Making comics with that character out of that costume (as they're going to be doing again this month) is simply a fool's game.
8.30.2011
Oh wow...
Got The Comics Journal (the oldskool print magazine version) #286 today for the gorgeous Otto Soglow reprints, but I got stuck on this cover image that's included in the Gail Simone interview instead: Static (later Static Shock, as I would know him on the crappy '90s TV show) #1, by John Paul Leon and Steve Mitchell. If there's ever been a cooler or more savagely modern superhero-costume design I haven't seen it. Look at that!
Making comics with that character out of that costume (as they're going to be doing again this month) is simply a fool's game.
Making comics with that character out of that costume (as they're going to be doing again this month) is simply a fool's game.
8.26.2011
Context
Sans Genre VIII
From Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino (1972):
"The connections between one element of the story and the other were not always obvious to the emperor; the objects could have various meanings: a quiver filled with arrows could indicate the approach of war, or an abundance of game, or else an armorer's shop; an hourglass could mean time passing, or time past, or sand, or a place where hourglasses were made..."
McCay
Herriman
Herge
Kirby
Tezuka
Panter
Miller
Ware
What do they mean? These pictures, these fractions of things much greater? They mean nothing. Out of context, they could mean anything, imply anything. But look at them.
In comics, it's never the individual pictures, no matter how lovely they are. It's the context one image puts every previous one into, the furthered understanding of a whole that each constituent part helps create.
And yet when comics are done right, every image is a complete composition in and of itself, something beautiful and isolated, a moment out of time that takes its readers out of time as well, leaving them to contemplate it.
A drawing in a comic is a communication, but not a complete one. A single puzzle piece. The only way in which the individual panel can function completely is as an example of beauty.
But none of this should belittle the panel. None of this makes one drawing closed in by four borders anything less than a thousand pages of sequencing and word balloons and plot twists and data is. Because the highest goal of any art is to communicate something beautiful. What makes comics special is that they are composed of complete beauty after complete beauty. An index of pearls on an invisible string that we glide along as we read.
You may say that comics can be something more than that. Even that they should be. But when the book is closed and the time with it is over and it's packed into the shelf, we all still have our favorite comics, we carry them around in us, sometimes we make lists.
What are our favorite comics? What is the best the medium has to offer? Is it that particular copy of that particular book that you own, with page sixteen dog-eared or the dust jacket lost? Is it ink on paper or the smell of newsprint new or old? Comics exists beyond these things. They are not even your favorite stories or your favorite drawings, the plot points or pencil lines that freeze you and speak to you. What makes us love whatever comics we love is the context we bring to them, or that they bring to us. The way they brightened our lives, or the way we came to them at a time when we were bright already. That string of pearls, that accumulation of beauties, is always one single thing when we step back further, something complete made of many things, each one of them complete as well.
There are things you can appreciate for the way they look or the package they come in or how clever they are. But the ones we love exist beyond the physical, in our minds. The memories of a feeling, or the feeling itself, or whatever the ones we cherish gave us in our time with them. These are true reasons.
And at its best what exists on the page, in the drawing, in the story, in the panels, only helps us there.
From Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino (1972):
"The connections between one element of the story and the other were not always obvious to the emperor; the objects could have various meanings: a quiver filled with arrows could indicate the approach of war, or an abundance of game, or else an armorer's shop; an hourglass could mean time passing, or time past, or sand, or a place where hourglasses were made..."
McCay
Herriman
Herge
Kirby
Tezuka
Panter
Miller
Ware
What do they mean? These pictures, these fractions of things much greater? They mean nothing. Out of context, they could mean anything, imply anything. But look at them.
In comics, it's never the individual pictures, no matter how lovely they are. It's the context one image puts every previous one into, the furthered understanding of a whole that each constituent part helps create.
And yet when comics are done right, every image is a complete composition in and of itself, something beautiful and isolated, a moment out of time that takes its readers out of time as well, leaving them to contemplate it.
A drawing in a comic is a communication, but not a complete one. A single puzzle piece. The only way in which the individual panel can function completely is as an example of beauty.
But none of this should belittle the panel. None of this makes one drawing closed in by four borders anything less than a thousand pages of sequencing and word balloons and plot twists and data is. Because the highest goal of any art is to communicate something beautiful. What makes comics special is that they are composed of complete beauty after complete beauty. An index of pearls on an invisible string that we glide along as we read.
You may say that comics can be something more than that. Even that they should be. But when the book is closed and the time with it is over and it's packed into the shelf, we all still have our favorite comics, we carry them around in us, sometimes we make lists.
What are our favorite comics? What is the best the medium has to offer? Is it that particular copy of that particular book that you own, with page sixteen dog-eared or the dust jacket lost? Is it ink on paper or the smell of newsprint new or old? Comics exists beyond these things. They are not even your favorite stories or your favorite drawings, the plot points or pencil lines that freeze you and speak to you. What makes us love whatever comics we love is the context we bring to them, or that they bring to us. The way they brightened our lives, or the way we came to them at a time when we were bright already. That string of pearls, that accumulation of beauties, is always one single thing when we step back further, something complete made of many things, each one of them complete as well.
There are things you can appreciate for the way they look or the package they come in or how clever they are. But the ones we love exist beyond the physical, in our minds. The memories of a feeling, or the feeling itself, or whatever the ones we cherish gave us in our time with them. These are true reasons.
