Saturday, May 15, 2004

Briefly Noted...

To all who've volunteered to tape the show tomorrow for Sergio, my thanks. I have someone recording it.

• Posted at 4:43 PM · LINK

Gill Fox, R.I.P.

Longtime artist and editor Gill Fox died this morning after several months of illness. Fox was born November 29, 1919 and started his professional career with a brief stint at the Max Fleischer cartoon studio. Labor unrest drove him away from that industry and into the then-new field of comic books where he drew for the earliest DC books and for the Harry "A" Chesler shop. In 1940, he became an editor and frequent cover artist for Quality Comics. His covers for Plastic Man are sometimes presumed to be the work of Jack Cole and his covers for Torchy (like the one at left) are often credited to that strip's main artist, Bill Ward. He eventually moved on from comic books to advertising cartooning with the Johnstone and Cushing Agency. One of his best friends there was an artist named Dik Browne and he eventually helped Browne when he began drawing the Hi and Lois newspaper strip.

Fox himself later segued into newspaper work and was intensely proud of his late work as a political cartoonist. His friend Jim Amash did the definitive interview with Fox and Alter Ego magazine and you can read part of it here. The man was a respected artist, extremely well-liked by his peers and pals, and a lot of cartoonists are in mourning today.

• Posted at 4:01 PM · LINK

Something I Hadn't Known

I'm watching On the Record With Bob Costas and they're doing a segment on the anniversary of the movie, Airplane. Co-director Jim Abrahams just mentioned that David Letterman screen-tested for the role of Ted Stryker, the hero ultimately played by Robert Hays. Does anyone think the movie would have worked with him in that role? I sure don't.

Speaking of Mr. Letterman: I enjoyed his show last night...the one taped at 4 AM. But he has to be really disappointed at the ratings this morning which were no higher than usual and maybe even lower. I also enjoyed an interview he did earlier in the week with John McCain. Dave is a better interviewer of political figures than many folks who do it full-time.

• Posted at 1:40 PM · LINK

P.S. on Lichtenstein

Robert Spina writes...

I couldn't help but notice you expressed no opinion of the "rightness" or "wrongness" of how Lichtenstein made his living. Or if "right" and "wrong" even apply here. It has always bothered me that Lichtenstein seemingly made his greatest fortune on the backs of some of the most talented, yet underpaid and under-represented artists in the field we hold so dear.

It bothers me, too. I should have made that clear. There was some degree of plagiarism in there in the sense of passing off someone else's work as your own. Lichtenstein did have the idea of enlarging comic book panels that way, and he worked out a way to replicate the dot patterns via (I believe) some sort of template. But otherwise what he was selling was the artistry of Mssrs. Romita, Heath, Colan, etc. He was hardly the only one to crib their work and his exploitation doesn't bother me as much as some of what their immediate employers did. But yeah, I thought it was wrong. I also thought that if you'd paid John Romita to do a comic book panel that size, you'd have gotten a much better painting for about a tenth the money.

• Posted at 1:18 PM · LINK

Popular Culture

Beginning in the late fifties, Roy Lichtenstein became famous for what some later called "pop art" paintings, many of which were enlarged comic book panels. Over at this site, a gent named David Barsalou displays some of the results of a long-term research project, which was to find the original source material for Lichtenstein's paintings. Most of them appear to me to be panels by John Romita, Russ Heath, Mike Sekowsky and Jerry Grandenetti. Needless to say, Mr. Lichtenstein made a lot more money off his versions than the real artists did from creating the originals.

As far as I know, there is no record of Roy Lichtenstein actually drawing comic books even though he was traipsing about New York from around 1951 to 1957 looking for commercial art jobs. Jack Kirby claimed that Lichtenstein applied for work at the Simon-Kirby studio during this period but that his samples weren't good enough. I'm not sure I believe that but it's at least possible.

• Posted at 12:07 PM · LINK

May 16, 2004 • Current • May 14, 2004