Interview: Roger Langridge

Roger Langridge has been working in comics for over 20 years, producing some of the most consistently funny material in a zany, over-the-top style.  Aside from his own creations which have been published by the likes of Fantagraphics, Deadline and Dark Horse, he has written and drawn the definitive comics take on The Muppet Show for Boom! as well as some alternative takes on established superheroes for Marvel, DC and 2000 A.D.  Last year’s Thor: The Mighty Avenger for Marvel was one of the most critically-acclaimed mainstream comics of recent years.  Next week sees the launch of his latest project for Boom!, a Lewis Carroll-inspired comedy called Snarked.  I spoke to Roger over email about this latest project and his comedy influences.

-- Gavin Lees

All art by Roger Langridge unless otherwise noted

Can you tell us a little bit about the concept behind Snarked?

It’s basically a long-form story, a quest, though broken up into issue-length chunks that can stand on their own to some extent. The basic idea is that the Red King, ruler of the unnamed little kingdom where our story starts, has gone missing on a sea voyage — his eight-year-old daughter, Scarlett, becomes the new Red Queen and resolves to find her dad, whom she is convinced is alive and well and out there somewhere. She’s aided and abetted in this by the unscrupulous Walrus and Carpenter, who, through a series of improbable circumstances, she appoints as her Royal Protectors. And so they set off for Snark Island to rescue the King — encountering lots of misadventures along the way.

What attracted you to re-interpret Carroll’s work?

I’m a lifelong fan of Carroll; I’ve read the Alice books many, many times, and I always get something fresh out of them each time I do. So there was that. There was also a sense that, in order to sell a brand-new concept to an audience after I’d just come off working on The Muppet Show Comic Book and Thor the Mighty Avenger, I’d need to come up with something with at least a whiff of familiarity, a smidgen of traction in the wider culture, rather than something entirely created from whole cloth. I’d been dabbling with a couple of Carroll-related ideas anyway (a web strip featuring the Walrus and the Carpenter, who I thought would make a fun, vaudeville-style double act; and a direct adaptation of The Hunting of the Snark, which I backed away from once I became aware that Mahendra Singh had just done one), and thought it might be productive to try and mash the two ideas together and see what happened, And here we are!

Your style of cartooning is quite exaggerated, and over-the-top — which was a perfect synergy in The Muppet Show — do you feel, though, that what the Carroll characters gain in visual style from you (opposed to Tenniel’s matter-of-fact style), there is something lost in the subtlety of his humour?

Yes, probably. I’m sure the kind of humour I’m going for isn’t at all the same kind that Carroll was going for. But I’m not interested in being the second Lewis Carroll or John Tenniel, I want to be the first Roger Langridge, so I think that’s a perfectly valid approach — Carroll has been subjected to so many reinterpretations by such a wide variety of artists over the last 150-odd years that my efforts are only a tiny drop in that ocean in any case; I may as well make it as much my own as possible.

I ask this because I thought that one of the great things about Zoot was that it highlighted the inherent comedy in the Beckett/Kafka/Sartre brand of existential writing.  Do you think of those writers as humorists?

I’m not familiar enough with Sartre to comment, but the other two, yes, very much so. Apparently Beckett once said that his ideal Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot would have been Laurel and Hardy. I can totally see that.

I love that idea! I can see that thread in your work as well — like what you were saying earlier about the Walrus and the Carpenter being like a vaudeville act. I noticed a lot of vaudeville influence in your work — obviously in strips like Fred the Clown and Mugwhump, but also more generally with mugs to the reader on punchlines and things like that.  What is it that you particularly like about the vaudeville schtick?

I think I absorbed the more traditional trappings of that world (like you see in Mugwhump) through watching The Muppet Show as a kid, actually. I mean, it’s not like I was around for the real thing. More broadly, the fascination with double-acts and that style of banter comes from watching comedy on TV - there’s a lot of that in the relationship between Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmonson, or between Blackadder and Baldrick. And I guess there’s the simple fact that most of my big comedy heroes - the Goons, the Marx Brothers, Keaton, W.C. Fields - have vaudeville or music-hall backgrounds. Even the Pythons and Peter Cook started out doing stage revues. Modern stand-up seems to be the spiritual successor to that world, I think - particularly when you have people now like Bill Bailey or Stewart Lee really broadening the boundaries of what stand-up can include. 

There’s also a love of language in Carroll (and, indeed Beckett) that you share with your frequent puns and wordplay. That’s quite a tricky area of comedy to work with — do you feel you have a good sense of what will elicit a laugh, as opposed to a groan?

Muppet Sherlock Holmes, art by Amy Mebberson

I hope I do! I don’t do a whole lot of puns, which is the one area where a groan is virtually guaranteed. I used to do a lot more of those, but lately I’ve been more concerned with character stuff. But yeah, I’m always trying to make myself laugh when I put gags together, even if that almost never actually happens due to the nature of the writing process. I try to avoid just throwing in stuff that’s “good enough” - things I like to think of as gag-shaped holes. They look like jokes and they have the rhythm of jokes, but they don’t make me laugh. I’d rather have no joke than a bad one.

Do you try out your jokes on other people first?  I wonder if you could maybe talk a little about your process of writing humour.

My writing hours are generally pretty antisocial, so there’s nobody else awake when I’m coming up with this stuff. Really, I just try to trust my gut. It’s not so much knowing how to write a good gag as it is being able to recognise a bad one and strangle it at birth. And if I knew how that worked I’d bottle it and sell it.

What was it like working with your brother Andrew on those early strips — were you both coming from similar places artistically?

Well, again, it was us trying to make ourselves laugh, or more specifically trying to make each other laugh, at least to begin with. Later on, as Andrew became the more dominant writer, I had to readjust my role a bit and come to think of myself more as a facilitator for whatever he was writing, a lot of which I frankly didn’t understand. And which he wouldn’t make much effort to explain, either - his attitude was, “If you need it explaining to you, you’re probably too thick to be reading it.” Bit of a smartarse, Andrew, at least back then. He’s mellowed.

Do you have any plans to work together again in the future?

No plans, though I’ve made it clear that the door’s always open if he gets inspired. But he’s very much the kind of writer who’ll wait for inspiration to strike and who will scribble it down very quickly - if it’s not something he can knock out in a couple of days in a white-hot frenzy, he’s not likely to do it.

What was your exposure to comedy growing up in New Zealand?

For me it was mainly British imports. We got stuff like The Goon Show and Hitch-Hiker’s Guide on the radio, and Monty Python and Milligan’s ”Q” series on TV - I’m sure there was American stuff as well, but I’ve forgotten most of it (along with a lot of the dross from Britain, of which there was plenty). Audio was big for me - apart from the Goons, there were the Python albums, which was my main exposure to them for years (having been slightly too young to catch them on TV, except for the odd isolated episode I saw when my parents weren’t paying attention). There was a bit of local comedy as well, though most of it was utterly dire. One exception was a guy called John Clarke, who did character comedy as this farmer called Fred Dagg — great stuff. Clarke left New Zealand for Australia after a bit. Anybody who gets any attention for anything creative generally leaves New Zealand, even if it’s only for a while - I think in order to find out if they’re really any good or not.

Was that the reason why you left?

Yeah, that was definitely a part of it. The other major reason was that New Zealand doesn’t have a comic industry of any kind, which is great if you like your comics to be pure and crafted entirely for the noblest creative reasons - the do-it-yourself comics scene there is really strong - but terrible if you’ve dreamed of becoming a professional cartoonist since the age of six. These days there are artists like Ben Stenbeck who can work for Dark Horse from New Zealand thanks to the Internet, but when I was coming up that wasn’t an option.

When you moved to Britain, did you find the sense of humour and comedy was very different?

Well there are two things there — the sense of humour, which I guess means the kinds of jokes ordinary people tell one another, and the comedy, which is the media and the stand-up industry. The comedy in New Zealand, as I’ve said, was largely foreign imports, so I had that as a baseline, although it was a bit of a shock to me when I arrived in Britain to discover that a lot of the very best stuff — Reeves and Mortimer, The Day Today — never reached us Down Under. 

The general sense of humour in the pub or on the street was, I thought, very different. I remember the basic New Zealand sense of humour as being pretty coarse and unrefined, without much subtlety; the British sense of humour, by contrast, was more about understatement for comic effect, at least in the circles I was moving in (which, I grant you, consisted largely of cartoonists — perhaps not a typical sample). I suspect that may have changed somewhat in the years I’ve been away, if stuff like Flight of the Conchords is anything to go by. Understatement seems to have caught on in a big way.

Not everyone realizes that The Muppet Show was filmed in Britain, and a lot of British humour snuck into it.  I know you worked some more modern British comedy references into your Muppets comic (like Reeves and Mortimer) — was that to be deliberately in-keeping with that tradition?

Not especially, though I thought there was enough overlap between the British surreal/absurdist humour tradition and the sensibility of the Muppet Show for it to be a smooth fit. Really, I just like referring to stuff I like - it keeps things interesting for me, and it rewards those readers who are in the know (without, I hope, alienating those who aren’t). I like finding stuff like that as a reader, so I like to give it back when I can.

What comedians have inspired you?

Spike Milligan is huge for me — my first hero. My comics have long been trying to capture the kinds of images The Goon Show put into my head. Other direct influences include Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Carl Barks, E.C. Segar. Ken Reid (creator of Frankie Stein, Faceache and many other strips for the British humour weeklies), Kurtzman and Elder... probably more if I think hard. And there are plenty of indirect influences, or people who I admire, but if I start listing those I’ll be here all day.

I’m so glad that you mentioned Ken Reid — I’m always slightly disappointed that he gets overshadowed by Leo Baxendale, since I think Reid’s work was a lot more ahead of its time.  Did you get The Beano, The Dandy, etc., over in New Zealand, or was that something you became exposed to later?

I still haven’t seen a whole lot of Beano or Dandy. They were available in New Zealand, but I found them less attractive than IPC’s somewhat gaudier offerings for whatever reason — I was reading Shiver and Shake, Cor!!, Whoopee, Monster Fun and Krazy Comic at various times. From which you can probably carbon-date me.

Faceache by Ken Reid

I know a lot of kids (myself included) learned to read from those comics.  Did they have a similar role for you, and looking back, can you still see their influence on your art and writing?

I had Carl Barks at the learning-to-read stage — I didn’t discover the IPC titles until I was about 7 or 8 — but I can certainly see their influence on me. Apart from Ken Reid, there were a few other artists whose tics and mannerisms I absorbed at a pretty young age when I was learning to draw, and I still see them popping up in my artwork from time to time — Robert Nixon, particularly, I can see a lot of in my work. And Leo Baxendale’s “Badtime Bedtime Books” in Monster Fun were like my stepping stone to Kurtzman and Elder in retrospect, in terms of all the background gags and the generally ramshackle, seedy atmosphere.

Those British children’s comics had always seemed to embrace the absurd and the anarchic, a trend that didn’t really take hold until much later in American humour comics and even later in mainstream TV comedy and stand-up.  Do you think it’s easier to be experimental with comics for young readers, that they’re more willing embrace material that’s a bit weird?

I don’t know about younger readers generally, but I know I loved the absurdist, formally-experimental stuff as a child, and it’s something I see in my own kids. Maybe it’s something to do with the way you acquire knowledge at that age - there’s a lot of smashing two or three apparently unrelated ideas (or toys, or Play-Doh colours or whatever) together just to see what you’ll get. And I guess they haven’t had time to build up vast frames of reference to sort out what’s “normal” and what’s “weird” the way we boring old grownups have. I do think the emphasis on story at the expense of all other considerations that’s been happening in art-comics over the past couple of decades has made it more difficult to do stuff that’s more formally playful — when someone like Chris Staros gets up and proclaims that, “comics are all about story,” I want to get up and shout, “No! They can be so much more than that!” Herriman’s Krazy Kat, widely regarded as one of the greatest comics ever, told one threadbare story every week for decades — its genius was entirely in the infinite variety of ways it was told. I think kids get that.

Is that what prompted your move to all-ages comics, like Thor and The Muppets?

A big part of it was because that was what was on offer and I’ve got a family to feed — I just seemed to drift there. But I was happy to be there for all kinds of reasons — partly because I have kids of my own now, and if I don’t do something now that they can read and enjoy, it’ll be too late in a few years’ time. Partly because it doesn’t take a genius to see that if you only cater to adult readers and never produce anything for kids, there won’t be a new generation of adult readers in a few years’ time to take over from the current one. Partly because I’m of the opinion that, given the ever-dwindling audience numbers for comics now, making comics that exclude a younger readership in cases when the subject matter could so easily include them is commercially kind of dumb (I’m looking at you, every super-hero comic ever!). Alan Moore put this rather nicely a few years back when he observed that, “When Casper the Friendly Ghost has a drawer full of human fingers, you can’t help feeling we’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere along the line.”

I hope you’re not including Thor: The Mighty Avenger there, which is probably the best thing Marvel have put out in the last five years.

Thank you!

Oh, you’re welcome.  I don’t know if you saw the report that ICV2 put out recently that shows that children’s/all-ages comics have increased sales by about 65% — I just thought it was so short-sighted of Marvel to pull the plug on that when they did and then a few months later start reprinting your Muppets work because — whoops, there is a market for kids after all.  Do you think you’ll ever return to either of those properties?

If Marvel was willing, I’d be up for finishing the original Thor story arc as plotted, assuming Chris Samnee (or someone with Chris’ chops who had Chris’ blessing) was available — four issues and we’d be done — but I was ready to move on from the Muppets when I did. I was feeling a bit burned out and I think I was in danger of repeating myself; Carl Barks did Disney ducks for thirty years, but he was able to add his own creations to the supporting cast to keep it fresh, and I never had the impression that making the Muppets my own thing to that degree would have been encouraged. I was more than ready to work on my own stuff again when I left — better to move on when I was still enjoying it. Very glad I did that book, though. I think it opened a lot of doors for me and it was a hell of a lot of fun.

In some of your early work (Zoot, Art D’Ecco), a huge part of the comedy was the timing and pacing.  Was that difficult to carry over into the Muppets format, where gags and story had to be delivered in one-page installments?

Well, it didn’t have to be, really - but I tend to think in terms of one-page units. I think that’s part of the rhythm, actually. Each page is like a sort of maxi-beat, and each panel on the page is like a mini-beat within it. It probably helped with the Muppets that I was drawing most issues so I wasn’t afraid to write twelve panels to a page if the rhythm required it. When I was writing for other artists, I was a lot more antsy about making those kinds of demands on them.

You’ve been writing comics for other people to draw a lot more recently.  Is that something that’s difficult to do after being your own artist for so long?

Challenging, for sure - but that’s part of the appeal. I’ve been taking on those kinds of jobs because it seemed to me I might learn something, which I think is definitely, demonstrably the case; I think I’ve broadened my range considerably, and I think my stories have by necessity become tighter and more satisfying because I haven’t had the luxury of “saving” a duff idea at the drawing stage. So, yes — I’m getting a lot out of the experience.

Even though you’re busy with Snarked for the foreseeable future, are you planning on writing more projects for other people?

I’m not sure “planning” is quite the word — everything I’ve written for others so far has kind of fallen into my lap (if writing and drawing my own stuff for a couple of decades counts as “waiting for something to fall into your lap”) — but I’m currently writing an adaptation of “A Princess of Mars”, the first of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars novels, for Marvel — that’s being drawn by Filipe Andrade. I’d like to do more writing for others, definitely. Got a couple of half-arsed ideas rattling around that need working on, possibly after Carter is done — right now I don’t really have the time to start spinning any more plates beyond the ones I’ve currently got in the air.

What is it that keeps you coming back to comics?

Partly because I think there is something inherently subversive and unrespectable about the form; if you can draw, and you want to make fun of something or somebody, you make a cartoon about them. That goes right back to the classroom. We start thinking of cartoons in that way at a pretty young age. Partly because, like standup or prose, it’s something that one person can control from start to finish - if you’re writing sitcoms or screenplays, the delivery of a gag isn’t always down to you, whereas with comics it is, completely. Partly because visual exaggeration is so easy to do, and so flexible - in addition to the written word, you have that whole visual vocabulary at your disposal. And partly because, after a couple of decades of making funnybooks, I’m utterly unqualified to do anything else even if I wanted to.

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Review: Twisted Savage Dragon Funnies

Twisted Savage Dragon Funnies - Michael Fiffe (ed.)
Image Comics, $18.99, 978-1-60706-402-2

Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon is probably the epitome of ’90s Image Comics excess, even moreso than Todd Macfarlane’s ridiculous Spawn or any of the cookie-cutter superteams by former marvel hot-shots.  No, those guys were just (badly) drawing what they could, and taking themselves incredibly seriously, with a combination of hype and dumb luck somehow giving credence to what they did.  But Larsen’s Dragon was different, with his purposely exaggerated anatomy and patently ridiculous origin (both on and off the page — the story goes that this was a character wee Erik came up with when he was 12) it always seemed like he was just having a laugh and riding the stylistic crapwave with glee. There was no way that placing a giant green man with a fin of his head in “mature” situations like custody battles, and fighting thinly-veiled parodies of other comics could be anything other than ironic.

So, it’s perfectly fitting that now, after the success of DC’s Bizarro Comics and Marvel’s Strange Tales, that Larsen opens himself to parody in Twisted Savage Dragon Funnies — short strips by indie creators that originally ran as back-up features in the monthly Savage Dragon comic.

The typical conceit of the strips is not too far removed from Larsen’s own, placing the green-skinned hero in a variety of genre situations from Ben Marra’s galactic space opera to Vito Delsante and Rachel Freire’s Russ Meyer homage.  Each one derives a good deal of its humour from Dragon’s appearance being completely at odds with his surroundings, or the absurdity of some of his rogue’s gallery (the man with a head that looks like a cross between a chicken and Bart Simpson seems to be a particular favourite).  But it’s not quite as cynical as you’d expect and many of the young, hip cartoonists seem to have an affection for the Dragon, happily taking from his tangled continuity and obscure characters. 

Kat Roberts’s loving take on Angel and Mr. Glum (a young girl and a pint-sized, petulant alien) is one of the stand-out stories in here.  The strange disconnect between the two is played to full effect with the cute charms of Angel bristling against Glum’s Napoleon complex and impotent rage.  Yet, the result is quite tender and Roberts pastel-tinted art beautifully captures the tone.

If there’s one constant among the work, it’s that the artists are obviously enjoying the hell out of drawing Larsen’s creations with Dieter VDO’s demented low-brow art being the only real “off-model” tale.  Even Larsen himself gets in on the action in the finale, drawing the bookend pages on a tale with Dragon quantum-leaping through different realities, all drawn by different creators.  So, we’re also treated to 2000 A.D.’s Simon Fraser turning in a fantastic Dredd tribute, George O’Connor’s medieval Dragon and Mike Cavallaro’s female superhero (who’s introduced while roughing up a clam…). 

Michael Fiffe should be commended for managing to wrangle together such a diverse and fresh assortment of talent to work on these shorts, especially small press talents like Zack Soto whose work deserves to seen by a wider audience.

Let’s just hope that a few years down the line, there are no legal battles over any of the new characters created in here.

-- Gavin Lees

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Review: Feynman by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick

Feynman - Jim Ottaviani (w) Leland Myrick (a)
First Second, $29.99, 978-1-59643-259-8

The work of a biographer can be difficult, even given a prize subject like Nobel laureat Richard Feynman.  As a physicist, so much of what was interesting about Feynman was internal and theoretical and the passion for his field was only truly conveyed when hearing the great man talk.  So, a retelling of his life story is liable to leave us cold, given that not much of what he did was inherently exciting, more the way that he did it.  It’s to his credit that Jim Ottaviani decided to rather craft Feynman as a character in a biographical comic (a biomic?) with artist Leland Myrick.

Much of the material in here comes from Feynman’s own recollections of his life and is presented in the same not-quite linear manner, dancing from time-to-time, subject-to-subject, in true, rambling oral tradition.  That’s not to say that the creators didn’t do their homework, the bibliography at the end of the book cites over thirty books consulted in the process of writing and drawing Feynman.  The result is a work that feels like an entire life, told with the wit and charm of its subject, and isn’t afraid to tackle the more complex areas of Feynman’s work, nor the more uncomfortable aspects of his life.

In fact, for that the authors have a clear affection for their subject, he still comes across as something of a creep.  It’s a common trait among successful academics that their social skills are somewhat lacking, but to see Feynman watch his wife die in arms and respond without any semblance of grief; or witness him, as a professor, hitting on young students in the library is incredibly off-putting.  Even though Feynman referred to himself as a “curious character”, some of his actions are downright disturbing.  While his work in quantum electrodynamics (QED) may stand as a monumental breakthrough in physics, Feynman makes us question whether the man himself was worthy of the same praise.

It’s his work, and the pursuit of it that takes up most of the pages here, though.  The cool, detached line of Myrick’s art is perfect for this, especially when diagrams, formulae and calculations begin to encroach upon (and often take over) the scenes from life.  The almost diagrammatical style of his characters makes the two naturally interchangeable. Since Feynman’s work was so visual (he himself being a synaesthete) it’s appropriate, and indeed helpful to our understanding, to see it laid out in comic form.  If it seems improbable to have advanced physics distilled down to an easily-digested form like this, that’s almost exactly what Feynman wrestled with himself.  In one of his more humanizing moments, while recovering from cancer surgery, he takes up a challenge from his friend to explain QED to her.  In a tragic turn of fate, she dies before Feynman can complete his refinement, and it is through the subsequent lectures given in her memory that the world at large has come to know his work.

The end conclusion that Feynman comes to is that understanding is not important, but rather simply knowing and being able to appreciate the forces and processes at work in the universe.  Similarly, with this book Ottaviani and Myrick abandon any attempts to explain Feynman’s eccentric, anti-social behavior, but through exploring his life with him, we come to know him better and can appreciate exactly what a series of squiggles on a blackboard did for the world.

-- Gavin Lees

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Feature: Shapes Shifting - pt. 3

Part III: The Manhunter from Mars

One would think the superhero genre would be filthy with interesting stories featuring shape-shifters: no special circumstances or explanations are required as shape-shifting is no more outlandish an idea than unaided flight, super-strength and heat vision. It isn’t the case. No doubt there are a decent number of superhero shape-shifters and stories that contain, but in almost every case their powers are used for infiltration or some derivative thereof.

There are other options for storytellers to choose. So far we've looked at the shape-shifter's kinship with creativity itself, and how that kinship allows shape-shifters like Merlock Jones to play tricks on the reader that a character with a concrete form cannot. In contrast to Merlock, and his creator E.C. Segar, who may not have intended the effect outlined in the previous installment, there are certain creators who not only fail to play tricks on the reader using their shape-shifter, but who make no attempt to tell a story in which a shape-shifter's presence creates a unique experience. Even if Segar didn't intend Merlock's month of haunting, he intentionally used Merlock's abilities as a master of disguise for a unique comedic effect similar to the classic mirror scene in Duck Soup.

There are several shape-shifting superheroes/villains who are complete failures judging by the above criteria, but there’s one whose track record is interestingly pockmarked. The Martian Manhunter first appeared in the iteration which fans now recognize him in the November 1955 edition of Detective Comics, #225.* In “The Strange Experiment of Dr. Erdel,” written by Joe Samachson and drawn by Joe Certa, a brilliant scientist named Mark Erdel wrenches J’onn J’onzz, Martian, from his home world. Erdel greats J’onn with a convenient heart attack, trapping J’onn on Earth as Erdel is the only man alive who can operate the accidently-steal-an-alien contraption. Within that same strip, J’onn decides to take the form of a human man in order not to frighten all who see him. Again, here our hero’s aim is infiltration, this time into the entire human race. This is a better use of the infiltration plot than most: perhaps because as the character grows infiltration might meld with the themes of human intolerance and the other among us. Sadly, though, from 1953 until the 1959 episode, “The Unmasking of J’onn Jonzz,” the Martian is more or less confined to his human body, and whenever he does change to his true form he stays invisible, always solving crimes unnoticed and ending every strip with a wink to the reader: the sole witness to his feats. This leaves no room for a shape-shifting theme because each episode is concerned with what crazy new power J’onn will have in order to keep them winking moments fresh.**

Eventually The Martian Manhunter’s abilities are codified to match those of Superman but with telekinesis and shape-shifting to boot. J’onn could, then, in the hands of an intelligent creator, branch out on his own and become his own character rather than a poor substitute for Superman.

For one of the best examples of how his shape-shifting abilities make him unique, we turn to issue #24 of the Martian Manunter ongoing series that began in 1998. This particular issue was written by the series’ regular writer John Ostrander and penciled, thank the sweet Martian Christ, by fill-in artist Doug Mahnke. (Tom Mandrake was the regular artist on the series, and his pages are unerringly sloppy.) The Martian Manhunter, you see, has a bit of an obsession with Oreos (chocos, they’re called), and apparently, when J’onn doesn’t get his chocos, shit gets real. Here J’onn’s partners Booster Gold and Blue Beetle not only hide J’onn’s personal stash of chocos, they buy up all the chocos in the stores immediately surrounding Justice League HQ causing J’onn to go into a comedic, choco-withdrawal induced rampage through the city.

J’onn’s shape-shifting abilities grant the story two very special features. The first and more obvious is along the lines of what was discussed in the first post of this series, namely, the changing of shapes based on whim or, in this case, blinding rage. As the rampage progresses and his rage builds, J’onn grows more and more monstrous, eventually coming to resemble The Hulk almost to the letter.*** Which leads us to the second feature of the story—parody. And not just parody, but iconographic parody more effective and natural to comics than a snarky bit of dialogue.

Taken together, these two features make the prospect of a Martian Manhunter story much more appealing: that although we know for the Martian mind and body are linked in a unique fashion, the changes he undergoes are not always what he wills. What better an allegory for the addictive process in which the subconscious mind affects so much of what we do? That part of the mind most mysterious having control over his form, what new and interesting shapes might the Martian Manhunter and his stories take?

Admittedly, a list of three is a poor census of the shape-shifting population, but the three examples do illustrate the important distinction between shape-shifting and “solid” characters: in one way or another they are possibility personified, be it in plot, theme or character, and have the ability to teach us about ourselves and the medium in which they exist simultaneously. 

-- Ian Burns

*The reason I’ve chosen The Martian Manhunter over Jack Cole’s Plastic Man, arguably the more obvious choice for a superhero shape-shifter, is that the latter is entirely too successful by this essay’s standards and an analysis of him would yield too similar a conclusion to part one of this series.

**Within only months J’onn gains “molecular hypnosis,” which he uses to fix a baseball game in order to thwart a fixer; “Martian lungpower,” which he will later use to fly; x-ray vision, the ability to walk through sold objects, and my personal favorite: “super-willpower,” which … well, J’onn should do the talking. “Through deep concentration, I can will my body to any part of the world! I want to be downtown … Downtown … DOWNTOWN!” He then appears downtown.

***Darwin Cooke uses J’onn as a walking pop-culture reference as well in his New Frontier books.

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Comics: Plague Johnny #5

Plague advances whatever defeat within a feat tiger. When will the censorship jump? The scrap tolerates plague. The inheritance compacts Johnny. The background comprehends Johnny near the padded shadow...

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Review: Celluloid by Dave McKean and The Wolf by Tom Neely

Celluloid - Dave McKean (w/a)
Fantagraphics, $35, 978-1-60699-440-5

The Wolf - Tom Neely (w/a)
I Will Destroy You, $25, Buy it here 

When we think of silent films, the very name indicates to us that something is missing, so to refer to these two recent graphic novels as “silent” would be entirely selling them short — not to mention that the word also carries connotations of quietude that doesn’t quite fit either.  Yet, the fact that Dave McKean and Tom Neely chose to tell their stories without dialogue, narration or words of any kind still leads us to look at them differently.  When the author refuses to present us with anchoring text — and, in the case of these books, a conventional plot — it can often feel like being cast adrift, treating every image as a puzzle to be solved and somehow jigsawed together with the adjoining pieces.  Rather than work against them, though, that feeling seems almost an integral part of these comics, which deal in their own way with very similar themes of transcendence, transformation and sex.

Dave McKean

In McKean’s Celluloid — his first long-form comics work since 1996’s Cages — a young woman, finding herself unexpectedly returning home to an empty house, decides to watch a reel of film that sits in a projector, ominously placed on a pedestal.  The film that unfolds seems to show her having sex in a darkened room, which we presume to be a home movie, and she begins to masturbate.  At the film’s — and her own — climax, the reel stops and the celluloid melts.  Rather than white light, what remains on the projection screen is a door.  When the woman, of course, opens the door she finds herself taken through various sexual tableaux, each one rendered in a distinctly different mixed-media style by McKean, and shifting ever more towards realism until the book becomes pure photography in its final scene.

Tom Neely

Neely’s The Wolf is a similarly hallucinatory nocturne.  A man’s night-time transformation into a wolf sparks an exploration of his identity and a sexual journey of uninhibited desire.  Alongside the male and female protagonists, who each go through their own transformation, he brings into play the images of skinless creatures and anthropomorphic trees that have featured in his work before. Neely seems less interested in a plot than using his players to riff on certain universal themes and to delve symbolically into the human psyche.

