COFFEE TABLE the fifth

On the coffee table this month along with the cup of coffee are two Japanese film and television monster toys, one from the Godzilla series and the other from Ultraman, plus a copy of Swamp Thing: Dark Genesis by Len Wein and Berni Wrightson that collects the origin story plus the first ten issues of Swamp Thing.

Hedorah and Twin Tail find Swamp Thing. (Photo by Louise Graber)

These Japanese monster toys made by Bandai react as if they have found something awesome. And they have…of course. Swamp Thing, even before Alan Moore began writing it in the 1980s and took it to a high level of comic art, was one of the significant comics stories of the 1970s and a seminal text for comics scholars to study. The cover illustration by Berni Wrightson shows that the swamp monster has a similar textual pattern to that on Hedorah’s body, seemingly still growing and somewhat organic. Hedorah was nicknamed ‘the Smog Monster’ or Sludge from the sludgy meaning inherent in its name in the Japanese language. Twin Tail, on the left in the photo above, has err, two tails. You can’t see its face here as it is standing on its head with its twin tails in the air but it want to slither over Swamp Thing, or at least the graphic representation of him. Fun with coffee, comic art and monster toys!

Hedorah needs some strong, black and sludgy coffee after meeting the Swamp Thing. (Photo by Louise Graber)

Read the other entries in this series:  COFFEE TABLE the first   COFFEE TABLE the second   COFFEE TABLE the third   COFFEE TABLE the fourth  and for further mention of Japanese monster movies and their makers read my blog DRAWING THE OCTOPUS.

INKING THE OCTOPUS

Here is another excellent cover illustration for GARO, the Japanese anthology manga magazine, made by Terry Johnson (a.k.a. King Terry a.k.a Teruhiko Yumura a.k.a. Flamina Terrino Gonzalez). Each issue of the magazine consisted of a creative collection of alternative comics featuring a wide range of artistic styles. Terry got to design a few of the covers for Comic Cue magazine as well as GARO. I’m picking one of his octopus designs. You can see another of his jobs inking the octopus for GARO in a previous post of mine 9 Brains, 10 Art.

GARO cover illo by Terry Johnson, 1982.

And you can read about Terry in Fred Schodt‘s book Dreamland Japan: Writings On Modern Manga in which he describes Johnson’s art style as as heta-uma or (bad-good). Paul Gravett also mentions Terry and the heta-uma art concept(his translation is unskilled/skilled) in his book Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics. The image(above) looks a very striking illustration and a very graphic one to me. When I found it, sealed in plastic, in a bookshop in the Jimbocho bookshop area of Tokyo, I just had to get it.

Read another of my posts on Terry Johnson and the octopus: 9 BRAINS, 10 ART

COFFEE TABLE the fourth

Visiting a cafe in Adelaide whilst passing through that city on a road trip recently I sampled the standard blueberry muffin and flat white coffee fare available there. With Nick Lowe looking at something outside from his position on the poster wall in the Hindley Street area I determined to explore the direction of his gaze following consumption of the coffee and cake. Crossing the street I found an alley that housed not only a comics shop but a DIY zine shop opposite. Thanks Nick, with my lack of local knowledge of the scene, that was a really good find! Returning to Sydney by air it was fun to find that Jack Black was aboard and looking very animated. He had played Adelaide Oval the night before with his band Tenacious D as support for the Foo Fighters. Jack sat up the pointy end of the plane and we were down the back end with the Foo Fighter roadies who were a lot of fun to travel with. The one in our row was wearing a Brian Chippendale graphic T-shirt and had actually met the guy at TCAF. Serendipitously, I had bought a Chippendale graphic novel the previous day in Adelaide and had it as my in-flight reading. What a magical trip!

Nick Lowe poster with blueberry muffin and coffee. (Photo by Louise Graber)

Back in Sydney I resolved to complete the coffee table blog as per last time by pulling out an art book. On the coffee table this time around is The Art  of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius Of Comics by Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhle. It’s big, glossy, heavy and intensely illustrated with a fantastic collection of photographs, comics and cartoons as well as some process art and roughs from Kurtzman’s career.

The Harvey Kurtzman coffee table comic art book (cover detail).

