Flowering Nose

The Floweringnose website is being remodeled

2012-01-23T18:31:00.000-08:00

Well the time has come. I have hired a website designer, and he is going to redo Seth's website. If he were here he could do it himself, but I can't, and it needs doing.
Come Monday, January 30, it will be six years since Seth died.
But don't worry, we are not planning Big Changes. Mostly he is going to make it more accessible to me, and get rid of the obsolete parts, and the parts that Google says are infected.

So keep looking from time to time. I'll let everyone know from here when the new parts will be unveiled.

It's Seth's birthday today

2011-07-22T07:48:00.000-07:00

Today is 39 years from the day Seth was born. It's also ComicCon time in San Diego. And his wife and son just arrived from Japan yesterday evening. So it's a Seth day in our house!

And just in time for this day, comes from good friend to the blog J(ay), a stack of sketchcards, drawn by a variety of different artists, all different takes on the Flowering Nose. What a gift, one that took a year or so to put together! There are 41 of the cards. Forty-one! Not being good at organizational things myself, putting together something like this seems like almost an impossibility to me. But you did it Jay, out of love for Seth's art, and warmth toward his family.
Here is an assortment of cards, in no particular order:

Many of them also include a slug, or even a snail.
Many of the sketchcard makers are familiar with the Flowering Nose game, and got his cape, his colors, and occasional fields of flowers.

To everyone who contributed, thank you so very much. Seth's take on life was goofy, charming, and filled with a combination of loving and working hard. That his birthday should bring a gift so much in the same spirit shows me that his spirit is still here. Wow.

Willworld has been re-released

2011-06-02T20:07:00.000-07:00

It looks like Willworld has come out again, in a $7.99 edition, as of May 23 or so. And because of that, Seth is again getting some attention on comic book blogs such as this one, and this one.

Willworld's pages bubble over with creative ideas, from the expressive borders around the frames, to the many quirky throwaway characters

to the fabulous architecture and machinery.

It has enough creativity flowing through its ink and cellulose veins to make several dozen comic books, I think. I am amazed every time I go through it. I am glad that a new group of comic book readers will be able to savor its delights, people to whom the $20 for the original was too big an expense.

WORLD DRAWING DAY--June 4, 2011

2011-05-29T10:33:00.000-07:00

June 4 is World Drawing Day. Wherever you are, whatever else is going on, take a few minutes to pick up a pencil, or a pen, or a mouse, or a stick, and draw. Then scan your drawing in to one of the websites that is collecting them: YouTube, Deviant Art, Facebook, PaperDemon, and a bunch more. They tell you all about it on the website.

The organizers hope to inspire One Million drawings.

It doesn't matter if you think you can't draw. There is no judgment involved. Nobody is going to say, "This one is accepted; this one is rejected." The hope is to recapture the joy that we had as little kids in the process of making marks on a page that represented something we liked.

It's not often that a public event comes up that has no purpose other than encouragement and delight. I like this.

Pictures at an exhibition

2010-10-18T08:44:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd post some photos that I took at the opening reception for the SugiPOP! exhibiton last Thursday evening. For a teeny-tiny museum, they got a lot of guests, and good press. The director said that there were over 200 people at the opening, and the show was on the front page of the Portsmouth newspaper.

The first room has some pretty traditional lovely Japanese woodblock prints, and some other wholly Japanese art. In the next room are rough drawings for an animated cartoon--maybe 40 of them. The third room has Seth's work, and the fourth room has that TV set, showing the whole of an animated cartoon in Japanese where Tofu sat enthralled, plus some animation cels. There are about eight rooms in all. On the whole it looks nice and tells a story of the collision of popular Japanese and Western styles of storytelling.

Incidentally the name SugiPOP! is another fusion of Japanese and American. "Sugi" is from the Japanese verb "Sugiru", meaning "to be too much", as in "Tabe-sugita": I ate too much. So the idea here is either that this is too much POP, or maybe that Japanese-American POP itself is too much, overwrought, over the top.

That's Hisako, Seth's wife, there with his work in the bottom photo.

SugiPOP! more pictures

2010-10-12T10:24:00.000-07:00

I have posted this page so many times, I wasn't going to put it up again. But I love it so much, and it is going to be on exhibition at the Portsmouth Museum of Art in New Hampshire.

His Vertigo Pop sketchbook will also be there, which you can find a little bit about here. And below, here are a couple of pages from the sketchbook. I have no idea what page they will open it to in the exhibition--he used it to work out nearly every frame in at least the first of these books.

We leave tomorrow to fly there for the opening reception.
Come join us if you can!

Clockwork salarymen

2010-10-06T08:45:00.000-07:00

Seth's best buddy Langdon Foss sent me this video because he said it reminded him of Seth. Yes, it is just the sort of thing Seth would like: precise, intelligent, amusing, and ultimately, life-affirming. Genki Sudo is a Japanese martial arts star turned writer, singer, dancer, and health expert.

SugiPop! Seth's work on exhibition

2010-10-05T08:31:00.000-07:00

In the interests of showing part of the process of creating works of art, as well as the finished works, the curators of this exhibition have included both this sketch for Vertigo Pop: Tokyo as well as Seth's sketchbook, which includes his roughs for nearly all the frames in the first issue of the story.

When Seth started working on this story, he was here in San Diego. He and his first wife were in the process of getting divorced, and he was living in the garage of their house. He had his slanted art table set up by a window, for natural light, though he had electric light as well. He had an electric heater at his feet (always--he liked to be warm). And he had this page, done on official 11" x 17" DC illustration board, pinned to his bulletin board.

He had worked out the norms of the style he was going to use for the figures in this story in the sketchbook: rubbery arms and legs with not much in the way of knees, no noses at all, those lips that look like two sausages: a manga-style look. But on this page are his references, for a consistent look throughout the whole of four issues.

The other manga style effect was his use of very realistic, detailed backgrounds. He was impressed with Japanese artists' deft combination of two rather different stylistic modes in one piece: clear, realistic backgrounds in good perspective, plus cartoonish figures. The real background gives weight and believability to the story, while the cartoonish people can show inner emotion more vividly than people (especially the notoriously reserved Japanese) usually do in public. Taken as a whole, the style gives the possibility of big drama to a story.

SugiPOP!

2010-09-14T08:11:00.000-07:00

Here is the page from yesterday. in which Steve, the American photographer sees Maki, the high school girl who fascinates him, all dressed up to go to a concert. Maki, in turn, is infatuated with the leader of the band they are going to see. We see her dressed in what she calls "visual kei" style, a version of Cosplay--dressing up in a sort of Goth Lolita style, a combination of babygirl cute and dangerously sexy.

Here are some photos of girls dressed in a similar style in Tokyo's Harajuku Park.
emphasis on the cute

and on the sexy.

Seth's design for Maki's outfit is more like the lower one, with her black platform shoes and short dress, but with enough little girl elements to give it a more quirky and less on-the-prowl look.

He has given her a grand entrance. She emerges centered in her almost square frame, with the flat wall behind her, the incongruous men's and women's bathroom icons flanking her just at wing level. He has used the elements of an ordinary scene--a public restroom where she changed her clothes--as a sort of stage set to make Maki stand out as the star that she wants to be.

SugiPOP!: Anime, Manga, Comics and Their Influence on Contemporary Art

2010-09-13T08:30:00.000-07:00

The Portsmouth Museum of Art in Portsmouth, New Hampshire has an upcoming exhibition called SugiPOP! Anime, Manga, Comics, and Their Influence on Contemporary Art. They asked to borrow a few pages from Seth's Vertigo Pop Tokyo series for the exhibition.
Pictured here is one of the pages that I am sending them, featuring Maki, the brazen, fame-seeking high school girl who is the central figure of this story. I'll write a little more about this page in another post.

The curator who wrote to ask about borrowing some of Seth's art said the following: Seth Fisher's Vertigo Pop Tokyo is an important American comic inspired by Japanese traditions, and as such, tells an important story about the history of these popular art forms. Seth's legacy lives on in his creations, and our exhibition would benefit immensely to include his chapter in comic history.

I am always surprised and gratified when people outside the comic book world know about Seth's work. I myself would not know about it, except that Seth is my son. But his Japanese connection coincided with a surge in American interest in Japanese pop culture, and Japanese infatuation with American pop culture. The American and the Japanese pop art visions have influenced each other to the extent that a new genre is emerging. And so now a mainstream art museum in the conservative Northeast is showcasing the blending of culture. And we get to be part of it.

Watch for more information on this!

More from the archives of Myst 3 sketches

2010-08-14T08:32:00.000-07:00

These two sketches from the tower at J'Nanin show Seth's understanding of architecture and of Art Nouveau architecture in particular. Art Nouveau was not just a matter of curving forms instead of right angles; it features stylized plant forms, balance, and proportion. The harmony between white space and busyness is a one of its hallmarks. Too much blank space and you have something that looks like a grain silo; too much busyness and you have Los Vegas for the eyes.

Good proportion makes your eyes happy: they want to just feast on the vision.

Both the sketches are views of the tower that is shown here in its final form. Like an architect Seth imagined and drew out even most of the hardware. My husband and I have done some home remodeling, and I know that there are some elements that I for one can ignore forever. And then I find that I have to make a decision about something I had never noticed before: "Do you want those hinges to be brass or stainless steel? --gloss or matte finish? --three screws or two?" But here they are--imagined in nearly all their detail in Seth's sketches.
I suppose that is what concept artists are paid to do. And it suited Seth's vision to imagine the detail work.

Myst 3 drawings

2010-08-12T08:08:00.000-07:00

A kindly and observant Mystophile wrote to me this week to send me links to a couple of other places on the web where Seth's drawings had been posted--drawings that I had not put up myself. Here is one link he sent. And he re is another (both put up without mention of Seth's name). With the aim of keeping this blog interesting, I had not posted ALL the drawings that I have. But it seems that people who love Myst really want to see everything. And I am glad to put something up here every month or so. So let me find a few drawings from Seth's notebook that I had not previously posted.

Here are some sketches of plants and animals for J'Nanin. The flowers I recognize. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the animals made it into the game.

Seth's drawing of the crab is quite a bit nicer than this scan. He didn't often use shading in his drawings, but he did on this, and his is far more subtle than what you see here: much lighter and rounder, even with as much softening as I could do on Microsoft Picture Manager and Picasa.
I don't remember seeing these half-buried bones in J'Nanin anywhere. But of course, at the time, I wasn't looking.

Happy Seth's birthday

2010-07-22T01:00:00.000-07:00

Today is Seth's birthday: Thursday July 22. He would be 38.

The great illustrator Barry Moser (a hero of mine, I am not sure Seth knew his work) took on the project of putting together a glorious illustrated Bible. He said in a lecture he gave about this work:

"Don Quixote said that if we wish to travel and avoid the fatigue, expense, suffering, and inconveniences of things like heat & cold & hunger & thirst & insects, we should sit comfortably by our firesides and travel by maps."
The description of the lecture goes on: "When he came to it Moser was an older, work-callused journeyman and as such he did not venture into certainty or absolutism. He ventured into uncertainty— and into self. He did not have a map. He traveled in the cold much of the time, and often on very thin ice. He was, as he says, 'uncomfortable, uncertain, and unarmed'."

Illustration at its best is opening oneself up to the discomfort, uncertainty, and nakedness of reaching inside to try & locate the images, the format that will bring out the truth that is inside each story. Seth traveled the same road as Mr. Moser did. He reached into those often avoided places inside to find what was necessary for each story. He drew each story as true as possible. Each one required a different style, a different tone. Seth was willing to pour himself into the work, and come up with, not what people expected, but something alive.

It was all about Life. Seth was never content to do what was easy. He threw himself into life as he did into his work, eyes and heart open to see and hear, always putting the most into the moment at hand. I think this film of Joe Eigo, stuntman and gymnast extraordinaire, which I found on Seth's hard drive, is a fitting gift from Seth to his family, friends, and fans on his birthday. What he does is a kind of physical metaphor for what I think real Life looked like to Seth: joyful, uncommon, full of surprises, the result of many hours of hard work, practice, and full attention to what you are doing. To Life!!
Happy Seth's birthday all!

More giant heads

2010-04-13T08:30:00.000-07:00

After posting the Easter Island picture yesterday, and noting that those heads were part of Seth's mental landscape, I remembered the giant heads that float all around Willworld. But on this page in particular, the large bottom frame has a head statue clearly modeled on the Easter Island ones. Those statues have fascinated people ever since Captain Cook landed there in 1774, but they became particularly meaningful, or maybe particularly memorable for Seth for some reason, and their imagery pops up now and again all through his work.

Easter Island

2010-04-12T08:16:00.001-07:00

This drawing of Seth's from 1999 was sold recently; I saw it on the Comic Art Fans website. It was originally done on commission for someone who collected drawings of cliffs, asking various comic book artists to draw a cliff of some sort for him. Seth's cliff is actually a promontory or stone needle with an Easter Island-type head carved on the very top, out in the middle of a bleak and deserted landscape, softened only by the gorgeous cumulus clouds.

The photograph below--from today's Bing page--is instantly recognizable as Easter Island. It's all a fascinating sight, and the story about it, which you can see here, is maybe even more interesting. I post this today because when I saw the Bing background, and played the YouTube video, I wanted to show Seth. He would have loved this: both the photo, and the information. He included Easter Island statues in other places in his work. They seemed always to be part of his mental landscape. And besides, he always got a kick out of David Attenborough. We watched the whole Life on Earth series when Seth was in grade school. "Here, just a few feet away, is a group of komodo dragons. They look placid and sluggish, but in fact, they can run very fast, and can eat a water buffalo, or a human."

