Your Monday Panel 39

X-Force #1 (1991), page 11 panel 1. Rob Liefeld.






I dislike bad comics art as much as the next online snob, but I really try to keep it to myself as much as possible. It's one thing when a positive critical consensus springs up around an artist -- like, it's pretty cool that everybody knows how talented Cliff Chiang is now -- but when the knives come out in comics fandom it's not only brutal, it can bar interesting work from ever getting properly appreciated. It was decades before Jack Kirby's post-Fourth World books ever got anything but slagged off, and we're just now getting to a place where the masses don't consider Dark Knight Strikes Again a failure. What am I getting at? Well, above is a Rob Liefeld panel. Look at it. I think it's pretty great, and I'll explain why in a second, but can you even see it straight? Or have the two decades since the comic it was published in sold four million copies so poisoned your eyes to liney, jumbled, hyperkinetic panels like this that something switches off in you the moment you perceive it? It's a struggle for me too.

In case you don't know, comics fans generally hate this stuff. "Rob Liefeld", unfortunately, has become an industry-wide byword for craftless, overly commercial cash-in comics, stuff with more flash than substance -- and, in a tangent I'm not going to get into, for all the shady creator-screwing that seems, poetically, to be a component part of said comics. But Rob Liefeld (along with his Image cronies Jim Lee and Todd McFarlane) had an influence on commercial comics art that's matched only by gods: Milt Caniff and Jack Kirby. Like those two generally-acknowledged masters, Liefeld has bled into the substance of the medium itself, his mannerisms and tendencies as inextricable from the look of the average modern hero comic as Kirby action blocking was in the '70s or Caniff spotted blacks were in the pre-Code era. Like those two, Liefeld's greatest impact on his field didn't come as an artist but as a stylist, an abstract collection of tics that a whole generation followed. What makes Liefeld's art so interesting as compared to that of Lee and McFarlane, who both shared the lininess and anatomic hiccups, is the same thing that keeps him from getting the fan appreciation those two guys get despite their having done much poorer, uglier work than Liefeld was ever guilty of. Lee and McFarlane were both draftsmen to a certain extent. They knew at least some of the rules of perspective, lighting, et cetera. They put some of the real in their work, and it clashed horribly with their crack cocaine/Fila sneakers/Guns 'N' Roses affectations.

But Liefeld was self-taught and snot-nosed, didn't know or care what supposedly essential elements his panels were missing, what supposedly extraneous bits he was adding in, why it shouldn't by rights have worked. And it didn't matter a bit, because work it did -- commercially, to the tune of more issues than had ever been sold before or have since, and aesthetically, as bizarre, confrontational, visionary comics. There's precious, precious little of anything with even a remote connection to reality in this picture: the anatomy is shot to hell, the rules of gravity are awol, the figures and faces betray no connection to the human and only vague relation to the humanoid. But it's all so self-consistent, all so true to the continuum of mind and hand and eye behind it. Liefeld sees muscles where people don't have them, but always in the same places. He imagines hairstyles that boggle the mind, and he uses his trademark wavering, bleedy masses of little lines to sculpt them. He draws facial expressions that only intense plastic surgery could create in our world, but the surgeon is always the same. He creates superhero costumes that edge into abstract ideology, so "functional" that they're no longer functional at all, pure eye-gouging adornment for the deformed demigods that tangle with each other like a sinewy yin-yang across this thick-bordered box. It's a vision of a world further from the humdrum reality that superhero comics are supposed to free us from than anything else the genre has ever given us. Pure, fully formed, perfection unto itself.

This is the level Liefeld functions best on: abstract art. The crosshatching is ridiculous if you insist on it being some kind of representational device, but look at it for what it really is, lines on paper made by a hand that didn't want to stop making them until every centimeter of space was shouting at maximum volume, and you're getting somewhere. There's a joy in the pure marks of Liefeld's line-blizzards, something most every "Image style" adherent since has missed. A sugared up, perpetual-motion glow. It gets into the background of this panel too, where the raw naturalism of the hatchmarks' asymmetry is dropped for a Jim Steranko spread of geometrics: the shape-and-line toolbox of superhero technology spread across the page in minute, functionless detail. There's a significant aspect of the baroque to that background, so laden with stuff that it vies with the figures themselves for attention. Like the hatching, it's purposeless, but it takes the picture further with enthusiasm, sheer steroided muscle, the delight its creator takes in the task of making it and then making more. And through all the glorious indulgence, Liefeld displays enough working knowledge of the action-comics mechanism to pop the characters out of their frame, increasing the bang of the image while ensuring that no matter how busy the background gets we'll see what matters first.

Liefeld's name may never be one that comes up when people talk about "good comics art", but can anyone really define what those words mean? Is it beauty? This panel has the beauty of a vast metropolis seen from a descending airplane, of vintage computer circuitry, of blazing housefires, of everything rioting all at once. Is it functionality? A Liefeld may not move you along through the story like a Toth or Miller does, but every panel hits so hard and nasty that the giddy guilt-free mayhem of superhero comics ends up better served by it than anything considered or elegant. Is it individual expression? Liefeld never bends to the world as it is, whether in reality or even in the comics that came before him. He pulls from inside himself and draws what comes. And for my money, that's what "good comics art" is.

"The Transparent Blue Angel"

Kill Yr Idols

Cover your eyes, it's another team-up so intellectually invigorating that reading it all the way through at once may cause total euphoria! This time it's me and the world's leading scholar of all things Grant Morrison, Tim Callahan, going deep and subtle into the vast, seamy morass that is Mo's current extended run on the Batman character. The column's up now on Comic Book Resources, and it's a hell of a read. Tim ever-so-eruditely wallops the piss out of a few of my critiques of more recent issues, I keep on insisting that Batman #666 is the greatest thing since Mark Millar invented comic books, we both reveal that we (personally) hate the guy who drew the picture above, and uh, Henry Rollins comes up. I guess it's sort of ironic that what's undoubtedly going to be my most-read writing on comics ever takes a decisively negative approach to Grant Morrison, aka the one guy going who makes me think people who write but don't draw their comics may not be total pointless voids, but as somebody once said, all idols have to die! Go read, and don't come back until you're done!!

Your Monday Panel 38

Powr Mastrs 3 (2010), page 13 panel 1. CF.


Comics art places such a massive emphasis on "style" that sometimes it can get hard to talk about the stuff at all without using that word. Even at the most basic level, you can undercut the panels by putting them in the big boxes of "cartoon style" or "realistic style" and letting that suffice. "Style", as it's all too often laid out in comics discussions, has the opposite effect of actual artistic stylisms: it robs the work of individuality, assigning it to a junkheap of other artists whose drawings hit the eye in only the most tangentially similar of ways.

Which is why CF's art is so interesting. It seems to fall neither here nor there, not traditionally realist, but with none of the usual cartoon drawing inflections either. It's at no great pains to do anything but depict the actuality of its subject: no crosshatching or shading to "real things up", no iconographic shortcuts. There is only the picture in the panel, looking not as it looks in real life or as it's typically set down in comic books. CF's drawings look like drawings, the captured forms of real or imagined things. And yet nothing of reality's visual noise or imagination's evasiveness makes it into the images. Everything is natural, sprung from a single source, uninterrupted by story or influence or the workings of the mind. About the natural, CF says "I'm trying to appeal to this part of nature which has a terrifying quality. But it's kind of beautiful at the same time." There is no mechanical element or over-construction to the pictures. All that's there is the lines and the blanks, the whites and the blacks, pure and unadulterated. "I always liked seeing raw pencils in comics," he explains. "I would always wish that was the comic. Cause it's magic..."

And it really is. It's easy to see an alchemy on CF's pages, where the homogenizing element of craft and the authorial voice imposed by cartooned stylizations are both stripped away. One primitive tool, the pencil, puts everything down, and then it is done. If there is any authorial voice to CF's linework, it comes from not from the artist but the tool he uses. Seething inside each sleek, perfect line is the humanity inherent in the pencil itself, roughness and expression screaming from the grit and constant irregularity of the graphite trails. No line or black space runs completely uninterrupted: look close and you can see scratches and scuffles, a million individual variations which cannot be counted one by one as a part of the artist's intention. If CF is behind these blips of imperfection, it's as their conceptualizer, the mind that accedes to them -- not the actual hand making them. The lines' forms and symmetries are straight, balanced, perfect. The tool itself, the way it goes down onto the paper, is what brings the chaos. Pencil does not slide across the page like ink, it does not throw perfect, silent blacks and move on. It's dust. It lingers, tiny particles that actually move with every breath of air that hits them. It has an energy of its own. To CF, "energy has nothing to do with people or ideas. It's like an invincibility formation." And there is something beyond the human in the drawing. It simply exists first, a pure visual, and only imparts story or character second.

