Michael Turner Dreams

Here’s the most frightening thought I’ve encountered on the web lately:

“Anyway, Kara Zor-El is making her debut on the new season of Smallville. Yep, that's right, the girl who will eventually become Supergirl. And man, did they choose a drop dead gorgeous actress to play her...she looks exactly like one of Michael Turner's characters jumping off the page into real life!”

(link via Blog@Newsarama).

Fortunately, even with a terrible wardrobe and apparently photoshopped boobs, actress Laura Vandervoort does not look exactly like a Michael Turner drawing. She isn’t deformed or emaciated, and she appears to have feet.


But, still, the idea of Michael Turner drawings coming to life: that’s going to haunt my nightmares. Much more frightening than anything in Marianne Dreams.

(No offense meant to blogger Blankie of It’s Thursday, I’m in Love– my brain just had a spasm of literalism.)

Nostalgia Squared

The Forbidden Planet International blog reports that Nostalgia and Comics, the Birmingham comics shop, is thirty years old.


That means that it must have been about four when I started shopping there. Now, Nostalgia – as everyone I knew called it – is just around the corner from Birmingham New Street railway station; and my school was just across the road from Coventry station. Trains from Coventry to Birmingham took twenty minutes (express) or thirty minutes (local). So there was just enough time to dash out of school at lunchtime, catch a train, make a hasty purchase at Nostalgia, and still be back in time for the bell for afternoon classes.

Completely against school rules, of course, and wholly reliant on trains being fast, frequent and reliable. Golly, and I thought that I spent too much time wallowing in Nostalgia then.

Picture
Nostalgia and Comics as it was - the sign has since been replaced with one using FPI's corporate branding. Photo found on Yahoo Travel.

Zero Credit Rating

If you look through the adverts in the latest Previews catalogue for upcoming publications by Virgin Comics, you’ll see that before the writer and artist credits, there is usually a creator credit. So we have Seven Brothers “created by John Woo”, Snake Woman “created by Shekhar Kapur”, Voodoo Child “created by Weston Cage and Nicolas Cage”, and so on.

But there is one glaring exception.


It’s a shame – yes, I think “shame” is the right word – that the phrase “created by Frank Hampson” appears nowhere on that advert. Not that he has been credited on previous revivals, but the context makes his absence all the more stark.

Before Comics Britannia

Anyone with a specialist interest must have mixed feelings when the mass media turn their attention to it: however welcome the exposure might be, the risk of misrepresentation and mockery is high.

The BBC has now filled out most of the web-pages on the site supporting the upcoming BBC4 series Comics Britannia (thanks to the FPI blog for pointing this out).

Taking those pages with the fuller descriptions of what is in each of the three parts posted by Lew Stringer on his Blimey! It’s Another Blog About Comics, and with the review Rich Johnston wrote for his Lying in the Gutters column, based on preview discs, it would seem that the BBC has actually produced an accurate and balanced series of programmes about British comics, which is not something I’d ever have expected. I’m very much looking forward to the broadcasts.

But I still think it’s a pity that, like Keith Robson’s exhibition at the Museum of Hartlepool, the BBC has chosen to start with the publication of The Dandy in 1937 (though the captions to some of the gallery images, such as the note about Dudley Watkins’s artistic debt to Tom Browne, do lend some reassurance that earlier material will not be entirely written out of history).

I can understand why this is a tempting starting-point for a TV programme aimed at a general audience: mention The Dandy and The Beano to anyone under the age of 80, and you’ll provoke instant nostalgia. Mention Comic Cuts and Illustrated Chips and you’ll get blank looks. But it seems to me that a series about British comics should attempt to consider the ways in which the British variety is distinct from those in other countries, and some significant distinctions had already taken form by the 1930s. Of course, each of these is shared with some other countries: it’s the combination which creates the unique flavour.

Short, weekly anthology formats were already the norm. This would mean that British comics would continue to concentrate on stories that could be told in one or two pages, or in one or two page instalments, unlike the longer formats favoured in the USA or Japan. Collected reprints would allow European comics, which also favoured short anthologies, to break out of this restraint, but that did not happen in Britain.

Comics were wholly for children. The older line of comics for adults, such as Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday was dead. Unlike Japan or Belgium and France, an adult readership for mass market British comics would not emerge in the post-World War Two years. The contrast with other countries would be even stronger if the growing adult readership of comics in the USA had not been nipped in the bud by the creation of the Comics Code Authority.

