Go get issue 2 of Judgment Day!
The second issue of my first-ever horror comic is in comic shops NOW.
Truthfully, Megan Hutchison’s unrelentingly brutal cover for Archie: Judgment Day #2 below should be enough to have any discerning readers rushing for their local comic shop or ordering the series directly from my pals at Collector’s Paradise. But, if you insist on playing hardball, keep on scrolling for a whopping six-page preview and some musing from me on my aspiration to literary comics.
What are literary comics anyway?
I find comics’ contemporary, near-universal urge to make books like movies/television to be profoundly wrongheaded,1 in large part because of how drastically the mediums differ from one another.2 Movies/television are a hot medium, requiring little involvement from viewers, over whom images and sound wash for the entirety of the runtime. Meanwhile, comics are a cool medium, requiring active involvement from a reader to not only read the words and parse the images, but to actively create their relationships to one another, filling in all of the action elided through the panel gutters.
In my estimation, the urge to do comics with voluminous text – typically consisting of bloviating inner monologue captions describing the artwork or telling the reader things that should have been shown in the artwork – is just as wrongheaded as the mindless mimicry of film techniques. It’s also incredibly ugly, boring and – like many film techniques in comics – an abhorrent use of extremely limited space.
What, then, am I referring to when I speak of literary comics?
Like comics, novels are a cool medium; you have to squeeze the fruit to get the juice. Not only must a reader slog through hundreds of pages of text, with all the optical and cognitive work that entails, but – if the novel is good and the reader an attentive one – they must spend further time in rumination to tease out the book’s themes, i.e., what it’s actually about beyond just plot. This is because good novels are dense with meaning, but meaning obscured by ambiguity and nuance. It’s through this rumination that readers discover a meaning made more profound and impactful than if it had just washed over them as part of a film adaptation of the exact same plot.
It’s a similar mechanic to the way in which we read comics, actively working to fill in what happens between panels. This is why, when an engaged reader looks at a well-crafted comics page, they don’t simply see a series of images arrayed on a page but, rather, a singular whole as well as an arrayed series of images, simultaneously.
This, to me, is the magic of comics: The work that a reader must do on their own, imbuing the art with additional meaning. The reader is enlisted in the act of storytelling in a way that’s deeper than other mediums. The problem though, is that this incredible strength is too often disregarded and ignored, frequently a direct result of writers who would clearly prefer to be working in movies/television.3
Great novels, however, don’t have this problem. Think of your favorite novel. Chances are, it’s not just the plot and/or the writer’s prose you love but, rather, the experience of reading it, the things you discovered and pieced together. Maybe you notice them consciously at the time of reading, the weaving in of themes and motifs and symbolism. Or maybe you come across them later, piecing thoughts together days later while doing something entirely different. Or, perhaps it’s all in the subconscious, with ideas bubbling up in your head, unbidden, but drawn forth by the stimuli provided by the novel.
Here’s the big question then: When’s the last time you had that experience with a comic?
I’m not asking when you last enjoyed a comic; that happens all the time. I’m talking about a comic that bowled you over with its richness, density and complexity. Something that, rather than blasting through a six-issue collection in a single evening, you felt compelled to consume it slowly, chewing on the tough bits, savoring the delicious ones. Ruminating, the better to think on and discover all the meaning contained within a piece of art. A work that’s more than a parable with a simple one-to-one metaphor, a comic that actually expresses ideas that can’t be contained in a Hollywood high concept.
That, my fine-feathered friends, is a literary comic.
And, crucially, I think they’re possible. Viable even. Despite the significant and idiosyncratic constraints of contemporary US comics. But, as previously discussed, you don’t get at it by aping movies or popular streaming shows. And what make novels rich and complex4 makes for truly turgid comics. What, then, is a comic book man with literary aspirations to do?
The answer is lean into that which only comics can do. It used to be unlimited special effects budgets and byzantine continuity, but comics no longer has a monopoly on those. Instead, we must look to the comics form, the medium itself, and, eschewing techniques borrowed from film, come up with our own. New techniques that aspire to the depth of the most complex novels through comics’ fundamental storytelling unit: The page. Or, if we want to flex, the spread.
That’s what I’ve been working at while up on my mountain the past few years. My frequent collaborator Jed Dougherty and I have been developing a new approach to comics, one that centers the reader experience of a series of spreads and that utilizes every dot of ink in pursuit of thematic exploration. One of the simplest, most difficult, and most impactful changes I’ve made to my process has been doing thumbnails. Despite not even sending them to Jed, I do them for every page, before I script, so that I can make sure that every time the reader turns the page, they’re confronted with something so visually compelling, so rich with information narrative, thematic and emotional, that it’s on the verge of overwhelming. Something that simply can’t be rushed, that must be read patiently, lovingly, and returned to for further study that is always rewarded.
While you’ll have to wait a bit longer to hear more about and, most importantly, see the fruits of Jed and my labor, you’re in luck, because Archie: Judgment Day has been an incredible opportunity to test my new approach. When you work with someone as much as Jed and I have, it’s inevitable that a shorthand and sympathetic understanding arises. When working with someone with whom you’ve never collaborated, however, that rapport doesn’t yet exist.
Fortunately, my friends at Archie paired me with the incredible Megan Hutchison, who, in addition to being a lauded subject-matter expert when it comes to all things spooky, witchy, and, well…infernal, is also an incredibly game collaborator, taking my thoughts and ideas for page layouts and designs and, as in the best collaborations, tweaking them to make them even better. What’s more, she also actively engaged with the themes of the work, bringing her peerless eye for costuming and set design to the proceedings, ensuring that every stitch of clothing, every piece of background bric-a-brac, was enlisted in our grand march toward thematic exploration and rumination.
