Floweringnose Day 2021

We have all this artwork that Seth has done.  He was so good at what he did that it is possible to just indulge in baths of Seth art soup and fill yourself with it, slurping up all kinds of  pictures:

elegant drawings for Myst 3 Exile--  

comical, clever art with his signature perspective genius, coupled with great visual storytelling in the two part Doom Patrol series,

his own designs for weird spacecraft,

a museum full of art lovers,

the weirdest of all his weird drawings: a scene both horrific and comical, where Our Hero has no chance whatever to escape (even the sun has it in for him) but he remains serene as he contemplates it all,

an absolutely fabulous fight scene, involving four people, where the action is completely clear, in which there are no right angles

 

a calm scene of fishing from a rock in Japanese waters,

or many others.  

In his pictures there are many different life perspectives, different styles, different moods, different 

speeds, different attitudes.  He was able to immerse himself in any of them, and enjoy them.  It was all Life, and that was what it was all about: Life.  

His artwork is so compelling that now we may be tempted to say that it is enough.  And of course, it has to be.  The man is gone.  But I'd like to offer a link to a conversation he had with interviewer Mike Jozic in 2004.  It gives a little flavor of what it was like to be with him:

Mike Jozic interview from 2004

 

 

Contact page 4

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

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

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

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.

Sacrifice page 4

Oh oh! Did the Great Tree-Squid Creature get carried away, or was it the idea all along that not only the beautiful young woman, but also at least one of the shamans would be consumed?


The only clue that this all happens in the Nimbus world is the the view from the window in the top panel, of the airships floating along behind the man who is about to meet his end.

At the end, in the little scroll, there are the letters DWARI. I don't know what that stands for, but my guess is: Done With A Rapidograph Inker. (Actually the I is curious--P for Pen would be more likely, but dyslexic though he was, Seth did know his I's from his P's. Maybe he didn't want it to say DWARP. Or maybe it means something entirely different. Any ideas?)

Speaking of little scrolls at the end, I looked at the originals of the LIFT story, and Kaare's name is not written there, which means that Jay was right: Kaare did the colors on that story.
I don't know who did the colors here.

Sacrifice page 3

The magic starts to work and a tree-ish thing emerges from the woman's middle. The tree starts small, and quickly turns into a monstrous thing with a flowerish part on the end. Seth's handling of the "trunk"--indeed, the whole look of the story--seems very Art Nouveau, a genre that attracted him for a long time.





He did this story in 2000, the year he worked for Presto Inc. on "MYST 3: Exile". So he must have done it in his spare time. I mention that because the look of Myst 3 is very Art Nouveau, especially the opening world that Seth designed. The architecture, the ironwork, the stained glass are consciously designed with the kind of organic curving lines that so inform the Art Nouveau style.

Sacrifice page 2

This is one of the pictures that you can see in the regular part of this website, under Comic Art.

If anyone was wondering, from the first page, what those green balls with the holes in the sides were for, here they are: she has her hands in them. All the designs drawn on her skin fits right into the arcane writing and designs on the rug. Seth has created an elegant look to the magic that she is going to become part of. He generally didn't do calligraphy, but here the runic writing that is part of the spell is clean and beautiful, and quite magic looking.After I wrote above, I looked for the originals, and took photos of them, so here is my photo.

Sacrifice page 1

This is another four page wordless story that was published in Heavy Metal magazine in September of 2000. It also takes place in the world of Nimbus, though its connection is not so clear as that in "Lift". In fact I only know that it is part of the same world from something Seth wrote (and I have forgotten now where I read it).

Clearly the woman in this first page is preparing to give herself as a sacrifice, though we don't know why. She comes into the room in a cloak which she sheds somberly. The cloak, though it is only partly seen and quickly removed, is not at all a throwaway prop. It has been as carefully planned as the more substantial images in this story, with turtle shells at the shoulders, and a fabric design that--if you imagined the cloak spread out--you could picture, just from the little bit visible.

The three shamans (shamen?) have their assortment of magic tools at their sides. The one on the right has an open book and some scrolls. The one at the left has beside him something that looks like either a fire extinguisher or a seltzer bottle. Hmm. Each of the men has his own tools, presumably those for his own particular part of the incantation. The case at the top of the large lower panel seems to be an aquarium, because inside it you can see an octopus! I think that, especially earlier in his career, Seth couldn't resist things of the sea.

The other thing about this page that I wanted to mention is the point of view (which Seth always referred to as the "camera angle"). A bird's eye view is useful in a picture like this, where you want to show all the objects in a room in one picture, especially where no one thing is more important than another. Seth used it pretty regularly, from his earliest serious drawing. So he got pretty proficient at drawing people, and columns, and other stuff, in that extreme foreshortening that is necessary to make things look natural from above.

Two of the pages from this story are among the pages that Seth himself posted on this website, under the heading Comic Art.

Lift page 4

In this last page of the story, the pilot climbs out of his plane, which is now hanging by the ropes holding its wing hooks. He climbs up the ladder onto the blimp, still watched and tended to by the guy in the decorative mini-balloon, and then turns to wave a thank you.

The whole purpose of this story seems to be to describe some of the mechanics of living in this airborne society. Indeed, it is fascinating, seems possible (?), and gives the imagination a fertile field for inventing methods and devices for doing everyday projects.

The signature on this page says FISH, and underneath, Kaare, which would be Seth's friend Kaare Andrews. Maybe Kaare did the inks; I don't know for sure what his contribution was. They always wanted to collaborate on some work, and in fact did work together--one person on pencils and the other on inks--on at least one other occasion. Though I don't think they saw each other often they continued to have great respect for each other's work.

