Bill Sienkiewicz: Revolution, vol. I

VOLUME I

Bill Sienkiewicz

Revolution

Introduction by Neil Gaiman

“Bill sees clearly, paints beautifully. . . . My hope is that a book like this, filled with Bill’s art all in one place, will show people who think they know what Bill can do exactly how much

Self-portrait, 1984. Pen and ink on paper

more he can do than any of them had ever dreamed.”

—Neil Gaiman, author of The Sandman ISBN 9781644420010

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Bill Sienkiewicz

Revolution

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Bill Sienkiewicz

Revolution VOLUME I

Edited by Sal Abbinanti and Chul R. Kim

Essay by Ben Davis Introduction by Neil Gaiman

HOUSTON

Half-title: There Will Be Blood, 2007. Pen and ink on paper pp. 2–3. Jimi Hendrix, 2017. Lithograph pp. 4–5. Legion cover art for Marvel, 2017. Mixed media Wolverine card art for Upper Deck, 1997. Pen and ink on paper pp. 6–7. Gorilla, 2017. Mixed media Preliminary cover for Lone Wolf and Cub (detail), c. 1994. Mixed media pp. 8–9. Cat People, 2018. Mixed media Study for New Mutants, 2017. Digital rendering p. 10. New Men, 1997. Acrylic, watercolor, colored pencil on paper

BILL SIENKIEWICZ: REVOLUTION, Volume I Published by Six Foot Press Coert Voorhees, President Chul R. Kim, Publisher

First edition 2019 © 2019 Six Foot Press Unless otherwise noted, all artwork is © Bill Sienkiewicz Art

Edited by Sal Abbinanti and Chul R. Kim Designed by Patrick Seymour, @TsangSeymour Printed by Taeshin Inpack Co. Ltd. This book is typeset in Trade Gothic

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data available from the publisher.

All rights reserved

Distributed throughout the world

by Ingram Publisher Services www.ingrambook.com Printed in Korea

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To my paternal grandparents, Eleanor and Frantisek Sienkiewicz, immigrants who raised six children, for instilling in me a powerful work ethic and for believing I could grow up to be anything I set my mind to.

And to all the teachers in my life, especially Wilda Zidek, Nell Harper, Florence Kunkel, Kirk Bond, Barbara Jones, Carolyn Graber-Trout, and Don Brown. Their guidance, support, and belief in me made all the difference, inspiring me not only to follow my artistic dreams but to strive to be a better person—and to always keep learning.

My most sincere thank you.

—Bill Sienkiewicz

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Mad Hatter, 2016. Mixed media

contents PLATES 16 INTRODUCTION

Neil Gaiman

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Sketchbooks and Fine Art

122 Stray Toasters 24 BILL SIENKIEWICZ’S

EXPLOSIVE DEVICES

Ben Davis

152 New Mutants 172 Jimi Hendrix

52 YOU’RE NEVER DONE: INTERVIEW WITH BILL SIENKIEWICZ

Chul R. Kim

194 Daredevil and

Elektra: Assassin 204 Notebooks 215 Biography

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Dracula card art for Upper Deck (detail), 2010. Mixed media

introduction Neil Gaiman

For anyone who encounters Bill Sienkiewicz in the real world, rather than just on the page, there will be a moment of truth. Because at some point you will have to pronounce his last name. When you read his name on the page, it can be like the name of a character in a book: you take a crack at it, and never worry again.

I was twenty-five, and I was interviewing Frank Miller for TimeOut magazine in a pub that no longer exists called Cafe Munchen. “The work you did on Elektra: Assassin with Bill See-ink-ee-er-witz...” I said. Frank interrupted and said, “It’s Sin-KEV-itch.”

So I learned, and I would never forget. Now sometimes people come up to me and tell me how much they love the Delirium story in Sandman: Endless Nights, “the one by, I don’t know if I’m pronouncing his name right here…” And I say, “It’s Sin-KEV-itch,” and I feel, just for a moment, like I’m part of the chain of life.

I met Bill when I was twenty-six. Dave McKean was twenty-three and an enormous fan of Bill’s, and I was in awe of his talent. That was over thirty years ago, but it still makes me smile, thinking of how it felt to buy Elektra: Assassin in more or less monthly installments.

