Reading Comics On The Beach: 1

From my vacation, scattered thoughts on...

The Complete Jack Survives, first 7 stories, by Jerry Moriarty. Buenaventura.



- Real life is obviously heavy shit for Jerry Moriarty. He draws only the most iconic images that can possibly found in day-to-day existence, giving his explorations of a 1950s Average Guy's days unmistakable gravitas. Jack Survives is mostly one-page strips, never more than six panels to a (hugely oversized) page, and long stretches of time pass between the individual frames. These comics are monolithic in more than just size -- they cast moments plucked from life lived as monolithic importances, Moriarty's use of paint glorifying them even further. This comic is a celebration of the familiar -- even the mundane or banal -- as seen in a new light, as seen through a true artist's visionary eyes.

- These pages read more slowly than any other comic I've encountered, except for maybe Frank Miller and Geof Darrow's Hard Boiled. But while the reason for that comic's slow rhythm was the immense, eye-stopping amount of information crammed into every panel, Moriarty's comics never stop you from moving through them. They just move you along at a rate seemingly calculated to mimic paint drying, or the quality of sunlight in a room changing. The painted artwork is incredibly textured, more tangible than any other black-and-white work I can think of. Moriarty's brushstrokes won't stop you cold like Darrow's detail occasionally does, but it's impossible to read an episode of Jack Survives without getting lost in them just the same. Everything about these comics seems designed to make you linger; the bizarre, completely unique uses of formal devices like thought balloons or panel-to-panel transitions, the almost comically huge speech bubbles, the layers of black brushwork slightly submerged beneath fields of white paint. You're supposed to be lingering on the everyday happenings Moriarty depicts, and as long and deeply as the artist does, if at all possible. These are comics designed to make you see the beauty, or at least the value, in a bad TV reception or a cloud that looks like a horse, and to do so Moriarty keeps you looking at these things for as long as he possibly can. Compare to Alex Ross, whose attempting to create fast-moving action stories with meticulously painted pages crammed with photorealistic detail seem like an absurdly flawed approach in comparison.

- After Gary Panter, Moriarty is the cartoonist whose approach most seems prefigurative of the Kramers Ergot/Picturebox aesthetic to me. Not only are these weirdo comics with a great amount of joy in exploring form, they're stories that run on their own immense conviction that what they're depicting is important, and manage to convince the reader that it is despite all appearances to the contrary. There's also a shared fascination with the construction/deconstruction of the comics page -- Moriarty' pages are showcases for painted-out brushstrokes that remain visible, blurred and defiantly unpolished details, word balloons full of erased speech. I'm not sure how many of our current no-fi comix-makers were exposed enough to Moriarty during their development to have really directly dialogued with his work, but the lineage is there beyond a doubt. Moriarty's inclusion in Kramers Ergot is an important act of linking comics creators of two generation together with the concerns and aesthetics they share.

Final Crisis #1-3; Final Crisis Sketchbook; DC Universe #0, by Grant Morrison and JG Jones. DC.

- Rereading this much-maligned megacrossover for the first time since it all ended, it's immediately apparent how little happens in these issues. It's almost all buildup -- we see "bad things happening across the DCU" again and again, but there isn't really anything else going on in the first three issues of this comic. There's a point where it almost gets old (toward the end of issue #2), but then there are a few good scenes where even more bad things happen, and by the time you're reading an issue #3 with nothing but MORE of them you realize Morrison has done the impossible and actually built up a threat that it seems not even the superheroes will be able to surmount. This experimental (for hero comics) approach to narrative is what ended up dooming the series to unpopularity, but looking at it as anything other than a fanboy it's pretty hard not to be impressed by the sheer power of Morrison's slow burn to apocalypse.

- JG Jones was rushing his art pretty bad by issue #3, but it completely works -- watching his lines grow less precise and more erratic, his areas of spotted black grow larger, his figures get a little less constructed, you can absolutely feel the dissolution of normality that Morrison's script is chronicling. I would have much rather seen a Jones-drawn book all the way through with vast dives in "quality" every issue as the Evil Gods got more and more powerful, a decay of beauty to parallel what was going on in the plot.



- Since Morrison's re-arrival at DC in '04, this is the only comic he's written that even comes close to the gloriously in-continuity sweep of his previous tenure's JLA. Maybe if the fans had liked this book we would have gotten more, but it's kind of cool to see Morrison just going for broke on the one big spotlight moment he was given, the moment where he actually got to write and plan the continuity instead of just reacting to it. There's such joy in the worldbuilding Final Crisis engages in, from the casual metafiction of the Multiversal Monitors' scenes to the kinetic intensity new concepts like the Super Young team are introduced with. We may still get new ideas and big changes from Morrison in his DC work -- after all, it's what he does. But there was an utter unhinged glee in the writer's summer of 2008, in Final Crisis and Batman RIP, that has been missing from his subsequent superhero comics. Those books were too searing, too big, too intense and individual for the average DC reader, and especially with the ascendancy of Geoff johns over the past year, Morrison has obviously become number 2 at the company. But going back and looking at this stuff, it's got a drive and passion that goes past anything else he's ever written and into territory that otherwise has only been Kirby's.

Bottomless Belly Button, part 1, by Dash Shaw. Fantagraphics.

- It's pretty hard to speak to the overall plot of this book, especially since part 1 leaves off just as the "things happening" part is getting in motion -- but this is an interesting comic. Shaw seems almost not to care about his characters, to see them as abstract vehicles for amusement more than like, his pals or something. (Not exclusively... you feel at times for Peter and for Jill, but the distance form the other characters is noticeable.) This is ostensibly a "comedy" comic, and Shaw is close to the Herriman headspace of treating his made-up people not as people at all but as "pixies" that exist for our amusement. This is a bit hyperbolic, but it's interesting to see a long, character-driven comic where the characters' plights or feelings are secondary to more aesthetic concerns. Shaw goes beyond the readers' comfort zones, but he does it in weird ways that you only notice when you realize how well the characters serve the story and how carefully wound-up all their actions are to play off of one another.

- Superhero comics have nothing on this book for fascination with the human form. Easily the choicest quote from Shaw's Comics Journal #300 conversation with David Mazzucchelli was this one: "I like feeling things in my body." Shaw likes drawing other people feeling things too, and a great amount of this book's plethora of formal innovations are there to describe to the reader the characters' sensual experiences of situations. Whether it's a loving render of a kid wiggling his loose tooth or a panel where the burn of a calf muscle after a long jog is the only subject, Shaw writes about the body functions and sensation we never see in comics, discovering along the way that the medium hasn't got any way to show these things yet, and innovating right and left to depict them in his drawings.

- This comic is really funny. Shaw's not a gag cartoonist, though, and his way of making you laugh is worth talking about; rather than just writing a punchline or capturing that perfect facial expression, he uses formal techniques. The extreme awkwardness of a family dinner gone to pot is all tiny, cramped panels full of word balloons and hunched figures and sound effects. Peter's forays into romance aren't shown in painful flashbacks, but in their detritus: "Did you really drive to my house, sit there for an hour, kick over the snowman in the front lawn and drive away?" demands an ex-girlfriend's letter, hand-written on a sheet of notebook paper. It's hilarious, just not in a way we've seen before in comics -- or maybe at all.

- Probably the biggest and best innovation to be found in part 1 of this book is Shaw's labeling of things too abstract to be drawn clearly with simple lettered captions. (Wafting lines are labeled "steam"; a cluttered block of abstract patterns is "LOUD MUSIC".) A lot of the criticism of Shaw is directed at his "simplistic", "crude" drawing, but if you're going to be inserting these kinds of inherently metafictional reader-helpers into your comic, some form of cartooning is necessary, because it keeps the reader constantly suspending their disbelief rather than getting popped out of a true-to-life visual world every time we're told that "Sunlight makes dust in air visible" by text incorporated into the pictures themselves. And as long as he's cartooning, it's admirable that Shaw just goes for broke, simplifying his iconographic characters down into ciphers that remind some people of the utter primality in children's art. Maybe that isn't what a lot of folks want from their comics but hell, that's great cartooning. That's taking something this medium offers you and running it to the finish line, so if people don't like it they better take it up with comics, and the possibilities they offer artists intelligent enough to use them.

Your Monday Panel 5

Indian Summer (1983), page 15 panel 5. Drawn by Milo Manara.


For all the pitfalls of detail (see last issue), it remains one of the most important tools in the artist's repertoire. When it's both called for and used well, detail can create entire worlds that go beyond simply allowing the reader to slip through them and seductively drag the eye down into the story they're telling. This is one such panel.

What elevates Manara's way of filling frames up with information above almost anyone else working in comics is how naturalistically he draws. One of the problems with the Image school of liney art that took a bashing in last issue's comments is that even if you can get past the line matrices all over the human beings, that style is simply wrong for depicting furniture, or buildings, or certainly the natural world. There are only a very few things you can draw using it. But Manara can encompass multitudes, his thin, even lines almost shying away from the idea of "style" and into something like documentary, attempting to summon forth the real world on the page more than play any fancy self-referential tricks with his mark-making. Thick fields, sparse wilderness, the striving human form, the wildness of the animal world -- all are delineated in the same, exacting manner, one that seeks not to simplify them but to show them as they really are, in all their glory.

