Art Machine
Just another former infatuation junkie

Thanks to Boing Boing, I find my way back to ElfQuest.com – where WaRP Graphics has started the long process of posting every page of ElfQuest online for free reading. The second wave is about to go up, but the first wave contains – among other things – the first full story arc of the original series, Journey to Sorrow’s End.

It’s ElfQuest’s 30th anniversary this year, and last year DC Comics let go of them. They’re one of the longest-running indie comics on the scene, and I discovered they’re selling merchandise through CafePress.

I had problems with how DC handled their property. The “manga” reprints hacked the original art apart and re-ordered it, slathering it with a liberal dose of digital screen tones, and the only way to get the comic as it originally appeared was in overpriced “Archive” editions. Add to that the lack of promotion and the fact that the movie adaptation fizzled shortly afterward, and it seems like DC just didn’t quite bring its A-game.

There’s nothing wrong with CafePress. I still have a store with them, myself. But it still feels odd to see an indie comics institution of 30 years using what is usually thought of as a beginners’ merchandising outlet.

ElfQuest was a big part of my artistic development. It was the first outlet that made me realize that character design was more than just how people looked, but could also be used to reveal the inner life and monologue of a character. It was the comic that kept me interested in comics as a storytelling medium at times when the mainstream output failed to engage me. A lot of my sense of visual storytelling still comes from tricks I learned from Wendy Pini’s sequential art, with its use of cinematic angles and animated frame layouts that mimicked the time-flexibility of film.

And to top it all off, my first actual audience for any one of my short stories was an ElfQuest fan club (or “holt”).

I’m happy to see ElfQuest going online, and hoping that now WaRP will be able to bring back an audience for the comic. I know I’ll be tuning in every week and re-acquainting myself with what still remains my favorite comic.

Sci-fi blog io9 links to this article on the official Star Wars site comparing the Japanese manga of Star Wars to the Marvel Comics adaptations.

it’s truly an unfair comparison to gauge how well Marvel Comics originally adapted the classic trilogy films against how Japanese artists did the same. The deck is definitely stacked in manga’s favor. For the Marvel adaptations, produced during each film’s post-production period, the artists had not seen the films—they were working merely from the script, with some key photography and maybe some concept art. Also, they had to conform to the page and printing standards of newsstand comics from 1977-1983. This meant that all the action of a Star Wars film had to be crammed into six issues (or, in the case of Return of the Jedi, a mere four).

What quickly becomes apparent, however, is that the manga adaptation had far more going for it than just a long, long lead time and flexible format. The manga also didn’t have to deal with the Comics Code Authority, resulting in a much freer style with some of the more violent moments of the Star Wars saga. Where a piece of machinery conveniently covers the action in the Code-approved American adaptation, the manga depicts Luke’s hand being cut off with brutality and finality. Where Luke and Vader’s cave confrontation is toned down severely in the American adaptation, the manga version depicts it perhaps even better than the original film.

The open manga style also lends itself better to capturing the spirit of the film in general. While the Marvel adaptations feature painstakingly detailed artwork, the cartoon style of the manga allows it to better capture the comic relief of the series, while also lending itself to true hardcore pulp moments like Leia’s revenge on Jabba the Hutt.

So perhaps it is truly unfair to compare the two adaptations – as is usually the case with Japanese and American comics, it’s a case of apples to oranges. But it certainly is interesting to compare them. And it’s even more interesting to me to see this kind of side-by-side comparison published by the licensing company itself.

I wrote a couple of years (ouch) back about the redesign bug biting Archie comics. At the time, I had picked up an issue of Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Betty & Veronica, and I bemoaned the wooden artwork, the clumsy jokes, and the general feeling that somehow, the comic had decreased in quality, although also admitting I had never been a big fan to begin with.

The other day, I was at the store when I saw the good ol’ Archie Double Digests on the shelves. I decided this was my chance to see if the smaller size made the artwork look better, so I plunked down the bucks for both an Archie and a Jughead double digest. From these two slim volumes, I learned 4 things.

