R.I.P. The New 52: a look back at Justice League Dark
Posted: August 31, 2015 Filed under: review | Tags: comics, DC, J. M. DeMatteis, Jeff Lemire, Justice League Dark, Mikel Janin, Peter Milligan, publishing, superheroes, The New 52, US 1 CommentAlmost exactly four years ago, DC Comics cancelled all their monthly comic book series, just to relaunch most of them again as ‘The New 52’. I hesitate to call this a proper reboot, for reasons I have discussed here before. Anyway, now (in May/June) they have done the same thing once again, at last dropping the ‘New 52’ label: approximately half of the monthly series was cancelled, while the other half was renumbered to #1.
Several other weblogs have taken a look back at the 3 1/2 years of The New 52, among which I particularly recommend Steve Foxe’s “In Loving Memory: All 68 DC Comics That Have Come and Gone Within the New 52” at Paste. The general consensus seems to be that The New 52 was a bold marketing decision that may have made sense commercially, but in terms of the quality of the actual comics, not much really stood out.
If I get Foxe right, 93 ongoing series had been launched at some point during The New 52. Out of these, 25 have been relaunched and continued to the present day, while approximately 47 were cancelled already before this latest relaunch (i.e. after the ‘Convergence’ crossover event). The former consist of mainstays such as Batman and Action Comics, while among the latter we find mainly obscure oddities that were probably doomed from their very beginning, e.g. G.I. Combat or All-Star Western.
This leaves us with ~21 titles that sit in the middle, having made it to their 40th issue, but not being continued in this new iteration of the DC comics line. From a commercial perspective, these comic books seem to have ultimately failed too. But wasn’t there something in them that might be worth remembering? Didn’t all the effort that creators put into them amount to more than a mere footnote in the history of American superhero comics?
With this question in mind I re-read all 40 issues (plus Annuals and the like) of Justice League Dark, the only New 52 series I happened to have collected from start to finish. (More precisely, I started from #9, then got the first trade paperback and #7-8 later.) Instead of summarising the story, I picked the following 20 most memorable moments in Justice League Dark, in chronological order of publishing, to show that this series (and probably others with mediocre sales performances) might deserve a second look.
1. JLD #1 The very first issue (by Peter Milligan (w) / Mikel Janin (a) / Ulises Arreola (c)) is already full of brilliant ideas. Take the opening page, for instance: Madame Xanadu sits there and seems to look at the reader, while her tarot cards float around the room, some of them face-up towards the picture surface for the reader to see. (This is a composition that refers to earlier ones, two of them pictured in the Madame Xanadu Wikipedia Article.) The tarot cards show who be the protagonists of this first story will be: Deadman, Enchantress, Mindwarp (who actually turns out to not play much of a role), Constantine, June Moone, and Zatanna. The cards are labeled with the traditional tarot card names – ‘The Magician’, ‘The Fool’, ‘Death’, etc. What better way to start a story? You could even argue that the cards are on a different diegetic level and only there for the reader – after all, why and how would Madame Xanadu make such a tarot deck? Then again, the cards are shown several more times in the story and seen by other characters too.
2. JLD #1 Peter Milligan lend a dark sense of humour to his stories that neither Jeff Lemire nor J. M. DeMatteis, Milligan’s successors as writer of the book, ever accomplished. In this issue, supernatural phenomena suddenly occur, most of them only briefly told in one panel. My favourite one has the following caption text: “In a neighboring town, a shower of books in a dead language kill six people.” Get it? “Dead”? “Kill”?
3. JLD #1 Generally, Peter Milligan’s version of the Justice League Dark was much darker than that of the writers that followed. Almost all of our ‘heroes’ are shown to have a dark side. Madame Xanadu, for instance – otherwise a rather bland character – is shown to be addicted to some kind of drug. “How much of this stuff are you doing?”, she is asked by Shade, holding a phial in his hand.