LIFT page 3

This little story seems to be explaining how things work in the world of Nimbus. The pilot in the first page is flying his plane through the airspace of Nimbus, and the person with the flags signals to him where to stop. It looks as though this is the usual way that an airplane stops at a particular spot in the realm of Nimbus. As on an aircraft carrier, the large airship puts out some kind of rope or chain that hooks onto the loops of the small plane and just brings it to a lurching halt. The anxious signaler is (vainly, one would surmise) shouting out directions to the pilot as to where to go.

My husband, Seth's stepfather, is a retired Navy officer, a ship guy, and he spent a few years on aircraft carriers. I remember Seth asking him questions about aircraft carriers and how they work. At the time I thought he was just interested in the workings of things--which he was--but though I don't remember the content of those conversations, this story may have been part of their product.

LIFT, page 2

This is the second page of "Lift". As you can see from the black and white drawing that he did for Nimbus, the airships are similar to those. The Lift story is surely earlier than the b/w page, so he took those ideas and added to them for the later work. I am sure he could have told you what all the little gadgets and doohickeys on the outside of the blimps are for. His invented machinery was whimsical but never random.
In the upper left panel on the colored page, the airship at the top right--am I seeing things, or does it look like a toy duck? Seth did think ducks were funny.

LIFT

This four page wordless story was published in Heavy Metal Magazine in January of 2001. What I have here are Seth's own files of his work. So, like the story "The Seed", he evidently did his own digital coloring. I have the actual pages too, but I haven't taken pictures of them.

This story is one of several that he did in the same general setting--one that he had in his mind for years. Finally, in 2004 or so he wrote up his ideas into something he could give to a scriptwriter, and approached some media types who might be interested, though nothing ever came of it. I posted quite a lot about it in August of last year, under the general heading "Nimbus".

He intended for each of the stories to be able to stand on its own, much like a television series. I'll post the rest of this story in coming days.

Nimbus and Dinotopia

One time Seth gave me as a gift the book Dinotopia, by James Gurney. He knew I love that kind of beautiful illustrations, and he loved them too. What impressed him the most though, was the fact that Mr. Gurney had created an entire world, with all the details that went with it. When Seth was living in San Diego, probably in 2000, he and I went to see James Gurney at a bookstore, and we talked about his work.

I opened Dinotopia the other day, thinking my grandson (Seth's son Tofu, who is four) might enjoy it, and found the illustration on the left. I was struck by the similarity of the mountain with the buildings carved into it with Seth's drawing on the right for Nimbus. I suspect that Seth did not borrow the image--actually he hated borrowing other artists' work--but he may have absorbed and forgotten it, and later it came up into his mind as a new thing.

Nimbus storyboard drawings

When I first found these drawings I didn't think they were Seth's. They are so different from his usual style. But then I remembered some acrylic pens that he gave me a few years ago, in shades of grey. He gave them away when he decided he wasn't going to do that sort of work any more. Besides there is something in the faces of the characters that looks like Seth. I realized that these are some of the storyboard drawings he did when he was trying to sell this story to movie or TV studios. I guess they needed something a little more like photos than comic book readers do.

These drawing were a revelation to me; I didn't know that Seth could do this sort of casual, shaded drawings, full of action. The action is full of movement, natural and a little exaggerated, as befits a fantasy story of this nature.

Nimbus characters

These are a few characters that Seth called the Night People. His idea was to give them a sort of Aztec look, which he does without making putting them in any sort of actual historical costume. They are the ones who built the structures that I posted yesterday, and who live in those cities. Included in the drawing is a rather dinosaur-looking lizard, a definite Seth touch.

Nimbus booklet, page 10

Here we have a long shot of the same city built into the rocky mountain that we saw yesterday close up. The city seems to be half carved, halt built up from the rocks. The architecture is quite beautiful, with some columned porticoes, some domed buildings, and at least one round building with stairs spiraling around the outside. Seth as architect and city planner.

Nimbus booklet, page 10

This picture is a view of the civilization that sprang up on earth after most of its people had fled. Only a few souls were left, and they created quite an advanced culture, which our heroines find after some mishaps bring them down to earth. Seth has pictured the people in a sort of precolumbian New World way. As you can see in the image, there are not many buildings--the landscape is mostly rocky mountains and trees, with a few structures. But the structures that exist are elegant and decorative, built into the rocks, with plants growing from various places for decorative effect, and knowing Seth, he probably had some rationale that made them useful as well. The few people visible in this image are wearing elaborate headdresses but not much clothing, in a warm-weather Native American sort of style.

Nimbus booklet, page 9

Huge dragons in the sky.
As a family with a four-year-old who would rather be read to than just about anything else, we go to the library a lot, and see a lot of dragons of many different sorts. These dragons of Seth's are probably some of the most both elegant and terrifying I have ever seen: huge snakelike creatures with manes and hairy tails, twisting around each other in their effort to grab the small helpless humans in their sites.

Nimbus booklet, page 8

This is Amina. In part of Seth's sketch of the story he says this about this picture (I realize I am giving you a little bit of the story without any of the lead up to it, but this part can stand alone, I think):
"Suddenly the enormity of the task she has given herself dawns on her. Here is a 16 year old girl waving her arms and telling armies at war to stop and listen to her. It's impossible. Her arms drop down to her sides in disbelief. Here she has the answer for all these peoples problems but no one will listen to her. From behind her a Nimbus plane emerges and lines her up in his sights and fires. Amina is hit and falls as the plane strafes across the deck."