It’s Tuesday, meaning there’s a new episode of LAVENDER JACK -- recently referred to as “Steampunk Daredevil” by a Genre-savvy reader -- up for free on Webtoon! Check it out here.
Although I don’t know about Steampunk as a descriptor for this comic. I think of Lavender Jack as a little cleaner, a little more perfumed that that. “Laudanum Punk.” That’s more like it.
This week I’m writing the post early, since I’ll be gone at San Diego Comic Con all week. Before I leave, though, I thought we’d take a look at the development of an incidental character from this week’s episode. Main characters get designed before the series begins and background characters get worked out on the fly, but what about that awkwardly-placed middle character? More than an extra, less than recurring character? Let’s take a look at the process of creating the old man.
He’s never named in the story, and is only ever referred to as “the old man” in the script, but he plays an important role; he acts as an avatar for the kidnapped refugees, and a symbol of bravery even when you have no power to back it up. Even among the starved refugees, he’s old, weak -- but he’s not going to put up with this injustice for one day longer.
He begins as a character description in the script:
Originally I envisioned this panel as shooting past the old man and onto the lead orderly, but I changed it to a straight-on shot of the old man, thinking that was a stronger visual to start off the story. I also had him holding up his bowl instead of shaking his fist -- it’s not an aggressive gesture, just one meant to give emphasis to his impassioned cry.
This, for those who haven’t seen the film, is the late John Hurt in Snowpiercer:
Going off that, I began making ballpoint sketches in the margins of the printed-out script.
This first pass was both too soft and too cranky. I wanted him to have more dignity.
Here we see his face take on more sharpness and gauntness, and his hair becoming wilder. His eyes also became more intense and pained.
Incidentally: a good way to convey intelligence plus grim determination is having eyes that open with the upper eyelid instead of the bottom, paired with arched, furrowed eyebrows. The eyes suggest the character is alert and observant, while the brow gives them intensity. A great simple example of this is the design for Batman in Batman: The Brave and The Bold:
That all comes together in the final sketch:
The big hair gives him a more distinctive turn-of-the-century appearance, and works to offset his beard so that his eyes are at the center of his head, drawing our attention to the emoting he’s doing with those features.
We see how this all contrasts with the blunt, violent lead orderly:
As well as a strange similarity to the lithe, angular Lavender Jack:
The point of all this is to create incidental characters that make the world of the comic feel big, full of colorful people and unexplored adventures. If I expect you to buy into the purple science devil pulling kung fu B&Es, I’d better provide a world for him that’s at least as exciting as he is. Preferably more so.
As always, thank to everyone who reads, rates, likes, and/or comments. I might even see some of you at SDCC this week! And if you haven’t checked out the comic yet or just need to get caught up, here’s the link!
There’s a new episode of my mystery/adventure comic, LAVENDER JACK, up on Webtoon! Check it out for free here.
Written, drawn, and lettered by me, with colors by Jenn Manley Lee and edits by Bekah Caden.
This week, I’m trying out some different things with how I promote the comic. It comes out every Tuesday, but this week I only posted about it on Facebook and twitter the day-of. I’m seeing if spacing out the tumblr post to later in the week might help me keep the conversation about the comic going in between updates -- not to mention freeing up my work time on Tuesdays, since I do have to keep, like, making the comic. Seven pages of content a week ain’t exactly something I can bang out on my lunch break. Yet.
For this post, I wanted to share something I haven’t shown anywhere else -- the original design sheet for Lavender Jack that I included in the pitch:
My former studio mate Colleen Coover gave me some valuable feedback when I was coming up with the costume. Originally, there were more details to the shirt and eye mask, which she assured me would give me back pain over time if I didn’t pare them down. She also suggested losing those vertical lines on the mouthpiece, again to help simplify the design, as well as keeping him from ‘looking like a robot.’ I didn’t follow that advice at first, but the lines only lasted through episode three before I dropped them, as you can see in this week’s update:
Better, no?
Another thing I like about the costume is the three pleats on the back. They add character to the costume even when Jack’s back is to us (see also: Spider-Man, Superman, etc. Big ‘gold S on the back of the cape’ proponent, me.)
The three pleats also echo the three ledes on his gloves, giving the costume a stronger sense of cohesion.
You can see this also in how the shoulders, lapels, eye mask, ears, and horns all follow the same upward-sloping shape.
I’ll probably make more edits to the costume as I go along through the series, little tweaks and fixes that make it look better in motion and from different angles. But doing this design sheet at the dawn of the comic forced me to be more thoughtful about Jack’s costume, giving me what I feel is a strong base to start from.
Thank to everyone who reads, rates, likes, and/or comments. If you haven’t checked out the comic yet, here’s the link!
Lavender Jack Episode 4 is up for free on @linewebtoon! Check it out at this link here.
Long time solid dude @dirtyriver suggested that I include these updates with some BTS material, which I thought was a capital idea. I’ll be playing around with the format of these posts a little, so feel free to shoot me some feedback as I go.
Let’s start it off with a look at some process, from script to finish. For this, we’ll be examining the 15th panel of Episode 4.
SCRIPT:
I write out full scripts for Lavender Jack. I know some writer+artists prefer to keep it loose and figure out the story at the thumbnail stage, but I find it helpful to think in words first -- being able to describe a visual story using only written language lets me know that I actually understand it, or sometimes even lets me know whether or not it makes sense at all. These scripts are then reviewed by my editor, Bekah Caden, who makes them clearer, better tasting, and more filling.
THUMBNAILS:
Normally an artist will do loose thumbnails to get the visual beats of the story down and then transfer over to tight pencils. Due to time constraints, I cheat this a little with a tight thumbnail/loose pencil approach that I ink directly on top of.
I drew the Lord Mayor and Inspector Crabb into this panel, even though they weren’t present in the panel description in the script. This sort of thing happens a lot -- little issues you wouldn’t think of until you see them on the page. In this case, I realized that since the Lord Mayor was going to leave the scene in the next panel, we needed to see the group together in this panel, in order for the reader to have a clear sense of the geography of the scene.
INKS:
Here, ideally, is where everything sharpens and crystalizes. Lavender Jack is drawn entirely digitally, so I do a lot of tweaking of the ink lines to make sure all the characters are on-model and emoting properly. Even a dozen or so episodes into production, I’m still getting a feel for what makes these characters actually feel like these characters.
Apropos of nothing, Inspector Crabb is my favorite character to draw, followed shortly by Ferrier and Sir Mimley.
COLORS AND LETTERING:
Jenn Manley Lee is a phenomenal artist and colorist who makes this comic feel real to me. Whenever I get colors back from her, I drop whatever I’m doing to check them out. I’ve dipped out of parties, conversations, even dates to see her latest work on Lavender Jack. The lettering is my doing; this the first comic I’ve really lettered, at least since I started working in comics professionally, and I’m learning more about it all the time. Big ups to @dylanmeconis for teaching me how to letter in Clip Studio -- and how to draw a French Bulldog.
Bekah then looks over everything, we do final tweaks, and it posts on Webtoon, as you can see here!
Thanks for checking out the comic! If you haven’t, get into it, it’s a good time. You can hop right into the first episode here.
When a masked man begins terrorizing the wealthy upper class of the City of Gallery, exposing their dirty secrets through burglary and a mysterious power to make objects explode, the desperate Mayor calls in veteran detective Theresa Ferrier. What begins as a simple game of cat and mouse leads the two opposing forces of Detective Ferrier and Lavender Jack down a rabbit hole of mysterious organizations, betrayal, and lost love.
My new comic is out on Webtoon! Written/drawn by me, colored by Jenn Manley Lee, edited by Bekah Caden -- six pages’ worth of comic content, every Tuesday, for free.
Master Detectives. Masked villains. Byzantine conspiracies. Copious champagne. Elderly ladies in love. Check it out right here!
Picking up where we left off last week, we’re gonna dive back into1998′s BATMAN: GOTHAM ADVENTURES #1. You can check out part one here, but for those with time against them, the setup of the issue is: The Joker has killed the only son of industrialist G. Douglas Reid, who has put a fifty million dollar bounty on the killer clown’s head. With all of Gotham gunning for the reward, Batman and his affiliates have taken the Joker into their private custody until they can resolve the situation. With Batgirl guarding the Joker in the Batcave, Batman and Robin head off to answer a Bat Signal from Commissioner Gordon. We’re eleven pages in.
Along with the regular discussion of story flow and scene direction, I’m also gonna get really into some tiny moving parts that particularly interested me as an artist. That might ultimately make this one of the dryer entires in this feature, but hey -- if you wanna skim through the analysis and just enjoy some great pages, friend of mine, it’s okay by me.
BATMAN: GOTHAM ADVENTURES #1 and all characters contained therein are property of DC Comics, reproduced here solely for educational purposes.
***
PAGE TWELVE
Such a good design on that little Riddler iPod Shuffle (hereafter referred to as a “?Pod”). The question mark motif is clear enough to read, while still subtle enough to keep from being distracting. Loughridge does a good job of keeping the vibrant greens of the ?Pod distinct from the soft greens of Reid’s office in panel two. Burchett choses to include the Riddler’s staff on the ?Pod screen, which makes him immediately recognizable as the classic Batman villain and visually echoes the ?Pod’s design, helping us catch the motif.
Props to Bruce Timm for giving each of the Batfamily distinctive mask eyes, so they can be easily identifiable even in the shadows.
I’d also like to point out something so small it might even be an accident, but something I’ll definitely be using in the future: the different way Reid and Gordon hold their phones.
The angle of Reid’s hand in panel one suggests he’s holding the handset microphone closer to his mouth so he can better make his demands. His posture in panel two emphasizes the anger he feels, the power he’s trying to assert.
Compare with the angle of Gordon’s right hand, turning the handset so that the speaker is closer to his ear. Added to the way he’s gesturing with is other hand, this clearly shows us a man who’s trying hard to reason with somebody who just doesn’t want to hear him.
Try acting this out yourself -- imagining how you’d have to be talking to be holding a phone in each of these two ways. Like I said, it’s small, but it’s some real fine acting.
PAGE THIRTEEN
The ?Pod’s great design continues to help us out in the first panel -- it’s distinctive screen becomes an easily identifiable panel shape. Since the rest of the scene takes place in a green/teal environment, Loughridge gives that first panel a red boarder to help break up the scene. See also; the magenta sky.
There’s an interesting relationship between the Batmobiles in panels two and six. Here’s the page again, simplified to just those two panels:
See how the front bumper (gouger?) of the panel two Batmobile asserts itself over panel five? Somehow, this doesn’t interfere with the reading flow. Maybe it’s the simple black shape of the bumper, encouraging you to view it more as graphic element than a pice of diegetic matter. Or maybe it’s because the Batmobile is essentially a location, so we don’t expect it to interact with Batman and Robin inside -- and as a result, it doesn’t throw us when we see it encroach into their space. See also: the Uptown sign in panel seven.
Furthermore! The panel seven Batmobile’s rear fin creeps all the way back into panel two. It’s definitely purposeful -- it’d be easy to avoid with a very minor alteration in the angles of the cars so that they fit entirely within the panel borders. So why this atypical staging? It’s certainly a lively layout, for one thing. For another, liberating the Batmobile from the bounds of panel boarders makes it feel fast and powerful -- driving at liberty all over the page.
PAGE FOURTEEN
Look at that great smirk in panel three. The New Adventures redesign of the Riddler has nothing on the amazing sport coat and slacks look of the original, but it does have a certain stripped-down charm. It’s clean, distinctive, and devoid of redundancies.
This scene suffers some a little bit of messy geography, as we’ll soon see. For now, just take note of the balcony railing at the bottom of panel one, which is unquestionably where the gunmen are in panel four.
PAGE FIFTEEN
“Or merchandise worth an equivalent amount.” Templeton immediately ties the Riddler subplot to the main Joker narrative. Again, everything in this comic radiates from the clown prince’s murder of Reid’s son. The universe of the comic feels huge, but also connected.
The Riddler’s pose in panel two is his question mark motif writ large. Lowering himself on that ball, the “dot” in the question mark of his body, is a really good visual idea. Unfortunately, it’s at the heart of the geography problem in this scene.
But before we get to that, I want to point out a great example of setting up, execution, and finishing off an action: in panel one, the Riddler uses his cane to pull the rope towards him -- the setup. In panel two, he descends on the rope -- the execution. Then, in panel three, he’s still touching the ball -- finishing off the action.
PAGE SIXTEEN
Burchett makes great use of negative space to increase the tension of the Riddler’s countdown in the last two panels.
Sidebar: I’m remembering this bit from a Dan Olson video about -- don’t freak out now -- Triumph of The Will and the Cinematic Language of Propaganda, where he talks about the paradoxical perception strength and weakness of the enemy as viewed by fascism. Check out this segment of his video, and watch until about 10:50. It’s only a minute of video, and it’s interesting food for thought when viewed in the context of how to depict super villains, especially trickster-style villains like the Riddler (see also: Loki, Mysterio, or the Flash rogue who’s actually called ‘The Trickster’). Just try not to overthink the Nazi stuff.
PAGE SEVENTEEN
We jump from a panel of the Riddler to a panel of the Joker. Note how both of them are looking straight at us, both gesturing with their left hands -- the Joker’s even echoing Riddler’s countdown with his “Quarter to three” lyric. All of this means that we get to ride the tension of the Riddler scene right into this one, and multiply it by the demonstrably greater potential danger posed by the Joker.
The scene wrings extra tension out of the metatextual history that exists between Barbara Gordon/Batgirl and the Joker in the mainline DC universe. Even without that, we feel the threat he poses to her by the way he’s staged on the page. Look how the Joker dominates the layout: In Fig. 1 below, we have all the Joker panel appearances and dialogue (darkened so as to make the contrast more apparent), and all of Batgirl’s in Fig. 2.
He’s a talker, alright. But this serves another purpose as well: it reminds us that Batgirl is isolated -- trapped in that space with the Joker.
PAGE EIGHTEEN
On this page, the creative team and the clown prince have the same objective -- they’re trying to draw us/Batgirl in, commanding our attention, using a repetitive visual/verbal rhythm to hold our/her attention. The rhythm breaks when the Joker reveals his little magic trick in the final panel; on the art level, this is achieved by having the Joker break the panel border, along with the sudden snap to red.
PAGE NINETEEN
The intensity spikes with this page, both through the warmer colors and the more action-y diagonal gutters. Some clever staging here; Burchett is able to convey Batgirl’s jump in the first panel by showing us the railing behind the Joker, giving us a concrete landmark by which to place her in space.
Check out the motion lines Burchett and Beatty have given us here; see how no two actions take place along the same axis, creating a ton of energy on the page.
That black silhouette in the last panel is as gritty as this comic gets, but Burchett keeps it respectable by only showing the Joker, not the Batgirl he’s clobbering. On the next page, it’s immediately made clear she’s just knocked out, not fully Jason Todded.
Also, props of everybody for never messing up which of the Joker’s hands was cuffed. It’s the easiest thing in the world to accidentally switch it up, especially when a character turns their back to the reader.
PAGE TWENTY
The Joker is now free to move about the Batcave -- Burchett gives us a detailed look at the cave in panel one so that we viscerally feel this dangerous new liberty. He breaks the panel boarder again in panel two, which adds to that great double exposure as he sees the Batcave entrance. Sure, he saw it earlier when Alfred was coming down the steps, but it’s still a great moment. And anyway, it’s the Joker -- maybe he just forgot about it in all the excitement. Who’s to say?
PAGE TWENTY ONE
And we’re back. Here’s the heart of the geography problem -- or at the very least, a continuity problem. Back on pages fourteen and fifteen, we saw the Riddler’s goons are up on the balcony, along with him.
The Riddler then descends to the stage where Batman and Robin are standing. He then begins a one-two-three countdown; we leave the scene when he’s on two. Now he’s about to count three, and suddenly the goons are on the stage as well.
Gunfights are logistically tricky in any medium, especially when your heroes are unarmed. In this instance, the goons had to be down onto the stage so that Batman and Robin could realistically (”realistically”) take them on hand to hand. But since we never saw them descend to the stage, nor would they have had enough time to believably get there via stairs or whatever, their sudden appearance on the stage is very jarring.
A fix; in panel three on page fifteen, pictured below, we just have the goons descending on their own ropes.
If they’re fully rendered, they can be placed behind Robin, The Riddler, and Batman without interfering with their silhouettes.
PAGE TWENTY TWO
This is real solid action blocking. First panel has Batman in the foreground, Robin in the back. Batman’s punch leads organically into panel two, perpendicular to Robin’s kick -- now he’s in the foreground, with Batman in back. In each panel, they have their own fights on their own planes of movement, making the space feel huge. It’s a very short, simple fight scene, but this variety of staging from panel to panel makes it feel much bigger than it actually is.
