At times the things that can be achieved by comics’ usual mode of sequencing — strings of single panels after single panels — can seem almost limitless.  Looking at it from the inside out, as a comics-literate reader who can see the vast differences in approach to sequence that distinguish a Ware from a Kirby from an Eisner, it’s easy to get lost in just how diverse the pages can get.  But take a step back and look at comics as one visual medium among many, a vehicle for creating information to be absorbed through the eyes, and the methods of sequencing used by its artists begin to look surprisingly limited.

Think about it — or better yet, get out a bunch of your comics, all genres, all drawing styles, as diverse and differentiated a selection as you can find, and give them all a flip-though.  While comics have no shortage of different colors on their pages and different methods of mark-making swimming through their panels, a ridiculously large majority of them stick to that one typical mode of sequencing — boxed panels following boxed panels, groups of them fit more or less perfectly together like puzzle pieces, jammed snugly into the rectangle of the page.  The grid, as wonderful and variable a sequencing tool as it is, possesses a downright tyrannical stranglehold on the comics form.

Now I don’t know about you, but personally I like reading comics better than I like reading prose chiefly because their pages don’t all look the same.  And it’s frustrating to see how many comics lock themselves into prose’s side-scrolling, line-above-line sequencing pattern to put their information across.  Try to think about a page of comics as a painter or a sculptor would and it’s almost laughable.  Why does everyone stay in those safe little boxes all the time?  A page of comics is a canvas, a big pure space that can contain anything, and yet for over a century now, its artists have jailed their pictures in panel borders rather than exploring the possibilities of setting them free on the page, leading readers’ eyes along lines that aren’t straight and short and easy.

This Brendan McCarthy sequence is so interesting precisely because it breaks free of tradition, denying the grid and composing comics by simply laying multiple images down on the page.  It isn’t rocket science, people — draw one thing in one space and then another in close enough proximity and you’re working in the medium.  McCarthy, a fine-art student, brings a painterly awareness of the page-as-unit to all his work.  You can see it on his gridded pages, which always hew to a larger, unified color/design scheme, but it’s most apparent in single-page comics canvases like “Pop!”, quite possibly the most formally audacious, revolutionary piece of comics ever published by DC.

“Pop!” is a gorgeously cohesive thing, a page that can’t quite be reduced into its component parts, demanding instead to be viewed as a whole.  That’s interesting enough on its own in the context of a medium that typically propels its stories by demanding that the reader ignore the whole to follow the progression of little bits and pieces, but “Pop!” also bends its form to its function.  This is art-comix as pure as they come, but that doesn’t mean it lacks meaning beyond the pictures.  “Pop!” is a story about the world around us (circa 2006, but at least as relevant and applicable to this current instant), an attempt to encompass the dissonant, clashing currents at play in our real lives, to unify completely different things into one superstructure — just as Reality itself does.  The images give us three things: the rage of a bloody war, a sedate, bourgeois home life… and the world of hero comics, as perfectly symbolized by a Curt Swan Superman sample.  They aren’t subdivided into their own separate boxes, allowed to exist in private, hidden from one another.  They stretch all over the page, overlap and dialogue.  These are three real things McCarthy’s cartooning about, facts of life for every English-language comics reader, and in “Pop!” they’re taken out of the hermetically sealed arenas they usually occupy, stripped of separators, forced into contact.

The sense of flow in “Pop!” is beautiful.  Rather than the usual syncopated, stop-start motion that powers gridded comics pages, McCarthy’s page is a single extended movement, a long gesture from a beginning through a middle and into an end that fades out rather than full-stopping.  The near-satanic evocation of war at the top of the page has a literal stake in McCarthy’s caricature of the average well-to-do American’s peaceful home life.  The typesetting, understated but beautifully considered, forms a neat ‘L’ shape that takes the place of a panel border, separating the first image off from the second while leaving the total composition plenty of room to breathe.  McCarthy’s deft sequencing of his text pieces deserves just as much credit as his placement of the art fragments: a cohesive story can be easily grasped from hand-scrawled titles, a neat logo, a scattered bit of poetry, and a few disconnected balloons.  That story, of course, is one of idealistic revolution, peace triumphing over war, the mellow hippy type in the second image taking power from the American military-industrial hegemony symbolized by Superman, seen admitting his final defeat.  (In a world where the cultural revolutionaries are the good guys, superheroes are not only outmoded, but dangerous, after all.  You ever read something you just can’t believe they got away with?  I have.)

It’s an action comic with absolutely none of the action shown, but the constant motion of McCarthy’s free sequencing, the telegraphic power of the images he uses, and the amplified rhetoric of his words leave little in doubt.  A story like “Pop!” simply couldn’t exist in a grid: the images are so diffuse, the connections to be drawn between them such large leaps of logic that visually separating them would destroy the comprehensibility of the whole.  Only by presenting the images as parts of a single, indivisible canvas can McCarthy create the dialogue he does between them.

