So, no in-depth essays or anything today, but you can totally hear me talking about topics from superhero classics to forgotten Euro gems to Picturebox art books (and everything in between) right here if you want. Yep, I've got a new podcast just waiting for some ears to fill up, and I know at least some of you are wondering what my voice sounds like in real life. Or at least you are now that I mentioned it. (I gotta California accent.)
Seriously, actual reasons to go listen (in order): review of the new Bulletproof Coffin, thoughts on the forgotten ghetto-gore gem Real Deal, a look into the new Mat Brinkman book, droll comments on recent comics news items. Then I go into about a million creators of various genres and nationalities who I haven't given enough air to in my writing. Highlights include Wally Wood, Peter Milligan, Hugo Pratt, Goseki Kojima, and Frank Miller. There's way more too, seriously I talked my head off. Go listen, especially if you're bored at work right now!
I also threw in a little bouquet of hot musics to break up my voice's drone: finger-clenchin' blasts from Health and Disco Inferno. Yes. Okay, get over there. And please tell me what you think in comments, as your response will probably end up dictating whether I do another one of these.
10.29.2010
10.27.2010
Comix Curiosity
I've talked a few times before about the late 1970s as a pivotal era for American comics. It was then that the wall separating the mainstream from the underground grew thinnest before beefing itself back up again in the '80s -- a couple of years during which both "sides" of the medium didn't quite knew what to do with themselves, and so ended up doing pretty similar things. Probably the most visible nexus for this (often slightly uneasy) unification was Heavy Metal, which hosted work from undergrounders like Vaughn Bode between the same covers as it presented comics by future Swamp Thing artists Rick Veitch and Steve Bissette to the world, and not only that, but it was pretty similar stuff too. Of course, given the rather questionable mainstream-gutter publication Heavy Metal's become since then, it's tough to go back through the mirror darkly and really appreciate just how cutting edge the book was in its heyday.
Maybe this will help?
That's a comic strip by Ben Katchor that appeared in the December 1978 issue of HM. Though Katchor was just starting out as a cartoonist, his slightly blurred, cracked-realist point of view was already very much in evidence, as was the single-page-devastator approach of his best known work, the monthly Julius Knipl strip which appears in Metropolis magazine to this day. Julius Knipl is significant as a lit-comic that can actually stand next to literature without embarrassing itself, to be sure -- but it also represents about the furthest into the American arts 'n' humanities mainstream as comics have gotten, a regular feature in a prestigious magazine like it ain't no thang.
But what's so interesting about this Katchor Heavy Metal strip is the way it points to his respectable future (which in a few years would include publication in alt-comics' point of departure, Raw) while still engaging with the garish, space-frozen Heavy Metal ethos. This isn't the black-and-white meandering of Julius Knipl: Katchor's watercolors blaze off the page with as much brightness and conviction as anything by Philippe Druillet. You can lose the hoary scifi aspect of the comic in the strangeness of New York and Katchor's Joycean wordplay, but it's there, in a first panel that gives the term "dimension-hopping" the best visualization I've ever seen in comics. It's a testament to the strength of Katchor's style, of course, that it comes through so immediately even in this weirdo mashup of Little Nemo, Edward Gorey, and the X-Men issue of Marvels. But it's also a testament to what Heavy Metal was that it could pull off slapping a strip by one of comics-for-grownups' future leading lights on the same exact sheet of paper as this:
Y'know?
Maybe this will help?
That's a comic strip by Ben Katchor that appeared in the December 1978 issue of HM. Though Katchor was just starting out as a cartoonist, his slightly blurred, cracked-realist point of view was already very much in evidence, as was the single-page-devastator approach of his best known work, the monthly Julius Knipl strip which appears in Metropolis magazine to this day. Julius Knipl is significant as a lit-comic that can actually stand next to literature without embarrassing itself, to be sure -- but it also represents about the furthest into the American arts 'n' humanities mainstream as comics have gotten, a regular feature in a prestigious magazine like it ain't no thang.
But what's so interesting about this Katchor Heavy Metal strip is the way it points to his respectable future (which in a few years would include publication in alt-comics' point of departure, Raw) while still engaging with the garish, space-frozen Heavy Metal ethos. This isn't the black-and-white meandering of Julius Knipl: Katchor's watercolors blaze off the page with as much brightness and conviction as anything by Philippe Druillet. You can lose the hoary scifi aspect of the comic in the strangeness of New York and Katchor's Joycean wordplay, but it's there, in a first panel that gives the term "dimension-hopping" the best visualization I've ever seen in comics. It's a testament to the strength of Katchor's style, of course, that it comes through so immediately even in this weirdo mashup of Little Nemo, Edward Gorey, and the X-Men issue of Marvels. But it's also a testament to what Heavy Metal was that it could pull off slapping a strip by one of comics-for-grownups' future leading lights on the same exact sheet of paper as this:
Y'know?
10.26.2010
10.25.2010
Your Monday Panel 34
Kramers Ergot 4 (2003), page 70 panel 1. Mat Brinkman.
I could go on all day about the benefits and pitfalls that come with various levels of detail in comics art. (Recently, I pretty much have.) But though it's pointless to even look for an answer on the optimum amount of working over a panel needs, there's a related point that provides just as much food for thought: the amount of visual information being put between the borders. That doesn't mean clutter, or even detail -- just the things the frame contains that contain something themselves. Representational story information is a good place to start, obviously, but from there we can branch out into the kind of stuff I've generally been more focused on in this column. Displays of craft or virtuosity, formal innovation and rule-breaking, design ideas, stylistic declarations... the things that make the panels worth looking at for more than story comprehension. The things that make them art, even. The waver in a single Crumb line, the shaping of a JH Williams panel: these can say more than the word balloons do.
That's why the comics art of Mat Brinkman's so interesting. Though he's certainly worked in long-form, serialized stories, he's just as comfortable making comics without that safety net, moving into the real grit of art while bypassing the unifying element we all expect. His contribution to Kramers Ergot 4 is a good example of what I'm talking about: a collection of bizarre gag cartoons, random doodles, and deeply evocative finished drawings, it ditches the cohesive thread of narrative more or less entirely, remaining "comics" only by dint of its context and the fact that sometimes multiple drawings are featured on one page. The tension between gallery exhibit and funnybook, single unit and scattered parts, is palpable, part of the Brinkman appeal -- even the artist's more linear works often incorporate completely random story inserts and abrupt asides. Here, though, the single panel's status as a thing separate from the whole is played up, dangerously exaggerated. Look at the very edges of this picture: Brinkman drew it as a standalone image that filled up an entire sheet of paper before turning it into a comics panel by adding another image (not pictured) below it. This is visual information as we rarely see it: the panel borders themselves carrying a statement of intent.
It's a strangely literalist way of making comics: drawing the pictures and then adding them to each other with little regard for what pops out the other end. As a mode of working, there's some high-art rigor to it -- see Dada collage, Burroughs cut-ups, so forth -- but it's also so direct and intuitive a way into the medium that any child could have thought of it. Drawing + drawing = comics. That childlike simplicity extends into the execution of Brinkman's pictures. There's a genesis in the ragged, viscerally handmade Gary Panter line, but the fantasy-art trappings, the video-game shape constructions, the medieval-nightmare landscapes and characters take it to a different place altogether. Brinkman's monstrous subject matter is gloriously primitive, calling back to the childlike with its unadulterated view into the world of the artist's imagination, not to mention the sheer conviction with which he draws his terrifying creature. The shapes and colors in this panel could have sprung directly from the mind of a mildly disturbed six-year-old, but Brinkman brings a draftsman's hand and a trained artist's eye to bear on them, charging the forced perspectives and off-balance, lurching outlines with the vigor and immediacy of cave paintings. Added to the mix is a full understanding of tangible forms: there's hardly an abundance of rendering lines in this picture, but the ones that are there are perfectly placed, giving the flat 2-D kid shapes a real dimensionality and life. This is crafted, minimal cartooning in the mode of Toth or Kurtzman, where every line drawn brings the image closer to life. It's almost spiritual: a vivid, resolutely handmade expression of something with no basis in reality, a dreamworld made more shockingly physical than anything drawn into a grid with ink and mechanized colors could possibly be.
There's a lineage to comics that look like this, stretching back through Panter and Brendan McCarthy to the wildly psychedelic mindscapes of Steve Ditko, but Brinkman's picture looks like nothing else. Rather than swiping looks from those artists, it takes up the same intent, the looking into one's own imagination instead of the world we all see, the panel as an excuse to delve as deep into individuality as possible. To that end, this particular frame is jam-packed. The long arms and scalloped chest muscles are as "Brinkman" in their anatomical distortion as square fingertips and barrel chests are "Kirby" in theirs. The Lego-like path of cubes, abruptly cut off when it hits the blue-crayon background, is a unique, refreshing approach to the space within the panel. The colored line art gives the image a pop-art force while also making it more real, stripping away some of the surface and allowing us to really set our eye down in the linework and bask for a while. And the wet-noodle line tangles in the monster's grasp and down the road to the right are eruptions of pure, unadulterated artistic idiom, leaving behind even the tenuous grip on the figurative in the rest of the frame, blazing into a pictorial logic that has its only basis in the action of its artist's hands.
Then there's the medium itself, the delightfully rough, tangible waxiness of crayon. It gives no small amount of solidity to a picture that's greatly helped by the toehold -- in pen, for example, there just wouldn't be enough there for us to code this assemblage of shape and line as a physical form in a physical environment. It also functions as a neat callback to an earlier era of comics color, the vast masses of hue-crud carrying as much insoluble pictorial presence as screens of benday dots. Most of all, though, it puts vast amounts of visual information into Brinkman's lines themselves. The regularized blackness of ink, even at its roughest, could never say this much or this loudly. There's not a milimeter of homogeneity to the red trails Brinkman leaves on the page, their surfaces breaking up and rejoining, widening and tapering unpredictably, crawling with life. The flat blue background goes past even benday with the weight it carries, full of so much grain and tonal variation that we don't code it as "flat" at all, instead seeing it as the deep, shadowed background to Brinkman's haunting landscape, one that stretches further than the eye can see.
Like I said, information. There's no story to this picture: what story could bear it out? But in the way of style, of quest, of innovation, there's more going on here than pretty much any other comics picture you care to pick out. After all, story panels are just the components of something bigger than they are. By stripping that away and then bringing a hulking talent to bear on the tatters left behind, Brinkman gives us an entire world on a single sheet of paper.
I could go on all day about the benefits and pitfalls that come with various levels of detail in comics art. (Recently, I pretty much have.) But though it's pointless to even look for an answer on the optimum amount of working over a panel needs, there's a related point that provides just as much food for thought: the amount of visual information being put between the borders. That doesn't mean clutter, or even detail -- just the things the frame contains that contain something themselves. Representational story information is a good place to start, obviously, but from there we can branch out into the kind of stuff I've generally been more focused on in this column. Displays of craft or virtuosity, formal innovation and rule-breaking, design ideas, stylistic declarations... the things that make the panels worth looking at for more than story comprehension. The things that make them art, even. The waver in a single Crumb line, the shaping of a JH Williams panel: these can say more than the word balloons do.
That's why the comics art of Mat Brinkman's so interesting. Though he's certainly worked in long-form, serialized stories, he's just as comfortable making comics without that safety net, moving into the real grit of art while bypassing the unifying element we all expect. His contribution to Kramers Ergot 4 is a good example of what I'm talking about: a collection of bizarre gag cartoons, random doodles, and deeply evocative finished drawings, it ditches the cohesive thread of narrative more or less entirely, remaining "comics" only by dint of its context and the fact that sometimes multiple drawings are featured on one page. The tension between gallery exhibit and funnybook, single unit and scattered parts, is palpable, part of the Brinkman appeal -- even the artist's more linear works often incorporate completely random story inserts and abrupt asides. Here, though, the single panel's status as a thing separate from the whole is played up, dangerously exaggerated. Look at the very edges of this picture: Brinkman drew it as a standalone image that filled up an entire sheet of paper before turning it into a comics panel by adding another image (not pictured) below it. This is visual information as we rarely see it: the panel borders themselves carrying a statement of intent.
It's a strangely literalist way of making comics: drawing the pictures and then adding them to each other with little regard for what pops out the other end. As a mode of working, there's some high-art rigor to it -- see Dada collage, Burroughs cut-ups, so forth -- but it's also so direct and intuitive a way into the medium that any child could have thought of it. Drawing + drawing = comics. That childlike simplicity extends into the execution of Brinkman's pictures. There's a genesis in the ragged, viscerally handmade Gary Panter line, but the fantasy-art trappings, the video-game shape constructions, the medieval-nightmare landscapes and characters take it to a different place altogether. Brinkman's monstrous subject matter is gloriously primitive, calling back to the childlike with its unadulterated view into the world of the artist's imagination, not to mention the sheer conviction with which he draws his terrifying creature. The shapes and colors in this panel could have sprung directly from the mind of a mildly disturbed six-year-old, but Brinkman brings a draftsman's hand and a trained artist's eye to bear on them, charging the forced perspectives and off-balance, lurching outlines with the vigor and immediacy of cave paintings. Added to the mix is a full understanding of tangible forms: there's hardly an abundance of rendering lines in this picture, but the ones that are there are perfectly placed, giving the flat 2-D kid shapes a real dimensionality and life. This is crafted, minimal cartooning in the mode of Toth or Kurtzman, where every line drawn brings the image closer to life. It's almost spiritual: a vivid, resolutely handmade expression of something with no basis in reality, a dreamworld made more shockingly physical than anything drawn into a grid with ink and mechanized colors could possibly be.
There's a lineage to comics that look like this, stretching back through Panter and Brendan McCarthy to the wildly psychedelic mindscapes of Steve Ditko, but Brinkman's picture looks like nothing else. Rather than swiping looks from those artists, it takes up the same intent, the looking into one's own imagination instead of the world we all see, the panel as an excuse to delve as deep into individuality as possible. To that end, this particular frame is jam-packed. The long arms and scalloped chest muscles are as "Brinkman" in their anatomical distortion as square fingertips and barrel chests are "Kirby" in theirs. The Lego-like path of cubes, abruptly cut off when it hits the blue-crayon background, is a unique, refreshing approach to the space within the panel. The colored line art gives the image a pop-art force while also making it more real, stripping away some of the surface and allowing us to really set our eye down in the linework and bask for a while. And the wet-noodle line tangles in the monster's grasp and down the road to the right are eruptions of pure, unadulterated artistic idiom, leaving behind even the tenuous grip on the figurative in the rest of the frame, blazing into a pictorial logic that has its only basis in the action of its artist's hands.
Then there's the medium itself, the delightfully rough, tangible waxiness of crayon. It gives no small amount of solidity to a picture that's greatly helped by the toehold -- in pen, for example, there just wouldn't be enough there for us to code this assemblage of shape and line as a physical form in a physical environment. It also functions as a neat callback to an earlier era of comics color, the vast masses of hue-crud carrying as much insoluble pictorial presence as screens of benday dots. Most of all, though, it puts vast amounts of visual information into Brinkman's lines themselves. The regularized blackness of ink, even at its roughest, could never say this much or this loudly. There's not a milimeter of homogeneity to the red trails Brinkman leaves on the page, their surfaces breaking up and rejoining, widening and tapering unpredictably, crawling with life. The flat blue background goes past even benday with the weight it carries, full of so much grain and tonal variation that we don't code it as "flat" at all, instead seeing it as the deep, shadowed background to Brinkman's haunting landscape, one that stretches further than the eye can see.
Like I said, information. There's no story to this picture: what story could bear it out? But in the way of style, of quest, of innovation, there's more going on here than pretty much any other comics picture you care to pick out. After all, story panels are just the components of something bigger than they are. By stripping that away and then bringing a hulking talent to bear on the tatters left behind, Brinkman gives us an entire world on a single sheet of paper.
10.22.2010
Comix Surgery: This One Thing Darwyn Cooke Does In The Outfit
Parker: The Outfit, by Darwyn Cooke. IDW.
