The Seven Faces of Alex Niño

In Adventure Comics 425 (Jan. 1973) artist Alex Niño does something unusual. He dramatically changes the style of characters’ faces numerous times.

The title illustration features three objects that evoke the central conflict of the story: the helmet of a Spanish Conquistador, the spear of a Caribbean Indian, and the face of the natives’ leader, Fero (who names himself “Captain Fear,” hoping to generate terror in the “white devils” trying to enslave him). The face below is drawn in what we could call Nino’s baseline style for the story:

Yet on page two, Fero’s and his father’s faces look significantly different from the baseline style, which is visible in the panels superimposed on the main panel. Niño uses an almost pixilated effect, as if he’s enlarging a photo that can’t take being blown up, and so becomes blocky:

A close-up of the Spanish leader receives a similar, though even more abstracted, treatment:

The story’s next close-up employs a round and thick inking style:


The next face (Fero again):

Stylistically, this looks somewhat similar to the one above with its smooth areas of black, but the single color gives it a distinct, statue-like effect.

I’m not sure who colored the story -- no credit is given -- but the colorist understands Niño’s technique and uses a different palette for each new face, a palette unlike the story’s general approach to color.

Then, a new cartoony style of distortion is used for the face of a pirate as Fero slays him, and his head almost melts as his hair disintegrates:


The same character a few panels earlier:

When Fero names himself Captain Fear in the penultimate panel, his face resembles a picture taken by a thermal imaging device (a way to suggest the “white hot” intensity of his rage), and it looks like a looser version the statue effect used earlier:

Here are the last two faces in the context of the story's final eight panels:

The last two unique faces -- and even the story’s approach to faces as a whole -- seem to owe a debt to the kinds of distortions that characterize 1970s psychedelic art. There's something 'trippy' about reading a comic whose characters appear to be transforming in front of you . . .

The shifting styles approach is not often found in non-humor comics, where artists, though they might employ heightened exaggeration as Niño does, tend not to move between distinct styles that appear only for a single panel. And I can't think of many comics artists in any genre who use so many visual approaches within a single piece. Niño's technique here seems almost radical.

And there’s something about the ‘integrity’ of the older mass-produced comics page that makes the effect Niño employs -- or perhaps the effect it has on readers -- distinctly a comics’ one. While his changes are dramatic, the limited production methods used during the 1970s (the way comics had been produced for decades) ensure a kind of ‘naturalness’ to something that might otherwise be jarring, especially if used, say, in a movie. The warm, flat colors printed on newsprint make certain that the images don’t jump out at you in the way they might in animation or in the overdone coloring styles prevalent in current mainstream comics printed on glossy paper.

And it’s not surprising that Niño's style shifts would focus on faces, the part of the body perhaps most central to the art of caricature.

In the second part of “Captain Fear” (Adventure 426), Niño draws the story in a single style.