Tag Archives: James Romberger

Watchmen Coloring Update

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James Romberger argued in this post that the coloring in Watchmen covered up Sally Jupiter’s nudity in this panel. As James puts it, “The colorist has obscured where Gibbons drew Sally’s shorts and stockings pulled down in panel 4, which represents a typical male reaction to rape, at the time and often still.”

My brother Eric suggested in comments that their might have been a coloring change from the original. I have those, so I’ve duly scanned in the panel in question.

Some of the values are slightly different, but I don’t see any significant change…? James, what do you think?

Post to Incestuous Sheets

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The Rub at Magic Futurebox

This last weekend I traveled into the depths of Brooklyn to witness The Rub, a re-envisioning of Shakespeare’s Hamlet done by a small troupe, the Tremor Theatre Collective, which includes my wife and fellow Hooded Utilitarian Marguerite Van Cook in the role of the young prince’s mother, Queen Gertrude. After Marguerite’s many late rehearsals, she’d tell me of the unusual methods of director Nessa Norich, an innovative theatrical force emerging from France’s Jacques Lecoq International School of Theatre. Norich’s actors formed the production from improvisation, from physically interacting with each other and with the deep columned space of the host theatre Magic Futurebox. From weeks of coaxing and collating the freely invented dynamic interpersonal movement and gestural variations of her cast and imposing a anachronistic montage of verbal and visual references, Norich finally introduced a script in the last week of rehearsals. As I was trying to help Marguerite run her lines, they seemed almost peripheral to the source text with only scattered bursts of Shakespearian diction, but Norich’s presskit describes a “surreal and playful investigation of the frustration, anxiety, passion, complacency, selfdoubt, delusion, isolation and desire that come with being heirs to a state rotting from the inside out.” That’s basically what our Will was on about, as well as where we Americans seem to be at. When I actually saw the results of Norich’s intriguing construct, I found that Shakepeare’s narrative is well represented even as it is made part of something contemporaneous and electrifyingly involving.


The Rub: Gerson, Van Cook and Stinson. Photo by Nessa Norich

The character of Hamlet is effectively played by several actors: one (Micah Stinson) sulks and simmers while another (David Gerson) adopts a keenly fearsome, sinuous aspect of outrage held barely in check. Three more Hamlet alters argue by turns and interweave at breakneck speed through the cavernous room (Colin Summers, Daniel Wilcox and Steven Hershey, who also flow seamlessly into a mellow-voiced Laertes, a loquacious Polonius and an opportunistic King Claudius, respectively). Queen Gertrude’s role is here expanded to be a fiercely comedic whirlwind of Freudian complication. I can’t claim objectivity, but it’s awesome to see Marguerite use some of her many performative skills. As Gertrude she works the stage like a vaudevillian; she stalks with limber, cartoony malevolence, she flummoxes a game reporter (Chas Carey) like a Danish Ghaddafy, she purrs, cajoles and overtly schemes with her new husband against Caitlin Harrity’s earnestly vulnerable Ophelia. Site-specifically mapped projections cunningly use the architecture of the theatre to add ominous, surreal narrative elements. The audience is brought out of their seats to follow the scenes into the depths of the room, making them complicit in the action as it boils to its inevitable final conflagration. While it certainly adheres to the spirit of Shakespeare’s intent, The Rub also shows a freedom of conception that to me is the essence of Art. I love it and so does Magic Futurebox, who have extended the production through next Friday and Saturday.

The Rub @ Magic Futurebox: 55 33rd Street, 4th Floor, Brooklyn, NY (D, N, R trains to 36th St) on Friday Feb. 17th at 8pm and Saturday Feb. 18th at 8pm

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Before Watchmen: Too Sullied Flesh

Shakespeare’s plays are in the public domain; he left no heirs but he is always credited as the source of any use of his works because his efforts are of undisputed quality and value. I suppose it is possible that the more extreme liberties taken by the Tremor Collective might put some Shakespeare purists’ noses out of joint, but theatre is by its nature an act of interpretation. It is a given that a source play is subject to adaptation.  Plays are meant to be reimagined through the efforts of the director, actors, set designers and other members of the ensemble putting up the production.  This is not the case with the current news cycle bummer about DC Comics’ reworking of co-authors Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, a book that was not conceived with the intent that it should be re-interpreted by other creative talents, on the contrary: Watchmen could not be a more deliberately complete work than it is.

As it has stood for 26 years, Watchmen has gone through many editions and enriched DC Comics financially and in terms of credibility. In fact, this multifaceted work is virtually the jewel of their crown. It is one of the key books that began to give comics a degree of critical acceptance, and it is one that deserved such attention—it gave the company a cache to build on, which they have sometimes tried to do with their more ambitious efforts such as the Vertigo line and their similarly convoluted graphic novels, story arcs and miniseries. They could have continued to profit from Moore and Gibbons’ book and striven to emulate their example of excellence, without violating the bounds of decency. But that was not to be. First, Moore disowned the adaptation of Watchmen to a film by Zack Snyder and for a good reason: the comic stands as a finished and hermetic work of Art in the form of a comic. I doubt that he could anticipate how bad the movie would be, though; it reglamorized the violence which Moore and Gibbons had taken pains to deglamorize, changed the ending entirely and amplified what I see as the flaw of the book.


Watchmen: Sally Jupiter is sodomized offpanel; and the “cover-up.”

Make no mistake, what Edward Blake does to Sally Jupiter is not attempted rape, it is rape. He assaults and beats her, then sodomizes her. This is a DC comic and so we are not shown explicit penetration. Instead, the rape happens in a space of indeterminate timing between the first two panels shown above and outside the cropped image of the second panel, where the two characters’ relative positions, Sally’s choked scream of pain and the symbolic bestiality represented by the ape’s head in the case make abundantly clear what is happening. In panel 3, Blake isn’t removing his pants, he’s pulling them up. The colorist has obscured where Gibbons drew Sally’s shorts and stockings pulled down in panel 4, which represents a typical male reaction to rape, at the time and often still. Hooded Justice’s harsh direction to Jupiter to cover herself can be seen as an indicator of why both her daughter Laurie and Hollis Mason (in his book excerpt within the book) are unaware that the rape was actually perpetrated in full: the truth had been suppressed.


Laurie is given clue #1 that Blake is her father.