It’s the closest comics have come to emulating the pop song in word and image: the psychedelic color-field background unifies everything on the page with its brilliant pastels, giving it a shared tone and the sense of music’s continuous motion through time.  The song’s three “verses” flesh out the narrative in broad, colorful arcs, and the slickly designed “Pop!” logo works just like a catchy hook, a repeating motif between verses to tie it all together, as well as a final, indelible note to fade out on.  It’s almost like animation, this kinetic, flowing motion of one image into another; but instead of creating actual moving pictures to be experienced by a passive audience, McCarthy draws the mind in, providing a definite sequence of image and word to be moved through without stopping, lining up the breaks between drawings and balloons with the mental connections the reader has to make for it all to line up.  This is hardly the usual way of making “pictures that move” with comics — but that unusual approach, the wholesale discarding of comics-native tropes for something that simply works better to achieve McCarthy’s purpose, is exactly why “Pop!” is such a raging success.

(A final note: don’t you love that thin little strip of color running down the right side of the page, utterly harmonic but obviously disconnected from the main image?  That’s actually a bit of the next page that got pushed out when I laid the book flat on my scanner.  It looked so lovely that I left it on rather than crop it, because I think it makes the page a lot stronger as a whole.  The sequencing McCarthy plans for is incredible, but the total accidents that lie far outside of authorial intent can make artwork magic.)

Wolverine by Dan Panosian

Brigid did a round-up yesterday of various holiday gift-giving suggestions, so I thought I’d follow suit with some that I’ve seen lately.

• The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is auctioning off original art by Paul Pope, Eric Powell, Gabriel Hardman, Tom Fowler, Dan Paosian and many more, as well as lunch with Chew writer John Layman in New York next week.

• I remember shoveling a whole bunch of quarters into the X-Men arcade game back in the day; my friend Mike and I beat the game as Nightcrawler and Wolverine. If you have an Xbox fan in your life, they too can fight the Blob, Magneto and more in side-scrolling action, as the game will be available on Xbox Live Arcade Dec. 15. The PlayStation Network, unfortunately, won’t get it until February, so you’ll have to find something else this holiday season for the PS3 fan in your life. Joy to the world! The game will hit the PlayStation Network Dec. 14!

• Khepri Comics is selling Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon’s Atelier, a comic they created to sell at conventions.

• Comics creator Ben Towle has a 20 percent off sale going in his web store, where you can purchase original art from books like Midnight Sun, signed copies of Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean and superhero commissions.

• IDW continues their “12 Days of Comics” sale over on their website. Today’s special deal is Star Trek comics.

• Brendan McCarthy points out that Albert Moy is selling a whole bunch of McCarthy’s original art.

• Brian Fies is offering a signed bookplate to anyone buying Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? as a gift this season.

• Two cartoonists whose books I recently read and really, really enjoyed — Eleanor Davis & Drew Weing — have a web shop with all sorts of cool stuff for sale. Let me recommend Set to Sea by Weing and The Secret Science Alliance by Davis. (Via Flog)

• And finally, more free Christmas cards … this time by artist Jeffrey Brown, featuring cats!

If you’re a fan of Brendan McCarthy or the short-lived DC series Solo, do I have the post for you … The Strangeness of Brendan McCarthy has posted two sketchbook ideas “generated when Brendan was working out material for his issue of DC Comics’ SOLO,” both featuring redesigns of the Flash.

And if that’s not enough, they’ve also posted info and images on a new Judge Dredd story that will appear in 2000AD Prog 1712, which goes on sale this week in the U.K. “In a new story called Dr. WHAT? Judge Dredd tracks down a time-travelling Doctor who rides a Mega-City Portaloo along the timewaves, altering history and changing the future in a potentially catastrophic way,” the blog says.

Hellblazer: India

Hello and welcome once again to What Are You Reading?, where the Robot 6 crew talk about the comics and graphic novels that they’ve been enjoying lately. Today our special guest is Bill Reed, who contributes to our sister blog Comics Should Be Good!. To see what Bill and the Robot 6 crew have been reading, click the link below.

*****

Tim O’Shea

Batgirl #15

If you’re not up for reading recent event books in the Bat family, Bryan Q. Miller and Dustin Nguyen provide a hilarious cartoon-esque three-page summation from Wayne’s parents death through all the Robins to Wayne’s return from the “dead” in Batgirl #15.

Matt Fraction’s approach to Iron Man and Thor is much on the mind of fans and critics these days, but for my time and interest, what really captures my attention in Thor #617 is the art. I’ve been enjoying artist Pasqual Ferry’s since his days in the late 1990s on Marvel’s Heroes for Hire. The Thor series, colored by Matt Hollingsworth and lettered by legendary Thor letterer John Workman, is just making for some stellar scenes.

It’s easy to bash DC editorial for some of the oddball decisions they make every month, but whomever the hell made the call to greenlight the quirky Paul Cornell-written Knight and Squire should be knighted themselves. It’s a book in which Cornell creates a universe where Marvel’s John the Skrull would feel right at home. And as a reader, it’s the most bemused I’ve been by a mainstream narrative in a while.

