What do comics do better than, er, non-comics?

I read a few comics last week, which got me thinking about how comics tell stories. Here's an old post that asks a similar question.

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I recently read a crime novel whose one distracting quirk was an occasional paragraph of dialogue or exposition that read like an editorial comment or an information dump.

I've also been reading Greg Rucka's Queen & Country, a comic set in the contemporary world of British intelligence, and it occurred to me that comics can sometimes convey information more efficiently than non-graphic books — verbal information, I mean.

Say an author decides the contents of a report about complex, high-level, multinational drug, arms and financial transactions are essential to his or her story. How is the author to convey that information without dragging the story to halt?

Queen & Country's characters spend good chunks of their time at their desks discussing intelligence and other data, but the discussion is never boring. One reason is that we can see their reactions.

A spy chief might slap a report on his desk in disgust or grit his teeth as a superior shoots down his plans. It's a lot easier on a reader to see a skilled graphic rendering of such reactions than it is to read: "He slapped the report on his desk in disgust, grinding his teeth as his superior shot down his plans."

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What else can comics do better or more efficiently than traditional novels and stories? What can traditional stories do better? Have you ever read a scene in one medium that you thought would work better in another?

Rucka himself provides an opportunity to test these questions. He has written several novels based on the graphic-novel series. Read excerpts here and here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

The Black Hood, or how comics tell stories

(Clockwise from upper
left: Black Hood #1,
Black Hood #1, Black
Hood #1, and Black
Hood #1)

I almost never buy individual issues of comics because I don't like working myself into a state of excitement over something that will take me five minutes to read, then having to wait a month before I can resume the story. That's why I prefer trade paperbacks that compile five or six or eight issues. (Most recently I bought and read the two books that collect the 11 final issues of Jason Aaron and R.M. Guera's awesomely good Scalped.)

Philadelphia's own Duane Swierczynski and his artist collaborator Michael Gaydos compensate for the small number of pages in a typical comic by packing a whole lot of beautifully spare storytelling into those pages. The climax of the opening scene in their new Black Hood series, for example, is one panel, one color, and 19 words: "And as the dark came down over my head, I couldn't help but wonder: Would anyone give a shit?"

That's a lot of storytelling, mood-setting, and existential-doubt establishing for one little panel about two inches high and three inches wide, and Gaydos and the colorist didn't have to vary their palette much; the panel's all black, except for the two little white rectangles where the character's thoughts appear.

As often with good comics, I like the way the two media — words and pictures — play off one another, sometimes together, sometimes one (usually the picture) offering ironic commentary on the other. The Black Hood is something like a masked-avenger tale, the story of a guy, here a wounded police officer, who dons a mask and assumes a new identity before going out into the world to attack criminals, but the first glimpse of the protagonist in his hood is anything but heroic.

And Swierczynski is a hell of a technician and craftsman if he can get the hero to refer to "the 15-year-old inside my head" without even coming close to breaking the dark mood.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Leo Pulp

Half the fun of reading the Italian graphic novel Leo Pulp is trying to find a character not based on some real or fictional personage.

Author Claudio Nizzi has squeezed them all in (or paid tribute to them) under their own names or thinly disguised: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Dick Tracy, Darryl F. Zanuck, Marilyn Monroe, Sunset Boulevard, Frank Sinatra, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Marlene Dietrich, Lana Turner, Johnny Stompanato, Orson Welles, Erich von Stroheim, Peter Lorre, Greta Garbo, the Black Dahlia, Red Harvest (maybe), The Maltese Falcon (explicitly), Little Sister, The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, even, God help me, Joel and Ethan Coen. (The Farewell My Lovely-inspired Velma appears here as Velma Lebowsky.)

Perhaps the only character wholly original to the book is Leo Pulp himself, the tough, long-chinned P.I. who charges twenty-five bucks a day — unless the name is a tribute to Léo Malet, creator of Nestor Burma.

