So AFFECTED

Part 2 of my long comic AFFECTED just wrapped up today. I am really proud of it -- at this moment, out of all the comics I could direct your attention to, this is the one I most think you should see. If you haven't read it before, it's a dark 'n' sexy meditation on the current state of America that manages to tie Craigslist prostitution, the Iraq War, urban decay, the power of violence, and Hollywood culture up into a neat little bow. If you have been reading, suffice it to say that the new pages are the best ones yet, and that they deliver the titular line to boot! Come on, like you haven't been curious to know why this thing is called what it's called!

I really hope everyone who visits my blog will go check this comic out: it's where all my theorizing and idea-spinning about comics gets a practical workout, and it's also where my heart is. I work my hands off for the criticism I post here, but I'd die for AFFECTED. So go look.

If you've been following along, the new pages are here; if you haven't checked in since last time I posted about it, start here; and if you're new to the whole thing, the beginning is right here. Go read, go enjoy.

Your Wednesday Sequence 30

The Great Adventure (1978), page 102 panels 4-10. Milo Manara.



My latest Robot 6 column spotlights one of my favorite cartoonists, Milo Manara, who in a lot of ways is also one of the most overlooked. Not commercially -- I mean, a lot of my favorite artists are fucking around in the world of 100-copy print runs -- but critically, because Manara's stuff (not the page above, but probably the majority of the other ones he's drawn over the course of a 40-year career) has such a prominent intersection with pornography. Only now is any of his work getting reprinted in the US, and boy are the books overpriced. Well, I thought I'd give you the chance to check out a great little slice of Manara comics absolutely free, and to read what I had to say about it to boot. Do so here.

Oh yeah, I'll hopefully be writing a big article on some Manara comics soon... once I figure out which ones to tackle.

SKNIL

Little later than usual this month, but here goes your list of worthwhile internet time-sinks. Wait, is that an oxymoron?



In the future comics will be divided into the categories of pre- and post-Color Engineering.

- I bet this is the best comic you'll read today: Frank King's early masterpiece/Little Nemo ripoff, Bobby Make-Believe.

- When I wrote this I also reread the Comics Comics roundtable on Al Columbia's Pim & Francie, a book that only looks more and more prescient as time goes on. I think the revelation (contained on this Inkstuds interview, I think) that the destructed drawings in that book weren't an affected conceit -- ie, they weren't purposefully tarnished but simply reproduced as they looked after being left around the house, torn up, whatever -- makes that book even more interesting.

- George Elkind's best yet is also the best thing anyone's written the quietly perfect Boy's Club series. Also I totally sold him that copy of Memories.

- Ed Piskor's new webcomic is gonna be good.

- Nina Stone does a better job of explaining why I don't like to read Warren Ellis comics than I ever could.

- Moebius who? If you wanna talk sick cartoonists, let's talk Titian. Open the image files for these two paintings of Diana and Actaeon in separate tabs and go back and forth between them. Classic myth boiled down to two indelible sequenced images, the fundamental core of comics. Look at how well the pictures rhyme with one another, how simply and beautifully they illustrate comics' basic logic of action and reaction. God damn.

- Of all the many great moments in the history of comedy, my current favorite is "Bugs and Elmer: A Symbolic Discourse", curated by Bill Boichel of Copacetic Comics. Go here and get ready to pop a neck-vein laughing.

- Blaise Larmee gives a lecture at the Center for Cartoon Studies. His "evil clone" of my boy Adam McIlwee's Lust Brigade blog also yields up some new drawings. Check 'em out before they disappear. And speaking of whom, here's a Larmee interview that probably not a lot of you saw. It's really interesting.

- Tucker Stone. Via Tucker Stone.

- Also via Tucker: a video that made the rounds on twitter a second ago, but is well worth preserving for posterity. I showed it to my sister and she goes "this is too intense I think." This is what the DC relaunch should have been like, oh SHIIIIIIIIIT

- James Romberger's article on the violence in recent Neal Adams comics is one of those ones where you go "yeah, I know!" multiple times while thinking about a topic that's never even occurred to you before. Meaning: it's really good.

- The Frank Santoro blog you've never seen.

- Missed this one: the always erudite and engaging Sean Witzke interviewed by Eric Messinger. (Eric also talked to me a while back if you didn't catch that one.)

- My boyz hold it down in the belly of the beast. #soproud

- Finally, I don't care what you think: my comic AFFECTED is getting hot as fuck, so you better hop aboard before it goes bananas in November.

