Dark Knight Art

This week I've been rereading Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns. Ooh, bold choice, I know right? It's definitely one of the most over talked about comics there is -- not that it isn't worthy of a ton of praise, but if the comic can't get up and turn on the air conditioning while I'm reading it, there's just no way it deserves that much. That being said, I think Dark Knight is fairly under talked about in one respect. It's the same problem I have with the critical reactions that the book's opposite number Watchmen has gotten: I've seen a million evaluations of what Miller did with the (shudder) superhero archetype or the (bigger shudder, sarcastic voice) "Batman mythos", and plenty more about the book's capturing the anxieties of the Reagan-era zeitgeist. But it's a comic book, guys. You know what comic books have? Drawings. And despite the fact that Dark Knight is full to the utter bursting point with great ones, people persist in ignoring them in favor of a story that for all its strength has become the single most played out in comics.

Dark Knight's got so many ideas about form and its use for effect on every page that to go through and pick out all the instances of innovation or virtuosity would be at least a couple days solid of blogging. Seriously -- this is a weird criterion for quality, but as a cartoonist when you bang out a really killer page or sequence you tend to laugh diabolically to yourself when you look at it, and there's something on almost every page of Dark Knight, especially at the beginning, where I thought to myself "he must have been laughing his ass off when he finished drawing that". Instead of highlighting every single one, I thought I'd try and boil it down to a few general truisms about the unique visual language employed by Miller, inker Klaus Janson, and colorist Lynn Varley to make their book such a success. Here are a couple notes on why Dark Knight is so wonderful to look at.

(Real fast first, though, there's one thing I just have to say about the book's story content: nobody's ever going to accuse Frank Miller of being a subtle writer, but for all his bombast he presents a much more convincing picture of a superhero in the (then-) modern media landscape than Alan Moore was able to in Watchmen. Miller spends a massive amount of page space detailing the minutiae of a media firestorm with alternately hilarious and chilling caricatures of TV news and talk shows -- Moore shows some newspapers blowing down the street. Newspapers, yo? Did those things ever actually exist? And while Miller's script is bound and determined to examine the social consequences of masked vigilantism in the urban environment on both a macro and micro level, Moore pretty much dodges the issue, setting his big super-action blowup at the South Pole, where there isn't any society for it to directly affect. The fact that Miller is able to pull off the much more difficult feat of dealing with superheroes as they are and America as it is gives Dark Knight an extra layer of interest that isn't present in Watchmen. Anyway.)



Miller Mk. I. The big Frank Miller work that preceded Dark Knight was Ronin, Miller's trans-national trip through influence. That book crossed the Will Eisner/Gil Kane/Jim Steranko style Miller perfected in his long run on Daredevil with the inflections of European cartoonists like Moebius and Jacques Tardi, and manga artists like Katsuhiro Otomo and Goseki Kojima. The "fusion" style seen in Ronin is a fresh enough blend to basically count as its own unique way of making comics (and it certainly was at the time). But in Dark Knight Miller finally transcends influence. He'd learned all the lessons he was going to from the masters of American genre comics -- hence Ronin's internationalism -- and mixed in the snap of action manga pacing, the remote views and detail-for effect of Heavy Metal-era Eurocomics.

Check out the cityscape panel above, which I'm 99 percent sure is self-inked: nobody else in comics but Frank Miller has drawn like that, before or since. There's the thick ink lines on the gargoyle at left and the heat waves going across the page, and then the blaring din of thinner ones in the background, fading from depictive realism into random shapes the further back and to the right they go. This is detail oriented drawing like Moebius does, but it isn't detail that the eye can really "read into". It's so densely packed, the lines go in so many different directions, and there's so little bold color spotting over it that it's more like a wall of noise than a drawing with any real depth. A blistering assault. Which is exactly what Miller's book conceptualizes the big city as. Miller as noise cartoonist: I always tell people that the artist most similar to Miller is Gary Panter (and vice versa). You can really see it here.

What's especially interesting is that Miller pretty much completely discarded this thin-lined, detail oriented style in his more recent work for a much bolder, louder look that's almost wholly dependent on thick brush lines and massive areas of black. Almost a complete turnaround from what's on display in that city panel. There aren't a whole lot of artists in comics history who've forged one style so bold, let alone two of them. The only other ones that come to mind are Moebius and Robert Crumb. Rarefied company indeed.



Varley's painted color. For all that this is one of the first mainstream American comics to use painted color instead of machine tones, it's supremely understated in its color choices and technique. Varley's pale, washed out grays and ochres are probably the biggest reason that Miller's comic about tanks blowing up dudes with fangs and butcher knives at the city dump doesn't turn into a farce, a deathpunk version of the Adam West Batman TV show. The restraint in the hues keeps an element of control on the page even during Miller's darkest and most phantasmagorical moments. It's basically flat color throughout this comic -- no modeling of shapes, no drastic play with shadows and light that aren't already there in the line art. The one place Varley cuts loose on actually drawing with the color is with special effects, like that helicopter explosion above. And even in pyrotechnic moments like that one, it's the simplicity, the restraint and sense of minimalism that makes the pictures so memorable.



High impact lettering. I used to hate John Costanza's tilted, asymmetrical letters, especially on this book where the elegant, calligraphic Todd Klein subs in on a few balloons here and there. Now I can't get enough of it. If Varley's color is the constant element of restraint in Dark Knight, Costanza's lettering is a counterpointing constant amplification. His lettering, from the scrawled forms to the expressionistic streams of sound effects, really shouts. It's the perfect visualization for the words in Miller's larger than life, resolutely comic booky script.



Sixteen dummy. I see everybody talk about the "Watchmen grid". For those who don't know or don't notice, pretty much every last page of Watchmen is pinned to a nine panel grid, with very little variation. It's relentless. There's a similar thing going on in Dark Knight, though I've never seen anyone notice it: every page of this comic uses a sixteen panel grid as a template. The difference between Dark Knight and Watchmen's layouts is just about the best argument for auteur comics over writer-artist collaborations that you can find on the superhero racks. In Watchmen, Alan Moore imposes the nine-grid simply by not being the one who's drawing it. It's less negotiable, more fixed and stiff. Dave Gibbons gets more out of that layout than anybody has since, but it's still claustrophobic and cramped at times: the compositions demand room that isn't there because it's not in the script, or the balloons predominate the small panels to such a degree that it's difficult to tell whether there's even any necessary information contained in the pictures. Miller, on the other hand, is wildly variable with his page structure, proceeding from the sixteen panel grid rather than using it as every page's end point. It's rare to see a Dark Knight page that uses a strict 4 by 4 layout, but every single one (with the exception of three or four single-panel pages) uses it as an internal logic. A few spreads:




That first one is pretty standard -- the big moments get a whole tier, the dramatic pauses take up two panels, and the nuts-and-bolts story building moments whip by in regimental rhythm. Even the larger panels, though, are mostly still "on the grid", composed according to its rhythm. A two-panel-wide frame will have one piece of information on the right side and one on the left. The bisector isn't drawn, but it's still there. The second spread is a bit further out, but even on that splash page the three panels running down the side take up exactly 3/16ths of the space on the page, same as they would if the rest of it was filled in with a grid. The page across from that one has the exact same horizontal center point bisecting it between panels three and four as all the rest do, even though all of its panels go widescreen. The bottom half of the page is two four-panel-wide tiers sliced in two: the top half is the same thing, with the bottom of the first tier and the top of the second one fused together into one big moment of impact. Miller never deviates from the axis the sixteen-grid provides, he just finds endless variations to spin off of it.

