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lizard people in disguise???
I'm inclined to think so. Coming very, very late to the party, I read the Street Angel trade this past week, and I'm willing to bypass critical argumentation and just say that a lack of appreciation for Street Angel may well indicate that the reader has no soul. Between the covers of one small, salmon-pink trade paperback lies a guide to what mainstream comics need to start doing right:
- In place of stiff, static "photorealistic" art, we have Rugg's cartooning -- charming, yeah, but more importantly, it conveys motion. It lives and breathes.
- The stories are self-contained, but still seem to pack more incident and more ideas into twenty-odd pages than one is likely to find in a six-issue Marvel trade. This isn't hyperbole. Read Whedon and Cassaday's Astonishing X-Men: Dangerous, which I'm pretty sure is longer than the Street Angel tpb, then read the Street Angel book. Then compare what Rugg and Maruca have done with their hundred-and-twenty-or-so pages to what Whedon and Cassaday have done with their own. Then realize that Rugg and Maruca have real jobs, and Whedon and Cassaday shit six-figure paychecks. THEN WEEP, MOTHERFUCKER.
- Admire how easily Street Angel inspires laughter. How it never seems to try too hard. How it shifts from slapstick to emotional reality, but never jarringly, because we're always aware of Street Angel's dire circumstances even when the book is funniest, and we're still charmed when the book focuses on the bleak stuff. There's no calculation here, no cynicism on the part of the creators, no attempts to craft a movie pitch on paper; at the same time, there's no self-conscious artsiness. It's nothing but creators doing their level best to -- without pandering -- make a comic that doesn't suck, and trusting that the reader will agree that it doesn't.
And...I dunno, it's just basically so awesome I can't believe it. Over. |
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