I think in western comics the images are trapped in echo. On facebook I belong to a comic fan group that posts a lot of Marvel, Image, and DC stuff, mostly geared toward people excited about superhero comics. Which…I just like that there are people excitedly talking about SOME kind of comic. Anyways, the other day someone posted a pinup that Amy Reeder had done, and Reeder is a good artist, I like her work fine, I was a really big fan of that Madame Xanadu work she did ages ago–but it was this pin up she did of Swamp Thing. And it’s just Swamp Thing walking through water in black and white pen and ink. It’s very by the book both in terms of a pinup and in terms of what you would expect from a Swamp Thing drawing. It’s this character people like, positioned centrally, doing something vaguely like what they would do–and someone liked it enough to save it, and then share it to the group. And I thought–what if this image wasn’t of Swamp Thing? What if it was just some guy Reeder made up, in the same pose, drawn the same sort of way–would people still care? Would as many people still care?



I think that’s the edge of something that really strikes me about artists right now in the west. It’s why there’s usually this huge drop off when an artist goes from drawing superhero stuff for DC and Marvel to doing their own thing. It’s why you see a lot of artists at cons kind of chained to their table having to draw more DC and Marvel stuff for scratch. When I tabled with Katie Skelly a few years back in Seattle, that was something that really struck me, because she does commissions–and a lot of the people who would buy her commissions wouldn’t pick up her books as well–or ask her to just draw whatever, or even draw her own characters. They wanted to leave the con with an icon of their favorite character in a style they thought was nice enough at a fair price. They don’t really want Amy Reeder’s Rocket Girl, at least not as much as they want her Supergirl. Which is a thing larger than fan culture. It’s like you just want that poster of Christ to hang on your wall, and you don’t care if it looks like dumb as fuck. The image isn’t really there, just its placeholder. And that’s inside of comics too. I read a lot of comics where people are doing images in certain spots because that’s the spot they are supposed to be in, if that makes sense. Like for example, a last page shocking reveal has a formula that the audience reacts to and artists play to, especially in event books.



This emptiness becomes especially problematic given the homogeneous nature of the demographics of the people most visibly making comics, particularly when married to their newfound predilection toward branding themselves as allies to the marginalized. It’s like, I need a black body in this space, and it doesn’t matter how or why or in service of what–just so long as I put it in there, then job done. The recent(note: originally wrote this when it was recent) ignorant bliss podcast on the Dilraj Mann Island cover gets into this quite a bit. A society built on vacuous imagery will BE vacuous. If our images lose value, then we lose voice, art loses meaning, and you end up fucking with people for no reason to no end, just because you have nothing to say.



And I’m not even saying this as like a social justice position. Take that iconic page Ditko did of Spider-man trying to push up this huge machine while water floods in around him–a page so iconic that if you’ve seen it at all you automatically know exactly what image I’m referring to. You don’t have to know Spider-man to get that page. To feel the heroic effort, and weight of pushing against that machinery. That image isn’t just an echo or placeholder. It is the thing it’s depicting.

So I’ve been reading the Andrea Pazienza Zanardi collection that Fantagraphics put out this year. And this question of value to the image comes up in my reading. Because to me, Paz is this unrestrained expressionism in comics–his devotion to the image is so total that style cannot contain it. There’s almost a mania to his work trying to exorcise these images from his soul. “Mardi Gras Night” isn’t the work that’s the absolute best example of this because the linework is mostly taking a backseat to the painting–but I think of all of the comics in the Zanardi collection, it’s the most interesting to me because even though it is a very base, mean, nihilistic story about some cute italian boys pillaging a religious all-girls boarding school it is also a comic of completely holy images. Stuff that you can only explain with the image itself. Stuff that sticks with you for days on end, rolling around in your brain. These aren’t empty placeholder images, even though they are in the service of a story that is so debauched.

This image in particular is the one that haunts me. It’s this silent panel of Petrilli and Zanardi pouring alcohol on the floor of this boarding school, that they plan to ignite. I think in general when “Mardi Gras Night” pivots from boys sneaking into an all-girls school to see naked women, to like…arson is generally the point in the story, where you are kind of stop like “wait? What the fuck? Surely not” and right before they set the fire it’s this panel. It’s like the way that the alcohol matches the leotards, but also sits on top of the floor like blood, and that it’s pissing out of Zanardi in the foreground…and the way that Zanardi and Petrilli are leaned like they are performing some kind of ritualistic dance. This pagan thing in the middle of all of these crosses.

