Ploost?!?!

Panels 1 & 2 of Stickleback Part 6 Page One, sans lettering and titles.
Stickleback © 2007 Rebellion/2000AD
Created by Ian Edginton & me.

Stickleback part 6 is out - have to say, I was slightly nonplussed by the placement of the titles and credit boxes over the figures in the big panel on page one, when there was plenty of space at the top of the panel and a blank space next to it. Still, it's impossible to judge without knowing how much time pressure Tharg & his droids were under - I've done dafter things myself after a night without sleep.

The setting for part 6 is based on the real Greek Orthodox Cathedral of Saint Sophia in Bayswater. Check out the link for a groovy Quicktime VR tour of the interior (best reference I've ever had, short of visiting a location myself).

I've nearly completed the final part of Stickleback; I though originally I'd have to go three nights without sleep this week to get done, but after a massive work binge at the weekend, I got far enough ahead that I can wind down to Friday's deadline in a semi-relaxed manner.

XTNCT Collection is out!

My copies of the XTNCT collection came through the other day - thanks to Jonathan Oliver and his team at Rebellion for their excellent work - the book is beautifully produced (as was the recent Leviathan collection.)

Because it's in the squarer Megazine/old 2000AD format, this book looks like a traditional Franco-Belgian BD album - an impression added to by the muted cover colours, though I didn't plan it that way.

The interior pages have reproduced really well; the grey tones (always a bit of a challenge) are pretty consistent all the way through (much more so than the Megazine printings) and the whole thing is on a luscious glossy paper stock. Buy one now, and help to keep my fifteen imaginary starving orphaned children in rusks.

Notes From The Cupboard Of Doom

I'm on the final slog to finish Stickleback - ten pages to complete by 2nd February, so I'm going to be spending most of my time locked in my little cubbyhole aka The Cupboard Of Doom. As a result, my blog postings may become even more irregular than usual for the next couple of weeks.

Part nine is another double episode (ten pages), with some real unexpected twists and a couple of absolute laugh-out-loud moments. Though Ian and I have been developing Stickleback for three years now, it's only when you get to the scripting stage that you really find out what the characters are going to be like. I just love what Ian has done with Stickleback himself; there's a strangely engaging willfully cheerful immorality to the character, as if Wilfred Bramble were playing the Antichrist.

False colour and finished-state versions of Stickleback Part 5 Page 5 Panel 2.
Stickleback is copyright © 2007 Rebellion/2000AD
Created by Ian Edginton & me.

In case I don't have the time next week, I thought I'd post advance warning that the groovy twisted-roots panel I blogged as a false-coloured image will be turning up in next week's 2000AD (Prog 1521, Stickleback Part 5).

I was also cheered to note that a few pages of Stickleback Part 3 printed a bit dark, and some of Part 4 printed a bit too light. This may seem like a really odd thing for an artist to say; the reason is that my hero Alberto Breccia had just the same problems with certain episodes of his classic strip Perramus, and sharing those problems makes me feel oddly reassured that I'm getting the technique right :-)

Stickleback Parts 3 & 4 References

Fewer than in the earlier ones, but here we go:

Part 3

Mister Punch
The comparison of the malign hunchback Punch with Stickleback is pretty obvious - however, you may not know that the figure of Mister Punch derives from the Harlequin - the unpredictable trickster figure of the Comedia dell'Arte.







Stickleback's Loft
Some of this was covered by lettering, but from left to right we have a giant stone head of Hastur from Leviathan, a poster advertising The Circus of Dr. Lao , A portrait of Capt. Jack Dancer from Red Seas, the After Eight Ormolu clock (between Stickleback's feet), Kali from Ray Harryhausen’s The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and, symbolic of Valentine Bey's situation, a Greek vase showing Herakles battling the Hydra.


Part 4

Festival Road
I messed up here; this should have been Festive Road, home of Mister Ben (from the 1970's UK children's TV series of the same name.)

Haircut

Before & After

To paraphrase Elizabeth Tudor, I have my hair cut "once a quarter whether I need it or no". Style-hound that I am, I have it razored down to a number 3 cut by my belovèd, the tonsurious Dr. F. The resulting suede effect will last me a good three months before becoming long enough to be irksome (ie requiring combing at least once a day).

There was an unexpected side effect to 2007's first razor cut; on my first day out with it, I was chatted up by a perky young man at a supermarket checkout. While I was not tempted to stray from the paths of heterosexuality, the encounter didn't half cheer me up; I'd never been chatted up by a perky young thing of any description before, not even back in the long-ago days when I was a perky young thing myself.

Matthew Badham Has A Blog!

