“The Dorothy Paintings” and More in South Yarmouth

The Cultural Center of Cape Cod is hosting a summer celebration of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

The executive director of the institution, Molly Demeulenaere, says: “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is more than just a story; it's a timeless exploration of what it means to find and appreciate the complex emotions around the concept of home. Dorothy’s journey, alongside her wonderfully loyal and caring friends, mirrors the universal quest for belonging and self-discovery, making it a story that truly resonates across generations.”

Its description of the event says:

At the beating heart of this enchanting exhibition is Christina Schlesinger’s “The Dorothy Paintings.” This compelling collection of thirteen mural-sized canvases reimagines Dorothy’s adventures with a freshness of perspective that aptly portrays her as the symbol of youthful resilience and independence. Schlesinger’s work demands attention while simultaneously depicting a delicateness and vulnerability rarely seen successfully in combination.

Some of Schlesinger’s paintings can be seen here. The Cape Cod Times offers additional photographs of the space, showing how there are hands-on activities for families, inside and out.

This exhibit will be at the center’s Flagship Bass River Campus, 307 Old Main Street in South Yarmouth. The gallery is open Tuesday through Friday from 10 to 5, and Saturday from 10 to 3. The show will run through 7 September.

“Book on the Charles” in Belmont through 17 May

The Belmont Galley of Art is featuring an exhibit of work by local children’s-book illustrator for the local children’s-book publisher Charlesbridge.

The Boston Globe reports:

“Books on the Charles – 25 years of Charlesbridge Picture Book Illustrators,” which [Rebecca] Richards cocurated along with Watertown artist Leslie Evans, celebrates 15 New England-based picture book artists who have created art for Charlesbridge Books, a children’s book publisher located in Watertown.

“I’ve always wanted to showcase original works from children’s books in a gallery setting, so people could admire the work for the fine art that it is,” Richards said. “I think this exhibit brings back that sense of fun and wonder we had as children visiting a world of imagination created by picture book illustrators.”

Among the artists featured are Alan Witschonke of Natick and Wayne Geehan of Acton. There will be an artists’ reception and book-signing on the afternoon of 13 April, and the exhibit will be up through 17 May.

Introducing (One Version of) Dr. Megalo

A couple of weeks back, I linked to the Boston Comics Roundtable’s “Working Method” experiment, which this month is focused on a script I wrote called “Owl and Pussycat.” Different artists are sharing their character designs, layouts, and even finished pages.

As part of the exercise, I avoided specific details about the characters because I wanted to give the artists the widest latitude. And because the way I pictured those characters wasn’t original at all. When one of the artists, Mike Tomasulo, asked me what I had in mind for the villain Dr. Megalo, I had to admit I was imagining Sivana from the Captain Marvel comics.

But Mike’s question prompted me to push myself a little, and I gave him some more options for Dr. Megalo:

For instance, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson in an ugly plaid blazer. An attractive blonde woman whose face has been scarred in a lab accident. A spoiled young prodigy in an oversized lab coat. A Silicon Valley billionaire who hasn't worn a tie since his bar mitzvah.

And the next day I had another idea: basing the design of Dr. Megalo on Edward Lear, author of “The Owl and the Pussycat.” At the Thursday B.C.R. meeting I sketched out that idea. Dan Mazur inked it (while fixing some proportions) with a brush. And finally I added type while trying out Manga Studio.

The “Owl and Pussycat” Experiment

The Boston Comics Roundtable is conducting a group exercise we call “The Working Method.” One member writes a short comics script—only three pages in all. Artists take that script as far as they choose—character designs, thumbnails, pencils, or all the way to inks and letters.

Members did this first a couple of years ago, at the suggestion of artist Jay Kennedy. One of the resulting comics, “Amazons v. Valkyries” by Lindsay Moore and Laurel Lynn Leake, was eventually published in the Minimum Paige anthology.

