Tomorrow

The Question #1 (2005 series). By Tommy Lee Edwards, Rick Veitch, and John Workman. DC.


If they don't die first, all superhero comics wilt eventually. Energy dissipates, creators get subbed for or replaced entirely, editors commercialize, crossovers interfere... it's a nasty business. One way or another, I can't think of a single hero book published in the past two decades that's started with a high standard of quality and kept it up -- let alone improved on it -- over more than 25 issues. (Even X-Statix, the closest contender, starts to flag a bit before the two-year mark.) Strangely enough for a genre whose senior citizens have issue numbers in the high 800s, the superhero game is ill-suited for long runs: when it's good it's about the quick bangs, the one-liners and bone-crunching fight scenes and whoa look at the colors on that panel and the intensity that builds hot and hard between pages one and 22, then cuts off abruptly and repeats itself verbatim next month. If I may, reading superhero comics is like doing any other kind of drugs: short blasts are great and most effective, but the more there is after a certain point it gnaws you, and you start to think about why you're subjecting yourself to this.

So, if the end is almost always less than the beginning, why read superhero comics at all? Because, to stretch a metaphor, that first high is a killer. I don't have fingers to count the great superhero issue 1's I've bought that have tipped off into boring rehash after promising greatness -- and while the comedown's always a bummer, those 1's are memories I cherish, even sometimes keep in boards and bags to reread before I offload them on the neighborhood kids.

As a serialized hero comic, Rick Veitch and Tommy Lee Edwards' 2005 Question miniseries fares a lot better than most. The plot twists itself up enough to bypass any story-decompression pitfalls, the art stays front and center on the same quality benchmark for every page in the book. It's liberally spiced with futurism, extreme violence, psychedelic interludes, just-beyond-the-pale conceptualizing, and uh, John Workman letters. It's a rock-solid superhero story, the kind of thing you wish they'd refuse to put out any worse than, or at least friggin' collect in book form. (Check your back issue bins, kids!) But despite the liberal helping of Good Stuff slathered over issues 2 through 6, this series is a textbook example of the lightning in a bottle an issue 1 can catch before surrendering, however pleasantly, to formula.



The Question issue #1 is a shockingly virtuosic display, the creators involved straightup attacking the 22-page DC pamphlet format to force down as much formalism, expression, and genuwyne forward-looking innovation as its gullet will take. The book starts out in media res, no introductions necessary, page one shoving its way into your face with a brute force that's too surprising to resist. Edwards slices up his tightly gridded, self-colored panels into two unequal halves, the slivered gold-and-silhouette left sides giving way to full-color line art on the wider right sides. In robustly stylized Workman letters over fluid technicolor phototracings that give the proceedings the air of a particularly avant Italian fumetti comic (or some bizarre arthouse Question movie, or hell, even dream itself), Veitch gives the hero's narration all he's got, weaving strings of broken-glass words around the percussive breaks of panel borders:

"Yesterday
Inner ear's cocked to the background murmur.
Overloaded with the buzz of a cluster hive.
I'm inhaling the psyche of the city.
The only one paying attention.
The rest are hypnotized.
Sleepwalking.
Enthralled by pre-packaged gossip.
Mesmerized by manufactured dreams.
Ignoring the unspeakable.
Denying the unknowable."
-- Rick Veitch, The Question #1, 2005

And that's page one, all we get before it switches scenes entirely. This is all our heroic narrator gives us to explain himself and his world -- a blast of oversaturated glo-fi panels, an arrow of malevolent beatnik word-abstractions. This isn't reverent, this is new. This isn't entertainment, this is provocation. This isn't a sightseeing tour, this is art. It's all perfectly echoed by Edwards' compositions, which zoom in and out on the black shape of the Question while fading the urban panorama that surrounds him into a blurred, near-abstract haze of digital light and ticks, scratchy line (below). It's a hell of a brave way to kick off a comic, basically daring the reader to handle this much pure style before it shifts into plot-mode on page 2.



And page 2 is something else entirely, a bright nine-grid of POV shots that trace the Question's alter ego, crusading reporter Vic Sage, on a train ride from Chicago to Superman's stomping grounds in Metropolis. From the muddy, glowing, impressionistic muck of the Question scenes, we're catapulted into an almost-too-real world of human figures with lines drawn over them, bits of Sage's hands or the newspaper he's reading moving into his sightline every once in a while to give the proceedings the surrealistic air of a first-person shooter video game. What Sage sees, we see. What happens to him, happens to us. And nothing more. It's a supremely effective way of placing us in this enigmatic, prickly guy's shoes, but even more impressive than the story conceit is the formal one. Save for a killer post-Steranko splash, these two pages' elements compose the entire issue's structure, as the Question's dark, rock-hard scat-narration action pages (set "yesterday") alternate with Sage's sparkly, eye-squinting realist views (set "today") for every page left in the comic.

The layouts pulse arrhythmically between sixes and nines, counterpointing one another in the particularly vigorous fashion that only plot-independent structuring can achieve, somehow managing to tell us a white-knuckle action/suspense thriller as they go. There's tension in Veitch's plot, sure -- the dude knows how to write a good comic book -- but the real gripping meat in this thing is watching the pages' high-wire act, waiting for the inflexible layouts to cause a breakdown in formula or story. Never happens. This comic is on its game. As a reading experience it's less akin to typical superhero comics than pre-20th century poetry, in which the weighty Alexandrine structure was a non-negotiable fact of life and the best not only worked in it but exploited its idiosyncrasies to slam harder or float lighter. Like amphetamine-addled, postmodern, medium-transplanted Baudelaires, Veitch and Edwards stride right into the lion's den of ironclad structure and make it work for them, their story warping and pretzeling into a totally unique shape around its building blocks. Increasingly surrealistic dialogue tradeoffs with a mysterious young boy who seems to be riding the train alone shoot the mounting grit and violence of the action plot through with dislocation and the all-important, ever so difficult-to-achieve sense that there's more going on here than we can see.



Like the Toys'R'Us souvenir Vic Sage works on above, this comic is a puzzle, a jigsaw full of knife-cut pieces that we won't be able to assemble until issue 6 (the villain's seeming escape from being trampled to death by cattle in a brutal heavy-industry stockyard fight scene, for example, turns out to be something even more interesting 100 pages down the line), and like all good puzzles the joy here isn't seeing the superhero-story picture completed. No, this issue is all about working it, ideas tossed around in a million directions, the art more jarring than nice to look at, the reading itself an inevitable road to a provocation. Like the Ayn Randian morals that Question creator Steve Ditko imbued the hero with lo those many years ago, this comic is completely uncompromising -- no trace of concession to the pure-hypothetical new or younger reader who'd never pick this particular book off a rack anyway, and no time for sly continuity checks or bland shared-universe apportioning either. It's hero comics done raw: violent, populist, aggressively intelligent, unstoppable.

Yeah, unstoppable, and that sense of total forward motion is particularly impressive when you consider just how loosely the component parts of this -- after all -- work for hire, division-of-labor comic hold together. Edwards' art, which incorporates "drawing" on nothing even approaching a panel-to-panel basis, is the book's most obviously problematic element. Photoreferencing is bad enough, but this thing is very obviously constructed from a lot of digital-camera shots that got run through a photoshop filter or two and then scored with a few lines where Edwards thought it appropriate. As such it's stiff in the body language as well as the transitions between the frames, the usual flow of action comics cut out and replaced with the stop-motion grind of machinery at work. Too, there's little room for cartooning in Edwards' visual world: this art is too constructed, too subtly lit, too real to get into the kind of contortions that comic book body language and facial expressions use to tell their stories.

Somehow, though, it works perfectly. Veitch's relentless staccato narration turning the herky-jerky quality into an asset, strings of panels never running together, but hitting like a succession of juddering sledgehammer blows. Workman's resolutely handmade, idiosyncratically shaped lettering adds a much-needed dose of immediacy, as well as the missing sense of drawing, of shape and line sprung straight from human inspiration. And Edwards himself quite obviously knows what he's doing, achieving plenty of motion with deft figure animation, tweaking the colors into floaty smears of blue and white or truly scary redgray slicks, slashing the photos with a blazing marker line to rob them of the delicacy that's got no place in this comic. It might be too real, but this is reality through the fog of drugs or fiber-optic transmissions or mental illness -- way more interesting than what we see, as is appropriate for comics. It hangs together somehow, and like its wade through the unforgiving structure, this struggle enlivens the book, makes it hum with an electric tension.



