New book offers glimpse into cartoonist's workshop

Sandy Plunkett’s name is one to conjure with – at least among connoisseurs of the cartooning world. His body of work, which includes the rendering of various superheroes for DC and Marvel comics, is reported to be highly prized by the more discerning disciples of pen-and-pencil art.

 

 

He’s far from a celebrity even as artists gauge these matters, however. And Plunkett, who grew up in New York City but now lives in Athens, knows this perfectly well.

“I have been called, within the comic-book world, ‘an artist’s artist,’” he observes wryly. “Which I think is something like telling your 16-year-old daughter that she has ‘inner beauty.’” So Plunkett was pleasantly amazed when David Sanders, formerly director of the Ohio University Press-Swallow Press, after hearing a talk Plunkett gave, suggested he put together a collection of fugitive sketches, along with some connecting text, to form a book.

“David had specifically said it should be work from my sketchbooks,” Plunkett recalled. “He suggested that I might be able to fashion some sort of narrative.”

The result is “The World of a Wayward Comic Book Artist,” which draws on Plunkett’s private sketchbooks and journals to open a window on the creative process – and insecurities – of a gifted creator of fantastic characters and worlds.

It’s recently been published by the OU Press-Swallow Press in hardback and paper covers, complete with a generous selection of black-and-white and color reproductions of Plunkett’s artistry.

For graphic art fans, the book is a feast of Plunkett’s work – always recognizable as his own, but ranging over a wide stylistic territory. Some of it’s funny, some of it’s dark, and some of it’s just superb realistic sketching.

Plunkett also happens to be a graceful and thoughtful writer, and his ruminations on what drives him to draw, what makes his art look the way it does, and his worries over whether he’ll ever be able to create anything really lasting, are far more than just filler between the pictures.

A section called “Meditation on Nostalgia,” for example, probes into the artist’s fascination with the work of cartoon artists from the early 1900s, including Harold Gray (“Little Orphan Annie”) and Frank King (“Gasoline Alley”).

This leads him to question whether his nostalgia for an older America may be not for the country herself, but instead for “the romantic visions of her visual folklorists, which are themselves an amalgam of truth and wistful yearnings? It’s a depressing notion. When I look at my own drawings, I see a nostalgia for a world I’ve never lived in, a nostalgia not expressed directly, maybe, but evident in the rough line that refuses modern sleekness and a stolid sense of compositional balance. What’s the chance then that I’ll ever produce work of any authenticity?” Though his sketchbooks have doubled as journals for years, Plunkett said, “this is the first time I’ve gotten a public forum for that stuff to be aired… Many years ago, I realized that you’re taking a risk when you’re being honest, but it makes things a lot more interesting.”

ONE OF THE HIGHLIGHTS of the book visually is Plunkett’s series of drawings for Ray Bradbury’s extraordinary, dark Americana fantasy, “Something Wicked This Way Comes.”

Having read it in his younger days, Plunkett recalled, he picked the book up later as an adult, and “on re-reading it, I realized, that though as a novel it has some weaknesses, it really is just an extended tonepoem. And if you read it that way, it’s absolutely captivating.”

Plunkett was this close to creating graphicnovel versions of both “Something Wicked” and “Fahrenheit 451” – Bradbury had signed off on the project – when the owner of the publishing company who set up the deal was killed in a freak accident.

The sketches included in Plunkett’s book give a hint of what might have been, and come close to capturing the delicate balance of innocence, magic and fear that Bradbury put into his work.

One theme that Plunkett candidly examines in his text is the tension between wanting to be a pure artist, devoted only to the work, and the nagging needs of not only the ego, that wants to be famous, but also the human animal, that wants the good things in life.

In a funny one-panel toon called “The Cartoonist’s Recurring Nightmare,” a scraggly artist, portfolio gripped under his arm, and looking remarkably like Plunkett, comes across a really buff-looking Jesus, who scolds him thusly: “Enough with this ‘I’m an artist and I don’t care about social norms or conventions.’ Look at me! I’m in good shape. I diet, exercise. I have a little put away in mutual funds…” And so on and so forth, on earth as it is in heaven.

Has a book devoted to his work helped quiet that tiny voice of uncertainty? “That’s an interesting question,” Plunkett admitted. “It might be too early to tell. It feels good.”

He admitted that for years, he’s wanted to have something he could pull down from the shelf, and show to any friend who asked for an overview of his work. “This book fulfills that,” he said.

OU Press-Swallow Press, for its part, is pulling out the stops to promote the book, with a campaign that includes a series of “Show Us Your Plunkett” videos in which local luminaries share their connection with Plunkett and his art.

“We’re so lucky – we’ve got an artist right here in town,” explained the Press’s Jean Cunningham. “And I think because of what the book is we just wanted to handle the marketing of it differently, in a celebratory way.”

Plunkett, who also supplies The Athens NEWS regularly with political and topical cartoons, will publish a serial comic strip, “Adventures of Harold Mitty, Pizza Boy,” in The NEWS’ classified ad section every week beginning in September.

Plunkett has book-signing appearances scheduled for 6:30 p.m. today (Thursday) at the Athens Public Library, and 3-5 p.m. Saturday at the Restaurant Salaam in Athens.