Where the human mind behind the art comes in is with the composition. "Composition is the most important thing," the artist says. "It dictates everything. Composition's so weird... those power structures... that's why one corporation succeeds and one fails, composition. And if you don't have it you will perish. That's why they're constantly trying to destroy artists and discredit artists, because it's so powerful." There's no evasion to CF's compositions, whether the layouts of the total pages or the pictures in the boxes. They present themselves. The subject exists as the center of each image, and everything proceeds from there, the logic of the drawings trumping the overly familiar style rules of most comics art. The panels are naked, totally open with what they show us, addressing their subject matter in the simplest and most direct way possible. If a similarity with other artists' work creeps into CF's drawings, it's here: Jack Kirby chased the same unadulterated purity, and Moebius found a similar Zen simplicity of presentation. The look of the work itself has less to do with either titan of comics art than that of many others (to my eye its delicate forms and gravity-defying dreamlike quality is closest to Winsor McCay) -- but the connection exists, and on a deep level. It all draws from the same sources of "raw forms becoming more differentiated tissue. They're a form of energy and they've always been with us."

But the things that go into the drawings -- those subjects -- are important too, and CF pulls from a seemingly endless font of visual ideas that occupy the same raw, vital space as the substance of the lines themselves do. The forms and objects are never completely divorced from reality, but they aren't the solid certainties that most comics art deals in exclusively. CF draws people and environments that, like ours, are alive, constantly growing, expanding and withering, forever locked into a process of transformation, changing into something we've never seen before. Even his machines shift shapes between the panels. His abstract designs mirror the contours and motions of light and darkness through the air, or the shapes that dance behind our eyes when we close them. It's all real, it all exists, it's just rarely made it onto the page before. CF draws in thrall to the world, mixing its rarer, stranger elements into new things inside the panels. In his surrender to his tools, his exhibition of free imagination, his willingness to let his art be dictated by outside forces, he paradoxically becomes one of the medium's most individual artists. Other things speak through him. "I feel like I'm always trying to stop drawing and stop making anything," he says. "I'd like to quit. I don't think anybody can be good at anything until they decide to quit."

CF quotes taken raw and jumbled from a slideshow presentation at Family Los Angeles.

The New

Boy's Club #4, by Matt Furie. Pigeon Press.
AND
I Want You #2, by Lisa Hanawalt. Pigeon Press.


When Buenaventura Press went down into the comics-publishing graveyard earlier this year, there were plenty of reasons to be sad. No more Kramers, no more Comics Art magazine, no more weird prints by our favorite weird comics artists. But Buenaventura's delights weren't all so high-toned and rarefied. In fact, one of the most troubling aspects of the publisher's shutdown was that they'd been publishing some pretty amazing comics in the ongoing pamphlet format -- you know, the same way Batman Odyssey comes out. There's an immediate, approachable nature to pamphlets that something like Kramers Ergot 7, for all its imposing glory, can't touch. And the fact that Buenaventura's kicked off its resurrection as Pigeon Press not with more of their quixotic, glorious top-shelf quasi-comics but with new installments of those populist pamphlet series comes off like some kind of statement of purpose. Pigeon Press, it seems, is a smaller Buenaventura, perhaps one whose star-reaching ambition will no longer be allowed to run its bank accounts into the red, but one whose commitment to presenting quality comics certainly remains unaltered.

The two pamphlets in question are Boy's Club #4 and I Want You #2. The Boy's Club issue is great as always: Matt Furie's erstatz-Muppets creation has as much a basis in formula as any animated kids' show or licensed genre comic, but I can't think of anything else out there that uses the basic template of grids 'n' gags to such outrageous, chest-clenchingly hysterical effect. Four issues in, the book is well aware of what it does best, and rather than mess with success Furie's devoted his considerable skills to topping himself with every new installment. Like each of the last Boy's Clubs, this one is the best yet, featuring a sparkling overdose of the idiosyncratic acid-laff cartooning that this comic's got on lockdown -- slowly transforming heads, hilariously bland catchphrases, gross-outs galore, and perfect visualizations of the physical effects of drugs. At this point Furie's got his unique little toolbox down to a crystalline, completely pure aesthetic: we can pretty much always tell what's coming a few panels into one of the book's massive index of short strips, but there's no end of joy in watching the familiar progressions unfold beneath Furie's vacant, straightahead blocking and dead-on pen line.



That's not to say this comic isn't fresh and striking, though: quite the opposite. In this issue we meet a new, Big Bird-derived member of the comic's slacker bro-terie, the perfect caricature of that one really tall, skinny, stringy-haired stoner you see around sometimes in a shirt like this. In the comic's obvious high point, Bird-Dog narrates us through an illustrated history of marijuana, complete with plenty of busty anthropomorphic-pot-leaf babes posing in lingerie and getting busy with cockroaches in not-safe-for-Marvel positions as his listener's eyes glaze into a Kraftwerkian robot stare at arms which have somehow stretched, Plastic Man-style, from his shoulders to halfway across the room. Immediately after which we get a full-frontal scene of a sunglassed werewolf twirling his dick around in the blare of a strobe light, which is really one hell of a visual. In the end the most compelling aspect of the Boy's Club formula isn't the six-panel grids or the best drug jokes in the medium or the only-in-comics sense of freedom. It isn't even Furie's artwork, which at this point has gone beyond earlier issues' slight Crumb and Groening inflections to a pure realm of sugarshocked, lo-fi bliss. It's watching how relentlessly this book ups its game, how much further into its own bizarre something it goes with every issue, every page, never thinking to look back.



Lisa Hanawalt, on the other hand, hasn't quite got her formula down yet. The big joy of I Want You #2 is the expansion of it all, a neat counterpoint to Furie's dynamic riffing. Much of the material in this issue carries over from the previous one, and there are even some definite callbacks to Hanawalt's debut minicomic Stay Away From Other People. But from the canvas of the lists and how-to guides, the unmatched body humor and rodeo-shirted talking horses, springs a staggering amount of new ideas about just what a comic can be, just how to make us laugh or feel uncomfortable. Hanawalt's drawing, always formidable, has improved by leaps and bounds, her meticulous thin-lined penwork recalling nothing less than an animal-obsessed indy comics version of Rafael Grampa as her stocky painted work edges dangerously close to Jerry Moriarty or Eddie Campbell. It's beautiful as hell, but unlike Furie Hanawalt doesn't really "draw funny", and there's a palpable, delicious discomfort that goes with seeing such beautifully illustrative cartooning so jacked into setting out warped vomit and moose-dildo gags.



There's a big, broad, plastic-Barbie-doll surrealism to Hanawalt's work -- this issue, like the last one, features multiple pages of animals bedecked in improbable headwear such as the "Lazy Susan Hat With Hot Dog and Pancake Condiments" or the "Saguaro-In-A-Top-Hat Hat" -- and like the best surrealism, this comic is focused on creating a continuum where all the weird shit falls under some kind of logic as much as it is on making the weird shit itself. Though the gags and non sequiturs are (literally) wilder and woolier than anything the real world could possibly develop, there's a naturalness to them nonetheless, a sense of regimentation to the Ansel Adams-on-peyote visions. A lot of that comes from Hanawalt's unique formatting of her comics. Most are presented free of grids, multiple self-sustaining images floating on the page to form some kind of bizarre list or index. The list format is a key component of what Hanawalt's doing: no matter how random or absurd the pictures and descriptions of them get, they all still come in some kind of order under invariably sensical headings like "Things to Pack in your Road Trip Toolbox" (includes a jar of leeches and a trepanner) or "How To Flatter a Person" (by panel two you should be rubbing your genitals around inside their shoes).



While Furie's formula governs the kind of content he's creating, Hanawalt's is about content totally unhinged. The strange over-literalism of the numbered panels with their text headings not only accommodates the floods of dream-logic drawings, it invites them. And from there the comics form is blown wide open, suddenly anything goes. An EC-formula shock horror story about a horse whose body is infested with tiny birds noodles into an expertly curated letter column complete with spot illustrations of the missives' content and a series of Facebook wall posts detailing the tragic, gory death of an adorable kitten named -- eep! -- Hanawalt. You end up laughing at all this stuff, but total stunned silence is just as apt a reaction to a great deal of it. Hanawalt is going way outside the typical human experience for the best of her work, and the way she brings it all back to everyday junk like getting a haircut or eating a sandwich is nothing short of stunning. Words like "comedy" or "farce" just don't apply: this is over the edge, something completely new, with only the comics medium that it couldn't happen outside of as a guide. Phenomenal.

