Noah Brown Traumatic Tales #1 (2019)
Well, it's not quite so violent or weird as Energy Realms, and I must admit I already miss Power Squad and Stabber Duck, but Noah Brown's latest offering otherwise delivers. This time the horror is a little more traditional in so much as that fewer special effects will be required when Spielberg gets around to adapting this stuff.
Brown's art continues to fascinate. On a technical level it may be a few life-drawing classes short of a picnic - whatever the hell that means - but makes up for its shortcomings in other ways. I myself spent a decade or so as a vaguely underground cartoonist, and one of the first things I realised - once I noticed that I wasn't actually Leonardo da Vinci - is that consistency compensates for a multitude of sins, working by the logic that if a mistake is repeated often enough, it will eventually seem like you meant it. Knowing what you're doing is at least as important as doing it.
With this in mind, Noah Brown's art is beginning to remind me of that of Charles Burns or Mark Beyer - not really so much the look as the sheer jaw-dropping intensity, like there's voodoo scratched into the page with a flicknife dipped in ink, and even if lines seem to have been drawn in the wrong places, those are the places they're supposed to be because pretty was never an option here. You are expected to shit yourself. That's the effect he seems to be after.
The same applies to the writing, and close inspection reveals that beyond the chaos, the timing is pretty fucking sharp with not an extraneous line of narrative to deaden the pace.
Darius the Decider seems to be the star of this particular show. It's also the longest strip, and hence the one which sustains the gratuitous and absolutely inexfuckingcusable violence the longest, and the opening full page splash panel of the aforementioned Darius contemplating his own giant hand is one of the weirdest things I've looked at this year.
Noah Brown still isn't any closer to taking over the Garfield strip once Jim Davis is gone, but he makes Johnny Ryan look like a Neil Gaiman strip about Shakespeare's most delightfully whimsical creations, and his art will violate you in ways you can't even imagine.
Well, it's not quite so violent or weird as Energy Realms, and I must admit I already miss Power Squad and Stabber Duck, but Noah Brown's latest offering otherwise delivers. This time the horror is a little more traditional in so much as that fewer special effects will be required when Spielberg gets around to adapting this stuff.
Brown's art continues to fascinate. On a technical level it may be a few life-drawing classes short of a picnic - whatever the hell that means - but makes up for its shortcomings in other ways. I myself spent a decade or so as a vaguely underground cartoonist, and one of the first things I realised - once I noticed that I wasn't actually Leonardo da Vinci - is that consistency compensates for a multitude of sins, working by the logic that if a mistake is repeated often enough, it will eventually seem like you meant it. Knowing what you're doing is at least as important as doing it.
With this in mind, Noah Brown's art is beginning to remind me of that of Charles Burns or Mark Beyer - not really so much the look as the sheer jaw-dropping intensity, like there's voodoo scratched into the page with a flicknife dipped in ink, and even if lines seem to have been drawn in the wrong places, those are the places they're supposed to be because pretty was never an option here. You are expected to shit yourself. That's the effect he seems to be after.
The same applies to the writing, and close inspection reveals that beyond the chaos, the timing is pretty fucking sharp with not an extraneous line of narrative to deaden the pace.
Darius the Decider seems to be the star of this particular show. It's also the longest strip, and hence the one which sustains the gratuitous and absolutely inexfuckingcusable violence the longest, and the opening full page splash panel of the aforementioned Darius contemplating his own giant hand is one of the weirdest things I've looked at this year.
Noah Brown still isn't any closer to taking over the Garfield strip once Jim Davis is gone, but he makes Johnny Ryan look like a Neil Gaiman strip about Shakespeare's most delightfully whimsical creations, and his art will violate you in ways you can't even imagine.
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