Your Monday Panel 47

Frontline Combat #2 (1951), page 27 panel 3. Harvey Kurtzman.



As it's typically practiced, American comics art runs back to two basic traditions. There is the immediate, broadly expressionistic caricature of early 20th-century newspaper cartooning, and the lush, detail-rich flourish of that same era's illustrative art, which also frequently found a home on newsprint. The mode of drawing that fills comics of all stripes today is, when considered as part of a historical lineage, a fusion of the two traditions -- almost always situated somewhere in between the sensuous tangibility of the great turn-of-the-century pulp and ashcan art and the majestic simplicity of the first funny pages, the two sources that provided greatest inspiration to the first wave of comic book artists. It's interesting to note that both traditions were deeply rooted in the print process that produced them. Whether it was the concerted hatching that brought pre-photorealist pulp spot illustration to life or the simple shapes that gave vintage cartoons their kick, it all went from original to print via engraving, by all accounts an arduous process that carried a very real danger of destroying a picture's subtleties and nuances.

Early mass media's reliance on engravers, I'd imagine, is one of the big reasons for comics' great (largely still entrenched) reliance on line. Combinations of thin single trails have always constituted and still do constitute the vast majority of comics-medium pictures, and small wonder when it's a form whose masterworks were cut into the surfaces of metal sheets for its first decades of life. I'd also guess that the necessity for engraving is part of the explanation for why visibly brush-made lines weren't a big part of comics art for a long time. Engravers had enough to do capturing the nuances of pen marks made by a single nib; the strokes of hundreds of hairs across the paper may have looked beautiful, but for a long time they presented a sizable hurdle to jump between artifact and facsimile. Too, with engravings of one kind or another -- woodcuts, etchings, et cetera -- forming most of the Western black-and-white artistic tradition, use of the brush may not have really occurred to many early comics artists. Contrast this with the strong Oriental tradition of monochrome brush-and-ink painting, which provided manga artists with a more cuturally entrenched example of brushwork from the beginning, and ended up inspiring more than a few American comics artists also.

That non-Western flavor is a big part of this Harvey Kurtzman panel's appeal. Kurtzman was hardly the first artist to use brush; in fact, by the time he came into prominence the tool had been in a golden age for years, with artists from Will Eisner to Alexes Raymond and Toth exploring its potential for subtlety and overblown expression in equal measure. Nobody ever quite overblew it with the brush like Kurtzman did in his EC Comics stories, though, frequently leaving behind the established comics-art vernacular entirely for something that feels much more of a part with the looseness and spontaneity of wash painting. There's a total embrace of thick smear and deep shadow in this panel that comes in sharp contrast to the prevailing comics styles of the '50s. The differentiation between lines and solid blacks comes perilously close to total disappearance on the figures in the foreground, the curves and angles that sculpt their outlines blotted down in voluminous strokes that accomplish as much lighting as form. Such visual information is carried in these brush marks, in their unpredictable idiosyncrasies of shape, their random breaks and reformations, their sheer energy, that they allow Kurtzman an incredible simplicity in his pictorial elements. There's much for the eye to savor here, and plenty of it isn't in the composition or characters but in the substance of the ink itself. Look at the crusty breaks in the dashes on the soldier on the extreme right's sleeve, or the opposition of vertical and horizontal lines that tautens the struggle at the panel's center. It's all laid down with such verve that the motion of it vies with the content for attention.

This panel is also a perfect example of what makes Kurtzman's work so unique in comics art, even if the tool he used so brazenly has seen plenty of vigorous use since he laid down the blueprint for noise-art brushing. No, what fascinates me here is how -- talk about Kurtzman as "pure cartoonist" aside -- the picture doesn't really fit neatly into either of the two categories of comics art I mentioned above. There's a cartoon strength and simplicity of gesture stamped onto every figure, and a powerful minimalism in the facial expressions too. But everything is so tightly packed with, well, detail, every square centimeter filled up with something popping off of that bold red background, every surface muddied up with brushstrokes or lanced with the scrawl of Kurtzman's manic pen line. There's a vast amount of illustrative vividity layered onto the simple shapes, in between the blasts of brushed ink. The result, I suppose, is indeed "pure cartoon", evocative of the real without submitting to the look of it -- but it's cartoon in a way few others have gotten close too. Kurtzman was a dynamo, the energy of his brush lines carrying over to the way he filled his panels to bursting, and this panel almost cracks open with the drive it's drawn with.

Panter Draws Kirby

This is my favorite picture right now.



Gary Panter's 1978 portrait of Jack Kirby. Unless I'm very much mistaken it's not taken from any one specific photo reference. It's a beautiful portrait. Panter's famous "ratty line" walks the tightrope of restraint around its black spaces, never quite ripping into the messy, childlike scrawl that boils off the pages of comics like Dal Tokyo and Jimbo -- but raging and expressive nonetheless, subdividing shadows into tiny flakes of white space planed apart by dancing black-ink razors. And the pure blacks, stomped down in rounded bruise shapes that blot the face into being. Flashes of shocking white snapping over it all, the lighting so hot it burns the paper blank in places. Like the drawings its subject did, like others by its artist, it pushes off the page with its forcefulness.

This is what Jack Kirby looked like in real life.



It takes a deep understanding to deviate as intensely from the look of the real as Panter did and still create an image that looks like the person it's depicting -- again, as Panter did. Not just an artist's understanding of facial construction, though there is certainly plenty of that in Panter's image, the subtle crease in the forehead, the play of light across the jaw, the integration of every surface and feature into one solid whole. But it's more than that. It's an intimacy, an understanding of the face at hand. Maybe even the person beneath it. A familiarity with who is being drawn. The Panter monograph that the portrait is scanned from refers to Kirby as Panter's "great adolescent influence". While there's no one photo of Kirby I've seen that looks like the portrait could have been copied from it, I think Panter must have looked at a great many photos of Kirby to capture the truths of his face so distinctly. To put the tired eyes together with the cocky mouth and the jowly cheeks so seamlessly. But more than just looked at them -- absorbed them. Taken them into himself.

This is a self-portrait by Jack Kirby.



What's notable about it when measured against the rest of Kirby's work is its softness, the round, relaxed shapes, the relatively small amount of cartoon in the facial features. The depth of focus leading far back into the room. The smooth curves of Kirby's hands at rest on his drawing board. It comes in striking contrast to the distillation of style that can be seen on the page he's working over. The drawings in its panels are pared down even further than Kirby took them in his stories. The radiance of a technological demigod's face. The harsh angles of a 3-D sound effect. The sleek surface of a flying saucer. It's on the page that's on the page, a secondary realism. The portrait is one of the least stylistically affected images Kirby drew post-1962 or so, and it looks a little clumsy in places. Understatement was a departure for the 20th century's greatest overstater, the action-comics proportions of the boxy arms and the slightly idealized facial features jarring with the relaxed sense so atypical in Kirby's work. It's incredibly charming. Kirby, who turned men into gods and gods into pure sheer energy, goes outside his comfort zone to present himself not as another endlessly dynamic Kirbyism, but as a real, normal man.

Kirby has very often been sentimentalized in the years since his decline and death, turned into a kind of readymade father figure for the "comics culture" that becomes more a part of the mainstream with every passing San Diego Comic-Con. There is such joy and life and depth of feeling in his work that it is all too easy to imagine him as an illuminated beacon of pure human warmth and loveliness, the comics medium's archetypal innovator, happily drawing multiple brilliant pages a day, never asking for more than the chance to keep doing it for a living wage. It's an image with plenty of basis in fact; by all accounts Kirby was a truly lovely human being, and he absolutely did sit and bat out comics at a pace I'm not sure anyone has touched before or since. But there is more to Kirby than just that. Monumental rage, deep fear, paranoia, confusion, crippling frustration surging through the blank spaces of his panels along with the openhearted beams of light. Kirby was not pure. He was a conduit for positive and negative in equal measure. In his panels, these forces build and intermingle and ignite, braiding together into something so unique and powerful that often one can no longer tell which is which; only that it's force.

