Some Comics I Have Read

Before you read this, read this.

DC Universe Legacies #2, by JH Williams III, Kubert & Son, and Len Wein. DC.


Dude, you know what? This shit is boring. Despite its many flaws issue #1 at least mustered up some forward momentum, some of the page-turning power that keeps so many people from putting down their middling superhero comics halfway through. This one, though, has a story that just kinda happens until it's over. I already talked at length about how Legacies' man-on-the-street narrative is the worst possible way to tell this kind of sweeping superhero history -- through the viewpoint of one unimportant man's life, we'll get none of the epic intensity of DC's greatest moments and way too much of the inconsequentiality that happens when action writers do "real life". At least last issue saw Legacies' putzy narrator, Paulie, witness two honest-to-God hero-villain fights. This issue's big action? The Newsboy Legion beats up some bullies. Then we get told why the Justice Society are super important. ("They inspired a whole generation of masked men and women to follow them." So did the Klan.) Then Estes Kefauver makes them break up. The fuckin' end.

You know, I really try not to make this kind of criticism of these kind of comics, because let's face it, there's always a lot worse and there are probably more than 50,000 people in the world who think Marvels is a good comic book. They'll always exist, I'll always not care one way or the other. And honestly, I've always found decrying bad comics' existence a little pointless. Like, who has the time? I really do attempt to focus only on the good stuff. But jesus christ, man, when you've got Andy "Carnage" Kubert penciling, Sir Joe Kubert inking, and a backup strip by JH Williams and this is the best you can get them to draw, it's an embarrassment to the medium, and a waste of incredible talent (some of which, heaven knows, isn't going to be around forever). And yeah, "it's just superheroes, what do you expect", but honestly that's bullshit. It's superheroes! It's big, it's noisy, it's garish, it's epic! At least it should be -- all this has is a bitchin' double-page spread followed by 20 pages of guys in fedoras and bad suits jostling around.

I do wonder how much Len Wein is to blame for it, though. A series like this has got to be editorially mandated at every step, which at DC basically means scripted by the participants at a Wizards of the Coast Heroclix Professionals tournament. And Wein has written good, original, occasionally mind-blowing comics in his time. I tend to point the main story's lack of inspiration at Mike Carlin & company, because for the second issue in a row the backup piece absolutely crackles. Williams III explodes the original Seven Soldiers of Victory across obscenely horizontal day-glo pages full of catchphrases, double-fisted punching, and hilariously offensive pidgin-Asian narrative captions ("so we go to CHINATOWN, Mist' Crimson and I, to stop theft of JADE DRAGON from sacred pagoda" -- swear to God), no time for a breath in or out. It's everything the main story isn't -- smart and fast and hard and fun, with a real eye for intelligent evocation of a vital past as opposed to arrested-development blathering about nonexistent "legacies".

Still, it's Williams' show to steal, and he certainly rises to the occasion -- designing a snazzy logo for each Soldier, switching up his drawing style at schizophrenic-with-ADD rates, and mugging into the newspaper strip format better than anything in Wednesday Comics. (Interesting to note: the style-switching doesn't seem to contain any explicit callbacks to other artists like the Mazzucchelli-isms of Batwoman or the Kirby streamlines of Seven Soldiers #1. Everything here is based in a style Williams himself has employed at some point or another, and it's totally fascinating to watch an artist of his caliber dividing up an entire career in comics that way -- especially when that career is his own.) It's an 8-page tour de force from a master artist and a writer who can clearly do better than they're telling him to, a certain kind of comics at its upper limits. Another issue of Legacies that's worth the money, but maybe not the frustration.

Fucking superheroes.

Smoke Signal #4, by a lot of people. Desert Island.


Oops, missed this one -- I meant to review it way back in April when it came out, but never got around to it. Now with issue #5 out, this feels like my last chance, so here goes. It's only another issue of Brooklyn's finest free comics newspaper, mixing up fun, loose pages from DQ/Fanta supastarzz with slabs of snappy juvenilia from so-underground-they-take-the-subway minicomics hipsters. The standouts are obvious: Michael Kupperman explains literary inspiration and makes fun of Winsor McCay's dialogue in a single page, Tom Gauld packs his spread with a Russian-novel amount of clearlined story detail, and Taylor McKimens continues his drippy quest for the title of best brush line in comics. First prize, however, goes hands down to Matt Furie's color centerfold. The tale of a scaldingly sexy cat named Katrina (natch) and her torrid affairs with a ninja and his pet eel, it's a gushy, taste-challenging boundary-pusher in pink and purple that lives up to anything in Boy's Club. Lots of KY jelly!

Just as notable, though, is the solid collection of work from unknowns. Though a few pages are obviously not ready for primetime, and a few more are about being a hipster in New York, not a single one is a letdown. Everyone here's got something to share, something to say, something interesting going on, and that's a pretty incredible thing in a comics anthology. Not only that, there's a great tonal consistency running through the paper without too much actual repetition (though two strips do prominently feature sasquatches). The best thing about Smoke Signal is its feeling of no-pressure fun with comics, of lab work by great minds. Why shouldn't trendy skum from Brooklyn get their stuff put under a Johnny Ryan cover, after all? Why can't the talented amateurs have access the same venue Dash Shaw uses for his spontaneous narrative experiments? After all, everyone here is making comics, and interesting ones at that. A free, communal, relaxed blast of art, Smoke Signal is nothing less than a proposed utopia, and one of the best ones I've come across at that. Git yore copy here.

8 Silber Minicomics, by various. Silber Media.


I got these in the mail a while ago and just now made my way through the last one. Silber minicomics are some seriously mini comics, each page a little bigger than a postage stamp (image above slightly larger than actual size). One panel per page, one line of narration per panel. The idea is that you can put a few of them in your wallet, read them on the bus or train or whatever, so that's what I've been doing for the last little while. It's a spartan way of doing comics, occasionally even close to avant-garde (as in the "Marked" comics, where panel after panel of loose, swiped-looking '90s-style hero art get hurled down into an emotionless well until it all just stops). This stuff is the bare minimum of "sequential art", wedded to stock genre stories that don't emote or engage so much as simply exist and wait for you to come to them. The format is something some of the artists can deal with and some can't -- the bad ones just do drawings, the good ones take the image-image power of facing pages, build up a stony rhythm, and make the pictures really cascade. Notable titles are Marked, Mecha, and Just A Man. This stuff is pretty weird; inaccessible, largely tone-deaf comics that inhabit a sometimes uncomfortable place between craft and lack thereof. But that's the charm of them, the charm of the noncommercial, the primal. Here's their site: you could definitely do worse.

Batman: Return of Bruce Wayne #2, by Frazer Irving and Grant Morrison. DC.


My goodness, Frazer Irving, can I have your child? This is simply an incredible-looking comic, a primer on atmosphere and action, color and dimension, surface and substance. Irving's digitally painted art has arrived at a fully-formed style, black lines and color rendering working in perfect harmony to create an illusion of reality so convincing that you can feel the autumn wind and hear the slam of waterfalls. This is much more than mere photorealism, however -- these visuals achieve the perfect balance between cartooning and illustration that so many strive for. Unlike in some of Irving's previous work the characters are always fully grounded in recognizable environments (sometimes as lovely as master landscape paintings), and though he clearly knows the rules of cartoon exaggeration and caricature, Irving's faces and figures are always totally original work, quirky and full of real personality. He's also one of the best colorists in hero comics, making everything from the harsh CMYK of the distant future to the heartrending cornflower-and-sunset hues of 1600s Gotham Town sing. And he can do a hell of a kinetic action sequence on top of everything else. This is vital comics from a master who's reached the top of his considerable game, the kind of stuff that turns up classic in a decade. Get in now while the getting's good.

