1) You must check out this week’s All Over Coffee by Paul Madonna. Clouds! One of my Sunday morning joys is the new episode of this strip every week.
2) Happy Birthday to Tom Spurgeon! One of the few must-read daily comics bloggers.
Two for Sunday
Clouds 7
It’s been awhile since I posted some cloud drawings. Here are two single panel comics by Hank Ketcham from Dennis the Menice: His First 40 Years (more on this soon). Both have a great abstract patterning to them that makes the clouds much more physical and material than one usually sees.
Clouds 6
It’s been months since I posted a cloud panel. Here’s one from Osamu Tezuka’s Phoenix vol. 7 (Viz, 2006). Despite his caricatural characters, Tezuka tends to use very detailed backgrounds, particularly the nature scenes. The world becomes more real than the characters in some ways. Here’s a great one panel page, a dark mountain with [...]
Clouds 5
Click for larger.
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.
Clouds 4
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 [...]
Clouds 3
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 [...]
Clouds 2
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 [...]
Clouds 1
Click for larger size.
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 [...]
