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[The Ghost Man]

Greetings all,
The wait is finally over! I always keep my word and if it seems I'm posting the news early, it's to accommodate the time difference in Australia.

Welcome to the official announcement and grand opening of The Vintage Inkwell Academy 2.0!
The brand new site address is now located here:

https://vintageinkwell.com

A lot of time and work has gone into developing and building this all from scratch and I hope you all enjoy the results. My primary aim was to ensure that visitors receive an optimal and entertaining experience whilst visiting. Thoughtful planning and creative design went into upgrading the visual, informational and instructive resource aspects of the site.

All of the blog posts have been newly edited and revamped, with new content added, so make sure to check them all out. With a new professional look and feel and a packed to the rafters Library, stay tuned for even more great things to come.

For now, I'll be taking some much needed holiday and then returning to my long deferred drawing and illustration studies.

If you're keen on the site and find it of merit, please share it with friends, family, associates or whomever might find it of interest. Sincere thanks to all the TVIA supporters and their patience during the site's renovation.

Cheers,

- The Ghost Man

[Captain Audio]

Good luck, quite a project and valuable resource for future artists.

[The Australian Panther]

Ghost Man,

Wow! This is a quantum leap!
Robb, you should find the Vimeo videos interesting.
Really going to have to take the time to really explore the site. You have come a long way.

Be interesting to see where this leads you.
I like where you are coming from.
Cheers!     

[ComicMike]

Great thing, my compliments. 

I have already drawn the attention of some of my pen pals to the site.

[Robb_K]

Ghost Man,

Wow! This is a quantum leap!
Robb, you should find the Vimeo videos interesting.
Really going to have to take the time to really explore the site. You have come a long way.

Be interesting to see where this leads you.
I like where you are coming from.
Cheers!   

I checked out the re-vamped site.  It's really much more user-friendly and a very professional setup.

But I couldn't find the Vimeo Videos to which you referred.  Can you please direct me to where I can find them?

[The Australian Panther]

But I couldn't find the Vimeo Videos to which you referred.  Can you please direct me to where I can find them?

Robb, scroll right to the bottom of the Home page!

Cheers!

[The Ghost Man]

Thank you all, your responses on your site experience are richly rewarding. The one thing I am most happy and appreciative for, is the cross-collaboration and cooperative association between TVIA and CB+ that's developed out of this all. I hope to drive much deserved traffic back here and expose new artists to all the comic book wonders they've been missing out on.

Without Comic Book Plus's vintage comic resources, I wouldn't have this well-spring of artistic and creative inspiration. The profound knowledge base and art repository here has greatly enhanced my illustration and content creation vision for the future. CB+ is a very strong, and exceptionally committed community that's always helpful, with many talented individuals. I am very proud to count myself as a member and hope I give back as much as I receive.

Standing applause go to CB+ and you all,

- TGM

[Robb_K]

But I couldn't find the Vimeo Videos to which you referred.  Can you please direct me to where I can find them?

Robb, scroll right to the bottom of the Home page!
Cheers! 

Thanks!  I found them.  Brilliant films.  I hadn't seen them in many years.

[The Ghost Man]

Just a note to all that I have decommissioned and deleted the old, original TVIA to finalise the full carry over to the new TVIA at https://vintageinkwell.com. I also just newly added 5 rare vintage instruction books to the Library and 3 vintage animation videos to the home page!

Cheers for everyone's support.

[The Australian Panther]

I just had a quick look.
The new stuff looks good.
I'm embarrassed that I don't spend more time over there.
Cheers, Mate!

[The Ghost Man]

Thanks AP, no worries. Sometimes I feel we both run dinosaur museums and I'm rather surprised at the lack of traction and interest. The younger generations just don't seem to give a toss and seem to be inculcated to prefer ostentatious, vacuous and raucous nonsense. I think it might be as simple as we grew up eating steak and they've been conditioned to eat and demand bin filler hot dogs.

This isn't a slight upon them and apologies for any broad generalisations, it's just an observation of reality. For God's sake, I just realised, I sound like some knobby geezer going on about 'the youth of today'. Oh well, rest assured, they'll be doing the very same many years from now, lol.

