I lost a month of my life due to 1970s american newspaper comic strips, specifically Alex Kotzky on “The Girls in Apartment 3-G” in which I can see the fracturing of our reality and a glimpse of where comics *could* have evolved.
I can’t explain—believe me or don’t.
Everything about the comics medium in the 1970's was wild, and fascinating, and full of infinite possible directions, and the moment of maximal possibility was a 1975 to which we can never return.
I hate that strip.
Not BEN CASEY overall, which is well-drawn and stupidly-written, like many story strips of the day, but the Big Face That Involves A Nose-Shaped Lamp Thing That We Colored Flesh Tone Because What the Hell is so insanely disruptive.
Tell the story, Neal. Don't get in its way.
You have a point, but I'm inclined to disagree: the oddly-shaped and colored lamp is the one bum note in a visual organization that otherwise suggests both forward motion and a dominant central character. To my eyes, anyway.
One bonus of that Deadman page was it led directly to Dave Sim designing the first Mind Games issue (#20) of Cerebus so that all of the pages formed one giant image. That was very well done.
The Wall With An Upper Lip On It is also weird. I assume Neal meant it to be just an odd shadow, but instead it looks forced, like he couldn't figure out an actual shape to put there.
If I were any good at Photoshop, I might reconfigure it into the four-tier tabloid version it's set up to...
The one thing Adams didn't take into account was that various papers configured the strip in different ways. In some paper the strip would have looked like THIS and the hidden head was completely lost.
He must have known it'd be published like that in some papers, because he drew the throwaway panel and kept to the panel widths that allowed it.
He probably figured that those accounts were the minority, so it'd work (to the extent it does) most places.
The caption in that third panel (fourth in the three-tier version) is just awful. So cramped. Neal wasn't leaving enough room for lettering overall, but that one's especially terrible.
Yeah, it looks like it's cropped on the left side, due to there being no room to have any space to the left of the letters, and overlapped by a figure, and that all contributes to making it look like an object, not a caption.
It's better but still distracting.
But also -- black and white was how Neal saw it as he drew it, but not the way the readers would see it, and he should have understood that better. Maybe seeing it in color taught him something, though.
I think it’s cute but I understand your objection. And in my opinion, young artists often get into cutesy tricks when they’re newly excited about the craft. It usually settles down over time. I get you, though
I agree. Neal was being too clever without being clever enough to actually pull it off. Isolated the one last couple panels are terribly composed with random bits of crap on the walls that only make sense combined with adjacent panels.
That full panel and the use of the composite image is *amazing*
Like, *wow*
Promethea had some stuff that (now that I’ve seen this) feels like an homage to it, but this usage of the composite is just utterly delicious.
Absolutely pioneering, and gives some (justifiable) context to Adams' later grumbling that he had been doing Steranko's experimentation before Steranko had.
The implied movement in the frames is also tasty, and feels like it informs some of the dynamics of some 90s X-Men(/Factor/Force) panels that came later, honestly.
It sweeps along and my brain feels the hustle and bustle, with the image of the dude’s forming in my unfocused eyes.
Mwuah, I adore it
That actually was a big part of what Adams would say later, too: that his experimentation was done not just for the sake of style, but as a means of carrying forward a story through the visual organization. You can see it beautifully at work here.