Huh? Oh, story was okay... stuff like "an immense cosmic loom of converging and separating timelines" and "in the final instant before universal heat death, time's last chance saloon", so you know it's a Morrison book. It's got his typical better-than-everything-else-on-the-racks quality, but I don't know how much I'm feeling this Bruce Wayne stuff. There's certainly none of the shiny new energy of the Dick 'n' Damian adventures over in Batman & Robin, and it feels like Morrison is trying to tread water without boring anyone as we march back to the property's status quo. And yeah, it's good, and yeah, he isn't boring me, but this ain't The Filth or Seaguy, or even the Quitely arc on B&R or Batman 666. Did you expect it to be?

Finally, and this isn't an option, if you have the comic get it out and read it again while you listen to this on full blast. It works. For real.

Your Monday Panel 18

The Kin-Der-Kids, October 31, 1906(?), panel 1. Drawn by Lyonel Feininger.


There's a conversation in certain comics-cognoscenti circles about how much better the coloring technology used on turn-of-the-century Sunday pages -- the very earliest comics -- sets a standard that nothing since has been able to live up to. I tend to agree, for the most part. Certainly the early broadsheets have a diversity of tones which was unavailable to comics artists between the 1940s and 1970s, and the visual punch of litho-screened dot matrices finds no real equal in modern computer colors. But I also tend to think that the reason old newspaper colors look so good is because the artists knew how to use them.

"The whole (printing process) must be conducted like an orchestra. Only this way can you achieve the magic integration of the hues and their values with the rich complementing function of shades, textures and blots. Without this integration, your work will always remain just a contour-drawing to which color has been added."

That's Lyonel Feininger on his approach to color, as quoted in a Comic Art piece by Thierry Smolderen. Hell of a quote, something every comics artist should read and absorb. Of course, the best and most conscientious cartoonists have always had to do with the way their work was colored, from midcentury superhero artists like Steranko and Starlin who amplified their pages with their own tones to modern innovators like Frank Santoro, who places the color in his panel grids before drawing a line. But in the days of the Sunday page there was no such thing as a "colorist" -- there was only the processing plant, and it fell to the artist to create specifications for how his work was to colored. These "color guides" ranged from broad minimalist jobs (Roy Crane's) to sensitive masterpieces (Hal Foster's). Regardless of their varying levels of attention to detail, though, they focused the artists' attention on how their work would take color, and just as importantly, how the final product would look in print.

Feininger's work stayed true to his credo of conductor-like attention to the way color impacted his art. His panels are a display of the cartoonist's exuberance mingling with the fine artist's restraint, of the push and pull between the two. Feininger began his 46-page career in comics with pages that exploded with the crudity of early comics -- gooey splats of red blood set into bright blue seas and saffron skies. He ended it with a run of strips colored entirely in a shade of orangey-beige that has much more to do with the modern art of the 1910s and '20s than with anything going on in comics at the time. This panel catches him in between the two extremes. An expressive palette of earth tones has replaced the garish primary colors, but their use is still pure cartoon -- flat stretches of meaty hue spreading over vast areas of space with only a few spare lines to add dimensionality. Feininger's knowledge of the effects of print on his art is apparent; here his scratchy penwork is held back, leaving the dot screens' roughness to imbue the panel with most of its craggy texture. This is brave cartooning, trusting a great deal of its liveliness to mechanical process, showcasing the illusion of detail over the real thing, and Feininger finds an elegant brutality in the imprecision of the muddy, gritty, splattery sheets of color that sprawl across his angular composition.

Given Feininger's journey from cartoonist to high-art painter, it's difficult not to look at his comics from a fine-arts perspective. This panel, with its open space and monumental edifices, prefigures such cartoon minimalists as Alex Toth and Jesse Marsh -- men who also trusted large areas of their art to the miracle of dot-screen printing. But it also puts on full display the roots early cartoon has back into the fine art of the late 1800s. Feininger's loose, spindly inking and jagged, abrupt shapes are more the product of German Expressionism than anything else; while the attention paid to the tactile rock surfaces, the expanse of sea and sky, and the effect of screen-printing's lux perpetua lighting effects on all of them are worthy of Impressionist masters like Monet, or even the dappled glow of pointillism. And then the eye moves to the tiny, vigorously cartooned human shapes in the bottom corner and the looming battlement windows at the top, and it all feeds back from academia and into the picture, the representation of things happening -- into pure comics. That house on the hill, carved into form out of unyielding rock, is a a perfect symbol for Feininger's art; hard-won control of chaos blending into the beauty of a sheer force that no human hands could ever produce.

Comix Surgery: Driven By Lemons

This isn't really a review, just a sampling of my thoughts on Josh Cotter's 2009 graphic novel Driven By Lemons (AdHouse). I think the loose format of "Comix Surgery" is probably the best way to write criticism on this particular book. This may not be true of everyone, but when I write reviews I always end up having to leave out at least one idea I had so it can read cohesively. Not a big deal with an issue of Batman, but Driven By Lemons is so full of information, so taut in its pulling against itself that to use the single "narrative" that reviews center themselves around would just be insufficient. If you want a review, here's two sentences:

This is the best comic of last year, a graphically stunning, emotionally raw descent into the harrows of depression, creation, and the daily struggles of the human mind. A profound work of true high art dealing in brutal picture-blasts and rich, fully-developed symbolism, Driven By Lemons aims at a target few cartoonists have dared, and hits it right in the bullseye.

That said, it's a very subjective and personal comic with no easy answers and more than a few attempts to openly defy any "sense" it might make. Tough reading, the kind of book that you need to go through multiple times to even form opinions on. And there's definitely no "figuring it out for sure". Hence, what follows is a very non-authoritative attempt at giving this throbbing mass of idea and image a little bit of form. It's all my own thoughts about what someone else's thoughts mean, so take it with a grain of salt; but how cool is it to even have comics that inspire a different interpretation from everyone who reads them? This is what literature and art have, this is great stuff, this is the future of the medium right here. So yeah, what follows is my reading of Driven By Lemons. Hopefully you find it interesting. Hopefully you read the book or re-read the book and make your own.

Ready? Okay!

- LIKE I said, the book's symbology is rich, sumptuous stuff, really cartooning on a higher level. Cotter finds a perfect artist's shorthand for the concepts he's illustrating, like all good cartoonists do -- but his concepts are all in the thoughts running through his protagonist's head, so he ends up finding the perfect ways to illustrate stuff like "the effect of neuromedication", or "creative thought". The fact that such abstractions make their way into the visual realm of the comic at all, rather than just being the subject of exposition, is pretty incredible all by itself. How many comics go into visual metaphor and then use it to describe their character's internal lives? Can't think of too many. What's really amazing, though, is that the whole book is about those internal states, with absolutely nothing linking it back into any "real world". It's an electrifying high-wire act watching Cotter pull off abstraction after abstraction, and the effort it takes to roll with it all and try to put sense to it is exhilaration itself -- a big part of the fun.

- MAYBE NOW'S a good time for some illustrations. These are pictures of the visual motifs that run through the book's three loosely connected parts. The explication of them is again by no means authoritative, but definitely the product of months of thinking if that helps. So, roughly in order of appearance:



Dionysus, Greek god of wine, revels, and sudden epiphanies. Symbol of the creative right brain, bringer of creativity. Traditionally inspires ritual madness -- the "freeing of oneself". Holds a power both great and terrible, potentially enriching and potentially life-destroying. Imbues mortals with the gift of artistic thought, uninterested in the havoc it may wreak on their mortal lives.



