Words Seem Out Of Place

“It would be immodest to say I’m terrific fun, but I am — I have a good time.” ***** Sylvia Miles passed away recently at 94, after a good, long life full of movies and parties. She was the epitome of New York cool, the #1 Partygoer in Manhattan . She was synonymous with the sort of decadent mid to late century New York City social scene that only lives on today in photos, and of course the memories and stories of those who lived it. She was so effortlessly cool in Midnight Cowboy , while also masterfully revealing her character's sadness and insecurities. Her Oscar-nominated supporting performance in the only X-rated film to ever win an Academy Award,  Midnight Cowboy (1969), is so extraordinarily memorable, especially when you consider she only had somewhere around ten minutes of screen time to make such a lasting impression. Seeing that film when I did, as a young college student becoming more obsessed with cinema by the day, was a seminal moment, and Mil...

If you grew up in the 1980s, then chances are you know Jose Garcia-Lopez's work, even if you didn't read comics or don't know his name. His art was not only featured in the pages of DC Comics, but also on almost every bit of company merchandise imaginable, from t-shirts to toy packaging and everything in between. If you took a Wonder Woman lunch box to school in, say, 1985, then it's likely you carried around some stellar Garcia-Lopez art and were the envy of all your friends. Much of this merchandising art was pulled directly from Garcia-Lopez's highly influential and legendary DC Style Guide . For decades, this was the company bible, to which all artists referred when drawing the deep stable of DC characters, and it was Garcia-Lopez's art that they were referencing. His sequential art is not to be ignored, either. Look at the page below from a Superman comic. Note how each panel is brimming with life—from the wonderful variety of facial expressions o...

Nicola Scott. Photo: Cole Bennetts. For my money, Nicola Scott is the finest comic book artist working today. Certainly, she's been an excellent artist for a while now, since she first entered the field about fifteen years ago, but recently she's emerged as a truly special artist, with a style all her own. Make no mistake: she's outrageously good now. Her recent work, especially on DC's  Wonder Woman and Image's  Black Magick,  is astonishingly impressive—seriously, drop everything and pick up the trades for these series right now. These books make it clear that Scott is in the midst of a major moment, and she's grasping those opportunities and making the most of them. Thanks partly to a unique confluence of events, including Wonder Woman's (brief) United Nations Ambassadorship last fall (for which Scott illustrated the jaw-dropping poster), the character's 75th anniversary in 2016, and the new Patty Jenkins film starring Gal Gadot, Scott's...

Darwyn Cooke, one of the most popular artists working in comics over the past two decades, died this weekend. He was only 53 years old. His wife announced Cooke's illness on his blog just the day before his death, under the heading "Fuck cancer." My sentiments exactly. I've been touched by it personally and that feeling of anger at it, even all these years later, never fully goes away. Cooke had so much more to contribute. From graphic design to animation storyboards to writing and drawing comics and graphic novels, Cooke did it all. He also did more with less and I don't mean less talent. What I mean is he used very few lines and they were clean and direct. He conveyed joy and exuberance through his classically Art Deco/animated cartooning style. The popular sentiment among comics fans is that no one draws the classic DC pantheon of heroes as well as Cooke. There's a reason for that: he drew these larger than life characters with a dynamism and energ...