Scraping By On Words

It really is a shame Mighty Avengers has been saddled with the artwork of Greg Land. The script by 2000 A.D. alum Al Ewing delivers a better straightforward superhero narrative than Marvel has produced since Peter Parker: Spider-Man under Paul Jenkins, Mark Buckingham, and Humberto Ramos. None of the cloying cuteness of Daredevil or Hawkeye, none of the unimaginative snark of Brian Bendis’ Guardians of the Galaxy, and none of the portentous, elitist posturing of Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers books. Mighty Avengers #3: No Single Hero is old-fashioned in its depiction of good guys on the job, working towards common good.

Much of Ewing’s writing, in fact, seems a reaction to Hickman’s Avengers/New Avengers/Infinity mega-arc. Where Hickman goes for godlike awe at his monolithic superteam (like Grant Morrison and Howard Porter’s JLA), Ewing stresses humanity, whether it’s the class-based bickering of “Superior” Spider-Man (Dr. Octopus having hijacked Peter Parker’s body) and “Spider Hero” (who is, apparently, Blade the Vampire Hunter in disguise)–ironically, Octopus calls Spider Hero an “impostor”–or a rooftop bonding moment between Power Man and White Tiger before entering the fray against alien invaders (showing an almost Shane Black-level of efficient scripting). Where Hickman is unconcerned with the “countless” death tolls incurred by his extraterrestrial threats, Ewing shows characters deliberately avoiding casualties (stalling for time when civilians are possessed by Lovecraftian terror Shuma-Gorath). Where Hickman is building the Avengers into a Homeland Security super-gestapo (Watchmen minus the moral compass; The Ultimates minus the satire), Ewing suggests reclaiming the super-hero as a model of populist sentiment–the choice of black, Hispanic, and working-class characters as the good guys, with Dr. Octopus-Spider-Man as an unlikeable crony capitalist and odd man out, harkens back to Roger Stern. Stern’s one-time Captain Marvel Monica Rambeau, here dubbed “Spectrum,” is again de facto team leader, putting a stop to the Spider-bickering and dealing the finishing blow to Shuma-Gorath.

This classicism is surprising from Ewing, who previously went for the jugular against vigilante tropes in the Garth Ennis work-for-hire book Jennifer Blood and the psychedelic spoof Zaucer of Zilk with Brendan McCarthy. And yet, doing so perfectly undermines Hickman’s surveillance state apologia: when White Tiger says she wants her death to “mean something,” Power Man gives a Dalton Trumbo response (“Death don’t ever mean anything. It’s just some &#$% happens to you one day”), promoting life as Hickman’s pretentious “To protect a world, you must possess the power to destroy a world” deals death.

Ewing’s populism never quite overcomes the elitism of its sibling Avengers books, even if it’s a start. Luke Cage gives a rousing speech to a crowd of civilians on how “we are all Avengers,” yet we only see civilians acting in the previous issue to No Single Hero. Here, bystanders are reduced to either brainwashed masses or Cloverfield Millenials, capturing video on smart phones (a passive form of grassroots activism). Then there’s the depiction of Hickman-esque hyper-power–Blue Marvel and Spectrum–as being key to successful super-heroics, if not to the absurd degree shown in those charts-and-graphs-obsessed books. But, like fellow Brit China Miéville, Ewing understands the power of identity, the universal strength of community: Spider Hero gives advice to Power Man on summoning his chi, connecting “home and family” to “streets and landmarks” to “New York City”–“It all has power.”

It’s to the credit of Ewing as a writer the scene, as with the comic, manages to scrape by. Greg Land depicts it with flatness, two closeups on Spider Hero and Power Man against nondescript color backgrounds. A more virtuosic artist like Emma Rios would have deployed fragmented, aspect-to-aspect grids (as she does in Pretty Deadly). Then again, Land’s style has been all wrong for this series: his stiff, Uncanny Valley figures always seem to display inappropriate emotion (Blue Marvel’s eerie grin when he heals Spectrum from a life-threatening wound), even when he’s not tracing what looks like still-frames from porn.

