You know what the new Comics Journal was missing? Some good old pamphlet-format superhero comics talk. What else could I do but provide some? I reviewed the first issue of the new Frazer Irving showcase comic Xombi over there, finding it rather a distressing thing. The kind of comic you want to extend your empathy to because it's obviously going so far beyond the minimum to please you, but never actually gets there on the merits of what it is. Tough stuff. There's also a bunch of Irving art-analysis in there too, so go check it out! Starts like this:
First and foremost, Xombi #1 is an object lesson in how modern mainstream comics can be good in almost every way, and still come out unsatisfying. There isn’t much wrong with the book on paper. It’s got a highly talented artist in Frazer Irving, and an underrated, rock-solid writer in John Rozum. It stars a character most readers are more or less unfamiliar with, which means its creators are working from the ground up rather than merely building new scaffolds around something. And it’s a relaunch of a property that’s never had a definitive, unmatchable run of issues but hasn’t yet been beaten bloody with too many tries for one — prime real estate in superhero comics. Read more
3.31.2011
3.30.2011
Your Wednesday Sequence 4
City-Hunter Magazine #1 (2009), page 4 panels 1-3. CF.
This time it's a CF page under the microscope on Your Wednesday Sequence over at Robot 6. I had a lot of fun writing about this one because it (like pretty much everything CF does) engages very directly with the act and look of drawing. Felt like a little departure from the more technical, paneling-focused sequences I've written about in the last three installments. Rather than mess around with how his information is presented, CF just presents some fascinating information. Here he breaks down a crazy futuristic car and some sleazy neon lights into a single, motionless block of pure line in a cool three panels. And I break down how he does it. So come on over and have a look, I think I like this little piece. If you really need some extra prodding, it starts like this:
t’s easy to overlook just how incredible a thing sequence in comics can be. It’s the language the form uses to construct itself, so of course it’s going to gain some transparency for the average reader, become as silent and reliable and forgotten as the shapes of the individual letters that make up this article. Sequence is the most essential element of comics, and as such it’s taken for granted by many who engage the form.
But sequence is magic. To me the most mind blowing, amazing aspect of the comics form is how it can juxtapose multiple images that have absolutely no continuity, no relationship between themselves, and still force readers to see them as connected, inextricable, bound up in one whole. That might sound obvious or silly when they’re sitting right next to one another — comics panels do share the context of the pages they’re printed on, the books they reside in — but the same can be said for a Rembrandt hanging next to a Girodet in an art museum. That shared context is a mysterious and powerful thing. I’m not sure anybody can explain why it works, why we instinctively understand disconnected single-panel images as contributing parts of a whole. It just does. We just do. Read more
This time it's a CF page under the microscope on Your Wednesday Sequence over at Robot 6. I had a lot of fun writing about this one because it (like pretty much everything CF does) engages very directly with the act and look of drawing. Felt like a little departure from the more technical, paneling-focused sequences I've written about in the last three installments. Rather than mess around with how his information is presented, CF just presents some fascinating information. Here he breaks down a crazy futuristic car and some sleazy neon lights into a single, motionless block of pure line in a cool three panels. And I break down how he does it. So come on over and have a look, I think I like this little piece. If you really need some extra prodding, it starts like this:
t’s easy to overlook just how incredible a thing sequence in comics can be. It’s the language the form uses to construct itself, so of course it’s going to gain some transparency for the average reader, become as silent and reliable and forgotten as the shapes of the individual letters that make up this article. Sequence is the most essential element of comics, and as such it’s taken for granted by many who engage the form.
But sequence is magic. To me the most mind blowing, amazing aspect of the comics form is how it can juxtapose multiple images that have absolutely no continuity, no relationship between themselves, and still force readers to see them as connected, inextricable, bound up in one whole. That might sound obvious or silly when they’re sitting right next to one another — comics panels do share the context of the pages they’re printed on, the books they reside in — but the same can be said for a Rembrandt hanging next to a Girodet in an art museum. That shared context is a mysterious and powerful thing. I’m not sure anybody can explain why it works, why we instinctively understand disconnected single-panel images as contributing parts of a whole. It just does. We just do. Read more
3.29.2011
NYComix Swag
I went to New York last week. I took home far too many comics. These are them.
The Broons & Oor Wullie: Happy Days! 1936-1969, by Dudley D. Watkins. DC Thomson.
I was jazzed just to find this one. It's an import compilation of the best from British cartoonist Dudley D. Watkins' best-known creations, the mischievous-kid strip Oor Wullie ("Our Willie") and the family-catastrophe chronicle The Broons ("The Browns"). Yes, Scottish accents are played for laughs in these comics. The strips are pretty repetitive when you read a lot at once, but Watkins is a ferociously talented cartoonist, an utter joy to watch at work. The book's chronological sweep moves from the year of both strips' creation to that of Watkins' death, and it's fascinating to see Watkins' learning curve go from start to finish in a bit over a hundred pages. For the first half of the book the new lessons being learned are apparent in pretty much every individual strip, and when Watkins peaks around 1955 it's a bravura performance in mannerist cartooning that few before or since could equal.
Watkins is a great gag cartoonist, his characters full of idiosyncrasy and body language, his vaudevillian staging smooth and snappy, his backgrounds and figures alike drawn rich with detail but always in the simplest, most direct manner possible. At his best, he makes comics like a fusion of Frank King and Ernie Bushmiller, which is about as good as it gets in humor strips. Watkins' greatest gift is less tangible than any of that, though. He simply draws funny, the construction of his every facial expression or pose almost radiating humor. The work collected here is a lot of fun, stuff that's long been a staple of British comics (the strips are still published as biannual books, apparently, and I know Frank Quitely regularly names Watkins as his greatest influence) but seems like it could really set some American cartoonists on fire if the right reprints came along. Until then, this book is a nice little curio piece.
Skin, by Brendan McCarthy and Peter Milligan. Tundra UK.
I've been looking for a copy of this one for a solid four years now. It's Brendan McCarthy! It's 20th-century Pete Milligan! It's apparently so controversial that the printers refused to print it! It's also impossible to find for under fifty bucks or so. I've never seen an actual copy other than this one. I broke into a cold sweat when I saw it. It's been a collector's holy grail to me for such a long time at this point that I'm afraid I'll get disappointed when I actually crack the covers, so now I'm just "savoring" (read: "waiting to alter my consciousness before I look at") it. Waitin' for the right moment. I'm sure when that moment comes I'll write something about it. For now though: I have a copy. Kinda cool.
Krazy & Ignatz: 1919-1921, by George Herriman. Fantagraphics.
Well, it's Krazy Kat, so it's the best comic I got on this trip. (Tell you a secret: it's the best comic ever.) Herriman is so astounding that you almost take the genius of the actual content for granted when a new one comes out, and the way you judge the merits of the individual book is 1. how cool the Chris Ware cover is, and 2. how interesting the introductory text pieces are. In this case, category 1 basically kings every single other Krazy book so far -- Ware was on his A game with this maximal/minimal cover design (better picture here) -- and category two stands up pretty well too, with Bill Blackbeard continuing his investigation of the Krazy Kat characters' prehistory, and an essay by John Callahan on Herriman's Los Angeles, which of course is awesome when you live in LA, supremely awful copyediting be damned.
As for that unbeatable content, if you've ever read Krazy Kat before you know what's goin' down. Herriman did some of his most immediate and compelling work in the early years of the strip, blending wild layout experiments with an impulse toward sprawling epics of single-page storytelling. The experimentation cools down by the second half of the book -- Herriman was five years into Krazy Kat by this point -- and the famous mouse-hits-cat-with-brick formula starts to kick in a little harder as Herriman moves toward straighter, gridded layouts. It's not as pyrotechnic as the earlier stuff collected in the last volume, but it's just as interesting, a grandmaster realizing he's uncovered a complete, individual aesthetic and making the first moves in what would be a quarter-century-long quest toward refining it to total purity. Amazing stuff. They all are. Read Krazy Kat, people! If you're gonna spend your time reading comics, there isn't anything you're going to find that's more worth your time.
The New Adventures of Grossmallerman #1, by Guy Richards Smit. Regency Arts Press.
Never heard of this cartoonist, never heard of this publisher, never heard of this comic. I'll let you google him yourself -- I did just enough to realize the guy seems to be a fucking weird fine artist who made a comic this one time, and then I realized I'd way rather this book was a mystery to me forever. I'm going to do a whole blog post on it so I won't blab on too much here, but suffice it to say that this is a completely unique comic that's unlike anything else I've ever read. If I had to offer a comparison, I'd say it's like a weird mix of Herge, Tim Hensley, Johnny Ryan, and Jerry Moriarty. If that sounds pretty weird, it totally is. Completely amazing, this book bowled me over. More on it later.
Xombi #1, by Frazer Irving and John Rozum. DC.
Reviewing this one for TCJ. It's pretty good for a superhero comic, but it's something that demands you offer that caveat to your "pretty good" assessment. It never quite busts out from the commercial-comics boundaries into "this is art" territory. Which is fine, whatever -- if you don't mind superhero comics or enjoy work that's constructed in those particular confines I'd recommend checking this series out. I'm just not as used to this stuff as I used to be (I thought about it and I'd only read four new-release superhero comics this year before this one), and it feels a little limited to me when I'm going to this from shit like Krazy Kat. Oh well. But it's still good. Frazer Irving isn't doing career-best work here but he can still draw incredible panels. If you're just gonna pick something off the rack, this should be a prime contender. Again, more when my TCJ review comes out.
Dr. Strange: What Is It That Disturbs You, Stephen?, by P. Craig Russell and Mark Andreyko. Marvel.
Tucker hooked me up with this one. Thanks pal! It's a remake of a '70s Dr. Strange annual that P. Craig Russell drew on spec when he was a hungry young comics artist and ended up getting published. Years later he wanted to reprint it but when he was looking at it he decided he needed to redraw some stuff. Then he ended up redrawing the whole thing and changing the entire story. Apparently he left one panel of the original in there for fun, and his afterword invites readers to try and spot it. You can color me stumped, but I guess I'll say this one?
I dunno, it has kind of a post-Steranko '70s thing to it, but that could just be the coloring. I'll save more rigorous investigation for later. Anyway, this is a really really good Dr. Strange comic, and there are not many of those. The best ones are invariably the kind of comics where you zone out on the story and just enjoy Steve Ditko or Gene Colan or Brendan McCarthy drawing what they saw on their acid trips, but damn if Russel doesn't spin a gripping, light-but-memorable romp of a story in here, an epic battle between light and dark magic that encompasses fallen angels, enchanted mirrors, evil twins, love beyond death, and of course -- of course -- the nether dimension of Ditkopolis. Hell yes. People assume that the whole impact-visuals thing is the way to do Dr. Strange, but just put a committed fantasist with a lot of talent on the book and watch the sparks fly. Russell is way too much of a storyteller to get bogged down in creating really trippy panels that only end up obfuscating what's going on; his drawings, elegantly cartooned with an incredibly graceful flourish to every last ink line, ring clear as a bell. It's in the formal aspects -- layout, sequencing, letters, production tricks -- that he gets psychedelic. Gutters drop in and out to give the big moments extra punch, tiny rows of meticulous panels lead onto inset rows of even tinier ones, the pictorial rhythms build counterpoints and harmonies and then create counterpoints to those harmonies... it's virtuoso stuff. There are even some raw-pencil panels in this thing, for god's sake! It was 1997! Take that, CF!
This might sound like a slam, but I mean it as a huge compliment: this comic is like the Disney movie of Dr. Strange. Beautiful, approachable, imaginative, highly stylish but with a rock-solid story that it never loses track of, and above all, transportative escapism on the highest level. Mainstream comics just don't get much better than this. Hit up that quarter bin!
Moritat Elephantmen Sketchbook, by Moritat. Active Images.
Another one from Tucker. Man, Moritat can draw. Mostly pictures of hippos and elephants in trench coats, with some hot girls thrown in for good measure. It's the kind of sketchbook where your eyes go right past the content and just focus on the craft being brought to bear, which is pretty massive here. Moritat's recent run on The Spirit was probably the best that comic's looked since Wally Wood drew it more than fifty years ago, and that is really saying something. What's so cool about Moritat is that his style looks very "American action comics", kinetic and brusque and detail oriented in the appropriate way, but none of his mannerisms really seem to have been drawn from that idiom. The three dominant forces of influence at work in this sketchbook seem to be the Franco-Belgian clear-line tradition (Herge via Moebius), the organic detailing of guys like Eduardo Risso and Geof Darrow, and '80s action manga. It's a similar fusion to the one that produced Brandon Graham, but Moritat comes out of it with a more populist, direct style. It's fun to watch him cut heads with whatever was put in his hands for this sketchbook -- he blasts the paper with loose, easy pencil strokes, then he kicks out a perfectly clean rapidograph drawing, then a masterpiece in Sharpie. Good pictures, that's all this is and all it's supposed to be. Would that everything in comics did its job so well and unquestioningly.
Made In France: 8 Artists and the Graphic Novel. Neuhaus.
Awesome comic-type thing that isn't really a comic. I reviewed it here.
Warmer and Vastness No. 1, by Aidan Koch. Self-published.
A couple of minicomics by my favorite young cartoonist. Silkscreened covers, hand-sewn binding. Koch's pencil art looks absolutely phenomenal in rough xeroxes. Nice.
Warmer is the more narrative of the two, though that doesn't really mean it's straightforward or anything. A strong current of words and pictures, boxed away from one another, isolated. It centers around what seems like the end of a relationship, and a young woman's physical experience of weather. There's a very subtle but no less powerful eroticism to parts of it -- or maybe just "sensuousness" is a better word. The feeling of being cold and warm in someone else's skin. The sequencing is a lot more direct here than in Koch's book The Whale, giving a few logical glimpses of things, considering them from different angles, before cutting off into blankness and words. Artful and evocative stuff. It doesn't hit on the same dizzying emotional level as The Whale, but it's not really trying to. It's Impressionist comics, gauzy and slow, painting with broad strokes to capture a general impression rather than particularities. Very delicate and beautiful.
Vastness No. 1, "a collection of short stories + poems", is both more diffuse and more literal -- story fragments instead of a story, wonderfully constructed sequences sitting on the pages, putting across nothing much but a quick snatch of feeling and a few gorgeous, indelible images each. Beautiful people encompassed in equally beautiful natural environments that come right up to the edge of total abstraction when the people leave them. It would be easy to stare at one of Koch's pencil woodlands or seascapes for hours, watching the marks and their imperfections fade in and out between depiction and existence as pure visual, their own nothingness. Some of the little stories here are really interesting, some more just reasons for the pictures that they lean on to exist. The highlight is a four-pager about two young girls wandering through a woods and pretending to be Walt Whitman and Ernest Hemingway. It's fun to see comics engage poetry in such a self-referential yet completely effective way. Everything in this book is good, though, and there aren't many other places in comics you can get anything like Koch's personal, playful, free yet highly restrained aesthetic.
Prelude to Deadpool Corps #3, by Philip Bond and Victor Gischler. Marvel.
Sean Witzke had told me Philip Bond did a Deadpool comic. Great cartoonists get hard up for cash like the rest of us, I guess. Anyway, I went looking for it and this is what I found. Issue three of a five-issue miniseries about alternate-earth versions of Marvel's most annoying character, oh boy. Surprisingly, it was a pretty satisfying read. It certainly exceeded my basement-level expectations. It's a story about a stray dog being subjected to the same surgical-enhancement procedures Deadpool was in the regular Marvel universe, with the same mutant-power-producing results. The dog becomes a circus freak, defies all kinds of terrible deaths, and fights a dog version of Wolverine. it ends with the "real" Deadpool coming along to recruit him into a battle against... something. They don't say what, and I'm not about to read the non-Bond issues. (Well, maybe I'll look at the Liefeld one.) Bond really sells the humor and ridiculousness of it all, though, his squat, thick-lined drawing really excelling when it comes to um, mutant dogs tearing each other to shreds. He's another guy who just draws funny, and even though this is about the stupidest a comic can possibly get, he makes it look good enough to be a lot of fun for what it is.
Deadpool Max #6, by Kyle Baker and David Lapham. Marvel.
I bought two Deadpool comics at the same time, just walked up there and slapped them both down like I collect that shit. So many people do, who's to tell that I'm actually a Comics Journal critic conducting dangerous field research? The hazards of dabbling in hero comics, folks. Anyway, this is another issue of the good Deadpool comic, Kyle Baker's attempt to lay down a definitive run on a monthly mainstream book after his amazing Plastic Man disappeared from earthly memory. I haven't talked about Deadpool Max in a while, mainly because I wasn't thrilled with the way it was moving away from single-issue stories and into epic continued stories and interactions with other Marvel characters. It's still an amazing read though -- Baker is drawing and computer coloring in what seems like a genuine attempt to raise the bar, mixing in tweaked out post-Kirbyist action sequences with intense racial caricature and digital texturing that nobody without his monumental cartooning chops should ever attempt. Month in and month out this is the best looking comic on the stands, and David Lapham's super-espionage plot is actually starting to cook a little bit after stalling out over the last two issues. I'm still not convinced that actual long-form storytelling is the best fit for a book that functions best as a modern superheroic incarnation of Harvey Kurtzman's Mad, but as long as it's entertaining and Baker's drawing it I don't care enough to take my eyes off the panels for a second. This book's canceled with issue 12, which put me into conniptions of rage at first, but then I thought well, at least that's longer than that awful Thor book that Marvel just canned, and if it's a solid 12-issue brick of a comic, then I can also hold it up to people who go on too long about Watchmen, like "you wanna know what mature readers superhero maxiseries is really the best...?"
No more, that was all. No comics for me this week, this was quite enough for now. If you want me I'll be reading Krazy Kat.
The Broons & Oor Wullie: Happy Days! 1936-1969, by Dudley D. Watkins. DC Thomson.
I was jazzed just to find this one. It's an import compilation of the best from British cartoonist Dudley D. Watkins' best-known creations, the mischievous-kid strip Oor Wullie ("Our Willie") and the family-catastrophe chronicle The Broons ("The Browns"). Yes, Scottish accents are played for laughs in these comics. The strips are pretty repetitive when you read a lot at once, but Watkins is a ferociously talented cartoonist, an utter joy to watch at work. The book's chronological sweep moves from the year of both strips' creation to that of Watkins' death, and it's fascinating to see Watkins' learning curve go from start to finish in a bit over a hundred pages. For the first half of the book the new lessons being learned are apparent in pretty much every individual strip, and when Watkins peaks around 1955 it's a bravura performance in mannerist cartooning that few before or since could equal.
Watkins is a great gag cartoonist, his characters full of idiosyncrasy and body language, his vaudevillian staging smooth and snappy, his backgrounds and figures alike drawn rich with detail but always in the simplest, most direct manner possible. At his best, he makes comics like a fusion of Frank King and Ernie Bushmiller, which is about as good as it gets in humor strips. Watkins' greatest gift is less tangible than any of that, though. He simply draws funny, the construction of his every facial expression or pose almost radiating humor. The work collected here is a lot of fun, stuff that's long been a staple of British comics (the strips are still published as biannual books, apparently, and I know Frank Quitely regularly names Watkins as his greatest influence) but seems like it could really set some American cartoonists on fire if the right reprints came along. Until then, this book is a nice little curio piece.
Skin, by Brendan McCarthy and Peter Milligan. Tundra UK.
I've been looking for a copy of this one for a solid four years now. It's Brendan McCarthy! It's 20th-century Pete Milligan! It's apparently so controversial that the printers refused to print it! It's also impossible to find for under fifty bucks or so. I've never seen an actual copy other than this one. I broke into a cold sweat when I saw it. It's been a collector's holy grail to me for such a long time at this point that I'm afraid I'll get disappointed when I actually crack the covers, so now I'm just "savoring" (read: "waiting to alter my consciousness before I look at") it. Waitin' for the right moment. I'm sure when that moment comes I'll write something about it. For now though: I have a copy. Kinda cool.
Krazy & Ignatz: 1919-1921, by George Herriman. Fantagraphics.
Well, it's Krazy Kat, so it's the best comic I got on this trip. (Tell you a secret: it's the best comic ever.) Herriman is so astounding that you almost take the genius of the actual content for granted when a new one comes out, and the way you judge the merits of the individual book is 1. how cool the Chris Ware cover is, and 2. how interesting the introductory text pieces are. In this case, category 1 basically kings every single other Krazy book so far -- Ware was on his A game with this maximal/minimal cover design (better picture here) -- and category two stands up pretty well too, with Bill Blackbeard continuing his investigation of the Krazy Kat characters' prehistory, and an essay by John Callahan on Herriman's Los Angeles, which of course is awesome when you live in LA, supremely awful copyediting be damned.
As for that unbeatable content, if you've ever read Krazy Kat before you know what's goin' down. Herriman did some of his most immediate and compelling work in the early years of the strip, blending wild layout experiments with an impulse toward sprawling epics of single-page storytelling. The experimentation cools down by the second half of the book -- Herriman was five years into Krazy Kat by this point -- and the famous mouse-hits-cat-with-brick formula starts to kick in a little harder as Herriman moves toward straighter, gridded layouts. It's not as pyrotechnic as the earlier stuff collected in the last volume, but it's just as interesting, a grandmaster realizing he's uncovered a complete, individual aesthetic and making the first moves in what would be a quarter-century-long quest toward refining it to total purity. Amazing stuff. They all are. Read Krazy Kat, people! If you're gonna spend your time reading comics, there isn't anything you're going to find that's more worth your time.
The New Adventures of Grossmallerman #1, by Guy Richards Smit. Regency Arts Press.
Never heard of this cartoonist, never heard of this publisher, never heard of this comic. I'll let you google him yourself -- I did just enough to realize the guy seems to be a fucking weird fine artist who made a comic this one time, and then I realized I'd way rather this book was a mystery to me forever. I'm going to do a whole blog post on it so I won't blab on too much here, but suffice it to say that this is a completely unique comic that's unlike anything else I've ever read. If I had to offer a comparison, I'd say it's like a weird mix of Herge, Tim Hensley, Johnny Ryan, and Jerry Moriarty. If that sounds pretty weird, it totally is. Completely amazing, this book bowled me over. More on it later.
Xombi #1, by Frazer Irving and John Rozum. DC.