That tension is the real draw of this comic, what separates it out from the pabulum it shares a genre with. Like the Ditko stories that came before it, this version of the Question feels like superheroes let off the chain. The protagonist kills, often gruesomely. The writing has a style all its own, one that takes the desire not to sound like anything we've read before as its guiding light, but still ends up being so comics. The art puts you front and center in a world too crazy to dream of, the filters of fantasy art stylisms -- and even line -- stripped away all but entirely. This is what the best hero comics are all about, the strain between escapism and the feeling that it's all too much and you'd rather just be a spectator. It's gripping, immediate, and it doesn't let go until you're long past finished -- all those things that the Marvel/DC books of the years since have promised and failed to deliver. There's no mire to this: it just keeps blasting until it runs out of pages.

All the uneasy futurism makes it very much a thing of its time (that is, the days of the Bush Administration's Senate majority and high approval ratings), the clear light of America's ice-cold post-9/11 conviction and drive battling with the blood red shadows of the new millennium darkness no one could quite ignore. I mean, remember experimental superhero comics? In the exhausted, drunk, ugly 2010 world of increasingly ridiculous spandex fantasia merry-go-rounds this thing reads like a bullet from a gun pressed right to your skull; but a while ago it wasn't crazed outsider art, it was the next step from Joe Casey's Wildcats or Grant Morrison's 1234 or Brian Azzarello's Batman/Deathblow. The issue is titled "Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow", in self-reference to the headings separating the Vic Sage and Question segments. The promised "Tomorrow" doesn't come until the end, though, as Sage gets off his train with more mysteries than solutions and the Question watches the end of a miserable punk's wretched life. The crimebusting reporter inhales some superscience gas to get high, then walks off into the sunrise of a new day. There's no "To Be Continued", no huckster promises of what the next issue holds -- instead, the bottom of the last page blares "Tomorrow" in massive op-art Workman letters, throwing down a gauntlet just like every page previous. Are you going to be here to see the future?



And then... the subsequent issues abdicate their torch, succumbing to above-average adventure and contemplation. Which is cool. It's what we hope for when we go to the counter for our hero comics. But that's the problem, this first issue opens up and screams and gives with something no one could have expected, much less hoped for, and it blazes a trail right off into the unknown, a trail that no one since has bothered to follow down. DC in 2005 -- as I read it that was Seven Soldiers, All Star Superman, Solo, Kyle Baker's Plastic Man, Seth Fisher's Batman -- a place of hope for what came next. In that time no one could blame Veitch and Edwards and Workman for shrinking from the limelight, for trusting someone else to pick up go as hard as they did while they wrapped up their little punching plot in peace. It wasn't the brave choice, the real thing to do, but no one could blame them. And yet five years down the line it's gone to piss, DC is a suppurating embarrassment, Marvel is Marvel, superhero comics offer nothing but some good art once in a while. I found this comic in a quarter bin with the rest of the discarded futures. It didn't belong there. Or maybe it did, I don't know. All I know is that we never saw The Question #1's tomorrow, and I would have preferred it to what we got instead.

Your Monday Panel 30

Heavy Liquid #5 (1999), page 3 panel 1. Paul Pope.


Much as I ballyhoo completely individual drawing styles ("shorthands") in this column, I don't think they're necessarily a prerequisite for great comics art. Plenty of beautiful, boundary-breaking comics have been produced by artists whose eyes weren't on the style of the drawings as much as the page designs and compositions (Steranko, Marshall Rogers), or who haven't worked through their influences and into pure expression (early Moebius/Gir, early Frank Miller, Carmine Infantino, et cetera). But as good as those comics can get, and it's just as good as anything else, they come second in immediacy to the artists whose very lines and shadows flash out the name of their makers. The artists with the emblematic, unmistakable styles pretty much always arrive at them after years of refinement and journey: check out the more or less basic genre-isms of early Kirby, early Mignola, early JH Williams and see what I mean.

I'd imagine that's why Paul Pope hit comics like such an utter thunderbolt: a few formative THB issues, two somewhat uncertain graphic novels, a silent sojourn into Japanese comics... and then suddenly it was all there on the page, a rich, unadulterated visual world that's only had to undergo minor tweaks since. Pope's bullet-train progression is like if Kirby had suddenly appeared in '64, done a few run-up Thor and Captain America issues, and then dropped the Galactus Saga. Where it differs from Kirby and his ilk is the progression it took, which involved more subtraction than addition. Pope began with a slightly mainstream-inflected fusion of manga, Eddie Campbell, and Jacques Tardi, but he didn't add muscles and dots and beams of light like Kirby did, or levels of realism like Williams. Pope scraped it back and back until all that was left were the robustly physical figure drawings, the crooked shadow-shapes of buildings, and above all the thick, seamy marks of his brushstrokes.

That brush line is the real thing, the emblematic, immediate quality of Pope's art. Gorgeously, this panel displays nothing but. There's the crackling trail of ink, veering right to the edge of control, blooming outward and tapering in with the whims of the horsehide and paper grain as much as the artist's hand. There's the splatters over the blank spaces, the raw excess of drawing this way, pre, completely unpredictable. There's a deep impressionism (perfectly fitting for a Parisian skyline shot), with the three-dimensional shapes of buildings jutting up at us before collapsing once again into the flat chaos of total line. There's Kirby in the brawny zigzags and thickly formed shapes. There's an awe-inspiring discpline fighting through the tangle in the perfectly gridded-out streets in the middle, and there's a kid's-drawing spontaneity and headiness in the slashed, crude brushwork on the outskirts to the right. The Eiffel tower reimagined as a Steranko power-beacon. The skies opening up around it. Stripped of Pope's hotly human figures, starkly tinted in a flat, haunting blue, it's massively cold, alien even: the in-story view from an orbiting satellite done to perfection.

What strikes me the most about this panel is how well it functions as a thesis on minimalism's secret identity: maximalism. Pope subtracts figurative elements until there's almost nothing left: a few recognizable edifices, a towering shape in the distance, vague right angles, perspective, nothing else. But there's more line, more shape, more being shown in this picture than any George Perez or Alex Ross you care to show me. The writhing, completely abstract mass of brushstrokes just below the skyline on the far right isn't all that different from the type of configurations that routinely show up on like, the arms of Jim Lee characters. What elevates Pope's patch of hatch is the context it's given, its identity not as an addition to something that's already there, but as a figurative element stretched to the very edge of identifiability. Only in tandem with the rest of the picture does this burst of total line spring into focus.

And that's true for any section of this frame -- the panel can only get over as a total image; there's no picking out the best-drawn figure or most detailed background element here. Cut it in half and it falls apart. Take out the skyline and it falls apart. It's unified, one single environment, all one. Pope has subtracted until nothing can be subtracted any more, but there's still so much here. Drown in it.

Comix Surgery: Greatest Comic Of All Time, Part 1

Could be part 1-and-only for all I know... I found this guy in a shop totally at random and the other issues I ordered online haven't arrived yet. If they stand up, more installments will be forthcoming.


DC Showcase featuring Manhunter 2070 #91. By Mike Sekowsky with Vince Colletta. DC.

I show this comic's cover in a board and bag above because that's how it first appeared to me: in a fifty cent bin like all the rest, sandwiched between shrapnelled issues of Secret Society of Supervillains and Spider-Man/Doctor Octopus: Negative Exposure. I love what boards and bags do to comics, how new and special they make them look. They remind an overanalyzer like myself that for a lot of people these things are fetish objects, bought and preserved and read hurriedly, furtively even, powerful secret totems that are not to be questioned. I used to read comics like that. I miss it, but there's no going back. The board and bag did something especially wonderful to this particular comic. Sitting there in its preservative coffin it looked for a second not like a Silver Age relic by the first dude to ever draw the Justice League, not like one of the old beater books that you always find in the discount bins. It looked almost of a part with the rest of the comics, the superhero detritus of 1999-2007 or so.

And yet. If I saw a modern superhero comic with that cover I would fucking flip my shit, you know? That completely assured, completely unselfconscious mixture of cartoon and realist drawing, that strangely looping title script, that giant corporate logo in the upper left, the expressionist masks of those alien faces. The way the light passed through the plastic of the board and bag onto that gloriously non-unified color scheme, lime green and blood red and desert yellow mixed together into a way of pictures that we haven't seen in years. It's all here, and so casually. Code-approved. I bought it, looked inside.