When a new Darwyn Cooke book comes out there's little question of "good or bad". It's all "how good is it?" Well, in the case of The Outfit, the answer is very, very good. Cooke's journey away from the Bruce Timm slickness of his early comics and into raw, craggy Frank Miller/Alex Toth roughness takes about six steps forward here, his brushwork looking ever more like it was ripped into the pages with a knife and his watercolor shading managing to put across more pure expression with one color than most comics ever do with the whole rainbow. More than that, Cooke's use of the comics form itself explodes off the book's pages, encompassing a barrage rapid-fire style shifts, action blocking that only finds a parallel in work from names like Eisner or Krigstein, and a synthesis between pictures and words that's tighter and more choreographed than Cooke's comics have ever been.
As for the story, it's a hard boiled crime thriller, the kind of thing that's great to read when all the beats hit right (as they do here), but not that interesting to talk about. The general feeling is that everything in this comic could only happen one way, so when it happens that way, and with a swaggering sense of style to boot, all you have to do is sit back and enjoy. So I'm not going to talk about the story other than to say that if you read it, it will be good.
I would much rather talk about this.
I won't say this is the best or even the most effective sequence in The Outfit, because y'know, that's for you to make up your own mind about, but it's certainly the one that hit me hardest. It's basically an exact re-do of a sequence from the last Parker book, The Hunter, and it goes something like "our unrelenting, merciless hero, Parker, has tracked a mob boss to his hideout, where the doomed quarry broods in what he believes to be safety until he turns around and realizes his enemy has gotten the drop on him". Yep, even down to the same splash-page reveal, but while The Hunter's sequence was merely good comics, this one is a master class on how to make the medium work to its full potential. Take a seat.
First panel (page 113.5): The first thing we see here is the word balloons, with Cooke banking on the power of blank black-and-white space to pull us in, not to mention the fact that the eye's able to glean meaning from the familiar shapes of letterforms before even the simplest of drawings. It's set up that way on purpose, because the moment of silence that elapses over the rest of this panel, between that word balloon and the gutter, is essential to the pin-sharp pacing Cook's got going here. That area of black and white leads us right down the middle of the panel to the next one, the light from the opened door and the shadow Parker casts on the mob boss (Bronson)'s jacket. It's a big minor chord struck dead-center: we can see the instrument of this man's death before he does, and that shadow falls over everything else that happens here.
It's the tension between what we can see and what the picture's subject can't that makes the rest of this panel so nervy, so full of tautness: this is a great picture of a man off in the world of his own thoughts, more so for the fact that we know he'll only be there a second longer. But for the rest of this panel, anyway, he's undisturbed, and it's perfect. The angle and the subtle preoccupation in the body language are excellently considered, but there's real meat in the rest of it. Look at just how much visual information is clustered in the direction Bronson's facing, away from us, away from Parker, away from the forward motion of the panel and back to the previous page. Literally as well as figuratively, Bronson is looking back, and the twisty, crowded mass of lawn furniture stands in for thoughts too tangled for him to notice the stark, simply-drawn reality that's crept into his office on the other side, signifying his future (or lack thereof). The black cross of shadow that the windowpane casts on his face is another excellent touch, the "window" of memory blinding Bronson to what's going on behind his back as well as providing a visual touch that strongly prefigures the marked man's impending doom.
Second panel (page 113.6): Suddenly that shadow slips across our vision too, and we're put in the same dark Bronson sees, his thoughts flashing in white script across our eyes. Cooke is really just going drill-to-bone with the tension here, stretching us thin between the knowledge that there's a gun at the back of the man whose eyes and mind we've suddenly found ourselves behind, and the concrete visual images of the narration, the reverie we can't help but slip into though we know it's someone's last. Blind, we wait. Then, a perfectly considered cold shard, a knife to the gut with that final line. Bronson doesn't feel a cold chill "up and down" his spine or "through" his spine, it's "ON" his spine, because that's exactly where Parker's physical presence shows up in the previous panel. We look back at it -- you can't help but do so, it's just set up that way. Parker is in the room with us.
Third panel (page 114): Then, BANG, good night, the reveal. This kind of shot can be corny or anticlimactic if it's done wrong, but Cooke gets everything he possibly can out of it with a pose and angle so understated-but-iconic it looks like it was carved out of wood. The lighting's what really sells this picture, though: those two circle shapes sweeping across the page to stand in for Bronson's eyeballs and our own, moving reading-direction, down and to the right, until the shock of Parker's figure standing there stops them dead on his half-revealed figure, the mass of shadow that still clings to him turning his long coat into reaper's robes. Cooke's cartooned facial expression is the picture of simplicity, getting across one thing and one thing only, but the exact right one. The framing of the figure in the white light and simple shapes outside the door is textbook, but perfectly achieved. The watercolor turns violent, brush grain becoming visible and lending the whole picture a knotty, craggy, splintering texture. The lampshade on the left doubles as a subtle bit of comic book shorthand, a starburst of Bronson's shock and surprise emanating from the same direction his eyes are moving in.
There's so much going on here, but it hits you perfectly, all at once, a single, flat sledgehammer of impact in the correct comics-panel manner. But we can't move on from there: we're drawn in by the clever little bits and the roughness of the brushstrokes, drinking in the details of the last thing Bronson will ever see, just as the doomed man himself certainly is. We escaped the blackness of his thoughts, but we can't escape the camera that centers in his shoes. And Cooke comes as close as possible to making us feel the immediacy and conviction of the moment as its victim feels them. Purely. Without thinking.
Hell of a sequence.
When a new Darwyn Cooke book comes out there's little question of "good or bad". It's all "how good is it?" Well, in the case of The Outfit, the answer is very, very good. Cooke's journey away from the Bruce Timm slickness of his early comics and into raw, craggy Frank Miller/Alex Toth roughness takes about six steps forward here, his brushwork looking ever more like it was ripped into the pages with a knife and his watercolor shading managing to put across more pure expression with one color than most comics ever do with the whole rainbow. More than that, Cooke's use of the comics form itself explodes off the book's pages, encompassing a barrage rapid-fire style shifts, action blocking that only finds a parallel in work from names like Eisner or Krigstein, and a synthesis between pictures and words that's tighter and more choreographed than Cooke's comics have ever been.
As for the story, it's a hard boiled crime thriller, the kind of thing that's great to read when all the beats hit right (as they do here), but not that interesting to talk about. The general feeling is that everything in this comic could only happen one way, so when it happens that way, and with a swaggering sense of style to boot, all you have to do is sit back and enjoy. So I'm not going to talk about the story other than to say that if you read it, it will be good.
I would much rather talk about this.
I won't say this is the best or even the most effective sequence in The Outfit, because y'know, that's for you to make up your own mind about, but it's certainly the one that hit me hardest. It's basically an exact re-do of a sequence from the last Parker book, The Hunter, and it goes something like "our unrelenting, merciless hero, Parker, has tracked a mob boss to his hideout, where the doomed quarry broods in what he believes to be safety until he turns around and realizes his enemy has gotten the drop on him". Yep, even down to the same splash-page reveal, but while The Hunter's sequence was merely good comics, this one is a master class on how to make the medium work to its full potential. Take a seat.
First panel (page 113.5): The first thing we see here is the word balloons, with Cooke banking on the power of blank black-and-white space to pull us in, not to mention the fact that the eye's able to glean meaning from the familiar shapes of letterforms before even the simplest of drawings. It's set up that way on purpose, because the moment of silence that elapses over the rest of this panel, between that word balloon and the gutter, is essential to the pin-sharp pacing Cook's got going here. That area of black and white leads us right down the middle of the panel to the next one, the light from the opened door and the shadow Parker casts on the mob boss (Bronson)'s jacket. It's a big minor chord struck dead-center: we can see the instrument of this man's death before he does, and that shadow falls over everything else that happens here.
It's the tension between what we can see and what the picture's subject can't that makes the rest of this panel so nervy, so full of tautness: this is a great picture of a man off in the world of his own thoughts, more so for the fact that we know he'll only be there a second longer. But for the rest of this panel, anyway, he's undisturbed, and it's perfect. The angle and the subtle preoccupation in the body language are excellently considered, but there's real meat in the rest of it. Look at just how much visual information is clustered in the direction Bronson's facing, away from us, away from Parker, away from the forward motion of the panel and back to the previous page. Literally as well as figuratively, Bronson is looking back, and the twisty, crowded mass of lawn furniture stands in for thoughts too tangled for him to notice the stark, simply-drawn reality that's crept into his office on the other side, signifying his future (or lack thereof). The black cross of shadow that the windowpane casts on his face is another excellent touch, the "window" of memory blinding Bronson to what's going on behind his back as well as providing a visual touch that strongly prefigures the marked man's impending doom.
Second panel (page 113.6): Suddenly that shadow slips across our vision too, and we're put in the same dark Bronson sees, his thoughts flashing in white script across our eyes. Cooke is really just going drill-to-bone with the tension here, stretching us thin between the knowledge that there's a gun at the back of the man whose eyes and mind we've suddenly found ourselves behind, and the concrete visual images of the narration, the reverie we can't help but slip into though we know it's someone's last. Blind, we wait. Then, a perfectly considered cold shard, a knife to the gut with that final line. Bronson doesn't feel a cold chill "up and down" his spine or "through" his spine, it's "ON" his spine, because that's exactly where Parker's physical presence shows up in the previous panel. We look back at it -- you can't help but do so, it's just set up that way. Parker is in the room with us.
Third panel (page 114): Then, BANG, good night, the reveal. This kind of shot can be corny or anticlimactic if it's done wrong, but Cooke gets everything he possibly can out of it with a pose and angle so understated-but-iconic it looks like it was carved out of wood. The lighting's what really sells this picture, though: those two circle shapes sweeping across the page to stand in for Bronson's eyeballs and our own, moving reading-direction, down and to the right, until the shock of Parker's figure standing there stops them dead on his half-revealed figure, the mass of shadow that still clings to him turning his long coat into reaper's robes. Cooke's cartooned facial expression is the picture of simplicity, getting across one thing and one thing only, but the exact right one. The framing of the figure in the white light and simple shapes outside the door is textbook, but perfectly achieved. The watercolor turns violent, brush grain becoming visible and lending the whole picture a knotty, craggy, splintering texture. The lampshade on the left doubles as a subtle bit of comic book shorthand, a starburst of Bronson's shock and surprise emanating from the same direction his eyes are moving in.
There's so much going on here, but it hits you perfectly, all at once, a single, flat sledgehammer of impact in the correct comics-panel manner. But we can't move on from there: we're drawn in by the clever little bits and the roughness of the brushstrokes, drinking in the details of the last thing Bronson will ever see, just as the doomed man himself certainly is. We escaped the blackness of his thoughts, but we can't escape the camera that centers in his shoes. And Cooke comes as close as possible to making us feel the immediacy and conviction of the moment as its victim feels them. Purely. Without thinking.
Hell of a sequence.
10.20.2010
Isolated
The Man (1972), by Vaughn Bode. Print Mint.
Comics history is full of stops and starts. More artists than any article could mention have shone the way toward futures that never happened, put forth ideas that never found enough thinkers. You could argue that's been the case with anybody who's actually used the medium to do something good. Just as interesting, though, are the ones who hinted at things that did happen much later. Look at the number of guys who invented the graphic novel in the first half of the 20th century, the proto-undergroundings of Boody Rogers and Basil Wolverton, the Watchmen blueprint of Robert Mayer's novel Superfolks, the hints of costumed-heroism in Frank King's Motorcycle Mike. Given these prefigurations and coincidences and about a million others that fill up comic art's apocrypha, it's not such a crazy thought that there are certain things comics were always meant to do, the demands of the medium itself imprinting on a progression of artists until they were finally met.
Talking about progression, maybe the biggest one American comics have made in the past quarter-century is the development of a non-genre mainstream. The lit comics that fill the Barnes and Noble displays and New York Times bestseller pages have a pretty well-documented history of antecedents, from the early freedom of Krazy Kat through the rebel yell and stylist perfectionism of the ECs and the newly literate, medium-expanding transgression of the undergrounds, to a culmination in Maus -- if not the first adult graphic novel (cause who knows about terms like that, really) then certainly the first one people noticed in the way these things get noticed now. Those are the high points, and if you could somehow extract those comics' essences and blend them all together (warning: don't actually try this) you'd probably come up with something fairly close to Acme Novelty or Love & Rockets. Fairly. But not quite.
There's a certain temper that most all of the lit-comics high points share, a passionate and yet slightly detached impulse toward using the medium's toolbox to dissect human feeling. Of all the big graphic novel stepping stones the historical roll-call above mentions, Maus probably comes closest to this place, but even that book is more interested in the narrative than the psychological. It's also nonfiction, which means bravura performing on the level of Jimmy Corrigan or Ghost World, that scalpel-made-of-panels thing that really brings you inside, gets sacrificed for verisimilitude and the uncertainties of real life. No, for the first entry in the modern lit-comic's full scale interior examination of cartoon characters, we've got to go back further. Back to 1972, when the superhero and underground booms of the '60s had both decidedly run their courses, when the future of comics with spines and the direct market and Alan Moore and Raw was still undreamed of, when the closest the stuff got to excellence was maybe a Kirby issue of New Gods, or a Rand Holmes Harold Hedd book -- or, best of all, a Vaughn Bode comic.
Bode is something of a forgotten figure these days, but that's not to say he didn't loom large or leave traces. Unfortunately, circumstance -- a short career that spanned some of comics' more prominent "dead years", a dodgy reprint catalogue, a style that's aged rather bizarrely, and a decidedly outre, untimely death at the height of his powers -- has conspired to keep him more of a formative influence in graffiti art than comics. That's less true of late, with the "fusion" garde finding revelation in his earthy tone and punk-funk stylistic gestures, but of all the '70s greats whose work packed the debut issues of Heavy Metal, Bode is decidedly one of the lesser-knowns. And lord, just try finding one of his comics somewhere! The truth of it is that Bode isn't visible enough for the magnitude of his contributions to be fully recognized. And that's a shame, because one of them is writing the book on emotional, human comics in The Man's 24 pages.
The Man is one of the simplest, most straightforward comics you're likely to encounter, a Stone Age-set character piece whose space-filled four panel grids move deliberately from fast motion into slow as it marches from a stark, craggy beginning to an end that looks exactly the same. If that sounds like a metaphor for life, well, it should: what begins as a Ralph Bakshi-cool version of The Flintstones ends up in the blurry black wasteland of Camus and Beckett. Unforgiving existentialism, void, despair. We begin, appropriately, with the Man, a squat, bearded, rubbery little creature who picks what at first appears to be a completely ignorant way across gorgeously minimal, thick-lined, zipatoned landscapes in search of food. Bode's austere, elegant, at times nearly engraved looking backgrounds form a bracingly effective counterpoint to the richly kinetic figure of the Man, whose constant hopping, falling, and dragging abjects him even from the other pictorial elements he shares his panels with. Though truly beautiful, this scrabble of rocks and trees and mountains is just as much a dead world as our skyscraper-haunted concrete jungle, never moving, blanketed in the cold grandeur of mechanical dot screens, unconscious of the life that skitters across its surface. What we take for bone idiocy when the Man first begins talking to his wooden spear (named Stick) soon slides into focus as a haunting desperation, the word balloons that hang above the barren landscapes a creative act by a mind that knows on some level it cannot be alone and survive on these endless plains, between these chunky-inked boulders and Herriman pebble sprays.
In this context even the Man's primal struggle for survival is weighted with a deep futility. An epic death-stuggle with a wooly rhino takes up no more space than the Man's near-suicidal struggle to recover a misthrown Stick. The panels shift from day to night, from black to white, without our even noticing. There's no cosmology here, no relative importance and unimportance. There is only existence at the center of a world that's far too unkind, panels of quick action and panels of slow walks through what will one day become the building stones of civilization. Nothing takes precedence, no moment is remembered. Each panel drawn at exactly the same size and shape as the last one, and as the one that will undoubtedly follow. After the rhino is killed the skies open up, and the Man's existence at the total mercy of this world is revealed in a series of frames filled with massive, cartooned raindrops and the hapless figure's hysterical, pantomime terror.
