Powerful Panels: Iron Man #149 by John Romita Jr.

The original context of the two-part "Doomquest!" storyline in Iron Man isn't really known to me, but it's been recontexualized as significant or notable by a relatively recent hardback put out by Marvel that's a sort of companion piece to the other, big Michelinie-written, Romita Jr.-drawn story "Demon In a Bottle". In its current context then, opening up to the first issue of what sounds like a crazy-awesome story--Iron Man and Dr. Doom in Medieval times--you expect to be immediately blown away by something...that big, storyline opener that hooks you in or grabs you.

Not so much here, which isn't a surprise if you've read a lot of these pretty-smart, leisurely Marvel comics from the 70s, but it's strange in any era that the comic's first fight scene would be represented in a single panel like the one above, Even the most "sophisticated" of superhero comics never avoid illustrating a fight scene, but here we are, on page three of a new storyline, and John Romita Jr. represents a confrontation between Iron Man and a bunch of helicopter gunboat modern-day pirates in one rectangular panel of abstract images and odd sound effects.

The immediate things that come to mind are the old Adam West "Batman" show, with its over-the-top sound effects that bursts across the TV screen atop the awkwardly chereographed fight scenes, and old cartoons which often represented a fight or tussle as a cloud of motion lines and limbs popping out here and there. Both of these are references to things a little less serious than most Iron Man comics and so, it seems in a way, Romita Jr. even hinting towards the absurdity or at least, the weird, kinda hilarious choice he's made to not draw what could easily be a cool, mood-setting fight scene right at the beginning of the book. The sound effects too, are particularly weird and nonsensical, certainly not ones I've ever read before: "Whram", "Shrak", "Phlow".

It's hard to tell and silly to speculate as to why Romita Jr. chose to skip over this first fight scene, but the most reasonable argument seems to be that he and Michelinie have a whole lot of story go rush through in the next two issues--one double-size but still--and taking a page or two to illustrate a fight that's ultimately irrelevant just made sense. Of course, that only kind of makes sense...it's a fight scene! Show it anyway!


Still, there's a very cool, weirdly satisfying feeling to the panel, especially in the context of the ones before and after it. It reminds me of the "Superhero Minimalism" experiments over at 'I Love Rob Liefeld' where a comic's reduced to the fewest panels as possible while still making sense and retaining the power of the entire comic. Here then, Romita Jr. reduces the played-out fight scene of every comic into three panels: The Villian talks some shit, the Hero kicks his ass, the Villain goes to jail. Still, there's something inexplicably weird and almost like Jim Starlin cosmic about that odd frame of yellow and orange, "Batman" sound effects, and shards of debris or something flying in the center. It's easy to look at it and know it represents "Iron Man beats people up" but looking closer, it's represented in a really strange way.

This odd choice to eschew the fight scene for a bunch more exposition and set-up illustrates the specific joys of really good comics starring Iron Man, wherein the storyline and emotions are always much, much cooler than the action That statement could be easily applied to most good superhero stories, but it's especially true of "Iron Man", where it's Tony Stark that seems infinitely more fascinating and engaging than his alter-ego.

Even in the pretty-much perfect movie, the big, giant fight scene feels more like an inevitability and thing that's gotta happen than any kind of culmination or explosion of all the emotions and stuff that preceded it. Lopping off this "Doomquest" fight scene that really, really doesn't need to be in there and really would only serve as some kind of attention-grabbing device is a brilliant move, but one that would be rare in comics, even today.

Powerful Panels: Pirates of Coney Island #1 by Vasilis Lolos

Pirates of Coney Island is a still-to-be-completed eight-issue series drawn by Vasilis Lolos and written by Rick Spears. Currently, it's stuck at issue six, although Mr. Spears assured myself and Karen (in separate conversations at SPX) that the final issues are indeed written and just need to be drawn and then you know, published.

The series is in part, an obvious homage to Walter Hill's The Warriors as it's about theme-based gangs in Coney Island, namely the uh, "Pirates" (dudes) and "The Cherries" (chicks), who like most gangs, are rivals and stuff. And like The Warriors, it's all happening in some strange, non-our world setting where everything's fun and unreal but not meaningless or disconnected from real-world emotions, even as it enthusiastically exists in a world where all of the Pirates sleep in hammocks right next to one another and the villain's a bad-ass caddy called "Cadillaculla".

One of the best aspects is the tension between Spears' fantasy Coney Island world and Lolos' angular, uglified art work. Everyone in Lolos' world is squat and wrinkled, with their eyes too far apart. Because the work's consistently "ugly", you forget about that aspect and get used to how strange everyone looks. It's hard to describe, but Lolos' work shares the weird but makes sense, iconic feeling of stuff like The Simpsons or something. You know, where you're like, "Okay, everyone's yellow and their eyes are stuck together, got it." This sends you further into the story and the just-outside-of-this-world feeling that Pirates has and maintains as the story gets more serious.

