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The Anatomy of Expression: Will Eisner and 'A Contract With God'

Timothy Callahan — 2013-04-03T12:00:00+00:00

In 1978, the legendary Will Eisner released A Contract With God upon the world, a masterpiece that launched the graphic novel craze that would eventually compel your local Barnes & Noble to push aside mid-list Sidney Sheldon and Chuck Palahniuk novels to dedicate upwards of twelve feet of shelving to books like The Walking Dead Volume One, The Walking Dead Volume Two, Persepolis, and Superman: Earth One.

That's the simple and untrue history of the graphic novel, and of A Contract With God in particular. Decades hence, we know more about how what we call the graphic novel came to be, what A Contract With God had to do with it, and how this seminal work was not always viewed with such esteem.

The real story is that Will Eisner, likely known at the time, if at all, as the creator of The Spirit -- a strip that had barely been seen since the '50s -- wrote and drew this long comic book called A Contract With God, and Other Tenement Stories and the big book publishers in 1978 weren't at all interested in such a thing. A small publisher (of mostly children's books) named Baronet gave it a shot, but the few stores that stocked it didn't know what to do with it.

In a 1998 interview with R. C. Harvey, Eisner recalled his excitement when Brentano's in New York City -- an upscale book store -- decided to order a few copies, and he told Harvey the story about his "graphic novel" debut, and the story goes like this: Eisner held off from visiting Brentano's for about a week, but couldn't resist seeing his book on the shelves. When he approached the store manager, Eisner introduced himself as the author of A Contract with God and asked. "Where is it?"

He learned that the store had it out front, where it sold very well. But then a James Mitchner book came out so Eisner's book was shelved with the religious books because it had "God" in the title, but it didn't belong there, so it ended up in the humor section, but then a reader complained that it wasn't funny, so it was taken off those shelves.

"Where do you have it now?" asked Eisner.

"In a cardboard box in the cellar," said the manager. "I don't know where to put the damn thing."

Revisionist history may credit Eisner as a pioneer in the graphic novel field, and Eisner's shadow still looms so large over the entire medium of comic books that it seems impossible that his work in 1978 wouldn't have been a gauntlet thrown down to the industry. But it wasn't Eisner's A Contract With God that broke through the bookstore barrier. It was just a weird, largely ignored picture book when it was released; one that might have been appreciated by a certain portion of the readership, like the comic book aficionados who had been catching up with black-and-white Spirit reprints and were curious to see what Eisner was up to at the age of 61.

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If A Contract With God was hailed as a masterpiece, and it was, that recognition came years later, when a few astute critics juxtaposed Eisner's humane graphic-novel-that-was-really-a-collection-of-stories with the grotesque and ridiculous comics that were available on spinner racks. Compared to Arak: Son of Thunder or Dazzler, a book like A Contract With God must have seemed like a slice of sublime genius. It was about life and death and pain and suffering and love and sex and hope and despair. There were no Viking Native American barbarians or glittery roller skates to be found. A Contract With God had to be a work of high literary and artistic merit, because the other stuff that kind of looked like it certainly wasn't.

I don't know that A Contract with God is hailed as a masterpiece anymore. A landmark, maybe. Masterpiece? Not so much.

The conventional wisdom in comic book circles and maybe the fringes of the literary and/or art world is that Eisner's real pioneering work was on The Spirit in the years right after he returned from World War II. That's where Eisner made strides in comic book storytelling that have influenced nearly every generation of creators since. His work on the graphic novels later in his life is impressive not because of their content, but because they exist at all. He was ahead of his time with his intentions toward A Contract With God and his decision to devote the last few decades of his life to writing and drawing comics that might interest adults showed his keen awareness of the direction the medium would take. And while he might not have broken into the book market the same way later books like Maus and Watchmen would, he was certainly a shepherd of this new soon-to-be-stampede. And he remained a wonderful ambassador for the possibilities of comics.

It's with all of that context that I reread A Contract With God recently, via the W. W. Norton edition published in 2005, which pulls it together with Eisner's follow-up books, A Life Force and Dropsie Avenue under the title The Contract With God Trilogy.

A Contract With God reads differently now than it did when Norton first released their version in 2006, only a year after Eisner passed away. The year after Eisner's death was filled with tributes to the old master. It was difficult to read anything in and around comics that wasn't a variation of "Here's What Will Eisner Meant to Me." There was some backlash, as there always is when someone receives too many accolades, but 99% of the world seemed to agree: Will Eisner was the best.

In that light, A Contract With God didn't stand much of a chance of a fair reappraisal. When held up as one of the first graphic novels ever by a guy known to be the grandmaster of comics, A Contract With God is a bit of an embarrassment. It's full of hand-wringing and outrageous exaggeration. It's a clumsy and overly-expressive pantomime of life, with bombastic narration and too-serious self-indulgence. The New Yorker labeled Eisner's work "cornball histrionics."

I would have agreed with that assessment in 2006. Now, I'm not so confident in dismissing A Contract With God. The "cornball" and the "histrionics" are visible if you come at Eisner's work from the perspective of someone looking for realism or subtle emotional truth. But Eisner isn't playing on that battleground. His approach to comics is one of pure expression first, realism not at all.

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A Contract With God is operatic and grand and it doesn't ever pretend to be anything else. Other than viciously personal. And it succeeds on all those counts.