But the Man is not to be alone forever. Bode occasionally punctuates his prehistoric landscapes with other stirrings of life: fat, downy white birds whose rolling lines approach a Crumb level of grace, the aforementioned rhino, and tiny post-dinosauric lizards whose mischievous, scrambling motions endear the Man to them enough for him to experiment in domestication. Erg, the cute little critter who eventually sates our protagonist's urge for companionship is in many ways his polar opposite: his reptile brain needs none of what the Man's love offers him, and takes great exception to the leash and forced marches being a pet entails. The Man finds heartache in leaving his lizard tied to a tree during a hunt for food, while the animal itself relishes the chance to bask in the sun and stare at the butterflies without interruption. Inevitably, Erg's lazing respite and defenseless position end up sealing his doom when another hungry caveman comes lumping along, and when the Man returns his grief and outrage result in the murder of the one creature in the book who might have been capable of reciprocating his need for companionship. Once more, the Man is alone, and he will remain so.
The meat of the comic, though, is not to be found in this endless string of minor heartbreaks and meaninglessness. Twice when the solitude and hopelessness become too much, the Man takes to a tower of rocks, set against the tangible blackness of the looming sky. Here he attempts to make sense of his wretched state, to explain to himself and his spear and the deaf world around him what's really going on here. Of course, being human, we know, but could we really verbalize it any better than this? The Man catches some threads and grasps wildly for others before failing, his monosyllables sketching out an interior life in the same deep, primitive, resolutely felt tenor that Bode gives his outside world's ink lines. After his only friend is killed, the Man reflects in devastated ellipses on death and what it leaves us missing: "When Erg comes back, Stick, we will tell him how empty we are, and Erg will make us full... Erg will come... the wind is cold... it is crying... it is empty, just like us... I know Erg is... not."
It's impossible not to read a metaphor for modern life into this stuff, though one of The Man's most impressive aspects is that while it invites us to feel the panels into our own lives, there's no set reading to be found. The cold, calligraphic backgrounds are an interior landscape, our world, the Man's world, all of it, and none of it. Erg is a friend, a lover, our sense of hope, the importance we place on unimportant things. Stick is our conscience or our madness or maybe something else entirely. Read it as real life and it all falls apart. Feel what the Man feels and you'll recognize old heartbreaks and the taste of bitter days past. They are what's real here -- there are no certainties, no easy symbolisms. In the end it's only human emotion, wrought perfectly, that we can clearly recognize twisting through Bode's panels. The rest is for us, like the Man, to guess lamely at. This is far more than the fruitless drugged philosophizing of the undergrounds or the road-company Shakespearean Marvel platitudes. This, for the first time, is comics facing down the fundamental human truths of death and solitude, the knowledge that no matter what connections we make we are, in the end, all alone. Such bleakness can be made overpowering, nothing more than a knife in the reader's gut, but Bode's soft shapes, his simple compositions and boldly expressive figure drawings make it a much more human thing. This isn't nihilist declaiming, it's the cold comfort of a voice in the darkness telling us that at least we aren't the only ones living in this endless world.
When Bode drew The Man, however, he was alone: outside the mainstream, a marginal figure in a dying underground, plying a drawing style so beautifully idiosyncratic and alive that it's taken decades for anyone to really begin extracting from it, and working through a comic that wouldn't see its day for many years to come. Though an entire mini-genre of truly incredible comics work would eventually spring up around the exploration of human loneliness, Bode would never see them come. Maybe that's one of the things that makes this book so poignant, the fact that if its creator could have lived a little longer the Man would have heard at least an echo in reply to his desperate cries of solitude. But that's giving Bode's work short shrift: there's been nothing really like this since. Though he mines the same internal space as Ware, Clowes, Seth, and company so often have, he comes at it from a wholly different space -- more human, less exhaustively thought through, lived rather than experienced. This is a one-of-a-kind document of a beautiful strain of comics that found its pinnacle on these pages, but also of deep, essential human truths and feelings that have rarely been given voice so honestly or skillfully, inside the comics form or out. Unforgettable for the way it uses the medium, The Man's real draw is the way it transcends comics completely and becomes, like those grunted, lonely speech balloons, another pearl on the string of human creation. What's come since may have equaled it, but Bode's masterpiece has never been bettered.
Comics history is full of stops and starts. More artists than any article could mention have shone the way toward futures that never happened, put forth ideas that never found enough thinkers. You could argue that's been the case with anybody who's actually used the medium to do something good. Just as interesting, though, are the ones who hinted at things that did happen much later. Look at the number of guys who invented the graphic novel in the first half of the 20th century, the proto-undergroundings of Boody Rogers and Basil Wolverton, the Watchmen blueprint of Robert Mayer's novel Superfolks, the hints of costumed-heroism in Frank King's Motorcycle Mike. Given these prefigurations and coincidences and about a million others that fill up comic art's apocrypha, it's not such a crazy thought that there are certain things comics were always meant to do, the demands of the medium itself imprinting on a progression of artists until they were finally met.Talking about progression, maybe the biggest one American comics have made in the past quarter-century is the development of a non-genre mainstream. The lit comics that fill the Barnes and Noble displays and New York Times bestseller pages have a pretty well-documented history of antecedents, from the early freedom of Krazy Kat through the rebel yell and stylist perfectionism of the ECs and the newly literate, medium-expanding transgression of the undergrounds, to a culmination in Maus -- if not the first adult graphic novel (cause who knows about terms like that, really) then certainly the first one people noticed in the way these things get noticed now. Those are the high points, and if you could somehow extract those comics' essences and blend them all together (warning: don't actually try this) you'd probably come up with something fairly close to Acme Novelty or Love & Rockets. Fairly. But not quite.
There's a certain temper that most all of the lit-comics high points share, a passionate and yet slightly detached impulse toward using the medium's toolbox to dissect human feeling. Of all the big graphic novel stepping stones the historical roll-call above mentions, Maus probably comes closest to this place, but even that book is more interested in the narrative than the psychological. It's also nonfiction, which means bravura performing on the level of Jimmy Corrigan or Ghost World, that scalpel-made-of-panels thing that really brings you inside, gets sacrificed for verisimilitude and the uncertainties of real life. No, for the first entry in the modern lit-comic's full scale interior examination of cartoon characters, we've got to go back further. Back to 1972, when the superhero and underground booms of the '60s had both decidedly run their courses, when the future of comics with spines and the direct market and Alan Moore and Raw was still undreamed of, when the closest the stuff got to excellence was maybe a Kirby issue of New Gods, or a Rand Holmes Harold Hedd book -- or, best of all, a Vaughn Bode comic.
Bode is something of a forgotten figure these days, but that's not to say he didn't loom large or leave traces. Unfortunately, circumstance -- a short career that spanned some of comics' more prominent "dead years", a dodgy reprint catalogue, a style that's aged rather bizarrely, and a decidedly outre, untimely death at the height of his powers -- has conspired to keep him more of a formative influence in graffiti art than comics. That's less true of late, with the "fusion" garde finding revelation in his earthy tone and punk-funk stylistic gestures, but of all the '70s greats whose work packed the debut issues of Heavy Metal, Bode is decidedly one of the lesser-knowns. And lord, just try finding one of his comics somewhere! The truth of it is that Bode isn't visible enough for the magnitude of his contributions to be fully recognized. And that's a shame, because one of them is writing the book on emotional, human comics in The Man's 24 pages.
The Man is one of the simplest, most straightforward comics you're likely to encounter, a Stone Age-set character piece whose space-filled four panel grids move deliberately from fast motion into slow as it marches from a stark, craggy beginning to an end that looks exactly the same. If that sounds like a metaphor for life, well, it should: what begins as a Ralph Bakshi-cool version of The Flintstones ends up in the blurry black wasteland of Camus and Beckett. Unforgiving existentialism, void, despair. We begin, appropriately, with the Man, a squat, bearded, rubbery little creature who picks what at first appears to be a completely ignorant way across gorgeously minimal, thick-lined, zipatoned landscapes in search of food. Bode's austere, elegant, at times nearly engraved looking backgrounds form a bracingly effective counterpoint to the richly kinetic figure of the Man, whose constant hopping, falling, and dragging abjects him even from the other pictorial elements he shares his panels with. Though truly beautiful, this scrabble of rocks and trees and mountains is just as much a dead world as our skyscraper-haunted concrete jungle, never moving, blanketed in the cold grandeur of mechanical dot screens, unconscious of the life that skitters across its surface. What we take for bone idiocy when the Man first begins talking to his wooden spear (named Stick) soon slides into focus as a haunting desperation, the word balloons that hang above the barren landscapes a creative act by a mind that knows on some level it cannot be alone and survive on these endless plains, between these chunky-inked boulders and Herriman pebble sprays.
In this context even the Man's primal struggle for survival is weighted with a deep futility. An epic death-stuggle with a wooly rhino takes up no more space than the Man's near-suicidal struggle to recover a misthrown Stick. The panels shift from day to night, from black to white, without our even noticing. There's no cosmology here, no relative importance and unimportance. There is only existence at the center of a world that's far too unkind, panels of quick action and panels of slow walks through what will one day become the building stones of civilization. Nothing takes precedence, no moment is remembered. Each panel drawn at exactly the same size and shape as the last one, and as the one that will undoubtedly follow. After the rhino is killed the skies open up, and the Man's existence at the total mercy of this world is revealed in a series of frames filled with massive, cartooned raindrops and the hapless figure's hysterical, pantomime terror.
But the Man is not to be alone forever. Bode occasionally punctuates his prehistoric landscapes with other stirrings of life: fat, downy white birds whose rolling lines approach a Crumb level of grace, the aforementioned rhino, and tiny post-dinosauric lizards whose mischievous, scrambling motions endear the Man to them enough for him to experiment in domestication. Erg, the cute little critter who eventually sates our protagonist's urge for companionship is in many ways his polar opposite: his reptile brain needs none of what the Man's love offers him, and takes great exception to the leash and forced marches being a pet entails. The Man finds heartache in leaving his lizard tied to a tree during a hunt for food, while the animal itself relishes the chance to bask in the sun and stare at the butterflies without interruption. Inevitably, Erg's lazing respite and defenseless position end up sealing his doom when another hungry caveman comes lumping along, and when the Man returns his grief and outrage result in the murder of the one creature in the book who might have been capable of reciprocating his need for companionship. Once more, the Man is alone, and he will remain so.
The meat of the comic, though, is not to be found in this endless string of minor heartbreaks and meaninglessness. Twice when the solitude and hopelessness become too much, the Man takes to a tower of rocks, set against the tangible blackness of the looming sky. Here he attempts to make sense of his wretched state, to explain to himself and his spear and the deaf world around him what's really going on here. Of course, being human, we know, but could we really verbalize it any better than this? The Man catches some threads and grasps wildly for others before failing, his monosyllables sketching out an interior life in the same deep, primitive, resolutely felt tenor that Bode gives his outside world's ink lines. After his only friend is killed, the Man reflects in devastated ellipses on death and what it leaves us missing: "When Erg comes back, Stick, we will tell him how empty we are, and Erg will make us full... Erg will come... the wind is cold... it is crying... it is empty, just like us... I know Erg is... not."
It's impossible not to read a metaphor for modern life into this stuff, though one of The Man's most impressive aspects is that while it invites us to feel the panels into our own lives, there's no set reading to be found. The cold, calligraphic backgrounds are an interior landscape, our world, the Man's world, all of it, and none of it. Erg is a friend, a lover, our sense of hope, the importance we place on unimportant things. Stick is our conscience or our madness or maybe something else entirely. Read it as real life and it all falls apart. Feel what the Man feels and you'll recognize old heartbreaks and the taste of bitter days past. They are what's real here -- there are no certainties, no easy symbolisms. In the end it's only human emotion, wrought perfectly, that we can clearly recognize twisting through Bode's panels. The rest is for us, like the Man, to guess lamely at. This is far more than the fruitless drugged philosophizing of the undergrounds or the road-company Shakespearean Marvel platitudes. This, for the first time, is comics facing down the fundamental human truths of death and solitude, the knowledge that no matter what connections we make we are, in the end, all alone. Such bleakness can be made overpowering, nothing more than a knife in the reader's gut, but Bode's soft shapes, his simple compositions and boldly expressive figure drawings make it a much more human thing. This isn't nihilist declaiming, it's the cold comfort of a voice in the darkness telling us that at least we aren't the only ones living in this endless world.
When Bode drew The Man, however, he was alone: outside the mainstream, a marginal figure in a dying underground, plying a drawing style so beautifully idiosyncratic and alive that it's taken decades for anyone to really begin extracting from it, and working through a comic that wouldn't see its day for many years to come. Though an entire mini-genre of truly incredible comics work would eventually spring up around the exploration of human loneliness, Bode would never see them come. Maybe that's one of the things that makes this book so poignant, the fact that if its creator could have lived a little longer the Man would have heard at least an echo in reply to his desperate cries of solitude. But that's giving Bode's work short shrift: there's been nothing really like this since. Though he mines the same internal space as Ware, Clowes, Seth, and company so often have, he comes at it from a wholly different space -- more human, less exhaustively thought through, lived rather than experienced. This is a one-of-a-kind document of a beautiful strain of comics that found its pinnacle on these pages, but also of deep, essential human truths and feelings that have rarely been given voice so honestly or skillfully, inside the comics form or out. Unforgettable for the way it uses the medium, The Man's real draw is the way it transcends comics completely and becomes, like those grunted, lonely speech balloons, another pearl on the string of human creation. What's come since may have equaled it, but Bode's masterpiece has never been bettered.
10.18.2010
Your Monday Panel 33
Fantastic Four/Iron Man: Big In Japan #2 (2006), page 17 panel 1. Seth Fisher.
One of the more interesting concerns facing modern comics artists is how to reflect the overwhelming frenzy of the digital age. Like any artistic challenge, it's not something everyone's taken up: plenty of guys still draw the same as they did before anyone but rich people had a computer in their house, and BodyWorld and its ilk aside, digital has yet to really change comics' traditional mode of working. I don't think this is due to a total lack of innovation or willingness to engage. There are plenty of artists whose work grafts into exciting new fusions of the handmade and the machine with computer color effects that would have been impossible to achieve a few years ago. Futurists like Kevin Huizenga and Chris Ware have played around with mirroring the experience of cyberspace in their panel progressions. Webcomics keep pushing that cutting edge further and further forward, meshing into the fabric of the digital experience itself.
Most importantly, comics as they stand may well be the medium that's most reflective of the all-at-once onslaught that is the internet and its attendant headspace. Panels themselves give multiple, "tabbed" views into the same scene. The different vehicles available for delivering words -- caption boxes, thought bubbles, speech balloons, sound effects -- allow multiple "threads" of comment to run parallel to a sequence of actions. The presentational aspects of multi-paneled pages let completely different sets of events coexist in the same space, whether they "load" in lockstep or unfold themselves at different speeds. And perhaps most importantly, most significantly, comics are a fusion of two separate operations, the words and the pictures, and are capable of defining both objective and subjective views at once with the drop of a single thought balloon or narrative caption. The figure artists and scene-setters of the comics world may not throw their energies into directly countenancing the digital age, but their medium runs right alongside it anyway. (There's an argument to be made about how comics' increasing popularity as we move deeper and deeper into said age is anything but a coincidence... but I digress.)
Seth Fisher's comics, though, take the bull by the horns. Where the joy of most comics is the flow, the progression of time through the panels as moderated by the choices the artist makes, Fisher's best works -- Big In Japan chief among them -- come all at once, each panel on every quirkily designed page hitting so hard as to completely erase your memory of the last one. It's comics for an ADHD, multi-tabbed computer world, every new moment taking total precedence, whatever attention span the plots may possess completely circumvented by the pop and smack and fully realized individuality of the single panels that push them forward soundbite by soundbite.