It's a very valid approach, but one that never seems to get enough attention, and maybe that's because there are at most one or two other artists using it who have Manara's intensity of vision, who can conceptualize a world this deep. Few could imagine every stalk of vegetation, tree and cloud and crow here in enough detail to draw them -- and then to draw them so masterfully! Manara's line is so perfect, so able to ride the razor's egde between cartoon bounciness and realist rigor that with a simple outlining of forms, a few lines here and there for shading, and a wistfully expressive color palette, he can give us a world to be lived in as fully as this one.

And he does it with the details, with the creation of something as fully realized as it possibly could be. Note too the thickness of the cornfield, its unwillingness to be run through. The way the spiraling crows' panic shows the covered-up motion of the running boy more effectively than a mere figure drawing possibly could. The huffing, puffing billow of the clouds seen almost touching the boy's breathless face. The picture's every detail is visible and free of abstraction, but much of what makes this panel so real is that the detail does more than just sit there. It enriches, gets the lines to come alive. This is an utterly beautiful picture, to be sure. But Manara's genius lies in taking it farther than just making beauty. In drawing as truly and as realistically as possible, the artist is engaged in a far greater task -- the re-making of life.

Your Monday Panel is an ongoing series examining the building blocks of comics -- individual panels.

DTU Interview: Michael DeForge

"I like drawing creepy and ugly things."



One of the most promising young cartoonists to come along in years, Michael DeForge is an absolute comics blizzard. Reading his work is a transportative experience, a ticket into a world full of cartoon naivete and real-life nausea -- like watching Hanna-Barbera cartoons on bad acid. His comics, especially his Koyama Press series Lose (of which issue #2 has recently become available), showcase an overpoweringly seductive blend of lo-fi indie comics grit, superhero-informed dazzle, formal daring -- and best of all, an electrifying willingness to take his comics to places the medium has rarely gone before. By turns touchingly humanist and gut-wrenchingly horrific, Lose synthesizes the familiar and the unknown into a whole that is on par with the best sequential art being published today, and points the way towards a fascinating tomorrow. The Toronto-based artist recently took the time to tell me about his influences, his favorite superhero comics, the attraction of terrible events, and missing his friends' birthday parties.

Matt Seneca: Before we talk about your work, give us some insight into its creator. Who is Michael Deforge? When did you start drawing? Did you do any formal training, art school -- or were you self-taught? Talk about your development.

Michael DeForge: I'm 22. I grew up in Ottawa but moved to Toronto for school. I didn't go to art school and I dropped out of the English program of my university during my second year. I wanted to put more energy into drawing, and I thought leaving school would be the best way to go about doing that.

I've been drawing for about as long as I can remember, and I always wanted to draw superhero comics growing up. By high school, I still wanted to do comics, but kind of realized I would be a poor fit for superhero books. When I started doing flyers for local punk and indie shows I realized I could try to make a go of it as a commercial artist. That's sort of what I do now - support my personal work that doesn't make too much money with the commercial gigs I do.



MS: So how do you approach the illustration work in relation to your comics? Are there different levels of involvement? Different ways of going about making them?

MDF: Yeah, I end up going about them as two totally different things. I'm engaged with my commercial work and put a lot of energy into it, but I don't have any illusions about it. I know illustrators who live and die with each revision clients ask for. I just think of it as a job. It just happens to be a job I really enjoy doing. I try my best, but at the end of the day, you have to put aside your ego and work within the limitations you're given.

MS: Your comics seem very consistent and of a piece with one another, but your commercial work is more like a body of quick hits that sprawl out in various directions. Is there any unifying idea behind your illustrations? Anything you want to accomplish with them as a whole?

MDF: Not really. In fact, I like the variety. I get some energy from trying out different ways of drawing or being forced to draw things I wouldn't normally have any interest in depicting.

Some guys can sell a "style" but I've never really managed to sell my illustration work that way. I try to be more of a chameleon with my commercial work. I think it's always very clearly my hand behind each piece, but I try to adapt to whatever aesthetic the client is asking for.

MS: It's pretty cool that you've been able to keep your comics separate from the merry-go-round of making a living as an artist... I guess the only more "commercial" comics work I've seen of yours was the Vice piece. I've read that you interned for Vice -- was that how you got the Bunky and Scarface gig? And was it more high-pressure than, for example, an issue of Lose because it was for such a big publication?



MDF: I think I manage to keep my comics separate because my publisher, Anne Koyama of Koyama Press, has put so much faith in me. She's just been so supportive, and it's because of her that I'm able to make Lose entirely my own thing.

I actually got the Bunky and Scarface gig through Nick Gazin. He does regular reviews for the site and curates the weekly web comics. I can't say there was a ton of pressure because Nick seems pretty open to anything. For something like Lose, I actually feel way more pressure. I get kind of nervous about it, because each issue consumed a significant chunk of my year. Like, "This is my book! This is the reason I haven't had time to attend your birthday parties for the past four months! Judge me accordingly!"

MS: Would you ever take your comics in a more commercial direction? Do you like doing more personal work in less bright spotlight? A lot of Lose, especially, is pretty brutal -- do you think it's just got to be done outside the mainstream so you can get the ideas out with no interference?

MDF: I feel like I'd actually be thrilled to take a shot drawing comics in more commercial formats, so long as I could still come back "home" to doing things like Lose, where I get to do whatever I want. But it's one of those things where, like - I love the idea of just writing straightforward monthly superhero scripts, or doing a daily gag strip, because they're things that I'm really interested in. But I know I probably won't ever be able to, since I'm not sure I have the discipline for either of those things.

MS: Oh man, that was going to be my next question! Well, if you ever do get handed the keys to the DC universe or something, you’ll have at least one buyer. Let's talk about superhero comics, then -- who are your influences from that section of the field, and how much do they inspire your work?

MDF: Jack Kirby is huge for me. I consider him to be a big influence, although I don't think it shows in my actual drawing style. But I'm really inspired by the way he approached world-building and design and organized information in all sorts of interesting ways.



Neal Adams, Steve Bissette and John Totleben, Frank Quitely, Trevor Von Eeden, Mike Mignola -- there are artists who I love and study and take a lot of energy from, but it's sort of weird, because I don't think my artwork visibly reflects those influences. I just absorb a lot of it, and maybe some of it comes out and maybe it doesn't.

MS: Do you follow mainstream comics, and what do you think of the superhero industry these days as a whole?

MDF: I still buy mainstream comics, but I'm not sure if I have any opinion of the industry as a whole. For instance, I see people complaining about big crossover "event" comics. Something like Final Crisis isn't really my cup of tea, but I don't really have anything to say about it because I just skip over that stuff. I'm following Batman and Robin but I skipped Final Crisis, you know?

Mainstream books I've liked in recent months have been Criminal, Orc Stain, the JH Williams Detective Comics issues, the Ultimate Spiderman relaunch, Hellboy and BPRD, Young Liars and the Matt Fraction/Howard Chaykin Punisher issues I've been buying from back issue bins. I try to buy comics that Doug Mahnke draws, but I really dislike Geoff Johns, so I've been skipping his Green Lantern work.

MS: How about influences from outside the mainstream? What art/"alternative" comics artists do you see yourself as carrying on or developing traditions and ideas from?

MDF: Mark Newgarden, Igort, Brian Chippendale, Mat Brinkman, Marc Bell, Dan Clowes and Chester Brown have all been tremendous influences on me in one way or another.

Aside from art comics, Kazuo Umezu and Hideshi Hino have both been huge for me. Herriman and Schulz. I love Jules Feiffer, although I think it's the same case as with Kirby - I doubt the influence is visible at all. In fact, I don't think my drawings could resemble Feiffer's drawings any less. Maybe it shows up in my writing or humor more.

A lot of other types of art and design informs my comics work as well. Poster design and children's illustration especially.

MS: As somebody whose comics showcase an affinity for both sides of things, what's your take on the disconnect between comics' mainstream and alternative worlds?

MDF: Frank Santoro and Jog have both written a bit about cartoonists who are informed by a much wider scope of work than just the North American traditions of cartooning. They aren't on a "genre comics" path or an "alt comics" path, they're just sort of feeding off everything. I feel like that's a lot more common lately. Dash Shaw, James Stokoe, the Closed Captioned Comics guys, Bryan Lee O'Malley, Sheldon Vella, Hellen Jo, Zack Soto, Jon Vermilyea, Michaela Zacchilli, Paul Maybury -- they're just doing the work and aren't really concerned about what camp they're in.

MS: Let's talk about Lose. It seems like there are some very specific things you're expressing, both in terms of ideas and formalist genre concerns. For example, both issues have been more "horror comics" than anything else, but they're not easily classified as belonging to any horror comics lineage -- they're just your own thing. What do you want Lose to accomplish as a comic? Do you think it accomplishes your goal or goals, or are you still working on saying what you want to say?

