"Clarisse, Sixteen"

*

PROCESS:
Inspired by David Mazzuchelli and Richmond Lewis' method for coloring Batman: Year One, as detailed in the back of that comic's Deluxe Edition. The colorist paints over photostats of the original black-and-white line art, then the lines are printed back on over the paintings. My version is a little off-register, but I haven't got the budget or resources of DC Comics so I'm not too put out, especially when print cartridges are like 25 dollars. Maybe I'll do better next time.

Line art:



Painted color:

Panel Week: Roundup

My weeklong exploration of individual panels, spanning 75 years and six genres, concluded yesterday. Here's the introduction, and below is a gallery of the panels I spotlighted (click the artist's names to read the respective essays).

I hope you have enjoyed Panel Week, whether it was because you learned something or took issue with something I said or saw a piece of art you'd never seen before... or just liked reading the posts. If you did enjoy, there will be more coming; beginning this Monday, I will be spotlighting one panel per week for your delectation. Hope to see you back here then, and on every Monday from here on in. Until then, here's Panel Week once more:


(Garrett Price, 1933)


(Doug Wright, 1952)


(Curt Swan, 1962)


(Guido Crepax, 1965)


(Jim Steranko, 1968)


(Yuichi Yokoyama, 2000)



(Dash Shaw, 2009)

Panel Week: Saturday

The conclusion of a continuing series examining the building blocks of comics -- individual panels. Introduction here.

"Blind Date 1" (3/2009), page 7 panel 4. Drawn by Dash Shaw.



There's an energy in the air of the present day. The decade that just ended brought comics not only a new level of cultural cachet, but also a bevy of work that proved the medium more than deserving of its new spot up there with films and novels and paintings. Thanks to Dan Clowes and Chris Ware and Grant Morrison and David Mazzuchelli and the rest, it might not be too much of an exaggeration to say we've arrived. But what's most thrilling about comics at the beginning of the 2010s isn't the destination that's been reached -- it's the journey now to be begun. There's a new, young crop of artists coming who never worked in a time when comics were considered as objects of scorn and derision or mass-market pap that was below "real" art. To the Class of 2010 comics have always been part of the one big thing, and now that the form has entered the conversation of other pop-cultural forms, we can let loose and dialogue with them a little.

Dash Shaw is one of the brightest lights among the new cutting edge, an artist of great dimension and sensitivity whose work showcases a ravenous artistic eye, always expanding to take influences and techniques from a dizzying array of mass media and fine art sources alike. While the perceived disconnect between the two input sources of "high" and "low" art was a bone of contention -- sometimes a stumbling block -- for the previous generation of avant-garde comics makers, for Shaw there usually seems to be no disconnect at all. Anime, painting, literature, Silver Age pulp -- he takes it all in and runs it through his own creativity, producing the comics that we always knew in the back of our minds were possible, but that we never dreamed we'd see.



Perhaps the most elegant example of Shaw's panaesthetic approach to comics is his short story "Blind Date 1" -- a comics adaptation of the trashy daytime reality show "Blind Date" that was originally anthologized in Mome before being collected in the recent Unclothed Man hardcover. The premise sounds like it could be awful, but in Shaw's hands it's a vehicle for some severely advanced art explorations, a place to plumb the gap between comics and TV. Casting the art in the same pale blue light, Shaw immediately evokes television's static unreality, and goes further by using multiple media in basically every panel. Splashes of white paint mirror static crackles. Thick pools of blue ink recall the fuzzy, strangely bright blacks of the screen, the crosshatching that bleeds off them looking like pixels. Some of the fluidity of moving images is captured by Shaw's almost liquid pencil work, which fills in only the spotty details that poor TV reception provides, leaving impressionistic traces all over this panel. You know everything that's there, but you can only see the essential bits -- expert stuff.

The result is a great approximation of the cheap digital video used on shows like "Blind Date", but it's also something very beautiful, almost sublime. It's a testament to Shaw's artistry that he can draw this kind of haunting impact from such an aesthetically impoverished original source. Even the conceptualizing of a daytime TV show of no particular merit into a beautiful comic takes a skill of its own, involves no small amount of creativity and thought. It's not the kind of idea that comes to just anyone. The composition of this panel isn't something most of us would blink at, or even notice, in the context of the "Blind Date" show, but Shaw sees something more in it and has the talent to show it to the rest of us. Sleazy Greek-deity figures melting in blue heat. To see past the world as it is, into places beyond -- this is true vision, and this panel shows Shaw to be every inch the visionary. Regardless of its seedy origin, it is a thing of beauty, a rose cultivated from a bed of nails. A more interesting view of our everyday lives, and that's one of the best things that comics can give us.



*

(Thus concludes Panel Week, but watch out for a related announcement tomorrow! Until then...)

Wednesday Roundup: Alternate Currents

New Comics Day 2/24/2010: what I read, how I felt about it, and why you should (or shouldn't) care.



Uuuuurgh, what a week. Utter mediocrity on the new racks, nothing in the back-issue bins -- I bought just one comic this Wednesday, so this Roundup's going to be a little creative. I'll be talking about that book, the free promo comic they gave me at the store, and a comic I ordered online that arrived in the mail that same day. Buckle yr seatbelts, and bear in mind that variety is the you know whatever...

Batman & Robin #9, by Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart. DC.

Issue nine -- this comic is basically free of a new series' novelty by this point. It just is what it is, and it looks like that's going to be Grant Morrison and popular artists telling fairly typical Batman stories a little better than we're used to seeing them told. Like I said last time, there are worse things. But that's hardly a recommendation, especially when what was so good about Morrison's pre-B&R residency in Gotham was its sense of direction, that breathless build to something big and heavy and never before seen. Who cares if the art mostly sucked and there wasn't any proper conclusion? The fifteen or so issues of Batman that preceded this title's launch had such smoldering verve and purpose that you could feel the wind of motion coming off their pages -- they made you adrenal without your realizing why.

Then there was the Quitely arc in B&R, which had novelty and industry-best art on its side, and then the Philip Tan arc, which could easily be written off as an aberration, a three-issue shortcircuiting of Morrison's master plan. But here we are, three more issues later, and what once was the fastest rollercoaster ride in comics is starting to feel like a meander in the superhero mire. What does this story mean in the context of the bigger picture? The big revelation at this arc's end? That Bruce Wayne is still alive somewhere, which we already knew even if we haven't been paying attention to DC publicity. It might be a necessary plot hurdle to jump, but what matters is that the energy and verve and pedal/metal rush of Morrison's first three years with Batman have been in short supply for the past six months, and this book is suffering because of it.