[Captain Audio]

The younger generations just don't seem to give a toss and seem to be inculcated to prefer ostentatious, vacuous and raucous nonsense.

Sounds like what they said when we first starting hearing of the Beatles.

For that matter even Elvis Pressley performances were met with violent oposition. In fact when he played at the local VFW an aquaintance of mine got his butt whupped like a rented mule by Elvis's close friend and body guard Red West for taking a swing at the King.

[The Ghost Man]

Greetings again all, just a word that I've just uploaded 10 more rare art instructional books to the The Vintage Inkwell Academy Library.

[SuperScrounge]

Was indexing cartoons and about comics material for the Grand Comics Database and came across an article about writing for comics from the February 1940 issue of Writer's Digest. https://archive.org/details/sim_writers-digest_1940-02_20/page/18/mode/2up

Don't know what the copyright status is, unfortunately, but I thought you'd like to see the sample of his script page.

BTW the author's name is a typo in the byline. It should have read Emile C. Schurmacher https://www.comics.org/creator/4012/

[The Ghost Man]

That article was BRILLIANT! Thanks SuperScrounge for posting that, I've been looking for something just like this for literally years! The article contents and date of publishing were perfect and it was like finding gold.

[crashryan]

I echo Ghost Man's thanks for the Writer's Digest article. I've never seen a more detailed nuts-and-bolts article on GA comics writing. It's funny, though, to find Victor Fox on the market list when the writer spoke about quick payment from editors!

If you want to see the entire Sky Wizard story in context, we have it here:

https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=21237

The page from the article is our page 18. Pencils by Ed Kressy, the first artist on the Lone Ranger newspaper strip, and inks by Norman Fallon. According to an article on previewsworld.com, Fallon co-founded an art studio with Kressy and Dick Sprang of Batman fame! Here's an excerpt:

With Norman Fallon and Ed Kressey, he [Dick Sprang] co-founded the studio Fallon-Sprang at a little loft in Manhattan. A promotional flier advertises the studio as comics packagers for such features as Power Nelson who was introduced in Prize Comics #1 (March 1940) and Shock Gibson. In addition. the shop did human interest features such as Speed Martin and the interplanetary feature Sky Wizard and a detective feature called K-7 ? both of which were introduced in Hillman Periodicals? Miracle Comics #1 (February 1940), and attributed to Emile Schumacher.

You'll find the Sprang bio here:

https://scoop.previewsworld.com/Home/4/1/73/1017?articleID=247305

[The Australian Panther]

Quote from: The Ghost Man on February 01, 2022, 01:36:26 PM
    The younger generations just don't seem to give a toss and seem to be inculcated to prefer ostentatious, vacuous and raucous nonsense.

Sounds like what they said when we first starting hearing of the Beatles.
For that matter even Elvis Presley performances were met with violent opposition.

Same thing for Frank Sinatra and the BobbySox crowd, where we first saw hordes of screaming females, - in this century anyway.
Ditto for the Flappers in the 20's of the last century.
And in fact I believe there is a quote making the same point re the 'current' generation, as far back as ancient Rome.
That said, Ghost Man, we are in agreement!
Looking at the current generation of comics -as I do - here is a workable formula.
1/ Make your central character someone who all you readers can identify with, so a gay, black, female vampire would be a good move.
2/ Under no circumstance have your story refer in any way to the modern day real world. The current real world is too complex, crazy and controversial. [ see what I did there? By accident I assure you.]
So have your story take place in a Steam-punk, Dystopian future alternative universe, where everybody is a Zombie and Witches are the heroes.
3/  Forget about character. Not important after you have defined identity.
4/ Relationships? Everybody betrays everybody else.
5/ If the world is dystopian how does all the tech work? Don't worry, nobody will every ask that question.
Sit back and wait for the Netflix contract.
And if you think I'm kidding, you are just not paying attention.

Not cheers!

   

[The Australian Panther]

I echo Ghost Man's thanks for the Writer's Digest article. I've never seen a more detailed nuts-and-bolts article on GA comics writing. It's funny, though, to find Victor Fox on the market list when the writer spoke about quick payment from editors!

Agreed. but may I point out that there is also an article here by the great Henry Kuttner [on  writing Adventure] which is just as interesting and relevant.

