Your Monday Panel 27

Flinch #1 (1999), page 13 panel 1. Drawn by Frank Quitely.


There's a certain something that gets added to comics art done in the superhero genre. Maybe it's that comics are a medium of of iconic images and the heroes are the biggest icons of all, or maybe it's that idiom's place of pride in the American comics tradition. Maybe it's both. Maybe something else too. Maybe none of the above. Regardless, once the art gets folded into those bright, serialized pamphlets with the multinational corporations' logos on the covers, it changes somehow, melding into the tapestry of visual shorthands and conceits that the thousand other artists to draw the same things contributed. Some guys, like Darwyn Cooke, change up their styles for the hero books on purpose, slickening the lines and thickening the figures to keep the rides moving smoothly. With others, the change seems more unintentional -- Richard Corben's art can't help evoking Kirby more than Frazetta when it comes in a Hulk book, same working methods as ever or no. There's a gain to be had from moving into those shared universes: immediacy, sizzle, the power of old, and well-proven ideas. But they call them "shared universes" for a reason, after all. There's usually something individual lost in the bargain, and the better the artist is the more of a dilemma the change can be.

Example: Frank Quitely. The guy's probably the best artist to draw superheroes in the 2000s, and I wouldn't trade his fully developed, glowing work on All Star Superman or the fluorescent shadows of his Batman and X-Men for anything. But looking back at his career in American comics, which had a good run in the highbrow trenches of '90s Vertigo comics before moving into the land of the flying men, there are losses all over the place as he marches toward Olympus. The Quitely of old was a perfect artist for that witchity, acid-fuzzed Vertigo kind-of-a-scene -- based solidly in the shaggy, laddish English comics tradition with prime American transgression via Crumb and the Euro elegance of Moebius thrown in for variation's sake. Quitely wasn't ultramodern so much as plain wild during this period, throwing formal innovation around with little care or even heed for what stuck, moving too quick to return or refine. That would change, and he would become a better artist when it did, but there's a near-suicidal bravado to the construction of panels like this one, which tosses a few absurdist Frank Miller screencaps over a strangely literal transformation of black gutterspace into a physical surface before inserting some cartooning that's caught deep in the cracks between the natural and the mannerist.

Quitely was wickedly funny in those days, too, mixing an affinity for the nastiness of the human form and a talent for evoking the extremes of body language with fine-art mastery of form and a true physiognomist's eye for grotesques. It's been a good long time since the internet twisted itself up calling Quitely's people ugly when one of his books came out, and while it's because he's become one of the all-time best illustrative cartoonists of the human form, I miss guys like this panel's horrible bearded fatso in the shorts suit, or the alarming-looking gentleman clutching his peni I mean his cigar. Sometimes you'll see this kind of extreme reality-based physical strangeness in a bit-part Quitely villain design these days or something like that, but the freak show used to be his stomping grounds, the building blocks of his panels. He had such a riotous impulse for it, that ugliness that popped you out of the panels, skintight clothes on bodies that didn't deserve them, facial expressions that elicited uncomfortable laughter and then awkward silence, jumbled layouts that never let you quite get comfortable. It was such a jaundiced view, comics as a brightly-colored attack dog, and once Quitely moved past it no one else could hope to fill the void.

It was an environment uniquely suited to Quitely's drawing in those days. While he's gone beyond the traditional mode of pen-and-paper comics art and into a quietly revolutionary fusion of direct markmaking and digital craft, the guy had a way with the ink that's been lost in the shuffle. Look at the downright Disney-animation bounce of the TV jelly-glob's hands in screenshot 2 here, or all the pure, unadulterated style in the illegible scrawls of the magazine "text". While pulling the art directly from Quitely's pencils gives us the viscerality of the real thing, it's less something in the presentation, the emphases Quitely the inker could lay on so thick. This panel's monstrously ugly quasi-humans work because they're lined in with no less gusto than the realistically crunchled-up pill package at the top right, or the advertisement's lettering -- clashing levels of realism aren't an issue here because everything's so cartooned. Reproducing the art from the barest form of drawing puts the reader front row, right inside Quitely's creativity, everything left on the page. It's great. But that means it has to be cleaner, grander, realer than it was in the days when he could hide behind the cartoon curtain that second layer of rendering allowed.

I cherish the Quitely we have -- he's an artist that the next wave and the one after that can go to school on, a genuine inspiration. But I get nostalgic for this Quitely, the crazy wonderful weirdo whose stuff hung together because it was always so close to falling apart. This work makes sense now: it was the laboratory that produced one of current comics' greatest talents. But just look at this panel and forget who it's by, forget the backstory, forget what it was building up to. It's all so pretty nowadays, but it was also great when it was raw and ugly! Just look at a vision from a brain that sees a madder world than we can. Horrible, isn't it? Beautiful, isn't it? And not like a whole lot else.

Skeleton From The Closet

From Thor #162, March 1969.

Inst'nt Classik

"Man of God" in Age Of Heroes #4, by Brendan McCarthy and Elliott Kalan. Marvel.


In the old days, this was all we had. The comics would come out every week, just like they do now, and they would sit on the racks in their stapled pamphlets, just like they do now, and they would look like the lowest common denominators of popular culture, just like they do now, and they would read like it far too often et cetera. The difference is that nowadays we've got stuff that doesn't work that way. You can buy a graphic novel in a bookstore, you can check out webcomics on your phone, you can grab a mini at conventions or the good specialty stores, and that's not the whole list of options. In a way it's impressive that the single-issue comic book, so awkward, so slapped together, so minimally considered, has survived this long at all -- let alone as the dominant force of the last medium whose mainstream isn't completely moribund. I bought the comic with "Man of God" in it off a newsvendor in Hollywood who has a spinner rack next to the men's magazines. He looked at me kind of funny when I paid for it because usually all I buy is National Geographic, but I kinda put on this punk rock facial expression that was like "Yeah. Fuck you. Comic books."

This comic's cover says: "THE HEROIC AGE AGE OF HEROES" in big sparkly-gold letters. Then it says: " 'Age of Heroes... sets the tone for the incoming Heroic Age with wit and style and class.' ComicBookResources.com." Seeing that when I bought it, I took a genuine, heart-straining pride in owning this thing, and also in the fact that I've been published on "ComicBookResources.com", even if it was only the one time. Why? It's hard to say, honestly. Maybe it's because I work at "The Gap" all day for minimum wage as the photoshopped faux-post-Springsteen "rock music" blares overhead like air raid sirens -- with a goal of creating a "consumer experience" whose ultimate end is the elimination of human friction, a time-slip after which you don't remember how you lost your money or got those jeans but know it was pleasant enough that you'll come back next time -- and this comic book cover alone is so flawed, so human, so imperfect despite itself, despite the overdone computer-logoing and the silk-smooth Jae Lee artwork. The "AGE AGE" that screams off the masthead, the bizarre, elliptical quote that won't make sense to anyone who isn't deeply vested in not only Marvel continuity but Marvel branding (isn't the Heroic Age already here? it says so on the cover), and besides that, states the book's true intentions almost too baldly (this is a comic book miniseries that exists to generate interest in further comic book series, quality come as it may). It's not part of the larger robot culture, it's something else. Smaller, odder, more alive. I get to be part of this, too. So can you. The issue retails for $3.99.

This is stuff that we only get to see here, the clumsy fumblings of a "media empire" as it gropes for a place in everyday American life. You think a movie, even a prequel for some other movie, leads with "AGE AGE"? You think they feel like convincing the audience that their flick is tonally consistent with the next one to come is important enough to hit the posters with a quote testifying that, in fact, it is? Only in comics, and if you read these kind the choice is between savoring or lamenting this stuff. You figure out where I am.



Or maybe I'm proud of this comic because for all the big-media posturing and commercial affectations it's still playing the same tunes those old comics played, before an underground and a recession broke the newsstand model, before a bunch of dudes decided they had created the "graphic novel", before anyone even considered that things could be different. The Heroic Age Age Of Heroes #4 contains four short superhero stories, told with varying levels of skill and inspiration. This is how it used to be, all right -- no "events", not too many carefully-piloted serials, and comic book after comic book filled up with made-to-order shorts that the editors commissioned by the yard and found a place for somewhere. Two of this book's stories are terrible, one gets by, and one is strange and a little awkward and beautiful. Though three of them involve Captain America to some degree or another, Cap himself gets four lines of dialogue in total, and the comic leads off with an 11-pager about a new female version of the Black Panther dealing with the fallout of her African kingdom having lost its mineral wealth to the ruler of a European nation. (Yes. It's not as good as that sounds.) So this is what comics were and still are, man, beneath the high-art highlights, beneath the New York Times bestseller lists and movie adaptations. The best story in this book is top five in all the comics that came out so far this year, but its format beats the genius down along with all the rest, just like it did to Toth, Kane, Cole, Wood. Down into the unnoticed seas of detritus that the biggest company produces every month, and you really need to care to pluck the diamonds from the rough. No one is telling you you have to read the new Age of Heroes, and maybe that's why it feels so much more special and so much more real to pick up something like Brendan McCarthy's "Man of God" than the new Acme Novelty Library. Quality here isn't planned, it just... happens.



