July 25, 2010

Man Without Fear: David Mack, Daredevil, and the Bounds of Difference (Part One)

By Henry Jenkins

Last fall, I delivered one of the keynote talks at the Understanding Superheroes conference hosted

at the University of Oregon in Eugene. The conference was a fascinating snapshot of the current

state of comics studies in North America. It was organized by Ben Sanders to accompany a

remarkable exhibit of comic art hosted at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art — “Faster than a

Speeding Bullet: The Art of a Superhero,” . The exhibit consisted of original panels scanned the

entire history of the superhero genre – from its roots in the adventure comics strips through the

Golden and Silver age to much more contemporary work.

The conference attracted a mix of old time fan boys whose interests were in capturing the history of

the medium and younger scholars who applied a range of post-modern and post-structuralist theory

to understanding comics as a medium. In between were several generations of superhero comic

writers and artists who brought an industry perspective to the mix. Charles Hatfield delivered a

remarkable keynote address talking about the technical sublime in the work of Jack Kirby and my

keynote centered on the fusion of mainstream and experimental comics techniques in the work

which David Mack did for Daredevil.

The presentation was really more of a talk than a paper so it’s taken me some time to get around to

writing this up, but I had promised some of my readers (not to mention Mack) that I would try to

share some of the key ideas from the talk through my blog. A number of readers have asked about

this piece so I appreciate their patience and encouragement. In honor of Comic-Con, where I am,

as you read this, I am finally sharing with you my thoughts about David Mack’s Daredevil comics.

Images from Mack’s work here are reproduced by permission of the artist. Other images are

reproduced under Fair Use and I am willing to remove them upon request from the artists involved.

This paper is part of an ongoing project which seeks to understand what a closer look at superhero

comics might contribute to our understanding of genre theory. Several other installments of this

project have appeared in this blog including my discussion of superheroes after 9/11 and my

discussion of the concept of multiplicity within superhero comics.

At the heart of this research is a simple idea: What if we stopped protesting that comics as a

medium go well beyond “men in capes” and include works of many different genres? No one

believes us anyway. And on a certain level, it is more or less the case that the primary publishers of

comics publish very little that does not fall into the Superhero genre and almost all of the top selling

comics, at least as sold through specialty shops, now fall into the superhero genre. It was not

always the case but it has been the case long enough now that we might well accept it as the state

of the American comics industry. So, what if we used this to ask some interesting questions about

the relationship between a medium and its dominant genre? What happens when a single genre

more or less takes over a medium and defines the way that medium is perceived by its public – at

least in the American context?

One thing that happens, I’ve argued, is that the superhero comic starts to absorb a broad range of

other genres – from comedy to romance, from mystery to science fiction – which play out within the

constraints of the superhero narrative. We can study how Jack Kirby’s interests in science fiction

inflects The Fantastic Four and other Marvel superhero comics in certain directions. We can ask

why it matters that Batman emerged in Detective Comics, Superman in Action Comics, and Spider-

Man in Astounding Stories.

But second, we can explore how the Superhero comic becomes a site of aesthetic experimentation,

absorbing energies which in another medium might be associated with independent or even avant

garde practices. And that’s where my interest in David Mack comes from, since he is an artist who

works both in independent comics (where he is associated with some pretty radical formal

experiments in his Kabuki series) and in mainstream comics (where he has made a range of

different kinds of contributions to the Daredevil franchise for Marvel.)

Certainly, most comic books fans understand a distinction between underground/independent

comics and mainstream comics but there is surprisingly fluid boundaries between the two. In many

ways, independent or underground comics were often defined as “not superhero” comics and

therefore still defined by the genre even if in the negative. Throughout this essay, I am going to

circle around a range of experiments which seek to merge aspects of independent comics with the

superhero genre.

My primary goal here is to map what David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristen Thompson describe

in Classical Hollywood Cinema as “the bounds of difference.” Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson draw

on concepts from Russian formalism to talk about the norms which shape artistic practice and the

ways they get encoded into modes of production. By norms, we mean general ways of structuring

artistic works, not rigid rules or codes. Norms grow through experimentation and innovation. There

is no great penalty for violating norms. Indeed, the best art seeks to defamiliarize conventions – to

break the rules in creative and meaningful ways and in the process teach us new ways of seeing.