Jupiter’s previous flirtations with Blake are used as justifications for her contemporaries to think that she had somehow “brought it on herself” and Jupiter’s own feelings of shame and what can be seen as typical victim psychology cause her to diminish the crime, to the extreme that a decade later she has an affair with Blake, which produces a child: Laurie.


In Laurie’s childhood memory, Sally tries to explain to her husband why she has a tryst with Blake, the rapist; confronted by Sally, Blake gives out with clue #2; and their daughter’s epiphany on the moon.

 


Hammering the offensive flaw: Sally loves her rapist.

Sally kissing the photo of the late Blake amplifies the flat note in what is otherwise one of the most carefully and sensitively composed comics ever done. In a medium predominantly directed to males, an often overtly misogynistic form oblivious to the consequences of sexual violence, this rare realistic depiction of rape in comics comes to represent a offense a woman could forgive, that she even might even come to love her rapist. Even more offensively, Snyder in his film made the fact of Laurie’s very existence through Sally’s forgiveness be the salvation of the world. This concept unfortunately lurks in the book, but shorn of the larger rationale of Moore and Gibbon’s ending which involves the human race uniting in the face of a manufactured outside threat, in the film the forgiveness of the unforgivable, the purpose of conception superceding a woman’s rational sensibilities, the “miracle” of the existence of even the product of a rape, all become the primary lynchpins of a narrative seemingly altered to pander to Christian Americans.

For his part, Moore removed his name and refused to profit from this adulterated mess, while he ensured that his collaborator and co-author Gibbons was the sole beneficiary of any royalties. Moore and Gibbons always steadfastly declined to do any more comics with the characters of the book and for 26 years DC respected their contribution to DC’s standing enough to let it go. It should be noted that a production of new comics like Before Watchmen did not happen under the watches of the more sensitive Jenette Kahn or Paul Levitz. No, it takes a corporate pitbull like Dan Didio to make such a decision. With the recent announcement, Moore immediately registered his protest and Dave Gibbons—well, unlike Moore, he still works for DC on occasion, so I’d guess that he couldn’t risk anything but a vague “good luck with that” statement. DC’s behavior, along with Marvel’s recent anti-creative legal victories, should send a cold chill through comics professionals.

And that brings one to question the involvement of all participants. Now, I shudder to imagine that I was more of a “team player,” that I hadn’t bitterly complained about such things as inequities of cover credit, that I drew in a still gritty but somewhat prettier style and had somehow “moved up the foodchain” of artists who draw for DC, or that Brian Azzarello in a generous mood had decided to throw me a bone for drawing his very first professional script, the results of which pleased Axel Alonso so much that he made his new writer a star, and Azzarello had actually recommended me for a gig. Okay, that’s a little poke at Brian, but let’s pretend that for any of these reasons I had been actually offered the Rorschach title. Then I would have been faced with the painful prospect of turning down such a very high-paying, high profile job for reasons of ethics. It’s hard to come down on people who need work. “Tough economic times” can be a powerful incentive to ethical compromise. But one wonders whether people as successful as Azzarello, Darwyn Cooke and J. Michael Straczynski need the work. Rather, they seem to all believe that they are entitled to presume on Moore and Gibbon’s masterpiece, because they are bursting with their own “stories to tell” about the characters. One wonders how they would feel if the shoe is on the other foot and it was their brainchildren at stake. Regardless, their presumption shows a disregard for comics as an art form of any significance and disrespect for the accomplishments of their contemporaries.

It gets worse: given that the actuality of the rape has been debated, one wonders how the re-interpreters will further mangle Moore and Gibbons’ intent. One might dread Cooke’s version of the adolescent Laurie in Silk Spectre, even if it will be drawn by Amanda Conner, because Cooke, known mainly for his reinterpretions of others’ creations, in his first adaptation of the appallingly misogynistic Parker books invalidated any claims of sensitivity or irony in his approach by having the lack of taste to render all the female characters with his typical cute Batman Beyond template. What one gets is interchangeable, expendable girls dying cutely for no reason at all, while the main character could care less. It doesn’t bode well and the covers of the new comics released so far carry out a theme of disempowerment, some directed deliberately at women, as Noah showed in his HU post yesterday. A general theme of uncaring seems to blanket Before Watchmen; as Azzarello stated in The New York Times what seems to represent mainstream comics’ overall regard for their audience’s intelligence: “a lot of comic readers don’t like new things.” Jack Kirby must surely be spinning in his grave. Perhaps Azzarello in his case was being ironic, but he couldn’t be more clear that one won’t be seeing anything new in Before Watchmen.

Genius, Clarified

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Greg Sadowski and Fantagraphics’ Setting the Standard is perhaps the best book on Alex Toth that has been published thus far, because it represents the complete body of Toth’s 1950s work for Standard Comics, reproduced as closely as possible to its original printed color form (1). Toth did his art with the intent that it be colored and so, even though the colorists at the time ignored the artist’s color notations and most often made uninspired color choices, still the art can only be considered complete in the form for which it was intended. For this volume, editor/designer Greg Sadowski meticulously cleaned up the pages of the original comic books.

Sadowski takes a straightforward, comprehensive approach and so Setting the Standard can rest comfortably on the bookshelf next to Fantagraphics’ other excellent recent collections of essential comics such as Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant, Roy Crane’s Captain Easy and Buz Sawyer and Carl Barks’ Disney epics. The Valiant and Easy volumes set a high bar for the reproduction of classic, beautifully colored Sunday strip pages, but comic books present a different set of difficulties, due to cheap, misaligned printing and often perfunctory coloring.

Recoloring might help, but as can be seen by various reprints where older works have been slathered with airbrushy digital effects, restraint is to be desired. Some options are the semi-faithful recoloring that Barks recieves in the handsome, just released Lost in the Andes, or the recoloring that Sadowski has been having Marie Severin do for his Bernard Krigstein books, though these approaches are dependent on access to clean copies of the black and white art. For Setting the Standard, Sadowski went back to the source to provide another practical model for the reproduction of old school four-color comics.

I have Best Romance #5 which contains Toth’s first job for Standard, “My Stolen Kisses”, which is also the first story in the Fantagraphics book.  This particular comic is dog-eared and scotch-taped but the color is actually not badly registered, however,  comparisons of panels from it and from the collection still show the effort that Sadowski put in:

Left: panels from the original comic. Right: Sadowski's cleanups

Sadowski painstakingly corrected the images where the color in the original comics was off-register, minimized the bleed-through of “ghost” images from the printing on the reverse sides of the pages (in some cases he replaced mottled single color backgrounds with clean areas of color) and restored the areas around the images and behind most of the lettering from the color of decomposing newsprint to white—daunting efforts when one considers that he did some 400 pages worth.