Panter's picture captures that artist, not the simple hardworking man. It feels to me a truer Kirby. Black and white, calm and storm, good and evil blasted across a face nearly blank of expression, prepared to take every atom of it in. It is a heroic Kirby, but not a Kirby hero. It does not engage with the Kirbyist drawing style. It is the Kirby a young Panter must have imagined right along with the millions of other kids who read his comics: the stony, impassive, flickering countenance of a man who could turn his pages into lightning rods with a few black blots. It is Kirby as he exists to those who never met him, never heard him speak or knew his warmth firsthand. It is the Kirby that went on the page, a solid generator from which sprang energy, a man who gave us gods, and nothing more. It is a character, just as much as Black Bolt or Galactus is, something pulled from the comics and channeled through Panter's own vision of it.

This may or may not be another self-portrait by Jack Kirby.



A detail from the cover of Fantastic Four #7, it is the one image of the Mr. Fantastic character that the artist inked in addition to penciling. Kirby's biographer Mark Evanier has commented on the remarkable similarity it bears to the man who drew it. If we accept that this similarity is a conscious choice rather than an unconscious reflex (artists do tend to draw like they look, after all) or evidence for a convenient mirror by Kirby's drawing table, then this image shares quite a bit with Panter's portrait. It is Kirby as hero, the artist transformed into his creation. Even here, however, the restraint of Kirby's other self-portrait is visible. There's a sensuousness to the lines, a fluidity to the spotted blacks that isn't usually there. The hyperbolic facial expressions so common in his comics are absent. Instead the face is solemn, contemplative, laser beam eyes looking at the drawn world from the inside out instead of the outside in as they more often did. Again, Kirby the man pulls back from depicting himself as a mere Kirbyism. There was more to him than what he put on the page. There simply had to be. But those parts of him were the parts that Panter never knew. All he had were the pages. What he drew was what could be pulled from there.

This is a self-portrait by Gary Panter.



Of course, it's doing the exact same thing Kirby's self-portraits do. Panter holds back the stylist whose work we've seen in so many fractured, rivetingly expressionistic comics, instead going for a real likeness, a subject rather than a caricature or even a character. The ratty line moves with more grace and subtlety than anywhere else in Panter's oeuvre I can think of, orderly rows of little flecks constructing a realist image bit by painstaking bit. The eye-popping color contrasts of Panter's paintings are cooled as well, a few sharper wisps of pink and yellow fading into the general skin tone, the bold orange background serving to push the face further out rather than catch the eye in its own right. Like Kirby, Panter depicts as much of his open, matter-of-fact humanity as possible. The stylisms that influenced entire generations are left out in both cases. The message is clear: those things may come out of the men in the portraits, but it isn't them. That's comics. This is life.

This is a panel from one of Jack Kirby's comics.



This is a copy Gary Panter made of it.



Panter was obviously a very capable Kirby copyist, with an understanding not just of the look but of the underlying shapes and light patterns that held the work up. What fascinates me is how Panter, in his portrait of Kirby, gets to the idiosyncrasy of his own massive style by evoking another stylist. It would have been easy enough, perhaps even clever enough, to do a Kirbyist portrait of Kirby himself. But Panter drew a Kirby born of his imagination, a picture that came out of his head as much as it came out of his hands. A mythological Kirby. The Panter portrait, in the end, is a portrait of inspiration: the drive that Kirby's comics gave their readers, the quest inherent in a young artist re-creating the face of his hero.

"The Kirby tradition is to create a new comic."
-- Jack Kirby's response to another artist who said he intended to draw a new version of Captain America in the "Kirby tradition".

I think he would have been proud.

Rhapsody in Cartoon

Superwest (1987), by Massimo Mattioli. Catalan.



I often think the comics medium's aesthetic history is for more critical readers what character and continuity are for superhero fanboys -- a really fun game running underneath our favorite texts, inviting us to engage multiple works by multiple artists as a single body, encouraging a buildup of mental connections that gets downright indexical if you read enough. Comics' artistic development is especially interesting to follow because of how much it relies on the constant reconsidering and reconstituting of genre tropes. Many of the same stock story setups (not to mention formats) have stayed with us for the better part of a century, and though new ones do occasionally emerge, it's rarely more than a few years before they become as ritualized a set of conventions as the average Fantastic Four issue. Strange thing; in comics innovation rarely takes the form of total novelty. Instead it's the slow build of new structures onto the old structures, the rote stories never disappearing but beginning to be done in slightly different ways. That's where the game aspect of looking at comics comes in. Pretty much everything good -- and certainly everything influential -- can be considered in the middle of its impact radius. Who exactly is a work drawing from, and who, in turn, drew from it? It's all right there on the page to be extracted, and there is no small joy to critiquing a medium in which "this looks like Hal Foster" can be a valuable insight.

Where playing the game gets really fun is with the books that didn't hit so hard. Seeing a little Kirby in your Kyle Baker is a great thing to pick out, but there's a little Kirby in at least half the sum total of American cartoonists. His influence extends, where plenty of others' don't. Take Massimo Mattioli, for example. Never seen the guy's work in a comics shop, and were it not for my memory of a single sentence about "he draws like a Disney animator on crack" in the indispensable Slings and Arrows Comics Guide, I would have passed it right over in the used bookstore too. On the one hand, it's whatever. I've probably passed over a lot of good comics without even pulling them off the shelves. Who's got the time? But on the other hand, the good-but-silent work that leaves no visible trace of itself a quarter-century down the line is valuable precisely because of that lack of communicated influence. It's impossible not to read a little Chris Ware into Frank King, because you know how indebted one man's work is to the other's. Superwest stands on its own by comparison -- it certainly has a basis in past cartoonists, but those influences simply culminate on its pages, because lord knows I've never heard of anyone taking up Mattioli's frantic, near-Dada blasting as an influence. It's a dead end, or maybe a trail blazed as far as it could possibly go. Heaven knows they don't make 'em all like this.



What's really fascinating about this book's total non-presence in comics history, though, is just how jacked into -- even emblematic of -- a very specific, pivotal time in the medium it is. The six strips that fill out Catalan's slim, sharply designed hardcover collection were drawn in the early '80s (two of the middle ones are dated '82 and '83, though the rest aren't timestamped so it's rather vague -- not translated until '87, in any case), and they are fiercely of their time, maybe even out ahead of it a little. The early '80s: superhero comics were still A Silly Thing, though the seeds of "maturity" had been planted and were germinating fast, Heavy Metal and Epic Comics had brought sleazy adult-oriented Eurocomics across the Atlantic, and Raw had sprung from the underground to redefine the medium for survival in the third millennium. And... there was Superwest, sitting pretty at the intersection of all those things, with an aesthetic that borrowed equally from the hokey grandiosity of yesterday's hero strips, the alien throb of the weirdest Euro sex farces, and the cutthroat ambition of Spiegelman and Panter. If anyone at all had internalized it, it would work pretty well as the defining comic of its moment. There's a very "eighties" feeling to the book, where boundaries are unquestionably being pushed but just as unquestionably still being worked within. It's a picture of a medium moving toward transcendence, not quite there yet.

Mattioli's aesthetic has its deepest basis in Robert Crumb, whose influence was definitely the strongest connection between the Continental fantasists of Heavy Metal and the furious scratchers of early art-comix. It's Crumb pared down though, the waver and texture of his rapidograph marks traded in for the perfect machine economy of Mattioli's marker line. What makes it into the comic are all the bits of Crumb that weird people out, minus the sensitivity and grace that elevate them. There are cartoon animals with erect dicks and nipples, there is a grossly sensuous roundness and wobble to the characters' forms, and it all takes place against a disturbingly fractured urban background, the hard corners and rectangles of flat sidewalks or buildings jabbing out at the eye, forcing the overwhelmed onlooker back into the stories. And make no mistake: these are overwhelming comics, page after page sending tides of flat color and squiggly line and cartoon hyperbole to crash against its readers' perceptions. After Crumb, Mattioli slaps on a sickening-sweet amalgam of what seems like every vintage funny-animal animator's style, pushing every gesture into a contortionist freakshow, every facial expression into some outsider-art parody that borders on derangement. It's all the wildest, most outre potential of cartoons distilled and ground into the broken glass of transgression, every panel an exclamation point, the only logic leading from intensity to greater intensity to the end.