Liveblogging Deadpool Max #2 In An Altered State Of Consciousness

What follows is a transcript of my immediate reactions to the comic Deadpool Max #2, by Kyle Baker and David Lapham, as I experience them. And yes, I am off my effing head right now.



9.29 pm PST:(soundtrack: loud)

9.31: Ooh, and Lapham rips out of the gate with a devastating swing at that "word association" scene in Morrison's Arkham Asylum! "Loneliness? MONELINESS! Father? MATHER! Mother? ORANGE!!" It's a knockout! I am not making this up.

9.34: Kyle Baker's color spotting has become so ridiculously clean that the holding lines are just these decadent luxuries. This is like the flattest of comics art, close to the bone with these totally raw unaltered digital shapes, but it's given this crude, pop-up-book dimensionality by the contrast between the inked panel elements and the computerized pure-color ones.

9.36: Beautiful homage to Steranko's early, Kirbyist SHIELD stuff on page 3.

9.39: There's a lot of great work with body language going here. Baker makes Deadpool's posture and little gestures so jerky and skitzy, it works great against everybody else's heroic posing.

9.42: WOW the colors on this flashback sequence look incredible. Baker's doing Richard McGuire, that's the only stuff I know that comes close to this. Actually, that and this one silkscreen comic I saw today, I can't remember what it was called but it was about Gertude Stein (I think) and published by Nobrow. (Just checked, it's called ADA, by somebody or something named "Atak", everybody go order it cause it was crazy and beautiful and really disgusting.)

9.43: If you're like me and this is the only Deadpool comic you've ever read, this issue actually has some incredible origin sequences. They're like the first unique-looking superhero origin pages in like, 40 years? How long since the last good origin sequence? Does Batman #666 count as Damian Wayne's origin sequence? Probably, I guess.

9.47: OK, this issue has the best and most disturbing single panel of the act of peeping tomism I've ever seen. This stuff could go in a gallery no sweat.



9.50: Aw, graphic panel of a grown man picking his zits! This is like Alfred E. Neumann on crack, folks!

9.51: Wow, in the panel where the old woman is offering to let a guy into the hospital to see his friend but only in exchange for sex Baker goes uber-Manara portraiture drawing. This comic book, let me remind you, is published by Marvel. How has the MAX imprint not ruled this hard since Corben's Cage?

9.53: (more soundtrack)

9.55: There's some really intense... the only way I can describe it is post-chiaroscuro inkwork in here, like Matisse maybe. Figures totally blacked in with bits of spotted color everywhere. Sort of Paper Rad doing Miller Sin City style, but with a lot of Eduardo Risso in the shapes of the silhouettes. These huge, utterly magnetic areas of pure black spread across the technicolor rest of the page and just vacuuming you in. Oh, you know what? It looks like Tommy Lee Edwards' Question stuff.



9.59: Confession time! My personal greatest primal fear is the American medical establishment (I have nightmares about the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center), and Lapham creates these incredibly unsettling paranoid-hospital scenes out of whole cloth. Both this book and Lapham's chef d'oeuvre Young Liars feature really scary scenes dealing with the power dynamics inherent in psychoanalysis.

10.02: We read this stuff as humor comics because that's the only way to do it and stay sane but if you take some of these lines totally straight they're like the soap opera version of Viennese Actionist sloganeering or something. "Please, you must believe me! I would never in a million years inject you with paralytic drugs and cut out all your internal organs to be sold on the black market!"

10.04: I'm kinda surprised to say, but I think Kyle Baker has worked out the first coloring schemes that successfully make computer lettering look like a natural part of the environment.

10.06: There's this one great panel in Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp, a two-tone painted portrait of a monk praying, with all these beautiful pinks and blues flying around the frame... Baker does his version of that about 2/3rds of the way through this book, you'll know what I'm talking about when you see it.

10.09: Really queasy push and pull going on in some of these panels between Baker's perfectly symmetrical computer-drawn elements and his light-on-physics inked cartooning. It's actually like... throwing these panels way off-balance, they really tip you over into the next one, sluice you around on the page.

10.11: Annnd, no issue of Deadpool Max would be complete without a bestiality joke, but wow, a pigeon? That is legitimate innovation happening right there.

10.13: Huh. The hero is apparently in the back room of the hospital with his girl eating people's frozen internal organs? Is this really post-universal health care bill America? Baker's computer rectangle shapes really just fragment in this panel, it goes all sharp-cubist and puts these vertiginous op art kaleidoscopes in the corners of the frame.



10.14: Oh hey, we actually get to find out why Deadpool associates his mother with oranges! Did not see that coming. It's not exactly Alan Moore for complexity, but still pretty smart writing.

10.18: Remember that vicious "Captain America fights Hulk" sequence in Ultimates volume 1 #5 about... maybe eight years ago? That was a legitimately sick moment, but it just got its "nastiest half-page four-panel takedown scene" crown stolen hard. (Page 20.)

10.21: Man... this issue has some of Baker's most realistic facial drawings since the late '80s, but he gets really almost Sergio Aragones with these full-figure action pages. Loose and scratchy. It ends up going past cartooning into the quick-sketched style of life drawings of figures in motion. Added to the stiff toothbrush-box colors, it looks phenomenal.

10.23: Lot of Quitely in the sequences where the dancing-robot body language meets the realist portraiture -- more a similar fusion of elements than the same look, but there are still definite strings running between the two artists.

10.27: OK, done! The full-page ad for next issue looks pretty phenomenal, this almost Disney-animation looking shot of Deadpool fighting a Nazi babe in the middle of a bunch of Klansmen. This is really a pretty incredible comic you guys, superhero stuff done not just right but interesting, actually a mode of mainstream comics I've never seen before. It's full-blown, plot-involved superheroics somewhere deep inside, but it's also a fusion of the most ridiculously disturbing elements of Alan Moore-Rick Veitch "dark hero" comics and the most biting assaults of Kurtzman super-parody. If you're looking for the next great new neglected Marvel book to champion (and you know you are ya dirty fanboy, that's like number three on every comic shop-goer's want list), this is the one. And of course, it looks great. If this comic didn't exist I would have dreamed it. Real stuff, done with equal style, bile, and consummate professionalism. Good, good comics.

(And here is my review of last issue.)

Head On Collision!

Hey fanboy, feel like getting yr blood pressure raised? Then you better go here, because the visionary writer-on-comics Sean Witzke and I have just dropped many thousands of words on Jim Steranko's high-octane SHIELD opus "Who Is Scorpio?"



In addition to Jaunty Jim's splatter-pop masterpiece, we also digress enough to get in thoughts on JH Williams, the '60s undergrounds, Frank Frazetta, Guido Crepax, and everything else in the entire world that matters. You really think you can fight that? Well, you can't. So go read it already!

Your Monday Panel 37

Daredevil #228 (1986), page 20 panel 2. David Mazzucchelli.



Let's think about line for a second. From Crumb to Moebius and back again, comics art has seen a staggering amount of pure, seductive beauty made up of little ink trails. Line is lovely, instinctual -- the immediate response of the artist, pen in hand, to his environment. By and large, line is how the vision gets put down. Everything that comes after it is refinement. Comics, for most of their history, have been made of lines: panel borders, letterforms, speed lines, impact lines, hatching lines, the shapes of word balloons. From the days when the only thing that would come out of the heaving, grimy printing presses right was strips of black ink, the line has made comics what they are. Early comics artists like Winsor McCay and Lyonel Feininger were in love with it, eschewing spotted blacks completely for the shapes their pens outlined and space left open for pure color. George Herriman downright gloried in it, bringing line away from its existence as a tool for pure depiction and into the realm of the instrument, signifying vast blurs of true expression with riotous, scratchy bursts of it.

The line is in our blood, the medium's heritage, and that alone marks comics out as different. Because take a look across the gutters into fine art and it loses precedence like crazy. Line in painting is a secondary tool at best. In sculpture about the only thing it's good for is preparatory drawings. Photographs don't use it a whole lot unless the artist's doing something weird in the developing room. And in film it's pretty much impossible to even make one. No, the line gets into art through pure necessity, and that's why media that had their start in mass produced print (comics and illustration, basically) have made the most use of it. And in comics, which needs to hit hard and fast with its pictures to get you to the next one, it's really been about the outline, the contour. In the panels as we read them, light and tone and detail are all secondary to getting down the basic shape so we can follow it. McCay knew: he always did his characters' silhouettes at least two times as heavy as the lines he drew inside them. And just notice how iconographic the basic outlined shapes of all your favorite characters are. Dick Tracy's got the hawk nose, Batman's got the pointy ears, Nancy has that weird stuff coming out of her hair, et cetera.

