The stunning clarity and clean simple lines of artists like
Aja and
Chris Samnee (in
Daredevil) and
Tonci Zonjic (Lobster
Johnson) may have inspired a trend. In
Ed
Brisson’s Comeback, Michael Walsh attempts a similar
simplicity but falls a trifle short in clarity, perhaps because he’s deploying
a juicier brush. The story, which confronts the inevitable difficulties to be
encountered in time travel, is provocative but not easy for a literal-minded
non-sf geezer like me to follow. And because in Walsh’s hands, facial
distinctions fade into simplicity, it’s sometimes hard to tell which character
is which—a complication that time travel (when are we anyhow?) compounds, alas.
Noel Tuazon also seems an off-shoot of
the “new simplicity” style in Brian
Buccellato’s Foster. Tuazon’s
brush is even juicier than Walsh’s: blacks splash across the drawings, and
shadows, rather than defining shapes, seem to distort them. He varies the
splashing with thin-line touches (I think he draws first with thin lines, then
adds brushwork just as Noel Sickles taught
Milton Caniff to do in their
celebrated chiaroscuro technique), and while the linear contrast adds visual
interest, the over-all effect is undercut with his deliberately sloppy
shadowing.
Buccellato’s
protagonist, Foster, is a down-and-out alcoholic in a dystopian world through
which lurk “dwellers,” man-eating monsters from the sewers below. Buccellato
says he’s exploring fatherhood in the relationship between father and son when
he has Foster “adopt” Ben, the 8-year-old offspring of a prostitute living down
the hall. But in the second issue, we learn that Ben is a hybrid, half-dweller
himself, and what that will do to the father-son relationship is anyone’s
guess.
Buccellato,
who is also writing DC’s New 52 Flash,
could use an editor for this Dog Year Entertainment title. He says the story
takes place in “a nameless metropolis” called “Vintage City.” If it’s called
Vintage City, it ain’t exactly nameless, is it?
Then
again, to reconsider my recommendation, it was probably an editor (if not
Buccellato) who captioned a photo of the writer by calling Buccellato “a former
High School of Art and Design dropout.” If he’s a “former dropout,” what is he
now? Has he enrolled again?
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