My 10 From 2010

Note: this is not, nor should it be construed as, a "top 10" or "best of the year" list. Quality, while obviously important, isn't my only criterion for enjoying comics. It's about a feeling too. So this list is ten comics that hit me hardest this year, that took me furthest into the unnameable thing I get from the medium. I also think they are all terrific reads, and if I were to do a top 20 or 25 they would all certainly make it on the list. But there were books this year that are better than some of the ones listed here (X'ed Out, The Outfit, THB #2, Mome), there are ones I didn't get to yet (The Wrong Place, It Was The War Of The Trenches), and there are ones that I decided not to list because they were all or mostly reprinted material (Wally Gropius, The Unclothed Man, Captain Easy, that Rand Holmes biography, Absolute All Star Superman). You should check all those out too.

So what we've got here is a list of ten (or 38) comics I really loved that came out in 2010. They're not ordered because that kind of value judgment doesn't really appeal to me, but also because I couldn't come up with a good 10-to-1 progression. My favorite comic of the year was The Whale. I thought the best comic of the year was Lint. I'd feel dishonest putting a "number 1" tag by either, and making the other one number 2. I guess this is my top 10 number 1 comics of the year, then. I really hope you will read them all, and after that maybe you can figure it out for yourself.

In alphabetical order:

- Afrodisiac, by Brian Maruca and Jim Rugg. AdHouse.



In a lot of ways this January release was the perfect comic to kick off 2010 with. Part indie-cool hero comics farce, part passionate homage to the sleaziest and most bizarre aspects of '70s Marvel action books, it works away beautifully at very specific influences while never forgetting that it's got all of comics, not just one set of tropes or genre, to work in. Rugg's cartooning has never looked better or been more formally audacious, and he and Maruca nail the goodole action comics story over and over again over the course of a hundred beautifully designed pages. And while the boundary-pushing in both form and content is thrilling indeed, the real meat of this book is just how convincingly its creators pull a unique, fully-formed aesthetic from the scraps and leavings of yesteryear's tossed-off hackwork. All good comics stories could only be told in the comics medium, but Afrodisiac could only be told in the exact version of the comics medium we have, the one where reading some Paul Gulacy comics after a Clowes book can really blow your mind. Rock solid and brave as hell from start to finish, Afrodisiac is a minor miracle; superhero comics that put an awareness of the medium's sprawling entirety to work on the page.

- Batman Odyssey #1-5, by Neal Adams. DC.



In the year that Grant Morrison's decline made superhero comics less worth following than they were at any point in the previous decade, who could've guessed that Neal Adams of all people would deliver the craziest, most unrestrained and challenging hero book on the stands? Not me, but somehow that's still the way it happened. Batman Odyssey is all the criticism leveled at superhero comics over the past 45 years rolled into one sublime steamroller: juvenile, gory, incomprehensible, illiterate, pointless, rambling, decompressed, supercompressed, sexually repressed, shackled by continuity and self-reference, just plain daffy. But those can all be really fun things to read, and Adams seems to take them not just as part and parcel of the cape-and-cowl story, but as the big draw, the things superhero comics bring to the table. And he's got a point, because Odyssey is as intense and electrifying and addictive as smoking crack cocaine, a journey into the pure distilled essence of what may just be the strangest of all fiction genres. And underneath it all is the question of whether or not Adams, one of the pillars the modern version of said genre built itself off of, even knows what he's doing. Whether it's a serious attempt at laying bare some foul fundamental truth of hero comics or the uncomprehending seizures of a genius gone off the rails, it's more exciting than just about anything else with a monthly release schedule right now.

- Brendan McCarthy comics (Spider-Man Fever #1-3, plus shorts in Captain America: Who Won't Wield The Shield, House of Mystery #27, Age of Heroes #4, and 2000AD #1712-1713). Marvel, DC, 2000AD.



Comics' most quixotic artist? Hard to say, but if you were to look at this year alone, Brendan McCarthy takes the crown without half trying. What had to be the most anticipated return to the medium in years (in the circles I like to hang out in, anyway) started with a bang -- Matt Fraction collab! big Marvel miniseries! -- before withering into random anthology shorts you couldn't find without the internet to help you. Then there were the rejected pitches and comics drawn but never published, the big year-end art sale, the retreat to a non-US distro British publication, and the lurking feeling that McCarthy had failed in his big bid for mainstream commercial-comics success. It's too bad though, because the comics he's making are about as close to outright Kramers Ergot art-on-the-page as superheroes have seen since... god, probably since last time McCarthy made comics. Whether it's the chopped'n'screwed Ditko Dr. Strange remixes, the career-best linework on the Captain America short in Age of Heroes #4, the Frank Miller/Heinz Edelmann hard psychedelia of the Judge Dredd two-parter, or the thrown gauntlets to the digital coloring profession that every passing page seemed to be, McCarthy is obviously still full of ideas about comics, ready to take them places they haven't been before. Hopefully he sticks around to take them there, but if not we got a good hundred-plus pages out of him that will last far beyond the year that gave them to us.

UPDATE: McCarthy himself dropped by the comments section to give us all the real narrative behind his year in the medium, ironing out my overly romantic little fantasy right quick. Thanks Brendan!

- The Bulletproof Coffin #1-3, by Shaky Kane and David Hine. Image.



Also in '90s glo-fi Britcomic artist returns this year: Shaky Kane and the masterpiece all his Deadline strips and random one-shots promised for so long. This six-issue miniseries, which just wrapped up today, is first and foremost an attempt to resurrect the Silver Age. Its heroes destroy villains without remorse or neurosis, its colors lay flat and dazzling over the panels, and its story pulls no punches and saves nothing for next issue. But, as both we and Bulletproof's name-shifting fanboy hero discover, you can't go home again. Comics have changed since the heady days of Kirby, Swan, and Steranko, and from the Frank Miller/Geof Darrow grit in Kane's art to the post-Morrison self-referentialities dripping from Hine's scripts, this book is simply too smart to be what it wants to be.

It's a metaphor for the superhero comics themselves, of course -- no matter how much it may appeal to us we can't be children anymore, so grow the fuck up Geoff Johns & co. -- but it pulls no punches with its readers, either, sneering at us for buying into this corporate-controlled property graveyard that once held true genius. In its final, virtuosic fade back into reality from Kane's technicolored fantasyland, it pulls all that remorse and neurosis and complexity onto the pages before presenting a completely blank slate, a final page of pure white. The superhero comic is over. What do we draw now? Do we draw anything? Or do we file this one in the longboxes with the rest and go do some living? The choice is ours, and the heroes that taught us wrong from right are no longer anywhere to be found. This is kids' comics doing very grown-up things, and looking incredible in the bargain.

- Deadpool Max #1-3, by Kyle Baker and David Lapham. Marvel.



Then again, when something dies, especially something as ridiculous and self-important and incredible as superhero comics, it's always essential to have somebody dance on the bones. Enter the greatest cartoonist of all time, the medium's best writer of mentally-ill characters, and the last superhero who'll ever make any impact on the public consciousness. Deadpool Max is a conundrum, half vicious satire of everything ugly and stupid and cruel that hero comics get away with, half unprecedented amplification of those selfsame problematic elements. It's very funny comics, but it doesn't take much laughing before you start hurting when all the jokes are about rape or racism or disability or serious injuries. Lapham works with a skewer like nobody else, but he gives himself the worst of it, and it's such a strange thing to witness that at a certain point the wisest thing to do is give up and just look at the pictures.