I mean, he actually goes there. There's a fearlessness smacked down all over these pages, and not just the ones with close-up photos of dicks either. Mattioli uses every tool at his disposal -- subject matter, collage, painted color, flat color, and a huge does of pure, overstated comics grammar -- to keep you on your back feet, never letting his pages settle into a rhythm, or even a cohesive style. The ante never stops upping, the familiar never emerges from the strangeness. That's saying something when the shapes and configurations are as basic as these. It's the same things we've seen so many times before, whether in Disney movies of the funny pages, in thrall to such a shockingly different grammar and set of rules that it's a battle just to hold on. A battle, however, that's never conceded; Mattioli is just enough of a storyteller (and writes comics with just enough of a story) to keep things permanently comprehensible, even occasionally forcing nervous laughs out of the jaws his heavyweight cartooning so effortlessly drops.

Superwest is ostensibly a book full of superhero tales, and it does observe the bare minimum of the genre's requirements. Though he's some kind of weird cartoon dog (or maybe a mouse or something?), there is a hero, and he does change identities to battle evil, and the day is generally saved at the end of each episode, with evil undergoing some form of punishment or other. It's only innovation in that comics way -- new takes on an old formula. Mattioli may go from point A to point B in his stories, and he may even do it in neat four-to-eleven-page bursts, but he certainly takes the scenic rout through some bizarre territory on the way. The plot mechanics' underpinnings are as vague and dislocated as dreams. A city's entire road system turns to quicksand, a communist spy starts exploding people's heads at a public weapons exhibition, a hundred hot dogs go mad and begin attacking people... it's got the cotton candy-light sensicality of the best Silver Age comics, but the whimsy of that material is replaced by a cynical, paranoid darkness, a constant reminder that the flat reds and blues in the panels are also the colors of blood and suffocation. It's all so relentlessly twisted that there's no choice but to give in to it, to forget the sunny innocence usually associated with cartoon animals and really buy the idea that these Picassoesque caricatures are no less than bent realities, subjects of a world so nightmarish and surrealistic that it rips amusing antics right out of their hides.



Of course, it doesn't take much to conceptualize cartoon stars 'n' anvils as real pain, or the blunt-force bizarrerie of early Looney Tunes as disturbing fever dream. The axiom about simple ideas being the best ones only works in comics when the art is there to back it up, and Mattioli is no exception. As I said, Crumb and Tex Avery are the big points of departure, coupled with an intent to shock and disrupt. Mattioli has an obvious interest in the minimal forms of cartoons, stripping away any traces of rendering in favor of smooth hard surfaces, sanding the shapes of his characters down and down until they ride the bleeding edge of abstraction. It's great to look at, and it really blasts the eye across his gridded pages, but more fascinating is the way these most basic of forms' interactions with one another peel back the layer of familiarity we're so used to with cartoons, revealing the underlying nonsensicality of the poses and gestures we force our brains to read as fight scenes or chase scenes or handshakes or screeches. This stuff is so deep in age-old comics grammar that it carries meaning no matter what, but there's a constant consciousness of the fundamental absurdity the Disney/Warner Bros. mode of cartooning carries. From the panel compositions to the facial expressions, everything is just a little bit skewed, asymmetrical or overblown, and seeing such imperfections so willingly integrated into stock cartoon worlds is a severely weird experience.

No less weird is Mattioli's storytelling sense, which is spot-on as action comics, but less so in the context of his animation-art style. We're used to seeing characters that look like this in perpetual motion on a screen, not frozen in panels, and the transposition from one to the other (which I've written about before) can be odd enough. But Mattioli is using comics to do comics, taking up only the drawing conventions of animation, and his sequencing creates a very different kind of perpetual motion. There are huge gaps of time swallowed up in pretty much every panel transition, and the mind races to simply keep pace with the pages. Mattioli draws each picture to carry the individualized strength of a painting, everything happening so fast that mere story comprehension is about all one can salvage at the first read-through, each panel barely even coding as part of a sequence. If the pages hang together as single units at all, it's visually: Mattioli's colors, incredibly striking from frame to frame, interact beautifully at the full-page level, the simple shapes of pure blue and pink and green so strong that their dialogue extends across the panel borders, forcing a little sequentiality back into the individual panels by forcing the eye to perceive whole pages as single things.



If there's a single panel that codes for Superwest as a whole, it's this one. The icky maturity of Mattioli's cartoons is on full display -- that Donald Duck lookalike looks as though he's on the verge of a heart attack, and notice his rumpled shirt and the hair on the drooped-Mickey counterman's arms (gross). There's a great simplicity of shape and line, circles and squares and cylinders, so simple, even crude, that it would be easy to believe a somewhat talented kid had drawn them were it not for their perfect, assured placement. But what really blazes off the page is Mattioli's treatment of the panel as a canvas, his color work willfully obscuring clarity for pure impact. Again, its smooth shapes lend a veneer of professionalism, but the color on this page looks is more slapped over than integrated, the abstract forms and pop-art dazzle more important than the panel's actual pictorial content.

Never in my life have I seen anything like the color of that superimposed table shape slammed over the drawing itself, making a much louder, more immediate point than any linework could hope to. And then there's the single blue tile at the bottom right, just as illogical in itself as the table that makes transparencies of everything around it, lending a curt little exclamation point to Mattioli's declaration that the purity of color matters more here than any representation his lines might be attempting. It's still cartoon because it's loud and bold and supremely simple -- but it's the flexible sense of cartoon worlds applied to the making of the picture itself, the form that contains the form sagging beneath the weight of such experimentation. And yet, through it all, the panel's perfectly readable, never even hinting toward a lack of clarity.

So that's this comic, maybe too weird for success, maybe translated and put to the American market a few years past its time... ignored then and forgotten now, regardless of the reason. But as a document of a moment in comics, it's pretty much without peer. It's got Spiegelman's formalist bent and interest in subverting funny-animal cliches. It's got Joost Swarte's drawing style nailed, with a straightahead viciousness of both form and content that anticipates what Paper Rad would do with their comics a good two decades down the line. It's got plenty of Clowes urban nihilism, and it's not too hard to see Chris Ware in its concerted transformation of low-art immediacy to highbrow concept. If the book has a failing, it's that it's only those things, all the weird and shocking aspects of the best comics that have come since, and none of the the broader, more reader-friendly elements. Reading Superwest is like visiting a weapons test, or an exceptionally curated modern art gallery. It may not always be pleasant, but it's the future. And it flat-out refuses to apologize.

Your Monday Panel 46

Tintin in Tibet (1958), page 2 panel 7. Herge.



Though cartooning is basically a long, regimented series of simplifications, it can't quite be fully characterized as a minimalistic art form. Part of that is sheer semantics -- you can't say a medium (or hell, a language) is anything without some contradictory tidbit jumping out to spite you. From comics to cave paintings to runes to Renaissance underdrawings, cartooning encompasses multitudes. For every Charles Schulz there's a Hal Foster, and vice versa. But more than that obvious quibble, in cartooning the simplifications are so often also exaggerations. When so much of the real world's minutiae is taken out of the drawings, something has to step up to fill that void, and in practice the important parts that stay in the picture become ever more dramatic and engorged. Even when they don't though, staying in relative proportion a la Jaime Hernandez or Winsor McCay, that subtraction of extraneous detail still amplifies the elements remaining in the picture because they're the only things there.

So cartooning: an art of simple maximalism? Or maybe of massive minimalism? As ever, you just can't make it that clear cut either way. Especially when the great cartoonists -- the real great ones, like the kind that get museums made of them -- have a way of gumming up the issue with gorgeously unclassifiable panels like the one above. There's really not much of a case for this picture as minimalist, despite the undiluted cartoon purity of it. Setting aside the fact that's it's been absolutely set ablaze with visual information, Herge's drawing is, as almost always, perfectly crowded. Though he whittled his figures and faces down to the simplest collections of line and shape, the onetime Georges Remi never let them stand alone that way. Peruse the crowd swamping this panel and you'll notice how draped they are in the proliferation of wrinkles in their clothes, jewelry on their bodies, and loose hairs poking from their heads. Of course, all those extra bits (extra bits, keep in mind, tacked onto extra bits) are laid down with the same confident simplicity as the figures themselves -- a wavery line rather than a straight one for a wrinkle, a quick little pen stroke for a hair out of place, the same circles for pearl necklaces and watch faces and any number of kinds of earrings. None of it's given any undue attention, any visual identity that will confuse the focus of the picture, but at the same time it's all undeniably there, evoked, made real. In this way Herge might be said to be comics' cartooniest of realists; while he'd simplify until he hit the bone, he didn't leave much behind.

