Rover, wanderer, nomad, vagabond.
It’s right there in both her twitter bio and at
her website, ripped from a Metallica
song, all you need to know about Becky Cloonan. Born in Italy, she’s rested her head for most
of her life in parts of the US and Canada but she’s constantly on the move,
firing muskets with 2000AD’s Mike Molcher in England one week, hanging out with
beardy metallers in the Netherlands the next, and most recently, spotting
platypi in Queensland. Clearly, this wanderlust
is a vital part of her life. More than that, however, it could also sum up her
approach to her work, her art and her craft.
She roams many worlds, this Becky Cloonan, so let’s visit
a few of her destinations. While by no means comprehensive, I’ve tried to cover
as much ground as possible. If I’ve omitted your favourite Cloonan comic (and
there are a number) my apologies, but at least I’ve saved something for when
she returns…
COMICS OF THE WEEK : BY CHANCE OR PROVIDENCE, CONAN THE BARBARIAN,
DEMO, DRACULA, EAST COAST RISING, GOTHAM ACADEMY, NORTHLANDERS: THE GIRL IN THE
ICE, PIXU, SOUTHERN CROSS
By Becky Cloonan & Friends
Published By a bunch of folks
The first twelve-issue run of Demo began back in 2003, marking it in many ways as the prototype
of a style of comic so very popular now in 2015. An exploration of diverse super-powered
youth, stripped of costumes, archenemies and mega-crossovers, Demo went low-fi (as its title suggests)
with its super-theatrics, containing its stories and all of its characters into
single issues where, more often than not, powers were completely incidental to
plot. Demo is about outsiders, their
lives, their loves, their ordinariness and lays all this out on its black and
white pages in downbeat, dramatic fashion – the gloominess, but heartfelt truth
of teen angst stripped bare.
Although lacking the refinement of her later work,
Demo clearly marked Cloonan as one to
watch and watch closely. Cloonan, bravely for such a relatively new artist at
the time, shows serious artistic dexterity, altering her artwork from story to
story, sometimes subtly, sometimes radically, from shoujo-esque big-eyed manga characters, to Paul Pope-like urban
waifs of thick lines and flowing hair, to characters so inky and reduced in
feature they almost look like they are printed from woodcuts.
Her gift with facial expression is already on
display here. Look at the below. Has there ever been a more perfect depiction
of honesty in a character’s face rendered with so few lines?
Vertigo re-published the series in 2008 and it
would only be a few years later that a second, six issue volume appeared from
the publisher. 2011’s Demo Volume Two
doesn’t skip a beat yet is, overall, far more optimistic in its story
resolutions and is fuelled by much less teen angst in general tone. Cloonan
again mixes it up from issue to issue and shows the refinement that the
intervening years of hard work and craft provided. Now both volumes are available in a single collection
from Dark Horse, making for well over 400 pages of this highly influential gem from
a period where indie and mainstream comics really began to bleed together
significantly.
East Coast
Rising, written and drawn by Cloonan, came and went in 2006 as a single
volume from Tokyopop. It garnered an Eisner nomination for best new series and yet
somehow never returned to bookshelves ever again thanks to Tokyopop cancelling
the series and leaving its creator with ¾
of its second volume actually completed yet never to be printed. Fuck you
very much, Tokyopop…
For my money, East
Coast Rising shines as a rare, true example of westernised shonen manga done right. There is no
artifice to …Rising, with Cloonan
giving her natural early inclinations towards manga and Paul Pope a freer
reign, yet never losing sight of her individuality in the process. It’s
ridiculously fast paced, with the manga format allowing for long, expansive
action sequences and multiple double-page spreads. The tones by Vasilis Lolos
are superb, adding depth to the art and that extra dab of manganess complimenting Cloonan’s thick, inky lines perfectly.
Set in a future, flooded New York, …Rising is focused on a young boy named Archer
who survives the destruction of his original vessel by pirates aboard the feared
ship Hoboken. Rescued from the depths by the crew of the La Revancha, Archer
reveals that the crew of the Hoboken also stole his map –
a map leading to a legendary cache of treasure formerly belonging to a
long-dead mayor. With its punk-rock pirates, snapping turtle kaiju, skull-faced death kraken, ship
battles and lost treasure, …Rising
rollicks along, with perhaps its only flaw being that so many characters are
introduced they have a tendency to get lost in the shuffle during its
sprawling, lengthy, multi-person chases and battles.
