For information on stopping the spread of COVID-19, and on what to do if you are quarantined, have a look at the World Health Organization site.
Back to a little bad girl action from the early 90s. I read another issue of Lady Death the last time I did a series highlighting Black creators, also illustrated by today's featured artist Steven Hughes. That wiki article is quite sparse, but here's a really lovely obituary that lays out Mr. Hughes' importance to comics in the early 90s, and highlights his position as founder of Chaos! Comics and as one of the most successful Black comics creators around. They're not really my thing, though the last time I did have some stuff to say about the page layouts (still amazing - Mr. Hughes' panel borders verge on the invisible) and the myth-building that was going on. A couple of issues later, and I'm not really sure what's happened, but this one is pretty much a 20ish page battle between first Lady Demon (Death) and Purgatori, and then Lady Death and Satan. Not really much of the myth-building, though I guess the ending, with LD taking over Hell, is pretty mythic. I will admit to a morbid curiosity as to how her story eventually plays out.
But on the other hand, though Mr. Hughes' command of it is expert, the big boobs skinny waists bad girl look is just far too distracting. I always come back to Kill la Kill, one of my favourite animes when I'm considering the overabundance of exposed female flesh in a comic. In the anime, the characters dress in costumes every bit as revealing as Lady Death's. But at some point in the series we realize that we've stopped paying attention to the sexualized bodies because the story is so engrossing. At least, that has been the experience of myself and others I know. I think the trouble is that this doesn't happen in most of the Chaos! comics I've read. The physicality of the character is just so..there that it's never not impacting the story. And I won't bother with the why question. We all know why the characters are presented that way.
But the thing is that, as I mentioned last time, there's something intriguing about the story of Lady Death. She's a badass female character, takes no shit from Satan himself, and seems to actually have a well-wrought backstory. And Mr. Hughes' art is just wonderful. His characters all look different physically (with the exception of every lead female character), they all move through their environments in different ways (I noticed in this issue the different way Satan moves through the battle as compared to Lady Death - each character has their own way of expressing physicality), and his layouts are interesting without sacrificing logic.
So I remain torn about the series itself, though it appears to have all the ingredients for something quite cool. It's just difficult to see past the boobs.
More to follow.
Further Reading and Related Posts
There's a bit more on Chaos! Comics on the blog, including a section in my ongoing thoughts on the intersections between music and comics.
Note: While I am focussing very heavily on only one creator, generally, in these posts, I never want to lose sight of the fact that comics are a collaborative medium. While the Black creators are taking necessary precedence right now, you'll always be able to find any other primary creators' names in the tags. In fact, in a lot of ways it's this spirit of collaboration that we ought to be taking away from comics at the moment and figuring out how we can apply it to our broken society.
No comments:
Post a Comment