There are his war comics Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat including a tale from the latter title based on an incident from the Korean War called Corpse On The Imjin that is a most impressive piece of visual storytelling. Then there is his work for a series of magazines: MAD, that includes several covers, Humbug, Help! and Playboy and his collaboration with Will Elder. Excellent choice! Kurtzman’s work was of its time but brilliant. As the title describes him and this book demonstrates he was a comic art genius.

Read the other entries in this series: COFFEE TABLE the first   COFFEE TABLE the second  COFFEE TABLE the third

DRAWING THE OCTOPUS

On looking through a sketchbook I compiled during my travels in Tokyo in 2008 I found these two paintings I did of my favourite undersea creature, the octopus. After a visit to Odaiba Island in Tokyo Bay I started thinking of Gojira and those Japanese monster movies from the 1950s and 60s many of which were made by Ishirō Honda. Movies such as Destroy All Monsters, Godzilla and Ebirah, Horror of the Deep(directed by Jun Fukuda, not Honda). I loved these films. The films were low budget and this gave the production design an amusing aspect. The monsters were usually played by actors wearing monster suits, moving anthropomorphically out of the sea and onto land. Then I figured I would draw my own Japanese monster, the blue, cartoonish one below, substituting an octopus for Ebirah, a lobster, and making it anthropomorphic.

Blue octopus in monster mode. (Painting by Michael Hill-© 2008 Michael Hill)

I followed this drawing with a more painterly, greener octopus, located deeper down in the sea than the blue one that appears to be wading knee (or tentacle) deep through Tokyo Bay. The green one, by contrast, is underwater, sand-crawling on the bottom and also in an aggressive mode, perhaps even more menacing and less amusing than the blue one.

Green octopus in menacing mode. (Painting by Michael Hill-© 2008 Michael Hill)

COFFEE TABLE the third

On the coffee table this time round, alongside the coffee table cup of coffee, is not a cake but a coffee table book…on comic art. No cake but this book has a sweet collections of beautiful drawings or should I say reproductions of drawings designed for comic art. The book is handsome, large format, hard-covered with more than 330 pages and illustrations on most of these. It was edited by John Carlin, Paul Karasik and Brian Walker and actually served as an exhibition catalogue for its subject, an exhibition titled Masters of American Comics that was shown at the Hammer Museum and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and The Jewish Museum and The Newark Museum during the period 2005-2007. Carlin and Walker co-curated the exhibition following some initial ideas from Art Spiegelman. There are 16 essays on aspects of the show by a range of artists, writers and scholars, including the curators, and one, a homage to the painter Gary Panter, from his friend Matt Groening.

A humble cup of Flat White coffee. (Photo by Louise Graber)

Artists whose work featured in the exhibition included Milton Caniff, R. Crumb, Will Eisner, Lyonel Feininger, Chester Gould, George Herriman, Frank King, Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, Winsor McCay, Gary Panter, Charles M. Schulz, E. C. Segar, Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware. Despite it’s cost the book/catalogue is a treasure of comic art with nearly 300 illustrations, many of which are in colour. There are a large number of these that show the original comic art complete with indications and instructions from the artist for their graphic reproduction. A few carry adhesive strip stains and markings picked up in their preparation. There are also colour reproductions of printed pages torn from newspapers that have yellowed with age. It’s all very graphic.

The coffee table book- Masters of American Comics showing Herriman's Ignatz with a brick.

By chance I also came across the November 2005 issue of Modern Painters: International Arts And Culture that contained an article “From The Garbage Can To The Gallery” by David D’Arcy relating to the exhibition and with a profile by Art Spiegelman. It makes the salient point about galleries’ general view of comics as art-whilst being prepared to hang comics influenced work by Pop artists they have been more reluctant to exhibit actual pieces of comic art. The issue also included a look at the work of Raymond Pettibon who incidentally provides an essay on the work of Will Eisner in the catologure, and a feature on the digital animation company Pixar. The magazine features a panel from Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts on its cover with the character Lucy shouting at her brother Linus about art.

The art journal Modern Painters comic art themed issue.

As I have placed this book on the coffee table rather than in my library with the aim of leisurely browsing my way through it during morning coffee rather than do a more serious reading and note-taking of it at my desk, I have added some text content to the post since publication. Now that’s treating it like a coffee table book…browse, browse…make a note and add it to the article.