The stories themselves are not stellar, but that was “standard” for the time. This type of presentation is effective for the work of non-writing art stylists of 4-color comic books such as Toth, who all worked with scripts that were rarely intended to be more than cheap pulp entertainment; the onus was largely on the artists to make the material resonate. Here we are treated to many tales that are dignified only by Toth’s determination to wring feeling from them.

Even the best stories here are redolent of the banal false consciousness of 1950s America. They are mostly forgettable junk—humans prevail over the world domination plans of implausibly gullible aliens, foolish criminals get their just desserts, a woman is charmed when her suitor names a cow after her:

Or, they can be offensive junk: vengeful soldiers bury dehumanized “gooks” alive with a bulldozer, a woman struggles to prove to her husband that she can do better housework in order to preserve her marriage.

Toth’s oft-cited praise for the Standard scripts of Kim Aamodt falls flat when one actually reads them. A story described as one of Aamodt’s best portrays a woman torn between an older and a younger man. The dilemma is resolved when the older man bows out because “you kids…belong together.” Okay, it’s efficiently written and it is a great art job:

Page with my favorite Toth montage, from Man of My Heart

But, as in the other stories here, women are not allowed to make their own decisions. More so than Toth’s other assignments, the romance comics do give the artist a chance to draw a range of emotions and choreograph more intimate stagings, but they are also intended to program young girls to be subservient. In most cases, it is only that Toth drew these stories that elevates them from a justified place in the dustbin of comics history.

There are a few interesting stories though and thanks to Toth, many passages of thoughtful comics storytelling. The romance work is often brilliantly articulated and visualized with glamorous drawings that rival those of the illustrators famous for depictions of beautiful women who inspired Toth’s interpretations, Al Parker and Jon Whitcomb.

Toth’s handling of horror and suspense is intuitive, sometimes harrowing and exhibits his more radical inventions. “Grip On Life” is one story that sticks with me; it is a brutal rendering of an abusive husband who brings his wife back from the dead to serve him. Here and also in the shadowy peripheries of “The Shoremouth Horror” and “Galloping Chad Burgess”, Toth’s compositions are partially obscured and his extremes of emotion barely glimpsed.

A simultaneously realistic and abstract splash leads to atypically explicit abuse

IDW’s Toth biography proves its value as a companion to collections like this. In examining Genius, Isolated‘s appended timeline of published work for this period, one begins to see the progression of Toth’s efforts to address the critique of DC production ace Sol Harrison: “You don’t know what to leave out.” One sees the artist vacillating over years as he goes back and forth from clutter to simplicity and back and forth again.  1952 sees him end his first tenure at DC Comics with some beautifully realized collaborations with inker Sy Barry including the affecting “Queen of the Snows”, to move on to these works for Standard and his concurrent collaborations with Harvey Kurtzman at EC.

The three EC stories are spread over the same three years Toth was at Standard and form a learning curve of themselves. Kurtzman’s practice was much more sophisticated than anyone else Toth ever worked with and it seems that he absorbed a lot of storytelling information from acting in the subservient role that Kurtzman’s autonomy demanded of his artists. In the first, “Dying City” from 1951, Kurtzman inked Toth’s pencils and Toth appreciated that the inking “simplified my drawings and dropped in some blacks that I hadn’t even figured on. He made it simple, and powerful.”

Thunderjet, 1952: together, Kurtzman and Toth achieve a high level of realism.

Kurtzman knew his stuff and Toth took the lesson on board, to the point that he alienated Kurtzman on their third co-effort two years later by dropping in some blacks that his writer/designer/editor hadn’t figured on in “F-86 Sabre Jet”, 1953. To further the narrative intent, Toth’s silhouettes accentuate the disorientation experienced by the pilot protagonist (2).

At Standard, with a sympathetic art director/ inker in the person of Mike Peppe and with publishers who seemed to appreciate the value of Toth’s efforts, in the space of a few years profound changes take place in the artist. In particular, he has an epiphany of idiosyncratic simplicity in 1952 with his interpretation of the unfortunately now-anonymously written “The Crushed Gardenia”, which allows him to transcend his influences and find his own most pure style.

The Crushed Gardenia

The storytelling and drawing in this story is minimalist and oblique, with extremely cropped images in panels that are clearly designed with the interrelationships of the whole page compositions in mind. It furthers a tendency for distortion seen earlier, for example in the misproportioned splash of “Triumph Over Terror”:

Um, that's weird

The characters in “The Crushed Gardenia” have squarish heads with the features crushed into the center, which remind me of Milton Caniff’s year or so on Terry and the Pirates where everyone takes on what I’ll call a Flip Corkin aspect: compressed figures with boxy heads.

Caniff's Flip Corkin

The art in “The Crushed Gardenia” is so freshly reductive that it looks as if it might have been drawn yesterday, but a few months later Toth is drawing the densely composed “Geronimo Joe” which reflects the influence of Albert Dorne, later still the elaborately detailed “Lonesome for Kisses” which begins to resemble Neal Adams(!). There are plenty of experiments throughout the Standard stories, but the attenuated drawing of “The Crushed Gardenia”, that represents Toth at his most innovative, will hardly rear its head again until the 1960s.

Toth’s Standard period ends when he is conscripted into the Army, where he formulates his more elegant mature style in his solo Jon Fury strips for his post’s newsletter. After his discharge, he works on book-length stories for Dell and is forced to simplify further, at times drawing with a breezy, nearly generic realism, sans experimentation, then in the early 1960s he begins working for DC again and the drawings become more muscular, the panels become overstuffed with detail. This clutter may have been dictated by Toth’s DC editors, but Sol Harrison must have been scratching his head. Soon though, as the decade progresses through to the cusp of the seventies, Toth will hone it down.

