Seth's 48th birthday July 22, 2020

Perspective.  Seth was SO good at perspective.  He studied it of course, made a point of learning how it works, and how to use it.  But then he owned it, and he could play with it, as in the top page from WillWorld.  

Perspective gives me fits.  Seth recommended a book by David Chelsea, PERSPECTIVE FOR COMIC BOOK ARTISTS  which I am reading and trying to use, but I don't understand what he is talking about a lot of the time.  So it feels a little bit as though I am trying to read it in a foreign language.  

But especially today, thinking of Seth, I am persevering.  

 

Seth's Birthday, a couple of days late

You can tell which of these two grave markers is Seth's.

I spent Seth's actual birthday (Sunday the 22nd) at the abbey where he is buried.  I tidied up his grave & visited with him, which I can do anywhere, but there at the grave is the designated spot.  The cemetery is rather austere; all the graves have the same simple concrete cross and a plaque that tells his name and dates.  Hisako and Sarah and I couldn't leave Seth's grave QUITE so plain; it just wouldn't express Sethness that way.  So his particular spot is recognizable from far away by the brightly painted rocks on the arms and top of the cross.  Who knows what HE would have done, had he been available to put his mark on the site?  Now he has to rely on other people's response to his life, people who are not so wildly creative as he.  So we take our cues from him, but do it our way.

Since it IS (or rather it was just a couple of days ago) Seth's birthday, I thought it would be good to post a couple of images of his work that maybe had not been posted before--or at least not for a long time.  The joyful madness of these images just reaffirms the Life beneath the surface of his life.  May his joy keep resounding in the lives of those who love both his person and his work!

Big in Japan, issue 2 page 15

Big in Japan, issue 2 page 16

Big in Japan, issue 2 page 17

A new review of Seth's Big in Japan artwork

Click here for the link to the review.

How glorious to know that Seth's work is not disappearing, but still giving the careful viewer a thrill that is visceral.  It's too bad that comic books are so small.  For someone reading only for the plot, the visual details that tell the inside of the story are easy to miss.  In Seth's work, no details were arbitrary: every piece of wall decoration, every nuance of positioning has been considered and has meaning.  It has meaning for the story, and it works visually (though occasionally there are details he inserted just to amuse himself).  In the panel above, for example, the room is made of body parts.  The floor is a series of hands, the wall is eyeballs and teeth and tongues.
The reviewer, Greg Burgas, is one of those careful viewers who notices everything.

I am glad that people like him are out there, looking carefully at comic books, and pointing out to the rest of us the fine points that make Seth's work so much more than just nice pictures to go with a weird story.

Superhero Art exhibition: We were there!

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 not using references: Big in Japan issue 1 page 18

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.

Superhero Art exhibition, Big in Japan pages

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.

Big city life

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.

Crowd scenes: Happydale and Big in Japan

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.

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

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.

Literal and Graphic, part two

These two pages are not really comparable, except insofar as they are both pages where something quite dramatic is taking place. But it is interesting to see side by side the difference between Seth's more literal work in Willworld, and his more graphic work in Big in Japan.

In both pages the main person has body decoration. Dr Yamane's decoration is entirely graphically portrayed, as even circles on his bare skin, though if we were to see a photograph of someone with such things, the circles would vary considerably with the contours of his body. In fact, I would presume to say that if Seth had drawn a person in Willworld with circles painted on his body, we would see his body contours clearly through the undulations of the circles.

The warrior in Willworld an ancient Chinese sort of armor, which is also a kind of decoration for his body. Here each of the rows of bamboo, if that's what it is made of, is intricately drawn and the rivets are all in place.

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 graphic mode: Big in Japan #1 page 22

Compared with the Doom Patrol page from yesterday, on this page the details are cleaner, more spare, more decorative. Seth always loved details, but he learned to use them not just for their own sake, but to give drama to the image and pleasure to the eye of the beholder.

From the whatever-that-is monster floating through the air in the upper left frame, to the strikingly angular frame for the gorilla's threatening face, to the shocked face of Reed in a little box, to the creatures floating below in a clear sea, below the gorgeous almost Art Nouveau splashes we see above the water level, every detail has both an informative purpose, and a design purpose as well.

Clean and stylized: Big in Japan #1 page 4

In Seth's later work he got away from slavishly realistic images, and drew faces in a Manga style (especially for this book), and pages with a graphic design sense. He knew the difference between a realistic style and a graphic design style.

He wrote the following to an artist who came to him for advice:
"I think its time for you to decide if you are going to commit to more graphic representation in your characters, or if you want to swing towards a more literal, spatial representation. Of course both are fine, but you seem to be kind of stalled in the middle.

"The graphic representation will allow you all kinds of flexibility with story telling and give you a more salable product faster i think. Though you gain a lot of versitility by drawing things very literally in the long run. Am i making sense?

