Frank Godwin at Home

Frank Godwin in the 1930s

Frank Godwin, Party Animal
One of the wonderful things about the Internet is the way you find valuable information in places you never thought to look. For example I finally unearthed an example of Alfred Sindall's Paul Temple art on a website devoted to media depictions of ventriloquism (because the Temple story concerned a ventriloquist).

I recently stumbled across another gem: a remarkable glimpse into the everyday life of Frank Godwin during the 1930s. It seems that in 1928 Godwin and his third wife, Sylvia, bought a "cottage" called Fallbrook in upstate New York. The article I found was written by Kihm Winship, an historian of Fallbrook's neighborhood, the lakeside village called  Skaneateles. Curious about the house's history, Winship discovered that Godwin had made the home a sort of "artist's colony," entertaining not only other artists but A-list celebrities like James Thurber. The Godwins held legendary house parties. Though one source called them "wild," a description by Thurber makes the parties sound not like drunken debauches, but rather extended weekends full of fishing, boating, hiking and long luxurious dinners--the sorts of things wealthy Upstate New Yorkers did in Nancy Drew novels.

Sylvia Godwin in the 1930s

I'm not going to paraphrase this excellent essay; rather I charge you to visit the site yourself. You'll find a bio of Frank's wife Sylvia, who not only ran the house but toured South America and brought back textiles which she exhibited at an art museum. You'll also find some great visuals--not only the photos I reproduce above, but also a Godwin family Christmas card, shots of the house, and candid photos of visiting celebs. Be sure to read the comments. People connected to the house, including Godwin descendants, offer further details.

Photo source: http://kihm6.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/frank-godwin-a-genius-on-the-lakeshore/

Frank Godwin Connie Sundays 1935

Miss Mystery, 1935
Here are scans of four tabloid Sundays of Frank Godwin's Connie.They appeared in the Milwaukee Journal in 1935. I bought them a long time ago (you can guess how long by noting that the ad appeared in the Menomonee Falls Gazette).

At the time I had seen only one Connie Sunday, a translated, undated reproduction in a French fanzine. It was  part of a continuity and was drawn in Godwin's familiar Flagg-Gibson style. So I was surprised to find these Sundays to be self-contained "mysteries of the week" drawn in the simpler style of the early Connie dailies. That would change within a year, because by 1936 Connie was a full-blooded adventure continuity strip. The Sunday stories didn't tie into the dailies, which was a good thing. Few papers carried Connie dailies; fewer yet ran the Sundays.

20 January 1935:

27 January 1935:

3 February 1935:

10 February 1935:

Technique Talk--4

The Need for Speed (continued)
In the last post we looked at speedy Frank Godwin fighting the Deadline Doom in some old Connie strips. We agreed that speed is king in the commercial art world.

In my day the undisputed kings of speed were the Filipino comic artists. Almost to a man they could produce quality finished work at dazzling speed. Alfredo Alcala, Nestor Redondo, Fred Carillo, Tony de Zuniga, E.R. Cruz...the list goes on and on.

When these guys stopped working for comic books they moved to the better-paying animation industry as designers and storyboard artists. That’s where I got to know--and admire--many of them. One artist I especially enjoyed talking to was Abel Laxamana. Out of all the Filipino artists I knew Abel was the only one inclined to intellectualize about comic art. In one of our discussions I asked him how Filipino cartoonists came to be so damn fast.

Above, Abel Laxamana

He explained that during the heyday of Filipino comics (the 50s and 60s) there were plenty of comics published, but the pay rate was abysmal. To make even a modest living an artist had to produce lots of pages. You either learned to be fast or you sank.

Interestingly, this situation shaped the entire culture of Filipino comics. Though the pay was low publishers demanded a high standard of artwork. Face it: when you have to live up to guys like Francisco Coching and Alfredo Alcala, you’d better be good.

Above: The Man, Francisco Coching

This was the origin of the Filipino studio system. An established artist, eager to make more money, contracted with publishers to deliver more work than he could possibly do himself. To keep his commitment he hired assistants, often newer artists who hadn’t yet cracked the big time. The veteran artist paid his assistants from the income and took a percentage for himself. The assistants got plenty of experience and dreamed of the day they’d be good enough to approach publishers personally, overcommit on their own contracts, hire their own assistants, and take their own percentage.