Lemon-y guy. Symbol of the epiphany or new idea -- pops up randomly in the story as new creative thoughts enter the protagonist's brain. The gift of Dionysus, the lemon is always both a blessing and a curse, neither entirely one nor entirely the other. Portent of...



...red shit. Symbol of the mind's process during creative periods -- manic, anarchic, unpredictable, at times even dangerous. Intimated at one point to be beyond language, and as such outside of rational, "normal" thought.



Blue shit. In Cotter's words, "metallic blue, sheer static cold... deceptive and expanding... beautiful and all-consuming. A convincing new reality." Symbol of the medicated brain in artificial "peace" or "stasis". Something to be escaped, but also perhaps the easiest, best way to live life. Always swallowing up the red shit's hot vitality and replacing it with an insidious calm.



Gray shit. Struggle. Symbol for mental turmoil, difficulty, agony. The inability to do anything, red or blue. Often blots out entire panels. Travels in Dionysus's wake.



Pink tree. A healthy way of life and thinking, incorporating both red and blue. Spiritual salvation. To be gained at any cost.



Rabbit-y guy. The protagonist, creative man. Seems to be an explicit symbol for Cotter himself.

There's that -- the "key to the book" I use to make it make sense in my head. Next, some notes on the story and how these elements interact with one another. Most of my thoughts on this book and its symbolism are vastly informed by Tim O'Shea's recent interview with Cotter, which is not only a much better "key to the book" than I could possibly provide, it might be the best interview I've ever read with a cartoonist. Anyway.

- THE BOOK begins with a satirically staid portrait of William Faulkner, and the beginning of his quote, "An artist is a creature driven by demons." Naturally, over the course of the next page Faulkner's portrait is transformed into the lemon-y guy, and his quote into the book title's origin, but there's a lot in that line. Cotter is announcing right away that this is not a celebration of creativity in all its wonders, but a look at what life as an artist can do to a person, what it's done to him personally. Thus, over the transformation sequence, "demons" become "lemons", and creative ideas become something to be feared. Not only is it a stunning passage of comics art (below), it introduces the entire book's unique paradigm, the imagery's fits and starts plunging the reader into a world where damnation lurks behind cartoon grins, in the medium of comics itself.



- AFTER THAT we get two pages of dense hand-lettering over which Cotter addresses the book's readers in full-blast Dada prose and declares his intent to mess our brains around hard. ("You want a beginning?" he asks. "Maybe I'll fuck with you and put it 2/3 of the way through." Et cetera.) We go another ten pages before the protagonist is introduced, swimming through a dense haze of Cotter's visual and verbal thoughts that ends up in a total breakdown of the artificial peace brought on by the blue shit (below).



Only then does Cotter introduce his main character and stand-in, a broadly cartooned rabbit-man, a white shape with a bare minimum of detail. I'd imagine we get this particular visual as our guide through the narrative for all the typical reasons artists use animals in their stories -- more empathy, more identifiability, a nod to history, a knowledge of what works in the medium -- but Cotter's so successful at it because his pure-thought prologue puts us directly into his (the author's) mind as the book begins. Only after we've spent a few pages in it are we subject to the revelation that these thoughts are actually coming from the rabbit's mind (the second page in the image above is seen as a thought bubble hovering over the rabbit's head in the panel that introduces him). Bang, perfect empathy, perfect understanding of the high stakes following this lil' bunny, and an incredible use of formal devices to bring the reader into both the story and the protagonist's interior.

- THIS COMIC is a story about struggle; struggles with mental problems and struggles to make art. It's interesting to note how well Cotter ties the two together -- until they're inextricable really -- with repetition and symbolism. Each one of the book's three parts details an epic inner struggle before ending in a visually spectacular violent sequence. Part one is all about psychology, the struggle of the red against the blue, the unpredictable chaos of the imperfect creative mind against the precision of the medicated, "safe" one. It's a long journey through gray squiggles of agony and ends with the rabbit pulling mechanical implants out of his body, blue thoughts and red blasting from him until they mix into a dull brown and everything collapses.



Part two details the rabbit's descent into depression and subsequent time in a Kafkaesque hospital, moving queasily through doctors and days until he turns inward for a more spiritual cure. The answer is found when he lets the two halves of himself, red and blue, die. They are replaced with an admonition to "beware of Dionysus" and the pink tree, the integrated whole with which it is possible to live a happy life. But with the rebirth of the healthy soul comes the rebirth of the lemon of creativity, a portent of more hard things to come. We get a one-panel look at this unwanted gift, and then everything goes black. The fight with mental illness is visualized as giving birth to creativity; you can't have one without the other, and for the artist new ideas are the burden that comes with the blessing of sanity. Art is, perhaps, an expression of the potential insanity that lurks inside the rabbit.



Part three depicts the newly sane, post-pink tree rabbit talking on the phone and telling us how much better he feels now. At first we swallow it -- we want to swallow it after bathing in the horrors of the previous two chapters -- but as the conversation moves into a full-page panel taken up almost entirely by a speech balloon full of disjointed rambling and blacked-out words, we can see that the lemon has derailed the rabbit once again. Just to slam it home, at the end of his monologue the rabbit picks up the phone to find it's disconnected, no one on the other end of the line. He gets into his car with the lemon and is suddenly blasted by a vision of Dionysus, who claims him (for the comics medium, I assume) with the exclamation "You got the touch!" before flying away, gray masses of struggle in his wake. The end.



The three parts can be read as sections of a longer sequence, or as the same story repeated three times in three different ways. Either method of reading ties mental illness directly in with creativity, resulting in something far more interesting than a simple comics narrative. In many ways this book is polemical, providing a pretty extreme viewpoint and using sheer artistic virtuosity to back it up.

- FOR ALL the talk about the "visual language" created by another big artsy 2009 graphic novel, Asterios Polyp, that book's use of form and color to provide story shorthand has nothing on this one's. David Mazzucchelli's comic used formal devices of color and drawing style to serve a rather pedestrian plot, but in Cotter's work the eye-burning colors and the shapes they make out of the panels often are the plot. As such their dominance of the pages is never showy or trite, as Polyp occasionally could be -- it simply feels right. Where Mazzucchelli's formalism was always popping you out of the narrative with what sometimes seemed to be mere "tricks", Cotter's formalism is a direct expression of the action occurring.

It all hinges on the different levels of sophistication the artists bring to their respective color cosmologies; both use reds vs. blues to denote the main conflicts of their story, but while Mazzucchelli's dichotomies were pretty obvious and at times even hackneyed (red = femininity/intuition/flow, blue = masculinity/logic/structure), Cotter's evocations of fractured mental states are supremely personal, totally unique to the story he tells. The symbolism, both in cartooning and plot mechanics, of Cotter's book is simply more subtle, original, and well-integrated than that of Mazzucchelli's, and where it gets overbearing in Asterios Polyp it provides Driven By Lemons with incredible narrative power. (Not trying to bash Mazzucchelli, just pointing up something Cotter excels in. Take issue in comments if you must.)

- COTTER'S INTERVIEW isn't incredibly clear on this point, but to me it reads like a resignation from comics. This book, which is as good an expression of the creative person's inner struggle as I'm aware of, is what really makes me think he might be gone for good. If one-tenth of the agony described here goes into Cotter's creative process I admire him for even having the ability to put pen on page.

- PART TWO, in which the rabbit is hospitalized and ends up curing himself with the power of his own mind, is a pretty savage indictment not only of the byzantine absurdity of the US health care system, but of Western psychomedicine in general. Cotter seems to be saying quite explicitly that psychiatry and drugs are only further problems, and the only way to be cured is to cure yourself. Like the yellow stop sign on the last page of the book says: Let go. The internal curative process shown, a confrontation between the rabbit's red and blue halves and an all-powerful, all-wise one-eyed flaming fox, points at once in every conceivable direction -- religion, sprituality, philosophy, self-reliance, acceptance, even death -- everything but modern medicine. Try something else, the book says, because the current method simply doesn't work.



