Monday, April 26, 2021

Betrayal in Color

John Dallaire, the Age of Bronze colorist, has been working hard coloring my black-and-white artwork for Age of Bronze: Betrayal Part One. The battle scenes, the crowd scenes, the embroidery on the Trojan costumes--it's all got to be colored. John follows the first two Age of Bronze volumes with the same quality work on the next volume.

I've approved a decent number of pages so far. And the book's getting to a state in which I'm approving pages at a faster pace. It's still not ready to be put on a publication schedule yet, but we'll get there eventually. And I'll let you know here when that time comes.

Until then, however, here's a sneak peek at a finished page of Betrayal Part One in color:


 Copyright © 2021 Eric Shanower. All rights reserved.

Color copyright © 2021 John Dallaire. All rights reserved.

Monday, April 19, 2021

Brinkley Broadcasts Anew

The play The Resistible Rise of J. R. Brinkley by Edward Einhorn debuted in New York City in October 2018 to rave reviews. Now you can listen to an audio performance of the play by podcast. Untitled Theater Company #61 presents it free for your listening pleasure on a variety of platforms. Choose your preference here: http://www.untitledtheater.com/previous-productions/resistible-rise-jr-brinkley.html

Why do I feature this podcast here on my blog? Because I was the scenic artist for the original live production. Clearly the podcast doesn't feature my art, but I think The Resistible Rise of J. R. Brinkley is a super play anyway and I'm glad to have been a part of it, so I recommend it to all of you reading this.

It tells the true story of a 1920s con man who touted the eating of goat testicles as a cure for impotence. That's right, read that previous sentence again if you have to. And people believed him! 

I've previously illustrated a couple of playwright and director Edward Einhorn's books (Paradox in Oz and The Living House of Oz) and a few of his short stories in the past. Edward and I have a project coming up in the future, too. We collaborated on a new Age of Bronze-related project that I'll announce here when it's ready for release. Hint: it's a new version of an old version of a sacrifice.

Copyright © 2021 Eric Shanower. All rights reserved.

Monday, April 12, 2021

Quadruple Your Oz Pleasure

Volume Two
Volume Three
Volumes Two and Three of Marvel Comics's Oz: The Complete Collection bring you loads of Ozzy fun and adventure.

Volume Two contains the full comics adaptations of Ozma of Oz and Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz. 

Volume Three contains the full comics adaptations of The Road to Oz and The Emerald City of Oz.

I adapted the scripts from L. Frank Baum's classic children's book series. Skottie Young drew all the artwork. Jean-Francois Beaulieu colored it all. And Jeff Eckleberry lettered it all. These four stories were previously published as comic book series and as single volume graphic novels. Oz: The Complete Collection brings you two stories per volume.

Volume One of Oz: The Complete Collection is also still available. I posted about it earlier here.

While Ozma of Oz is perhaps my favorite of L. Frank Baum's Oz books, I want to say that I loved Skottie's and my adaptation of Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, the fourth Oz book. While it was the first of our adaptations to not become a best-seller, I felt Skottie brought a renewed energy to the art and to the bizarre and menacing characters that infest the story. Baum wrote an unsettling, surreal journey featuring vegetable people who walk on air and live in a city of glass, a land of invisible killer bears, and silent wooden gargoyles with detachable wings. The creepy weirdness just doesn't stop till Dorothy and friends reach the Emerald City, where all the old familiar Oz weirdos conduct a ridiculous murder trial. Does that sound too odd, even for Oz? Well, you can see it all in glorious full color in Volume Two of Oz: The Complete Collection.

Skottie Young cuts loose with the character design in The Road to Oz, particularly at Ozma's spectacular birthday party. I love Skottie's version of Polychrome, the Rainbow's Daughter. We stopped with the sixth book, The Emerald City of Oz. If any spot was a logical place to stop adapting the Oz books (if one isn't going to adapt all forty), that one's it. But I still wish we'd been able to continue beyond six books. 

Copyright © 2021 Eric Shanower. All rights reserved.

