Secondhand Supes

I went browsing yesterday in the two remaining secondhand bookshops in Whitley Bay, Bay Books and Oliver’s. One of the books I came away with was the 1983 British Superman Annual, which reprinted the trilogy of stories by Len Wein and Jim Starlin from DC Comics Presents issues 27-29 (cover-dated November 1980 to January 1981) that introduced the alien super-villain Mongul. There’s also a Superboy story by Cary Bates and Bob Brown.


A major selling point was the cover by Brian Bolland. Twomorrows later reprinted it for an article in Draw! about the artwork produced for British DC reprint annuals, but they printed it in monochrome. This allowed them to misidentify the floating head at top left as Darkseid. But it’s not him, or Thanos, either. I wonder if Jim Starlin is throwing himself into the upcoming Death of the New Gods in the hope of getting rid of Darkseid, and so covering up his artistic tracks.

Coincidentally, the illustration on the endpapers is an undistinguished piece by Dave Gibbons, who would go on to draw Mongul in his most memorable outing, “For the Man Who Has Everything”, written by Alan Moore.

The stories are quite fun. One point of note is that, after Superman has screwed up and allowed Mongul to get the key to the star-sized weapon platform Warworld, he turns to Supergirl for “heavy duty super-help”. Supergirl soon demonstrates that she is more level-headed than her cousin.


It’s not a characterisation I expect to see any time soon in the current run of Supergirl.

Pictures and Panels
Superman Official Annual 1983, cover by Brian Bolland, London Editions Magazines, 1982

Superman and Supergirl “Warworld!” by Len Wein (scripter), Jim Starlin and Romeo Tanghal (artists), Ben Oda (letterer), Jerry Serpe (colourist) and Julius Schwartz (editor), DC Comics Presents issue 28, DC Comics, December 1980, reprinted in Superman Official Annual 1983, London Editions Magazines, 1982

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.)

Light, Shade and Supergirl

Renato Guedes has been rightly praised for his artwork on the latest issue of Supergirl, chiefly for his convincing and non-exploitative depiction of its teenage heroine. And it is, indeed, refreshing to find an artist who can make figurative realism work on the pages of a comic book, achieving a readable fluidity and avoiding the lifelessness that often undermines photo- or model-referenced comic art.


What I find most interesting, though, is Guedes’s use of colour. Several comic book artists have, like Guedes, adopted a style of drawing that uses fine, unmodulated, clear linework with little chiaroscuro, in the realisation that computer colour now provides shading and depth in a way that the old, flat, ben-day dotted colours of newsprint comics could not. Scott Kolins and Pete Woods are good cases. But they generally work with colourists who provide fully modelled, mimetic colouring of the sort seen, for example, in the panels from 52 that I posted yesterday.

Guedes, on the other hand, does his own colouring, though he does not ink his own pencils. His technique is quite different from the norm. Generally speaking, he deploys each colour in two sharply contrasted tones, one light and one dark, rather than providing continuous modelling. The effect is as if everything was seen by bright sunlight, casting sharp shadows – or perhaps, since the darker tones often dominate, bright sunlight seen through sunglasses.


This technique does not always show Guedes’s drawing off to its best effect. In heavily shadowed panels, the fine linework can be swamped and hidden. But it is very distinctive, and, given his choice of which parts of the art process to undertake himself, it is presumably an important part of the way Guedes wants the pages to look.


I’m not sure what Guedes’s intentions are. Perhaps he feels that fully-modelled colour can deaden the image. Perhaps he just sees light that way. Whatever, I’ll be interested to see what he does with future issues.


Panels
Supergirl issue 20, “No Good Deed …”, written by Tony Bedard, pencilled and coloured by Renato Guedes, inked by Jose Wilson Megalhaes, lettered by Bob Leigh, edited by Matt Idelson, DC Comics, October 2007

Reviews: Action Comics, Gutsville, Spider-Man Fairy Tales

Action Comics issue 850 “Superman: Family” by Kurt Busiek, Fabian Nicieza and Geoff Johns (writers), Renato Guedes (pencils and colours), José Wilson Magalhães (inks), Rob Leigh (letters) and Matt Idelson (editor), cover by Renato Guedes, DC Comics, Late July 2007, 38 pages of strip, US$3.99

This is a disjointed story, as Brainiac 5 helps Supergirl, still trapped in the 31st century, use a gizmo to peer into the past, specifically picking up key moments in Superman’s life (after a few attempts showing other versions of Superman throughout the multiverse), including some previews of forthcoming attractions in the Superman comics, in the manner of issue 1 of the latest run of Justice Society of America. These fragments are used unsubtly to hammer home how lonely Superman has been until he learns that he has an actual living relative. The story doesn’t really hang together well, and the dialogue is clunky and full of forced exposition.