Maybe it's just because living in the times you live in makes them feel more urgent and self-important than they actually are, but I can't remember much casual experimentation within the mainstream over the past half decade. Brendan McCarthy's outta-nowhere shorts aside, it's like Jemas-era Marvel was the capstone for a tradition that pulsed long and heavy for the years that ended there and started, well, about here. This comic was released in mid-1970: Marvel had definitively stolen DC's biggest-publisher crown, the undergrounds were waning, pretty much every superhero franchise that's still around today had been created. It was the beginning of lean times for mainstream comics, the comedown off what will all but certainly forever remain the hero industry's greatest moment biting in hard. Things had changed in comics, and things would change more still. The quasi-underground publication Witzend was reintroducing the theory of artist over character to a mainstream that'd abandoned it since compiler Wally Wood's salad days at EC Comics, testing creator-owned genre strips like Steve Ditko's Mr. A on an audience that, like the material, gravitated toward an area somewhere in between the scruffy total-freedom undergrounds and the suffocating banality that the heroes were already falling victim to.

In time, independent publishing would gain its foothold in comics by exploiting this very territory, offering the more talented, further-out Marvel and DC hacks an arena to go a little wilder, throw down a little harder, get paid a little more. Books by companies like First and Eclipse, by creators like Jim Starlin and Mike Grell and Howard Chaykin, may not look all too different from the rest of the genre crop in the brilliant light of today's fusion-comics world, but the simple opportunity to drop house style from the stories and cape'n'cowl inflection from the art kicked off a movement that hero comics are still feeling the benefits of today. The Frazer Irvings, the JH Williamses, the McCarthys can only find a place in today's Big Two because the genre books that stretched a little past the boundaries proved it's really okay not to look like Kirby or sound like Lee. In one of the most creatively repressive areas of comics, they proved that you could do your own thing and still make some money at it.

But before that it was a lot dicier. There's a reason the early-mid '70s are littered with so many far-out gems of bizarro expression that seem like they should never have been a part of mainstream comics: they shouldn't have. The Howard the Ducks and Fourth World sagas weren't Marvel or DC's province, but given that those two were the only game in town and, like I said, it was a failing market, some of the business leaked through anyway -- usually in places like Showcase, the venerable DC new-title-tryout book that round about a decade earlier had given birth or rebirth to the Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, the Atom, the Justice League, ad nauseam. If Mike Sekowsky, the career DC workhorse whose oeuvre stretches back to the high Golden Age and spans a million competently-drawn comics, many of them starring famous characters, had wanted to do his Manhunter 2070 book ten or fifteen years later, he would have done it as a slick, ongoing creator-owned at Eclipse or somewhere similar. It fits right in with the orbiting space-junk that the early independents traded in, excellently drawn by a craftsman who put a bit more time and thought into it than usual, production value a little higher than average, eschewing the flying men for another, equally hackneyed genre -- just as long as no one's wearing a cape, for godsake -- and covering up the strange sense of absence inherent in superheroless comics drawn by a superhero artist with a breeze of extra inspiration.

The difference between MH2070 and the raft of similar books that followed in its wake after a decade's interval is in the style of the thing. Where the best books of the '80s creator-owned boom (Chaykin's American Flagg, Rogers' Captain Quick) pointed their visions far into the future -- such that they've only begun to feel "modern" in the past few years -- Sekowsky's book is stridently of the past, incorporating none of the emblematic '70s grit and scramble for higher ground or even any real influence from the Marvel Age cats. No, stylistically, Manhunter is a classic-era DC book through and through, a science-laced permabulation through the stars drawn in the rarefied, technically superb Infantino/Toth house style. The calendars will tell you this book's less than 15 years removed from American Flagg, but where it counts the temporal distance is more like half a century.

And that's what makes Sekowsky's book so interesting. He's playing the same song he always did, probably the only one he knew how to play; but the exhilaration and verve he puts into his moment in the spotlight -- with good colors, with no heroes, with no writers -- nonetheless belongs to a tomorrow he would never be a part of. Standing on the teetering platform between the two eras, an artist rooted in the past, pointing to the future, he draws...

Let's take a look.

(soundtrack, listen loud)



Page 1: Right off the bat, this comic hits a little different than its contemporaries, discarding the obligatory opening splash in favor of a simultaneous-image montage full of white space that sets the pictures in an infinite background. No panel borders: it all just floats there, not tied together but somehow still cohesive. I know I just said that Sekowsky doesn't display much Marvel influence in this book, but this page is the first of a few notable exceptions, all of which point to the study of one Marvel artist: Jim Steranko. This comics page-as-mural approach looks to my eyes like a definite attempt at a Steranko-style presentation switch-up, though done in a rickety, asymmetrical way that lacks the graphic design verve of the master. It's still interesting, though, the planets sprinkling out into the text and the cartooning styles switching up fast and furious on the alien-thug portraiture.

If more proof's needed as to the Steranko derivation, check out that bit of destroyed rocket ship at bottom left. The chiaroscuro and detailed machinery go back to Wally Wood, but the tight, technical Cubist pen detailing on the rockets is pure Steranko, as is the bold use of color against massively spotted blacks.

It's important to note the Steranko influence on this book, especially given how Sekowsky leads with it: in 1970 Steranko was the furthest-out artist the mainstream had ever seen, and it would be a few years before the next generation really emerged to walk in his footsteps. (That next generation, of course, would provide the mainstream-moonlighter backbone of the early independents with not a few significant vertebrae: Starlin, Rogers, Chaykin, Steve Rude, et al.) Until then it was all stuff like this, somewhat uncertain bats at the bold new style Steranko had crammed his pages with. Still, in '70 even the most rudimentary Steranko alignment was some kind of a statement, as Neal Adams and his subsequent followers had emerged to steer mainstream comics art back into a more traditionally illustrative, exaggerated-realism mode. Look at a comic nowadays: that's the stuff that won out, boring lines and figurework not pop art and colors. Sekowsky puts himself on the losing team from page one, but man does that space-fragment look gorgeous to me.



Page 2 panel 1: The Style of Mike Sekowsky. This stuff is mad derivative, mixing more-or-less-equal parts Toth subtractvism, Infantino designy staging, Caniff black-spotting with a workmanlike slapdash quality and liberal bits of whoever-was-inking-him (Vince Colletta in this case, the trademark thin pen line very much in evidence). Somehow it's a beguiling mixture, putting spiky angles where Caniff and Toth favored soft shapes (the mountains) and going all cartoon-minimalist on the figures and equipment. Stuff like the almost-sketched faces, the lack of holding lines on the spaceman in orange's left arm and his silhouetted hands, the naturalistic-yet-stiff body language of the alien -- it's obvious Sekowsky can really draw. That he chooses to forgo detail in favor of the rich environment and strange atmospherics of panels like this one only testifies to it.



Page 3 panel 1: The cat at lower left is Starker, our hero, the titular Manhunter. A grizzled, driven battle vet of few words and impeccable taste, he recalls Steranko's Nick Fury and brings along a very Steranko-esque panel. Tilted camera, hot girls used as scenery, flashy space background, and the big intruding op-art device of the monochrome die: it's all part and parcel of the Jaunty Jim playbook, and making the protagonist the kind of motherfucker who puts all his cash on black 13, black thirteen, the first time we see him goes right along. Starker, though, whether through total naivete or immensely well-calculated subversion on Sekowsky's part, ends up as a crazier character than even Steranko ever managed, as we shall see.




Page 3 panel 5, page 4 panel 1: Ahem, as I was saying. This cad is bringing back not one but two intergalactic space-skanks to his private, luxe orbiting satellite! Then you turn the page and get an explanation for it which I imagine the editors thought was there to lend a modicum of decorum to the whole bit, but which, um, are you kidding me? This smooth silver fox has been hired by a rich daddy to chaperone his two spoiled party-girl daughters across the galaxy? Okay whatever, maybe forty years ago it actually didn't occur to some readers that there was sex going on in the background of this comic, but nowadays, please, and that backstory makes it so much worse! Look at how tall they are in comparison to him, look how unsteady on those high heels, look at what the girl in the black is wearing! These are two teenagers spending their vacation being tutored in the ancient arts of love by a violent, sexy old bachelor. Comics do not get much more inappropriate than Manhunter 2070.

