Myst 3: Exile, Revisited

Recently I came across an article in a Catholic publication that talked about the increased sense of wonder and attention to detail that the author developed from playing the video games in the Myst series.  
In traversing the lands in Myst, searching for clues to unlock the mysteries, "nothing is meaningless," says the author.  "All points to a pattern beyond itself."   I now know that life is like that: complex and full of meaning, and it rewards efforts to find what is below the surface.

I played Myst 3: Exile when it first came out, before Seth died.  In playing I would lose track of time navigating its scenery and machinery; and more often than I like to think, two hours would go by before I came up for air. I was new to video games.  (Even now, except for a very few small forays, Seth's games are the only ones I have played.)  But it was so beautiful, so haunting, that images from it still appear in dreams and in my vision at other odd times.  I was very disappointed--though also slightly relieved--when I had to get a new operating system, and it would not support Myst.  The beauty and draw of it, and the duties that called to me were irreconcilably at odds.

When I found the article referenced above, it gave me a rationale for looking to see if  it could still be had, and played on Windows 10.  The answers were Yes, and Yes.  And it could be had for under $10.  So I bought it, from GOG Galaxy.  

Now, as an old lady, and a non-gamer, I am sure I don't know anything that my readers don't know, but since I found it, I thought other people who might have wanted to reconnect with this intricate and compelling game would be happy to know that even the likes of me can find and install it.   

One more thing.  The first age, J'nanin, was designed by Seth.  (He also designed the last age, Narayan.)  When I was playing Exile the first time, I expressed my frustration to Seth that though I could walk all over the island, I couldn't figure out how to open anything.  He said, "It might help to make a map of the island."  That was all the clue he would give me, but it was enough.

SugiPOP! more pictures

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!

SugiPop! Seth's work on exhibition

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.

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 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.

Flash sketch

Another pencil drawing for Flash. It is interesting how much detail he put in this pencil study, and how closely he held to it for the final drawing. Pretty much everything stayed the same, except for the direction that Hal is looking in. That one alteration gives the final drawing a surprisingly greater amount of life and connectivity. (The disconnected body in the upper right of the sketch seems to be a figure study, never really part of the scene.) Even the queen-lady's goofy headgear was perfected in the sketch and not changed for the final, though it seems to have lost a couple of large balls--or snail shells--from the top.

Flash sketches

Look what I found! I was going through some notebooks, looking for scans that Seth had made of some of his comic books. He made computer paper size scans of all his work and kept them in notebooks. All those notebooks are here at the house: I didn't realize before what a great resource they are. Sometime I'll scan some of those images to use here on this blog.

Anyway, in that box there was an envelope of very tight, clean sketches for Flash: Time Flies. Unfortunately Seth used a very hard pencil do do his preliminary sketches. The hard pencil makes lines that don't smudge, so he could get good detail, even in drawings as small as these; they are all done on used computer paper. But my attempts to scan them resulted in mostly white space with a few little grey dots.

Here are a couple that are a little darker. The lower one IS a pencil drawing, a somewhat darker one. Still very tight. He didn't fudge on those elaborate ribs in the vaulted building, even for the sketch he made for his own use. It was all copied pretty exactly onto the page for the Flash book. I have put the page that each sketch was used for beside the sketch, if Blogger put them in the right place.

Freddy Wertham page 3: Seth's roughs and Langdon's finished work

I won't post the whole book in this way, but I'll show one more page. The rest of Langdon's work can be found here.

On this page Langdon stayed quite close indeed to the roughs Seth did. He used exactly the same positions for the characters: the person in the lower right corner (Lucifer) has the same old fashioned glasses and unpleasant smile; the action in the large upper panel takes place in the middle ground of the scene just as in the rough drawing. The characters are sitting or standing in very nearly the same positions.

If you make the rough drawing bigger you can see how Seth blocked in his perspective. There are perspective lines lightly drawn in all through the image of the workroom. His lines continue off the page to the vanishing points. I know from what he wrote that he did not always make perspective so precise in his pictures; some places you can fudge and it will be fine. But in a room like this, where we see a big space littered with squarish objects, if the perspective is off, the reader will have a sense that something is just not quite right.

Freddy Wertham page 1: Seth's roughs plus Langdon's finished work

Here is page 1 of the Freddy Wertham story. On top is Seth's rough drawing, which I posted a couple of days ago, and below is the finished page that Langdon Foss did from it. Langdon does gorgeous work on his own, and though he used Seth's general blocking, he did not feel the need to follow slavishly the exact positions of people and things on these pages. It must have been a little difficult so soon after Seth died not to retain as much of Seth's sensibilities as possible. But Langdon, of all people, knew that an artist must follow his own artistic muse, or what he produces will have nothing in it of value. That was one of the things Seth stressed to artists he was trying to encourage: "Don't copy me or anyone else."