Back at Standard, Mike Peppe is one of Toth’s better inkers and he does a credible job on such concisely pencilled stories as “The Eggbeaters”, “Geronimo Joe”, “Free My Heart” and “The House That Jackdaw Built”. Still, the greatest stylistic cohesion is seen in the instances where Toth inks and letters his own pages such as in “The Crushed Gardenia”, “I Fooled My Heart” and “Too Many Cooks”. But it was Toth’s romance work that was most influential to his contemporaries; John Romita and Ross Andru are noted here, but also for example one can see echoes of Toth’s “I Want Him Back” from Intimate Love #22, 1953 in Frank Frazetta’s Standard romance tale “Empty Heart” from Personal Love #28, 1954:

Toth and Frazetta did some hella good kissing scenes

I’m not claiming this is a swipe, but the first time I saw the Frazetta panel years ago, I immediately thought he’d been looking at Toth. I am inclined to think that Toth exhibits some influence himself, from Bernard Krigstein, in the linear qualities of “The Mask of Graffenwehr” and “Images of Sand”. Then, there is the odd 4-panel split image in “The Phantom Ship”:

The singular tier

This compound panel is a single image broken to imply the passage of time between the individual component panels; the sound effect superimposed on the whole thusly becomes more protracted and the frenzied scene takes on the qualities of an epic battle. It’s a very unusual effect that resembles Krigstein and probes into areas later explored by Steranko. Toth did a romance story with Peppe, “I Do…” in 1955 for Atlas that also has some layouts that remind me of Krigstein.

I had believed that a clue to Mike Peppe’s inking was that it was he who would ink noses with a line along the edge of the nostril that defines a plane between the side of the nose and the underside of the nostril. It is present in the stories attributed to Peppe and it looks wrong to me….it wasn’t something that Toth would do, I thought.

Inked by Peppe, with too-sharp nostrils

Yet in “I Want Him Back”, which Toth signed alone and so is thought to have inked, there’s lines on the nostrils! And maybe I’m crazy, but the main figure in the opening panel of that story looks to me like someone else drew it. Perhaps Toth didn’t ink everything in some of the stories he is credited with?  Or, maybe there were editorial changes to his work?

Toth inked five full stories and a few odd pages here. Apart from the two episodes of Joe Yank, which are inked by his best DC inker Sy Barry (with the main characters’ faces reworked by Art Saaf), the rest are credited or attributed to Mike Peppe and John Celardo.  The hands of Mike Sekowsky and Mike Esposito are noted as present in some of the many stories attributed to Peppe; the book also mentions Ross Andru as a possible inking assist, plus I believe I see Carmine Infantino in a few places as well. I noticed this previously in Greg Theakston’s two-volume black and white Standard collections Toth: Edge of Genius, but I was unable to get Infantino to confirm or deny this when I asked him at a con a few years ago. Some of these questions may be addressed now that this work is readily available to be absorbed by the public and comics scholars.

In Setting the Standard, the choice of supporting material is excellent. The fairly comprehensive interview with Toth from Graphic Story Magazine (and later, The Comics Journal #98) is reprinted with a new selection of reproductions, including appropriate pages by artists who influenced Toth such as Irwin Hasen:

Left: the Hasen repro. Right: my scan of Toth's much later, very Golden Ageish and Hasenesque version of the character

The stories are also annotated in the back with a selection of relevant or at least semi-relevant quotes from Toth’s letters (3).

In the end, interpretive cartoonists such as Toth must be judged by the quality of their realizations of the scripts they were given, good or bad. Isolated or excerpted pages don’t give any idea of the work; only whole stories can provide the intended reading experience. In Sadowski’s book, Toth’s work speaks for itself and the artist likewise. The book’s assemblage and design are very well done to make a package which is pulpy but tasteful, not cheap nor overly slick, not high/low cute or old-boy sentimental. It provides a complete and important body of work by a great cartoonist.

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Footnotes

1. My other favorite Toth book is Manuel Auad’s One for the Road, which collects all of the black and white comics Toth did for Pete Millar’s 1960s hot rod magazines, which I like for similar reasons: it collects an entire body of often-outstanding comics from obscure periodicals, that would be exceedingly difficult and expensive to track down, which can now be read/appreciated in their entirety. Similar collections of Toth’s Warren and DC Comics work should now be published.

2. I only found one mistake, one that has been replicating in Toth books for a while: Frontline Combat # 12 is actually dated May/June 1953, rather than November 1952 as it is listed in Jim Vandeboncoeur’s Toth index; when corrected, “F-89 Sabre Jet” comes after “The Crushed Gardenia” in the timeline. Their proper placement clarifies Toth’s progression; that is, apart from the possibility that either story was held for a time in inventory by their editors.

3. In Setting the Standard there are references to Toth’s annoyance with the efforts of Standard’s chief letterer Herb Fields. In researching this article, I came upon a letter in John Hitchcock’s compendium of his Toth postcards, Dear John, which amusingly depicts and describes a visit the artist had with Fields:

More is Never Enough, or Kant’s Numerical Sublime

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Ah, the Kantian sublime stands a great craggy edifice,  its  very mention sends shudders through the soul. Well not so much…however, talking about Kant is always fraught. The very name “Kant” invokes the sublime as one tries to wrap one’s head around his prolific ideas. Thus, to discover relationships on the comic page from the mind of the great Kant, it seems like a good idea to break his ideas into panel-sized pieces.

Published  in 1790, Kant’s Critique of Judgment  proposes two aspects of the sublime, the numerical sublime and the dynamical sublime. His rigorous mind comes to these two forms from his discussion of aesthetics and they represent for him an attempt to grapple with the sublime. Even though the sublime experience happens in the body, technically the sublime is our experience of what we see, Kant offers a diagnosis of what might trigger an attack of the sublime. I defer to medical, psychological terms because the sublime is a disruptive force that disturbs the human mind and body. The sublime disturbs order, well-being, bienseance in the Enlightenment sense and represents a charged and potentially dangerous experience.

The feeling of the sublime is a feeling of  displeasure that arises from the imagination’s inadequacy, in an aesthetic estimation of magnitude, for an estimation by reason, but it is at the same time also a pleasure, aroused by the fact this very judgment of the inadequacy, namely, that even the greatest power of sensibility is inadequate, is (itself) in harmony with rational ideas, insofar as striving toward them is still a law for us.

So for those thrill seekers who love to be disturbed, disrupted and knocked out of complacency by comics, the question is where is it and how can I get more of it. For those who like to gaze at the stars and contemplate the enormity of space, actually you are engaging in both of Kant’s sublimes simultaneously, the dynamical unbounded, immense and the numerical that tries to count the stars and is blown away by the impossibility of the task.

At present, I want to count stars if you will, or more properly consider the improbability and achievement of representation of the numerical sublime in comics.

All that being said, it seems that there are self-evident reasons for artists not to want to draw crowd scenes, but there are some that thrive on the creation of minutiae. Phillipe Druillet for example undertook the task of representing Gustav Flaubert’s  Salammbo and the results are stunning.