Ending on a major cliffhanger, it’s a true shame
the series was never continued, as its bouncy energy, streak of adventure,
gorgeous vessel design and overall sense of fun are quite contagious. My own
copy is beaten and exposure-yellowed from frequent flip throughs and
readings. Cloonan would soon get pretty serious with her writing, for the most
part ditching the fun YA shonen
aesthetic permeating …Rising. It
would return, however, nearly a decade later and prove not only critically
welcomed, but commercially viable.
In 2008, Cloonan, Fabio Moon, Gabriel Ba, Raphael
Grampa and Vasilis Lolos won the Eisner award for Best Anthology with their
self-published comic, 5. I’ve sadly never
so much as even glimpsed a copy of 5 and
as such am halfway convinced it never existed in the first place, so let’s move
on to the next effort by this group (sans Grampa, unfortunately), Pixu, a grey-toned horror graphic novel
published by Dark Horse in 2009.
One of the more successful efforts at creating
supernatural dread on the comics page, Pixu
updates the old weird fiction trope of old houses and institutions as supernatural
hotspots. Rather than conjuring strangeness and horror through “alien”
creatures/gods of interdimensional origin, as in the work of Lovecraft and Hope
Hodgson for example, in Pixu the horror is still supernatural and rooted on
site but instead manifests itself in very human ways – obsessions with
cleanliness, compulsive behaviours, fraying relationships, buried secrets and
the hidden perversities of its cast.
Set in an old, dank mansion converted into
apartments, each creator features his/her own character(s) for the most part of
the story, breaking down their characters’ sanity slowly as the exterior evil,
shown in inky, splotchy tendrils creeping into panel, and blotches of mould on
ceilings, tries to burrow its way not just into the house, but into their souls.
Character arcs begin to intertwine as the creepiness ramps up, with death,
mutilation and immolation awaiting all.
A wonder of multi-person co-creation, Pixu is surprisingly subtle despite the
grisliness of its last third. It becomes something of a Pinhead puzzlebox of a
comic, asking readers to bring the dark parts of their own imaginations to the
table to help open it up and construct narrative meaning and sense. Multiple
explanations and motivations are there for the taking, all depending on just
how dark you’re willing to go.
Cloonan’s character, Claire, vomiting on her
boyfriend Omar right before she serves him up a bowl of soup filled with shards
of her own bloodied fingernails, is just a sliver of the unnerving oddness
within this black and white triumph of atmospherics over exposition.
“The Girl In The Ice,” (2011) a Cloonan-drawn, two
part story from issues 35 and 36 of Brian Wood’s brilliant, much missed Viking
anthology series, Northlanders, is
the gloomy, downbeat tale of an old hermit whose land is caught in a turf war
between warring clans. When he finds a dead girl’s body frozen in the ice
beneath him, his curiosity about her demise and his genuine concern for her
fate has him hacking her corpse from its frozen grave. Bringing the girl’s body
home, he plays armchair coroner and quickly suspects foul play -- “a crime of
empowered men in a lawless land.” When he receives news that soldiers are to be
posted at his home, however, he must return the girl to the ice before they arrive,
or face the inevitable accusations of his role in her death.
Cloonan’s art showcases both Iceland’s snow-capped
mountains rolling ever onward in panoramic blue-tinged panels and the lines of
weariness carved into our old man’s face, the marks of a life hard-lived, with
equal skill and care. It’s her gift with expression that bonds us to this poor
fellow so quickly, the sadness in his heavy-lidded eyes, alternating with fury
at the girl’s circumstance and the soldiers’ arrogance. Becky humanises him
beautifully and as the story of this “old man who only wanted to know the
truth” heads towards its inevitable end, Cloonan’s art deftly, poetically
reminds us that the harshness of this land is equally matched by the harshness
of ourinner character.
While not comics, I’d be remiss not to mention the
illustrations Cloonan provided for a 2012 Harper Collins release of Bram Stoker’s
Dracula as it shows off the artist’s
work at its most lavish and design-orientated. Full-page colour illustrations
and spot illustrations running horizontally down the page accompany the complete
text to Stoker’s classic. Cloonan’s Count is as handsome as you’d expect with
her giving him life, even as his eyes are rimmed red and his white shirt
blood-spattered. The sensuousness of Stoker’s story and his characters’
seductive abilities are on full display, without the cheesiness inherent to
many such attempts at sexing up the story visually. I mean, just look at this:
It’s really the only version of Dracula you’ll ever need to own.
