Sans Genre

Maybe a new continuing series? Let me know if you enjoy...


from Bloodstar, by Richard Corben


from March 2010, by Taylor McKimens

(INTRO)

The more I think about it the more I figure that there are really only three genres of comics, or at least three "types". The first two are the boring ones. First, we've got hermetically sealed genre/superhero stuff that's too edited and focus-grouped and industrially produced for any element of art to come into it. Next, there's hermetically sealed underground/minicomics stuff that's too DIY and ragged-edge and handmade for any element of craft to come into it. Finally, there's the good kind of comics: everything in between. I imagine I must have said this before somewhere, but I'll say it again: comics is a dance between craft and art, something that requires a certain level of skill to do well and a certain level of vision to do convincingly. Unfortunately the majority of the comics that are made lack one or the other; hence the pitiable mainstream and the sad state of most zine racks. The stuff that sustains the form and moves it forward is the hybrid creature, word and image, discipline and freedom twinned together.

I just said something pretty similar to this, but let me restate it in much grander terms: in the long run, genre won't apply to what our medium has produced so far. Just as Steranko, Bode, Irons, Gulacy, and vintage Moebius look like the component parts of one big thing from our perspective, so will everything we have now lose the artificial separations of milieu and historical context once enough time has passed. What remains is always the work, and when the 1960s and 1930s and 2000s all sound like the same time period (like the 1320s and 1350s and 1390s kinda do now) people are going to notice how similar a Josh Simmons comic is to a Reed Crandall EC horror story, or a Schulz strip to a James Kochalka, or a Winsor McCay to a Quitely. There are good comics and bad, that's etched in stone forever. But within the good, distinction disappears eventually. It all becomes a solid core, the laser beam that points to what comes next. If you're asking "but will comics survive that long," get out of here.

How does the movement from the cubby holes of genre into one unified body happen? Well, plenty of ways. Maybe the reason I'm thinking about this kind of stuff is because I just got a bunch of old Heavy Metals at the same time as I'm rereading my old Raws and looking through the new Rand Holmes retrospective book (really good, by the way... review soon). Juxtaposition makes old works new again, no matter how little they have to do with each other. That's what the Golden Age of Reprints is giving us: an accessible history not just of the art but of the styles. The ability to grab a Frank King book in one hand and a Jerry Moriarty in the other and go damn...

But that's only where it begins. As much as it changes the way the medium's perceived for critics to be doing that, where it really starts hopping is with the artists doing the same thing. The real reason I'm equating Bode and Moebius? Guys like Brandon Graham and James Stokoe (plus Frank Santoro with his comics criticism) drawing the line for me, with comics that fit the two into one harmonious continuum. Not only does this work break down genre on the pages, it breaks it down in readers' minds. Cheech Wizard and The Horny Goof? Didn't used to be the same thing to me, but they sure are now I've read Orc Stain. That kind of historical remixing sticks when the comics are good, better than any critical thesis possibly could. Just like Flex Mentallo draws Eisner and Crumb so close I read both of them differently now, there are multiple books out there on the racks today making those connections for people, new ones, different ones, and it's only going to continue now that we've got so many different books for the artists to draw from. The real legacy of the Golden Age of Reprints? Only time will tell, but this is tangible, this is real, this is happening as we speak.

(It will also help if anyone can ever write a history of comics: not hero books, not art comics, not one decade or company, but the whole thing, all of it, which is what it's always been anyway.)

(OKAY)

And yet...

And yet there's more to it than that. Comics don't make their biggest steps forward with guys looking at books, or at least that's not the whole story. Whether it's Kirby with his battlefield memories or Crumb with his head full of acid fuzz, the real stuff comes out of inspired minds translating thoughts from shadows swirling inside to lines and colors on the page. And one of the most interesting things about comics is how its artists come to the same conclusions, the same styles, the same pictures, independently of one another. How these different milieus -- because they do exist, it's the reader's choice not to read them into the works, but the artists can't help living different lives -- produce such strikingly similar work. I doubt Nick Cardy had seen Blueberry when he first put pen to paper on Bat Lash, but something in the process of creating a Western comic book took over, put those two series side by side.

So at last we arrive at the two images above. Richard Corben, the post-EC airbrush master who satirized and glorified high barbarian fantasy in equal measure; and Taylor McKimens, the PictureBox-approved, gallery circuit crayon-wielder whose comics seem most intent on glorifying Tuesday's leftover food. McKimens has all but definitely seen Corben -- but the contents of their comics have basically no overlap. They are doing different things with different media for different purposes.

But look! Comics takes hold, and somewhere in two completely different artists' brains, the process of making them produces the same picture. Corben's high-saturation, psychedelic hues sluice into McKimens' fluorescent tone-trails. McKimens' obsession with gooey, slobbery texture for its own sake finds a kindred spirit in a Corben slime monster. The utter texture in both images seems to spring from the primal source of cartooning itself, with its cardinal rule that "everything should look like it's made from the same stuff". These pictures drip and drip and drip, doing nothing else, and pull the eye down the page with an iron grip. Both grab you and stick your hand in something moist and fetid for a second, jar you, let you go. It's all they have in common, and it's probably the closest the two artists will ever come -- but it's really there, it's really something. It's a tiny fragment of a new connection, and someday someone will make a Corben/McKimens fusion comic and it will stun everyone who's watching.

There are more of these, everywhere. All they need is for somebody to find them. Pick up a book.

A note: I wrote this yesterday. Went to put it up today, and Frank Santoro has mined the much of same ground (which is really his ground to begin with) more incisively than I could possibly have hoped to do. Apologies if they're wanting; go look at his article, it's better than this.)

Kwiknotes 7/29/2010

Yep, and you know what that title means: no scans! Sorry, here's some random digressions instead...


-THIS WEEK I read some Den comics by Richard Corben and some Captain Americas by Jim Steranko. Though Corben's career didn't really start blasting until Steranko was more or less out of the game, they're still chronologically close, which is interesting. (Steranko is probably the most influential artist to leave comics before his influence was visible at all. When he quit Marvel there was no Jim Starlin, no Marshall Rogers, no Paul Gulacy -- nothing to show that he'd even made a ripple in the pond. All that stuff sprung up post-mortem, which seems pretty unique, especially in a time before comics reprints allowed artists to pick up influences like pennies from the street. But I digress...) Anyway, I was struck by how similar Steranko and Corben's work is, how both artists catch the same zeitgeist despite having done the work itself in totally different milieus. Artistically innovative stuff, simultaneously pushing the boundaries of "realism" and "surrealism" in comics with overly-muscled, slightly sleazy heroic fantasies that conform to some genre norms and subvert others: you could use that sentence on a Corben or Steranko book and it would work out fine. Have the mainstream and the underground ever dovetailed so closely as they did in the very late '60s and early '70s?

It's worth noting that both Corben and Steranko parlayed big influences from the Twin Towers of '60s cartooning (Crumb and Kirby, respectively) into such similar work. I'd imagine the common threads were the psychedelic art both luminaries dabbled in but never fully committed to, the overall sleaze-funk look of the era's ad art, and (definitely) EC Comics. But how strange that such different original contexts -- the superhero world and the underground -- seem almost one and the same these days. I don't know, I'd imagine that there wasn't much perceived overlap with Jim Steranko comics when Corben was putting out stuff like Den, but now it's all a part of those pre-Heavy Metal, underground influenced adventure books to me -- right there alongside stuff like Cheech Wizard, Gil Kane's Blackmark, Gulacy's Shang-Chi, Starlin's Warlock, Windsor-Smith's Conan, Vampirella. That's a vein of comics that's seen woefully little study in past years, when most scholars skipped from the Galactus Saga and Zap Comix to Raw and Moore's Swamp Thing like the '70s never happened.

Luckily it's a vein that's being mined more and more extensively by creators these days (Benjamin Marra, where you at!), and as such being reclaimed by those with the back-issue bin bravery to go where comics scholarship largely hasn't yet. Those weird subversive-adventure comics seeded the medium with so much, exploring some of the same distribution routes the first "indy" publishers utilized as well as doing the real narrative and formal trailblazing that gave so much of what was good in the '80s and beyond -- Chaykin's American Flagg, Miller's Daredevil, Moebius' later work, Kelley Jones' Batman, Marra's comics, Orc Stain -- a body of work to draw from, a library of fascinating failed experiments. The threads connecting all this stuff are still loose and tangled, but hopefully we'll get some good historical digging on the period at some point. And jeez... if you're just a reader, most of these comics are still priced at like three bucks.

