The One-Panel Critics: the Vanity of Swamp Thing

It's been nearly a month since my last measly post, and I don't think I'm going to break any postyness records for July, either. But here's a little something I noticed recently.

I've been re-reading my old Swamp Thing paperbacks, thinking about the storytelling as well as the story there, and I noticed a couple of panels from the slow build at the end of Saga of the Swamp Thing #30 ("A Halo of Flies") that I hadn't paid attention to before. Probably I had skipped past these quickly because they're pantomime (there's no text to read), which is a shame, because they build up to an awfully strong final-page reveal—one that anticipates the rug-jerking surprise at the end of the eleventh issue of Watchmen, in its small way.

Here are those panels I mentioned.



Maybe you're already seeing what I saw.

Even if you're not an avid Swamp Thingophile, you may be familiar with Bernie Wrightson's cover to House of Secrets #92, which included the first Swamp Thing story:



(This image borrowed from the Grand Comics Database, like the next image.)

This story was later reprinted, with a new framing tale around it, in Saga of the Swamp Thing #33, with John Totleben providing a cover swipe or homage from Wrightson's original—with the post-Alec-Holland Swamp Thing's sweetheart, Abby Cable, in the place of Linda Olsen.



By now you've probably figured out what I've noticed: the elaborate vanity setup that the silent swamp monster stalks past on his way to Abby's curtained four-poster bed.



My hunch is that this is an earlier homage to House of Secrets 92. Maybe Steve Bissette will correct me if I'm wrong about this, but I think it's deliberate.

As he looms through the house, Swamp Thing is framed to look like a monster, even though he's the hero of the tale, and the "cinematics" of the scene help to build a really nice sense of foreboding that the chapter's conclusion pays out in spades. It's a nice touch—and a subtle thing to notice more than two decades after the comic was originally published.

Doodle Penance: "comic freedom poetry"

The week's "Doodle Penance" has to be a solo effort, because Mike has other things on his mind. But I'm going to supplement my little doodle with a few selections from other cartoonists.

That's because when I read this week's search term — "comic freedom poetry" — a little slideshow started in my mind: it was something like "Stereotypical Comics Hippies I Have Seen Outside the Undergrounds," and featured the following images.

First, of course, Chester Williams, a minor character from out of Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing. Chester's the guy who finds one of Swamp Thing's hallucinogenic tubers in the swamp...



(That's a page drawn by Stan Woch, and collected in A Murder of Crows.)

Chester's a pretty sympathetic guy, even if he's not the smartest or most upright of characters. I'd be willing to argue that you can tell a lot about a cartoonist's outlook from the way he treats his aging hippies. Faded idealism is a vulnerable sort of personality, and some cartoonists won't treat it kindly. Early signs of Frank Miller's cynicism, for example, are obvious in his handling of this all-business peacenik in Ronin.



(You'll probably want to click that to enlarge it.)

And of course you'd know that these hippies belonged to the satirical and grotesque world of early Dan Clowes, even if he hadn't signed the title panel.



All of this leads to my own "freedom poetry" doodle. I'm not sure what this says about me as a cartoonist, though.



Maybe I'm trying to say that freedom really isn't the secret to good poetry?

Thesis: Zack Snyder Fetishizes Blood

I waited a little while, but this week my curiosity got the better of me, and I went to see the Watchmen movie. Here's my take on it. It wasn't terrible, but it seemed to miss the point of Moore & Gibbons's comic in a lot of important ways. A lot of the comic's complexity had to be streamlined and flattened out for the film, and although Zack Snyder obviously had time to put a lot of stuff in slow motion—and to extend a number of quick melees into fight-scene set-pieces—many of the subtler parts of the book got sped up so that they didn't have time to register properly. (The revelation and decision on Mars might be the worst example of this.)

