 |
|
|
Opus 158: Opus
158 (April 3, 2005). We take a lingering look at the graphic
novel The Long Haul, stump
for Frank Miller's "Sin
City" flick, point the finger of scorn at the philistine Richard
Goldstein, and review a full half-dozen new comic book titles. Topics
this time and their order are: Nous
R Us -Manga bust, Pekar's latest, Langridge vying for Reuben, Syrian
censorship, library heroism in Iraq, Tintin squeezed out by greed; Funnybook Movies -Wonder Woman, Fantastic Four, X-Men; Comic Strip Watch -some anniversaries,
Dennis is six but only for a day, the shocking commonplace in 9 Chickweed Lane, Lynn Johnston's dentistry, and an award for Frazz; Editoonery -The
winner in The Week's first
annual competition and what's good and what's dubious about it, Ann Telnaes leaves TMS and Scott
Bateman gives up on King; New
Yorker News -an assortment of comments about magazine cartooning
by cartoon editor Robert Mankoff and others, and a new piece of visual
comedy in the magazine; Feetnit -revisiting some topics from previous
outings: Cho's Shanna and what it means for U.S. foreign policy, Trudeau's
artistry in his Hunter Thompson tribute, and flacid reasoning by popcult
critic Goldstein, who, it turns out, couldn't find any examples of Dole's
withered arm being cartooned (even though he says it happened "often");
More Memorable Sin -Frank
Miller's Sin City moves; Funnybook
Fan Fare -Reviews of The New
West, Alexa, Black Panther, The Expatriate, Superman: Strength,
and Belly Button Comics; Book Marquee
-The Long Haul reviewed.
Finally, our usual Friendly Reminder: Remember, when you get to the
Members' Section, the useful "Bathroom Button" (also called
the "print friendly version") of this installment that can
be pushed for a copy that can be read later, at your leisure while enthroned.
Without further adieu- NOUS R US For the first time since converting to monthly magazine
format ten issues ago, the Comics
Buyer's Guide for May doesn't have a cover devoted to promoting
a movie based upon funnybook superheroes; instead, we have the Green
Lantern. ... The manga boom may be going bust. Publisher's
Weekly reports that ADV, a Houston-based manga publisher, has laid
off as many as 40 staff from its manga division because the marketplace
is saturated with the product: "Anyone can see there's only so
much shelf space available [in bookstores] for manga," said DVD
president John Ledford, "-we've adjusted our schedule to keep pace
with the [limited] opportunities." ... Harvey
Pekar's latest graphic novel commemorates his surreal experience
as the subject of a movie, American Splendor: Our Movie Year ($16.95
from Ballantine); I haven't seen it yet. And
here, from Fantagraphics, comes the news that Roger Langridge, whose Fred
the Clown is a masterful cartooning performance, has been nominated
for the Comic Book Division Reuben Award in the annual award fest of
the National Cartoonists Society. Fred is a "heartbreakingly funny"
masterpiece of sight gags and whimsy, and if Langridge gets this award,
which he richly deserves, he might continue to produce comic books instead
of taking up some endeavor that will make a living for him. As I've
said before, to experience Langridge is to experience comics as high
art. Don't miss him. Or them. His books are still available from www.fantagraphics.com.
Cartoonists in Syria, like those in many totalitarian countries, are often
persecuted if they express views critical of the regime in power. Ali
Farzat says his work is not officially banned, but no newspaper editor
is willing to chance publishing his cartoons, many of which are brutally
critical of authority figures. Ali once published a satirical magazine,
reports Dan Isaacs of BBC News. Launched in 2000 during a brief period
of greater freedom of expression following the death of President Hafez
al-Assad, it was "the first private publication to have been published
in over 40 years of Baathist rule." It was banned three years ago.
"I went too far for them," Ali said; "the government
issued a resolution, and within one hour they had closed my newspaper
and my office and taken away my printing license." The Syrian government
owns and controls all media, and foreign publications are censored as
they enter the country. But relaxation may be in the offing when the
present Ministry of Information re-evaluates the current press regulations.
One journalist who was imprisoned in 2003 for five months because he
wrote an article that embarrassed the authorities said: "Officials
who believed they could control the flow of information are now realizing
that it's impossible"-particularly in the Internet Age. Said Isaacs:
"The tide of information flooding into Syria is unstoppable."
Alia
Muhammad Baker, the head librarian of Basra, Iraq, is the heroine of
two new children's books, one of which, by cartoonist Mark Alan Stamaty, is a graphic novel. The British forces left the
city after conquering it, and the library was left unprotected. Baker,
with the aid of neighboring shopkeepers and friends, quietly removed
about 70 percent of the library's collection, according to Eden Ross
Lipson in the New York Times, and stored the books in
a restaurant next door just in time to avoid a mysterious fire which
destroyed much of the library a few days later. Baker's rescue adventure
is entitled Alia's Mission: Saving the Books of Iraq by
Stamaty. Another book, The Librarian
of Basra: A True Story from Iraq, is a more conventional illustrated
children's book by Jeanette Winter. In
Belgium, comics are "an integral part of the country's culture,"
according to Susan Wilander at Expatica.com: "Over half the books
printed in Belgium are comic books. That means a new comic book is published
every day by an industry that supports around 600 professional artists."
Foremost among these is doubtless the late George Remi, whose creation
of Tintin in January 1929 probably did much, over the ensuing years,
to establish a cultural cache for comics. Understandably, Remi's nephew
is upset that a recently mounted exhibition, "Made In Belgium,"
does not include anything by Herge (Remi's pen name, made by reversing
his initials and giving them a French pronunciation). The famed cartoonist's
second wife controls Herge's estate, and she and her new husband, an
Englishman named Nick Rodwell, could not reach a financial agreement
with Dexia Art Center which had hoped to have a section in the exhibition
devoted to Herge. So the show, spread over six floors of the Center,
went on without Tintin, perhaps Belgium's most famous personage internationally.
The nephew says he and his sister are "outraged" by the apparent
greed of Rodwell, who, Remi claims, "wants to turn Tintin into
a Disney style empire and anyone who gets in the way is crushed."
He wants the Belgians to know that not all the Herge family is so grasping,
and he has appealed to his step-aunt to rethink the situation. Funnybook
Movies. He made his name, initially, with Buffy the Vampire
Slayer, and now Joss Whedon turns
to another female warrior as he signs to direct the impending Warner
Bros. celluloid enactment of DC's Wonder
Woman, saying, "Wonder Woman is the most iconic female heroine
of our time, but in a way, no one has met her yet. What I love most
about icons is finding out what's behind them, exploring the price of
their power." The task is daunting because of the dismal showing
at the box office of "Catwoman" and "Elektra," which
seems to suggest female superheroes aren't as potent as their male counterparts,
tv's "Alias" to the contrary notwithstanding. They have yet
to find an actress to fill out WW's spangled bustier. The Fantastic Four movie, due in theaters
on July 8, is hoping to overcome a long history of failure and frustration.
