There’s this Grant Morrison quote I like a lot. It’s inflammatory, but I think there’s a lot of truth in it.

As for all this talk I keep hearing about how ‘ordinary people’ can’t handle the weird layouts in comics – well, time for another micro-rant, but that’s like your granddad saying he can’t handle all the scary, fast-moving information on Top of the Pops and there’s really only one answer. Fuck off, granddad. If you’re too stupid to read a comic page, you shouldn’t be trying to read comic books and probably don’t. As creative people, I feel we need to call time on the relentless watering down of comics design and storytelling possibilities in some misguided attempt to appeal to people who WILL NEVER BE INTERESTED in looking at or buying hand-drawn superhero comic books.

The emphasis is mine, and keep it in mind as you read.

How do you read a comics page?

Stupid question, right? But no, not really. The comics page is the most basic building block of a comic book. They haven’t changed too much since they were first invented. You can have words and pictures and you can have ink in CMYK or digital PSDs or AIs in RGB, but without a page to put it on, the tabula rasa of yore, you’re out of luck. It’s probably the one thing in comics that’s genuinely indispensable. (Well, that and ink.)

You could make cases for Jack Kirby, Steranko, and even the often-horrid art of the speculator boom of the ’90s for changing the way people read comics. This change has happened several times. The change came when people began treating the space between the panels, the passage of time that happens there, differently. Panels began to convey different kinds of action.

What’s nice about David Aja’s work is how he treats his layouts. Rather than simply being a tool to convey the story, which is generally how most artists treat their layouts, Aja often turns the layout into part of the story. It’s like if the television you use to watch movies ended up actually introducing new data into your viewing experience.

He’s done this in a variety of ways. David Uzumeri wrote a pretty fantastic appreciation of a single page from Daredevil 116 for Funnybook Babylon. It’s absolutely worth reading, if you have the time. The reason why this page is so crucial is simple. (Hopefully I can talk about it without plagiarizing David.) The Kingpin is a man defined by his relationships. The tommy gun and revolver represent his status in a very old-fashioned form of organized crime. Spider-Man was his introduction to the superhero community. Daredevil looms large in Kingpin’s mind, ready for violence, but bottled within Daredevil is a silhouette of Bullseye, Daredevil’s worst enemy and Kingpin’s former chief assassin. Separate from all of that is Vanessa, the Kingpin’s wife. He tried to keep her segregated from his less than savory pursuits, but those pursuits eventually destroyed her.

(When Ditko and Romita would draw Spider-Man with a half-Spidey mask over his face, it was meant to show how Spider-Man and Peter Parker coexisted, and how they cooperated and interfered with each other’s lives. They compete and battle each other, with Spider-Man taking the form of his responsibility and Peter Parker being his inner selfishness. The two halves need each other. They define each other by their existence, and sometimes even their absence. A simple technique–a face that is half Peter Parker and half Spider-Man–with fantastic depth. It’s storytelling quicksand, you don’t realize just how deep it goes til you’re knee deep in it. If that technique went off and had a baby with Steranko’s Agent of SHIELD, and that baby was raised by some of the more out there Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli stuff on Daredevil, you’d end up with something like this, I think. This is also a technique that only works in comics. It’d look stupid in live action.)

This is a comics page. It’s the same kind of comics page you’ve grown up reading, but it isn’t. The grid is gone, replaced with the outline of a man’s head, and stacked high with meaning. It’s part of the story, not the hanger the story is draped upon.

Next.

In Immortal Iron Fist, certain punches and strikes get a bit of extra oomph. Aja plays with your sense of time to accomplish this. Each panel on a page is a specific instant in time. When Spider-Man has several afterimages present on a page, doing a diverse array of actions (or just punching one guy 3-10 times), that is meant to take place in the same instant. It’s a show of speed. Aja, though, slams it into reverse and likes to pull your focus in to a specific point on the page you’re reading.