Reviewing this one for TCJ. It's pretty good for a superhero comic, but it's something that demands you offer that caveat to your "pretty good" assessment. It never quite busts out from the commercial-comics boundaries into "this is art" territory. Which is fine, whatever -- if you don't mind superhero comics or enjoy work that's constructed in those particular confines I'd recommend checking this series out. I'm just not as used to this stuff as I used to be (I thought about it and I'd only read four new-release superhero comics this year before this one), and it feels a little limited to me when I'm going to this from shit like Krazy Kat. Oh well. But it's still good. Frazer Irving isn't doing career-best work here but he can still draw incredible panels. If you're just gonna pick something off the rack, this should be a prime contender. Again, more when my TCJ review comes out.
Dr. Strange: What Is It That Disturbs You, Stephen?, by P. Craig Russell and Mark Andreyko. Marvel.
Tucker hooked me up with this one. Thanks pal! It's a remake of a '70s Dr. Strange annual that P. Craig Russell drew on spec when he was a hungry young comics artist and ended up getting published. Years later he wanted to reprint it but when he was looking at it he decided he needed to redraw some stuff. Then he ended up redrawing the whole thing and changing the entire story. Apparently he left one panel of the original in there for fun, and his afterword invites readers to try and spot it. You can color me stumped, but I guess I'll say this one?
I dunno, it has kind of a post-Steranko '70s thing to it, but that could just be the coloring. I'll save more rigorous investigation for later. Anyway, this is a really really good Dr. Strange comic, and there are not many of those. The best ones are invariably the kind of comics where you zone out on the story and just enjoy Steve Ditko or Gene Colan or Brendan McCarthy drawing what they saw on their acid trips, but damn if Russel doesn't spin a gripping, light-but-memorable romp of a story in here, an epic battle between light and dark magic that encompasses fallen angels, enchanted mirrors, evil twins, love beyond death, and of course -- of course -- the nether dimension of Ditkopolis. Hell yes. People assume that the whole impact-visuals thing is the way to do Dr. Strange, but just put a committed fantasist with a lot of talent on the book and watch the sparks fly. Russell is way too much of a storyteller to get bogged down in creating really trippy panels that only end up obfuscating what's going on; his drawings, elegantly cartooned with an incredibly graceful flourish to every last ink line, ring clear as a bell. It's in the formal aspects -- layout, sequencing, letters, production tricks -- that he gets psychedelic. Gutters drop in and out to give the big moments extra punch, tiny rows of meticulous panels lead onto inset rows of even tinier ones, the pictorial rhythms build counterpoints and harmonies and then create counterpoints to those harmonies... it's virtuoso stuff. There are even some raw-pencil panels in this thing, for god's sake! It was 1997! Take that, CF!
This might sound like a slam, but I mean it as a huge compliment: this comic is like the Disney movie of Dr. Strange. Beautiful, approachable, imaginative, highly stylish but with a rock-solid story that it never loses track of, and above all, transportative escapism on the highest level. Mainstream comics just don't get much better than this. Hit up that quarter bin!
Moritat Elephantmen Sketchbook, by Moritat. Active Images.
Another one from Tucker. Man, Moritat can draw. Mostly pictures of hippos and elephants in trench coats, with some hot girls thrown in for good measure. It's the kind of sketchbook where your eyes go right past the content and just focus on the craft being brought to bear, which is pretty massive here. Moritat's recent run on The Spirit was probably the best that comic's looked since Wally Wood drew it more than fifty years ago, and that is really saying something. What's so cool about Moritat is that his style looks very "American action comics", kinetic and brusque and detail oriented in the appropriate way, but none of his mannerisms really seem to have been drawn from that idiom. The three dominant forces of influence at work in this sketchbook seem to be the Franco-Belgian clear-line tradition (Herge via Moebius), the organic detailing of guys like Eduardo Risso and Geof Darrow, and '80s action manga. It's a similar fusion to the one that produced Brandon Graham, but Moritat comes out of it with a more populist, direct style. It's fun to watch him cut heads with whatever was put in his hands for this sketchbook -- he blasts the paper with loose, easy pencil strokes, then he kicks out a perfectly clean rapidograph drawing, then a masterpiece in Sharpie. Good pictures, that's all this is and all it's supposed to be. Would that everything in comics did its job so well and unquestioningly.
Made In France: 8 Artists and the Graphic Novel. Neuhaus.
Awesome comic-type thing that isn't really a comic. I reviewed it here.
Warmer and Vastness No. 1, by Aidan Koch. Self-published.
A couple of minicomics by my favorite young cartoonist. Silkscreened covers, hand-sewn binding. Koch's pencil art looks absolutely phenomenal in rough xeroxes. Nice.
Warmer is the more narrative of the two, though that doesn't really mean it's straightforward or anything. A strong current of words and pictures, boxed away from one another, isolated. It centers around what seems like the end of a relationship, and a young woman's physical experience of weather. There's a very subtle but no less powerful eroticism to parts of it -- or maybe just "sensuousness" is a better word. The feeling of being cold and warm in someone else's skin. The sequencing is a lot more direct here than in Koch's book The Whale, giving a few logical glimpses of things, considering them from different angles, before cutting off into blankness and words. Artful and evocative stuff. It doesn't hit on the same dizzying emotional level as The Whale, but it's not really trying to. It's Impressionist comics, gauzy and slow, painting with broad strokes to capture a general impression rather than particularities. Very delicate and beautiful.
Vastness No. 1, "a collection of short stories + poems", is both more diffuse and more literal -- story fragments instead of a story, wonderfully constructed sequences sitting on the pages, putting across nothing much but a quick snatch of feeling and a few gorgeous, indelible images each. Beautiful people encompassed in equally beautiful natural environments that come right up to the edge of total abstraction when the people leave them. It would be easy to stare at one of Koch's pencil woodlands or seascapes for hours, watching the marks and their imperfections fade in and out between depiction and existence as pure visual, their own nothingness. Some of the little stories here are really interesting, some more just reasons for the pictures that they lean on to exist. The highlight is a four-pager about two young girls wandering through a woods and pretending to be Walt Whitman and Ernest Hemingway. It's fun to see comics engage poetry in such a self-referential yet completely effective way. Everything in this book is good, though, and there aren't many other places in comics you can get anything like Koch's personal, playful, free yet highly restrained aesthetic.
Prelude to Deadpool Corps #3, by Philip Bond and Victor Gischler. Marvel.
Sean Witzke had told me Philip Bond did a Deadpool comic. Great cartoonists get hard up for cash like the rest of us, I guess. Anyway, I went looking for it and this is what I found. Issue three of a five-issue miniseries about alternate-earth versions of Marvel's most annoying character, oh boy. Surprisingly, it was a pretty satisfying read. It certainly exceeded my basement-level expectations. It's a story about a stray dog being subjected to the same surgical-enhancement procedures Deadpool was in the regular Marvel universe, with the same mutant-power-producing results. The dog becomes a circus freak, defies all kinds of terrible deaths, and fights a dog version of Wolverine. it ends with the "real" Deadpool coming along to recruit him into a battle against... something. They don't say what, and I'm not about to read the non-Bond issues. (Well, maybe I'll look at the Liefeld one.) Bond really sells the humor and ridiculousness of it all, though, his squat, thick-lined drawing really excelling when it comes to um, mutant dogs tearing each other to shreds. He's another guy who just draws funny, and even though this is about the stupidest a comic can possibly get, he makes it look good enough to be a lot of fun for what it is.
Deadpool Max #6, by Kyle Baker and David Lapham. Marvel.
I bought two Deadpool comics at the same time, just walked up there and slapped them both down like I collect that shit. So many people do, who's to tell that I'm actually a Comics Journal critic conducting dangerous field research? The hazards of dabbling in hero comics, folks. Anyway, this is another issue of the good Deadpool comic, Kyle Baker's attempt to lay down a definitive run on a monthly mainstream book after his amazing Plastic Man disappeared from earthly memory. I haven't talked about Deadpool Max in a while, mainly because I wasn't thrilled with the way it was moving away from single-issue stories and into epic continued stories and interactions with other Marvel characters. It's still an amazing read though -- Baker is drawing and computer coloring in what seems like a genuine attempt to raise the bar, mixing in tweaked out post-Kirbyist action sequences with intense racial caricature and digital texturing that nobody without his monumental cartooning chops should ever attempt. Month in and month out this is the best looking comic on the stands, and David Lapham's super-espionage plot is actually starting to cook a little bit after stalling out over the last two issues. I'm still not convinced that actual long-form storytelling is the best fit for a book that functions best as a modern superheroic incarnation of Harvey Kurtzman's Mad, but as long as it's entertaining and Baker's drawing it I don't care enough to take my eyes off the panels for a second. This book's canceled with issue 12, which put me into conniptions of rage at first, but then I thought well, at least that's longer than that awful Thor book that Marvel just canned, and if it's a solid 12-issue brick of a comic, then I can also hold it up to people who go on too long about Watchmen, like "you wanna know what mature readers superhero maxiseries is really the best...?"
No more, that was all. No comics for me this week, this was quite enough for now. If you want me I'll be reading Krazy Kat.
3.23.2011
Your Wednesday Sequence 3
BodyWorld chapter 8 (2008), panels 291-296. Dash Shaw.
It's Dash Shaw's turn in the spotlight over at my Robot 6 column this week. Mostly I talked about in-panel sequencing, specifically the way Shaw will superimpose two images over one another in the same panel space. That's something I think a lot of artosts will probably start picking up on in the coming years, especially in webcomics, where you can actually get an image to occupy the same space that a different one did a second earlier. Other topics covered include sequencing of comics elements besides panels, the inescapability of sequence in telling comics stories, and more of the sense-experience-via-comics probing I did last week in my Guido Crepax column. I've heard Shaw's a Crepax fan, actually, and come to think of it that might be what he's reading him to pick up. It certainly isn't a drawing thing, because those guys draw about as different as possible. Though they both draw pretty great.
Anyway, go read it; I think it is pretty good.
It's Dash Shaw's turn in the spotlight over at my Robot 6 column this week. Mostly I talked about in-panel sequencing, specifically the way Shaw will superimpose two images over one another in the same panel space. That's something I think a lot of artosts will probably start picking up on in the coming years, especially in webcomics, where you can actually get an image to occupy the same space that a different one did a second earlier. Other topics covered include sequencing of comics elements besides panels, the inescapability of sequence in telling comics stories, and more of the sense-experience-via-comics probing I did last week in my Guido Crepax column. I've heard Shaw's a Crepax fan, actually, and come to think of it that might be what he's reading him to pick up. It certainly isn't a drawing thing, because those guys draw about as different as possible. Though they both draw pretty great.
Anyway, go read it; I think it is pretty good.
3.21.2011
Artifact
(or, "Man These New York Used Bookstores Are Good")
Made In France: 8 Artists and the Graphic Novel (2007). Nyehaus.
I'm hanging out in Brooklyn this week. I found a really bizarre, interesting "comics artifact" -- I'm a little hesitant to just call it a "comic" -- here today. Used bookstore, the kind where the comics are packed in with the pop/design art monographs. The sum total of the comics section was Brian Chippendale's If 'N' Oof on one side, then this book, then Chippendale's Maggots on the other side. Pretty funny. Made In France: 8 Artists and the Graphic Novel looked like a nice anthology of French art-comix type of work on a quick browse through it in the store, which seemed like something worth owning. It wasn't until I was looking at it later that I realized this thing is an exhibition catalog. As that medium goes, Made In France is just beautifully designed -- it looks like a book on the outside (above), but then you open it up and instead of leafing pages you get this:
Oh wow, full marks for presentation, no doubt. Seven slim pamphlets showcase the work of the eight artists spotlighted in the exhibition, only one of whom I'd heard of at all before. An eighth contains a few succinct, informative notes from the show's curator, Eurocomics writer Matz (best known in America for his Archaia series The Killer). There's also a pretty dope poster. The pamphlets aren't comics stories though, they're reproductions of the original art boards that made up the exhibition, usually accompanied by the cartoonists' paintings or sketchbook work. Some interesting stuff from some engaging artists, none of whom have had work translated into English I believe.
- 1. Paulo Bacilieri
Very pretty drawing in this one. It starts out with a few pin-up pages in a nice naturalistic pen style, lots of delicate hatching that indicates light with a very soft touch, lots of rounded shapes. What puts them past being mere eye candy is the hyper, maximalist environments Bacilieri places his bikini'ed girls in, always cluttered and lived-in. Girls lying around in stacks of books and comics, girls kneeling on floors with neatly labeled telephones and bottles of Italian wine. The closest thing we've seen to it in American comics is Brandon Graham, but there's a committed attempt at realism in mingling with the cartoon emphasis on making every element of the drawing code for a distinct Thing. I found the pin-ups more interesting than Bacilieri's comics pages, which have a nice, almost manga-style flow of action but can get bogged down in the decorative woodcut look of the hatching.
- 2. Christian De Metter
Painted comics pages -- done in gouache so they look a little heavy, but light and impressionistic enough so they don't edge into uncomfortable Alex Ross territory. Maybe more like Scott Hampton or Jon J. Muth. De Metter composes his pages very strikingly, setting out distinct horizontal tiers and then chopping them up into subdivided blocks. It might be a bit too pyrotechnic an approach in flat ink and color, but the softness of the paint helps it flow a little, as does De Metter's dispensing with panel borders and allowing the painted panels to just sluice into each other at the edges. A few of De Metter's canvases are spotlighted as well: soft-focus, photorealist work that didn't move me too much. Two of the three paintings were naked women with ridiculously big heads, like a Dave Cooper thing without the great cartooning.
- 3. Jean-Claude Gotting
More painted comics, much more interesting ones this time. Gotting's black and white acrylic pages are superficially most reminiscent of Jerry Moriarty, boldly cartooned rather than "painterly", with a similar '50s nostalgia aesthetic at work -- but his drawing looks more Art Spiegelman. Thick black lines cutting through bright whites and rough, sanded-down grays. The canvases in this one are also a lot more interesting to my eye than De Metter's. They're almost Lichtenstein at first glance, really simply cartooned portraits, but Gotting brings a real-world play of light and an almost Cubist color palette to his subjects, lending the simple forms an impressive depth. Good stuff going on in here.
- 4. Miles Hyman
Not really sure how I feel about this one. Hyman's a good artist (though his soft-light pin-ups look like something you might find on the wall of a tiki bar circa 1987) with a real knack for composing a page. There's a great one in here of a guy getting brought down by a naked female axe-murderer, and a few tightly gridded pages that really ooze tension. His cartooning kind of weirds me out though. It's drawn in charcoal, which is really interesting, but it has a very stiff woodcut look about it, kind of a mix between Berni Wrightson and Rick Geary. Realistically lit faces that look like mutated babies. If that sounds strange, well, it is. Hyman does interesting work, no doubt, but I guess it's just not to my taste.
- 5. Lax
Ah, the French one-name-cartoonist tradition! Ah, Romance! This one is fascinating. Its spreads show black and white line art for the pages on the left side, and hand-drawn color roughs on the right, Pantone marker strokes bleeding out of the panels completely carelessly, delicate waves of flat pastel color subsuming everything in a rich glow that reminds me a lot of Frank King. Not necessarily the same colors he used, but the same ambiance, quiet and warm. Lax's actual drawing is less interesting than his color to me, but it's still pretty good, a slightly Moebius-inflected reading of the scratchy, overcrowded Howard Chaykin style. Lax knows when to drop the detail and focus in on what's important, though, and when a black and white page looks muddied by too much going on, the color one always directs the eye to the center of the action with ease. There are sketchbook pieces in the back of this one, just straight life drawings of female nudes. They're very good, but not much different than what you'd see in the notebook of any accomplished artist. They show Lax's line to be strong and assured when it cuts away all the anecdotal information that sits on his comics pages. If he were to do sequential work in his sketchbook style that would really be something to see.
- 6/7. Jerome Mulot and Florent Ruppert
This is my favorite one by far. Mulot and Ruppert are collaborators, but heaven knows where there's room for one to leave off and the other to take over. Their pages are filled with minimal, wonderfully composed black and white thin-line drawings, superficially reminiscent of CF but much more deeply engaged in a European tradition of slightly grotesque cartooning that artists like Brecht Evens and Olivier Schrauwen have recently brought American alt-comics into contact with. Mulot and Ruppert go all the way down to the bone, though -- their delicate, almost hesitant pen drawing communicates a great deal about posture and drapery and lighting with just a few deeply considered strokes. It almost looks like contour drawing in places. Their page compositions are incredible to behold, too: a double-page spread of a woman smashing a bottle over her would-be rapist's head starts out with disturbing, knobbly figurework before paring down into hands scrabbling across a tabletop and finally an explosion of smashed glass against a yawning white background, while another sequence shows an array of faceless figures before and after being hacked up into bits. There's a breathtaking delicacy in Ruppert and Mulot's work that clashes up against their bone-chilling subject matter brilliantly. Really interesting artwork that I can't think of much else like. I'm waiting for a translation now.
- 8. Sergio Toppi
I can't figure out how I know this guy's name, but oh well. His work is probably closest out of all these to what people associate with "European genre comics" -- that flowing, bronzed Heavy Metal magazine thing. Very Moebius, with some Gustav Klimt decorative flourishes thrown in that probably come from looking at Philippe Druillet, but look pretty Bill Sienkiewicz to my American eyes. I would say the artist currently working the Toppi style hardest in America is Simone Bianchi. The subject matter of these pages is pretty typical -- barbarian warriors, noble Indian braves, cowboy types -- but hey, that stuff is cool to look at when it's drawn this well. Toppi is kind of a John Buscema figure, I guess, not one of the great revolutionary talents but a rock-solid genre comics artist whose distillation of a few more idiosyncratic, influential artists' work into one general style has ended up having an influence of its own. Matz could definitely have picked a worse "grandmaster" to finish off his exhibition with.
So that's this book -- a lot of interesting comics art, some of which is genuinely great work, and the opportunity to really go deep into another country's cartooning tradition. In a lot of ways I feel like one can learn more about comics in France by looking at these few curated pieces from each artist than reading a whole book from each of them, because this is what gets put on display. The one I found is labeled "156 out of an edition of 1500", and I've never seen a copy before in my life, but it's definitely worth tracking down. Killer book design, cultural education, and comics all in one, who could ask for more?
Made In France: 8 Artists and the Graphic Novel (2007). Nyehaus.
I'm hanging out in Brooklyn this week. I found a really bizarre, interesting "comics artifact" -- I'm a little hesitant to just call it a "comic" -- here today. Used bookstore, the kind where the comics are packed in with the pop/design art monographs. The sum total of the comics section was Brian Chippendale's If 'N' Oof on one side, then this book, then Chippendale's Maggots on the other side. Pretty funny. Made In France: 8 Artists and the Graphic Novel looked like a nice anthology of French art-comix type of work on a quick browse through it in the store, which seemed like something worth owning. It wasn't until I was looking at it later that I realized this thing is an exhibition catalog. As that medium goes, Made In France is just beautifully designed -- it looks like a book on the outside (above), but then you open it up and instead of leafing pages you get this:
Oh wow, full marks for presentation, no doubt. Seven slim pamphlets showcase the work of the eight artists spotlighted in the exhibition, only one of whom I'd heard of at all before. An eighth contains a few succinct, informative notes from the show's curator, Eurocomics writer Matz (best known in America for his Archaia series The Killer). There's also a pretty dope poster. The pamphlets aren't comics stories though, they're reproductions of the original art boards that made up the exhibition, usually accompanied by the cartoonists' paintings or sketchbook work. Some interesting stuff from some engaging artists, none of whom have had work translated into English I believe.
- 1. Paulo Bacilieri
Very pretty drawing in this one. It starts out with a few pin-up pages in a nice naturalistic pen style, lots of delicate hatching that indicates light with a very soft touch, lots of rounded shapes. What puts them past being mere eye candy is the hyper, maximalist environments Bacilieri places his bikini'ed girls in, always cluttered and lived-in. Girls lying around in stacks of books and comics, girls kneeling on floors with neatly labeled telephones and bottles of Italian wine. The closest thing we've seen to it in American comics is Brandon Graham, but there's a committed attempt at realism in mingling with the cartoon emphasis on making every element of the drawing code for a distinct Thing. I found the pin-ups more interesting than Bacilieri's comics pages, which have a nice, almost manga-style flow of action but can get bogged down in the decorative woodcut look of the hatching.
- 2. Christian De Metter
Painted comics pages -- done in gouache so they look a little heavy, but light and impressionistic enough so they don't edge into uncomfortable Alex Ross territory. Maybe more like Scott Hampton or Jon J. Muth. De Metter composes his pages very strikingly, setting out distinct horizontal tiers and then chopping them up into subdivided blocks. It might be a bit too pyrotechnic an approach in flat ink and color, but the softness of the paint helps it flow a little, as does De Metter's dispensing with panel borders and allowing the painted panels to just sluice into each other at the edges. A few of De Metter's canvases are spotlighted as well: soft-focus, photorealist work that didn't move me too much. Two of the three paintings were naked women with ridiculously big heads, like a Dave Cooper thing without the great cartooning.
- 3. Jean-Claude Gotting
More painted comics, much more interesting ones this time. Gotting's black and white acrylic pages are superficially most reminiscent of Jerry Moriarty, boldly cartooned rather than "painterly", with a similar '50s nostalgia aesthetic at work -- but his drawing looks more Art Spiegelman. Thick black lines cutting through bright whites and rough, sanded-down grays. The canvases in this one are also a lot more interesting to my eye than De Metter's. They're almost Lichtenstein at first glance, really simply cartooned portraits, but Gotting brings a real-world play of light and an almost Cubist color palette to his subjects, lending the simple forms an impressive depth. Good stuff going on in here.
- 4. Miles Hyman
Not really sure how I feel about this one. Hyman's a good artist (though his soft-light pin-ups look like something you might find on the wall of a tiki bar circa 1987) with a real knack for composing a page. There's a great one in here of a guy getting brought down by a naked female axe-murderer, and a few tightly gridded pages that really ooze tension. His cartooning kind of weirds me out though. It's drawn in charcoal, which is really interesting, but it has a very stiff woodcut look about it, kind of a mix between Berni Wrightson and Rick Geary. Realistically lit faces that look like mutated babies. If that sounds strange, well, it is. Hyman does interesting work, no doubt, but I guess it's just not to my taste.
