Saturday Splash Page #77

 

"Clint Barton's Big Mouth of Madness," in Thunderbolts 2000, by Fabian Nicieza (writer), Norm Breyfolge (artist), Joe Rosas (colorist), Comicraft's Jason L. (letterer)

Set during the first few months of Nicieza's run as writer of Thunderbolts, Clint Barton's approached by an associate of Daimon Hellstrom's with a message: Mockingbird's soul is trying to contact Hawkeye from where she's trapped in Mephisto's realm. Hawkeye recognizes Hell is probably not a place for his morally compromised team to go, and tries to handle it alone. His team, naturally, choose to follow anyway. Atlas gets himself in debt to the Enchantress to get an audience with Pluto so he'll open a doorway, and Moonstone brings a pair of Clint's underwear so Pluto can create a "sympathetic alignment" to help them find Hawkeye faster.

They naturally end up in the standard scenario of confronting their inner fears instead. The reactions are varied. Mach-IV acknowledges his guilt for murder and vows to do better. Atlas accepts he's never going to "get it right", but intends to keep trying. Songbird and Charcoal both deny any guilt whatsoever over what's used against them. Moonstone says she's prepared to handle whatever she's becoming.

The dialogue emphasizes how real everything feels to the team, but I feel like it missed a chance to let Breyfogle really go wild with the nightmare imagery. The man absolutely had that gear in him, as evidence by any number of Batman stories he drew, but this comic does not take advantage of that. Missed opportunity.

Hawkeye puts a temporary hurting on Mephisto with an arrow juiced up by a chaos magic and a battle stave loaded with the purer intentions of the trapped souls, and the team bails with a body wrapped up behind Mephisto's throne. A body which turns out to be Patsy Walker (Mockingbird would have to wait another 8 years to return in Secret Invasion.) This leads into the Avengers Annual of the same year, and eventually the Steve Englehart/Norm Breyfogle Hellcat mini-series we looked at in Sunday Splash Page #236.

This comic gives Hellstrom the air of a man pretending to be cold and heartless, but saddened by the distance between he and his ex-wife. Englehart paints a less-tragic picture, and Christopher Cantwell's seemingly trying to rewrite history to suggests Patsy's always just blamed Daimon (and everyone else) for her own shortcomings. Which smells a lot like bullshit, but he's using Daimon to shovel a good 40% of it, so it may very well turn out be bullshit.

Sunday Splash Page #236

 

"Into the Fire," in Hellcat #2, by Steve Englehart (writer), Norm Breyfogle (artist), Tom Smith (colorist), Dave Sharpe (letterer)

So in 2000, Marvel brought Patsy Walker back from the dead. In a Thunderbolts Annual we'll see in Saturday Splash Page some time next year. After a subsequent appearance in the Avengers Annual of that year, Patsy got this 3-issue mini-series by Englehart and Breyfogle, where Hellcat finds herself caught up in a war for control of the realms of condemned souls.

Patsy herself is struggling with finding meaning in life. She'd committed suicide and wound up in Mephisto's realm, didn't really get asked to be brought back to life, and isn't sure there's any point in it. And while Dormammu's spearheading the invasion, two of the realms being invaded are ruled by Mephisto, who claimed her soul, and her second ex-husband, Daimon Hellstrom. So she's got to help two people she doesn't particularly care for.

Englehart ramps up Patsy's abilities somewhat, as her time in Hell has taught her to both sense magic and be able to evade/slip free of it. She's no spell-slinger, but actually getting her with a spell is hard to manage. Breyfogle and Smith give the magic that gets tossed around a vivid, tangible presence, coiling around victims, which lets Patsy's ability to avoid it be more visually interesting than simply dodging it.

They also, as you notice above, revamp her costume, essentially swapping the blue and yellow. I like it personally, makes her look more sleek, but when Busiek and Larsen pulled her into their Defenders run, they immediately reverted her to the original look (though they retained the magic-sensing abilities). I don't remember them doing a lot with Patsy struggling with her past suicide, either, but a lot of the focus of that book was on how much the Big Four hated being forced to work together.

Englehart wastes what I feel is a lot of pages on the idea that actually, Satannish was created by Dormammu, as a double agent for when Dormammu inevitably invaded these Hell-realms. At the very end, we find out that actually actually (yes I typed it twice on purpose), Hellstrom is the Son of Satannish, because he was Dormammu's second double agent, in case the first time didn't work. Which feels like the sort of needless continuity patch Roy Thomas or Geoff Johns would do, and also seems like much more subtlety than Dormammu would bother with. If he was able to create Satannish back when Mephisto first came into being, why not just crush Mephisto then?