Above: Nestor Redondo

The publishers didn’t care whether artists used assistants, but they did insist that the art delivered to them look like the veteran artist’s work. Thus it was critical that assistants learned to imitate closely the master’s style. Out of this system arose the Filipino National Style.
Americans often criticized Filipino artists for “all looking alike.” Like all generalizations this was simplistic; Filipino artists had individual styles just like all cartoonists. But like all generalizations, this one had a grain of truth. The similarity between Filipino artists’ styles was greater than that of artists in any country except perhaps Japan.

At the root of this phenomenon was, of course, the studio system. If you’re assisting Nestor Redondo, you learn to draw like Nestor Redondo. Later when you become a lead artist yourself and establish your personal style, you’ll still show a strong Redondo influence. Inevitably you’ll pass some of that influence to your assistant, and so on.

Above: Fred Carillo

Once I asked Fred Carillo for his Secret of Speedy Drawing. To him the key was visualizing exactly what you would put on the page, then drawing it directly with a minimum of wasted movement. While visualizing would mean a second or two spent not drawing, the time taken to make the drawing time would be cut dramatically. Fred pointed out how I (and so many other artists) wasted time figuring out what to do on the paper, sketching, scribbling and redrawing. His approach was like alla prima painting: visualize the stroke, put it down, and leave it.

As I said last post, speed drawing reveals just how good you really are. The downside is that no matter how good you are, to stay ahead of the game you make compromises.

Above: E. R. Cruz

Instead of researchiing a car you draw a generic car, or re-use stock characters. Perhaps all your characters start looking alike. This was the Achilles’ heel of E.R. Cruz, a speed demon among speed demons. He had one young-man face and one young-woman face; if there were two young men in a story it was difficult to tell them apart. And finally, as Abel once suggested, when you wanted to slow down and really take time on a piece you might find you don’t remember how.

All the same, if you want to see top-grade comic art done at speeds that would make an American’s head spin, check out the oeuvre of Coching, Alcala, Redondo and their brethren. It’s amazing.

The art in this post was found at the website museum.alanguilan.com. This guy's collection is incredible; you mustn't miss his site if you appreciate great comic art.

Technique Talk--3

The Need for Speed
While working on a Connie collection recently, I encountered an example of a capable artist pushed to the wall by deadlines. Frank Godwin was known as both a prolific and a reliable craftsman. He always seemed to be doing several things at once: magazine illustration, his own comic strips, ghost work on others’ strips, book illustrations, agency work. But in 1938 work seems to have gotten the best of him.

Godwin always drew Connie quickly. Even when at the top of his game he worked in a fast, calligraphic manner quite different from the lush style he used years later on Rusty Riley. But during the course of four short stories we see him working faster and faster until, it seems, he is overwhelmed.

At the beginning of the period, Godwin looks like this: fast, but taking time to work up his figures and putting thought into staging and atmosphere.Gradually his drawing speeds up. Figures are sketchier, often looking as if Godwin has drawn them directly with the pen. Backgrounds (admittedly seldom of much interest to Godwin during this period) become little masterpieces of indication. Check out the last panel.By the time he starts the third story line, the strain is beginning to show. Finished panels still appear occasionally, but backgrounds are often reduced to a couple of lines or vanish altogether. Godwin begins cheating with head shots and talking airplanes.By the fourth story Godwin is desperate. Almost every panel is a head-and-shoulders shot, and backgrounds--well, just take a look at this sequence, which opens at a Central American airport, then moves to the hero’s hotel or wherever he’s staying.Alas, the effort is in vain. The last week of the continuity is ghosted by another artist, and the following story is entirely ghost work.So what happened? Illness? Taking on too much work? Too much partying? Of course we’ll never know. But the story told by those ever more rapid drawings started me pondering the role of speed in comics.

Anyone who’s been in the business knows that speed is king in the art world. Speed trumps quality: a mediocre artist who makes every deadline is more valuable than a supremely talented artist who’s unreliable. Interconnected demands of clients, publishing schedules, busy printers, and overloaded distributors don’t leave much wiggle room. You want to survive as an artist, you have to be fast.

