Great illustration of different cloud types from calamityjon. (Thanks Tym for the link.)

2) Happy Birthday to Tom Spurgeon! One of the few must-read daily comics bloggers.

Today’s clouds come from Marc Males’ Different Ugliness, Different Madness (my review here). The panel above shows an amazingly frenetic mass of clouds that hardly look like clouds at all with their sharp edges and their oddly downward movement. The panel below is a beautiful example of simplicity in panel composition and
cloud drawing.

In anticipation of my review tomorrow, here’s any episode of comics clouds featuring half a panel (it’s a full page panel) from Tom Gauld’s Guardians of the Kingdom (Cabanon 2005). Yep, those white blobs are clouds. My cropping emphasizes (though not too much more than the original) the negative space. This minimalistic rendering with extreme amounts of hatching is fairly standard for Gauld’s style.

Hal Foster draws some mean clouds. Well, they are pretty active, fitting for the adventures of Prince Valiant. The two panels here are from the second episode of the strip dating back to 1937. I couldn’t pick just one, so I give you two. Note the movement in these clouds, they look to be shooting across the sky. They also have a certain abstracted realism that blends with the strip’s general style and tone. Look at the line work in those clouds, beautiful. That’s the child Valiant in the magenta shirt in both panels.

Today’s clouds (click on the image for a bigger version) come from Frontline Combat #12 (1953) and are drawn by the great Alex Toth (which means the text is by Harvey Kurtzman). This whole story takes place in the air and clouds are often used as a environment and grounding for the planes. In this two panel sequence we see clouds as both sky and ground. I love the way the foreground clouds in the second panel act as negative space but also obscure most of the panel borders. The clouds themselves are drawn very simply and contrast nicely with the black wing and mountain which are both very abstract and mostly unrecognizable out of context (like here?). This was actually the first Toth comic I ever read.

Another series to accompany my Masters of Comics and Panels Alone projects. This time: clouds! There’s something about the way a cartoonist draws clouds that says so much. I’ve been noticing this lately, and I’ve got this weird thing about cloud drawings (if only mine could be so great). So we’e are starting off with an image from a book I’m about to review, Lewis Trondheim’s comics essay Désoeuvre. Trondheim’s clouds have a wild and lively look to them that adds to the general appearance in his drawings of a world that is alive, animated almost (his trees have a similar effect).