You see the punch in a panel of its own, but there’s a little more added into the mix. Small circles, like targeting reticles in video games, emphasize the point of impact, and by virtue of taking place at one specific moment in time, emphasize the impact itself. It changes the pace of your reading, so instead of going punch-kick-punch-uppercut, you’re seeing punch-jawbone-kick-kidney-punch-neck-uppercut-chin. Four beats become eight, and suddenly you’ve spent more time on the panels, more time focusing on the thing the layout wants you to focus on, than you normally would have. One breath becomes an infinite amount of time, captured like a slideshow.

He does something else when Orson Randall arrives in the USA. He does a little jedi mind trick, something that would be a flick of the wrist and a blur of the fingers in real life, and each position of his hand gets a panel dedicated to it. This little bit of nothing, something that later in the book is a mere blur across two panels, gets a lot of page space.

This forces you to dwell on the trick itself, rather than the fact that a trick happened. Imagine if Spider-Man’s web-swinging was drawn differently. Spider-Man in mid-air-right arm curved in-right arm flung out-thwip position-web shooting out-hand pulling tight over the web-right arm pulling back and propelling Spider-Man forward. One action split into seven distinct segments. This is choreography at work.

These are all magic tricks that artists can use to control how you read comics. Aja does it better than most, particularly on Iron Fist. Two things made kung-fu movies exciting: speed and clarity. You want to see people moving quickly and doing impossible things, but you also want to be able to see exactly what Five Elements kung-fu is. If you can’t tell what it is, the action sucks (see also: The Dark Knight). Iron Fist is a kung-fu book, and while the cinematic stylings of kung-fu movies cannot be directly transplanted onto a comics page, Aja does the next best thing. He captures the look and the feel, if not the totality of the motion.

Do you get it?

A punch, for a particularly relevant example, is one smooth motion with a lot of moving parts. Your back muscles flex, your arm changes shape, and your body turns with the punch. Throwing repeated punches turns one motion into many, but since they’re taking place on the same body, they have to flow into each other. It’s not as easy as just drawing jab-jab-straight. Look at this Roy Jones Jr highlight reel. Jones is fantastically flashy, but watch how he moves. His legs move, his feet shift, his head bobs, and his body works. Have you ever seen Bruce Lee’s Green Hornet audition video? There’s a lot of similar things on display, and the theory holds true for all of it. Aja applies this sort of thing to comics very well, showing the myriad motions that people go through when they do simple or complex things and picking out the specific moments you need to show maximum action.

This is the opposite of the watering down that Morrison spoke out against. It’s aggressively pushing forward the standards of what to do with a comics page, how to tell a story, and expanding the language of comics.

And I haven’t even talked about his collaboration with Ann Nocenti, 3 Jacks. Tim O’Neil and Abhay already did that.

Pay attention to David Aja. Pay attention to how you read comic books. Everything matters. It’s all part of the story. And if you can’t handle it… maybe you should quit comics and start reading novels.

Booze, Broads, and Bullets continues! Tim O’Neil takes on the Tao of Miller! Tim Callahan posts a scan of Tales of the New Gods: Nativity by Frank Miller and then analyzes it in When Words Collide: Frank Miller’s New Gods! Chad Nevett looks at A Dame to Kill For! Check the index for the full slate of posts!

Frank Miller’s Batman doesn’t kill. He decided to, he wanted to, in Dark Knight Returns, but chose mercy for the Joker instead at the last possible moment. In Dark Knight Strikes Again, Batman condones killing, and is happy when Lex Luthor gets maced by Hawkboy, but the only life he actually takes is Dick Grayson, and he regrets that choice. The heroes of Sin City are something else entirely. Marv, Dwight, Gail, the girls of Old Town, Miho, and almost every character has a body count by the end of their run. Life is cheap, and their bullets are nameless. Miho is especially brutal, not being averse to toying with a man before he dies. Miller’s got no problem writing people who think that killing is as easy as breathing.

Daredevil, though, is something different. In the classic final issue of his run on Daredevil, “Roulette,” Miller has Daredevil place a gun to a helpless Bullseye’s head. He thinks over their past, and eventually proclaims that, when it comes to killing Bullseye, his “gun has no bullets.” He can’t murder him in his bed, no matter how much he wants to deep down inside.

