an idea for an illustration - he had a major Superman fan in his life, and for a special birthday present he wanted to have her appear on a comic cover with the big boy in blue. It sounded like fun, but I was a little hesitant.. Despite being a comic book fan - and having obsessively traced and copied the covers & characters when I was very young - I'd never done anything in that style as a grown-up picture-maker. He asked me to think over some image concepts & get back to him. I then looked at A LOT of comic book covers, from every period of the character I could find, including some of the great Neal Adams work I grew up with. As a kid I was never big on Superman - he was usually the backup if Spiderman or Batman were unavailable. The Christopher Reeve movies gave him a boost when I was 5 or 6 years old, but by the time the horrifyingly mulleted "Nuclear Man" showed up looking like a rock-opera escapee in the awful fourth, my enthusiasm was fading. He always seemed a bit too clean cut & indestructible. Years later I was vaguely aware of him having been revamped with long new-age hair & amazingly it didn't inspire me to pick up an issue.

No.

Absolutely not.

But the minute I was drawing the icon himself, none of that mattered. Sitting down at a drawing board featuring the Daily Planet, Lois Lane and that costume gave a definite thrill. Particularly at the colouring stage, adding those hyperbolic hues.. This surprises me still. Maybe some images are so connected to childhood excitement they're impervious to adult reason. As well as bullets.

Here's a quick run through the process. After looking at all the old covers, the original idea of um.. lets call the girl I was inserting into the picture Lana, for the sake of vestigial privacy.. Ok, so the original idea of Lana being substituted for Lois in Supes substantial arms, safely rescued and in flight, developed into the jokier idea of Lana rescuing him & speeding him away from a choice selection of super-baddies while Metropolis receded below. As Lana was to be dressed in her distinctive daily clothes (red hoodie, shorts & green sneakers), no extra costume design was needed. I was keen also to reference as much of the history of the comic as I could, this being for a fan and all, and a picture of a mid-rescue super-Lois became a central influence. 

All this & a Pulitzer too.

It was in the search for reference pics of women carrying men that I stumbled on the "Lift & Carry" fetish - muscular women hauling slim men about the place, sometimes clothed, sometimes not. Hey, to each their own - and one of those snaps became my major reference for the hands, legs & feet! 

Up and away..

For other elements, like clothes & light, friends kindly did a bit of posing, sans fetishy buzz. I think.

Superhoodie.

Metropolis was a straight steal of New York, as in the post-Shuster comic itself. In my Superman world, the Daily Planet has been so successful they've moved right into the Empire State Building and done a little remodelling on the roof. Drawing the Planet's famous rooftop globe was one of those jobs that you expect to be simple and quick, but which was actually kind of torture. Instead of making it up off the top of my head, I measured everything, designing it 3 dimensionally & endlessly drafting & redrafting. Pretty stupid, given the simple requirements of the finished work. Another live & learn experience. And a lesson in how sometimes a good guess can come out about the same as a painstaking calculation..

The job spilled over into time I was booked to be away from my studio set up, 2000 miles north in Queensland. This changed a few things - the choice of art supplies became the available acrylic, coloured pencil & Uniball pens, and the workspace was an improvised one.

My temporary folding-table studio, mid tropical summer..

This was the location in which everything finally came together. At drafting stage I tend to work on 60gsm tracing paper, to make easier the process of combining the various more usable bits of different drawings.. Here's a few of the early doodles & experiments. 

Lois ala Lift & Carry. Just figuring shapes at this stage.

Tricky hand types. Should look surprised, but not horrified..

Rough heads, hoodie body & that globe!

After a lot of this, there was finally a usable combination of faces, buildings, clothes and muscles. Lana's legs were a difficult one to sell - she was a combination of four completely different people - but at last it stopped looking like bride of Frankenstein & fitted nicely.

Starting to look like something..

This was also when the design was simplified to strike out the supervillians. Not only did that mean a lot less design & figure work, but a stronger idea emerging - Lana was now saving Superman from the daily grind of rescuing the ever-plummeting Lois. Leaving Lois to make her own way to the ground floor seemed to give the joke more bite - and it turned out Lana had never been much of a fan of Miss Lane.. Perfect. (Insert scheming laugh here.) I moved on to the inks. For some reason I was working at A4 size. Not sure why.. But to get a decent likeness I switched to A3. I decided this having already started to ink A4 size, so the plan was to leave out the faces, xerox the incomplete inked image onto 220gsm art paper, then finish the remaining inks & colours full size. Overcomplicated, but sometimes them's the breaks.

A4 inking in progress.

The A3 upgrade. Colour at last!

