Filling in for Mike Peterson while he’s on assignment to tranquil Santa Royale, California, I’m Brian Fies.
Today's Bizarro by Dan Piraro spoke to me because this is pretty much how I spent my weekend.
My brother-in-law Marc came to town, and when he does I always try to have a couple of new microbreweries lined up for us to try. The region is full of them, they hatch and die like fruit flies around here. Marc's an occasional home brewer and my Jedi master who taught me to appreciate good beer. I'd like to say we sit around analyzing ABVs and IBUs, but mostly we just BS. A conversation about werehamsters would not be out of place.
Bizarro cartoonist Dan Piraro is a character. I’ve met him a few times, enough that when he sees me he sort of remembers seeing me before, and I’ve attended a few of his entertaining talks. He’s compact, with sharply rendered facial hair and sideburns, cool vintage suits with broad-collared shirts, stylish hats, and a cigar when the facility allows it. He looks like a character from his own strip (which he is, sometimes). Does he wear jeans and a t-shirt on weekends? Does he ever get tired of playing “Dan Piraro?” Or is that just who he is?
Piraro at the Charles M. Schulz Museum in September 2010, photo by me.
I don’t know, but he is one of the most talented cartoonists working today. The National Cartoonists Society gave him its Reuben Award for “Cartoonist of the Year” in 2010. He’s also a comedian, host of a short-lived reality TV series (“Utopia”), a dedicated vegan, and a terrific surrealist painter in the tradition of Dali and Magritte.
The Virgin and Her Daughters, oil on canvas, by Piraro.
And a character.
One quality I love most about Piraro is that he can really draw. It’s not always evident in the small panels and broad style of cartoons he does, but I think he’s one of the best pure draftsmen in comics. Clean, precise, beautiful compositions, always the right amount of detail to direct the reader’s eye to the joke. Craftsmanship like his is nearly a lost art in modern comic strips.
Several Bizarro collections can be found at your heroic local independent bookstore as well as through your evil unblinking Internet overlord. If you’re interested in more than Bizarro cartoons, I can recommend Bizarro and Other Strange Manifestations of the Art of Dan Piraro, which covers a lot of his life and non-comics art. That book’s 10 years old but still available at good prices online.
Craft Corner
Last Thursday, I complimented Anne Gibbons's drawing of a medicine cabinet in Six Chix, saying that I thought her asymmetrical perspective helped it "read" better than a perfectly centered point of view. Reader Andy left a comment on that post asking what I meant by that.
What I mean by "reads" is how quickly and easily someone can interpret a drawing. If people can tell what the drawn objects are and how they relate in space without even thinking about it, it reads well. If people have to take a few seconds to figure out exactly what they're looking at, it reads poorly.
Say I drew a shallow box, in perspective, as if I were sitting dead center in front of it:
That's a fairly abstract and not very interesting figure. It could be anything. But if I move my point of view just a little bit to the side, like Gibbons did, I think the drawing's more interesting and a bit easier to decode:
Still, even if you see that as a three-dimensional object, it's impossible to tell how big it is, or whether it's poking back into the page or protruding out toward the viewer. To help it read even better, you can add some other objects that readers are familiar with:
It's not always necessary (and Gibbons didn't do it), but shading can help it read even better. Light sources typically come from overhead, so shading the top surface of the cabinet makes it look like it's receding from us.
Understanding how a drawing "reads" is important in comics, which are (often) all about streamlining reality to the minimum amount of information needed to convey an idea. If you get it wrong, readers are confused and a drawing fails.
Thanks Brian for the little art lesson!
Posted by: Dave from Philadelphia | 07/18/2016 at 01:18 PM
I like the fact that, when you talk art, I can still understand you. You literately add a dimension to the conversation today. Or slightly subtract one. But it works!
Posted by: Mike Peterson | 07/18/2016 at 04:49 PM
Thanks for the amazing write up, Brian! I am honored and humbled. Sorry it took me several days to find it. I'm always slow to catch on to something outside of my own tiny world of brutal deadlines. We should grab a beer sometime and turn into hamsters!
Posted by: Dan Piraro | 07/24/2016 at 11:11 AM
Thanks, Dan! Sounds good to me.
Posted by: Brian Fies | 07/25/2016 at 10:43 AM