Powerful Panels: Northlanders #17 by Vasilis Lolos

Save for a few sound effects and angry yells ("Fucker!") from Snorri the Black or Egil the Sledge-Hammer, the latest issue of Northlanders, "The Viking Art of Single Combat", an issue-long fight scene, is entirely buttressed by Vasilis Lolos' radiant art and a constant, pitch-perfect narration from Wood.

Lolos' work captures the whirl and confusion of a lengthy battle while remaining clear and comics-grammatical enough to make sense and the issue could really stand alone without Wood's narration, though it wouldn't have the emotional resonance. Wood's concern is with the tiny details, ritual, thoughts, worries, back-history, and everything else of viking lore, casually translated into a language closer to our own. It's like an issue of Tor with a college degree.

Much the way Kubert wrote Tor, a caveman comic, in something resembling the hard-boiled detective style, Wood adopts current slang and modern-day analogues to his viking tale, but not to simplify the story or dumb-it-down but to tap into some of the emotions at-stake: "For the common man, it's all too easy to find yourself in the middle of a levy, conscripted into service by your fucking landlord. Surely the taxes you pay means the lord and his bodyguards have an obligation to see you don't eat an axe?".
Part hip history lesson, part formal exercise in comics writing and art, and all raw, oddly affecting emotion, "The Viking Art of Single Combat", is like a comics version of Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait--an intense dive into brawny athleticism and ritual, with no tiny detail spared. And that's the brilliance of Lolos' work here, a perfect balance of visual narrative that occasionally freezes or shifts to hone-in on the tiniest detail. Something, in a previous Powerful Panels post, I showed Lolos to do expertly.

Above is a perfect example of Lolos and Wood working together. Wood's line ("the central concept of "Striking where he isn't") exemplified in the main image of Snorri striking Egil, a strip of pale orange whirling around the characters to indicate the motion of the blow that indeed, strikes Snorri where he isn't. At the same time, Lolos complements the main image here with two smaller panels of intense detail. The panel in the upper left is a close-up of Egil's armor with a slash of motion across it--or that's what I think it is. It's an odd but awesome choice, Lolos zooming-in something that's not visibile in the main image (this is from the opposite angle, presumably showing Egil's front, left side) but oddly, illustrating the motion or action line as well. Of course, if Lolos didn't illustrate the line of motion, he'd have to draw some kind of damage or something because the panel without that visual suggestion of Snorri's striking would lack the kineticism necessary.


But it's the other small panel, in the lower right side of the image that's especially fascinating: An image of the sky with small pieces of metal and debris flying through the air. Standing on its own (below or at the top of this entry), it's completely abstract, and even within the narrative of the story, it's pretty jarring and initially confusing. Confusing because, Lolos' drawing captures something that couldn't be captured in any other artform. In movies for example, this kind of close-up of debris (or blood or whatever) flying off of someone/something would be a quick cut-away or a slow-motion, kinda stupid Matrix-like image that slows the scene down for a second and calls attention to the detail. It's similar to the Panels post I did on Mike Mignola's illustration of the 1/8th of a second when a match is struck and it lights up the room. A similarly strange and impossible-to-present image in any artform other than comics.

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.