In this image, the ziggurat panels and small inserts of emblems, add order and assistance to a series of complex, visually stunning images that refuse easy assimilation.

Druillet orders the panels so that the densely articulated depictions of soldiers become patterns. The patterns take on aspects of movement as the viewer struggles to rest his focus on any single aspect of the dense and lushly colored planes.  The panels allow us to fall into these impossibly detailed surfaces and  while his gesture is conceivably  an attempt to contain the sublime, we even add into the landscapes because we resolve the problem of the numerical sublime with an articulation of infinity.

Moebius his contemporary, also works with scale and prolific figures. This overhead spread literally gives the reader a birds eye view of the sprawling action. The detail draws the viewer into the depth of the landscape.

Further, Moebius constructs space in such a way as to open geographies with limitless potentials. At the same time, his vision manages to bring a plausibility to bear that gives a substance to the  fearsome scope of his world.  This image has a life outside of the panels.

His influence is readily obvious in this piece by Geoff Darrow for film  “The Matrix”. The narrative of the film suggests the  numerical sublimity of alternate universes or of unleashed and uncontainable technology. Darrow’s image suggests an unnerving numerical sublime.

Darrow’s work is compelling in its detail. Yet, a strange thing occurred when I began to seek the numerical sublime depicted in comics, the examples that I thought I recalled, were not there. Apparently, my imagination had filled in the blanks. I was surprised to find that the imaginary capacity to see  a more complex world in one’s imagination is not limited to words and reading, but it seems we are able to do this with visual data as well. We are able to store that imaginary information as though it we had seen it. I’m sure the experience of looking for an image that “one is sure is in the comic but just isn’t there when you look” is a commonly shared event.

I definitely thought there were more figures in this Frank Frazetta image for example, the movement and depth of field left me believing that I had seen more than was actually there.

As it turns out this is incredibly useful to the overworked artists who dread the hyper-multiple.  Milton Caniff shares this story about how he dealt with the the demand for the impossible:

The writer comes in sits down, sits at a typewriter and types out this paragraph to direct the artist. The artist comes in and has to draw a man and a woman standing on a windswept hill and 10, 000 Chinese communists coming up with drawn bayonets. Now when you’re the artist and the writer you do the same scene, but you show a fairly close up shot of the hero and heroine, some wind lines and clouds behind with a few leaves going by to show a windswept hill. The man has his arm around the girl, pointing outside the panel saying: “ Look! Here come 10,000 Chinese.” That’s when you’re writing. and drawing. And that’s to make the point.

SABA: You’re making it easier for yourself, is what you’re doing, (laughter).

Caniff: And that’s an exaggeration of the point, that the artist can control it. If he wants to he can draw the 10,000 Chinese soldiers, but usually he finds a way out.

All the same, Caniff takes the challenge:

These roiling compositions are rare, but notwithstanding, their accomplishment stays with the viewer long after they have been seen. It is as if they gather exponentially from the details and the superfluity that they offer.

Artist Tony Salmons offered pithy comments from his perspective in an interview with James Romberger about an artist’s  challenges when representing crowds :

Salmons notes three seemingly innocent words often seen in scripts, ‘a crowd gathers.’ Salmons says, ‘A writer scripts or merely plots this line down on paper and goes on to the next scene. I spend an entire day researching, casting, lighting and acting out that crowd. Is it an opium den? SF or Hong Kong? Texas? German beer garden? Rainbow room at 30 Rock? What kind of crowd? If I do it with total commitment the considerations can go way beyond this. And the writer’s contribution is 3 words, ‘A crowd gathers.’ No matter what the story requires, the artist must make it so.

Salmons is clearly up to the task. His ability to work with space and depth, through black spotting and line work shows off his skill in this sublime image. Movement in the figures seems to amplify the effect in the depiction of a multiple figure composition.

James is also able to produce a crowd:

There are artists who it seems are born to create numerical chaos. James’ image was created during the LA riots in 1992.  The numerical sublime seems to lend itself to revolutionary statements, both literally and figuratively. Consider how radically Gary Panter’s proliferating, unmoored marks assaulted  the parameters of comics.

This type of chaos; of uncontained, irrational imagination stood in direct opposition to the world of corporate comics. Yet Panter was not the first to explore the possibility of overloading the senses to fracture the present from its traditional past. The sixties brought us S. Clay Wilson and other underground artists who filled the page with so many marks in the attempt to  literally “blow our minds.”

It is hard to think of Captain Pissgums without his disturbing cohorts, or to image the revolting  Ruby without her subversive dykes. Wilson, by the sheer volume of  his outrages, insists on a dislocation from the anchors of  America’s received concept of civilization in the sixties. More is always more. These images enter our brains and continue to propagate, because the sublime works to replicate itself. The sublime is sublime, it just keeps adding to its own being.

Jack Kirby too played with sex and the sublime, recognizing the sensory, even erotic power of its energy. For him in the image below, the sublime offers as a site of irony, perhaps bizarrely preemptively and philosophically connected to the vision of  Wilson:

In Kirby’s vision, the senses demonstrated through a mania of eroticism, threatens the virility of Captain America and thus  destabilizes the rationalist  face of order to bring out a collapse of social coherence. While the gesture is not one that many feminists would at first relish, it is nonetheless  interesting for  its alignment of feminine energy with a romantic, revolutionary world.  It is a world slipping out of control.

The numerical sublime is exciting and dangerous, precisely because it is uncontainable. It is hard to achieve, yet ultimately desirable as a destination for many comic artists who seek to escape the confines of the panel and the comic pamphlet. Bernie  Krigstein discusses a project that he would like to undertake with John Benson in a special 1975 issue of Squa Tront and immediately falls into the abyss of the sublime as his concept multiplies itself into infinity:

BENSON: And you would adapt the entire novel?
KRIGSTEIN: Yes; maybe hundreds of pages, or whatever the number of pages it would run to. But as I look at these sample breakdowns, even then I didn’t do it the way I would do it now. I still didn’t give enough space to the pictures. I would make it even much more pictorial in proportion to the number of words that it has here. I’d expand this passage here, where he’s running desperately; I’d expand it much more. And this one passage here, where the regiment is swinging from its position, could practically be a story in itself.
I’d have broader monumental breathtaking sweeping panoramas of the armies. I’d want to convey the notion of the enormity of it and then the contrast of the microscopic things going on inside of this enormity. And I would expand these sequences in order to elaborate on the microscopic things happening to where they’d have the character of deep stories. And the whole thing would be a connection of many many stories into one huge monumental panorama. These roughs still do not convey my real approach, what I would do right now. But some parts of it I find very satisfactory anyway.
BENSON: Actually, you’d have to excise some portions of the novel so that you could treat other portions fully the way you wanted to.
KRIGSTEIN: Exactly. But on the other hand, while cutting out stuff from one point of view, I would insist on an open-ended expansion from an editorial point of view. It might take 100 pages; or I’d like to have the freedom to take 1,000 pages for the same amount of text. I’d like to have no limit on the amount of space for pictures. But now I’m fantasizing; what I’m saying now is pure fantasy.
That would be a monumental enormous project. It means that every single one of these panels has to be a picture, a real picture, without compromising. I couldn’t rely that much on close-ups, either. I’d make it much more pictorial.