Sean T. Collins

Batman goes to Palomar! Okay, not quite, but this week I continued my LOVE AND ROCKTOBER project of reading my way through Los Bros Hernandez’s Love and Rockets in its entirety, while also reading a whole lotta Bat-books in one sitting. Click the links for full reviews…

Birdland: As seen here on Robot 6, this is Gilbert Hernandez’s porn comic, a joyous and optimistic (and filthy!) flipside to his often bleak Palomar work.

Amor y Cohetes and Fear of Comics: Two short story collections, the first from Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario, the second from Gilbert solo–wide-ranging, gutsy work among the best ever done in this form.

And just for fun, now that the current mega-arc has reached the end, I read the last 15 or so Grant Morrison Batman comics, alternating between Batman and Robin, Batman, and The Return of Bruce Wayne. (Click the link to see the order I put ‘em in.) Dense, thrilling, creepy, stuffed with beautifully choreographed action sequences, and imbuing Batman with an engrossing sense of mystery. it’s pretty much exactly why I read superhero comics.

Chris Mautner

Koko Be Good

I like the way Jen Wang draws faces. I like the way she draws round, ovally eyes that have just a dot of a pupil in them, and shades the area around them so the look like they’re going to sink back into the skull at any moment. I like how fluent she is with eyebrows, how she understands it’s one of the most expressive parts of a person’s face and uses it to help the reader gain insight into her characters. I like how they look like rolling hills when someone’s feeling inquisitive or sly. I like how everyone’s heads look like little eggs.

All that being said, I can’t say I cared much for her debut graphic novel, Koko Be Good. The book is about a carefree young woman (girl? I had trouble figuring out her exact age) who pals up with a shy, inhibited guy who’s heading for Peru with his girlfriend and they both affect each other in deep, meaningful ways. Despite the length of the book, the characters are rather ill-defined (especially a third young man who is unfortunately shunted to the sidelines for most of the book) and I found myself constantly asking unanswered questions about these characters’ behavior and pasts. Where is Koko’s family? Why does she behave like such a loon? Why does Jon put up with Koko’s nonsense and verbal abuse? Wang is reaching for grandiose themes about adulthood and responsibility here but they elude her grasp considerably. She seems to have trouble articulating her larger points and I felt like I was getting an incomplete picture of the characters and their lives. Still, great eyebrows.

Brigid Alverson

I’m greatly enjoying IDW’s Library of American Comics series, partly because I’m a pushover for classic newspaper comics and partly because they are so well done. To be honest, I never heard of Secret Agent Corrigan X-9 before I saw their collected edition, but the brief introductory essay got me oriented and I was ready to jump in. X-9 was the creation of Dashiel Hammett (The Maltese Falcon) and Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon), but this volume starts in 1967, when the team of Al Williamson and Archie Goodwin had just taken over the strip. It’s sophisticated in that 60s way, with slinky women and chiseled men, and everyone is smoking cigarettes the whole time. The stories are delightfully preposterous, too, in the way secret-agent stories used to be. The art is stylish and rather dark, as befits the subject matter. Putting a daily comic strip into book format does point up one flaw that is inherent to the medium—there’s a lot of repetition, and characters say each others’ names way too often. Still, there’s plenty of action and a lot of twists, and this strip makes good reading in its own right as well as as a period piece.

I asked my teen-librarian friends for some recommendations recently, and they were unanimous on the subject of Hopeless Savages. Happily, Oni Press has just released a collected edition of the first three comics, and more are apparently on the way. It’s the story of a cheerfully dysfunctional family of punk rockers—mom, dad, and four kids, living the punk life in the suburbs. The art is dynamic and the characters are a bit stereotyped but easy to like; I’m only halfway through the first story arc, but I already know I’m here to stay.

Bill Reed

The problem with getting all my comics through mail-order is that I’m usually weeks (and streets) behind the rest of the blogosphere, but coming to these books in critical isolation allows me to view a work fresh, unswayed by outside opinions. Unfortunately, that means I won’t get my clammy paws on Atomic Robo for another few weeks! I have only just digested the following comics:

Spider-Man: Fever

The Spider-Man: Fever trade paperback, written and drawn by Brendan McCarthy, really should include Dr. Strange in its title, as well. A psychedelic tribute to the stories and mind-bending environments of Lee and Ditko, Fever involves Spider-Man’s soul being stolen by an extra-dimensional tribe of spider-beings, one of whom is the very spidey who bit Peter Parker that fateful day. By coincidence, Spider-Man’s body has crawled into Dr. Strange’s bathtub, and Strange has to journey down the drain to save his friend. McCarthy seems to make comics like Burroughs wrote novels, or Bowie wrote songs, cutting up and stitching together chunks of Ditko comics, old age mythology, and new age mysticism to create an effervescent, day-glo fever dream of a comic. No one makes comics like Brendan McCarthy; he is the only artist who can match Ditko’s surreal visualizations. That’s why McCarthy comics are always worth reading.