There is a wonderful drawing Seth did in the mid-90's, which I can't find right now, of an ornate art gallery with many people milling around a giant elongated head of this sort. The juxtaposition of the two worlds is classic Seth, and quite endearing. I'll look for that drawing and post it when and if I find it.

More musings about Art

2010-03-13T09:00:00.000-08:00

My husband and I went to the symphony last night to hear Joshua Bell play the violin with the San Diego Symphony. Even I, visual more than aural in my understanding of the world, can hear the glory of the music he caresses from his violin. He can produce sounds that are so sweet they feel like honey, and a second later find sharp, raw chords. His music flows, it sweeps, it crushes. He seems to be one with the music, looking in it for the underlying essence, and whatever that is, he finds and sings with his instrument.

I was pondering what is the difference between a violinist like Joshua Bell and an excellent violinist like the other symphony musicians. Would he ever play in an orchestra, just one of the string section? No. His playing is art. It is different from those. They all play for love: they certainly don't do it for the big money; it isn't there. But he plays with some extra measure of love and attention. It's not just expertise. It is full oneness with the music.

I think all art is that way. All great artists are that way. They must have the skills; that is basic. But skill is not sufficient; they must be able to put their skills, their heart, their minds, everything wholly at the service of the music. Egos may be huge, but during the music, the ego must serve the art, not vice versa.

I write these things here because I think Seth was also such an artist. He put his whole self into whatever it was he was doing: his art certainly, but also whatever he had to do. Nothing was routine. Nothing was too small for attention. Everything became worthwhile in his hands.
I have said here before that I used to ask him to look for projects to work on that had more literary value. He said to me once in reply: "Think Verdi." I said, "Touche." Operas rarely have real literary worth until the music becomes part of them. But the music adds to the words in such a way that the whole becomes something of lasting value. In just that way, Seth's comic books may have been for fun, but his art lifts them out of the run of usual books, and makes them something more: art.

Musing about Art

2010-03-02T09:12:00.000-08:00

The art exhibition at the University of Oregon is over; they have sent us back the pages we lent them for the show. We sent them in mylar envelopes, they returned them beautifully matted. These people did things better than they had to.

This picture of a dejected Batman (issue 195, page 22) is one of the pieces they sent back. I have finally photographed it.

I have watched some of the Olympics, as just about everyone who has access to some sort of viewing tool has done. My favorite in the winter Olympics is ice dancing. I know, it's not really a sport. But that's what I like about it. The couples don't have to all do the same set of things; they can create their dance. It's art, or sometimes it is. As I was watching, I remembered a couple from maybe 20 years ago whose routines were different from anyone else's. I couldn't remember their names, so I Googled (actually Binged) 1990 ice dancing, and found them: Torvill and Dean. If you haven't seen them--or even if you have--this is truly worth watching. They did something that NO ONE else did: they subsumed their own egos into the dance. That is, it was not about parading their skill; it was about making something beautiful. Their timing was absolutely perfect, but it wasn't about that. Their strength was astonishing, but it wasn't about that. Their virtuosity was legendary, but it wasn't about that. It was not even about the exact unison of their actions. It was about making something beautiful. Dance is a spectator art; it doesn't exist without an audience. But these dancers are not showing off for their audience. Nothing in them says, "Look at how great I am." What they say is, "Enter into the spirit of this number, and be transported to a place of delight."

In contemplating Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, I am aware that all great art has that in common. It is not about showing the skill of the artist, or even the vision of the artist. It's not about ego. Sometimes what is right for the work is to do something simpler than the artist's skill level is capable of. Sometimes a great part has to be taken out because it doesn't go with the rest of the piece. An artist does what is in his or her own soul, without wondering if it's really OK to do it that way because it hasn't been done before. An artist takes his or her own vision and translates it into their particular art form, even if it's socially peculiar, or never before heard of, or obsolete, or unpopular. It's not about other people, even if it is done for others to see or hear.

I began this post by mentioning that the people of the Jordan Schnitzer gallery at the University of Oregon had treated the artworks they borrowed with care far beyond what was expected. That is also a part of art: doing far more than what other people expect, because it has to fulfill ones own vision of what is right.

Here above is this picture that Seth did, of Batman sitting on a couch looking like an unhappy guy in a spandex suit, his tool belt hanging realistically down onto the floor, and a knife upright in the floorboards where he has thrown it in frustration. This sort of image of Batman upset some fans, who wanted their superheroes a little less vulnerable. But it takes Batman to a level of realism that accentuates his superpowers rather than diminishing them, because it shows him to be a guy like your neighbor, who just happens to have an extra source of ability, and is learning to use it. Batman too is an artist: a man who has an extra ability, and learns how to use it, sometimes in unprecedented ways, so the rules have to be made up as he goes along.

Flowering Nose day

2010-01-28T20:37:00.001-08:00

Saturday the 30th of January it will be four years since Seth died.

We have gone on to do things other than grieve. I for one have been drawing quite a lot lately, thanks to Seth, and it has become much easier and faster to get what I want down on paper. (Though when I draw I become more acutely aware of his absence than at other times.) I don't worry that if I erase this, the next try will be not as good. I know that I can do it. I have done battle with perspective and backgrounds, and have learned from doing and redoing. I have stayed with my project, again thanks to Seth, and have improved it. These are student-type thoughts, but I guess it's ok to be a student again. If I don't keep learning, I'll just keep repeating myself.

Last year some of Seth's siblings declared January 30 Flowering Nose Day, a day to encourage artists, to take risks in order to do something worth doing, to create something that delights you, to have fun doing whatever you are doing, to do your best at whatever you do, to remember Seth by stretching out your arms and loving what you are doing and who you are with.
I am all for it.

Happy New Year

2010-01-04T13:50:00.001-08:00

It's 2010 now. That still sounds pretty spacy to someone born around the middle of the 1900's, though I better get used to writing that number on checks.

The Art of the Superhero exhibition at the University of Oregon should be in the process of being taken down now. In September it seemed like it would be up a long time, but now I wonder why they made the time so short.

The lady at our library who was in charge of the exhibition of Seth's work last summer (2008) told me that there are a couple of other libraries in the area that are interested in showing his work sometime. It always makes me happy to think about new people finding his beautiful work, and being able to see it in its original form.
If any of the readers of this blog know of venues: galleries, museums, libraries, that would be interested in showing--but not selling--Seth's original artwork, please let me know. I would entertain offers from pretty much anywhere in the world, I think.

I am not sure what will happen to this blog this year. I am spending more time doing my own artwork.
Seth has helped and encouraged me immensely. There are letters that he wrote to aspiring artists that explain how art fits into the whole of life; there are the many times he wrote or spoke about the duty of the artist to be true to his own vision, and not the demands of other people; there are his illustration tips that he wrote for his own use; there are the works themselves; it was very instructive to examine them for how the parts of a page fit together in order to tell the story in the truest and most dramatic fashion possible. All these are things I saw after Seth died, and they bring to mind the little things he told me while he was alive: the tips he gave me on occasion about making my art work better, about making the design more interesting, about keeping on doing it, because it is worthwhile. There are the letters I have received from artists who Seth encouraged. There is his life, fully lived, not ever giving way to fear.

It may be that the time is near that the best way to honor Seth and his work is to do my own work, rather than to write this blog. At this advanced time of my life, I believe that it is not too late to make art more than just something I can do better than my friends. Seth has taught and encouraged me, and I now believe that I have the duty to use my God-given skill, to improve it, to do something with it that has some value in the world. I don't want to regret missed opportunities, wasted time, misuse of potential. I think that is what would honor Seth the most, and I think it is what he most wanted: for his mother, and for everyone to use their own skills and vision to the highest degree possible.

Flash: Time Flies page 31

2009-12-14T08:51:00.000-08:00

It was the colorist (Chris Chuckry)'s idea to picture Steve Kriozere with blue outlines rather than black. Seth drew him the same as the other things in this picture. You can consider for yourself if it works better visually that way or not.

A couple of things jump out at me from this page. One is the structures, which I have talked about before. The physical setting is as much the star of this story as anything else, at least in Seth's rendering of it. The varied ornate awnings and solar panels that take up nearly the whole of the second frame all seem to be part of an overall plan for heating and cooling and maybe making the air usable, something an engineer could figure out if he could see the blueprints.

The other thing that interests me is-- though maybe a comic book art staple--something I don't have the guts to do in drawing. That is the realistic (but exaggerated-looking) perspective in the small square on the lower right, of Steve hurrying away, seen from below. It's an ant's-eye view, and if you were lying on the ground taking a photograph you would see it the same. Nevertheless, it's unnatural to draw it that way; Steve comes out looking a little like Gumby. The pointy sticks bouncing around between us and him make it clearer.

Flash: Time Flies page 22

2009-12-07T09:19:00.000-08:00

What strikes me about this page is the structure of the building where all this action takes place. I am not sure that we are ever shown a long shot of this building, where we could see how all the parts fit together.

Though this image shows the entire city, it is not at all clear exactly in what part of the city the action takes place.

But in the first and third panels of the upper page--22--the front door(?) of the building, with its tiled overhang, is visible. Seeing it makes you feel that, whether we can see it or not, Seth knew exactly what the whole place looked like.

When they put together the settings for Myst 3: Exile, the designers needed precise specs for each of the "ages" where players go, so the journey from one place to another would make sense. Seth told me that some designers actually built models of their place, so they could picture how to get from one area to another. Seth liked to do that sort of thing in his mind. He may have made a map, but if he did I never saw it. I kind of doubt it. It pleased him to challenge his brain to visualize places in 3-D. When I was trying to play the game, and I was stuck on the first level (designed by Seth), he gave me a hint: "Make a map." I did, and that helped me more than anything to solve it.

In all his work Seth tried to make his scenes look as though they went beyond the edges of the picture frame, but his work on Myst 3 may have increased his prowess in picturing the entire stage set, whether the reader ever sees it or not.

Flash: Time flies page 20

2009-11-30T08:01:00.000-08:00

I think this is quite an amusing page. First, in the top frame, the Flash encounters a tunnel that looks sort of like an Art Nouveau take on a phonograph megaphone.

(Probably no one younger than I am will know what I am talking about, but this is the image I am thinking about: Nipper the RCA mascot, listening to His Master's Voice.)

Anyway, inside the tunnel is that trail of machine parts, all suspended in mid-air because both he and Steve Kriozere, who left them there, are going so fast that the parts have not had time to begin to fall to the ground yet.

Then in the second frame, he enters into the tunnel gathering up all the parts at superspeed, worrying as he goes that he is walking into a trap. We see freeze-frames of him at several different nano-second intervals, with extra arms to show how fast his arms are flying in order to gather up all the parts while they are still at arm level.

In the lowest row of images, his face alternates with a holographic projection of the face of the person who is giving him information about what is happening.

This page is all about Time. Of course Time is the major mover and shaker in the story, but this page in particular shows its variety: speeded up in the higher panels where many things happen in the space of less than a second, more or less regular in the third panel, and slowed way down at the bottom, where we are shown several views of a conversation that has no real relevance to the story. Comic relief adds a slower pace for just a bit.

Flash: Time Flies page 19

2009-11-24T06:50:00.000-08:00

On this page, the monstrous Anton Musenda (monstrous in both heart and body) explains the physics behind the story, why he is a giant spider, why Steve Kriozere can't stop running, and what he wants Steve to believe about his motivations.

A couple of things are notable about this page. In the first panel, Anton holds up with his spider's foot a limp warty and somewhat misshapen body with a kind of screw in the neck for his head to fit on. This is the best body that this scientifically advanced society could create for him, though it would seem to me to be preferable to the giant spider's body that he presently inhabits. Seth pictured the man's soul as so warped that he would rather live as a repulsive, but powerful, giant spider than as a human being with an imperfect body.

The second notable thing about this page is the very elegant structure in the cener panel, which reminds me a lot of the lower level of the tusk house in the J'Nanin level of Myst 3 Exile, which Seth designed a few years earlier.

See if you don't agree.

inspiration from Seth: Happydale page 46

2009-11-16T14:48:00.000-08:00

After Happydale was published, DC Comics sent Seth back his original drawings. He was so excited to have his own first comic book out in print. He was living here in San Diego at the time, and asked me if there was a page from Happydale that I would like. I went all through the pages, searching for an interesting one with a sort of human scale, that I could relate to. I am not sure really, why I chose this one. I guess I liked the guys hanging out at the local diner, doing regular things in their loopy Happydalian sort of way.

This picture hangs above my drawing table, where I look at it every day as I sit down to draw. It inspires me in many ways. First there is the fact that each of the characters is entirely recognizable, not only from his oddnesses, but from his facial features. I'd know Stretch's face even if he didn't have all the loose skin hanging from it, and Dino's even without the costume.
Next there is the fully realized setting. The decorative brickwork and the things on the shelf are only seen in a few panels, and have nothing to do with the story, but they are part of the whole ambience, and so Seth drew them in. It is as though this was a real place that Seth had been to, even if only in his imagination, and he could see in his mind's eye all the little bits that decorate the walls and shelves.
The other thing that inspires me is the realness of the facial and body language of the participants. The busboy clears the next table and someone lugs a box outside while our guys are bickering at their table and Dino is returning from the men's room. Sherman the waiter comes by with his tray and a half smile while Stretch works on his drink and Dino on his joint.
Seth doesn't point in an exaggerated way at any of these elements; they are just everyday parts of the page. The care and precision that has gone into all of it shows me just how very much I still have to learn. But the fact that Seth did learn it means that it can be done.
I am inspired daily.

