What I want for Christmas: An Essential Howard the Duck Vol. 2 (aka when black and white is better)

I would really love to see another volume of the Essential Howard the Duck.  I know that if they pushed it they would only have a hundred pages of material for the second volume, but there is an important reason for making a second volume instead of making everyone go out an buy the omnibus to get those last couple of issues (plus the magazine stories).  It is not just about the cost, it is just an important fact that the comic is so much better in black and white.

The relative merit of the Essential and DC’s Showcase series is that they are cheap at 16-20 dollars cover price, with a page count of 500 plus pages.  But there is a point in that they reprint on news print, which looks better on some of those older issues and they print in black and white – which in some cases is an improvement over the coloring in the older comics.  This is my opinion, but I think Howard the Duck looks better in black and white than the color, especially the treatments that sometimes come across in the omnibus reprinting.

Here is a comparison.  I wish I could reproduce the same page, but despite the poor scan that was the black and white I have to admit that I find the coloring a bit distracting.  The color scan is from an aged issue (notice the yellowing of the paper) but still I think in many ways the comic does translate better to black and white.

I know there is not much Steve Gerber material that was not published in the Essential, but I wish they would figure some way to get it out.  The Omnibus is a great idea.  I have the Spiderman one that reprints the first 40 or so issues plus the letter pages.  I really dig that they did that.  The art sometimes seems overcompensated in places by the coloring process and the page stock they use.  The result is that the colors look a little on the goofy side.  It also changes the whole context of reading comics.  Removing the color places the concentration on the art, which can be a good or bad thing depending on the artists style and skill.

Something I have been thinking about is what made me lose interest in comics back in 1990, 1991 or so – right before Spawn #1.  In many ways it was the mess that became of the Xmen, my favorite book back then.  The Liefeld art didn’t help.  I liked Jim Lee.  I liked Art Adams.  But Liefeld had a style that I hated.  The weird legs, small feed, long torso, lack of proportion…that and the pronounced need to give mullets to the characters really turned me off.  But the comics boom did what it did to most of us fans back then that have only rediscovered an interest through podcasts really.

The use of the newsprint also brings up an interesting aspect.  Modern comics translate well to the slick paper stock used in Omnibus and trades these days, but I think that newsprint just feels better to my eye.  The Vertigo trades usually use a form of newsprint instead of slick paper, and I think it translates very well.  The black and white thing can be hit or miss.  I have the Green Lantern Showcase, the first one, and those stories do look a little silly since everything he is supposed to be fighting is yellow.  That is saved a bit by that old golden and silver age comics habit of always (over)stating the obvious.  That Showcase also shows the problem with the translation from black and white with certain art styles.  Many of those early books were very dependent on a line style that looks very 2 dimensional when you remove the color.  In fact it looks like a cartoon strip like Peanuts, not highly detailed.  Kirby had a bit of that in the early days, but he managed to overcome it by doing more with the scenery in the panel and the layouts.  The early Green Lantern problem is that there is often very little in a panel to provide texture.  The characters lacked a depth of field that is usually found in cartoon strips in the newspaper.  Indeed, Get Fuzzy is an interesting example of a comic that conveys a depth of field in the medium that usually spends all its energy into delivering the punch line to a 3 or 4 panel joke.  Get Fuzzy does that but with dimension and perspective that comes from the talent of a humorous artist, not a humorist who can draw.

In some places the black and white treatment boils down the comic to an interesting combination of pure art and story.  The good artists from the late 1960s and 1970s look good in black and white.  The Kirby stuff in the Essential Captain America Vol. 1 and the Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 1 looks great.  The Punisher and Spiderman Essentials also look really good.  The idea was to save money, but I think it also really looks good too – with some minor exceptions such as the occasional pages that look like bad photocopies where the original art has been lost.  The Essential Hulk had some problem with that.

The newsprint and black and white combination has been very good though on the early stuff.  The black and white treatment is not for everyone, and many people will not read these “coloring books” because they are not in color.  For many superhero books this is understandable because of the real appeal of the colorful costumes.  I think some people, consciously or not, might reject the black and white art because of an association with manga – often a much villified form for comics fans who just do not like it.  Conversly, manga fans sometimes feel the same way about color comics.  There are fans who can move between the two but there seems to be an imposed wall between the two forms (enough for them to be subject to completely seperate audiences) that doesn’t really see too many people moving between the two as a general rule.

