Nick Gazin's Comic Book Love-In #101

Hello My Fellow Comic Bookies,

My name is Nick Gazin, and this is my weekly comics review column for VICE, in which I review and discuss comics, zines, art books, and anything nerdy or arty that I think is worth sharing with you, the discerning lover of art and beauty.

Here's some news.

Heather Benjamin, the great artist and frequent contributor to VICE, is having an art show that opens on September 18. You should go. I'll be there.

Penelope Gazin, the great artist, VICE contributor, and also my sister is having an art show in Brooklyn on Friday at Tender Trap. You should go. I'll be there DJing.

Enough news. Here are some reviews in order of goodness. The most good is the first book. The last book is the least good.

Corto Maltese: Under the Sign of Capricorn and Corto Maltese: Beyond the Misty Isles
By Hugo Pratt, IDW

Corto Maltese is the main character in a series of popular Italian graphic novels that Hugo Pratt started making in the late 60s. Although Hugo Pratt is hugely influential and his Corto Maltese series has been translated into dozens of languages. It's a big deal all over the world, but somehow it's never been given a proper English-language, American printing. A few years back there was an attempt to publish it, but the publishers reformatted the panels, which was a supremely shitty move. The great masters of comics are thinking about composition on multiple levels. First there's the composition of the two-page spread, then the composition of the individual page, and finally the composition of the individual panel. Moving the panels around or isolating them as digital comics is fine if you're reading shit or have no taste, but when you're looking at great art, you don't fuck around and jumble up someone else's genius.

These new collections are oversized like the original European publications and printed on really nice, heavy paper. The cover flaps unfold to show old nautical maps of the locations that we see in the stories. Everything about these books is beautiful except the covers, which feel very dated to me. The drop shadow, the giant Euro comics logo in the bottom left. It's just not interesting. When you look at old BD volumes from the 60s to the 80s, the covers are always beautiful and have these great colors. The covers of these books are like camouflage. These covers do not betray how great the interiors are. That's my only complaint about these books.

Corto Maltese is a great adventure comic in the vein of Tintin, Carl Barks's Donald Duck comics, or Indiana Jones. The stories are set in the 1910s and focus on Corto Maltese, a sailor who travels around and metes out justice in a chaotic and hostile world. It's a little like Popeye—if Popeye were a sexy-looking Italian guy, and there were no jokes. The stories contain betrayal and romance and sadness and discuss themes like colonialism and other important and meaningful stuff. Although Corto is a white man visiting a lot of "exotic" locales, he always interacts with the people from other places on the same level and they speak intelligently. The only savages in Corto Maltese are the power-hungry politicians. Although the books are carefully researched and feel like they could be plausible, there are references to magic and a character named Gold Mouth who seems to be centuries old.

The art in these books is top-notch, inky artsiness. Scratchy tight lines done with efficiency and then beautiful flat areas of black swabbed onto them creating a pretty, noir world of absolute values. There's some real neat and transgressive stuff done with word balloons as well. A word balloon containing dialogue's curve will almost perfectly interlock with the bridge of a character's nose. Sometimes the balloons will be partially behind objects in the background.

I interviewed Dean Mullaney, who translated the original comics and put this book series together for IDW. Dean Mullaney is the Eisner and Harvey award-winning editor of the Library of American Comics. Here is that.

VICE: What are your duties as the creative director of the Library of American Comics?
Dean Mullaney: I decide what books we publish and also decide the formats and dimensions, choose the paper stock… I also edit nearly all of the books and design many of them.

Can you tell me about the Library of American Comics?
LOAC is an imprint of IDW Publishing, and is the leading publisher of archival collections of classic newspaper strips and books about leading comics artists. Since 2007, we've released more than a hundred books, including the three-volume Alex Toth series that won the Eisner and Harvey awards for best book about comics, and the Eisner for best book design this year

*Is Corto Maltese modeled on a young Keith Richards? Was there competition from other publishers in North America to do these books?*
From what I understand, just about every comics publisher has at one time tried getting the English rights. In fact, I was unsuccessful in trying to get the rights more than 30 years ago! It was LOAC's Milton Caniff and Alex Toth books that brought us to the attention of Patricia Zanotti, Pratt's longtime assistant who controls Pratt's literary estate. Based on what we did with Caniff and Toth, Patricia trusted us with Pratt's masterpiece.

