The Dorkiest Thing I’ve Ever Done

I suppose it would be funnier to say I’m not proud of this these:

art: Keith Pollard source: The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe publisher: Marvel Comics Group © Marvel Comics Group

art: Keith Pollard source: The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe publisher: Marvel Comics Group © Marvel Comics Group

The lovely lady on the ends there with the Eva NERV shirt is a cartoonizized version of my fiancée, Rose.  (Sorry, ladies.)  For the purposes of this extremely nerdy endeavor, she is exactly six feet, though she’ll only own up to 5′10″ in our banal, superhero-less real world.

Uh — what can I say?

People are different heights?

– And model sheets are helpful.

P.S.F.F.N. (Post Script for Fellow Nerds): This is the height of the Beast according to the Marvel Universe Handbook circa ‘95.  When he underwent the audacious “secondary mutation” to become Disney’s Beauty and the-version, I am well aware that he appeared to gain a foot or so.  God bless Morrison and Quitely.

P.S.F.N.N. (Post Script for Non-Nerds): I am also aware that it appears as though Ant Man/Giant Man is quite literally the butt of a rather obvious joke.  Laugh away.  The two versions are actually vital to us social outcasts and therefore worth your ridicule.

Throwing Down the Gauntlet

Alright dorks, have your mother turn down the t.v. upstairs so you can listen closely. This is the only truly well-designed superhero:

art: David Mazzucchelli book: Daredevil publisher: Marvel Comics Group © Marvel Comics Group

art: John Romita, Jr. book: Daredevil publisher: Marvel Comics Group © Marvel Comics Group

Yeah, I said it. Stop putting all those Wonder Woman comics you were “looking at” back in bags and boards and do something! Spam me! Flame me! Drag my name through the mud!

Spider-Man, you say? Not even. Hal Jordan Green Lantern? A leotard by any other name… Thor? Please, the Ultimates redesign deserves mention for making something of those silly giant buttons perhaps. Wolverine? No. Gambit? You’re kidding, right?

Flash? Mmmm, not enough red.

Yes, Daredevil is the only superhero who inherently looks great on the page (NOT the silver screen). You can’t screw that costume up. Minimalism with perfectly designed accessory and beautifully lettered, interlocking, alliterative Ds. The little details, like the slightly shorter than usual gloves and boots, referencing his dad’s wrestling career, the ever-so short horns, make it.

It was actually my mother who got me into comic books. I’m sure that had she known her son would be teaching classes in them as a grown man rather than working at a respectable law firm like his fellow Ivy League graduates, she probably would have chosen not to expose me to them. As it was, she still took her sweet time. You see, we lived at the bottom of a quarter of a mile long driveway. At the top of which, at the road, there was a large storage barn we referred to as the machine shed. My mother kept the hundreds of comics she had collected throughout her early adult life up there. When I was about six, she started telling me about her collection. I begged her to bring them down to the house, but they were trapped behind band saws, under pool tables covered with timber, or some such excuse, so instead she just described them to me. My talent for art was already burgeoning, so as she told, I drew, creating my own private Marvel-ous Universe. She told me of the X-Men (her favorites) and I began to draw a one-eyed man who shot lightning out of his face and a hairy long-haired beast with giant claws coming out of his fingers (she never could quite explain to my tiny self why they would come out of the back of his hands). I had Doctor Strange as some paisley hippie magician. Finally, after some cajoling, my father was able to convince her this was cruel to deprive me of something I was so invested in already, and he moved some large piece of machinery and brought home a box. I was hooked before I had even seen a single comic.

And Daredevil was the only character, by my admittedly biased and childish judgment, who turned out better than I had re-envisioned him. My version was truly demonic and lacked any eyes. I wondered how anyone would be willing to get invested in a horrifying hero like that. But the “real” deal was pretty slick. I loved the heck out of the cane/billy club gimmick. And the young artist in me, he who would never dare color out of the lines, must have appreciated that his eyes, gloves, belt, and boots wear separated by lines but not color. Even a kid thinks that’s kind of earth-shaking. I can’t even tell you how many times I re-drew that first cover there with my own superhero in the cross hairs and my own villain looming large in the background — but it never looked as good as Daredevil’s good old monochrome tights.

And which of your superheroes, might I add, has the chutzpah to pop the actual devil in his kisser like the latter? Vade retro me, Satana!