- 5. Lax
Ah, the French one-name-cartoonist tradition! Ah, Romance! This one is fascinating. Its spreads show black and white line art for the pages on the left side, and hand-drawn color roughs on the right, Pantone marker strokes bleeding out of the panels completely carelessly, delicate waves of flat pastel color subsuming everything in a rich glow that reminds me a lot of Frank King. Not necessarily the same colors he used, but the same ambiance, quiet and warm. Lax's actual drawing is less interesting than his color to me, but it's still pretty good, a slightly Moebius-inflected reading of the scratchy, overcrowded Howard Chaykin style. Lax knows when to drop the detail and focus in on what's important, though, and when a black and white page looks muddied by too much going on, the color one always directs the eye to the center of the action with ease. There are sketchbook pieces in the back of this one, just straight life drawings of female nudes. They're very good, but not much different than what you'd see in the notebook of any accomplished artist. They show Lax's line to be strong and assured when it cuts away all the anecdotal information that sits on his comics pages. If he were to do sequential work in his sketchbook style that would really be something to see.
- 6/7. Jerome Mulot and Florent Ruppert
This is my favorite one by far. Mulot and Ruppert are collaborators, but heaven knows where there's room for one to leave off and the other to take over. Their pages are filled with minimal, wonderfully composed black and white thin-line drawings, superficially reminiscent of CF but much more deeply engaged in a European tradition of slightly grotesque cartooning that artists like Brecht Evens and Olivier Schrauwen have recently brought American alt-comics into contact with. Mulot and Ruppert go all the way down to the bone, though -- their delicate, almost hesitant pen drawing communicates a great deal about posture and drapery and lighting with just a few deeply considered strokes. It almost looks like contour drawing in places. Their page compositions are incredible to behold, too: a double-page spread of a woman smashing a bottle over her would-be rapist's head starts out with disturbing, knobbly figurework before paring down into hands scrabbling across a tabletop and finally an explosion of smashed glass against a yawning white background, while another sequence shows an array of faceless figures before and after being hacked up into bits. There's a breathtaking delicacy in Ruppert and Mulot's work that clashes up against their bone-chilling subject matter brilliantly. Really interesting artwork that I can't think of much else like. I'm waiting for a translation now.
- 8. Sergio Toppi
I can't figure out how I know this guy's name, but oh well. His work is probably closest out of all these to what people associate with "European genre comics" -- that flowing, bronzed Heavy Metal magazine thing. Very Moebius, with some Gustav Klimt decorative flourishes thrown in that probably come from looking at Philippe Druillet, but look pretty Bill Sienkiewicz to my American eyes. I would say the artist currently working the Toppi style hardest in America is Simone Bianchi. The subject matter of these pages is pretty typical -- barbarian warriors, noble Indian braves, cowboy types -- but hey, that stuff is cool to look at when it's drawn this well. Toppi is kind of a John Buscema figure, I guess, not one of the great revolutionary talents but a rock-solid genre comics artist whose distillation of a few more idiosyncratic, influential artists' work into one general style has ended up having an influence of its own. Matz could definitely have picked a worse "grandmaster" to finish off his exhibition with.
So that's this book -- a lot of interesting comics art, some of which is genuinely great work, and the opportunity to really go deep into another country's cartooning tradition. In a lot of ways I feel like one can learn more about comics in France by looking at these few curated pieces from each artist than reading a whole book from each of them, because this is what gets put on display. The one I found is labeled "156 out of an edition of 1500", and I've never seen a copy before in my life, but it's definitely worth tracking down. Killer book design, cultural education, and comics all in one, who could ask for more?
3.20.2011
Prevue
Three images from a longer comic I'm working on, the first installment of which should be out in a week or two.
3.19.2011
TCJ Review: Night Animals
Another one! This time I dropped a fairly long review of Brecht Even's new book Night Animals, a really interesting but ultimately frustrating slab of sex/art-Eurocomix. I liked the book, and it was one of those ones where I liked writing about it just as much. So go read, or read the first bit here if you must:
Brecht Evens’ gorgeous pamphlet Night Animals is one more entry in the Little Nemo column: a surface-level book that hints frustratingly at greater depths which prove difficult to actually access. Night Animals is a bedeviling thing, a sex comic that obviously wants to be a lot more than just porn, but offers up an oddly brusque take on sex and sexuality. The comic is split between two wordless stories, the first about a rather schlubby man’s quest for a bed partner, and a second, slightly longer one detailing a very young girl’s sexual awakening. The simplistic treatment of deep themes marks it out as a young man’s work (the artist is 24, and was 21 when this material was first published in Belgium), but it also carries the energy of youth, a vigor of craftsmanship that makes up in large part for the almost careless quality of the story content. Read more at tcj.com!
Brecht Evens’ gorgeous pamphlet Night Animals is one more entry in the Little Nemo column: a surface-level book that hints frustratingly at greater depths which prove difficult to actually access. Night Animals is a bedeviling thing, a sex comic that obviously wants to be a lot more than just porn, but offers up an oddly brusque take on sex and sexuality. The comic is split between two wordless stories, the first about a rather schlubby man’s quest for a bed partner, and a second, slightly longer one detailing a very young girl’s sexual awakening. The simplistic treatment of deep themes marks it out as a young man’s work (the artist is 24, and was 21 when this material was first published in Belgium), but it also carries the energy of youth, a vigor of craftsmanship that makes up in large part for the almost careless quality of the story content. Read more at tcj.com!
3.17.2011
Your Wednesday Sequence 2 (Special Features)
Valentina: Magic Lantern (1976), page 17 panels 1-11. Guido Crepax.
Hey guys, go check out my new Your Wednesday Sequence column on Robot 6! It's about Guido Crepax, hands down my favorite comics artist of all time, and I think it's some pretty good reading.
I usually make a pretty sizable amount of notes toward these columns before I write them (as I did with Your Monday Panel), and I thought I would start including the notes in these link-posts just so you, my faithful DTU readers, could get a little something extra for checking this site out on the regular. I know it's more and more links these days, but hey man, I get paid for this shit! PAID TO WRITE ABOUT COMICS, so if I gotta turn this site into a link-dump once or twice a week I'm sorry, but it's goin' down. Anyway -- yeah, my notes for this one were mostly about the way comics can present either information (story data) or sensation (visual sense experience), or some mixture of the two. Obviously just about all the comics there are do both, but it's interesting to look at which ones place the emphasis on which thing. (In my column, I contend that Crepax is focused on sensation above information, which is why he's the most successful eroticist comics have ever had.)
But thinking about Crepax as a pure sensualist, creating comics that bypass intellectual engagement and go straight for the eyes and the erotic imagination, I was struck by -- well, here's the note I scribbled:
A paradox of "abstract" visual art: the word "abstract" was originally used to mean "purely intellectual", carrying no meaning that can be derived from sensation. "Truth", "understanding", "immorality" -- these are "abstractions", divorced from sense experience and relying entirely on the workings of the rational mind. But abstract ART is art with all depictive meaning stripped away, art that exists purely on the level of sense experience with no barrier of intellectual comprehension standing between it and the viewer's eye -- the complete opposite.
It's interesting to think about which meaning of "abstraction" can be applied to abstract comics. For me something like David Gray's 1981 is pure sensation, a visual experience that engages the senses and pleasure receptors long before the mind starts trying to make a story out of it (though that might change by the time it's over. But something like Mike Getsiv's Eyeballs is pure information, because I find the individual pictures themselves less engaging than their sequential, logical movement through the panels. It's an interesting distinction, and one that can't be made except in purely subjective terms, since it's all about whether the sequencing or the panels themselves grab you the reader first. I dunno if any of this makes any sense -- something to chew on hopefully? If not, jeez, just go read my actual column. It's good! And a lot more lucid than this, but what do you expect? This is only a link post after all. Once more: go read!
Hey guys, go check out my new Your Wednesday Sequence column on Robot 6! It's about Guido Crepax, hands down my favorite comics artist of all time, and I think it's some pretty good reading.
I usually make a pretty sizable amount of notes toward these columns before I write them (as I did with Your Monday Panel), and I thought I would start including the notes in these link-posts just so you, my faithful DTU readers, could get a little something extra for checking this site out on the regular. I know it's more and more links these days, but hey man, I get paid for this shit! PAID TO WRITE ABOUT COMICS, so if I gotta turn this site into a link-dump once or twice a week I'm sorry, but it's goin' down. Anyway -- yeah, my notes for this one were mostly about the way comics can present either information (story data) or sensation (visual sense experience), or some mixture of the two. Obviously just about all the comics there are do both, but it's interesting to look at which ones place the emphasis on which thing. (In my column, I contend that Crepax is focused on sensation above information, which is why he's the most successful eroticist comics have ever had.)
But thinking about Crepax as a pure sensualist, creating comics that bypass intellectual engagement and go straight for the eyes and the erotic imagination, I was struck by -- well, here's the note I scribbled:
A paradox of "abstract" visual art: the word "abstract" was originally used to mean "purely intellectual", carrying no meaning that can be derived from sensation. "Truth", "understanding", "immorality" -- these are "abstractions", divorced from sense experience and relying entirely on the workings of the rational mind. But abstract ART is art with all depictive meaning stripped away, art that exists purely on the level of sense experience with no barrier of intellectual comprehension standing between it and the viewer's eye -- the complete opposite.
It's interesting to think about which meaning of "abstraction" can be applied to abstract comics. For me something like David Gray's 1981 is pure sensation, a visual experience that engages the senses and pleasure receptors long before the mind starts trying to make a story out of it (though that might change by the time it's over. But something like Mike Getsiv's Eyeballs is pure information, because I find the individual pictures themselves less engaging than their sequential, logical movement through the panels. It's an interesting distinction, and one that can't be made except in purely subjective terms, since it's all about whether the sequencing or the panels themselves grab you the reader first. I dunno if any of this makes any sense -- something to chew on hopefully? If not, jeez, just go read my actual column. It's good! And a lot more lucid than this, but what do you expect? This is only a link post after all. Once more: go read!
3.13.2011
//The Coming Thing\\
Sans Genre VI
(image from this)
We're deep into what will become the history of webcomics at this point, with a readership for the comics medium's online format that soundly eclipses even the best selling Diamond-distributed Wednesday books. Deal with it, folks -- not only will the adventures of the Doom Patrol and the Agents of Atlas, if not necessarily Batman and Wolverine, be digital-exclusive by the end of the decade, so too will a large part of the interesting new alt- and art-comix work. It's already started: Dash Shaw's Pantheon-published print version of BodyWorld might be hanging off those Borders shelves now, but you could read the thing free online for like a year before that. People worry (online, mainly) about comics' shrinking presence in the newspapers and what it means for the survival of the venerable, wonderful comic strip format, but the reality of it is that the strip is still the most popular format comics come in, it just doesn't come on newsprint any more. Most interestingly to me though, these days it seems like more artists than ever before are engaging the webcomics format as the "infinite canvas" spoken of most prominently by Scott McCloud in his -- problematic but still occasionally dead-on -- book Reinventing Comics, which itself had an almost Paper Rad-ugly retro-digital thing going on its cover.
That book came out a long-ass time ago though, and McCloud's conceptualization of online comics as able to utilize infinite space, unrestricted by the borders of the physical page, took a while to catch. I'd guess there are a few reasons for that: first of all, the technology just wasn't really there for the works I'm going to talk about in a second to do what they do and still look good (and just as importantly, interface good) while doing it. Remember when it took a solid minute for an image to load on your computer? Nobody wants to read comics like that. But secondly, I really do think that it took a new generation of comics creators to see the digital environment with clear eyes and bring true vision to the comics they put into it. Give McCloud credit, he conceived of webcomics that were more than pages, but his practice of what he preached was pretty wack, and not even in a way that's going to look cool and retro ten years from now.
Today's boom of young creators making web-specific comics that not only work better online than in print but engage with the visual experience of computer reading is comparable to the boom of formally audacious material that hit comic books in the early 1940s, a little while after the format got its start. The washed up and/or aspiring newspaper strip artists who staffed the comic book ranks at the format's inception couldn't see the page turns and opportunities for extended visual narrative that the new way of making sequential art offered. It took a few years of young kids who weren't from any other world coming into the game before the Eisners and Kirbys appeared to show everyone the potential inherent in comics magazines. Same again during the rise of the "graphic novel", which started out with some pretty embarrassing fumbling around in Extended Pictorial Storytelling by comic book-format natives like Jim Steranko, Gil Kane, and Eisner himself. There too, it took quite a while before anyone (in America, mind you) was producing long form comics-with-spines that both stood up aesthetically and actually utilized the long form to do something more substantial that 24 pages could fit.
And here we are once more, with a fucking crazy new format that anyone can see has the potential to massively expand what comics can be. It's in the how that it gets tricky. More than tricky really: impossible to address critically. How webcomics are going to change the substance of what the medium is is impossible to say because it hasn't happened yet. All we can possibly do is look around at the work that's different from your average printed-object comic, that's operating in a way that's not the same, and catalog it to be recognized when its mode of operation pops up again and the real fun -- influence -- begins.
If I had to pick a "most-influential" webcomic out there right now it would probably be the aforementioned BodyWorld, which Dash Shaw serialized on the web between 2007 and 2009. It was hardly the most widely read webcomic (from what I understand, that honor goes to Penny Arcade, shudder), but it was certainly the only one to push the webcomics-specific "scroller" format into print -- wide-release, major-publisher, New York Times-reviewed print, no less. 2010's printed BodyWorld featured a vertical, rather than horizontal, facing-page orientation, to be read down in the manner of a scrolling web page rather than across like a book, and fold-out inside-cover flaps designed to mimic separate browser tabs. (It looked like this.) Oddly enough, and though it's a great comic, I think BodyWorld's greatest legacy is going to be formal rather than content-specific: the printed version was the earliest prominent formal expansion of beyond-web comics that led back directly to comics as they're experienced online.
Interestingly, where BodyWorld the book falls down is where the webcomic is most formally exciting. While I certainly felt cool as hell reading that thing on the subway, there were two places in particular where the printed page simply failed to convey a device that not only worked but felt innovative and unique online. The first of these was the chapter breaks. BodyWorld was a comic that stuck tightly to nine- and twelve-panel grids until the very end, and when a chapter was over the panels simply stopped, often in the middle of a tier (see above). It worked great online, mimicking the abrupt, understated endings of Youtube videos or audio clips, but on the printed page it left big holes of unfilled space, creating an unsatisfying sense of the page as a design unit. The second, bigger failure of print to live up to Shaw's digital vision came at the end, after the grids break down into a monumental "splash page that scrolls down and down, far taller than could be fit whole on any computer screen (below). On the computer, read in one smooth motion from top to bottom, it was a filmic experience brought to still imagery, a long vertical pan down a futuristic cityscape. In the book, however, it was more image than could be accommodated; the single picture split up into seven different pages, impossible to view or even really conceive of as a single thing, requiring three page turns to view in its truncated entirety.
I don't want to or mean to declare the "comics page" dead, or even a relic of the past. The printed page carries its own potentialities: texture, ink registry, variances of gloss and buff and size. There is also a single-minded purpose to printed comics, which are individual objects that exist only to be read and looked at; webcomics, which share in the general ether of the internet, something else always only a tab away, are perhaps less deeply engaging, less holistic about being what they are. (That's not a value judgment in any way; comics themselves are not a holistic form but a mongrel hybrid that grew into something beautiful, after all.) All this being said, the fact remains that many young and exciting artists are creating their early comics work on the web these days; and not only that, they're doing things in it that simply don't translate to print. Webcomics are no longer just a cheap way to show people pages or a convenient and accessible platform for a daily strip. They are an aesthetic destination in and of themselves, with their own parameters and potentials to be explored.
Probably the most exciting webcomic currently running is Blaise Larmee's 2001, a monochromatic experiment in bracing literalism that feels a bit like Jaime Hernandez's "Maggie and Hopey" stories reconstructed for a post-millennial audience of ADHD computer lifestylists. 2001 is a full-screen scroller webcomic: a single one of Larmee's wide, deep-focus panels takes up the full width and twice the height of the average laptop's browser window. Scrolling through it is disorienting, a demand for constantly realigned perceptions as the characters' motions are tracked around inside the box of the computer screen. The between-panel motion in 2001 is almost animation, the perspective constant, the figures' movements captured in painstaking, diagrammatic detail. They move across the screen and gesture dramatically. They recede into the black background and come so close to the viewer that their white forms fill up the window almost completely.
In a recent Comics Journal interview, Larmee said "I insist on staying in the present moment. 2001 exists, for me, in real time." That's all well and good as the kind of vague artistic statement of purpose we hear so often from the buzzword-spouting likes of Grant Morrison and Matt Fraction, but what distinguishes the quote is how well and clearly Larmee is able to pull it off. In 2001 what's being lost from comics as traditionally practiced is the removed, almost omniscient view of in-story time that the ability to apprehend a page full of sequenced panels at a glance allows. Instead, readers are as caught in the single moments of Larmee's panels as the characters themselves are, frozen in his frozen moments for the long scroll through them, unable to access the comic from any other point. While a superficial comparison could be made to all-double-page-spread comics, it falls apart with a little thought: a printed book with pages can be entered into anywhere and read in any order, the flicks of the leaves from front to back or vice versa allowing the reader to transcend the story's order of events, to choose to live outside it even once it's been entered. But when you go to 2001's website you start at the top and the only way to go is down, through the comic exactly as it progresses, vision flowing with it. You can scroll back up, too, but even then the movements between panels are precisely defined, sequenced with an exactitude that leaves no room for interpretation. In a way it's as close to "objective truth" in storytelling as I can think of comics getting.
Also jacked into Larmee's precision-guided use of the scroll, but less chained to the exactitudes of formalism is Connor Willumsen, whose standout works are the serialized "Everett" and the recently released standalone piece "Blackhold". "Everett" carries a bit more of traditional comics' look, with tiers of multiple panels visible all at once on the screen, but like 2001, this is work that demands to be read one way. In "Everett" the scroll acts as a kind of internal gravity for the comic, economically drawn panels pushing the eye quickly across the tiers and then down in such a rapid succession that it's easy to read long passages of it while slowly scrolling downward without stopping. The tiers are restricted to the standard width of the screen, but the layouts are able to take in an unlimited amount of vertical area, and unlike Shaw and Larmee Willumsen plays with that ability. Long passages of empty gray pass between tiers of "Everett", tall vertical panels sluice down into squat grids or tiny images before exploding into full-screen tangles of line. "Everett" is basically a standard-width comic that measures out at the the height of a small building, and Willumsen uses the unprecedented continuous space webcomics allow to full effect, mixing solid, basic comic book-style layouts with dazzling formal experimentation that could never succeed on facing pages that require turning.
Willumsen's "Blackhold" is something else entirely, a completely panel-less single image that goes even further into the scroll. Like 2001, its images take up the full width and many times the length of the screen, but in "Blackhold" there are no dividers, none of Larmee's demarcations between separate pictures, separate moments. Instead the whole thing is one astonishingly smooth slide from beginning to end, a progression from one place to another that presents disconnected single images in the manner of all comics, but moves through them with a speed and slickness that has nothing at all to do with the typical gridded, bordered-in reading experience. It's about as close to animation as comics have gotten, panel-less and easy to read without stopping the downward motion of one's scroll. Movement on a screen, the only difference being that the reader dictates how fast everything goes. And though the black-and-white dot matrix background behind the images can get downright hallucination-inducing if it's scrolled through at too constant a speed, there is one element of "Blackhold" that absolutely can't be replicated on paper, no matter its size. Willumsen's drawings for the comic are not digitized in the standard tiff or jpeg formats, but rather as moving gifs, which flash staccato bursts of bright red and yellow from Willumsen's still drawings. It's a fascinating addition to the comics artist's toolbox, one that leads the reader to question whether it's still comics at all. But then, these things are supposed to be successions of still pictures that somehow manage to move, and given that the light wherever you happen to read a comic dictates so much of your experience of it, why not let the digital environment allow its artists one extra element of control over their work?
That extra control that's so apparent in Larmee's work, and that battles with the speed of the reader's scrolls in Willumsen's, is almost entirely given over to the audience in 1981, a webcomic by artist David Gray with "conceptual oversight" by JCorp, an association of internet memesters who like to hang out on Larmee and friends' Comets Comets website. If BodyWorld was too big for the printed page, 1981 is too big for the screen, its images requiring side- as well as top-to-bottom scrolling to view in their entirety. It's completely enveloping; no matter what section of the comic you happen to be looking at, there's more on all sides, surrounding you. The comic is almost completely abstract, with no story or characters to speak of, only repeated visual motifs that echo down the page. It's a bath for the eyes in a mist of pixels, the shimmering pastel colors and lo-fi graphics manipulation more a contemporary artist with a MacBook's imagined view of a past time than anything that could actually have sprung from the titular year (least of all in the comics medium).
Again, 1981 is something that exists on the very bleeding edge of what's generally agreed upon as "comics", its use of sequential image putting it right there with any issue of The Walking Dead, but everything else either mutated or stripped away, intent most of all. Rather than a storytelling vehicle, 1981 is a place that exists entirely so that thirsty eyes can soak in a little pleasure, no engagement with anything but the pictures and their lines and colors necessary. It's hardly the next big thing in the medium, but the fact that it's being done alone is interesting, and the fact that it succeeds so well at simply being gorgeous to look at makes it roundly successful. 1981 is perhaps the least likely webcomic of all time to be given a print version; formal impossibility aside, it's tough to imagine an audience for this kind of lighter-than-air, pure-visual exploration existing in comics shops. The true home for this work is on the web, where a few minutes' visit to just about any website is worth what it costs you, and where there's far too little that just feels pleasant to take in.
As I write this article, I'm realizing that it could very well be obsolete in within a few months -- or hell, even as soon as the next installment of Larmee or Willumsen or Gray's comics go up. Things change in a flash on the web, and writing an aesthetic survey of content that could only exist on it is a daunting thing. Speculating on web-based history to come, on the impact that what's going on now will have on the future, is downright hopeless. But with that said, I hope none of this is remotely relevant tomorrow, or as soon as I hit the post button in a few seconds, because that will mean somewhere in the neverending ether someone will have posted something brighter, newer, something that uses comics to do more and risk more. And that's well worth losing a bit of commentary for. I do want to point out, however, that writing this has forced me to use more new formal terms than I've ever used in anything before. The mere fact that we have to consider the directions we scroll in, the file formats of image uploads, the size of our browser windows, the function our screens serve as points of entry into exciting new comics, when we discuss these works, makes them worth discussing. Get used to those terms. They're not going anywhere.