Am I crazy in thinking that Corto Maltese was the sexiest adventure comic protagonist at the time of his creation?
If thinking that qualifies you as crazy, then join the club. In this respect, Corto is very much like the young Sean Connery, whose sexy and dangerous attitude appealed to both genders and various sexual orientations.

Have you noticed how much Corto Maltese looks like Paul Pope?
Shouldn't that be: "Have you noticed how much Paul Pope looks like Corto Maltese?!" Ha!

Was Hugo Pratt influenced by Alex Toth? They seem very comparable in a lot of ways.
Pratt, as a writer and artist, was influenced first and foremost by Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates. Seeing Terry in 1937 is what made Pratt want to become a cartoonist. Was he also influenced by Toth? Certainly—especially in terms of his minimalism and modern sense of design. One look at some of Pratt's mid-60s stories, such as Luck Star O'Hara (published in Argentina), show a clear influence of Toth's 77 Sunset Strip and FBI Story comics from the late 50s. Conversely, I think Alex was, in turn, influenced by Pratt. Toth's 1982 Bravo for Adventure dream-sequence story has strong echoes of Corto Maltese from both Rendez-Vous in Bahia and The Ethiopian.

One thing that I love about both Pratt and Toth is that they stage their characters in poses that you've never seen before.

One of the things that interests me about Corto Maltese is his insistence that he has no morals.
Corto might say that he has no morals, but we know better. When push comes to shove, he always takes a moral position. How that moral position is defined is what makes his actions so interesting. Corto is usually found on the side of the underdog, of the oppressed, and against the hypocrisy of the ruling class, xenophobic nationalists, and organized religion. He's more at home with an "honest" scoundrel like Rasputin than mealy-mouthed oligarchs who say one thing and do another.

I love the mixture of tight pen work and the loose expressive brushwork that goes on top of it. Do you know if he would complete each page or panel at a time, or did he do the pen lines for an entire chapter at a time and then do the brush work in one second stage?
He approached the stories differently. In The Ballad of the Salty Sea, Pratt drew it as full pages one at a time. For the stories in our new book Under the Sign of Capricorn and the subsequent couple of books, Pratt worked on half-page art boards, although he still drew the stories straight through. Beginning with Corto Maltese in Siberia, Pratt drew one tier at a time. If he didn't like a specific panel, he was known to cut it out, place it on a table, and possibly use it later!

Do you know how much reference material Pratt would use to draw the comic?

He carried out extensive research for all of his stories, whether it was the mysticism of the Kabbalah, military uniforms of the period, or the tattoos of South American indigenous people. For The Secret Rose graphic novel, he researched Swiss history and mythology, and also consulted the French alchemist André Malby. Pratt also researched his stories simply by living in various countries of the world, by his extensive traveling, and incredible curiosity and powers of observation.

Did these comics originally appear in color?
No. All of the Corto stories were first published in black and white, except for the last two, which were published both in color and black and white.

I'd like to talk about the book as an object right now. In almost all regards I think this book is perfect. The spine, back cover, flaps that unfold into old nautical maps, the chapter pages, the paper quality—everything is perfect to me, with the exception of the front cover. I think it kind of looks like a boring textbook. The drop shadow and placement of the logos seem sort of cheap to me, but it also feels like it's not as exciting as a lot of the covers of previous Corto Maltese books that came out from NBM and Casterman. I think that knowing how to design the covers of reprinted material is tricky, but I feel like the cover could be both more consistent with the original material as well as more dynamic. Would you be willing to talk about the design of the book and the cover?
Sure. I'm glad that you noticed the paper stock. I looked at dozens of samples, finally settling on this very thick 160-gram stock because it holds the ink so well. In reproducing Pratt's art, it's essential to capture his rich blacks in contrast to his use of empty negative spaces. You'll also notice that the paper is not a stark, cold white. It's just slightly off-white so that it accentuates that contrast without jamming it in your eye.

Regarding the cover, I guess it simply comes down to a difference of opinion. Designing the cover for a reprint book is tricky (trust me, I know—I've designed more than 100 of them in the last seven years), but coming up with a design that will work for a set of 12 books is trickier still. I like to design an entire series up front, including the back cover and spine; there's nothing worse than being halfway through a series and realizing that you don't have enough art that blends with the designs already done. Before I ever begin designing a series of covers, I need to fully immerse myself in the material. Not just one book, but the entire series. I read each book again and again over the course of six to eight months until I felt completely connected to it. What is it that makes Corto… Corto? Is it the action, the adventure? Those are situations that help explain what the character is all about, but these are not action-adventure stories in the traditional sense so action-oriented covers would be misleading.

