Chris met Scott Shaw down at a comics convention in San Francisco. Someone came to Chris’ table and said he’d been at Scott’s table, talking about Chris’ Doris Danger comics with him, and Scott was aware of the work and was a fan. Chris went over and introduced himself, and could tell they were instantly going to be best friends. Scott’s approachability, warmth, intelligence, and fun/sharp/hilarious sense of humor burst from all his projects, whether his super entertaining Oddball Comics critiques, his Captain Carrot, Simpsons and Annoying Orange comics, or the Muppet Babies cartoon that Chris watched when he was a kid, that won him four Emmy Awards!
Wow! HERE ARE LINKS to MORE great clips of ALL your favorite comics creators… from my upcoming documentary, “Diary of a Struggling Comics Artist!”! Thanks for watching!
I began working on Brush with Peril in 2009, and I thought I had finished the first volume thirteen years later, in 2022. After sitting on it, waiting to sign a contract with a publisher, I began to get antsy about the prologue I had begun so long ago, and after so much time had passed in addition to my improvement of art skills and story-telling, and my understanding of what I thought the project should be and where it should go, I began to think I should make a new, different prologue, to better illustrate the purpose of the story. And so I did. But lucky you; here’s…
EDGAR DEGAS (French, 1834-1917). A superb draftsman (I was truly amazed upon first seeing Degas’ pastels in person), and master at depicting movement in a still image. He imbued modern subject matter with the traditional methods of a classical painter, creating impressive series of bathing women, laundry workers, horses and their riders, female nudes, and women combing their hair. But he’s most famous for his paintings and drawings of ballerinas (in fact, over half of his oeuvre depicts dancers).
Now that time has passed, we view his ballerinas as precious, lovely images celebrating dancers and dancing. However, at the time, the French ballet was no longer considered a high art form, and so there were no “great dancers” to speak of. On the contrary, Degas was portraying a reality and brutality of the working life of un-beautiful, sweating, stressed young girls who began dancing as young as age eight, for a a grueling ten to twelve hours a day, six or seven days a week; their muscles curled or extended into contorted, agonizing discomfort as they stretch or dance, their feet raw and bleeding, many of them upon reaching “sexual maturity” at age 13, prostituting themselves to the ogling men waiting in the wings, for a pittance.
Degas was a conservative; his work evidenced feelings of anti-semitism, and he was a celibate and lifelong bachelor as a result of his misogynistic views of women (he refered to his ballerina models as “little monkeys” or “little rats” because rats were believed to transmit syphilis). His works were viewed with admiration for his draftsmanship, as well as contempt for their “ugliness” (Degas believed in pysiognamy, which claimed degenerate behavior and criminality were determinable by “primitive” physical features, and thus he purposely exaggerated his dancers’ features). He was a modernist in that he looked to the modern subject matter of everyday, realistic life and leisure and fashion of the newly industrializing cityscape. Although he is today considered one of the founders of Impressionism, he would have been appalled to have been told it, as he refused to associate himself with other styles.
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