Eisner writes, in Comics & Sequential Art -- his seminal how-to book -- that drawing is akin to calligraphy in its symbolic gesture and imagistic sweep: "...this is the art of graphic story-telling. The codification becomes, in the hands of the artist, an alphabet with which to make an encompassing statement that weaves an entire tapestry of emotional interaction." To Eisner, drawing is not a kind of handwriting, but a kind of manufactured iconography-through-image-making, like hieroglyphics. Concepts expressed visually, in primal form.

That iconic, symbolic mode is the mode Eisner uses throughout A Contract With God, whether it's in the opening story in which Frimme Hersh curses the heavens for the death of his daughter or the final story in which a summer vacation in the Catskills results in extreme sexual misconduct. Eisner doesn't express sadness in his comics, he expresses SADNESS!!! with capital letters as tall as the sky and plenty of exclamation points for everyone in the world to hear. He doesn't express lust, he expresses LUST!!! and, well, you get the idea, because Eisner won't stop yelling it in your face. But it's a powerful antidote to the kind of affectless melancholy that permeates the more critically-acclaimed dare-I-say-literary comics of artists like Chris Ware or Dan Clowes.

Eisner is more like a proto-Peter-Bagge, all flailing arms and unrestrained passion, and his work has never pretended to be otherwise, no matter how it's been packaged.

But that energy alone wouldn't make A Contract With God worth reading if it didn't also have something at its heart. And it does: this is Eisner channeling his world into expressive form. It's not about him, but the stories come from his life, and they are exceedingly personal, and not at all what you might expect. The first story, the one that gives Eisner's first book its title, is not just about a man devastated by the loss of his daughter -- though that's how it begins. It's about a man who rages against the fates by trying to control the physical world around him. He falls prey to his own selfish aims, and so the victim becomes the villain of his own story and dies the minute he realizes a moment of hope to make things right again. It's a devilish story that goes far beyond its initial scene.

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And that's the story Eisner admits is based on his own anger and pain after the death of his daughter several years before. Yet he doesn't make the father sympathetic at all. He pushes us to despise him, even in a story based on his own sorrows as a father.

The following two stories, "The Street Singer" and "The Super," find their inspiration in Eisner's childhood, and the characters who populated the city around him. Both stories are cruel and sinister and full of ironic tragedy. Though "The Street Singer" is a picture of alcoholism and domestic violence, "The Super" is the more deviant of the two, with explicit overtones of pedophilia. These are the horrors of childhood, made into Eisner's expressive, iconic hieroglyphics.

A Contract With God ends with "Cookalein," which is part pastoral romance and part retreat-into-the-wilds-where-animal-instincts-reign. The pastoral romance side is far from wistful, as the cast of characters on vacation have violent trysts with each other and rape is embroiled with sexual awakening. The complexity of the story comes from the layers of emotion, but it's like an orchestra of screams of pain and longing. Like an Archie comic book plot directed by a vengeful Elia Kazan.

A Contract with God is still no masterpiece, but it's not something that should be ignored, either. It's a primal statement of emotion from a creator who had mastered the grammar and acoustics of comics and used it to blast a set of loud, nasty, confrontational songs at your face. Will Eisner may never be subtle, but he's often unforgettable, and that's as true here as it is anywhere.

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Mania and Dream Logic: Looking Back at Steve Ditko's Cackling 'Creeper'

Timothy Callahan — 2013-02-21T12:00:00+00:00

Filed under: DC, Reviews, Opinion

The Creeper isn't the greatest Steve Ditko creation, and it's not even the most Ditko-esque. (Maybe those are the same things.) But one thing the Creeper comics have going for them is that they follow their own unsettling dream logic, and Ditko commits to the mania that powers the title character. This is a costumed vigilante who dresses in yellow body paint, wears a green wig, and sports a freaky red shag carpet over his shoulders, to complement his fur-lined boots. Raging reporter Jack Ryder first dons the outlandish outfit to sneak into a costume party where he suspects criminal activity, and he keeps it because of a knife wound and super-science. It bonds with him thanks to a desperate injection and a conveniently-timed hyperspace implant, and the Creeper is born.

That's the absurd origin of the Creeper, and it's one that was revised and rewritten in the decades after Steve Ditko stopped working on the character. It doesn't make any kind of sense. Jack Ryder infiltrates a costume party with the most blatantly noticeable costume in the history of costumes? And the guy he's there to sort-of rescue happens to have a super-serum inside a ready-to-go syringe that gives Jack Ryder super-healing and super-strength? And not only that, but the genius implants a displacement field inside Ryder's gaping wound because arms dealers and warlords could use it to make stealth armies? What now?

Yet, that's what we get in the opening story, and we go with it, because in Ditko's odd universe what matters is the strangeness, not the believability. It's spectacle, but not of the sort with cosmic crashes and dynamic gestures. Instead, it's the sordid, unsettling kind, the equivalent of a gang of clowns piling out of a Volkswagen and pulling the mask off the ringleader to reveal that he's a criminal mastermind who once pretended to be your best friend. That kind of vibe. You may have had nightmares like that after eating too many slices of bacon and goat cheese and anchovy pizza.It was Dan Clowes that convinced me that Steve Ditko's superhero comics were worth reading. I'm sure Clowes has spoken or written about his appreciation of Ditko, but that's not what I'm talking about. And it might be difficult to believe that Ditko, the creator of many of my favorite childhood comic book characters like Spider-Man and Doctor Strange and the Question and the Blue Beetle, would be someone I often overlooked as an artist. But I did. I avoided Ditko's work for years, finding his doll-like poses and long shots and big-toothed, rubbery-faced characters antithetical to what I enjoyed about superhero comics. His comics looked, to me, like a kind of puppet theater. His characters were marionettes bouncing around on a colorful but ultimately uninteresting stage.