All the format blustering aside, the substance of this thing is also from a simpler (Heroic?) age. Used to be someone would write a script, some short genre thing with a few moments built in that seemed likely to produce good pictures, and then it got put into the hands of the best artist available to draw it, like a prayer put into the hands of God. There was no dithering about where the book was going to be in two years or who was best suited to draw the Batman character (and thank heaven, because then I doubt Dick Sprang would've gotten anywhere near him). The reality was that there were artists who wanted work, and the stories went to the ones who could draw. You could hardly be blamed for thinking that mega-weirdo Britcomics auteur Brendan McCarthy's the least likely guy to fill out that role decades down the line, but here we are, and here he is.

In the entire decade of the 2000s, we got one new McCarthy comic book. It was 48 pages, but still. In the past five months we've gotten six (and a couple hot covers to boot), all of them for the major corporate publishers, half of them done over someone else's scripting. I have no idea why McCarthy's gone this deep into the trenches when he could draw whatever he wanted and have it turn out bought and beautiful; is he hard up for cash? Does he want to know the same artistic existence his Silver Age idols did? Does he want to cut his teeth on a few lo-fi workshop gigs before crescendoing into a "real" return? Or, and this one seemed least likely of all at one point but gets more plausible every time he makes a fairly nowhere script into a wild thing, does he realize that there's greatness to be had down here, too? Everyone with more than a passing interest in genre comics will have come across one of the incredible random shorts that pop out of the industrial-production machine from time to time -- Richard Corben's made decades of them, Bernie Krigstein ripped a string of them in the '50s that we're still catching up to, and Dan Nadel just curated a giant friggin' book of them, but my favorite is Toth's "Girl in the Golden Flower". Has McCarthy really consigned himself to the same depths, to the pious work of elevating hack scripts to Olympian heights by imagining them as beautiful comics? Whether or not it's a long-term career plan, it's what he's spending his time doing these days, and thank god for that.



The short genre story (that is, shorter-than-pamphlet-length) doesn't have too many other top-flight practitioners these days. It's kind of a shame, because they can be really unique and sublime in a way nothing else can. While longer hero stories take pit stops for character development, pacing-focused scenes, crossovers, everything else, and alt-comics shorts are usually concerned with either creating a tone or putting some notable scene on display more than explaining it, the best superhero shorts lock into the subject matter with laserbeam intensity, pruning away all the bells and whistles of shared-universe action serials in favor of beginning, middle, end. Outside of the random miracles like All Star Superman, shorts are pretty much the only places you're likely to find "pure" hero storytelling anymore, just no-frills comics yarns about dudes in costumes doing dangerous shit.

At their best, hero shorts have enough economy and tact on the writing side and enough skill and showboating on the art side to turn every panel into something worthy of consideration -- not epics or sagas as much as collections of little blasts, a funny line there, a clever reference here, a neat composition in that panel, a color-process trick in this one, a string of pearls that manages to never let you down. McCarthy's past two shorts have both come close to this ideal place, but fallen a little far with scripts that left enough space for delectable psychedelic freakouts but not proper conclusions. With "Man of God", though, he finally gets there, incorporating his disorienting visual stylisms into straight storytelling and producing his strongest, most focused art since returning to comics. Though there are few things in the medium like seeing McCarthy go off the chain with his signature brand of post-everything technicolor madness, he gets further here by directing attention first to the story's cleverer nuances and his formidable drawing ability (something that hasn't always been as apparent as it could be in the past few months), and only then slapping down the chromas with his usual vengeance.



"Man of God" is an odd little story, kinda puked up from the depths of Marvel banality -- a Stan'n'Jack rehash drawn by an old master who hasn't worked in years from a script by a dude off "The Daily Show" -- but hell if Stan Lee wasn't a hack whose greatest success had come out of "Monsters to Laugh With" and Jack Kirby wasn't a broke has-been when they started off on their big adventure, and hell if a team like McCarthy and Elliott Kalan can't make a great comic with a little trying. Surprisingly for Marvel, surprisingly for a TV writer, surprisingly for a third-rate superhero anthology, Kalan's script is quite good, maybe even outright laudable. It's yet another entry in not one but two of the most annoying categories of comics, namely Lee/Kirby plot rehashes and stories about reg'lar folks whose lives conspire to bump them into superhero plotlines, but for all that it keeps its feet. There's fertile ground to be mined in both of those wastelands if someone talented digs deep enough, and Kalan shoulders the load with aplomb, giving us characters instead of ciphers (or, funny ciphers instead of bland ones when neccesary), writing dialogue that accomplishes more in a page than the average Brian-Michael Bendis does in a storyarc, and weaving a plot whose simplicity only adds to its glacial power.

"Man of God" is the story of one of the Inuit fishermen who discover Captain America's body floating in a slab of Alaskan ice after his death in Nazi-smashing action, but it's so much more than that. The fisherman's tribe end up worshipping the frozen, glorious figure as a god, and the fisherman himself keeps the faith up to this day and the Super Soldier's second miraculous resurrection from death, prompting a hugely interesting subtext about the way comic book fans "worship" their heroes. "My god isn't named Steve!" yells the fisherman's modernized, post-tribal grandson, and the script isn't afraid to acknowledge the absurdity inherent in the fervent belief fandom uses to make these characters so real. But the fisherman counters with a question: "So your god can come back from the dead, but mine can't?" Later, after recounting the tale of how Captain America's presence spurred him to a heroic deed of his own, he muses to an action-figure fetish: "He made me a better man. That is all the god I need." It's a head-on look at the modern fanboy trend of casting superhero stories as modern mythology, going over the idea's case with a mixture of brutal honesty and warm compassion. The ending's ambiguous, as these things so often are, but that's perfect, really -- how authoritative an answer can we expect about whether or not it's a good idea to worship a Captain America doll? Regardless, it's deep and ambitious and genuinely thought-provoking, which is so much more than expected, so much more than comes along but once in a blue moon. It's a vastly entertaining story that asks big deep questions about life, death, and the beyond; same as the best work of Clowes, Schulz, basically anyone else you care to mention.

Is it that good? Guess not. But it certainly looks better than anything else that's hit the stands in a long while. Since returning to comics, McCarthy's definitely been building to something, paring his linework down while taking bigger and bigger chances with his colors and incorporating an ever-increasing amount of digital graphics. On this issue's glossy paper his "new look" finally comes fully formed, a thick, craggy line carving up the pages with incredible grace, sepia-tone inkwashes pushing the flashbacks into an unrestrained mythological realm, acrobatic use of computer effects, and the warrior strength of Pacific Northwestern motifs standing stoically behind the panels. The framing gets downright defiant, packing metric tons of dreamlike McCarthy weirdness into slick, snappy '60s-Marvel action layouts, and the shifts between illustrative and cartoon drawing come fast and furious, snapping the tone from the laugh-out-loud family drama of present-day Inuit Alaska to the freezing, stentorian grandeur of Captain America's glacier years. The closest relative to this stuff is the stiff, Eastern European, engraved-looking art of Marvel Bullpen also-rans like Don Heck and Dick Ayers, but the color lava, the stylistic switch-ups, the maximalism and poise of McCarthy's style give it so much more. It's got everything form Jamie Hewlett to Kyle Baker to Joe Kubert in its brazen pen scratches and wide-open solid blacks, and it delivers on every emotional beat and moment of archaic wonder in Kalan's script.



