Yes, it’s time for another hiatus. As usual, the Monday reminders of comic-book awesomeness will continue, but the longer Thursday posts will probably only be back in the summer.
In the meantime, I leave you with a little time capsule of another era when Batman was super popular… In fact, he was so popular that people even went to the cinema to see his godawful 1943 serial (the one that was basically lampooned in Adam West’s TV show). I love all the scare quotes, suggesting the reporter’s embarassment and/or campy glee, especially when writing about the “Bat-Girls.”
Gotham Calling is still primarily a blog about comics, but I’m also enjoying posting about other books on my bedside table. They’re genre narratives as well – and many of their themes and concepts overlap with those of the comics I usually write about anyway… Yet they tend to approach these themes and concepts with remarkably different sensibilities, which makes for a stimulating change of pace.
For instance, here are a couple of futuristic novels (written in a somewhat distant past) that have recently messed with my head:
THE DEATH OF GRASS
(John Christopher, 1956)
“As sometimes happens, death healed a family breach.
When Hilda Custance was widowed in the early summer of 1933, she wrote, for the first time since her marriage thirteen years before, to her father. Their moods touched – hers of longing for the hills of Westmorland after the grim seasons of London, and his of loneliness and the desire to see his only daughter again, and his unknown grandsons, before he died.”
Read now, this apocalyptic novel about a virus that wipes out crops and the ensuing social collapse cannot help but feel as topical as ever. There are shades of the covid pandemic, with the virus initially being heartlessly – and not without racism – dismissed in the West as something that will mostly affect China, followed by growing tension – and suspicion – between the general population and the government authorities (one of the set pieces, relatively early on, involves trying to pierce through one of the road-blocks set up to prevent inter-city circulation). Likewise, the themes of famine and ecological disaster suit our age of climate crisis, as does the increasingly fashionable Darwinist mentality of survivalist narratives set in a post-state land where ruthlessness, brute force, and moral compromise are requirements.
And yet, The Death of Grass couldn’t be more of its time and place (i.e. 1950s’ England). Along with the dated gender dynamics, you have the ghosts of World War II and the postwar era, from rationing to the state of emergency, not to mention the very notion that all these civilians have enough training and nerve to roam around the countryside shooting at each other. And then, of course, there’s the Cold War, reflected not just in the subplots about atomic weapons, but also in the encompassing end-of-days vibe as well as in the level of anthropological pessimism, so characteristic of fiction from an era when humans seemed doomed to continue fighting forever (or, at least, until they destroyed their entire species).
And it’s against this backdrop that we zoom in on a small group of people trying to make it across the country as nature and society disintegrate around them…
“Tadcaster was on edge, like a border town half-frightened, half-excited, at the prospect of invasion. They filled up their tanks, and the garage proprietor looked at the money they gave him as though wondering what value it had. They got a newspaper there, too. It was a copy of the Yorkshire Evening Press – it was stamped 3d and they were charged 6d, without even an undertone of apology. The news it gave was identical with that which they had heard on the radio; the dull solemnity of the official hand-out barely concealed a note of fear.”
Part of the appeal – for me, at least – has to do with the contrast between such a sadistic scenario and a certain idealized image of British quaintness, restraint, and civilized arrogance… which gets viciously torn apart. (A few years later, Hollywood gave a similar treatment to American suburbia, in Panic in Year Zero!)
Seriously, John Christopher pulls no punches. The Death of Grass may start off with a somewhat picturesque, low-key tone, but it soon picks up speed and it just keeps cruelly escalating the stakes: horrible things happen to likable characters and everyone has to deal with the way the world has become. The prose isn’t necessarily witty or elegant, from the point of view of conventional literary standards, but the book sure is gripping as hell.
When Christopher stops for a breather and the rare existentialist musing, he earns it. There is an element of libertarian fantasy in the novel (hell, in the whole damn genre), but also a conservative streak that expects us to be shocked and indignant about the status quo of lawlessness. Such tension isn’t usually explicit, fortunately, but it does inform a number of striking passages:
“The question of whether the weather held fair would make a lot of difference to them. How easy it would be, he thought, to pray – to sacrifice, even – to the moorland gods, in the hope of turning away their wrath. He glanced at where the three boys lay curled up between Roger and Olivia. They would come to it, perhaps, or their children.