Land is unaided by colorist Frank D’Armata, who changes his palette after a decade of murky, ugly schemes which made several comics near-unreadable. Together, the two lighten the skin tones of the main characters, while depicting crowds of middle-class white folks, deflating Ewing’s inclusive “We are all Avengers” theme. Ewing’s no stranger to bad, incongruous art: Jennifer Blood labored under the oddly-plain exploitation of Dynamite artist Kewber Baal. Blood, however, had an interesting tension between Baal’s style (which followed mainstream comics trends) and Ewing’s sardonic observations, which put the series in Steve Gerber territory (Foolkiller, particularly). Land and D’Armata are there as a connection to the Brian Bendis/Joe Quesada house style/regime which Jonathan Hickman inherited and Ewing is backup for.

The art gets in the way of theme, rather than illustrate it, leaving No Single Hero only with words. Well-written, thoughtful words, but fighting a battle it barely wins with its own partner.

Trumping Realism

Shaolin Cowboy #1
Art and Writing by Geof Darrow
Published by Dark Horse

The kind of attention to detail Geof Darrow brings goes way beyond realism. Where that movement–typified in comics by John Cassaday, Bryan Hitch, and Greg Land–affects the way the world looks (as appropriated in styles hewing closer to Gustave Courbet or Honoré Dauemier), Darrow seems more intent on capturing the way things are. The worlds he depicts in Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot, Hard Boiled, and especially this newly-relaunched Shaolin Cowboy, are cluttered with garbage, roadkill, tattoos (including tramp stamps on zombies), and graffiti. Even text, be it profanity-only dialogue during a zombie attack or an absurdly-long recap in the opening pages (blending pop cultural references and broad political humor), is part of Darrow’s sensory overload, but Darrow’s more numerous silent pages are plenty dense without it.

Rather than hyperrealism (Darrow doesn’t aim for photographic fidelity, only hi-def), this artwork can be considered hyper-materialist. Like with subsequent detail-obsessed artists James Stokoe and Christian Slade, everything about the world is summed up in the little details, point-blank stating an objective, physical reality occurs even when one is not looking (yet, paradoxically, only seems to matter when one is). A group of slackers encountering the Shaolin Cowboy, and the undead he battles this issue, have a car packed with candies, drinks, and junk food telling exactly what their routine is day after day (likely including some percentage of the spray-painted desert rocks); this is mirrored by an NSA satellite whose techies have similarly disheveled appearances and sloppy workstations–the satellite is also stamped with corporate logos, connecting America’s surveillance apparatus with the online targeting of Facebook ads. Darrow practically begs questions about the entire hacker/contractor structure which Edward Snowden currently is the face of with his imagery.

This in itself is much more impressive than Jim Lee’s gaudy-yet-sterile gatefold poster pages from Superman Unchained #1 (hyped for their size like a dick-wagging contest). Darrow not only has more social-savvy than Lee, but better design sense, too. Darrow’s pages move, whether it’s the opening splash (mostly empty space until you get to a frog on a rock) or the moment-to-moment transitions (such as Shaolin Cowboy glancing left and right before sighing with exasperation). Lee is content with blowing up standard action poses (Superman smashing a DC version of the International Space Station) to make collector’s items–disrupting the flow of the comic itself for shameless consumerism.

Where Lee promotes mindless, lifeless destruction (for all the Scott Snyder narration, those poster images lack any context or purpose beyond Superman punching metal), Darrow invites closer inspection. The clutter never interferes with the action: Darrow’s layouts, coupled with Dave Stewart’s colors (exchanging the noir tones of Fatale and Hellboy for a blues-and-earth palette, leaving the Cowboy in primary colors), always make his trash a sideshow attraction, simultaneously moving the action forward but allowing readers to linger on life they might otherwise ignore in their daily reality. As good as the fidelity of Hitch or Cassaday is, or as superficially spectacular as those Lee pages are, that quality of capturing life, like Courbet and Daumier, is missing. In that respect, Darrow trumps realism.

Throwing His Mighty Avengers

From Essential Spider-Man vol. 1 (Amazing Spider-Man #15)
Art/Plot by Steve Ditko, Words/Editing by Stan Lee

So, The Comics Journal has yet another Kirby/Lee argument going. Yet again, it devolved into a shouting match about whether or not Stan Lee is a doodoohead who couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag (or something?), overtaking Robert Steibel’s wonderful breakdown of Jack Kirby pages and the “Marvel Method” (again). Essentially, if you read any Comics Journal comment thread on the subject, you’ve read this one. Exactly. If there isn’t Patrick Ford’s contempt for genre (happily promoted by the Journal) or Robert Stanley Martin’s contempt for sound rhetorical skills (promoted by a guy named George), everyone seems contemptuous of saying anything of substance about creator’s rights, because they’d rather treat the system which starved out so many old pros as Team Edward/Team Jacob shenanigans (or Marvel v. DC shenanigans, even). More about egos than principles in the House That Groth Built.