And at its best what exists on the page, in the drawing, in the story, in the panels, only helps us there.
Something Wonderful
This is the best piece of writing about comics I've read all year. My friend Adam McIlwee and I were talking about the future of his Lust Brigade blog a while back and I suggested that he use his proficiency with the general internets to "stalk" cartoonists who people might not know as much as they want to know about. Over the past month or so I've helped him fact-check an article about cartoonist du jour Blaise Larmee and his associates White Shasta and JCORP that's only grown more and more sprawling. The payoff is tremendous: an epic think piece about digital role-playing, the far side of the obscure-art-comix world, and just how diffuse the question "who am I" can get online. Every once in a while somebody writes something about comics on the internet that means more than a discussion of inking techniques or back issues. This is one of those somethings. Read it.
PS: I'll have the JCORP/1981 interview up for your reading pleasures soon enough.
TCJ Review: Zegas #1
It's been a while since I reviewed anything for ye olde Comics Journal, but then I read Michel Fiffe's absolutely stunning comic Zegas and felt obligated to get the message out there to as many people as I possibly could. Head over and read the review, and then hopefully it will have convinced you to buy the comic, which is a beautifully gnarled piece of dystopian-scifi art comix. Essential work, and about as of-the-moment as anything else out there right now. Fiffe is making work that deserves as much notice as it can get, so reading what I had to say about it is the least you can do. Starts like this:
Some “good comics” are the kind you appreciate coldly, for the craft or cleverness on display, but some — less common, unfortunately — are so hot they pull you in and resist the critical eye as you read them, their artistry loud or urgent enough to shuck off its identity as lines on paper and simply communicate. The first oversized, color-splattered issue of Michel Fiffe’s Zegas is one of those glorious few, a comic that goes from the first panel to the last without even hinting at the idea of slowing down, a brush-inked rush that twists through four short, vaguely connected stories, running out of paper more than ending. The atom bomb force that Fiffe brings to his art is visible on each level, from masterfully composed spreads through perfectly framed panels down to beautifully blown-out individual lines. But just as impressive is how considered the comic is, how well every element of it hangs together when held up to the light. Read more
Some “good comics” are the kind you appreciate coldly, for the craft or cleverness on display, but some — less common, unfortunately — are so hot they pull you in and resist the critical eye as you read them, their artistry loud or urgent enough to shuck off its identity as lines on paper and simply communicate. The first oversized, color-splattered issue of Michel Fiffe’s Zegas is one of those glorious few, a comic that goes from the first panel to the last without even hinting at the idea of slowing down, a brush-inked rush that twists through four short, vaguely connected stories, running out of paper more than ending. The atom bomb force that Fiffe brings to his art is visible on each level, from masterfully composed spreads through perfectly framed panels down to beautifully blown-out individual lines. But just as impressive is how considered the comic is, how well every element of it hangs together when held up to the light. Read more
Your Wednesday Sequence 23
Ada (2010), pages 2-3. Atak.
Well, I'm back to talking about normal old "comics" on my Robot 6 column, but that was supposed to be the point anyway. This week it's another entry in the "archive of the obscure" category, as I do some riffing on a spread of images and typography by the German cartoonist Atak. So what if nobody's read the comic I got it from, just look at those colors! If your interest is piqued, head on over and read what I had to say about it; if you insist on a preview, it starts like this:
The sequence that the pictures on a page of comics run in is the most important decision an artist in the form can make; everything proceeds from there. Less pressingly important, but still often worth examining, is the sequencing of words. I don’t mean the poetic order that the individual units of language are put in, but the actual organization of text on the page, the way the reader’s eye is invited to move from one line of text to the next. It’s so important to effective comics storytelling that the through-lines between blocks of type be clean and easy to follow that it can be difficult to find anything really out of the ordinary being done with them. Read more
Well, I'm back to talking about normal old "comics" on my Robot 6 column, but that was supposed to be the point anyway. This week it's another entry in the "archive of the obscure" category, as I do some riffing on a spread of images and typography by the German cartoonist Atak. So what if nobody's read the comic I got it from, just look at those colors! If your interest is piqued, head on over and read what I had to say about it; if you insist on a preview, it starts like this:
The sequence that the pictures on a page of comics run in is the most important decision an artist in the form can make; everything proceeds from there. Less pressingly important, but still often worth examining, is the sequencing of words. I don’t mean the poetic order that the individual units of language are put in, but the actual organization of text on the page, the way the reader’s eye is invited to move from one line of text to the next. It’s so important to effective comics storytelling that the through-lines between blocks of type be clean and easy to follow that it can be difficult to find anything really out of the ordinary being done with them. Read more
8.17.2011
Your Wednesday Sequence SupaSpecTac DeluXXXury Edition #1
Peep that video and tell me it isn't a comic. Over at Robot 6 in a special edition of my sequence column, I discussed how and why that statement's true. It's fascinating to see a piece of filmmaking that denies its home medium's propensity for onscreen motion in favor of the still staccato hits of the comics grid. Really amazing stuff. Plus if you happen to go to the theater between drinks six and seven or thereabouts, that soundtrack is bangin'.