Genres are thus a complex balance between the encrusted conventions, understood by artists and

consumers alike, built up through time, and the localized innovations which make any given work

fresh and original. The norms thus are elastic – they can encompass a range of different practices –

but they also have a breaking point beyond which they can not bend. This breaking point is what

Bordwell and Thompson describe as “the bounds of difference.” They have generally been

interested in the conservative force of these norms, showing how even works which at first look like

they fall outside the norms are often still under their influence. They have shown how the classical

system has dominated Hollywood practice since the 1910s and continues to shape most

commercial films made today.

In my work, I have been more interested in exploring the edge cases, especially looking at the

transition that occurs when an alien aesthetic gets absorbed into the classical system. This was a

primary focus of my first book, What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the

Vaudeville Aesthetics and it’s a topic to which I have returned at various points throughout my

career. In this talk, I want to use David Mack’s work for Marvel to help us to map “the bounds of

difference” as they impact mainstream superhero comics.

We can get a better sense of why Mack’s work represents such an interesting limit case by

sampling some of the reviews for Daredevil: Echo – Vision Quest from Amazon contributors, each

of whom has to do a complex job of situating this work in relation to our expectations about what a

mainstream superhero book looks like:

If you’d like to see Daredevil swinging through New York City beating up bad guys,

this is not the comic for you. Although this is technically Volume 8 of the

recent Daredevil run, it isn’t exactly part of the regular continuity. The five issues that

make up this volume were going to be a separate miniseries, but when Bendis and

Maleev needed a break from Daredevil (after the Issue 50 battle with the Kingpin),

the Echo mini was published under the Daredevil title instead.

This has led to an unfairly bad reputation for this beautifully painted, dream-like

exploration of identity and willingness to fight for a cause. Daredevil subscribers

expected more of the plot and action that had filled the series to that point, and this

meditative break was frustrating, particularly considering the point that Bendis had

halted the main plot.

If you are a fan of Alias (the comic) or Kabuki, this is for you. If you would like to gaze

in awe at the poetic writing, beautiful painting and stunning mixed-media art of one of

the most creative men in comics, buy this comic. You won’t regret it.

****************************************************************************************

**

I think if this had come out as a graphic novel, or as a seperate mini, I may have

enjoyed it more. But imagine being engrossed in an intelligent, gritty fast-paced work

and then being forcefed an elaborate, artsy character study on a relatively minor

character. … This should have been a seperate mini or graphic novel. Instead we get

the equivalent of a documentary on Van Gogh between Kill Bill Volume 1 and 2.

************************************************************************************

This book is a sadistic deviation from thier storyline and is writen and draw by David

Mack. This is a (…) crap fest about a very minor character and her hippie like journey

to discover her past. …He then further expresses his impotency in the field by using

chicken scratch drawings and paintings to move the story along with hardly ANY

dialog. THis book is an artsy load of crap that should not be affiliated with Daredevil

or Marvel.

Each of these responses struggles with an aesthetic paradox: Mack’s approach to the story does

not align with their expectations about what a superhero comic looks like or how it is most likely

structured – yet, and this is key, the book in question appears in the main continuity of a Marvel

flagship character. There is much greater tolerance as several of the readers note for works which

appears on the fringes of the continuity – works which is present as in some senses an alternative,

“what if?” or “elseworlds” story, works which more strongly flag themselves as site of auteurist

experimentation.

There is even space there for the moral inversion involved in telling the story from the point of view

of the villain rather than the superhero: witness the popularity of Brian Azzarello’s graphic novels

about Lex Luther and The Joker. But Mack applies his more experimental approach at the very

heart of the Marvel superhero franchise and as a consequence, the book was met with considerable

backlash from hardcore fans who are often among the most conservative at policing “the bounds of

difference.” Vision Quest is not Mack’s only venture into the Daredeviluniverse: David Mack

wrote Parts of a Hole which was illustrated by veteran Marvel artist Joe Quesada; David Mack then

contributed art to Wake Up, written by Brian Michael Bendis, perhaps the most popular superhero

script-writer of recent memory. In both cases, then, Mack’s experimental aesthetic was coupled with

someone who fit much more in the mainstream of contemporary superhero comics. The result was

a style which fit much more comfortably within audience expectations about the genre and

franchise.

We can see the difference in these two images, the first drawn by Quesada for a Mack Script, the

second as drawn by Mack based on his own conception. Both combine multiple levels of texts to

convey the fragmented perspective of Echo, the protagonist, as she confronts her sometimes lover,

sometimes foe Daredevil. The use of bold primary color and the style of drawing in Quesada’s

version pulls him that much closer to mainstream expectations, while the deployment of pastels and

of a collage-like aesthetic falls outside our sense of what a superhero comic looks like. The subject

matter is more or less the same; the mode of representation radically different and in comics, these

stylistic differences help to establish our expectations as readers.

