Rip Kirby

There was a time when I used to read all the comic books that I could lay my hands on. Rip Kirby was one of the books that impressed me, mainly for its perfect line work and of course the interesting stories. 

After WW-II, Alex Raymond returned to making cartoon strips and created ex-marine Rip Kirby as a private detective. I think the wonderful line work was the skill of John Prentice.

The comic strip used to come in pocket book size (A5 size)

His butler, Desmond, was an important character in all the books and managed to give a twist to the stories.

I was so impressed by the drawings, that I tried to draw Kirby from a comic book. I did it by putting in grid lines with pencil and did the final drawing with black felt pen. I drew this in the early seventies, so this is about five decades old. 

I have placed a pen there to give you an idea of the actual size. The enlargement is to the scale of 1:5 

When this turned out well, I tried my hand at one more character from the same comic book. 

Now that I have all the time in the world, I think I should try some more enlargements. Maybe Lord Greystoke's son (Tarzan) 

A movie with a message

There must be very few who did not enjoy the comic books  when they were kids. (I always wondered why they were called comic books)

My favourite ones were Phantom, Mandrake the magician and Tarzan. 

It was so fascinating to know that Tarzan was the child of Lady & Earl of Greystoke who were shipwrecked and how he was adopted by one of the apes who had  lost her own child. 

Then came other lovely cartoon strips like Denis the Menace followed by Calvin and Hobbes. The difference between Denis and Calvin is that Denis thought and spoke like a child would whereas  Calvin’s thoughts and words were that of an adult.

Coming back to Tarzan, I remember the time I cut up all the Tarzan comic strips from the daily newspaper (Monday to Friday) stuck them together to form one big roll.    

I  modified  a shoe box  to make some sort of a movie viewing box and fixed the roll in it so that it could be viewed like a movie. Those were days when kids were happy with simple pleasures  of life…

Recently I saw a short cartoon movie  which  brought back old memories. This  was an animated movie with a  difference . It conveys a message of life  without actually preaching about it. In fact there are no dialogues, no voice over, just music (and I loved the music too). It is for the viewer to decide what the movie has to say. The message is so simple that even a kid can understand it. Come to think of it, I think this is a good cartoon movie for kids. A movie with a message.

To see the 3 minute movie click here.

Comic book characters

Was always fascinated by comic books.
When you look back, its probably because of the visual treat that you get while reading a story. And I was more fascinated by the quality of the drawings that were produced in these old comic books.

Some of the illustrations that I liked were those of Phantom, Rip Kirby, Tarzan & Mandrake the magician. The illustrations were three dimensional when compared to Tin Tin & Astrix which were two dimensional.

Not that Tin Tin and Astrix were bad. In fact my pseudo name in this blog Haddock is my favorite character Captain Haddock from Tin Tin.

I was so fascinated by Rip Kirby that I decided to draw the character Rip by magnifying it ten times. So I set about the task of drawing grid lines (in pencil) on the comic book and painstakingly reproducing it. Once I was satisfied, I inked it with a simple black sketch pen. This was done about 25 years ago.

Once I realised that I could do this enlargement bit, I tried it out on another character from the same comic book (I don’t remember her name) but it did not turn out so well. So I stopped it at that and dropped Desmond (Rip’s butler) from being enlarged. (poor Desmond)

Now that I started dabbling with Photoshop, I thought of doing the same in the soft form. Tracing my original work in Photoshop took some time and I must say there are many things that I have yet to learn when it comes to these software tools.
After all learning is a continuous process.

Coming back to reading, I think the best thing that happens when you read a book is that you start to visualize the scene in your mind. But when you watch TV that freedom is curbed as you are forced to “see” the scene that is depicted on the screen.

No wonder they say “What a treasure of books” The treasure is not the books but the freedom of visualization.