It probably didn't help that I grew up on ROM Spaceknight and Speedball Steve Ditko, lesser artistic works by any standard (except the perils of nostalgia), and knew his more famous characters via interpretations by other writers and artists, so his versions of his own creations looked quaint and archaic. But it wasn't just that. I had learned to love Jack Kirby by then, even though I didn't grow up with his seminal work. And I liked Gene Colan and Don Heck and other Silver Age artists just fine. But I never quite understood the appeal of Ditko.

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It wasn't until the mid-1990s when my brain shifted into the right mode. I had been reading a lot of Dan Clowes by then -- his Eightball remains one of my favorite comics of all time -- and I thought about a reality in which someone like Clowes would get a chance to (or even want to) draw a sustained run on a superhero comic. That's when I realized that it had already happened. Many times. Steve Ditko was the weird outsider who drew atypical superhero comics with what could, in retrospect, be called a proto-alt-comics aesthetic. I had been misreading his comics for years.

I'm sure Ditko would hate such labels. "Proto-alt-comics aesthetic" probably sounds like a whole bunch of nonsense. But that was my way into his world. That was the perspective that allowed me to appreciate Ditko for what he was, not what he wasn't. Since then we've had a substantial Steve Ditko renaissance, with the more literary-minded comic book critics reminding everyone that Ditko is still out there, drawing comics in his mid-eighties, producing his own idiosyncratic small press work for mail order customers. And major publishers have brought many of his comics back into print, via sometimes glossy and always decently-expensive hardcover editions. Biographer and editor Blake Bell, specifically, has teamed up with Fantagraphics to remind all of us that Steve Ditko matters, thanks to their line of Ditko-focused art books and reprints of long-forgotten masterpieces.

That's all a long lead-in to a simple fact: I read 2010's DC Comics release The Creeper by Steve Ditko and I liked it.

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Ditko isn't the credited scripter on all of the stories collected in this volume, and the tone shifts around a bit depending on who fills in the word balloons, but the underlying stories are of the odd and unusual Ditko variety. When Denny O'Neil (under his own name or under the pseudonym Sergius O'Shaghnessy) writes the dialogue, the Creeper stories become a bit more crime-and-revenge oriented. When Michael Fleisher writes the script for the Creeper's appearance in First Issue Special #7, a third-rate Batman villain becomes the subject of mockery and the whole story takes on an air of ironic confidence. When Ditko writes the Creeper backups in World's Finest Comics, the strip becomes a freakshow gallery, like a bounding Dick Tracy lineup. His run ends with "Furious Fran and the Dagger Lady," and what's interesting about the Dagger Lady is that she has dozens of daggers strapped to her body, including two attached to her head, and she throws them. Hard. It's silly and wonderful and Ditko seems interested only in amusing the audience and nothing more.

But he does it his way. There's nothing commercial about any of the comics in this collection. The Creeper is an unattractive, almost accidentally heroic protagonist. He does punch out plenty of criminals, but only because he's there and punching is what needs to be done. He's no altruistic knight in yellow body paint. Nor is he a justice-bound avenger. He's just a reporter who doesn't do much reporting and gets caught up in weird activities mostly because everyone in the world seems to want to cause trouble in and around the television station. So he presses his magic button and turns into the Creeper, cackling weirdo of...whatever is in front of him.

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Perhaps Steve Ditko's Creeper stories show his rejection of traditional superhero tropes, and his celebration of the odd creatures who lurk at the fringes of society. That may be it. But they don't seem to even have that much on their mind. Instead, the Creeper stories are about off-beat, jaunty enthusiasm for action over inaction. They are about colorful characters doing colorful things, via the mind of Steve Ditko circa 1968. In that proto-alt-comics kind of way.

The Creeper by Steve Ditko is on sale now in finer comics shops and bookstores.

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The Inhuman Magnetism of Ted McKeever's 'Eddy Current'

Timothy Callahan — 2013-02-14T14:30:00+00:00

Filed under: Image, Reviews, Indie, Opinion

A comic like Eddy Current feels like it should start with a bang, and it almost does. The explosion comes soon enough, with a lightning strike and loose power cables jammed into an exposed outlet and a Dynamic Fusion Suit that goes "zam!" Eddy Current, the comic, and Eddy Current, the title character, begin the adventure supercharged, and everything goes haywire from there.

Originally published in 1987 by Mad Dog Graphics and most recently collected into small, thick hardcover as part of Image Comics' "Ted McKeever Library" series, Eddy Current wasn't Ted McKeever's first work but it was definitely his first major work. And at twelve issues, it remains his longest work ever as a writer/artist. If it reads like a work of comic book improvisation, it should: McKeever mentions in the Afterword that he wasn't limited by any outside industry forces or even any self-imposed constraints in the overall storytelling: "The only three actual limitations were the amount of pages per issue, that the story be in black and white, and that I had to meet the monthly deadline. Everything else was wide open for whatever the hell my head would allow."

"I let this crazy bastard, Eddy, run wild all over my imagination as I documented his adventure," McKeever says. It's as simple, or complex, as that.

The marketing for the 2008 Eddy Current collection describes the protagonist as "A Don Quixote for the 21st century," but that's not quite right. Like Quixote, Eddy aspires to become a great hero. And like Quixote, he heads out into the world to do what he thinks is right. But while Quixote's delusions lead him into a parody of a noble quest, Eddy Current can see the world how it really is. He may seem crazy -- crazy enough to be institutionalized with Nurse '"Rat-sh*t" as his keeper, in an allusion to that most famous of madhouse melodramas -- but when he breaks loose and ventures into the city, Eddy's the one who knows right from wrong and good from evil. He's the voice of reason in a pit of vile corruption.