- See more at: http://henryjenkins.org/2010/07/man_without_fear.html#sthash.30ieQkao.dpuf

July 26, 2010

Man Without Fear: David Mack, Daredevil, and the Bounds of Difference (Part Two)

By Henry Jenkins

This is part two of a four part series exploring how David Mack’s visual style challenges the

conventions of the superhero comic.

Mack helped to introduce Echo (Maya Lopez) as a character in Parts of a Hole. Her backstory is

classic superhero comics stuff. Here’s how her backstory gets described in the Marvel Universe

Character Wiki:

When she was a small girl, Maya Lopez’s father, a Cheyenne gangster, was killed by

his partner in crime, the Kingpin. The last wish of her father was that Fisk raise the

child well, a wish the Kingpin honored, caring for her as if she was his own. Believed

to be mentally handicapped, Maya was sent to an expensive school for people with

learning disabilities. There, she managed to completely replicate a song on the piano.

After that, she was sent to another expensive school for prodigies. She grew into a

gifted and talented woman. Upon visiting her father’s grave with Fisk, she asked how

he died. Fisk told her that Daredevil had killed him.

Maya was sent by the Kingpin to Matt Murdock to prove Matt’s weakness. He told her

that Matt believed he was a bad person, and that she was the only way to prove him

wrong. (As Maya believed him, it would not appear to be a lie when she told Matt.)

Matt Murdock and Maya soon fell in love. She later took on the guise of Echo, hunting

Daredevil down. Having watched videos of Bullseye and Daredevil fighting, she proved

more than a match for Daredevil. She took him down and nearly killed him, refusing

only when she found out Matt and Daredevil were one and the same. Matt managed to

correct the Kingpin’s lies. In revenge, Echo confronted Fisk and shot him in the face,

blinding him and starting the chain of events that would lead to his eventual downfall.

All of this provides the backdrop for Vision Quest. As the title suggests, Maya goes out on her own

to try to heal her wounds and think through what has happened to her. The result is a character

study told in stream of consciousness, which circles through her memories and her visions, often

depicted in a highly iconic manner. This, for example, is how Quesada depicts the moment where

Kingpen kills Maya’s father in Parts of a Hole.

Now consider the way this same event gets depicted early in VisionQuest.

Mack’s page combines multiple modality — multiple ways of depicting the world — with highly

iconic and abstract images existing alongside hyper-realistic images of the same characters. This

radical mixing of style is a hallmark of Mack’s work, constantly forcing us to think about how things

are being represented rather than simply what is being represented. Consider this abstract

rendering of the key events — Fisk is reduced to his big feet and legs, much as he might be seen

as a child, while the breakup become Matt and Maya is rendered by the figure of the child ripping a

picture of the two of them in half.

We are operating here within the theater of Maya’s mind, yet she is also presenting these events to

us with an open acknowledgment that as readers we need to have her explain what is taking place.

Once the book has established these rich icons, they can be recycled and remixed for emotional

impact. This image builds on the first in several ways. Mack juxtaposes a more mature version of

Maya with her child self here and the childlike drawings are repeated to again represent key

emotional moments in her life. While Mack repeats the purple of the earlier image, the dominant

color that we associate with Maya on this page is red, a color which captures her passion and rage.

She has moved from a vulnerable child victim into someone who has the capacity to strike back at

those who have caused her pain.

Let’s pull back for a moment and try to establish some baselines for thinking about what may

constitute “zero-degree style” in the superhero tradition. While his work was considered bold and

experimental at the time, Frank Miller’s run on Daredevil has helped to establish the stylistic

expectations for this particular franchise. Miller’s style was hyperbolic — though nowhere near as

much so as in his later works, including The Dark Knight Returns, 300, and Sin City. Yet, he also

allows us to see some of the ways that superhero style orientates the reader to the action. The goal

is to intensify our feelings by strengthening our identification with the superhero and with other key

supporting characters. For this to happen, the pages need to be instantly legible. We need to know

who the characters are and what’s going on at all times, even if you can use minor breaks in

conventional style in order to amplify our emotional responses to the action.

One of the most basic ways that superhero comics do this is through the color coding of key

characters, especially the hero and villain, who are depicted in colors that will pop off the page and

be distinctive from each other. Electra was designed to in many ways compliment and extend

Daredevil so it is no surprise that she is depicted here with the same shade of red.