Of course, I didn’t know it then, but the reason for Daredevil’s design standing head and shoulders above the rest can be chalked up to his re-designer: Wally Wood. You’d be hard pressed to find a more stylish inker. That guys work just exudes slickness. It’s like watching an old movie with Carey Grant, Clark Gable, or Gregory Peck – sometimes you just feel like you have to take a breather because the guys are too pretty, too well-lit, too stylish. Wally Wood can make these schlubs look like the best-designed heroes under the sun, for god’s sake:

art: Wally Wood book: The Legendary Justice Society of America in All-Star Comics with the Super Squad (I'm not even kidding) publisher: DC © DC

Is that Space Ghost in the back there? Toth, you ganker! One of those guys is named, I josh you not, the Star Spangled Kid. But Wood makes even doomed-to-failure ideas like that shine in their primary-colored garb like pop art masterpieces. Superman, hobbled with a downright terrible costume, hasn’t looked this good since the Fleischer cartoons. He’s looking pretty dang fine here thanks to squinty Dick Tracy eyes and graying temples. God, even the machinery is beautiful, to say nothing of Power Girl (va-va-voom)!

So let’s have it, fanboys! I challenge you to come up with one more superhero that looks great even when not drawn by a luminary like Wally Wood. Send me your names! Comment galore! Fight, fanboys, fight! Argue your cases! I’m honestly curious to know your thoughts.

And then I’ll elucidate why you’re wrong.

Against All Odds

If you can’t overwhelm them with state-of-the-art designs, bowl ‘em over with sheer numbers.

art: Erik Larsen colors: I.H.O.C. book: Savage Dragon © Erik Larsen

And recognizing that drawing headshots for a roll call of all these bad guys would take another whole spread and ruin the surprise, while at once realizing the inherent awesome-ness of a roll call, Erik copyrighted every one of these baddies and listed their names in the indicia:

Now, many of these characters are merely parodies of other properties, (Nuke Rage, the Human Sparkler, Fade, Octopus, not to mention heroes like Mighty Man and Kill Cat) but many, many are not.  Some are kind of silly.  Far too many have exposed brains in some sort of glass case (one of which belongs to Hitler).  The guy dead center does not seem to realize that even a molester from the Seventies would deem a costume featuring a hole to reveal every follicle of Austin Powers-level chest hair, a cod-piece,  AND a cape is overdoing it a tad.   Some of them obviously started as bad puns but evolved into a pretty killer design on the drawing board: Open-Face and Doubleheader spring to mind.  One of the coolest villains just has the head of a chicken.  However, all of it looks pretty great when Erik draws it.  It all hangs together and somehow seems cohesive thanks to a single creator at the helm in a way that, say, DC’s pantheon doesn’t.  Wait, I take that back — all of DC’s characters do look the same: they all look like crap.  And, lovably, Larsen doesn’t take this all very seriously.  He seems to design some characters on the page and knows full well many will just be cannon fodder.  However, since the man loves a surprise, he’ll make sure the guy who’s gonna die in three more pages has one of the best costumes in the ish.  The love Erik has for the genre shines through on every page, and you can’t help but embrace his often ridiculous, but wildly creative, and sometimes surprisingly nuanced world.  Larsen holds himself up to a very high standard, and you can see him trying to push further and overdo it nearly every issue.  This is abundantly apparent in shots like the one above, which occur in some form every 8 issues or so.  Savage Dragon will win over anyone who found the form of comics young because it’s the book all of us were writing in our heads when we put down our X-Mens and Fantastic Fours and went outside to play our own versions, usually with more killings, crazier twists, and even bigger chests (male and female).  If grown men choose to scoff at it, I completely understand.  I can’t really defend a guilty pleasure.  Larsen characters smartly appeal to the collector in me and nearly inherently all comic book lovers.  I’m not much of a creepy man-child, but if someone made nice, iconic toys of all his characters, I’d need to buy every one. The same cannot be said for any other company’s line, but could be said if someone only released toys of Kirby’s complete creations.

One man did this.

Wolverine as Batman’s Human Shield

Here is my attempt at a “realistic” version of Wolverine and Batman. Please, do not misunderstand my purposes. I do think superheroes work best as punk rock. DK2 paved the way for some of my favorite works in spandex, Lenil F. Yu’s New Avengers and John Romita, Jr.’s newest work on Spider-Man. And I, like any illustrator who has been forced to wield an honest to goodness paintbrush (for like oils and watercolors and stuff) in art school, think Alex Ross is a terrible painter. Former-roomie Sean T. Collins and I agree on many things, including the fact that there is nothing “cool” about seeing the wrinkles in spandex. That doesn’t suddenly make your childhood heroes “come to life!” It just loses the Greek heroic nude aspect of the genre.

