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Underground > Comic Books >

The Best of 1980s Comic Book Design... Ever

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03:15 / 16.09.05

After the Tujiro story ends, Spar winds up catching the vengeance of Argent.

The narrative of the series as a whole is broken up such that various people who come into contact with Grendel grow obsessed with it until they become Grendel themselves. And the old villains/foils come back to hunt the new incarnations. Very cycle-of-violence.

Anyway, the Pander Bros take over their own inking for the last bit of the Spar storyline, and get a little wackier, almost sloppier:

It's cartoony, it's New Wave, but it's also fragmenting up a little bit. I think these quadrilaterals are *very* '80s, too -- and so is the way the background just vanishes. I dunno -- I suppose older comics did that, too, but something about this style seems very decade-specific.

03:23 / 16.09.05

Spar is succeeded by her lover, Brian Li-Sung, who descends into not mere obsession, but outright madness. This is our first clue that Grendel is not just a persona, but more like an extra-dimensional force or spirit of violence that possesses victims.

The shaky, indie, cartoon-style art of Bernie Mireault (in what I think was his first big gig) illustrates the gritty devolution into irrationality. There are three narrative levels -- Brian's dialogue, his handwritten journals, and the red, angry voice of Grendel.

As you can guess, that redness at the bottom gradually rises as the story progresses.

The fact that the future is getting grimier and grimier is also a big '80s thing -- Captain Kirk never had to deal with traffic like they had in Blade Runner.

(It's getting late...I'll do the second half of the series tomorrow.)

miss wonderstarr

06:35 / 16.09.05

That is breathtaking stuff, sausage and grant. I'd never seen that Italian furniture design before, but immediately it looks like the source of so much classic 80s primary-colour geometry. Even that "Crisis"/"Vice City" texturing is there at the base.

Always had a suspicion I was missing out by never picking up a copy of Grendel (apart from Wagner's Batman/Grendel). Again, those first pages -- which I prefer infinitely to the second set, although the latter do, as you say, have a punky, New Wave look about them that recalls 80s fanzines and maybe album art -- point to a wider background influence. Japanese art, modified through Western sensibility as was the case with Miller and manga, seems to have been a massive factor shaping 80s design. Maybe a sense of "cleanliness", or even of overall "design" as a whole, with the page laid out in a pleasing fashion? The Grendel spreads are effective even though you can't read the text. Perhaps that aesthetic of having the comic book page, rather than just the individual panels, work as a striking, balanced work of art in itself, is an 80s innovation borrowed from Japanese design.

09:48 / 16.09.05

After the three-issue Mireault run, Wagner did a couple short mystery/crime stories, fleshing out minor characters affected by the Grendel-obsession.

For this one (the one I found hardest to read, although I liked looking at the tiny pictures), Wagner took over all the art duties. It's supposedly from the memoirs of the cop who supposedly put two Grendels away -- he pursued Spar and Li-Sung. His present-time stuff is fairly conventional, but the memoir is told using replication (almost xeroxes, sometimes) and this TV-ish multi-panel grid:

This was followed by a more conventionally told 3-shot with art by Hannibal King and Tim Sale -- and the first collage-style covers I think I'd ever seen:

- - - -

After these two short stories came the really majestic run -- the Eppy Thatcher Grendels.

10:14 / 16.09.05

Kovacs -- I don't know where Geldhof came from, but I'm pretty sure the Panders weren't really "comics" artists, and I know they're from Germany. In around '97, they made a bit of a splash in the art film circuit with what's basically a short porn film shot entirely on infrared film, with a grinding, industrial soundtrack. It's called "The Operation" and I had the head-bending experience of watching it at a Miami Beach Film Festival sitting next to my girlfriend's mother. It wasn't until a couple days later that I realized I'd recognized the filmmakers' names.

------

OK, the Eppy Thatcher run. For this longer story, Jay Geldhof (who inked those pretty, pop-art pages in the Christine Spar run) returns on pencils, and John K. Snyder does inks. The layout from the Mireault pages returns, since we're dealing with another insane protagonist -- this time, he's wigged out on drugs. It's a far future society, where a militant Catholic church is the ultimate authority, Elvis is a saint, and Grendel is the Devil... and, thanks to lots of drugs and homemade electronics, Eppy Thatcher is Grendel.

This is 1988 -- note the two repairmen/rat catchers. We're not stealing from Duran Duran, now -- we're borrowing characters from the "Money for Nothing" video. And the collage work slips in and out of the pages. George Christ!

(Click on the smaller images to make 'em larger.)