4. JLD #2 In the first few issues, Milligan needs to introduce a lot of characters, and he does a brilliant job of it when it comes to Deadman. Deadman is a ghost, and the only way he can touch and be touched is to possess a living person. Things get awkward when he wants to do that to sleep with his girlfriend, who is not so keen (“You’re asking me to sleep with another man”).
5. JLD #5 What all JLD writers emphasise is that the JLD is quite a fragile superhero team. Consequently, the first break-up of the JLD already happens in the fifth issue (and it’s not going to be the last). “I’m going, and I don’t ever want to see any of you again”, says Constantine.
6. JLD #8 John Constantine and his irreverent attitude has been the biggest draw of this book for me. Madame Xanadu: “My ‘project’ didn’t last as long as I’d hoped, but… but I truly believe… that is has been worthwhile.” – Constantine: “Worthwhile my jacksey. We might as well all have stayed home and got pissed.” (Jeff Lemire came up with some good Constantine one-liners too when he took over in #9 – Steve Trevor: “Around ARGUS we’ve even taken to nicknaming you the ‘Justice League Dark.'” – Constantine: “That is the stupidest name I’ve ever heard.”)
7. JLD #9 Jeff Lemire’s first JLD issue is generally another apex of the series. There’s an ingenious example of medium specificity in the scene in which Constantine wakes up with a “truly epic hangover”. A voice says to him, “We need to talk.”, and Constantine answers, “You didn’t spend the night, did you, sunshine? I mean, I was drunk, but I don’t think I was that drunk…” Perhaps it needs to be mentioned that in this series, Constantine is not written as bisexual, so the reader might expect he is talking to a woman. On the next page, the person turns out to be Agent Steve Trevor, who visits Constantine strictly on JLD business. If this was a film, it wouldn’t be half as unexpected, because Trevor’s voice would be recognisable as a male one.
8. JLD #9 Another brilliant display of medium specificity are the gutters between the panels in the same issue: when the JLD enter an ancient Peruvian temple, the gutters are shaped like spiderwebs. This is a kind of foreshadowing, because not until the next page, spiders (well, human/spider monsters) actually appear.
9. JLD #10 A trio of villains, the “Demons Three”, are introduced on a splash page. The way in which they are presented is charmingly old-school: facing the reader, delivering a short monologue, speaking in custom lettering. Throughout the series, beautifully designed villains are depicted in this way, most notably “Black Boris” and “Blackbriar Thorn” in #12, “Blight” in #27, and “The Between” in #32. This ‘Monster of the Week’ pattern, however, becomes tiresome at some point and brings us such underwhelming villains as “Pantheon”, “Pralayah”, and “The Beyond Beyond”.
10. JLD #12 Some more medium specificity: when Doctor Mist says to Zatanna, “I will deflect your backwards magic right back at you”, he turns her speech bubble with backwards speech into a sound effect (in which the letters appear in normal order) which he throws at her.
11. JLD #0 Each New 52 series got a ‘Zero Issue’ in which the origin story was told (similar to the later Secret Origins series, but tied to comic books rather than individual characters). A charming detail of this one (still written by Jeff Lemire, but pencilled by Lee Garbett) is that we get to see how Constantine got his iconic trench coat.
12. JLD Annual #1 Lemire’s story is hopelessly convoluted, but it’s a nice twist when the villain, Nick Necro, tells Zatanna that it was him who formed the JLD in the first place, in order to get the Books of Magic. “You weren’t so hard to get on the team, Zee, but can you imagine how difficult it was to convince anyone to put John Constantine onto a super hero team? I tell you, getting out of hell was easier.” Maybe a(nother) metatextual stab at the concept of the whole series?
13. JLD #14 When Black Orchid explores the House of Mystery (Constantine’s home), she stumbles upon a room in which Constantine keeps files on many superheroes, including Orchid herself. This is a much-needed recap of some of the things going on in the DC universe (in other books mostly). At the same time, it’s fun to see how close Constantine is to revealing the secret identities of Superman and Batman (which the reader is only able to tell through extra-textual information).
