Ty Templeton the Amazing Young Man

One of the people that used to work for the Silver Snail

was a charming young man named William P. Marks;

who spent a lot of the time smiling and chatting with the customers.

I think that it was Ron Van Leuween or Tom Stormonth who

dubbed him "Smiler" or some such nickname.

William was an entrepreneurial sort and he joined forces with another young wunderkind of Toronto fandom, Kevin Davies, on the last four issues of the Fanzine turned Magazine, "Miriad".

Art by Kevin Davies

Art by Kevin Davies

Art by Kevin Davies

That was back in 1981.  The magazine and the publishing partnership fizzled out after their fourth issue together (#7) but it led to Bill's next publishing venture, "Vortex Comics".  Which in turn led to him publishing the cult hit comic, Mr. X and later on, Howard Chaykin's "Black Kiss".

Courtesy of Dean Motter .com

Not forgetting, Chester Brown and his contribution,
 "Yummy Fur",
which was not my cup of tea but garnered a lot of critical acclaim in it's day.

That eventually led to my seeing the early artwork of the incredibly talented and very young, Tyrone Templeton.

Ty was something else back then, charming, witty, talented and handsome... overwhelming in a lot of ways and a conversation with him was often akin to being slapped in the face, repeatedly, with a wet fish, by the whole cast of Monty Python!

At least, that is how I often felt.

Anyway, Ty was a regular member of the ebb and flow of the Silver Snail regulars and I watched, in awe, as his skill with pencil and ink continued to improve.

That brings us to the oddity that I present below.

I have a vague but persistent memory of actually receiving this flyer from Ty himself, while milling about in the foyer of the Snail.

I didn't attend.  I'm a lot of things but a party person I am not, invite me at your peril!

I would be interested to know if anyone else managed to hang onto one of these flyers or am I alone in this?

That's it, time to call in the cat and head for bed.
See you all next time.

The Silver Snail at 323 Queen Street West, a little History.

I was twenty years old, living in Birmingham, England and making plans to visit relatives in Toronto, Ontario, for the very first time.  I was already a comic book junkie and had been for at least seven years but I had never been to North America, the Promised Land of Comic Collecting!

It was the summer of 1977 and in the pages of the Overstreet Price Guide for that year, I found a full page advertisement for the Silver Snail.  I knew that, once in Toronto, I had to visit the store and discover the untold treasures awaited me there.

As it happened, in the twenty or so days that I was in Canada, I visited the store three or four times and came away with priceless things like the missing issues of Charlton's/John Byrne's Doomsday Plus One... amongst other things.

More to the point, looking back, it was the first time that I met Ron Van Leeuwen, the owner and his girlfriend/wife Uli Havermann.  It was also the first address of the Silver Snail,

321 Queen Street West, Toronto.

Being young and stupid, I neglected to take a photograph of the store and I really wish that I had done because it would be wonderful to look at it today. 

Although I didn't have any plans to emigrate to Canada at the time, within two years I was doing just that.  I landed in Toronto on the last day of January in 1980 and very soon thereafter made my way downtown to visit "The Snail".

That first visit was a trifle confusing and I thought, at first, that the store had been renovated.  For a start, I was sure that the check-out counter had been on the left, as one came through the door and yet, here it was, on the right.  Of course, once I spoke to Ron, it became clear that he had moved his business into the store next door,

we were standing in

323 Queen Street West, Toronto

the second home of the store.

It took me another two years to get around to actually photographing the new address but in the winter of 1982 into 1983, I was about to return to England for a visit and I wanted to show

 my old collecting buddies where I got my books from.

Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to show you this :

and here is the beautiful business card, for this incarnation of the store, painted by the talented and at the time, very young, Paul Rivoche :

It may not seem like very much to be excited about but to a lot of people, this store was Mecca and we all visited it regularly; new comic books or not, just to hang out.

I don't think that I ever told Ron, at least not in so many words, how much he and his store meant to me.  I'm sorry that I didn't because I should have but I was young and thoughtless.

With that in mind,

THANK YOU RON

for all the good years

and the good memories.

This one is dedicated to Mike Bothelho

of Toronto's Comic Book Lounge

and his enthusiasm for the history

of the comic book shops of our city.

Missing Release Dates!

As I have grown older and my avid interest in all things Comic Book related has mellowed, compounded by the absolute inability of almost any artist that I admire to keep to a regular publishing schedule.....

Well, the upshot of it all is that I miss books when they come out.

The latest example would be 

by Brian Stelfreeze,

someone that I have watched with awe since his first book,

Cycops, from Comics Interview, way back in the 1980's.

Mister Stelfreeze drew in a very stylized fashion but with a great deal of self-assurance and he has never lost either quality.  It has always been a shame, to me, that he has done so many covers and that I could not afford to buy a comic book just for a cover!

Anyway, back to the point.  I don't buy the Diamond Catalogue, "Previews", anymore and it is easy to miss things on the long list of Independent Comics that publish, on their web site, each week.

