About ten years back, I would have been thirteen or so, still in boy scouts. We were off on a weeklong camping trip to Sabbatis County, a cut of Adirondack territory that whistled in the morning and hummed at night, water was clean, air was fresh. This was the same camping trip in which I pissed in the woods and a bear walked about twenty feet away from me, the bastard so full of whatever he’d swiped from other terrified campers (over whom I had the considerable advantage of having already been pissing when I saw him) that he mercifully took no interest in my rapidly retracting pecker.

I had recently been reintroduced to Robert Crumb’s work, and for the first time to Gary Panter, Daniel Clowes and probably Art Spiegelman, several of whom (most notably Panter) I still shamelessly lift ideas from today. I was at that insufferable crossroads of losing a salient patience with superhero comics (which I read then and continue to read today in secret), ready to move forward into deeper, darker waters. I had to take artistic qualifiers like “awesome” and “looks so cool” out of my vocabulary and replace them with talk of spacial activation, personal symbolism and allegory, which were quite as obnoxious then as they are now. I would apply these terms to all sorts of hard-working, deserving figures, like the much maligned Jhonen Vasquez (who is a much better artist than you remember him being, and JTHM, grating in the extreme as an agent of marketing, stands as an interesting and mostly well executed portrait of a young artist from a largely underepresented culture learning how to make comics). I was beginning to see that Picasso was in fact not even a little bit boring, that Redwall and Harry Potter were certainly not the best (or only) books ever written, and that mainstream comics were predictable, formulaic and only for the low of mind, words I’ve since been forced to eat. However, at that point, voice dropping and mind (ostensibly) swelling, I firmly stood my ground and swore off the mainstream, guaranteeing the lack of success and marketability I enjoy to this very day.

But at that point, I had Nathan’s copies of Just a Pilgrim. I loved Preacher, Hitman and Hellblazer, more for the still considerable levels of perversity and gore in their pages than for their larger themes and structure, which flew well over my vastly inflated head. Pilgrim was not the best book Garth Ennis ever wrote (That would be a tie between the aforementioned Hitman, Preacher and the first 20 issues of the Marvel Knights Punisher). This ain’t a post about Garth Ennis (that will come later). This is a post about Carlos Ezquerra. In issue two of Pilgrim, one of the most jarring and memorable images committed to modern comics swung a mallet into my cherubic face.

Carlos Ezquerra was born in Zaragoza, the Kingdom of Aragon, Spain, in 1947. This places him in his late thirties or early forties when he hit his stride on Judge Dredd, in his fifties on the Hitman annual and pushing sixty on Pilgrim. The broader scope of comics dictates that upon hitting the half-century mark, most artists “slow down” and begin to produce more technical and quiet work, as we’ve seen from Mazuchelli, Clowes, Crumb, Campbell, Panter, Moebius, Moore, etc. This is fine and dandy for one strain of cartoonist, but Ezquerra, if possible, only went crazier. His early work owes an obvious debt to Moebius, like so many of his fellow 2000 A.D artists at the time. With that said, his page composition, sense of pacing and scale, as well as the bare-bones markmaking execution of his work, especially in black and white, was second to none back in the seventies and eighties.

It’s funny, when I was younger, comics were very infrequently spoken of in terms their rules and regulations insofar as the illusion of motion in driving a narrative is concerned. Maybe that’s just my generation, more wrapped up in Jim Lee than Jim Woodring. We had our Scott McCloud, who is a very nice man if you ever get to meet him. We had people like him telling us to look at Will Eisner, who told us to look at the movies. It’s an old artist thing, and it’s obviously valid. It bothers me that amongst some of these older guys (most of whom can draw rings around you, me and everyone we’ll ever meet) speak about comics as a retarded offshoot of film, implying that only by understanding film vocabulary can one be a good artist. I’m in two camps about that one, as I think an artist who understands the languages spoken in different mediums is probably going to be a superior artist to one who focuses on only one form of expression. I’m also dead sick of  comics being treated like (or made exclusively to cater to) film. It ain’t fair. But, with that said, Ezquerra falls into the old camp. He talks about watching a lot of film to study composition, the ways people move, images that work and don’t work, etc. But, again forcing me to eat my belligerent words, Ezquerra’s work is so utterly unique to comics that there’s plainly a lot to be learned from his ways.

Rounded Borders

He doesn’t always use them, but it’s a very interesting method of storytelling, and one that’s much more subtle than his draughstmanship would lead one to believe he’s capable of. He plainly suspends panel borders altogether in the interest of sending the action sailing from one moment to the next. If we’re going to speak McCloudian, most of the transitions in the above pages are moment-to-moment, aspect-to-aspect leaps across a static field. I tend to think that Ezquerra understands better than many of his contemporaries the importance of page activation through more than pedantic detailing (though he fell prey to that as well when he was young). The second page from the bottom, first words “NUMBER 4 CARTRIDGE!” is as well composed a page of action comics as we’re ever likely to see. It strikes me as partly late-period Ditko (which would, now that I think of it, be roughly contemporaneous with this comic) and, call me crazy, but I see some Carl Barks in there, as well as Don Rosa and Walt Kelly. These artists are the go-to guys for cartoonist a little older than Ezquerra, so it’s almost undoubtable that he would have seen them. Barks in particular subtly composed his page to both swell around and emanate from a chosen center. Even his transitions of a character running in one direction in one panel, and in the second panel, to continue the same run but apparently be moving in the opposite direction, was a sharp (and fairly difficult) artistic choice to keep the pace and pulse of a story intact throughout. Barks was obviously working on comics with a softer, younger reader base than Ezquerra, but these things ARE connected.

The rounded panel borders work in a variety of ways. Firstly, they do away with the abrupt angularity of a “classic” comic book panel transition. They lend speed and urgency to the panel, but in an incredibly subtle way. As readers, we generally just see the subject matter. For my part, I read these things two ways, and often read them twice: First as a kid reading a comic, loving the story and the art and not wanting it to end. Then once more, critical faculties intact, barely even reading it, more like performing an autopsy and an investigation into possible suspects and motives (if suspects and motives were artistic tricks for me to steal and use in my own work without crediting anyone). To think about it another way, everyone’s seen either the oldest Superman comics or the Max Fleischer cartoon at least once. When they say “More powerful than a locomotive!”, do they show a stalled, angular train with a plume of smoke pouring straight into the sky? Hell no they don’t, they show that train barreling forward, curved at its most vertiginous points, giving the sense of speed and power as invisible forces surge forward from the horizontal and vertical centers. The same principle applies here. The way these visual cues affect our reading of comics are subtle, but being aware of how this vocabulary works seems very important to me.

Two halves of a circle

When you’re working on a straight grid in comics, as in the topmost page and the one below it, you have to challenge yourself to make that grid swell and contract like the living, breathing entity it is. Ezquerra uses a lot of subtle tricks to do this, including composing everything on the top tier as a half-circle, throwing a compositional line through the middle (never forget, even in something like Archie, without something to direct our vision it’s really easy to get lost on a comics page) and the lower half of the circle below. On the top most page, if one wanted to print it out, they could draw a single curve through every point of interest on the higher tier of the page, angle across through the little guy in black cleaning his gun (important!), through the black logo (important!) and to the face of the kid on the lower half of the page, which is shaded and darker than what’s around him (IMPORTANT!). The trick of guys like Ezquerra, as well as Von Eeden, now that I think of it, is to have drawn so many damn comics that the most important visual choices become so obvious as to appear arbitrary. They could not be further from arbitrary, but the way Ezquerra guides our eye using little more than negative space and fields of black (which, without the contour line drawings, could probably still serve as a fairly cogent story) is the work of a seasoned professional who knows every tool he uses like it’s his own reflection, and I doubt even little old Alex Toth would have anything to horrid to say about this comic, unlike poor Steve Rude’s.

Fuck the Panel Borders comin’ straight from the underground

I’ve been working on comics in sketchbooks lately, one or two panels a page, and the limits definitely do me a lot of favors. I’ve also been obsessed with comics from the 70s and 80s, so the idea of doing away with panel borders entirely is one that I’m keen to experiment with some more. The last two pages above are a great demonstration of this uniquely two-decades-past approach to treating the page as a grenade. It’s not the green bumpy part of the grenade that’s dangerous, it’s the explosion that comes when the green bumpy part is gone. The second page from the bottom is an incredible distillation of everything I’ve already said about Ezquerra. The way the panel borders disappear as the battle begins is no accident of any kind. It’s a canny, subtle comics trick that, when used properly, is as heart-stopping and awe-inspiring as any battle scene in film (except maybe the end of The Killers). The composition travels down the barrel of the gun, the helmet ripple-mimics the curve of the motorcyle, the body motion and even the emanata in the panel above, the gun barrel rips into the last whole panel on the page, the lines of the shouting man lead right to the four guys firing the guns, who make a downward-facing parabola which is echoed in the drawing beneath… This is a fucking gorgeous page.