Frank Miller’s Daredevil has two aspects that make him so entertaining. One is his intense sense of morality. He believes in the law and the rules, and works in his day job to prove the supremacy of those rules. The other is his flawed nature. His nighttime gig allows him to make shortcuts to, or circumvent, the law as he likes, dispensing justice at the end of a baton or his fist. This causes him no end of internal strife, and the crux of “Roulette” is that his morality is greater than his weakness.

Man Without Fear, Miller’s 1993 retelling of Daredevil’s origin with John Romita Jr, shows the kinds of situation where Daredevil will kill. The last action scene in the book is a chase, with a pre-Daredevil Matt Murdock fighting to rescue a young girl who has been kidnapped by a goon. One man dies by accident at the beginning of the fight, and Matt’s forced to stab another with his own knife while fighting underwater. What’s key is what he thinks as he’s killing the man: “A knife– no choice– give it back to him.”

Murdock is practical. When there’s no other choice to be found, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. He leaves the rest of the men unconscious or broken. There is a very controlled application of force to be found in Murdock’s style of crime fighting. While he occasionally loses it, or gets wrapped up in his own arrogance and goes too far, Daredevil generally knows exactly how to walk the thin line of being a vigilante.

Later in the book, Murdock intentionally kills a man. He’s put in a situation where he dies, the girl dies, or the villain dies. He begs the villain to stand down, saying, “I don’t want to kill you. Let her go.” The villain pops a shot off, winging Murdock’s arm. Murdock repeats his plea. The man fires again, and again, and Murdock swats the last bullet back at him, hitting him square between the eyes.

Mere moments before their encounter, the man kills a cabbie. He tells the horrified little girl he’s kidnapped that “It was nothing.” Four pages later, he’s dead and the contrast couldn’t be clearer. He killed because it was convenient. He took the path of least resistance. Murdock, on the other hand, only did it when there was no other option. It isn’t a habit, it isn’t something he’s proud of, it’s simply something that has to be done.

Miller’s Murdock is the hero who will make the hard choice, who will weigh his options, who knows his limits, and will not hesitate when it comes to doing a bad thing in order to do the right thing. It’s a refreshing change from most of the hardline “heroes don’t kill!” interpretations you see in comics. When given a choice between a child and a murderer, he chose the child. He didn’t waffle when faced with the choice. He told the man what would happen, he gave the man a choice, and the man chose poorly.

Frank Miller, ably assisted by Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley.

Raise your hand if you wanted to read a story about Battlin’ Jack Murdock, bad father, washed up boxer, and dude with no powers. His son, Matt, grew up to have powers, but Jack? Nah. Pointless, right? Gimme the guy with the radar vision, not some pug ugly boxer.

I thought the same thing, and then I read Carmine Di Giandomenico and Zeb Wells’s Daredevil: Battlin’ Jack Murdock, a Marvel Knights series about Daredevil’s pops. I enjoy Wells in general, and Di Giandomenico isn’t half as popular as he should be, so I checked it out on a whim. In exchange for that whim, I got a great story that fits neatly into the Daredevil mythos, adding a lot of flavor to Jack Murdock’s last fight and last night on Earth. It’s much better than it should have been, considering its subject, and way better than probably anyone ever expected.

Pre-Battlin’ Jack, Jack was supposed to lose the fight, but he instead sees his son in the crowd, realizes that throwing the fight would be the ultimate sign of weakness, and knocks Creel out. The Fixer, who fixed the fight, kills Jack in retaliation, leading to Matt Murdock masking up and going out for vengeance.

Battlin’ Jack fills in some blanks. We see Jack’s side of things, from the moment when Matt’s mother abandoned him on Jack’s doorstep to Matt being blinded. We get to know someone who had previously been an archetype, Papa Drunk Boxer. His likes, his issues, his failings, and his goals.