Krigstein never manages to enclose the scope of his discussion or one imagines, of his project.  Its ability to continue to grow, exponentially and out of control is self evident in his comments and in his breakdowns for a proposed adaptation of Steven Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. The depiction of these kinds of ideas present problems for the very best:

The lower left hand panel that represents the mass of troops has turned into an abyss of black marks. Chaos occupies the otherwise ordered mind and controlled hand of an experienced and competent artist.

I leave with an image by Hal Foster, who often composed panels with multiple figures and I invite you to consider whether his images are ordered or chaotic. Whether and how the force of the numerical sublime can be made to serve its master, or whether it inevitably escapes free to roam unchecked.

Neal Adams: Ultraviolence

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From "Blood," chapter 3, Dark Horse Presents V.2 #3.

CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE

In the seventies, Neal Adams’ realism, comprehensive draftsmanship, hyperkinetic storytelling and page design, sophisticated coloring and in addition his efforts on behalf of creators’ rights marked him as a potent force in American comics. He seemed poised to do something substantial in comics, something that would pull all of his skills together in a complete and meaningful statement. But instead, he has dedicated his energies to running his studio/publishing house Continuity for many years.

I’ve not been to Continuity and cannot speak to their effectiveness in the world of advertising, and it should be considered that through it Adams has given a lot of artists work, but the comics they have published are literally a bargain bin explosion of histrionic superhero titles. In a reflection of the old comic book studio system, the books are drawn by various often highly competent artists who apparently must all work within Adams’ stylistic parameters. The boss is to my mind too eager to redraw his artists’ drawings. The result is Neal Adams-ish product that is debatably unified in a visual sense, but that is difficult to read and has an aura that can be described as luridly aggressive.

I do respect Adams’ abilities though, and anyone working within mainstream comics can thank him in some part for the much more creator-friendly contracts that are standard now. And so, I have made repeated efforts to talk to the artist when I saw him at conventions in New York. He doesn’t make it easy. For years it seemed he only wanted to talk about a sort of anti-visual comic he was doing about “two guys in a bar” discoursing on theoretical geology. The book still hasn’t come out, but on his site he has posted pages with lots of dense ballooning, big heads with earnest expressions and gnashing teeth, and some dinosaurs. I heard about it first-hand from him several times, but it felt like he didn’t talk to me but through me to a space somewhere behind me. Now, he owes me nothing, he’s more than paid his dues…and maybe it was just me, or perhaps I caught him at a few odd moments, or maybe it is a sort of canned spiel he does at cons just to deal with all the people who approach him.

Adams has more recently emerged with an assortment of covers and then a series of stories: “Blood,” serialized in the new incarnation of Dark Horse Presents and the bewildering DC miniseries Batman: Odyssey. He’s obviously putting a lot of effort into this work, it is all elaborately drawn, but also, much of this recent work has ultraviolent depictions of over-the-top violations of bodily surface and splattering blood.

Cover for All-Star Batman and Robin #9.

Flipping through a few of his recent efforts, I see heroes spitting blood from between teeth so clenched that they might shatter from the pressure, muscles and veins popping, threatening imminent cardiac arrest. I see men tied to chairs and tortured gleefully, bullets ripping through flesh and exploding heads. The images are linked to superheroes, a genre still considered to be in the realm of children, in that the majority of the population would think that a superhero comic would be okay for a child to look at. In that context and even if considered as adult entertainment, Adams’ images are disturbing.

So, at the New York ComicCon this last weekend, I talked to Adams about his explicit handling of violence.  I asked him if, in his position as the premiere uber-American superhero artist, he felt that he was representing the Guantanamoid, Saw franchise mentality so prevalent in America now. Torture has become normalized by being disseminated through the media to the point that people have become inured to such behavior, because “that’s how we roll now,” after “everything changed.” Adams’ Batman has bullets gouging through his arm, his heroes strangle each other or shoot people with guns or squirt streams of blood as they are beaten to a pulp. The basic question was what is he trying to say, or does he think he is saying anything?

He proceeded to the most considered response I have gotten from him. It wasn’t a formal interview, I didn’t have a recorder, so I’m going on memory for my account of the conversation. In essence, he said that much of his work was about the repercussions of violence. He pointed first to two of his stories involving the superhero Green Arrow. In the first, Adams and writer Denny O’Neil portray GA mugged by young drug addicts, who shoot him with one of his own arrows that they have gotten from his charge Speedy, who has become a junkie. Adams drew the justly famous sequence below where the wounded hero takes himself to the hospital, that well represents the artist’s ability to achieve cinematic realism on paper:

From "Snowbirds Don't Fly" Green Lantern #85, 1971.

In the second, GA mistakenly kills a perp with an arrow and in horror and guilt forsakes his crime-fighting identity to join an ashram:

From "The Killing of an Archer," The Flash #217, 1972.

Until Adams reminded me, I had forgotten that his body of work does display a consistent theme of showing violence in as real a light as possible. From his earliest handling of Batman, he gave the action a substance that had a visceral impact on the reader:

From "And Hellgrammite Is His Name," story: Bob Haney, Brave and Bold # 80, 1968

By sheer force of will, Adams defined the look that allowed DC to update their staid image and compete with Marvel. He had to fight every inch of the way, as far as I can tell. He ran the heroes through the wringer visually, but the work then often had a humanistic edge. This became less apparent as time passed. It should be said that the mainstream comics industry itself resists taste and significance. For whatever reason, his comics output dwindled. In an interview Adams said with what seemed like some chagrin that he considers Superman vs. Muhammed Ali to be his finest effort:

From Superman vs. Muhammed Ali, 1978.