McKeever may have been making it all up as he went along, or channeling the Eddy Current running through his brain, but he did have a template to follow, or perhaps a formula to reject, in the form of the traditional superhero narrative. As much as Eddy Current is sort of a modern day Don Quixote, it's definitely a superhero origin story, even if it mocks its own forebears.

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In the book, the institutionalized Eddy Current dreams of the arrival of his Dynamic Fusion suit which will give him powers like his hero, the Amazing Broccoli. If that sounds like the premise -- and terminology -- of a young reader's comic drawn in the style of The Powerpuff Girls or Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, then you haven't seen Ted McKeever's work. McKeever is no cutesy artist. His comics kick the concept of charming in the teeth. And spit on such an idea. McKeever's work -- and Eddy Current is an early but strongly representative example -- is a harsh and ugly and angular and dark. At first he looks to be influenced by Keith Giffen by way of José Muñoz. But while Giffen dabbled with the expressively black Muñoz style in the 1980s, McKeever committed to it and expanded it in his own direction. Eddy Current is an angry-looking, often abstract comic. About a guy with an electrified power suit inspired by a comic book about the Amazing Broccoli.

McKeever's depiction of Eddy's Dynamic Fusion Suit is emblematic of the approach the writer/artist takes to the superhero genre: it's definitely not a heroic-looking costume, and it may not even really work. It's iconic, in its own way. And symbolic of the inner strength Eddy often summons to continue on his adventure, but it's not a transistor-powered Iron Man suit or streamlined spandex outerwear. It's an asymmetrical bunch of straps and wires, partially covering one leg and some of his arms, with a power source hooked onto the front of a pair of exposed undershorts. The bands that cross in the middle of Eddy's chest like a pathetic X give the Dynamic Fusion Suit the look of a sad masochist or a pervert on the loose. It doesn't help that he also wears a trench coat and pair of meticulously-drawn Converse All-Stars. Eddy Current is no comic book superhero, except that he is, by default, because he's the hero of this comic book.

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Eddy's wild exploits -- detailed with chronological precision, with each issue equaling one hour of his escape from the asylum before the power returns and he will once again return to his padded cell -- set him into the streets of the city known not-so-ominously as Chad, where he runs across vicious murderers, a hulking and devoted nun companion, and a plot to manipulate the populace via the already-relatively-obsolete mass-medium of radio. Eddy and the nun named Nun fight with furious abandon and sacrifice themselves for the good of an uncaring populace.

It's a superhero story that doesn't want to admit it's a superhero story because superhero stories are silly. But in the hands of Ted McKeever they aren't. They are grotesque and exciting and vicious and darkly comic and inspiring. Not everything is clear in Eddy Current, and sometimes it's a challenge to figure out what exactly is happening during some of the more chaotic sequences, but it's the story of a madman pretending to be a superhero and succeeding, so a bit of swirling chaos is part of the fun.

In the real world, "eddy current" refers to a kind of magnetic force. It's one that is sometimes used to stop railroad cars or, more appropriately, roller coasters. That's the feeling that this comic gives at the end. The ride is over, and it's a complete one, but you can't help but be a little queasy as you step away, even as your heart pounds with the lingering thrill of the experience.

The Ted McKeever Library: Eddy Current is on sale now in finer comics shops and bookstores, and available digitally from ComiXology.

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Jack Kirby's 'Spirit World': We Are on the Outside

Timothy Callahan — 2013-01-31T17:00:00+00:00

Filed under: DC, Reviews, Opinion

The 2012 hardcover collection of Spirit World isn't just a compilation of lesser Jack Kirby ephemera. These are comics that few readers have ever seen, not because they weren't popular, but because they weren't given a chance to become popular. Not that the series stood a chance to gain a huge following upon its release in 1971, as unusual and weird-looking as it was (and still is!), but these paranormal tales, drawn mostly written or rewritten by Kirby and completely drawn by Kirby, are like art projects launched thirty-something years into the future.

What I'm saying is that the Spirit World hardcover is like a brand new 2012 comic that just happened to be written and drawn in the early 1970s and if you like your strangeness strange and your art artistic and your sense of equilibrium equi-liquified, then you should totally read this book. Unless you're scared. Are you scared? Just a little?

First, some background: Spirit World itself -- a glossy horror magazine directed toward a more adult audience -- was barely even released. As former Kirby assistant and longtime Kirby scholar Mark Evanier writes in the 2012 collection, "Even if you were buying comics back then, you might not have seen Spirit World #1. Neither Steve [Sherman] nor I could find a copy at any newsstand. Then again, we did live in the tiny, insignificant town of Los Angeles, California."

Spirit World was part of Jack Kirby's ahead-of-its-time proposal to DC which called for them to reach out to new, contemporary audiences with better paper, magazine-style, and with books filled with content that wasn't just rehashed 1960s cornball schlock. Kirby knew the world was changing, that readers wouldn't fall for the same silly romance tropes and stunted sci-fi spectacle. According to Evanier, Kirby proposed themes that "mattered to college-age kids of the day: The Vietnam War. The environment. Politics."

To provide context, DC comics from 1971 featured visuals like Jerry Lewis hiding atop a totem pole from some colorful Indians, Aquaman shrinking down into magic ring, Lois Lane turning into a snow sculpture, and someone named David cheating on his girlfriend on the cover of Secret Hearts.

