Al Fresco Art Club Challenger: Free-For-All
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Today’s Al Fresco Art Club was an unguided free-for-all. With every subject available, I fell back to my favorite medium: pen and ink and the topic I’ve been thinking about for months: finding a style that I can say is really my style. With that noble goal in mind, I chose to do fan art based on two of my favorite artists, Derf Backderf and Yoshihiro Tatsumi. The grotesque fist is part of Derf’s cover image for Punk Rock and Trailer Parks. The older brother teasing his younger brother, Hiroshi, comes from page 237 of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life. I have read both of these books many times over the years.
I admire these two artists for finding their style and sticking to it. I love Derf’s rendition of punk life in the Midwest. I’m hooked on his weirdly geometric sense of anatomy, and I dig his medieval, heavy hatching! I admire Tatsumi for not sheepishly going down the beaten path. He chose to create manga for adults — that was a tough way to go in the 50’s and 60’s when most publishers wanted to cater to the tastes of children. He struggled his whole career to popularize gekiga-style adult-themed comics. He has been called the grandfather of alternative manga.
Bravo, Derf! Bravo Tatsumi Yoshihiro!
