I don’t have too much to say about this chapter — even with the narrator’s sad, resigned tone, this piece is a bit more fairy tale-ish than the others. There’s also a jagginess and willful ambiguity to the ending that stymies the opportunity to draw much of a moral from the story, which I appreciate — but I could look at these character drawings for hours. OK, I thought of something else while adding the jpegs; it’s noteworthy that our hero has no problem mowing down the undead and Aurum’s guards, but nearly comes undone by the idea of killing a monk. I don’t know enough about Quique Alcatena or Eduardo Mazzitelli to file a brief in critic court, but there’s a vague Catholic flavor to some of these pieces.

My translating skills aren’t so hot, but a few folks have asked me to try to give them some idea of what’s being said, so here goes:

Page One:

CAPTION: When I met Plumbum, I had already lost my left arm, my ideals and the will to fight for ideals of others. That is, they deserted me.

PLUMBUM: When you see it, Ferrum, only then will you understand!

CAPTION: I do not know why we became friends, we were so different. Plumbum, so noble and clumsy …. I was none of these things.

PLUMBUM: She has the color of the sun and its shine! When she looks at you with her golden eyes, it’s as if the rest of the world melts away!

CAPTION: So noble and clumsy and in love.

PLUMBUM: Aurum, I’m here!

Page Two:

CAPTION: There was no exaggeration. Only the sun (not even the sun) could compare to Aurum’s beauty.

TITLE: Golden Eyes

CAPTION: Her eyes, her incredible golden eyes, lingered on me. Plumbum growled at me.

PLUMBUM: Ferrum ….

CAPTION: Like the sun (more than the sun), they seemed unattainable.

AURUM: The man of my dreams must bring me …. the impossible triangle from the land of the dead ….

CAPTION: My good friend Plumbum. So noble. So clumsy. So in love.

Page Three:

CAPTION: So naively reckless.

PLUMBUM: Do not stop me, demons! No one will stop me! Nothing can stop me! Ah, there you are!

Page Four:

AURUM: The man of my dreams must be able to seize from the masked monks, their illuminated circular medallion …

MONK: What are are you looking for?

PLUMBUM: The medallion … I …

MONK: Know you, I will not give it nor anything else that has been deposited in our custody. You must kill us.

Page Five:

CAPTION: I can see Plumbum hesitate and then collapse.

PLUMBUM: Please … oh Rayos, forgive me … please, how I wish I did not to have to do this!

AURUM: The man of my dreams must be able … to collect a handful from the rivers of fire … and shape with his hands a perfect mirror that does not distort my beauty.

CAPTION: My good friend Plumbum, so foolish.

Page Six:

PLUMBUM: I’ve done everything you’ve asked, beautiful Aurum. What more could I do?

AURUM: I’m sorry … the man of my dreams should be made of the same stuff as me … your efforts have been futile.

PLUMBUM: You … you once told me of an alchemist, a magician who transformed everything into gold.

FERRUM: He was just a lunatic, and his experiments never ended well!

PLUMBUM: Take me or I’ll rip off your other arm. And then a leg … and then ….

FERRUM: I will. All right?

CAPTION: My friend sobs. He could kill me with his sobbing.

PLUMBUM: You know, my friend, you know that I would do anything for her eyes to look at me, only me.

Page Seven:

CAPTION: I pointed the way but did not travel with him. I did not want to be complicit in this tragedy. In return, I kept watch at Aurum’s balcony so that no other man approached her in his absence.

CAPTION: The next night, he returned. I knew it was him because I recognized his silhouette in the distance. And the intense golden brightness given off his body. The same glow that drew Aurum to her window, fleetingly.

AURUM: Get him out of here! I do not want to see it!

CAPTION: Never, never had any of the alchemist’s experiments turned out totally fine.

Page Eight:

CAPTION: Plumbum and I do not know how we became friends. [We are so different.] But friendship is irreversible.

FERRUM: Let’s go, Plumbum. Pick up the pace.

CAPTION: So, that night I helped break down the doors of the house, kill the guards, and go to her room.

FERRUM: Quick, Plumbum.

PLUMBUM: Wait a moment.

CAPTION: So, I did nothing while he, not without tenderness, explained to Aurum that she would be his, as he was.

PLUMBUM: Do you see it, my love? Do you understand? Now your eyes, our golden and beautiful eyes, only look at me. Forever.

CAPTION: So I’ll accompany his escape until the guards make us pay for so horrific a crime, someday. So, because he is my friend, I will join his folly. Forever.

And … we’re back. Hi.

We left off at me bloviating about Metallum Terra, a delightful return to form for the amazing Enrique “Quique” Alcatena.

Aside from the striking character/world design we’ve been spoiled rotten expecting from Quique on his every project, what often stands out in Terra is its narrative poetry.

That’s not poetry in the traditional, rhyming-text sense, but in how these chapters play out as stories.