On the other hand, the highly codified colors of the Marvel universe allow us to instantly recognize

the Hulk on this cover simply through the image of his arm and the contrasting red and green

prepares us for the power struggle which will unfold in this issue.

A second set of conventions center on the depiction of action and the construction of space through

framing. Miller was especially strong in creating highly kinetic compositions which intensify the

movement of the characters.

In this first page, we see Daredevil falling away from us into the city scape below, while in the

second Miller uses extremely narrow, vertical panels set against a strong horizontal panel to show

the superhero’s movements through space.

Both of these pages break with the classic grid which is the baseline in these comics, but their

exaggerated framing works towards clearly defined narrative goals. This next page breaks with our

expectations that each panel captures a single moment in time by showing multiple images of the

Daredevil in a way intended to convey a complex series of actions.

while here we seem to be looking straight down on the action in the top panel and subsequent

panels are conveyed in silhouette, though again, there is such a strong emphasis on character

motivation and action that we never feel confused about what is actually happening here.

This next image shows other kinds of formal experiments which still fall squarely within the

mainstream of the superhero genre — notice how the text becomes an active element in the

composition and notice how the falling character seems to break out of the frame, both ways of

underlying the intensity of the action.

Now, let’s contrast the layering of text here with the ways that Mack deploys text in Vision-Quest.

Notice for example the ways Mack deploys several different kinds of texts — printed fonts,

handwritten, and the Scrabble tiles each convey some aspects of the meaning of the scene. We

have to work to figure out the relationship between these different kinds of texts, which suggest

different layers of subjectivity that are competing for our attention. When I first read this book, I was

especially moved by the ways that the hand print on Echo’s face — which elsewhere in the book is

simply another marker of her supervillain identity — here becomes a metaphor for the last time her

father touched her, moments before his death, and the sense memory it left on her, an especially

potent metaphor when we consider the ways that the character is alligned with hypersensitivity and

a powerful “body memory” which allows her to replicate physically anything she has ever felt or

seen. While the sounds and dialogue emerge from the action in the case of Frank Miller’s pages,

they are layered onto the depicted events in Mack’s design, part of what gives the page the quality

of a scrapbook, recounting something that has already happened, rather than thrusting us into the

center of the action.

The key elements of Miller’s style come through here — the use of color to separate out the

characters, dynamic compositions which emphasize character action, repeated images of the

character within the same frame, flamboyant use of text, and the bursting through of the frame, all

combine to make this a particularly intense page.

Where most superhero artists seek to covey this sense of intense action in almost every frame,

Mack seeks to empty the frame of suggestions of action, seeming to suspend time. Consider this

depiction of Daredevil battling Echo from Quesada’s work for Pieces of a Hole.

The splash page traditionally either indicates a particularly significant action or a highly detailed

image, both moments of heightened spectacle. Mack, on the other hand, often empties this splash

pages so we are focusing on the character’s emotional state rather than on any physical action.

Having established these conventions of representation, the mainstream comic may tolerate a

range of different visual styles as different artists try their hand on the character, often working,

more or less, within the same continuity. So, we can see here how Tim Sale plays with color to

convey the character’s identity even through fragmented images which focus on one or another

detail of Daredevil’s body.

Or here we see how Alex Maleev creates a much more muted palette and a scratchy/grainy image

which marks his own muted version of the hyperbolic representations of the character in

earlier Daredevil titles.

The mainstream comics allow some room for bolder formal experiments but most often these come

through the cover designs rather in the panel by panel unfolding of the action.

Mack’s artwork functions this way in relation to Bendis’s Alias, where he was asked to design

covers that did not look like conventional superhero covers and that might be seen as more female-

friendly, reflecting the genre bursting nature of the series content which operates on the very fringes

of Marvel’s superhero universe.

The tension between genres is especially visible on this later cover from the series which shows

how its protagonist is and is not what we expect from women in a superhero comic.

- See more at:

http://henryjenkins.org/2010/07/man_without_fear_david_mack_da.html#sthash.dDwqwbpv.dpuf

July 28, 2010

Man Without Fear: David Mack, Daredevil, and the Bounds of Difference (Part Three)

By Henry Jenkins

Last time, I explored some of the ways that David Mack’s visual style defines itself outside of the

mainstream conventions of superhero comics. Today, I want to start with a recognition that Mack is

not the only experimental comic artist who has sought to engage with the superhero genre. In so far

as it defines the expectations of what a comic book is, at least in the American comic book, artists

often seek to define themselves and their work through contrast with the superhero genre.