McCarthy’s longtime pal Peter Milligan weaves a similar path of magic and identity with the Hellblazer: India collection. As a neophyte to John Constantine, I’ve only read Milligan’s run on the title, which portrays Constantine as a bastard who is shocked to discover he has a heart, going to nigh-Orphean lengths to rescue his deceased girlfriend from death’s clutches. Ghosts rule the day, be they Englishmen transformed into demons, stealing Indian girls from the streets of Mumbai, or the specter of punk rock, come back to seek revenge on the conservative party. Giuseppe Camuncoli and Stefano Landini’s clean and angular art works well for the titular arc, but Simon Bisley draws his issues as I always imagined Hellblazer comics to look: swathed in blood and grime, so enveloped in inky darkness that the reader finds him- or herself squinting to make out the details. Milligan comics are often a coin toss, but when they hit, they really hit. Hellblazer is a solid baseline smack– not quite the stand-up triple of Human Target, but it may get there in time.

I also follow a few webcomics religiously. Written by a six year old, Axe Cop (by Malachi and Ethan Nicolle) continually reunites me with my own inner child, the kid completely awed by these bizarre comics books. Awesome Hospital (Chris Sims, Chad Bowers, Matt Digges) combines the genre absurdity of Adult Swim series Children’s Hospital with over-the-top madness and excitement that only comics can provide. Lastly, everything by Kate Beaton is worth reading, mixing the art of sketch comedy with a critic’s eye toward history and literature.

The Thing

Publishing | Marvel reportedly has issued a round of Digital Millennium Copyright Act notices to Google in an effort targeting Blogger sites that serve as clearinghouses for links to pirated comics. (Blogger was purchased by Google in 2003.) One such blog, Comics Invasion, already has been shut down. [Bleeding Cool]

Passings | Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Paul Conrad passed away Saturday of natural causes. He was 86.  The winner of three Pulitzers, an achievement matched by just two other cartoonists in the post-World War II era, Conrad worked for the Los Angeles Times for nearly 30 years, and earned a place on President Nixon’s infamous “enemies list.” [Los Angeles Times, Comic Riffs]

DC Comics

Publishing | David Brothers considers the state of DC Comics: “DC is clearly trying to turn a corner and move away from their past in one way or another, and Diane Nelson seems to be encouraging that, judging by how DiDio describes her ‘Why not?’ philosophy. We’re still in the middle of the transition to a New DC, and while there are several new developments, we aren’t quite at the point where we can point what their new direction will be.” [Comics Alliance]

Publishing | David Wolkin crafts a timeline of Joe Quesada’s decade as editor-in-chief of Marvel. [Comics Alliance]

Crime | A suspected burglar, 28-year-old Robert Summers, was shot and killed early Wednesday in a confrontation with the owner of a Lancaster, California, store that’s been identified as Bases, Cards and Games. [Los Angeles Daily News, Bleeding Cool]

Crime | Adjeel J. Bartley, 21, was charged over the weekend with burglary, criminal mischief and giving false information to police after he allegedly broke in to The Comic Book Store in Glassboro, New Jersey. [Gloucester County Times]

Crime | Marc Rowland, 36, was convicted last week of burglary and resisting law enforcement in the attempted break-in at Castle Comics and Cards in Lafayette, Indiana, in June 2009. Rowland was wearing a black ninja outfit, and tossed away a vest containing carbon dioxide cylinders, throwing stars and a walkie-talkie as he attempted to escape police. [WLFI.com]

Dragon*Con

Conventions | Ann Hoevel and Barbara Vey report on Dragon*Con, which was held over the weekend in Atlanta. [CNN.com, Publishers Weekly]

Retailing | Profiles of Rock Bottom Comics in Columbia, Missouri, A&M Comics in Miami, and Astro-Zombies in Albuquerque, New Mexico. [MOVE Magazine, Miami New Times, Daily Lobo]

Creators | Legendary cartoonist Mort Walker, 86, talks about the 60th anniversary of his comic strip Beetle Bailey: “I don’t know how I’d be retired. I wake up every day with another idea.” [The Associated Press]

Spider-Man: Fever

Creators | Mark Kardwell interviews Brendan McCarthy about his Spider-Man: Fever miniseries — the collected edition hits shelves this week — which could just lead to another Marvel project: “… Another story has started to take shape, probably just starring Dr. Strange and Clea … I’m interested in different forms of magic and enchantment, not just that dark Aleister Crowley angle … Hollywood, for example, is certainly a place of magic: Enchantment by the manipulation of projected light. The name ‘Hollywood’ has a deeper esoteric meaning too. The wood of the Holly tree was used by Druids to make wands. I think Dr. Strange should get involved with The Light-masters of Hollywood. There’s some great online articles by Jay Weidner on the esoteric symbols concealed in corporate Hollywood movies.” [Bad Librarianship]

Creators | Johanna Draper Carlson talks to Colleen Doran about the business of freelancing and self-publishing. [Comics Worth Reading]

Creators | Posy Simmonds discusses the film adaptation of her comic Tamara Drewe. [The Scotsman]

Creators | Julianne Mattera spotlights John Ostrander, who held a writing workshop in Durand, Michigan. [The Argus-Press]

Creators | Writer Stuart C. Paul chats about his new Wildstorm series Ides of Blood. [Fangoria]

FUBAR

And it needs a home. Any takers?

from Spider-Man: Fever #1 by Brendan McCarthy

Warning: People who use the phrase “playing the race card” need not apply to the following post. I guess that rules out, y’know, our entire political class, but oh well. Anyway, a trio of recent pieces have taken on the issue of race in contemporary superhero comics and movies.

Perhaps the most high-profile of the three pieces is Chris Sims’s essay on “the racial politics of regressive storytelling” for Comics Alliance. Sims argues that DC Comics’ current penchant for restoring the Silver Age versions of Green Lantern, the Flash, the Atom, the Legion of Super-Heroes and so on has the unintentional but regrettable effect of pushing their successors — in many cases, non-white characters created to replace their slain or off-stage white predecessors — to the sidelines. While he’s quite clear that he doesn’t believe Geoff Johns or any of the other writers or editors involved are motivated by racial animus, he laments the way in which several decades’ worth of minority characters are now becoming “footnotes” in the race to create comics that evoke the creators’ and readers’ memories of their childhood favorites. I’m sympathetic to the obvious truth in Sims’s argument — replacing Ryan Choi with Ray Palmer, for example, does indeed “whiten” the Atom concept once again. But as I wrote in an essay on my own blog, I think the blame lies not with Johns and his Rebirths and Brightest Day and so on, but with the creators who, instead of creating strong non-white characters out of whole cloth like Luke Cage or Storm or Black Panther, simply put new guys in the old guys’ outfits, thus all but inviting readers to think of them as substitutes and pine for their original favorites.

Next, Brandon Soderberg of Are You a Serious Comic Book Reader tackles a scene from the first issue of writer-artist Brendan McCarthy’s trippy Spider-Man: Fever in which an African-American character acts and speaks in a fashion that’d make the vest-wearing street toughs of Bronze Age comics blush. Not only does Soderberg call out the cringe-inducing urban patois in which the character speaks, but the strangely outdated outfit McCarthy’s given him: “the guy’s dressed like say, a De La Soul or Souls of Mischief fan from the early 90s, not a thug at all,” says Soderberg, who also writes the hip-hop blog No Trivia. I found the scene extremely off-putting myself, though I do find Soderberg’s commenter Julian’s explanation — that McCarthy deliberately inserted a retrograde portrayal of a minority character in order to emphasize the project’s throwback nature — at least a little plausible.

Finally, David Brothers of 4th Letter caught a few fans protesting the proverbial too much over the casting of The Wire‘s Idris Elba as one of the Asgardian gods in Kenneth Branagh’s upcoming Thor movie. Brothers is actually sympathetic to the complaints, to an extent, calling the casting “race-changing for no good reason”; but he points out that given the historical inaccuracies already jam-packed into Marvel’s take on the Norse myths, a black Norse god is hardly a dealbreaker.

Of course, it hasn’t been that long since Mark Millar’s Kick-Ass came in for criticism over its troubling-to-some treatment of non-white, non-male characters, so this is clearly a topic that’s on readers’ minds. As far as I’m concerned, the more thoughtful exploration of the treatment of race we can get in an industry with comics’ frequently shameful racial legacy, the better.

Even though we live in a golden age of reprints, there are still deserving comics that, for one reason or another, fail to get collected, translated, or reprinted in nice, shiny, new books. This monthly column is dedicated to those books that, we feel, need another round in the spotlight.

The welcome return of artist Brendan McCarthy to the world of comical books with Spider-Man: Fever got me thinking about how most of the comics he’s done (mostly with Collect This Now’s patron saint Peter Milligan) are sadly out of print. That’s a shame, as his bibliography contains a lot of great work that deserves re-examination, including Rogan Gosh, Paradax and the topic of today’s column, Skin.

One of the more interesting things about Skin actually is that it had a bit of trouble getting published initially. Originally Skin was supposed to be published in 1990 in Crisis, a spin-off of the classic British anthology series 2000 AD. The printers refused to handle it, and the publisher got cold feet, and it didn’t end up seeing the light of day until 1992, when Kevin Eastman’s Tundra press released it with little fanfare.

What made so many of these fine folks reluctant to print the comic? Well, for one thing, it could have been the subject matter. You see, Skin is about a Thalidomide baby. More specifically, it’s about a Thalidomide kid who’s a skinhead, has sex with hippies and eventually ends up getting revenge on the people who made the drug by going after them with an ax. (oops, spoilers!)

