“Wally Wood’s 22 Frames That Always Work”
Anne Lukeman took Wally Wood’s 22 Panels That Always Work and turned it into a teaching tool for filmmakers. It lends itself especially well to noir.
The Only Good I Got From That Awful “Boat That Rocked” Movie…
…is my newfound love for The Turtles. They built a whole sequence around this song in the movie and even the addition of January Jones couldn’t save it. But the music nearly did.
Image: Half a whisky wheel
Whisky Magazine has an entire “Nosing Course” online for free, should you want to learn how to wank about whisky. (I do!) The image above is half of the “Whisky Wheel,” a graphic that helps you understand the terminology used when describing the taste and aroma of whiskies.
Video: BMW continues to make fascinating vehicles with boring names (Vision EfficientDynamics prototype)
Director of BMW design Adrian van Hooydonk, I love you already. I know that we won’t see a car with this sort of shape for a while, but I can now starting dreaming of driving a sporty EV or hybrid in the future that doesn’t look like a Prius.
Worst. Cover. Ever.
I offered to send my extra copy of Jonathan Coulton’s “Best. Concert. Ever.” CD and DVD to the person who could record the worst JoCo cover in 30-seconds. Here are the entrants and the winner. Gird your ears’ loins.
Dan Beeston had already recorded his attempt to play “Skullcrusher Mountain” and sing at the same time. It’s a monument to one man’s commendable lack of dignity.
@charliewolf recorded something that is not a triumph, nor a success of any size.
@j2n4me recorded a version of “re: Your Brains” that’s better than anything ever recorded by Bright Eyes. And therefor: disqualified.
@JakobBurrows recorded three bad covers for the price of one, leaving a video that runs a full 2:27. Disqualified!
Jason Burrows recorded 30-second cover of “Still Alive” that sounds like a adolescent version of most of the characters from Venture Bros.
@schult recorded two entries, one that I have already forgotten, and one DVD-winning cover of “I Ruined Everything” that distills everything that nobody loved about Tiny Tim into a half-minute jam, then buries it under a flute. Winner!
Why District 9 is like a videogame, and why it says more about apartheid than you think (Spoilers)
I called District 9 a movie “made by gamers and for gamers,” a statement made with the knowledge that director Neill Blomkamp had been tapped previously to make the movie version of Halo. Still, when N’Gai said he “didn’t see it,” it stuck in my craw. To me, District 9 shows how heavily games and movies have merged into the same shared milieu. Beyond the visual and emotional space cribbed by Children of Men before, District 9 isn’t just sharing a vision of the future explored previously in videogames (specifically Half-Life 2, with its mix of old world architecture, brown-note-emitting crystalline monoliths, and benevolent insectoid bipedal aliens [hat tip]) but modeled its protagonist’s progression on that of a typical videogame hero.
In mostly serious example (and here be spoilers):
• Hero promoted with no prior qualifications
• Starts mission by killing dozens of harmless baby enemies
• Co-op partner unlocks “First Abortion” achievement and badge
• Levels up with alien superpowers
• Fights generic quasi-military enemies who are awful shots
• Trained in heavily scripted sequence to use a series of alien weapons of increasing lethality
• Pilots a complicated mechanized power suit with only seconds of training
• Ends up spending the rest of his life crafting items
There’s more to it than simple coincidence.
One of the main criticisms I’ve heard of the film this weekend is that it didn’t fully address the issue of apartheid, perhaps using it (at worst) as window dressing. I’ve of the “pop art should pop first” school, but I think some of the vagueness of the issue was also intentional, especially how a single line—something along the lines of “the workers freed from the ship were mostly dumb drones”—has provoked a weekend’s worth of conversations with Carmela and online about why the aliens did not rise up against the humans, if Christopher Johnson (no relation) was part of a more intelligent, princely caste, and other issues of class and power and intelligence.
I wrote this on a gaming forum:
I am starting to suspect that the intimations about the worker class prawns and whether or not Christopher is one were specifically written with a lighter hand to provoke the very conversation about intelligence, apartheid, and slums that we’re having. (And that I’ve been having with my girlfriend since Friday.)I think that’s why I didn’t at first understand the complaints about the apartheid story being underserved by the movie itself. (I’ve typed “apartheid” more in the last weekend than I have in the last decade. That counts for something, right?) I can’t help but think that if they’d spent more time on it than they did that it would have become tedious — or worse, simply a statement of opinion, rather than provoker. I’d rather a thinking man’s Halo than, say, Enemy Mine. It might not be as “important” or as well regarded in twenty years’ time (my girlfriend’s main complaint), and maybe my teenage testicles are still showing, but I still like my alien movies to have some explosions and mech suits.
Besides, violence is much of the message! If there were no MNU to keep the prawns in the slum with the threat of violence, there would have been no problem at all.
Porsche 959 Gruppe B Concept (Frankfurt 1983)
Road & Track dedicated nearly its whole September issue to Porsche past and present. John Lamm’s look back at two of the German automaker’s most technologically advanced models, the 959 and the Carrera GT, was especially illustrative of how far advanced some of Porsche’s thinking has been; the 959 in particular was a supercar decades ahead of its time, an all-wheel-drive velocity lozenge that could cram itself through the air at up to 195 MPH from a 0-60 time of just 3.6 seconds.
Above is the Gruppe B concept that Porsche revealed at the 1983 Frankfurt Auto Show, photographed by the terrific René Staud (and available as a print if you like). While it’s not quite as obvious in profile, the concept had a conspicuous lack of air vents—just two lateral slices in the front and an intake slash on the hood. Combined with the solid hubcaps (which never made it to production 959s) it typifies early ’80s futuristic form. It’s not hard to imagine the Gruppe B as a getaway car chased by Detroit’s Ford Taurus Robocop police force.
The 959 was a favorite of America’s nouveau riche boy racers in the ’80s, as well.
John Lamm:
The price of a 959 was around $350,000 but it reputedly cost Porsche $500,000 to hand build each supercar. To cut its losses, Porsche topped production at 226 in 1989 and never did a U.S. edition. Yet the 959 was so highly regarded that several well-heeled U.S. enthusiasts, including Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Paul Allen, imported them and in the early 1990s the factory built perhaps a dozen more cars and sold them for $1 million each.U.S. 959 owners couldn’t do much with their cars legally until 2000. A driving force behind the “show and display” rule — often called The Gates Law — that allows U.S. 959s was Bruce Canepa and his well known design house in Scotts Valley, California. Not only can owners like Gates, Allen, Ralph Lauren and Jerry Seinfeld now drive their cars, but Canepa imports 959s and makes them legal.
Related • JALOPNIK FANTASY GARAGE: Porsche 959
Ecofont: Free holey font that saves ink
Printing doesn’t just use paper—it also uses ink. So Dutch design house SPRANQ have created a new font, “SPRANQ Eco Sans Regular”, that peppers its arms and ascenders with holes to use less ink when printed. Thus, its common name: “ecofont”. (more…)
Wally Wood’s 22 Panels That Always Work: Unlimited Edition
I’d seen “Wally Wood‘s 22 Panels That Always Work” around the net here and there for several years, always as a low-resolution scan of a copy that was clearly the product of dozens of generations of photocopies. As a comics fan and occasional artist who absorbed what little drawing skill I have by copying and tracing comics when I was a teenager, I found the juxtaposition in Wood’s piece telling. Here was a working artist distilling his craft into 22 panels that could be used to teleport across the occasional creative wasteland, yet each example was dashed off with effortless skill. I live by very few maxims, but there’s at least one I’ve found useful: Fake it ’til you make it. In Wood’s piece I could see an artist who had clearly made it but hadn’t forgotten the practicality of the occasional shortcut.
A few months ago my friend Felipe Li showed me yet another copy of “22 Panels,” offhandedly mentioning that the original paste-up was for sale at Gotham City Art, with the dubious price of “Make Offer.” The listing for the piece, now removed, read as follows:
Ask any working comic book artist who has been in the business for more than ten years about “Wally Wood’s 22 Panels That Always Work”, and they know of it like it was the bible. Google “Wally Wood” and “22 panels”, and you get over 150 hits. It is with great pleasure that GothamCityArt.com brings this historic piece to market. Once shrouded in secrecy, Wally Wood would selectively give assistants and those close to him three 8×10 photocopies of comic panels that bore the absolute essence of drawing comic book panels. 22 images in total, they held the secret to a comic book illustrator’s success, and those who learned from them benefited from the master’s wisdom. The panels were gold, but were not packaged in such a way that was easily disseminated.
Years later as an Editor at Marvel, Wood’s former assistant, Larry Hama, needed a tool to give direction to his would-be artists. He had two copies of the three sheets. With the help of another ex-assistant of Wally Wood’s (whom he recalls may have been Paul Kirchner), Hama reassembled the “Tri-Force” of Wally Wood sheets. On the back of a Marvel art Bristol board, Hama wrote the now-famous caption “Wally Wood’s 22 Panels That Always Work”, and had Robbie Carosella and Elliot Brown stat down the sheets. He ran off 50 copies from the board, and handed them out to potential pencilers. Pretty soon, other editors were sending pencilers and even some old pros down the hall to get copies from him. Eventually, he had more master copies statted and gave them to other editors so they could make their own copies to pass out. The original paste-up, with Hama’s original hand-lettering, was eventually tucked into an envelope and put in the back of a flatfile, where it stayed for more than a decade. Second, third, fourth, tenth and twentieth generation copies continue to be made and handed down. The artwork pictured here is the original pasteup, as well as the three 8×10 copies that were statted down to make the board. Some of the panels, which were lost through use, were restated to the original board over the years.
I made what I considered to be a low bid and it was accepted. It is now my pleasure to offer these relatively high-resolution versions of “Wally Wood’s 22 Panels That Always Work” in “Unlimited Edition,” scanned in from the original paste-up. The widescreen versions include the whole of the paste board, including a serendipitously open area on the left hand side of the image that makes them practical to use as desktops for your computer, despite the otherwise busy background of the rest of the piece. My scanner is not large enough to scan the entire paste board at once, so I have tried to make a reasonable effort to stitch together four separate scans, although I did not go to any great length to remove all trace of seams.
There is also a 4:3 black-and-white version, tweaked to provide a 1600-by-1200 pixel duotone that emulates the previous versions available on the internet, albeit with greater fidelity.
While I did not leave any watermark or URL on the specific image files, I would ask that you refrain from using the images for any commercial purposes without my permission. Otherwise, please disseminate as freely as you like. Part of the reason I bought the piece was to ensure that it remained available to any artists who might find it inspiring or useful.
Larry Hama, who pasted together the piece and did the lettering, was kind enough to respond to an email I had sent him after purchasing the piece. Note especially his suggestion that Wood created this piece not for others, but as a reminder to himself to not become bogged down in unproductive eddies. Hama’s correspondence follows:
I worked for Wally Wood as his assistant in the early ’70s, mostly on the Sally Forth and Cannon strips he did for the Overseas Weekly. I lettered the strips, ruled borders, swipe-o-graphed reference, penciled backgrounds and did all the other regular stuff as well as alternating with Woody on scripting Cannon and Sally Forth.
The “22 Panels” never existed as a collected single piece during Woody’s lifetime. Another ex-Wood assistant, Paul Kirchner had saved three Xeroxed sheets of the panels that would comprise the compilation. I don’t believe that Woody put the examples together as a teaching aid for his assistants, but rather as a reminder to himself. He was always trying to kick himself to put less labor into the work! He had a framed motto on the wall, “Never draw anything you can copy, never copy anything you can trace, never trace anything you can cut out and paste up.” He hung the sheets with the panels on the wall of his studio to constantly remind himself to stop what he called “noodling.”
When I was starting out as an editor at Marvel, I found myself in the position of having to coach fledgling artists on the basics of visual storytelling, and it occurred to me that the reminder sheets would help in that regard, but three eight-by-ten pieces of paper were a bit unwieldy, so I had Robby Carosella, the Marvel photostat guy at the time, make me re-sized copies of all the panels so I could fit them all on one sheet. I over-compensated for the half-inch on the height (letter paper is actually 8 1/2-by-11) so the main body of images once pasted up came a little short. I compensated for that by hand lettering the title.
Images:
• Original Scan, 2560 x 1600 pixels
• Original Scan, 1920 x 1200 pixels
• Original Scan, 1680 x 1050 pixels
• Original Scan, 1440 x 900 pixels
• Original Scan, 1280 x 800 pixels
