Arnold Zwicky's Blog

A follow-up to my 7/10 posting “Their satanic majesties re-imagined”, which was

A chapter in the re-working of artistic materials, provoked by my searching for a model for the character Zn in the Bizarro cartoon I posted on yesterday, in “Cu Co Ni & Zn!”, a strip depicting Wayno’s vision of a heavy-metals heavy-metal rock band

(#1) Wayno’s character Zn

… rather than a simple caricature of KFK [Kerry Fucking King — his self-chosen epithet — of the thrash metal band Slayer],

(#2) The actual KFK, complete with the sign of the horns

in Zn Wayno has created a fresh character, a re-worked, re-imagined — a nicer, more Wayno-friendly — rock star, as a kind of homage to the original. Discarding the original’s less savory characteristics (rather than exaggerating them), and so salvaging a vision of what KFK could have been. A lot less Slayer and a lot more Led Zeppelin.

(Orthogonal to all this, my posting also looked at the details of Wayno’s cartooning style)

Wayno’s intentions. Now, an exchange with Wayno in e-mail:

— W: I like to do my homework, but for the Heavy Metals gag, none of the characters are at all based on real people. I’m not terribly knowledgeable regarding metal musicians. The drawings are shorthand characters that are supposed to read as hard rock or heavy metal musicians.

— AZ > W: Ah, that was the other possibility — that these images are coming from your subconscious, which is much richer than you credit. You have a truly gigantic bank of images, most of them partial and schematic, in your head — it’s one of your great powers as a professional artist —  and you mine them constantly in your work, rarely with any sense of where they come from. I assume that at some point you came across images [like #2] of Kerry King as a thrash metal guitarist, and then bits of these images surfaced when you were trying to imagine a thrash metal guitarist. So you conjured up a nice-guy version of Kerry Fucking King (who is an amazing guitarist but otherwise a major asshole).

We have been here before. Ending up in the thickets where artistic creations come from (where the wild things are, à la Sendak). That time, it was me and the gag cartoonist Bob Eckstein, who managed to produce a recognizable portrait of the great gag cartoonist Sam Gross (someone BE and I both admire) while steadfastly maintaining that he had no such intention.

From my 1/17/23 posting “The bearded cartoonist, post-simectomy”:

It begins with a Facebook posting by Bob Eckstein on 1/12

(#3) The BE cartoon: a bearded fellow — I take him to be a cartoonist (since this is in The Daily Cartoonist) — in a hospital bed, post-simectomy

[Facebook discussion about this cartoon:]

— BE: that is Sam Gross on the cover on the right, and many say, Sam Gross in the cartoon on the left. I’ll let him decide –– I’m seeing him in a little while.

— AZ > BE: So: you drew this — really fine — cartoon featuring a bearded cartoonist in a hospital bed, post-simectomy. Cartoonists often (intentionally) base their depictions of their characters on real-life persons (sometimes famous people, sometimes just friends); others, including the models, might disagree on the degree of likeness in such depictions.

Also, a cartoonist creating the fresh image of a generic character will sometimes inadvertently draw something resembling a real person (by sheer happenstance — every such image is going to resemble someone— or by its bubbling up from bits of memory).

So, two separate questions, one having to do with your intentions (were you drawing an (affectionate) cartoon likeness of Sam Gross?), one having to do with the cartoon cartoonist’s likeness to Gross (does the character look like Gross? in whose judgment?). I assume you were aiming for Gross, and I judge that to be an excellent cartoon likeness of him, though others might differ.

— BE > AZ: I did not intend to draw Sam. But friends have since said it is a dead ringer for him. I have been accused of making my doctors look like my doctors, women in crowd scene look like my exes and men in scenes look like my brother Joe. It is never intentional but as I draw without reference and use the library in my head, these faces come pouring out onto the page, by accident as these are faces I have seen the most or saw the most and cannot get rid of.

— AZ >BE: I allowed for that possibility, suspecting that that’s the way you work. (Quite different from Wayno in Bizarro, who’s forever deliberately inserting caricatures of real people [but not invariably].) Writers and artists create their characters, locations, situations, and events from bits and pieces of their experience, from an appreciation of those that have cultural value, from pure invention — but the results often resemble, sometimes quite movingly, things in the real world. (And working from a model doesn’t necessarily give greater depth to the result.) You didn’t intend to draw Sam, but somehow you drew him anyway, who cares by what route.

This entry was posted on July 12, 2024 at 11:37 am and is filed under Art, Cartoonists, Linguistics in the comics, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.