The superhero "realism" and "relevance" of the Bronze Age was creeping into other DC titles, as Neal Adams drew an extra-sinewy Man-Bat, and writer Denny O'Neil said "no more" to Kryptonite in Superman, and the Teen Titans faced ironic pummeling at a so-called peace rally.

Amidst that DC Comics backdrop, Kirby proposed something that might actually have been reasonably adult and sophisticated. But Spirit World ended up not being what he had envisioned. DC cut costs, ditched the idea of a full-color glossy magazine, and left it up to Kirby to create his own stories to fill the pages. And rather than connect it to their other publishing projects, they released it under the made-up name of "Hampshire Distributors," and cancelled the series before they heard sales reports for issue #1. Not that it would have mattered. Undistributed bundles could be found in warehouses. No one knew what to do with Spirit World, even after they saw it.

Because Spirit World, as released in 1971, is kind of a mess. It's not a comic that tackles social concerns of the day. It's not particularly adult in its sensibility. And it features three Jack-Kirby-meets-the-1970s-meets-Vault-of-Horror suspense stories followed by an inelegant prose tale and a Sergio Aragonés gag page ripped from a different source.

In every way, it's nothing like Jack Kirby reportedly proposed it to be, but it can't help but reveal his true interests. It's a Kirby work, through-and-through (except for the prose short and the Aragonés page), and while it's clear the DC Comics abandoned the project without proper support, the first issue of Spirit World, as reprinted in the 2012 hardcover, springs from the heart and mind of Jack Kirby. It's his interests that shine through on its pages. His passion for art and history and psychology and the unknowable that lies behind it all.

Spirit World may have been a mess, but it's a fascinating one that offers some genuine chills because of Kirby's confidence in his own material.

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The three Kirby written-and-drawn Spirit World stories from the first issue -- reprinted as the first half of the hardcover collection, printed in dark blueish-gray -- are set up more like episodes of a television series than a comic. Hosted by Doctor E. Leopold Maas, parapsychologist, each installment tells of a strange, haunting occurrence: the housewife who could foresee the assassination of John F. Kennedy even if no one would believe her; the house haunted by the towering ghost of an escaped slave once chased by a "Confederate commando unit"; and the past life regressions of "The Screaming Woman." Though more overtly sexualized and violent than most of Kirby's work up until that time, these stories were tamer than many of the EC Comics of fifteen years earlier and more tepid than the Warren magazines that likely prompted DC's even fleeting interest in Kirby's magazine proposal from the beginning.

But Kirby's storytelling power makes his supernatural tales more convincing than most. And his use of the fictional Dr. Maas provides a pseudo-scientific grounding for the stories that makes them more effective than the cackling EC Cryptkeeper or his colleagues.

This isn't mysticism and fantasy, Kirby's Spirit World implies. It's parapsychology. Which is almost close enough to maybe be considered a science, as long as Kirby says it is.

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And while those three Dr. Maas-introduced tales fill the majority of pages of Spirit World #1, Kirby also follows his muse toward an increased use of the collage technique he had sometimes incorporated into his superhero comics. Here, it's skulls and eyeballs and masks and ominous skies, a far more interesting medley than the poorly-reproduced geometric collages of the Negative Zone in The Fantastic Four. And there's even a full-on fumetti sequence with young men and women photographed in homemade Flash Gordon-esque costumes that reads like a cosmic questing of the sort that would fit right into the middle issues of Alan Moore and J. H. Williams III's 21st century Promethea.

In page after page of Spirit World, Kirby's ambition surpasses his execution, and in the collected edition, we get to experience it for probably the first time. Plus, we get to read additional Kirby stories intended for Spirit World, including his explosive declaration of the power of Nostradamus's prophecies, the horoscope monsters of yesterday and today, the proto-New Godsian "Toxl, The World Killer," a deadly-sincere exploration of spontaneous combustion, and the case of Karl Burkel, whose brain may have contained "a chamber locked to all other men!?"

(Double or triple punctuation are not uncommon in this book, and that's okay!!!)

It doesn't seem that Kirby spent long mourning what could have been after the brief life-and-death of Spirit World, since the rest of the 1970s proved to be another amazingly fertile decade for his unrestrained creativity. But few of his comics before or since are as odd as Spirit World, the magazine that never quite was, and the stories that seemed to not quite belong to any particular era. "Are We on the Outside of the Spirit World" the first issue's cover asks us, without even a question mark. Yes, we are, and we always will be. But we can all see inside its covers now, and appreciate it from a distance.

Jack Kirby's Spirit World hardcover is available at finer comic book shops and bookstores.

Some images taken from The Jack Kirby Museum.

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Mike Baron and Steve Rude's 'Nexus': Exploding Preconceptions Since 1981 [Review]

Timothy Callahan — 2013-01-08T10:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Dark Horse, Reviews, Opinion

"I begins and ends with Andrew Loomis," Steve Rude wrote in a 1989 collection of his sketches published by Kitchen Sink Press. "Loomis takes the best qualities, whatever sexual, sensual qualities that men respond to in women and refines that to a laser's focus." Rude learned to draw by copying Loomis. And by copying Jack Kirby. And Alex Toth. And Paul Gulacy. And he didn't stop there. Rude's sketchbooks are filled with layout studies and color experiments and tonal variations, but mostly they are filled with figures, drawn from looking at the work of illustration and comic book masters in his early years, and increasingly filled with life drawings as time progressed.

