The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 46: The Clockmaker #4, May 2003

Okay, I get it now. The Clockmaker is a play. The series, or at least these four issues, make much more sense in that context. In a play we don't necessarily have room or time for exposition, nor for movement to too many different locations. Act One introduces the main characters, gives us enough of their personalities to make sense of decisions and conversations, and provides a place in which these things can occur. And then ends on a crux point that changes the direction and scope of the action.

I think I'm gonna have to track down act two.

My understanding is that the art of the next act is not reproduced 1:1, which is a shame as I really did enjoy the size of the artwork here. It reminds you that comics started out in that tabloid size and that the art was far more spectacular (in that it was a spectacle) than it is in current comics. I think we see artists like Jack Kirby and Bryan Hitch using the smaller contemporary venue to its fullest, but not too many other artists do. Or they use it in a way that appears to be self-limiting. Having the 1:1 reproduction size in The Clockmaker, coupled with the notion of the series as a play rather than a serialized story (or as well as) really creates a singular comics experience. I wonder if it's been reprinted, and if so, in what format?

Okay, moving on from The Clockmaker tomorrow. Moving through the collection, Neil Gaiman's 1602 is next up, but I'm not sure I feel like reading that. I've also dug out the four issues of The Score from Piranha Press, so maybe that. But, fair warning, we're having a "Death by Whiskey" party this evening, so tomorrow might be a fill-in post.

Unless I can find a comic about either whiskey or hangovers.....

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 45: The Clockmaker #3, April 2003

Things ramp up a bit in this issue of The Clockmaker, though I'm not entirely certain how it's all going to wrap up in the next issue. I know the second act of the series was published as a graphic novel, so I'm hoping for some kind of ending to the first act in tomorrow's issue. But here's the thing...I'm not entirely certain what there is to wrap up. Yes, there are mysteries surrounding the deaths of Astrid's father and brother at the beginning of the series, and around Herbert, the man who lives in the pendulum, but these mysteries have been only very, very slightly hinted at. The majority of the series so far has been Astrid whining about being forced into the life of a clockworker, and Hans telling her what a stupid little girl she is. Again, much as I enjoy the over-sized format of the book in terms of what it does for the art, it does no favours for the story.

What I'm hoping for is this: that the end of tomorrow's issue will intrigue me enough to go out and track down act two. The world that Krueger has built here looks cool, but looks can only carry a comic so far. I could imagine the story of these first three issues actually being a first issue in a series, especially with the end of issue #3. But to get to the point of feeling like I've read one issue by the time I've read three issues points to a flaw. On the other hand, you have to experiment every now and again in order to understand what about a medium does and does not work. Pretty as this format is, I'm not sure it works particularly well for a serialized story.

We'll find out tomorrow if the story holds up.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 44: The Clockmaker #2, February 2003

A return, then, to the world of The Clockmaker, a title that comes very clearly into focus in this second issue. The comic continues the magazine format folded in half, and once again this makes for some stunning visuals. There's slightly more plot in this issue. I say slightly because I'm getting the impression that the novelty of the format is privileging the art over the story in this case. I know it's only 2 issues in, but I don't have a clear sense of Hans and Astrid, who I'm assuming are our two main characters. And I would lay the culpability for this lack of knowledge on the greater emphasis on the art and design of the book. There is one character that has been fleshed out really nicely through the art, and that is the clockworks itself. If we consider it as a character, and there's some hinting of a kind of consciousness within the works, then we see a character that is mute but speaks vividly through depiction. This raises an interesting question, one that I was bandying about with my posts on Ditko's Shade: how do we distinguish settings that are simply background from settings that are characters in and of themselves? I'm thinking here of the various depictions of the realm of dream in The Sandman, always shifting and moving, in many ways defining the possibilities of action for the anthropomorphic characters, but very definitely a character in and of itself. Ditko's backgrounds, especially in the "Zero Zone" gave me the same impression.

I'll have to keep an eye out for backgrounds that are more than backgrounds, or rather, settings that are more than settings, that are characters in their own right. This further leads us to think about how we define character and setting in comics.

See you tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 42: The Clockmaker #1, January 2003

The Clockmaker is an interesting experiment. I rediscovered it this weekend while I was re-organizing the collection, and thought it would make a nice follow-up read to Pope's 100%. Don't ask me yet about the storyline. There is a mountain in Switzerland, and beneath it is a giant clock. Astrid, presumably our main character, returns from the US to take over care of it after her father and brother are murdered by....something.

The introductory issue doesn't feature too much in the way of story, especially with the 4-5 pages of sketchbook work at the back. But it is enough to be intriguing. What's a little different about this first issue is it also introduces us to a new (sort of) format. Though the comic looks like a regular, modern-age sized comic, it actually folds out to twice this size and reads in an almost tabloid-sized format (for which I can find no scans online). While this does intrinsically cut down on the amount of story in the issue, the artistic vistas it opens are truly spectacular. There are two splash pages (in this case, the size of four regular comics) depicting the clockworks that are amazing. The format is a bit clunky in terms of readability, as the crease that ends up being in the center of the book makes turning the pages a bit difficult, and occasionally, from the collector's perspective, harrowing.

Not much more to say at this point. I like Matt Smith's artwork. It's dynamic in and of itself, but also has a pseudo-Mignola feel to it that I enjoy. I won't be reading this one issue by issue, day by day, but will be breaking it up over the course of the next week or so. See you tomorrow.