Your Wednesday Sequence 20

Ganges #2 (2008) page 3. Kevin Huizenga.



I wrote about a really crazy Kevin Huizenga page on my Robot 6 column this week. Check it out. That is all.

Wake Up

2011 July: Daredevil volume 3 #1 is released. Its final page contains this tribute to recently deceased artist Gene Colan from the book's creative team.



1948: Gene Colan, then 21 years old, creates his first story under the auspices of editor Stan Lee for Timely Comics, later to become Marvel Worldwide, Inc.

1950: Colan is laid off from Timely during a period of recession for the comic book market. He spends much of the following decade freelancing for various publishers.

1957: Colan is blackballed from industry leader DC Comics following a confrontation with editor Robert Kanigher. After over a decade of work in comics, he drifts away from the field, eventually taking a position as an artist for a company that produces educational film strips.

1963: Colan marries his second wife Adrienne, who encourages him to return to comics. The industry, in the midst of a miniature renaissance brought on by the superhero revival taking place at Marvel and DC, finds a place once more for Colan, who picks up work at both companies as well as a handful of others. Like many journeyman artists Colan picks up as much work as it is physically possible for him to handle, submitting himself to a demanding two-pages-per-day regimen for many years to come in order to support his four children with his comics income. Later Colan will admit to having relied on amphetamines to maintain his '60s output of three finished issues a month.

1966: Colan does his first work on the Daredevil character, one whom his dramatically physical chiaroscuro visual style continues to define. Colan's run on the character lasts eight years. His impact on the approach to the character taken by subsequent artists, from Frank Miller to David Mazzucchelli to current Marvel Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada, is vast, as is the debt owed by the 2003 Daredevil film to Colan's renderings. Colan receives standard page rates and no creator ownership for his Daredevil work, as dictated by the contractual system in place at Marvel at the time -- one whose validity and legality have been brought into question time and again in the intervening years.

1969: With Stan Lee, Colan cocreates the Falcon character, whose adventures are still published today. Often cited as the first African-American superhero, the Falcon is a minor watershed for mainstream comics and their Marvel-led move toward real-world relevance. The character's first appearance is in Captain America #117, for which Colan received page rates and no creator ownership.

1972: Colan cocreates the Tomb of Dracula comic. Over 70 issues, mainly with writer Marv Wolfman, Colan turns the schlock-horror title into a bastion of quality in a singularly dreary time for mainstream comics. It still stands as one of the finer examples of the form during its mid-'70s period of hibernation. Over the course of the comic's run, Colan receives page rates and no creator ownership.

1973: Colan cocreates the Blade character with Wolfman in Tomb of Dracula #10. In 1998, the Blade film, again highly indebted to the rich atmospherics and dynamic action of the Colan pages that spawned it, originates the look and tone of the wildly successful Marvel films that continue to be released today.

1976: Colan joins writer Steve Gerber on Howard the Duck, a minor classic of superhero comics, as well as one of the first mainstream books to make a concerted attempt at engaging the avant-garde. Once more, Colan's sleek style and visual flair become qualities that remain associated with the property. For his work he receives page rates and no creator ownership.

1980: With Adrienne's encouragement, Colan quits Marvel, pushed out by then-Editor in Chief Jim Shooter's dislike of his work. As might be expected given the acrimonious nature of Colan's departure from Marvel, he is given nothing but his walking papers. The page rates Colan survived on during his most fruitful years with the company are the only acknowledgment he will receive for his massive contribution to the Marvel media empire. Colan subsequently signs a contract with DC, where his work meets with little enthusiasm. After the contract's expiration, he freelances for early independent publishers like Eclipse and Dark Horse, picking up smaller jobs from DC where possible.

1989: Still working as a freelancer, Colan returns to Marvel in the wake of Shooter's departure. As remains the case today, if an artist with a family to support and bills to pay needs work whose financial reward is worthy of their time and effort, Marvel is one of a very few options. Colan, 63, has a heart attack this year as well. As a freelancer, he has no employer to provide him with health insurance. Given Marvel's policy of total company ownership, he also lacks any kind of cash nest egg to prop him up as he enters the last quarter of his life: no money for Daredevil, none for the Falcon or Blade or Howard the Duck. Only page rates, spent decades ago.

1990s: Colan develops glaucoma. His artist's eye decaying, it becomes impossible for him to produce the pages that keep his finances afloat with the same meteoric speed he once did. That point, however, is more or less moot: Colan's style gets more and more "old school" with every passing year. Though superhero comics are the only ones that pay, their insistence on flavor-of-the-moment novelty is cutting down more and more severely on the amount of work one of their most notable elder statesmen is given to produce.

2000s: Colan's early adaptation to the world of Internet art sales and commissions enables him to survive a near-disappearance of regular commercial comics work. Though he still picks up work from them on occasion, the companies that Colan did so much for in return for cost of living-level support in decades past have more or less forgotten him. His fate is now more or less in the hands of fan community that supports him by paying for sketches of the corporate-owned characters he worked on in years past; a community that ironically tends toward viewing creators in search of remuneration for characters and concepts they created in years past as selfish has-beens.

2008 May: Colan is hospitalized with liver failure. An impassioned open letter from Adrienne on her husband's tenuous health and finances is met with a wave of support from fans and fellow comics creators alike. Auctions are held, items of value are donated.

2008 September: Marvel, the entity both most able and most obligated to financially commit to keeping Colan in good health, makes a gesture toward doing so with A Tribute to Gene Colan, a one-shot pamphlet comic reprinting old Tomb of Dracula and Daredevil stories among others, the profit from which will be donated to the artist. It's a curiously hollow gesture given the amount of money Marvel has derived from Colan's work over the years. The comics market Marvel sells their comics with uses a catalog-order system, offering retailers items for purchase at a heavy discount to then sell to customers for cover price. By offering the Colan tribute book though this system Marvel effectively places even the small amount of responsibility for Colan's finances they have assumed on the comics-shop network. The number of copies the small business owners of America order determines the amount of money Colan gets. Given the realities of the comics market -- realities of which Marvel Comics is more aware than anyone -- an all-reprint one-shot with low production values isn't likely to make the top 300 selling comics for its month of release. And as if that weren't enough, Marvel raises the price of the tribute book after its solicitation, further cutting its appeal to the retail community.

2009: Colan draws his final full-length comic, Captain America #601. The following year he wins an Eisner Award, the industry's highest honor, for his work on it. Beside this small metal statuette, Colan receives page rates and no creator ownership for the comic.

2010 May: After a domestic incident resulting in Colan's hospitalization with a shoulder injury, Adrienne Colan is barred from contacting her husband or any third parties connected with him.

2010 June: Adrienne Colan passes away in undetermined circumstances. Rumors continue to circulate about her death today.

2011 June: Gene Colan dies at 84. He never receives money or official acknowledgment from Marvel Comics for the creations he gave them during his years of service.

2011 July: Daredevil volume 3 #1 is released. Its final page contains this tribute to the recently deceased Colan from the book's creative team.