An interesting thing about working fast is that it strips you down to your basic abilities. No time for reworking or redrawing; you wham it down and leave it. Your good points stand out and your weaknesses jump up and down screaming. Looking at this Connie speed session one sees just how good a draughtsman Godwin was. Even at breakneck speed he still draws beautifully--he just draws less.

In my next post I’ll talk a bit more about speed, represented by the record holders of speedy comic book production: the cartoonists of the Philippines’ “golden age” of comics.

Frank Godwin, Illustrator (2)

Why I (heart) Frank
I'm due for a return visit to the library tomorrow for some more Godwin scans. In the meantime I offer a couple of fine samples I found on the Internet. I want to share them both because they're great reproductions and because they show off the many sides of this versatile illustrator. First up is an original Godwin painting from Illustration House. It came without source information.
While a little slicker in finish than many of Godwin's paintings, this presentation of an immigrant family demonstrates that Frank painted as well as he penned. I get a late 1920s vibe from the costuming, though the smooth painting style foreshadows late-1930s and early-1940s illustrations. The husband's face captivates me. His expression tells volumes about his thoughts, his experiences, his personality. A beautiful piece!

Also from Illustration House came this penanink rendition of Christ giving the money-changers what for:I believe this is part of a series Godwin illustrated for Collier's in the late 20s. This is Frank at his black-and-white best. Though Jesus' pose is a bit stiff, it's offset by everything else in the picture. The play of light against dark, the posing of the money-changers, the swirling drapery sculpted by seemingly hasty but actually carefully-drawn pen strokes, the handling of the high- contrast lighting on the men's faces...who could ask for more? This man was born to draw!

There's a lot of Rusty Riley to be found online, of which this is just one.It's a shame the scripts on Rusty Riley were so mundane...Godwin poured all of his skill and experience into the strip . Some of his Rusty drawings are as good as anything he ever did. This particular daily doesn't fall into that category. Technique-wise it's more of a "B/B plus" sort of original. I chose it because of the way it hearkens back to Godwin's Judge days, with the flamboyant caricatures of the painter and the mustachioed art buyer, and their exaggerated poses. I also like the "time lapse" effect of the last two panels. It's a rarity for Godwin. Like most cartoonists of his day he treated panels as a series of tableaux. The trick is really effective here. It's almost like looking at a flip book. Speaking of posing, the two crooks by the window are as lively as the foreground figures.

I saved this one for last...a real find. And a frustrating one! The site I took this from offered scans of a number of obscure early comic strips, mostly Sundays. Many seem to have come from Canadian papers. But there was no info on the pieces and no way to contact the owner. Here is the link to the main page. I recommend following all the sub-links. This magnificent page is surely one of Godwin's early syndicate jobs. In old newspapers there were countless examples of these "montage" pages in which the cartoonist suggested variations on a theme with a series of vignettes. Often these pages seemed like an excuse for the artist to draw his favorite stuff! They certainly brought out the best in many cartoonists--like this one did in Godwin. I'm guessing this was from the late teens or early twenties, as William
S. Hart's star had faded by the mid-1920s.

From the scribbled background lines and the sketchy treatment of the lion it's clear Frank knocked this out in a hurry. The fact that this knocked-out montage is still a knock-out technically demonstrates how great a command Godwin had of his medium and his drawing skills. Little marvels appear everywhere you look. The turbulent drapery on the "nice little spinster" (some spinster!) and her royal suitor...the Kley-like vigor of the thunderstruck Monte Carlo gamblers...everything about that lion!! And check out the hands. As one who's had trouble all his life drawing hands, I'm mesmerized by the way Godwin indicates them with the merest of gestures, yet they burst with convincing life.

Oh, geeze...I'm gushing again. Forgive me my purple prose, I just cain't get enough o' Frank!

Frank Godwin, Illustrator--1926

Frankly Godwin...Frankly Great
(At right, Frank Godwin's cover for Collier's, 18 September 1926)
I missed two days due to, of all things, writing a movie treatment (a long story). This post begins something I've wanted to do for twenty years: to take advantage of the Pasadena Public Library's magazine collection and scan work by the great illustrators and cartoonists hidden therein. It's about time I did. A while ago their roomful of patent office gazettes disappeared. Then the microfilm room shrank to half its size and the space was filled with internet terminals. Will the magazines go next? I packed up my laptop and my trusty scanner and went in search of Frank Godwin in Collier's Magazine.

