illustration

Maurice Sendak, Caldecott-winning author of classic children’s books such as Where the Wild Things Are, died this morning due to complications from a stroke. He was 83. His most recent book was Bumble-Ardy (HarperCollins), the tale of a mischievous pig named Bumble who has reached the age of nine without ever having had a birthday party. He takes matters into his own hands (well, cloven hooves) and invites all of his friends to a masquerade bash that quickly gets out of hand. In discussing his widely beloved work, Brooklyn-born Sendak was always quick to credit his mentors, the late Ruth Krauss (The Carrot Seed) and her husband Crockett “Dave” Johnson, who wrote Harold and the Purple Crayon. The most valuable lesson they imparted to the budding children’s book author, whose big-headed kids were initially rejected by publishers for being “too foreign-looking”? Be truthful. “If there’s anything I’m proud of in my work—it’s not that I draw better; there’s so many better graphic artists than me—or that I write better, no. It’s—and I’m not saying I know the truth, because what the hell is that? But what I got from Ruth and Dave, a kind of fierce honesty,” Sendak said in a 2005 interview, “to not let the kid down, to not let the kid get punished, to not suffer the child to be dealt with in a boring, simpering, crushing-of-the-spirit kind of way.”

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Remember Gooey Huey or Leaky Lindsay? Wondering what became of Sewer Sue or the elusive Adam Bomb? Reunite with these and 202 other disgusting old friends in the pages of Garbage Pail Kids (Abrams ComicArts). The book celebrates the beloved sticker trading cards, produced by Topps in the 1980s with a creative team that included Art Spiegelman and John Pound, who have penned the introduction and afterword, respectively. “We all worked anonymously, since Topps didn’t want the work publicly credited, presumably so we could easily be replaced by other hands,” Spiegelman has said. “I was annoyed at the time, but my book publisher, Pantheon, was very relieved. The first volume of Maus was being prepared for publication while the GPKs were near the height of their popularity.” Along with a trove of rare GPK images, the book includes four previously unreleased bonus stickers. Just keep them away from Up Chuck and Heather Shredder.

“The only valuable class I took in art school was from a guy who taught display lettering which was literally like sign painting,” says cartoonist (and screenwriter) Daniel Clowes of his formative years at Pratt Intstitute. “Everybody else was like, ‘Aww man, I can’t believe I have to take this cornball class,’ where I was front and center every week. Still to this day I use everything I learned in that class.” Clowes’s irresistible handlettering, groundbreaking graphic novels, beloved New Yorker covers, and much more are the subject of a retrospective that opens next Saturday at the Oakland Museum of California. “Modern Cartoonist: The Art of Daniel Clowes” is accompanied by a splendid monograph out this month from Abrams ComicArts. Designed by Jonathan Bennett, the book includes essays by the likes Chris Ware and Chip Kidd. And feast your eyes on a test sample animation by Nicholas de Monchaux, who is masterminding the design of the exhibition:

The imminent museum survey earned the cartoonist a Clowes-up—”Humanity’s Discomfort, Punctured with a Pen“—in Sunday’s New York Times, where he shared the front page of the Arts & Leisure section with a Smurfily dressed Nicki Minaj. Among the diverse Clowes admirers that writer Carol Kino rounded up for the profile: Alexander Payne, who is directing the film adaptation of Wilson; Art Spiegelman; and (would you believe?) Neo Rauch. “Dan’s work stands out because of its precision,” Rauch told Kino. The artist was also “fascinated by its underground, slightly creepy aspect,” and added, “Plus, he has a very dark humor that appeals to me immediately.”

“Miffy and Friends is a Claymation series based on the children’s books by the Dutch artist Dick Bruna, who created the character in 1955. The show presented a world so stunningly peaceful that I dreamed of entering it myself. It was drawn in the minimalist, mouthless style of Hello Kitty. (The brand sued the owner of the popular Japanese character for ripping off Bruna’s style; the two sides recently settled in court.) Its heroine (at right) lived with her animal friends in an idyllic Dutch town, but none of them spoke; their small dramas were narrated in voice-over. The pace was slow. The colors—red, blue, and yellow—were brilliant. It was like a shelter magazine for toddlers. The mood was so lulling that when, in one sequence, Miffy gave her broken toy a small, frustrated kick, my husband was startled. Yet, meditative as the show was, Miffy was a jolt to my expectations. This was children’s TV? Why was it so beautiful?”