2011-: It isn't the tribute itself, which is a touching example of hearts in the right place and even carries traces of what seems like genuine emotion at points. It's what it stands for: a tiny gesture of remote pity by an immortal giant watching the lives of the people who built it pass more quickly than they should. It is a hypocritical expression. A lie.

This is what happens to the lives that give themselves to the world's most beautiful medium. This is what working in comics does to people.

Something is wrong.

DTU Q&A: Shaky Kane on Elephantmen

This week saw the release of Elephantmen #33, another stellar installment of one of the best-drawn monthly comics going. The big ticket for this particular issue was the presence of artist Shaky Kane, a post-Kirby punk-art maestro whose career has miraculously revived itself after being left for dead in the wake of the early-90s Britcomics boom. There are a lot of things to enjoy about Elephantmen #33. The semantic thrill of seeing that Kane's work has enough currency these days to get him hired onto an ongoing mainstream comics series for an issue is the subtlest. The most obvious is that this is exactly the kind of comic that Shaky Kane draws the living daylights out of: a nasty little post-human horror story set in a dystopian future Los Angeles. Richard Starkings' script whips through interspecies murder, cultural criticism, third-world exploitation, and a sloshing stew of plastic surgery disasters that Jello Biafra himself would be proud of. As drawn by Kane, it's everything a single issue of a comic book should be, a screaming hunk of something new and wild, self-contained and impossible to shake. I asked Shaky a few questions about it; being the all around Great Guy that he is, he gave with the answers, as well as the drawing up top.



MATT SENECA: How did this gig come about?

SHAKY KANE: David [Hine, Kane's writing partner on The Bulletproof Coffin] had known Richard [Starkings] for a number of years. Since British Marvel was around. It was Active Images [Starkings' publishing house] who put together the hard-bound Strange Embrace. Richard was really into Bulletproof Coffin, his design team pulled the whole thing together. I met Richard for the first time last summer at Bristol Expo, we all went out to dinner and the idea came up to do something for Elephantmen. I imagined a couple of pages, but after seeing the Bulletproof work, Richard wanted me to do the whole book. Bulletproof Series 1 wound up at the end of the year so I wanted to do something else before starting on Series 2.

MS: What makes the Elephantmen universe interesting to you?

SK: Art-wise, all the people you like are in there. Richard mixes it up. Its a great concept that's expanded out to define its own universe, just as you put it.

MS: What was the difference working from a script by Richard as opposed to David Hine? Your layouts on this comic were pretty different from Bulletproof Coffin, did you approach this story differently?

SK: This was a different project all together. Once we'd ironed out the premise of Bulletproof, David would send me detailed script pages. Number of panels on a page, suggestions of mood and pretty much the dialogue as it appeared in the final book. That's what David's so good at.



Of course being a joint project I was free to add my own suggestions and even dialogue ideas, The Destroyovsky quote in particular was something I had on hand from my shoe-box of ideas, but mostly it was unnecessary. It was all sewn up.
Richard's script was much looser. It was written as a narrative piece. He would give me directions as to what would appear on mostly double page spreads. The Tokyo Plaza cityscape [above] I drew over the holidays, before I'd even seen the first drafts! I was into drawing it. Richard loved the picture and worked it into the story. Of course a lot of the detailing was already established by Ladronn, but I gave it a Shaky spin. It was up to me to tell the story, working across the pages. Like I said I was really into it. That's what I do.

I was particularly keen to let someone else work on the coloring. And what a great job [Gregory Wright] did. It's slick, but not overwhelming. Its got a Tintin vibe to it, fairly flat but still reader friendly. The way I like it to look.

MS: A lot of the images in this comic were either really blown up or shrunken-down looking; did you construct it on the computer or with an analog (ie, photocopying) technique?



SK: That's the only way I know how to work. Take the double page cityscape again as an example. I drew up the basic structure of the entrance to the turnpike. Then I spent the best part of a week drawing up all the details, working evenings as they came into my head:- The Ripley's truck, The Cap'n Howdy hoarding, the retro cars. I plastered on the detail by scanning them in and layering them onto the page. There's no actual piece of artwork with that image on it.
I own a box full of maybe 50 various sized drawings.

I stopped using photocopies because the line deteriorates and gets to look second generation. Steve Cook actually showed me how to scan in bigger than A4 when he came to visit, a breakthrough! I'm starting to work in a more logical way. or should I say commercially viable way. Just finished a piece for a show at Orbital Comics in London. [image at top]. Here it's all drawn on one sheet of card. In a way the line weight holds better. But what can I do? You figure these things out as you go along.

MS: Two part question to close things out: if you had to sell this issue of Elephantmen to someone what would you tell them... and if they bought it, what would you want their reaction to be?

SK: Again this is a unique book. If you like books about pneumatic bust-lines and implausible cosmetic surgery, preformed by a ringer for the guy out of Human Centipede using kitchen appliances, drawn by a guy with too much time on his hands... then this is definitely the book for you.

You want people to like what you do, appreciate how much you put into it, that's it's real reward.

Your Wednesday Sequence 19

Incanto (2006), pages 11-12. Frank Santoro.

I talked about a really lovely spread of panels out of Frank Santoro's book Incanto on my Robot 6 column this week. I knew I wanted to write about something from that book all week, but I went right down to the wire deciding which one it was going to be. There are so many great pieces of comics in it. Here are two spreads I went so far as to scan and make notes on before deciding on a different one. I thought I would post them because Incanto is a tough book to get and one it seems like not a whole lot of people might have seen. So take a little time with them, and then go track down a copy somewheres:




To see which one I ended up doing the column about, as well as read me talking about the subtle differences between "drawing" and "cartooning" among other things, click here!

Geoff Johns: The Best On Offer (2)

Part one here



For a comparison to the dissonant storytelling style Geoff Johns has pioneered, we have to look outside comics, to the work of Henry Darger. Darger, probably the best-known and most influential “outsider artist” in modern history, spent his life creating well over 15,000 pages of a near-comics work in words and pictures, The Story of the Vivian Girls in the Realms of the Unreal. In Darger, childlike innocence and whimsy is placed next to scenes of terrifying death and torture, from which resurrections are common and daring escapes via epic battles downright commonplace. Various alien races interact in relative harmony, quasi-religious mysticism is a constant presence, and the general effect is one of a highly unusual adult mind attempting to recreate something of childhood’s pure, unfettered imagination after having seen far too much of life’s cruel reality go by. Darger-influenced comics are a relatively recent phenomenon: despite being featured in the groundbreaking avant-comics anthology Raw, his work has only really been absorbed by the cartoonists of the past 10 years or so, typically in visually-driven, confrontational art-comix by cartoonists like Mat Brinkman or Christopher “CF” Forgues.

As far as Dargeresque superhero comics are concerned, it’s Johns and Johns alone. The overriding sense in both men’s work is one of complete dislocation from reality as we know it: human forms still converse and conflict and move through space, but that’s about it. The rules of the game, the governing principles of reality, are completely alien, the province of an entirely imagined logic. In Johns’ Green Lantern universe it often seems that nothing is random, that the laws of inertia and physics have been replaced by the ministrations of various cosmic deities representing the spectrum of human emotion. It’s a vastly compelling idea: though he has never been one to flinch away from showing the most degrading, disturbing things allowed in mainstream comics (and at times actively expanded the parameters of how far into the meat grinder things can go), in Johns the very presence of death and evil is firmly explicable, the fault of “bad” entities who merely require defeat at the hands of the “good” ones.