The current exercise is using a script by me titled “Owl and Pussycat.” I gave myself the challenge to tell a superhero tale in only three pages, a story that I as a kid could have picked up and understood at the basic level. There are, to be sure, many unanswered questions left about Owl, Pussycat, and their evil nemesis Dr. Megalo—unanswered even for me.

At this point participating BCR artists are sharing their designs for Owl and Pussycat on a Tumblr page. The sketch above is by Roho, for instance. I see my job now as to keep quiet about how I might have imagined those characters or the setting, page layout, overall look, etc. in order to leave the artists with maximum freedom to make their own choices. At the end of February the whole group will sit down and discuss the different choices people made.

This exercise is also open to folks who aren’t involved in the Boston Comics Roundtable, or even in Boston. Here’s the link. We expect to post further scripts of different sorts in the future.

Princesses in Golden Dreams

Ruth Sanderson paints really nice fairies and princesses. She’s also really nice herself; we worked together on an SCBWI bookstore event this fall.

There’s an exhibition of Ruth’s work at the Norman Rockwell Museum right now through February: “Dancing Princesses: The Fairy Tale Art of Ruth Sanderson.” That museum now owns the original paintings for her version of The Twelve Dancing Princesses. The opening reception for this exhibit takes place on Saturday, 7 December, from 4:00 to 6:00 P.M.

In addition, Ruth is participating in the Cottage Street Open Studios in Easthampton, Massachusetts, on Friday (10:00 to 4:00), Sunday (noon to 4:00), and Saturday, 14 December (10:00 to 4:00).

And for folks who can’t make those events, she’s published a 224-page hardcover book titled Golden Dreams: The Art of Ruth Sanderson. Below, courtesy of Fairy Tale News, is an image showing how Ruth assembled the painting above with sketches and photo references.

A Vision of Dorothy and the Emerald City

ArtBoy Gallery in Australia launched an online “FanBoy vs ArtBoy” exhibit of work inspired by The Wizard of Oz. For most contributors that meant the MGM movie, but some created original visions. This stylized portrait of Dorothy and the Emerald City is by “Jubly-Oomph,” and is available for sale (presumably in Australian dollars).

Chris Giarrusso’s Brother Act

My favorite set of brothers in superhero comics appears in Chris Giarrusso’s G-Man series. Mikey, called G-Man by his friends, is the younger brother: eager, imaginative, perseverant, and naive. David, who took the name Great Man, is his elder: capable, exasperated, bossy, and protective.

Giarrusso was at the MoCCA Festival last weekend, and I did something I’d never done before: commissioned a sketch.

Specifically, I asked for “Great Man cosplaying Nightwing and G-Man cosplaying Robin. The Tim Drake version.” To which Giarrusso answered, “Really?” and “Um, I don’t have all the costume details in my head.”

I assured him I wouldn’t sweat the small stuff. After all, he publishes with Marvel. (And he knows the costumes well enough to produce these versions of Batman, #1, and Superman/Batman, #26.)

By the end of the afternoon, I was the proud owner of this piece of art.

I asked Giarrusso about the next volume of G-Man. He said he was more than halfway through creating that story, in which the fraternal dynamic of Great Man and G-Man will be tested by the arrival of…a baby brother!

(And speaking of annoying baby brothers, last week Caanan, creator of Max Overacts, posted this convention sketch of Damian Wayne and his babysitters, titled “Don’t Be Rude—Be a Hero.”)

Panel One in Nightwings Seven

Above is another example of a single comics panel showing Nightwing in several poses, instants apart. It appears in Nightwing: Freefall. And I don’t think this one works. I remember having to pause to figure out what was going on—precisely the wrong effect for a panel intended to convey swift, fluid action.

We’re supposed to read the lower panel as showing Nightwing swinging himself over the front of his glider and into the air, somersaulting, to land on a winged pursuer. Not only is that physically implausible, but the art requires reading this Grayson as flying to the left and into the background. Most examples of this comics technique show the multiplied figure moving to the right foreground, the direction we westerners read.