But more than simply serving the story, McCarthy creates great moments all by himself. "Let's go outside" is a line that gets you excited about turning the page when there's a purple and orange snowstorm raging over the Alaskan ghetto, throwing huge gusts of digital flash and blue-scarlet snowflakes in our eyes. It's a joy to watch the deep ink washes of the flashback story go from muddy brown to pure gold as the Star-Spangled Avenger's presence kindles the dormant heroism in our fisherman, or to notice how deftly McCarthy frames the glow of a saffron headlight through the indigo night as it illuminates a squabbling family. There's a fanboy thrill in seeing McCarthy's poppy, post-Kirby versions of Iron Man and Goliath or his bestial Sub-Mariner (complete with a dull digital halo to set off his perceived status as an angelic messenger from the "ice-man-god". And his Captain America, despite spending the entire story frozen in a see-through tomb, steals the show with a near-mystical beauty and a transformative power radiating from his ancient eyes. This is superhero comics elevated the only way they can be -- by their art, to the absolute height of action slam and drama, no chance untaken, no moment under-represented, nothing taken for granted, everything drawn onto the page with teakwood solidity and saltwater splash, everything looking glorious, heroic.

And yet at the end of the day this is just another Captain America story, retelling what's got to be one of the two most retold Captain America stories of all time. It doesn't push formal boundaries very far, it doesn't transgress in any "meaningful" ways, and it all ends up happy and right in the end. The fact that it turns those things into strengths is probably rather unlikely to endear it to a legion of superhero fans with no aesthetic sense who've "seen it before", and another legion of alt-comics fans with a problem with hero books who "need more from their comics". Unlike the great comics that get recognized as great right off the bat, you have to come to this story -- it isn't going to come to you. But like every great comic, everything that's worth the reading and the contemplating and the seeking out at any cost, it looks beautiful and it has something to say. I always want more, and plenty of days I feel like I've read enough to have seen it all before, but "Man of God" is a stunning, masterful piece of comics art, and to deny it is to deny the greatness of small wonders, the magic that can come along without our even noticing. Only in comics? I don't know, but you can find it here, you can be a part of it here, maybe even off a newsstand.

RandomRecentReadsRiffing

Words on the past few comic-things I've read, one of which is a new release; my favorite picture from each is included.

The Bulletproof Coffin #3, by Shaky Kane and David Hine. Image.

This issue actually came as a pretty big surprise, a grand guignol action blowup in the middle of what's been some very terse, suspenseful roaming through atmospherics and weirdo autocritique. That's not to say it isn't still incredible stuff: three issues of the same thing gets to feel familiar, and that word is not in Bulletproof Coffin's vocabulary. So instead of the haunting imagery and deep-impact what-is-reality scrabbling, we get a nasty violence comic that smears Shaky Kane's kool-aid colored, Kirby-on-PCP artwork across page after bludgeoning page. You know what happens in this comic? First a dude in an insect costume drives a spike-wheeled tank the size of a building across a landscape of ruined temples, hooks dragging behind it and digging up corpses and old comic books. Then a hot girl in an animal-skin bikini escapes from a pretty intense bondage scene to fight blue and pink dinosaurs before being zapped through time to witness the post-apocalyptic wasteland Earth has become. You think that part's only a comic book, but then the girl shows up in the real world and helps the insect-costume man fight more dinosaurs, plus a platoon of zombie Vietnam vets.

It's a total rush, Hine's narrative zipping in and out of the comic-within-the-comic without a moment's pause, Kane's art and colors finally going buck wild on some fantasy action after two issues wearing the shades of reality. This is still massively audacious, devil-may-care material -- there's the frenetic overkill of the fight scenes and the Burroughs cut-ups Hine screams into on the last splash page -- but just as brave is the utter joy in letting go this early in the series, the confidence that two issues is sufficient to get readers familiar enough with the comic's world and meta-levels that issue three can spread a noise-rock adrenaline burst across all of it. (It works perfectly, of course.) Much as Bulletproof Coffin's pastiche-ing of Silver Age comics is designed to evoke a simpler, better time for the superhero genre, its creators' confidence in the material and their total abandon in its execution is what really brings this book in line with the best of Kirby, Swan, Steranko, and the rest. This is hero comics the way they're always trying to be: classic but modern, universal but individual, dumb but smart, never for a second predictable. And much as Marvel and DC's commendable failures are interesting to read for all that trying, Bulletproof Coffin wades into the deep end, turns up the volume, and just does. Best panel:


(I also said stuff about this book on Newsarama.)

Wowee Zonk #2, by various. Self-published.

This is the second most recent issue of the Canadian art-comix anthology Wowee Zonk, which trades in clear, hyper-simplified cartooning, lowbrow humor, and disorienting psychedelia. As with all anthologies the quality of the contributions varies, leaving it to make or break on the overall tone it hits. In that respect it's pretty great, with the prevailing feeling being one of really talented people getting together to have some fun. The stories are all more or less insubstantial, with an emphasis on stretching formal boundaries over creating straightforward narratives, scenes kind of popping up out of nowhere rather than crafted into being. That's not a bad thing, though, when the art looks this good. There's plenty of fun to be had from squirming through the layout mazes and traps the contributors set for their unsuspecting readers, or just letting it happen and glorying in deep black lines on newsprint. Of note, as always, is Michael DeForge's story, which goes way deeper into formalism than his higher-profile stuff, raining a sea of muck down onto copies of the same page until it gags with the thick viscosity of his best work. But the showstopper here is Chris Kuzma, whose silent, haunting story of environmental exploration, hardcore sex, and impossible love beams in harder and harder on one visual motif until we're left with a sea of sensuous linework floating across the page, cut off from meaning, into the void. It's excellent stuff, worth the price of admission by itself. Best panel:



In The Studio: Visits With Contemporary Cartoonists, by Todd Hignite. Yale University Press.

A thick compendium of interviews with the leading lights of modern alt-comics (Clowes, Crumb, Ware, Panter, et al) In The Studio occupies a pretty unique space. It reads like it's trying to be the kind of boring, overly academic book that gets written about these creators with ever-increasing frequency, but it can't help turning into something way better, with every artist interviewed foregoing highfalutin' chatter in favor of rhapsodies on the theme of why they love comics. Compiler and interviewer Todd Hignite (editor of the late lamented Comic Art magazine, from which some of the book's interviews are drawn) opens each segment with a mind-numbingly eggheaded introduction to an artist and their work, but vindicates himself with the quality of the monologues he draws from his subjects. Gary Panter gets to the heart of his creative process while praising "the guy who drew Tarzan real chunky" (Jesse Marsh), while Dan Clowes shows off bits of the '60s pop-cultural detritus that spawned him, taking time out to present some killer Otto Soglow art. Massively entertaining and just as rewarding, this book is a weird object lesson: no matter how much the great ones are drawn elsewhere (film, fine art, music, academics), it always comes back to comics.

But "comics" is a broad thing, and the most fascinating part of this book is seeing the artists' shared influences popping up over and over again, for the most part totally independent of one another. It gets a little obvious once the book's younger creators start talking about the older ones (Ware on Crumb's work, for example), but the commonality of influence among the artists who were born before the undergrounds took off is striking to say the least. The obvious touchstones like Herriman and Schulz get praised up and down, of course -- but Chester Gould gets multiple mentions too, and so does the pre-reprint boom Marsh, and John Stanley. This book more than any other I've seen draws pointers to the genesis of alternative comics: the workings of brilliant minds who saw the little weirdnesses lurking in the corners of the mainstream and cobbled them together into one big weirdness, a whole new way of doing the thing. If you want to understand influence in the comics medium, I'd go with this book above anything else. And if you want to get inspired to draw something or write something or just read something, this is pretty good for that, too. As love letters to the medium go, In The Studio is rather odd, but top notch all the way. Best panel (OK, it's not a panel but a Gary Panter art piece, you wanna see it or not? NSFW):

Your Monday Panel 26

Thor #162 (1969), page 18 panel 1. Drawn by Jack Kirby.


I know I mentioned a while ago that I was trying to avoid what seem like the three most obvious talking points for a comics blog, namely Chris Ware, Alan Moore, and Jack Kirby. Nothing against those guys; in fact I enjoy all of them quite a bit. It's just that there are far brighter lights shone on them than what I can provide, while there aren't a whole lot of people burning through their hours writing about obscure Jim Steranko shorts or Italian sex comics. But you know what? I was reading some Kirby the other day, and damn if it didn't make me want to say things about it. That right there might be the most important, lasting aspect of Kirby's art -- it overpowers you. It makes faux-intellectual hipster skum like me write articles on it, it turns on the dormant obsessive-collecting gene in people who have one, it attracts and repels non-comics readers in equal measure, but always with magnetic force, and hell, it inspired some hacks in the '60s and '70s to make a whole multimedia empire about it.