It's the most perfectly symmetrical layout a comics page can use effectively, four across by four down. That's the beat of pretty much any modern pop song you care to name -- and I mean any pop song, rock, hip hop, electronic, r and b, metal... it's all four by four. I think a big part of the reason the modern pop audience responded and continues to respond so favorably to Dark Knight is because whether they realize it or not, Miller is using the comics form to speak a language everyone is already primed to accept and be entertained by. It's music, immediate and gratifying, and Miller rips solo after devastating solo on top of a beat so simple and insistent that it can hold him up no matter how far afield he goes on top of it.

The other big advantage of the sixteen-grid is just how ridiculously dense it is. There is a ton of information of just about every page of Dark Knight, so much so that it tells its story in half the pages Watchmen does. There's a significant arc, a beginning, middle, and end happening on almost every individual page of this comic. Nothing's elliptical, nothing demands you turn the page because the action gets cut off right in the middle. Rather, it's all a build, crescendos leading into greater crescendos.



TV eye. The way Miller drew the newscasters and various other personalities in the many, many screen shots that provide Dark Knight with a modernized Greek chorus is another thing that used to bug me. Way more often than not you can't actually see their eyes. It's just blank horizontal lines, black slits beneath their eyebrows. What the hell, Frank?



This time I think I got it, though: the eyes, maybe even more so in comics than real life, are our way of accessing character and emotion, the giveaway to what a character's really thinking, outside the balloons. The TV talking heads' lack of eyes is a highly effective way of implying the wavery, humming appearance of a TV screen, the electronic interference between the viewer's eyes and the image on the glass. And then, more obviously, it's the easiest way for Miller to point to the soullessness and vacuity of his brain-dead commentators. When a real character with an actual part to play in the story -- Two Face, or Commissioner Gordon -- comes on the screen, their irises and pupils pop out just as plain. When we shift back to the yapping anchors, the screen goes up once again. It's a nice little bit of visual grammar that I don't think anyone since has really picked up on and used.



Miller's poetic lines. The tiers on the sixteen-grids that don't have any variation to them reveal another advantage of that layout. Four panels long is about as dense as a tier can get before it just gets fragmented and elliptical. It's long enough for Miller to build up a rhythm within the tier itself, without having to force it into a dialogue with the rest of the page. The four-panel line has the same potential for accumulated power that a line of poetry with a larger amount of syllables does. It can play off itself, refer back to itself, function as a piece of music on its own. The above is one of the more famous examples of this -- a zoom in matched to a zoom out, the dominant visual device of red bars turned to different uses, an intelligent, evocative bit of juxtaposition -- all in one tier, a fourth of a page. Here's my favorite one, though:



It's poetry, pure and simple. Gun to target then target to gun. One end of the tightrope line connecting to the other end, meeting at the very center of the tier. A straight line running across the whole thing, barrel to rope to rope to barrel. The elegance of the two middle panels that function as a single unit and the right and left ones bookending it with rhyming compositions. There's so much internal rhythm and harmony in this single tier, more than most entire pages have. The density of Miller's art doesn't just mean it can carry more story than most comics -- it can do more of what comics do best, relating pictures to one another beneath a single, overriding concern.

People never talk about this stuff. They should.

AFFECTED [paid advertisement]

Here are the three best pages yet from my comic Affected, posted yesterday. If you aren't reading it already, consider this a painstakingly embossed invitation to hop on before things start getting really crazy in a week.





You can read the whole comic so far right here.

Your Wednesday Sequence 12

Nipper, June 20th 1964. Doug Wright.



So sick. So sick I couldn't even hear the soft'n'soothing music I had put on to make me feel better. So sick I was hallucinating that Queen Elizabeth came to hang out. So sick it took me two days to post this link to my latest Robot 6 column. This week it's a look at a single panel by Doug Wright -- but wait, hold up, isn't this supposed to be a column about sequence? Well, yes, and that's why Wright's panel is so interesting, because it packs so much information into the frame and hangs it around such a well-considered composition that you can't help but read it step by step as opposed to all at once. Neat stuff. Wright is one of the four or five artists who I always try to bring a little something extra to my discussions of, so go check this one out and see what you think. Starts like this:

Yes, yes, I can see perfectly well that this is only one panel. But sequence is just the same as anything else: one definition works fine until you run across something that contradicts it. To my eyes, the picture above is one such something. Today we’re going to examine how an artist can build sequence into a single image, creating pictorial motion without having to subdivide the page with panel borders.

We’ve already seen how sequence is subjective. The information on any page of comics exists independent of order, and while most artists lay out their pages in a way that leaves little of that order to question, it’s easy enough to skip around in the panels of comics your own way, randomizing the events or stitching new meanings into them. (What do you mean you’ve never tried that? You really should.) This is especially true of silent comics, where there are no strings of dialogue or narration to get in the way. Similarly, there’s almost never one correct, proscribed way to read a single panel, a logic the reader is meant to follow to move through one picture. In multi-panel comics, the images are most often meant as quick hits of action or locale, with only a single stage of the events taking place communicated within them before the next one hits. When there is more than that going on, as in this single-frame strip by Doug Wright, the Charles Schulz of Canada, what the reader is dealing with is sequence.
Read more

Double DeForge

Lose #3 [AND] Open Country #1, by Michael DeForge. Koyama Press/self-published.



After what was easily the best year a cartoonist's had in recent memory, Michael DeForge seems ready to enter Act Two of his busily flowering career in comics. As usual, he's all over the place these days -- editing anthologies of artwork and erotic comics, making strips for print and web magazines, and of course, putting out lovingly produced comics of his own. The most recent two in that last category are an interesting pair.

Lose #3 is the latest issue of DeForge's one-man pamphlet anthology, certainly the most hotly anticipated release of his yet. Done up beautifully in the Koyama Press style, it's a comic that looks ready to take on the world, or at least to make it question why everybody's so hot for trade paperbacks and graphic novels when we've got stuff like this coming out for five bucks a throw. The debut issue of Open Country, on the other hand, is a lo-fi xeroxed minicomic, the beginning of what's projected to be DeForge's longest work to date. Though they mark out vastly different territories of what can be done with single-issue comics, neither can really be seen as a departure for DeForge. This is a young artist whose storytelling and presentational styles run as wide as they do deep, and these two comics are evidence of a talent too sprawling to be encapsulated between a single pair of covers.

The new Lose feels like a transitional comic for DeForge, the beginning of a reach to new frontiers. While the book's first issue fused fantasy tropes and black humor into an innovative take on gag cartooning, and the second was a breathtakingly savage journey into the ugly heart of modern life, the third weaves the conceits of the previous two into one smooth continuum before looking around for new inspirations. The showcase strip, "Dog 2070", (is that a Mike Sekowsky shoutout, Michael?) incorporates all DeForge's previous work into its post-apocalyptic setting and puts its anthropomorphized dogs through a Chris Ware style depressed-in-middle-age narrative. The fusion of DeForge's warped take on genre with the generally accepted inflections of "intelligent comics" is interesting enough, but what's most remarkable is how much humor and horror juices up the relatively banal, restrained story. Even when dabbling in other idioms, DeForge remains fully himself. A scene of the shlubby, divorced main-character dog struggling to remain anything better than socially ridiculous at his job is capped off with a hilarious gag about seeing a psychiatrist -- on the next page that psychiatric session turns into a truly disturbing dream sequence that holds DeForge's all-time grisliest scene of body deconstruction (this is a career that's already had quite a few of those, mind).