Sometimes coloring can make a single figure in such a panel stand out helpfully as the most recent. But a small, distant figure doesn’t become more prominent than the large, nearby figure simply by being bluer.

At Comics Without Frontiers, Miguel Rosa continues to explore this technique by featuring giant panels from Gianni de Luca’s Italian adaptations of William Shakespeare. De Luca’s scripts were originally created for the stage rather than the page, of course, giving him a lot of words to fit in.

As Rosa shows, De Luca created several full-page or full-spread panels showing the same two characters several times as they move through a scene, conversing. It’s striking how almost all the movement in these examples flows from right to left, and usually background to foreground.

One of the few exceptions to that pattern appears in this two-page panel from De Luca’s Romeo and Giulietta. Yet it’s notable how in the portion of the duel that moves toward the background the word balloons thin out, with only one character speaking. That lowers the possibility of us becoming confused about what to read next.

So do possibilities like these negate Devin Grayson’s advice to novice comics scripters to “Avoid multiple actions in one panel”? I still don’t think so. Because it’s one thing for practiced comics writer-illustrators like De Luca and Frank Miller (Rosa’s initial example) to use the multiple-figure technique. It’s another for a novice scripter to unwittingly stumble into it, as Grayson warned against.

A good analogy might be the “rule” not to stack panels on the left because we readers will have trouble deciding how to move from the upper left panel: to the right or down? Many guides for beginning comics writers include that prohibition.

Yet it’s not that hard to find comics artists stacking panels on the left, with composition and balloons leading the eye down and then to the next column. I’ve noted a successful example as well as an unsuccessful one in a successful comic. Today’s Cul de Sac by Richard Thompson breaks the “rule” delightfully, word balloons guiding our eyes.

But just because practiced comics creators know how to make something difficult work doesn’t mean that new creators shouldn’t be warned against trying it until they’ve learned more.

Daredevil and the Family Circus

A day after analyzing some big panels in which a single character appears multiple times, I read Tucker Stone’s Comixology interview with scripter Mark Waid highlighting this double-page spread designed by Marcos Martin for a recent issue of Daredevil.

Waid explained:

I said "look, I need the two of them in a street scene in the glory of all of New York". I used that Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali book as an example for him, that famous two-page spread that Neal Adams drew of the city. . . . It's an amazing drawing. And we needed something of that sensibility. And then I said I was sorry and that I would pay him back for it in the years to come. And you saw what he did. He turned an establishing shot into the Family Circus. And I mean that in a good way!

Stone notes that Martin did similar things in recent issues of Captain America and Spider-Man. I recall another example in Logicomix, by Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos H. Papadimitriou, and Alecos Papadatos.

Waid refers to the well-known “dotted line” Sunday strips of Bil and Jeff Keane’s Family Circus. Those are different, however, usually showing the moving character only at the end while preserving his path across a landscape with a dotted line.

In many ways this multiple-figure image works like those I discussed yesterday (and not just because, technically speaking, it appears in a Daredevil comic). The action moves left to right, background to foreground, helping us English readers to arrange the moments in chronological order. Having a horizontal space to work with probably makes that easier. In addition, both approaches involve maintaining the same basic mood throughout the scene.

Notably, the individual vignettes on this spread are visually separated by areas without balloons or major characters. We can thus insert mental gutters between the moments. In contrast, the multiple figures in yesterday’s panels often overlapped each other, signaling how we should consider them as all part of a single quick series of movements.

(The panel above displays another way of “showing the invisible” for Daredevil, who’s blind but has enhanced senses and radar due to one of those convenient early-1960s accidents with radioactivity. The square boxes popping up around the scene communicate what he’s hearing, smelling, and otherwise sensing.)

The Gorey Enigma

Yesterday I visited the exhibit “Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey,” at the Boston Athenaeum. It was at once familiar and strange, which seems appropriate.

