Comic: Age of the Dragon

Go to: The Bristol Board, by Charles Vess

Comic-Con Album Pt 12

Jeff Smith

Charles Vess

Back at the Cartoon Books, a PA message declaring the official close of Comic-Con causes someone to pull out a bottle of champagne. Toasts are made. And there is a visible sense of relief over reaching the end of another convention.

Pt 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

Drawing Down The Moon

By Charles Vess, Susanna Clarke

As someone who enjoys the work of popular fantasy illustrator Charles Vess, I haven't followed his development as an artist all that closely. So a lot of the images compiled within the pages of this 200 page retrospective Drawing Down the Moon: The Art of Charles Vess were a pleasant surprise. If I had to sum up his oeuvre as presented in this book, it would be that Vess has been extremely succesful in pursuing projects that were suitable to his individual talents. For example, he's returned to William Shakespeare's ageless comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream several times throughout his career. That choice is emblematic of him - Vess seems particularly drawn to stories that deal with the intersection between the realms of the mundane and the magical.

One thing that I can relate to some degree are his various artistic influences. Vess cites comics legends such as Jack Kirby, George Herriman, Russ Manning, and Hal Foster. But he was also strongly informed by the work of classic fantasy illustrators from the late 19th and early 20th century such as Maxfield Parrish, Arthur Rackham, Richard Dadd, Alphonse Mucha, and Howard Pyle. Some of his early attempts at comic book storytelling are reproduced, and show that Vess had already learned to blend his comic and illustration influences. Vess exhibited many of the characteristics of his illustration heroes: The lithe figures, pastoral settings, the finely textured pen and ink cross hatching, and the harmonious color palette and subdued tones of his subtractive style of painting. Vess had all the necessary tools to become an accomplished artist. Those youthful efforts contained just the smallest hints of the command for multi-layered tableaux and the mastery of fanciful decorative elements found in his later, more mature work.

One big misstep, from the way he tells it, was enrolling at the department of painting and printmaking of Virginia Commonwealth University, where he graduated with a BFA. Whatever valuable technical skills he acquired came at the expense of disapproval from his peers. At the time the faculty was strongly influenced by the abstract expressionist movement - the antithesis to the narrative art dear to Vess. "I had to struggle for many years to regain that lost, individual sense of whimsical fantasy that those school years tried to squelch." I guess the pop art movement had not yet penetrated the walls of VCU's academia.

The Fairy Market

Another odd choice which is only briefly touched on were his attempts to work for Heavy Metal magazine. The publication's emphasis on sci-fi, combined with a preference for a brighter, more garish palette, buff figures, and a blood-and-guts approach more in line with Frank Frazetta than with Aubrey Beardsley (just to name two of Vess' early heroes) seemed like a poor fit. Unsurprisingly, one of the magazine's editors would describe his art as "too nice" for their purposes.

They Were Like Knights and Great Ladies out of Some Medieval Story Book

However, working in the comic book industry allowed Vess to eventually make his way back to the faerie idiom and narrative illustration, especially when he began collaborating with fan-favorite writer Neil Gaiman - a professional relationship that continues up to the present. His paintings for Gaiman's novel Stardust remains his most ambitious, and one of his most successful, bodies of work to date. Along with wider recognition came greater freedom to choose who to collaborate with and which stories were available to illustrate: whether it was the victorian-era J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, modern emulators like Charles de Lint and Susanna Clarke, the darker horror-fantasies of George R.R. Martin, pro bono work for local community organizations, or his own self-publishing efforts through Green Man Press. While some of these projects are bound to come across better than others, depending on the reader's own tastes, there's a remarkable stylistic consistency to his art in this later period of his career that speaks to how carefully he's built his reputation as one the industry's foremost fantasy illustrators.