When it comes to modulating irony, American adventure comics have produced a pretty narrow historical spectrum, usually arriving as a fable/O Henry/Crime Does Not Pay presto-chango button for the ending.

My translation skills aren’t so hot but there doesn’t seem to be that sort of lesson-teaching moralism here, but we’re still firmly in the land of fable.

It’s a delicate balance to achieve, so it’s a pleasure to see even on less-than-mindblowing chapters like this 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?]

It’s to Quique’s credit that he didn’t conform very well to late ’80s/early ’90s gringo independent-comic expectations; the first dozen or so pages of this 1991 collaboration with writer Alan Grant [originally serialized in Toxic magazine] are pretty uninspired stuff, a derivative hodge-podge of tropes and action that played more to Grant’s strengths than Quique’s — albeit with a delightfully anti-clerical tone that’s always fun. The lackluster results are especially odd when you consider that Quique redrew the original 50 color pages, apparently lost in Toxic‘s collapse, as a 48-page B&W album for Comiqueando Press in 1998. But then ….

….

…. the Alcatena we know and love takes over for a bit, filling pages with some of his trademark showstopper character designs and vignettes.

This Beauty & The Splinter Beast thing’s got one sweet cellular telephone, I must admit:

I wasn’t sure if this book was worth covering — I obviously don’t have much to say about it, there’s just not a whole lot here for Alcatena fans to get excited about — and then I saw page 28:

That’s right — BLACK KINGPIN MOTHERFUCKERS. Who would have thought the pinstriped slacks were such a key to the character’s design?

The introduction to this book says that Grant wrote a Makabre sequel, of which Quique only drew one chapter before the project was orphaned by its publisher. He presumably finished Metallum Terra [which I'll begin examining next week] in its stead, so we all win.

As much as I love Frank Robbins, I can’t take reading these stupid comic books anymore. Here are some entertaining odds & ends I clipped and saved before throwing the rest out.

Instead of a pastiche of ’40s supercomics junk, Invaders #10 reprinted an real piece of ’40s supercomics junk with “The Wrath of the Reaper,” from Captain America Comics #22 [January 1943]. Al Avison & Al Gabriele’s art is no great shakes but I appreciate that they tried to ape the Simon & Kirby look, especially the slashing, almost abstract look they often gave faces. I also enjoyed the deeply cynical view of how easily manipulated the American public is by the popular media — of course, Stan Lee wrote/dialoged/whatevered this story at the same time he was in the U.S. Army’s Signal Corps, and Father Coughlin still haunted the imaginations of media-minded and/or progressive writers for years after he was driven off the air.

It’s a shame that, even with the graphic-novel boom and such, there’s still no money to be made in blackmailing major cartoonists with the endearing/embarrassing letters of comment they sent to their favorite comic books as children. Although, if I did the math right, Seth was 14 when he wrote to Roy Thomas. [From Invaders #14, March 1977]

Things I still love about comic books, despite comic books:

#1. Frank Robbins and Frank Springer.

#2. Hitler as final boss/hands-on villain who doesn’t believe in delegating any tasks to his employees.

#3 A Special Belt-Apparatus universal translator that lets a “Ja” and “der führer” go by, which apparently makes for “perfect English.”

4. Cap’s Skippy/Little Orphan Annie eyes.

FWAP. [Panels from Invaders #17]

Pretty conventional subject matter, but this is the weirdest looking cover of the series to my eye: the Cap is clearly a John Romita figure and the other Invaders look like heavily redrawn Romita/Kane, but the Hitler looks like a Jack Kirby drawing and the soldiers & overall layout look like Gil Kane’s work. What the hell? Also, what is the Human Torch doing, aside from using his powers to catch the attention of children?

BLONG BLONG

So, when last we left them, Enrique “Quique” Alcatena and Ricardo Barreiro had taken the legendary viking mariner Ulrich through a haunted-boat Alien retread that only sparked up a bit once we got to the hot Viking-on-Alien action. Appropriately for an ancient seafaring epic, the rest of the album shifts into a more episodic, scattershot narrative, freeing Quique to do what he loves/does best ….

… really cool designs, presented in startlingly clear vignettes.

Literally every page-spread of the book’s second half features one of these bravura scene/tone-setters.

I can’t quite put my finger on why these work so well for me and similar pin-up-style panels don’t — I guess it’s the level of detail, which shows that it clearly wasn’t done to cut corners and save drawing time, the sheer volume of thinking that went into rendering the textures and weights of the figures and objects, like a wispy precision in drawing a perfect block & tackle rig that would be barely visible in the construction panel above. It’s all deliberate, almost adamant when these panels don’t necessarily move the story forward much.

At times, Quique’s inks in this half often achieve a look that’s confident but somehow rough and delicate at the same time, like Joe Kubert inking P. Craig Russell and making that work.

GUNSHOW! Here are a few full pages to give a sense of these showstopper panels in context. The amount of texture given to the walrus-mustachioed guy’s cloak, in a panel with at least three other figures plus a decorated roof and a picture window — it just kills me.