Johns’ cosmology occasionally approaches the grand terms morality play operates on, but there’s no actual morality involved in these stories. All the blood explosions and breaking skeletons and planed-open bodies and the forces that govern them are conceived as pure entertainment, with no greater message whatsoever to communicate. Though the presence of “good” and “evil” imply some higher relevance, there is no reflection on right and wrong action, no lessons to be learned or messages to take away. The actions that drive the plot of a Johns comic are literally impossible for humans to take in the real world, and all that is shown of their effects is the influence they have on other, similarly abstract entities. Good and evil cease to matter when it’s impossible to practice either one. For all their near-divine grandeur, these comics are literally meaningless when considered as anything but the actuality of what their panels depict.



The actuality of Green Lantern #43, then, is that of a prologue issue to the dizzyingly complicated, stupefyingly violent, and incredibly successful multi-issue saga “Blackest Night”. It’s also one of the most unremittingly bleak and violent issues of a superhero comic ever published without the caveat of a mature readers label or an out-of-continuity disclaimer. As far as the “DCU” is concerned, this is all real, and the lack of any excuses is one of the most striking things about it. This is nothing but a mainstream superhero comic, pitched to the most general of audiences the medium commands, and it is absolutely horrifying. The issue chronicles the transformation of also-ran villain Black Hand into the first member of the undead Black Lantern Corps. Composed mainly of flashbacks, the present moments it depicts are almost blinding in their stylistic conviction and the certainty with which they’re executed. As Black Hand recalls the path that brought him from the cradle into the bondage-stud festooned black latex costume he wears today, he rises from the skeleton-scattered grave he sleeps in, walks to the old family home, murders his family member by member, sits down at the table, and shoots himself in the head. Such narratives aren’t completely foreign to the blackest corners of crime fiction or horror film, but to see it in a superhero comic is uncommon to say the least. Johns doesn’t stop at a mere four-color pastiche of exploitation media, either: two bloodsoaked pages after Black Hand’s death comes his comic book-appropriate resurrection as a vein-popping, dessicated Black Lantern, hi jinx to follow in many issues to come.

The story, drawn by Doug Mahnke with great skill and a tremendous sense of dedication to the material, follows a near art-comix logic, letting the impact of the images drive the story, with the words little more than tonal additions, amplifiers for the impact of the showcase pictures rather than reasons for them or even really a string for them to hang together on. The black-on-white of the word balloons and the white-on-black of the narrative captions become part of the pictures themselves, their place in the panel compositions as essential to the images as any ink line or spotted black. It’s a highly unusual way for superhero comics to operate, this surrender to the total power of pictures, especially when the images are as dark as the ones Mahnke summons up. As the issue begins with Black Hand lying in his rain-soaked grave, transported with bliss and locked in an embrace with a dirt-smeared skeleton, the captions read in bold capital letters. MY HEART IS FILLED WITH DEATH, they declare over Mahnke’s digitally-colored canvas. AND I AM HAPPY. From here, the issue rolls like thunder.

Black Hand thinks back, showing us the defining moments of his life in what we don’t yet know is to be his last. The first memory is of a small child, barely able to walk, finding his mortician father at work. Splattered blood covers the man’s hands. A young female corpse lies black-lipped on a metal table in a pool of dark red. PRETTY, a word balloon tells us.

A wan, sickly-looking boy gestures at a shady glen in the corner of the graveyard he and his father stand in. In the foreground we see another man chest-deep in the hole he digs with a battered spade. The boy smiles as his father looks off into the glen. THAT’S WHERE I WANT MY GRAVE, the words hanging over him say.

The boy has grown. A towering demonic creature shatters his window at night, leaves him a strange golden weapon, and is carried off by glowing green angels. The boy, terrified, uses the weapon to reduce a squirrel to a cluster of tiny bones. He lies, for the first time, in an open grave. I COULD SEE HIS RING GLOWING LIKE A NIGHT LIGHT THAT WAS TOO BRIGHT, go the words scrolling alongside the fetal-positioned boy. I NEEDED TO SHUT IT OFF.

The boy is making himself a new set of clothes. BODY BAG is superimposed over a panel that shows him stroking a sheet of shiny black fabric. He cuts it up with silver scissors. He wants to wear clothes, he thinks, that remind him of something SPECIAL. He holds a freshly cut black domino mask over his face. Veiny eyes pop out through the shadow it casts. Something that reminds him, he thinks, OF MY FIRST KISS.



Back in the present day Black Hand crawls out of his grave. The grass sizzles and turns black beneath his touch. Hunched, he walks through the family cemetery once again. Arriving at the door of his ancestral home, he turns his weapon’s green light on his brothers. They explode, faces fixed in rictuses of pain, skeletons bared, explosions of blood hovering around them like black mist. Huddling behind the grue-sprayed dinner table, Black Hand’s father watches his son’s weapon perforate his mother’s chest cavity with an uninterrupted emerald beam. Ribs clatter to the floor. Black Hand turns to his father. Now two green skeletons lie on the floor, which is turning red beneath them.

Black Hand sits down and points the weapon at his own head. YES, we read. ONE MORE. A wordless full-page panel gives a diagrammatic reading of his suicide: eyes popping inhumanly wide, teeth gritted, cheeks sucked in, a drop of blood from the nose, a small hole in the right temple and another one, spewing wet, in the left. Black hand falls. Computerized blood droplets fill the panels. It appears to be raining red. His eyes, still open, fill with blood.

A tiny man appears, hovering over the black-clad corpse. He vomits a pure black liquid onto it. Black Hand rises, his facial skin seemingly planed away, black tendons and blood vessels spread across it. I WILL FINALLY EXTINGUISH THE LIGHT, the final line of the comic reads.



There’s a linear story beneath the chilling string of imagery Green Lantern #43 presents, but it simply doesn’t feel as important as the sense of utter hopelessness that Johns and Mahnke create: if any Johns comic goes beyond its own complexity and into the realm of successful exploitation work, it’s this one. The point of the comic feels utterly abstract, the creation of something monstrous more urgent for a moment than the epic saga it’s supposed to be leading into. The closest thing to it that exists in comics is Al Columbia’s deconstructed graphic novel Pim and Francie, which presents a disconnected suite of horrifying images that share a great deal of the gothy, unrelenting tone that Johns and Mahnke pull off so convincingly. Both comics overwhelm, their content secondary to the way in which it’s presented, the total seriousness and malicious intent. As drawn by Mahnke, every bit of the issue carries an overwhelming sense of bad vibes, creeping evil. Men wear black suits. Women sit stiffly. Children’s eyes appear edged with mascara, standing out eerily from pale skin. The most familiar objects -- a table, a lawn, a picture in a frame -- are rendered as hideous, frightening things. Real life is a threat, one shot through with a crushing sense of the macabre, one with a single possible ending.