But you don't have to track down Steve Rude's sketchbooks to see that development -- or the influence of the great artists of the past -- because it's embedded within every page of Nexus, the 32-year-old comic book series that has received a bit of a resurrection in the past year, with some appearances in Dark Horse Presents and a new cycle of reprinting as part of the compact-but-thick Dark Horse Omnibus line. It's hard to imagine a more powerful dose of thrillingly weird sci-fi superhero tragicomedy pathos than you'll find in those first few years of Nexus comics. Steve Rude may provide the visual juice, which is more than ample, but writer Mike Baron provides the angered broken heart that powers the narrative about Horatio Hellpop, the galactic prince cursed to dream of murderers and despots until he's compelled to execute them else lose the power -- and sanity-- needed to protect the people under his care.

If we focus just on the first 14 issues of Nexus -- which spans the first three black-and-white magazine-sized issues and the first eleven issues of the ongoing series initially published by Capital Comics and then taken over by First Comics with issue #7, conveniently packaged together in the Omnibus edition - we find the core of the series immediately established with a keen focus, but we can also see the range and variety of the storytelling. Nexus is a book about a cosmic space executioner, but if you had never heard of Nexus before, and you pictured what a "cosmic space executioner" series would look like, and what stories you might find on its pages, you would never imagine anything like what Mike Baron and Steve Rude deliver. They not only take the concept in unexpected directions, almost immediately, but they do so in a way that enriches the central ideas of the story.

Nexus is not "The Punisher in space." Not even close.

So what is Nexus? It's plenty.

It's the story of Horatio Hellpop, lonely son of a mass-murderer, living in a kind of self-imposed exile on the planet Ylum (pronounced "eye-lum"). Hellpop is the "Nexus" of the title, a costumed executioner who kills because he must. His nightmares torment him, and identify his next target (and his targets are mass-murderers themselves). His only relief is found in killing the killers, exploring the strange archeology beneath the surface of Ylum, which he eventually opens as a haven for interstellar refugees, and spending time with his beloved Sundra Peale.

It's the story of Judah Maccabbee, the self-styled "Hammer of God," a musclebound Dr. Seussian sword-wielding Thune who patterned himself after the great Nexus, and soon becomes the title character's most trusted ally.

It's the story of Dave, Judah's thought-lost father, and his dignified attempts to do what's right for his friends and neighbors. Dave the Thune acts as the wise moral compass for much of the series.

It's the story of Sundra Peale, Horatio's lover, a young woman who quickly falls into what seems to be a subordinate role but has more hidden depths that we first realize. And it's the tory of Ursula XX Imada, nefarious spy and seductress. And it's the story of Tyrone the refugee-turned-politico. And it's the story of Clonezone "the Hilariator" who is not at all hilarious, no matter (or because of) how hard he tries. And it's the story of Ylum itself, and the mystical energy forces at play beneath the world, and the social forces at play on its surface.

But most of all, it's the story of Mike Baron and Steve Rude exploring a beautiful and strange reality of their own making, seemingly unconcerned with living up to any preconceived notions about what a series about a cosmic space executioner should be like. They consistently defy expectations in their first 14 issues, even when the expectations we might have are the ones established by earlier issues. It's exciting to see that happen.

Admittedly, the first three issues of the black-and-white Capital magazine series are raw. Steve Rude has ambition and talent, visible on the page, but his characters have a posed stiffness and his backgrounds are ill-defined, particularly in the first issue. After a few issues, beginning-Rude begins to more closely resemble proto-Rude, and by the time the Capital Comics issues transition into First Comics issues, Steve "The Dude" Rude emerges as a pure force of comic book artistry -- a journey the reader witnesses in the span of this single Dark Horse omnibus. Rude's dynamic layouts and whimsical backdrops and sleek figures and beautiful contrasts make Nexus look amazing for years to come.

So there's that artistic progress to marvel at, and appreciate, as a definitive statement of "this is what comics can look like." But even if that rapid acceleration of artistic progress is notable, even thrilling, that's somewhat predictable. Young artists get better as they produce more work, even if few artists in the history of comics have ever been as impressive as quickly as Steve Rude. So where are the surprises then? The defied expectations?

A better set of questions would be: "where aren't the surprises?" "When are expectations not defied?" Because from the beginning, Nexus does not give us the Syd-Field-or-Robert-McKee structure that harkens back to Aristotle's Poetics and provides a neatly prescribed, clearly outlined story arc. It does that in pieces, and Mike Baron establishes long-term subplots (some of which, as in the case of Ursula XX Imada, will literally grow over the course of several years and gain a life all their own), but what remains refreshing about Nexus, above and beyond how terrifyingly beautiful it looks once Rude finds his line, is that the mystery and exploration of its own universe becomes the immersive experience that drives the reader from issue to issue. It's not a matter of "how will this conflict be resolved in a traditional, comforting way?" as much as it's a matter of "what new conflict is in this weird wormhole over here and what will we find when we get there and then how will we get out of it?" Nexus tends toward that latter question far more than the former. It's exploratory. It's curious.

And that makes it come alive.

Characters lose their heads, and regain them. Space station nightclub hecklers turn riotous. A gravity well leads to a dimensional rift controlled by a one-eyed flying manta ray. A slugfest gives way to a rhyme battle. And amidst it all is Nexus himself, the executioner, trying to make sense out of the universe and find a sliver of peace.

Steve Rude began his career by learning from artists of the past, but in collaboration with Mike Baron he created something unique for its time, never since duplicated. It's wonderful to see the original series returning in the Omnibus format, available for a new generation of readers to learn from, even if Nexus always was, and always will be, one of a kind.