Read the other entries in this series: COFFEE TABLE the first   COFFEE TABLE the second   COFFEE TABLE the fourth

ON TREASURE ISLAND

Some visual moments from my recent trip to Fiji to attend Japan Culture Week 2011 in the capital Suva, presented by the Embassy of Japan and the Japan Foundation.

In the hotel pool in Nadi, my friend the octopus. (Photo by Louise Graber)

Doctor Comics in shark jaws at the University of the South Pacific. (Photo by Louise Graber)

In the photo above I’m chewing on the QR code for The Comics Grid and about to be chewed myself by the great tin shark on the campus of the University of the South Pacific in Suva.

In the Fiji Museum in Suva, the Eel God sacred club. (Photo by Louise Graber)

In addition to my affinity with the octopus and various fish I am partial to the eel. During my Fiji visit I was pleased to find that the eel has acquired the status of a deity and a creative one at that in Melanesian mythology. Below is an artwork I created based on the freshwater eels that used to be found and fished in the Parramatta River near Blacktown in Sydney.

My own eel art work(print, painting and collage-© 2009 Michael Hill).

Another treasure inside the Fiji Museum was this old metal Hopkinson & Cope printing press, imported from England in earlier days. At my printmaking workshop in Suva I demonstrated a Japanese method that employs one’s body weight as a press rather than a device such as this European device.

Old metal, pre-digital printing press. (Photo by Louise Graber)

There was also a collection of highly creative and somewhat abstracted contemporary Japanese craft objects on loan from the Yamanashi Prefectural Museum of Art on display. Outside of the museum was the setting for the rambling, languid and tropical Thurston Gardens, a botanical garden.

Some of the contemporary Japanese craft objects on display.

On this Treasure Island, apart from the art and the marine life, there were collections of coconuts, palm trees and flowers including red hibiscus and white frangipani, all over the place.

There was a big frangipani presence on the island. (Photo by Louise Graber)

There was a plentiful amount of fresh fruit, flowers and vegetables for sale along the Queen’s Road and also at the Suva markets along with tables of fresh fish-tropical treasures of the South Pacific!

Read my other Fijian project post: FLYING THE ANIME FLAG IN PARADISE

A GOD COMES DOWN TO EARTH

Thor and a secret agent man discuss cosplay on the streets of New Mexico.

Thor directed by Kenneth Branagh is another good film this year from Marvel Studios and another based on one of their Marvel comic book series. Branagh brings a touch of theatricality to the production that is surprisingly restrained, or perhaps disciplined, when one considers he could have gone more operatic with all of the costumes and pagentry, the Rainbow Bridge, the battles with the Frost giants and the traveling back and forth to other dimensions. The juxtaposotion of the galactic location of Asgard with earthbound New Mexico provides a striking visual contrast to the look of the film. It is a costume drama with the actors elaborately clothed, posed, and enunciating their lines, at times, in a quasi-Shakespearean manner and when Thor and his loyal friends appear in their Asgardian garb on earth it starts to look a little cosplay-ish to the locals. And speaking of the gatekeeper who allows or refuses access between the Asgard and Earth dimensions he has the most Jack Kirby-esque design stature, a strong influence from the comic indeed.  The overall production design of Asgard by Bo Welch is appropriate and impressive.

The film oozes mythology of the Norse kind. Thor is a god and has a magic hammer with boomerang like return tendencies. There is a lot of old-school material but the film does get an injection of contemporary coolness with references to the hero being ‘cut’, the putting of his photo on Facebook and some music by the Foo Fighters. And Stan Lee gets his brief cameo after missing out in X-Men: First Class.

Local input includes the Australian actor Chris Hemsworth in the title role, some digital visual effects work by Sydney company FUEL VFX and the holding of the world premiere of the film in Sydney. Hemsworth does a good Thor from the development of a powerful physique following some intense weeks at the gym, to his arrogance and dummy spit in front of his father. Following this he comes crashing down to earth with the loss of his godly and superhero status. Then his calmness and noble gestures emerge once he gains some humility. His brother Loki is given a menacing performance by Tom Hiddleston and Anthony Hopkins is just right as the booming King Odin of Asgard.

Marvel has its own developing mythology, too, and I continue to enjoy seeing some of it adapted in the recent spate of films. I went to the 3-D version of the film in the cinema earlier this year but the recently released 2-D video disc is fine. For a formal analysis of a Thor comic read my post on The Comics Grid: Thor’s Comic Opera: Götterdämmerung Revisited.

