October Comics (2021): ALIENS book one

 

From Dark Horse Comics, written by Mark Verheiden, art by Mark A. Nelson, with lettering by Willie Schubert. This was Dark Horse's second major licensed title after a Godzilla special the previous year, and it became a ripe property for many great comic stories. 

Ten years later, Hicks & Newt are still haunted by nightmares of what they experienced on the moon of Acheron, when the aliens overran the colony and the marine complement sent to investigate the colonists' disappearance. Now, they are going back into space to gather specimens of these aliens for the government, which has ideas of creating a bioweapon from these fierce killers. Newt is looking for escape from the mental hospital where they keep her sedated, while Hicks seeks only revenge. But, unknown to most on the military ship, BioNational -- a huge corporation with the same ideas as the government -- has paid off the primary officer on the ship and is following them, in order to grab the aliens for themselves once the marines have taken care of business. Of course, everything goes to hell, because there's nothing like a happy ending -- or even a clean ending -- when aliens are involved. 

Verheiden's story is a proper sequel to the first two Aliens films and moves the story along nicely. But, I don't know if it would land so well if not for the moody, black-and-white art from Mark Nelson. Nelson's work in this series is, for me, the star. His feathery inking adds a dimension to the human characters that can be lost in very strict inkwork, such as would often be found in superhero comics, and his delineation of the aliens is breathtaking. They are dominant and creepy and intimidating all at once. I re-read this series regularly and almost always at this time of year. It's a perfect book to read as the weather turns colder and the rising breeze skitters dry leaves up the street. If you're looking for a great October read, you should check this out. It's great!

-chris

SIN TITULO by Cameron Stewart

Cameron Stewart is a fantastic artist.  He came out of nowhere, for me, when he worked with Grant Morrison on Sea Guy.  I loved his clean style and ability to convey emotions through a limited amount of lines.  Seriously, great work.

So, when I discovered he was doing a webcomic, titled SIN TITULO, I checked it out.  Spurred by the discovery by the main character, Alex MacKay, of his grandfather's death a month earlier, Sin Titulo is a maze of realities that weave in and out of one another, dragging readers down myriad rabbit holes with little explanation.  With the updates consisting of single, eight-panel pages, each time, Stewart had to reintroduced and then punctuate each page with a cliffhanger or a revelation or a new mystery.  And he managed that with great facility.

Dark Horse collected the web series into a nice hardcover, which is how I finished reading the story, as I am a poor one to keep up with online comics.  The biggest question I had, with this story that had dream sequences that fed into the memories of another, seemingly random, character, which wove into the story of MacKay's grandfather and an orderly from the retirement home where his grandfather lived out the rest of his life, was whether Stewart could stick the ending.

Rest assured, he did.

And as impressive as Stewart's art is, I was more impressed with his writing in this book.  The pace of the book, teasing out the various narrative threads that appear to have tenuous connections, at best, with one another, was masterful.  He offered the audience just enough to entice them without giving away too much.  And the way he manipulated not just the ideas and the scenes, but the words with which he explained things, was wonderful - a real joy to read and experience.

Sin Titulo is a great book, and if you are a fan of comics, you should definitely check it out.  I don't know how you could be disappointed.

chris

30 in 30: Concrete - Think Like a Mountain

#15:  Concrete: Think Like a Mountain
Storytellers: Paul Chadwick
Publisher: Dark Horse
Year Of Publication: 1989-1998 (collection: 2006)
Page Count (can be approximate or in # of issues format): 198 pages

WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT WRITING / STORYTELLING:

It’s an old lesson – and maybe more of a reiteration – that whenever you have characters with competing viewpoints, you have to view each character’s argument from the standpoint that “they are in the right.”  If we are lazy in contemplating both sides of the argument – spelling it out in positive terms as a true activist/believer would do – then the dialogue will not ring true, and it will come across as rhetoric rather than a story.

 
WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT ART / STORYTELLING:

One thing Chadwick likes to do often is show the hidden parts of nature (whether in the underbrush or beneath the Earth’s surface) in a panel.  It not only makes for an interesting and distinct visual stamp for Concrete, but it also ties in with the main character’s personal ideology.  Utilizing the visuals to enhance characterization is an interesting tool that I’d like to try and use in my own work.