Langdon used Seth's page set-up: the size, shape, and content of each of the frames. But he drew the mugging from a different angle, and in the center panel he drew Freddy falling in a quite different manner from Seth's preliminary drawing. Seth himself changed things routinely from his roughs, so there is always leeway to do so. Langdon also added all the little squares of explanations, his own humorous labels (though I don't think they are legible in these scans). And of course all the details of the scenes.

Look how Langdon curves the buildings just slightly in the center panel, where Freddy is being knocked backwards. That's no doubt how Freddy's mind would perceive it, and it gives the whole scene an out-of-whack, hit-in-the-head feel.

Freddy Wertham roughs, pages 3 and 4

The finished drawings for these are on Langdon's website

These are the third and fourth pages of it, blocked in for Langdon to draw.


Page 3 seems to take place in a comic book art studio in hell, a place where there is a can of pencils in the foreground of the upper frame, and people sitting at drawing tables working in the background. Seth has put the action in the middle ground. Then the lower two frames have close-ups of faces. The left face is Freddy, who has lost part of the top of his head. The right one is the devil, I guess, smiling unpleasantly.

In page 4 some poor sap in what looks like a monk's robe is drawing away, with Lucifer showing him to Freddy. On the top right we have a close up of their two faces, with the devil's long fingernails prominently visible. The two lower panels have increasingly closer views of Freddy and Lucifer. It is interesting to me that the bottle of ink in the center panel is in front of, and about the same size as, Freddy. Is that an indication of its relative importance?

Rough drawings for "Freddy Wertham goes to Hell"

These are pages that Seth blocked out for a story by Joe Hill, who also wrote the Spiderman Unlimited vol 2 #8 story that was published in March of 2005 (just before Big in Japan). I think this was always intended as a collaboration between Seth and his best friend Langdon Foss. The two of them had wanted to collaborate on a story ever since they roomed together in college, but the opportunity never seemed to arise. Regardless of how it was planned, Seth introduced Langdon to Joe Hill, who became a fan of Langdon's art as well as Seth's. And then, when Seth died with the pages to this story only blocked in but not completed, Joe asked Langdon to finish them. So then, it was a collaboration, but not exactly the kind they wanted. It is odd how things work out: I think we often get what we want, but it doesn't come simple and clean. It comes with baggage that we didn't anticipate.

So this story has been finished for at least a couple of years, but has not yet been published. I thought it was going to be published last year, but I think the company was having problems, and may have folded.

Ff/Iron Man: Big in Japan 1 page 22

Thank you Rick, for mailing me this preliminary sketch, which I am posting along with the final drawing. It is somewhat surprising how little was changed from the original idea to the finished presentation. The sound word, CROM, was added later, as were the insets in the upper left and lower right. The monster insets have that big-head cartoon look that Seth was pleased to give them at odd times when they are being showcased. In this page, it makes them look like angry but ineffectual toy monsters, railing against something much larger and more dangerous, though the hand coming through the wall appears to belong to our friend Ben Grimm.
Much of this series is a sort of ordered chaos, exemplified by this page. Buildings are in mid-crash, monsters are in threat mode, havoc is being wreaked, but it is all pretty fun.
By the way, Seth also signed this page. I'm not sure how he chose which ones to sign.

Tokyo 1 page 24

I couldn't upload the image I have that I said yesterday I would post. It is in a format that Blogger doesn't accept. So I am posting this page, volume 1, page 24, from the Vertigo Pop Tokyo series, and the page from Seth's sketchbook that corresponds to it. It's not a very good scan, but if you look you can see the working out of most of the poses from the page here, the two mid-level panels where Steve is trying to hold Maki back, and where the players all face off for a showdown. The big panel at the bottom is worked out on the following page of the sketchbook.

Tokyo and Batman sketches

This particular page of Seth's sketchbook has him working out both Batman and Tokyo right next to each other. He was drawing both of them at the same time at least part of the time. Batman took him a long time to finish; as I mentioned before, it seemed to be an extra project, and the DC editors didn't give Seth a deadline on it at all. I remember when he was beginning the work on Tokyo--it was while he was living here in San Diego in late 2001/early 2002. Then he moved to Japan and finished it there. But the sketchbook starts with Batman, so he must have received that assignment first. I know he finished those pages while he was living in Japan, because Hisako says that she got to draw squiggles for the afro of one of the characters in the book.

*

In the sketchbook, there are many more pages of Tokyo than there are of Batman. Seth worked out the look of almost every frame in the sketchbook before he put them on the official drawing boards. The page on the right shows the very first page of the series, a partial map of Tokyo that curves into a 3-d image of some of the buildings. Tomorrow I'll show the end result of that idea.