What Have We Been Reading? #4

Two versions of a panel from something I've been reading this week:

The first, which is what's in my notebook:



The second, a bit more faithful, thanks to some Photoshop hoodoo:



(Click that one to observe the halftoney faithfulness.)

Recognize it? It's from something really great.

What We Have Been Reading #3: Britten & Brülightly

Back before SPX, I posted a mystery panel for the third "What Have We Been Reading?" post, and no one has guessed it yet. But before I move on and write more about the minis I got at SPX, I thought I'd go ahead and say what I have been intending to say about the source of that image.



Britten & Brülightly came out in 2008, the debut graphic novel by Hannah Berry. It's a noir detective story set in London, featuring Fernandez Britten, an Ecuadorian detective who looks French, and his business partner, a talking teabag. (I appreciate the fact that the teabag, which only speaks to Britten, is neither explained nor marked as unusual. It's one of a few touches in the world of this book that make it feel off-kilter and seedy.)

I'm not sure how to rate the mystery plot in this book. On the one hand, I guessed the lynchpin detail of the plot as soon as the first clue about it dropped, but then the book did a good job leading me off the trail with red herrings, so that soon I wasn't convinced that I was right after all. I don't read a lot of mystery novels, so I don't know whether this counts as good practice or bad practice. I felt a little cheated when I saw the blocks slide into place, but that might just have been because I had a hard time following the storytelling in the climactic showdown.

When I drew my swipe panel, I said there were a couple of things about the book that I didn't like. One of them is the lettering.



I know I was complaining about computer lettering yesterday, but this book is having sort of the opposite problem: hand lettering that isn't steady or legible, and draws attention to itself in an unfortunate way. Speech balloons appear in an untidy all-caps hand, and Britten's narration is in a script that is at times genuinely hard to read:



I don't mean this as an insult to Berry, but because I know the lettering has been bothering me, I want to take a look at it in detail, to figure out what about it isn't working. After all, I teach this sort of thing on occasion, and I want to be able to give good advice to my students. Have a look at this balloon, enlarged from the size at which it appears in the book, and see whether you spot any problems that I don't mention:



So: for starters:



I notice that the letterforms aren't very consistent. Look at the two versions of B that appear in this part of the balloon, or the two Ls.

A lot of the letters are made in a single loose stroke (with no strong angles) that tends to open up and lose its shape, like the B in BE or the N in BRITTEN.



There's not much consistency in the proportions of the letter parts. Look at the way the bulb of the R dominates the letter in REALLY, compared to the one in HEARD. Notice the way the proportions of the E shift, too.



A lot of the letters, as part of their basic form, contain a C-shaped swoop, so that when you pile a lot of Rs, Es, Cs, and Ss together, it's really sort of hard to distinguish one letter from another.

My first reaction to this lettering is that it's been done by someone who doesn't often write by hand, and who rarely prints in all caps when she's not lettering a comic. It doesn't feel as regular and natural as handwriting, and it's not as legible as it could be.

It also doesn't mesh well with the drawing in the comic, which is much more controlled and natural. Maybe that uneasy fit is partly a question of drawing medium: the images are in a fairly lush range of watercolors, and there's no lettering equivalent for that. Would the letters look better if they were in good dark ink, though? Blowing them up for this examination suggests that there was an interface problem between the tooth of the drawing surface (watercolor paper?) and the pen used for inking (a fiber-tip pen?), but I'm not expert enough to say for sure what's making the edges of the letters so fuzzy.

The other main thing that bothered me about Britten & Brülightly was the character design.



Most of the characters are all cheeks and nose, so their heads are dominated by features that don't move and aren't expressive. Most of their heads end right behind the ears, and their eyes are way above the vertical halfway point on the skull. Given the realism of their environments, I found these caricatured distortions distracting. Moreover, since most of the characters' heads had the same distortions, it was hard for me to tell the characters apart. In the climactic scene, I needed to be able to recognize both of the characters revealed in the bottom panel here:



... but I was honestly confused. Had I seen those noses before?

I didn't hear much about Britten & Brülightly when it came out, and I'm not sure what sort of critical reception it received. I don't mean to make it seem like I hated the book. In fact, there's a lot I like about it. But I can't help wondering what it would have been like with a more practiced lettering hand or a somewhat more practical sense of character design.

What Have We Been Reading? #3

It's been a while since I've done one of these "What Have We Been Reading?" posts.

How posts in this format work: I swipe a panel from a comic I've recently been reading.


You, the readers and commenters, tell me whether you recognize the panel, and where you think it's from. A few days later, I draw up a more extended consideration of the book in question. (I still owe you a review of Shiga's Meanwhile..., don't I?)

Here's a hint about this panel: it contains both of the title characters of the book.

Another note, not exactly a hint: the panel also contains two things I really didn't like about the book.

I'll be on my way down to SPX directly after teaching today. I imagine I'll be able to keep posting from Bethesda, but I'm not sure what form those posts will take.

Doodle Penance: "detached mustache"

This week's "Doodle Penance" comes from some anonymous web-creeper who came by the site looking for "detached mustache," just as the title above implies.

Mike finished his doodle before I got mine done, so I'll let him explain his results:

In a way, this doodle would serve just as well as my inaugural contribution to WHWBR?, since it is based on images from one of the few comics I've had any time for lately. In my typical fashion for reading webcomics, though, I tend to forget to read this one for weeks on end, then binge on a couple of months' worth of archived strips. So far I'm up to January 2005, which means I am well acquainted by now with the usually mustachioed figures of Nice Pete and Lyle from the famous Achewood:



It should be clear from the typography (as it were) how my thought process worked on this one. Surprisingly, the Achewood-specific element came really late in the day: I had notions of just drawing guys screaming in agony as mustaches were torn from their faces, thereby conveying the sense of an "ache"; but this version seems less horrendous, as if the 'staches really did just detach, slipping down from 'neath the noses of Nice Pete and Lyle, and thereby, Samson-like, depriving two of the hardest characters in Achewood with the main source of their strength and danger. At least, they don't look so tough to me now that they are clean-shaven.

