A liberal apologia for GI Joe, Part Three
Dec. 7th, 2009 12:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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scans_dailyA liberal apologia for GI Joe, part two.
GI Joe issue #4. Domestic terrorism and the honor of a soldier.
In this issue we see a cutaway of the GI Joe headquarters and the Cobra mindset. This is all about where Cobra comes from. Although they never appear specifically in this issue, it's pretty obvious that this is an affiliated training camp. The implication is that Cobra finances, and recruits from, American militia groups.
Color problem sorta messed up the zoom. Hmm, as I gaze into Clutch's eyes there I sorta question my love of Trimpe's art. Well, this is the early stuff.
Gah. You really can't get away with those top two panels any more.
Trimpe uses "artistic composition" more than "photographic composition." He orders things where they make sense on the page (and there's an awful lot of awful one-point perspective backgrounds in this issue).
The bottom panel, for example, is a series of cartoons ordered so as to be read clearly:
Big Leaf Texture #22...
words...
big red truck...
planes and hangars...
more Big Leaf...
some girders and an airplane to pull your eye back over to...
the big red truck again!
The composition does not release the eye, but draws the eye further in, exactly as if you were searching a scene yourself. Brilliant! Great composition! Photographically impossible.
Trimpe doesn't have his technique together yet, either. I think it was great for these guys that they had actual models of for everything; the toys. It accounts for some of this book's crazy, wonderful relationship with perspective and space.
Snake-Eyes has nice handwriting.
Snake-Eyes. Yeah. He's cool. Right? It's not just me?
Anyway, stuff happens, there's story and stuff...
...perhaps Snake-Eyes would explain it to us if we only knew Morse Code...
Kirby Patrol! I'm entertained by that second page. That's what I'm talking about when I mean "artist perspective," or "storytelling perspective." Not one of those panel is photographically possible, in spite of the fact that all the objects are accurately placed and in perspective with themselves. They are arranged for storytelling.
Another big difference between this and the cartoon. Those cartoon ejector seats don't get used much.
The faces here remind me of Giffen. Maybe Trimpe and Giffen have a common artistic ancestor that I'm not aware of...
Now, Hawk doesn't live quite up to his name here and does his best to avoid killing Carruthers (who does indeed die, you never see him again). Part of it is respect to a fellow vet and unwillingness to fire on an American aircraft, but...it's almost like Hawk sees a little of himself in Carruthers. They do look similar, but it's hard to tell if that's the characters or the artist. There's some interesting stuff about identity in this issue, about what a soldier is and does.
See? A soldier's duty is to protect the weak. Carruthers was a soldier who went too far, who began to fight just to fight, and not to protect. Maybe that's the difference between him and Hawk; Carruther's only interested in his own survival while Team Joe (here exemplified by Hawk (leader, fighter, jet pilot, etc.) and his dark shadow Snake Eyes) cares only for the survival of others. Joe pledges allegiance to wider concepts, which Carruthers refutes, nuclearly.
It's amazing how well the story stands up to fragmenting like this. Hama wrote each individual page as a mini-story, and it really works.
Really, really, really works.
As in, if you write comic books, you should be doing this.
Larry Hama, layin' down the information. Knowing is half the battle, I guess. Anyway, I bet most of you didn't expect that the most realistic nuclear-bomb-defusing scene that you'd ever read would be in GI Joe Comics #4.
"Lighten up on the science lecture, Zap!" he says. "M'man Grunt 'bout to save the world from glowin' in the dark!" And he does! TEAM Joe saves the day!
But as he raises the trophy in victory, a shadow falls across his face.
Also, civilians are stupid and mean.
Here is a slightly more realistic version of the same story above:
http://unnecessaryg.com/gijoe/McSweeneys%20Field%20Recordings_McSweeneys_2_Part%202%20of%208.mp3
http://unnecessaryg.com/gijoe/McSweeneys%20Field%20Recordings_McSweeneys_4_Part%204%20of%208.mp3
http://unnecessaryg.com/gijoe/McSweeneys%20Field%20Recordings_McSweeneys_8_Part%208%20of%208.mp3
Can't remember exactly where I got those or how they ended up on my computer...
So. The UN. As soon as I get back to where my library card can do some good, I promise that I'm going to check out some books on the history of the UN. Real books, with covers on them and everything. But until I've got some more research in, I hope to leave that subject alone for a bit.
GI Joe issue #4. Domestic terrorism and the honor of a soldier.
In this issue we see a cutaway of the GI Joe headquarters and the Cobra mindset. This is all about where Cobra comes from. Although they never appear specifically in this issue, it's pretty obvious that this is an affiliated training camp. The implication is that Cobra finances, and recruits from, American militia groups.
Color problem sorta messed up the zoom. Hmm, as I gaze into Clutch's eyes there I sorta question my love of Trimpe's art. Well, this is the early stuff.
Gah. You really can't get away with those top two panels any more.
Trimpe uses "artistic composition" more than "photographic composition." He orders things where they make sense on the page (and there's an awful lot of awful one-point perspective backgrounds in this issue).