(image from this)
We're deep into what will become the history of webcomics at this point, with a readership for the comics medium's online format that soundly eclipses even the best selling Diamond-distributed Wednesday books. Deal with it, folks -- not only will the adventures of the Doom Patrol and the Agents of Atlas, if not necessarily Batman and Wolverine, be digital-exclusive by the end of the decade, so too will a large part of the interesting new alt- and art-comix work. It's already started: Dash Shaw's Pantheon-published print version of BodyWorld might be hanging off those Borders shelves now, but you could read the thing free online for like a year before that. People worry (online, mainly) about comics' shrinking presence in the newspapers and what it means for the survival of the venerable, wonderful comic strip format, but the reality of it is that the strip is still the most popular format comics come in, it just doesn't come on newsprint any more. Most interestingly to me though, these days it seems like more artists than ever before are engaging the webcomics format as the "infinite canvas" spoken of most prominently by Scott McCloud in his -- problematic but still occasionally dead-on -- book Reinventing Comics, which itself had an almost Paper Rad-ugly retro-digital thing going on its cover.
That book came out a long-ass time ago though, and McCloud's conceptualization of online comics as able to utilize infinite space, unrestricted by the borders of the physical page, took a while to catch. I'd guess there are a few reasons for that: first of all, the technology just wasn't really there for the works I'm going to talk about in a second to do what they do and still look good (and just as importantly, interface good) while doing it. Remember when it took a solid minute for an image to load on your computer? Nobody wants to read comics like that. But secondly, I really do think that it took a new generation of comics creators to see the digital environment with clear eyes and bring true vision to the comics they put into it. Give McCloud credit, he conceived of webcomics that were more than pages, but his practice of what he preached was pretty wack, and not even in a way that's going to look cool and retro ten years from now.
Today's boom of young creators making web-specific comics that not only work better online than in print but engage with the visual experience of computer reading is comparable to the boom of formally audacious material that hit comic books in the early 1940s, a little while after the format got its start. The washed up and/or aspiring newspaper strip artists who staffed the comic book ranks at the format's inception couldn't see the page turns and opportunities for extended visual narrative that the new way of making sequential art offered. It took a few years of young kids who weren't from any other world coming into the game before the Eisners and Kirbys appeared to show everyone the potential inherent in comics magazines. Same again during the rise of the "graphic novel", which started out with some pretty embarrassing fumbling around in Extended Pictorial Storytelling by comic book-format natives like Jim Steranko, Gil Kane, and Eisner himself. There too, it took quite a while before anyone (in America, mind you) was producing long form comics-with-spines that both stood up aesthetically and actually utilized the long form to do something more substantial that 24 pages could fit.
And here we are once more, with a fucking crazy new format that anyone can see has the potential to massively expand what comics can be. It's in the how that it gets tricky. More than tricky really: impossible to address critically. How webcomics are going to change the substance of what the medium is is impossible to say because it hasn't happened yet. All we can possibly do is look around at the work that's different from your average printed-object comic, that's operating in a way that's not the same, and catalog it to be recognized when its mode of operation pops up again and the real fun -- influence -- begins.
If I had to pick a "most-influential" webcomic out there right now it would probably be the aforementioned BodyWorld, which Dash Shaw serialized on the web between 2007 and 2009. It was hardly the most widely read webcomic (from what I understand, that honor goes to Penny Arcade, shudder), but it was certainly the only one to push the webcomics-specific "scroller" format into print -- wide-release, major-publisher, New York Times-reviewed print, no less. 2010's printed BodyWorld featured a vertical, rather than horizontal, facing-page orientation, to be read down in the manner of a scrolling web page rather than across like a book, and fold-out inside-cover flaps designed to mimic separate browser tabs. (It looked like this.) Oddly enough, and though it's a great comic, I think BodyWorld's greatest legacy is going to be formal rather than content-specific: the printed version was the earliest prominent formal expansion of beyond-web comics that led back directly to comics as they're experienced online.
Interestingly, where BodyWorld the book falls down is where the webcomic is most formally exciting. While I certainly felt cool as hell reading that thing on the subway, there were two places in particular where the printed page simply failed to convey a device that not only worked but felt innovative and unique online. The first of these was the chapter breaks. BodyWorld was a comic that stuck tightly to nine- and twelve-panel grids until the very end, and when a chapter was over the panels simply stopped, often in the middle of a tier (see above). It worked great online, mimicking the abrupt, understated endings of Youtube videos or audio clips, but on the printed page it left big holes of unfilled space, creating an unsatisfying sense of the page as a design unit. The second, bigger failure of print to live up to Shaw's digital vision came at the end, after the grids break down into a monumental "splash page that scrolls down and down, far taller than could be fit whole on any computer screen (below). On the computer, read in one smooth motion from top to bottom, it was a filmic experience brought to still imagery, a long vertical pan down a futuristic cityscape. In the book, however, it was more image than could be accommodated; the single picture split up into seven different pages, impossible to view or even really conceive of as a single thing, requiring three page turns to view in its truncated entirety.
I don't want to or mean to declare the "comics page" dead, or even a relic of the past. The printed page carries its own potentialities: texture, ink registry, variances of gloss and buff and size. There is also a single-minded purpose to printed comics, which are individual objects that exist only to be read and looked at; webcomics, which share in the general ether of the internet, something else always only a tab away, are perhaps less deeply engaging, less holistic about being what they are. (That's not a value judgment in any way; comics themselves are not a holistic form but a mongrel hybrid that grew into something beautiful, after all.) All this being said, the fact remains that many young and exciting artists are creating their early comics work on the web these days; and not only that, they're doing things in it that simply don't translate to print. Webcomics are no longer just a cheap way to show people pages or a convenient and accessible platform for a daily strip. They are an aesthetic destination in and of themselves, with their own parameters and potentials to be explored.
Probably the most exciting webcomic currently running is Blaise Larmee's 2001, a monochromatic experiment in bracing literalism that feels a bit like Jaime Hernandez's "Maggie and Hopey" stories reconstructed for a post-millennial audience of ADHD computer lifestylists. 2001 is a full-screen scroller webcomic: a single one of Larmee's wide, deep-focus panels takes up the full width and twice the height of the average laptop's browser window. Scrolling through it is disorienting, a demand for constantly realigned perceptions as the characters' motions are tracked around inside the box of the computer screen. The between-panel motion in 2001 is almost animation, the perspective constant, the figures' movements captured in painstaking, diagrammatic detail. They move across the screen and gesture dramatically. They recede into the black background and come so close to the viewer that their white forms fill up the window almost completely.
In a recent Comics Journal interview, Larmee said "I insist on staying in the present moment. 2001 exists, for me, in real time." That's all well and good as the kind of vague artistic statement of purpose we hear so often from the buzzword-spouting likes of Grant Morrison and Matt Fraction, but what distinguishes the quote is how well and clearly Larmee is able to pull it off. In 2001 what's being lost from comics as traditionally practiced is the removed, almost omniscient view of in-story time that the ability to apprehend a page full of sequenced panels at a glance allows. Instead, readers are as caught in the single moments of Larmee's panels as the characters themselves are, frozen in his frozen moments for the long scroll through them, unable to access the comic from any other point. While a superficial comparison could be made to all-double-page-spread comics, it falls apart with a little thought: a printed book with pages can be entered into anywhere and read in any order, the flicks of the leaves from front to back or vice versa allowing the reader to transcend the story's order of events, to choose to live outside it even once it's been entered. But when you go to 2001's website you start at the top and the only way to go is down, through the comic exactly as it progresses, vision flowing with it. You can scroll back up, too, but even then the movements between panels are precisely defined, sequenced with an exactitude that leaves no room for interpretation. In a way it's as close to "objective truth" in storytelling as I can think of comics getting.
Also jacked into Larmee's precision-guided use of the scroll, but less chained to the exactitudes of formalism is Connor Willumsen, whose standout works are the serialized "Everett" and the recently released standalone piece "Blackhold". "Everett" carries a bit more of traditional comics' look, with tiers of multiple panels visible all at once on the screen, but like 2001, this is work that demands to be read one way. In "Everett" the scroll acts as a kind of internal gravity for the comic, economically drawn panels pushing the eye quickly across the tiers and then down in such a rapid succession that it's easy to read long passages of it while slowly scrolling downward without stopping. The tiers are restricted to the standard width of the screen, but the layouts are able to take in an unlimited amount of vertical area, and unlike Shaw and Larmee Willumsen plays with that ability. Long passages of empty gray pass between tiers of "Everett", tall vertical panels sluice down into squat grids or tiny images before exploding into full-screen tangles of line. "Everett" is basically a standard-width comic that measures out at the the height of a small building, and Willumsen uses the unprecedented continuous space webcomics allow to full effect, mixing solid, basic comic book-style layouts with dazzling formal experimentation that could never succeed on facing pages that require turning.
Willumsen's "Blackhold" is something else entirely, a completely panel-less single image that goes even further into the scroll. Like 2001, its images take up the full width and many times the length of the screen, but in "Blackhold" there are no dividers, none of Larmee's demarcations between separate pictures, separate moments. Instead the whole thing is one astonishingly smooth slide from beginning to end, a progression from one place to another that presents disconnected single images in the manner of all comics, but moves through them with a speed and slickness that has nothing at all to do with the typical gridded, bordered-in reading experience. It's about as close to animation as comics have gotten, panel-less and easy to read without stopping the downward motion of one's scroll. Movement on a screen, the only difference being that the reader dictates how fast everything goes. And though the black-and-white dot matrix background behind the images can get downright hallucination-inducing if it's scrolled through at too constant a speed, there is one element of "Blackhold" that absolutely can't be replicated on paper, no matter its size. Willumsen's drawings for the comic are not digitized in the standard tiff or jpeg formats, but rather as moving gifs, which flash staccato bursts of bright red and yellow from Willumsen's still drawings. It's a fascinating addition to the comics artist's toolbox, one that leads the reader to question whether it's still comics at all. But then, these things are supposed to be successions of still pictures that somehow manage to move, and given that the light wherever you happen to read a comic dictates so much of your experience of it, why not let the digital environment allow its artists one extra element of control over their work?
That extra control that's so apparent in Larmee's work, and that battles with the speed of the reader's scrolls in Willumsen's, is almost entirely given over to the audience in 1981, a webcomic by artist David Gray with "conceptual oversight" by JCorp, an association of internet memesters who like to hang out on Larmee and friends' Comets Comets website. If BodyWorld was too big for the printed page, 1981 is too big for the screen, its images requiring side- as well as top-to-bottom scrolling to view in their entirety. It's completely enveloping; no matter what section of the comic you happen to be looking at, there's more on all sides, surrounding you. The comic is almost completely abstract, with no story or characters to speak of, only repeated visual motifs that echo down the page. It's a bath for the eyes in a mist of pixels, the shimmering pastel colors and lo-fi graphics manipulation more a contemporary artist with a MacBook's imagined view of a past time than anything that could actually have sprung from the titular year (least of all in the comics medium).
Again, 1981 is something that exists on the very bleeding edge of what's generally agreed upon as "comics", its use of sequential image putting it right there with any issue of The Walking Dead, but everything else either mutated or stripped away, intent most of all. Rather than a storytelling vehicle, 1981 is a place that exists entirely so that thirsty eyes can soak in a little pleasure, no engagement with anything but the pictures and their lines and colors necessary. It's hardly the next big thing in the medium, but the fact that it's being done alone is interesting, and the fact that it succeeds so well at simply being gorgeous to look at makes it roundly successful. 1981 is perhaps the least likely webcomic of all time to be given a print version; formal impossibility aside, it's tough to imagine an audience for this kind of lighter-than-air, pure-visual exploration existing in comics shops. The true home for this work is on the web, where a few minutes' visit to just about any website is worth what it costs you, and where there's far too little that just feels pleasant to take in.
As I write this article, I'm realizing that it could very well be obsolete in within a few months -- or hell, even as soon as the next installment of Larmee or Willumsen or Gray's comics go up. Things change in a flash on the web, and writing an aesthetic survey of content that could only exist on it is a daunting thing. Speculating on web-based history to come, on the impact that what's going on now will have on the future, is downright hopeless. But with that said, I hope none of this is remotely relevant tomorrow, or as soon as I hit the post button in a few seconds, because that will mean somewhere in the neverending ether someone will have posted something brighter, newer, something that uses comics to do more and risk more. And that's well worth losing a bit of commentary for. I do want to point out, however, that writing this has forced me to use more new formal terms than I've ever used in anything before. The mere fact that we have to consider the directions we scroll in, the file formats of image uploads, the size of our browser windows, the function our screens serve as points of entry into exciting new comics, when we discuss these works, makes them worth discussing. Get used to those terms. They're not going anywhere.
3.11.2011
TCJ Review: City-Hunter Magazine #1
Oh wow, already? Yes folks, it's another review of another great comic from me over at The Comics Journal. As my new boss Dan Nadel sez, "Two in one week from the Seneca. We hope he never grows old and tired like the rest of us." Don't worry about that anytime soon. And I'm totally using that second sentence as a blurb if I ever publish anything.
Anyway, the comic in the hot seat is C.F.'s Picturebox-distributed zine City-Hunter, which is actually an "expanded reissue" of an older CF zine -- same thing, but with more pages more pages, especially more smeary painted ones and photos of dudes pissing on manhole covers. Maybe I'm not describing what an amazing thing I found the comic to be so well, but I promise I do a way better job in the actual review I'm trying to get you to read. In case you need some extra incentive, it starts like this:
This is an odd little magazine that walks on the outer fringes of what most would consider “comics,” while showcasing a barrage of imagery from one of the medium’s most exciting visual stylists. C.F.’s new City-Hunter minicomic, a handsome offset zine with pages oscillating between black & white and color, is an expanded reissue of the old City-Hunter minicomic, which was pretty much the same thing. New pages mingle with old in a sequence that’s only stronger for its apparent randomness. It’s a strange, compelling presentation strategy, allowing readers to contemplate new material alongside old and to see the progression from then to now as clearly as that which takes place between panels. Read more at tcj.com!
3.09.2011
Your Wednesday Sequence 1
"Blackheart" part 2 in Dark Horse Presents #92 (1995), page 1 panels 1-3. Frank Quitely.
As promised, it's the beginning of the sequel series to my recently wrapped "Your Monday Panel" column. However, unexpectedly -- even for me -- it's been outsourced! That's right folks, I've joined the crack team of critics at Comic Book Resources' Robot 6 blog for the big follow-up, and I must say I'm loving the new digs already. My new thing is called "Your Wednesday Sequence". I'm trying to move away from the pictorially based, fine-arts approach to analysis I put to individual panels in the Monday columns and examine sequence, which is what makes comics comics (think about it) with the same kind of in-depth, nuts and bolts approach. Hopefully you'll go check it out, and continue to do so every Wednesday afternoon to come! Not convinced? Fine, it starts like this:
Sequence is what puts the component parts of comics — individual panels — together. It’s as fundamental to what the medium is as anything else. It provides comics with their high-flown academic code name, sequential art, and it’s what makes this a form that we read rather than look at. But there’s not much as far as a definition for “sequence” as it applies to comics art. What is it? (To find out, read more!)
3.07.2011
Free Agency
Last time I played at Sean Witzke's house we both had so much fun that we decided he should come over to mine some time! Sean is one of the best writers engaging the comics medium right now, a critic's critic with strong individual views and more than enough nuance and rhetorical skill as a writer to back them up. Here, we go in on a comic we both figured would be the perfect place to give with a little knock down drag out punditry. It's a long ride, so drop the needle on this and buckle up...
ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN
by Frank Miller, Bill Sienkiewicz, and the divine hand of the comics gods. Marvel/Epic, 1986-87.
MS: So this fuckin’ comic. Okay. I feel like there are so many books people see as being emblematic of 1980s superhero comics, but that’s only because the market went the way it did. Claremont’s X-Men into Watchmen... Simonson’s Thor into early Sandman... and for sure, Frank Miller’s own Daredevil into Dark Knight Returns. But those comics are just the threads people picked up on, and as the stuff was coming out none of it was really much more emblematic than anything else. It takes a lineage springing from a book for it to really leave a footprint in its time period like that, to mark a certain point in comics history as its own. Nobody picked up where Elektra Assassin left off. Really, nobody even picked up where it started, except maybe Miller’s opposite number Alan Moore in his own Bill Sienkiewicz collab Brought To Light.
This is kind of a weird thing -- but it seems to me that one of the reasons Elektra didn’t really get internalized by comics and end up marking its moment in time the way so many other “slightly mature superhero” comics of the ‘80s did is because it was already such a perfect encapsulation of the world that produced it, no sphere of influence necessary. I mean, cyberpunk weirdness, fully intense Reaganist political underpinnings, and god, the look of the thing! We’re at a moment in pop culture where me saying Bill Sienkiewicz draws hella ‘80s is something people will know I mean as a compliment, right? The pastel tones, the slightly washed-out cocaine focus, and man, the fashion! It’s just so right there in its time -- honestly, more than pretty much any other hero comic I can think of offhand is. In Watchmen, in Dark Knight -- and in the ‘60s-hip Marvel stuff and the flavor-of-the-moment ‘90s Image books too, there’s always these imagined trappings, this fantasy world keeping the world outside the window at bay. Here? No. This is a comic about a pretty crazy moment in modern America, and it’s just got all this super-weirdness thrown in to... to fuck with us, I think, honestly.
SW: Oh absolutely. And done for Miller and Sienkiewicz to fuck with each other, and each of them to fuck with their peers. There are definitely post-Elektra Assassin comics, though, there are big ones. And I think I read all of them before I read Assassin -- Joe Casey and Ladronn’s first story in their run on Cable, Sienkiewicz’s own Stray Toasters, every Dave McKean comic, every David Mack comic (both of those guys always felt like they were less enervating versions of Sienkiewicz once I got around to reading the real deal), and of course Alan Moore’s biggest failure Big Numbers. The encapsulation of the 80s - you could argue that the insane, 3-script process that created it, rewriting it twice then again when Sienkiewicz’s pages came in seemingly done from a completely different script. There is the Burroughs idea of the cut-up, and if it applies to any comic book it’s not going to be Morrison’s intentional attempts at it or Jim Woodring magically divining something through process. No it would be Miller and Sienkiewicz just struggling to work together, forcing unintelligible chaos into something that tells a story. So it being exactly what we’d want the time period it came from to be represented as? That makes sense to me.
MS: Word. And I’m glad you mentioned Burroughs, cause he’s so huge in this comic. More than his spirit hanging over the formal play, he really bleeds into Miller’s writing style to a pretty shocking degree. I mean, plenty of comics writers use lots of -- dashes, -- but in Elektra Miller seems to be specifically aware of the way Burroughsian interrupts could be used to push a comics narrative forward. He’s fully attuned to Burroughs, the same rhythms, the same tone. Which is quite shocking for a superhero comic, really. I mean, that’s the dude who does books about guys ejaculating and shit! But Miller just goes in there and scrapes out everything of Burroughs that can be rendered into comics form, and takes plenty of his piss and vinegar too.
People really seem to forget this period of Miller’s career because it was the time when he wasn’t drawing anything -- but I think that ‘86 to ‘89 or so is definitely when he did his most accomplished comics writing. His early-’80s stuff and of course his modern stuff are so jacked into that noir-y, Raymond Chandler voice that's gone into self-parody at this point. But on Assassin he’s just as focused on the blurry, abstract, razorblade Burroughs experimentalism, on chopping up his words and seeing how far into incomprehensibility he can go and still have it be a narrative at all. It’s one simple thing intertwined with the other simple thing in Miller’s writing, and the fusion comes out anything but simple. The narration, the dialogue -- I mean, forget plot, forget the pacing or anything more comics-native -- the words in the balloons and the boxes are right up there with the very best the medium’s put on offer.
SW: I always thought that there was something about Sienkiewicz that brought those influences out in writers - I have to admit I haven’t gotten further than 100 pages into Gravity’s Rainbow but I know that Miller is a fan, I actually have a copy of Rainbow with his cover. But in Big Numbers and I think in the first issue of Elektra (and DKR) there are blatant Pynchon references. There’s the strange literary side of sf that both of those writers grasped onto, exactly as they were working with the same artist.
I seriously think that post-Dark Knight, Miller decided that he was going to make his name as a writer, and actually took that idea to heart. Elektra, Born Again, Year One, Love and War, Give Me Liberty, Man Without Fear, Hard Boiled - until he got massively burned by Hollywood the first time and decided that he needed to re-affirm his love of drawing. For a short period, he could go toe to toe with any other writer in comics.
MS: Yeah, and then when he came back to drawing -- and you know, thank god he did, because that guy is the only thing mainstream comics have that can hold a candle to Gary Panter -- it was like he forgot he had been writing stuff with two stylistic aspects and went back to one-dimensional noir. Oh well. I honestly wonder how involved Miller was in the visual side of these comics -- any of his comics of this period, with Siekiewicz or Mazzucchelli or Gibbons -- because they don’t really look like Frank Miller comics, do they? I mean, Siekiewicz had obviously learned the same lessons about pacing and panel size used for effect from Dark Knight that everyone else did, but beyond that this book is his show. As Born Again is Mazzucchelli’s show, et cetera. Miller the writer did not have a lot of visual stylism to him, like the way Alan Moore sticks all his artists in those nine-grids and keeps them there. Maybe Miller understood that to make a comic that was truly visually successful you have to let the guy drawing it own it. Or maybe he knew all he can do by himself is that thuggish noir stuff, and when he wanted to make a different kind of comic he got different artists.
SW: Well, in that big awkward Comics Journal Interview book Miller talks about how Sienkiewicz and Darrow kind of did whatever the hell they wanted to and Gibbons and Mazz were working pretty tightly close to his scripts. Visually, I don’t know, there are a lot of similarities in pretty much all of Miller's non-Sink/Darrow collaborations - you can tell that the same guy wrote the bathroom scene in Born Again and the fight with the dogs in Man Without Fear and the laser going off in Give Me Liberty, those scenes all operate on the same metronomic timing. But when he is given the chance to compete with an artist he does it, which is something that separates him from basically every other one of the “big” comics writers. He knows that he can draw this if he wants to, so he’s going to let his partner play, but he’s not going to make it easy for them. With Sienkiewicz, even more than Darrow, it’s a battle on the page.