As a consequence, I missed the fact that the fourth issue of Daymen had been released, way back at the end of July and I only realized that fact a week ago.

Luckily, the helpful guys at The Beguiling were able to find one for me in their racks.

Thanks very much guys.

It happens far too often and sadly, I don't really care as much as I used to.  There was a time when I was sure that my passion for collecting would never wane but I am older and wiser now.

One more beautiful image from Brian and it's off to bed for me.

Page Layout in Comic Books

The western world reads from the left to the right and the top to the bottom of a printed page of text and these rules apply to a comic book page too.

In the early days, when comic books were made by reprinting comic strips from the newspapers, no one gave any thought to how well the cut up strips would "read" in a different layout.

The original format, of probably four panels in a row, for most cases, read well enough in a left to right orientation but cutting those four panels up and rearranging them in two tiers of two panels per tier... exposed some short comings in design for easy reading.

Despite the commonly held belief, that comic books are merely an arrangement of images in a grid, why do some examples of the medium stand out from the crowd?

READABILITY

It is a fine art, one where the artist subtly leads the reading eye through the panels on the page, reinforcing the pattern of reading that we all learned in childhood.

LEFT to RIGHT and TOP to BOTTOM

I was a very slow learner and it took me a very long time to be able to separate the storytelling from the story.

It is also very interesting, that in all the books about making comics, all the interviews with the artists make comics, most of them never remark on the importance of 

learning how to direct the reading eye.

In the summer of 1989, I sat in a seminar given by the very talented Ty Templeton at a Comic Book Convention at the Westbury Hotel on Yonge Street, here in Toronto.

Ty did his best, within the limits of a one hour tutoring session, to give us an idea of what was involved in the designing of a comic book page and it still took me another twenty years to really be able to see it!

Anyway, enough chatter.  Here is an annotated page, drawn  by the talented and prolific Matt Howarth, that displays his clear understanding of his craft.

In fact, this page almost acts as two pages because a page turn over could have occured at the point where the diver enters the water... What happens next?... but instead, the reading eye is dragged up to the top of the page and then pulled back down through the last two panels for a more interesting page turn over (human interest is now involved with the introduction of a new character) when the diver lands on top of the girl.

I hope that someone out there finds something helpful in my ramblings about making comic books.  It is a fascinating subject and I have enjoyed tracking it down, through the years, to arrive at the understanding that I have today.

One last thing.  JOE KUBERT had an amazing understanding of page layout and anything that he drew, especially in his later years, should be considered to be Comic Book Layout 101.  The two books that he wrote on the subject,

Superheroes : Joe Kubert's Wonderful World of Comics

and

Joe Kubert's Comic Book Studio

should be required reading for anyone who is interested in learning how to be a comic book artist.

McGinnis, McNeil and Barbara Bode

I ran across a listing for this the other day

a new book about Robert McGinnis and I hadn't

heard a word about it!

Titan Books of the U.K. are the publishers and they

brought out the Artist's Edition of Walt Simonson's

"Alien", a lovely piece of work, last year.

I think that I first took notice of the art of Mr. McGinnis after reading an article about him in Greg Theakston's "The Betty Pages".

And then, there is Carla Speed McNeil...

I discovered her "Finder" stories in the original collections,

at a comic store in Kingston, Ontario.  I had never heard of the series and I was amazed to discover a "New" talent who had already published a large volume of work!

 I am very happy to see this new collection appearing on the market, it has been too long.  The stories are collected from their original appearances, in the new Dark Horse Presents, a fine publication.  Unfortunately, as an anthology, it simply contained too many strips that I wasn't interested in, to justify buying it as it came out; despite the presence of Finder.

Finally, there is Barbara Bode.

The image bellow is the only one that I could find on the Web and I was surprised by that.  Barbara was the wife of Vaughn Bode (the creator of Cheech Wizard and a whole universe of other colourful characters) and Vaughn always sited her as the model for his "Bode Broads".

The life of a muse is never easy and from all reports Vaughn was not the easiest person to peacefully co-exist with.  Mark Bode, Vaughn and Barbara's son, said, "...we had just ridden on the tail of a space cowboy comet, which was Vaughn's life with us."

Vaughn died in 1975, as the tragic result of a consciousness raising experiment and in that same year, she met Rick Falcon.  From all accounts, Rick was a exactly what she needed after the turbulent years with Vaughn and they were very happy together.  

Barbara passed away in 2007.

A Typical Week's Worth of Books

I indulge my love of comic books and art books by,

almost every week, on New Comic Book Day,

visiting the book shops of downtown Toronto.

I don't usually come home without at least one addition to the collection and fairly often, quite a few new items are in my backpack.

So, here is a typical "haul":

Starting out at the BMV book shop at

10 Edward Street, close to the new location of the Silver Snail Comic Shop.

I already own this one, I bought it when it was released and I was 18 and living in Birmingham, England.  It was cheap enough that I couldn't pass over the chance of a "reading copy" and it is in lovely condition too.

