Saturday Splash Page #119

 

"180 x 9mm Invert", in Street Angel #5, by Jim Rugg (writer/artist/letterer), Brian Maruca (writer)

Jesse Sanchez is an orphan, a martial artist, an expert skateboarder who goes by the name "Street Angel." As a caption box informs us in the first issue, she fights 'for the poor, the forgotten, and whenever possible, for food.'

Rugg and Maruca originally published the 5-issue mini-series in 2004 through Slave Labor, though I picked this up as a nice hardcover released through Adhouse Books about 10 years ago. Over the five issues, Jesse saves the city (and the mayor's spoiled, uselss daughter) from the villainy of Dr. Pangea, finds herself in the middle of a ninja/conquistador war, complete with an oblivious Irish astronaut, fends off a demon with the "help" of Jesus, saves a new friend from an escapee from The Ring, and keeps a bunch of rednecks from killing a black guy for being too fly. It is exactly the sort of wild combination of disparate elements I love.

It's a lot of action, with Jesse being mostly irritated she has to deal with all these idiots causing trouble around her, but Rugg and Maruca use that to show her sarcastic teen side. After beating up the cops that tried to bring her to the mayor, she kicks his door in and spends the entire conversation talking through a megaphone she swiped from those cops. While also calling the chief of police a pervert repeatedly. Eh, he probably was. There's a one-page story (where Rugg draws the characters closer to a Little Orphan Annie style) where her friend/sidekick convinces her a baby skeleton is actually a leprechaun skeleton, and Jesse will get a reward for taking it to the hospital.

She does not get a reward. But in a different one-page comic, she gets invited to a birthday party, where she learns about the existence of pinatas and their delightful, sugary innards!

They do sometimes touch on the notion that this is not a great life for Jesse, beyond the gags about Jesse being mad if someone eats her lunch. One story is just Jesse going about her day, hanging out with some of her other friends who live on the street, trying to find some food. That involves her getting embarrassed when a girl from school sees Jesse jump out of a dumpster, and Jesse losing a trucker cap she found in one dumpster, in a different dumpster.

But mostly, it's fighting, and Rugg can vary the presentation of it in a lot of ways. He might have a 3-panel sequence where the first panel shows a cop grabbing Jesse's arm, which flows into the second panel of her other fist clenching, which moves directly into her punching the cop. Or a silent, single image like above. Or a brief sequence of Jesse and another character beating the hell out of each other. Two pages after the splash page above, Rugg gives us a two-page sequence that's just Jesse slaughtering over two dozen guys, with panels scattered across the page, sound effects in 10 different fonts, some of them going backwards across the page, a rocket launcher fired in one panel on the left side of the page, flies clear across the background to explode on the right side of the page. It's excellent work, I'm very jealous.

Rugg and Maruca have done maybe 6 or 7 Street Angel one-shots (released through Image) since this hardcover was released. They're in color, and based on the one I read, it felt like the color takes away the effect of Rugg's shading. But the one I read also didn't have a lot of fighting in it, so maybe it wouldn't have noticed as much during action sequences.

What I Bought 5/5/2018

How did everyone's Free Comic Book Day go? I tried a couple of different stores, but they only had a half-dozen or so of the different options, and none of them were the ones I was interested in. Kind of a bummer.

Giant Days #38, by John Allison (writer), Julia Madrigal (artist), Whitney Cogar (colorist), Jim Campbell (letterer) - Relax girls, if it's one of those Escher houses, you'll double back to each other in no time.

Daisy settles into her job as mentor for the arriving students, including cracking down on one poor guy who was just trying to get a little high. Boo, don't be a narc, Daisy. Susan, who took no part in apartment hunting, has still decided she hates the place McGraw chose, and is carping endlessly. Hey, I like to do the same thing, but that doesn't make it less shitty. Esther tries to head off the unpleasant things Dean Thompson told their housemates about her, but has possibly succeeded in playing into his hands. Daisy's proposed solution is the worst possible idea, given that we all have a pretty good idea which poor bastard will end being Esther's "fake" boyfriend.

It's a nice mix of quick conflicts and longer term ones. Things get started on Daisy's work as a mentor, with the potential for future issues if she can't accept there are situation beyond repair. Esther gets what is likely going to be a subplot that won't resurface for a couple of months. And we have what appears to be a brief conflict for Susan that gets resolved within the issue. Throw in some jokes and it's good times all around.

Something I'm noticing is that with books I've come to expect creative team stability from, I start glossing over the credits, which can lead to surprises (it happened with this week's Squirrel Girl as well). So I wasn't expecting a different artist, but Julia Madrigal handles things well. Although I can't tell if Dean Thompson looking thinner and missing his topknot hairdo is meant to signify a change for him, or just Madrigal straying from the established look. On one of the first couple pages, I thought Madrigal had a bit of Phil Foglio's style in hers, but it never cropped up after that. She does a good job with the sequences where a character goes through a wide range of expressions and postures in rapid succession. She doesn't seem to exaggerate as much as Max Sarin did, though that might be that the issue didn't call for it. But when she does need to, she pulls it off. Although she gives most of the characters a pair of lines running diagonally across their nose (except the ones with upturned or button noses, like Daisy and Esther). Not sure what that is, but once I saw it, I couldn't stop seeing it.

