Eisenberg and Hazelton* Contrasted

Harvey Eisenberg's natural style was fairly traditional - basically very rounded characters like 40s animation: Tom and Jerry. When he started having to draw comics using Ed Benedict's more stylized angular characters, he went through a transitional period where he tried to adapt.
His clean compact and controlled compositions were evident right away, but he had some trouble figuring out how to tilt the characters' angular heads at first.
Yogi's perspective doesn't make much sense in the panel above.
His cheats became more subtle as he got used to working in this style.His staging is always very controlled and easy to read.
Gene Hazelton - who had a similar background in animation had some differences in his style. He works more on a part by part design basis. Each individual piece of his picture has a pleasing design and style, but the overall staging and composition is less organized than Eisenbrg's. Drawing your pictures piece by piece, rather than from the big elements down to the smaller ones inevitably leads to a more cluttered look.

I think Gene was more concerned about how the characters looked, and he filled in the trees and background elements in all the spaces left between the characters.
Gene's specialty was stylish cuteness. He was known for his cute kids...

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/old-brew/gene-hazeltons-angel-face.html

Harvey's kids are cute too, but a bit more pudgy, less Valentine's card sweetness - and again he is more concerned with the balance of the composition, the negative spaces, framing of the characters and readability and flow of the whole picture.
Gene is also known for his cute women.
Here's Gene with a less cluttered composition. With cute fishies.Here's Harvey showing off perspective and his easy organization (hierarchy) of a lot of detail.
I loved these strips when I was a kid and thought that the artists must be animators, because the comics seemed to have elements of modernity, appeal and style that was more evident in animated cartoons than in the general comic strip style - which was traditionally more stiff.

http://allthingsger.blogspot.com/2010/06/bear-with-me-tuesday-comic-strip-day.html

another giveaway:

Eisenberg - these men have overall forms that are pulled along the lines of action. Their details- hair, clothes, arms, facial features all are kept tightly conformed to their dynamic overall statements.http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2009/05/eisenberg-subtleties-studies.html

Below are Gene Hazelton's men. They have lines of action too, but less direct. Their details are sticking out more and breaking up the overall flow and statement. - but each individual detail - the shape of the eyes, the fingers etc. have interesting angular shapes.
Each part of that phone receiver draws attention to itself, but the parts contradict each other and break up the overall shape of the phone.

Harvey thinks from big to small. Gene thinks from small to small and hopes it all adds up in the big picture.

*** Mark Christiansen thinks that the art I'm attributing to Hazelton here is actually Iwao Takamoto. He could be right, although it looks to me like Hazelton at least did the finishes and the faces.

Either way, these are all great cartoonists and the differences between Eisenberg and the other artists are still evident.

Thanks Mark!

http://www.markscartoonart.com/

Mark is a wonderful cartoonist too, so go check his blog...

A Comic Strip With Specific Expressions

Zoran, a frequent commenter posted some great Calvin and Hobbes strips awhile ago and I've been meaning to link to them.

I stopped reading comics strips in the 1970s when amateur artists began dominating the papers, but now and then I would notice a small handful of strips that stood out as the last lights flickering in the dim twilight of post-hippie decline of western culture.
One was "Shoe" by Jeff MacNellyand later I noticed Calvin and Hobbes.
I don't know a lot about the strip or its creator, Bill Watterson, except that Calvin is obviously drawn really well. Zoran did this great post showing that he even uses lots of custom-tailored poses and expressions, rather than the simple cookie-cutter repeated frames that so many comic strip artists rely on. This is rare for comics strips in its whole history - let alone in the 80s or 90s.

http://unmitigatedaudacity2.blogspot.com/2009/01/great-calvin-expressions.html

Too bad Watterson left the field when he seemed to have been its last hope.

Sorry these images aren't larger...

Gottfredson Rubber Hose Fun

My theory is that during the first year of an animation program, the students should learn basic animation by using classic rubber-hose characters and moving them the way animators moved things in the 1930s. Then they should work their way into slightly more organic characters the next year or 2.

WHY LEARNING TO ANIMATE WITH RUBBER HOSE STYLE SPEEDS YOUR PROGRESS
It's a very appealing style on its own and Floyd Gottfredson did it well.







http://comicrazys.com/2010/06/01/mickey-and-his-horse-tanglefoot-1933-dailies-floyd-gottfredson/

Johnny Hart's Cartoon Physics

Johnny Hart's drawings look simple on the surface but they are very clever, I think. He has a great natural sense of cartoon physics or cause and effect - how one event leads logically (or illogically) to another.
It looks like he could have been influenced by Roadrunner cartoons.
His drawings have a lot of tension and feeling in them too. Each drawing contains a lot of complex information. ...and the continuity of the successive drawings is brilliant. He only has a small number of panels to describe a lot of action. Making the decisions of what parts in between the action you can leave out and still get the idea and gag across is very brain-intensive. I have trouble with that. I want to show every tiny fraction of action in my continuity and it tends to drag out the cartoons longer than necessary.
On the other hand, Hart is one of my biggest influences and largely sub-consciously. My storyboard scribble style is much like his finished drawing style. Fast and just what is essential, without worrying about making a perfectly polished drawing.
This is how I see the function of storyboards-to convey the continuity and essential part of the gag, feelings and story.
What's really hard is hanging on to these essentials from department to department in an animation studio, where the successive polishers smooth out the finish, but sand down the guts.

Look how much information and feeling is packed in that middle panel of the Dinosaur smashing into the tree. You see the impact as the main action. The tree is being ripped out by the roots as a secondary action and the roots are dragging in the opposite direction of the tree. On top of that, all the dirt is flying off the roots. The leaves are being smashed against the top of the tree in heavy bunches and a few individual leaves for texture.

Then the tree impact is causing Peter to fly out of the leaves on a raft (why does he have a raft in a tree?)

Hart is conveying pacing in still drawings, without the luxury of animation and real time. Very impressive.

You have to be a very good editor to draw powerful comic strips like this.

The Ripples - George Clark

Here's a guy who has almost every cartoon skill wrapped up together: great composition
Each individual shape is fun and designy, yet it fits neatly within a complex group of shapes
Just the shape of this car and window is beautiful on its own. Then it is filled with a beautiful grouping of flowing organic yet constructed characters
His poses all work together. They don't seem just pasted next to each other like some of those modern flat cartoons I've been making fun of. This is all thought out to make each object part of a whole composed picture.
He is a master of negative shapes between the flowing poses. The spaces between are as pretty as the forms they separate.
And then, like some other rare comic strip artists' work, all the individual panels are composed against each other to make the whole age look planned and designed.
I suspect that George Clark was a big influence on Owen Fitzgerald - and therefore Mort Drucker. Look their stuff up for similar approaches to composition, flow and design.




next: later Clark and pretty girls


http://lambiek.net/artists/c/clark_george.htm

http://www.animationarchive.org/labels/Complete%20Guide%20To%20Cartooning.html