I know what you’re thinking, but Skin takes place in a time before neo-Nazis basically took over the whole skinhead ethos, when they were more a group of young toughs who liked to shave their head rather than a bunch of racists. Their attitude — and the attitude of the book in general — is more punk rock than David Duke.

From 'Skin'

Now thalidomide, in case you don’t know, was a drug that was given as a sedative and all-around wonder drug until they realized it caused severe birth defects. It never was used much in the United States, thanks to the efforts of FDA inspector Frances Oldham Kelsey, but more than 10,000 children in Europe and elsewhere were born with deformities or other problems.

Martin Atchinson, the main character of Skin, is one such victim. Nicknamed Martin Atchet by his mates, Martin is possesses two useless arms, which he is very obviously self-conscious and upset about, but he tries not to let it prevent him from having a good time, which usually involves getting drunk and busting someone’s head open.

And, in case you haven’t guessed it by now, Skin isn’t some Hallmark tearjerker of the month where the victim is so noble that he inspires us all to better our lives. Martin’s a bit of a jerk, honestly, He gets into fights, is angry at everyone and everything around him and insults and attempts to molest the one girl who shows him some sympathy (she’s cross-eyed so she sort feels his pain you see).

From 'Skin'

This is an extremely short (only 48 pages) story and McCarthy and Milligan (along with Carol Swain, who provides the fantastic coloring job) don’t mess about too much with plot and character development. Just by the time you’re settling in and getting accustomed to Martin and his world, you’re at the denouement and the book’s over. As a result, Skin has feels more like a modern-day EC story than the sort of pre-Vertigo material that was popular at the time.

This is also an extremely angry work, and its brutality still carries something of a concussive force after all these years. Milligan’s prose, though it hurries along a bit too much, remains sharp and to the point and captures Martin and his milieu rather well.

The real reason to read Skin, however, is to drink in McCarthy’s visuals. Eschewing panel borders entirely, he lets the images flow into the other, with Swain’s psychedelic, at times gritty, color scheme giving the book an almost fable-like atmosphere. It’s a real tour-de-force performance and reminds me just how underrated and under appreciated McCarthy is by comics fans.

Looking at most modern mainstream comics today, where arms get pulled off with alarming frequency, little girls get crushed in collapsed buildings and Wolverine gets eaten alive by an inbred Hulk before clawing his way out of the brute’s body — all in luscious detail and full color — it seems odd that something like Skin would ever generate such trepidation among publishers. It was a simpler time I suppose, when it was thought that comics should just stick to happy thing and not concern itself with “serious” matters.

We know better now. Or at least we should. One way to show that we do would be to get this book out in the public once more.

My thanks to Joe McCulloch for loaning me his copy of the book.

Doctor America

When I first saw the solicitation for Marvel’s upcoming Captain America: Who Won’t Wield the Shield? one-shot, I thought it was just another Deadpool parody comic. But while Deadpool does make an appearance — or the Golden Age version, anyway — he’s not the only character making fun of Captain America. The book will feature a new Forbush Man story written by Jason Aaron, a Doctor Strange/Captain America mash-up by Matt Fraction and the previously mentioned Golden Age Deadpool tale by Stuart Moore. Marvel.com talked to all three writers about their stories.

“Dr. Stephen Rogers, transformed by the Super-Satan formula into the pentagram-bespangled sentinel of the arcane, Doctor America,” Fraction said. “On behalf of the Undergovernment he goes mano eeeee mano with Richard Milhous Manson, aka the sinister Red Dick, and his genocidal assistant Bebe Rebeyonder to save the soul of the swinging, sinister, ’60s.”

Fraction’s tale, appropriately, will be drawn by Brendan McCarthy, as you can see to the right. OK, now I wish I’d pre-ordered this …

Spider-Man: Fever #1

One of the biggest problems with comics these days is that Brendan McCarthy simply isn’t making enough of them.

The UK artist, known mainly for his inspired and frequently surreal collaborations with writer Peter Milligan during the 1980s and 90s, (most notably Skin and Rogan Gosh) hasn’t produced any sequential art since his mind-bending issue of Solo (fittingly the last issue in that late, lamented series) six years ago, a comic which in itself marked a lengthy hiatus. In between those periods, McCarthy has opted instead to mostly work on various television and movie projects like Reboot, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies and most recently a potential fourth Mad Max sequel.

Thankfully Marvel is about to change all that. The company that Disney bought has enlisted McCarthy to write and draw Spider-Man: Fever, a three-issue limited series starring the wall-crawler and Dr. Strange that will arrive in stores this April (or at least the first issue will).

I talked to McCarthy over email about the new series and the challenges it offered.

Q: Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think your last published comic was that final issue of Solo back in 2004. What have you been doing in the interim since then and what made you decide to return to comics after such a lengthy hiatus? More specifically, how did this particular project, FEVER, come about?

