My greatest frustration in discussing mainstream superhero comics is my inability to describe, clearly and precisely, what's distinct about a particular artist, or the differences between this artist and that one. Independent cartoonists usually bring such aggressively individual styles to their work that it isn't too hard to talk intelligently about the difference a given artist's style makes to the experience, even if someone lacks (as I do) a technical aesthetic vocabulary, so long as they're sufficiently attentive and responsive to the art. Some mainstream superhero artists really do bring more daringly distinct styles to their work--Bill Sienkiewicz on
Moon Night and especially
New Mutants were eye-opening early examples for me, and J. H. Williams III's more recent Batwoman arc in
Detective Comics is a brilliant standout case. But the differences are much more fine-grained and tricky to articulate when the artists aim at what Douglas Wolk calls the "default style of the superhero mainstream":
But what is that default style, exactly? You know it when you see it, but it's hard to pin down. Here's a stab at it: it's designed to read clearly and to provoke the strongest possible somatic response. You're supposed to react to it with your body before you think about it. Most of its characters, especially the heroic ones, are drawn to look as "sexy" as possible--wasp waists, big breasts, and flowing hair on women; rippling muscles on men. People and objects are partly abstracted and partly modeled, but always within a framework of representation. There's a lot of foreshortening, for the somatic excitement of seeing something right in front of your face. The style gives a sense of even the most everyday actions and interactions being charged with sex, power, and beauty. Most of all, generic mainstream drawing is doggedly quasi-realistic--or, rather, it's realism pumped up a little, into something whose every aspect is cooler and sexier than the reality we readers are stuck with. It's meant to provide an escape route into a more thrilling world than our own. (Reading Comics, p. 50)
In the
Blackest Night crossover event, Ivan Reis's art for the main title and Doug Mahnke's for
Green Lantern are both clearly of this sort--and both strike me as really first-rate examples of it, too. It's seriously hard for me to imagine these comics looking any more perfect for what they are. Mind you--I've read some complaints,
some of which I'm
inclined to agree with, and
some of which I'm not. Ultimately, Reis and Mahnke deliver exactly the visual experience I was hoping for. Their art has been so crucial to whatever enjoyment I've gotten out of
Blackest Night, that I felt I owed it to them to dig in a little deeper and try a little harder to say something about their contributions, in a way that spotlights their individual strengths. I truly wish I could. Here's the problem, though--below are two images of the same scene, one by Reis in
BN #1 and one by Mahnke in
GL #44:
What's clear to me from these images is that although Reis and Mahnke are both working at the high end of mainstream superhero art, they're still quite distinct from each other. The distinction is easy to see in these fairly representative images, and nobody with a passing familiarity with either artist should have trouble identifying who drew which. I'm afraid this is where I hit my critical limits, though--I just can't figure out how to put the overall distinction, or a more detailed breakdown of the differences that comprise it, into words.
What's more, I have to confess that I don't have a good sense
at all for the difference an inker makes, to the point where I could easily confuse an inker's contribution with the penciller's, in analyzing these comparisons. For example, in his
review of BN #5 at IGN, Dan Phillips notes:
More problematic is the presence of two different inkers, Oclair Albert and Joe Prado, whose different approaches to Ivan Reis' pencils lend an inconsistency to certain sequences; Look at the panel of Superman and Superboy fighting a horde of the undead and tell me that looks like any other page in the book.
Here's the panel he means:
He's right. The panel does stick out like a sore thumb in that comic, and looks to my (admittedly inexpert) eye almost as different from other inkings of Reis's pencils as Mahnke's pencils look from Reis's in the sample panels above. Again, though, damned if I could explain the difference.
Bottom line, here: I'm just entirely unequipped to offer intelligent criticism of mainstream superhero art. If anyone would care to educate me, or point me toward some resources where I could begin to educate myself, I'd sure appreciate it. The best I can do now is say that Mahnke and Reis, both in their own ways, rose magnificently to the occasion for
Blackest Night, to deliver, with their distinct yet nicely complementary styles, one of the most eye-popping and viscerally thrilling visual experiences in superhero comics I've ever had the pleasure of savoring (what's more, they stuck impressively close to schedule, maintained impressive consistency of quality, and only the single issue of
GL #49 featured guest pencillers).
