The Thousand Words Method

Or sometimes you shove an entire beatdown into a perfectly composed single image, (to be fair, a large, double-page spread image):

art: Rob Haynes book: Daredevil publisher: Marvel Comics Group © Marvel Comics Group

Rob Haynes’ clean “European” line gives a beautiful stillness to the bedlam and even seems to suggest slow motion within a non-moving drawing.  But there is so much action taking place within the drawing through deliberate construction of well-placed diagonals.  The perspectival depth of the scene is almost entirely suggested by the perfectly angled throwing stars.   This could never be a freeze frame of a movie because ever s0 slightly different moments in time are all being compressed into one image.  The tiny details of the detritus should alert any haters to the intense care put into Haynes’ seemingly simple style.  This methodology is fully-considered, able to tackle large buildings, figures and even minuscule hoops of metal.    I remember when this “fill-in” issue of David Mack and Joe Quesada’s run on Daredevil came out, so many readers were disgusted by this “amateurish” art.  Quesada himself knew he was actually being shown up on his own book.  Haynes doesn’t need to cover his anatomy work with hatching or cleverly placed shadows.  Every line is exactly where it should be and any more would be needless fiddling.  The lines may and colors may be flat, but I’ve never seen Daredevil look so round.  The athlete the stories always tried to suggest is finally there in this shot, seeming to float across the tops of buildings.  And the story itself was a clever little conceit designed to fit perfectly between the surrounding issues of the run, fleshing out the world of the story much as this gorgeous image fleshes out Murdock and his New York night life.

And before any nitpickers point out that, be all that as it may, Haynes still got lazy and recycled his perfect pose on the female in the back, her name is “Echo.”  I’ll let you guess her powers and put that wagging finger down.

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.

Simultaneity

In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon does one brilliant thing after another, and no, I’m not just talking about his sentences. His first coup d’etat is making you more interested in the lives of his normal human protagonists than in those of their larger-than-life superhuman creations. His second is a wonderful formal trick that takes advantage of his understanding that first fact. Every time one of his all-too-human heroes is thrown into a real bind, once quite literally faced with a ticking time bomb, Chabon switches to a chapter about the comic book they’ve created AND NEVER HAVE I CARED LESS ABOUT PRETERNATURALLY GIFTED OVERMEN IN BEYOND-DIRE ESCAPADES IN WHICH THE FATE OF THE PLANET HANGS IN BALANCE! And it’s not just because I never really care for the trite trappings of the genre like that. Nor that Chabon’s Escapist and Luna Moth are dull — they are as serviceable as the rest in tights. It is because Chabon has found a way to make the “real” banal world so much more compelling, and he pulled the bait and switch. As you progress through the book, you begin to be able to feel the tension get so opressive and thick, and you just know the next chapter is going to be about that damn Escapist! Damn you, Chabon! Just let the scene play through!

But Chabon knows better than that. Cross-cutting, switching from one scene to another and back again, can assure reader attention. It keeps her on her toes. It also provides ample opportunity for two seemingly-unrelated tales to butt up against one another in fascinating ways, often providing a synergy impossible if kept in their respective corners.

Now, Chabon is far from an innovator here. E.L. Doctorow does it constantly and to even greater effect in his sublime The Book of Daniel. That book switches plotlines, timelines, and writing styles so often you need a scorecard, but always for essential effects and reasons. The whole thing is being assembled from notecards and an outline in the library by the narrator as we read it, so diversions and thematic abutments are par for the course. He’s working out as he goes, don’t you know? Coppola, director of your homework assignment for Layout, famously does it not only in your opening, but also in the climax of Apocalypse Now. Through perfectly timed and selected cross cuts we are led to believe we are literally watching a giant machete hack huge chunks out of Marlon Brando’s fleshy corpus. It is harrowing to watch. But in fact, we are merely watching a bull get ritualistically slaughtered on camera and die before our eyes. Ah, thank god. I was really convinced I was being subjected to something awful for a bit there. (You’ll never catch that “No animals were harmed during the making of this film” disclaimer on any of Coppola’s early work. That horse’s head in The Godfather? Not a prosthetic. And I heard Francis and Gene Hackman just killed a dog for fun off-camera during the making of The Conversation.) The point being, Coppola joins two scenes of raw, brutal intensity and shows them to us simultaneously so our capacities are overloaded. We are left confounded and drained, unable to pull apart the pieces to know exactly what sort of “horror” we have just witnessed. Even John Woo uses cross-cutting to great effect in the “romantic” car chase between Tom Cruise and Thandie Newton in Mission Impossible II: a twirl of red cars interspliced with the twirls of the red-dressed Spanish dancer from the previous scene. The cars become lovers, the chase: sexy.

Comic books, despite their defining characteristic as the art of juxtaposition, do very little putting scenes side-by-side. It’s a lack that is ripe with untapped possibilities. Here’s just a pretty standard Chabon-like use of it to heighten tension and build suspense through dramatic irony:

art: Rob Haynes book: Daredevil publisher: Marvel Comics Group © Marvel Comics Group

Simplicity is best for the execution of this sort of thing, so here Haynes opts for a standard Kirby six grid, and keeps the left side for the girl, the right for the crook. The colorist helpfully separates the scenes through palette: cool colors for the lady’s shower, warm colors for the would-be perp’s hot-blood. (Don’t worry; Daredevil somehow stops him.) Notice how the girl seems so much more oblivious since the guy is literally right next to her. This omniscient viewpoint gives us audience members a sense of superiority. We want to shout warnings or derision at the woman. It makes the read interactive. Imagine these same scenes played out separately over the course of two different pages. We readers would just be yelling, “Get on with it! Yeah, I see where this is going.” Displayed simultaneously, with shot for shot correspondences (first tier: full body shots, second tier: closeups on hands and their items, third tier: over-the-shoulder focused on mouths), the tango seems to be unbearable, unimagined and unavoidable.