It seems like Englehart really wanted Patsy to figure this all out, like a goofy twist on the soap operas she used to love (according to what she says in this mini-series), and needed an appropriately convoluted reveal.

After this, it was 8 years before Patsy got another mini-series of her own, and 7 years after that before she got an ongoing. We won't see either of those for a few years (probably late 2025.) She will pop up in an ensemble mini-series in a few weeks, however.

Sunday Splash Page #153

 

"You Have No Idea, Tim," in Detective Comics #621, by Alan Grant (writer), Norm Breyfogle (penciler), Steve Mitchell (inker), Adrienne Roy (colorist), Todd Klein (letterer)

As you probably guessed from last week's hint, most of the Detective Comics issues I have are from Norm Breyfogle's run with Alan Grant on the book. At least the parts that are collected in the two Legends of the Dark Knight: Norm Breyfogle hardcovers DC put out a few years back.

Breyfogle and Grant (and John Wagner as co-writer), started at issue #583, and went to issue #594. There's a gap, and then starting with issue #601 and running until the issue shown above, it's the Grant and Breyfogle show.

The stories are a nice mix of done-in-ones, and two to four-part stories, kept within the title, rather than jumping across the various Bat-books. So there might an issue about a First Nations warrior coming to Gotham to retrieve items of cultural significance (and mete out a little justice) from some white guy that paid to have them stolen. Or Catman's pet tiger escapes and Batman ends up tangling with them while Catwoman looks on. 

There's an element of supernatural/psychological threat or horror to the stories. Whether it's Cornelius Stirk terrifying his captives because he needs the chemicals their brains produce in response to fear to keep himself sane, or a desperate man creating a monster from his own anger, fear and hate to protect him from mobsters demanding protecting money. The original Clayface gathers the third and fourth versions to make himself the "ultimate" Clayface, and while he's at it, dopes Batman up and sends him into a hallucinatory nightmare.

I'm not sure what Grant's trying to say about Batman with all that. His version is kind of all over the map. At times cracking one-liners and quips while knocking people out, other times snarling and gritting his teeth like he's severely constipated. His Batman is self-aware enough to recognize when he's out of his depth, and capable of being scared. He's also ridiculous enough that, when Vicki vale breaks things off with Bruce, Bats swings over the city thinking about how Batman needs no soft kiss on the cheek, and "Vicki? Who's that?"

Sure, Batsy.

Either way, it gives Breyfogle a chance to really expand his boundaries as the series goes on. Get a little more creative with some of the page layouts when it's the mind that's under attack. Make Batman appear as more of a looming dark shadow than a person. He seems especially fond of putting Batman's face and limbs either in shadow or hidden under the cape, but having the emblem on his chest clearly visible. I guess to emphasize the idea of Batman as a symbol rather than a person. He can still humanize Batman when he needs to, soften his lines when Batman wants to avoid frightening a child, or is feeling a little cocky. But a lot of the time, Batman looks more like something more than human.

Anarky's probably the biggest character actually created during this run, and the legion of homeless guys he'd later employ in the Grant/Breyfogle mini-series (see Sunday Splash Page #25) are recurring characters throughout. Other than that, I don't know if Stirk got much traction. Kadaver fucked around with the Penguin (shown repeatedly committing actual crimes, instead of pretending to be a nightclub owner or politcian), which didn't end well. Corrosive Man was neutralized (neutralimed?) I guess Ratcatcher pops up in crowd scenes.

People who are allowed to fall through the crack in society are something Grant at least touches on regularly during the run. That and people who suffered hardship or loss like Batman, but decided to be a bit more lethal in how they handled it (see Ratcatcher and also the aforementioned guy who summoned a demon from his mind). Batman tells Tim Drake (who starts showing up right near the end of this stretch, but won't become Robin until Grant and Breyfogle switch over to Batman), to accept the anger, because one day it'll be his friend. I'm not sure that's a great message, but I guess the idea is it's your friend, not your master. Bats tells Stirk something similar, that he lets his fear have its say, then he chooses to listen to it or not.