MS: Yeah, he’s never written a straight out bad-looking comic, which is definitely not the case with Moore or Grant Morrison or Peter Milligan. He creates visually successful work, even when he’s not doing it with brush in hand. Though that said -- there are places in this comic where Sienkiewicz falls down and Miller himself would have been rock steady. I honestly feel the same thing with Sienkiewicz that we discussed about Steranko in our last thing, where he was just such a world-beating artist who doesn’t have too many direct descendants in modern comics. Like Steranko, he had a period of influence, no doubt -- the early ‘90s, with Sam Kieth and McKean and Simon Bisley. But none of those guys really lasted either, did they? (Unless McKean’s Fantagraphics book proves me wrong in a second, which would be sweet.) But anyway, I was thinking about why Sienkiewicz’s visual style hasn’t really survived in the way that say, Gibbons or Mazzucchelli’s has, and what hit me first while reading this was man -- Bill Sienkiewicz really can not block out an action scene that well! I’m thinking specifically of the first one in the book, with Elektra breaking out of a mental hospital and killing all the guards; the style of it is just so strong, that beautiful paint and this really stormy color. But the panel compositions themselves and the sequence they’re put in is -- gotta say -- kinda boring. And if you notice that, Sienkiewicz's problem with straight kinetic "comic book action" pops up again and again through the whole series.
SW: Oh man, don’t diss Simon Bisley. He’s so much better than McKean ever was, he just never gave a shit about anything like “art”. Put Slaine next to Cages and tell me which one is an unreadable piece of shit. Anyway, it is weird that he can’t pull that off here when his Moon Knight pages are super-kinetic, easily placed next to Miller’s own Daredevil pages. I think part of that was that Sienkiewicz placed more emphasis on the entire page looking good rather than panels, or even sequences. He is maybe the definitive pre-JH Williams artist for “page-as-unit”. Then again, there are panels like that sequence where Elektra pulls her hand just into frame and it’s covered in blood up to the wrist - which is maybe the most indelible Sienkiewicz image for me.
MS: Yeah, he gets the atmospherics of action no doubt -- and I mean, the guy is one of the most atmospheric artists ever to use the comics form -- but it’s the bangs and slams, the crude parts that Frank Miller himself does so perfectly, that he lets down on. Like, there’s this thing running through the book where talking heads describe the most bitchin’ action sequences possible. It’s totally hypnotic because Miller the writer is so on top of his game that you get pulled in and your imagination produces something deeply satisfying -- but the pages themselves? Eh, not all that much to look at. It’s like Miller wasn’t quite sure how to play to Sienkiewicz’s strengths when they started the series and took a while to really figure it out. By issue 4 or so they get going, with the chase scene through New York while everybody’s hallucinating at the same time. That’s where it starts to gel, because Sienkiewicz did impact with color changes, style changes, formalist tricks, not the typical way of drawing a really sick punching shot.
SW: Well I think that Sienkiewicz’s entire style changed between Love and War and the first issue of Elektra, and that might have caused Miller some trouble - it didn’t help that he was rewriting and resequencing the scripts without talking to Miller. I mean, there is a Jasper Johns tribute here for christ’s sakes, which isn’t something Sienkiewicz would have put in a comic even a year earlier, I don’t think. He was actually discovering how much more he could do with his skill set, and then Miller was handing him a script full of ninjas and Pynchon references. So the push and pull in those first 3 issues are definitely combative, which makes the sweet spots like Elektra’s childhood with Stick (featuring the most hilarious Wolverine cameo ever) are even sweeter.
MS: Oh man, I know. So bizarre, that whole scene. That mention of “what he could do” is important, because this comic is stuffed full of things you couldn’t ever have done in a serialized pamphlet before maybe 1986, 87. You mentioned how Sienkiewicz was doing pretty strong action sequences in Moon Knight, which was early ‘80s, heavy on the Neal Adams influence -- and printed on newsprint. Same with his New Mutants stuff a little later. The best he could do in that medium -- I’m talking medium as in "set of tools" here, not "art form" -- was get a little Ralph Steadman with his inking and keep drawing the same stuff otherwise. It wasn’t until the glossy white paper came into comics in the mid-’80s that he could do paint, do airbrush -- hell, just do raw pencils even. It’s weird; we see the “natural mode” of comics as inked Bristol with colors mechanically laid over, but how UN-natural is that laborious process? Sienkiewicz wasn’t a production man, he was an artist, and as soon as he could put raw material on the page, he did, in full effect. I mean, the originals for this comic must bear such a minimal difference to the printed product. The color is there, the pencils are there, and nothing stands between the artist’s hand and the completed piece.
Honestly, I think that puts Sienkiewicz in line way less with pretty much anybody working in mainstream comics (again, McKean and Bisley aside) and way more in line with the art-comix world, the raw-pencilers and the messy painters. CF does things with paint that remind me more of Sienkiewicz than anyone else. There’s that impulse toward purity, toward the medium on the page and nothing in the way of it. I read Stray Toasters as something that should have been published in Raw, you know? It’s deeply weird seeing that in a superheroic context, but it just barely works, this weird Frankenstein monster of a comic that doesn’t belong where it is but doesn’t quite have a way to be anything else figured out yet.
SW: Yeah, but it's so much better than anything that came out in Raw (Stray Toasters, I mean). There is definitely a post-David Lynch need for Sienkiewicz to not only go as weird and personal as he could but also pursue the mainstream of the medium, and that makes Stray Toasters so much more interesting as an object to me. Here’s this incredibly fucked up CS Lewis tribute about child abuse and we’re going to sell it next to Moonshadow and Grendel. There’s nothing like that when you discuss Spiegelman for me because it’s a far more fucked up, quixotic endeavor from the start. That’s what we call failing BIG.
MS: Ha! Well, there’s always that one Alan Moore Raw story about how inhuman Japanese people are, jeez. But yeah, I get you. I think you’re onto something when you talk about Sienkiewicz’s impulse toward the mainstream, because why the hell else would an artist like that have ended up as an inker of third-tier Marvel comics? For God’s sake! But yeah, I think you’re right. He likes drawing this stuff. You know, his career as an inker is so interesting to me, the way he just tears inferior pencillers’ stuff to shreds with that line, just slashes the christ out of them. I always thought it was out of frustration that this is where he ended up. But maybe... in a way inker is the perfect way for him to do both things -- he’s deeply embedded not just in mainstream content, but in the mainstream comics production process, and yet he still gets to put a substance down on the page and not see it messed with no matter how weird and over-regimented the coloring gets. They don’t fuck with the black. It remains.
SW: He definitely loves it, him and Frank Miller were both teenagers who showed up at Marvel and DC with their portfolios begging for jobs. But he had an aggressive growth pattern that lead him to literally outpace entire schools of comics production. He was lucky that he was working at the time he was. And I think it helped that Miller had fought so hard with printers on Ronin to get the colors right that when they got around to Elektra, Sienkiewicz knew he could force technological changes if he felt the need to. It is the definition of “cutting edge”.
MS: It’s weird that only the most advanced production process of the times could capture something way simpler than most comics art, just raw material on paper. The comics medium has grown such a bizarre, byzantine artistic process out of acquiescence to printing methods that haven’t existed for a few decades now! You can feel the friction of it in Elektra though, like there are places where Sienkiewicz will draw something that looks a little more typical of ‘80s action comics but it still just pops off the page because the paper’s so white, the painted color is so fresh. He was breaking the chain that held the look of the hero genre to what had come before, but he’s still pretty visibly indebted to it in places. Kinda cool.
SW: Did you read that interview with Kyle Baker that Seth Kushner did? Baker talks about how weird it is that thick brush line evolved in comics and how harshly people reacted when he tried to break out of that. The raw pencil moments are just amazing - the black and white photo of Elektra on Garrett’s desk? It’s the perfect application of that technique.
MS: I really do wonder how much non-superhero artists look at Sienkiewicz, because given how locked into that same antiquated production process today's genre comics are, there’s such a limited space for their artists to apply any of the stuff that really makes Elektra such a fabulous visual experience. I feel like the guy’s got WAY more to teach everyone working outside that bubble, but he’s kind of undiscovered as an influence. I see a lot of him in Frank Santoro, but then Santoro is a history guy, and part of the older generation too. I feel like when the younger art-comix kids discover Sienkiewicz he’ll just be HUGE, up there with Kirby. I really do think he’s got a moment in comics art to define that’s still waiting to happen. There are so many possibilities that only he explored. Hopefully the Kyle Baker wave that’s just starting to hit leads people in the right direction.
SW: Baker’s a little easier to grasp for a lot of people because he’s such an anarchist, and the humor influence. In order to get into Sienkiewicz when you’re young, you really need to be into the subject matter to latch on completely -- you need to be a fan of Miller or Moore basically.
MS: That’s interesting. He might be the most innovative artist to have worked almost exclusively with writers. Stray Toasters is basically an invisible book at this point, and yeah that shit is great but it doesn’t really read as well as Assassin or Big Numbers (also tough to get ahold of themselves, now that I think of it). Yeah, I always look at the guy’s career and think it really is pretty similar to Steranko -- such a massive talent, and yet he never quite put it right there for people to absorb. I mean, this comic is a masterpiece, undeniably, but it’s a collaborative masterpiece rather than Sienkiewicz at full bore.
SW: So do you think that’s a lesser thing than a solo masterpiece?
MS: Oh boy, ummm... argh, I gotta say yeah. As a comic maybe not, as long as it’s a story that tells itself well it doesn’t matter how many people work on it, but as an artwork, as the expression of a unique aesthetic, the collaborations are pretty much always going to be lacking something. Like, imagine if we only had the Lee/Kirby collabs and no Fourth World. It would still be one of comics’ most incredible bodies of work, but we’d be missing the purity of Kirby. Like we’re kinda missing pure Sienkiewicz. Not that I’d even trade this book for eight issues of a Sienkiewicz solo miniseries done at the same time or anything, because there’s so much Miller greatness in Elektra... but hypothetically, if there were a pure Sienkiewicz comic that I knew was as good as this one I’d take that over this because I think -- the interesting intersections collaborations can lead to acknowledged -- that individual expressions almost always go deeper.
SW: Yeah, but “purity”? Not as interesting to me as a true collaboration. Which this is, it isn’t a script illustrated by Sienkiewicz, it’s two artists struggling to both make their statements together. The same way that I’d say From Hell is more interesting than anything Campbell did on his own or Moore wrote for someone else. I don’t always subscribe to the idea that everyone has something to say, you know? (Even though I know Sienkiwicz did) It may seem like a strange point to make, but an artist making a pure expression isn’t always going to be their most interesting or vital work. And... Elektra is a more “Sienkiewicz” comic than Stray Toasters. Hell, there’s one better, “Hit it!” is a better Sienkiewicz comic than Elektra even.
MS: Well, sure. I’d rather Morrison’s Animal Man over a solo Chas Truog comic, ha. Yeah, From Hell, there’s a collaboration I’d take over anything else either guy’s ever done. I guess Miller and Sienkiewicz just don’t fuse as perfectly, which is interesting since they both came out of the same milieu, both with a lot of the same aesthetic concerns. I’m trying to think of why... and I guess what I come up with is that even at his most abstract and experimental Miller was interested in creating a series of hard, percussive hits -- the stabs of that cut-up style narration, the brutal action sequences that the art doesn’t always sell -- whereas Sienkiewicz was so tonal, so lush and spread out and atmospheric, with a forte in subtle shifts, extended periods of harmony and dissonance, and formalist exploration that didn’t necessarily further the plots but just nuanced them deeper and deeper. It’s really different ways of making comics, and a perfect fusion of them like Moore and Campbell get in From Hell would have been amazing, but the breach is just a little too wide....
SW: Let’s talk about the narration -- that was Miller’s style as he was leading into the book. I think when pared with Sienkiewicz, who was moving away from Miller’s syncopated style with the information shown, the narration creates this amazing version of the classic Marvel comics internal heroic monologue and actually brings it closer to both novelistic convention and human thought. I like to think that if Elektra Assassin never happened (and Love and War), if the two of them ever collaborated, I don’t think that Born Again and Year One would be as amazingly narrated as they are. For something that is Miller’s strongest proficiency as a writer, it is forged in this book.
MS: Yeah, because he had to work so hard with Sienkiewicz to sell that style, it was such a stretch -- and I don’t want to tear it down at all, they do an incredible job of bending radically different aesthetics into a collaboration that works. After the challenge of Sienkiewicz, working with Mazzucchelli, who’s really a much more like-minded artist, must have been just so easy and instinctual for Miller. This comic, though -- it’s like “Sister Ray” or something, isn’t it? Two guys with different styles blasting away as hard as they can in their own voices, halfway looking for them to intersect but also just vibing off how dissonant it can get, how actively they can work against each other.
Miller’s narration almost feels like an attempt at making comics with words alone, it’s so imagistic and punctuated, it lives so vividly within each individual panel and then moves on to something equally vivid in the next. And that’s where those talking-head action sequences are so great, because Miller’s trying to pull your mind into this visual sequence he’s obviously blocked out in great detail inside his head, and Sienkiewicz just has these caricatures on the page talking at you. It’s so head-spinning, so disorienting, you just have to surrender to the comic and let it take over. Which of course is perfect for the weird, abrasive, confrontational story that Elektra is. Ha -- when I was at the release show for the new Brian Chippendale book I heard some kid saying about Maggots, “I wanted the book to make me sick, and it never quite did.” He shoulda locked into some Elektra Assassin!
SW: If you wanted to you could say that Miller wasn’t a great writer until he worked with Sienkiewicz and he wasn’t a funny writer until he worked with Darrow. That would be mean, though. Fucking hell, it is like “Sister Ray”... Miller had this fixation in this time period on narrating from inside a diseased mind too -- so you are being constantly screamed at by someone you know is untrustworthy, which just adds to the dissonance of the words and pictures. Even when you are being told what is happening as you see it - the horrible crutch of 70s Marvel writing -- you are experiencing it from two different perspectives in-story, as well as the way the people telling the story. The two of them are turning the horrible weaknesses of the way comics are made into strengths. There is real sickness in this comic -- like, the longrunning description of Miller as anti-feminist gets super-complicated once you bring this book up because it is everything horrible about his depiction of women often on the same page as everything that is amazing about what he could do. It can accurately be described as confounding. It’s seasick, reading this book, and often you are with the characters as they are disoriented by the plot or their own thoughts.
MS: And Sienkiewicz adds so much to that with the bits of pure prettiness he lances through it. Miller’s so good at ugly -- except Ronin that’s basically his whole career, gorgeous comics about ugliness -- but Sienkiewicz, with that outside-comics aesthetic history he brings onto the page, enhances Miller’s basic template so much. The Egon Schiele pastiches in the mental institution, the scattershot greeting-card style images Elektra hallucinates as she gets kidnapped by the Great Beast, it’s never just one thing, always a combination of factors that never quite lock together. As a piece of straightup art that might be problematic, but as the outre, disturbing experience it was obviously intended as, there’s no beating it. Even the prettiness adds to the dissonance when it’s not in tune with the words.
About the truly weird misogynist aspect of the book -- yeah, it’s definitely the most complex thing Miller’s done with one of his female characters. I was realizing as I was reading it last night -- ok, the main crux of the plot involves this semi-buffoonish SHIELD agent named Garrett sort of stumbling into this psychic connection with Elektra, right? For most of the series they can hear each other’s thoughts, or more accurately they find themselves thinking one another’s thoughts. And godDAMN if “Garret” (with one 'T') isn't a cryptogram of “Miller”! He’s even drawn to LOOK like Miller in a couple panels! So even the female character Miller went deepest into, and was obviously most passionate about, never really had subjectivity as a character -- here because she’s literally having a man’s thoughts PUT INTO her head! Probably Miller’s ultimate, most conspicuous failure as a writer -- of movies, of comics, of anything -- is his inability to really write that many different characters, to differentiate his voice convincingly. This, then, is like his autocritique, a commentary on how he KNOWS he’s filling the heads and mouths of these automatons on the pages with his own psychology and words -- but dude, he’s writing them! He can’t help it! Can a man become a woman, even on the pages of a comic? Not if he’s Frank Miller!
SW: Also Miller and Sienkiewicz stop showing you the interior of Elektra’s head after the first two issues. She becomes this force of unpredictable actions, and sometimes you are told her motivations. So what you are dealing with in the beginning, which is a character piece with access into Elektra’s mind, becomes a useless priority. Because I think that Miller feels okay that he’s defined that her mind is in a lot of ways broken. So the introduction of Garrettr creates this dramatic tension that what Elektra thinks is going on may or may not actually be going on.
The autocritique -- YEAH, it is right there. There’s this weird thing about Miller where the earlier his work is the more complex it is - Ronin is totally a deconstruction of his own love of juvenalia and then there’s Assassin, where he gets to take apart the very basic element of his style, which is CHARACTER. That’s not even there in Born Again/Year One/Give Me Liberty, which are more story-focused. And then the Sin City period to now, he’s artistically maturing towards simplicity not complexity. He’s the anti-Morrison. Honing in on what he loves rather than adding to it. The weird thing about Miller is that his most fuck-you, worldbeating angry young man work is also intensely aware of it’s own rationalizations.
MS: Right. Caricature.
Annnd, that seems to me like a pretty good place to bring up politics. Miller’s always referred to as a hardline, quasi-nuts conservative, but -- I dunno, maybe it’s just that I haven’t read a whole lot of interviews with him where he speaks directly to it -- but I always felt like his politics came across as a lot more complex than that in the comics, anyway. There’s certainly no Steve Ditko agitprop, no sense of a clear right and wrong. In Elektra the same grainy, xeroxed heads stand for both the left and right of American politics -- one’s a grotesque mask of Richard Nixon, one’s a twisted JFK lookalike. And there’s certainly no attempt made to present one as better than the other. Let alone good. I think a lot of that is just the zeitgeist this comic taps into, the total hopelessness of the late ‘80s -- the crack epidemic, the bad economy, the military interventionism that somehow never made it to full-blown war but always threatened to, the creeping knowledge (in the US and UK at least) that the people who’d been put in charge were in all likelihood legitimately insane. There’s SO much paranoia to the world this comic sketches out, such a trapped feeling of hopelessness. Voting a Democrat into office just ain’t gonna do it when said Democrat is possessed by the Great Beast. And it’s not like the situation on the ground is any better.
SW: Dude, did you know that Ken Wind xerox is a self-portrait by Sienkiewicz?
MS: Whoa, I did NOT! Fuck!
SW: It’s fucking crazy because I was reading how Marvel got hate mail because people said it was a photo of Dan Quayle and Sienkiewicz had to say “no, that’s me”. Anyway, yeah - my whole thing is that Miller clearly never had a hardline pov on his politics, and you can see it shifting and becoming more of a right-wing position as he’s gotten older. Because yeah, post-9/11, the guy who created Nuke? That guy is totally going to go hawk, the guy who has spent his career struggling with that side of patriotism and reconciling that with his personal politics suddenly in a situation where he can see an identifiable “good” and “evil”. Not a surprise to me at all.
MS: I can see that. Maybe it’s just because I grew up in the GW Bush era that I so strongly identify conservatism with a pro-government view, even though historically it’s been more the opposite. Miller definitely went hawk post-911, but he was still making as much fun of the idiots in charge as he’d made of Reagan, and that was just such an offbeat stance in like 2002, 2003. God, what weird times!
Anyway, I wanted to say -- what really strikes me about Elektra is that it’s probably the place where Miller goes in hardest on politics. Martha Washington has more of a plot basis in it, but it’s... I dunno... cartoonier there? Or something. In this comic it’s just so goddamn raw and twisted and ugly, so brutal. And what stands out to me is that Miller’s able to maintain his stance, his -- honestly, nihilistic -- reserve of judgment. It’s all fucked, there’s not any right to the wrongs. Which, when the wrongs are this front and center and this disturbing, is really horrible. And more than that, there’s absolutely no sense of moral outrage at the innocent lives lost or the manipulation and lies, the threats of mutually assured destruction. It’s just fact, and Miller’s too... too something to put forth anything but reportage on it. On one hand that’s a pretty admirable instance of narrative restraint, like can you imagine say, Clowes or Crumb or any of the other “culturally relevant” mass market cartoonists holding back and just presenting this black a view of America without condemning it? But on the other hand it’s so cold and futile that it becomes meaningless, just bodies and not lives. I don’t know if Miller was truly that unsentimental about humanity, if he was fucked up on a shit-ton of drugs, if he was just totally shellshocked by the times he was living in -- probably all three at once -- but it’s riveting, and very uncomfortable to read.
SW: That stance is really what I love so much about this book - which, even in these two guy’s body of work, is the most nihilistic, most ginger about the matter-of-fact position of “we’re all fucked” they put forth. I don’t know, sentimentality in satire is poison in everything that isn’t Twain or Vonnegut, right? Elektra Assassin is really the Dr. Strangelove of the 80s for me - I mean that last page is so giddy and amazing. I’d rather laugh at this stuff, I guess.
MS: Than feel it? I guess the book’s creators would too, and I mean... I think it’s probably only in looking back that the inability to process one’s times from a humanistic standpoint, as opposed to Miller and Sienkiewicz’s sarcastic one, looks like any kind of a failing. (I wonder how Chappelle’s Show is gonna seem in 2032?) But the fact is that we -- or I, anyway -- look at the middle bits of the comic, the really nasty spy-game, nuclear-threat, splatterpunk scenes that just compound and compound for hundreds of pages before they get any kind of resolution and feel like it’s all just...
I dunno. I think some things demand a moral compass -- not saying that there’s one correct one, but I think that’s an important element to a fully rounded story that countenances the kind of deep-black realities this one does. Without something “good”, or at least “acceptable” or “worth preserving” or “appealing”, all the fighting is really exhausting. Not to say it’s valueless -- I like a good workout as much as anybody -- but there is something it lacks, something that could have made it a better or at least a more ideologically full work.
SW: I don’t know, I’d say that meaner, dismissive approach is sometimes the best hot knife to the point - (and Arrested Development? Totally the best critique about the Iraq War. Not joking) - I’d make the argument that in not taking a moral outlook, that is a moral outlook. Like... Alex Cox’s work, where he will go out of his way to thwart the emotional reward because the point is absolutely horrible and by frustrating the audience he’s drawing attention to it.