Burchett also manages to maintain a consistent rightward movement throughout. It totally feels like Batman and Robin are just tearing through these guys, and the uniform direction of movement is a big part of that.
PAGE TWENTY THREE
Back to Wayne Manor with this very cool page. Check out how the action funnels towards the bottom:
By placing the Map to Movie Star Homes where he has, Burchett guides the eye back to the central axis of the page. The action then travel’s straight down the central axis, getting narrower and narrower panel by panel, from the Joker’s wide stance to Alfred’s tactical crouch.
(The vibrating tea tray is a very nice touch.)
PAGE TWENTY FOUR
Wobbly panel shape as a shorthand for a woozy character coming back to lucidity is an evergreen technique. I’m also a big fan of the popping bubbles thing, but your milage may vary. When Batgirl comes back to full consciousness in panel three, Burchett cuts to a wide shot, soberly showing us all the characters in relation to each other, which is a great way to indicate a return to reality. We end this subplot, which preyed on themes of isolation and home-invasion danger, with Batgirl and Alfred standing together. An satisfying emotional mini-arc -- and appropriately, Alfred gets a joke in on the Joker.
***
You can get this entire issue -- for free! -- on Comixology, along with every other issue of GOTHAM ADVENTURES for around a buck apiece.
For a couple of my own comic creator bona fides, check out WILL EISNER’S THE SPIRIT RETURNS and SAN HANNIBAL, and pre-order the trade collection for BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: GODS AND MONSTERS.
Additional content can be found on my website, danschkade.com, as well as my twitter!
PAGE x PAGE ANALYSIS-- BATMAN: GOTHAM ADVENTURES #1
PUBLISHED: DC Comics, June 1998
SCRIPT: TY Templeton
PENCILS: Rick Burchett
INKS: Terry Beatty
COLORS: Lee Loughridge
LETTERS: Tim Harkins
EDITORIAL: Darren Vincenzo
For the last couple weeks, the time I might have otherwise spent writing more Page x Page Analyses was instead spent writing, revising, and thumbnailing the first issue of a new series. If the winds stay southernly, I’ll have more to say about that soon -- but in the meantime, it’s got me thinking about what goes into making a successful first issue. Charged with introducing the cast and premises as well as telling an engaging money’s-worth story, they're tricky beasts, even when you’re dealing with established characters. Maybe even especially when you’re dealing with established characters. For kids.
Such is the case with 1998′s BATMAN: GOTHAM ADVENTURES #1!
I looked at issue 17 of this series in the debut installment of this feature. Aside from writer Ty Templeton and penciler Rick Burchett, the same creative team was here at the beginning, and all of the same good qualities are in play: strong meat-and-potatoes storytelling, muscular use of color to set location and mood, clear, clean inking, and solid lettering that invisibly guides the reading flow. With its intelligent use of simple character-driven plotlines and dynamic visual direction, BATMAN: GOTHAM ADVENTURES #1 is a prime example of how to introduce new readers to a full, lived-in world -- even if that world has been on your TV since 1992, and in continuous publication since 1939.
BATMAN: GOTHAM ADVENTURES #1 and all characters contained therein are property of DC Comics, reproduced here solely for educational purposes.
***
PAGE ONE
We kick off our new Batman comic by having The Joker leaping straight at the reader as the entire Batfamily gives chase.
Why mess around if you don’t have to, y’know?
This is not, strictly speaking, a splash page. The inclusion of that little “With a price on his head!” panel to go along with the title is blatantly non-verisimilitudinous (meaning it explicitly breaks any illusion we have that what we’re seeing is real, immersive). I think this was a canny move; this issue is going to do some really tricky tone-juggling where the Joker is concerned, so starting out with these two very different deceptions of him right on the first page immediately lets us know what to expect. Lee Loughridge’s colors are on the job to keep this from being confusing, clearly placing the first panel in a different spacial and temporal plane than the main image.
PAGE TWO
The first panel follows immediately from the opening page, establishing a nice fast pace of action. I love how the Batfam looks sort of like a flock of birds -- it’s a cool way to add a dynamic, distinctive element to what is essentially just a footchase.
This whole sequence has particularly clear lines of motion, beginning with this page:
Having Batman point directly at the reader in the last panel is an effective way to snap off the action flow of the page, making it feel more three-dimensional than the simple zig-gag it would be otherwise. Side note: how great are those sharp silhouettes in panel three? Funky and distinctive, selling the force of the explosion while still letting us know who’s who.
PAGE THREE
Lots of good stuff going on with this page. Again, the action continues directly from the previous page as Robin follows through on Batman’s order and saves a civilian from the falling debris. We get a nice little bit of characterization-through-action -- Robin is a good soldier, a capable superhero, and a wisecracker -- as well as demonstrating how the Batfamily is concerned with protecting the people of Gotham City just as much as they’re concerned with catching criminals. Seems pretty basic, but it’s surprising how often that simple mission statement gets lost in the shuffle of telling a new superhero story.
See also how the space where the flaming debris land in panel two is along the same latitude as where the civilian was standing in panel one. The arc of Robin’s swing also passes through that same point. This is a helpful touch, showing us how narrowly she just avoided a fiery demise.
We do lose track of Batgirl for the rest of this scene, which could be considered a structural error in the script.
Burchett makes sure we don't lose track of Batman and the Joker by turning them into there sharp, easily identifiable silhouettes, backlit by Loughridge’s distinctive colors in the explosion and the screen. You really can’t miss them. Tim Harkins continues to help us out on the lettering front, drawing a line between Batman, the Joker, and Summer Glisan’s news report. The citizens below add to the general danger by making the city feel full of vulnerable citizens, as well as helping us get a sense for how high off the ground the action is.
PAGE FOUR
This is such a great way to get exposition across. Where an infodump like this can often kill a story’s momentum, the ongoing Batman/Joker fight keeps up the intensity of the scene in a way that really doesn’t take up all that much real estate on the page. This device also connects our main characters to the exposition by allowing the Joker to directly react to it. He really is a loathsome villain; Templeton’s script does a deft job of balancing out the goofy, whimsical elements of the Joker with the lethal. Too far one way and he’s just a clown who makes Batman look silly for having to contend with him -- too far the other and he’s a shrill, boring serial killer.
More clean movement on this page:
Note how this layout draws our attention to the horrible rectus smile in panel three from two different directions; the action line from the previous panel as well as the Joker’s shaking fist, with Batman’s head in the bottom left corner pointing up to it for good measure. All conflicts in the issue derive from the fact that the Joker murdered this young man, so it’s very important that we absorb this image before we move on to the next page.
PAGE FIVE
See, again, the great balancing act. The anti-bat spray and the giant inflatable glove are patently ridiculous, but when laid over the face of a father driven mad by grief, the clownish gadgets become salt in the wound. The reader really identifies with the father here; imagine if you lost the person you loved more than anyone in the world, and this prancing asshole is the one responsible. Even when you put a price on his head, he just laughs at you. Look how sinister he is in panel three. He’s the most killable man in the Gotham City, this guy.
PAGE SIX
Man, how do you not read that first line in Mark Hamill’s voice?
There’s a really interesting use of space here. The action takes place all around the edges of the page, giving the whole sequence this great sense of verticality -- even if there is a slight gaff in that Burchett and/or Beatty forgot to draw the Batline in panel four. That said, I do love the inclusion of the reporter and cameraman in that panel, giving the environment a nice sense of depth that emphasizes the splattery fate from which Batman just saved the Joker.
The action, and with it the scene, ends in the left of the last panel. This leaves the city shot in the right on that panel to act as a sort of ‘pan away’ moment, creating a quiet beat without cluttering the page with another panel. It’s super effective.
Something I forgot to address elsewhere: Burchett is always contrasting the rigid, unflappable Batman with the constant mugging of the Joker. This is largely down to Bruce Timm’s terrific character models, but Burchett is a sharp enough cartoonist to know how to stage them so those contrasts really land.
See also: this great juxtaposition at the top of this page.
PAGE SEVEN
I’ve always loved this lady in the bottom corner. No analysis, just crushin’.
PAGE EIGHT
Weirdly enough, The Joker is our POV character for this page. Despite being a comic book tie-in to a very popular tv show, this is still technically the first time we’re seeing the Batcave in this comic book series, so Templeton and Burchett give us this nice spacious look at the pace. The Joker’s reaction helps sell it as an impressive space, even if he’s mostly just talking nonsense. Loughridge uses this scene to establish the cool teals and greens that will indicate Batman’s private environments from here on out, such as the cave or the inside of the Batmobile.
Cutting from the huge shot of the cave to the narrow horizontal final panel adds to the suddenness of Batman cuffing the Joker to the railing.
“Awp!”
PAGE NINE
This is our introduction to Nightwing, so of course the wayward bad boy Batchild has to come screeching into the panel on his badass black motorcycle instead of just walking in like a normal person. Templeton and Burchett give Robin something to do by having him goof around on the railing, which avoids having the scene become just a bunch of people standing around in capes. See also: wringing a moment of tension out of Alfred’s introduction. I dig Batman’s snarl in the last panel -- the most emotion we’ve seen from him so far. Alfred being in danger will do that.
PAGE TEN
Burchett adds dynamism to panel one by tossing a dutch angle into the mix. It’s a smart move -- having a diving action like a tackle go directly towards or away from the reader can sometimes come across as static or just unclear. The dutch angle gives this panel enough energy to sell the action.
Also, a rare continuity gaff: the stairway entrance has a doorjamb here, where on the previous page it’s just a rough opening in the cave wall. The Joker looks a little bit off to me as well -- could this have been one of the first pages Burchett drew in the new B:TAS style? It’s a pretty common practice for an artist on a new book to initially draw some pages from the middle of the issue, just to get a feel for the new project on some pages of lesser relative importance. When it comes to this specific page, of course, I’m purely speculating.
Regardless, Robin looks excellent in panel four.
PAGE ELEVEN
What a great page. This is the point at which the main plot splinters into its various subplots, emphasized by seeing all our players head off in their own directions in panel one. Batman hands the scene off to Batgirl in panel two, and in panel three we fully establish her as the new POV character for the Batcave scenes going forward. In the next panel, we see the rest of the Batfamily drive away on their various conveyances, the looming silhouette of the Joker’s handcuffed arm, and Batgirl herself in the midground between them, really selling how suddenly isolated she is. The last panel says it all -- even if he’s handcuffed and weaponless, no one wants to be alone in a room with the Joker.
Here, we end the first act with all our plotlines well in play:
Batman and Robin try to crack the case Gordon has for them (which, if you were paying attention on page seven, you know involves The Riddler)
Nightwing on patrol, which will almost certainly involve...
All the Gothamites who’re scouring the streets looking for the big payday
Douglas Reid using all his wealth to get his revenge on the Joker
And Batgirl, guarding the man himself in the Batcave.
All of which will unfold over the remaining twenty seven (!) pages, each of which is as dense and active as what we’ve seen so far.
There’s a lot to love about this comic, and I’ll be coming back to it in the weeks to come. But today, I just wanted to look at the opening pages of a comic that does an exceptional job of using a clever, character-driven premise to set up its world.
***
You can get this entire issue -- for free! -- on Comixology, along with every other issue of GOTHAM ADVENTURES for, like, a buck or two apiece.
For a couple of my own comic creator bona fides, check out WILL EISNER’S THE SPIRIT RETURNS and SAN HANNIBAL, and pre-order the trade collection for BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: GODS AND MONSTERS.
Additional content can be found on my website, danschkade.com, as well as my twitter!
PAGE x PAGE ANALYSIS — “GANGBUSTER: SWING ANNA MISS” from THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN #500 (1993)
PUBLISHED: DC Comics, June 1993
SCRIPT: Jerry Ordway
PENCILS: Tom Grummett
INKS: Doug Hazelwood
COLORS: Glenn Whitmore
LETTERS: Albert De Guzman
EDITORIAL: Mike Carlin with Jennifer Frank
A couple days ago, I took a look at a short segment of the sixty-five page ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN #500 — specifically, the four-page introduction to Superboy by Karl Kesel and Tom Grummett. Today, I wanted to revisit a different part of that same issue: the nine total pages of subplot that focus on the nobody’s favorite hard-hitting hero of Suicide Slum: GANGBUSTER.
Oh, Gangbuster. While many casual comic history buffs may cite 90s comic character design trends in terms of pouches and spikes, I feel like Gangbuster represents the aesthetic of that era in an equal but opposite way. His “What if Firestorm was Robocop” look is such a prime example of what straight attempts at designing new comic book characters in the classic superhero mold looked like at the time. The shoulders. The helmet. His little logo. He’s so serious. He’s just the worst. I think I might love him.
But hey, Andrew Weiss I ain’t — far better to let you see my man Gangbuster in action and let his performance speak for itself. So let’s tuck in and take a look at his subplot in ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN #500, which I’ve entitled, for the purposes of discussion: “GANGBUSTER: SWING ANNA MISS.”
THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN #500 and all characters contained therein are property of DC Comics, reproduced here solely for educational purposes.
***
PAGE ONE
Aww, yeah. Drink him in.
Grummett and Hazelwood create a sense of distance between the buildings by showing the foregrounded building Gangbuster’s hanging off of in full detail, while the buildings in the background are rendered in black silhouette, suggesting they’re far enough apart that light affects them differently. This has the side affect of giving Gangbuster a sense of height — if the buildings behind him feel far away, we automatically assume the ground must be equally far below. This is a great hero shot, besides. From this first image, we know what kind of superhero Gangbuster is: the weapon and helmet suggest he has no powers, the collar implies he’s kind of a squarejohn. To my eyes, his design invokes two moralistic Marvel characters: Daredevil and Cyclops.
The message is clear: the Super R.A. is here to kick some ass.
PAGE TWO
Excellent establishing shot of the alleyway — going with an over the shoulder angle concretely places Gangbuster, our audience surrogate character, relative to the other characters below. When added to the previous splash page, this gives us a very strong understanding of the space: a narrow alleyway with entrances on both sides.
Note how Grummett makes panels two and three a smaller inset of panel one, giving the feeling that what we’re seeing is a detail of the larger scene. Colorist Glenn Whitmore even makes the gutters of these panels a dark red, a color we already associate with Gangbuster, further coding the scene as being observed by him, even though panels two and three are not literally from his POV. This might be reading into things too much — this color coding might just be a happy accident. Super minor continuity issue with his nunchucks: they’re dangling free on page one, but gathered into his fist here. Personally, I’d think the clinking chain connecting them would give him away. But who knows? It’s the DC Universe. Maybe they’re hard rubber instead of metal. Moving on.
Also, that guy next to the car. Keep an eye on him.
PAGES THREE AND FOUR
These pages work together as a sort of splash in three parts. The black field floating behind the panels on page three is a great way to add depth to the layout — Grummett employs this several times over the course of the issue, always to good effect. On the big splash page, I really like the visual representation of the whipping motion of the nunchucks; it adds force and speed to a weapon the can often look sort of ineffective on a static comic book page. The slowly increasing size of Gangbuster across both pages conveys the growing intensity and brutality of his attack on these guys. This also sets up this moment as the height of Gangbuster’s evening — we’re clearly meant to be more or less on his side right now. After all, we need a hero now more than ever. Superman’s dead.
PAGE FIVE
The first three panels on this page consist of tight action shots, limiting our ability to see our environment, so we share in Gangbuster’s surprise when we pull to a wide shot in the last panel. Dropping out the border in panel four, surrounding the figures in negative space, enhances the feeling that the cops have swarmed him from out of nowhere — although note that Grummett adds enough puddles and junk on the ground to make the figures feel like they’re standing on something solid. Lastly, making all of the figures the same cool shade effectively equalizes them; Gangbuster isn’t a superhero, he’s just some schmuck that’s about to get canned.
PAGE SIX
Is the cop who calls out to Gangbuster in panel four the same one who fires at him in panel five (“Charlie”)? Logistically, It would make sense — there’s no one in front of him in panel four, and Charlie in panel five is clearly in front of the “Charlie -- No!” cop in that panel (who we’ll call “Killjoy”). Character-wise, however, it would make more sense for the panel four cop to be Killjoy — he’s even holding his gun the same way in both panels.
I point this out as an example of the pitfalls of making characters in identical outfits too physically similar. If you’re drawing a group of big city cops, there’s no reason not to make them diverse in race and gender, if for no other reason than to add easy distinguishing elements between what is otherwise a totally homogenous pack of unnamed characters (although there’s plenty of other reasons why this is a good idea).