Distributor 20th Century Fox is committed to at least one
sequel and hopes for a franchise; more than 60 companies have merchandising
contracts-despite the movie-making disappointments that have dogged
the foursome for decades, stretching back into the 1980s when Stan Lee
was laboring mightily in Hollywood to get his brain children translated
up to the big screen. The campy 1993 effort produced by Roger Corman
was the only tangible result; manufactured just as the company's film
rights were about to expire, it was never released it was so bad. And
director Peyton Reed left the current enterprise two years ago. Then
along came Pixar's astonishing superhero family, "The Incredibles,"
which looked like a parody of the Fantastic Four and which captured
much of the spirit of the vintage team-causing the FF filmmakers to
alter their product, even cutting a scene that was too much like one
in the Pixar movie. Matthew
Vaughn takes Bryan Singer's place as director of the third X-Men movie; Singer, who did the first two mutant movies, opted out
to re-launch the Warner Bros.' Superman franchise; "X-Men 3"
is slated for a May 2006 release. ... Thomas Haden Church, who played
the womanizing ignoramus in "Sideways," has been cast as the
villain in "Spider-Man 3," but he will play a new nemesis,
as yet unidentified, not, apparently, from the roster of Spidey's comic
book bad guys. ANNIVERSARIES: Dave Whamond's Reality Check,
an off-beat syndicated panel cartoon that habitually twists common phrases
and everyday images for a skewed view of the world, is ten. ... And
celebrating its mere fifth anniversary is Soup
to Nutz, the grossly outrageous strip in which, it sez here, "family
values" usually refers to a coupon booklet, by Rick
Stromoski, who will take office as President of the National Cartoonists
Society when it meets this spring in an undisclosed place at an undisclosed
time. Comic Strip Watch. On Monday, March 14, Chuck Wilson, a newspaper reader
in Everett, Washington, phoned the office of the local paper, the Daily Herald, in alarm. "Have you
looked at Dennis the Menace today,"
he cried. "He's turning six! He's supposed always to be five-and-a-half."
Well, yes and no. Dennis has a birthday every year-on or about March
14, which is the birthday of Dennis' creator, Hank Ketcham -and it's always his sixth birthday. But the next day,
he goes back to being five-and-a-half. Reassured by the Herald's columnist, Julie Muhlstein, who had contacted promotion manager
Rose McAllister at King Features, which distributes Dennis, Wilson breathed a sigh of relief.
He reads two papers every day and is an avid peruser of the comics pages
in each. But Dennis is not
his favorite; 9 Chickweed Lane
is. And
changes continue to roll out of Brooke
McEldowney's exquisitely rendered strip,
named for the address of the address of the place where Juliette
Burber, her daughter Edda, and the grandmother live. But they all don't
live there anymore. Several months ago, Edda won a place in a professional
ballet company and went to the Big City (New York, presumably) to pursue
her career. Her cat, the Siamese Solange, went with her; and Amos, the
boy who's followed her everywhere all their lives, also made the trip.
I read Chickweed Lane every day (on the Web at www.comics.com), but I must've
been out-of-town for a week or some such excuse because I missed when
Edda moved in with Seth, her male dancing partner. And then, slowly-as
I began to realize that they lived together-I also realized that Seth
is gay. Given the panic that anything vaguely unconventional incites
among newspaper readers, I was surprised (1) that McEldowney's syndicate,
United Feature, permitted such behavior and (2) that I had heard no
outcry about any of it. After all, McEldowney vaulted over two presumably
insurmountable taboos: he has an unmarried couple living together, and
one of them is a homosexual. Admittedly, these things happen all the
time these days, but not in the funnies. So I asked him if there'd been
any manifest outrage among Chickweed readers and how he had divulged Seth's sexual preference.
Here's what he said on March 24: "I
have received, out of a bundle of very pleased letters about new direction
for Chickweed and Edda and so forth, two notes
from readers displeased that Seth is gay. They have both said they will
not read Chickweed again.
There was one note from a fan who worried that Edda might not realize
he's gay, and wished that she be warned. About what, I'm not sure. Frankly,
I don't think the kind of reader who would object to such things would
have been a devoted Chickweed fan in the first place. A little
while back, I established that Edda would be sharing rent with her new
dance partner in the ballet company until she finds her own digs. I
never even perceived a morality issue in this. When I was studying at
Juilliard, many students shared apartments and rents. Edda, of course,
is being paid handsomely for her services, but finding an apartment
is still rough at times. So she stays at Seth's place and splits the
rent. (Obviously, this will in time become informally permanent.) "The
main thing about Seth, I believe, is that he is not an issue, a statement,
an object for controversy. He is just Seth, and his homosexuality is
just part of the package that makes up his personality. I think he's
a wonderful character, the kind who cares for his friends, worries if
Edda's out late, makes sure she's getting a balanced diet, has his own
friends, and falls in love at the drop of a hat. He also is the influence
that wants Edda and Amos to get back together. He's a romantic. There
should be no issue in that. I think I haven't heard much about it because
I rather slipped him in under the radar. As I say, he's not an issue.
I never used the words gay or homosexual in the strip. He was obvious.
However, soon I believe an interview I did with The Advocate will focus entirely on the
issue of Seth as a homosexual character in a comic strip. I suppose
I could hear more about it after that. Frankly, I don't care. He's a
good character, and I have no intention of running around, changing
things to appease features editors. People are exceedingly dirty-minded,
the moral paragons most of all. If they had it their way, we'd be running
away from our own knees (Spike Milligan's image)." As
you might imagine, I agree with and applaud everything McEldowney says
here. Ditto his visuals in the strip, which continue to be among the
most imaginative on the comics page. Apart from regularly depicting
his characters from inventive angles (which maneuver is often, itself,
the gag that day), he's never content with the ordinary. If the story
demands a day's worth of talking heads, you may be sure that McEldowney
will fill his four panels that day with four completely different views
of the discussants, one of which, at least, will be from a highly unusual
perspective. Imagination, visual imagination. We so seldom see it so
frequently exercised to such effective lengths as we do in 9 Chickweed Lane.
