{"id":2289,"date":"2012-08-13T00:36:42","date_gmt":"2012-08-13T04:36:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/?p=2289"},"modified":"2012-08-13T00:36:42","modified_gmt":"2012-08-13T04:36:42","slug":"joe-kubert-1926-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2012\/08\/13\/joe-kubert-1926-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"Joe Kubert, 1926-2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Joe
\nDC Comics<\/font><\/p>\n

I was saddened yesterday afternoon to hear about the death of the comic book artist Joe Kubert. Although I came of age about a decade too late to be reading Kubert’s work when it came out, I did see a lot of references to those comics, especially Sgt. Rock<\/i>—but once I had a chance to catch up with the stories, I actually leaned more towards the doomed German WWI fighter pilot Enemy Ace<\/i>, from which the brief excerpt above is taken.<\/p>\n

If you get the chance, you should track down the DC Showcase editions for those two characters; the stories are filled with one amazing example after another of Kubert’s cinematic approach to laying out a story in sequential panels. The example I’ve chosen is fairly conservative; in other stories, Kubert could produce stunning layouts that presented “close-up” panels embedded within larger panoramas, nimbly calling attention to the most important story elements while—and this is crucial—not being so<\/em> virtuosic that you’d be paying attention to him rather than the story. He also had a wonderful eye for historical detail, which you’ll see in every page. He did do superhero comics at various points throughout his career, but there’s a realistic tone to his best work that… well, when I first started getting into it, the closest comparison I could come up with to explain it to other people was the equally great Will Eisner.<\/p>\n

During his lifetime, Kubert founded a school for cartooning and graphic arts<\/a>, which became a training ground for artists like Tim Truman, Steve Bissette, Rick Veitch, and Amanda Conner. He also raised two sons, Andy and Adam, who are themselves accomplished comics artists; in fact, Kubert’s last gig appears to be inking Adam’s pencils on one of DC’s Watchmen<\/i> prequels. I haven’t actually read any of it, but the artwork I’ve seen online has an old-school vibe I suspect fits the project well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DC Comics I was saddened yesterday afternoon to hear about the death of the comic book artist Joe Kubert. Although I came of age about a decade too late to be reading Kubert’s work when it came out, I did see a lot of references to those comics, especially Sgt. Rock—but once I had a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[417,419,416,418],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2289"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2289"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2289\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2293,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2289\/revisions\/2293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}