But the line is a two-way street. It's a tyrannical thing, especially in genre comics: if you're "inside" comics as a longtime reader it's tough to notice it, but just look what an overwhelming majority of the stuff outlines its characters with the little black trails that don't exist in real life and then works in, as opposed to finding some kind of inner core before sculpting out. To give everything to shape, the way everyone from Kirby to Ware has, is to lose light and the incredible things it can achieve in art. For a long time there was no way not to do just that given the production process and ridiculously unaesthetic coloring methods comics employed. And I'm not saying comics made of lines are bad -- by and large, those are our masterworks. But it would be interesting to see more that was different. More like the panel above.

David Mazzucchelli broke more or less free from dependence on line in last year's Asterios Polyp. That's not to say he didn't use plenty of it, but there wasn't a black trail in the book. It was all colored line art, which gave him space to work in different gradients, worry less about the shapes themselves and more about what was inside them. (Which actually ended up as a not-insignificant theme of the comic itself.) But when this panel was drawn in '86, Mazzucchelli was hackin' out phenomenal action comics on a monthly deadline, working in four-color newsprint, the belly of the beast that birthed comics' dependence on contoured blacks. Look at the panel, though: the interest in light, in texture, in the stuff of reality that can't be gotten with the harsh contrast of black and white, was already there. And in an underwater scene, where the whole world fades to shades of gray, he got the chance to do something about it.

Zip-a-tone has to be the most interesting device in the comics toolbox to come as a response to the limits imposed by cheap printing. Those matrices of dots basically turn two-color pages into three-color ones, the evenly spaced black-white pattern evoking gray if not actually putting it down. Considering it takes no small talent just to swing a black and white comics page into something interesting, it's probably no surprise that only the very best have created good work with the stuff: Roy Crane and Noel Sickles were early masters, Bernard Krigstein did straight murder with it, Jim Steranko had his moments, and then Mazzucchelli got interested for a bit. As an iconographic device that screams comics, zip is great, but what's really fascinating about this panel is how it engages with Mazzucchelli's drawing. In the days before computer tones, this stuff was adhesive tape that you'd cut into the exact shape you wanted and then stick down onto the art board: a laborious, inexact process that no one could ever get to look as elegant and finished as their inkwork. Zip-a-tone always brings out a tasty roughness in its users, and the thick stops and starts that swirl inside the massive screen of it Mazzucchelli lays down here are no exception. The lines of tone and open space don't look like the linework in this panel: they're less exact, more spontaneous, in a lot of ways more real.

But that roughness is counterpointed by a considerable grace: Mazzuchelli's working with black and white both against what's in effect a gray background, and that gets him out of the line-driven mode of straight black on white. The torrent of water spilling into the cab is highlighted with a few pen scratches, but it's mostly the pure, rushing blues of the non-toned, non-outlined space (made, I'd imagine, with Wite-Out brushstrokes drawn over the tone). It's got all the shimmer and glow and force of an actual spigot of water, something line and shape's crystal solidity can't evoke half as well as a drawing of the way the light looks hitting it. Then look at the other pure-blue areas: it's the highlights on Matt Murdock's head and the bubbles drifting up from the cab, the brightest things in the scene. The art, set loose from the white background, becomes painterly, lightening the page as well as darkening it. It's the dynamic contrast between the two that really pulls the weight of the picture-making here. The blacks that form the shape of the face are chiaroscuro, a pure mass of shadow rather than mere marks. Same thing with the cab's rearview mirror off to the left: it's a big smudge of dark, the bar attaching it to the car suggested rather than shaped by its line. The whole panel is that way, really: lines acting as guides to shapes rather than defining them, the play of light left to really make them what they are.

It's worth noting that Mazzucchelli could be so confident in his approach because the times were changing. Color in mainstream comics, though it wasn't anywhere near where it is now, had at least been acknowledged as an element of the art rather than the production, and actual artists were beginning to get involved in the work. Richmond Lewis, who would later do incredible pure-light painted color over Mazzucchelli's work in Batman: Year One, adds the last essential element to the drawing here, erasing the need for a contour line around the figure with the perfectly placed dab of green jacket. The kind of rapport between artist and colorist that Mazzucchelli and Lewis had is rare, to say the least (they're married), but a similar single-purpose focus comes to the fore a lot in work by the increasing amount of mainstream artists who are coloring their own stuff. As the necessity for black line art fades and dies, we appear to be moving slowly towards a future in which there won't be any need for this kind of extraordinary effort to wrench something hi-fi out of the lo-fi. But as a picture by an artist struggling to expand his form's range -- and succeeding! -- this panel is great.

Available Works

Presenting Doug Wright


In the future, when books on the comics reclamation process are as common as Scandinavian crime novels, our current Golden Age of Reprints won't be seen as the flooding four-color deluge it seems like to us now. No, once people can look back and actually take the time to study the why and how of the rafts of old-comics books hitting the stands every week, they'll see the one big thing is really two things, two driving forces that simply both happen to end up as creamy paper between hard covers. The first and more obvious of these forces is the march toward an available comics canon, the rescue and reinstitution of classic material like Krazy Kat or the Fourth World saga. Getting the books everyone should know to a place where people actually have a chance to become acquainted with them. But the other, more interesting side of the Golden Age is one that didn't really make itself evident until the canonical stuff was a proven success and people started casting around a little for more gems the comics world could (re-)use. That's when an element of the visionary started to creep into the reprint game. When the names on the spines were no longer ones the average Comics Journal reader would be apt to recognize. When the books stopped being obvious (if necessary) museum-collection pieces and started turning into curated gallery showings, exhibitions for works no one had seen before, based less on duty to comics study and history -- not to mention the chance that some money could be made -- and more on passion for the work, conviction that the stuff inside the books was worth shoving back at a culture that'd ignored it the first time.

A surprising number of the "passion projects" have been unqualified successes. That's what happens when people care about the comics they're making, whether it's drawing the lines themselves or scanning and color correcting and designing and picking the right paper stock. So when I say last year's Complete Doug Wright hardcover, masterminded by Seth and published by Drawn & Quarterly, is the best of the lot, it's not for lack of competition. Above all, the book is a scorched-earth treatise on monograph making. If ever a single volume defined its artist -- and not only defined, but redefined, vindicated, glorified -- it's this thing, 15 by 12 inches of painstakingly presented biography, ad art, historical delving, fine art, photographs, magazine art, reprint-process details, sketchbook art. And comics, and comics, and comics. The Complete Wright is the only reprint book I've ever seen that would function effectively -- beautifully -- if the comics themselves were stripped away, such is the strength of the 75 page context-salvo that opens it. That said, the comics themselves are what justify the time spent on Wright the man and illustration artist, and justify they do. The book's main event, a decade-long suite of Wright's family newspaper strip Nipper, is comics as intoxicant, a seemingly endless flow of virtuoso linework, eye-poppingly spotted color, beautifully paced gag cartooning, and utterly charming period detail.



The book got a follow-up with last month's Nipper: 1963-1964 collection, and the two could not be less similar. The titles signify pretty well for the difference: while the Complete Wright was expansive and monolithic, the Nipper book is intimate, understated. A slim 8 by 5 inch softcover, about the only thread it retains from the Wright monograph (beside the material itself) is Seth's elegant design. Even that, though, is pared back to a nifty cover and a few mannered endpapers. Ditto Brad Mackay's biographical notes, which run a concise two pages after spreading the man's entire life out for all to see in the hardcover. After that, it's the comics alone, one to a page, panels fit together in snug units as opposed to scrolling lazily down from skyscraper heights.

If that sounds reductive, well, maybe it is. The nature of the new Nipper book itself is a bit reductive, paring Wright's work back from the Olympian canvas of the first book and literally fitting it in the reader's hands. (It's also handy in pockets if you've got a long subway ride or something ahead of you.) But I'd hesitate to pronounce it inferior. After all, what we're here for is the comics, and somehow the panels on the pages turn up the same size in both books. What's missing from the Nipper book is only the ancillary, the delicious hoopla that trumpeted Wright's introduction to an American comics market that hadn't even caught his existence when he was actually doing the stuff. And what's left is the stuff itself, one of the very best newspaper strips I've ever read. Nipper.