Matthew Badham, comics journalist and interview king of the Megazine (he's done both me and Ian in the past year) now has a blog.*

Aside from being an all-round good egg, Matthew is also a man of no mean physical resilience - that's to say, he's remained on good terms with me even after sampling my cooking.

*That is to say, he's had a blog since 16th December, but I've only just got round to mentioning it.

References In Stickleback Parts 1 & 2

With part 3 of Stickleback out already, I thought it might be fun to share some of the stuff we’ve referred to so far in the series. Ian often drops little references into his scripts, and though sometimes they'll appear in small panels that make them too tiny to read (not to mention I'm horribly bad at likenesses), I always have a go at fitting them in.

Part One

Gog and Magog
There are numerous myths and legends surrounding the names Gog and Magog all around the world - in Stickleback we're referring to the tradition in which Gog and Magog are two giants who are the defenders of London (figures of them are carried in the Lord Mayor's Show to this day).

See Wikipedia entry for Gog and Magog

Ian must have a bit of thing for these two; if you look carefully, statues of Gog and Magog can also be seen on either side of the door to the Martian's chamber in the last chapter of Scarlet Traces .


Victorian London
Our rather fanciful version of the city, laced with overhead walkways, draws inspiration from the set design (by John Box?) for Carol Reed's 1968 film of Lionel Bart's Oliver!








Abdul Alhazred
Readers of the work of H. P. Lovecraft will be familiar with the name of Abdul Alhazred the Mad Arab, translator of the dreaded Necronomicon.








Part Two

Will Hay, Moore Marriot and Graham Moffatt
The trio of comic actors, here more-or-less reprising their roles as Buggleskelly, Harbottle and Albert from the 1937 film Oh Mister Porter!










PC 49 and Sgt. George Dixon
Practically impossible to make out, these two - PC 49 (Police Constable Archibald Berkeley-Willoughby) was the eponymous hero of a popular BBC radio series which ran from 1947-53.

George Dixon was the lead character of the television series Dixon of Dock Green. Played by Jack Warner, the character was first introduced in the 1949 Ealing film The Blue Lamp, and featured in a stage play and a series of one-off television plays before the BBC commissioned a regular television series, which ran from 1955 to 1976.



The Jolly Cripple Pub
Happy haunt of the crew from Red Seas, this is the first hint that Stickleback shares a universe with Ian Edginton and Steve Yeowell's popular strip for 2000AD.








Background Characters in The Jolly Cripple
You'd do well to spot them, but background left are meant to be Janus Stark and Blind Largo (Valentine Bey spills Stark's pint as he staggers out of the pub on the last page of this episode). Sat just behind Len Chipps is someone who might be Adam Eterno, and on the wall is a picture of the former proprietress (Mistress Meg?) from Red Seas.



Tonga the Pygmy
Inspired by the Andaman Islander from Conan-Doyle's The Sign of the Four.

Alberto Breccia & Me

From Perramus by Juan Sasturain and Alberto Breccia

For some time now I've wanted to publish something about Alberto Breccia. If he's known at all in the English speaking comics world, it's probably as the father of artist Enrique Breccia; but Alberto was a prodigious talent - I'd go as far as to say, one of the all-time greats of world comics.

I felt it especially important to write something now, as my latest work on the 2000AD series Stickleback owes a great deal to Breccia, particularly the series Perramus, for which he devised a paint-and-collage technique which looked like nothing before or since. With the following article (split across four posts for manageability), I'll try to show a line of development from Breccia's brilliant but relatively conventional work in the early 60's, through to the unique and ground breaking work of the 1970's and 80's.

I believe that if you're an artist, you should talk about your influences, partly give credit where credit's due, and partly to share those things that have inspired you.

I hope you're as inspired by Alberto Breccia's work as I have been.

Breccia Part 1: Mort Cinder
Breccia Part 2: El Eternauta to Lovecraft
Breccia Part 3: Perramus
Breccia Conclusion

Alberto Breccia Part 1: Mort Cinder

Breccia Introduction
Breccia Part 2: El Eternauta to Lovecraft
Breccia Part 3: Perramus
Breccia Conclusion

All illustrations in this section taken from Mort Cinder by Hector Oesterheld and Alberto Breccia

Appearing in Mysterix magazine from 1962 to 1964, Mort Cinder was written by Hector Oesterheld , who had already collaborated with Breccia on a series called Sherlock Time in 1958. It is the tale of a London antiquarian, Ezra Winston, who is befriended by a mysterious immortal, Mort Cinder. Breccia based the look of Winston on himself: Mort Cinder is supposedly based on his assistant and friend, Horacio Lalia.