MDF: It's a weird thing to talk about, since if I'm honest, my goal isn't much more broad than, "I have an idea for a comic, I sure hope I don't screw up drawing it."

I started the first issue during a really rough year. I mean, it's not like I set out to "write a comic about my feelings!" or something, and I hope it doesn't read that way. I just wanted to write a funny and compelling comic - but looking at it now I can see that it reflects a very specific time in my life, and drawing it was a good way of organizing a lot of what was going on.



MS: You stay more or less focused on horror comics -- what is it that you like about that style of stories? Any other genres that particularly attract you?

MDF: I just sort of fell into doing horror stories. I didn't see the first Lose as a horror comic at all, until I showed the finished pages to people and they described it like that. I like drawing creepy and ugly things, and I'm also interested in stories where characters are swept up in terrible events beyond their control, so that's what attracts me to horror.

There are other genres I'd like to do. I'm interested in doing a crime story and a science fiction story right now, but I haven't developed either of them very far yet. I'd like to do more straightforward humor stuff, too.

MS: Your website says Cave Adventure is an abandoned serial, but then it popped up again in Lose #2, albeit in a pretty different form. Nesbit Lemon also made a re-appearance in that issue -- again, in a totally separate milieu than we saw in issue #1. Do you plan to continue with "Cave Adventure" or Nesbit? And if so, will you keep changing them or do you have specific plans for their future use? Do you typically plan things like that out far in advance, or just let it happen as you're working?

MDF: There are definitely going to be more Cave Adventure strips, but they're all going to be self contained shorts and not have much to do with the serial. I like the idea of having a "cast of characters" I can come back to. Like that self portrait Ernie Bushmiller drew where he's looking at his creations and saying "Who's got a gag for me today?" So I have plans to go back to using a few characters again, although most of the stories will be unrelated to each other.



I plan things out in advance, but find it impossible to stick to any plans.

MS: Yeah, life is usually too interesting to plan it, I suppose. That said, is there anything you're working on right now that you want to tease?

MDF: I have a bunch of projects that I'm just finishing up, actually. I did a small book of drawings called "Maxim's Top 100" that's gonna be printed by Simon Bosseé, and an 8-page silkscreened comic called "Wet Cough." The eight-pager was drawn to accompany a short animation that's being screened for the Out Loud Book Arts Show on April 3rd at the Philadelphia Print Center. I just finished a three-page strip for Vice's website that I'm really proud of, and hopefully will be on their site in a month or so. I did a two pager for the next issue of Diamond Comics, which is the newsprint zine that Floating World puts out. I also just wrote a 12-page Spiderman comic that I might work up the nerve to start drawing later this week.

MS: Last question: as a young and obviously very talented guy who's established himself but is still relatively new to comics, what do you like about the medium, the business, the culture? And is there anything you'd like to see change or evolve?

MDF: I feel really cheezy writing this out, but I really just feel excited about comics, all the time. It's a really good time for comics, and I feel very privileged to be living in it. Comics from the past or from other countries are so easily available to me, and that wasn't the case 10 years ago. I never get bored with comics because there's just so much new stuff to be found.

As far as how it will develop, my buddy Ryan, who runs the Same Hat blog, has been talking to me a lot about internationalization, and that seems about right. It's exciting to be able to read cartoonists from other countries, informed by a set of influences completely new to me.

Bulletproof thanks to Michael DeForge for his time and consideration in giving me this interview! You can buy your copy of Lose #2, as well as a bunch of other great DeForge comics at his website while you check out the incredible artwork on display there.

Zap!

My analysis of a panel from Jim Steranko's Strange Tales #168 has been added to the collection of links at The Drawings of Steranko, the ultimate resource on comics' prince of darkness! Peruse it and a huge collection of other phenomenal Steranko tidbits here!

Into The Void: Part 1 (of 3)

The DC comics of Steve Ditko

Intro Part 2 Part 3

The seven issues of Beware The Creeper span Ditko's first period of residence at DC, begun a little before and ended a little after Hawk and the Dove. By far the most homogeneous of his three creations for the company, the Creeper looks in retrospect like an attempt to create a relatively safe, commercially viable hero series that mixed in just the right inoculation dosage of Ditko weirdness. The formula had worked with Spider-Man, and DC had every reason to believe it would work again. Their confidence in Ditko is evident right from the start; despite the received wisdom about DC being the more conservative, creatively strict of the two big superhero publishers, by mid-1968 they were falling behind Marvel in sales for good, and entering a period of experimentation under Carmine Infantino's editorial directorship that would yield a spate of fondly-remembered Silver Age gems -- but no financial hits. Regardless, right off the bat Ditko was given the freedom to go a little wilder than he had at Marvel, creating grimier stories in the vein of his contemporaneous, often downright vicious Charlton work.



The first Creeper comic, published as Showcase #73, sees Ditko taking a few enthusiastic swings at his new freedom. Though he had been the sole plotter for the last several issues of Spider-Man, the book was still very much a product of Stan Lee's wider vision for the Marvel universe. Cut loose from that imposition, Ditko sets about creating a world of his own. The drawing is noticeably different from his Marvel work, inkier and more focused on the simple, often clumsy movements of characters than on slam-bang action. Where heretofore the verisimilitude of Marvel's New York had trumped DC's suburban fantasylands for grit, Ditko wasted no time in establishing the setting for his Creeper stories as a beastly, dark megalopolis full of cast shadows and vertical lines. Marvel may have been the more realistic company, making a point of including some of the workaday world's tougher realities in their comics, but Ditko's Creeper eschews realism and dives right into pulpy darkness. This was the grimmest, scariest-looking superhero comic being published at the time, and the most exciting thing about the inaugural Creeper issue isn't the stock story or the rather uninteresting protagonist, but the billowing gloom, the utter ambience that hangs over it, right down to the outre character designs.



The subsequent issues -- the first two of the Creeper's own series -- are the best of Ditko's run on the character. Settled in at DC and apparently confident in the world he was creating, the artist began to stretch out, experimenting with high-contrast angst, nerve-wateringly suspenseful passages, the mechanics of his drawing, and even the era's limited production effects.



The panel above carries a feverish mood more in the vein of Will Eisner's Spirit work than anything from kids' superhero comics, with a composition closer to Hitchcock horror than Kirby zip. Ditko steps out of of his comfort zone with the exact instant he chooses to portray here, as well; perhaps better than anyone else at drawing "point of impact" shots capturing both actions and reactions, here he restricts himself to an instant of highest tension rather than violent release. The villain's foot touches the window-glass for a millisecond before breaking through, at jarring odds with the last moment of his victim's unawareness. It's typical of the kind of storytelling Ditko was doing. Drama over pathos, in the art if not in the scripts, which despite their bluster are rather charming in their heavy-handed seriousness and attempts at adult characterization.

These were frequently hilarious -- Ditko, working with (pseudonymous and still largely unknown) scripter Denny O'Neil clearly understood that a large part of Stan Lee's success was due to his injection of real life's inconveniences into heroic narratives. But where Peter Parker would struggle to find the right pills for Aunt May's illnesses or impress Liz Allan, the Creeper's alter ego Jack Ryder was always contending with a perplexing string of "problems", common man's troubles like you know, being forced to walk an annoying girl's dog.



What's admirable about the first few Creeper issues is watching Ditko's anarchic side at play. He stuffs the pages with panels and characters and spotted blacks, filling them to bursting just because he can. Compared to the congestion of his last few Spider-Man issues, the sense of freedom is palpable, and in a different way than his often rushed, tonally dour work for Charlton. It reads like Ditko was enjoying creating the Creeper each month, taking pride in and having fun with a high-profile book that was all his own. The Creeper's laughter is a common script device as well as a strong graphic motif, and Ditko obviously liked it -- by Creeper #2 it's made its way into the title text, and for all intents and purposes this issue the book is called "HA HA HA HA HA HA BEWARE THE CREEPER".



The art continues to be refined past the point of mere mastery. There's a willingness to go beyond storytelling with his tinkering, and with the first issue of Creeper's title Ditko begins playing with iconography. Rather than the typical starbursts, his impacts are signified by stylized dot slams that look like solid balls of pain, or drops of vinegar in oil.



His curiosity transcends even drawing: Creeper #1 is the earliest mainstream comic I've seen that features colored gutters between panels, and color is also intelligently used to code Jack Ryder's transformations into his giggling alter ego. Ditko was obviously interested in the production aspects of the work he was doing -- this kind of consistency of color is rare in Silver Age comics, and stuff like those gutters just didn't happen back then unless somebody specifically requested it.




Watching Ditko peak on Beware the Creeper is a thing of beauty. He seems to understand that the attraction of this book isn't in anything related to the writing (by this time Ditko had Hawk and the Dove if he wanted to really write) -- it's in the lure of the shimmering, black world he's created, in the way he he spins the stories with his art, in the intricacies of the drawing. By issue #2 he's casually throwing out bits of genius like they were confetti from a window.



