What a glorious time to be a comic-book fan! Classic comics are being digitized, we can carry around thousands of books on our phones and e-readers. Independent and small-press publishers are thriving, and at least one of the Big Two (>cough
Every time you set the bar at a new level, that becomes the new base. So it’s progressively more difficult, because the expectations of the audience are greater.
Plus, we’re comic fans, we like to argue about all of this stuff.
Preorder it or have your comic shop pull it for you. I really don't know what to expect with the order numbers on this. It could end up being a pretty limited print run. https://imagecomics.com/comics/releases/paklis-6
After I made my original post about the colouring on Frank Miller’s work (and thanks for the incredible response it got, by the way) I went and spent a day or so doing a few more pages of The Dark Knight Strikes Again- because it’s addictive, gosh darn it. People who see these keep asking me to do the entire book but now I’m married it’s harder to justify Bartkira-sized, insane unpaid projects, so you’ll have to hold your breath on that one (N.B. Bartkira volume 5 coming soon).
I did the opening few sequences from DK2 Chapter 2, because people seem to think of this section, starring the Superchicks, as the most shockingly poor part of the book. As you might have predict, given my lifelong propensity to being the guy who loves what everyone else hates (and vice versa), I think it’s great. It seems to be Frank’s attempt to satirise the over-sexualisation of women in 90′s superhero comics, which is funny because people don’t really file Frank Miller next to “feminist” in their mental rolodexes. But I never understood the popular characterisation of Frank as the “all women are whores” dude, since this is the man who created Carrie Kelley, Martha Washington, Ronin’s Casey McKenna, Superman’s daughter Lara, and a few more besides- check back, and you’ll see not only a myriad of diverse, nuanced female characters, but you’ll see that he was putting women of colour in lead roles about thirty years before the rest of the industry caught up.
The sequence after that is a very interesting one, too. We’re all familiar with Frank’s most famous response to the events of 9/11- the thuddingly ill-conceived Holy Terror, which was pitched as “Holy Terror, Batman” before DC quite rightly said “hell no, you’re not telling that story with Batman” and he put white-out on all the bat ears and called it something else. Now, the reason this DK2 sequence I’m about to show you is so fascinating is because it was drawn in 2001, directly after terrorists devastated Frank’s city, and depicts Batman flying the Batplane straight into an American skyscraper, leaping out, and then killing and dismembering The Secretary Of State, a four-star US general and the Chairman Of The Joint Chiefs of Staff- before carving the Zorro symbol into the face of the President of the United States (or at least, the President’s evil puppetmaster). “Striking terror. Best part of the job”, says Batman. So the man who would go on to make Holy Terror drew a comic where Batman is literally a terrorist, in the year 9/11 happened.
All this is why I don’t have much truck with the people who immediately write Frank off as a bigot- for all his missteps and the ugly, unfortunate politics he’s displayed in his latter years, he’s got a track record that at the very least paints him as a contradictory, complicated human being, and to me suggests that he was once a something of a progressive and a radical before losing his way in the last decade.
This aside, the usual housekeeping and disclaimers apply to the work I’m about to show. The original colouring on this book is by Lynn Varley, and my recolouring is meant as no disrespect to Lynn, who over twenty years has built a body of work that makes her a strong contender for the best comics colourist of all time. If you don’t believe me read Ronin, which has the most consistently inventive and beautiful colour styling I’ve ever seen in a comic book. While DK2 is my least favourite work of hers, Lynn’s choices nonetheless formed the backbone of at least some the work I did on the pages you’re about to see and thus she deserves at least some of the credit. Here goes.
I’m sure that you’ve read at least one or two comic books in your life.
Maybe they were good, maybe they weren’t. But they had a certain structure, right? The way that panels are rearranged and stuff…
So, have you ever tried to look at what is between the panels very closely? At the very tip of a speech bubble? What if, and I’m not saying it’s true, but what if there is something? Something powerful? Something able to change the flow of the narrative? Maybe even some kind of manifestation of the comic book itself?
And just imagine what happens if it doesn’t like featured characters: poorly written stereotypical sets of gimmicks.
traddmoore