For the familiar, I’ve written before about how I first saw Gorey’s work at a young age, and recognized his distinct style the covers of what seemed like perfectly acceptable books. As a result, I didn’t realize that he’d been a “cult figure” until years later.

One reason Gorey was so recognizable is that his drawing style was very consistent through his career. Envelopes he decorated while he was a Harvard student in 1948 are immediately recognizable as his work and no one else’s. They look very much like the drawings for The Unstrung Harp, his debut book from 1953, which in turn look quite like the illustrations in his posthumously published books four decades later. Perhaps connoisseurs know the hallmarks of “early Gorey,” “high Gorey,” and “late Gorey,” but I couldn’t have sorted the items in time without the labels.

A more surprising source of familiarity is that Gorey drew at the same size as his drawings were printed. (I measured a sketch from The Hapless Child against the images in a printed edition to be sure.) All those thin lines, that intricate hatching and cross-hatching, that hand-lettering, was done in “real space.”

I spotted only one drawing with remnant pencil lines (aside from those used for positioning). There are several examples of paste-on additions, but relatively little painting over unwanted marks with white.

The exhibit includes some sketches in a looser style as Gorey worked out ideas, experimented with layouts, or sketched for the theater. Also on display are some manuscript pages, showing him at work on his verse. “The Osbick Bird,” for instance, is typed as “The Something Bird” while Gorey tried to think of the best nonsense word, and a preliminary sketch uses the Carrollian “Jubjub Bird.”

I would have liked to see more items showing how Gorey produced his drawings: intermediary or unfinished examples, art tools, video of him at work. But what was on display was delightful enough.

To the Moon and Back

Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11, by Brian Floca, is an excellent nonfiction picture book retelling the history of the first human mission to the Moon.

The prose is tight and poetic, its tone a mix of matter-of-fact and awestruck. Pages jump between the astronauts in space, mission control back on Earth, and a family watching the action on their living room TV. This history doesn’t dig back into the geopolitics of the space race, or ahead to the end of lunar missions; it focuses on that human achievement of July 1969.

I enjoyed watching how Floca used his art and design to pace his story. The first illustration after the text starts is a landscape on Earth with the Moon as a distant crescent in the sky. Floca frames this round image in the blank white page, both opening the book slowly and symbolizing how this life is limited to Earth.

Later that image’s blue, green, and white colors make a visual rhyme for the image of a round Earth in the black sky that we finally see at the end of the astronauts' visit to the Moon. And as a coda, the book’s final illustration is also a round landscape, blue and green. But now there’s a full Moon overhead, and the family we’ve seen throughout the book is running across the grass.

Floca breaks down the rocket countdown into six rectangular panels on one spread, ticking off the seconds. Turn the page, and the liftoff is the first full page spread of the book.

Even the endpapers in Moonshot get put to use, in different ways. The front set shows the stages of the lunar rocket while the back set retells the history in more detailed prose suitable for school-report research.

Of course, this is a journey many books have taken before. There’s a lot of source material about the lunar missions, and a built-in market. Moonshot even got published on the fortieth anniversary of the landing. Last year’s Cybils Non-Fiction Picture Book winner, The Day-Glo Brothers, got points from us judges for being the very first book on its topic. But Moonshot is also terrific, and deserves the other awards it’s brought home.

Gotta Wear Shades

Mike Shatzkin ran the math on the declining prospects for the Kindle, Nook, Reader, and similar dedicated devices setting the course for electronic publishing. Instead, he sees the near future in the land of Apple:

even if 2 million new iPad owners, on average, buy 1/3 as many ebooks as 700,000 new single-purpose ebook device purchasers, the larger, full-color, web-ready screens sold in the last two months would be responsible for as much ebook consumption as the book-dedicated devices.