At
the University of Toronto, Lynn
Johnston and her dentist husband Ron, a graduate of the institution,
were honored April 2 with an award of distinction for "putting
a human face" on dentistry. Johnston's strip, For
Better or For Worse, concerns the doings of a family the father
of which is a dentist. Said Johnston: "[This] recognition is especially
meaningful to me because it is an honor I share with my husband. Running
a dental practice may appear to be a solo endeavor, but as most dentists
know, a spouse's support is a valuable asset." The dean of the
University's dental school said, "Although Lynn Johnston is not
a dentist herself, her work has helped Canadians see the person behind
the profession and made people less fearful about visiting a dentist's
office." I don't remember many sequences in the strip taking place
in the dentist's office, but the recognition is nice anyhow. Frazz, a comic strip set in an elementary
school whose title character is the janitor, received the 2005 Wilbur
Award from the Religion Communications Council for excellence in communicating
values, ethics and religious themes in secular media. Frazz won it in 2003, too. The lead character
is a role model to the student body in the school where he mops the
floors, whistling Beethoven as he works. The kids come to him for advice-and,
sometimes, just to spout off. Here's a youngster talking to Frazz about
Valentine's Day: "So I found these Valentine cards at the store
... they said, 'To my one and only' ... And they came in boxes of twelve
... math is weird," he finishes; and Frazz, studying the kid, says,
"I know a weirder subject." EDITOONERY Clay Bennett
(Christian Science
Monitor) won the John Fischetti
Award for editorial cartooning, which carries a cash prize of $5,000.Bennett's winning entry shows American
soldiers in the classic Iwo Jima flag-raising pose, propping up a house
of cards with "Iraq" on the back of each card-the sort of
visual metaphor at which Bennett is particularly adept. This is the
second time Bennett has collected the Fischetti (named affectionately
for Chicago editoonist John Fischetti); Bennett also won in 2001. The
contest-sponsored by Columbia College in Chicago-also gave honorable
mentions to Steve Breen (San Diego Union-Tribune)
and Nick Anderson (Courier-Journal, Louisville). The March 18 issue of The Week magazine, my favorite, contained a dandy 20-page insert announcing
the results of its second annual Opinion Awards, which, this year, include
editorial cartooning for the first time. The editors of the magazine
believe they are uniquely constituted to assess "the vitality,
relevance, and coherence" of the nation's commentators because
they survey every day the news and opinion columns of the national press
in order to assemble each edition of their magazine, which is, topic-by-topic,
a summary of the week's events. And they're doubtless correct in their
self-evaluation. In the political cartooning category, Tom
Toles (Washington
Post) got the nod ahead of Chip Bok (Beacon
Journal, Akron, Ohio), Steve Kelley (New
Orleans Times-Picayune), Mike Luckovich (Atlanta
Journal-Constitution), and Gary Markstein (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel). Other opinion-monger winners were Peter
Beinart, editor of The New Republic,
and, as Advocate of the Year (on a single issue, in this case, civil
liberties and national security), syndicated columnist Jonathan Turley.
The trio of bloggers who drove Dan Rather out of the anchorage at CBS
were dubbed Bloggers of the Year. In tagging Toles the Editorial Cartoonist
of the Year, The Week's judges "were struck by
Toles' ability to create cartoons that somehow feel good-natured even
as they skewer their targets." One judge said he was "enriched"
by Toles' "sense of the ridiculous"; another said his cartoons
are "the place to go for insightful observation and a good laugh";
yet another said Toles was "reliably wonderful." All pretty
vacuous assessments. None
of the judges, who were the magazine's editors augmented by a panel
of distinguished personages associated with the Aspen Institute, are
cartoonists. They were instructed to look for a "consistent impact
through a marriage of artistry, humor and originality." I doubt
that any agreement exists among the judges as to what "artistry"
means-or "humor" or "originality" or "marriage."
Much the same criticism can be leveled at any of the annual editooning
award competitions although the Pulitzer committee usually includes
a cartoonist. We are left to suppose, then, that most judges of editorial
cartooning look for a good laugh. None, we suppose, think of the editorial
cartoon's most potent trait-the memorable visual metaphor that lingers
in the readers' minds, twisting their perceptions ever after and, perhaps,
influencing their votes in the next election. Too bad. I don't quarrel
with their final choice, though, or with the recognition this competition
gives the four runners-up. All have produced hard-hitting cartoons through
the year. And The Week itself
clearly values political cartooning. It publishes one or two pages of
editorial cartoons every week-unflinching opinions usually, not just
jokey cartoons of the sort Newsweek
dotes on (although the selection of cartoons by the contending finalists
as published in the insert was more giggly than the usual weekly selection).
Moreover, the cover of the magazine is always a caricature of a person
prominent in the news that week-rendered in full color as a political
cartoon. And all the winners are caricatured here by one of the cover
artists, Fred Harper. So we know The Week has a high opinion of the cartooning
craft. The
magazine also seems to lean left (which may account for my affection
for it). The sampling of opinions on every news topic that are published
in each issue include conservative as well as liberal points of view,
but, except for the cyberspace columnists, all the winners of this year's
laurels are, more-or-less, liberal. That, however, may reflect our contentious
times as much as an editorial bias. Whichever party is in power is always
the target for commentators, which de facto gives more visibility to
the opposing point of view. And in the wake of 9/11, the conduct of
the Bush League has been highly debatable. So perhaps it is natural
that the Opinion Awards go to those who have been doing most of the
debating, the loyal opposition. Elsewhere. Editoonist Ann Telnaes, who
won the 2001 Pulitzer in editorial cartooning, says she's leaving her
current syndicate, the Tribune Media Services, effective April 1. "The
relationship wasn't beneficial
to either party," she told Dave Astor at Editor
& Publisher. "We didn't see eye-to-eye on the sales effort."
As of March 16, she hadn't found a home in another syndicate. She hopes
her 150 TMS client papers will continue to use her work. And she continues
to do a weekly cartoon for Women's eNews online and a once-a-week strip
in King Features' Six Chix. Scott Bateman announced that he is withdrawing
from King Features' Best &
Wittiest package, which has distributed his cartoon since 1997.
About a dozen cartoonists submit cartoons to King for the package, and
King picks six a day to send out to client papers, paying $55/cartoon.
Bateman says he'd been selling about ten a month, and since he has no
home base newspaper, King's fee was much of his income. Recently, he
says, King has been picking "fewer and fewer of my cartoons, shying
away especially from the harder-hitting ones. Granted," he adds,
"my work's been getting edgier in tone and design, but still-in
terms of content, it's nothing worse than, say, 'The Daily Show.'"