In 2012, Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan were tasked
with relaunching Conan The Barbarian
for Dark Horse, putting this former indie team, now bona fide mainstream stars,
back together one more time. It was an inspired choice, with Wood busting out
his pulp chops and Cloonan bringing the swoon to everyone’s favourite
Cimmerian. With Dave Stewart’s moody colours perfectly suited to what, in my
opinion, is Cloonan’s finest sequential art to date in issues 1-3, the team made
quite the splash with The Queen of the
Black Coast, which introduced to the Dark Horse run of Conan one of the
most enduring characters of Hyborean mythos – Belit.
However, as celebrated as the book was when it
launched, there were also numerous and vocal criticisms plaguing it. The vision
that many a mouth-breathing Robert E. Howard obsessive had of their favourite loincloth
wearing barbarian with his hyper masculine, musclebound physique, simply did not
gel with Cloonan’s youthful, handsome, more realistically proportioned and sinewy warrior.
It was bizarre. I love John Buscema’s Conan
probably more than a straight guy should, but Cloonan’s Conan, with his smiles,
eye-glints and the enthusiasm of a man with the thrill of travel and adventure
in his blood, is a complete breath of fresh air. He is very much alive, Cloonan’s
Conan, and I could haggle with Howard purists all day about the “authenticity”
of her depiction, but really, this Conan feels like flesh and blood to me
(which is the problem for many), a man whose passion for both adventure and
Belit feels real.
And it’s with Belit that things get really interesting,
for Cloonan’s Belit is near spectral in appearance. She’s the myth here, not
Conan, virtually translucent in skin tone, raven-haired, lithe, strong and
possessed of intelligence demonstrated not only through her words but through a
mere look. It all feels far more believable
to me. Conan, this titan of a young man, needs to fall for someone more
striking than himself, a figure more mythical, more beautiful, someone almost
post-human in physicality and femininity. Behold!
Collecting her three efforts self-published
between 2011-2013, the tales in By Chance
or Providence bring the seriousness to Cloonan’s writing, a real sense that
sleeves were rolled up with the itch to prove something, most
likely to herself rather than her readers.
“The Mire” won her an Eisner in 2012, but all
three of these efforts are superb and wonderfully varied in their
atmospherics. All three stories are
essentially fantastical, brooding love stories with dashes of uncensored Grimm,
The Romantics, ancient myth and Shakespearean tragedy dosed into their
sumptuous grey-toned pages. My personal favourite, by a hair, would be 2013’s “Demeter.”
Named after the Greek Goddess of the Harvest,
“Demeter” follows Anna who toils long and hard on the land but loses her lover
to the sea. The lengths that Anna will
go to in order to save her doomed romance forms the emotional core of the tale,
even as she dares to “rise to meet” the waves should they intrude on her
land-bound life. Wonderful stuff.
“Wolves” (2011) is the most overtly horror of the
trio with it’s tale of a hunter paid to kill a werewolf who is in fact his
lover. It’s all shadow and moonlight, monster and sword and the obviousness of
its plot does nothing at all to diminish the power of its ultimate reveal and
the subsequent transformation of the hunter into a lone wolf of the forest,
naked, carrying naught but the knowledge that the coming full moon will bring
not transformation but something far worse – memory and guilt and the pain of
lost love.
The Eisner-winning “The Mire” is mostly set in murk
and on haunted ground, with its young squire protagonist bearing a letter that
unknowingly contains the details of his own origins through a stretch of
swampy, supernatural land called The Withering which is haunted by a
territorial, skull-faced spirit.
Cloonan’s command of short-form comics is on full
display in this trio of stories. All three feel expansive and fully realised
despite the relative shortness of their page count. Her pacing is on point
throughout them all and, point proved, Eisner collected, she moved on yet
again.
It really should not have taken this long to get a
book like Gotham Academy out. It
seems like such a no-brainer and there’s a part of me that’s actually a little
surprised the title isn’t 100 issues old yet. However, 2014 was the year this ongoing
book finally appeared, featuring a cast of multi-cultural teens and their day-to-day
lives at Gotham’s premier private school. This being Gotham however, the notion
of “day to day” is hardly normal.
Co-written by Cloonan and Brendan Fletcher and
beautifully illustrated by Karl Kerschl, the team’s bubbly characters – Olive,
Maps, Kyle, Colton and co. -bounce their way through class and after-school
adventure with a manga-esque fluidity and such richness of colour that the
panels actually resemble clipped animation cells pasted onto the page. These
quirky characters, juxtaposed with the austere, traditional school buildings
and grounds, breathe a big burst of fun back into the Batverse, something
that’s been generally missing since the New 52 initiative started.
