Emma Peel Sessions 33 – armageddon in effect

(this is post after David’s Big Fat Kill piece)

Booze, Broads, and Bullets week is over, and its been great (check out the index!). I didn’t get halfway through the stuff I wanted to get through (things I wanted to write about – Give Me Liberty as a game-upping response to DKR being ripped off by Robocop; Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot is the best Jack Kirby monster comic of the 90s dressed up as Kaiju; the physicality of those early Daredevil comics and how its linked to Miller and Janson’s cohesion as artists; Ben Urich’s pov in Born Again; the editing in the helicopter scene in Dark Knight Returns and in connection, Carrie Kelly being a great character; pretty much all of Elektra Assassin). I’m really happy that David organized this, I feel bad I didn’t have something up every day. I think it shows how everyone who participated works – Tim O’Neil’s piece is a slaughtering-the-sacred-cow take down, Tim Callahan’s is calling attention to an obscure or forgotten minor work, Chad’s follows a linear timeline to show the way Miller changed from a-to-b, David’s work is intuitive and comprehensive.

It’s kind of messed up doing several books with Miller as a writer during a week celebrating his work, I’ve spent so much time talking about him as a writer. Miller is like Scorsese, he completely changed the rulebook for what someone could do visually, thematically, he understood how to pace action viscerally on the page. He is a watershed figure, a demarcation point between the mainstream of the 1970s and 1980s. He was cutting edge, and pushed himself for the whole decade. Hell, in 1992, Miller was still doing angry young man work. Then Hard Boiled came out, and effectively made Miller into a dinosaur. I’ll set my biases up now, I think that Hard Boiled is it. It’s one of the two or three comics I put up as the best that has ever been done. It’s an example of what comics can do that nothing else can’t. When you read months and months of garbage, of repetitive uncreative nonsense, you go for the best off of the shelf.  You pull out Domu, you pull out Incal, you pull out Hard Boiled. For lack of a better term, it’s pure comics.

And that means a lot of things. For people who comics is about writers, or characters, or speaking to their own personal experience, I don’t think Hard Boiled is even on their radar. I don’t know, different people have different ideas of whats important to an artform, and I think what Geof Darrow does on the comics page is amazing. According to interviews with Miller, Hard Boiled was written as a full script, a very intricate follow-up to Give Me Liberty. Darrow came back with these expansive action sequences that went on forever.

“When I received the artwork for the first issue of  Hard Boiled, I had written a straightforward science fiction story. When I saw the artwork, I was floored. I was helpless. I didn’t have any idea of what to do. This was completely different than anything I had imagined he would do. The sheer excessiveness of it was shocking.

And I realized that if I had gone with the way I had originally written it, it would have just been like hitting the reader with a two by four again and again. Or maybe a ballpeen hammer. The book wouldn’t work. I spent several days wondering what to do, and looking over the pages again, and falling deeper into despair. Finally I happened to write down the words “Come and get it, you bum”. And realized that it was going to be a comedy. Because it was so over the top, it would be unbearable if it were serious. So I played the straight man; Martin to his Lewis.”

Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot, the other Miller/Darrow collaboration, was written “Marvel-style” from an outline. Its a lot of fun, and its certainly more in tune between the two creators. But that tension between the ideas and the images, the hyper-realistic delineation and the dry, flat dialog. The horrific and the comedic blurring into the same thing. That is missing from Big Guy and Rusty.

Hard Boiled is the story of a robot who kills everything. He’s named Nixon. Thats it. Sure, you could delve into it more, but why? It’s a comic that catches fire in your hand. The joy of Darrow drawing the book is whats so incredible about Hard Boiled. It’s not an artist who wants to recreate the real world, rather it’s an artist who creates an entire world. Darrow is clearly in the school of Moebius, where you get the feel of one artist’s hand in every building and piece of clothing. Darrow isn’t the kind of artist who’s good at a splash pages or talking heads or fight scenes or storytelling or drawing cool stuff, he’s good at all of it. Moreso, he has a distinctive hyper-representative style – no surface isn’t without a logo, a cartoon character, a nasty pun scrawled on it. Every piece of debris is rendered. Every face has an expression. Every figure is has gesture. Its so complete that it is unnerving to look at some of these pages, to see someone who can draw like that and still understand pacing, framing, when to drop the background, when to use a splash.

Hard Boiled is a comic that came out at the wrong time, hitting the same time as the “Image Revolution”, too wry and weird to hit with kids, too violent and direct to hook anyone else. In 2010, every comic wants to be Hard Boiled, everything thats good is sardonic and full of fucked up shit. Brandon Graham’s lush, pun-filled landscapes, Prison Pit’s dismembering jizz-fixated body horror, Frank Quitely’s hyper-real grounded storytelling – they’re Hard Boiled’s children, whether intentional or not.

This post is for Jared Lewis, who’s celebrating a birthday today. Hard Boiled is one of his favorites, and I don’t think I could talk about it nearly as well as he could. Dude is more metal than I am.

One more to come, should be up very soon.