There's still Cameron Stewart and his outrageously small-paneled, extreme point-of-impact fight scenes and unexpected layouts to pull this comic up above the rest of the superhero books, but this is his last issue, and the new tricks Morrison is pulling in Joe The Barbarian don't seem to have bled over into this book. Plot points end with whimpers rather than bangs, there are callbacks to better Morrison stories, and it's all got the vague familiarity of a pretty-good-DC-comic. This is still a fun read, but for this book to have lost its feeling of coolness and originality just before it begins its big "return to the status quo" storyarc is hardly encouraging. A Morrison comic is always going to be one of the best things on the rack -- the man knows how to pump it out in style -- but there's always room for something more. It'll be interesting to see whether Batman & Robin can pull itself out of its (second) rut next issue, especially without the career-best Stewart art. Here's hoping...

RATING: 6 out of 10.

"Where Were You?" in X-Men Second Coming Prepare #1 (free promo comic), by Mike Carey and Stuart Immonen. Marvel.

Okay, so this is the free teaser pamphlet Marvel put out to whet fans' appetites for the upcoming X-Men crossover "Second Coming". X-Men is what brought me into buying monthly comics so I always wish I was following it, but it's been a long time since the Morrison/Casey/Milligan days of practical costumes and accessiblity, and based on this I'd say the franchise has regained every bit of the "septic toenail" impenetrability that Bill Jemas' presidency at Marvel so successfully dispelled. I mean, I've got a lot more X-Men continuity than the average non-Marvel zombie and I couldn't fucking make heads or tails of this thing, even after I read the "Previously" page for the fourth time.

"Where Were You?" is a six-page short, quite aptly drawn by Immonen, that (I think) provides a terse sketch of the X-Men's emotions before a great battle for mutantkind's existence. If that is indeed its aim, then cool. It's been done before, but I'm not too snobby to appreciate a good Cyclops or Magneto character moment. One problem -- I have no idea what any of them are talking about. There are a lot of references to backstory involving a mysterious "she" (who I gather from the "Previously" is the most recently born mutant) and a "he" whose identity there are no clues to at all. Adding to the mystery, the story's told through the video camera of someone named "Roxie" who's decided to film the X-Men during their moments of preparation. It creates unintended emotional distance from the characters to view them through the view of someone else, and yep, I have no idea who Roxie is either. Need I even mention that shots of a shrouded dead body keep awkwardly popping up? It doesn't really matter, because I've got no idea who the deceased is, either!

This comic is a perfect example of the thick fog of confusion that prohibits entry from the entire Marvel cosmology, but especially from what I think is their best franchise, the X-Men. As I said, I've read more X-comics than the average guy by far -- all the Kirby, all the Claremont up through volume 8 of the Essentials, all the Joe Casey, all the Morrison, and a good dose of the Andy Kubert stuff from the late nineties. But you shouldn't have to read any other comics to understand the latest issue, especially when the latest issue is a promo for a supposed "jumping-on point". (Of course, the real reason for this crossover isn't to attract new readers at all but to gouge the wallets of existing ones, but usually there's at least a veneer of accessibility attached to these exercises.) It's utterly embarrassing for Marvel and the comics industry that this shit does fifty thousand a month and better books get cancelled left and right. The fact that I could understand "Apocalypse: The Twelve" as a nine-year-old but can't make heads or tails of this is appalling. Maybe I'm just too dumb, but I'm pretty sure it's this comic that is. Here's Wolverine, speaking for me:



RATING: 2 out of 10 (I sorely wanted to give this a 1, but Immonen can't be faulted for his contributions, which do look quite nice).

Smoke Signal #3, by various. Desert Island.



Here's something we need more of. Smoke Signal is a free newspaper-format anthology published by the Brooklyn store Desert Island (three bucks for shipping to the West Coast but that's less than my second choice, Marvel New Avengers Siege #62, costs). It's got work by a few regular Mome contributors, a couple of PictureBox publishees, free-range weirdos like Chester Brown and Marc Bell, and I assume the names I'm not familiar with are Brooklyn minicomics cats, but who knows. This thing unspools like a good anthology should -- there's obviously a lot of different talent levels on display but every story is at least readable, and the real killers are nicely dispersed between pleasant diversions and bits of pretty fluff. Into these latter two categories fall Taylor McKimens' scummy redneck fish story, Anders Nilsen's philosophizing, heavy, Anders Nilsen-y piece about the same character he featured in Mome #1 (and probably some other comics I haven't seen), and Chris Cammett's airy detail-o-rama strip, which ends with a tiger breatfeeding the main character. Gabrielle Bell, Michael Kupperman, and Ron Rege Jr. also make their usual strong showings.

Then there's the hot stuff: "Salvia", by Luke Ramsey, is as good a visual interpretation of that drug's unforgivingly psychedelic hammerlock as R. Crumb's mid-'60s stuff was of acid, all strange 3-D plastic heads and evocative patterns and long tunnels. L. Nichols' "Glass Eyes" a scathing blast about the reality of getting old, executed in a gorgeous primitivist style that never sinks into Gary Panter or Rory Hayes parody like 99% of art-brut comics do. An untitled piece by James Moore elevates running over a deer on a forest road to an unforgivable crime of Wagnerian proportions, pulling gut-wrenching pathos from its protagonist's regret in twelve mossy, ink-blasted panels. And Chester Brown puts an interesting twist on the Kirby homages that have become popular in art comics lately, redrawing an early Fantastic Four page in his own shadow-haunted style, bringing the stark, Eastern European darkness that's always swimming around the edges of Kirby's panels to the fore. I'd read a Sub-Mariner book by him, for sure.



Dash Shaw's strip, "2002" predictably steals the show. It's a two-page evocation of post-9/11 paranoia at its zenith, fortified by sublime coloring that looks like psychedelic linoleum. This is the other comic I read this week that creates emotional distance by showing the characters through a third (and eventually, fourth) party's eyes, but here that distance allows us to meditate on the inexorable gap between our thoughts and those of other people. It's a heady comic that never loses the plot and another beautiful story from Dash Shaw, who's fast becoming the 2010s' Cartoonist To Watch (you heard that here first).



Smoke Signal is hope for the future, full of fringe-y and downright unknown cartoonists stopping over to have a little fun on their way to better things. It also doubles as a great primer on modern art-comics idiom, showcasing as broad a range of styles as you're likely to find in any anthology. Buy it because it's a great idea, because it's excellent comics, or because it's an awesome way to break out of the direct Diamond currents that run this medium a little further into the ground every week -- I don't care why. But buy it, because it gives you that cool feeling of pleasure and enrichment only this medium deliver, and isn't that why we're all in this to begin with?

RATING: 8 out of 10.

Panel Week: Friday

A continuing look at the building blocks of comics -- individual panels. Introduction here.

"Ladder Truck" (2000), page 6 panel 6. Drawn by Yuichi Yokoyama.