-SPEAKING OF comics history that's yet to be written, I'd imagine I'm not alone in thinking that Kramers Ergot will be seen by future generations as one of the most important comics to come out of the current time period -- maybe the most important. Which means scholarly examination. But dude, of all the books to study, that one is going to be hard for historians to get their good looks in at. The first two issues are minicomics, so scarce and underground you can't find copies to save your life. So do you start at #3, the first one that's actually procurable? Or #4, the first one to feature color, abstract art, non-narrative comics, and many of the creators who made it a must-read book? Shouldn't academic studies be comprehensive, or at least have the option? And then there's the fact that only the most recent two issue remain in print at all, and even then on a pretty spotty basis. I do hope that some kind and enterprising publisher steps up to keep such a vital part of our history perenially in print now that Buenaventura Press has passed on.

-I DON'T know how widely this view is going to be accepted, but I've gotta say -- people who denigrate superhero comics as "wish fulfillment" are indulging in bitter crankery of a fairly low degree. I can't imagine that most superheroes speak anything but super-indirectly to the fantasy life of any sane person -- it's way more about escapism, pure and simple, relief from the grind. The reason a lot of kids get drawn into devoted hero fandom at a slightly pre-adolescent age has nothing to do with the Freudian hooey of "power fantasies"; it's because when you first start finding out that this isn't a perfect world, that in fact it's a seriously warped place to live, you naturally turn to something warmer and kinder and "righter" to replace the illusion of perfection that's been taken away. You turn to Superman, or Flash, or Batman or whoever: men with the power to make everything good and right. We all need dreams from better places: superhero comics provide some people with theirs. Let the critic focus on the work and its quality, leaving medium-wide judgments behind. We really don't need them anymore.

-THE PRACTICE that still persists at Marvel (and to some extent at DC too) of putting out comics whose covers are totally non-representative of the content and just feature pin-ups of the title characters? Near as I can figure, the only guy who's ever been able to do it well is the same guy who started it all: Frank Quitely. His covers for New X-Men, which was Marvel's flagship book from 2001-03 or so, were so striking and different that an entire company followed in their footsteps. It looks so awful now when you just get a cover with like Thor standing against a color filter, but it was really something else back in the day to see a 2-shot image of Cyclops just standing there mugging against a bright, flat background. The cover to NXM #114, Quitely's first issue on the title, is the key: the X-Men stride out toward the reader in an arrogant, self-conscious strut that real humans only do on runways. Quitely positioned his characters as fashion models for those covers, not superheroes: they were attractive, they had "look at me" attitude as opposed to the "badass" variety, and they weren't wearing costumes but the day's high fashion. That meta-conceit of mimicking another, more recognizable and widely-seen art form -- Quitely was drawing the Marvel version of Vogue ads -- has been lost on a generation of cover artists, resulting in the racks' current hideous appearance.

Edit: Sean T. Collins kindly reminds me of the Ultimate line covers, which employed pin-ups slightly previous to Quitely, and still do today. I forgot to use the line I had cooked up to address that, which went something like: "The contemporaneous Ultimate line began using pin-up covers around the same time, but they were so hideously ugly that I can't imagine anyone working in comics is moving forward with that particular inspiration."

-COMICS HAS got to be the medium that utilizes present-tense narration the most.

-THOUGH THERE have always been artists who pushed the farthest boundaries of comics further and further into total rough, handmade craftlessness, these days the form seems to be reaching some kind of critical mass. Rory Hayes took the torch from the undergrounds (with their logic-defying psychedelic imagery) and Herriman (with his rawbone pen line) and made some of the most abstracted comics art that had been seen up to that point. (He's been reclaimed by the Golden Age of Reprints, I'd guess in no small part because of his aesthetic similarity with the modern art brut garde.) To my eyes the biggest follower of Hayes' stylistic precepts is Gary Panter, who made the line even rattier, dada-ed his stories to dangerous degrees, and occasionally produced completely abstract comics pages. After Panter a whole movement starts, with Fort Thunder-ers from Brian Chippendale to Mat Brinkman creating pages of uber-scrawl and arrhythmic color that sometimes form cohesive stories only because we're told they do so. And that's pretty much where we are now.

But pretty soon someone's going to come along producing high-quality work that really takes it to the next level, which I think is total abstraction: comics without characters or linear stories, comics where the degraded quality of the drawing is the sum total of the subject matter. There's some stuff along those lines in the Abstract Comics anthology, and I've seen more around here and there -- but no one has really stepped up to own that kind of comic yet, to make it their "thing". I wouldn't mind if it was Taylor McKimens, whose less narrative pages stick fairly close to the Fort Thunder aesthetic as well as storyless, purely visual motion. But regardless of who does it, I think a whole new seam of comics-making is set to open up in front of our eyes in the next decade. All it'll take is one person with enough talent and dedication.

-ALAN MOORE and Frank Miller: the more they make enemies of today's mainstream, the more tomorrow's alternative scene will claim them as their own. It's already happening: there's a whole school of "indy" books over at Image where Ronin is a big stylistic precursor, and even Shaky Kane seems to be channeling Lanky Frank at times. Did you notice the appearance of Moore's The Courtyard in Dash Shaw's Bodyworld? Small steps toward a topsy-turvy future.

What this says about the mainstream, however, is hardly encouraging. Moore and Miller ripoffs were responsible for so much of the superhero dreck pumped out over the past quarter-century that it's probably good for the genre to get those two guys out of their system for a while -- but if they become verboten as influences, if "doing a Moore" becomes the equivalent of what "doing a Weisinger" is now? You realize that means Brian-Michael Bendis ripoffs, right? Grant Morrison's influence can't sustain an entire field on its own, especially when people are so piss-poor at imitating him. If it's to survive, the hero market is going to have to start looking at the alternatives for inspiration, just as the alternatives seem to be enjoying a love affair with old mainstream comics right now. I can think of a lot worse things than the next Spider-Man writer embarking on an extended Fritz the Cat riff.

-WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Lynx

That's a serval, actually.

Here's your weekly Newsarama-Rama: a feature review of David Hine's inaugural issue of The Spirit, which hardly lives up to Bulletproof Coffin but did allow me the space to digress on the nature of good post-Eisner Denny Colt material...

...and a quick bat at DC Universe Legacies #3, in which I say the exact same thing as I did in my reviews of the first two issues here. The attraction for me is repeating myself in a smaller amount of space every time. Issue #1 took me an essay, #2 took me a write-up, #3 took me a paragraph; look for a one-sentence review of #4, a one-word review of #5, and um, after that I'll probably drop the book because it's not very good. As always, you can get my Newsarama links in the sidebar as they come out if you don't like waiting for these weekly aggregations.

Next, I cracked the other big mainstream comics site this week, guesting on the can't miss weekly roundup column "What Are You Reading?" at Comic Book Resources. My contribution came in at about five times the typical length of these things, covering ten different comics of vastly diversified characters. Because that's what I read. It's basically a long, random blog post so go check it out. And this may also be of interest: my Neal Adams Batman post was very kindly linked to as part of the excellent "Sunday Brunch" column on CBR a while ago, engendering a comments section that should catch a certain type of reader's eye.

I did another big long essay for an outside site that should be along soon, so you can expect yet another link-post shortly! Outsourcing, what a quandary!

Your Monday Panel 22

"Ghost of Dragon Canoe" (2004) from Kramers Ergot #5, page 2 panel 3. Drawn by Dan Zettwoch.



Like in any medium, there's a million little things crawling around in comic books that can't be done anywhere else. Speed lines, word balloons, impact starbusts, hell, the act of panel-to-panel construction itself -- not for any other storytelling medium, these, and they tend to look pretty funny in paintings too. Most artists just skate along the surface of comics' language, the degree of grace with which they do it separating the bad from the OK from the mediocre. But art in this form does best when a facility with the pure act of drawing (be it in minimal Schulz or grandiose McCay style) is crossbred with an equal skill for using comics to make comics. When form and function intertwine. The ones worth looking at pay attention to the panels themselves as much as what's in them, learn about what comics do better and what comics do best, and then set to turning it out.