Flash: Time Flies page 18

2009-11-09T08:40:00.000-08:00

Steve Kriozere meets Anton Musenda, who presents himself as another guy struggling with body issues, but who in reality has parasitical ulterior motives. His guise as a huge spider reveals his heart to the reader.

The claustrophobic setting is part of what makes this comic book less appealing to me than others of Seth's work, but it makes the reader feel--not just know intellectually--the tension in the story.

This page, like the last two we have looked at, is made up of four horizontal panels. Two of the panels show the same setting from the same point of view. Seth has used this device in a few places, to make the background still, in order to better show the movement of the characters through time. Since Time is a major player in this story, I am sure it seemed relevant to Seth to use as many ways as possible to show the movement of time: slowly, quickly, and inbetween.

Showing the movement of time was one of the first things Seth was interested in, in drawing comic books. Somehow making the reader experience time, rather than telling them about it, is one of the things that a comic book can do that a word book--even an illustrated one--cannot. This page from 1993 or -4 shows a very early example of this interest of his.

Seth was always interested in illustrating the mathematical factors of the world: how things work in extremes of time and space, obscure mathematical principles, what might happen at the far edge of the universe. A reader who shares his interest may pick up the math angle, but probably most will not.

Flash: Time Flies page 17

2009-11-02T09:36:00.000-08:00

In this page, the Flash is searching for Steve Kriozere, the test pilot whose last flight gave him the ability--or the curse--of being able to go at superspeed and never slow down. What the Flash has found are some machines all taken apart and their pieces still hanging in the air.

Seth has drawn the intricate pieces of some unknown--but at least to me completely believable--machines floating in an orderly way in the air before he reassembles them again. (He is not only superfast, he also has a supermemory. At our house, when we take apart machines, most often we have a piece or two left over.)

This page, like the last one I showed, is made up of four even panels, the last one slightly larger than the others. The artist's job here is to slow down time, so that the readers can see action that we are told happens in the blink of an eye. To that end, we see the Flash the same size and in the same position in all three pictures, sort of like a flip book, or the cels from an animated story. The top two panels each show several of those cels one on top of the other. In the third one he has finished his activity.

Then at the bottom, when we step back from his action, we see to our amusement, that the machine he was fiddling with was part of some sort of hospital device, which is in use all the while.

Flash: Time Flies page 15

2009-10-26T10:39:00.000-07:00

As the test pilot Steve Kriozere nears the era in which our story takes place, he is spoken to by a siren voice that he can't resist. Seth pictures him running and running, through an ornate funnel into a vapor of fluffy clouds surrounding what turns out to be a holographic projection of the face of Anton Musenda, the villain.

This unearthly scene is pictured in four equal size panels, with varying amounts of clouds. His helmet-hidden face, the clouds, the various views of him running all give the page the feel of a dream. Where is he going? What is he going to do there? What does it all mean? Questions we ask of dreams...

Flash: Time Flies page 14

2009-10-21T08:06:00.000-07:00

As I understand, the Flash wears a suit with little wings on his headpiece to resemble Mercury, or Hermes (shown in the inset), whosespeed is reflected in the speed of the Flash.
In this story, the Flash has flashed ahead in time to another era, in which the people don't trust him. They dissolve his suit and grow a new one for him "from a cell culture over a technological frame". Clearly, either these new people don't understand the mythology behind his winged hat, or the cell culture fabric won't make stand-up wings, because for the rest of this story he wears the new suit with its funny little stubs of wings. That insistence on realistic details in the midst of bizarre--but almost convincing--science was one of the hallmarks of Seth's drawing. You can see his little wing stubs in the lower right frame on this page, where he is taking things apart at super-speed and then putting them back together again in a Sherlock Holmes style effort to search for clues for something he does not know about.

As I look at this page, another thing that strikes me is the constant shifting of scenes in a page with very little white space between the frames. I didn't notice it when I was looking at the page full size, but the continual scene changes give a feeling of motion, constant, jerky motion. So Seth didn't just draw him running, but he gave the whole page the feel of running, change, movement.

Flash: Time Flies page 4

2009-10-14T09:10:00.000-07:00

I know in general people would rather see the pure, uncolored drawings straight from the pen of Seth, but some of those are gone, sold years ago, and the ones I have, I have just not taken photos of yet. I do have these color scans though. So with your forebearance I am going to use the color Flash scans.

This is the page following the one I posted yesterday. What is happening here is that Steve Kriozere, the test pilot, has flown his plane so fast that somehow his own molecules have become fast, and now he is speeding into the Future. That's what is pictured here: him bursting the thin membrane that keeps Today intact, and hurtling into Tomorrow.

Back behind the paper is the city we saw on pages 2-3. You can see some of the same buildings, but from a different angle. After all, the airplane is in a different place than our point of view in the double-page spread. Steve flies out toward us, ejected from his seat, while his plane falls apart, the bolts, wires, and engine parts being flung in every direction, many of them toward us.

Lately when I look at Seth's comic book pages, I always wonder what the script said that he was following. Did the author (John Rozum) say, "While Steve's plane falls apart, he flies out toward us through a paper screen"? I have no idea if this was his idea or Seth's.

In any case, this image shows pretty clearly that pilot Steve is heading toward another dimension. His posture, hand reaching out, indicates that he is not falling down, but straining for something more. The hole in the paper, the plane beginning to disassemble, all put together show us the old falling away, the new beginning.

Flash: Time Flies pages 2-3

2009-10-13T09:27:00.001-07:00

The other day my husband asked me about Flash: Time Flies. He said that he had never actually seen that comic book. I got out a copy so that he could look at it, and he reiterated that it was new to him. This is the one for which Seth was nominated for an Eisner award, in 2003, though I think it was actually for this together with Vertigo Pop Tokyo.

This book is my least favorite of Seth's works, mostly because of what is probably best about it: its virtuoso use of perspective and its emphasis on its science-fiction backgrounds.
This double-page spread, however--the prelude to the story--finds us in a contemporary American city, where a test pilot has just taken his plane through the speed of sound, and then faster and faster until he gets so fast that something funny happens with Time itself. It is only when I read the text and realize that Seth had to come up with images for the concepts in this book that I realize how inventive his pictures are. He managed to put clarity into what are really non-visual ideas. This page is so nice looking that you can almost miss how a very strange scientific concept is made both clear and--to a non-scientist like me--believable.

Seth always wanted to do comic books of his own stories. I always said that his own ideas were so mathematical that the audience for them would be limited to the very few people in the world who love and understand math as he did. This story shows how he took a mathematical/scientific concept and loved it into reality. The next post will show more.

Myst 3: drawing for Narayan

2009-10-12T09:36:00.001-07:00

I posted the above sketch on April 23 of this year, under the heading "Unused Sketches". A couple of weeks ago an alert (but anonymous) Mystophile noticed it, and sent me this color picture from Myst 3 below, of the game's final world Narayan, saying that what I had thought was an unused sketch was almost certainly instead a drawing for that world. As you can see...

As I told my reader, I played the game all the way through, but didn't remember this image at all.

Superhero Art exhibition: Batman

2009-10-06T08:04:00.001-07:00

Well, Tofu was tired of being photographed, but this is the only picture I have of this particular drawing of Seth's. This picture was the focus of the highlight of the exhibition for me.

Here's what happened. We were just about to leave. The museum space was FULL to overflowing with viewers. (I am guessing that 500 people showed up for the opening.) But I made one last stop at each of the places where Seth's work was on the wall, in case someone I knew was there. So I came to this page, and stood there next to guy probably in his late 20's and the woman with him. He elbowed me, pointed to Seth's picture of Batman sitting discouraged on the couch, and said, "Isn't that great?" I said, "Yeah." (sigh) He went on, "That is the best thing in this show." I said, "I agree." He just kept gazing at the picture, murmuring about its wonderfulness, and I said, "My son did that." He wasn't exactly surprised, or even particularly interested, but he said, "Tell him how great it is. THAT's what it's all about."
Ahh. I floated back to our hotel that evening, amazed at the kindness of God.

Superhero Art exhibition: We were there!

2009-10-05T07:30:00.000-07:00

We didn't take many photos at the art exhibition. It just got too crowded (the picture at the top, of the hall, was taken before the general public was allowed in), and besides, Tofu (left) had spent too many hours in the car and was antsy. So we stood by Seth's pictures, here and in one other place, and tried to listen to what viewers had to say.

The exhibit is gorgeous. This is a serious look at superhero comic book art as Art, its history in our culture, how it reflects our inner longings, its evolution from the 30's to the present, and just, well, the pleasures it has brought to a lot of people.

The only drawback for me was that, while each piece was labeled, there was no commentary on the wall. I know that commentary is not always welcome; after all it is one or two people's understanding of what we should be able to see for ourselves. But when you take sequential art out of its context in a story, and a historically relevant piece out of its historical period, unless the viewer is a serious student of the genre, or at least a serious looker, it is hard to understand the importance or the value of a single work. Even though a person can see without having to have learned how, still, Seeing is harder than reading. Without words to explain what is happening, a person has to work harder to understand what is happening. That's why reading wordless books sometimes feels like Work: the reader is forced to exercise an often unused capacity.

The page on the wall to the right of Tofu is page 41 in Willworld: the giant eraserhead gestapo ruthlessly erasing a swath in retribution for Hal's "illegal" activity. It is one of the wittiest pages in Seth's repertoire, I think. We stood beside it and explained what is happening in it to several viewers, who then said, "Ah, now I get it. Wow!" That was gratifying.

on the road

2009-09-23T21:14:00.000-07:00

The family is on the way to Oregon to attend the opening of the superhero exhibition at University of Oregon. We are taking a few days to drive north from Southern California, and a few more days to drive south again. There is the exhibition itself, and the three grownups are heartily looking forward to that. But for the five-year-old among us (Seth's son Tofu), that is likely to be one long dull evening. So for his benefit, and to show his mother some more of the USA, and also because it is fun to take car trips together, we are making this trip into a tour of the beautiful Pacific Northwest as well. We are sitting right now in a motel near Mount Shasta, one of two volcanoes in California (although I think it is a dead one). Tomorrow we will stay at the Oregon Caves, where no matter how hot the outside temperature is, inside it is pitch dark and a steady 44 degrees F. The next day we'll drive to Eugene, where the university is, and go to the Opening.

I am writing this on my husband's laptop which has none of my pictures on it. So I won't be able to post any pictures until we get home October 2. But I will take some photos of the exhibition so I'll be able to show them here sometime after that.

Achieving clarity: Batman SNOW #194 page 16

2009-09-18T11:49:00.000-07:00

One of the things that Seth advised in his list of illustration tips was to "use key objects to simplify your story telling". I was looking at a few pages of his from the Batman SNOW book, and trying to determine what he meant by that.
In this page, let's see what he has done. The scene takes place at the Gotham City waterfront, among the canneries and tackle shops, where nothing much that's legal happens at night. Seth sets the scene quite vividly in the large upper frame, with the planks of the pier on the right, and those rolling metal warehouse doors on the upper left. In front are the police detective and his cohort standing behind a wall. I am not sure if all these things could be termed "key objects", but they all help to set the scene so that one can tell easily at a glance what is happening. It doesn't require dialog to understand that the people in front are hidden from the people in the middle, or that something is going on that is probably against the law.
I think that's what Seth meant by "simplify your storytelling". He set the scene so clearly and plainly that the dialog doesn't have to do that job.
Key objects in the next two frames are (1)a bulldozer and (2)a truck filled with electronic surveillance materials. In just these three frames we have a good idea of what is happening here. Incidentally, the previous pages do not refer to what is going on here, so this one has to explain itself.

Making a story clear

2009-09-15T08:51:00.000-07:00

The other day I had a nice visit from Chris Ryall, the editor in chief at IDW Publishing in San Diego. He came by to bring me a complimentary stack of books of a graphic novel called Locke and Key, which has the story Freddy Wertham Goes to Hell added in the back. Both stories were written by Joe Hill, who also wrote the Spiderman Unlimited story that Seth drew. Chris, who is a fan of Seth's, wanted to see Seth's last work (even though his part of it was only the blocking out of the pages) printed in color, went to some trouble to get reprinting rights from Grave Tales, and then Seth's friend Langdon--who actually drew the pictures--did the coloring. All in all, it was a labor of love.

Interestingly, in the lead story, the first of a series, they printed not only the graphic story, but also the script that was given to the artist, Gabriel Rodriguez. Though I am not a fan of the genre (horror) I read the story, Locke and Key. The pictures are stunning, but I thought the story was hard to follow, until I read it with the script in hand, continually looking from the script to the pictures.

Now, please understand, for the most part, I am not a comic book reader. The only comic books I own are ones that Seth did. So I am not the audience for whom this book was intended. I also am SO VERY familiar with Seth's work that I see all the subtleties that probably most readers miss. HOWEVER, it seems to me that even though some of the stories that Seth illustrated--notably Willworld, and the two issues of Doom Patrol--make jumps of logic that continually befuddle the reader, the pictures give details that clarify some of the more abstruse questions. I wondered what Seth would have done with the scripts that Gabriel was given. A useless question of course, but it brings out the matter of how to make a story clear.