The strip is drawn using a method called chiaroscuro - the drawings are made out of blocks of solid black and white with the minimum of outlines. Breccia also starts using texture (note the dabbed ink on Ezra Winston’s scarf in the panel above). Because it’s so high-contrast, chiaroscuro is by definition dramatic and is good for creating a mysterious or spooky atmosphere; Mort Cinder is a mystery series with supernatural elements, and the art style is most at home with the episodes that veer towards the horror genre.
Applying chiaroscuro technique to the human face and figure is relatively straightforward; applying it to complex subjects such as architecture and street scenes is what separates the men from the boys, as in the following:

This panel is just stunning - there’s not an outline to be seen. He’s drawing the whole thing with a brush, too. Something to note - although this drawing is strongly figurative (“realistic”), it’s also quite impressionistic - that is, Breccia’s more concerned with mood and atmosphere than showing every last detail. We can see important stuff - the sign “Ezra Winston, Antiquary” is visible - but we can’t make out exactly what’s in the windows of the shop, or the exact form of the front door (though, charmingly, Breccia has included the detail of an early-morning “pinta*” on the front step).

*though in decline, the British tradition of doorstep delivery of milk in pint bottles continues to this day.

Another street scene from Mort Cinder, and one that I think is more significant in terms of Breccia’s later development. Since the whole idea of using chiaroscuro is to produce dramatic, high contrast drawings, the idea is to avoid adding anything in the way of cross-hatching or shading to blend the whites and blacks. But look at the far right of the panel; Breccia’s adding texture to the shadow areas, breaking up the blacks with dabbed brush strokes to suggest bricks. Note also the trees at the far end of the lane, made using negative space - that is, he’s drawing the gaps between the branches, leaving the white of the paper to represent the branches themselves.
Though this doesn’t look like much in itself, I think it’s an early sign of the prevailing trend in Breccia’s later work - a move towards expressionism - that is, a way of drawing in which the marks of the drawing themselves become an important feature of the drawing.

That explanation’s a bit clumsy, I know; you can see better what I mean in the following examples:

This is possibly one of the most famous panels from Mort Cinder - where Ezra Winston, terrified by something he’s encountered in a graveyard, flees down an avenue of trees. But look at the difference between this and the previous panels - this isn’t an attempt by Breccia to draw real trees. He doesn’t try to render bark or leaves or shading- instead, he’s found a beautiful way of laying down ink that suggests not only the silhouettes of trees, but an atmosphere of menace too. The drawing itself has become the star of the show, without detracting from the storytelling.
That last point is very important - because, to paraphrase E. M. Forster, "comics, oh dearie me yes, comics are about telling stories." The images in comics have to convey information - action, character, atmosphere, situation - to help carry the story along, otherwise there's no point to them. The more expressionistic your drawing style, the more risk that the content of the drawings will be lost. For the rest of his career, Breccia would walk a tightrope, pushing the boundaries of style and technique, without abandoning storytelling. That’s very difficult to do, and it's one of the reasons I rate him so very highly.

Finally, this is the clearest example; an even more expressionist night landscape from the same story. Here Breccia’s starting to really use texture for the first time, playing the grittiness of a menacing, textured sky against the bold white silhouettes of the trees. It’s as “out there” as Mort Cinder was to get, but in later projects Breccia would build on this new way of working - and then some.

Breccia Introduction
Breccia Part 2: El Eternauta to Lovecraft
Breccia Part 3: Perramus
Breccia Conclusion

Alberto Breccia Part 2: El Eternauta to Lovecraft

Breccia Introduction
Breccia Part 1: Mort Cinder
Breccia Part 3: Perramus
Breccia Conclusion

Also written by Hector Oesterheld , El Eternauta was serialised in Gente magazine in 1969. Technically it is El Eternauta II; the original was written by Oesterheld and drawn by Francisco Solano Lopez for Hora Cero, starting in 1958. Both versions feature a time traveller (the "eternaut") who visits Oesterheld to warn of a future disaster. The much more political overtones of the second version may have helped contribute to Oesterheld's eventual demise (see part 3 of this article).