-- -- --

If it's not obvious from these two pages, the bumbling rat catchers are the church/society, and Eppy/Grendel is a killer rat. Very effective parallel story-telling. I don't think that's an exclusively '80s development, but the contrast between the geometric lines of the rat-catchers and the raggedy rat is really nice... practically a collage in itself.

10:26 / 16.09.05

The regular run ended with the primacy of Orion Assante, a politician who topples the church and sets himself up as emperor. It has the feel of Dune, sort of (far-future politics), but also the feel of the first Hunter Rose run -- reinforced by the return to the blocks of typed text, geometric layouts, use of TV screens as narrative vehicles (literally, this time). The vampires, by the way, are descendants of Tujiro.

The art duties again recombine some familiar names from earlier in the run: black and white art by Tim Sale, coloring by Bernie Mireault.

(click for bigger image).

And that's that. There's a sort of post-Orion story (Grendel War-Child) that came out later, and a couple prequel pieces (Silverback - the origin of Argent, and a Stacy Palumbo story). But they never felt quite as cutting edge as this stuff.

11:11 / 16.09.05

Interesting... the first double-page spread you posted (the Wagner/Rubin one) has clear echoes in JH Williams's work on PROMETHEA: the unified design, the icons (i.e., the little inset Grendel-heads), the use of purely decorative elements—something rare in the stripped-down, momentum-driven world of comics.

See, the thing about comics art is that, in some ways, it's less like art and more like prose: it's functional before it's decorative, and its function is (generally) to tell a story... and clearly (we hope). That's going to necessarily limit the heights of abstraction or decoration to which an artist will rise: rightly or wrongly, these things often get in the way of clear storytelling.

Whether that's an intrinsic property of the abstract/decorative approach, or whether most comics artists simply do these things very badly, I really couldn't say with certainty—although in my prejudices I suspect the former.

13:51 / 16.09.05

i have nothing to add to this thread but my thanks for the top class contributions, best reading i've had here in ages

14:31 / 16.09.05

Well, the thing I think Grendel did very well was figure out a visual hook for the kind of story that was being told.

That first Wagner/Rubin spread was supposed to be a history, a memoir, and a kid's story, too, sort of (Spar's mom, Stacy, is the axle around which that plot revolves, and she's a little girl in the story).

Brian's story is mostly scribbled in notebooks (the first notebook pages actually appear in the last book of the Panders' run), so that becomes the visual hook for that story. Scribbles.

The Orion Assante story is a historical documentary, essentially. Text pages and TV screens. And I should have scanned more than just the one page -- that colored bit across the top is telling a parallel story about the growth of Assante's Grendel Guard. It's the same trick you see in the Li-Sung Grendel-voice pages, and in the Eppy Thatcher rat-story strip. Two converging stories in the same space, separated by layout.

Did that happen before this? I mean, I can imagine it happening in something like Plastic Man or the Silver Age Flash, but I don't think I'd seen it until this.

miss wonderstarr

15:27 / 16.09.05

The device of different narrating voices, each distinguished by panel-colour or handwriting, is another feature common to today's comics that I believe originated in the 80s. Wagner did it in Batman/Grendel -- Jeph Loeb does it a lot now, sometimes with those little icons of a Bat- or Superman logo to show us whose thoughts we're privy too.

But I would guess this was another of Miller's innovations. Dark Knight has yellow for Robin and bright blue for Superman's narration, with the blue even fading as Superman's strength goes. Year One develops that device further with different penmanship for the different diary-perspectives of Gordon and Wayne. Again, I'm sure this idea has been taken up and developed elsewhere -- off the top of my head, Morrison had Peyne's narration regressing from adult handwriting to childish scrawl in Zenith Phase IV.

And the unmistakeable white-on-black reverso-captions that Gaiman used for all the Sandman's speech seemed to have originated in his Black Orchid, where he introduced that inverted colour-scheme to convey Batman's voice.

I don't believe fragmented captions representing a character's stream of consciousness, or colour-coded captions for different characters, or handwritten diary entries, were common -- if they can be found at all -- before the 1980s. I would suggest that we just had the omniscient, melodramatic authorial narration before that point: "Join us, READER, as we stalk the rooftops of this DESOLATE city with the one men call..."

17:37 / 16.09.05

The device of different narrating voices, each distinguished by panel-colour or handwriting, is another feature common to today's comics that I believe originated in the 80s. Wagner did it in Batman/Grendel

It's also in the Eppy Thatcher storyline -- Orion is part of a secret political cabal, and we never see their faces or speech balloons, only different-colored captions, floating over various other scenes.