The feeling that someone was having the time of his life making art. The power of Daredevil: Love and War.

The outrage and brilliance of Brought to Light. And the feeling that it was all building towards something.

What it built towards was Stray Toasters, written and drawn by Bill, still one of my favorite places that comics went, thirty years ago. I thought after Stray Toasters they would all be like that, that Bill had kicked the doors down and now everyone would make comics magic, but no.

If you want to know who I was when I was 26, when we first met, Bill drew me in a notebook. I was a blank space in shades, with hair. That was me (fig. 1). We used to talk about making a comic together, called (if memory serves) Processional. During the course of the comic, the entire population of New York would march into the East River, never to be seen again. Mostly, I just wanted to make Bill draw everyone in New York. I loved how he hovered between realism and surrealism, the way he seemed to understand how to make any picture of anything in whatever style he needed to tell it.

What I took from Bill, and from his work that I love, was that if I were ever going to write something for him, it would need to be a real collaboration. Frank Miller described working with Bill as a table-tennis match, with each of them hitting the ball back to the other.

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Swamp Thing, 2018. Ink on paper. Private collection

Girl with a Dragon Tattoo preliminary art for book cover, 2017. Ink and color pencil

I wanted to write something for Bill that would allow him to decide to stop playing table-tennis and to start playing Monopoly, Whist, or Cards Against Humanity, if that was where his muse was going to take him.

It took us about sixteen years finally to work together: we made the Delirium story in Sandman: Endless Nights. We did it like this: I wrote the loosest script I could and gave it to Bill. He sent back art. I loved that 18

it was inspired by the script, like a jazz improv inspired by a classic song. I called him and asked if he had done any more art he hadn’t sent, and he admitted that he had. He sent them over. I laid everything Bill sent me down on the floor, put the pages in a whole new order, and then rewrote the script to take into account what Bill had actually done—a freeform journey into madness and out again.

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Elektra, 2016. Mixed media. Private collection

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Fig. 1. Neil Gaiman sketch, 1986.

Pen on paper. Courtesy of Neil Gaiman

Bruce Lee, 2015. Pen and ink on paper.

Private collection

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Preliminary drawing for book cover, 2014. Acrylic on paper

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New Mutants sketch covers, 2018. Mixed media

When I told Frank Miller I had done this, he looked at me with a certain amount of what I suspected might actually have been admiration. “You put the pages in a different order,” he asked. I told him I had. “It never occurred to me to reorder Bill’s pages,” he said, in the tone of someone who would absolutely be reordering the pages the next time they made something together.

I felt I had given Frank something back, in return for the favor of teaching me how to say Bill’s name.

control of what he does. He’s not an unacknowledged genius. He is Bill Sienkiewicz, and he’s up on the pedestals already. He is acknowledged. But my hope is that a book like this, filled with Bill’s art all in one place, will show people who think they know what Bill can do exactly how much more he can do than any of them had ever dreamed.

Enjoy!

What else is there to say? It’s been thirty-three years since we met. Bill sees clearly, paints beautifully. He absorbs styles and ways of making art with the facility he had as a young man, but now I always feel he’s in 23

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Fig. 1. Stray Toasters, 1988. Mixed media

bill sienkiewicz’s explosive devices Ben Davis

“We haven’t even touched the limits of what comics can reach.”1 That’s how Bill Sienkiewicz concluded his interview with MTV newsman Kurt Loder in 1988. With his long hair and earring, Sienkiewicz every inch looked like he embodied the anarchic rock ‘n’ roll energy that he had brought into the medium in the course of the 1980s.

He was then in the middle of publishing the dense and nightmarish opus that he both painted and wrote, Stray Toasters (fig. 1). He had just done the gonzo illustrations for Brought to Light, an angry comic-book indictment of the CIA, and co-edited Strip AIDS USA, a comics anthology and fundraiser for people living with AIDS, responding to the then still underacknowledged crisis.