And screwed up. Even with my small, light (and invertible) scanner it proved difficult to get the pages flat. I've had to omit several of my scans because of focus problems. I didn't catch them at the library because to speed things up I waited to check the scans at full size until I got home. Live and learn. All the same I got some nice stuff from the library's second-earliest Collier's volume: the second half of 1926 (their earliest volume is from 1920, but I haven't found any Godwin work that far back).

Collier's was a general-interest magazine (known in the biz as "mass" magazines in contrast to upscale "class" magazines like Vogue). It ran in direct competition with The Saturday Evening Post, which it resembled in both design and content. Though it lasted through the 1950s, Collier's always ran a distant second to the Post. The SEP artists have become so famous, even many enthusiasts don't realize how many excellent illustrators worked for Collier's. Just a sampling: Frank Godwin, Mead Schaeffer, Saul Tepper, Walt Louderback, John LaGatta, Bradshaw Crandell, Frederic Stanley, J. C. Coll, and John R. Flanagan. The printing in the 1920s wasn't very good (heck, even the Post's printing was mediocre back then), and color was usually limited to black plus red. Despite this the magazine is an untapped gold mine.

The first Godwin I encountered was a pair of spots for a humorous page narrated by "Uncle Henry." Each issue Henry, one of those wise country folk common in humor of the day, held forth on some contemporary topic. Frank Godwin provided two black-and-white spots for each article. The one above is from "How are the Fallen Mighty (sic)" in the 31 July 1926 issue.

This drawing is a bit more realistic than the other spots. Godwin drew most of the Uncle Henry illustrations in an exaggerated style reminiscent of James Montgomery Flagg's cartoons. In fact, after seeing Godwin's illos from this period I speculate that Flagg was a stronger influence on him than Gibson. Note that this drawing, though rendered in pen style, was done in charcoal. Charcoal was the preferred medium of many Collier's (and Post) illustrators due to the popularity of F. R. Gruger.

The next drawing, an Uncle Henry piece from 28 August ("Old Home Weakness"), really shows the Flagg influence, especially in the man at the left and the woman on the right with the bee-sting lips . On the other hand, the boxer's profile looks like a Frazetta hero!

I was beginning to wonder if cartoons were all I'd find when I came upon "Easy Money" by Lawrence Perry in the 11 September issue. Frank did two beautiful charcoal-and-wash illustrations for this baseball soap opera. Sorry about the lost focus at the left edge (binding interference).
Here it looks like Godwin was adding Grugeresque wash to his charcoal-as-pen technique. The results are smashing. I love the delicate rendering of the woman's face, especially the shadow of the hat. It contrasts nicely with the bold strokes on her stylish 20s dress (could this be Connie Kurridge?). And check out the figure emerging from the mist on the extreme right!

On the following page two beautifully-drawn ball players face off across the spread.Wash is even more important in this illustration than in the first one. It also appears that Godwin used a pen here...the older player's feet and the shadow beneath him seem to be pen or brush work.

(Sidebar: I'm reluctant to over-analyze these old wash drawings. Over the years I've seen what appears to be wash in a printed illustration, then discovered by seeing the original that the "wash" was created in the halftone process. White paper often photographed as light gray. Unfortunately in 1926 they didn't have Photoshop to adjust levels (it was still in beta). Photoshop 1926 consisted of a mechanical router grinding down unwanted gray areas on the printing plate so they wouldn't print. Because this inevitably left a shaped edge platemakers frequently chose not to rout out areas within the main drawing--a person's skin, for example.)

In the 9 October issue is another lovely two-illustration job ("The Wedding Guests" by William Alton Wolff ). The first features a breathtaking bit of drapery on the second man's coat.

The gesture of the woman in the next drawing is as impressive as the still-life of the sofa upon which she lies. I can't get over how guys like Godwin make this stuff look so easy. He's one of those artists whose work at first glance seems full of detail. Looking closer you realize it's all suggestion...Godwin puts in just enough to tell you what you need to know. Your mind does the rest.

In that priceless book, F. R. Gruger and his Circle, a tale is told of the time a reader wrote praising Gruger for the incredible detail he'd put into a group of dishes in the background. Curious, Gruger checked the original and found that the dishes were broadly laid in with a few quick strokes suggesting their design. The detail the reader praised was all in his head.