I'd like to talk in the next few postings about some of the issues that give clarity to a story.

Issue number one: Who are the characters?

How do you identify the various characters? Line drawings of faces can be very general, especially when they are printed small enough to put several boxes of them inside a page that is about 8" x 10".

Here is something that Seth said to an aspiring artist about making characters identifiable:
"Try to design characters so that they are identifable 360 degrees around. Ie the mohawk is a good design since you can ID the character from the back of the head so it gives you more options for angles to take in the scene and still keep things clear. You can use hats, clothes, a bird on their shoulder, whatever...."

In this page from Willworld, the cast of characters has their own peculiarities that give them instant readability: Hal of course wears the green mask. But even in black and white, his face is recognizable. His hair falls lankly down on his forehead, and he has that bewildered expression. Mu-Fon has no nose, and a beret and turtleneck sweater. Kelly has six arms. Even the people at the bar who we see only once in the story are all recognizable as individuals, both from their clothing and their facial style.

On not using references: Big in Japan issue 1 page 18

2009-09-08T09:36:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was talking about the fact that toward the end of his career Seth stopped using reference material at all. He wanted to draw entirely from his imagination.
So this series is done without use of any books to refer to. It is, of course, a good story for that--wild, crazy, and full of monster-silliness. Though it IS set in the real (though with its own weirdness) city of Tokyo.
Seth knew the inside of a public restroom well enough for the first frame; the inside of a Japanese apartment well enough for the second one; the front of the museum he made up; and the other two frames are dominated by the monsters themselves.

Seth had the capacity of picturing a scene, and then turning it around in his head, so that he could see it in his mind's eye from all sides. This is a skill that he developed on his own. He could probably picture a scene pretty well anyway, but he worked on turning it around mentally, so that he could draw it from any point of view. There are computer programs that do it for you, but as far as I know Seth never had one; it was faster and more convenient for him to be able to do it himself.

This sort of skill really helps with perspective, because when you draw by the laws of perspective, you have to be able to recognize visually that you have it right. It's similar to understanding mathematical equations. You may not have done the arithmetic exactly right, but if you have an understanding of about what the answer should be, you will recognize if your figuring is off by too much.

In any case, this is a funny page. A page of comic relief. Nothing big is happening; the monsters are making many small, annoying entrees into the city around the museum. Each frame is a separate vignette where people are encountering monsters where they didn't want them.

In Seth's own words: What I don't do

2009-09-07T10:24:00.000-07:00

Seth said, c.1998:
"I was terribly pleased to receive an e-mail from a fellow artist (an excellent one at that) about a year ago who asked me if I projected photographs and then traced them to make my art. 'Heavens No!' I exclaimed with a hint of glee. Langdon and I use virtually no references, and I would never use a projector. That would just be wrong. Well, not exactly no references. I have a stack of reference books for flowers and historical detailing and a few car magazines, but pictures are never drawn 'as is' from a photo, and by and large I use those books to spur my imagination rather than as a drawing crutch. I don't use references for figure work (besides the occasional contorted face in the mirror) because honestly it's easier for me to work from my head than from life (or a photo). Photos lie. A person looking at a photo believes that the image is correct because it's a photo, But for a twisted pose even tracing a photo exactly may not leave a convincing piece of line art. Choosing the pose is just as important as drawing it right. Likewise, my interiors are pieced together as I go along. My moral fiber works against me in regard to references. Since I was in high school I have been afraid to death of plagiarizing.

"I read once that if an artist copies a picture from a book he is plagiarizing that photographer. I became more and more conscious of this as I got older and it got to the point where I wouldn't even work from photos I had takcn myself, at least not without feeling guilty. Bizarre, isn't it? I think I have gotten over the more extreme elements of plagiarizing-phobia, but the spirit remains deeply embedded in my soul. But don't canonize me yet. The only things that come out of my pencil are things that have gone into my brain via one sense or another, and there are certain works of mine that might (on close examination) resemble certain styles and subject matter of other artists I adore (by accident or on purpose). I can't even be certain of all of them, but I look back and sometimes they become embarrassingly clear."

I am posting a couple of pictures that may illustrate both Seth's use of his own imagination, and his mastery of perspective, the kind of thing that may have given the unnamed artist the idea that he projected photos onto his pages and traced them. On top is page 31 from issue 2 of Happydale, and on the bottom is page 31 from Flash: Time Flies.

Over the years he kept a growing library of reference books, which he used--as he said--for flowers, cars, time periods, and so forth. But after Vertigo Pop Tokyo he pretty much stopped using references at all. He said that he really wanted to do it all from his imagination. Tomorrow I'll post a couple of pages from Fantastic Four that would have been done without references at all, from his own increasingly fertile brain.

Influences on Seth, in his own words: Otomo

2009-08-27T07:32:00.000-07:00

a couple of Seth images

Seth wrote this in 1998 or earlier, when he talked more about his work and methods. Later he let the work speak for itself more. I think he also didn't have the time to write so much about it; he spent more time DOING it.
a couple of Otomo images

But here is what he said about Otomo:
"Katsuhiro Otomo is definitely my idol whn it comes to angles and comic storytelling. Quite simply put, he is the best, bar none, at making a story exciting, subtle, and clear. His epic work Akira is the first book I pull off my shelves every time I feel a little empty in the idea department. Looking through his eyes suddenly makes me realize how two-dimensional and uninspired my thought processes are. It makes me rethink the obvious."

Seth's admiration for Otomo then, didn't cause him to copy at all, just to rethink his own pictures. So what he learned was about seeing an old idea from a new perspective, and making a story exciting, subtle, and clear. The two images (out of gazillions) that I chose from Otomo show all these things, and although you can't see the story from just these pictures, you can see that there certainly is one.
The two images of Seth's that I chose show how he also learned to look at a story with fresh eyes, and to find a point of view (both literal and figurative) that is clear and tells something about the story that the words alone are not saying.

Superhero Art exhibition, Big in Japan pages

2009-08-21T06:40:00.000-07:00

Here are the three pages from Fantastic Four/Iron Man: Big in Japan that will be in the superhero exhibition at U of Oregon next month.

I am sure that--in a show that contains 175 pieces of art--this little section of Seth Fisher work will serve as a contrast to a good bit of the very black and white, smash and fly superhero art. However, as a Seth fan, it seems to me that the five pages I have shown here (the sixth I don't have either a scan or a photograph of) don't by any means show the range of Seth's art.
But as the show is about the genre in general, and not about Seth specifically, I suppose I shouldn't expect it to show the full extent of his powers. But someday, I look forward to seeing another SOLO Seth Fisher exhibition.

Superhero Art exhibition

2009-08-17T07:44:00.000-07:00

I used to turn semi-regularly to an online listserve where buyers and collectors of original comic book art prattle and wrangle about their purchases, about what artists they like, and about collecting comic art in general.

Eventually I stopped reading; there was not much they had to say that was interesting to me. But on one rare visit to the site, there was a letter from one Ben Saunders, asking for contributions to an upcoming exhibition at the University of Oregon of original superhero art.

I contacted him, told him who I was, and that I have in my possession most of Seth Fisher's art.

Not only did he know Seth's work, he knew--without any prompting--the details of various individual pages of Seth's work. This is a guy who either has a photographic memory of every comic book he has ever read, or who has really loved and noticed Seth's work in particular. Probably some of both. We made arrangements for him--representing the university--to borrow six memorable pages of Seth's art.

The exhibition, which is titled "Faster than a Speeding Bullet: The Art of the Superhero", will begin on September 26, and continue through January 3. It is a HUGE show, and will contain work by some of the originators and biggest names in the genre. Seth would love to be in such company.

I posted above two of Seth's pages that are in Oregon now awaiting framing. I'll show you the rest of them soon. If you are going to be anywhere near Eugene, Oregon from the end of September through the end of the year, you might want to go make a visit. We'll be there for the opening.

Influences on Seth, in his own words: Rick Geary

2009-08-11T07:35:00.000-07:00

Rick Geary is an artist who used to live in San Diego. He did regular illustrations for a local free newspaper, and his elegant and witty work has appeared in so many different publications that probably everyone who sees it would say, "Oh, I've seen that art."
Seth did a one-year stint as editor of his college humor magazine. Someone contributed a humorous history of the world (or something like that), and he needed illustrations for it, I want to say about 20 small pictures. Seth wrote to Rick Geary and asked him if he would do it. He did, for $200. Pretty small change for the work of a well-known artist. I think he gave Seth an affordable price because he's a nice guy, and Seth was a college kid on a budget.

That was the beginning of Seth's relationship with Rick.
The drawing below is a small example of the wit and elegance of Rick's work.

The drawing above is part of a page from Happydale, drawn about the time he wrote the words below:
"Last week I was accused of having a '1920's style', and I guess it's basically true that the kind of thick outlines I use to identify shapes was pretty popular around the turn of the century. However, it was Rick Geary (not the stunning Winsor McCay) that prompted the development of my line. I am always struck by the kind of clarity that he can achieve in his art by controlling line width. In fact, after dozens of people insisted I needed to learn to use a crow quill pen (which I still can't use, though I'd like to try), it was Rick who told me he used Rapidographs for all his work, and gave me the confidence to try a less traveled road. I still think that Rick is one of the greatest unrecognized illustrators in the country despite that his work has appeared in countless publications from Heavy Metal to National Lampoon plus dozens of comic books."

Seth's own words about his influences: Moebius

2009-08-08T09:00:00.000-07:00

The text below is an excerpt from Seth's earliest website on Geocities, before he got his own web address. That puts it before 1999. It is also before Happydale, which was his first comic book.
These two images at the top are Moebius in two different moods.

"My Senpais

"Senpai is the Japanese word for your senior (in age or experience), especially when they work in the same field, or help guide you. Naturally, every artist needs to find his own style to express himself, but the value of learning from others should not be underestimated. Recently "Geoff Darrow" has been the first word I hear at critiques from comic types. I suppose it's because we both have a high tolerance for straining our eyes and putting in hordes of detail but, and I assure you this is true, Geoff still draws about fifty percent more stuff than I do and about 200 percent more carefully. Honestly, Darrow is stunning, if only for his patience. The irony is however, that although I really enjoy his work, I don't think I was ever really influenced by him and I certainly didn't try to cultivate a Darrow feel in my art.

"Moebius has been the biggest influence on my art since before college. Moebius' work taught me that I don't have to make perfect sense with all my art and that I can use it to play with my own subconscious. I imagine he taught me to really enjoy the process of drawing instead of just the finished piece. Naturally I envy his beautiful line work, but what is really amazing to me is the variety with which he attacks his subject matter."

The bottom two black and white images are Seth in two different styles. I think he learned the lesson about variety quite well.

Batman SNOW #192 page 10: Groucho

2009-08-04T09:07:00.001-07:00

In my last post I mentioned that the father slug in Seth's funny little slug album sometimes has a mustache and bushy eyebrows, reminescent of those Groucho nose-and-glasses contraptions. And of course of Groucho himself.

I don't think I have posted this picture here before: Seth's inclusion of Groucho as a scientist in Dr Fries' company. This scientist has one more brief walk-on in issue 194, page 6, though without his glasses. This isn't a funny part of the story, but this page always tickles me. Seth amused himself with details, some of which the editors caught and eliminated, and some, like adding Groucho as a character, that they allowed.

One more thing about this page. I love the way Dr Groucho wraps his arm around the doorway, so you can see his right hand in the neighboring office next to the donuts, and his face in Dr Fries' office through the window that says FRIES, VICTOR on it. A very elegant throwaway panel.

Father and Son Slug Album, III

2009-07-31T11:56:00.000-07:00

Here is the final installment of the Slug Album, plus one page of still life art. The last image is a slug sushi. Ah, now that I have said that you can see it, can't you? That's rice on the bottom.

Only one of these has Papa Slug with a mustache and those heavy eyebrows. But anyone who knows Seth knows that he was crazy about those Groucho Marx noses-and-glasses. That's what the eyebrows and mustache are about.

The first time I went to visit him in Japan, in 1995, when he had been teaching there about six months, I asked him what he would like me to bring him from the US. Here's what he asked for: several decks of Bicycle playing cards--the standard ones that magicians use (he was very good at sleight of hand), a couple of rubber chickens, and a dozen pairs of nose-and-glasses.

I'm still not sure what he used them for, but I know his students had never had a teacher quite like Seth.

Father and Son Slug Album, II

2009-07-30T07:47:00.000-07:00

More pages from the Father and Son Slug Album.

In the page on the right, if you can't tell, the two slugs are pondering a salt shaker (Salt sprinkled on a slug will make it shrivel up and die.)

In this album the father and son slugs have small adventures with a number of different challenges (learning to balance on a ball or climb into a bottle), diseases, and trials of life. They face all of them with a sort of innocent interest. Even when Father Slug is cut in half, both their reactions seem to be curiosity rather than horror. "Hmmm. So now THIS has happened." Much like Seth's own responses to life.

Father and Son Slug Album

2009-07-29T09:19:00.000-07:00

Look what I found in the closet yesterday!

This is a funny little pink notebook that says on the front "Snoopy and Woodstock". I thought at first it was made in Japan, because they love cute little things there, but it doesn't appear to have any Japanese writing on it. Seth used it to make a little book of father and son slug drawings. My guess is that he did it after Bob's Amazing Life, while he had father and son slugs on his mind.

I have posted the first three pages. I'll post the rest of them tomorrow.
There are some more small, simple ink drawings in here too. All worth seeing.