Luckily, this is the best and most innovatively drawn comic of the year. Kyle Baker, after decades as the medium's most talented working journeyman, has found a home on the high-paying, creatively free gig that was always the place he'd make his masterpiece. And he's wasting no panels doing so -- the color on this book is a primer in how to make raw digital graphics work in the medium, something that's going to be informing the best-looking mainstream comics for at least the next decade, but just as impressive is the vast array of cartooning styles Baker spreads across his panels, moving from Looney Tunes to art-comix to Euro refinement to pure Kirbyist hero charge in single sequences, using more pure comics grammar in half-pages than most artists to over the course of entire books. Paradoxically, the first post-superhero superhero comic finds its power in what made the genre worthwhile from the beginning: great writing, great art, and a ravenous hunger for the new.

- Lint, by Chris Ware. D&Q.



Chris Ware is about the closest thing to a guarantee you can get in comics; he's simply the most talented artist working in the medium today. But even guarantees can carry a few surprises, and watching Ware up his game to all-time-seminal-text proportions in 2010's installment of the ACME Novelty Library series was honestly one of the biggest shocks of the year. In Lint Ware goes far beyond everything he's done previously, sloughing off the tropes and mannerisms that have defined him for so long for the wide-open feeling of work by a cartoonist with no limits. A large part of it comes from Lint's embrace of influence; Ware's had one of the most immediately recognizable visual styles in comics for over a decade at this point, but here he mixes things up, lending his formal mastery to pastiches of Roy Lichtenstein and Richard McGuire, quoting Jack Kirby and Frank Quitely like he's owned them for years, and taking a foray into art-comix that encompasses the styles of what seems like a good half of the idiom's leading lights. Lint is bravura comics, unafraid to try whatever it wants with the page, powered by a wealth of sheer talent that nobody else working in comics can even come close to.

But it's Ware's storytelling that's really evolved. In Lint there is no self-reflexive dwelling on individual feelings or neuroses, no glowering attention paid to mere facets of life. Between its embroidered covers this book tells more than just about any comic you care to name, the entirety of one modern American life that's oh so typical in its individuality. The pages skip from year to year, the panels from emotion to emotion, and by the unparalleled graphic representation of death and what comes after it that closes the book, it seems that nothing has been left out. Of course, 72 pages are too short for that to be true, and Ware's a lot smarter than that too. The real grit and power of Lint's story is what's missing, what ugliness the beautiful panels don't show. All we know is that it's there, and but for the explosive art-comix sequence we're left to guess at it. This is as close as the comics medium has come yet to creating a real person, and as in real life we can only guess at what lies beneath. All we have is the pages, but they're enough for at least another year of study.

- Michael DeForge comics (Lose #2, Spotting Deer, Peter's Muscle, SM, Maxim's Top 100, plus shorts in Smoke Signal, Monster, Wowee Zonk, Strange Tales, StudyGroup 12, Vice Comics, probably some I'm forgetting). Koyama Press/self-published/Desert Island/Marvel/et cetera.



Dude had an epic year, in case you're not getting that from the small manuscript of text up there. In fact, Michael DeForge, trampolining from last year's killer debut issue of Lose, just about took over comics in 2010, making better minis than anyone else, putting out two beautiful feature issues with Koyama, hitting anthology after anthology with standout shorts, and finishing out the year with A Goddamn Marvel Story. It was such a thick blizzard of incredible comics that the concerted fan had little choice but to try and keep up, letting page after vigorously cartooned page seep in through the eyes and blow the mind. Following DeForge as he ripped this year's string of gems was about as close to an endurance-level sport as comics reading gets.

But amidst the massive quantity of top-notch work and the pyrotechnic feeling of even more potential waiting for its time to come, there was a very definite aesthetic being laid down, evolving and revealing further facets of itself with every new page and weirdo snap ending. DeForge trades in comics as iconography, his glossy, superslick lines equally suited to recreating Steve Ditko and Bill Amend characters, his panels giving what feel like definitive visualizations of the everyday acts comics are shy about showing. His people sweat and salivate, his environments decay and grow fungus -- everything is in thrall to a process, a gelatinous creep forward, and the unease it engenders. DeForge's cartoons are smooth and soft, but there's never much of the cute or cuddly to them. And when there is, you know the maggots will be swarming over them soon enough. It's not immediately obvious what larger concerns DeForge is getting at yet, but watching his focus narrow to a laser-beam intensity is reason enough for a hundred times the pages he made this year. It isn't often that the new kid on the block does work this immediately arresting while promising so much to come, but DeForge is obviously a cut above just about anyone else making comics right now.

- Powr Mastrs 3, by CF. Picturebox.



This year has to have been the biggest moment for mainstream/alternative comics unions since... god, since the golden years of Heavy Metal. Creators like DeForge and Kane/Hine and Rugg/Maruca made work that embraced the delights of both strains of comics with equal conviction. The new, best-yet volume of Powr Mastrs belongs to that moment as well, but where other cartoonists arrived in between comics traditions by taking up influences from both, CF followed his own star. Powr Mastrs has all the personal expression and bizarre idiosyncracies of the hardest alt comics, not to mention a dose of pure searing art-comix vision. But as winding and psychological as it gets, there's an equal weight of kinetic hyper-action, high-concept fantasy dazzle, and broad readability to the book.

Pages of total abstraction give way to a white-knuckle chase sequence, adventure shorts become exercises in contextless high-impact picture making, and page by page the barriers between all the comics conventions we hold onto break down. This is comics for the future, everything that's exciting and unique about the medium presented all at once, with a hint that the mind behind it knows exactly what's comes next but wants to let us savor the suspense for a while. It helps that CF's grown as much as an artist as he has as a conceptualizer, his storytelling flawless, his individual panels sublime on their own. As sheer visual spectacle, carrying hints of Kirby and Panter and Moebius while always remaining its own, this book is tough to beat. And as a story, as a hermetic philosophical text, as a deeply felt poem in images, as ideas, there's nothing else like it in the medium.

- Smoke Signal #3-7, by various artists. Desert Island.



The best anthology of 2010 wasn't just the one that had the highest-quality work in it. It was about the feeling pulsing across its massive newspaper-format pages, about the totality of what was being presented, about the way it put forth not one style or concept or genre of comics but the medium unbound, work of various appearances and various quality by various creators. You couldn't ask for a better survey of non-mainstream comics than this year's issues of Smoke Signal, where breakout minicomics stars rubbed shoulders with out-of-nowhere European visionaries and established indie legends. Every page was a new thing, completely its own, and a ridiculously high percentage of them were not only impressive but sensational. This comic is also just plain fun to follow -- its editorial voice became stronger and surer with every issue this year, each one a huge step forward from the last. Not to mention, it's an invaluable place to find new work from established creators who aren't around as often as we'd like them to be. Where could you see non-Wally Gropius pages by Tim Hensley this year? Where did Dash Shaw do his most advanced comics? Where did Taylor McKimens drop a few eye-destroying broadsheets? Where did Chester Brown draw the Fantastic Four? It all happened here, in a little newspaper published out of a little shop in Brooklyn, on pages whose sense of fun and freedom overpowered metric tons of other more self-important work done this year.

- The Whale, by Aidan Koch. Gaze Books.



No comic ran deeper this year than The Whale. On pages drowned in wave after wave of graphite dust, Aidan Koch suggested more than told a devastating story of death and life's seemingly impossible existence in the face of it. Koch's comic is almost unearthly in its beauty -- a few spare strokes and hazes of erasure laying out entire fog-drenched landscapes, sheets of scratched static crackling over one another, everything always pulsing with energy, a slow beat running through disconnected panels that overwhelm time after time, page turn after page turn. Koch's art is total immersion, both in the substances it's made of and the immensity of space and texture in its panels. Everything in this comic is there to be touched with the eyes, drowned in, felt.

