Your Wednesday Sequence 17

Amazing Spider-Man Sunday Spectacular, pages 5-6 panels 4-7. Marcos Martin.



Today I finally returned to talking about mainstream comics in the latest installment of my Robot 6 column, with an analysis of the eye-popping Marcos Martin spread above. I kinda felt like I had to: can you even believe I pulled off a Yuichi Yokoyama to Blaise Larmee to Brecht Evens hat trick on Comic Book Resources? I was looking through the book this sequence is from the other day and trying to figure out which one of the many gorgeous Martin spreads I was going to talk about when Tucker Stone was like "I love that picture where he's taking off his pants". Tucker's got an unparalleled eye for such things, folks. See it?



Look at just how ridiculously good a figure drawing that thing is, and done from what's got to be the most incredibly difficult angle possible to boot. Bird's eye view and bending over toward the camera? I just drew that pose into a comic that should be online shortly, and it took me a good four times as long to get right as any of the other ones in it. Marcos Martin is a big fat show-off, and that's why his comics are so incredible to read. There are other, more theoretical reasons that I go over in the column, which starts like this:

The basic motivating idea behind comics art is “pictures that move.” The whole point of sequence is to force readers into seeing motion between images, to position individual pictures as the captured points of larger, extended passages of movement. That said, on the printed page “pictures that move” is an obvious oxymoron. The stillness of drawn images is one of the most fundamental problems that comics have to work against, and as with other non-negotiable truths of the medium like its lack of ability to produce sound or light, pretty much every artist of note has come up with a slightly different way to overcome it. Read more

Comfort Rude

Comics wear you down. Especially when you're doing the thing as I try to do it, staying out on the edge of all the new developments and shocking challenges the medium plays host to, it's all too easy to get tired. Rawdog experimental art-on-the-page, mixed-media reinterpretations of cartooning, xerox-machine noise on printer paper... oh man, I love those things, but oh man, don't show me any of those things. I get like this from time to time. I think when we start we probably all come to comics as a place of rest and relaxation, something that can entertain us and create a little pleasance in our lives for a second. Most readers treat every single one of their interactions with the medium that way. I think that's largely because most readers are reading superhero comics, which (at best) are designed to deliver exactly what I'm talking about, hits of escape and fantasy that leave you feeling good. Such an interaction with comics is exactly what I was looking for last time I picked one out -- something I didn't have to work at, something perhaps with the tinge of nostalgia to it. For me, then, it had to be a superhero comic. It couldn't have been anything else.

When you come up reading these things you never go away entirely or for good. The fishhook of familiarity that shared universes and recognizable character dynamics places in you never comes loose completely. Even when, like me, you haven't read a modern superhero comic in the better part of a calendar year. They'll always be the comfort food, the link back to a time when comics was something new, something you hadn't figured out yet, something you didn't even realize had aspects that could be "figured out". But I think I'm part of the very last generation for whom that warm, friendly, rose-colored attachment to superhero comics exists. It's a feeling that's driven the mainstream-comics market for years, the soft blanket of buying habits, the sense of commitment and welcomeness. These days, it's the only thing keeping the things read at all. There is a blindness that comes with superhero fandom -- I've got, every comics reader I know has it -- it's the one that keeps people from realizing just how bad the stuff on the shelves these days is, that we are being served by a generation of writers that's very probably the worst of all time, and a crop of artists that's the product of the friendly comic book making companies finally getting on this whole "labor outsourcing" thing that killed all the automobile-manufacture jobs in my family.



Basically, superheroes are no longer an industry that's interested in creating new readers. You knew that? Yeah, everybody knows that. But more importantly, they're no longer placing any premium at all on creating that sense of welcome, either, the approachability in both content and method of delivery that used to make the Marvel Universe seem like something appealing for kids to get into. It's just gone. This is no longer a market that even attempts to create new participants. But you know what? They aren't gone from comics. Kids are still wild about comics, people. I'm back on the retail train and I have seen them scream for Amulet and crawl across floors on their hands and knees for Yo Gabba Gabba and Bone. When the ones who stick around go looking for something pleasant and nostalgic in a decade or two, it won't be anything with a Marvel or DC logo, it'll be the new bookstore-ready crop of well-drawn, well-considered, positive-message graphic novels. Can superheroes survive this? My money's on "no".

So yeah... I might be archaic in my clinging to spandexed demigods for warm, unchallenging comics reading, but that's what it is. The comic I chose was the recent hardcover collection of Thor Godstorm. It's an interesting book to pick off the shelves. The Alex Ross-style painted cover image is backed by a blurb exclaiming "A new enemy is empowered to battle Thor, but which old enemy is behind it all? Plus: the ominous Uroc, terror of Trolls! Guest-starring the Avengers and the Warriors Three!" Beneath the blurb is the back-cover image, a painting of Thor fighting Loki. Which old enemy, indeed. Just look at the diction of those sentences though, just think about their utter impenetrability. They speak a secret language. This is supposed to be the book's marketing, the place for it to extol its own virtues, and it boasts of nods to concepts that only those who've read a lot of things like this before will even know, let alone be caught by. It's a language that I understand, but it isn't my language per se. If this book spoke that tongue it wouldn't even have a cover image, just bold capitals spelling out THOR STEVE RUDE MIKE MIGNOLA, because those are the dudes whose artwork is in the book, and that's what sold me.



Mostly it's Steve Rude, who draws the main "Godstorm" story, in which a sentient raincloud battles Thor over three different eras. (This isn't just nostalgia comics because it's superheroes, it's one of the kinds that's actually calculated to remind readers of how sweet and innocent the stuff was back when they were kids in 1965. (My father was three years old.) As written by Kurt Busiek, it's perfect pap, the best dopey hero comic you could wish for. I wish for those a lot.) Rude is an interesting artist, with an interesting career to go with. He quit comics a while ago to focus on painting commissions. Now he's ostensibly "back", though nothing's actually been published with new work by him lately. I'm always excited to see work by Rude, because his artwork is perfectly pitched toward creating the kind of pleasant, uncomplicated and nostalgia-driven reading experience I associate with superhero comics.

Rude's work is rooted deeply in Jack Kirby, whose particular stylisms and affectations are themselves a kind of secret language for superhero comics, the codes with which stories about physical conflicts between costumed musclemen most successfully compose themselves. Pretty much every American hero comic published in the past 40 years has a basis in Kirby, but there's a basis and then there's what Rude does, which is more along the lines of reanimation. Kirby's pacing, his compositions and gestures, the way he blocked out scenes and used facial expressions to imply character -- it's all here, done with an instinctive understanding that goes past copyism. This is just how you make good hero comics, and if it ends up a derivative product that's okay, because believe it or not this is a medium that other artists have worked in before. But for all the applied knowledge brought to bear on its pages, Thor Godstorm doesn't look exactly like a Kirby comic. Rude's understanding of the Kirby style is a rather archaic one to my eyes: he isolates the nuts-and-bolts storytelling, the stylistic consistency, the clean lines and crisp solid blacks -- not the crackling power of pure images that's become the most recognizable aspect of Kirby's legacy in the wake of the new-millenium art-comix that bear his influence.