What the great graphic novelists of the last generation painted as trite or meaningless, DeForge digs into for the same chills and thrills he's previously turned to genre for. In terms of basic content, the closest cousin "Dog 2070" has is Ware's Jimmy Corrigan -- but while that book gave its readers a character who was unable to find beauty in a world packed to the gills with it, DeForge plops the same type of guy (or um, animal... whatever) down amidst smoking ruins, blasted-out buildings, crumbing infrastructure, encroaching mold. These things certainly look incredible as drawn by DeForge, who's approaching a Jim Woodring level of expressiveness and decorative power with his lines, but there's no mistaking this world for beautiful. As with all great post-apocalyptic fiction, DeForge draws the desperation from his jokes and the poignancy from his more serious emotional beats with the simple fact of the chaos they're set against. The unnamed dog we watch fail at work, with his ex-wife, with his children, even with his psychiatrist, may not see much beauty either -- but that's largely because he isn't given much of it to see. As the plot crests with a hilarious punchline that's as satirical and petty as it is deeply felt, it's easy to come away from the story with the sense that DeForge has found a completely new and successful take on one of comics' more hackneyed story types. There are plenty of things in comics that are similar to aspects of "Dog 2070", but there's nothing quite like it.

The same is true for the collection of short strips that rounds out the new Lose. "Ant Comic", a densely gridded two-page strip, explores the same feelings of powerlessness and bizarreries of being a member of the insect kingdom that Ware mines in his "Branford Bee" strips, but with an added facility for gags and a sharp counterpoint of slacker-youth dialogue. Speaking of youth, the single page titled with that word shows off DeForge's masterful way with slimy, gushy textures while reminding us that newborn babies look really fucking gross. "Manananggal", a wordless five-pager, edges right up next to total abstraction with a look at the social and reproductive rituals of a group of monsters so hideous that their interactions lose all logic but that of shapes in motion. It feels like DeForge going as far as he can go with something, a small branch of his vast system of visual codes and tropes finally explored to the fullest.

"Improv Night", the opening short, is a proficient run through the classic EC Comics twist-ending horror story, with plenty of near-Dada strangeness thrown in for good measure. We've seen things like this from DeForge before, but there's something new and intriguing in -- of all things -- the figurework, which puts a fluid litheness to the basic, simplified forms typical of his style. It's an exciting thing to see, given that the human figure has always been one of the things that looked less interesting filtered through the DeForge viewpoint. Good thing, then, that this new facility for figure drawing is given plenty of room to stretch out in Open Country #1, itself a comic largely about the artistic act of constructing a human figure. It's a lot less simple then pen and ink here, though: the construction this minicomic's characters are concerned with happens via psychic projection, one of those skills you don't learn until the last few years of art school, like linoleum cutting or darkroom photography. Thank god for Youtube tutorials.

DeForge's art looks incredible beneath the book's dense haze of photocopier noise, a perfectly rough chorus for his clean lines and soft shapes. The whole thing is pinned to a basic three-tiered grid, which DeForge manipulates with skill and nuance. Dialogue scenes are packed into tight six-panel grids, while the panels open wide in stranger scenes, letting the body detritus and telepathic energy float around the corners of the pages with the xerox grit. A few splash pages punctuate the action with pure moments of pictorial strangeness, sudden bursts of light or darkness expertly placed for maximum dynamic effect. And the newfound fluidity of DeForge's human forms is everywhere, turning talking-head scenes between humans into material as engaging as any of the monster battles or physical-mutation scenes we've see from him previously.



The story follows a young guy and his girlfriend's attempts to learn psychic projection, inspired by an exhibition by an emerging artist of the form (emerging meaning you can find interviews with her online, but she still waits tables at the local diner). The obvious high point is the pair's first attempt at projecting their psychic images, with muscles and skin and cartooned facial features swirling around one another with a haunting grace, simultaneously evoking the beauty of the human form and the knowledge that it's all just ground beef in a soft skin wrapper. As an act of pure drawing it's up there with the very best of DeForge's career, and it's certainly as atmospheric and unique as anything he's ever drawn.

Just as interesting, though, are the plot dynamics DeForge is setting up -- the relationship between the protagonist and his girlfriend has the subtle precariousness of all young loves, and our hero's first encounter with the gorgeous artist whose work so inspires him is a supremely effective cliffhanger. The mere fact of DeForge on a long-form story is thrilling enough: the prospect of seeing his oddly realistic take on character played out across a more nuanced plot structure that can't fall back on the snap endings he so effortlessly employs in his shorter works puts some actual promise behind that thrill. The line for issue two starts here, folks. And as for phase two of DeForge's career, well, it seems fairly certain that we'll all be hearing a lot more about it soon enough.

Running My Mouf

Look at that panel! I forget those intense color shapes whenever I think about Watchmen. John Higgins 4eva. I pulled the image from a long interview I just did with the pop culture/comics blogger Eric Messinger over at his blog Accidental Jellyfish. It's the first phone interview I've ever done, so fans of my podcasting will recognize the elliptical, can't-this-guy-hold-a-thought-for-a-sentence conversation that's my stock in trade. Eric got a ton of gab out of me: we mostly talked about my approach to comics criticism and how I see it affecting and being affected by the medium's future. If you want a printed record of my predictions about where this crazy thing we call comics is going, get on over! We talked about a lot of other things too, including:

*my favorite comics bloggers,
*the Matt Seneca Method of reading comics,
*my own comics work,
*the way making comics and comics criticism are really the same thing,
*the drawbacks of my approach to comics,
*Krazy Kat,
*Watchmen,
*Grant Morrison,
*the approaching demise of Marvel and DC,
*and why I love comics more than anything else.

I think it's a pretty great interview, so go read it.

"She's A Dancer"

I just dropped the most beautiful single page of comics I've ever drawn here. I've been trying to treat the comics I draw that aren't Affected more like fine art and less like "comics", where no matter how pretty the page is it always seems to be just steamrolling this story over you really insistently. The comics page, with multiple images arranged in harmonies, has such a potential to exist as beautiful visual input first, and leave everything else for second. Also, I keep returning to something Frank Santoro said a while ago about elegance of effect, making an elegant drawing. Even though comics is full of guys who make lovely pictures, pleasance rarely if ever seems to be the central goal of the work. I'm trying to make these shorter strips I do just nice to look at, things that make you feel good when you see them first and foremost. I think this new one is at least a worthy attempt, so why don't you go look at it and tell me how I'm doing?

Your Wednesday Sequence 11

Poem Strip (1969), pages 151-153. Dino Buzzati.



Oh man, three posts on Poem Strip in half a week! No more to say about the thing here, so just go here and check out the Buzzati sequence I talked about this week on my Robot 6 column. It's one of the better parts of the book -- a little shard of near-Kirbyist action storytelling in the midst of an art-comic with relatively little narrative panel-to-panel storytelling. Buzzati had a whole different spin on the "action scene" than just about anyone else, but man did he do it beautifully. Go check it out, the column starts like this:

The action sequence is probably the type of comics-making that the greatest number of artists have engaged in (except maybe the gag), and it’s also one of the best tests of a cartoonist’s ability to do what they do convincingly. Action demands that an artist utilize a number of skill sets all at once: an understanding of the human figure to sell the gestures, composition to produce impact, panel-to-panel transitions to move the reader through it, attention to detail so that the action’s environment never gets lost behind it. Beside that, words on the page become meaningless at best during action, actual impediments at worst. Action is perhaps the facet of comics storytelling in which it helps least to be told what you’re seeing. The artist alone sells action. And as we know, sequencing is what sells comics art. Read more

Untitled Chester Brown Article

aka "But I Can Love"
aka "He Fucks Them Twice"

Paying For It (2011), by Chester Brown. Drawn & Quarterly.