Street Angel: After School Kung Fu Special, by Brian Maruca (writer), Jim Rugg (writer/artist) - I'd say you should see the other guy, but that might be too graphic for sensitive readers.

I think this is part of a hardcover book Rugg and Maruca released last year. That was listed as 40 pages, this is just 25, so I'm guessing they cut off the school dance portion, which did make a good stopping point. The last page here, works well as the final beat of the story up to that point, but you can see how the story could go forward from there.

Anyway, Jesse actually comes to school and finds she's been challenged by some loser ninja-in-training named Jacob. Jacob then spends the rest of the day antagonizing her, which seems like a stupid idea when you plan to fight her later. Jesse's also dealing with her best friend Bell, who is trying to get Jesse to go to the school dance, because otherwise Bell's parents won't let her go. The two situations resolve in a way none of them expected.

I feel like the book's playing with that whole idea of young boys pulling girls hair or calling them names because they can't just say "I like you." Only here, no these two really don't like each other. Jacob smashing Jesse's face into her lunch is just him being a jerk. And Jesse really has no time for any of it.

Maybe it's the book being in color, but it looks like Rugg simplified his style some. Especially on the characters who aren't Jesse, he seems to have adopted a more bare-bones, broadly expressive approach, not going too heavy on the details. It works; there's no difficulty following what's happening, faces convey what they need to. There's a good sense of pacing in the set-up for some of the bits. Jesse plunks Jacob in the face with a dodgeball at one point, and the sequence builds over a page-and-a-half. Rugg and Maruca even distract from it a little by having Bell talking about Juan, some boy with a crush on Jesse. You see Jesse picking up the ball and wonder if she's thinking along the same lines as Bell, just trying to be cool about it.

As If Skateboarding Orphans Don't Have Enough To Worry About

I picked up this hardcover collection of Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca's Street Angel a couple of months ago, because I'd seen some panels from some the current issues they're releasing online, and it looked interesting. I'm ten years behind the curve, but that isn't anything new. I was pretty sure I was going to like this a half-dozen pages in, as the title character kicks in the door of the mayor's office, then delivers her half of the conversation through a megaphone, just to be a jerk to him (he deserved it).

Street Angel stars Jesse Sanchez, a junior high aged orphan who is also an ace skateboarding, kung-fu crimefighter. None of the 5 issues in the hardcover are connected to each other, and each one seems to be playing with different tropes or common superhero comic concepts. Mad scientist threatening the city, time-travelers (who are conquistadors), spacemen, killer robots, demons trying to make the plucky female lead their bride, randomly capricious religious figures. For the most part, Jesse reacts as someone who has seen all of it before, and is just annoyed by most of it. She'll point out the stupidity of some of it, but for the most part, it's just one more problem to deal with, like homework, or food..It feels a bit like Rugg and Maruca are pointing out how ridiculous this gets, while also gleefully embracing it for the sake of having cool stuff in their stories.

It reminds me of other comics from the mid-2000s where everyone was adding whatever random weird stuff they thought of because it would be cool or awesome. A lot of times it involved Tesla, I think. I did it in some of the stuff I wrote, in my own limited way, so this isn't a complaint. I love that Rugg and Maruca will decide that time-traveling conquistadors invading Wilkesborough isn't enough, they should hate and fight ninjas they find there, and also, an Irish astronaut should show up. And Jesse's plunked unwillingly in the middle of this, wondering how the hell to get all these idiots out of her neighborhood.

Rugg's art works well for both the more action-oriented and quieter parts of his and Maruca's stories. He has a good sense of pacing in the fight scenes, and he can vary it up. Go with the full-page splash that shows a sequence of events, or a bunch of small panels focusing on different moments in the progression of the fight, or a combination of both. Sometimes the violence is graphic, other times it's over-the-top to be funny (in a sort of dark way), but it works whichever way. Rugg also likes having the sound effects react similarly to the objects they're related to. Door gets kicked in, the sound goes flying along with the pieces. Jesse gets hit by an ambulance, the sound is going to get scattered all over by that same front bumper. He doesn't do it all the time, and it doesn't distract from the story, it's just a nice touch he throws in.

Since the whole thing is in black and white, he does the same thing with using negative space, scenes where Jesse's in a dark place, and an object of person is indicated by the absence of more shadows. Again, not all the time, but occasionally, and effectively. Although it frustrates me since I always find that kind of thing very cool (it's something I like about Joe Quesada's artwork too, maybe the only thing), but I can't quite get right myself.

I like that transition in the panels above. From the white to black background in an instant, even as the guy is finishing his sentence, and helps draw the eye to the fist. And the unfinished sentence's placement carries over to the actual violence, which is why that schmuck didn't finish that sentence.