Daniel Clowes’ The Death Ray is a thorough deconstruction of the superhero myth, depicted

through multiple genres, though most often read in relation to our stereotypes about serial killers

and school shooters. Note here Clowes’ self conscious use of primary colors — red and yellow — to

set up the lurid quality of the more fantastical sequences in the book, often standing in contrast with

the more muted colors of realistically rendered scenes.

Project Superior is a recent anthology of superhero comics drawn by some of the rising stars in the

independent comic worlds, resulting in work which further defamiliarizes the conventions of the

genre.

I particularly admire a series of red, yellow, and blue images created by Ragnar which reduce the

superhero saga to its basic building blocks. There is no story here, only the elements which get

repeated across stories. This Doug Frasser story is clearly intended to suggest Daredevil though

not in ways that would illicit a legal response from Marvel.

This one by Rob Ullman which combines a play with iconic elements and a much more mundane

sense what kinds of work superheroes perform.

Here, Chris Pitzer further abstracts the characters into a series of geometrical shapes with capes,

while following the basic narrative formulas to the letter.

These experiments are interesting because they explore the potentials for abstraction or realism

which exist on the margins of the mainstream industry. There is also a great pleasure in watching

these gifted cartoonists use the codes of mainstream companies as resources for their own

expressive play.

We can see similar forms of abstraction in Mack’s work in the Daredevil franchise. So, for example,

this page from Wake Up is as fascinated with the color red as anything found in Project Superior.

And we see throughout Vision Quest Mack’s fascination with reading the central characters through

various forms of abstraction, often involving pastiches of the work of particular modernist artists.

This play with abstraction can be understood as part of the process by which Echo wrestles with her

own identity, especially given the many overlays of other’s performance she has absorbed through

the years as she has exploited her powers on Kingpen’s behalf.

Or consider the various ways that Mack deconstructs Wolverine, one of the more iconic characters

in the Marvel universe and thus one which will remain recognizable even in a highly abstracted

form.

Mack is interested especially in three aspects of Wolverine’s persona — his animal like ferocity, his

claws, and his metal-enhanced skeleton — which become, in the end, all that remain of the

character in some of these images. Wolverine becomes a set of claws without a man much as the

Cheshire Cat becomes a grin without a cat.

Note how Mack uses the frame lines to pick up the shape and impact of the claws or how he

incorporates photorealistic renderings of animal bones to remind us of the skeletal structure which

gives the character his strength and endurance. By this final panel, Mack uses Exacto blades to

suggest Wolverine’s claws and shows us only the human bones beneath his skin. Here, the

abstraction serves the purpose of creating ambiguity since as we read this story it is not meant to

be clear whether Echo met the actual superhero or whether this Wolverine is a projection of her

shamanistic vision.

Mack’s collaboration with Brian Bendis seems to rely heavily on his capacity for abstraction.

For Wake Up, Mack is asked to depict the world of the superhero as seen through the eyes of an

emotionally disturbed child who has watched his father — the Frog — die at the hands of Daredevil

and who has struggled to process what he saw.

Here, Mack’s movements between highly realistic and more abstracted images are meant to convey

objective and subjective perspectives on the action. The child endlessly draws images of superhero

battles and as the story progresses, we learn how to sequence those images to match the voices

he hears in his head. Needless to say, there are clear parallels to be drawn to the movement from

single images to sequences of images which constitutes the art of comic book design. As

with Vison-Quest, the story refocuses on a secondary character — Ben Urich — with Daredevil

seen only in terms of his impact on their lives. We can see the focus on the subjective experience of

an emotionally disturbed character as a historic way that modernist style gets rationalized in more

mainstream projects — starting perhaps with the ways The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari frames German

expressionism in terms of the world as seen through the eyes of a patient in an insaine asylum or

for that matter, how Hitchcock absorbed aspects of Salvador Dali’s surrealism into Spellbound,

another film set at a mental hospital.

- See more at:

http://henryjenkins.org/2010/07/man_without_fear_david_mack_da_1.html#sthash.JfXjhp3q.dpuf

July 30, 2010

Man Without Fear: David Mack, Daredevil, and the Bounds of Difference (Part Four)

By Henry Jenkins

If Project Superior pulls the superhero genre into the space of independent comics, then a range of

recent Marvel and DC projects have pulled the independent and avant garde comics artists into the

realm of mainstream comics publishing, again via the figure of the superhero. Here, again, they

seek to motivate the experimentation through appeals to character psychology. In this case, DC

invites us to imagine what its superhero sagas would look like if they were produced by the

denizens of the Bizarro World, noted for their confusion and often reversal of the norms of human

society.

Matt Groenig (The Simpsons) shows the Justice League characters as being blown out of the pipe

of Bizarro Superman, helping to set up the premise of the collection as a whole. If Project

Superior is drawn towards forms of abstraction, the Bizarro comics have more room for the ugly

realism that we associate with certain strands of indie comics, a tendency to deflate the heroic

pretensions of the characters through various forms of the grotesque, as in this image by Tony

Millionaire,

or the everyday, as in these images by Dave Cooper,

Danny Hellman

and Leela Corman.

These superheros are very down-to-earth, their human faults and foibles on full display; the heroes

are often shown off-duty doing the kinds of things their readers regularly do. These images depend

on our pre-existing relationship with the superheros for much of their pleasures. Project

Superior depended on generic versions of the superhero, while these stories work with Batman,

Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and the others, with the artists incorporating just enough of the familiar

iconography and color palette to make it easy to recognize which characters are being evoked and

spoofed.

Anyone who has read a Batman comic will no doubt recognize much of the debris in the Bat Cave

depicted in this drawing by Kylie Baker, yet his cartoonish style is very different from what we would

expect to see within the Batman franchise itself. This Jason Little page depicts the superheroes as

bath toys, suggesting that they only come alive in the imagination of the child who is playing with

them.

Mack himself relies on the image of superhero action figures, in this case of Marvel characters,

in Wake Up, as another way into the tortured imagination of his young protagonist.

Mack’s work involves a fascinating blurring of the distinction between graphic novels and artist

books. Artist books are artworks which are intended to explore the nature of the book as a genre.

Sometimes, they are printed in limited editions. More often, they are one of a kind items. They play

with the shape, texture, and format of the book in ways that are idiosyncratic to the individual artists.

They often are focused on the materiality of print culture rather than on the content of the book.

Nothing could contrast more totally with the cheaply printed, mass produced and circulated comic

book. Historically, the art work which went into producing the comic was presumed to have no value

and was often discarded once the book has been printed, much as we might toss the manuscript

once the words have been set into type.

Yet, Mack is very interested in creating pages which are artworks on their own terms. He deploys

innovative techniques and unexpected pigments (such as coffee grinds) to construct his images.

Often, he layers physical and material objects onto the page so it is not a flat representation but

something with its own shape and feel. Mack publishes books which remove these images from

their context in the unfolding stories of his graphic novels and call attention to them on their own

terms as artist’s constructions, often describing and documenting the techniques which went into

their production. His process has been documented in a film called The Alchemy of Art, which

shows him creating some of the images contained within Vision-Quest and includes his comments

on the process. Here, the printed comic becomes almost a byproduct of his creative process which

is concentrated on the production of beautiful one-of-a-kind pages.

Throughout Vision-Quest, Mack calls attention to the often invisible but always important framelines

and buffers in his layout by using physical materials rather than drawn lines to separate out his

panels. In other instances, he glues objects such as leaves or bird’s wings directly onto the page in

what amounts to the graphic novel equivalent of Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight.

In other cases, he creates designs which play with the orientation of the page, demanding that we

physically turn the book around in order to follow the text or the action.

In his own graphic novel series, Kabuki, he plays with the notion of origami — encouraging the

reader to think of the page as something which can be folded and sculpted rather than simply part

of the printed book.

In each of these cases, Mack builds on practices associated with the art book movement, but

deploys them in relation to mass produced artifacts. He wants us to remain conscious that we are

holding a printed object in our hands that has particular properties and expects particular behaviors

from us. Here, again, he has both built upon and broken out of the visual language of mainstream

superhero comics.

This is not what a superhero comic is “supposed to look like”, even if it is telling the kind of story

which might be readily accepted if communicated through a different style or mode of

representation. Exploring the ways that Mack pushes against these expectations even as he

operates at the heart of one of Marvel’s cash cow franchises is what helps us to understand the

“bounds of difference.” And in the process, it helps us to understand how diversity operates within a

genre which has otherwise come to dominate the comics medium.

     

Filed Under: book shelf, Comics Culture

Comments

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August 9, 2010 at 6:38 pm

I don’t know if there’s anything Groenig can’t create a depiction of and still put his unique variation

on.

I think some of these small comic stories could be made into all-out comic series’, especially the

ones by Cooper and Corman. However, they probably would not sell as well as the originals…

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