-Critic Emily Nussbaum examining the renaissance in children’s programming, in the February 13 and 20 issue of The New Yorker

“The birds developed out of gag strips and short experiments I had started with. They began to develop personalities….But I didn’t really know how to draw comics. To a great extent, the story of this book is the story of me trying to figure out what I’m doing exactly. For as long as I can remember, I’ve spent a lot of time drawing pictures, and probably for that reason it was something I had become reasonably good at. Making comics, however, is about more than just being able to draw well. It involves rhythm and timing, directing the reader’s focus, making objects and faces recognizable from one panel to the next. Things as subtle as a character’s posture and the way a panel is framed convey information, whether intentionally or not. Part of the pleasure of drawing for me has always been to watch an image take shape in front of me, and to adapt and respond as it unfolds. There’s a way that drawing can be very improvisational. But in comics, if it isn’t consistent, you risk confusing your reader. If that happens more than once or twice, she will take her attention elsewhere.”

-Author and artist Anders Nilsen on his magnum opus, Big Questions, recently published by Drawn and Quarterly

Just a couple of years after his then-ubiquitous and not-yet controversial poster of President Obama made the cover, Shepard Fairey is back at it again for Time‘s Person of the Year edition. The artist has designed the cover for the annual issue, wherein this time they picked “The Protestor”, once again skipping an individual person and instead focus more of a concept. If you’re familiar with Fairey’s work, you’ll of course recognize it immediately, with his familiar propaganda-esque illustration and coloring. Christopher Knight at the LA Times thinks the match between Fairey and Time is a perfect fit, though not at all in a good way, calling the Fairey a “designer dissident” and the only artist who “is really suitable for the job of creating the publication’s inevitably ironic cover.” Knight gets more critical from there. Here’s a bit:

The style oozes cozy, collectible nostalgia. On the cover of Time, the schmaltzy result trivializes the portentous power — and authentic potential — of the “Arab spring,” Occupy Wall Street and whatever might-or-might-not be breaking now in Russia. Questioning authority never looked more corporate and conventional.

Criticism aside, let’s just hope Fairey made sure to get the photo rights behind the illustration more squared away this time around.

In The Seven Crystal Balls, Tintin’s ride was a golden Lincoln Zephyr.

We’re slightly nervous about the Spielberg-directed The Adventures of Tintin, an animated 3-D extravaganza that brings Hergé‘s spunky gumshoe reporter to life (the title character is played by Jamie Bell, despite our entreaties that the role be given to Burberry’s Christopher Bailey). On the bright side, the film’s imminent American debut has occasioned some swell Tintin coverage. In the Wall Street Journal, Meghan Cox Gurdon did a fine job of elucidating the enduring appeal of the brave yet fallible young Belgian, whose dramatic adventures remain at human scale. “And he is always gorgeously drawn in the distinctive clean lines of his creator, Georges Remi (whose initials reversed and pronounced in French produced the nom de plume Hergé),” she writes. “Hergé’s style is so perfectly suited to the two-dimensional medium of comics that any digital version was bound to produce howls of outrage.” Meanwhile, Fred Bierman of The New York Times calls attention to Tintin’s excellent and wide-ranging taste in cars, from a 1921 Ford Model T to a 1971 Land Rover 109. And how’s this for a kicker?

The automobile is even responsible for Tintin’s most identifiable trait: the upturned tuft of his orange hair. In the first book, Tintin’s hair was combed flat, but it was a fast ride in an open-top 1925 Mercedes that gave rise to his now-famous hairstyle. It has stayed that way ever since.