Impact -- perhaps comics' greatest strength. The medium's employment of still images for storytelling purposes gives it a viscerality that's unachievable in books, and a lingering power that movies and TV's moving pictures cannot possess. As such, the mainstream of comics art in America has been a movement towards the perfect depiction of impact, the development of a function that can fully utilize the inherent power of the form. It reached a peak with the 1970s work of Jack Kirby, which probably had the most "raw power" ever seen in comics. Since then the mainstream's movement has been toward refinements of Kirby's power, like the formal amplifications of your Walt Simonsons and John Romita Juniors. But the pursuit of impact has not been confined to the mainstream. Outside the insular world of superhero comics, other artists have been chipping away at the problem without the help of the battering ram Kirby provided. And if the solutions found in comics' weirder reaches don't jump up and sock you in the face like the superhero books do, they can still rattle you down to your bones.

Yuichi Yokoyama is one of the most interesting cartoonists to have emerged since the turn of the century, and certainly one of the most unique. "Conventional manga," he stated in the 2007 interview that concludes New Engineering, his first translated work, "is entertainment and my work is not.... An interior or psychological representation would make my work humanistic, which I don't want.... I definitely do work to remove the human trace... in my work I am aiming to create things that offer new discoveries." It's not exactly a typical approach, and not one you can really argue with, either. There are really only two ways to react to the stated aims: either throw up your arms and refuse to participate (which most American readers have) or study the work from a purely intellectual level, to see how well it carries out its stated goals -- an immensely rewarding reading experience, at least if you don't mind your comics as cold as the vacuum of space. And so to work.



Yokoyama may be striving for something beyond the pale, but he does so with striking proficiency. In the New Engineering interview, he speaks of trying to clearly communicate meanings that are universal, that will be just as clear to cultures hundreds of years into the future as they are to us now. To achieve this he utilizes a minimalist style: no inkweights or shading, no spotted blacks, and as clean a line as is humanly possible. Here he delineates a scene of abject terror -- a city under attack by gunmen in a giant "ladder truck" -- with serene detachment, pulling back from the heat of the crowd to incorporate plenty of unfeeling concrete and water, turning the humans in the picture into mere ideograms, showing them running but not giving any stray thoughts to who any of them are or what this all means in the context of their lives The inhuman elements of the panel -- featureless architecture, oddly calm waterspouts -- almost mock the frightened people, and even the unvarying crispness of Yokoyama's line and the smooth blandity of his Zip-A-Tone textures seem chosen to deny the panel's living participants any sympathy.

Without having to worry about imbuing his work with any kind of human element, Yokoyama is free to focus on that quixotic holy grail of action comics art: impact. He plays fast and loose with elements of anatomy, stretching the runners' bodies like taffy until the poses look more like unfathomable dance moves than natural human motion, but if anything this cools the level of the panel's urgency.
It might just be a side-effect of his desire to eradicate humanity from his work, but Yokoyama's character/fashion design is both brilliant and completely unique, here turning a panicked crowd's stampede of terror into a catwalk for the bizarre second skins of his near-abstract garments, seemingly designed to lend maximum force to the poses drawn. Rather than moving your eyes through his picture, as most comics do, Yokoyama's panel seems only to want to hit you, once, hard, before you inevitably move on.

Perhaps what is most interesting about viewing Yokoyama's art in the context of his aesthetic goals is the balancing act involved. Removing all emotion, all humanity from your art is a goal which involves no small part of abrasion, but Yokoyama counterbalances that element of his work with an utter peace that on reflection is just as necessary. As such his work is almost paradoxical. What does this panel mean underneath it all? Nothing, but it stamps itself onto your vision nonetheless. And that is definitely an accomplishment in its own right.

Panel Week: Thursday

A continuing look at the building blocks of comics -- individual panels. Introduction here.


Strange Tales #168 (5/1968), page 18 panel 3. Drawn by Jim Steranko, inked by Joe Sinnott.



Choosing the Jim Steranko panel I promised yesterday proved a harder task than expected. In a recent Comics Journal interview with Dash Shaw, no less a personage than David Mazzuchelli cited Steranko as his chief inspiration when it comes to solving the problems presented by working in the comics form. "There's always something inventive," he said. "Some way that he found of showing something... bringing something into comics that no one else was." It's a spot-on comment -- after he found his sea legs around his fifth or sixth Nick Fury short, every panel Steranko drew contained some graphic idea, some device or appropriation that was new to the pop comics genre.

Certainly one of the most admirable things about his work is the restless nature of it -- after a few issues of inking SHIELD in Strange Tales he was drawing it, after another issue he was writing it too, after a couple more he became its colorist as well, and by the time it became its own series he was designing the title font and doing the lettering on the splash pages. This relentless drive to do more, to get inside the mechanism of what at the time was a strictly labor-divided art form, is all over his every issue -- panels bleed into more panels, photos blend with linework, there's a new stab at some formal element each time you turn the page. His work is schizophrenic, heady, its reach often exceeding its grasp, but Steranko was reaching past the stars to other universes, and what lay within his grasp was greater than basically anything else seen in comics.

What makes for good art, though, is bad for the panel-picker -- trying to select only one frame to showcase from those jaw-dropping twenty-odd issues is like trying to chew water. Which bold innovation to focus on, which beautiful drawing, which striking composition? I ended up at a loss, paging through one of my very favorite Steranko stories, "Today Earth Died" in Strange Tales' final issue, marveling at the sheer consistency of an artist who hit more or less monthly deadlines for half a decade and was still able to turn his every panel into a canvas, a work of art. I eventually gave up trying to find the best panel and just looked for one that I could talk about, one that exhibits a wide range of what makes Steranko such an inspiration.



With writing, coloring, and drawing under his control, and a strong hand exercised over lettering as well, Steranko comics are the most aesthetically unified of the Silver Age. The man knew how to make his stuff look good. Here his one-of-a-kind approach is welded to a familiar trope -- the villain, mid-dastardly deed -- and we can observe the technique in an area familiar to us. Perhaps the most immediate impression this panel makes is the color, a frothing surge of dark reds and sick yellows, with a good bit of the drawing left white and unadorned. The color seems to cradle the figure rather than saturate it, the elegant crimson shading giving a modicum of grace to a rigid contortionist's pose. Steranko sculpts slow waves of light around the villain's hand with a green halftone, adding almost subliminally to the panel, a detail that you don't see, but read nonetheless. The light from the energy-glow is made shockingly bright by the stark absence of any color all over the figure's face and chest. More than most, Steranko understood how his comics' tones would actually reproduce, and his bold, hue-drenched approach looked better on cheap newsprint than anyone else's, the strong pinks and oranges and greens revealing a Marvel Universe where chroma behaved a little differently than in our world; a perpetual Twilight Zone.