Smoke rings used to indicate depth fields, drawing a subtle line between the characters in the panel for the reader's eye to follow.



He also seems to take a particularly righteous pleasure in creating "pop art productions" outside of their ostensible home at Marvel.

Issue #3 sees the drawing as sharp as ever and the darker pulp aspects of the comic emphasized -- both welcome, but there are problems. The story dislocates the cast from the modern urban setting so essential to the book's feel, plopping them down instead on an island filled with Hammer Horror movie-type inhabitants. As a result, the simplistic aspects of the scripting cloy instead of charming and the plot feels sluggish instead of simmering along as the previous two did.



More distressing still is Ditko's use of fewer and larger panels to tell the story. The art is still pretty much invincible -- few could even dream of getting more movement, more horizontality, out of a three-panel grid -- but unlike contemporaries Kirby or Steranko, Ditko used larger panels as a way to fill up unused space, a corner-cutting mechanism, and big frames like these are an indicator that he was no longer as engaged in what he was doing. Look for comparison at Mr. A, the Question, or even the earlier Creeper stories; when his heart was in it, when he was doing his best work, Ditko used the nine-grid, and he filled it up with overlapping characters and word balloons, so many ideas that they threatened to bounce each other off the page. In Creeper #3, the art is sharp, the storytelling fluid -- but the simple fact that there is space left wanting demonstrates that something was wrong.



Creeper #4 worsens the problem. The drawing, while still very fine, isn't up to the standard even of the inaugural Showcase issue, and the layouts, full of large, often alarmingly bare panels, are downright murky at times. The issue has a slapdash feel -- obviously the work of a great talent, but just as obviously that of a man driven to distraction. The previous month had seen Ditko's last issue of Hawk and the Dove, always a better-written book, and one that featured creations much closer to Ditko's heart as well as more in line with his personal concerns. Apocryphally, Ditko absented his own book due to ideological squabbles with its more liberal scripter, Steve Skeates; whatever the reason, by December 1968, he was left with one book where recently he had had two, and it was the inferior one. Given this context, the results as seen in Creeper's final issues make sense: Ditko was back in a similar position to what he had gone through at Marvel, hacking out superhero stories he didn't much care about, producing art that, while still clearly a cut above the average fare, lacks any of the energetic crackle that was so powerful in earlier issues. The image below is a full-page panel, certainly bereft of detail, but unfortunately, not exceptionally so.



Issue #5 is quite clearly the end. Ditko, heavily and poorly inked by Mike Peppe, stumbles through the first half of a two-part story which brings back a villain who had already appeared in two previous issues. The drawing is barely perfunctory -- so much of Ditko's style, so much of his genius was in the inks that under inferior hands, the art barely looks like his. The characters rush through a very large-paneled story plotted as well as scripted by Denny O'Neil, now in the ascendant and no longer bothering to use a pen-name. Ditko, whose searing visions and brilliant response to more creative freedom were the only reasons the Creeper was ever worth reading about, had become a non-presence in his own book.

The best page of the issue bats lazily at an interesting layout -- a mildly notable response to Jim Steranko's work in the same vein, perhaps. But even here, the drawing is poor, the line is nothing like Ditko's, and the characters merely float, unmoored from their creator's guiding hand and even from the motions that they're being put through.



In the letter column of issue #5, editor Dick Giordano mentions that Ditko has been "ailing" of late, his assignments passed on to others. The next, final issue of Beware the Creeper finished Ditko's abandoned two-parter with uninspired, clearly rushed Gil Kane art. Steve Ditko would not work at DC again for the better part of a decade.

to be continued

Intro Part 2 Part 3

Into The Void: Intro

The DC comics of Steve Ditko

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

Steve Ditko is easily one of the most discussed artists to have worked in comics; there are volumes on his general craft and style, a million appreciations of the minutiae of his art (from the impossible hands to the impossible landscapes), plenty of talk about his hardline right wing-Objectivist philosophies... and of course, his early/mid-'60s Marvel work has been a hot discussion topic since the beginning of comics fandom, and will probably continue to be long after everyone reading this article has died.

Ditko's as close to immortality as pretty much anyone else who's worked in comics -- his Spider-Man issues alone have given him that much. But the thing about half-century-long careers is that they always leave a few relatively unexplored shadowy areas, and Ditko probably has more of those to his name than most. For the first three decades of his career, he was an absolute chimera, moving rapidly in basically every direction his field allowed, and a few that it didn't. From penciler to inker to writer to letterer, from commercial hack to fetish artist to superhero revivalist to fanzine contributor to alt-comics trailblazer and back again, Ditko did every conceivable job there was to do in comics, usually more than one at a time. But the brightness of the spotlight shone on Spider-Man, and to a lesser degree on Dr. Strange, has for decades all but eliminated even the barest general knowledge of the rest of Ditko's output.

Lately, there have been moves toward claiming the entirety of Ditko's career for the history books, of presenting a more comprehensive, well-rounded story than the "superhero artist gone mad" bit that's characterized him for so long. Blake Bell's generally excellent 2008 biography was a good start; and Fantagraphics and IDW have recently published books that place Ditko's rarely-seen 1950s horror/suspense/romance work in the context of his broader career. Ditko's later, self-published work is a bit more of a problem, containing as it does some of the most intense philosophical screeds ever to come out of a comic artist, let alone such a well-regarded pioneer; but even these "packages" are of late garnering more critical attention than they have in years. And surprisingly, Marvel have not done badly in the way of Ditko reprints, giving his pre-superhero revival monster comics lavish hardcover treatments and spotlighting some of his post-1970s commercial work in a "Marvel Visionaries" hardcover. Over the last decade, piece by piece, year by year, volume by scattered volume, a fleshed-out career narrative has begun to emerge for consumption, a fascinating picture of the rise and decline of a truly massive talent.

Through it all, though, a significant (if not particularly large) piece of the puzzle has been missing. After leaving Marvel in 1966, Ditko did absolutely inspired work at DC and Charlton for the remainder of the '60s, until his increasingly rigid Ayn Randian ethics and general artistic dissatisfaction took him in the direction of creator-owned work and self-publishing. The Charlton comics have been reprinted (at least the superhero ones -- by DC, oddly enough) in prohibitively expensive, confusingly branded hardcovers with rather cruddy production values. The DC work, however, has been more or less lost to time since its original publication.

It's a shame, too, since the three series Ditko created for DC are intertwined, yet notably different portraits of the artist at the absolute zenith of his powers. Having learned every artistic lesson he needed to, enthused at his new milieu, and improving his craft every day in the testing ground that was his low-paid Charlton work, Ditko's two '60s DC creations, the Creeper and Hawk & Dove, abound with energy, virtuosity, and a wealth of sheer style unleashed by Ditko's escape from the overbearing presence of Stan Lee. A decade later, Ditko was back with Shade the Changing Man, a showcase for the last throes of his prime, containing perhaps his best cartooning and a concerted attempt to create a comprehensive world of his own. None of the series were hits -- Ditko didn't stay even ten issues on a one of them -- but nonetheless they were, and remain, a crossroads between Ditko's straight superhero work for Marvel and his intensely personal creator-owned comics. They showcase both the good and bad in both these "sides" of Ditko; comics done as well as they can be done at times, nearly impossible to get through at others (often in the same issue). They are a portrait of a genius struggling with his medium, his situation, and himself. They are essential.

to be continued

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

Your Monday Panel 4

Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days (2009), page 56 panel 1. Drawn by Al Columbia.



"Detail" is a double-edged sword in comics art. There is a thin line a pictorial storytelling medium medium must walk: not enough to the pictures and nothing is created, no illusion of life fed to the reader. But with too much detail in the panels the eye must slow to catch it all, and the work is in danger of being simply looked at rather than read. Then there are different kinds of detail: what separates the involving, lively motion captures of Frank Quitely, say, from the empty line matrices of Jim Lee? There's no objective way of qualifying "good" or "bad" detail -- that would be tantamount to declaring what is "good" and "bad" comics art, a bridge I refuse to cross -- however, let me offer a very subjective opinion on the difference between details that enhance a work and details that degrade one.

Since comics are a reading medium, it's got to be about the amount of information conveyed. All that matter is that the reader "believes" the pictures -- that is, that they're well-formed enough to foster the necessary illusion of reality. After that, it doesn't matter how much crosshatching you put on your Batman image; for all intents and purposes, it was Batman as soon as the cape and ears went onto the figure drawing. What does matter is how much can be easily read within the panel, how much each picture tells you before you move on to the next one. An Alex Ross picture may have a note-perfect rendering of the way the sun glints off human skin, but does it tell the reader anything more than one panel of Dennis the Menace? Usually not, and quite often much less, which is why I consider that kind of detail as often, laborious, unnecessary, and an impediment to the reading experience.