All that said, great bit of action between panels one and two. The close-up of Gangbuster grabbing the cop in panel one, a right to left motion, leads directly into the huge left to right throw in panel two. I love the anatomy in this scene — you can really feel how much effort the decidedly non-superhuman Gangbuster has to put into the throw. Once again, Grummett and Hazelwood create a feeling of space in panel two by dropping the back two cops into black silhouettes, with their badges still visible to create a feeling overwhelming, encroaching authority.
Also, considering how ineffective small arms typically are against costumed crimefighters, our boy Charlie is one crackerjack marksman. Or maybe — just maybe — Gangbuster is a goddamn terrible superhero.
PAGE SEVEN
Here is where I point out a minor flaw in this whole sequence; now that we’ve left the alleyway, we can say conclusively that the guy in the suit standing next to the car on page two never showed up again. He’s not even in the pack of cops surrounding Gangbuster on page five — we just lose track of him entirely. It’s a small thing, but since Grummett (or possibly Ordway in the scripting process) chose to include him in that establishing shot of the alleyway, it would have been nice to see him again when the Undercover Cops twist goes down. Losing him like this adds to the hash this scene makes of the work done to establish this space on the first two pages.
Couple possible fixes: One, take the guy in the suit out entirely. The initial interaction of the undercover cop and the drug dealer is framed very tightly and personally, so just have them be there (ostensibly) alone. Then pull the reveal of the undercover cop as is, and all the uniformed cops still swarm him from — the walls? I guess? They kind of come out of nowhere.
Two, and my preferred fix, would be to have a couple of guys in suits sanding by the undercover cop’s car on page two, with one distinct guy standing next to the drug dealer — a big guy in a leather jacket, something that screams “bodyguard.” On page three, Gangbuster takes out the bodyguard in panel two instead of the drug dealer. We keep Gangbuster wailing on the drug dealer on page four — that looked great. On page five, instead of just punching out that one cop, we have Gangbuster diving into the men in suits in a more “superhero takes on a bunch of thugs” type fight. Then the men in suits reveal themselves to be undercover cops, instead of the uniformed cops just appearing out of nowhere at the end of page five— something I keep bringing up because it really does bother me, since the geography of the narrow alleyway was so well established on page two, making the sudden appearance of the uniformed cops feel a little like a cheat. Wouldn’t Gangbuster have been ideally situated to see them hiding in the alley, from his vantage point on the fire escape high above? This proposed scenario cleans all that up, and loosely preserves the extant flow of action. And even though I did ramble on about this for a goodly while, it is ultimately a minor flaw. But then, that’s the thing about minor flaws; there’s usually a pretty easy fix.
Meanwhile, this page: Really strong lettering from Albert De Guzman at play here. Look how he guides our eye down the page, helping Grummett’s already clear line of motion by creating an arrow of words pointing right to Hob’s Bay.
Grummet consistently makes Gangbuster small (I.E. less powerful) on this page, a clear contrast to how huge he was during the opening pages. Here he’s dwarfed by everything on the roof, from vent pipes to chimneys, culminating in the huge cop’s hand + gun in panel four. I personally would’ve liked to have shown a little more of the cop’s arm, enough to see an official insignia up on his shoulder, but we’ve already established that the cops’ jackets have furry cuffs, so it works fine enough as is.
PAGE EIGHT
There’s been no shortage of great layouts in this issue, but this page is a cut above. The narrow verticality of that first panel bleakly lays out the stakes at play; the cop on the roof, the three story jump, the bay below. Grummett and Hazelwood use the fog off the bay to drop the buildings beyond into the deep background, visually “clearing the path” to the bay.
The second panel eliminates everything but this huge full-figure shot of Gangbuster diving, with a couple scraps of lead paint from the roof to place him in space. We can’t see his expression, but his captioned dialogue is tremendously affecting. Note also how while Gangbuster is diving towards the bottom on the page, the lettering still leads us organically to his plunge into the bay in panel three, even though that panel is layout-wise much higher on the page.
Nice reverse shot in that last panel, reminding us how far Gangbuster has just jumped and adding tension to the idea that he might not have survived. The last line is continued in a caption on the following page: “…No way anyone could’ve survived THAT!”
Another note about the last couple pages: Grummett always has Gangbuster moving in the same direction, left to right, throughout the entire rooftop chase. For this reason, the bullet Gangbuster catches is in his right arm — the arm that’s always facing us.
Oh man! It could’ve been a cool visual dichotomy, if we had seen the official insignia on the sleeve of the cop pointing the gun at him at the end of page seven! The officer of the law has a symbol of his authority where the vigilante has a bullet wound! Ahh, well. Still a phenomenal page.
PAGE NINE
We come back to this subplot after about twenty pages with a nice, low-energy establishing shot of the docks. The wafting, flapping paper is a great way to suggest windchill and urban decay. The bay is to the left of the page — when last we saw Gangbuster, he was making a rightward dive into the bay. On a storytelling level, we’re on “the other side” of the bay. Gangbuster got away clean.
High-Pockets is immediately helpful here, despite having a crummy night. No deep analysis to be had here, I just like it. Good little character trait for a good little character. As he hauls Gangbuster out of the drink, we see he’s transferred his wine to the pocket of his coat, which he then gives to Gangbuster. High-Pockets doesn’t offer him his hooch, mind you — Gangbuster just straight jukes it. We end on a nice reverse silhouette as High-Pockets and the slumped, defeated Gangbuster lope off into the shadowed, Superman-less city of Metropolis. Gangbuster’s last line concludes in caption on the next page: “…Then I’ll be finished with this stinking place!” Our hero, kids.
Again, this is one of the first comics I even read. When I think about it, Gangbuster has to have been one of the first, say, fifteen superheroes I was ever aware of. Before Green Arrow or Daredevil or The Question or Black Canary, I knew about Gangbuster — a character who, as depicted here, just isn’t really cut out to be a superhero. He’s a washout, a bencher, a big ol’ can of coulda beans. He’d be one of the hockey pad Batmen from The Dark Knight, only they wouldn’t let him join because he’s just such a giant prick. He’s awesome. Gangbuster, man! Gangbuster.
***
You can buy the full 65-page issue of THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN #500 for the surprisingly low price of $1.99 off Comixology! It’s absolutely worth the read, containing a truly emotional Pa Kent story as well as the introduction of Cyborg Superman, which is, if nothing else, exceptionally well-paced.
Meanwhile -- we’re in the final days of the Kickstarter for SECTION ZERO!
Tom Grummett reunites with writer Karl Kesel to bring back the high quality old school team-based adventure comic — one of the few types of fiction that genuinely does work better in the medium of comics than it does anywhere else, and these guys are high in the top list of creators who can pull it off. If these awesome Gangbuster pages above did anything for you, SECTION ZERO is totally on your frequency.
If you want to read some preview pages and learn more about the project, I highly encourage everybody to check out the SECTION ZERO Kickstarter — it’s entering its last week and I very much want to see this book on my shelf.
***
As always, feel free to check me on any mistakes I might have made, add your own commentary, or share similar examples of good comics done well. I’ll be back next week with a different comic to peruse.
PAGE x PAGE MINI-ANALYSIS — “FIRST SIGHTING: SUPERBOY” from THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN #500 (1993)
PUBLISHED: DC Comics, June 1993
SCRIPT: Karl Kesel
PENCILS: Tom Grummett
INKS: Doug Hazelwood
(After this point, I don’t know for sure who did what — this is just one of many stories in this king-sized issue, with only the script, pencils, and inks credited to this story in particular. However, Grummett and Hazelwood also drew the 40+ page story that makes up the bulk of the issue, and so it wouldn’t be the craziest thing to assume they did the duties on this story as well. Acknowledging that this is an assumption, those credits are:
COLORS: Glenn Whitmore
LETTERS: Albert De Guzman
EDITORIAL: Mike Carlin with Jennifer Frank)
Fun autobiographical fact: my mother bought this comic fresh off the stands, way back in the summer of 1993. A direct followup to THE DEATH OF SUPERMAN, this five and a half dozen page monster ran her $2.95, plus Texas state sales tax. I was all of three years old and didn’t know Superman from Peter Pan, so I wonder: did she run the numbers and figure, yeah, the son of a behavioral economics professor and an information systems management consultant was probably going to be the kind of serial fiction nerd who’d appreciate this comic? Did she take a gamble on the outside shot of it becoming a collectable? Or, Occam’s Razor: after all the media coverage about how DC Comics had killed the Man of Tomorrow, she saw the “BACK FROM THE DEAD?! THE MAN OF STEEL FIGHTS FOR HIS LIFE!” cover blurb and thought it might be worth the three dollars ten to find out how he did.
[Cover by Jerry Ordway]
In today’s mini-analysis, I’ll be looking at just four pages of this issue. I was flipping through it for the first time in years and appreciating it in a new light, owing to my newfound appreciation for the action-packed but emotionally intelligent storytelling of penciller Tom Grummett. The issue ends in four short stories that introduce the four infamous replacement Supermen; Steel, The Eradicator, The Cyborg Superman, and of course, my man Superboy — and it wasn’t until this read-though that I realized the Superboy segment was scripted by Karl Kesel, someone who does the same kind of clean, classical work with the writing that Grummett does with the art. Now, full disclosure: I’ve worked with Karl on BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: GODS AND MONSTERS for Dynamite Entertainment, but I’d like to think that instead on biasing me in Karl’s favor, it just gave me a greater understanding of his scripting acumen. I’m sure you agree.
Since Kesel and Grummett are currently reuniting to resurrect their sci-fi adventure series SECTION ZERO on Kickstarter — more on that at the end of the analysis — I thought their four-page introduction to the Metropolis Kid might be worth an in-depth look.
THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN #500 and all characters contained therein are property of DC Comics, reproduced here solely for educational purposes.
***
Before we start, this is the page that precedes Kesel and Grummett’s story (this preceding story scripted by Roger Stern with art by Jackson Guice and Denis Rodier):
So, this is what’s in our heads as we head into our next story, yeah? Okay. Onward.
PAGE ONE
The opening of this page has a couple hoops to jump through: it’s the start of this new four-page story, and has to introduce us to our characters and setup like any opening panel has to. But it also has to maintain the loose illusion of being a continuation of the main sixty-five page narrative; it can’t indulge in a splashy title page. And lastly, it has to execute a pretty acute tone shift from the darker than dark “Vengeance of Superman” vignette Stern and Guice just served up.
The path that vaults all hoops at once: Environment As Action. The blaring alarm at four in the morning, the scrambling troops (who in this first panel act more as setting than as characters), and a couple simple caption boxes letting us know what’s up. Background? Man, to hell with a background, we only got four pages for this thing — it’s all action, it’s all information, and it’s coming straight for us, right down to our super heroic focal point character making eye contact and shouting orders at us. This is How You Engage a Reader 101.
The rest of the page immediately, but smoothly, gets us up to speed. Who’s the Captain America guy? The Guardian. What’s his deal? He’s in charge of the Cadmus soldiers. Who’s the suit? Westfield. A reminder of the early hour — that’s clearly important, and Kesel doesn’t want us to forget it. What’s Westfield’s relationship to the Guardian and the soldiers? The wet blanket superior officer who commands authority but not respect. Who do we like more? The Guardian, because he’s a better leader and we’ve seen his face, so we connect more with him even though his face is now partially masked. Plus he looks like a cool superhero, while Westfield looks like your friend’s lame dad. And it all ends on a classic page-turn cliffhanger: “No telling who — or WHAT — is on the other side!”
Five panels in, and already we’ve forgotten all about “the Vengeance of Superman…”
PAGE TWO
Ballsy use of such a huge panel in such a short story. The muted, mid-tone coloring of the lab not only makes the Guardian stand out, maintaining him as our focal character for this scene, but also draws our attention to the small scrap of bright red Superman cape hanging on the shattered glass tube. Situating that scrap in the bottom right quadrant of the panel guides our eye clockwise towards the next panel. And just in case you didn’t notice the scrap on its own, Grummet uses Westfield’s eyeline and his outreached hand to draw an invisible line to it. Also of note: Guardian, the honest hero just doing his job, notices the big thing, the shattered tube — Westfield, who knows what’s really going on in that lab, is the one who notices the scrap first.
Guardian is super dominant in the rest of this scene. He picks up the scrap, taking physical charge of the evidence of Cadmus’ sketchy Kryptonian secret. He’s looking directly back at Westfield, who’s turned away from him and is making excuses; signs of weakness. Guardian continues to be the largest/strongest presence in panel three and again in four, where he aligns with our POV as we look up at Packard. Speaking of Packard, he’s rocking another very recognizable lame dad look. So far the two grown-ups we’ve seen who aren’t exciting soldiers or cool superheroes are stuffy, grumpy squares. This is what adults are like in this Superboy story.
Note how the room feels full of soldiers throughout this scene, even though there’s only ever one soldier in each panel. The smoke filling the room goes a long way to achieving this effect, suggesting unseen mass, and Guardian seals it by commanding “McFarlane” to “Have your squad search every inch of this place.” Great way to keep the scene full, but not cluttered.
PAGE THREE
As we change from interior to exterior settings, the page layout changes from the boxy, squarish panels of the previous pages to a series of page-wide horizontal panels. Nearly every panel is a good example of a different way to utilize this type of layout, starting with panel one: it gives us a nice wide establishing shot, clearly showing the geography of the tunnel entrance, the highway, and Metropolis beyond.
In panel two, the powerful left to right movement of Superboy punching the grate off the tunnel entrance is enhanced by how it utilizes all the vertical space, giving the feeling of focused power — like a bullet through a barrel.
In panel three, we see how well a horizontal layout helps us introduce a bunch of characters at once, with lots of non-active space on either side of them for everybody to get in a line of character-establishing dialogue. Kesel even sneaks in a nice little hint at the nature of Superboy’s powers. Notice that the Newsboy in the middle of the pack doesn’t get a line, but that’s fine, because he’s featured heavily in the next panel. No need to cram everyone’s moment into the same panel, which usually feels forced anyhow.
In panels two through five, the limited vertical space is employed to cut our freshly-minted Superboy into segments. By keeping us from seeing all of him at once, we build his mystique and the anticipation of the reader, not to mention helping us get a feel for the individual elements of his complex new costume.
PAGE FOUR
Ladies and gentlemen: a late but strong entry for best superhero costume of the 20th century. After teasing him for pages, we get this legitimately iconic reveal of our new Superboy — no matter what he says he is. We also benefit from how well Kesel and Grummett established the spatial relationship of Metropolis, the tunnel, and the highway, so that we don’t need to show any of the Newsboys to know we’re sharing their POV here. We’re so familiar with the space at this point, we inherently know that’s where we are. This composition is thematically strong, too — he’s throwing this last defiant declaration before turning back around and heading down into Metropolis, into whatever adventures await him there. It’s like a low-grade cliffhanger. It’s a promise of something exciting to come. This is how you introduce a character.
***
You can buy the full 65-page issue of THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN #500 for the surprisingly low price of $1.99 off Comixology! It’s absolutely worth the read, containing one of my favorite Pa Kent stories ever.
Now, like I said -- SECTION ZERO!
Kesel and Grummett reunite to bring back the high quality old school team-based adventure comic — one of the few types of fiction that genuinely does work better in the medium of comics than it does anywhere else, and these guys are high in the top list of creators who can pull it off. If the Superboy pages above did anything for you, SECTION ZERO is totally on your frequency. Take a look:
Right?
If you want to read more preview pages and learn more about the project, I highly encourage everybody to check out the SECTION ZERO Kickstarter — it’s entering its last week and I so want to see this book on my shelf.
***
As always, feel free to check me on any mistakes I might have made, add your own commentary, or share similar examples of good comics done well. I’ll be back next week with a different, longer comic to peruse.
PAGE x PAGE ANALYSIS — ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #69 (2005) with special guest AUD KOCH
Dan Schkade and Aud Koch (right)
ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #69
PUBLISHED: Marvel Comics, January 2005
SCRIPT: Brian Michael Bendis
PENCILS: Mark Bagley
INKS: Scott Hanna
COLORS: J.D. Smith with Chris Sotomayor
LETTERS: Chris Eliopoulos
EDITORIAL: Ralph Macho with Nick Lowe
Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley wrote and drew ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN for one hundred and eleven consecutive monthly issues. Can you even imagine.
(I, by contrast, drew WILL EISNER’S THE SPIRIT for twelve consecutive monthly issues and barely made it out with all my fingers still intact.)
