Recent Reads

Once again, I’m going to use a subject suggested by Tom Spurgeon’s Five on Friday feature as an excuse to throw together a random mix of observations, each too inconsequential for a post in its own right. Plum pudding or mess of potage? You decide.

I’m going to expand the theme of “the last five comics you read, good or bad” to the last ten.

10. Posy Simmonds True Love
Eddie Campbell blogged about this book and wrote, “In a better world, you'd read my affectionate recollection and immediately go out and buy a copy.”

I’d like to think I’m making the world a little better.

9. Jules Feiffer Jules Feiffer’s America: From Eisenhower to Reagan
I have long underestimated Feiffer as a draughtsman. Based on my memories of reading his Village Voice strips (published over here by The Observer), I had categorised him alongside Thurber as a writer who also drew a bit, rather than as a cartoonist. But there is some very fine drawing and cartooning here, with solid and effective composition and a particular understanding of the uses of repetition. Feiffer gets a remarkable amount of weight out of his nervous lines, particularly in his gnarled caricatures.


8. Andi Watson Glister Issue 2: “House Hunting”
Somehow, when I reviewed the first issue of Watson’s charming children’s fantasy, I failed to notice how reminiscent his drawings were of the work of the classic children’s illustrator Edward Ardizzone, especially in the quality of line. So I’ll mention that here instead.


7. Ilya (ed) The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga Volume 2
Sadly, I am coming to the conclusion that I don’t really like the most obvious elements of manga – the pacing, the melodramatic “acting” of the characters, the graphic devices used to convey emotion, and, above all, the ubiquity of pointy-faced goggle-eyed androgynes. There are manga that I do enjoy a lot (Lone Wolf and Cub, Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, Ranma 1/2), but that is probably despite their common stylistic ticks, rather than because of them. Volume 2 in Constable & Robinson’s series is, on the whole, more faithful to the surface elements of clichéd manga style than Volume 1, and I found less to enjoy in it. It is probably no coincidence that by far my favourite comic strip here is Laura Howell’s The Bizarre Adventures of Gilbert & Sullivan, which may render its characters in a style somewhere pitched between chibi and Rumiko Takahashi, but which does so on top of a structure that is pure Leo Baxendale.


6. Rick Veitch Army@Love Volume 1 The Hot Zone Club
There are some good satirical side-swipes here, and a solid handling of narrative. But just as a million and one books, films and comics about the Vietnam war pay no attention to the Vietnamese, Army@Love treats America’s wars in the Middle East as being entirely about Americans. The natives of the fictional country of Afbaghistan appear only as targets and set decoration, except for a small family whose supporting role is to disrupt the marriage between two more important (because American) characters. There’s a huge flaw in the central conceit of the comic: the army is using a hedonistic lifestyle as a recruitment tool, but it is also trying to keep it secret. How do you use a secret in your recruitment ads? But look at this panel which addresses the desire for secrecy.


The implied belief – which may be the character’s, but which may also be Veitch’s own – is that what was shocking about Abu Ghraib was the embarrassment caused by the lack of self-control among Americans, not the torture and humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners. There’s a difference, and its an important one.

5. Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, John Severin, Jim Steranko and others Marvel Masterworks: Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD Volume 1

4. John Aggs Robot Girl

3. The Beano Issue 3404
Something of a relaunch, with a higher price, all of 99p, a Dennis the Menace strip that ends on a cliffhanger, and two new series: London B4 12 (is that a pun on the lost Lon Chaney silent horror movie London After Midnight, and if so, how many 11-year olds will get it?) and Tales of Johnny Bean from Happy Bunny Green, which uses twee stylings, including the return of the libretto, recounting the whole story in narrative captions, to tell a tale of juvenile delinquency. The art is by the versatile Laura Howell, looking quite different here from her manga. She also provides inks to Hunt Emerson’s pencils for Ratz.


The inside front page provides quite a break from publisher DC Thomson’s tradition of leaving the comics’ creators in anonymity: it lists “top stories” (six out of fifteen this issue) and actually credits the artists. That leaves nine strips uncredited, and the writers’ names are still nowhere to be seen, but at least it’s a step out of the nineteenth century.

2. Scott Adams Dilbert
The first book I ever read about cartooning was The Cartoon Connection by William Hewison, then art editor of Punch. He came up with several categories of cartoon humour, one of which was “Recognition Humour: Recognition Humour at its most humble is straightforward reportage heightened very slightly by a dash of theatricality; here the cartoonist plucks at our sleeve and points to an ordinary everyday event, and as we are looking he flashes a beam of torchlight at it. The edges become sharper, the shadows darker, the action a little more exaggerated – we see that this very familiar thing is suddenly more significant.” Most days, Dilbert shines that torch with precision. (On the other days, it goes to Elbonia.)

1. Andy Riley Roasted

Flogging a Horse that is Not So Much Dead as Absent Altogether

Coincidence strikes. No sooner do I make one (erroneous) post about comic strips in Playboy that I find this when sitting down with a copy of Jules Feiffer’s America - From Eisenhower To Reagan (edited by Steven Heller, Alfred A Knopf, 1982):

"In 1958, my first collection of cartoons was published, on the basis of which Hugh Hefner offered me $500 a month to draw for Playboy. Since the [Village] Voice still did not pay contributors, it was the first regular money I made doing the work I cared about. My attitude was often non-Playboy or anti-Playboy. Rather than object, Hefner suggested ways of making my points stronger. In addition to his better-known qualities, he was a wonderful cartoon editor, the best I’ve ever had."