At the center of Pirates is the budding love affair between Pirate "Patch" and Cherry, "Trish". Again, playing with well-worn but effective sub-genre rules, their romance has to be kept secret, is sort of denied by Patch and Trish themselves, and could cause the dissolution of the rival gangs or at least, some serious shit's gonna go down. The romance is especially a surprise because in the first issue--which brilliantly, focus only on the Cherries, we never even see the Pirates--it's Trish and her fellow Cherries that find Patch wandering the beach and it's Trish that slices his eye out.


In the panels leading up to the removal of his eye, Trish and (soon-to-be) Patch talk shit to one another and are kind of doubled, with Patch putting up his fists ready to fight. The next panel is a close-up of Trish's stomach and crotch, and the panel after that, her flicking out her switchblade. In the stomach/crotch panel, Lolos makes the weird choice of sketching out some light pubic hair sticking out of the top of Trish's low shorts. It's just ten or so thin dashes of ink, but it's jarring because we don't expect it (and it's not necessary) and because in some ways, it's a funny way of it seems, showing Trish's bad-assness. Dunno if there's some actual precedent, but it just makes sense that in this 80s cult movie homage comic, the bad-ass chick would have her pubes sticking out, no?


There's also something just sort of voyeuristic and like, viscerally exciting about the image. At the risk of reading like some comics pervo, it's inexplicably erotic precisely because it's sort of fucked-up and realistic and not supposed to be attractive. Because it's drawn with the same uglification as the rest of the comic and Lolos' art has sort of lulled you into Spears' comic world, it has the same sort of exciting effect that seeing this in real-life might have. Unlike most comic books, especially Marvel/DC books, the vague sexuality of it isn't made a big deal or anything and that's exactly what makes it sort of is a big deal here. It's ugly and real and is more appealing because of it.

In Issue #4, there's a big fight scene between the Pirates and the Cherries and in the struggle, one of the Cherries' breasts falls out of her shirt. This is the Roger Corman 70s-era exploitation trick of sticking in some gratuitious nudity--fight scene=titties popping out--that's also made it's way into a lot of comics in less overtly sexual ways. So many of those X-books I read as a kid were full of fight scenes between busty girls or even a guy and girl fighting and rolling around, which was a corny and (I now see) obvious way to make the comics appeal to my third-grade, almost new-to-boners brain. Here again though, it's not made overtly sexual or idealized, it looks pretty much what a boob looks like when it's half-way out of a shirt.

Once again, that's actually what makes the image appealing. It looks and is rendered in a realistic way and in effect, bypasses the idealized part of our brains and connects to real sexual memories we have. It's all real obvious, but in an air-brushed, photo-shopped, plasticine culture and blah blah blah, these little glimpses that resemble the reality we live become extra appealing. This is presumably, the reason for the increased popularity of "amateur" or faked to look amateur pornography and all that...


Lolos' casual use of sexuality reminded me of this rather overt image by Paul Pope from his book PulpHope. When pretty much everyone I know opens this book, they quickly end up on this image and it's often commented upon and discussed. Sure, there's the whole thing of it being a pretty explicit drawing of a vagina that moves eyes toward it, but I think it's the blase' way that Pope illustrates it--hyper realistic within the confines of his style--that grabs people too. What makes anything interesting, be it intellectually, emotionally, or sexually, is the details and well...Pope doesn't spare the details in this image.


The focus on these vague bits of "real" sexuality in Pirates is not to simply be kind of creepy, but to highlight the way these comic book-y images foreshadow and build-up to something meaningful in the comic. That too, makes them more appealing than another Marc Silvestri "Witchblade" pin-up. That first scene, where Trish cuts-out Patch's eye really is about sex, not only because you can see her pubes but because Patch sees it too. In Issue #5, Patch finds Trish in order to enact revenge and they essentially have an all-out knife-fight that ends with the two making out in a pool of blood! It's not some weird S & M thing or anything--it's supposed to be weirder and funnier than that--and it goes more along with Lolos' dirty but attractive aesthetic. Their fight-scene turned make-out has the same messiness and weird, inexplicable, un-idealized excitement as Trish's pubes sticking out.

This panel, from Issue #6, is Trish in the hospital, concerned about Patch and in her own, half-joking way, admitting she really fucking likes, maybe loves, the dude. This adds one more dimension to their relationship and makes all of the sort of vague sexuality and tension of the Trish/Patch sub-plot (turned main plot) mean something: they just might love each other! It's beyond glimpses of naked bodies and sexuality, but that's where it started (just like all relationships).