Neither or them went into this cold — Bendis cut his teeth on a long series of hard-edged indie crime thrillers like AKA GOLDFISH and TORSO, while Bagley had been a regular Marvel Comics fixture since the eighties, with a strong history drawing Spider-Man in particular. But they both hit their stride on ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN, kicking out a new version of the character that felt fresh and familiar and, in the process, creating one of the most consistently entertaining superhero comics this side of EMPOWERED. My personal MVPs: their new versions of Aunt May, Daredevil, and the surprisingly affecting mega-narrative of the Ultimate Green Goblin. And that ending — ho man, that ending.
The issue we’ll be looking at this week, ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #69: “MEET ME,” takes place more or less in the middle of their mammoth hundred and eleven issue run. And that’s part of why I chose it — the goal of this feature is to take solid, workmanlike comics from professionals who know what they’re about and see what makes them tick, but also to see what we can learn from their mistakes. Mister Bagley’s credentials are unimpeachable; I’d place him up with John Romita JR and Andy Kubert as one of my top living artists of straight-up old-school Marvel-style Super Hero Comics. But mid-run slippage is inevitable, and sometimes the shortcuts of a good artist can be just as useful to pick apart as the abject failures of a bad one.
I also picked this issue because I thought it’d be a good fit for my guest: comic artist Aud Koch, one my favorite people to talk theory with and someone whose output I’m both impressed by on a peer level and super into on a fan level. Even though this is the first time I’ve had a guest on this feature and I only half know what I’m doing, Aud was still willing to sit down and help me beta test the tandem Page X Page Analysis experience like a mensch. Now, Aud’s the nicest person you’ll meet in a year, but she’ll also tell you exactly what she thinks and damn the torpedoes. She’ll make some poor young artist cry one of these days. She’ll feel just awful about it, too. My point is: I didn’t exactly pick her name out of a hat for this, y’know?
With that, let’s go to the transcript!
ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #69 and all characters contained therein are property of Marvel Comics, reproduced here solely for educational purposes.
PAGE ONE
DAN: So, Aud: are you of the opinion that a single issue should be a complete story in and of itself?
AUD: That depends on what the intention of the writer is. I think this one is fine without being that way — I mean, this whole series is set up like a teen drama show. They always have cliffhangers.
DAN: And “previously ons…”
DAN: There’s certainly a lot more boring ways you could start an issue off.
AUD: It’s definitely eye-catching, but an immediate problem is: who’s the main character? You’d think from the first panel that it’s Liz. Or Johnny, who’s the one with the big action shot. But no, it’s actually those tiny little figures in the corner.
DAN: We’re not really getting much from her expression in panel one.
AUD: Which is a problem that I had throughout a lot of the comic. The expressions felt slightly off to me.
DAN: I would have to agree. The point of this exercise is not to nitpick, but sometime small details really do go a long way towards keeping a page from working.
AUD: Later on, there’s that scene that’s entirely just Peter and MJ standing around talking to Johnny for like four, five pages, so it entirely rests on the acting that Bagely does through characters, but there’s no movement happening at all. Bagley doesn’t do the thing where he makes everything a soap opera, which is good, but he also can leave his figures rather flat.
PAGE TWO
DAN: The game’s upped quite a bit here. I feel like we get a lot more from the expressions. Bagley has a great model for the Human Torch — he’s able to suggest emotions and facial details even though he’s all flamed up.
AUD: The artistry of the flames on Johnny is really beautiful. Looking at it now, these last three panels should have been the first ones of the issue.
DAN: Mm, yeah! We’d start off with Johnny looking down at our main characters. Because it really is Peter and Johnny’s interaction that the issue hinges on — Liz’s story is a secondary thing, even though she’s the first character we see in this issue.
Bagley and inker Scott Hanna do a good job of suggesting the city in the panel one background, giving the scene a good sense of pace; They’re not in the Mojave desert, they’re on a beach near New York.
AUD: Something I found a bit distracting though is — what the hell is going on with that moon? Like, that’s not a moon! It’s a warty… mass!
DAN: Fair enough. And it’s funny because the city’s so nicely abstracted, while the moon is — I feel you there.
AUD: It’s like a giant tumor in the sky!
DAN: I also have a little problem with Liz’s motion in panel two.
AUD: Yes! She should be be running away from Jonny and off the page. That way she’d be looking back at him as she make her exit off the page.
DAN: Yeah, I think that would be better.
PAGE THREE
DAN: Here we have another juicy Human Torch splash image…
AUD: See, that’s another money shot — storytelling-wise, it would have made more sense if it was us looking up at Johnny from where Peter and MJ were standing, seeing him him shooting off into the distance from their point of view. This one looks like we’re about to follow Johnny off on some… flame adventure.
DAN: You’re right, it really does feel like we’re transitioning to his POV, when that’s clearly not what’s going on.
AUD: Bagley also didn’t take into account where speech bubbles would go. you can see that the letterer was like “what the fuck am I supposed to do?”
DAN: Yeah, they’re spillin’. He could’ve dropped the figures a little bit.
AUD: The only reason it doesn’t fit is because Bagley wanted to leave room for this image of Johnny shooting off, which again, storytelling-wise, doesn’t really work.
DAN: One thing I do really like about those bottom three panels — they’re this nice narrative unit, small and cramped and comic booky in the corner to offset the splashy sci-fi spectacle of Johnny shooting off into the night above. It makes MJ’s dialogue, which is think is pretty funny here, even funnier by comparison — it’s like a small comedy aside.
AUD: But then, they are the main characters…
DAN: They are the main characters! Good point.
PAGE FOUR
DAN: Alright, here we are back in the Baxter Building.
AUD: This is one where it was really, like, these expressions are so flat… it doesn’t carry the scene.
DAN: One art thing I have trouble with here… I don’t know if Sue is his mom or the same age as him. I have trouble placing her.
AUD: Well, the only reason you’d know that is because she says “little brother,” which I feel like Bendis might have added because it wasn’t clear.
DAN: It’s a problem when you have a character who’s supposed to be a teenager, which Sue clearly is —
AUD: Wait, she’s a teenager?
DAN: I mean, is she not?
AUD: [Laughs] She probably is…!
DAN: I mean, that’s a problem, we should know! And she’s wearing lipstick and whatnot…
AUD: It’s that hollywood syndrome! Women don’t wear makeup when they’re in let-down at home clothes. Ack.
DAN: That said, I think Bagley does a good job of moving the camera around. Even though there’s not a lot happening on this page, it’s not static. After Johnny says “leave me alone” in panel five, we cut to this nice, lonely panel with heavy shadows.
AUD: I don’t like the way they’re facing inward in that panel necessarily, though.
DAN: You’re rather maintain Johnny’s rightward positioning from the earlier panels, to maintain a sense of space?
AUD: I want his face to keep facing the bottom right corner, so if Sue’s off to the side, she’d be closer to the outside of the page, since she’s on the outside of him in the conversation.
DAN: Yeah! Johnny’s sitting still and staring in one direction, so we really should we moving around with Sue, not moving around with Johnny, who’s stationary. That’s a really good point.
Also — I like the hot pretzel line in panel four. That was something specific to them that nicely places them as siblings. Sometimes that little element of specificity can really help sell a scene.
AUD: The devil is in the details!
DAN: The devil’s in the details.
PAGE FIVE
AUD: Bagley does do really good backgrounds. That feels like a school.
DAN: Mm! What are the elements that cement that for you?
AUD: Well, it’s not generic. The front of that building is really nice. That’s a building that I’ve never seen before, and that I haven’t seen in movies, which is good because that means he isn’t doing the pruned-down, basic idea of what a school should look like.
DAN: Yeah! And it’s still got the cement walls, it’s got the low ceilings and whatnot.
AUD: All of the people in the backgrounds are doing things, which is awesome. They’re not just standing around like props.
DAN: It’s true. And then also, they’re not overacting. You’re right, he’s really good at that. A couple nice little touches — the back of this guy’s t-shirt, the Home Ec textbook. We didn’t need those details to place it as a school, but they do add some variety.
I feel like the pacing in these last three panels are not as good as the writing is. The panels three and four are setting up her reaction in panel five, so it’s weird to me that panels four and five in this sequence are sub-panels of panel three. I would rather have the first two take place in the same plane. Setup, setup, then payoff.
AUD: My major beef with the sequence is: the reason that she feels so bad is everyone’s laughing at her, right, but we can’t see the people laughing at her.
DAN: We should see them laughing! It might even be better if we switched it so we don’t see many people in the panel three, and then see them all in panel five.
AUD: Yeah, do it so it’s just MJ and Liz at first, and you get the growing sense of her being surrounded by these glaring entities.
[Aud’s edit, version 1:]
DAN: Or! Have panels three and four right next to each other in their own row, then have panel five be a wide panel along the bottom of the page. I think that would be a superior version of an already fairly solid page.
[Aud’s edit, version 2:]
DAN: The scene is also very mid-2000s, which I appreciate.
AUD: That’s another thing with his setting! It does really look like the time period it was drawn in, which is fun.
DAN: Yeah, it’s not just the stock comic book teenagers. I think that’s why this series was so popular when it came out. It really did feel like high school, despite the fact nobody working on it was… matriculating.
PAGE SIX
DAN: I like that Johnny’s car is red. I think that’s a slick color cue.
AUD: The only thing I have to say is… Bagley consistently does these weird perspectives that throw you out of following who the main characters are supposed to be. Like, I don’t like that opening panel. There’s something off about looking down on them.
DAN: Ohh, yeah. That’s a good point. The camera isn’t down with them, it’s distant, it’s above. There’s a nice line of motion where Peter and MJ in panel one lead into Peter’s position in panel two, but then Bagely breaks it immediately by switching the camera around in panel three.
That said, I do really like Johnny’s incognito-wear.
AUD: [Laughs] Talking about early 2000s…
DAN: Right? I love it.
PAGE SEVEN
DAN: So, like you said earlier, these Peter and MJ talking to Johnny pages are a little bit — well, there’s not a lot happening.
AUD: I feel like the scenes where there’s just people standing around give you the most room to, like, wander and throw in creative things. Do fun acting, have them fidget. This does not do that.
DAN: I do like that close-up of MJ in panel two. It helps us identify with her; it sells her curiosity and her sympathy. A different version of this panel might have had her farther away, in which case that line could have sounded a lot more accusatory. I feel like this averts that.
AUD: All of these pages are superficially fine. There’s a good variation of sizes of faces… I don’t look at this like, “I don’t know how to read this,” which is nice.
DAN: Being able to read the comic is very important. Yeah, the drawings are all really attractive, the coloring is good as well — it works together well as a package. I think what we’re harping on here is unfulfilled potential.
AUD: Yes!
DAN: Speaking of color, I like what colorist JD Smith did with the sky. It sells the end of the school day really nicely and avoids being just “sky colored!”
PAGE EIGHT
DAN: I like the negative space on this page.
AUD: Yeah, that is interesting…
DAN: Really nice flow of action from panels one to three. Johnny’s head turns slightly between the first and third panel, which sells this beat of silence in panel two. And I like dropping out the panel border in three; it makes him feel alone and insecure. I wish there was more stuff like this in the issue.
AUD: And I wish there was more stuff like Peter’s stance in panel five.
DAN: Yeah! One foot up on the curb, one in the gutter. That’s really nice.
AUD: Whereas in all these other panels, they’re just standing straight.
DAN: This is a very attractive final panel.
PAGE NINE
DAN: More great negative space on this page. You almost feel like Bagley started to get bored in this scene and started to change things up.
AUD: Which yeah, if only he had… done that earlier?
DAN: Same thing with Peter’s silhouette in panel three. It’s a really intelligent use of Peter’s design, indicating him by just his the line of his floppy hair.
AUD: Which, if I remember correctly, there was quite a bit of mocking of throughout every comic he appeared in.
DAN: And I like that! I like that Peter has goofy nerd hair. Because he’s a goofy nerd — that’s a big part of his appeal. When Peter Parker is too cool, he starts to fall apart, I think.
AUD: Panel six is bad.
DAN: [Laughs] Why is panel six bad, Aud?
AUD: Okay, so, once again, we’re coming from Peter and MJ’s perspective, but we’re in front of Johnny’s car. He’s driving into where we’re standing! Why would you not have him be driving away from the viewer? Bagley consistently puts the motion of action towards the viewer, and that doesn’t make sense to me.
DAN: It makes for a more dynamic image, but… it can make for muddy storytelling.
AUD: Yeah, it makes the motion come to a halt, because there’s nowhere for your eye to go.
DAN: I feel like this comic really thinks Johnny’s the main character. And I just… don’t… think he is. Maybe that’s on me.
PAGE TEN
DAN: More of that curious downward angle. Yeah, I’m with you — I’d rather have more environment shots from the ground. Because this doesn’t really tell me anything about the environment — all I get from this is that they’re still approximate to the parking lot. And as an artist, if you’re in a rush, you’re just begging to make technical mistakes if you keep shooting things from this angle.
AUD: Yep.
DAN: But, again, credit where it’s due, good job moving the camera around the characters. Nice full body acting in panel three — which is shot from the ground, and is super attractive. Maybe he should do more of that! I dunno! And Peter and MJ’s dialogue continues to be funny.
AUD: It’s delightful!
DAN: Bendis is aware this is magic, and he gives us a good amount of it.
AUD: Yes! Going back to the teen drama — what makes this so good is the personality of the characters and how much they come through. The dialogue carries it a whole lot.
DAN: This comic has a nice small cast — you understand all their motivations, they all have distinct voices and personalities. The human element is really well put together.
PAGE ELEVEN
AUD: This page — I hate this page.
DAN: [Laughs]
AUD: Okay, I don’t hate it, but I have major issues reading it.
DAN: Tell me!
AUD: The first two panels are fine, but then — where the hell are you supposed to go??
DAN: That’s a good point! That’s a very good point. Now, If I block out panel three—
AUD: It works! You don’t need that panel!
DAN: Really, all we’d need is to change Johnny in panel four, from looking around to looking up at Peter. The reason why he’s looking around isn’t super clear — since Johnny is supposed to be under wraps, I’m assuming that when he sees Spider-Man, he’s looking around to see if there’s other costumed people who’re gonna jump him. We can do without that.
AUD: Okay, other funny thing — as you said, Bagley thinks that Johnny is the main character. This is supposed to be from Spider-Man’s point of view, right? So the first shot should be from where Spider-Man is seeing him. Even if you don’t see Spidey in the shot.
DAN: Well, yeah, that would be a nice shot/reverse shot from panel two to panel three. It’s funny; in panel two, we actually WANT Bagley to do the down angle.
AUD: Yeah!
DAN: There’s an easy fix for this wonky reading order that keeps all the panels:
You drop panel three half an inch and make panel two a page-wide environment shot. It’s a subtle difference, but I think it strengthens the flow of the scene.
AUD: And also, why do we even need the time? Just to show it’s been a while since school got out?
DAN: It’s shows — He’s supposed to meet Liz at 5:00, and this shows it’s been… longer. It also shows that Spidey was allowing for the possibility that Liz would show up. He doesn’t just pop up at 5:00.
AUD: Ahhh, right. Okay. Yeah. But why is Johnny wearing the costume? Like, if he’s incognito, why is he wearing the Fantastic Four costume?
DAN; Well… I guess, in this universe, nobody knows it’s a Fantastic Four costume yet.
AUD: But he’s still obviously wearing some kind of uniform.
DAN: I dunno, maybe he just came from, y’know, street luging.
AUD: [Laughs]
DAN: Still rocking his street luge gear.
AUD: “…Street luge…”
PAGE TWELVE
DAN: Okay, so I really like the arc of Spider-Man’s movement on this page. It starts mid panel one, comes up and down in a nice arc across the top three panels. That’s really cool.
AUD: However; it would’ve made more sense to me if it started with his face pointing in some way towards the right.
DAN: I agree that would be a little bit better; even if his head was just cheated that way a little bit. I still think this works fine, but that would’ve been a slight improvement.
AUD: Even if the body was just flipped.
DAN: Ah, yeah, yeah! That’s good. Even just inverting Spidey’s position in panel one makes it that much smoother:
AUD: It still trips my letting thing. You want to read straight down from panel one into panel four.
DAN: Yeahhhh, that is unfortunate.
PAGE THIRTEEN-FOURTEEN
DAN: So, this is great.
AUD: Yes, except… okay, I do like it. But for me, it was another lettering issue. I feel like they were hesitant to put any dialogue in in panels two, four, and seven because there was so little room to the left of the fold. Maybe if those panels had been extended half an inch, they could’ve… I don’t know…
DAN: I think I disagree with you on this one. I think that they chose to make it a quasi double-page splash because Bendis wanted this moment to exist all at once, without risking it being split up by ads. I think that’s why it’s cheated over the fold this way. That said… the balloon placement in panel four is distracting.
AUD: Yeah, you can tell there’s all this space above Spider-Man’s head where the dialogue was supposed to go.
DAN: It really shoulda been there. If this were a digital comic, that would’ve been perfect. I does weirdly work quite well in panel seven…
AUD: Because they put dialogue there!
DAN: There you are, then. Even if Spidey had said “um” in panel four, just to full in that space, that would’ve been an easy fix.
AUD: So, okay, this is a big moment; but why is it a big moment? Peter’s already seen his powers. We already know that’s what Johnny does. Is it that he’s revealing his “Human Torch” name?
DAN: Well, It’s a big moment for Johnny. Again, this issue thinks Johnny is the main character. So it’s a big moment for him… Peter’s reaction is still genuine, it’s still surprising to see a person, y’know, light their hand on fire. And also, it’s the first time in this universe where The Human Torch and Spider-Man are on the same page, so there’s a little bit of a fan nod there, plus a little bit of this being Johnny’s moment to reveal himself to, he thinks, a new person. Some of it is just a nice juicy visual on which to hang the rest of the scene.
The dialogue in this scene is great. I like the idea of this scene. Johnny’s life is actively inconvenienced by Spider-Man — the way his life is set up is a direct reaction to Spider-Man’s existence. But he likes Spider-Man a lot, so they’re being friendly.
AUD: I like… I think I have a thing against power imbalances. Like, Peter and Johnny are on the same level, but with this scene, it’s like hero worship. Johnny’s like a fanboy, and Peter just allows that imbalance to continue. That’s a personal thing, I just don’t like it — except that at the end of the scene, it switches, where Peter becomes the fanboy for Sue Storm. So I did like that.
DAN: Yeah! You see it in panel five, which is where Peter and Johnny actually become friends, but it’s also where you see Peter changing the subject of him being rich, trying to protect the idea of him being rich — read, “cool.” But here in panel seven, he can’t help but reveal he’s not cool, because he’s such a big fan of Sue Storm.
AUD: I will say, throughout a lot of these scenes of pure dialogue — again, this is just a personal preference — you get these panels where there’s so much back and forth in the same panel, and I don’t like it. I like it when you get more of a focus on what the characters look like when they’re saying each individual line, so there’s more emotional hit to it. Here it’s all consolidated, so you don’t get as much personality from the characters.
DAN: Would you’ve liked if this comic had, let’s say, five more pages to it that just allowed a little more space for the back and forth between the characters?
AUD: Well, either prune down the dialogue, or… yeah, extend it, give the artist more room. But then again, I don’t know if Bagley would’ve really wanted more room — he doesn’t really seem to enjoy drawing these still dialogue moments.
DAN: Or maybe at this point he’s so used to them that he just kinda bangs ‘em out without thinking too hard. Which we could hardly fault him for.
AUD: Yeah! Issue… sixty-nine of a series?
DAN: Jeezy Petes.
I don’t know if I already said something nice about JD Smith, but the colors are real swell here. The glow on Spidey’s chest in panel one.
AUD: One detail I really like is that his coat is actually on fire in panel two.
DAN: Oh yeah! That is a nice little touch.
And now, this is an excellent final panel; an onomatopoeia leading off the page, they’re both looking in the same direction, off the page, towards the page turn, you gotta turn the page, you gotta know what’s gonna happen next…
PAGE FIFTEEN
DAN: I love this page.
AUD: Rrrrrreally.
DAN: I do! I do, and I’ll tell you why: It does the handoff of POV from character to character really effectively. So, this page is split into two equal circuits of storytelling. They have roughly the same layout; the first one is Spidey vaulting off — the webline’s going off the page in the right direction, he’s going off the panel into the negative space, it’s really dynamic. This is where Bagley’s ‘everything comes towards you’ thing really works. And then we end on Johnny’s reaction to this, which then transitions into the second circuit; this nice juicy Human Torch moment that mirrors Spider-Man’s. There’s a little joke, and then we stay on Johnny’s reaction in the last panel, a reaction that follows through from his other reactions on the page. So it’s a really effective handoff. And then, from the perspective of somebody who’s maybe meeting these characters for the first time, it’s cool to see how Spider-Man has to jump off the jungle gym and shoot a web and, y’know, he moves in THIS way, and meanwhile Human Torch can just straight up fly, he’s made of fire, he moves in THIS way… I mean, I could see experiencing this for the first time and really getting excited for these characters, the way they’re depicted on this page.
What do you think?
AUD: That’s interesting, because I really disliked this page.
DAN: Ooh, tell me! Tell me why.
AUD: Well… I guess one of the things I’m personally most concerned about is the way the lines of action move within the structure of a single page. Not just the way that the characters are moving, but all of the composition. This page feels really cluttered to me; there’s all these different directions, and there’s so many different moments happening too, and none of them are given enough space.
DAN: In a way, I think you’re sort of right… what makes this page work for me is that there’s the two complete circuits, but a page is typically only supposed to be one.
AUD: What you said about Spider-Man having to climb off the jungle gym — I didn’t even realize that that’s what had happened there because there’s such a gap. I want to see him moving onto the jungle gym. In the first panel, I want more of a pause as they look at the smoke. I would’ve preferred smaller bits of them both going off.
DAN: Maybe we coulda cut down on some money shot panels and reallocated that space to give these two moments bigger moments on their own pages. I still really like this page, but I totally agree with your criticisms.
AUD: I also feel like that last panel should have maybe been the back of Johnny’s head, so we’re following him as he’s going somewhere? As it is, it’s just a static image of his face.
DAN: Mmm, yeah, I could see that.
PAGE SIXTEEN
AUD: It’s beautifully drawn. I really like the swoop of the smoke.
DAN: Yeah, Bagley’s smoke is really cool; all whispy and tendrily. It is a little bit weird to me that Spidey’s swinging left, into the page fold. I would rather have flipped Spidey’s figure so he’s facing right, maybe just jumping down with her in his arms, or with his web attached to the roof ledge. There’s some nice contrasting movement between Spidey and the smoke, but it’s still a little muddy to me.
AUD: Once more, who’s the main character on this page? You actually think it should be Johnny this time, carrying over from the last page.
DAN: Also: modern comics artists have finally stopped drawing that high-riding underwear on women, which I personally appreciate. Nobody liked that.
AUD: That was also never, like, a real thing that happened, even in the early 2000s.
DAN: This is a type of page layout I like a lot; you’ve got a tall, scene-setting panel, and then everything that follows is sort of a detail of that main setting.
Panel two is nice; we’re clearly from Johnny’s perspective, looking down…
AUD: Except that time, it shouldn’t be! It should be focusing on Spider-Man!
DAN: Crap, you’re right! You’re totally right. The perspectives in panels one and two should be switched. We should be on the ground with Spider-Man and her looking up in panel two, and we should be with Johnny looking down on the scene in panel one.
PAGE SEVENTEEN
[Long, thoughtful shared pause]
DAN: Nice line of motion along those bottom panels… I hate this baby. I’m sorry.
AUD: That’s not a terrified baby! That’s a hungry baby opening its mouth for food.
DAN: I dunno, maybe she’s got a Spider-Man-colored bottle or something, so when he comes in the room she’s like, “oh thank god, I’m parched.”
AUD: I also don’t think panel four is entirely clear enough about what Johnny’s doing.
DAN: What if this panel were framed by the window? So we could see the fire going away from us, from inside the building, and towards Johnny.
AUD: Oh, that would be clever…
DAN: And then we can skew panel five just a little bit so it’s not just the same shot twice.
Panel six is a really good panel.
AUD: It is a really good panel, yeah. Unfortunately, it is followed by a weird baby.
DAN: Oy. Such a weird baby.
PAGE EIGHTEEN
AUD: Panel one immediately gave me the feeling that it should be flipped. The direction of motion — it doesn’t look like he’s jumping out of the building.
DAN: He’s just coming down from heaven with a baby.
AUD: That’s what this looks like. Also, it would have helped a whole lot of his suit was singed.
DAN: Or if smoke was trailing off him, yeah.
AUD: In panel two, why are we looking at this from the very above again? Do it from Peter’s point of view! Actually, wait — if you move panel four up next to panel one…
DAN: Oh, yeah, that’d work. Because the Torch panels don’t tell us… much. And Bagley and company have my sympathies here, because showing a contiguous stream of flame coming out of the building and towards Johnny? I don’t know how I would show that.
AUD: I think the flames themselves are fine, but the swoop of the smoke around the border of panel two gets me.
DAN: This is an instance where the old Marvel style of captions talking about what’s happening would really help you out.
AUD: I mean, you need to be really careful with captions… actually if he were muttering something…
DAN: Oh yeah! Like, “Oh my god, he’s drawing the flame out of the building” or something.
AUD: Yeah! Yeah, that would work.
DAN: Or a panel where the babysitter like “What’s going on” and Peter’s like “I-I-I-I think he’s drawing the flame out of the building” and she’s like “How is he doing that” and he’s like “[weird noise plus awkward shrug]”
AUD: See, and that would have been awesome, just to add more personality and some nice moments between Peter and the crowd.
DAN: I mean, sure, he’s amazed at the Torch in panel four, but this would really sell the — well, anyway.
PAGE NINETEEN
AUD: We've talked about unfortunate ad placements before; I’d just like to point out that those are DC characters in a Marvel comic.
DAN: Right as things seem at their most dire — Batman and Superman pop up!
AUD: Come to save the day!
DAN: We got this, guys, don’t even worry about it.
So, this page: I understand what’s happening here, but I wouldn’t if I hadn’t read a bunch of other comic books.
AUD: …Yes, because there’s not a sense of him getting rid of anything, it’s more like he’s channeling the energy to blow something up.
DAN: Yeah. That said, I like the sweeping top left/bottom right motion of the clouds, which adds a nice parallax to the bottom left/top right motion of the flames. And at least there, it’s popping off the the page, away from us.
AUD: And up where people are looking.
DAN: Yes! They’re following the line of action. That’s quite good.
AUD: And the colors on this panel are beautiful.
DAN: They really are. JD Smith clearly knows how to bring out the warmth and energy of the flame with these nice cool background colors. I have no idea why the cough was lettered like that —
AUD: I thought it was hilarious. It was for comedy, right, ‘cause he’s actually saying “cough?”
DAN: Oh! [Laughs]
AUD: At least that’s how I interpreted it, as a humor beat.
DAN: But then as we go on, we see that he’s actually coughing ‘cause of smoke inhalation.
AUD: Is he?
DAN: Here, put a pin in that, we’ll come back to that. That’s mostly a nitpick on what is overall a very strong page.
PAGE TWENTY
AUD: What the…?
DAN: What is happening in this first panel?
AUD: I think that’s Johnny flying off.
DAN: Oh!
AUD: To the park, to meet him again?
DAN: Yes.
AUD: But.
DAN: Maybe Johnny could have been smoldering there a little, in panel two?
AUD: You could have just not had panel one and have them just meet up again in the park.
DAN: Again, my sympathies to Bagley, because this flame stuff is… it doesn’t exist in the real world, so he’s gotta hack it out.
AUD: I do love the trails of the smoke in panel one. And that looks like a fucked up building.
DAN: Although! I think the colorist let us down a little there. This flamey bit coming out of the building should be smoke. It shouldn’t still be on fire.
AUD: That’s… definitely true!
So: who’s the main character in this scene?
DAN: On this page, it seems like they’re both the main character. And after the scene we just had, I’m cool with them being equally important on this page.
AUD: Yeah. The jump between here and the next page wasn’t clear to me, though.
DAN: No. I mean, it’s a funny bit! I get it. But.
AUD: The ending on his face at the end of the page just didn’t hit right. I do like that body movement in panel three.
DAN: Again, when Bagley chooses to do acting, he does a really good job.
PAGE TWENTY ONE
DAN: Okay, so here’s where the downward angle really works. Again, I would have liked to have a little flame coming off him in panel two to show the transition from Torch to normal. Overall, I like this scene a lot. Like, Johnny having to lose his jacket is a nice narrative device to show the sacrifice of heroism.
AUD: Plus a metaphor of the police getting him. I will say that in all the comments about the acting, all of it was passable — except for panel four.
DAN: Really! Why?
AUD: Just bad acting!
DAN: You just think it’s, what, cheesy?
AUD: It’s cheesy and it does the soap opera thing.
DAN: Ah, fair enough. The script description, I assume was “Johnny lets the moment land, feels proud of himself.” Tough to pull off. But I hear ya.
AUD: And also he’s facing…
DAN: Yeah, have him face the other direction. Although, I do kind of like him looking off, taking this moment to himself —
AUD: But that’s part of what bugs me the most! Like, look at panel three — they’re not looking at each other. They don’t seem to be in the same interaction.
DAN: I think this page is a good example of problems with placing figures in space that Bagley has throughout.
AUD: Especially scenes that are just dialogue.
DAN: The scene were MJ and Peter are talking to Johnny in the parking lot earlier is helped because Johnny’s leaning against a landmark; his car. But when they’re a little more free form like this, the figures start to drift around.
AUD: I love that last panel.
DAN: It’s a great panel. I love the lighting on Spidey.
AUD: Johnny’s… beautiful?
DAN: [Laughs] He’s very pretty.
PAGE TWENTY TWO
DAN: Final page.
AUD: Another money shot of him! How many are in this fucking issue!
DAN: [Sighs.] I guess if I were choosing to defend this, I would say the initial money shot on page one —
AUD: Was fine.
DAN: Yes, it sells the chaos and the fear of what’s happening. This next one on page three —
AUD: Nope.
DAN: — if I wanted to defend it, I would say that was, like, Johnny flying off into the sky like Frankenstein’s Monster, and then this last one is him flying into the sky like a hero. It’s a progression.
AUD: [Snort.]
DAN: Your milage may vary. More great sweeping motion of the clouds that create a contrast to him flying away at us —
AUD: Another example of things flying out of the page.
DAN: This is just a personal thing, but I would have broken the panel boarders here at the top and had his hands reach out into the bleed.
AUD: Yeah, if he’s gonna do the big moment where he comes out towards you, have him come out towards you!
DAN: And panel two is a funny final beat that undercuts this big heroic moment with Peter coughing — that’s solid. The birds are bit much.
AUD: The buildings are nice, though. He draws nice buildings!
DAN: He does! He’s really good at drawing this comic. Mark Bagley, shocker, is a really good guy to be drawing a Spider-Man comic. He’s good at buildings, he’s good at dynamic action — he is good at acting. I think in this issue, we just see him being a little bit on auto pilot. There’s not a lot we can say is really wrong with this issue.
AUD: Yeah, if I picked it up I would happily read it. The structural elements of it were perfectly passable.
DAN: Yeah! It’s well-written. It keeps moving. And the final action set piece is a nice way to get them to team up and learn about each other, but only be interacting with each other; they don’t have to fight anybody. Y’know, Paste Pot Pete doesn’t show up and they have to team up against him.
AUD: This is the exact kind of comic I would love to have drawn! Yeah. It’s good. Well written. Very well written.
DAN: You could be a hell of a lot worse.
***
You can buy a copy of this issue on Comixology, along with every other issue of ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN.
You can also pick up Aud Koch’s Marvel Comics debut, last week’s ULTIMATES 2 #7, written by Al Ewing with colors by Dan Brown -- which I highly recommend.
Check out Aud’s website, and hit her up on twitter! She’s always posting new art -- including some Spidey and Torch stuff that gives you an idea what this comic might’ve looked like if Aud had ghosted Bagley.
As always, feel free to check me on any mistakes I/we might have made, add your own commentary, or share similar examples of good comics done well. I’ll be back next week with a different comic to peruse.
PAGE x PAGE ANALYSIS — ‘THE SHADOW STRIKES!’ #13 (1990)
PUBLISHED: DC Comics, October 1990
SCRIPT: Gerard Jones
PENCILS/INKS: Eduardo Barreto
LETTERS: John Workman
COLORS: Anthony Tollin
EDITORIAL: Brian Augustyn
THE SHADOW STRIKES! is high on my list of favorite ongoing series ever. As far as I’m concerned, of the many four-color iterations of The Shadow, this is the one that truly gets it right. The Shadow of STRIKES! is a lurking, manipulating hybrid of The Phantom of the Opera and John Wick, the action of the series playing out mainly through the perspectives of his agents and his criminal quarry. This book is tight, hard-edged, and restrained; it avoids a lot of hacky pulp comics pitfalls because it understands that the original Walter Gibson Shadow novels weren’t “trying to be pulpy” — they were trying to be lean, lurid action thrillers. This is almost entirely down to writer Gerard Jones, but it works better than anywhere else in the issues drawn by the artist that defined the look and feel of the series — Eduardo Barreto. STRIKES! sometimes suffers from being the type of lower budget 80’s/90’s DC book where the fill-in issues can be sloppy to unreadable and the truly great issues mainly succeed by virtue of being the product of creators who weren’t really being watched that closely, but that doesn’t mean I’m grading on some kind of a curve when I say the truly great issues are truly great.
Today, we’re looking at one of those issues — the second installment of an amazing four-part storyline that sees The Shadow, along with his most trusted agent Margo Lane and the begrudgingly complicit Inspector Cardona, taking his private war on crime from their habitual New York haunts to the streets of Chicago. In this analysis, I’ll be looking at how tightly Barreto’s pencils and inks hew to Jones’ script, and how the diligence of colorist (and Shadow historian) Anthony Tollin actively facilitates the near-seamless transitions between the plot’s many storylines. This is a full comic that never feels crowded, a dense comic that keeps light, and a very comic booky comic book that never loses sight of the emotional reality of what it’s depicting.
THE SHADOW STRIKES! #13 and all characters contained therein are property of DC Comics and/or Conde Nast Publications, reproduced here solely for educational purposes.
COVER
I love how conceptually simple this cover is. Graphic, understated buildings. A mostly obscured main character. Smoke and mist wafting around for a little atmosphere. There’s only one thing that’s clearly rendered — a tommy gun, unfired. The Shadow is usually depicted using handguns, so him holding this universal visual signifier for “MOB STORY” immediately lets you know what you’re in for. And that’s even without the blurb at the top. You wanna see The Shadow fight the Chicago Mob? I know I wanna see The Shadow fight the Chicago Mob.
PAGE ONE
Something THE SHADOW STRIKES! does particularly well is maintaining the balance between mainstream comic book sensibility and HBO subject matter without making either seem out of place. We open with a prime example — the hand acting in panels one through four clearly conveys uncomfortable reality of a woman having sex she doesn’t enjoy with a man she doesn’t like. This transitions to her reaching over to grab a cigarette and light up in panels five and six (along with the barb “what was even quicker than usual” for those in the back). This establishes her as our POV character for the scene, something every scene going forward will have in some form or another. The point of this opening scene is to establish bad guy mobster Anthony ‘Half-Step’ Sbarbarro as a detestable macho prick in his personal as well as professional life. By identifying with this woman, we share her lack of fulfillment and, soon, her ongoing victimization. We quickly learn to hate Half-Step by seeing him through her eyes. We also see a hint of a gun in a shoulder holster, in case you didn’t realize what kind of comic you’re about to read.
PAGE TWO
This page validates the bad feeling we got about Half-Step on the previous page. Not only so we establish the leg injury that gives him his nickname, we show how petty and violent he is. Note how loose his fingers are as he strikes her in panel four — it’s a casual, low-effort act in between tying his tie and pulling on his pants, and it absolutely demolishes her. Half-Step is a powerful man who callously uses that power to abuse those weaker than him. The scene ends on her, leaving us stewing in the emotional trauma Half-Step leaves behind him. Imagine a version of this scene that focuses on him instead of this nameless woman; his hands on the first page instead of hers, him walking out into the hall in this last panel instead of her crying into her pillow. One version of the scene encourages you to identify with Half-Step, or, jesus, maybe even thrill in his violent savoir faire. This other version shows him for the monster he is by humanizing the people around him.
PAGE THREE
Chick Heck — a dynamite name — catches us up on the events of the previous issue and shows us pictures of the main players so we’ll recognize them when we see them later. While Joe O’Hara is mainly just a quippy mannequin to help Chick with the recap, there’s some great staging between him and the showgirl in the first couple panels. She’s way too smart for him, and even though she’s constantly placed in positions of power in her panels (larger than him in panels one and three, walking past/in front of him in panel two) he just keeps checking out her legs with the unearned confidence of a white man with a little hair.
PAGE FOUR
More concise, well-written recapping, which Barreto livens up even further with a variety of camera angels and some cool lighting and drapery. We see Half-Step (who I keep accidentally and only quasi-understandably calling “Johnny Stomp” before correcting myself) near the end of the page, connecting this scene to the last and reminding us how much we would like for somebody to kill him. Chick does us a final narrative solid by setting us up for the next page with a great dramatic line.
PAGE FIVE
And now, after getting to know the distinct personalities and motivations of five characters across four pages, we get our title page. The Shadow stretches out onto the scene, speaking like goddamn Dracula and dressing the part. Between Barreto’s smoky effects* and Tollin’s icy, atmospheric coloring, The Shadow really feels like a different kind creature than anything else in the book. Also worth mentioning is John Workman’s great work on the issue’s title, with the rigid ‘B’ adding extra viciousness to the sketchy, violent ‘UTCHERS.’
*I was curious how exactly Barreto achieved this affect. I consulted with Jesse Hamm and Lukas Ketner, and the consensus is that Barreto probably drew these pages on coquille board, using graphite or lightly-applied colored pencil for the smaller areas of texture and watercolor sponge with white gouache, or possibly even just correction fluid, for the large smokey areas. If any collectors or collaborators of Mr. Barreto know otherwise, please let me know. I’m still curious.
PAGE SIX
This page does a great job of immediately changing the focus of the scene from The Shadow to old man Romanowski. The Shadow is a non-character who will never learn anything new about himself or struggle with a decision, so the drama of the series usually centers around how ‘normal’ people react to him. In this case, it’s the equally resolute Romanowski, whose whole motivation is neatly laid out in the first three panels. “And I will owe NOTHING... to NOBODY...Not even YOU,” Mr. Devil-Man With A Gun.
There’s a nice leftward motion as Romanowski tries to hustle this intruder out of his house, followed up by the overwhelming rightward motion of The Shadow as he silences the old man and makes his final pitch. This panel’s layout, its placement on the page, and even Tollin’s blue coloring all loosely mirror the Half-Step slap on page two; I think this is the first instance in the issue of the creative team setting up parallels between the two men. The Shadow also possesses a frightening degree of physical power, but he uses it carefully. He’s scary, but not dangerous. Or at least less dangerous. He’s not actively a woman-beater, how about that. The two panels in question, so you can draw your own conclusions:
Continuity note: the money on the floor in panel two carries over from the previous issue — Tad came to his father asking for money to pay out his gambling debts, and Romanowski, enraged at his son’s weakness, grabs glass jars containing his savings and smashes them to the floor, yelling “take it! Take it!” He uses jars because he doesn’t trust the banks — having his own money during the stock market crash was what allowed him to grow his business to what it is today. This goes further toward establishing that Romanowski sees himself as a man who doesn’t owe anything to anybody. This scene here doesn’t rely on that information, but it’s useful garnish, no?
PAGE SEVEN
Tad’s brief show of spine on the previous page immediately melts once The Shadow leaves — Barreto keeps him wobbling and weak while his father is still and resolute. The scene transitions from being about Romanowsky the senior to being about Tad, tears in his eyes as he speeds away. The last panel switches it again to the Shadow, watching silently from high above. Note how Barreto makes liberal use of the graphite shading, but leaves The Shadow’s hat and Tad’s car flat, highlighting them by omission. And man, how insane is this angle? We somehow see the train and the car at the same time without it feeling forced. The complexity of the El Tracks The Shadow’s hanging on might at first seem punishingly complicated, but I think it’s actually the parallel beams of that structure that makes the warped perspective visually legible in the first place. Using something difficult to depict something impossible. Eduardo Barreto. I tell ya.
PAGE EIGHT
This page gives us what I like to call ‘an artificial action beat.’ The Shadow catching a ride on this train is hardly a conventional action set piece, but it’s a splashy, physically extraordinary Thing That Is Happening and it breaks up a couple of dialogue-heavy scenes. It also gives us a private moment from The Shadow, helping us like him as our macroprotagonist by seeing him successfully doing something difficult. How do we know it’s difficult? The acting in his face in panel two, plus the fact that he loses his hat. On some level we know he can’t fly or teleport, but seeing him actually have to put effort into getting around helps us identify with him, without sacrificing too much of his mystery.
At the bottom of page: the return of shaky Tad. Jones does a good job of keeping small NPC type characters around, like the singer in panel four, making their Chicago feel full. It’s easy for large-cast crime comics like this to start to feel like the only people in the world are the people involved in the case in question; bizarrely, this can actually serve to make the case seem less important. What’s so bad about bad guys if there’s no society at large to be threatened by them?
PAGE NINE
Georgie Katomeris’ office (containing Georgie, Tad and Half-Step) and Frank Nitty’s drawing room (containing Nitti, Jake Guzik, and Half-Step again after some passage of time) are indistinguishable from each other as Barreto draws them, but are still kept distinct by three things. One is Jones’ dialogue — the ellipsis in that precedes Nitti’s panel three dialogue indicates a jump in time. Another is Nitti’s smoking jacket — he wouldn’t be going out in it, so we must have changed locations from the office to his private residence. The last and most effective is Tollin’s coloring — the grey of George’s office gives way to the green walls of Nitti’s drawing room. I admit this transition felt abrupt to me at first read, but these three clues let me easily find my footing again.
PAGE TEN
We spent the first two pages of the issue showing Half-Step to be detestable; now we show him to be truly dangerous. His patience and planning further draw him into parallel with The Shadow — having him tell a story that essentially ends with “I could have killed the President of the United States but didn’t want to because of my deeply held principles” does a great job of showing us his crazy ego and, more importantly, his ambition. The point of the end of this scene is clear: this is not someone who’ll willingly stay in a subordinate role forever. But he’s not just going to throw his weight around. He’s going to be smart about it. Note how he goes from very small in panel five, cut off by the top of the panel, to large in panel six, crowding Nitti into the corner.
PAGE ELEVEN
Half-Step dominates his half of the page. The heavy shadowing on his face in panel three indicates there’s something dark going on in his mind. The other half of the page is all about The Shadow. We finally have the two of them in the same location here, with the Shadow placed in a position of power — the low angle of his glory shot in panel five, the fact that Half-Step doesn’t know he’s being watched. They’re even sort of almost facing each other down, with Half-Step facing left in panel three and the Shadow creeping in towards the right in panel five. But like Half-Step, The Shadow won’t just smash in guns ablaze— he’s playing a longer game. This page really sets them up as worthy enemies, with a lot of good, or at least better, people caught in the metaphorical crossfire between them.
PAGE TWELVE
Here we finally catch up with Inspector Cardona, Brenda Shield, and Margo Lane, who Chick Heck introduced us to by proxy in his earlier scene. This page has what for my money is the only real misstep this issue makes; although Margo and Cardona are both name-checked on this page, Brenda is not, and it’s been so long since the Heck scene that it’s asking a lot of the readers to remember her by sight — especially since there isn’t really much going on with her design to visually distinguish her, big polka dot bow or not. That said, this page does still somehow manage to give us that cool, spacious three-panel sequence of Cardona walking away from the ladies only to be waylaid by The Shadow while still leaving room for a nice big ‘Identify With This Character Please’ shot of Margo in the penultimate panel. Jones also manages to give us clear ideas of both Margo and Cardona’s characters, their dynamic with each other, AND their individual dynamics with the Shadow while he’s at it. Lastly, I like Tollin’s choice to give Margo a Green color scheme, making her instantly as visually distinct in the issue as the Shadow in his blacks and reds. For a page that makes the issue’s one arguable mistake, it sure does a hell of a lot right.
PAGE THIRTEEN
Half-Step is back, haunting the plot just like the Shadow does. Seems to be a theme of men preying on women in this issue — let’s keep an eye on that going forward. Note how much real estate on the page is given up, letting the panels float around; this is used in the top half to separate Half-Step from the other guys in the car, painting his “Like I’m gonna break this city down” line as an unthinking quasi-crazy utterance, as well as to separate Margo and Brenda from the gossiping nightclub crowd in the bottom half.
PAGE FOURTEEN
Here we explain Brenda’s stakes in this scene. Even if you don’t empathize with her high-society worries, it’s worth noting that Jones has made clear through action and dialogue that every character in every scene has something they want, need, and/or fear, and Brenda is no exception. Tollin draws attention to the dreaded encroachment of gossip in the last panel with a change in background color from a neutral yellow to a threatening orange.
Now, bear in mind, Margo might be genuinely supportive here, but all of what he’s saying about herself is a lie. There is no Dick. She's never met the Hartes. She’s working Brenda as per the Shadow’s orders — she and her fellow agents are basically Ocean’s Eleven if Danny Ocean decided to start dressing like Doctor Sax and fighting crime, and if that means pulling a hustle on a pie-eyed heiress, then I guess that’s just what's on the agenda for the evening.
(Fun personal trivia: This comic came out the month my girlfriend was born. She also sort of has the face Barreto gives most women he draws. Coincidence? One wonders.)
PAGE FIFTEEN
Margo is the only person in this issue who gets an internal monologue, which she uses here to reveal the way her charade chafes, but also the freedom she feels from being anonymous, from being unconnected to her past mistakes. So, of course, enter: the man who knows all her secrets, here to spoil her reverie. This scene takes place in the ladies room — another example of a man trespassing against a woman, except that while our gangsters are doing it for personal gain, the Shadow (here unsexed and dehumanized to the point of being almost a silhouette) does it in service of his theoretically higher calling. He dominates panel four, almost encircling her. Margo’s body language tells it all — not afraid, but very uncomfortable. We keep the scene in her perspective by cutting from the Shadow in panel five to Brenda in panel six, both more or less in her literal point of view. Note again how Barreto employs negative space above and below the final panel to create a zoom-in effect on Brenda’s eyes.
PAGE SIXTEEN
More Big Sister Margo; see how she controls Brenda’s body in panels one through three. Half-Step is inside now — I think we’re supposed to infer that he’s responsible for loosing the rumor that’s upsetting Brenda. A slightly abstract example of a man invading a female space? I might be reaching, there.
Barreto does a great job of changing locations by making panel five a round panel with poor Joe Cardona on the right of the frame, contrasting with Half-Step’s leftward placement in the square panel opposite. Tollin helps with a cold color shift. The last panel might not seem like it does a lot, but it actually sets up two things for later in the issue: One is that it makes for the second time we see The Shadow and Cardona together, so when we see them together again at the end of the issue it benefits from a satisfying ‘rule of threes’ thing. The other is that it sets up one of The Shadow’s later appearances — I’ll touch on why this was necessary when it comes up.
PAGE SEVENTEEN
A great falling line of action as Tad stumbles and falls across the top four panels. Employing steadily lengthening panels like this is something Barreto does so well, and here it has the side benefit of giving Half-Step room to really loom over Tad in panel four. Meanwhile, I’m glad Half-Step’s poor, mistreated girlfriend had a good lay. She deserves it.
PAGE EIGHTEEN
Barreto is so good at clothing and drapery that you start to take it for granted — and then you remember it all over again when he draws a disheveled suit like the one Tad’s stuffed into. As soon as Nitti shuffles Tad out of the apartment, Half-Step’s attention turns to the woman. We get super close to him, the rendering becomes denser, meaner. Tollin even gives him an angry rage-flush. He’s huge in panel four, crowding her to the edge of the frame. His dialogue transverses panel five into panel six, implying he’s following her as she tries to get away from him. The final panel puts us back in her shoes, as Half-Step’s rage is directed straight at us.
PAGE NINETEEN
Panel one to panel two is the kind of cut we don’t see much in comics, despite it being incredible effective. We get the point of her abuse without — man, I guess the phrase I want to use is cheapen it by showing it explicitly on the page. Clearly implying something and then cutting away can be even more effective than showing it outright. If we were to see this scene play out, we’d still know in the backs of our heads that this is, essentially, a superhero comic, and that it’d be possible that when we turned the page, The Shadow might show up to save this woman. When the scene is over and the hero never appears, we might be left wondering, “Christ, then what was the point of seeing all that?” This method here conveys what happened with a haunting finality, but without any creepy exploitation.
On a characterization front, the thread that culminates in this scene is massive. Half-Step treats this woman like an appliance, but claims he’d kill any man who touched her. He actively entraps her into this weird “gotcha” self-cuckold and then punishes her for falling for it. This shows us so much about the depth of his bizarre self-loathing, his warped pride, the outright evil of him. And yet, again, staging these as events in her life keeps her from being just a prop to let us know how super duper bad this story’s bad guy is. She has an internal life outside of him. This all actually makes these displays of his violence more effecting because we’re seeing its effects on a “real person,” not just some Real Doll who doubles as a speedbag.