One review compared Leo Pulp illustrator Massimo Bonfatti to the old Mad magazine cartoonist Sergio Aragones, and the parallel is apt. Both artists used every square inch of space, offering a busy feast for the eyes like a cartoon Pieter Breughel. The book is sprinkled with gorgeous panels, lovingly rendered in depth and detail in the style of George McManus as well. This is a book worth looking at as well as reading.

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Self-question for the evening: Why should I get so upset just because someone at the Pen & Pencil Club just said: "The price point is choice!" when I think he meant "It's cheap!"?

Did I mention that the young pirla was smoking a cigar?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

More Chandler and two fine openings from John Lawton

I can't get away from this Chandler thing. I've started Frank Miller's Sin City, an early landmark in the current golden age of crime comics, and both the first volume's title and its occasional wisecracks are obvious Chandler tributes. That title? The Hard Goodbye.

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Back in the non-graphic world, John Lawton's A Lily of the Field promises another aborbing and touchingly human look at civilian life during wartime. Here's the beginning of the prologue (and no one writes better prologues than Lawton: "It had not been the hardest winter."

And here's the opening of Chapter One:

"The war began as a whisper—a creeping sussurus that she came to hear in every corner of her childhood—by the time it finally banged on the door and rattled the windows it had come to seem like nature itself."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

The comic with something extra

The Golden Age of comics ended in the 1940s or early 1950s, but the High Tang dynasty of comic-book packaging is in full flower now.

I've just finished Volume 3 of Queen and Country: The Definitive Edition, not to be confused with the Queen and Country collected editions or plain old Queen and Country. The modern comic-book industry sells and resells the same stories, publishing "special editions" and bundling books into collections and collections into mega-collections, adding scripts, sketches and other extras at each step to flesh out the page count and entice potential buyers who have already read the stories elsewhere.

Each of the first two volumes of QAC:TDE collects twelve issues of the original comic, leaving just eight for Volume 3. The publishers filled out the space with a lengthy script, notes on the characters, and sketches. I'd rather have more story, because these dramas of adventure on the front lines and behind the scenes of British intelligence are damn good, and I may post about them one day.

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For now, how do you feel about extras, whether sketches of a super sidekick, commentary tracks on a movie DVD, or new tracks on a greatest-hits album? Are they desirable enhancements, or marketing schlock? What are your favorite and least favorite extras?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

A real cool comic and a real free sample

I've now caught up with all but an issue or two of the Scalped saga, and I can say a few things about the characters and about how the story fits into the noir and hard-boiled traditions. I can also speculate about how long writer Jason Aaron and artist R. M. Guéra will continue this superb comic-book series.

Scalped works as high-intensity noir because every major and significant supporting character is driven by traumatic, unresolved events in his or her past. It works as fast-moving narrative because Aaron jumps back and forth in time, more distant flashbacks always building toward the present, and thus averting the danger of losing focus.

It works as believable, contemporary storytelling because it is unsparing and unsentimental in its depiction of the fictional Prairie Rose Indian reservation, and because its Native American, Asian and black characters can be driven and corrupt. There is little guilty-white-liberal breast-beating at work here. It works as hard-boiled because it's harsh and violent and because Aaron puts wisecracks in the mouths of tough characters at the grimmest moments.

Vertigo has just published or is about to publish Issue #33 of Scalped, and I wonder how long the series will continue in its current narrative form. A number of stories to this point include lengthy flashbacks to a given character's back story, and Aaron will run out of characters sooner or later, or at least risk seeming soap-operalike if he introduces new characters for the sake of giving them dramatic backgrounds. Already, the two strongest characters — the gone-but-returned Dashiell Bad Horse and the violent, corrupt, venal, haunted casino owner/police chief/boss/ex-activist Lincoln Red Crow — overshadow fellow characters given equal back-story treatment.

But that's a quibble. Scalped is one of my best crime-fiction discoveries in recent years and certainly the most unexpected.