It's funny to me. People try so hard to draw WELL. Seth did that; he trained himself to be able to draw whatever was necessary for his stories. But when I hear people say what they like about Seth's art, good drawing is part of it, but whimsy, light-heartedness, humor are what they remember. These drawings are clearly the work of someone who knows what he is doing: there is no scratching out, no eraser marks, no pencil underdrawing. The slug-people are consistent (something that comes with practice). But it's not gorgeous draftsmanship, it's just delight, and a kind of sweetness that does not overlook the low and squishy creatures of the world.

Seth told me once about being in a Japanese home and seeing a man spy an insect of some sort sitting on a windowsill. The man picked up the insect, brought it close to his face, looked it over, and then set it back where it was on the windowsill. Seth was very impressed with that gesture. Some Americans would pick the creature up and put it outside; most would squash it. Probably no one but an entymologist would examine it and put it back, in that unsentimental but harmless manner.

Seth's note on yesterday's Moses picture

2009-07-23T09:09:00.000-07:00

I knew the note below was in my archives somewhere, but it took me some mental detective work to dig it up. It must have been in the very early incarnation of Seth's website, when it was still on Geocities (remember that?), without the lllama.com address. My friend Mary Bell had printed out every page from his website (how proud we all were of Seth!) and she sent them to me after he died. A little extra Seth when it was most needed.

It shows the Moses picture over a drawing of a Seth character called Murl Fern, and it says that it was done in 1996, a couple of years earlier than I thought.

The caption says, "My, my, my...Seth's mother must be tickled pink!" giggles Murl. "It was a Christmas/birthday present, after all. I'm not sure why, but Moses himself isn't really visible [and I had thought the guy in the middle with the crookstaff was Moses] but his aftermath certainly is. But who's they guy with no teeth?"

Happy Birthday Seth

2009-07-22T11:02:00.000-07:00

Today is Seth's birthday. He would be 37 today. In honor of his birthday I am posting a present, one that he gave me, rather than one someone gave him. He got so that he really didn't want people to give him presents anyway. He kept trying to get rid of everything in his life that was not strictly useful.

But this is a present he made for me, I would say around 1998. I don't usually ask for things for Christmas or birthdays. In general I believe that gifts should be from the heart of the giver, and not demands from the recipient. But nevertheless, that Christmas I told Seth that all I really wanted was a picture by him of Moses turning his rod into a snake in front of the pharaoh of Egypt and all his magicians. Pharoah's magicians then turn their rods into snakes too, but Moses' snake eats theirs. It's a great story, and part of what I teach every year to sixth graders in my Sunday School class. He was annoyed at my request because he thought I was underhandedly trying to make him read the Bible. I did want him to read the Bible, especially that part, but mostly because I wanted him to like it. I thought he would say, "Wow, this is great stuff!" which it is. On the other hand, that picture really was the present I desired most from him.

Loving son that he was, he drew the scene for me. Not in a perfunctory way, either. He put his usual whole imagination into it. It came out quite different from what I expected. I kind of pictured more of a long shot, with a bigger view of the room. This intimate scene is delicious, with the expressions of horror and surprise in both faces and body language, the patterns everywhere: in the cloth, pot, the palm leaf, the sandal crossstraps, turbans, even arm hair, and the lovely graphic design of the whole image. I love it.

going to Hawaii

2009-07-09T20:11:00.000-07:00

We are leaving tomorrow morning for Kauai, the northernmost and oldest of the Hawaiian Islands, to spend a week paddling around in clear waters with multicolored fish, playing around in countryside that is described as so green that the people who develop your pictures (if you do it that way) will not believe it and so they will get the colors wrong.

I had wanted to post one more entry before we set out, but I still have a lot to do to get ready to leave, and so I don't have the time now. It always takes me an hour and a half or so to find something to post and write about it. I'll be back next Friday, the 17th, and will try to post something soon after that.

But I am thinking also that Seth's art is finite. I haven't posted every single one of his artworks, but I am not sure that is the goal. I am getting to where I am talking about things I think Seth himself would rather I didn't talk about. He would love for me to talk about his work, to consider what he did that was good storytelling, and what he did that made a difference to me. But I am not sure he would like my overanalyzing it, and I'm afraid I'll get to that point if I keep going on here too long.
So soon I think I will slow down and only post once a week or so, and stop sometime. This blog has been a very good thing for me, and other people seem to enjoy it, but then really we need to go do our own artwork, live our own lives.
God bless us every one.

Influences on Seth, in his own words

2009-07-08T22:04:00.000-07:00

Thinking about the influences on Seth, I reread the interviews with him by Mike Jozic on meanwhile.net. In the earliest one of them, from April of 2002, Seth talked about the artists he considered his role models. He mentioned Moebius, Katsuhiro Otomo, and Winsor McCay. I have talked about Moebius and McCay, but not Otomo yet. To me that's the hardest, both because I am not so familiar with his work, and because Seth didn't ever really imitate his style, but probably learned from him more internal things that he used in his work. When you love something you learn from it (him, her) whether you mean to or not.

I want to quote what he said about Moebius though. It explains how Seth saw Moebius, and something of how Seth worked.

Jozic: It looks like you have some strong European influences in your artwork. The level of detail reminds me a bit of Darrow, and the overall atmosphere of the story seems to recall the work of Moebius. Am I off base, or am I pretty much hitting the nail on the head?

Fisher: Well, Moebius is a key influence in my art. He really exemplifies what I think an artist should strive for in his work. Technical mastery, consistency, style and freedom. Seeing his work showed me that art is about learning what is possible, and then pushing that boundary. Trying to control your work too much jeopardizes that, so you try to gain as much technique as possible and then just let go.

The page I have posted (sorry about it being in color; I have the whole set of color scans for Flash: Time Flies, but not that many b/w ones)--indeed, the whole of the Flash book--I think shows Seth having gained technical mastery and being able to let go and draw intricate scenes of total fantasy. This delicate design of the leg joints on the villain, and his elaborate solar panel-looking headdress, the buildings with their layer upon layer of ornate vaulting, all these things speak to Seth's having learned how to draw (in curved perspective in this case) and then being able to have fun inventing, which is what he loved.

He also learned from Moebius not to limit himself to one style. You don't have to satisfy other people's expectations. You go for what satisfies yourself, and if you are as picky about your own work as Seth was, that is a high goal.

Influences on Seth: Winsor McCay

2009-07-03T21:03:00.000-07:00

Seth gave me this delightful picture of a girl riding a jellyfish a long time ago: maybe it was when he was still living in the Oki Islands (before 1998), I don't remember exactly. I wouldn't say that he drew it on account of his knowledge of Winsor McCay, but when I found the picture by McCay below it reminded me of this one by Seth.
I have spoken here before about how much he loved the ocean and its denizens. He may have encountered jellyfish while he was diving, and pictured a pleasurable--not stinging--relationship between a girl and a really big jellyfish, something he could do in a fluid, curving, poetic, neo-Art Nouveau sort of manner.

Influences on Seth: Winsor McCay

2009-07-02T07:22:00.001-07:00

Winsor McCay was a pioneer in the drawing of comic strips. He was, according to the things I have been reading about him, the first to set his comic stories in other than the real world, the first to use surrealism in his work, though what he himself wanted most to do was to draw beautiful pictures. His Little Nemo in Slumberland seems to have been the the first comic in which panels might change shape as an aspect of the story, so the panel shape became actually part of the artwork. This is one thing that Seth gloried in, and used especially robustly in Willworld, as you can see in this page, where Hal has come in contact with this hallucenogenic globe, and just bl0%*#>+=*~~s into never never land. This is an especially McCayish page, with Hal in his 19th century style nightshirt and nightcap (not that Little Nemo wears either one) and heading off to a sleep that is sure to have weird dreams.
There are several other aspects of Seth's art that owe something to McCay. In his style of drawing, where he didn't use shading, and not even much black, he needed some way to make the important parts of the image stand out. He did it by using heavier and lighter lines,

as McCay did. It seems to me that he did this consciously, after discovering McCay's work while he was in college. Seth's first or second multi-page booklet is a story he wrote in the style of McCay's "Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend" that starts out ordinary and grows more and more fantastic, ending with his heroine falling out of bed saying, "I knew I shouldn't have eaten that rarebit right before bed."

Also like McCay, Seth wanted particularly to draw beautiful pictures.

Influences on Seth: MC Escher

2009-07-01T08:27:00.000-07:00

Again I am not sure "influence" is the right word for Seth's relationship with the work of MC Escher. He knew and loved Escher's work, and was interested in some of the same visual issues as Escher was. The Doom Patrol page that I have posted here shows different levels of reality, just as the beautiful Escher lithograph does.

In Seth's page we have first of all, the thing that Seth never forgot: that he was making comic books. This is not The Real World, ladies and gentlemen; it's a fantasy story. And the people on this page are not real people. So that's Level One: comic book. But on this page there is also Level Two: the giant TV screen where we see people from a more distant reality, talking to our heroes via monitor from (fantasy) France. The fact that the TV screen is slanted gives it a visual Level Three, where we see the people from France at an oblique angle.

The different levels of reality in Seth's art are less pointed than in the Escher, but the mind behind them was just as interested in visualizing concepts from Math and Physics, in playing with pen and ink on paper in order to show more than merely the progress of a story. Seth wanted to add something scientific and even spiritual to his pages to give anyone who was willing to spend time with his art an entree into depth of life beneath what is easy and obvious.

Influences on Seth: MC Escher

2009-06-30T15:25:00.001-07:00

It may be not so much that Seth loved the work of MC Escher, but that he felt a kinship with it. Like Escher Seth was a mathematical sort of artist who loved visual puns, a complex kind of symmetry, designs that repeated,
but where the repetitions are not exactly the same.

What Escher termed Symmetry drawings like the ones posted here, Seth used as a jumping board to start thinking about the complex repetitive images that he called Tessellations.
He loved making these things. It was something that he did entirely for himself; he got very little revenue from them: a few posters sold, that's all. However, at the time of his death he was in the midst of negotiations with a fabric manufacturer to do some fabric designs. Another person wanted him to paint some ceramic tiles with a Seth Fisher repeated design. So it is possible that he would have started to do tessellation work that made him some money.

Influences on Seth: a couple more Moebius

2009-06-29T09:47:00.000-07:00

I think Seth learned a lot from Moebius. I didn't realize how much until I started looking (recently) for Moebius pictures here on the internet. The picture at the bottom from Moebius shows a couple of effects that Seth used definitively in his work.
In the top illustration, from a Cicada magazine story, Seth has set the point of view well below the eye level of the protagonist in the picture, so that we look up to see his face and the ceiling above him with its futuristic structures. This picture, like the Moebius one below, has a very non-organic, mechanized world look, to go with the story which is set in a post-apocalyptic world where everyone lives inside, never seeing the sky.

Another trick he learned--and I presume this is where he learned it--is to use details--not just dots or lines--to create grey space, in order to show depth, create visual interest, and make sense of a complex scene. In the second image, from Flash: Time Flies, Seth has put the Flash on top of a building whose architectural ribbing makes (not really rectangular) rectangles, and whose tiled floors make small squarish shapes. He has used all these things to give a sense of depth to his picture, as well as making some white space and some grey space. It's the same thing Moebius did in the picture here. If you look at the picure quickly you see white and grey spaces. If you stop to examine it, you see all the details that make the space grey.

Influences on Seth: Moebius again

2009-06-27T15:07:00.001-07:00

I couldn't find an exact reference for this picture from Moebius' work, but from the things I can find online, this drawing from a college-age Seth seems very Moebius-esque.

In his senior year in college Seth, who, as many people know, majored in Math, not Art, was given the opportunity to have a one-man art exhibition. I flew out to Colorado Springs in January for the opening of it. It was a cold, snowy evening, and not too many people attended, but the school newspaper gave Seth a glorious review, which I will look for. The reviewer called Seth "The Fisher King" (after a movie that was popular at the time). This and yesterday's image were two of the pieces in the show. He was so pleased to have his own exhibition space, and the show looked really good, and we were so proud of him.

Influences on Seth: Moebius

2009-06-25T20:26:00.000-07:00

This black and white drawing of Seth's, from college, is a fairly self-conscious homage to Moebius, as you can see from the actual Moebius drawing below. Seth's is not a copy, though. Seth put his own spin on the image of the lonely girl in her odd helmet. He probably didn't have Moebius' drawing in front of him. My guess it that he remembered having seen it and did his own response to it.

Big city life

2009-06-24T14:02:00.000-07:00

Seth was familiar with urban life, and he liked it. He had been very happy in the couple of places he lived in the country in his life, but there was something about the adrenalin of the big city that drew him in.

He also liked cranky individuals. It gave him great pleasure to see the great and powerful come in contact with the small but dogged. He didn't buy books very often; by the time he was living in Japan the second time, he was trying to keep his possessions to a minimum. But he found a book that touched his imagination enough to actually purchase it and find a place for it among his shelves, called Architectural Holdouts. It's about the curmudgeons who own small properties in New York and absolutely would not be bought out for any price when some large corporation wanted to build something on their land. The result was things like the pictures I am posting below.

Backpack Alarm book, last picture

2009-06-23T09:33:00.000-07:00

"Hello Future!"