Having said that, one difference did jump out at me, that has less to do with the detailed technicalities of style and more to do with broader visual imagination, and that is the way they depict the operations of the power rings. The difference is both noticeable and consistent enough that I would guess writer Geoff Johns left them plenty of leeway in the scripts, rather than writing detailed instructions for how each specific use of a power ring must look on the page. For example, I doubt Johns specified to Mahnke that the following exchange of "ring-fire" from
GL #46 had to be drawn as Sinestro swinging a giant morningstar and Hal Jordan cutting the chain with a giant scissors:
My guess is, those details are Mahnke's contribution. If anyone knows otherwise for sure, please do correct me here.
Reis is responsible for the extraordinary two-page spread from
BN #1 at the top of this post. That one example notwithstanding, as I took a closer look back over each artist's work for the crossover, I was surprised to find that almost all the ring-slinging images that stood out in my mind as particularly vivid and memorable were done by Mahnke in the pages of
GL. What this comes down to, I think, is that for Mahnke much more than for Reis, the rings manifest their power not only functionally, but expressively, as well. This image of Black Lantern Abin Sur spraying rapid-fire giant skulls at our heroes from
GL #47 is probably my favorite:
The battle with the Specter in
GL #50 offers some amazing sights, too. While a giant hammer isn't the most inventive power ring effect, Mahnke gets a lot of mileage out of it with an intensely graphic depiction of the damage it does to Black Lantern Specter's lower jaw:
This image of Hal staking the Specter not only has a great power ring effect on display as the focal point, but is a marvel of composition, with the giant Specter surrounded by buildings getting their windows blown out by his mighty bellow of agony, while other ring-slingers fly all around and Coast City Black Lanterns mill zombie-apocalypse-style in the street below:
Of course, it also recalls another striking image for which Mahnke is known--the Green Lantern staking of that stupid random non-Darkseid Big Bad that Grant Morrison pulled out of his ass in
Final Crisis:
Back to
GL #50, though, it doesn't work this time! The Specter yanks it out and throws it right back in Hal's face:
Very cool! But Mahnke doesn't just do straight-up action--he also throws a lot of wit into the mix, as when he accompanies sarcastic dialogue about a violin with an actual ring-generated giant violin in
GL #47:
Or there's this humorous use of the ring to punctuate a bit of dialogue from
GL #48:
And I love the way the stop-sign fades out in the lower panel. I also can't help mentioning another favorite image, from
GL #50, where a similar device is used to more serious purpose:
Mahnke often puts just as much thought into how the other rings should visually manifest their powers, given the characters who wield them and what the situation calls for:
To be fair, since Mahnke handled the art for
Green Lantern for this event, where most of the War of Light played out and most of the ring-slinging took place, he had many more opportunities than Reis to get creative with the power effects. And Mahnke does draw plenty of instances where power rings function--and look--simply like blasters, shooting generic colored beams of light. But just because Reis didn't have as many opportunities doesn't mean he lacked for them, and yet he shows almost none of the expressive flair Mahnke does in depicting the visual manifestation of ring powers. Almost all the time, it's plain old blaster-rings (from
BN #5):
This, from
BN #3, is a little better:
. . . but just mimicking Hawkman's weaponry in a fight against Hawkman is still pretty on-the-nose. There is quite a cool moment in
BN #7 where Black Hand shoots tons of coils of barbed wire out of his ring:
. . . and I love it that Hal Jordan then clouts him with, of all things, a giant
cross:
Astonishingly, that's about it, though, as far as visually interesting power ring effects drawn by Reis in the main
Blackest Night title.
Now, I know Reis did a lot of prior work on the
Green Lantern title. I went back and looked at his art in
Sinestro Corps War, and was surprised to find pretty much the same as in
Blackest Night--plenty of colored light all over the place, and boy does it look snazzy, but he almost never gives it interesting form there the way Mahnke does in the
GL Blackest Night tie-in issues. One of the most visually arresting power ring effects in
SCW is
Karu-Sil's pack of predators, and Reis does draw them well, but she (and they) are an Ethan Van Sciver design.
I don't mean to knock Reis here. I'll say it again--I love his art!!! Without it,
Blackest Night never would have held me. And by no means does he ever skimp on the flash and pizazz in rendering action scenes with power rings a-blazing. But I do want to praise Mahnke for going above and beyond, and giving just that much more thought to how the ring effects could and should look in each specific context.
And that's enough for this installment. I'll keep looking at the art, and maybe something else will jump out at me worth writing about. In the meantime, stay tuned and stay groovy!
