ARCHIE - from Hideous Itchiness to Appealing Fun

ARCHIE is about as all-American and generic-but-cute a cartoon style as ever existed. But it didn't start out that way....

ITCHY LUMPY PIMPLY SWOLLEN BEGINNINGS

The first Archie comics were drawn by bad superhero artists. Guys who loved to fill up stiff awkward uncomposed drawings with itchy sloppy cross-hatching.Archie himself was a pile of itchy pimply lumps who just before puberty dreamed of his favorite men in colorful undergarments.
At the onset of puberty he was aghast that his dreams shifted to something altogether different than men in underpants.These artists must have been going through puberty too. Look at the attention to the cross-hatching on the girls' most sensitive swollen aching areas. You gotta see the insides of these comics to believe them!

Poor Archie had a hard time adjusting to this new stage in his life. Can you believe this stuff was on the newsstands in front of decent American kids of the 1940s?
This has to be one of the itchiest lumpiest drawing styles in history. It's amazing that the comics survived past this fetal stage of development. Maybe because they had all the characters and their relationships figured out right from the beginning -even though they were lumpy.

EARLY CUTE EYES, LESS ITCH

At some point in the late 40s the style smoothed out and got much cuter.

Archie's pubescent pimples and cross-hatchy complexion migrated to his temples and remained under control there forever.
The girls retained lumps only in the places we like them to be lumpy. They are cute in a puppet-like googly eyed way.

BOB MONTANA

Bob Montana may have been the one to redesign the more appealing, more cartoony streamlined version of Archie and the gang. He also drew the daily and Sunday comics for years. He has a very fun style and it's a little offbeat - not perfectly balanced.I'm not sure who did these two, because they aren't signed, but they definitely fall in line with the Montana look.
Archie's pimples eventually evolved into ringworm.

BILL ? - AND VARIOUS

I'm not sure who these are either, but they have the rounded features and huge saucer eyes that gave the characters so much appeal.

HARRY LUCEY

Harry Lucey is my favorite Archie artist because he has an awkward yet really human style. He isn't trying for perfect balance in his poses and design. Instead he goes for a more fleshy life-like quality. His girls are the most feminine because of their slight awkwardness and always have a veneer of filth in their poses and attitudes. This was a guaranteed formula for success - aiming stories and drawings about teenage sexual tension at teeny-boppers.

Lucey's girls stand and pose like real girls - slightly off-balance.

DAN DE CARLO

Dan De Carlo seems to be the favorite Archie artist among modern cartoonists. I think it's because his design aimed at being perfectly balanced and safe. It is appealing graphically, but to me it can be too careful, stiff and unnatural.
He avoids difficult poses and when he needs to bend the characters, just takes the same 3/4 head and torso he would draw on a straight on eye-level shot and tilts it on an angle like a flash cartoon. Very wooden.Here's a DeCarlo action pose - all limbs and body parts in straight lines bent in 90% angles.

He does have quite a talent for interesting outfits and designs.
It's strange that this stiff wooden simple style has since influenced super-hero cartoons, which by their inherent nature should be meaty, muscular and dynamic.

I like Archie during its heyday of the late 40s to the early 60s. It is a kind of generic style, but a very appealing one and it aims directly at true humanity. Today's generic is aiming at aliens from space. You have to learn to accept it and get used to it, whereas Archie appealed to universal urges. You don't have to be trained to read cute pictures of pretty girls constantly tempting and frustrating "America's Typical Teenager".

I'll put some stuff up from each artist soon.

I got these images from this great site that's full of old comic book covers:
http://www.coverbrowser.com/


If you know some of the artists here I couldn't identify, let me know!

Appeal in Ugliness - Basil Wolverton

Do you think this is ugly? I'm sure Frank and Ollie would. I don't. I think it's immensely appealing.

Don't look at the itchy details. Look at the shapes that make up the whole image. I broke them down into their construction up here.

Although there are many itchy artists who preceded and followed Basil Wolverton, many artists can get lost in the details that obscure what's more important - the overall instant impression of the drawing.

Basil Wolverton has traits that I find appealing:

FUNNY: The Illusion Of Life's 12 principles of animation left out the most important one - that cartoon drawings should be funny.

DESIGN: Basil has a great design sense. Each shape he draws is fun and interesting and he arranges them altogether with great skill and with the final purpose of making us laugh.

What the Disney animators consider "appealing" is not really invented design. Instead, they evolved a community style that at its best balanced a few cute approved shapes in a non-offensive manner. Bambi is the epitome of the style at its most appealing. You can see their designs evolving away from the rubber hose style of Donald, Mickey and Pluto towards Bambi from the mid 30s to the early 40s. Once they got their appealing balance of shapes and squirrel mask down, they kept it going for the next decade; Lady and The Tramp are exactly the same designs as all the Bambi characters. They just take their appealing squirrel masks and wrap them around slightly different forms - and all the forms themselves are basically the same - even the humans.