Also, dig the colors on Starker's spaceship in the top panel -- nobody's credited for the job, this book being a product of the dark ages, but those visible brushstrokings and that violent contrast between the orange and blue were not at all common for the period. This is only one of many panels where it's obvious that the colorist was really going for it in a way that just didn't happen on the mainline Marvel/DC stuff at the time.



Page 6: All right, I'm about to get all Freudian, but this is just mind-boggling. Read it, man: these two nymphs in inexpertly applied, Colletta-girl makeup are trying to get Starker to stick around for, well, we can guess, but y'know, duty calls since this isn't that kind of comic. So they settle for a peck on the cheek and admiringly watch him speed off to adventure because he's just that rock hard all man. It's a scene that plenty of other comics from Caniff on down have used.

But I'm sorry, there is just some crazy fucking sexual subtext on this page. Sekowsky can't help but let a "big boob" flop out into the dialogue as this girl in a costume right out of Georges Pichard plants a big wet one on Starker, which is enough of a brush with pure masculinity to get her apparently basking in a warm, orgasmic afterglow in the next panel. As a giant penis shape protrudes from her face. And then look right and read some of the most hilariously loaded narration is comics history. I'll repeat it, it goes: "And the two girls watch STARKER ZOOM OFF into the VELVETY BLACKNESS." Emphasis mine. Dude, a guy named Starker who makes a habit of zooming off into velvety blacknesses? Coupled with that picture? What more could I add?



Page 10 panel 6: Okay, so he goes to collect the bounty on some bad guys, who are holed up on a planet where everything is viciously carnivorous. This is a picture of flying piranhas trying to eat through Starker's air bubble to get to his face's flesh. Which is cool n shit, but just look at the real meat in this panel, the intense punk/abstract art design of the composition. The staging of the previous panels makes it easy to tell what's going on here, but the near-total lack of any figurative elements, the exploding fury of the black shapes radiating outward from what we can just identify as a human head, the jagged overlapping, the fierce green background and the red raygun! This is way past pop art, we're approaching Gary Panter territory. Colletta's scratchy inks help out quite well here, too: when what's required is the opposite of slickness that guy is your man!



Page 11 panel 1: Another exploration of a similar theme, with the flying piranhas now being devoured by flying barracudas before they could get through Starker's spacesuit. This is a really incredible panel, Sekowsky's depth indicators flashing across the frame intermittently rather than resorting to the usual solid backdrop. Or at least here the solid backdrop is the figure itself, the ostensible focus of the panel, with the hero's face popped out in pink against an unforgiving blue field. The shadows of Starker's spacesuit, especially at the bottom, also deserve a mention, their shapes echoing the black shapes on the fish themselves, filling up the panel with what isn't actually there and adding greatly to the disorienting whirl. That half-a-face sliver of humanity right in the middle of the cyclone is phenomenal: he's really hiding, curled up in his armor, and Sekowsky brings the facial detail in a way he hasn't in previous panels to really nail down the acting, the unmoored feeling.



Page 13 panel 1: This is just a really interesting composition. Drawing's pretty good, I love the spotted blacks on those mountains, but what really impresses me is how much depth comes across when it's not actually there in the picture. For Starker in the background to be that big in comparison to the bad guys in the foreground he's gotta be crashing what, like less than fifty feet away. But Sekowsky makes it seem like a significant distance with everything he puts between the shot-down hero and the human villain closest to us: color masks over the two villains behind him, pushing them way back into the frame even though they're standing right next to him, and then a big wash of black that cuts the hero's figure off even further.

In comics, two depth fields behind the foreground is usually like trees, mountains, or building, city skyline -- miles and miles -- but here Sekowsky uses that convention to trick our eye into adding distance that isn't drawn in. He does it for the most utilitarian of reasons: he doesn't want to sacrifice the detail of Starker's fall to earth by drawing him as a tiny little dot against the sky, and beside that he's got a killer scene with some carnivorous rocks (yes) to squeeze in before the evildoers can catch up to the leading man. It's just fascinating how adroitly he achieves that, without even trying.




Page 15 panels 3-5, page 16 panels 1-2: This is such a great action sequence. It's very well-drawn, of course, with a wonderfully harmonious mix of claustrophobic linework, rich spotted blacks, and open colored space; but it's the staging, the blocking-out of the action and the body language that really makes it for me. It's totally relentless. First we get the slow, unusual slithering snake-like motion in the first panel, all tension and build, and then everything explodes out of the barrel of a raygun in one single static instant, a giant pop that's followed by another as the camera swings into a totally wild angle, the background falls to heavy-benday brown, the only motion in this frozen snapshot of a panel coming from the weirdness of the composition and the crunchy scuffle of marks around the villain's space-sled. After these two stamped-down quick hits we veer wildly into the extreme physicality and gesture of the next panel, with its contortionist body language, and the figure animation of the next, with the still camera recording an immediate reaction to the previous panel's action.

It's a disorienting flurry of techniques chopped up and employed with a masterful craft and attention to detail, about as far from the blazing impacts of Kirby or Adams as you can get, but the kinesis in the scene's staging, the roving, digging camera and the dead-on, solidified figurework sells it nonetheless. Excellent stuff.




Page 16 panels 6-8, page 17 panel 1: A super-creepy death scene that gets over almost entirely on suggestion. I'd imagine any modern artist would've been unable to resist the intensity of a full-on closeup of the cannibal ants swarming over Lester here's agonized face behind the plastic air bubble, slowly picking away the flesh as they went, but Sekowsky had to deal with the Comics Code and there was no way in hell he could have gotten away with that in 1970. What he improvises, though, with some key help from the colorist, is even nastier -- more suggestion than depiction, in the classic horror mode. The nauseatingly fleshlike color and texture of the grubs as they swarm into the spacesuit is unsettling enough, but the desperate, theatrical plight of the villain's figure as he runs away, dripping death-bugs and flanked by screams is truly horrible, and the camera's full 180-degree swing around him as his motion's cut off by death is a deftly considered bit of composition, as is the shrunken, skeletal form that can no longer fill up the spacesuit. Then, the money shot -- not a gory blood-mask but the white glint of a shadowed skull, picked as clean as the plastic shield surrounding it -- really pounds in how bad a number the ants did on this poor sap. (I'm actually kind of surprised this panel got through the censors... thank god it did!) The sudden blue sterility of that last panel after the hot pink and purple of the previous ones is another nice touch.



Page 17 panels 2-5: Another sweet bit of action, with Sekowsky again favoring a separated action/reaction approach instead of the more typical, robust figure interactions of Kirby or Ditko. The clean-ass right angle of the opposing forces in that top panel make its pop just terrific, and then Starker's graceful body language and the sudden starbursts of energy going off around him as he blasts back really sell the aerial, gravity-free setting of the battle. That third panel is pretty great, too, a nice chunk of totally comic book-abstract picture making.




Page 21 panels 2-4, page 22 panels 1-2: And here's another example of Sekowsky producing an interesting effect despite being forced away from the most logical path by the kids'-comics mores of his times. The panel we all want to see is Starker just burying that sword in the dragon-thing's eyeball, blood and vitreous humor spurting, beast howling, knuckles white. But again, in a DC comic of the time there's just no way. Instead of that indelible point-of-impact panel, which is what belongs in 22.1, we get something else: a near-repeat of the previous panel, layering more exposition, more wait, more tension onto the space between that massive, baleful eye and the sharpened sword-point. Look at those two panels -- it's the exact same moment drawn twice, the angle widened and ramped up in the second panel to really grip you before it...

Before it lets you go with a rather disappointing after-action panel to wind things up. It's anticlimactic because the times demanded it be, but Sekowsky's innovative cross-page panel-doubling really works the moment over nonetheless.



Page 23 panel 2: Really great, legitimately intriguing cliffhanger, an incredible rarity for its time. Even these days most genre books hook you for the next installment by foreshadowing some action face-off in the works, rather than a character revelation. Let alone the fact that -- even still! -- such character motivations are almost never revealed. Why does Hal Jordan fight crime as the Green Lantern? We, uh, haven't gotten to that issue yet, but Sekowsky's bound and determined to make his Manhunter a more interesting character than the average masked dope by his second book. This is another place where MH2070 really bears a resemblance to the early creator-owned action books: interest in who the heroes were as people was a big hallmark of '80s genre comics, but it was very sparse indeed before then, and this is a pretty special treat, considering.