So we come, in our roundabout way, to Al Columbia and this panel. Look at it again if you like. Columbia is a master of "good" detail; his simplified, cartoony drawing style tells you much more about his characters and the world they inhabit than could be said with photorealistic art that simply approximates our world. His art uses the early-Disney drawing style with a sick irony, evoking menace with lines drawn from the vanished America of the Depression era. It's a style that plays on our fear of the past, of less enlightened times, of days when kids played in the streets with no one watching them, when health care was a bottle of bourbon and a bone saw or a back-alley clothes hanger, when the serial killers weren't nerds gone off their meds but brawny stranglers or licentious axemen. It's all here, all in the mutated bigfoot cartooning, the faded paper, the uninked pencil lines, the defiance of a piece of art left incomplete -- all the forgotten bad sides of an era we like to remember as a golden age spit back in our faces.

But beyond the evocative style of the panel, there is an utter wealth of information on display. Like in last week's Caniff panel, Columbia goes full-on animated with Sonny Blackfire's arm, taking us through a moment of hesitation, a rung doorbell, and then a picked lock. The rough pencils work especially well here: by displaying an uncertainty about which position to draw the arm in and roughing out five different options, Columbia communicates all five within one frame.

No less advanced is the lettering. We get this demonic half-man's whole backstory -- his continuity, more precisely -- with references to other characters and comics, his own history, and even a bit of his family origins, in a rough yet elegant near-diagram. (More world-building, this time with language: the modern-sounding "corporation" is crossed out in favor of the richer, antiquated "fortune". And Jesus -- "Snuff Comix" indeed!) The word balloon is icing on the cake: that starburst is used in comics to denote everything from drunkenness and wheezing through orgasms and death rattles. Columbia evokes them all by placing it in the mouth of an enigmatically leering man in no particular physical straits, forcing us to wonder what's going on in the mind of this Bloody Bloody Killer to cause it. Just like most of us can only guess at what's going on in Columbia's mind -- this panel is the work of an utterly unique talent operating at the top planes of his medium.

Your Monday Panel is an ongoing series examining the building blocks of comics -- individual panels.

Wednesday Roundup: Unterwelten

New Comics Day 3/17/2010: what I read, how I felt about it, and why you should (or shouldn't) care.


Slow week, so one of these is NOT a new release. Find it online.

Joe The Barbarian #3, by Grant Morrison and Sean Murphy. DC/Vertigo.

A bit of an in-between issue; we got the setup in the last two, and there's a killer last-page cliffhanger that'll probably power the comic for at least the next two, but getting to it is less of a roller coaster ride than the previous issue was. The ebb and flow of this series' storytelling seems to have settled in, and it's a solid rhythm. Morrison ratchets up the tension of Joe's fantasy-world quest until it goes beyond suspended disbelief, and then he throws in a panel or two of real-world danger to keep you worried about the hero. It'll be interesting to see how far beyond the typical comic's threshold Morrison goes: he has a system set up where no matter how bombastic, how ridiculous the situations in his action-figure netherland are, he can keep the reader from dialing out with a single frame of his boy hero close to a very real death.

That said, this issue could have used a little more of the real world, as Joe's fantasy quest progresses at the expense of any development in his true life's narrative. The key to this kind of story is to make the reader care equally about both plot strands, and by slightly oversaturating the Playmobil pirates and keeping the scenes in Joe's house to a minimum, Morrison has got me a bit bored of the high adventure stuff. (Especially compared to last issue, which introduced about a million little ideas, this issue's travails down basically a single path feels less exciting.) Still, the fantasy stuff is solid -- we get a few big revelations, a bit more explanation as to what this story's actually about, and some nicely-done scenes between our ever-widening cast.



Sean Murphy remains the star of the show, blocking out some great submarine-battle action, keeping the dialogue snappy in the more expository scenes, and doing a thousand contractors' share of worldbuilding as we get further into this comic's dreamy rabbit hole. He varies his drawing style a little too, going a bit more inky and a bit less liney for the issue's torch-lit, subterranean setting. As a result, Dave Stewart gets room to shine, his psychedelic purples, oranges, and greens making the apocalypse look absolutely fabulous. This is a good-looking comic, and watching Stewart get a handle on working with Murphy is pure joy. Overall, a decent read that might not bring the noise or any new readers, but will certainly keep those already on board eager for more.

RATING: 3 out of 5.

Lose #1 (2009), by Michael DeForge. Koyama Press.

Notify the Searing Visions Department! Lose is a 24-page minicomic with excellent production values (color cover, great paper) and the general feeling of something special. DeForge's art is like a mix between Ivan Brunetti and Josh Simmons, walking that beloved fine line between cutesy and grotesque -- everything is slickly inked and crisply outlined, but the adorable abstractions that he uses for characters are sweaty, melted-looking has-beens that are as likely as not to be covered in rotting filth. His style looks like where cartoon characters go when they die.



How appropriate, then, that the main story in Lose is that of Nesbit Lemon -- a "guardian elf" who looks like something Gary Panter would cook up for Hanna Barbera -- and his descent into hell. After questioning the working conditions in God's employ, Lemon is cast down into "the lower planes", where the boss is a great and terrible black mountain named Abaddon, the damned (from Mr, Fantastic to the Yellow Kid to Jughead) frequent a bar shaped like Nancy's head, and the kindly gay-cartoon couple around the way are just waiting for an innocent to sacrifice to a carving of Charlie Brown's head.

This is deeply weird, at times disturbing stuff -- DeForge's art, full of spotted blacks and zip-a-tones, really makes you feel for the pitiful figure of Nesbit Lemon as he promenades through the workings of a disturbed mind, getting cut open and cutting others open himself. But through the woozy, black murk there's a definite story being told, perhaps even a cosmology being laid out. As Bullwinkle explains it to our man upon his arrival in hell: "Your smile... will begin to appear ridiculous and unnatural. Gradually it will appear as nothing more than a crude carving on a marionette's face... so unfamiliar you'll question whether it was ever actually you there at all. 'Could I ever really have felt that way?' (you'll ask)."

Like Josh Simmons, whose Batman desecration is a definite cousin to Lose, DeForge seems to be questioning why some of these characters had to become the property of grim-n-gritty comics writers, why others had to be revived again and again in stranger and stranger forms -- anyone remember Robert DeNiro as Boris Badenov in the Rocky & Bullwinkle live action movie? Unlike a host of inferior works, though, the question being asked in Lose doesn't seem to be "Why did my childhood comics have to change?" but "Why were the artists' original intents deviated from?" If childhood comes into it at all, it's metaphorically; DeForge knows they had to change because you're not a child anymore, because adulthood changes everything, including the comics lucky enough to make it that far.



Perhaps Lose's strongest bit is when we get a glimpse of DeForge himself in the Nancy-head bar; he has appeared in the comic before this, but not here, and paradoxically, he begins telling Nesbit about his real life. "I've started doing spots for this small-press music quarterly," he blabs, "... plus, I've started work on my graphic novel! Things are finally looking up for me!" It makes a weird kind of sense if you think about it: DeForge does live in this hell, bombarded with skewed, diluted versions of these classic characters every day. Extrapolate it a little further and there's a deadly serious point underneath all the weirdness and cartooning: we all live in this Kirby/Panter/Rory Hayes amalgamation, this strange bardo of pop culture. We all live in hell. Not the first thing you want to hear from your comics, but DeForge strews the path to the revelation with so many little gems that we follow happily along.

A similar ambience hangs over the course of the issue's "B" story, a Green Lantern story that reads like what the Bizarro Comics anthologies could have been if there hadn't been any editors around to stop the characters from swearing and imagining Wonder Woman naked. The upshot of it is that the poor fellow's lost his imagination and is unable to create willpower-constructs with his magic wishing ring anymore. Rather than throw in the towel, he goes to art school to try and get something back, and this brings him into frequently hilarious conflict with the rest of the Justice League. The material is played a lot more for laughs than Nesbit Lemon's is, but the points being made are similar in their black-humor denial of gloom. The key scene is an uproarious team meeting with a hyper-confrontational Batman and a Flash who's using team funds to pay for his braces. As a parody of the Brian Bendis internal-conflict-and-talking-heads approach, it's dead on. Is this what we want in our superhero comics? (I wouldn't mind it as much if DeForge were writing them, honestly; "Young Green Lantern" is a riot.)



Lose is a hell of a thing: a comic that manages to be entertaining and say things about life, the world we live in, and -- most importantly -- the comics we read. This is the work of a truly individual creator, locked deep into the art he's making, aware of his influences and willing to exploit them to the fullest even as he transcends them all. Brilliant. I can't wait for issue #2.

RATING: 4.5 out of 5.

Good One

(Not a review per se, just a few thoughts on a really interesting comic.)



Joker, by Brian Azzarello, Lee Bermejo, and Mick Gray. DC.