Dan Zettwoch is one such artist. A member of the formally-obsessed USS Catastrophe crew, his work is rife with all the bells and whistles of the form turned inward on itself. The pages of a Zettwoch strip are like funhouses for the comics art nerd: panels set into other panels, double-page spread maps, diagrammatic breakdowns, directory arrows jutting from the word balloons, and very much et cetera. Like all good art must, though, it retains its clarity, the spotlight on formal processes never obscuring the stories but carrying them along. It helps that Zettwoch is a top class cartoonist, his fat ink line and caricatured faces surfacing a sure sense for color and shapes that gives each page the loose, barreling forward rush of a good football play. The artist's two sides -- cartoonist and crafts student, markmaker and mapmaker -- don't meet in every panel, but when they do, it's pretty intense.

Just take a look at the one above. The comics-only trope that most visibly occupies Zettwoch is the "cutaway view" panel, in which roofs, walls, surfaces of any kind are temporarily rendered invisible so the reader can peer into the setting of the action and get an architect's blueprint-view of what's going on inside. It's an old trick; Kirby used it to great effect, as did Steranko, and it shows up as a quick house tour in plenty of random Archie issues, too. Its past as a flashy '60s fad might be the reason it isn't used a lot today, but Zettwoch makes it part and parcel of his very modern comics and brings out the potential it's had all along. The cutaway, seen here at the height of its powers, is a more organic version of panel subdivision, throwing up borders between the sections of the object being opened up, and more borders between that object itself and the rest of the frame. The cutaway view has the power to make a whole page out of a panel, which is exactly what Zettwoch does here (with the help of some of his handy arrows), guiding the reader into the Red River Church of the Nazarene, on a tour through its innards, and then out.

It's an immense amount of detail packed into a single frame (about 4" by 4" at print size), and Zettwoch brings a full-page worth of layout to facilitate it, routing the minimal figures' snakelike path through the church in a tight loop to leave as much space open as possible for architectural details, similarly winding dialogue, those arrows. Not to mention the great uncalled-for panel content: the Red River Church's iconographic flaming-dove logo is inexplicable but it's an awesome drawing and adds a weirdly appropriate "seal" to the holy building's blueprint. The chorus of stained-glass chroma in the upper right takes you out of the characters' path just enough to get you to notice the relative size of the structures they're walking through -- panel and church, respectively. The balance of blacks, whites, and color on the page is perfectly considered, monochrome borders bleeding into a centered splash of hue, tying up the loads of information in a neatly-designed package, making all the linework and elements something breezy and bite-size. Zettwoch gets everything he possibly can out of his panels, and that's what makes his comics important -- but he also looks stylish as hell doing it, and that's what makes them good.

All About The Washingtons

Quick 'n' loose, notes from the mainstream's price wars.


If you buy superhero comics on just about any level you will have noticed the price discrepancies. The DC books are by and large $2.99, $3.99 if they have backup stories or extra content. The Marvel books are $3.99 across the board. Both companies push into the five- or six-dollar range if they put out any kind of oversized or anniversary issue. That's the times we're living in -- I liked when I was a kid and I could buy a comic every week with my allowance, but if comics people as a group know two things it's that the economy's bad and not a lot of kids are reading anymore. We all swallow those prices when we take it to the counter. I personally wasn't in the game until the minimum cost began with a 2 anyway, so I don't really mind. And I am by no means a Marvel buyer, so... I don't know, 75 cents' uptick over a decade for the majority of the DC books seems pretty good considering I used to be able to get three Snickers for a dollar.

But man, some people -- the ones who spend their lives in the trenches, the ones whose pull lists consist only of the injunction "one of everything", the kind of die-hard loyalist customers that do the real work in keeping the big companies afloat -- some people care like motherfuckers. Part of it's age. To be one of those forty-books-a-week cats you've got to have the economic security that mostly only comes with being old enough to remember a time when the price of a comic was two numbers. When I worked retail I could kind of see how those quarter, fifty cent price bumps got to people. We had a couple guys who shopped at my store, two who got all the DC, one who got all the Marvel, one who got everything... oh yeah, and one who got 20 copies of any book that featured Wonder Girl. I'm not even lying. You could see how it hit them in the moneybelts. One month it was a high three figure loss total, then on price bump month it went into four figures. They still bought, but they bitched about it, and Christ. I would have too. But those are the lost causes from day one.

It would be one thing if the lost were the only ones bellyaching about prices. That existence is tied to price in the way a normal fan's isn't -- it's almost a kind of peonage to the companies whose universes they live in. When the landlord of your fictional reality raises rents by a third, yeah, you kick and scream about it. But Price Wars isn't just about the die-hards. Once Marvel went to the hard four dollar price of entry, which was just before I quit comics clerking, it was everyone who ponied up to put their money down. You never heard such a commotion. And that's not even to mention the message boards. Look at a comment thread on Newsarama and you'd think Wolverine'd been killed for all the vitriol and piss and threats of boycott that dollar extra got, still gets, from fans. And I don't know, maybe I'm the only casual observer on the Newsarama comment threads and everybody else there really was having trouble paying the electricity because their comics of a sudden cost more; but I doubt it. And then if you click over you can see Marvel riding high like always on their slightly-less-than-half the market's dollar share.

Here's where it gets interesting, though. Like I said, that one-third price uptick made pretty much no difference to Marvel's financial share of the greater comics market. Which sounds like everybody still bought the shit they bought and sucked it up, right? No difference in the charts, no difference in the sales. But -- and I'm not that good at math so correct me if I'm wrong -- I said but, if their prices were up by over 30 percent and yet their dollar shares weren't moving except for maybe two or three percentage points, that means sales lost, and I'd guess not a few. The bottom lines are so deceptive. Marvel beats DC by ten percent on units pushed and dollars made each and every month -- however. Maybe it's something only retailers really notice, but Marvel puts out way way above ten percent more books than DC, even including Vertigo and Wildstorm. On a typical week it's between one and two fifths more. Then there's the fact that not too long after the Marvel gouge, DC books started showing up more and higher in the top ten bestseller range. And that lately predictions have leaked from at least one retailer of a "Marvel collapse" in the wings if DC can hold down that dollar-cheaper line.

There's more to make of this numbers stuff than I'm making, lots more, and I hope somebody will make it. But like I said I'm not that good at math, and I'd rather look at what it all means for the comics than the companies. What we appear to have is a genre -- the biggest genre in the industry, the one a majority of people seem to think is the industry -- cracking under its own weight. Is a dollar, a fucking dollar, really the threshold keeping a significant number of readers from the content they so happily slurped up at three-and-tax-and-a-board-and-bag a year ago? It actually seems that way, because heaven knows the material isn't changing. Marvel still tops the charts with gimmicky horseshit like Spiderman Obama Team-Up and DC still swipes at worthy competition with hermetically sealed fanboy orgies like... um... that Geoff Johns one. This particular price change is worth noticing, is more significant than the 25-cent increments the barcodes slid up during the 2000s, because it's the straw that broke the camel's back. That is, it appears to be the price that people won't pay for more samey, mediocre comics.

So if you didn't know it already -- and it doesn't take a wise man to know it, I've known it ever since I first saw an issue of "Wizard" -- the superhero factory is in trouble. If the aging base, the lack of young talent, the branding confusion, the fear of risk, the shrinking market weren't enough, it's looking like a down economy is all it takes to price a giant of the industry right into the poor house. Maybe not this particular down economy, but heaven knows things aren't improving, and if we hit another mini-Depression... well, just extrapolate that. Despite all the hot air the publishers and even some of the retailers blow about hard times being easy on escapist entertainment, people are demonstrating every month that they won't pay more money for the same product. It speaks to so much: the weakness of the material, the weakness of the business, the weakness of the customer loyalty that's probably the biggest single factor keeping Marvel and DC on top. A single picture of George Washington to sway giants. This is not a healthy time for hero comics.