14. JLD #15 The JLD is teleported to some kind of magical counter-world in which the JLD members turn into their opposites: the immortal, ageless Madame Xanadu turns into an old woman, Deadman becomes alive again, and Constantine can’t tell lies anymore. The latter aspect becomes relevant for the overall story arc when we learn that Constantine’s feelings for Zatanna are apparently true.
15. JLD #24 J. M. DeMatteis takes over as the new JLD writer, and he takes Constantine on a “Magical Misery Tour” on which he confronts his inner (?) demons. A well-written exploration of Constantine’s character – although one could argue it’s a little out of place in a team book.
16. JLD #26 Swamp Thing has recently joined the JLD, and what I like best about him is when he transforms himself, e.g. grows wings. In this issue, he briefly turns into some sort of whale.
17. JLD #27 In order to defeat the villain Blight, who is the embodiment of evil, Constantine and Nightmare Nurse decide to fight fire with fire and invoke the “Blackmare Curse”. This spell “drills down into the deepest pits of the soul… unleashing all the darkness there”, which turns the two into fierce monsters. Naturally, the Curse works better the more corrupted and depraved its evocators are. Thus we are given another little piece of the puzzle that is the true nature of John Constantine’s character.
18. JLD Annual #2 Another interesting spell is the “K’Am’Deva Curse” with which Zatanna rips Constantine’s heart out of his chest so that he loses all feelings for her, and all memories of ever having loved her. The explanation why they do this is that the bond between them acts as a “magical battery” for some supervillains. At the end of the issue the two get separated when Zatanna is sucked into a “whirling hole in space and time” (#35). Things get awkward when they meet again in the final issue.
19. JLD #35 Zatanna emerges in another parallel world in which she meets her father, Zatara the magician, who was supposed to be long dead. Zatara tells her he had found a “doorway through time” through which he took his wife and little daughter with him and settled in a world were “thought itself would instantly become manifest reality” and “no one grows older”. Wait – his daughter? Zatanna realises there’s something not quite right about Zatara’s story… I won’t spoil the ending, but ultimately this story turns out to be a nice version of the old ‘dream within a dream’ theme. On the flipside, this is once again not much of a ‘team book’ story, and it’s too bad the book is no longer drawn by Mikel Janin at this point.
20. JLD #36 Towards the end of the series, an old villain returns: Felix Faust, the ancient sorcerer. Except he is in the shape of a monstrous caterpillar now. I like him best in the cover image (by Guillem March and Tomeu Morey), in which I only saw the caterpillar monster gripping the herous with its tentacles at first, and only later did I spot Faust’s tiny head at the end of the monster. This is probably one of the best JLD covers after Ryan Sook had stopped doing them (#14 was Sook’s last one, I think).
DC’s The New 52 – cool or not cool? Part 2/2
Posted: May 31, 2014 Filed under: review | Tags: Batwoman, comics, continuity, DC, intertextuality, J. H. Williams III, Justice League Dark, Mikel Janin, Peter Milligan, remakes, Scott Snyder, superheroes, Swamp Thing, The New 52, US, W. Haden Blackman, Yanick Paquette Leave a commentEarlier this week I looked at three comic book series from The New 52, and found that the first issue of each wasn’t very newbie-friendly, contrary to what DC had advertised. Let’s analyse three more titles today and assess their jumping-on adequacy.
Batwoman #1
Language: English
Authors: J. H. Williams III (writer/artist), W. Haden Blackman (writer), Dave Stewart (colourist)
Publisher: DC
Released: 2011-09-14
Pages: 22
Price: $2.99
Website: still no series information at DC.
A lot of people seem to like this series, or more precisely, J. H. Williams’s art. I for one found it too sexploitative even by mainstream superhero comics standards, and consequently didn’t bother to read Batwoman past this first issue. The story starts with a supernatural crime case which both Batwoman and the Gotham City Police Department try to solve. Intercut are some scenes of Batwoman training her sidekick, and of a mysterious organisation that is probably more prominently featured in later issues. This setup is straightforward enough to grasp the basics of this setting, but then again there are many references to previous events, such as the double page on which Batwoman talks to her father about the past, with a background filled with scenes that are inscrutable for the new reader.
