LIBRARY artefact #020
SUPERGODS Redux
Part 3
Many writers do this differently, but the basic form is the same. DC Comics tends to favour the type of fully realized finished script seen above. Marvel Comics uses the ‘Marvel method’, as pioneered by a time-strapped Stan Lee, where the writer creates a basic plotline, often in close discussion with an artistic collaborator, to include major story beats, resolution and character development but leaving the pacing, choreography and breakdown of images to the artists. At one extreme this can result in seamless collaborative efforts like Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons Watchmen or at the other in grim battles of wills between writers and artists as in an infamous sequence from the Claremont/Byrne X-Men in which a suffering Cyclops is brought to his knees less by grief than by the overhanging weight of word balloons heavy with so much detailed exposition that his final speech seems to flatten him like an airbag expanding from the top of the panel.
‘YOU MUST HAVE PICKED THE MINDS OF THE KREE AND SKRULL OBSERVERS, LEARNED WHAT ANCIENT WEAPONS WERE HIDDEN HERE.THEN YOU USED YOUR FIGHT WITH THE X-MEN TO DRAIN YOU OF ENOUGH ENERGY TO MAKE YOU VULNERABLE AND FINALLY WHEN YOU WERE READY, YOU…YOU…OH, JEAN…JEAN…’
Oh, Jean, indeed. Jean Grey AKA Phoenix AKA Dark Phoenix, who was now a smoking stain on the floor, offered no reply, which was just as well. There was no room left in the panel for anything other than a tiny prone Cyclops.
In more extreme cases of the Marvel script method, the artist would provide a fully drawn story and the writer simply added appropriate dialogue and captions. Jack Kirby often arrived at the Marvel offices with fully pencilled and plotted stories, typically introducing several new characters and locations into the bargain.
Sometimes the artist who does the pencil work adds black ink lines to his drawings to make them fit for reproduction. Sometimes another artist, an inker, will do this work. Next in line on this wheezing, stamping, ’City Lights’ conveyor belt is the colourist, (or ‘colorist’ as it’s written in U.S. comics) who, as the name implies, brings the final touch of full colour to the pages. In the past the limitations of the 4-colour process set limits on what these specialists were able to do but the advent of computer colouring, with its full spectrum palette brought a finer, smoother finish. The colour work in today’s comics has more in common with painting, rendering or 3-D modelling. No longer limited to flat combinations of primary filters, the colourist can now add textural and lighting effects that were previously impossible, bringing a new weight and a photographic sheen to 2-D drawings.
This is how superhero universes are built, maintained and tended like gardens over generations: on a strict monthly production schedule. When the specialist Direct Market comic stores made possible the creation of ‘limited series’ aimed at fans rather than a general audience, artists were able to slow down and produce career-defining work outside the deadline process while taking advantage of a star system that made the work more collectible. Artists unable to cope with monthly pressures were able to relax and take their time on prestige books. This resulted in the development of ‘art’ comics, where a single writer and artist team worked on a limited run of a character’s adventures, like Jim Lee and Jeph Loeb’s ‘Hush’, a 12-issue serial mystery packaged as a definitive Batman story by two highly-marketable fan-favourite creators. Good work takes time and that time is often given to the artistic stars of the industry.
The techniques have become more sophisticated over the years. Since the rise of personal computing in the 80s, lettering colouring and even inking has been done onscreen. The grey tones of pencil lines can be sharpened digitally to create high contrast black lines in a process called digital inking.
Some comics are lushly painted, featuring photo-realistic water-colour or gouache pages, as in the work of Alex Ross. Some have the texture of airbrushed advertising art, the plastic luscious hyper-reality of fake tits and Michael English paintings, stretched smooth and glossy with artifice. Lightboxed from DVD stills, these synthetic cut-out characters populate ‘filmic’ comics.
But the same basic roles remain in shared universe comics. Like a traditional rock band with drums and rhythm and bass, the regular team of writer/penciller/ inker/ colourist/ letterer and editor is required to create pop comics on a tight and demanding schedule.
The finished work began on someone’s desk or drawing table, pitched at the bleeding quarry face of inspiration and reader expectation.
The new instalments that build on the history, themes and patterns of the ongoing paper Universes go on sale in specialist stores on Wednesdays in the US and Thursdays elsewhere. Maintaining the production schedule on the kind of living expanding Dreamtime recurring narratives that typify a Batman or a Spider-Man comic book is a never-ending process, month after month, year after year, decade after decade, which uses up generations of talent and imagination. The production line is unceasing, always demanding and until very recently, far from lucrative. To work on corporate superhero titles is to work for hire. DC Comics owns every line of every Batman, Superman or Justice League story I’ve ever written. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t happily created hundreds of characters for the DC and Marvel Universes (we all want to leave our little scribbles on those immense walls) and there are now profitable royalty and bonus schemes designed to make the pain more bearable but characters and stories created for the DC or Marvel Universes become the property of those worlds and their owners, and are absorbed into or rejected from the continuity in accordance with their success or their nostalgic return value. I own a great many of my own characters and concepts but, as I say, there’s something mind-boggling about participating in an ongoing project as colossal as the DC Universe or the Marvel Universe, like adding stones to a pyramid or a great cathedral, whose completion you will never see.
For now, we’re done with the clang and bang of instruments. Let’s leave the worker’s hero donging on his cosmic anvil. The steaming cog wheels of the 1930s busily manufacturing the future using any and all raw materials, including people’s lives and dreams.
We’ll leave the dark satanic mills to their work as we rise along the descending path of the lightning stroke and bid farewell to the material world we leave behind. In the end it’s the gold that counts. Setting aside the deals and the betrayals, the naivety and the machinery, it’s the dreams I most want to talk about and why we‘ve chosen to dream them.
Let’s rise from the superhero’s birth matrix of pulp, pouring ink, distributor trucks, deadlines, exploitation and the midnight sweat that is the physical precipitation of ideas haggled onto pages.
This cheap unprepossessing format in search of an identity had given the superhuman ideal a new toehold in a new world, one that gave the candy coloured superbeings access to the minds of children, where they could take root and propagate.
Stamp them down, rip them up, burn the roots and salt the ground: superheroes will grow and spread.
Soon they had spread across the whole world.
this is weirdly inspiriational. thank you.
Modern Times -- It’s Modern Times with The Conveyer-Belt, Production-Line and prototype experimental Food Machine. And the rollerskating.
City Lights is the one with the poor, blind flowergirl and Millionaire Tippler with a Multiple Personality (Dis)Order Set -- Jovial, Bounteous, Warm, Loyal and Generous when sotted, a Viscous, paranoid Fascist skinflint while stone-cold sober.
The Tramp has to figure out a way to keep him drunk and friendly long enough for The Jovial Millionaire Personality to him to gift him the money that he can use to pay for The Flower Girl to get the treatment to cure her blindness, and SURVIVE their boozy rollicking hijinks and escapades, without the Sober Personality taking control, having forgotten that he even knows The Tramp, and having him immediately arrested and thrown in jail --
[ It’s •very• funny. ]