But the real darkness of Johns’ work takes insider knowledge to access. From Columbia to Jim Woodring to Gary Panter, comics from the opposite side of the alt-mainstream divide have been going dark and atavistic for decades, and from Rick Veitch to Josh Simmons to Garth Ennis, that darkness has been brought to the edges of the superhero mainstream for almost as long. It’s an uncomfortable thing when it happens. When superheroes win we see them as amplifications of the human spirit, elaborately drawn symbols for the idea that though the world may often seem an evil place and humanity all too assailable, day by day we remain alive, and sometimes that alone is a victory. When hero comics give way to this thick a darkness, though, the sense is one of total hopelessness. That downbeat sense doesn’t invalidate the art propelling it -- the list of great works ending on a note of defeat is vast and includes plenty of comics -- but it begs the question of why superheroes are a part of the story at all. They exist to triumph, and when they don’t the poignancy of hopelessness itself is lost, set adrift by a failure to highlight the fragility of the human condition. Johns’ darkness is real darkness, the dark of malice but also of vacancy: comics as pure, vapid spectacle, the aesthetic potential of the ideas being worked with left behind.

Where this darkness has rarely if ever been allowed to go is right to the core, into the top-selling, most recognizable titles and their associated action figure sets and marketing campaigns and appearances on bestseller lists. Green Lantern #43, and all the rest that share its frenzied bloodlust, its meaningless gospel and sense that there is no way out, are fully intended as commercial objects: they are, in fact, the most wildly popular things American comics have to offer at the moment. What that says about the medium’s audience is open to interpretation, but I’m afraid I can’t see a way that it says anything good. And what it says about the superhero comics themselves, these stories of inhuman beings fighting for a simpler, lighter world, seems all too obvious. Though they win the battles like they always do, when it’s happening in Johns' comics they’ve already lost the war.

THE END. We've been here for a while.

Geoff Johns: The Best On Offer (1)

“The world he saw rang with percussion. Skeletons snapped. Blood and entrails exploded on a grand scale. He’d stroll through the streets, eat, bathe, weed his rose garden, and it would gather over his head, an insidious halo, as black as dried blood, glittering with the thunder of snapping bones.”
-Dennis Cooper, Closer

Right now the Geoff Johns aesthetic is probably the most prevalent in all of mainstream comics. It rules the roost at DC, dictating more or less the entire line, with Grant Morrison and a few of his copyists providing the only real voice of stylistic dissent. Across town at Marvel there are too many books to share much more than the superhero genre -- and even the most homogeneous of them are a fusion of Brian-Michael Bendis naturalism, Mark Millar bombast, and Stan Lee hokum. If in the history of comics there’s ever been a point when the most prevalent aesthetic hasn't also been the most divisive I'm certainly unaware of it, and the components that make up a Johns comic are no exception to that rule.

Johns’ style seems to have evolved in stages, or at least people’s areas of focus on it have. He started out as one of the hardcore continuity guys, never Frank Miller pop or Alan Moore transformative, but always a writer who could be counted on to know the backstories of the properties he was working with, to understand the character and relationship dynamics that had powered them for decades, and to create stories with a firm basis in both. He was hardly expanding the sphere, but he had a firm knack for writing comics that spoke to the core, the readers who’d been here before and wanted to see more of the same presented in such a way that its sameness would never occur to them. Like pretty much everything else about Johns’ work, this quality carries no inherent positive or negative value -- in fact, it’s quite tricky to even assign a value to. It simply is: if you buy a Johns comic, attention to continuity is one of the parameters the story will operate within.

However, Johns has taken his reverence for what came before to a level perhaps unmatched in superhero history: no mean feat, as those who follow the genre on even the most cursory terms know. The second of Johns’ identifying mannerisms is his interest in the iconic. That’s a word that got bantered about a lot during the middle of last decade as the ideal mode for superhero comics (since this country’s economic collapse, it’s been replaced in that capacity by fresh). Iconic is basically an attempt at alchemy, the distillation of year upon year of backstory into compact form, characters presented as a kind of telegraphing symbol for their own long history. The easiest cross-medium comparison is to music: making a character iconic is a bit like making a dance remix of a song, pruning away the ornamental and the expositional and rendering a single, steady hook that retains the identity of the whole while ceasing to hint at the complexity it might have held in its original form.



Superhero comics as they were practiced from the late 1960s to the early 2000s were anything but iconic. Direct allusion to the thickly layered continuity that powered them both hobbled them and provided them with their greatest point of individuality. For better or for worse, no pulp novel series or TV show ever built a world as dense as the DC Universe. Up to a certain point, Johns seemed happy enough at play in the thickets of past glories that his genre provides, but eventually that seemed to stop being enough. Every truly great writer of superhero comics does more than just exploit the “shared universe” concept: they put their own spin on it, creating stories that change the fabric of the story environment itself, forcing future writers to work within the parameters of their stories. There’s nothing wrong with this.

In Johns, however, that desire was mingled with an equally strong attachment to what he saw as the purest forms of the character concepts he was using, the iconic readings of them that first emerged in the continuity-heavy comics of the high Silver Age and were perpetuated by the on-model renderings of the Super Friends TV show in its various incarnations. Johns’ stock in trade became something between reversion to type and retooling for the future. The “Johns relaunch” was typically composed of a return to something approximating the original idea that birthed the character in the middle years of the 20th century, a dangerous and sexy face-lift for the villains that had played the biggest part in the hero’s early career, and the introduction of darker concepts to the range of story possibilities. Performing a dizzying string of surgeries on bagged-out concepts like Hawkman, the Justice Society, the Flash, and Green Lantern, in a couple of years Johns went from a second-string writer of some note to the savior of many of comics’ most moribund yet potential-rich concepts.

There was a troubling aspect to some of these relaunches, which erased decades of conceptual growth and saddled versions of the characters that were fully and completely intended for children when they were created with uncomfortably adult story material (and occasionally carried an even more vexing hint of racial whitewashing). Though superhero comics have “not been for kids anymore” for a fair few decades at this point, Johns’ reinterpretations made a cottage industry out of ignoring the stories that had passed during those years, moving the characters back to the conceptual ground they operated on during the years when even a thrown punch was an uncommonly savage thing to see in a DC comic. What Johns seems to be doing is going back to the versions of these characters and worlds that were made for children, and seeing how they fare when they have spilled entrails and blown brain matter to contend with.

However, there was never any question of Johns’ good intentions: it was always abundantly clear that he loved his characters deeply, and his audience just as much. Above all else, he made comics designed to serve both well. But for even the most committed fan it’s plain to see that the audience is made up of real people while the characters exist only on the page. At some point it seemed to become more important to Johns that he serve the real people, the ones who lined up for his autograph at panels and wrote hosannas to his name on fan forums and blogs. The basis in continuity receded, and the level of violence became higher and higher, more and more of what sold the books. And the sales numbers got higher and higher. Over the past few years, Johns’ comics have done more than any others to peel back the disquieting aspects of superhero comics and what their fans are really looking for.



