Comics: Shopping for Art!

It’s always a thing I feel a little bit ashamed to admit, but there it is: I go to comic books mainly for their artwork. I know all about the brilliance of today’s comics writing – I hear about it all the time from comics aficionados, that today’s industry writers are smarter and more literate than they’ve ever been. They have greater scope than in the past, since the mainstream superhero comics have shifted to a pacing that’s always got one eye on the graphic novel collection down the line. This can make buying individual monthly issues pretty frustrating – more than ever, they’re now just chapters in a future book, with little internal urge to be dramatic pound-by-pound (and since the individual issues are now $5 apiece, Marvel and DC have left ordinary regular comic-shop customers precious little reason not to wait for the graphic novels and forego buying any comic books at all).

Even so, I’m a sucker for picking individual issues from the comics racks! And my choices are always guided by artwork – as, for instance, this week: I bought the first issue of a new Marvel series called Savage Hulk, written and drawn by the great Alan Davis, which would almost always be plenty reason enough to buy. It’s an odd thing, but unlike such earlier Davis masterpieces as The Nail and Superboy’s Legion, it appears to be set firmly in normal continuity, not a what-if kind of story. It’s set in Marvel’s past and takes as its jumping-off point from issue #66 of the old first run of The X-Men in which the team of teenage mutants take on the Hulk in Las Vegas and only manage to defeat him temporarily thanks to the telepathic powers of their teammate Marvel Girl.

The fight is re-hashed in this issue, and a new one is clearly in the offing for future issues, which raises awkward logistical problem of the fact that as super-teams go, the old X-Men stand less of a chance against a rampaging Hulk than virtually any other. Cyclops’s optic energy beams bounce off him; Iceman’s projected ice is easily shattered by him; Beast, the team’s strongman, can lift 2 tons as opposed to the Hulk’s 100; the broad-winged Angel is a bystander – and even the team’s later additions, Polaris with her magnetic powers and Havok with his energy-blasts, would be all but useless. In fact, only Marvel Girl’s telepathic powers would stand a chance of working, and then only to calm the Hulk down into his human alter-ego, Bruce Banner, not to beat him.

Even so, this issue was really good – a delightful retro thing, featuring the old-fashioned Hulk, the one who occasionally rampages and only wants to be left alone (there’s a wonderful sequence in which Davis shows him sitting in the middle of the desert at night, reaching up for the beauty of the stars). I haven’t read anything about this series, but I very much liked the first issue.

And if I was drawn to buy it because of Alan Davis, how much more so must that have been true for John Romita Jr., one of my favorite working comics artists (and, incidentally, a heck of a guy), especially if he’s drawing Superman, my favorite superhero character.

It’s been much, much harder to be a Superman fan in these last three years, during the regime of “The New 52,” in which the character of Superman took on such an ominous and offputting new spin. This Superman is an alien super-being, floating one foot off the ground, dating Wonder Woman, entirely distanced from normal humanity, utterly humorless – and the basics of that characterization aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, since they were the basis of the latest Superman movie, which has so far made almost a billion dollars. This Superman barely even thinks about protecting the innocent and wouldn’t bother to foil a bank robbery even if every little old lady with a savings account begged him to, so he’s a bit of a trial to read – in fact, I usually haven’t been buying Superman on the comics stands (that bizarre absence, plus the still-mourned lack of my beloved Legion of Super-Heroes, feels utterly unreal).

But for Jr Jr, I at least sprang for Superman #32, the start of a new storyline in which a boring ponytailed new super-character named Ulysses enters the DC universe, introducing himself to Superman by helping our hero defeat a fairly nondescript new villain. There are rare-enough personal moments – we see Clark Kent at the Daily Planet offices, and, more interestingly, we see him at home in his apartment, unsuccessfully trying to have phone conversations with first Wonder Woman and then Batman, and then paging through a photo album, patently lonely. These are exactly the kind of details that have been missing from this comic since it was re-invented, and they were refreshing to see, even though they certainly aren’t going to last.

The artwork sure was nice, however: Romita’s panel-work is so unapologetically muscular and elemental, in some ways just perfect for this new bludgeoning version of the character. This artist will sacrifice almost anything for dramatics (at one point Superman uses his heat vision on the bad guy, and one beam lands a full foot wide of the other – which isn’t of course, how vision, heat or otherwise, works). But somehow it all works (less so with the issue’s curiously static cover, which has a fine age-old principle but boring execution); I ended up enjoying the issue, and I’ll probably follow the whole of Romita’s run – which won’t be very long, of course! Even in this issue, in an interview, he’s already enthusing about the other DC characters he’d like to draw … always a bad sign – Doomsday, as it were.