There were also things I liked about the movie—Rorschach's death was played remarkably well, for example—but mostly it felt to me overly faithful to the surface properties of the comic while completely missing its soul. I'd compare it to a note-for-note cover of, say, an early Elvis Costello song, played on "updated" instruments and sung by someone who doesn't speak English and is only repeating the sounds of the words phonetically. Maybe all the right sounds are there, but everything about the rhythm of meaning is screwed up.

And then there's the question of blood, which is the reason I've gathered you all here tonight. Moore & Gibbons's Watchmen has some brutal violence in it, especially considering the context of mid-'80s superhero comics it was written in. (Many more violent mainstream superhero comics would eventually emerge, but that hadn't happened so much yet.) And when people are hurt badly in the original Watchmen, they do bleed. But watching Zack Snyder's Watchmen, I got convinced that he thinks the human body is a highly pressurized balloon full of blood and bones. It's an alarmingly gory movie, and many of the bloodiest moments are actually places where Snyder and his screenwriters depart from the text they're otherwise following so faithfully.

For example: Big Figure's tubby henchman never gets removed from in front of Rorschach's cell; he's killed quickly so that he won't suffer when the other henchman cuts through the lock with an acetylene torch. No bloody stumps waved at the camera.

When Dan and Laurie are ambushed by the knot-tops in the alleyway, they fight back brutally—the book certainly gives the idea that the way superheroes survive their tussles is by fighting dirty—and there are probably some broken bones. But click this image to enlarge it, and see if you can find a compound fracture:



When Dr. Manhattan is "fighting crime" at Moloch's gambling den ("Dante's"), we don't see human debris splattered onto women's faces or the ceiling. In fact, I'd always assumed this guy was just getting a face full of nitrogen or something like that.



Similarly, when Dr. Manhattan is winning the Vietnam War for Nixon, we don't see him exploding any people. In fact, the trio of enemies in the foreground (uniformed here; in stereotypical conical hats in the movie) seem to flee in fear pretty successfully:



I'm not sure whether these changes are meant to make Dr. Manhattan seem more distanced from human morality (something that's supposed to happen gradually, not all at once, so placing that change in his past is a problem), or whether they're just meant to make him seem more dangerous, or more of a badass. Given some of the other aspects of the movie, I'm inclined to guess that Snyder's driven here by the cheapest and dumbest motives, but I could be wrong.

Similarly, there's more blood when Rorschach fights people. As a boy, Walter Kovacs bites the cheek of a boy who has been teasing him. (That's fruit juice on young Walter's face.) The cheek never splits open to gush blood.



The man who kidnaped Blaire Roche doesn't exactly get off easier in the book, but his demise seems to require a more cold-blooded detachment or dissociation from Rorschach. It's not a crime of passion. (Killing the dogs might have been.)



(In the movie, Rorschach tells the kidnaper that "dogs get put down" before he swings the cleaver. If anything, Chapter VI figures Rorschach, not the kidnaper, as being like a dog: in the panel right after he bites the other boy, two different speech balloons say he's "like a mad dog." And of course the split dog's head has the same fearful symmetry as a Rorschach blot.)

When Rorschach dispatches Big Figure in the prison bathroom, it's pretty clearly a death by drowning. As he walks out of the bathroom, Laurie tells him they shouldn't "dive head-first into things," and he answers:



Somehow, in Snyder's Watchmen, that turns into a seeping puddle of blood, not toilet water. (I hesitate to speculate how Snyder's Rorschach got that much blood out of Danny Woodburn.)

In these instances, I can really only guess that Snyder just thinks blood spatters are kewl, and that a badass super-vigilante would be even more awesome and extreme if he left a trail of bloody carnage.

Remember that flashy kung-fu sequence in the prison riot? Well, in the book, Dan and Laurie incapacitate most of the prisoners who are still alive after the riot by turning on the "screechers" in Dan's Owl-ship. These seem to give the prisoners nausea and headaches. So here's the kung-fu fight sequence from the original prison break:



That's some adrenaline-pumping action, isn't it? (Again, I think Snyder is mainly at pains to make his superheroes seem like badasses, instead of like out-of-shape middle-aged people with sharp minds, a bit of preparation, and some martial arts training.)

Oddly, there are a few scenes of blood in Moore and Gibbons's Watchmen that get played less brutally in Snyder's movie version.

One of them is the moment when Adrian Veidt is attacked by a gunman in his corporate offices. In the movie, Snyder's camera lingers over the bullet piercing Veidt's secretary's calf (in the book, she takes the bullet in the chest, and bleeds a lot). This is one of the few moments when his Matrix-style slow motion is justified by the tempo of the scene in the book. But look at how harshly the original Veidt handles his assailant, compared to the movie's quick, balletic strike:



My guess is that Snyder's Veidt doesn't hit as hard because he's never as athletic as the original Veidt. Snyder seems to want Veidt to be merely an effete ultra-rich celebrity, not a match for all comers in hand-to-hand fighting.

In fact, one of the other places where blood disappears in Snyder's adaptation is in Veidt's super-fast dispatching of Nite Owl in their "final battle."



That hurts. And in fact, that's the last moment when Dan tries any sort of attack against Veidt. (Rorschach keeps coming, and Veidt almost absent-mindedly neutralizes him several more times while Dan stands around, pats a cloth against his nose, and talks to Veidt.) In Snyder's vision of Watchmen, Nite Owl isn't pudgy around the middle, and is still able to imagine taking Veidt in a hand-to-hand fight. Moore's Nite Owl knows better than that.

And of course, there's one other scene in which the blood totally disappears.



Snyder shows us a few immolations in the climactic attack on New York, but the only aftermath we really see is architectural. What do you think that says about Snyder, or about his fetishization of blood?

Doodle Penance: "rorschach mask pattern sewing"

Well, it seems like everyone and his dog is talking about Watchmen this week, and apparently our Google search logs aren't inoculated against Watchmania either. This week's "Doodle Penance" comes from some crafty type who was pointed here in a search for "rorschach mask pattern sewing."

As is often the case, I was initially befuddled by this search. Fortunately, I have read and taught the graphic novel co-created by Dave Gibbons quite a few times now, and I'm pretty familiar with its visual motifs.

Casting my mind's eye back over the details of Watchmen, I remembered a panel that seemed to be the one this googler was looking for. Oddly, I haven't been able to find it online or in a quick cursory glance through the book. So, since this is doodle penance anyway, I went ahead and drew it from memory. (You can click to enlarge.)



Mike's off on a trip, so he won't be able to post stories of sewing his own Rorschach mask when he was in junior high, but he has already alluded to it. (And that's probably what our googler originally saw.)

Doodle Penance: "12 reasons for penance"

This week's Doodle Penance is brought to you by an anonymous Google-searcher who found our site when looking for "12 reasons for penance." That strikes me as an unusually specific and limited request, in terms of the numbers. Having been trained in guilt for many years in graduate school, I can think of many more than a dozen reasons to be penitent. Still, we're happy to oblige...

Since we're both pretty busy this week and the blog hasn't been hurting for content, Mike and I decided to divide up the dozen reasons. Here are my half-dozen:



(You may click if you want a better view of my looming guilt.)

These are all reasons specific to my guilt as a cartoonist or a comics critic, and they are all guilts that derive from inaction (or from the opportunity costs of my other actions), rather than the many bad things I have done.

Let's see... First, there's poor Matteu, whose last "weekly" strip got drawn early in May of last year.

Then there's the Mapjam, which is a project with some real potential. Why has it taken me two years to draw a three-page story? What would it take for me to get that thing underway again?

Oh, and the essay on Alan Moore's collaborative practice, which I've been meaning to edit a little bit and deliver to the good folks at Secret Acres—two days' worth of work, tops, which I've been postponing for more than a year and a half. Let's let the Moore essay stand in for all of the many essays I haven't written, including that nearly-finished thing that Mike and I were working on about comics and set text.

