PrettyFakes

Because one or two of you infrequently demand it! Comics! and zombies!

Well, with Hallween coming up, it seems like as good a time as any to take a gander at some of the more horrific purchases in my stack from the last couple of weeks. Marvel has been getting into the Halloween spirit big time, with their “Horror” edition of the MU Handbook and their diverting “Where Monsters Dwell” series of one-shots that revisit the brutes and beasts who used to headline Marvel titles before superheroes came along and muscled them out of the way. The highlight of these—well, of the two I picked up—is clearly Fin Fang 4, a comic tale in which the Fantastic Four attempt to rehabilitate four of these monstrous menaces by shrinking them down and giving them menial jobs at the Baxter Building.

Of course, there’s diverting, and then there’s ambitious. With Klarion, the Witch-Boy #4, the third of Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers series comes to a satisfying close. At this point, I’m beginning to think that reviews of this project may just be redundant. Either you like a mini-series about blue-skinned subterranean half-alien Puritans who raise the undead to tend their crops, or you don’t. And if you don’t, well, Greg Morrow has something to say to you (For the purposes of this making sense, replace “cosmic treadmills” with “blue-skinned subterranean half-alien Puritans”):

“See, things like the Cosmic Treadmill, they’re pretty silly out of context. It’s awfully easy and fun to make fun of them, to make some remark about kitsch or leaving behind adolescence, except that all the while, what you’re doing is stripping away what makes superhero comics fun and interesting and entertaining. If you strip away the Cosmic Treadmills, what you’re left with is a bunch of fascist psychopaths beating and killing each other, which can’t sustain a publishing world.”

I’ve been surprised at and pleased with the way this story has developed; Klarion was one of the characters in whom I had the least interest, but Morrison has made his tale one of my favorites. In recent appearances in the DCU—which Morrison throws out the window entirely, starting fresh with a new version of the character—Klarion has been rendered as a kind of effiminate high-camp trickster, a depiction that Morrison sees as a distortion of Klarion’s roots as an occasional foe in Jack Kirby’s The Demon series. I’m not quite sure I buy Morrison’s line on that, but at any rate, he’s focusing at least as much on the “boy” aspect of Klarion’s character as on the “witch.” In his rarely-flappable competence in the face of the unknown, with his urge for exploration and his exultation in new discoveries, Klarion recalls the protagonists of British boys’ adventure books of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the whole world was just waiting to be mapped for the empire. Klarion’s wide-eyed-but-deadpan wit serves him well in the face of the horrors he encounters above and below ground. But there is still something of the trickster about him, and his desire to explore the unknown, prompted partly by his fear of being properly assimilated into witch society, recalls any number of heroes of nineteenth-century American literature; of course, while women might have wanted to “civilize” Huck Finn, none of them tried to burn him at the stake, like those in Klarion’s hometown.

There’s a lot going on here, and yea verily, props must be properly administrated to artist Frazer Irving, whose art manages to be whimsical and horrifying all at once. There’s a touch of Where the Wild Things Are in his depiction of faces, particularly, that I think must not be accidental; Klarion, at bottom, has always been a peculiarly Morrisonian kind of fairy tale, and Irving’s art wonderfully achieves that combination of the fantastic and the gruesome that characterizes fairy tales in their oldest and oddest—and most interesting—forms.

Speaking of art, let’s consider the case of Greg Land, penciller on Ultimate Fantastic Four, a title I’m still enjoying despite my initial worries that once-and-current writer Mark Millar wouldn’t live up to the heights set by Warren Ellis, whose UFF run I liked so much, especially the Negative Zone story. Anyway, I don’t think I’ve read a single review of a comic drawn by Land that doesn’t begin with “Now, I don’t care for Greg Land’s photo-realistic, airbrushed-looking art.” Well, I don’t always either. If contemporary Frank Miller art, all rough lines and negative space, is on one end of the representational spectrum, Land is clearly on the other—you can’t get much more “realistic” than this without just pasting in a bunch of snapshots. My own preferences are somewhere between Mike Mignola and Kevin Maguire—a wide range to be sure, but Maguire still falls well to the south of Land’s work.

However, Land was the perfect choice for this book’s previous arc, “Crossover,” which saw Ultimate Reed Richards lured to an alternate dimension where zombie versions of Marvel’s superheroes had taken over the planet. It sounds silly, I know, but the genius of having Land provide the art was that, in the context of his normal world of glowing, smooth-skinned, ready-for-my-Tiger-Beat-photo-spread characters, his zombies were a genuine and skin-crawling aberration. Though I typically prefer the Jae Lee and the Kubert art that preceded Land’s arrival on the book, there’s really not a lot of difference between a regular Jae Lee face and a zombie Jae Lee face. But Land clearly lavished as much attention on conveying the corrupt, diseased, rotting, contaminated visages of the zombified heroes as he did on making the regular cast look pretty. The first appearance of the zombies a few months back, after an issue full of what might as well have been, visually speaking, Dawson’s Creek characters interacting, was a bona fide shock, something I don’t get too often in comics anymore. And that contrast still works in this issue, #24—I’m reading along, thinking to myself that it was silly to keep Land on now that the zombie storyline is over, and then I remember what he’s good at:

Okay, it’s a little less scary with all the yellow stripes. Stupid glossy high-quality paper. But you get the idea.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 26th, 2005 at 8:25 am and is filed under Comixx, Professor Fury. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.