Hallowe’en

From ghosties


and ghoulies


and long-leggedy beasties


and things that go bump in the night


good Lord protect us.

(First published by Walter de la Mare as an old Scottish prayer in Come Hither, 1923)

Panels
My Dead Girlfriend Volume 1 “A Tryst of Fate” by Eric Wight, Tokyopop, 2006

Buster Gonad and his Unfeasibly Large Testicles, art by Simon Donald, I think, reprinted in Viz: The Sausage Sandwich, John Brown Publishing, 1991

Daredevil “Stilts” by Frank Miller (scripter/storyteller), Klaus Janson (penciller/inker/colourist), Sam Rosen (letterer) and Dennis O’Neil (editor), Daredevil issue 186, September 1982, reprinted in Daredevil Visionaries: Frank Miller Volume 3, Marvel Comics, 2001

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume 2 by Alan Moore (writer), Kevin O’Neill (artist), Ben Dimagmaliw (colourist), Todd Klein (letterer) and Scott Dunbier (editor), America’s Best Comics, 2002-2003

Silken Scarlett

According to the Hollywood Reporter (link via Blog@Newsarama), Scarlett Johansson is being cast in Frank Miller’s film of The Spirit as Silken Floss, “a sexy and intelligent secretary with a vindictive instinct that makes her the perfect accomplice to the Octopus”.

Will Eisner had a character called Silken Floss too - Dr Silken Floss, who was both a nuclear physicist and a brilliant surgeon.


I’ve no wish to denigrate secretaries, but it is notable that Eisner was able to envisage women in prestigious non-traditional careers in 1947, whereas Miller, in 2007, isn’t able to do the same.

Still, it’s a change from the two professions into which Miller usually fits his female characters: whoredom and assassination. Those of Miller’s fans who resent this step may take comfort from the thought that, the last time he had to write about a secretary, Karen Page from Daredevil, he immediately turned her into a junkie porn performer instead.


Panel
The Spirit “Silken Floss MD”, Comic Book Section, 9 March 1947, reprinted in The Spirit Archives Volume 14, DC Comics, 2004

Reviews: Deadpool/GLI Summer Fun, Martha Washington Dies

Deadpool/GLI Summer Fun Spectacular issue 1, written by Fabian Nicieza and Dan Slott, lettering by Dave Lanphear, editor Nicole Boose, cover by Paul Pelletier, Dave Meikis and Will Quintana, 39 pages of strip, Marvel Comics, September 2007, US$3.99
Features: Squirrel Girl, art by Kieron Dwyer, colour by Pete Pantazis
Deadpool and the Great Lakes Initiative “Drunk with Power”, art by Nelson, colour by Giulia Brisco
Big Bertha and Deadpool “A Date with Density", pencils by Paul Pelletier, inks by Dave Meikis, colour by Will Quintana
Flatman and Deadpool “Fight or Fold?”, art by Clio Chiang

It’s nice to see that that, although so many of its core super-hero titles are being bound ever tighter into cross-continuity big events, Marvel continues to publish titles that provide lighter-toned stand-alone stories: not just the Marvel Adventures line, but the likes of Spider-Man Family, Hulk and Power Pack, X-Men: First Class and the occasional special about the third-rate super-heroes from the Great Lakes, of which this is the latest.

It’s a bit of a mixed bag. A major problem is the presence of the repulsive psychopath Deadpool. It is possible to make casual, amoral slaughter funny, but it’s hard and requires a careful balance of tone. Deadpool’s repeated killing of Mr Immortal raises a laugh, because we know Mr Immortal will recover (the clue is in his name), and because repetition of an absurdity is an old comedy standby. But the gratuitous killing of a passing character called Grasshopper right at the end is just plain nasty and leaves the book with a bad aftertaste (but see the comments section for more on this - added 16 July).

“Drunk with Power” is the weakest thing here, laboured and stolid in plot, dialogue and artwork. “A Date with Density” is nimbler on all counts, but still rather pedestrian.

“Fight or Fold?” is lovely little throwaway piece, with light, dancing artwork from Chiang.


But the best thing here is the Squirrel Girl sequence. Nicieza and Slott skewer the dark, gloomy, adolescent tone of the Civil War period Marvel comics, but still provide a coherent story about a delightful, upbeat character that works for those of us who haven’t read the Civil War books. Dwyer’s compositions are clear and fluid, finished with a rough, energetic line. It’s a shame about the ending, but otherwise, these two stories easily justify reading this comic.


Oh, and a message to toy manufacturers: please tool up a model Squirrel-A-Gig right now. Well, when you've finished with those librarian figures, anyway.


Martha Washington Dies by Frank Miller (writer), Dave Gibbons (artist), Angus McKie (colourist), Diana Schutz (editor), 17 pages of strip, Dark Horse Comics, July 2007, US$3.50

In which Martha Washington dies, surprisingly enough; in a blaze of light, at the age of one hundred, after speechifying a bit. No man-eating badgers are involved.

Miller provides an uneventful coda to the Martha Washington series, with touches as unsubtle as the previous episodes (“And now the barbarians sing their chants and set off their bombs and pray for the Armageddon we’ll never let them have”), but without the jokes. Gibbons’ artwork is as meticulous as ever.

I have seen some online criticism of Dark Horse for publishing something so inconsequential. But this chapter will serve a purpose by providing a definitive end to the upcoming omnibus The Life and Times of Martha Washington in the Twenty-First Century. For those who already have the preceding stories in one form or another, this separate publication is surely a positive and helpful thing, staving off the Hobson’s choice of expensive duplication or incomplete story.