In the tunnel of serious comics fandom (and if you're reading this blog, you're in it, playboy) it can get kind of hard to sort out what "really matters", like there are intense conversations going on about whether the Dark Horse Tarzan reprints kept enough of the original benday dots et cetera. But here's a clue: just think of how many of those apocryphal, exhaustive conversations, god bless 'em, revolve around Kirby, like flaming asteroids orbiting a massive planet. Warren Ellis spent a year riffing on other people's drawings of Superman heads over Kirby figures. The conversation about whether or not Vince Coletta's inks served Kirby's pencils, and to what degree, is older than most of the people taking part in it. There's a medium's worth of thought about this one creator and his work, which ought to tell us something. Writ large: Kirby's art matters. Like it or not, the shapes and trails that bled out of his graphite are foundation stones of the comics medium, mortared in by the massive amount of work that's taken up direct from where he left off.

So why have so many followed Kirby? There's no one easy answer, there are more like ten of them. But given that it's Monday and I'm in art-analyzer mode, I'll talk about the shorthand. It's pretty easy to look over a few pages and see Kirby's impact on the language of superhero comics. The foreshortening codes for deep focus, the dot crackles are pure raw energy, the zigzags are high-gloss reflective metallics, the light trails are blinding speed... we know these things. (There's a point to be made about how Kirby's art depicted events and phenomena that weren't really big parts of hero comics before he drew them, about how he not only perfected a language, but invented large swaths of it, but I digress.) Kirby not only refined the kinetic essence of action comics down to a few motifs, he picked motifs that got right to the point, perfectly communicating abstract concepts that most other media don't even begin to traffic in without having to explain a thing. If you ever read a long run of Kirby/Stan Lee comics, you can see Lee's expository narrative captions fade into the background and eventually disappear almost entirely as the shorthand reaches its zenith. At a certain point around '64, '65, we don't need to be told that the pulsing waves of sheer force are gathering around the hapless figure of the -- we can just see it happening, drawn in a manner that leaves no room for question and no time for explanation.

That's why I find this panel so interesting: past 1968 or so, Lee/Kirby comics stop being as good, with Lee increasingly distracted, overworked, uninterested, whatever, and Kirby sort of looking past the material he was drawing to the richer pastures of his Fourth World epic. At this point the stories start to stretch an issue's worth of plot into two or three, the splash pages get more frequent, the grids use less panels, and everything generally spreads a lot thinner. As a reading experience, the books rarely reach their mid-decade heights again, but this is, after all, comics, and if you only want a reading experience they have this shit called "books". No, the reason to read late-'60s Kirby is the pictures, which left subtlety behind and reached a height of bombast, pomp and circumstance, pure alien grandeur as the plots slowly leeched out of them. By '69 Kirby was in his last stretch of months at Marvel, and there were no more Galactus Sagas to be drawn. He was basically filling up the pages with his shorthand, getting by on increased stylization and upping the visual punch to compensate for a lack of substance. And you started getting panels like this one.

If you've read the comic it comes from, you probably know what this panel depicts, but if you forget or if you haven't see it before, take a look and feel the uncertainty. What's in this picture, exactly? It's a completely pure example of Kirby's stylistic riffing, a frame devoted only to the chaotic dot clusters that bear his name. ("Kirby krackle", ya heard?) What's so interesting to me about it is that unlike the mass of other Kirby panels that show this same scene, a figure swallowed up in pulsating energy, this one isn't immediately apprehensible. The colors do their bit to help, but in the end you have to know what character is at the center of that devastation to really pick it out. That's Galactus, with his big crest-hat thing and his fists clenched, in kind of a two-shot profile view. But it takes you a second to see it, and as such the immediate reality of this picture is one of style over content, Kirby's increasingly masterful shorthand finally breaking out and taking precedence over the increasingly uninteresting story material he was drawing. A seething swarm of furiously spotted blacks coalesces into a near-random assortment of shapes. Screaming benday tones cover everything in a blanket of acidic heat. An urgent, noncommittal word balloon testifies to nothing but this single moment's power. A world cracks. An artist moves past his art, into unadorned expression. Kirby's art, which always strove toward purity, fullness, a whole universe between the panel borders, peaks. It's as much of comics as you can fit in one panel, the frame almost bowing outward with its fury.

This Is My Favorite Superman Story

"The Last Days of Superman", by Curt Swan, George Klein, and Edmond Hamilton. From Superman #156 (1962), as reprinted in Superman in the Sixties (1999). DC.

Here are some reasons why.


- BECAUSE Shaky Kane was totally right. In the interview I did with him a while back, plug plug, he extolled the virtues of Curt Swan's recolored, computer-sharpened art in the Superman: Bottle City of Kandor collection. Recoloring old comics is something a lot of purists, myself included, balk at -- but I've got to say, Curt Swan's stuff is the exception to the rule. It's so brilliantly drawn, saying so much with the precision and the smallest little lines, that the buoyant essence of it can get lost underneath the waves of newsprint grain and benday dots that old comics printed with. I mean, I have a bunch of old Swan issues and they look great, but seeing his work on white matte paper, every millimeter of linework perfectly on-register, in a setting where the color purple doesn't look like a laborious undertaking and you can get effects like the "ominous red splendor" of the sunset above? I've got to say it feels like the way this art was meant to be seen, the highest expression of what Swan was trying to do. (It also definitely helps that DC prints on matte as opposed to glossy, and that their color reconstruction is generally miles above any other company's.)



- BECAUSE the real stuff isn't in the repro, it's in the art itself. This is the best-drawn Swan comic I guess I've seen, and considering the standard of utter dream-level quality that guy set in his Weisinger Superman work, coming from me a McCay comparison would be lesser praise. Swan more than any other hero artist is the man who could draw anything: he fills his city scenes with an unmatched mixture of jumble and vacant space, his landscapes move from Antarctic friezes to painted deserts without losing anything on the way, and his glorious, classical figures wear faces that display as full a range of human emotion as any comic, superhero or not, has achieved to date. Swan creates the most tangible world of any of the great Silver Age artists, one that differs from ours only by degrees -- the holding lines around things and the wonderful things that happen in it. Every element of this most fantastic of Superman stories (time travel, space viruses, re-terraformation of multiple planets, more heroes than you can count) is grounded in the dappled, slightly idealized reality Swan gives his panels. Perry White is a paunchy man in bad suits, but he's got the face of your kindest uncle. Lois Lane and Lana Lang have none of the faux-sexy accoutrements of typical comics girls; they're just drawn as beautiful women. Even the most ridiculous elements, the flying midgets with heat vision and the lightspeed construction of iron pyramids, are worked through with Swan's methodical, emotion-tinted vision, presented with no artifice or apology, made to look like something that really happened in a reality not too different from our own.

That's not to say that this comic is bland or visually boring, however -- quite the opposite. Swan's look-it-in-the-eye approach to material that only the wildest dreams are made of doesn't just give this comic conviction, it casts a proto-Chris Ware surrealistic aura over every panel. Superman lies in a lead-glass coffin in the middle of the desert waiting to die as he weakly gives final orders to a squadron of his robot duplicates, and damn if it doesn't look exactly like that's what's happening. Swan's style is no style; he's a gifted cartoon illustrator whose portrayal of things as they are brings his comics to vivid life in a way that Kirby's crackle or Infantino's design sense never could for theirs. What's more, Swan's compositions are almost totally unique among the Silver Age greats for their lack of filmic techniques. These are comic book panels as pure comics, dynamic, dramatic single images that bleed right to the borders and always lead you into the next one. And lest anyone harbor the impression that Swan is a stranger to atmospherics or the "big image", he takes panel after panel of this comic to to give us the most indelible pictures of Superman the 20th century produced. The tautly pitched story of the perfect man going up against death by the Kryptonian "Virus-X" brings out the Ingmar Bergman drama in Swan here...



... the Bernie Krigstein high-intensity portraiture in him here...



... and his Mad Magazine satirical side here.



It's the equivalent of a virtuoso director working with top-notch actors in film: Swan finds the big comicky moments, the flowing wells of emotion, and the feel of reality, and puts it on the pages all at once. Sometimes it's there in the script too, sometimes he draws it from thin air, but it's always palpable. Curt Swan art makes the impossible seem possible, not by bringing it down to street level or dirtying it up with grit, but by reminding us -- with the twitch of a muscle in Superman's face, a flick of Saturn Girl's hair, those tiny little lines he draws that always make a difference -- that in his world even the gods are human. And despite the high focus, the confidence and the precision of every perfectly-composed panel, the lack of explicit stylisms instills it with a palpable calm, a reverent hush where most hero comics of the same era had a screaming core. It's comics with a slowly beating heart, a sense of serenity and peace. Superman never fights anyone when Swan's drawing it, and the thought balloons come as often as the dialogue. Swan's Superman can most often be seen head down, shoulder to axle, working on the next world-saving idea -- as good and personal a metaphor for the uncredited artist-as-producer role Swan filled as can be found in his era's genre comics.