And what a feeling it is. Koch brings us not just to the wintry beach her story takes place on, but deep inside the nameless woman through whom we see it happen, never pulling any punches with the unrelenting mix of loss and struggle that surrounds her. The Whale plays with heavy themes that can go wrong in a second -- along with mere death there's suicide, the afterlife, existential doubt, and a very strong undercurrent of spiritual possession -- but the handling of them is so deft, so honest, that it all seems right, like it couldn't have happened any other way. This comic is a trip inside something, a handful of pages to be experienced far more than read, and though part of it is a journey into the raw potential of the comics medium, there's something more, an unnamed feeling that clings to every page. Koch uses words and pictures not to show but to evoke, and her comic is a haunting, vividly affecting piece of pure poetry that lingers far after the final page.

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See you next year!

How We Do

Sans Genre IV



I'm stating the obvious, but oh well. It's all about sequence in comics. Though with the good stuff the reading experience is fluid and seamless, this medium more than any other is a sum of constituent parts. Movies, drama, music, they all flow by you whether you want them to or not. Unceasing, continuous, and even when the film goes to a still frame or the play switches sets between acts or the song hits a moment of silence, there's still progression because those media are pinned to a time limit, a moment to begin and another to end, and time is always passing within them. There's less of that flow to prose writing, but text invites perpetual motion, the paragraph or stanza breaks more often than not just places to catch your breath before you keep on reading about the same thing. The uniformity of type on the page is also lulling, hypnotic, a reason not to stop. (A literary friend of mine recently asked why I like reading comics more than prose and I said it's because all prose looks the same. Game set and match, thank you.) Comics, though: there is a space between every two pictures, every bit-by-bit of story, and no time passes, and you are no further from the beginning or closer to the end until you move past that space and into the next one. Comics ask that you stop and drink the single moments, freeze the story stock still with every panel and take in something that has no time to it, not even a millisecond of progression, a single suspended instance.

Somehow it works, and works well. Comics speak to the way our brains work enough so that we never have much problem making stories out of the tiny snatches we're given from whatever full process is occuring. But looking at it objectively, this is a Frankenstein monster medium, isn't it? Pieced together rather than solid. How many times does a page show two completely different pictures one after the other, no shared characters or setting or even color scheme, and expect us to make it flow? That's why sequence is so very important. Pick the wrong pieces of your story's moments to isolate and stitch up, and it becomes impossible to tell what's going on. This element of choice probably makes comics less immediately accessible than other visual media -- I'd guess a lot of us have known people who say they just "can't read" the stuff, and there's something to that protestation of illiteracy. No matter how bad the editing on a film is, there's always something to understand, because from moment to moment you can see things moving, you can parse them as you parse reality, even if the cutting is completely incomprehensible. In film sequence is constant, unceasing. If cuts in that medium are comparable to panel borders in this one, in film there is still motion and progression inside every panel. But in comics there is only the flash, the bang, one stillness and then the next. And that's really different from anything else.

In fact, it gives the comics maker something untouched by any other medium.

Let's consider time for a second. Experiential time, the passage of moments in reality as we perceive them, is one single flow, neverending from birth to death. Though we forget things or misremember them or even, in serious cases like amnesia or senility, find them completely erased from our brains, we know there was always something happening, that the progression of time is and has always been extant. (If you wanna argue with that feel free, but go find yourself some postmodern literature to read because it's not what this is about.) Film, animation, and video games are all able to replicate this constant flow with a rapid pulse of tightly linked images. Anything higher than 16 frames projected per second and the human eye can't tell the difference between flicker and perpetual motion. The usual speed these days is between 24 and 30, though it can go up to 300. It's important to remember, though, that at their most basic all these media are comics: sequential progressions of single images. They just move faster on the screen than the page.

Now watch this, and see where it starts getting interesting.

Finished? That's a little excerpt from 3D Monster Maze, the first 3D video game created for home computer systems. Six frames per second. Your eye can do comics that fast if, they're drawn simple and intuitive enough. The difference is that in Monster Maze the speed is unwavering, a constant march forward with no possibility of variation in the time taken on each individual frame. And here's where comics jump into the fray.

The comics artist, like I said, can create something pretty close to Monster Maze if necessary. Our minds can stitch up a slick tracking shot or figure animation into a similar approximate, herky-jerky stab at real life. In fact, we do it all the time. See:




Both six frames you can easily do in a second, basically film on paper. I chose to show these particular two because one is from comics' earliest history (Winsor McCay, 1905) and the other is about as contemporary as it gets (Matt Furie, 2010). But though comics can do this, they usually don't. Because comics offers something that continuous media can't, not even at one frame per second. Comics have stillness, and that means that whenever they go from one place to another there's going to be a gap. A gap in time, a gap in motion, a gap in the illusion of life as it's given to the reader. No matter how slowly frames run onscreen, they can't separate themselves out from one another the way the panels of a comic do, can't dialogue on the page and explain to you exactly how much time is elapsing. Comics are planed open in their progression, laid out bare. They tell you what they're doing.

The panelled page allows for a much deeper, more engaging experience than the single-camera, animated Monster Maze approach. Here's the form in the hands of two artists who helped shape the way it's most often practiced in America:




This is the baseline speed for comics, a second or two passing in-panel before the gutterspace eats another couple. Then repeat. The gaps and the time in the panels working in tandem, about equal with each other. We don't need to see the minute progressions McCay and Furie give us, all we need is the suggestion of something going on in between the pictures. The camera unmoors, and we're given no explanation for the different perspective each panel gives into its subject, but we still understand. We track Will Eisner's Spirit as he limps down the halls of police headquarters even though the long walk itself is pared down to a few still, uninhabited frames. We ride through chaos with Jack Kirby's Steppenwolf even though we don't see him going through anything at all, only fixed at different moments in time. It's the sequencing that gives us what semblance of life exists, the way the compositions speak to what isn't actually on the page.

And this is the big paradox of comics: something from nothing, motion from stillness. We look at individual panels one by one, but that's not how we take them: they are subsumed, surrounded by story (or at least context). We move from one to the next. And once the composition is in place, once a comprehensible sequence is arrived at, once the disconnected images are linked up, there is no one speed for comics. The McCay and Furie move differently than the Eisner and Kirby. Readability holds all four together, but beyond making it readable there's a million ways to do this. The comics medium's utilization of the unmoving, visibly still frame as its base unit allows it to go much further into time and its distortion than any of the continuous media can. The four examples above share more than just readability. They've all got a steady pace to them, a rhythm to read the panels in that isn't too far a leap from the rhythm film strips flicker at. It's the way comics suck us in, that rhythm -- but once we're in, the artist can begin to manipulate us. Back to the gaps between panels, the moments where everything stops before beginning again, where we have to infer and can't actually see. They're all regularized slivers in between the drawn moments on the pages above. But they can be whatever the artist wants. Any length, any space in time. The simple fact is laid bare above: there are at least two speeds that comics can work at. What if someone were to combine them? What if others were tested?



One of the first artists to really engage with that question was Bernard Krigstein, whose craft found its pinnacle in the 1955 shock-horror short "Master Race". The sequence above is comics doing something it had never done before; not animation or Eisner progression or Kirby point-of-impact, but something that goes further. Krigstein begins with a fairly typical two-panel tracking shot, a second or two in the panels and then a second or two in between, but then (in what, by the way, was scripted as a single panel) he suddenly speeds up his sequencing, capturing four stages of one moment, slowing down our perception of the it. There's a sixteenth of a second at most elapsing in panels three through six, and less than that in the gutters. But it's draaaawn out, made to last almost forever, warped in a way that goes further than a simple frames-per-second variation and into the way we're reading the story, shocking us into actually experiencing it more slowly rather than just showing us a slow-motion sequence. There's still a steady rhythm going with the pictures and the gaps between, but it suddenly quadruples its time signature, slicing one stage of time as it's been drawn in the first two panels down into four.

