The Villains in my Home Town. part 2.

T his situation always terrified me. I'd get the phone call from reporter Sharon Marshall to see if I was available to sketch. It was informal like that. I'd have to iron a shirt and get on my bike, with my art stuff in my backpack. I had the whole system worked out , except I never seemed to be able to have a shirt ironed ahead of time. I'd get into the courthouse to find that I had to draw not one villain but a whole gang of them.



These jail inmates had made a desperate bid for freedom, armed with makeshif knives, axe handles and rocks, hijacking the prison tractor to ram through the high fences, and wounding seventeen prison warders in the melee, which was captured on security cameras.



The various rooms in the courtouse all have their different aspects, and I was never entirely comfortable with this one. I preferred the situations where I could get an angle on the figure that enabled me to do something big and bold with volume and depth, as in the first one I showed yesterday (he was trying to turn away from me, which played into my hands) or if it was one figure I could do a thorough character drawing (again, as with the two yesterday) but with this one I was stuck with a frieze-like group shot. The camera went in close, so that the image was much larger on screen than the original, and thus looking very loose, and panned across...





Once outside the fences the ringleader was run down by a prison truck and was allegedly suing for injuries.

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Scary trousers- five minute video.
In the Q & A following a reading at Book Soup, West Hollywood, Neil Gaiman tells the origin of his occasioal nickname 'Scary Trousers', which involves Alan Moore, the sequence of From Hell for which I am currently showing the scripts on this blog, and my recounting of the anecdote as an episode in King Bacchus, which is currently out of print. (link via Neil himself)

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Our pal John Coulthart has put that morbidly compelling Sopranos poster by Photogrpaher Annie Liebowitz beside the Delacroix painting upon which it was modelled: those other Italians visiting Hell, Dante and Virgil.

Update! My pal Duds in comments draws our attention to this: Joe Pantoliano's panties get in a wad. Ralphie doesn't like the way he's represented in the new issue of Vanity fair (i.e. With his head off). Annie Liebowitz again. I forgot to pick up my copy on the way home from lunch with my pal White.