Page 24 panel 5: Hang on, we're not done quite yet! Three additional pages follow the end of Starker's feature adventure, the first two of them constituting a quick-hit enslaved-by-aliens story. It's pretty nothing, most resembling those page-long Hostess cupcake ads, but it works as a way to introduce a formula to the Manhunter's adventures: here, as in the feature, Starker battles some alien creepazoids before hauling them in to the law for a nice bounty. It's also got this panel, which is a further display of Sekowsky's unusual flair for action. Concentrated entirely on the receiving end, with no figure interaction at all, it stands up thanks to Sekowsky's note-perfect posing, not to mention the almost photorealist shaping of the shadow on the floor. It's not much in terms of actual motion, more a thick block of solid weight positioned so precariously that we can't help but feel its instability.



Page 25 panel 4: Power Plus Purple is the street name for a particularly potent strain of marijuana grown in Oakland, and judging from this comic book I wouldn't be too surprised if Mike Sekowsky himself was in on that little tidbit too.



Page 26: The last page of the book is a full-page ad for the next issue, constructed in much the same white-backgrounded, borderless manner as the first. It's a great exercise in one-page storytelling all by itself -- Showcase got canceled with #93 and I wouldn't have been too surprised if Sekowsky wasn't sure his next comic would ever see the light of day, because he packs a whole issue worth of story into here. It's worth noting also that this isn't a house ad that ran in all the DC books -- this is Sekowsky consciously choosing to draw an ad on the last story page of his comic, which is pretty fascinating if you ask me. It's reminiscent of Brendan McCarthy's one-page ad "Pop!" (still the best comic that guy's done this century): aestheticaly unified with the rest of the issue, but using the form itself to point aggressively at the new, at what comes next. Like this whole thing, it's tied down into a present that didn't have much place for it, but it didn't shrink for a second from the future in which it would finally find a place.

"First In Space"

Your Monday Panel 29

Rozz Tox #3 (1972), panel 1. Drawn by Gary Panter.


One of my favorite things about comics is how marginal a medium it's been for most of its history. There've been bright flashes of popular interest, some leading to creative booms (the early newspaper strip days) and others to lean times (the speculator era), but for the most part comics as a mass medium has been more idea than reality. Certainly for the past half-century the form's come nowhere close to TV, movies, music, or even books in terms of popular currency -- though that does appear to be changing. There's less money in comics, fewer corporate interests nosing around, a smaller community of followers, and most importantly a relatively paltry amount of genuinely revolutionary, world-beating creators. As a fan, I tend to enjoy this fact. There's a special feeling to being able to trace certain tropes or outlooks through lines of creators and knowing they were the only ones using them, or having a fairly large amount of the most popular stuff be the actual good stuff because it's tough to throw a lot of money at a failure in this industry and lowest-common-denominator public tastes don't really enter into it as much as they do in other places. I would have had to go to film school for as much movie history as I have comics, major in literature to know as much about pictureless books. But comics history is small and somewhat self-contained, enough so that I could pick up vast swaths of it working eight-hour shifts in a back issue archive for a couple years.

However, that small history is one of comics' biggest problems too. Where film or music or any of the other media the average dude on the street sometimes spends his money on have volumes and volumes of marginalia that can go toe to toe with the canon and come out even (if not on top), comics can't really boast the same thing. It goes back to the fact that this isn't conceived as art for the masses, that as a medium comics are just now starting to emerge from the "special interest" category. What that means is that for a long time the medium's been stuck with special interest creators, artists who aren't here to move forward but to do the same thing again. Most artists don't come to this medium because they just wanna make art and happen across it. Those types pick up electric guitars or paintbrushes. Comics people come from comics, and sometimes they can't see the forest for the trees.

Which brings me to my point, that of the rectangle. Take a quick look back through the archives of this li'l column, and notice that every single picture I've talked about is based strictly within four sides, stiff borders, the panel as it's been conceptualized from the beginning to here. Not that the rectangle doesn't work, not that it can't be beautiful and even individual, but still: Toth, Yokoyama, Ware? We're talking about some artists whose obsession with shapes informed entire careers! And still the pictures run until they're cut off by those borders, ever-present, non-negotiable. Comics literally has trouble thinking outside the box.

Which is why this panel by Gary Panter is so refreshing. It's presented here as reprinted in PictureBox's massive 2008 Panter monograph, the same book that quotes its artist on the attractions and pitfalls of "escaping that rectangle". Coming from a comics perspective, there's almost as much to the thought as the product of it: God, to even know that you're imprisoned! But Panter's "shaped" panels are more than dry formal exercise -- they expand with his drawings, let the artwork inside them carry itself out to its full potential.

Just look at this example. It's got a real blueprint, cutaway-view quality to it, even though it's a fairly typical panoramic establishing shot. You get the sense that everything in the scene is on display, that the entirety of, um, Ronald McDonald and Frank the Plant's apartment is being laid bare for your eyes, not just a panel-shaped sliver. It's all down to the joyously unconventional borders: the arch upward at top left that makes the ceiling a tangible part of the picture (check out a random comic; not a common occurence) while forcing perspective into a drawing that uses none of the typical lineweights or shading to connote it. The panel's top and bottom borders work perfectly with the established perspective as we read left to right across it, with the top border peeling down to indicate the far wall and the bottom line expanding out towards you to place you directly inside the room. Notice the two intersecting corners drawn in the upper right: the top one functions as the back corner of the room itself (which our peripheral vision isn't quite wide enough to see), while the lower one, the one that continues down into the outline of the rest of the frame, is the very corner of our vision itself. Panter's discarding of the rectangle is not showmanship; it's a calculated move that gives more reality to the picture and to the viewer's experience of it.

Yep, I said it: reality. Probably not the first word that comes to most comic fans' minds when the name Gary Panter is mentioned. This panel is a pretty good example of why (distorted forms, primitivist drawing, a strong sense of the strange), but also of why that shouldn't necessarily be so. Panter's trademark "ratty line" is on full display here, knots and tangles stretched across the frame from end to end. They haven't found the craftsman yet who's insane enough to cut his floorboards in those punk rock zigzags! But the ratty line is anything but tossed off, anything but amateurish. Notice just how tightly regimented the modulations of it are, just how harmoniously its lightning-bolt trails waver back and forth. There's an intense rhythm to it, one that's backed up by Panter's assertion that he laid out his later book Jimbo in Purgatory in such a way as to produce a "pulsing effect". Combine this tidbit with Panter's occasional career as a lightshow projectionist and the ratty line rationale springs into focus. If we're placed inside this panel, those quavers and snags are the movement of the light itself in through the window, pulsing past us, and the movement of our eyeballs as we take it all in. The focus and detail concentrates around Ronald McDonald as we consider him in his solitary abode, blurring out into big, vague white shapes in the periphery that we aren't really paying attention to.

This is realism for sure, just a whole different kind than we're used to in a medium full of Alex Rosses and Jim Lees. Just as the Impressionists set out spaces that felt more alive than the clarity of the previous generation's high-focus painting, just as there's more of life and movement in one bigfoot R. Crumb panel than a 22-page photoreferenced pamphlet, there's more reality to Panter's drawing than most rectangles could possibly hold. It sounds ridiculously simple to say that expanding the panels expands the medium, but in Panter's hands it's true for all that.

Shaken

Monster Truck, by Shaky Kane. Wishbone Studio.


When I was nine I actually went to a monster truck rally, and it was at a place called the "Cow Palace", too. You had to wear earplugs because the motors were so loud and it was at an indoor arena where echoes boomed off the walls like crazy. It went on a little under two hours, about the length of a good action movie. At the end they had a demolition derby, where eight or ten Cadillacs got wheeled out into the middle of the dirt pit and the monster trucks destroyed them as utterly as possible. There was this weird "backstory" going where the announcers kept reminding everyone over the engine din that one of the drivers had stolen another driver's truck, and that the man who usually drove the Gravedigger was tied up in a back room somewhere. Everybody was screaming so loud the headache lasted into the next day. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life.

