"Saturngirl"

Apparently there's a new Legion of Superheroes book coming out? Personally I always thought the best thing (only thing?) to recommend that comic was Curt Swan drawing Saturn Girl in her original costume. My take:



(Yes, this IS a "procrastination post". "Into The Void" part 3 will be along soon enough, with an addendum to follow shortly after. There will probably be a Free Comic Book Day post between now and then, though. Patience.)

Iceberg Tips

"There were some books that would be like the history of comics, and you’d see a lone, little tiny strip of Buck Rogers, for example. And it was almost like looking at the toe bone of a dinosaur. You’d build this entire imaginary beast out of this one little fragment."

That's Charles Burns on a a part of being a comics reader that really got his imagination going as a kid. I can't speak for anyone else, but for me this is what comics are all about. You get a first, addictive hit of Eisner, or Clowes, or the X-Men universe, or whatever, and it suggests so much more. The encounter with something so unique, so novel and other, is enough to bring you down the path, through that creator's work or that comic's backstory and into the world of this wonderful medium. That experience of first contact with uncharted imaginative realms is dizzying, transcendent: something a lot of people read comics because of. A dragon to chase. Sometimes you get lucky and you find it again, stumbling upon a '70s Heavy Metal in a back-issue dig or deciding to take a chance on the collected Krazy Kat. Sometimes you just read every issue of Hulk that comes out for the rest of your life and hope.

The Burns quote is important for a reason besides just verbalizing a truism of comics reading: it also reveals the best kind of book, penny for pound, to find new visions in. Comics histories are difficult -- they're never comprehensive, go out of date almost immediately, are almost always a chore to read, and typically center on either known quantities (Kirby, Kurtzman, Schulz, the stuff you already know back and forward if you're reading a history of the medium) or give too much space to anachronistic material (Neal Adams, Frank Frazetta, that whole bag). There's always something in them, though, however hard it might be to find it.

A dire prediction: as comics get more entrenched in academia it'll only get harder to come across histories that do any real digging, and once the McCay-Crumb-Ware canon is roundly agreed upon and in place (sooner every day), the thrill of discovery will seep from comics histories like ink from a leaky pen. Indeed, I find that the big medium-wide survey books get better the further back in time you go (has anything come out in the past quarter-century to equal the Smithsonian Book of Newspaper Comics?), so let's go back in time 38 years and look at something nice.

Graphis: The International Journal of Visual Communication #159 (1972). The Graphis Press.

While this issue of the art/design periodical Graphis isn't the first attempt at a survey of comics' aesthetic history (Les Daniels, a contributor to the issue, got there before, for example), it's certainly an early one, predating the first efforts of Maurice Horn and Ron Goulart as well as Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes. 1972: the undergrounds' first wave was still happening (though waning), and the Silver Age superhero revival was just beginning to die off. Those two movements, linchpins of most every serious historical work to have emerged since the 1980s, were relative novelties, not hallowed ground. The history of comics in '72 was the "real" Golden Ages of newspaper strips in the 1900s and '30s; the blunt energy of the first superhero boom; EC's tale of triumph and defeat; and only then, the tantalizing bits of newness that had emerged over the past decade from the pens of Kirby, Crumb, and overseas talents like Pratt and Giraud (still more famous under that name than as Moebius). Comics in 1972 were like crude oil: unfiltered, raw, and messy, hardly suited for the kind of grand hardcover exegeses we get these days. But somebody at Graphis was paying attention, and decided that the several decades of the form that had passed at that point were worthy of a spotlight. So came #159, subtitled "The Art of the Comic Strip Special Issue".

What the public got from the Graphis Press in 1972 was 80 pages of appropriately scholarly discussion, printed in English, French, and German, contributed to by a nice mix of European and American writers. The appropriate intellectual bases are covered... there's a look at comics prehistory that features hieroglyphics, tapestries, and Rodolphe Topffer; a conscientious survey of narrative technique, with everything from Prince Valiant to Golgo 13; sections on Little Nemo and Jules Feiffer; the patchy-but-fascinating "Echoes of Modern Art in the Comic Strip" (Lieutenant Blueberry and Toulouse Lautrec: yes! Carmine Infantino and "the ground-level perspectives of pre-1914 fashion drawings": not so much!); "Comics Variations", which examines undergrounds and sex comics from both sides of the Atlantic; and even a fast-paced flip through the best of superheroes, penned by Gil Kane and Archie Goodwin.

It's a nice read -- stimulating but not too heady, entertaining material that teaches you something -- however, nothing that stands tall in the post-Comics Journal critical landscape. What really endears Graphis #159 to the modern eye is the art it reproduces. The issue proceeds in the style of an exhibition catalogue, with panel sequences and occasionally whole pages referred to as numbered figures, small peeks getting larger and more colorful as the sections race toward a gallery of full-page Little Nemo excerpts. The quality of the material chosen is an undeniable testament to the pre-Raw medium's aesthetic mastery (still, of course, in question in 1972, though less so in Europe). But in its fascinating mix of little-seen pieces from now-immortal artists and eye-popping cross-sections of devastatingly beautiful unknowns, the issue is more than just a case made for the comics: it's a look at how deeply the well extends beyond even the Golden Age of Reprints, and also a bigger helping of those dinosaur toes Burns mentioned than can be found just about anywhere else.





These are probably the crown jewels: three glorious panels by Alain Saint-Ogan, a French master who preceded Herge by a couple of years and was named honorary president of the very first Angouleme festival. They showcase an artist with chops that measure up to anyone's: an achingly beautiful economy of line, an expressive, almost McCay-style bounciness, compositions that use the comic book panel as a canvas for painterly journeys into fully-realized worlds, and a magnificent cartooning style that looks like George McManus doing his best Walt Disney impression, mixing the elgance of Art Nouveau with the thick, affecting minimalism of early animation. These are the panels I think of when I read that Burns quote -- there are a few more on the Lambiek site -- who knows what other wonders he executed? Saint-Ogan has, by my research, completely escaped English translation thus far.




I've written a little bit about the top panel before, but in a world where Hugo Pratt's masterpiece Corto Maltese has been forbiddingly out of print for decades, any excuse will do. The bottom panel, while not possessed of the same mad daring, is a white-knuckle look at the savagery with which Pratt inked; the blacks look like they were drawn with a squeegee. Together these panels give a view into the utter chaos from which Pratt pulled his impossibly sharp, crisp drawings and compositions. They're fascinating in themselves as single images, and the comics they suggest are mind-boggling.



Moving into full-page reproductions, here's a blast from Touis and Frydman's "Sergent Laterreur". The colors and audacious lettering choices point to a more Pop, considered version of the early, more psychedelic undergrounds, but the straightforward presentation of it all recalls early newspaper strips -- Frank King's fixed-camera, documentary framing, maybe, coupled with an overload of Lyonel Feininger's madcap expressionism. There's been a French-language reprint of this fairly recently, but as this review points out, the comics are essentially untranslatable, text-graphics heavy as they are. What Graphis provides is only a window onto beautiful artwork that will probably be forever denied to non-French speakers.



Another French delicacy is the work of Robert Gigi, whose "Agar et Zarra" looks like some dream fusion of Guido Crepax and Winsor McCay, rocketed into the future and drenched in Technicolor. Whoever picked out this excerpt had a particularly sharp eye -- through all the riveting close-ups and psychedelic color, the illusion of a Little Nemo-style stage for the dreamlike action to play out on is effortlessly upheld. This sequence rivals Kirby's best stuff for use of abstract elements to convey motion: look at how forcefully the background dots drag the butterfly net down in panel 3. There's just so much in these five frames, so tastefully considered, so beautifully drawn. Gigi also seems to have no work translated, and scant biography for the interested internet searcher. One can only hope that one day we'll get more.




Amidst the alien splendor of the French excerpts, certain of the superhero material takes on an unexpected cast. At top, the best case I've seen for the total uniqueness of Gil Kane's storytelling approach, as well as a virtuosic use of the limited Silver Age color palette. Below it, witness refinement and primitivism doing battle in Lou Fine's masterful tweaking of the nine-panel grid, as well as a strengthened case for garish four-color printing when it's done well. There's a surrealistic aspect to the Fine page, like it's unmoored from any semblance of reality, and the graceful exhilaration of flight combined with the harsh abstract backgrounds are strangely redolent of Krazy Kat's desert-dusted majesty.



Finally, a message from a screaming future that never came to pass: Jodelle, by Guy Peellaert, who was seduced away from comics by rock and roll, moving quickly from French BD periodicals to David Bowie album covers with only a few backward glances. This is the other side of Crepax's coin in the world of exquisite '60s Euro-smut comics -- blown-out, overstated, drowned in garish/gorgeous color, but with a choreographed, sinuous line and ease of composition -- a cartooning -- that recalls the very best of Crumb. Modern equivalents are tough to point out. This is really a fully-formed style of comics that no one followed, but given Peellaert's apparent popularity in Japan, a weird connection to Yuichi Yokoyama's detached cleanness seems feasible, though admittedly farfetched. Tim Hensley, with his beautifully simplified figures and wide planes of empty, brightly colored space, might be as close as American comics get.

Such guesswork, such flailing for relatability, of course, is the utter joy of finding an object like this magazine -- it is full of the paths that were once taken, or at least there to be taken, but are now inaccessible and overgrown. There is a fascination in seeing the way the past once pointed to the future, and seeing what has been left behind when that future begins. In Graphis #159 it approaches pricelessness.

Your Monday Panel 9

"Fritz Bugs Out" (1965), page 22 panel 4. Drawn by Robert Crumb.



Of all the lines in comics, none is more influential than Robert Crumb's. A thin, snaky, wonderfully rounded trail of black, Crumb's penstroke is a divine mixture of technique and spontaneity, of precision and imprecision, that has only been equaled by one or two others, and certainly never surpassed. A lot of it comes from a perfect meeting of artist and tool: Crumb's use of the Rapidograph pen, which produced lines of perfectly uniform weight and thickness, was so well-suited to his lumpy, grimy/cute style, that it spawned legions of notable followers on either side of the Atlantic. Everything from the Dionysiac freakouts of Rory Hayes to Moebius' Apollonian splendors owe a debt to those exact-yet-unpredictable contours, that thin outline's great economy, that hatching which works like a more human, expressive form of Zip-A-Tone.

Once the first wave of American underground comics burnt itself out, though, Crumb's line took a back seat to his stories in terms of influence. Though he's certainly a main progenitor for every unfortunate comic about masturbation that's been anthologized since 1970, the best of his '60s pieces captured the spirit of a zeitgeist that has inspired artists again and again. Fritz the Cat is probably the best-written of his revolutionary hippie-era work, eschewing the dated patter of Mr. Natural for a broader look at the struggles that consume human life: man versus society, man versus himself, man's quixotic search for enlightenment. At their best, like in this panel, the Fritz stories eschew post-Kennedy hipstering in favor of a vast, expressionistic depiction of existence a modern world.

Though it was never destined for dorm-room posters, this image is as iconic as anything Crumb created before or since. The looming machines dwarf the hapless passerby, their lolling forms and unexpected curvatures conveying more personality than the hunched, beaten posture of the regular joe who has lived among them too long. They completely surround Fritz, almost sarcastically embracing him -- even the spiky hatching used on the floor conveys added meaning, giving a literal visualization of the phrase "living on pins and needles". Fritz's deftly cartooned face also speaks volumes, its component parts reduced to a configuration our eyes don't even register as an expression, but simply pass over and code as "isolation". The genius of Crumb's funny-animal anthropomorphizing of his characters stands revealed here too. Much as we may pity the poor kitty, we are unable to quite get into his head ourselves -- his animalian countenance essentially blocking out any real empathy. Far more than just a picture on a page, this is an image of mankind in the post-nuclear era: traumatized and small, surrounded by terrors and a void of understanding, with nothing to do but shuffle forward as bravely as possible. It is an entire world captured between four shaky borders, spilling out where it gets too much to be contained. Perhaps it's Crumb's curse to be the artist who defined the 1960s, but the power of work like this speaks to the power of the times it was produced in so well that those in need of definition can't help but keep turning turn to him. And they will continue to.

Comix Surgery: Spider-Man Fever #1

Presenting a new regular feature on DTU. Less scholarly than Your Monday Panel, more immediate than my reviews, Comix Surgery will track my thoughts on prominent single issues as I make my way through them. The best panels, the coolest effects, the most significant lines? They all end up here, in a laundry list that will try to explain the comic at hand's essence.

That said, let's take a look at the first comic in years by a man who once wrote about only wanting "the best bit"....


Spider-Man Fever #1 (of 3), by Brendan McCarthy and Steve Cook. Marvel.



Page 1: Was this the comic's original cover? I know it was billed for the longest time as a Spider-Man/Dr. Strange team-up book, and McCarthy's been quite up front in interviews about how that's what it still is and that Marvel just changed the name to move extra units. In any case, the cover the book came out with is preferable, though this one would probably look better with different coloring.


Page 3 panel 1: McCarthy doesn't wear his Steranko influence quite as prominently as he does his debts to Ditko; this isn't a Nick Fury/Captain America comic, after all. But his willingness to just plop photographic elements into his stories -- not in the Kirby manner of using photos as code for alien/alternate dimensions or anything, but just as a little extra design dazzle -- is a definite product of Steranko's lineage. McCarthy's got a great feel for the practice, too: just that Walk/Don't Walk iconograph brings you fully into the slimy, grimy NYC the story's set in, maybe even better than a drawing could. It's like a slow ease into the fiction of the story, taking you from real life to the crazy world of "McMarvel" via the stepping stone of photos' more "realistic" representation of the world. Or: it just looks cool.


Page 4 panel 4: More great photo-mixing. This panel's almost got an ersatz Alex Maleev-on-Daredevil vibe -- it's brighter than that comic was, obviously (just look at that lo-fi lava flow background!), but it also somehow pushes New York's stony bleakness up in your face with the tiny figures and the unease generated by coloring what we can't help but code as "sky" with a nuclear orange-yellow, in exact opposition to what we'd expect.

McCarthy's spoken of trying to create comics that provide a completely different experience than film, a response to working in the film industry for the past while as well as the drab crop of movie storyboards under Marvel covers that have been so popular lately. One of the best, most obvious ways to do that is vertical panels, and McCarthy doesn't spare them. More than a punk rock sneer at the inferior comics that aren't embracing their own medium, though, the up-down feel of the book is a good evocation of Ditko, whose comics were vertical as hell. This panel, with its buildings stretching down to the very bottom of the page, taking up more space with their verticality than the figures that are much "closer" to us, is just one great example of many.


Page 8 panels 2-3: I just think it's funny that the normal-est people in this and McCarthy's last comic (Solo #12) have been cliched pot smokers, especially when this scene is redolent of the old Marvel "hero deals with workaday folk in the course of his crimefighting" standby. When you see a comic like this you assume that there's at least some drug use going into it -- at least I do -- but it is rather "Silver Age Marvel" of the artist to make these kind of overtures to it. Is this the 2010s version of Steranko's "I gotta stop smokin' these new cigars!" at the end of "Today Earth Died"? Probably not that overt, but there's always issue 2!


Page 10, panels 1-3: Another killer vertical sequence, and this time with sound effects that really pop. I can't figure out what's up with the (gorgeous) color change in panel 2... is it like the "oh shit" moment of Spider-Man realizing he's out of webs? A representation of his haggard state? Doesn't matter, really. I wouldn't mind if we had more comics where the artist just uses a different, real pretty style for a panel whenever he feels like it. Honestly, that's how Ditko, Kirby, Steranko innovated a lot of the time: just plugged away and put out what happened, and it's fun to see it in a comic that isn't a back-issue bin wallet-breaker.


Page 11 panel 5: It isn't that noticeable right off the bat because of the oddball camera angle, but this is some intense anatomical rule-breaking (what is he, 14 feet tall?), perfectly hammering in Spider-Man's blasted physical/mental condition. Messing with anatomy to create mood is another trick that Ditko liked to use, but it's worth nothing that this isn't Ditko-styled distortion (big heads, ridiculously huge and flexible hands, extended appendages), but something all McCarthy's own. You could read this comic all the way through just noting how McCarthy interacts with Ditko's style and tropes. I think a lot of people expected this to come out looking a lot more like a Ditko comic than it does, but it's kind of cool that McCarthy seems most interested in the feeling being created. Fever's got Ditko psychedelia, Ditko urban gloom, and a heaping helping of Ditko's inhospitability to the faint-hearted reader. Like Ditko, McCarthy wants his comic not to be a "well-structured story" or a "satisfying single issue", but a freaky ride that makes no concessions, and he's captured that aspect of his idol to a T.


Page 17 panel 5: This is the kind of brutal, nonliteral coloring only comics can pull off that we just don't see in mainstream books any more. Plenty of artists out there endeavor to make at least one page an issue their big "pin-up" shot, and they pull you out of the story with an ostentatious splash page full of posing; but slap some Toulouse Lautrec colors over even a small, fairly typical close-up panel and you've got something more iconic by far. Prettier too.


Page 18 panel 3: And Jesus, speaking of coloring, when was the last time you saw this kind of stuff in a Marvel book? McCarthy's oversaturated, lysergic Lisa Frank pastiches have more to do with Paper Rad than anyone doing colors for the superhero books. I think most colorists are reticent to make the books they work on into the kind of gaudy things that people think of "children's hero comics" as, but when someone cuts loose like this it doesn't make it amateurish, it makes it beautiful art. It's ridiculous that your average issue of X-Men or whatever comes out colored entirely in sepias when we have computer programs that can make our comics look like this. Color's a gift: nine in ten superhero comics look better when you see the black-and-whites anyway, so let's hope the mainstream colorists take this comic as a thrown gauntlet and start using the rainbow instead of treating it with all the blandness of a default position.

Also: I don't know what McCarthy sees on his acid trips, but those strung-bead networks and the fragmentation at the corners of the big windowframe are severely evocative of the psychedelic experience in this critic's view, at least.


Page 19: I'm reminded of the final pages of Thor #160, where Kirby took three panels and added a centuries-old race of itinerant alien warriors, the Wanderers, to the proceedings of an issue he'd already built up into his biggest cosmic spectacle to date. This page has the same feel: we've already seen so much this issue that we expect a quick race to the conclusion, but nope! Three pages to go and McCarthy pops you with a deeply strange couple of extradimensional dog buddies making detached quips about the action. I really hope these guys factor into the main plot: while it's nice to just have this one bizarre page sitting in the middle of your Marvel book, it would be even better to have such weird creations interacting with Steven Strange and Peter Parker next issue. There's nothing like introducing rad new characters to hit the tone of constant, imaginative expansion that was the best part of '60s Marvel. Let's hope these ones are here to stay -- at least for the next two months.

Cover: I can't be sure, but just as I was about to post this I noticed that the extradimensional windows on the cover give views into what appear to be Ditko panels, recolored by McCarthy. You can judge for yourself:

Your Monday Panel 8

Little Nemo in Slumberland from October 14, 1906, panel 6. Drawn by Winsor McCay.


Boors will tell you that the 20th century is a story of technology superseding imagination, of the rational over the imaginative. Whatever. But watching the trajectory of the medium wind from the stuff of Little Nemo to the present day makes a pretty strong case for that kind of progression in popular comics art, anyway. Think about it: from these full-blast flights of completely unrestrained fancy to the more lyrical, dreamy wonderlands of Krazy Kat and Gasoline Alley, to the cinematic, body-focused character drama of Terry and the Pirates and Flash Gordon, to the populist grit of early superhero comics, to the social realism of EC and then the psychological realism of Marvel, to the bland, gray mixture of boredom and petty violence that powers, say, Mark Millar's comics. Of course, Winsor McCay is only the best-remembered purveyor of pure imagination to the readers of turn-of-the-century newspaper strips (check out Lyonel Feininger or Harry Grant Dart). But what made McCay a historical figure and all the others brilliant footnotes was that his imagination seemed not like the visions of one man, but like an objective viewing of a world beyond our own.

McCay's drawings of things are so precise, so perfectly realized that unlike other, more expressionistic early comics, they leave no room for question. He draws things as they are, exaggeration-free, whether they really exist or not. I spoke a few weeks ago of Milo Manara's ability to "see" the world in his drawings more clearly than the average artist; McCay too saw every last facet of the things he was creating, but his vision is even more rarefied because he was creating dream-worlds, impossible creatures, faraway vistas like the space travel seen here. His fantastic visions are justified not only by his masterful drawing, but also by his no less precise use of the comics medium -- the frame, our view into his world extends far downward to catch the characters in the moments of their descent into the vastness of space. The little things make this panel: the slack ropes that show the downward motion in progress, with Nemo's unsteady posture as he sits down as a neat exclamation point. The elgant detail of the spacecraft's window frame. The Princess's grace. Everything's slight tilt to the left. This is the real stuff, the harmony and counterpoint in Little Nemo's symphony, the detail that turns great art into history.

McCay would never see a spacecraft -- pure imagination would guide his pen in the calling-forth of Nemo and the Princess's scarlet star-sphere, the delicate observation platform it provides them, and the simple beauty of the cosmos' sharp-pointed celestial bodies. It's a far cry from the technofied, post-Wally Wood "speculative realism" that would become the norm in pop comics over the next century -- more delicate and personal by far. But it's got such beauty, such radiance, such light, that any thought of realism falls away, and you float, like Nemo, in the antique glow of McCay's drawing.

"Superman No. 2 (Warning! Door May Open Suddenly)"

For ease of reading, open a new tab on each page before beginning








Previous Superman comic here

This story was by far the most fun I've had working in the comics medium. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!

Going Down...

Lose #2, by Michael DeForge. Koyama Press.


The first issue of Michael DeForge's one-man anthology Lose was one of those rare, irrepressible comics that almost bloodies you with its brilliance. It announced its creator as a fully-formed talent ready to take on the world -- its biggest cliffhanger was what DeForge was going to come up with next. And a few months later, here it is: Lose #2, and another inoculation-level dose of one of the most interesting new talents comics have seen in a while.

Where Lose #1 jumped around from story to story, taking in a hell-bardo for cartoon characters, anthropomorphic gag strips, slices of autobiography, and even the DC Universe, this issue puts a glowering, laser-beam intensity focus on one longer story, with only a couple of shorts backing it up. The decrease in variety isn't a problem: the B-strips (a greatly entertaining continuation of DeForge's Top Shelf 2.0 serial "Cave Adventure" and a weirdo, formalist autobio page) work well as backups, fleshing out the reader's appreciation of DeForge's wide-ranging talent while not distracting a bit from the main story, as the supplementary material in #1 occasionally did. They serve only to enhance the power of "It's Chip", a 21-page slice of absolutely modern horror that takes the cake as the best piece of comics published so far this year.

While the first issue of Lose was only nominally a horror comic, shot through with plenty of humor and formal awareness, "It's Chip" is like a well that DeForge plunges his readers into, spiraling you down into the blackest depths of decay. Perhaps its nearest point of comparison isn't anything from comics, but the low-budget, hard-hitting, semitopical impact-horror movies of the 1970s -- movies like "Last House on the Left" or "Texas Chainsaw Massacre", which explored the most repulsive bits of contemporary America and made political points simply by portraying the darkness they did.



This isn't the '70s, though, and it also isn't a movie. DeForge shows an incisive awareness of his times and the surrealistic meaninglessness they offer, as well as the possibilities the comics medium offers for deep, affecting horror. Lose #2 is a whirl or queasy images, counterpointing acid-boiled faces with inspirational posters, joyful smiles with hordes of maggots, and, powerfully, a child in a cowboy costume with a dead and rotting horse. This is a comic set in the Iraq war's America, where everybody lives in manicured subprime houses, where we talk about reality shows on the phone, where the television screen is trusted to put the kids to bed and blind them to man's inhumanity to man. The jutting up of suburbia against a vicious, unfathomable natural world provides the crux of the story, which is the simple chronicle of what happens after two latchkey-kid brothers, Chip and Reggie, encounter a horse's decaying corpse and the nightmarish parasites nesting within. The older brother is repulsed (maybe he was born before the turn of the millennium), but there is a strange, magnetic attraction between the younger brother -- the one in the cowboy costume -- and one of the giant spiders swarming around the body. This harbinger of decay, this black crawling thing recognizes something in Chip, the young, unspoiled image of modern American childhood, spits acid in the older brother's face, and becomes the younger boy's pet (or makes him a pet, perhaps).

An abomination puked up from the guts of a dead wild horse follows Chip home, makes his Lynchian family life feel "kind of weird", sleeps in his bed with him, and spends the next day spraying industrial-level solvents into the faces of all the bigger kids who pick on him. The action is like a documentary-style chronicle of every bullied child's revenge fantasies; plenty of kids wish for powerful pets or friends who could utterly destroy their enemies, but seeing it marked out in cool, detached nine-panel grids -- without emotion! with a nightmarish cartoon realism! -- is a disturbing spectacle. Chip is an uncomprehending child suddenly given the power of a terrifying monster, or one of the deadly chemical weapons we made a war over. Either way, the bullies end up in the hospital with grim prognoses, and the spider sneaks back to the horse's corpse at night to lay a sac of eggs, then crosses a river to the next suburban labyrinth, to the next sunny meadow and the next rotting symbol of an America that was.



In the morning it's like it was never there. Chip's severely cartooned, sunny-side-up eyes gush with tears as he snuggles up against the horse's ribcage, all his monsters disappeared. The egg sacs open. Larva dance across the salty rivulets pouring down Chip's soft child's face. The rest of the spiders lay apocalyptic waste to the town. Old Glory burns, high on a flagpole. Monolithic letters spell out: The end.

It's an utterly bleak, bizarre story, ultimately as entrancing as it is frightening, assaulting rational sensibilities as much as it does the primal unconscious. DeForge expertly mixes the mundane with the horrific, pushing slabs of modern American life out at us from angles that make them look like completely alien objects, finding -- as only the best do -- the absurdity and menace in the existences we inhabit every day. This is a comic of the zeitgeist, capturing superficial details like video game systems and the mideast wars in its periphery, but centering on a feeling that's emerged in the US over the past year or two; the unmentionable fear that everything its wrong, nothing is working, that we are caught in a slide to oblivion. It gets you scared not of spiders or corpses or suburban creepiness, though it has all of those things. It gets you scared of the end, of a black and final abstraction, of the one thing that can't be written off as irrational or unrealistic, that can't be wished away. DeForge peers into the abyss, and relates what he sees in word balloons and panels that hang heavy with the power of it.

DeForge's artwork continues to evolve. Where Lose #1 was set entirely in various fantasylands, here DeForge creates a plausible reality with his syrupy, elastic cartoons -- an entire continuum made from glops of body, smooth exoskeletons, obsessively intricate linework, and thick, fudgy black areas. It's a very attractively cartooned comic, its gorgeous Chris-Ware-meets-Rafael-Grampa vistas and people drawing you further in with every panel, every line. DeForge's switch from Zip-A-Tone shading to simpler gray areas makes a big difference, smoothing out his art's high contrasts and giving his sinister junglescapes just the right amount of glossy sheen. Everything is ground down to the simplest cartoon form it can be shown in, then built back up with obsessive, slimy linework into something just different enough to jar you from your comfort zone. DeForge bends his drawing skills to his story's purpose masterfully, and the results are something to see.



Lose #2 showcases a perfect intersection of story and art, both incredibly nuanced and iconographically simple. This is high comics storytelling that works in perfect tandem with the greater picture it puts forth. It reads like an achievement.

Both issues of Lose are available here. My review of Lose #1 is here and a recent interview I did with Michael DeForge is here.

Prevue 2

I'll have six pages of this up within a week or so... right now I'm finishing the inking and just beginning work on the colors. Check back soon for the full comic, and in the meantime enjoy the new posts!

Your Monday Panel 7

Ronin #1 (1983), page 20 panel 2. Drawn by Frank Miller, colored by Lynn Varley.


Transcending influences is what separates good comic artists from great. Going beyond work inspired by others and into a completely unique mode of creation is a hard thing to do in such a relatively young field, one that's seen a very small amount of truly high-quality work done in it. Novel writers can take a pinch from Dickens and a bit of Tolstoy and a little Rushdie and Abe and Dennis Cooper (or whatever) and sew together an individual voice for themselves; it's the same in painting and movie-making and most other disciplines. In comics, though, the classics are few and far between, half of them don't live up to their reputations, and the other half are out of print.

Superhero comics -- where so little of real lasting genius has been put forth and so many artists have prefer bowing to market tastes instead of forging personal styles -- are especially self-cannibalizing. The history of superhero art, taken broadly, is a comedy of bad xeroxes, its trajectory a straight line from copyism of Alex Raymond to Jack Kirby to Neal Adams to John Byrne to Jim Lee. In this backwater of swipe files and hackwork, an artist's taste becomes an important part of his skill set; the ability to channel someone from outside the current vogue may as well be individual style for all it matters. In a world where copying someone new is a significant contribution, only the very best can rise to becoming themselves.

Which brings us to Frank Miller. Where his noirish, gritty writing has become the dominant mode of hero comics in the past quarter-century, his art's imprint is surprisingly hard to discern in today's post-Image field. Perhaps it's because he's got the wrong influences: though Miller's post-1985 work is that of a fully-formed, blazingly individual talent, the comics that got him famous (basically all of which remain in print) are not the typical Adams/Byrne contraptions, but rather stylish art clearly done off the backs of Steranko, Eisner, Kirby, and Kane. That's an oversimplification, and reductive, but give Miller credit: he knew who to draw from, and the synthesis found in his Marvel work of 1979-83 is a powerful brew. Miller, even as a young imitator, was a comics sophisticate -- he knew how to steal from the best.

This is what makes Miller's work on Ronin so fascinating. Usually we can glimpse artists' development, their collecting of influences, only obliquely, as small bursts of layout switch-ups or inking experiments appearing randomly throughout stings of issues. But by 1983 Miller was enough of a superstar to do whatever he wanted, and he chose to work through a final set of inspirations before beginning his first truly individual and non-derivative work, Dark Knight Returns.

Ronin is Miller in the lab -- the panel above shows his great inspiration of bringing foreign traditions into direct dialogue with the American comics history in his work, crossing dangerously potent strains of Japanese (particularly Goseki Kojima-influenced) minimalist brushwork with the Eurocomics futurism of Moebius or Druillet. Miller also had a new set of influences to show off: Gary Panter's "ratty line" is all over Ronin, and there's something of Vaughn Bode's oversized softness in this picture as well. Miller had also graduated to the master class of Kirby and Steranko study, attempting his own spin on the artists' more difficult stylistic quirks. Here we see a cold, abrasive brand of Kirbyist foreshortening, as well as Steranko's interest in portraying the images of television screens taken to the next level with a bold shorthand for holograms. The panel may abound with empty white space, but there's more in it, more art and learning and tradition in what marks are there than can be seen in most complete issues. Miller, informed by his experiments in others' workings, would soon be moving on to his own thing -- but it is a joy to see him at play in pure comics, like a sponge full of the best from the medium being squeezed dry.

Into The Void: Part 2 (of 3)

The DC comics of Steve Ditko

Intro Part 1 Part 3

As he hit his deadlines on Beware the Creeper for DC and Blue Beetle and Captain Atom for Charlton in 1967 and early 1968, we can presume Steve Ditko was doing a lot of thinking. He was producing a handful of high-quality superhero comics as both plotter and artist, as well as creating sporadic mystery shorts and fanzine pieces. If none of it quite reached the heights that his Spider-Man and Dr. Strange work at Marvel had, there were excuses enough; he was stretching himself thin across many books, he was refining his art and storytelling, and his scripting always lacked Stan Lee's particular melodramatic flourishes. What Ditko had would have been more than enough for the average midcentury journeyman action artist. It wasn't enough, however, for the man himself.

The first real evidence of this was The Question, created as a hard-hitting (at times shockingly so) backup feature when the Blue Beetle was given his own series. The Question doled out rough, monolithic punishment to criminals in a vein not often seen in comics since the Kefauver hearings. But the real draw of these shorts was the hero's tendency to expound on his belief in absolutist justice, on Ayn Rand-influenced ideas of objective right and wrong, and on the failing of mercy to serve society. The opinions of common people, before occasionally heard in passing as Spider-Man swung by them on the New York streets, became a Greek strophe, representing the people's end-of-the-'60s paralysis and unwillingness to do what Ditko saw as necessary to save themselves, from themselves. It was a big (though barely noticed) moment for superhero comics -- the advancement of the form's level of discourse from early Marvel's heavy-handed humanism to a the handling of truly adult, weighty ideas.

During this period Ditko also began working on Mr. A, who later took the Rand influence to places that even the Question might have thought a tad extreme, but that character would only really develop after Ditko and DC parted ways. These ideas languished in fanzines and the backs of low-selling Charlton books for a year, until DC, apparently pleased with the performance of the first few issues of Ditko's Creeper series, gave him Showcase #75 to try out another new concept. With a successful new series under his belt, as well as a command of comic art that was reaching its apex, Ditko was ready to go bigger with his heady brew of stentorian philosophy and superhero action, and the book that emerged in June 1968 was The Hawk and the Dove.



Ditko had played it safe in his first Showcase try-out issue with the introduction of the Creeper, a rather straight hero seemingly designed with an eye toward replicating Spider-Man's success. Now, he hurtled off into unexplored territory. H&D is perhaps the first superhero comic to feature a serious struggle other than that between the concepts of "good" and "evil"; with an eye on current events, Ditko set his new comic's physical conflicts in a larger interplay of aggression versus pacifism, peace versus war, hawks versus doves. The main participants in the struggle were both heroes -- high school-age brothers with beliefs that fell on the opposite ends of the political spectrum, endowed like Spider-Man with super-crimefighting abilities. Unlike the arch-nerd Peter Parker, though, Hank and Don Hall did not spend time mirroring the realities of teenage neuroticism. They were archetypes for the warring ideologies of '60s America, symbols of a house divided. It was perhaps inevitable that their comic would be unlike anything that had come before it.



H&D's inaugural Showcase issue is first and foremost an example of Ditko the comics artist at his peak. The script (written by Steve Skeates from a Ditko plot) has enough to do introducing the characters and their relatively complex conflict; concerted exploration of it would have to wait. But no punches are pulled with the art, which helps the story along by defining characters through their body language (see above), handling crowd scenes with great verve, and blocking out kinetic, page-turning fights. There are some solid moments of philosophical struggle -- the issue opens with Hank and Don arguing point-blank about whether or not the US should be in Vietnam, and the tension between the heroes is what drives the action forward much more than any conflict with crime -- but by and large the Showcase issue serves just to get the series where it's going.

To that end, it's a very good comic: the brothers' origin sequence is especially nice. Ditko had created fully-formed extradimensional vistas before in Dr. Strange, and he does so again here as our heroes are granted powers by "a voice that comes from everywhere and nowhere at the same time." But the difference is that here that voice's point of origin is visualized as emanating from outside the panel borders, as more real than the characters themselves. It's almost metafictional -- Ditko acknowledging the artifice of giving his characters superpowers so the book would sell by making reference to his role as the bestower of those powers. The powers come, as it were, from a world on high, cast down by an intelligence with motives beyond the boys' understanding. The world may as well be ours. The intelligence may as well be Ditko's.



Having established his concept well enough to explore fully in later issues (as well as to earn it a title of its own), Ditko went at Hawk & Dove #1 with a ferocity that was unprecedented in his career. The issue is an utter masterwork, at once a tight family drama, a philosophical tug-of-war, a formally audacious slab of comics, and a riveting exploration of whether or not the world needs superheroes at all. This last aspect of the comic provides most of the drama, as abrasive violence-lover Hank quickly becomes almost addicted to his superheroic double life as Hawk, and gentle pacifist Don mulls over whether or not to give up vigilantism altogether. The questions asked are powerful in their context (Frank Miller was undoubtedly reading), and represent a real innovation in superhero comics as Ditko takes it one step further than Stan Lee ever did and has his characters, as well as his general populace, do some soul-searching about how necessary vigilante justice is. There are no easy answers and no winner in this conflict, and the comic is notable for that alone.



But there's so much more. This is not the didactic, partisan Ditko of later years; H&D #1 is consumed in the philosophical struggle it details. There's a real interest in examination, in probing at what is right and what is wrong. It's unique in the Ditko oeuvre for using liberal politics not as a straw man to be knocked down by Randian righteousness, but as the equal of conservatism, fully as reasonable and worthy of thought. There's even a surprising sympathy with student radicals, a shock for those accustomed to the right-wing Question and Mr. A strips. Ditko was obviously going though a struggle himself, and expressing it the only way he knew how -- superhero comics.



This was the crossroads of Ditko the thinker -- giving both sides a final shake in a mainstream comic that could appeal to everyone equally before beginning work on the political tunnel that his harshly personal creator-owned works represent. But it also represents a summit for Ditko the comics artist, as he bends the form around like a stick of taffy in order to best depict the thoughts whipping through his head. Rather than sapping his creative energy, as it did to, say, Al Capp or Neal Adams, serious political contemplation seems to let Ditko loose on his pages. Almost every device he used to make the comics he drew his own sees some kind of culmination in H&D #1, whether it's squinky dot designs



or anatomical distortion



or soul-searing angst,



Ditko reaches within and produces defining images and storytelling, using a shorthand that is entirely his own. It's a virtuoso performance of the kind almost never seen in monthly commercial comics, culminating in a centerfold that beautifully showcases early use of use of multiple panels in a double-page spread, as well as a bold, unconventional, and absolutely gorgeous middle panel that's a piece of comics all by itself.



The issue is simply a masterwork. H&D #1 is new territory, absolutely the best comic Ditko had produced to date.

Then...

Autumn 1968 was a pivotal time for the comics (and, one suspects, the life) of Steve Ditko. H&D #2 came cover dated November '68, time-stamping it with the same month as Ditko's other "best comic ever", the first and only full-length Question story in Mysterious Suspense #1. Where Hawk and Dove was a journey, MS #1 was the destination -- and it comes down decisively on the side of the Hawk, with its lone hero standing up to a wishy-washy, pacifistic, and overly forgiving world, delivering a justice that few can face and only he can mete out. After a few months' struggle, as dramatized in the first two H&D comics, Ditko had made a firm political decision that would consume him from then on.

Hawk & Dove #2 reads about as can be expected, given this background. With his struggle concluded, Ditko had no need for its sequential-art vehicle anymore, and seems much less involved in this comic than its two predecessors. Though it's not as bad as the sharp comedown off Beware the Creeper would be a few months later, the art lacks the effort and energy of previous issues, and Steve Skeates, the book's young, liberal scripter, seems to have taken the driver's seat as far as the writing is involved. Suddenly Don, the Dove, is right about everything, and Hank, the Hawk, is basically a brazen, bumbling fool. The balance between what they represent is lost, and where once their opposition to one another threatened to boil over with vigor, now they read more often like the simple bickering of two teenage brothers.

There's just less of Hank and Don here, too, as much of the comic's length and interpersonal drama is taken up by the villains, a group of penitentiary escapees. (If additional proof was needed that Ditko wasn't giving H&D his full attention anymore, this issue features sympathy for a man guilty of a crime, absolute anathema in the artist's post-'68 work.)



There are still a few good bits to be had here -- in fact, it's an above-average superhero comic, even with background-less and at times inaccurate art. Ditko shows off an uncanny ability to tap into the teenage mind in Hank's fantasy sequence at the beginning of the issue, which lacks only a nude babe to complete it.



He also refuses to slack off in the choreography of his fight scenes and his considered, left-field camera angles. It's as though despite the fact that he no longer needed Hawk & Dove for exploring ideas, he could always use it to fine-tune his drawing.



Ditko left the book after #2, and it folded after a few Gil Kane-drawn issues. Its impetus was gone after its creator crossed whatever road he crossed in the fall of 1968, and the characters have languished since, each revival more ludicrous than the last. Hawk and Dove were -- are -- different from the rest of DC's corporate-owned library of characters: not only were they the creation of one of the comics field's most unique voices, they were his and his alone, proxy heroes that fought for '60s liberality and '60s conservatism instead of the Flash or Green Lantern's undying Truth and Justice. They were windows into the head of a fascinating artist, and went unmoored from any sense or spirit once he finished with them. For a few invaluable issues, they provided not only a link between Ditko's early straight-superhero works and his later, Objectivist tracts -- they gave us the best look into Steve Ditko that the man himself, now comics' most prominent recluse, will probably ever give us. If they are read between the lines, Ditko's Hawk & Dove comics give us Steve Ditko the human: not in the personal-politics sense of Mr. A or Avenging World or the at times unreadable "Packages", but in the sense of the real, the thinking, the struggles, the triumph. They are comics with the stuff of life in them, and ultimately the most interesting work of a genius.

to be continued


Intro Part 1 Part 3