OLD COMICS WEDNESDAY: Alcatena y Mazzitelli’s Metallum Terra [part one]

After the disappointing, lackluster Makabre, it’s easy to imagine Quique Alcatena was delighted to cut loose on his followup serial Metallum Terra — another collaboration with writer Eduardo Mazzitelli; eight-page chapters for the monthly magazine Cóctel in September-December 1991.

The back matter for this collection lays out a pretty bare structure for reading this work as epic poetry rather than heroic fantasy; drawing a sharp line between the two is a bit above my pay grade but I know I prefer my Quique comics to be less interested in The Hero’s Journey™ than in using a protagonist as a vehicle for exploring the artist’s visual imagination. Less Luke Skywalker, more Jerry Thompson, please.

We’ve gone on the Hero’s Journey plenty of times; make the scenery stunning, give us a few great amusements and something to chew on and we promise not to kick the seat and ask “Are we there yet?” for the next hour or two.

…

Even Quique’s most active, plot-driving heroes seem to serve more as  sub-metatextual tour guides, leading us through his environments, local characters and notable events first, then being heroes who need to do ______ to progress to their goal/the next act of the story.

The key to this sense of intent is the openness of his pages and panels — compare these pages to even the most Quiquesque of Makabre‘s art from last week and you’ll see some of what I mean. Even on its busiest page, there’s [breathing] space in Metallum that’s missing from the earlier book, which gives it a sense of the epic without resorting to full-page splashes.

At his best, Quique’s art is psychologically expansive; a double-page spread in a single panel. For a medium so dominated by action/adventure, this is a surprisingly rare talent for an artist to possess.

[Kind of a sappy ending, but we saw it or some variation on it coming, didn't we?]