(The rabbit's violent removal of his life-support system in part one is along similar lines, I think.)

- CHRIS WARE on Jerry Moriarty: "His work set a new tone and target -- poetry -- for comics." With Driven By Lemons Cotter hits that target and sets it up even higher. If Moriarty is a Wordsworth or Whitman, a humanist with a gorgeously stentorian command of his medium, Cotter is the avant-garde wave of modernism; a T.S. Eliot or even a Tristan Tzara. This book is a masterful use of the comics medium that takes it to a place it's never been before.

- LASTLY, I'VE got to give it up to AdHouse for the brilliant book design, which is a facsimile of the Moleskine notebook Cotter drew this whole comic in -- right down to the rounded corners and yellowish paper. Comic art never looks better than when it's printed at original size, and the lack of any mitigating material like introductions or house-designed title pages gives a great "artifact" feel, very intense. This book is just a brick of art, all part of the one big thing. Like all the best it is what it is, and no more.

I'll almost certainly say other stuff about this book at some point, but it might take me another six months. So look for Part 2 like you'd look for the sequel to a movie you just saw. And please feel free to share your thoughts, spesh if you don't agree with mine. Together we will reach understanding! Or not! Even better!

Comix Immortals 2morro

I've probably been thinking about these images more than any others lately. By Michael DeForge, from the first issue of his excellent series Lose; bright new work from a bright new voice that bears plenty of examining. I've already said a good bit on Lose, though, and for now I'd like to pick at a more general scab that this sequence brings up for me.

It can be pretty interesting to see comics artists draw other people's characters. Think of everything from Art Spiegelman's Dick Tracyisms to Darwyn Cooke's Spirit reconstructions to, I don't know, Jack Kirby drawing the Demon to look like Hal Foster's Prince Valiant in that one episode where he has a goose-skin stretched over his head. I mention those three for the same reason I spotlight the DeForge panel. They're not just swipes or derivations, like art by the next hack to take over Frank Miller's Batman is -- this kind of "covering" gets good when it openly displays an artist's attempt to work through, or maybe work into, the lineage of their own inspiration. To understand how and why their influences put the lines down where they did. To discover a new mode of creating. To be free of their own individuality. To understand the medium a little better. That's the reason you draw like someone else, why you choose to outline forms in another artist's shorthand. When they're done well (Steranko's Captain America, McCarthy's Spider-Man, DeForge's Lose), comics cover versions display artists forming their own cosmologies out of ink and newsprint. At best, like in the panel above, what you get is a very personal look at the medium's aesthetic history -- the century-plus of circumstances that led to a single artist's formation.

I find it interesting to scrutinize the segments of DNA that DeForge chooses to spread out on the page for us. Here are the mainstays of comics, creations of artists that anybody worth reading has absorbed. Kirby, Gould, Outcault, Herriman, Tezuka, and Steinberg are all here holding it down, just as they do in countless masterpieces. There are also more personal references that point to the specifics of DeForge's comics: shout-outs to Archie, Hanna Barbera animation, Otto Messmer, Floyd Gottfredson, Hagar the Horrible. What I'm really struck by, though, are two inclusions that mark DeForge as a young cartoonist with a solidly modern view into "comics history". Included in this panorama of his jumping-off points as an artist are Gary Panter's Jimbo (way over on the right), and Alan Moore/Steve Bissette/John Totleben's Swamp Thing. These aren't casual throw-ins by any means, they're important references to where DeForge is coming from. A new generation of comics-makers is taking the reins of the medium, and they were largely born after Raw (on the Panter, art comics hand) and Dark Knight and Watchmen (on the Moore, heroey side of things) were already history -- just as much a part of that "past masters" table as the Yellow Kid.

I think the next five to ten years are going to be a pretty interesting time. Just as the guard changed in the '40s for Eisner and Kirby, in the '60s for Crumb and Steranko, and in the '80s for Moore and Panter, it seems to me that we're living in the beginning of another turn of the page. Heaven knows what the current post-Kramers Ergot, post-Grant Morrison generation will have brought to the medium by the time another one steps up to be counted, but maybe we can find some indication of where things are going by looking at some more of the characters that seem likely to reach iconic status over the next chapter of comics' narrative. Whose work is soon to pass from life into history? What characters will tomorrow's stars cut their finer teeth by copying? Anyone's guess; here are a few of mine.

JIMMY CORRIGAN


If anyone on this list is already there, it's this guy. Chris Ware is certainly the defining cartoonist of the 2000s, and his hunched, breeches-wearing sap is the star of his defining book. Jimmy Corrigan is an iconic visual image drawn in an unmistakable style, but his character traits say as much about Ware and his influence as his appearance. Awkward, sensitive, maladroit, antisocial, but painfully earnest and aware of his flaws, Jimmy is shorthand for an entire mini-genre of comics. He'd be immortal on his look or his character -- combine both, and it's all but a certainty that we'll have Corrigan parody/homages by the time the 2020s roll around. Just call him the "new Nancy".

SANDMAN


Another iconic visual, and created by perhaps the most broadly successful writer ever to have worked in comics. Sandman, like Jimmy Corrigan, is the symbol of so much: the post-Watchmen "dark intelligent" approach to hero comics, the '90s in all their commercial unpredictability, and the writing-focused trench Neil Gaiman cut through the mainstream that, like it or not, still runs deep today. Who knows whether Vertigo would exist at all without this guy -- Sandman is an indelible symbol of the kind of comics where the words in the balloons are the most important thing on the page. Moreover, Gaiman's penetration of the larger mainstream culture and his mass-appealing public image, which has so much in common with his character, have put Morpheus in a lot of brains that live outside the comics bubble. Whether or not Gaiman will be a major influence on the next generation of cartooning talent, his most famous creation will always evoke a certain, very popular brand of comics better than any other character.

DEADPOOL


Huh boy, I know. Believe it or not, Rob Liefeld's inscrutable mercenary is popular as hell with the fanboys right now, and doesn't show any sign of cooling off. (You know how many other characters can support multiple titles in this market? Not Wonder Woman. Not Captain America. Not Iron Man.) Like Venom was a certain amount of time ago, Deadpool is a potent symbol of superhero excess and just how much market share it commands, and if I had to pick the next ubiquitous superhero he would be it. Especially if his movie ever gets made.

Fanboy love aside, though, Deadpool reaches iconic status for what he symbolizes in the development of mainstream comics storytelling. The recent boom in high-energy, low-content "kicksplode" hero comics is nothing if not an attempt to revisit the airheaded bestsellers of Liefeld's '90s and try to figure out what made them so compelling to so many people. As proven by the number of books he headlines, Deadpool and his ilk are something that has worked continues to work well in comics, financially if not always creatively. As long as there are nerds reading the stuff, there'll be an immature, self-referential poster boy selling to them. Deadpool's here, and probably here to stay. Give it a decade or two and he'll be as big as the Flash.

Also: this is total speculation, but given that 99% of both the superhero and art sides of the industry treat Liefeld's work like it's got AIDS, I think it's very likely that a bunch of snot-nosed newcomers to comics are going to start affecting his influence at some point in the near future. What repels the old guard will always attract the new wave, and there is a lot to appreciate in Liefeld. As comics artists with fully-formed aesethtics go, he's pretty underutilized as an inspiration, and I wouldn't be surprised to see guys coming out of nowhere with Image-derived styles that get described as "like Liefeld, but good" or something similar. Mark my words, we'll be seeing some Deadpool in more than just the fanboy blogs soon.