I interviewed the Greatest Living Cartoonist...

... Gary Panter. It's up now at The Comics Journal. Far and away the best interview I've done. Go read.

Fighting Americans

Separated at birth:

Here's a Jack Kirby drawing of the Fighting American, a character he created after he got screwed out of Captain America and figured if the entire American comics industry was going to build itself up by copying him, he could do worse than ripping himself off.



Here's a detail from the astounding new Yuichi Yokoyama book, Color Engineering (much more on which soon). There's no way this is a coincidence.



I've often wondered about Yokoyama's stylistic similarity to Kirby, usually concluding that it must just be one of those things. I'm not sure how available Kirby's work is in Yokoyama's native Japan, and from what I understand he doesn't hold a particularly high place in the Japanese canon of comics either. But here's Japan's best cartoonist, Yokoyama, doing a straight-up Kirby quote. Now I'm thinking the perceived disconnect between Yokoyama's world and Kirby's is mainly in the way they're marketed: Kirby has the commercial empires of Marvel and DC pushing him, Yokoyama goes through one of the US's artiest publishers to get his work out here in the States. I read Yokoyama's drawing of a Kirby character as the kind of homage to the master that it seems like every American cartoonist performs at least once, as well as a simple, bold reading of Kirby himself. That stuff may be filling the millionaires' pockets today, but it's still as crazy and adventurous as it ever was. After this drawing, the spirit of Kirby hangs over the rest of Color Engineering, adding a welcome varnish of pop-comics sensibility to the stunning new work of one of the form's premier avant-gardists.

Your Wednesday Sequence 29

Love & Rockets: New Stories #4 (2011), page 89. Jaime Hernandez.



What they're all saying is totally true: Jaime's work in the new Love & Rockets is some of the best comics ever. Forget everything else you're reading right now (unless it's Yokoyama), and go get that comic, because it's just better. Seriously: in light of comics like the new Jaime's existence, all this coverage of the New 52 (hinky hink hink!) and whatever else just seems gauche as hell. This week everybody is talking about Jaime, so I thought I'd add my voice to the chorus by analyzing the gorgeous page above in the latest installment of my Robot 6 column. Check it out here. Starts like this:

I don’t think I’m advancing anything too controversial when I say that if there’s a Platonic ideal for the comic book page, it’s a piece of sequential art that works both as an assemblage of individual panels and as a single, unified artwork. This, of course, is a lot easier said than done. When gridded layouts are discarded to turn the page into a poster-style piece of op-art there’s always some readability being sacrificed, and the grid is all too often a vehicle for cartoonists to work inside without paying sufficient consideration to what sum their page’s parts are creating.

Jaime Hernandez squares that circle in the page above, a slice of comics that flows like fine wine from panel to panel but stands rock solid as a full-page unit. The basic conceit of the page is that it isn’t unified by a dual identity as one single picture or any fancy layout tricks, but an immediate, cohesive sense of motion that every panel supports completely. It’s not always beneficial for comics to be “pictures that move”, but Jaime is a classicist through and through, perhaps the purest one in comics right now. Every panel here is story information above all, a drawing that communicates something of substance as clearly and crisply as possible. That’s true of pretty much everything Jaime’s drawn for the past two decades, but on this page the story is bracingly simple, and every panel works toward a common goal: closing the perceived space between the characters inhabiting two separate frames. Read more

TCJ Review: Prince Valiant vol. 4: 1943-1944

In my most recent appearance over at The Comics Journal I banged out some serious praise for the latest volume of Hal Foster's masterwork Prince Valiant, newly reprinted by Fantagraphics. Prince Valiant is an interesting comic -- when I think about it I know abstractly that it has no case for being called the best comic ever, as it was for decades from the 1940s to the '70s or thereabouts. But whenever a new volume comes out I get so deeply lost in Foster's art and the romance of his stories and settings that I'm constantly thinking to myself "this is the best comic ever!" I guess I will have to conclude that Prince Valiant isn't NOT the best comic ever, and leave it at that. Or actually, I won't be leaving it at that, because I've got another 1500 words on it right here. Go read them.

DTU Interview: "J-Shasta"

Here are the facts:



This February I interviewed the current leading man of art-comix, Christopher "CF" Forgues, at the Hooded Utilitarian website. The comments section was closed because Frank Santoro had recently suggested to me that closed comments were generally a good idea, and because I hadn't learned to laugh at HU's semi-legendary pile-ons yet. Noah Berlatsky, who edited the interview, told me that closing comments "wasn't ideal", but was gracious enough to let me have my way. Other than that, I didn't catch any flack for it.