The framing device is pretty swift. The book’s composed of four chapters, each of which begins with one of the first four rounds of Battlin’ Jack in his last fight against Carl Creel, bka Absorbing Man. We hear his thoughts during the fight and then it fades to white. On the next page, the past fades in and we get more back story. So, the flashback has a flashback inside of it. Make sense? It’s very organic in the book, and gives it a sense of… inevitability. We already know how this story ends, the question is what’s going to be different and what layers Wells and Di Giandomenico are going to add onto it.

Di Giandomenico apparently cut his teeth overseas on boxing comics. I’ve been giving some thought to digging one up and importing it, just because I like his art so much. The boxing scenes are just as good as anything you’d see in Hajime no Ippo. There’s a great sense of motion, and Di Giandomenico understands how bodies wrap and entangle when you throw a punch. It’s a little bloody, but hey- it’s boxing. Get punched in the face and see how much you bleed.

Di Giandomenico does a great job of giving each character their own feel, too. Jack is craggy and wear, head bowed, shoulders worn down from having the weight of the heavens on his back so long. Matt’s thin and wiry, but his head’s held high and he’s hopeful. Josie, of Josie’s Bar fame, is drawn with clean lines, borderline ingenue until she turns that on its head. The villains look genuinely bad, with Slade being particularly notable for being kind of a skinny Snidely Whiplash.

Good fight scenes are rare in comics. Too often it comes down to one guy punching another guy through a wall, then the other guy punching the first guy through a different wall, then some jumping, some quipping, and then it’s over and someone’s costume is ripped. Or mostly gone, if it was two girls fighting. Di Giandomenico gets flow and motion and rhythm, which makes his art wonderful to me.

Basically, the art’s great. Here’s a five page sequence to prove it.

This quickly became one of my favorite Daredevil stories, and I talk about the ending in the 22nd Fourcast!. Esther agrees that it was tremendous on the show. For fun, read Battlin Jack and go directly into Frank Miller and John Romita Jr’s Man Without Fear.

If you’re looking for more Di Giandomenico, he did Spider-Man Noir last year, which was probably the best Spider-Man story that year. Amazon’s got the normal-sized Premiere HC and a smaller softcover graphic novel. The smaller book is around the same size as Viz’s Signature books, like 20th Century Boys or Pluto. Maybe a little bigger.

But yeah, Battlin’ Jack Murdock was a good’un. And it’s dumb, but I kinda liked seeing Josie as more than “Hard-nosed chick from the bar with the window Daredevil always throws dudes through.”

From Typhoid #4, the last issue of Ann Nocenti and John Van Fleet’s 1996 miniseries from Marvel Edge:

Typhoid Mary is one of my favorite comics characters and was created by one of my favorite writers and one of my favorite artists. This is a good scene that illustrates exactly what she is. Mary, Typhoid, Bloody, and Mary Walker. Virgin, Whore, Femme Fatale, and Human. Parts of a whole.

I can’t figure out my favorite part of this scene. It’s either when Mary Walker wakes up and puts the gun in her mouth (“here’s to lightening the load”) or the way she switches from Mary to Typhoid to Bloody in quick succession on the next page. Bloody’s justification for killing speaks volumes, too, with shades of Ennis’s Frank Castle lurking in her words:

“You wanted to know why killers kill? What a stupid question. Did it ever occur to you that some people should be dead?”

I dug this mini a lot. I’ll have to work up a real review for it, because it’s really very interesting from a variety of viewpoints. But honestly, I really, really want Ann Nocenti to do some more comics. These are fascinating, and since the blogosphere has a decently-sized feminist faction, I’d like to think that we’d get some interesting discussion of her old work out of it.

This book also convinced me that, like Noh-varr, Bendis has no qualms about taking older, previously-established characters and sanding them down until they fit into the fictionsuit he needs to make his story work. Typhoid Mary goes from representing corruption and beauty and social pressure and imbalance to being… Generic Loopy Crazy Chick With Her Boobs Out. Noh-varr goes from Angry Dane McGowan Bent on Fixing Earth By Force to Confused Baby Hero, Easily Led Around by An Obvious Villain. It’s really soured me on his writing. It feels so lazy, like it’s sucking all the potential out of these wonderful things just to have them in a story.

