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.