It's important to note that truism of Herge's work before scaling our focus outward to take in the panel as a whole. Because it's the same thing from a distance as it is on the precisely-lined soles of that little jumping boy on the right's shoe, filled to completion and not a drop further -- even where the scalloped edges of that word-balloon burst cut across the panel border, it's all for one effect, all pointing the reader right into the miniature explosion of sound at the center and the tumultuous effect it has on a hotel full of guests. Yes, this panel is crammed enough with bodies and faces and clothes and furniture to put George Perez to shame, but let's actually take a second and look at as many of them as we possibly can, down to the scattered playing cards and the spilled coffee and the blotted ink. How many pictorial elements can you count as incidental, as not bound into the panel by their reaction to its subject? I've got four: two windows and two plants, and that's it.

This panel is nothing less than a titanic display of sheer visual imagination, a downright symphonic set of responses to a single action. It's like an index, as though Herge sat down at the drawing table and decided to create a comprehensive catalogue of the different ways objects both animate and inanimate could overreact to hearing somebody sneeze. Displays of virtuosity for its own sake in comics tend to take the route of that picture linked above, but everything here is just so damn effectual that you've got to forgive Herge for blowing a small moment completely out of proportion. That's especially true when you take into account the fact that Tintin, despite being a more rousing adventure comic than pretty much anything before or since, is also dyed-in-the-wool humor. When the point is making people laugh comics' key tenets of efficiency and directness can be set aside a little, and the incidental detail laid down here, while it breaks a lot of typically-sensible rules, is simply funny enough to justify itself and more. The flabbergasted look on the knitting old lady's face, the man hiding behind the table, the stray pair of legs diving for cover, the mom getting a faceful of scalding hot coffee... it all adds to the point of the panel, and when that point is overstatement there's hardly much of an argument against overstating things. In the end maybe cartooning is just chasing purity, and this panel's blaring, focused delivery of one thing via many things fits that bill perfectly.

Frank Santoro's "New Values"

better photos here and here



UNDERGROUND

Down a back alley across the street from a Starbucks and a Subway in West Hollywood is the entrance to the Dem Passwords art gallery. LA is such a silent city that it was no surprise when I walked back into the gloom behind the building to nothing. No big blaring music, no hum of voices, no fine water-slick young things stapled to the outside walls smoking. Just the tone of quiet, and a shaft of yellow light rising off a stairway cut into the pavement, going down. As signposts go it was a pretty good one.

Frank Santoro was inside, cool as a cucumber in some conversation with some kid who had bright scarlet hair, and we said a quick hello before I moved further in to look at his paintings. Dem Passwords is a slap in the face of a space -- a long, low, stripped-bare silo type of room that goes back and back in one smooth rectangle. Golden light, white walls. There was a devotional aspect to looking at the paintings in this particular setting. In the quiet uncrowded gallery it almost felt like a pilgrimage, or at least the end of one. Under the earth and surrounded by light, descending into something step by step. The paintings lined the left wall, curved around at the very back of the long room, and then took me back to the front along the right. It was perfect; each image another layer of sensation, expression, of the fully grounded but feather-light energy in their every misty airbrush line. I walked along a row of pictures, deeper with every one, and then they were taking me back, and I clapped eyes on the last, surfacing.

"New Values" is the name of the show. It's nineteen color airbrush paintings on gold parchment. The pictures are of ancient, mainly Roman gods and goddesses in various forms; some are idealized human figures, some are stoic, archetypal animals, some are landscapes or knots of abstract shapes. In a way they are pictures of everything. "It's a different way of engaging content," Frank told me. "The symbols can work as narrative in and of themselves. The symbol is charged by the way you present it, you can use those things to propel narratives or associations... it can just be lines, but it can also stand for wisdom, or Minerva, or you name it." Instant meaning, just like in comics, but the layers of meaning in these images governed the lives of entire civilizations once upon a time. They hit harder, they carry more.



IDEA SPACE

"You're not going to believe this," I said to Frank once I had come back from my trip through the paintings, "but last night in a dream I saw that exact image of the two hexagons intersecting." I gestured at the vermillion-pink abstraction. "It's a temple shape," he said.

THE CITY AT NIGHT

I was lucky to have gotten there early. After half an hour or so the faces started trickling in, some of which were also names that comics people know. A random assortment of guys and the same little wave of cute semihipster girls I seem to see at every single "cultural event" I go to. A few of us were outside smoking when a stone killer of a black car (maybe a Jaguar or a Porsche or even a black Peregrino -- I didn't see) pulled into the alley and parked in the space right in front of the stairs leading down into the gallery, scattering us to either side. Its owner got out, the kind of imposing and perfectly preserved old guy you only see in LA, bright red sweater and bright white hair, accompanied by a big slab of bodyguard name of Pablito. "You know who that is?" asked Sebastien, one of Dem Passwords' owners. "That's Jerry Heller, he used to manage NWA... Bone Thugs-n-Harmony... he brought Kraftwerk to America..."

"That's Los Angeles," Frank said, laughing about it later. "That just put the cherry on top of the cake for me."

FRANK'S PAINTINGS

"New Values" is an achingly beautiful show. The bold airbrush lines and assured, nearly brash colored pencil marks that form the paintings share in the undiluted purity of the best comics color, but also swim with a subtlety that the printed object is incapable of capturing. Every spray of ink is a radiation, a build. Lightly saturated, almost invisible mists of tone at the edges tighten up into full, clean strokes at the centers, the power of the lines diffusing off into an ambient haze. These are largely one- or two-color paintings -- three at most -- but the variations in thickness the airbrush allows gives each picture a thousand gradations of the hues that anchor it. The effect is riveting, a strikingly real play of light and shadow imposed onto the basic strength of cartoon forms, fusing into something far beyond the look of the everyday but too tangible to be pure fantasy.

"It's a different kind of line than I've ever made," Frank said. "I think it's easier to control than a spray can, but because it's water-based it's blowing out the paper, like wrinkling it. So you have really one go. You can't go back and fix anything... it's like fresco or watercolor where it's just fast. And the vibrancy of the colors is great, because you can get these crazy fluorescent water-based airbrush colors now, and they're just... they're awesome. If you can get it in the gesture... you're not getting a brushstroke. If you make a painting that's really wacked out it's not going to look like a Basquiat or anything because he's not using an airbrush; but you can get it to look like a science fiction paperback cover..."

So somewhere between the density of Richard Corben and the simplicity of graffiti tags, then; but there's a solid quality to Frank's pure-color, near-luminous paintings that only the space between the two more traditional modes of sprayed art can provide. The lines are few, and they are certain, and they possess an almost magic grace -- minimal patterns that state themselves with the clarity of a spot-on musical phrasing. In one sense they are timeless. But in the spontaneity of their sprayed-on lines and the restraint that charges their instantly recognizable forms, they are also art of the moments that produced them, of certainty, of action without hesitation. "I wanted a new value for myself," Frank said when I asked him about the show's title. "How do you harness just the raging fucking torrent of madness inside yourself? How do you find a filter? I like limiting my palette, limiting my tools."



SILENT SYMPHONY

Frank is given to using musical terms when discussing his art. At the opening I saw him school a kid named Lazer on how to read his comics work. The panel transitions are like beats, and the colors are like tones. The backgrounds are like the bass, and then the linework up front is... he mimed a guitar solo. "This is like pure tone," he said, pointing to a color-only sequence. "But it's always got that beat going underneath it." He slapped his fingers on each panel in rhythm. When he speaks to the paintings it's jazz-cat talk, harmonics and melody, freed up from the pounding throb of comics' panel-by-panel linearity. "I'm trying to find the notes on the page, the harmonic points on the page. They're all in the same harmonic scale, rhythm scale... they just, they fit together. There's not gonna be a friction with them architecturally. Even though the subject matter might change they're bound." When I asked him about what went into the way the paintings are sequenced, he went deeper: "It's really a matter of beat matching, color matching. Making harmonies and figuring out how the scale's gonna go. It has a different rhythm based on the light in the space..."