Swamp Thing #1
Language: English
Authors: Scott Snyder (writer), Yanick Paquette (artist), Nathan Fairbairn (colourist)
Publisher: DC
Released: 2011-09-07
Pages: 22
Price: $2.99
As I’ve written in my previous reviews of this series, Scott Snyder doesn’t make it clear right away whether or not protagonist Alec Holland really is the Swamp Thing. In his dialogue with Superman, Holland says that he once was Swamp Thing but has renounced this superhero identity. At the end of this issue, Holland and the Swamp Thing (or ‘a’ Swamp Thing) are in fact shown as two distinct figures talking to each other.
Again, past events are referenced heavily in this book, but this time, it feels more like a deliberate, clever element of ambiguity, rather than as if you’re missing out on something if you haven’t read all previous Swamp Thing comics. For those readers already familiar with Swamp Thing, there are several easter eggs to be discovered in the drawings in the form of fictitious company names on labels which pay tribute to the original Swamp Thing creators.
Justice League Dark #1
Language: English
Authors: Peter Milligan (writer), Mikel Janin (artist), Ulises Arreola (colourist)
Publisher: DC
Released: 2011-09-28
Pages: 20
Price: $2.99
I’ve already written about the art of this series in a previous post, but let’s focus on the story here: as in some of the other comics, mysterious supernatural things happen, and superheroes investigate. The Justice League fails, though, and the clairvoyant Madame Xanadu assembles a team that is more apt to deal with mystical threats – the eponymous Justice League Dark (although that name isn’t used here). Thus, this first issue is a typical team origin story. Each member is introduced briefly and we learn about their respective powers, except for Deadman, who is only featured on two panels for the time being. This book requires some basic knowledge of the Justice League, e.g. Zatanna’s affiliation. More importantly, the Justice League members refer to the villain, the Enchantress, as a familiar figure, although new readers probably won’t have heard of her.
To sum up, hardly any of the six New 52 number ones I’ve read are particularly good jumping-on points. This is mainly due to the editorial decision to maintain the status quo: if you have all these characters and their backstories and their established settings and back-up casts, why not continue to use them? Any major change would have angered the old readers, and DC didn’t want to risk that. That’s why their comics are still not attractive for new readers.
Apparently, DC’s business strategy is to hold on to the old readers and make them buy as many comics as possible, which is why they let “crossover mania” break out in each New 52 title. Before too long, the continuity of the DC universe will be so messed up again that the next half-hearted “reboot” will be necessary to unravel it. Eventually, the target audience won’t take note anymore.
DC’s The New 52 – cool or not cool? Part 1/2
Posted: May 26, 2014 Filed under: review | Tags: Animal Man, Batman, Brian Buccellato, comics, continuity, DC, Francis Manapul, Greg Capullo, intertextuality, Jeff Lemire, remakes, Scott Snyder, superheroes, The Flash, The New 52, Travel Foreman, US 3 CommentsIn September 2011 – two years and eight months ago – DC started this New 52 thing. So it’s hardly “new” anymore, but they still put “The New 52” on their comic book covers. Maybe this time is as good as any to ask: was it all worth it?
First of all, what is The New 52? Some people call it a relaunch, or a reboot. Essentially, though, it was a renumbering: all of DC’s monthly comic book series were set to “#1” in September 2011. Therefore, Action Comics #904 from August 2011 is followed by Action Comics #1 in September instead of #905. Likewise, there is no Detective Comics #882, and so on. This seems like a risky idea, but commercially, it worked wonders for DC, at least in the beginning. By now, it looks to me as if the sales boost effect has waned, judging by the estimates published on The Beat, for instance (see e.g. this column by Marc-Oliver Frisch on DC’s July 2013 sales).