Panels from El Eternauta by Hector Oesterheld and Alberto Breccia, 1969

From the late 1960’s on, Breccia began experimenting with new techniques for creating comic art. From what I’ve been told, El Eternauta was drawn using oil-based inks on a glass table, which allowed Breccia to create the unique swirl textures found in what would normally be solid blacks (see the shadows in the first of the two panels above).
The normal procedure for reproducing artwork at this time was to make a drawing on paper, photograph it, then use the resulting negative to make a printing plate. Because Breccia was drawing directly onto a glass sheet, light could be shone through it to make a printer’s negative by means of photographic contact printing. Once the negative was developed, the glass sheet would be scraped clean and the next page drawn onto it in turn!!
I suspect this technique must have been difficult to control, as some of the drawing in El Eternauta seems a bit shaky compared to Mort Cinder; some of the panels are also very abstract and frankly, pretty difficult to read. Reader reaction at Gente was apparently pretty negative, and the strip finished rather abruptly. Nevertheless, El Eternauta represents a step towards the future; Breccia’s taken the idea of using chiaroscuro, but with detail or texture added in the “black” areas, one step further.


The Lovecraft Adaptations

From La Cosa En El Umbral by Norberto Buscaglia & Alberto Breccia
collected in Breccia-Lovecraft: Los Mitos De Cthulu

Between 1972 and 1975, sometimes in collaboration with writer Norberto Buscaglia, Breccia adapted nine stories by H.P. Lovecraft (collected as Breccia-Lovecraft: Los Mitos De Cthulu). Here he really began to play both with technique and style; the early stories feature finely-rendered pen or pencil drawings that were pretty much in keeping with the style of Mort Cinder ten years before; the later stories are rendered in a whirlwind of paint, collage and monoprint that verges at times on the completely abstract.
Breccia begins using monoprint (a technique of drawing with slow-drying inks onto a non-porous surface such as glass and then making a one-time transfer onto paper) first as a means of drawing the undrawable - the splodgy textures he produces are perfect for suggesting grisly nastiness (as with the skull, above) or Lovecraft's "unnameable horrors"- and later as a means of generating textures to be used in collage. This collage technique was the one which would feed into his work on Perramus in the 1980’s.

From La Ciudad Sin Nombre (The Nameless City) by Norberto Buscaglia & Alberto Breccia,
collected in Breccia-Lovecraft: Los Mitos De Cthulu

A more conventional use of collage soccurs in the relatively restrained La Ciudad Sin Nombre (The Nameless City). Here Breccia uses what look like photographs clipped from magazines to provide textures for cave walls, rocky mountains and deserts.*

*I found myself thinking about this strip during a conversation with the artist Ingebjørg Jensen about ways to represent wreckage and rubble in her graphic novel about the wartime bombing of Bergen. I realised it would be easy to reproduce the effect in Photoshop using scanned textures or digital photographs. That was the start of my interest in simulating Breccia’s collage techniques using digital media.

Breccia Introduction
Breccia Part 1: Mort Cinder
Breccia Part 3: Perramus
Breccia Conclusion

Alberto Breccia Part 3: Perramus

Breccia Introduction
Breccia Part 1: Mort Cinder
Breccia Part 2: El Eternauta to Lovecraft
Breccia Conclusion

All images in this section from Perramus by Alberto Breccia & Juan Sasturain

Artistic achievement aside, the creation and publication of Perramus has to be hailed as an act of courage. It is story about life under dictatorship, begun in 1982 when the military government in Argentina was still in power. The consequences of attracting the attention of the regime would have been plain to Breccia and writer Jan Sasturain - Breccia’s former collaborator Hector Oesterheld had become one of the “disappeared” in 1976*. The first book of Perramus received an award from Amnesty International in 1989.
*See Oesterheld’s Wikipedia entry for details.

Style; though he’s pulled back from the more extreme, abstract drawing style used in the later Lovecraft adaptations (and much of the work in between), the characters in Perramus are relatively stylised, moving towards a much more cartoony look in the later stories. Several real persons appear as characters. The author Jorge Luis Borges, who is a regular cast member, gets a relatively restrained treatment, often based closely on photo reference. Others, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Fidel Castro and Frank Sinatra are caricatured a little more freely.

Backgrounds are another matter; here Breccia plays freely with all the tools he’s learned to use in the preceding years. This panel (from page two of the first story) combines watercolour for the sky, plus a collage of various hand-made textures and even a photograph (bottom left). Two important things to note: first, Breccia’s still working with a kind of chiaroscuro - see how you have areas of dead white highlight, with the texture and detail concentrated in the shadow areas? Second, he’s keeping everything very graphic; that is to say, all those bits of texture and splodginess are confined within hard edges. It’s still all about the drawing.

A typical townscape from Perramus; Breccia not only plays off dark against light, but also different types of texture against each other to give the buildings shape.

The organic disorder of the jungle balance against the stark regular lines of the aircraft. I suspect the jungle is a monoprint (oil-based ink on glass?); Breccia’s not afraid to use accident, letting the paint take its own direction (within limits) and riding the edge of chaos to produce an astonishing end result.

