Last year, I posted a 'blog entry recommending that my readers visit Golden Age Comic Book Stories, where are found not just golden age comic book stories, but more generally a great many wonderful examples of the art of illustration.

By way of Golden Age Comic Book Stories, I've been led to another 'blog, the Pictorial Arts, to which I also want to give a strong recommendation. Like Golden Age Comic Book Stories, the Pictorial Arts features many examples of outstanding illustration. The Pictorial Arts differs in various respects. Most strikingly, its owner, Thomas Haller Buchanan, writes something of what the illustrations (and often the illustrators themselves) have meant to him, the rôle that they have played in his life.

Buchanan is himself a professional artist of superior ability; one gets to see some of his work

at another of his 'blogs, People Skills. At the Pictorial Arts he says little about that ability or about that work, but instead writes about work of other artists that he has found compelling, from the time that he was a small child up to the present. One may see not what he can produce, but that he could and can see as an illustrator would, and what he saw and sees that made him aspire to become an artist himself.

One of the things that I respect about Buchanan is that he posts about the work that he appreciates, regardless of its social standing. But what has me actually following his the Pictorial Arts is that I like so much of the work to which he directs attention. Some of it is by artists whom I have long admired; in some cases it is work that I too first encountered as a child and which made a strong impression on me. In other cases, I'd not seen it at all before I found it in his 'blog.

Tags: 'blogs, comic books, comic strips, illustration

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