There were a few pinups in the back of the book. It blew my mind that Howard Chaykin did one:

This is a different kind of Continuity Off, as Esther and I break down six plot twists and turns that we’ve enjoyed over the years. 6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental is our theme music, of course, and here’s a few of the stories we’re going to ruin for you:

-The Last Days of Ted Kord
-The last great X-Men tale (New X-Men, if you disagree you are objectively wrong)
-The connection between Hitman and Punisher
-Batman buying girlfriends
-The Death of Jack Murdock
-Superboy Prime punches.

Listen carefully.

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I’ve yakked about Ann Nocenti’s run on Daredevil before, but honestly, it was really great and underrated comics. The message that violence is not the answer, that heroes cannot use violence as the end-all/be-all problem solving tool, all of that stuff? It’s what Daredevil could use a little more of these days, instead of increasingly tortured melodrama and depression. I like my Daredevil to be a little more like Nocenti’s and a little less like Blankets, you know?

Anyway, context: Matt Murdock has forsaken the love of his life for Mary, the good half of Typhoid Mary. At the same time, Daredevil has fallen under the spell of Typhoid Mary, who betrays him, has him beaten, and then finishes him off by dropping him off a bridge. When DD wakes up, New York City has gone to Hell, literally. It’s infested with demons, the skies have gone red, and monsters roam the streets.

Daredevil, ashamed of himself and his actions, has gone quiet. He’s moving on auto-pilot, never speaking, just brutalizing demons. It isn’t even properly protecting people. The demons provide a convenient excuse for Daredevil to work out his frustrations. Not much of a hero, is he?

Best part’s the smile at the end.

Words by Ann Nocenti, art by John Romita, Jr.

I dig O’Neil in general, is pretty great, but his look at Ann Nocenti’s story in Daredevil #500 was superlative.

But Nocenti is, well, better than that. Just in these pages she gives us a lot: a Daredevil / Bullseye fight, yeah, but that’s not really the main event. The main event is the two spectators who watch the fight and then, with a wounded Daredevil, explicate the preceding action. So not only do you see the fight, but every action in the fight is interpreted after the fact. The fight isn’t what’s important – in fact, you don’t even know why they’re fighting, or even what year the fight occurs. It could have happened in 1982 or 2006. I’ve read dozens of Daredevil / Bullseye fights over the years, but I haven’t read one that actually felt this visceral in years and years – you see every punch, but you also see the moment after the punch lands. No wonder one of the spectator characters is a boxer – boxing is another symbolically freighted activity, and Daredevil’s history with boxing makes for a nice overlap of symbolic metatext. Daredevil isn’t the invincible ninja master anymore, he’s a broken fighter with a concussion – possibly hallucinating.

Every word is true.

Abhay also goes in over on SavCrit, and he nails it, too. Gotcha good.

I’m a little surprised at how much of my taste in comics has its origins in Daredevil. I got back into comics largely through buying copies of Frank Miller’s Daredevil Visionaries. I’d never read his run on Daredevil, and it was just what I needed to leapfrog onto the Bendis run, which led to other Marvel books, and so on. When I was a kid, Miller was my introduction to both grown-up comics and crime comics.

There’s another aspect to this that I haven’t talked about, before. Before I was introduced to Grant Morrison’s work, before I discovered Joe Casey, Ann Nocenti introduced me to weird comics in the pages of Daredevil. I didn’t have many issues of her run, but I had some of the ones with Typhoid Mary and a few seriously off-kilter tales.

I’ve been re-reading Nocenti’s run on Daredevil, and it positively leans. Her run is as much about how Daredevil is an overly violent fascist and a failure of a hero as it is about swashbuckling and dating. Nocenti got right up in the face of what it meant to pull on tights and beat up a criminal and did a pretty good job of breaking it down into its component parts. She has Murdock struggle with the thought of solving problems with his fists, forcing him to look at the effect he has on his environment. She introduced the Fatboys, a gang of youths who alternate between assisting Daredevil and getting into trouble. They follow his example and sometimes they get hurt. Sometimes they hurt people.