Marvel seems not to care. They launch $3.99 series left and right, they lead bookstore market pushes with shitty 30-dollar hardcovers, they requisition the Crossgen library of characters? Maybe they're sleepwalking down the road to oblivion, maybe I've got it wrong and the junk does as well as it ever did, maybe -- most likely -- Disney's got their backs regardless and this surviving-in-the-direct-market smallball just doesn't matter like it used to. But DC, good old DC, the company that always brings a smile to my face, is showing signs of the kind of blind, panicky, thrashing expansion that comic book recessions are all about. Perennial runner-up that they are, they weren't able to hold it all down at $2.99. But they keep the big books there, the ones that take up Marvel's vacated top ten spots, and they seed the ancillary titles for the real fans with backup stories to help ease out the extra dollar from the pocket.

This doesn't sound significant, or at least not very, but I think it kind of is. Marvel bulls ahead in its ever-insufferably, ever-justifiably arrogant way, confident that hacks' content and Jack's characters will keep it on top like always, same shit in a different, more expensive bag. But DC has started changing the content to get fans onto a price point they've demonstrated they won't all accept without some pushing. By and large, the backup features haven't been stellar (though the Black & White strips in the back of the new Spirit book have at least been uniformly interesting), but that's not the point: they could have been. Just like any formatting leap, they offer creative people the opportunity to try something out. And whether they fall on their asses or excel or make more mediocre crap doesn't matter on a certain level. Something new's being done, or at least an old idea's being reintroduced to a new market.

And need I remind anyone, the same month last year the backup features came out, so did the glorious (though haters certainly hated) Wednesday Comics. It was another way of cramming the $3.99 down the readership's throats, but what we got was a legitimately brave, innovative stab at a different form of both making and presenting comics. Marvel's shot back was the Strange Tales anthology, which like its opposite number had some good stories and some bad, but lacked the experimental energy of artists set loose on a new formal challenge as well as a new storytelling style. It didn't feel like a probing step into unexplored territory, it felt like the Bizarro Comics books DC put out five years previous.

This is what happens when the markets are bad and the money is tight: new forms, new ideas, and sometimes ones that make for better comics. Let's look back into the '70s, when everybody's wallet was reeling with the recession fever and the cost of paper hit the comics in the price points. Marvels went up five cents to two dimes apiece and DCs went up ten to a quarter, which basically fixed the market into the solid first-place second-place configuration it's remained in to this day. But after a while of eating dust, DCs began mutating into strange and appealing forms, the best of which are impressive even now.

It was the day of the 100-Page Super Specials and 80-Page Giants, which packed shit-tons of Curt Swan art into the Supermans, Infantino art into the Flashes, et cetera, for a dime or quarter extra. The DC Giants, genre treasure troves with piles of romance or western or horror stories illustrated by journeymen whose swiped panels would cut today's superstars to ribbons. And eventually, the 52/25 format across the board, which jammed the comics with 20 extra pages of reprints -- good stuff, Gil Kane sci-fi shorts, Simon/Kirby stories, Kubert war yarns -- to justify taking that quarter from those kids' pockets. It all crashed down eventually, DC went back to Marvel's 20 cents and cut all the glorious fat; but man, if you can find some '71/'72 DC comics in your store's beater bins, snap them up, because that flood of reprints and extras and ephemeral gems hit most every book they put out and turned a sagging line into a clearing house for the richest archives any comics publisher's got. Marvels from the same period? Not too much of anything, a whole lot of Kirby-ripoff content that ruled the roost with mediocrity.

I'm looking at DC's October solicitations now, and they're wonderfully diversified. There's straight pamphlets for $2.99 and pamphlets-plus-backups for $3.99. There's two biweekly series. There's six 56-page, $4.99 comics: I didn't even know that was a thing until it apparently became one this month. (I like that ratio. Longer stories along with extra content for a penny under the lowest real unit of money the American consumer trafficks in. Or it seems so anyway.) There's the adoption of Marvel's "Omnibus" format at a cheaper price point. There's, ha, there's a JLA 80-Page Giant for $5.99. There's something I really like, which is the rollout for the brand-new "DC Presents" format, something kind of in between a trade and a pamphlet -- 96 pages of hard-to-find back issue stuff for $7.99. Things like complete Warren Ellis minis, pieces of Ed Brubaker's Batman run, a book full of Hawkman and Deadman scrapings that includes Infantino, Teddy Kristiansen, and Sean Phillips art. There are some totally normal-format pamphlets for $3.99 too, but not a lot, and this is the second-place company after all.

Is all the stuff I mention going to be good? Not a chance. Is any of it? Maybe some, we'll have to see. (It's always kind of cool to get reprints of unheralded corporate books, and if this "DC Presents" stuff keeps up I imagine they'll get to something worth the collecting one day. If I was a bit more of a hyperbolizer I'd compare the format to Fantagraphics' Ignatz series. It's cool, but won't go that far.) What's happening here, though, is change. Creators given the chance to tell longer stories, shorter stories, stories that are necessarily different from the baseline. The better half of last decade's quarter-bin books shined up and tossed into the audience again to see if they'll stick this time. The admission that the market isn't buying the same shit in quite the same numbers these days, that something new might not be amiss. It might not sound like much, but change is all that ever drives things forward, the only way we get what comes next, and this is how it happens in the mainstream. This is what we get, and I'll celebrate it even if no one else wants to. Even if no one else even notices.

Comix Surgery: Fusion Album

The Silver Surfer (limited series) #1 and 2, by Stan Lee and Moebius. Marvel.

-NEAR AS I can figure, this comic is a pretty good signpost to the end of an era. The 1980s were a time of expansion for pretty much every segment of the American comics industry: there was an indie boom, a rather incredible rise in the quality of the top superhero comics, the first trickles of the positive public perception that floods the Borders stores with comics these days, an uptick in reprints of important historical material, and most relevantly, the concerted effort to translate high-quality European comics into English that brought the work of Moebius to our shores. In many ways this Silver Surfer series is a summit to that decade, an original English language work by a foreign master teamed up with the man most associated with the medium in this country, a piece of comics that presents itself more or less explicitly as art, a superhero comic that often eschews adrenaline for political and spiritual musings.

One issue at the dizzying heights of a field that had committed itself to quality -- and the next amidst the beginning of the decline that the commercial, Marvel-monopolized 1990s would prove to be. Though this comic has much of the '80s' expansionism to recommend it, there is also perhaps a warning, not so much in its pages as in what it is. The greatest paragons of two of the world's three major comics traditions on the same book, working for the same company. If that company were to decide that art was no longer an issue and profit had become the only thing worth striving for, what could stop it?

-I LOVE when Frank Santoro gets out a new variation of his "fusion comics" rap over at Comics Comics. It's a great talk (I linked to the articles for a reason), but what's really cool is that every time this new term "fusion" comes up for comics that incorporate idiom, influence, style, whatever, from the Big Three comic book-making countries, everybody seems to really get into hopping on the comments threads and throwing out the names of random "early fusion" or "pre-fusion" comics. Last time my big suggestion was Ronin. This time it was this comic. Read further, we shall see why. And start thinking about "fusion", because it's a good term that's still in the process of being defined, and the conversation is pretty open if you're interested.

-"THERE'S A graphic language to American comics that I could have used, but I didn't because I'm too lazy... Instead of forcing myself to fit into those rules I let out another facet of my creativity."
-- Moebius, on his process
Indeed. And that's what's fascinating about this comic. A book full of Moebius copying Don Heck panels would have been interesting, but in a more fannish, less immediate way. However, the most important part of that quote is the artist's acknowledgment that there even are rules, a method, to American comics, his obvious consciousness of them while moving forward. All thought bleeds into creation, and watching the French maestro's dance with the animating spirit of American pulp is a hell of an entertaining tug-of-war.

-OKAY, JESUS, I'll talk about the actual comic part of the comic now.



Page 2 panels 1 and 2: Right off the bat, this is not the typical superhero comic. The staid minimalism of French ligne claire ("clear line") cartooning meets Milt Caniff's post-Deco "snowy mountain" shorthand. The second panel, while still rooted in French cartoon, also shows off a bit of manga stylization and framing. There are shades of Osamu Tezuka all over this comic, and this is just an early indication. The vertical-landscape composition and flowing, sinuous linework of the top panel also owe much to Japanese art, though not necessarily manga.



