New Comics

1!



I dropped my latest short strip here. It's a full-color scifi thing about societal forms on the planet Neptune: essential reading no matter how you slice it. Give your parched eyes a treat and check it out.

2!



AFFECTED, my graphic novel in progress, just keeps steamrolling every other webcomic out there. It's up to page 20, which is where the "first issue" would have ended back when I was planning to do it as a series of zines. In addition to the creepy Los Angeles explorations, the deadpan knife's-edge monologues, and the rawdog sex scenes, I just threw in the first of many big plot twists. Ciffhanger! Come catch up if you haven't been reading along, because it'll really start exploding on Monday with the next update.

Bulletproof: The Kane & Hine Interview (on TCJ!)

I interviewed Shaky Kane and David Hine, the creators behind last year's glorious, mind-bending superhero romp The Bulletproof Coffin, over at The Comics Journal. Read it!



Quotes from Kane:

"I wouldn’t consider myself an intellectual by any stretch of the imagination!"

"Give me a call when the Fat Paycheck Movement gets rolling. That’s the one I’ve been waiting for!"

"Maybe Stan Lee would be up for getting shot."

"Comic book art. It always sounds like a put-down."

"Go look around some galleries, hey! But that’s too artsy for most comic book readers."

"Even the most delirious devotee would be hard pressed to keep up with all the multiple covers and crossovers on offer. And to top it off they all look so ugly."

"I don’t really know anything about American alternative comics."

"I didn’t physically print the comics, but then I’m fairly certain that Damien Hirst didn’t paste the diamonds onto that skull."

"There’s probably an Earth-2 Shaky Kane sitting back in the La-Z-Boy, right this very moment, feeling pretty smug about being the King of Comics!"

AND MORE

Quotes from Hine:

"My first punk clothing was a jacket with added bullet holes and blood."

"I’ve been feeling shackled by the medium instead of set free by it. "

"I get bored to death by badly conceived, poorly executed comics that lay claim to some kind of artistic credibility through willful obscurity. (I don’t mind willful obscurity if it’s shit-hot though.)"

"Basically our heads are totally and permanently fucked up."

"I fucking hate comics that are movie pitches. It’s nothing to do with the death of the superhero. It’s the death of the cheap throwaway comics that you roll up and stick in your back pocket or pile up under your bed and come back to and re-read over and over because you love them in a way that you cannot love any other medium."

"San Diego Comic-Con is a feeding frenzy for other media, while the comics themselves are almost ghettoized."

"It’s hard to keep your integrity when it’s so easy to compromise to make a living."

"If some Hollywood producer comes to us and offers us big bucks we’ll sell out as fast as anyone."

AND MORE

Read the whole thing!

Your Wednesday Sequence 8

Little Nemo in Slumberland, February 2nd 1908. Winsor McCay.



It's another installment of my Robot 6 column, this time on a page that's at the very least got a case as Winsor McCay's most famous piece of comics. Lest you look on me as an analyzer of the over-analyzed, I also brought the little-seen animated version of this sequence into the conversation, centering the article around the formal differences between comics and animation, which are more subtle and interesting than it seems at first consideration. As far as I know, this McCay page has the closest proximity to the animation based on it of any comic that's been adapted to the screen -- being able to see McCay's treatment of not only the same scene but the same motions and figural distortions is completely and utterly fascinating. So soak the page in, watch the movie, and then head on over here and read what I had to say about them. Starts like this:

Comics and animation have an interesting relationship. Both can be broadly designated “pictures that move”, both have the same typical end goal of visual storytelling, and both rely on frame after frame of closely considered progression to push themselves forward. Someone smart (I can’t remember who right now, apologies) once said that animation is comics at 24 frames a second, which is basically true, especially when the physical medium — film strips — that animation resides on is considered. A stretch of animation celluloid is a comic, maybe a weird, incredibly slow-moving one, but a comic nonetheless. A litany of great comics artists, from Alex Toth and Jack Kirby to Matt Groening and Ben Jones, have done serious time in animation. The skill set isn’t the exact same thing by any means, but there’s plenty that translates. Read more

Infantino's Flash

A Leisurely Liveblog

As readers of my comics know, Carmine Infantino is one of my favorite comics artists, as well as a big influence on my own comics work. I also think he's a distressingly under-recognized presence in comics history, someone whose importance to mainstream/action comics is almost up there with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, and at the very least equals that of more talked about artists like Steranko, Gil Kane, or Neal Adams. Infantino is probably the representative artist of a lost chapter of comics history, the bland and traumatized years from 1955 to 1962 or thereabouts. Infantino did his best work during the time when the Kefauver hearings and subsequent dismantling of EC Comics had clear-cut the art form of anything that wasn't good vs. evil action comics, teen laff books, or funny animals, and the Kirby-Ditko axis had yet to lead superhero comics into the Marvel Age renaissance. The undergrounds were at best a nagging idea in the back of Gilbert Shelton and R. Crumb's adolescent brains. It was one of the few eras in comics history when a craftsman, rather than a visionary, could produce work with a legitimate claim to being the most interesting stuff out there.

Infantino's early 1950s work runs a distinct second-best to the ECs, and once the Marvel artists get going in the mid '60s it pales in comparison again. But in that underfed middle stretch, he was the best of a bad lot. That might be a dubious claim to comics greatness, but Infantino's comics are great on their own merits, no doubt about it. It's just a quieter greatness than that of Kirby or Wally Wood or Harvey Kurtzman, an uninterrupted grace and clarity of vision that elevates workaday comics into isolated moments of sublimity. The other artist who worked in this unobtrusive mode during the same period was Alex Toth, the "artist's artist" of comics, whose mastery of craft surpassed even Infantino's. As a maker of pure comics art, Toth has the better case as the midcentury lull's leading light. But the stories he drew were simply the same old thing done up to perfection, juvenile war or romance stories reframed for the trillionth time, definitive readings of material that really didn't deserve them. Infantino, however, worked in superheroes during the ten-plus years or so when that idiom possessed the real energy and excitement in comics, when their shared universes were expanding by the page and nothing was solid yet, when formal possibilities were being torn into more than explored, when a generation of artists who could have made truly great work were pressed into the service of a few million child readers, and vented their frustrations by producing some of the greatest fantasy stories of the 20th century.

Infantino's work has that energy to it, the feeling that no one had ever drawn these things before. His long run on the Flash kicked off the superhero revival of the '50s and '60s, its first few years laying the path from the crude, hyperbolic Golden Age superhero comics of the WWII era to the relatively subtle, nuanced material that is the best of '60s Marvel. He is how superheroes got from there to here, from their generally recognized Point A to their Point B. His historical value is undeniable. Those Flash comics, while they never quite transcend their genre like Fletcher Hanks' wild early superhero death-fests or Kirby at his biblical best, are still something quite wonderful: superhero comics being the best they can be without becoming anything else. They aren't modern myths or outsider art, they're only entertaining stories of men in colorful costumes struggling for power or money or justice. But with the formal skill, the sheer wealth of drawing talent, and the lively tone Infantino brought to these stories, that feels like more than enough.