And thinking that, he felt a great weariness of spirit, as though out of the past his old self, his civilized self, challenged him to an accounting. When it sank below a certain level, was life itself worth the having any longer? They had lived in a world of morality whose lineage could be traced back nearly four thousand years. In a day, it had been swept from under them.
But were there some who still held on, still speaking the grammar of love while Babel rose all round them? If they did, he thought, they must die, and their children with them – as their predecessors had died, long ago, in the Roman arenas.”
SOLARIS
(Stanislaw Lem, 1961)
“At 19:00 hours, ship’s time, I made my way to the launching bay. The men around the shaft stood aside to let me pass, and I climbed down into the capsule.
Inside the narrow cockpit, there was scarcely room to move. I attached the hose to the valve on my space suit and it inflated rapidly. From then on, I was incapable of making the smallest movement. There I stood, or rather hung suspended, enveloped in my pneumatic suit and yoke to the metal hull.”
Set in the confines of outer space, on a research station specialized in the study of the mysterious ocean of the planet Solaris, this is a bona fide classic of hard science fiction. The book is narrated by a recently arrived psychologist, Kris Kelvin, who has to deal both with his idiosyncratic fellow scientists and with a set of extremely eerie phenomena (which, he comes to suspect, are probably a result of the latest unauthorized experiments).
The subjective perspective means that the story is as much about what is out there as about Kelvin’s own journey of discovery, especially as he is forced to confront his darkest secrets and moral dilemmas along the way. For all the psychological and emotional introspection, though, his is also an intellectual journey – and part of the appeal of Solaris is to follow the protagonists’ discussions as they debate, test, and theorize about what the hell is going on.
I’m sure I got a particular kick out of this because of my own path in academia. This is truly a novel for those who enjoy reading about science, even if it is fake science… The bulk of the second chapter is pretty much a scholarly literature review about a whole fictional field of studies, its authenticity enhanced by both detailed practical considerations and references to typical interdisciplinary disputes:
“Lack of funds delayed the departure of a proper Solaris expedition for three years. Finally Shannahan assembled his team ad obtained three C-tonnage vessels from the Institute, the largest starships of the period. A year and a half before the arrival of the expedition, which left from the region of Alpha in Aquarius, a second exploration fleet, acting in the name of the Institute, placed an automatic satellite – Luna 247 – into orbit around Solaris. This satellite, after three successive reconstructions at roughly ten-year intervals, is still functioning today. The data it supplied confirmed beyond doubt the findings of the Ottenskjöld expedition concerning the active character of the ocean’s movements.
One of Shannahan’s ships remained in orbit, while the two others, after some preliminary attempts, landed in the southern hemisphere, in a rocky area about 600 miles square. The work of the expedition lasted eighteen months and was carried out under favourable conditions, apart from an unfortunate accident brought about by the malfunction of some apparatus. In the meantime, the scientists had split into two opposing camps; the bone of contention was the ocean. On the basis of the analyses, it had been accepted that the ocean was an organic formation (at that time, no one had yet dared to call it living). But, while the biologists considered it as a primitive formation – a sort of gigantic entity, a fluid cell, unique and monstrous (which they called ‘prebiological’), surrounding the globe with a colloidal envelope several miles thick in places – the astronomers and physicists asserted that it must be an organic structure, extraordinarily evolved.”
I love all the world-building, explicit and implicit. The surnames of the scholars and cosmonauts suggest a future in which space exploration has become a globalized, international affair, which was itself quite a sci-fi notion back in 1961, when Solaris was first published, in communist Poland.
But Stanislaw Lem, one of the most acclaimed sci-fi writers ever, hasn’t just crafted a thorough and richly complex fictional place – this is a first contact narrative, imagining the implications of encountering an alien life form so baffling that it challenges our scientific and ethical foundations. Existentialist and ultimately metaphysical in the questions it raises, Solaris is a book about trying to grasp incommensurable magnitude and, therefore, about dealing with the limits of knowledge and the challenges of translation.
Then again, distant galaxies have always been a fertile ground for Eastern Bloc science fiction. In spaceships and space stations like the one in Solaris, geographically (and chronologically) removed from the Earth’s dictatorships, readers get to follow isolated characters who freely debate and make choices away from the gaze – and the chain of command – of the authorities.
