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Milton Knight's work is just amazing. I love his revamp of early cartoon aesthetics, both the visual and social aspects. Midnite, our eponymous heroine, takes aim at her detractors and enemies, but also at the overtly racist tone of the cartoons that inspire her adventures.
Early Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons play fast and loose with physics, both of the world surrounding the characters and of the characters themselves. It's as if the characters and the environment are in a constant state of movement, which can be a difficult thing to portray in a static comic image, but Mr. Knight's art manages it wonderfully. Characters will expand with rage to fill a panel as they move through a world that seems to shift and change with each panel. But Mr. Knight's work also draws on the comic strips of the era as well, with small cartoon characters hanging about the edges of each panel offering commentary or little jokes.
A similar thing happens with the writing of H.P. Lovecraft - stick with me here. Lovecraft himself was an awfully racist human being, an aspect of his thought that, once realized, presents itself quite blatantly in his work. But contemporary writers have taken Lovecraft out of the works, as much as possible, and made his stories much more accessible. We can't ignore the fact that the early 20th century was an overtly and damagingly racist time, but what we can do is take the nostalgic lens through which we often view these older eras and smash it, making room for conversations about what it was really like, and for fantasies like Mr. Knight's that suggest what it might have been like had the era not been so steeped in racially-motivated oppression.
More to follow.
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