Bateman's cartoons are among the most distinctive visually: they typically
consist of a series of geometrically minimalist talking heads whose
utterances appearing in typeset alongside the pictures. On Sunday, March
20, Bateman did a four-panel cartoon commenting on the so-called "culture
of life" campaign being waged in connection with the Terri Schiavo
situation, pointing out the self-serving hypocrisies of the conservative
stance. Lipping the
Trite Fantastic from the Pages of the New Yorker Quoted by Jerome Weeks in the Dallas Morning News, Robert
Mankoff, cartoon editor at The
New Yorker, explains the disappearance of cartoons from most magazines
these days by saying that "they've gotten over-designed-there's
no place for a cartoon." I've been saying as much for years: cartoons
disappeared from magazines when art directors started controlling the
content of the publications. Art directors like solids-solid colors,
solid blacks, solid white space, and the solid "gray" of columns
of type. Cartoons interfere with the cadence-counting impulse of page
design by manipulation of solids. Explaining
the continuing appeal of The New
Yorker, one of its new breed
of cartoonist, Matthew Diffee, says the secret is the
magazine's "intellectual cache: it's a magazine that takes humor
seriously." Diffee's college is Bob Jones University, which prompts
the press to tag him as "the Christian cartoonist," a label
he doesn't much like. Despite his faith, he can rib religion. A sign
outside a church in one of his cartoons read: "No shirt, no shoes,
no salvation." Mankoff
says he had to "teach" the current
New Yorker editor, David
Remnick, about how cartoons should be deployed in the magazine. New Yorker cartoons are topical (and always have been) but not as
front-page topical as newspaper editorial cartoons. For decades, thanks
to the magazine's founder's Puritan bent, sex was taboo as a subject
for cartoons. Then when Tina
Brown took over as editor in 1992, that area opened up. New
Yorker-style sex, that is, Mankoff explains-"that means no
sex. No sex is funnier." He cites the drawing of a couple in bed,
the woman snuggling up to her husband and saying, "Is this a good
time to bring up a car problem?" In
recent issues, an innovation has crept, almost unnoticed, into the magazine.
One of the New Yorker graphic
traditions is the sprinkling of spot drawings-pictures of vases of flowers,
tricycle wheels, the odd chair, bent forks, and the like-throughout,
breaking up the gray acreage of typography with a little visual relief.
Unsigned, the drawings were by an anonymous assortment of contributors.
Lately, as reported by Ann Farmer in the New
York Times, the spot drawings in a given issue have all been by
the same artist for that issue, and the pictures are thematically unified.
In the anniversary issue of February 14 & 21, for instance, the
spot illos depicted a succession, decade-to-decade, of the city's hot
night spots. In another issue, artist Laurent Cilluffo showed a pipe-smoking
fisherwoman pulling a bottle of champagne from the sea, then two glasses,
a bouquet, a love letter, a ringing telephone, and, finally, her suitor.
Other sequences are not so continuous in the comic-strip mode. The one
at hand showcases a series of pictures of a cowboy and his struggles
with his horse. Said Remnick: "The spot drawings are part of the
delight of the magazine, but I thought they needed a little something
new. We've been running some of the same windmills, toasters, umbrellas
and shoes in six-month rotation for a long time. And so we've let some
contemporary artists take a shot at it, and some of the new spots are
individuals and some have a recurring theme or joke or tell a story."
Art director Caroline Mailhot
said, "I think in the treatment of these images, there's a
bit of poetry that goes into it. It comes through with a certain surreal
quality." About
the topicality of the magazine's cartoons, Mankoff admits to a liberal
bias "in some sense," he says, "but not really ideological."
Comedy not conviction inspires cartoonists. "Cartoonists look at
the general human condition," he elaborated in an interview in
the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, where
the College Tour of New Yorker
cartoons was on exhibit. "Cartoonists also look for duplicity
or doublespeak, whether it's liberal or conservative. That's fodder
for their work." Politics involve a system that makes politicians
into "paid liars. For example, it's very strange that someone gets
up and reads somebody else's words and is credited for them. We accept
that. But the cartoonist points out the weirdness of that. In one cartoon,
a politician says, 'Let me be vague.' In the historical arc of the political
condition, the cartoonists point out that people haven't changed. In
that sense, our cartoons are conservative, but they're subversive in
that they suggest that whatever politicians say, we think of as BS." Roz Chast, one of the magazine's mainstays
for decades now, can't find her footing for political commentary. "I
find it's hard to have one clear opinion about things. When I can see
something clearly, I can do a really good political cartoon. But so
often I can see an issue from twenty-four different sides." Oddly,
Mankoff believes that newspaper editoonists are "actually hired
to express a newspaper's viewpoint." That's true only insofar as
newspapers tend to fire political cartoonists whose views run counter
to the paper's. But most of today's editorial cartooners think of themselves
as opinion mongers independent of the positions of their newspapers.
If their mongering goes athwart their newspaper's-well, it's a fine
line at best. Quips and
Quotes As we've all known since grade school when we were prone
to uttering double negatives ("I don't got no bananas"), two
negatives do not make a positive, algebra notwithstanding. But, oddly,
two positives these days make a negative. Yeah, right. According
to the New York Times, more
Africans have moved to the U.S. since 1990 than came here in the previous
two centuries, including an estimated half-million brought here as slaves. In
a recent issue of the Washington Post National Weekly, Dana Milbank,
discussing the partisan perspective that seems to distort all news these
days, recalls the wisdom of Daniel
Patrick Moynihan: "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion,
but not his own facts." Ellen DeGeneres: "My grandmother
started walking five miles a day when she was 60. She's 97 now, and
we don't know where the hell she is." Feetnit (the plural
of footnote) You ever find yourself, after you've said something,
thinking you could have said it better? Happens to me all the time.
