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Artist Arthur Rackham (1869-1937) is known for art nouveau fairy-tale drawings and for children's book illustrations. His work has certainly been an influence and inspiration for many comic creators and animators, but he never did anything himself in either of those mediums. His images were too composed, too ornate, and too static to lend themselves to the repetitive sequences of film or funnies.
At least, that's true of most of Rackham's paintings. It's not true, however, of his work in other media. Specifically, Rackham was amazingly skilled in silhouette — the art of cutting paper to create outlines of figures, usually in black. Rackham illustrated at least two books entirely using this method —
Cinderella (1919) and
Sleeping Beauty (both with pedestrian text by C.S. Evans).
Comic artists and animators have to simplify their forms; otherwise, the repetition of images becomes technically and visually unmanageable. Usually, this simplification is accomplished by the shorthand of cartooning, involving some combination of exaggerated features, sketchy forms, and diminished background detail.
But, as Rackham shows, simplification can also be accomplished through the silhouette. Indeed, in Rackham, the silhouettes essentially function as cartoons, utilizing a similar exaggeration, a similar preciousness, and a similar, and essential, mobility. You can see this clearly in the frontispiece to Cinderella. The central painted image is fine art; a frozen, elaborately rendered moment. Above and below are silhouettes, which, in their almost slapstick animation, look like, and function as, cartoons.
The top row of mice, in particular, could just about be a comic strip. Is that a row of mice all gamboling simultaneously? Or is it a single mouse running across the page, represented sequentially?
This kind of conflation of time and space is essential to comics, and Rackham uses it repeatedly in his silhouette work. Here's one striking example from
Cinderella, where the fairy godmother is changing a lizard into a footman:
And here's a similar example from
Sleeping Beauty. The woman represented here actually has six children, but Rackham — surely intentionally — has arranged them so that it looks as if there's one boy, growing up as we watch.
Or another example from
Sleeping Beauty:
And finally in
Cinderella: the fairy godmother goes up the chimney just as the stepsisters arrive home. On the one hand, this is a single illustration; on the other, it's a sequence of two panels. The result is similar to some of Winsor McCay's effects in
Little Nemo.
Even more reminiscent of McCay — or perhaps of Chris Ware — is this amazing two-panel, single-interior drawing, where the numerous vignettes occur both simultaneously (if you look at the picture all at once) and sequentially (as your eye moves around the page.)
The simplicity and animation of the silhouettes, and the sheer number of illustrations Rackham drew for these books, also enables him, at times, to actually tell the story through pictures — to create wordless comics. For example, here's Sleeping Beauty waking up:
Similarly, in his illustrations for Cinderella's ball, Rackham creates what is essentially a flipbook. Here's the first page of the sequence:
The second:
And the last:
The impulse at this point, of course, is to simply scan the entire contents of both volumes. The goofily sensual, sensually goofy image of the naked queen talking to a frog in
Sleeping Beauty, for example, or the three color, two-panel full-page spread showing Cinderella about to climb into her carriage... But one has to stop somewhere, I suppose. Besides, both of these books are still in print in readily available, cheap editions from the Everyman Library. If you have even a passing interest in illustration, or comics, or art, you owe it to yourself to check them out.
Noah Berlatsky writes regularly for The Comics Journal, The Chicago Reader, and his own blog, The Hooded Utilitarian. He's also an artist of sorts.
A Pundit in Every Panopticon is ©2008 Noah Berlatsky