Well, today I read the book everyone's talking about. In the bookstore on my lunch break. Chester Brown's "comic-strip memoir about being a john" is a little pricey, but not prohibitively so; I read it in a hurry with people walking by in every direction rather than taking it home and kicking back with it because I'd already made the decision that I wasn't going to contribute to whatever financial success it might meet with. Frankly, I think this comic's existence as a commercial object is pretty gross. In case you've been out of touch with comics lately (or only read superhero kind, ha ha), Paying For It is a catalog-in-comics of the experiences Chester Brown has had with prostitutes over the last decade and change. Brown is a committed john, not the kind who patronizes the sex industry between romantic relationships or as a secret infidelity to a partner. He hasn't had sex without paying the woman for it since the mid-'90s. His book's story arc kicks off with his decision to begin seeing prostitutes, and its action tracks his development through various encounters with them.

I think making art in any way, about anything, is one of the very greatest possible things a human being can do. Creating art is one of the relatively few actions that separates us from the animals, that makes being human a rarefied and wonderful thing. I don't think any topic should be off limits to the arts, no matter how potentially offensive it might be. The idea of prostitution, though, isn't even something that offends me. I've had two friends who worked as prostitutes, one who'd quit by the time I met her and one who was doing it when I met her and continues to do it now, as far as I know. I've dated a woman who used to work in the sex industry. None of them enjoyed these jobs. But it's not a big deal to me. And I've certainly enjoyed books about people doing way worse things than than paying for sex, some of them true stories, some of those autobiographical. (Sanyika Shakur's true-crime memoir Monster remains one of my favorite works of American literature.) My biggest problems with Paying For It are the utter callousness with which it treats its secondary subjects, the prostitutes Brown sees, and its direction of a financial reward toward one of the men who has taken advantage of their economic need to sell sex.

The easy mitigating point is that Brown is exploiting his own experience as one of society's marginal figures as well. But is putting oneself on display willingly ever exploitation? I'm not sure, and even if it is it isn't really comparable to Brown's exhibiting of the women he's paid for sex -- most of them without ever knowing their bodies and the positions they were put in years ago would one day become graphic novel fodder. Not to mention the fact that Brown didn't choose to enter the world of commercialized sex because of necessity, let alone because he was forced to.

Though I can't really think of a good reason not to, I won't issue a blanket condemnation of johns -- well, I suppose there are men with physiological conditions that more or less completely preclude their access to free sex, but Brown isn't one of those -- what really bothers me is the ones who exploit women's necessity to offer sexual services for money, and then exploit them again by making a self-centered book about engaging in that first exploitation. Would you buy your copy of this book (that is, if you were to do such a thing at all) from someone you knew had stolen it from another person? The biggest, surface-level point of interest with Paying For It, the reason people who haven't got all their Yummy Fur back issues yet will look at it, isn't Brown himself, and neither is it any experience that's specific to him. It's the chance to vicariously experience the act of seeing a prostitute -- something a vast majority of the population will never do, but something I'd also imagine a similar majority has wondered about the specifics of, if only in a completely abstract way. In purveying this thrill to his readers, complete with the assurance that it all really happened just as it looks on the page, Brown is little better than a pimp. He is the medium between customer and prostitution, and the price one pays to own his book is money paid for very real transactions between prostitutes and their customers. The fact that readers of Paying For It don't get their own dicks wet is neither here nor there: real prostitutes really got fucked in the making of it, and if paying for that isn't enough, the book's price tag asks you to pay the man who did it for the privilege of hearing about it.

That's galling -- but I wouldn't deny Brown the right to try and make money from his story, no matter how off-putting I find it or repugnant the implications may be. What's been absolutely infuriating is seeing the wave of praise that's washed over Brown and his book from the tributaries of the comics internet over the past little while. Yes, the critic's job is to evaluate craft and examine the impact of its narrative and aesthetics, but if ever there was a comic that demands a humanistic reaction take precedence, this is it. I've chased down reviews of Paying For It looking for a single one that takes issue with Brown's willingness to profit from his experiences as the demand side of a deeply troubling sector of the black market economy: nothing. People seem all too happy to bypass that aspect of the work and get to the kind of discussion with which they also greet books about mystical gardens or reinterpretations of Pinocchio. It's not the same thing, you guys, in fact it's really really different, whether or not you got your copy for free. There's art sprung from the imagination and the hands alone, and then there's art sprung directly from something I personally would never want to ever be a part of.

When I first got into transgressive literature and art I would always shake my head in disdain when I read condemnations of work by men like the Marquis de Sade or Krystian Bala, work that had roots in its creators' direct participation in human suffering but was undeniably art. Couldn't people understand, I would ask myself, that art is beyond the specifics of its creation, that it stands apart from its birthplace? Well, maybe now I'm one of those reactionary readers who lacks the detachment necessary to evaluate a work and not its author. And hey, Chester Brown didn't even kill anyone! But I think art like de Sade's and Brown's needs the barrier of time between it and its audience before it can be considered for its artistic merit alone. I can read de Sade without batting an eye because the lives of the maids and prostitutes whose torture inspired his lacerations-in-prose would have long since passed anyway regardless, dust in history's wind. But they were realer things to the audience of their day -- and the outrage the books that threw the mask of art over them inspired may have been part stifling moralism, but was certainly also part rational indignance at seeing the transgressions of their creator offered up for sale to an eager public. Only the long viewpoint of art history can reduce the quality of actual human lives to secondary considerations -- that or a readership with a stunted viewpoint lacking in understanding or compassion or both. Good thing, then, that Brown makes comics.



So yeah, I've been infuriated by the run-up to my reading of Paying For It, and went in fully expecting to be infuriated by the book itself. I wasn't. It's not really infuriating; it probably isn't even capable of inspiring that vehement a reaction. It's just ugly (not in the good Jon Vermilyea way), and it's just sad (not in the good Chris Ware way, either). For me at least, there's no setting the book's point of origin aside, but even a look at its craft and construction is irksome in the extreme -- objectionable, even. Positives first, I guess: Chester Brown can flat out draw. His style is as tight and controlled as any of the great masters of cartooning, up there with Schulz or Tezuka, its forms perfectly regularized and animated with a supremely assured sense of motion that never for a panel gives up its self-consistency. The lines, sculpting tiny figures in tiny panels, are so precise they look like they've been laid down with razorblades. From start to finish the book is the kind of dazzling display of pure skill that seems almost designed to make every cartoonist it can lay down their rapidograph in an admission that they'll never get this good.

Where the drawings falter is the composition. Nearly every panel presents full figures, shot at three-quarter views from above, as if by a camera mounted on a low ceiling. It puts the reader in the position of a surveillance camera, or maybe God, never able to access anything but the tiny bodies' movement through space. It's emotionless drawing -- quite literally, it does not emote, it merely presents. Brown's face remains drawn and taciturn behind blank-rimmed eyeglasses for most of the story. When an ex-girlfriend's face is drawn about three quarters of an inch high at one point, it feels almost explosively revealing; when on the next page a thin, scalpeled trail of ink cuts her brow with a frown, it's the most effusively drawn display of feeling we'll see between the book's covers. From the beginning of the book forward, Brown denounces romantic love as irrational, so perhaps it's not surprising that we aren't treated to the wild emotional transports-in-panels of, say, John Romita romance comics -- still, none of Brown's feelings make it out of the panels alive, and that's the wrong way to go about making the case for deeper understanding. We know from the front cover that Brown has visited prostitutes, and plenty of us know the reason why from the advertising ("I want to have sex, but I don't want to have a girlfriend" on the comic-shop promo postcards, they really ain't for children anymore, folks -- unless they are again, if you see my point). Brown's drawings are adept at communication the specifics of that same information, but they offer nothing as to the inner processes a "normal" man goes through in becoming a john.