One of the beauties of this online extravaganza being conducted here
is that I could, if I wanted to, revisit any less than brilliant utterance
in my personal past and try to improve upon it. I've not done it much,
if at all, and I promise not to bore you in the future with endless
"I can top that" reprises, but this time, here are a few of
those second thoughts about things I said in Opuses 154, 156, and 157
plus a few blurts of related albeit new information. First,
here's a little rehashing of Frank
Cho's treatment of Shanna
in the new Marvel series of that name, picking up by repeating what
prompts me to re-think what I said in Opus
157: Cho says he's always had trouble accepting the Shanna concept-"a
city woman with no powers leaping around in the jungle, beating up wild
animals and men with guns just didn't fly with me." So he's arranged
a new origin to "make her into this unstoppable force with questionable
moral compass." And it's that last bit that keeps us on the edge
of our chairs. (Well, that and Shanna's embonpoint.) A moral dilemma
wrapped in a threat of violence. More than just gigantic gorillas and
gazongas, gang. In fact, we can, with very little effort, discern a
shadowy symbolism in the Shanna persona: there are more than a paltry
few among us who believe U.S. foreign policy is military force directed
by a faulty moral compass. [That last sentence is the re-think, as if
you couldn't guess.] And
here, beginning with what I said before in Opus
157, is a slightly more amplified take on Garry
Trudeau's week-long tribute in Doonesbury
to Hunter S. Thompson, an example of cartooning
artistry that deserves longer and louder applause than I committed last
time: Reassuringly, Trudeau said he has no plans to let Duke follow
Thompson's self-destructive example. Although Honey has a bad moment
on Saturday at the conclusion of the week-long sequence when Duke suddenly
disappears after commenting that "Doc was my inspiration-in a way
I owe him everything!" It is a perfect conclusion to an inspired
week. [And here's the new stuff:] Trudeau's deployment of word and picture
in tandem during the week plumbs the possibilities of the medium. Trudeau
has demonstrated for years that he is a past master at timing and impudent
dialogue and at getting inside the heads and personalities of each of
the characters he creates, however eccentric and distinctive each of
them is. But he doesn't as regularly reveal how cartooning can achieve
Art. This week, he does. The pictures add a layer of meaning to the
dialogue, a layer that reveals Duke and his relationship to the fabled
stoned inkslinger as neither words nor pictures alone without the other
is capable of showing. Moreover, both Duke and Thompson are evoked through
Trudeau's ingenious devices, each shedding light on the other. The interplay
between the verbal and the visual is flickeringly complex and nuanced
and as mystically outrageous as Duke and Thompson are themselves, and
the surreal of the strips becomes the reality of the artform, day by
day. Terrific. Meanwhile,
back in Colorado, Thompson's home state, the bombastic journalist continues
even after death to impinge upon the world of the sane. His relatives
and friends are seeking to fulfill his wishes for a funeral service
and a lasting monument, guided by a BBC documentary on his life in which
Thompson specified that his cremated remains should be shot out of an
upside-down, sculpted mushroom perched on a 150-foot high double-thumbed
fist. I gather the double-thumbed fist is some sort of gonzo thing.
The Rocky Mountain News published an artist's representation of the device,
which will be erected on Thompson's Woody Creek ranch where it would,
subsequent to its initial purpose, serve as a tourist attraction. In
my exposition in Opus 154 about Edgy
Strips and reader outrage, I observed that the Internet provides
complainers with an easy-to-deploy mechanism for fulminating rancorous
and overweening exasperation. A few people can create the impression
that huge numbers of readers are objecting to this or that strip. When
I picked up my March 28 issue of Time,
I found in the cover story a staggering instance of this phenomenon
running rampant. Describing the "Decency Police," the article
discussed the FCC's disciplining of Fox for its airing of an episode
of "Married by America" in which several strippers appeared
covered with whipped cream and a man was shown licking the confection
off the breasts of one of the women. Fox was fined $1.2 million, the
largest fine ever. The FCC reported that the questionable broadcast
had generated 159 letters of complaint. Considering that several million
viewers probably witnessed the licking, 159 complaints doesn't seem
like many. But the situation gets even more astonishing. An enterprising
blogger filed a Freedom of Information Act request to see the letters.
"Because of multiple mailings, the letters actually came from just
23 people, 21 of whom used a form. In other words, three people composing
letters of complaint precipitated a seven-digit fine." Finally,
as a follow-up to the piece in Opus 156 about
Nasty Bigoted Editorial Cartoonists, I confess that I was wrought
up enough about Goldstein's lunkheadedness that I shot a missive off
to The Nation, a somewhat abridged version
of my original diatribe that blazed away in this colyum. They printed
my letter in the April 4 issue of the magazine, followed by Goldstein's
response, which I now quote herewith: "I
haven't found any sketches of Bob Dole with a withered arm [Goldstein admits], so they may well not exist, as R.C. Harvey asserts.
But cartoonist Michael Ramirez did draw Dole with sticklike, skeletal
legs (under the legend "Dead Man Walking"); Sean Delonas rendered
him holding a cane, with a seeing-eye dog at his side; and Matt Davies
put Dole's name over an unattended walker. The idea that images like
these were a comment on Dole's advanced age seems disingenuous
[What? Sorry: I can't help myself. Like I said, the guy is a visual
illiterate. "Dead Man Walking" is clearly OBVIOUSLY plain-as-the-nose-on-yr-fiz
a reference to Dole's age,
not his arm. Where's a Dead Man walking to if not his grave, the destination
of the aged? Ditto the others. Dole's age
is being ridiculed, not his arm. But let's let Goldstein continue in
his own misguided way-it gets better.] ... seems disingenuous since
Ronald Reagan was never shown with such morbid features. [Sheesh.
Sorry. Again. Good mannered editoonists didn't depict Reagan as aged?
I'm afraid they did-excessively wrinkled jowly neck, for one thing.
But even if that doesn't count, Reagan was twenty years ago, and times
have changed. We learned some things in the ensuing decades. One thing
we learned right away by the end of the Reagan term was the consequence
of electing aged politicians: they fall asleep during Cabinet meetings
and Iran/Contras slip by while they drowse. Better not make that mistake
again. So this time, better point out that the candidate is old so we
won't walk into that one with our good-mannered eyes averted. Old, not
crippled or disabled.] This was a mocking response to Dole's disability-a
source of much anxiety at the time-done with enough subtlety to provide
the artists with deniability. [Aha! Now we know why editoonists are so obtuse in their picture-fying.
Deniability is what they're aiming for. They don't wish to clarify but
to obfuscate. That's why they use all those confusing visual metaphors.]
The lesson here is that bigotry in cartoons has grown more indirect
at least when it comes to race. But it's still permissible to traffic
in other stereotypes, as the many images of Hillary Clinton riding a
broomstick demonstrate." End
of his letter. To
my admittedly jaundiced eye, it seems that Goldstein manages with every
utterance here to support my argument. My chief point was that he is
visually illiterate-incapable of "reading" an editorial cartoon.
But even before demonstrating, once more, this deficiency, he admits
that there is no evidence of the bigotry he accuses editoonists of indulging:
"I haven't found any sketches of Dole with a withered arm,"
he says. Well then, why make the accusation to begin with? He says he
saw this depiction of Dole "often." Yet he can't find any
of these frequently disseminated images. Did he make it up out of whole
cloth? Evidently. He had to fabricate the bigotry in order to claim
it exists. But
back to his visual illiteracy: in citing the skeletal figures drawn
by Ramirez and Davies, he overlooks the fact, obvious to anyone who
watches the work of either cartoonist for more than a day, that both
cartoonists draw all
human beings with spindly legs and arms. That's an aspect of
their style. Goldstein, however, is blissfully ignorant of such basic
artistic considerations. Finally,
having absolutely no leg to stand on whatsoever, Goldstein resorts to
an argument that can neither be proved or disproved: he accuses me of
being disingenuous by stating the obvious (the cartoons were about Dole's
age, not his arm) and then, reversing himself completely, asserts that
the "age" devices were a cover that permitted editoonists
to deny that they were really mocking Dole's disability. How can anyone
disprove this assertion? Or prove it? There's no evidence either way.