ENID (from Ghost World)


This one might share too much common ground with Jimmy Corrigan, but I think Dan Clowes the artist is distinct enough from Ware, the other titan of the graphic novel boom, to command a separate spot in the imagination of tomorrow's artists. There may be a few superficial similarities, and a few more of milieu, but Clowes has a vastly different storytelling style that in a lot of ways has been more influential than Ware's. I wouldn't even be surprised to see "post-Clowes" and "post-Ware" schools of serious-comics makers dividing up the bookstore market soon like post-Moore and post-Miller material currently divides up the hero comics racks. Enid is an eminently recognizable cartoon, and with a cult classic movie featuring one of the best comics-to-screen character transitions of all time on her side. As Jimmy Corrigan already symbolizes a certain type of comic, so too does Enid: the hipstery, defiant, snobbish, somehow lovable character type that's come to rule the "indie culture" finds its closest sequential-art parallel in Ghost World. This is a low blow, but if comics have a Michael Cera, she's it. As Clowes's fame and influence grow, so too will Enid's status as the iconograph that best symbolizes his contributions to comics -- and to a larger spectrum of the culture, as well.

FONE BONE


You know what comic kids right now are reading? Bone. I probably sold more of those colorized Scholastic Bone books to parents and their children during my retail days than I did of everything else combined. Jeff Smith's a part of a massive number of grade-schoolers' minds right now, and some of those kids are going to be making comics in ten years. Just as a generation that had grown up in the Golden Age brought back hero comics in the late '50s/early '60s, so too is Bone going to spread its influence far and wide across the medium a decade or so from now. And it isn't just that a lot of kids read this stuff -- a lot of kids read Naruto, too, but Masashi Kishimoto isn't half the pure cartoonist Smith is. Hell, I can think of maybe three other people working in the field who have Smith's chops, and the Bone clan, especially their book's big star, are his greatest creation, an expression of perfect cartoon minimalism that finds an equal only in Charlie Brown and Nancy. That puffy white shape is as iconic as the Superman symbol, or will be soon anyway.

The fact that such pure material is sticking into so many kids' heads during their formative years is huge; I wouldn't be surprised if Bone emerges as the cartoon statement of the late 1900s/early 2000s after we start seeing its influence come out of artists who missed life in the last millennium. At the very least, Jeff Smith will end up as the Carl Barks of our times, with an influence that stretches across genres and ends up almost undefinable. Room at that table for a few more? Yeah? Then here's to the future....

Anybody else got some? Let me know!!

Your Monday Panel 17

Parker: The Hunter (2009), page 132 panel 1. Drawn by Darwyn Cooke.


"Style" in comics -- especially American comics -- especially American action comics -- is a tricky proposition. Once an artist decides to put some fighting or shooting or running into their book, they enter the place in the medium where tradition is solidest and most entrenched. Small wonder: for decades there have been artists working at it in the pages of innumerable books per month, whittling the dynamics of movement, impact, speed, and tension down to a grammar. The fact that virtually every new action artist takes something of his predecessors' approaches rather than reinventing the wheel adds to the fundamental difficulty of making a unique action book. No matter what gets tried, it seems, there's always some Kirby or Caniff or John Byrne or Steranko that leaks in. And even when a seemingly new approach arises, there's always some less popular progenitor behind it, or maybe a few chromosomes from an artist whose work lies beyond the sphere of fighting comics. That's the trouble with new work done in an old idiom; and there have probably been more fight scenes drawn in American comics history than anything else.

So yeah, "style" is a tough thing for the action artist, rarely coming out in the construction or the tonality or even the nuts-and-bolts stuff like layouts and panel compositions. What distinguishes the material is almost always the drawing itself, the shapes and lines an artist uses to say the same things so many have already said. There are, after all, infinite ways to make a muscle pump or a punch hit hard, and despite photoreferencing and swipes and the tyranny of "house styles", no two are alike.

Darwyn Cooke is a great example of what I'm talking about. His immaculate cartooning wallows in the stylisms of Toth, Kirby, Kurtzman, and Bruce Timm, not Frank Millerishly remixing or transposing them so much as synthesizing. Cooke's art goes to the bones of his influences, a hard rendering of their common interests in thick inks, explosive movement, controlled pacing, and layouts that move the story along rather than drawing attention to themselves. What small bits of style are lost in the boiling down are made up with Warner animation bounce and space age ad-art cool lines.

Such a well-formed, considered mode of drawing leaves little room for tonal variation. Cooke works within such defined parameters that his art's only stylistic shifts are those between the slick and the rough, between the fluid, graceful cartooning of Batman Ego and the blunt brush-blasts of Parker. His career has largely been a migration from the former to the latter, thin lines and languid figures lost to simplified forms and a handmade look along the way. The panel above is some of the roughest Cooke we've seen yet. Chunky chiaroscuro inks blare off the page with no need for texture or holding lines, the brushstrokes snapped brutally down with the controlled fury of a master. Cooke's evocation of three distinct planes of depth without varying the quality of his marks between them is impressive, especially when you consider most panels stop at two. His ability to construct an immediately legible picture using only a swirl of thickly spotted blacks is also pretty incredible; all we get is a splash of white light to draw the eye and an over-roughened brushstroke on the back of the trailing coat, but the conviction of the inking is such that we can still immediately distinguish man from machinery.

Cooke's use of blue ink for shading also deserves mention. Not only does it have a vastly stronger visual kick than the gray tones of your typical B&W comic, the vitality of color is much more successful at evoking the sliding grays and flickering shadows of the vintage noir films The Hunter is so indebted to. Cooke's art moves, and where gray would pin it down, the color speeds along with it. But the blues do more than attest to Cooke's design/color sense -- they allow his art its fierceness and spontaneity by taking over the burden of implying depth, shade, and weight. Notice the use of the blues here: the extreme foreground is darkened so that your eye slips right into the white at the center of the panel, where the color now works to isolate the figure against the blank background. By leaving these burdens to the shading tone, Cooke the markmaker is set free to construct a symphony of whites and blacks, rough-hewn but placed with an elegant grace that speaks to the slick stylist at work. Here, Cooke transcends his influences not with layout or composition but with the sheer force of his drawing and the skill behind it. It might just be another picture of a man running, but all the same it's more than that.

BPRIP

Last week brought the sad news that Oakland's finest comics publisher, Buenaventura Press, has shut down. While it appears to have been a long time coming and wasn't necessarily the most surprising announcement in the world, it was still one of the saddest I can remember. Buenaventura not only gave a home to some of the most left-field voices in comics -- it elevated those weird wonders to a position of glory with elegant, appropriate packaging and design that left no stop unpulled. While other publishers may have gotten more comics to a mass audience or shelled out bigger money to push their releases, there was something special about a BP book. Every time I bought one, which wasn't as often as I wished it could have been, I felt as though I had done a little more than my typical Wednesday comics run. I felt like I had found a piece of art, something enduring, transcendent even. Something with a higher calling than boards and bags and back issue bins. Something special. It was a great feeling.

Five Buenaventura Press books I have loved:

(Going in order of book size)

Boy's Club #3, by Matt Furie.



Every issue of Matt Furie's Boy's Club is incredible -- simple six-panel grids and perfectly bouncy, bright cartooning tunneling into a bizarre mix of Muppet characters, debased-Archie hip-kid antics, gonzo drug sequences, and utterly vile gross-out humor. The most recent issue manages to crowd everything that made the previous issues' short strips snap and crackle into a single feature-length tale full of killer dance breaks, harsh-noise hallucinations, refrigerator mishaps... and of course the star of the story, the biggest shit ever taken. What would be simple minicomics fodder in the hands of many other artists gives Furie license for scorched-earth humor routines, genuine character-building, epic pure-cartoon exaggeration, and vivid explorations of the psychedelia inherent to the comics form.

