Noir illustration/comics

[Hotcod]

Yes, it's another project and i can use some help with the research. We already have a list of stuff to look at like gregory crewdson and edward hopper with films like far from heaven and such... which are all linked to noir in some way... which is not to say everything we've been told to look at is noir but i'll explain why the noir stuff is interesting me in a second.

There's just not a good list of noir inspired illustration out there. There's of course frank miller and stuff like the classic batman cartoons (i'm not so up on my batman comics) that i'm looking in to and blade runner was on the other night randomly heh but i was just wondering if any of you knew any good stuff in this vain that i could take a look at. I want to gather a few styles together because if i do go down this root it's going to be far to easy to fall in to copying millers style or some such.

I do have an idea for a style i want that i think will try and mix noir with the very 50s "advertising" style of drawing... or at lest something along those lines so it's all very angular and such along with splashes of colour.

The project is to tell a story with out using words (at lest 4 art work) that story is either a retelling of all or part of 3 fairy tales or something from your own life. Now we where looking over stuff like far for heaven and gregory crewdson and it struck me that little red ridding hood has in the accepted subtext a hell of a lot of things in common with base of film noir... hell even "little red" is a noir name... mix that up with a detective huntsman and some hit of hitman or such called wolf with little red being a prostitute (as is often suggested the story is about) and you get a fun way to tell the story with a cool look to draw from.

The fact that you have stuff like red hot ridding hood by tex avery which is linked to pin up girls and jessica rabbit which is linked to the noir style of who framed/who censored roger rabbit you have those links that let me give honest to god good reasons for what i'm doing... which is a rarity for me.

So yes, any good noir illustration and cartoons you know of would be a grate help. I simply want to build up a rather large reference base out side of film as a starting point

[crazyD]

The comic Criminal is a pretty good recent noir book. It should have a couple of trades out. I hear Sleeper is very similar, but haven't read it.

[Blue]

Not sure if this would be something you want, but Bendis did a handful of books that I really enjoyed that were noir in style: Goldfish and Jinx. I'm not sure if it's exactly what you're looking for in terms of artistic style, but they're certainly good reads and in the genre you're looking at.

[Hotcod]

i'll take a look at those, thanks... just got done watching far from heaven and it turns out i must be some kind of philistine given i hated the damn thing. It was beautiful in terms of the scenes them selfs but it's so clearly trying to reference a given image and style of still art that it brakes down in terms of a film... the heavy use of colour motifs was interesting at first but ended up with me groaning when she pulled a purple scarf out of her pocket... on top of that the narrative is heavy handed, dull, and did not cause me to care about it at all... all the main plot points just felt so contrived to let the director make statements that it sucked the life out of the story and just reduced to making the whole film "oh homophobia and racism is bad!"

I mean just to put it up against something else i'd seen lately Glory, the film about the first black civil war regiment, it's handling of the whole race thing seems almost childish. I kind of stumbled on to glory and it pulled me in and made me care and while on the lowest level it was also trying to say the same kind of things it was just handled better... i cared about the people involved unlike the annoying little girl who gets hit by a rock in far from heaven which was an as clumsy shoe horned in side plot as i've ever seen...

[Sazime]

The more recent one-shot of Iron Fist, the Queen of California, may help. I have others, but me needs to think...

[Superman's Dead]

Goldfish is great.

Some of the Matrix comics have a noir style.

OH! 100 Bullets! 100 Bullets is a great ongoing series with tons of archetypes, with one of the graphic novels (forget which...Counterfifth Detective) basically being a straight up private eye story. The illustrations are great and half the time they're a paralell to the dialogue, happening off 'screen' or in the distance. That's a great one.

[Hotcod]

Meh whole things not really turn out how i'd like... i was close to packing the whole idea in... here are 2 unfinished images of the 6 i'm doing... first one is missing a lot of object and the 2nd needs a redone background and redone legs... i'm going to try and at lest draft the other 4 tonight which shouldn't be as hard as the others are not from as odd angles

http://hotcod.madebymonkeys.net/1resample.jpg
http://hotcod.madebymonkeys.net/3rs.jpg

[Hotcod]

http://hotcod.madebymonkeys.net/storytelling.html

as done as it's going to get for those of you that care... sadly it's not really finished in the way i wanted it to. I was going to add a bit of animation to each scene and have little "puzzle" things in each scene to unlock the next... just different ways of interacting with the stuff on screen.

Mouse to the top to go up, down to go down, click on a frame to enlarge click on the big pictures to close... the big pictures are not rightly croped from some reason but ah well

[Nuggsy]

As far as comics go I'm not too sure. I haven't read comics for years. I have read Jinx, however, and if you can get past the storyline (because it's basically "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly") then the artwork might serve you well.

Honestly though, I'd check out some other films first. I'll throw some out here, not necessarily in chronological order, but they should get you thinking about the aesthetic.

Chinatown
Touch of Evil
The Maltese Falcon
The Big Sleep (1946)
The Long Goodbye (1973)
Double Indemnity
The Postman Always Rings Twice
L.A. Confidential
Blade Runner
The Big Sleep
The Terminator
Brick
Murder My Sweet
Dark City
Ghost in the Shell
Kiss Me Deadly.

. . .and so forth. Watch them for their emphasis on lighting. Examine low-key lighting and chiarroscuro lighting. The conventions, as well as some of the lighting and shot techniques, crept into sci-fi.

Sounds like a cool assignment.

[Nuggsy]

crap.

I just noticed that this was an older post.

Well, I hope that your project went well!