Read my other reviews of comics based films:

Captain America: The First Avenger: RED SKULL VERSUS CAP

The Green Hornet: GONDRY GOES FOR IT

Green Lantern: MAN IN A GREEN MASK WITH MATCHING RING AND LANTERN

Tamara Drewe: DRAWING TAMARA DREWE and other writers

X-Men: First Class: A FIRST CLASS X-MEN FILM

COFFEE TABLE the second

I took a recent trip to Brisbane to see the Surrealist exhibition Surrealism: The Poetry Of Dreams at GoMA(Gallery of Modern Art). The show had been temporarily imported from the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, in Paris. Whilst there I breakfasted at aja coffee house in Elizabeth Street. The toasted fruit bread I ordered was served on a slice of black slate with a dollop of cream, a smear of jam and a sprinkling of icing sugar. It was gourmet toast of course and presented with such style. Matched well with a mug of milky coffee the size of a jug it was most satisfying start to the day.

Toast and jam-ramped up a few notches. (Photo by Louise Graber)

The Surrealism exhibition was superb and so large it took a couple of hours to take in and that was without watching all of the films all the way through. Fortunately there was a rest point in the form of a reading room at about the two thirds mark of the show. It was interesting to see just how many of the artists in the movement had experimented with cinema and made short films. Several of these were screened in the exhibition in an effectively integrated manner including the eye-slicing shocker Un Chien Andalou by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. Lots of photography and collages were displayed along with the paintings and sculptures by the likes of Brauner, Dali, De Chirico, Duchamp, Magritte, Miró, Giacometti and Max Ernst. No photos allowed but here’s my ticket.

The Dream ticket.

Read the other entries in this series:  COFFEE TABLE the first   COFFEE TABLE the third  COFFEE TABLE the fourth

9 BRAINS, 10 ART

In my first post on the octopus I mentioned that it had 3 hearts along with its 8 arms, feet or legs. There is also some talk of it having 9 brains. This is perhaps due to the fact that in addition to the main brain located in its head, each of those 8 arms, feet or legs possesses its own clump of neurons, thus 8 + 1 = 9 brains?Whatever the science fact I am probably more interested in visual representations of this highly intelligent creature, especially graphic ones such as this cover design for GARO with an illustration by Terry Johnson (a.k.a. King Terry). If  an octopus gets a 9 for brains I’d give this cover a 10 for art.

GARO #260 cover illustration by Terry Johnson.

GARO was an anthology manga. Each issue consisted of a creative collection of alternative comics featuring a wide range of artistic styles. I was lucky to find some back copies of this comic in the Jimbocho area of Tokyo. Jimbocho seems to have a hundred or more bookshops that, between them, cover the entire field of publishing from maps of the world to medical encyclopedias to underground comics and textbooks. There are several universities and lots of students nearby that provide good patronage of the bookshops. I also found a restaurant there that sold black pig gyoza-Yum! There was another where the students could buy gyoza filled with chocolate. I had no takoyaki on this occasion.

The Jimbocho area of Tokyo. (Photo by Louise Graber)

Read another of my posts on Terry Johnson and the octopus: INKING THE OCTOPUS

SPROUTING GREEN MANGA

If you look through the window of Gallery 4A in Haymarket at the moment you’ll see the unusual sight of sprouts growing out of manga. This makes yet another way of getting comics into an art gallery. This exhibit is the work of Japanese artist Koshi Kawachi and is part of a group exhibition titled After Effect that has been curated by Olivier Krischer. The artist calls his work “manga farming” and it has a definite green edge involving the recycling of printed material and the growing of vegetable matter. Using manga as a seed bed is a novel method of recycling old comics and as some editions of manga in Japan are published in phone book size proportions, a single volume may be sufficient to get your crop started. The potential is even there for some interesting pairing of titles and sprouts, and if space is at a premium, the smaller, narrower sized manga might be considered…broccoli with Bakuman anyone?…or fenugreek with Kami no Shizuku perhaps?  The exhibition is on at 181—187 Hay Street, Sydney till October 15th.

Manga sprouts. (Photo by Louise Graber)

Manga sprouting sprouts. (Photo by Louise Graber)