Nexus Omnibus volume 1 is on sale now in the Dark Horse/Things From Another World store as well as finer comics shops and bookstores, and is also available digitally from Dark Horse Digital. Volume 2 goes on sale in March.

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SEX: 'Sex' Writer Joe Casey on New Superhero 'Sex' Comic [Interview (about 'Sex')]

Timothy Callahan — 2013-01-07T12:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Image, Interviews, News

When teasers popped up this past summer with the line "Image Comics Wants You to Buy Sex," it wasn't all that shocking to discover that Joe Casey was behind it all. His new comic book series, he announced in San Diego, would cut through all the will-they-won't-they games and get right to the point with its one-word title: Sex.

It's not that Casey is known primarily for his sexually-charged comics, but he's known to show a restlessness with comics the way they are and the way they have been. The veteran writer has one of the most eclectic back-catalogs of anyone working in the industry today, whether it's his pacifistic Superman stories for DC or his chaotic creation of the devious Zodiac within the midst of a too-serious Marvel event or the self-reflexive madness of Automatic Kafka from days gone by or his Kirby-cosmic homage in the soon-to-conclude GØDLAND. Joe Casey loves comics, and he never lets us forget it.

His upcoming Sex ongoing series -- due from Image in March -- may not quite be what readers expect, though. I had a chance to read the first issue's script and check out the unlettered artwork by Piotr Kowalski, and I was surprised by its less-than-bombastic tone. Casey's new comic may scream Sex on the cover, and there may, in fact, be some sex inside, but it's not a book that wallows in hyper-kinetic debauchery. It's an exploration of...

Well, let's see what Casey has to say about it. He and I talked about Sex, and, as usual, he wasn't afraid to speak his mind. ComicsAlliance: Your last creator-owned project from Image was 2011-2012's Butcher Baker the Righteous Maker, and that was a comic frothing with sex, or at least virility, and now you're ready to unleash a comic actually called Sex into the marketplace? Isn't that title a bit too on-the-nose?

Joe Casey: I dunno... I'm guessing it's about as on-the-nose as titling a comic book Batman or Iron Man, if you're talking about titles that reflect what's actually in the series. Then again, there's also those comic book titles like Love and Rockets or Hate or Optic Nerve that are more akin to the title of a novel or a TV show. Y'know, the show's called Breaking Bad, not Walter White. But I suppose readers can ultimately decide which kind of series the title evokes when they read it. Hell, maybe it's both.

CA: So what kind of series is it? It has superheroes and it has sex, but what's the real angle you mean to explore with this comic, and what made you interested in the topic in the first place?

JC: Well, once again, I think the readers -- all five or six of them that have the balls to actually buy this series -- will judge for themselves just how much "superheroes" and how much "sex" the series actually contains. For some, it'll be more than they were expecting... and for others, it might be less than they were expecting. Those two concepts are definitely tied together, though. In superhero comic books up to this point -- especially in so-called "mainstream" comic books -- sex has generally been a subtextual element (that is, when it's not used as some kind of punchline). I guess there's an aspect to this series where we're trying to make it an explicitly textual element that we're pushing much more to the forefront. And, in that respect, it has a lot to do with character and conflict. I'm sure someone hearing about this series without having read it will be girding their loins for some over-the-top, gratuitous sexual content. Now, I'm not saying there won't be some of that... but I wouldn't classify this series as full-on erotica, either. That can get to be a bit boring after a while.

Obviously, you're asking me what it is and I'm telling you what it's not... but, at this point, that may be the best that I can do when I'm talking about it on this kind of macro-conceptual level. We'll see if it gets better as the interview progresses... but something long form like this, it's a process of discovery-through-doing as much as it is executing some grand plan you might start out with.

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CA: Is there something about the superhero genre, whatever that means to you, that has a fetishistic quality that implies a sexual subtext? Is it just the tight costumes and the exaggeratedly idealized bodies? Is it the naive morality juxtaposed with the physicality?

JC: I think it's all of that and more. I doubt any of this is news to anyone. But there's another facet to the discussion... in America, we're still coming to grips with our own sexual repression. Just like it's always been. Superhero comic books in particular don't deal with that repression very well. Not consciously, anyway. If anything, they tend to feed into it by sliding across the surface of sexuality -- or, more specifically, sexualized concepts -- without ever really exploring it. Not that they should, not that they're required to, but they certainly spend enough time trafficking in sexual imagery, almost always in a very clumsy, ham-fisted way.

CA: We watched as that stuff was deconstructed way back in comics like Marshal Law and Watchmen, but I'm wondering if the superhero fetishism/sexuality is different now than it was then. What do you think? And we're comics like that on your mind as you started writing Sex?

JC: I have a riff on this... if you really go back and look at those comics and others of their ilk, obviously you'll see them exploring more sexual content and taking those obvious fetishistic connections and making them more prominent. But, to me, it's all really obvious stuff. My personal take is that it was more likely an application of the taboo-breaking nature of underground comix finally leaking into the mainstream a decade after the fact and applying it to superheroes. It ended up not being so much of a deconstruction, at least in terms of sexual content. It was more of a shortcut -- one of many, no doubt -- to making sure the world at large knew that "comics aren't for kids anymore"... making Catwoman a former prostitute and all those other funky ideas. Almost three decades later now, I'd like to think we're all a little more well-adjusted. But, y'know, we're probably not. Maybe I'm just personally feeling a little more well-adjusted at the moment, which could make this an ideal time to explore this sort of thing in my work.