There have been some exceptions to the black and white is better arguement in my mind.  The late 1980s trades of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles by Darkhorse stand out in my mind.  They recieved a pretty interesting coloring process, in tune with the technology at the time.  I would note that their headband/masks were all red until later issues when Donatello picked up purple one he wore like a bandana.  These comics were before the Archie deal, which created the Turtles with colored headbands and a Turtlemobile and pizza everywhere – but they stand out in my mind what the Turtles were best:  violent, psychological and dark.  The coloring reflected that in the same way that the Archie comics colorized Eastman and Laird’s characters so that they would fit the kid friendly, fun, light-hearted world that they were aiming for.  And they did succeed.

Another black and white conversion that I don’t know about is Dr. Strange.  I haven’t read any of those essentials, but that cosmic feel might be dampened in the conversion process.  I also don’t think a black and white Watchmen would work.  It’s not so much that it would be bad, but that it would psychologically feel weird to read that story in black and white.  I have heard V for Vendetta was intended to be in black and white, but the coloring is very integrated with both of those.  That is something that really came out of the 1980s move towards that darker realism, a more integrated approach to the coloring process.  Same with Gaiman’s Sandman and the Sandman Mystery Theater stuff.  I read the second Silver Surfer Essential and there are some parts where it feels like the black and white process leaves something missing, mainly because you are left with splash pages and panel after panel of black space with little dots of white for stars and the Silver Surfer moving through it all.  I doubt if a book like Alex Ross’s Marvels would translate to black and white…but I also think that no one would be stupid enough to try and do such a move.  It would miss the whole point.

My feeling is that black and white translates well to artists who do good work with background and textures, who use depth of field with characters.  The setting can also have an impact.  Cityscapes look fine but in space it can look overwhelmed by the blacks.  The artist will also have something to do with how good it looks.  I would say that a really good artist like Kirby, Ditko or Romita looks great because losing the color lets their art stand out.  But a poor artist might be thankfully obscured by the coloring and that does alot to help their stuff be more appreciable.

Things like the Savage Sword of Conan trades that Darkhorse has been putting out were black and white originally, though printed magazine sized, and they look just fine in that form.  Walking Dead works well in black and white but the writing is so good that I think the black and white aesthetic helps to concentrate on the literary and not the cerebral parts of the story.  That’s not knocking the art – which is great.  It just makes the art serve the vision.  They also found an interesting way of making their zombies original.  Are the zombies grey or green?  Are they bloody?  By being in black and white the zombies are blanked a bit, avoiding the imposition of a clique onto the zombies.  No matter what we say, there is little that is original in the construction of a zombie visually.  All the creative aspects found in the zombie genre are found in the interpretation of subject and the construction of the narrative.  Making Walking Dead in black and white really changes the aesthetic so that you aren’t thinking about the rotting people but are concentrating on the dialog and psychology of the situation.  That is what is interesting about the book, and though I like the art I really love the story.

I would say Nixon’s Pal is another, different example.  It uses such a strong shading component that adding color to it would make the art muddy.  The way the art works in that book is that it really bridges the light and dark in a way that throwing color into the mix would just make it less evocative.

Modern stuff, using the computerized coloring process might not be too good.  I just read the Black Panther Enemy of the State trade and I think it would really look dismal in black and white.  I have been holding out on getting any of the Wolverine Essentials mainly for that reason – I just don’t know how good they would look.  The newer Xmen Essentials also have the same issue for me.  More recent Batman also seems like it might not make the translation too well – especially the Detective Comics stuff from the 1980s.  Batman was dark in his grey and blue, but in black and white I don’t know how he would standout from the shadows – there might be a flattening of perspective if you did that.

To sum up my random musing on this topic, black and white is better if you have a good artist and sufficent perspective and detail in the original art.  In some cases it can look better than the original, such as the Essential Howard the Duck.  In some cases it can flatten the art out, like the Green Lantern Showcase, and expose the two dimensional bleakness of the art without color.  In some cases the way in which the artist approaches the process – such as Silver Surfer or Detective Comics can result in a reverse was out of sorts, too much black and you really start to miss the color that comes with the comics.  Finally, the newsprint aspect just looks and feels better in alot of cases.  Pure white paper is not the best at times, and with the black and white reprints it is nice that there is a hint of grey (or even yellow once you’ve had it for awhile) to the paper so that you get a little grey with the white to keep it from looking so stark.  The newsprint helps to mellow out the contrast.

I still think they should put out something with the Howard the Duck material that wasn’t in the the first Essential and maintain the black and white process.  They probably won’t, but you can always hope.