No, the following piece was a commission from a co-worker of mine for his nephew of the kid’s two favorite heroes. By that point, I had moved beyond ever trying to pitch a superhero book to a major publisher. The genre is just not a great fit for what my work has become. I have literally had Marvel editors fly through the superhero work in my portfolio and comment, “Well, I wish the former stuff had the life of this stuff,” while staring at some completely dour and esoteric stuff they would never publish in a million years. The only way I was going to be able to find some interest in this for me and thus create a piece worth the price tag for my friend was to adapt the piece to my current interests. I thus determined my rule would be to only draw the characters wearing things they could actually purchase in a real human store, and to use that restriction to delve into my own attachment to these characters and attempt to make concrete my understanding of them as people. Any geek worth his mettle has complained at a mag, “Wolverine wouldn’t say that,” but how many of us could pick out what belt he’d wear? (Answer: metal scorpion buckle.) Bottom line: Wolvie is trailer trash; Wayne is not stupid, and would thus wear S.W.A.T. gear and a helmet.

art: Josiah Leighton Wolverine © Marvel Comics Group Batman © D.C.

Regardless of what you think of the experiment or the image, you gotta admit, Logan in a Guns ‘N Roses tee and a Dale Earnhardt, Sr. jacket is pretty frickin’ rad.

Remember When a Great Toy Was a Guy in a Loincloth Whose Arm Swung If You Crushed His Fruitbasket?

This is what toys look like these days!

creator: Nirasawa Yasushi © Nirasawa Yasushi

creator: Nirasawa Yasushi © Nirasawa Yasushi

creator: Nirasawa Yasushi © Nirasawa Yasushi

creator: Nirasawa Yasushi © Nirasawa Yasushi

creator: Nirasawa Yasushi © Nirasawa Yasushi

creator: Nirasawa Yasushi © Nirasawa Yasushi

creator: Nirasawa Yasushi © Nirasawa Yasushi

Note to all American comic book artists working on a sci-fi or superhero book:

“Do what Snoop says, ‘Step your game up.’”

Delegation of Tasks

To be fair, much of the reasons toys, and movies, and video games have such great designs is because they hire people like this just to come up with the visuals:

art: Doug Chiang © Doug Chiang

This guy did designs for the new Star Wars movies! He probably worked on something good as well… (If your wondering, after the above post, why Lucas didn’t tap Nirasawa for designs there, I share your befuddlement.) Look at all the thought that went into this machine, and yet, it’s really quite a simple concept, fleshed out perfectly. I particularly love all the guide lines he uses to balance the image. He tries, in vain, to explain what each is for in his excellent design book, but ultimately the intuitive artist should be able to see visually what they accomplish in terms of form. I can’t exactly explain them either. They are like those loose strokes your art teachers used to try to force you to start with to get “the gesture of the pose.” Swoop, swoop and done: now just fill in all those pesky details of surface anatomy and shadow. Well, it’s true. If you don’t get the stuff in the right place, the details are for naught. And here, you can see how Chiang makes sure he has a workable and pleasing shape with those construction lines before he gets into all his awesomely anal details of tank treads and elbow joints. Something needs to stick out this way, this way and…this way. Center of gravity — here. And gravy.

Well, the monthly superhero penciller does not have time to even tweak until he gets the right shape. He can’t even get this far…

art: Doug Chiang © Doug Chiang

Let alone this far…

art: Doug Chiang © Doug Chiang

But with designs like this in the zeitgeist, are we comic readers really supposed to be afraid of Skrulls?

One of the two major event comics of the summer involved green-skinned aliens with lines on their chins. Is this Babylon 5?

Now I genuflect at the altar of Kirby more than the next guy, and I’ll certainly defend his work as timeless to literary critics and high society art snobs, but I think he would honestly be disappointed that his ideas, even his toss-off designs like the Skrulls, are still being trotted out verbatim time and time again, mutilating the carcass of a long dead horse.

Kirby lived in different times. Not simpler, but certainly ones in which technology was not so pervasive. Kirby’s smartest realization is that we would have no idea how the technology of advanced alien cultures would operate, superior work should be inconceivable to us, so it should be drawn as baffling geometric shapes with no concern for function. That’s gutsy and artsy on so many levels. He created the future.

