Great British Comic artists 3: Leo Baxendale

This week, I want to look at the third of my three top British comic artists: Leo Baxendale.

Born in 1930, in Preston, Lancashire, Baxendale would help to redefine the look of British humour comics. Starting out in 1951 as a freelancer for the Beano, he would go on to create a number of characters for that comic, most of which still live on today. They included Little Plum (1953), The Bash Street Kids (1954) and The Three Bears (1959). Even today, more than sixty years since he picked up his pencil, Baxendale is still admired by comic artists and much imitated too. His style can clearly be seen in the modern versions of The Beano and Dandy.

What makes Baxendale shine to me is his wonderful ability to convey anarchy in his strips. Like Searle and Giles, Baxendale seems to enjoy creating anti-authoriarian characters. The Bash Street Kids are a fine example of this:

Once he hit his stride in the mid 1950's, Baxendale was no doubt one of the best humorous artists around. Perhaps his greatest ability was however was being able to pack so much detail into an image. Look at this, another one of his Bash Street Kids sets. There seems to be so much going on here, a real sense of anarchy. Note the precariously balanced Smiffy on the fly paper.

Baxendale was a skilled draughtsman who could pace a gag. Some of his best work, in my opinion being his work on Little Plum, particularly when Plum faced his greatest adversaries, the mischievous bears that plagued this version of the Wild West.

After Parting with DC Thompson (publishers of the Beano and Dandy) during 1962, Baxendale was given the opportunity to launch a new comic: Wham (1963) was the result. Characters here included Eagle Eye and Grimly Feendish*. Feendish was perhaps one of the best British comic villians created. A villian who engaged in naughtiness and badness - a sort of pantomime villain, dreaming up often complex plans for sometimes quite small gains. His appeal perhaps lay in his slightly gothic feel, a little unusual at the time, as the boom in monster comics would not arrive until the early 1970's - Feendish was assisted/hindered by his (rather doltish) minions consisting of various creepy crawlies and tentacled... er, things. Just imagine if this stuff had been animated.
*Feendish would be given his own strip in Smash, a companion paper to Wham

After a spell round at IPC, where he created Clever Dick, Baxendale decided, in 1975,  to quit weekly comics, instead concentrating on his Willy The Kid and Baby Basil characters which appeared in a number of hardback books in the late 1970's.

Today, Baxendale a spry 81 years old, is still going and long may he continue.

Sources and Further reading

Leo Baxendale website

http://www.reaper.co.uk/main.htm  -  Baxendale's own website

Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Baxendale

Images

Bash Street Kids and Little Plum images - extracts from Dandy/Beano Anniversary books - Copyright DC Thompson

Grimly Feendish image - Copyright Leo Baxendale/Odhams Press. Sourced from <<http://reprintthis.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/reprint-this-grimly-feendish.html>>


Next: Across the pond to look at a couple of my favourite American comic strip artists - first up, my favourite artist of all time: Walt Kelly.

Emulating Ronald Searle

A bit more work.

Just a couple of pieces from last month to follow up the Ronald Searle post. I tried doing a couple of drawings using a dip pen and trying to emulate his style. It didn't really quite work, but it was a reasonable try. Most of all, I really enjoyed just going mad with a quill pen though.

Mmmm ink...

Enjoy.

My own work

I've not really gone through my own working process much, so I wanted to show some of the pieces I've been working on lately.

My current self generated project is centred around a group of anthropomorphic animals, a theme, I'll admit I enjoy drawing quite a lot. The premise is based around a lizard, a rat and a tasmanian wolf (thylacene) working together in a garage. A rival garage opens up next door, run by a weasel with a not too bright rhino and a less intelligent porcupine. The main focus is the interplay between the three main characters and the events in their life along with the rivalry with the garage next door. I've always enjoyed mixing up mundane elements with the extraordinary and this will feature heavily in the stories with outlandish cartoonish violence mixed with social observation.

The first stage has been to develop the character designs. The three principal characters have been knocking around for some time now, but I never felt that the character designs were particularly accomplished, being designed when I had less experience. Thus, in order to understand what makes a good character design, I've been looking at a number of books and websites - most notably gleaning advice from John Kricfalusi (the creator of Ren and Stimpy) who is something of an expert in this field as well as  looking at design work from such folks as Joe Murray (Rocko's Modern Life) and Genndy Tartakovsky (Dexter's Laboratory) as well as from earlier artists, notably Walt Kelly (Pogo) and Carl Barks (Uncle Scrooge/Donald Duck).

I'm preparing the seventh member of this ensemble - a secondary character: a somewhat nervous Armadillo accountant who will work alongside the rat, lizard and wolf. After looking at a lot of good anthropomorphic animal designs, I started to play around with shapes.

Then some sketches of armadillos just to get the feel of what these guys look like.

For me, I felt this character works best if he's small and insignificant. He needs to look like an accountant, and most of all we need to see his personality from first sight.

Combining props - the glasses, the tie and the safety helmet - and his pose - in this case, he seems to have picked up a minor injury - should tell us a lot about this guy.