And along with the politics of contrast with everyday reality, you also have more timeless themes, as a couple of characters directly denounce anthropocentrism and the impulse to conceptualize difference through analogies, correspondences, and projections of ourselves. The result is a stirring, thought-provoking read.
“We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all sham. We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don’t want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can’t accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past.”
One of the things I enjoy doing at Gotham Calling is to quickly zoom in on specific skills and quirks of the many awesome artists of Batman comics, from Don Newton and Tim Levinsto Graham Nolan and Frank Robbins. Today, I want to spotlight one of my favorite traits of Enrique ‘Quique’ Alcatena, namely his flair for adorning panel borders with flourishes that bring out each story’s core motifs…
Detective Comics Annual #7
A self-taught Argentinian artist, Quique Alcatena entered British comics in the late 1970s and eventually made his way to DC, where his first Batman work was this 1994 swashbuckling period piece set in an alternate reality where the Dark Knight is an English pirate called Leatherwing who targets Iberian galleons in the Caribbean.
Ah, pirates… It’s not too much of a stretch to see a family tree growing from these violent outlaw figures operating by their own code (at least as depicted in popular culture) to Zorro and, by extension, to the Caped Crusader strand of virile, if campy, vigilantes. Now, as far as pirate comics go, this one isn’t as nastily funny as Isle of 100,000 Graves or Portrait of a Drunk, but Chuck Dixon’s script is nevertheless highly amusing, what with its quaint turns of phrase, rhymed narration, and the way it reimagines the Batman mythos (including a cathartic reversal of A Death in the Family). Alcatena’s deadpan – yet baroque – artwork helps sell the humor, redesigning the cast’s extravagant garments with a straight face while placing them in a lavishly illustrated adventure.
The ornate panel borders, beside serving a practical function in the pages’ layout (for instance, clearly separating the scene with an ersatz-Catwoman fleeing the ship from the one about Leatherwing, Robin, and Alfredo in this version of the Batcave – the Bat Cay), contribute to the whimsical faux-historical spirit. The arabesques above may resemble the jewelry one might find in Leatherwing’s treasure, but they’re clearly also meant to evoke the illuminated manuscripts of old… Or, better yet – and perhaps deliberately – they rather evoke the pastiche of such illuminations you could find in the sort of pulp magazines Dixon probably read for inspiration, so that the access to the 18th century is openly mediated by the fiction of a much more recent past, thus adding yet another layer of history – and intertextuality – to this Elseworlds tale.
(Dixon and Alcatena later reunited for a fun sequel entirely made of verses and splash pages, ‘The Bride of Leatherwing,’ published in Batman Chronicles #11.)
The Batman of Arkham
2000’s The Batman of Arkham one-shot is another Elseworlds tale, and another period piece, but instead of a pulpy romantic adventure, we now get a gothic horror psychodrama set in 1900 where a version of Bruce Wayne is a Freudian doctor in a post-Bedlam Arkham Asylum.
Tonally, it’s a very different comic. It was penned by Alan Grant, one of the most interesting and prolific Batman writers, who had an instinct for injecting even the most lowbrow material with his passionate political and philosophical concerns, often resulting in provocative and/or weird projects. Grant occasionally used the freedom and storytelling potential of Elseworld narratives not just to rearrange the Dark Knight’s tropes and aesthetics, but also to problematize the franchise’s values through recontextualization. In The Batman of Arkham, he challenges the series’ standard problematic depiction of mental illness as evil, unimprovable, and contained only through violence and incarceration… Here, such a worldview is linked to outdated, century-old ideas attributed to a villain (Jonathan Crane) and actively fought against by a hero who argues that ‘Men are made evil.’ (Plus, as you can see in the scan above, when it comes to women, the very notion of ‘evil’ is externally imposed in order to preserve reactionary social norms.)
Quique Alcatena pushed his quirky panel borders to a new degree. Besides enhancing specific atmospheres (dizzying in the first page above, which suits Poison Ivy’s hypnotic seduction moves; generally stiff and oppressive in the scene at the bottom of the second page, just like Crane’s conversation with Wayne), they appear to project characters’ states of mind, which makes thematic sense in such a psychological story.
Thus, the borders around Poison Ivy look like climbing vines, not least because they are superimposed over some kind of wooden garden fence that frames the whole page. This ties both into the fact that the character typically identifies with nature (reinforced by the leaves coming out of her hair, although that may have been an additional choice by colorist Noelle Giddings) and into how twisty and entangled Ivy is feeling at the moment, restrained as she is for the crime of seeking liberation. Likewise, the borders of the very final panels, around Bruce Wayne and Jonathan Crane, shift from a rational angularity to a sinister melted shape, a distortion that suggests the characters are heading in a darker direction (in the case of Crane, this is complemented by the unnaturalistic Scarecrow-ish shadow).
Grant and Alcatena formed quite a team. In fact, they had already partnered up a few years before, in Legends of the Dark Knight #89-90, where they had reimagined the origin of Clayface…
Legends of the Dark Knight #90
This image really stuck with me over the years. ‘Clay’ is both a horror story and a story about horror, as early-career Batman is still learning to cope with fear and supernatural threats… and here Quique Alcatena – ever amaster of the medium – nails it perfectly, not just through Clayface’s horrifyingly grotesque design, but also through the eerie way the magical shape-shifting matter appears to contaminate the page’s whole layout. It is the stuff of nightmares: the squiggly panel borders stretching and dripping towards the bottom of the page somehow seem alive, fluid, unstable, and even gory.
While storywise ‘Clay’ is a loose remake of 1961’s Detective Comics #298, the artwork alone makes this a whole other beast. Alcatena’s skill in rendering both a monster *and* a monstrous mood sell the key impression that this is a scary – and deeply fantastical – world… one in desperate need of a certain masked hero.
Since I did a coupleof postsabout The Adventures of Tintin a while back, I guess it was a matter of time before I got around to writing about Spirou & Fantasio, the other major classic series of Belgian bandes dessinées about madcap globetrotting adventure.
In particular, I want to focus on the first decade or so after World War II, when the series was both written and drawn by one of the greatest geniuses in the history of cartooning, André Franquin.
Despite its long-lasting popularity in continental Europe, most albums of Spirou & Fantasio have yet to be translated to English (although Cinebook and Europe Comics, slowly but surely, have finally been doing a praiseworthy job at fixing this). Indeed, the series never reached the same level of critical acclaim – and scholarly discussion – of The Adventures of Tinitin… not even close!
One reason for this may be, precisely, the inescapable comparison with Tintin. After all, although Spirou has different hair, a different attire (he is often dressed like a bellhop, strangely), and a different adorable pet (Spip the squirrel, instead of Snowy the dog), he has pretty much the same personality as Tintin: a young, curious, friendly, (initially) asexual hero with smarts and a kind heart. Spirou’s hotheaded-but-well-meaning sidekick, Fantasio, is a version of Captain Haddock, albeit less politically incorrect and not a sailor… in fact, he’s a reporter, like Tintin. The comparison can go on: they often hang out at a palace with an old inventor who at one point builds a model submarine!
Above all, they get involved in a very similar type of all-ages Boys’ Own thrillers…
The Wrong Head
This parallel became more superficial as the series developed its own identity and mythology – and it didn’t appear to bother readers in the first place (I remember accepting the derivative features as a serviceable springboard for fun rip-roaring yarns when I was a child… Hell, the fact that the whole thing at first seemed Tintin-like was a bonus, as I was looking for more of the same anyway!). Still, when it comes to the medium’s intelligentsia and academia, I’m not sure Spirou & Fantasio ever fully cast aside the negative connotation of being a less sophisticated copycat of a critical darling.
All of it written and drawn (or closely supervised) by Hergé, The Adventures of Tintin feels shaped by an auteur’s artistic vision and evolving personal concerns – i.e. the type of stuff scholars and critics love to scrutinize and evaluate – while Spirou & Fantasio, in turn, comes across like much more of an industrial franchise: the character of Spirou was originally created by cartoonist Rob-Vel, in 1938, for the leading strip of the magazine Le Journal de Spirou; it became property of the publisher Dupuis during WWII; Jijé introduced the co-lead Fantasio (who also went on to be a key character in Franquin’s hilarious strips about Gaston Lagaffe, known in English as Gomer Goof); and the series has been passed around from one creative team to the next throughout the ages, to the point that new albums – and spin-offs – by different writers and artists keep coming out almost every year, with flexible internal continuity (for example, some are set in the present and others in the distant past, although the characters usually have the same age).
I realize I could be describing Batman or loads of other IPs from American comics but for a long time this made Spirou & Fantasio relatively exceptional in the European scene… and probably made it earn less respect and less close attention than the finite opus that is Tintin.
I’m sure it didn’t help that the series was more prominently comedic, as well. Don’t get me wrong, Tintin is certainly humorous…
The Castafiore Emerald
However, the tone of Spirou & Fantasio has always been much more playful (with a couple of exceptions), including outright surreal and metafictional gags. André Franquin no doubt played a major role in popularizing this aspect when he took over the series, in 1946: if Hergé’s ligne claire was sometimes used to render physical comedy in an anchored, quasi-realistic, and comparatively stiffer world (as seen above), Franquin’s Spirou pushed the slapstick further while drawing everyone – and everything – as elastically cartoony, within relative boundaries.
At one point, Franquin even came up with a gas that diegetically made solid metal soft and malleable:
The Dictator and the Mushroom
There is a case to be made that Franquin’s Spirou and Fantasio is not just a more whimsical version of The Adventures of Tintin, but ultimately a kind of good-natured parody of Hergé’s work. Like Tintin in The Broken Year, the two heroes travel to a fictional country constantly embroiled in revolution – in this case, Palombia – in Spirou et les héritiers [‘Spirou and the Heirs’, one of several albums bafflingly untranslated to English, all the more so because it introduces many recurring elements and cast members]. When Spiro and Fantasio get there, however, they find something much more frantic: every important building they look at immediately explodes and the streets are littered with chaotic gunfights and tanks. If Hergé caricatured Latin American politics, Franquin seems to be spoofing that very caricature!
Even when he plays the material straighter, in the sequel, The Dictator and the Mushroom, Franquin seems less interested in satirizing imperialism than Hergé did in The Broken Ear or, later, Tintin and the Picaros. It is a pacifist tale (Spirou and Fantasio try to sabotage Palombia’s military arsenal before its latest leader invades a neighboring country) but the story doesn’t seem informed by specific geopolitics, only by a general impression that this part of the world is full of warmongering regimes (yes, the Cold War only fully blasted into Latin America with the coup in Guatemala of 1954, a year after this album came out, but almost two decades before Hergé had already linked the region’s violence to neo-colonial interests…).
If there is a political angle here, it’s the liberating joy of laughing at buffoonish authoritarianism:
The Dictator and the Mushroom
Seen from this prism, Franquin’s run appears less like a poor imitation of The Adventures of Tintin than like a talented cartoonist taking a familiar blueprint (like Hergé had done with the works of Jules Verne and Alfred Hitchcock) and filtering it through his own idiosyncratic sensibilities. In other words, it can be read as an auteur piece on the same level of Tintin, not least because Franquin’s output was itself incredibly groundbreaking and influential.
While Franquin’s plotting was thinner and probably improvisational (at least early on), he was quick to introduce a bunch of concepts and visuals that have remained a lasting staple of Spirou & Fantasio (and which have themselves been imitated by other series), from Fantasio’s despicable cousin Zantafio to the competitive reporter Cellophine (Seccoutine in the original), not to mention the exotic animal Marsupilami (a prodigy of design and frequent deus ex machina) or the village of Champignac-en-Cambrousse, with its pompous mayor (so proud of the village’s first – and apparently useless – traffic light) and its eccentric count/grandfatherly master of mad science.
Notably, Franquin’s distinct drawing style displayed a flair for imaginative and amazingly fluid designs, which he often applied to gizmos (including some very cool vehicles!) and to action set pieces. Again, compare Hergé’s and Franquin’s depictions of North African architecture – while the former carefully traced reference photos and came up with credible backgrounds…
The Crab with the Golden Claws
…the latter filled the pages with deliberately skewed lines, less concerned with realism than with projecting the dizzying sensation of a foreign look at the seemingly labyrinthine kasbahs:
The Rhinoceros’ Horn
Is it a colonial gaze? You bet. And wait until you see his take on sub-Saharan tribalism in the same album… or the one in Le gorille a bonne mine [‘Gorilla’s in Good Shape’], for that matter. Like Will Eisner – and, yes, Hergé – Franquin, although a gifted artist and in many ways social conscious, was unfortunately not above the shameful ethnic stereotypes so in vogue at the time.
Then again, 1951’s Il y a un sorcier à Champignac [‘There is a Sorcerer in Champignac’] anticipates the subplot about racism against the Roma from the 1963 Tintin album The Castafiore Emerald. Indeed, like I mentioned about both Tintin and Lucky Luke (by Franquin’s close friend, Morris), racist imagery and humor do not preclude a compassionate undercurrent in these comics. For all of their forays into unbridled mayhem and grotesque caricature, the early stories of Spirou & Fantasio were informed by a remarkable empathy with people as well as animals.
Decades later, Franquin would indulge in glorious misanthropy through the brilliant cartoon series Idées Noires (published in English as Franquin’s Last Laugh and Die Laughing):
Franquin’s Last Laugh
Yet Franquin actually started his career doing upbeat, lighthearted comics where the stakes were frequently somewhat low, suggesting a world of big children where even the villains seemed more mischievous than downright evil…
In his Spirou & Fantasio, most criminals were just trying to make a buck in a difficult situation, which was presented as understandable and ultimately forgivable:
The Marsupilami Thieves
I love how, in the pages above, Franquin enriches what could’ve been a schmaltzy exposition scene through the Spip subplot, told wordlessly almost until the end at the lower level of the panels… Indeed, his artwork is chockful of nifty details. Notice, in the final panel, an ad for the very magazine that readers are reading, proof that self-reflexive Easter Eggs have a very long tradition in pop culture (as early as 1928, Fritz Lang’s Spies featured, in the background, a poster advertising his previous film, Metropolis). The sheer aesthetic pleasure and the captivating flow of movement make these comics worth tracking down even if you can’t find them in your native language.
You can sense the joy in each drawing, particularly in the many extended scenes with the Marsupilami goofing around. This sort of stuff is clearly where Franquin’s heart truly was. Sure, he could pull off pulpy thrills, as proved in albums such as Le repaire de la murène [‘The Moray’s Hideout’], with its pre-Thunderball underwater action, and Les pirates du silence [‘Pirates of Silence,’ written by Maurice Rosy], where Spirou and Fantasio stumble into an ambitious heist on a secretive Jet Set city…
However, the more he established himself, the more Franquin turned out to be much less concerned with genre than with visual invention. Most of The Marsupilamis’ Nest – one of his strangest (yet amusing) albums – consists of a pictured documentary about the fictional animal’s eating and mating habits. Vacances sans histoires [‘Uneventful Holidays’] – which should be read right after The Marsupilamis’ Nest – is a loose short story where Franquin gets to indulge in the 1950s’ growing love affair with cars (it was a key feature of French society, as analysed in Kristin Ross’ fascinating book Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, and I don’t suppose car culture was all that different in the neighboring Belgium).
This tendency eventually reached an apex in the wonderful The Visitor from the Mesozoic, where Franquin unleashed a damn dinosaur in Champignac:
The Visitor from the Mesozoic
What makes The Visitor from the Mesozoic so special – and so quintessentially Franquin-esque – isn’t just that it forsakes Spirou & Fantasio’s (and Tinitin’s, for that matter) usual brand of intrigue in the name of escalating chaos, shamelessly replacing narrative with a barrage of funny moments…
The thing is that, as you can see above, Franquin uses this Godzilla-like framing to trample over all sorts of authority symbols and figures. It’s almost as if the dinosaur represents Franquin’s own caustic id finally unchained and relentlessly smashing every institution that takes itself seriously.
The Visitor from the Mesozoic
Certainly Hergé never did anything remotely similar to The Visitor from the Mesozoic.
There is a delightful sense of freedom and iconoclasm to the whole thing. And, for a series that so far had mostly stayed away from an explicit engagement with politics, the book contains this priceless slice of cruel irony (where Spirou, appropriately, plays the straight man):
Since this year’s weekly reminders that comics can be awesome have been focusing on splash pages, double spreads, andshort sequencesof interior artwork, it’s been a while since I’ve highlighted covers, which are actually one of my favorite features of the whole medium, requiring artists to convey in a single image the exact tone readers should expect to find inside each issue.
Some of the greatest examples come from the British anthology 2000 AD, which has a very strong tradition of covers spotlighting its incredible character designs as well as a general sense of damned coolness (including, more often than not, hilariously huge guns). Here is a selection of a dozen classics from the series’ first decade or so:
