Containing Multitudes

Jaime Zapata, Ecuadorian

Flores secas aka Alicia

Huile/toile 50/40 cm

Pierre Laurel

Art Deco bronze

And here’s the Bruce Timm illustration my avatar comes from. Which I’d already posted here, but can’t seem to find.

I love everything about this pic : the film noir atmosphere, the night, the latent tension, the black & white art with its heavy use of shadows, the cartoonish expressivity that expresses so much more than photorealistic art à la Alex Ross. I’ve attempted to draw or write dozens of scenes like this in the last 25 years, and I’ve never reached a fraction of the raw iconic power of this illustration.

This pic evokes to me scenes from dozens of ‘50s-‘60s parperbacks I hunted down when I was a college student in the mid ‘80s, and especially of Richard Stark/Donald Westlake’s Parker. Darwyn Cooke did a magnificent job adapting this series. I think Bruce Timm would have done something totally rad and brutal on those, too.