Opus One:

1. Four Number One Comics Reviewed

2. Ugly Art Discussed and Defined (?)

1.    A Once-over for Some Ones. Four first issues arrived in This Corner between January and March. Three are limited series titles; one seems poised for a long run (or so the creators might be imagined to be thinking).
     The Victorian aims for a total of five issues, but I doubt it'll make it all the way. The creative team (Trainor Houghton, who conceived and developed the idea for the series; Marlaine Maddux, who writes it; Hartin Montiel Luna, who pencils it; and Jose Carlos Buelna, who inks it) pledges to "do something different." They intend to "show" us "a story through the artwork and words and actions of each character." That's not so different. But they expect us to "experience the satisfaction of discovering" for ourselves "where the story is going."
     Judging from the first issue, that means we'll have to de-code a lot of symbolism and other visual vagaries. Like the cover, for instance--which has no apparent connection to anything in the interior pages.
     Our most meaningful encounter with the actors in this drama is in the text descriptions at the end of the book, and these are the best clues we have as to what is going on. For most of the book, Fitz, an authority on Victorian history, listens to the nostalgic ramblings of an apparently dying man, once a friend or colleague. The pages are filled with fragments, dream-like sequences fraught with mysterious images. As for story, the book is all puzzle with no point. Any first issue is admittedly introductory in nature, but even if it is introducing a mystery, our curiosity should be more focused than it is here. Here, we ask merely "what the heck is going on?" And I doubt that is sufficiently tantalyzing to induce many readers to return for the second issue.
     The artwork is tightly rendered--too tightly. The lines that conjure up backgrounds are often ruled, indicating a sort of lack of confidence. And the figures seem stiff, almost as if they'd been drawn with a ruler, too. Every detail is meticulously attended to, and this bespeaks an uneasy fussiness that makes me uncomfortable. It's like visiting a friend whose livingroom is so neat you're afraid that you'll upset a delicate balance of decor by simply sitting in a chair.
     Moreover, the characters sometimes are not recognizable in every appearance. If Fitz didn't have a beard, I wouldn't know him from page to page. Even his spectacles change shape slightly from one picture to the next.
     Virtex (No. 1 of 3) is not much of an improvement. Written by Casey Lau, penciled by Kano (one name), inked by Alvaro Lopez and scripted by none other than Mike Baron, this book takes us into some sort of future dystopia in which outlaws of all sorts find their homes in the Madlands, and the Justice Cycle Bureau sends a cybernetic lawman named Virtex to rid the environs of its most vicious scourge, the Ripnun. This is about the only sense to be derived from the tale--and all of this comes from introductory character profiles, not the story itself.
      In the story, Ripnun's henchmen, "the rippers," take particular pleasure in dismembering whores at the various pleasure domes of the Madlands, and Virtex tries to stop them--unsuccessfully.
      This is punk space opera. Lots of brutal action which pretty quickly degenerates into meaninglessness (except, perhaps, for people to whom body piercing is entertainment). The only bright spot is the debut of a perky female with the punning name of Makina ("I'll be your deus ex"), who rescues Virtex in the book's final scenes. This duo promises to continue their pursuit of Ripnun in subsequent issues--probably perpetrating more senseless violence.
      The chunky, angular artwork, although committed with a confident bold line, is often confusing. There are virtually no backgrounds, a weakness the artists attempt to mask by presenting much of the action in close-up--hands, gritting teeth, bleeding cut throats. But since all the beings are either composed partly of metal parts (rendering them indistinguishable from the furniture in close-up) or wear outlandish costumes (ditto), it's difficult to make out sometimes what, exactly, is happening.
      With Scene of the Crime No. 1 (of a promised four issues), we find vast improvement. Written by Ed Brubaker and drawn by Michael Lark, this is a thoroughly competent effort. We meet a private investigator named Jack Herriman who is hired to find a missing woman. Jack's relationship to other characters in the story is clearly explained, setting up certain internal tensions. The woman who hires him is the mistress of a cop who was Jack's father's partner, and Jack's father was killed by the bad guys who mistook him for his partner.
      Jack finds the woman, they talk, they like each other, and the next morning, he finds her dead.
      Given the relationships set up and the provocation of the murder, we are properly primed for more. This is what the first book in a series ought to do: it has a conclusion of its own, but that conclusion (together with the other attendant material) provides a springboard to future developments--which we want to witness.
      Lark is an expert draftsman, drawing with a simple unembellished line but rendering his characters recognizable in every pose. He provides ample background visuals for every arc of the story, drenching his pictures in solid black shadow to create the necessary ominousness. Nicely done.
      Vext from writer Keith Griffen and penciller Micke McKone and inker Mark McKenna seems the first in a continuing title rather than the first in a limited series. And it, too, is expertly performed.
      We meet Vext, "the patron diety of mishap and misfortune," and we discover almost at once that he is the embodiment of mishap and misfortune--a typical Griffen comedic turn. And we like him immediately because he's so like us. He's exiled from somewhere in the cosmos to Earth, where he is understandably unprepared and therefore wholly baffled by everything. He has been instructed, however, not to don spandex or to perform any superheroic deeds. He must muddle through like an ordinary homo sapien.
      Nevertheless, a subplot simmers along, suggesting that Vext will be forced into superheroic action somehow.
      As an introductory issue, No. 1 gives us information necessary to our understanding of both this issue and future numbers, and it has a conclusion--which, like any good cliffhanger, whets our appetite for the next issue.
      McKone's artwork is expert in both backgrounds (for both locale and ambiance) and figures; and McKenna's inking is nicely quirky--a flowing line with pleasing lumps, twists, and turns by way of indicating volume and the shadows that model anatomy and furnishings.
      I'll buy the second issues of Scene of the Crime and Vext; but not of the other two.
      I know: it's unkind and somehow unappreciative to knock creative efforts that are so obviously well-intentioned. But the comic book marketplace is awash in product. The good is drowning in the bad and the mediocre. To save the first, we must brand the second and third.
      The creators of The Victorian and Virtex need more practice. Alas, it seems the best way to get it is to produce comic books like the ones they've manufactured. But it would be less expensive for them (and better for the glutted marketplace) if they could find another way.
      I wish them well. But they aren't quite ready for prime time yet.

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2.     Ugly Is As Ugly Does. Some artwork is just ugly. It's not fun to look at. No silvery laughter of appreciation bubbles up inside as you contemplate it. But it's hard to say why, exactly.
      For some months now, I've been secretly at work devising a rating system for artwork. The idea is to invent a scientifically replicable way of evaluating art so that we can say without fear of contradiction, "This is ugly."
      Sadly, I've had to give up the project. There just isn't any way that the aesthetic character of artwork can be measured scientifically. A picture is not a mathematical formula, which is either right or wrong. Remember what that third grader said about his arithmetic problem. He'd just added two and two and got four, and his teacher complimented him:
      "That's good, Johnny," she said.
      "Good, hell," he snorted; "it's perfect."
      Can't quarrel with that.
      But you can quarrel with aesthetic judgements about artwork. What I think is ugly, you might think is beautiful.
      Still, nothing daunted by the improbability of making an unassailable assessment, I offer the following disquisition on Ugly Art.
      By "ugly," I mean, sometimes, raw amateurism. If a person can't draw for toadstools, his artwork stands a good chance of being ugly.
      The drawings of your three-year-old sister, for example, are probably not very expert. They may be cute in some abstract philosophical sense. Like the man said, The wonder is not that the drawings are ugly; the wonder is that a three-year-old can draw at all.
      But amateurism is no absolute guarantee of ugliness.
      Ron Goulart's Golden Age Funnies (which once festooned the pages of The Comics Buyer's Guide) seems to be drawn with a toothpick on sandpaper. But Goulart actually harbors somewhere in his soul a rudimentary drawing ability. A given character looks the same from picture to picture--as he or she should. The linework, although seeming to wriggle about, actually doesn't: the lines are confidently applied. The artwork isn't ugly.
      (The undeniable quality of the work should, rightly, be attributed to the ghost who actually draws the strip. Goulart has John Callahan chained to a wheelchair in the attic under a single naked light bulb, dangling from the ceiling. Callahan draws the strip that Goulart takes credit for. When pressed on the matter, Goulart admits the existence of Callahan but claims that Callahan draws only the faces; Goulart himself does all the backgrounds and figure work.
      (Callahan, it might be remembered, wrote an autobiography of his life as a quadriplegic. Entitled Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far On Foot, the book is a merciless look at the cartoonist's alcoholic life before becoming paralyzed, his surmounting of the obstacles in being confined for life to a wheelchair, and his eventual emergence as a cartoonist, selling cartoons to The New Yorker, Penthouse, National Lampoon, and others. It's funny, witty, and heroic. But I divaricate.)
      To return to ugliness, let me recommend Lynda Barry's Ernie Pook's Comeek. Truly ugly. The linework is achieved sometimes by applying several lines to the same area of the picture, indicating a lack of confidence about rendering. The lettering is awkward. And there are polka-dots on everything that isn't merely spotted and scratchy crosshatching wherever there's a corner of a panel with nothing in it. (Assuming, that is, that a given installment is not devoted entirely to lettering, the words crowding the pictures into the basement of every panel.) Ugly.
      Nicole Hollander's Sylvia, although not particularly pleasing to my eye, is still not ugly. I mention it because it would appear to suffer from some of the same failings as Barry's work. But examine the lettering carefully, minutely: Hollander's lettering is more carefully spaced, the characters better formed. And Hollander isn't afraid of white space; her panels are pleasingly composed, her lines bold, her solid blacks artfully spotted.
      Hollander's characters have elbows and fingers. They have anatomy, for pete's sake! Barry's characters have no elbows or fingers--or anatomy. Ugly.
      But ability to make anatomy in pictures is no assurance of attractive artwork. Mark Alan Stamaty, for instance, can draw fingers. And eyeballs. And teeth. Holy moley, can he draw teeth! In fact, he may be the champion tooth drawer in the universe: every face he draws has teeth. And he draws every tooth in a person's head--individually--and even adds some extra dentures for good measure.
      Too toothy. All the mouths look like nutcracker mouths: they seem hinged to open and close by moving the lower jaw up and down. And his sense of proportion is shot. And everyone looks exactly alike except for different colored hair. Ugly.
      Some will doubtless argue that Ugly Art is no accident: it is, they say, a Deliberate Statement. It says something wondrously subtle about its subject. Something satirical.
      I suppose that means the artist thinks his subject is as ugly as his art.
      Maybe. But I doubt it.
      The only statement that Ugly Art makes is a statement about the aesthetic sense and skill of the artist.
      Goya made Deliberate Statements about ugly subjects with some of his drawings. But the drawings weren't ugly; their subjects were, but the drawings were skillfully made.
      Not that art must be pretty. We're not talking about floral arrangements here. Or colorful patterns. Nor is it necessarily the subject per se of a painting or drawing that makes the work pleasing. Not necessarily.
      Some art that is decidedly not pretty is nonetheless pleasing to behold because it communes to the soul in some ineffable way. Picasso's famed Guernica, for instance. The very distortion of the anatomies depicted speaks powerfully of the artist's reaction to the aerial bombing of a small town in utter disregard for the non-combatant civilian population: he saw this act as an obscenity, and the deliberate crudeness of his pictures surely tells us this. The painting shrieks with his outrage.
      If the absence of purely technical skill can result in Ugly Art, another ingredient with potential for the same outcome is clutter. If the artist produces a work that is so full of stuff that we can't tell one thing from another, it's probably Ugly Art. Moreover, if the work is so jammed up with lines, color, objects, and shadings that it fails to emphasize any aspect of itself, it's Ugly Art.
      Not all cluttered art is ugly; and not all Ugly Art is cluttered. But clutter--the absence of visual clarity or emphasis in a picture crammed with things to see--is an aspect of Ugly Art.
      Julie Doucet's work for instance. I'm looking at Purity Plotte No. 10 which seems to me a stunning example of art made ugly by the failure of the artist to create pictures with visual emphasis. Everything in nearly every panel cries out to be looked at. And cries in equal decibels. It's visual cacophony.
      Doucet can draw; no amateur she. She is, in fact, a quite competent draftswoman. Individual objects or people are competently rendered, but each thing--whether a book of matches tossed on the floor or the facial expression of a character--seems to demand our attention with equivalent insistence.
      In sharp contrast to Doucet's work we have Marc Hempel's in Tug and Buster. There is no comparison here: Hempel has distilled human figuration to its simplest geometric shapes, it seems to me. So in Hempel's comics we have a kind of raw simplicity; and in Doucet's, undisciplined complexity.
      But in Hempel's Tug and Buster, we also have a vivid demonstration of how an artist can manipulate his compositions for dramatic effect. Virtually every panel provides us with a strong visual emphasis through the very refined simplicity of Hempel's style.
      He also contrasts white space and solid blacks and texture and line with stunning results. Every page is a stark statement of artistry in the service of narrative.
      The stories are fun and funny, too. That's enough to start, no doubt. You're welcome to nominate your own candidates for Ugly Art. And I'll continue doing the same here from time to time.
      In the meantime, without further adieu, stay `tooned.

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