"Taking a graphic attack means that you can represent your scenes figuratively..making fire come out of your characters eyes kind of ally mcbeal style. Look at design work and try to make the impact of each panel intensify the story. That would mean simplifying somethings too probably and paying closer attention to the design of the characters from the start. using patterns and maybe more blacks and whites.

"The literal approach means really getting strict with yourself and having a mirror handy in front of you at all times and everytime you dont know how a fold of cloth would bend, you check and see. Every time you arent sure about how perspective works you work it out on scratch paper until you figure it out. Its all knowledge that you carry with you forever, so its a good investment..but it takes time."

Composition: Big in Japan cover #1

Judith Johnson, PhD, continues:

"In composition, we study the four Gestalt Grouping Principles: proximity, similarity, continuation, and closure. Gestalt means “wholeness” or “unity.” A good illustrator may use some or all of these. When one places objects in close proximity to each other, they have more visual importance and we see them as connected. When shapes (or lines, or colors, or values) in a drawing are similar, they have more visual importance. When lines or shapes repeat (continue) across a page in a pattern, they have greater visual impact. And finally, when an artist leaves the edge of a figure unfinished, our eye tends to “close” the shape, and we are forced to consider it, just as we may remember an advertising jingle in which the last word is left out."

We ask ourselves, are any or all of these gestalt principles used in the illustration? Does the illustrator clump things together? Repeat lines? Use patterns? Or does he leave portions of the outlines of an object not drawn, so we can 'finish' it with our gaze?"

It seems to me that all except the last of these principles is used in full complement in this illustration for the cover of issue 1 of Big in Japan.

1)The stylized cluster of monsters coming toward, and whirling around the Fantastic Four is certainly an exercise in proximity, as--separate though they are--they are all part of a cyclone of creatures and are easily seen as a single unit.

2)They all have patterned bodies, and most of the patterns are similar in size, though not necessarily in shape. Because of this, our eye easily takes them in as an overall pattern of monsterness.

3)Then the repetition of shapes: the waves and squares of the flat monster at the bottom, the scales at the top and bottom echoed by the scales of The Thing in the center (of the front of the wraparound cover)

This whole series is more stylized than anything Seth had done previously, and this cover in particular is a graphic tour de force. The swirl of monsters coming from the top left, which is the back cover of the book, and continuing on down to the front (right) where they seem to tie up the Fantastic Four in their sinuous clutch is so descriptive of the feel of the book, and so visually appealing that it is no wonder that it is one of the most reproduced of all the images that Seth has done. Each of the creatures is clearly separate from the others, yet--especially in black and white--we see them as a monsterly wave of destructive energy.

Composition: Big in Japan 1 page 1

Composition:
Continuing with the discussion of what makes good illustration from Judith Johnson, she starts out by saying that the composition of an illustration can be symmetrical or asymmetrical. In the case of a comic book, we are looking at both the composition of individual frames, and at the page as a whole. Seth always took both into consideration.
This page is asymmetrical in composition, although the dominant bottom frame is only slightly so, with three people running toward us, two large figures on right and left, and a smaller one in the middle.

Next she asks how the lines in the illustration encourage us to move our eyes over the whole page. "A good illustrator often keeps us visually engaged by encouraging our gaze to move in a slightly oval path in which we go back into the work and move through it again and again, noticing something new each time. A focal point is a place in the drawing that we return to over and over again." The woman's horrified expression seems to me to be a focal point in this page, next the man on the left, then the man in the middle, then we look up to see what it is that is frightening them.

More on composition tomorrow, looking at a different page.

Illustration, part one: Content

What makes great illustration?

In her very clear and thorough analysis of the illustrations of the great Charles Mikolaycak, Judith Johnson, PhD gives these three elements of illustration: Content, Composition, and Control. (She adds one other, Color, which is not applicable to Seth's work, because his color was added later by someone else.) Today I will look at content, and we will think about the others on subsequent days.

Content: What is in the foreground? What is in the background? the middle ground?

What is the cultural context? That is, where and when are the people living that we are looking at? What does their clothing tell us about them? The drawings should give us a clue to their modernity or antiquity, their relative wealth, the culture they live in.

What is the emotional content of the art? What is the position of the actors on the page? --Are they sitting, lying, crouched down, cowering, standing at attention? How are they placed in relation to each other? We should be able to read from the picture something about how the characters feel, without words.

It's interesting to go over this image with these things in mind. The place is clear from the picture: a large city in Japan. We see the chaos and destruction, and we see where it is coming from: the huge monster whose wings are so widespread that the picture frame cannot contain them. and whose face is so angry and menacing that we know at a glance that his destructiveness is not accidental, but methodical, deliberate, and malignant.

The only human we see in the photo is a guy sitting on the sidewalk selling electronic doo-dads, who seems to be the only one in town who didn't get the word that the monsters had struck.

There are people driving the tanks and other army equipment, but they are faceless in this image.