The next four frames -- train, man, train, man -- are an object lesson in how comics create story from thin air. This is still superfast animation-speed sequencing along the McCay/Furie lines, but it's applied to two separated parts rather than one single flow. We can understand that the train is bearing down on the man despite the facts that there is no actual motion in the panels and that the two aren't seen together until the fourth shot. The gaps here work to separate physical space as well as time, but because it uses the same speed as the four smooth, continuous "falling" panels that precede it, the sequence reads perfectly, an obvious progression from the top tier. Then in the final panel of the sequence, Krigstein gets as close to true in-panel motion as possible, casting off the look of the still image for a blur of faces as the train passes by. This is another one-second panel, we're back to the typical amount of new information in the box, but that information is shown rather than implied, the time it takes the train to move those few feet past the platform actually drawn onto the page. Krigstein is scratching deep at the limitations of the unmoving image, digging for what forward thrust he can get from it, while still using the concrete progression it allows masterfully.



Half a century later, here's JH Williams getting around the panel borders. It's still a sequence of frozen images, but Williams takes their subdivision further than Krigstein by splitting up the individual frames. We read these single panels as two-step actions (the crowbar hits the arm in white, then teeth bare and fists clench in red -- three panels on, the body crumples to the floor in red a millisecond before head hits stone in white). The effect of these boxes within boxes is to turn single frames into self-contained mini-sequences. By putting gaps into single panels rather than between multiple ones, Williams forces us to take the still images as progressions, to see movement within them. We get the points of impact, instantaneous, in blinding hits that recall the speed of camera flashes or lightning strikes, at the center of the slower, darker one-or-two-second physical reactions. It gets close indeed to film's in-frame movement, two different things superimposed into the same picture, bringing the sequentiality of multiple panels into single ones and making the whole thing move that much smoother. Williams uses more traditional action-action cutting in the first two panels before a blindingly quick transition between the third and fourth, recalling Krigstein's epic fall off the subway platform. It's a smoother, more elegant employment of the raw ideas of the "Master Race" sequence, the artist speeding time up and slowing it down, pulling multiple chunks of information from single pictures with the way they're bordered and made to dialogue with one another.



And here Frank Quitely explodes the multiple-views concept into full, vigorous life. The big background image of the, uh, robot dog jumping through the tank, isn't even subdivided -- like in the final panel of the Krigstein sequence, it's a few different instants that make up a single motion laid down together on the page. We watch maybe one second pass in this whole panel, but it's split up into five different sections, five tracked movements across the frame, the stitching-up done for us and all in the same box. There's no gutterspace at all here, only a perception of sequence that comes close to the experiential. The idea of frames per second no longer applies, but we can still see the movement, still watch something go from beginning to end in front of us. The gaps are gone now, and we are seeing something that mimics the way we see actual motion in life -- not a captured moment, but a string of them forced into one picture.

Quitely also goes deep into subdivision in this panel, and in doing so he brings us beyond the range of normal perception. Each moment in the background image gets its constituent parts extended across the frame in a row of tiny impacts, small parts of the one whole brought into focus. These rows aren't progressions, they're different aspects of the single moments occurring, and by presenting so many at once, Quitely gives us a totality of image, a full view into things, that our real-life eyes could never show us. It's a different thing than Krigstein or Williams are up to -- while they strive for movement, Quitely is locked on to the panel as frozen, immobile thing here, his rows capturing the same exact point in time across multiple frames, his in-panel tracking shot denying the need for transitions. Again, there may be space between the little boxes, but there are no "gaps", everything along each row is happening at the exact same instant. The spaces being stitched together are only physical now. We have arrived inside a moment in time, the sheer amount of it being presented forcing us to experience it as lived rather than looked down on -- as swimming around us all at once rather than passing us by in frozen increments.

Single pictures: they are incapable of true movement, even when they're projected at a thousand frames per second or drawn twenty-nine to a panel at the size of postage stamps. It's in making them try to move, in exploring the ways the spaces between them hit our minds, that comics go further. The comics artist can stop us on a single panel for minutes on end or push us through a hundred in a few seconds with the way it's all put together. Nothing is proscribed, anything possible in the way pictures and gaps between interact. But even in the most perfect sequences, there's always another factor that I haven't mentioned: collaboration. We the readers make the comic happen. It does not play on regardless, like things do on a stage or a screen. The artists can influence us and push us toward seeing, but in the end comics happen in our minds and nowhere else. From stillness to motion inside ourselves; it's a wonderful thing, that.

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Appendix; ask me about it in comments if you want

One Year

Well, today is the last day of my first year writing this blog. Coincidentally this is also my 200th post on it (actually, not that coincidentally -- I really hoped I could make it here in this amount of time). So I was gonna be lazy and just post a list of links to some of my old articles that I liked but for whatever reason never really blew up on the internet. If you wanna see that, just hang on a minute.

Because! Today is the day the feature interview I did with Tom Spurgeon of The Comics Reporter went up, and if you want to read anything having to do with me right now, it should definitely be that. It's a good 13,000 words and change so it ought to keep you busy for a while, and I'm really happy with/proud of the way it turned out. Tom and I talked about pretty much all of my favorite comics of the year (with the exception of my very favorite one, which I hadn't read yet when we did the interview), and we also spent a good amount of time on the Big Questions of where comics are now and where they're going in the future. All that, plus I totally talked about myself! If you've ever wondered who I am personally (and how could you not), this interview's got the Secret Origin of Matt Seneca all set out for yuh. Go read it, I couldn't have imagined a better way to top off my first year on the comics internet.

If when you finish that you want even more of me blathering on, then maybe you should check out this little Q and A I did with up-and-coming pop culture blogger Adam McIlwee. It's not as intensive on comics, but given that what we talked about instead is drugs and music I'm sure you can still find plenty in it to keep your eyes on the screen.

So yeah! One year in writing-about-comics-on-the-internet. Not tryin' to go all Oscar acceptance speech here, but I want to thank every single person who's read anything at all I've written over the past 365 days -- yeah, I mean you -- for giving me your time and attention. I've been incredibly lucky to have had so many people showing up here, and it's made me think harder and work more at doing this than anything else could have. If I've made even one of you think about something you wouldn't have or find beauty in something you never did before the way writing for you made me do so many times, then this year would have been worth it at twice the word count. And I want to give extra special thanks to anyone who's ever dropped a comment on one of my articles, even if it was just to tell me you dug one of the scans or you think I'm high for liking Rob Liefeld's art. It's the only way I can tell I'm making anybody think about anything, so please keep it up, and if you've wanted to comment but haven't I hope you will start. I'm prouder of some of the conversations I've had in comments sections here than anything I've written by myself; the articles are only my side of the conversations I want to start, so I hope you all continue to fire away.

Here are some people I want to give particular credit to for inspiring me or challenging me or helping me along or just being nice and saying hi: Joe McCulloch. Tucker Stone. Sean Witzke. Tim Callahan. Tom Spurgeon. Chris Mautner. David Brothers. Dirk Deppey. Derik Badman. Frank Santoro. Noah Berlatsky. Jason Overby. Brandon Soderberg. Tony Robertson. Tim Hodler. Dan Nadel. Chad Nevett. Andrei Molotiu. David Pepose. Laura Hudson. Jimmy Palmiotti. Jim Steranko. Gary Panter. Heidi McDonald. Sean T. Collins.

My everlasting gratitude to the three interview subjects who sat through what had to be some pretty boring interrogations this year:
Michael DeForge
Robin Barnard
Shaky Kane

And to all my blog and twitter followers (you should become one).

yeah

Now here are a few articles I never got much response to but wished I had, so I thought I'd throw them out there again in the hopes that maybe this time some of you guys would tell me what you think of them.