But that’s not the selling point here. What makes this comic worth looking at is Renato Guedes’ artwork, which combines a figurative approach as realistic as any you’ll find in comics with an almost ligne claire approach to linework and an abstinence from black shading. The unusual distribution of work on the art, with Guedes handling colour as well as pencils (but not inks), is crucial, as all the weight of the pictures comes from the colour modelling.


Guedes is taking over as the regular artist on Supergirl later this year. Numerous bloggers have already praised his advance sketches for showing a Supergirl who looks like a real person in real (if odd) clothes rather than the half-naked distended sex object who has populated the title’s pages since its revival. This issue of Action Comics suggests that there are more reasons than that to keep an eye on his work.


Gutsville issue 1 “Part One: Ingestion” by Simon Spurrier (story) and Frazer Irving (art and letters), plus appendices “A List of Oddities and Curiosities” by Ray Fawkes (text) and Fiona Staples (illustrations), “Gutsville Map” by Simon Spurrier, “The Butler and the Bolt: A Gutsville Mystery” by Simon Spurrier (story) and Simon Gurr (illustrations), Image Comics, May 2007, 22 pages of strip plus 9 pages of appendices, US$2.99

Gutsville tells the story of a community living in the belly of a colossal sea creature, which swallowed their ship 157 years earlier (or so the prologue tells us: the clothes worn by the characters mix influences from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth). There is class conflict and a killer on the loose.

Spurrier sets up his story nicely, limning in the main characters neatly, and creating convincing details of how his community would talk and act after generations in the belly of a beast. Irving’s art is clear and precise yet dark and foreboding, with one brief interlude making good use of his psychedelic style from Storming Heaven. An occasional experiment, such as using semi-transparent word balloons to indicate whispering, fails to come off, and it is still a puzzle how an isolated ship-load of people manage to obtain enough food, let alone clothing and furniture and even art materials, but on the whole this is a confident and well-realised comic.


However, I think it would have come across better if I had not recently read the collected edition of Leviathan, a 2000AD series by Ian Edginton and D’Israeli, the story of a community living on a giant ocean liner that was possessed by a demon twenty years earlier, where there is class conflict and a killer on the loose; and also Seven Soldiers: Klarion the Witchboy by Grant Morrison and Frazer Irving, in part the story of a community living underground, having been dragged there hundreds of years earlier by the fairy-like Sheeda, and whose inhabitants could wander around Gutsville without anyone remarking on the oddity of their clothes. The prologue to Gutsville even concludes with the phrase “Gutsville endures”, a clear echo of the chant “Croatoan abides” which peals through Klarion.

Still, there’s enough that’s good about this opening for me to hope that future issues escape from what at the moment seems like a high concept pitch of “Leviathan meets Klarion”, and tell a story of their own.


Spider-Man Fairy Tales issue 1 “Off the Beaten Path” by C B Cebulski (writer), Ricardo Tercio (artist), Artmonkeys Studios (letters) and Molly Lazer (editor), Marvel Comics, July 2007, 23 pages of strip, US$2.99

This is a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, with a version of Mary-Jane Watson as the heroine, a Peter Parker as the Woodcutter, and an Aunt May as a substitute for Grandmother. J Jonah Jameson also appears as a grumpy and distrustful village elder. But really, the Spider-Man elements here are at best irrelevant and at worst a distraction. The setting is classic mitteleuropan forest, not New York, and no superheroics occur. Spider-Man is used only as an external heroic ideal, which the heroine must replace with her own courage and initiative and that of her fiancé.

There are two variations from the classic story. Mary-Jane plays as active a part in killing the wolf as Peter (fair enough, though the way it is done is not terribly plausible), and Aunt May is not eaten, which I am sure would have disappointed me terribly as a bloodthirsty toddler. Still, at least Peter doesn’t have to put on his black woodcutter costume and become all vengeful. (And Mary-Jane doesn’t do any laundry in this story, either.)

The style of writing is clearly pitched at children, which is refreshing, though it makes it hard for this middle-aged man to judge its success. The art is bright and exuberantly cartoony, with computer colours allowing Tercio to miss out black lines altogether for anything other than black objects, creating a Matisse-styled cut-out effect.

