Another Wednesday, another sequence column. This time I went in on one of my favorite pages by Steve Bissette, the vastly underappreciated main artist on Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run. Bissette is a guy like Carmine Infantino or Garrett Price who I wonder how he's just a cult favorite and not a full-blown canonical figure. There was a whole wave of guys in the '80s who sort of wiggled right in there between the Apollonian psychedelia of the European Heavy Metal artists and the darker, nastier psych stuff of underground comics makers like Greg Irons or Rory Hayes. Bissette belongs to the same moment in comics history that produced Gary Panter, and while his work isn't as earth-shattering, it should still be talked about a lot more frequently than it is. Look at that page! Like I said in the column, this is the missing link between Jack Kirby and Jim Steranko's experiments in superhero psychedelia and photo-manipulation and today's Nazi Knife garde of noise-image comics artists. It's right in the gap between the Kirbyist story-serving photo-splashes and total abstraction, too -- still putting definite information across, but not really moving with any action or depicting the forward progress of anything. It's like a poem in comics, a perfect space between word and image where neither are really beholden to anything but being themselves and engaging the senses.
Speaking of the words, I didn't put this in the column since I don't think CBR needs any more Alan Moore bashing after this colossally idiotic Jason Aaron column (until he makes an actual good comic, then fuck that dude for real), but I feel like Bissette is the thing that makes a lot of those Moore Swamp Thing issues work at all. I mean they're amazing comics, but until he did Promethea Moore's verbosity never caught up with him as bad as it does on pages like this one. What kind of girl refers to her ass as her "flanks" during a sex-monologue, yo? Or ever. I talked a lot in the column about how Bissette goes "off the grid" with a lot of his Swamp Thing pages, just swirling a bunch of really high-impact images into each other and letting the captions wash over them, always pulling your eye back to the art not by plopping down another panel in the sequence, but with the (always warranted) detail and unconventional directionality of his pictures. Moore's captions don't seem over-written in the Chris Claremont way they would if Bissette composed normal gridded pages with images that tie directly into the imagery of Moore's writing. Instead they just seem like a verbal counterpoint to the focus and depth of Bissette's pictures, almost like they've been initiated by the imagery instead of the other way around. It might be Moore's best ever collaboration, and that's really saying something when the dude has worked with Dave Gibbons and Eddie Campbell and Curt Swan.
Another thing I wanted to mention but didn't since this is a SEQUENCE column and not a fine-arts visual one -- good lord, but Tatjana Wood could color a page. That blue-green-orange-yellow four-color process looks so much bolder and fresher than any more expressive full-color palette possibly could. Like a silkscreen poster or something. Look at that blue and yellow dot pattern over Bissette's black dots in the bottom center. We're in like, East Totem West territory here.
Less rambling, more clinical analysis! Go here and read the full article!
8 comments:
I dig your review; just want to add that to me, it's the absolutely incredible inking by John Totelben that really made this comic run so beautiful...his work is so essential and deserves at least a mention here...Thanks!
I think you just gave it one! Word up, Totleben's inks are pretty great. I didn't mention them just cause it's Bissette who did the sequencing, and that's what the column's ostensibly about.....
Thanks for linking up the article. I feel the same way you do. For all Moore's supposed strength as a writer, I read a lot of Swamp Thing the same way I read a lot of other comics: I mentally edit out all the narration boxes and take the story from what I see in the art.
This reading technique improves a lot of comics immensely.
"Actual good comic?!?" I'll take Scalped over just about anything.
not me
that you, Chris? batman inc, lookin' hot!
Yup. Me is he. Thanks!
You're right on a few counts: Yes, Bissette is criminally underrated and yes, I respected Jason Aaron UNTIL that Alan Moore rant which was ridiculous and yes, Moore's superlative, flowery language acts as a companion to Bissette's artful layouts and sequencing, instead of acting as a hinderance. Even brilliant writers click more completely with some artists than with others. I do have to say, however, that the Moore/JH Williams III pairing of PROMETHEA is not to be underrated. That was an instance where a script was so boundless in its imagination (some would call unwieldy) that it wouldn't have worked with an artist who scaled everything back and approached the page with a tighter, blockier, more personal grid. I think both JH Williams III and Alan Moore knocked it out of the park with PROMETHEA. It might still be my favorite fantasy comic of all time.
And whenever I hear the word "flanks" used for "ass" I remember James Joyce's love letters. Have you ever read them? They were so unpleasant in their adoration of butt that they will sear trauma into your brain for life.
Moore and Williams on Promethea -- something I can appreciate but am not really touched by. It's an amazing comic, but wasn't my cup of tea last time I read it. Though just thinking about it now I get visions of what a crazy, near-underground comix style psychedelic odyssey it was and now I want to reread it so there ya go.
Joyce's love letters, yah I've seen a few. dude had game but you sort of have to when you look like that, ha ha
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