The bottom panel, for example, is a series of cartoons ordered so as to be read clearly:
Big Leaf Texture #22...
words...
big red truck...
planes and hangars...
more Big Leaf...
some girders and an airplane to pull your eye back over to...
the big red truck again!
The composition does not release the eye, but draws the eye further in, exactly as if you were searching a scene yourself. Brilliant! Great composition! Photographically impossible.
Trimpe doesn't have his technique together yet, either. I think it was great for these guys that they had actual models of for everything; the toys. It accounts for some of this book's crazy, wonderful relationship with perspective and space.
Snake-Eyes has nice handwriting.
Snake-Eyes. Yeah. He's cool. Right? It's not just me?
Anyway, stuff happens, there's story and stuff...
...perhaps Snake-Eyes would explain it to us if we only knew Morse Code...
Kirby Patrol! I'm entertained by that second page. That's what I'm talking about when I mean "artist perspective," or "storytelling perspective." Not one of those panel is photographically possible, in spite of the fact that all the objects are accurately placed and in perspective with themselves. They are arranged for storytelling.
Another big difference between this and the cartoon. Those cartoon ejector seats don't get used much.
The faces here remind me of Giffen. Maybe Trimpe and Giffen have a common artistic ancestor that I'm not aware of...
Now, Hawk doesn't live quite up to his name here and does his best to avoid killing Carruthers (who does indeed die, you never see him again). Part of it is respect to a fellow vet and unwillingness to fire on an American aircraft, but...it's almost like Hawk sees a little of himself in Carruthers. They do look similar, but it's hard to tell if that's the characters or the artist. There's some interesting stuff about identity in this issue, about what a soldier is and does.
See? A soldier's duty is to protect the weak. Carruthers was a soldier who went too far, who began to fight just to fight, and not to protect. Maybe that's the difference between him and Hawk; Carruther's only interested in his own survival while Team Joe (here exemplified by Hawk (leader, fighter, jet pilot, etc.) and his dark shadow Snake Eyes) cares only for the survival of others. Joe pledges allegiance to wider concepts, which Carruthers refutes, nuclearly.
It's amazing how well the story stands up to fragmenting like this. Hama wrote each individual page as a mini-story, and it really works.
Really, really, really works.
As in, if you write comic books, you should be doing this.
Larry Hama, layin' down the information. Knowing is half the battle, I guess. Anyway, I bet most of you didn't expect that the most realistic nuclear-bomb-defusing scene that you'd ever read would be in GI Joe Comics #4.
"Lighten up on the science lecture, Zap!" he says. "M'man Grunt 'bout to save the world from glowin' in the dark!" And he does! TEAM Joe saves the day!
But as he raises the trophy in victory, a shadow falls across his face.
Also, civilians are stupid and mean.
Here is a slightly more realistic version of the same story above:
http://unnecessaryg.com/gijoe/McSweeneys%20Field%20Recordings_McSweeneys_2_Part%202%20of%208.mp3
http://unnecessaryg.com/gijoe/McSweeneys%20Field%20Recordings_McSweeneys_4_Part%204%20of%208.mp3
http://unnecessaryg.com/gijoe/McSweeneys%20Field%20Recordings_McSweeneys_8_Part%208%20of%208.mp3
Can't remember exactly where I got those or how they ended up on my computer...
So. The UN. As soon as I get back to where my library card can do some good, I promise that I'm going to check out some books on the history of the UN. Real books, with covers on them and everything. But until I've got some more research in, I hope to leave that subject alone for a bit.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-08 04:37 am (UTC)--LBD "Nytetrayn"
no subject
Date: 2009-12-08 09:24 am (UTC)Frex, look at the last panel here:
That is a dang good panel! It could be rendered much better, true, but when you judge it by depth and storytelling it works.
It's not in perspective. Things don't converge. Now, one reason they don't fall into line is because Trimpe wasn't much into rendering. But another reason it failed is that he set himself a one heck difficult task! You are looking through trees almost directly down at some things, just grazing across others, with things grotesquely manipulated for size (like the B-29 sandwiched between a red truck and a building).
Now, you could get all this information into a photograph, especially since things are recognizable from much smaller profiles. But it would never be arranged like this. Even with models on a set you'd have an incredibly difficult time with it. Either the truck covers more of the jet or the jet covers more of the building, and I just don't know how you'd get that last plane into the frame like that unless you used severe flattening with a telephoto, in which case how are you getting the background to rise up like that? Not even mentioning how you're looking down on the tower somehow, but only grazing across the wings of the B-29s.
I hope that's a satisfying answer; I'm trying to verbalize my experience as a photographer and it's resisting verbalization. Maybe I should strike out "photographically impossible" and replace it with "I couldn't do it."
It's great cartooning though.
Panel three: How would you focus the camera here?
The whole page is loopy, mostly because things are just not in the habit of arranging themselves like that. At least my reference photographs never come out half that clever and cut-and-dried. "The nature of things is in the habit of concealing itself."