Comics for Comics' Sake

The hardest part when talking about Jason is knowing where to start. He’s prolific, and his books are all great, so when I recommend him to someone and they ask what to read first, it’s tempting to say “All of them. Read them all first.” But in lieu of the temporally impossible, you might as well start with The Left Bank Gang.

The premise of the book is so high-concept and ludicrous that it sounds like a shaggy dog story. What if all those famous novelists of the Jazz Age lived in close proximity on the Parisian Left Bank, except they were all animals, and they were cartoonists instead of writers, and they fell on hard times and tried to pull off a bank heist?

It’s as dryly nonsensical as it sounds, but it works because of Jason’s art style. His depiction of the story could hardly be called realistic; the best word to describe it might be “fair.” Not fair as in a qualitative judgement of his skill on a scale from “excellent” to “poor,” but “fair” as in a style that makes no qualitative judgements. His hard-luck cartoonists don’t make grand or exaggerated movements, they just do what they do, never betraying any artist’s knowledge that they’re in a story.

The page composition complements this style well. I had initially thought that one of the reasons Jason’s style worked was because he didn’t vary his camera distance or placement much from panel to panel, and on most pages that’s true. But there are plenty of pages where it isn’t, enough so that you can’t discount his range as a cartoonist. What is true is that he rarely deviates from the simple-to-understand nine-panel grid.

When used like this, page after page, nine-panel grid does two things. It sets up a steady rhythm for the reader so that even when things start to go seriously awry in the story, it feels as natural and everyday within the grid as that casual dinner conversation ten pages back.

More than that, though, it prevents any panel from ever growing too big to let a character breathe. This is mostly a story about people feeling trapped, whether it’s in a country, a career, a marriage, or a life, and the tight space of every panel gets that feeling across well. Big, open vistas of breathtaking scenery are pulled out when an artist wants to impress the reader, but Jason’s restraint and insistence on the nine-panel grid goes all the further toward emphasizing the smallness of these people and their concerns.

Even if “these people” do happen to be the most celebrated writers of the early 20th century.

Generally speaking, I like webcomics. But what I like even more, paradoxically, are print collections of webcomics. I’m not sure I’ve ever read more than 5 pages of Girl Genius online, but I have all the collections so far. I enjoy them when they’re online, but they feel too ephemeral there. It’s not until I have a bound volume in my hand that I really feel like I’m looking at a comic, which is why when it comes to webcomics merchandising, I’ll take a book over a snarky t-shirt every time. (Far too few creators will indulge me on this, alas.)

Which brings us to Bite Me!, Dylan Meconis’ vampire farce of Revolutionary France. This was one of many books I picked up during APE 2009 (all of which I hope to get to eventually), but unlike many of those, this one’s reputation preceded it. I’d heard a lot of good things about Meconis, but I’d never gotten around to checking out her work, even though it was all freely available online. But now that I was right there at her table, and there was a bound volume, well then. I was powerless to resist.

Here’s what’s great about webcomics that you don’t often get with most American comics: they’re like a time-lapse photo of artistic development. In an original graphic novel, if the artist finds that his or her style develops over the course of working on the book, he or she can go back and patch up the first pages for consistency’s sake. But with a webcomic, of course, it’s being tossed up for public consumption as you go, so when the full story that originally took a year or more to create is put between two covers, it goes in warts and all.

For an example, here’s Meconis rendering Claire from near the start of each of the six chapters:

At the outset, the style is very flat and angular. There’s not much shading to be seen, and the facial poses tend to be either straight ahead or directly to the size, like an Egyptian frieze. But later, the poses get looser and more dynamic, the curve of the chin becomes an actual curve, and there’s more depths added to the facial structure with improved shading. (And this was where Meconis was by 2004. If you really want to be impressed, go have a look at where she is now.)

And now I feel a little bad, because I’ve taken all this space in an entry ostensibly about Bite Me! and all I’ve talked about is neat things you can see with a bound collection of any webcomic by an artist worth his or her salt. So back to the subject at hand.

The quality of the art having been firmly established by now, Bite Me! is something you want to read if you ever had a vampire phase and was later embarrassed by it. Meconis takes the Anne Rice trope of glamorous vampires in old France, but approaches it from the point of view that even after several centuries of unlife, the vampires wouldn’t be any more glamorous or seductive than ordinary people. Driving the stake home is Claire, an ordinary person who’s vampirized early on and takes naturally to the lifestyle. (And just to put the boot in further, there’s a late gag riffing directly off of Rice’s own characters.)

The format of the book is also worth a mention. Not the six-chapter format found online, which isn’t reproduced in the book. But… Well, ever since the trade paperback collection of superhero comics came into vogue, there’s been a debate about whether or not it’s acceptable to “write for the trade,” which is a way of saying writing stories that don’t have concrete stopping points in individual (purchaseable) issues, but instead simply cut off every 22 pages, because the assumption is that they’ll be eventually taken in as a complete 132-page story.

Like most webcomic authors who produce books, Meconis has her own variant of the “writing for the trade” problem to solve. She splits the difference neatly by organizing the story right from the start as a continuing plot that builds on itself with every page, but she also makes sure every page ends on a strong note–either a moment of melodrama or, more often since this is a farce, a punchline. Taken as a whole, you can still see the seams a bit. It’s not hard to remember the form in which the material originally appeared, where readers would be expecting a payoff with every update. Having a kicker at the end of every single page does play counter to expectations when reading a longform work, where you expect most things to build for a while before getting any payoff.

But if that’s true, it’s also true that Meconis ended up producing a work where something happens on every page, and you never (okay, almost never) get a page that’s just a big, self-indulgent splash panel because the artist thought it would look cool. The book is ultimately stronger rather than weaker due to the need to make sure every page works. In fact, there’s your review. Bite Me!: it works.