For Rude, Kirby seems to be the link to a golden past, a time when cartooning was a craft and comics was a job and even the most mercilessly professional hack could grind out a page that read perfectly. All the rough edges of Kirby, the weird bits that have become so fetishized over the past decade or so, are sanded down in Rude, replaced with something slicker and quieter and more homogenous. A distillation of Toth, Infantino, Sekowsky, Anderson, Hal Foster, even Norman Rockwell. A serene, understated figurative realism that makes the Kirby world seem a plausible one, a place where real human beings could really live. It's nostalgia as high art, the psychological image of better times past that Kirby calls up in superhero comics fans combined with a greater approachability and calm, a familiar type of comics crossbred with art that actually looks familiar, that creates pretty human figures and unthreatening environments with a few beautiful, fluid lines.

These things make Rude's work look pretty unique today, but there was a time when he was only a part of something bigger. It was probably a misfortune that Rude had his years as an exciting and hungry young genre cartoonist during the one window in time that such talent didn't end up doing long runs on bestselling superhero comics. In the 1960s and '70s, Marvel and DC were simply the only place to go, the single way to make a career of note drawing action comics. And once the artists who would go on to found Image Comics started tearing things up at the big houses in the late '80s, that became the thing to do once more. But there was a decade or so when publishing your own creator-owned mythological opus or space opera or superspy saga with a smaller house was simply how it worked, the way you were going to get rich and innovate exciting new ways of doing comics in the bargain. (Rude and writer Mike Baron opted for space opera in his gorgeous, unreadable series Nexus.) A whole wave of artists -- call them the "neoclassical" school -- participated in this era, guys who took the influence of Silver Age superhero drawing combined with a historical perspective on Pop art as fertile enough ground to spring whole universes of their own from. Rude, Paul Chadwick, Dave Stevens, Mike Allred -- all of them "did the Kirby" and created their own supernaturally powered characters, their own sublimely transportative story worlds.



All of them, Rude most of all, have been either lost to history or overlooked by it, the books that carry the greatest weight of their energy and innovation either out of print for years (Stevens and Allred, though that's been changing), ignored (Chadwick), or simply unavailable to any but the most diehard fanatics, scarce in the back issue bins and only reprinted in obscenely overpriced hardcover archive editions. Rude did plenty of work for the superhero publishers once the promise of creator ownership turned up an empty one, but there's always something lacking about it. In Thor Godstorm it's the totality of the retreat into Kirbyism, the willingness to subsume the individual Rude style -- busier compositions, subtler action blocking, a greater emphasis on bold graphic design -- into the anonymized general look of "classic Marvel". Corporate is as corporate does, and while one gets the sense that Rude was passionate about doing "Kirby comics", there's also the feeling that this was only a job for a man who managed the herculean feat of bringing out 100 issues of his own independent action comic.

But the real sad thing is that comics like Godstorm are the only Rude books you can actually read. Nexus, for all its great beauty and innovative cartooning, is a belabored mess, the jargon-y gobbledygook of superhero books cut loose from the idea of a youth audience. Rude's Silver Age-inflected "comics for grownups" are simply more complicated, more intricate, more self-referential. As written by Busiek here, they couldn't even exist without decades-old ideas to power them. Those busy compositions that differentiate him from Kirby are less striking, less immediate, more of a labor to get through when they pop up in Godstorm. The familiarity of a concept like dumb ol' Thor is all that makes a comic done in the Rude style comprehensible. The Silver Age ended a long time ago, and if the attempts to revive it, or even to scry something more workable than square fingers and foreshortened limbs from it had been successful then the name Steve Rude would be a lot more than a footnote. But like I said, comics wear you down.

Your Wednesday Sequence 16

The Wrong Place (2010), page 74. Brecht Evens.



My Robot 6 column keeps on rolling with a look at a gorgeous page from a book that probably would have made my top 10 had I read it last year, The Wrong Place. Its artist, Brecht Evens, is one of the most interesting young cartoonists working -- his comics take nothing of the form as it's usually displayed for granted, instead forging a unique path with virtuosic talent and a strong abstract understanding of what the medium is and what it does. I think the page I talked about is a pretty good example: it's a silent watercolor painting that uses a single background spread over every panel of its six-grid -- not exactly Jack Kirby, but just look how beautiful! The kind of departures Evens makes in his work are what keep comics fresh and exciting, so come here and read a lot more about them! The column starts like this:

The printed comics page is rarely allowed to exist as a whole. In comics as they’re traditionally done, the page is basically a vehicle for strings of panels, connected to one another by narrative and the flow of action but usually nothing more. Panels are typically conceived as isolated moments, with poses and camera angles and color schemes unique unto themselves. When one follows the next it almost always tracks the same dialogue streams, the same characters, the same forward thrust of time; but rarely if ever does it expand on the actual space set out in the box before it. Comics cut and cut and cut again, like a film helmed by a hyperactive editor. This is most often a searching medium, forever sliding into new angles and new compositions, looking for a newer and more immediate way into the spaces being set out by the story. Read more

Thor And X-Men

It's a Marvel double feature! No no, I don't mean this; I mean the movie kind of double feature! The situation was this: so compelled was I to write about my experiences with the delightful summer blockbusters Thor and X-Men First Class that I spilled forth well over 2500 words on their trashy glory. BUT, not wanting to sully this site's hermetically sealed status as an arty comics blog about comics-as-art and the art thereof, the only recourse was to outsource. Good thing, then, that I was able to bully a far better writer than me into posting my review on a far better site than my own. If you want to read those thousands of words head over here to Tucker Stone's fine blog The Factual Opinion, where they have been comfortably ensconced for all eternity. Yep. If you insist on a little taste before diving in, here's how it starts:

Marvel Movies -- is there any more recognizable commodity at today’s box office? In comics the time when “universe building” was an achievable task seems to have well and truly left us, with every company that’s placed an emphasis on constructing a shared story space for their properties to interact in either decayed into something else or gone belly-up entirely. There are worse testaments to just how much the average comics reader isn’t-a-child-anymore than that: it was easy to accept that Sal Buscema’s Avengers and Herb Trimpe’s Hulk and Gene Colan’s Dr. Strange all hung out, easy even to keep on accepting it as time went on because hey, you were twelve when you first read that stuff. And you were only five when Kirby first imagined it that way. But these new attempts, the ones undertaken when you were already a grown-up, they were just insults to your intelligence. Tell me why the WildC.A.T.S. and Spawn were allowed to bump up against eachother without explanation. Or why the stars of both Sojourn and Scion both had glowing ying- yangs tattooed on them. But we’re talking about movies here, people. Ahem. All I’m saying is, the fact that Marvel Films has managed to build a coherent, believable shared universe for their characters the same way the comics built one half a century ago is nothing short of a conceptual/marketing miracle. Read more

Service Interrupt: New York

(I drew that)

Thought I'd let everyone know that necessity's going to be making my blogging a little different for the next while. I moved to New York City for the summer, which means 1) I've got no scanner and 2) I don't have access to my "reference library" of comics. If I had to predict what this will mean, it's probably more theoretical, idea based criticism and more reviews for the Journal. So get used to those things. Affected will continue apace and then take a one-week hiatus after the first part concludes in a bit, but that's always been the plan. You might also want to look out for increased coverage of mainstream comics, but I'm not sure if that'll actually end up happening or not.

