Before Frank Quitely Was Quite Quitely

Frank Quitely is one of the most respected artists working in superhero comics today, known for his distinctive drawing style, dynamic compositions, and willingness to experiment with form.

Which makes his statements in this interview at Comics Beat more interesting:

When I started out, I didn’t know a lot about storytelling because I never got a formal training in comics. It ended up being kind of intuitive and my main thing was about trying to make it clear and interesting. You know, I wasn’t really thinking in terms of narrative flow, it was more just about clarity and trying to make it as good as possible. Gradually, over the years, I just became more interested in storytelling.

There was a DC editor I worked with named Dan Raspler – the Lobo editor amongst other things. He was my editor on JLA: Earth 2 and before I did JLA, I did a short Lobo story for them and it was the first mainstream DC thing I’d done; I’d been working for [the imprints] Vertigo and Paradox for a couple years.

I sent him the pencils and it was the best thing I’d done up to that point and I thought “he’s going to phone me back and tell me how good this is” and he didn’t phone for a week. I was really panicking by the time he phoned; he started the conversation with “dude, I don’t know how to tell you this…”

Basically what he said was my drawings were really lovely, but my storytelling was really boring. He went through and told me what I should be thinking about and that was kind of a real milestone. As it was, that book never came out for different reasons. For JLA: Earth 2, he made me fax a rough for every page because he wanted to see that I could do art that makes sense in rough with a sharpie, then I could do it properly. . . . That was a big leap for me.

DC Comics published JLA: Earth 2 back in 2000. That was one of many collaborations between Quitely and scripter and fellow Glaswegian Grant Morrison.

As for the “short Lobo story” that Quitely mentioned, that was Lobo: The Hand-to-Hand Job, also subtitled It’s a Man’s World, scripted by another Scotsman, Alan Grant. It was never printed. This webpage on unpublished comics says, “Although the publisher has never commented publicly on the comic, the disappearance of the project could be chalked up to the reported nakedness of Lobo for at least half the issue, as well as a scene involving sexual self-gratification by a league of asteroid miners.” Yes, that would do it.

“Roaming tribes of boy sidekicks”

This is how Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely let us know that one of the planes of existence in the Flex Mentallo miniseries is eeevil: the kid sidekicks have gone feral. Once that happens, there’s “No future. No hope.”

And they still don’t all have pants.

For anyone reading Flex Mentallo, I recommend also sampling Jason Craft’s online annotations, David Allison’s appreciation and lament for the recoloring, Sean Rogers’s critique for The Comics Journal and the many comments it produced, and Rich Johnston’s response to that critique. I’m not taking sides.

Batman, Robin, and the “Much-Maligned Sound Effect”?

The first issue of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's Batman and Robin magazine went on sale this week. One of its features, according to Morrison, is a novel treatment of sound effects. In an interview posted on the IGN comics site on 11 March, Morrison said:

I've asked him [Quitely] to re-introduce the much-maligned sound effects to superhero comics but in a way that integrates them more closely with the art.

And eight days later an interview on the CBR site quoted Morrison on the same point:

And he’s producing things like sound effects, because nobody does sound effects anymore. Everybody has given up on them, so what we’ve done is incorporate them into the artwork. When someone hits water, the water rises up and makes the “splash” effect. It just looks fantastic.

And this is how it looks.
Here's the sound of explosions during a high-speed chase.
And in Quitely's Gotham City, the sound of the new flying Batmobile firing a missile inside a highway tunnel is "BWKSSSSssssss."
But is the sound effect truly "much-maligned" in superhero comics these days? Has everyone indeed "given up on them"? A peek into DC Comics's other superhero magazines shows that's not so. It's true that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen did without sound effects, and that's the platinum standard for superhero stories--but it's also more than twenty years old. 

Perhaps what Morrison meant (besides hyping his upcoming work, as such interviews are supposed to do) is that comic-book sound effects have been the domain of letterers, now created with computer fonts rather than by hand. He and Quitely are clearly doing sound effects differently, incorporating them into the art from the beginning.

As for the other aspects of this magazine, I was a little disappointed. Parts were great fun, such as an opening chase scene that alludes to Mr. Toad's wild ride, and a new skyscraper headquarters for the new Batman/old Robin. We sense the friction between him and the new Robin that will define the arc of this series. But the story seems disjoint enough that I wonder if it was chopped up and stitched back together in different order.

Six pages from the end we see Commissioner Gordon up on the police station roof, shining the bat-signal into the sky. His men are skeptical this will work since Batman hasn't been heard from in a long time. But then, plunging through the skylight's beam come Batman and Robin! What a dramatic moment!

Except that we've already seen Batman and Robin in action on ten earlier pages. They've already delivered a criminal to the cops. And the previous page has shown us that they're up in the sky, about to test their new parachute-capes. 

The only surprise, therefore, is for Commissioner Gordon--and we never see his reaction. (Maybe in issue #2.) We readers are left wondering if Batman and Robin just happened to be out skydiving when the bat-signal was turned on. 

Furthermore, Quitely's and colorist Alex Sinclair's full-page image of the Dynamic Duo's descent (Robin in the lead, as shown in thumbnail here) lacks the deep, black shadows that have dramatized Batman stories for seventy years. What was no doubt intended to be a great moment left me, as I said before, a little disappointed.

New Portraits of Robin

This weekly Robin links to three new looks at the oldest young non-superpowered superhero.

First, The Black Cat has offered several new installments in the "Batman and Sons" parody. I linked to this webcomic last year. Its premise: Batman is raising all three male Robins (Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, and Tim Drake) as well as the future Batman of the TV cartoon Batman Beyond (Terry McGinnis). As a father, this Batman depends on Alfred and his own tiny, tiny reserves of emotional intelligence.

Here are a couple of panels from a page in which Tim decides to play Batman and Robin with his baby brother Terry.
I love how Terry's eyes show how well this is going over. Rest of the story.

And here's a new image of a new Robin by Frank Quitely, distributed by DC Comics to promote the upcoming Batman and Robin magazine. All signs point to this Robin being Damian, Bruce Wayne's love-hate child with Talia al Ghul.
The Batman and Robin magazine is being created by Quitely and Grant Morrison, a Scottish team who did wonderful things for All-Star Superman--including delivering it on time, something Frank Miller and Jim Lee had trouble managing with All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder.

In an interview at IGN, Morrison (whose earlier thoughts on Dick Grayson I quoted here) dropped this hint about his plans:

This is a very different Batman and Robin team from any that we've seen before. It's almost a reverse of the traditional dynamic, with a more light-hearted and spontaneous Batman and a scowling, badass Robin. Expect fireworks and violence.

Sounds interesting, but let's remember what happened the last time Robin was a willful, impetuous, defiant, and morally challenged young man. That was the second Jason Todd, and it ended (at least for about fifteen years) with him dying--at the request of a majority of voting Batman fans. My "Reasons for Robin" series is leading up to an argument that that was inevitable.

Will Damian have any more appeal than that Jason? Will his Batman be better able to cope? It would be delicious irony if Damian's Batman turns out to be Jason Todd, but Jason is anything but "light-hearted."

Finally, here's a link to an image of Red Robin by Francis Manapul. Red Robin was originally the name adopted by the middle-aged Dick Grayson on Earth-2. Alex Ross then used the name and designed this costume for the middle-aged Dick Grayson in one possible future of the DC Universe in Kingdom Come. Now the company's brought that costume into the DC Universe of today to sell more dolls, and is teasing fans with the mystery of who will be wearing it.