These Flash comics are some of my favorites of all time, maybe even the ones I come back to most often. That said, they're singularly difficult to make a critical case for as stories -- simplistic, nonsensical kid stuff that hardly display any consciousness that they could be anything but what they are, let alone make the attempt. Their charm is in their whimsical daffiness, a tone that it seems has been irretrievably lost to comics despite its long and storied history as a part of the medium. Infantino's Flash feels like a final progression from the dreamlike, logic-light great early newspaper strips, where the drawings dictated the plots and color and form took precedence over sensicality and impact. These stories (collected in the generally excellent Flash Chronicles paperbacks) are strung along by Infantino's gentle virtuosity, subtle acts of inspired picture-making that always serve the strange, childlike narratives but carry a surprising power when they're considered as art for art's sake. That isn't how you're supposed to read these comics, and that's why they'll never be held in the esteem that the best of Kirby or Winsor McCay is -- but the drawings are there, the power is there, and digging it out is one of the purer joys reading comics can offer.

What follows is a gallery of some of my favorite Infantino Flash panels and sequences, presented with a little commentary to keep things interesting. I'll keep updating this part with more excerpts every once in a while over the next few days, so check back often!



This sequence comes just when police scientist Barry Allen is realizing he's been imbued with the superspeed powers of the Flash. I always thought the fact that the character percieved time as moving really slowly was may more interesting than the fact that he could run real fast. Infantino didn't get as much artistic mileage out of that slowed-down perception of time as he did out of pure speed lines, which he is basically the king of for ever, but he did some cool figure animation stuff with it, not to mention more interesting gestural motion-tracking like the bottom three panels. It's that top panel that really jumps out, though. The surrealistic, Magrittesque composition is unforgettable, but as notable is Infantino taking the opportunity to use the panel as a frozen moment, an actual frozen moment in time. Of course, given that no printed comics panel can actually move that's technically what they all are, but action comics are so invested in moving readers from panel to panel that you see a frame with no motion even being suggested, everything completely still in the middle of what it's doing. This panel does that, and then the speedy bit of animation underneath it just blasts out at you, selling the Flash's uncanny speed perfectly.



Here's another interesting, unconventional approach to depicting speed and motion. There's speed lines to it, sure, but that doesn't go too far with such a tiny figure. What really gets the picture working is the dizzying vertical orientation of Infantino's cityscape, like a hive of needles stabbing at the sky, everything in it leading from up to down in the exact same direction as the Flash. With such an abstracted figure the eye is pulled into that little cluster of architectural drawings, but it finds no relief there; everything in it is designed to hurl you downward at breakneck speed. Note also the curved corners at the bottom of the panel (in contrast to the top), which create a bullet shape, suggesting that the frame's being pushed downward by the force of the Flash's movement. It's all topped off with a wonderfully explanatory courtesy of writer Robert Kanigher, a superspeed exclamation that puts across a concept no drawing could. Infantino's picture, rather than trying to depict what's in the words, creates a perfect compliment to it.



A lot of good things happening on this page. Infantino's landscapes always really call to me -- he grounded his action not in the grimy cityscapes of the Marvel artists, nor the clean, pop-art suburbs and main drives of DC stalwarts like Curt Swan and Dick Sprang. With Infantino a sprawling metropolis is always in view, a collection of black rectangles dotting the horizon, but the arena for the story happenings is more often some lush, green fantasy space, a park or stretch of unincorporated land on the outskirts of the city. It's an ideal environment for action stories: an open space for figures to move dynamically through, but one where the instant recognizability of city skylines still holds sway. The first and last panels here are prime examples of the typical Infantino setting.

That second panel is one of the quietly brilliant moments I was talking about. Infantino didn't drop his backgrounds a whole lot; even in the most kinetic fight scenes there's always the token gesture of a horizon line or the wall of a building at the edge of the panel. Here, though, we move from present tense into a flashback, so Infantino dislocates us from the established "present" setting before showing us the past. Back in 1956 it was a given that a panel like this would be colored with a flat, bright single-tone background, something that would jar sufficiently to wrench the reader out of the flow they're accustomed to. The Flash Chronicles reprint uses a deep scarlet, which clashes perfectly with the villain's green and purple suit. It's a pregnant moment that gets you subliminally excited to read what comes next.

Finally, I always find that fifth panel really interesting. The villain's being rocketed to the past for his crimes by the future society he lives in -- but as a simple depiction of crime and punishment, this sequence has a lot in common visually with an electric-chair execution. The villain sits helpless in the vehicle of his doom, and then suddenly he's wrenched and illuminated as a surge of energy courses through him. The ECs, last year's back issues at this point, had given the world more than one stellar electric-chair scene; I always wonder if Infantino had gotten hot to do one himself and this was his way of sneaking his version past the new Comics Code.



Infantino was a solid figure artist who ignored the rules of anatomy as often as any other pre-Image superhero draftsman you care to name. Especially in his action scenes, if the immediate hit of the panel's content worked right, he rarely did much to create a believable sense of the characters' physicality. It's a comic book -- the stuff doesn't have to be "real", it just has to "read". Here, the Flash turns tiny for a second to dive through those heat rings, and then his legs and lower torso disappear as he tackles the scarecrow-limbed villain in the next panel. It's all so easy to comprehend, though, that it isn't immediately noticeable. You just go through it quickly, with no artistic showboating to slow you down. It's a solid, interesting approach to making scenes that are supposed to be happening at superspeed, one that would be unlikely to work in a lot of other contexts but succeeds quite nicely here.



Another ingenious way of depicting superspeed. As we're told, the Flash is moving so fast here he's fading out of sight, which sounds awesome but isn't much to look at. Infantino hits the final moment of the Flash's visibility with a profusion of speed lines, but puts across the sense of unhinged motion with the posture of the figures in the foreground. Those loose-limbed, expressive poses get transposed onto the whole panel, and we get the sense that the Flash is barreling along wildly without actually seeing it.



This kind of atmospheric treatment of city-as-character, weather patterns-as-plotline is lifted pretty much directly from Will Eisner's Spirit playbook, but Infantino's crisp, relatively uninflected style (especially as inked by frequent collaborator Frank Giacoia) gives it a pretty different overall effect. Eisner's expressive, fluid forms anthropomorphized everything he drew, from guns to trees to buildings; but when Infantino drew a city it was a city, pure and simple. The sense here is of massive forces interacting, not humanized edifices engaged in a plot. It's remote, stoic in its beauty. It's also a surprisingly quiet, deep note for an action story to hit -- nothing kinetic or splashy here, just a slow cresting. Lovely.



God, I really can't get enough of this guy's city drawings. It's interesting to note how far from the literal Infantino gets in his depiction of the Flash's madcap search through his urban environment -- this is simply not a picture of a man running along the ground. Speed lines are imposed over buildings, the path of movement flickers in and out of perspective, and it's punctuated by a gargantuan figure hurtling through the rooftops. But as always with Infantino, it reads, an illustration that puts off an immediate impression, carries plenty of craft value for closer study... and then falls apart logically the second you consider it.




This sequence is just a phenomenal bit of moment-to-moment action comics storytelling. Look at how Infantino's framing of it captures the most tense, dynamic view into the action possible again and again, from one panel to the next. The fluidity of the Flash's body language as he edges out onto the tightrope up against the rigid implacability of the city below him, soft lines versus hard, curvy versus straight. It gets at the fundamental, nail-biting quality of seeing a tightrope walk (even in drawn, ink-on-paper form): not just man versus nature in the traditional sense, but man versus a natural law that by all odds should win out. That bit of solid black space at the edge of the panel to pull the eye into the next ones is an especially nice little touch. Then it's the swinging-camera zoom in as the tightrope breaks, complimented by some body language that recalls nothing more than Steve Ditko's acrobatic Spider-Man figures (look at the hands!). Then the Flash runs up the tightrope, with Infantino showing the burst of movement that begins the action, then freezing it midstream with a photographic-negative style silhouetted panel. It's another still moment captured and taken out of time, any sense of movement or liveliness in the villain's figure or the buildings denied by Infantino's filling them in with blacks -- but the Flash is going too fast to be caught by the "shutter" of Infantino's drawing, and even his silhouette is bursting with speed lines. It's a simple, highly intelligent way of indicating speed that goes far beyond the normal range.