MS: I get it. I mean, this is a subjective problem I have as a reader, not something I can even make a case for as an objective problem with the work. It’s great satire, and who sez it has to be more? Not me. I mean, you won’t find a bigger Dada fan than I am, and that shit is all about meaninglessness, the human right not to take a stand but for destruction. BUT, Dada was about destroying until even destruction had been wiped from the earth, while Miller and Sienkiewicz show no such sophistication of ideas. They’re just in it for the fire. Which, again, is fine, and hey -- all action comics should carry such directness of precept! That said, though, when the literal END OF THE WORLD AND ALL HUMANITY is the logical conclusion of the fire you’re playing with -- and it is here, that’s a scene we see happening -- it’s too adolescent for me, too “clueless teenager” to just flip your hair back and rail another line and go fuck it, maybe we should all just die then.
SW: Well I think you’re getting at a good point there -- which is that (transition gears squealing) Elektra Assassin is a good example of Best Broken Comic Ever Made. Where it works as a whole because of how disjointed, stilted, mid-growth-spurt a work it is. Totally an adolescent approach to most of the material, even as scene-to-scene it hits these amazing heights of sophistication in storytelling or even character, but there is no consistency. Not of tone, not of perspective - which is probably because of the insane process of making it but also it has to be that this a comic that was “about” something but they weren’t quite sure what until the very end. The politics don’t just shift over Millers career - they shift from issue to issue, slowly becoming a bigger element where in the other stuff he did at this time period that element was either there or it wasn’t. Here it’s showing up like a spasm eventually overtaking the text.
MS: That’s a really interesting thing to bring up, because it’s like the flawed side of something we were praising about the comic earlier. That tonal inconsistency that works so well as the inside-psyche impressions of a mental patient or a paranoid spy at the end of his rope -- it just doesn’t work to deliver a message, does it? It’s not focused enough. This comic is a raging success as an aesthetic object, and even as something totally black and wrong and nihilistic... but it really really does want to say something more about the world it lives in, and it just can’t do both things at once. You need legitimate hope for the future to even bother about imparting any message, and if Miller and Sienkiewicz have any, they’re certainly not putting it on display here. Even Sienkiewicz’s art changing issue to issue, sometimes evolving between the beginning of one issue and the end -- there’s no solid footing for readers to stand on, which is both a great virtue and an ultimate failing.
SW: It is total chaos. Which is why I think that it’s so vital and alive because it’s like the ghost of the creator’s attempt at a much better comic that would have been less of a mess but also less engaging. Its aggravating a lot of times to read this comic, but it’s also shocking at how certain scenes or layouts are still cutting edge 25 years later, and I don’t think that you can get one without the other. It needs to be a failure.
MS: Yeah, and in a way that’s where the very humanity of it comes through strongest. The inability to process any of it into a real engaging answer, or even an appropriately indignant question. In life there are heroes who can do those things, but most of the humans end up doing exactly what Miller and Sienkiewicz do and just give up, play some video games. (Does this comic remind you of shit like Doom and Metal Slug too?)
SW: Not really, but that’s because my video game history begins and ends with Street Fighter. I always thought of it as like a Shinya Tsukamoto/Takashi Miike movie, just noise and fucked-up kinks. Or maybe Mr. Freedom (which is maybe the ultimate take on political nihilism), but I don’t think that Miller was directly influenced by that until Dark Knight Strikes Again.
MS: Yeah, though who knows? That guy brought more of the arcane into American comics than just about anybody else. Manga? That shit was not on the shelves at Borders when Ronin came out.
SW: Corto Maltese in DKR!
MS: I know! And nobody gets that even now!
Talking about politics, it is really interesting -- especially given where the guy ended up, and the lack of hope or future this comic presents so strongly -- how ambivalently Miller treats “traditional values” in this comic. There’s that whole long scene in issue 3 where the golden dream of house and kids and family is visualized as the literal psychological domination and brainwashing of a woman by a man, and the opening scenes in Latin America are hardly set in the idyllic land of banana pickers who just want democracy that Reagan had sold just enough of the populace on. It’s like Miller knows all the “American Dream” stuff that basically forms the backbone of a lot of rightist thinking is built on the back of exploitation and CIA skullduggery. That scene with the institution of the American family being dragged through the mud is the most combatatively “liberal” thing Miller ever wrote in a lot of ways.
SW: Well, it is interesting that he tackles all the major points of classical American institutions - Hollywood, institutional medicine, religion, family, politics in control, politics in electorate, and the C.I.A. (which is shown through the ultra-cartoonish ultra-techy SHIELD), organized crime. And each of them to a one are dismissed quickly and then either left by the wayside or mocked for the duration.
MS: Or -- as in the case of SHIELD -- presented almost exactly has they had been before, in this superkool cartoon version of reality that takes on a more sinister cast only because it shares pages with all this political horror. Just as Max Fleischer animation starts looking really grotesque when Sienkiewicz’s protege Al Columbia holds it up next to some terrifying bad-acid monsters in Pim and Francie, so does Jim Steranko’s awesome techno-fetishism look almost ridiculously simplistic and naive when Miller simply juxtaposes it with the political reality of actual nuclear weapons, actual military bureaucracy, actual death.
SW: I think that juxtaposition is what creates a lot of the best moments - the “childlike” style of Elektra’s flashbacks in the first issue only work because of how Egon Schiele the rest of the issue is, and a lot of the humor in the last couple issues comes from Sienkiewicz’s realistic draftsmanship applied to death dwarfs in Fantomas masks and a guy walking around with a bloody knife in his face.
MS: God, this is such a surrealistic comic book. It’s always so strange to me when Miller goes in on some humor, because it’s... I mean, I never laugh at that stuff. It’s like his humor just lays down this layer of weirdness under the plot mechanics, it’s so byzantine and strangely written all the time.
SW: Oh yeah, byzantine is a perfect word for this book. I dunno, I do think Miller can be funny but in this book it’s totally a morbid sneer. Like, DKSA is pretty damn funny. The first Sin City is INSANELY funny.
MS: It’s that dissonance between Miller and Sienkiewicz’s intent again. I bet Miller would have caricatured those weird dwarves really differently.
SW: The question comes up - did Miller even write them as dwarves? That’s a Sienkiewicz thing, or at least it feels like it is. But I see what you’re saying - I don’t think 75% of these scenes could have ever been drawn by Miller. They just wouldn’t work because of that element of bigfoot in his work, that weird physicality to the Daredevil stuff would have ruined even the characters. Garret needs to be that static figure.
MS: Yeah, totally; because this comic is in large part about the beauty of violence, both in terms of the in-story stuff like the elegance and refinement of Elektra’s ability to kill, and in the larger sense that in this world, getting pissed enough to blow things up is basically the only real act of humanity one can take. Sienkiewicz sells it so well -- and that really is not an easy thing to sell. It couldn’t hardly have been anyone else drawing this book. I feel like even the most elegant black-line artist, like even if Hal Foster had drawn this stuff, it would have just been too crude, too simplistic, too monstrous. With Sienkiewicz you end up just looking into the dull, smeary orange explosions and cutting blue laser beams and the content just slips away, and you can contemplate something really beautiful, something incredibly pleasant and soothing to the eye.
And then you take it in as story again, and oh shit! It’s dudes in jet packs getting their hands chopped off!
SW: Well, even if you just want to think about the other collaborators Miller had - Darrow on this book would have been too much, like a sandblaster telling you a story,and everyone else is too damn clean and consistent. Philosophically, it really does strive for that Sam Peckinpah, Bruce Lee, “violence is the only expression of life” point. Totally over-grasps for it a dozen times over, but it is really rare for an action comic to come out and take that position instead of the Kirby school of violence-as-a-problem-we-love-to-watch. That’s not a position that even the most cavalierly violent storytellers like to make, let alone embrace the way that this book does.
MS: Yeah, Miller is one of the very few superhero creators who isn’t ashamed of violence in some way or another, who truly seems to understand its power AND not really be interested in fighting against it. (It seems to me that perspective’s way more common in alt-comix, actually -- when guys like Johnny Ryan or Ben Marra or even Clowes do violence they just DO it and there’s no apology.)
But there really is another aspect to a lot of it, places where the intersection of Miller’s cut-ups and Sienkiewicz’s tendency toward pictorial abstraction create something that really takes an effort to view figuratively, to look into and even see as human-on-human violence. A lot of the less physical fight scenes, stuff like the helicopter chases, are really more like comics tone poems than anything else. Like meditations on violent themes rather than actual action comics. Just these hot colors and razor words spinning around not doing anything but existing, and the specifics of what’s going on are very tenuously weaving in and out of focus.
SW: I think with those guys it is abstracted just a little bit more? Maybe not Marra. Like I think Johnny Ryan is more interested in the act of drawing violence than the violence itself. “Meditation on violent themes” is spot-on, I’d say. They are totally set pieces in the classical action sense but they are disconnected from their conventional delivery.
MS: Yeah, I think that’s why Sienkiewicz can’t really nail any of his big fist-to-fist fight sequences, and probably even why he uses more typical Marvel blocking in the overt non-fighting physical-action material. He isn’t really interested in the choreography or adrenal feeling of violence, the things that obsess Miller. It’s a much broader, more abstract impression he’s going for, and the meat and impact that obsess just so many action cartoonists aren’t really even in his headspace very much.
SW: Yeah, Miller is a very physically concerned guy. He’s the guy who's drawn a twelve page car chase for fun (which for me means that he could do interviews draped in an American flag and spewing racial slurs and I’d still be a fan. THERE’S A FUCKING 12 PAGE CAR CHASE IN FAMILY VALUES), and Sienkiewicz was done with that stuff after all those years on Moon Knight and New Mutants.
MS: Talking about Sienkiewicz’s intent -- I’m kind of wondering if he ever wanted to draw something in this comic that was just ugly, you know? Something with no redeeming aesthetic value whatsoever. Because even though the HR Giger pastiches and the weird truncated action make you feel kinda strange inside, they’re still very beautiful to look at. But then there are panels where it really is just this dull paint smearing all over the place, and matched with some of the basest, cruelest and most nihilistic satirical writing comics have ever seen. Do you think he ever just wanted to make something that looked bad? And if so, did he succeed at any point?
SW: I don’t know, that seems like it’s mis-representing Sienkiewicz a little bit. If it’s meant to be ugly I think it would feel more intentionally destructive to any attempt reading - which I think is something you can say about Sienkiewicz’s other comics. I really do think that all of the ugly panels and odd tones - I think that those panels still convey exactly what you need in that moment as a reader. For a comic that the go-to descriptor is “fragmented” each page is absolutely crystal clear to what is happening.
MS: I guess that line of questioning really brings us into this whole academic-arts thing about aesthetics and “what is beauty”, “what is ugliness” too, huh? Like, you’re totally right -- Sienkiewicz, for all that his art might strike odd tones and harmonize with Miller’s writing strangely, never goes totally off the script into incomprehensibility. I mean more like, did he ever just draw a panel thinking man, I really want this panel to look like a piece of shit, you know? But then it’s the kid-drawing style and the impressionistic color stuff... and that stuff does kinda look like shit out of context, but it just makes this book richer. And even further out of context, when we’re just talking about visual work outside of the mainstream arena or the genre arena, there’s plenty of good comics art that looks like kids’ drawings, honestly. But Sienkiewicz using that style INSIDE the mainstream is interesting, and it seems like it has a lot greater potential to be “ugly” or “wrong”. I bet a lot of Miller fanboys bought this book and thought that it was ugly!
SW: Maybe a better word is “grotesque”? Because while it’s sometimes visually grotesque it’s also a grotesque satire on Miller’s part - the two of them together has a lot of similarities to editorial cartooning as much as it has with Terry Southern.
MS: Sure, that works. And that’s a word that gets at both Miller’s hardheaded nasty approach and Sienkiewicz’s grander and more rarefied way of doing things. They can both definitely be called grotesque. The comic’s whole world -- the fashion, the A-bombs, the mind control, the slightly skeezy experimantation... I mean, even its identity as a part of corporate comics... it’s all grotesque!
Probably the capper to that grotesquerie is the last few issues, where one of the Bad Super Spies actually gets the kind of enhanced-humanity superpowers that are so casually presented in all the other Marvel comics. Even Miller himself has worked on characters with these godlike abilities and done it pretty straight (as in his Wolverine series) but here it’s this truly terrifying thing, like it is in Alan Moore’s Miracleman. It’s interesting because there’s the long sequence pretty much smack in the middle of the comic about the total destructive power of the atom bomb, and after that everyone running around on the pages seems so small for a while... but then at the end everything kind of gets reoriented with the introduction of superpowers. Suddenly the fight scenes really matter, because they involve the same kind of apocalyptic destructive force as the scenes about the Bomb do.
SW: And Miller goes out of his way to tell the reader that these powers are in the hands of dangerous, violent people. Perry is explicitly mentioned as a rapist, pedophile and murderer even before he makes his deal with the devil. There is a good argument going on in the Extechop characters that the kind of capacity to kill is given to only the most monstrous people - which is exactly the kind of intelligent thinking that Miller and Moore would put into their “grim+gritty” material that eventually became a shorthand - you know “team of mercenaries/criminals” is totally a 90s thing when it was originally introduced it had a specific job to do.
MS: That’s a really interesting point about the way it became shorthand -- usually when I think about that happening in comics it’s on the visual end of things and it kinda evolves the form, like how Kirby dots code for this whole manner of comics nowadays. But when you turn the writing Miller and Moore were doing in the mid-late ‘80s into a shorthand it just doesn’t work. Comics like this one (and like Miracleman, Big Numbers, et cetera) really can’t be “shorthand-ed” because the thing that makes them what they are is their concerted, long-form, deep-focus exploration of character and symbol. You can’t make a shorthand, an ideogram, an icon out of this stuff to code for what it is -- because what makes it special is the complexity, the irreducibility. Take even half an issue of character development and metaphorical progression away from this comic and it becomes a vastly inferior thing.
SW: I think the big problem with creating a shorthand out of the best 80s work - particularly Miller, Sienkiewicz, Moore, etc - is that the developments they made are stylistic developments, but they are also the expansion of earlier shorthand. Try and progress it further and it comes to a creative dead end -- reading any interview with Miller or Moore circa 89-90 and you can see they’re looking for ways out of the corner they’ve painted the industry into. For Miller it was simplifying what he did and for Moore it was dodging the question completely for half a decade and falling in love with the Silver Age again.
MS: Yep. And the way the industry did end up getting out of that painted-in corner, I think, was slowly creating a new mainstream, the bookstore-market graphic novels that everyone’s realized have now in turn created their own trap for themselves, their own overreachings and decadences. Now as then, we’re past the height of a boom time, locked into a shrinking market, and nobody really knows where to go. This is a comic that really speaks to what we’re in right now, because -- though Grant Morrison may possibly have made them more avant-garde and entertaining -- superhero comics have never, for two decades of trying, gotten to a higher level of sophistication than this one did. It took something new to reach beyond. This comic here is really the capstone of the Dark Knight/Watchmen era: the most writerly scripting, the meanest satire, the most innovative artwork. And then to get better comics had to go somewhere else entirely. I gotta say, pal -- here we are again.
SW: Which is great because it’s such a crude fuck-you to everything. I don’t really know if you can use this as a capstone to an era of superhero comics, though, any more than you could use American Flagg or Ronin as the start of that era - it is barely a superhero comic. Being published by Marvel and having an appearance by Nick Fury, yeah kinda. I mean, Born Again is a superhero comic, even Martha Washington is a superhero comic, but Elektra Assassin is absolutely not. The shrinking martket aspect - well it’s hard to argue but I think it’s a whole new place for comics because there is no Image boom around the corner, there is nothing to replace the vacuum.
MS: How the hell can we know? I doubt anyone though action comics would ever break out of the Big Two hegemony in ‘89, but it happened! As to whether or not this book is superhero comics -- that’s kinda what I mean, actually. Like, Watchmen and Dark Knight were undeniably expanding the sphere of what that genre could do and be, and then Born Again maybe expands it a little further, and the end of Moore’s Swamp Thing a little further, and on and on, and then we get this, and it breaks. Or the elastic that forms the boundary snaps back. What took the form, the medium itself father than this, was the stuff that took up the intelligence and innovation but dropped even the pretense of superheroism. Hell of a lot of ‘90s alt-cartoonists mention Sienkiewicz as a big early influence. I mean, Big Numbers came after Elektra and it’s a lot closer to what the comic actually was than any black-ops hero book that hit in the early ‘90s. Within hero comics I really do think this is the ending of something because from American Flagg to Ronin to Watchmen to this... the flow is so organic, but like we talked about before there isn’t really any superhero stuff that takes up where Miller and Sienkiewicz leave off. After this everything goes either Image or nostalgist for five years.
SW: I dunno man I really think anything I’m going to say about the “future of comics” is going to be stupid. I hate this line of thinking because cramming this stuff into a narrative always has to do backflips to ignore so much in order for it to make sense.
MS: Sure, but at the same time everybody was and is out there at the stores (or on Amazon now, I guess) reading each other’s comics, getting pumped on what their contemporaries put on the page and then making work to speak to that raised bar. That’s one of the things about comics that’s so beautiful -- it’s so easy to see that kind of narrative progression because we know Miller WAS looking at Kirby, and then he DID see Moebius, and then Sienkiewicz saw Miller and upped his game from Neal Adams ripoffs... it all really happened that way, you know?
SW: Yeah, and Alan Moore and Mike Allred both read Love and Rockets and learned completely opposite lessons from them. I just think that whenever you start doing that Beatles Begat Stones Begat blah blah of comics it’s too easy to forget that The Arealist exists. It’s too easy to say that all these things happened in a row and so it could happen again. Basically, I think that no one is going to drop an Elektra Assassin at the big two (or anywhere) anytime soon, because it’s not a scientific process. I don’t want to say “fluke” because that’s stupid but I’m 100% sure that something this chaotic isn’t going to magically appear now that mainstream comics are in a bad place again. I think there’s something unique to the way that this book was made that’s close to that famous, kind of stupid assessment of how to break into the comics industry (by Denny O’Neill? I have no idea) that once someone figured out how to make an Elektra Assassin they made sure that no one could ever do it again because it shows a flaw in the construction of the place as a whole.
MS: Totally. Everything that’s interesting in this book is born of frustration -- with politics, with fashion, with art, whatever -- but most specifically, the frustration of two creators whose ambition and abilities were straining against the final point at which that the milieu they were working in could contain them. There’s such an overflowing wealth of innovation in Elektra, but none of it has the glowing, positive “creating new languages” feel of prime Kirby/Steranko Marvel innovation. It’s two guys pacing around a rat trap and screaming different incantations at the walls, fuming about how they can’t get out. And it’s so beautiful and so powerful, but I have this comic on fuckin’ Baxter paper in stapled pamphlets with an Epic/Marvel logo on them, and I keep them in bags and boards in a longbox. They wanted to be so much more than that. But what else can I do with the things?
ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN
by Frank Miller, Bill Sienkiewicz, and the divine hand of the comics gods. Marvel/Epic, 1986-87.
MS: So this fuckin’ comic. Okay. I feel like there are so many books people see as being emblematic of 1980s superhero comics, but that’s only because the market went the way it did. Claremont’s X-Men into Watchmen... Simonson’s Thor into early Sandman... and for sure, Frank Miller’s own Daredevil into Dark Knight Returns. But those comics are just the threads people picked up on, and as the stuff was coming out none of it was really much more emblematic than anything else. It takes a lineage springing from a book for it to really leave a footprint in its time period like that, to mark a certain point in comics history as its own. Nobody picked up where Elektra Assassin left off. Really, nobody even picked up where it started, except maybe Miller’s opposite number Alan Moore in his own Bill Sienkiewicz collab Brought To Light.
This is kind of a weird thing -- but it seems to me that one of the reasons Elektra didn’t really get internalized by comics and end up marking its moment in time the way so many other “slightly mature superhero” comics of the ‘80s did is because it was already such a perfect encapsulation of the world that produced it, no sphere of influence necessary. I mean, cyberpunk weirdness, fully intense Reaganist political underpinnings, and god, the look of the thing! We’re at a moment in pop culture where me saying Bill Sienkiewicz draws hella ‘80s is something people will know I mean as a compliment, right? The pastel tones, the slightly washed-out cocaine focus, and man, the fashion! It’s just so right there in its time -- honestly, more than pretty much any other hero comic I can think of offhand is. In Watchmen, in Dark Knight -- and in the ‘60s-hip Marvel stuff and the flavor-of-the-moment ‘90s Image books too, there’s always these imagined trappings, this fantasy world keeping the world outside the window at bay. Here? No. This is a comic about a pretty crazy moment in modern America, and it’s just got all this super-weirdness thrown in to... to fuck with us, I think, honestly.
SW: Oh absolutely. And done for Miller and Sienkiewicz to fuck with each other, and each of them to fuck with their peers. There are definitely post-Elektra Assassin comics, though, there are big ones. And I think I read all of them before I read Assassin -- Joe Casey and Ladronn’s first story in their run on Cable, Sienkiewicz’s own Stray Toasters, every Dave McKean comic, every David Mack comic (both of those guys always felt like they were less enervating versions of Sienkiewicz once I got around to reading the real deal), and of course Alan Moore’s biggest failure Big Numbers. The encapsulation of the 80s - you could argue that the insane, 3-script process that created it, rewriting it twice then again when Sienkiewicz’s pages came in seemingly done from a completely different script. There is the Burroughs idea of the cut-up, and if it applies to any comic book it’s not going to be Morrison’s intentional attempts at it or Jim Woodring magically divining something through process. No it would be Miller and Sienkiewicz just struggling to work together, forcing unintelligible chaos into something that tells a story. So it being exactly what we’d want the time period it came from to be represented as? That makes sense to me.
MS: Word. And I’m glad you mentioned Burroughs, cause he’s so huge in this comic. More than his spirit hanging over the formal play, he really bleeds into Miller’s writing style to a pretty shocking degree. I mean, plenty of comics writers use lots of -- dashes, -- but in Elektra Miller seems to be specifically aware of the way Burroughsian interrupts could be used to push a comics narrative forward. He’s fully attuned to Burroughs, the same rhythms, the same tone. Which is quite shocking for a superhero comic, really. I mean, that’s the dude who does books about guys ejaculating and shit! But Miller just goes in there and scrapes out everything of Burroughs that can be rendered into comics form, and takes plenty of his piss and vinegar too.