(Read Scalped #1 free here.)

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I've read Scalped in trade paperback collections and regular monthly issues. One of the latter offers on its back cover an advertisement for Star Wars: Space Chicken. That's a cartoon comedy based on the Star Wars™ "universe," but the ad copy makes fun of the Star Wars™ fan phenomenon, with references to nerds and such. The idea of a movie/television/action figure empire so all-encompassing that it can make fun of itself is disquieting. Satire is good. Officially licensed satire seems somewhat worrisome, totalitarian and beside the point.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Red, white and a bagful of noir

I bought six issues of Scalped at my local comics shop this week and was surprised and pleased when I brought my purchases to the cash register to learn that the 50 percent off sale was still on. Then, when I found three back issues of 100 Bullets in the dollar bin, the proprietor let me have them free. Net result: nine dollars for nine books of the best noir being written and drawn today.

(Of course, in my day one could buy nine comics for $1.08. Even nine DC 80-page giants would have run $2.25, but who could have dreamed of such a bounty back then?)

Writer Jason Aaron situates Scalped on a fictional Indian reservation in South Dakota, and if you think the stories offer alcoholism and despair, you're right. But they also offer struggles for power, love, sex and money and, in a brief prologue to one story, a noirish flashback to Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee. Aaron and illustrator R. M. Guéra do a fine job creating a sense of place, in other words. Highly recommended.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

More novel graphics

Last month Jon Jordan sent along a generous package of graphic novels. Last week at Murder and Mayhem in Muskego, I talked with Brian Azzarello, author of one of the books.

In the opening pages of Filthy Rich, Azzarello's words and Victor Santos' art combine to tell the story in ways words alone could not, at least not so concisely.

The art plays against Azzarello's captions and moves the book into disquieting irony. The narrator, a football player forced out of the sport by a knee injury and something shadier as well, wryly casts his life as a fairy tale and himself as "a handsome prince, that everyone loved." Santos' rich black-and-white drawings, meanwhile, show the same narrator engaged in decidedly un-fairy-tale-like acts.

In Muskego, I buttonholed Azzarello, told him I admired his work (which also includes 100 Bullets and The Joker), and said I was fascinated, as a novice comics reader, by the ways pictures and words work together. I was pleased that he singled out the opening pages of Filthy Rich, just as I had.

Pages two and three tell us the fairy tale has ended, page three in five panels of jump cuts, from long shot to two-shot to extreme close-up to two more long shots from sharply different points of view. It's kinetic and exciting, and we don't know what it all leads to until a panel that takes up all of page four. The pace tells the story, but so do the words and the hulking size of the page-four panel.

(See two previous posts about comics here and here. In the first, I discuss graphics carrying the opening of an original story. In the second, art adds new dimensions in the graphic-novel adaptation of a great French crime novel.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Novel graphics

A week and a half till Bouchercon, which means I'll be Bouchercramming for my panel on crime fiction and translation. And that means posting may be a bit sketchy for a few days.

Speaking of sketches, I received a nice package of graphic novels this week from Generous Jon Jordan. The opening pages of one, Brian Azzarello and Victor Santos' Filthy Rich, tell a story in ways words alone could not, and I may discuss some of those ways when I'm more fully awake.

Azzarello's words and Santos' pictures work together at least two ways, and I thought back to a post I once made about how another comic created tension yet a third way: a wordless opening, the narration entering only after the art has created the tone.

This is all heady stuff for a words guy like me, so help me, comics readers: How do words and pictures combine to tell stories in ways neither could do by themselves?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

West Coast Blues: A classic crime novel goes graphic

Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942-1995) was one of the great crime writers, and his novel Le petit bleu de la côte ouest (translated previously as Three to Kill) may be the essential European crime novel of the last forty years.

