Ed Piskor and Figure Drawing

Jim Rugg and Ed Piskor discuss the importance of figure drawing in my work (transcribed from Cartoonists Kayfabe videos):

On X-Amount of Comics (Fantagraphics Underground, 2023):

Jim Rugg: “I love the design of this character [Limber Lass] with four legs.”

Ed Piskor: “It’s very disturbing.”

From X-Amount of Comics (2023).

Jim: “It’s really disturbing, but also it highlights some of Don’s figure drawing ability.”

Ed Piskor: “Amazing figure artist.”

Jim: “Like, it doesn’t work if you’re not good at figure drawing; it’s just a weird character otherwise.”

Ed: “I checked out Don’s sketchbooks before, like when the Crumb biennial was coming to town [at the 2004 Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh]. He was there, and he had his sketchbook armed with him, I think he teaches either cartooning or does do life drawing stuff, and so many pages, just the [human] figure twisted up in every angle, like he knows how everything lays in three dimension[s], and he doesn’t fake anything.”—5:46 in “Exclusive Preview! The Long-Awaited 1963 Annual is Complete! 30 years in the Making!” (2023).

On The Savage Dragon vs. The Savage Megaton Man (Image, 1993):

Jim: “And now we cut to Don Simpson’s side; boy, is his cartooning attractive here.”

Ed: “I’m a mark for Don Simpson’s comics; I think I have his body of work. I have every Bizarre Heroes, I have every Megaton Man, freaking King Kong, Wendy Whitebread, Undercover Slut—I have it. An amazing letterer, calling back to Artie Simek and Sam Rosen and like that era of stuff.”

Jim: “Incredible inker and figure drawer.”

From The Savage Dragon vs. the Savage Megaton Man (1993).

Ed: “Great figure drawer. And you really—because of like the oddness of all these [caricatural] characters—you really gotta make note of the figure drawing acumen with [the realistically-proportioned] Phantom Jungle Girl here. I dug into Simpson’s sketchbooks before, and it’s just page after page of like these figure studies.”—15:40 in “Dragon vs Megaton Man! Larsen vs Simpson!!” (2021).

On Megaton Man #1 (Kitchen Sink Press, 1984):

Jim: “There are little glimpses, too—Simpson has been making comics now for forty-plus years, and you see his style evolve away from this—but I see a lot of little Neal Adams-isms in the inking and some of the [core] shadow stuff. A lot of that I think has gone away [since], in favor of very nice feathering …”

Ed: “Yes.”

Jim: “… but it’s interesting to see some of those [early] influences here [in Megaton Man #1, 1984], and I think if you’re of a certain age, and you’re looking at superhero comics, I don’t think you could avoid some Neal Adams influence.”

From Megaton Man #1.

Ed: “It’s going to get, as issues go by—like issue #4 was my first issue—it’s going to get way more meticulous in the construction, you know, with the blacks and whites and with the little hatchings and stuff. He goes really crazy on the musculature of Megaton Man. But then, when he starts to do Bizarre Heroes, and certainly—y’know, what would the turning point be? I just don’t know, man. Maybe King Kong or somethin’ …”

Jim: “He does so much work; there’s that period of like Border Worlds, King Kong, and his adult [adults-only] work, all, I don’t know when that—late eighties, early nineties, into the nineties.”

Ed: “He arrives at his [mature] style by Bizarre Heroes, and I have, I have everything he’s done, every single comic he’s made, because when I discovered there’s a guy in Pittsburgh making comics, he was doing it with the Image guys … like, let me show this thing off real quickly …”

Jim: “Yeah, definitely.”

Ed: “This is little Eddy P., 1994, drawing a Megaton Man. And I discovered him because of Image. When I discovered Image, Image was already over in like ’93, ’94, like, I’m gettin’ five-dollar-for-ten-comic pack—whaddyacallit, man—gift packs or whatever at Bill and Walt’s Hobby Shop at Century Three [Mall]. So, like the Savage Dragon [vs. Megaton Man] issue and Splitting Image were a part of those packages, and Megaton Man showed up. So then, when I am grabbing my own comics, and it was Seth—we just did a shoot interview with him—where he said you start your collecting just to understand your form, understand your medium. So now, this character’s on my radar, and it’s actually issue three—uh, no, it is issue four [of Megaton Man]—this one—that was the first one. I got it at a hardware store in like a three-pack. But you could see how detailed the art gets, like look at how crazy that is, and then he starts to peel it back. Here’s—two patches on the eye [of Sgt. Sterankovich].”

From Megaton Man #4 (1985).

Ed and Jim: [Laughter.]

Ed: “So good. I read this comic a million times.”—8:26 in “YOU’VE NEVER SEEN Megaton Man Like THIS! Is Don Simpson an INK STUD?” (2024).

On Bizarre Heroes:

Ed: “Check this out, man: ‘After Don Simpson,’ because in Bizarre Heroes, there was like a two-page sequence with that jungle girl changing clothes, and like changing into her jungle girl persona ...”—21:23 in “A Cartoonist's First 1,000 Crappy Pages” (2020).

__________

Addendum: An artist (presumably) “alleged that last year Piskor offered to introduce her to ‘bigger industry folks’ in comics in exchange for going back to his home and letting him draw her nude.”—Comics Beat.

From “Teaching Cartooning” in Streetwise (Two Morrows, 2000).

Apparently, life drawing now counts as “sexual misconduct.” The less said, the better.—Don Simpson.
__________

The sketchbook pages of anatomical studies above are copied (mostly) from Louise Gordon, How to Draw the Human Figure: An Anatomical Approach (Viking, 1979). Other reference works are listed in the link.
__________

Gallery of Figure Drawing
Charcoal, Conte crayon, and pastel on toned papers. 18" x 24"
c. early 1990s by Don Simpson

Remembrances of Ed Piskor | Multiple Women Were Fond of Ed! | Ed: Socrates’ Sockpuppet