- BECAUSE a major plot point of this comic hinges on a telepathic mermaid princess's ability to read a dog's mind.



- BECAUSE the other best Superman story saw this one in all its grandeur and decided to imitate it rather than attempt to top it. Yes, All Star Superman (still the best Superman book of the current millennium, don't worry) takes this issue more than any other as its jumping-off point. There's the overarching plot, of course, with Superman up against a fixed amount of time before he perishes, but it goes a lot deeper yet. We've got super-labors to be completed before the great man's passing, pushing the narrative forward with the exact same device Grant Morrison took up to power his own almost half a century later, not to mention little things like prominent use of Superman-inspired heroes from the future, an appearance from the Superman Emergency Squad, and even the genesis of the writing-on-the-moon trick that Jimmy Olsen employs in All Star #4. Maybe this is the only Superman story worth telling, or one of a few anyway: the man who can't be beat up against all life's final enemy. Both times, decades apart, the answer's the same. Superman can never die. We knew that already, but of all the messages for one of his comics to leave you with, I think that's a good one.



- BECAUSE Brendan McCarthy used that panel in the best part of his Solo issue.



- BECAUSE this comic is a shining example of the iconic, timeless approach DC used to make their comics in the Silver Age. Chain the very best artists to the big characters for a few years until they develop an entire visual world for the property, and then get writers who recognize the importance of idea over story in superhero comics. This is one of those Silver Age books, one of the ones people who find the genre juvenile are bound to mock for its lightspeed conceptualizing, its glorying in the purity of what it is, but if you aren't too grown up to want some heroes in your life, this is the real thing. Writer Edmond Hamilton packs everything that makes the Superman mythos great into these 23 pages -- the Legion of Superheroes, Braniac, Kandor, Supergirl, Krypto the Superdog, Atlantis, the Daily Planet, Smallville, Batman and Robin, the Phantom Zone -- each element of the greatest story ever told gets time to shine in more or less definitive portrayals. If there was only one Superman comic, it would be this one, which takes up every aspect of the grand tapestry that is Superman, strips it down to the essentials, and feeds it through the hands of the best artist ever to draw the character. It's an entire universe in one go, an artifact that distills the power of all the thousand other Superman stories into a surging core.

More than that, though, this comic absolutely boils forward, tossing off world-beater ideas at an unparalleled pace. One page: the Legion travels back in time to attend their mentor on his deathbed, while the Superman robots dig massive irrigation canals in the Earth's deserts, transforming them "to look, form space, like Mars!" Next page: Supergirl flies out into the cosmos to smash together two uninhabited planets that will someday collide with Earth. Page after that: the Legion and Krypto construct a massive electrically-charged pyramid to dispel a space-borne cloud of fungus that, yes, will in the future be a menace to our planet. It's all so big, so epic, and yet Hamilton keeps in coming rapid fire for every page of the comic, turning even the most gargantuan cosmic threats into everyday occurrences for our heroes. This comic isn't awed at its own splendor, it's just a workmanlike journey through a truly fantastic environment, one where things happen big and fast and furious.

There's a pure joy to reading material like this for the craziness and the benzedrine pace alone, but when the writer's on his game enough to swing the clusters of ideas and one-liners into a richly dramatic narrative that unfolds, flows, thunders instead of just happening, it can be so special. It's pretty easy to read 99 Silver Age superhero stories and come to the conclusion that the barometer of quality just isn't too wide on this stuff, that there isn't much space between the aggressively good and the dreadfully bad. But there's always the one in a hundred, the one like this that shows some real love and inspiration, the one that stands outside its silly subset, a proud entry not just in the annals of "cool hero books" or "Superman episodes", but of comic book stories in general.

In the time that's passed since this comic first came out, a multi-million dollar industry has built itself around doling out in tiny chunks what Hamilton just shotgunned onto every page. This is breathless, no-holds-barred superhero world-building and world-exploiting on a scale that I don't think we'll ever see again. It's giddy, dizzying, so much content passing through a single pamphlet-length story, but man, if they still made them like this we wouldn't need so many graphic novels. This is not just a full story in one comic, it's an Olympian, futuristic epic that for once lives up to the superhero-ballyhoo catchphrase of "modern mythology". Everything that could possibly come to pass in this issue does, and at the end there's no way to feel but overwhelmed. The quality of the pulpy subject matter is open to debate (it's aces in my opinion), but there's no denying that taken for what it is, this comic is a masterwork.



- BECAUSE this is the issue where what we've always suspected gets confirmed: yes, Lois and Lana know Clark is really Superman; they just want him to trust them enough to admit it. As a corny, "seeya next time" ending, this one's head and shoulders above all the others. Just like this whole comic is.

"WATCHMECOMIX"

For no reason other than the fact that I always really like to look at stuff like this from other artists, here's my process for this comic.



1: Color guide. I draw some really light, basic pencil shapes in a small sketchbook, figure out my panel compositions (which, as you can see, often change between here and the final product), and then go over it with crayons or whatever else is handy. I spot blacks first on both the color guide and the page itself -- it helps me figure out how much or how little color I need, what choices I should make regarding the overall page design, et cetera.



2: Penciled page. I always draw and ink the panel borders first, just so I know exactly what I've got to work with. Even on my Gwen Stacy comic, which didn't have any panel borders, I drew them in with really heavy pencil and then erased them when the pages were finished. I typically pencil pretty light because I'm always erasing when I mess up or change things. You can tell how many tries it took me to get any one part of the drawing right from how dark the pencil marks are, like in the first panel the car is barely there and the girl is way more substantial since it took me so many lines to get her right. I press harder and harder every time I redraw a line, I guess out of some weird mixture of increasing certainty and frustration. I also always draw faces really hard, though I need to stop because they're tough to get right on the first time and nothing looks worse than a bunch of visible erasures over a face. Oh well.



3: Inked page. Like I said, I spot the solid blacks first with a big heavy C marker, get the basic shapes and contrasts in place before I go any further. So on this page that's stuff like the car, the black parts of the color-tunnel thing, Nixon's silhouette, and so forth. If the page looks too white before I start the linework, I try to use a heavier line and add more blacks. If it looks too black I see if I can shave any of the shapes down a little with wite-out, and draw with a thinner pen and less holding lines. How a page looks in black and white can make me reconsider my color scheme too, like from here I decided there should be a greater number of colors in some panels than were on my guide, hoping it would balance out the blacks.

Then I ink the linework, which is pretty self-explanatory. A lot of the time I try to "true up" a bad pencil drawing in ink rather than erase and do another pencil version because I like the spontaneity the lines have when you haven't drawn the same shape too many times. It's usually a worthwhile sacrifice for me to get a more handmade look on the ink lines over more polish on the drawing. Lettering always comes last, so I can adjust the size and shape of the balloons to what I drew. I never write out a script or anything, so the actual words on the page aren't fixed until I take the pen and put them down. I'll also have to adjust the dialogue to fit in the panels sometimes, otherwise I can get way too wordy and cover up all the art.



4: And once again, the final colored page. I color directly onto the art, usually with some combination of pens, markers, wite-out, and paint. Usually Sharpies are my main medium, but I used highlighters on this page for a little extra pop (which totally failed to show up once I scanned it, but it looks sick in person). If I have any images to paste onto the page, I do that last of all, after I've put down the colors that are going to go around it. I used the Lou Gehrig photo on this page mostly because I saw it it the New York Times the other day and thought it was the most beautiful picture I'd ever seen, that it deserved to be enshrined somehow. There's also the fact that this particular comic came to me in a dream and I could only remember two of the nine panels when I woke up (namely 3 and 8), so I was stuck for compositions. But also, the book that inspired WATCHMECOMIX was about destroying your idols, and when I was a boy the only person I held higher than Superman was Lou Gehrig. So I ripped up his beautiful photo and cut holes in it and stuck it to a comic book page, the end.

Through The Jungle: Jesse Marsh Review

I dug in deep to the sixth volume of Jesse Marsh's collected Tarzan comics over at Newsarama (down the page a bit), coming up with a short but sweet couple of hosannas to its name. It starts like this:

At this point our Golden Age of Reprints has more or less exhausted its original function of reintroducing acknowledged masterpieces to today’s audiences. That isn’t to say the quality of the treasures being dug up from the bins and the paper shows is flagging, merely that after a good decade of gorgeously reconstructed hits from yesteryear, we’ve moved into Phase 2: equally important, and with greater potential to take readers by surprise. Read More

Your Monday Panel 25

Mesmo Delivery (2008), page 24 panel 1. Drawn by Rafael Grampa.