Also, incorporating the entirety of the scene into the creation of the images can be effective and engaging.  In a specific instance in chapter 1 of “Think Like a Mountain,” the scene turns to the roof of Concrete’s home, which is on fire.  Concrete has solar collectors on the roof, and Chadwick uses them as inset panels of this scene to show the reaction of those on the ground to the person on the roof who is dumping the contents of the water collection tank that Concrete threw up there to stop the fire from spreading. 

 
RECOMMENDATION: B-

NOTES / REVIEW / SYNOPSIS This book collects the 6-issue series “Think Like a Mountain” along with a number of shorter stories that have been published elsewhere – most often Dark Horse Presents.  This was the last of the major Concrete collections for me to read and it was typical Concrete, which means it is a well-crafted book.  Chadwick managed to make the main narrative flow naturally, and his art was stunning in its detail and imaginative imagery.  Some of the shorter stories were hit or miss for me, and even when I didn’t enjoy a story, or felt like it didn’t work fully, I appreciated the experimentation incorporated by Chadwick in many of these vignettes.  If you like good comics, this is worth reading, and if you’re already a Concrete fan, then you’ll really enjoy this.

30 in 30: Witchfinder vol. 1

#3: Sir Edward Grey, Witchfinder: In the Service of Angels
Storytellers: Mike Mignola & Ben Stenbeck
Publisher:  Dark Horse
Year Of Publication: 2010
Page Count (can be approximate or in # of issues format): 152 pages

WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT WRITING / STORYTELLING:

In other media, creating a proper sense of unease is essential to a good horror story, which is something that can be difficult to achieve in comics.  But with this book, Mignola and Stenbeck manage to set that mood in the first issue through some non-sequitur transitions between the main narrative and panels showing close-ups of ancient carvings.  It’s something I’ve seen done in Mignola’s Hellboy stories and it works well here.  The transitions are disjointed, as they just “pop up” in the middle of a page without any captions or reason.  This not only jars the reading flow for a second but also takes your mind away from the story at hand and has you wondering what it means.  It’s not dramatic, but it is effective for this type of story.

WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT ART / STORYTELLING:

Listening to a podcast about movies this past week, the co-hosts discussed the fact that a simple way to help convey horror in film is to shoot daytime scenes in very bright, well-lit areas, and to film night scenes (the more horror-oriented) in deep darkness.  And though it may seem obvious, it’s a good lesson to keep in mind when writing horror, and one that Mignola does well with his spotting of blacks.  In this story, Stenbeck really works to utilize that Mignola sensibility while keeping to his own style, utilizing heavy blacks and deep shadows for the night scenes that are meant to be more horror-oriented while opening it up in the day scenes.  And it works really well.  Sometimes the best lessons are the simplest ones.

RECOMMENDATION: C

NOTES / REVIEW / SYNOPSIS:

This was a fairly typical “Mignola-verse” comic. Nothing stood out, for me, story-wise or art-wise.  That said, the fact that it was “typical” means it was well done and entertaining.  It won’t blow your mind but it will entertain, especially if you’re in the mood for a Mignola book.

-chris

OCTOBER COMICS - Universal Monsters adaptations

The Universal Monster films hold a dear place in many people’s hearts. They’re fun and, as a boy, were great for a scare when I watched them on television late at night. So, when Dark Horse published comic adaptations of some of these classic films back in the early 90s, I was onboard.

It’s been a number of years since I read them, but I remember enjoying these books immensely. The adaptations were very true to the movies from which they derived, and, as it is when we see Iron Man or Batman on the silver screen, it was a thrill to have these stories in a new medium for which I have such passion.

Dark Horse did a stellar job of pulling together creators for these books. Art Adams and Tony Harris are the obvious “name” stars to have contributed to this short series. Adams’s meticulous linework in the “Creature from the Black Lagoon” and his notable detail offer a fully-realized and icky swamp for this creature to reside in. Conversely, Harris’s more flowing ink style fit well with the fraying wraps of the mummy, bringing this encumbered figure to vivid, haunting life.

However, despite the involvement of Harris and Adams on this project, I was more anxious for the Frankenstein adaptation from Denis Beauvais. I was familiar with Beauvais’s painting from Dark Horse’s Aliens books. And he did not disappoint. His use of color and ability to evoke atmosphere through his painting fit this book perfectly. Easily, this is my favorite of the bunch.

And finally, Dracula was brought to life by Dan Vado, “supreme commander” of Slave Labor Graphics, and J.D. Smith, who works primarily as a colorist in the comics field today. Like Frankenstein, these two were able to imbue their adaptation with the atmosphere evoked in the film. The soft linework of Smith worked well in this respect.