Overall, it's a solid run. Fun stories that aren't trying to redefine the character for all time (futile as that would be), where Batman is allowed to be caught off-guard, overwhelmed, or just plain out-smarted (temporarily).

Sunday Splash Page #76

"New Gym Teacher's Weird," in Batman Beyond Unlimited #5, by Adam Beechen (writer), Norm Breyfogle (artist), Andrew Elder (colorist), Saida Temofonte (letterer)

In late 2010, Adam Beechen and Ryan Benjamin did a 6-issue Batman Beyond mini-series, focused on a mysterious new version of Hush who was going around killing Terry's enemies. Once it ended, they immediately started an ongoing series with the same creative team, only for that to be canceled after 8 issues because of the New 52 reboot. Then we got Batman Beyond Unlimited, which was really an anthology of stuff that had been released digitally first, then in physical copies later. You had Beechen and Norm Breyfogle on Batman Beyond, Dustin Nguyen and Derek Fridolfs on the future Justice League, and J.T. Krul and Howard Porter doing Superman Beyond.

Eventually they released a trade of just the Batman Beyond stuff, 10,000 Clowns, which is what I really was interested in. The idea is that one member of a Jokerz gang has figured out how to organize and gather all the different sects from across the country and bring them to Gotham, then drugged them until they're a mass of suicide bombers.

I'm unclear on why there would be people devoted to the Joker in Opal or Star City, but I guess we're rolling with it.

Beechen keeps a lot of other plots and subplots going simultaneously. Some of them are good; the two-parter where we learn Hush didn't kill Mad Stan after all, turns out to be a good reminder other problems aren't sitting still while the Jokerz gather. Some not so much; Beechen introduces a new Vigilante, who turns out to be the guy who killed Terry's father, and his last name is "Chill". Like, Joe Chill, get it? *facepalms*

Norm Breyfogle gives each group of Jokerz their own distinct look, while maintaining the greasepaint clown makeup look. It helps carry the impression of dealing with a bunch of loosely affiliated groups. Bruce Wayne looks like an older man who has tried to stay in shape, but is losing that war. The Joker King has a distinct look. Probably falls into the same trap people say a lot of George Perez' designs do (where he's the only one who can draw it well, which is a dumb complaint, like it's George Perez or Norm Breyfogle's fault other artist aren't as good as they are). There are a lot of fight scenes, and Breyfogle and Elder make those look good. It's easy to follow the progression of the action, how what happens in one panel leads into the next.

Sunday Splash Page #75

"That Suit is. . . Really Something", in Batman Annual #11, by Max Allan Collins (writer), Norm Breyfogle (artist), Adrienne Roy (colorist), Albert DeGuzman (letterer)

I own a grand total of two stories, from two different issues, of Batman Annuals. And that's because - say it with me now - they were drawn by Norm Breyfogle. It's this one or the one where Jason Todd has to get involved in an extracurricular activity at school, so let's stick with "Love Bird".

Pengy is paroled, over Batman's strenuous objections, and visits Dovina Partridge (whoo, wow), who he met through each of them sending letters to the Orinthological News. She'd be delighted to marry him. . . as long as he stays on the straight and narrow. So he opens an umbrella factory, staffed with lots of crooks Batman's put away. As it turns out, that is the only crime  he's guilty of this time around, consorting with ex-convicts is a violation of his parole. Batman goes 0-for-2 against the parole board, this time asking for leniency, but does vouch for Pengy with his fiance. Although my guess is the marriage never took place.

Breyfogle gets to draw Batman being put on his heels by Dovina when he tries to warn her about Penguin, and there's one panel of him and Robin watching the factory where Batman looks distinctly like he's sulking. He's in a crouch and has his cape wrapped around him so you can only see the part of his face that's beneath the cowl. Robin's leaning against a chimney like he's vaguely disgusted, or just giving boss some space for his pouting.

I'm pretty sure Batman: The Animated Series did a version of this, except the woman Penguin had fallen for was only leading him on because she and her society chums enjoyed laughing at him. I think the episode ends with Penguin muttering, 'I blame society. High society.'

Sunday Splash Page #72

"Alas, Poor Mustache Pete," in Batman #475, by Alan Grant (writer), Norm Breyfogle (artist), Adrienne Roy (colorist), Todd Klein (letterer)

I own about a half-dozen issues of Batman. One is issue #500, when Jean-Paul Valley builds his own Bat-suit (you know the one) and takes down Bane. Everything else is in the Legends of the Dark Knight - Norm Breyfogle collection, except for this issue. Which is also drawn by Norm Breyfogle. 

This will be a bit of a recurring pattern over the next six weeks, just telling you now. I don't give much of a damn about Batman, but the late Norm Breyfogle? That's another matter entirely.

For this issue, Scarface gets shot up by a new gang taking over his territory, and the Ventriloquist declares himself retired. That lasts less than one issue, so it's surprising Batman actually took the Ventriloquist at his word when he told him that.

The more relevant thing in this issue is it's the first comic I recall seeing Renee Montoya, who would go on to be one of Gotham's more prominent cops over the next 15 years, then take over as the Question. She's bringing Gordon some files when Bats comes to visit and pulls a gun on him. Breyfogle draws Bats as visibly human from the six-pack down, but all cape and strangely elongated shadows from there up. Points to Montoya for not being fazed when Batsy pulls his usual mid-conversation disappearing trick.

There's also a scene where Batman is about to swoop in to save Vicki Vale from some drug dealers, but the photographer she's with does it first. Then they kiss, while Batman swings off insisting to himself it doesn't matter. He didn't like Vicki anyway, he has The Night. Sure, Batsy, sure.

During the day, Breyfogle draws most of the buildings standing straight up and down, fairly clean. Maybe not classy, but solid, presentable. At night, he and Roy give them this look that could either be shadows, or just grime. Everything looks dingy and rundown. The buildings all seem to tower up out of these narrow panels into the sky. It's a little claustrophobic, and the buildings are drawn at angle, so they're almost reaching for something, or about to topple over. It's more menacing.

Sunday Splash Page #26

"Lost in an Alien Realm" in Anarky (vol. 2) #2, by Alan Grant (writer), Norm Breyfogle (penciler), Joe Rubinstein (inker), Noelle Giddings (colorist), John Costanza (letterer)

So after the 4-issue mini-series, Anarky got his own ongoing, where he tried to change the world by exposing the corrupt framework and by encouraging others to think outside its limitations. Most of that was off-panel. In-story, he fought a creature from outside their universe alongside Kyle Rayner (after the obligatory fight), and stopped Ra's al Ghul from kicking off a world war. In other words, he ran up against other forces bent on changing the world, but only in ways that suited their interests, at the cost of many other lives.

Then the last two issues were a Day of Judgment tie-in and one where Lonnie goes to visit the Joker, who he thinks is his biological father. That goes as well as you think it would. Not sure why Grant thought that was a good way to go. Especially since he and Breyfogle had set-up the idea that there were U.S. politicians getting nervous enough at Anarky to make him a target at the end of the Ra's story, but never ended up getting to it.

Breyfogle's still excellent, of course, especially since there are no pages of Lonnie lecturing his dog on the history of human thought. Actually, I'm not sure what happened to Lonnie's dog.

Sunday Splash Page #25

"Man, This Philosophy 101 Prof is Weird", in Anarky (vol. 1) #2, by Alan Grant (writer), Norm Breyfogle (penciler), Josef Rubinstein (inker), Noelle Giddings (colorist), John Costanza (letterer)

What I know about Anarky, the character, comes from this mini-series and the short-lived ongoing that followed it, which we'll look at next week. What I know about anarchy, the political system, comes from books I read about the Spanish Civil War, but that's neither here nor there.

Anarky's a 15-year old, brilliant and inspired by Batman to take changing the world into his own hands. By building a machine powered by energies stolen from Etrigan, Batman, and Darkseid. Grant takes the approach that Etrigan has no free will, and that what we think of as Darkseid is just one part of him in a particular form. Which is not a notion I had ever seen before.

Watching Anarky argue and fight with them, especially as drawn by Norm Breyfogle, is a lot of fun. It was Breyfogle being the artist that made me track this down. I know that's not the most dynamic full-page splash up there, but I love some of the layouts he use on pages with more than one panel, and he's always good at drawing fight scenes.

In Case You Haven't Heard About Norm Breyfogle Yet

I did want to take a minute to post the link to the fundraiser for Norm Breyfogle. My guess is if you read this blog for the comic related stuff, you already knew he'd suffered a stroke, and while he's recovering, he now has a huge hospital bill. So if you can spare a little cash to help with that, there's the link.