Back in 2011, the goal behind this move seems to have been to make people start reading DC comics who had not been reading them before, advertising the new “first” issues as good “jumping-on points”. The problem with these #1 issues was, they were not actually “relaunching” or “rebooting” their respective series, at least not in my understanding of these terms. A proper relaunch or reboot would have been to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch by introducing the characters and their settings again, without relying on knowledge that readers have acquired through other, previous material. Although the creative teams of each series changed and new story arcs began, it was never clear how much the new series built on the old continuity, or to what extent that backstory would be retconned. Later, DC tried to alleviate this problem and fill in the blanks through events like “Zero Month” (or the current “Secret Origins”). At any rate, I don’t think DC did a good job at catering to new readers (probably in order not to lose their old core readership), as I will show in this two-part blog post using the example of six number ones from The New 52. Here are the first three, in no particular order:
The Flash #1
Language: English
Authors: Francis Manapul (writer/artist), Brian Buccellato (writer/colourist)
Publisher: DC
Released: 2011-09-28
Pages: 20
Price: $2.99
Website: the links given on the DC website are all broken.
I picked up the first Flash trade paperback mainly because of Marc-Oliver Frisch’s glowing review of #1, and because I wanted to see how this unusual creative team setup (writer plus writer/artist) worked out. The merits of this comic aside, it’s not a particularly good jumping-on point for readers unfamiliar with its eponymous protagonist. The title page on p. 4-5 briefly tells his origin story:
Struck by a bolt of lightning and doused in chemicals, Central City police scientist Barry Allen was transformed into the fastest man alive. Tapping into the energy field called the Speed Force, he applies a tenacious sense of justice to protect and serve the world as The Flash.
Seriously? Lightning? Chemicals? “The energy field called the Speed Force”? We’re in the 21st century now, but this reads like some Golden Age origin story full of magical thinking. And it doesn’t explain where Barry got his ring from, from which his costume somehow emerges and wraps around him. The Flash’s basic superpower – speed – is easy enough to understand, but on p. 8, he uses two secondary powers that aren’t as easy to grasp: levitating things by producing vortices from his hands, and vibrating through solid objects. Francis Manapul and Brian Buccellato surely didn’t make these things up, but that is of no help to the new reader.
For readers who are somewhat but not overly familiar with The Flash, it may be confusing that there’s this character called Iris West, hinting at the possibility that Wally West, another Flash, might still be introduced later in the story to complicate things further. Another weak point of this story is the characterisation of Barry, or lack thereof. In the next few issues, the supporting character Manuel seems more fleshed-out than Barry.
Batman #1
Language: English
Authors: Scott Snyder (writer), Greg Capullo (penciller), Jonathan Glapion (inker), FCO (colourist)
Publisher: DC
Released: 2011-09-21
Pages: 24
Price: $2.99
From its launch up to now, Batman was always one of the best-selling comics book series on the American direct market, regularly outselling all other series except for new launches, crossover events or other special issues. (On the other hand, it is the only series with estimated monthly sales consistently over 100,000 copies, which says a lot about the current state of the industry.) It probably couldn’t have enjoyed that success on the basis of its title alone, so I eventually read the first TPB and wasn’t disappointed: Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo did craft a gripping story.
It is also a story that is accessible to new readers, although it may help to know who e.g. the Joker is. There are only two scenes that might be problematic for the newbie: one is Batman fighting a multitude of villains at Arkham Asylum at the beginning of the comic, some of which are quite obscure and “wasted” as extras in a melee. The other is the brief introduction of the “Bat-Family”: Dick Grayson a.k.a. Nightwing, Tim Drake a.k.a. Red Robin, and Damian Wayne a.k.a. Robin. Only one of the three is relevant to the story, so they’re only introduced here for (intra-New-52) continuity’s sake.
Animal Man #1
Language: English
Authors: Jeff Lemire (writer), Travel Foreman (penciller), Lovern Kindzierski (colourist)
Publisher: DC
Released: 2011-09-07
Pages: 20
Price: $2.99
Animal Man is another comic that I only bought in collected form, probably around the time of the crossover with Swamp Thing. Jeff Lemire is, beside the aforementioned Scott Snyder, the other new “superstar” writer to emerge from The New 52. That status, however, wasn’t enough to prevent the cancellation of Animal Man with #29 two months ago.
