The mystery begins with this cover by Charles Burns. The girl on the top half just weirded me out with her long pliable arm and shoulder that appears broken and brought in towards her chest. I'm amazed at how Burns can continue to disturb me by just making a few things seem a bit off.
Then I came across this page. It was an original drawing from a coloring book that I saw on Ebay. Aha! I thought. He must have had this coloring book as a kid and that image stuck in his brain. Perhaps the shoulder in this drawing always bothered him and he accentuated it in his version. I sort of marveled at the odds of finding this source for his cover and didn't think much else about it.
Until I came across this:
This panel is from an issue of Supergirl that I came across on the web a few weeks ago. I think it's the first comic with Comet her super horse, but I don't know the issue. Was this the image that Burns was taking from instead of the coloring book? Are there more of these out there that I'm not familiar with? It's such a weird, unnatural pose. Strange.
5 comments:
thatsa interesting mystery alright...
The supergirl one looks by far the weirdest with the odd shrunken hand too! Hope you get to the bottom of it, or at least unearth some more odd images!
Please post more images as you find them. The pose, especially the coloring book image, looks like something out of PHOTOPLAY or some other old movie-star magazine. Maybe a cover or feature? It could have ended up in a lot of reference files.
I look forward to contributing to the AWAKENED blog!
You're probably right, Steve. It does have that overly-conscious "pose like your waking up" feel to it. I wonder if it was just in a lot of morgue files of artists back then.
Awakened blog coming right up! I'm definitely throwing that pose into a comic the first chance I get.
I agree with Steve....many artists had the same pose files from Life magazine, etc...
There was no internet so it was pretty impossible to recall the sources.
It was probably some Marylin Monroe pose originally
I think it's most likely he (and probably on of the other artists too) was drawing from one of these images as opposed to the same photo reference (if there is one out there). In the Todd Hignite book 'In The Studio,' Burns shows some of his own 'swipe files' of old comic panels, which he seems to draw from pretty regularly. If you haven't seen the book, it's well worth checking out. Type 'Hignite Burns Swipe' into Google Books and you can see a few of the Burns pages.
Post a Comment