Then there are the blog posts I have planned but not written. That's a different category of guilt, since not writing them doesn't really hurt anyone but the blog. Still, I am wondering why I still haven't written the third of my three "Swansea Find" posts, which is supposed to be about Dudley Watkins's Desperate Dan. I was in Swansea back in July. How long could it really take me to write that post? And when am I going to post my other finds from the Joe Stinson Collection, for that matter?

And then there's the general woeful matter of squandered time. Could I have back all the time I wasted on, say, Civilization? (And that's not even to mention the egregious, awful time-squandering of summer 2007.)

And, finally, the most painful failure: I've got a book to write, and it's not exactly writing itself these days.

Writing this post was a little more painful than I meant for it to be. Now, if you'll pardon me, I'm going to spend the rest of the day grading papers as fast as I can and staying as far from the internet as I can.

...With that in mind, Isaac—this is Mike writing, now—I will refrain from sending the usual e-mail alert when I have completed my half of the proceedings and posted it to the blog; far be it from me to enable more guilty feelings in your day!

I don't think I care to get quite as specific as you did with the rehearsal of one's own personal failings. Not because mine aren't legion, but because I don't trust myself to stop before it gets too maudlin or icky (see, there's a perfect example of what I mean right there!). Indeed, I have depersonalized my doodle, as well, relying on abstract iconography for the most part, so I'll have to decode it in prose after this image:
What we have here is almost a mini-narrative of regrettable deeds, misdeeds, or failures to act, though in several cases the ill could just as well be a good were it reconsidered or redirected. From top left to bottom right in usual reading order:

1) Correspondence. I don't stay on top of it as I should.
2) Finances. I should really keep my eye on the ball more carefully and more often.
3) Inattention. The images here are meant to suggest "out of sight, out of mind," though that's one of the worst attempts at a drawing of a brain I have ever committed.
4) Skewed values. The item on the left of the scales is the earth, complete with its moon. The item on the right is a single person and his comfort. (I wonder who it could be?)
5) Reliability. There's an old saw about the dependability of oaths written on water. Note how the ink immediately leaches away into an indistinct blur.
6) The insufficiently-examined life. Hence the question mark for a head.

In the case of the original doodle, the medium is indeed the message, for I sketched it out on one side of a still-unopened envelope that instructs the recipient, "Please respond within 4 weeks." I can't remember when it arrived, but the other side of it furnished the drawing surface for a doodle penance post from January 4. (In defense of the recipient, the instruction might have been more persuasive if the senders had seen fit to identify themselves.)

And now, having indulged in this self-flagellating exercise, I repent of our having chosen this topic for Doodle Penance. Henceforth, let the good times roll!

Swansea Find #1: D.R. & Quinch

So: when I was in Wales last month, in a seaside town called Swansea, without much to do, I found myself poking around in the retail outlets, shopping absent-mindedly for comics and other random junk. I've got three of these posts planned, each focusing on a single piece of cultural flotsam. (You can picture me collecting them like driftwood or beach glass. Here is a picture of the beach in Swansea, to help you imagine:



... and to help you see why I was reduced to shopping.)

Anyway, on one of my idle perambulations, I stumbled upon an old shopping arcade—an indoor hallway with shops on either side of it—in which I found one Comix Shoppe. The guys working there turned out to be friendly and informative. When I asked what they might have that was local and interesting and hard to find in the States, they were stumped at first. There was one local minicomic that looked pretty clumsy; otherwise, the guy said, "You [Americans] pinch all our good writers," so pretty much everything recent was easier to get in the States.