The page beneath it is almost too Moebius to even discuss as an Ezquerra page, but we soldier on. Follow the solid blacks, remembering that the logo is as active an element of the page as any of the figures. Follow the thinner, sparer lines across the page, from figures to face to bizarre analytical corridor with dinosaur man. Notice those curved panel borders again, and the angled caption box bowing towards the curve in the upper right corner (and simultaneously leading the eye down to the next caption). The articulacy of his line, which is one of the most agile and underrated in comics, separating with ease each texture from every other.

One of my biggest problems with Pilgrim is the coloring. That ugly, flat computer coloring, where everything looks so brown and dull. Unless you were strapped for time (they were not), why would you have anyone but Carlos Ezquerra color Carlos Ezquerra?

The above page is from a Garth Ennis Judge Dredd story called “Death Aid,” about a Bob Geldoff type throwing a fundraiser to help people die. This story features some of Ezquerra’s best art from the time period when he stopped trying to draw like Moebius and began REALLY drawing like Carlos Ezquerra.

His coloring defies belief; every bit as good as Lynn Varley’s on The Dark Knight Returns and so completely complementary to his already stunning linework and composition. He composes the pages with more than just line and space now, he does it with color, with an alacrity that a lot of paid, professional coloring guys at the major publishing houses completely lack. It’s not enough to know that orange and blue are complementary to one another, any asshole who’s ever seen a sunset can tell you that. It’s about knowing how to move from what orange to what blue, what effect that places on the story at hand, what color certain emotions and situations really are; you need to be a stage designer, a DP and William Blake all at the same time to be a great comics colorist. This comic is probably over twenty years old. Ezquerra’s had his craft down to an instinct longer than most of us have been alive.

A few gorgeous pages from the Hitman annual, 1997. Go buy a Hitman book so DC/Time Warner doesn’t have my guts out for using the pages.

My basic point is, Ezquerra is one of a very few of a kind when it comes to action, crime and sci-fi comics. He’s virtually a godhead, in my mind. The sheer breadth of his work is amazing in its own right, but he’s also the increasingly rare artist whom you look at and struggle to find something wrong with it, only to realize there is (subjectively, anyway) nothing he can’t draw. I can’t articulate well enough what I’m trying to say about him, other than a young cartoonist probably couldn’t ask for a much better role model if they’re moving forward in comics. He’s simultaneously as graceful as Mikhail Baryshnikov and as subtle as a slug to the chest. All of you kids who are gazing at Alex Ross, Jim Lee, whoever kids like these days, you’re looking at the wrong guy. Ezquerra’s your man. Even Frank Quitely, one of the single greatest artists to touch a mainstream book in the last ten years, owes a gigantic artistic debt to Ezquerra’s line.

Ezquerra’s been around for so long and done so much work that an actual retrospective on the guy, at least in blog form, is next to impossible. In my considered opinion, however, one has no business drawing crime or sci-fi comics in the west today without the influence of Ezquerra. He’s an enormously important figure in many ways. He created Judge Dredd, he broke the page apart in a whole new way and, like the Christopher Walken of comics, he never turned down an assignment. He’s been making the monstrously, insanely difficult look infuriatingly easy for decades. For my part, I don’t think he should be relegated in our memory to one of those workaday artists, part of the who’s who of artists who covered an issue here and there and were typically better than the regular artists. I think that time is going to reveal Ezquerra to be a very important artist as things swing around again. As artists like Von Eeden and Ditko, Kaluta and even Art Adams are being viewed with a whole new appreciation, I think Ezquerra deserves a closer look. To be honest, for my money, Ezquerra is as important a figure for me, personally, as Neal Adams or someone like that is to a straight superhero guy. To me, Ezquerra is one of the all-time bests. Anything he’s involved with is immediately better for having him.

I don’t know, maybe we’ll see a resurgence in sci-fi crime comics. Anything’s possible, I guess. I kind of want to make one after writing this. Nathan, what are you doing tonight?