I'm having a good time here though, like you care. I keep on wanting to write a blog post about the difference between the comics sections in New York used bookshops versus the ones in LA, but that would require a level of bicoastal engagement I'm not really financially capable of. Basically, it boils down to a lot more animation-art, Fantagraphics, and Buenaventura books on the West Coast and a lot more Picturebox and D&Q stuff back east. It's weird how the smaller publishers, the ones who might not necessarily make the sale to Diamond distribution's nationwide network every time out (or at least not make it on a very big scale) are still noticeably regional enterprises. I got a copy of The Ganzfeld #4 for six bucks at The Strand. Six bucks! I've barely even seen that thing west of the Mississippi! And I've actually never seen a copy of #2 off Manhattan island. Kind of sad, because man that book is awesome. CF's "Blond Atchen & The Bumble Boys" is a youthful masterpiece on par with Crumb's first issue of Zap Comix, or Gary Panter's Rozz Tox strips -- an essential document from the early years in a truly great stylist's career. It's really good that Vice just "reprinted" it on their website, I think. It's the kind of thing that needs to be seen: the first fully formed work by a gargantuan talent that was still glorying in its virtuosity before bending to any purpose. Especially now that everyone is biting that style, it's incredibly refreshing to see how it looked when it had just been pulled from the ether.



That whole issue of The Ganzfeld is great, actually. The other night I showed somebody Frank Santoro's comics Chimera and Incanto and she was like "what else did he do?" So I showed her Storeyville and Cold Heat and his Kramers 7 strip, but to be honest I'd never really thought about how there isn't a whole lot else. The six pages of "Walking Distance" in here are great just because they're Santoro I hadn't seen before, but they're also just great comics period, poetic and wonderfully understated. They really create their own rhythm, unique from much else I've seen in comics. I'm always going on about how you can read a multi-paneled page or spread any way you want and you don't have to follow the typical left-to-right-and-down-the-tiers order that prose works insist upon, but let's be honest: most comic books afford far less enjoyment when you construct your own paths through them instead of following the one the author's set out. Santoro's are the exception to the rule, though. The looseness of the sequencing, the way it encourages the reader to think up reasons for the linkages between particular panels, is great for going "off the grid" and just comparing shapes or tones from anywhere on the page to one another. It's a really different reading experience from most comics, but that's pretty much the fun of it. There's also Gary Panter drawings in this issue, some awesome color Matthew Thurber stuff, which isn't something there's a great deal of, and a super entertaining Sugiura Shigeru comic. Good reading for a rainy afternoon in Union Square.

I also went to Desert Island and grabbed the new Smoke Signal, talked to Gabe Fowler for a little while. He told me about how CF's original pages have bloodstains on them and that people come in every day off the street in Williamsburg asking for Moebius comics. We also had a good laugh about the "DC relaunch," further confirming my theory that anyone in comics with half a brain can't even bother with a way to deny how dumb an idea it is. Instead of putting out all their new issues online, he said, they should just put a bunch of interns to work scanning their entire back catalogue in all its newsprint glory. I second that -- there's no way I'd download a copy of any Superman comic they can possibly dream up over there these days, but I'd pay through the nose for scans of everything Curt Swan ever did.

Maybe that sounds overly harsh? I dunno, lately it seems to me that the greatest value superhero comics have in these times is as a "historical" art form, one that's basically over and can be studied in depth by historians, psychologists, superfans, as a complete epoch with a beginning, middle, and end. I mean, if the end of Action Comics' 900 plus issue run doesn't signpost that end, then I don't know what does. Nobody can possibly think that genre's ever going to get back to the place of aesthetic supremacy it had when Kirby and Ditko and Steranko and Infantino and Swan and Adams and Sekowsky and Sprang were all doing a few books a month, do they? Better just to content ourselves with great works past and see them as something to evolve from rather than a sandbox that still has room to be played in. Those are the sands of the dead sea, people, just as much as surrealist painting or film noir or the gothic novel is. Like all those other dead forms that survive attempts at resuscitation, I think the best thing to happen is for the idiom to completely die for at least a generation, suffer the indignity of disparagement from the folks in the know, and then get revived by the bright young minds a few decades down the road, people with a perspective that's been informed by a culture where the form plays no part at all. People with a completely new perspective, informed equally by a world that's grown far away from the original inspiration and solid historical documentation of the important, classic works. That's why I try to distance myself from current superhero comics more and more these days -- cause I figure I might at some point want to make one, and if I do I want to come at it with a clean slate, not a mind full of things merely derived from powerful original sources.



The new Smoke Signal is real great. Apparently the James Jean cover is selling a lot more copies than usual, which is awesome news -- but the obvious highlight is the color center spread, a beautifully colorized version of Wally Wood's infamous "Disneyland Memorial Orgy" drawing, one I won't link to here because you should really just buy the comic to see it yourself in all its broadsheet-sized glory. Besides that though, there is a lot of great work by great cartoonists, which has totally become par for the course with Smoke Signal but still merits noting. The strips in this one are significantly more abstracted than usual -- Jason T. Miles bangs out a killer strip that melds post-Panter drawing with virtuoso use of zipatone and some hilarious gag cartooning, Conor Stechschulte's page has a completely pictorial logic that extends far beyond its panels, and Gerald Jablonski's spread places much more emphasis on the tentacular curls of the world balloons' tails than the actual words in them. Michael DeForge's strip is notable for a focus on mother-daughter relationship dynamics, especially striking after the father-son explorations of the latest Lose. With every new issue, Smoke Signal cements its place as the anthology to beat in the post-Mome landscape. It's also interesting to note how much more used to newspaper sized pages cartoonists seem to be getting: a few years ago, that format was a major novelty; now it's almost de rigeur, a truly reintroduced -- a new -- way of presenting comics. May they never stop coming at us.

Your Wednesday Sequence 15

2001 (2011). Blaise Larmee.