People really seem to forget this period of Miller’s career because it was the time when he wasn’t drawing anything -- but I think that ‘86 to ‘89 or so is definitely when he did his most accomplished comics writing. His early-’80s stuff and of course his modern stuff are so jacked into that noir-y, Raymond Chandler voice that's gone into self-parody at this point. But on Assassin he’s just as focused on the blurry, abstract, razorblade Burroughs experimentalism, on chopping up his words and seeing how far into incomprehensibility he can go and still have it be a narrative at all. It’s one simple thing intertwined with the other simple thing in Miller’s writing, and the fusion comes out anything but simple. The narration, the dialogue -- I mean, forget plot, forget the pacing or anything more comics-native -- the words in the balloons and the boxes are right up there with the very best the medium’s put on offer.
SW: I always thought that there was something about Sienkiewicz that brought those influences out in writers - I have to admit I haven’t gotten further than 100 pages into Gravity’s Rainbow but I know that Miller is a fan, I actually have a copy of Rainbow with his cover. But in Big Numbers and I think in the first issue of Elektra (and DKR) there are blatant Pynchon references. There’s the strange literary side of sf that both of those writers grasped onto, exactly as they were working with the same artist.
I seriously think that post-Dark Knight, Miller decided that he was going to make his name as a writer, and actually took that idea to heart. Elektra, Born Again, Year One, Love and War, Give Me Liberty, Man Without Fear, Hard Boiled - until he got massively burned by Hollywood the first time and decided that he needed to re-affirm his love of drawing. For a short period, he could go toe to toe with any other writer in comics.
MS: Yeah, and then when he came back to drawing -- and you know, thank god he did, because that guy is the only thing mainstream comics have that can hold a candle to Gary Panter -- it was like he forgot he had been writing stuff with two stylistic aspects and went back to one-dimensional noir. Oh well. I honestly wonder how involved Miller was in the visual side of these comics -- any of his comics of this period, with Siekiewicz or Mazzucchelli or Gibbons -- because they don’t really look like Frank Miller comics, do they? I mean, Siekiewicz had obviously learned the same lessons about pacing and panel size used for effect from Dark Knight that everyone else did, but beyond that this book is his show. As Born Again is Mazzucchelli’s show, et cetera. Miller the writer did not have a lot of visual stylism to him, like the way Alan Moore sticks all his artists in those nine-grids and keeps them there. Maybe Miller understood that to make a comic that was truly visually successful you have to let the guy drawing it own it. Or maybe he knew all he can do by himself is that thuggish noir stuff, and when he wanted to make a different kind of comic he got different artists.
SW: Well, in that big awkward Comics Journal Interview book Miller talks about how Sienkiewicz and Darrow kind of did whatever the hell they wanted to and Gibbons and Mazz were working pretty tightly close to his scripts. Visually, I don’t know, there are a lot of similarities in pretty much all of Miller's non-Sink/Darrow collaborations - you can tell that the same guy wrote the bathroom scene in Born Again and the fight with the dogs in Man Without Fear and the laser going off in Give Me Liberty, those scenes all operate on the same metronomic timing. But when he is given the chance to compete with an artist he does it, which is something that separates him from basically every other one of the “big” comics writers. He knows that he can draw this if he wants to, so he’s going to let his partner play, but he’s not going to make it easy for them. With Sienkiewicz, even more than Darrow, it’s a battle on the page.
MS: Yeah, he’s never written a straight out bad-looking comic, which is definitely not the case with Moore or Grant Morrison or Peter Milligan. He creates visually successful work, even when he’s not doing it with brush in hand. Though that said -- there are places in this comic where Sienkiewicz falls down and Miller himself would have been rock steady. I honestly feel the same thing with Sienkiewicz that we discussed about Steranko in our last thing, where he was just such a world-beating artist who doesn’t have too many direct descendants in modern comics. Like Steranko, he had a period of influence, no doubt -- the early ‘90s, with Sam Kieth and McKean and Simon Bisley. But none of those guys really lasted either, did they? (Unless McKean’s Fantagraphics book proves me wrong in a second, which would be sweet.) But anyway, I was thinking about why Sienkiewicz’s visual style hasn’t really survived in the way that say, Gibbons or Mazzucchelli’s has, and what hit me first while reading this was man -- Bill Sienkiewicz really can not block out an action scene that well! I’m thinking specifically of the first one in the book, with Elektra breaking out of a mental hospital and killing all the guards; the style of it is just so strong, that beautiful paint and this really stormy color. But the panel compositions themselves and the sequence they’re put in is -- gotta say -- kinda boring. And if you notice that, Sienkiewicz's problem with straight kinetic "comic book action" pops up again and again through the whole series.
SW: Oh man, don’t diss Simon Bisley. He’s so much better than McKean ever was, he just never gave a shit about anything like “art”. Put Slaine next to Cages and tell me which one is an unreadable piece of shit. Anyway, it is weird that he can’t pull that off here when his Moon Knight pages are super-kinetic, easily placed next to Miller’s own Daredevil pages. I think part of that was that Sienkiewicz placed more emphasis on the entire page looking good rather than panels, or even sequences. He is maybe the definitive pre-JH Williams artist for “page-as-unit”. Then again, there are panels like that sequence where Elektra pulls her hand just into frame and it’s covered in blood up to the wrist - which is maybe the most indelible Sienkiewicz image for me.
MS: Yeah, he gets the atmospherics of action no doubt -- and I mean, the guy is one of the most atmospheric artists ever to use the comics form -- but it’s the bangs and slams, the crude parts that Frank Miller himself does so perfectly, that he lets down on. Like, there’s this thing running through the book where talking heads describe the most bitchin’ action sequences possible. It’s totally hypnotic because Miller the writer is so on top of his game that you get pulled in and your imagination produces something deeply satisfying -- but the pages themselves? Eh, not all that much to look at. It’s like Miller wasn’t quite sure how to play to Sienkiewicz’s strengths when they started the series and took a while to really figure it out. By issue 4 or so they get going, with the chase scene through New York while everybody’s hallucinating at the same time. That’s where it starts to gel, because Sienkiewicz did impact with color changes, style changes, formalist tricks, not the typical way of drawing a really sick punching shot.
SW: Well I think that Sienkiewicz’s entire style changed between Love and War and the first issue of Elektra, and that might have caused Miller some trouble - it didn’t help that he was rewriting and resequencing the scripts without talking to Miller. I mean, there is a Jasper Johns tribute here for christ’s sakes, which isn’t something Sienkiewicz would have put in a comic even a year earlier, I don’t think. He was actually discovering how much more he could do with his skill set, and then Miller was handing him a script full of ninjas and Pynchon references. So the push and pull in those first 3 issues are definitely combative, which makes the sweet spots like Elektra’s childhood with Stick (featuring the most hilarious Wolverine cameo ever) are even sweeter.
MS: Oh man, I know. So bizarre, that whole scene. That mention of “what he could do” is important, because this comic is stuffed full of things you couldn’t ever have done in a serialized pamphlet before maybe 1986, 87. You mentioned how Sienkiewicz was doing pretty strong action sequences in Moon Knight, which was early ‘80s, heavy on the Neal Adams influence -- and printed on newsprint. Same with his New Mutants stuff a little later. The best he could do in that medium -- I’m talking medium as in "set of tools" here, not "art form" -- was get a little Ralph Steadman with his inking and keep drawing the same stuff otherwise. It wasn’t until the glossy white paper came into comics in the mid-’80s that he could do paint, do airbrush -- hell, just do raw pencils even. It’s weird; we see the “natural mode” of comics as inked Bristol with colors mechanically laid over, but how UN-natural is that laborious process? Sienkiewicz wasn’t a production man, he was an artist, and as soon as he could put raw material on the page, he did, in full effect. I mean, the originals for this comic must bear such a minimal difference to the printed product. The color is there, the pencils are there, and nothing stands between the artist’s hand and the completed piece.
Honestly, I think that puts Sienkiewicz in line way less with pretty much anybody working in mainstream comics (again, McKean and Bisley aside) and way more in line with the art-comix world, the raw-pencilers and the messy painters. CF does things with paint that remind me more of Sienkiewicz than anyone else. There’s that impulse toward purity, toward the medium on the page and nothing in the way of it. I read Stray Toasters as something that should have been published in Raw, you know? It’s deeply weird seeing that in a superheroic context, but it just barely works, this weird Frankenstein monster of a comic that doesn’t belong where it is but doesn’t quite have a way to be anything else figured out yet.
SW: Yeah, but it's so much better than anything that came out in Raw (Stray Toasters, I mean). There is definitely a post-David Lynch need for Sienkiewicz to not only go as weird and personal as he could but also pursue the mainstream of the medium, and that makes Stray Toasters so much more interesting as an object to me. Here’s this incredibly fucked up CS Lewis tribute about child abuse and we’re going to sell it next to Moonshadow and Grendel. There’s nothing like that when you discuss Spiegelman for me because it’s a far more fucked up, quixotic endeavor from the start. That’s what we call failing BIG.
MS: Ha! Well, there’s always that one Alan Moore Raw story about how inhuman Japanese people are, jeez. But yeah, I get you. I think you’re onto something when you talk about Sienkiewicz’s impulse toward the mainstream, because why the hell else would an artist like that have ended up as an inker of third-tier Marvel comics? For God’s sake! But yeah, I think you’re right. He likes drawing this stuff. You know, his career as an inker is so interesting to me, the way he just tears inferior pencillers’ stuff to shreds with that line, just slashes the christ out of them. I always thought it was out of frustration that this is where he ended up. But maybe... in a way inker is the perfect way for him to do both things -- he’s deeply embedded not just in mainstream content, but in the mainstream comics production process, and yet he still gets to put a substance down on the page and not see it messed with no matter how weird and over-regimented the coloring gets. They don’t fuck with the black. It remains.
SW: He definitely loves it, him and Frank Miller were both teenagers who showed up at Marvel and DC with their portfolios begging for jobs. But he had an aggressive growth pattern that lead him to literally outpace entire schools of comics production. He was lucky that he was working at the time he was. And I think it helped that Miller had fought so hard with printers on Ronin to get the colors right that when they got around to Elektra, Sienkiewicz knew he could force technological changes if he felt the need to. It is the definition of “cutting edge”.
MS: It’s weird that only the most advanced production process of the times could capture something way simpler than most comics art, just raw material on paper. The comics medium has grown such a bizarre, byzantine artistic process out of acquiescence to printing methods that haven’t existed for a few decades now! You can feel the friction of it in Elektra though, like there are places where Sienkiewicz will draw something that looks a little more typical of ‘80s action comics but it still just pops off the page because the paper’s so white, the painted color is so fresh. He was breaking the chain that held the look of the hero genre to what had come before, but he’s still pretty visibly indebted to it in places. Kinda cool.
SW: Did you read that interview with Kyle Baker that Seth Kushner did? Baker talks about how weird it is that thick brush line evolved in comics and how harshly people reacted when he tried to break out of that. The raw pencil moments are just amazing - the black and white photo of Elektra on Garrett’s desk? It’s the perfect application of that technique.
MS: I really do wonder how much non-superhero artists look at Sienkiewicz, because given how locked into that same antiquated production process today's genre comics are, there’s such a limited space for their artists to apply any of the stuff that really makes Elektra such a fabulous visual experience. I feel like the guy’s got WAY more to teach everyone working outside that bubble, but he’s kind of undiscovered as an influence. I see a lot of him in Frank Santoro, but then Santoro is a history guy, and part of the older generation too. I feel like when the younger art-comix kids discover Sienkiewicz he’ll just be HUGE, up there with Kirby. I really do think he’s got a moment in comics art to define that’s still waiting to happen. There are so many possibilities that only he explored. Hopefully the Kyle Baker wave that’s just starting to hit leads people in the right direction.
SW: Baker’s a little easier to grasp for a lot of people because he’s such an anarchist, and the humor influence. In order to get into Sienkiewicz when you’re young, you really need to be into the subject matter to latch on completely -- you need to be a fan of Miller or Moore basically.
MS: That’s interesting. He might be the most innovative artist to have worked almost exclusively with writers. Stray Toasters is basically an invisible book at this point, and yeah that shit is great but it doesn’t really read as well as Assassin or Big Numbers (also tough to get ahold of themselves, now that I think of it). Yeah, I always look at the guy’s career and think it really is pretty similar to Steranko -- such a massive talent, and yet he never quite put it right there for people to absorb. I mean, this comic is a masterpiece, undeniably, but it’s a collaborative masterpiece rather than Sienkiewicz at full bore.
SW: So do you think that’s a lesser thing than a solo masterpiece?
MS: Oh boy, ummm... argh, I gotta say yeah. As a comic maybe not, as long as it’s a story that tells itself well it doesn’t matter how many people work on it, but as an artwork, as the expression of a unique aesthetic, the collaborations are pretty much always going to be lacking something. Like, imagine if we only had the Lee/Kirby collabs and no Fourth World. It would still be one of comics’ most incredible bodies of work, but we’d be missing the purity of Kirby. Like we’re kinda missing pure Sienkiewicz. Not that I’d even trade this book for eight issues of a Sienkiewicz solo miniseries done at the same time or anything, because there’s so much Miller greatness in Elektra... but hypothetically, if there were a pure Sienkiewicz comic that I knew was as good as this one I’d take that over this because I think -- the interesting intersections collaborations can lead to acknowledged -- that individual expressions almost always go deeper.
SW: Yeah, but “purity”? Not as interesting to me as a true collaboration. Which this is, it isn’t a script illustrated by Sienkiewicz, it’s two artists struggling to both make their statements together. The same way that I’d say From Hell is more interesting than anything Campbell did on his own or Moore wrote for someone else. I don’t always subscribe to the idea that everyone has something to say, you know? (Even though I know Sienkiwicz did) It may seem like a strange point to make, but an artist making a pure expression isn’t always going to be their most interesting or vital work. And... Elektra is a more “Sienkiewicz” comic than Stray Toasters. Hell, there’s one better, “Hit it!” is a better Sienkiewicz comic than Elektra even.
MS: Well, sure. I’d rather Morrison’s Animal Man over a solo Chas Truog comic, ha. Yeah, From Hell, there’s a collaboration I’d take over anything else either guy’s ever done. I guess Miller and Sienkiewicz just don’t fuse as perfectly, which is interesting since they both came out of the same milieu, both with a lot of the same aesthetic concerns. I’m trying to think of why... and I guess what I come up with is that even at his most abstract and experimental Miller was interested in creating a series of hard, percussive hits -- the stabs of that cut-up style narration, the brutal action sequences that the art doesn’t always sell -- whereas Sienkiewicz was so tonal, so lush and spread out and atmospheric, with a forte in subtle shifts, extended periods of harmony and dissonance, and formalist exploration that didn’t necessarily further the plots but just nuanced them deeper and deeper. It’s really different ways of making comics, and a perfect fusion of them like Moore and Campbell get in From Hell would have been amazing, but the breach is just a little too wide....
SW: Let’s talk about the narration -- that was Miller’s style as he was leading into the book. I think when pared with Sienkiewicz, who was moving away from Miller’s syncopated style with the information shown, the narration creates this amazing version of the classic Marvel comics internal heroic monologue and actually brings it closer to both novelistic convention and human thought. I like to think that if Elektra Assassin never happened (and Love and War), if the two of them ever collaborated, I don’t think that Born Again and Year One would be as amazingly narrated as they are. For something that is Miller’s strongest proficiency as a writer, it is forged in this book.
MS: Yeah, because he had to work so hard with Sienkiewicz to sell that style, it was such a stretch -- and I don’t want to tear it down at all, they do an incredible job of bending radically different aesthetics into a collaboration that works. After the challenge of Sienkiewicz, working with Mazzucchelli, who’s really a much more like-minded artist, must have been just so easy and instinctual for Miller. This comic, though -- it’s like “Sister Ray” or something, isn’t it? Two guys with different styles blasting away as hard as they can in their own voices, halfway looking for them to intersect but also just vibing off how dissonant it can get, how actively they can work against each other.
Miller’s narration almost feels like an attempt at making comics with words alone, it’s so imagistic and punctuated, it lives so vividly within each individual panel and then moves on to something equally vivid in the next. And that’s where those talking-head action sequences are so great, because Miller’s trying to pull your mind into this visual sequence he’s obviously blocked out in great detail inside his head, and Sienkiewicz just has these caricatures on the page talking at you. It’s so head-spinning, so disorienting, you just have to surrender to the comic and let it take over. Which of course is perfect for the weird, abrasive, confrontational story that Elektra is. Ha -- when I was at the release show for the new Brian Chippendale book I heard some kid saying about Maggots, “I wanted the book to make me sick, and it never quite did.” He shoulda locked into some Elektra Assassin!
SW: If you wanted to you could say that Miller wasn’t a great writer until he worked with Sienkiewicz and he wasn’t a funny writer until he worked with Darrow. That would be mean, though. Fucking hell, it is like “Sister Ray”... Miller had this fixation in this time period on narrating from inside a diseased mind too -- so you are being constantly screamed at by someone you know is untrustworthy, which just adds to the dissonance of the words and pictures. Even when you are being told what is happening as you see it - the horrible crutch of 70s Marvel writing -- you are experiencing it from two different perspectives in-story, as well as the way the people telling the story. The two of them are turning the horrible weaknesses of the way comics are made into strengths. There is real sickness in this comic -- like, the longrunning description of Miller as anti-feminist gets super-complicated once you bring this book up because it is everything horrible about his depiction of women often on the same page as everything that is amazing about what he could do. It can accurately be described as confounding. It’s seasick, reading this book, and often you are with the characters as they are disoriented by the plot or their own thoughts.
MS: And Sienkiewicz adds so much to that with the bits of pure prettiness he lances through it. Miller’s so good at ugly -- except Ronin that’s basically his whole career, gorgeous comics about ugliness -- but Sienkiewicz, with that outside-comics aesthetic history he brings onto the page, enhances Miller’s basic template so much. The Egon Schiele pastiches in the mental institution, the scattershot greeting-card style images Elektra hallucinates as she gets kidnapped by the Great Beast, it’s never just one thing, always a combination of factors that never quite lock together. As a piece of straightup art that might be problematic, but as the outre, disturbing experience it was obviously intended as, there’s no beating it. Even the prettiness adds to the dissonance when it’s not in tune with the words.
About the truly weird misogynist aspect of the book -- yeah, it’s definitely the most complex thing Miller’s done with one of his female characters. I was realizing as I was reading it last night -- ok, the main crux of the plot involves this semi-buffoonish SHIELD agent named Garrett sort of stumbling into this psychic connection with Elektra, right? For most of the series they can hear each other’s thoughts, or more accurately they find themselves thinking one another’s thoughts. And godDAMN if “Garret” (with one 'T') isn't a cryptogram of “Miller”! He’s even drawn to LOOK like Miller in a couple panels! So even the female character Miller went deepest into, and was obviously most passionate about, never really had subjectivity as a character -- here because she’s literally having a man’s thoughts PUT INTO her head! Probably Miller’s ultimate, most conspicuous failure as a writer -- of movies, of comics, of anything -- is his inability to really write that many different characters, to differentiate his voice convincingly. This, then, is like his autocritique, a commentary on how he KNOWS he’s filling the heads and mouths of these automatons on the pages with his own psychology and words -- but dude, he’s writing them! He can’t help it! Can a man become a woman, even on the pages of a comic? Not if he’s Frank Miller!
SW: Also Miller and Sienkiewicz stop showing you the interior of Elektra’s head after the first two issues. She becomes this force of unpredictable actions, and sometimes you are told her motivations. So what you are dealing with in the beginning, which is a character piece with access into Elektra’s mind, becomes a useless priority. Because I think that Miller feels okay that he’s defined that her mind is in a lot of ways broken. So the introduction of Garrettr creates this dramatic tension that what Elektra thinks is going on may or may not actually be going on.
The autocritique -- YEAH, it is right there. There’s this weird thing about Miller where the earlier his work is the more complex it is - Ronin is totally a deconstruction of his own love of juvenalia and then there’s Assassin, where he gets to take apart the very basic element of his style, which is CHARACTER. That’s not even there in Born Again/Year One/Give Me Liberty, which are more story-focused. And then the Sin City period to now, he’s artistically maturing towards simplicity not complexity. He’s the anti-Morrison. Honing in on what he loves rather than adding to it. The weird thing about Miller is that his most fuck-you, worldbeating angry young man work is also intensely aware of it’s own rationalizations.
MS: Right. Caricature.
Annnd, that seems to me like a pretty good place to bring up politics. Miller’s always referred to as a hardline, quasi-nuts conservative, but -- I dunno, maybe it’s just that I haven’t read a whole lot of interviews with him where he speaks directly to it -- but I always felt like his politics came across as a lot more complex than that in the comics, anyway. There’s certainly no Steve Ditko agitprop, no sense of a clear right and wrong. In Elektra the same grainy, xeroxed heads stand for both the left and right of American politics -- one’s a grotesque mask of Richard Nixon, one’s a twisted JFK lookalike. And there’s certainly no attempt made to present one as better than the other. Let alone good. I think a lot of that is just the zeitgeist this comic taps into, the total hopelessness of the late ‘80s -- the crack epidemic, the bad economy, the military interventionism that somehow never made it to full-blown war but always threatened to, the creeping knowledge (in the US and UK at least) that the people who’d been put in charge were in all likelihood legitimately insane. There’s SO much paranoia to the world this comic sketches out, such a trapped feeling of hopelessness. Voting a Democrat into office just ain’t gonna do it when said Democrat is possessed by the Great Beast. And it’s not like the situation on the ground is any better.
SW: Dude, did you know that Ken Wind xerox is a self-portrait by Sienkiewicz?
MS: Whoa, I did NOT! Fuck!
SW: It’s fucking crazy because I was reading how Marvel got hate mail because people said it was a photo of Dan Quayle and Sienkiewicz had to say “no, that’s me”. Anyway, yeah - my whole thing is that Miller clearly never had a hardline pov on his politics, and you can see it shifting and becoming more of a right-wing position as he’s gotten older. Because yeah, post-9/11, the guy who created Nuke? That guy is totally going to go hawk, the guy who has spent his career struggling with that side of patriotism and reconciling that with his personal politics suddenly in a situation where he can see an identifiable “good” and “evil”. Not a surprise to me at all.
MS: I can see that. Maybe it’s just because I grew up in the GW Bush era that I so strongly identify conservatism with a pro-government view, even though historically it’s been more the opposite. Miller definitely went hawk post-911, but he was still making as much fun of the idiots in charge as he’d made of Reagan, and that was just such an offbeat stance in like 2002, 2003. God, what weird times!
Anyway, I wanted to say -- what really strikes me about Elektra is that it’s probably the place where Miller goes in hardest on politics. Martha Washington has more of a plot basis in it, but it’s... I dunno... cartoonier there? Or something. In this comic it’s just so goddamn raw and twisted and ugly, so brutal. And what stands out to me is that Miller’s able to maintain his stance, his -- honestly, nihilistic -- reserve of judgment. It’s all fucked, there’s not any right to the wrongs. Which, when the wrongs are this front and center and this disturbing, is really horrible. And more than that, there’s absolutely no sense of moral outrage at the innocent lives lost or the manipulation and lies, the threats of mutually assured destruction. It’s just fact, and Miller’s too... too something to put forth anything but reportage on it. On one hand that’s a pretty admirable instance of narrative restraint, like can you imagine say, Clowes or Crumb or any of the other “culturally relevant” mass market cartoonists holding back and just presenting this black a view of America without condemning it? But on the other hand it’s so cold and futile that it becomes meaningless, just bodies and not lives. I don’t know if Miller was truly that unsentimental about humanity, if he was fucked up on a shit-ton of drugs, if he was just totally shellshocked by the times he was living in -- probably all three at once -- but it’s riveting, and very uncomfortable to read.
SW: That stance is really what I love so much about this book - which, even in these two guy’s body of work, is the most nihilistic, most ginger about the matter-of-fact position of “we’re all fucked” they put forth. I don’t know, sentimentality in satire is poison in everything that isn’t Twain or Vonnegut, right? Elektra Assassin is really the Dr. Strangelove of the 80s for me - I mean that last page is so giddy and amazing. I’d rather laugh at this stuff, I guess.
MS: Than feel it? I guess the book’s creators would too, and I mean... I think it’s probably only in looking back that the inability to process one’s times from a humanistic standpoint, as opposed to Miller and Sienkiewicz’s sarcastic one, looks like any kind of a failing. (I wonder how Chappelle’s Show is gonna seem in 2032?) But the fact is that we -- or I, anyway -- look at the middle bits of the comic, the really nasty spy-game, nuclear-threat, splatterpunk scenes that just compound and compound for hundreds of pages before they get any kind of resolution and feel like it’s all just...
I dunno. I think some things demand a moral compass -- not saying that there’s one correct one, but I think that’s an important element to a fully rounded story that countenances the kind of deep-black realities this one does. Without something “good”, or at least “acceptable” or “worth preserving” or “appealing”, all the fighting is really exhausting. Not to say it’s valueless -- I like a good workout as much as anybody -- but there is something it lacks, something that could have made it a better or at least a more ideologically full work.
SW: I don’t know, I’d say that meaner, dismissive approach is sometimes the best hot knife to the point - (and Arrested Development? Totally the best critique about the Iraq War. Not joking) - I’d make the argument that in not taking a moral outlook, that is a moral outlook. Like... Alex Cox’s work, where he will go out of his way to thwart the emotional reward because the point is absolutely horrible and by frustrating the audience he’s drawing attention to it.
MS: I get it. I mean, this is a subjective problem I have as a reader, not something I can even make a case for as an objective problem with the work. It’s great satire, and who sez it has to be more? Not me. I mean, you won’t find a bigger Dada fan than I am, and that shit is all about meaninglessness, the human right not to take a stand but for destruction. BUT, Dada was about destroying until even destruction had been wiped from the earth, while Miller and Sienkiewicz show no such sophistication of ideas. They’re just in it for the fire. Which, again, is fine, and hey -- all action comics should carry such directness of precept! That said, though, when the literal END OF THE WORLD AND ALL HUMANITY is the logical conclusion of the fire you’re playing with -- and it is here, that’s a scene we see happening -- it’s too adolescent for me, too “clueless teenager” to just flip your hair back and rail another line and go fuck it, maybe we should all just die then.
SW: Well I think you’re getting at a good point there -- which is that (transition gears squealing) Elektra Assassin is a good example of Best Broken Comic Ever Made. Where it works as a whole because of how disjointed, stilted, mid-growth-spurt a work it is. Totally an adolescent approach to most of the material, even as scene-to-scene it hits these amazing heights of sophistication in storytelling or even character, but there is no consistency. Not of tone, not of perspective - which is probably because of the insane process of making it but also it has to be that this a comic that was “about” something but they weren’t quite sure what until the very end. The politics don’t just shift over Millers career - they shift from issue to issue, slowly becoming a bigger element where in the other stuff he did at this time period that element was either there or it wasn’t. Here it’s showing up like a spasm eventually overtaking the text.
MS: That’s a really interesting thing to bring up, because it’s like the flawed side of something we were praising about the comic earlier. That tonal inconsistency that works so well as the inside-psyche impressions of a mental patient or a paranoid spy at the end of his rope -- it just doesn’t work to deliver a message, does it? It’s not focused enough. This comic is a raging success as an aesthetic object, and even as something totally black and wrong and nihilistic... but it really really does want to say something more about the world it lives in, and it just can’t do both things at once. You need legitimate hope for the future to even bother about imparting any message, and if Miller and Sienkiewicz have any, they’re certainly not putting it on display here. Even Sienkiewicz’s art changing issue to issue, sometimes evolving between the beginning of one issue and the end -- there’s no solid footing for readers to stand on, which is both a great virtue and an ultimate failing.
SW: It is total chaos. Which is why I think that it’s so vital and alive because it’s like the ghost of the creator’s attempt at a much better comic that would have been less of a mess but also less engaging. Its aggravating a lot of times to read this comic, but it’s also shocking at how certain scenes or layouts are still cutting edge 25 years later, and I don’t think that you can get one without the other. It needs to be a failure.
MS: Yeah, and in a way that’s where the very humanity of it comes through strongest. The inability to process any of it into a real engaging answer, or even an appropriately indignant question. In life there are heroes who can do those things, but most of the humans end up doing exactly what Miller and Sienkiewicz do and just give up, play some video games. (Does this comic remind you of shit like Doom and Metal Slug too?)
SW: Not really, but that’s because my video game history begins and ends with Street Fighter. I always thought of it as like a Shinya Tsukamoto/Takashi Miike movie, just noise and fucked-up kinks. Or maybe Mr. Freedom (which is maybe the ultimate take on political nihilism), but I don’t think that Miller was directly influenced by that until Dark Knight Strikes Again.
MS: Yeah, though who knows? That guy brought more of the arcane into American comics than just about anybody else. Manga? That shit was not on the shelves at Borders when Ronin came out.
SW: Corto Maltese in DKR!
MS: I know! And nobody gets that even now!
Talking about politics, it is really interesting -- especially given where the guy ended up, and the lack of hope or future this comic presents so strongly -- how ambivalently Miller treats “traditional values” in this comic. There’s that whole long scene in issue 3 where the golden dream of house and kids and family is visualized as the literal psychological domination and brainwashing of a woman by a man, and the opening scenes in Latin America are hardly set in the idyllic land of banana pickers who just want democracy that Reagan had sold just enough of the populace on. It’s like Miller knows all the “American Dream” stuff that basically forms the backbone of a lot of rightist thinking is built on the back of exploitation and CIA skullduggery. That scene with the institution of the American family being dragged through the mud is the most combatatively “liberal” thing Miller ever wrote in a lot of ways.
SW: Well, it is interesting that he tackles all the major points of classical American institutions - Hollywood, institutional medicine, religion, family, politics in control, politics in electorate, and the C.I.A. (which is shown through the ultra-cartoonish ultra-techy SHIELD), organized crime. And each of them to a one are dismissed quickly and then either left by the wayside or mocked for the duration.
MS: Or -- as in the case of SHIELD -- presented almost exactly has they had been before, in this superkool cartoon version of reality that takes on a more sinister cast only because it shares pages with all this political horror. Just as Max Fleischer animation starts looking really grotesque when Sienkiewicz’s protege Al Columbia holds it up next to some terrifying bad-acid monsters in Pim and Francie, so does Jim Steranko’s awesome techno-fetishism look almost ridiculously simplistic and naive when Miller simply juxtaposes it with the political reality of actual nuclear weapons, actual military bureaucracy, actual death.
SW: I think that juxtaposition is what creates a lot of the best moments - the “childlike” style of Elektra’s flashbacks in the first issue only work because of how Egon Schiele the rest of the issue is, and a lot of the humor in the last couple issues comes from Sienkiewicz’s realistic draftsmanship applied to death dwarfs in Fantomas masks and a guy walking around with a bloody knife in his face.
MS: God, this is such a surrealistic comic book. It’s always so strange to me when Miller goes in on some humor, because it’s... I mean, I never laugh at that stuff. It’s like his humor just lays down this layer of weirdness under the plot mechanics, it’s so byzantine and strangely written all the time.
SW: Oh yeah, byzantine is a perfect word for this book. I dunno, I do think Miller can be funny but in this book it’s totally a morbid sneer. Like, DKSA is pretty damn funny. The first Sin City is INSANELY funny.
MS: It’s that dissonance between Miller and Sienkiewicz’s intent again. I bet Miller would have caricatured those weird dwarves really differently.
SW: The question comes up - did Miller even write them as dwarves? That’s a Sienkiewicz thing, or at least it feels like it is. But I see what you’re saying - I don’t think 75% of these scenes could have ever been drawn by Miller. They just wouldn’t work because of that element of bigfoot in his work, that weird physicality to the Daredevil stuff would have ruined even the characters. Garret needs to be that static figure.
MS: Yeah, totally; because this comic is in large part about the beauty of violence, both in terms of the in-story stuff like the elegance and refinement of Elektra’s ability to kill, and in the larger sense that in this world, getting pissed enough to blow things up is basically the only real act of humanity one can take. Sienkiewicz sells it so well -- and that really is not an easy thing to sell. It couldn’t hardly have been anyone else drawing this book. I feel like even the most elegant black-line artist, like even if Hal Foster had drawn this stuff, it would have just been too crude, too simplistic, too monstrous. With Sienkiewicz you end up just looking into the dull, smeary orange explosions and cutting blue laser beams and the content just slips away, and you can contemplate something really beautiful, something incredibly pleasant and soothing to the eye.
And then you take it in as story again, and oh shit! It’s dudes in jet packs getting their hands chopped off!
SW: Well, even if you just want to think about the other collaborators Miller had - Darrow on this book would have been too much, like a sandblaster telling you a story,and everyone else is too damn clean and consistent. Philosophically, it really does strive for that Sam Peckinpah, Bruce Lee, “violence is the only expression of life” point. Totally over-grasps for it a dozen times over, but it is really rare for an action comic to come out and take that position instead of the Kirby school of violence-as-a-problem-we-love-to-watch. That’s not a position that even the most cavalierly violent storytellers like to make, let alone embrace the way that this book does.
MS: Yeah, Miller is one of the very few superhero creators who isn’t ashamed of violence in some way or another, who truly seems to understand its power AND not really be interested in fighting against it. (It seems to me that perspective’s way more common in alt-comix, actually -- when guys like Johnny Ryan or Ben Marra or even Clowes do violence they just DO it and there’s no apology.)
But there really is another aspect to a lot of it, places where the intersection of Miller’s cut-ups and Sienkiewicz’s tendency toward pictorial abstraction create something that really takes an effort to view figuratively, to look into and even see as human-on-human violence. A lot of the less physical fight scenes, stuff like the helicopter chases, are really more like comics tone poems than anything else. Like meditations on violent themes rather than actual action comics. Just these hot colors and razor words spinning around not doing anything but existing, and the specifics of what’s going on are very tenuously weaving in and out of focus.
SW: I think with those guys it is abstracted just a little bit more? Maybe not Marra. Like I think Johnny Ryan is more interested in the act of drawing violence than the violence itself. “Meditation on violent themes” is spot-on, I’d say. They are totally set pieces in the classical action sense but they are disconnected from their conventional delivery.
MS: Yeah, I think that’s why Sienkiewicz can’t really nail any of his big fist-to-fist fight sequences, and probably even why he uses more typical Marvel blocking in the overt non-fighting physical-action material. He isn’t really interested in the choreography or adrenal feeling of violence, the things that obsess Miller. It’s a much broader, more abstract impression he’s going for, and the meat and impact that obsess just so many action cartoonists aren’t really even in his headspace very much.
SW: Yeah, Miller is a very physically concerned guy. He’s the guy who's drawn a twelve page car chase for fun (which for me means that he could do interviews draped in an American flag and spewing racial slurs and I’d still be a fan. THERE’S A FUCKING 12 PAGE CAR CHASE IN FAMILY VALUES), and Sienkiewicz was done with that stuff after all those years on Moon Knight and New Mutants.
MS: Talking about Sienkiewicz’s intent -- I’m kind of wondering if he ever wanted to draw something in this comic that was just ugly, you know? Something with no redeeming aesthetic value whatsoever. Because even though the HR Giger pastiches and the weird truncated action make you feel kinda strange inside, they’re still very beautiful to look at. But then there are panels where it really is just this dull paint smearing all over the place, and matched with some of the basest, cruelest and most nihilistic satirical writing comics have ever seen. Do you think he ever just wanted to make something that looked bad? And if so, did he succeed at any point?
SW: I don’t know, that seems like it’s mis-representing Sienkiewicz a little bit. If it’s meant to be ugly I think it would feel more intentionally destructive to any attempt reading - which I think is something you can say about Sienkiewicz’s other comics. I really do think that all of the ugly panels and odd tones - I think that those panels still convey exactly what you need in that moment as a reader. For a comic that the go-to descriptor is “fragmented” each page is absolutely crystal clear to what is happening.
MS: I guess that line of questioning really brings us into this whole academic-arts thing about aesthetics and “what is beauty”, “what is ugliness” too, huh? Like, you’re totally right -- Sienkiewicz, for all that his art might strike odd tones and harmonize with Miller’s writing strangely, never goes totally off the script into incomprehensibility. I mean more like, did he ever just draw a panel thinking man, I really want this panel to look like a piece of shit, you know? But then it’s the kid-drawing style and the impressionistic color stuff... and that stuff does kinda look like shit out of context, but it just makes this book richer. And even further out of context, when we’re just talking about visual work outside of the mainstream arena or the genre arena, there’s plenty of good comics art that looks like kids’ drawings, honestly. But Sienkiewicz using that style INSIDE the mainstream is interesting, and it seems like it has a lot greater potential to be “ugly” or “wrong”. I bet a lot of Miller fanboys bought this book and thought that it was ugly!
SW: Maybe a better word is “grotesque”? Because while it’s sometimes visually grotesque it’s also a grotesque satire on Miller’s part - the two of them together has a lot of similarities to editorial cartooning as much as it has with Terry Southern.
MS: Sure, that works. And that’s a word that gets at both Miller’s hardheaded nasty approach and Sienkiewicz’s grander and more rarefied way of doing things. They can both definitely be called grotesque. The comic’s whole world -- the fashion, the A-bombs, the mind control, the slightly skeezy experimantation... I mean, even its identity as a part of corporate comics... it’s all grotesque!
Probably the capper to that grotesquerie is the last few issues, where one of the Bad Super Spies actually gets the kind of enhanced-humanity superpowers that are so casually presented in all the other Marvel comics. Even Miller himself has worked on characters with these godlike abilities and done it pretty straight (as in his Wolverine series) but here it’s this truly terrifying thing, like it is in Alan Moore’s Miracleman. It’s interesting because there’s the long sequence pretty much smack in the middle of the comic about the total destructive power of the atom bomb, and after that everyone running around on the pages seems so small for a while... but then at the end everything kind of gets reoriented with the introduction of superpowers. Suddenly the fight scenes really matter, because they involve the same kind of apocalyptic destructive force as the scenes about the Bomb do.
SW: And Miller goes out of his way to tell the reader that these powers are in the hands of dangerous, violent people. Perry is explicitly mentioned as a rapist, pedophile and murderer even before he makes his deal with the devil. There is a good argument going on in the Extechop characters that the kind of capacity to kill is given to only the most monstrous people - which is exactly the kind of intelligent thinking that Miller and Moore would put into their “grim+gritty” material that eventually became a shorthand - you know “team of mercenaries/criminals” is totally a 90s thing when it was originally introduced it had a specific job to do.
MS: That’s a really interesting point about the way it became shorthand -- usually when I think about that happening in comics it’s on the visual end of things and it kinda evolves the form, like how Kirby dots code for this whole manner of comics nowadays. But when you turn the writing Miller and Moore were doing in the mid-late ‘80s into a shorthand it just doesn’t work. Comics like this one (and like Miracleman, Big Numbers, et cetera) really can’t be “shorthand-ed” because the thing that makes them what they are is their concerted, long-form, deep-focus exploration of character and symbol. You can’t make a shorthand, an ideogram, an icon out of this stuff to code for what it is -- because what makes it special is the complexity, the irreducibility. Take even half an issue of character development and metaphorical progression away from this comic and it becomes a vastly inferior thing.
SW: I think the big problem with creating a shorthand out of the best 80s work - particularly Miller, Sienkiewicz, Moore, etc - is that the developments they made are stylistic developments, but they are also the expansion of earlier shorthand. Try and progress it further and it comes to a creative dead end -- reading any interview with Miller or Moore circa 89-90 and you can see they’re looking for ways out of the corner they’ve painted the industry into. For Miller it was simplifying what he did and for Moore it was dodging the question completely for half a decade and falling in love with the Silver Age again.
MS: Yep. And the way the industry did end up getting out of that painted-in corner, I think, was slowly creating a new mainstream, the bookstore-market graphic novels that everyone’s realized have now in turn created their own trap for themselves, their own overreachings and decadences. Now as then, we’re past the height of a boom time, locked into a shrinking market, and nobody really knows where to go. This is a comic that really speaks to what we’re in right now, because -- though Grant Morrison may possibly have made them more avant-garde and entertaining -- superhero comics have never, for two decades of trying, gotten to a higher level of sophistication than this one did. It took something new to reach beyond. This comic here is really the capstone of the Dark Knight/Watchmen era: the most writerly scripting, the meanest satire, the most innovative artwork. And then to get better comics had to go somewhere else entirely. I gotta say, pal -- here we are again.
SW: Which is great because it’s such a crude fuck-you to everything. I don’t really know if you can use this as a capstone to an era of superhero comics, though, any more than you could use American Flagg or Ronin as the start of that era - it is barely a superhero comic. Being published by Marvel and having an appearance by Nick Fury, yeah kinda. I mean, Born Again is a superhero comic, even Martha Washington is a superhero comic, but Elektra Assassin is absolutely not. The shrinking martket aspect - well it’s hard to argue but I think it’s a whole new place for comics because there is no Image boom around the corner, there is nothing to replace the vacuum.
MS: How the hell can we know? I doubt anyone though action comics would ever break out of the Big Two hegemony in ‘89, but it happened! As to whether or not this book is superhero comics -- that’s kinda what I mean, actually. Like, Watchmen and Dark Knight were undeniably expanding the sphere of what that genre could do and be, and then Born Again maybe expands it a little further, and the end of Moore’s Swamp Thing a little further, and on and on, and then we get this, and it breaks. Or the elastic that forms the boundary snaps back. What took the form, the medium itself father than this, was the stuff that took up the intelligence and innovation but dropped even the pretense of superheroism. Hell of a lot of ‘90s alt-cartoonists mention Sienkiewicz as a big early influence. I mean, Big Numbers came after Elektra and it’s a lot closer to what the comic actually was than any black-ops hero book that hit in the early ‘90s. Within hero comics I really do think this is the ending of something because from American Flagg to Ronin to Watchmen to this... the flow is so organic, but like we talked about before there isn’t really any superhero stuff that takes up where Miller and Sienkiewicz leave off. After this everything goes either Image or nostalgist for five years.
SW: I dunno man I really think anything I’m going to say about the “future of comics” is going to be stupid. I hate this line of thinking because cramming this stuff into a narrative always has to do backflips to ignore so much in order for it to make sense.
MS: Sure, but at the same time everybody was and is out there at the stores (or on Amazon now, I guess) reading each other’s comics, getting pumped on what their contemporaries put on the page and then making work to speak to that raised bar. That’s one of the things about comics that’s so beautiful -- it’s so easy to see that kind of narrative progression because we know Miller WAS looking at Kirby, and then he DID see Moebius, and then Sienkiewicz saw Miller and upped his game from Neal Adams ripoffs... it all really happened that way, you know?
SW: Yeah, and Alan Moore and Mike Allred both read Love and Rockets and learned completely opposite lessons from them. I just think that whenever you start doing that Beatles Begat Stones Begat blah blah of comics it’s too easy to forget that The Arealist exists. It’s too easy to say that all these things happened in a row and so it could happen again. Basically, I think that no one is going to drop an Elektra Assassin at the big two (or anywhere) anytime soon, because it’s not a scientific process. I don’t want to say “fluke” because that’s stupid but I’m 100% sure that something this chaotic isn’t going to magically appear now that mainstream comics are in a bad place again. I think there’s something unique to the way that this book was made that’s close to that famous, kind of stupid assessment of how to break into the comics industry (by Denny O’Neill? I have no idea) that once someone figured out how to make an Elektra Assassin they made sure that no one could ever do it again because it shows a flaw in the construction of the place as a whole.
MS: Totally. Everything that’s interesting in this book is born of frustration -- with politics, with fashion, with art, whatever -- but most specifically, the frustration of two creators whose ambition and abilities were straining against the final point at which that the milieu they were working in could contain them. There’s such an overflowing wealth of innovation in Elektra, but none of it has the glowing, positive “creating new languages” feel of prime Kirby/Steranko Marvel innovation. It’s two guys pacing around a rat trap and screaming different incantations at the walls, fuming about how they can’t get out. And it’s so beautiful and so powerful, but I have this comic on fuckin’ Baxter paper in stapled pamphlets with an Epic/Marvel logo on them, and I keep them in bags and boards in a longbox. They wanted to be so much more than that. But what else can I do with the things?
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