*sigh*

Mighty Avengers #2
Art by Greg Land
Writing by Al Ewing
Published by Marvel

With Mighty Avengers, Greg Land seems to be trying to prove something here. The tracing–fashion mag, porno, or whatever source is this week’s Greg Land joke–so often present in his pages is dialed back to a handful of civilians, as are the celebrity referencing which also typifies his work. While the dominance of Spider-Man masks (be it Octo-Spider-Man or “Spider-Hero”) and Kirby-themed alien invaders can be a partial explanation, even characters shown with regular faces (Luke Cage, Dr. Strange, and an oddly whitewashed Monica Rambeau) all seem to be drawn entirely from Land’s pencil without copying.

Would be admirable, if the result did not immediately draw attention to Land’s numerous other faults. Namely, the plastic nature of his faces and barely coherent action. Fist fights are stuck in forever muddled closeups, more often content with showing the faces of who is doing the punching rather than the actual act of the punch, eliminating all sense of space and movement within his single-panel, meticulous recreations of Manhattan. And while Land’s photoreferenced horrors from comics like Iron Man or Ultimate Power helped discredit the Comic Realist art movement once popularized by Bryan Hitch, John Cassaday, and Steve McNiven (who managed to emulate realism through body language and facial expressions which matched what the script calls for, what Land never grasps), worse still is his attempt at depicting a shark torpedoing through water: so ramrod stiff and lifeless it may as well be a picture of a block of wood, there’s hardly any of the brutal, prehistoric grace one gets from Sean Murphy’s moody artwork in The Wake.

This proves to be yet another mismatch for writer Al Ewing, whose American work (such as his otherwise excellent Jennifer Blood run) has been marred by inconsistent, anatomically challenged artwork (being paired with Butch Guice for an Age of Ultron tie-in was a stroke of mild genius, offset by it being an Age of Ultron tie-in). Ewing’s snappier moments–including his depiction of Dan Slott’s “Superior” Spider-Man as petty, small-minded, and possibly bigoted–are undone by Land’s sloppy setpieces: Spider-Hero at one  point “steals” a beatdown from his namesake, mocking “Superior’s” logorrhea (“Less #$%@, more hit”); Land draws the characters in total isolation from one another (Spider-Man shouting “Hey” off-panel when the steal occurs), diluting the scene’s impact. A later brawl between Luke Cage and the sadistic Proxima Midnight similarly isolates its characters to create the impression they are furiously punching air. Absolutely zero respect for spatial relations. Only thing Land proves is he isn’t learning.

Popeye #15
Art and Writing by Bud Sagendorf
Published by IDW/Yoe Books

Where IDW’s revival of Dinosaurs Attack has been dolled up with shiny new paper and digital lettering, the Popeye reprints stick with old-fashioned newsprint. Much to its benefit, this actually prevents Bud Sagendorf’s artwork from seeming incongruous and dated, the way Herb Trimpe’s pencils in DA seem to exist on a separate plane from the floating word balloons and captions (modern mainstream comics have this problem too, if mitigated by the fact artwork is made entirely in this digitized schema). Instead, his imperfectly colored bright reds/deep blues are allowed to pop in a format they were intended for, rather than desaturate in one they were not (the way so many old movies end up looking more hideous in hi-definition remasters).

This time capsule approach works best with the comic material: Popeye helping animals in a Dr. Doolittle riff, Popeye resolving a problem on a rail line, and side stories with Wimpy, Olive Oil, and cowboy Ham Gravy. With the Popeye vignettes, Sagendorf portrays an oddly fluid class system: his oafish, well-meaning hero exemplifying blue collar ethics and pragmatism (the comic is peppered with DIY crafting instructions), rolling up his sleeves and working himself to exhaustion, such as caring for every single animal which comes to him with a problem in “Animal Talk”; yet, he is also portrayed as independently wealthy (owning a rail line in addition to his own boat), allowing him and his supporting cast to engage in such offbeat adventures. Sagendorf seems uninterested in any particular class theory–not socialism, lifting all boats on a rising tide, nor the “might makes right” of hyper-capitalism. Even when Popeye performs feats of strength, with spinach of course, they’re deployed in non-violent means: pulling a train sans engine or walking through a wall to teach a steak-loving bully the value of eating one’s veggies. Conservative masculinity with a more pronounced empathy for others marks Popeye as a Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican who would confound and anger the Reagan-histrionics of modern-day Tea Party businessmen and fundamentalist Christians

