Saturday Splash Page #35

 

"Crash Position," in White Lily #5, by Preston Poulter (writer), Jake Bilbao (artist), Kumar? (inker), Alonso Espinoza (colorist), Taylor Esposito (letterer)

The story of World War II Soviet ace Lilya Litvak and her friend/at least for one night love interest Katya Budanova, from their days as flight instructors for the male pilots, through their being assigned to combat units, their triumphs and losses.

Both Lilya and Katya are in an unpleasant circumstance. Lilya's a Polish Jew, so while she's got zero love for the Nazis, life in the USSR isn't exactly a bed of roses, either. Katya's Ukrainian, so again, someone who might not have a lot of love for Stalin or the Soviets. But, of course, they have to play at being loyal citizens, even when their superiors insult, degrade or generally act like they should be grateful living under Soviet rule.

Lilya is the main character, as even much of the time spent on Katya is focused on her attraction to Lilya. It's Katya who gives Lilya the white lily that becomes her call sign. And for the most part, Lilya is the one who drives the story. She's the one who mocks the male pilots they're training for being cowards or throwing up at the sight of Nazi planes, who out-flies her flight instructor when they're given the chance to fly real combat aircraft. Lilya is the one shot down over Stalingard and has to make it back to the base (though Poulter glosses over the particulars of that).

Katya is mostly carried along in Lilya's wake. Not that she isn't a good pilot herself, but the story doesn't give the impression Katya was excited at the prospect of fighting on the front lines, so much as she was good enough to get the opportunity and it would keep her close to Lilya. A lot of her page time is devoted to worrying about Lilya, or being disappointed that Lilya is attracted to the male captain that commands their squadron.

The first two issues were drawn by Lovalle Davis, who unfortunately passed away shortly after finishing the second issue. Jake Bilbao had been working on covers for the series, and took over interior duties as well. Both artists took an unusual approach during the air combat scenes. They essentially drew from the bottom of the page to the top. It allowed for more a widescreen feel, I guess, but you had to turn the book on its side. They also tended to intersperse smaller panels through the page, and often drew those in the shape of the plane's canopy or crosshairs. That was a nice touch, because it let them give a sense of the scale of the battle, just how many planes were up there at once, but made sure the reader didn't lose track of the main characters.

The mini-series could easily have been six issues, considering issue 5 is nearly 40 pages itself, but it fits with the overall arc of the story. When Lilya experienced a loss and considered ending it all, she was able to go forward out of desire to keep fighting Nazis. Once she's gone, Katya is basically playing out the string.

What I Bought 7/6/2021 - Part 2

Somewhere along the line in May, the fourth issue of White Lily came out and I missed it. I only figured that out when the fifth and final issue came out at the end of June, so I'm just going to review both today.

White Lily #4 and 5, by Preston Poulter (writer), Jake Bilbao (penciler), Kumar (inker?), Alonso Espinoza (colorist), Taylor Esposito (letterer) - I know it takes some work to heat up engines in a Russian winter, but this seems excessive.

These last two issues cover a lot of ground. Lilya's fiance, Captain Alexi, is shot down over Stalingrad. Unlike Lilya, he doesn't survive. She goes into a depression, reaching the point where she tries to light her fighter on fire while she's inside it. She decides to focus on killing the enemy instead. Death will find her on its own soon enough. Once the Nazis surrender at Stalingrad, Lilya and Katya are sent to be flight instructors. Katya's happy to be out of the line of fire (and have more chances to woo Lilya), but Lilya misses combat. 

The two of them do have one night of passion, but Lilya gets her wish and is assigned to a frontline squadron at Kursk. Katya, loyal friend/pining lover, goes against her instincts and follows. They're starting from square one almost in having to prove to the commander that women can be successful combat pilots (even though both of them are aces already), but they pull off their first mission, which had killed the last four teams that tried it. Eventually though, Lilya's time is up, when she runs afoul of two Nazi aces at once. Katya has a depressing visit home for leave to try and deal with her grief, and returns to the front. As she puts it, she would 'rather fight the Nazis than her mother. At least fighting them would serve some purpose.' She finds the two aces and kills one, but the other gets her. It's unclear if she at least managed to shoot him down. I think they may have partially collided, but we don't see his plane go spinning off into the horizon, so I don't know.

There's a lot in there I didn't cover. The last two issues are almost 65 pages combined. They could have made this a six-issue mini-series and I wouldn't have batted an eye. Lilya being a harsh training instructor. A sequence after Stalingrad where all their male wingmen start treating them like just sexual objects again. Which is a depressing recurring thing. They get some respect when the heat is on, but as soon as things start looking up, they're dismissed again. A bit during Kursk where Lilya and their Captain share Polish and Russian folktales. Katya doesn't get to share one from Lithuania until it's too late for Lilya to hear it.

