Hello, thought I would write a fairly quick round-up of the comics I've been reading and also have a bit of an opine on DC Comics' newly announced Watchmen prequel series, where I ask: Have comics hit Uncanny Valley?
So as well as Judge Dredd, I've been reading quite a bit of Spawn. The collection of the first 12 issues I checked out of the library is lively and entertaining. The artwork is clearly indicative of the trend towards the increasingly smoothed, digital composition and rendering that we see today but it is lively and dynamic. I don't want to go too deep into detail here but suffice it to say that Spawn combines elements of old-school Faustian drama in a war of attrition between heaven and hell, with 1990s American narratives of anti-Clinton conspiracy theories, and fears of urban crime and decay. The colours are brash and almost brassy in a seemingly very 90s way. Neil Gaiman has a very interesting guest appearance that sparked off years and years of legal wrangling.
Chris Claremont's X-Men: God Loves Man Kills is the inspiration for the second film in the 20th Century Fox film series. In many senses it's a classic stripped down X-Men story. You have mutant persecution, ethical dilemmas, action and Magneto's morally ambiguous charisma. There is no need to contend with the improbability of Marvel's wider universe that heaves under the combined weight of the X-series's mutants and other "super humans." Interestingly, the universe (metaverse) dynamic is something also used in Spawn with the connections it draws to other Image comics titles, Youngblood in particular. The extended universe is an important super-trope but it can be baffling from the point of view of willing suspension of disbelief (see a recent Marvel cross-over event like the Civil War arc). In avoiding it, Claremont creates a poignant graphic novella type story.
I thoroughly recommend both.
Now, being a big Dandy Warhols fan (I recently picked up their single "Boys Better" on a green 7"), I decided to order myself a copy of the new edition of Courtney Taylor-Taylor's One Model Nation. It's a lugers and motorik tale of analogue synthesis, Berlin and the Baader-Meinhoff gang. Not necessarily something to enamour one to their german friends, it nonetheless collapses time and space to get at some of the British and American outsider preoccupations with Germany.While it may face accusations of being a vanity project, Taylor-Taylor's collaboration with Jim Rugg has more to offer than that.
Although the artwork has that digital sheen: an uncanny valley of sorts, where one can find themselves wondering about the humanity of the art, this is offset in two key ways. First: the printing technique, the ink on paper effect is highly reminiscent of silk-screen printing. This lends an air of "authenticity" to the effort--like it's something made by one of the characters. Second, the industrial aesthetics adopted by the heroes of the story make Warholian ideas of production-as-culture a central component, which in turn validates the silk screened look.
I would say that there were slight characterisation issues: I wish the members of the comic's titular Kraut rock band were more individuated in their private moments. The character of Gunnar, while interesting in a dark intense way is never in my mind explicated enough and his fizzling away at the end into near irrelevance is somewhat disappointing. How about a little bit more time spent on who this tangential figure is and why the band have an emotional investment in him? Too much backstory can bog down a plot but too little can leave the motivations for the present action unclear. Maybe I need to reread a bit more to get to the bottom of this Gunnar character...
So, today DC officially announced Before Watchmen. They had some artwork that leaked pulled a couple of months ago so this shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. There's a lively debate about the ethics of this project and DC's broader treatment of Alan Moore. My mind isn't completely made up but somehow it strikes me that this set of comics (enough material for two or three trade paperbacks like the common editions of Watchmen in book shops) will most likely not endure as well as the source material. I think I'll read them though.
I worry a bit about the covers. Now, on the website they're posted in low-res with some aliasing of the images fairly visible so this can't be the final word, but they really do seem to have that uncanny valley effect. My understanding is that the economic and practical reasons for doing art digitally these days are overwhelming but I can find the superficial over-perfection somewhat off putting. One problem I have is that if the line and rendering are overly perfected in the digital domain I find it distracting, reminiscent of online comic strips and strangely unhuman. All of these concerns can interfere with the willing suspension of disbelief. This debate is much more common when discussing the relationship between people and CGI characters like in the recent Tin Tin film or The Polar Express. Is there any literature on the uncanny valley when it comes to the reader's perception of the illustrator and the illustrated?
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