It wasn’t the size, it was the crappy printing. The new double digests are crisp. Clean. Almost pristine. The line art is solid, the colors unblurred, no bleed on the page and no smearing of the ink. In other words, it’s lousy. I discovered that it may not have been the size, but the cheap printing that made me remember the artwork as being good. The old printings with reduced artwork, bleeding colors, and ink processes so helter-skelter that there was a 50-50 chance of any bold-faced word being illegible gave the comics a sort of charm. Rendered in clean lines, the by-the-book character renderings have almost nothing to give them an edgy, rough feeling.

Your children are buying reprints. It’s actually kind of ingenious. If you happened to read Archie back in the days and you have kids who are obsessed with it now, you can identify with them almost immediately. Not only are they reading a comic that looks and reads like the comics you used to read – they’re reading the exact same comics you used to read. I made this discovery suddenly as halfway through the Jughead digest, I ran across one of the few stories that I vividly remember from my childhood. In it, Mr. Weatherbee tries to improve the students’ scores by telling them to get their imaginations involved in the learning process.

My suspicions were further confirmed by a backup story in which Jughead is always “carrying around cassettes” ever since he got his “brand new video recorder.” Oh, you silly writers. Archie Comics had a brilliant plan going, and you had to ruin it all by trying to be all timely and everything.

Actually, this explains a lot of things that never quite jived back when I was actually a kid reading these. How Archie could have stylish 80’s hair in one comic and be showing off his new polyester leisure suit in the next before wearing a Kurt Cobain plaid flannel in the third. But the reprint of that first story also brought me to my third revelation.

Despite Archie Comics’ best efforts, the artwork is inconsistent. It’s an issue with any time you try to get people to adhere to a given style manual. Even if you have your artists training line by line from the original artist’s works, they’ll always wind up interpreting it in their own style. One of the reasons I knew that the comic in question was actually a reprint and not just a new version from the old script was a few key panels that had stuck in my young mind like… a very sharp, jagged thing that gets stuck easily. Not all the similes can be brilliant, people.

In this case, it was a good thing – a cartoonist who was experimenting within the confines of his style manual. There’s Jughead’s borderline psychotic expression as he proclaims that Mr. Weatherbee has inspired him, and his eery costume and makeup job as a mad scientist walking through the halls who stops to tell Mr. Weatherbee, “Today, ve are dizzecting someting. Or eez eet… zomebodee?”

In other cases, it’s not so good. In the lead story in the Archie digest, six pages are spent with Archie running around trying to get pristine winter photographs. In all of the six pages, there is only one facial expression that is not a broad, teeth-bared grin. It takes all of six pages for Archie’s mother to stand there in the final page – after having smiled the smile of the paranoid schizophrenic along with every other troubled soul in Riverdale – and finally offer a close-mouthed smile. The kind of tight-lipped simper that shows the true depth of misery in her life. Surely, she’s coming down off her diet pill high, she’s all out of the good vanilla extract, and the reality of her miserable suburban life is coming crashing down upon her without the comfort she usually gains through her intoxicant friends. A portly husband in a go-nowhere job, a vapid son whose promiscuous lifestyle will only lead to tears, freeloading neighborhood teens who raid her icebox without asking permission, and the kind of soul-crushing ennui that can only come from spending every waking moment getting her whites their brightest and avoiding those darn spots on her good glassware. Were we only to have one more page, we would see her sneaking into Archie’s room to “borrow” his model airplane glue – just to tide her over for one more day….

Sorry. I have to admit – the artwork in that story was a little bit depressing.

Finally, I learned – Yes, the writing has always been that bad. Well, maybe not always. After all, I have the feeling they’re not going back to the old Bob Montana days to get their reprints. But what I found is that the comics in general were not just suffering from hackneyed jokes – they were suffering from poor timing, as well. A lot of comics would have been funnier without the last page or panel. It reminds me of the experiment a while back in which people were making Garfield comics funnier simply by removing Garfield’s thought balloons. Here’s an experiment, guys – write a comic in which you don’t try to top your punch line with an immediate follow-up. One-two punches work well in boxing, they aren’t always as successful in writing.