But what about the purely physical enjoyment of sex that pulls Brown out of celibacy after a year or two and pushes him into interaction with the sex industry? There's nothing there either -- without exception, the sexual encounters are portrayed from afar, with the camera actually pulling back at times to show the same completely sterile view of a Polly Pocket sized Brown, back to the viewer, in various positions of contact with similarly tiny prostitutes, their faces obscured by hair, word balloons, their client's body. Tellingly, the closest we get to any kind of drawn sexual feeling is a close-up of Brown's dick as he blows his load jerking off to get ready for one of his first visits.

The rooms Brown's real body shared with those of real prostitutes, real friends, real ex-girlfriends, are reduced to dioramas, and rather than being given any intuitive, emotional understanding of Brown's actions we're forced to squint and read the tiny letters that spell out carefully designed arguments for why patronizing prostitutes is not only a justifiable choice, but the only rational one. Putting it mildly, most readers will find this line of thought difficult to accept, and that's why Brown's artistic approach is such a crippling blow to his overall agenda: if we can't gain any deeper, transformative understanding of why he himself chose to do what he does, how can we be persuaded? It may be the rational choice for him, but it isn't for most of us, or else we'd all be doing it. Brown's book reads like it's set up to convince its audience of something, but such a frozen piece of workmanship feels like the least credible argument for whoring ever.

Of course, the bulkiest part of Brown's case for overturning the current thinking on the sex industry isn't the comic itself, but the novella-length section of handwritten appendices Brown provides after the comic finishes in order to further explicate his stance on prostitution. I'd already decided I wouldn't read these when I first read the comic -- the part with drawings is what I'm interested in, not a Chester Brown's view on the socio-political and economic ramifications of decriminalizing prostitution. In practice, I lacked the time to do so. And after reading the arguments Brown lays out in the comic, I certainly lack the inclination. The one part I did read was the notes on the story provided by Brown's friend and contemporary Seth, who appears in it as a character, providing many of the arguments that Brown's irresistible logic slices through. This page-and-a-bit is largely taken up with Seth's explanation/apologia on Brown's mental state, which basically concludes that the book's author is a very nice person with something missing from his emotional makeup. I don't doubt it. As I said, Paying For It struck me as being tremendously sad, and that was because Brown seems completely unable to understand love.

"People need to be in romantic relationships because they're insecure," Brown explains early in the book. "The guy who has self-respect is the guy who doesn't need to be in a romantic love relationship." Brown views love as an offshoot of the urge to possess something, as a need for validation. And to be sure, what some people call love is. But true love is so much more than that, something simultaneous and without ownership, a mutual admiration that fuses into a single feeling, a bond as close as that of blood, seasoned with something beautiful and strange that makes one forget need or want altogether. Love is the jettisoning of desire, not the ultimate stage of it. It is fulfillment, not with what one has but with what one is.

Later, toward the end, Brown says "the romantic love ideal is evil... romantic love causes more misery than happiness. Think of all the single people who long for love and are miserable because they can't find it.... (When they find love) they're happy for a little while... until reality hits and then they're miserable." It's the rhetoric of the discarded lover, the heart so full of pain and regret that it can hardly bear to feel anymore. But just as no one in love considers the socioeconomic aspects of it that Brown is so intent upon decrying, once love hits it doesn't matter what's to come. It's worth it to feel it, even for a single shining moment. That's the way life works, and this is a book about a man who denies it.

The effects of that denial are disturbing -- or heartbreaking, depending on the amount of "sympathy for the devil" one's willing to extend to Brown. After an unsatisfactory encounter with a prostitute a few years into the narrative, Brown walks home thinking "at least I can write a bad review of her" on an escort-rating website he frequents. Prostitution is hardly the only industry which offers a way for its clients to give referendums on its workers. When I worked on the floor of a major retail chain, every customer I rang out at the register got a survey card to rate how good I sold the v-necks on. But it never feels good -- in fact it's one of the horrors of working in the modern world. After being rated on the brightness of my smile and the trendiness of my outfits, I can only imagine the degradation of being rated on my good looks or my sexual performance and willingness. But more than that, prostitution encourages this kind of emotionless, meat-market approach to human interaction. Will Chester Brown go online to rate the stockboy the next time he stops in for a pair of jeans at "The Gap"? I highly doubt it. But we see him reducing the women he has sex with to sets of stats again and again in Paying For It, and it's because -- though he tries to make it seem like any other transaction -- there's something about the commercialization of sexuality that strips away human feeling much more than buying anything else. A few pages after that, when Brown doesn't stop even though he's clearly hurting the woman he's fucking, it's easy to conclude that his years of trafficking in the most private aspects of human lives has inured him to others' pain. He did pay her, after all.

But the most devastating touch is the book's final pages, in which Brown admits that he's probably in love with the prostitute he's been in a monogamous relationship with for the past six years. He has sex with her alone, she has paid sex with him alone (it's unclear whether she has noncommercial relationships with anyone else) and he cares about her emotionally, would be sad to lose her. What isn't acknowledged -- what is perhaps too difficult to acknowledge -- is that while he is there for her regardless, the second the money goes away, so too does she. In the end Brown finds himself paying not so much for sex as for the very thing he took to being a john in hopes of avoiding: love, the love he could perhaps have found for free had he not so insistently denied its existence.

As a piece of comics-making and a think-piece in general, Paying For It is very good. Given its creator's status as one of the medium's masters and its unprecedented-in-comics subject matter, it seems fairly likely to go down as a classic of the medium. People will read it, and as with all else, contemporary reactions to what it is will fade, to be replaced by history's reactions to what it does, and how it does it. It's inevitable. But I would hope that righteous, human indignation at Brown's exploitation of a pre-existing problem will flare up and remain as long as it can, and that people will remember that this book is the product of a few women's unenviable way of life just as much as a child born into fatherless poverty is. You can read it. Maybe I'll even say you should read it.

But if you pay for it there's no way in hell that I'll respect you.

Come In

Poem Strip (1969), by Dino Buzzati. New York Review of Books.



Comic book artists, whether through willful ignorance or coincidental lack of education, often come close to making outsider art. Whether it's a young Jack Kirby gaining his chops by copying EC Segar and Hal Foster panels onto butcher paper or today's young cartoonists gaining theirs by copying Kirby, comics mainly feed on themselves in order to grow. Theories and practices from outside the medium's century of history and back catalogue of works-in-print are surprisingly rare -- so much so that artists who come to comics informed by a larger view of the arts often look like outsider artists themselves from within the microcosm of the medium. There's a point to be made about the symbiotic relationship between comics' shunning of the wider spectrum of artistic culture and the way the "real world" shuns comics right back (oh snap, I just made it!), but for the moment let's simply take a look at one of those "outsider comics" in which art and the world are more than 6x10 grids and back issues.

Dino Buzzati begins his proto-graphic novel Poem Strip with a paragraph acknowledging the debts owed by individual pages to a constellation of non-cartoonists -- Salvador Dali, F.W. Murnau, German medical scientist Otto Prokop, New York sleaze-porn king Irving Klaw -- a litany of names to be not only brought into comics, but which comics are to be brought into contact with. From the outset, Buzzati is not looking to slum it in the pulpy atmosphere of the comics medium, but to use the form to create something that could stand alongside his acclaimed novels and poetry. It's anyone's guess as to whether Buzzati came to Poem Strip (Poema a Fumetti, or "Poem in Comics" in its original Italian, a more illuminating if rather less catchy title) with the goal of elevating or expanding the form. But in 1969 comics were such that simply entering the medium with a wider selection of cultural precepts than was found in John Romita's swipe file could hardly help but create something that aimed at bigger and more rarefied goals than most everything else. It's clear from the first page, which throws the usual solid-packed, architectural look of the gridded page right out the window for a loose and free-flowing method of sequencing, words and pictures placed on the page in delicate complement to one another rather than billeted between the steel rods of panel borders.



It's a bit shocking for the longtime comics reader to see the form broken out of its byzantine pattern of tiers and word balloons and captions and gutterspaces. Buzzati's comics just read, the images and words often juxtaposed rather than fused and overlapping. The eye is focused on one thing at a time, a line of text and then an image and then a balloon, with comics' illusion of motion and life imparted by Buzzati's vivid imagery and wide-open approach to sequence rather than the usual blares of simultaneous prose and illustration. Gridded pages do appear, but rarely. When they do it's often to animate something, presenting a quick, loose motion capture before rolling back out into the book's regularized rhythm of two images to a spread, one per page. Especially with Buzzati's preference for captions over word balloons, it's almost too easy to look at the book and declare "that's not comics!" It certainly doesn't look like much else. But it's got the rich flow and ebb of comics, the spontaneity and life of still images in tight narrative sequence, pushed along by bridges of words; it just looks at the medium differently than any more "native" artists have. This is comics from somewhere other than comics, used because of the advantages the medium offers rather than as a default.



Buzzati's art is perfect for the way it's arranged. While most comics artists falter during longer sequences of full-page panels, Buzzati's single images are full of design sense, spreading out eagerly to meet the edges of the pages, vivid canvases that earn the total focus they invite. Bold, simple shapes, sensuously curved or jagged and abrupt, are layered with luminous pastel colors, so thickly saturated in flat chartreuses and periwinkles that they recall linoleum cuts more than comic book-style flat color. The markmaking is similarly refined, cable-wire tangles of thick black line giving way to gentle sprays of Art Nouveau dot screens. The splash pages never feel over-worked or barren: Buzzati understood how to compose pictures as well as comics pages, and the balance between dynamic sequencing and arresting single visuals is maintained from beginning to end.

The effect of some panels -- especially those in which the Aubrey Beardsley pointillism is brought to bear on monolithic pin-up posed nudes -- has plenty to do with the look of '60s rock poster art, which brings it into close proximity to the work of American underground cartoonists like Rick Griffin and Greg Irons, who were expanding the comics form themselves across the Atlantic as Buzzati inked his masterpiece. But the psychedelia is never overpowering, the visuals never wrest control from the narrative. A strong current of Continental expressionism tempers the flowery glow of the op-art sequences, scratchy lines or unforgiving edifices providing a concrete counterpoint to the liminal extravagances of the more hallucinogenic passages. Each image, no matter how oblique, is in thrall to the point Buzzati uses it to make: frequently devastating visual counterpoints to the haunting, metaphysical lances thrown by the text.



That text, then (expertly translated by Marina Harss), is a mod restatement of the myth of Orpheus that digresses into an extended "Explanation of the Afterlife" as well as several lyric suites on various states of being. It's a decidedly '60s narrative setup, but any hints of overweening, "Jesus Christ Superstar" triteness are brushed away by the complex, elliptical prose Buzzati wraps his pop art in. This really is a poem strip, with the narration only sketching out the literalities of scenes in broad strokes, rolling out thunderous proclamations and evocative wordplay the rest of the time. Buzzati's poetry is very much behind the times his pictures so perfectly evoke; he is basically a poet in the high Modernist style of Tristan Tzara or T.S. Eliot, spinning litanies of vivid imagery and lyrical juxtapositions out of single, overarching abstract concepts. Death is the moment "when strange noises come from ancient deserted rooms, when the autumnal sorcerers trail their long dark shadows through the gardens of joy, when marching toward certain victory the soldiers sing"; night is "the far-off bell, the far-off voice calling out over the rooftops, the howling dogs in the vast countryside beneath the glow of the moon".

It's beautiful writing, and an atypical, highly successful counterpart to the type of imagery Buzzati pairs it with. More than that, it's not the easiest kind of writing to make work in comics, where the image-making is usually left entirely to the art, but Buzzati is sensitive enough to the medium's demands that it comes off without a hitch. Sometimes the words' imagery is given a direct illustrated counterpart, others a more abstract conceptual mirror, but never do the words and pictures cease to interact with one another, and never do those interactions feel unnatural or forced. It's comics broken out of the idea that every line of text must have a direct pictorial answer, comics that get expansive with both the art and the writing at different times in different ways rather than moving in a constant lockstep. The result is something that imports the power of written poetry and wordless fine art into comics while retaining the power-in-simultaneity of the medium itself.



The plot is no less elegantly handled. It's another re-telling of a story everyone knows, and Buzzati treats the specifics (musician loses girl to death, regains her in the underworld, loses her again at the border between his world and hers) more as forgone conclusions than dramatic flashpoints. The real pathos and conceptual meat comes when Buzzati uses the story's ancient tropes to explore his own ideas. The guitar-strumming hero's passage from life into afterlife occasions an extended, meditation on death, the "gift of a wise God", without which the world holds no mystery or sense of urgency and importance. Death, Buzzati tells us -- via the empty jacket who serves as the infernal realms' "guardian demon", is the only reason for love, the thing that pushes us into feelings so monumental that we perpetuate our species in defiance of it. Love is "the ultimate bliss, but never joyful, never, for it would be nothing without the knowledge deep down that one day all this would end".

It's easy to suspect that Buzzati was writing about more than abstract concepts: Poem Strip was his last major work, and within three years of its release he would pass away after a long battle with cancer. There is a profound sense of urgency to Buzzati's carefully weighted words and slashing brush lines, something greater and more powerful than the monthly deadlines that pushed the ink from superhero artists' pens. In context the book's end, in which the rescued maiden holds her lover back from returning to life, telling him "You know it's pointless... let's say goodbye instead, a real goodbye," is absolutely heartbreaking. The Orpheus story holds the most power for the young and young at heart, those with the fullest conviction that death is worth wresting even the already dead from. There is a tragic grandeur to seeing it retold with such beauty by a dying man, to seeing it bent toward an acceptance rather than defiance of the ultimate end.



Like so many of the "mature" comics that would follow it, Poem Strip is a refutation of a heroic narrative that everyone's seen innumerable times before. Today, that structure itself has become another cliche. Buzzati got there before most of the others, and that's rather impressive in and of itself; but what makes this comic really worth remembering is the poetic touch with which it treats the medium, the way the potentials it uncovers for comics work against its sense of futility. Buzzati didn't lived to see comics' future, and it's anyone's guess how much more interested in it than any other artistic developments he would have been.

But he was building it.

How Well-Read Is Grant Morrison?

Today, partly because of Jeet Heer's encouragement and partly because it's the last cloudy day Los Angeles is going to play host to for what will probably be a solid four or five months, I'm reading Dino Buzzati's phenomenal, transcendent graphic novel Poem Strip. I'll write a real review soon enough (in the mean time you should grab a copy somewhere, because this thing is amazing), but I wanted to remark on something real fast.

The book is a loose, modernized restatement of the Orpheus myth, in which the musician hero descends into the land of the dead to rescue his becalmed love. When Orfi, Buzzati's Dylanesque version of the character, first passes through the gates to the spirit world, he's confronted with this...