Which means Editorial Anonymous was right to advise illustrators to keep their skills up with the technical capacities of those “larger, full-color, web-ready screens”:

I was shown a Dr. Seuss book on the iPad and had to wonder at the possibilities. As an illustrator I'm attempting to prepare for this brave new world by learning some animation techniques. As things become more digital do you think that this will be,
A) Incredibly useful
B) Kinda handy
C) A waste of time, static images will still be the norm

(A), and sooner than anyone thinks.

The future is not just ahead of us, it's sitting on top of us. It's sneaking up behind us. It's the milk in your cereal and the monster under your bed.

It’s also pleasant to consider that iPads will maintain the importance of interior page design. Electronic readers are all about the text, and often that’s all we need for a compelling read, as mass-market paperback editions show. But I like books that have a distinctive visual look as well.

Free Comics Day!

So I’m sharing a comic for free. I just created this very simple graphic story for the workshop on comics that I’ll deliver at SCBWI New England’s annual conference on 15 May. I conceived these panels to demonstrate what I’m thinking of as the four hallmarks of the medium and style:

• sequential, juxtaposed images for readers to compare.
• words and art telling a story together.
• words and punctuation as graphic elements.
• showing the invisible: cutaway view, motion lines, symbols of emotion, and of course word balloons.

The hardest part was the frog.

The Versatile Chris Wormell

I’m very fond of Chris Wormell’s picture book George and the Dragon, which I discussed back here.

But I’m even more impressed by this British illustrator after seeing Seven Impossible Things’ wonderful interview and sampling of his work in other media. The same guy who created this bunny also painted the cover above. And that’s a wood engraving. By the same guy. Really.

An American Batman in London

This weekly Robin has no Robin per se, but it’s all about the original Robin, Dick Grayson, as Batman.

Cameron Stewart, artist for recent issues of Batman and Robin, kindly posted some of his layouts on his blog. Stewart wrote:

Note some of the differences between the layouts and the final printed artwork in the traffic scene. This was my first attempt at it, and I did some revisions to punch it up for the final.

So I’m noting. The major difference comes on page 4 of the magazine, as Batman makes his way through London traffic on Westminster Bridge.

Here is Stewart’s sketch for much of that page. The top panel in its original form shows the Big Ben Tower at the left; that has disappeared from the final version below, probably because it was on the wrong end of the bridge. Omitting that detail allows for a closer image of Batman swinging up onto the bridge from a river boat. We see the biggest change in the second panel. The sketch version shows Batman bouncing from vehicle to vehicle until he lands on a van headed in the right direction. Multiple images of the same character in one panel is one way comics artists have discovered to show fast action over a short span.

In the version below, Batman does the same acrobatics, but Stewart has broken each step into its own smaller panel. I find the action in the original to be more clear, especially on the right side, where below there are suddenly two Batmans in one panel and the more prominent is the one we should read second. (Stewart inserts a visual clue that the rear Batman comes first by having his cape overlap into the previous panel, but that’s somewhat lost in the dark border.)

That said, a black and white sketch is naturally going to be clearer visually than a color version with the usual Gotham/London gray laid over the line art. I doubt the original layout would have been as successful in color. The last of these panels shows another change: Stewart brings us closer to Batman’s face, showing us his characteristic grim determination as he speaks by radio to his sidekick for the day.

Stewart’s second batch of page layouts contains a panel from the same issue in which two characters confront each other. As printed, this conversation has become a bit confused, ending with the new Batwoman saying, “I’m the new Batman.” Stewart explains:

As you can see, the page was laid out with the characters oriented consistently from left to right, but after I’d completed the final artwork I was asked to reverse panel 3 because the dialogue (which is written after the art is completed) required Batwoman to be on the left. I did make the change [electronically] but somewhere along the way the original art file was used by mistake, and thousands of readers scratched their head in puzzlement.

Designing Superheroes for Fun and Profit

Today I’m highlighting two sites devoted to the important enterprise of superhero design.