Man, I've been waiting to write my latest Robot 6 column, a consideration of the formal properties of Blaise Larmee's hands down stunning webcomic 2001, for ever. In case you don't know, that comic is one of the most important things to come out in a while, a big swath of new territory claimed for comics. There really isn't anything else out there like it, and since it's really just one big uninterrupted sequence, I was thrilled to discuss the whole long thing on those terms. What else can I say? Read the comic if you haven't, then read my take on it. Starts like this:

The webcomics medium itself forces the artist to confront choices that the printed page does not. The most obvious as well as the most important is just that, the lack of a page. In print, everything a cartoonist does has to hang around the page, the non-negotiable single unit, the contributing part of the whole. Unless the work in question is a Sunday page-style one sheet (pretty much a dead form in comics, honestly), it has to deal with those splits, the spaces between pages. One of the most special and unique things about comics is how it can present multiple story moments for simultaneous viewing with paneled pages, but that simultaneity only extends until the end of the page. Pages break things up by the very nature of what they are. The internet, on the other hand, is an endless visual landscape, the page turn as foreign to it as any other print-specific concern. Some webcomics betray their ties to print by imposing page turns on the reader. Blaise Larmee’s 2001 does not. Read more

Dream Logic

The Sandman #1 (1974), by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon. DC.



It's always fun to cherish history's little failures. 1974 was a doldrum time for the comics medium, more or less the middle of a nadir that lasted from the end of the superhero Silver Age and the collapse of the underground comix market to the re-energizing appearance of Raw and Heavy Metal magazines. It was a time during which one could be forgiven for thinking comics were dying. Perhaps appropriately, it was also the formative time for the direct sales market, the publisher-to-distributor-to-retailer model that replaced newsstand comics sales and remains the dominant mode of commercial exploitation for the art form to this day. As I understood it in the shop as a teenager from the comics-retail crusties who couldn't get anybody but me to listen to their war stories, it was the beginning of comics being marketed as content rather than artifacts. They were being sold by people who both knew and cared, not ones who had more of ground beef or tabloid magazine prices in their heads than superhero worship.

The upshot is that when the team of Jack Kirby and Joe Simon -- the men who'd brought forth Captain America, Captain 3-D, the Boy Commandos, the Fighting American, the Guardian, the Blue Bolt, the Fly, the Stuntman, and the entire romance comics genre a generation previous -- re-teamed on a little-remembered WWII-era creation of theirs called the Sandman, the direct market had one of its first Big Deals on its hands. Orders -- and this is all secondhand, but from what I've heard, orders were through the roof. How could the thing not be a blockbuster?

Well...



Here's how. For all that Kirby was the greatest artist ever to use the superhero genre, this particular comic caught him at a low point in his career. Emotionally drained by the cancellation of his epic, deeply personal Fourth World saga, and creatively taxed by pulling double or triple duty on a succession of increasingly frenetic, bizarre monthly series that functioned almost completely on the power of raw, unrefined Kirby art and Kirby ideas more than any narrative sense or structure, there was a reason Kirby worked with a writer on this book. King of Comics he may have been, but it's debatable how much a king with a ragtag kingdom is worth. Simon, for his part, was just on some weird shit. DC produced many comics that are better than the ones Simon created during his late-'60s to mid-'70s stint at the publisher, but few stranger. From the hallucinogenic Brother Power the Geek, simultaneously mainstream comics' most benighted and interesting attempt at exploring the same countercultural headwaters that were giving underground comix their success, to the almost disturbingly absurd Prez, a Watergate-informed clusterfuck of a comic about the adventures of a teen President, Simon's DC comics are the work of a true visionary, less commercial objects than totemic symbols of a completely unique voice. That being said, when corporate comics are "less commercial objects" than anything else, that's a problem.

So the early comics retailers ordered big on the shiny new first issue of The Sandman (the idea of comics' collectability was also in the ascendant), and they just kinda sat there. Because this comic is no blockbuster, it's a weird, tired, dashed off fever dream from a genius running on fumes and a great talent long past his sell-by date. It's easy to imagine the fans' disappointment with this kind of comic in 1974, but its wounds are the kind that time heals pretty well. Strange and borderline-incomprehensible it may be, but most midcentury superhero comics read that way these days, honestly. And the past decade or so has birthed a fairly persuasive line of thinking in which dashed off Kirby art is the best kind, all the big stylistic flairs and the crackling aura of the work left untouched by any attempts at prettiness or even boundary pushing. Sandman is Kirby working entirely within the parameters of the style he'd constructed over the past three decades and change, every gesture a stock gesture, every composition one he'd long since made a part of the medium's basic grammar. It comes close to automatic drawing at points, pulled straight from a subconscious repository of "Kirby images" without any interference.



(he ain't even used a ruler on the panel borders there)

That sense of the panels is enhanced by their subject matter: this is a highly surrealistic comic about dreams, a place where all the unique weirdness Kirby had built up since he and Simon parted ways in the '50s with all the equally idiosyncratic bizarrenesses Simon had developed. This is a Kirby comic more than anything else, the unmistakable visual style blazing across every page, a sense of dynamism taking hold long before any of the plot information can, subtlety sledgehammered into a distant memory. But what elevates it above the metric ton of similar work Kirby did in the second half of his tenure at DC is the presence of Simon as writer. Where Kirby had a tendency toward overexplanation, treating his every panel as a complete plot point and sometimes allowing his rambling Beat-Shakespearean narration and dialogue (after a certain point they both basically served the same function) to overtake the power of his panels, Simon is elliptical and vague in a way that serves Kirby much better. This comic really moves, never getting bogged down in exposition and honestly rarely bothering to explain things at all. Simon was a writer far ahead of his time: his presentation of raw, undeveloped ideas and willingness to let them work as content has more to do with the high style of the "pop comics" writers of the 2000s. At its best, this feels like a Kirby comic scripted by Grant Morrison or Mark Millar or Warren Ellis, loud and shouty, with the all reason for the shouting lost between the panel gutters.

Though Simon's plotting is highly elliptical, his scenes have much more flow to them than pretty much anything Kirby ever drew, which forces the artist into a different mode of working than usual: check out his motion-tracking here, with the boy hopping out of bed and into his waders in a single transition between gestures, and then rushing out the door in another. Kirby could do more naturalistic figure animation when he wanted to, but the premium here is on speed and energy, the pictures whipping by faster than even Simon's punchy, to the point dialogue.



Like I said before, Kirby's drawing in this comic is untethered from anything but itself, tapping the depths of the mannerisms that propel it with no time for anything else. It makes sense, then, that the dream scenes are the most fully realized visual moments in the comic, with Kirby constructing everything from whole cloth, no concession to realism necessary. Simon's scripting is up to the task, giving Kirby strong doses of the unsettling strangeness he smeared across everything he was doing at the time to work with.