Now artists are recycling a past he tried to see beyond. Kirby was so restless he would change costumes from page to page; you cannot possibly tell me he would not be bored to tears by the lack of innovation in the field he helped to reinvigorate. I can’t even imagine he’d be flattered to know the Skrulls were the hits of Summer 2008. “The Skrulls? God, with the chins? Tell me they’re not still wearing purple jumpsuits. You know those colors were just the villains-get-secondary-colors-so-as-to-contrast-with-the-heroes’- primary-colors editorial mandate, right? Bruce Banner was not actually supposed to be the sort of swinger who wore purple pants. I wanted him grey, anyhow. Stan said it was too ugly. Too ugly! I showed him with Orion!!! Even Iron Man he turns gold!”

Kirby the design innovator would not be welcome in comics today. The creepy “don’t change my beloved childhood toys” nostalgia would have no use for him. He’d be helping to design those thousands of individuated Taurens I vicariously watched when Sean T. Collins posted a video he vicariously enjoyed from a tribute march in World of Warcraft. Everything appears customizable in that game! How Jack would love to draw a new bull-headed character for every player (I know that’s not how it works)! “I don’t have to keep reference sheets?” “No Jack, just throw the old drawing away and see what you can think of next!” He’d be appalled that comics were trying to compete for children’s dollars in the age of a googleplex of perfectly designed Pokemon with men in spandex.

I have given excessive time to science fiction/superhero/fantasy design in this category, not because I think more new comic artists should keep mining those spent shafts, but rather that these books rely on visual inventiveness, and yet display such a paucity of creativity! And with each new graphic card for computers or pixel-upgrade for Blu-Ray comes a slew of gorgeous design that make use of this, making comic book creatures and heroes look even more shoddy in comparison.

Here’s a suggestion for the beginning of a solution: reassign the division of labor in comics. There is absolutely no reason, despite the presence of geniuses like Kevin Nowlan and Klaus Janson, that penciller and inker should be separate people. However, that does not mean I approve of the new time-saving trend of scanning in pencils and coloring over them. (Don’t even get me started on how much effort on the part of Joe Madureira was wasted on The Ultimates…) I merely think the guy who envisioned the art, probably has enough skill to finish it. In art school, I would bet he or she was forced to actually do so. Perhaps even with a brush similar to the ones inkers use! I am always baffled when I see a page of meticulously tight pencils. If Travest Charest could really imagine all of that detail, and knew where he needed every single line you see in the finished page, am I to believe he didn’t have time to ink it, or that he can’t figure out how thick to make bounding lines?

I am willing to accept, however, that the person who can perfectly layout a story, and depict the action, and stylishly create mood, and do every other thing covered on this site that goes into creating the art of a comic page may not be the world’s greatest fashion designer. Perhaps he or she can’t invent realistic-looking techie gadgets. An industrial designer might have a better time with that.

The Japanese division of labor seems a little more intuitive. There, the artist whose name is on the book is really more of a director. In his charge he has a legion of assistants, many who were specially hired to complete only certain aspects of the work. When I was in Japan, I set up an interview with Yuki Masami because of his creation of Patlabor, the cybernetic police drama. Much to my chagrin, he was now working on one of those special interest/hobby manga books that somehow thrive in Japan, the terribly titled “Grooming Up!”, a comic about a girl and her horse. He didn’t really feel like talking about Patlabor anymore. Neither did any of his roomful of assistants! There were beds in the studio! Most of these guys probably couldn’t have even talked about mobile armored police if they wanted to since, as Masami explained, he hired a new team when he started the new book. He now needed experts on horses. This honestly makes so much sense. He came up with the plot with his editor, laid the book out, and inked all the faces (for consistency and expression), various crew members did all the rest. Hate drawing backgrounds, John Cassaday? Hire an architecture school dropout! Never was all that big on getting out that pesky French Curve? I bet you could find an elderly drafting major who never learned AutoCAD and is hard up for work. Can’t invent mech to save your life, (designer of Ultimate Iron Man, I’m looking in your direction)? Get Doug Chiang to do it! Look at the first line of the Wiki for Patlabor:

a manga franchise created by Headgear, a group consisting of director Mamoru Oshii, writer Kazunori Ito, mecha designer Yutaka Izubuchi, character designer Akemi Takada, and manga artist Masami Yūki.

When you have Mamoru Oshii directing and a guy devoted to designing tech, how can one go wrong?