At least not for a while. Later in the month I received an email from a person or group of people called "VCR Ltd", using the email address "cfamalgamated". In a short, articulate, but strangely tongue-in-cheek message, they praised the interview while castigating me for closing comments. These days I usually throw emails like that one straight in the trash, but back then I was more open to indulging the internet and all the weirdness specific to its artier regions, so I responded. I can't say how glad I am that I did.

Though I've never met the pen pal who's in my email contacts as "VCR" but also messages me as "T-1000 Energy Savings" and most recently "Yellow5", I had a pretty good idea of who he, or maybe she, was. The recently shuttered Comets Comets website overseen by cartoonists Blaise Larmee and Jason Overby, while notable for its oblique, occasionally impenetrable approach to comics criticism, was perhaps most famous for its inflated comments threads, which took everything from advertorial spam comments to elementary-school poetics as fair game for discussions about the high-art status of the form. These threads tended to follow online conversation about Larmee and crew to other sites, inducing conniptions in editors and readers alike. The one exception was Noah Berlatsky himself, who ran a few deeply fascinating blog posts (including a swooning critical appreciation of Overby) by someone calling themselves "Cough Syrup" on his website early in the year, apparently in the mistaken belief that they were written by CF himself -- the chosen artistic idol of Comets Comets and its associated personalities. (UPDATE: Noah informs me in comments that it wasn't until after the pieces were posted that the identity mixup, quickly corrected, occurred.)

At the same breakfast with Frank Santoro during which he suggested I close comments on my CF interview, he told me he had discovered that "Cough Syrup" was the same person responsible for all the conceptual comments on Comets Comets, as well as a CF twitter account that had recently been revealed as the work of an impersonator. "I figured it all out," he said. "It's nobody, it's some kid from Louisville." Combine all this with the bizarre CF fan email and a comment from Cough Syrup on a link to the CF interview I posted to my website and I had a pretty solid idea of who I was communicating with, even if I didn't know their age, occupation, what they looked like, their level of involvement in comics, or even whether they were male or female -- I'm always careful to use gender-neutral pronouns when emailing with this person. There wasn't anybody else I knew of who was up to the same things as Cough Syrup (or JCorp, or VCR Ltd, or T-1000 Energy Savings, or whatever else they called themselves), and I enjoyed talking to them.

Then on Oscar night in March I came home from a party blasted on bath salts, and in the wee morning hours I discovered a new message from my mysterious correspondent, containing only the text "this me" and a link to the utterly phenomenal webcomic 1981. It was a revelation: not only did the page contain some of the most beautiful digital image-making I'd seen, it also carried a bold new sense of the computerized comic's habitation of physical space. 1981 spills out over the edges of a laptop-sized screen, leaving the reader to scroll around inside its 360-degree environment, following the diagonals and waves of its lines. More than a comic, it's a landscape to explore and discover, a piece of art to interact with physically as well as intellectually. When it came time to design a page for my own webcomic, Affected, there was no doubt in my mind as to who I needed to ask for guidance.

When I wrote about 1981 back in March, I emailed its creator to ask how I should refer to the author of the work and received the answer: "1981 is created by David Gray with conceptual oversight by JCorp." When I asked a few weeks ago how I should refer to the person I was interviewing, the reply was another "this me", followed by the name "J-Shasta". The implication is that Gray/JCorp/Cough Syrup is also White Shasta, a twitter and blogspot/tumblr user who hung around Comets Comets and who Blaise Larmee describes as "an anonymous person online whom I feel close to". When I mailed my pen pal a package of old comics I'd finished with, I was given the name "Minty Frech" as the recipient -- and a post office box in Louisville, Kentucky. It would appear Frank Santoro was right all along, and this artist who uses the internet itself as a medium is really just somebody from the heartland with a modem. But looking at 1981, as well as the various imagery posted on Comets Comets by JCorp and the spectacular "confession" written by the perpetrator of the CF twitter hoax, it's also clear that this is somebody with things of note to say. A few of them follow.



MATT SENECA: 1981 is definitely a unique comic. There isn't really anything else out there in the field right now that I can compare it to. Could you talk about your influences and what you wanted to achieve by making it?