Are these books scary? No. Are the original films considered scary by today’s standards? No. But these books are fun, and, if you enjoyed the Universal Monster films when you were younger, reading one of these will touch that nostalgic part of you that is also what keeps us reading comics. And that, to me, seems fitting.

chris

FYC bonus: Bryan Talbot's "One Bad Rat"

While I was writing for the Pulse, I had the opportunity to interview via email a number of creators whom I had admired for a long time. One of these creators was Bryan Talbot, creator of The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, Alice in Sunderland, and Grandville, among many other classics. Sadly, the piece on Bryan Talbot never made it to publication before my association with the Pulse ended. Now, I get to change that. And I need to thank James Robertson, curator of the great Bryan Talbot site, for setting this up for me back in 2008. If you are at all interested in the works of Bryan Talbot, check out www.bryan-talbot.com, it is a wealth of information and art.

-chris

For Your Consideration: Bryan Talbot’s The Tale of One Bad Rat
By Chris Beckett

The Tale of One Bad Rat
Written and Drawn by Bryan Talbot
136 pages, full color
HC: $19.99
Dark Horse Press, 2010 (2^nd ed.)

What It Is (with apologies to Dave the Thune):

Helen Potter is living rough – begging for food on the London streets as the chill of December sets in. A teenager, she has run away from home, following a similar path of her hero – Beatrix Potter. Her only friend is a pet rat. Living in Helen’s coat, it keeps her company as she tries to survive and figure out what to do next.

Walking along the banks of the Thames one evening, Helen is accosted by a drunk who tries to take advantage of her. Luckily, a group of boys roughly Helen’s age come to her aid, relieving the old sod of his wallet and Rolex in the process. They invite Helen to stay with them in their squat. She begs off initially, but the rain thrumming on the box she calls home changes her mind, and Helen makes her way to Kensington.

Helen finds comfort here for a while but is still plagued by the visions that have pursued her since she was young. She whiles away her days re-reading her Beatrix Potter library and copying the drawings found within. Helen feels a strong connection to these books and to their author. She tries to fit in with the others but when one of the cats kills Helen’s rat, she moves on once more, leaving the city behind to follow Beatrix Potter.

Heading into the countryside, Helen Potter is joined by a large apparition of her now-deceased rat. In the Lake District, Helen finds what she has been seeking – the peace needed to come to terms with her past and what her father did to her. With the understanding Helen gains from her self-reflection, she comes to realize that she must confront her father in order to finally move on with her life.

The Tale of One Bad Rat is a brilliant piece of fiction that feels far too real. Not just an expertly crafted piece of drama, One Bad Rat is also an important and relevant narrative that speaks to one of the most important and discomforting issues of our day – child sexual abuse. Tackling this subject is not an easy task – tread too far one way and one can be accused of “preaching,” while falling too far on the other side destroys the integrity of the work. But Talbot is at the top of his game with One Bad Rat and manages to weigh each of these priorities – telling a good story while conveying an important message – in order to produce an incredibly powerful comic.

The pacing of One Bad Rat is delicate, with Talbot teasing things out in an unhurried fashion. He intersperses the contemporary narrative with flashbacks, giving readers insights into Helen’s past, which in turn illuminate her current state of mind. Through these memories, the audience learns quickly what her home life was like. It’s not pretty and explains a lot about how readers have seen her act prior to this revelation. Uncomfortable with new people, unable to trust them, Helen is afraid of getting close to anyone and has an understandable problem with people trying to be affectionate with her.

Over the course of the story – originally broken up into a four-issue mini series – Helen grows as a person. She comes to grips with her past, moving beyond the guilt she once felt to anger at being taken advantage of. In a moving scene, Helen climbs the Old Man of Coniston, a mountain half a mile high, and, in the rain, releases her pent-up frustrations, screaming into the darkened sky. This is the turning point, the moment in which she knows she can finally confront her father.

Talbot is also an accomplished artist, and his work is as crisp and clean in One Bad Rat as in any of his other works. His landscapes in this tale rival Geof Darrow for their detail, and the facial expressions of his characters are second to none. There are some scenes that go on for pages sans dialogue, and Talbot conveys the emotion and the meaning of these scenes beautifully through the body language of the characters. It’s a classic example of using restraint to enhance the storytelling.

