#hex code color is temple sand

[bethanysus]

ok but imagine me making a line of spray paint and marketing it like a new makeup pallete ❤️❤️❤️

[arecomicsevengood]

HAYWIRE

It seems the comics writer Michael Fleisher died six weeks ago. I am not the person to write his obituary, but I'll tell you the little I know of his work in comics. He wrote the 1970s Spectre comics drawn by Jim Aparo, which, according to Tucker Stone, Darwyn Cooke said were his favorite superhero comics ever. They were reprinted in the 1980s as a miniseries as a miniseries called Wrath Of The Spectre. I tracked down copies of a few issues and after reading gave them to Noel Freibert, who for a while there was doing work indebted to EC horror comics, which is the sort of vibe of those Spectre comics. The Spectre uses his godlike powers to kill bad people in ways that are grotesque, but met the comics code standards for avoiding gore. For instance, someone might be turned into sand, or a melting candle. Aparo’s art sells it.

Harlan Ellison said, in an interview with The Comics Journal, that Fleisher wrote crazy stuff, and Fleisher tried to sue both Ellison and Fantagraphics for libel, claiming this cost him work. This seems a bit much, but looking at Fleisher’s Wikipedia page, the list of adjectives Ellison puts to Fleisher seems over-the-top enough that I wouldn’t be surprised if people took it seriously.

Fleisher also wrote the Shade The Changing Man comics Steve Ditko drew, and a 1980s Jonah Hex revival where the western character was transported into the future. Early issues were drawn by Mark Texeira at the start of his career; later issues were drawn by Keith Giffen when he was doing his style of José Muñoz swipes.

The one comic of Fleisher's I have on hand is Haywire, which I've actually been wanting to write about, though I don't have much to say about it. It was going to be a launching pad for a whole other thing. Haywire, like Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy's Slash Maraud, carried a "Suggested For Mature Readers" label in the late eighties but wasn't retroactively made into a Vertigo book. The stuff that got the Vertigo brand, in 1993, were descendants of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, and its idea of sophistication. Other comics DC was putting out then were more closely related to Frank Miller and Howard Chaykin, comics that were pure pulp, with a focus on action storytelling. There's no interest in being self-consciously literary in these comics, and very little interest in characterization or emotional payoff.

The "Suggested For Mature Readers" tag showed up in the eighties at roughly the same time as the PG-13 rating showed up at the movies. Parents were concerned about the level of violence in movies like Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, and created enough outcry that the PG-13 rating was created. Now, that's just the rating given to blockbuster movies, including most superhero stuff. The "mature readers" label, on the other hand, is a little more sophisticated or adult, because the superhero genre in comics basically trades in violence. John Carpenter sort of bemoaned the way the PG-13 rating ended up: He wanted a rating that would apply to his movies, so teens wouldn't be restricted from seeing them, but the model ended up being tame in a way that still essentially shut him out. These comics exist in this general region: Neither "adult" nor really for children. The letter pages, like those in issues of The Shadow written by Andy Helfer and illustrated by Kyle Baker, show an audience roughly divided between those scandalized and incredibly psyched on the level of violence contained in these comics, which will strike the comics reader of thirty years later as pretty tame.

(Something I wanted to write about was how the comics being made for children now strike me as unnecessarily tame. As someone who read superhero comics at a young age, I'm not sure of the point in all these things that seem like their only purpose is to just be vaguely cute. Even the newspaper strips I read which can be taken as being "for children" are actually intended for a general audience rather than a child-specific one. But the comics I read as a kid were also thought of as being "for boys," and so the fact that they acculturate their readers to being comfortable with violence can be taken as a given. Still, I think it's fine for stories to have conflict. Mainstream comics should probably dial back the violence, but. My thoughts did not reach a conclusion.)

Kyle Baker inked the first three issues of Haywire, which are the ones which look the best, with characters whose faces are most distinguished. The book's co-creator, Vince Giarrano, pencils the book throughout, and with the second inker things look a little more generic, though still readable. Bill Wray colors, and some images really pop. The writing is pretty good, as an engine of plot, and pacing out action sequences, though there's not a ton of character work. The book seems more about its plot than its premise, if that makes sense: Not trying to be high-concept, as the concept can be reduced to something almost generic, but that's not really how it reads, as it reveals what's going on in an unfolding fashion. It's almost more like a seinen manga than a superhero comic, but I wouldn't presume any authorial familiarity with that material.

In some ways, if anyone deserves to have his work primarily discussed in the context of some trend piece about violence in superhero comics of the seventies and eighties, it probably is Michael Fleisher. In a grander sense, no one deserves that fate. Probably nothing about the work left behind reveals the man he really was to those closest to him, unless he was some sort of Fletcher Hanks type. I should not presume he was. The berserk quality I admire in the work is present in the personalities of many men, and many have sympathy to it who live in a dignified manner. The triumph of the work is in the craft of it, that it can feel unhinged while retaining readability. The man was afraid that being confused with the work would prevent him from working, but that fear did not appear to have tamed the work itself any. So we're left with something that doesn't necessarily betray anything about the man who made it. RIP.

(Apologies to the Twitter user @britney_spheres who I’m sourcing these images from, whose posts interested me in the comic enough to track it down.)