Fred and Loathing on The Internet

The Artist Draws His Weapon

2024-Apr-02

Although the two books being reviewed today are the direct subject, the comic book landscape in the early 90s will be the larger target. Within that already esoteric field, we are going to be talking about one particular design tendency among comic books in the early 90s; guns! Back then, it was all the rage to give characters guns. Big ones. Real looking one: contemporary pistols and sub-machine guns drawn with clean illustrations. Or cartoonishly large futuristic weapons that look best served by a crew of several operators but are handily carried in one hand by a single superhero.

Prior to the 90s the realm of comics contained brightly colored figures that normally use fists or fictional powers to cheerfully stop crime. In the 80s comics took a turn toward the grim, the dark, the grimdark. The heroes became anti-heroes that stopped playing nice. Villains became appealing enough to have their own monthly title, or became abject paragons of ultra-violence. It would only get exaggerated in the next decade.

Guns were introduced into this world by introducing military trained agents or by adding firearms to existing costumed characters. For a while The Incredible Hulk, a character known for feats of strength worthy of ancient myth, was holding a huge caliber rifle in his early 90s adventures. Spawn, a brand new hero in 1991, wields the powers of a biblical supernatural Hellscape and is very often seen holding the most outrageous pieces of science fiction artillery. The brand new Image Comics was four fifths costumed military figures, holding guns and working for government agencies or corporations.

At the time I found the idea of gaudy colored characters using small arms to be breaking of some unspoken superhero design principle. I already thought the Punisher was best depicted as a regular guy painting a skull on his clothing, rather than a spandex clad vigilante that either bought or made his own black and white suit of tights with knee high white boots. Spider-Man, the garish and cheerful character with superhuman powers interacting with a very human Punisher wearing a bulletproof vest and a trench coat was my idea of balancing realism in comic books.

Spies and mercenaries became a handy background for introducing new characters that may or may not have super powers, but they do have expert skills with firearms. The ex-Special Forces origin story became more common than lab experiments gone wrong or visits from aliens. There could be some superpowers mixed in, yet the selling point was the guns and military operations. Deadpool is a great example of this new breed of costumed super agents. He is also a great example because the wealth of ex-military heroes and villains of the 1990s are not well known today, let alone still in an ongoing series. They were a dime a dozen in 1995, but few of them made a lasting impression.

The first book discussed today is a case of a tried and true costumed superhero, Catwoman, pushed into a world of guns and secret government operations, Catwoman. The second book is a post-90s (published in 2002) tale involving one of the ‘ex-Special Forces as a superpower’ characters that actually made it out of the 90s: Batman/Deathblow: After The Fire.

Although Catwoman is not a classical hero in the pantheon of DC. She is a popular figure that skirts the line between heroics and crime who has an origin way back in the almost century old Golden Age of superhero comic books. The collection I read was the first ongoing series for the character, starting in 1993. The Batman books at the time were reeling from the shocking removal of Bruce Wayne as Batman. (Another 90s trend in comics worth its own separate blog posts is a dramatic change to the status quo that promised to never return.) Taking Bruce’s place while he healed from a possibly career ending spine break, was a younger upstart suited with armor, claws, and guns. The main villain involved is the (then new) Bane, a somewhat more believable villain for a comic books series involving animal themed costumes.

To be clear, I had not taken the time to read every single page of the collection of the first dozen issues of this Catwoman series. I picked up the title on the strength of Jim Balent alone. He was an artist that got praise in the time Image comics was known as being the house of the best artists. He does get the chance to really flex how much he can do with detailed covers or thought provoking panel design. Most of the pages I found to be the stilted illustration style of DC in the 90s. Most scenes have the art looking adequate, but with no spark. If this was an artistic editorial choice or something done because DC used cheap paper at the time that could not hold a mess of ink and color, I have not discovered. Whatever the case, I came away seeing occasional glimpses of Jim Balent’s talent mixed in between panels that could fit into a dramatic Sunday comic strip like Brenda Starr. He might be known for pinup girl poses for his female figures but I see he can draw them in solid action without resorting to oversexualizing them, even though there are quite a few examples otherwise in this book.

The story, written by a woman named Jo Koy on every issue yet does not get billing on the collection’s cover, brings Catwoman out of the world of Gotham’s high end burglary game and into the South American nation where Bane became a freedom fighting legend. Here is where we get the chance to see Catwoman break free from the surly bonds of using her conventional superhero weapons (whip, claw, spikes, smoke bombs) for an AK-47. As far as classic superheroes with guns go, this is a mild case. Although the introduction of guns is mild, the story jumps into the international intrigue waters that most ‘ex-special forces’ superheroes swim in. Catwoman foments revolution, makes deals with western spy agencies, and hardly throws a punch to foil the sinister plans committed by a man in tights.

Those big sweeping status-quo breaking event stories of the 90s had the drawback of having numbered series not following a linear story. This collection had the first dozen issues yet to follow the story you would have had to find the missing pieces in other 90s batman titles dealing with Bruce Wayne’s recovery. I had hoped a collection made by a publisher of all these titles would make some sort of effort to fill in the blanks. Oh well, I wasn’t going to read the whole damn thing. I just wanted to see if Jim Balent is as good as I remember. He is, but I wouldn’t put him in the hall of fame.

The second book is somewhat of a Batman title. The title would have you believe it is a crossover between different publishers. Deathblow comes from the super flashy pages of Image Comics. Well from the pages of Wildstorm/Image comics. The story of Image Comics deserves another blog post as well. The long and short of it is that the Wildstorm characters were bought by the DC publishing company, and several characters were slowly imported into the proper DC universe. Thus we have Deathblow, a super secret elite government agent, mucking about in Gotham City doing spy stuff.

I have not read one Deathblow title before reading this book. I read plenty of Image comics in the nineties yet avoided this character. He appeared to be a straight up Rambo in a world of garish costumed freaks. After looking at Jim Lee’s work on the Punisher before he made his famous run on X-Men, I have the feeling he created this character so he could consistently draw painstakingly accurate firearms in action scenes (Jim does great covers for 100 Bullets!). The art in this title is handled by the astounding Lee Bermejo. Nobody could accuse this artist of being lazy. Every single little panel is packed to the gills with grimy detail.

That does bring me to a complaint I have for Lee Bermejo on this short three issue series. There is too much grime. I have trouble separating scenes taking place next to each other on the page yet are supposed to be set years apart with different characters. Perhaps the artist did not have much to work with. That’s the fault of the writer, Brian Azzarelo. This story of terrorists that may or may not be acting on behalf of a Western spy agency has nothing worth remembering.

My first view of Deathblow and he does not do much except work with other massively brawny men on some sort of espionage story that I could not exactly make heads or tails of. Had any character been memorable I would have gone back a few pages to ascertain just what happened in the ending, but they were not. If Deathblow had not put on his red face paint in a few scenes I would not have been able to pick him out from all the other square jawed white guys.

Bermejo, just like Balent, does a splendid job depicting real-world firearms. This story is a more intimate cat-and-mouse game than the Banana Republic rebellion in Catwoman, so all of the guns are flashy contemporary pistols. Bermejo also does a keen job of putting his military trained characters holding a solid pose before firing. Balent instead goes for dramatic figures shooting from the hip.

I had opened this blog post talking about the 90s phenomena about big guns in superhero comics and I ended up talking about two books that did not go too hard on guns. We did get to see the classic heroes inserted into more believable words of international intrigue. I do expect to read one of the classic Deathblow titles made by his creators, Jim Lee and Brandon Chiodo. As for Catwoman or 90s DC, I don’t think I have much interest in revisiting. Maybe just to see some cover that Jim Balent did.