Of course, there are problems with my claiming this piece of film as comics -- it has to break some rules to get there, like you can only see one panel of it at a time and the flow of its progression is predetermined. But the advent of webcomics sees rules being broken like crazy, new grammar flying at us all over the place. Webcomics like this provide a viewpoint through which a screenbound montage of single images can seem like something that's familiarly "comics". And even if you don't buy that, I think it's really important for comics' critical language to cultivate an ability to do readings of works in other media as comics, the same way older and more ossified forms strip mine us all the time. Watchmen in literature classes, Eisner in film class and bullshit like that. Time to strike back, to claim what's never been ours. This youtube clip is film? Fuck that. It's comics. Why? Here.
8.12.2011
Top 10 (Dashed Off)
A while back I was asked to contribute a list of what I think are the ten best comics to the Hooded Utilitarian's International Best Comics Poll. So I did. Making lists like these probably isn't as tough for me as it is for a lot of people, but that's because I try to keep in mind that it's a futile enterprise right off the bat. I haven't had cause to look at the list I made since I sent it off a few months ago, and reading it back over now I'm a little stranged out by some of my choices. Which is as it should be: I'll never nail down an ironclad list of my For Real Serious All Time Faves, because that stuff changes all the time, and I read enough comics so that it's always going to be changing anyway. So what follows is really The List of Comics I Figured Were Probably Justifiable As The Best During The Ten Minutes In May I Spent Making It. Who's got the time to go any further with this stuff than that?
The list is as follows. I didn't number the original because that wasn't how you were supposed to make these, but in the interest of "added value", I've attempted to place these comics along a ranked continuum. Just so you can be like "how the hell does this idiot think Krazy Kat is better than Jimbo". Here:
1. Valentina, Guido Crepax
2. Krazy Kat, George Herriman
3. Terry and the Pirates, Milton Caniff
4. Little Nemo In Slumberland, Winsor McCay
5. Jimbo stories, Gary Panter
6. Indian Summer, Milo Manara and Hugo Pratt
7. EC Comics stories, Bernard Krigstein
8. Nipper, Doug Wright
9. Driven By Lemons, Josh Cotter
10. Flex Mentallo, Frank Quitely and Grant Morrison
A few words on why for each one:
For me, no comic can surpass Valentina's claim to being the best drawn of all time (though a few on this list can match it). More than that, though, it's literary comics before that was a thing, an incredibly deep and nuanced look at its main character's psychology and past through the lens of a sexual history. If Crepax's work wasn't sex comics then it wouldn't be so overlooked, but then it also wouldn't be the single most successful piece of erotic art in this medium. The sequencing and blocking tricks Crepax uses to portray physical pain and pleasure are still the only work to have explored some of the avenues of the comics medium that they do. Last but not least, there's a pretty much unequaled surface enjoyment to be had from Crepax's drawings of beautiful men and women in various states of physical action and undress. It doesn't get better than this.
Except maybe in Krazy Kat. If Crepax's themes qualify him for the "great literature" title, George Herriman's actual nuts-and-bolts use of poetic language gets him there. For thirty years, Herriman turned in drawn poems that expanded the possibilities of layout and page design once a week. His line has no equal for its effusiveness and life, and his range, from touching to hilarious to vastly engrossing, is just as formidable. With the basic elements of comics -- some funny animals, a single page, and the same gag every week -- Herriman pushed he medium further forward from where he found it than anyone before or since.
Terry and the Pirates: man, do I love that comic. If your favorite cartoonist is a guy who did any work after like 1940, he's jacking (however indirectly) from Caniff. Terry is an important comic because it wrote the grammar for all the action books that would follow it -- from Kirby to Otomo to Quitely and back around again, the angles and blocking and sense of pace and movement operate within the cinematic, dead serious structures Caniff rendered from earlier gag-based action work by artists like Roy Crane and EC Segar. But Terry is good because Caniff combined that monumental grammar with a classical painter's drafting and compositional skills and a verve for adventure storytelling that stands shoulder to shoulder with HG Wells and Rider Haggard. More than 75 years on, Caniff's opus still hits harder than just about any action comic to have come after it: one can't help but want to throttle his bad guys, take up his quests, sweep his women off their feet. And then all those things happen, and so much better than you ever could have imagined doing it yourself. Still the best comic about people fighting? Probably, yeah.
Comics has perhaps the clearest single foundation stone of any medium: Winsor McCay and Little Nemo In Slumberland. It all flows from here -- adventure comics, art comics, gag comics, kid's comics, McCay saw no separation between any of it. In the century that's passed since the best Nemo pages, it's become something even grander and more fascinating than the beautiful mirror onto the world it was: to read Nemo in the 21st century is to be given a window into a more or less completely vanished past, the memory of a world gone by that puts even the most imaginative nostalgist's visions to shame. McCay was an unparalleled artist of the fantastic, but the documentary detail he brings to even the most ordinary lamppost or street vendor is what makes Nemo as much essential documentary as escapist delight.
For a more total fantasy, Jimbo is where it's at. Gary Panter is the greatest living cartoonist, the man who has more to do with establishing the comics panel's identity as a construct of medium and paper than anyone else, and still the most convincing maker of art brut as comics that the form has seen. But it's his wild imagination that makes him truly special, powering everything from the Texas-sized, Jack Kirby-on-acid surrealism of his early Jimbo comics to the towers of Joycean invention that are his more recent, Dante-inspired graphic novels. There are few moments as simultaneously gut-wrenching and heartbreaking as the closing pages of "Jimbo Is Stepping Off The Edge Of A Cliff", few greater shocks to the intellectual system than stepping into Jimbo In Purgatory, few drawings more beautiful than just about any panel Panter's put down in the character's multi-decade saga -- not just in comics, but the arts in general. Panter's is a mind that takes us further than we can go by ourselves, and a hand that puts the comics page in dialogue with Picasso and Warhol in a few ratty lines.
