POPLASKI DRAWS TEN-FOOT
CARTOON FOR PARIS
SHOW!
Artist Peter Poplaski finished a cartoon that is ten feet long for his
exhibition at Bernard Mahe’s Galerie 9e art located in Pigalle in Paris, France,
which ran from September 24th to October 8th, 2009. This
show is like a retrospective with examples of cartoon art from all periods of
Poplaski’s diverse career: 1970s underground, 1980s Marvel, covers for Death Rattle, The New Adventures of The Spirit,
Superman: The Sunday Classics, Batman: the Sunday Classics newspaper
comic-strip collections for DC Comics, Tom
Strong pages, but a 10
foot cartoon of Marvel monsters from 1961, what’s that
about?
“This
10 foot
panorama of Marvel monster characters evolved out of a dream I had in November,
1992, in
which I saw all these comic books I had read and loved as a kid, suddenly
turned into a television series in which the weekly show was divided up into
three stories done in three different styles: the Jack Kirby monsters were done
in stop-motion animation (like the original King Kong), the Don Heck story was
about monsters created with make-up (Rick Baker), and the third was a Steve
Ditko story animated like The Simpsons.
The Marvel monster comics, written and edited by Stan Lee: Strange Tales, Tales to Astonish, Tales of Suspense, and Journey Into Mystery of the early 1960s
imitated and mixed together the Godzilla type monster movies, and the old
Universal Frankenstein monster movies, with UFO paranoia and the Twilight Zone TV show sensibility of how
weird reality really is. What made these comic books oddly compelling was the
idea that the monsters were essentially just stand-ins for grownups, adults who
were destroying the world, or at the very least the “American Dream,” with the
Cold War, Communism, and the Atomic Bomb. It was the period of the bomb
shelter. Later, in 1962 and 1963, when this monster fad was fading, Marvel,
which was Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, had the inspired creativity to turn the
monsters into “super-heroes with problems,” thus was born the Fantastic-Four, Ant-Man, the incredible Hulk, the Amazing Spider-Man,
Iron-Man, Thor, and all the rest of what people now think of as summer
movie blockbuster events, rather than old 10 cent comic book characters. I was
working free-lance at Kitchen Sink Press in Princeton, Wisconsin
at this time, and the Cadillacs and
Dinosaurs comic book KSP published was in development for a Saturday
morning cartoon series. I have been asked on occasion to create something new
that can be developed and marketed, but my focus has always been working on
something that caught my imagination as a child. Such things may be clichés,
but they can sometimes become iconographic to our evolving sensibilities. So, how do you provoke interest in or sell a
TV series idea if you don’t have an option on the rights, or haven’t written a
script. I started with the merchandise. I thought if I drew a 15 or 20 foot panorama of the
monster toys that would be possible, (because toy merchandise is more
profitable than comic books) some big-shot at Marvel might jump on it. So I
began drawing a Jack Kirby monster or two everyday around my other work for fun
and got as far 10 feet,
well, 10 feet,
two inches, to be exact, on this larger than life idea before putting it aside,
because, after all, you can’t copyright an idea, and who wants to give
corporations free ideas for no money anyway?”
Peter Poplaski is painting and drawing
in Wisconsin and the south of France. Right
now he is participating in the exhibition TARZAN! Ou Rousseau chez les Waziri, from June 16 to September 27, 2009 at the
musée du quai Branly in Paris.
He is currently developing I’m Drawing As Fast As I Can, his second collection of sketchbook drawings and Zorro: the Myth
and the Image, a book about media and the
heroic archetype in western civilization.
