Salacious Illustration: Small And Imperfectly Formed

There's a dearth of strong non-spandex books on offer from the big publishers, and the only other source is the small press. But, Nick Locking argues, the small press just isn't good enough.
14 January 2002

This column is probably going to make my avant-garde, indie comic-reading friends put their handkerchiefs to their brows in utter shock, and throw pained expressions my way as if I were a retarded child who had just proudly shown them my name written in my own bodily excrement, but here goes.

When PREACHER was still coming out every month, before it reached its brilliant end, I think it was just about my favourite comic. I loved it. It was irreverent, original, it had buckets of charm, and most importantly (for the purposes of this essay) it was professional, and the production values were top-notch.

Gorgeous Steve Dillon artwork, effortlessly telling the story like he'd been born to do it, luscious and bright colours jumping off the page. Out every month (or close enough, with most of the delays being due to prudish censors rather than the creators or publisher). Brilliantly written.

Even the bits that some people don't like - like when Jesse spends a year in the small town of Salvation, chilling out and unwinding - I liked. Because they were miles ahead of just about everything else that was coming out at the time.

Similar to the PREACHER experience were books like SANDMAN, THE INVISIBLES, and even TRANSMETROPOLITAN, which will come to an end within the year. These are all really top-notch, widely read comics, with superb art and excellent writing, which came out every month.

But when TRANSMET author Warren Ellis finally sends Spider Jerusalem on his foul-mouthed merry way, what will we be left with? When TRANSMET is gone, there will be little-to-no mature reader, non-superhero works from the major publishers or imprints that I particularly enjoy, and sales figures suggest I'm not alone in thinking this.

One of the big four, Marvel, doesn't even really do non-superhero material. It's a superhero publisher, plain and simple, and though it deserves credit for putting out some of the best superhero material the industry has ever seen, if you're not a superhero fan it doesn't even merit consideration.

Vertigo is the one imprint that we can really turn to as a major source of top-notch non-superhero material - or at least we used to be able to. Vertigo is currently putting out a host of titles that cruise dangerously near to cancellation numbers, and in some cases have already heard their death knell.

Even the seemingly never-ending string of miniseries carefully milked from the dead and rotting teat of SANDMAN have largely passed like ships in the night, with scarcely a blip of critical acclaim and some dangerously low sales figures.

HELLBLAZER, once a proud capital ship of the Vertigo fleet, is selling fewer than 20,000 copies per month (and fan reaction to Azzarello's John-Constantine-in-America approach is not particularly favourable). Mike Carey's LUCIFER, I'll grant you, is an excellent comic that is getting a lot of well-deserved reviews, but even counting that and the soon-to-be-completed TRANSMET, that's two good titles from an imprint that used to be responsible for a large percentage of the industry's well-received non-spandex work.

So when the larger publishers aren't putting out much of interest, one naturally turns to small-press and indie publishers.

The problem there, however, is that indie work is, on average, not as good as material from larger publishers. I'm not saying that Marvel's X-TREME X-MEN is better than David Lapham's STRAY BULLETS. But when you take the best that the large publishers had or have to offer, they're generally of a higher quality than anything that indie publishers can create.

It seems as if indie stuff is graded on a different scale. Readers will forgive art that isn't particularly flashy, or paper quality and production values that leave something to be desired, because hey, it's an indie comic. They can't be expected to produce that kind of work with the revenues that indie comics bring in, as a lot of indie creators have regular jobs in addition to their work in sequential art. We will tolerate unimpressive art or second-rate dialogue in return for an undiluted vision and a lack of spandex.

But speaking personally, I can't live on bread alone. So where are my quality non-superhero titles? There's the aforementioned handful of titles from Vertigo, but there's not much else. I've tried turning to imported and translated Japanese comics, like EAGLE and SANCTUARY, but I find the translated texts rather jarring. It seems like the only really high quality comics I can read are the superhero comics.

Fortunately, I actually like superhero stories (after all, they're really just a cross between science-fiction and epic mythology). So it's irritating that, due to the special allowances that seem to be granted to indie books, superhero work is often pooh-poohed for its immature content despite its quality, while an indie comic is given a more lenient assessment, simply because it's not a spandex title.

Taken to something of an extreme, I've even seen it argued that titles like Brian Wood and Brett Weldele's COUSCOUS EXPRESS, published recently by AiT/PlanetLar, are superior to works like Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's WATCHMEN.

Now, I liked COUSCOUS EXPRESS. It was smart, charming and well written. It had stylish art and strong storytelling. I bought a copy, and I'll buy any more of the same stuff by the same authors - I won't be surprised if I end up getting Wood's next work, POUNDED, with Steve Rolston at Oni Press.

But - and I think I'm being fair here - it certainly wasn't a better work than WATCHMEN. I realise personal tastes can vary wildly, but surely that only goes so far. A masterpiece about superheroes is still undeniably a masterpiece, even if we do have altogether too many superhero titles around.

I've known people who have never read sequential art before who have read something like PREACHER and loved it. But if a person is told that the medium of sequential art has just as much to offer as the mediums of prose and film, and is then given an indie comic to read, well, it would be a bit like trying to promote the medium of film by using student-created shorts, or promoting prose by using amateur fiction. There could be some gems in there, sure, but in general, these are not the best advertisements for the medium.

I don't want to sound like I'm condemning all sequential art that doesn't come from Marvel or DC, but I think a sense of perspective is needed here. Until some larger publishers start putting out more high-quality non-superhero material, it seems like we'll be left floundering, cursed not by an over-saturation of superhero material, but an under-saturation of quality material from anywhere else.

Nick Locking is the award-winning co-creator of THE ATROCITY, and the writer of the forthcoming ROBOCOP: SIMPLE MACHINES.

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