Page 3 panel 5: Moebius's take on an earlier "Galactus is descending, the world is ending" panel: perhaps the most monumental drawing in the original Jack Kirby version of the Silver Surfer parable. Compare:



No one can beat Kirby for sheer chaotic energy, least of all the sleek and unflappable Moebius. Where the King does it a Dada, with figures overlapping figures, perspective shot to hell, everything approaching a collaged level of displaced frenzy, the Frenchman takes a step back and lets the crushing surge of the crowd depict itself, figure after figure moving across the panel at 45-degree angles, hot pink panic-filters submerging all, faces swimming out at you in agonies of terror. Two approaches to the same subject matter that couldn't be much more different, but that in my opinion come up with similar levels of success. Also, just take a second and check out how many different styles are used to cartoon each individual face in the crowd: one looks like Bill Elder, the next one Josh Simmons, the next one Jules Feiffer, the next one Joost Swarte...



Page 4 panel 4: An American comics device run through the Moebius filter. Flashback panels were basically always done in different shapes than the usual boxes until computer coloring came in with accessible sepia tones -- usually squares with either wavy outlines or rounded corners. This take on it preserves a whisper of the squiggly borders beloved to DC Silver Age stuff, but sharply crinkles the indentations, almost making the panel's shape recall a dog-eared scroll of manuscript, bending form to function. Nice little touch.



Page 5 panel 3: Inking savagery! Moebius says: "My pen was getting worn down... it made for a dark, powerful, rather interesting look. But when I changed pens, suddenly it was like everything had lit up. It's almost like working with something alive." Moebius also talks about taking this book as a chance to "take creative risks, face the unknown", and if you can't see it in the shifts of inking style in the panels up to here, keep looking. It's all over this issue, and not until about halfway through #2 does he really find a line to stick to. It's fascinating to see this stuff, though, this art that has so little to do with "Moebius" -- angular, stiff, blocky, thick-lined. It's like Walt Simonson inking Tatsumi or something, maybe even a little Jose Munoz or Ted McKeever. Even the composition changes, getting rid of the rest of the book's elegance for a tight-framed street-level reaction shot. A window into something almost entirely other than the artist who made it, all thanks to an old pen.



Page 9 panel 3: Some very Japanese stylization, especially on the girl's face. I guess there's some Otomo to it, but sparer, lighter, maybe a little more like Masamune Shirow. Or I don't know, even Sailor Moon type of stuff, that's every anime girl's face really. Notable because it leaves the French style behind and basically bends all the way into manga.



Page 10 panels 3 and 4: See, here his line is so fine you can't even see it. New pen! Moebius: "One of my motivations for doing this book was to experiment with the limited palette of the newsprint color comics... I didn't fully understand how limited the palette is." It's pretty obvious that he had rarely seen his stuff printed on newsprint before either, with the brown tone and benday swallowing up the fine linework that looks so delectable in white paper and offset color. What's left are the spotted blacks, which are very few, and the artist's use of that limited palette to pull it all together. You can see a lot of this approach in a certain strain of Japanese comics, stuff like Jiro Taniguchi's work, which limits the spotted blacks, uses a lot of detail but not many rendering lines, and works a similar crease between cartoon and realism.

By and large, though, the Japanese don't have to contend with color, which the drawing really has to struggle through here. It's a pretty good job, I think: Moebius gets great subtlety and depth from four colors (who else can make magenta sing?), and the flat tones placed over figures drawn in lines that you can't really apprehend unless you look close have the air of abstract art, or maybe linoleum cuts. This is a kind of delicate primitivism, superb color choices vindicating the decision to block out vast swaths of every panel with a single tone and forego the meticulous detail Moebius usually colors with. He uses a pretty similar approach in his most recent American work, the Halo graphic novel from Marvel, but with a much, much thicker ink line.




Page 14 panels 5-9; page 15 panel 1: This is almost a cynical look at the American "big corny reveal splash" convention. It's like Moebius is making fun of the way hero artists choreograph such sequences for maximum impact instead of naturalism: suddenly the girl is standing at least 20 feet away from the Surfer, there's a giant shadow falling over what was a flat, sun-drenched rooftop a second ago, and whoops! the camera panned too far out, so that the big hero ends up way smaller in his close-up picture than he was in the ones that preceded it. It works well for the story, though, echoing the plot focus on the angle that this is a mere man determined to defeat a god. Either way, and whether intentional or not, it's a really strange, individual take on a scene we've all read a thousand times before. Also, look at that first panel real fast: at this point Galactus has been on Earth for like three hours, and already he's set up fully functioning concentration camps. I do not remember that part from the Kirby version.



Page 19 panels 3 and 4: Great composition on that first panel. I love how Moebius has the Surfer standing sideways on his board in almost half the panels of this comic. That "looking through a crowd of heads" thing, that's a really neat angle that only Frank Quitely has picked up over here. A lot more guys should use it, it's great for depth and for livening up talking scenes. An outtake from Wally Wood's "22 Panels That Always Work".

I mostly want to point out the writing here, though: this comic almost never gets mentioned in this context, but it's definitely one of the better things Stan Lee's written in his career. There's no overbearing narration, no souring attempts at hipness... the confidence that this is a story that doesn't need to explicitly engage the audience about how awesome it is to succeed. And honestly, this is some pretty great dialogue, no community college Shakespeare recitations or carny patter in sight. Just dramatic and idiosyncratic, striving as far as it can stretch toward modernity and timelessness at the same time. Weird to say, but it's almost Kirbyesque.



Page 21 panel 2: Nothing I could say would make this panel more... uh, more uh... uh...



Page 27 panel 4: (This is really issue 2 page 2, but the book is more a French album split up into two pamphlet comics than anything with the actual features of a serial story, and it was subsequently collected... so bear with me.) It's interesting to note that 20 years previous these lines of dialogue would definitely have gone into narrative captions over action panels. In 1989, though, Lee gets his exposition out through the TV men. It's a pretty obvious pickup from Frank Miller (or maybe Jim Steranko), but functions as a good sign o' the times too. Stan Lee sticking his eternal wordy words into a Frank Miller panel, not realizing that Miller's TV stuff in Dark Knight was more than just exposition, is an apt metaphor for how the '90s turned out in superhero comics. Another interesting post-Millerism: I haven't even come close to looking at the man's complete works, but this is the only Stan Lee comic I've read that uses first-person narrative captions. It's a nice Franco-Japanese style meld on this guy's face, by the way.



Page 29 panel 4: Moebius: "A letterer may be a professional, but he is very likely someone who has stopped seeing lettering as something amusing." Yeah, plus he isn't the guy coloring the book. When he is you can do stuff like the "NOW!" at the bottom here -- I love that half-bright-red word. It stamps such a great period down on a panel with a lot of information in it, and you can also tell that the mayor is saying "now" like it's split up into two syllables, you just can't help but read it that way. "Nay-ow!"



Page 32 panels 1 and 2: This is a pretty imaginative use of the size of a full-page panel to really do something cool with the composition. The action/figure shot is drawn at a large enough size to give it a full splash page's impact, especially popped out the by the white framing the way it is. But it's also shot from farther away than usual, making the gesture an easier size to read through, and also allowing us to get a widespread panorama of all the devastation Galactus has caused. It's really two panels, the depiction of two things in one. It's also excellent how the multiple levels make your eyes do a zoom in on the figure, taking in progressive levels of destruction: first you get the burning building in the foreground, then the toppled cars and trucks and dented streets, then finally the demolition of a skyscraper in progress.



Page 41 panel 2: The purity of benday on newsprint, the most beautiful mode of comics in the world. This is glorious CMYK minimalism, four colors turning a flat couple of lines into a picture with the stuff of life to it. Moebius has arrived at a minimum line thickness to work on the newsprint with, but has also obviously embraced the lino-cut look of the colors overpowering his lines. It's all about the shapes here, with only the barest details drawn in. This is a completely different Moebius from the one who drew Arzach or The Incal: intentionally or not he has absorbed the popped-out colors, the fist-pound imagery, the Kirbyist minimalism of the American form and wedded it to his own style beautifully.



