Harvey Kurtzman - Opposing Poses, LIFE

Harvey Kurtzman is one of my top favorite cartoonists. I could go on forever about his skills, but I'll start with just a couple important ones to do with character. His characters seem alive. Motivated from within. They aren't tracings of model sheets, or awkward accidental poses.

Here are a couple tools he uses to achieve this.

His characters each individually have direct poses and lines of action, but he goes a step further.

He composes each line of action and silhouette so that the characters dynamically oppose each other. They aren't parallel or mirror images of each other.

Their poses work together to create a composition and contrasts in their attitudes and respective total energies. The character with the stronger pose has more energy and is generally the focus of the panel. The other character is generally reacting to the more dynamic one. He will have less energy - which is described by a less dynamic pose - or line of action.
Harvey makes his characters' poses compose together. The negative shapes between them are beautiful and functional, as they help you see the contrasts in their attitudes.


This quality of being able to draw characters that seem completely alive and moving and progressing emotionally from pose to pose is a rare talent - too rare. It's what you need to be an animator. Kurtzman would have been a natural animator.


You don't see many comics that have this much life. We've come to accept much comic art as being stiff, using repetitive poses and appearing smug in their stagnant repetitiveness.
Sadly, this has crossed over into modern cartoons-expensive ones at that! And leagues of fans defend this stagnation as somehow being an artistic choice, rather than just a lack of knowledge or extreme conservatism. Life essence is now considered "too cartoony".
If you want to improve your posing, life and compositions, then you need this cartoon bible in your library, and you should copy the poses as an exercise every morning before you start your regular work. Then apply this quality of living characters to your own drawings and watch them come to life too.

Life Sucks 2 sc 4-Storyboards are for STORY, not finished art

Here's an earlier sequence from Life Sucks. This is where Ren first approaches Stimpy in his garden. Stimpy thinks nature is proof that the world is full of beauty and joy and Ren begins to burst his bubble by explaining how much torture goes on in his lawn every minute of every day.




These two still drawings are Nick's cleanups of my scribbly roughs. This animatic is mostly drawn by me in my "bus doodle" style.

I have a few different drawing styles and I use them for different thought processes. When I am writing ideas, I draw them, but I draw really fast, with no regard to construction, perspective, line quality or any finished techniques. I am purely drawing feeling. I am trying to draw in real time as the events play out. I look like a complete spaz when I'm doing it and people make fun of me and imitate it.

The drawings are very scribbly but have the germs of all the visual ideas in continuity. Once these scribbles are complete, then I switch my brain to style mode and draw bigger versions of the same drawings that use more solid principles. This step (layout) requires slower, more carefully choreographed drawings and uses a completely different part of the brain to do. If I was trying to storyboard a scene in this finished style, it wouldn't work. I would be thinking of pretty drawings rather than story and emotion and continuity.

This is a major flaw with TV studio systems today. They expect their storyboard artists to draw finished clean drawings "on-model" so they can send them overseas and then have the animators just xerox them up. This is an extremely inefficient way to use storyboards.

Storyboards are called "story"boards because the story artists are supposed to be writing the stories, not doing the animation and layouts. The more time they waste doing clean stiff on-model drawings, the less time they have to spend on making the story work.

Executives do not understand storyboards anyway, let alone rough drawings. They are easily impressed by a clean inked line, and even if the story isn't working they will quickly sign off on a fancily rendered finished looking storyboard.

Stupid.

You should look up some of Mike Maltese's storyboards for Chuck Jones to see how writers used to work.

Anyway, this animatic is made up mostly of my bus-doodle style. Scribbly but emotional. The few clean and semi-clean drawings are done by Nick Cross and Matt Roach following me up.
LS
Uploaded by chuckchillout8

Eddie has a great storyboard drawing style. It's simple but full of amazing life, fantastic strong clear poses and staging and composition. I used to shudder when layout artists would get his boards and then instantly tone down all the poses when they added the details and put them "on-model". I loved doing layouts from Eddie's boards because all the thought and life was there, and I got to add my own creativity in the finished design details and adding a few poses.

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