John Holbo

Philosophers and Poets and Physicists and Primates

I came in second! And #2 tries harder, so I should provide some post-Christmas content to entertain all the philosophers coming this way from the APA blog. Hmmmm, what have I got, what have I got that I haven't posted yet?

OK, here's a thing I haven't shared with the world

It's a Flickr gallery of images of Philosophers and monkeys - well, primates. And physicists, too. And a baby. Here's my Flickr gallery description:

These were done for some videos I made for a class at the National University of Singapore. I needed illustrations of various figures for various purposes and I wanted them to be graphically unified. (Also, I was supposed to be careful about copyright!) The original idea was to do them all in the style of my Illustrator caricatures. When I'm preparing to make one of those I always first do a pencil drawing, with shading, often of just half a face - which I then mirror to create a symmetrical whole. Then endless node tweaking until the whole is satisfying. (Drawing half a face saves time. Also, seeing just half focuses the mind's eye as to which facial features will mirror nicely to catch the overall resemblance.) So anyhoo. It takes forever and a day to do all that. Time was a-wastin, deadline a-loomin' and all I had were all these damn half-face pencil drawings. So I ran 'em through Stipplism, which is a nifty Illustrator plug-in, and got these results. Which are actually kind of nice. It ended up working nicely because generally in the videos I have a quote from the figure in question on screen, and then the half-face goes nicely off to one side. But what quotes did you have from the monkeys, Prof. Holbo? OOOOOK! Ah, yes, there was some primatology involved. It was a fun class.

Mama In Her Kerchief and I In My Madness

"Holding with Haeckel that all life is a chemical and physical process, and that the so-called "soul" is a myth ..."

- H.P. Lovecraft, "Herbert West - Reanimator"

Years ago I made a parody Christmas book mash-up of Lovecraft/Haeckel/Clement Clark Moore. I called it Mama In Her Kerchief and I In My Madness: A Visitation of Sog-Nug-Hotep. I made print versions but then took them down (they weren't quite it.) Yet it lived, lurking beneath the surface, in the form of a perennially popular pair of Flickr albums and this old Hilo post. Hidden, winter sun-dappled tide pools of hideous, unfathomable, happy depths for kiddies to dip their toes in! But 2016 is the year of fake news. You can't spell 'fake' without the 'Haeckel'. So my fraudulent yet innocent concoctions have wandered and, eventually, been mistook for genuine Victoriana. Oh, well. I can't completely blame them. Real Victorian X-Mas cards are often dark and weird. Hence the joke.

Caliginous gloom is the best disinfectant. If, as some whisper, 'even death may die', then perhaps it is possible to quash a rumor that Haeckel actually designed X-Mas cards. Accordingly, I have seized the seasonal opportunity to republish and set the record straight. A new, improved version of the print edition is now on Amazon! It is also available on Kindle. Somehow Amazon has not managed not to see the connection yet, but I imagine that will resolve itself. (Also, I made slightly different covers for the two editions. Which do you prefer?)

For impoverished urchins, with nary a penny to spare, yet high-speed internet access, I have updated the Flickr galleries with some higher quality images. The old ones were skimpy. My most popular images, Blue Boy and Feeding Birdies, are available in larger sizes. Some others, including several of my favorites. (Maybe I'll get around to doing all of them. But not today.)

 

 

I always liked this one, but maybe that's just because I think it's an especially effective use of Photoshop. I made that thing look like a nice Christmas doily.

I have also updated the actual "Mama In Her Kerchief" cards, which were pretty much too small to be readable before:

 

The rest of the poem is on Flickr. But if you buy the book, there's even more than X-Mas cards! There real pseudo-scholarship you can use. This kind of stuff:

And, later:

Enjoy!