... And then he realized that I wouldn't have seen the recent reprints of material from 2000 A.D.. He had a nice run of Judge Dredd reprints, and a near-complete run of Strontium Dog reprints, but I shied away from those, and even from Nemesis the Warlock, mainly because I wouldn't have much room in my suitcase to carry home several phone-book-sized collections. But I was willing to buy this little gem:



It's the most recent edition of The Complete D. R. & Quinch, and for those of you who didn't click on the image to enlarge it, let me point out that it's a sustained collaboration between Alan Moore and Alan Davis, who were also putting out their Captain Britain and Marvelman stories around this time. But this no deconstruction of the superhero genre: it's sci-fi teen-comedy surrealist mayhem of a fairly high order.

Waldo "D.R." Dobbs (the "D. R." is for "Diminished Responsibility") and Ernest Errol Quinch are teenaged aliens with short attention spans, devious plans, and tactical nuclear weaponry. They first appear in a slight "Time Twister" story that parodies the von Däniken / 2001 notion that human history was shaped by alien visitors.



D. R. and Quinch time-travel through human history, carefully arranging things so that when Earth people get a space program, make alien contact, and petition for membership in the League of Disadvantaged Planets, the visible coastlines of Earth's continents spell out a rude message directed at the dean of their college. It's a fun story with plenty of one-off gags, and the final plot twist isn't bad for a short piece of this type.

The hyperviolent, sneering, disaffected teens were popular with 2000 A.D.'s early-'80s fanbase (for some reason), so Moore and Davis brought them back several times, in longer and more convoluted stories that gradually turned one-joke caricatures into characters with a shadow of depth. Moore's humor leans away from anarchic sneering and into surrealist satire. He's not known as a comic writer (I mean, he writes comics, but not comically), but Moore is capable of putting together some pretty funny stuff, and his timing is good.

But I didn't plunk down nine pounds for Alan Moore's sense of humor. I bought the book because I like Alan Davis's creature designs. He does some innovative and interesting aliens. Here are D. R. and Quinch walking out of a photobooth they've just disintegrated, in an outer-space bus station.



The character designs in this book are a lot of fun.

The guy at the Comix Shoppe also strongly recommended "the joke about Marlon Brando," and a familiar-looking alien named Marlon does turn out to be a major plot point in "D. R. and Quinch Go to Hollywood." That's not the Hollywood on Earth, "which was, like, this completely worthless scumball planet that me and Quinch destroyed one time"; there's a planet Hollywood in this version of outer space. On that planet, Marlon is a big-name star who insists that he play the lead in D. R.'s movie, even though the title at that point is just "Something Something Oranges Something." Here's a script reading:



(Count those fingers: Marlon only looks human. Alan Davis has fun with alien appendages. I was most of the way through the book when I realized that D. R.'s girlfriend Crazy Chryssie has a thumb on either side of each palm.)

As it turns out, the script is illegible, but Marlon is unintelligible and illiterate to boot. (The illiteracy might be a sort of garbled joke about Brando's insistence on reading from cue cards rather than memorizing his lines, but I think it's probably just a riff on the way he mumbles.) So unable to read is our lead actor that he cannot see the warning sign about not pulling an orange from the pyramid of sixteen thousand oranges on the soundstage. The result turns out to be the defining moment in a chaotic mishmash that D. R. markets as a film:



And that's why the movie winds up being called Mind the Oranges, Marlon.

Digression: The joke about Marlon Brando's elocution isn't a new one, of course. When I was looking over that script-reading scene, it occurred to me that the timing was almost Kurtzmanian; then I remembered that Kurtzman and Elder's Goodman Beaver take a similar shot at Brando, in the era when On the Waterfront made him a heartthrob. Goodman Beaver puts on Brando's mannerisms in order to catch the eye of a woman who is ignoring him:



Anyway, D. R. & Quinch is certainly not Moore's finest work; it's not even his finest work of the period. (This is roughly the same era when V for Vendetta and Marvelman were appearing in Warrior.) I don't even think it's his funniest material of this era. (That laurel wreath goes to the Bojeffries Saga strips.) But it does have more than its share of interesting moments, and Alan Davis's space-alien cartooning looks very good to me. In light of the last few years in movies-made-from-comics, however, it might be interesting to revisit "D. R. & Quinch Go to Hollywood," for Moore's take on hollow, know-nothing movie culture written almost two decades before LXG.