Reviews: Aquaman, Hellblazer, The Brave and the Bold

Aquaman, Sword of Atlantis issue 50: “Cold Water” by Tad Williams (writer), Shawn McManus (penciller), Walden Wong (inker), Todd Klein (letters), Dan Brown (colours), Joey Cavalieri (editor), cover by Mario Alberti. DC Comics, May 2007, 38 pages of strip, US$3.99.

I hadn’t encountered Aquaman since Grant Morrison’s JLA. But Scipio at The Absorbascon has a list of fun things from this issue, and with a new writer and a new art team starting here, I thought this might be a good jumping-on point. I was wrong. Oh, there’s lots of good humoured silliness and oddity, particularly involving King Shark and the new version of Topo, but the story is highly confusing. There are no fewer than four leading characters who are either amnesiac or living under assumed identities, or both. At least two of them might be Aquaman. What I take to be the new plot – about a nasty underwater church – seems to be tangled with untucked threads from early issues that are not adequately explained.

Shawn McManus’s art is clear and expressive, but Walden Wong’s inks seem to have robbed it of the texture and character I remember from McManus’s fill-in issues of Swamp Thing. Most oddly, whole pages go by without anything to remind the reader that the action is supposed to be taking place underwater: characters stand rather than swim and talk without breathing out air bubbles. Several have long hair, which resolutely refuses to billow around in the water.

A curious feature is that all the intelligent sea creatures have human bodies, albeit topped with heads derived from marine life. Topo, for example, is no longer an octopus, but a humanoid with a squid-like head. Presumably, the authors either find it impossible to maintain sympathy for beings that look too odd, or they expect their readers to feel that way.


Overall, a disappointment. Despite all the welcome humour and invention, I don’t think that I’ll be back for issue 51.


Hellblazer issue 230: “In at the Deep End” Part 1 by Andy Diggle (writer), Leonardo Manco (artist), Lee Loughridge (colourist), Jared K Fletcher (letterer), Casey Seijas (editor), cover by Lee Bermejo. DC Comics/Vertigo, May 2007, 22 pages of strip, US$2.99.

This was another return to a character I’d neglected for some time, facilitated by the arrival of a new writer. Unlike Aquaman, this really works as an issue for new readers. All you need to know to follow Andy Diggle’s debut issue is that John Constantine is a supernatural expert mixed up with low-life, and that is explained within the story itself. This is a modest vignette, about how Constantine found himself tied to a pier support waiting to drown, and how he gets out of it, but it makes confident use of flashback, with solid characterisation, and a slow reveal of the plot. The cockney hard-man dialogue is perhaps a little overdone.


Leonardo Manco’s art seems perfect for this series: it is dark and gritty, and shows a particular talent for realistically varied faces.

Overall, this issue is spot-on, both as an entertaining story in its own right and as a hook for the continuing series.


The Brave and the Bold issue 2: “The Lords of Luck, Chapter 2: Ventura” by Mark Waid (writer), George Pérez (penciller), Bob Wiacek (inks), Tom Smith (colours), Rob Leigh (lettering), Joey Cavalieri (editor), cover by Pérez. DC Comics, May 2007, 22 pages of strip, US$2.99.

Oh, dear, this is an unpleasant surprise.

The first issue of the revived Brave and the Bold was light-hearted superhero fun. But this issue, telling of Green Lantern and Supergirl’s attempt to recover the Book of MacGuffin from the gambling-mad planet of Ventura, is dominated by teenage Kara’s blatant passes at Hal and his response.

Significantly, we are given Hal’s internal monologue, but not Kara’s; a clear signal that we are intended to identify with his viewpoint. Unfortunately, this seems to be same opinion held by puritans of assorted religions – that women are temptresses who inflame innocent males to lusts which they must manfully resist.

The whiff of antedeluvian sexual politics becomes stronger when Hal tells Kara that she’ll never get a boyfriend, because no man wants a woman who is stronger than he is. This proves to be the inspiration for Supergirl’s decision to flush out the man with the Book by hiding the big red “S” under a four-year old’s impossibly short pink dress and pigtails.

Yes, really.


Illustrating this distasteful tale, Pérez, as usual, portrays his hero and heroine with the looks of Ken and Barbie, though Supergirl is drawn with a genuinely young and animated face. The art team manage to convince us that they are giving an accurate portrayal of a crowded and gaudy planet, rather than just producing crowded and gaudy pictures. Tom Smith’s colours, in particular, are appropriately bright, and help ensure that no images dissolve into confusion.