Paul Chadwick's Weblog

Gene Colan

Nice to see he rated a respectful obit in the New York Times.

I spoke to him once, about fifteen years ago.  A mutual friend had put him in touch.  He called, wanting advice on how to break into movie storyboarding.  Talk about overqualified!  I tried not to gush.

Quite the film buff, I gather from an interview I read.   I can see why he would've wanted to do a little bit of that, even in the Autumn of a career.  I wonder if he did.

The most painterly penciller in comics, this side of Everett Raymond Kinstler.  Always a sense of directional light, body movement, windblown leaves, splashing water, flowing drapery, impressionistic but convincing architectural ornament.  Glamorous, realistically drawn women. 

I admired him.

"...a trifling ascendency, which he improved to increase the disparity..."

When he was young my son used to ask me unanswerable, unknowable questions, and I often answered, "well, I suppose almost everything has happened once."

The more I live, the more I think it is so.

A Couple of Commissions

Somebody had me do Blok, a rock character I didn't know existed!

And Concrete, walking off Vancouver Island.

For what it's worth, my rates:

-Pencil 1-2 characters 8 x 11 $100.00
-Ink 1-2 characters 8 x 11 $200.00
(additional characters can be added for $100.00)

-Watercolor & pen line 1-2 characters, with background 9x12 $350.00
(Same on 11x17 watercolor paper $ 500.00)

-Cover reproductions $600 b& w or $1000 color

And if you have something special in mind, I’ll cheerfully negotiate.

Not So Fast

Shows me for not checking the stats.

Green Lantern opened soft, though hardly disastrously.  I guess all genres settle down after a while. 

That, and everybody's feeling poor right now.

I Saw Green Lantern

I had low expectations.  The trailers showed a story so loaded with cosmic folderol, ill-shaped creatures massed in unreal environments, that I doubted it could have any resonance with real life (the head-trip puzzlebox Inception had left me cool for this reason).

But they wisely get a lot of the galactic craziness over with in the opening voice-over -- much like the theme song to The Beverly Hillbillies brought you up to speed -- so we knew what Ryan Reynolds would soon be up against.

And a charming fellow he is.  Reminds me of Steve Rude.  Good comic timing, unafraid of looking uncool.  Your wife or girlfriend will appreciate the fact that they get his shirt off more than once. If you heated him properly you could make a waffle on his abdominals.

Some surprises.  Peter Sarsgaard's Hector Hammond is the subsidiary bad guy, a nicely tortured soul and mirror character to Ryan's Hal Jordan (daddy issues both!).  Message:  science nerds bad, jocks good, upending the usual comic-book order.  He gets a disease that leaves him looking like Joseph Merrick, poor dude.

Main baddie Parallax is a huge entity, suggesting an octopus, lava, and feces all at once.  I worried how a fight with a relatively tiny Green Lantern could be dramatized.  But it works well.  The projected green catapults and ak-ak guns and walls are quite entertaining (if illogical; why project a gun when you could just project bullets?) in the same way the magic duel was in The Sword and the Stone.

In fact, Green Lantern is particularly suited for CGI, in a way Superman, for instance, is not.  All those projected green things are perfect for it, and there are countless opportunities for one last emerald whatzit to jazz up the proceedings.

Blake Lively is a gorgeous creature, worthy of her check-box on Leo DiCaprio's Life List.  And she can barrel-roll a stealth fighter without smearing her lipstick.

Parallax must've lost some brain-cells in that prison cave, as he falls for the old follow-GL-right-toward-a-sun-until-it's-too-late-to-swerve trick.  But at least it's nicely set up in the beginning, when Hal destroys a couple of billion dollars worth of fighter planes to prove his integrity.

There were other good set-ups (a three-second scene with a Hot Wheels set plays this role).  And there was some symbolism going on in the art direction with the color red, early on: his Mustang, the birthday balloons, that signal light on the airport control tower.  Maybe somebody can explain what it was.

Nice for DC to have a non-Batman hit.  It's been a while.
 

In a Wound in the Earth

I just talked with editor Diana Schutz and DHP #2 is out, with my Concrete story "In a Wound in the Earth." 

Although not inspired by it (chalk that up to a predawn trip to Haleakela Crater decades ago), I'm put in mind of this passage from the unique British stylist Denton Welch:

His dreams had been even more terrifying and wonderful than usual. He found himself lying full-length in an enormous open wound. The exposed, gently bubbling, cushiony flesh was very comfortable; but he knew that if he moved even his eyelid he would inflict terrible pain on the giant in whose wounded red bosom he lay.

In another dream, grotesquely enlarged diamonds waved about on long gold wires. They were contrived to look like sunflowers in a garden bed. Orvil was a very small child lost under the artificial leaves of these flowers. The wind blew; the diamonds rocked madly, backwards and forewards, banging their cruel facets against Orvil’s face. Like glittering, vicious footballs of ice, the huge diamonds struck his head, tearing the flesh till his eyes were filled with blood and he could feel the points of adamant ringing on white bone.

That's from a semiautobiographical novel, In Youth is Pleasure.

 I found another book, A Voice Through a Cloud, more readable; it's an account of the aftermath of a crippling bicycle accident which eventually killed him (it took years). 

Some writers compel interest simply because they write honestly and specifically about what goes on in their most peculiar minds.  Welch is one such.

 

 

 

Seems Unlikely

This 1 3/4 inch incised-on-bone depiction of a mammoth or mastadon ( at least 13,000 years old, since that's when they went extinct) found in Florida struck me as a modern fake.

Why?  The linear overlapping in the legs.  This drawing convention is fairly sophisticated, not even present in Egyptian heiroglyphs. 

But some of the cave paintings at Lascaux show it, though more crudely, so I could be wrong.

Herzog's new documentary on those cave paintings sounds like it's actually worth trekking to see it in 3-D.

Superlative

I admire the artist couple Catska and Cory Ench, who live on the Olympic Penninsula about thirty miles south of my island home.

Influenced by both Renaissance art and psychedelia, their paintings are full of craft and imagination.

They spoke on a Norwescon 09 panel that I sketched.  Click to enlarge.

Visit their site and be prepared to linger.

Wow

I blathered on for 200-odd pages about overpopulation in The Human Dilemma, but this short sweet strip from Stuart McMillan has all power and poignancy I'd hoped to achieve.

Plus a nice Tintin inside joke.

Stuart's main site.

(h/t Jeff Hartt)

Standoffish

It's out of character, rather surly and challenging for Concrete, but I always liked this drawing.  I put it on my business card.

Last night I colored it, so here it is.  Click to enlarge, as always.