Three Decades Ago in Comics
Part One
1986, three decades ago, is considered a seminal year for the comic book industry in America. Two of the most influential big-company projects were released that year, both from DC Comics: Alan Moore's "Watchmen" and Frank Miller's "Dark Knight Returns".
Both have been hailed as graphic novels that elevated the medium to literary status. Both brought renewed attention to comics, and have both been movie-ized lately, "Watchmen" back in 2009 and "Dark Knight Returns" in various forms over the years, most recently as the loose basis for this year's "Batman V Superman."
In the strictest sense, neither of these graphic stories, the Watchmen nor DK Returns, was a "graphic novel." The Watchmen was a twelve issue "maxi"-series and DK Returns was an over-sized four-issue miniseries. It has only been in the subsequent years as each collection was collected into one graphic-novel-sized publication that the term "graphic novel" has been applied to them.
Both were influential and have shadows that loom large over both the industry as a whole and the creators themselves.
The phrase "graphic novel" was coined by the great Will Eisner, one of the creative cornerstones of an American creation. Over the years Eisner published stories steeped in real life, beauty and tragedy and truth about the human condition, in what he called "graphic novels."
The name has since become a catch-all for any comic-sized form of entertainment thicker than 96 pages. Today, many graphic novels are collections of story arcs in specific titles.
In 1986, though, there was a legitimate Eisner-styled graphic novel released.
And...it was a psychedelic mystery:
The words "psychedelic mystery" were ballyhooed in reviews, and that gets one's attention. What exactly could that mean?
The review I was reading was for a fancy new hardcover reprint. The interview had Kirchner talking about his friendship with the late van der Wetering. When I found plenty of original 1986 books floating around I had one shipped, the one pictured above.
The binding is stiff and vulnerable to cracking.
Inside, it's the pages that are the thing. Each page is its own composition, one idea or transitive verb action symmetrically posed with other connected idea-pieces. It's beautiful and interesting to look at, but is it a flowing comic book experience? No, not in the traditional sense, and maybe that adds to the psychedelic feel.
Disconnected-yet-connected: truth and fantasy simultaneously. The mystery unfolds in large full-page compositions.
One of these splash pages is probably the sexiest set of comic images I've come across in my few decades. The way the dancer reminisces about her former career is shown through her steadily stripped form, another example of the psychedelic nature of the book. The smirk and bush in the last drawing is hot:
Reading this artistic-project-masterpiece is well worth the fifty-five minutes it takes.