Here’s the funny thing about returning to that hopeful ’80s prognostication now, though: It’s at once a prophecy realized and a prophecy thwarted. On the one hand, comics are now part of mainstream culture in a way that fans could have only imagined thirty years ago. The mature energy and creative flair that Sienkiewicz and his generation uncorked are part of the reason they broke out of their niche as kids’ stuff.

On the other hand, they are these days appreciated for their mythologies, as “intellectual property,” diffused

throughout the multimediascape. As far as I am concerned, the frenzy of page-level experimentation that Sienkiewicz unleashed remains underappreciated.

Here’s what Alan Moore had to say about what made Sienkiewicz special, writing in 1990 on the heels of their collaboration on both the trippy “Shadowplay” in Brought to Light and the naturalistic black-and-white homage to small town England, Big Numbers: What I have come to appreciate more fully is the breadth of his talent. Precisely because Bill’s versatility is the most obvious feature of his work, its extent tends to be taken for granted or overlooked. When the style verges wildly from panel to panel, it is easy to forget that each work that Sienkiewicz approaches emerges with its own distinct identity, each one different than the other. Elektra: Assassin is quite unlike Stray Toasters. Bringing matters closer to home, “Shadowplay” does not even remotely resemble Big Numbers. In each case, Bill has worried at the work in question until he finds that part of it that seems most central in the light of his individual vision, building his interpretations from that point into unique expressions that are wholly separate, each intuitively attuned 25

Fig. 2. Batman, 2007. Mixed media Fig. 3. Superman preliminary drawing, 2016. Pen and ink on paper

to the heart of the respective works that they represent.2 This quote captures something about the negotiation at the heart of the work. Comics sometimes are tagged an “impure art,”3 neither literary nor visual, but some unstable combination of the two. Mostly, this is a source of insecurity—the idea that comic art is always at the service of something other than itself, often something very commercial or pulpy.

A “fine art person” is liable to look at Bill Sienkiewicz’s plunging black-and-white Batman or Superman (figs. 2, 3) and recognize its visual flair, the way that it renders the immediately recognizable icon in a dramatically new way that still captures the iconographic essence, acknowledge the design ingenuity of rendering the rippling cape as a solid, monumental plane of white, trailed by lines of white streaking through the black background—and still end with the thought, “but it’s still just Superman.”

In a way, that’s a funny judgment. You can think of many art-historical heroes whose main goal was not individual expression but to put their mark on some bit of the Bible or Greek mythology, for whatever religious 26

or governmental authority could pay the bills. Bernini’s The Ecstasy of St. Teresa or Breugel’s Netherlandish Proverbs were certainly not “personal” in the modern sense—just very dynamically distinctive.

To be fair, personal expression is too much a part of the contemporary idea of what’s valuable in art to leave aside if we are going to talk about comics “as art.” And Sienkiewicz has a style that can sometimes feel as if he has sprayed his brain out directly onto the page. He has a tendency to create his own rules—to a fault. And there very much is a personal story, an arc to the way that Sienkiewicz has defined himself creatively in his work that is worth telling.

But the point Moore makes and that I want to reiterate about Sienkiewicz’s uniqueness is the knife-edge balance in his work between “individual vision” and fidelity to the logic of the material at hand, not all of it in his individual control. To look at his work “as art,” as far as I am concerned, is not to say that he has made some great images that happen to be in service of a story, that can be extracted from their context to be appreciated in some “purer” way—that they could hang in a museum, though his best art could. It’s to take note of the way that he inhabits the impurity of the medium

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Fig. 4. Moby Dick, 1990. Mixed media

so well. Not that he transcends the material, but that he burrows so deeply and distinctly into it.

Jim Shooter upon meeting Sienkiewicz, in the latter’s telling. “Is that a problem?”5

The moments where the precariously balanced forces at play come together into a new idea for expressing something on the page are what I am going to call Bill Sienkiewicz’s “devices”—knots of invention that are, as Moore says, “attuned to the heart of the respective works that they represent,”4 but making that heart beat with a new Sienkiewicz-ian pulse.