To please an ever more passionately divided audience, Johns has made DC’s superhero universe into a venue for unprecedented exercises in exploitation storytelling and conceptual darkness. Under his guidance, the “DCU” has traveled far indeed from the whimsical, consequence-free place it was when the stories whose concepts and frameworks he so regularly borrows from were written. But then, the people who dip their imaginations into it with the greatest frequency and intensity have traveled far themselves. Johns’ writing is writing for children that grew up long ago, a gospel of violence and degradation pitched to an audience whose passion for the material would seem to testify to the deep level it speaks to them on.

Though opinions on the level of craft he brings to his comics vary wildly, Johns is undoubtedly a visionary storyteller, a builder of fully realized worlds completely independent from this one. The list of names who have created cosmologies as fleshed out and imaginative as Johns has in his Green Lantern books is short and impressive: Jack Kirby, Chris Claremont, Dave Sim, Neil Gaiman, perhaps a small handful of others. Furthermore, the conceptual dissonance underlying Johns’ Green Lantern books is almost completely unique: simple, childlike ideas like a spectrum-spanning Rainbow Lantern Corps to complement the established Green one counterpointed by gore-spraying violence on a level rarely if ever seen before in supposedly all-ages superhero comics.

The sheer intensity of this violence is nothing new to genre fiction -- horror and action movies have been spilling gore for decades, and the literary tradition is packed with paragraphs that investigate the human animal’s capacity for destruction. Johns’ bloody sequences are tough to claim as literary and more difficult to see as at all engaged in any investigation of the violence they present, but even then he remains in proximity to an artistic tradition, that of exploitation. At best, exploitation comics use similar precepts to pop art, allowing the simple presence of confrontational content to incite reader response rather than calling it up with a more subtle approach. When the Johns superhero comic presents such content in the middle of stories that require a specific, rigorous engagement from readers, however -- a working knowledge of continuity and backstory, a familiarity with the writer’s previous issues, an understanding of the shorthand “iconic” approach to character being used -- exploitation techniques simply fail, the bluntness and shock of seeing sprayed red losing much of its impact to the immediate thoughts that go to what every dismemberment and vivisection mean in terms of the larger, epic plot.

There’s also a much simpler problem with Johns’ insistence on soaking his characters’ spandex with viscera. The Silver Age stories Johns is so clearly enamored of rarely featured so much as a punch to the face, the strictures placed on the medium by the Comics Code Authority forcing superhero storytelling into a light, vividly imaginative, almost pacifistic mode of operation in which no one ever killed or maimed or even really caused physical harm. There’s an unanswered question raised by Johns’ resurrection of these works, one that won’t go away: why does he feel it’s necessary to add the violence in?

PART 2

The Junkyard: 07.13.2011

A new weekly column about what washes up on the walls Wednesdays; it's more or less like this



As you may have heard if you're one of my stalkers, I'm back working comics retail -- which means I'm back in contact with the mainstream of the medium. Literal contact, I have to touch these things, man! Usually it's pretty tough for me to actually make it through a full issue of a current superheroey comic, but I really do have a lot of fun flipping through them looking for bits. A nice punching panel, a knee-slapper editing mistake, an unintentionally hilarious bit of dialogue, a sign that comics are moving another little bit closer to total aesthetic and commercial transcendence. Or bankruptcy, it's so hard to tell the difference. Either way, I thought I would use the internet to let everybody do that with me each week for the next little while. This was actually a really good week for the serialized stuff: Hellboy and BPRD on the same day and a new fucking issue of Rasl makes three comics I can look at in a completely unironic fashion. But that's no fun. So get ready to flip the shit like a thalidomide baby...

Detective Comics #879 and Black Panther #521, drawn AND colored by Francesco Francavilla, written by hacks. Marvel/DC.

Neither of these was a terrible comic to read, actually, though DC just stays making comics designed to disgust the living ass out of anyone who hasn't netflixed Hostel twenty times (you want to know how the splatterpunk Geoff Johns aesthetic works in the real world, people? Small children covering their eyes and plugging their ears in terror during my visit to Green Lantern at the cinema is how). The rise of a villain whose main power is his racism, seriously, in Black Panther was legitimately gripping. But who cares about stuff like that when I'm rereading Dostoyevsky's short novels in my secret identity as a consumer of other forms of media? This is comics, and comics have a) pictures, and b) bright colors. When an artist colors himself it's always a good sign. When they bring a highly competent fake-Mazzucchelli drawing style to the table it's even better. But the reason I want Francesco Francavilla to be my new boyfriend is because he colors that drawing like this



and this



and this.



Psychedelia is alive and well on the pages of second-tier superhero comics, people, just as free of the limitations of "depictive" pictorial techniques as ever. Keep on rockin' in the free world, dude, and keep doing it to the tune of two issues a week please. Steranko would be proud.

Captain America volume NEW #1, by Steve McNiven and Ed Brubaker. Marvel.

Didn't Marvel just defy math to get Captain America to issue 600 like a year ago if that (there were really only 590-something), only to turn around now and relaunch the thing? They should just stop doing sequential numbers on these comics. If you look at the sales charts it's always an extra few thousand people buying it whenever any comic whatsoever hits a round number, so just imagine if like, every issue of Avengers was #25, every X-Men was 1, every Hulk was ZERO, and Thor ping ponged between 100, 1000, and 75 from installment to installment. The day is coming, guys. (Marvel has also introduced decimals to their issue numbering, I swear to god, but that is literally too hard of math for me to follow. Dropping out of high school before you understand fractions completely really limits your enjoyment of superhero comics, which is probably why I prefer shit like Houellebecq essays.)

Anyway, I haven't read a Brubaker book since the Sleeper days or thereabouts -- anybody know the exact moment when that guy became boring? Seriously: this issue has a premise of Captain America versus Hydra, which means guy in red and blue fighting guys in green and yellow, a coloring potentiality that can save even the most wretched pages, and we see those two sartorial choices in the same panel a total of THREE times, two of them on really small figure drawings. Congrats to Brubaker for moving up to the next level of ex-Crossgen artists to write for, though. It's only a few more years of toil before the big Greg Land collab we've all been waiting for, brother! McNiven doesn't do terrible work on this comic, though the complete lack of drapery on any piece of black clothing is weird up against the meticulous detail on everything else. Gotta get the issue out on time somehow, I guess. For every thirty-head high figure like this



there's a nice shot like this



so call it even, I guess?

Batman The Dark Knight #3, by David Finch and Uncredited Writer Paul Jenkins. DC.

While Marvel struggles to figure out how to make a comic issue #1 and issue #HISTORIC at the same time, the new order at DC is letting high Image-style artists chop the pseudo-pulp novel scripts of some of the worst writers in comics history to bits in order to draw more Batman splashes. So as with your average PictureBox comic, your enjoyment really depends on how boss you find the man with the pencil's style. David Finch is no Kevin Huizenga (newsflash!), but there is a lot worse if you ask me, and dude's sequencing can actually get really cool at times. Observe:



I did not realize the newly reinstated yellow circle around Batman's logo glowed until I read that page. Must be the tiniest lightbulb of all times. That kind of stuff takes work though, enough so that by the last two pages of the comic what are you gonna do but say fuck it and fill 'em up with THIS. Too big for the scanner bed, bitchiz!



