I’m reading James Thurber’s The Years with Ross. It turns out that for a while Thurber’s rejects from The New Yorker were being bought for the special hip/with-it page of the New York American, a newspaper owned by William Randolph Hearst. Apparently a lot of them were of dogs (no surprise) because Hearst sent the editor this note:
Stop running those dogs on your page. I wouldn’t have them peeing on my cheapest rug.
Damn. The weird thing, of course, is that Hearst liked George Herriman so much. It’s hard to imagine one man being able to appreciate George Herriman but not James Thurber, or vice versa. But, given that such a man existed, I suppose it was inevitable that someone made a movie about him.
i can imagine it (although i like them both, & would probably adore herriman as much as i do thurber if i'd read more herriman).
i mean, herriman had a deceptively simple, yet formally slick & consistent style. thurber drawings are deceptively… scribbly. there are lots of people, even today, who get offended by professional artists who draw "like my five-year-old could."
"Deceptively simple" vs. "deceptively scribbly" seems like a viable distinction, but it's not one I get right away. Is it the difference between drawing like an apparent 12-year-old and an apparent five-year-old?
When you say "slick & consistent style," I guess we can run into trouble as to what "slick" means. To me Krazy Kat looks accomplished but not slick, and Thurber's drawing does look consistent, in that his people all have a similar look, his dogs all have a similar look, etc.
what i mean is… herriman's characters were simply drawn, but they were completely consistent. ignatz's head was always in the same proportion to his body, his arms were always a certain thickness, he had the same amount of fingers & the same apparent skeleton & musculature each time he was drawn (excepting deliberate exaggerations for effect). that's not the way a twelve-year-old draws, even an artistically skilled twelve-year-old, unless s/he's had rigourous training &/or drawn the same character several hundred times in the effort of having him come out the same each time.
consistency was not, i think, something that thurber worked at in his drawings. they only look similar because they were drawn by the same person using a roughly consistent approach to drawing. fingers were as numerous as they needed to be for each pose. elbow joints just kind of happened.
this may be more obvious to a cartoonist than to a non-cartoonist (i never realized how hard complete consistency was until i had a setting & a cast of characters to maintain, & not being the type to draw a character several hundred times before i allow myself to draw her in a story, animation-style consistency is still out of my grasp). but for me, that's pretty much what distinguishes "polished" from "unpolished" (which probably would have been a better term to use than "slick").
aside from things like… the mere fact of having contiguous, closed shapes, which herriman had & thurber didn't. i may need to think ths through more, but i think when you have contained, impermeable characters against backgrounds that are also closed shapes, it looks more like a world you can enter into, a three-dimensional space with an internal logic, no matter how different it looks from our experience of our three-dimensional surroundings.
when you don't close shapes, or render backgrounds consistently (like there's a mantel, but its lines just kind of trail off, & there are no lines indicating it's against a wall or on a floor), it requires a much bigger leap from "these are lines on paper" to "this is a dog in a parlour."
not that you can't tell it's supposed to be a dog in a parlour, but that you can't easily imaginatively put yourself in that parlour with that dog.
i still don't know if that makes sense.
Thanks, actually that teaches me a lot. Closed shapes vs. open ended is the sort of thing I wouldn’t process on my own. The same with consistency of form. I guess that’s why I don’t write much about drawing.
Thurber’s consistency is more like uniqueness, I suppose. It would be pretty hard for anyone else to do what he did, but he couldn’t reproduce himself either. I expect a pro can do the same drawing twice, maybe not as well the second time but still twice. Whereas Thurber just blundered his way from one end of the line to another and wound up with something brilliant. In “The Years with Ross” he tells how the famous seal-in-the-bedroom cartoon started out as his attempt to draw over again a sketch that he had lost, a quite different one of a seal sitting on a rock out in the Arctic.
Yeah, that was a great explanation, Miriam. And it’s good to have you back blogging, Tom!