That last encomium seems all the more remarkable when we remember that Feiffer’s very first “cartoon editor”, back when he was working on Clifford for The Spirit Section, would have been Will Eisner. But, then again, I assume that Feiffer would have been paid for Clifford and his Spirit scripts, so this may just be a case of conveniently ignoring a professional pre-history which wouldn’t fit with the marketing of Jules Feiffer’s America as a 25th anniversary volume. Or maybe Hefner really was a better cartoon editor than Eisner. Perhaps he could have had a second career at the Kubert school of cartooning if the whole porn-mag-and-men’s-clubs empire had failed.

Review: The Spirit 1-4

The Spirit issue 1: “Ice Ginger Coffee” by Darwyn Cooke with J Bone (inks), Dave Stewart (colour), Jared Fletcher (letters), Scott Dunbier (editor), 22 pages of strip, DC Comics, February 2007, US$2.99

The Spirit issue 2: “The Maneater” by Darwyn Cooke with J Bone (inks), Dave Stewart (colour), Jared Fletcher (letters), Scott Dunbier (editor), 22 pages of strip, DC Comics, March 2007, US$2.99

The Spirit issue 3: “Resurrection” by Darwyn Cooke with J Bone (inks), Dave Stewart (colour), Jared Fletcher (letters), Scott Dunbier (editor), 22 pages of strip, DC Comics, April 2007, US$2.99

The Spirit issue 4: “Hard Like Satin” by Darwyn Cooke with J Bone (inks), Dave Stewart (colour), Jared Fletcher (letters), Scott Dunbier (editor), 22 pages of strip, DC Comics, May 2007, US$2.99


If it wasn’t called The Spirit, I’d like it even more.



Qualms about Hussein Hussein apart, Darwyn Cooke’s revived version of The Spirit is an expertly crafted series of light adventure stories, mixing humour, thrills and quirky characterisation. Its writing is surefooted, amusing and well-paced, and its artwork serves the stories perfectly: technically competent, expressive and smoothly-flowing. More comics should be like this.

But The Spirit was a strange candidate for revival for any reason other than protecting a trademark. There is nothing compelling or striking about the lead character. As the script for Cooke’s first issue put it, he is “a big blue average”, brave, handsome, affable – but not very interesting. To be sure, well-adjusted heroes are a rarity in American comics, but there is nothing here to make an author declare, “I must make stories about this character”.

The same is true of the other elements of the strip. Central City is an undistinguished urban space. The supporting characters are colourful, but Cooke has chosen to change them significantly. P’Gell has lost her casual amorality to become a woman with a committed and tragic past; Silk Satin has lost her criminal background, family complications and British nationality to become a professional CIA agent. They might as well be new characters – well-drawn, entertaining characters, but in no need of those old names.

What was unique and compelling about The Spirit was not its component parts, but the way that Will Eisner used them. It may seem strange to emphasise the importance of Eisner personally, when The Spirit was the product of a whole studio. But look at how the strip read when Eisner was not paying attention – while he was away on military service in World War 2, or when he left the writing to Jules Feiffer and the art to Wallace Wood in 1952. It is almost a different series altogether. Even if he was just overseeing scripts and polishing art, Eisner’s influence completely dominated The Spirit in its heyday.

That heyday certainly saw a lot of light-hearted adventure stories in the Cooke mould. But it also emphasised two characteristics of Eisner’s work throughout his career: a compulsion to develop new techniques and to push the boundaries of his craft; and a fascination with the lives of ordinary men in the street, and how destiny, fate or chance can bring catastrophe to them. Both characteristics are on display in these opening pages of “The Fly”:




In contrast, Cooke has so far concentrated on his lead adventurers, with little room for bystanders. Furthermore, his strip reads like the work of a master craftsman working within the limits he has already staked out for himself.

The main piece of experimentation has been Cooke’s use of double-pages splashes. For the most part, these have not been successful: neither the images themselves nor their place in the story have justified their size. An exception is the splash for issue 4, which conveys something of the environment in which Satin and the Spirit have found themselves.



Otherwise, Cooke has confined himself to the odd little trick like this multiple image of Dolan from issue 1 …



… or these flashback images from issue 2 …



..and issue 3.



The issue 3 flashbacks are a good example of Cooke working within his comfort zone. The use of full page width panels and geometric colour blocks (derived from modernist advertising graphics of the 1950s and 1960s) serves to differentiate the flashback sequences from the present day scenes. But Cooke had already used both techniques in The New Frontier and his issue of Solo.

Still, it is perhaps better that Cooke makes The Spirit his own than that he should fall victim to the self-conscious pastiche that often results when comics creators try to be Eisnerish. Take this example from Alan Moore and Rick Veitch’s Greyshirt.



It is clever and effective, but also forced and arch.

There is, of course, one other big difference between Eisner’s Spirit and Cooke’s. In four months, Cooke has produced four 22-page stories. Over the same period, Eisner would have produced seventeen or eighteen 7-page stories, giving him much more scope to play with new ideas. Perhaps, as he gets into his stride, Cooke will start stretching his muscles. I certainly intend to hang around long enough to find out.



Panels from the issues under review, plus:

The Spirit “The Fly” by Will Eisner, The Spirit section for 10 March 1946, reprinted in The Spirit Archives volume 12, DC Comics, 2003

Greyshirt “How Things Work Out”, by Alan Moore (script), Rick Veitch (art), Todd Klein (letters), David Baron (colours), Scott Dunbier (editor), Alan Moore’s Tomorrow Stories issue 2, 1999, reprinted in Alan Moore’s Tomorrow Stories Collected Edition book 1, America’s Best Comics, 2002