My thought while looking at those pages earlier this week was that it was due to advances in printing technology (or just paper quality). I don't really know if this was true, but it seems like it could be.

17:51 / 16.09.05

Grendel: War Child was actually my introduction to the GRENDEL mythos. I don't have the issues in front of me but I recall a strong European feel to the art. THe storytelling was interesting in that

each issue featured a different geographical location. This worked very well in introducing the world of Grendel and was presented in that cinematic style we've been discussing with repeated panels showing subtle changes.

The main charactor grew up. Something that is rarely seen in comics the main character, ORION's son, started the issue as a child. By the end of the serie's 6 (or 12) issues he was a young man. He had been on the run for some 12 years had various adventures and returned home to claim his role as Orion's heir.

miss wonderstarr

18:28 / 16.09.05

It's also in the Eppy Thatcher storyline -- Orion is part of a secret political cabal, and we never see their faces or speech balloons, only different-colored captions, floating over various other scenes.

Is this Grendel material all post-Dark Knight? Wagner seems clearly influenced by Miller's 80s work, as much as Chaykin -- and Moore, by contrast, arguably the other most influential writer of the 80s, kept using the purple-prose omniscient-narrator captions all through Swamp Thing as I recall.

On the other hand, there is Rorschach's Journal, handwritten in fragments all through Watchmen.

20:40 / 16.09.05

The Christine Spar stories start in 1986. I could look up the month if you like, but I'm 95% sure it's after August (since I know I was reading the second or third issue in college, and I started in August of that year).

Dark Knight was big then (I stuck a bat symbol and quotes from the book on a sheet of butcher paper on my dorm wall after a big Halloween party), but I don't know if the series came out in '85 or '86. I think the first collection was early in '86, wasn't it?

The Mage books (with the Grendel end-story) were not too much earlier. I can also look that up once I'm home, if you're very curious. They were very hard to find. (I only have two of the small-format books, which themselves were reprints of shorter Mage comics which I've never, ever seen -- I don't have the full "Devil by the Deed" story, although I know it was reprinted much later under one cover.

I think Mage wound up riding Grendel's coattails - there was a larger-than-usual, glossy-paper collection of Mage stories that came out the same year... but without the Grendel story in it. They might never have finished the end of the small-format Mage reprints because of the large-sized release. (This may fit under your collect them all heading -- it's certainly part of the same phenomenon. The glossy Mage collections had cover art colored by airbrush, which was a little novel at the time.)

----

Here's a semi-related question: When did Ronin come out? If I'm remembering correctly, that had a few of the same narrative/design gimmicks as Dark Knight, although the story was freakier. I seem to recall the eco-bubble computer/environment thing engulfing the city along the bottom/edges of the page as other actions took place in panels within the page.

Hmm. Now that I think of it, that may be a thing in '70s horror comics. I'm not familiar enough with them.

I am remembering a really freaky Steve Gerber Man-Thing about a crazed writer that had a splash page of words coming off a typewriter, where they were used as a design element surrounding/framing a drawing of the writer. It wasn't as pronounced as some of the strange typography in this '80s stuff, but it's definitely one of the roots of it.

20:47 / 16.09.05

and Moore, by contrast, arguably the other most influential writer of the 80s, kept using the purple-prose omniscient-narrator captions all through Swamp Thing as I recall.

Oh, the thing I remember about the Moore Swamp Thing's I've read is he really uses that thing where speech bubbles carry over to the next panel's caption when there's a change of scene. It's really a film trick. Like, Green Arrow's on the JL satellite, shouting, "We've all got our little pieces of turf..." Next panel, crazy vines growing out of an insanely grinning Floronic Man, with a caption saying: "...but who's looking out for Houma, Louisiana??"

And I distinctly remember the Demon getting a few captions, although if he was a narrator or if it was just that scene-transition trick, I don't know.

It's the equivalent of using character dialogue as a voice-over in film, something I know was big in '70s horror films (creepy zoom into something monstrously suggestive as people blithely discuss something ironically unrelated.)

