Friday, June 13, 2008

Ff/Iron Man: Big in Japan 4 page 13

When Seth set out to draw something like this where he was trying to show what was happening in a place that we the reader had never conceived, much less visited, his mathematical/scientific way of looking at things surfaced, and we get this schematic drawing of the rooms inside the volcano, such as you might find in the instruction manual for your car engine. He was rather a left-brain artist anyway. Or rather he used both sides of his brain to a far greater extent than most of us are able to do. This page shows the merger of the schematic, nothing-but-the-facts style of illustrating (in the bottom half of the page), with the wierd, right-brain-conceived monster from the depths of nightmare (in the upper half of the page). And then there is the newsmagazine-like inset of Reed and Ben Grimm reacting to the nightmare.

This combination of left and right brain in the same image, the factual-seeming schematics plus outlandish monsters bring to mind the writing of Jules Verne, or CS Lewis, or Dante. These artists all were able to search within their own well-stocked imaginations for juicy images, and then make them seem solid enough to describe in plain and concrete detail.

1 comment:

bgudna said...

this page is nothing short of mindblowing!