Probably the chief reason for this info-highway temper is obvious in the picture above: Fisher packs the space between his borders with a compulsive level of detail, stretching out thin-lined, deadly accurate vistas that don't stop until they reach their four-color horizons. Fisher's use of detail is worth dissecting a little; while certainly overwhelming, it never interferes with the reader's immediate impression of the action at hand. That's because this is an accretion of pictorial elements within the frame, not of high-focus warts and tics within the elements themselves. There's a truly immense amount of different surfaces in this panel -- the million walls of the buildings in a Tokyo suburb, the monster-skin and tank metal and telephone poles and trees -- all drawn with architectural precision. But these are as clean as surfaces can get, without a single Jim Lee hatch or Paul Pope ink waver. It's a massive assemblage of circles and rectangles, each left brightly open for Chris Chuckry's flat colors to sparkle up. There's a reason that billboard face in the bottom right is drawn that way: it's only another shape-collection to flesh out this environment, not something we're actually supposed to focus on.
No, Fisher knows exactly where to put our eyes, the beacon of his wall-of-sound-effects pointing right into the monster -- himself a sculpture made of many circles -- disrupting the quiet geometry with a downright outre act of body language. Even the explosions ripping into this Simpsons-meets-Godzilla weirdo's flesh harmonize with the scheme Fisher has set up, their perfect spheres mirroring the simplicity of the treetops below them. This is iconic comics art in the raw, each individual segment of the full frame stripped down to its most basic shapes and colors, to a desktop-icon level of simplicity. I've seen those tanks and little yellow spits of fire coming out of them plenty of times before: they were in every lo-fi '90s arcade game I played as a kid. I'd bet Fisher's sen them too. Same goes for that bright yellow crown shape drawing attention to the tiny Iron Man hovering around the monster's head -- it's the same shape and color video games use to help you track your character through blurry crowd scenes. This importation of another medium's iconic shorthand is well worth the noting, both for the possibilities it offers future artists and just so the comics historians of tomorrow know Brian Lee O'Malley and Scott Pilgrim didn't do everything.
And then there's that bank of sound effects, the majority of which aren't sound effects at all. This is where the formal properties of comics that I was talking about earlier really come into play. In a jumbled, disassociated order that perfectly suits the moment depicted, we get the sound effects proper (two of them, big ones, WOM BOOM!), the source of the impacts (!BOMB!, and then the explanatory EXPLOSION), the immediate, traumatized reactions they engender in their target (the FEAR first, then the PAIN when they actually hit, followed by the DANGER the brain processes at said PAIN, and the HORROR rational recognition of the moment produces), and up top the motivating factor in all this, the vengeful general whose hateful visage sits perfectly framed by the word that kicks it all off. And Fisher doesn't stop there: action leads into reaction, Iron Man's impotent NO, separated from the white-rimmed cluster of the opening salvo, but existing in the same general morass of sound thanks to the bright, hand-lettered text that forms it (a word balloon here would just abject the push from the pull).
That's a lot for one panel to hold in, but Fisher puts it all in place elegantly, and with such conviction that it's hard to imagine this going down any way else. We get all we need in the sounds, which thanks to the white gutters lining them could very well be considered a panel unto themselves, but there's more to show, more things to draw, more of our attention for this picture to take before we move onto the next one and it all restarts again. Fisher shows it, draws it, takes it. Like those tiny trees and bushes and windows in the background of this panel, they're there -- so why not?
One of the more interesting concerns facing modern comics artists is how to reflect the overwhelming frenzy of the digital age. Like any artistic challenge, it's not something everyone's taken up: plenty of guys still draw the same as they did before anyone but rich people had a computer in their house, and BodyWorld and its ilk aside, digital has yet to really change comics' traditional mode of working. I don't think this is due to a total lack of innovation or willingness to engage. There are plenty of artists whose work grafts into exciting new fusions of the handmade and the machine with computer color effects that would have been impossible to achieve a few years ago. Futurists like Kevin Huizenga and Chris Ware have played around with mirroring the experience of cyberspace in their panel progressions. Webcomics keep pushing that cutting edge further and further forward, meshing into the fabric of the digital experience itself.
Most importantly, comics as they stand may well be the medium that's most reflective of the all-at-once onslaught that is the internet and its attendant headspace. Panels themselves give multiple, "tabbed" views into the same scene. The different vehicles available for delivering words -- caption boxes, thought bubbles, speech balloons, sound effects -- allow multiple "threads" of comment to run parallel to a sequence of actions. The presentational aspects of multi-paneled pages let completely different sets of events coexist in the same space, whether they "load" in lockstep or unfold themselves at different speeds. And perhaps most importantly, most significantly, comics are a fusion of two separate operations, the words and the pictures, and are capable of defining both objective and subjective views at once with the drop of a single thought balloon or narrative caption. The figure artists and scene-setters of the comics world may not throw their energies into directly countenancing the digital age, but their medium runs right alongside it anyway. (There's an argument to be made about how comics' increasing popularity as we move deeper and deeper into said age is anything but a coincidence... but I digress.)
Seth Fisher's comics, though, take the bull by the horns. Where the joy of most comics is the flow, the progression of time through the panels as moderated by the choices the artist makes, Fisher's best works -- Big In Japan chief among them -- come all at once, each panel on every quirkily designed page hitting so hard as to completely erase your memory of the last one. It's comics for an ADHD, multi-tabbed computer world, every new moment taking total precedence, whatever attention span the plots may possess completely circumvented by the pop and smack and fully realized individuality of the single panels that push them forward soundbite by soundbite.
Probably the chief reason for this info-highway temper is obvious in the picture above: Fisher packs the space between his borders with a compulsive level of detail, stretching out thin-lined, deadly accurate vistas that don't stop until they reach their four-color horizons. Fisher's use of detail is worth dissecting a little; while certainly overwhelming, it never interferes with the reader's immediate impression of the action at hand. That's because this is an accretion of pictorial elements within the frame, not of high-focus warts and tics within the elements themselves. There's a truly immense amount of different surfaces in this panel -- the million walls of the buildings in a Tokyo suburb, the monster-skin and tank metal and telephone poles and trees -- all drawn with architectural precision. But these are as clean as surfaces can get, without a single Jim Lee hatch or Paul Pope ink waver. It's a massive assemblage of circles and rectangles, each left brightly open for Chris Chuckry's flat colors to sparkle up. There's a reason that billboard face in the bottom right is drawn that way: it's only another shape-collection to flesh out this environment, not something we're actually supposed to focus on.
No, Fisher knows exactly where to put our eyes, the beacon of his wall-of-sound-effects pointing right into the monster -- himself a sculpture made of many circles -- disrupting the quiet geometry with a downright outre act of body language. Even the explosions ripping into this Simpsons-meets-Godzilla weirdo's flesh harmonize with the scheme Fisher has set up, their perfect spheres mirroring the simplicity of the treetops below them. This is iconic comics art in the raw, each individual segment of the full frame stripped down to its most basic shapes and colors, to a desktop-icon level of simplicity. I've seen those tanks and little yellow spits of fire coming out of them plenty of times before: they were in every lo-fi '90s arcade game I played as a kid. I'd bet Fisher's sen them too. Same goes for that bright yellow crown shape drawing attention to the tiny Iron Man hovering around the monster's head -- it's the same shape and color video games use to help you track your character through blurry crowd scenes. This importation of another medium's iconic shorthand is well worth the noting, both for the possibilities it offers future artists and just so the comics historians of tomorrow know Brian Lee O'Malley and Scott Pilgrim didn't do everything.
And then there's that bank of sound effects, the majority of which aren't sound effects at all. This is where the formal properties of comics that I was talking about earlier really come into play. In a jumbled, disassociated order that perfectly suits the moment depicted, we get the sound effects proper (two of them, big ones, WOM BOOM!), the source of the impacts (!BOMB!, and then the explanatory EXPLOSION), the immediate, traumatized reactions they engender in their target (the FEAR first, then the PAIN when they actually hit, followed by the DANGER the brain processes at said PAIN, and the HORROR rational recognition of the moment produces), and up top the motivating factor in all this, the vengeful general whose hateful visage sits perfectly framed by the word that kicks it all off. And Fisher doesn't stop there: action leads into reaction, Iron Man's impotent NO, separated from the white-rimmed cluster of the opening salvo, but existing in the same general morass of sound thanks to the bright, hand-lettered text that forms it (a word balloon here would just abject the push from the pull).
That's a lot for one panel to hold in, but Fisher puts it all in place elegantly, and with such conviction that it's hard to imagine this going down any way else. We get all we need in the sounds, which thanks to the white gutters lining them could very well be considered a panel unto themselves, but there's more to show, more things to draw, more of our attention for this picture to take before we move onto the next one and it all restarts again. Fisher shows it, draws it, takes it. Like those tiny trees and bushes and windows in the background of this panel, they're there -- so why not?
10.15.2010
In The Red
"Dear Logan" in Strange Tales II #1. By Rafael Grampa. Marvel.
I believe I've said this before, but Rafael Grampa's 2008 graphic novel Mesmo Delivery hit like an atom bomb. The book is so fresh, so propulsive, so utterly drunk on its own stylishness that it requires less from the reader than pretty much any other comic on the stands. A pair of eyeballs is all you need to let yourself into Mesmo; Grampa's massively individual approach to the comics language, from caricature to color to staging, is enough to seduce just about anyone from there. It's such a unique, wild ride that I don't know how many of its readers will have given much thought to the possibility of Grampa's stylistic evolution. Myself included, plenty of folks would have been happy to read Mesmo variations for the next decade or so. Given the tiny amount of other visible Grampa comics work, I'd imagine that's what's expected of him to a certain degree. We haven't seen anything else he can do. And especially on a somewhat random Marvel anthology short that he pumped out in between pages of the creator-owned epic he's working on, it would have been a stretch to expect anything more than a reiteration of Mesmo's dark red, queasily humorous blood-churning aesthetic.
But the best are relentless. The best have a wanderlust that takes them deeper into who they are as artists with every page, every line, every decision made -- not just the ones in the big marquee books. And it's certainly looking a hell of a lot like Grampa is one of the best. Not only does this eight-page mature-readers Wolverine story swagger up to be counted among the current rash of instant classic superhero shorts, it sets the artist's personal bar even higher than his last comic took it, outpacing the art-brut Mesmo rocketship in a scattering of panels so indelible that they numb the fingers holding them.
While it's the story content that really puts "Dear Logan" in the stratosphere, Grampa's art deserves as much mention as anything that's been printed this year. The big steps forward are immediately noticeable: here Mesmo's dirty-OCD penmark flurries are ground up and sprinkled liberally over a backdrop of gravel-rough brush blacks that rival Paul Pope's for fluidity and Frank Miller's for brute strength. The gloom they hang from the ceilings gives the story a claustrophobic, thrashing feel entirely different from the hellish panoramas of Grampa's previous work -- perfect for a short piece that's got no time for explicit atmospherics. One look at the rusty, jagged blacks spreading out between the panel borders and we know exactly where we are. The brushwork's set off beautifully by streams of psychedelic color that dash through the slipstream mazes of the lines in nastied-up primary-tone derivatives. There's not a single shot in this story that depicts any natural light whatsoever, and Grampa takes full adavantage of his underground-boxing-club setting to slash the spray of cracked, multicolored klieg bulbs across his characters. Nothing is hidden in this comic -- the blurs of motion boil to the top in deadly accurate scabs of ink blotting, and the high-contrast color job brings out every last smudge and hair and bead of sweat on the bodies of those it lacerates.
Grampa's switched up his staging here, as well, and though it's certainly the product of necessity in a comic that has to begin and end in as much space as the best Mesmo sequences used to show maybe thirty seconds passing, he takes up the challenge and turns it out in style. Where Mesmo took pains to construct slow builds from pure-atmospheric silences to towering heights of violence, there's revelation in in utter noisemaking here. "Dear Logan" is a nonstop carnival of blood and dark absurdism on par with the best of Josh Simmons or Johnny Ryan, but Grampa takes up different threads of degradation -- desperate lives, psychological fugue states, sexual violence, plenty of samurai swords to guts -- and weaves them into a glittering tapestry of broken glass and trauma. It's like watching Mesmo get run through a blender, with all the crescendos and he-can't-get-away-with-that moments chopped together and held up with panel-gutter duct tape. There's no room for a build to the bang here: it's just scraping and slamming all the way through, getting louder and louder until everything cuts out for a final page of desolated silence. These layouts are full of money shots, points of impact stretched out in sharp processionals, and the panels that let us catch our breath are the still shots of monstrous fight promo posters or hearts flying through smoke-scented air. It's not all ugliness here, though. The refinement and consideration of Grampa's maximalist linework must be beheld to be believed, and the deep-focus establishing shots come close to Kurosawa in their harmonious placement of pictorial elements.
But most significantly, "Dear Logan" is an absolutely heartbreaking story. Stranded in the seething mass of bloat and spotted blacks that forms the audience for the story's mutant deathmatches is a beautiful woman, crying. Any eight-pager has to get a lot across with the pictures that can't fit in the words, but the sheer poetic power of that image as Grampa draws it is like a cold fist to the throat. It's especially revealing, especially touching, when we realize that this post-Lichtenstein vision of loveliness is the first actual attractive person to have made it into Grampa's comics, set down in the ugliest, most brutal environment he's ever drawn. Grampa isn't an artist who makes every woman some refined and gorgeous creature: his people are ugly in and out, playing the blackest of danse macabre roles across split, ruined inkscapes. As such, the image of a lovely person has no small amount of telegraphic effect: in this story about ugly people doing ugly things, we take it for granted that this woman's soul is as soft as her face. A reason for Grampa's blown-out, deathly setting appears. This is the world grace and good are given to survive in. The mere sight of something beautiful against this hideous background is touching. Witnessing its struggle against the stale, stenching darkness that fills its pores and brushes up against its hair is nothing less than tear-inducing.
And it's a monster of a struggle, to be sure. "Dear Logan" would be a supremely notable story even in the least of artistic hands, because it finally takes the Wolverine character to his logical conclusion. The man who can live through any wound, the man who's survived being burned alive, fragmented by bullets, ripped in half, blown up, stabbed, mauled, gassed, amputated, and reduced down to a single drop of blood only to rush back into the fray for more every time he heals finally gets his inner workings planed apart for all to see here. It's the only interpretation of the character that makes any sense, and Grampa pulls no punches: the vaunted Wolverine is a desperate masochist, a violent man who's not only learned to live with the pain but to draw his pleasure from it. A glazed, transported look comes into Logan's eyes when his claws rip through his skin, and in the fighting rings that he created he begs for his punishment, taking everything from ginsu knives to lawn darts under his rapidly repairing skin before letting loose in an orgasmic explosion of violence, ripping the heads from his tormentors.
This in itself is further than the character has gone before. But Grampa is nothing if not uncompromising, and in a move that I still can't believe got past Marvel editorial, he brings his story behind closed doors, showing us the sexual side of this bloody desperation. Our beautiful, crying girl has been shown the truth of violent men: in the red-lit room where the Claremont/Millar/Hama Wolverine we thought we knew would have taken her to the floorboards, Grampa's Wolverine, the real Wolverine, does something quite different, much realer. He lies down, hands her an awl and asks for punishment. She gives it to him, because it's Wolverine, because this is supposed to be the pinnacle of the animalistic sex thrill that's behind all these kinds of characters, but in the end she's covered in blood and unfulfilled and scared of herself. There's nothing to him that she wants anymore. The final page, that moment of silence, slowly drags the camera away from the man who was long the most enigmatic character in comics, leaving him behind in the empty locker room that's been his true home all along. Nothing left to see, no mysteries left to solve. This is the last Wolverine story.
