In Search of Steve Ditko (BBC documentary 2007)

In Search of Steve Ditko is a 2007 BBC documentary following Jonathan Ross on his attempt to track down the elusive comic book titan, best known as the co-creator of Spiderman.  along the way, Ross sits down with Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Stan Lee and more to discuss the man and his classic work.

 

William Stout's "Legends of the Blues"

William Stout has built a formidable body of work in his 40+ year long art career, ranging from comics and album art to storyboarding and conceptual art in film and television.  In 2013, Abrams ComicArts published his "Legends of the Blues" book which builds where Robert Crumb's classic "Heroes of the Blues" trading card set from 1980 left off.  Stout renders over 100 Blues titans in his own version of Crumb's iconic, bold crosshatched style, and wrote a short biography to accompany each entry.  Oftentimes, Stout weaves in symbolic imagery in the backgrounds to enhance the individual's mythology.  It's a brilliant collection of images, and the book is a must have for any fan of illustration or the blues.

here are some examples.  buy the book HERE.

Milo Manara does Marvel

Milo Manara, the legendary French erotic comics master, unwittingly found himself at the center of a heated debate on the oversexualization of women in American comics with his infamous Spider-woman cover.  Manara did what he has done best over his decades-long career, seductive women in provocative poses, and the internet broke as a result.  His other Marvel covers were cancelled in the wake of the outrage.  America is still a place with rigid Puritanical views on sexuality, yet openly flaunts death and destruction in every available medium, and Manara's work simply doesn't jive with these sensibilities.  It is unlikely we will ever see the Master's work published through mainstream comics on this side of the ocean again, so here is a collection of his Marvel covers, as well as some pages from his 2010 graphic novel, X-Women, written by Chris Claremont (download a Spanish copy HERE, for scholarly review of course).

1830s animation with the Phenakistoscope

Forty years before the advent of motion pictures, and eighty years before the development of modern animation, creative minds were already attempting to make a series of static images magically move for an audience.  One of these earliest pioneers was Belgian inventor Joseph Plateau, who created the Phenakistoscope in 1831.  His device used images on a spinning wheel that, when looked at through a slit onto a mirror, created the optical illusion of movement.  The phenakistoscope was considered a novelty or a child's toy at the time, since only one viewer at a time could look through it, but the basic formula for motion pictures was officially in place.  in 1871, Eadweard Muybridge would use a series of successive photos to make the first movie, "The Horse in Motion," and in 1914, Windsor McCay would become one of animations most prominent pioneers with "Gertie the Dinosaur."  The work of Plateau helped pave the way. 

Richard Balzer has been compiling and digitizing many of these early phenakistoscopes into GIFs, as well as other early animation devices like zoetropes, fantascopes, and thaumascopes. Without his effort, this art form would likely have passed into the ether.  please go to his website HERE and his Tumblr HERE to see more and to gather more information.