There’s a world of potential content that doesn’t involve superheroes and Adams did on occasion make stabs in those directions, also on point with his stated theme. In a potent solo story for the fanzine Phase One in 1971 (reprinted in Marvel’s b&w magazine Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #1 in 1975), “A View From Without,”  the reader is brought very close to the last moments in the life of a napalmed Vietnamese baby:

From "A View From Without"

It was a singular gesture for its time from a major American cartoonist.

Another strong piece was “Thrillkill,” written by Jim Stenstrum, about a sniper who kills randomly from atop a tall building, based on a then-recent true event. Adams drew explicitly rendered gunshot wounds specific to the elevation of the shooter:

From "Thrillkill," Creepy #75, 1975.

It remains one of the most immediate and horrific pieces Warren ever printed. I felt the same discomfort when I first saw Thrillkill as I do with Adams’ current work.

Adams didn’t want to discuss that story, I think because here he is doing superheroes again and that’s what he wants to talk about. He’s pushing them even farther than he had previously. He had a convincing rationale for the cover I mentioned where Batman is shot through the arm:

Cover image for Batman Odyssey #1, 2011.

Adams said that when his father was in the military he had been shot in the arm in exactly that way. Okay, the image was based on a memory that was impressed upon him by his dad, that he felt strongly.

He then explicated on the sequence below, where as I had noted to him, Robin gets a fetishistic pleasure from holding a gun. Adams acknowledged that creepiness, but emphasized Batman’s explanation of why it is best to be the only unarmed man in a room full of trigger-happy thugs:

From Batman Odyssey #1, 2011

Okay again. Adams does make statements about gun control and against violence by graphically showing what happens to someone when they are beaten or shot. It’s about consequences. He cited the old “knock-out” that in comics one recovers from spontaneously, would actually put one in the emergency room. Showing the repercussions of violence is an antidote to harmless fake violence.

I had taken up enough of his time and other people were waiting for him, so I thanked him and moved on, but I looked at the works in question again later. The sequence with Batman and Robin at least makes sense to me now, but I still have a few problems. Such as, any intended examination of  gun control in Batman is counteracted by the prevalence of typical comics imagery of cool money shots of dudes, including Batman, shooting guns. At best, the comic is sending a mixed message.

One could say, who am I to talk, since my first commissioned work for Vertigo was also Brian Azzarello’s first DC story, “Ares” in Weird War #1. But in my more recent books for them I made every effort to deglamorize the violence, to make it look as pathetic as possible. It is not easy because cool money shots of dudes with guns are a longstanding meme in comics, they’re written into the scripts.

What about readers becoming inured to all sorts of extremes by overexposure? On the one hand, brutal images are suppressed; our press is imbedded and we allow limitations to be placed on war imagery, the lack of violent imagery enables a population to think their wars are bloodless. On the other hand, what we did get was the pictures from Abu Ghraib and torture images have been exponentially spreading through pop culture. Even if they are intended in a cautionary way, does the audience actually get off on ultraviolent images?  Adams’ grisly covers are the most problematic in this regard, because as covers they are the primary images being used to sell comic magazines. Oh hell, it’s Gaines and the severed head in court again.  But I’d like to see the sales figures on those covers—do we, the audience, desire such representations? Do they represent for us the secret violence of the wars fought in our name, or are they a sort of violence pornography, like old Midnight tabloids and wrestling mags full of pictures of bloody bitten foreheads?

My reading of Batman Odyssey is complicated by the overload of visual information caused by the techniques that Adams and his studio use. As comics, the pages strike me as counterintuitive, but I could say that about many mainstream comics. The writing is, well, unclear, but I can’t even read it properly because the design is so hyperactive. The characters seem to be operating at fever pitch constantly and the drawings slide around in full bleeds everywhere, running the pages together in the gutters and off of the pages and all elements are brought to a uniformly overworked plastic finish. Bloody hell!

What I responded to in Adams’ art in the seventies is how far he pushed the limitations of newsprint in four colors…his moody color was one of the best things about his work. He can also watercolor very effectively, although I have not seen him do a finished story in that medium. Here, the color destroys the realism of the drawings and thus the reader’s ability to fall into the story. It’s roughly the same type of pulp material that Adams brought to life in the seventies on newsprint for 12 cents or a quarter, but now the colors on the shiny, expensive paper lack texture, or such texture as there is looks photographic. It is a cold, resistant surface that repels the reader. The suspension of belief due to the surface plasticity undermines the narrative and so the artist’s message.

Adams didn’t do the color but I can’t even fault the no doubt painstaking efforts of the digital colorist—it is a sterling example of a look that is everywhere in mainstream comics now. It occurs to me that perhaps these types of comics are not selling so well nowadays because only a relatively small audience can relate to the machined wall of digital coloring and the inertia of font lettering. These techniques negate the intimate, hand-done, illuminated quality of comics.

A reason why comic art is not illustration is that a illustration supplements a text which is complete on its own. The text can be read independently from the illustration and I can enjoy my Noel Sickles book without reading the stories he illustrated. In comics, the art cannot stand on it’s own, nor can the text. If they could, then my collection would have a lot more French albums. In comics, art and text are interwoven; the art shows you how to read the text, it forces you to read the text in order to comprehend the story. Likewise, the text cannot read apart from the art since so much of the narrative is comprised of what is depicted in the art. The overly busy design and cold surface of Adams’ recent work actually goes against the medium by resisting reading, so what comes across is the splatter and the cool money shots of dudes with guns.

Adams did an impressive widescreen drawing in Batman Odyssey #1 of the character on top of a speeding train, so I know he hasn’t lost his chops. However, and leaving aside myriad other issues that emerge when one actually deciphers the comic, what the work gains in flash and bombast, it loses in clarity. The trumpets can be made more resonant by allowing for some quieter passages. Whatever substance he’s putting in there is not coming through, because everything is playing at top volume all of the time. I don’t have the other issues in the series, but arrrgh. I’m thinking they should come with an Advil.

Caniff: Momentum

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Click on images to enlarge.
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“The impacts of both pictures and words drive more deeply into human awareness than any anthropologist has yet cared to note.”
-Milton Caniff
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I just read four of IDW’s collections of Terry and the Pirates back-to-back. They comprise one of the most gripping narratives I have seen in comics. They are essential reading for anyone who loves the medium of cartooning and enjoys exciting, involving storytelling. These gorgeous, thick hardcover volumes edited by Dean Mullaney each print two years worth of black and white daily strips and color Sunday pages. The stories certainly read differently in book form than they could have with the protracted exposure of serial doses. Once I was hooked at the outset, I had a hard time putting down any given volume. The relentlessly powerful engine that Caniff stokes pulls the reader along helplessly.

