Perhaps out of some misguided allegiance to my youth (when I was a “reader-collector” of Marvel and DC comics), or even out of some need (equally misguided) to prove to myself that I'm not an “art comics snob,” I've long been scanning the new comics racks for a mainstream-superhero title that I could “follow.” With the exception of Marvel’s Omega the Unknown (by a team fully outside of the mainstream stable of writers and artists), nearly every comic I have purchased or read in the store (a lot) has been a disappointment, especially the horrible Jimmy Olsen one-shots of the past year.
(I like how the areas of red and yellow stand off against the grays and blacks. Even a night scene that's dense in Jones's trademark shadows and thick black areas somehow becomes bright.)
The humor in Jones’s art is not ironic or parodic -- the story is a crime drama and works as such; but again, there’s something about the cartoony aspects of his art that keep the brooding within bounds, as in this dutch angle panel with angular shadows:
Subtitled “A Lost Tale of Bruce Wayne as Batman,” Batman Unseen appears to be completely outside of the cosmic crossover continuity chaos that makes so many current mainstream comics unreadable for me. It’s a bit of a throwback, a very pulpy comic with a mad scientist-invisible man, and some two-bit hoods directed by a super-villain type. But writer Doug Moench never overplays his pulp hand in a self-conscious way, and nothing is being revised, rebooted, etc . . . There’s very little pretense: it’s far more entertaining detective fiction than collectible superheroic drama, and it helps that the comic focuses more on the cast of criminals than on Batman.One pulpy feature that works very well is the way that Moench and Jones open each issue’s many chapters with an image of Batman as a kind of host-narrator, a silent version of the horror comic convention of the comedic narrator. There’s a light humor to many of these set ups that, for a moment, takes us out of the narrative's continuity and contributes to the comic's "ludic sensibility":
Here’s a two-page spread from issue #1: an ad for a DC comic (Blackest Night) followed by the last page of the Unseen story. It offers an unintended contrast, one that sets Jones's approach side-by-side with the typical machismo that pervades many superhero comics. In the ad, all of the characters' hand and mouth gestures and poses evoke, in their "extreme attitude," the unfortunate excesses of the 1990s Image comics house style. Jones uses some similar gestures and poses, but renders faces, hands, and bodies very differently. And the attractive, light and loose lines he employs to draw the disappearing scientist and his lab materials shows an artistic playfulness and stylishness absent in the ad and comics like the one it's selling:
So far, Batman Unseen has been an entertaining comic.