J-SHASTA: I like the idea of suspension a lot. Vincent D'Onofrio's character in The Cell and Plato's world of forms, for instance. The hero and setting of the ideal human quality: spectral.

So if I had a goal it would be to create a world that one could fall into and become static. And that could be peaceful and liquid or totally alienating. Have you ever tried DMT? Just kidding.

A couple novels by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Pierre Guyotat that I read a few years ago really influenced the way I think about space or at least clarified thoughts I already had. I was looking at the video game Flashback some when I made that as well. I think in 1981 the characters are the images and they are twisted and become not just projections but objects within new projections. Not unlike you and me.

It's nice to think of abstract things as free zones of open possibilities but also as mechanized parts of an unstoppable progression, or in the case of 1981, a regression, where maybe the origin story turns out to be a curse.... if that makes sense to anyone but myself.

For the record I consider it unfinished.

MS: That idea of image as character is really interesting, because it gets at a core truth of comics, where we're asked to assign personalities to cartooned symbols (ie the circle and dots and squiggles that make up Charlie Brown are neurotic and depressive, et cetera). Is that a concept you came to through interacting with the comics medium, or some other way?

J-S: Less comics and more encountering conceptual art, performance art, minimalism and experimental film in college where the aesthetic representation of raw material overwhelms any kind of action or narrative or illustration of human desires...and yet, there are the desires, inside us! 'I wish I was somewhere else' for instance. Or 'I want to kill this artist'.

The vacuum abhors itself, it doesn't need me. And so it is a better character or at least a better actor than me. Because it is perfectly concealed. Without flaw. How lucky.

Wrestling with imagery that gives very very little and does not instantly impress made me value and be more aware of the process of how and why I imagined what I did in response to all kinds of stimuli, not just art. Consciousness being the vigilant animator of life.

I guess in high school I realized that investigating interesting music and movies and books to find that perfect level of being enthralled that came so much easier as a younger person was like chasing mirages and after a while you confuse the chase with the goal and yes, your things play you. Ideas too. There are many ideas that I have embraced and then shed as they lost their aura. Or maybe they shed me?
So, collecting but also file sharing and image viewing online. One thing creates the frame of reference for the next thing, as actively as a person interprets your dream for you. This is just memory colliding with the eternal present, right. I have no firm ground to stand on but the sands of time that move right through me. That's the name of an ironic post-rock revival band from 2014 that is wildly unpopular.

Maybe it's a tangent but I will say that if the Information is anything like its hosts, it does not want to be free.

And 1981 is a little 'dead inside' compared to the way engaged readers easily empathize with Tin Tin or Christopher Robin or Richie Rich or Calvin or Archie or Jason Fox. I guess there's a heart down below. If people enjoy the site/comic I imagine it's because they can see it.



MS: How did you get into comics? Can you sketch out the path that led from your first experiences with the form to creating 1981?

J-S: I discovered a worn and tattered Mickey Mouse comic on Christmas Eve in my great-grandparents' magic basement when I was 5. By the time I entered kindergarten 9 months later, it had been destroyed by mold. Comics will never replace that singular night.

If I work till I die I would like to build a giant prison one million panels tall by one million panels wide by one million panels deep of nothing but robotically mechanized mirrors and deep inside there would be a hole and overlooking the hole would be a burning tower with a solitary switch on a white plastic plate that when flipped would open all the windows and the radiation of the sun would bounce off every mirror at such an angle that the perfect image would be centered on a blue orb that floats above the hole and it would be swallowed.

MS: Sick. There's a significant push and pull between traditional craft and its absence in most of the work by Co-Mix contributors, and yours seems as much a part of that as anything else. What's your take on pictorial craft, how important do you think the painterly (for lack of a better word) values championed by Frank Santoro, among others, are to making comics?

J-S: Thanks for the compliment! I think Frank wrote a compelling conspiracy theory about outdated ideas of the harmonic balance between chaos and order in his essay series for TCJ. I enjoyed following his descent into madness!

This being said, I really like illustrators like Harry Clarke and Lynd Ward. Craft is really just a matter of how precisely you wish or are able to depict your ideas and is not strictly related to technical finesse, in my opinion. Naturally, this can involve being imprecise or sloppy or glitchy if that helps you to communicate a particular idea: such as the deterioration of the image, the limits of perception, how cool things look when they are acidy, or any other number of hi-concept themes.
Lo-fi fanatics are as grating as anyone else. It is 2011. The future may look more like an oscillating Grape Shasta rhombus that is shattering apart in infinite hi-res drips than something less computery looking uh, I guess... whewftah!