Next I do some poses and head shots just to break in the character. I want to find the best and easiest way to draw him. This is particularly important if he's to be animated in the future. All the best pieces are pasted into a model sheet.

Then there's colour - not always easy. I experimented with more earthy colours, before deciding to go bold and making him blue. Hopefully, the form and the addition of armour plates on the snout should indicate that he is an armadillio.

A coloured Dillon

And that's about it for now. I'll put this guy away for a couple of weeks and come back to him with a fresh eye to see if anything needs tweaking.

Good night.

Heroes of British Cartooning: Carl Giles

Following on from my discussion last week on Ronald Searle, I wanted to turn my attention to the second of my three heroes of British comic art (actually I have to confess that I have many more than three but I want to keep it simple to begin with).

Carl Giles is without doubt one of the finest cartoonists to grace the pages of our newspapers. Giles was a wonderful illustrator and could convey a broad range of humour from biting satire to visual slapstick - always the hallmark of a good cartoonist.  Born in 1916 and passing away in 1995, Giles worked initially for the left leaning Reynold's News. He switched to the Sunday and Daily Express in 1943, where he would work until he hung up his pen in 1991 (he'd stopped working for the Daily Express in 1989).

Like Searle, Giles also had an anarchic element to his work. The Giles family included among others the wonderfully wicked Grandma, a horse racing obsessive with an acerbic sense of humour and the various children, most particularly, Ernie, a small wise cracking boy who seems to know too much for his age, and who often appeared with his long haired friend, Stinker. In this family, Giles seemed to inherently understand the squabbles, petty differences and misunderstandings that exist within such groups.

He was also one of the few artists in this medium who could convey rain and snow with such detail. His ink washes to create rain soaked streets or his absence of ink to depict snow are wonderfully atmospheric.

Giles was a gifted cartoonist who brought joy to millions through his brilliant draughtsmanship and wonderful humour.

More info

http://www.cartoons.ac.uk/artists/carlgiles/biography
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Giles


Next time: Leo Baxendale

Great British Cartoonists: Ronald Searle

I wanted to start this blog with a look at some of my favourite cartoonists over time. Being a brit, I want to focus on some of our home grown talent, in particular those comic illustrators prevalent in the middle years of the 20th century - from about 1945 to 1970. Why, you may ask, this period? Well in many respects this era is often overlooked in favour of the Golden age of cartoon and comic art, which in the UK is the period from 1900 to 1940, when many fine illustrators such as Bestall, Heath Robinson and Shepherd were at the peak of their powers. Yet interestingly, the generation of artists who would follow, in post war Britain, would perhaps best reflect the changing face of society, as it moved from a war damaged, austere nation to the booming society of the swinging sixties. Their work would provide a microcosm of the changes that the UK would undergo over this period. They would challenge many of the traditional conventions of cartoon art, often breaking with long held ideas and approaches. Increasingly they moved away from traditional or sentimental subjects , embracing instead the anarcharic, satricial and rude.  These trailblazers would lay the foundations for the modern age of cartooning and their shadow over British and indeed world cartooning is significant.

Okay, so that introduction did have a lot of superlatives, but I do believe that this period was an important one. With that I want to focus on three cartoonists, who in my own opinion, perhaps contributed the most during this era: Ronald Searle, Carl Giles and Leo Baxendale. There are three reasons I wish to focus on these gentlemen. Firstly, they are all the highest rate cartoonists of any generation. Secondly, all were excellent gagsmiths, able to visualise a joke or a gag with perfection.  But most of all, it was their ability to portray humanity at its most anarchic and wicked. All three would become famous for their unruly children (not literally of course). All three were able to show the worst of human nature, and yet, perhaps also the best.

Of these three, it is perhaps Ronald Searle who had the most success as a cartoonist. Searle, born in 1920 and who died only in December last year, was one of Britain's most celebrated cartoonists. Best known for his creation St Trinian's and his work on the Molesworth series, Searle has had a wide influence, not just on cartooning but beyond into animation (the look of Disney's 101 Dalmatians [1961], was based on Searle's style) and the wider visual arts. My own love for Searle comes from his ability to create so much from very simple line work. Take this St Trinian's illustation for example. Searle's line style is so simple yet conveys so much. I love his use of dip pen, which creates a line with so much raw energy. Look at the almost demonic expressions of the girls pulling the rack.

Searle was also a wonderful reportage illustrator. His drawings and observations of people in their surroundings are remarkable pieces of art in themselves. 

The top image is of the characters observed around Spitalfields, London in 1953. The lower image of a public house in Germany in the 1960's. Searle enjoyed observing and drawing the people around him. Even his more nuanced observations though still have a sense of caricature about them. The people he illustrated seem larger than life.  I love his confidence, being able to work directly in pen, yet still produce an accurate yet charismatic drawing, so full of life.

Finally I love his gag work. Often simple but always wonderfully put across.

Searle was truly a pioneer of modern cartoon art. He will be much missed.

Next time - another British genius - Carl Giles.

Thank you for reading and Good Night.