A lot of what Caniff accomplishes here has not been surpassed in comics. Many of the characters resonate strongly with the reader. Throughout, the sensitive handling of Terry’s “coming of age” is impressive. So is the villainy of a host of despicable scoundrels, some of them quite believable as is the case with the wretched Tony Sandhurst. I cared about what happened to Burma, Raven Sherman and Rouge; in this Caniff’s nearest correspondent is Jaime Hernandez. Their characters’ appeal is not only due to their motivation and dialogue but also to the way that the artists are able to put forth their nuance of expression and gesture. Like actors, cartoonists such as Hernandez and Caniff must believe their characters to be able to convey credibility to the reader.

The books boast excellent reproduction and fascinating supplemental essays by Bruce Canwell, Jeet Heer, Russ Maheras and others, Terry-related promotional art and photographs of the artist and his circle. There’s only one down note, in his introduction to Terry V. #2, Pete Hamill repeats a claim that he made in a letter to The Comics Journal (#135, 1990, p.34) years ago, that the millions of people who read the strip did so for the writing rather than the art, citing that because Caniff’s friend Noel Sickles’ strip Scorchy Smith was beautifully drawn but dead in the water story-wise, ergo the story (“that is, the writing”) is what is primarily significant. Hamill seperates the art from story as if the story lies only in the text. Yes, Caniff is a good writer, and yes, there is almost nothing that I can compare to this in scale and quality, but the fact is that the narrative in comics is carried by both text and art. Caniff is one of the greatest exemplars of this.

Sickles WAS missing part of the equation—both text and art signify to the reader, both are “read.” Caniff was prodigiously talented at both and it is their interlocking orchestration that marks his mastery. The story would not have had anywhere near the same impact and import to his huge audience if it had been drawn by another artist, if it had been done without Caniff’s sometimes oddly stiff but still expressive figuration and clearly differentiated likenesses, his sense of deep space, composition and dramatic lighting, his facility for exacting observation and reference, his pen and brushwork, his color, the level of developing skill involved in his amazingly nuanced renderings of his characters and their world.

The powerful impact of imagery in Caniff’s work is made clear, though unfortunately in a negative way, by the fact that the work is so tainted by racist depictions. Connie is no more forgivable than is Will Eisner’s Ebony. These characters permeate and compromise the works of their respective creators. To forestall apologism, I do not believe Caniff and Eisner were forced to include these depictions. Both also tended to draw non-racist ethnic characters next to absurdly caricatured ones—as in Eisner where one sees Ebony attempting to woo a more realistically cartooned African-American girl, in Caniff one sees racist depictions of Japanese people and the Chinese Connie interacting with more realistically-rendered images of Chinese people. Connie is omnipresent in Terry and often displays ingenuity and courage, but his visual depiction is irrevocably abhorrent, even if one could find a way to tolerate the obvious glee Caniff invests in the character’s mangling of English.

9/18/38: Connie at his worst in a page that resembles the later works of Will Eisner, Johnny Craig and Wally Wood.

Still, if one can somehow ignore this mitigating factor, there is much of great value to be found in Terry and the Pirates. At this moment, the work in Volumes 2, 3 and 4 resonates most strongly to me. I have yet to read the final volume, but so far I prefer the stories done before Caniff became more intrinsic to the American war effort. The later stories, as well as those in Caniff’s subsequent strip Steve Canyon have a feel of military formalism that seems a bit less free and alive than the more imaginative earlier adventures. But when it is Pat, Terry, Connie and Big Stoop blasting through stories that are driven by the artist’s superlatively developed female characters such as Burma, April Kane and the Dragon Lady—this is the stuff of great comics.

I scanned pages from several of the volumes to post here, which represent moments that struck me as particularly well-articulated, amazingly drawn or fabulously colored, or that showed places in Caniff’s trajectory that I feel had to have been seen and loved by certain artists, who I may or may not have known were profoundly influenced by Caniff.
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9/17/39: I think that Jack Kirby stared at this page long and hard.

I also think Kirby took some inspiration for his visceral fight scenes from the shockingly abrupt bursts of ultraviolence by the mute Big Stoop.

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1/27/39: I speculate that these particular dailies were catalysts for Jesse Marsh.

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1/7/40: here we might see some of the roots of Hugo Pratt.

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7/10/38: a patch of roughly hewn strips from mid-1938 apparently formed a model for the style of Frank Robbins and also look a lot like Craig.

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11/21/43: Alex Toth greatly admired Caniff’s work. This page anticipates Toth’s approaches to The Land Unknown and Hot Wheels.
A model for the oblique simplicity of Toth.

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7/04/43: this page is an early manifestation of the type of psychological coloring that Jim Steranko would later pioneer. Caniff’s color is one of the best things about his work.

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1/31/37 and 8/26/44: as influential as Caniff was, he himself was inspired by his friend Noel Sickles, whose hand was in Terry occasionally, as I am guessing is the case in these strips.

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3/30-4/2/38: the Dragon Lady displays her incredible potency in my favorite speech in the whole of Terry.

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9/27/39: Pat’s chauvinistic response.

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6/27/40: Caniffian feminism: women must lie.

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A series of Sundays 7/28-9/8/40: at this moment in 1940, Caniff’s work takes on a notable elegance in drawing and color.

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4/18/43: a intriguingly composed, beautifully colored page.

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4/30/44: another….this one is just great. You get the idea.

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Illustrated Wallace Stevens: Madame La Fleurie

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I recently devoured two of the excellent collections of Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates assembled by Dean Mullaney and Bruce Canwell for IDW. It seems appropriate to apply my feelings about Caniff’s narratives to a Wallace Stevens poem. The piece shows the difference between illustration and interpretive cartooning. Stevens’ work roils with imagery, but it is very easy to step on the words, so my incorporation of the text with the art in the form of a faux-Sunday comic strip balances between literality and a parallel path of my own. The finished strip gives me deja vu, as if somewhere in time I have seen something like it before, perhaps in an old National Lampoon, or maybe in a pop art collage of old Terrys.

 

 

Illustrated Wallace Stevens Index
James Romberger’s Website