Showing posts with label illustration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label illustration. Show all posts

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Drawing, Comics, Animation and Pedro Eboli

original posting, May 10, 2008
updated, October 18, 2012

With much of its focus on stereotypes and ethnic American theories of subjectivity, it's easy to forget that a fair chunk of Tex[t]-Mex looks at the history of Warner Brothers animation teams--in particular, it's third chapter, "Autopsy of a Rat," pries into the work of Isadore, I, Friz Freleng and Robert McKimson, whose efforts on Speedy Gonzales are memorable to say the least.


Dan DeCarlo's Latina spy femme fatale.
source: http://cartoonsnap.blogspot.com/2010/01/yardbirds-by-dan-decarlo.html

Before I was ever a writer, I was a cartoonist--thrilling to the sweet, sordid lines of Basil Wolverton (right), Bill Elder, Al Jaffee, Don Martin (Splorf!), Sergio Aragones, Wally Wood, Harvy Kurtzman, Curt Swan, Murphy Anderson, Jim Aparo, Mort Drucker, Antonio Prohias, and Dan de Carlo (above, center), just to name a few. So while the motivation for my autopsy of Speedy Gonzales in the book might have been to out "the man" for making miserable "Mexican" mise-en-scènes, the desire to root out the workings of animators also belied my Walter Mitty dream of working on the Pixar "back-lot." Here's a page of crude pencil sketches I did in 2003:




And, here, in splendid profile, an india ink and watercolor rendition of "dawg," my "signature" alter-ego who is tagged in dive bar bathroom stalls from San Diego to London, from Paris to Austin--this particular version is a screengrab from the colophon of The Hurt Business: Oliver Mayer's Early Works [+] PLUS:
Lastly, here, a page from my graduate school notebook.



All of this as a preface to a well-wrought piece of animated delight from the eyes, mind, pen, and computer of a Mr. Pedro Eboli snagged from drawn.ca:



Friday, December 17, 2010

Chikle.com

Just a quick December link to Chikle.com--a San Diego graphics art phenom, Chikle's xicanosmotic semiotic wonders are a gift to the eyes; a chapter in my upcoming book Eyegiene, for UT Press, writes about artists including Chikle and Izel Vargas, next-generation Chicana/o arts shamans whose canvases pulse with a vibe that marries more traditional plastic arts like painting, illustration, and silk-screening with the vibrant and electric pace of itunes and youtube.  Click the image to hit Chikle's online gallery.

Sunday, May 16, 2010

Saturday, September 19, 2009

Robert Crumb on God! Genesis by way of Mr. Natural


Robert Crumb is a national treasure--an American original whose eye and hand whisper depraved mutterings that spurt out of his pen and onto the page. The result? Canvases that echo Hieronymus Bosch via Will Elder, Breugel via Buñuel. Crumb's now taking on God with W.W. Norton. The world will never be the same; hit the image opposite for a taste and grab a full excerpt here @ boingboing.net.

Sunday, June 07, 2009

Greg Gossel New Work

Greg Gossel: Happy Endings Preview from Greg Gossel on Vimeo.

Marta y Néstor, El robot bajo el agua | Facebook DJs

I am beginning to love the video posting ease of facebook; witness this cool find this morning zapped to my eyes via Profe Ralph Rodriguez's upload--hit the image to the right to view Marta y Néstor's video, directed by Jorge Jaramillo, or merely play it below. Ralph's cool book with UT Press, Brown Gumshoes: Detective Fiction and the Search for Chicana/o Identity, is worth looking at as well.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

REPOST | Izel Vargas


Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America introduces the concept of "Xicanosmosis," a mouthful of a word that fuses the ideas of "Chicano" with "osmosis"--sort of a shorthand way of talking about what happens when the cultures and histories of the United States and Latin America combine, clash, fuse, and frolic. Izel Vargas's amazing paintings embody the odd, symbiotic dynamics of xicanosmosis in ways that my book just can't match. Click "Dora" above to go to Vargas's cool art site; one of my favorite pieces? "Estados Jodidos"; Izel Vargas writes into the galleryblog with an anecdote about what happened when he displayed "Estados Jodidos" in public below.


"What was funny was that no one knew what "Estados Jodidos"* meant, except for the occasional Spanish-speaking passerby, which happened to be the Latino workers that were employed near and around the storefront. When I was asked about it, the conversation quickly turned into a one about immigration in NC--some of the surrounding counties had been passing laws that didn't allow workers to hang out in certain areas, limited taco truck vending, and gave cops the power to detain for ICE officials anyone they identified as illegal. Most Latino immigrants didn't understand these laws mainly because of a language barrier, which in turn added more mistrust that had already permeated within the community. This is how 'Estados Jodidos' came to be."

[* A Spanish-language pun on "Estados Unidos" or The United States, "Estados Jodidos" means "The Fucked States"]


repost from Janurary 14, 2009...

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Millard Kaufman, RIP



Thanks to regular contributor Michael Wyatt Harper for the headsup.

Monday, March 16, 2009

Cool Lucha Libre Graphic on FFFFound.com

original posting: 1/13/09 @ 1:49pm


Gracias to "anonymous" for the i.d. of the Blue Demon!

update 3/16/09

...and a shout-out to alexis ziritt, the artist, who has just checked in with a credit! nice work!

Amazing Archive of Kitschy and Dazzling Movie Posters


Semiotic spelunker of the visual, dadanoias.net finds the most amazing thing on the internets; for instance, this archive of movie poster scans--one of the best I have seen!

Get your hands on one of my books ...