Page 48 panels 1-3: And finally, the point of the book, a wrenching note of bitter pessimism from the usually beatific arch-humanist Lee. Maybe it's the power of the language, maybe it's the punch in the gut of the sentiment, maybe it's because Moebius draws the living hell out of it, but this is way more convincing than all that '60s Marvel "we're all brothers" stuff. Though the same things could be said about this whole comic, in the end. An unexpected, truly stunning finish to a gorgeous, vastly underrated and under-read comic.

Galactus-size thanks to David Brothers for his research assistance.

Newsarama-Rama! week of 7/14/10

It's that time again so let's get to it, message board static notwithstanding. Yes, for reasons of mental health and time management I shan't be reading the comments on my Newsarama reviews anymore so if you want to bring it, bring it here for good or bad. Anyway, uh...

... yeah. First up, go here for platters of praise to the transcendent Bulletproof Coffin #2 and another balls-out (literally) issue of Orc Stain. Image Comics, 510 represent! Read the reviews, but let me just tell you now that if you like comic books there's a good chance you'll like one or both of these ones, so buy them and see.

And you can also go here for some love to the new big Darwyn Cooke Parker pamphlet and some ambivalence toward a very poor issue of Grant Morrison's Batman. People did not seem to see eye-to-eye with me on either critique. Take that for what you will.

Your Monday Panel 21

Prince Valiant from 1/15/1939, panel 1. Drawn by Hal Foster.


Hal Foster has been undergoing a bit of historical remodeling of late. In the Alex Ross era of photo-referencing, crosshatching, and computer rendering, the status he held for so many years as comics' preeminent realist illustrator has been more or less overturned. It's too early to tell how his newly renovated, GARP-era legacy will end up, but since Fantagraphics began its wonderful new Prince Valiant reprint series there have been a few notable articles repositioning Foster as the leading paragon not of illustration in comics, but a brand of illustrative cartooning that everyone from Frank Frazetta to Wally Wood to Eric Shanower took into the future.

In the context of comics Foster's illustrative talents are more immediately apparent than his facility for cartoon. Rarely before or since has the sequential page been so lushly drawn, so fully imagined, so rife with the illusion of life -- especially not as compared to the early newspaper strip's other great masters, who tended to work broad and expressive rather than meticulous and understated. Too, Foster almost always eschewed cartoon's streamlining of forms and subtraction of details, concerning himself instead with evoking the real weights and textures and subtle motion of everything he turned his brush to.

But somehow Foster never overdrew a single panel, imbuing his every frame only with an amount of detail that could be carried forward across the page without stopping the reader's eye or crowding out the story. "Lifelike" in Foster's hands is just as imaginative an achievement as George Herriman's bold abstractions -- it is no more a thing of reality than the goings-on in Krazy Kat's Coconino County, but rather the fond dream of times past and how brilliantly grand they must have looked. Just as much as any of his contemporaries or followers, Foster was engaged chiefly in creating a world to tell his stories with, and every little spotted detail or flawlessly drawn figure brings the reader deeper into it. A Prince Valiant page is a slower, more idyllic journey than a Milt Caniff or George McManus strip, for sure, but it's just as riveting, just as full, and it gets you just as far. Where most classic strips blaze trails into the beyond at full, exaggerated speed, Foster's work is the scenic route of cartooning, where the beauty of the panel performs an intricate dance with the forward motion of the story.

The panel above is Foster the cartoonist in full force. While the illustrator's disciplined detailing and perfectly realized lighting are at the fore, so too is a bold simplification of the picture's highly constructed content. The blacks and whites of the drawing are completely sublime; pure empty space on the bottom gives way to a twisting mass of boldly brushed shadow, which coalesces into line as barely as possible, putting forth only the minimum detail necessary to figure out the picture. And open shape with a few contours and bristling lines drawn in gives us a horse's head, which in turn brings the entire horse, and then a whole regiment of horses from the mass of blacks. Faces are graven as much as drawn onto the figures, the chiaroscuro play of a couple darkened eye sockets and hollowed cheekbones putting a man on every saddled back. A thicket of black lance-lines stabs the starless sky, a poetic mirror to the shadowed, stamping legs that cluster on the ground. An entire scene floats between the panel borders, grounded in space not by any drawn elements but by Foster's utterly convincing shapes and composition Only the combination of an illustrator's eye for realistic form with a cartoonist's instinct for the bold, immediate picture could produce a panel like this.

Foster was suited to the newspaper strip in more ways than one. His grand synthesis of maximalist and minimalist drawing found an equal in his gorgeous coloring, which splashed every page of linework in the perpetual glow of silky sun or sifting moonlight. Here Foster the cartoonist takes full control of the colors, evoking night far better with the blue-gray screen tone thrown from border to border than could be done with a palette full of paint. Dull, murky colors swim out of the foggy gloom in tiny scraps, perfectly spotted by the illustrator's eye -- but only the warmest shades of red and yellow, everything else sealed over by the color of the darkness. The back edges of the company of riders seem almost to blend into the grit of the color dots, losing shape and focus as it gains in the illusion of reality. Foster demonstrates a masterly control of a tool exclusive to the comics artist, the newspaper color printing process, bringing the form's cartoony artifice into contact with his tactile, organically drawn world. It's not pure on either side, to be sure: this is lovely synthesis, one thing and another, and an almost perfect grace between them.

Check out this weird comic I found

Ah, the "Disneyana" section. At least in the LA area, every good used bookstore has one, typically full of dust balls and shelves that have no discernible order to them. At worst, they're like kids' nooks that are mysteriously popular with a bizarre succession of graying old men that pours into them, but at best they're as worthy of investigation as the comics section. And highly as I'd recommend the massive Illusion of Life and Art of Walt Disney monographs, or Walt Stanchfield's indispensable Drawn To Life cartooning master course, or Abbeville Press's tabloid-sized hardcover reprints of Floyd Gottfredson's exuberant, riveting work on the Mickey Mouse newspaper strip, I just found something that's got 'em beat all hollow.

Most Disney books above a certain age have a kind of enigma about them. Missing copyright information, no authors credited, foreign languages employed at the drop of a hat... I guess these things are always weird, but I've yet to see one that surpasses Walt Disney Magic Moments as a sheerly strange, beautiful object. It's a transcription of ten cartoons from Disney's first decade into the comics form, a collection of screencaps pasted up into neat twelve-panel grids, kind of "retroactive storyboards". Occasionally a panel is blown up to 4 times the regular size for some variation; not necessarily because it's a particularly good or important panel, but just because it keeps things interesting and makes the page design look a little better. Strangest of all, we're led through the stories by captions running below each panel. Sometimes hyperbolic, sometimes dry and verbose, decidedly self-aware and punctuated not by their own rhythm but by the breaks in the panels, the supposedly-written-by-Walt-himself text spots function more as a running commentary on the drawings than actual narration.

You know what, let me paste a bit of a story from the book up here so you can see what I'm talking about before I get any further. Go ahead and take a look (sorry, the book's too big to fit a whole page on my scanner so these are split into top and bottom halves):










Pretty odd, right? The panel-to-panel transitions are so un-kinetic, so obviously not intended to be seen without their bridging motion sequences that it hardly even feels like comics at all. And honestly, I don't know -- this is "sequential art" for sure, but repurposed from another medium, and done so in a presentational, fixed mode that makes no concession to the form whatsoever. A lot of people talk about widescreen hero comics as being "movies on paper", but this thing takes the cake as far as I'm concerned. It's almost a purely theoretical comic, taking up the medium with no knowledge (or at least employment) of its agreed-upon grammar or its storytelling strengths. Look into these panels: the characters move like crazy, but there's nothing there to pull you forward or pop them out at you. Ub Iwerks's drawings are of the screen and for the screen, pinned into their boxes with total unawareness that there's a next one to get us moving on to.

When this stuff moves at all, it moves slow. If you can ignore the text and just trail your eyes across it's obviously got a better flow than comics, with the characters' every motion telegraphed and played out in perfectly logical, naturalistic increments. But still, man, seven panels for Mickey to light his cigarette! No movement smacks or jars, no scenes snagging with drama or cutting out to skip ahead -- it's like "real-time" comics, the action unrolling seamlessly in front of us with absolutely nothing hidden or held back. There's no "point of impact" to be found, but rather a long playing out of every motion, every little trick and line of dialogue. It's almost a fetishistic presentation of these cartoons' content, with all the little absurdities and grotesques of the animated world cross-sectioned and served up for scrutiny and study.