If you think DC's going to get 52 monthly books out under the sterling crop of quality controllers they've got at the helm right now, you... you probably won't get your mind changed by anything I have to say. Don't stop believing! The future of the medium as a commercial industry is in your hands! Literally! I'm not really crying, I just ate a jalapeno is all.

BPRD Hell On Earth Monsters #1, by Tyler "Da New Boi" Crook and the most consistent writing team to have worked in comics this millennium. Dark Horse.

It's BPRD so it's good. You think I have anything to say about the construction besides that? Nah, the only question here is how some guy nobody's heard of is going to measure up to Guy Davis, who put together a run of periodical comics work over his past eight years on this title that stands shoulder to shoulder with the best by many a Lifetime Achievement Eisner Award recipient. Tyler Crook? Not too bad, actually. Not too bad at all. He's not Davis -- a little cartoonier, a little of the fake Paul Pope magic that shows up in Becky Cloonan and Nathan Fox, but what keeps springing out is what was also notable about Duncan Fegredo's early Hellboy comics: consistent attempts to incorporate the mannerisms of the book's previous (great) artist into a different but complementary style. From here it looks like it could be pretty interesting to watch Crook develop. Also this, so he's good in my books:



The Amazing Spider-Man #665, by see below. Marvel.

This comic: as pleasant and unremarkable as falling asleep at the end of the day. This cover, though: well thought out as hell. Paolo Rivera in full effect, take a second with it.



Also, hand-drawn title lettering!



I just think it looks nicer than computer kind, but that also means that when he drew this page they had enough time before the comic came out that they knew who was going to be working on it from start to finish, as opposed to planning for sending half-inked pages off to seventeen freelancers' inboxes a few hours before press time with promises of American dollars. A totally rhetorical reason to like a comic better, but it helps put some of the illusions back in a boy's head.

KING OF THE HEAP THIS WEEK:

Sherlock Holmes Year One #5 Giant Dick Variant Cover, by Aaron Campbell I Think. Dy-no-mite!



Figure that one out if you can.

Give Up

Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World (2005), by Seth. D&Q.



Seth is one of a few names that can be counted on to pop up in discussions of comics with actual literary merit. His great skill as a cartoonist and storyteller is obviously the biggest reason for that -- but as the medium winds its way through the opening years of the 21st century, another seems more and more worthy of mention. Quite frankly, I think the era of cartoonists that attempt to address the "literary" with their work, to dialogue with the great works of fiction and their tropes, has passed us by. That's not to say that the baseline of quality in comics has somehow dropped; only that the zeitgeist behind the good ones these days (and for the past several years) seems increasingly geared to the pictures, the layouts, the history of comics, the things that lie within the medium rather than across the way in literature. (The necessity of a word that serves the same function for comics as "literary" does for prose is especially pressing when this distinction is being made. I've used comicky a couple times, but it seems most likely that nothing will ever stick.)

As time goes on literary comics becomes more and more recognizable as a phase in the medium's development, one that begins around the Hernandez brothers and ends around Craig Thompson. These days the big influences from that period are the great cartoonists who resisted the impulse to travel routes of content previously taken by prose fiction: Gary Panter, Al Columbia, Moebius. Seth, for his part, isn't an influence I see popping up in much exciting new comics work -- there might be a little of his style in Michael DeForge, but it lies beneath other artists' more recognizable inflections. In the long view of history, when Seth as well as Thompson and the Hernandezes and Alan Moore and Adrian Tomine and all the rest are merely memories, it may well turn out that the artist's most significant contribution to the field will have been his massive effect on its book design practices. It's only because the literary-comics movement has hosted some of the very greatest cartoonists in history... but among names like Ware and Clowes, even an artist as forbiddingly talented as Seth is an also-ran.

To his credit, he admits as much in the typically self-deprecating foreword to Wimbledon Green, which is far and away his best book. "No one," Seth writes, "would mistake this gentle poking of the comics world with Mr. Ware's profound and moving work." All the charm of the book is right there in that sentence: Seth has done the kind of comics he makes sure to point out this one isn't, and while they've been very good they've never quite managed the Achievement status that other cartoonists have reached. It's anyone's guess what the reason for that might be, but I think it's because Seth's forte isn't the literary but the comicky. The nostalgia for a forgotten past that tints all his work is much more unique and interesting when it's turned to tall tales than human drama. His broadly cartooned, deceptively simple manner of drawing people is perfect when applied to caricatures rather than characters. And most surprisingly, it turns out that Seth, one of the longest-form of long-form plotters in comics (his serial Clyde Fans has been running for well over a decade at this point), makes his best work in the "novel of ideas" category. Wimbledon Green is a romp, a delightfully silly and fun tear into comics culture and the loons who take it way too seriously, shot through with an amiable sarcasm. Seth spends the whole book making fun of his characters -- or at the very least, studying them with obvious bemusement -- but his affection for everything and everyone he's put into his story is both obvious and infectious.



The main plot of the book is an absurdist shaggy-dog tale chronicling the efforts of a group of cantankerous comics enthusiasts with limitless resources to gain possession of a super-rare back issue that may or may not actually exist. Seth throws out ideas like a fire throws out sparks to make what sounds like mundane subject matter anything but: what in reality would be a few bland phone calls and a paid shipping bill turns into aerial combat, chases through swamps, kidnapping, and grand theft beneath his pen. The little details that push the action forward are almost uniformly more arresting than the actual plot. The club of collectors that forms the book's cast is based out of a marble-columned museum in the center of a bustling city. Crooked comic book auctions end in hard jail time. The massively corpulent, dauntingly pretentious, somehow-still-endearing title character lives in an imposing mansion called the "Temple of Newsprint" -- with an Indian manservant straight out of Little Orphan Annie -- and he can tell who printed a comic by smell alone! This is a comic that refuses to take itself seriously on just about any level, and it is so much the better for it.

Assembled from hastily drawn sketchbook vignettes, its most appealing quality is its looseness, a sense of spontaneity offset by the skill of its artist. When the imagination and hands coming up with the material is this good, one both trusts that the rambling, elliptical story is going somewhere, and doesn't mind that it isn't going there now. Indeed, though Wimbledon's quest for the coveted back issue is the ostensible focus of the comic, that story ends well before the book itself does. The final quarter of the book is both the most perplexing and the best: filling in gulps of backstory by the page, it serves no immediate purpose to the already-concluded narrative but merely entertains like crazy. Seth tells us about the founding of the "Coverloose Club" of comics aficionados, about a few of Wimbledon's more hilariously embarrassing interactions with other collectors, and -- best of all -- about the high points of an obscure (fictional) 1940s comic series that happens to be the title character's all-time favorite. One can't help but wonder while reading these masterful bits what the story is really about if not the hunt for the rarest back issue of all, but by the end it's obvious: just read the title again. Every charmingly zany vignette in the book contributes something or other to our understanding of the mysterious, ridiculous, borderline tragic Wimbledon Green. It's a character study with few peers in comics, and the fact that its subject is such a strange and farcical one only makes the study itself that much more unique and interesting.