Note also how well panel two and the butcher hanging up the cow in panel three frames the interaction between Romanowski and his debtor, Karl. Size continues to equal power as we get the huge foregrounded gangster (rendered into one monotone shape by Tollin’s colors) making the bright, full-figured Romanowsky look smaller and more vulnerable than he realizes.
PAGE TWENTY
The empty room in panel one gives us a moment to breathe as we head into a tense scene. At the same time, we know we’re getting close to the end of the issue, so an entire panel dedicated to an empty room makes us slightly nervous — we’re aware we’re running out of time. Which, by design or by happenstance, is the Shadow’s point at the end of the page. Tad is consistently rendered in a clear, clean comic book style, while The Shadow is rendered in planes of light and darkness, making him seem elemental, powerful, spectral.
PAGE TWENTY ONE
This is the best page in this comic. I lost my mind when I saw this page. It’s AWESOME. Look at how well rendered Romanowski is in panel one. The oppressive dark architecture in panel two, drawing the eye to the small, bright Romanowski. That unnecessary but oh so cool-looking graphic black-out in panel three. The hatching on Romanowski in panel four. The callback to Half-Step’s leg injury, set up nearly twenty pages ago. The cascade of action across those last three panels. Tollin’s colors across the whole damn thing. I love this page. This page is why they have comic books.
PAGE TWENTY TWO
Look at Romanowski’s face in panel one, highlighted by the falling glasses. The FURY. The reveal of Half-Step is so pat, so understated. The little throw-away line to himself further cements him as a bona fide evil psycho criminal — one more reason we want to see him go down. The circular panel inside the square field of panel five, a technique I can’t ever remember seeing before, gives the impression that a notable amount of time has passed since the glasses fell — glasses that Barreto made sure to pointedly re-establish as a visual signifier for old man Romanowski in these last few pages.
So, The Shadow shows up late. This is why it was important to set up The Shadow’s intent to see Romanowski in that panel at the end of page sixteen; to have The Shadow appear too late would come off as arbitrary, or even as an intentional delay on his part, if we hadn’t established The Shadow’s intentions beforehand. Or, put more simply: in order to show a character failing at something, you have show they were trying to accomplish that thing in the first place — especially when so much work has gone into conveying that character’s competence.
PAGE TWENTY THREE
The Shadow respects Romanowski’s principles. Of all the characters in this story, the two of them are the most alike in that regard. But while Romanowski was a stubborn old butcher and easy prey for Half-Step and his guys, The Shadow is an unkillable psychic murder man.
Panel two is full of space, both geographic and negative, giving us another much needed moment of breathing room. All the gangsters present have distinctive color cues, easily letting us get a feel for the size of the gathering as opposed to an amorphous clutch of same-colored “GANGSTERS (tm),” which often happens in comic book scenes depicting groups of men in suits. They can become like zebras if you don’t take the time to make him distinct, as they are here. Half-Step’s buggy zooms into panel four from beyond the page, a nice way to emphasize that the vehicle is coming at them from out of nowhere.
PAGE TWENTY FOUR
The tommy gun EXPLODES through panel one, dissolving the panel border itself. Those carefully color-coded mobsters from the previous page all catch bullets, which wouldn’t mean as much to the reader if they weren’t distinct from one another. “A bunch of gangsters got shot” becomes “several men were brutally murdered by machine gun fire.” Said gunfire chases Guzik from left to right in panel three — note the diagonal line that tracks his presence in panels two, three, and four, making his plunge to the ground in panel four seem like an extension of his movement in the other panels, even though the they happen on radically different parts of the page. Barreto keeps the same angle on Guzik in panels four and six, cementing him as the lone survivor of this drive-by and the default POV character for the scene. Or, to put in visually:
This is some seriously solid craft.
PAGE TWENTY FIVE
The Shadow is HUGE on this page. This drawing of him the biggest thing in the entire comic — the same size as he is on the cover. He bookends this story, dominating it. Cardona’s fear and uncertainly help sell the terrifying finals words of his boss, seen here in full on What-If-Hannibal-Lecter-was-Batman mode. This drive-by was easily the biggest act of violence in the issue, and the heavy blacks of The Shadow on this last page emphasizes him as this dark presence bringing doom to the Chicago mob. This page cements what we can expect from the next issue: The Shadow’s done his ground work. He’s ready to start making some moves.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Despite having three more pages than your typical modern comic, the page for page action is always dense and well-paced. Every scene feels necessary and the story never lingers long on any one place or character, and yet it never feels overstuffed or rushed. It takes time for some impressive visuals to break up the action, but never to the point of self-indulgence. There’s always something happening, even in a scene that basically boils down to ‘Two women go a club and a third woman talks shit.’ I talk a lot about Barreto — and I would, he remains one of the best artists of all time — but I don’t think enough can be said for Jones’ masterful pacing and lean yet conversational dialogue. These are two creators at the top of their game, with a solid coloring/lettering/editorial team backing their play. Almost thirty years after its publication, there’s still a lot to learn and even more to admire in these pages. This is definitely the kind of read that makes me want to up my game.
When possible, I’ll be placing links at the end of these so you can buy better copies of the comics I’m analyzing with out my words getting in the way.
Retroactively, here’s Comixology links for the comics I covered in my first two reviews:
BATMAN: GOTHAM ADVENTURES #17
PETER PARKER: SPIDER-MAN #13
As far as I can tell, THE SHADOW STRIKES! has never been collected in print, nor does Comixology doesn’t carry it, so I’ll link to another great Shadow story by someone else who really understands the material: Matt Wagner’s GRENDEL vs THE SHADOW, with Brennan Wagner on colors. I’ll also throw in a link to another Eduardo Barreto DC comic I’ve always dug, written by this issue’s editor, Brian Augustyn: BATMAN: MASTER OF THE FUTURE.
As always, feel free to check me on any mistakes I might have made, add your own commentary, or share similar examples of good comics done well. I’ll be back next week with a different comic to peruse.
ANALYSIS -- PETER PARKER: SPIDER-MAN, VOL.2, #13 (January 2000)
SCRIPT: Howard Mackie
PENCILS: Lee Weeks
INKS: Robert Campanella
COLORS: Gregory Wright
LETTERS: Troy Peteri for RS & Comicraft
EDITORIAL: Ralph Macchio, Bob Harris (EIC)
PETER PARKER: SPIDER-MAN #13 is an interesting parallel to last week’s BATMAN: GOTHAM ADVENTURES #17. It was made at roughly the same time, and occupies a similar place in its series run (the series’ second years, after the look and feel of both books had been established). This leaves both issues to preform similar duties — not to open up new ground or bring everything to a close, but to keep the ongoing macronarrative afloat with exciting, well-made, meat and potatoes storytelling. Both series are secondary titles, rather that the AMAZING SPIDER-MAN or BATMAN books that serve as the flagship titles of their respective lines, and therefore they have a certain latitude to explore different stories those main books don’t or can’t. And like Scott Peterson, Tim Levins and Terry Beatty, Howard Mackie, Lee Weeks and Robert Campanella are lean, dynamic storytellers with intimate, hard-earned understanding of the technology of comics.
The differences are few, but significant. GOTHAM ADVENTURES is a publication explicitly targeted at younger readers, while PETER PARKER is aimed at the slightly older mainstream Marvel audience — its storytelling is meant to be denser and more interconnected to ongoing story threads. GOTHAM ADVENTURES is drawn from animation-informed character models, while PETER PARKER is drawn in the more illustrative Marvel house style. Which brings us to a final, somewhat abstract but sometimes very important, difference; GOTHAM ADVENTURES is a DC Comic, where PETER PARKER is very much a Marvel Comic.
With that, let’s get into 2000’s PETER PARKER: SPIDER-MAN #13 — “LIVING IN OBLIVION!”
And please, feel free to check me on any mistakes I might have made, add your own commentary, or share similar examples of good comics done well.
PETER PARKER: SPIDER-MAN #13 and all characters contained therein are property of Marvel Comics, reproduced here solely for educational purposes.
COVER
This cover is not only powerfully simple, it also sets us up for a gutpunch visual at the end of the issue. Note the great anatomy on the crumpled Spider-Man at the bottom, apparent even with half of his costume reduced to matte black. The sketchy black in the Carnage face is a little messy for my tastes, but the face would’ve been too insubstantial without it. Maybe if the Face had been expanded to huge, nightmarish Jack O’Lantern proportions, it could have stood better on its own.
PAGE ONE
This opening splash is great. The dialogue clearly introduces all three characters by name, and the staging immediately shows how powerful Carnage is. The absence of background is compelling — we want to know who’s saying these things, and to see how Spider-Men gets out of this mess. The barely hinted-at grass they’re kneeling in give the scene just enough of a sense of place to make the it feel real.
PAGE TWO-THREE
POW! What a followup splash! Only it isn’t actually a splash, is it — it’s a five-panel page, expanded to twice its normal size by stretching it across the real estate of a double page splash. Such a power move... you can only pull this kind of thing off every once in a while before it gets gimmicky, and they decided to come out the gate swinging with it. The way this forces you to physically rotate the book even ads impact to Carnages laterally sweeping blow, which your eye immediately goes to, since it’s aligned with the fold of the page. Weeks made sure the blow wan’t QUITE centered on the page, however, since that would make it disappear into the fold, defeating the whole point. With one move, Carnage knocks Venom away from us while sending Spider-Man sprawling towards us, making him seem even stronger. The double-sized page also allows the scene-setting panels one and five, which would come across as tiny on a normal page, to seem wide and immersive. We also get our first close-up of the issue in panel two — Carnage, establishing this as HIS show.
The one weakness of the double-page format is actually evidenced in my scattered commentary above — because your eye is drawn immediately to the center of it, you end up reading the page in pieces rather than the top to bottom, left to right manner pages are drawn to facilitate. Fortunately, the action on this page is really less sequential than it is scene-setting, so nothing is really lost. This time.
PAGE FOUR
I love the little circuit of panels one though three. Introducing the incongruous element of the baton hitting the fence in panel one sticks in your reading flow, twisting your understanding of the space and adding to the weird atmosphere of the scene. More glamour shots and close-ops of Carnage — we start getting the inkling that this might not be his show so much as his fantasy.
PAGE FIVE
Panel one repeats the pose of the close-up in the last panel of the previous page, indicating the shift from fantasy to reality. We now see the face was Carnage’s — aka Cletus Kasady’s — weird tech-inflected jail cell. Weeks consistently stages Cletus in the background, making him smaller (and implicitly weaker) than the guard at all times. This does a couple of things for us; 1) it shows us the cruelty of the guard in charge of Cletus, giving us a nice mini-boss for his part of the story. 2) It catches us up on why Cletus doesn’t have his alien costume anymore (and if you didn’t know what that was when you picked up the comic, you can intuit everything you need to know from what you saw in his fantasy). 3) It establishes an enmity between Carnage and Venom, which may come into play later. And finally, 4) even without his costume, Cletus Kasasy is clearly dangerous, unhinged, and patient.
PAGE SIX
This page is… muddy. Weeks and Campanella do a good job of setting up the geography of May’s apartment, but Wright’s colors make it difficult to delineate between middle and background. The BING of the elevator is way too dark, disappearing into a tangent with the ceiling. Jill and Arthur aren’t well established until we see them in panel five, which makes Jill’s crying seem even more sudden and forced, and the phone-drop in panel six is really over the top. It’s possible the script for this page was re-worked after the art came in for some reason or another, but the end result is just not that great. Totally kills the momentum from the previous pages.
Now, you shouldn’t point out a problem if you don’t have a solution, so here’s an easy, non-structural fix for at least some of this: put the phone in May’s hand in panel two, and then move May’s first two lines from panel three to panel two. In script form, it might look like this:
PANEL TWO — MAY answers the phone, glancing over at the door as she hears the elevator bing.
MAY: Hello! Parker Residence. May Parker Speaking.
MAY: Oh my… someone’s coming up in the elevator, too!
MAY: Could you hold on for one moment, please?
PANEL THREE — JILL and ARTHUR STACY enter the apartment. MAY looks over at them as they enter, covering the mouthpiece of the phone.
MAY: JILL and Arthur STACY! What a pleasant surprise. I’ll be with you in a second. I just answered the phone and—
I think this is more natural, and gives the vaguely useless panel two some activity. It also makes the whole point of panel three “Jill and Arthur enter the room,” which does a better job of introducing them.
PAGE SEVEN
Weeks employs one of my favorite tricks here — conveying the physical freedom of a character by having them slightly overlap the panel boarders. You can see it in Spider-Man’s figures in panel two and four. Four is especially effective — having Spidey partially outside the panel helps give us the feeling that he’s dropping into a scene in progress. Note also how Weeks slowly brings Spidey closer to us throughout panels one and three, ending in a nice juicy close-up. We’re nearly a third of the way through the issue and this is the first time we’ve actually met our hero, so this is a good way to get acquainted with him this late in the game. Some nice relatable internal thought also helps us get on the same page as the titular Peter Parker; imagine this scene without any lettering and see how cold and remote our faceless hero becomes.
PAGE EIGHT
Mackie give us a fun superhero take on the “daydreaming about your vacation at work” shtick. Weeks maintains a nice rightwards line of motion from Spidey’s dive in panel one, tearing off the door in panel two, the look over the shoulder and down the right-reaching arm in panel three, and then changing course by having Spidey run towards us in panel four, away from the rightward trajectory towards danger in the first three panels. An annotated version of the page to demonstrate what I’m talking about, just in case I’m describing it clumsily:
Spidey’s lean in the last panel is dynamic as hell.
PAGE NINE
The large black expanse of the bridge might seem like a waste of space at first, but it’s actually a way for Weeks and Campanella to stage the teetering bus high up in the panel and page, helping to sell the precarious verticality of the soon-to-fall vehicle. It’s kind of a static panel, which makes me think there might have been some more rubble and activity in the pencils that got lost in the inks. The ‘Department of Corrections’ label in panel four is a nice, natural way to establish the prisoner transport element of the scene without relying solely on the expository dialogue in panel five. It sets us up for the revelations of the rest of the scene and keeps the plot moving — another way in which this sequence is playing catch-up for being so relatively late in the issue. It’d be nice if Wright had used different colors between the uniforms of prisoners and the guards (established in the Kasady scene as grey and green, respectively).
PAGE TEN
The bus falling and exploding is a cool, kinetic way to put a button on this scene. I’ve been criticizing Wright’s colors so far, but he does dynamite work on this page. I love the blue figures in front of the brilliant blaze in panel three, as well as the glowing reverse angle on Spider-Man in panel four. Some heavy, but not too heavy, symbolism in panel five — the looming presence of Carnage hovering over a sleepy, unsuspecting city.
PAGE ELEVEN
This page is a fairly flat “people in a room talking in cliches” scene, but Weeks keeps it alive by changing up his camera angles, going from wide shots to close ups, and employing another favorite trick of mine by dropping out the background and panel borders in the panel three group shot. Note the use of the spiky houseplants as the visual shorthand for May’s apartment.
PAGE TWELVE
Weeks and Campanella dwarf Spidey with flaming wreckage in panel one, selling the pressure and anxiety he feels at the prospect of Kasady’s escape. We cut to a relatively close shot of Spidey in panel two to smooth the transition to an extreme close up of Kas(s)ady’s empty prison uniform and cuffs in panel three. Dropping out the background and panel boarder in panel four emphasizes the immensity of the danger Spider-Man, and New York by extension, now faces.
(Trivia: Jack the Ripper’s bodycount is generally accepted to be a horrible -- yet ultimately modest in the grand scope of comic book super villains -- five.)
PAGE THIRTEEN
The close-in anatomy shots across the first four panels builds to a good full-body reveal in panel five. I’m not sure who the uniformed guys on the ground are supposed to be; I guess they’re cops? I can’t see a hardware store having armed security on hand. It’s just weird to use dead cops solely as serial-killer-escape potpourri. It makes the scene feel fake. They don’t even need to be there — the fact that the knife blade is the only part of Kasady that isn’t red indicates he’s covered entirely in paint, not blood, and it’s not like he couldn’t just be ranting to himself. Personal peev, and anyway, it’s very well drawn. I can’t find any one person “J.P. Bradford” might be. Who knows? Maybe it’s Lee Week’s brother-in-law.
PAGE FOURTEEN
Man, maybe I’m missing some context from other Spider-Man comics of the time, but these Aunt May scenes sure feel like a whole lot of nothing. Waiting by the phone in a well-lit apartment is just about the least dynamic thing you can put on a page. She’s literally napping in this scene. That said, panel three is really well drawn, and Weeks nicely ratchets up the intimacy in the last two panels by sacrificing some real estate on either side.
(These Aunt May scenes are the exact reason for Wally Wood’s 22 Panels That Always Work.)