Something that glories as hard and deep and unapologetically in pulp as "Dear Logan" is hardly the usual form of "literary comics", but I'll make the case for it nonetheless. Because they really do exist, you know: these violent men who punish themselves by hurting other people, these lost women who believe in the lie and get hurt either way. Sometimes it starts in a boxing ring. Sometimes the women are good women, even beautiful. This story may prominently feature Deadpool getting his head chopped off in a hail of perfectly drawn blood droplets as the crowd goes wild, but it's no less about a real thing, about a real kind of person who makes a real, often sad and confusing way through the real world just like the rest of us do. You may ask why Grampa doesn't just come straight with it and show us that man without the claws, without the healing factor, without the lucha mask and adamantium. But these men always have their weapons and their walls, and you may as well also ask why Burroughs made his evil men Venusians, why Wilde made Dorian Gray's sexuality a magic painting, why Dante made his Italy Inferno.
In "Dear Logan" there are men with metal skin and claws and hacked-off arms that grow back instantaneously. This enhances. It makes the real things so large we can't deny them, so immediate we can't look away. It makes this comic sell thousands as opposed to hundreds. This blood-drenched superhero boxing ring is the landscape where Grampa can best lay down his truths and his incredible art, where high fantasy can go further into the roping guts and intestines of violence than any reality, and pull more from them as well. That makes it interesting. But the ring's canvas still takes perspiration sweated out in a mix of lust and terror, and the floorboards still absorb the salt of tears cried by a good person who's been made to see the bad inside, and there's no fantasy, there's nothing superheroic about that. It's only life Grampa is putting down here -- the brutal side of life, the shriek, the crawl. That he uses our heroes to do it speaks to a bravery that no one in his story has.
I believe I've said this before, but Rafael Grampa's 2008 graphic novel Mesmo Delivery hit like an atom bomb. The book is so fresh, so propulsive, so utterly drunk on its own stylishness that it requires less from the reader than pretty much any other comic on the stands. A pair of eyeballs is all you need to let yourself into Mesmo; Grampa's massively individual approach to the comics language, from caricature to color to staging, is enough to seduce just about anyone from there. It's such a unique, wild ride that I don't know how many of its readers will have given much thought to the possibility of Grampa's stylistic evolution. Myself included, plenty of folks would have been happy to read Mesmo variations for the next decade or so. Given the tiny amount of other visible Grampa comics work, I'd imagine that's what's expected of him to a certain degree. We haven't seen anything else he can do. And especially on a somewhat random Marvel anthology short that he pumped out in between pages of the creator-owned epic he's working on, it would have been a stretch to expect anything more than a reiteration of Mesmo's dark red, queasily humorous blood-churning aesthetic.
But the best are relentless. The best have a wanderlust that takes them deeper into who they are as artists with every page, every line, every decision made -- not just the ones in the big marquee books. And it's certainly looking a hell of a lot like Grampa is one of the best. Not only does this eight-page mature-readers Wolverine story swagger up to be counted among the current rash of instant classic superhero shorts, it sets the artist's personal bar even higher than his last comic took it, outpacing the art-brut Mesmo rocketship in a scattering of panels so indelible that they numb the fingers holding them.
While it's the story content that really puts "Dear Logan" in the stratosphere, Grampa's art deserves as much mention as anything that's been printed this year. The big steps forward are immediately noticeable: here Mesmo's dirty-OCD penmark flurries are ground up and sprinkled liberally over a backdrop of gravel-rough brush blacks that rival Paul Pope's for fluidity and Frank Miller's for brute strength. The gloom they hang from the ceilings gives the story a claustrophobic, thrashing feel entirely different from the hellish panoramas of Grampa's previous work -- perfect for a short piece that's got no time for explicit atmospherics. One look at the rusty, jagged blacks spreading out between the panel borders and we know exactly where we are. The brushwork's set off beautifully by streams of psychedelic color that dash through the slipstream mazes of the lines in nastied-up primary-tone derivatives. There's not a single shot in this story that depicts any natural light whatsoever, and Grampa takes full adavantage of his underground-boxing-club setting to slash the spray of cracked, multicolored klieg bulbs across his characters. Nothing is hidden in this comic -- the blurs of motion boil to the top in deadly accurate scabs of ink blotting, and the high-contrast color job brings out every last smudge and hair and bead of sweat on the bodies of those it lacerates.
Grampa's switched up his staging here, as well, and though it's certainly the product of necessity in a comic that has to begin and end in as much space as the best Mesmo sequences used to show maybe thirty seconds passing, he takes up the challenge and turns it out in style. Where Mesmo took pains to construct slow builds from pure-atmospheric silences to towering heights of violence, there's revelation in in utter noisemaking here. "Dear Logan" is a nonstop carnival of blood and dark absurdism on par with the best of Josh Simmons or Johnny Ryan, but Grampa takes up different threads of degradation -- desperate lives, psychological fugue states, sexual violence, plenty of samurai swords to guts -- and weaves them into a glittering tapestry of broken glass and trauma. It's like watching Mesmo get run through a blender, with all the crescendos and he-can't-get-away-with-that moments chopped together and held up with panel-gutter duct tape. There's no room for a build to the bang here: it's just scraping and slamming all the way through, getting louder and louder until everything cuts out for a final page of desolated silence. These layouts are full of money shots, points of impact stretched out in sharp processionals, and the panels that let us catch our breath are the still shots of monstrous fight promo posters or hearts flying through smoke-scented air. It's not all ugliness here, though. The refinement and consideration of Grampa's maximalist linework must be beheld to be believed, and the deep-focus establishing shots come close to Kurosawa in their harmonious placement of pictorial elements.
But most significantly, "Dear Logan" is an absolutely heartbreaking story. Stranded in the seething mass of bloat and spotted blacks that forms the audience for the story's mutant deathmatches is a beautiful woman, crying. Any eight-pager has to get a lot across with the pictures that can't fit in the words, but the sheer poetic power of that image as Grampa draws it is like a cold fist to the throat. It's especially revealing, especially touching, when we realize that this post-Lichtenstein vision of loveliness is the first actual attractive person to have made it into Grampa's comics, set down in the ugliest, most brutal environment he's ever drawn. Grampa isn't an artist who makes every woman some refined and gorgeous creature: his people are ugly in and out, playing the blackest of danse macabre roles across split, ruined inkscapes. As such, the image of a lovely person has no small amount of telegraphic effect: in this story about ugly people doing ugly things, we take it for granted that this woman's soul is as soft as her face. A reason for Grampa's blown-out, deathly setting appears. This is the world grace and good are given to survive in. The mere sight of something beautiful against this hideous background is touching. Witnessing its struggle against the stale, stenching darkness that fills its pores and brushes up against its hair is nothing less than tear-inducing.
And it's a monster of a struggle, to be sure. "Dear Logan" would be a supremely notable story even in the least of artistic hands, because it finally takes the Wolverine character to his logical conclusion. The man who can live through any wound, the man who's survived being burned alive, fragmented by bullets, ripped in half, blown up, stabbed, mauled, gassed, amputated, and reduced down to a single drop of blood only to rush back into the fray for more every time he heals finally gets his inner workings planed apart for all to see here. It's the only interpretation of the character that makes any sense, and Grampa pulls no punches: the vaunted Wolverine is a desperate masochist, a violent man who's not only learned to live with the pain but to draw his pleasure from it. A glazed, transported look comes into Logan's eyes when his claws rip through his skin, and in the fighting rings that he created he begs for his punishment, taking everything from ginsu knives to lawn darts under his rapidly repairing skin before letting loose in an orgasmic explosion of violence, ripping the heads from his tormentors.
This in itself is further than the character has gone before. But Grampa is nothing if not uncompromising, and in a move that I still can't believe got past Marvel editorial, he brings his story behind closed doors, showing us the sexual side of this bloody desperation. Our beautiful, crying girl has been shown the truth of violent men: in the red-lit room where the Claremont/Millar/Hama Wolverine we thought we knew would have taken her to the floorboards, Grampa's Wolverine, the real Wolverine, does something quite different, much realer. He lies down, hands her an awl and asks for punishment. She gives it to him, because it's Wolverine, because this is supposed to be the pinnacle of the animalistic sex thrill that's behind all these kinds of characters, but in the end she's covered in blood and unfulfilled and scared of herself. There's nothing to him that she wants anymore. The final page, that moment of silence, slowly drags the camera away from the man who was long the most enigmatic character in comics, leaving him behind in the empty locker room that's been his true home all along. Nothing left to see, no mysteries left to solve. This is the last Wolverine story.
Something that glories as hard and deep and unapologetically in pulp as "Dear Logan" is hardly the usual form of "literary comics", but I'll make the case for it nonetheless. Because they really do exist, you know: these violent men who punish themselves by hurting other people, these lost women who believe in the lie and get hurt either way. Sometimes it starts in a boxing ring. Sometimes the women are good women, even beautiful. This story may prominently feature Deadpool getting his head chopped off in a hail of perfectly drawn blood droplets as the crowd goes wild, but it's no less about a real thing, about a real kind of person who makes a real, often sad and confusing way through the real world just like the rest of us do. You may ask why Grampa doesn't just come straight with it and show us that man without the claws, without the healing factor, without the lucha mask and adamantium. But these men always have their weapons and their walls, and you may as well also ask why Burroughs made his evil men Venusians, why Wilde made Dorian Gray's sexuality a magic painting, why Dante made his Italy Inferno.
In "Dear Logan" there are men with metal skin and claws and hacked-off arms that grow back instantaneously. This enhances. It makes the real things so large we can't deny them, so immediate we can't look away. It makes this comic sell thousands as opposed to hundreds. This blood-drenched superhero boxing ring is the landscape where Grampa can best lay down his truths and his incredible art, where high fantasy can go further into the roping guts and intestines of violence than any reality, and pull more from them as well. That makes it interesting. But the ring's canvas still takes perspiration sweated out in a mix of lust and terror, and the floorboards still absorb the salt of tears cried by a good person who's been made to see the bad inside, and there's no fantasy, there's nothing superheroic about that. It's only life Grampa is putting down here -- the brutal side of life, the shriek, the crawl. That he uses our heroes to do it speaks to a bravery that no one in his story has.
10.13.2010
Deadpool Expansion
Deadpool Max #1. By Kyle Baker & David Lapham. Marvel Max.
It's a foregone conclusion that superhero comics always present us the readers with better versions of ourselves, caped men that have become everything we could ever be and more. The heroes are smart, bookish even, like we are, and though they're awkward around women they get the girl. They're always handsome, anyway. They've got some muscle to them. Their jobs can be relied upon to come through with enough to support at least a middle-class lifestyle. The villains and disasters are there because nobody wants to read something without any drama to it, but they always go down in the end, allowing us to get back to the best part of the comics: the proxy lives they slip us into. Nobody wants to be Spiderman, can you imagine the hassle? But who wouldn't want to be Peter Parker, that perfect mixture of Stan Lee nerd and Steve Ditko self-actualizer whose life looks as stuck in neutral as the real thing can feel but always seems to be moving inexplicably forward despite its serialized spate of roadblocks.
If that's the micro, here's the macro: the superhero's role in society is just as idealized as the men in tights themselves. The Golden Age was a processional of flamboyant war heroes and community policers, the sedated Eisenhower era gave with a massive cutback on the masks to a country that had seen enough action for a while, the resurgence in the dynamic '60s saw characters who began as happy cogs in the well-oiled machine of the military-industrial structure turn into soul-searching, largely inept vehicles for social change. This is textbook. And as the psychedelic travelers of the '70s gave way to the ripped commandos and media rebels of the '80s, it all fell into the doldums of the Bush-Clinton years. How was the ideal individual to behave in society at the close of the millenium? Nobody really knew, and despite the bold, globalist futurism of Warren Ellis's Authority, the hero market was as diffuse and aimless as its history had ever seen it.
Then -- nine eleven, and suddenly the heroes had a purpose again, if only a small and brutal one. If there had been a man in 2001 to 2003 or thereabouts who could have killed or even merely captured Osama bin Laden while we were watching, America would have made him a Caesar. Suddenly there was a reason for a moribund concept and a failing genre to exist again, and for a while there it looked like we were really going to see another Golden Age -- not only did the books get better but the flags flew in the panel backgrounds, jingoism became part and parcel of the narratives, and more and more of the ground that costumed villains and supporting casts had previously held began being ceded to the opposing forces of stock government agencies and road-company terrorists. Where for so long the game had been about making good people safe from a world that comes in varying shades of ugliness (usually somewhere between the brights of DC's Silver Age and the bloody blacks of post-Dark Knight urban terror comics), at the very furthest making the world at large safe for democracy by refighting World War II, now everything underwent a subtle but appreciable change.
There's a massive amount to be written about the way the tempers of the times are reflected in 2000s hero comics. As soon as the little WTC-memorial logos went up on the Marvel covers (soon replaced by a support-our-boys starstriped heart icon), the
books were no longer about the search-and-destroy programs Good ran on Evil. We were all more culpable than that. The world was more dangerous than in had been in a long time. Now the heroes had to understand why their villains were doing what they did, make an effort to parse who they were and where they came from, take them out without upsetting the populace if at all possible, and then use what they had learned from the encounter to make sure such things would never happen again. They did happen again, of course, because these are superhero comics for goodness sake, and the new modus operandi (as seen in Civil War, Grant Morrison's X-Men, Joe Casey's Adventures of Superman, ad nauseam) was too slight, too anesthetized, too real. See, the post-Alex Ross duty to verisimilitude that hangs around hero books like a bad smell had crossed some wires somewhere, leaving our dreams just as traumatized and careful as reality.
Who knows? Maybe if the heroes had risen up in one four-color spandex wave as soon as those buildings blew up on that day, and taken the fight direct to the Middle East for a few gung-ho years of open season on stereotyped terrorists, America's frustrated desire to kick some ass again wouldn't have bled into the Dadaist nightmare cry of real-life war. I'm not saying it would have worked out that way, just that it could have. Who knows? Because Hitler died to end the Golden Age, but we didn't kill him and we couldn't kill Nazism either. No, the hero comics have always been the best arena to go to war with abstract concepts. We dealt with our embarrassed grief quick enough -- we had those ever so of-the-moment "tribute" benefit books (anybody still have their copy of "Heroes"?), and that abominable J. Michael Straczynski-written issue of Spiderman, where Dr. Doom's tears of impotent rage made me laugh but that kid watching his dad's body get carried out on the stretcher sent chills up and down my eleven-year-old spine. I haven't read it since. I haven't needed to.
Ink is always the better currency, art always the truer riposte, ideas always the bombs that lead to the real brighter tomorrow. Comics have taught me this. What I did need to read, what everybody needed to read, were the next step comics, the ones where the musclemen we love hopped over to the Fertile Crescent and got the revenge we realized too late we didn't want to pay for in real human blood. There were two of those comics, remember? One was the big-ticket Frank Miller Batman propaganda graphic novel, Holy Terror, in which the Dark Knight was gonna go kick bin Laden's ass. The other one was a Crossgen book by noted genre-comics conservative Chuck Dixon. It was called fuckin' AMERICAN POWER, marketed as exactly what we could have used to get our crippling frustrations out: a new hero created explicitly to go after all the real-life, genuwyne, non-fictionalized terrorists on W. Bush's hit list. And kick their asses, presumably. Greg Land even quit Sojourn to draw it.
Neither comic came out. The War on Terror turned into a star performer on the list of America's most egregious atrocities. Life imitated art like crazy. We never got the real man, the Caesar who brought bin Laden's head into Times Square on a platter -- we were never going to. But we never even got him in the superhero comics, where it could really happen and so easily, where it could have done us some good without doing anyone else any harm. The mainstream moved on, Marvel crawling up itself with the handy old continuity shoehorn turning the halfbaked political salience of Civil War into the axis for an ever more obtuse, expensive saga, and DC retreating into a noxious mixture of nostalgia for the years when Khruschev held the Middle East down and the self-obsessive grossness of reality TV.
And now, of all times, we get the moment we've forgotten we were waiting for.