The section where Lilya falls into depression after Alexi's death, Bilbao uses mostly smaller panels in rows, to show the progression of time. For example, three panels showing a steadily increasing pile of cigarette butts beside her bed. There's also a bit where the speech balloons of anyone speaking around her are just filled with squiggles to show she's not registering what's being said.

I think Poulter should have held off on the dialogue in Katya's death scene. The last few panels, as she's reaching for a blood-stained white lily she placed in her cockpit are kind of marred by all the "GHEH gheh gahuuuuuuuuh" sound effects for death gurgles. I think the fact we saw her take several rounds to the chest four pages earlier and the way she slumps over in the last panel would tell us she was on her last legs well enough. Bilbao's art could convey what needed to be well enough on its own.

Bilbao also manages to shift his art style a bit for the folktale parts, especially for the Captain's one panel story about the bird trying to touch the sun, and Katya's about the girl whose evil stepmother makes her ask the Baba Yaga for the secret of fire. The latter especially, he mimics the sort of medieval storybook picture feel for most of it. Not so much the very end, when the girl has become fire herself and returns for revenge, but Katya's also clearly thinking of Lilya throughout, and especially at that point, so it fits. Reality intrudes on the fantasy.

I really enjoyed this whole mini-series.

What I Bought 5/19/2021 - Part 1

I almost found every comic I went looking for this week. The only one I missed was Runaways, which was not the one I expected to whiff on. But it all fell out rather neatly because we can look at two third issues today, and two second issues on Monday.

Black Knight #3, by Si Spurrier (writer), Sergio Davila (penciler), Sean Parsons (inker), Arif Prianto and Chris Sotomayor (colorists), Cory Petit (letterer) - How will Thor escape from his prison within the Ebony Blade? What's that? You say he can create portals with Mjolnir? Never mind then.

Dane, Jacks, and Elsa go hunting for the Ebony Chalice and end up in some mystical wasteland where they encounter Mordred and his sidekick. Elsa's having a lot of fun trying to kill the sidekick while Dane and Mordred take swings futilely at each other. The two of them are interrupted by the land itself creating phantoms that tell them what they want to hear. Mordred shakes of Faux-Arthur's love first, and so Elsa splats Dane's head with her shotgun so Mordred can't swipe the sword while he's confused. Dane regenerates, extremely angry, and Mordred bails. Meanwhile, Merlin's old raven shows Jacks what happened with Sir Percy fought a younger Thor, and then leads her to the Chalice. Which Dane is going to drink from, which Mordred is very excited about.

Given my nature to suspect cutesy surprise reveals and double-crosses, I'm half-expecting the raven to be behind all this. Bitter that it was cast aside into this place by Merlin because 'a wizard's familiar smacks excessive of the pagan ways.' Probably not, although the notion of the raven wielding the sword, the shield, the dagger, etc. is amusing. I'm also wondering if Dane gaining understanding would make him incapable of wielding the Ebony Blade. Mordred figures Dane can't let himself be happy because he won't be able to use the sword, so he at least wants to understand. If he understands, whatever he's going to understand, does that cut him off at the knees?

 

Prianto and Sotomayor go for brighter colors in the flashback to Thor's run-in with Percy than in the rest of the book. Granted, that part is apparently under bright sunlight, but there's also an element that things started out well, that Camelot was a bright and honorable place once, but now it was all leading to a dark and dreary end, full of fog and ruin like the place Dane, Elsa, and Jacks spend the issue. The blade drew out Percy's worst habits and he became something awful. If Dane keeps on, he'll end up the same way presumably.

White Lily #3, by Preston Poulter (writer), Jake Bilbao (penciler), Kumar (inker), Alonso Espinoza (colorist), Taylor Esposito (letterer) - I'm honestly guessing on everything past Bilbao, because the credits on the inside cover haven't changed from the first issue's.

Back in action, Lilya gets shot down and has to bail out into Stalingrad. She manages to lure a Nazi chasing her into someone else's grenade trap, and spends the night with a grieving mother who eats bread made of sawdust and has left her deceased son frozen outside. I guess digging through frozen soil would be difficult. Making it back to base, she's ready for more, while Katya and Alexi worry. Alexi worries so much he sort of proposes, and they end up as wingmen. Alexi's old wingman, the captain of the squadron, ends up flying with Katya. And the issue more or less ends after another mission when a downed Naiz pilot is brought in asking the meet the flier who shot him down. He doesn't believe it was a woman, and he's less happy it was a Jewish woman. Well tough shit, Fritz, count yourself lucky they left you alive long enough to satisfy your curiosity.