...which reminded me immediately and forcefully of this.



That second sequence is from Grant Morrison and Jon J. Muth's DC/Vertigo graphic novel The Mystery Play, which is definitely in the top rank of least-discussed Morrison works. Having basically given up in disenchantment on that guy's superhero comics work, The Mystery Play is the comic of his I return to for the writing most often (I just look at the pictures in the Frank Quitely collaborations). It's as far as Morrison has ever gotten from the action-comics idiom, and it carries none of the conceptual weight or amphetamine energy that counterbalance each other in his poppier comics. The Mystery Play is Morrison utterly sober, not just sublimating non-narrative concerns to tell the story first, but seemingly not even bringing any to the table. It's a book that says what it as to say quietly and then leaves, which is a refreshing change of pace from a usually bombastic writer. Rather than the technicolor, screaming-future tone of most Morrison, it feels more like a European art film, a Harold Pinter or Samuel Beckett play, a slightly avant-garde novella. It isn't the most successful comic in the world, but it doesn't really feel like it needs to be -- it's just a story that got produced in comics form. Its aims are quite small, almost hermetic. It feels like "serious art".

That's the same way Poem Strip feels (though Buzzati gets visually expansive in a way I've never really seen anyone else get), and the strength of the similarity between the two sequences above got me wondering whether Morrison might not have encountered Poem Strip at some point and incorporated its tone and a bit of its content into his own artsy metaphysical graphic novel. Seems like a reasonable enough hypothesis, except for the fact that the book was originally published in Italian in the '60s, and didn't have an English-language version until two years ago. My sole point of contact with it before then was seeing two excerpted panels of it in Graphis. I have absolutely no idea as to Morrison's facility with the Italian language but it seems less likely that he would have read Buzzati's book back in the early '90s than like, a Ninja Turtles comic. I'd be super impressed if it turned out Morrison had read Poem Strip before it came out in its current edition. And if the similarity between those sequences is just a coincidence, it's a powerful one. I'm unaware of any broader occult significance to the image of a coat on a hanger, but that could just be my own ignorance. Whether Morrison was drawing from Buzzati or they were both drawing from some mysterious, unknown source, it seemed interesting enough to bring to your attention.

Your Wednesday Sequence 10

Saga of the Swamp Thing #34 (1985), page 17. Steve Bissette.



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!

Comics As Criticism

Crumb knows



Recently I've had a few different people ask me about how I copy other cartoonists' drawings in my own comics. I never really considered why I was doing comics-as-criticism before, or even where I got the idea -- it just felt right, so I did it. I talked about it a little in this interview, among other places, and having to think it through enough to answer questions about it has been interesting. Basically, for me making written criticism of a visual medium is always going to have some feeling of artifice to it. The comics criticism I enjoy reading is usually historically based, or it addresses some aspect of the "world of comics" that goes beyond the work on the page. I can see everything in the comic for myself, and explaining it out in words when it's all right there gets more and more tiring unless those words are really really good. You ever read something like Dostoyevsky and wish you could understand the original Russian? Or Baudelaire in the original French or whatever? Writing book reviews and close readings feels like working as a translator -- certainly a worthy endeavor, as well as a craft of great subtlety and value -- but it gets to a point where I want to use comics to talk about comics.

I feel a far greater understanding of (say) Guido Crepax's brush lines when I'm trying to make the exact same shapes and thicknesses with my own hands than writing "Crepax used his brush like a stonemason uses a chisel" or something. And hopefully people see the powerful, enduring aspects of others' art when they see the parts of it that translate to a copied drawing made by someone else. I think that's why homages, much as they're sometimes derided as unthinking or lazy, are such a popular, enduring part of comics art. They're the natural, pure way for artists to talk about the work of other artists, and they give insight into the work of both copier and copied by allowing viewers to see what of the original is strong enough to remain and what's been overpowered by something new.

Homage is really just the tip of the iceberg, though. There's a surprisingly rich tradition of great comics artists using their work to engage in criticism beyond the affirmative, even fannish big ups of direct homages. Comics that use their own medium to illuminate or question or parody or redefine other, older comics are definitely out there, and they've reached a fairly high level of brilliance a number of times. Here, in chronological order, are a couple of good ones.

- Will Eisner on Al Capp, Chester Gould, and Harold Gray in The Spirit, 1947.



You have to know some pretty arcane comics history to even get close to understanding this one, but it's fascinating nonetheless. The plot of this seven-page short hinges around how Li'l Abner cartoonist Al Capp used to parody other popular newspaper comics -- most notably Chester Gould's Dick Tracy, in the farcically violent, almost surrealistically sarcastic strip-within-a-strip Fearless Fosdick. When Capp's avatar (Al Slapp, natch) is almost murdered, the Spirit interrogates his world's versions of Gould and Little Orphan Annie cartoonist Harold Gray, assuming that the merciless satire they've fallen victim to would be enough to drive anybody into a homicidal rage. More than anything else, Eisner uses this strip to parody parody, asking with tongue firmly in cheek whether Capp the funny-page satirist mightn't be wasting his time. "A Voltaire of the comics, eh?" the snickering Spirit asks the comics-syndicate boss who first tells him about the case.

What follows is perhaps the most farcical of the character's many farcical investigations. The New Deal-liberal Eisner's version of the arch-conservative Gray is a moneyed, elitist fool, catered to by servants and eventually found to be beyond suspicion of the murder attempt because he only uses gold bullets. "Lead bullets, indeed!" he roars. Eisner's treatment of Gould is just as mocking -- while Dick Tracy began as a straight, hard-boiled noir comic in the Prohibition era, by this point Gould had reached the strange, often downright baffling "Two-Way Wristwatch Radio Era", in which the lantern-jawed police detective's adventures became more and more outlandish and alien. The Spirit's visit to him reveals a dissipated figure, driven hopelessly insane by Capp/Slapp's "damage" to the character he had "slaved to make believable". Each cartoonist parodied is drawn to look like one of his most famous creations: Capp is a midget, bucktoothed version of Li'l Abner, Gould is the thick-lined, fedora-ed, slightly frightening Dick Tracy, and Gray is the blank-eyed Daddy Warbucks. Eisner clearly has fun lampooning Gray's lumpy, rounded drawing style with characters that look like cylinder-armed refrigerators and go blind when the white ovals of their eyes are painted over with ink. His criticism of Capp's comic-strip parodies is less successful, if more thought-provoking: Eisner certainly succeeds in making the whole enterprise look thoroughly ridiculous, but does so with a comic-strip parody of his own, deflating his point a bit. Regardless, it's fascinating to see one of comics' grandmasters engaged with three others in such a lively, almost careless fashion, and the story that comes out the other end is even borderline comprehensible!

- Guido Crepax on Alex Raymond in Valentina, 1972.



A few years after introducing the world to the photographer and inadvertent adventurer Valentina Rosselli (the heterosexual male portion of said world took special notice), Crepax turned away from the sexy spy-adventure stories he'd been placing her in, and toward his signature character's psychosexual history. 1972's "Valentina Intrepida" tracks her development from the moment of birth to the morning before she steps into the espionage-action whirl of the first published story she appeared in. It's an unutterably beautiful portrait-in-comics that uses the form to create a life as rich and deep as anything in any form of fiction -- the only other comic to come close in Chris Ware's "Lint", which basically swipes its formula wholesale. Up to and including the homages to previous comics greats that Crepax throws in as visualizations of Valentina's first, pre-adolescent erotic fantasies.