Into The Void, an in-depth, multi-part look at Steve Ditko's years at DC Comics

Fly In Amber, a brief chronology of Guido Crepax's Valentina (which is my favorite comic ever)

Iceberg Tips, a quick romp through some comics that have escaped modern critical attention but deserve all the availability and analysis (and in some cases, translation) they can get

Greatest Comic of All Time, an autopsy on Mike Sekowsky's lost gem Manhunter 2070

Inst'nt Classik, the modern hero-comics marketplace considered through the lens of Brendan McCarthy

Some notes on Driven By Lemons, probably my favorite comic of last year (the last few years, really)

A Missing Link, review of the year's best reprint book, Roy Crane's Captain Easy volume 1

Welcome To The Jungle, a look at Olivier Schrauwen's fascinating Chromo Congo

annnd, to wrap it all up, here are some comics I drew.

That's it for a bit! Seeya Monday with the year's last panel, and then after that with my list of 10 From 2010. Happy holidays you guys!

Comic of the Year

The Whale, by Aidan Koch. Gaze Books.


My favorite comic of the year is stripped down to the bones. As a package, not a piece of art or a story but a thing, it's like a challenge. It's smaller than a superhero comic or a manga digest or a bookstore-market graphic novel, thinner, lighter. It doesn't jump out at you from store shelves. You have to be looking to find it. There's something to that, an intimacy. You go in search of a book and you're speaking with it before you've ever even seen a copy. And then you find a copy -- I found a copy -- and when it's opened up, the pages, the art and the story, the comic part of the thing, is just as stripped down, as bare, as intimate. The Whale is about life and death, the natural and the supernatural, land and water, grief and acceptance, and the uncertain places where all those things meet. And it comes naked, even its secrets still clinging visibly to the pages.

Comics art as it's most often published is covered up and then covered again. Penciled inked colored is the procession most readers know, so much so that the word "drawn" almost sounds affected, too grandiloquent for the subdivided reality of the comics medium. But all pictures are drawn, and it's only because we're so used to seeing the drawings encased in blacks and hardened in hues that we forget. The Whale, though, is drawn and left alone, a book of pencil marks and nothing more. The first thing you notice is the incredible softness of it. A lushness. A million different gradations of the color gray. Look close enough at one of Aidan Koch's pencil lines and it stops even being a line. Uniformity of tone drops away, the unpredictability of pencil lead on paper bursts forth, and everything is flickering, trails that veer from almost solid to barely there. And they veer, but they never quite come down in either place. They never disappear entirely or turn to pure black. There's always -- and at this point you are looking so closely at the lines that it's impossible to deny the fact that they've been printed, that on the page they aren't lines at all but clusters of tiny dots -- and in even the fullest depths of black dots there's always a spot of white, and even in the blankest stretches of white space there's always a dot of black. The Whale is an in-between, a liminal space from beginning to end.



Koch isn't the only artist drawing comics in pencil. She's not even the only one who drew a terrific comic in pencil this year. But her pages more than anyone else's range far and wide across the space between black and white, presence and absence, that the tool affords. As colorless comics it's got the fullest range of expression I've ever seen. Where comics art traditionally concentrates on creating a single, baseline look from which it can deviate for dynamic effect, Koch's drawing is much less calculated, and achieves something much greater. It's all dynamics, panels filled to bursting with stormy scratchmarks giving way to boxes of blank, a few trails of steam or spray wisping across them before fading out. No baseline, no steady center, no familiar equilibrium to be safe in. Frame by frame, The Whale catapults itself from dark to light, from thick to thin, from full to empty.

Unlike the rest of the pencils-only garde, Koch seems less interested in markmaking than texture, less focused on the telegraphing power of single strokes and more on creating an immersive whole from groups of them. She has no "line" in the usual comics-language sense of the term, no iconographic way of trail-making that signifies the identity of the artist at work. Sometimes the strings of graphite waver, lightening as they go, wobbly things of great fragility that betray the human touch behind them. Other times they are deep and certain, laid down where they are with no doubt that this is the only place they could go. What emerges in line's place is texture, a deep sensuality that diffuses into every panel. Pencil grain, smudges, erasure marks, the dust that spreads itself like carpeting across the pages. Everything in every panel of The Whale, from salt seawater to slick windbreaker-fabric to hard shell, is marked out as really feeling how it feels -- but there's another texture to it also. Koch never lets us forget that her printed comics were sprung from a real substance, graphite dust on paper, and from one drawing to the next she controls the ebb and flow of that substance with a skill that borders on alchemy, peeling it back to a thin whisper before stretching it out from corner to corner with a thunderous roar.



The Whale, then, asks more of the reader than most comics: something of sequence is given up to the total power of single images, pictures that hit so hard and hold you in for so long that the between-panel connective tissue of comics wears paper thin in places. The relationships between these images don't always carry the continuous flow of film, nor the A to B thrust of traditional comics, nor even the slow progression of storybook illustration. The connections are whatever you make them. The pictures are pictures and they mean what you think they mean. Koch dictates the particulars of her narrative less with the content of her panel progressions and more with the all-encompassing tone set by the individual images. Though the story is never unclear or even muddy in the slightest, the significance of certain frames is not immediately apprehensible either. There are panels of tiny black-gray pencil dots that might be sand or rocks or mental fog. There are panels so taken up with darkness -- darkness alone -- that they lose all depictive meaning. They are only feeling, evocation, the power of seeing the work of human hands presented so undeniably and in such great measure. Plenty of the frames can read two ways: there is the surface of them, the abstract haze of substance on substance, gray on white, and then there is the depth, the fog-blanketed lines of perspective they shoot deep back into their compositions, pulling you down into the story, making you feel it.

It's a beautiful approach to comics, truly individual in the sense that it only works as well as it does because of the raw talent in the artist behind it. And it finds a perfect parallel in the book's story, which is equally raw and expressive. Just as most of The Whale's pages stop at one or two spare but deeply evocative panels, its plot is skeletal, a tracing of a very few events that carry immense feeling. The story of a nameless woman dealing with a loved one's death, it's light on words and even lighter on dialogue (five word balloons total). The narration moves us not through the pictures but into them, where the real meat of the content lies. Close-up after close-up of the book's protagonist bring us into her interior much more accurately than verbal explanations of her thoughts could. Her facial expressions and subtle body movements are a masterful performance of acting-in-pictures that forces a nearness into the story, the sense that all its disconnected panels are simply expressions of the alternating numbness and turmoil inside this one person. The way Koch uses lettering as a tonal element is also worth special mention: laid out in rows of large, delicate italicized capitals, it feels easily as much a drawn element as anything else in the book, and the expressiveness of its forms combines with gestures and glances to create a language all its own, a way of communicating that makes the meaning of the words themselves something luxurious, lovely but not strictly even necessary.

It's a story and a way of story-making that you focus on as a whole more than move through as a journey, and Koch uses that wavering stillness to create an unusual, deeply affecting narrative shape. Though there are still multiple scenes that proceed from beginnings to logical ends, The Whale basically discards forward story motion for a dive from surface to bottom into one thing, one stage of grief, one feeling. The disconnected panel sequencing is a large part of that -- we never feel much pull, only a thickening of what is already on the pages, a single idea being elaborated and elaborated upon until it forms one perfect crystal of a story. The book opens slowly, Koch's nameless woman walking along a wintry beach over stippled shells and erasure marks, reminiscing. Shots of beach detritus, a dead person's clothes. "There's not as much as I thought," the narration muses. The sequence is spare and quiet in the extreme, not even properly there as a story yet, but it works because it's so obviously a concerted exploration of that spareness, of how still things can be on the page and in life. It explores the farthest corners and peeks into the crevices, a dazzling array of different pencil tones exhibited from one panel to the next -- and what it finds is emptiness, absence. Rarely has a lack of something filled pages so convincingly. The book is almost halfway over before even the smallest shift clicks in and the woman asks herself "What do I do now?" Then it's off the beach and into the water, a rowboat towing her through the waves, the panels building up a tidelike rhythm -- and suddenly, with a jolt, the stillness stops.



