POPLASKI DRAWS TEN-FOOT

                   CARTOON FOR PARIS SHOW!

    Artist Peter Poplaski finished a cartoon that is ten feet long for his exhibition at Bernard Mahe’s Galerie 9e art located in Pigalle in Paris, France, which  ran from September 24^th to October 8^th, 2009. This show is like a retrospective with examples of cartoon art from all periods of Poplaski’s diverse career: 1970s underground, 1980s Marvel, covers for Death Rattle, The New Adventures of The Spirit, Superman: The Sunday Classics, Batman: the Sunday Classics newspaper comic-strip collections for DC Comics, Tom Strong pages, but a 10 foot cartoon of Marvel monsters from 1961, what’s that about?

“This 10 foot panorama of Marvel monster characters evolved out of a dream I had in November, 1992, in which I saw all these comic books I had read and loved as a kid, suddenly turned into a television series in which the weekly show was divided up into three stories done in three different styles: the Jack Kirby monsters were done in stop-motion animation (like the original King Kong), the Don Heck story was about monsters created with make-up (Rick Baker), and the third was a Steve Ditko story animated like The Simpsons. The Marvel monster comics, written and edited by Stan Lee: Strange Tales, Tales to Astonish, Tales of Suspense, and Journey Into Mystery of the early 1960s imitated and mixed together the Godzilla type monster movies, and the old Universal Frankenstein monster movies, with UFO paranoia and the Twilight Zone TV show sensibility of how weird reality really is. What made these comic books oddly compelling was the idea that the monsters were essentially just stand-ins for grownups, adults who were destroying the world, or at the very least the “American Dream,” with the Cold War, Communism, and the Atomic Bomb. It was the period of the bomb shelter. Later, in 1962 and 1963, when this monster fad was fading, Marvel, which was Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, had the inspired creativity to turn the monsters into “super-heroes with problems,” thus was born the Fantastic-Four, Ant-Man, the incredible Hulk, the Amazing Spider-Man, Iron-Man, Thor, and all the rest of what people now think of as summer movie blockbuster events, rather than old 10 cent comic book characters. I was working free-lance at Kitchen Sink Press in Princeton, Wisconsin at this time, and the Cadillacs and Dinosaurs comic book KSP published was in development for a Saturday morning cartoon series. I have been asked on occasion to create something new that can be developed and marketed, but my focus has always been working on something that caught my imagination as a child. Such things may be clichés, but they can sometimes become iconographic to our evolving sensibilities.  So, how do you provoke interest in or sell a TV series idea if you don’t have an option on the rights, or haven’t written a script. I started with the merchandise. I thought if I drew a 15 or 20 foot panorama of the monster toys that would be possible, (because toy merchandise is more profitable than comic books) some big-shot at Marvel might jump on it. So I began drawing a Jack Kirby monster or two everyday around my other work for fun and got as far 10 feet, well, 10 feet, two inches, to be exact, on this larger than life idea before putting it aside, because, after all, you can’t copyright an idea, and who wants to give corporations free ideas for no money anyway?”

Peter Poplaski is painting and drawing in Wisconsin and the south of France. Right now he is participating in the exhibition TARZAN! Ou Rousseau chez les Waziri, from June 16 to September 27, 2009 at the musée du quai Branly in Paris. He is currently developing I’m Drawing As Fast As I Can, his second collection of sketchbook drawings and Zorro: the Myth and the Image, a book about media and the heroic archetype in western civilization.