The drawing itself is no less fine, a fairly standard pose given extra vigor by the strength of the figure's outline, extra drama by the pathos in the clenched left hand, and extra impact by the intense, almost intimate close-up angle selected. The crisp drapery of the tunic is in striking opposition to the metallic sheen of the armor, looking almost as if the two were inked by different artists and adding a little blast of disorientation to the drawing's grace. Steranko found inspiration in the outrageously-drawn machines of Jack Kirby for his codifying of perhaps comics' best shorthand for metal, the ringed bands seen here around the villain's arms.



More expert shorthand is seen in the glow which almost lazily rings the villain's right side. Again Kirby is the inspiration, but while he drew his energy fields to communicate power, Steranko's had a beauty to them that was almost sublime -- there is a kind of final peace in the seductive curves that edge the eldritch glow. The face is expertly cartooned, a blistering rage pulsating off of it that speaks both of danger and cool detachment. Look at the eyes and forehead, then the nose and mouth and chin: the top half of an alien's head is drawn onto the bottom half of a human one, striking the perfect balance between otherworldly and human anger. It's disarming, drawing on our deep-seated repulsion with asymmetrical faces to show us menace rather than tell us about it.

A dynamic composition is intensified by the head and arms drifting off-panel, adding movement that isn't drawn but is still somehow there. It's a strange, startlingly three-dimensional moment to depict, the instant of swift, silent motion that comes right before the point of impact -- not a moment any other Silver Age artist would have chosen to draw. Of course, Steranko acquits himself admirably, pulling a hidden, creepy power from it. There's subversion in the choice of this particular panel, something more in line with the underground than the mainstream; a tension, a ferocity that is most frightening in the moment before its discharge. Something new -- a shockingly close-up view into something dangerous, and almost surreal -- one more thing to bring into comics. Another jolt of rock-poster psychedelia is added by the splotchy cation-box outline. Even when it was Sam Rosen doing the actual lettering, Steranko was finding ways to make it sing. Singing is what all Steranko's panels do -- his writing and drawing and production skills a harmony that may not always be the catchiest, but has the seductive power of magnetic force. It's a song not heard since he vanished from the field decades ago.

A song so masterful only one man ever knew how to sing it.

Panel Week: Wednesday

A continuing look at the building blocks of comics -- individual panels. Introduction here.

Neutron: The Lesmo Curve (5/1965), page 14 panel 6. Drawn by Guido Crepax.



The work of Guido Crepax is a silent engine, driving American comics art forward despite the fact that most of this country's fans have never heard his name. He was a chief influence (perhaps the chief influence) on Jim Steranko's SHIELD, one of Frank Miller's biggest inspirations in reaching for something beyond superhero comics, and his shadow falls across the stylings of modern-day artists like Sean Phillips and Alex Maleev. That said, and despite relative celebrity in Europe, he remains virtually unknown here, his best work out of print, his stock not particularly high even among the cognoscenti. What's easy to miss is that he was probably the best Continental artist to pick up a pen during the '60s.

Most of Crepax's work during that time was hardcore pornography of the very weirdest stripe -- his sci-fi S&M comic Valentina, which was based more around the intimation of deep-rooted psychological fears than the exhibition of arousal, never strayed into bad taste, but it certainly was far from user-friendly, especially as a one-handed read. It's a top candidate for strangest comic of the 20th century, a work which almost propels the reader away from it with a heavy blackness made of sex guilt and revulsion, and it's probably this slow, ferocious inaccessibility which explains Crepax's relative absence on our shores.

He did do work, however, which stands up as deliciously mainstream. Valentina was spun out of the ultra-hip superhero noir Neutron, which was basically a '60s Marvel comic as designed by Hubert de Givenchy. A superb play of shadow and light, tailored cloth and bare skin, it's Crepax's brutalist side set to play on a relatively light good guys/bad guys story, the superhero book that took the most bottles of ink to draw. As I mentioned, Jim Steranko was an early follower, and despite all the grandeur of his Crepax-influenced work at the very peak of Silver Age genius, nothing American comics produced during the '60s quite measures up to Neutron.



It's hard not to talk about fine art when discussing Crepax, as his work is miles above basically anyone else ever to draw an action story. This panel combines the best of impressionism and expressionism, the trees in the background arrayed in a row that perfectly opposes the direction of Neutron's sprint -- but are they even trees at all? Look closer and the illusion of this panel almost completely falls apart, beginning with the gnarled, woodcut-style brushstrokes that form the backdrop. They're almost just abstract inkwork that could be spiderwebs or a flock of birds or the burnings of smoke from a fire; trees only because of the tableau Crepax sets them in.

Indeed, the car is the only solidly delineated object in the panel: the road is nothing more than a few pen strokes, and Neutron's clothes cling to the darkness, backlit seams of illumination just enough to mark them out as what they are. Crepax's consummate skill with a brush is on full display: rarely was a superhero's night as black as this. It looks like he drew this panel with a squeegee, pushing aside just enough gloom to create a recognizable scene. The fact that this ink-drowned, minimalist approach was able to swim into focus as a strikingly beautiful picture is something of a miracle, ample evidence that the master is at work.



The composition, too, is masterful. Crepax was in his element when drawing the human body (the reason he made such an incredible porno artist), and he fits his characters into panels like they're wearing second layers of clothing. Here he bends Neutron beneath the top of the frame, not only increasing the sense of motion, but lending the super-spy's flight a sneaky, almost awkward look, perfectly evoking the dead silence of espionage. The over-delicate clench of the fists, the bowed head, the off-kilter slant of the legs -- none of it is by accident, everything contributes to the information being communicated.

This is a rectangular panel of fairly standard dimension, but Crepax uses Neutron's horizontally-twisted posture to make it seem as wide as any theatre's silver screen, stretching out the time it take us to move through the picture even as he amps up the speed at which his character is moving. This is expressionistic figurework at its very best. Utterly fine-art skill, technique, and rendering bent to subject matter that is somewhere in between the bizarre no-man's land between dignity and pulp. You could call that modern art, but you'd be missing something of the sheer energy here, the singularity of vision. You could call it superhero art, but this panel is just so much more. Best just to call it Art, make sure that's with a capital A, and drink the panel in once again.



*

(AUTHOR'S NOTE: Despite my very best efforts, I keep saying reductive things about Jim Steranko. He may be an easy target, but he's also my favorite comics artist ever, so I hereby resolve to spend Thursday with a Steranko panel and try to rebut my criticisms with a few of the million things I love about him. Until then....)

Panel Week: Tuesday

A continuing look at the building blocks of comics -- individual panels. Introduction here.

Superman #156 (10/1962), page 9 panel 6. Pencilled by Curt Swan, inked by George Klein.



Curt Swan is an essential, if sometimes overlooked, member of the superhero comics canon. Probably the action artist to best inject the characters he drew with convincing emotion and interiority, he's best known as the defining Superman artist of all time -- the man who gave us the myth. Such an archetypal drawing style presents the critic with a challenge: Swan's stories, layouts, linework, et cetera, are so ingrained in us from the moment we first start reading Superman that it's hard to describe what exactly is so good about them. In the end they just "look right", and in the end Swan's art is Superman comics more than anyone else's.

It's easier to study the formal elements of Swan's work, rather than attempting to define why exactly he was so well-suited to Superman. This kind of scrutiny is an honor Swan has long deserved, but rarely been given -- perhaps because while Kirby and Ditko at Marvel and Kane and Infantino at DC were iconoclasts with overwhelmingly individual styles, Swan dealt a little more in things as they are. It's easy to lump him in with the inferior artists in Silver Age DC's crop of magical realists than to take the time to pick out the little things that made him the best of that bunch. Only when we come along a panel like this one is Swan's brilliance, the subtlest of geniuses, made tangible enough to talk about.



The most remarkable thing about this panel is its formal audacity. Swan's approach to a staple of superhero comics -- a character flying through the time barrier -- is almost absurdly literalist, yet somehow imaginative and well-composed enough to ring truer than any other. To offer a comparison, Jack Kirby would probably have depicted the scene in this panel as an epic struggle with crackling energy fields and Steve Ditko would have drawn a long journey through psychedelic geometry, but Swan draws time travel as a kid would -- stripped of bombast or need for explanation. A simple solution, yes, but one that gets its point across perfectly, and allows for maximum compositional freedom. (Note that the actual physical space Supergirl travels is about two feet forward, with nary a millimeter of the panel wasted.) Comics' mixture of image and text to communicate meaning is taken full advantage of, with Supergirl simply moving through a flurry of years, no abstraction neccessary: I immediately think of Dash Shaw's similarly stunning melds of image and explanation into single drawings.

Formalist bravery or not, this image has all of Swan's trademark grace: Supergirl descends from the prismatic ecstasy of time travel like a messenger from heaven. Haloed by the rainbow bands of past decades, cape arrayed to resemble red angel's wings, the impact of her sudden appearance in the future is not shoved in our faces or bombastically trumpeted -- it's just shown. Swan's care even extends to the space left for the lettering, with two big balloons separating the Legion from Supergirl, neatly symbolizing that she's still in the process of getting through to their chronological plane. The composition follows a tricky Z shape, nearly impossible to draw cleanly, but Swan pulls it off with ease by posing Supergirl in the exact shape of the path the reader's eye should follow. (He also makes a vertically-oriented panel work for him, a tougher thing to do than it might seem.) The event depicted here would have probably taken any other artist three panels, but it's boiled down into one perfectly elegant one. No wonder Swan was the penciller of choice for the Mort Weisinger era's hyper-condensed Superman epics.

And all the little details -- the way Swan makes superhero costumes look like futuristic high fashion rather than bizarre spandex concoctions. The classical figurework and postures, recalling nothing more than Renaissance-era religious art, older hero myths than this one. The use of minimal backgrounds to paint a picture of a better world of tomorrow, drawing on our collective association of perfectly-manicured lawns with order and safety. The simple futurism in the Legion's clubhouse and time-travel globe, more natural and evocative than any technopolis that Kirby ever drew. The lightness of Supergirl's figure in flight as compared to those of the earth-bound Legionnaires. A million more things, half of them unquantifiable, just there in the artwork somewhere. You can't explain the whole thing, all that this panel is. Like everything Swan drew, it simply looks right.

Panel Week: Monday

A continuing look at the building blocks of comics -- individual panels. Introduction here.

Nipper, 8/2/1952, panel 5. Drawn by Doug Wright.


(click to enlarge)

Much as everyone who works in panel sequences is a comics artist, there's another term that's sometimes used to describe makers of sequential art: cartoonist. Whether by accident or design, this is a term with a pretty rarefied aura, usually used only to describe an elite group of comics artists who forged entirely individual styles to express their own personal world views. George Herriman was a cartoonist. So was Will Eisner. So are Paul Pope and David Mazzuchelli. But what makes a cartoonist? How to transcend comics art and get onto the plateau to which that word applies? All I can give you are my thoughts on the matter, as the term is rather nebulous and ill-defined. However, the fact that there's no accepted definition for it makes any one individual's take as good as the next, so here goes.

I believe a comics artist becomes a cartoonist only with two things. First: a fully formed drawing style which is entirely consistent with itself, and which presents all elements of the world in a way that reflects that style. This is very often, but not always, a way of simplifying the look of the real world into images that fit into an iconographic pattern. (Jack Kirby is a great example: everything he drew after 1964 or so retained the same boxy, shadow-seared, powerful look, whether it was skyscrapers or fighting men or doomsday machines.) Second: transcendence of all influences -- not copying anyone, basically, and reworking or improving on the stylistic tics of those whose approaches inform the cartoonist's own. (The first person who comes to mind is Jim Steranko, whose art began as a simple fusion of Kirbyist drawing and Krigstein-influenced layouts, before incorporating elements from Milton Caniff, Peter Max, and Frank Frazetta, and finally emerging as an individual vision.)

But that's all semantic. Here's what isn't: by any measure, Doug Wright is a cartoonist. Every element of his pictures is unmistakably his own, drawn from a world that exists only in his head and drawing hand. Yet all of his abstractions work in perfect tandem to create a comfortable environment for visiting eyes, a place delineated by one of the most inviting picture-languages to have sprung from any artist's pen. To carry off a wordless comic strip for over 30 years without a hitch is no mean feat, but the pure ease of Wright's work in simple red, white, and black makes Nipper one of the most approachable and timeless of the great comics unearthed by the Golden Age of Reprints.



The recent, superlative Complete Doug Wright collection spoils the single-panel reviewer for choice, and this picture is as good as any in the book. We'll get to the beautiful drawing in a second, but it bears mentioning that Nipper was and is so inviting because it's funny. Wright had a rare gift for blocking out deceptively simple jokes in strings of individual panels that each had amusement in them. While humor is like quicksilver -- hard to pin down -- the formal elements that contribute to the hilarity of this panel are a breeze to cherry-pick. The soft, bouncy innocence of Nipper in his swim trunks, and the expression of utter joy on his face as he hits his father with a rock are priceless; they look so much like harmless fun that the invitation to laugh at the father's plight is irresistible. The framing of the panel, so well designed, so visually appealing, evokes the kind of corny heartwarming postcards or souvenir posters that are amusingly at odds with the image of an adorable little boy doing his father a rather serious injury. Then there's the white sunburst halo adorning the father's head, complete with a perfectly neat exclamation point that signals both the father's comical alarm and Nipper's sheer happiness at the pain he's causing his dad. Maybe it's a bit of a cruel joke, but it's a good one.

This panel is the essence of cartoon drawing, the simplest of pictograms used to convey the maximum of emotion (here pure delight). Nipper is easily Charlie Brown's equal in terms of feelings expressed, but Wright's understanding of the human form beats out Charles Schultz's by a mile, lending his gag panel a physicality and impact that Peanuts never approached. Note the solidity of the line indicating the rock's motion, the blast of white impact marks in exactly the right place, the little lines showing the rock's slow bounce off the father's head. The meticulousness of Wright's delivery shows compositional forethought most artists wouldn't lend even the most serious of work.

The elegance of the color composition is equally striking, the whites arranged to roughly mirror one another, the eye made to whiz over the path of the rock's flight. Nipper is throwing bullets! Too, the clean shapes of the boy and his riverbank mask an appealingly raw approach to drawing water. The word scrawl seems very appropriate as a compliment here, white and black scribbles lending the lake a clear surface sheen that speaks fervently of sunny summer afternoons. No less an artist's eye is lavished on the house and shore in the far background, and on Nipper's riverbank, the absolute minimum of drawn elements filling in the scene as clearly more an entire panel full of linework would. Wright's picture evokes more than depicts, takes you there more than shows you, makes you feel it more than see it. And that is precisely what cartooning is.

Panel Week: Sunday

A continuing look at the building blocks of comics -- individual panels. Introduction here.

White Boy, 11/5/1933, panel 5. Drawn by Garrett Price.


(click to enlarge)

Rapid movement and speed are problems to derail all but the most adept of comics artists. Leaving aside the considerable challenge of depicting any movement in still images, how to show acceleration? How to make the reader feel it, to speed up their eye movements and then slow them down again when the action's over? When a sound solution is found, there are usually fireworks -- think Carmine Infantino's matrices of horizontal lines, Frank Miller's wordless sequences, Jack Cole's anatomical distortions. If a comic artist can conquer drawing speed, they've almost certainly got more to show.

This panel's a good example of what I mean. It's got a little of everything mentioned above: no words, obviously, and a use of speed lines that comes close to decorative, but nonetheless accomplishes a sense of great velocity. Then there's the astonishing fluidity of the antelopes' bodies, certainly nothing ever seen in nature: the ridiculously slender legs and almost completely horizontal contortions of their bodies might not be possible, but the legs function as speed lines in and of themselves, and it's abundantly clear that if this were a prose story the word "flight" would be used to describe the creatures' sprinting. When an artist (again Infantino comes to mind) is able to bring that much body language and pure design to his figures, we tend to hail him as a virtuoso. That Price is able to do the same thing with animals' bodies might as well make him a Martian. This is a view of the natural world only given to a very special few.

More: each of the antelopes' poses is a still from the animation of one leap. The birds in the background are almost completely abstract elements, pushing the eye forward to follow their blackness (note the position of the eagle's wings, jabbing you through the rest of the panel). While the eye is naturally drawn to darker colors, blacks most of all, here Price directs you toward the lighter side of the panel by thickening his line weights on the right, and clustering his flock of speed marks there. He uses the whites just as well as the blacks, placing them horizontally to quicken the movement of the eye over them, and so over the middle of the panel. Indeed the middle of the image is strikingly bare -- you go end to end over it in a flash.



Then there's the color. Even now, with computers that can do anything and a few artists about who the same can be said, we're barely getting back to the delicacy and grace that newspaper coloring had from the 1900s to 1930s. Price may have been the one to use it best of all. If speed is a tough thing to show in comics, heat is even more difficult to evoke well -- but Price does it with ease, creating an absolutely inhospitable environment on the left side of the panel. Darker side or not, the eye just can't be persuaded to stay there long. The morass of birds and speed lines look like heat waves shimmering in the air, an impression borne out by the lack of a line around the middle antelope's leg as it kicks out in front of the blood-red sun. The tremendous speed created by the panel has a purpose beyond itself: we can feel the bright-orange heat as we race through it.

And of course Price's composition is peerless, with the flight of the animals urgently communicated on the left side, their speed stretching through the middle, and their bodies bunching up into the (relatively) cool right end; a little story told in miniature. It's a panel that showcases nature's graceful beauty and ultimate destructive power in equal measure, terror and magnificence in one. This could even be a landscape picture if it weren't so action-packed; amber waves of grain rippling in the scarlet of a summer brushfire. If I were choosing single panels to illustrate why White Boy is a prime candidate for the title of greatest uncollected American comic, this would be Exhibit A. Such genius deserves the greatest canvas we can give it.

Panel Week: Intro

Why did you first pick up a comic?

For me, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this, it was the art. I grew to worship superheroes very quickly, and fell deeply in love with the medium itself soon after that, but who knows? If that Curt Swan style, all thin lines and bright colors and Apollonian figures, hadn't dazzled me as soon as my eyes came into contact with it, who knows what would have followed? Despite the cult of the comics writer that has sprung up over the past quarter-century in the wake of Chris Claremont and Alan Moore and Frank Miller, let us not forget that it's the use of art that separates comics from other storytelling mediums. It's the art that marks comics out as something so attractive and different that six-year-old boys are drawn magnetically into their panel grids.

As such I try to spend a good deal more time on this blog discussing art than writing, but I've noticed a problem with my art criticism, and indeed with comics criticism in general. It's much more likely to go into the specifics of things like layout, pacing, compatibility with script -- the stuff in between the panels rather than the panels themselves. I certainly think that's valid, and more and more appropriate as the formal elements of the comics page are addressed by a new generation of cartoonists, but it always feels like there's something else that should be talked about. Something missing.

Maybe it's that feeling I got as a kid that I don't get anymore, a feeling from the days when I was oblivious to page design and the art of storytelling-by-layout and could just look at a single drawing for ages. The feeling of being totally sucked in by a panel, of swimming around in its lines or color choices or whatever else. The feeling of being overpowered by pure, raw art.

"That looks cool" might not be good criticism, but it's still a large part of why I read comics. I think it's a big part of why anybody reads comics. To ignore the power of "that looks cool" is to be insufferably pretentious, or worse, to have lost touch with one of the most magical parts of participating in this great medium.

So this week we're going to do a lot of "that looks cool" -- brief hits of comics art criticism that isn't about layout or page design or any of that (except when it is), but about the drawings. The individual pictures that show us worlds different from our own. It'll be a chronological tour, and I'll attempt to draw from as diverse a field as possible of genres, styles, et cetera. Because when you set aside all the differences between Superhero and Alt and Euro and Manga, it's all guys who are drawing their asses off, who have a beautiful imaginary world inside them, who want to take you there.

Let's go.

"Star Burst"

(click to view full-sized)

Wednesday Roundup: Double-Teamed

New Comics Day 2/10/2010 AND New Comics Day 2/17/2010: what I read, how I felt about it, and why you should (or shouldn't) care.



AUTHOR'S NOTE
My apologies for not posting during the past week or so. I've been busy with moving house and the million other little things that task brings up. (The rather sensational reason for the move is coded in my recent story "Steel", now UPDATED with additional thoughts on the necessity of superheroes and the first Superman picture I've ever dared to draw. Go now!)

Also, I wanted to give my new "Gwen Stacy" comic a good amount of time at the top of the blog for everyone to enjoy -- here's the link if you haven't seen it yet. Once again, sorry for missing last week's Roundup, and here we go with a double dose to cover it.

*

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Batman & Robin #8, by Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart. DC.

Morrison continues to hold it down through his busiest month in recent memory, but this issue lacks a little of the verve the last one had. Some of the snap is gone from the dialogue, and the subplot involving England's battling super-crime families
has gone off the boil rather badly. The breathtaking excitement that last issue exuded isn't really here anymore, and what we're left with is the mechanics of a superhero comic at work.

That doesn't have to be a bad thing, though, merely a slight step down. There's still a lot to like about this comic -- Damian's return is a huge plus, as he continues on his campaign to be Morrison's best-dialogued character of all time. There's a callback to that most underappreciated of Morrison superhero comics, too, as the army of Batman clones from Final Crisis have their ultimate fate revealed. Besides the cool feeling of being truly in the loop on continuity references, it's nice to see Grant's way of dealing with the theft of Bruce Wayne's body by the tepid Blackest Night crossover. Stealing one of his ideas to use in an inferior comic? It won't stop the stories he has planned. To paraphrase John Cale, Morrison has reams of this shit.



Cameron Stewart hasn't lost a step between issues, and if Morrison's scripting has slowed down a little from last issue's energetic blasts, the art closes up the gap and more. The main draw is a meticulously choreographed fight scene that bursts the pages at the seams with tiny, kinetic panelling, all speed lines and twisting figures. In places Stewart's debt to Frank Quitely's work on the book is obvious, but in others a very subversive feel creeps into his gummy, muscled figurework, reminiscent of Josh Simmons' Batman profanity more than anything else.



Then there are the little touches Morrison scripts can bring out in artists -- that view down the middle of high spiral staircases we all like to take in, the utter absurdity of King Coal and his posse of deviant chimney-sweeps, and my favorite bit, a very clever homage to Dark Knight Returns that fits seamlessly into the acrobatic action sequence. even if this wasn't its very greatest issue, this is still a comic that stands head and shoulders above the rest of the mainstream crop, basically guaranteed to be the best book on the racks whenever it comes out... at least as long as Cameron Stewart is drawing it.

RATING: 7 out of 10.

Jonah Hex #52, by Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray, and Jordi Bernet. DC.

Speaking of guarantees, here's one of the most reliable in comics, mainstream or otherwise. Palmiotti and Gray have tamed the Western-comic beast, getting the genre down to a stylish and eminently readable formula while still retaining a craggy, loping unpredictability on every page. Basically, as long as Jonah Hex can stagger off into the sunset at the end of the issue, anything goes in this comic. And safe outside the superhero genre's confines, that ethos can be put to the test with a gusto almost never seen in DC comics. This issue we get the hero smashing a child's skull with a rock, wrestling an alligator, blasting away with a shotgun a few feet from a baby, and pulling leeches out of his own skin. All in a night's work.

What makes Jonah Hex so great, though, so remarkably consistent, is Palmiotti and Gray's note-perfect character work. With the atrocities he commits every issue, it would be all to easy to make Jonah Hex the bad guy of his own book. Rarely does he come up against antagonists who are worse people than he is, and often they are clearly better. But Palmiotti and Gray's hero has something inside him, some tiny spark of not just decency but real good deep in his belly. It's a testament to just how believable a character, how real a person the two have created, that after giving all my issues of this comic a few good deep critical readings -- after looking as hard as I could for it -- I can't figure out for the life of me quite what exactly that spark is. It's just this deep, undefinable something, a saving grace inside one of the scariest men ever to take up residence on the funny pages. With every issue, every defining moment, every ordeal Jonah Hex is put through, this book climbs higher on the pinnacle of truly great Westerns.



This issue's draw is undoubtedly the return of artist Jordi Bernet. If Palmiotti and Gray are Jonah Hex's defining writers, Bernet is certainly their run's defining artist. His pages, sprung from the Eurocomics school of Hugo Pratt and Lucky Luke rather than from the typical Kirby/Byrne cauldron, whiplash the reader deep into Hex's heart of darkness at breakneck but always precisely controlled speeds. He slings his blacks like a grandmaster, and this issue's setting, a dark and dreary swamp, is particularly fitting. The best panels look like they were drawn in mud, not ink.



But setting aside Bernet's formidable skills, his work on this comic is especially distinguished by the rapport he seems to share with its writers. Other truly great artists have taken up the book's reins for an issue or two, but none have produced work with such an understanding of what it is that this comic does best. Bernet knows how to give us the quieter moments, his art swimming back into impressionism and murk during Hex' flight through the swamp, the beat of adrenaline underlying every line. Then in the action scenes his art explodes into raw shadow and light and cartooning, whisking the reader's eyes from panel to panel fast enough to chafe them. He's in complete control of everything he does, and stories like this are right in his wheelhouse.

The story, then: it's utter minimalism, less a slice of Jonah Hex's life than a little splintering shard. The dialogue fills in what it has to -- the conversation on the first five pages is interesting enough to fill an entire comic -- and leaves the rest to Bernet's markmaking, the words rough and to-the-point when they come at all. A few men are after Hex for the self-defense killing of a young boy who put a bullet in his gut. He flees through the swamp and takes sanctuary in the house of a beautiful widow, who has strange ties to the posse pursuing Hex. That's it, unless you need to be told that the whole thing ends in gunfire. It's hardly a plot at all, more a pit the character's thrown down, and so much the better. What's special here are the rolling flashes of good and blackest evil that wage war under Jonah Hex's skin. The way the swamp becomes a character in itself, slow and old and bloodthirsty. The darkening of the panel borders as night falls.

And best of all, the way Bernet's images of Jonah Hex sum up Palmiotti and Gray's character perfectly -- half a gunslinging hero who makes moral decisions only when he has the luxury, and half an all-consuming demon, second only perhaps to Death himself.



RATING: 8.5 out of 10.

*

Wednesday, February 17, 2010


Joe The Barbarian #2, by Grant Morrison and Sean Murphy. DC/Vertigo.

Nice. If the first issue of this comic was a soft, evocative whisper of things to come, this one is a blast from an amplifier ganked up to 12. Morrison's writing spills out some of the most intense worldbuilding we've seen from him in a very long time indeed, filling the pages to the brim with visions of technicolor menace. Pirates, robots, a doomed metropolis, Batman, and an extended Usagi Yojimbo homage: this kind of thing is what the word romp was invented for. Never is the plot lost, though, or the comic's bright sheen of intelligence compromised by genre tropes. What could be simple action overkill comes off as smart -- Morrison has come up with a story that makes samurai rats fight Transformers while servicing a clever plot that works on multiple levels.



And oh, those levels -- the interplay between the madcap action-figure world of Joe's diabetic hallucinations, where his life-imbued toys fight out a sprawling battle for existence, and that of reality, where he struggles madly through tiny, white-guttered panels to get to the kitchen and some potentially life-saving glucose, is what provides the real meat here. If this story's point of identification is provided by Joe's all-too-real home life, and its escapism by the frenetic antics of armored rodents fighting GI Joe wraiths, it's watching a young boy's slippage between these two states of awareness that provides everything else.

While ordinarily a reader must suspend disbelief to care or worry about characters in this kind of fantasy-based adventuring, here the threats to Joe are very real, very scary, because we know that the villains draw their power from his body's distress signals. This issue gives a whole new meaning to the term "guilty pleasure" -- much as we might be conditioned as comic book readers to slip into worlds of imagination, in this case we are afraid to. Every moment spent in these fascinating hallucinations is another moment for Joe's life to slip away. The more Morrison explores the conceit of this story, the more interesting it becomes, the more wrinkles are perceptible in it.



But enough about that. Sean Murphy is creating absolutely brilliant comic art here, striding forth to take his place in the pantheon of great Morrison illustrators. Every interesting thought the writing offers is matched in the art. The formalist switches between extreme widescreen shots in the hallucinations and small panels bounded by uncomfortable amounts of empty white space in the real world is the eye-catching big idea, for sure. But it's easy to be swept into the story entirely, to take on Joe's perceptions to the extent that it becomes to difficult to realize when his hallucinations are fading in and out before he does. It's wonderful comic art in that sense. Total immersion in an alien environment that feels so real. And also, the guy just draws brilliantly. His spot-on use of Zip-A-Tone, his Bill Watterson forestscapes, his incredibly energetic action scenes -- Murphy leaves it all on the page. You can imagine him sweating hard as he draws this stuff.



Joe The Barbarian is a comic everyone should be watching. Morrison is writing in an almost entirely new style, one that takes the best from manga and kids' comics and Hollywood. But there's an element of subversion here, too: the '80s toys? the harsh-environmental-survival story tropes? There are comparisons to be made with Kramers Ergot noise-comickers like Ben Jones and Mat Brinkman. It will be interesting to see how Morrison exploits the stranger, more abrasive potentials of the world he's created. From what he's given us so far, and with the incredible art of Sean Murphy going for it, this is a comic that can do anything next. I'll be there.

RATING: 8 out of 10.

DC Universe Origins, by like a million people. DC.

Sometimes you take a chance on something weirdo and it's a revelation. Sometimes it's a waste of money. Last Roundup I encountered one of each of these types. Here's another: the in-betweener. This trade paperback collection of two-page origin stories for just about every major DC character certainly has some value, but it's severely compromised. So is every superhero comic, you might say, but this could have been something really special.



First, the good: this is exactly the kind of book that both DC and Marvel should have out and keep in print above all else. It's a wonderful primer on the crazy-complicated DCU, a quick tour through everything you need to know about characters from Starman to Congorilla (whose origin is rawdog insane, by the way). The approach taken in this comic is head and shoulders above comparable projects like Who's Who in the DCU and the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe in that it uses the comics form to express the requisite info, as opposed to pin-ups and text blocks. The result is something much more organic and readable than any superhero sourcebook before it.

The art, too, is top dollar in many places. Where else can you get Ryan Sook, Kevin Nowlan, Cliff Chiang, Howard Chaykin, and JG Jones together in one book? The two-page-montage template that every story uses is more than a primer on the characters; it functions as a great introduction to some of the hero genre's best artists. You get everyone's style in microcosm -- Andy Kubert draws expressive, distended figures in hyperkinetic pin-up panels. Brian Bolland spares no detail and displays his flare for oddball compositions. Doug Mahnke fills his panels up with slithery grit. Stephane Roux makes sensitively colored cheesecake pages. Et cetera. This is still a who's who, just one of comic book talent instead of characters, and so much the better.



But then there's everything else. First off, as nice as the display of different artists' talents are, they're basically stopped at a drawing style exhibition. There are still writers writing these things, and in my opinion that's a mistake. Better to just give the artists the origin text pieces they're to illustrate than have a Mark Waid or a Len Wein impose the restrictions of full scripts. It would have been great to see this group of artists go to town on page layout, heck, even lettering, but that level of vision just isn't there on this project. And don't even get me started on the homogeneous, overdone DC computer coloring that taints most of the stories. There's an unpleasant sameness percolating right through this book, as if editorial was uncertain how much art should be allowed to enter into such a project.

(One story does grab onto individuality and refuse to let go: the Bizarro origin, which is told entirely backwards, making for an almost Dadaist juxtaposition of panels if you read it normally.)



But make no mistake, editorial's hands are all over this thing. There's an unpleasant list of "essential storylines" at the end of every character's bio, where clunker stories like Cry For Justice and Infinite Crisis are given multiple plugs, quality be damned. The promotion of saleable goods over true quality extends to the choice of artists, as well -- the hackwork of Tony Daniel and Mark Bagley might sell comics, but it looks poor indeed in a book full of drawings by the best action artists in the business. Worse still is the omission of origins for major characters -- Flash and Aquaman chief among them -- because they're due for continuity revamps elsewhere.

In the end, this book is reduced by its compilers' lack of vision, and what could have been a bible for the DC Universe, a treasure trove of beuatifully-presented information on the World's Greatest Heroes, is made something vastly inferior. Even the format and price point evince lack of creativity. DC Origins could have been either an oversized, hardcover art object, a book to be admired for years to come; or alternatively, a bargain-priced first taste of the DCU proper for kids moving up from the Johnny DC titles or new readers sucked in by Dark Knight or All Star Superman. Instead it sits right in the unattractive middle, a 14.99 paperback with bare-minimum production value and no great care lavished on it (the cover is a reused Alex Ross image from Justice League: Liberty and Justice).

If you like superheroes or comics art and you're looking to spend fifteen dollars, you could certainly do a great deal worse. If, however, you're looking for something truly memorable, just walk on by. Myself, I'm extremely low-income and not especially given to mediocre comics. I would deem this book a failure, but I don't think anyone involved knew what they wanted it to achieve. So I guess it'll do what it does: make DC a little bit of money and then sit on store shelves until the next big sale. There are worse things, but there are also better ones, and this project could have done some of them. It's really too bad.

Put another way:



it's got too much of the panels on the left, not enough of the one on the right.

RATING: 5 out of 10.