Disney resorted to a "safe balance" of shapes, rather than inventing new designs from scratch on a regular balance. As far as I can figure, they didn't actually have a designer - they just let the animators work with the characters on each movie until they naturally evolved into a functional evenly proportioned design that was non-offensive.

Basil Wolverton is a superior cartoon designer of the top-tier because of his great imagination and his control of shapes and hierarchy of sub-shapes and details.

The difference between these cartoons and some of the itchy ones I posted before is that these are not really ugly. They are cute and upbeat. Each of these characters seems to be unaware of his or her own ugliness - they seem to all be delighted to be ugly.

I know when a lot of young cartoonists try to imitate my style, they tend to focus on the scenes that were supposed to be ugly. There is a way to do pretend-ugly that is still appealing.

Here is a guy who is definitely blissfully happy to be ugly.
How does Basil make his superficially itchy detailed stuff look so unique and appealing?

He uses some of the same tools of design that animation designers use.

SILHOUETTES: His characters have a totally clear silhouette. That makes it easy to read, and it shows a command off design clarity. His designs commit to the idea. They aren't timid vague non-descriptive shapes.
FILLED SPACE VS NEGATIVE SPACE

NEGATIVE SPACE IS NOT JUST A TOOL THAT YOU APPLY TO THE OUTSIDE OF THE CHARACTER. IT SHOULD BE USED WITHIN THE CHARACTER'S SILHOUETTE AS WELL.

This guy's face is well forward of his head. We can see his face clearly because of the space behind it - between the face and the ear.

COMMITMENT TO OVERALL STATEMENT

This woman's head is bullet shaped. Nothing vague about it.

The bullet shape is the major form of the design. The next level of the forms do not distract from the bullet. They are smaller and move horizontally, rather than vertically like the bullet.

HIERARCHY: The 2nd level of forms also have clear overall shapes - the eyes, the nose, the mouth, and the ring of curly hair at the bottom. The details - the individual hairs, the warts etc. are then wrapped around the forms in the same directions that the forms themselves have.

This Russian guy has an overall boxy form. That's clear and non-ambiguous. Basil doesn't let the rest of the sub-shapes distract from this.

Within the overall form, the next level of forms has a lot of contrasts - in size, in direction, in shape. The image isn't cluttered. There is lots of space between the funny parts. Space is a designer's friend.

Speaking of which, there is a space on everyone's head that a lot of amateurish cartoonists ignore or are not aware of - that's the space between your face and the back of your head. The face is at the front of the head, it should never fill up the whole head. I have had to explain this to so many of my own artists, that I go into a trance whenever I have to explain it again.

THE "ITCHY" DETAILS

I love Basil's cross-hatching. It doesn't fill up all the space in his designs. It helps define the forms. It isn't random noodling. And on top of all that it's funny. The sheer idea that characters who are so ugly deserve all this extra work refining them kills me. This is the inspiration for the close up detailed paintings in Ren and Stimpy. The best of them aren't actually ugly. They are very beautifully painted, with much love by the likes of Bill Wray and Scott Wills. I have seen this idea copied since (even in the Games Ren and Stimpy's) and perverted by actually being ugly, either by a cluttered mean looking drawing, or by later cartoons with just plain sloppy painting technique.

This style is not itchy at all to me. By "itchy" I mean useless floating cross-hatching that doesn't help describe clear entertaining forms. David has some thoughts on this too:

david gemmill said...
richard willaims. the dude tortures himself. who the #$%^* would want to animate that &*#%@? at least Anime has some sort of redeeming quality, like maybe the robot sequences and action scenes end up looking cool or entertaining..but all of richard william's $&%@# is always just painful to watch...and not entertaining. Only hardcore animation fans *%&^ off to the technical expertise that was involved to make it (not creative expertise though).I feel sorry for the people that had to inbetween. And he had the audacity to animate on ONES. on ONES.

Animate this *^&%$* design on ONES.You can look at scribner, and freddie moore and see pictures of them smiling, or you can look at pictures of Dick williams who looks very depressed and methodical.Animating cartoons is supposed to be fun, work, but fun. not torture.

Jonathan Harris said...
I will admit that I was inspired big-time by Robert Crumb at a certain point in my life, and that I do still admire his stuff. However, I do find myself wondering how much this is just a product of my being born in this generation, and thus having grown up being made to like ugly things (I've been considering this point lately and it's making sense of a few things).I do also find Raggedy Ann and Andy themselves quite appealing (in the faces, at least), but the rest of it does look a bit too much like animation #%$^&*@$#& (I still feel I should check the film out again, though).Also WOW I thought that link said "Michael's Porn Animation" at first! It made sense given the context, too!




There are many sides to the concept of "appeal" and I have barely scratched the surface. There is also "spicy appeal", a kind of appeal that grows on you. It's not instantly cute and might even make you mad at first but is much more human and honest than simple Bambi cute. Virgil Partch, Don Martin and many other artists fit that category.