Nipper is incredibly populist at first glance, a sequence of low calorie runs through lightly farcical family drama drawn in springy, kinetic cartoon figures and consummately crafted light-realist environments. But beneath the candied peppermint swirl of the surface, Wright's artistic individuality -- and even occasionally his human psychology -- are given full rein to exhibit themselves. The distant backgrounds of almost every panel are easily as interesting as the action. Filled right up (though never crammed) with yarns of anecdotal detail, they exhibit what one suspects Wright's heart of hearts was in it for: aching, loosely limned Canadian landscapes, neat cookie-box rows of suburban lanes and houses in the spring and fall strips, mellow, untamed wilds for summer vacation, pastoral snow-fields over the cold winters. You can learn a lot about an artist by paying attention to his backgrounds, and Wright is a perfect object lesson. One begins to sense that these endless landscapes, often terminating in the pure expression of scuffled pen lines that no longer represent anything but a feeling, were as much an internal environment for Wright as any observed scenes. There is a golden, nostalgic weight they carry that few life drawings match.

None of this is to say that the action in Nipper isn't worth following, however. What starts a a pretty typical (if always beautifully drawn) cute-kid strip in the first half of the Complete Wright book's run has morphed into an uncompromisingly hilarious battleground by the time the Nipper book begins. While an abiding warmth and sentimentality -- even a traditionalism -- is always floating somewhere in the background with Wright's beautiful Canada, the violence and sarcasm with which the artist details sibling rivalry, schoolyard fights, social embarrassment, and childhood injuries both physical and psychological, is almost always outre and occasionally downright shocking.



Much of it is down to Wright's incredible artwork, which ratchets simple gags up to shattering force with dense, crisp waves of linework, a fluid sense of motion, and intuitive, note-perfect action blocking. The final panels of these strips almost always carry some elaborately hysterical expression of physical anguish, extreme awkwardness, total rage. As punchlines they're very effective; so much so, in fact, that it's easy to overlook just how much craft and line and effort, how much passion Wright obviously puts into drawing them. These overheated family meltdowns were clearly a preoccupation of his, if not an out and out obsession. Presented as the inevitable endpoint of kids' antics or husbands and wives' best intentions, in Nipper, knife-sharp aggravation is all families' destiny. It never hits Charles Schulz cold or nihilistic, however. There's too much care put into the details of the drawing, too much happiness and contentment in the quiet moments that are always jarringly interrupted by the strips' ends. The family that wars together stays together, apparently, and Wright's family very obviously loves each other. It's a great template for violent gag cartooning: we can laugh as much as we want to at the mishaps with hockey sticks and thrown rocks and scalding cups of coffee, knowing it'll all be forgotten by the next page.

These broader themes add a great deal to Nipper that goes beyond simple awe at Wright's facility with pen and ink, and they're what really jump out of the new smaller book. With all the beautiful context and the incredible design taken out of the equation, the material steps up to fill the void, amplified by the lack of anything else. Doug Wright comics are nothing to sneeze at by themselves, and the '63-'64 collection is prime stuff, continuing the cresting rise in quality that was so fascinating to chart across the strip's first dozen years in the Complete Wright book's exhibition. As comics, the two books stand shoulder to shoulder, not to mention heads above just about anything else out there.



I've still got some quibbles about the smaller book: Wright's annual extra-sized Christmas strips are just left out, and the minimal packaging dilutes the power of single-panel strips like the one above. But overall -- strangely -- the casual, charming little Nipper collection feels like a good progression from the overpowering extravaganza of the Complete Wright. Drop Nipper: 1963-1964 on the general public and the reaction would be a mumbled "so?" But the Complete Wright does the best job of any book about comics I've seen in convincing us of its subject's importance. That first towering tombstone of a book was the most convincing introduction the man and his work could have hoped for. But after that there's nowhere to go but the work, the incredible comics the monumental figure made. And those weren't so loud, those weren't such rarefied things. They were revealing and intimate and laugh out loud funny. They got put on the breakfast table with the rest of the paper. They should be right there for you, they should fit in your pocket. The warm, personal setting suits Nipper quite well. I'm hoping we'll get a lot more.

Joint

Break The Chain (1994), by Kyle Baker. Marvel.


There's still such a thing as ten-cent boxes in the comic shops worth going to (namely the ones that'll never show up on any list of "comic shops worth going to"). They reduce the act of buying comics to something slightly less contemplative than buying gum. Peep the cover, make a snap decision. Object lesson: this book. A flat-color background and Kyle Baker in 1994 drawing sneaker treads like Frank Miller in 2002? Worth my dime. I'm into that.

Of course, even with the element of financial risk basically gone, there's still a gamble involved in buying comics. The space they take up in your house, the time they take up in your life. For obvious reasons, bargain-bin comics carry a chance of disappointing pretty hard. There are some killers too, don't get me wrong, but I've never come across one that earned its keep like this. I mean, I opened it at the subway station and:



Suddenly I'm hooked.

Break The Chain is one hell of a bizarre artifact, both a symbol of the ridiculous excess of '90s corporate comics and an example of how said excess worked pretty well some of the time. There's no publisher information or even a barcode on the cover because it originally came packaged like this. Included a KRS-One single to listen to while you read, retailed for 6.99. Yes, I got this rare first-issue collector's item at one seventieth of its cover price. The comic's indicia lists it as a product of "Marvel Music", whose publisher was one Stan Lee. The music video for the "Break The Chain" single indicates that the song was published by the same company. Yes folks, Marvel had a hip hop record label, Marvel hired established, popular artists to record for said label, and Marvel then hired talented comics-makers to create promotional pamphlets for the recordings rendered. How it was ever decided that this was no longer a viable practice, I have no idea. Spider-Man Fever? Pff, I'd rather see Brendan McCarthy's Lil Wayne miniseries. And what's Paul Gulacy doing that he can't draw that Ghostface hardcover we all know he's had in him for years?

Break The Chain is a comic that gets by (from the dime bin to my boards and bags, anyway) on context alone, but its content is easily as double-take-inducing as anything that came printed on its polybag. After the air-raid siren statement of intent above, we're blitzkrieged again with what may be the single craziest panel Kyle Baker's ever drawn.



Which is saying something. That panel signifies pretty well for the rest of the comic: Break The Chain casts its nets wide, both in story and in art. Baker's panels are totally fearless throughout, drenched in the stale Kool-Aid of early computer coloring, bursting with rubbery pinball cartoon characters, torn to ribbons with ink lines whose boundless exuberance curl into a deeply elegant alphabet of trails and shapes. The Kyle Baker of 1994 had worn the journeyman's hat for a while, the relentless style change-ups that define him today already very much a part of his artistry. But he really puts it all together here, shotgunning Kirby and Bakshi and Avery and Miller onto the pages all together with sugary glee and amphetamine conviction. At its best, Baker's art here edges into George Herriman territory, characters so purely cartooned they no longer represent anything "real", thrashing and dancing and pontificating against technicolor backgrounds pieced together from the loosest scraps of free inking. This is comics art on full blast, too loud and self-assured to make an effort at being anything but what it is.



The plot, such as it is, goes straight ahead with equal force, though of course it can't match the sheer quality of Baker's art. But what it lacks in virtuosity it makes up with its refreshing weirdness and novelty. This is not your average comic story. The journey begins with Big Joe Krash (KRS-One in one of his numerous secret identities) walking around the streets of New York to get the word out about his new record, which just happens to be the one that comes with the comic. With a few truant elementary-school kids and his buddy Malcolm in tow, Joe repairs to Grandmoms' house, where the tape in his boom box shares its messages of hope, pride, and racial unity over the din of the Oprah episode in the background. In the end the importance of new ideas and positive thought is roundly proven out, and we've learned that you can get these keys to success "anywhere! Including school!"



So yeah, Break The Chain is comics as discourse in a lot of ways, Steve Ditko's Mr. A philosophizing reimagined as a savvy after-school special for underprivileged kids. It's actually pretty astonishing just how much Baker manages to put across in 32 pages, hammering the message in with grid after eye-popping grid of visualized lyrics. Somehow it never comes across as dull or preachy, though: there's enough immediacy and verve to every panel that this comic feels like fun all the way through. Cut loose from the literality more plot-driven material demands, Baker turns each of his drawings into some kind of a showcase, whether for warped political cartooning, overamplified caricature, or simple deranged hilarity. (The panel of a successful, well-educated surgeon taking a scalpel to his patient's brain with Bugs Bunny gusto was a particular favorite of mine.) As ever in comics, the narrative is carried more by the art than its own power, but that's hardly a problem, and when the art goes this schizophrenic, this panoptical, this loud, it's hardly like reading a narrative at all. Sequence is discarded for impact -- one panel hits, then the next and the one after that. Each carries the weight of a minor revelation.