From Spider-Man: Fever #1

Steve Wacker asked me if I was interested in doing something for Marvel, after he had seen the DC Comics’ SOLO material. I always thought I could do a decent take on Dr. Strange. He’s my favorite Marvel character. One of my best-loved comic stories is the 1965 Silver Age Spider-Man and Dr. Strange annual story by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. FEVER was inspired by that strip.

Q: Obviously it’s not just coincidence that the two stars of Spider-Man: FEVER happen to be the two Marvel characters co-created by Steve Ditko. I know Ditko was a big influence on your work. Did you see this project as a chance to pay tribute to him? And if so, how did you go about doing so without it being too obvious or slavish a homage?

You’re exactly right. Steve Ditko is a singular genius and I wanted to ‘pay homage’ but not be slavish… I’m obviously not in his artistic league, he really is a master, but I was happy to invent a story that utilized the amazing dimensional realities that he created all those years ago. Having done Shade and now Spider-Man and Dr. Strange — all that I’d like to do next is The Creeper! (I have to admit, Hawk and Dove never really did it for me.)

I absolutely adore those pre-superhero short stories that Ditko did with Stan Lee. One day, I’m going to persuade Marvel to create a collection of the best of them and get them to print those classic stories on good quality paper with good inks. Those modern reprints in those garish colors are unbearable to me! Maybe best to scan off the original comic pages.

Q: Apart from Ditko, what were some of the other specific influences on Fever? I detect a bit of Lovecraftican horror in the mix for example.

No, not Lovecraft. I just can’t get through his incredibly dense prose. The spooky story element is purely my own invention.

Other influences on this FEVER strip are Heinz Edelmann, the designer of the beautiful ‘Yellow Submarine’ film and some rather obscure Australian Aboriginal artists. There are some pages in the second issue where I was using aboriginal ‘dot’ designs with the lettering, to create swirling, psychedelic effects.

The UK designer Steve Cook contributed some very nice sfx and color throughout the strip as well. His own Alternity photographic work is very well done.

The occult artist Austin Osman Spare was looked at while I drew this, but more for the ‘magickal atmosphere’ of his thought.

From Spider-Man: Fever

Q: Apart from Ditko, what was it about Dr. Strange and Spider-Man that appealed to you? What is it about these two particular characters, that, say, Captain America or the Fantastic Four don’t have?

My original pitch was for me to write and draw a Dr. Strange story, but Steve Wacker, as editor of the Spider-man line, said that if Spidey was in it, we would have a better chance of selling it to Marvel — and it would help sales.

I’d quite like to do a good FF story sometime, as the Lee/Kirby run is still stunningly great. I did have a pitch called “The Fabulous Four” which was Stan Lee’s original name for the group, an alternative ‘take’ on their origins. But let’s see how this FEVER series goes down with the readers.

I think Mark Millar’s version of Captain America, in the recent “Civil War” series, was right on the money. I have nothing to add to that character.

Q: I’m probably wrong about this, but apart from your Solo issue and Judge Dredd, you usually haven’t worked on licensed or big pop culture characters (at least in comics at any rate). Were there any specific challenges in working with as familiar and beloved a character as Spider-Man that you didn’t necessarily experience before? If so, how did you handle it?

I’ve always been interested in my own characters more than other people’s. But for Dr. Strange I make an exception!

Otherwise, I feel I could do a really good “All Star” Flash for DC. I’d make it very 60s Infantino, using all that gallery of villains. Next to Batman, I’d say The Flash has got the best bunch of bad guys lined up against him.

The Creeper interested me too, for obvious Ditkovian reasons! Steve Niles had a decent stab at it but I don’t think DC have nailed him properly yet.

I’d like to do a good Swamp Thing graphic novel too, as I really love the original — and very bizarre — Wein/Wrightson comic series.

Q: One of the things that struck me about the issues I read is the blend of humor and horror that runs through the series. One the one hand you’ve got these genuinely frightening spider monsters saying some very funny things. Is that blend of the serious and the silly important to you in your comics work? Do you worry at all about having one undercut the other?

No. Tonally, I like the comedic dialogue playing against the horror elements. Tarantino used opposing streams of comedy and extreme violence in Pulp Fiction to good effect. So it can work well if executed properly. There’s definitely a ‘Monty Python’ type of surreal humor running through this story. But there’s also some deeply emotional moments for the characters to live through as well. I like these things playing off each other.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about your working process on this comic at all? I notice for example, that you use a lot of vertical, as opposed to more traditional horizontal, panels in your layouts. What was the thinking behind that?

I am trying to get away from comics ‘aping’ movie storytelling. Comics are not films, so panels don’t have to be shaped like movie screens. Comics do not move or have sound. They are really, a completely different medium. I know people want to get Hollywood to buy their stories, but I think it’s now getting boring to merely copy movie storytelling tropes. Comics are comics, a totally different form! Time for comics to cut loose again.

Q: Am I correct in assuming that the sorcerer Crawley is a stand-in for Aleister Crowley?