[The Australian Panther]

Me again!
Having read the article, thought I would compare his ten rules to Marvels take on those rules.
Explains a lot about the silver age, I think
1/   Have your hero almost invincible, but not entirely.
Marvel; Followed this one.I also think that Stan Lee in particular, listened to a lot of radio serials - and we know Kirby frequented the movies. So Spiderman, Daredevil, Captain America usually lose their first fight, uninjured and then beat the villain at the end of the story. But the Marvel characters vulnerability is in their personal relationships or their character.
2/ Put him in an exotic locale .
Marvel: Put all their characters - at first - in a locale that most of their artists were most familiar with - Either the state or the city of New York. That helped give the stories an element of realism.
When characters do exist in 'exotic' locales, the artists are always half-hearted about detailed and accurate locales. Which is one of the problems with the Submariner.   
3/ Make most of your action take place out of doors. That gives the artist a chance to do his stuff.
Most artists, in my observation, and I take the point that time constraints are a factor - are stinting on environment details. Buildings almost always look the same, in the Silver Age few 'Heroes' drove cars. Does Superman even have a license? You would expect a farmboy from Kansas to drive a car. That's a rite of passage. But if the stories are written by New Yorkers who take the subway, that detail is irrelevant.
Ditko, with his Spiderman, is the exception. Who can forget those New York landscapes that Spiderman used to swing through?
4/ Keep wordage to absolute minimum. [Absolutely crucial.] 
Silver age and now; Kirby and Lee both got this. Many of the second generation writers [70's 80's] did not.
Today, even with Marvel and DC many comics are more like TV scripts. Talking heads and pages and pages of no action and all dialogue. Exactly what do they teach in those Comic book schools? Because they are not turning out people who know how to write comics.
5/ Ditto Love elements.
Marvel and today; Lee recognized that the market he needed to reach was primarily college age students, so personal relationships were a necessary element - although kept to a minimum- the visual action is always the main game. In some current comics 'love elements' read also 'identity elements' is almost the main game.   
He also wrote,
'If he is above average, he may land in the movies.... ' Well, we know how badly that turned out for most of the creators, don't we?'                       

[The Ghost Man]

I have to say AP, that you really had me thinking on your previous reply and doing some introspection. Not the part where you ran down the 'Woke Comics Formula' which was spot on the mark. It was the bit before that got my wheels turning in self-analysis, "Am I just another cranky geezer that's simply slagging off the younger set?". It really had me objectively thinking and comparing and I finally came to the honest conclusion of no, that's not it.

To distill this as simply as I can, and pardon any generalities, but there's a generation who grew up with freedom, tastes and appetites for steak and analogue reality warts and all. Another generation were groomed and inculcated to the taste of cheap substitute 'impossible' meat and a digitised, virtualised world with  physically alienated experiences. Older generations were revolutionary iconoclasts that fought and challenged the status quo of every age, save this one, which appear to actually align with the status quo narratives propagated by governments, media and social engineering. Change was wild, unpredictable, free and feral and now a chilling effect has fallen upon the younger generation and they are being domesticated.

If you ask me honestly I believe the status quo has added a dampening and fully controlled element to all media, and the culture at large. One look at 'Cancel culture', the growing imposition of censorship and the irony of zero tolerance coming from those screaming about intolerance. A long while back, the war cry was NO MORE WAR! NO FUTURE!, and now it's "Of course men can give birth and breast milk is now 'chest milk'". I'm exaggerating just a bit of course to make a point.

Do you realize that now a comedian like George Carlin or Benny Hill would never be given a platform to explore their creative art now? That a Jimi Hendrix or Johnny Rotten would ever be permitted much less elevated to the public ears and eye?

The question is not younger generation versus the older set, it's about the feral versus the domesticated.

[The Australian Panther]

Ghost Man,

Am I just another cranky geezer that's simply slagging off the younger set?". It really had me objectively thinking and comparing and I finally came to the honest conclusion of no, that's not it.

And that's why I said I agree with you.
Well written.