Toward the end, these more integrated chapter pages start appearing — perhaps the earlier ones were cut from the serialized original to this collection, I don’t know — and they’re quite effective. Although that LEMURIA looks like something out of a ’70s APA.

At this point, I no longer understand what the hell is going on in the story, and I don’t care. They could have tipped-in a handwritten note reading “Hey Milo, we’re just going to fucking pelt your eyeballs with one amazing image after another until we run out of pages. Is that OK with you?”

[✓ ] Yes [ ] No

and

and

That’s right, smiling dolphin-headed creatures in cloaks, observing an aquatic Gotterdammerung. If you made it this far, this should not be a dealbreaker.

“….. I thought I was having a dream …..”

I like this panel because it reminds me of the brief period in Mike Mignola’s development when his core style was set but he still squiggled quite a bit in his inking. The End.

[Thanks to Mr. Witzke for suggesting this comic to review and thus getting me off the Alcatena-Wiseman see-saw for a week.]

Even a professional comics hater like me found it easy to like Dwayne McDuffie, who was clearly a good dude who loved comics even though he was too intelligent to be completely fulfilled by the corporate-pamphlet field that never knew quite what to make of him –  a career riddled with interviews that were always more engaging and entertaining than the actual finished product once it came out of the IP sausage factory …. largely to fanboy indifference.

McDuffie achieved escape velocity from Marvel’s editorial offices with Damage Control, three four-issue miniseries published over 1989-1991; I don’t have them all handy, but I remember reading them during my time in the Journal library and thinking the series was fun and pretty thoughtful for something published under Tom DeFalco’s custodianship of the company. I’m pretty sure it was Marvel’s only attempt to cash in on DC’s [maybe I should say Andy Helfer's] successful “Bwah-ha-ha” cycle of comedic adventure comics, which is odd — the company always took after papa Stan and not papa Jack or Steve, and Stan rarely finished an issue without some tongue-in-cheek banter.

Damage Control never really caught on, I think, for two reasons: Most supercomics fans won’t buy comics that don’t have a consistent, reliable amount of superheroes in them, and the series itself strikes what’s probably an untenable balance between broad comedic fantasy and pragmatic logistic realism. This particular vehicle just doesn’t corner that well.

Think of the superduper content in such a comic book as a burger and fries, and any real-world content as the parsley: It used to be that if the chef cook gave you any parsley at all, it will be as a garnish on the side, which you’d ignore but not resent it for being on the plate. In the comics, these are usually scenes/subplots involving the supporting cast, although I always liked the scenes of Peter Parker on his college campus or realizing he needs a shower badly or discovering that he’s been on the go so long that the food in his fridge has spoiled on him. These days, a lot of burger joints have gotten fancy and chopped the parsley up and worked it into the meat they serve. I can’t think of a good example of this stupid metaphor in action in recent comics — please don’t make me read them — but I’ve heard that it’s there. In Damage Control, the burger joint served a bowl of parsley soup with meatballs on the side, and wondered why few of their regulars ordered it more than once. This might be a rare example of Marvel actually overestimating the intelligence of their audience.

All that said, what compelled me to write about this particular comic can be summed up in two words: Kyle Baker. The other 11 issues of the series were drawn by the supremely versatile workhorse Ernie Colón, and it’s a little bizarre that a miniseries, even in the must-hit-deadline office culture of the late ’80s, would bring in a replacement cartoonist on its first issue. Is there a good office story here?

At the time, Baker’s exuberant cartooniness always had inking that showcased an appealingly polished, careful sheen — a character might look wildly off-model from one panel to the next, but his rendering of those figures would be as unique as his fingerprint. This issue, however, looks like a rush job; drawn with the same pen for almost everything, often with no penciling first. In a lesser artist/storyteller’s hands, this sketchbookish approach would be disastrous but Baker pulls it off with aplomb, even giving the story’s events the kind of coked-out mania it probably wouldn’t have gotten from Colón.

Rush job or not, there must be a good story behind the recurring gags about the width of Albert’s lapels being illustrated with him wearing a solid black jacket:

Times like that, isn’t it better to change the joke to something about tie knot or color, or something about his shoes?

It’s perversely entertaining to watch even the loose sketchbook style of the first few pages devolve and sometimes mutate, presumably as the deadline drew closer.

___

One of the joys of seeing jobs like this is noting how artists seem to use the same short cuts and often wind up finishing that have the same curiously isolated, haunted affect; some of the panels throughout this issue come off as homages to the infamous Iron Man #39, which Herb Trimpe drew in just a couple of days.

Have I mentioned that I love how Baker uses Morley Safer as his template for Lenny? Altho this panel, WTF:

I know that drawing of John on the right is a swipe/photo reference from somewhere, but I can’t put my finger on it. Publicity photo of Bogie? Lee Marvin? If you know, tell me; it’s making me nuts trying to think of it