William Horberg

Digging Deep

Lot a lot of my friends back then, growing up in the sixties in Chicago I was enamored of comic books.

I started collecting them when I was eight or nine years old, and I remember taking several bus rides to get out to the small hard core gathering of avid comic book collectors taking place in the conference room of a bank out west on Irving Park Road in Chicago to buy my first golden age comics. I felt like one of the youngest kids in attendance that day.

I soon came to know the names of the great comic book artists of the day that people were starting to take seriously and search out the issues with their covers or artwork - Frank Frazetta, Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, and earlier artists like Al Williamson, Carl Barks, Alex Raymond and Milton Caniff.

Over the years, as comics gained in respectability, more and more obscure artists have been rediscovered and their work has been republished and reintroduced to new generations of fans or brought to the attention of older fans for a new appreciation.

I grew up loving Edgar Rice Burroughs and had collected and read most of his novels in their ACE edition paperbacks. But I had never heard of Jesse Marsh, nor seen the DELL comic book series he drew based on Burroughs' Tarzan characters, until they were lovingly reprinted a few years back by Dark Horse.

Marsh was a Disney animator who came to draw Tarzan after WW2 and had a decades long run doing various books for Dell until the mid-sixties. His drawings are simple, almost naive, but they really capture a young boys imagination, even a 53 year young boy like myself.

I'm glad the excavation of 20th Century pop culture continues, and that they are digging deep to find these gems and give them new life.

Enjoy!

william

Portrait of a Fellow Pupil

Natalie and Diego have been attending an "art camp" this summer.

Their daily immersion in creativity has been a joy to behold. Each day they come home with new handmade treasures. Natalie is already an accomplished artist, but for Diego this daily dose of independence in a structured environment has lead to an explosion of his fertile imagination. 

We all know children can create amazing works of art, all the more special for their unique way of seeing the world. On a recent trip to London, the small book that really caught my eye at the used book store on Charing Cross Road was "Children As Artists" by R. R. Tomlinson.

Published in 1947, the author used the work of young children from various Junior Girls' Schools and High Schools as the basis for his essay on these tiny Titans or Titians as the case may be!

These amazing paintings are all from that small volume.

With the near elimination of the long held idea of the arts being an essential component of a child's development and education in our No Child Left Behind era, Tomlinson's words of 65 years ago echo loudly today:

"This innate urge in a child to draw and create is a precious inheritance, the value of which has not yet been fully realised by education authorities; neither has the beneficial effect of its encouragement upon other forms of expression and growth been apprehended by them sufficiently."

Expression and growth have been running wild around here lately, with a tip of the hat to old R.R.

Enjoy!

william 

Chicken Nuggets

Here is a new entry from the continuing adventures of Diego and Natalie, which is just another name for my life in comic book form.

A lot of parents of children with autism may be able to relate to this one:

Any tips for those pickiest of eaters?

Thanks.

 

Enjoy!

william

Yugoslavia 1964

My third and final "find" from the Belgrade flea market was a promotional photo album collecting the work of various Yugo photographers circa 1964.

These three felt particularly cinematic, like lost stills from the unit photogaphy of some classic unnamed Eastern European art film. Antonioni on the Danube.

The high rises of Novi Beograd or new Belgrade felt so modern and promising then, especially in black and white.

Enjoy!

william

In Old Serbia

In the green market nearby my Belgrade apartment, tucked amongst the tables of red radishes and bulbous mushrooms, there was sometimes a cantankerous dealer in books and other old paper ephemera.

He seemed to greatly resent any effort I made to non-verbally negotiate with him through gesture and proffered Serbian dinars, so I think I paid dearly for these few old vernacular photographs of everyday life in old Serbia.

But it was worth it to bring them home and share them with you here, and preserve these images of a land and time and people far away from most of our modern experience, but eternally human in their joys and social activities.

Enjoy!

william

Serb Noir

Here is a wonderful piece of Serbiana - a vintage paperback edition of Raymond Chandler's "The High Window" found on the sidewalks of Belgrade.

The publisher Dzepna Knjiga was based in Sarajevo and this edition came out in 1964.

Even in the former Yugoslavia, "R Cendler" was entertaining readers with his tales of fallen angels, crooked cops and errant knights.

Enjoy!

william

This Serbian Life

And finally, here is the cover of my comic memoir of my days in Serbia filming "Therese Raquin".

Logically, I would have posted this first but it was the drawing that I finished last, after I got home, so here you have it in reverse order.

With a grateful acknowledgement of assistance from Elsita for the wonderful water coloring of the ink drawing.

Gundulicev venac was the wonderful name of the street I was living on with my roommate, the world class stills photographer Phil Bray. With his ear for language he picked up a smattering of passable Serb much better than I, but neither of us could ever remember or pronounce the name of our street!

Enjoy!

william

Serbia (pt. 5)

Happy Independence Day!

Here is the last page of my comic memoir of the last few months in Serbia:

Pancevo is the town about 45 minutes outside of Belgrade where we filmed several different sets in one building that was an old museum.

Ivanovo was a frozen wasteland when we first scouted there in January, but became the lush green river banks of both the Raquin family's country home in Vernon and the lake outside Paris where the lovers murder their victim.

Kalemegdan is the old fortress park right in the city center of Belgrade where we built a metal gazebo to house a bear in our version of a proto-zoo.

And Simanovci is hardly a tourist destination, but a sign on the highway giving the name of the town closest to the acres of land in the countryside where the PFI soundstages were built.

From such disparate and incongruous elements were built the illusion of 19th Century Paris for our play.

Enjoy!

william