Still MORE Frank Talk On Drawing

We reach the midpoint of the Draw-Along With Frank Borth strips - this time with an important lesson that some modern artists (Yeah - you know who you are) missed when they were learning to draw - FEET!

If you're just joining us, here are parts One and Two of the series.

Three down, two to go. But let's jump back a bit to that Sketch-It of Ben Franklin we showed at the start of this series. It was numbered 6 - here are the previous 5...
 

With Ben Franklin, they saved the best for last, eh?

Ben Franklin is one of those people i think of when i think of Great Americans.
It's a shame our Fake President hates him so much, and is trying to destroy Franklin's works, isn't it?

But, i digress. (sorry, Peter)

If things go according to plan, we'll be back this afternoon with another little post for those who don't care for Art Lessons.

page art by Frank Borth from Treasure Chest Of Fun & Fact v18 #s 15 & 16 (1963)

Civilizations More Advanced Than Our Own

One of the many terrific artists who worked for Treasure Chest Of Fun & Fact whom we have yet to see here is Fran Matera. Unfortunately, Fran's most notable work, Chuck White (and his Friends), simply doesn't lend itself to to short form coverage like blog posts. It needs omnibus editions covering decades of evolving story.

We'll see Matera on some other series sometime, hopefully sometime soon, but while we're waiting we've got a little one-shot history comic written by D.H. Johnson. This feature is descended from earlier series like The What-If Fairy and The Story Of ________, at which we looked previously. Long after they dropped the formalized structure, they continued with strips that covered the story behind things in the world around their readers. In this strip, we look at the history that lead to Our Curious Calendar -

I realize that some may be confused by the assertation that this story covered civilizations more advanced than our own. That's likely a cognitive dissonance caused by confusing Technology and Civilization/Society.

When these societies encountered contradiction between their systems and objective reality, they labored to correct their systems to match reality. 
In our society, we work to correct (or at least re-label) reality to match our system.

Obviously, their civilizations were more Advanced.

page art by Fran Matera from Treasure Chest Of Fun & Fact v18 #9 (1963)

More Frank Talk On Drawing

Draw-Along With Frank Borth Part Two, or Parts Three & Four, depending on how you're counting, continuing from yesterday morning's post...

I realize that not everybody is interested in such things, nor likely to appreciate Frank's approach here. So while we continue this for the next few days, i'll try to do an unrelated post in the afternoons. (In theory at 3:33pm, Pacific Hermit Time)

Well - not exactly unrelated. All comics are 'related' - comics and movies are 'related' - and so on. I'll likely get even closer than that - i'm thinking we'll probably stick around in Treasure Chest Of Fun & Fact since we're here already.
Maybe we'll finally check back in with The Bear, eh?

page art by Frank Borth from Treasure Chest Of Fun & Fact v18 #s 13 & 14 (1963)

Frank Talk On Drawing

We were going to go flying again with the Franks (Moss & Borth), but as i was pulling pages i realized the we still had a major bit of Borth dangling. Quite a while back, i dropped this page into the mix of a scattered post -

Note that the Sketch-It is numbered - #6, implying a series.

In another post focused on covers from Treasure Chest Of Fun & Fact, i teased this cover -

Draw-Along With Frank Borth - #7, it says! 

Back in 1963, Borth serialized how-to-draw lessons, and they were quite good. He touched on things that i usually don't see - though, to be honest, i haven't read a lot of How To Draw books. I already had my own approach by the time i found them. So, i could be making ign'ant statements here.

But, for example, in the first lesson he talks about the usual bit of how everything is made from squares, circles, and triangles. But then, before going further, he has the students actually practice drawing the geometric shapes, getting comfortable with them before moving forward. Quite practical and solid foundation work. And you even get a sense of what Scott McCloud would elaborate upon decades later regarding the nature and history of art & storytelling. (Did McCloud refer to sign language as "drawing on air"?)

And, of course, it's Frank Borth! It's not hard to figure out i'm fond of his artwork - we're passing a score of posts featuring it. TCoF&F published 20 issues each school year. The first half of volume 18 featured another serial from the Capt. Frank T. Moss & Frank Borth team (One of their Ferdy tales. We'll get to him), and when that completed Draw-Along filled the space for the next 10 issues.

You know where this is going, right? Of course we're going to run them all. They're generally five pages each, so we'll do two at a time. That way i won't have to fight too hard with Blogger's defective image upload. (I get tired of waiting for over half an hour for them to not frell up the transfer and leave it hanging.)

Observe the footnote at the bottom of panel one below. 16 years at TCoF&F at that point. And most of those years, he and Capt. Moss did a serialized tale together. We've seen The Enchanted Flivver series, but there was also The Champ (no - get that picture out of your head) and Ferdy, both of whom have pages pulled to run here eventually, and many others including one-shot stories. Since Treasure Chest of Fun & Fact wasn't available to the general public, and i don't believe any of these have been collected and reprinted as they should be, we'll be coming back repeatedly for more. (Along with a bunch of other hidden treasures from artists like Joe Sinnott and Reed Crandall, for whom words like Great and Legendary are often used.)
For now, let's get to that "panel one below" -

For the second lesson, the inside front & back covers were utilized to provide an artist's aid -

I liked the old styrofoam head i used (an cheap wig stand) cosiderably better since this thing is really only good for front & side views. But i like the concept. And the X shape does make a Funny Face of sorts.

On to the lesson!

You're going to have to practice fast since the lessons continue tomorrow (i hope). 
Better get to it!

page art by Frank Borth from Treasure Chest Of Fun & Fact V18 #s 11 & 12 (1963)

Stupor, Snooper, or Blooper?

Today we've got a semi-random sampling of old comics with little connective tissue. They're all comedy strips and they offer up the choices titling this post - StuporMan, the Snooper Man, and BlooperMan.  The first two come from the '40s, and the last one comes from the '60s; twice. They all just jumped out as i was passing while thinking about another, harder to write, post.

Nonsense is always easier. Just ask our government.

From the first issue of Joker Comics, by Douglas Grant and Harry Ramsey, we've got StuporMan -

Twas only single digit minutes later when i bumbed into Soapy Sam, the Snooper Man - close enough for the rhyme to ring...
 

And not 15 minutes after that, BlooperMan got in on the act - and so a post was born. We've actually seen Blooperman before, on the cover of Go-Go Comics, back when we were looking at Bunny Luv, i think. Or maybe while visiting Grass Green's work on Superella. Either way, now we can finally see who that guy on the cover was, with Jon D'Agostino drawing the strip...

Some days are sillier than others.

page art by Douglas Grant & Harry Ramsey, ???, and Jon D'Agostino from Joker Comics #1, Terry And The Pirates #4, and Go-Go Comics #s 3 & 4 (1942, 1947, 1966)