Comics based on other media were common. They dated back at least as far as Dan Leno’s Comic Journal of 1898, and their place in the market had been cemented by the success of Film Fun and its imitators in the 1920s. Now they make up the majority of periodicals published for children. Apart from the success of Disney, I don’t think this has been true in other major comic-producing countries, where it has, if anything, been more common for other media to borrow from comics (US television and film; Japanese anime) than vice-versa.

Common themes, stereotypes and tropes were already in place. For example, it was common for humour strips to feature people of low status (such as children or tramps) opposed to authority: contrast The Bash Street Kids, where the children of Class 2B are in conflict with Teacher, with Archie, where the pupils of Riverdale High are mostly in conflict with each other.

It may be that Comics Britannia will fill in some of this backstory once it has got viewers’ attention with more familiar comics. Whatever, when it comes to what is actually in the documentaries rather than what is not, I feel a lot less apprehensive than I did when the series was announced.


Picture
Front page of Film Fun issue 254, artist and writer uncredited, Amalgamated Press, 22 November 1924, reprinted in Alan and Laurel Clark Comics: An Illustrated History, Green Wood Publishing, 1991

The Troublesome Tribbles

Link blogging
Across the universe
On the starship Enterprise
Under Captain Kirk …

There can’t be many people reading this blog who haven’t already encountered this link on Blog@Newsarama or The Beat, but for the benefit of those few: inspired by a newspaper article which revealed that Edward Gorey was a fan of Star Trek, Shaenon Garrity has produced an adaptation of “The Trouble with Tribbles” in a spot-on impersonation of Gorey’s style.


Funniest thing I’ve seen on the web in ages.

Friday Night Fights: In the Reign of Queen Rena

When seeking brutal violence to assuage the cruel heart of Bahlactus, Jaime Hernandez’s Locas, that insightful series about young punks from the barrio growing into unfulfilled middle age, may not be the first place you’d look.

But Jaime Hernandez can draw anything with clarity, verve and life. And in the early days, anything was just what he did draw – spaceships, dinosaurs, superheroes, horn-headed billionaires … and a women’s wrestling champion getting embroiled in a murder in a fictitious South American country, and running into an old and brutal rival from the ring.

Ladies, gentlemen and Devourers of Worlds, we present Queen Rena Titañon versus Bull Marie!


I love the framing of the two tiers that show the actual fight: the regular panel grid, and unwavering but not all-encompassing point of view give the action a steady rythmn but also a slightly chaotic vitality (are we going to lose sight of Rena entirely?) that complements the power that Hernandez's draughtsmanship puts into each blow; and then the wide, static panel opening the final tier is an exhilation of relief and triumph.

Panels
“Toyo’s Request” by Jaime Hernandez, Love and Rockets issue 3, Fantagraphics, Fall 1983

Review: Lucky

Lucky volume 2 issue 1, “My Slideshow” and “My Affliction” by Gabrielle Bell, 32 pages of strip, Drawn & Quarterly, May 2007, CDN$4.25

In this issue of Lucky, Bell presents two inter-linked stories. The second, slightly longer, tale “My Affliction”, is a dream-like narrative of giants, dogs and sudden emotional attachments. The first, shorter, story is a directly autobiographical piece in which Bell presents “My Affliction” as a slideshow and attends a comics convention in the United States.

The two stories share a common presentation. Each uses a regular and invariable six-panel grid. Almost all panels show full-length figures in medium shot. The exceptions can be seen as reinforcing this rule. For example, in one panel, we see a close-up of a hand holding a wooden doll, but the doll itself therefore takes the place of a full figure, foreshadowing its later transformation into a person. Throughout, Bell draws with a largely unmodulated, even line, adding shading and weight with hesitant patches of black.


The effect of these techniques is that both stories proceed at a steady, even monotone, like a passage of prose made up of sentences of similar length, all beginning, “And then…”. But this has different effects in the two halves. In “My Affliction”, it makes the bizarre events and transformations seem mundane and plausible, while in “My Slideshow”, the unnatural regularity creates a sense of unease and tension. Thematically, the two stories also seem to take complementary tacks: “My Slideshow” is predominantly about Bell’s internal state and insecurities, while “My Affliction” externalises her emotions onto her relationships with the dream characters she meets.

