Cimorene

So we started watching the newly released Netflix series The Umbrella Academy, based on Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance's award-winning comic books.

... Number 5, the time-traveling adult trapped in the body of a small child, was kind of my favorite in the comic book, and part of the weirdness was obviously how young he looked. They made him 13 in the series, and the actor who played him was 14 for filming (which makes him 15 this year).

He looked familiar to me (he wasn't, he just looks a bit like someone else) and so, trying to place him, I looked him up on IMDb and his biography hit me with this:

Within a few months he had booked two network pilots, a film starring Tyler Blackburn, and an episode of "Modern Family." [...] In June 2018, Aidan made history becoming the youngest United Nations Ambassador of all time after five years of working as an Ambassador to numerous environmental organizations. [...] Aidan is currently recording his first album as a solo artist and plans a world tour following the release between seasons of The Umbrella Academy.

After we paused the show I read it more carefully and found that all-important phrase, "[h]is father being in the industry". Since the author of this wordy, over-capitalized and eccentrically-punctuated tale had also written one other bio, I clicked and discovered from his dad's even more bewildering bio that he was in film production/finance (and a paragraph of other things, all after "Intelligence field"). LOL.

The tough thing about letting The Umbrella Academy be my introduction to comics wasn't the writing. I could tell right off that it was excellent and, after all, bad writing is no surprise to you if you've ever read books, let alone fanfiction.

No, the tough thing is that Gabriel Bá's art is not only excellent - execution-wise it's probably in the top 1% - but also has an incredibly distinct style, and its uniqueness, aside from being memorable and full of character, is imaginative and playful.

If you search about for another comic to flip through, the art is not only a step down in quality (and that's even when the second GN my wife bought was Watchmen), but a disappointing step back into a more formulaic system of imagery. Way and Bá play with the genre and are masters of it; most comics I've picked up and flipped through (the ones I've read are much fewer, mainly for feminist reasons having nothing to do with the art) plod dully along within the genre, mistaking it for the limits of possibility, not even realizing what they're doing - like plebefic.

Some of the books Wax has bought have had nice art. We recently bought Volume 1 of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, which has some stunning visual design and blocking in the lines and ink, but possibly the worst, most repulsive coloring imaginable. (effex tells me the early volumes were re-colored in later editions, and we will have to be careful to purchase those if possible, now.) And I just got Volume 1 of newish Vertigo title Madame Xanadu, which has really beautiful line-art & coloring by Amy Reeder Hadley and Guy Major. We've also bought a special GN of Witchblade set in feudal Japan drawn not too badly by [I had to go check] Billy Tan, with some truly excellent coloring by Steve Firchow.

But none of these I've seen have so far approached the innovation and the sheer coolness of Bá's deliberately stylized noir approach, which reminds me of Batman: The Animated Series from my childhood (which received design awards at the time, I believe). (I'm sure there are other genius artists working in the industry whose work I have not happened to encounter, and this is not a cry for recs, because I still don't intend to explore comics widely and certainly not on the basis of art. I try not to buy books that don't pass the Bechdel test, for one thing, and I prefer to save most of my book budget for female protagonists.)