I include that top panel just because I want to talk about the bottom one. These two come at the bottom right of their page, the last two panels you read. Like I said before, Infantino hardly ever dropped his backgrounds, and when he did, it was always for dramatic effect. Here's a good example of that effect -- one hundred percent of the reader's focus is drawn to the facial expressions over that transition, which are quite honestly stunning. Barry Allen (the Flash)'s face is a great bit of realist cartooning, the ultimate visualization of "bafflement" without becoming at all grotesque or un-anatomic; and his reporter girlfriend Iris West's face is a mask of expectation, mysterious and rapturous. The lines radiating from the pupils of her eyes! It's almost a transcendent moment, one in which the feeling put off by the panel not only outstrips the story content it has a basis in, but doesn't even mirror it very much. These are the faces of people about to receive final enlightenment, not solve a Scooby-Doo style mystery. Infantino's organization of the figures within the panel is really quite unconventional, cutting off half of Iris's face, sunceremoniously shoving the reader's eye to the veriest bottom right corner of the page, rudely forcing us to get to the next page quickly. It's a manipulative way of getting the reader excited to see what comes next -- usually when we hit a page transition that urgent it's because the stort is really cooking, but here Infantino does it all with composition, which is bound to produce some of the same feelings in the reader regardless of their engagement with the story. Now that's what you call serving your script. Also: Iris is totally earning her "bitchiest superhero girlfriend" crown in that top panel, jeez.

more later

Your Wednesday Sequence 7

"Pop!" one-page strip in Solo #12 (2006). Brendan McCarthy.



I reviewed this gorgeous Brendan McCarthy one-pager in the latest installment of my Robot 6 column. The cool thing about looking at a one-page story is that you get to talk about an entire work while you talk formalism. So I wrote an extra-length thing to try and cover both the review and analysis angles. And this is my favorite McCarthy story, so I tried to give it a good once-over. The only thing I forgot to mention is how neatly McCarthy uses the center of the page, placing that "Pop!" logo right in the middle of it to transition the reader's eye from the first to second image and then from the second to the third. So elegant. Anyway, I said a lot more over there, so go read! Starts like this:

At times the things that can be achieved by comics’ usual mode of sequencing — strings of single panels after single panels — can seem almost limitless. Looking at it from the inside out, as a comics-literate reader who can see the vast differences in approach to sequence that distinguish a Ware from a Kirby from an Eisner, it’s easy to get lost in just how diverse the pages can get. But take a step back and look at comics as one visual medium among many, a vehicle for creating information to be absorbed through the eyes, and the methods of sequencing used by its artists begin to look surprisingly limited.

Think about it — or better yet, get out a bunch of your comics, all genres, all drawing styles, as diverse and differentiated a selection as you can find, and give them all a flip-though. While comics have no shortage of different colors on their pages and different methods of mark-making swimming through their panels, a ridiculously large majority of them stick to that one typical mode of sequencing — boxed panels following boxed panels, groups of them fit more or less perfectly together like puzzle pieces, jammed snugly into the rectangle of the page. The grid, as wonderful and variable a sequencing tool as it is, possesses a downright tyrannical stranglehold on the comics form. Read more

Plastic Reprints

Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched To Their Limits! (2001), by Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd. Chronicle Books.



The best thing about the Golden Age of Reprints that comics have undergone over the past decade-and-counting is obviously the fact that we've got our history back. For the first time ever, understanding comics via the library of its truly great works rather than a few random snippets pulled from newsstands and back-issue bins is not only possible but downright easy. I think that's something a lot of people who are concerning themselves with comics' future right now overlook: the young kids coming up aren't just part of the translated-manga generation, they're also the first wave of new readers who could pull Frank King and Osamu Tezuka books off the library shelves as a little side dish to their Naruto. A significant awareness of comics history has become possible to achieve without even looking for it. A browse around a well-curated comic shop doesn't just mean they've got Kirby and the Hernandez brothers anymore, it means a casual interaction with a century of aesthetic evolution, comparable perhaps to the way that randomly running through Netflix for something good to watch can give one a startlingly clear portrait of the different phases of world cinema.

So that's cool. I mean, that's fucking amazing. But another invaluable element of the reprint boom has been that it's allowed a whole new kind of comics to exist. I definitely couldn't have gotten the comics education I have without the Golden Age, but even I, a tender lad of 20, think I was just a little too old to really catch the wave perfectly. Not everything of interest was available to me as I got interested in it over the course of the 2000s. What did you do when you got hot to read Prince Valiant or Dick Tracy in 2005? You had to go to the old-school reprints, which at best were unromantic, plainly wrapped tomes that presented the work in low-budget printing on poorly designed pages; and at worst were hideous abominations, recolored, re-sequenced, incomplete, seemingly put together by astigmatics with paste jars for hands. The idea of making a "beautiful book" simply wasn't a consideration when it came to reprinting comics until the turn of the millennium or thereabouts.

It's almost an embarrassing luxury that we can enjoy the complete run of Krazy Kat as designed by Chris Ware, or see Winsor McCay's finest pages at their gargantuan original size. But the presentational/curatorial aspects of reprinting really get important when they're employed not on classic works that are now simply being treated with the respect they deserve, but on the personal obsessions of the books' compilers. Things like the obscure Canadian gag cartoonist Doug Wright being given the best monograph a comics artist's ever gotten courtesy of Seth and Brad MacKay, or Chip Kidd using his obsessive collector's mindset to shine a spotlight on Jiro Kuwata's Batman manga, or Dan Nadel rendering a coherent prehistory for the PictureBox aesthetic, are touchstones for where comics are now just as much as the Complete Peanuts or Fourth World Omnibus books. They share shelf space, after all.



Of all the personally motivated, devotional reprint books released over the past decade, I think the one that blurs the boundaries between curation and actual art most severely and interestingly is the Art Spiegelman/Chip Kidd team-up on Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched To Their Limits. I think a solid argument could be made that the best biographer/book designer teams have done as much for comics in the 2000s as the best writer/artist combos (Chris Ware and Jeet Heer or Morrison and Quitely is a choice I'm not sure I could make, to be quite honest), and Spiegelman and Kidd, both incredible artists as well as top-rank comics ephemeralists, have enough design sense between them to put a book of reprinted panels up there with the very best original-material comics. The book in question is a somewhat loose, ragged collection of parts more than a sleek and coherent whole. It reprints a lengthy Spiegelman essay on Plastic Man creator Jack Cole's tragic life and comic art (both senses of the word) from The New Yorker; it functions as a Plastic Man-focused Kidd design monograph in the Batman Collected mode; and it presents a handful of full-length Cole stories in their glorious, smeary original newsprint form. The book is very much a look at the art of all three men: though Cole is the star of the show, neither Spiegelman nor Kidd do much at all to hide their hand in making him look so good.

