Mudman #2

The second issue of Paul Grist's excellent Image series, Mudman, seems to exist mostly so that the holes of the first issue, intriguing though they were, might be plugged. Reading it on its own, is, accordingly, a little frustrating; I'm not sure if this way of telling Mudman's origin story, first from the perspective of hero Owen Craig and then again from the perspective of the bank robbers who set in motion the creation of our hero, separated by covers and two months of actual time, is an effective narrative technique. In fact, here it seems like Grist is committing the great sin of comics writing, a sin that he wrote he was trying to avoid in the introduction to the series' first issue, namely, writing for the trade. This part of the story, certainly, is going to read better in a collected edition than it does here, simply because, in order for the story to make sense, a relatively intimate knowledge of what has come before (that is, before in our frame of reference, but concurrently to the events of the first issue) is necessary.

Having read that issue a few times (because it was one of the best single comics of 2011), knowledge isn't really an issue here the way it can be sometimes; my recall on this one seems to be pretty good. That said, it shouldn't be an issue at all; a link in the chain of a serial story is a good, strong, link only when it depends on a basic understanding of what went on, not the ability to exactly review the timeline at any given moment. Because this issue occupies the same timeframe as the last issue, with certain parts lining up so that the two issues make a whole, neither issue actually hangs together on it own, at least plot-wise. I was sort of willing to forgive this last issue, because I thought Grist was doing something formally clever, but it's pretty clear here that, even if he is intentionally mirroring the way comics come together in the construction of his plot, it doesn't really work, at least not here.

Still, Mudman is still an excellent comic book, precisely because this issue, like the last issue, is a masterpiece of the form. If the series so far doesn't appear to quite have the hang of serial storytelling, what it does do well is show that Grist is a master comicsmith, someone who really understands what it is that makes comics (as a medium fundamentally different from other mediums that have a tendency towards serials, say, television or blockbuster movie franchises) tick. There are two, opposite, reasons for this mastery. The first, the more obvious one, is that Grist has an intuitive way of representing sensory input that we usually understand as non-visual in a visual way, particularly subtle things like emphasis in speech. He does the big, bold, BLAMs and so on in an incredibly user friendly way too, but it's the little things, like the increasing line weights on each letter in a climactic use of "SHUT UP," that really shows how good Grist is.

The less obvious evidence of his mastery, though, is how good he is at working with what isn't there, namely, how excellently Grist uses the gutter, how innovative and well-used the interplay between the panels and the absence (that is, the infinity) that exists in the between is. I've dealt with this before, so I'm not going to gush too much about it now, except to say that Mudman is how a comic should be laid out, with a view towards both an aesthetic appeal and a narrative one. The art is similarly consistently brilliant, although Grist has a little trouble with perspective and relative size, a trouble that seems to have to do with his otherwise excellent understanding of negative space.

Mudman, although not a perfect comic book by any means, is a great one, maybe one of the few great ones around right now, and it is this way precisely because it is flawed, precisely because Paul Grist is trying something new and interesting and risky. In some ways, the book is a cautionary tale, a reminder that comics, unlike the visual fine arts, has to have a good working relationship, the appropriate balance, between form and content. Still, although formalism and abstraction are by no means new to the medium, they are new to the populist version of it at the base of what Image Comics (and, by extension, most of the American comics industry) does, and what Grist is doing is gutsy and worth purchasing, particularly if we hope to see more medium bending work like this in the future, from Grist or anyone else.

Not Just More Grist For The Mill

I didn't even have a chance to get to the comics to figure out that Mudman was just a little bit different. On the inside cover, just to the right of the indicia (you know, the information about the comic and the publisher, that little bit of a periodical that no one but Jon reads) is a little column written by the comicsmith, like the kind you find just before an old letters page. It's got the same sort of pop-philosophizing that those columns have, the same sort of short, terse, joyful sentences that remind you that rarely does anyone do comics just for the paycheck, that everyone who is in the medium is in the medium because they love comics.

It's pretty clear, from reading that little column, that Paul Grist loves the medium, and not only the medium, but the traditional understanding of the medium, and the medium's traditional delivery system: the comic book, "not," he writes, just to be sure that we understand, "floppies of pamphlets or any of those other slightly derogatory terms that people use to belittle the format." He's not talking, either, about "'sequential art' or any of those other terms folks use when they're trying to be clever about comics," nor is he "Writing for the Trade" or "planning on cramming the collections full of 'DVD extras' like deleted scenes, sketches, and 'directors commentaries.'"

Mudman, then, starts out with a little bit of a manifesto, with an explicit declaration of what it is and what it isn't, with a clear warning: what you have in your hands, says Paul Grist, is nothing or more less complicated or clever than a comic book. It's a pretty bold statement, when you think about, and it's one that's entirely unnecessary: Mudman is a hell of a comic book, the kind that is, actually and despite what Grist might like to claim, quite smart in what it has to say about comics, simply because it does well what comics do well, that is, it tells a story through only the essential parts of that story; everything else is left to the reader to fill in.

All comics, of course, operate in that way; the gutter is what makes comics comics. But Grist uses it particularly well, in part because the story he's beginning to tell, of a young Englishman, Owen Craig, who wakes up one morning and finds that he has the capability to become mud, is as much about the gaps in what happens as it is about what we (and he) know to have happened. The plot comes to us in bits and pieces and, in this way, reflects the way that the medium works. Grist is saying something about comics, and he really is being quite clever about it.

It helps that Grist gives the gutters such an important role on his page: rather than force them towards the edges with too many busy panels, the lines that surrond the action are thick and, although he isn't afraid to draw into them every once in a while, more often they invade the space normally occupied by action than the other way around. What's really impressive about it is he doesn't give a centimeter on this particular principle: the gaps are pretty uniformly twice or three times the size they are in most comics. When he does do something funky, it's a good clue that you're supposed to be paying attention: something outside of the normative boundaries of the universe has happened, or is about to happen. The panels, they really are the world that Grist is building, but there's something intriguingly ephemeral and metaphysical about what surronds it.

And that's all before you get to the art. I've wondered for a long time about Chris Samnee's influences and, if Grist's stuff on Jack Staff looks anything like this stuff here, he has got to be one of them. Mudman's got this great look, blocky and stylized and flat, and the characters move without seeming too loose or slippery. Sometimes it gets hard to tell his characters apart, particularly when they're wearing school uniforms, but that very well may be the point. Another side effect of the gutter-width, perhaps intended and perhaps not, is that the art has room, the characters don't feel cramped even though his art is relatively detailed. What's so amazing about that detail is that there is this preponderance of random seeming lines, but even those add to the art, and, upon closer examination, they make the figures complete.

If there's one thing that seems a little off it's how, on initial reading, the plot seems to barely hang together; there are a few things that just seem to be missing. What's sort of goofy about that, though, is that those holes, rather than being frustrating, draw you back into the book, make it seem really interesting and subtle. Whether or not it all fits together, I suspect everything is going to become clear in the next few issues but, whether or not it does, Paul Grist, by not trying to be clever, by embracing the medium as it was, has put together what may very well be the most interesting and important mainstream comic of 2011.

Quote for the Week 11/20/11

"Thing is, I really like comics. Now, when I say comics, I'm not talking about 'sequential art' or any of those other fancy terms folks use when they're trying to be clever about comics. I'm talking about 32 pages of folded paper together with a couple of staples. Comics. Not floppies or pamphlets or any of those other slightly derogatory terms that people use to belittle the format. Comics."

-Paul Grist, on the first page of the first issue of his Image comic Mudman, convincing me to put it on my pull-list even before I've read the damn thing.