Talbot also utilizes the nine-panel grid with a facility rarely exhibited by other comic artists. In order to control the pacing of the story, he warps the nine-grid, stretching some panels right to the edge of the page while other smaller panels are overlaid on larger ones expanding across the background. He also combines panels to create larger ones when it suits the story, giving readers the comfort of the nine-grid while pushing at its boundaries to enhance the storytelling. It’s subtle but engaging, a master storyteller using all the tools available to create an important work of art.

Though the linework and layouts in One Bad Rat are impressive, the coloring is what really stands out for me with regard to Talbot’s art. There are many pages where it feels like he is using watercolors to achieve his effects. Much of the color feels it was applied with a brush, giving the art a more natural feeling than the flat coloring found in so many comics. The overall effect is that I find myself drawn in even more because of the classical beauty of the art. Even fifteen years removed from its initial publication, these four issues stand out against the “rest of the crowd” found on the comic racks in 2010.

An Interview with Bryan Talbot (originally conducted in 2008)

Chris Beckett: Why comics? What was it that attracted you to this storytelling medium?

Bryan Talbot: I've been reading them since before I went to school, before I could read, in fact, following the stories without the words. I started drawing my own comics when I was about eight. I just continued reading them as I grew up. I love illustration. I also love stories. With comics, you get both! What could be better?

Beckett: What was your inspiration for The Tale of One Bad Rat and what aspirations did you have for the book?

Talbot: The original idea was to set a comic in the English Lake District, a place I know very well. One day I visited the house of Beatrix Potter, the writer and artist of children's storybooks who died in 1943 and it occurred to me that she told stories using a mixture of words and pictures, as did I. After researching her, I didn't think that I could make an interesting graphic novel based on her life. The recent movie "Miss Potter" made it interesting by cheating - they just made things up, departed from the truth somewhat. I didn't want to do that.

Then I saw a teenage girl begging in a London subway station. She was being harassed by this huge Jesus freak, who was trying to get her to go somewhere with him. She looked so mortified, as if she wanted the ground to open and swallow her up. It put me in mind of descriptions of Beatrix Potter at her age: "painfully shy". That became the first scene in the book.

Beckett: How much research went into the creation of One Bad Rat, and was it difficult for you to work on a book dealing with such uncomfortable subject matter?

Talbot: It wasn't all that difficult. I just had to make sure that I wasn't being preachy or simplistic. I was careful not to make her father, the abuser, a two-dimensional monster. Like the vast majority of abusers, he's just an ordinary guy who's so selfish and thick-skinned that he doesn't consider his daughter's feelings.

I did a great deal of research. I read about a dozen books on the psychological after-effects of abuse, though one would have done. They all repeat the same things in different words. I also read transcripts of abuse survivors talking about their experiences and talked to friends who had been abused. The same phrases are repeated again and again, both in survivors’ descriptions of what they felt and still feel and in the coercive language of the abusers.

When I was plotting the story, I needed an excuse for her to run away from home. Sexual abuse is often a reason for kids running away and I put it in, almost without thinking. It was only after I'd done the research that I realised that this was far too important to be a marginal story device and that it had to be what the book was all about.

My primary concern was to tell a good, gripping story

I also read over a dozen books on Beatrix Potter.

Beckett: I like how you broke the story up into different sections that fell at natural points within the narrative ­ Town, Road, & Country. But these didn't fall within the prescribed 32 page increments when initially published. How did you approach the initial mini series and were any revisions necessary for the story to work in the standard comic format?

Talbot: No, it was just a matter of where to cut the story. That's why the comic page count varies in each edition. The story was structured as a novel. The book is really in two halves, Town and Country - a reference to Beatrix Potter's tale of the town mouse and the country mouse. Road is just a short linking sequence.

Beckett: You are an artist who has managed to achieve success within the comics medium on your own terms. That said, what advice would you give to aspiring creators hoping to break into comics?

Talbot: Persistence seems to be the overriding factor. If you have the talent and really want to do it, don't give up. Bad Rat was rejected by every publisher of illustrated books in Britain. This is before the current boom in graphic novels, when "comics" was a dirty word.

Beckett: What other projects are you working on that you would like to tell readers about?

Talbot: I'm writing the next CHERUBS! book, which is now being drawn by Mark Stafford. The first graphic novel in the series was published recently by Desperado. Mark is the hottest Indy comic artist in the U.K. and his work on CHERUBS! is amazing. I can only compare him to an Evan Dorkin or Bob Fingerman, though his style is clearly his own. The book is a supernatural comedy-adventure, featuring a bunch of gonzo cherubim loose in New York on the eve of the apocalypse.

