When I was a teen comics reader in the 80s, I remember asking the owner of my local comics shop (Jeff Yandora of Phantom of the Attic in Pittsburgh) to recommend some other comics like Moore, Bissette & Totleben's Swamp Thing, Simonson's Thor, and Chaykin's American Flagg. When he asked me what I meant by that, the best I could explain was that I thought these were comics that made their own world. I wasn't talking about “world building” as it's done in science fiction. I was struggling with my limited vocabulary to identify a quality I saw all these comics as sharing—an authorial voice that made the experience of reading them unique. The manner of telling the story was inseparable from the story being told. (He recommended Love and Rockets by the way, which was definitely the right pick.)

It's 30 years later; I've been making comics professionally for 20, and I find myself facing this question from the other side: what can I do, as the middle person on the comic book assembly line, to give my readers a comparable experience, to tell stories that feel like the way they were told is the only way they could be told. (And let me get a disclaimer out of the way: throughout this essay, I'm going to be citing the work of my betters. I am absolutely not comparing myself to any of them. I'm identifying them as creators who either achieved something I aspired to do, or who did something that I then stole.)

When I accepted Marvel editor Steve Wacker's offer to draw Superior Foes of Spider-Man, all I knew was that Steve had been very easy to work with on my Hawkeye fill-in issue, and that it was “a ground-level villain book” which probably meant that the naturalistic, low-key Sickles/Mazzucchelli/Micheluzzi/Aja approach I enjoyed so much in that Hawkeye story might be a good fit for this one too. Reading Nick Spencer's pitch and partial script for the first issue confirmed this. This was a story about the problems of a bunch of unglamorous losers. So that influenced my first decision in finding the visual voice for Superior Foes. I'm going to tell this story with a restrained approach to draftsmanship that emphasizes what happens in a panel over how exciting it is. That means I'm probably not going to have much use for melodramatic Kirby/Buscema/Kane storytelling. Little if any dynamic foreshortening, very few glamorous moments of figures caught in perfect gestures. We want pathos and laughs. Most superhero comics are set up to deliver aspirational power fantasies. No one aspires to be like our leads. A lot of the fun is going to come from showing them to be completely ineffectual.

(All art examples: script by Nick Spencer, art by Steve Lieber, and color art by Rachel Rosenberg. Click on the art to see it larger on your screen and in slide show mode.)