Francis Bacon Caricature

"In body, he was strong and erect, of middle height, his limbs gracefully put together, his gait kinglike, his face long and somewhat lean, his habit rather full, his countenance composed, and the motion of his eyes rather sedate than powerful. His forehead bore marks of severity, his mouth had a touch of pride. And yet when one penetrated beyond those outworks, and soothed him with due attention and seasonable discourse, one found him gentle and easy to deal with; so that he seemed quite another man in conversation than his aspect promised; and altogether he was one who might easily get himself a reputation at variance with his manners."

- quoted in Daphne Du Maurier, "The Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall"

Hegel Caricature

Election day. Looking pretty dark. No Owl of Minerva in sight. But yesterday I drew Hegel. (Yesterday I was too nervous about the election to think, so I drew. Today I'm too sad.)

When Hegel walked into the lecture hall, the, the rumble of conversation abruptly stopped, and it became so quiet that people described it with the cliche that 'one could hear a pin drop.' As one of his Polish hearers described him, Hegel, with his pale white face, clumsily waving his hands as he spoke - often with his eyes closed - seemed like a 'phenomenon from another world.'

- Terry Pincard, Hegel: A Biography, p. 611-2

Kant Caricature

I haven't been doing enough of these. Life is busy.

"Kant was a very attractive man: 'His hair was blond, the color of his face fresh, and his cheeks showed even in old age a healthy blush.' His eyes were particularly arresting. As one contemporary exclaimed: 'From where do I take the words to describe to you his eye! Kant's eye was as if it had been formed of heavenly ether from which the deep look of the mind, whose fiery beam was occluded by a light cloud, visibly shone forth. It is impossible to describe the bewitching effect of his look on my feeling when I sat across him and when he suddenly raised his lowered eyes to look at me. I always felt as if I looked through his blue ether-like fire into the most holy of Minerva.'"

Those Germans. They can be quite Romantic.

- Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography, p. 116.

 

On Beyond Zarathustra At Hilobrow

My friend Joshua Glenn was kind enough to invite me to showcase On Beyond Zarathustra at Hilobrow. So I gave him 15 whole pages of fresh material, plus a think-piece about Seuss and Zarathus and Philosophy.

I think this may be my favorite from the set, graphically speaking. I'm trying to master fake oil painting in Photoshop.

Starting next week, I'll put the Hilobrow pages up at Tapastic and Flickr, with the other ones.

#Inktober Hegel Sketch

I don't usually attempt non-digital inking but why not? It's #inktober! So I did Hegel. The face is ok but my brushwork is just terrible. Maybe I'll get better by the end of the month.

 

 

Caricature and Comics

I contributed a survey article, "Caricature and Comics", to the Routledge Companion To Comics, eds. Meskin, Cook, Bramlett. You can read my self-archived version of the piece here.

Abstract:

Caricature and comics are elastic categories. This essay treats caricature not as a type or aspect of comics but as a window through which we can view comics in relation to the broader European visual art tradition. Caricature is exaggeration. But all art exaggerates, insofar as it stylizes. Is all art caricature, since all has ‘style’? Ernst Gombrich’s classic Art and Illusion comes close to arguing so. This article conjoins critical reflections on Gombrich’s discussion of ‘the experiment of caricature’ with a survey of art historical paradigm cases. It makes sense for comics to emerge from this mix.

Philosophy Caricatures - Now With Extra Kierkegaard!

Another Flickr gallery just up. I've been working on some stylized caricatures of famous philosophers. I hope, eventually, I'll get around to a pretty full set. So far just five. The new one in the set is Kierkegaard.

Here's what he looked like when I was just doodling, pencil and paper:

Zarathustra Still Updating; Science Fiction Illustrations

I've been keeping up On Beyond Zarathustra. Don't forget to check Tapastic for updates. But I won't keep mirroring all the updates here.

Here's something else I just posted to Flickr: a small gallery of graphics I worked up for SF and Philosophy, last time I taught it. Classic thought-experiments re-imagined as pulp novels. I would really like to take the time to do these up proper, but I only had time for a quick-n-dirty treatment. For example:

 

I explain the point over at Crooked Timber.