The comics career of Rafael Grampa is incredibly exciting for a bunch of reasons. First and most obvious, dude makes really good comics and it's nice to have another talented artist in the ranks. Second, he's one of a crop of new creators who've bypassed the rigid genre forms that have restricted the comics form for so long. His sole major work to date, the feature-length Mesmo Delivery, hits you first with frothing blood 'n' guts 'n' urine, native to the depraved side of underground comix, but it's no less puffed up by the pop hyperbole of shonen manga and the high-craft kinetics of mainstream superheroes. What really gets me about Grampa, though, and I'd guess I'm not alone in this, is that he comes from a comics tradition that's very much outside our own, one that we haven't seen too much of in the States -- one we can't know what to expect from yet. He's from Brazil, a country which boasts its fair share of popular American-industry artists, but not one that's really been "revealed" to us yet. Ivan Reis and his countrymen mainly draw superheroes like Jim Lee meets Dave Gibbons, and while that works it's doesn't get your knuckles white like seeing some foreigner taking a cockeyed look at things and then singlehandedly reassembling the comics grammar we're used to.

Yeah, Grampa -- his stuff hits like an atom bomb, rude and loud and sweaty, full of the banging rhythm that only comics can hope for. The guy's a brilliant artist, as even a cursory glance up top will attest: his eye for composition, honed by time in the animation trenches, is formidable, packing a massive amount of information into the panel without crowding anything and managing to keep each visual element crisp and distinct, perfectly readable. What strikes you as a barnstorming moment of insane confusion, figures sloppy with body language and all squashed together, reveals a deep consideration once you pick it apart a little. This panel is full of action and reaction, taking in a big gulp of time rather than just freezing the frame. We get the yawning arc of the roundhouse swing in the speed lines behind the fist; the point-of-impact crush 'n' splat in gut churning hi-contrast detail; and then the stunned reactions on the faces of the witnesses. And the drawing itself keeps up the act, with hog-wild Wolverton/Jack Cole bigfoot cartooning gone over with the finest and most meticulous of pen lines, pulling a nauseating amount of greasy detail from the figures and making that popped face really scream. It's a bizarre, visceral meld, not illustration and cartooning but cartooning and cartooning, two split-off branches of the same trunk lashed back together with blood vessels and electrical tape.

But as good as the drawing is, it's equally interesting to dig through what's behind it. First and most obvious is the truly grody subject matter: we see guys who look more or less like this hitting each other a lot in comics, but it's never been this way before. I can't help but see this panel as a punky nod to Jack Kirby and his ilk, artists who drew this same picture a million times but never dared to go into its consequences, stopping short of blood and bits of brain with starbursts and impact lines. This, Grampa tells us, is what comic book violence really looks like, this is what a Kirby-muscled man swinging full tilt can do to the human body. Not only does it slap pretty much every tame fight comic in history across the face with an unanswered gauntlet, it finally brings the grit, the wild overstatement and battering force of comics into the action itself, stamping an exclamation point onto something so many cartoonists have failed to actually cartoon: a dude punching somebody smack in the face.

And none of this is even to mention the bravura formal elements of the panel. Letterer Rafa Coutinho is every bit the master of his craft that Grampa is, and the two work in a perfect tandem here that no American action comic since the advent of computer lettering has been able to touch. The innard-red, Western-movie SPLAT in the top right corner is what draws the eye, for sure, but Coutinho really gets into it, dropping the BAM of the fist's initial contact with the face in behind it in a cool white that makes the red pop even harder. Then there's the loosely scrawled WHOOSH hidden behind the barreling arm, acting almost as a second set of speed lines, and the twin AAAHs in orange to add a final element of chaos to the frame. Just as well-considered is the sickly shade of yellow underlying everything, a far more effective and individual choice than the typical red or white of impact, and one that also gets at the pit-of-the-stomach disaster in the moment. And through all the innovation, Grampa uses the old forms like a pro. Speed lines, blood plewds, sweat droplets, dust kicked up by boots: it's all so alive with energy, but just as clearly marked with Grampa's unmistakable style as everything else in the panel.

A final note: there's an in-story reason why the ducking-down guy's one fist is bigger than his head, but one of the most important facets of good comics is that sometimes artists make up reasons to draw awesim shit. So don't even worry about it.

Another Odyssey

Or: hey, remember when I used to write actual reviews of actual comics on this site? That was cool.

Ulysses volume 1, by Georges Pichard, Jacques Lob, and um, Homer. Heavy Metal Classics.



Whether you like it or not, the superheroes are here to stay. The shadow cast over the American comics medium by guys in capes and gals in leotards is so all-encompassing that a vast majority of today's talent comes in carrying the genre's influence in some way or another. So all-encompassing, in fact, that that last statement doesn't even sound strange to us; but can you imagine if every single new writer came in with a nouveau roman influence, or all the young moviemakers had watched only Hammer horror movies in their lifetimes? The preponderance of that one kind of story in our country's version of the art form has produced a lot of greatness, a lot of mediocrity, and a lot of outright terrible work, but most importantly it's led to a severely weird public profile for American comics -- one in which the medium can't "normalize" or "mainstreamize" itself very successfully because most of its best and brightest lights have spent at least some time with Batman or Rom Spaceknight, whether in jest or for the paycheck or driven to it by real passion.

But, but, but! Cross the border, take a plane ride, go to the beach and dig a hole to Japan, and it's a whole different ballgame. In pretty much every other significant comics tradition in the world, the superhero, if he exists at all, is recognized for what he really represents: a fairly minor if incredibly charming genre. Though manga has produced a fair amount of classic material that moves and talks like hero comics even if it doesn't quite work the same, the other major comics tradition (over in France and Belgium) has only dabbled in the genre, and without producing much of interest. That's not to say they don't have heroic fantasy over there, far from it. But where American comics bit into the longjohned men like a weaning toddler into a mother's teat and refused to let go, the Francophone comics world traffics in other hackneyed cliches for its genre material: barbarians, space, utopian sci-fi, westerns. And perhaps it's just cause I'm a filthy American fanboy who thinks any comic can be improved by slapping a domino mask onto it, but for me France's general denial of the US form's combination cash cow/genius repository makes it even more interesting when one of that country's great artists decides to take the genre, its tropes, and its silly little contradictions head on.

Which, man that took me a while, which brings me to Ulysses.



There's this very rarefied strand of Silver Age-era Eurocomics that always strikes me as dialoguing pretty closely with contemporary American comics. Guido Crepax on early Valentina laid out a blueprint that Jim Steranko swiped more or less wholesale for his SHIELD, while Moebius stretched from Caniff on Blueberry to Crumb and Corben on his early fantasy shorts and Hugo Pratt took up the midcentury "adventuring globetrotter" template from the Yankee papers, stoking it to a fever pitch with Corto Maltese. But... Crumb, Steranko, sure... but you know who else was drawing comics back in those days, and reaching the peak of his individuality when Pichard set croquille to paper on Ulysses? KIRBY.

Jack Kirby, to my eyes, hasn't been absorbed by the Continental tradition as thoroughly as a lot of other American cartoonists who are much less influential back here have. Judging from my totally superficial reading of what Euro stuff I can scrounge up, as well as the grand total of like seven European comics shops I've been inside, the big heroes over there are either the classic strip illustrators (Foster, Raymond, Caniff), the EC guys (Wood, Kurtzman, Frazetta), and the undergrounders (Crumb, Irons, Shelton, more Crumb). Kirby -- the keystone, the spine of American genre comics -- doesn't seem to come into it that much. But I don't know; I mean, the French were looking at superhero comics in '74, at least I go to think Moebius and probably Phillipe Druillet were, and there had to be some Kirbys in there somewhere. Because Pichard, whose usual mode is more like this (warning, may offend), to indulge in such intense Kirbyisms as those above and the one below, seems way more than just a coincidence.