When they came out with "graphic novels" in the '80s and it got all Watchmen this Maus that, everybody missed the true triumph of the form: Manara and Pratt's Indian Summer. Pratt laces a sumptuous epic of a historical adventure with enough literary and historiographical ambition to power a shelf of Pulitzer Prize winners, and Manara musters line, color, layout, and composition into a unified statement of terrible beauty. In a little over a hundred pages, Indian Summer accomplishes more than most comics do in half-century runs.
If Manara and Pratt did the perfect long-form comic story, Bernard Krigstein drew the perfect short. Actually, he did it twenty or thirty times. Though the stories themselves are usually the typical accomplished hackery that EC made into a cottage industry, Krigstein cut into them with the precision and flair of a Rodin cutting marble. Every angle, every gesture, every single line of these stories, is perfect in both consideration and execution, the work of a master gifting a form that was beneath him with a genius that outstripped anything he ever worked on. The raging epic "Master Race" is most often mentioned as the Krigstein story whose content comes closest to matching its visual might, but there are a host of others -- from the Ray Bradbury adaptation "The Flying Machine" to the downbeat Poe pastiche "The Catacombs" to the hallucinogenic Far Eastern trip-out "Fever Dream" -- that Krigstein's perfect pictures forcibly elevated to high art.
Peanuts took the top spot on the Hooded list, but I'm much more enamored of Nipper, its Canadian cousin. Doug Wright lacks the heavyweight existentialism of Charles Schulz, but he brings a drafting ability and sense of vitality that are similarly unmatched in the kid-strip genre. Wright keeps narrative at arm's length while using the comics form to create tone poems about place and action that are more convincing in their visual construction and more gorgeous in their pure surface appeal than any others.
Indian Summer is the perfect commercial graphic novel, but the book that comics' avant garde will be contending with for the next few decades is Josh Cotter's Driven By Lemons. Bracingly abstract, incredibly touching, and visually virtuosic, Cotter takes the comics-as-fine-art gauntlet thrown by Panter and tears it to shreds with a story that uses color and shape more than word and line to communicate a heartbreaking message about mental instability's relationship to making art. Possibly the most harrowing comic to have unearthed as much beauty as it does, Driven By Lemons is the most compelling argument yet for the idea that comics get better as they get more complex.
Superheroes deserve a spot on any great-comics list, so how about Flex Mentallo, which makes the genre and concept both seem like they actually matter in real life without getting all ridiculous and Grant Morrisony about it? Immersed in page after page of gorgeous Frank Quitely art is the most relevant story Morrison has ever written and will ever write, a simple piece about how scary growing up can be and how it really does all turn out okay if you can just believe in yourself a bit. The amount of filth and horror and high-concept twaddle Morrison adorns it with makes for a comic whose pure entertainment value rivals anything by Kirby or Miller, and Quitely never fails to bring out both the poetic and the gruesome in it at once. Plenty of people will tell you you don't have to read any superhero comics at all, and they aren't wrong, but you're missing out on something truly unique and wonderful if you skip this one.
*comics I left out but at any other time would have been just as likely to put on as any of these: Will Eisner's Spirit, Herge's Tintin, Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix, Jim Steranko's SHIELD, Carmine Infantino's Adam Strange, Frank King's Gasoline Alley, and like five different Kirby comics.
8.11.2011
Your Wednesday Sequence 22
Jonny Double #2 (1998), page 17 panels 1-5. Eduardo Risso.
The latest installment of my Robot 6 column is up! I really liked how this one turned out. It's a few hundred words on a brutal Eduardo Risso sequence that involves people's body parts being slammed both against things (car roof) and in things (car door). Who else uses a parked car as a prop in their fight scenes? This column also features the single best comment anything I've written has ever received (second one down). If that doesn't pique your interest, it starts like this:
The fight scene is like a litmus test for cartoonists. Of all the medium’s conventions, only the gag strip comes close to the sheer amount of depiction fighting has been given in comics. Like the gag, most good artists can choreograph one effectively. What’s much more difficult and much more rare is a fight that’s both blocked out well and unique looking. Unlike gags, however, the fight scene is a very specific thing: impact shots of multiple human figures in motion, negotiating one another’s presence in physical space. Again, just the number of times people fighting have been drawn into sequenced panels over the past century-plus of comics means it can be tough to find an acme for it that’s truly one’s own, completely untouched by anyone else. Read more
The latest installment of my Robot 6 column is up! I really liked how this one turned out. It's a few hundred words on a brutal Eduardo Risso sequence that involves people's body parts being slammed both against things (car roof) and in things (car door). Who else uses a parked car as a prop in their fight scenes? This column also features the single best comment anything I've written has ever received (second one down). If that doesn't pique your interest, it starts like this:
The fight scene is like a litmus test for cartoonists. Of all the medium’s conventions, only the gag strip comes close to the sheer amount of depiction fighting has been given in comics. Like the gag, most good artists can choreograph one effectively. What’s much more difficult and much more rare is a fight that’s both blocked out well and unique looking. Unlike gags, however, the fight scene is a very specific thing: impact shots of multiple human figures in motion, negotiating one another’s presence in physical space. Again, just the number of times people fighting have been drawn into sequenced panels over the past century-plus of comics means it can be tough to find an acme for it that’s truly one’s own, completely untouched by anyone else. Read more
8.07.2011
Maybe I Will Do This Once A Month?