Somewhere along the line, I had stopped being overly impressed by Dean Yeagle and his creation, "Mandy".

Don't get me wrong, Dean is a wonderful cartoonist but the subject matter was always the same and I am no longer a teenage boy!

That being said, the books weren't cheap when they were released and that played a part too.  This one, I just simply overlooked and at $15, for a collection of images by a variety of artists, was too good to pass up.

This was in the $2 bin and it has some lovely photos of pretty women in luxurious lingerie.  I have a separate library of photography and images, which this will fit right into.

Moving on, to the largest BMV outlet, up on Bloor Street, I found these treasures:

Amazing X-Men #4 by McGuinness

Amazing X-Men #5 by McGuinness

Der Mond, a very attractive art book about a japanese artist, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto.  A book that I had checked-out at it's full price of $50, being sold for $10, meant that it too was going home with me!

This one was simply a lucky find, in the 50 cent box.  The lead story is by the fledgeling Travis Charest.

Neal Adams Presents, Bucky O'Hare and the Toad Menace.

Published by Vanguard/David Spurlock

in 2006, this one just didn't register on my radar.

I already own the large compilation of the same strip, that was published in the 1980's, soon after the strip's initial run in Adam's "Echo of Future Past" magazine.

But after rereading the extensive interview with Michael Golden, the artist, in the issue of Modern Masters about him and his career, it was an item that I wanted for the collection.  It had been sitting in the glass case/check-out counter at BMV for weeks, calling my name...

 After that stop, I walked across the road to The Labyrinth, a tiny, well stocked Art Book Shop that has the misfortune of facing the largest discount book store in the city.

The owner does his best to stock the type of publications that appeal to Art Geeks like me and this is one of them.  Produced in England and costing a staggering $35, here in Canada, this is a lovely magazine.  It is comparable to the Illustrators Magazine produced in the USA, but with a slant toward British and European artists.  Worth every penny.

One last Port-of-Call.

The Beguiling, on Markham Street.

I was completely unaware that this was to be Stuart Immonen's last issue on this title and it is a shame to see him go.  As I have said before, Stuart is a total craftsman and I have enjoyed poring over his pages, trying to glean the arcane knowledge of how to tell stories effectively in a comic book.

I wish him well in his future endeavours and wherever he goes, whatever he does, I will be buying it and learning from him.

That's all Folks!

Books, Books & More Books

I have been a collector of comic books and art books for over forty years and while I am not a "pack rat", at least I don't think I am, my collection is fairly large.

Today, I finally had to do something about the books that would not fit on the, already extensive, shelves and that had made navigating the floor space an issue.  I hasten to add, that this is a room set aside for the books and not all over the house!

So, using the age old method of boards laid across milk-crates, I created a centre island, two shelves tall, plus the floor beneath and set about tidying up.  The end result is very satisfying but there are still a couple of areas of the floor that wouldn't fit.

Ah, well.  Baby steps.

I would impress upon anyone reading this, that I also have a second room that houses the Girlie Magazines that I collected in my younger days, comic book and Science Fiction related fanzines and all of my Art Instruction books.  The same room also has piles of reference material, often called an Artist's Morgue, my cartoons, the original art that I have bought over the years, my poster collection, a filing cabinet, a drawing table and boxes of old video tapes.

I need to tidy that mess up too but as I said above, baby steps.

I must sound like a buying machine but seriously, it has taken me 40 years to get into this state, it did not happen over night.

In the last couple of years, since I turned 55, I find that I buy fewer items but the ones I do buy are usually expensive.  For example, the IDW Artist's Editions, which are lovely but at $120 to $175 Canadian, they knock a hole in my old wallet.  I have most of the volumes that they have published so far but some of the newer offerings have not tempted me.

I still think that the one dedicated to Will Eisner's The Spirit is the best of the bunch, mainly because it is comics 101 for we students of the medium to pore over.  It is a revelation to see whole panels cut out and patched over with a different image.  Not to mention all the other repairs and corrections.

It is not very interesting or exciting to buy a book where the original art is as "clean" as the printed page.  As an amateur cartoonist, I understand the personal drive toward a pristine original but it won't teach anyone looking at it a thing; it is the repairs, the overworking with a better idea, that are ultimately more informative and interesting.

One last thing, Stuart Immonen.

This Image is from his own web page

and I do hope he will not object to it's use here.

I was not an immediate fan of his work when he began

but over the last few years, probably since he worked on the Ultimate Fantastic Four, he has impressed the HECK out of me.

His recent run on the All New X-Men is stunning and looking at his pages is a lesson in how to draw comics that flow.  Panel to panel, tier to tier and page to page.  The only other people, in my mind anyway, who made comics that worked so well, were Alex Toth and Joe Kubert.  I mean it.

On top of being a marvellous technician, he is also a work horse.  Of the 29 issues of the title released so far, he has turned in 21 and done all that work in only 20 months!

Mister Immonen, as little as it is, I salute you.

The fact that he is a fellow Canadian is just icing on the cake!