Shaky Kane's comic Monster Truck mines much of the same visceral ground with an equal gaudy hunger. The story, such as it is, couldn't get much simpler: a big yellow monster truck, marked up with Japanese graffiti and driven by an impassive post-human observer, grinds across a desert landscape filled with strange apparitions spawned from the low, grimy side of pop culture. It's a slow descent into utter frenetic hysteria, rusted stunt cars giving way to dinosaurs, zombies, robots, superheroes, and carnival workers, often all on the same page. The big spotlight here is on Kane's art: the unyielding masses of thick Kirby outlines and worming Darrow detail, the straight-on blast of the bright pop art coloring, the obsessive texturing (rust, desert scree, rough hide) on everything. The reading experience mimics the titular truck's bumpy ride across its fantasmagorical landscape, with each line of narrative beating like a rusty nail pounded into knotty wood, each image's captivating big-screen power jostling against the excitement of turning the page and seeing what's next.



There's a formal conceit to Monster Truck, and it's a whopper. The digest-sized, horizontal-format book is made up solely of full-page spreads, one on every other page in sort of postcard-book style, each one interlocking with the last. Stretched end to end, the book's pages form an epic, thirty foot long panorama, encompassing the monster truck's entire drive through its trash-haunted wasteland. What Alan Moore and JH Williams twisted and groaned to pull off in Promethea, Kane achieves with the greatest of ease: this ride may bump and bang around, but once it starts, it never stops until it's finished. Stripped of panel borders (except for one inset, rearview mirror-ish view of the driver), the book also discards much of the artificiality of the comics form. The flow of time and space in Monster Truck is perfectly, breathtakingly continuous, not chopped up into frames and planed open with different angles. It's free, it's heady, it's the blue sky above and the yellow sands below for pages and pages. It's a whirl. More than any other comic I can think of, it moves.

Of course, the speed it moves at is left to the reader, and despite the flipbook format and spare narration I can't imagine whipping through this book at the speed one whips through say, a Frank Miller or Osamu Tezuka comic. Monster Truck is a joyride, pure and simple, and the scenery it rumbles through is second to none. The book's every page is a visual feast to be savored and savored and savored some more, with something -- a radiant color choice, a greasy sliver of linework, a bit of design madness, a nod to Kirby or Big Daddy Roth or Sprang -- always reeling you in to stay a while. The images veer from claustrophobic freakouts to sparse, dry monoliths, but the lurching rhythm never breaks, no one page outdoes another. They're all perfect just as they are. Quite literally, they're all one. This is comic book excitement in its most distilled, primitive form, that of "I wonder what he's gonna draw next?" Kane never disappoints, drawing strands from the detritus of three continents into the boiling cauldron of the whole.



As world-building its closest relative is Gary Panter's Dal Tokyo, which mines the same influences in a similar manner, and also exploits a similar formal technique. But where Panter repackages his found images in ratty linework and Renaissance literature, Kane lets them bang off the pages unadulterated, less concerned with refurbishing them as with simply presenting them in all their original trashy glory. It's very Pop, Warholian even, but Kane never loses the thread of comics, the rich sequentiality of the images, the narrative sense of an entire strange world passing by you, and where Warhol bounces your eye off the surface of his pictures, Kane's run deep enough to drown in. After the giant eyeballs start erupting out of the crusty desert earth on page 10 it's more or less like nothing else exists, and after the "Mars Attacks!" bubblegum card Martians arrive on page 30, you'll wish nothing else did. Like I said, there's a world on these pages, and it's the world we lose ourselves in when reality gets too much or too boring. Batman, Transformers, Frankenstein, Barbie -- they all find their way into the landscape, and it's little wonder that Monster Truck carries the combined transportative power of them all.

It's a seemingly effortless fulfillment of a goal that seems to be concerning comics more and more of late. With the past three decades' surfeit of boring "real-world" based comics having reached the point of total failure, the interesting artists these days are choosing to explore other worlds, weirder worlds, places to get lost in. Monster Truck feels most of a piece with the "environmental exploration" comics of today's avant-garde, books like Brian Ralph's Cave-In, CF's Powr Mastrs, Olivier Schrawen's Chromo Congo, or the aforementioned Dal Tokyo. Like those comics, this thing both bulldozes through and glories in the creation of its own environment; but unlike those explicitly underground works, Kane's environment is not so dependent on the heretofore unseen. Monster Truck is a cut-up tour through everything we already have, a pop culture junkie's explosion into wall-to-wall art. We've seen this all before -- just not with so much spirit, not so wonderfully, discordantly, harmoniously thrown together. The world in a blender, all the tastiest parts shaken, rattled, and rolled into a technicolor mind-warp.



In this respect, Monster Truck most closely resembles that greatest of comics: Krazy Kat. With its ever-shifting desert landscapes it places its cowboy boots directly into Herriman's footprints, and its mishmash of cultural toy-totems is the closest our disparate, newly globalized comics world has come to Krazy's distinctly American melting pot of Shakespearean, Yiddish, Ebonic, Irish, who knows what other kinds of patois. But this is the future, after all, a world of movies and TV -- and comics, and comics -- and what Herriman did with words Kane does in pictures, sampling Goth horror, superhero big beat, Japanese techno from a monster truck mixing deck. This is modern comics writ large (like, thirty feet large): a kaleidoscope of pictures and words and ideas for the taking. A past that gives birth to the present. And from here -- the future. The truck rolls on...

"Two Nazis"

A spot illo I did for the (now sadly defunct) comics/culture fanzine Gee Whiz a while ago. NOT to be taken seriously, but I thought some of you comicky types out there might enjoy it.

Smoke Signal Review Is Up On Newsarama

Ha, that's a kinda funny sentence, isn't it? But dammit, the new issue of Smoke Signal (#6) is so good that I'm bound and determined to share my thoughts with the "big audience" that I keep getting told about, so here it is, go read, right now.

Actually, you know what? Hold up a sec, and check out this post on the DTU-spawned art blog Images Degrading Forever. As experimental comics art goes, IDF's Robin Barnard is off in his own universe, sailing beautifully part Jupiter, and you oughta watch for the next while because it's getting better all the time.

Your Monday Panel 28

Green Lantern #171 (1983), page 4 panel 4. Drawn by Alex Toth.


Cartooning is a white-knuckle walk down a tightrope with no end. The point of departure is illustrative drawing -- the presentation of images from life, as observed in life. Plenty of artists never make it out of that realm, and as far as comics go there's no reason why that has to be a problem. From Hal Foster to Jim Steranko, this medium has seen some fine realist artwork. But the realists ignore a fundamental challenge of the comics form: the creation of true picture-writing. Making the visuals simple and iconic enough that they carry instant meaning for the reader, with no contemplation required and no illustrative details slowing down the story. This hieroglyphic ideal is one of the more frequently stated goals of comics, I'd imagine because it separates the form from its two closest cousins, prose and illustration. Pictures that tell stories without words put comics outside the realm of the literary; and images used to inform rather than immerse fall beyond the illustrative.

But for all the hypothetical advantages of this "ideal" mode of comics, there's an aspect of the medium it fails to consider: the sheer beauty of illustrative artwork. Charles Schulz and Jules Feiffer, to name the two artists who've perhaps gotten closest to a pure-iconographic realm of comics, read better, more smoothly, than pretty much any illustrative artist you care to name. However, I personally have always found something to be missing from the experience of their work as compared to that of Alex Toth, a devoted minimalist who nonetheless took pains to keep an inoculation level of illustrative information in his panels. All three of these artists searched relentlessly to strip excess pieces from their staging, excess lines from their rendering, excess detail from their shaping of forms. But where Feiffer typically dropped his backgrounds altogether, where Schulz indicated setting with sections of rigid fence post or bits of scrubby grass, and where both essentially drew everything with the same lineweight, Toth (along with the rest of his ilk, Mignola, Crane, Yokoyama) put just enough illustrative variation into devices like line and camera angles to give his version of iconographic minimalism the added verve of pretty pictures, of the visual world's beauty.

There's a reason for that, and it exposes another question about the pure-abstract, picture-writing mode of comics. Schulz and Feiffer's works (and those of R.O. Blechman and Ernie Bushmiller and, at times, Chris Ware) are comics of the mind, whether they be emotionally-based wanderings or dialectic ideas or even simple sight gags. But Toth drew action comics -- comics of the body, of landscapes, of things that wouldn't make sense if we couldn't see them. This was his reason for shying away from the final pare-downs that the great strip cartoonists made: without the scraps of illustrative-comics grammar Toth employed, the environmental richness and kinetic cutting and hyperbolic figurework and variated lines, the material he drew simply wouldn't have worked.