Now the book has made its way into graphic-novel form, as West Coast Blues, adapted and illustrated by Jacques Tardi and published by Fantagraphic Books. The story follows with hallucinogenic clarity a young businessman named Georges Gerfaut (anglicized here as "George") through an accidental encounter that leads to: beating, killing, hit men, privation, wandering then salvation in the woods, sex, revenge, voluntary uprooting from his family, clashes with a Latin American torturer on the run — and then back to the same ring road in Paris where he began, wondering, perhaps, whether it was all real and whether it will happen again. There is no catharsis, no happy ending. There is no sad ending, either. The story simply runs out.

The book is slyly funny without being jokey; thrilling without ever seeming manipulative; cool, distant and ironic in its narrative voice; immediate in its depiction of violence.

What do Tardi's illustrations add? Mostly a crowded sense of daily life, an ironic, sense-sharpening departure from the dark, shadowy atmospherics that sometimes nudge noir toward mere style. Tardi's scenes of Gerfaut and his family at a holiday resort are notable here, full of packed beaches, spilled ice cream, traffic jams, and an attempt on George's life.

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(The new title presumably refers to Gerfaut's perferred music, the cool West Coast jazz that Gerfaut listens to as he unwinds and the tension builds.

Here's what I wrote about Manchette last year in a post called "Who is the most influential crime writer?" Here's a roundup of the year's mystery and crime comics from Brian Lindenmuth. And here's what one current crime writer, a admirer of Manchette's who has paid tribute to him in his own work, has to say.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

A thick book(seller)

I visited my local comics store today to inquire about Darwyn Cooke's adaptation of Richard Stark's The Hunter. Here's what happened:

Me: "Do you have The Hunter?

Click-click-click-click. Silence.
"Darwyn Cooke, graphic-novel version of Richard Stark's novel?

More silence.

"Nothing?"

The help: "Our computer is slow."

I circle the shop, browsing.

The help: "Who's in it?"

Me (nonplussed): "Who– Why would you ask who's in a novel? It's a novel, by Richard Stark – Donald Westlake – adapted and drawn by Darwyn Cooke.

I circle the shop again and come back around to the help and the store's computer.
"Not getting anything?" (On a previous visit to the store, another employee had called up information on the book and given me an approximate delivery date.)

The help: "I'm getting too many titles."

Me: "Why are you looking for a book on IMDb?"

The help: "Oh, it's not a movie?"

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I'll find another place to buy the book. In the meantime, read about Darwyn Cooke and the Hunter comic at the Violent World of Parker Web site. And read some of my posts about Richard Stark here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Graphic Manchette

With hat tips to Pulpetti and Duane Swierczynski comes news that Jean-Patrick Manchette's novel Le petit bleu de la Côte Ouest, previously available in English translation as Three to Kill, will appear in a graphic-novel version called West Coast Blues. This version, adapted and illustrated by the French cartoonist Jacques Tardi, is to appear this summer as the beginning a series devoted to Tardi and published by Fantagraphics.

Here's what I wrote about Three to Kill and Manchette's other novel available in English, The Prone Gunman:

"Manchette reinvigorated noir, inventing what French critics call the néo-polar, or neo-whodunnit, and if all that neo stuff makes you roll your eyes, stop and think for a minute: How many of the old-time hard-boiled writers make your blood run cold the way they presumably did for readers in the 1930s and 1940s? How mean, in other words, are Raymond Chandler's mean streets today?

"Certainly Manchette's time, an age that saw assassinations, cover-ups at the highest levels, and revelations of the violence that attended colonialism and its end, could no longer be shocked by small-town or even big-city corruption of the Hammett and Chandler kind. Manchette restored that ability to shock, with tales of what power can do to those it finds convenient to crush. And he did it while remaining true to the roots of pulp. Heck, the guy even loved American movies and played the saxophone. How much more genuine can you get?"

Click on the Jacques Tardi link above, and you'll see why I'm excited about this Fantagraphics release.