That can be a problematic approach in the wrong hands: when reprints designed to showcase the work of an artist become more about who's doing the showcasing than the work itself, the exercise can begin to feel a little pointless. The saving grace of the Plastic Man book is that both Spiegelman and Kidd are as worthy of the consumer's consideration as Cole himself is, and speaking in comics-historical terms, may both end up being more important. Furthermore, Cole's cartoony, kool-aid-surrealist aesthetic is the directing force behind every page of the the book. Kidd chops and resequences Cole's pages and panels like a pointillist mixmaster, but such was the non sequitur quality of Cole's best Plastic Man work that Kidd's barrages of disconnected images, blown up and shrunken down and barely even chronological, make at least as much visual/cognitive sense as reading the full stories. The artist's early gag cartoons barrel into a vivid gallery of seemingly random Plastic Man excerpts; his later work on lurid crime comics blurs into his final years as the first of the classic Playboy illustrators. If the reader wants to catch their breath, they'd better put the book down, because everything about Kidd's presentation pushes forward at increasingly dangerous speeds. There's always a discomfort that comes with seeing the work of a long-dead artist reinterpreted and given a new and modern logic by eager admirers, but just as Chris Ware on the Walt & Skeezix reprints is by far the most talented "art assistant" that Frank King ever had, so too is Kidd a far better "editor" of Cole's work than any of the profit-oriented shop bosses the artist labored under in his funnybook-making years.



Kidd's dream-logic, scissor-happy organization of the mass of illustrations that run alongside Spiegelman's text is more than just gorgeous design, more even than a perfect evocation of its subject's aesthetic. Once Cole's macabre, almost completely unexplained death at his own hands has been detailed (complete with a scan of the suicide note he sent to his boss, Hugh Hefner), and Spiegelman's incisive yet expansive narrative has wound to its conclusion, Kidd takes a blistering solo on the book's last few pages, which are subtitled "A Portfolio of Polymorphously Perverse Plasticity". On these pages the narrative threads holding together the images' sequencing disappears completely, as does the necessity for any of the historian's fidelity to the original artwork. Kidd cuts loose in page after page of harsh-noise collaging, layering details of glamor-girl watercolors on top of digitally distended Plastic Man panels, slapping bits of newspaper obituary, bombastic Golden Age comic book lettering, and suicide note over it all with an unhinged vigor that borders on ferocity. It's a man's career transmuted into a pure Dadaist image-assault, and if such a treatment would be all wrong for a book about pretty much any other cartoonist (Cole's contemporary Will Eisner, say, or his spiritual predecessor Lyonel Feininger), it's a perfect final representation for the irrepressibly bizarre but commercially restricted Cole.

But no matter its charm, it would be a travesty if Kidd's cut-up eulogizing were the only view into Cole's art afforded to readers. So many books on comics artists present panels, production art, single pages in such volume that they never get around to showing the reason why their subjects really mattered: the comics themselves. Here, though, the three full-length Plastic Man stories, epic crime comic, and smattering of short strips reprinted provide a fascinating look at the real thing. Page after page of Cole's cleanly inked, kinetically cartooned, utterly bizarre stories testify to the accuracy of Kidd's design scheme: Cole was on some weird shit, and no denying it. The first story conjures up a genuine pathos with its detailing of an orphan's tragic life, but it's built up into something much more interesting by the deeply strange, out of nowhere plot elements the whole thing hangs itself on. The villain runs his nefarious schemes from a boat perfectly camouflaged to look like the water around it. The orphan's father abused him not with the standard beatings, but with a handy hive full of bees. Plastic Man forces an apprehended gangster to suckle at a gas-pump's nozzle. None of this is rendered with anything but the broadest comedic touch, the smiling wink of farce. Combined with the heartfelt tale of the orphan boy's plight, the story reaches an unstable, immensely enjoyable place between: neither joking nor serious, not earnest or sarcastic. An honest depiction of something very, very bizarre.



The other two Plastic Man stories go even further into the void, eschewing some of the deep emotion of the first story for broad, manic cartoon dynamism. Cole's art reaches an almost impossibly hallucinatory peak in "Plague of Plastic People", in which every citizen of an entire city is given Plastic Man's stretchy, transfigurative powers. With the necessity for drawing accurate human figures erased, Cole goes hog wild, tossing out panel after panel of tire-shaped children, tangling intertwined lovers, Pinocchio-nosed housewives, and random rubbery limbs filling the sky with an origin at points unseen. It's utter chaos, but a chaos so self-consistent and amusingly drawn that is feels not only safe, but inviting. Cole had an unmatched genius for creating strangeness, but just as important was his ability to make everything seem fun and light in the classic superhero tradition. In any other artist's hands, these Plastic Man stories would be mind-bruisingly alien, terrifying vistas of senselessness. Cole makes them so entertaining and funny that even the weirdest shapes assumed and blackest punishments meted out by Plastic Man carry a genuine warmth, an intangible but certain sense of benevolence.



That warmth is what makes the final Cole comic reprinted, a ghastly sex-drugs-'n'-murder crime story (later ballyhooed into a national menace by Fredric Wertham) so shocking. The same formal breathlessness and illogical rush is there, but instead of leading to laugh after bewildered laugh, it sucks the reader into an inescapable downward spiral, the cliche "life of crime" rendered with such vividity and attention to detail that it practically sweats off the pages. The inclusion of the story alongside the lighter Plastic Man material is an elegant statement-in-comics of the path Spiegelman's narrative skillfully traverses. The biography of Cole is streamlined and effective, never getting bogged down in minutiae but providing enough context to describe a highly dramatic arc and make readers feel that something wasn't quite right with Cole long before the revelation of his suicide. It's richly anecdotal, occasionally downright broad writing, well suited to its subject, actually earning the often overused superlative "tragicomic".

Where Spiegelman gets expansive is where it counts, in his criticism of Cole's comics work. Spiegelman digs deep into what makes Cole's pages read as crackerjack action comics amid all the zaniness without ever losing sight of his uninitiated New Yorker/Chronicle Books audience or failing to draw a broader conclusion about Cole's life or overall aesthetic from the particulars of a single sequence. To the wider public, Spiegelman will always be one thing above all: Maus, the comic you can find on your aunt and uncle's bookshelf. But inside the world of the medium, his status as a connoisseur of comics (as exercised in his editing/compiling of Raw and Arcade, not to mention his world-beating Comics Journal and Comic Art Magazine interviews and parodic takes on everything from Dick Tracy to comics focused high-low art shows) may actually beat out even Maus in terms of influence. Spiegelman the comics enthusiast is the one we get here, in fine form. He diagrams the narrative flow of single pages, delivers hits of solid panel-by-panel analysis, draws comparisons between Cole and everyone from Eisner to Gil Kane to Jack Kirby, solidly placing him in the context of a larger tradition, and waxes theoretic about comics' disappearing "near monopoly on primal visual fantasy" and Cole's understanding "that in comics anything one could dream one could draw". It's impossible to come out of it without a renewed appreciation of the unique power of comics -- for a new reader drawn in by Spiegelman's name (or their New Yorker subscription) I could see it being downright revelatory. As a comics critic, Spiegelman's sharper than just about anyone else, and the extended passages of a master of the medium engaged in deep, focused long-form criticism of another master's work are just about unprecedented.



More than just a reprint book, Forms Stretched To Their Limits is a display, a guided tour of its subject's art and the influence that work had on its better-known compilers' own work. It's not a formula that's easy to replicate: put simply, most reprint makers aren't as interesting or talented as either Spielgelman or Kidd, and the personal, art-from-art approach only works if the new art is as good as the old and the persons referring to themselves have interesting things to say. Beside that, though, most work by comics' great artists, no matter the genre or cartooning idiom, carries an element of purity, a spark that can be all too easily destroyed by presenting anything but what was originally intended. But like his rubbery hero, Cole's work is more malleable, adaptable to new forms, almost inviting to the new-millennium meddlers cutting through it with designer's scissors and biographical glare. Cole's work is effectively formless, in the end, its every square inch charged with the same level of ersatz impact, indilutible. It's a unique, fascinating quality, one that can only be brought out by changing it, by putting it to unintended uses, by doing to it what would ruin most other great comics. As a collaboration between biographer, designer, and original artist, this book is unmatched. As a comics reprint it has peers, but it's unique and brilliant enough to have no clear betters.

Your Wednesday Sequence 6

Kramers Ergot 6 (2006), page 35 panels 1-4. Marc Smeets.



Here's the latest installment of my Robot 6 column. This time I talked about an absolutely gorgeous page from the sketchbook of the massively underrated (and under-read) Dutch cartoonist Marc Smeets. Smeets is a really interesting artist for a lot of reasons -- his cartooning skill is pretty much unimpeachable and he has a real propensity for truly bizarre visual ideas that are still compelling, which is a lot rarer than it might sound. But what I focused in on is the way Smeets' work present a completely non-linear comics experience, one in which the sequencing of images next to one another on a page is about the only thing that makes the random, scattershot processions of disconnected words and images "comics" at all. Smeets really works on the outer limits. It's a way of comics very much worth talking about, and it also gives me a chance to present my side of the somewhat contentious discussion that erupted in the comments section of last week's Hal Foster analysis. So go read it. It's real good. Starts like this:

Sequence is vast. As I’ve said here a few times before, it’s what’s makes comics comics. If it’s got images placed in sequence on the page or on the screen and it wants to call itself comics, then I for one fail to see grounds for rejecting it as such. That’s not to say that all comics are equal — though sequence is what creates visual art as comics, the skill of its use is a major part of what creates good or bad ones. But the idea that certain kinds of sequencing are more appropriate to comics, or even work better in comics than others is simply a fallacy. The old chestnut “it’s the singer, not the song” applies here. A method of sequencing’s effectiveness is directly proportionate to the skill of the artist using it. Read more

AFFECTED

I've been working on a graphic novel for the past month and a half or so, and after a few misfires trying make serializing it as a series of color zines work financially, I've decided it's going to be a webcomic instead. The website for it is here.



What's been posted so far is the first eight pages of what is looking like a 100-150 page story. AFFECTED is a long hard look at the Iraq War, modern alienation, the decline of American standards of living, and the truly monstrous sexual culture of Los Angeles. It's action comics, it's romance comics, it's art comics, it's sex comics, it's fiction, it's nonfiction. So far, I think it's the best thing I've ever done.



I've got about thirty pages finished at this point, and like I said so far I've posted the first eight. It starts a little slow but heats up pretty quickly after this. I'm going to try for regular updates on Mondays and Thursdays. The first few will be longer, multiple-page installments, and then it'll probably smooth out to two or three new pages a week as I eat up the surplus I've stockpiled. The first update is tomorrow at noon P.S.T., so check back then. For now, go here, and I hope you enjoy your first look at AFFECTED.

Comix Surgery: Morrison's Closeted Batman

Batman #655-658 (2006), by Andy Kubert and Grant Morrison. DC.

Anyone out there remember these? Grant Morrison's epic-length stewardship of the Batman franchise is more or less neatly divisible into three phases, roughly equal in length if not in page count. The first phase is Morrison finding his take on the character, writing 15 or so stylistically bold single issues that don't add up to much together. Phase two is the magnum opus, the frenetic slow burn that wound through the Batman book and the Final Crisis crossover with a crescendo in the Frank Quitely-drawn launch of the new Batman & Robin series. Phase three has been a protracted nadir, the slow flaming out of the writer who was once the most solid reason to keep an eye on mainstream comics followed by the even slower realization that there's not going to be a second act, that Morrison has pulled off the "best writer in comics" act for longer than anyone else in the medium's history and the comics that are coming out these days are him cashing in a well-earned public rest on his laurels (not to mention his built-in 50K audience).

That little narrative of Morrison's tenure on the book makes the early phase one issues by far the most interesting to me. The meaty issues at the middle of the run are great, but they're another great long-form arc in a career full of them, a little better than JLA and not quite as good as X-Men. And given that nothing Morrison's done with Batman is a masterpiece on the level of Flex Mentallo or The Filth, the real place to get something unique out of his work on the series is at the beginning, which just might be the best example we've got of Morrison doing the superhero-hack thing in his typically grand style. Pretty much all of the writer's caped-adventure comics issues have been mere stitches in a larger tapestry, single installments of some grand multi-part whole. That's even true for these early Batman issues -- but given that this particular tapestry keeps stretching on and on with absolutely no end in sight and no meaningful end within reach, it's less compelling to read them as the opening of another Morrison epic, moreso to look at them as the work of the writer with the craziest ideas stretching out on the Batman warhorse for a little bit before bearing down and getting all self-referential with it like usual.

The issues from 655 to 669 or thereabouts are great entertainment, the creations of a Morrison with much more important things (All Star Superman) on his plate, clobbering readers in the face with goofiness and bombast and bombastic goofiness, glorying in the fact that nobody can pull off that particular combination better. These were the issues that came before Morrison had decided that Batman was going to be his serious comic, when he was just having fun with what's probably comics' most iconic world. The thing about Batman is, though, that it's the superhero whose dominant tone and portrayal relies most on being serious and not being fun. Because when you don't treat Batman seriously, you can slip quite easily into some highly subversive caricature that's downright dangerous for the folks holding the purse strings at corporate headquarters. But Grant Morrison is Grant Morrison, and what he was able to put on the page in his unserious, silly first year with the Caped Crusader still defies belief. Why? Because it goes right into the age-old, obligatory laff at the Batman concept with a vigor no one before or since has dared. In other words, it's really really gay.

I don't pretend to be an expert on queer literary theory, but I've got enough to know that one of its significant elements pre-1960 or so (and perhaps its dominant element pre-1920 or so) is coding, a process by which gay characters and relationships are presented either silently, without being overtly painted as such, or stealthily, under cover of gender changes or mysteriously absent or deceased opposite-sex love interests. You didn't think Dorian Gray actually likes girls, did you? You didn't think Blanche DuBois actually is a girl, did you? Coding can also occur when gay sentiments or acts are presented in the context of a larger hetero plot structure that explains them away. It's anything from an unmarried character being described as "a queer fellow" to Walt Whitman following up his virtuosic, homoerotic "Calamus sequence" in Leaves of Grass with a few clumsy, uninspired verses on male-female coupling. Coding was a necessary form of self-censorship for most of literary history, but it can be tough to pick your way through as a critic in these somewhat more enlightened, open times. It's often necessary to go at old works by gay authors with a directness bordering on the illogical, ignoring plot points intended to indicate that all is in perfectly hetero working order in favor of isolated events and snatches that depict a moment of two of homosexuality before being inevitably "corrected".

It's a tough critical faculty to develop, this willful discarding of broad mechanics and story logic for the quick beats that hold the real significance. Being an occasional critic of superhero comics helps, though, because that's what you have to do to get any aesthetic value out of the damn things: ignore the ridiculous, farcical plot beats in favor of a really killer panel here or a slick bit of sequencing there. The meaning of the pages doesn't matter; what's actually on them does, just like it does when you're dissecting coded gay lit. And the thing about coding is that once you've learned to pick it out, the same little "tells" can be found in books that aren't gay, or at least not known to be. Such is the case with the first arc of Morrison's Batman, which packs a ridiculous amount of barely-concealed homoeroticism into a perfectly straightforward story about Batman bringing a new boy home to the secret cave he shares with Robin. Yes, I'm perfectly aware that the new boy is a) his son and b) the product of a passionate hetero hookup. But I'm also aware that c) the female end of said sexual union is the daughter of archvillain Ra's Al Ghul, who was out of play for DC writers at the time after being apparently killed in the Greg Rucka/Klaus Janson miniseries Batman: Death and the Maidens. And none of those three backstory items affect the immediate impression left by the boundary-pushing tidbits that follow, presented with minimal commentary.