MS: How did you create the images that make up 1981?

J-S: I created 1981 using Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 and MS Paint. I sketched at least half of the individual images beforehand using ballpoint pen on bar napkin or note paper to get an idea of the progression of movement and scale. The results are a mixture of freehand drawing, default shapes, cutting and pasting, and other fairly rudimentary image editing techniques. And I prayed a lot obviously.



MS: How essential is the digital medium, the online format, to your artistic process? Do you think you could make something as interesting as 1981 without a computer?

J-S: It is not essential but digital space is shaping my brain my image my voice and perceptions in only the newest and freshest 2.0+ ways imaginable so until we break through 0 and 1 to -1 or ∞ or whatever lies in wait that can be represented by a couple squiggly lines, I feel compelled to acknowledge the present horizon that we are collectively cresting like a pack of lemmings wearing sunglasses and drinking Surge and playing a computer game where we control the livelihood of adorable avatars of ourselves that is named Lemmings. But I like all kinds of media, even the old variety.

There is no reason for me to hang my hat on 1981. I was not even born then for one thing. With or without a computer whatever I do next will be better. And better and better. Don't u feel like we r all improving?

[When you say without a computer I take that strictly to mean that no editing or finishing is done on a computer and the internet is not used to share documentation of the event/object. Is this even possible? At this point I would have to be a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it to escape the outstretched fist of the web. But like anyone, my dreams are art and they are much better than 1981. Or the real world in general at times. I am sorry that they are not for sale.]

MS: Right now we have a steadily increasing number of comics that interact with digital processes on some level or another. How do you think digital tools and the internet are going to change the comics medium as a whole?

J-S: In the future more comics will appear shiny.



MS: You might be best known for impersonating CF on twitter for a few months (which you then wrote my favorite blog post of the year about). That post, though, didn't really give a clear reason as to why you began impersonating him in the first place. Care to tell us now?

J-S: Over the last couple years, Chris Forgues transformed from respected artist to pied piper to icon. I wanted to both reanimate and re-martyrize CF's sacred digital corpse using an uncomfortable social media platform. If that is not comic(s/al), I do not know what is.

MS: You've contributed various images and designs to the Co-Mix blog. What attracted you about that particular site and group of people?

J-S: I originally read the graphic novella Young Lions as a ghost story. Since then it has been revealed that there really was a 'Holly' and apparently he died last summer. I believe in resurrection and so I attempted to commune with the survivors and revive his lost spirit. It's still unclear if these efforts were worth it. Only God knows.

MS: You've also told me you're the person responsible for most of the "conceptual comments" on that blog and the articles about it and its participants that have popped up on other sites. Those things have fascinated me for a while, and infuriated plenty of Important Comics People -- what is the idea behind them?

J-S: Between October 2010 and late spring 2011, I contributed over 400 comments under various aliases to the Co-Mix (aka CometsComets) weblog. During this period of time I commented anonymously at many other web sites under posts related to the Co-Mix crew, at times criticizing those characters in a very hostile manner.

It is hard to choose one single motivating factor behind all of this activity, but one of them is the spike in popularity of 4Loko. The other is a desperate reaction to the factors that made the death of NASA and SETI possible. Basically, I was driven by the fear of silence.

MS: Do you know why Comets Comets shut down?

J-S: Gosh Matt, I just want to go Home.

You can check out 1981 here, and J-Shasta's comics-as-criticism posts on the Hooded Utilitarian here.

UPDATE: conceptual commenter SCHOOL's Blogspot profile yields a webcomic (here) that appears to date back to 2001.

Kirby's Taint

ha ha, I know right?



Yes, Jack Kirby is amazing. I love his comics, and I love the frenetic, idea-driven style of comic he created and eventually perfected. What I don't love is one specific outgrowth of his influence. Before Kirby, the Platonic ideals of action comics art were Hal Foster and Alex Raymond, both essentially realist figure artists. A massive part of Kirby's genius was his arrival at a way of cartooning the human figure in motion, using foreshortening, large areas of spotted black, and his own titanic style to create a convincing simulation of reality that owed precious little to realist anatomy. That's not to say Kirby didn't understand realist values -- his early comics testify to at least as good an eye for the figure as the average Golden Age artist, and he's on record about the lessons he learned from both Foster and Raymond.

