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I’ve really been looking forward to Vanessa Davis’s new book, Make Me a Woman. I’m a great admirer of Davis’s zaftig ladies and of the minimum of lines she uses to describe them—round, undulating, bumpy, and squiggly, but always lively. The image blown up on the cover is a great example: The long, rubbery curve of the figure’s leg, foot, and arms, the off-kilter half-moon toenails. The tiny smudges of red polish outside the lines, which signifies her imperfect painting technique, is splendid. I also love her characters’ upturned noses, bubble mouths, and the occasional double chin. She’s generous in the way she draws people, not just in size (not everyone is voluptuous) but also in breadth. These autobiographical comics—divided between published strips and pencil drawings from her daily diary—are often as much about her as everyone around her. (more…)

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Steve Ditko, from Spider-Man #33.

Jaime Hernandez, from “Bob Richardson”.

The bridge is over. The bridge is over. Yes. But what does that mean in practice? One way to describe our bridge-less world is to say that it is now possible to read Jaime Hernandez and not see the influence of Ditko. Indeed, I suspect that most readers of Love and Rockets might not know who Ditko is.

That’s not much of a loss. There are all sorts of pleasures in Jaime H.’s work that don’t require Ditko-knowledge. Anyone who is literate and has an eye can appreciate Jaime’s excellent sense of character, the purity of his art, the constant inventiveness of his stories, and the sheer scope of storytelling he’s achieved over hundreds of pages.

Still, there is a small loss. Consider the above panel from the Jaime story “Bob Richardson” (page 4 of the story).

The panel is a visual allusion to a famous sequence in Spider-Man #33 where the web-slinger is trapped under a giant machine. Ditko’s scene was one of his great dramatizations of the triumph of the will, with Spider-Man overcoming not just the machine but also own sense of failure and defeat. In the Hernandez story, the significance of the allusion is that on a psychological level Maggie undergoes a many traumas: she’s beaten down by life and is made to feel good-for-nothing by friends and family alike. Yet she finds within herself the resilience to go on. Hernandez’s image of the dog under the machine is meant to say something about how Maggie feels. He’s taking Ditko’s super-heroic imagery and transforming it into a scene of quiet emotional symbolism.

The visual allusion to Ditko is only a tiny nuance, one thin sliver in a multi-layered story. Still it’s a layer that one would like Love and Rockets readers to know about.