That picture's from Deadpool Max #1, as drawn by Kyle Baker. Baker has definitely been one of the more politically relevant voices in comics over the past decade, hitting hard and uncompromising with the pre-Obama black humor/black rage of Birth of a Nation and Nat Turner, and the viciously nasty Iraq satire Special Forces. Personally, I wouldn't have thought such a deeply radical voice would have given us the propaganda shot we spent Alex Rodriguez's Texas Rangers years salivating for. But as deft and devastating a sociopolitical firestarter Baker is, he's also the tip-top of current superhero cartooning, and he's nothing if not effective with the jobs he does. And with this ugly, shadowed little guilty pleasure of an image, Baker does hero comics the biggest favor they've had in quite a while.
Whether everybody working in the genre picks up on it or not, this is the cathartic end to an era of superheroes that's gotten dangerously lost of late. This is what all the books were trying to show us but dared not draw -- victory in the real fight, revenge for the lives that were taken as opposed to given up. The desire to get Osama bin Laden may have energized the field once upon a time, but it's been a millstone around the neck for years now, and by finally just drawing the damn picture, Baker frees us from that old raison d'etre. Old scores are settled now, and the heroes can go somewhere new, find bigger dragons to slay.
Of course, "going somewhere new" has always been the very hardest thing you can ask mainstream comics to do, so it's good that Baker, with David Lapham on scripts, spends the rest of the book showing us how. Though Deadpool Max reads like nothing more than a well-concieved, expertly crafted superhero comic where they can say fuck, that's a hell of a thing when it feels like the book comes from 2017. This is a bold step forward into the breach, an utterly stylish comic whose style is all its own. There are tiny snatches of older comics buried in the bedrock of this thing, some Preacher here, a bit of Joe Kubert or Miller there, but they're displayed as inspirational points of departure as opposed to lazily incorporated influences. Baker's art is as solid as ever, and its seamless synthesis of the different artistic hats he wears -- gritty draftsman, hyperkinetic cartoonist, forward-looking digital wizard -- makes it the best looking work he's done in years. The layouts in this comic absolutely breathe, condensing down in dark scenes before opening out to a yawning gape for action tracking shots that get downright surreal in their unflinching, Bugs Bunnyish shots of explosive blood splatters and flying viscera.
This comic just looks ahead of everything else out there, Baker using its pages to take his place with Frazer Irving and Brendan McCarthy as a dean of futurist computer coloring. But where those two go psychedelic, noise rock places with their machine effects, Baker is resolutely mainstream. The fibrous, tangible brushstrokes and calligraphic pen lines lose their blackness, blending into the backgrounds to define forms rather than merely sitting on top of them. Flat, monotone shapes are laid in behind the figure art, popping the richness of the linework out at you while functioning as gorgeous, near-cubist set dressing in its own right. As in real life, the carpets and desks and elevators in this comic aren't made of the same stuff as the people, and the tension between the viscerally handmade and the purely artificial gives the pictures a cold, demonic kick. It's both a purer and more evolved realization of what Frank Miller and Lynn Varley laid the blueprint for in DK2: comics as pop art that you can still dive into somehow. Past all that, it just looks beautiful.
While Baker is certainly the star of the show here, David Lapham comes up aces too, turning in the best comic he's written since Young Liars ended. Lapham takes the Max imprint's mature-readers purview far more seriously than anyone since Garth Ennis, turning it to a scathingly intense mixture of scatological laughs and explosive violence that, while populist, isn't the kind of the thing too much of the actual populace will be able to stomach for years to come. One of this comic's pictures is the closest-up close-up of a dick I've ever seen in the medium, and it's certainly the only close-up of a dick that has Deadpool tattooed on it in Ed Hardy/Hiroshige cartoon shorthand. And speaking of Deadpool, Lapham pulls off the world's dumbest, and thus hardest to write superhero with aplomb. In a world where most of the real stars still cling to the tenuous threads of sanity and social decorum but the pop-up media memes don't even pretend to, perfectly written mental illness feels like the right place for the superheroes to go, especially one who's gotten as big as quick and in in as inexplicable a fashion as Marvel's bootleg ninja-Wolverine. And despite all the men in thongs and reaching down toilets and surviving atomic bomb explosions, this comic grinds along in the correct 22-page pop song manner, the old pro Lapham cramming a standard action comic full of plot and character in with all the broken ground somehow.
It may feel like the future, but we've been living in the past for years now. Make no mistake: Deadpool Max is the present, a truly modern comic in every sense of the word. It's still a continuing serial published by Marvel, so it'll never change the landscape in the way that one dumb-ass picture of bin Laden does again. But next month the world will be something different from what it is now, and this comic is such a thing that issue 2 will be right there with it, moving forward like everything else does, like everything that doesn't ought to be. This is the end of an era, but there's no mourn or fanfare to it. Everyone should be more concerned with what comes next, and that's why they should be reading Deadpool Max.
I also did a first draft review of this comic you can read. Why would you do that? Because this link is also redeemable for one rumination on the incredible new issue of Seth's Palookaville (image below). Check it out.
It's a foregone conclusion that superhero comics always present us the readers with better versions of ourselves, caped men that have become everything we could ever be and more. The heroes are smart, bookish even, like we are, and though they're awkward around women they get the girl. They're always handsome, anyway. They've got some muscle to them. Their jobs can be relied upon to come through with enough to support at least a middle-class lifestyle. The villains and disasters are there because nobody wants to read something without any drama to it, but they always go down in the end, allowing us to get back to the best part of the comics: the proxy lives they slip us into. Nobody wants to be Spiderman, can you imagine the hassle? But who wouldn't want to be Peter Parker, that perfect mixture of Stan Lee nerd and Steve Ditko self-actualizer whose life looks as stuck in neutral as the real thing can feel but always seems to be moving inexplicably forward despite its serialized spate of roadblocks.
If that's the micro, here's the macro: the superhero's role in society is just as idealized as the men in tights themselves. The Golden Age was a processional of flamboyant war heroes and community policers, the sedated Eisenhower era gave with a massive cutback on the masks to a country that had seen enough action for a while, the resurgence in the dynamic '60s saw characters who began as happy cogs in the well-oiled machine of the military-industrial structure turn into soul-searching, largely inept vehicles for social change. This is textbook. And as the psychedelic travelers of the '70s gave way to the ripped commandos and media rebels of the '80s, it all fell into the doldums of the Bush-Clinton years. How was the ideal individual to behave in society at the close of the millenium? Nobody really knew, and despite the bold, globalist futurism of Warren Ellis's Authority, the hero market was as diffuse and aimless as its history had ever seen it.
Then -- nine eleven, and suddenly the heroes had a purpose again, if only a small and brutal one. If there had been a man in 2001 to 2003 or thereabouts who could have killed or even merely captured Osama bin Laden while we were watching, America would have made him a Caesar. Suddenly there was a reason for a moribund concept and a failing genre to exist again, and for a while there it looked like we were really going to see another Golden Age -- not only did the books get better but the flags flew in the panel backgrounds, jingoism became part and parcel of the narratives, and more and more of the ground that costumed villains and supporting casts had previously held began being ceded to the opposing forces of stock government agencies and road-company terrorists. Where for so long the game had been about making good people safe from a world that comes in varying shades of ugliness (usually somewhere between the brights of DC's Silver Age and the bloody blacks of post-Dark Knight urban terror comics), at the very furthest making the world at large safe for democracy by refighting World War II, now everything underwent a subtle but appreciable change.
There's a massive amount to be written about the way the tempers of the times are reflected in 2000s hero comics. As soon as the little WTC-memorial logos went up on the Marvel covers (soon replaced by a support-our-boys starstriped heart icon), the
books were no longer about the search-and-destroy programs Good ran on Evil. We were all more culpable than that. The world was more dangerous than in had been in a long time. Now the heroes had to understand why their villains were doing what they did, make an effort to parse who they were and where they came from, take them out without upsetting the populace if at all possible, and then use what they had learned from the encounter to make sure such things would never happen again. They did happen again, of course, because these are superhero comics for goodness sake, and the new modus operandi (as seen in Civil War, Grant Morrison's X-Men, Joe Casey's Adventures of Superman, ad nauseam) was too slight, too anesthetized, too real. See, the post-Alex Ross duty to verisimilitude that hangs around hero books like a bad smell had crossed some wires somewhere, leaving our dreams just as traumatized and careful as reality.
Who knows? Maybe if the heroes had risen up in one four-color spandex wave as soon as those buildings blew up on that day, and taken the fight direct to the Middle East for a few gung-ho years of open season on stereotyped terrorists, America's frustrated desire to kick some ass again wouldn't have bled into the Dadaist nightmare cry of real-life war. I'm not saying it would have worked out that way, just that it could have. Who knows? Because Hitler died to end the Golden Age, but we didn't kill him and we couldn't kill Nazism either. No, the hero comics have always been the best arena to go to war with abstract concepts. We dealt with our embarrassed grief quick enough -- we had those ever so of-the-moment "tribute" benefit books (anybody still have their copy of "Heroes"?), and that abominable J. Michael Straczynski-written issue of Spiderman, where Dr. Doom's tears of impotent rage made me laugh but that kid watching his dad's body get carried out on the stretcher sent chills up and down my eleven-year-old spine. I haven't read it since. I haven't needed to.
Ink is always the better currency, art always the truer riposte, ideas always the bombs that lead to the real brighter tomorrow. Comics have taught me this. What I did need to read, what everybody needed to read, were the next step comics, the ones where the musclemen we love hopped over to the Fertile Crescent and got the revenge we realized too late we didn't want to pay for in real human blood. There were two of those comics, remember? One was the big-ticket Frank Miller Batman propaganda graphic novel, Holy Terror, in which the Dark Knight was gonna go kick bin Laden's ass. The other one was a Crossgen book by noted genre-comics conservative Chuck Dixon. It was called fuckin' AMERICAN POWER, marketed as exactly what we could have used to get our crippling frustrations out: a new hero created explicitly to go after all the real-life, genuwyne, non-fictionalized terrorists on W. Bush's hit list. And kick their asses, presumably. Greg Land even quit Sojourn to draw it.
Neither comic came out. The War on Terror turned into a star performer on the list of America's most egregious atrocities. Life imitated art like crazy. We never got the real man, the Caesar who brought bin Laden's head into Times Square on a platter -- we were never going to. But we never even got him in the superhero comics, where it could really happen and so easily, where it could have done us some good without doing anyone else any harm. The mainstream moved on, Marvel crawling up itself with the handy old continuity shoehorn turning the halfbaked political salience of Civil War into the axis for an ever more obtuse, expensive saga, and DC retreating into a noxious mixture of nostalgia for the years when Khruschev held the Middle East down and the self-obsessive grossness of reality TV.
And now, of all times, we get the moment we've forgotten we were waiting for.
That picture's from Deadpool Max #1, as drawn by Kyle Baker. Baker has definitely been one of the more politically relevant voices in comics over the past decade, hitting hard and uncompromising with the pre-Obama black humor/black rage of Birth of a Nation and Nat Turner, and the viciously nasty Iraq satire Special Forces. Personally, I wouldn't have thought such a deeply radical voice would have given us the propaganda shot we spent Alex Rodriguez's Texas Rangers years salivating for. But as deft and devastating a sociopolitical firestarter Baker is, he's also the tip-top of current superhero cartooning, and he's nothing if not effective with the jobs he does. And with this ugly, shadowed little guilty pleasure of an image, Baker does hero comics the biggest favor they've had in quite a while.
Whether everybody working in the genre picks up on it or not, this is the cathartic end to an era of superheroes that's gotten dangerously lost of late. This is what all the books were trying to show us but dared not draw -- victory in the real fight, revenge for the lives that were taken as opposed to given up. The desire to get Osama bin Laden may have energized the field once upon a time, but it's been a millstone around the neck for years now, and by finally just drawing the damn picture, Baker frees us from that old raison d'etre. Old scores are settled now, and the heroes can go somewhere new, find bigger dragons to slay.
Of course, "going somewhere new" has always been the very hardest thing you can ask mainstream comics to do, so it's good that Baker, with David Lapham on scripts, spends the rest of the book showing us how. Though Deadpool Max reads like nothing more than a well-concieved, expertly crafted superhero comic where they can say fuck, that's a hell of a thing when it feels like the book comes from 2017. This is a bold step forward into the breach, an utterly stylish comic whose style is all its own. There are tiny snatches of older comics buried in the bedrock of this thing, some Preacher here, a bit of Joe Kubert or Miller there, but they're displayed as inspirational points of departure as opposed to lazily incorporated influences. Baker's art is as solid as ever, and its seamless synthesis of the different artistic hats he wears -- gritty draftsman, hyperkinetic cartoonist, forward-looking digital wizard -- makes it the best looking work he's done in years. The layouts in this comic absolutely breathe, condensing down in dark scenes before opening out to a yawning gape for action tracking shots that get downright surreal in their unflinching, Bugs Bunnyish shots of explosive blood splatters and flying viscera.
This comic just looks ahead of everything else out there, Baker using its pages to take his place with Frazer Irving and Brendan McCarthy as a dean of futurist computer coloring. But where those two go psychedelic, noise rock places with their machine effects, Baker is resolutely mainstream. The fibrous, tangible brushstrokes and calligraphic pen lines lose their blackness, blending into the backgrounds to define forms rather than merely sitting on top of them. Flat, monotone shapes are laid in behind the figure art, popping the richness of the linework out at you while functioning as gorgeous, near-cubist set dressing in its own right. As in real life, the carpets and desks and elevators in this comic aren't made of the same stuff as the people, and the tension between the viscerally handmade and the purely artificial gives the pictures a cold, demonic kick. It's both a purer and more evolved realization of what Frank Miller and Lynn Varley laid the blueprint for in DK2: comics as pop art that you can still dive into somehow. Past all that, it just looks beautiful.
While Baker is certainly the star of the show here, David Lapham comes up aces too, turning in the best comic he's written since Young Liars ended. Lapham takes the Max imprint's mature-readers purview far more seriously than anyone since Garth Ennis, turning it to a scathingly intense mixture of scatological laughs and explosive violence that, while populist, isn't the kind of the thing too much of the actual populace will be able to stomach for years to come. One of this comic's pictures is the closest-up close-up of a dick I've ever seen in the medium, and it's certainly the only close-up of a dick that has Deadpool tattooed on it in Ed Hardy/Hiroshige cartoon shorthand. And speaking of Deadpool, Lapham pulls off the world's dumbest, and thus hardest to write superhero with aplomb. In a world where most of the real stars still cling to the tenuous threads of sanity and social decorum but the pop-up media memes don't even pretend to, perfectly written mental illness feels like the right place for the superheroes to go, especially one who's gotten as big as quick and in in as inexplicable a fashion as Marvel's bootleg ninja-Wolverine. And despite all the men in thongs and reaching down toilets and surviving atomic bomb explosions, this comic grinds along in the correct 22-page pop song manner, the old pro Lapham cramming a standard action comic full of plot and character in with all the broken ground somehow.
It may feel like the future, but we've been living in the past for years now. Make no mistake: Deadpool Max is the present, a truly modern comic in every sense of the word. It's still a continuing serial published by Marvel, so it'll never change the landscape in the way that one dumb-ass picture of bin Laden does again. But next month the world will be something different from what it is now, and this comic is such a thing that issue 2 will be right there with it, moving forward like everything else does, like everything that doesn't ought to be. This is the end of an era, but there's no mourn or fanfare to it. Everyone should be more concerned with what comes next, and that's why they should be reading Deadpool Max.
I also did a first draft review of this comic you can read. Why would you do that? Because this link is also redeemable for one rumination on the incredible new issue of Seth's Palookaville (image below). Check it out.
10.11.2010
Your Monday Panel 32
Solo #12 (2006), page 24 panel 3. Brendan McCarthy.
All my talk about varying levels of detail over the past few weeks can basically be boiled down to one nugget, and it's a good bet as the most nauseatingly over-cited piece of comics art wisdom: as long as it serves the story, it's probably OK to put in. As long as it's superfluous to the story, it's probably OK to take out. But there's a stream of comics to which that just doesn't apply, because they aren't about the story as much as the experience, the unique flavor, the things that only the comics medium can deliver. Gary Panter does that kind of work. So does Jim Steranko. And so, as I'll explain, does Brendan McCarthy.