The result conveys to me more mood than meaning, but that’s no bad thing. Normally, I find little interest in accounts of a cartoonist’s day to day life, and less in the recounting of dreams, but by linking the two, without drawing blatant parallels, Bell has produced something much more engaging.

Review: Superman 666

Superman issue 666, “The Beast from Krypton” by Kurt Busiek (writer), Walter Simonson (artist), John Workman (letters), Sinclair and Loughridge (colours) and Matt Idelson (editor), 38 pages of strip, US$3.99, DC Comics, October 2007

It’s a dream! It’s a hoax! It’s not an imaginary story! (Except that, you know, aren’t they all?)

The last demon from Krypton’s Hell – destroyed along with the planet and its inhabitants – arrives on Earth and tries to corrupt Superman as he dreams, gaining strength from Superman’s descent.

I’m tempted to quibble with the universality of American Christian concepts in DC’s cosmology: a hell with demons tormenting sinners is not even a part of all of Earth’s religions, let alone a necessary component of those of other planets; and the idea that Superman has only to sin in his heart for it to be real is oddly reminiscent of Jimmy Carter. But that would be unfair. After all, this story owes its very existence to the fact that its issue number matches a cryptic crossword clue in the Book of Revelations.

And the story is, mostly, a lot of fun, with an increasingly surly and sulky Superman (amusingly cartooned by Simonson) dealing unrestrainedly with the frustrations of his life: all those people demanding protection, Jimmy Olsen and his screeching signal-watch, the parade of pointlessly aggressive super-villains. In doing so, he produces an array of ever-sillier silver-age super-powers.


(Hmm. I’ve never been able to dictate the rules in my dreams. But then again I’m not Superman, so we’ll let it ride.)

Eventually, of course, the real, pure-hearted Superman reasserts himself in a manner that recalls the best bit of the movie Superman III.

Busiek paces the story nicely, with an ominous build-up and a nicely graduated slide into corruption, and keeps a decent handle on exposition by the device of having Zatanna trying to work out what is happening. The story can be taken as a counterpoint to his ongoing “Camelot Falls” arc, in which Superman is confronted with the possibility that his selfless heroism is holding back humanity’s development. Here, in contrast, we see the consequences if he gives in to selfishness. There are oddities – I’m not sure why Hawkman, Animal Man and Aquaman should make portentous announcements to thin air as the demon passes, and I was strangely distracted by the fact that Clark Kent is still using a manual typewriter in 2007 – but the only part of the story that really failed for me is that it goes out of its way to raise the question of whether, in the current version of the continuity, Superman has killed (as he did in John Byrne’s 1980s run on the title). Really, is there anyone who regards this sort of guessing game as entertaining? It’s not as if we can engage with it: we can merely await an arbitrary decision by DC editorial.

Wholly on the positive side of this issue is Simonson’s artwork. It’s not strikingly developed from the mature style he was already using by the time of his work on Thor or New Gods (except, perhaps, by adopting a touch of Ted McKeever for the demonically-possessed versions of Batman, Wonder Woman and Supergirl), but it’s good to see it again. Simonson seems to have been devoting more time to his writing lately: it would be nice if he got his pencils out more often, as in many ways, he is an ideal superhero artist.

Simonson’s artwork reconciles a number of apparently opposing traits. It is monumental, but massively energetic. It is loose, but makes extensive use of rigidly geometric shapes, circles and straight lines. It is sculptural, but flat – an impression reinforced by John Workman’s lettering, which never leaves the two-dimensional picture plane. The result is like some mad Assyrian bas-relief, only livelier, more colourful, and a good deal less vile.

Overall, an entertaining one-off issue. On this evidence, stepping aside from long arcs and crossovers can clearly make for good storytelling.

The Magical Cleavage Window – It’s All Done With Mirrors

Over at Journalista!, Dirk Deppey has posted Darwyn Cooke’s cover for the next issue of The Comics Journal. “What do you see?” he asks.


Well, I see someone who can’t hold a mirror properly. It’s got a handle, young lady. I hope those gauntlets are clean, otherwise you’ll be leaving smeary marks all over the surface.

And, anyway, I thought it was the eyes that were the mirror of the soul?

