One panel from... The Cartoon History Of The Universe

Have you ever been drawn to a single panel in a comic or graphic novel? It could be a splash panel or an inconsequential small panel, but for some reason it stands out to you. Perhaps it's because of a particular action pose, character design, rendering of some object or another, the way it's coloured or shaded, or indicative of a particular skill on the artist's part.

What I'll be looking at here are single panels from comics I admire that I keep coming back to. In this case it's for none of the above reasons: it's a single human hair. I know, right? It sounds stupid. But bear with me here. Once you see the context of said hair, you'll know what I mean.

Here's the book I'll be looking at.

It's called The Cartoon History Of The Universe, Book 1 by Larry Gonick. This was a series that he did that was published between 1978 and 2008, comprising some 1,460 pages across five volumes – a mammoth project detailing the history of the world from the Big Bang onwards.

The above volume isn't one of those five volumes. It's a separate edition from 1982 containing the first four comic book installments that were published by Rip Off Press between 1978 and 1980. (Quite a bit of it was altered for the first Cartoon History volume proper.) Anyway, my mum gave me this book sometime in the late '90s. Her school's library was going to chuck it out and she rescued it and gave it to me. 

The 'Date Due' slip inside the cover, where the librarian had to stamp the due dates in the olden days, is completely blank, suggesting that no one ever borrowed it. But the book itself is creased and obviously well-thumbed. So evidently it was read by plenty of people – though perhaps not by any of the kids at the Beehive Montessori School.

Incredibly, given that this is one of my favourite comics of all time, and Larry Gonick one of the cartoonists I most admire, I let the book sit in my cupboard for about two years before I got around to reading it. I probably gave it a cursory flip-through when I was given it, but once I read it, I read it so many times that it was even more dog-eared than an actual dog. The whole book is full of amazing and funny drawings of humans, animals, dinosaurs, single-celled life forms, and even strands of DNA.

Anyway I'd better stop waffling and show you the panel in question.

It comes towards the end of the book, as part of a story about King Solomon (of Old Testament fame). Now it must be said that I don't think this little panel is the best drawing in the book. Far from it. It's just a dude in a chair. But look at the detail there. The whole book was drawn with a brush and Winsor & Newton drawing ink (I know this because I emailed Larry Gonick in 2006 and asked him.)

Gonick's human figures are, while cartoony, expertly rendered with few solid blacks and many fine parallel brushstrokes for shading, something I have always tried to do and failed every single time. Looking at the panel, you see tiny yet important details: notice the eyelid and eyelashes as a simple L-shape, the thicker line on the back of the crown, the fold lines on the sleeve, and the stroke forming the top of the nose terminating instead of joining up with the crown.

And then there's that hair. Just a wiggly line, but look at the uniformity of the curves in it, and how it thins out at both ends. That's the kind of effect you really only get with brush and ink, and he nailed it there.

So that's one panel from one book I like. There will be more in future posts, so look out for those. Tintin included. Although trying to single out just one panel from Tintin would take me longer than it took Larry Gonick to draw five volumes of Cartoon History. I might save him until last.