The biggest failing of mainstream superhero comics is that they deny the auteur. In the Big Two superhero universes, consistency and continuity are paramount, and no creator's vision is valuable enough to override however many years of character development and previous plots have been collected. Stasis might appear an unfortunate byproduct of "curating the characters' legacies" or whatever they want to call it, but in reality it's the most important thing. For the minds in charge, everything needs to stay the same forever, because it's worked out okay as is for this long. If anything is changed, if any chances are taken with the paymasters' intellectual properties, if any great writers or artists were just given free rein -- well, it's never been done before, so who knows? But the prevailing view says that if the talent were given creative freedom, the house of cards might crumble tomorrow. And no one wants to find out whether or not it actually would on their own watch.

So we've got what we've got.

But once upon a time a movie called Dark Knight made the bosses a billion dollars, and the worker bees in DC editorial cashed in whatever creative capital that bought them on a slick hardcover production called Joker. Joker, period -- as in no Batman. No continuity, no Comics Code, no other titles to coordinate stories with -- none of it, just provided that the barest niceties were observed. So as long as the nipples were covered and nobody said shit or fuck, Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo got to go to town on one of those blazing, individualized visions so rare to superhero comics. And the results, as it happened, were stunning.



Azzarello straddles the gap between company-owned direction and free creation better than almost anyone else who writes superheroes, and probably only Grant Morrison has had more aesthetic success on both sides of that divide. Azzarello is an experienced writer who's had plenty enough time in the industry to know that the freedom to play with some of DC's most iconic, interesting characters outside of any continuity or editorial mandates would probably never present itself again, and certainly not on such a high-profile gig. The freedom to create something like Joker is an uncommon thing indeed, and Azzarello treats this done-in-one hardcover like the chance of a lifetime it is.

These are characters we all know, even those of us who aren't habitual superhero readers -- and by know I mean more than the way the costumes look, I mean we all know who the Joker and Two-Face and the Riddler are, how they act, what it is they do, maybe even a little bit of how they think. Azzarello can't fight that. On the most basic, gut level he too is servicing the characters, because even in a bookstore market-friendly "graphic novel" there's no point in fighting decades of history. There are no nods to past stories in Joker, no shoutouts to the creators' favorite Dick Sprang or Infantino issues, but Azzarello realizes that those old stories have turned these characters into readymades, toys that don't even need to be wound up before they're set loose. By this point Batman's rogues gallery is stocked with forces of nature, elemental embodiments of the different types of evil humanity can twist itself into. So the Joker's still a maniacal sadist, Croc is still a thuggish bruiser, the Penguin's an oily sheister, and Two-Face is as smooth and dangerous as a viper. There are cores to these characters that Azzarello doesn't touch -- instead he picks them up and sets them down in a world of his own creation, far from the goodole DCU, and lets his comic chronicle how that turns out.

Azzarello's Gotham City is like an episode of "The Wire" on hallucinogens, or 100 Bullets with supervillains. By taking Batman out of the equation, he makes space to examine the nasty, almost Jungian nightmare aspects of these most dangerous of superhero characters. Suddenly the motivations aren't killing one caped man, they're what we in our world know -- power, money, adrenaline, the barbaric desire to be feared. What remains of Gotham is the vision of a crime-infested city where the maddest men rule, where malice is the ultimate goal -- and of the utter absurdity inherent to such a place, the sense of unhinged laughter into an insane abyss that only the best Joker stories have.



But instead of the deathly dandy we've seen so many times before, we get Joker in the Heath Ledger vein, with unlimited screen time -- dressed like he walked out of Hugo Boss and into a blender, doing lines of coke with a gothed-out groupie, robbing banks armed only with a bloodstained photo of the bank manager's daughter because he's dead broke. We get a Croc who looks like Stringer Bell with steroids and a congenital skin condition, hanging out in a meat locker or massaging his crotch in a strip joint. We get the Penguin in an ugly gangster's cheap white suit, vomiting his guts up. We get the hideous, steamingly bizarre truths of these characters, delivered in a twisty crime novel that isn't like anything we'd ever see in the Detective Comics or Batman pamphlets, but is still somehow more like the real thing than any of the stale superhero monthlies.

Azzarello sees the hearts of darkness in his cast, and perhaps in the Batman mythos as a whole. He takes the fun out of it, yeah -- but how fun is multiple homicide? He brings a superhero legend down to earth, yeah -- but isn't that worth doing now and again? This book is a one-trick story, yeah -- but it's a trick that no one's been allowed to do before, and it's being done by a great writer with more gusto for the job than could be expected. The script is fast and dirty, screaming off the pages with stylized dialogue, paranoia and a willingness to drag the venerable DC icons to an edge they haven't visited at least since Frank Miller did his thing in '86.



Lee Bermejo is no less impressive -- this is far and away the best work of his career. Inked by Mick Gray, his art loses its usual washed gauziness for a heavy patchwork of scything lines and huge swaths of ink. The spotting of blacks is incredibly impressive, all jagged shapes swimming into recognizable forms while maintaining the sharpness of broken glass. It looks like cubist superhero comics at points -- cubist both for the pixellated vortexes of shadow that define the characters' shapes, but also for its absolutely vicious intent. The layouts straight-up drag you from page to page, never showy or ostentatious, but with all the elegance of maximum efficiency.

It isn't often that an artist goes to town on a script like this; Bermejo works in perfect sympathy with the hard core of Azzarello's story, his art constantly groping in its inky blackness for a better composition, a cleaner panel-to-panel transition, a nastier facial expression, a more extreme moment of impact (Batman's bootsoles hitting the ground actually make a huge "RUNCH" sound effect). For all the art's meticulous detail, the reading experience is never slowed or cluttered -- rarely have pages been so filled up and yet so bleak. Bermejo absolutely raises the bar for anyone who wants to draw these characters after him. In presenting his vastly alternative view of these well-known characters, he ends up doing nothing less than defining them for the modern era.



Joker is exactly the kind of superhero comic we need more of. It is a true example of what today's top-notch creators are capable of when cut loose from the arbitrary controls imposed on them by backwards editorial systems more interested in "product stability" than their ostensible jobs -- that is, the creation of art. We need more like Joker because only comics like these can justify the continued existence of the ridiculous, unwieldy hero "universes"; Azzarello and Bermejo strip-mine 75 years of Batman continuity, throw away mounds of anachronisms, and end up with alchemy, the garbage of the modern hero comic boiled down into gritty gold. Joker is a triumph of art over product, of bold revision over static cling, and of anarchic freedom over pale, scared restraint -- a modern superhero masterpiece.

Your Monday Panel 3

Terry and the Pirates 10/29/1939, panel 10. Drawn by Milton Caniff.


When people talk about Milt Caniff, the phrase "cartoon realism" is bound to come up at some point. More than any other artist, Caniff was the discoverer of an ideal synthesis that lay between depictive realism and simplified cartooning, of the urtext for action comics. He wrote the book, and of all the action artists since, only Jack Kirby has surpassed him for sheer influence.

Caniff's genius lay in an almost instinctual grasp of how to mix cinematically-styled composition and layouts with ones more native to comics (Will Eisner, for one, was taking notes); and in a drawing style that fleshed out backgrounds, props, costumes, and landscapes in meticulous, impressionistic detail while simplifying faces and movements into iconographs that carried great impact and could be read quickly and easily. Here he employs a movie style close-up to perfectly frame his action, but drops the backgrounds to pop the figures out at you. The faces and body language are simplified and then exaggerated, but the clothes and skin display perfect realist shadowing, no fold or pucker overlooked. Tellingly, the only place the shadows move away from reality is where they overlap with the comic book-y starburst of pain around Klang's head -- there they are almost perfectly parallel with the lines of force spreading outward from the punches. Note also the blood on Pat Ryan's knuckles and Klang's face; this might be a cartoon, but in Caniff, cartooned actions have realist repercussions.

This panel, though, is more than just an exemplar of Caniff's synthesis of abstract and concrete. It is also an example of the artist's formalist side completely unchained. Where most other artists would have gone with a straight impact shot and drawn the moment the fist connects with the jaw, Caniff revels in the comics medium's prerogative to distort time -- it's impossible to tell whether this is a sped-up depiction of six or seven punches in a row, or a single punch slowed down into stop-motioned stages. Either way it's depiction of sequential action, a "comic" in a single drawing. No mean feat. Caniff was a master not only because of his immense talent, but because he took chances with panels like these, and in doing so went places that no one had gone before -- and that few have been able to since.

Your Monday Panel is a continuing series examining the building blocks of comics -- individual panels.

Welcome To The Jungle

Chromo Congo, parts 1 and 2 (as serialized in Mome #17), by Olivier Schrauwen. Fantagraphics.


Grant Morrison on his first experience of Jack Kirby's Fourth World comics: "It felt like I'd been mugged by the Word of God." Divine voice or not, there's something there in the feeling of getting mugged, something that transcends creator or genre and applies to the comics medium as a whole. Comics' multi-angled presentation of both words and pictures and their status as a realm for the single creator give them a power unique among media -- the power to pick readers up and deposit them deep in the visions of individual creative minds with no holds barred, no mercy.