So we read terror here, but with a couple of clues that tell us not to take it too seriously. The large slug on top of the building on the right grimaces down at everything like a large, impotent playmobil figure, and below him a billboard celebrates Seth's son 登風（Tofu). These give us a wink from Seth, "Relax and have fun. Enjoy the ride!"

HANDS one more time: Big in Japan #2 page 21

Even monsters and very comic book-y superheroes have expressive hands.
Look at Iron Man in the top two frames. On the left he wrings his hands and on the right he holds on to his head for sorrow. On the right the dead monster Droom for whom he is grieving holds his hands out helplessly.
Even the robot in the wide frame in the middle of the page uses his right hand to point tauntingly at Giganto and Eerok.
And at the bottom, Dr. Yamane pulls away from the onslaught of monsters from the ocean, fingers spread wide in a gesture of anxiety.

matters of scale: Big in Japan

In the page on the right we see Iron Man next to the open hand of Grogg, the cow-faced megalosaurus. If we assume that Iron Man is about six feet tall, we could say that the span of Grogg's hand is a little over twice that, or roughly 15 feet wide. I did a cursory measurement of how many spans tall I am: about eight and a half. 8 1/2 times 15 equals 127.5 feet tall (or a little taller--he may be taller in relation to his hands than I am): about as tall as a 12-story building. So the size of his hand is consistent with the image on the left, where he is standing with his hands on top of a couple of buildings, but a few others are taller than he is. He is about as tall as a medium-size building in downtown Tokyo.

Seth talked to me a little bit about scale when he was drawing these monsters. He said that people don't know whether these monsters are 30 feet tall, or hundreds of feet tall. So he had to make that decision himself, and then make them consistent. There are places where he varied from that scale, either to make a point about HUGENESS, or just to play with scale. But when he did that, he did it deliberately.

Marvel and DC

The following quotation is from an interview that Mike Jozic did with Seth in August of 2005. Seth had been working on Big in Japan for Marvel, and Mike asked him about his two years under exclusive contract to DC Comics.

Seth answered, "I adore the people at DC, [they] are really cool - well, most of them. [They are] really really warm and creative and have a fine attention to detail.
"At the same time Marvel is really supporting me and pushing me to take risks and do work that I think is really relevant inside and outside of comics. Marvel is little more crazy, I think, at least at this junction in space-time. And a skin-tight fit for my deviate thoughts.
"I told Joe Quesada and Paul Levitz a few years ago that I would like to be the guy who heals the rift between Marvel and DC, all they had to do was let me draw Spider-Man vs. Batman and I would take care of the rest. It's still an open offer, but maybe it should be the X-Men vs. the JLA. Might be more opportunity for humour in there.
"Joe was like 'Sure.' I think he was serious. I can't remember Paul's exact words. Something funny, I think, but crude."

Thinking about Seth's work for DC and Marvel respectively, I thought it might be interesting to look at some of them side by side. The work is not comparable exactly; I do realize that we are looking at figurative apples and oranges, but still, here are full page drawings of monstrous beasts from Willworld on the left, and Big in Japan on the right.

In Big in Japan, Seth kept the idea of "comic" square in the middle of the comic book. Nothing, certainly not the monsters, was taken seriously. (Though, for Seth, there was always some serious intent. His aim was always Truth in some form.)

Willworld, trippy and wierd as it is, and as much as it doesn't really aim to be explicable in the real world, is a serious sort of fantasy. Hal seems to be in and out of real danger, though the forms keep changing all the time. The art reflects the real, though hallucinatory, nature of the story. Big in Japan is pure silliness with a veneer of surrealism.

Am I making sense? I think you who know Seth's work understand what I mean, and can tell from even these two more-or-less representative pages. The Willworld one is page 73, and Big in Japan is issue #1 page 14.

Ff/Iron Man: Big in Japan 4 last page

Seth's e-mail to his editors says, "So at the end Cory yells, 'Cut, that's a wrap!'
"I hope I got in the ballpark with your guys faces. Make sure Chris colors your hair the right color. Mine is easy.
"Peace. Seth"
On the last page the inside-out apocalypse beast speeds out into the universe, and the pore cannon spits the germinal moloid out into space to wait for another organism somewhere to come by to inhabit. (I guess that is what is happening.) Anyway, Noah the baby moloid, or moloid egg, or something, looks happy.
But the story ending is pretty much beside the point. The monsters were the story, and they have done their song and dance. The interest in this page is entirely the image in the lower half, of the editor Cory Sedlmeier, Seth, Zeb Wells the writer, and Chris Chuckry the colorist, along with the fictional stars of the story and a squad of moloids in celebration mode.
Seth never felt that he was very good at portraits, though he could draw someone who was instantly recognizable. His self-portraits are always spot on, and the times that he included members of his family in his books, they are easy to catch.
This picture is particularly poignant coming at the end of this book, where it serves as his public epitaph.