If the book's first half is decompressed comics at their finest and most elegant, the second half is an equally astounding whirl of parallel stories, linked images, memories, and reverberating symbolism. Ghosts, suicide attempts, dead whales, car crashes, and dreams are chopped up into stunningly composed pages and pieced together into an exquisite corpse of indirect meaning that nevertheless hits right at the heart of the idea, the tone, the beyond-story something Koch is striving to portray. The uncomprehending desperation of a dying animal nails down part of it. The blaze of oncoming headlights another. The icy, titanic push of deep-sea waves a third. And so on. What that it is isn't really a word or even a concept, not something you can name. But it's something you can feel. And by the end of the book it's in every panel, every line, every word and every nerve. Everything has been saturated with it. As the woman walks down her frozen beach, away from us in her final panels, visible erasure finds its most hauntingly poetic use ever in the comics form as the narrative box containing the forward motion we've been waiting for, the thing we've seen so many times before in stories, is made something else. "Echoes in the empty space," it says in those fragile letters. Beneath those words, rubbed out so that it's almost invisible, is "I'm okay." Meaning on top of meaning. The reality that you can't say things like that for sure. And then the last page. "And then quiet." Closure is literally erased, hinted at but not truly there. As long as memory exists it can never be, after all. Like with a comic, we open things back up.

In a year of incredible comics, my favorite year in the medium since I've been reading the stuff, The Whale jumps out as my favorite not because of its incredible craft -- though it's beautifully made there are other books that also were, and beauty is cold and hard and not worth much alone. It's not because the story is so moving, either -- though Koch plays with the fire of highly manipulative plot elements and acquits herself with a seamless, haunting grace. It's not even because it has both those things, the cold of beauty and the warmth of feeling intertwined, the story-and-art that make the medium bent to each other in such a stunning display -- though that's why I think this book is important, something a lot of people will be moved by in a way comics haven't moved them before, something a lot more will learn from. No, for me it's because so much that was good and brilliant and inspired this year was so about itself, so inside comics.

The best of 2010 showcased influence and homage, the received wisdom of the medium's history reimagined and commented upon, satirized and vindicated, brought up again in new lights or brought back to where it started. And that's exciting and worthwhile and everything else comics can and should and have to be. But the real thing, the thrill, the joy, the thing that makes this medium so much more important to follow than any other right now, is that we have artists like Aidan Koch making books like The Whale, bringing comics onto the page not from other comics but from inside themselves. Trying, failing, succeeding all at once, making beauty and emotion and even more, making those things that aren't words or pictures but both and neither -- making comics -- and making them completely new. Reminding us that though we've seen so much here already it's still moving forward, and there's plenty still to come. And that matters at least as much to me as whatever that plenty actually turns out to be.

Odds are you won't be able to find a copy of The Whale in your local comics shop, but you can order it direct from the publisher here.

Your Monday Panel 42

Deadpool Max #3 (2010), page 15 panel 2. Kyle Baker.


Sometimes -- I'll be honest, most of the time -- in talking about comics art it's hard to see the forest for the trees. Given that in most comics the pictures only tell part of the story, leaving something or other up to the words, it's tough to make art-only analysis speak to content. Or at least to make it do so and still matter. There are plenty of words out there on why Jim Lee draws a badass Batman, after all. It's when you're digging deeper than the "cool picture" categorization that content begins to matter less and less, and craft to matter more and more. At a certain point, the conventional wisdom goes, it's not important what's in the picture but what makes it up, the lines and shapes and blacks themselves. Like most conventional wisdom, there's something to that. "Style" as it's popularly conceived, the mannerist tics or lack thereof in an individual artist's drawing, is often what marks the superior comics out from the rest. Put another way: the best stylists draw people and places, everyday things and things that will never exist, but because of the way they make their lines, their shapes, their blacks, you can always tell their art is their art no matter what the picture's showing you.

In most comics, analyzing craft isn't too hard. There are plenty of ways to make a panel, plenty of cartoon interpretations of the way things really look, but they almost all boil down to black ink over gray pencils on white paper, brushed or penned, maybe with a color process thrown on over, maybe not. It's a procedure that's produced a staggering amount of different results, an incredibly broad spectrum of beautiful art that only widens by the Wednesday. So it's really mostly about understanding brush grain and benday, shadowing and stipple, and how it all combines to work on the page. I'd put comics art's stylistic diversity up against that of any other medium in the world, but on the most basic level, that of the elements that form the physical substance itself, so much of it is all the same. And that's why living in the times we're living in is so exciting.

You might not notice it if you're content to stay nose-deep in the mainstream grind or pick up the latest hardcovers from the alt-comics bros every few months at Borders, but if you look around a little for the stuff, the medium is changing. I don't necessarily mean in the plots of the stories it tells or the content of the pictures it shows us or even the way it does what it does (though those things are happening too) -- I'm talking about that basic level, the physical substances that constitute a page of comics. Because it's not just ink on paper anymore. Pencil unadorned made up two of this year's most interesting comics. Paint is moving from the void of Alex Ross territory to a more expressive, Jerry Moriarty-ish place in the work of artists like Dash Shaw and CF. Frank Santoro has his glorious airbrush comics and Darwyn Cooke is doing galvanizing work with watercolors. But to me the most interesting of the new substances is the one that isn't a substance at all. 2010 could well go down in history as the year of computer-drawn comics' vindication. Essential artists from Frank Quitely to Michael DeForge are drawing on screens rather than paper, Frazer Irving's hard-light pixel sculptures reached a pinnacle on the pages of his Batman & Robin run, Brendan McCarthy returned to comics and proved in short order that digital psychedelia trumps the other kinds -- and we got Kyle Baker drawing Deadpool Max.

Baker's been playing with computers for longer than pretty much anybody else in genre comics, and while his work with digital media hasn't always been pretty, it's always been forward-looking. Unlike anything previous. Baker simply isn't interested in the computer as a time-saver or a homogenizer (which are the things the rest of the mainstream seems most eager to get out of it) -- instead he's spent more than a decade tinkering with ways to get expression from artifice, to turn the computer's flat and sterile way of image-making into a tool for expression, to get inside the binary code and start slinging it around in the wild, loosehanded way he's slung his ink for so long. It's been a long process, and fascinating to watch: really akin to seeing someone teaching themselves to draw all over again on the pages of published mainstream comics. And on Deadpool Max Baker has finally gotten there, to a virtuosic use of the computer as pure aesthetic tool that's rivaled only by Ben Jones and the Paper Rad crew. While so many artists create digital work that denies the computer's tendency toward creating total disorientation, Baker's work outright revels in it. Inconsistent backgrounds and immense detailing and flat color and overly simple modeled shapes, impediments to so many comics that have come before, are given enough room to be themselves in Deadpool Max that the figures and brushstrokes and rendering -- the elements of traditional comics art -- fall into harmony with them rather than edging them out. Baker is simply encompassing more on his pages than anyone else right now, and watching him synchronize a full range of LCD magic with good old-fashioned action comics drawing is a fascinating experience you just can't get anywhere else.