Complex as it looks, this is still chiaroscuro; the guy in the chair stands out white against a jumble of blocks of texture. Overall, you can read the background as a street scene with figures, though individual details may be unclear. What’s important is that the foreground figure stands out. Though some of the panels in Perramus can be very busy, Breccia never lets self-expression overwhelm the storytelling.

Perramus is a unique and outstanding piece of work; possibly because of the technical know-how needed, it's never really been imitated. Breccia balances "realistic" drawing, cartooning, expressionism, painting, drawing, order and chaos in a way that had never been done before or has been since.*

*If that statement seems a bit odd coming from someone who is attempting to reproduce the look of Perramus, it's because I consider my own work a mere, pale shadow of Breccia's.

Breccia Introduction
Breccia Part 1: Mort Cinder
Breccia Part 2: El Eternauta to Lovecraft
Breccia Conclusion

Alberto Breccia: Conclusion

Breccia Introduction
Breccia Part 1: Mort Cinder
Breccia Part 2: El Eternauta to Lovecraft
Breccia Part 3: Perramus

From Perramus by Juan Sasturain and Alberto Breccia

Alberto Breccia’s work is desperately under-appreciated in the English speaking world. This article can only scratch the surface - I haven’t touched on his adaptations of Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson, or any of his wonderful colour work, including arguably his last great work, Dracula, Dracul, Vlad? Bah! a comical take on Dracula executed in a fully painted cartoon style different again from anything shown here. (For a fuller overview of his work, try the website Historieta Argentina.)
.
I rate Alberto Breccia so highly because, for the last thirty years of his life, he never stopped experimenting. He was always trying new techniques, new storytelling methods, new drawing styles. I don’t like everything he did, and not all of it is a success, but that's what happens when you constantly dare to try something new. What's remarkable is to see such a pioneering spirit in someone approaching the end of his career.
Breccia’s work was always fresh and always bold - and brave, too. I don’t mean "bravery" in some namby-pamby artistic “the fans won’t like it and I’ll get bad reviews” sense. I mean that he lived at a time and in a place where his work could have put him literally in danger of his life, yet he continued anyway.

Recommended Works

The website Historieta Argentina gives a comprehensive overview of Breccia's career, with samples.

Mort Cinder (1962) - 2 volumes. black & white
Breccia-Lovecraft: Mitos de Cthulu (1975) - 1 volume, black & white
Perramus - (1986) - 3 volumes (but, confusingly, 4 books; Books 1 & 2 are published as volume 1, Book 3 as volume 2, Book 4 as volume 3), black & white
Dracula, Dracul, Vlad? Bah! - (?date), 1 volume, colour.


Availability

Very little of Breccia's work has ever been translated into English - Fantagraphics started publishing Perramus in comic-book format in the 1990's, but sales were poor and only four issues (covering part of book one) came out. The only volume currently in print is the Alberto Breccia Sketchbook, actually an album of page layout sketches with text in both Spanish and English.
In France, Les Humanöides Associes published reprints of Mort Cinder (2 volumes), L'Eternaut, Le Couer Revelateur (Poe adaptations) and Dracula, Dracul, Vlad? Bah! in the early 2000's while Casterman published the whole of Perramus as three deluxe albums in the 1990's.
In German, there are translations of Mort Cinder (2 volumes), and Perramus (3 volumes) , both published by Carlsen Verlag in the 1990's.

To the best of my knowledge all of the above are currently out of print.

Spanish offer the best crop of titles, naturally, and a number of titles have come back into print in the last few years; my copy of Breccia-Lovecraft: Los Mitos de Ctulu was bought new in Spain only a couple of years ago. Titles seem to have been reprinted by a number of publishers, so your best bet is to google "Alberto Breccia" and look for Spanish language retail sites.

Most of my own collection has come via www.abebooks.com, a clearing house for second-hand bookshops around the world; it's an excellent source, reliable and cheap; I usually pay about £10 per volume including international postage. The only drawback is that shipments from the states can take a couple of months if you're not willing to pay a premium.

Breccia Introduction
Breccia Part 1: Mort Cinder
Breccia Part 2: El Eternauta to Lovecraft
Breccia Part 3: Perramus

Stickleback Cover

No Prog number yet I'm afraid (I usually find out when the thing hits the news stands), but I've been commissioned to do a Stickleback cover for 2000AD. Thought you might like to see pencils (left).

Part eight's in progress and has some corking moments - including yet another little cross-over within the "Edginton-verse" (of which more closer to the time).

Stickleback © 2007 Rebellion/2000AD.
Created by Ian Edginton & Me.