Monday, April 5, 2021

Remembering the Mushroom Planet

At eight years old I read for the first time Eleanor Cameron's 1954 science fiction children's book The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet. The book drew me in as only the best books can. I wanted to be one of the characters and go on that wonderful space flight. And while I read the book, that's who I was and what I was doing.

Afterward, I read the sequels, though none of them manages to capture the power or produce the intense longing of the first book. In fact, though I tried as a child, I couldn't get all the way through the final book in the series, Time and Mr. Bass. That had to wait until I was an adult.

Through a mutual friend, I met Eleanor Cameron for the first time in 1985 at an Oz convention. Though she wasn't particularly an Oz fan, our mutual friend was, and she lived in the next town from the convention facility.

I went to her house only once, after both she and her son
David, the model for the hero of the Mushroom Planet series, died. Our mutual friend as David's executor took me and my partner there to a meeting with Eleanor's executor and to help clean out some of her final belongings still remaining in the house.

Eleanor's papers went to the Kerlan Collection, the University of Minnesota's children's literature branch. Those papers included a sixth Mushroom Planet manuscript. The mutual friend arranged for me to read a copy of this manuscript with the intention of determining whether I could shape it for publication. And if so, I would get the job of illustrating it, too.

I was excited, hopeful, and a little intimidated.

I plowed through the entire published series once again, then read the unpublished manuscript. Parts of it are delightful. But my overall reaction was disappointment. Even granting a twenty-five year gap since the previous Mushroom Planet book, I found some of Eleanor's choices confusing, even troubling. For instance, aspects of the manuscript indicate that the action takes place shortly following the final book in the series, which would be during the 1960s. But the manuscript also contains contemporary mid-1990s references, such as a mention of CNN. Eleanor left a list of notes addressing problems with the manuscript. She clearly recognized some of the manuscript's deficiencies, including the confused time period, but many of her notes don't even hint at possible solutions or suggestions for revisions.

In my opinion, the story needed re-thinking, re-shaping, a tremendous amount of foundational work before it might be brought into shape as a worthy addition to Cameron's Mushroom Planet series. I didn't feel competent to perform that work. In my opinion, someone far more in tune with Eleanor Cameron's creative thinking should be the one to do it, if, indeed, such work could ever be done by someone not Eleanor herself. So that was that.

A few years ago, I received an e-mail out of the blue from Paul V. Allen, then working on a biography of Eleanor Cameron. He'd run across a comment I'd written online. Mari Ness on her tor.com blog posted her delightful analyses of the Mushroom Planet books. There I'd mentioned some of my interactions with Eleanor and her work. For Paul I expanded on that info and put him in contact with the mutual friend who'd facilitated my meeting Eleanor in the first place.

Then I pretty much forgot about Paul's Cameron biography.

A few years later I got an e-mail from Paul announcing the book: Eleanor Cameron: Dimensions of Amazement. It's a well-put-together, readable biography. Eleanor Cameron gave children's literature far more than just the Mushroom Planet books, although Wonderful Flight still holds a special place, not just in my reading history, but in the memories of many readers.

The biography delves into Cameron's philosophy as a writer. She held definite ideas about writing for children. She practiced those ideas in her own projects and spoke out on them, too, famously criticizing Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a book that gave my childhood a similar sort of immersive experience as had Wonderful Flight.

 Paul V. Allen mentions me in the course of the biography. I find that slightly embarrassing. I feel like such a minuscule part of Cameron's life, the tiniest of endnotes at most. Still, I'm happy to be included as a part of the life of Eleanor Cameron. What I've enjoyed the most about the book, though, is learning more background about the Mushroom Planet series.

If you've ever enjoyed any of Eleanor Cameron's books--any of the Mushroom Planet series, the Julia Redfern series, or books such as A Spell is Cast and The Terrible Churnadryne--you would probably enjoy Eleanor Cameron: Dimensions of Amazement by Paul V. Allen. You can order it directly from the publisher, University of Mississippi Press, at this link:

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/E/Eleanor-Cameron

Copyright © 2021 Eric Shanower. All rights reserved.