But the artists who inherited Kirby's sphere of greatest influence -- that is, superhero comics -- had a new ideal to work from. Kirby's followers are almost uniformly victims of his success. No action artist since has assembled a cartooned style that presents dynamic figure drawings as successfully, and the Foster/Raymond fallback of inserting realism where dynamism falls short has warped into something that simply doesn't work. Rather than wedding realist, workable anatomy to Kirbyist gesture, composition, and dynamism, the common solution seems to be a combination of Kirby anatomical distortion (the over-muscled men and blow-up women stereotypical of superhero comics) to more realist, observation framing.

Example:




The tiny head, lack of neck, thick wrists, squat posture, and tree trunk legs work in Kirby's version because it's a sharply foreshortened action shot -- not only are some body parts hurtling toward the camera and some thrown back, the anatomy is less likely to be noticeable as non-realist (which it is) because we're paying attention to the pose. And the impact of the picture is actually enhanced by seeing the figure thrown out of proportion -- it's like hearing a musical dischord, it puts you right on the edge of your seat.

The modern version (example above by Olivier Coipel, who I actually think is better than most and don't intend to call out specifically) pulls from all Kirby's anatomical distortions and none of his dynamism. A completely static pose is only made more problematic by the obvious lack of attention to realist anatomy. Though Kirby's version is much more broadly cartooned, it's a far more convincing piece of artwork because it's fully aware of what it's doing. It has an internal logic that the work done in his shadow lacks, with its strange combination of observational framing and dynamic figure. Kirby's characters always moved, and as such they were designed for constant motion. Freeze them in place and they fall apart, as today's superhero art is showing on a weekly basis.

My advice to the modern action artist: go look at some Hal Foster comics before you get to Kirby. We can't all be visionaries, you know.

Your Wednesday Sequence 28

Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days (2009), page 23. Al Columbia.



I wrote my latest Robot 6 column on the page above. If that's a gag strip, and its action certainly mimics one, it is friggin' black humor. But look at it! Al Columbia at his queasy finest! I really got going when I talked about it too, so click this link to read all the thoughts on comics as a wildly inaccurate, non-realist ("unrealist"?) tool for representing reality it brought up in me. Is sequential art the medium of visionaries? I think so. First paragraph below:

Of course, no matter how realistically drawn or meticulously framed they get, no comics can even come close to accurately depicting reality; or even approximating it, really. When the human eye takes in the work of comics’ great photorealists — Alex Raymond, Neal Adams, Alex Ross — the message it sends to the brain speaks of a certain closeness to the look of the real, but the first thing it tells us is always that we’re looking at a drawing. This is why comics seem somehow lacking whenever they position themselves in competition with film: what that medium depicts is reality, stripped of a third dimension and re-presented at a later date. Comics, which can never escape their fundamental identity as works produced by human hands, are a medium of approximation, forever suggesting the existence of their content, never crossing the line into literal reproduction of anything that’s actually happened in the real world. Read more

"Hipsters"

I made a new comic and posted it here. Part art-comix, part autobio, part illustrated response to the new feature film "Drive", which is amazing but not as good as its soundtrack. (Holy shit, that soundtrack you guys.) It goes way rougher and cartoonier than I usually do, which was a fun change -- brought on in part by my current reading project of all the Kramers Ergot back issues, and in part by happening to have some Frank Quitely 2020 Visions comics sitting on my drawing table for the past few days. Also drinking while drawing. Anyway, the thing is called "Hipsters" and it's about hipsters, which seems like the most appropriate topic to make an art-comic about. It's really pretty. Go look at it!

Foster's Physiognomic Faces

I started in on volume 4 of Fantagraphics' new Prince Valiant reprint series yesterday. Best long-running serial action comic of all time? You better come with something Kirby if you want to convince me otherwise. Prince Valiant might just be the comic that held the "greatest of all time" title in the popular opinion for the longest period of time, and while I can't really make the argument for that, it still does what it did just as well as when it was first published, and what it did is what action comics (including pretty much everything superhero) have tried to do since -- a time period that covers the entire history of the comic book format. As far as beautifully drawn escapist entertainment goes, I literally can't think of anything better.

Hal Foster's comics also have more of a basis in high realist portraiture than just about anything that came after. Prince Valiant builds impressively fleshed-out characters for an action comic, and a lot of the heavy lifting is accomplished by Foster's breathtakingly observed close-up shots, which basically paste personality traits onto the faces they depict. In itself that isn't so special -- it's one of the things cartooning's designed to do, after all -- but it's a much more difficult task to accomplish given the level of realism Foster worked at. In a Foster comic every face is a construction of active muscles beneath layers of skin and (often) facial hair, themselves covered over by all manner of ornamental hats and helmets and headdresses... but the distinct features, as well as the characteristics they're meant to communicate, shine through regardless.