Or, rather, the evidence, such as it is, can be argued either way, hence
constituting no "proof" in support of one side to the exclusion
of the other. The last refuge of an intellectual scoundrel is an inarguable
fiction. The
only argument against this aspect of Goldstein's case is to ask how
he could be right about this when he's wrong about everything else in
his analysis of comics and cartooning? Hillary on a broom is scarcely
of the same order of things as Dole with a withered arm. Incidentally,
one 'tooner told me he made reference to Dole's arm in a cartoon in
which his caricature of Dole says he can beat Clinton with one arm tied
behind his back; but that, it seems, is not so much making fun of Dole's
disability as it is Clinton's lack of experience. Still, the point is
moot as far as Goldstein's criticism is concerned because he admits
he couldn't find a single instance of a withered arm Dole-despite, astoundingly,
have said Dole was "often" depicted that way. I was,
however, a little hasty in claiming shining knighthood for editorial
cartoonists, as a few among them pointed out in response to this brouhaha:
American editorial cartoonists have consistently employed the most vile
ethnic and racial caricatures when depicting enemies of the U.S. The
Hun during World War I; Germans and Japanese during WWII. And, recently,
rag-headed Arabs for Iraqis and Islamic insurgents. Editoonists could
be a little less stereotypical in their portrayals of Arabs, for instance.
And of women generally. That's
the problem with stereotypes: such images are a visual shorthand and
communicate certain ideas quickly, but to ignoramuses like Goldstein
(and to many who are intelligent and caring citizens) stereotypical
imagery bespeaks bigotry, not visual shorthand. One
unhappy upshot from the Goldstein episode is that my faith in The Nation is seriously undermined: that
the magazine would publish such flabby logic as his does not recommend
The Nation as a reliable interpreter of
the passing scene, political or social. Alas. MORE MEMORABLE
SIN In the April issue of Playboy, Stephen Rebello reports on Frank Miller's "Sin City" movie, which in three interlocking
stories feature Mickey Rourke as Marv, "an outcast misanthrope
on a rampage in a morally bankrupt metropolis." Filmmaker Robert
Rodriguez "forfeited membership in the Directors Guild when the
organization refused to let him and Miller share director credit on
the film," says Rebello. The only time I met Miller was at the
MoCCA Harvey Awards dinner last year, and I asked him how he liked making
movies. He liked it, he said. Rebello quotes him: "Having worked
with Hollywood a bit, I thought, I've got no future here." But
he found out different working with Rodriguez, with whom, I gather,
the working relationship was highly satisfying. Said Miller: "I'd
already drawn the damn thing, so I didn't have to work on the shots
all that much. What I loved was getting to play with the actors. Mickey
Rourke, as pure a Marv as you could ask for, has moments in this that
terrify me. ... The tone of the comic is completely uncompromised. My
fingerprints are all over this movie." The
movie gets generous notice in Time,
too, just the week before it opened: "The movie seeks out a
line between an R rating and an NC-17. ... It's gory stuff, but it's
also a visually arresting blitzkrieg with action so bare-knuckled you'll
leave the theater spitting out teeth," writes Devin Gordon with
a particularly picturesque turn of phrase. "The entire film is
a digital painting in stark black and white with dashes of color. ...
Frame for frame, it doesn't merely resemble the comic book. It is the comic book." The fidelity to Miller's vision has received
considerable notice. Rourke, who plays Marv "with cheerful menace"
in "a career-reviving turn," wears a prosthetic to get Marv's
physiognomy correct. "There's no way Marv couldn't have that bizarre
profile," Miller told Heidi MacDonald on The Beat online. Miller's
comic book visuals became, in effect, the storyboard for the motion
picture. And Miller added to that right on the spot. "I had a sketchbook
and was coming up with shots because you need more shots than you get
in a comic," he told MacDonald. The movie was another adventure
into the green screen world that "Sky Captain" introduced
us to, a world not wholly unfamiliar to a cartoonist. Said Miller: "You're
working with actors but you're essentially doing animation and everything
behind the actors is made up, like [a] drawing." Asked why Hollywood
was so enamored of comic-book characters lately, Miller said it may
be because comic book creators have great freedom to experiment-without
worrying about vast amounts of money being spent-and therefore the likelihood
that they'll produce fresh material is higher than it would be "in
a Hollywood boardroom. ... The other thing," he continued, "is
that one person can make a comic book. One person can't really make
a movie. As soon as you start complicating the process, you're gonna
have a lot more voices around. Sometimes the solitary voice can be the
best one." Miller's
experience with making "Sin City" was so much better than
his previous adventures in movie making (with two Robocop movies) that
he will happily join the production again should "Sin City"
be a big success, fostering a sequel. For the time being, though, he's
back drawing comic books. He's just finished the next Batman book, Holy
Terror, Batman, and he has more Sin City tales to tell. "I
have a story about Nancy Callahan that I think will break your heart,"
he told MacDonald. "But it's not ready yet." And then there's
a "dream project" that he describes, cryptically, as "my
Corto Maltese." Meanwhile, Dark Horse, Miller's Sin City publisher,
is re-issuing all seven Sin City books in a new, smaller format. The
size was Miller's idea: "It makes them more intimate," he
said; moreover, "crass as it sounds, it means you can put them
in your purse." Funnybook
Fan Fare I think it might have been a mistake to read the first
issues of Jimmy Palmiotti's The New West and Stan Lee's Alexa in the
same hour last week: by comparison to Palmiotti's terse and cinematic
storytelling, Lee's effort came off second-best. But not a distant second-best.
The difference may well be simply that superheroics in the tradition
of Stan Lee's Marvel are no longer as gripping as they once were, and
Lee continues to commit comics in the old way. Maybe it's just me: mayhap
I'm simply no longer as keen on superheroic cavortings as I was once.