McCarthy fits in with the other two guys I mentioned above for more than just the feel of his stories. Like Panter and Steranko, he comes to comics out of a separate, "higher" visual art tradition. Panter is a pop-expressionist painter, Steranko a midcentury commercial artist. McCarthy, for his part, is spawned from the English art schools of the 1970s, where whimsy and psychedelia intertwined with formal play and the utmost importance of style. (There's a reason more famous rock bands came out of those places than painters, after all.) What McCarthy brings to comics out of his pure-visual arts background, not to mention his time in movie and animation design, is an almost unparalleled focus on making the images come first, a willingness to throw the story in the back seat and just make mind-blowing drawings. That's a really foreign impulse for most mainstream comics artists, who not only work in a divided-labor system that makes true pictorial soloing impossible, but also come to comics via comics, the mere idea of choosing not to use certain storytelling conventions falling outside their headspace.
Reading McCarthy comics you often get the sense that he doesn't know or care just how directly upstream he's swimming, and as such the product is wildly variable. Sometimes a McCarthy page turns up a total mess, all sense of sequence and flow lost in a sluice of color or line. Other times it hangs together somehow, and the results are nothing less than a new way of comics that's not even definable for the amount of innovation it carries. Sometimes it's both at the same time, head-spinning, and that's probably why McCarthy's disorienting laughing-gas-blast pages have remained cult objects rather than bleeding into the canon like they should have years and years ago.
In the panel above, though, McCarthy gets it all right. It's a pretty basic take on subdivision, two actions in one panel -- but McCarthy subtracts the cold, formal procedure of in-frame borders and just packs two pictures in there, totally irregardless of the fact that the usual thing to do is one per rectangle. It makes for a hell of a kinetic composition, layering action over reaction, call welded to response in a fully organic, perfectly readable sequence that scrolls neatly across the page but doesn't ask us to hop any gutters or move past any dividing lines. It's the fullness of one (literally!) explosive moment in a self-contained unit, binding the two individuals' actions together rather than abjecting them from one another. A totally original approach to fight drawings, this is one where you wonder why they weren't doing it all long.
But McCarthy takes his all-in impulse way further than just forgetting to draw a line down the middle. There's a true pop artist's approach to the language of comic-book shorthand on display here: check out the massive amount of speed-line haze the monster's roundhouse swing generates in the upper left, the irreverent, video game-esque glow of the Latin sound effects that splat across the page in seeming ignorance of the figure drawings they're covering over. The starburst in the middle that provides the frame with its loudest noise also functions as a bold exhibition of individual style. When was the last time you saw a comics artist draw a starburst that looked like a radiant portal, or maybe a glittering deep-sea creature, and not that same regularized shape we all know? It's that kind of reconsideration of old comics standards that makes McCarthy's work so fresh, so surprising. And then there's the little details -- richly anecdotal, utterly distracting, totally not in service of the story -- but that endlessly layered explosion of bright-light crucifixes totally sells the anger of the starburst's blast while lending the panel a decorative element of high psychedelia. Hell, the processional line of them across the bottom even draws your eye right into the rising action, and it gives a backgroundless panel some definite perspective in the bargain.
Of course, McCarthy's career as a comics-color conceptualist deserves at least as much ink as his drawings. These days he pretty much stands alone as a computer-tone wildman (well, him and Frazer Irving), but this panel sees him in a relatively restrained, nearly Zen mode, innovating colored line art for every single pictorial element, the navy and pinks and yellows and most of all the absence of any distracting blacks unifying a hugely messy composition with calm, futurist precision. This is something almost nobody's picked up on since, and it's something absolutely everybody working in full color should have: given that pure black line doesn't even exist in real life, why not just go for it and make the tones of the lines a part of the over all color scheme? McCarthy's cornflower shadows and blazing letters go all the way to the bone for this picture, lending that expressionist explosion no end of strange, starry light. And despite the amped-up brightness and high contrast of the hues, it's all perfectly balanced, with derivatives of the three primary colors carrying equal weight and no extra hues needed, plenty of white left in a frame that somehow never gets overcrowded, the delicacy of the pastel tones evening out the spiky violence of the picture.
So yeah, this panel breaks a lot of the rules. It takes way more time to read than the average one-action composition, it moves your eye around the page in a veering, reeling fever-motion, it's messy as hell and full of concern for anecdotal detail. And yet it works -- because of the painterly color choices, the strength of the composition, whether unconventional or not, the pop-art vigor of the subject matter, the thick, blameless linework that slams it all into being. It doesn't look like normal comics, but would you really want it any other way?
All my talk about varying levels of detail over the past few weeks can basically be boiled down to one nugget, and it's a good bet as the most nauseatingly over-cited piece of comics art wisdom: as long as it serves the story, it's probably OK to put in. As long as it's superfluous to the story, it's probably OK to take out. But there's a stream of comics to which that just doesn't apply, because they aren't about the story as much as the experience, the unique flavor, the things that only the comics medium can deliver. Gary Panter does that kind of work. So does Jim Steranko. And so, as I'll explain, does Brendan McCarthy.
McCarthy fits in with the other two guys I mentioned above for more than just the feel of his stories. Like Panter and Steranko, he comes to comics out of a separate, "higher" visual art tradition. Panter is a pop-expressionist painter, Steranko a midcentury commercial artist. McCarthy, for his part, is spawned from the English art schools of the 1970s, where whimsy and psychedelia intertwined with formal play and the utmost importance of style. (There's a reason more famous rock bands came out of those places than painters, after all.) What McCarthy brings to comics out of his pure-visual arts background, not to mention his time in movie and animation design, is an almost unparalleled focus on making the images come first, a willingness to throw the story in the back seat and just make mind-blowing drawings. That's a really foreign impulse for most mainstream comics artists, who not only work in a divided-labor system that makes true pictorial soloing impossible, but also come to comics via comics, the mere idea of choosing not to use certain storytelling conventions falling outside their headspace.
Reading McCarthy comics you often get the sense that he doesn't know or care just how directly upstream he's swimming, and as such the product is wildly variable. Sometimes a McCarthy page turns up a total mess, all sense of sequence and flow lost in a sluice of color or line. Other times it hangs together somehow, and the results are nothing less than a new way of comics that's not even definable for the amount of innovation it carries. Sometimes it's both at the same time, head-spinning, and that's probably why McCarthy's disorienting laughing-gas-blast pages have remained cult objects rather than bleeding into the canon like they should have years and years ago.
In the panel above, though, McCarthy gets it all right. It's a pretty basic take on subdivision, two actions in one panel -- but McCarthy subtracts the cold, formal procedure of in-frame borders and just packs two pictures in there, totally irregardless of the fact that the usual thing to do is one per rectangle. It makes for a hell of a kinetic composition, layering action over reaction, call welded to response in a fully organic, perfectly readable sequence that scrolls neatly across the page but doesn't ask us to hop any gutters or move past any dividing lines. It's the fullness of one (literally!) explosive moment in a self-contained unit, binding the two individuals' actions together rather than abjecting them from one another. A totally original approach to fight drawings, this is one where you wonder why they weren't doing it all long.
But McCarthy takes his all-in impulse way further than just forgetting to draw a line down the middle. There's a true pop artist's approach to the language of comic-book shorthand on display here: check out the massive amount of speed-line haze the monster's roundhouse swing generates in the upper left, the irreverent, video game-esque glow of the Latin sound effects that splat across the page in seeming ignorance of the figure drawings they're covering over. The starburst in the middle that provides the frame with its loudest noise also functions as a bold exhibition of individual style. When was the last time you saw a comics artist draw a starburst that looked like a radiant portal, or maybe a glittering deep-sea creature, and not that same regularized shape we all know? It's that kind of reconsideration of old comics standards that makes McCarthy's work so fresh, so surprising. And then there's the little details -- richly anecdotal, utterly distracting, totally not in service of the story -- but that endlessly layered explosion of bright-light crucifixes totally sells the anger of the starburst's blast while lending the panel a decorative element of high psychedelia. Hell, the processional line of them across the bottom even draws your eye right into the rising action, and it gives a backgroundless panel some definite perspective in the bargain.
Of course, McCarthy's career as a comics-color conceptualist deserves at least as much ink as his drawings. These days he pretty much stands alone as a computer-tone wildman (well, him and Frazer Irving), but this panel sees him in a relatively restrained, nearly Zen mode, innovating colored line art for every single pictorial element, the navy and pinks and yellows and most of all the absence of any distracting blacks unifying a hugely messy composition with calm, futurist precision. This is something almost nobody's picked up on since, and it's something absolutely everybody working in full color should have: given that pure black line doesn't even exist in real life, why not just go for it and make the tones of the lines a part of the over all color scheme? McCarthy's cornflower shadows and blazing letters go all the way to the bone for this picture, lending that expressionist explosion no end of strange, starry light. And despite the amped-up brightness and high contrast of the hues, it's all perfectly balanced, with derivatives of the three primary colors carrying equal weight and no extra hues needed, plenty of white left in a frame that somehow never gets overcrowded, the delicacy of the pastel tones evening out the spiky violence of the picture.
So yeah, this panel breaks a lot of the rules. It takes way more time to read than the average one-action composition, it moves your eye around the page in a veering, reeling fever-motion, it's messy as hell and full of concern for anecdotal detail. And yet it works -- because of the painterly color choices, the strength of the composition, whether unconventional or not, the pop-art vigor of the subject matter, the thick, blameless linework that slams it all into being. It doesn't look like normal comics, but would you really want it any other way?
10.07.2010
Metropoli
Dominion and Panterville
Seth and Gary Panter are two artists who create alternative, "indie" comics, but that's about where their shared ground ends. Seth is a nostalgist and a traditionalist, a massively skilled designer and cartoon artist whose understated, whimsical narratives and schooling in the high New Yorker drawing style produce aching, elegant comics that seem most intent on crystallizing the experience of memory itself, of stepping into the golden-hued better world of the past. Panter, on the other hand, is comics' most accomplished futurist, a ragingly iconoclastic pop artist whose gloriously messy, ink-blasted pages and deconstructed narratives go beyond the post-apocalyptic to hint at something rising from the ashes of the end. They're bound together by the medium of comics, of course, though both do more work outside the form than the vast majority of its artists. Past that, though, it's tempting to say they've got nothing in common.
Tempting. But if you actually did say it you'd be wrong, because both Seth and Panter hand-make little buildings from scratch in their spare time. What? Yes.
This is a pretty weird hobby, one which only one other comics artist (Chris Ware) has to my knowledge indulged in. But we'll put Ware aside, because it's these two guys alone when you look at the scale of what they've done. Both artists have created massive collections of their shoebox edifices, and both have showed them off to the public in print, Panter in his sprawling self-titled Picturebox monograph and Seth in the most recent issue of his one-man comic arts anthology Palookaville. This is more significant than it may sound at first: both men's miniature public-works endeavors are admittedly secondary to their "main" oeuvres, but both have also been deemed worthy of presentation, taking on the cast of art projects as opposed to accumulations of creative marginalia. They're three-dimensional sketchbooks, if you will, and the fact that both not only keep them but have allowed their hobby to bleed into their profession is telling.
Most all comic art has its genesis in the comics-collecting hobbyism of the kids who grew up to draw it, and what Panter and Seth are doing by presenting their buildings to the public is pulling back the curtain on the fully-formed artist's mind as it works through its own creativity, same as that kid's did while he was sitting on the floor with the funnies. More than that, by allowing us access to these non-comics projects Panter and Seth give us a new viewpoint from which to consider their art. The houses themselves are easily as individual and creatively striking as the comics, both men's cardboard concretes obviously outgrowths of the personal aesthetics they developed making sequential art.
Seth's buildings are neat, precise, often painstaking. Water towers sit atop delicate latticeworks, a delicate craft brought to bear in replicating pure utilitarianism on a delightfully unworkable scale. The ascending box shapes of skyscrapers sit neatly one atop the other, straight rows of tiny windows sometimes painted on, sometimes created by applying minuscule squares of cardboard to the larger sheet that forms the wall. Brickwork is deftly lined in with a meticulous verve. Seth's trademark midcentury advertising-style typescripts adorn signs for chophouses, radio stations, record stores, cinemas, the businesses of a bygone world. Complicated, precariously balanced ornaments -- awnings, marquees, columns -- bedeck the simple rectangles, adding elegant touches of class.
Despite the regularity of shape -- boxes, boxes, and more boxes -- that characterizes the place the artist has named "Dominion City", there's a refreshing variation-on-theme at play among the individual pieces. The squares and rectangles fit together asymmetrically, sections fixed at odd angles or unexpected inclines. They are unmistakably old buildings, charged with the quaint pleasantness of the antique, and speak directly to the intention their creator states in a self-penned Palookaville essay on his little city: Dominion "satisfied some urge to possess the old buildings I saw out in the world... putting them in amber -- saving them from the wrecking ball." This cardboard snowglobe is as much a display of Seth's powerful, driving nostalgia as any of his comics works.
Panter's buildings are just the opposite. Bold, alien-looking minimalist constructs, they evince little of the intense attention to detail found in Seth's charming municipality. Instead, Panter puts his mind to the conceptual, innovating architectural forms as the ideas and the materials come. These structures are not to be found in Seth's newspaper-age city, and probably not in yours, either: toilet-roll silos that look over Olympic sized masking-tape pools complete with diving boards, geodesic-roofed huts flanked by wine-cork storage barrels, low-slung bunkers with packing-foam earthworks strapped on by thick rubber bands. Panter rarely adds illustrative detailing to his media -- perhaps an ornamental strip of tape here or a hastily scribbled door there -- achieving his architectural nuances by recontextualizing the original materials. An almond box's cheery labeling literally gets turned upside-down to become a glowing piece of advertising, while clear plastic sheeting is cut into made-to-order tinted windows and the wavy surface of corrugated cardboard becomes the material of choice in this bizarre assemblage of a 22nd-century border town.
Here we can begin to identify aesthetic differences between the two amateur architects, ones that lead us back into their more widely seen works. Panter the pop artist is delighted with trash-as-it-is, merely rearranging it into new life. His alchemy is not so different from what Marcel Duchamp pulled off with his readymades: looking at everyday things differently here, monkeying around with their shapes and spatial relationships there, and imbuing them with an absurdist beauty that makes us see them as more than the are by stripping them of all functionality, turning them into art. Seth's process and intent are completely different: he literally paints over every inch of his cardboard husks, removing their original appearance entirely and telling us a story that makes us believe in them as buildings only, the strangely touching creations of his artistic mind alone rather than Panter's collaboration with whatever interesting looking junk his day-to-day has thrown at him.
This inherent difference in approaches finds a perfect mirror in the two cities' print presentations. Seth's Dominion is presented as what it has become: a traveling art installation, complete with in-situ photos of the works in gallery settings, an incisive, deeply considered essay on the project's genesis and subsequent exhibition running along its consummately designed pages. It's very much like an Artforum article as imagined by a top comics creator, the beauty of the houses presented next to a scholarly explanation and history for them. The supplements included in the article speak to Seth's architectural process: pointed, deliberate, moved through with specific goals in mind.
Panter's city, on the other hand (not named, but designated "Panterville" in its own feature article) is prefaced with a brief summary by architectural writer Karrie Jacobs, who uses her paragraphs exhorting the gorgeous originality of the individual constructions rather than providing much rationale for the existence of the whole. It's enough that they exist: "Gary builds his models from whatever is lying around in his studio," states Jacobs by way of explanation, and in this case we really don't need much more than that. While Seth's buildings have much subcutaneous reason to exist, much procedural thought behind them for us to grapple with, Panter's simply are -- there just so people, their creator most of all, can look at them. Panter's abdication of the writing chores on the Panterville article speaks to his whole outlook on the project: it just happens because he's a creative guy and has this stuff around, while Seth regiments his own creativity into serving a larger purpose.