It’s this moment where the story turns from “boys peeping on girls” to a story of ecstatic religious terrorism. There’s a pit here that you fall into. And the pages after this are panel after panel of the boys grabbing panicked women by the hips and breasts and running around like sexual mass shooters against the backdrop of crosses and screaming nuns while the fire they’ve started grows proportionally like a bright purifying jizz.

And you’re like “what the fuck am I reading?”. It’s beautiful and insane, and then as the boys get away from the fire, the colors cool for a minute, and the weight of the human repercussions of their actions hits Petrilli so hard he folds himself over at the crotch in anxiety before running back in to save the trapped Roberta.

And even as he is carrying her through the flames like some great hero, he’s still grabbing at her naked breast and butt–and it’s such an insane space to be in, because Petrilli CAUSED the fire. It was him and his friend’s raging boners that started the whole thing. Petrilli manages with one last grope of Roberta’s ass to push her to safety, as he is now himself closed off within the burning building. And the comic warps into this hell. Petrilli’s leotard and hair melt off. His skin boils and pops. His eyes become orange and red pools of pain, and when he finally gets out of the main part of the fire, it’s to these steaming tiles which scald him further–he’s become this grotesque impotent goblin man, screaming to God to give him mercy and end his pain, and then Paz draws him in this blasphemous Pieta pose of tiny dicked broiled Petrilli before the building collapses in on him. Grace, Paz style.

Even without Cola’s deeply ironic “moral” of the story where Petrilli becomes a lionized hero of the community the fucking like…old school profanity of the thing hits like a wall of bricks. It’s such a vicious repudiation of heroism, of religious morality, and even of masculinity(here masculinity manages to encompass both rapist and heroism very comfortably!). And it’s for sure incredibly base, with panels of Zanardi sniffing women’s underwear–but it scales so quickly to these holy images. I don’t think I’ve read anything like it before. I mean there are other great Zanardi stories that I’m going to write about eventually, but “Mardi Gras” is a really special comic.



I keep coming back to this, which I spoke about in my Ranx article, when we talk about transgression in comics, for a lot of people, that just means they get to say “faggot” or draw a lynching of a person of color, or like draw muslims in horribly hateful ways. But their shit is so stupid. They don’t really care about any of this shit. They might as well write their scripts in tongues for how articulate they are–for how much value there is behind what they’re doing. It’s empty and passionless iconography done simply to continue an echo.

But Paz says shit. I mean like it’s literal shit, but it’s the truth of the shit. The shit has weight and stench. You can hold it in your hands and you won’t forget the day you held this shit. The man has seen a good painting in his life. He’s read a book or two. He’s not saying shit just because he has nothing to say, but somehow since he can draw, he has to fill up the page and do the job–there’s so much force behind his work. Even when it is ridiculous, style can’t contain him. That’s what the page says to me. There’s meaning here, even if it was just “I felt the conviction of this line, this story, this thing and so I made it”–it’s not cynical, it’s pure. And not only that, it’s pure AND the man is a master artist. Which I think is something of a theme for the work I’ve focused on this year in my comics criticism. And I do it because that’s what I see as lacking for the most part. Like a lot of comics day to day I feel like is asking me to read books that are both compromised AND look and read like shit. And there’s things like this that come out and you don’t hear a single peep about them.



A quick glance at google only turned up one review, a negative one on Paste that complained about how the book was too mean with a closing paragraph about the art being “somehow compelling”–which someday I need to write an essay about how for as supposedly progressive as people in comics position themselves as, their POV on a lot of things just sounds like your parents. I swear comics these days is a lot of adults wanting themselves to be raised by comics they can aspire to, rather than art they can think about. I mean imagine being an adult unable to process art because it is too violent, or has sex in it. I had parents growing up, I don’t need a comic critic parent as an adult, thank you very much. But I mean that goes back to it. When the shit that is being put out are these empty echoes bereft of anything but their iconic placeholders it’s hard to really say there is much there to consider as an adult. But then when there is stuff like this put out, it’s not shared around, no one reads it or talks about it, they’re too busy swapping icons of their childhood–and I’m just like…wtf are you here for? You know you don’t get to actually be a kid again, and that time is ticking, death is coming–demand something so great that you sound like an idiot trying to explain it to anyone!



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