I'm surprised Poulter didn't spend more time on Lilya making it back to base. The woman who shelters her for the night says she doesn't know how Lilya will get across the Volga to her squadron, and we never find out. The story just cuts to the airfield and Katya being overjoyed when Lilya shows up in the back of a truck. Maybe it wasn't that interesting and Lilya made it uneventfully, but it seems odd to have a character specifically wonder about that and then just gloss over it entirely.

So, with Lovalle Davis' passing, Jake Bilbao, who has been drawing the covers thus far, steps in as interior artist as well. He joins the ranks of Harley Quinn artist Chad Hardin as someone whose work I originally encountered in the Bloodrayne comics I was buying the first few years this blog existed. Unexpected encounter, to be sure. His lines are a bit softer than Davis', characters' faces are rounder. Lilya's hair looks like it got styled a bit more. The inking and shading on faces is cut back a lot, especially for the women. I guess they look prettier. Depends on your aesthetic preferences. 

 

Though there aren't as many in this issue, the flipping of the page on its side for the air combat scenes continues. So was that always something Poulter wanted for the more widescreen effect, or was it Davis' idea and Bilbao is trying to maintain consistency?

What I Bought 5/1/2021 - Part 2

I'd hoped to have more comics to discuss in this round, but I couldn't find a copy of the first issue of You Promised Me Darkness, and the first issue of Jenny Zero, which was originally supposed to be out two weeks ago, is only just out today. So one book is what you get.

White Lily #2, by Preston Poulter (writer), Lovalle Davis (penciler), Walden Wong and Diana Greenhalgh (inkers), Alonso Espinoza (colorist), Taylor Esposito (letterer) - German bombers are like potato chips, shoot down one and you're hungry for another.

Lilya goes from winning her first dogfight to getting the instructor she beat to take her to bed. Lady who knows what she wants and gets it. It leaves her friend Katya pining, and one of the other pilots, Raisa, jealous. That goes on for six months, and then they're sent to Stalingrad, because most of the air units there are dead. Lilya shoots down a plane in their first real battle, and she Katya, and two other pilots are transferred to the same squadron as Alexi, the instructor she beat. Who Lilya's been keeping up a long-distance relationship with. No time for her to focus on that, because they're really going to get mixed up in the madness of Stalingrad very soon.

Davis continues to use the sideways page approach for the air combat scenes. I think it works better in this issue, because now Lilya's mixed up in huge dogfights with dozens or hundreds of other planes, so it allows for him to simultaneously show the scale of the fight, but have room to focus on smaller details within it. 

It becomes like a vertical double-page splash, where the backdrop is all the other planes flitting around, with Lilya or someone else occasionally in the midground. Then Davis intersperses smaller panels throughout that zoom in on a particular bit of action, or show the perspective from that fighter's cockpit (and he draws some of those panels in the shape of the cockpit glass).

There's also a page where Raisa makes a snide comment about Lilya constantly receiving letters from Alexi, where Davis spends six panels on Lilya pulling out papers, rolling the letter up in them, lighting it, and taking a puff. Then at the bottom of the page, she blows the smoke in Raisa's face. I like the deliberate step-by-step approach there, showing how far she's going for this brief, but satisfying bit of spite.

The bad news is, at the end of the issue there's a note from Poulter that Davis passed away not long after his finished this issue. Which is sad for a lot of reasons, obviously, beyond him not getting to finish this series. That's a low note to finish a review on, but it feels odd to go on discussing the differences in Wong and Greenhalgh's inking styles after that.

What I Bought 3/2/2021 - Part 1

I originally hoped to have these comics in time for this to go up Monday, but that didn't happen. Mail service difficulties of some sort, I guess. We'll get to a pair of Marvel comics on Friday, but for today we've got one mini-series that's wrapping up, and another that's just starting.

Kaiju Score #4, by James Patrick (writer), Rem Broo (artist), Dave Sharpe (letterer) - Don't look at me, Pierson, I'm glad you're dead.

The kaiju fight is on, but Marco figures there's still a chance to crack the safe because Mujara will lose quickly. And for a minute, he's right, and Michelle cracks the safe. At which point Pierson knifes Marco, laughs at his request to let Michelle live, and then dies in an extremely satisfying manner when the monster fight starts back up. Because Mujara didn't get the memo she couldn't win.