The Merry Dancer's Emporium

While I have my own quibbles with the book's design (I don't particularly care for the cover's color scheme and would have preferred the text to blend into the cover image), there's not much to complain about the content of the book. Susanna Clarke provides a fairly apt introduction. Apart from the reproductions of the finished artwork, there are samples of some of the underlying line art sprinkled throughout the book. Vess indulges the art geeks by concluding with an informative section on how he created the book's cover art. Overall, Drawing Down the Moon is as satisfying a retrospective as any found in today's market.

A Dream of Apples

Bone: Rose

By Jeff Smith, Charles Vess, Steve Hamaker

I've started to re-read my Bone collection, which is composed of various original pamphlets and pre-Scholastic trade paperbacks. It's been many years since I first examined the series as a whole. But I decided to begin at the middle, and read Rose. This comic stands out for a number of reasons. Although it's often labeled as a prequel, it wasn't originally released after the completion of the series, but in the midst of its serialization. Creator Jeff Smith took a break from Bone to initiate Rose and Stupid, Stupid Rat Tails. Both projects were collaborations between Smith and other creators. Both were set in the distant past of the Bone universe. Since the series had begun to roll out a few significant revelations, such as the identities of the hidden main antagonists, this was as good a time as any for Smith to fill in some of the backstory for the readers. As such, Rose and SSRT serve as a kind of interlude, as well as a glorified flashback sequence, before Bone would move inexorably towards a climactic showdown.

Of course Rose contains no real surprises, since it requires that the reader be already familiar with the fantasy world revealed in the series at that point. Without the Bone cousins as reader identification characters, the story's fairy tale elements come to the foreground. This also means that much of the characterization that makes Bone so appealing is missing here. In the series, the eponymous hero Rose Harvestar is known as Gran'ma Ben - a no-nonsense, tough as nails farmer who races against cows because, well why the hell not? However in Rose, both she and her sister older Briar become archetypal feuding siblings: The latter's a power-hungry schemer, while the former is completely oblivious to the latter's open hatred towards her. Individual motives for their behavior don't extend far beyond one being pure and good, and the other being pure evil. Supporting character Lucius Down, a gruff but noble barkeep in Bone, has zero personality here except as an easily manipulated bodyguard. And the cigarette smoking Great Red Dragon in transformed into a stern, judgmental, and stubbornly impassive observer. The absence of the Bone cousins is usually brought up to explain the lack of humor. But my guess is that Smith was more concerned with producing a straight fantasy than injecting even a bit of levity into the story.

This makes Charles Vess an appropriate choice as the book's artist. As someone influenced by Arthur Rackham, his art is charming enough to please adults while still appearing creepy enough to scare younger readers. But it's a different school of illustration from the Disney animation style that informs the rest of Bone. With each chapter, Vess becomes more capable with translating Smith's characters into his own idiom. But a few, most noticeably the Great Red Dragon, betray and uneasy balance between Smith and Vess' divergent artistic approaches. Rose is also the only book with interior art that was originally published in color. This contributed to its initial impact among fans who were accustomed to seeing the characters in black and white. Even today, his application of light color washes contrasts significantly with the more heavily textured styles found in most digitally painted comics. Vess is very adept at using color to enhance the story. As the mood becomes darker, the warmer reds, oranges, and yellows are gradually replaced by cooler greens and blues. White snow that initially appears in the background suddenly falls more heavily as the situation grows more dire, until it envelops the landscape. It's a traditional narrative device. But it's gorgeously executed by Vess.

When set against the events of the rest of the Bone series, Rose is a small scale work. The overall tone of the book is sinister and foreboding. And the ending is left unsettled not only to remain consistent with concurrent issues within the series, but also to foreshadow upcoming events. In retrospect, the battles depicted in Rose were probably a dry run for the even grander armed confrontations that would take place in future chapters of Bone. But since Rose is collected as a separate work to be read after the Bone story-line, most readers will find it redundant. The Bone series repeats most of the pertinent information found in Rose anyway. But when Rose first came out, it only added more intriguing layers, helped along with a dash of color, to the then unfolding Bone saga.