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Comic Book Brain by Erik Weems. Business site is here.
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THINGS TO CLICK
ONLINE COMICS
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ARCHIVE 63
Standing
Last Apples of Summer - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Batman in Yellow
Pneumonia
Well, I contracted pneumonia. Two weeks now of interesting wheezing and unusual coughing. Pneumonia facts: Pneumonia at one time had a 30% fatality rate. The current rate of demise is 5% of hospitalized cases each year. Approximately 3 million in the USA get pneumonia each year, with half a million ending up in a hospital. Some 25,000 will die from the ailment. Of things that kill you in America, it is number six. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Large Photos: Ford 1965 "Super Camper"
Frank Robbins Batman
In this 1972 Batman tale, you can see the influences of TV cop programs, fashion (circa 1972) and especially Robbins' own life-long kinetic style. He brushes in thick, rich black inks and uses his own lettering style for exclamatory word balloons that reminds me of modern manga. Although Robbins' style is formulaic in the way classic adventure strips for newspapers were during their great Milt Caniff heyday, at the same time Robbins' brings solid storytelling skills to his pages. Everything keeps moving, and his Batman figure is both a black-shrouded character loaded with ink and an expressive figure that Robbins' gives telling hand and eyebrow motions to. Batman has often been drawn as if he were encased in a frozen mask, but not here. In Robbins' artwork, his humans are always spilling over with emotions, no matter what the scene is, Robbins heightens everything so that his specific intent can't easily be missed. The tale itself is a simple "how did he do it" crime story in which Batman must solve the seeming mass of suicides which were actually the product of frequent games of Russian roulette hosted by professional gambler Conway Treach. The story is shoe-horned into fifteen pages and Robbins runs it out right at the last panel. In between he introduces various locales and characters, and through it all are the great slabs of ink he uses to shape the pages and individual panels, and the (often) silhouetted figures that populate them. A unique talent and a singular idea of how to do a Batman story.
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Thursday, October 3, 2008 
Pneumonia is an inflammatory illness of the lung.