I'm also about halfway through my next graphic novel. It's called GRANDVILLE (published by Dark Horse, 2009) and is a steampunk detective-thriller.

Holding the Center - "Reading" Sam Kieth's ALIENS

It's funny how, once something is in your head, you begin to see it everywhere. It's understandable. With a new understanding, you become more aware. Anyway. That's what occurred this past week.

One of my favorite blogs is the Comics Comics blog from the guys at Picturebox. They know comics - not just what is good, but the process, the history - and the insights you can glean from the posts at the site are fantastic. Definitely worth checking out if you love comics.

Anyway. Frank Santoro - whose books Storeyville and Cold Heat (with Ben Jones) are two of my recent favorites; great, personal comics that don't look like anything else on the stands - likes to write about process over at the Comics Comics site, and recently he's been discussing the "center" of the comic page. How (if I may paraphrase), if you utilize a 6-panel or similar grid, then the center is being given up to the gutters, and the prime portion of real estate on that page, the involuntary focus of the page, is lost.

Santoro goes into this in more depth in his two recent Comics Class posts - Class #1 and Class #2 - and does a far more informed job than I of discussing the importance of the center. It's intriguing and I would recommend hitting the links, and then put Comics Comics into your RSS feed.

This relates to my "Halloween month" revisiting of Mark Verheiden's initial ALIENS trilogy from Dark Horse in the late 80s/early 90s. I hadn't read them in years, and after watching Ridley Scott's director's cut of the original ALIEN, I was excited to dive into the longbox. I'll write about the stories therein later. But what I found interesting was a particular page of art from the third series, subtitled Earth War and drawn by Sam Kieth. The page in question is this one:



This is a complex layout, considering the reading of the panel does not follow the traditional left-to-right/up-and-down path. It goes down the left side of the page, and then jumps back up to read down the right side, despite the lack of dialogue in that final panel.

It made me think of debates I hear on some of my comic podcasts, where they lament the fact that there is no more centralized office where new artists get to learn about comic storytelling from masters of the form, similar to the mythical stories we hear of the Marvel bullpen where artists like George Perez interned with Rich Buckler while learning from others working in the same space. Some artists today want to create these elaborate page layouts, but then we, as readers, don't know how to follow the action on the page.

But Sam Kieth's layout for this page works perfectly, and he is ably assisted by Jim Massara who did the lettering for this series. You can follow the action with my rudimentary photoshop arrows below:



In the first panel, we have a marine reaching into a hole where a second marine has fallen. Our eyes follow the word balloons as they wrap around the first marine's head, following the final balloon as it stretches out into the second panel below, leading us directly to this marine's head in that second panel which is blown through by the alien. The trajectory of the alien's inner mouth (what is that called?) and the blood and brain matter sends our eyes away from the center of the page down to the bottom left corner. The blood spatters all the way to the edge of this panel and our eye falls into the bottom left panel, which has the second marine turning away from the spattering blood and brains - which tie this panel in with the previous one above it. Our eyes then naturally cross over to the panel beside this one - and it is important to note that these two panels at the bottom left of the page are as wide as the second panel right above it, the single gutter going up the right side of these panels effectively demarcating the left and right of the page. In this fourth panel, our eyes are raised up toward the top of the image by the retreating bit of food the alien took with it and the word balloon that falls out of the upper boundary of this panel. And this leads our eye over to the final, tall panel on the right and to the alien hanging above the marines. The dripping blood from the alien's mouth then leads our eye back down to the bottom of this panel and the two marines looking up into its hideous maw.

I was really impressed with how this page was laid out. I know I have encountered some difficulty in reading recent comics, mainly because enough thought has not been put into the layout of the page.

This is what I appreciate from Frank Santoro and other artists like him, and like Sam Kieth in this example. I also found it interesting to note that Kieth, whether conscious or not, refused to give up the center of this particular page. You'll notice that the dividing line between the right and left of the page is off-center, nudged toward the right. And it is telling that the main focus of this page - the alien's attack on the marines - is found within the center, as noted below.



These are things I didn't think about when I was just reading comics. But now that I'm trying to write comics, I examine the books more closely than I ever did. And having teachers like Santoro to show the way at Comic Comics is certainly a help.

chris