That's the title for this page. The text is actually about how in the future people and things may all have chips imbedded in them that tell who you are, and you may not need to carry money or a key.
Seth has chosen instead to illustrate a child's toy image of what the future might look like, with a grinning space craft exiting the earth, and, in the inset, a boy with a similar grin, wearing a helmet made out of what looks like a colander with a little pencil eraser sticking out of the top as an antenna. You can picture little electricity lines coming out of his antenna, and going "bzzz!" Seth could have done a realistic sort of astronaut in his Michelin Man suit and bubble helmet but his drawing has much more charm, don't you think?

I started to write that Seth's picture was of a 1950's style image of what an astronaut might look like, but looking for a picture to support that, I found a great blog called Paleo-Future, full of predictions about the Future from old magazines and other popular media. A little research there showed that in the 50's in general they had a much better idea of what space travel might actually look like than I would have thought. I mention it here only because the blog is something that I think Seth would have gotten a huge kick from. It's definitely worth a visit.

Backpack Alarm book, More on Electricity

2009-06-22T07:23:00.000-07:00

This picture illustrates a section called Conductors. "Some materials make it easy for electricity to flow...."

Seth's son Tofu--who with his mother, lives with us--has a kit that is full of great experiments using a battery, some little plastic coated wires, and other oddments that you might find around the house.

In Seth's picture the three-inch tall man in duck slippers is doing projects very similar to the ones Tofu can make with his kit. Somehow that makes this picture particularly authentic. The little man is also doing his experiment in a safe way, wearing his duck slippers and thick mitts to prevent himself from conducting electricity through his body should he make a mistake and touch a live wire.

Backpack Alarm book, Electricity

2009-06-19T07:17:00.000-07:00

This page is subtitled "What is electricity?" and it makes a valiant attempt to explain to kids in a couple of paragraphs about how electrons move from one atom to another.

Seth pictures a curly-haired scientist in her lab coat looking wide-eyed through the lens of a curving microscope at an atom which is doing its little atomic dance there on the base.

Backpack Alarm book, Airports and Homeland Security

2009-06-18T08:14:00.000-07:00

The heading here is about protecting against terrorist attack, but this picture illustrates a sub-topic: "Bees, Making the World a Safer Place".

The paragraph explains how researchers at the University of Montana are training bees to locate landmines. Safer than using dogs, whose weight can set off the mine.

I love the big-haired lady paratrooper, her arms loaded with honey, stepping up onto a rock as she follows the bees to the mine.

The dot-eyed bees look a little like Bob the Slug, don't they?

Why is the soldier stepping on a rock instead of around it? I think it is to give her body the same curve as the line of bees has.

Incidentally, in the book, there is one more close-up bee at the top right, its body coming from outside the border of the picture, as if it were arriving at work from another job site.

Backpack Alarm book, Protect Yourself

2009-06-17T07:52:00.000-07:00

Protect Yourself!

This page is on identity theft. The bad guy here has Seth's own hairstyle, but he also has a mask, the same kind of mask, incidentally, that Hal Jordan, the Green Lantern wears: one that seems to be painted or stuck on to his face.
The innocent victim has hair, a goatee, and a mole, an ordinary jacket with a smiley face on the sleeve. The sneering thief, wearing a collarless jacket and a wide belt, looks a little like a refugee from a BeeGees concert. Is that part of his problem? His own identity is out of sync, so he tries to steal someone else's... I don't know if that's what Seth had in mind, but I wouldn't put it past him.

Backpack Alarm book, next page

2009-06-16T07:43:00.001-07:00

This page--as you might guess--is called Cyber Crime. You can tell that the guy sticking his head out of the computer and into your life is a Bad Guy because he has on a mask AND has stubble, hair, and no eyebrows: a bad sign. (Seth himself had a lot of eyebrow.) He is also sneering at you.

One of the things I found in Seth's website when I first got hold of the numbers to get into it was a letter he had written to the people at Becker & Mayer! when he finished the work. He signed it--as I remember--"Seth, artist and good guy". Indeed.

Backpack alarm book: High Tech Security

2009-06-15T07:57:00.000-07:00

This illustration is from a page titled High Tech Security. What I don't know about these pictures is what guidelines they gave to Seth.

He has the woman pictured at the entrance to some sort of top secret institution, with an automatic gate that--if she fails the identity test--you know will surely send out both alarms and some sort of shield so that she can't enter. It's all very industrial and technical looking. He has put an eyeball identifier, a palm identifier, and a keypad on the gate for her to pass. She is wearing a uniform and standing militarily straight, as befits the employee of such a place. The whole ambience of the picture speaks "High Security", but of course, a little tongue in cheek.

Backpack Alarm book

2009-06-13T07:50:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I got a fabulous gift in my e-mail!

On May 25, I posted a picture from the children's book/packet that Seth illustrated called BUILD YOUR OWN BACKPACK ALARM. I had that image because a friend of Seth's sent it to me; I didn't have any of the other illustrations: either the paper copies or the digital ones. But when I wrote to Becker & Mayer! to ask them if they could send them to me, they went to a lot of trouble to hunt them down, and gave permission to post them here.
At the risk of sounding like Blanche DuBois, I have been astonished and moved by the kindness of strangers toward me in regard to Seth. I truly don't know if people are always like that and I was always too muddled to notice, or if it is Seth that brings it out in people.

But here is the second illustration from the backpack alarm booklet. This page is titled "Sound the alarm!", and it gives a short lesson on the use of various sorts of theft alarms. In Seth's picture, the visitor is avoiding the dog, stepping over the electric tripwires, and touching the keypad in order to enter the house without being crushed by the fall of a nail-studded board overhead.
For a small, clean drawing, this one has a lot of information. Seth was more tempted to add too many details than to leave things out. So, though he simplified his work for projects like this, he didn't leave out the humor, the perspective, the engineering.

Rocks and Flowers poster

2009-06-12T11:19:00.000-07:00

Here is the poster that I showed just four squares from yesterday.

Seth didn't do anything meaningless or random. Each of the squares is a tiny adventure in the life of a flower, or sometimes a rock.

Rocks and Flowers

2009-06-11T08:55:00.001-07:00

Seth stored all these little rocks and flowers squares on his computer separately. He probably wanted to move them around to find the best way to put them up all together as a whole. They exist in two incarnations. One is a cover for Cicada magazine with 20 squares, and the other he did as a poster with 40 squares (which a dear friend had made up for us, and I suspect we could get more of if anyone is interested).

Each of these disarmingly simple squares is a moment in the relationship between a flower and the world around it. The flower is at by turns tender, bemused, wise, gallant, ethereal, and sometimes sad. He isn't emotional, but he watches and wonders.

Happydale 2 page 5

2009-06-08T08:51:00.000-07:00

Some more of the people of Happydale.
On this page we meet Ralph and Ron Beck, jingle writers and sharpshooters, and the unnamed, obese receptionist at the sheriff's office.
I do not know how much of this is Andrew Dabb's brainchild and how much of it is Seth's. The original idea was Andrew's, but the two of them worked on it together, and the collaborative effort probably brought out the best in both of them, leading to, on this page: the sharpshooter team of one brother with no legs and the other with no arms, the fat receptionist who can't help but spread juicy secrets.
The next few pages introduce a delightfully bizarre group of Happydalians, people who are just part of the crowd in this town, but would be pariahs anywhere else.
We looked at the deputy sheriff HR's telephone the other day, which was a rotary one. Ralph and Ron have a (digital) kangaroo phone. They also have in their apartment an Easter Island statue, a pair of antlers (on the floor), a computer and copier, and Seth's favorite Moebius T-shirt. The receptionist has on her desk a small sign that says in alternate views, 1, and F. In Constance's living room there was also a small square on top of the TV with an F on it. Ah, now I get it: F is for Fisher. Also behind her on the wall is a most unlikely (except in Seth-land) large painting of a group of samurai.

Crowd scenes: Happydale and Big in Japan

2009-06-05T21:12:00.000-07:00

Seth began Happydale in 1998, and drew Big in Japan in 2005. Those books mark the beginning and the end of his comic book career.

I thought it would be interesting to compare crowd scenes from the two books. It's not so much that his style evolved (though that was at least partly true), but he consciously tried to use a different style for each story. Both those factors account for the differences between these two pages.

Of course no place is quite like Happydale. Its citizens are, to a man, unique, goofy, charming, and eager to participate in whatever is going on. In the page from Happydale (issue 2, page 24) the crowd has gathered because someone has been shot and the perpetrators have locked themselves in a house and taken the residents as hostages. Each frame is drawn from the point of view of someone in the crowd; indeed, three out of five of them take the point of view of a midget. We are among the people, enjoying the festive atmosphere, and knowing that the police are fighting a losing battle trying to keep the crowd under control. There is a feel of unrestrained delight in this page that is part of the story, and also, I think, how Seth was feeling at the time.

The page from Big in Japan (issue 1 page 19) is less intimate, more designed, more elegant. The people in it are individuals; we see their unique hair and clothing styles, but we can't guess their personalities. They don't connect with us, the reader. That is reasonable in this context, because the people in the crowd are not the stars of this series as they were in Happydale: the monsters are the stars. And the monsters shine! They are the ones that are cute and ugly, unique, goofy, and even charming.

Happydale 1 page 44

2009-06-04T20:52:00.000-07:00

Another page full of great details.

Seth said in his notes for Doris and Fruit (in 2003) that he wanted to try & simplify his work.

Earlier he had said in an interview with Mike Jozic:
Geoff [Darrow]'s art often taunts the reader to try and spot everything on the page, and at some point I think it stops serving the story. Besides, I can't compete with Geoff for detail. He would beat me every time. Nevertheless I do hear comparisons to Geoff a lot....

I can't compare Seth's level of detail with Geoff Darrow's because I am not familiar with any comic book art really except Seth's. But it seems to me that in Happydale, the details give a sense of place, the way you know about someone when you go to their house and see what stuff they have on display on the walls and bookcases, as well as what they left sitting on the chairs and tables.

It's pretty delightful that HR uses a rotary phone. Seth liked to get the era right. Though Happydale takes place in the present, or in the not too distant past, the people who live there don't have much truck with the outside world, so HR is perfectly satisfied with his phone the way it is, as well as his record player in the corner.

Let's go to Happydale again

2009-06-03T06:33:00.000-07:00

Seth's earlier work seems more ornate than his later work, more detailed. Compared to this, Big in Japan is quite severe, if I can use that term. Look at all the frou-frou in this house. Of course that's the look he wanted for this setting, but all of Happydale is so loaded with details that you can entertain yourself for hours going through the details in the background. He said himself that he never put in details the way Geoff Darrow did, with whom he was often compared, but he did like them.

Just in the furnishings and tchotchkes in this room, you've got a heavily carved grandfather clock, a table loaded with chess set, statue, candy dish, vases, and other things, then there is the floral wainscoting, and all the pictures seem to be in fancy frames. On top of the TV there are a video, its box (I think), a bowl of cookies, and the letter F. Eugene is lying on the floor surrounded by comic books and cookies. There are also various hard-to-read details in the extreme foreground. I can't tell what they are, but they make you believe that the room goes on farther, and that if you could stretch the edges out more, you would see more of the house. Seth makes you think that this is NOT a "picture"; it's more like a photo of a real place.

Doris and Fruit 2

2009-06-02T10:11:00.000-07:00

This is the house next door to Mr Fruit's house. I love this drawing. Seth loved it too; he always wanted to do something more with it.

Here is the first part of the story line that he sent to DC.

The story is about a duo: Doris and Fruit.
Fruit is a guy that is made totally out of fruit and vegetables and Doris is a young woman who lives in a house full of all kinds of animals...well actually the house is MADE of animals (please see pictures).
Have you seen the Monkey Vs Robot book by James Kochalka? It is awesome, and it
really starts to bridge the gap between bookstore comics and comic store
comics. The pages will all be square. The pages would be broken down into into either 1, 2 or 4
panel pages with the panels always divided equally on the page. Very
simple, very accessible. (again, see Monkey vs Robot).

This story is 30 Pages. (I am assuming pages 1-2, 3-4, 5-6...are facing
pages.)
_______
Page 1:
Fruitman stands, back facing us, doing his dishes in the kitchen. In
front of
his is a window looking out on his garden.
_______

Page 2:
Shot from outside looked back at the window with Fruitman staring out
with a
puzzled look on his face.

A rabbit is sitting in the garden munching on some trampled vegetables.
Next to him are some HUGE foot prints.
_______
Page 3:
We see the rabbit again, this time standing next to a huge rhino
standing in the middle of the garden. The garden is ruined.
_______
Page 4:
Reaction shot of fruitman. He is shocked.

Fruitman grabs a broom.

He runs out at the rhino.

He hits the totally unfazed rhino with the stick.
_______
Page 5:
He tries pushing the rhino.

He tries pulling the rhino. The animal won't budge.

His eyes get big as he looks at the rest of his yard.

He looks across and sees that path of destruction goes through his fence
and tool shed too. His eyes bug out.
_______
Page 6:
He follows the trail of destruction and sees that it leads all the way
down the street through the neighborhood. The trail is pretty easy to
follow.

Doris and Fruit 1

2009-06-01T10:03:00.000-07:00

I posted these two images quite a long time ago, but Seth's sister Willa just sent me the originals, which I photographed and am putting up here.

When we received them we spent quite a bit of time going over all the fruits that compose the body of who Seth called alternately Fruitman, and Mr Fruit. Actually the lower one Seth titled "Bowling with Fruity Bob". (There are some bowling pins lightly penciled in behind his feet, which you may be able to see if you look carefully.) There are a few differences between the two Mr Fruits, which probably means that some time went by between the two drawings.