Still, Lee's book has its moments. The story, supplied by Lee (in what
we suppose was the traditional "plot outline" manner of the
Marvel Method-more miss than hit, a thought here, a crisis there) and
scripted by Steven A. Roman, focuses on a comic book publishing company headed
by an enthusiastic cornball named "Happy" Harry Sturdley (a
cornball Stan Lee name if ever there was one and an obvious reincarnation
of Lee himself), who's desperately searching for a new crop of money-making
superheroes. Alexa is his star artist. The book begins with her alone
and beat-up in a nearly empty room; we don't know why. Then we wind
the clock backwards to witness the advent of two giant alien superheroes
in skintights, who have arrived on this planet via the portal Alexa
somehow provides. Although they pretend benevolence and they consent
to be merchandised in comic books by Sturdley (Alexa draws the books),
they actually plan to take over the world. Most of the first issue is
devoted to their various machinations-and Harry's; the title character
hovers around the edges but doesn't appear much. Amid these shenanigans
are repeated satirical jabs at superheroing-fantastic powers and unrealistic
anatomy and Las Vegas style costuming (remarking about the scanty attire
of superheroines, Sturdley says, "You think the Comics Code is
going to approve of heroines who pop out of their tops when they throw
a punch?")-and some self-deprecating pokes at Lee himself, all
of which constitute the best parts of the inaugural issue. The book
concludes with more in this vein, a text piece, "Chapter 10"
of a "forthcoming" faux volume entitled
The Tighter the Costume: The Life and Times of the Fantasy Factory (Harry's
comic book company). In this, we learn that "Sturdley and his staff
were caught off-guard by the almost overnight transformation" of
comics from spangled superheroes to "grim and gritty storytelling.
... Suddenly, the pithy catch-phrases like Sturdley's often-quoted 'The
tighter the costume, the stronger the hero' were overpowered by such
advertising tag-lines as 'Death's a bitch, and she's in heat,' which
had been used to promote the longtime rival Dynasty Comics' revival
of The Temptress. ..." Layouts and breakdowns in Alexa are in the vintage Marvel manner-each
panel capturing an energized moment, every picture accompanied by either
a speech balloon or a caption. While this treatment fosters a relentless
excitement, there is no intensity of feeling here. In sharp contrast,
in Palmiotti's New West, we
have plenty of the latter. Sequences
of silent action in The New West
impart a potent vivacity to the events depicted, and Phil Noto's pictures, drawn with stark linear precision and no feathering,
seem to enhance the drama with their raw simplicity. The circumstances
in which the story unfolds are intriguing: some sort of "pulse
weapon" has shut down all electrical power in Los Angeles, and
our hero, Dan Wise, a renegade private cop, pursues his quarry on horseback
with a katana sword, narrating his story in the best street lingo of
the hard-boiled genre of detective fiction. The main event is the kidnapping
of the mayor, but there are sideshows. Wise, engaged by the mayor's
wife to find her husband, had some years before failed to recover their
elder daughter from kidnappers, and he lost his partner in the encounter.
So there's some residual bitterness on both sides, but the bitterness
is sweetened somewhat by the younger daughter's infatuated pursuit of
the detective. The action commences when Wise, following a lead to the
whereabouts of the mayor, runs into a gang of the bad guys and starts
systematically dismembering them, one at a time, with the katana sword.
The bloody efficiency of this action is emphasized by the almost complete
absence of verbiage in these sequences: we witness Wise's gruesome activity
without the accompaniment of any ameliorating language. The issue ends
when he gets to the kidnappers hideout and sees that "they have
power." With a single cliffhanging stroke, Palmiotti has brought
both of the main threads of his story together-the kidnaping and the
vanished power. The next, and concluding, issue of this 2-issue min-series
will resolve both issues. The
visuals in The New West -page
layouts and panel compositions-are restrained; the actions take place
between panels rather than in them. We see a hoodlum's hand in one panel;
a wrist-stump in the next. When the mayor's younger daughter approaches
Wise as he sleeps on the couch in his apartment's livingroom (she's
supposed to be in the bedroom), he lets her lie down beside him and
puts his arm around her. It's a gesture of comfort. No more. And the
action takes four long silent panels to accomplish, building tension
as it transpires. The depiction is methodical, step-by-step-not energetic,
exploding in one stupendous pictorial extravaganza. And it is in this
distinction that we can find the difference between the tried-and-now-trite
aura of the superhero comic books of yesteryear and the graphic narratives
of today. It is the difference between excitement and intensity of feeling,
between energy and human drama, fantasy and realism. For fans of the
superhero action of yore in Marvel's heyday, Stan Lee's Alexa is a well-wrought reenactment-better
than some of Lee's work a few years ago for DC-with highly competent
art by half-a-dozen sterling performers (starting with Dave Gibbons and Dan Jurgens). For aficionados of the medium, it's gratifying to see
that words and pictures in tandem can achieve something more than excitement
as they do in The New West. Black Panther No. 1 is another superlative
performance by John Romita, Jr.
and his inker, Klaus Janson,
for a story by movie-maker Reginald
Hudlin, who, it would seem, thanks perhaps to his association with
cartoonist Aaron McGruder (in the graphic novel Birth of a Nation last year), has become
attracted to the comics medium. The Black Panther is an African monarch,
invented by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby back in the sixties in an effort,
we assume, to champion the cause of American blacks. Lee and Kirby's
instincts were admirable, and to some extent, they achieved their goal,
offering a black character who was not a jungle stereotype but rich,
cultured, intelligent and high-tech. Naturally, when the character graduated
to his own title in 1977, the initial series folded after only 15 issues.
Hudlin has revived the character but infused him with a new dignity
and transcendent power. In this first issue, we witness through the
centuries several attempts by outsiders to invade and conquer the Wakanda,
the Black Panther's people. Every attempt fails spectacularly. That
brings us up to the present time and the U.S. State Department with
an African-American honcho, Dondi Reese (sound familiar?), and some
racist underlings, protesting "a bunch of jungle bunnies telling
us they've got a 'no fly' zone over their thatched huts." Reese
evidently wants to bring the Wakanda to heel, and as the inaugural issue
closes, we meet the assassin who will, apparently, attempt to do her
bidding. Hudlin's
storytelling is, understandably, cinematic. The opening sequences, showing
thwarted invasions of the Fifth and Nineteenth centuries, devote plenty
of time (space, pages and panels) to setting up a confrontation then
resolving the suspense with a devastating counter-attack from the Wakandas.
Nicely suspenseful throughout, seasoned with satisfying action in which
racist scum are humiliated and then obliterated. Hudlin's racial sympathies
are on the front burner here, with virtually all of the white personnel
being rampant racists. The Black Panther himself makes only momentary
appearances, and we are reminded of Lee Falk's Phantom, who "lives"
for generations (in the Phantom's case, by a succession of the original
Phantom's male offspring); his absence successfully builds anticipation
for a forthcoming encounter. Romita's pencils give us meaty figures
of geometric rather than anatomical shape, skillfully modeled with lines
that flick and leave and a little feathering. Janson augments the feel
with a bold outline and filigree detailing and fineline shadowing. Beautifully
done, and the restraint of the visuals emphasizes Hudlin's pacing. In
the first issue of The Expatriate
by B. Clay Moore as drawn by Jason Latour, we have a startlingly new
visual approach. Latour's lines are bold and sometimes scratchy, and
then he steeps the pictures in splashy deep black shadow. All this is
fresh enough, but the coloring is a vault into difference: the colors
are shrill, gawdy and garish reds and purples screaming off the page.
