Geoff May created a series of minimalist designs of the Disney cartoon, Darkwing Duck. This was one of the best after school cartoons of the 90s. It remains one of my personal favorites after two decades. It featured a mild mannered, single parent named Drake Mallard. He protected his city, St. Canard, as the masked vigilante, Darkwing Duck.
It was a cartoon where the majority of its themes, characters, places, storylines, and so forth were direct parodies of content from comic books. What wasn’t there to love for a kid like me who had just gotten into comics around the same time? I’d spend the next decade of high school and university learning about art. There’s no surprise, of course, that a minimalist collection of Darkwing Duck characters would tickle my fancy!
The minimalist movement strives to reduce the subject of the work to its essence, essentials or identity by eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts. The challenge, then, is to provide just enough visual cues in this collection of work to make the lines and shapes of colours recognizable as the cartoon characters they are inspired by. So, without further ado, I must introduce this series as such: “I am the terror that flaps in the night, I am the internet meme that pops up in the browser of your soul… I am DARKWING DUCK!”
Well, it sounded cool in my head anyways…
Image Credit: [Bite.ca]
COMMENTS