Seth's ability to create fully fleshed-out, perfectly idiosyncratic set-ups for completely ridiculous story details is unmatched, almost Dr. Seussian at times. The effect is closest to that of a great performance, with the tale getting taller and taller but never quite leaving the realm of the believable. That's how the old masters of the form, great newspaper cartoonists like Roy Crane and Harold Gray and Doug Wright did it, piling absurdity onto absurdity with a straight face until they had accumulated into a functioning universe. Ever historically-minded, Seth is aware of the sandbox he's playing in, and seeing him riff on the formulas and techniques of great cartoonists past is a delight. From John Stanley's "YOW!" punchline to Frank King's method of drawing dappled sunlight falling through trees on a human figure, this comic takes its medium's history as a giant toybox, spinning new takes on old classics with no end of glee. The visual style Seth uses to support his riffing is worthy of its influences, too: his usual tight, meticulous cartooning loosens up for this sketchbook comic, a rich, golden-hued wash spreads over the panels, the characters become less real people and more amalgamations of simple shapes, and everything gets more and more inviting to read.

You can blaze through Wimbledon Green in an hour or spend days marveling at how Seth constructs fully immersive environments in postage-stamp sized panels with a few square door frames, or spare lines of slashed brickwork, or the bubbling silhouettes of trees. There's a delightful messiness to the most satisfyingly drawn sections of the book, with the wash escaping out over the panel borders or the shapes that make up a figure drawn wobbly and asymmetrical. It's as if Seth is so sure of his forms and compositions that there's simply no need to labor over them too long. The visual continuity of the comic never breaks down, supporting the reading experience with every panel, and everything beyond that is mere frills. It's the ideas behind the drawings that really count here, the smoothness of the pages' movement and the iconic simplicity of the elements in the panels. It's beautiful, like hearing Mozart banged out of a half-busted saloon piano.



That interplay between craft and spontaneity, fine writing skills and throwaway subject matter, the important and the trite, is exactly what makes Wimbledon Green such an individual book and such a good one. By turning a skill set that stands with the best of literary comics to something less serious, something closer to what the great cartoonists of yesteryear that so obsess him and influence his work were doing, Seth created the most interesting and eminently readable book of his career. Sometimes being less serious about one's art pushes it to the greatest heights, and this is certainly one of those cases. When the more restrained, wistful moments and hushed, sparsely gorgeous landscapes that Seth is so famous for enter Wimbledon Green, they have a powerful effect amidst all the giddiness and whizzing of ideas: one can truly appreciate what the artist's contemplative nostalgist aesthetic brings to the table in a hyperkinetic, ADD medium. And when they recede, the skill as a yarn-spinner that Seth so rarely employs in his other work is front and center, making the pages turn like a strong gust of wind. Few artists have the skill to render something concrete with this much abandon; fewer still have the precise combination of strengths to make their most off-the-cuff work their best.

FREE MUSIC: The AFFECTED Interviews, part 2

Look at that. When I posted a scan of the same piece of paper back in April, it looked like this. It's the blotter pad I've been using as I draw my serialized graphic novel AFFECTED, and it only gets nastier as time goes on. In addition, it's the cover to the mixtape I curated as a soundtrack to the comic, which you can download over at Adam McIlwee's very fine pop culture blog Lust Brigade. The mix is a pretty straightforward blend of LA party noise, scary music about sex, aching classical piano, and trashy pop bits. It goes like this:

1. "Puerto Rican Ghost" by Mars
2. "Chopin: Nocturne in C Minor, Op. 48 - Lento" by Tamás Vásáry
3. "Die Slow" by HEALTH
4. "Hollywood (Fenech-Soler Remix)" by Marina and the Diamonds
5. "Burning Sage" by Cold Cave
6. "Fuck Me" by Captain Ahab
7. "Distractions" by Insides
8. "Candles" by John Cale
9. "Armenia" by Einstürzende Neubauten
10. "Before Tigers (Blindoldfreak Remix)" by HEALTH

Good stuff at the best price point of all, git it right now.

Is that all, though? Hardly. Adam also posted a spot-on critical appraisal of AFFECTED, as well as the second in a series of interviews with me about the comic. You came here looking for comics criticism, so go read some. Adam's writing is great and he's a great interviewer too: I always end up putting at least as much into my writing for these interview questions as I do for posts on the blog. This time we talked about Watchmen, the Iraq War, writing good character dynamics in comics, drawing the "internet landscape", Osama bin Laden, the genius of Steve Ditko's "Question" comics, and the way today's young hipster kids (like us) relate to their identity as Americans. I'm really proud of it, so I hope you'll go check it out, and take a look at the comic itself when you're done.

"Lucca"

Last time I posted a comic here I talked about working at a large scale and trying to think about the comics page as a painting or poster as well as a storytelling device. Creating something that works on a visual level when you look at it from far away as well as read it up close. This story was a perfect opportunity to put some of that thinking to a practical purpose: I actually made it for a gallery show, at a bigger size than I've ever worked before. A lot of the inspiration for it came from the Greek vase paintings on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art here in New York, though Rodin's erotic watercolors still hold as powerful a sway over my drawing as ever, maybe even more of one since I was trying to see if I could make fine art as well as comics with this strip. Frank Santoro's comics, as ever with these, were also a big influence. Most of the drawings here are from life in some roundabout way or another: the female figures are copied from a few life drawings I did back in Los Angeles a few weeks ago, and the male figures are yours truly, posing in the mirror. The flat color seems to be everybody's favorite part of this one. It's not often that works in painting, but then again these aren't quite paintings -- so there you have it, I suppose.

Your Wednesday Sequence 18 (Watchmen Journal)

Watchmen #7 (1986), page 16. Dave Gibbons.


I am living and breathing this comic lately, you guys. First and foremost, I wrote my latest Robot 6 column on it, which allowed me to go deep into talking about Dave Gibbons' compositional skill, archetypal images, John Higgins' killer coloring (check out that bottom tier!), and the underlying similarity between dream states and the comics medium. I love dream sequences in comics; not necessarily reading them, Michel Fiffe makes a good point in the comments about how they're usually a vehicle for lazy writing, but looking at them, oh man. Comics are inherently dreamlike, so when artists need to create actual dreams with the form, they typically have to go at least a little wild. Go read the article, that's why I'm writing this right now.

But also in Watchmen news:

- I have been rereading the book. It's as fun as ever, and boy oh boy does Higgins' coloring knock my socks off every time. I never really remember just how vividly, unconventionally colored that book is when I think about it -- it's such a serious, ponderous piece of work, but the pages really scream with airy brightness too. A lot of the time I feel like those glowing pinks and oranges and greens are the main thing keeping the book out of the po-faced, self-parodic "grim and gritty" zone that its opposite number Dark Knight Returns, for all its charms, occasionally visits. Maybe it's the settings Gibbons creates, also. Watchmen's New York feels less like the bustling hub of early Marvel or Miller's urban terror zones (the two main interpretations of that city, probably all big cities, in American comics), and a lot more like the cloud-scraped, shining, slightly dingy metropoles of the era's Eurocomics.