- #655, page 13 panel 1: Robin, the character whose very existence makes the Batman concept more explicitly queer than that of just about any other superhero, makes his entrance into Morrison's run by sliding down a phallic Batpole. The '60s Batman TV show's beloved mode of mansion-to-cave transportation only makes this single appearance in the entirety of Morrison's run if I'm not mistaken -- one has to question why it's used here of all places, in the same panel as the teen ward's opening line, which can be read as a statement of what's on his mind just as easily as a greeting. "Guys."



- #655, page 14 panels 3-5: Robin's exit comes hot on the heels of his entrance (he'll be back), and in similarly flamboyant fashion. Zipping on a jacket strikingly reminiscent of Jake Gyllenhall's in the then-recent Brokeback Mountain, the Boy Wonder announces that he's so excited about, yep, going up into the mountains for a little while! Alfred the butler reminds him about the necessity of removing his mask to pass for a member of the "normal" populace outside the cave, and Robin quickly complies with an Andy Kubert-drawn pout of the lips and dainty hand gesture.



- #655, page 21 panels 6-9: Alfred ties Bruce Wayne/Batman's bowtie for him while teasing him about his reputation as a studly, eligible bachelor. An insanely girlish pose accompanies Bruce's declaration that Alfred "has crossed the red line with him." Ahem. The butler growls "Playboy!" before running through how to come off as the owner of that ladies'-man reputation one more time.



- #656, page 12 panel 5: Issue #656 is taken up mainly with a long fight scene in an art gallery that's showing a Roy Lichtenstein-esque pop art exhibit. One might think that Kubert would go off the hook copying his favorite vintage panels of DC-owned characters in a sequence like this -- but the only one that appears is HG Peter's rendering of William Marston's Wonder Woman, she of the highly camp, almost explicitly queer early issues, a gay icon almost from the day the first installment hit the stands.



- #657, page 9 panels 1-2: Robin comes back from his weekend in the mountains only to find that Batman has brought another young boy (his bratty son, Damian) home to the cave with him. His immediate question: "What about us?" It's a completely naturalistic bit of dialogue that takes it for granted that these characters have a much deeper relationship than crimefighting partners. Fans of the comic will no doubt think "of course, Batman's Robin's father figure" -- and that's what you're supposed to think -- but how many Hollywood movies drop that line between soon and father, and how many between lover and lover? Especially given the queer context Morrison's set up, it reads that way far more immediately to me.



- #657, page 11 panels 4-6: Look at that top panel and don't infer any depth. Wow. Of all the compositions Kubert could have used to depict this moment, he chose this one.



- #657, page 15: Yes folks, "sparring" is "fucking" in hipster slang, and has been for a good few years now. That's historically been an area of linguistics Grant Morrison's liked to keep up with, is all I'm saying.



- #658, page 10 panels 1-2: So after no end of troublemaking, Damian fianlly gets to tag along on a mission as a substitute for Robin, who's out for the count after too much sparring. Batman inducts him into the crimefighting fraternity by taking him for a ride on his rocket. "I have a lot of stuff nobody knows about," Batman tells Damian over his shoulder. Clearly.

I have no idea whether any or all of this is the product of either Morrison or Kubert's (or both's) intention or not. If so, it's a pretty fascinating subversion of a comic that's carried plenty of potential queer themes for decades now, but hasn't ever really seen creators working on it who are willing to exploit them. I'm certain some people will object to my readings of these panels as too overt, too campy -- and yes, they are ridiculously campy, no doubt about it. But camp has been an integral part of gay art and literature for decades now, and Batman himself, in his pop-art 1960s, has done his time as a legitimate camp icon. If all this imagery and innuendo is completely unintentional, then at the very least it shows up the Batman tropes and concept as being more susceptible to accidental homoeroticism than I'd imagine anyone previously suspected. Once again, I'm not claiming the "Batman & Son" story is a full-on gay text -- constructing an actual queer narrative for it is a bridge too far. But its parallels with coded gay lit are rather striking. At times it really appears to be performing homosexuality within the confines of a typical heterosexually-tinged superhero narrative, and I wouldn't be at all surprised that Morrison, before getting serious about making his Batman comics, decided he'd play around with the old joke about Batman and his Boy Wonders a little bit. Maybe he even asked Kubert in on the fun. Who knows? I don't, but I think these are moments worth considering from that angle.

"Haunted Bike"

A proper scroller format piece. Read it at Matt Seneca Comix!

HarmoniComix

Sans Genre VII

I just did a writeup of this two-panel Hal Foster sequence. Go read it if you want, then come back.



There are a few ideas in there about color and music that I wanted to explore further. First, there's this. Paraphrased:

I like to think of panel sequencing in comics as having more to do with music than the literary or the visual arts. It’s easy enough to see layout as rhythm, with each panel break a beat and each tier of panels a measure. But something that gets a lot less consideration than rhythm (even though it’s at least as important) is harmony in comics, the interactions of each panel with the last and the next. Beat, by comparison, is easy. Anybody can keep steady time by clapping their hands, just as anyone can take a ruler and draw a panel grid. But it takes a real skill and inspiration to compose within that rhythm, to drop notes or panels that create something greater than the sum of the parts when they sit next to one another. To create harmony.

Even when the notion of reading this sequence is put aside for appreciation of it as pure visual, as two pictures placed next to one another, their interplay is wonderfully harmonic. Foster creates a smooth interplay between the images by placing their horizon lines on a nearly exact level with one another. The base background color — a mild sea-green — is also the same from one panel to the next, like a single tone underpinning the gorgeous contrast between the interval of blue to orange in the sky.

The basic point of the article is to say that one of the most beautiful things a comics artist can do (as well as one of his or her most difficult tasks) is to create images that not only make story sense in sequence, but that actually mesh well as pictures, that look pleasant and create a pleasant effect when considered together. Drawing one good panel after another is like playing an instrument and hitting completely random chords with beautiful intonation: it's admirable, but something is still missing. The problem of inter-panel harmony is something I've been thinking a lot about lately, prompted by moving all my comics to a scroller site and working long hours on another project in the same format. In printed comics, the page is the unit. It's how the reader first perceives each section of the comic they look at, and most pages are drawn with that in mind. From Winsor McCay to Jim Steranko to JH Williams on down, great comics artists who work with print as the end goal of their art have created pages that work together as single compositions, the panels within them referring back to or forming a fractional part of the whole.

With the coming wave of webcomics, though, everything's different. When I was making pages that were only designed to be uploaded to this site, looking like this where the reader sees the total page before reading anything, inter-panel harmony didn't matter as much as the overall composition of the page to me. What hits first typically hits hardest, after all. But with the new wave of webcomics, the idea of the "page" is becoming more an more irrelevant -- what matters is the scroll, and how it shows the comics to readers. The unit is the computer screen, which is horizontally oriented, like a tier of panels, not a full page of them. Foster's sequence above would fill a browser window perfectly. The harmony created between images, rather than by pages drawn on full sheets of paper, may be in the process of becoming more important than ever before.

