Images

And here’s another guy who’s a huge influence on McKean (and another one of my very, very favorite artists): the estimable Bill Sienkiewicz, one of the few bona fide geniuses working in comics (McKean is another). He’s probably best-known for his Marvel Universe stories, especially Elektra: Assassin, Moon Knight, and New Mutants, which are all collaborations, but his own writing holds up just as well, if not better, on stuff like Stray Toasters. This one’s of Conan the Barbarian, obviously. Many thanks to Thomas Haller Buchanan over at mydelineatedlife.blogspot.com for sharing this one with the world.

Joel Peter Witkin’s Woman Once a Bird, one of Witkin’s less shocking pictures, believe it or not. McKean uses the same techniques—the dark framing around the edges of the picture, the use of harsh physical imagery to convey ideas from myths, the ornamental constriction of his models’ bodies—to make much stranger but less horrifying images. Witkin’s work predates most computer effects; he used pieces of corpses in some of his photographs and people with birth defects—"extraordinary bodies,“ he called them—in others. There’s a glorification of the necrotic that I find disgusting in his work, and a celebration of weirdness that I find really reassuring and uplifting.

Also, here is a page from what I—seriously now—truly think is probably the greatest serial comic book ever created, Groo, by Sergio Aragones with Mark Evanier. It’s funny as hell, drawn with a level of sustained technical expertise totally unmatched at its length on any other title, and it even manages to pack a real satircal wallop in its later issues. I love old-fashioned swords-and-sandals adventure stories, and Groo manages to both fulfill that genre and add immeasurably to it at the same time.

Don’t get me wrong, there are better graphic novels, better story arcs and maybe even funnier humor titles (if you can think of one, by all means tell me), but pound for pound, no series has ever managed to maintain such an incredibly high quality for so long. Read the early issues (back before computer coloring), and you can practically hear colorist Tom Luth screaming across the drafting board, “FOR GOD’S SAKE, SERGIO! AFTER THE THIRD TIER THEY’RE JUST ALL GOING TO BE FUCKING BROWN!”

And here, for reference, is a great one by Alphonse Mucha, an artist whose work you’re going to recognize if you’ve ever fawned over a great J.H. Williams III layout or enjoyed a good Melinda Gebbie page. He did posters all over New York in the 1920’s, though he was personally Czech. More on him here; consider this clause a reminder to myself to put up some Virgil Finlay and Arthur Rackham so you know where greats like John Totleben and Charles Vess are drawing from, too.