In the vast index of Marvel comics, Break The Chain certainly falls somewhere in the "weird" category. As mere product, like I said, it's little more than a symbol of the ridiculous decadence mainstream comics achieved at the height of the speculator era -- one of our greatest cartoonists turned to illustrating what basically amounts to a feature-length ad. But as comics, as story and art and that indefinable third something the medium carries, it's great: a meeting of two revolutionaries' minds across their media, an escapist kaleidoscope with few parallels, a chance to see panels and word balloons and color go way more bonkers than they usually allow themselves to, at Marvel or anywhere else. Interestingly, Break The Chain also works pretty well as a mid-'90s version of Marvel's Silver Age "social conscience" stories, the ones where Spider-Man would fight dope pushers or Nick Fury would remind us that a man is a man no matter the color of his skin. Decades after that, why not let us see a rapper as a superhero, why not just lay it on the line about the state of black America, why not make that dedicated, passionate preaching the whole thing instead of just the trimmings? Lord knows it's a hell of a lot better than the rest of what Marvel was doing in '94. And honestly, it's a hell of a lot better than most of what's come since as well.

Your Monday Panel 36

Batman: The Animated Series title sequence storyboard (1992), panel 30. Bruce Timm.


Well, as long as I'm claiming things for the comics medium, why not talk about storyboard sequences? Put any decent "art of the film" book next to any uninspired action comic and you can see how deep the similarities run. Storyboards are comics, no doubt, progressions of drawn pictures that create narratives as they go. Actually, in some ways they're a lot more artistically advanced than the average comic: the lack of words and impetus to create a totally comprehensible visual sequence forces the medium's artists (who often moonlight in comics or vice versa) to really knuckle down in a way so many of the monthly-release hacks don't. There's no conveniently captioned exposition to explain muddy blocking, no in-story context the artist can lean on to clarify a hard-to-parse sequence. The context of storyboards is the context of film itself: a constant flow, no gutters, with every second as important as the last and without comics' single-unit panels. When we read comics one panel can dazzle us for minutes on end before the next one mystifies us and takes us right out of the story. In film, there's no stopping, and the storyboards have to reflect that as they create it.

Of course, there are some places where comics definitely have it over storyboards. The very meta-story experience that film's continuous flow can't really create is comics' bread and butter: the action is always planed open, picked apart, sanded down to its constituent parts, and how we put those parts back together is completely up to us. (Anybody who's read Brian Chippendale's book Maggots will know what I'm talking about -- why do we always read the damn things left to right and down the page, anyway?). Comics can counterpoint or comment on their action as it occurs by simply playing out two scenes over the same page (movies have split screen but ugh, what makes Warhol's "Chelsea Girls" such a drag to get through is what makes Alan Moore's stuff sing). Comics can speed up and slow down time way more naturalistically than movies ever could by simply putting down a gutter and drawing the next thing that happens, whether it's a millisecond or six hours later. (Zack Snyder's attempts to do such things with slow motion film kinda make me seasick when I watch them on the big screen.) Comics have the whole page, the whole issue, the whole book to play out their formal experiments, while storyboards have to limit themselves to the screen-shaped panel that stands in for their final destination.

Still though, look at this panel! Bruce Timm's drawn some fine comics in his day, but interestingly, the full page that set former animators from Rafael Grampa to Jack Kirby free has always constrained him. In his comics, Timm by and large sticks to the grid, any camera motion occurring between the frames. But in his storyboards, where everything that happens on the screen has to be telegraphed and diagrammed first, and where the page, as it were, has no edges, Timm doesn't have to worry about eating up valuable real estate with weirdly shaped, distended showcase panels like these. This virtuosic study of Batman in motion is exactly the kind of thing we need to see more of in comics -- a severe bending of form to function, a panel composed like nothing we've ever seen in order to sell its subject harder than we've ever felt it.

The first thing that pops out at you is the part that doesn't make it to the screen: that big white arrow. It's less an artistic element and more a functional one in the animator's-guide storyboard context. This is simply how Timm indicates why the panel's shaped that way and what the camera's doing in it, so of course it's the most important thing for the production team to see. But in the pure-art context, the this-is-a-comics-panel context, it just busts out and rips. I've talked about arrows in comics before, but this one takes the cake as far as pure dynamic force goes. Its size, its arch, the way its holding lines disappear at the very end -- Batman isn't just jumping, he's blasting forward with tremendous power. I wish comics would step up a little and really own arrows the way Timm does here; polite little directional indicators are all well and good, but this one gives the action so much weight, not to mention a definite axis, all in one element.

There's also a fluid, deeply organic use of subdivision at play here. That clean diagonal lurch is definitely a product of work done outside the traditional comics medium, dictated by a movement up and to the left, the exact opposite of the direction our eyes go when we're following a story on a page. But it works so well, the movement plotted out from beginning to end by that strangely gorgeous shape, its stages captured as if by a strobe camera in three kinetic moments. That last panel at the top wouldn't necessarily code quite right if we were reading it in a book, but thanks to Timm's composition and our foreknowledge that this is all going to the screen, it works perfectly. Timm imports film's ever-progressing context to his static drawing, using one image to depict a flow-through sequence of time rather than a single captured instant. What's most striking about this panel is how far out of the formula it breaks, not just in terms of what it's doing but also in how different from the typical rectangular "screenshot" storyboard drawing it is, and how well it works despite that. This is the kind of story-enhancing, deeply visual gesture we should see so much more of in action comics, an artist breaking out of the usual mode to really sell something.

Then there's the drawing itself. It owes just as much to the storyboard format as anything else I've mentioned -- this is clearly "not for print", lacking any of the crispness or high-gloss finish of Timm's comics. It's more akin to a layout panel, a sketch done to explore an idea before the final realization. But that's exactly the charm of it: free of the impeccable mannerism of Timm's finished art we can really feel the foundations that underpin his drawings. Batman is a cold and springy mass, almost pure shadow, rimlights dramatizing the exaggerated curves of Timm's figure-drawing shorthand. There's so little anatomy at work that it might as well not be here at all, but what we do get is a primer in Bruce Timm gesture, Bruce Timm simplification. A ridiculously compact, curve-backed crouch, followed by the soft arches of hugely exaggerated leg calf muscles. Then the shadow takes total control. The minimal shapes of the buildings form a perfect, stagey backdrop, but they're also lovely cartooning in themselves, and everything's polished to a fine dark glow by Eric Radomski's gray tones. The thing almost looks like a film still if you blur your vision right, the deep focus of the washes straight out of the deepest noir. Not for print in comics, maybe -- but for comics to study over, for comics to learn and incorporate. One day, hopefully, they'll all do stuff like this.

The Hokusai Grids

Sans Genre III

Ask the guy on the street who invented comics and he'll tell you it was Stan Lee. Ask somebody who knows their stuff and they'll give you Richard Outcault. Ask somebody who really knows their stuff and you'll hear the name Rodolphe Topffer. But, and I'm just sayin', check these out.






They're by Katsushika Hokusai, one of the foremost Japanese artists of the early 1800s. The face grids were first published between 1818 and 1820; the weapon grid sometime in the 1830s. They were published in a wildly popular, multi-volume series of mass-produced artists' folios that sold like crazy in their country of origin and went through waves of reprintings whenever the latest in the series came out. Sound familiar? It gets better: the name of the series was the Hokusai Manga. Rodolphe Topffer, the Swiss romanticist comics have claimed as an appropriately distant, even mysterious father figure, was still in his teens when the first of those grids hit the woodblock presses of the Orient. Taken on the surface, Hokusai trumps the Western-centric history we've constructed, those subdivided prints putting down a solid step into sequential art before any of the usual heroes.

But it's no fun to just say that, so let's pick these things apart a little.