The particularity of this approach makes for an incredibly elegant sequence, lines and shapes creating a symmetry between the paintings, an interconnecting web of form that links the images together in a distinct whole. The shifts in color and outline from painting to painting are big ones -- hot pink gives way to seafoam green, purple and gold to black and orange, minimal shapes to fully rendered figures -- but they never jar, always subsumed into the larger structure of the show as a single unit. When you step back and take in "New Values" as one solid thing, a sum of its parts, the effect is immense. Total. Every shade on the color wheel sings out at you from all directions, the clouds and barbs of their different tones surging at different speeds, a body in perfect harmony with itself. It's like hearing a full-blown orchestra coming to life; a cornucopia of sound, beautifully melodic passages interweaving, unified.



MISSIONARY MAN

It's bigger than the comics page, and the public event of it had an element of grandeur missing from the experience of reading a book. But Frank is a cartoonist making paintings, and there are comics in this work -- the sequence, the iconic impact, the bright color and simplicity of form -- as much as anything else. This opening is hardly the only intersection of comics and the fine-art world over the past little while; Ben Jones and Mat Brinkman have exhibited recently, Gary Panter's at least close to being as much of a painter as he is a cartoonist, and no less a patron saint of comics than R. Crumb took over the Hammer Museum a few miles down Santa Monica with his Genesis pages just a year ago. These worlds are colliding, or at least getting closer. "I don't think it's a very different thing," Frank said. But even a slight difference is bound to make a change. "Art fairs... the gallery circuit... it's like you sort of have to meet them halfway. You make different kinds of work specifically for the gallery, it's not what you do for your comics and for your zines and stuff."

I thought about how I was talking to the critic who coined the term "fusion comics" last year just as much as the painter who'd done the mind-blowing work that surrounded us, and how maybe this thing of his -- undeniably a fine-art show, unabashedly a part of the art-gallery world -- was comics too. "New Values" has the sequence-derived narrative, the accretionary power, the understated grace of individual units native to comics, and damn if Frank's renditions of Mercury and Rhea don't look like they stepped out of some undiscovered issue of Jack Kirby's Thor. The real excitement, the feeling that this is an important thing happening at this moment in this basement, comes from the intersection, the way the paintings don't feel like one thing or the other thing but both. Like without either side of the equation, painting and comics, classical and contemporary, iconic and iconoclastic, LA today or Rome circa 79 AD, none of it could be what it is.

"I'm trying to inject it with..." he trails off. "Finding the essence there and just pulling that out. Just really working at that and being sincere in one's attempt to speak well and truly, and just... report. And witness. And I'm purposely speaking in like, missionary talk, because I'm just shocked at how devoid most people are of that understanding. Specifically in artistic, pictorial terms, there's such a rich history and it's all right there and everyone just can't fucking see it. In comics it's like -- for 20 years I've been hearing "Comics can be anything! They are this, they are that!" But that's for a handful of us. Everybody else is still wrapping their head around the fact that there's just such a thing called fuckin' comics! Beyond just meeting them halfway, you have to provide different avenues of getting the conversation going."

NEW VALUES

"The Etruscans would make these tomb paintings for a funeral -- and then they'd seal up the tomb and that was it," Frank mused in the gallery the morning after the show, empty of its audience now, the paintings precisely placed where they had been the night before, beams of light drifting in through the front windows before being swallowed by the deep gloom of the Dem Passwords silo. What had felt like something given birth and come to life last night now felt somber, elegiac, the cold of sun through glass settled over it. We were the only ones in the gallery, everything still. "So it was these awesome paintings that everyone would see for like a few hours and then that was it."

"I'm trying to... it's not harsh," he said. "It's melodious, it's pretty. Especially in comics there's just this desire to be... discordant, and everything's harsh, and like... extreme!... and it just doesn't need to be. That's my new value. I make no apologies for wanting to make an elegant drawing. This is me trying to catch up to an education that I wanted to have. I feel like I'm starting over."

***

HEREWITH THE AUDIO

The quotes above are mostly taken from an interview I recorded with Frank the morning after the show opened. It's a fairly long talk that breaks down into random chit chat a few times, but it's interesting enough that I thought I'd post it in its entirety too. Frank is a downright rousing talker, and if you haven't listened to him before you really should now. Do it here!

NOTE

The photos that accompany this article look really weak, I know. My camera situation is not, shall we say, the most satisfactory. If and when someone else posts some more real pictures you've got to go look at them because the show was just so amazing and these snapshots simply don't do it justice in the least.

GO SEE IT

"New Values" will be open until February 18th. Dem Passwords is located at 7914B Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood (enter through the alley half a block south). Their phone number is 772.202.2733, call it for hours. Seriously, if you have any chance whatsoever to go see this show, do so. It's good.

The Personal Pages

Diary Comics #1, by Dustin Harbin. Koyama Press.



It's always fun to watch a talented cartoonist take up one of comics' familiar forms and lend their own particular inspiration to it. We live in an era where a vast majority of the comics that matter are leaving the old formats and formulas behind -- the internet replaces the page, the annual hardcover replaces the monthly pamphlet, the original graphic novel replaces the story arc -- and while it may be a specifically inside-comics thrill when a new stab at the old ways pops up, the thrill is there nevertheless. Right now we've got Kyle Baker riding hard on the warhorse of serial superhero issues, Smoke Signal kicking out inoculation dosages of Sunday paper-style broadsheets by the medium's greats every few months... and Dustin Harbin (among others) knocking out a daily comic strip with all the tenacity and consistent brilliance of a master newspaper cartoonist. You pick the era.

While daily updates have become such a part of internet culture that it's easy to take them for granted, even when it's a comic every single day, and a generally excellent one at that, there's a tangible sense that Harbin is on an epic streak to be gotten from reading his autobiographical four-panel shorts online every day. The consistency I mentioned is a big part of that -- like with any comic built out of such small individuated units there's a variance of quality between each strip, but the benchmark Harbin has set for himself is strikingly high. Though they don't always make me laugh out loud or keep returning to them in my thoughts throughout the day, that happens a lot. And honestly, the slight differences in the amount of gratification the strips deliver each day is one of the peculiar joys of the format Harbin has jacked himself into. While there's certainly something to be said for putting forth an Ernie Bushmiller level of stoic, perfectly unchanging brilliance, it's a lot more fun to follow a strip that has its good days and its really good days. Nothing less than an element of hope comes into it -- will Harbin merely kill it today, or will he come forward with another strip exploring little corners of the comics form that have so far remained unlighted? Gotta read to find out!



But as enjoyable as following Harbin's bite-sized bursts of brilliance can be from day to day, they're trumped as a total reading experience by Koyama Press's slick pamphlet-form compendiums. Harbin's energetic, tiny panels thrive on the printed page, the dense thickets of linework spread out over them opened up for the eye to enter and rove around in without fear of computer screen-induced blindness. The tight, symmetrical clusters of the individual strips' layouts -- two panels on top, two on the bottom -- gets a neat mirror in the formatting of the comics' full pages -- four comics per, two down and two across. And of course, the reader can really stretch out into Harbin's work across 48 pages in a way the tiny flashes of daily strips can't possibly compete with. Collected dailies are an interesting reading experience that don't really have a parallel outside comics, a long-form presentation of short-form work, leaning more heavily on the power of accretion than anything else. Reading a hundred and ninety complete works laid end to end sounds daunting, and in a way it is. By the end of a Diary Comics issue, you've lived with Harbin (and his dogs, and his cat, and his TV preferences, and his furniture, and his friends, and his daily routine) for half a year. But on the page as in reality, the passage of time is so imperceptible, such a charming and agreeable feeling, that it's the easiest thing in the world to rush through the months and watch the orbit of Harbin's life subtly evolving over longer periods of time.