Material this abnormal basically always has things to teach its readers about comics. It's devastatingly good, snappy cartooning if you skip to every third panel along or so. The original medium frees it from the need to follow any real-world physics, offering interesting possibilities for the still-image form that keeps itself more grounded in realism so the audience can follow along. It's a mode of pure cartoon that's pretty foreign to comics, with all the exaggerated motion and body language shown and fully played out rather than just implied in single frames. And there's a bevy of little primers on what not to do, on how comics should necessarily differ from animation -- though in just this one book it's still fascinating to see that slowness, those long sequences against one single background, the characters appearing and disappearing with no explanation, or cut off for a panel by the borders of the frame.

And then there are the captions, forever separated from the story they're telling, forever in the margins, flailing around in the printed page's absence of sound, abjected from the rich possibilities of comics' synthesis of picture and word. Magic Moments, in its marking out of explicitly different spheres for the writing and the drawing to operate in, most resembles the endless narration-ing of Golden Age action comics mixed with the studied "picture novel" approach of Jim Steranko's Chandler. As naturalistic as the motion of the players in their little screens is, the captions seem absolutely bent on pointing up their artificiality, taking you out of the story in every way from sudden breaks into screenwriting-style dialogue attributing ("MICKEY MOUSE: Hurrah! Hello, you all... distinguished audience") to commenting on the artifice of the layouts themselves ("this is another one of those helpful close-up panels"). It's writing to make Stan Lee's most awkwardly referential moments seem downright elegant, but it has a point to make about the practice of "writing" comic books: when the artist is on a high enough level, when the illusion of life is there in full, there's no room or need for words.



However, the writing's tendency to go against the grain of simple storytelling gives this book another side, one probably more successful than its masquerade as comics. I've seen storyboard sequences published everywhere from Timm and Dini's Batman Animated to those hardcover "art of superhero movies" books no one buys to Dash Shaw's Unclothed Man collection (which does a really good job of filling in some of that moat between comics and animation). But this is really so much better: fully developed, final pieces from master cartoon artists in their chosen medium, arrayed in big spreads on massive pages for us to glory over. The art's so often secondary to the story in the cartoons themselves, and it's nice that the comics version lets it go the other way around, slows it down and gives us a chance to really look at everything. There's beautiful artwork that should interest any comics fan on every page of this book, hell, there's even a few unreleased Dali background paintings in the introduction, and Magic Moments' use of the comics form allows us to soak in them as long and deep as we possibly can. In fact, it might be better to view this as a visual history of Disney's early years. Or a very strangely written art book with a quirky page design that simply has a lot to do with comics. (Hey, if we can read Gary Panter's stuff that way...) But regardless of formal quibbles, storytelling problems, mysterious origin, everything else, this book is full of gorgeous panel after gorgeous panel, and that alone makes it worth the time.

Holdin' it Down

Batman Odyssey #1, by Neal Adams. DC.


I don't mind superhero books I can take seriously, but a decade of reading them has schooled me pretty hard in the fact that the really good ones come along at a rate of about one series every two or three years. I think most people probably get that on some level or another. The majority of those people, once figuring out this depressing law of the Wednesday-based life, choose to pretend that the entertaining serials are actually good comics and let their brains atrophy on shit like Ed Brubaker's Captain America or Geoff Johns' Green Lantern or books written by a man named Matt Fraction. There's another way to go, though, the way I like to do it, and that's called treat the entire mainstream like a quarter bin.

"EEEYAGH! 'S a demon... oh... oh... we're dead now. Look-it look-it 'sgot claws! A foul thing... from HELL! We're gonna DIE!"
-- Neal Adams, Batman Odyssey #1, 2010

It's damn easy to do if you try at all -- the current mainstream has a hell of a lot of incredible artists using their talent on wretched material, turning laughable action pulp into divinely elevated laughable action pulp, and most of them bounce from book to unimportant book with little method to their careers' madness. Once you admit to yourself that a competent superhero serial with rotating artistic teams is not that fun to read, there's a whole nother, crazier world to dive into. Richard Corben's MAX books, Howard Chaykin's random fill-ins and character revivals, Marco Rudy's JH Williamsy quest for a script that can be read without aggressively asking you to put it down and find something else, Cliff Chiang's job as the best journeyman in the industry, Brendan McCarthy's inscrutably placed eight-page killers... I mean, there's two or three books of this stuff out every week, and it's all so cool and so fun and so much more what corporate comics are about in our times than anything else.

"Too well-armed... damn, aim bad... add train jostling. They'll hit nothing. Something... focus."
-- Ezra Pou- I mean Neal Adams, Batman Odyssey #1, 2010

This week was like that with an exclamation point, with the release of straight-superhero pamphlets by two "old masters" of comics art who should probably know better. The first of these, Batman Odyssey's debut issue, was definitely the more, shall we say, enigmatic. Neal Adams has always been one of my very least favorite comics artists (anyone who's taken my "How Well Do You Know Me?" quiz on Facebook can attest to this, I'm not just a bandwagoneer for the soon-to-be-popular He Was Better On Brave And The Bold In 1969 meme), but damn if this book's cover didn't straightup snatch four dollars out of my pockets. The queasy computer coloring, the steroidal face and figure, the low-four-figure, Todd McFarlane number of lines used, the ever so post-Comics Code blood explosion as the bullet's impact bunches up the skin on Batman's wrist? Did Neal Adams see how the '90s turned out? And then there's the memory of those terrible Complete Adams Batman hardcovers from a few years ago, which still stand tall as a monumental warning of the atrocities computer coloring can wreak on superhero reprints.

"And now I was playing catch-up. I had no idea what the mystery was... that I hadn't solved. If you asked me, then, what the mystery was... I couldn't have told you."
-- Neal Adams, Batman Odyssey #1, 2010

I'm at the place in my superhero comics fandom where I enjoy a total trainwreck more than anything that isn't as good as, say, the average Jordi Bernet-drawn issue of Jonah Hex. And after missing Cry For Justice last year, there was no way I was going to pass Odyssey up. I have no idea how people who actually like Adams' art felt about this book's visuals, but oh man, it all looked like that cover and more so. This thing had me giddy with a Rob Liefeld level of hysterics. As much as digital comics-coloring technology's advancement in the years since those reprint hardcovers has helped cats like Frazer Irving, it's still smashing the shit out of Adams' already-questionable overdrawings. No actual humans are credited with the colors here, the byline going to Adams' own Continuity Studios instead, but whoever ran this bad boy through the Photoshop should take a kind of lunatic pride in their achievement. Multichromatic and disorienting as a scary mushroom high, so high-contrast "realistic" it makes actual reality seem like an impressionistic watercolor painting by comparison, this stuff is like a syringe full of urine in the eyes -- too intense and unforgettable an experience to do anything but laugh about when it's over. Look at this shit, I love how close to the look of the original Max Payne videogame it gets.



But hey, let's not forget about the drawing itself. Leaving aside the vertiginous level of clarity Adams brings to every single detail he can possibly fit into the panel, have you ever seen a dude with a body like that do that pose? That's because it's impossible, as a visit to my local Hollywood swimming pool will attest. Adams' overly limber, fluid figurework always bothered me, but until now I just figured it was because of his drawing style. Think about it, though -- people with that many muscles have trouble crossing their arms behind their backs, let alone reeling forward in a third-baseman's crouch with their fingernails dragging on the floor. I mean, I'm a Steranko fan. I don't care about anatomy. But it's obvious Adams does, and to see someone putting this much into it and getting it this wrong is kind of sad but mostly kind of funny, especially given that this stuff started a whole movement in superhero art that's still very much in vogue. When the mainstream's five minute hate against this comic begins (and it's coming, the emperor never had any clothes to begin with), will all the faux-photorealists and crosshatchers deny their heritage and start trying to draw like Alex Toth? Can we dream? And need I mention that the layouts are as obfuscated, the foreshortening as grotesque, the panel borders as absent as ever? Or that Bruce Wayne's face is drawn to resemble that of a 16-year-old Laotian girl in need of an eyebrow wax?