What’s so amazing about Nocenti’s run is that she followed up Frank Miller and David Mazzuchelli’s Born Again, one of the top five best superhero stories. Picking up the reins after two masters of the game told an amazing story must’ve been daunting, but Nocenti handled it well. She picked up the storylines they left, continuing on with a law practice-less, but happy, Murdock.

Brubaker and Bendis’s Daredevil is inextricably linked to the Frank Miller version. They’re continuing on in the same kind of story that he started back in the day. Nocenti, though, swerved right out of the gate. Her Murdock flipflops from confident to troubled, wrestling with his demons with the help of his girlfriend.

Typhoid Mary, whose origin story is collected in Daredevil Legends Vol. 4: Typhoid Mary, has been one of my favorite villains since I was a kid. Obviously, I didn’t get the Madonna (Mary)/Whore (Typhoid) complex that helps define her character or the subtle (?) feminism that Nocenti slipped in. There was just something about her that was, and is, endlessly interesting to me. She wasn’t like Batman’s villains, who were just crazy for the sake of being crazy. She wasn’t like Spider-Man’s villains, either, who were concerned with wealth. I don’t know that I had the mental capacity as a kid to articulate why I enjoyed reading about her so much. Mary was just undeniable.

The best word for her, as near as I can tell, is “uncomfortable.” Lesser writers will treat her as a generic crazy chick, Poison Ivy Plus Catwoman Minus Clothes. Nocenti, though, used her like a scalpel. She wasn’t a Bad Girl, but she was a bad girl. Typhoid Mary was a lot of issues distilled into one creature– religion, sexism, feminism, violence, and morality collided in her. She’s genuinely damaged goods, and troubling.

Mary is the easiest thing to point to when describing Nocenti’s run on Daredevil, but it’s just a part of the whole. There was the nuclear holocaust-obsessed son of a supervillain, the trials of the Fatboys, and the Inferno crossover. It’s creepy, but not creepy like a horror comic or a T&A book. It’s a crawling creepy, a book that makes you feel uneasy. Heroes who are far from perfect and entirely too human, a city full of people who refuse to be categorized into neat little boxes, the way a homeless woman tries to tell her husband where her gift is before she’s murdered by a villain… “that’s not right” sums it up pretty well.

Nocenti’s one of my favorite writers. No wishy-washy “one of my favorite female writers” or “throwback writers” or whatever. Just straight up, real talk, “favorite writers.” She’s good at what she does, and well worth seeking out. She’s spent the past few years out of comics, including filming a documentary, but she’s got a story in Daredevil 500 this August, with art by David Aja.

Good on her and good on Marvel for seeking her out. I’d like to see more work out of her in the future. I miss her voice in comics. Marvel should reprint more of her Daredevil. She did something special, and I think she’s been unfairly overshadowed by Miller’s run. Both are classic for different reasons.

Hey, buddy! Welcome to another week of Ultimatum Edit! It’s been a while, so I’m sure you’re a little fuzzy on what’s been going on. Let me recap for you.

Issue 1: Nightcrawler died, Dazzler died, Beast died.

Issue 2: Wasp died, Xavier died.

Issue 3: Thor died, Yellowjacked died, Cannonball died, Emma Frost died, Polaris died, Sunspot died, Blob died, Detonator (who?) died, Forge died, Longshot died.

And other characters died in other comics. That’s what’s important. Who cares about telling a story? It’s all about being SHOCKING! Whoa, did you see how bloody that one scene was? Who’s going to go next?! Whoo! Hope died a little too, by the way.

ManiacClown and I will be back tomorrow to deal with Dr. Strange. Oh, and Kitty Pryde gets a page too.

Day Two!
Day Three!
Day Four!
Day Five!
Day Six!
Day Seven!