[paw broon]

"The younger generations just don't seem to give a toss and seem to be inculcated to prefer ostentatious, vacuous and raucous nonsense." - The Ghost Man.
You certainly have a point.  But people have been saying that about "the younger generation" for generations.
I remember my dad going on about how I could listen to "that racket" in the early days of British pop and R&B, as he couldn't understand a word of it.  Yet my dad listened to Gigli singing in Italian and couldn't understand a word of Italian. Mind, Gigli's voice was something to marvel at.
As for comics, kids/young people have so much more to attract them.  The superhero movies seduce them; computer games gobble up hours while at the same time weirdly, attention spans shorten - e.g. twitter, FB etc. 
The delight of opening a Mac Raboy drawn comic or a Hampson Dan Dare just doesn't cut it for many nowadays.
And I don't know why.  Well, I do, sort of.  I'm another cranky, old codger who can bore for Scotland on The Phantom or Buck Ryan, if anyone will listen, that is. So despite telling myself when I was young that i'd never be like my parents, I am.
But censorship is interesting and I could well be constrained by upbringing as I feel we have much, much less censorship today than when I was growing up. Computers allow users to access almost anything.  Books which were banned in my youth, opinions which were hushed up, D Notices, Lord Chancellors and so on.
I never had "steak", if that's an analogy for freedom, I had square slice sausage - you have to experience it to understand. Unpredictable change to me was the early '60's when all seemed possible.  It didn't happen.  The "White Hot Heat of Industry" (Labour Gov't), yes, but I'm not happy with what it led to.
The Government controlled so much and today it doesn't.
Benny Hill was funny. I saw a bit of an episode the other night, but "creative art"?  I don't think so.
I heard some Bob Newhart on the radio the other day.  Now that was funny.  It was back then, it is now.
Hendrix - all power to him, up to a point when it became self indulgent poor stuff.
Despite being a "Nat" - wanting Scotland's freedom - I don't agree with some of the lgbtq stuff they're spouting.  If folk want to live their lives differently from mine, let them get on with it.  Just don't keep going on about it. They have the freedom and lack of censorship and oppression to do that vey thing.
And back to comics.  I wish there was some form of censorship on many modern comics, if only for bad taste and lack of humour.  I try now and then to read new stuff from the big 2 but I usually give up.  Once you've read a Hugo Pratt Corto tale or a Barks long Uncle Scrooge, you realise where the value and quality lies.

[K1ngcat]

"The younger generations just don't seem to give a toss and seem to be inculcated to prefer ostentatious, vacuous and raucous nonsense." - The Ghost Man.
You certainly have a point.  But people have been saying that about "the younger generation" for generations.

Yes, I too grew up listening to music that the older generation moaned about saying it was all beat and you couldn't understand the lyrics, exactly what I've been inclined to say about a lot of modern "pop." Strangely, the most modern music always seems the most unappealing, and through my lovely wife's influence I now find myself capable of enjoying some dance and rap, being quite partial to a bit of Snoop Dog or Eminem.

I'm certain now that I was as vacuous and raucous as any teenager, and outspoken and arrogant with it, but I did grow up in the 60s and everything did seem possible, as paw says. What I'm not certain about is the suggestion that the young today are "domesticated." I wouldn't feel that description applies to the disconcerting number of conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, anti-vaxers, or teenager murderers that the western world seems to have given birth to recently.

I'm hardly "woke" but I am probably a bit of a bleeding heart liberal, for which I make no apology, mostly the result of thirty years spent in what is now called "social care" looking after frail, elderly and disabled people in their own homes. I met so many wonderful people, who all advised me not to get old, but I didn't listen and am now hopelessly crippled and housebound.

Anyway all I'm getting round to is, I know the young of today seem weird but, cut them some slack, there's still a chance they may grow up as well-balanced as any of us! I can tolerate anything but intolerance.

[Comeekz]

TVIA is an awesome resource. As an aspiring cartoonist as a kid, I loved getting books on cartooning at the library, so this collection is a dream come true for me, even today. I especially like the famous artist cartooning course.  One lifetime isn?t long enough to utilize all the excellent information here!

[The Ghost Man]

Thanks for sharing your experience at the site Comeekz, the site was created just for visitors like yourself and I appreciate your feedback. I do have one question, do you think that the blog posts have added any valued information to the site as a whole?

Cheers,

- TGM