The powerful Wonder Woman opening this week’s Club is by Darwyn Cooke (1962-2016), a gifted Canadian artist who worked at Warner Bros. Animation in the 1990s (he designed the opening credits to Batman Beyond [1999-2001], for instance) before diving into print comics. Many of his signature achievements were at DC Comics, including a run on Catwoman (2001-02) with Ed Brubaker and the publication of his graphic novel about the members of the Justice League in the 1950s, The New Frontier (2004). Cooke’s last major project was a series of comics adaptations of four novels featuring a criminal named Parker by crime writer Donald Westlake; below are a few Cooke panels from The Outfit (1963 novel, 2010 adaptation.)
Here at the Club, we’ve previously praised the weekly YouTube cartoon workshops co-sponsored by the Black Mountain Institute and the magazine The Believer. New workshop videos include “Making Poetry Comics” with Bianca Stone; “Making Comics with Empathy” with Jamar Nicholas; “Drawing Worlds” with Tillie Walden (who drew the ethereal illustration above); and “Drawing Food” with Anu. All the Black Mountain / Believer videos are here. Please note: The programs are designed to be family-friendly, but they’re also recorded live, and sometimes the discussion between teacher and practitioners veers into adult topics. Please watch a workshop before sharing it with young kids.
By making so many images, activities, and exhibits available online, museums have been a heroic presence during the pandemic, and they continue to share art with us as we reconnect with social life. This is true of the Dallas Museum of Art, which posts extensive write-ups of their past and current exhibitions—one exhibit titled “For a Dreamer of Houses” gives us the fishy washing machine (Olivia Erlanger’s Pergusa) above—and offers a series of inexpensive virtual classes for toddlers and youngsters. Also of interest: The Museum’s “Games & Interactives” page, where you can find activities that encourage your child to “think like an architect,” paint like a Pointillist, and crack the codes in a virtual escape room!
Barbara Bradley (1927-2008) was a 20th-century commercial artist, author (Drawing People: How to Portray the Clothed Figure [2003]), and educator who designed and led the Illustration Program at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco for twenty-five years. (She has a campus building named after her on the Academy of Art campus.) On the Female Illustrators blog, Bradley talks about the trajectory of her career: her interest in art as a child, her years as a student at the University of California-Berkeley, her job at New York City’s Charles E. Cooper Studio, and her post-retirement work teaching art workshops at Disney and Pixar. Her talent as the “Queen of the Perkies and Cutes”—because she specialized in illustrating children, beautiful women, and bucolic family scenes–is clear in both a Flickr set of her art compiled by Lief Peng and a Pinterest board assembled by Kay Foth.
N.A.S.A.’s Astronomy Picture of the Day website is now 26 years old. It first went live in June 1995 and was one of the first sites to “make journalistic use of full web hypertext,” i.e. to imbed links in its text that take readers to other relevant sources of Internet information. The design of the Astronomy Picture site hasn’t been updated since 1995 either, which makes it a nostalgic reminder of the early days of the “World Wide Web.” And the pictures are beautiful! Here’s the main page where the daily picture gets posted, and here is a full archive of titled pictures, all 9,000+ of them. Above is a picture from 1972’s Apollo 17 mission, where astronauts Harrison Schmitt and Eugene Cernan had to repair their Moon Rover’s fender with “spare maps, clamps, and a grey strip of duct tape.”
Hector DeJean of the Crime Reads website looks at the early films featuring The Shadow, a violent, mysterious crimefighter and a star of pulp novels that pre-date Superman, Batman, and the Lone Ranger. DeJean discusses The Shadow Strikes (1937), International Crime (1938). The Shadow Returns (1946), and a 1994 Shadow movie starring Alec Baldwin, and concludes that the hero’s enigmatic inconsistencies make it “harder for audiences to grasp the central idea of the character.” Actually, I find DC Comics’ Shadow series (1973-75), written by Denny O’Neill and stylishly drawn by Michael Kaluta, Frank Robbins, and E.R. Cruz, to be a successful adaptation of The Shadow’s rough appeal. Below are a few covers from the original Shadow pulp novels, and images from Shadow stories by comics artists.
This weekly blog post is written and compiled by Craig Fischer. To send along recommendations, ideas, and comments, contact Craig at [email protected] [.]