Initially, Animal Man’s superpower was to temporarily gain one single ability of one single nearby animal, e.g. strength from an elephant, or flight from a bird. A goofy but fun concept. Later (but still before The New 52), he gained the ability to take on powers from all living beings, not only those nearby. That made him one of the most boring superheroes ever, as he can now at any time gain superstrength and flight etc., like so many other superheroes.
In Animal Man #1, this leads to clumsy storytelling by way of internal monologue in captions, such as “I just take on the weight of a bumblebee”, or “I reach out and grab the napping ability of a cat” (p. 14). Anyway, unfortunately for new readers, the story in this issue isn’t so much about Animal Man and his powers, but rather the beginning of an arc that puts Animal Man’s daughter Maxine in the foreground as the “avatar of the Red”. This new metaphysical concept of the three struggling primordial forces, the Red, the Green and the Rot, is relatively well explained in the following issues, but it overshadows Animal Man as a character.
Another potential problem with this comic for old and new readers alike is Travel Foreman’s art, which is certainly distinctive with its expressive lines and scarce but heavy cross hatching. I for one never got used to it. Readers already familiar with Animal Man will notice how similar the setting is to that of Grant Morrison’s acclaimed run from the late 1980s, with a focus on Animal Man’s domestic life with his wife and two children. This raises the question, though, how these runs are interconnected, or why all the familiar characters are still the same age as back in the 80s, even though the story is clearly set in the present day.
For two other interesting takes on The New 52 and its convoluted continuity, see Vaneta Rogers’s blogpost “The NEW 52 Two Years Later: The Reboot’s Biggest Surprises” at Newsarama and Paul C’s “The New 52 Continuity: It ain’t so bad!” at Last of the Famous International Fanboys.
Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion – in comics?
Posted: September 22, 2013 Filed under: review | Tags: art history, colour, comics, DC, Ernst Gombrich, illusion, Justice League Dark, Mikel Janin, mode of representation, perspective, Peter Milligan, reception aesthetics, superheroes, The New 52, theory, Ulises Arreola, US 2 CommentsHeinrich Wölfflin once said, “not everything is possible in every period.” Ernst Gombrich takes this statement as a starting point in his book Art and Illusion (first published in 1960 but based on a lecture series from 1956) and asks: if artists always want to represent what they see as accurately as possible, why do their results look so different from period to period? In other words: why does art have a history?
Gombrich’s main explanation is the “tenacity of conventions”. There is an “enormous pull in man to repeat what he has learned”, and only “exceptional beings” are occasionally able to “break this spell and make a significant advance” (pp. 24-25). That’s why, according to Gombrich, art has slowly become to look more and more lifelike.
So where do comics fit into this model? Gombrich actually mentions them as part of the “victory and vulgarization of representational skills” (p. 8), which had become ubiquitous in the (i.e. Gombrich’s) present day. Is that really the end of the story? Do comics constitute the apex of artistic illusion? Probably not. I think comics retain some features which Gombrich assigns to earlier periods, or “primitive” art.
One of these features is the treatment of local colour. In earlier times, artists didn’t try to represent the colour of an object as they perceived it (not an easy task, as Gombrich explains), but instead chose colours that fit into a specific overall tonality, as was demanded by the taste of the public of that day (chapter I).
Another feature of primitive art is to show each object in its “characteristic shape” (p. 302) – a horse from the side, a coin from above, etc. -, rather than to employ a “purely visual mode” (p. 19) with foreshortenings and intersections. (In a way, this “visual mode” is similar to Svetlana Alpers’s “Albertian mode”.)
When I was reading the first Justice League Dark trade paperback the other day, I found traces of both of these “primitive” characteristics in it. Justice League Dark was (at that time, 2011) written by Peter Milligan, drawn by Mikel Janin, and coloured by Ulises Arreola. I’ll write more about this interesting series in a later post, but for today, let’s look at p. 9 of the third issue.
