Look! — Nice Tapes, Okay, Boy?—Okay?–
Robert “Roblog” Lynn has an excellent post about the art and career of political cartoonist Herbert Block. As is often the case, I am always learning fascinating stuff from the magic that is UMW Blogs, and the Roblog is consistently an excellent source of both information and inspiration. He’ll be spending this year thinking about “the structure of newspaper comics” and he starts off with a look at the National Portrait Gallery’s retrospective of Block’s work. Here’s an excerpt from his post:
Going by the trade name of Herblock, he coined the term “McCarthyism,” now a required vocabulary word for every 11th grade American history student, and gave us some of the most memorable images of Richard Nixon ever drawn. The exhibition includes his minimal set of drawing supplies and the beautifully goofy bronze National Cartoonist Society’s Rueben Award (named after Rube Goldberg. It looks sorta like this). Most interesting of all is the opportunity to see how the artist worked–the still visible non-photo-blue pencil drawings, his large, fluid sketchy inkings, and the frequently whited out and taped over faces he corrected again and again and again.
Read the rest of the post here.
on Oct 20th, 2008 at 1:20 am
I bow my head to salute this great cartoonist and incidentally a fine human being.