Since nobody reads the comics internet on the weekend, I'll hit you with some links rather than one of the more substantial posts I keep meaning to write.
- The Hooded Utilitarian's list of the 115 best comics of all time is posted after a slow, appropriately grand rollout last week. I contributed a list, which I'll post here shortly; I was a little surprised at how many of my picks made it on the master list. Of the short essays that accompanied the top 10, my favorite was definitely Tucker Stone's touching paean to Calvin and Hobbes, but I also quite liked Shaenon Garrity on Little Nemo and Robert Stanley Martin on basically why Watchmen still matters if you're a comics snob. If you want a few laffs, there's also a protracted comments thread about the problems with the list here.
- Frank Santoro, all-time comics gramndmasta and Reg'lar Guy, is selling some back issues to get his car fixed up. Each set comes with an original Santoro drawing (holy shit!). There are some really good comics in some of these, even though some of the runs Frank is selling off are the exact ones I spent last year collecting. If you don't have your Mazzucchelli Daredevils and Gulacy Master of Kung-Fus in order, get goin'.
- Alison Sampson's Space In Text blog is the bomb, and not just because of how kind she's been to me. This week she posted the best thing I believe I've ever seen there, which is saying something: the raw, smudgy, absurdly brilliant pencils for Liberatore's Batman Black & White story. Damn. If you've ever seen that story as it was published, the spiky inks definitely take something away. These pencils are about as good as it gets.
- When you are a Respected Comics Critic people STAY sending you their bad webcomics on email. It's 100 percent worth it though, because every little once in a while, somebody sends you something that peels your cap back. Such was the case with this comic by Berlin-based artist Benny Nero. Oh wow, you guys: the big touchstone is obviously Moebius, but it's got everything from Toth to Brecht Evens swimming around underneath. It's weird when a far more accomplished artist than yourself makes a piece of work that contains a homage to you (look at the top of this post!), but it's also pretty cool.
- Speaking of, my own webcomic AFFECTED continues apace. Get in on it now before it goes 100% rawdog sex comics next week.
- My boy Robin Barnard, having completed his quixotic Doubtland project, is currently copying a Frank Miller Daredevil issue panel for panel, and writing some cracking good blog posts about each page as he completes it. There ain't much else out there like this, folks.
- Nina Stone perfectly sums up the best comic I've read since Garden, Nobrow Press's Obsolete.
- Finally, Stan Lee talks to Rob Liefeld, circa 1989. Good gracious.
- PS: anybody with a Tumblr that isn't Quenched Consciousness, you are no longer allowed to post anything from old Heavy Metal issues. I mean Jesus Christ, you guys...
8.04.2011
The Junkyard: Elimination Round
What washes up on the walls Wednesdays...
Given the massive amount of comics with a "#1" on the cover everywhere you turn these days, I thought I'd conduct a little experiment this week. Three comics published by three different companies covering three (more or less) different genres were selected from the wealth of material shipped by Diamond distribution this Wednesday to compete against one another for the honor of being my New Favorite Series. People are always asking me what monthly books I'm buying and they invariably come away like "what a jerk" because the answer is always "none". So in the spirit of getting down with the proles, here's how this works: my favorite comic of the three will get another purchase when issue #2 comes out, hell or high water. The middle pick will not. What happens to this week's "Junkyard Dog" issue? Bad things. Read on.
But first! Let's meet the contestants!
The Punisher volume something #1, by Marco Checchetto and Greg Rucka. Marvel.
Greg Rucka: not the right man for this job. I say that based off what he brings to the table as a writer, leaving the actual content of the comic aside for a second. This is the guy who writes comics about British women (British women), books about a guy named Atticus Kodiak (Atticus Kodiak), and tells audiences at signings that he's a lesbian trapped in a man's body (a lesbian). Do these things, dear reader, add up to a portrait of the writer you want bringing you the blood-soaked adventures of the purely American endpoint of action comics named Frank Castle every month? The answer rhymes with the artist of this book's last name. Despite clipping his dialogue to admirably unrealistic degrees ("Wedding. Groom, most of the rest, shot dead. The bride's still hanging on, what I hear") and setting some of his action in Gravesend Brooklyn, where I hung out just the other day, this is kind of a bitchy Punisher comic, with a climax featuring the titular skull-shirted leatherman choosing not to blow somebody's head off. I ask you.
The art? Oh yeah, this is some comics art that exists, right here. As in, that's the best you can really say for it. Thinly disguised photomasking backgrounds, vain attempts at JH Williams style "intelligent layouts", weird pseudo-manga character designs that look like early 2000s video game box art, this one's got it all. But irritating mannerisms aside, I have to wonder about the process Marvel puts their new artistic talent through to get them up to standard these days. Is there one? Those dudes used to have to go hang out with John Romita, John Romita senior no less, until they got their continuity and blocking in working order. These days an issue one of a character who's had two movies and a lot of incredibly solid comics to his name in the past decade can come out without ever once establishing a sense of place for its action. Like, literally, you're never given a picture in this comic that indicates where things are taking place relative to one another. Is that guy across the room? No, he moved to the corner! Or wait, he was never there in the first place! It's baffling. In addition, somebody needs to tell Marco Checchetto that there is a grand total of zero prostitutes in the entire world with gauges and dyed-purple undercuts, because nobody will pay to have sex with anyone who has either of those things.