There's a "but" that comes with the Hokusai pieces, a pretty significant one. They've got no story to them. The pages divide up neatly like comics and have the same newsprint tinge behind their printer's ink as any Herriman page you care to name, but they don't go anywhere, the panels don't lead neatly into one another. They're multiple portraits on single pages, not quite the one big thing from constituent parts that makes comics comics. It's a fair criticism, especially when you take them next to the engrossing, plot-heavy sagas that Topffer would offer the world a few years later. And maybe if I were writing this article in, say, 1955, that lack of an immediate narrative to pull you in and make you "read the pictures" would disqualify the work as comics right away. But as comics have grown and expanded, more or less completely ignorant of Hokusai's works (as far as I can tell), they've stretched out into areas that give a lot more weight to his unconnected portraits.



Above is a sequence ("sequence"?) by Seth Fisher at his most Japanese, from Vertigo Pop Tokyo, one of early-2000s American comics' more interesting experiments in replicating shojo manga. It's not a perfect comparison with the Hokusai because it comes smack in the middle of a larger story. But... well, here's the full page...



I mean, the ad pages in commercial comics come in the middle of the stories too, but nobody would argue they're in thrall to the larger plot dynamics. And while there was a point in time when basically every panel of every comic published was there to serve the story in an immediate, obvious fashion, that's just not the case these days. Nobody would argue this little Fisher twelve-grid isn't comics, but it's got no more to do with the actual story Vertigo Pop Tokyo's telling here than the Hokusai prints themselves do. No, it's gridded portraiture, just like the pages that preceded it by almost two centuries. We instantly read it as comics because it's in the middle of a comic book, but taken by itself it requires a slightly different logic; one we can apply to Hokusai's images too. There's a larger theme to Fisher's piece -- all the portraits' subjects are characters in the Vertigo Pop comic -- but Hokusai grouped his pictures thematically too. The first two grids above are portrait-sequences of blind people. The third one is shots of traveling performers, followed, no less, by a nice open view of one of their performances. That's edging mighty close to narrative. The last one is weaponry. The story to be found in both Fisher and Hokusai's sequences comes from the accumulated logic of the images themselves, the rhythm of the grids, the repetition, the speculative threads we draw from picture to picture, the narrative our minds construct for it.

Which sounds awfully abstract, but then again, comics demands its readers face up to abstraction. From a book you may have seen:



Two images whose disconnect from one another is far greater than anything in the Hokusai grids. The lack of word balloons or captions to bridge the panels isn't normative, but it's hardly unique, either -- even books like "World War Hulk: Aftersmash - Damage Control" often feature two silent panels in a row without fussing about it. Comics, even in the most meticulously-tracked figure animation scenes, always require the same thought process it takes to stitch up those Hokusai portraits into a unified whole. Those Watchmen pictures have nothing to do with each other, but in the book we read through them without pause. Try it with the Hokusai pages now: there's a vigorous rhythm at play, a picture-to-picture logic that defies you to take them all at once, forcing you into the sequence whether you can glean a larger "plot" from it or not. It's there to be moved through piece by piece, then appreciated as a whole at the end. These grids are almost like comics as music: each face with a unique tone and treble all its own, complimented by the ring of the previous one before complimenting the next with its own little individual burst of sensory input.

At the core the "no story" criticism is really a question of context. Vertigo Pop Tokyo and Watchmen spend pages and pages building up theirs, until we hardly read the image sequences I spotlighted at all: we let the pictures code for abstract information that fits back into the story. Hokusai's comics don't have that kind of picture-idea transubstantiation going on, but they're also not totally devoid of context or significance. This is a comic about blind people. This is a comic about clowns. This is a comic about projectile weaponry. They don't all gotta be Watchmen, after all.

More interestingly, though, Hokusai's near-Dada flirting with image accretion brings us to a fundamental truth about comics: they cannot lack a context. Two or more images in sequence play off each other, even if there's no immediate relation between them, even if everything else is void. When we see two pictures, we go back and forth, we see the second in the context of the first, the first in the context of the second. The grid's sequence may not impose story on its contents, but it imposes subject. Like:



That snippet's by Jason Overby, excerpted from last year's seminal Abstract Comics anthology. This isn't comics about blind people, not even comics about faces, but it's hardly "about nothing" either. This is comics about lines, space, form and emptiness, and not only does the way these two completely unconnected pictures are put in sequence inform the way we experience it (flip it backwards in photoshop if you don't believe me), we can't help but assign some kind of meaning to these abstracts. Shapes are glimpsed. A screen appears, obscuring them. That's tense, that's deep, I wanna see what happens next. This stuff has little basis in Topffer's populist laff riots, let alone Richard Outcault's character-based hysterics, but there's a clear line running from it back to Hokusai. In both, the grid and its automatic sequencing pull disassociated, floating images from the air and force them to speak with each other, building power as they roll ahead. Which, of course, is something all comics do. Hokusai just ignores everything else for that one marvel of the form, the sequence and its tendency to build a sum greater than its parts. There may not be much genesis for Batman or anything in the grids, but for the comics that shoot lines and glances deep into the heart of the medium and its capabilities, this stuff is the foundation. Long buried, perhaps, but still there. Still comics.

And finally, if any further evidence is needed that Hokusai was working squarely in the comics form, he drew some straight bitchin' superheroes.



(The Hokusai images are scanned from the monograph Hokusai: First Manga Master, a book that everyone should own. My thanks to Rory Root. And if you liked this, make sure you check out this great Frank Santoro article on a few of the subjects I touched on!)

A Great Achievement

The ACME Novelty Library #20, by Chris Ware. Drawn & Quarterly.


It's been five years, give or take, since Chris Ware moved his ACME Novelty Library series from pamphlets into the annual-book format that's so popular now. Five years, five "issues", and a good three inches of horizontal space on the bookshelf. When he made the move in late 2005, it mostly looked like one of the graphic novel format's most important practitioners fully embracing the comic book, letting go of the old stapled-paper warhorse to engage the real mainstream of American arts and letters via the bookstore market. And sure, that was a big part of it. But now we've got "Lint", in the unforgettable ACME #20, and it lends the format switch-up a clearer focus. In 2005, Ware left behind the influences he'd spent his career up to that point grappling with, processing, and eventually transcending. Literally: he upped stakes from the disposable mode of delivery everyone from McCay to Herriman to King to Crumb to Spiegelman to did their work in, and slapped hard covers on his comic. This was permanent art now. And it is still, but in his most recent book, Ware the fully-developed artist goes back into the toybox of influence, rummages around among the heroes he's left behind, and winds them up again to see if they can add anything more to what's probably the most unmistakably individual style of comics going in the current era.

But Ware's raking up his old ghosts is hardly the kind of mindless, inferior pastiching (or, shudder, "homage") that's so common to lesser comics. No, this is an artist who's undeniably created his own graphic language looking for new ways forward and deciding, to stretch a metaphor, on becoming multilingual. Seeing this kind of in-depth stylistic borrowing from an artist as uniquely virtuosic as Ware doesn't really have a parallel in comics -- the closest thing I can think of is the way Jimmy Page (himself a major fixture in "Lint") used to shift his Zeppelin riffing into licks from James Brown or Elvis or Scott McKenzie songs when he was feeling particularly epic in concert. The performance here is similarly riveting, and it has a similar bravado. The artist himself is buried surprisingly deep in his stylistic evocations, but it's never in doubt that the same hand is guiding this comic's every last page. Ware's been doing what he does perfectly for a long time; now he's turned his focus to encompassing multitudes.

The opening of "Lint" moves from a blank page to paring down the aesthetics of comics' most famous non-comic artist, Roy Lichtenstein, into something that actually works in sequential(ish) form, a loose, airy page full of perfectly round benday dots that actually build into something, the matrix of colors coalescing as the dot themselves get bigger and finally form a human face. This is birth in the story, the beginning of life for Jordan Lint, the character whose sum total of existence, from birth to death, is fit neatly between the book's hard covers. But it's more than that, it's Ware "birthing" vital, richly living comics out of the sterile, single-image pop that we all associate those red-circle-on-white-backgrounds with.



That intro attests to what Ware will do with the works of other artists over the rest of the book: repurpose them into facets of his own sprawling style, while finding a proper place for them in the continuum of life and comics art the story lays out. We begin with Lichtenstein, who never drew a comic, and the first moments of Jordan's being; we move into infancy and an elegant expansion of the rounded, vigourously bouncy aesthetic Richard McGuire (who's drawn like three comics) laid down in his "Ctrl" strip and PBS Kids animatics. From there we get childhood, drawn in the same simplified style Ware's used in previous kid stories. Much later in the book a scene of elementary school-aged terror is blasted onto the page with a terrific swing at the ratty lines and monumental images of Gary Panter (who, though he's changed the field as much as any Crumb you care to name, hasn't really drawn a whole hell of a lot of comics, and puts at least as much attention into his visual-arts career). By Jordan's early adolescence, Ware's quoting Jack Kirby, who drew more comics than Lichtenstein, McGuire, Ware, and Panter combined.