Horatio Hellpop

20:00 / 17.09.05

"When did Ronin come out? If I'm remembering correctly, that had a few of the same narrative/design gimmicks as Dark Knight, although the story was freakier. I seem to recall the eco-bubble computer/environment thing engulfing the city along the bottom/edges of the page as other actions took place in panels within the page."

ronin came out in 83 and was definitely a major part of the design-aware comics revolution we're discussing. since we're talking about storytelling as well, miller uses some very deliberate devices to separate the different narratives in the story. the ronin narrative has horizontal panels taking up the width of the page (with some exceptions) and thick ragged borders, vs. the very differently gridded moebius-future which generally involved a tall vertical panel of the left of the first page of the sequence followed by a stack of basically square shaped panels which would continue for the remainder of the sequence. he breaks this occasionally to do interesting things with panel grids (a device he seems mostly to have abandoned after the 80's, to his detriment i think) which is also very design-conscious.

someone who should be mentioned in this discussion is richard bruning who was the designer for most of the best-designed books that dc put out in the 80's. (i think he's a dc vp now.)

sorry for the lack of images, when i get home i'll see if i can scan some pages.

Horatio Hellpop

20:12 / 17.09.05

someone should post the first couple of pages of chaykin's american flagg to see some of the comics-innovative things that chaykin and ken bruzenak were doing with the lettering. i also think chaykin is far from being the poor man's miller. although miller is definitely a better visual storytelling, chaykin's awareness (and usage) of the history of illustration and design is much more evident than miller's. (this is definitely true for chaykin's 80s work but he seems to have expended this interest outside of the comics field in the 90's. his recent work tends to be very slight in terms of visual cleverness although well-packaged, e.g. his challenger's of the unknown series for dc.)

miss wonderstarr

17:41 / 18.09.05

To call Chaykin "the poor man's Miller" was lazy shorthand on my part, but my fairly slim experience of Chaykin's 80s work (Blawkhawk, The Shadow, a few secretive skims of Black Kiss) does suggest a tedious concern with strong-jawed macho types mastering bitches and bimbettes. So I've never given him much of a chance. From the little I've seen of American Flagg I would agree his page design is inventive and radical, perhaps preempting Miller and Gibbons' Give Me Liberty.

18:45 / 19.09.05

Grendel pedantry: It wasn't R. Rubin, it was R. Rankin. And he was the inker -- turns out that in a stack of Grendel:War Child's I got from a friend there was a reprint of the "Devil By the Deed" story as a single, standard-sized comic with a few Grendel pinups by famous artists. Forgot I had that. The copyright in it was '85, I think. Maybe '86. My Dark Knight collection was definitely '86.

By the way, one of the things that stands out with a lot of '80s comics -- the idea of the panels being frames hanging in front of some other kind of background -- was done in the 1920s in Krazy Kat... a visual style which was quoted heavily in the Sunday funnies by Berke Breathed in Bloom County. Something in the retro zeitgeist, maybe. Or did Fantagraphics publish a Krazy Kat collection or something during that period?

miss wonderstarr

19:15 / 19.09.05

Abrams published a lavish Krazy Kat, The Comic Art of George Herriman in 1986 I think, and I believe another, The Other Side to the Shore of Here, same period. Also around that time, the Guardian newspaper began running Krazy Kat regularly, and there was a novel based on the strip, by Jay Cantor, published in 86. The anthology of comic strips against Clause (--> Section) 28 in Britain, Aargh (artists against rampant government homophobia) included a Krazy Kat pastiche by, I say without checking, David Leach?

However, I can't remember any nods, tributes or references to Krazy Kat in any of the post-86 comics I've read. Whereas Sandman pastiches Little Nemo (perhaps another design pioneer) at least once.

17:41 / 20.09.05

Well, I wasn't thinking of specific pastiches as much as that sense of space. You can see the same thing in that second Pander Bros page at the top of this page -- the quadrilateral panels showing the eye and the blade and claws and teeth are sort of floating over the big splash of Argent clawing Grendel. I don't recall that 3D trick being a gimmick in 60s and 70s comics (although I could be mistaken or unaware of something).

Frustratingly, I can't find examples of what I'm talking about in Krazy Kat online. I have the first year's collection that recently came out, in which like half the pages use this trick -- a weird landscape with panels floating over it.

miss wonderstarr

17:56 / 20.09.05

That page you're referring back to looks reminiscent of 60s (70s?) underground comix to me. My first reaction to it would have been "post-punk".

03:47 / 21.09.05

Anyone here picked up Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith's FELL yet? Some of the backmatter that Ellis puts together talks about how Templesmith's work to him is reminiscent of people like McKean and Sienkiewicz who were working on 2000AD covers in the 80s. I def. got that nascent vertigo feel from the art on this one.

Ellis also tells a great anecdote about McKean and Sienkiewicz trying to outdo each other on the collage stakes to the point where Sienkiewicz freighted in a kind of coffee table sculpture with flashing lights as his cover submission for the new issue...

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