Process: Brandon Graham

Over the last year, I've mentioned, I think probably repeatedly, that I admire the work of Brandon Graham. Graham has recently turned to tumblr, a platform through which he has shared, among other things, process work. My favorite bit of this detritus from this detailing of how the sausage is made is the below layout guide, which Graham sent to artist Giannis Milonogiannis for Prophet #31.*

It's easy to forget that comics is a collaborative process; often, we want a clean division between "writer" and "artist," but I think it's important to remember that many creators are both, even if they are credited as one or the other. Here, Graham is stepping into a part of production that we tend to think of as the artist's purview; elsewhere, like in the Marvel Method, the artist is probably much more responsible for the plot of the book than the writer is. One of the things thats interesting to me about this is the way that each group of creators seems to work differently, so that one particular thing that makes for a successful collaboration between Graham and Milonogiannis might not be useful for Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips or for Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie. There is, it turns out, more than one way to make good comics. 

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*I don't think I'm going to do a top ten list but, if I were to, chances are that Prophet would be the book of the year. If you haven't checked it out yet, its time to give it a shot. 

The Cat Is a Weapon

Are you reading Prophet? Far be it from me to comment on your pull list (and goodness knows there's nothing that I hate more when I go to my store, look through my pull pile, and then put something aside only to have someone say "Put that back! X is the best book being released right now." May be, bro, but I'm still putting it aside for a reason), but you really should be, if you like detailed, sprawling sci-fi stories and wonderfully sloppy, almost European looking, comics art or if you think that Rob Liefeld had some really great ideas but was really sloppy when it came to executing them (I'm not sure that that's a thought that anyone has ever had but, hey, Prophet is great-- maybe Liefeld's just an idea guy?).*

Anyway, read the book. You'll like it, I promise. And if you like Prophet? You might like Brandon Graham's King City. I say that because, while the two have a few things in common (like a certain utterly magnificent oddity) they're, mostly, very different. For one, Graham's simple art, which is composed of neat single lines and carries a very heavy manga influence, is worlds away from Simon Roy's. And, although both books could be qualified as sci-fi, Prophet feels much more like a work in the genre, while King City takes things that are classically seen as trappings of science fiction and utilizes them more for the sake of a charming weirdness than as an attempt to tell a story in a specific mode. In fact, if I were to attempt to categorize it that way, I might suggest that Brandon Graham's book carry the vaguely oxymoronic label of slacker epic, a genre that certainly goes back as far as The Hobbit, and perhaps even further.

What makes King City a slacker epic? Well, for one, there's the ending, which eschews what it seems to be leading towards, that is, our hero Joe defeating an extinction level, demon-based threat that grows in power during the first act and second acts, and then literally looms over the action during the third, in favor of a much smaller victory in global terms, although what is ultimately a much more significant one for Joe himself. For another, there's Joe: a lockpick who trained for two years in order to learn how to correctly use a weaponized, soup loving, cat named Earthling.

Basically, Joe is the most awesome hero ever conceived while a creator was stoned. I don't say that to denigrate what Graham has done; in fact, that not only the premise of the book but also every other fleshy detail was probably first described in a sentence beginning with the phrase "wouldn't it be awesome if...", adds significantly to the serious achievement that is King City. Nothing of this type has ever been so tightly plotted, or so constantly, wonderfully, surprising. Almost any element of the book handled incorrectly, the constant puns, the fact that the cat is a weapon, the zombie war in Korea, the damsel-in-distress sub-plot starring Joe's friend Pete, or, particularly, the featured roles that Joe's ex and her new boyfriend play, could seem either cloyingly clever or utterly predictable and, somehow, Graham is so deft as a storyteller that all of these elements come off as smart rather than cute or cliched. In fact, given how sprawling the main story is, the most amazing thing about the book is just how much of a complete world King City inhabitats, and it is to Graham's credit that he builds this world and then doesn't get lost in it by feeling the need to explain everything. The book could be three or four times longer than it is, and still it wouldn't fully exhaust every awesome idea that its author introduces; instead, what we get is an incredibly tight story that exists in an almost believably odd world-- and that's something worth checking out.

Before I give this edition of the book an unqualified recommendation, though, I would be remiss not to mention that there is a pretty significant problem with a section of the book, insofar as the art is unfortunately and noticeably distorted. If Graham were a lesser artist, or if every other thing about the book (as an object) weren't so brilliant, I'm not sure it would matter so much; on the other hand, if those things weren't true, there would only be a third as many reasons to pick the book up. As it is now, only a small section of the book has significant imperfections and, maybe, that's about as close to perfect as comics ever get.  


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* For the sake of full disclosure, I'm an issue behind on Prophet just like I'm an issue behind on everything else; it's been a busy month, ok? Hopefully I'll make it to my store tomorrow. 

Review: Prophet #21

Before Wednesday, I knew nothing about Prophet. I'd heard some rumblings, I think, from the dark corners of the comics blogosphere, but nothing that really caught my attention, not even when the book moved into the light. No, none of that was all that interesting, and none of it would have made me go out and by the book.

My guy, though, he hooked me up. You see, I have an at-home-guy and an at-school-guy. Both are really good dudes, both run really great shops. But I see my at-school-guy a lot more. What's great about my at-home-guy, who runs my at-home-store, what's great about him is that he sort of knows me, even though I go in to his shop six times a year at the outside, once or twice over the summer and on breaks. In part, he knows me because we have similar taste, but in part he knows me because he's very, very good at what he does, but, anyway, when he asked me if I had ever read King City and I told him that I hadn't, but that I had heard good things, he told me about this Rob Liefeld relaunch stuff that actually looked like stuff he wanted to read, and so I took a copy and...

...well, sure enough, this is stuff I'd like to read, which is amazing considering how generally and utterly miserable I find Rob Liefeld's work. What's so amazing about this John Prophet, though, the first we've heard from the character since Rob Liefeld's last period of general relevancy, is how much gold Brandon Graham and Simon Roy have panned for out of what was apparently a shit river of a Cable clone. This stuff is really good, as if the apparent volume of John Prophet's muscles is inversely proportional to the quality of the book he's in. Obviously, part of what makes it so good is Roy's art, which about as far from Liefeld (that's the last time his name will come up, I promise), as you can get; it's got this fantastic and malleable thin line, with a deliberately sloppy hesitancy that reminds me of Frank Quitely. That line is what makes the book work: it defines a world that appears to be like ours (and in fact is, in a technical sense, ours) but which is actually nothing like the world that we inhabit. Roy's compositions, too, tend towards mid-range and distance shots: John Prophet, in other words, is inhabiting a world, rather than moving in a world that appears to exist only because of him (although, of course, this is precisely what is going on). Of course, what helps the world Roy made be so convincing is how willing he appears to simply stay out of his colorist's way, and the ambiance that Richard Ballermann gives to the book only just stops short of magnetic.

Brandon Graham does an excellent job, too, considering he's had not only to remake someone else's concept, but explain that remaking to both a brand new audience and those people who actually did like Image Comics in the nineties. I expect he failed on the second front: anyone who dug Youngblood is probably not going to like this too much.

Obviously, this is a good thing.

Prophet's joy is in its subtlety, which is sort of a weird thing to say about a comic that features post-coital cannibalism (did I mention that the sex was with a creature that was definitively non-human? And that the scene transitions with the alien smoking her equivalent of a pipe, and then cutting John Prophet open in order to retrieve an organ that belongs to her? An organ helps her reproduce?). At the end, all we're left with is a man (familiar to some, although only vaguely recognizable) on a mission in a strange new world.
And its a big, wide, dangerous, wonderful one.