There is a story that goes with these pictures, called "Doris and Fruit", which involves also the one I will post tomorrow (also sent by Willa). Seth wrote up the story proposal and sent it to DC Comics, about Mr Fruit living next door to the house I will show you tomorrow. I don't have DC's letter, but I presume their answer was, "Not right now, but keep thinking". Seth loved odd juxtapositions. He was continually dreaming up stories based on things being connected that are not usually connected: "What would happen if..." sort of stories.

Contact page 4

2009-05-29T21:59:00.000-07:00

So here on the last page, we have this wizard cum navigator inside one of the blimps studying his charts. He is surrounded by his tools: a compass, a small scale, a quill pen, some other pens, what I think must be a sextant in front, and books, bottles, telescopes, a bell, a rope, and a lot of rather ornate equipment of various sorts that give a feel for the quality of life aboard the blimp more than giving information about what he is doing. I really like this large upper frame. It gives a sense of life in another time and place, a culture where alchemy is a science and the instruments of science are handmade and decorative. I suppose the idea of a society led by wizards who dress in billowing sleeves and tapestry fabrics is a staple of science fiction. In that sort of society spiritual questions enter naturally into the dialogue and magic is part of ones daily life.

The wizard is distracted from his labors by something that makes the bird squawk, and then we see that the something (the bullet from the first page) has made a hole in the window. So the title of the story is ironic. The man on earth made contact. That was it.

Contact page 3

2009-05-28T20:35:00.000-07:00

So far these three pages look as they are about unrelated things. The first page showed the guy on the ground, who at the end took a potshot at the airships. On the second page the airships

were flying around doing their thing, and the denizens of the sky were gathering together for we don't know exactly what.

Now on this page, the first frame has this flier, attached by a lot of cords to a balloon. The next one shows a woman sitting on a little stool and bathing in Japanese style. (Is she the same woman from the previous page?) The third frame shows the driverless plane heading straight down, while the pilot hangs in the air behind it. Is that what happened when the guy on the ground shot his gun?

Lots of questions. As far as I know, Seth didn't write anything about this particular story. In part he may have meant these early Nimbus stories to explore the setting of the world he had created, maybe even more than to tell their own tales.
He also liked to leave some aspects of the story to the reader's imagination. He didn't want to tell his readers how they were supposed to feel about the things that happened in his stories.

When he did his ALIENS A--Z alphabet book, one of the things he liked about it was that he didn't make any of the creatures scary, or cute, or slimy, or fuzzy, or any of the things that either repel or attract a person. They were very clean, flat, line drawings of weird creatures. Myself I thought it was a weakness of the book; I thought you would want to know how big they were, how slimy, how fearsome, etc. But to Seth, he liked that there was no emotional content to those drawings at all. My son the mathematician.

Contact page 2

2009-05-27T19:38:00.000-07:00

Page 2. In one of the blimps the wizards are preparing something. It would appear to be something like the sacrifice that Seth did a separate 4 page wordless story about. There is a nearly naked woman sitting in the middle of the rug, which has more or less the markings on it that are in the sacrifice picture. But the setting is more workaday, with a couple of children in the foreground making houses out of cards, a guy sitting on the right looking bored, and a Sethly amount of bric-a-brack lying about on shelves, not exactly the setting for a solemn sacrificial ritual.

In the second frame we can see the blimps more clearly than in the first page, from yesterday. They are longer and leaner than the ones Seth designed a little later. I know he had some changes of ideas about the designs. Below is one of his later designs, with several auxiliary compartments and solar panels all along the top.

Contact page 1

2009-05-26T21:23:00.000-07:00

This may be the earliest of the Nimbus stories. It is a four-page wordless story called CONTACT. It was published in Heavy Metal magazine in Spring 1998, when Seth was still living in Japan for the first time, making it his first published work, I believe.

This first page is set on earth, which is inhabited by people who are less technically sophisticated than the ones who have taken to the skies and are living in blimps.

The llama on this page is an indicator that this was drawn at a time when Seth was still partners with his friend Langdon as A Better Lllama Graphics. He often included llamas in his work then. He was just starting to draw full pages, and though the size and shape of the frames are varied, in this story they are all rectangular.

The native sort of earth person sits beside a stone wall as his backpack leans against a rock which has a clothesline tied to it where a shirt is drying. He sees all the airships flying overhead and takes a shot at them with his long, long rifle.

I am including a later drawing Seth did of the Nimbus airships, for comparison. I think they are pretty close to what the ones in this story look like, though in the later drawing we see them from above instead of below. Even though Nimbus was percolating for several years, the elements in it are quite consistent from one period to another.

Backpack Alarm book

2009-05-25T21:17:00.000-07:00

Seth illustrated a kids' book that was part of a package that you could use to make your own backpack alarm. The book was a child's history of locks. I had forgotten that I never saw the originals of those illustrations until a friend of Seth's sent the above picture to us. It is one of the illustrations in the book.
He finished these pictures right after Big in Japan. In fact, I am pretty sure that finishing this set of illustrations was what he had gone out to celebrate the night he died. After working for so long on Spiderman Unlimited, Big in Japan, and then this, he had his own projects he wanted to do.

He used a simplified, boneless style for the people. He developed that rubberleg look for Vertigo Pop (as you can see in the upper black & white page), though it was subtle there. It became more overt in Big in Japan, when Reed lengthens his body (the lower page really shows it) in order to do some special moves as Mr Fantastic. Having developed that as a look, it became one of the tools in his arsenal that he could haul out when the subject called for something humorous and not realistic.

Homage to Mucha

2009-05-24T10:39:00.000-07:00

I recently got out Seth's hard drive again, and perused the files in it for pictures I either hadn't seen, or at least hadn't downloaded to my computer. This one was among them. I only have the colored image; he doesn't seem to have saved the original b/w one. That probably means that he sold it some time ago.

He liked the work of Alphonse Mucha--something I have mentioned before--regardless of the fact that Mucha's work has a sameness that Seth strove against all throughout his career. Everything Mucha did was pretty and elegant, in that Art Nouveau style of curving lines and floral elements. But his work is lush and gorgeous, and Seth loved balance, beauty, and line.

So this is his homage to Mucha. There are a couple of other pictures he did of women in that sort of languid pose, surrounded by curving lines that owe something to Mucha, but this one was saved under his name.

Though it was consciously done "in the style of", Seth never intended it to be mistaken for work by the Art Nouveau master. His woman is not a 19th century female, more of a Sci-fi person, I would say, maybe someone from Seth's Nimbus world. She's too lean for 19th century tastes, for one thing, and her clothing and slightly forward-leaning pose are those of a woman in control, not of a woman accustomed to others in charge of her life. The elements that surround her are also Sethy: a medallion behind her with a pattern of artichokes; and those green and yellow things on the right look like plants from another planet. The round thing she holds in her hand looks like something from Willworld.

Doom Patrol 13, page 7

2009-05-22T10:52:00.000-07:00

Here's the page after the one I posted yesterday.
In the top frame we are looking out from the inside of the jewelry box they just found at everyone's curious faces, to highlight the importance in their lives of the discovery.

The next frame shows them all from above, an overview of what is happening. Then close-up, from below, of Cliff (Robotman) and his shock at finding this item from his long-ago life. Seth manages to make his face both robotlike and shocked, his fingers robotlike and graceful.

The final frame, from outside the window, shows again (we have seen the decrepit outside of the building twice in earlier pages) the outside of the apartment building where they live. We are reminded that it's a seedy area of town, and these are probably not the people we would choose to be in charge of saving us from the destructive forces of some powerful and malevolent enemy. But they turn out to be the ones we've got.

Doom Patrol again, issue 13 page 6

2009-05-21T08:29:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted this page from Doom Patrol before because I thought maybe it was a little dull. But in fact, its repetitiveness is its elegance. We are looking at the same room from the same point of view in every frame except the next to last, and that one is just moved a skoch to the left, and pinpointed by the circle around it. Only the activity in the room changes, like frames for an animated cartoon, or a flip book. We can see that in the sketch he did for this page, he only drew one image, the interior of the room. He was going to repeat it each time. As I look closely at the frames I can see that they are not copies of each other. He actually did redraw each one, though he probably used one master image and a light table to make sure they were uniform.

The sameness of the scenes makes the actions of the characters stand out. We notice every small movement of these bickering flatmates as they get up one morning. I especially like Vic, just waking up from his sleep on the couch, his sleepiness showing in every pose, as well as in the sum of them.

The circle around Ted's face and the jewelry box reminds me of the magnifying glass of some storybook detective, zooming in on a clue.

EGGWORLD: Seth's pinball game

2009-05-20T08:50:00.000-07:00

Seth loved to make things. I don't know exactly how this first came about, but one day he bought an old pinball machine. The first photo shows how it looked when he first got it (though he had already started painting the sides blue by the time he took the photo).
He was always amused by eggs; they have so much potential to be characters. And the idea of the payoff being egg salad just seemed apt and just. So he worked on this thing for probably the better part of a year, on and off. The second photo shows the play area finished: a Sethish combination of elegance and goofiness.

The year he worked on it was either the time he was working for Presto designing Myst 3, or the following year, when he was working on Willworld--he was living in San Diego in any case. The photo to the left is the finished game. The summer of its completion(maybe 2001), it was shown in a gallery that had an exhibition of comic book based art (during Comic Con, of course). After that it sat in our garage for what seemed like a long time. When Seth was going to move to Japan he promised us that he would find a home for it. He ended up selling it to the owner of an art gallery in Los Angeles, a Chinese guy. In appreciation the gallery owner sent us a box of Chinese sweet buns. So we got garage space back and a box of sweets in the bargain.

Lifeblood, part two

2009-05-18T09:29:00.000-07:00

Here are pages 5 and 6 from the Lifeblood story. Seth did not use the format on page 5 very often, of smallish, uniform frames with no background. This was one of his ways of controlling the passing of time, a concept that he considered an important one in comic book storytelling. As in time lapse photography, he singles out one activity to attend to at a different speed from the rest of the story. Here he shows it over the course of several seconds or minutes, thus slowing down the reader and forcing him or her to focus on that activity, making it central in his attention.

In the next page, she tells how she got this way, a page that is important for the course of the story, but that could be dull pictorially. Seth livens the page by doing things like putting a square frame in the center of the page showing only Victor's ankle in a leg iron. The conversation says nothing about his imprisonment, but Seth makes it the elephant in the parlor, that nobody mentions but everyone sees.

Lifeblood

2009-05-15T10:34:00.000-07:00

This weird story was published in Heavy Metal magazine in Summer, 2002. It was written by

Michael O'Connell, who most likely contacted Seth at Comic Con a year or two earlier. The story has some similarities with the novel The Collector by John Fowles. It is about a woman who, through some sort of laboratory mishap, has come to need to ingest blood through her skin to stay alive. So she kidnaps a guy she meets in a bar and chains him to the bed in her basement apartment in order to draw blood from him when she needs it.

It is entirely set in this dreary basement apartment, with two characters only, one of whom can only move slightly, as he is chained in place. The claustrophobic setting and narrow story form a huge challenge for an artist, especially Seth who liked to make every scene different from every other one. I suspect that the challenge was one of the reasons he accepted this assignment.

Looking over the pages, I believe Seth did pretty well in making each frame different from the others. He shows the action, such as it is, from many different points of view. This title page shows the room from a point of view above the ceiling right over the toilet. He amused himself by showing not only what a bug on the ceiling would see, but detaching the room from the house and drawing in also the cinder blocks inside the walls.

I remember when Seth was working on this story. He was living here in San Diego at the time. It may have been just after Willworld; I think it was during the summer. He showed me, but didn't say much about this work; eventually he maybe found it just not that interesting.

Memorable fight scenes: Zendra cover

2009-05-14T08:37:00.000-07:00

I know, I posted this image before, here. The letters from Seth to his editors that are in that post are pretty interesting and charming, but beside the point here.

This scene, like the ones I posted yesterday, are not memorable so much for the amount of hurt that is being received, as for the elegance of the design. Comic book readers will know the names of these characters--I don't--but the lizard woman (Is that Zendra?) has flipped upside down, her long tail waving sinuously above, to stave off the attack of the robot. He/It is ripping apart the wall of what must be some sort of postmodern fortress, because the wall seems to be filled with cables and electric doodads. In a building whose structure is mainly parallel lines, the overall impression on the viewer is curves: especially the curve of the broken wall and the curve of the handful of cables. Those curves form a circle around the center of the action, with Lizard Woman's head at the hub of the circle. So in a picture fairly confusingly filled with detritus and other details, the main action is circumscribed neatly by a frame of cables which has meaning in the action as well. Amazing.

Memorable fight scenes: Vertigo Pop Tokyo

2009-05-13T08:47:00.000-07:00

First of all let me apologize that these images are not very high resolution. I cropped them from images that were not that big in the originals.

Yesterday's topic made me think of other scenes from Seth's work that, while not meeting the criterion of causing great bodily harm, are nevertheless great fight scenes. These two frames from Vertigo Pop Tokyo are, I think, two of the best ever.

The upper one, from issue 2, page 16, is a group of Japanese high school girls at their PE class. The girls have ganged up on Maki's good friend Mizumi, who you can see rolled up in the mat, with her fuzzy ponytails sticking out. Their meanness has enraged Maki, who dives into the gang of girls, fists flying, to wreak vengeance on whoever has caused pain to her friend. In Seth's hands there are arms and legs poking out from all directions, everything shooting outward with centrifugal force from the center. It's a great image.

