R. Crumb, the Art of Comics No. 1 (2010)

I always find you can learn so much from an accomplished artist. They seem to know about everything!

This was one of my favourite parts ...

> Yes, I use pencil first. With Genesis, because there was so much technical stuff that I had to do, especially drawing correct anatomy, I would often make a sketch first on a piece of scrap paper, try and get it right before I started penciling on the drawing paper. How’s this angle, his arm, and the guy’s holding a tool, how does that look? I used Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion, from the late 1800s. It includes hundreds of photos of naked people in action, really handy for any kind of cartoon work where you have to draw people realistically in different actions and poses. Like the scene where Jacob is wrestling with the angel; fortunately there were pages of photos in Muybridge’s book of men wrestling.

This made me immediately search google for 'Muybridge Animal Locomotion'. I had seen the galloping horse images before, but had no idea Muybridge published 700+ such studies in 1887. [0] UPenn has some of them archived digitally. [1]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadweard_Muybridge [1] http://dla.library.upenn.edu/dla/archives/search.html?q=muyb...