Here are some previous Detectives Beyond Borders posts that mentioned Manchette, who figures — or at least part of him does — in Swierczynski's novel The Blonde.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

More Moore

I've been surprised from time to time by the popularity that crime fiction enjoys among graphic-novel readers. Based on nothing other than guesswork and prejudice, I once would have associated comics more with fantasy than with crime. But no longer.

First, cover copy on one of the Batman collections referred to the story's murder mystery. Then a staffer at my local comics shop, as slacker-like a slacker as any who ever called a customer "Dude," surprised me when he said he wished the Watchmen movie had played up the story's murder mystery more. And then there are writers like Duane Swierczynski, who write both novels and comics.

My latest eye-opener in this regard is Alan Moore's Top 10, which I discovered thanks to the comic-store dude cited above. The story has a typically fantastic Moore premise: A city called Neopolis is built after World War II to house a population that consists entirely of superheroes. Their population explodes. Unemployment and associated social problems proliferate. And a wild squad of cops with odd superpowers of their own is charged with keeping order in this messy world.

Moore, I have read, cited Hill Street Blues as an influence, which means that Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels were an influence, too. The books have extensive fantasy and science fiction trappings, but at their heart they're ensemble police stories. That an imaginative writer such as Moore finds this time-honored form fertile ground speaks well for the vitality of crime fiction.

The books are vehicles for Moore's humor and social commentary, and the fantastic setting makes a wonderful background for the stories. That setting? Think of the bar scene in Star Wars, with all those weird creatures drinking and socializing. That's a nice set piece, right? Imagine all those creatures with lives and problems of their own, inhabiting a New York-like city, trying to survive, committing crimes or trying to solve them. That's Top 10.

I expect I'll have more to say once I've read all of the books. For now, though, I'll share a snippet of dialogue from The Forty-Niners, a Top 10 prequel:

"`Uh, say, buddy, excuse me? This'll sound kinda nuts, I know, but ... are you a vampire?'

"`I'm a Hungarian-American with an inherited medical condition.'"

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Comics, comics, comics

I've spent two days surrounded by more comics than at any other time since I was 10 or 11 years old. And guess what? Some of this stuff is pretty good.

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As I was saying before I was distracted by an evening of wholesome family fun, Duane Swierczynski and Michel Lacombe's The Punisher opens with a disquisition on spearing a human being:

"Harpooning a man isn't as easy as you think. ... You've got to catch bone. ... Otherwise the hook will just rip away. ... So you aim for the ribs. ... Avoiding the heart. ... Especially if you want your catch ... to make it back to shore."

Makes you want to keep reading, doesn't it? And that's what a good prologue ought to do. Oh, and the first three panels are wordless. Lacombe's art carries the action alone and does so as simply, dramatically and economically as one could imagine: nothing but a rope unfurling against an aquamarine sky.

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Jason Aaron's Scalped both updates and remains staunchly faithful to noir. Updates? The story takes place on an Indian reservation, a category of setting largely if not entirely unexplored in noir. Faithful? The protagonist is named Dashiell Bad Horse, and the tribute to Dashiell Hammett has not a trace of the cute or the nostalgic about it. This is dark stuff: violent, full of the hardest kinds of choices between bad and worse, and all richly abetted by R.M. Guera's dark art work, redolent of night, blood and arid plains.

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Part III of my Great Comics Adventure was a visit to Geppi's Entertainment Museum in Baltimore, a vast repository of American cultural artifacts from the dawning of the mass-media era. That era started earlier than one might think, but that's material for another post. For now, I noted with interest the occasionally dark shadows amid the garish colors and sharp, stiff lines on comic-book covers as early as the 1930s. Noir influence found its way into comic book early on.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

A graphic interlude with raw fish

Tony Chavira sends notice of an online P.I./noir comedy comic strip on which he's been collaborating for the last few months. Click here for the adventures of the suave, confident, powerful and inept Tuna Carpaccio P.I.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008