What's interesting is how close he got. How far down the tightrope of pure cartoon he went without ever making it all the way. I chose this panel because it reminds me of one of the most emblematic Charles Schulz images: Charlie Brown and Linus' tiny figures against the big searchlights of the tree-farm in "A Charlie Brown Christmas". Here Toth gets at the same stillness and dislocation, the alien feeling, dwarfing his sillhouetted, minimal figures in an unforgiving environment of basic shapes that just barely yield to imparting information. A few pen marks code for windows, and deftly spotted blacks pin down a decisive light source; but take a moment, and notice the mix of added and subtracted elements that make those marks and blacks so successful. The windows on the buildings not only taper in a perfect line with the perspective, they're ever so slightly weighted with it too, getting lighter and lighter the further into the background they fade. The spotted blacks break up into periodic sketchiness (like the scuffle of marker-line behind the buildings on the right) or dissolve with a sprinkle of dots instead of a clean cut. The lines of the walls and the banks of sand are craggy, rougher than the smooth shapes of the figures. Suddenly texture is very much a part of the picture: rough sand and adobe crag, drawing the eye a little further in, making the reader feel the heat a little stronger. The subtle variations of lineweight do much for the panel's deep perspective, too, with the thick, strong marks on the dunes in the foreground fading into thin trails the further back they go.

It's important to note that most of these devices -- the big black dots on the sand, the tangled lines at the top of the hill, the fat hatchmarks bearing down from the sky -- are not, nor are they meant to be, illustrative drawing. They're codes, the same codes that Schulz and Bushmiller used more sparingly, to different ends. We know the real world isn't made up of these blacks and marks, but this panel still looks like how we see things, whereas anything further into minimal design would be a bridge too far. What’s illustrative is how much of this environment Toth sees, the amount of visual information packed into the panel borders, the panoramic shape of the frame itself. Toth gets to his place of realness, of beauty, by piling it on, adding subtraction to subtraction to abstraction until his minimal world holds as much as the real. As much shadow, as much light, as much texture, as much scope. It's just arranged more subtly, seen more poetically, changed into something both familiar and strikingly different. It's art, to make it simple.

Horrors

Abominations, by Hermann Huppen. Catalan.


Horror comics are tough stuff. There are almost a ridiculous amount of impediments to getting a comic to scare people -- it starts with the level of reader participation the medium demands, where unlike with moving pictures the reader has to engage with the work for it to happen to them at all. Asking someone to go deeper into something while simultaneously constructing it to repel them is certainly possible (see any horror novel), but it's a balancing act nonetheless, not as easy as drawing a punch with some impact behind it. Comics' lack of motion is also a problem -- in a medium where the audience theoretically has an infinite amount of time to stare into each single image, getting the movements in the shadows and the blurred atrocities is harder than it is when (in prose) someone sees something out of the corner of their eye, or (on film) a guy in a fright mask runs by the camera real fast. Then there's art style, the barrier of another person's hands between the story content and the reader's experience of it. Film goes direct to the eyes, prose straight into the imagination, but comics have to appeal to both at the same time. You see the scary picture, you pick it apart until you're seeing brush lines and benday instead of what scared you, and then the story basically asks you to pretend the thrill's still there when you move on to the next panel. Like I said, tough stuff.

But there's a less universal reason why horror comics have a higher hill to get over than most other genres -- the EC line. Not only did the American medium's all-time greatest company-wide line of books build itself on the foundation stone of horror, they took it about as far as it can go. The best-put-together crack team of illustrators a comics house has ever hosted going deep into churned-out tales of dudes getting run through meat grinders, dudes getting their torsos ripped open by piranhas, dudes getting blown into a bloody hail of tiny pieces, dudes getting their innards turned into athletic equipment... as hard as the ECs are to stand up to in terms of pure gall, if you haven't got the craft as well it doesn't matter, because this was Bernie Krigstein, Johnny Craig, Jack Davis drawing. American comics shy away from horror. When they do go there it's usually either more "dark fantasy" type stuff or it just isn't good to read. Horror manga do a bit better because they don't look much like anything that came out of EC. So what happens when a Eurocomics artist -- one who's got some Wally Wood and Joe Orlando to his style -- takes it on? Well, we get Abominations, which is very good.

This 48-page album, published in English in 1990, contains four short horror stories, putting it more or less directly in the same ballpark as the ECs (which also contained quartets of scary shorts). More than that, they all utilize the same broad formula as EC did, with gore and shocks being the main instruments of fright, atmospherics close at their heels and clever plotting only popping up as needed. These are art-based comics, as the ECs were, relying on the spell that beautiful pictures weave to take care of the attraction side of the horror engage/repel equation. And like the ECs, they are brutal, they are sick, they pull no punches. Hoe do they hold up? Not just as works forever to be judged against the yardstick of a medium's great works, but as examples of the medium itself? Well, this book is a pretty rough ride, so let's take them one by one.

MASSACRE


In a lot of ways, this first story is the closest thing in Abominations to standard American comics. It's a badass revenge tale, more in line with the Punisher than any fringe-genre evocation of dread or bitter social comment. (Those will come later.) It's also probably the simplest story in the book, a mostly wordless study in action and reaction. A young, handsome man drives home in his luxury car. He opens the door to find his wife has been brutally murdered, stripped and slashed to ribbons with a razor blade. He susses out a clue the police miss, tracks the killers to their hideout, and exterminates them all with the same gory relish that went into his wife's murder. And that's it. The story ends with a final panel of the handsome man walking away from his last victim's Molotov cocktail-charred corpse, wordless, the two characters' faces obscured by turned backs and flames, respectively.

Though the fight scenes have a definite pull and urgency to them, a real sweat-soaked tension, "Massacre" is a supremely cold exercise. Ten pages of humans hurting each other in obscenely horrible ways, no final point to make or even much formal innovation (though I did like the panel above quit a bit indeed). It's just shoot, stab, slash, burn, Hermann piling nightmare situations on top of one another and trusting the strength of his cartooning to drag the reader through it without their being pushed away by the gut-churning violence or the lack of any real story content whatsoever. It works, it completely works -- the story is riveting, a white-knuckle thrill ride, but its empty, nihilistic smolder is the best thing it has going, magnifying these events, these sordid little atrocities, until they eclipse everything else, until it seems that nothing else could possibly exist in the world. This country farmhouse on this rainy, freezing evening. This wood-grain. This pitchfork. This blood. These screams.

It's masterful stuff, about as immersive as comics get, and as horror it's really interesting because the content isn't too different from the kind of fight scenes that were getting into the harder edges of mainstream action comics like Batman or Wolverine in the depths of the post-1985 mature/nasty superhero revolution. The horror is all in Hermann's imagining of the sequence of events, both visual and narrative. Where the average hero goes into a close-quarters battle to the death with stoic pride and emerges bathed in immature glory, Hermann's nameless protagonist goes in with empty, gutted desperation, fights it through by the seat of his pants, lashing out with whatever's at hand in an icy rage to blow back even the most jaded of readers, and walks away with his back to us, obviously without having accomplished or even felt anything of any value. Hermann strips the glamor from an archetypal hero story and finds not Alan Moore neuroses or Harvey Kurtzman yuks or even Benjamin Marra black humor -- no, here it's the supreme, concrete-slab horror of life derailed, sans hope, sans justification, sans meaning.

The art is similarly impressive, falling somewhere between Moebius' high-focus, richly organic detailing and Paul Gulacy's gritty '80s-action-movie cartoon realism. Drenched in blacks and moodily colored, it turns the rural outskirts where the action takes place into something primal and alive, the original place of horror. Hermann's sharp lines and deep detailing marks sway with force of expression, and his figures are balls of fury, radiating coiled tension without popping out muscle-veins all over the place. This is action comics of grit teeth, clenched fists, bone and wood and gasoline. Its characters are ciphers, yes, but so vividly brought to life that we smell their fear, we feel their pain, we fight their pointless battles with them.