In this scene, the superhero Deadman tries to stop June Moone, who is possessed by an evil witch, to jump from a rooftop. In panels 1, 3 and 4, the colour of that rooftop is black. In the last panel, its colour has suddenly changed to a textured grey, even though the lighting remains unchanged. Which is the “right” colour of the roof surface? That’s hardly possible to say. If it’s made of concrete or a similar material, it could appear greyish in daylight, but the scene takes place at night, so it might just look black. The reason for the colour change is, I believe, a pragmatic one: in the last panel, the roof on which Deadman and June are standing (or falling from, respectively) has to be distinguishable from the other rooftops of the surrounding buildings, so one is grey (thus adding the benefit of allowing to show shadows) and the others are black. (Another instance of a colour change is the reddish background of the second panel, but then again, Justice League Dark is full of such eerie glows.)
As for the second feature, June Moone’s face (her “characteristic shape”) is always shown more or less frontally on this page, regardless of where her body is orientated towards. Often, the figures in this comic are reminiscent of amateur stage actors who are taught to always face the audience so that they can be heard better. Deadman is shown twice frontally and twice from behind, but his red-and-white shape is easily recognised from any point of view – unlike June Moone, the unexceptional supporting character. We need to see her face to instantly recognise her.
I’m not saying the art in Justice League Dark is bad. It’s just in accord with the current style in mainstream superhero comics, which values clarity higher than accurate representation of the artists’ perception. The readers need to be enabled to easily read the comic and identify the important elements on the pictures, in order to understand what’s going on in the story. The story, not the look, conveys the atmosphere. In such a paradigm, there is no place for ambiguity.
That being said, Art and Illusion is a rich and diverse book. For a different connection to comics, see Nicolas Labarre’s article “Art and Illusion in Blutch’s Mitchum” at The Comics Grid. Also of interest to the comics researcher might be chapter X of Art and Illusion, “The Experiment of Caricature”.
Why I stopped reading Swamp Thing
Posted: August 10, 2012 Filed under: review | Tags: Animal Man, comics, crossover, DC, fantasy, Francesco Francavilla, horror, Jeff Lemire, Marco Rudy, mystery, Scott Snyder, Steve Pugh, superheroes, Swamp Thing, The New 52, US, Yanick Paquette 5 CommentsReview of Swamp Thing #7-12
Previously in Swamp Thing: by the time I wrote my last review, Alec Holland was about to turn into the Swamp Thing, and the series was about to get really good.
Language: English
Authors: Scott Snyder (writer – plus Jeff Lemire in #12), Yanick Paquette/Marco Rudy/various (artist)
Publisher: DC
Pages: 20
Price: $2.99
Website: http://www.dccomics.com/comics/swamp-thing-2011
Back in issue #7, the series still seemed to be going in the right direction. With the help of the Parliament of Trees and his “bio-restorative formula”, Alec Holland is finally transformed and emerges from a giant cabbage as the Swamp Thing. The artwork by Yanick Paquette leaves little to be desired.
In issue #8, however, Paquette shares artist duties with Marco Rudy, depicting the clash of Swamp Thing and the army of the Rot. (For an insightful critique of that concept, see Iann Robinson’s review of #12.)
This pattern is repeated in issue #9: the first 8 pages are drawn by Paquette, the remaining 12 by Rudy. This constant back-and-forth between those two artists is annoying, but at this point, their styles had grown so similar that I almost didn’t mind anymore. A lot of mystical, epic fighting takes place in this comic book.
With issue #10, a completely different artist, Francesco Francavilla, takes over (including the colouring). While Francavilla is by no means a bad artist, his style is such a far cry from Paquette’s and Rudy’s that one cannot help but notice the difference and wonder why.