But though I could pick apart the chain of influence all day, the real clue to Ulysses' genesis in American heroism lies in its subject matter. This comic is like a tres-French rehash of Kirby's Thor, mixing a fairly linear adapation of the Homeric title myth with as much technofied super-god intervention as possible. Scripter Lob puts Stan Lee-awesome hero detritus (V-16 jet engines, flying saucers, robotic cyclopes) to every facet of the original story he possibly can, with impressive results: he does quite well at whipping the Odyssey into a nicely considered, if slightly cracked, version of the superhero formula. The Greek pantheon watches Ulysses struggle through the Mediterranean from a steel-coated, dangerously reflective Olympus, peering down at Earth with their massive, cutting-edge home theater setup, looking for all the world like one of those issues where the Avengers review tapes of their previous adventures. Hermes has got a Jay Garrick Flash costume going, Poseidon looks like a clankier Black Manta, and and Hephaestus seems to have purloined the Mk. I Iron Man armor (though all the goddesses' scanty costumes are something else again). This stuff could quite easily read as uproariously funny, but it's all played totally straight, putting on a kids-comics naivete with Pichard's American stylisms. Just like our superheroes, it's serious because there's no other way for it to be and still matter.



So yeah, this is superhero comics. It's got metafiction (Homer himself climbs aboard Ulysses' ship to share the journey home and work on his manuscript) and sex (Pichard is completely unable to contain himself once Circe starts turning men into pigs), but by and large the core of this book is stripped-down Kirbyist adventure, bigger monsters to fight and crazier pictures to draw at every turn. As such Pichard is what powers this comic, the script only as important as the images it bring out of his pen. In that respect it's quite impressive, taking a fairly significant step back from the artist's usual fleshy, stippled torture-porn and into something that owes equal amounts to Kirby and ancient Greek pottery art, turned out with squeegee brushing and a thin, elegant, delightfully scratchy pen line. This is superhero comics as fine art, the heroic poses doubling as expressive contour drawings, '60s underground hatching into the refinement of Dore woodblock prints.



Hazing over it all is a truly phenomenal color job: Pichard uses his watercolor palette with a savage, minimalist touch, evoking a more sophisticated version of vintage hero comics' CMYK tones by coloring not for realism or saturation but pure effect. Submerged entirely in harsh, blinding yellows or nauseous turquoise murks, it pops the flat figure drawings out of their gloomy, futuristic backgrounds and into amplified life with tremendous force. There's a real delicacy to it as well, though: Pichard knocks dimensionality into particularly stiff poses with deftly placed modeling tones, and little details like the streak of green added to a Cyclops' burning yellow eye beam, or the Winsor McCay stained-glass technicolor of Aeolus' aerial palace have way more to them than most full-process digital jobs. Indeed, the best thing that can be said about Pichard the colorist is that he doesn't overdo it for a minute: every page is a striking trio of whites, blacks, and chroma, a sum truly more than its parts.



Yup, much as this book owes to the kind of hero comics you can get 25 for 15 in the Essentials volumes, it remains its own thing throughout. There's one fight at the beginning, and it lasts all of four pages before we're back to the open seas, the gloriously variable layouts, the superhero gods who would rather sit around watching TV in their retrofuturistic lounge than provide us with action. This is a comic about superheroes, but it's about the blazing glory of superhero colors, the delight of having a status quo to return to after each adventure, the sexy urges underlying everything, and just how good those costumes look, not the boring American action-intrigue. The best sequence comes on the witch Circe's island, where steadfast Ulysses falls victim not to slithering monsters or technological traps but the dark, pulsing allure of a willing Pichard woman. It's pure seduction in comics form, incorporating Crepax sensuality and Steranko trippiness in a rock poster-style assault that forces you to give up, hang on, and be completely overpowered as the pages turn themselves ever forward.



In the end, what we've got here is a pretty good case of something from nothing. This comic is wildly derivative in a lot of ways -- besides the Kirby it's got plenty of French-specific genre gesturing, and shades of all kindsa vintage, kitschy, "transgressive" comics from both sides of the Atlantic. But it's got a powerful beauty to it as well, and it's one of those rare books that chooses and incorporates its influences well enough to get beyond them and become something all its own. A better-drawn Barbarella set in the distant past instead of the far future? If that doesn't sound at all appealing to you then you probably aren't a part of the doubtless small, tangential audience for this comic; but if it does, if you are, this is page after page of sunken rubies, pulled direct from the Aegean sea of yesteryear. '74 or 1200 BC, it doesn't really make much difference.

Last post til Monday....

The Batman Odyssey #2 Review

Me and this comic, man: together forever. Welp, after a great many people took my positive review of the fucking craziest comic to hit stands since Wally Gropius as a slam (um, maybe somewhat understandably), I have taken to the fanboy hub at Newsarama to shout it from the mountaintops in no uncertain terms:

Batman Odyssey is the superhero comic of the year.

Read it and weep...

Your Monday Panel 24

Bringing Up Father from 5/5/1940, panel 3. Drawn by George McManus.


Mostly this column looks at a certain strain of comics art, that being illustrative work that stretches out an appendage here and a tentacle there into cartoon. What's usually missing from that art style's approach, wonderful though it may be, is the willingness and occasion to dig into the pure cartoonist's top task -- namely constructing a good individual shorthand. Getting from depicting the contents of a panel to cartooning them is merely the first leg of the challenge, because after that the conscientious artist is left to ponder what makes their simplified distortions of the world as we see it any different (let alone better!) from the next joe's. We've got exactly as many solutions to the problem as we have great cartoonists, because once you wave goodbye to the neighborhood of the real, everything is measured in how uniquely you see things. The great shorthands share precious little with what came before, and usually see rafts of copyists after the fact. There's Kirby's electric Aztec zigzagging, Herriman's vast landscapes and jitterbug pen line, Tezuka's future-Disney finery, Crumb's thin-lined cute grotesques... you get the idea. The point is, George McManus' shorthand stands with all of the above.

Actually, in terms of utter distortion of the world as we know it, McManus probably beats out all of the above, Herriman included. Show a page of Bringing Up Father to an alien and I can't imagine it would have any idea that Jiggs' top-hatted teddy bear face is supposed to code as human. Hell, I myself have trouble with that sometimes. But in his strange piling up of circles and arches McManus hits the grace notes in between so many great moments in art, comic or otherwise. It's got all the effusive, sugar-spun delicacy of Art Nouveau, but a great deal of rounded, slicing Deco sheerness as well. Winsor McCay's precise, orchestral compositions go hand in hand with the galumphing bigfoot of Frank King or Bud Fisher's Mutt and Jeff. The claustrophobic styrofoam vaudeville of Chic Young's Blondie is here, but no less than the dynamite roar of Roy Crane's Captain Easy. McManus' style is like a clearing point for pre-WWII popular art idioms -- he takes a little of everything, planes away all but the flattest shapes, the most simplified forms, and regurgitates it out onto the page in a panic of high-impact coloring. It's a total mess, to be sure, but the most elegant mess around, flawlessly smooth drawings rioting their way through themselves, slamdancing each other out of the frame for room to breathe.

The panel above is typical of McManus, who like Crane and Herriman would often anchor his Sunday pages with one big picture that really killed it. However, where Crane's centerpiece shots roped the rest of the page in with considered compositions, and Herriman's with endless, open planes of color, McManus goes grand mal epileptic seizure. The panel borders stretch out as wide as they possibly can, but still have no hope of accommodating the level of robustly cartooned detail involved, which is so great that any other panels involved have no choice but to orbit around it like the moons of Jupiter. This one is unique, though, (and in my opinion quite superior) for its restrained use of word balloons, which usually saw as much use in these kinds of panels as, say, the color yellow. But here McManus shows and doesn't tell, leaving the boatload of bathing beauties to speak more eloquently than words could (though Jiggs, as always, offers some earthy commentary).

Without Bringing Up Father's yesteryear-mangy dialogue strewn over everything, the human form according to one of its more severely idiosyncratic artists takes precedence, with the beach gals forming a kind of decorative strip across the middle of the panel -- all Technicolor-Nouveau bathing suits, giant flower-petal hats, ET/china doll faces, hourglass silhouettes. It's almost impossible to separate the individual forms from one another without doing some serious work, but that tangle of lipstick and willowy limbs is the whole point, after all. Style meets content on a beach full of eye candy, McManus letting his readers' senses feast on line, shape, color, while his characters feast on the lure of the flesh. As the abstractions grow wilder -- everything looks made of either part of a circle or the angle of a strict, straight line -- it all gets so much more real somehow, the simplicity of everything giving it a herky-jerky, high-speed life of its own. There's more: the Herge contours of the guard rails, the classical-art-on-crank composition, and god, those pre-computer graphics buildings in the background! But the fact of it is that there's so much more, enough to spend paragraphs and not be half-finished. It's a blur of energy that hides meticulous construction, it's a Rube Goldberg analysis of every tiny little detail of a scene we all know -- it's comics. You should probably just look at it now.