The sense of process, of participating in a work that is not and may never be truly finished, is an especially key component of Diary's first issue. The book begins with early strips drawn as personal, not-for-print exercises, before moving into the material drawn explicitly for Harbin's webcomic. It's fascinating to watch the strips shape themselves up from sketches into their caffeinated, stylized mature form over the first few months. If you've ever read the first volume of a newspaper comic you've seen the odd, engrossing spectacle of an artist whittling down the forms of their world until they hit the purity of form that underpins what they're doing; but Harbin starts his diary completely free, the art lacking any of the polish that publication demands. The progression from scratchy, minimal early strips to the tightly regimented bustle of the later ones is as appealing as the anecdotal, often hilarious stories powering them. There's refinements being made in almost every strip of Diary #1, certainly on every page, though Harbin never loses the spontaneity of his line or the stretchy looseness of his figures. The manic zest of his strips acts as a center point, everything tightening up around it, anchoring it to a cartooned world that brings its pop and hilarity into ever sharper focus. Harbin also makes big steps as a gag writer on these pages, moving from the random laughs peppering the early strips to a focused rhythm in the later ones, every panel a well-considered snapshot leading up to punchlines that are sometimes understated and sometimes wildly overdone, but almost always effective.



Though the daily comic strip is Harbin's big place of engagement with a lineage of previous comics artists, there are also some very interesting things being done with the mechanism of autobiographical comics in Diary. While autobio is obviously less specific to comics than the daily gag format, it's still got a long history with the medium, marked by certain tropes that have become prevalent enough to qualify as stereotypes. The depressed cartoonist, his misanthropy, his women troubles, the particulars of his engagement with pop culture (or lack thereof) -- at this point these are all archetypal constructs, and Harbin is deeply aware of what his work is doing in relation to them. Though clouds of hatchmarked depression close in on him from time to time, Harbin always beats them back, seemingly as much because he knows his audience is sick of glum, moody autobio comics as anything else. He isn't above making fun of Flavor Flav, but he's never the snooty alt-cartoonist in his interactions with media, either; Lost figures prominently in quite a few strips, and everything from the Neverending Story to Twitter get time in the spotlight. More than playing off expectations, though, Harbin innovates some fascinating new language for autobio comics, detailing conversations with friends about how he should draw them, and creating strange, hilarious meta-gags like the one above.

It's obvious Harbin knows exactly what he's doing with every element of his comic, and he only continues to improve as he puts that knowledge to better and better use. Diary is every inch a worthy entry in the index of each form Harbin uses it to engage with -- a riotously funny gag strip, an addictive webcomic, an autobio work that subverts expectations while building the same engrossing, self-perpetuating arc around itself that all the best work in that genre does. Highly entertaining work from a tireless cartoonist whose best is clearly yet to come. Until the next strip, then...

Your Monday Panel 45

Bogeyman Comics #2 (1969), page 3 panel 3. Rory Hayes.



It's always interesting for me to think about how easily comics pull us in. The instinctive dialogue the our minds enter into with cartoon drawings as soon as we clap eyes on them is an odd and marvelous thing. We usually see comics history as extending back maybe a century, maybe into the early-mid 1800s if we really push it. But the language of comics, the basic signs and glyphs the drawings are made of, is something we've been working on for a long time. I don't really think hieroglyphics and cave paintings are direct precursors to comics in the way they've occasionally been made out to be; nonetheless, I definitely believe that comics owe a great debt to those things, and right now are probably the most visible home for the instant-meaning, idea-container function drawing has served since prehistory. All the smaller, competing milieus and historical narratives seething around inside the medium are so fascinating that sometimes it can get tough to look at the entire, international form as the one relatively small thing it is in the big picture of human artistic achievement. Comics as a whole engage in a much bigger strain of art -- the instantaneous, ancient one that makes faces out of dots and curves and landscapes out of single horizontal lines. The one that bypasses our eyes and puts meaning in our heads immediately.

Of course, all that is usually beneath the surface. Most comics come with some level or other of illustrative sheen to them, the colors or the details of the linework more obviously noticeable than the work's ability to set your mind in motion. But among the artists who deal more directly in minimalism, in the form's vast ability to suggest rather than show (Charles Schulz, Jaime Hernandez, Harvey Kurtzman, et al), there's a real, distinct visual similarity. Perhaps this is stating the obvious, but cartoon language is really quite rigid. There's always room for the mannerisms of style, but strip it down far enough and you get to the real, basic necessities of shape and line placement that keep the stuff from falling apart. There are certain shapes we recognize immediately, true, but when artists go in search of "pure cartoon" and work in basic line and shape alone, giving up the wealth of context offered by illustrative detail, the stakes get higher. Because outside the instant-meaning shapes and lines we all recognize, there are entire universes of ones we don't. Straying too far from the familiar in minimal cartooning holds high potential for failure -- the work can simply stop holding meaning if it goes far enough from the look of the real, becoming at best a Rorschach test for the different things readers assign to it, and at worst just empty.

That's the way it usually goes, anyway. But comics, from Kirby to Panter, have had a striking amount of artists whose work uses only the bare bones of literal depiction and comes out on the other side rich with subjected, invented meanings; the world not as it really looks, but as it's seen. Rory Hayes is one of those artists, one whose sequences of pictures build stories out of their own bizarre alien logic, the consistency of their utter weirdness giving the reader just enough of a solid platform for understanding to take root in. As individual, decontextualized panels, though, it's something else entirely: screaming, deformed looks into a warped existence that's been taken too far from our own to be fully understood anymore. Though the strength and simplicity of his forms qualifies him as a minimalist, there's plenty of content to chew on in pretty much every panel Hayes ever drew. He really placed a premium on filling up his boxes, and that wealth of information works in direct opposition to the total understanding most comics attempt to give the reader. While we can easily imagine the drifting, sterile suburbs behind one of Schulz's one-line backgrounds, or the neon metropolis a single Frank Miller skyscraper suggests, with Hayes everything is clearly there and clearly unrecognizable. Rudderless, adrift in the artist's own idiosyncrasy, allowing us nothing to hold onto.

There's an intense flouting of agreed-upon cartoon conventions in Hayes' work, from the dizzy grind between minimal forms and maximal texturing to the disregard for rules of light and perspective. This panel is a great example of just how vertiginous Hayes could get: the two black spheres on the left reflect the beam of light shining in through the window on the back wall, but the third one on the right is reflecting the paned shape of another, unseen window across the room, not the strip of white brilliance that dominates the picture. A flash of reflected light just like the ones on the first two spheres hangs without an origin in the depths of the blackness. Hayes puts a beautiful, meticulous layer of shading on the creature in the foreground, but spots none beneath it where it sits, setting the entire picture floating, almost totally free of gravity.

There's an understanding that highly simplified cartooning usually produces in the reader, almost a contract between artist and audience stating that work done in this mode will not actively defy the natural laws of the world in order to get over as depictive, apprehensible storytelling. Things like the human shape of the creature being interrupted by that rocky head, or the bright light in darkness provided by the abstract shapes at top right, actively defy the rest of the picture's impulse toward simplicity, working against the eye's instinct to classify everything in the panel as quickly as possible. Hayes follows his own imagination out into its furthest reaches, leaving behind the overtures minimal cartoonists so often make to the audience, instead putting everything he can into his pictures whether it "makes sense" or not. This, I'd imagine, is the reason his work inspires so many of today's farther-out, more experimental comics artists; though his storytelling was always crystal clear, panel by panel Hayes sacrificed the comics medium's traditional, cartooned accessibilities in favor of total self-expression.

Which brings us to the big question Hayes' work begs -- did he know what he was doing or not? Was he the glowering artiste destroying comics' usual parameters to achieve the nauseous intensity his work carries? Or the cracked outsider who just wanted to draw EC Comics stories and ended up with this stuff due to the limitations of his skill set? What biography we've got on Hayes seems to indicate that he was a combination of both, but looking at the work alone offers no answers, only the question louder and louder with every bit of stippled shade. Are the grotesques of the bear's facial expression and the creature's melted-human form calculated provocations or genuine nightmare visions? Are the abstract shapes and lighting regimented stylisms or random, personal firings of ink? Hayes drew psychological comics in a different sense than we're used to, but no less a valid one. The characters are as flat and inscrutable as the pop-horror worlds they inhabit, but it's impossible not to wonder at the dimensions of the mind behind this panel, and what secret flashes were hidden in its spotted blacks.