Seriously, Broo draws this one silent panel of a bloody smear on the wall and one of Pierson's hands stuck to it, and it was just, really good. Patrick had done a good job making Pierson an entirely unlikable (if perceptive) dick, and Broo helped that along with the obnoxious man-bun and all the sneering faces, and then they gift us with a lovely send-off. Actually, I wish Broo made that panel bigger.

So that's good. Monster fight over, backstabbing asshole dead, safe opened, everything's roses. Except for the little matter of water displacement when the beaten monster retreats to the sea. But Marco comes up with a way to protect the loot and not die. So yes, everything's good. Except for him not feeling as satisfied as he expected. But there's always another job.

I'm guessing Marco's feeling unfulfilled because he's finally completed his dream. He actually pulled off one of his ludicrous heists. But without that to drive him, he's left adrift. You'd think he could appreciate his success a little more, but humans are weird like that. As for Michelle, Marco was apparently right that she wasn't going to leave this life as she said, and she seems to have gotten a taste for more high end jobs. She's gone from being like the little sister on her crew, to setting up jobs and hiring talent. The ability to self-motivate is a valuable one.

One thing I am intensely grateful for is that this actually told a complete story, and didn't set it up as one of those things where the heist has repercussions that cause problems. You know, where Marco and Michelle have now pissed off some other powerful person by stealing his paintings, and must pull off another monster-related job to settle things. There was something I'd read in one of the solicits that made me think that was going to happen, and I was just dreading it.

But, it didn't. So, hooray!

White Lily #1, by Preston Poulter (writer), Jack Nolan (breakdowns), Lovalle Davis (penciler), Walden Wong and Diana Greenhalgh (inkers), Alonso Espinosa (colorist), Taylor Esposito (letterer) - They look so happy! Yeah, that's not gonna last.

Lilya Litvak is a Polish Jew in the Soviet Union, who, when the story begins four months after the Nazis invaded, is a flight instructor. Katya Budanova is also a flight instructor, and possibly Lilya's girlfriend. I mean, she offers her a flower (the white lily) to work into the fur collar of her flight jacket, that means something, right? 

They spend their days taking young (male) pilots up in biplanes trying to teach them how to fly. They're both drafted into a new, all-women fighter squadron, although their instructor doesn't seem to think much of training women, and tells them they're really just going to be delivering planes to the front, and that they should dive and flee if they encounter Nazis. 

Well yeah, a Yak-1 against an Me-109 is a huge mismatch. You had to get to like the Yak-7 before it was worth a shit. Anyway, Lilya shows what she can do, and although her Captain (the proverbial old battleaxe of a woman) is pissed, her instructor is impressed.

Poulter works a bit about Lilya's turmoil over her heritage into the story. The Soviet Union has not really been kind to Poles, or Jews. We see in a flashback (as she and Katya recite the Citizens' Pledge) they hung her father right in front of her when she was a child. Her mother is very disappointed in her for helping the Soviets. But I think Lilya figures at least the Soviets are giving her a chance to fight a different group of people who would kill her simply for existing, which is more than the Nazis would do if she were under their control. There may turn out to be more to it than that, but after one issue, I think she just really wants to be able to hit back for once.

It's interesting that while we see Lilya lose her father in her flashback, Katya's is her as a young girl being excited about seeing a plane fly overhead and getting the pilot to wave back to her. Also that her mother didn't approve (and still doesn't, since she doesn't think fighting is work for women.) So Katya might be driven more by her love of flying, and maybe the opportunity to be herself more.

One stylistic thing either Nolan or Davis does (Nolan isn't listed in the credits on the inside cover, but is listed in a small credits box on the 3rd page/title page) during flying scenes, they flip the page on its side, as in the example above. That's how it looks in the comic, like that sideways Spider-Man comic Todd MacFarlane did. 

It's like a widescreen movie, probably to offer more space, the illusion of the open air the pilots are in. The pages are nice; I like that they use the cockpits or gun-sights as panel boundaries. But it's a little awkward when you turn a page, and then you have to turn the comic to keep reading, then turn it back a couple of pages later. Maybe they could have just run that across the top half of two pages, then used the bottom half for either another widescreen panel, or smaller ones if it was time to go back to a more conventional layout.

I'm curious to watch the colors in this as the story advances, because the first issue everything is surprisingly bright and clear and clean looking. But Lilya and Katya haven't been involved in the fighting yet. It's still early days, and I wonder if Espinosa will muddy things up as thing progress. I know Lilya's going to be in action near Stalingrad by issue 3, that's going to be a very different experience from avoiding a single scout plane while on a training run.