Furie is such a fully-formed cartoonist that despite the deep-water weirdness of his stories you can still just open the comic up and inhabit it as easily as you would a smoke sesh with your roommates. There's an overwhelmingly chill, laid-back tone to his writing that matches his art's assured lines and clean panel compositions -- these are incredibly fun comics, almost impossible not to like as soon as you open them. And despite the airy, loose pacing of this issue, Furie manages to cram a ton of visual treats into it, with characters metamorphosing into cats, other ones into flowers, eyes popping out of their sockets like lava flows, gushily lettered word balloons blaring out of their mouths, et cetera et cetera and very much et cetera. There's little else like Boy's Club (maybe picture Johnny Ryan writing an Alf comic drawn by Tim Hensley?), and that, of course, is the charm. Material this incredibly vital doesn't grow on trees, and Buenaventura jazzes it up with cardstock covers, color endpapers, and even a free sticker. Boy's Club is a truly uncommon thing, a comic that's cool and hip by any measure, and the rare brilliance that powers it makes it feel like something that should have been a part of the medium from the beginning.

I Want You #1, by Lisa Hanawalt.



Notice I didn't say that there isn't anything else like Boy's Club. Though it stakes out an entirely different visual spectrum, the one-and-so-far-only issue of Lisa Hanawalt's oft-nauseating exploration of convenience living, anthropomorphic quadrupeds, and violent body mess-ups is a country cousin to Furie's impulse for finding the truly hilarious in the truly gross. Hanawalt goes right for the jugular from before the first page: the inside cover features delicate watercolors of hemorrhoids and anal fissures, and it only gets worse from there, each successive spray and ooze of body fluid prompting an even more uproariously inappropriate punchline. But amongst the chaos of things like She-Moose & He-Horse's way-too-overt sexuality and the strangely stylish Slice 'N' Wear Avocado Hat, Hanawalt keeps a remarkable hold on things, her art running a gamut of stylistic shifts and always prodding the jokes into an area you can laugh at as well as find repulsive.

Where I Want You diverges from Boy's Club is the steadfast femaleness powering not just its subject matter (massive amounts of horses, tips on things to hide before a date comes over), but its approach to humor (the standout short is "Menstrual Terminology", featuring informative entries like "The Death Valley Stuffer: trying to insert applicatorless tampon into dry orifice"). There's a sense of perverse discovery at play on every page -- even if we've seen gross-out comics from women before, we've never seen them done quite this personal or quite this hardcore, and the discussion of bodily specifics such material necessarily engenders turns Hanawalt's book into quite a different beast than the male version. The overall impression is that of being shown those horrible STD slides from eighth-grade biology class all over again, the ones you may not have wanted to know about but certainly won't ever forget. Hanawalt's deft sense of the humorous and her fluid, detailed drawings lead you down her book's dark path by paving it with roses: "Why am I reading this?" you'll ask yourself between hysterical brays of laughter and compulsive flips to the next page. It's best not to wonder too much about what's happening and just go with the flow. Hanawalt is the 21st century's Roz Chast, a deadpan, unique humorist who can really draw, and if there's a future for humor comic books this looks like it to me.

Comic Art Magazine #9, edited by Todd Hignite.



Buenaventura only published the last two issues of editor Hignite's Comic Art, but those two issues, especially the most recent one, set forth the most compelling future for writing-about-comics that's yet been seen. Comic Art earns its space on the shelf with the other print mags by doing the one thing that can't be done better or easier on the internet: presenting a simply beautiful artifact that's got as much raw worth as any actual comic you care to name. From the Tim Hensley covers to the Jonathan Bennett design the magazine looks lovely, and every page is first and foremost a visual experience, reproducing gorgeous strips, pages, cartoons, and illustrations from the farthest-flung corners of the comics medium. It's an utterly refreshing vision of comics scholarship, one that finds no room for any brand of negativity in the midst of the heaping bounty the medium offers. Here the high mixes with the low, Lyonel Feininger's museum-ready newsprint compositions arching over into Kaz's glossy-primitive Underworld strips to shake hands. It's a vision of a medium without critical boundaries, where Jesse Marsh and Jerry Moriarty begin to look pretty similar -- a kind of comics utopia, where sincere love of what's good trumps the very existence of what isn't. Maybe the Comics Journal is the magazine about the form that we need, but Comic Art is the one that I'd guess most of us want.

But there's more than just celebration going on. Though artists like Marsh and Moriarty are now known quantities, well-served by the Golden Age of reprints, in 2007 that simply wasn't the case, and other than the Kaz retrospective basically every page of the magazine is concerned with public service; the re-presentation of essential work that was either lost to history at the time or remains so today. Seeing stuff like comics pages from the 19th-century satire magazine Simplicissimus or strips from Dick Tracy's high-volume 1950s prime is the merest indication of what a treasure trove the comics medium is, and how important Hignite & company's archeological efforts are. One day, the magazine tells us, all this will be ours again. But until then, the glimpses it affords are glorious peeks into worlds that remain unknown but bear distinct similarities to our favorite dreams. Comic Art is a magazine about comics that's easily as important to the medium as any series or graphic novel to have come out at the same time -- and more importantly, a path forward into a newer, brighter understanding of and love for the art form.

Kramers Ergot #6, edited by Sammy Harkham.



There isn't much one can do to introduce Kramers Ergot other than hit the nail on the head and say it's the best comics anthology of all time. Editor Harkham has a vision for the future of comics that's just as strong as Hignite's for the future of books-about-comics, and this issue of Kramers storms the gates of sanity with Dan Zettwoch's deadpan surrealism, Marc Bell's futuristic sequential lifeforms, and utterly stylish contributions from Paper Rad and Tom Gauld among numerous highlights. There's an absolute, overwhelming swarm of ideas-in-art on display here, but it never seems a random grouping; Harkham's skill as a curator is razor sharp, maintaining a very definite sense of continuity while managing never to repeat himself. It's as if every artist showcased has gone their own way from the same motivating thought, that being You can do anything with comics.

What makes this issue of Kramers the best of all isn't just the work's quality or its perfectly considered grouping, though. It's the sense that this issue inhabits a moment in comics' aesthetic history as fully as any comic, from Showcase #4 to Raw #1, ever has. A lot of that has to do with the propulsive sense of shared ideaspace that the succession of artists featured gives off, but more than any other edition of Kramers, #6 has its feet planted in the past while looking toward the future. While the likes of Ron Rege and Matthew Thurber point out the way ahead, Jerry Moriarty and Gary Panter help show the reader how we got here, while planting a few new seeds of their own. Perhaps best of all is this issue's dive into the reprint pool, with monumentally important translations of Marc Smeets' aching, autumnal Dada/Herge pages and Suiho Tagawa's McCay-on-a-sugar-high imperialist funny animal manga, Norakuro. You can do anything with comics: it's the new century's driving idea, and Kramers #6 reaches into the past while surveying the present to crystallize it in an astounding book with that mantra as its reason for being. It's a good metaphor for Buenaventura the publisher: moving forward with an breathless enthusiasm and an unmatched eye for beauty.

The Complete Jack Survives, by Jerry Moriarty.