Miller’s Spirit, Take One

Frank Miller: When you’re dealing with something you’ve created, be very protective. If you love it, if it’s still an alive and ongoing thing …
Will Eisner: Well, you have to resist the temptation of having a movie made.

(from Eisner/Miller: A One-on-One Interview Conducted by Charles Brownstein, Dark Horse Books, 2005)


So far as Frank Miller goes, I’m in the camp that feels that his hard-boiled macho self-parody stopped being funny around the time of his second or third Sin City story. So, despite his friendship with Will Eisner, the news that he was to direct a Spirit movie was not altogether welcome.

And yes, this is old news. But I’ve just reminded myself that Miller has done creative work on The Spirit before. Back in 1981, when he was still the hot young writer/artist on Daredevil, he took part in “The Spirit Jam” that I mentioned yesterday, pencilling two pages to a Denny O’Neil script.


Just as Miller borrowed from Eisner’s Spirit for Daredevil, he has here borrowed what looks a lot like Josie’s bar from Daredevil and put it in The Spirit. The big plate glass window is doomed, of course.


“The Spirit Jam” pages were basically just a brief bit of slapstick done for the fun of it. But I still prefer them to the brutal mess used to promote the movie as if it was part of the Sin City franchise.




Panels and pictures
Panels by Denny O’Neil (writer), Frank Miller (penciller) and Terry Austin (inker) from “The Spirit Jam”, Will Eisner’s The Spirit issue 30 by Will Eisner, Kitchen Sink Comix, July 1981

Promotional poster by Frank Miller for the film Will Eisner’s The Spirit, 2006

Real-Time Lord

This week’s new episode of Doctor Who has a gimmick: called “42”, it tells the events of 42 minutes on board a spaceship, unfolded in real time over the 42 minutes of the episode. Presumably, it is no coincidence that “42” is 24 backwards.

Comics’ big recent experiment with real-time storytelling was DC’s series 52, each weekly issue portraying what happened in one week in the DC Universe. The writers found that this placed them under certain constraints (no “man at the door with a gun” cliffhangers, for example) and sometimes they fluffed it (such as the police taking several weeks to turn up to arrest Lex Luthor), but they did have the advantage that readers were tied to the real-time framework too, receiving only a week’s worth of story every week.

Within a single issue, it is harder to regulate the speed at which the reader reads. There is a battery of devices comics creators can use to simulate the flow of time: the number and size of the panels on a page, for example; their proportions (wide panels seem to take more time to read – Frank Quitely uses them for this purpose in All-Star Superman); the density of the images and amount of text to read in each panel; the width of gutters; and the use of images that explicitly indicate the passage of time such as changes in the angle and intensity of daylight.

Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns gives us a clearcut example of some techniques for controlling the flow of time in comics. Most pages are built of a large number of small panels (on an underlying sixteen-panel grid), each containing a simple, quickly read image, with a consistent number words. As a result, these pages tick by rapidly, but then Miller will throw in a full-page splash, and time seems to stand still.


Bullet time, right there on the comics page. But techniques like this only affect the relative speed at which time seems to pass. Is it possible for a single-issue single narrative to simulate the absolute passage of a particular amount of time, an in particular the time it takes to read?

Will Eisner had a go. In The Spirit section for September 11 1949, Eisner told the story of an attempted robbery, killing, and failed flight that took just “Ten Minutes”.



The most obvious technique that Eisner uses to try to regulate time across his seven pages is to read a watch for us at the start of each one. This is less crude than it might seem. Since we know from the start that the lead character, Freddy, will die after ten minutes, the marked passage of time also builds up the tension.



The illusion of the regular passage of time is maintained by the panel progressions. With only two exceptions, each panel follows directly on from the previous one, with no cutting away from Freddy. In general, any given area of any page contains the same amount of imagery and words for the eye to read, although Eisner does not use an identical panel grid on each page.

One of the exceptions is telling. The events of the first two-thirds of page 4, in which two customers discover the dead shop-keeper, seem to pass quickly. Then we get this panel, with no panel boundaries and lots of empty space, which works like those Frank Miller splashes, taking us out of the regular time-scheme. Unlike the Miller example, Eisner brings us back into the story not immediately, but about a minute later.



After the dramatic events of killing, discovery and flight, Eisner reminds us of how short a period of time has passed by bringing back the little girl from page 1, still working through her chant.



Only after this does Eisner bring in the Spirit himself, bringing his story to its tragic denouement, as Freddy is killed by a subway train.



Does it work? Not entirely. It took me four-and-a-half minutes to read this story through, not ten. Some of the pacing also seems a cheat. On page 6, Freddy is hailed by Dolan from a police car (Dolan is asking for directions, unaware of Freddy’s role in the crime that he has been called to); Freddy then walks – casually, hands in pocket – into a subway station, asks for a ticket, drops his change, has it picked up by the Spirit and passes through a turnstile. According the page-top watch, this is all supposed to take just a minute. It doesn’t match.

But I only noticed that when I went back to work out what Eisner was doing. And no-one in their right mind (unless preparing a blog entry, of course) sits down with a stopwatch to time how long it takes to read a comic strip. While reading it, Eisner’s story successfully maintains the illusion of the sustained passage of events in real time. It also tells an effective story pitched somewhere between film noir and O Henry. So, yes, it works.

Let’s see how Doctor Who does, in a rather easier medium for this sort of thing.


Panels

Batman “Hunt the Dark Knight” by Frank Miller (story, pencils, inks), Klaus Janson (inks), Lynn Varley (colours and visual effects), John Constanza (letters), DC Comics, 1986, reprinted in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Titan Books, 1986

The Spirit “Ten Minutes” by Will Eisner and his studio, The Spirit Section, September 11 1949, reprinted in The Spirit Archives Volume 19, DC Comics, 2006