ALEX ROSS - Interview Part 2: The Strange Death of Alex Raymond and Inspiration

[@rockon8174]

Beautiful interview! Thank you for uploading!

[@clubgrubbug]

It was entirely our pleasure!

[@SeanWickett]

Great interview! Thanks for this. I'm gonna post my comment from part 1 here also: Everyone who loves illustration NEEDS to go to Rockwell's museum. They're huge and stunning. One mind-blowing thing I noticed are the colour flecks he added to shadow areas. It mimics film grain..... like... what the??? He was a superb artist. I know people like to pin him as a realist, but.... I don't know. He's a cartoonist that renders with a realism. I don't know how to put it. I used to think he was a realist, but once I became an animator, and learned more about his process... he's a cartoonist, through and through. He has an exaggeration of emotion and posing that is not in the photographs he'd use for reference.

[@clubgrubbug]

I saw one of his pieces, I think at The Met, and yes, it is real painting with a real use of glazes, layers, etc. Which is part of why they don't look as good in reproduction, a lot of light interaction and structural color gets lost. Absolutely he is a cartoonist at heart. Same with Raymond, even more so for Drake, realistic as hell but also very rubbery and lively.

[@SeanWickett]

@@clubgrubbug Agreed, they are stunning in person. When you're able, try to get to his museum. Beautiful place. His artwork is (or was?) hung in chronological order. It's an eye opener.

[@clubgrubbug]

@@SeanWickett on the bucket list🤩

[@HrvojeGrahovac]

😮😮😮where’s part 1?

[@clubgrubbug]

That will be on his channel at 2 pm today. Linked at the end if this video. Part 3 will be on his channel next tuesday at 2.

[@thevasic]

Such a great interview...Alex Ross is such a great artist and is the kind of person comics needs to ensure it's future...Full Circle blew my mind! Carson, I hope you were able to take in the compliment given to you for your work on TSDofAR..it is so well deserved!

[@clubgrubbug]

Oh, trust me, I took that in and ran around the house a number of times with it. I think Alex is the first person to ever actually praise the book for what it became. Most of the reviews focused on what it failed to become, so to have someone at Alex's level see it for what it had to become and enjoy it for that meant everything to me. A real honor.

[@thevasic]

​@@clubgrubbug ...calling it "The Strange Death of The Strange Death of.." would have been genius!

[@clubgrubbug]

@@thevasic More honest, but very cumbersome🤣😂🤣😂

[@theunwantedcritic]

I have been waiting for years for Alex Ross to have a long conversation with someone about his work. The magician pose from the tarot card is is called : As above so below. The woman in the painting with the long dress is holding a wand and might be ready to draw a magic circle while she uses her other hand to invoke magical energy. Now that I think about it comics, has a lot of magic in it. Even those science fiction characters like all those 1960s legion of superheroes members who simply point their fingers and lightning came out of their hands or they made people float or they could walk through walls. All of that stuff is just magic with the coat of science fiction painted over it.

[@clubgrubbug]

So honored that we got to be the ones to do that long chat. Make sure to keep an eye on Alex's channel for part 3 tomorrow! 100 comics are saturated in myth and magik. I think the MCU movies and Star Wars are the clostest we have to collective meta-narratives these days.

[@johnm.withersiv4352]

Hadn't thought to think about Alex Ross, Alex Raymond, and Norman Rockwell together in the same thought. It makes sense.

[@clubgrubbug]

Rockwell was always pretty obvious with Ross, to me and a lot of the design work he does has that Raymond flavor. Rockwell use John Cullen Murphy of Prince Valiant and Big Ben Bolt fame as a model when Murphy was a kid. And, in my mind, Rockwell had that special ability, that Stan Drake had as well, to make realism as rubbery as a cartoon.

[@johnm.withersiv4352]

@@clubgrubbug Totally makes sense in retrospect. I just never thought about Rockwell alongside comics. Oddly, I do think about David Mann and comics. I'm convinced most of his centerfolds were one image stories.

[@clubgrubbug]

@@johnm.withersiv4352 Rockwell was THE master of the single image story.

[@rf2254]

There's a part one?

[@clubgrubbug]

That will be on his channel at 2 pm today. Linked at the end if this video. Part 3 will be on his channel next tuesday at 2.

[@rockon8174]

59:10 WHAT IS THE SERIES?????

[@delwynklassen3644]

It’s true, even if it didn’t happen. Though not all the threads link into the warp and weft? Good lord, conspiracy theories are odd (Foucault’s Pendulum by Umbero Eco speaks to this explicitly).

[@clubgrubbug]

Coincidence is what makes reality run - what is science but a description of where things predictably coincide - so it is easy to take it too far, especially for a massively creative mind. Makes total sense to me. Thus why I have come to my current interpretation of faith, which is like the engineering aspect of coincidence, the coincidences that can't be described and tracked in a scientific sense, but may still have operative power in some way of organized in the right configuration. Some will be proven by science one day, some by research consensus, and many will always remain an issue of faith.

[@delwynklassen3644]

@@clubgrubbug part of why I enjoy all of Cerebus; even if I don’t agree, I’m going to go check. Indeed, ‘correlation is not causation’ is what was shown in statistics class, but sometimes “there’s something there” as stated by [Neil?] in Reads.

[@clubgrubbug]

@@delwynklassen3644 Yes indeed. Where things come together is how patterns form and what is existence but patterns? Especially as we come to understand the universe as a self-computing quantum computation.

[@delwynklassen3644]

@@clubgrubbug And Then! What if the patterns are a construct of the measuring system OR only appear to us as pattern because of underlying structural change. Like, particles are the intersection of waveforms - and Then. How should we then live? It’s a fun rabbit hole. 😵‍💫

[@clubgrubbug]

@@delwynklassen3644 I am sure it is both. The tools we use foreground a specific type of coincidence over others. The best thing I could recommend on this topic is this Stephen Wolfram talk. kzbin.info/www/bejne/rnmzgpKliNh9nck