There's a bracing tinge of fantasy to Watchmen, a reserved blue note that's foreign to other superhero comics, but downright inherent to the work of Heavy Metal artists like Francois Schuiten, Enki Bilal, even Herge honestly. Higgins' colors are a big part of that feeling too -- it isn't monochrome and flat but crystalline, almost kaleidoscopic. Immersive. I love it. I've read that comic a billion times so the urge to push forward through the story and find out what happens has long since dissipated. I just like to look back into the panels and think about what it would be like to live there.



-I have finally watched the movie. I agree with you, it was terrible, but I also found the Dr. Manhattan monologue scenes where he's remembering his life as a human and then deciding that life does have inherent value incredibly touching. I was drawing the whole time I watched that thing, and I actually think that might have helped, because it was really the audio of those parts, just listening to them, that made them work so well for me. All that writerly Alan Moore dialogue sounds ridiculous when it's coming out of the gruff Rorschach guy or the wooden Silk Spectre girl (who is an incredibly nice person in real life, so I feel a little bad saying that). But the voice of Dr. Manhattan is perfect -- reserved and deadpan, letting the sound simply carry the words and the words themselves carry the rhetorical content. One second it sounds completely devoid of emotion, the next there are tones of longing and regret and hope and lack of understanding absolutely swirling through it. It's the ideal voice to read Alan Moore writing, never overacting material that would be so easy to ham up, but always delivering the emotional beats in it. Those sequences are also scored quite well, with soft bronze strings and synths that bear the voice up without ever overpowering it enacting a perfect counterpoint. Though the last Manhattan scene is completely ruined by the Hendrix riff kicking in at the end. Such is life when you watch bad movies.

- I have copied a bunch of Gibbons panels featuring Rorschach into my comic Affected. The first bit is up now, you will see more of them soon. Copying Gibbons is interesting because his understanding of drapery and shadow and the balance between black space and white is so strong, but his grasp of the human figure... less so. I know, you're like "whaaaat?", but take that book out again and look at those coconut heads and Ken doll hands. Look at this!



Look at it! I have a theory about the particular anatomic distortions Gibbons makes consistently throughout the book that I might make a blog post with later if my good friend Comics Alliance keeps on not posting the grand guignol masterpiece of an article I gave them days and days ago, but for now go look at my take, and if you're behind on Affected, now is a good time to catch up. Plug plug!

Aw man...

Today I got the latest issue of Diamond, the generally excellent newspaper anthology published by Floating World Comics out of Portland. For my money it's the best one yet. Paul Pope draws a gorgeous dream comic and a cover that got me some weird looks when I read the thing on the subway. Dash Shaw contributes a surrealistic spread starring Barack Obama that continues his ever-more intriguing use of expressionistic acetate color overlays. Jonny Negron brings the house down with a massively psychedelic porn-y strip that explores territory pretty much foreign to everything but tentacle-rape manga. Jim Rugg's literalist reading of the classic cat vs. mouse cartoon scenario, complete with compund fractures, ripped off ears, and blood-filled eyeballs literally dropped my jaw a couple times. This is such a great comic, you guys.

So I was saddened to see this in the fine print at the end:



Thus, apparently, ends one of the worthiest entries in what's becoming a more and more prominent new format for comics, the newspaper anthology. Final issues always make me think about the series in question's place in comics history (or lack thereof), and I feel like Diamond's got an interesting one. Tucker Stone's recent article on anthologies makes the point that in the post-internet comics landscape they aren't really the introductory stage for new artists that they used to be -- now they're more rarefied places for the cream of the crop to test out ideas and show off their chops. The result of that might be less historical importance (they're no longer the first place anyone was published), but it means that we get more things like Diamond: venues for cartoonists who've earned the privilege to do a little stretching out in an environment with the air of "indie cool". More specifically, the newspaper anthology, which I think in the long view will end up being seen as the dominant form of this era in the format, affords some of the grandest stretching out possible: the broadsheet page hasn't been this relevant a presence in comics art since the 1940s, when Hal Foster and George Herriman banged them out for an audience of millions on a weekly basis.

Diamond and comics like it are really something quite unique: isolated incidents of visually stunning work by the medium's best artists, slapped together in cheap packages and often given away for free. That's a wonderful thing. I'll be raising a glass to editor Jason Leivian's lovely experiment tonight.

Dump

Current investigation: Italian smut cartoonist Paolo Serpieri

I never do this... but guess what? I'm gonna do this. Working on two epic comics-blogging projects right now, both of which should be along shortly... so for now you get links and ephemera. Original content? What's that?

- I'm not sure I know what it is, but Blaise Larmee is a dude who wrote a book where everybody was like "original content doesn't exist". He's also a notoriously difficult interview, so I was quite surprised and pleased to see how much my boy Adam McIlwee got out of him in this critical profile piece. Ten songs! Feed your ipod now, that Nite Jewel track is pretty much unfuckwithable.

- Speaking of whom (kinda), Aidan Koch's redesign of Larmee and friends' Comets Comets site is the prettiest thing I've seen on the web in forever. It takes a while to load, but go now, because they redesign that site as often as some comics fans wash their hair.

- Gary Panter has a new book out but I don't guess you'll see it in stores: it's published by French publisher UDA, and American distributor Picturebox can't even give out review copies, so wholesale to retailers is probably also out. You better get your copy here fast: it's a beautiful book, and the mix of paintings, comics, and sketchbook stuff gives a remarkably clear look at the many facets of Panter's creativity. Just thought I'd let ya know about that one.

- I read this Geoff Johns interview. It's pretty good/funny/weird... if you have any interest in reading an interview with that guy, whether completely sincere or completely ironic, this thing's got you covered.

- You guys all read the Shit Comics tumblr, right? Well whatever, it's time to get acquainted.

- Tucker Stone's top 10 comics.

- Finally, I got a few sweet back issues of Heavy Metal the other day: the one in question had shorts by Guido Crepax, Francois Schuiten, Liberatore, and Joost Swarte all in the same issue. There's also an excellent interview with Liberatore, the artist behind the ultraviolent, technicolor Ranxerox (reproduced below). Nobody ever talks about Heavy Metal interviews, I'd guess mainly because they were doing the notable ones during the same time that Gary Groth was dropping novel-length talks with people like Gil Kane and Burne Hogarth -- but within the parameters of the breezy short-form interview, that magazine published some pretty interesting conversations with some fascinating artists. The Journal was never going to talk with that generation of exploitation-comics artists anyway, but in retrospect the Heavy Metal garde was an enthralling group of cartoonists who never got half the play they deserved from the English-language comics press. I'd hope the current crop of comics critics can get good career-spanning interviews out of at least Moebius and Corben before it's too late: those guys are a lost chapter of comics history, and it would be a shame if the best talks with them available were a few pages in random expensive magazine back issues.

Anyway, I really like this interview: there's a kind of jocular frankness that all the Heavy Metal artists share in common (could be the translator?), and it's really interesting to hear a legitimately great cartoonist like Liberatore profess his relative disinterest in comics as opposed to painting and illustration. Dig in: