So this blog has now moved to:  www.inkspillsincblog.wordpress.com

The portfolio site is at:  www.inkspillsinc.carbonmade.com

My Etsy page is:  www.inkspills.etsy.com

And the ol’ Flickr remains:  www.flickr.com/inkspills

I’ll be leaving this blog up for a few weeks to let the new URL pick up some steam, and then close this down. It’s been fun, kids.

This new year has me feelin’ a little more back in the saddle. I’m just back from hanging some work in London, which was a bit of a boost. I don’t often see my work printed big and hanging on walls, so it’s nice to see it up on something larger than a computer screen and realise that it looks alright. Feel like I’ve got some of the old mojo back, so we’ll run with it and see what turns up, yeah?

The original was brighter and the colours were a lot more prominent, but I kind of like this muted version a little more. It’s softer and feels a better fit.

In other news, I’ve had a whole lot of work hanging in (of all places) Urban Outfitters in Bristol. A month’s free wall space is better than a kick in the teeth, I guess.

I also found myself doing some doodling during the week, which isn’t something I do often (more fool me). I was playing with a few ideas that have been circling recently, and a few influences, including Walt Disney’s pack-mule on the road to success, Ub Iwerks (aka “The Man Who Created Mickey Mouse”). It’s a horse that’s been flogged into the dust, but I still love the style. Think I’ll try this one out as a T-shirt design, too…

This reminded me of a thing I drew a coupla years ago now, a spoof of the early Disney/Iwerks characters like Horace Horsecollar and Flip the Frog. The fonts match the opening titles to ‘Steamboat Willie‘ pretty well…

Friedman isn’t too well known in the UK: the State-side magazines he usually works for don’t circulate much in these parts, but after reading a profile piece in some comic’s journal a while ago I tracked down one of his books and totally loved it.  To paraphrase an oft-used idiom (and the grimace-inducing silver bullet for many a career artist), I like his early work best.

The art is a photo-realistic, stippled nightmare bathed in Murnau lighting, and the subject matter is usually Friedman’s fascination with absurd retrophilia made flesh: all the flotsam and jetsam of an American pop culture of yesteryear; failed movie stars, X-listers and also-rans trapped in a weird Twilight Zone of absurd parody and adulation. Obscure 1950′s TV personalities, B-movie legends, forgotten comedians, and a fixation on the geek-couture crowd Friedman himself has one foot firmly in; the kind of  losers who hang around comic book stores and watch all-night Stooges marathons over TV dinners. Friedman isn’t actually making fun of this social detritus in his early work, and though it might look mean, it is arguably a strange form of hero worship.

Some are pretty straight biopics of his favoured losers, and other times he removes them completely from their context and forces them into a variety of bizarre ‘What If…?‘ worlds that could only have been devised by Rod Serling if he got wrecked on amyl nitrate and Listerine.

Moving into the 90′s, Friedman’s work got more commercial (not something I decry – a man’s gotta make a living, and not everybody gets jokes about Tor Johnson…) and he started to phase out the black-and-white stipple style he’d emerged with, instead opting for a more traditional full-colour painting style. The references to obscure American kitsch were gradually replaced with more familiar, contemporary celebrity, and that’s kind of where he lost me. The writing is still in his own inimitable style, but gags about Paris Hilton and Stephen Baldwin, for me personally, just lack the weird charm of his earlier work.

Modern celebrity is too…modern. It’s too real, and omnipresent. Too familiar. I’d prefer to be reminded of it as little as possible. But the celebrity cult of the 1950′s and 60′s is like another world, in another lifetime, and the kind portrayed by Friedman is not the kind we’re all used to seeing. Nearly none of these people are a success. They’re the bedsore-ridden underbelly of American pop culture. The people Friedman draws might crawl from the same rock-pool of repugnant fame and self-entitlement all celebrity does, but fifty-odd years of reflection and assessment creates a more measured profile of these characters. Friedman’s crowd might be ugly as hell (physically, morally, socially) but there’s a lot of pathos to his work.

In his strip, Bela Lugosi’s Scariest Role, Friedman gently lampoons the legendary Dracula actor’s descent into typecasting Hell; Lugosi struggled to get any work outside of the B-movie horror trade, and was eventually reduced to working with shlock-maestro extraordinaire, Ed Wood. It’s a cautionary tale (of sorts), and well worth satirising. It’s funny. But the strip also documents Lugosi’s addiction to morphine, which ravaged his appearance as he grew older. When a sallow-faced Lugosi quips in the very last panel – “At least I’m still performink!”, it’s an honest little moment of tragedy and quiet humour, full of empathy.

The above two panels are from one of my favourite Friedman spreads – America’s Love Affair With Ethnics Hollering One Word Over And Over. It’s such a stupidly simple idea, and it’s a great example of his odd sense of humour. Not only do we get Chico Marx and Jerry Lewis doing their thing, we see everyone from Brando’s wild howling of “Stella!” in A Streetcar Named Desire, to dwarf Bond henchman Nick Nack shouting “Da plane! Da plane!“.

All Hail Friedman!

[All work copyright of Drew Friedman/Fantagraphics]

I’d spent quite a few hours shuffling very small bits of paper around and produced nothing. I’d set out with a pretty good idea of what I wanted but when it came to actually solidifying the whole mess, it was just uninteresting vagueness. It just wasn’t there. It wasn’t even an interesting mistake.

There are occasions when no matter how positive you are about what’s going to appear in the petri dish, you’re expectations are confounded. Eventually, frustration takes hold and you just start sifting through the shit for the glint of diamonds. Most of the time you’re rewarded with nothing but a shitty mess on your hands (figuratively speaking), but sometimes you get lucky.

It can seem like random chance, like luck, but more likely it’s deterministic. Like evolution. It was sort of inevitable, eventually. Someone just had to give it the time and space to play out.