This really was an old school illustration - I just noticed the Magic Plus tape masking the white border around the work. Haven't had to do that in a long while. So, at this point the job was basically done - some earthy colours on the cityscape (a palette chosen so as not to let the figures disappear into the background) & finishing on the Daily Planet and bam.. or shazam.. or something.. but finito anyway. As a result of the circumstances of it's production the delivered work had a very handmade look that I was pleased with & might not otherwise have tried - that grainy, almost lumpy coloured pencil look made it something that couldn't be mistaken for the machine-printed sheen of a real comic book & spelled it out as a love-letter to one instead. Here's a slightly over-compressed version of it - 

The delivered work.

And the reason I've included a fairly low-res version is because there is one more - as time went by I couldn't resist going back & doing a little retouching. I liked the finished work, but couldn't help picturing it with one of those exclamation-prone story headlines below the figures, and maybe some whoosh lines under Lana to balance that up... I also took the opportunity to bring some grey into the sky area, like it's a smoggy Metropolis day they're getting up & out of. I'm happy with it now, (as much as you can ever be with a finished piece) & really glad to have had the chance to work on something that struck me at first as perhaps not the most exciting job. I need to offer my apologies to the man of steel on that front. Sorry Superman. You were really good fun.*

Superfinished.

Supercloseup.

*Superman apology does not indicate change in personal preference for Spidey or Batman. Nice try Supes.

Cronenberg's Gut Feeling.

In the years before David Cronenberg's filmography included subjects like William Burroughs and Sigmund Freud the Canadian director was the king of cerebral splatter - and sure, that combination may make for limited competition so his cornering the crown on it might not have been challenging, but being in his audience to watch the end product often was. Packed to bursting with meaty rage monsters, sex monsters and general pulsating goopus his films through the 70's and much of the 80's delved deep into humanity's strange, rotten recesses. Shivers, The Brood, Videodrome, Scanners & The Fly all seem to be part of the director's picking at the question of what makes us human.. and they often involved sifting through the entrails literally. That's the part that stuck with me as a kid. What cinema-going childhood of the eighties would really have been complete without the sight of Michael Ironside chewing scenery and using his vein-popping psychokinetic powers to blow up someone's head? Yep, it's quite a legacy. I only mention all of this because of a photo of the director that I strayed across a while back which absolutely had to be shared - it's probably from 1982, maybe 83.. During Videodrome's production period.  And I'm not certain if it's a totally latex James Woods, or some part of him is the real James Woods, but either way, that's a fun day at work. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, may I present David Cronenberg and his fistful of gizzards.

Relative As Clockwork.

A couple of years ago I heard somebody mention the idea that our experience of the speed of time passing is relative to the percentage the given period represents of our lives so far lived. So a month of school holidays when you're eight years old can seem like forever, while exactly the same stretch away from work thirty years later will probably pass in a flash. The longer you live, the shorter each month will feel. There can be exceptional circumstances which reverse this trend - when watching Pirates of the Carribbean 3 for instance, kids will probably find the yo-hoing all-too-soon over while an adult may feel like an excruciating lifetime has crawled by. But that isn't the point. The point is how quickly years - and this year in particular -  get away. So with apologies for the lack of regular updates from your rapidly ageing blogger in this fast-escaping year, it's over to Leunig, who nails it once again.

Oh, and excuse the oddly small sizing of the cartoon -  another tangle with Blogger's weird settings. It's either this or so large it spills into the column on the right. To see it on a scale not requiring your magnifying glass, do just click on it. A pleasing lack of eye strain should ensue.

The Girl In The Picture.

Every now and then something comes up that makes you realize how easy it is to look without really seeing. For years I saw this picture flip past in our old family albums, and the most striking thing about it was the presentation - that lush Hollywood style of pose & lighting that was so popular at the time & made everyone look like they were stars of their own private movie. Actually this was Townsville, north Queensland in 1960. Elvis & The Drifters were sharing chart space with Rolf Harris, Menzies was Prime Minister & television was still a treat often shared with neighbours. When the girl in the picture had this shot taken at a local studio she was 18 years old. It was my sister who saw it's most important aspect - the missing smile. The Rosslyn Mathiesen that we knew was one whose enjoyment of life was obvious, and that infectious joie de vivre was always writ large in pictures of her. Striking the dreamy moviestar pose didn't seem her style at all. So what was going on? I'm still surprised how little I was seeing. In 1960 Rosslyn's mother Gladys had died, still in her early 40's. This photo was taken very soon after. The session had been booked in advance & forgotten. They called to remind her, and despite the circumstances, she went in. She said that day she didn't feel like smiling. Before she was 25, Ros and her sister Wilma had lost their brother, mother and father. When I look at this picture now I see someone who understood the uncertainty and brevity of life from very early on. I also feel sure it fired her enthusiasm to live with passion - to use that limited time well. She became a nurse, a wife & a mother, loved art, nature, music, food, books, friends.. ideas. Had a low tolerance for bullshit. Could absolutely take a mango apart, right down til the seed was white. Loved to float around in salt water or get covered in dirt in the garden. Just to get stuck in. People trusted her & many depended on her. And she was always very encouraging of the art I made, & keen to help out when things went wrong. As well as being my mother, she was a great friend.