Oh yeah, and what with the gunplay there in Daredevil #1 two weeks ago and this comic this week, the Cloisters Museum and Gardens are getting torn the fuck up lately. This place might look nice, but you're more likely to catch a bullet hanging out there than Slauson and Crenshaw, these days.
The Infinite #1, by Rob Liefeld and Robert Kirkman but who cares about him, ROB LIEFELD. Image.
Bliss. Pure, wonderful Rob Liefeld art is printed all over every last page of this comic, and I am as soft and quivery as a butter-basted marshmallow for this stuff. Here's what people who criticize the lack of realist anatomy or backgrounds or um, drawings of feet in Liefeld's comics are missing: those things aren't what you should be coming to action comics for to begin with. You think you're going to get a really good figure drawing out of a picture of a dude with guns in both hands blasting multiple people's heads off at the same time? Or a really good environmental drawing? Or some fetish art-level detailed rendering of the human pedal region? Whatever. I want my comics about people who kill people to be brash and noisy and damn well ugly enough to sustain the premise they're based on, and Liefeld is the best in the business at those things. (Greg Irons rest in peace.) Liefeld doesn't draw "correct" comics or "elegant" comics because that's not what he's trying to do. These are exciting comics, and I am truly uninterested in whether or not the guy drawing them can also pull off a decent architectural drawing. All I want is two-dimensional guns being driven through faceplates in order to produce gouting blood explosions by the first page turn. And this comic? It delivers.
Credit where it's due: Robert Kirkman, despite being perhaps the most boring comics writer to have reached the level of success he has, does a more than impressive job of providing Liefeld with the kind of things he's good at drawing. When it isn't speed line-addled hyperviolence (which it mostly is, thank god) it's page-tall hardbodied blondes simultaneously running and tiptoeing right toward the reader or full-page portraits of the book's characters, as sure of their idiosyncrasies and stylistic deviations as any Picasso. Beyond these things there literally isn't much: the Liefeld landscape is a spare, monotonous one, all flat surfaces and drab colors pervaded by a bland, unrelenting sunlight. It's certainly a harsh, depressing place for this comic's vague intrigues and endless fights to play themselves out across, but it's also one of the more affectingly, devastatingly accurate takes on the beautifully banal Southern California landscape, where even the filled space just looks like more space to be filled. Liefeld's an Anaheim boy, and though we aren't given an actual real-world location in this book, there's no question that its artist is drawing what surrounds him:
It's almost an aggressive blandness at play here, one that provides a perfect background for the amplified hysterics of the action scenes, but comes close to haunting when it's left alone. Beautiful stuff, and certainly like nothing else out there. If you've ever been curious to pick up a Liefeld comic, now is the time.
Rachel Rising #1, by Terry Moore, just another stranger in paradise. Abstract Studios.
You know what I find Terry Moore's comics? Inscrutable. The guy can draw all right... and it's never even close to the Geoff Johns DC Comics level of awfulness... but I've never read an Abstract Studios production that didn't leave me wondering why. Such is the cult comic, I suppose. This one's about usual for Moore, vague plot about a woman in some kind of trouble that involves us far too deeply with characters we, you know, haven't met yet... but whatever. My main beef with this comic, which involves a pretty young chick coming back from the dead after being garotted and thrown in what appears to be a swamp, is that is doesn't go nearly far enough in that "cult" direction. Call it what it is -- exploitation comics don't come with better set-ups than that! Like, how would this shower scene not be made better if it came with a heaping helping of gratuitous nudity? Don't talk to me about "good taste" when she's got those gory scars cut right into her neck! Come on, Terry.
Ultimately, Moore's problem is one of milieu. I'd look at environmental drawings like the ones in that first scan if they weren't part of a comic that encourages me to keep reading ahead in order to get to something that never happens. If this thing were a CF style contemplative art-comic it might have a chance, but then it would also have erections and girls discharging, so it would be what it needs to be anyway. As it is? Confused, and confusing, like the moment of awakening after you've fallen asleep in an unfamiliar place. Similar to that experience, you don't spend this one in a particularly unpleasant state. Just waiting to get somewhere better.
RESULT
This was a lot more clear-cut than I thought it would be. I'll be grabbing The Infinite #2, skipping the next Rachel Rising (thank god, cause can you imagine asking for that comic by name at the shop?), and as for my copy of The Punisher #1, well, consider this my protest against Marvel's murder-by-inaction of Gene Colan and its breathtakingly callous fucking-over of Jack Kirby's children:
Ash on my breath, bitches.
I've never smoked a comic before, so figuring out the logistics of it was a bit of a challenge. Luckily I got plenty of experience making unconventional smoking implements in my middle school years, so rigging an exaggerated bowl-and-chamber out of a Sunny D bottle and a trail mix container only took a few minutes of thought and a few more of execution. It took a long time to light the comic since I had to crumple it up so tight to fit it in there, and I ended up burning my fingers with the lighter. Eventually I just dropped a few matches in, which seemed to work a lot better. Green and pink flames started shooting out at alarmingly high heights, prompting my erstwhile photographer to question how good an idea the project was. After a few assurances she started snapping, though, and we were in business. The smoke from the comic was incredibly harsh, with a really strange taste -- oily and sweet at the same time. Typing this an hour or so later I can still feel it coating my throat. It made me cough violently every time I hit it, and all I could do was try not to let any of the fumes into my lungs. The water didn't help at all. My vision started to blur, and I got so dizzy I had to sit down for a few minutes before continuing. Tears were streaming out of my eyes and eventually I admitted defeat after having ashed about half of the comic. (It was an oversized issue, so I don't feel too bad.)
Ultimately, I had a lot more fun smoking this comic than I did reading it. I highly recommend that those of you who bought Punisher #1 consider putting it to the same use!
Given the massive amount of comics with a "#1" on the cover everywhere you turn these days, I thought I'd conduct a little experiment this week. Three comics published by three different companies covering three (more or less) different genres were selected from the wealth of material shipped by Diamond distribution this Wednesday to compete against one another for the honor of being my New Favorite Series. People are always asking me what monthly books I'm buying and they invariably come away like "what a jerk" because the answer is always "none". So in the spirit of getting down with the proles, here's how this works: my favorite comic of the three will get another purchase when issue #2 comes out, hell or high water. The middle pick will not. What happens to this week's "Junkyard Dog" issue? Bad things. Read on.
But first! Let's meet the contestants!
The Punisher volume something #1, by Marco Checchetto and Greg Rucka. Marvel.
Greg Rucka: not the right man for this job. I say that based off what he brings to the table as a writer, leaving the actual content of the comic aside for a second. This is the guy who writes comics about British women (British women), books about a guy named Atticus Kodiak (Atticus Kodiak), and tells audiences at signings that he's a lesbian trapped in a man's body (a lesbian). Do these things, dear reader, add up to a portrait of the writer you want bringing you the blood-soaked adventures of the purely American endpoint of action comics named Frank Castle every month? The answer rhymes with the artist of this book's last name. Despite clipping his dialogue to admirably unrealistic degrees ("Wedding. Groom, most of the rest, shot dead. The bride's still hanging on, what I hear") and setting some of his action in Gravesend Brooklyn, where I hung out just the other day, this is kind of a bitchy Punisher comic, with a climax featuring the titular skull-shirted leatherman choosing not to blow somebody's head off. I ask you.
The art? Oh yeah, this is some comics art that exists, right here. As in, that's the best you can really say for it. Thinly disguised photomasking backgrounds, vain attempts at JH Williams style "intelligent layouts", weird pseudo-manga character designs that look like early 2000s video game box art, this one's got it all. But irritating mannerisms aside, I have to wonder about the process Marvel puts their new artistic talent through to get them up to standard these days. Is there one? Those dudes used to have to go hang out with John Romita, John Romita senior no less, until they got their continuity and blocking in working order. These days an issue one of a character who's had two movies and a lot of incredibly solid comics to his name in the past decade can come out without ever once establishing a sense of place for its action. Like, literally, you're never given a picture in this comic that indicates where things are taking place relative to one another. Is that guy across the room? No, he moved to the corner! Or wait, he was never there in the first place! It's baffling. In addition, somebody needs to tell Marco Checchetto that there is a grand total of zero prostitutes in the entire world with gauges and dyed-purple undercuts, because nobody will pay to have sex with anyone who has either of those things.
Oh yeah, and what with the gunplay there in Daredevil #1 two weeks ago and this comic this week, the Cloisters Museum and Gardens are getting torn the fuck up lately. This place might look nice, but you're more likely to catch a bullet hanging out there than Slauson and Crenshaw, these days.
The Infinite #1, by Rob Liefeld and Robert Kirkman but who cares about him, ROB LIEFELD. Image.
Bliss. Pure, wonderful Rob Liefeld art is printed all over every last page of this comic, and I am as soft and quivery as a butter-basted marshmallow for this stuff. Here's what people who criticize the lack of realist anatomy or backgrounds or um, drawings of feet in Liefeld's comics are missing: those things aren't what you should be coming to action comics for to begin with. You think you're going to get a really good figure drawing out of a picture of a dude with guns in both hands blasting multiple people's heads off at the same time? Or a really good environmental drawing? Or some fetish art-level detailed rendering of the human pedal region? Whatever. I want my comics about people who kill people to be brash and noisy and damn well ugly enough to sustain the premise they're based on, and Liefeld is the best in the business at those things. (Greg Irons rest in peace.) Liefeld doesn't draw "correct" comics or "elegant" comics because that's not what he's trying to do. These are exciting comics, and I am truly uninterested in whether or not the guy drawing them can also pull off a decent architectural drawing. All I want is two-dimensional guns being driven through faceplates in order to produce gouting blood explosions by the first page turn. And this comic? It delivers.
Credit where it's due: Robert Kirkman, despite being perhaps the most boring comics writer to have reached the level of success he has, does a more than impressive job of providing Liefeld with the kind of things he's good at drawing. When it isn't speed line-addled hyperviolence (which it mostly is, thank god) it's page-tall hardbodied blondes simultaneously running and tiptoeing right toward the reader or full-page portraits of the book's characters, as sure of their idiosyncrasies and stylistic deviations as any Picasso. Beyond these things there literally isn't much: the Liefeld landscape is a spare, monotonous one, all flat surfaces and drab colors pervaded by a bland, unrelenting sunlight. It's certainly a harsh, depressing place for this comic's vague intrigues and endless fights to play themselves out across, but it's also one of the more affectingly, devastatingly accurate takes on the beautifully banal Southern California landscape, where even the filled space just looks like more space to be filled. Liefeld's an Anaheim boy, and though we aren't given an actual real-world location in this book, there's no question that its artist is drawing what surrounds him:
It's almost an aggressive blandness at play here, one that provides a perfect background for the amplified hysterics of the action scenes, but comes close to haunting when it's left alone. Beautiful stuff, and certainly like nothing else out there. If you've ever been curious to pick up a Liefeld comic, now is the time.