It’s one thing to hear me talk about it, but it’s quite another to see it for yourself. So, without further ado…
Judgment Day #2 preview
That’s enough blather for me this month but, before I get out of here, I’d be remiss not to mention that everyone – I mean everyone – at Archie has also been incredibly game for Megan and my aspirations on Judgment Day. Obviously, Matt Herms’ colors and Jack Morelli’s letters are integral components of the whole we’re creating, but we’ve also been supported every step of the way by editor Jamie Rotante and everyone you care to name, all the way up to the Goldwater family themselves. It’s a rare thing to work on a book with everyone pulling as hard as they possibly can in the same direction and I’ve absolutely treasured the opportunity to create a book worthy of study and rumination.
As always, get up in those comments and tell me what you’re thinking. Ask questions, review good books you’ve recently read, tell me things you’d like me to talk more about in future newsletters, issue forth a polemic against aforementioned blather…the world, oyster, etc.
xoxo,
Aubrey
The biggest, most foundational, most damaging way this manifests itself is in how the vast majority of comics are written with a focus on story. This isn’t to say that comics don’t require story but, unlike movies/television, in which scripts act as general guides with control of visual elements left to other parties, in comics, the scripts themselves mandate visual elements. The end result is comics that aren’t written as comics consisting of spreads but, rather, scripts consisting of scenes that are then shoehorned into spreads, pages and panels.
Another prominent example of the wrongheaded aping of movie/television techniques in comics is repeated panels and even zooming in across multiple ones. It’s a technique that takes up space without providing any additional information, a cardinal sin in a medium in which page real estate is so precious and hotly contested. While jarring when it first came into fashion, in the contemporary context it signifies nothing more than a creator who wishes they were working in a different medium and hasn’t bothered to learn the strengths and weaknesses of the one in which they’re currently slumming.
My opinion is that these folks aren’t even writing comics; they’re writing teleplays at best, stage plays at worst, that they then hammer into the shape of a comic. It’s an approach that has been en vogue for two decades now, with generations of writers doing pastiches of other writers’ pastiches of old Aaron Sorkin and Joss Whedon shows. Once you notice it, it’s hard to see much else on the racks.
Those reams of texts talking about people’s inner thoughts and emotions, giving extensive backstory, or providing detailed descriptions, from which, collectively, density and complexity of themes arise.
I think Alan Moore and JH Williams III's PROMETHEA is a prime example of your definition of a "literary comic" here. Every page heavy with theme and meaning, while the comic *could* nevertheless be read quickly for the mere plot, but that would be missing the point.
And while the definition you're laying down here is certainly one way to approach a "literary comic" I'd argue it's overly limiting, and overly dismissive of authentic comic techniques. Comics are textual-visual in nature, as film is audio-visual. They share a lot while still being distinct, but the boundaries wherein certain effective techniques are shared between the two aren't automatically a sign of a creator wishing they were working in the other. That dismisses the shared structures of the formats. Same with the textual elements as shared with prose.
It's fine (and wonderfully ambitious) to want to create a comic that is free of all shared qualities, to create a comic that only uses techniques specific to comics. But that isn't what comics *should* be, any more than silent films or specific editing techniques or movies made to please cinephiles are what movies should be.
Most non-Big Two comics are made with ample nuance and layers of meaning, both visually and textually. The reader has to choose to slow down to take it in as such, but when they do, the complexity is there. People "read" audiobooks on 1.5x or even 2x speed. when I was younger I knew adults that took pride in "speed reading" through novels - learning how to quickly scan a page for keywords and blow through books at an alarming pace. People binge watch Twin Peaks. The problem isn't that the mediums aren't giving people "literary" works, it's that people are choosing not to consume them as such.
It's possible that your upcoming literary comic will force them to slow down, or at least only draw in people who want that. (Likely more the latter.) But it will still come down to the reader wanting to do it. When I take in a comic, most comics (I read very little Big Two anything) there is always subtext and nuance and incredible technique being used that I hadn't seen before and/or wouldn't have thought of myself - the joy of so many creators working in the field today. I'm looking forward to seeing what you're cooking up with this one, but not sure I agree with your take on the status and use of the comics format on the whole.
The easy answers to your question could be The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, Daredevil Born Again, and others. And while I had that kind of reaction while reading those books, the most recent time I’ve had an experience like the one you described is while reading the collected editions of the Usagi Yojimbo Saga.
I would not be the first or the last to say Stan Sakai is a master, but I will say it again anyway. I am currently working on Volume 8 and every time I pick it up, I am taken into that world. The stories are the same and different each time but it doesn’t matter because I just want to be in that world. I want to be on the road with the ronin, never staying in one place too long, going from town to town, solving problems.
The more I read it, the more I am drawn into the world of rabbits and rhinos. Usagi’s journey is the closest experience I’ve felt to reading Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. I was immersed in those two novels so much so I just wanted to be in those worlds. Stan Sakai does the same thing with Usagi, I just want to exist there for a little bit each day.
Each time I read a Usagi comic get the same feeling, like a warm blanket is being pulled up on a cold night, like arriving home after a long road trip. I read a lot of other comics but nothing takes me to a certain time and place like Usagi.
I don’t know if that’s what you mean but that’s what it meant to me.