Given the globetrotting-adventure aspect of Prince Valiant, it's inevitable that representatives of many nations and races are given the full-panel portrait treatment, which means another impressive if sometimes slightly problematic aspect of Foster's artistry ends up in the spotlight. The way he constructed those faces varied depending on the heritage of the individual he was drawing; not so remarkable when oe character's European and another Asian, but a fascinating and refreshing testament to the consideration the artist put into his strip when the differences between a German face and a Swedish one make it onto the page. The downside of this is that Foster did a good amount of tiptoeing along the edge of racial caricature, but his emphasis on realistic physical construction kept him a great deal more reigned in than most of his contemporaries. (Except when Prince Valiant went to Africa, oh boy.) Anyway, I've been having a great time looking at how well Foster nails the physical differences between his pan-European cast -- differences too subtle for most cartoonists' styles to do much more than barely hint at. And honestly, there's lessons to be had from the way he mixes caricature into realism for his less savory pictures of non-European characters too. So with that said, below is a gallery of Foster faces and their corresponding nationalities. Check it out.



English (this was the English-Canadian Foster's default facial type for "noble" Europeans of indeterminate background)



Italian



Tunisian



Turkish (ahem)



West African (double ahem, though I suppose Foster deserves credit for keeping his caricatured Africans in the background. This image, printed at about the size of the head on a dime, is the biggest size he drew one at in Prince Valiant. Which is a problem in and of itself, but one preferable to the kind of racist grotesquerie cartoonists reguarly indulged in in the 1940s...)



German



Palestinian



Norwegian



Finnish (I know, weird right?)



French



Scottish



Mongolian (considering the "Yellow Menace"-styled caricatures of Asian faces that were de rigeur in comics during the World War II years, this is a marvel of restraint.)

So there you go. Hal Foster kill them all.

Your Wednesday Sequence 27

Wolverine #3 (1982), page 9. Frank Miller.



Yes folks, it's Miller Time on the latest installment of my Robot 6 column. The obvious choice for a Frank Miller sequence would have been one of his meticulously choreographed fight scenes, but try saying something original about one of those besides "damn son, this is meticulously choreographed!" So instead I chose this page from Miller's most high profile drawn-but-not-written comic, the original Wolverine miniseries, a collab with the ever-verbose Chris Claremont. I riffed a little on the heavy Japanese influence visible in Miller's approach to the sequence, and how well it deals with the problem of Claremont's wordy writing, which according to the comments section elevates this page to "literary cinema"! Holy shit! Anyway click here to read it, or if you're really that on the the fence about the whole thing, here's a paragraph to get you going:

For all that Frank Miller deserves as much credit as any other American cartoonist for bringing Japanese comics to these shores, the intersections between his own comics and manga are somewhat surprisingly limited. It’s obvious from a flip through a vintage Miller comic that he’s fascinated by the work of Goseki (Lone Wolf and Cub) Kojima and Katsuhiro (Akira) Otomo — but beyond that powerful one-two punch, and maybe a bit of Golgo 13‘s Takao Saito, the chain of Japanese influence on Miller’s prime-period work is either subtle or nonexistent. Which doesn’t have to be any kind of problem; after all, the Miller of the early-mid 1980s was conducting a balancing act with the cartooning mannerisms of three continents, unifying the systems of visual codes used by comics from America, Europe, and Japan into a single style before anyone else even thought to do it. But it’s nice to see Miller go for a more purely Japanese moment on this page, one that calls back a lot further into that artistic tradition than his usual action manga debt-paying goes. Read more

Blaze of Youth

One of the things that separates the Great Cartoonists, capital jee capital see, from the rest of the great cartoonists milling around the comics industry, is the quality of their ephemera. Comics has enough one-off masterpieces of various lengths to keep you busy for a decade, but finding markably lesser work created by those masterpieces' authors that still has something of substance to offer can get pretty difficult. I'm talking about comics like McCay's Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, Tezuka's Astro Boy, Ware's Quimby the Mouse... work that forms the lower echelons of a master's canon but remains essential for what it tells us about its artist. To cut to the chase, I'm talking about comics like Jaime Hernandez's 1983 short "Hopey", which succeeds as a piece of comics on its own merits but is far more interesting taken with the benefit of hindsight, as a pivotal step in Jaime's multi-decade career.