Only the best comics can mug you, catch you unawares and drag you into something alien. Krazy Kat does it with deconstructed language and a setting that has almost no basis in reality. Gary Panter's work does it with sheer brutality. Carmine Infantino's with disarming elegance, Jim Steranko's with the power of new ideas, issues of Kramers Ergot with an overwhelming bouquet of unfamiliar flavors. Reading comics that startle you, that take you by surprise with brilliance or formal audacity or whatever else, really is like getting mugged: it's never the same twice. Everyone who can do it does it in their own way.



So this was my latest encounter with sequential-art street violence: a swirl of gonzo cartooning and fever-dream color called Chromo Congo, written and drawn by the elusive Belgian Olivier Schrauwen, whose graphic novel My Boy got rave reviews in 2006 and has since become impossible to find. As far as I can tell, this is his first work specifically for the English-language market (it's wordless, for what that's worth). The smoldering travelogue of a colonial-era explorer in what I assume is the Belgian Congo, it's extreme-impact environmental-immersion comics on the order of Panter or Mat Brinkman's graphic surveys of alien lands, but there's a much less primitive, much more fine-art elegance mixed into the potion, a purely intellectual side that counterbalances the utter savagery of the jungle climate that forms its setting.

Schrauwen's work certainly seems foreign, the product of influences vastly different than what the artists here usually get. If comparison with American artists had to be made, it would be to a couple of real oddballs. First, Lyonel Feininger, whose German-expressionist Sunday pages made him the first true avant-garde comics artist. The grimy brightness of Schrauwen's color palette recalls turn-of-the-century newspaper coloring, sure, but beyond that and a few drawing-style similarities the real wavelength he shares with Feininger is a sense of cartooning as abstract-art iconographics that have very little basis in reality. When Schrauwen's characters eat too much, they turn into egg-shaped, neckless monsters, swell into round, appendaged beach balls, vomit in Christmas-colored rivers, and only then return to normal human proportions. When ants swarm into the protagonist's tent to feast on a bar of his chocolate, they are bigger than his hands and feet, and only when he has escaped to the outside do they assume more normal, grain-of-sand proportions.



Such unbridled distortion recalls another American comics weirdo: Fletcher Hanks, whose anatomical amplifications and outside-looking-in take on superhero comics resulted in work where the real was discarded in favor of a series of haunting images unpinned from earthly physics or reason. Schrauwen takes that disdain for drawing reality and eye for unsettling imagery and crosses it with fine art. (Imagine Hanks inking Feininger on a silent adaptation of "Tintin in the Congo".) Both Schrauwen and Hanks' settings were the most arresting parts of their stories; whether it's the alien planets of Stardust or the jungle of Chromo Congo, their utter disdain for humanity in both artists' landscapes transforms them into characters of their own.

Whatever his influences, Schrauwen transcends them: in the end, Chromo Congo is his alone. The most obvious stylistic tic is the aforementioned distortion of human and animal bodies -- Schrauwen takes manga's practice of slipping characters in and out of angry, big-headed "super-deformed mode" and applies it not just to a broader range of emotion, but also to depicting human physiological reactions: hunger, laughter, sickness, fear, et cetera cause swollen limbs, inflation and deflation of the head and facial features, and always a divorce from normal reality of some kind. Then when the danger becomes too great, when the action crests into dismemberment or death, the drawing reverts to an almost empty, strictly figurative gloss. The line not being crossed is that of the grotesque -- Schrauwen's story is first and foremost a beautiful work of art, and he uses his author's prerogative to see that it remains so.



And make no mistake, through the vomiting and gangrene and rifle blasts and monkey attacks, this is a work of beauty. The unmoored, alien feeling of the action sequences carries an undercurrent of lonely sadness that comes to the fore during the slower in-between parts, as when the protagonist sits in his tent and stares through the little picture that comes in his chocolate bar, back into the world from whence he came. His journey is far from over, and seems to be taking him (and the narrative) into some strange, cartooned-Joseph Conrad territory the like of which has never been seen before in comics -- part a cartooning virtuoso's vision of the human body as a theater of the absurd, and part his evocation of feelings too strong to be held by even the best-designed eight panel grid.

Wednesday Roundup: Strange Days

New Comics Day 3/10/2010: what I read, how I felt about it, and why you should (or shouldn't) care.



(If ever I was going to find an excuse to post that drawing, this week is certainly it.)

NOTES: Since last week's Roundup post I've received two suggestions, one of which I'll be following, one of which I won't. The first was that I move to a five-point rating scale instead of a ten-point one. As long as I'm awarding half-stars in these reviews there are really twenty unique ratings I can give the comics I'm talking about, and that's a bit ridiculous -- like, what pushes a comics over the top from a 3.5 to that key rating of 4? What missing quality makes an 8 worse than an 8.5? Seems silly to me, anyway, so it'll be five-point ratings from now on, and I'll try to keep the "-and-a-halfs" to a minimum.

The second suggestion was that since I'm too busy to ever even get my comics on the day they come out, let alone read and then write about them on Wednesday too, I might think about changing the name of this feature to something like "Weekly Roundup". I flirted with that and then I flirted with plain old "The Roundup", but honestly it doesn't really matter to me. If you have a bee in your bonnet about that day-of-the-week discrepancy, though, feel free to tell me in the comments and I may well reconsider.

Phew. Anyway...

Batman & Robin #10, by Grant Morrison, Andy Clarke, and Scott Hanna. DC.

Enough of superheroes fighting, says Grant Morrison, let's get them into some pulp mystery! This issue is a welcome breather from the Cameron Stewart arc, which opened action-packed and gripping but by its last issue turned "not letting up" into a defect. The best Morrison superhero issues are often the ones where he just advances his plots slowly and surely, brings the characters through the unique wringers he's designed for them, and if there's a fight that's cool but if not it's no big deal. Basically all of his X-Men was a slow burn to that Xorn reveal, his Animal Man is another comic where the plot just kind of moves forward until it concludes, and to be honest, my favorite parts of his Batman have been the bits where he just adds little plot wrinkles into the character's mythos and then pushes the characters into dealing with them.

This is one of those issues, more a long, suspenseful set-up than anything else. It's hardly the weaker for that, though, as it's only good beats that are being hit. Also, and this is what's really exciting, Morrison has been scripting Batman long enough so that by this point all the backstory that he's using to inform his plots is stuff he's written himself. Don't get me wrong, the Silver Age re-jiggering of Batman RIP was a blast and a half, but now that's over with. And the one bit of Morrison's Batman I liked better than RIP was the 666 issue, with Batman blasted a few decades into a future designed only by Morrison, where every creation came from the guy actually writing the comic and it felt like Batman-plus: same character, whole new world. Well, turns out that future is now: Morrison has been so busy intertwining his own plot threads with the broader Batman tapestry that I didn't even notice there were enough of them to power a story by themselves until they started to do just that. Cool.



(This has happened before of course, when Morrison spent about the same amount of time building new worlds for the X-Men that were immediately destroyed when he left Marvel. Perhaps this issue's best bit is when Morrison takes time to reflect on whether that will be the fate of his Batman concepts as Damien, emblematic of all the bold changes Morrison has made to the Bat-universe, spends a lot of this issue worrying about what will happen when Bruce Wayne and the status quo return. "If my father returns..." he muses to Dick Grayson "... we can't be Batman and Robin anymore, can we?" And though Dick tries to cheer him up, it's true. They can't. Later Talia alludes to Damian's eventual fate once Morrison is no longer there to shepherd him and he takes his place as another minor DCU character: "Perhaps you'll be lucky enough to rise through the ranks of the Teen Titans. Or not." It's great stuff whether or not you want to see the metafiction in it -- what troubled kid wouldn't be a bit more troubled knowing he's reached the highest position God, or editorial, or whatever, will allow him? I digress...)

Morrison has put some good blocks in place over the past four years or so and is finally getting around to the business of knocking them down. In an issue that seems a lot longer and richer than average, we get Damian running WayneTech, Talia showing the ace in the hole we should have realized she always had, more on RIP's revelations about the Wayne family history, the dirt on Oberon Sexton, and even some Final Crisis callbacks. Morrison is the modern master of continuity play, and he's best when he's working with his own.

The new art team of Andy Clarke and Scott Hanna come up looking pretty good, too. Clarke draws like a Frank Quitely with less interest in cartooning and more in approximating reality. The lines are sharp and meticulous, the characters perfectly on-model, the layouts get it done without any fuss, the action is crisp and the atmospherics gloomy. There are some nice little bits, too -- Damian wears the outfit Dick Grayson always wore in the Batman animated series and Talia looks like an alien goddess, Alfred leads the Haunted Wayne Manor Tour with a candelabra and not a hint of self-awareness. Just textbook good superhero art, looking pretty while serving the story. All in all, this is a step up from last issue and an intriguing beginning to the next chapter of Morrison's Bat-epic.



RATING: 3 out of 5. (It's really a 3.5, but how bad would that look after my little spiel up top?)