What fascinates me about Corto is his attitude. That's what I believe the covers needs to convey—that laconic, seemingly dispassionate, enigmatic, exotic attitude. Corto is also, as you say, sexy and dangerous. I felt the best way to convey that attitude is with the incredible facial expressions Pratt drew. For the first cover I wanted Corto to look straight out at us. In your face. Eye contact. As if he's challenging us. On another cover in the series he's looking off to the side, smoking a cigarette, in essence saying to the reader, "So what the fuck are you looking at?" Between the 12 covers, I've tried to convey the various attitudes and aspects of the character.

We also need to take into account that the overwhelming majority of people who will buy this series have never previously read a Corto Maltese story. The covers need to be representative of what they're getting inside. The stories are in black and white, so that also spoke to me that a black-and-white image is appropriate. Background elements tell us more about the series—but they need to be in a secondary position. The map conveys travel and adventure—and each map is contemporary to the stories; it is a map that Corto could have used in 1916 or 1920—and the seagulls convey movement and Corto's peripatetic existence. Pratt said he loved drawing seagulls because of the sense of freedom their flight conveyed.

We're also publishing a series of six limited-edition hardcovers aimed at readers who already know and love Pratt and Corto. For these I'm using some of Pratt's fantastic watercolors.

I am overwhelmingly grateful for this book and its high production values. I still feel like the cover is less grabbing than it could be. Tell me about these watercolor-cover versions? How much will those be?
We haven't settled on pricing for the six limited edition hardcovers. Probably around $100 each. These books will be close to original art size (approximately 12" x 16") and include the contents of two of the trade paperbacks… plus lots of extras and background material, sketches, photo reference, etc.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past
By Shotaro Ishinomori, Perfect Square/Viz Media/Nintendo

This comic was originally published in Nintendo Power magazine, serialized in 12 installments over the entirety of 1992. For me and millions of other kids and immature adults, it was probably the first Japanese comic that we had ever read. The common tropes of manga were new to me and stood out. The simply drawn characters in front of the complex backgrounds, the speed lines, the carefully paced-out panels that aren't crammed with tons of expository dialogue were all new to me. This comic was great then, and it's still great.

The plot of the comic is pretty familiar fantasy territory. Link, a young man who looks like a cross between Robin Hood and Peter Pan, is entrusted with saving the fantasy kingdom of Hyrule and rescuing the Princess Zelda from an evil wizard named Agahnim. Over the course of his journey, he makes friends and fells foes and confronts inner demons and returns the world to peace.

This is probably the most beautiful comic ever made that was based on a video game. I recently started playing the game this comic was loosely based on, and it's great but very simple. Shotaro Ishinomori makes the flat world of the Zelda game into a rich one that you explore along with Link. We see a lot of beautiful and frightening things. For the most part, Link is traveling alone in this story but he's talking to himself and it really feels like his words are asides to us, the readers.

Franky (Et Nicole)_#3
Various authors, Les Requins Marteaux Éditions

This is an insanely pretty 300-page French comics anthology where it seems like the loose theme is sex on the beach and sexually aggressive women. I really wish I read French. There are a few English-speaking comic people in here, including Jason Murphy, HTML Flowers, and there's an interview with Johnny Ryan. There's around 30 contributors to this book, and none of them are bad. All of them are good, and a few are great.

Monument Valley Deluxe Art Card Set
Published by Iam8bit

It's hard to imagine that an iPhone game could be beautiful, but Monument Valley is beautiful and also crazy. You wander around these M. C. Escher landscapes as a teeny little blank person and put a rose on someone's tomb and stuff. Iam8bit made this set of eight 5 x 8-inch cards with some of the pretty, pretty levels from the game on them in an envelope that velcros shut. They seem kinda small to frame, but they are pretty to take out and look at anyway.

Tom Tom Magazine Issue 21

Tom Tom, the magazine for female drummers, has gone from being a cool idea that didn't necessarily seem like it was going to last to being this really beautiful, well- crafted thing. It's now on its 21st issue and is a really fucking beautiful object. Great layout and design, good articles, great paper quality, good photos, and also sheet music for songs. Great idea, great execution.

That's it for this week. See you next Wednesday. I shall never forget the time when we were together in our dreams… Follow me on Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr.