Your Monday Panel 14

Buster Brown, (unknown date) 1903, panel 7. Drawn by Richard Outcault.


I've been wanting to write something on old cartoons for a few weeks now. Except for the obvious classics like Nemo and Feninger, turn-of-the-century comics art has until recently been a little too weird for me to really enjoy -- belabored and highly wrought, but often imbued with an incredible sadistic energy that gave rise to punchlines more intense than anything else the medium saw until the worst of the EC grinder stories. Interesting, if hardly pleasant, in small doses -- close to intolerable in larger ones. No one embodies the queasy idiosyncrasies of early gag strips better than Richard Outcault, creator of The Yellow Kid and, according to plenty of histories, the American comic itself.

There's a bizarre tension in Outcault's work. A push and pull between the kind of pure cartooning that would with Bud Fisher and George Herriman become the common language of newspaper strips, and a more illustrative mode that has its roots in the fine popular art of the 1800s, stretching back through pen-and-ink masters like Aubrey Beardsley to the woodcuts of Dore. The two styles mix and mingle on the page, but Outcault's art is hardly a synthesis; instead it's just a smashing together, an artist struggling toward the look of the future while still clothed in the look of the past. There's a discomfort to be had just looking at this stuff, a feeling that this is very aesthetically shaky ground. It's off-putting at first, but the jarring quality of Outcault's art gives it depth. You can't pin his style down as one thing -- parts of scenes are meticulously rendered, like every last little fold of the curtains' cloth, and others are barely there, left up to the color, like the rest of the room. It's alien, defiant art, drawings that are basically impossible to grasp the rationale of.

Then there's the actual cartooning -- or is it cartooning at all? It's tough to say, as there's certainly a bevy of distortion in Outcault's figures and faces, but done with nothing like self-consistency. )Note the more or less realistic depiction of the black dog as compared to the bristly, bug-eyed bendiness of Buster's dog Tige.) Then there's the question of simplification. While Buster, and indeed all Outcault's characters, have cartoon silhouettes, the penwork used to bring them to life is the antithesis of cartoon drawing. Thin-lined, over-rendered, meticulous, filled with superfluous detail, it turns Outcault's players from cartoons into grotesques. It looks as though the artist's strips take place in a world of gross physiognomic distortions, a land of dwarf-bodied, jack-o-lantern-headed dandy boys in thrall to Looney Tunes laws of physics. These comics are nightmarish, no less so for the schizophrenic, bug-eyed expressions of cannibal glee that settle on Buster and Tige's face any time pain is inflicted on anything. (That poor poodle! Jesus!)

There's a horror aspect to Buster Brown, and the cruelty of the darkly uproarious plots finds a hell of an abrasive mirror in the contortions of an artist caught between two idioms. Outcault's art is as far from what we'd call fully-formed as can be imagined, and the fact that he worked so adeptly in such a style for an entire career of punchline after physical punchline, laugh after painful laugh, makes one suspect that a bizarre genius lurks in the scribbly corners of his panels. Weird as anything, yes. But fascinating nonetheless.

(This is Your Monday Panel 14. Your Monday Panel 13 is called "Into The Void: Addendum".)

Comical Weekend, part 2

"Adventurous Cartoonists & Far-Out Comics at Cinefamily"



The belated West Coast release party for Dan Nadel's Art In Time couldn't have struck a bigger contrast to Pasadena Comic Con. Less people than I saw milling around the Stan Lee booth at Pasadena piled into West LA's shabby-chic Silent Movie Theater to see the Picturebox dude's presentation of interviews with some pretty bizarre cartoonists who were grouped together based only on having some thread in their work of adventure. It was telling, however, that as opposed to the crowded, sweaty Pasadena atmosphere, this under-attended, low-profile to-do had the feeling of a real event, like everyone was excited to be there, like something important was going on. I hate to be a guy who says something like this, but the differing atmospheres of the two comics shows were indicative of the state of medium itself. The superhero con was packed, but it had the feeling of duty about it, with few truly enthusiastic fans in attendance and even fewer who felt comfortable showing said enthusiasm. In contrast, the little art-comics thing had maybe seventy-five people show up, but there was talking and laughing and an unmistakable sense of urgency. No one was there for a reason besides the fact that they really wanted to be. Such is our medium today.

"Adventure" is a hell of a subjective word, and Nadel's new book, while not as wide-ranging as Art Out Of Time, is still a gamut-runner on par with any other reprint anthology, warping from Jesse Marsh's gloriously crafted Western stories to Sam Glanzman's steroidal "existential jungle comics" to the utopian B&W works of forgotten underground cartoonists like Barbara Mendes, Sharon Rudahl, and John Thompson (all of whom were interviewed tonight by Nadel).

Art In Time is absolutely a worthy sequel to its predecessor, but it also smacks of the "companion volume", with neither the roving, panoptical scope nor (quite) the level of consistent brilliance that Art Out Of Time had. Still, that's hardly a knock, as Nadel's first book is probably one of the top two comics reprint books ever. Art In Time's pleasures are still incredibly vast, just a trifle less immediate. Where every page-turn of Art Out Of Time offered up some stunning work of completely new and unheard of genius, Art In Time traffics in complete, longer stories and largely known artists whose more offbeat, high-quality work may not have seen the light of day in a while. In this way it's the more modest of the two books, less of an explosion and more of a presentation.

But in another way, this book is much more hardcore; here the panoply of styles, time periods, tones, and genres showcased in Art Out Of Time gives way to the magnetic, abrasive beat of action story after action story, the violence and brawn only occasionally ceasing for black and white, viciously psychedelic interludes that hit you just as hard as any of the fighting comics do -- just in a different place. Art In Time rides its single, monolithic groove for just over 300 pages, and experiencing large chunks of it in one go is likely to leave the reader with the twinned exhaustion and exhilaration that long workouts do. There is precious little charm or whimsy to this book; there is only the racing, breathless work, the expansion of that foundational word: adventure.

So, adventure comics. Perhaps to keep a little continuity with the hipster/Family Bookstore crowd that showed up, or perhaps just because it was most convenient, Nadel presented four of the weirdest adventure comics artists possible. First, Johnny Ryan held a sprawling interview with an artist whose work does not appear in Art In Time, but who in the context of the book show provides an interesting link between it and Picturebox's current esoteric, often visceral output.

Laurence "Psycho Raw" Hubbard is the artist of the lost comics masterwork Real Deal, and he personifies the freewheeling nature of the book beautifully. Real Deal is like something Gary Panter might have produced if he hadn't gone to art school, a darkly hilarious stew that features gorgeous primitivist artwork, a philosophy of "urban terror", and scenes of incredibly over-the-top violence set against a nightmarish background stitched together from all the scariest aspects of LA. Hubbard himself is a gregarious, bulky black guy in his late forties or fifties, wonderfully unpretentious and incredibly engaged in the work he created back when. His interview with Ryan featured a good slate of fascinating reminisces that went behind the scenes of Real Deal's creation ("I dug Marvel -- George Kirby and Steranko," he mused, "and Dick Tracy, because it was the only comic that had blood in it and people getting killed, people getting shot..."). Mostly, though, it was two guys who love drawing and reading violent comics laughing their asses off at a seemingly endless string of slides showing the grisliest pages from Hubbard's cracked creation. "I always liked to draw violent stuff," said Hubbard, citing the Los Angeles of the '60s and '70s, when the Black Panthers and LAPD were going full blast at one another, as a favorite topic. "Machine guns, explosions, helicopters, exciting things like that."



Hubbard and Ryan had an infectious humor for Real Deal's horrific subject matter ("Oh, here's where they're beating down the guy in the wheelchair"... "Every issue had a couple of 'gore dances', where the main characters would stomp on somebody's body", et cetera), and within a few minutes there were a chorus of guffaws at every new slide or line of dialogue read aloud. "Like I like to say," Hubbard chuckled, "it's no holds barred." The hilarity came to a stop only once, when an older woman in the crowd spoke up after a slide of a waitress getting shot in the legs, voice measured but with plenty of volume:

"I don't think it's funny."

Whoa, dead silence! "Yeah," says Hubbard. A few scoffs from the crowd. "Yeah, well, ah, yeah..." Ryan interjects with some garbled words of defense. "It's for the fans," says Hubbard.

"Like Robert Williams once said, it's comics," Ryan rejoined. "You don't get paid so you may as well do what you want."

The woman was quick with a comeback. She had twin braids down the sides of her head and a rather prim sunhat on. "So," she said, "I guess that proves you guys really enjoy fucking up women bad!"

"Uh..."

"Uhh..."

A few more scoffs from the crowd. "You enjoy it!" The woman's close to shouting now.

Hubbard finally bounces back; "Well, plenty of men get fucked up too in Real Deal."

"It's equal-opportunity fucking up," chimes in Ryan, and that was pretty much that, though a weird self-consciousness remained on the very edges of the laughs that came afterward. Maybe for that reason, the conversation shifted to the genesis of Real Deal, which is a slice of classic Americana. Turns out Hubbard and Real Deal writer H.P. McElwee worked together at California Federal Savings & Loan in the '70s and '80s ("We'd hang out together in the basement because you could drink down there and stuff," Hubbard said). Since both were interested in comics, it was only a matter of time before they were collaborating on their own ultraviolent ghetto joints in between long shifts at crappy jobs. Eventually the giant newsprint first issue of Real Deal emerged, then the pamphlet-sized regular series that followed.

They worked the convention circuit, picking up a cult audience, and eventually even got distribution with "Diamond or Capital, I can't remember which one." (Keep in mind that this was in the midst of the early '90s black & white comics boom.) Indeed, Ryan spoke of how it seemed that the Real Deal crew were trying to create their own publishing empire, and Hubbard answered that that was the exact idea. The mind boggles. But it all came crashing down with McElwee's death at 43 due to a stroke. One issue of Real Deal was published afterward, then nothing. Until now, anyway: Hubbard, enthused by the distribution possibilities of the Internet, has plans to revive the series. I know I'll be there.



The first thing everyone noticed when Nadel took the stage to interview a trio of the underground cartoonists featured in Art In Time was that the woman who had provided the lone contrarian voice to the Real Deal violence onslaught wasn't just some random lady. Nope, she was Barbara "Willy" Mendes, artist of the bizarre, intensely spiritual Illuminations, a comic book fantasy which mines the deep seams between tapestrial, Eastern-influenced poster art and the most iconographic works of Winsor McCay. Also in on the interview were John Thompson, an SF poster artist whose Cyclops Comics walks the border between text and images, melting loose, simplified-Crumb cartooning and ancient Greek calligraphy into a whole that Nadel aptly characterizes as "ecstatic"; and Sharon Rudahl, whose epic Crystal Night is an entire new world released onto the page, cartooned in a somewhat antique style that showcases equal parts Joe Shuster and late-period Will Eisner.



Nadel began the interview by asking the participants about the strains of "adventure" in their works; Mendes was quick to answer. "Life is the adventure," she said. "My life is a huge adventure. But my adventure isn't an adventure of fucking people over!" A pretty significant speech followed, based around the tenet that the creative work people put into the world produces the real things that happen in it. It was certainly the night's most impassioned moment, though it quite obviously put Nadel in an uncomfortable position. The plot was a bit lost after that, and reminisces of the '60s comics scene began flying fast and furious from one artist to another as they all lived their primes again. Thompson told some delightful stories about Robert Crumb ("His feet didn't touch the ground,") and mentioned the time he met Bob Dylan. Rudahl described the freedom that breaking out into comics gave her after years of art school: "All my teachers just wanted me to paint black canvases or white canvases." Mendes agreed: "(Comics) gave me a chance to participate in a public medium... I saw comics as the chance to do a Dore-like thing." Same with Rudahl: "I'm drawn not to comics but to woodcut illustrations." And suddenly her art swims into perfect focus.

"Lysergic acid was a great inspiration to me," said Thompson. "That's the adventures I'm talking about," crowed Mendes. There were plenty of bawdy hippie-era disclosures, probably the juiciest of which was Mendes and Rudahl's reckoning that they were the only two women in the San Francisco scene who didn't end up in bed with Don Donahue. "He'd be happy to be remembered for his virility," opined Thompson. All the memories brought forth had a common thread, that of a lost golden age, a time of real things and a real beauty that has in the intervening years been subsumed. Certainly the night's most beautiful quote came from Rudahl, when she said "I remember walking down Valencia Street and thinking if we all survive this is gonna be like Paris in the '20s."

Afterwards I bought a few copies of Real Deal at cover price from Hubbard, who signed them for me with a huge smile. He had reason to be happy: everyone there wanted an issue. It felt like his comic had reached a critical mass, at least in the walled back garden of the theater. "Sorry I don't have any of #2, I need to reprint those somehow," he said to the surging crowd. Nadel leaned over. "We should talk about that." Yes!!

I had a prior engagement for dinner, so I had to skip out on Jaime Hernandez's screening of the '40s classic "A Letter to Three Wives", and his talk about it with Sammy Harkham. Too bad. (If anybody was there and wants to leave something in the comments about it, be my guest!) The last thing I did was get my Art In Time signed by Rudahl, Thompson, and Mendes, the latter two also doing sketches. Seeing Thompson draw was especially grand: he laid down an androgynous, delicately beautiful face in profile, first penciling, then inking in red, never putting a line wrong. His precision was intense, a fascinating thing to see in action. It's clear from the image that he's only gained ground as an artist since Cyclops.



Finally, I gave Nadel a copy of my collected Superman stories. "Here's an adventure comic for you," I said. He thanked me graciously, then noticed: "Ooh, and in an Eclipse Magazine bag, too!" It was true. My last chapter of Englehart and Rogers' Coyote needs a new home.

"Yeah well..." I said. "I had to take something out of there."

Comical Weekend, part 1

"Pasadena Rock'n Comic Con"



It's two long train rides from my place in LA to the Pasadena Convention Center, which is low-slung, unassuming, and so inoffensive a work of architecture that I would have walked right past if it hadn't been for the line outside. It was a small con, the kind I'd imagine you get in Lansing and Tempe and Scranton too, but it had puffed itself up pretty good on its proximity to a major city. Of course this became a problem....



It wasn't too "rock'n", for one thing -- the promoters doubtless expected the mere fact that Pasadena neighbors LA would turn this into the new "LA Comic Con", like a West Coast twin to NYCC, but that just wasn't the case. You can't launch a new con and have it blow up big on will call orders; in other words, these guys were expecting sold tickets to hype up their show, but they were also expecting to sell all their tickets on the back of said hype. A paradox. The end result was that all the major '80s hair metal bands that had been promised didn't end up showing (not a problem for me), and the con's rock'n-est aspect was a guy outside with his guitar singing, and I quote, "I've got the facebook blues."

So it wasn't a worthy competitor to the glitz and overkill of San Diego. Instead it was a comic show. A half-empty hall, one or two solid creators, the smell of hot dogs, tattered longboxes, a lone Green Arrow cosplayer sweating his ass off, &c., &c., &c. You can delude yourself -- especially when you live in a big city that has a couple of high-end stores, you can delude yourself about what it really is that you do with your free time. You can think of comics as underground artists and book launches and great reprints and glossy cardstock covers on the best superhero pamphlets. But go to a con and you just get hit with comics, man, the fanboys, the lifers, the tradesmen, all the more unsavory and pedestrian aspects.

Comics, loud and smelly. You stand in a line outside for the better part of an hour because there's only one guy at the ticket booth inside, and it's 85 Fahrenheit already, and who are you shoulder to shoulder with? It's CGC collectors. It's ridiculously loud Asian girls. It's old guys with horrendous breath. Most of all: it's the middle-aged guy with a wife and kid who's taking this half of the day off to indulge his hobby. He has a t-shirt that says something, it's pulled over a gut and tucked into sizeless bluejeans. He has an ATM card. And you're here as a post-ironic hipster who's got a passle of Steranko books in his backpack to get signed because that guy changed your life, and you spent the two train rides over reading his SHIELD #2, "The Evolution Island", and listening to the avant-garde composer Edgard Varese because both of them are artists who dealt in climax after climax, who pulled you higher, higher, higher, and never let you back down -- they just stopped when they were done.

But comics are Disneyana to the guy in line with you. They're cereal boxes. They're consumer goods he interacts with, drawing the societally-expected amount of enjoyment from every one he buys. Sometimes he buys Ultimate Comics Spider-Man and sometimes it's Spider-Man Fever. He likes them both. To him they are both baseball cards. But can you imagine if some of the baseball cards were baseball cards and some had pictures by Dorothea Lange, Man Ray, David Lachapelle? What wonders would lay in store for the roving eye, for those who look deeper. Some do. Some don't. Some will one day.

Thank god we can look deep at all: that these depths are even in our hobby, that the seethes of genius have migrated into these collectibles over the past century. Thank god that comics hold more than the biggest cereal box.

And after an hour in line you go in, and a nattily dressed J. David Spurlock is the first person you see, and he tells you Steranko's not coming.

WHAT I GOT AT THE CON

There were very few vendors at the show, maybe six total who actually had more than fifty comics on hand. A lot of costumiers, a lot of bootleg DVD's, and probably the one thing that the closeness to LA did bring the con: a booth full of crisp new L. Ron Hubbard books. When it's like that you can forget about finding that miracle booth with the Morrison Zenith books and the Rory Hayes issues and the Nick Cardy original art. It all splits down the middle into the slapped-up jobs full of last year's overstock pamphlets and the Silver/Bronze Age specialty shoppes, where they've got it all down to fanzines and quarter bins carefully stripped of anything good by eyes more discerning than yours. There's always some finds to be had at a comics show, though; here are mine.

Jim Steranko print



Apparently the Vanguard booth didn't expect Steranko to be a no-show any more than I did: they were so loaded down with Jaunty Jim items that poor Bill Sienkiewicz had to push it out of the way just to sit down. Stan Lee was signing (I saw him, and yes, I can report that that guy does actually exist) so the FOOM issues went fast, but that left a lot of solid '70s material. They had single pages from the Supergirls pin-up calendar (kicking myself now for passing those up), a lot of other random posters, a calendar, trading cards -- anything to disguise the fact that Steranko hasn't drawn a comic in over two decades. Don't get me started. I like the picture I ended up with, though. It was cheap, which is cool enough, but this random picture of a random superhero is neat because there's no Captain America or whoever to distract you from the work of the artist on display. And this is a pretty quintessential Steranko image -- bright colors, screen tone, feathered Raymond/Frazetta linework, and that particular, rather strange mixture of glimmery, feminine grace and over-muscled brawn that only the man could get. I'm glad I found it.

Terry and the Pirates newspaper Sunday from 4/21/46



Pacific Comics Club was represented a the con by a lone, aged Italian gent reading a foreign newspaper in the middle of an absolutely ramshackle booth. There were a great deal of random comic strip reprints scattered across two tables in piles so thick I couldn't get to the bottom of them all (who knew Nostalgia Press reprinted Terry? or that there was a huge series of color Johnny Hazard books? not me...), but the real find was a binder full of pristine Caniff tearsheets, five bucks apiece. There were a few good ones, an aerial battle and a sizzling Dragon Lady scene among them -- but I've always loved this strip for just how cartooned and expressionistic it is, melting Frank Engli's note-perfect lettering right into the body of Caniff's art, which is in the height of its late-Terry Kurtzmanesque phase. This is about as un-illustrative as Caniff got after 1935 or so, blasting the panels with blacks and ersatz jubilation. It really shouts off the page, and considering this is going to end up as framed wall art I definitely think I made the right choice.

Valentina: Ciao Valentina e altre storie HC, by Guido Crepax.



I've gone on at length about Guido Crepax's Valentina before, so I'll keep it brisk this time: the fact that this comic is not in print in English is a travesty. What little reputation it has in the US is that of an intense sex comic, which it certainly was at times, and I'd imagine that's the reason no publisher wants to take it on. But wow, Crepax drew sex better than anyone else, ever, and honestly, how ridiculous is it that this country's comics scene will only allow itself erotic art that goes along the lines of an issue of Hot Moms or Pee Soup? There are beautiful, artistic porno comics out there that put anything being published right now to shame, and the fact that this Golden Age of reprints hasn't even attempted to accommodate their crown jewel must be considered a mark against US graphic novel publishing.

This beautiful Italian-language volume contains the first two Valentina albums (which I've already got in a decades-old Eurotica translation), but the printing here goes all out, reproducing every slash and stipple in even the finest brush work. It's revelatory; this is by far the best I've ever seen Crepax printed. But the real draw for me was the inclusion of a later album, "Valentina intrepida" as a kind of preface. It fills in the titular female photojournalist's life story, starting at childhood in WWII-era Italy and winding anarchically through the growing girl's fantasy worlds. Crepax deftly bends the monochrome chic of the '50s with the young Valentina's favorite comics (Raymond's Flash Gordon and Lee Falk's Phantom), swelling the classic American works into distinctly Continental phantasmagorias and then overlaying them with the heroine's Muriel Spark-esque adolescence. The scene where a deathly anorexic Valentina silently weeps on encountering her first glimpse of Louise Brooks in an old movie is as close to poetry as comics have gotten; and I'll let Crepax's beautiful, abstracted Aubrey Beardsley-meets-Chris Ware sex sequences speak for themselves:



When Fantagraphics is done with Jacques Tardi, I expect this masterwork to be next on the list.

The Hands of Shang-Chi, Master of Kung-Fu #18-24, by Doug Moench, Paul Gulacy, and Steve Englehart.



Though he wasn't there in body, Jim Steranko's spirit sort of hung over Pasadena today. Every tradesman who had any Steranko to his wares put it front and center, no doubt expecting to capitalize on his promised appearance. I would have been in ecstasy had I not spent the past few years hunting down every last item offered online. Oh well. But one thing the Steranko fever did bring to the surface was a great deal of comics by Paul Gulacy, including some Shang-Chis I didn't have.

Gulacy is an interesting artist, basically forgotten nowadays (apparently the fate of any artist who gets a career retrospective published by Vanguard), but probably the guy who took up Steranko's torch and carried more than anyone else once he was gone. There's definite chops he shares with Jim Starlin and Marshall Rogers, but where those two had concerns that overrode the Steranko (Kirby for Starlin; Krigstein for Rogers) and were generally more incorporators of Zap Art, Gulacy dove right in, deep as he could go. I talked just yesterday about how cool it can be when an artist devotes his entire aesthetic energy to the stylistic quirks of another -- see Tom Scioli on Jack Kirby, Frank Miller on Will Eisner. Gulacy is as much a member of that fraternity as anyone else; he goes so far into Steranko's poster art-style hyperboles and deft, '70s-ad-art inking that it becomes its own thing, independent of anything Steranko actually did because it's not (at least as of these issues) incorporating anything outside of his style. These are fascinating-looking comics, but equally strange is the subject matter's mixing with it, the exploitation-y grime of Marvel kung fu comics turning the Steranko pastiches into something very like the comic book version of those ads for strip-mall dojos you can find in the backs of said comics. Bizarre, tacky, almost painfully past-its-time stuff that nonetheless transcends with its pure energy and enthusiasm. That's Pasadena con for you.

That's comics.

(Tomorrow brings part 2 with Dan Nadel, Jaime Hernandez, Johnny Ryan, and lots more hipster-comics stuff! GET READY!!)

Robin Barnard

"Who is this brilliant young man, now universally hailed as Van Gogh 2.0 and The New Picasso?"



Digging up new and interesting voices in comics can get pretty random once you go beyond the obvious places like Mome and Kramers Ergot and the better criticism websites. With webcomics and minicomics and a few new publishers making distracted grabs at an increasingly theoretical "mainstream" every year, the discerning fan is ripe to be overwhelmed. Often it isn't until something cool is staring you in face that you remember: oh yeah, sometimes you just find things...

Case in point: Dave Sim's bizarre featurette on "photo-primitive" artist Robin Barnard in Glamourpuss #12. It's typical for Sim to venture far afield in the "magazine parody" sections of his comic (my guess is that the weirdness of those segments allow him to exercise his manic and often viciously satirical side without too much of it bleeding over into his ongoing, authoritative study of photorealistic comics art), but this thing was ridiculous. Where once had lain witty barbs tossed with glib delivery at the shallowest fashion mags was now stupendously overcooked fake-Artforum prose, championing the merits of the visual world's new "Prime Innovator", a deceptively modest post-modernist who was already gathering a tremendous amount of heat with Those Who Know. The artist, of course, was Barnard, and it all sounds somewhat acceptable until you see his drawings, which look like this.



Though the stuff is hardly Alex Raymond, I think there's an interesting power to it. Despite the inaccuracy of the lines and the occasionally freakish distortions (look at those teeth!), it's still apparent that these are supposed to be pretty women. There's little actual ugliness or even deconstruction to Barnard's picture-making; his line is interesting in its uniform, almost unwavering thickness, and he's able to capture the way the women in the pictures he works from actually look with a minimum of anything resembling craft. Indeed, the lack of craft is probably the most interesting thing about Barnard's photo tracings -- where typical comics art finds a level of detail it's comfortable with depicting and then sticks solidly to it (whether it's the minimum of Chester Gould shapes-'n'-shadows to the maximum of Moebius linework-tapestries), Barnard is appealingly all over the place. The clusters of pen strokes for the hair are an entirely different kind of detail from the tortuously rendered macrame of the shoulder strap. Contrast it all with a blank face evoked only by childlike feature-shapes and you've got something pretty interesting.

Of course, Barnard's actual drawings probably aren't the most interesting thing about his work. It's always exciting when artists take the work of other artists not as mere influences or inspirations, but as entire genres to work in. From Joe Casey and Tom Scioli's serialized Kirby-baths in Godland to Captain Britain/Halo Jones-era Alan Moore's obsessive refinement of Chris Claremont, there's a magnetic, intellectual pull to art that is primarily interested in exploring boundaries set forth by someone else's natural style. It's something that comes off as derivative in, say, music or prose, but the nature of the comic is something different. Where a million bands have blurred themselves out in replicating the exact guitar sounds of Sonic Youth (for example), in comics there's some kind of inexplicable, bloody-minded merit to comics work that finds its main aesthetic interest in Bernard Krigstein subdivisons, or Gary Panter ratty lines, or whatever else.

But if narrowing the focus to explicate one thing done by one artist is a worthwhile experiment in comics, it's still a pretty unique mind that picks out Dave Sim's Glamourpuss for its devotionals. The book itself is largely an attempt to explore one "single thing", that being Al Williamson-style photorealistic women. And the plot only thickens due to the utter devotion Williamson himself had to perfectly capturing an exact replica of the Alex Raymond style. Such is an industry which is little policed by enemies of derivative art-making, sure. But more interestingly, such is a medium where derivation is more often than not the path to an individual voice, or at least individual work.

What, then, is one to make of Barnard's self-published debut comic, a slick, oversized pamphlet called Glamour, Not! that mimics Sim's book right down to the cover layout. It's a copy of a copy of a copy, but it can't be faulted for that; seeing an utterly unschooled, primitive artist such as Barnard have a go at the exact form used by a consummate craftsman like Sim (one which I opined even Sim only got away with because of his level of formal artistic skill) is much too interesting a proposition. It's interesting in the execution, too: Barnard is faithful to Sim's template all the way through, from the layout of the credits page to the farcical letters in the back of the book. Rather than more highbrow photorealism scholarship, though, Barnard takes his readers through an increasingly elaborate series of metafictional jokes featuring the characters (and traced panels) from George & Lynn, an airheaded "sexy gal" strip by Conrad Frost and Josep Gual that runs in Rupert Murdoch's British tabloid The Sun.

It's an interesting, often genuinely funny meeting of artist and content -- Barnard's debased-Sim format and bad-good style set to work on a modern, schlocky newspaper comic as opposed to the (still occasionally schlocky) sophistry that Sim spends his book studying. For a regular reader of Glamourpuss, the experience is utterly bizarre, so self-referential that threatens to fold over on itself like a slinky. Grant Morrison's got nothing on this! The non-George & Lynn bits of the comic are taken up by a heartfelt, illustrated paean to Glamourpuss, which is where it gets really interesting. The text is good as a recommendation for a book more people should be reading, and in its pure belief in what Sim's doing with his comic it also gives a good insight into Barnard the artist. But it's the accompanying illustrations that provide the kicker. They're Barnard's phototracings of a few of Sim's phototracings, and seeing how far the images wander from their originals in this protracted, artistic game of Chinese whispers is fascinating. Perhaps it's too much to mention that the photos Sim did his originals from were the same photos Barnard traced from on the drawings seen in Glamourpuss #12.



The effect of seeing this in Glamour, Not! is unlike anything I've gotten from comics. I'm living in the hope that hope someone will do a knockoff/homage/parody of Barnard's comic just so we can see their tracings of these images that have already gone through so much. I want to see these pictures degrading forever. Imagine if a page of Kirby pencils was passed to inkers from Joe Sinnott to Mike Royer to Vince Colletta -- on and on, down through Kirbyites like Scioli and Erik Larsen, down until it was being traced and traced by random SVA students, each new set of inks going over the old until it wasn't images at all anymore, just random things a mass of different people had made, just a block of art. Barnard's unique inspiration carries this mad, glorious impulse further than I've seen anyone else go, and I applaud him for it. Glamour, Not! is hardcore conceptual comics in excelsis. May Barnard continue to change whatever he puts his hands to.

DTU Interview: Robin Barnard



MS: As someone with a fairly unique aesthetic, why comics? What does this medium offer that draws you in?

RB: I have always loved comics and was introduced to them at a very early age –- the first thing I drew that was anything more than the generic house with a rainbow was a comic strip.

The comic that started me off was an issue of Marvel UK's Star Wars Weekly from 1978 which had Archie Goodwin & Carmine Infantino on Star Wars, Chris Claremont, John Byrne & Terry Austin on Starlord, and Stan Lee and Gene Colan on Tales of the Watcher. Starting off with such a high quality work ignited an interest that still burns brightly to this day. It is rare that there is a comic that I do not like and have read thousands of titles over the years.

What I like most about making a comic, especially a self-published one, is really there are no rules or limits, you do not have to worry about budget restraints when imaging something. As long as you can draw it, then it can be done – also the flexibility of the form is just incredible. You can do anything you can put your mind to –- it's really illustrated fiction we are talking about here!

MS: What are your favorite comics or kinds of comics? I'm especially interested in who you see as having influenced your own work. (Yes, besides Dave Sim.)

RB: My favorite comics vary quite a lot, but I have a number of titles that clearly stay way at the top of my personal favorites –- V for Vendetta, Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns, the Phoenix Saga, Walt Simonson’s Thor, John Byrne’s Fantastic Four, Frank Miller's Daredevil, anything by Barry Windsor-Smith –- in short I really appreciate anything that puts real time, care, and attention into making the experience something much more than the sum of its parts.

In terms of comics that influence my drawings, I have not been consciously looking or thinking "aha, I like the way this was done maybe I will try that" – at least not until recently as I had never done anything other than tracings from UK Glamour magazine. But I have picked up on some things from doing Glamour, Not! and some of the special pieces that followed it and this is informing what I do now. So I guess there’s some Conrad and Gual, and possibly some of the Dave Sim doing Al Williamson. But definitely less of the latter –- I am not that good!

MS: What comics do you like that are coming out now? What's special, what's worthy of notice?

RB: At the moment I read so many titles is hard to keep track of them all, but I like the current run on Unknown Solider that’s going -– that’s a great mesh of art and storytelling. Creepy from Dark Horse has been pretty good so far, solid storytelling there – of course its all been about Glamourpuss for me for so long that I tend to forget other comics!

MS: What made you so interested in Glamourpuss? What is it about that particular book that speaks to you?

RB: Dave Sim himself introduced me to Glamourpuss. I actually sent him a letter about Cerebus Archive #1, about his admission of guilt to having done “The Beavers” and I just causally mentioned at the end of the letter that I would give Glamourpuss a try. To my surprise I got an issue sent back to me from Dave himself –- that started off an ongoing dialogue that still carries on to this day.

That issue started my love affair with Glamourpuss, as it was such a unique and unusual title -- a combination of elements which you would think would not work not only working but actually redefining the medium! I like anything that stretches the boundaries of what a comic can be, as I said before I think no limits should be the rule –- so seeing such a dynamically creative work and so brilliantly illustrated it was hard not to fall in love with Glamourpuss, really. The fact it had humor in it as well takes it to another level, I love anything with humor in it -- as becomes apparently self-evident from any conversation I have!

It was Glamourpuss that started me off drawing again for the first time for longer than I can remember, so I have actually been at this for less than a year!

MS: What goals or aims made you decide to create Glamour, Not!?

RB: Ah Glamour, Not! Well, originally this was just going to be a giveaway product for a signing of Glamourpuss a UK comic book shop convinced me to do, I just wanted to show something to kind of get people interested in Glamourpuss really.

When I was about a week into drawing it, episode 18 of Cerebus TV was on –- and Dave Sim decided to feature Glamourpuss #12, which Dave had decided to include a lot of my tracings in and declare me as being “the master of photo-primitivism”. Well... after that I decided I needed to expand the scope of what I was doing to at least include the Cerebus forum and this did of course change the direction of what I was doing as well. This was directly responsible for my tribute to Glamourpuss in Glamour, Not!

From that point I wanted also for Glamour, Not! to be a way to get Cerebus forum members interested in sending some feedback for Cerebus TV by giving it to them free. I also wanted it to be a birthday present for Dave himself and a way of thanking a number of individuals who had helped me out in one way or another (Hi Max, Oliver, Margaret!). Beyond this I see anything as being a bonus.

Also I have said that I would be happy if one person actually likes what I have done. I guess there’s no accounting for taste!

MS: For readers unfamiliar with George & Lynn, what about it made you choose it to parody/homage?

George and Lynn -– Well I knew with Glamour, Not! I wanted to parody Glamourpuss #12 –- as a way of kind of saying thanks for the inclusion of my drawings (which was beyond my wildest dreams!) but all I knew about this at the time for sure was the Russ Heath cover with my name, and some judiciously covered nudity by means of a caption.



I knew whatever I wanted to do, it would have to be something approaching a photorealism newspaper strip. But instead of being a serious study of this as you get in Glamourpuss, I decided to invert it and have humor (that also means what would be the parody section is actually serious).

So the newspaper strip had to have humor, photo-realism and references to scantily-clad women as a matter of course and it had to be something that I was familiar with to be able to do anything half decent. I grew up reading the Sun Newspaper so George & Lynn seemed a natural fit.

There was also a large element of “domestic burlesque” in George & Lynn which I knew would go down well even if the other parts of it would not!

I would also say that at least in-story George and Lynn is quintessentially British as well, which helped a lot.

Finally I chose George and Lynn as it was so flexible and a rich source of existing material, I purposely took panels with captions I liked out of context to make a story!

MS: Where do you see Glamour, Not! fitting in the wider comics landscape? Are there any writers or artists (again, besides Sim) whose work you think is similar to your own?

RB: That’s not something I have thought about –- I am not particularly good at being objective about my own work. I have not thought that anyone would appreciate Glamour, Not! on a wider scale than it has gone so far –- I mean in honesty it is the first real comic that I had done that is actually complete.

If by some random chance it does actually go wider, I would be more surprised than anyone else!

As for anyone’s work who is similar to my own, I have been given a number of different comparisons by other people, but none of these are ones I am aware of myself. I tend to think "well, me is me" really. My own opinions of what I have done can be scathing and are shown word for word in Glamourpuss #12, so I tend to not to compare anyone else to me as I am still trying to figure this out -– I keep saying maybe one day I might get good! Like I said, no good at being objective –- sorry!

I take the line "well, if someone likes what I have done that’s good, but I more than understand if not." I am still practicing really. To put this in context someone once said my work was horrifying and scary and asked for it to be removed!

MS: What's next for you -- more comics? More Glamourpuss features? Anything you want to tease?

RB: Well, I am still working through the 2000 bad drawings anyone has to do before they can decide if they are any good or not! At the moment I have just returned back to doing photos from Glamour magazine again, as you have seen [picture at top of article -- MS].

In terms of what is going to be out there with my work coming up –- Glamourpuss #14 features a cover in part inspired by my drawing #145 and I am told that possibly some more of my drawings might turn up in a Glamourpuss letters page.

I think I may be very lucky in the future along similar lines –- but I honestly don’t know, I think I have been lucky enough already!

Oh, and I sent you a drawing –- maybe you can put it up here for everyone to see?


[John Byrne's Superman, by Robin Barnard]

But by and large I will keep on going, doing 2 drawings a day, as I am only just past 200 and still have another 5 years to go on the 2000!

If Glamour, Not! is well received I may well make doing a comic an annual event. I think it’s good to switch mediums and try something else for a change as this then informs everything else you do.

If anyone actually likes something I do I have no hesitation in sharing it freely and openly and I would love to be able to get other people trying their hand at this. At least at the level I am at it's not as complicated or difficult as some people might think!

I treat what I am doing as relaxing and a bit of fun first. If I actually do anything good, that’s just a bonus. Combine that with a regular production schedule and you will improve naturally!

[Bulletproof thanks to Robin Barnard for his time and patience in providing me with this interview. You can see more of Barnard's work at the Cerebus forum, or in Glamourpuss #12, available in finer comic shops.]

"Superman No. 4" / "Land Fall"

First:
read the prologue, "Star Burst"
then read "Superman No. 1"
then "Superman No. 2 (Warning! Door May Open Suddenly"
and finally "Superman No. 3"

{Now, as always, click to enlarge}






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Into The Void: Addendum

The haute couture of Steve Ditko's Shade

(This is Your Monday Panel 13.)

For all my thousands of words of analysis of Steve Ditko's DC work, some of the best things about the comics he did there are the things that are just cool or look good, no illumination needed. So in that spirit, let's take a look at the girls of Shade.

Ditko was hardly a "girl" artist. His idiosyncratic style, expressionistic brushstrokes, and singular vision of humanity could result in comics where everyone looked like they were mentally ill. There's an indefinable weirdness to Ditko's human beings -- often as not they aren't even characters, but stand-ins for moral states or ideological abstractions. Whatever the reason, Ditko rarely managed (or maybe bothered with) attractive men or women, any sexual allure usually drowning in the vigor of his brush lines.

But the clothes Ditko drew are another thing entirely. From the sharp, occasionally beatnik influenced early-'60s style shows Peter Parker's high school quad was grounds for, to Dr. Strange's silky and elaborate magician's garb, to the cool, buttoned-down fury of Mr. A and the Question's slimline suits, Ditko always used clothes to his story's advantage. Never mere coverings, they're always saying something: about the people wearing them, the action's setting, or the moral tone of the story.

Shade features some of Ditko's best costuming (despite the rather unfortunate Kirbyist-stripper's togs the protagonist spends most of his time in), but it's also notable for finding a place, at last, on some pretty girls. Ditko's stylistic lean toward cartooning in Shade stripped a good deal of the strangeness from his human faces; the men's jaws are squared, their features regularized and slid into handsomeness. And the women are often gorgeous, long-lashed, Caniff-influenced svelte beauties. And outfitted in Ditko's fashion-forward designs, they become some of the most visually-absorbing visions of femininity ever to grace superhero comics. Let's take a look.



Shade's true love, Mellu, is the book's female lead and Ditko's main canvas for women's costumery in it. She first appears in this psychedelic jumpsuit, which is like a road map to all Ditko's stylistic quirks. There's the thick-on-thin ink lines, the unusual shapes, the extreme asymmetry, the unmistakable squiggles, and those weird bubble-shaped things on the tights that could only have come from Ditko's brush.



The brushwork on the skirt is peculiar to Ditko, but this is an R. Crumb girl through and through; the meaty legs, the rolling, purposeful gate, the extreme pear-shape... there's even a Crumb-ish look of base cunning about the facial features. (Side note: I can't figure out whether that's her left arm tousling her hair or just some ill-placed background lines. Anyone?)



Oh, it's Frank Miller-o'clock! Maybe it's just the retro-futuristic, Clockwork Orangey yellow and green skirt/sweater combo, but I can see a lot of Carrie Kelly as Robin in this girl. Her big, flat feet are another late-period Miller adoption. And look at her walk! The cartoon feet, the shoulders pulled back, the severly swishing skirt -- there's so much motion to her that she almost jumps off the page. This is a great drawing and an excellent example of what Ditko's interest in simplification on Shade added to his style.



Look out! This girl's a gangster's moll, a bit player with a "silly feminine" interest in the occult. I love how Ditko just splashes a total '20s femme fatale in the middle of all the futurism of Shade -- but he makes it work perfectly with the minimalism of her outfit. Another cartooned pose ramps up the sexiness; and look at those thick, uninhibited brushstrokes on the dress!



Another great look for Mellu, again based around those trippy circular designs that were so purely Ditko's. The real story here, though, is how well Ditko cartoons a gorgeous woman: like I said, there's a lot of Caniff in her face, but the full lips, button nose, and mischievous come-hither look are entirely the work of their creator. If Ditko ever drew a pretty girl, I say it was in this panel.



The women of Shade weren't all set dressing or heroines, however; villainess Gola Zae was perhaps the most terrifying human Ditko ever brought forth, from the blown-out, crazed eyes to the striped, what-the-hell hair to the jumpsuit, which features the almost carven-looking concentric circles seen as design motifs in the darker Dr. Strange stories.



The alternate dimension of Meat was the setting to a lot of crazy costume concepts like the above, but it also gave Ditko a chance to design the Metan security uniforms, consummately slick unisex jobs that gave the bob-haired policewomen an achingly mod, British army-influenced look. And as if it wasn't enough already, he tops it all off with a perfectly elegant, snappy hotel-bellboy short-brimmed cap. Fab. This picture showcases another especially pretty face, as well.



The costume Mellu gets wears to fight equally well-designed villain the Cloak is as close as anyone in Shade ever really got to a traditional "superhero costume". Though no less impressive, it's got a different vibe than the rest of the Shade couture -- almost an Apollonian, Alex Raymond-on-Flash Gordon tone to it. Jerry Serpe's classy white/blue/gold color palette really give it a striking flash, and that headdress is equal parts antique feminine tiara and futuristic warrior's helm. (Grant Morrison's Aztek would later adopt a similar look.) This outfit is especially suited to Ditko's meaty, arcing brush lines, as well. A look at what might have been a different vision for the costuming of Shade had it been allowed to evolve. The chance to see that evolution is just one of the regrettable victims of Shade's cancellation.

Read "Into The Void": Intro Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

Into The Void: Part 3 (of 3)

The DC comics of Steve Ditko

Intro Part 1 Part 2


After spending the better part of a decade in the forbidding world of pre-direct market alternative comics, Steve Ditko returned to DC in 1977. Blake Bell's biography offers one reason: after spending years doing mystery and ghost shorts for Charlton Comics in order to underwrite his independent efforts, Ditko had built up quite a library of material there. Always the industry's barrel-scraper, Charlton apparently began finding it more cost-effective to reprint one of the many old Ditko stories rather than commission a new one when they needed a slot filled. The resulting lack of funds surely played a part in Ditko's return to the superhero monthlies, but reading Ditko's small press, Objectivist comics of the period hints at something else, too. There's a tired quality to the mid-'70s Mr. A stories, especially, that is nowhere to be seen in earlier work featuring the character. One of the more interesting wrinkles in the career of Ditko the artist is just how much of his hacked-out mainstream work displays higher quality than the independent works that were supposedly so important to their creator. Watching the draggy quality disappear from Ditko's work once he was back in the superhero yoke is telling; could it have been that he wanted to work on a high-profile monthly again to refresh his creative batteries?

Whatever the reason, mid-1977 brought the first issue of Ditko's Shade the Changing Man. Ditko was no longer the hot, bright light he had been in 1967 when he came to DC fresh off of Spider-Man, but in the depressed, transitional comics industry of the time, a new book from him was still worthy of notice: DC's promotional push evidences itself in snazzy house ads and the new book's letter columns, which tells of advance copies being sent out to prominent fanzines to stir up a little buzz. This was not the last time DC's attempts to countenance the emerging direct market and its new hierarchies would play a part in Shade's story.

Promotions or not, though, Shade #1 does gangbusters on its own merits. From page 1, it's obvious that this is a new kind of Ditko comic: the first two panels are action-zapped panoramas, hurling the reader headlong into the story and its environment, a techno-expressionist world of tomorrow in an alternate dimension called Meta, where the dialogue is shouted and expository and the art is the finest Ditko had done in years.



The story moves at an almost frantic pace, crackling with odd ideas and excess energy. The protagonist, Rac Shade, is a good man wrongfully imprisoned for treason and then accidentally freed -- transported first into the cracked-mirror horror house of the "Zero Zone", which serves as a buffer between Meta and our dimension, then to Earth. Surely it goes without saying that Shade (a former elite police agent) has apartments and an illegal, dreadfully powerful M-Vest hidden in a major American city? That's the kind of comic this is, where the ideas are just unpredictable enough to keep their convenience from bothering the mind. It's a far cry from the downbeat attempts at realism in Spider-Man, Hawk & Dove, and some of the Objectivist works -- Ditko was moving forward into a different kind of personal work, one that put as few strictures as possible on his prodigious imagination. The device that sets out what will function as the comic's plot for the duration is introduced by page 3: Shade uses his break from prison as a starting point to "make things right", which is about as open-ended as superhero plots get short of "fighting for justice". Over the issues Shade goes head to head with more or less the entire population of Meta and not a few earthly threats in attempts to clear his name.

Honestly, it's a great setup, because it means Ditko can preserve the book's forward momentum while throwing Shade into any adventure he thinks of; a vehicle for the kind of open, uninhibited storytelling that Spider-Man had and the right-wing books were too focused on their missions to attain. Shade is a rather surprising step for Ditko -- not only back into the mainstream of the business, but back into a manner of comics that he hadn't worked in for a good nine years. This willingness to change is matched in Ditko's artwork, which uses the "perception distortions" the M-Vest produces in criminals as an excuse for some of the most outre cartooning Ditko ever produced:



The M-Vest scenes are a glorious affirmation of the anatomical license pure superhero action allows its artists, hands spreading, appendages foreshortened, perspective shot to hell, and faces given up to manga's super-deformed mode. It reads wonderfully, allowing the fight scenes a fluidity that had been lost in the realism of the Question and Mr. A stories, and an ease of reading unseen since Ditko's Marvel Age. There's also an oblique but noticeable debt to the squat figures of Jack Kirby; Ditko has to pull out a few plot stops to get there, but once the M-Vest kicks into action Shade's square knees and elbows, his sledgehammer fists and savage eyebrows all recall the crude bombast of the King's Bronze Age. Ditko doesn't continue in that idiom for very long, but seeing it in one of his comics at all is a testament to the alternate horizons he was using Shade to explore. There are ideas -- new ones! -- in every moment of Shade's first issue, creating a deeply immersive experience that packs maybe three comics' worth of plot into 17 pages. It's a thrilling read, but equally thrilling is how into it Ditko seems, going out of his way to create some of the most detailed art of his career, using little formal tricks like the M-Vest distortions to snap the narrative along, even reavowing the '60s hipness of Dr. Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum.



Issue 1 ends with a killer cliffhanger panel introducing a villain named Form, and issue 2 is her showcase. Easily the best villain Ditko had created since his Marvel days, Form is all the dark sexual undercurrents in Ditko's artwork given full-blown, terrifying life as a woman made of suffocating shadow -- as well more cartooning of the kind Ditko hadn't really gotten up to before. Bold shapes morph into other bold shapes with little or no realistic physicality behind them, just pure line blocking out areas of shadow and light, body and city. Form is another great in-story excuse for the artist's id to exercise free rein over his panels; all she is is a squiggly glob of void, reined in by quintessentially Ditko veering ink trails.



This issue has a bit more of a typical hero-villain plot than the previous one, given that it isn't also saddled with relating an origin, but the art makes up the difference, squeezing a massive (even for Ditko) amount of information into some panels:



and turning to formal compression techniques like subdivision in others.



Issue 3 moves the action from Earth to Meta, giving Ditko a chance to unwind himself even further. Gone are familiar patterns of sky and skyline, wall and sidewalk. In their place we get an astonishingly thought-out alien dimension, complete with flying cars, acid swamps, thickly spotted blacks, fashion-forward uniforms, and environments whose only rule of physics seems to be the assumption of Ditkovian forms. Rarely has a setting been so suited to the man who drew it; and Ditko seems to reach deep within his inner cartoonist to produce Meta. Now almost completely divorced from any attempt at or obligation to his signature realism, Ditko begins moving toward a new style,at least in his backgrounds. The usual exact brush lines and graceful shapes give way to smooth, rounded, futuristic forms later to be seen in Frank Miller's Ronin, mixed with the chewy fatness of Vaughn Bode. Meta is a design triumph, an engrossing background for Shade's stories to play out against -- unique to Ditko but at the same time like little else he had produced before. Finally, the impulses toward urban grit and psychedelic landscape seen previously in his work had merged into one organic whole.



No less well-designed are the villains introduced in this issue. Hot on the heels of the nightmarish stickiness of Form come major character Sude, a giant cartoon face on what looks like a massive robotic testicle with arms; and the Cloak, a bit player with perhaps the best character design Ditko ever created. At this point Shade's rogue's gallery is already the most impressive of any Ditko character's since a certain wall-crawler. Combined with the rest of the world-building done in this issue, it looks quite like Ditko was trying again to create another Spider-Man -- this time not by replicating that character's specifics, as in Beware the Creeper, but by constructing a mythos as fully-formed, unique, and engaging as the one he and Stan Lee had collaborated on in the early '60s. Ditko's energies are obviously very much with this book, and it pays out in the reading -- at this point every issue of Shade was a journey deeper and deeper into a fascinating alternate reality, like one of the dreamy vistas glimpsed in the background of a Dr. Strange panel all those years ago given name and brought to life.



To that end, much of issue 4 takes place in the graphically stunning Zero Zone, giving the artist an opportunity to fully express his impulse toward the psychedelic, as well as his more recent interest in pure cartoon.



Ditko's melding of the two concerns to create the Zero Zone -- easily his most fully fleshed-out "bizarro dimension" -- brings him more or less entirely out of the superhero-art idiom; panels like those above are more in line with Greg Irons or even Rory Hayes. Jerry Serpe's colors are especially helpful here, giving the Zone enough of an alien quality for this sequence to rank as probably the furthest-out Ditko's comics ever got. The rest of the issue carries a "psych ward" vibe, the consequences of the dangerously visionary first half wreaking themselves on the book's players, resulting in evil and madness.



The issue's deeply cartooned quality extends beyond the Zero Zone, too: whether it was just because he was rushed or because he couldn't switch back to a more normal style fast enough, the pages closely following feature character designs that come close to an Osamu Tezuka level of instinctive, caricatured markmaking. It's a rare instance of Ditko's content overwhelming his professionalism; the result is a series of nightmare faces swarming scribbled across the pages, their scratched simplicity more powerful than the most studied drawing could ever be.



This issue is the hinge on which the rest of Shade swings; though the faces return more or less to normal in issue 5, Ditko's art has changed slightly; the poses are more dynamic, the facial expressions consistently hyperbolic, the character designs are bolder, and the action is more fluid, more alive, than ever before.



However, the plot has settled down a little; while the narrative still crackles with energy, it all proceeds from the internal logic that Ditko has by now built for events taking place on Meta; Shade's good actions win him a friend every issue or two, but the rest of the planet is invariably against him. It's still very entertaining, but it lacks something that the first few issues' fumbling around amidst piles of ideas had. At this point, we know more or less exactly what kind of a comic Shade is, and while it's a very entertaining one, it's no longer one that can do anything it wants, like it seemed to be in the beginning. This feeling of slightly increased predictability is lessened in issues 5 and 6 by the antics of villain Khaos, an engine of total destruction who plays at political terrorism and sets innocents afire (on-panel, no less), boasting "Your grisly death shall be a warning to all of Meta that to defy Khaos is to court doom!" Motherfucker's hardcore! And the trails of destruction he carves into Ditko's futuristic landscapes are an opportunity for the artist to really sling the blacks around, creating something close to a blunt, benday-dotted version of Impressionism that peaks during the epic battle between Khaos and Shade.



Big panels are used in said epic battle, which is always a warning sign -- but the art loses no detail to them, and it's a joy to see Ditko's thick, sludgy brush lines given a little more room to breathe. Serpe's colors throughout are very strong, and by issue 7 (the book's penultimate) Ditko seems to have been sufficiently impressed to create a story where they carried some of the plot's weight, as Shade falls victim to "The Color Coma!"



It's a title that promises greatness, but the comic itself is decidedly a step below all the previous issues. Shade is put out of the action, leaving the few governmental figures who are convinced of his innocence to fill in some unnecessary backstory, which shows just how important this comic's fire-fast, unrelenting pace was. Though the illusion of action is maintained with many detailed, finely gridded pages (at times reminiscent of Ditko's slow-burning Question stories), the boil has gone off the scripting, and we're left with a lot of proclamations and less of the great fight sequences that were so densely sprinkled through all the past issues. Too, we realize just how many characters Ditko has introduced since the action shifted to Meta in issue 3 -- not something that matters when everybody's rushing through dimensions and hitting each other and getting set on fire, but when the plot mechanics come in to play more heavily it gets cumbersome pretty quick.

By issue 8, the transformation to a solidly plot-driven comic is more or less complete. Metan political intrigue takes precedence over feverish action, and though the flashbacks continue, they at least begin setting out what seems like important information. Though the issue itself isn't very interesting, subsequent ones promise to be: Shade's sympathizers, who now include the President of Meta, are set against a power-hungry lieutenant eager to root out institutional corruption. More interesting still, a Metan villain, Dr. ZZ (another snappy design) has found a way to Earth that bypasses the Zero Zone, setting the stage for invasion. It's involved, and less viscerally interesting than the hyper, jittery action of the first several issues, but the potential in Ditko doing a serial epic about other-dimensional politics and an underground takeover of our world seems limitless. Other than a few two- or three-issue stories in later Spider-Man and a halfhearted attempt at subplotting in Charlton's Blue Beetle, Ditko hadn't done this kind of long, continued story since the "Eternity Saga" in Dr. Strange provided one of his finest moments. And the cliffhanger for issue 9? "Trapped in the Zero Zone"!

Editor Jack Harris's letters page promises greatness to come; issue 9, supposedly already drawn, was to introduce the Odd Man, an intriguing Ditko backup feature with a protagonist named "Clay Stoner" that eventually saw one story printed in Detective Comics. But it was 1978, and hype for the "DC Explosion" -- the launch of a raft of new titles designed to appeal to the ever-growing direct market and level the playing field with Marvel -- was in the air. "The DC Explosion's shock waves reach Shade next issue," Harris proclaims. Reach it they did, but not in the way most readers must have expected. Falling numbers for most extant titles (though not Shade) and a bad economic climate all around turned the situation into an executive-mandated "DC Implosion", and Ditko's epic-to-be was one of the 20 titles that found itself beneath the axe that spring. Puffing up Shade #9 in the letter column, Harris hyperbolized "We're not certain the world is even ready." Apparently it wasn't.

Ten years and countless comics after the last time Ditko and DC parted ways, this time the story was reversed. Now the company was the one who walked away from the artist, Ditko the one left in the lurch. The "Implosion" left one finished issue of Shade unpublished, and -- apocryphally -- ten fully plotted issues unrealized (Shade #9 eventually saw print in Canceled Comics Cavalcade). Shade remains Ditko's most consistently high-quality DC work because it, unlike Hawk & Dove and Creeper, was not allowed to run its course. Just another comic, just another cancellation, just another day in the hero industry that Ditko had re-entered. He published the single Odd Man story, wrapped up a mediocre Creeper serial that had been running in World's Finest, and in 1979 returned to the no doubt strange embrace of Marvel and their Editor Emeritus Stan Lee.

Steve Ditko had come full circle.

the end

An addendum, "The Haute Couture of Steve Ditko's Shade", follows. Read it here!

Superhero comics

This was the only pamphlet I bought this week; I'll say things about Roy Crane and Tim Hensley at some point in the future.


DC Universe Legacies #1, by Len Wein and many artists of repute. DC.

First, a rating. I give this comic 3 out of 5 -- it's not bad and not great. I didn't really want to put it down at any point while I was reading it, and there were bits I quite enjoyed. Okay.

In many ways DCU Legacies is as good as it could possibly be. Well, that's not exactly true, but close enough. This comic is as good as could be expected. It's ostensibly a history of the DC Universe, which means scads of pre-written material is available for the creators to sift through. In comics like this there's so much fertile ground to cover that it's rare to get conceptual badness at any point; most of the work has already been done, and a writer with sewing skills is more valuable than a visionary. At best, "history of" or "legacy" comics are a well-strung-together series of high points that took years to happen the first time around, decades of time and reams of comics reduced to one harmonious jigsaw puzzle that gets put together in front of your eyes. This is that, but it's also something less.