Crepax shows a young Valentina being completely swept away by early newspaper adventure strips, Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon and then Lee Falk's The Phantom and Mandrake the Magician. The dashing heroes become fixtures in her fantasy world, replacing the toy soldier she used to imagine dancing with, grown up into a beautiful ballerina. She is a bejeweled, silk-draped beauty object in the standout Raymond sequences, pulled this way and that by powerful bronzed arms, melting into submission to anyone who can take her away from the constant violence spreading across the pages. Crepax's reading of the sinuous, decorative Flash Gordon drawing style (no small influence on his own art) is note perfect, spotlighting a deep understanding of Raymond's brush techniques and compositional methods. Considered next to Crepax's ultra-modern, jazzy lines and sleek, polished layouts, Raymond's style looks clumsy and incredibly antiquated -- Crepax is as aware as any critic that the best of Raymond hasn't aged well -- but it retains an incredible power, the classical posing and oddly straightforward framing almost closer to medieval tapestry than action comics.

More fascinating still is Crepax's focus on woman-as-sexual-object in Raymond, directing readers' attention to something that was always implicit in Flash Gordon, but never stated outright. It's especially shocking -- even objectionable -- to see Valentina as a character-free, trophyesque "Raymond girl". Crepax's creation has a solid case as the most fully-realized female character in comics history, and to see her suddenly thrust into the typical-action-comics-girl role of passive... victim? spectator? prize? forces a consideration of genre tropes as sheer misogyny. But it's more than that. These are Valentina's own fantasies Crepax is showing us, and they also beg questions about the willingness of "damsels in distress" to accept their roles -- or at least the potency of the role as a sexual possibility. Crepax sees a whole world of erotic entrapment and complexity at play in Raymond, but rather than pick it apart like an armchair psychiatrist, he rebuilds it on the page in flowing lines worthy of the artist who inspired them.

- Art Spiegelman on George Herriman in "High Art Lowdown", 1990.



"High Art Lowdown" is my favorite non-Maus Spiegelman comic, the one where his impulse toward doing smart things with the comics page feels most necessary and least contrived. It's a collection of single panels and short strips crammed onto one big square canvas, the overriding purpose being to ridicule a "high/low" art show at the New York Museum of Modern Art. It's a blazingly virtuosic, ingenious piece of satire, cleverness and rage blasting from it in equal measure -- comics criticism as a vehicle for a wider critique of culture and art. Cenered in the tangle of MoMA-eviscerating gag illos and sarcastic hosannas to turn-of-the-century Preparation H ads is a three-panel homage to George Herriman's Krazy Kat, a.k.a. The Best Comic Ever to those who've given the medium enough study to encounter it. Spiegelman emphasizes the raw power of the scratchy Herriman line with slashing, angular strokes of ink, contrasting it with the cold blandness of a Roy Lichtenstein pastiche that reminds us of how "the real political, sexual, and formal energy is in living popular culture", as opposed to reinterpretations of yesterday's trash. To underline his point he draws a giant dick-shaped cactus into the corner of the strip's final panel, giving Herriman's sweeping desert an explicit sexuality lacking from Lichtenstein's plastic blondes.

Spiegelman's larger point, I think, is something every comics fan will agree with to at least some extent. Who wouldn't rather read a run of Krazy Kat than look at the portentous surrealist paintings it inspired? The issue of sexual energy in Herriman's work is more difficult -- depending on the image one has of the kindly, gentle Herriman, perhaps even slightly troubling. Maybe it's just because it's shown in such an explicit, over the top manner, but I personally can't help but think that phallic prickly-pear overstates Spiegelman's case just a bit. Krazy Kat as a font of pulsing sexual energy? I'm not sure. That said, it's still a thought-provoking bit of critique; the window it provides into thinking about sexuality in Krazy Kat is a valuable one. Herriman's constantly shifting, endless landscapes were a liminal, beautiful fantasy space, erotic in and of themselves. And there's not really any way to argue the fact that Krazy Kat was a comic about the sadomasochistic relationships between hermaphroditic (or at least gender-bending) beings. I'd imagine that looking into Herriman's own sexuality is a bit too much like looking into your grandpa's for most comics historians -- but if anyone ever does, there's surely a great deal to be written on Krazy Kat's amorphous, iconoclastic sexual aura, and Spiegelman deserves praise for pointing out that side of a comic that still gets the better of critics across the medium.

- Josh Simmons on Batman in Batman, 2007.



Pretty much every alternative cartoonist worth his or her salt has some "superheroes are kind of silly, aren't they" strip or other kicking around in their catalogue, and the same thing holds true for critics of the medium. It's a good point, and one worth making again and again in a comics culture so thoroughly over-dominated by the adventures of Adonises in lycra, but nobody's ever made it with the conviction and intensity that Josh Simmons' bootleg Batman minicomic exudes. Regardless of content, the act of making a comic about a corporate-owned superhero is an act of criticism, a commentary on the creator's subjective interpretation of a character that was around before and will be around after them. The bootleg superhero comic, then, is the critic/artist's rebuke to the system. Why can't I tell my version of the old story without risking a cease-and-desist notice, the bootleg creator asks, and there is no answer but the obvious: because your version threatens the parent company's ability to make money from its trademarked icons for some reason or another. Whether that reason is subversive autocritique or lack of the prescribed craft elements (this one has both), the simple fact that artists who want to innovate using these characters are forced to do it in bootleg form is one of the more damning indictments of corporate hero comics that I can think of.

Simmons is aware of all this, of the charged, dangerous status his comic's very existence as a non-commercial object gives it. On the most obvious level the book is a rhetorical examination of the Batman character's endpoint, a kind of thought experiment-in-comics about the problems with Batman's obsessive, fascistic war on crime. It's the dark place DC Comics will never let their biggest moneymaker go: Simmons presents a Batman gone rogue, mutilating criminals' faces "to set them apart", because, as he reminds us here just like in every official Batman comic, he won't kill. In the DC comics, this uncrossable line is a magic totem that keeps Batman the housebreaker and assault artist and vigilante and villain-torturer a "hero" -- in Simmons' comic it's his downfall, the reasons for the horrifying violence we see him inflict on a hapless, passed-out junkie.

In the most intelligent take on the character in decades, Batman isn't a hero anymore. Is this, then, really a "superhero comic" at all? And if leaving the heroism behind is the only way to make interesting comics with these characters anymore, is the very idea of the superhero dead? Like any good piece of criticism, Simmons' comic leaves room for discussion, but also has an opinion of its own. The unforgettable final page shows Batman tearing away at himself, first removing his glove and then ripping off his own fingernail. The subtext is clear: even the quintessential superhero is less interesting as a superhero than a human with an all too human, frail mind. The overgrown nail of hero comics is ripped off with these pages, and what remains is the new territory open to alternative comics. It's an impassioned, devastating commentary on the current state of the comics industry and the superhero genre in general, one that uses the medium itself to make its points.



In a way all comics art is comics criticism, or at least in-depth analysis. Every artist's work both displays and explicates an approach to the medium, distinct ideas about storytelling, pace, form, and every other element that goes into the making of comics. One can easily read an artist's influences as affirmative criticism of the work being drawn from. But there's something vital to bringing the silent discussion of these things that every comics page is out into the open by really talking about them, putting readings of or opinions on other artists' work into new stories, mixing the old ideas with the new. Comics-as-comics-criticism is a vital field, one that relies on the pre-existence of others' creative work just as all criticism does, but is just as much the creation of new work, action and reaction combined into one. At its best, it leads its readers to the same understanding that its creators have reached, the ink lines and panel borders that form the path to the destination more beautiful and indelible than any written words could hope to be.