Tonally, it’s the return to East Coast Rising that I mentioned earlier with unfolding mystery
in place of lengthy widescreen action sequences. There’s so much to love here –
The Cobblepot family as both History Class material and engine of the mystery,
an unnamed student yawning during Bruce Wayne’s speech, Aunt Harriet (!) and the
academy’s never-ending secret passageways and tunnels. The comparison to Harry
Potter is perhaps inevitable and somewhat apt (provided even by Cloonan herself),
but with its old cemeteries, rumours of ghosts, Lovecraftian incantations and
secret maps, I find it more Mystery Machine than Hogwarts. Fittingly spooky
mysteries rooted in Gotham’s history, characters and mythology propel the book
forward and cause its charming, “meddling” teenage detectives to frequently
allow their curiosity and adventurous streaks to get the best of their common
sense.
In a Bat-era where a villain like Mr Freeze has
had his complexity and the tragedy of his origin stripped from him, making him
just another psycho for Batman to punch, Gotham
Academy even has the balls to cast Killer Croc in a sympathetic light and
Batman in the role of antagonist. Packed full of Easter eggs for Batman
trainspotters, the creative team do not forget that their title also needs to
function as a teen drama. The creators slowly, patiently reveal more and more
about their cast, their histories and their intertwined relationships, and in
the process create perhaps pound for pound the single best book DC currently
publishes.
Sadly, we now conclude our journey into the
creative worlds of Becky Cloonan by joining Alex Braith on her five-day trip on
the Southern Cross, a huge spaceship bound for the moon of Titan. Alex searches
for answers to the mysterious death of her sister Amber, who worked for a shady
corporation drilling for oil on Titan. Written by Cloonan and drawn by Andy Belanger,
Southern Cross is four issues old as
I write this, a weird-fiction tinged, deep space mystery, a fantastically
oddball slice of comics SF from Image Comics. The Southern Cross itself resembles
theYamato from Star Blazers gone haunted and
industrial, its staff and passengers look like refugees from the grungy Euro SF
pages of Jean-Marc Rochette’s Snowpiercer.
It looks tremendous.
Belanger’s clearly having a blast here, with the
design of the ship itself and its interiors, as well as the especially starry cosmos
swirling about it, beautifully realised. His cross-sections of tube-filled
hallways and various levels add extra claustrophobia to this story – a nice
little cherry of anxiety on top of this narrative mound of paranoia and
building insanity. Lee Loughridge’s colours deserve a mention here too,
enhancing the artificiality of the ship’s light through his use of neon pinks,
yellows, greens and Blade Runner
blues.
Cloonan’s well-plotted mystery ticks along, eager
but in no great hurry, as all good mysteries should behave. Her cliffhangers
are weird, horrific, compelling and increasingly psychedelic and Belanger’s
layouts become more broken and fractal to match them.
Another mysterious death aboard the Southern Cross
is revealed and Alex’s supernatural encounters increase. All the while, the mysterious gravity drive
ominously WHUMS like something lost from Kirby’s Fourth World due to
malfunction, possession or omniscience…
“That’ll be fifty GCPs,” says a dodgy drug-dealer
who doses Alex’s eyes with a psychedelic drug of truly cosmic, dimension-bursting
properties.
“Keep it,” Alex says, handing over a stack of
bills. “Where I’m going I won’t need it.”
And here we end. At a cliffhanger. With a promise
that in less than thirty days, Becky Cloonan is going somewhere else. The good
news is, as with most of her trips, she’s going to be taking us with her.
WEBCOMIC OF THE WEEK : COMIC ATTACK-BECKY CLOONAN
Hopefully one day, Comic Attack, Becky Cloonan’s semi-autobio…errr…kinda-autobi…errr…well
her comic strips featuring herself, are put in their own dedicated spot so we
can just click on over and enjoy her adventures baking zucchini bread, running
from dinosaurs, forming dance posses and being romanced by Putin one after the
other until the end of time. Until then, click on over to her Deviant Art page
and enjoy.
COMICS VIDEO OF THE WEEK: ORBITAL COMICS PRESENTS: GOTHAM ACADEMY DIRECTOR’S
COMMENTARY WITH BECKY CLOONAN
Another one for process nerds! Thanks to Orbital
Comics London, here’s Becky Cloonan, in front of a charmed audience, pulling Gotham Academy #1 apart to reveal its mechanics
and its super-sweet centre. A wonderful look at the collaborative spirit behind
the title, this hour long video might ease the pain of those unable to attend
either this Friday or Saturday when Becky holds court at All Star.
See you next week. Love your comics.
Cameron Ashley spends a lot of time writing comics and other things you’ll likely never read. He’s the chief editor and co-publisher of Crime Factory (www.thecrimefactory.com). You can reach him @cjamesashley on Twitter.
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