Insides

Sans Genre V

Comics have no lack of great characters. In fact, we're probably the lone medium going that sells more off characters featured than artists working. (Movies are the only other one that comes close, and I could be wrong but I feel like "Eddie Murphy" is a bigger box-office draw than "Shrek", all told.) At the most basic, bonehead, pop-culture level, it's still the characters that mark the form. A picture of Batman codes better for "comics" than the shape of a word balloon or the pattern of benday dots or any panel layout you care to name. Maybe it'll always be that way. But regardless, it's worth asking who exactly the characters that act as our ambassadors are. Anybody want to name me Batman's character traits? What kind of a guy is he? Superman? Iron Man? Wolverine, Wonder Woman? Character?

Right. They haven't got any, at least not so you'd notice unless you've read the stuff like it was holy writ. Part of that is because they're archetypal ideas that have been filtered through the sensibilities of different artists over decades of social and aesthetic evolution, but much more deeply relevant is the fact that they're sprung from a visual medium. Comics, try though it may to go further, is fundamentally an art form of exteriors. We see the surfaces of the characters -- in the icons' cases that's bright color, slick design, skintight curvature, flash -- and their flat skin and sometimes their perfect hair -- and let those things define who they are and what they're doing for us. That's as opposed to the archetypal characters of comics' non-visual cousin literature, who are biult of words and have writers to focus us on who they are inside. Robin Hood? Roguish social-justice guerilla, and that fragment of idea defines him whether he's visually incarnated in the feathered Errol Flynn cap or the dank Russell Crowe robes. Sherlock Holmes? Ascetic, eccentric thinking machine, whether he's shown to us as the Basil Rathbone deerstalker or the Robert Downey dandy. But Batman? Lose the ears and the cape and no matter how hard you sell the insider knowledge of murdered-parents-terrible-oath he'll never be Batman. The identity is in the pictures, the rest is only justification for them.

And that's true even for the ones who do have legitimate claims to interiority. Try putting Charlie Brown in any shirt but that yellow and black zigzag one and you can't tell who's spouting the self-loathing chestnuts. Take Jimmy Corrigan out of Chris Ware's iconic visual style and you have a depressed nobody in a vest, a bystander at best. No matter how deep the person inside the panels runs, if they don't hit you first visually the way the medium that contains them does, they're sunk as an icon. When it comes to defining what and who things are in comics, the words in the word balloons run a far distant second to the lines and shapes and colors underneath them.

But comics is also a storytelling medium, and we do have a use for those words, no matter how secondary. The art tells us who's who and shows us their movements through particularized space; and until somebody fully achieves the grail of the all-silent Great Comics Novel, the words are there to tell us the why and wherefore. How do the characters change from one moment to the next, how do they feel about things, what are they thinking right now? The words, as they did with Robin Hood and Sherlock Holmes and too many other "great characters" to name, give us the interiors of the exteriors, if that's not too much to handle. The abstract insides that pictures can never fully engage with.

Of course, it's been a long road getting here. Put simply, comics didn't always (and still usually don't) tell stories about characters with any interior life, anything that their outward appearance and actions didn't show us. Below, a short sequence from Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in 1910; still a prime contender for the title of most graphically advanced comic of all time. But the words... I mean...



These aren't even the verbal parallels to the visuals that today's most simplistic comics draw -- they're bald restatements of exactly what the pictures are already telling us. Everything in these panels is geared toward presenting a single, objective meaning. Something causes the ship's decks to shake! It is a whale, which has swallowed the anchor and is now towing it out to sea! Beautifully drawn and colored, but that's all we get. There's no subjective, human view into the action being presented, no indication that the characters are acting as anything but narrators of their own lives. No feelings, not even opinions. Not even thought, honestly: these are shouted declarations, bouncing straight from the environment that produces them to its inhabitants' vocal cords and back again, with no indication given that an individual mind has come into play at any point. It could just as easily be the chairs or the ocean waves talking. This is just how comics worked back then, hitting in buffeting, brutal, beautiful single slams, unified presentations of one literal thing and that one thing alone, and then on to the next one.



Of course, comics had "characters" from the beginning, at least insofar as every story needs some measure of complimentary or conflicting personalities to drive it. But for years comics were vaudeville, and featured the broadest of types playing base slapstick roles -- the foolish and lazy wag, for example, or the demonic child, or the harrying boss, or the scheming, ineffectual villain. And to a man, they announced their intentions and carried them out, or at least did their damndest to. It wasn't until the Dada-era advent of George Herriman and his masterpiece Krazy Kat that true depth of characterization really hit comics. The visual performances Herriman's characters repeated endlessly over the strip's near-three decade run marked them out as different from one another, individualized: one always received pain, one inflicted it, and one meted out the punishment, while a chorus of stock commenters looked on. But it was Herriman's use of language that really defined who Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse and Officer Pupp were beyond their scratched-out silhouettes. It's easy as pie to tell one of Krazy's squeaky-voiced, abbreviated, patois'ed word balloons from Ignatz's brash, slangy mutterings and Pupp's Shakespearean braggadocio. Herriman literally gives his characters individual voices, ways of expressing themselves that nobody else on the page can quite reproduce. It's still all exteriorized, they're still voicing what they're feeling for the world to hear, but in such a way that there can be no doubt as to the unique individual identities of the speakers. Though we're not given a view directly into it, there are obviously very different internal processes shaping the separate actions and reactions Herriman's trio of anthropomorphs have to their surreal, repetitious world.



The above is probably as close as Herriman would come to true interiority, with Walter Cephus Austridge speaking the incomprehensible language of his first few appearances, forcing Herriman the omniscient narrator to step in and tell us the meanings he's trying to express. In other words, there's something hidden inside him that nobody else in the panel can get at, even though it hardly fits with "interior life" as it's commonly understood. Still, it's an exciting start.

Frank King's mid-1920s work on Gasoline Alley was the big step forward, though, for the first time presenting comics characters whose volume of private thoughts was at least equal to that of their performed, visualized public personas. King's people would say one thing and mean another, smile in the pictures when they really felt sad or angry, string others along with ulterior motives, and hide parts of themselves away at least as often as the average human does in everyday life. And while you could surmise that some of that was going on in earlier comics, King innovated by telling it to us in no uncertain terms.



It's in Gasoline Alley that the lines between the exteriority of images and spoken speech, and the interiority of thought -- never the clearest to begin with -- really start to blur and fade away. Characters frequently speak to no one but themselves, and while that was common enough in Krazy Kat and even before, here the substance of it is much less made up of asides to the audience and random jokes, much more of feelings and motivations kept hidden from other bubbling up to the surface in solitude. King's characters not only express their individuality in these monologues, they lay bare private lives that the pictures on the page are incapable of showing us. The words' purpose stands revealed: while pictures illustrate, they can also hide things, and unless someone tells us there are times when we'll never know. Like the bodies and faces -- the outsides -- of real people, drawings of comics characters can only take us so far into who they are. The balloons push us deeper, give us further understanding. The dividing line between words and pictures is also a dividing line between what's freely given and what's shut away from everyone but we the readers.



Around this time, some (as far as I can tell) unrecognized genius made an addition to the comics' grammar that perfectly visualized the growing split between characters' interior and exterior, drawn lives: the thought balloon. Here, in a gorgeous, murmuring, cloudy variation on the word balloons designating spoken speech, was an elegant and unobtrusive way to spell out what the people in the panels were thinking without forcing them to belt it forth for all to hear. It's significant that thought balloons didn't really emerge as a common comics trope until the stories the medium was telling were countenancing the characters' hidden thoughts enough to need them. And even then, it was hardly a Joycean level of interior monologue going into them during their early years. In a medium whose Depression era was mostly spent transporting the populace to exotic, adventurous climes and presenting them with logic-light gags, the thought balloon was little more than a straw man, a newer and sleeker vehicle for exposition. Above, from Milt Caniff's Terry and the Pirates in 1938, probably the greatest example of the then-new action comics idiom, is a typical example: a sentence or two to fill you in on what happened yesterday, a quick reference to an older story, and a few wooly colloquialisms thrown in to goose a bit of "personality" into the verbiage. Perhaps not too impressive, but this is still a picture of a form functioning in a more graceful and efficient way than it had once been able to.