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CA: Alan Moore once said something about sex in comics used, almost always, for "comedy or horror," but if I think about sex in superhero or other genre comics, I'm also reminded of what Howard Chaykin has done over the years, and he seems to treat sex as a power struggle, primarily. From what I've seen in the first issue of Sex, you may possibly be exploring comedy, horror, and power in the long term, but it seems more like you're using it as a symbol of what has been repressed. As a secret life, or sublimated desires, of someone in the public eye. How does that interpretation line up with what you have planned?

JC: Well, the lead character in Sex, Simon Cooke, isn't quite the "billionaire playboy" that someone like Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark is... although he does have some bucks. As a superhero, he was way more driven in a way that, say, Batman never was. Even Bruce Wayne seems to get laid on a regular basis. But Simon's time spent in his civilian identity was a complete ruse, just counting down the hours until he could get back into costume and deal out some righteous vigilante justice. It was an escape from "real life." He was completely single-minded... there was no room for anything else in his life besides his ongoing war on crime. Well, now that he's retired, he's being forced to confront all those things he pushed off to the side in the twelve years he was a superhero (which, as we're depicting it, was an almost monk-like existence), most notably a social life. To live a normal, healthy adult life is probably the greatest challenge he's ever faced. How does he even begin to do that? Well, trust me, he makes a lot of mistakes along the way... some of them will play as comedy and some of them will play as tragedy. And, yeah, there's a lot of repression there to deal with, in all sorts of areas... things he's had locked down for the entirety of his adult life up until now.

CA: The first issue has some brief flashbacks, but as the series goes on, how much will you be delving back into Simon's former life? Is Sex as much about the past as it is the present? Will we see the sacrifices he once made, or does his life as a superhero just work as backstory for what's happening now?

JC: The flashbacks will occur every once in awhile, but I don't think we'll rely too heavily on them. It's definitely a book about the present... about living in the moment. Some folks might assume that the flashbacks are a way for us to have our cake and eat it, too... a storytelling crutch that allows us to actually show Simon as a superhero. But we're being very careful not to show him in full costume when we do flashback. I guess it's a similar challenge to the whole "Superman won't throw a punch for a year" experiment I did on my last blast of Adventures of Superman. We all know there's a visceral jolt that occurs when you see a superhero on the page, on camera in full flower. A kick to the balls of every power fantasy you've ever had It's a trope that's obviously worked since Action Comics #1. But it's also too easy and that's not what this series is. It's not meant to push all the usual buttons. There are other buttons to push...

CA: What struck me most about the first issue was the look of the whole thing. I had never heard of Piotr Kowalski and since I hadn't seen any preview images before I read the opening issue, I expected, with a title like Sex, something much more bombastic. Something closer to the look of Butcher Baker or Automatic Kafka or Haunt. But Kowalski's work is a much more realistic vein. He looks like the kind of guy who would draw European crime books, or do a guest stint on some Shadow comics or something. It's certainly not what I expected, and not what I tend to think of when I picture "Joe Casey comics" in my mind. You haven't tended to work with artists like this -- not since, what, Devil's Due G.I. Joe? -- and I'm just wondering how Kowalski's style affects the way you write the comic.

JC: Yeah... I see what you mean about artistic style. But for every Nathan Fox or Tom Scioli I've worked with over the years, there's also Charlie Adlard and Sean Phillips and others that I've also done some pretty good s*** with. So that more "realistic" -- what a weird f***in' word for it -- style of artwork is something I'm pretty comfortable writing for. But Piotr specifically had that European sensibility (naturally, since he lives there) that I thought was a good match for this material. To present these characters and this subject matter in a very straightforward manner was definitely the way to go. It's not meant to be bombastic in any of the typical ways. Emotionally bombastic, maybe...

CA: The first issue is definitely not emotionally bombastic either. It's pretty understated for a comic that screams Sex right on the cover. What's the structure of this series -- and it is an ongoing, right? Are you thinking in terms of smaller arcs or a giant overarching structure of escalation or what? And how large is the cast of characters going to be?

JC: It's an ongoing, monthly series. But I'm not really thinking in arcs at all. Sex takes more of a novelistic approach, kind of like what I was doing way back on Wildcats. Anyone who read and dug that series will feel right at home here. The size of the cast... that's tough to say. I guess you could say it's big. It's sizable. It's an entire city we're dealing with, and even though Simon is the focal point of the series at the beginning, we'll be telling stories about a lot of different characters. In a very real way, it's an opportunity to let my Love and Rockets influence come out a bit, in terms of how to tell a story that deals with a community of people. But, y'know, ensemble casts are my thing. You don't have to look too closely at my body of work so far to see that. Of course, one aspect of the series that I haven't really talked about before is that the superhero of the book might've retired... but his rogues gallery is another story entirely. So anyone who's read my work can look forward to a whole new cast of freaky villains to get close to. And I actually think there's quite a bit of emotion conveyed in the first issue... it's just not all on the surface. Again, that feeling of repression can be pretty seething.

CA: And sexual repression underlines the whole series, or is that the hook to get everything started and see where it leads?

JC: It's a lot more than a hook... it's something that exists underneath the surface of just about everything in this series. Think about it... how much of our behavior can be traced back to some sort of repression, whether it's giving in to it or (hopefully) transcending it? If anything, it's an exploration of human nature, but seen through the filter of a few classic, post-superhero tropes. Simon's doing a lot more than simply trying to get his f*** on... he's trying to find out who he is, what he's about. Just like we all are. I hope readers check it out, because I think this is a ride that we can all take together. Not to mention the all-new back-matter I'm packing into this thing, each and every issue. Talk about a lack of sexual repression...!

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