You see how this works? It's a slow move from formlessness into the Ware way, but there's so much more than that. "Lint" is a story about how we slide into focus as human beings, from the first moments of existence when we can be anything, anyone, to the end when we're pinned by death and have no time to be anything but the exact person we've spent every moment of our lives as. It's mirrored by the opening section's slide through increasingly "comics-native" artists' idioms, making us wonder if this is gonna be the Ware book where he ditches his usual, consummately comics mode of working for something closer to those other arts-and-culture things that the hardcover ACME was supposed to bring him more in line with. Will this be a book by Ware the visual artist? The "comics novelist" he gets ballyhooed as by the mainstream press? No, this book draws a line straight in, from a completely blank page at the beginning to this thing Ware does so well, panels stacked in order, richly drawn. From the page to the image to the sequence. To comics. The tour of influences takes on a self-reflective tone once Jordan's a grown man with a grown man's inflexibility and we've been set down securely in Ware's own style: this is how both character and artist got where they are, a blank slate collecting reflections of other things until it's itself.



Though Ware stays pretty much within his own style once Jordan's made it past the Kirby wish-fulfillment phase into his teenage years, no two pages of this book look the same. Slowly the rounded forms crag, slowly the thick, simple shapes sag, and the realist, thin-lined style Ware's explored in sketchbooks and his "Building Stories" strips finds a place in the continuum, popping up to mark the big moments of Jordan's developing maturity until he's old and fixed and it's the only thing left. There's even a significant Frank Quitely look to a lot of the panels during Jordan's decline -- coincidence or not, Ware's tour of the medium's best draws out the distinctly comics-native artist of the superhero mainstream's greatest-ever story about aging and death (namely All Star Superman) at just the right points.



The art states its case as pure visual craft so well that you can stray far into the book before noticing how well Ware bends it to the story, how much it becomes the story. A powerful shorthand gets constructed early on: benday codes for pure sensation, various lettering fonts indicate levels of maturity in the thoughts that run unboxed over the panels, two pink concentric circles form a bare, minimalist breast that indicates thoughts of sex, single red and blue dots are the beating pulse of rock music... there's a whole lexicon on these pages, one that fills them with as much pure information as any lines of text. "Lint" is, let's not forget, a collection of weekly strips originally published in Ware's stomping grounds/first-run test tube The Chicago Reader, and it reads with more of the info-heavy, slightly disconnected page-to-page flow of a Prince Valiant or Little Nemo storyline than the torrential outpouring of Jimmy Corrigan. There are no "sequential" page sequences in the comic; rather, each single page begins and ends its own fragment of Jordan's life before they're all put in order. Some of the memories squabble and ache with minutiae, drawing meticulous rows of nipples or mouse clicks across the white, others stopping the eye dead with a single image of a car crash or a forlorn reflection before spraying out the images' lead-ups below with a few disconnected framing shots. As a reading experience, it's richly comics: each page a meta-panel of its own, the gaps in time between them the blank gutters we're so used to jumping. What could have been an exhausting tour of an unexceptional life instead becomes a whip through all the best and the worst, showing everything that hits home and gets felt, passing by what merely passes by.



In that, this is deeply "literary" comics. Like the previous issue of ACME, "Lint" is a tour through the dashed hopes and accrued regrets of the American male, but where ACME #19 dealt with the subject matter largely through a vigorous EC Comics/Ray Bradbury homage, #20 drops the gloves and dives in defenseless, tracking a modern-day man's existence and thoughts from the moment of life to the moment of death. It's Updike, it's Dos Passos, and very much et cetera, subject matter that's bound to hit home with the reader cause hey, what straight white American everyman can't remember the first time he saw a girl with her clothes off (January 3rd 2006) -- but it's also nothing new, and Ware seems to understand that. Though there's certainly some empathy for Jordan as he flails his way through a life that works out okay but could have been a lot better too, we're never asked to sympathize with him, to live his life with him and feel what he feels. That's old hat, that's prose, that's twentieth century, and this is tomorrow. This is comics. The story ends in 2023, as it begins: with we the readers observing the planed-apart, gridded autopsy of Jordan's existence that the comics form gives us. In this medium we're outside and we watch, at best through the character's eyes, but we never really get into their body or their mind. There's no sentimental mythologizing of rote, boring lives here: it's a textbook's view of what being a man in this country is, presenting image after image, figure after figure, sensation after sensation, and letting us draw our own conclusions. It's the best treatment of the kind of middlebrow literary themes the wider market's so enamored of that comics have given us yet.



If this all sounds cold or bleak, well, there's some of that for sure. This is a Chris Ware comic, after all. But the relentlessly hopeless tone that's driven a good number of his previous works (the last two issues of ACME chief among them) is left out here. The bleakness is only in the narrative's total objectivity, and it's as easy to read warmth into Jordan's love for his kids as it is to feel the ice in his bitter old age. Where all Ware's past work has presented lives in media res, beginning after their beginnings and ending before their ends, in "Lint" it's all laid out. There's an notable lack of narrative focus: the book just sprawls, encompassing a full life and a full range of feeling. It's up to us which ones we want to feel. Which ones we're capable of. Just like in reality.



With all the referencing this comic invites -- and there's a lot of it, I haven't even gone into how Ware draws Jordan the toddler to look like a more solid version of Crayon Shinchan (nor will I) -- it's easy to lose sight of Ware the innovator on its pages. Make no mistake, he's there. The things Ware does with his put-on styles, from the blurred haze of benday over the Kirbyist drawing to the expressionist, architectural-vaudeville views into McGuire to the red-ink clarity (I'm sorry) he lends the Panter snippet, aren't failed attempts at authenticity, they're evolutions, ways forward from those idioms just like the one he's busy forging from his own. The shift to a vertically-oriented page format from a horizontal one for the Panter sequence isn't just a nod to the "scroller" format of webcomics and Dash Shaw's print version of BodyWorld, it's Ware getting inside the mechanism of his neat little hardcover and just turning it out, forcing it to express itself even when tipped on its side. The dot-matrix explosions of Jordan's birth and death are as boldly formalist and visually striking as Ware's ever gotten, which is saying something. The slow progression of the drawing from cartoon to realism is the formalist thread that holds the narrative together, easily as powerful as anything in Maus or Asterios Polyp.

Best of all, though, is the end, where Jordan's mind fades away and the last page fades back to white, the benday-dotted mantra of existence "I am" repeating and repeating until nothing is left but the white.



That white is the same formless void that gave Jordan birth on the first page, though.



And while there it comes speckled with intentional printing imperfections, here it's really blank, it's really the end, and the reader's left scouring it for some unplanned dot or blip of distortion, some glimpse of hope beyond the vacuum. This comic had a large print run. Some books will have it. Some books won't. Some people will find it. For others, there will be nothing. We'll all search, though. And then we'll all close the book and see the back cover: the blue paper strip forming a massive "I" and the two tiny, backward "am"s keeping the mantra going while reminding us that if we really want to see the life, read the "I am" properly we've got to flip the cover back open. Book design as narrative. This is new, this is virtuosic, this is utterly, utterly beautiful.



My favorite part?

For me, it's seeing Jordan on his deathbed at the end, all his stupid pointless teenage memories floating back in before condensing down to his first love and the first death that shortly followed it. Both are haunting memories, calling back to the existence of better days but never there to be accessed without dwelling on their end. But in the final moments, these are the things Jordan doesn't regret. "I didn't know she was here," the disconnecting mind flashes as his first girlfriend appears in the hospital bed next to him. "Good."

That's a promise I've wanted, a promise I've needed. Because I'm too young to have anything but stupid teenage memories yet, and the last five years of them -- the five years ACME's been coming out as a book, almost to the day -- have been made so poisoned with regret and hate and sadness that I bite my lips until they bleed when one of them pops into my head. I spend whole days wondering whether I'll ever be able to look back on the joy and the happiness and the existence of a love that was completely real without only feeling the loss of those things. And there is nothing, no imperfections or distortion or life that I can see on the blank white last page of the particular copy of "Lint" that I bought, but at the end of the life it chronicles there is a straight white American everyman who is happy memories of his first love stayed with him, happy to have lived and lost, even if it's only in his final moment. And even if I have to wait as long as Jordan does the memories are worth it. The life, whether it's in comic pages or in skin and veins and books read, is worth it.