The thought balloon achieved a pinnacle of sorts in 1953, on the pages of the EC Comics-published short "So Shall Ye Reap", written with an uncommon sensitivity by Al Feldstein, and drawn by the inimitable Wally Wood. It's interesting to note that the thought balloon really only began to evolve a unique, essential place for itself once the medium had become largely a divided-labor undertaking, with "writers" and "artists" contributing component parts to the final products, whereas earlier comics were overwhelmingly the product of a single story-and-art overseer directing various assistants. But I digress...



"So Shall Ye Reap" opens with a brutally elegant literalizing of the split between speech and thought in comics. On one side of Wood's splash page sit the parents of a young man, awaiting the minute of their son's execution. They speak aloud to one another, their words directed not just to each other but to society at large, attempting to absolve themselves of blame for their son's failure in life and impending death. On the other side, bound to an electric chair, sits the son himself, Kenny, counting down his final moments with thought balloons bubbling up from his bowed head. The words assigned to him are reflective, interiorized, a psychological self-examination. Child and parents' narration intertwine over the course of seven neatly split pages to lay out Kenny's path from all-American childhood to Death Row, with the parents' halves bemoaning their boy's failure to capitalize on the idyllic upbringing they feel they gave him, while Kenny peels back the surface to reveal the holes in the dream: beatings, psychological abuse, and a final rejection that seals his doom. The story, of course, is a perfect example of the different purposes served by speech and thought balloons. The parents speak for all to hear, casting blame on a son to whom society has already assigned an unforgivable guilt. Kenny broods to himself, running through a silent refutation that is too late to save his life. Both sides of the page end up with the same, inevitable conclusion: as the final moment hits the parents curse Kenny for what he's done to them and their reputations, as the boy's final thoughts sizzle away with "I guess... I was just a bad son."



This is more than just a formal exercise, though. Feldstein and Wood's passion play uses comics' existing interior/exterior dynamic to give the form one of its earliest and most affecting examples of another, equally complex dualism: that of the character as both subject and object. We're shown the same single life through two viewpoints in "So Shall Ye Reap", but one perspective shows Kenny as an unregenerate bad seed, while the other portrays him as the deeply sympathetic victim of an uncaring society. Both are true, both really happened. But the one in the thought balloons is Kenny's life as told, as lived from within, while the one given in speech is the life as observed, as experienced without the feelings and motivations that determined the choices made in it. On the surface, the exterior, Kenny just couldn't make it in the world as it was. But by planing into his interior with the words above the panels, the story forces its readers to question how fair the society is for setting people like Kenny on the path to their gruesome ends. It's a virtuosic, legitimately groundbreaking piece of comics, the place where the dualism of subjectivity (the individual as interior, defined by themselves with their own view onto the world) and objectivity (the individual as exterior, defined by the world around them in relation to society) really began to produce interesting comics.

It's also one of the clearest examples of the way midcentury comics juggled interior and exterior, subject and object, with a strikingly high degree of success. Even if stories as nuanced and compulsively readable as "So Shall Ye Reap" were a rarity during the '50s and '60s, the level of sophistication with which Feldstein and Wood manipulated their form became almost de rigeur for a time. Despite the juvenile plots and inane dialogue of the vast majority of the era's comics, they quite frequently managed to present no less than three intertwining but markably individual views into the action occurring in just about every panel. Below, from Steve Ditko and Stan Lee's Dr. Strange:



In order, that's omniscient narration explaining the panel's contents to us; the performative speech act of the spell Strange recites in the word balloon (itself an exteriorized "action" in that speaking the words is what produces the effect on the environment); and the thought balloon that explains the action's motive and leads us into the next panel. There's a massive amount of information crammed into this small panel, a moment in time cross-sectioned and exhibited as a collection of component parts. And this wasn't a rarity, it was downright pedestrian. It was simply how comics worked at the time, utilizing various ways of presenting words to submerge readers in an undeniable sense of things really happening. Each element of the panel -- narration, speech, thought, drawing -- points to the same event. But they bring it to life in different ways, working together in an almost symphonic fashion to give a much deeper impression of it than the simple statement that any one of those elements could provide.

But back to comics' discovery of subjectivity. The early Marvel superhero comics that Dr. Strange constituted a minor part of were the furthest the medium had yet taken its characters into the cracks between subject and object. Where supervillains had heretofore been one-dimensional raving maniacs or extra-earthly terror-beasts, under Ditko and Lee (and fellow Marvel artist Jack Kirby) they were often victims of tragic misunderstandings or misadventures that doomed them to lives of crime. Feldstein and Wood's Kenny in skintight costumes, individuals whose acts against society made them okay for the heroes to hit, but whose reminisces and interior monologues offered readers a "supervillainous subjectivity" to go along with it, an individual's view into how "evil" can easily be an outgrowth of simple human emotions like jealousy or embarrassment or anger.



Ditko and Lee hit the zenith of this approach with their work on Spider-Man, generally acknowledged as comics' first anti-hero. Like Marvel's villains, Spider-Man was loathed and feared by the public, and his nerdy alter ego Peter Parker was no less reviled by his high school peer group. The difference between Spider-Man and his gaggle of socially outcast villains was that this character was in no uncertain terms a good guy, battling for justice despite the often unwanted nature of his efforts. The delicate balance of character as individual subject and societal object seen in "So Shall Ye Reap" was discarded here in favor of a narrative that came down heavily on the side of subjectivity. Spider-Man was what he saw himself as, a hero, and the general populace that rejected him or believed him a villain was simply wrong. Where Feldstein and Wood asked questions, Ditko and Lee proclaimed: with this character, at his height the most popular in comics, it was the inside, the thought balloons that told the truth. The external view of things was a false one.

This was to become the dominant view in comics. Whether it was the immediacy of the humanist "Marvel Philosophy" or the larger cultural drift of the second half of the 20th century, within a decade or two presenting characters' subjective views into their own situations had become the dominant way of doing things. This change necessitated a change in the way the words on the page were presented. The first thing to go was the omniscient narration that for so long had invited readers to experience their stories as told by some unseen presence rather than the characters themselves. Without those caption boxes proscribing meaning, the only view into the action was through the eyes and words of the characters that it encompassed. "I" became the way of things, not "he". In the late 1970s and early 1980s, most significantly in the work of new-wave writers like Alan Moore and Frank Miller (below), the thought balloons that had defined the subjective view for so long began to disappear also, replaced by caption boxes like the ones that had once held the words of invisible narrators.



This movement of characters' in-story narration from balloons to boxes is significant; by placing an individual's interpretation of events in the same place that until recently had been occupied by the inarguable fact of third-person narration, subjective, character-narrated storytelling was further entrenched as the only way to do things. And by losing thought balloons' visual tether to the characters producing them, as well as the delicate, impermanent look of their scalloped borders, characters' chronicling of their own stories became something, well, less subjective, less arguable, more factual-seeming. Around the turn of the millennium, the two main commercial comics houses, Marvel and DC, banned thought balloons outright, their visual reminders of first-person narration's inherently limited subjectivity lost to the vast majority of the medium's American readers.

In a very real way, comics' subjects have become its objects, the delicate insides that once hid or wavered in the face of the exterior world now defining what that world is for us. What lies beneath the surface of the pictures has become the fact of our stories, no longer open to interpretation but legislated by the people the drawings show us. It's been a fascinating historical process. But I can't help but feel that we're missing something by letting limited views drive so many of our stories. There was a moment when comics, though bound to idiotic plot specifics, held the potential for greater narrative complexity than any other storytelling medium had ever had, different ways of saying the same thing coursing through its panels like blood through veins. I think it's a shame we've lost that to the degree that we have. Because pure subject and pure object just aren't that interesting by themselves. It's with fusions of the two that the medium's potential for simultaneous presentation of many things is really being used in full. Word as inside and picture as outside sounds alright as a binary that defines how comics do what they do, but one of the greatest beauties of the form is that there's never yet been one single way. Only accepted fashions that get subverted again and again by minds greater than what they're coming into. The current mode of picture and word, subject and object, inside and out, is not a terminus. It's merely another stop along the road. I hope what's coming next comes soon.