More than any other comic Jaime ever drew, "Hopey" feels youthful. As far as the story goes, that's got its ups and downs: it gains plenty from the palpable energy imbued in all Jaime's "Locas" stories, but it's dogged by the cloying cuteness the artist couldn't quite drop until 1987 or thereabouts (which, not coincidentally, is when he started producing real masterworks as well as fascinating curios). Where the feel of exuberance and freedom really benefits the comic is in the art, which for the first time ditches the Noel Sickles/Steve Ditko illustrative bent of Jaime's earliest work for the length of an entire story, stripping away excess linework to center itself around the graphic boldness of black shapes set in white space. (Footnote here, cause I can't resist: why does nobody ever talk about the numerous intersections between Jaime's work during this period, when Love & Rockets was the alternative comic, and that of Paul Smith, who was drawing the superhero comic, X-Men, right at the same time?)

There's a massive sense of excitement at play in this comic, the unhinged glee of a kid with a new toy. Jaime's early sci-fi stories follow in the mold of Roy Crane and Bernard Krigstein, forever searching for a way to put a single line in place of many, to imply texture or drapery with a few stray marks. As his skill set grew, though, more and more Alex Toth leaked into his pages, which began leaving orchestrated areas of linework behind in favor of single, contorting inked areas that impled more and more of a panel's contents. "Hopey" sustains this approach for a full eight pages, using hatched linework almost exclusively as a gray tone and relying on sparse, solid blacks and whites to put over pictorial information. It's an approach that Jaime has been refining ever since -- by this point he's got it down to such a virtuosic system that it's tough to argue the contention that he's the greatest B&W cartoonist of all time, even if you don't agree with it. Here, though, it's a novelty, and watching Jaime piece together a beginning, middle, and end without deviating from it is like watching a talented amateur walk a tightrope. The moments or trepidation and hitches in balance are what make it so exciting.



The most immediate advantage of Jaime's chiaroscuro approach is its potential for high drama, which is taken direct, frequent advantage of in "Hopey": this comic is lit like a Fritz Lang movie, full of sprawling shadow blots and razors of white light cutting through black. It's a far cry from the unerringly honest Southern California lux perpetua of Jaime's current work, and it overdramatizes the slice-of-life content regularly, but the dizzying smack of a comic in which a car passing by a few kids walking down the street lights up the panels like an atomic explosion is undeniable. Just about every drawing in this story is a new chance taken, an idea about minimalism and how best to show something with as little as possible. It doesn't always work (as in the panel above), but there's a palpable joy of drawing at play here. You can almost picture Jaime (then all of 24 years old) at the drawing table, excitedly figuring out the drastic effect that the next miniscule change in light source is going to have on the way he draws his characters and their surroundings. Or at least I can, cause I feel the same thing all the time. Tonal appropriateness comes in a distant second to the experiment of the thing in "Hopey", which sees an artist weighing the tools that would eventually lead him to stylistic mastery for the first time.



It does all come together and work in a few places, though, and when it does it's pretty spectacular. Seeing the young Jaime's enthusiasm for dynamic shots and impactful sequencing (he hadn't shaken off all the influence of genre action comics yet, not by a long shot) combined with the older Jaime's poised sense of reserve and economy is pretty breathtaking. The steady balance in how the bright-to-black fade above is orchestrated, or the rhyming areas of horizontal white blotching on the car and vapor trails below -- these are the building blocks of something much greater, an artist spinning out the most assured work of his career to date, discovering it on the page, unfiltered and not yet put in any kind of practical working order.



"Hopey" veers back and forth between masterful and mediocre time after time in eight pages, which probably would have made for a frustrating read at the time. But reading it almost thirty years after the fact, with one of the greatest bodies of work in comics history rolled out in its wake, makes that exact inconsistency the joy of the thing. The gusto put into panels that miss the mark as often as they connect is part of the fun. Musical analogies are always apt when you're discussing Jaime's vintage work, and this story reads like a demo tape or early album by an iconic band listens: perhaps not so satisfying on its own, but the moments when everything locks into place and calls back to high points yet to come are a thrill all their own. "Hopey" is the place where Jaime first really gave a workout to the tools he'd later use to do this



and just recently used to do this



and seeing that is something you can't get anywhere else.