Jockeying For Position

Howard Chaykin and Matt Fraction are no strangers to showing how sex relates to class. In that regard, Satellite Sam isn’t unique in their bibliographies. It is, however, the best of both Fraction’s High-Concept plotting and Chaykin’s explicit storytelling. The scratchy, rugged glamor Chaykin lends to the characters invites readers to pour over every line and wrinkle on a person’s skin, which seems to ooze sweat and oil and hormones. Like in his Black Kiss and its sequel, the effect is pornographic. Artist and writer use this approach to explore four relationships, a cross-section of 50s Hollywood elite: born again actress Kara and stand-in Mike reflect suburban desire for privacy when they dredge up secrets from the past; tech-obsessed Gene and lounge singer Eve, suffering gender-based communication breakdown; an affair between an FCC commissioner and Madeline, the wife of TV executive Ginsberg, demonstrating Old Money/New Money rivalry; and finally, flashbacks to Kara’s time with deceased actor Carlyle (Mike’s father).

These various tugs of war show class in flux. Whether it’s the careerism of Gene or Madeline assuming managerial authority in her adultery (“So get on your fucking knees and get to work.”), the characters struggle to control their destiny.  an inverse of Black Kiss 2‘s theater scene: private, upper-class, and female-dominant where that was communal, poor, and male-dominant, Chaykin and Fraction equate sexual appetite with wealth and power, with the artist adding in how it is all a messy business (a reality severely lacking in the Photoshopped babe art of the Greg Lands, Gillem Marches, or Jim Lees of the world). Nowhere is this more evident than in Ginsberg adopting working-class, “rich get richer” rhetoric while enjoying the luxury of a spacious estate and servants; Madeline comments on this hypocrisy by saying, “He married the first rich girl he could find.” Meanwhile, Eve ends up spurning Gene after the man ignores her in favor of a technological anomaly–a camera recording a monitor playing what the camera records–then has him thrown out of the jazz lounge she performs in. It’s a lovely, decompressed sequence, with Chaykin’s panels allowing letterer Ken Bruzenak to stretch lyrics across the width of a page to show how much can happen within the space of a few lines from a song. In both cases, Madeline and Eve are emasculating the men, embodying fears about the rising feminist movement post-WWII as one where women asserting their sexuality and their gender will force men to relinquish their status.

Similarly, Kara’s dual narrative as Evangelical Christian and party-hard bad girl (symbolized by her cross tramp stamp), links Puritanical repression with a desire to maintain status. Both with Carlyle and Mike, she worries about illicit pictures of her reaching circulation, drunkenly slurring “Gotta career ta conshidder” to the former. Though she never gets explicit with her recollections, she does tell Mike “he had his ways,” implying Carlyle’s stature as celebrity played a role in his dalliances (marked by a pathological stash of pictures of each conquest). Her shame matches Mike’s, who becomes terse to avoid talking about wartime experiences–feelings which have caused some measure of impotence (the previous issue had him unsuccessfully masturbating to the pictures he’d discovered). Their shame is socially dictated, though: Kara’s for being too sexual, Mike’s for not being sexual enough, a pernicious double standard where the opposite is considered the natural order (Satellite Sam seems overly-obsessed with this theme, which limits the psycho/sexual/sociological exploration solely to upper-middle to upper class whites).

Fraction explored similar class and gender neuroses in his Marvel comic Hawkeye. Clint Barton and Kate Bishop were shown as masters of archery and hand-to-hand combat, but complete fuck-ups in their personal lives. This was largely down to their social status–he a working class schlub who lucked into money, she a media heiress whose father is in constant mid-life crisis–which made their relationship awkward. In both Hawkeye and Satellite Sam, Fraction illustrates masculinity which needs to be redefined for feminist equality, and the rough business of striking that balance. Yet, Hawkeye never rose above pretext for twee Pop Art, which led to the series’ current wave of downtime fill-in issues. Unfiltered and paired with Chaykin’s line work, Fraction allows his tics and gimmicks to follow a theme.