The point of these panels posts is generally to focus on the way the artists conveys something in a single panels or group of panels, but in this case, Rick Spears' name should be in the title of this entry because Spears and Lolos perfectly complement one another here. Spears crafts a typically outsider, "forbidden" love plot with just the right degree of fun and idiosyncrasy to make it feel new and Lolos illustrates it with the same degree of raw energy and familiarity. What begins as a kind of loosely "dirty" voyeuristic image of pubes is really the first hint of the weird, scrappy love affair that one Pirate and one Cherry experience.

Powerful Panels: Tomb of Dracula #2 by Gene Colan

About the only constant in Tomb of Dracula is Gene Colan's artwork. Writers came and went--especially early on--but he's there from #1's clever re-telling and updating of the Dracula story to those late issues when for some reason, Dracula and the Silver Surfer are hanging out. Like so many of the post-Kirby/Ditko 60s and 70s mainstream artists, a superficial look at the art leads to the assumption that it was all very similar. This wasn't helped by pop artist Roy Lichtenstein's immediate appropriation of comics art, turning it into kitsch before it ever really go to breathe, but the real excitement of the era's art lies in the details; subtle differentiations between artists, what they did to make an end-run around the brutal, bottom line demands of comics. Colan's work stands out for being a little darker, with thicker lines, more black and a penchant for Ditko-esque, quasi-psychedelic imagery to punctuate a scene of action. This is what made him ideal for both Howard the Duck and Tomb of Dracula.

Of course, in a lot of ways, the two series weren't that different. There's a over-the-top edge to Tomb as the series navigates being really fascinating and scary and a little goofy and over-the-top too. And the series was smart to not shy away from that absurd stuff because putting Dracula at the center of the comic basically sucks him of all his mystique and turns him into a melodramatic, old-as shit weirdo.

On the the final page of issue #2, in the panels building up to the issue's end, Dracula sees dawn approaching and makes his way back to his coffin. Main character Frank Drake though, isn't even concerned with Dracula because he just had to kill Jeanie, his girlfriend who got bit at the end of issue #1. There are other moments like this that cuts Dracula down to size or like, temporarily demand him irrelevant to the narrative. In the first issue, Drake thwacks Drac in the head with a silver make-up compact and we get a pretty hilarious close-up of Dracula angrily holding his temple.

Here, Dracula has a giant, villain-like speech and no one cares: "Know this Frank Drake--you've won but a battle...in the final analysis, the game is mine--as it always has been--will always be--Mine! Forever mine!". I won't get snarky and make fun of comic book melodrama, but what is strange there is how Dracula has to tell him that "in the final analysis", Drake will lose. It's weird and obsessive and sort of confounds his own threats. It's like how in the song "My Way", Sinatra talks about how "the record" will "show that [he] did it [his] way". The record?! This rugged individualist guy is going to defer to "the record"?

But again, this whole scene isn't about Dracula, it's about Frank Drake, whose whole life just got fucked the fuck up. He stabs his girlfriend and then watches her melt from the very dawn light that Dracula split to avoid. Colan, in the first of the three panels directly above, shows her melting by little dashes of ink, like particles of life spreading and dissipating. Some real E.C Comics style stuff, especially her swirling word balloon, but she's not screaming in terror, even in these final moments, she tries to comfort Frank, telling him, "It's better this way...I don't hurt anymore...". The next panel goes wide and we see Jeanie as a disgusting mess on the floor. Drake sobs and his best friend--and the guy Drake stole Jeanie from--Clifton Graves holds tight to a curtain, in his own way equally shocked. There's nothing really "comic book" about this frame, it's just real. It's clear something very horrible happened, but their posing is awkward and realistic and not melodramatic. The narration reads like the action slug in a screenplay, succinctly and vaguely poetically describing exactly what we see in the frame--"Drake sinks to his knees..."--and then adding a note about "understand[ing] the full meaning of futility..."; for that frame at least, it's some black and white, sad-bastard Scandanavian movie contemplating "the full meaning of futility".

And then the comic does something very odd. For the final panel of the issue, it goes to an exterior shot of Big Ben and a horse statue with rays of sun peaking out, as the narrator pontificates on "revenge". The image and the narration have no obvious connection and it has little to no relationship to the previous panels either. Showing Big Ben and the statue is not working on some symbolic level and so, there's no direct correlation between what's happened and where the comic book leaves you. It's almost like the horrible scene we just experienced was too much and the comic had to leave the room with two grief-stricken guys and a melted girlfriend in it and get some air.

By the way, the Gene Colan Tribute book comes out tomorrow and although it's $9.99, it's probably worth picking up. If not for the bunch of Colan-illustrated stories and artist reminisces, for the fact that the money made on the book will go towards Gene Colan's medical bills. All roads lead back to Robert Kirkman's silly "vlog" manifesto thingy as of late, but this book's a pretty good example of a big evil comic book company helping out one of their aging slaves...