Recently Read: Fire Power Volume 1: Prelude, by Robert Kirkman and Chris Samnee

 

Fire Power has turned out to be one of the finest comic book series of the last several decades and the pre-series Volume 1 graphic novel sets the tone and the standard. In the book, an ambitious, hefty 160 pages, author Robert Kirkman and Chris Samnee mix fantasy, martial arts action and drama that will bring a smile to readers of Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy's classic '70s Master of Kung Fu series. Kirkman subverts cliches from the very beginning. In a superlative twelve-page sequence of silence, Owen Johnson risks the elements to reach a secluded Shaolin temple at the top of a mountain. There he finds the wise old man he's searching for - only, he sports Air Jordans and listens to Radiohead on his iPod.

There's plenty of mystery, romance, intrigue, drama and action here, sensitively drawn by Chris Samnee (whose work is the reason I picked the series up), who channels the spirit of cartoonist Alex Toth in his classically choreographed storytelling. I'm usually averse to computer coloring in comics, but Matt Wilson (who's worked with Samnee on several projects) keeps the color schemes inventive, subtle, appropriate and surprisingly beautiful.

Volume 1: Prelude has been kept at a low price point ($9.99) for years in order to provide an easy access point to the complex series and though the story has ended, it's still a great time to invest $10 and read it from the beginning.

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Recently Read: November, Vol. 1: The Girl on the Roof

Matt Fraction and French illustrator Elsa Charretier have begun an intriguing and bleak noir story in November Vol. 1: The Girl on the Roof. Three narratives interconnect, centering on the unhappy loner Dee, hired (by a literal heavy stranger) to daily decipher a newspaper-published puzzle and then engage in a small act of spy craft on a roof.

She doesn't know what it all means and neither do we. Further chapters widen to include goings-on in the city police station and some acts of what appear to be terrorism. The tone of the work is unrelentingly grim.

The dissection and reconstruction of time and places require the reader's strict attention, but because the book is so thin, the attention is not all rewarded. At only 76 pages in, it's not really the novella described on the back cover, but merely the first third of a graphic novel. (Novellas tend to be self-contained and have endings, whereas sections of novels are chapters.) It's best read, and perhaps best packaged, as one whole work.

The artwork by Charretier, in the aesthetic tradition of Alex Toth, Darwin Cooke and David Mazzuchelli. is beautiful to engage with, though. The look and feel of the work is also greatly enhanced by Kurt Ankeny's various and appropriate lettering styles and Matt Hollingsworth's atmospheric brown, blue and gray palettes.

It's too early to adequately appraise November, but I'm very much looking forward to the next chapters.

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Alex Toth Shows the Other Animators How it's Done.

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An Alex Toth Page I Like

From The Land Unknown (Four Color #845), Dell, 1957.

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Studying How Alex Toth Drew Feet

Seems you can't ever draw shoes well enough...

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Warming Up

A warming-up method that might help your drawing (or not): doing quick sketches of Golden Age Alex Toth panels, simplifying them into their basic shapes and shadows.

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Recently Read: Scorchy Smith and the Art of Noel Sickles

Quite simply, Noel Sickles' 1930s run on the comic strip Scorchy Smith is the ur-text of American adventure cartooning. Though Roy Crane's Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy led the way, Sickle's single-handed and seemingly off-handed advancement of using ink and brush-based chiaroscuro to define shadows, forms, figures, compositions and objects revolutionized and galvanized entire generations of cartoonists.

The first cartoonist who utilized Sickles' new technique was his friend and colleague Milton Caniff, who applied it to his Terry and the Pirates strip, with amazing and classic results (Caniff's writing and strip characters were better, so the graphic advancement in his strip brought the quality of comic strips to a whole new level). Nearly every major adventure cartoonist afterwards applied Sickles' new techniques to one extent or another, far too many than can be listed here: Jack Kirby, Carmine Infantino, Don Heck, Alex Toth, Lee Elias, Wally Wood, Will Eisner, Frazetta, Johnny Craig, Frank Robbins, George Tuska, Alex Raymond...

Scorchy Smith and the Art of Noel Sickles reprints every Scorchy Smith strip Sickles drew, including strips before he started and after he left. That's only the second half of this very heavy and large, nearly 400-page book. The first half functions as an excellently researched biography by Bruce Canwell accompanied by hundreds of beautifully reproduced color and B&W illustrations, ads, paintings, sketches, comics and graphics
of all kind by Sickles through his long career. Jim Steranko wrote the introduction.

I cannot recommend this fine book enough; it's an essential, foundational reference and document for any serious reader of comics and scholar of the art of cartooning. The only small compaint I have is the binding developed for the book isn't adequitely strong enough for the weight of the pages the book holds.Though I was very careful, the end papers began to tear away from the book. A book which weighs 6 and a half pounds needs much stronger binding, especially at $50.

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Noel Sickles

I'm not sure where this ('60s?) Sickles illustration first appeared (can anyone help me out?).

One thing that's clear, though, is that Sickles continued to grow both in technique and in influence as an artist.

Just as his loose, noirish, chiaroscuro-based style made its big impact on Milton Caniff in the '30s (culminating in the styles of Alex Toth, Frank Robbins, Lee Elias and so many others), so this '60s style predates and sets the stage for many of today's indie cartoonists of what could be called the Fantagraphics/New Yorker school, any one of whom could have drawn the figure at the top of Sickle's illo.

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Alex Toth Lives in Fatale

A gorgeous, Alex Toth-ish panel by Sean Philips for Fatale #2, published by Image.

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Kikuo in The New Yorker

Check out the gorgeous details above from a recent illustration by Kikuo for The New Yorker magazine.

I remember the days (the '80s and earlier) when The New Yorker was far too high-falutin' to publish any work in the tradition of Alex Toth. Now, of course, indie comics illustrators are a dime a dozen in the mag. Kikuo's work really stands out, though, for a use of color which is both bold and sensitive, a minimalist line and stark, striking blacks.

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