Tuesday, October 1, 2024

My latest acquisition, Bob Lubbers (as Bob Lewis) "Secret Agent Corrigan" daily comic strip from 1966. Secret Agent Phil Corrigan stars in this aviation-themed adventure alongside Miss Perkins. It was created in ink over graphite with Duotone chemical shading board.


This strip has a bonus: Bob often included rough pencil corrections or sketches on the back. In this case, it's interesting to see how he changed the airplane's direction, creating a more dramatic composition.


This isn't the first Bob Lubbers "Secret Agent" comic strip in my collection; I actually own quite a few. See here.

I also have his "Robin Malone" and "Tarzan" strips. See here.

 

really appreciate his stylization and the balance between realism and cartoonish drawing. As my friend Zoran Djukanovic said, "He is very, very talented. There is such ease in his heart and his hand."

 


 

Poster for "Man's Teardrop"

My new poster design for the play "Man's Teardrop" by JDP-Yugoslav Drama Theater in Belgrade, Serbia.
 
A "Man's Teardrop" is a collage drama based on the motifs of four one-act plays, and one short story by A. P. Chekhov. The actors of this theater play are defeated in love, lost in time and imprisoned in an inn during an apocalyptic storm that directs them to each other and incites both conflicts and reminiscences, soaked in the writer's all-pervading irony. The least common content of the selected texts are the breakdowns of the male heroes that bring them to tears, which are still seen today as a sign of inappropriate weakness, and therefore exposed to stigma and self-restraint. 
 
The elements of comedy are, a natural consequence of the poetics of the everyday and ordinary, but also a progressive and always modern, and certainly contemporary, Chekhov's comment on the banality and dullness of male machoism and patriarchy as a social order. And that storm, as a metaphor for the chaos, tumult and wars of today, represents all the turmoil that inevitably comes to the surface, if tears are suppressed, and pride and shame due to male "weakness" are encouraged.
 
You can see more of my JDP theatrical posters here: