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

 

 

It's Seth's Birthday today

I have probably posted all these before, but time goes by and it's nice to see some of the stuff we thought we knew all over again with new eyes.
Doom Patrol was not an Important Work, but it is endlessly creative, every page filled with interesting and amusing details, and beautiful layouts.  I get a kick out of it every time.  Even the pages that are only what in opera is called "recitativo"--the daily conversations that have to be shown in order for the big events to make sense--like this first page, are a delight to look at.  Seth did nothing in a commonplace way, as he had seen it done before.  No artist invents everything himself; they all stand on one another's shoulders, but Seth did not take for granted perspectives, layouts, how a particular emotion is depicted, or how a particular character needs to relate to his/her environment.  He started from scratch every time.

It's a lesson for anyone who wants to create.

Just another reason to say, "Thank you Seth." 

By the way, the kanji on Vic's T-shirt on the first page is "Heaven."

Influences on Seth: MC Escher

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.

Doom Patrol 13, page 7

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

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.

Doom Patrol sketch issue 13 page 9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Doom Patrol 13 page 19

The computer with the pictures on it is still at the shop, but this page was posted by Tim Utsler on the Comic Art Fans website. Tim bought it from Seth himself, who signed it for him at the top.

I believe that Doom Patrol is the only series where Seth used broad swaths of black for something other than a night sky. On at least two pages in DP he used black paint to show a psychological state. In the upper panel on this page Robotman's anger is blistering out in the jagged black paintbrush strokes. Beast Boy is cowering in the face of his outburst of rage, Elasti-Lass (as she calls herself) holds her hands up against it, and Shyleen--who in the form of the Chief is the object of his anger--wrings her hands helplessly.

This is more or less the central page of this book. It needs to explain both who the bodies are that are inhabited by the folks we met earlier, and also show that the people inside the bodies have different characters than formerly. It is rather confusing unless you read it carefully, so the art must give as much information as possible on several levels. This Seth loved doing. In the center left panel, Robotman's head reflects the faces of the people he is talking to. It gives the impression that he is talking to these people, but also that they are in his mind. Three faces are reflected, the fourth, who is always off on his own, is also seen, but in the background. It seems to me a brilliant way of showing multiple facets of a multifaceted story.

Doom Patrol 13 page 5

I am posting this today, but after this I will be out of computer range probably until after Easter. See you then.

I think this is the page that one fan said expressed a sort of angst that he thought that maybe many readers could identify with. "Who's like me? Who knows how I feel?....I'm out of place here, out of sync." The speaker happens to be a man turned into a robot, but I suspect that a lot of folks feel that they too do work that is robot-like, or that their insides are hidden under a steely exterior, and nobody understands or cares who they really are.

Seth gave his Robotman human--not robot--body language, and an expressive face. Along with that are the bare tree, the spare background, and the upper panel in which the two characters' heads are cut off, all adding up to a scene of melancholy world-weariness between Robotman and the unnamed old man, who may know more than we think.

Doom Patrol 13 page 4

With a little encouragement, I photographed all the pages from Doom Patrol, in the ongoing goal of making sure that all Seth's work has been copied and catalogued.

So this blog gets the fruit of my labor. Here is page 4 of issue 13.
Seth only did two issues of this series, an odd story that owes more to science fiction than to the superhero genre. A group of squabbling apartment mates--one of whom happens to be a man turned into a robot--with no warning, come to inhabit the bodies of a group of superheroes called the Doom Patrol. With their own personalities but someone else's bodies, they have to take on the last project that the Doom Patrol had hanging over their heads.

In this page, before all the above has occurred, Robotman has taken a walk. The first panel is viewed from a distance, but then the conversation quickly turns personal, and the rest of the page is viewed at close range. Seth managed to get real expression from a face and body that remain metal and robot. In black and white the old man's quilted jacket blends with the block wall behind him, making him seem as nearly invisible as forgotten old men may often feel in a big city.

Literal or Graphic

I thought it might be interesting to compare these two pages which both have that giant hand smacking the side of a building. The top one is from Doom Patrol #14 page 18, and the other is from Big in Japan #2 page 8. One of them is a scan and the other is a photograph, so there are differences in the look of them just from that, but there are other differences as well that are easy to see when you see them both together.

The Doom Patrol page is dense with detail: rubble, folds, lines of skin and cloth, as well as lines on buildings. There is very little white space on this page.

The Big in Japan page is much cleaner. In the lower left panel, for example, where in a photograph we would see the landscape and architecture behind the lunging monster, Seth has drawn it in a graphic style, so the monster is floating out in nothingness, all the better to see how he is the center of attention.

The actual hand smacking the wall is surprisingly similar in the two pages.

I don't want to imply that the later style is better, or that Seth graduated from literal to graphic style. He used the graphic style for this comic book. I think he decided that it would suit the purpose and intent of this story better than a literal style would do. He could make use of both.

Drawing in literal mode: Doom Patrol #14 page 5

Early on Seth learned to draw the small realistic details of everything. They were the real particulars of a street scene, or of a face, or of an interior that he used to create dark areas in his drawings, or to show perspective, or to indicate impact. In this page from Doom Patrol, for example, he has drawn the eyes and nose and hair of Ava (aka Elasti-Lass) with the folds and creases that we have on the smoothest of bodies. The skin of Beast Boy as a dinosaur is suitably unevenly lumpy, as a lizard skin would be (I think). Anyway, it has the look of realism.
At the bottom, the robot monster's head breaks the sidewalk as it hits, and the rubble looks very rubbly. The buildings in the center frame are simplified, but if we saw buildings from that distance, we would see them simplified.
He was still drawing in a mainly literal mode, though he did use elements of graphic design in his drawings. With his Marvel work, however, he began to draw in a style that was much more heavily graphic in style. The monsters here are realistic-looking. The ones in Big in Japan are just as detailed, but the details have design interest rather than only descriptive interest.

Keeping things in scale

This is from a letter that Seth wrote to someone who had asked him for advice. (Thank you Steven.)
"Big Hint: Create location indicators to make panel transitions smooth. I wish I had a picture to show you.
"Imagine a checkerboard tiled wall with small circles all over the white tiles. Very distinctive. You shoot straight on with your character right in front of it. Now you have an identifiable SCALE and PATTERN that you can use again. Suppose a giant slug (it happens) crawls across the wall in the next frame. Normally you would have no way of noticing that the slug was huge without a scale cue like a hand or a salt shaker in the foreground, but you have it tagged now because you established it before. Also if you shoot that wall again anytime in the future, people will automatically remember that location and know where you are again, without you having to do an establishing shot again. You can use ANYTHING to give the reader a reference point that you can keep coming back to.... This is one of the most useful techniques around and even I don't use it enough. You take item A and item B and instead of relating them to each other, you relate each one visually to a new item C that you create. Really pulls things together."

I couldn't find an area where Seth did exactly what he was talking about above, but in the pages above, and in many other pictures of monsters, he used buildings and windows to show how big the monster was. He also used patterns on walls, floors, and ceilings to locate people in space. These two images show the same building from different angles, one from about second story level, which lets us see what the creature looks like, the other from the ground, which shows us the reactions of our heroes. Not only do we get the scale of the monster, but we also realize that we are looking at the same building under its feet, with its distinctive arched windows.