Skip to content

The Patron Saint of Superheroes

“Chris Gavaler Explores the Multiverse of Comics, Pop Culture, and Politics”

December 18, 2023 New Shenandoah Comics: Angie Kang & Robert James Russell

Shenandoah Issue 73.1 (Fall 2023) is now live. It’s the tenth issue to feature comics, and the eighth I’ve helped edit (I happily step aside for occasional guest comics editors, including José Alaniz who curated an amazing selection by contemporary Russian women last spring, and Rachelle Cruz who curated an equally excellent selection in Spring 2021).

We don’t define “comics” on our submission page, because we hope to attract as much variety as possible. When my advanced comics course recently perused back issues, they questioned whether some pieces suited any of the scholarly definitions we examined in class. Sijia Ma‘s “A Hundred Stories,” for example, is a sequence of photographs (which they decided was allowed) but none of them are juxtaposed on a shared page. Another student was happy to call Mita Mahato’s “Lullaby” a comic, but not a “poetry comic,” as it’s termed in her author note, because the “poetry” includes no words.

I don’t think any of my students would challenge the two works in our new issue, Angie Kang’s “The Birthmark” and Robert James Russell’s “How to Make a Full English,” because both share a range of conventions common in the comics medium. And yet they both push at those norms in exciting ways.

If I’d seen Kang’s before publishing The Comics Form last year, I would have included this pair of panels in my discussion of “match cut” juxtapositions:

The technique is common in film, but rarer in comics. The juxtaposition of Kang’s main character sitting in her doctor’s office and then driving is striking because her figure is drawn from the same perspective and in the same position relative to the frame. Or, since there is no sharp black line framing the panel, to the image edges.

That’s another subtle quality I enjoy about her image style, those softer edges, which reveal how the color is not added to a prior line drawing but is an organic and defining quality of the artwork. I also enjoy a quiet meta moment, when she paints an exhaled breath of smoke to resemble a speech balloon. In Italy, comics are called “fumetto,” little puffs of smoke.

Kang also uses speech sparingly, letting her images do most of the narrative work — as with this haunting dream sequence that could stand alone as an abstract comic:

She is also artful with her turns of perspective. The first image below is ocularized from the main character’s literal point-of-view, but then the angle shifts to over-the-shoulder, so no longer also literal but still focalized from her internal experience — as felt even more in the third panel’s zoomed-in intensity. Then that last panel captures her emotional experience by leaping to a detached and distant angle.

Russell explores a different set of comics qualities.

First, he establishes his own image-text format: numbered text begins above each image — is interrupted by a single tall panel — and then finishes below. The first features a double-decker bus, which not only confirms the title’s English setting, but also evokes the two-level, or “double-decker,” approach to text.

The images are simplified in a naturalistic style (comics studies really needs a term for that — I refer to it descriptively as “unexaggerated simplification” in The Comics Form), but with some subtle disruptions.

The black surrounding the next image creates a kind of matte effect that extends the frame — though it could also be interpreted literally as the darkness of the building sharpened by the contrast of the lit window. And, whether visually literal or not, it evokes the main character’s isolated emotional state:

A later panel removes visual ambiguity with a fully expressive use of background color:

And though a panel typically includes a single image, Russell plays with that aspect of the form too, drawing panels within panels:

I also really appreciate the hand-written quality of Russell’s lettering — which adds to a general feeling of memoir, while also allowing a sudden shift in emotional intensity:

And note that pleasantly unexplained shift to a painting-by-numbers conceit — perhaps because, as the rendering of the words becomes more evocative, the representational meaning of the image flattens? I’m not sure, but I love the effect.

Russell and Kang are also wonderfully different, even as they each further refine comics possibilities.

Check them out at the new Shenandoah.

Tags: , , , ,