I was delighted to find a pointer to The Superest, an ongoing game of rock-paper-scissors with superheroes. Start anywhere (such as that link above), and move down to see who that hero has been designed to vanquish, up to see who was invented to beat that hero.

Thus, for example, the Cord Marshal, with power over extension cords, can defeat General Contractor, but he falls to Midwife, “snipping cords of all shapes and sizes.” And she in turn meets her match in… Well, you’ll have to explore. It really is the Superest.

In addition, months back the Graphic Novel Reporter offered a link to The Hero Factory, a site that allows visitors to design their own superhero by plugging in variables about gender, hair, facial features, uniform colors, weapons, and so on.

The site doesn’t offer a choice of body shape. Which may, with superheroes, be the whole point.

Look at the Pretty Pictures

At the Oz Enthusiast, Bill Campbell discusses an illustration that Dale Urey created for a never-published edition of Ozma of Oz. At some point the picture’s original background was whited out, and Campbell had it restored. However, in the end he seems to think that the erasure improved the composition of the picture.

Comixology ran an article by medieval historian and librarian Karen Green on the affinity between medieval narrative art and comics. All the usual sequential-art suspects are here: Trajan’s column (1st century), the Bayeux Tapestry (11th century), banderoles as word balloons (discussed back here). For additional Oz content, Green’s second essay in this online column was whether to add Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls to the Columbia University collection.

Lastly, Tom Tomorrow’s Modern World (published online by Salon and Credo) channeled Goofus and Gallant to show the difference between political protests this year and those of the past, oh, seven or eight years.

The Twenty-First of This Month

Today is the birthday of Princess Ozma, ruler of Oz after the events of The Marvelous Land of Oz, the second book in the series.

L. Frank Baum almost certainly never intended people to know that Ozma had a birthday on 21 August. Throughout The Road to Oz, published one hundred years ago, characters refer only to the party planned for “the twenty-first of this month." But earlier in the book Dorothy mentions that it's August, and Oz fans put the two statements together. (Baum later used Ozma's birthday to motivate two of the three plotlines in The Magic of Oz, but never mentioned the date in that book.)

The lovely modern drawing above, titled "Ozma the Great," was posted by ~cilyconcar on deviantART.

Stylin’ on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

The Design Inspiration collected depictions of Dorothy and her companions along the Yellow Brick Road in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from twenty-three different illustrators. They appear to be influenced largely by:

• the 1939 MGM movie.
• a wish to break expectations of what these characters should look like--lots of "dark Oz" hints.

Above, for example, is the work of Sebastian Giacobino.

The article is titled “25 Various Styles of The Wizard of Oz Illustrations," but there are two samples apiece from Skottie Young and Robb Mommaerts.

For the missing two styles to seek inspiration from, therefore, I propose those of original Oz artists W. W. Denslow and John R. Neill, despite their lack of deviantART portfolios. 

Denslow was a ground-breaking and influential cartoonist whose illustration work incorporated aspects of poster style. Neill's realistic line art was more standard for his time, but he executed it wonderfully and thus made the fantastic creatures and landscape of Oz seem more real.

(In other Oz news, the play Say Goodbye, Toto opened without fatalities in Los Angeles. Haven’t seen reviews on the web yet.)

A Field of Poppies

This is an illustration by Lisbeth Zwerger from her 1996 edition of The Wizard of Oz.

Illustrator Paul Schmid wrote about it:

One of the greatest challenges an illustrator has is taking an inherently busy subject and controlling the chaos so that the piece powerfully communicates the essence of the story to the viewer.

A field of poppies could result in a nearly unreadable cacophony as an illustration. A riot of pointless color at the very least, overwhelming the eye.

Besides, red poppies are cheerful, this scene needs to be frightening. So what’s an illustrator to do?

Selections must be made! Choices! Manipulation! Power wielded!!

Schmid's goes on to analyze Zwerger's choices. He wrote about another of Zwerger's illustrations here.