While I'd hate to see all comics deploy color this way, it works for
this book. Moore, inspired, he says, by Jimmy Buffett's song about expatriated
Americans, "Banana Republics," puts his protagonist, Jack
Dexter, in just such an environment, running from something unspecified.
Then he sics two hunters (government agents?) after him. They wreak
havoc and bloodshed wherever they go, and Dexter escapes just ahead
of them, falling into the arms of Maria Lobo, who is connected to the
local ruling class somehow. Nicely and inventively done. The
last number in Scott McCloud's
Superman: Strength has arrived, bringing
to a close this disappointing three-issue series. The story in this
issue, "Cloudsplitter," features the trite device of a villain
who is the logical psychological byproduct of an abused childhood seeking
revenge upon the entire world. There's a generous amount of hardware
on display and lots of spraying action lines. Aluir
Amancio penciled the book, and most of my disappointment in it is
due to his treatment: his anatomy is seriously flawed in several instances,
and his embellishment, feathering everything with a profusion of parallel
lines, gives to every panel an almost unrelieved plethora of visual
impact. And
in Belly Button Comix, we
have another generation of R.
Crumb, namely, his daughter Sophie,
exploiting our morbid interest in adolescent sex and angst galore.
She has a drawing style that is serviceable but not particularly attractive.
Still, if she could find a subject other than her own (perhaps mostly
imagined) dissatisfaction with the way life works out for young people,
the book might be worth reading. But we've seen it all before-and better
done by her father (not to mention numerous other autobiographical 'tooners
who've essayed the same psychic landscape after him), and there's nothing
notably novel here except the female point-of-view. And that, alas,
turns out to be not so different from the male point-of-view when it
comes to angst and disappointment with casual sex. BOOK MARQUEE In coining the term "graphic novel" in 1964,
Richard Kyle made an insightful
distinction that enhances our appreciation of comics. "Comics,"
said Kyle, "are not illustrated stories. In comics, ideation, pictures,
sound (including speech and sound effects), and indicators (such as
motion lines and impact bursts) are all portrayed graphically in a single
unified whole. Graphics do not 'illustrate' the story; they are the story. ... In the graphic story,
all the universe and all the senses are portrayed graphically"
[i.e., in the static visual mode]. Kyle's point, and mine (although
he makes it better than I have), is that in comics everything is portrayed
and conveyed in the same manner, visually. And the concurrent presence
in the visual mode of speech as well as action, locale, etc., makes
comics what they are, a unique kind of pictorial narrative. In fact,
this concurrence, if not interdependence, may actually define the medium. In
The Long Haul (174 6x9-inch pages in black-and-white
paperback; $14.95) by Anthony
Johnston as drawn by Eduardo
Barreto, we have a persuasive example of Kyle's thesis. Set in 1871
on the vast landscape of the American plains, it's a caper tale with
the trappings of the Old West. Cody Plummer, whose last name is the
same as a notorious mid-nineteenth century Montana gang leader's, is
an ex-con who learns about a shipment of federal money to be sent via
train to San Francisco as final payment to the Union Pacific for its
part in completing the transcontinental railroad. Plummer resolves to
rob the train, and the first half of the book is spent, in classic caper
manner, introducing us to the "experts" he recruits to help
him: the conniving tart, the card sharp and gambler, the safe cracker,
and the locomotive driver. Each introduction is a short story that illuminates
the expertise of its protagonist. We also meet the financier who, wronged
by Union Pacific, provides Plummer with operating capital and furnishes
the moral excuse for the robbery. And we meet Robert Harding, a Pinkerton
agent assigned to guard the shipment, who is also Plummer's personal
bette noir. His shabby treatment of Plummer supplies an added justification,
however frail, for the heist because it serves as a sort of payback
in their long-standing rivalry. The money will be shipped in an armored
boxcar that, once closed, is impenetrable to anything short of dynamite,
which, if deployed, would destroy the loot as well as the car. Seven
guards will be on duty in the car at all times, and the progress of
the train will be monitored and reported by telegraph from each town
it passes through, using a secret code. Plummer hatches a scheme that
will enable them to rob the train without killing any of the guards
or hurting any passenger on the train. It can be done, he explains,
because no one will know they're being robbed. How this is accomplished
is the story, and telling it here would ruin the surprise that is essential
in criminal romps of this breed. I don't think, however, that I'd be
giving away the game by saying that the tart's task is to get the code
by seducing a telegraph operator who has it. Johnston
has constructed a daunting task for Plummer and his cohorts and a finely
tuned series of maneuvers that click into place with the precision of
a Swiss timepiece, including, as most capers do, one or two unexpected
developments that threaten the success of the enterprise. The exposition
sequence, in which the protections for the shipment are explained, is
a particularly deft performance that shifts back and forth between Plummer's
explanation to his gang and Harding's briefing of the guards who will
be aboard. The changing focus prevents the sequence from being simply
verbal explanation without any visual interest. The same sort of shifting
from one on-going scene to another and back again takes place during
the suspense-filled robbery, culminating in the final deception and
denouement. Barreto,
whose work we've seen here before in the graphic novel Union Station, participates in the narration by giving the characters
distinctive facial personalities, placing them in convincing locales
and settings, and timing the action-all, as Kyle has said, integral
parts of the story, not "illustrations" of it. Moreover, much
of the excitement transpires in wordless sequences in which Barreto's
pictures are indisputably the narrative. Quite apart
from supplying such essential storytelling ingredients, Barreto's crystaline
drawings give the novel its distinctive cool aura. His crisp lines are
accented by liberal use of solid black-in silhouettes, deep shadows
masking faces under broad-brimmed hats, and the like-and by strategic
arrangement of white space. Some of his simple page layouts and panels
are minimalist, almost devoid of detail; but others-street scenes, crowded
saloons-are loaded with telling props and atmospheric accouterments.
And when the action heats up, Barreto's line gets looser; in such sequences,
he often reminds me of George Evans' superlative energetic delineations
in Secret Agent Corrigan. Although still firmly anchored in modeling
black shadow, the lines curl and twist and deliberately avoid connecting
one to another, imparting to the visuals an energy that underscores
the movement being depicted. Barreto's pictures are as much a part of
the story as Johnston's plot, and both are impressively adept. Metaphors
be with you. To find out about Harv's books, click here. |
|
send e-mail to R.C. Harvey Art of the Comic Book - Art of the Funnies - Accidental Ambassador Gordo - reviews - order form - Harv's Hindsights - main page |