The lower frame is from issue 1 page 24. I know I have posted this picture before, and talked about the structure of it at some length, but I think it is probably one of the best things Seth ever did. Again it's Maki on the attack, jumping her brother the reluctant yakuza before he can do any harm to her idol Hike. It's a somewhat more complex image than the other, but like the first one it has arms, legs, and bodies flying outward from the center. All the bodies are at different angles, even that of Steve, who is merely photographing the action and not involved in the fight. Hike is falling out of the picture to the right, Maki is leaning away from us, and her brother Ryuji is falling out of the picture to the left. (Incidentally, the three characters in the fight all have pretty bizarre shoes.) Steve is leaning back, into the picture, as he videotapes the fight.

Monster fights: Big in Japan issue 2, pages 13 and 15

2009-05-12T09:28:00.001-07:00

Robt Seda-Schreiber, in his blog Very Secret Monster Things, has nominated the bottom panel of this page, issue 2, page 15 of Big in Japan, as a great "One Panel of Pain", a memorable comic book fight scene.

In his blog he has posted the color version; here is the black and white. He describes the scene better than I could, with the names of the monsters and robot and all. Pkop!! Foom! Yik! The robot, under the control of Reed Richards and Ben Grimm, delivers crippling blows to two monsters at once, in the seemingly confining space among the skyscrapers of downtown Tokyo.

In the center frame of the page above, the reader can see what is happening inside the robot's mouth, while two pages earlier (below) we see inside its chest cavity where Ben Grimm is controlling the cords and pulleys that make him move, like a puppeteer with a marionette much bigger than himself.

I don't know if all comic book artists show the reader the inner workings of things, but for Seth, that was what interested him: How Things Work. At heart he was partly a physicist and partly a designer.

Doom Patrol sketch issue 13 page 9

2009-05-11T09:10:00.000-07:00

One more Doom Patrol sketch. In this one too, Seth stayed so true to his sketch that there is almost nothing to compare between it and the final. He even drew in most of the machinery in the bottom frame, making the perspective right in his sketch.

We have talked before about the issue of size and shape of the frames on the page, but I think it bears repeating. Making the frame outlines work with the scene that is happening inside can make a page come alive. Here, in a very simple example, Seth has made Robotman wake up from his entree into The Past Made Present at the top of the page, where the wiggles and swirls from his mind bubble up and off the page, like the fizz from soda in a glass. The top two frames are horizontal and narrow, Robotman caught in the middle of a strange, though strangely familiar, land.

One very Sethy addition to the final page: the big computer in the middle of the bottom panel has a vertical thing added between the two reels, giving the machine the look of an observer in Robotman's wondering search through the laboratory.

Doom Patrol 14 page 11 Incarnations of ElastiGirl

2009-05-07T20:18:00.000-07:00

This page stars Elasti Girl, or as Ava prefers to call herself, Elasti Lass. I found a few old pictures of her, which I will put in here below. Seth has made all the settings, as well as the characters, pretty realistic. It seems to me that psychology is the central attraction of Seth's piece of this story. In looking for the other pictures of these characters I find lots of old comic book covers, and bits of the old stories. In general the Doom Patrol seems to have been pretty campy, even from its inception. But here, the camp is played down, and the fight against the Brotherhood of Evil is merely a backdrop against which the characters' search for themselves is the central theme.

This page, where a giant Ava lifts the lid off the schoolhouse, looks much less silly than the idea sounds. The town where they first arrive certainly looks like France. The girls in the schoolhouse respond to the intrusion of a giant in reasonable ways, some of them screaming because a monster has appeared, some of them falling because the building is wiggling, and one holding her head against falling concrete from the lifting of the roof.

A couple of other Elasti Girls for comparison:

This early one has a headband, a hairstyle that we used to call a "flip", and those flashy purple boots with a kind of wing coming off the sides. Seth never gave his superheroes uncomfortable shoes. In Seth's issues he only shows Elasti Girl's feet a couple of times, but when he does he gives her calf length boots with flat soles and no wings. Maybe he thought, "Who can fight against evil in high heels?" Besides, in general he liked women to look themselves: no makeup, a minimum of bling. He got mad at me for wearing makeup one time. (I rarely do anyway.) It was occasionally an issue with his first wife April. We all have our quirks.

Here's another one in those same shoes, showing her undies to all the people in the street below her while she rather awkwardly holds back that airplane. This artist and the one above both make the buildings pretty much cardboard backdrops for the action.

Doom Patrol sketch issue 13 page 22

2009-05-06T20:26:00.000-07:00

Let's look at one more sketch, along with its final form.

In changing this from a two-frame page to a splash page with two insets, he made the look of it quite a bit more dramatic, even though the essentials are not changed a bit. The fact that, in the final, the frame with the monster in it doesn't end at the top gives the whole image a more looming, less confined feel, though the only actual drawing we see above the inset is a bit of the top of a building on the left.

He added details to the buildings, especially at the bottom. And he changed the style of the windows. He also changed the team's look in the bottom inset, so the faces are different sizes, meaning we see them from very close up. Though the page is effective in the sketch, the changes he made to the final add a surprising amount of drama.

Doom Patrol sketch issue 13 page 10

2009-05-05T09:31:00.000-07:00

This final is also so much like the final that there is not very much to say about it, except to marvel at how well Seth pictured the scene in his mind. He always thought of himself as a movie director, setting up scenes for maximum impact.

But I would also like to look at some other artists' work on Doom Patrol, to see how Seth's vision of the team was his own.

Let's look at Larry Trainor, AKA Negative Man. Seth has him wrapped entirely in white tape, for which there are precedents, though most artists make his facial tape part of his face rather than something stuck on the outside. I like the fact that Seth's Negative Man--who is NOT Larry Trainor--is skinny, with a definite non-superhero body. Here are a couple of examples of other artists' work on him:

In an early drawing he is dressed in a tight-fitting superhero suit, as ElastiGirl also wears. His bout with radiation seems to have not hurt his physique at all.

John Byrne gives him gloves and a costume, and real tape, though in this drawing his wavy hair is left showing, for at least a little sex appeal.

Doom Patrol sketch issue 13 page 4

2009-05-04T08:25:00.000-07:00

I posted this page a little while ago, but now that I have the sketch, it's worth seeing it again alongside the final.

Noticing the slight change in the appearance of Robotman from the sketch to the final, I assumed that the final was built to look as Robotman "always" looks. So I did a tiny bit of research and found some images from some original Doom Patrol comic books. It turns out that Seth has designed Robotman in his own way.

Even the cover of this issue, drawn by, I think, Billy Tan, has Robotman with human-type biceps and a superhero look. Seth has reinvented him as a real robot, with only a robot's facial expressions, metal arms, and joints that clearly do not have a human being inside.

Here is the cover of issue 13.

And here he is with Larry (Negative Man) and Rita (Elasti Girl) from 1963, drawn as a guy in a brass colored robot suit.

Doom Patrol sketch, issue 13 page 21

2009-05-01T10:45:00.000-07:00

After talking at other times about how rare it was for Seth to use black in his work, I see that in his work on Doom Patrol he actually used it quite frequently. In fact, on this page, one of the differences between the sketch and the final is the amount of black background he put into the page. Three of the four panels on this page have a solid black background.

It seems to have been an anomaly though. He was not afraid of--in fact he relished the idea of--using a different style for every book he did. So the black backgrounds are part of his Doom Patrol style.

Once again, I am astonished at how carefully he worked out the page in the sketch, and how little he deviated from it. Even the details of the Chief's workroom are nearly the same from the sketch to the final drawing. In the final the flooring is slightly more decorative, a lamp is taken away, the black items are removed, but that's pretty much all.

Doom Patrol sketch, issue 13 page 15

2009-04-30T08:11:00.000-07:00

I wish I could show you these two images side by side. Blogger doesn't let me post two images exactly next to each other, or at least I don't know how to do it. But it is nice to be able to compare the two easily.

Let's look at the center frame. Seth included there all the floor panels--a rather elegant version of an old-style checkerboard floor. In the final, instead of the heavily foreshortened floor he put in an elaborate control panel with Robotman at the controls, but eliminated the wiring around the top of that panel. In the sketch we have a sense of the size and feel of the room they are standing in. In the final we are more overwhelmed by the TV monitor on the one hand, and the amount and complexity of electronic gear on the other. So Seth has subtly manipulated the reader's perception of the kind of situation the team is in. In the final the huge TV monitor looming over their heads with the three malevolent faces shown on it is quite striking, especially as it is dominated by the visible brain in the center. So instead of a view of the beautiful floor--attractive but not informative--we get a feel for the situation.

One word about the oblique frame at the bottom. The one in the sketch seems very effective, off kilter as it is, with just the shocked faces of the team showing in it. (With Beast Boy as a llama. Seth's first official artistic enterprise was called "A Better Lllama Graphics", which gave him a special affinity for llamas) The bottom frame in the final is even more effective, I think, with the face of the hapless Shyleen in the Chief's body needing a special divot broken out for her/him, and even then, just barely visible.

Doom Patrol sketch, issue 13 page 2

2009-04-29T09:28:00.001-07:00

It is astonishing to me how completely Seth planned everything out in his mind before he began to draw the pages. That is probably not quite true; he probably did other preliminary sketches that didn't get saved. But not many.

In these pages though, the final is so much like the sketch that there doesn't seem to have been much in the way of working out of setting or placement of figures on paper. Even the tattoos and the clothing were not afterthoughts. (The kanji on the guy's black shirt, by the way, reads "heaven".) It is interesting to me that the only significant changes seem to be in the bottom panel, where the setting and perspective are entirely the same, but the position of the characters is different. In other words, Seth planned the perspective and view, and put the characters in afterwards.

He didn't always work that way. He wrote about his method of drawing in an essay he did on perspective in about 1999. Here is what he said:

I sketch the scene from a bunch of different angles in my sketch book. Some people can also close their eyes and imagine the scene and sort of zoom in and out and around, like on an expensive CADD (computer aided drafting and design) program, but some people can't. It is a great ability to cultivate, though, and it gets better with practice. Either way you need to kind of get the feel for what type of scene you want. You need to decide if the characters' positions are more important or if the background information and setting is more important. It will hopefully vary from scene to scene. Whichever is more important you sketch in first. If you have a really great pose of a guy sitting down, and it is central to the piece, then you might design a piece of furniture and even a whole room around that one person. The more logical way is to draw the setting first then put in the characters second so that you can be sure you have strong figure-ground relationships (i.e., no one seems to be "floating" above the floor if they're not supposed to). In fact, I think that most comic artists draw in the characters first, though with me it's about 50/50.

Doom Patrol sketch issue 13 page 8

2009-04-27T21:03:00.001-07:00

A very kind fan/friend of Seth's recently sent me a treasure trove of scans of sketches (Ooh, a lot of alliteration) that Seth had sent him of his preliminary work for Doom Patrol. (Thank you Steven!) I am posting here his sketch for issue 13 page 8, compared with the final drawing of that same page. Interestingly, most of the sketches he sent are VERY similar to the finals. Seth seems to have worked out the issues and details in his mind before he drew anything on paper. This page is an exception. Robotman's upside-down body with the brain falling out is the same, but the contents of his weird dream could hardly be more different from the prelims to the final. The floating blocks from the sketch are quite robot-like, yet dream- even nightmare-like. But then in the final page, the stuff of nightmare really comes out: squishy, oozy forms, teeth, eyeballs, horns, and bumpy skin, soft and stretchy and shapeless things. It's really much more effective, by the way, in black and white, than it came out in the comic book, where pastel colors and grey lines make the various components blend into each other more than here. But Seth has talked before about how hard it must be to color his work.

a couple more Myst 3 sketches

2009-04-27T06:33:00.000-07:00

Two sketches. The lower one is for something that definitely became part of the machinery in the game. Machinery didn't exactly come naturally for Seth, but he was pretty good at it. Most of his toys as a young child were the kind where you put things together, Legos and the like. And I have a little story. When Seth was 9 years old, I was divorced from his father and I met Bob, who I later married. On my first date with Bob, he invited both Seth and me for dinner at his condo. Seth finished dinner first, and disappeared into the bathroom. Later Bob told me that what Seth had been doing in there was taking apart Bob's shaver. He wanted to know how things worked.

So gears held no particular mystery for him. The gears in his drawing would probably in fact make an elevator go up and down, though I doubt that anyone playing the game would take the time to make sure they were right.

The other drawing is for something that I don't recognize. It must not have made the final cut, but it seems so particular that you would think I would know at least where it is supposed to be. My guess is that it is an early design for the lower room in the tusk on J'Nanin. The final one turned out quite different from this.

Myst 3 design: Narayan

2009-04-24T16:41:00.000-07:00

These look like preliminary drawings for the last age, Narayan, which Seth also designed. He did the page of masks (maybe more), but then I don't think he ended up using them at all. As I said, it's been quite a few years since I played this game, and at the time I wasn't comparing the actual game with his drawings.

But it's clear, from both his sketches and from the photo of the room, that this was always intended as a room composed of twisted and sinuous ropes or branches of material, very organic in a surrealistic way. The final room is not nearly so complex as Seth's drawings. In designing a game--as well as designing architecture--it is not enough to make places that are beautiful and interesting; in this case the spaces also have to accomodate the puzzles and the story that takes place in the room. Everything must fit together.