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Monday, August 15, 2005
Godland #1
Sometimes a creator or creators do something with a book that’s so brash and so ostentatious you just have to admire them for it. Joe Casey and Tom Scioli have come up with a comic book that seems straight out of Marvel’s Bullpen circa 1967 (although it does seem to take place in modern times). Casey has admitted that he and Scioli work from that Stan Lee invention of the “Marvel style” and on the surface the book wouldn’t look odd next to an issue of a Roy Thomas/John Buscema Avengers. It may take getting used to compared to everything else you probably read today but what the two are trying to do with Godland might prove to be a really interesting take on superheroes and their past.
Scioli’s art will bombard any readers eyes with its devotion to Kirby’s style of thick lines, bodies seemingly shaped out of bricks of clay and panels that are filled with that certain brand of sci-fi mayhem. There’s been many an artist who have employed the weaponry Kirby perfected on books such as Fantastic Four and Thor. Yet those artists, people like Walt Simonson, Steve Rude and Mike Mignola, always built off of what Kirby did with their own style and creativity. Scioli seems fine to just take that patented Kirby look with no other hint of any other influences or changes and use that for storytelling. That is Scioli’s personal style, or at least that’s what it seems to be so far. Jim Roeg points out in a great post how this book is hyperreal, hyper-Kirby, and that’s what made the book so interesting to me. The greatest Kirby books have that “bursting at the seams” feeling, where characters’ situations are so action packed they feel like they might very well fall out of the page and into real life, bringing all the characters’ pathos along with them. In Godland it’s the Kirby-ness itself that feels overwhelming, intoxicating the reader by taking this wonder of Kirby’s work into action. I can see how it could turn off readers who would rather see creators originate upon past works instead of revisit them. I don’t think Godland simply revisits Kirby and Lee/Kirby books of bygone eras as much as it is increases the hypnotic mania in those books by filtering it through a fan’s devotion and skill.
That’s not to say there’s isn’t some type of building on what Kirby has done, or at least some conversing as Roeg would put it (I keep referring to his review because it made me appreciate the book in a whole new way after already reading it. You should read it right now instead of going over my drivel. Go click that link and then come back). Casey adds just that much self-awareness into the thought balloons of protagonist Adam Archer that there seems to be another dimension to this book (and with a cosmic tale like this one “another dimension” could be taken literally). He fights with this monster in one of those great knock-down drag-out battles that those superhero comics of a different day did so well and yet his thought balloons are filled with doubts about his current situation.
“Why am I verbally taunting this thing? Am I such a poseur that I can’t help myself?”
“Christ...Why do I keep talking smack like that?”
“Dam it…This has gone on too long.”
Those are the things Archer goes over while his in a fight for his life in front of our very eyes. The fact that any type of tinkering with the superhero form is still done strictly of the style of an old Marvel comic is what worked a lot for me. It expresses a lot of ideas about that time in superhero comic book history, the major one being fondness, although that’s hardly the only one. I share that fondness, perhaps you do as well, and I hope that Casey and Scioli are able to balance this exploration of superhero comics while still telling mind-blowing celestial tales.
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