PAGE FIFTEEN
Weeks easily indicates that the vehicle Kasady jumps on in panel two is a limousine just by including those vertical ornaments in between the windows. Wright leaves the blue in his eyes, reminding us he’s just a crazy guy in paint right now, and not the alien death monster he’s still claiming to be. See also: the hair in his face, the wrinkles on his forehead, his toenails.
PAGE SIXTEEN
Probably just a coincidence, but Kasady’s slash in panel one follows the same motion as Carnage’s sweep on the page two-three double page. Very well-drawn Kingpin here, his intelligence indicated with subtle hand motions as opposed to Kasady and turtleneck goon’s broad pantomime.
PAGE SEVENTEEN
Panel two gives us another good look at the environment, making the following action feel more grounded and understandable. It’s generally a good idea to cut to a wide shot at the start of an action scene. Meanwhile, Weeks continues to be a stellar anatomist.
PAGE EIGHTEEN
Including some onlookers in panel one helps sell the moment of Spidey getting blindsided by Kasady. Bit odd that Spidey couldn’t evade a manhole cover when he usually dodges bullets, but that’s a nitpick. The creative team keeps the fight personal by cutting to the closeup in panel two — this sequence is closing out Kasady’s story from the opening of the issue, and this closeup helps keep it his story. For this page, at least.
PAGE NINETEEN
Now the tide turns against Kasady, as it must, and we switch back to Spider-Man’s internal thoughts. Spidey goes from a prop in Kasady’s story to Kasady becoming a prop in his.
I gotta say, Cletus’ short-lived reign of terror leaves me pretty cold. Despite the work done to establish his captivity and his enmity with the blonde guard on page five, we never get any real payoff on it. His escape happens in between pages, and the guard is never seen again (it’s possible he’s supposed to be the guard Spider-man talks to on page nine, but even that’s some poor followup). For all the great buildup of Cletus Kasady as an enemy to make Spider-Man quake in his webs, the confrontation we ultimately get fails to live up to it. It’s shame, because as far as the Carnage stuff went, up to page twelve we were really cooking.
The page ends with this gorgeous montage panel — Venom huge (and possibly even diegetic) in the foreground, while the Kingpin looms in the sky (definitely non-diegetic) like a malevolent blue moon. Spidey’s tiny form shows his childish declaration of independence to be just that; there’s larger forces in play than the desires of Peter Parker.
PAGE TWENTY
Speaking of Peter Parker, here he is at last. It may even be intentional that Peter’s been spending the whole issue as Spider-Man, unable to even end his thoughts without a crisis coming up. Weeks indicates Peter’s feeling of independence of personal empowerment by steadily increasing his size throughout the three panels, culminating in him literally clenching the Spider-Man mask in his hand, symbolically getting a hold of his life. Or so he thinks.
PAGE TWENTY ONE
Lot going on with this page, all of it good. Peter’s graceful, playful jump into the stairwell shows us his frame of mind as he heads into this heavy scene — knowing he’s in a good place will make his imminent descent into a bad place all the more crushing. As Peter enters the apartment, Wright does a good job of drawing our eye to Aunt May in the background with a warm yet menacing gold-orange light. Since we more or less know what Peter’s heading into, Weeks helps us feel the tension of his uncertainly by keeping us close to him in panel five. Great use of black negative space in panel six. Note that the action in the last three panels happens along the same axis, helping to build the tension further.
PAGE TWENTY TWO
Huge, empty splash page; they’re in shock, in pain, all alone, with only each other to hold onto. Like I said at the beginning, I think the cover thematically connects to this final splash page — the dark and bloody Spider-Man moment setting us up for the eventual sucker punch of the big empty Peter Parker moment.
Overall: A very well-drawn comic that suffers from a script that maybe relies a little too much on genre conventions and ultimately fails to pay off on its imaginative first half, as well as a few missed coloring opportunities. A lot to like from all parties involved, though.
At the end of all this, I’d be remiss if I didn’t include the back cover, which is a stone cold comic book classic:
On a recent trip to visit my folks, I went through some boxes and found, sans cover, this copy of 1999’s BATMAN: GOTHAM ADVENTURES #17. Gotham Adventures was my full-stop favorite comic when it was coming out, a combination of me being smack dab in the middle of its target demographic and it being really, really well made. Tight story, dynamic artwork, clean, crisp colors and letters. As I transition from Vacation Dan back to The Schkade That Works, I thought it would be a useful exercise to go through this issue, page by page, to see how it ticks.
I’ll be focusing mainly on the pencils and colors by Tim Levins and Lee Loughridge, respectively, plus Scott Peterson’s script — Terry Beatty is one of my favorite inkers ever and letter Tim Harkins acquits himself expertly, so I won’t have much to say about them beyond “continues to be amazing, surprising no one.”
And please, feel free to check me on any mistakes I might have made, add your own commentary, or share similar examples of good comics done well.
Batman: Gotham Adventures and all characters contained therin are of course property of DC Comics, reproduced here solely for educational purposes.
PAGE ONE
We open strong with a full-page splash. Three distinct players whose suits, hats, and bad ties immediately code them in the Timm-verse aesthetic as ‘Hoodlums’ give us immediate sense of threat. Their momentum is heading left, into the fold, against the western flow of reading; this is because they’re bad guys — their actions go against the proper order of things, up to and including the reading flow. But also for another reason, which the right-most hood’s reaction sets us up for, compelling us to turn the page.
PAGE TWO-THREE
An even stronger followup with a double-page splash. Batman smashes in through the window in a powerful left to right movement, in direct opposition to the gangsters’ movement on the previous splash. The background establishes the family Batman is there to protect, as well as the shabbiness of their apartment and clothes. The fact that Batman’s cape can still be partially outside the window while he’s hitting the hoods who just came through the opposite doorway immediately sells how small the space is. What could these poor people possibly have that’s worth three armed gunmen kicking down their door?
PAGE FOUR
This page is all about one thing: establishing Batman as an overwhelming force. Strong left-to-right movement, always dominating the panel, no signs that this is especially difficult for him. His first line of dialogue: a piece of short, relaxed, confident detective talk.
PAGE FIVE
The first two panels do a lot. Batman converses openly with the Agronas family, who clearly trust him. He’s a terrifying physical presence, but a terrifying physical presence of the people. It also shows that Nicky Agronas is bright — wears glasses, reads the newspaper. As soon as they mention the husband, the husband appears, which is a nice clean introduction for that character. There’s no reason the husband could’t have been in the double splash that introduces his wife and son, but having him coming home in the middle of this scene is a great way to inject a little motion onto a page that would otherwise just have been four people talking in a room. Lastly, the sudden use of heavy black — enhanced by Loughridge’s shift to unnatural yellow lighting — makes Batman’s suspicion of the husband feel intimidating without having to change his physical demeanor, which would have both been over-the-top and undone the work the first couple panels do to make him a sympathetic protagonist.
Academic sidebar: Setting aside that this is an issue in a series featuring one of the most famous fictional detectives of all time, how do we know Batman the protagonist of this story? Because he’s the one doing things and asking questions, moving the plot forward.
PAGE SIX
Nice one-two beat with the first two panels on this page: Panel one, Mr. Agronas is calmly answering the question — he’s a good citizen with nothing to fear from Batman. Batman still dominates the frame, though. Panel two zooms in on Agronas, putting the question of his involvement to bed with a simple, honest mini-joke. Letting him have a panel all to himself to say this is a good way to humanize him. In panel three, Batman continues to tower, but there’s no threat of violence. Here, as on the high-angle shot in panel three of the previous page, we see some shattered glass to remind us of the damage to the window and door from earlier. The money Batman leaves them for said damage is totally understated, with only the bright green color drawing attention to it. Batman’s a stand-up guy, but drawing attention to it wouldn’t fit his image.
PAGE SEVEN
There’s nothing in this first panel that says “JAIL” or “POLICE” — it’s just a bluntly governmental-looking building (I believe it’s specifically the blocky grey columns that give it this feeling), but we can tell from the fact that there’s prison bars in the next panel that that’s what the building is. No need to add extraneous detail. I like the design Levins gave the head hood, first seen on page one — the unibrow is a great way to sell the change from frowning to fear. Note also how many memorable features the big prisoner has — bald, scar, blind eye, bad teeth. He’s easy to remember, which will become important shortly.
PAGE EIGHT
Loughridge’s sickly green colors of the previous page snap back to natural lighting on this page, immediately conveying the change in environment. And hey, how great is that Commissioner Gordon silhouette in panel one? That’s some smart use of character model. Regarding the design of the big prisoner from the previous page — we see here that he’s in fact Batman in disguise, which actually saves us a lot of space on this page; instead of showing him removing the disguise and then putting on the cowl, we only need to see him opening the shirt to reveal the bat emblem, and then in the next panel, bam, he’s Batman. We know Bruce Wayne doesn’t look like that. We know it’s a disguise. We get it. It does rely on the reader having a basic knowledge of these characters and this world, but all things considered, that’s a pretty safe bet. Couple other things: Levins keeps the energy up by skewing the axis of the four panel grid, which also gives this rooftop scene a nice sense of vertigo. I’m actually not a huge fan of the last panel — I find that the upside-down pose kind of undercuts the gravity of what he’s saying, I think the leftwards movement is weird, and the whole panel is just, like, tangent city. That said, still a strong page.
PAGE NINE
Again: Batman as an Overwhelming Force. I know I just bashed the previous page for its leftward movement, but on this page it works really well — the wreckage of Batman’s assault on the house leads leftward towards the front door, up the stairs, ultimately across Zarelli’s desk, towards the man himself. I think this counter reading flow movement really effectively sells Batman as an invading presence in this man’s home. This page also shows us the wealth and power of Enrico Zarelli, who we finally see in the last panel after being mentioned regularly for four pages; The huge house, the framed artwork, the dozen armed thugs. See also the confidence of his speech, and the fact that he’s shadowed just like Batman. There’s an implicit feeling that this is a meeting between equals.
PAGE TEN
Nice that our first full look at Zarelli has him in his own panel, with the cowled shadow on the wall behind him suggesting Batman’s off-panel movement towards him. Great acting here — I love how Zarelli no-sells Batman’s gimmick.
PAGE ELEVEN
Levins (with the round panels boarders) and Loughridge (with his deceptively-hard-to-pull-off-well use of grey and sepia tones) work together well here to make the scene a flashback without drawing attention to that effect. Note how we don’t need to see Zarelli’s whole body to know he can walk, we just need to see him moving at the same height as other, presumably ambulatory people. Cool dramatic composition in the last panel, placing us in the line of fire along with Zarelli and his men.
PAGE TWELVE
This use of shadow to cleanly yet powerfully suggest something gruesome off screen is something ‘Batman: The Animated Series’ did so well, and it’s likewise effective here. Seeing Zarelli’s clenching hand (the Z ring was established on the previous page) gives us just enough intimacy to feel his pain. The use of black as a costume design element in this scene makes Zarelli, his son, and Batman feel a little more important and real than the hoods on either side.
PAGE THIRTEEN
I like that there’s a batarang laying on the ground amongst the dead/unconscious gangsters. It’s not necessary, but we saw him throw it on the previous page, so it’s a nice little piece of continuity. The final two panels have added impact because they’re the last before the page turn, giving them a feeling of isolation and hopelessness (undercut slightly by the fact that the page turns to a very colorful double page DC Kids page encouraging young readers to enter a nabisco sweepstakes, recycle this comic, and, perhaps most puzzlingly, pick up the first issue of the ‘Day of Judgement’ crossover).
PAGE FOURTEEN
Good call having Batman’s cape closed over him on this page. It makes him less aggressive, almost judge-like, befitting the respect he’s giving this man who lost his son. The cool coloring in panel four adds impact to the dicey situation Batman now faces.
PAGE FIFTEEN
Appropriately, we go from talking about sons de facto and de jure to having Batman talk it over with Dick Grayson, his son by any other name. Here, the upside down thing actually serves to break up the mood after a heavy scene. The fact that they’re talking about serious business while casually practicing acrobatics makes the scene particular to these specific characters — even when there’s no one to punch and nothing to detect, there’s still always Batman stuff going on in this Batman comic.
PAGE SIXTEEN
This page rules. I love how much motion there is, even down to Dick’s change of arm position in the background from panels one to two. It makes the motion of Bruce pulling off the mask seem smaller and more intimate by comparison. And that last line is just all-american grade-A understanding of character. It’s informed by Bruce’s origins, but not directly referencing them. He can’t put his personal desire to see Zarelli’s empire destroyed before his human duty to give Nicky the chance to know his biological father. Panel two of this page also features our first and only bleed art (art which extends beyond the edge of the physical page, as opposed to art contained within the boarders of a panel), which further gives the Batcave a sense of hugeness, and nicely breaks up the layout of the page besides.
PAGE SEVENTEEN
Note that the only characters we can clearly see on this page are Nicky and Zarelli — the scene is about them, not Batman and the goons, who are all either far away or in shadow. Nice touch, the goons all being in casts and bandages. I can’t even put my finger on why that works so well; they’re not really there to guard anything, since Batman already went through them once without much trouble. I think their main purpose on this page is to make us feel how Nicky feels in this place; this big house full of men with guns, this intimidating world this man is asking him to be a part of.
PAGE EIGHTEEN
This page is lit warmly, with lots of sympathetic angles. It’s not until the last panel that Zarelli’s pitch is thrown into any kind of suspicious light. “Without family, you have nothing” — but family with Zarelli means gunmen, tainted opulence, and the looming, annihilating specter of Batman.
Now, I’ve eschewed ads in my scans until now, but I include this one as a particularly good example of how even the best writers have no control over what image might end up facing an important emotional moment.
PAGE NINETEEN
The first page dedicated entirely to Nicky and Zarelli. The very sympathetic first panel transitions into an intense close up in panel two that makes Zarelli’s offer feel almost like a threat, even though that’s clearly not how he intendeds it. Zarelli can’t help being the dangerous gangster he is. The first time Nicky speaks, it’s to ask about his parents, and I love Zarelli’s castoffish response, “The people who raised you?”
PAGE TWENTY
Another page solely of Nicky and Zarelli. If the last couple pages have been all about Zarelli’s pitch, this one is entirely about Nicky’s process. The Thinker’s a little on the nose, but I dunno, it works. And it goes towards our ongoing theme of Nicky Is Smart. He’s staged strongly throughout, reflecting the strong decision he makes. The choice to include the background in panel four helps reinforce Nicky and Zarelli’s spatial relationship, which heightens the act of walking away. That it’s this close to the end of the story and Peterson can still devote an entire page to this moment shows how well-paced the issue is.
PAGE TWENTY ONE
The goons become useful again in this final action beat. Batman Overwhelming Forces them into the doorjamb, a good use of the environment to make it clear he gets to them before they can get after Nicky, but his real rage is saved for when he turns around toward Zarelli. He’s huge in this panel, as aggressive and dangerous as we’ve seen him in this issue. Zarelli, by contrast, is made small by a high angle shot, his hands folded in his lap. The four panel grid is even skewed so as to squeeze him into the corner, in addition to making the action in the previous panels more dynamic.
PAGE TWENTY TWO
It’s Batman and Son again, with the green glow of the batcomputer establishing the change in location. The note to Lucius Fox in panel two is a nice large scale version of him leaving the money on the Agronas’ table on page six. And Nicky would be a good candidate, too — this is the (or at least a) payoff for Nicky Is Smart. Panel three is small and all utility, showing Batman’s change back to Bruce Wayne as we transition up from the cave to Wayne manner, a panel made necessary by the fact that we haven’t yet established that location in this issue. We’re left with a nice big final panel, rosy and nostalgic in direct contrast to the green of the batcave. Bruce looks from left to right at the portrait of his parents, mirroring the portrait in Zarelli’s study, cementing the emotional connection he feels to a man who is in all other regards his enemy. You could read the fact that Bruce’s sitting as an additional corollary to the wheelchair-bound Zarelli, but I think it’s just that a seated position works best for the horizontal composition of the panel. Strong ending for a very strong issue.
LETTERS PAGE
Nothing insightful to offer here, it’s just that I’ve always thought this next issue cover was rad. I probably have that one too, somewhere.
(The missing cover, by Bob Smith and Terry Beatty, is awesome.)
This exciting and action-packed climactic issue of Dynamite’s critically acclaimed series, finally finds The Sprit in the merciless clutches of the criminal warlord, Mikado Vaas! At last, this mysterious villain has stepped forward to save his daughter, Sachet Spice, and to wreck his ultimate vengeance on one of Comicdom’s most famous and iconic heroes. Beaten and bloody, The Spirit fights on…