Rachel Rising #1, by Terry Moore, just another stranger in paradise. Abstract Studios.
You know what I find Terry Moore's comics? Inscrutable. The guy can draw all right... and it's never even close to the Geoff Johns DC Comics level of awfulness... but I've never read an Abstract Studios production that didn't leave me wondering why. Such is the cult comic, I suppose. This one's about usual for Moore, vague plot about a woman in some kind of trouble that involves us far too deeply with characters we, you know, haven't met yet... but whatever. My main beef with this comic, which involves a pretty young chick coming back from the dead after being garotted and thrown in what appears to be a swamp, is that is doesn't go nearly far enough in that "cult" direction. Call it what it is -- exploitation comics don't come with better set-ups than that! Like, how would this shower scene not be made better if it came with a heaping helping of gratuitous nudity? Don't talk to me about "good taste" when she's got those gory scars cut right into her neck! Come on, Terry.
Ultimately, Moore's problem is one of milieu. I'd look at environmental drawings like the ones in that first scan if they weren't part of a comic that encourages me to keep reading ahead in order to get to something that never happens. If this thing were a CF style contemplative art-comic it might have a chance, but then it would also have erections and girls discharging, so it would be what it needs to be anyway. As it is? Confused, and confusing, like the moment of awakening after you've fallen asleep in an unfamiliar place. Similar to that experience, you don't spend this one in a particularly unpleasant state. Just waiting to get somewhere better.
RESULT
This was a lot more clear-cut than I thought it would be. I'll be grabbing The Infinite #2, skipping the next Rachel Rising (thank god, cause can you imagine asking for that comic by name at the shop?), and as for my copy of The Punisher #1, well, consider this my protest against Marvel's murder-by-inaction of Gene Colan and its breathtakingly callous fucking-over of Jack Kirby's children:
Ash on my breath, bitches.
I've never smoked a comic before, so figuring out the logistics of it was a bit of a challenge. Luckily I got plenty of experience making unconventional smoking implements in my middle school years, so rigging an exaggerated bowl-and-chamber out of a Sunny D bottle and a trail mix container only took a few minutes of thought and a few more of execution. It took a long time to light the comic since I had to crumple it up so tight to fit it in there, and I ended up burning my fingers with the lighter. Eventually I just dropped a few matches in, which seemed to work a lot better. Green and pink flames started shooting out at alarmingly high heights, prompting my erstwhile photographer to question how good an idea the project was. After a few assurances she started snapping, though, and we were in business. The smoke from the comic was incredibly harsh, with a really strange taste -- oily and sweet at the same time. Typing this an hour or so later I can still feel it coating my throat. It made me cough violently every time I hit it, and all I could do was try not to let any of the fumes into my lungs. The water didn't help at all. My vision started to blur, and I got so dizzy I had to sit down for a few minutes before continuing. Tears were streaming out of my eyes and eventually I admitted defeat after having ashed about half of the comic. (It was an oversized issue, so I don't feel too bad.)
Ultimately, I had a lot more fun smoking this comic than I did reading it. I highly recommend that those of you who bought Punisher #1 consider putting it to the same use!
8.03.2011
Your Wednesday Sequence 21
Phoenix: Future (1967), page 15 panel 9 (or is it panels 9-11?). Osamu Tezuka.
This week on my Robot 6 column, I looked at a panel that might really be a sequence, or is it a sequence that's actually a single panel? I couldn't really come to a hard and fast answer, but I do know one thing: it's definitely a comic. There is some interesting theoretical space between "panel" and "sequence" in comics, though, so why don't you go read me exploring it?
Yeah yeah, I know I haven't done much comics blogging lately, but soon enough you will be able to a) read my ten thousand word interview with the Greatest Living Cartoonist, and b) buy a t-shirt with my artwork on it, so that's what it had to be for a second there. Oh, and the column starts like this:
The easiest way of thinking about sequence goes something like this: multiple panels, related by subject or context and taken together at a steady rate, fuse together into a single, more communicative thing. Something that imparts more meaning than a single drawing can. But it gets a little more complex than that when the question of what exactly constitutes a panel is raised. Read more
This week on my Robot 6 column, I looked at a panel that might really be a sequence, or is it a sequence that's actually a single panel? I couldn't really come to a hard and fast answer, but I do know one thing: it's definitely a comic. There is some interesting theoretical space between "panel" and "sequence" in comics, though, so why don't you go read me exploring it?
Yeah yeah, I know I haven't done much comics blogging lately, but soon enough you will be able to a) read my ten thousand word interview with the Greatest Living Cartoonist, and b) buy a t-shirt with my artwork on it, so that's what it had to be for a second there. Oh, and the column starts like this:
The easiest way of thinking about sequence goes something like this: multiple panels, related by subject or context and taken together at a steady rate, fuse together into a single, more communicative thing. Something that imparts more meaning than a single drawing can. But it gets a little more complex than that when the question of what exactly constitutes a panel is raised. Read more
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