Then there's this, the single funniest page of comics Kirby ever put pencil to. The setup is pretty basic: this weird doll that a lone shipwrecked sailor bestowed on young Jed in his final moments of life seems to be causing the boy terrible nightmares, so finally his grandfather (who's always regarded it with suspicion because "boys don't play with dolls") just takes it and starts smashing the fuck out of it, just destroying this completely inanimate object for absolutely no logical reason whatsoever. Blocked out in Kirby's hyper-action style, which frames an old man banging a doll against a table in the exact same way as Thor smiting a frost giant with a stone sledgehammer, it reaches a sublime level of ridiculousness, a truly dreamlike place of hyperbolic bizarrerie. The old man's sudden pangs of regret are just as good: completely understandable thoughts of self-reproach in the wake of something that goes beyond all rational comprehension. "How will I ever explain this insanity to Jed?" he asks himself -- for some reason his sober characterization of the actions two panels previous as "insanity" is particularly hilarious -- before referring to the destroyed doll as "that thing", making it clear that remorse only goes so far and he's still got a pathological hatred for the object of his fury.



The subsequent burial of the doll is a rare instance of a wordless Kirby page. It's uncommon to see Kirby's breakdowns this literal, the tracking of moment to moment this clear. Simon's influence is almost certainly at work on this page, and it's delightful to see him pull something this focused on a single moment from his artist. Also, that grandpa just stays creepy.



Here's a panel from another wordless sequence: check out that blank space at the top. I'd bet anything that the words were actually erased from it. The way comics use inherently disconnected images to propel narrative is surrealistic as anything, honestly, and Simon's refusal to lead his every panel off with bridging narration the way pretty much every other '70s comics writer did hints at a deep understanding of the form and the way it could be used to enhance his content.



Another uproarious moment: as any Neil Gaiman fan knows, the Sandman carries around a bag of magic sand that instantly sends anyone whose eyes it's sprinkled in to dreamland. Here, the mysterious vigilante makes his first appearance in the world of the waking to help the cops out with the aftermath of a devastating earthquake. When not enough doctors can be found, he uses his magic sand to alleviate the wounded's suffering. But think about how that would look to anybody else! This cat is throwing sand in people's faces! That's a bad thing, not a good thing! It's both entertaining and quite impressive to see Simon acknowledging the bald absurdity of the situations he's presenting, none of which are too different from standard hero-comics action. Honestly, if there's a reason for this comic's existence, that light, playful subversion is it. Cloaked in Kirbyist action storytelling, it reaches a pinnacle that few other comics have known, or even display an awareness of.



It's all so strange that there seems little point in mentioning the overarching story specifics. They're few, and simple, because "story specifics" is less important to this comic than like six or seven other things: the Sandman, Master of Dreams, watches as young Jed acquires his sinister doll, and intervenes when it turns out to be one of many that a group of disgruntled former Axis scientists have sent out to ravage America the way we ravaged Japan and Germany in the Second World War. "Why, that was almost thirty years ago!" cries an indignant Sandman. The way these people hold unreasonable grudges! Laying out the plot like that makes it seem a lot more straightforward than it actually is, though: thanks to Simon's dreamlike, more or less unsequential plotting and Kirby's slapped-out, almost ragged drawing, this comic feels more like a series of vaguely connected events than a real story. Sometimes the best way to talk about a book is just to describe the highlights, and this is definitely one of that kind.

#garden (expanded)

Imagine my surprise the other night when all the people I was hanging with cut out just as the party was getting started! What's a boy to do? Well, I elected to ride out my buzz with the new Yuichi Yokoyama book, Garden. And twitter about it constantly. (This is what you're missing if you don't follow me on there, folks. Just click the button to the right!) For the uninitiated, Yokoyama is easily one of the top five cartoonists going, a visionary futurist with a sense of story and the mechanics of the medium that go a good century past everything else out there. The basic premise of the book is this: a group of people enter a garden and are mildly surprised to find it full of unfamiliar, apparently manmade geographic features. They explore the garden's seemingly endless terrain. That's pretty much it, though it goes WAY deeper than that -- I'll explicate it later, I promise! -- what makes it so compulsively readable is the relentless imagination Yokoyama applies to absolutely everything he draws, from forms right through to functions. It's as fully realized an alien world as anything that's ever been done in comics form, a "universe" as fleshed out and bristling with ideas as the world of Marvel or DC Comics. To explore it is to be completely immersed in something not of this world, but incredibly beautiful nonetheless.

The translation of any new work by Yokoyama should be considered an event, and as of now this 300+ page opus is definitely the book of the year. As I said, I'm going to write a lot more and a lot more in-depth about Garden in a sec, but for now here's a transcription of my little twitter rampage, with expanded ideas, images, et cetera. Enjoy:

- reading the new Yokoyama after a few too many right now, comeon follow along

- Yokoyama's drawing style, his geometric linework and the amount of white on the page, puts up a wall of noise without any "messiness". Like, Infantino used to to talk about "irritating the eye" a little bit on the page, using some discordant element to draw it in -- this is like a fully irritating page, just impossible to look directly at. You feel an IMPRESSION more than see the actual IMAGE.

Here's what I mean: the eye shrinks from white space, and Yokoyama just papers it on there before drawing the harshest, most unforgiving angular lines over it. It's really tough to "read into" most of these panels, to actually keep the eye on them long enough to rove around and appreciate the depth or detail. Those things are definitely there -- but Yokoyama wants you to move through these pages fast. The eye just doesn't stop looking for a more habitable environment, wicking over the pages like crazy. Yokoyama's work achieves fast-paced "page turner" status completely regardless of content -- you're turning those pages because he's forcing you to with his drawing. There are a few passages in here calculated as "resting places", where the blacks are spotted heavier and the panels are bigger and more inviting, but it's largely this same breakneck speed-inducing thing all the way through.



- This book is where Yokoyama finally masters the use of Japanese kanji-character sound effects: they're by far the thickest blacks on the page, they POP. It's more of a subtitles looking thing than the traditional "superimposition" comic book sound effects thing.

Yokoyama sent these same crazy scrolls of angular Japanese characters across his panels since his first book, New Engineering -- but while it was just another element of visual discord in that book, and absent from his next one, Travel, here it works beautifully with the action as separate but harmonious information. Those thick blacks pop it forward, like I said, like subtitles pop out from a movie screen. See above. Actually, I just thought of this: you ever watch the Japanese channel on TV? They pretty regularly will layer in ad text and icons over the images of the actual programming for brief bursts, creating a cover of text that you just read through to keep watching the show. It's the same thing here: these sounds are unmistakably happening and constant, but you're watching the action. The auditory is just another layer of input placed over the visual. You know, like in real life?

- Yokoyama's talked about being an "anti-humanist": his comix bear it out. The ONLY sense impression being communicated is the visual. Like, touch, taste, smell? just not there in the drawing on any level. They DESCRIBE them in the dialogue instead. USUALLY i'd find that was a detractor from the work, but Yokoyama's aesthetic incorporates it so well that it just works.

I know I just spent a paragraph talking about the incorporation of sound, but it's obviously separate, like I said -- not a part of the drawing. You get no sense from the compositions or posing that the characters have any sense reaction to the things they're seeing beyond the very seeing of them. This was the panel I was talking about in particular: that could be a drawing of people touching any texture -- the only way we know it's mushy is the words.



- this dude writes the HIGHEST dialogue...

Ever had that, where all you can do is just verbally state your sense impressions? Drug states are the only ones where that's happened to me personally, but I seriously doubt that's what Yokoyama's depicting. The guy's mind is just permanently on another level. I do make a joke about it later though.

- Yokoyama's characters wear helmets and shit on their heads to stay SAFE, man! They do some dangerous activities! Jousting with sticks?

Later they climb monkey bars over a waterfall, slide down hundreds of feet worth of firepole, climb through tiny tunnels... there's a palpable element of danger to the entire journey that only grows the longer the book progresses without anybody getting hurt.

- Page 10 panel 5: as much depth as I believe I've ever seen in a comic book panel.



Beautiful. When he wants you to see in-panel depth it's definitely there.

- yo @grantmorrison - this is a true "comic of ideas". you'd love it

- page 12, yah i gotta write tomorrow's Wednesday Sequence about that

I totally did!

- Yokoyama's dialogue has SUCH a subtle but persistent sense of humor. It's the dryest words, but spoken in solid "punchline rhythms".



The literality of the dialogue can be hilarious sometimes: check this out and picture funny, overdramatic voices to yourself. Or I mean, if you read this whole book assuming these guys are all stoned, it's pretty funny too. That thing where you have to talk even the simplest actions through logically to understand how they work. Like I said, they're not high though.

- the "footnotes" to other pages Yokoyama's including have just incredible potential as a storytelling device.

The end of the book is all follow-up scenes to pages of the main narrative, showing what happened to certain characters or how certain structures were built. It's a very "comics" way of structuring things, asking readers to skip over whole chunks of book and fill in the blanks, panel-over-gutter-to-next-panel style.

- book reminds me of THIS http://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/david-smith-cubes-and-anarchy-0 which i saw a while back

Copy-paste that link and check it out. That David Smith sculpture exhibit was completely amazing, a massive airplane-hangar size room full of massive, alien metal objects. If I had treated it as a playground instead of an exhibition, I would have been living this book, basically. I see a big crossover between Yokoyama and avant-garde sculptors like Smith: both are primarily concerned with creating unfamiliar new forms and forcing people to confront them in physical space, Yokoyama just does it on the page. It'd be billions of dollars to build this place in real life, after all.

- yo i thought dis new coldcave record was wack but its the perf soundtrack: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb7hRZyT6SE

No it isn't, you were just wasted. The new Cold Cave record is indeed dope after you get used to it -- especially that one song above -- but the only thing it shares with Garden is an intermittent sense of really bad vibes laid over a placid surface. After that record was over I put on Cornelius, which is a million times more appropriate: another Japanese weirdo artist creating invitingly unfamiliar landscapes, only with sound. Listen; the video is great too.

- these "camera flash" pgs are SO psychedelic

Here's the twitpic I took. This is one of those "resting points", where the eye can stop to take a breather, really dig into the drawings. Yokoyama's use of gray tones is incredible.

- there's an EXTREMELY palpable sense of menace around these pages. this is a TRULY alien environment. that would breed fear, for sure

- All the humor starts to feel just a LITTLE like nervous, desperate humor - you can't decipher its emotional content so that reads

- yeah, this could so easily turn into a horror comic. but it doesn't, so it just carries this protracted, unrelieved tension.

Like I said, bad vibes. You start to wonder after you realize how long these guys have been in the garden about what this place means, who's behind it, what's going to happen to them in there. You can only explore for so long until something happens. Is the bland statement of visual input that makes up the dialogue an expression of complete terror? There's just nothing to suggest any of the sentiment behind it so you can't say for sure one way or another.

- oh my god, WINSOR MCCAY on the 2-pg spread at 36-37!



Nobody drew processions like McCay -- I mean real epic ones, with lines of people and objects stretching back and back. Yokoyama summons that spirit beautifully in a few places in Garden. He has McCay's facility for simultaneous architectural innovation and structural realism too. He invents new structures like crazy, but none of it would be impossible to build with enough time and money.

- it's HILARIOUS when they finally notice the sound of the sound effects that have been goin on the WHOLE TIME after 40pgs ...like i said, no sense fed but sight!



- You get the sense there's all this wild stuff Yokoyama wants to draw, and he just creates the most literal situations to propel it. Like they just go, "oh, here's one of these! oh, here's one of these!" that is the plot.

- hey @BRIANMBENDIS - THIS is how you do parenthetical dialogue! http://www.pictureboxinc.com/products/921-garden

Expand your reading habits, fanboy.

- man, you get SO sucked into the action in this thing but when you actually look at the characters they are such wicked drawings

It doesn't really translate just how fast and furious the book reads from just a few scans, but you hardly even notice what the characters look like, just what they're doing and where they're going. It probably also has to do with their lack of typical human features. But Yokoyama's way with character design is just as wacked out and innovative as his architectural creations. Look at these motherfuckers!



- oh shit, this is totally a drug narrative, the 35 different protagonists just had to run and hide from the cops

- seriously, if like mathy dmt trippers ever discover this book it'll be a bestseller: "Yokoyama creates a completely convincing depiction of drug states, a world in which everything is foreign and unnatural"

Like I said -- not serious, people! But if you do happen to read this in an altered state of consciousness, the scene where mysterious "security forces" roll through on a lone train-car and there are like a million guys hiding from them in every possible place is just wickedly suspenseful. The book's sense of not knowing how to work anything or correctly negotiate anything's presence in space -- of total novelty -- is a facet of some drug experiences too. Just putting it out there.

- page 57, world's most avant garde portrait of Humphrey Bogart



- yeah there are no soothing spaces in this book at all, nothing like the beautiful landscapes of Travel. it's the modern manmade world. This is a post-apocalyptic landscape.

More on that in the actual article I'm going to write -- but yeah, these chaotic masses of building material and familiar objects reassembled into baffling new configurations seem at times like the product of total destruction, like a particularly artful tornado blew through a supermodern city. It's the lack of purpose to any of it: we build things to "work", to do stuff, and none of the constructions in Garden seem even remotely conducive to the ongoing process that is human habitation. What could be their creator then but chaos?

- you know, this would be the most entertaining movie ever, but the element of work involved in reading comics makes it way better

True words. It's a mental workout and a visual one. Never exhausting, but refreshing and exhilarating, like a solid session at the gym. There are almost no other comics you can say that about, and this is coming from somebody who loves the things.

- I love how obvious it is in every panel that Yokoyama's drawing this whole thing with a ruler

Check out the way the straight edges of everything crisscross over each other. It's evidence of craft, the tool on the page, just as much as CF's dusty pencil lines or Gary Panter's raw ink strips are.



- whoa, @GardenHighlights is now following me because of this nonsense

- the further you get into this book's travel through unfamiliar territory, the more apprehensive you get about getting home...

It's an interesting question that gets a fascinating answer by the end -- but there's no sense of destination to this journey, only the tour through things never before seen. There's never any mention or even allusion made to going back to where everybody came from. It's a spiritual journey as much as a a physical one in that sense: wherever it ends up, that's going to be the new place everyone is.

- when the environment actually harms them for the 1st time at pg80, it's TERRIFYING (they fall down a hill, ha ha, bloodcurdling)



Seriously, when the increasingly dangerous maneuvers through this place actually let off a little tension and end in a situation that could potentially hurt people, it's incredibly gripping, just because of how long we've been waiting for it to happen.

- cool, he drew a panel the wrong shape for its borders on 86



Never seen it done before, way into it.

- if im ever rich enough to have a bill gates style fantasy house ima tell yokoyama to design it

********

And that's where I cut it off because I was getting too into it to want to bother about making comments anymore. Like I said, a longer article about the whole book will be around soon enough. The last third or so is one of the most beautiful, fascinating things I've ever seen in comics, so you should probably just go get a copy before that post hits in order to know what I'm talking about. Seriously -- book of the year, people.

Before I go, though, I had to text one of my friends this panel from a few pages later, with the subject line "satanic messages in the new Yokoyama":



Is that legal?

Stained Pages, pt. 1

(maybe pt. only; decent soundtrack)

Thickness #1, by Katie Skelly, Jonny Negron, Zejian Shen, Derek Ballard, & True Chubbo. Self-published, git it here.



There's no particular reason why right now should be the moment when comics' cool kids really tear into doing sex stories. If I had to hazard a guess as to the source of what I'm hoping will turn into a much bigger wave than it is now, I'd go with the fact that there's a new generation of comics talent coalescing as we speak (maybe call it post-Kramers Ergot), and after the last group of wild-eyed youngsters rendered genre comics as a new fuel for the avant garde, what's the chronic youth of today -- kids who didn't grow up with the image of comics as a sex-phobic, self-loathing place -- to do but wick off the clothes? Reasoning aside, however, it should have happened forever ago. Of all storytelling's genres, porn is one of the few that simply isn't available to the mainstream, that falls solely to the underground to deliver. Making erotic art puts you underground: I'm sure Vertigo or Pantheon would have loved to publish Dave McKean's 35 dollar Serious Graphic Novel, but stories about fucking are too hot for anybody but Fantagraphics to handle, apparently.

More than that, it's one of the places of greatest unexplored potential for comics. Fight scenes have powered the medium's most commercially successful sector for a solid eighty years at this point, but how many of the great American cartoonists have put much of anything into investigating the other kind of physical-first, rhetorical-second human interaction? Sex has certainly produced no end of great comics in Europe. And just think of how ridiculously baroque the accumulated decades of action storytelling knowledge have made the best fight scenes we see today! Frank Quitely on We3, anyone? So many years of the best artists comics had to offer drawing fights has expanded the form's capacity for expression, forced cartoonists time and again to find their own idiosyncratic answers to the problems of speed, impact, pain. Which is wonderful -- but all those things are so hard. Where is the comics grammar for softness, transcendence, pleasure, going to come from, if not the investigation that's just now getting underway?



So if you ain't heard yet, check it out: sex comics are the big cool thing on the cutting edge this summer. There's this, there's this, there's this, there's this, there's um, me... and then, finally, there's the comic we have at hand. Thickness (edited by Michael DeForge and Ryan Sands, so it knows what it's doing) is an anthology that bends the hi-fi inclinations of small press art-comix to the lo-fi. Beautifully printed in four separate colors, it pops off the paper it's printed on while leaving plenty of risograph noise behind. An indelible cover image can't quite keep the edges of interior pages from sandwiching out into view. The ink on its pages rubs off onto your fingers as you read, a true physical substance that spreads itself all over you. Purple fingerprints on the white keyboard as I'm typing this. Like the body of an anorexic supermodel, Thickness manages decadence and refinement while just barely hanging together.



It's a remarkably solid anthology, each of its four main stories delivering something completely unique while sharing a certain spirit with the rest of the work, featuring a few obvious highlights but no letdowns. Of all the stories, Katie Skelly and Zejian Shen's look the least similar and share the most in common content-wise. Both sketch out loosely sequenced, surrealistic lesbian encounters on deserted beaches, and both bend their action to incorporate truly bizarre physical irregularities. Skelly's story nods at a porn-manga convention with a bit of tentacle sex, while Shen veers right up to the boundary of the grotesque, focusing her short's action on a pair of sentient clitorises. Neither story is particularly hardcore in what it portrays: the eroticism here comes from the mining of visual art's potential to play fast and loose with the restrictions of human anatomy. Shen's short finds as much to personify in pleasure organs as the human figure, then anthropomorphizes a pair of oysters to put a metaphorical, surprisingly heartwrenching capper on the narrative. The actual sex scene is made up of one long, focused zoom in, a discarding of everything but the direct source of sensation. Not a bad way to portray cresting pleasure with a sequence of panels.



Just as action comics bedeck their human avatars with layer upon layer of imaginary muscle, Skelly gives her lithe, fluidly cartooned women high heel-shaped feet and vestigial bunny ears, creating fantasies that require no assembly and add an extra sheen of simplified grace to her lush, thick-lined panels. There's as much sensuality to Skelly's dense junglescapes and seaweed forests as her figures. The lines of flowers in bloom meet flowing hair, vines twine around legs and waists, and characters fade as environment comes to the fore, every line in every panel demanding attention, communicating something quite lovely no matter what part of what object it's depicting.



Derek Ballard's futuristic freakout "Trap Shadez" discards the natural environment for an artificial, supermodern one. There's a high sense of uncertainty about the strip's pages: Ballard's op-art, post-Steranko sequencing and elliptical plotting are part of it, and so is his distorted, gesture-heavy, near-cubist figure drawing, which shimmers with a strange elegance almost reminiscent of the best idealized superhero comics artwork. Mainly, though, the same eroticism that Skelly allows to define her story's setting is allowed to operate here, albeit in a completely different arena. It's not quite clear whether "Trap Shadez" takes place in a physical environment at all, or whether it's a visualized reading of online interactions: floppy discs are passed from hand to orifice, beams of pure energy project from futuristic machinery, and the dialogue is taken up completely with non-sequitur tech jargon. It feels like the internet landscape reinterpreted as a physical fantasyland, one where altered states of consciousness are a way of life, sequential order is largely replaced by semi-continuous window switching, and sexual encounters end with being penetrated by the horn of a midget unicorn. Ballard's strip is the least explicitly sexual of the bunch, but it displays an uncanny understanding of the intersections between the unknown and the erotic. It'll probably be incredibly arousing for your grandchildren when they see it.



While Ballard points off toward a bold new socio-sexual future Jonny Negron is working a little closer to home, on what certainly looks like a prime candidate for the future of pop comics. Negron's "Grandaddy Purple, Erotic Gameshow" is by far the longest strip in the book, basically a single issue unto itself at 21 pages, and it's the uncontested highlight. Negron's art is an absolute revelation: his author bio bills him as "the lovechild of Yuichi Yokoyama and R. Crumb", and to be sure, there's a heaping helping of big-legged women and dudes with geometric shapes for heads on his pages. But that simple one-plus-one statement of influence leaves out the lessons learned from CF's bold design and willingness to exaggerate forms to their breaking point, the sublimely assured, pyrotechnic Paul Gulacy-by-way-of-Benjamin Marra approach to layout and sequencing, the slick Otomo action scenes, the drawing mannerisms that read like a smooth blend of every pop anime show broadcast on network TV during the 1990s. It's completely unlike anything else out there at the moment, a fusion of component parts so powerful that it's surprising nobody's attempted something similar before, but so advanced and novel that one wonders if a million lesser cartoonists haven't simply made failed attempts.



The other available Negron comic, a rawdog adventure rager called Demon God Goblin Heaven, is full of blindingly bright bits of inspiration obscured beneath a slight haze of newcomer's uncertainty. Here that brilliance is at the fore, blazing away with an astonishing degree of surety. Negron is a stylist -- and what a style it is -- but what's most striking about his work is his mastery over the style, how it never obscures or obstructs of what's going on in the panels. There are chops in this comic that take plenty of artists entire careers to accumulate. As for the content, well, there's nothing I know of that quite compares. "Grandaddy Purple" takes the commonality between sex comics and fighting comics as a given, elevating spills of fluid both sanguinary and seminal to a neon-lit level of majestic sleaze that seems to demand every last grain of risograph grit blanketing it. It's quite simple at the core, a simple tracking of a spidery-skinny, mask-and-Run-DMC-chained ninja type's movements through a packed, stomach-churningly sexy pleasure palace. Exploding into life with an action scene so hot you'll swear you can feel the comic's hands on your lapels, it slinks into a sex scene that carries the rising intensity of the most unhinged noise comics through setpiece after perfectly blocked setpiece of figure interaction. Negron's layouts are especially fierce: Crepax's panel subdivision is alluded to, but packed into solidly rhythmic symmetrical grids, a savage beat pounded into even the most unhinged moments of physical transport.



It's porn in which artistic virtuosity isn't just matched by the level of explicitness, but caused by it: hardcore in every sense of the word, with a ridiculously over the top snap ending that's both earned and elevating. The closest comparison I can make to the meeting of wild transgression and monumental craft in "Grandaddy Purple" is last year's similarly raw Rafael Grampa story "Dear Logan", which brought the sadomasochistic overtones of the Wolverine character into the light; but where that story ended, this one begins, exploring sharp, red, beautiful places nothing but porn really can. Without a doubt, it's the short comic to beat in 2011.

And honestly, Thickness just might be the anthology to beat as well. It's fresh and new and full of fascinating work from a bevy of serious talent -- the Family Sohn contributes a laffer of a one-page gag strip on the back cover just to end things with an exclamation point -- about as much as you can ask from a collection of comics. But what's equally attractive about the debut issue of this series (issue 2 this fall!) is how much it feels like the beginning of something that could spread far beyond this one book into a real movement for art-comix in the 2010s. The 48 pages between these covers stake out so much unfamiliar territory that it's hard to imagine people won't be hungry for more, and it's about time. The work is great, but the best thing about Thickness is just how exciting it can be.

Not like that, you perv.

Deathcast: Episode 3

Cover your ears, folks -- I made another one! In a slightly shorter episode of the Internet's Only Podcast About Comic Books than usual (still well over two hours), I rapped about:

-Frank Miller,
-the new Yuichi Yokoyama book Garden,
-Michael DeForge and Ryan Sands' porn anthology Thickness,
-how sex comics are my favorite genre in the medium,
-the best cartoonists working in black and white,
-the "DC Reboot" and why it's a terrible idea
-what creators I'd like to see working on the new DC books (some unconventional answers here),
-Blaise Larmee's webcomic 2001,
-what ongoing series I'd buy if I could only buy 3 of them (I could only think of one),
-Dave McKean and how I think his incredibly '90s Sandman cover art is prime material for a semi-ironic retro revival,
-my favorite comic, Valentina Reflection by Guido Crepax,
-and why comics is such a misogynistic place and what we can do about it.

Of course about a million other topics get brought up and considered in the course of all this. Go listen and see what you think, it's me blabbing about comics and that's what you came to this site for anyway, right? Right!

Geronimo Ji Jaga Rest In Peace

Just a picture today. I made this portrait of my godfather Geronimo Ji Jaga (formerly Geronimo Pratt) a while ago and am posting it here in memoriam, because Geronimo died today. He was the bravest, strongest, and kindest man I ever knew, and the example I could always look to above all others to know what was right. He was a hero of the Vietnam War, a leader of the Black Power movement, and a political prisoner for 27 years after being framed for murder by the LAPD. He died in the Tanzanian village he moved to after being freed. He was only 63 but he lived centuries. He saved lives and spoke with cockroaches and provided me with the clearest example in the world of what hope is. He wouldn't have gone if he wasn't fully ready.

I never needed heroes from comic books because he was a part of my life.

I'll see you on the other side, Geronimo.

Your Wednesday Sequence 13

Pulphope (2007), page 32. Paul Pope.



In my previous weekly nuts 'n' bolts of comics art column, I skipped installment #13 just to be on the safe side. But my Robot 6 column knows no superstition. This week I went over a beautiful Paul Pope page. It's not necessarily "abstract comics" -- you can tell that there's figurative action going on easily enough -- but it works against many of the same problems that abstract comics do. Pope's attempt here is making line move rather than lie still on the page, to create movement outside the limits of the typical Kirbyist "dynamism". He's a useful artist to examine those ideas with, given that he has such a fluid, calligraphic line. I said this in a podcast once, but I haven't put it in print: one of my favorite things about Pope's work is how you can look at it as figurative drawing, but there's enough going on in his linework to kind of zone out in it and let your eye take his backgrounds or cityscapes in as successful abstract art. On this page he actually goes abstract, or at least literalist: the lines are lines, and the comic is left to get by on their strength alone. It's a fascinating bit of comics art, and I wrote what I think is a pretty solid writeup of it. Go read! Starts like this:

Creating the illusion of movement is one of the main goals of comics art. It’s what sequence is there for. That said, it’s not the hardest thing to do when the movement in question is that of human figures or familiar machines. Dynamic posing and composition work quite nicely much of the time, even when it isn’t quite certain where the movement is being directed, or how. Comics have a library of stock gestures and shot transitions for artists to pull from in order to sell their action. Creating a sense of real life on the page is one thing, but to simply put some jump in the pictures, two words — “copy Kirby” — are often all that’s needed. However, that’s only true as long as the artist is dealing with easily recognizable forms. Read more