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Friday, April 22, 2005
Sharknife
When I was a kid I had a subscription to Nintendo Power that lasted for at least three years and was quite the avid video game player. During those heydays of SNES vs. Genesis commercials my friends and I would come up with our own video game ideas in between rounds of Street Fighter II and F-Zero. We would come up with brand new characters and moves for them as well as storylines that I’m sure would embarrass me, and I have blog devoted to comic books. After reading Sharknife I wouldn’t be surprised if Corey Lewis a.k.a. “The Rey” did the same thing when he was younger. This is a video game crammed into the pages of a comic book. The great thing is that Lewis accomplishes recreating all the fun one would have playing an NES solely by using still pictures. This is a new creator who has already proven he has some interesting things to do with a comic book.
The back cover promises us “100% Action Comics” (I line I hope doesn’t land him in some legal trouble with a certain subsidiary of Time-Warner Communications). Lewis knows that his strength is with giving the reader page after page of kinetic energy. A typical page structure has panel borders slashed across as if they’re claw marks, sound effects that fall of the page and figures whizzing by each other with only enough times to land hits on one another that cause abstract spirals and shapes to fall out of their bodies. In the first chapter this style takes some getting used to and it’s hard to always tell what’s going on in each panel. By the time chapter 5 rolls around, and the chapters move by pretty quickly here, Lewis had gotten more comfortable with this style and its easier to read this book and fall into the high-tempo groove he’s getting into. Lewis influence is not hard to see. Even if he didn’t list 100% as one of his favorite comics in the back, no one would be surprised that Lewis has read a lot of Paul Pope. They both employ a scattered, quick line that keeps things moving. Luckily Lewis doesn’t only absorb the Kirby influence in Pope but has probably also read his fair share of Kirby. The King’s work is the Holy Grail in terms of creating comic with mind-blowing violence and Lewis has soaked up the way Kirby used the weight and design of figures in his interest to make fight scenes look awesome.
There is something of a plot about in the book, but it’s just a pretense for the action to happen. The story is of Sharknife protecting The Guandong Factory, the five-story Chinese restaurant he works as a busboy at. All these weird little creatures have the nasty habit of disrupting service at the restaurant so lowly busboy Caesar Halleuja has to eat special fortune cookies that turns him into the mecha Sharknife to protect the establishment. Lewis makes sure these fight scenes feel like something of a video game, complete with references to “special moves,” displays of Hit Point bars and arrows exclaiming critical hits. The charm comes out the excitement Lewis has for this whole culture of “Nintendo chic.” The scene where Caesar convinces a young boy to throw him over a fortune cookie is full of oversized action and delight that it can definitely bring about a smile, giving the reader the adrenaline boost they would get when their characters gains a 1-Up.
With so much concentration on 8-bit action it’s a delightful surprise that Lewis can pull of the scenes of character interaction with the same fun sense of style as the rest of the book. Caesar and the restaurant owner’s daughter Chieko are usually drawn like half-graffiti/half-manga characters but the beginning of Chapter 3 has them in cuter, deformed version of themselves. I suppose it’s meant to recreate the way characters in RPG games look different in cut scenes, fight scenes and when they’re walking around a city. It’s a cool technique and the scenes show the that while this book isn’t going to be mistaken for Love & Rockets anytime soon, Lewis never lets a change in pace violate the tone of the book.
There is one misgiving I have about this comic. This will appeal to any of the people in this world who are in their late-teens/early-twenties, read Giant Robot magazine, watch FLCL, consider Deltron 3030 the high point of hip-hop and know that up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, select, start is a postmodern prayer. I am one of those people, as are many of the people I go to school with (if Oni markets this book right they could have a huge hit on their hands like Slave Labor Graphics have huge hits in their Goth books), and I dug the Hell out of this book. I have the bad feeling though that if I handed this book to anyone a decade older than me or more they would be completely alienated. There is something to be said about young kids creating works for themselves that speak only to contemporary desires. Grant Morrison and Joe Casey have both said they want to see works by younger creators that owe nothing to the work they are doing so much so that they wouldn’t even recognize these new comics. In that case Sharknife certainly fits that bill. On the other hand there is also something to be noted about how while good work can interest a select group of people, great work deal in much more universal themes where one wouldn’t have to be raised in a certain decade to appreciate.
Sharknife is a good piece of work. It is a great representative of a certain subculture of youth. Lewis is a young creator and I hope he is creating comics for a long time. For that to happen it means he’ll have to keep growing and challenge himself and his audience. Bringing back memories of the days when shouting “ha-du-ken!” at the TV screen was a normal occurrence is cool but I want to see him use his gifts to give us a lot more. I think he can do it, it’s just a matter of will he or not.
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