Yes, you are correct. I have chosen to use Aleister in his tabloid-baiting “Wickedest Man in the World” persona. But unlike writers like Grant Morrison and Alan Moore, etc, I don’t have that much regard for him. It all seems a bit silly when you’re no longer a teenager. Crowley was a brilliant occultist and opportunist, but as a human being, he was a dismal failure. He was also quite mistaken in his final understanding of the nature of reality. He was never able to dis-identify with his ego and ‘cross the Abyss’. I tend to prefer the other major British magician, Tommy Cooper.

Q: In some ways Fever has a much more straightforward or linear storyline than, say, your work in Solo or Rogan Gosh, despite the spiders and supernatural elements. Do you see this as being separate or different from your past comics projects because of that?

This is a Marvel Comic, so I think I should try something different, but keep it within mainstream sensibilities. I’d like it to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. And if it’s a hit, well, I have a kind of sequel planned…

Q: A lot of times online I come across descriptions of your work as being “trippy” or “weird for weird’s sake” which seems to me a bit shallow and dismissive. Does that sort of surface reading of your art bother you at all?

Not at all. My main pre-occupation in writing and drawing FEVER was to keep myself interested all through the process, as I get easily bored… So I make sure I’m surprising myself, moving in different directions with the art and writing. I like lots of ideas to be in a comic — the ideas are what interest me the most really.
Hopefully the readers will be entertained by the book. Sometimes I make myself laugh when I’m creating the story. That’s a good sign. It means that at least I had a good time!

Q: What’s up with Swimini Purpose, your limited-edition art book? Any chance of a second printing coming out anytime soon? While I’m asking, any chance a new edition of Skin, Paradax! or Rogan Gosh will appear as well?

I’d like to do a completely new edition of SWIMINI PURPOSE at some point in the future. If a decent offer comes up, I’d certainly consider it. But it’s probably best if I produce it myself as I get tired of people wasting my time.

As to all my other comics work, mainly created with Pete Milligan, well, I’m sure that one fine day a good quality ‘collected ‘ edition will be available. We’ll probably have to die first though. Currently, none of my past work is in print.

Q: What’s happening with the new Mad Max movie, Fury Road? Are you still involved?

Over 8 years ago, I co-wrote and did core designs on Mad Max: Fury Road. That was quite a while ago, so I’m not sure how much of my script or design is still there. But I’m pleased to say that it’s back in production. The director, George Miller is a very talented and savvy fellow and I look forward to seeing it. I just hope it’s a good movie.

from Brendan McCarthy's Spider-Man: Fever

Comics Alliance scored themselves an exclusive preview of writer-artist Brendan McCarthy’s upcoming Spider-Man/Doctor Strange miniseries/voyage into prime Ditko psychedelia, Spider-Man: Fever. I hear that if you press play on The Dark Side of the Moon when you open the cover, it syncs up perfectly.

You can breathe, breathe in the air from Doc’s Sanctum Sanctorum when the book hits this April.

(Via Douglas Wolk)

Spider-Man: Fever

I’ve been waiting for this one for awhile … Marvel.com released an early look at the Spider-Man solicits for April, and I’m ecstatic to see that Brendan McCarthy’s Spider-Man mini-series is kicking off then. Here’s the solicitation text:

SPIDER-MAN: FEVER #1 (of 3)
Written by BRENDAN MCCARTHY
Pencils & Cover by BRENDAN MCCARTHY
One of comics’ most innovative and original voices, Brendan McCarthy, brings SPIDER-MAN: FEVER — a truly unique and surreal story evoking the classic Silver-Age psychedelia of Steve Ditko’s Dr Strange. In FEVER, Spider-Man is abducted by a depraved tribe of spider-demons to a bizarre dimension, where he is to be eaten alive. Dr. Strange goes on a perilous occult quest to rescue his friend — and tangles with some very peculiar characters along the way…
32 PGS./Parental Advisory …$3.99

Fever promo

Mark Kardwell shares with us an “idea sketch for a ‘Coming Soon” type of advert” for Fever, the upcoming Dr. Strange/Spider-Man miniseries written and drawn by Brendan McCarthy. This Marvel Knights series is due in April, McCarthy told Kaldwell.

Delinquent Jimmy Olsen

Brendan McCarthy shares a “what might have been” moment — a comic he pitched to DC called Delinquent Jimmy Olsen. Click the link and go read about it; it sounds insanely cool.

“My Spider-Man/Dr Strange story is now at the half way point. It’s a three issue mini-series that will appear under the Marvel Knights banner, probably in the early summer. It’s been great fun drawing and writing the series, and Marvel seem to love what I’m creating so far. I’m coloring the book with Steve Cook, who designed the SWIMINI PURPOSE book for me a few years ago.

If Fantagraphics can’t have Dr. Strange, as Eric Reynolds suggested in August, this is equally as awesome.

McCarthy says he can’t show any art from the book yet, but he does share this piece, proclaiming he’s from the lineage of Ditko:

by Brendan McCarthy