This difference in the articles that reveal our twin cities to the public is a mirror onto the two builders' differences as artists. Seth is fundamentally a storyteller, one who creates epic comics novels and has rigorously documented the "history" of Dominion in a thick sketchbook ledger that makes forays into virtuosic design and straight comics storytelling (from the excerpts included in the article, anyway) appears likely to become the crowning achievement of Seth's career. Massive amounts of time and thought have gone into this sketchbook, into Dominion: from a hobby, it's become a major work of art. This is actually not unprecedented with Seth, who turned his book-collecting hobby into a comic/documentary about his best finds in 40 Cartoon Books of Interest.
In the gallery setting, Seth's craftsmanlike, spatially-conscious arrays of his buildings turns them into something not too dissimilar from a comic: an accretion of art pieces that, taken together, tell a larger story. "A street plan," Seth informs us, "is still many years away," but the mere fact that he's conceptualized one is telling. In comic artists' hands, cities too become narratives.
Panter's city also reflects his comics work, which is full of recontextualized stories (Dante as punk rock opera, for starters) and seemingly unconnected panel-to-panel transitions. "Part of the fun is putting them in arrangements," Panter muses, "like making a compound." It's a spontaneous, freewheeling approach that sounds awfully similar to the way Panter puts together his comics pages. The single sketchbook drawing that accompanies the Panterville article is a chaotic mass of lines that only occasionally submits to representation, labels for "a enclosed kitchen" and "sand" scrawled over the art itself. There's no indication that the drawing was done with any connection to Panterville in mind -- it's just there, a parallel track in penwork instead of cardboard, to illustrate the way these concepts, the buildings, take up Panter's headspace.
But it illustrates more than that. There's an off-the-cuff, energetic quality to Panter's cardboard creations that's absent from Seth's more finely-done, elegant realist structures. It's a tradeoff that's present in the two artists' comics work as well: Panter, who has one hell of a sideline as one of the greatest living American painters, is a visual artist first, a recycler whose pieces are only connected by the thread of their architect's personal aesthetic and the fact that there are more than one of them. His city, like his comics, changes whenever he takes it out. Seth, on the other hand, is an illusionist, a story man who draws his own unique vision of reality so tightly over your eyes that you become enmeshed in his world to a degree that Panter's art brut never allows. Both cities have their limitations, both their enviable strong points, and perhaps it's inevitable that they'd be the same as the ones that crop up in their builders' other visions.
What strikes me most about these tiny cities is their status as perennially unfinished projects, hobbies that no amount of time or cardboard can ever turn "fully realized". Seth's building's are full of the imaginary lives he has created to run through them, and Panter's are hot with the immediacy of the mind that made them; but both, when all the pieces are proudly on display, are empty cities. Silent of sound, dark of interior light, no people walking their streets. Despite the illusion of life that charges them, that makes them so beautiful and interesting to us, these cardboard shells will never convince us like a comic can, will never carry bodies and minds of their own. The stories of these buildings will never hold in them the stories of lives. Panter and Seth both chase the illusion of life in their "real" work, while in their cities, set to play, they are content without it. As such neither Dominion nor Panterville, I believe, could ever be the sole focus of either creator. But as outgrowths of minds and hands that simply will not stop, that make discarded boxes and leftovers into beautiful imaginary places, they reaffirm my faith in and wonder at the glory of art. Just as much as any comic ever could.
*
Of course, you know the real reason I wrote this was to ask everybody whose houses they like better and why. So if you're still reading, tell me in the comments!
Seth and Gary Panter are two artists who create alternative, "indie" comics, but that's about where their shared ground ends. Seth is a nostalgist and a traditionalist, a massively skilled designer and cartoon artist whose understated, whimsical narratives and schooling in the high New Yorker drawing style produce aching, elegant comics that seem most intent on crystallizing the experience of memory itself, of stepping into the golden-hued better world of the past. Panter, on the other hand, is comics' most accomplished futurist, a ragingly iconoclastic pop artist whose gloriously messy, ink-blasted pages and deconstructed narratives go beyond the post-apocalyptic to hint at something rising from the ashes of the end. They're bound together by the medium of comics, of course, though both do more work outside the form than the vast majority of its artists. Past that, though, it's tempting to say they've got nothing in common.
Tempting. But if you actually did say it you'd be wrong, because both Seth and Panter hand-make little buildings from scratch in their spare time. What? Yes.
This is a pretty weird hobby, one which only one other comics artist (Chris Ware) has to my knowledge indulged in. But we'll put Ware aside, because it's these two guys alone when you look at the scale of what they've done. Both artists have created massive collections of their shoebox edifices, and both have showed them off to the public in print, Panter in his sprawling self-titled Picturebox monograph and Seth in the most recent issue of his one-man comic arts anthology Palookaville. This is more significant than it may sound at first: both men's miniature public-works endeavors are admittedly secondary to their "main" oeuvres, but both have also been deemed worthy of presentation, taking on the cast of art projects as opposed to accumulations of creative marginalia. They're three-dimensional sketchbooks, if you will, and the fact that both not only keep them but have allowed their hobby to bleed into their profession is telling.
Most all comic art has its genesis in the comics-collecting hobbyism of the kids who grew up to draw it, and what Panter and Seth are doing by presenting their buildings to the public is pulling back the curtain on the fully-formed artist's mind as it works through its own creativity, same as that kid's did while he was sitting on the floor with the funnies. More than that, by allowing us access to these non-comics projects Panter and Seth give us a new viewpoint from which to consider their art. The houses themselves are easily as individual and creatively striking as the comics, both men's cardboard concretes obviously outgrowths of the personal aesthetics they developed making sequential art.
Seth's buildings are neat, precise, often painstaking. Water towers sit atop delicate latticeworks, a delicate craft brought to bear in replicating pure utilitarianism on a delightfully unworkable scale. The ascending box shapes of skyscrapers sit neatly one atop the other, straight rows of tiny windows sometimes painted on, sometimes created by applying minuscule squares of cardboard to the larger sheet that forms the wall. Brickwork is deftly lined in with a meticulous verve. Seth's trademark midcentury advertising-style typescripts adorn signs for chophouses, radio stations, record stores, cinemas, the businesses of a bygone world. Complicated, precariously balanced ornaments -- awnings, marquees, columns -- bedeck the simple rectangles, adding elegant touches of class.
Despite the regularity of shape -- boxes, boxes, and more boxes -- that characterizes the place the artist has named "Dominion City", there's a refreshing variation-on-theme at play among the individual pieces. The squares and rectangles fit together asymmetrically, sections fixed at odd angles or unexpected inclines. They are unmistakably old buildings, charged with the quaint pleasantness of the antique, and speak directly to the intention their creator states in a self-penned Palookaville essay on his little city: Dominion "satisfied some urge to possess the old buildings I saw out in the world... putting them in amber -- saving them from the wrecking ball." This cardboard snowglobe is as much a display of Seth's powerful, driving nostalgia as any of his comics works.
Panter's buildings are just the opposite. Bold, alien-looking minimalist constructs, they evince little of the intense attention to detail found in Seth's charming municipality. Instead, Panter puts his mind to the conceptual, innovating architectural forms as the ideas and the materials come. These structures are not to be found in Seth's newspaper-age city, and probably not in yours, either: toilet-roll silos that look over Olympic sized masking-tape pools complete with diving boards, geodesic-roofed huts flanked by wine-cork storage barrels, low-slung bunkers with packing-foam earthworks strapped on by thick rubber bands. Panter rarely adds illustrative detailing to his media -- perhaps an ornamental strip of tape here or a hastily scribbled door there -- achieving his architectural nuances by recontextualizing the original materials. An almond box's cheery labeling literally gets turned upside-down to become a glowing piece of advertising, while clear plastic sheeting is cut into made-to-order tinted windows and the wavy surface of corrugated cardboard becomes the material of choice in this bizarre assemblage of a 22nd-century border town.
Here we can begin to identify aesthetic differences between the two amateur architects, ones that lead us back into their more widely seen works. Panter the pop artist is delighted with trash-as-it-is, merely rearranging it into new life. His alchemy is not so different from what Marcel Duchamp pulled off with his readymades: looking at everyday things differently here, monkeying around with their shapes and spatial relationships there, and imbuing them with an absurdist beauty that makes us see them as more than the are by stripping them of all functionality, turning them into art. Seth's process and intent are completely different: he literally paints over every inch of his cardboard husks, removing their original appearance entirely and telling us a story that makes us believe in them as buildings only, the strangely touching creations of his artistic mind alone rather than Panter's collaboration with whatever interesting looking junk his day-to-day has thrown at him.
This inherent difference in approaches finds a perfect mirror in the two cities' print presentations. Seth's Dominion is presented as what it has become: a traveling art installation, complete with in-situ photos of the works in gallery settings, an incisive, deeply considered essay on the project's genesis and subsequent exhibition running along its consummately designed pages. It's very much like an Artforum article as imagined by a top comics creator, the beauty of the houses presented next to a scholarly explanation and history for them. The supplements included in the article speak to Seth's architectural process: pointed, deliberate, moved through with specific goals in mind.
Panter's city, on the other hand (not named, but designated "Panterville" in its own feature article) is prefaced with a brief summary by architectural writer Karrie Jacobs, who uses her paragraphs exhorting the gorgeous originality of the individual constructions rather than providing much rationale for the existence of the whole. It's enough that they exist: "Gary builds his models from whatever is lying around in his studio," states Jacobs by way of explanation, and in this case we really don't need much more than that. While Seth's buildings have much subcutaneous reason to exist, much procedural thought behind them for us to grapple with, Panter's simply are -- there just so people, their creator most of all, can look at them. Panter's abdication of the writing chores on the Panterville article speaks to his whole outlook on the project: it just happens because he's a creative guy and has this stuff around, while Seth regiments his own creativity into serving a larger purpose.
This difference in the articles that reveal our twin cities to the public is a mirror onto the two builders' differences as artists. Seth is fundamentally a storyteller, one who creates epic comics novels and has rigorously documented the "history" of Dominion in a thick sketchbook ledger that makes forays into virtuosic design and straight comics storytelling (from the excerpts included in the article, anyway) appears likely to become the crowning achievement of Seth's career. Massive amounts of time and thought have gone into this sketchbook, into Dominion: from a hobby, it's become a major work of art. This is actually not unprecedented with Seth, who turned his book-collecting hobby into a comic/documentary about his best finds in 40 Cartoon Books of Interest.
In the gallery setting, Seth's craftsmanlike, spatially-conscious arrays of his buildings turns them into something not too dissimilar from a comic: an accretion of art pieces that, taken together, tell a larger story. "A street plan," Seth informs us, "is still many years away," but the mere fact that he's conceptualized one is telling. In comic artists' hands, cities too become narratives.
Panter's city also reflects his comics work, which is full of recontextualized stories (Dante as punk rock opera, for starters) and seemingly unconnected panel-to-panel transitions. "Part of the fun is putting them in arrangements," Panter muses, "like making a compound." It's a spontaneous, freewheeling approach that sounds awfully similar to the way Panter puts together his comics pages. The single sketchbook drawing that accompanies the Panterville article is a chaotic mass of lines that only occasionally submits to representation, labels for "a enclosed kitchen" and "sand" scrawled over the art itself. There's no indication that the drawing was done with any connection to Panterville in mind -- it's just there, a parallel track in penwork instead of cardboard, to illustrate the way these concepts, the buildings, take up Panter's headspace.
But it illustrates more than that. There's an off-the-cuff, energetic quality to Panter's cardboard creations that's absent from Seth's more finely-done, elegant realist structures. It's a tradeoff that's present in the two artists' comics work as well: Panter, who has one hell of a sideline as one of the greatest living American painters, is a visual artist first, a recycler whose pieces are only connected by the thread of their architect's personal aesthetic and the fact that there are more than one of them. His city, like his comics, changes whenever he takes it out. Seth, on the other hand, is an illusionist, a story man who draws his own unique vision of reality so tightly over your eyes that you become enmeshed in his world to a degree that Panter's art brut never allows. Both cities have their limitations, both their enviable strong points, and perhaps it's inevitable that they'd be the same as the ones that crop up in their builders' other visions.
What strikes me most about these tiny cities is their status as perennially unfinished projects, hobbies that no amount of time or cardboard can ever turn "fully realized". Seth's building's are full of the imaginary lives he has created to run through them, and Panter's are hot with the immediacy of the mind that made them; but both, when all the pieces are proudly on display, are empty cities. Silent of sound, dark of interior light, no people walking their streets. Despite the illusion of life that charges them, that makes them so beautiful and interesting to us, these cardboard shells will never convince us like a comic can, will never carry bodies and minds of their own. The stories of these buildings will never hold in them the stories of lives. Panter and Seth both chase the illusion of life in their "real" work, while in their cities, set to play, they are content without it. As such neither Dominion nor Panterville, I believe, could ever be the sole focus of either creator. But as outgrowths of minds and hands that simply will not stop, that make discarded boxes and leftovers into beautiful imaginary places, they reaffirm my faith in and wonder at the glory of art. Just as much as any comic ever could.
*
Of course, you know the real reason I wrote this was to ask everybody whose houses they like better and why. So if you're still reading, tell me in the comments!
10.05.2010
Comics from Mars, review from Newsarama
This is a link to my review of Paul Pope's new THB issue, the one-man anthology con-exclusive thing. It basically ruled, as I explain in the text of said review, which is hosted at Newsarama and starts out like this:
At this point we're a good decade into Paul Pope's star turn as one of mainstream comics' most popular, iconoclastic voices. Those copies of Solo 3 and Batman Year 100 have sat on the shelves so long that it's pretty easy to forget Pope was't always the guy he is now -- more or less uniquely for a member of the Big Two star stable (Ed Brubaker aside), Pope came to the mainstream not from fandom or knockoff books or some third-world country full of eager slaves (that's a joke, kinda), but from alt-comix, that other fully-developed strain of American comic book making that runs perpendicular to the superhero stream. Pope's heroic-action books have always been interesting largely because of his outsider perspective, which encompasses a gently satirical view into the overly po-faced conventions of genre comics, an emphasis on the purity of his art, and an explicit flair for the avant-garde that keeps him searching for new ways of telling old stories.
In the midst of Pope's long, trailblazing stomp through the Diamond-distributed market, though, we have THB, a very occasional (2+ years between this and the last issue) black-and-white single-creator anthology pamphlet in the finest alterna-comix tradition. And this book makes it abundantly clear that despite the years in the commercial wilderness, Pope hasn't lost a step as a creator of personal, expressive, idiosyncratic stories with no capes or editors in sight. THB #2 is largely a sift through Pope's library of influences, turning up stones from three continents' worth of comics-making traditions and melding them all together with the rawest, most gorgeous ink line ever to limn Superman's spitcurl. Read more
At this point we're a good decade into Paul Pope's star turn as one of mainstream comics' most popular, iconoclastic voices. Those copies of Solo 3 and Batman Year 100 have sat on the shelves so long that it's pretty easy to forget Pope was't always the guy he is now -- more or less uniquely for a member of the Big Two star stable (Ed Brubaker aside), Pope came to the mainstream not from fandom or knockoff books or some third-world country full of eager slaves (that's a joke, kinda), but from alt-comix, that other fully-developed strain of American comic book making that runs perpendicular to the superhero stream. Pope's heroic-action books have always been interesting largely because of his outsider perspective, which encompasses a gently satirical view into the overly po-faced conventions of genre comics, an emphasis on the purity of his art, and an explicit flair for the avant-garde that keeps him searching for new ways of telling old stories.
In the midst of Pope's long, trailblazing stomp through the Diamond-distributed market, though, we have THB, a very occasional (2+ years between this and the last issue) black-and-white single-creator anthology pamphlet in the finest alterna-comix tradition. And this book makes it abundantly clear that despite the years in the commercial wilderness, Pope hasn't lost a step as a creator of personal, expressive, idiosyncratic stories with no capes or editors in sight. THB #2 is largely a sift through Pope's library of influences, turning up stones from three continents' worth of comics-making traditions and melding them all together with the rawest, most gorgeous ink line ever to limn Superman's spitcurl. Read more
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