Flowering Nose Day 2014

On Falling

A couple of small delights from Seth's oeuvre.
The above page from Happydale is interesting and maybe a bit foreboding, because the person they are talking about in the top panel is a picture of Seth himself, falling (on rollerblades) down the library steps. When Seth was in college he was an expert skater.   I have a photo of him on skates with a LOT of air underneath him. He used to jump over cars and the like.  He always wore knee and elbow pads, and since he didn't like to be hurt, he was always careful, no matter how high he jumped.   But he did do a lot of jumping, and maybe he learned to fall, and did like it.  Falling may have represented freedom to him.

And speaking of falling, below is page 9 from Seth's only Spiderman story.  In the story some knuckleheads are playing at being like Spiderman; they seem to be looking for the stupidest possible way to die.  This page shows one of them, whose safety rope has broken, being rescued in mid-fall by Spiderman himself.  The subject matter notwithstanding, it's an incredibly beautiful page, with the action at the top of the building at the top of the page, the middle at the middle of the page, and what is happening below at the bottom of the page.

On this Flowering Nose Day, let us use our energies to fall in love with each other and with all that is good, to encourage each other, and to do kindness with reckless abandon.  

Joe Hill: Freddy and Spidey

An alert reader/friend pointed out to me that on his blog Joe Hill posted a nice story about the origins of the Freddy Wertham comic book. Here it is.
In his blog entry Joe recounts that Seth decided to help him get started in the comic book writing field. He didn't know it, but that was the way Seth in general related to other artists. He loved to encourage artists, which included artists in all fields. He believed that all people are connected together, and so when one person does what is true and real from his soul, everything in the world is made truer and more real, and thus benefits everyone.

I have posted a few pages from the Spiderman Unlimited story that Joe wrote, and here is another. I agree with Joe's assessment, Seth's art is really gorgeous. His lines are so very clean and his setting up of the story is beautiful.
Here is an example that I haven't posted before of Seth's work from Spiderman Unlimited. The setting is fully realized--down to the lights on the toy store sign, crumbling tiles on the wall, and dog poo on the street--though not entirely real; witness the sign on the signpost that Duff Memphis hurtles into. Seth gives Joe the respect of giving his story seriously elegant drawings that show that we are not to take the story seriously.

Literal and Graphic, part three

Here we have two guys in capes and tights to compare with each other: Batman on top and Spiderman below. Seth drew this Batman series over a pretty long time, from about 2001 through 2003 (he was not given a deadline). This short Spiderman story he did at the same time he was working on Big in Japan, I think, or maybe right afterwards, so it was 2005. It has some of the most graphic, that is, non-literal work that Seth did. Very slick and clean. Actually, I don't have a scan of the image, but some reader complained that it was too graphic and not literal enough; there was a smiling sun on one page that they thought was what? not serious enough for a hero like Spiderman?

In any case, though there are many differences between them, both these pages have the caped hero charging into the middle of a situation to save the day. Both pages also have a crowd of surprised people in one frame. The Batman page has a realistic feel, with real-looking faces, and realistic reactions to the entree of a strong and competent superhero. The Spiderman page has caricatures of the main actors, a group of lunkheads attempting to copy their hero's actions. The whole page, indeed the whole story, has a caricaturish feel.

This page in particular is notable for its graphic design quality, with the guy falling off the building at the top of the page, careening through the air in the middle (with Spiderman catching him), and the crowd at the bottom of the building and bottom of the page, trying to get out of the way. The concept of the fall from the top of the page to the bottom really works.

Spiderman Unlimited page 6

This is the page that is hanging on the wall behind where David is serving wine in the photo below. It has all those mature Seth trademarks: sound effect words that express the sound visually, clean clear images, quirky details, a page that is designed so that all the elements fit together as a whole. I just noticed that he nuns on the bottom left are standing so that the curve of the nun in front makes an arch of negative space around the nun in back. Lovely.

Spiderman Unlimited page 9

OK, one last image on the subject of sound noises. Julien Schantz, a comicbook art collector in France, wanted to be sure I included this image, which not only has sound effects that show all the facets of Seth's sound effect vocabulary, but also has an elegant full page structure, with things breaking at the top (top of the page, top of the building), someone falling and being caught in the middle, and a crowd at the bottom (on the ground) trying to get out of the way. That is, the page is not so much divided into panels that show sequential actions, but the page as a whole makes sense. The actions are sequential, but the time elapsed between each panel is very brief, and there is time overlap.
One of the things that interested Seth when he was first beginning to do comic book pages, was that the artist could move the action along faster or slower by the way he drew the panels.
Tomorrow I will show another page from Julien, where Seth consciously made the action sloooow down.

Spiderman Unlimited, page 1

This is the first page to the Spiderman Unlimited story that I posted about Saturday. This one Seth sent to me in an e-mail in 2005, colored, though he did not do the colors.
Most of the lettering in Seth's pages was done by professional letterers, but he got a kick out of doing his own sound effects, as in the second panel. I'll write more soon about the lettering he did for sound effects.

Spiderman Unlimited

This page is from Spiderman Unlimited, volume 3, #8, an 11-page story called Fanboyz, about three not-too-bright Spiderman fans who try to do what their hero does. The story is so slight, the humor in it is so broad, that it is easy to overlook it (as I did when it came out in May of 2005) and miss Seth's skill at putting the scenes together, his always clean and elegant drawings, and his ability to give real weight as well as comic foolishness to the images of morons wearing their underwear on top of their pants and doing idiotic stunts.
The story was written by Joe Hill , who is a serious writer of novels and stories. I think this is his only comic book.