So that's Mike for this week. And, perhaps predictably, my own analysis of the search term proceeded along a similar path. Noticing, as Mike did, that both words contained the same string of letters, in the spirit of Lewis Carroll's "Mischmasch" word game, I started searching for the other magpies that contained T-A-C-H-E.

I hadn't known that tache itself, in English, means a buckle or a clasp; nor had I known that in French tache means a blot or a stain. Equipped with those obscurities and one cheat I allowed myself to invent, I cooked up this story in seven silent panels:










It was nice to draw an actual comic for a change. Not that I had time to do it, really. But sometimes you have to make time for fine art.

What Have We Been Reading? #2

Here's a swiped panel from one of the things that helped me pass the time this week while I was recovering from the extraction of my wisdom teeth.



So, what do you think, fair blog-readers? Can you identify the text I'm quoting?

(If not, don't fret: I'll have a longer review and consideration up on the blog in a few days eventually.)

What We Have Been Reading #1: Kirby's Eternals

A few days ago, I posted an odd mostly-magenta panel that Mike quickly pegged as a Kirby swipe. Now it's time to tip my hand and reveal what I have been reading this week.

I'm actually still making my way slowly through this, but it's a collection of the first eleven issues of Kirby's mid-'70s von-Däniken-influenced post-Fourth-World return-to-Marvel Eternals.

Who are the Eternals? Well, you see, in the time before human history, a cadre of titanic aliens (the Celestials) visited Earth and, from a single common ancestor, derived three races. The humans, you're already familiar with. The Deviants, whose genes are so unstable that every one of them is grotesquely different, have lived on the bottom of the ocean for centuries, since the destruction of Lemuria. And the Eternals are a bunch of undying and beautiful humanoids who meditate on the top of mountains, perfecting their superhuman mental gifts.

It's kind of high-concept.

When the series begins, the only human record of the Eternals, the Deviants, or the Celestials is in our ancient mythology. And then, just as a human archaeologist discovers an Inca ruin that depicts their presence, the Celestials return. The archaeologist's guide and assistant, Ike Harris, reveals himself to be in fact the Eternal master of flight, Ikaris, and suddenly massive wheels are in motion. The Celestials will observe the planet for fifty years, then judge it.

To Kirby's credit, the Eternals that we meet really do have the personalities of immortal semi-gods. They're either prone to pranks and hijinks, bored with their interminable lives, or pompous and portentous in their over-seriousness. (Ikaris tends toward the latter disposition, but Sersi, Makkari, and Sprite are all rascals.) And not even the most sober of them is incapable of irony.



Please click to enlarge and read that dialogue. The "raiment" that Ikaris has assumed is really anything but simple: it's a phantasmagoria of Kirbyesque design, and it's hard to imagine drawing this a hundred times...



Ikaris isn't the only sartorially complex Eternal. Consider the haberdasher who cooked this up:



Once the Deviants find out that the Celestials have arrived, they decide they need to provoke humanity to attack the space gods. (The Deviants fought the Celestials before, and that's why they live under the ocean now.)

So a bunch of Deviants dress up like "Space Devils"—I told you this was high-concept—and attack Manhattan.





There's Kro, the Deviants' general, dressed up as Space Satan. He's the guy I was drawing in my teaser panel.

It turns out that humanity is pretty easy to convince, on this score...



...and this is something I'd like to return to in a moment.

Eternals is fun because it gives Kirby room to imagine a new mythology, and because it gives him a chance to draw some incredibly crazy things. The Celestials are mountainous in size, and one of them (Arishem) carries the formula for world decimation on his brobdignagian thumb:



Yes, click to enlarge there. Arishem wouldn't fit on my scanner.

It seems pretty clear from the first five issues that Eternals doesn't happen in the regular Marvel universe. The story wouldn't make any sense there. Humanity is totally unaware of beings with superhuman powers living among them. The Eternals, not the various pantheons of gods, are the source of mankind's myths. Margo Damian panics when Ikaris, dressed in his bold-colored togs, jumps out of her plane and flies. When weird-looking guys in spacesuits start burning up New York, everyone assumes that it's the Devil, not the Skrulls. This can't be the world where The Fantastic Four fended off Galactus.

And yet, in the sixth issue, a skeptic named Arnold Radisch becomes the victim of an odd prank...



... and on the very next page, three well-equipped field agents are identified as "Nick Fury's men." From this point forward, the Eternals are in the same continuity as the Inhumans, Starfox can join the Avengers, Kro's kids can hobnob with Iron Fist, and Ajak can shoot pool with Beta Ray Bill or something.

I'd like to know what brought the Eternals into the Marvel universe. I wonder whether this was Kirby's decision, or something that came from Archie Goodwin, the book's editor. Anyone out there know more about this?

What Have We Been Reading? #1

I have an idea for a new feature for the blog here. I haven't even discussed this with Mike.

I thought it would be fun to post, occasionally (maybe weekly), sketchy or doodly "covers" of just a panel or two from something one of us has been reading (in the rare, precious moments of leisure between work and sleep).


(Oh, please click to enlarge.)

And what is that, that I've been reading? That's for you, Dear Reader, to guess in the comments section. As I'm imagining this feature, that's part of the fun! (Get it right, and maybe we'll figure out a prize of some sort.)

I'll come back in a few days to give an answer and a little capsule review.