The Staging of Macbeth PT. 1

When I was a youngster, my favorite comics were always the Classics Illustrated series, so as a professional it was my good fortune to actually do three jobs that were adaptations of classic material. One was Kidnapped (CLICK HERE) and the other two were for Boy's Life Magazine: The Hound of the Baskerville's (CLICK HERE) and Macbeth. (CLICK HERE)

These jobs  required a lot more preparation than the normal work.When you're doing period pieces, you have to be extremely accurate with costumes and settings. Their are a thousand little details you have to deal with.

On Macbeth not only did I have the advantage of working on a Shakespeare play, but I also have an excellent sci-fi writer, the late Suzette Haden Elgin. The biggest problem for both of us was reducing a five act play to sixteen pages of comic book material.

Step one was doing character designs for all the principal players. For this I used several costume book for accurate reference. I also went to a number of famous illustrators like N.C. Wyeth, E.A. Abbey, Robert Fawcett and Dean Cornwell for their stylistic interpretations.

I also "cast" the actors. I used photo reference of Sean Connery for the lead, and Greta Garbo as his wife. Wherever possible, I also tracked down photo reference for the rest of the players.

The second step was to break the script down into a series of pictures that quickly and concisely moved the story along. As the compositions are worked out to best show the action, the placement of the captions and dialogue balloons are part of the process.

With penciling I make use of my character sketches, thumbnail drawings and whatever reference I have gathered. At this point most of the thinking problems have been solved and you're just slaving over the hard work of producing crisp and lively drawings. Normally, for comic books I was using the standard 10" x 15" paper size but with this story I was using 14" x 19" with the full page bleeds.

Next week: Ink the pencils and doing color roughs.

Mitchell Hooks

Since I know virtually nothing about Mitchell Hooks himself except that he was a fellow Detroiter,  the following is the artist's bio that appeared in Walt Reed's The Illustrator in America.

"The career of Mitchell Hooks (1923-1913), like that of many other artists of the post-World War II era has been involved to a great extent with paintings for paperback book covers. His interpretations have a strong poster quality, in keeping with the need to hold their own on display with other competing titles on the bookstands, but also have a subtlety and sensitivity that attracts a closer and longer look.

In addition to his book designs for Avon, Bantam, Dell, Popular Library and Fawcett publications, Hooks has illustrated for Costmopolitan, The Saturday Evening Post, The Ladies Home Journal, Redbook, McCall's, Woman's Day and other magazines.

Mitchell was born in Detroit, Michigan, and obtained his art education at the Cass Technical High School there. Later he studied further with James Billmeyer in New York. After the way, and Occupation duty as a Second Lieutenant in Germany, he returned to New York to begin his free-lance illustration career.

In recent years, Hooks has become more diversified, dividing his work between magazines, hardcover books, paperback covers and advertising. Hardcover books include illustrations for The Franklin Library, Reader's Digest Books and Coronado Publishers."

But while I know very little about the man himself, his illustrations have  been a source of inspiration to me since I first discovered them when I started my tearsheet collection many years back. Hooks was a precise draftsman,  and despite the spontaneous style that he painted in, that quality always showed through. He had a strong sense of color and knew how to effectively and emotionally use it. But what really sold me was the way his cinematic storytelling drew you into the complicated designs of his compositions. 

The Art and Life of BERNIE FUCHS

When I was at a meeting of our CAPS (California Artists Professional Society) a few years back I had the good fortune one night to attend a lecture by Bernie Fuchs on his career as an illustrator. I was very familiar with the work of Bernie Fuchs and he was one of my idols. Getting a chance to see his originals first hand and to listen to him speak about his life made for a splendid evening for me. Later in the evening after the talk, I brought several books illustrated by Bernie up for him to sign, and afterwards shook it hand. It was only then I realized that he had  three fingers missing missing on his drawing hand. I was a bit shocked, but also had a new found respect for the man; his hand had been injured in an industrial accident late in his teenage years, but he hadn’t let it stop him from excelling as an artist.

And excel he did. When he exploded on the scene in the late 1950s his work was extremely competent, but stylistically looked little different from most of the illustration being used. That changed quickly as like Parker, Briggs and Peak before him, once his foot was in the door, he immediately began to develop a unique and dynamic style which has influenced so many other artists. Coming into a field that was facing a life and death battle with photographic competition, he not only survived, but flourished where so many others were fell by the wayside.

Ironically, growing up in Detroit, one of my complaints when I was trying to break into comics, was that there weren’t the plethora of great illustrators to learn from in the area, as there were in New York. It wasn’t until much later in life I discovered that even at that time the great Bernie Fuchs worked in advertising for the car industry in Detroit; and he was not alone as Bob Peak, Austin Briggs, Harry Borgman and a number of others were continually in the area because of the automobile clients. I just hadn’t taken the time to find out about them.

My fellow Fawcett collector and noted illustration historian, David Apatoff has just written a remarkable book, The Life and Art of Bernie Fuchs and it’s a must for any serious fan of illustration. Besides being filled with amazing pictures, the biography is a fun and interesting read. One anecdote he relates is that when Fuchs moves to Westport, Connecticut one of the first persons he meets is Robert Fawcett, who insists that they run over to meet his neighbor, Austin Briggs. Fuchs had just replaced Briggs as the artist on a major account and Fawcett, who was feuding with Briggs at the time, thought it would be amusing to twist the knife. Ironically, while the meeting was awkward, Fuchs and Briggs immediately liked each other, bonded,  and became close friends. It might be poetic justice that Fuchs also replaced Fawcett on a major account not soon after.

Here is a link to where you can pick up this wonderful book: Amazon.com

(Bio from Wikipedia)

Fuchs was born in O’Fallon, Illinois on October 29, 1932. He grew up in humble circumstances with no father. His ambition was to be a trumpet player, but that ended after he lost three fingers on his right hand in an industrial accident the summer after he graduated from high school. Fuchs turned to art as a career, despite having had no formal art training. He enrolled in Washington University in St. louis, Missouri, where he graduated in 1954.

His first job was illustrating car advertisements for New Center Studios, located first in the Fisher Building, then in the Penobscot Building in Detroit. Art Greenwald was the owner of the studio. it was the largest and most successful studio in Detroit in the 50’s and 60’s. A couple of the other illustrators were Chic Albertson and Donald Silverstein. Bernie was recognized immediately for his incredible talent and pulled in major accounts for Greenwald. Within a few years of moving to Detroit, Fuchs’ opened the studio The Art Group, which specialized in work for the city’s auto companies. In the late 1950s, Fuchs moved to Westport, Connecticut where he began doing illustrations for McCalls, Redbook, The Ladies Home Journal, Sports Illustrated and other magazines.

Fuchs was commissioned for the illustration of four US postage stamps, released in 1998. The stamps featured folk musicians Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter, Woody Guthrie, Sonny Terry, and Josh White. Fuchs also illustrated several children’s picture books, including Ragtime Tumpie and Carolina Shout!, both written by Alan Schroeder.

He painted portraits of several U.S. Presidents, including John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, as well as of such athletes and celebrities such as Muhammad Ali, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nichlaus, Ted Koppel and Katharine Hepburn.

At age 76, he died September 17, 2009