The girl in the picture, Rosslyn Anne Murray (nee Mathiesen), died in April this year of complications from ovarian cancer. She is very much missed.

For donations to cancer research & awareness, please visit http://www.cancer.org.au/Getinvolved/donate.htm That's the Cancer Council, who do great work.

The Adventures of Peter Weller Across The Eigth Dimension

OK, that might be exaggerating a tad but the guy certainly gets around.  Recently I was working up a jokey idea for a sticker using the image of Detroit's favourite police cyborg - Robocop - when I ran across an article on the varied career of the man in the suit himself, Peter Weller. It reminded me to post the sketch in the previous update, but there's also a couple of details about his offscreen life that really need to be shared. I promise this is a one-off & the blog isn't about to become Entertainment Tonight.

It seems like after the promise & fun of the Actor's Studio, Buckaroo Banzai, Robocop & Naked Lunch, Weller had a stretch of bad luck direct-to-video experiences. Anybody who saw Screamers surely had to feel for him in this rough patch. Or at least that's how it looked from the outside. But in fact Weller was doing exactly what he wanted, apparently enjoying the cop shows & exploitation as much as the arty fare, seeing it all as breadth of experience. That's what he's always after. And it turns out he's quite the polymath - as well as acting he also directs, plays jazz trumpet (in the Three Men From Italy group with friend Jeff Goldblum), runs in marathons, speaks fluent French & Italian and - this is my favourite part - while living in Italy discovered a passion for history which led to his becoming a university lecturer on ancient civilizations, literature & fine arts. Showing up for class & discovering your teacher is Mr Banzai has gotta be a little weird. Now all he needs is a touch of physics & medicine and he's totally ready to fight aliens. Weller is currently working towards a PhD in Italian Renaissance Art History from UCLA. A few years back he fitted in hosting the Engineering An Empire series for the History Channel. Also he's in the fifth season of Dexter. Not a lazy man.

And here he is. PW, the renaissance man.. with a shoebox on his head. That's really him, helping out a campaign to get a statue of Robocop built in Detroit. Google "RoboCop Speaks To Detroit" for his funny, rambling video plea. And relax - they raised the money. The statue will be built. 
Love this guy.  

One more subject I've learned about from the web trawling - The Robocop Unicorn craze. I don't know how I missed it til now, but it seems to be weirdly popular. Far as I can tell, it started with a fake political ad, (you tube ahoy for this one) urging citizens not to vote for ED-209, who has problems negotiating stairs, but to give it up for "Robocop Unicorn." It caught on. I have no idea why. But it led to a lot of pictures like this:

It's a strange world. 
Thank you for your cooperation. Good night.

Sketchy Details Emerge From Bug Powder Dust.

Some recent rummaging in the bottom drawer turned up this quickie sketch of Peter Weller, playing everybody's favourite Exterminator in Cronenberg's Naked Lunch. Really had forgotten about this one - made at a time when some friends & I were trying to figure out a good plot for a gangster-monster clay animation. We watched & read a LOT of pulp, but sadly never did quite crack it. I guess this pic must be about 15 years old now.. drawn by pausing the VCR & working out or fudging details through the videotape haze, just using pencil on cheap butcher's paper. It's rough, but seeing it again I didn't mind it - worth sharing for the Weller/Cronenberg/Burroughs fans out there anyways. And I still think a gumshoe splatter flick would be fun. You know the drill - something boiled so hard it's head explodes. Down these tentacle-infested streets a man must go who is not himself tentacle-infested, and so on. Yeah. Hard to give up on that. Maybe one day..

Eisenstein Could Really Get Prickly If You Rubbed Him The Wrong Way.

Well this is terrible. Once again I wake up from a quick nap to find I've got a foot-long beard, everybody's dressed funny and we've declared our independence from England.. OK maybe that last part was optimistic - regardless, I've let way too much dust gather on the Arsegravy. By way of apology & with the promise of a proper update soon, I offer this stirring image of Sergei Eisenstein - director of Battleship Potemkin, father of montage, and lover of the saucy holiday snap. It's 1930, he's in Mexico, and his enthusiasm is clearly huge. Action!