Thursday, April 15, 2010

Self-P, part three

From the copy to Omar Calabrese's Artists' Self-Portraits:

"At first a self-portrait was hidden in a narrative painting: an artist would paint his image as part of a crowd scene, for example, or as a mythological figure. On the other extreme, once the genre was accepted, it was practiced by some artists—Rembrandt, van Gogh, Munch, and Dali, for instance—as almost an obsession."
--
For these comic book book jackets, hiding is not an option. These artists, no matter what measure of control they assert in their portraits, are winners in the publishing world: a-mythological, unflayed, nowhere near a crowd. The book precedes the self-portrait; the self-portrait is the book's penultimate manifestation. Joe Schmoe gets no. Zinesters give only the ghostly fingers of their email addresses. Drawing obsessive autobiography is perhaps the compromise, the build-up, but the surrogate self as a narrative subject opposes the typical self-portrait. Crumb and Spiegelman have the obsession, and have achieved both surrogate and self. Joe Sacco's obsession, however, netted him a real life photo to bolster his real life reporter credentials.
--Ho ho: Norman Rockwell's Triple Self-Portrait (from Autoritratti).

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Self-P, part two

-artist with tools (David B. at drawing table)

-artist with accoutrements (Lynda Barry with some animals and her own creation Beat Poodle Fred Milton; Lynda Barry in Eden)

-artist descriptive, r-e-a-l-i-s-t-i-c, non-ironic (Crumb); yet, also artist iconic (older Crumb still recognizably Crumb)

-artist styled as character, brought into characterworld (doglike Jason and Renaissance Sikoryak, but also Barry and B.)

-artist all of the above (Spiegelman on the Maus flap)

Monday, April 5, 2010

Self-Portrait in a Comicvex Mirror

Author self-portraits from Epileptic, The Greatest of Marlys, The Book of Genesis, I Killed Adolf Hitler, and Masterpiece Comics, respectively.