That said, the most viscerally exciting moments of the book so far have been the panels where Baker abandons traditional drawing entirely, leaving behind visible inkwork for pure-digital experiments that don't look much like anything comics have done before. Like most revolutionary comics art, these sequences don't always work perfectly. They are transcendent, and they can glow too brightly or blend together too well or simply derail the reading experience. When they work, though, they work like magic. The panel above is so iconographically simple that you can read through it in less than a second, but so visually arresting that it hits you with that killer Kirby pop as you go. It's so heavily detailed that the Marvel print process couldn't contain it -- check out how vicious the grain of the dot screens gets over it! -- but the detail is layered on a few strong, instantly recognizable elements that need no explanation. It adds nothing but depth, an extra pull into what's going on, exactly what detail should do in comics. The composition is familiar, a standard action shot that you can find in about every other war comic ever drawn, but put to Baker's bizarre, technofied stew of Fauvism and photorealism, it feels unprecedented, innovative. Like the fascinating Marvel-published superhero comic that contains it, it's a new look at something familiar.

What I like best about this panel isn't any of that, though. I love Baker's all-computer drawings because they take me out of the craft-scouring mode of the art analyst and put me back on the edge of my seat as an observer, a passive reciever even. There are no pen lines or brushstrokes or even pencil or airbrush or paint to this picture, nothing to signify the directions Baker's hands were moving in to make this panel or how fast they were going or with what force they pressed down. In a lot of ways it's completely divorced from "craft" as we know it, the imperfections of the human body at work cast aside in favor of flawless digital precision. I don't know whether Baker created the evocative shapes and gorgeous lighting of the treeline here or whether he copied and pasted them from the canvas of some Dutch master. But the thing is, it doesn't matter. By removing the elements of the handmade that dictate "style" in all the comics art of decades past, Baker makes us focus once more not on what the image is made up of, but on what it is. It's a parachute falling to ground, string-straight computer lines adding tension, red implosion punching out dynamism, tall thin canvas stretching out the moment. It's a sliver of time depicted not as it actually looks, but as it's intended to be felt, hot and plunging and desperate. It's beautifully made. Who cares how?

Then there's this.

Scanned from Daredevil #216, March 1985.

"Greenline"

New fiction! It's some drama-ed up reportage from the worst stops along the Los Angeles subway system, and I'm quite happy with it. Starts like this:

You take the green line of the Los Angeles subway system from LAX to Norwalk Station, where you will catch another train into another part of town. Reportedly the subway, called Metro, cost three million dollars per mile to build. If in many cities, older cities, the subway is akin to veins, here it is not that internal. Here in the capitol of the automobile it is more like a spiderweb spun across the city’s face while it was sleeping, left there without supervision. It is a place for the lower reaches of the working classes, construction workers, crackheads, women with infants and children, drunks, community college students, and people who like to think that riding it proves something. Read more

Comics Journal: 3

Shopping for comics in freezing temperatures with Tucker Stone of The Factual Opinion? Hellz yes. Why bother even coming to New York if that's not on the agenda? Here is what I bought:



A Corben Special (1984), by Richard Corben. Pacific Comics.

I've been looking for this one for a good while. It's an epic (28-page) color adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, kicked out for that lamest of the early "action alternative" publishers, Pacific, as its artist's glowing only-in-the-'70s Heavy Metal star was on the wane. In terms of story treatment, the flesh and bones of the way the panels are laid out and the drawings that go inside of them, this stuff is way straighter than the taffyish stretch of Corben's wildest HM-era fantasies. The pages proceed in tight, gridded units, occasionally unfurling into a short widescreen sequence or compacting for a burst of panel subdivision, but it's always subject to a trigger-finger control that never quite cracks. This is a different Corben than the man had been up to this point. The hazy chromium glow of his most heavily airbrushed work is faded here, locked in beneath thickly inked black shadows and dense clusters of fat hatchmarks. Really, it's an early workout for what would become Corben's current-day "Marvel style", grotesque, shadowed body-heavy cartooning crusted over with inkmarks that look like they could conceivably be the product of a stiff wire brush.

That's fitting, considering Corben would return to Poe adaptations on his inaugural Haunt of Horror series for Marvel in 2006. If that book captures Corben at the end of a journey, black and white linework and nothing more, this one is a beginning -- the airbushed color's role may be reduced from what it was in material like Den and Bloodstar, but those comics went crazier with it than just about anything before or since, and compared to just about anything else, this thing is far out there. Even through the most traditional of EC-derived blocking and stock horror compositions, a deep psychedelic weirdness shines through. A church's stained-glass windows cast blazing CMYK light patterns across its cobblestoned floor, the vivid 3D modeling on uninked figure drawings make it look at first glance like somebody dropped all their dolls on the pages, and the titular house floats on billows of pink and blue mashed-potato clouds, strangely angelic amidst the rest of the period grit and mildew. It's a strange thing, this, a strange story drawn by a strange artist in a strange section of his career. That strangeness is part of what makes it better than pretty much anything I could have picked out of the new-release at Jim Hanley's, but there's a massive level of pure craft being brought to bear here, an understanding of the way each element of a comics page works put together with elan by a guy who does them all better than most people ever figure out how to do just one.

5 is the Perfect Number (2003), by Igort. Drawn & Quarterly.

Of all the great early-2000s alt-comix that have just kinda dropped off the shleves in the past five years (BJ and da Dogs, where you at? no seriously, where you at?), this is probably the one I most sorely missed. I remember reading it from the library when I was thirteen and totally getting my cap peeled back by the virtuosic use of duotone color, the sprawling scope of the drawing, the utter fused continental/Eisnerian atmosphere racing through every line. The story was the bomb too as I recall, a disorienting Mafia-based mindfuck with a lot of dudes dying and getting beat down... I had totally forgotten how beautiful the pointillist way Igort draws blood spurting out of bullet wounds is. I haven't even started rereading it yet -- this book is a brick, winding and novelistic in a way precious few noiry action comics are -- but with a certain kind of comic there's a lot to be said for just flipping through and stopping on the images that pull at you for longer than the reading process ever allows. This stuff takes hours per panel to draw, and giving even a few of the frames even a fraction of that time back can be deeply rewarding.

Igort is a cartoonist who's worth the time, too. There's an obvious ligne claire influence on his stuff, and big hints of Jose Munoz and Massimo Mattioli too, but where it gets really interesting is just how much of American comics iconography he seems to have absorbed. The book's dedicated to George Herriman (along with Georges Simenon, bitchin'), but from the cover on it's far into Chester Gould iconographic silhouettes, with bold quotations out of everybody from Bernard Krigstein to Gary Panter to Ben Katchor backing it up. Igort is obviously big on influence -- visible influence -- but there's so much from so many different sources whirling across these pages that it all fades back into one thing, the totality of comics art that takes immediacy not as some random creative weather pattern but as the product of a definite, concerted craft. These panels manipulate you, yanking your eyes all over the place, but never off the lines you're meant to be following. It's a bravura performance in the design of comics, on par with and quite reminiscent of Darwyn Cooke's Parker stories. Think of a more sensuous, bizarre version of that and you've got the right idea. I'd say "now go get your copy," but you know. Keep an eye out, I guess.

Cold Heat #1-4 (2006-07), by Ben Jones and Frank Santoro. Picturebox.

The pitfalls of modern serial comics, man! I bought these guys with no small joy after two years spent wishing I'd copped them from the last comic store I worked at and thinking I'd never see them again. I get home to order the 5/6 issue, and lo and behold: it has gone from the internet, never again to be found, amen. Oh well, maybe in another two years. At any rate, these are comics worth having, two really interesting "big formidable art-comix" creators jumping straight into the pamphlet format with no apologies or preambles. Cold Heat is a fully focused attempt at pop comics storytelling by two guys who are good enough with the medium itself to get there even though plenty of component parts in both plot and visual style are coming from far more dangerous places. The pure visual appeal of the pink-and-blue coloring and linework got -- just sayin' -- mainstreamized by David Mazzucchelli in Asterios Polyp to great effect, but that comic didn't slap it on over ninja school courses, balls-out gridded overdose sequences, or weirdo alien/phantom abduction scenes. Cold Heat goes all the way in, reducing genre comics conventions to the purest emotions and artistic impetuses powering everything and letting the arty rawness seep in from those same undeniable power points. Figure drawing leads to action scenes, abstract feelings lead to romantic subplots, a desire for the new brings on the drugs and rock 'n' roll. There's a reason comics are the way they are. Jones and Santoro just mine the crude from the place it all starts in, reminding us.

