Here is a reprint of my most recent post for the AMAZING STORIES website. This post was inspired by my good buddy Cal over at the Cave of Cool who tends to knock one of my great childhood heroes because of his choice of shirts.
This post is about icons.
It's about powerful images and the way that they can become stuck in the public consciousness.
But it's also about old pulp heroes. One in particular.
I suppose I should start at the beginning. Not back in the 1930's when Street and Smith released a new hero pulp magazine featuring a super-scientific crime fighter named Doc Savage. Not even in the 1960's when the adventures were reprinted in paperback format with covers painted by artist James Bama.
For me the beginning was the summer of 1976. I was eleven years old and it was the start of our family summer vacation. Summer vacation for me meant long drives in a hot car with my brothers and I in the back seat. We had made a stop somewhere and my mother sent us in to a used bookstore with a little bit of pocket money to buy comic books to try to keep us interested in something else other than fighting amongst ourselves.
I started rifling through the second-hand paperbacks. I can't remember exactly what I was looking for, but when I came across the Doc Savage paperback I was stopped cold. The cover showed a muscled man with a torn shirt and a strange haircut, fending off a trio of weasel-like creatures. The name DOC SAVAGE was blazoned across the top but above it was the name of the adventure: The Other World.
The description on the back of the book got me even more excited. “To the world at large, Doc Savage is a strange, mysterious, figure of glistening bronze skin and golden eyes...”
How could an eleven year old resist that? I read the paperback and wanted more.
Fortunately there were lots around at the time. George Pal had just made Doc Savage, the movie. There were comic books and magazines and plenty more paperbacks all featuring the iconic image of Doc Savage sporting a torn shirt.
The iconic torn shirt.
An icon is a religious work of art from Eastern Christianity. Depictions of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, saints, what have you, these images were very powerful representations of a people's faith.
The icon has become co-opted by our society for anything but religious purposes. An icon is a visual representation of an idea or a feeling. It can be a symbols that encapsulates a feeling or an idea. Icons are very powerful, though we tend not to think too consciously about them. But that's how they work.
Take Sherlock Holmes. Holmes was never... NEVER... described as wearing a deerstalker cap. The illustrator of the stories, Sidney Paget depicted Holmes wearing a traveling cloak and a deerstalker hat for one adventure. For whatever reason, the deerstalker became permanently associated with Holmes. The deerstalker was a country cap, favored by hunters. To wear it year round, in the city was an absurd thing back in the late 1880's, yet it quickly became Holmes' costume.
Put on a deerstalker cap and you are Sherlock Holmes. Even the recent BBC TV series Sherlock, which has updated Holmes to the Twenty-First century, could not entirely get away from at least giving a nod to the existence of the famous cap.
Doc Savage wearing a torn shirt ALL the time is ridiculous. Yes, he's an adventurer and very busy. If, in the course of an adventure his shirt gets torn he doesn't have time to get a new one.
Some bloggers, including Calvin from Calvin's Canadian Cave of Cool, take to complaining about it, asking why he doesn't make his shirts out of the same, seemingly durable material out of which his pants are made.
But these questions are immaterial. Doc Savage's ripped shirt is iconic. It's as iconic as Sherlock Holmes' deerstalker, or Tarzan's loin cloth.
It was not always like that. Just as with Holmes's deerstalker, the torn shirt is a product of the illustrator. Doc Savage's original pulp magazine run featured lots of action-filled covers and on some Doc appears wearing a ripped shirt. In the very first issue Doc's shirt is torn. Nowhere near as torn as it would be in later covers, but it was there from the beginning. But other covers do not feature the torn shirt. In some cover illustrations Doc is wearing a suit and tie with not a single rip in sight.
When the adventures were released in paperback the job of painting the covers went to artist James Bama. Bama was the one who settled on the image of the torn shirt (the publishers insisted on the weird, widow's peak hairstyle, but that's another story) and the torn shirt appeared on every single cover that Bama or any other artist painted, right up until today.
So now, poor Doc Savage has to wear a torn shirt all the time, just like Sherlock Holmes was saddled with his ridiculous deerstalker. Perhaps Doc will move beyond the torn shirt. There is supposed to be a new movie in the works. Perhaps that will give us a new iconic image for Doc Savage. Maybe something cleaner, sophisticated and less... torn.
Perhaps that is a vain hope. I imagine that the poster for the movie, should it ever materialize, will feature a picture of whatever broadly muscled actor they cast sporting a shirt hanging raggedly about him to better highlight his pectorals and six-pack abs. That image will still overshadow the essence of a character who is so much more than a torn shirt.
Such is the power of the icon.
I've been here and there. I've drawn a lot of pictures. I've written a bit, too. I'm not good at this self-promotion thing. Look, you want to know about me? just visit these websites. Okay?
www.mdjacksonart.weebly.com
http://mdjackson.deviantart.com
http://community.imaginefx.com/fxpose/mdjacksons%5Fportfolio
This is published over at the AMAZING STORIES website just today (and please follow the link) but I wanted to present it in its entirety here today because Finlay is an illustrator whose work has always been close to my heart.
Whenever I think about black-and-white illustrations from the old science fiction magazines, it is always the work of Virgil Finlay that I picture in my head. And why not? The man was a genius with a pen and ink… and he laid it down one dot at a time.
Virgil Finlay was born July 23, 1914 in Rochester, New York. He studied art vigorously in high school and it was there that he discovered scratchboard, his medium of choice. Scratchboard, back in the early 30′s was a white board to which black ink was applied. After the ink was dry, it was scraped off by the artist. It is the opposite of putting a black ink line on a white sheet of paper. Finlay used both techniques on the same drawing: filling areas with black so that he could scratch through to the white to achieve a specific tone of gray and also creating his middle tones and grays with hatching and stippling in black ink on the white surface.
And man, could he stipple!
Finlay had discovered science fiction with Amazing Stories in 1927 and horror and fantasy with Weird Tales in 1928. By 1935 he was confident enough that he could provide better illustrations that he sent six unsolicited drawings to Farnsworth Wright, the editor of Weird Tales pulp. Finlay’s stippling ability almost lost him the job as Wright was uncertain that such fine dots would reproduce on the cheap pulp paper. Fortunately a test print proved acceptable. Enough of the detail remained to provide the readers with the rare experience of seeing a new artistic genius explode fully developed onto the scene. He had four illustrations in that issue.
Finlay’s work was an immediate hit with the readers and the writers. H.P. Lovecraft wrote him fan letters and even composed a poem about his art. Finlay was a fan of the genre as well as one of the most talented artists to enter the field. These combined to provide his work with a power and grace unknown in the pulps. The stippling, fine hatching and pebble board were all used in conjunction to give his images a texture and depth beyond anything ever seen. Using an ultra-fine lithographic pen, he would dip just the tip into ink and allow only the liquid ink, not the tip of the pen, to touch the surface. He then wiped the residual ink off the pen point and repeated the procedure for the next dot. This incredible and incredibly labor-intensive technique, coupled with his enormous talent, created images of near photographic quality.
His reputation quickly spread. In addition to multiple illustrations is nearly every issue of Weird Tales through 1939, Wright chose him to illustrate the first in a proposed series of illustrated reprints of Shakespeare’s plays.
1938 he moved to New York City to take a staff position on The American Weekly, a Sunday supplement distributed with Hearst newspapers nationwide.
He served in the Army from 1943 to 1946. Except for this hiatus, he crafted hundreds of images for various science fiction pulps throughout the forties. Included were: Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Fantastic Novels, Startling Stories, Super Science Stories, Amazing Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Fantastic Adventures, Argosy, and even a few comic books for DC. He continued to work for those titles that lasted into the fifties. During that time, however, the pulps were phased out of existence and the “digest” was born. Rates decreased and making a living became more difficult.
He did do some color covers for certain magazines, but his color work, although technically competent, did not have the same magic as his black and white illustrations
Throughout the forties and fifties he was the most popular artist in science fiction. However, his painstakingly slow techniques could not be rushed. Short cuts resulted in less satisfactory work. He often did nothing but draw, sixteen hours a day, seven days a week to eke out a living at the wages that the pulps and digests could afford to pay. When markets would dry up as magazines floundered he was known to take jobs repairing lamps.
In 1956 Finlay took on work for an Astrology magazines. They paid him better than the digests and continued to buy his work right up to his last years. Finlay died in January of 1971.
I am indebted to Jim Vadeboncoeur Jr. His comprehensive Illustrators website has a masterful page about Finlay and much of this post was cobbled together from his site. Any errors or omissions are my own.
I've been here and there. I've drawn a lot of pictures. I've written a bit, too. I'm not good at this self-promotion thing. Look, you want to know about me? just visit these websites. Okay?
www.mdjacksonart.weebly.com
http://mdjackson.deviantart.com
http://community.imaginefx.com/fxpose/mdjacksons%5Fportfolio
I started rifling through the second-hand paperbacks. I can't remember exactly what I was looking for, but when I came across the Doc Savage paperback I was stopped cold. The cover showed a muscled man with a torn shirt and a strange haircut, fending off a trio of weasel-like creatures. The name DOC SAVAGE was blazoned across the top but above it was the name of the adventure: The Other World.