FLIGHT


The shortest and by far the hardest and meanest story in Abominations, "Flight" is markedly similar to "Massacre", only with even less held back and even more minimal regard for human life, let alone decency. Like "Massacre", it's straight-up search and destroy chase comics, but transposed in time to the bleakest, darkest corners of the Neolithic era. Hermann draws it with a malice that burns off the page, eschewing the deft figurework and meticulous staging of "Massacre" for something deeper, dirtier, uglier. The panel borders drop out and the frames become slightly indistinct, wavery shapes, cut apart by tiny beams of white that offer the only relief from the art's relentless gloom. Every centimeter of every panel in "Flight" is full of marks -- pen scratchings, thick, savage brushstrokes, and sponged-on blots of ink that spread over everything, their writhing, spontaneous forms more immediate and primitive than anything short of pure abstraction.

The story is well-matched to its ghastly visualization. It's the riff from the beginning of Grant Morrison's X-Men run played backward: two naked, exhausted, plainly terrified figures, one male and one female, emerge from the gloom of a burned-out savannah, running at full tilt. The male falls. The female keeps going, then falls as well. Hair-covered, lumpy, primordial humans appear out of the roiling dust. A spear skewers the fallen woman. She's raped, then carried off and hung upside-down over a slowly kindling fire. Then... she wakes up. It's a cop-out pretty much every reader will have seen before, but -- oh, wait -- in the final half-a-page Hermann utilizes the patented EC twist ending. Turned on by the memory of her dream-rape, the woman's hand slides under the sheet. Someone walks down the hall toward the bedroom. "That you, my big honey?" the woman calls from inside... as a lumpy, hair-covered hand eases the door open!

Like most of the EC snappers, the ending flirts with farce, not to mention plain old offensiveness. There's a very uncomfortable strand of sex-based Eurocomics in which rape is portrayed as a fantasy experience for its (invariably female) victim, and Hermann plays it out to the very end here, with his protagonist almost salivating at the thought of being subjected to inter-species rape once more. And aside from the total hokiness of the twist, which does, after all, place a pre-Neanderthal type in the hallway of a very modern home, there's a weird confusion to it. Has this primitive man somehow been transposed into modern times to finish the job he started in the dream? (That's just kind of dumb.) Or... is he the, umm, the "big honey" that the woman was expecting, some kind of cave-lover in a co-habitating relationship with the woman? (Which is even dumber, and brings the story into the realm of outright misogyny.)

Either way, it's gross as hell and hard to understand from any kind of logical perspective, which slams the door shut on this story in as appropriate a fashion as possible. If "Massacre" is a genre story stripped of the usual moralistic trappings, "Flight" is "Massacre" stripped of even the barest motivation. The jarring twist aside, this is some of the most horrible shit you can see in a comic -- brutal stabbings, decapitated heads with stakes through the eye sockets, truly terrifying antagonists stalking prey driven so far into fear that it's lost even the vestige of human rationality, and a few straight-on shots of erect cave-dicks. And it's more than the subject matter, but the way it's presented, in Hermann's atmospheric, dense, utterly realist drawings. Even Josh Simmons' "Cockbone", which is the one story I can think of that matches this for sheer brutality, hides its ugliness to some extent behind the screen of a cartooned, mannerist drawing style. "Flight", though, is nothing more or less than a vivid imagining of a truly disturbing sequence of events. Yeah, twist aside this is the most effective horror comics I can think of. But with the twist, it becomes something other than horror, a bizarre object lesson with a psychosexual point to make that's too elusive and absurd to even fathom. The mocking laughter of the void, this -- five pages sounds short, but anything more would take us out of art and into the realm of obscenity.

THE CAGE


Abominations deals almost completely in environmental horror, relying on images and atmosphere rather than any clever plot maneuvering to convey what icy chills and creeping disease is necessary. In a way, "The Cage" is the acme of that approach; in a way, it's the furthest from it. The plot is a straight rip from a template you can find in basically any issue of Heavy Metal -- after a thermonuclear war, the vast majority of Earth's population has been reduced to barbaric mutants, and a small holdout of "normals" holed up in a dilapidated apartment building struggle to survive and find a way forward. There's definitely some horror to that outline, and Hermann does a fair job extracting it, but the tropes and the environment fall squarely in the realm of sci-fi. It's a far cry from the instant horror of "Flight" and its devastated stone age, or "Massacre" and its serial killers, but Hermann twists the dystopian look of Moebius' "Long Tomorrow" or Miller's Ronin into something we can be afraid of, spiraling everything out from the single, devastatingly dark image of the titular Cage (above), a lonely lookout post which hangs down from the tenement's bastion of sanity and into the mutants' land of the damned.

With the story more or less out of the fright arena, the pictures in "The Cage" are the sole means of instilling fear, and they shoulder the load well. The cage itself is a minor masterpiece of design -- chains, cold iron siding, and barred windows suspended in thin air, it's dread in miniature. And it anchors the bulk of the story, as page after page arrays panels around it, places huddled figures inside it, considers it from multiple angles, lets it hang over everything with its full weight creaking and groaning for release. It's not terror so much as tension, a tension that never lets up -- both the story begins and ends with the same image of the metal edifice set into the choking indigo of night, the mere plot points of beautiful mute women, frayed group dynamics, malice and revenge, savagery and civilization nothing against the slight sway and low hang of the image, more powerful on its own than any explanation.

Which is good, because the story's rather incomprehensible in its own way -- you can follow the action near enough, and the characters' motivations are fairly well-grounded, but the end is a violent mess that leaves the main character (a new recruit to the commune of the "normals") dead for no discernible reason. That's okay, maybe even the best way to go, because it doesn't dilute the power of the pictures (maybe just the picture, singular) with any meaning. It lets it be what it is, which is a story about that one dread thing, the cage that can't be explained but simply is. It's scary enough that way, and leaving the reader in the unknown is a good place for a horror story to go.

VENGEANCE


By far the most classically constructed story in Abominations, "Vengeance", the book's closer, is probably the most overt use of the EC formula. Like a bushel of shock-horror classics before it (Bernard Krigstein's "The Catacombs" being perhaps the best example), it's the story of two rotten petty criminals getting it in the neck, their misdeeds paid forward with an unimaginably gruesome demise. Hermann uses the formula as a prime opportunity for some EC house-style artistic showboating, mixing pointillism, woodcut-style flashback sequences, and fearsomely atmospheric lighting into a dark, richly visual extravaganza. As horror, it isn't as effective as the smoldering grit of "Massacre" or the fever-dream blottings of "Flight", but this is really pretty comics, panel after twi-lit panel that the eye just sinks into.

It's a good approach for the subject matter, which is very straight -- a tried 'n' true Old-European vampire-y thing, with the two crypt-robbers getting good and fucked up by bats, falling gargoyles, and finally the grotesquely drawn bloodsuckers themselves. It's competent storytelling elevated by excellent art, which is basically what every good EC story was. But there's also a pretty interesting political subtext to "Vengeance", which deserves a little digging up. The story was drawn in 1986, at which time Eastern European communism was on its last legs. The old power structure was crumbling, the Soviet Union was entering its final half-decade of life, and its satellite nations were moving rapidly through the process of democratizing themselves. More importantly, immigrants were beginning to slip through the tarnished cracks in the once-impregnable Iron Curtain, and the capitalist West was suddenly an asylum for post-communist immigrants who carried the baggage of their countries' histories into its new world.

The sociopolitical problems this exodus caused are at the root of "Vengeance", as the story's two ne'er-do-well main players (Janosz and Ferko by name) literally bring their nation's demons into the West along with their plundered treasure, leaving that most Eastern European of villains, the vampire, to run riot over what appears to be Paris, with collateral damage all over the place -- an innocent policeman here, a historical work of architecture there -- there's a very mid-eighties feel to it all, shades of the international spy games and intrigues that heated up as the Cold War melted down. The story metaphor's obvious, and made more so by the patrons of the bar Janosz begins and ends the story in, who cast dour looks and grim aspersions over the "foreigner" who "barely speaks our language". But unlike the famous EC "preachies", which gave solid opinions on the social issues that powered their gruesome plots and backed them up with the hard-hitting material itself, Hermann (a Belgian who must have had some opnion on the matter) keeps any individual perspective on the matter of post-communist immigrants strictly hidden. Instead, he zeroes in on the terror of the hunted men, the gruesome visage of their vampiric pursuer, and without much sympathy for any of the story's thoroughly unpleasant characters, either. For Hermann, they're all bastards, they're all the damned, and the less proseletyzing on that fact the better.

He just draws it.