The body is a primary concern for both authors.  Given that these are, in their own ways, erotic narratives, we find ourselves frequently confronted with the naked body.  This was a feature of Neely’s previous work The Blot, although the overtly cartoonish style of the work made it quite jarring; here in The Wolf, his style is much more aggressive and representational, lending itself well to exploring the human form.  The bodies of his two leads, especially the wolf, are impossibly gangly which lends an awkward creepiness their movements.  When it comes to love-making, the overextended limbs make the act seem more protean and balletic, rather than animalistic.  But the body is also a source of horror, spilling forth nightmarish creatures from its guts — the aforementioned skinless ones — who, for the wolf, seem to reprimand his baser urges, constraining and devouring him; for the woman, they appear to taunt her with a memento mori of the ageing to come: sagging breasts and withered flesh.  They become an outward manifestation of their inner doubts and fears that must be overcome in order to be happy.

Dave McKean

McKean’s treatment is much more traditional, however.  The young woman of Celluloid begins as a mere pencil sketch on the page and rarely do we see a full-figure view of her.  The body becomes compartmentalized — a finger, a nipple, lips, legs, vagina — like an infant’s view of the world.  As she progresses through the first door, she become solid and corporeal, but merely an observer of the carnal acts going on around her in the fantasy wonderland, until she reaches its second tier.  It is here she encounters an “earth mother” figure, haloed in fruit and with fourteen breasts.  Unlike Neely’s work, the abnormalities here are presented as beautiful, and as the woman consummates her meeting with the goddess, the resultant imagery throws some interesting analogies between fruit and the body (there is even some poetic visual rhymes, as a physalis becomes a clitoris).  The result is that the flesh is constructed as something enticing, without any guilt or doubt surrounding its enjoyment.  This makes her next foray with an engorged incubus seem perfectly natural, and their frenzied oral copulation simply another facet of sex.

Tom Neely

This treatment of sex and eroticism as an engagement with nature, and an almost spiritual act, is reflected in the way that McKean has his protagonist change through each scene.  Initially, it is a sketchy figure who watches photographic images on film, and as her journey progresses, she moves further and further towards the photographic image herself while her partners become increasingly abstract.  By the end, it is an indistinct shadow that she finds herself taking pleasure from.  The underlying theme that sex makes us whole and has the potential to change our image of ourself is also a concern in Neely’s book.  Given the nature of the work, it is ambiguous whether the transformations that the man and woman undergo are supposed to be symbolic, hallucinations, or part of the surreal fabric of his fictional world.  Nevertheless, the transformations are central to the book’s working, seeing the male character become more wolflike as he sheds his inhibitions and indulges instincts of not only desire, but also devotion and loyalty.  The female metamorphosis in The Wolf is curiously evocative of McKean’s earth-mother figure, with the woman undergoing a literal blossoming from flowers, to branches and leaves until she becomes a tree entirely — a living embodiment of life itself.

Dave McKean

For all the pell-mell of the mindbending plots, the creation of altered states and surreal fantasies would be for nothing, if it were not for the sheer virtuoso talent of both creators.  McKean has long been established as a master of multimedia imagery and Celluloid represents possibly his finest work.  The clarity and seamlessness with which he combines photography with drawings and paintings makes every scene entirely convincing.  It’s this hyper-reality that encourages us to submit to the dream-logic of the story.  It’s all the moreso with The Wolf, though, as Neely deliberately breaks the connection to reality with his visual quirks.  When the skinless creature first emerges, he wears the mime-gloves of old Disney cartoons as a telling sign that the rules of reality no longer apply, and we are in the realm of elastic physics.  This allows Neely’s expressiveness to play and amplify the world of the story — the introduction of full colour is later used to indicate the passion between the two central figures and, much like McKean’s world, the characters become fuller and more realised the further they indulge their passions.  When they finally do have sex, right at the centre of the book, the art descends to pure expression — swirls of colour collide, lashed by inky black strokes and water splashes — Jackson Pollock with a dildo up his arse.

Tom Neely

It’s difficult to compare these books with other work simply because they are so unique and the artists have such idiosyncratic styles that, really, these stories could only be told by them.  By losing the words, the art’s connection to the story is drawn so much tighter.  Perhaps comparisons with silent cinema are not so uncalled for after all, as when else has cinema paid quite so much attention to the singular image, or been unafraid to break boundaries of convention?  That same spirit rests in both these books which are two extraordinary examples graphic storytelling.

-- Gavin Lees

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