Art from 1999: Display design, self-portraits and… Ezra Pound?
September 12th, 2009 by ReinderThe images below are all from a single sketchbook from 1999, and are all that remains of that sketchbook. First, two self-portraits for a solo magazine called IK (me) that I put out in the late 1990s. It consisted mostly of autobiographical stories, some of which made it online.
Penciled self-portraits of me, myself and I. Yes, I too have done the pencil-biting self-portrait schtick.
Display art for a convention. I was winding down as the editor of another fanzine, Impuls, and one of the last issues I worked on was a special dedicated to the Devil. We got some good devil-related comics in including a very nice page by Erik Wielaart, and I wanted to make some displays for a convention. Then I crashed and burned on conventions, hard, and didn't go to any for years. Needless to say, this display never got made.
That year, I was also considering creating a graphic novel about the life of the poet Ezra Pound, of whom I'd been reading a biography for some reason. I'd got fascinated by the complexity of his life and his obsessive, larger than life and ultimately very unpleasant personality. In my head, it morphed into an online graphic novel that would fully use the formal advantages that Internet as a medium has to offer, and so we can all agree that we dodged a bullet when I decided to abandon the project. Aaaanyway... while working on it, I tried a number of approaches to drawing the main character:
Semi-abstract or manga-influenced
Realistic
White House in Orbit-esque
Something more like my default style of the time, so it'd be easier for me to draw