So how do you create harmony between two images? It's easy enough to do with line and form -- symmetrical or similar shapes will do the trick pretty well. Notice, for example, how the Foster sequence is oriented on a perfect diagonal -- the ships' masts and riggings direct they eye along a line perfectly parallel to that formed by the king's arm and the break between the end of the first caption box and the beginning of the second. Below is a more explicit example of harmonious shape in comics, from CF's Powr Mastrs 3. They aren't constant from panel to panel -- that's a drone, the accretion of one element. Rather, they complement each other, like say, a four-note lick in a guitar solo does.



Where it gets a lot trickier is creating harmony with color, as Foster does so brilliantly in his sequence. It has a basis in the shapes of his forms -- the horizon line of both panels is almost exactly the same, which allows them a wonderful ease of interaction -- but the inspiration that powers the sky's transition from blue to orange above the constant green sea, that's poetic. A deviation from realism that makes the sequence just sing out. How do you get that? What should an artist have in mind to construct those kind of color intervals, that kind of harmony? It would be folly to reach for one definitive answer, but here's what I came up with.



We're going to be returning to this image a lot, so you should probably open a new tab on it. As most readers have probably not heard, I spend a good chunk of my non-comics time making music. I've also got synesthesia, which is a weird thing where sense impressions cause your brain to produce other, unrelated sense impressions. There are all different kinds based on which senses trigger which other ones -- I don't know what my kind is called, but I have different colors assigned to letters and numbers in my head and, relevant to the topic at hand, see colors when I hear music. Because of this, it's really easy for me to conceptualize color as music. It's made even easier by the fact that the western musical scale is based around seven root notes, A to G, and the color wheel is typically drawn as being based around six or seven dominant colors, the three primaries and the three secondaries. (The seventh color is usually "indigo", which is halfway between blue and purple. But given that comics weren't able to print either indigo or purple satisfactorily for most of their history, and that I don't really think indigo and blue create very different impressions on the page, I've subbed in pink as the seventh color -- because it's used more often, because it has more of an impact, and because I think its effect is usually pretty distinct from that of red or purple.) Now this is where we get into musical theory just a little bit, but if you don't know anything about the subject, it's all good. Here is an easy to use online keyboard with the notes clearly marked so you can "play along" with what I'm talking about.

I've assigned a musical note to each of the colors on the color wheel above. This is somewhat random, based on the peculiarities of what each tone makes me "see" and the color each letter "is" to me, but I think it works pretty logically. A, the "first" note, is red, the boldest and strongest of the colors. E, the note/chord that more guitar oriented songs are rooted in than any other, is blue, the most commonly occurring color in nature and hence the "root" color for the greatest amount of comics scenes. That makes C the third primary color, yellow. All together they form a basic piano chord shape, as well as the most basic expression of the full color spectrum. Move the chord up by removing the low A and playing a high G, and you have the another basic chord (the beginning of the C scale, which is typically the first thing piano players learn), and the basic range of the spectrum once again. The last thing I want to do is to suggest that these particular color-note combinations are set in stone, or even "better" than any other ones people could come up with. This works for me, but I suspect everyone might have a slightly different version of the color scale that works better for them. The main thing is to relate color to sound, to ground color theory in the solid basis of musical intervals, where it's quite easy to construct strategies based on how one wants an overall piece to "sound" or affect the reader.

Everything else I'm going to talk about is written on the color wheel image, but I thought I'd explain it a little further. There are all different ways to construct pleasing color combinations in comics. But musical theory provides a useful way into the at times overwhelming world of color, a few basic rules to use as a springboard into more advanced experimentation.



Blue to pink is E to G. That's a legendary interval in rock and roll especially. I feel like this quote's been attributed to a million different people, but I remember it coming from Pete Doherty: "All you need to play rock music is E to G and a cool haircut." (That's Pete Doherty the Libertines guitarist, though there also just happens to be a comics colorist by the same name. Shivers up and down my spine, people.) E to G is "I Wanna Be Your Dog", it's "Whole Lotta Love", it's every dumb, shuddering, indelible riff you've ever heard. Comics wise, blue to pink is first and foremost Frank Santoro's Cold Heat (above), which is like the most rock and roll comic ever created. Musically, the E to G interval is a third. Other thirds are A to C (red to yellow) and D to F (green to purple). There's a dynamic range in all of these color combinations -- they aren't harsh or overpowering, one color tempers the other -- but together they still create a single atmosphere, a logical progression rather than a striking juxtaposition.

For that, we have to go to fourths. Guitars are tuned in intervals of fourths, but this is also a pretty common dramatic interval in symphonic music. It's a little dissonant, but has a strange harmony to it as well. Foster's blue and orange skies aren't strictly a fourth because it goes E to B rather than the other way around -- but it creates the impression of one since the eye goes right to that flat orange and the blue in the first panel is covered up by words. It's a smoky, portentious color interval that ratchets up the moment into something grand and meaningful. And while we're speaking of dissonance, the color wheel I drew doesn't incorporate sharps or flats. These are the "in-between" notes, the black keys on the piano. So that's in-between colors like turquoise, vermilion, chartreuse, indigo. When you use all those together they harmonize with one another just like red and yellow and blue, but add in the "major" note of a primary color and you have a dissonance, two colors too close together to create a pleasing contrast but too far apart to blend into one another. Gary Panter uses these a lot in his work, as does Jon Vermilyea. Visual dissonance is a noise-comics thing, just like tonal dissonance is a noise music thing.



One-color comics (such as Darwyn Cooke's Parker, above) are like drones. The color is a single, steady tone for the sound of the piece, the blacks and whites, to come to the fore and be defined against. In the one-color context especially (though I think this generally holds true for full-color comics as well), the black and white linework is like recording quality. The "messier" it gets, the more black on the page, the grimier and lower-fidelity the sound. Lots of black is like a punk record, while lots of open white (or color-only) space is like clean recording, a Beatles album maybe. When Cooke floods a panel with blackness, it's like hitting the distortion all of a sudden: impact, instant grit.

The final interval that I see used a lot in comics is the fifth, which means red and blue a good ninety percent of the time, just as the blues scales that employ fifths quite often have A to E as a significant part of their makeup. Like blues, fifths don't really have too much dynamic range -- transpose the "key" and you get weird combinations like green to red or pink to green -- but the groove of red to blue is pretty much unbeatable as far as carrying longer sequences goes.



I'm not sure how much use anyone can really get out of these scattered notes, or how much the harmonies color makes me feel will be relatable for anyone else. If anything, though, I'd hope that the musical analogy is something that gets transposed to comics with more frequency. The constant comparisons of the medium to literature and visual art, while wonderful, hold it back. Comics can engage with anything, and color especially is the kind of pure, content-free appeal to the senses that artistic use of sound also creates. It would be nice to hear a good color passage described as Wagnerian or Beatlesque rather than pop-art or Deco every once in a while, and nicer still if comics colorists began directly addressing musical ideas in their work. The above are only my rules, my ways of making the analogy make sense. I'd hope that everyone will write their own. Brendan McCarthy, one of the most interesting colorists working in the medium (above), has stated that the digital in comics color works like the electronic in music, and while I think that analysis has a lot to recommend it what really excites me is the fact that he's reaching beyond traditional parameters for his inspiration. More people should be doing that.

Monochrome McCay

Little Nemo In Slumberland from April 23rd-July 23rd, 1911. Winsor McCay.