Apparently the stroke affected his left side, and he's left-handed. Hopefully that can be dealt with through physical therapy. My grandfather had a stroke, and I know he was able to get back some use of that half of his body, able to drive and walk at least, pick things up, things like that. Drawing is more of a fine motor skill thing, so I don't know how different that's going to be. That's one of the things that's scares me, that at some point my body's going to break in some way and I won't be able to do things I enjoy any longer. And it could just happen out of the blue. Hopefully Norm Breyfogle's going to make a full recovery with time.

Let's Take A MinuteTo Gush About Norm Breyfogle

{Edit: This was supposed to post Friday. I set it to do that, and it didn't. God damnit I haven't even upgraded to the new Blogger and it's screwing me over. Can't even enjoy a comic convention without something going wrong.}

I mentioned it in the review of Batman Beyond Unlimited #2 last week, but Norm Breyfogle does seem to favor those short, wide panels to depict a quick series of actions. He used it in the previous issue with the two hammer-wielding Jokers, as well as in the scene where Terry meets Dana's brother Doug. The thing it brought home was that he really likes to use them in threes, which I sort of remember from the Hellcat mini-series he did with Steve Engelhart in 2000. It's a way to highlight the beginning, middle, and end of some specific action, I guess. In the review, I mentioned the sequence when Doug cold cocks his father, so I thought I'd show it here.

Yes, it's another photograph, but it's not too bad. You can tell what's happening. I just want to talk a little about it. Dialogue by Adam Beechen, art by Breyfogle, colors by Andrew Elder, and letters by Saida Temofonte.

In the first panel, Doug's eyes and the movement with the towel draw our eye towards the center of the panel, where his father's arm and the word balloon take us over toward Dana on the far side. The second panel has the towel again drawing the eye to the right, but only a third of the way, instead of half. From there, the movement of Doug's left arm brings us to the strike on his father's chin and the jagged "KRAK" that accompanies it. Now that we're roughly halfway across, and seeing his father's face, we can follow his speech balloon over to where Dana's 'Doug!' is, which neatly shows us her reaction. In the final panel, you have his father's blood catching the eye's notice*, the balloon leading us to Doug, whose posture points towards Dana, who's leaning back towards the right edge of the panel.

What's nifty is, even as each panel is laid out so they each draw your eye from left to right, they're also laid out so you can read them on a diagonal. You could go from Doug's flip of the towel in Panel 1 (in the left third of the page), to the actual hit in Panel 2 (dead center), to Doug stepping over his father and moving in Dana's direction in Panel 3 (right third of the page).

The other nifty thing is, there's at least a second or two lapse between Panel 1 and 2, for Doug to have avoided his father falling on him, place the towel over his shoulders, and step over towards Dana, but we don't see it. We're like Dana, whose eyes are still focused on her unconscious father. She might be in shock to the extent, that she never noticed Doug moving until he was almost right in front of her. Those moments in between are blank for her and for us.

I didn't include it in the photo, but the panel after that is a close up of Doug giving Dana a kiss on the forehead and saying 'Love you, sis.', before the next panel pulls back to Dana sitting on the floor, alone in the bathroom with her bleeding father. It's a nice representation of the disconnect in Doug's mind between what he just did to his father, and the affection he feels for his sister. He doesn't see anything incongruous about his behavior, but Dana's sweating and terrified in both panels. She can't ignore what he just did. There's even a thick black border between the top three panels and the bottom one (which the Panel 4 partially overlaps), which presents that brief instance of violence as something separate from everything else, likes it's exists in its own pocket universe.

I feel like I should say something about Elder's colors. The way that their father is the large shape, mostly a heavy black color, versus Dana's lighter blue, and the pale colors of Doug's skin and towel. It's like their father should be the dominant presence, since his are the strongest colors, but he's being dismissed with contemptuous ease. He goes from being slightly taller than Doug, to being pulled a little shorter, to flat on the ground beneath him, and the extent to which the black of his coat dominates lessens with each panel, until the third one when Doug's dark blue pants and speech bubble are each overlapping it. Dana's light blue dress is probably the brightest object in the panel, which helps the reader keep her in mind even while she's essentially a spectator in all this. Doug's colors are the least visually striking, yet he's the one who has the power, and comes to dominate the scene.

* Does that seem like a lot of blood for an elbow to the chin? I've been fortunate to not have been struck that way, so I don't know, but it seems like a lot. Unless he bit through his tongue because he was caught off-guard. I imagine that would produce a lot of blood.