Since Werner Herzog’s 3D film Cave of Forgotten Dreams was such a big hit earlier this year, should we now expect a follow up, wherein the adventurous director travels to the wilds of central London and dares enter a small apartment? If you’re a certain professor of archeology at the University of York, you apparently might consider it. The Telegraph reports that a handful of cartoons drawn by John Lydon (or Johnny Rotten) of the Sex Pistols have been discovered behind a cupboard in what are now offices. The archeologist in question is Dr. John Schofield who has compared the find with the cave paintings at Lascaux in France, or at the very least, perhaps even more important than the “lost early Beatles recordings” the BBC found in the mid-90s. In that case, Schofield is careful to remind that a producer at the time of that finding said the discovery was “like finding Tutankhamen’s tomb,” so his comparison to ancient cave paintings shouldn’t sound so absurd. That said, the Guardian‘s Johnathan Jones isn’t buying any of it. Writing that “archeologists should know better” and that anyone from that field who agrees with the importance of the find is merely doing so “to provoke their own profession” without really understanding that modern culture constantly “glorifies the immediate.” In a general sense, his argument seems to boil down to: why stoop to pop culture’s level when there’s legitimate, albeit less sexy, work to be done? Our personal addendum is that, while we genuinely like Lydon’s drawings, and realize their importance to the comparatively very recent history of music, isn’t it a bit premature to label something a major archeological find when the guy who drew them is still alive, and could likely redraw the same cartoons today?

It’s no secret that Chip Kidd is a big Batman fan. In fact, just a couple of years back, we were talking about exactly that, when we wrote about the famous design keeping tabs in his journal of all things Batman-related at that year’s Comic-Con. Now it seems that Kidd is making that love official, with the news coming last month that DC Comics had brought aboard Kidd to pen a full-length graphic novel and artist Dave Taylor to visually bring it to life. Though the news about Batman: Death By Design, which is set to be released sometime next year, has been circulating since mid-October, there have been a number of great interviews with both Kidd and Taylor out there, with new illustrations popping up from the book here and there. We point you first to Newsarama, who recently interviewed Kidd, learning that one of the story’s main villains is a new creation made by the designer himself. Named Exacto, Kidd describes him as “an architectural critic as a Batman villain.” Comic Book Resources also has a great talk with the designer from right after the NYCC event, wherein he talks a bit more about the artistic direction the book will be taking. Here’s a bit about coming up with the name and where it all goes from there:

I actually came up with the title first. I thought, “If it’s me and you know who I am and what I do, then I’m going to come at this whole thing from a design standpoint.” I’ve said for many years that Batman himself and especially the way he’s evolved is brilliant design. It’s problem solving. And we get into that in the story. Beyond that, it became about me going “What if?” What do I want that I haven’t seen? And really, the overall Art Direction for the book is “What if Fritz Lang made a Batman movie in the late 1930s and had a huge budget? Go!” There’s the visual platform.

Rule #82: Cook

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Michael Pollan elaborated on this omnivorous mantra in his 2009 book, Food Rules, which offered 64 “simple rules for eating healthily and happily.” Having spawned reader-created t-shirts, market bags, posters, and plenty of reader-submitted maxims, the book has been reborn in a glorious illustrated edition. The enhanced hardcover version of Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual (Penguin) goes on sale today and is awash in colorful, witty paintings by Maira Kalman. Elegantly designed by Claire Naylon Vaccaro, the book includes a new introduction and 19 additional food principles, such as “Love your spices” and “Place a bouquet of flowers on the table and everything will taste twice as good” (Kalman opts for a green fluted vase of hot pink poppies). And while there are plenty of fresh veggies and farm scenes to admire, Kalman’s signature way with pastry is featured in such rules as “Treat treats as treats” and “Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself,” which is matched with a Hostess cupcake. “When Michael asked if I would like to illustrate this book, I said two things. First, Yes. Absolutely Yes. Second, that Cheezdoodles had a beloved place in our family history,” explains Kalman in her handwritten introduction. “He did not hold that against me. This is a great country. Vast. Complicated,” she notes, pausing for a painting of a plump sausage floating on a pink ground. “With plenty of room for extremes.”