For all that Winsor McCay's Little Nemo is one of the most influential and talked about comics in history, it's got plenty of relatively unexplored pockets. Nemo had a long run -- a broadsheet every Sunday for a solid decade between 1905 and 1914, and then a revival from 1924 to 1927 -- but the first four years or so of that run are so ridiculously front-loaded with brilliance that it's easy to simply overlook everything else in the effort to mine everything from the richest seams. And while the Nemo of the 1910s and'20s isn't as visually mighty or formally dazzling as the earlier material, it's still one of comics' all-time greatest artists plying his trade in high style.

Despite his gargantuan influence, McCay is kind of an anomalous artist in comics history. His work displays much more interest in architecture than the human figure, his stories (such as they are) are light as taffy and rarely make sense, let alone mean anything, and his most famous work is years on end of a little boy's bemused wanderings through a gallery of fantastic, strangely immaterial visions. Hardly Kirby's Fantastic Four or Spiegelman's Maus, you know? The closest comparison to the kind of comic Little Nemo is is probably George Herriman's Krazy Kat, which places a similar premium on atmosphere over comprehensibility and features a constantly mutating, logic-free setting. But Krazy Kat is legitimate literature, poetry in comics form, and Little Nemo, content-wise, is a curio at best. What makes McCay so important is his devastatingly gorgeous visual style, a sumptuously detailed, strikingly composed, formally audacious mix of Art Nouveau whimsy, unparalleled technical drawing chops, and a rough but highly effective feel for pure cartooning.



But with McCay the fact that the stuff looks good is just as important (if not more so) than the reasons why. A century and change after Little Nemo first rolled off the presses, the comics medium has produced very little indeed that can lay claim to the same immediate visual appeal shimmering across McCay's pages. It's an appeal that hits before story comprehension, before the eye can even register the page as being composed of separate panels -- hits as pure, beautiful image. And that appeal is all down to the colors.

Despite the advances computers have brought to comics production methods over the past decade or two, nothing digital has yet caught up to the subtlety and harmony and range of expression captured in the colors of early newspaper comics. And for all his skill as a mark maker and a designer, McCay's greatest talent may have been using his era's marvelous palette with greater verve and appeal than just about anyone else. McCay's black and white drawings speak boldly; his color work sings, walking the comics medium's fine line between depictive realism and stylized fantasy without ever really putting a foot wrong. McCay's color panels are swollen with soft, brilliant light, the full spectrum of hue represented in shades that never fail to complement one another. McCay is certainly one of comics' greatest artists, but he is no less one of our greatest colorists. And that's why the Little Nemo of mid-1911 is so interesting.



At the time the strips in question -- fifteen of them, total -- were published, McCay was transitioning. For those fifteen weeks, McCay was drawing not one, but two Little Nemo strips for publication every Sunday: one of them for the New York Herald Co., which had published Little Nemo from its beginning six years previous, and one for William Randolph Hearst's American-Examiner syndicate, which had just acquired McCay's services and would retain them for many years to come. The strips show their artist's strain and lack of time in different ways. The early Hearst strips are simply weak, with uninteresting compositions and sloppy (though still incredibly fine) drawing blanketed in bold, utilitarian-but-effective color compositions. The drawing on the final Herald strips is a bit better, though it too tapers off toward the end -- but McCay, the unparalleled colorist, apparently couldn't find the time to color them. The result wasn't pure black and white, but a hasty two-color rendering of the strips, with raw black line work suffused here and there in variations of a single pastel tone. It's hardly the highly saturated, pre-psychedelic look McCay was and is known for, but the strength of his drafting and the placement of the single tones gives the one-color strips a stark, bold appeal whose distance from the typical Little Nemo material is interesting to contemplate.

Visually, at least, McCay's work has aged extraordinarily well when considered up against virtually every other comic strip of its time, and though the man's prodigious imagination deserves a good amount of credit for that, it's mostly -- again -- due to the effortless virtuosity of his color. Most Little Nemo strips certainly look different than the printed material of today, but they don't really look old. The same can't really be said of the one-color Nemo pages, in which the high-contrast, deep-focus immediacy of the color pages fades into the black and white of yesteryear, the tints of cerulean or goldenrod lending them more of a nostalgic, turn-of-the-century-ad-art look than any extra realism. The sudden lack of pictorial believability is especially notable in the first few strips, which finish out the airship-journey plot McCay had been working on since the beginning of the year. Looking down from the zeppelin's observation deck at the same stunning architectural vistas Nemo's dreams have showed us for more than five years, something is obviously missing. The opulent visions of Edwardian-era urban America that looks like a pure, magical fantasyland beneath McCay's full-color treatments suddenly resembles a vintage postcard more than anything else, black shadows and white light and orange-sepia in-betweens. It's still beautiful to look at, but the transcendent radiance, the harmony that glows beyond the panel borders is gone.



I suspect the first two monochrome strips, which wrap up the aerial adventure plot, were intended for full color. The drawing is much finer, the staging more seeping and dramatic. They're also the final strips to use the classic Little Nemo title script. Finally, after them McCay seems to have really hit crunch time and gotten down to the business of making gorgeous hackwork. The third of the one-color strips unceremoniously dispenses with the zeppelin setting, as Nemo goes to sleep and falls into a dream-within-a-dream, only to be quickly snatched up by the Greek god Mercury, who takes him on a quick tour of the outer cosmos. The choice of setting is telling: space is about the easiest background to draw, and the strip must have come like clockwork to McCay after years on end of thick jungle and meticulous cityscaping. The layout pares down to a simple twelve-panel grid, which it would more or less stick to until the end of the Herald run. The story ends with the page, and the next week a new, completely unrelated one begins.



In essence, McCay's lack of drawing time was forcing him into the pattern of his era's more typical newspaper cartoonists; for a few weeks he produced corner-cutting work on schedule, relying on closing punchlines over engrossing story material and graphic boldness over top quality draftsmanship. McCay's lasting appeal lies in the bulk of his work's transcendence of those commercially-mandated norms, but it's fun to watch him put the hack hat on for a brief run of pages. McCay's work is so joyously maximalist that there's no small amount of interest to be gotten from observing the final Herald Little Nemo strips go further and further into minimalism. Backgrounds flatten out from wide open panoramas into the flat surfaces of building walls and billboards, then go even further into abstract patterns of line that we're given to understand are rocky cliffsides or city sidewalks. McCay's love of figure animation sustains a few strips, then fades into more typical comic-booky cutting between panels, the characters taking up greater and greater amounts of space with their forms.



McCay was obviously getting away with something in his last few Herald strips. The relatively low amount of effort put into them is obvious, and their slapdash, almost improvisational quality could not be more different from the painstakingly constructed feel of classic Nemo. It's a testament to McCay's consummate skill as a maker of visual stories that the strips still succeed roundly as gorgeous, eminently readable comics. Though the visual impact of the one-color strips is much more noticeable than the drawings in the panels, the penwork remains of an almost peerless quality, the cragginess that McCay's line sometimes flirted with in nature or urban decay scenes coming to the fore, making up for a good deal of the color's lost tangibility. And the one-color treatments themselves still showcase a masterfully subtle touch at work, halftones and quarter tones emphasizing the spaces of pure color's segues into the white areas. There is a certain quality to McCay's best Nemo work that isn't quite apparent until one has seen these strips: that of a quiet, desolate loneliness. Little Nemo's world is that of a dream, after all, and apart from the characters and objects that are direct parts of the action, it is always a frozen, static world, the backgrounds existing only as visual information, never influencing the stories one way or another. It's easy to miss when those backgrounds are massive banks of buildings or sprawling crowds of courtiers, but when they narrow down to a few string-thin lines they almost hum with a melancholy radiance. These are still beautiful comics, but their beauty is about as far from that of the better-known Little Nemo material as can be.