Fly In Amber

Sometimes it's the small stuff -- the real small stuff, the tiny little grit inside the medium, that gets to you. Reading a book and savoring a simile, watching a movie again for that one facial expression the female lead makes an hour into it, sitting through a mediocre record for the giddy moment when the solo kicks in on track ten. Coming to the medium you come to not for something vague and boundless like "diversion" or "entertainment" or "education", but for something pure and rarefied, something... I'll cut to the chase, something like this. Sequence from Guido Crepax's Valentina Reflection, Heavy Metal, December 1980.



See it?



Those arrows pop up in film now and again, but not often enough to mark them as a "movie trope" or anything. They're native to comics, homegrown and perfectly organic, while on the silver screen they typically appear in an artificial, overly self-conscious way, animated camp jumping into real life to mark out something that the audience has already seen. More to the point, film, with its constant motion and single-image presentation, has no need to use arrows the way comics do: as straight up diagrammatic checkpoints that direct the reader through unconventional, potentially confusing layouts. They've been around forever, a more elegant, immediate reading aid than the number sequences newspaper cartoonists like George Herriman and Winsor McCay guided their pages' followers with. They started out simple enough -- crude, energetic, immediately apprehensible signposts to the next panel on (as in Dick Sprang)...



and nowadays they're formal trump cards, employed in every capacity from full-on pyrotechnics (JH Williams)...



to in-story motion helpers (Dash Shaw).



But Crepax is little concerned with such specialization. His use of arrows is pared down, almost stentorian: thick black pointers that match his ink line for weight and graphic strength. When they're used, it's swift and definite, either popping up in-panel to focus the reader with a minimum of fuss...



or as curt reminders not to linger in any one frame too long.



Take another look at those two examples, though. Crepax certainly enjoys playing with the arrows -- his books are full of them -- but they're never strictly necessary. Nothing gets ambiguous enough for us to really need them: we can see Neutron's microcamera just fine without any help, and the layout in the second sequence leaves little room for question. These arrows are amplifiers, drawing extra attention to the elements they point out rather than playing the role of the tour guide. The second example works especially well: we move through the smaller panels quickly, following the lockstep rhythm of their layout, then get blasted into the longer, suspenseful moment of the big panel by that final exclamation mark, no time for savoring the stolen kiss. Crepax saw the distinct storytelling possibilities in his arrows, and sprinkled them onto his pages not as cover-ups for poor construction, but as extras to be used whenever they make the stuff sing a little louder. Tools to go past the baseline on, rather than get to the baseline with.

Anyway, back to the sequence I started with; here it is again.



At first the arrow at the center of the image seems like total nonsense. What's it pointing at, which direction is it leading us in? An arrow with two heads facing in opposite directions comes close to paradoxical. Which way? we ask. Both ways. Back and forth, not moving but floating. And suddenly Crepax is doing something very much worth talking about. That image-toggle, one to the other and again and again, between the facial close-up and the single mystified eye, is something most comics don't even consider. That arrow doesn't pick us up and move us on; it traps us. It forces us to stop "going through" the comic for a second and collaborate with Crepax on creating our own reading experience. Only we can determine how intensely the arrow moves us between the frames. Crepax gives us the direction, but we control the speed the panels flicker back and forth at. We control the number of times we go through it, the length of time it takes to extricate ourselves from the formal trap and follow the word balloon back into the narrative. We see the agonized face, then feel what's in the depth of that eye. We get subsumed for a moment, forget the presentational story-mode of comics to become an actor with a role in creating the drama, the interpretation of the moment left to us and how deeply we can feel it. Back and forth, back and forth, something we basically never see in comics.

Now pick up a book, any one will do, and flip to a random page. What the hell, check out a bunch of pages. It can get overwhelming how they all rush you so headlong into themselves, panels designed to get you to the next panel, then the last panel, then to the next page, then to the last page ad nauseam. The prevailing wisdom holds that the artist's job is to push the reader forward, forward, keep them moving fast and steady enough so that even if they want to stop reading they won't be able to until they're done. And what really gets them going quicker? Look at that Williams picture again: arrows. It takes supreme confidence in one's material to encourage the in-story contemplation that Crepax does, to tell us to stop moving, go backward, and then just oscillate for a second. Crepax turns the arrow's purpose around on itself as he puts his story on pause between two images: forget what's happening, it says, and go inside to meditate. Consider the two images, not as a strict sequence of first to second, but simply as connected. In the context of one another. And of course, it serves the story perfectly as Valentina's paralyzed alarm finds a mirror not just in the word balloons but in the rhythm of the page itself.

This isn't just a one-off thing Crepax tried out here, though. In fact, it's best described as a double-arrow-shaped skeleton key to understanding the man's whole approach to the comics form. Crepax, especially once his art reached full maturity, rarely if ever encouraged the reader toward the frenetic pace most comics take as a given. Offhand, I'd guess this is due in part to the fact that the Italian comics tradition has much less of a distinguished past in the fast-lane action style of the American, French or Japanese masters. There's also Crepax's admiration for and influence from Alex Raymond, certainly the least kinetic of the great American genre cartoonists.

But most of all, Crepax understood that he was working on a very different type of stories than the action-derived material in the vast majority of great comics from around the world. Crepax drew sex comics, no doubt or pause about it, and as such he emphasized the slow languors and physical impressions of his moments, trapping his readers in the sensations, the feelings of every panel, rather than concerning himself with the brusque linearity of forward motion. There's an enraptured standing still at the heart of Crepax's best work, more than any kind of movement through physical conflict or time or life. The glassy, sub-sonic bliss of physical ecstasy, of gathering up beautiful pen and brush marks with your eyes. In Crepax they're one and the same, and you don't want to move on until you're sated.

It's a joy to watch him work this approach out in the debut Valentina story (1965). From page one forward he's got a brush line that stops time, but it's yet to really flower, often disguised under the plot and layout mechanisms of action comics.



Still interesting stuff, to be sure; a heist scene in a skinny-black-tie variation on the mod, contemporary Carmine Infantino style. But though the layout, the staging, the pace are all fairly close to your average '60s Spider-Man adventure, there's already something more peeking through. The second panel steps out of the flow for a second to focus everything around the shrill blast of the cop's whistle (perfectly evoked by the masses of bludgeoning inkwork clustered next to it), and the large frame in the middle of the page is more of a madcap scatter than a composed action shot -- massively expressive figures all over, everything overlapping, rough blacks sanded into the shadowed areas, depth and perspective all but removed from what becomes more of a tableau than a gun-battle sequence.



A few pages from the end of the debut album, Crepax lays his hands on that skeleton key, in a small but brilliant gesture that would give birth to an entire career. We get a typically long, low action panel before the kinesis of the moment sags and softens at the sight of a gorgeous girl, and then it gives itself up completely, all urgency lost in the sweetness of the kiss and the inked shapes that build it. Then it's the beginning of something amazing; Crepax's first sex scene, flinging moment-to-moment storytelling out the window in favor of a warmly jumbled, impressionistic tangle of close-ups, touch, desire, spotted blacks. There's no apparent "right" way to read this sequence, and that's the point. The panel borders almost cling to one another. Crepax steps outside of comics' strict linear flow and into an utter sensual freedom: feeling, drawing, image on image with no explanation made so much more powerful and important than a story.



Within a year we get panels like this, which expands the overlapped mania of that cops 'n' robbers shootout into a completely vertiginous, Gary Panter-style ink-warp that goes far indeed from the immediate iconography of most cartooning. We aren't meant to understand this picture right away, quite the opposite. To get anything out of it we have to step through the door into the party, catch the light flashing off the musician's saxophone, look the pretty people up and down, admire the abstract shapes that add up to the African mask. It's something miles away from what most comics ask of their readers: admiration not apprehension, suspension not motion.



In 1972 Crepax has left his spy-action stories completely behind for the recesses of Valentina's psychological history. The realm of dreams, memories, and fantasies are to be the book's arena for its duration, allowing Crepax the freedom to dispense with A-B-C storytelling entirely and bring his comics into a symphonic realm, a painterly realm, a place where the feelings, physical or otherwise, are all that remain. And the drawing only gets lovelier...



In 1976 he shows us what it's all about, by putting Valentina (who at this point the reader has long since fallen in love with, has felt with, has become) into our own position, that of the voyeur. On her knees, she watches two sailors fuck through a keyhole; passive, devouring, enraptured. Her eye is our eye, the eye of the beholder, and it carries as much behind it as we do behind ours.

Then in 1980 he shows us that eye again, in murmuring gray and wistful blue. And then he gives us this.