Especially since in issue #11, Rudy is back as the artist. What was Paquette doing in those 2 1/2 months when he apparently wasn’t drawing Swamp Thing? In fact, the next Swamp Thing issue with Paquette as artist will be #13, which is scheduled for October. I couldn’t find a statement from DC that explained what makes this merry-go-round of artists necessary. Apart from being irritating for the reader, I can’t imagine Eisner and Harvey award-winning writer Scott Snyder is fond of constantly working with fill-in collaborators. This situation is telling about DC’s attitude towards its authors.
The last straw came in issue #12 with the start of the dreaded Animal Man crossover story (“Rotworld”). In fact, this issue is part two of a two-part “prologue” to said storyline, the first part being Animal Man #12. Crossovers that require you to read every single tie-in issue to keep up with what’s going on are a clumsy attempt increase the sales of each involved series, and it doesn’t work with me. I have tried to get into Animal Man before, but didn’t like Steve Pugh’s art, so I don’t feel like picking it up now. Neither am I interested in seeing other characters from the DC universe make guest appearances in Swamp Thing (which will happen in issue #13).
So I won’t be reading Swamp Thing anymore. By means of crossover mania and artist roulette (which DC intends to keep spinning), DC has killed a strong series. Still, it was worth reading for most of its first year, both as a DC universe comic that does without (regular) superheroes, as well as for the intricate ways in which it refers to the pre-relaunch era. Thus the first trade paperback, collecting #1-7 and coming out this month, might be of general interest. For me, however, there are more interesting comic books being published by DC at the moment – more on those in later posts.
Rating: ● ● ○ ○ ○
Review: Swamp Thing #3-6
Posted: February 5, 2012 Filed under: review | Tags: comics, DC, fantasy, horror, Marco Rudy, mystery, Scott Snyder, superheroes, Swamp Thing, The New 52, US, Victor Ibáñez, Yanick Paquette 4 Comments
Language: English
Authors: Scott Snyder (writer), Yanick Paquette/Marco Rudy/various (artist)
Publisher: DC
Pages: 20
Price: $2.99
Website: http://www.dccomics.com/dccomics/comics/?cm=20705
Previously in Swamp Thing: Alec Holland is the Swamp Thing, the Knight of the Green… or is he? Scott Snyder doesn’t really answer that question, in what I assume is an attempt to both pay tribute to and at the same time break away from Swamp Thing’s backstory.
Issue #3 shifts the main focus to a new character, a hospitalized boy named William who becomes the first villain of the series. Things get more creepy from here on. In the Alec Holland storyline, we see him using his power to manipulate plants for the first time, and there’s a nice one-page flashback to happier times for Swamp Thing and his lover Abigail (i.e. a tribute to the earlier series). Although only Snyder and Yanick Paquette are credited on the cover, more than half of this issue is actually drawn by Victor Ibáñez (!), which could be the reason why I liked the art a little bit better than in the first two issues.
In issue #4, Marco Rudy suddenly takes over as penciller, and there are three different inkers now. These changes in the art team are highly irritating, but in itself the art isn’t bad. There’s some more nasty horror in William’s storyline, whereas Alec learns about the epic and mystical background of the Swamp Thing.
Paquette returns as penciller and inker in issue #5, and now I remember what I like about him: his inking is really striking. While I don’t care much for his heavy crosshatching, his outlines, which can be up to about 3mm thick in a close-up, are daring. A third storyline about an evil scientist/occultist in the Amazon Jungle is introduced here, and Alec Holland shows off some more of his Swamp Thing powers in a battle against William.
The artist carousel revolves once more and brings us Marco Rudy again as the penciller and inker for issue #6. I’m not saying Rudy is a worse (or better) artist than Paquette, but I wish they’d let me get used to either of them. Apart from that, this is the darkest, most atmospheric and probably best issue of the series so far.
Luckily, Snyder quickly did away with the idea of connecting Swamp Thing to the rest of the DC Universe (that Superman appearance in the first issue was truly awkward) and now pursues a distinct mystery/horror/fantasy tone. If only DC could resolve the artist trouble, this could be a really good comic. (The next two issues are announced with Paquette as artist, so let’s hope they stick to him.)
Rating: ● ● ● ○ ○
The 650-Cent Plague 