UPDATED four days later: Here is a snippet from the "DC Nation" panel at Emerald City Comic Con, the weekend after this issue was released:

"The question of whether the current Robin – Damian Wayne – would join the Teen Titans was posed to the panel. Sattler laughed and replied, “He’d hurt them. We’ve actually talked about it, but he’s busy in the Batman books all year. We’ll revisit it at the end of the year.” "

I almost want to bring this comic up to a 4 out of 5 just for that. Not only is Morrison directly speaking to DC's editorial workings in the pages of his comic (I'm assuming he was told about these plans well in advance of Seattle's con-goers), he does it with a biting, almost bitter sarcasm. That line takes on the weight of all Morrison's knowledge that no matter what he does it'll be too good, to bright, too brilliant for mainstream comics universes -- that it'll all be thrown away the second he's out the door. This is why I read superhero comics; for all the ballyhoo about the indies being the real home for "comics lit", they can't even begin to approach the complexity and levels of resonance that are available to the well-written, heavily editor-ed and company direction-ed superhero book. Bravo.

The Mystic Hands of Doctor Strange #1, by various. Marvel.

I've never read a Dr. Strange story that wasn't drawn by Steve Ditko. The closest I've gotten is attempting a few of the inane, slapdash shorts that shared the pages of Strange Tales with Steranko's SHIELD just after Ditko's departure from Marvel. So what the hell, this week I got lured in by Frazer Irving and Peter Milligan between the same two covers and figured I'd go for broke and pick a Dr. Strange comic from the back issue bin, too (see below) and make it a total of five different Sorcerer Supreme stories this week. I love the character, I wish he were more in the limelight -- he's one of those fringe Marvel guys like Silver Surfer who I'd buy an ongoing series of even if it wasn't better quality than the average superhero book just because I like the milieu and the original concepts so much. Hence, despite getting burned on the last Marvel B&W mag I bought, I took a chance on Mystic Hands and it turned out to be a rather pleasant surprise. Quick looks at the four stories in it...

Story "The Cure", by Kieron Gillen and Frazer Irving.



Good stuff. Frazer Irving is always a delight, though his coloring is such a part of the experience of his comics that I really missed it in some places, coolness of the black and white format be damned. It's still top-drawer art, though; the lack of color prompts him to go more in-depth with the facial expressions and rendering, really popping the little details out at you. His handling of depth is enough to make you double-take, and he draws the Ditko costumes brilliantly. And I'm not even mentioning the Lynn Varley Dark Knight 2 photoshop filters he uses for Strange's spell-casting scenes. His 22 pages are worth the $3.99 by themselves.



Kieron Gillen's script has its good bits, too -- he writes good magic-y stuff, which is probably one of the hardest things to do well in comics, and his script tends toward the hip, Vertigo style of not-explaining-things-and-just-letting-them-be-weird. He falters hard at the end of his story, though, committing the cardinal sin of superhero comics writing and having Dr. Strange defeat a villain who has changed the world for the better. The typical mealy-mouthed excuses about free will, natural course of human history, et cetera, are trotted out, but at the end the "hero" of the story has made the world worse than what it had evolved into before he stuck his nose in, "evil" machinations or no. And I realize that most Marvel readers probably aren't socialists like me, but um, if you're going to call the Bolshevik revolutionaries terrorists, what the ass were our founding fathers? Just sayin'. "The Cure" is a pretty good story that ends up being turned into a bad one by its rather blockheaded insertion of politics where they're not asked for.

Story "Melancholia", by Peter Milligan and Frank Brunner.

Basically your standard Milligan Marvel story -- solid plot, goes more in-depth with the character work than most writers would, nothing memorable. You get the feeling that Milligan knows he can turn this stuff out in his sleep. He's like his buddy Grant Morrison in that respect, as well as in a lot of others. So why is Morrison writing long, bestselling, highly acclaimed Batman and Superman runs and Milligan hacking out little Hellblazer arcs and eleven-page Dr. Strange stories for bottom-tier Marvel anthologies, especially when in the mid-1990s they were looking like the twin inheritors of the next wave of comics, no one showing any less genius than the other?

I think it's probably because for some reason -- different minds, different childhoods, slightly different stylistic interests, I can't be sure -- Morrison can find a way to make himself care about these corporate-owned characters that he didn't create, and Milligan really can't. Where Morrison's work on X-Men and Batman is in many ways the equal of his more artistic creator-owned stuff, Milligan's sojourns with those characters are footnotes at best. He can write a good hero story,defnitely -- he writes a good Dr. Strange story for this comic -- but there's none of the passion that was in Enigma or Face or X-Statix, where he could really cut loose. Milligan is one of the most purely talented writers in comics, but writing classic-level superhero fiction is a skill he just doesn't have, and it's not for any technical reason but because his scripts just never seem interested enough.

But hell, I'd hack out stories I didn't care about too if it meant I got to work with Frank Brunner! I don't know why this guy doesn't get regular work at Marvel anymore, but it must be a really good reason. His art here is just great, layouts trippy when they need to be but always easy to follow, ink washes pitch-perfect in their evocation of the Creepy/Eerie mystic horror comics of yesteryear. There's formal flash, too, as when the panels suddenly condense during a scene of domestic violence:



The younger artists who replaced guys like Brunner at Marvel might have had more pizazz, but there's a lot of knowledge about how to make comics that work in his art that's become incredibly rare since his heyday. Nice to see him back, even if it's for such a few pages.

Story "So This Is How It Feels", by Ted McKeever.

Pretty cool, though obviously a minor story done for that Marvel cash. McKeever's art is great for the grittier side of Greenwich Village and the drunken, demon-filled bender he takes Stephen Strange on, even if the script doesn't make much sense. Not that that's a bad thing -- it does one of the most important things a superhero strip can do, and that's leave plenty of space for the artist to draw stuff like guys getting their heads squeezed in, blasted with energy by floating skulls, using mystic incantations so strong their clothes are reduced to mere atoms... fun to read.

Story "Duel In The Dark Dimension", by Mike Carey with spot illustrations by Marcos Martin.

Hoo boy. Well, if you're going to go to the trouble of commissioning a superheroic prose story for your comic, you might as well get the published novelist in your stable to write it. This is actually not bad reading, a fun little snippet of Strange's apprenticeship with the Ancient One with some seriously delicious illos by Martin that look like Bruce Timm by way of Paul Pope. Still, it's a prose story that would have worked better in comics form, and considering this is a comic book, it's a little silly that didn't happen. And may I say, and this isn't to fault Carey's perfectly fine story, but a Dr. Strange comic would have been the place for some experimental prose if there ever was one. Imagine a battle with Dormammu as transcribed by William Burroughs in cut-ups, or some Alain Robbe-Grillet literalist narration of an otherworldly mystic conflict, or, or, or, or... oh well...

RATING: I'll go with 3 out of 5. Solid, some great art, but nothing in the writing that speaks of real earth-shaking inspiration. Good comic.

"The Light That Never Was!" featuring Dr. Strange, in Marvel Fanfare #8 (1983), by Peter Gillis, Carmine Infantino and Terry Austin. Marvel.

And as promised, here's Dr. Strange story number five. I've never heard of Peter Gillis, and that's no big deal -- his story is quite unremarkable. (In summary, Dr. Strange and his friends fight a demon.) But this issue also features Carmine Infantino a good three decades after the early-sixties prime during which he could quite seriously have been called the best artist in comics, and any work by such a talent deserves a look, especially when it's sitting in the quarter bin.

Late-period Infantino is fascinating in pretty much the exact same way late-period Kirby is. Both artists spent their careers moving from realism into abstraction, both hit an ideal mixture of the two at some point (Infantino on Adam Strange from 1961-63, Kirby in my opinion on Fantastic Four and Thor from 1966-68), and then both surpassed it, not knowing when to stop and injecting their work with more and more shorthand elements until they basically became self-parodies. The difference between the two artists was that during his long decline, Kirby was privy to the incredibly sympathetic inks of Mike Royer, who straightened out so many of the defects inherent in Kirby's post-'60s approach that the reading experience never suffered until the great man was a good decade past his prime. Infantino, however, was subject to less tender mercies. Here he's inked by Terry Austin, whose realist, liney approach worked wonders for more figurative artists like John Byrne and Marshall Rogers, but wreaks havoc on Infantino's more design-based, delicate illustrations.



This image basically says it all: once an artist who drew the human figure in a gorgeously abstracted manner, by the '80s Infantino was struggling to even draw it pleasingly. Where more spotted blacks and fleshier contours could have helped greatly, Austin wasn't that kind of inker. Every appendage is a toothpick, every pose is oddly warped and distended, the faces have only a shadow of classic Infantino care, and everything is slashed to ribbons with hatched lines that have no business being there. It's not the worst comic art in the world -- there's even kind of a perverse pleasure in lapping up the empty calories provided by a great penciller's blasted shell -- but it's not enduring work by any means. A mere curiosity, tinged with bygone glory.

RATING: 2 out of 5.