If I were being more cynical, I'd say that someone in editorial read Marvels and put together a comic that's nothing more than the DC version of that mediocre book. This is a better comic than that is, because it isn't drawn by Alex Ross and (so far) the stories it's retelling aren't ones that have already been homaged to death. But there's definite conceptual similarity, and the common ground Legacies shares with Marvels is by far its biggest problem. Like Marvels, Legacies is narrated by a kindly old codger of the Greatest Generation who takes up the first two Scott Kolins-drawn, hideously computer-colored pages inviting you in for coffee and telling you "the masked men have been sort of a lifetime obsession with me." (Good to know, and hey, maybe it's my own failing that I'm not in the segment of the audience that goes "me too!") Only after that does the story start, moving back in time to the narrator's rough-n-tumble childhood in Depression-era Metropolis. Aside from the excess of corny sentiment undercutting any Eisner-y dynamism that could have been wrung from a good in media res beginning set in the grit and iron of the bad old days, showing the entire history of a superhero universe from such a conventionally human perspective is a major error. (Contrast it with the old, grandiose Marv Wolfman/George Perez History of the DCU, which was narrated by, yes, God.)

Such a normal, uninteresting human narrator (Paulie, by name) instantly destroys most of the abstract, escapist spectacle that should be this kind of comic's main goal: a history of the DC heroes should be all the biggest fights, the most Wagnerian space operas, the moments of tensest personal drama -- the stuff no human eyes have e'er before beheld, for crying out loud! DC has probably published over 400 top-notch comic books in their 75 years, and ideally those ones should be packed as thick as possible into a "history" comic. By choosing to focus on some nobody's impressions of it all, we get exactly two semi-impressive looks at the very earliest Golden Age crimefighters in issue one -- the comic's a tenth done now, and we only get characters who have super powers in the backup strip. Oh, I'm sure we'll hit all the supposed high points of the DC "story"; Paulie will thrill to the arrival of Superman -- he'll rescue him from a burning building, probably -- and he'll feel kind of scared about this new Batman chap -- maybe he'll save him from getting mugged -- and he'll worry about his wife and family during the Crisis on Infinite Earths. Maybe one of the neanderthals brought into the present from that Alan Moore Swamp Thing issue will come freak out at his house's electric lighting.

But all of those things can't happen, though, because a normal person (who isn't a comic book reader) having that many brushes with the heroes in his life would be ridiculous. The main story both begins and ends with full-page panels of the Justice Society on vintage magazine covers, and there's a bit in the middle where the young Paulie collects newspaper clippings on the recent rash of hero appearances. It's a sign of things to come: Paulie's going to have read about all the good stuff in the paper, just like everyone else, and we're supposed to want to read about him telling us about what he read in it. Hoo boy. Why filter the material through the perspective of someone who, at best, we'll feel is a guy just like us -- when we can go out, read the actual stories, and filter it through our own perspectives? These kind of "history" comics always have the secondary function of cleanup jobs, allowing a company to point readers to the editorially-approved "important" past stories, but to put it so on the surface is not a little galling. Having "just some guy" telling us what DC events he thought were worth noting is a lot less interesting -- a lot less entertaining! -- than it would be to have a framing sequence featuring Dan Didio passionately explaining why said events were integral to his vision for the company.



What I'm getting at is this: the trend toward including a supposedly "normal human" perspective in superhero comics is a terrible one. It made for bad comics from the inception (what did we learn from Phil Sheldon in Marvels? that the Galactus invasion was scary and some people are racist, I mean "hate mutants"? -- thanks for that), and now that we've seen it done so much it's also derivative of bad comics whenever it gets hauled out of the closet again. For god's sake, these are stories about resurrected Egyptian kings, about vengeance-driven ghosts, about alien wishing lanterns and explorers from the future and madmen and gorgeous gals in fishnets who can snap your spine, and inserting this kind of mealy-mouthed "realism" into them is only a denial of what they are, only something that makes you question what's going on. Why doesn't Paulie get killed by the mob after saving the Atom from them? Because it's a comic book. But in that case, what is a guy like Paulie doing in a comic book about an action-loving midget fighting organized organized crime to begin with? The juxtaposition of cliche "real folks" with the stuff of legend, the most spectacle-laden flights of fancy available in any medium, may once have been interesting. But it was never good, it was always detrimental, and everyone should have figured that out by now.

Anyway, once you get past the presence of poor concept in a comic that has no right to any, this is a decent read. Good on DC for handing the project to an old stalwart like Len Wein rather than an up-and-coming Sterling Gates, JT Krul kind of guy. There's a four-page preview for some kind of new Green Arrow series Krul is writing in the back of the book, and it's just the thing to make you appreciate the imperfect-but-rock-solid competence of Wein's writing on Legacies. When a comic whose worst flaws in execution are dialogue like "They're tough as nails and absolutely fearless! What do you think makes men like them tick?" is packaged with a bit of one that has a mohawked would-be rapist telling his victim "Hope you didn't use up all your energy, lady... cuz you got work to do," before getting the tip of his nose, bull-ring and all, torn off by an arrow, you realize there's a level of quality you're being gifted with. And Wein's writing is quality, moving the story along nicely, making the fight scenes matter in terms of the plot, never egregiously lacking in logic, and constructing a perfectly sound springboard for incredible art.



Which is what everyone's got to be here for, right? I'm excited to see how the use of different artists on different, stylistically-appropriate "time periods" is going to work out; seeing the JSA on the cover of Life isn't half the cliffhanger that it is to know JH Williams and Dave Gibbons are going to be evoking the high Golden Age and the Wertham years in the next two issues. Of course, this issue doesn't exactly slack off with the art either, as Joe Kubert lends the best brush line in comics to his son Andy's forceful, dynamic compositions in the main story, and JG Jones gives the backup an antiquey majesty. Predictably, the best moments are those when the writing takes a back seat and the visuals shine in. Watching the Crimson Avenger busting up a protection racket or the Atom hurling crates of liquor at hoods is a reminder of why superhero books always have to be about fighting. These are the best figure artists, the best draftsmen alive, and there's more to be had in letting them cut loose on sequences of bodies in ecstatic motion than there is in anything short of a Delillo novel or a Scorsese movie. Not even the worst scripting can do much to stifle stuff like this; there's simply always going to be value for money in the privilege of watching this issue's artists draw.

There's also a really interesting tension between the looks of the two stories. The Kuberts' best moments are the ones where the poverty and grime of the working-class '30s mix into the blacks of Joe's inks to portray something startlingly real...



... while Jones' story is all Rockefeller glory and wealth and high living, mixed with society superheroes that take on an almost art-deco sheen in this context.



It says way more about socioeconomics in America than the script possibly could, or even attempts to. If all the rest of this book's artists are matched this well to the material they draw, it will be quite an accomplishment.

In the end, what we have here is incredible artists drawing a flawed script that manages both telling a story and not embarrassing itself. In superheroes -- hell, in comics -- that's saying something. This book is surely a cut above the claptrap that makes up, say, at least 75% of every comics genre, and that alone is a pretty good recommendation. You need to want to enjoy it for it to be much fun, but hell, that's true of Krazy Kat and Asterios Polyp and the Kirby stuff, too. You can count on one hand the comics we've had that actually seduce their readers, and none of them are coming out monthly these days. To be a regular comics reader is to lower your expectations, and to find the beauty in something like Joe Kubert's brushwork on an inferior penciler, or the formal swazzle of JG Jones' flashback sequences (he turns the panels themselves into big word balloons -- I got really excited about it, anyway).

I'm hopeful that this story will end well, have good bits of hero action in every issue, employ only top-flight artists, and end up like Paul Gulacy's Master of Kung-Fu, or Dave Gibbons' Green Lantern, or whatever John Romita Jr. draws -- a dumb-ish book that comics art aficionados who don't mind superheroes go out of their way to get at, because there's precious little else but that when you're done with The Spirit and All Star Superman. It's not a bad fate, and I've got to say it's not a bad comic. You can read it if you want to.