FRANCIS BACON (Irish-born, 1909-1992) was known as being the life of any party, staying out all night, entertaining everyone at a bar or party with his boisterous wit and fascinating opinions and insights on any subject. He was one of the first artists whose work got me really excited to learn more about art. He’s a figurative painter – he primarily paints portraits, often of friends and lovers, often of those who have passed away, and then addressing issues of loss – but his brushwork and imagery is unsettling, raw, brutal, and horrifying; almost more properly descended from medieval depictions of Hell and its eternally anguished sufferers than from classical portraiture – except for the clear Godlessness in Bacon’s world view. He considers his work realist – not because of photo-realistic qualities (which are absent), but because his work instills a very real, visceral, emotional reaction. His portraits feel existential, alienated, claustrophobic, tormented, bleak, and alone, and they often literally scream within their confined spaces.
For some reason, all through art school, I had very little interest in Monet, although I do remember a student in class sharing an art book that we flipped through together, and I began to realize how Monet had done a series of very similar paintings of a cathedral, and then later in the book, he had done a number of very similar paintings of hay stacks in the fields. My fellow student said that she found these series interesting, and pointed out that Monet was looking at how light played on these places at different times of the day. So Monet would paint the setting in the morning, and then he woud paint it again, at high sun, or during sunset – or on a cloudy day, and again on a sunny day. These types of images, then, become more interesting to me as you see them as a series, and not just as a stand-alone piece. And from a comic book point of view, they become narrative, or filmic, rather than one moment in time – because it documents changes in time.
When I began my comic, Brush with Peril, referencing art by Monet was the last thing on my mind. I thought of him as a painter of parks and plants and “girly things” that weren’t suitable for a manly man like me who only enjoys spies and fast cars and sports and guns and other manly things like that. HOWEVER, spy novels have to have suspenseful scenes on trains, and when I started looking for train themes in the history of art, a number of Monet’s paintings popped up, and I realized that this too was somewhat of a series he had dabbled with. In fact, this is considered his first series of paintings that concentrate on a theme. AND I really liked this series, so I would say that Monet’s trains were my gateway drug into an appreciation of his work.
CLAUDE MONET (French, 1840-1926). A founder of Impressionist painting, in which artists, usually in nature, try to quickly capture impressions of the countryside they see before them, using fast, raw brush strokes, live at the scene, before the weather or light changes. As an appreciator of Batman and Daredevil and other super-heroes who beat up bad guys, I never had much interest in his work; I felt Monet’s subject matter was a little “sissy-ish.” However, when I finally saw his humongous originals of lily pads, I was blown away. When I began attempting to draw them for this comic, I gained a new appreciation of his illusions of the plants above the water, the surface of the water, and what lies under the water. How do you represent all that depth and dimension with only paint on a flat two-dimensional canvas?? It’s been argued that these were the first abstract paintings in art history.
GEORGES SEURAT (French, 1859-1891) devised, without any tradition before him, a mathematically precise painting technique of color theory, where he juxtaposed tiny dots of contrasting colors close together, so that the viewers’ eyes blend the colors optically. This may be one of my earliest realizations about the magic of art, having an elementary school teacher show the class how all these tiny dots combine to make an enormous drawing of a park! His paintings took years, often with dozens of preparatory studies beforehand, and as a result his actual body of work is small (seven monumental paintings, hundreds of drawings and sketches, forty smaller scale paintings and sketches). The average artist doesn’t show their full potential until the two-thirds mark of their lives. Seurat painted his masterpiece at age 25 and died at age 31, the cause of death uncertain.
Vincent van Gogh had trouble hiring models, for monetary reasons, but also, I picture a man who was thoroughly unpleasant to be around, not “a people person” that townspeople are flocking to go up alone to his studio to spend lengthy chunks of time with him.
While Van Gogh was living in Arles from 1888-1889, he was primarily producing landscapes. But Joseph Roulin came to be a loyal and supportive friend, and not only wound up posing for multiple portraits, he also had his family – his wife as well as children ranging from four months to seventeen years – pose. Van Gogh painted every one of them at least twice, and then let them keep a painting of each family member, so that their home was a literal portrait gallery of modern art.
Joseph was 47 at the time, a working class man at the railroad station as an entreposeur des postes. (Warehouse shipping and receiving? Storage and inventory maintenence? Who can translate French??)
How These Portraits Began Shaping my Comic
In researching for my comic book project, Brush with Peril, stumbling onto these portraits was my first opportunity to begin realizing that often artists revisit subject matter, and work at it, over and over again. This first glimpse and realization of an artist’s series began to become very fascinating for me to see, as I then found it again and again – Van Gogh’s bedroom, Bacon’s Popes, Freud’s self-portraits, Degas’ ballet dancers, Monet’s water lilies or hay stacks or trains. It not only becomes fascinating to get a sense for what an artist was attempting, but also in using these images for my narrative story-telling comic book, in which a character could appear more than once to have a continuing narrative, and a new painting could be referenced each time, rather than either re-using the same image, or trying to come up with my own version of how a character or scene might appear and be consistent.
[Extra special thanks to www.art-vangogh.com, a fantastic website with an immense gallery of Van Gogh’s work as well as some great biographical info!]
Doc Savage pulp stories of the 1930’s and 1940’s featured a seemingly super-human man, always described as the strongest and most dexterous, and also a master scientist and doctor and everything else you could coincidentally come up with that might be needed for each next adventure. His assistants were all the greatest in their respective fields of law, archaeology, electronics, and so on – but their skills paled in comparison to Doc’s, whose own skills far surpassed these experts. That cracked me up, this idea of someone with a LONG resume of skills, all of which he ranked “number one in the world,” putting experts to shame for their comparatively pathetic abilities, compared to Doc Savage.
INSPIRATION: JAMES BOND LICENSED 1980’s ROLE PLAYING GAME
As a kid, I owned this James Bond role playing game from the 1980’s, which I loved even though I didn’t really ever have any friends to play it with me. In this game, like Dungeons and Dragons, you created your own spy who earned skills in all manner of sports and physical activity, gambling, fighting techniques, weapons mastery, various sciences that are potentially helpful to a spy, disguise, weapon-using, and on and on. I loved all the possibilities, and the game manual gave a list of all these skills that could become necessary or helpful on your adventure, and you chose the ones that suited you. As combined with the above Doc Savage, I decided my spy must be a master of EVERY possible skill that a spy could possibly possess, and so that’s how his list of attributes came about as an introduction to him, on this page of my comic.
The Look
THE SKI MASK AND TUXEDO
The costume element sprouted out from a project I was doing back in 2007, “The Spider Twins,” in which I drew an encyclopedia full of professional wrestler-looking high school students who went around in masks trying to right the wrongs they felt were being committed all around them. While researching different masks and shoe wear to make each character unique, I stumbled onto a photo of someone in a tuxedo who was wearing a mask, and I thought, that’s a brilliant look. But the imagery didn’t fit with the Spider Twins. However, I realized now, it would fit perfectly for a spy.
James Bond wore many costumes, depending on the situaion – horse jockey, race car driver, suave dinner party goer, scuba diver, astronaut, golfer, cat burgler. It crossed my mind to do the same with my character, but I ultimately decided one costume is plenty, like a super hero might have.
That put in the back of my head this idea for a character in a tuxedo with a ski mask. In designing the character, there was a conscious decision to make the character all black, and to make the black of his suit impenetrable to light, so that there are no visible wrinkles or folds in the cloth, no shininess in the light. It’s just black.
When I was around seventh grade, there was a comic by DC called Vigilante, and he was a Batman/Punisher character type, but unlike other characters with “black” costumes at this time (whose costumes were blue), his costume was all black, and the black was in this fashion where you saw no reflection of light or muscle definition as you would in the other black-costumed characters (like Black Bolt or Black Panther or Black Widow or the Punisher). There was (other than a few stripes) no definition of the character’s form except the outline of all the black.
Vigilante 1 (1983), cover by Kieth PollardFantastic Four 46 (1966), cover by Jack Kirby Black Panther 7 (1978), cover by Jack Kirby
Mike Mignola defines shapes by solid blacks, and even so, they are fully realized and three dimensional, and I wanted to use this same style of all-black.
I sent some preliminary pages of my comic to my best friend, Dave Gibbons, way back on 9/5/12, and he wrote back in an email, “Graphically speaking, it’s a masterstroke to have the spy in flat black and white: really “pops” him out amongst the hatching and tonal work.”
INSPIRATION: LUCHA LIBRE and SANTO
A masked character walking around amongst the population and performing everyday tasks was a mainstay of famed Mexican professional wrestler and icon, Santo (The Saint), who was as big a star in Mexico as the biggest sports or movie stars of the U.S. He wrestled for five decades, and starred in 52 films, where he wrestled mad scientists, crooks, secret agents, and monsters like Dracula, the Werewolf, Frankenstein, and the Cyclops. He wore a mask with holes for his eyes, nose, and mouth, and in the films, he would body slam and elbow the villains, but also just walk around fully masked, anywahere in public he needed to go – Through the airport, playing chess, driving cars – and no one seemed to notice or make a google-eyed second take, or mind or show any sign that they thought it odd that this enormous guy is walking around with this ridiculous mask on. I loved that, and decided my spy should do the same.
The Van Gogh Brothers
Looking at Van Gogh’s Self-Portraits, I feel like he didn’t have the skill or interest to accurately convey actual proportions of his own face measurements, which creates for him a series of portraits that might have facial similarities, but to me they look less like a bunch of self-portraits of one person, and more like several portraits of several different similar-looking people, such as brothers or relatives.
It reminds me of The Simpsons Season 9, Episode 17, “Lisa the Simpson,” where we meet a bunch of Homer Simpson’s relatives, who all have a strong resemblance to Homer, but one is thinner, and one has a thicker head of hair, they’re different ages, and one has a mustache, and they have different fashion senses, and so on.
With this in mind, I thought it made for a fun joke, AND was a no-brainer that if I used Van Gogh’s self-portraits, they would need to be, not one character, but each portrait a different person – a family of brothers who were all vicious, sadistic, brutal, and slightly unhinged – a gang of violent thugs for hire.
Vincent van Gogh made over 35 self-portraits, the bulk of them (over 25) over a two year period while he was in Paris (1886-1888). He was broke at that time, and didn’t have money to hire models, so the simplest, least expensive solution was to paint himself.
[Extra special thanks to www.art-vangogh.com, a fantastic website with an immense gallery of Van Gogh’s work as well as some great biographical info!]
How Van Gogh’s Self-Portraits Shaped my Brush with Peril Project
Looking at Van Gogh’s portraits, I feel like he didn’t have the skill or interest to accurately convey actual proportions of his face measurements, which creates a series of portraits that might have similarities, but to me they look less like a bunch of self-portraits of one person, and more like several portraits of several different similar-looking people, such as brothers or relatives.
It reminds me of The Simpsons Season 9, Episode 17, “Lisa the Simpson,” where we meet a bunch of Homer Simpson’s relatives, who all have a strong resemblance to Homer, but one is thinner, and one has a thicker head of hair, they’re different ages, and one has a mustache, and they have different fashion senses, and so on.
With this in mind, I thought it made for a fun joke, AND made much more sense to use all these portraits as if they were each a different character, and they’re a bunch of Van Gogh brothers who were all vicious, brutal thugs for hire.