I've already said a good bit about this book, but no critical analysis can really get at the timeless, essential aspect of the work done here by Moriarty, or the service Buenaventura did comics by reprinting it. Jack Survives is mostly one-page strips, a few panels combining into a bigger thing -- the baseline for a medium that's gone so far from there. But Moriarty stays there, in the eye of the storm, in the beating heart of comics, and lets his deep, rough paintwork and simple, rhythmic dialogue and layouts slowly unfold into an entire world. The assured use of black and white, the simple moments so perfectly reborn, the eloquence of every line of paint, the convergence of a million meaningless details into a heartfelt, light-heavy whole that somehow means the world. This is as close as art has come to an American Zen, a place of stillness and enlightenment that looks upon its being with equal wisdom, delight, and incomprehension. Moriarty's brushstrokes hang as heavy as the life that we can touch, as the real thing itself, and his comics are probably the best evocation of that real thing that we have. Chris Ware's introduction calls this the most important comics reprint ever, and while I'm not as sure as he is I also wouldn't argue. This, like all the Buenaventura books, isn't just comics. It isn't even just art. It's a service.

You'll notice I didn't use the past tense in describing the comics above, and that's because the work endures. Because of BP, this stuff is out there to be read, from now until the pages crumble, and that's a hell of a thing. So thanks to Alvin Buenaventura for greatness past, and let's everyone wish him good luck wherever he ends up. Hopefully it'll have something to do with more comics...

Your Monday Panel 16

Strange Embrace #1 (1993), page 8 panel 3. Drawn by David Hine.


With all the accolades Shaky Kane is getting (and will no doubt continue to get) for his art on The Bulletproof Coffin, it's pretty easy to forget the other side of that book's creative equation, writer David Hine, can draw too. And not just "draw" in the belabored, Grant Morrison, comics-writer-drawing manner: Hine, on his Gothic-modern freakout comic Strange Embrace, drew with a power and vision that pushes him to the front of the post-EC horror artists' group. Hine follows the oldest, best rule of horror here, and throughout all his ink-drenched artwork for the series. It isn't what you see that scares you, it's what you don't.

That said, his work in black and white is nothing short of incredible (a fact obscured by the recent Image Strange Embrace reprints, which inexplicably added color to the pages). This stuff is dark, but never over-shadowed or obscured -- the panel above finds a crooked balance between open space and closed, the whites slashing the thick blacks to ribbons, bringing every pictorial element into crystal-clear relief. It's difficult to use this much shadow in a frame and have it turn out a picture of anything at all; but Hine slaps every single dark area down into the perfect place, pounding depth and weight into his composition without sacrificing a thing.

There's nothing like a perfect control at play here, however. Hine's brushed inking seems to carve the shapes onto the page as much as draw them, the rough-hewn detailing and outlines perfectly evoking the substance of the wooden idols that dominate the panel. Those fear-masks' domination, on the other hand, is hardly random -- rather, it's painstakingly achieved with a masterful use of the widescreen frame. The V-shape depicted points away from the reader and into the page at the hapless Anthony Corbeau, who clings to the small bit of light available, the very presence of his near-collapsing shape inevitably bringing shadow to it. He drowns deep in the blacks of his own panel, hapless compared to the distended bulk of the statues that lurch toward us on the return leg of the V, their alignment and the camera angle bringing them closer until all depth disappears from the frame and we're left with the expressionistic grotesque of the mask that fills the last quarter of the panel from top to bottom.

Read across, this panel is a horror story in miniature, a progression from normality to human anguish and then into an alien whirl of images that finally swallow us whole, leaving nothing but the implacable markmaking of their existence. This panel is a balancing act between dark and light, humanity and horror, drawn in a space somewhere between control and loss thereof that mirrors what's inside it better than any word balloon possibly could.

Comix Surgery: 23 Panels

"Aw man, only five pages of Morrison/Quitely?? You'd almost have to go panel-by-panel to say anything interesting about it --"

"Today" pages 1-5 in Batman #700, by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. DC.

PAGE 1



Panel 1: An immediate use of one of the most interesting techniques Quitely showcased in his last go on B&R -- the blacking in of shapes around the panel borders. Here, in a full-bleed panel, it creates an organic frame for the picture while maintaining the effectiveness of an opening splash. Beyond that, though, it places you much deeper "inside" the comic than a more typically bordered shot would. While your run-of-the-mill panel borders simply block in the picture, the shapes Quitely uses here to outline his image are also part of the image itself. The unorthodox framing creates not only a great sense of depth and dimensionality, but also an increased tension between the panel's elements, an expanded sense of their spacial relationships to one another. Not to mention the circular-ish shape of the picture, which, when coupled with the arrangement of the figures and the angle of the staircase, encourages the eye to kind of spiral in on the central figure of Jim Gordon. And then when you get there, the Commissioner's bizarro-Hamlet pose is pretty stellar.



Panel 2: For all the bitching about "widescreen" panels, they've got their place, especially when they're composed by an artist who understands how to use them. Quitely's undoubtedly the cream of that crop; here he creates a multi-action panel that you actually read through, rather than apprehending all at once. By pulling the eye in a smooth line across it, Quitely gives a great deal of forward motion to the figures, while enabling Morrison to cram way more dialogue into one frame than most pictures would allow. There's also an nice down-and-to-the-right direction to the composition, leading you from Batman's head up top down to Damien near the bottom, and finally into a smooth segue to the next panel.



Panel 3: Another nice composition, using a sedately balanced close-up shot to lend Professor Nichols' impromptu autopsy a clinical air. I didn't even notice Robin standing off to the side until I put this panel on the scanner -- the inclusion of little details is always a plus. And check out the deep, intense rendering lines on Nichols' face; high-class markmaking. Alex Sinclair's colors continue to mess with Quitely's art, however minimally: while Quitely creates a halo of blank space around the two heads that are the drawing's main focus, Sinclair puts an overload of texture on the wall behind them, drawing the eye into that blank space rather than bouncing it back to the characters. You can tell that wasn't the intent by the little lines indicating brickwork on the far sides of the panel -- none in the middle, though! The over-coloring even gives that back wall a weird shape, like it's expanding outward a little bit.

PAGE 2



Panel 1: A really fine exterior shot, soaked with atmosphere. More fusion of black panel borders with blacked-in pictorial elements, here working to create an incredibly tangible sense of place, of the camera's location inside the picture (namely, under the arch of the bridge). Quitely's Gotham is excellently designed, the Euro-Gothic edifices giving way to distant skyscraper sleekness in the top right corner. It's like a synthesis of the set design from the Tim Burton movies and the Josh Simmons Batman comic, which is about as good as it gets. The startled birds flying away are a pretty little touch, giving this stentorian picture a little fluid motion.



Panel 2: Lots to like here; I dig how Quitely places the street sign in the approximate spot where a narrative caption announcing the scene's location would usually go. These are pictures that do more than illustrate, they carry weight usually left to the writing. The height of the signpost is pretty exaggerated (how tall is it, 40 feet?), again to create a heightened sense of depth. That's especially cool since Quitely has set this panel up to very obviously mimic all the artificiality of a stage: there's a flat backdrop, a spotlight, hell, even playbills and a marquee. The minimal set dressing is key for the choreographed action that's about to go down, but it's interesting to see Quitely addressing it head-on and inviting the reader to see it through the lens of another, more objectively "real" medium, that of the theater -- or more probably of performed dance.



Panel 3: A nice close-up shot with some good dramatic tension between the figures. The height of the foreground object (this time, Robin) is again exaggerated slightly, not just for depth but to create a little continuity between this panel and the previous one. It's also neat how the frame gets a little thinner as the camera zooms in. And I don't know whether it was Morrison or Quitely who decided to make it so that yearly wreath has black roses on it, but either way it's pretty kool.