"We're going to the piers."
"What's at the piers?"
"Dinosaur exhibit."
-- Neal Adams, Batman Odyssey #1, 2010

But hey, as many as the haters will be, most people are going to at least claim to enjoy this stuff -- it's Neel Addumz! -- and in an industry in which such a man as David Finch can command the launch of a new series featuring one of the world's most recognizable characters, this book hardly presents the most deserving target of all. Neal Adams is a bad comics artist; some people hold the mistaken belief that he's a good one. That's basically my whole point, and I'm forty years too young to keep him from influencing too many people with my indelible comics criticism. But stop right there, pal, we haven't even gotten to the writing on this thing yet! And while Neal Adams is too entrenched in people's minds as a dude who draws good comics for them to read him as anything but, his writing is on the next level of strangeness.

"I heard what seemed to be a very loud voice... like a handful of fries in hot oil."
-- Neal Adams, Batman Odyssey #1, 2010

Simultaneously drawing from the best traditions of Brian Michael Bendis won't-they-ever-shut-up dialogue, Steve Ditko inappropriate political shoutouts (hey second amendment, you may as well curl up and die now that Neal Adams has used his personal Batman comic book to enter the fray), and current-Marvel bad copy editing ("Turbos armed... bio diesel engaged come on... all systems on"), this thing's word balloons will have even the sourest puss rolling on the floor in hysterics as it repeats itself, philosophizes about brain's superiority to brawn, and gives Man-Bat some hilariously accurate drug-withdrawal dialogue. The plot, of course, is fairly strong because it's a Batman comic and your average seven-year-old can map out a solid Caped Crusader story, but hoooo boy, the execution of it is not to be missed. There's more raw information, more personality in Adams' scripting than in any other hero book on the stands, and it only adds to the fun that it's the personality of a gray-bearded wino wandering the streets at 3 AM unable to close his mouth for more than five seconds at a stretch.

Just to give you some idea, read the sequence below a few times. Until your sides hurt. Then go buy this comic, because I want the Absolute Edition and they'd love to make one if this sells enough.



X-Women #1, by Milo Manara and Chris Claremont. Marvel.

This week's other big name artist meets big name superhero franchise comic. X-Women is an exoticist slam-banger that not only features Chris Claremont's return to comics that real people read, but also what I believe is the first-ever superhero work by no less than hardcore Italian porno comics' greatest living artist, Milo Manara. Manara is just about the opposite of Adams as far as my opinions are concerned -- hardly taken seriously as a master of the form, but dammit, I think he is one. However, a tropical bikini adventure featuring Marvel's most bodacious mutant babes in what appears to be a constant state of panting if semi-clothed sexual friction (it isn't really, those pouted lips and tongue-heavy open mouths are just a natural reaction to the Indonesian heat) might not be the best way of making his case as a serious auteur of sophisticated comics to the wider American market.

Yep, this is another comic whose cover codes quite well for its insides. Is it cheesy and cheesecakey at the same time? Yes. Is it eroticized to a ridiculous extent? Yes. Does it read like Chris Claremont's worst girl-power impulses lashed together into a makeshift story? Oh yes. But underneath it's still got Milo Manara art in every panel, which means that it's never a chore to read if you spend your time on the pictures. Like the Batman Odyssey faithful, the reader coming to X-Women because it's a story written by the guy who wrote the Dark Phoenix Saga and illustrated by the guy who drew Indian Summer will be pretty disappointed. Guys this age and Neal Adams' age don't make good superhero comics; that ADD, adrenal, up-to-the minute tone and verve is the province of younger men, slicker, easier to bend and more conniving. But wait, we aren't here to read "good superhero comics", remember?



Though none of Claremont's embarrassing excesses are as awful or as eye-poppingly hilarious as Adams's, this comic's got some snickers in its too-large narrative captions too. From sentence one, you remember why Tom Orzechowski had the toughest lettering job in comics on those Uncanny X-Mens of yore. Dig this scintillating, full-force opening:

"Think of it as nature's roadblock at the bottom of the strait of Malacca that separates Singapore from the Indonesian island of Sumatra, part of a whole host of islands that form a natural barrier to the lowest points of the South China Sea."
-- Chris Claremont, X-Women #1, 2010

So yeah, purple as hell throughout, and full of Claremont's peculiar, sometimes just plain icky characterization. Storm sings "Proud Mary" like she was Tina Turner, Rogue monologues about how nice it is to "just be Anna" after losing her powers for the first time since last issue, and there are numerous female-bonding cliches dragged into the swelled word balloons, none of them resembling anything I can imagine actually happening in real life. And while Manara can block out a quick fight sequence as well as anyone who's spent a career drawing humans physically engaged with one another at close quarters, his presence gives this book a pretty weird cast, especially if you've got a prior knowledge of his catalogue. Shadowcat gets a shot-from-the-floor panel after kicking somebody' ass that's the exact same composition we see Shevah Black from Indian Summer in before she starts riding her preacher dad in the bathtub. Marvel Girl disappears behind a Greek villa's column with a handsome young buck in a leather jacket and we wait for a repeat of the anal fist-fuck the James Dean lookalike put on Claudia Cristiani in Click 2. I guess it might be kind of weird that they'd give the guy who drew that stuff the chance to draw this stuff, but then again maybe not. What's weird for sure is that he draws both in the exact same way, heroines' bodies limber, legs bare with toes pointed, eyes lidded, nipples stiff and breasts straining against the cloth of skimpy shirts that never actually come off.

So this comic is kind of a weird thing... I don't know, maybe the word is smutty? Though that's not quite it, not exactly. Claremont's heavy handed pseudo-feminist writing might grate at times, but it goes a ways against the casual misogyny that informs all these exercises to some extent. Familiarity with his history adds to the experience: with four hundred or so issues of these characters behind him you know that the X-Women are more to Claremont than blow-up dolls, though going from this comic alone it might be hard to tell. I'm really heading into speculation with this thought so don't quote me, but it kind of feels to me like this might have been as close as Claremont felt he could get to explicitly showing the erotic side of the characters he's spent so many years with. A Manara/Claremont comic book isn't something that the comic shop newbies Marvel is always telling us exist will be snatching off the racks, and this is the kind of read that's definitely helped by a little foreknowledge going in.

But beneath the questionable precepts and comics-insider backstory, I thought there was some kind of cool stuff going on in X-Women. Manara's art is always gorgeous, and though he isn't bringing any herculean effort or stunning formalism, there's not a bad drawing in this whole comic. The women aren't the only stunning thing to look at: Manara's line has evolved from the slick, pinpoint sharpness of his '80s prime into a thicker, more spontaneous, utterly fluid trail that has just as much a way with sheer silk dresses as the rusting hulks of crashed airplanes. And when he takes a second to stop posing the gals with their asses sticking out at you, he can blast out quite the impressive panel in a brashly physical style that never puts too much detail in or leaves too much out. This is undoubtedly a gorgeous comic book from a talent we could stand to see a lot more often on these shores.



Plus, when you get down to it, the idea of a superhero comic that titillates its readers with sex instead of violence seems pretty honest, maybe even wholesome. This isn't the kind of dark, lurking, repressed wankery that passes for "sexy" in the average lycra-adventure rag, it's an unabashed, full-scale revel in the obvious lust that Manara brings to his panels. Where most mainstream comics pretend to be about "important issues" like "Trust" or "Freedom" but really only do a lot of angst and fighting, this comic's content with showing a lot of gorgeous women, making an effort at some gorgeous men to be fair, and calling it a day with a great deal less pretense than usual. There are little bits of action at the beginning and the end, but this is mostly a comic about Storm & co. changing clothes and swimming. It's like an episode of "Charlie's Angels" directed by a somewhat dissipated Fellini on one of his more randy days or something -- not interesting in and of itself, but with that artist attached, sign me up. I'd say the same thing about "Fall of the Mutants" if it had Milo Manara drawing it. Gorgeous-looking comic, dumb script, somewhat skeezy -- that's the benchmark of quality for superhero comics, right? X-Women is no masterpiece, but it does depict a kind of minimum standard for the mainstream -- beautiful trash. That's what the great ones spend most of their time on, after all.