The Complete Cheech Wizard #1 (1986), by Vaughn Bode. Rip Off Press.

I have no idea how this got into the stack of comics I bought today, cause I bought it three days ago at Desert Island. Since it was in the stack, though, I feel compelled to mention it. It's a compendium of Bode's stoneriffic '70s strips featuring the titular hat-with-some-legs attached adventurer. I have not read it yet, but I will say that it's kinda weird how Desert Island and Hanley's both had the exact same to Bode pamphlets, and only those two. This one and Junkwaffel #3. One copy each in both instances, I believe. They call it synchronicity. Now I'm looking inside the comics and the art, as expected, is pretty great. So I'm off to read it. Later.

Your Monday Panel 41

Wonder Woman: Bondage (2005) developmental drawing. Bill Sienkiewicz.



Bill Sienkiewicz is one of comics' hushed voices. This is a medium full of career trajectories that tell deeply interesting stories, narratives that jump out at you from the wikipedia issue bibliographies or random appearances in quarter-bin books' credits boxes. All too often these narratives hit high points before ending in heartbreak, whether in the pages of comics that don't deserve the talent working on them or in drawings like these, random scatterings from projects with promise that never were. In a lot of ways what this picture is shorthands pretty well for the whole Bill Sienkiewicz story, or at least the parts of it that happened in comics. The guy hit the medium like a freight train in the '80s, moving from a black rain of Neal Adams-influenced typical superhero issues to lysergic, genre-exploding action comics like the Frank Miller-written Elektra Assassin to formalist, early artcomix rage in his Alan Moore collaborations and creator-owned Stray Toasters series. Then came the dropoff, the quixotic Jimi Hendrix graphic novel and the return to work-for-hire mainstream comics that followed, now largely minus the paintbrushes and typesetting and photographic elements that made Sienkiewicz's work sing in tones the medium had never heard before.

What was left was the line, the brittle, scratchy, deep-black curlicuing stabs into the paper, the rigorously imperfect tracings of perfect shapes. It's I enjoy Sienkiewicz almost as much as an inker of rote modern-superhero nonsense as I do in his electric-murderer mid-'80s mode. There's a frenzied darkness to this line, an Adams slickness run through with Egon Schiele poetic roughness. They look like work, these inked spasms, like the hand behind them is attached to a body that has something it needs to get through. And seeing it blasted on over some hapless hero hack's pencils, seeing it corrode and destroy and elevate, is quite something. But it's even better when Sienkiewicz builds the pictures from the ground up, when that line is structured by the same acme that produces it, when it's allowed to pull the images from thin air. It lets the artist go much more minimal with certain aspects of the figure than in any of his inking work -- those blot-ridden, sculpted legs are a minor masterpiece -- showing us where tics like the deep-focus hatching on the arms and the spiraling spotted blacks in the hair fit into the totality of the Sienkiewicz method. There's a weightless quality to this picture despite the near-chaos of the hatching, a perfect welding of stylistic expression to underlying structure.

That underlying structure is one that can use some unpacking, though. Genre comics, whether at their cartooned boldest or decked out with photorealist gloss, almost always deal in certain iconographic shapes: the hard edge of a square jawline, the rippling bump of a bicep, the flowing lines of a windblown haircut. Or the curves and swells of the modern image of a flawless female body. A geometry so precise that examples of it don't exist in the real world, but one so powerful that the hands of countless figure artists have graphed it, shaped it, known it intimately. It's a symbol, a stamp, an icon, and like all icons there's only one correct way of it. Balance is key, and so is vision: exaggerate too far and the realism leaves it. Fail to exaggerate enough and the idealism vanishes, the thread of fantasy drops away. Those essential elements, exaggeration, realism, idealism, fantasy, are merely the intellectual aspects of the purpose served by their outward manifestations. The flawless blank sections of skin, the pillowy breasts and thrusting asses, all in concert, none taking precedence. The purpose is titillation. Sienkiewicz knows his way through this process as well as anyone, and he does the "pretty girl" flawlessly here, complete with high heels and taut, expressive body language.

It doesn't have to be a bad thing that so many comics come with some kind of sexual excitement as part of their intended effect. There's a deep vein running between lust and aesthetic appreciation, and great artists that hail from and work in every demographic imaginable have gone down to mine it. But our lusts, our erotic pressure points, are so private and so personal that the very comics-specific creation of a single iconographic avatar to produce a planned reaction in them is questionable to say the least. There's also a much more significant problem. While comics' other iconic shapes code for individual characters with their own attached ideas, your Charlie Browns and Popeyes and Batmen, this particular one stands in for the generality of "woman" in a good... I'm going to say 50 percent of the comics you'll find in any store or graphic novel section, but it's usually much higher than that. This picture's got Wonder Woman, and that character is certainly the one most people would say if shown the shape and asked to name it, but the reality is that it has no name. And that given the effect the shape is designed to produce, it needs no name. It needs, as above, not even a face. Idealization can be a powerful thing, an empowering thing even, but the idealized shape in this picture isn't meant in the same way as the layers of musculature added onto the radioactive nerds who so often become superheroes on the pages of that same 50 percent of the medium. When it is made faceless, nameless, a shape alone, it -- "woman" -- is made to be what it all too often is: a blank sexual object.

The thing about this drawing is that you can know that, you can have a problem with it, but you can't deny what the other object, the drawing itself, is. It's an item of incredible craft, to my eye one of great beauty. Sienkiewicz's evocation of the icon gets at so much that's missing from lesser artists' treatments of it. The mix of roughness and grace in the inking, the sumptuous palette of lineweights that shimmers across the familiar warps and wefts of the shape, the textured modeling that lends a jarringly tangible quality to the fantasy object. There's also the subject matter, which makes it perfectly clear that Sienkiewicz understands what he's creating and choosing to satirize it. But he's still doing the same thing that the thing he's satirizing does, walking the same unsteady ground. A picture of Wonder Woman in bondage is about as loaded as it gets in the world of comics symbols, and I can't say whether or not it's a bad thing to take part in it any more than Sienkiewicz can really be called on the carpet for making it. I can drink in the beauty of the loose ink lines around the legs or the perfect alchemy of black and white that forms the metal breastplate all I want, but there are subject-specific elements of craft that make this picture so great at what it does too. The locks of hair spilling loosely on the floor. The fragile tension of the pose. The flat line of body against hard surface, all the way down. Those are things I'm not so sure about admiring, not so sure about pulling the beauty from.

They are native to a culture by men for men, expressions of a helpless woman meant to trigger male sexual response. They belong to a medium in which prominent female critics have stalkers, in which "tentacle rape" is a concept thrown into a bestselling book as a knowing wink to a hundred thousand fans, in which big industry figures cast doubt on women's ability to effectively serve on a jury. It's not Bill Sienkiewicz or Wonder Woman or bondage shots that causes me consternation in this image, it's comics. It's a word in the language, a common one like hey or girl. It's often been a beautiful one, and it's used beautifully here. This article is not a call for its abolition or curtailment. As with absolutely everything, comics have room to encompass it. But given the way it hits the vast majority of the medium's readership, it's a word whose power we should probably give more thought to. I live in Hollywood and I see women every day who have gone beneath the knife to make themselves look like this drawing. Sometimes I even find them beautiful. But it's never the same, and I think this picture is a good example of art that, while lovely, should stay on the page.

Bulletproof thanks to Tucker Stone for suggesting this panel.