Panel 4: This is really good panel-to-panel transitioning, with the camera zooming out and swinging around to better define the area of the "stage". I love how amped up Damian gets at the mere sight of people running toward him, while Dick is just kinda playin' it cool. Body language is one of Quitely's most underrated strengths. I remember a while back there was an interview with Quitely where the interviewer asked him about influences that might not be so obvious in his work, and Quitely immediately replied: "Will Eisner." There's a lot of Eisner here, not just in the explicit blocking-out of the setting as a stage, but also in the more cartoony cast Quitely gives non-principal characters. Batman and Robin are solid, fully formed human shapes; the two hipsters-at-bay are caricatures with overly expressive poses and stretched-taffy legs. It's very reminiscent of The Spirit, where you'd have Denny Colt hanging out with walk-on cops who were three feet tall with lantern jaws and hydrocephalic foreheads. I like it. Also: woops! Somebody forgot to draw Batman's chest-logo!

PAGE 3



Panel 1: As soon as the action starts, Quitely starts tilting the frames in weird directions, here moving the top toward us and the bottom out and away. It's a nice technique for showing motion and camera movement that doesn't involve loosening up the actual linework. Indeed, Quitely's figures solidify when they go into action, their poses more definite and their places in the compositions more fixed. The figurework on Batman here is especially good, full of considered motion and lithe power. Unless I'm quite mistaken, this is the chronological "first appearance" of Frank Miller's Mutant gang -- a fanboy thrill, for sure, as well as a concerted part of Morrison's "drive toward the future" themes this issue -- but the best part is that it gives Quitely an excuse to tip his hat to Miller a few times over the remaining pages, which is fascinating to watch.



Panel 2: More camera movement, more good use of widescreen compositions that the eye reads across. I also dig Quitely's approach to speed lines, drawing them only on the figures themselves instead of trailing off of them. Not only is it a lot more faithful to the way movement actually looks in the real world, it allows him to give a little more frenetic spontaneity to his drawings without sacrificing their construction. Here the figures, especially the lower halves, remind me of (watch out, artsy reference coming!) the Heinz Edelmann Lord of the Rings drawings displayed in The Ganzfeld a while ago; fully formed and packed with structure, yet fantastically energetic and lively. And no, I have no idea where Batman got those nunchucks from.



Panel 3: Another good close-up, again with the characters perfectly placed in the frame. The panel box is really moving now, tilting off the page to encourage you to go quickly to the next one. Sinclair actually does a pretty good job here, spotlighting not the figures (that would freeze everything up), but the space ahead of them where the fight is actually about to take place. Go forward, the panel shouts! It's cool to get this kind of speedy, intense lead-in to the fight because we all know, this being Quitely, that once it actually begins everything's going to slow way down. Interesting things are being done with the flow of the story here, not something most hero artists even seem to consider.

PAGE 4



Panels 1 and 2: Ho shit, here we go! There's been some discussion here and there about Quitely's approach to bat-action, namely the incredibly long amounts of time and large amounts of motion that pass between the panels and the considerable amount this approach demands from the reader, who has to stitch everything together with attention to the changes in pose, placement, et cetera. And for sure: this isn't Ditko, Gil Kane, John Buscema-style "action/reaction" storytelling, lacking the same visceral punch and that sense of wild acceleration. The choreographing of massive amounts of fighters is a Frank Miller pickup, but Quitely really does abstract it to an unprecedented degree -- this stuff is like Miller with every other panel cut away. What saves it, and in my opinion makes it an incredibly effective approach, is that everything is shown, just not explicitly. We don't need to see Damian actually vaulting off the trash can because it's rattling around and we can see him eight feet up in the air. We don't need to see the third mutant over in panel 2 actually running into the frame, because he's not there and then he is. This stuff does take time to sort out, but you only have to sort it out if you want -- with the kinetic figurework and the panel borders slamming around like crazy, it's obvious what's generally going on, and the chaos of reading over this fight scene at normal speed is like an amphetamine high.



Panels 3 and 4: As to the massive amount of time elapsing between each panel-to-panel transition, it's realism, straight up: Quitely choreographs his characters so that they actually move quicker during violent bursts of motion. You don't get to see everything during this fight because so much is going on, it's so disorienting, and everything's moving so fast that it simply can't all be captured. Especially the instants of impact -- all we get are aftermaths of spraying blood and crumpled poses, which is how Quitely really makes the blows hit hard. (It is a little disappointing not to get any embedded sound effects in this sequence, though. Oh well.) Quitely's certainly is a different, more sterile and overtly considered approach than most action comics take, but it's so stylish and succeeds so well on its own terms that its unwillingness to adhere to standard comics grammar becomes an asset. When people read a Quitely book, they should just expect to spend a little more time on the gorgeous, slo-mo action sequences. It gets the adrenaline racing! On a different note, hugely embarrassing coloring error: what color was the mutant with the hammer's shirt again? Come on, Sinclair!



Panels 5 and 6: More post-impact shots. This stuff is terrific. Dig how even the shadow-lines under the car in the first panel are a little twisted beneath the sudden collision of body and windshield. I'm not going to go on about how Quitely tilts his actions panels in relation to the areas where force is being exerted (Damian lands and pushes his side of the panel down, et cetera), but it's great stuff that more people than just Cameron Stewart should be drawing from. That's an excellent punch panel, too -- and it's funny to note how this scene fits Morrison's Batman next to Miller's. Where the aged Bruce Wayne of Dark Knight muses "I honestly don't know if I could beat him" at the prospect of a confrontation with the Mutant chieftain, young, potent Dick Grayson has him on the concrete in five panels and half as many seconds. Meta-bitchslap!



Panels 7 and 8: Damian fights dirty. Quitely gives the hurled hubcap force by drawing it flying way out of the panel, obviously surprising even Batman. Some more great body language here, and the background swims back into view for the final panel, framing the rest of the Mutants' hasty exit-stage-left with the exact same long, thin avenue they first advanced down on panel 1 of page 3.

PAGE 5



Panel 1: Another widescreen, scene-setting panel with a lot of different characters and opposing action. Quitely makes a specific effort to draw the eye along the entire space of the picture in a smooth, continuous motion, letting the sides bleed out to the page's edges and tamping down the top and bottom with black gutters. The slight tilt of the street away from the reader helps too -- you look "down" it to see the characters coming toward you. Then we get the re-appearance of Lone-Eye Lincoln, aka Bruce Wayne's drug connect, here in some stylishly designed Quitely threads instead of the drab shower curtains Tony Daniel dressed him in. I'm into that outfit, it's almost got like a ghetto-Phantom Stranger vibe or something.



Panels 2 and 3: This first panel is the only one in this comic where I wish Quitely hadn't dropped the background. It's too tall, and completely empty in a good bit more than half the space. Just a few lines would have helped here, like they do in panel 4 -- it looks like Quitely drew this picture for a large amount of dialogue that ended up not being as much as expected. Some more hot character designs, though. That girl ("S'Reena," ha ha) is delightfully creepy... cokehead stare aside, is that her own tongue she's chewing like bubblegum?



Panels 4 and 5: Good "acting" -- Lone-Eye makes the exact same face I would if a big goth-caped man were fingering my lapel. There's a great solidity to the figures as they stand their ground at each other, and the body language is just exaggerated enough to show off some interiority without slapping you in the face with it. The final panel is a fairly explicit Frank Miller quote -- a big, bold, nasty grin, squint-eyes and jutting bottom teeth a'plenty. What distinguishes it is Quitely's rough but elegant markmaking, loose and free but still lending a good amount of shadow and form to Batman's face. This is the advantage of printing straight from the pencil art: the spontaneity and power in those lines, in Quitely's hands, gets onto the page unadulterated. It's got a large amount of what's great about Frank Quitely as an artist -- precision, improvisation, individuality, and a quiet thunder that you can skip right over or contemplate for hours. Annnnnd... scene.