Enemies from Between the Panels!

As you can see from Mike's new thumbnails for p. 5 of the Elfworld story, we've been talking about having Arntham's mystery assailant come from a space between the panels of the comic, at least metaphorically. (For a while it sounded we were going to have them live literally between the panels, which seemed to sort of mess up the tone of the piece. I like the tone that Mike's setting up now, though, for sure.)

Anyway, this got me thinking about a couple of manipulations of the two-dimensional comics page that aren't really relevant to our story, but are still pretty interesting. People tend to talk about this sort of manipulation of conventions as "breaking the fourth wall," borrowing a term from theater, though there are ways in which that metaphor doesn't transpose to comics very neatly.

The best known recent instance of this in mainstream comics is probably a moment in the fourth issue of Grant Morrison's Zatanna series, which is collected in the third volume of his Seven Soldiers of Victorycollection: after defeating a scary-powerful bearded evil magician named Zor, Zatanna briefly gains a sense of a world beyond the "scaffolding" and "machinery" of her own world. She holds her hand out to us as we read, and the visible pressure on her fingertips seems to literalize that "fourth wall" metaphor for a moment. (Her hand appears at just about life size, so it's tempting to match your fingertips up to hers while you hold the book.)

It turns out that she's reaching out to the "Seven Unknown Men," who (from what I've read about the series) are supposed to be the writers at DC Comics, or maybe more like their extrusions into the fictional world they write about. There they are, all looking bald and sunglassed, a little like Grant Morrison I guess, with a few typewriter parts in the visual space between them and Zatanna's hand. (What are those things in a typewriter called, that strike the ribbon and the paper? I don't know.)

(These images were drawn by Ryan Sook with Mick Gray.)

But this isn't the sequence that motivated me to make a post on ye olde blogge.

When Mike and I were talking about the enemies coming from the panel gutters, I was reminded of a story in Alan Moore's 1963 series (the issue called Tales of the Uncanny) that features a hero called the Hypernaut fighting a monstrostiy from four-dimensional space. It's a pretty entertaining sequence, and I'm going to post it here, partly just because I know Mike doesn't have a copy of this comic. You can, as usual, click on these images to make them legible.

I think the moment between panels three and four, when the 4-D monster folds a panel to make the Hypernaut shoot himself in the back, is pretty clever, even if it's a little difficult to read. (I think it's the position of the first speech balloon in panel 4 that causes the problem.)

This sequence, with the 4-D monster reaching around the "blueprint" of the locked door, takes advantage of conventional two-dimensional techniques of representation pretty nicely.

(We're not surprised, in panel two, to see the insides of the wall, because that's the easiest way to show that it separates the Hypernaut from the 4-D monster; in panel three, the monster not only reaches around this representation, but bursts slightly out of the right-hand panel border.)

A little bit of trivia: if you're looking at those Hypernaut pages and thinking, "There's something sort of funny about that inking -- it doesn't look like superhero inking," then you've got good intuition. These pages were drawn by "Sturdy Steve Bissette," one of Moore's collaborators from Swamp Thing, but they were inked by none other than "Charmin' Chester Brown." Yes, this Chester Brown: the excellent cartoonist behind Louis Riel, The Playboy, and I Never Liked You.

Moore's 1963 series is full of interesting little surprises like that. And no post about 1963 could really be complete without reproducing one of the hilarious mock advertisements that Moore has in each of these comics. I could do a whole post on those, but here's my favorite:

Ah, yes. From the back cover of Tales from Beyond, it's the wonderful world of amazing live SOIL-MONKEYS. Never let it be said that Alan Moore isn't funny. It's sort of surprising that this series hasn't been collected up in some format.