(Technical note: the specialist vestmental-panelological term “Magical Cleavage Window” was coined and defined by Mr Dave Campbell. All serious scholars of sequential art are in his debt.)

A Straw

I see that one of the papers being delivered at the Manchester Metropolitan University conference “The Aesthetics of Trash: Reassessing Animation and the Comic” today and tomorrow is “The European Graphic Novel from Töpffer to Today” by Paul Gravett.

Is it too much to hope that this might be the start of a volume on bandes dessinées, to match his books on Manga and Great British Comics?

The full list of papers is at BugPowder (which has no permalinks, so scroll down to 22 August).

Ninety Years On

Today would have been Jack Kirby’s 90th birthday.


To mark the occasion, here’s Kirby’s reinterpretation of probably the first recurring comics character*, Ally Sloper, drawn in 1976 for comics historian Denis Gifford, and scanned here from The Jack Kirby Collector issue 12, July 1996.

*Update, 30 September: I no longer believe this. See here for why.

Keith Robson’s History of Comics

I took advantage of the Bank Holiday weekend to take a short trip to see the free exhibition Keith Robson – The History of Comics at the Museum of Hartlepool.

Keith Robson is a Hartlepool-born comics artist, chiefly for DC Thomson, and an illustrator for TV and books. The exhibition is partly about his work and partly about British comics generally, drawing on Robson’s personal collection. Despite the unrestricted title, there is no consideration of comics from other countries.

The problem with a museum exhibition about comics is that there is no way of treating the subjects in the way their producers intended – you can’t be allowed to leaf through and read them, for fear of damage. This exhibition approached the problem in four ways. On the walls were examples of Robson’s original art for strips like “General Jumbo” (from The Beano) and “Tricky Dicky Doyle” and “Jonah” (from The Dandy). In display cases were, I’d guess, something over a hundred comics, mostly from the 1950s to the 1980s, but with a good number of earlier examples too. All of these were closed, which meant that you could only see the covers. Fortunately, a lot of British comics used to run actual strips on the cover, not just single images, so there were samples of different styles of comic to read and consider. There was a television display cycling through a slideshow of comics images. And, earlier in the exhibition’s run, Robson had worked with a number of local children to produce a new strip with and about them. The results are now on display in a cabinet.

Context for these exhibits was a little lacking. There was no soundtrack to the slideshow, so the images were unexplained. There were two pages of text on display stands – one a biography of Keith Robson, the other his potted history of British comics, which sets out his view that comics effectively started in 1937 with The Dandy and that “traditional British comics” have now died out except for The Beano. The question of whether the mixed magazines now produced for children should be classed as “comics” is one that gets people hot under the collar, but what was odd in this case was that Robson’s exhibition did not match his definition. There were several pre-1937 comics on display, as well as issues of Starblazer picture library (if libraries are part of Robson’s “tradition”, then Commando is another survivor).

If anything, it was the pre-1937 comics that were of most interest to me. Regular periodical comics have been around in Britain since the 1880s. The significance of The Dandy is that it did away with the older British custom of telling comics stories twice over – once in pictures and word balloons, and again in text captions under each frame. This was a very useful way of producing nursery comics, as it gave parents something to read to their small pre-literate children as they looked at the pictures; but it was redundant elsewhere. I had only seen these older strips in reproduction, usually much reduced, making the text captions illegible. What surprised me was how small the type was even on the originally published tabloids: I’d guess about 9 point on a 1928 edition of Merry and Bright and even smaller on a 1939 edition of Jingles.

The single most beautiful piece on display was a 1928 edition of Happy Days, with “At Chimpo’s Circus” on the cover. The colours were as sharp and bright as if it had rolled off the presses yesterday.

Well worth a visit, then, though a small demerit goes to the gift shop for not stocking any related items. It may be, however, that plans fell through. Early publicity for the exhibition said that Keith Robson would be producing a history of comics in strip form, but the first page, which was on display, was unfinished, with only three panels lettered, inked and coloured. I hope that he gets the chance to finish this for another forum, even if I don’t agree with the starting point and definition.

The exhibition only has a short time left to run, closing after Sunday 2 September. If you want to make a day of it, the Museum is also the entrance to the horribly-named “Hartlepool’s Maritime Experience”, centred around HMS Trincomalee, a restored warship from 1817.