Seriously, Marvel editors, hire some bigshot Hollywood or Japanese designer once a year to just re-imagine or invent every character you have appearing in a given book that year. Watch sales skyrocket among teens and be prepared for even more calls from the movie folks. Or just force your artists to study the work of everyone I have put into this category…

In the End…It Doesn’t Have to Be All That Complicated

Assuming you were blessed from birth with perfect design sense, and have spent years honing your cartooning craft, it really doesn’t have to be as complicated as all the above examples. A simple, perfectly constructed character will suffice. Thirty or so exquisitely placed lines. Watch Chester Brown work:

art: Chester Brown book: Louis Riel publisher: Drawn and Quarterly © Chester Brown

art: Chester Brown book: Louis Riel publisher: Drawn and Quarterly © Chester Brown

Is that God complaining about Mounties? So awesome!

Now, I was less than sold on Brown’s other work, particularly The Playboy. (What? People – adolescents at that! – look at pornographic materials, in secret, and then feel sort of guilty about it? Explain. ) But here Brown’s cartooning mastery cannot be ignored. These character designs combine The Yellow Submarine with the monumentality of Diego Rivera’s mural figures. The latter is perhaps not as left field as it seems: Louis Riel was a real-life revolutionary, so the larger-than-life quality of Rivera’s Communist Manifestos is fitting. Put this comic at the top of your read pile and you’ll find yourself wondering why all your superheroes seem so wussy and frail. Viva la Revolution! Rethink what you know!

Perfectly Controlled Cartooning

OK, one last “Roll Call”-type image. Then I promise I’m done.

art: Shinji Nagashima book: Fuuten © Shinji Nagashima

These characters are from one of my favorite finds from my stay in Tokyo: a book from the Sixties or Seventies that is barely discussed called Fuuten, which roughly translates to “Bums” or “Homeless,” but I prefer “The Unwanted,” “Nobodies” or “Riffraff.” Shinji Nagashima’s pen and ink work is still stylish as all get-out today. Culturally and stylistically, I think it’s fair to say he is Japan’s R. Crumb, but I would not be surprised if he beat Crumb to the punch. His wonderful cartoons even amble around in a spread-legged gait that reminds an American audience of “Keep On Truckin’.” I am also not exaggerating in the slightest when I say the two volumes of Fuuten I am proud to have in my collection has had more effect on how I think of the potential of comics than anything Crumb has ever done. Did I just lose my indie comix cred card? Look at the spreads I post under Why Comics: Perfect Sequences and then get back to me with your ear-chewing. Nagashima can show the beauty of everyday existence on a comic book page. That resonates with everyone. I, personally, have never been drug-addled and sexually depraved and living in a loft in Haight-Ashbury. I love Crumb, but discussions of his work will be limited to his stylistic inking innovations. You could learn everything I have to teach by just getting a copy the complete Fuuten and drinking in every page.

Let’s focus on one aspect. Nagashima finds a way, within the constraints of his chosen “simplistic” style, to distinguish every character in his huge cast of characters. This is done with every trick we’ve discussed: accessories (hats, sunglasses), hairstyles, and brilliant cartooning: look at the shapes of all those heads! Your not at a loss for a moment in the tale for who is who. More than that, despite the few lines used, the characters do not read just as types. That would ruin a realistic yarn such as this, which is perhaps best compared to “On the Road,” minus the drugs, plus plot lines. These characters cannot become ciphers for the story to function. They must seem like real, individuated Japanese people, each with real problems and true loves. And they do.

Profile of a Profile

Again, as long as you’re a mature enough artist to have some real cartooning chops, simplicity can be best in character design. It just takes one distinctive feature for recognition: Bart Simpson’s zigzag hair, Charlie Brown’s zigzag shirt (and hydrocephalic skull), or this:

art: Frank Miller book: Sin City publisher: Dark Horse Comics © Frank Miller

That beautiful uninterrupted curve from hairline to nose defines Marv no matter how much ink Frank has left on his brush with intent to use. It is such an informed choice for a comic that thrives in the darkness of chiaroscuro. It allows for moments like this:

art: Frank Miller book: Sin City publisher: Dark Horse Comics © Frank Miller

Even when he’s running through the woods at night, reader recognition is not an issue. Unless, of course, he were not shot from the side. I’m not even sure Frank knows what Marv looks like head-on.

art: Frank Miller book: Sin City publisher: Dark Horse Comics © Frank Miller

By the way, I write these posts backwards so one can just start at the top in a category and scroll down through the entire lesson. My fiancee keeps telling me WordPress must have another way to sort these things, but I’ll be darned if I can find it. The point being, when this category is done, this will be the second time I have ended an argument with Frank Miller. It occurs to me that those could be words to live by. One could do worse than always ending an argument with Frank Miller…