Sienkiewicz’s run on Moon Knight (fig. 5) with writer Doug Moesch lasted approximately from 1980 to 1983. Because Moon Knight already struggled with a rep as a Batman knockoff, the knuckleheaded fan complaints that Sienkiewicz’s art was a “clone” of Batman’s most beloved contemporary artist (Adams) were probably louder and stung more fiercely: “It upset me to the point of making me angry and making me feel invisible,”6 he remembered. The facility with Adams’s style that had opened the door for him was now also being used against him.

A note: I’m basically focusing on the arc of Sienkiewicz’s development from his start in comics in the early ’80s to his definitive personal statement, Stray Toasters. This is the period before the 1990s comic bubble and the industry’s embrace of the “Image Comics Look” (Sienkiewicz’s words) closed the door on the kind of experimentation he was interested in, and he expanded his focus to other challenges in illustration and multimedia. My particular frame leaves out a lot, of course (including some of my favorites, like his brooding distillation of Moby Dick). (fig. 4) But it tells a story, which I hope might also put all the rest into perspective.

Psychological Splatter The story of Bill Sienkiewicz’s entry into comics has been repeated many times: A lonely kid from New Jersey who found solace in comics and a sense of self in drawing, slogging his way through the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts. He began his career with a reputation that almost everyone else sums up in the same three words: “Neal Adams clone.” Adams had brought an unprecedented balance of realistic anatomical rendering and expressive dynamism to comics, and Sienkiewicz was far from the only artist who taught themselves by his example. But for Sienkiewicz in particular, the label would both open doors and prove confining in equal measure.

“I’ve got this kid fresh off the street and he draws like me,” Adams is supposed to have told Marvel editor

Moon Knight #5 (“Ghost Story”) opens with a full-page image of the cowled crusader perched atop a mansion, hand grasping the back of a winged gargoyle head for balance, his white cape sweeping around him in its always-improbable crescent. The perspective is from above, plunging down past Moon Knight along the façade to where two kids are attempting to break into the building below. As an image, it’s fantastic and gothic while also being grounded in Adams-esque verisimilitude—which is just what it needs to be, since, from a storytelling perspective, what is happening is that Moon Knight is trying to scare off the kids with his ghost-like apparition, so that he can take on the criminals who have taken shelter in the house without putting them in danger.

A point of differentiation was that Moon Knight had extra personalities—crime-fighting vigilante and millionaire playboy, but also cab driver—giving a particular shape-shifting quality to its narrative (“Moon Knight to me—even though it was one character—was a group,” Sienkiewicz noted).7 The book from month to month flickered between exotic adventure locales and gritty tales of ’80s New York, from James Bond-ish derring-do to horror-noir 29

Fig. 5. Moon Knight sketch card, 2007. Pen and ink on paper

psychodrama. Both thematically, in terms of the focus on fragmented psyche, and aesthetically, in terms of his future penchant for channel-changing tonal shifts, this was fertile soil.

The cover of Moon Knight #23 in September 1982 (“Perchance to Dream”) features the first major appearance of the signature Sienkiewicz splatter (by then, he was both penciling and inking). The jet-andsilver crusader was then locked in a two-issue arc battling “dream demon” Morpheus, who could harness the “ebon energy” of dreams into rays of darkness and whose hypnogogic powers gave Sienkiewicz’s yen for mind-expanding imagery room to play. The cover is a fairly standard image of the muscular, costumed Moon Knight, gripping his truncheon, but cut off at the right and at the knee to allow the left half of the cover to frame him against the backdrop of a shadowy New York skyline. Morpheus’s darkling energy fields and the issue’s winter setting were Sienkiewicz’s inspiration to finish the image by overlaying it with splatter, which gives the art a whole new atmospheric texture. Moon Knight’s white cloak is splattered with black; the inky black cityscape is splattered with white (even Sienkiewicz’s signature is partly obscured by splatter).

The effect is a visual parallel to the theme of fantasy and reality bleeding into each other.

The apex of Sienkiewicz’s early evolution on Moon Knight came two issues later, with December 1982’s parable-like sixteen-page mini-story, “Hit It!” (The idea for the story, Sienkiewicz has said, was his own, with Moesch just doing the dialogue instead of the plotting).

This study in the Bronze Age superhero’s uneasy collision with realism was billed as “The Most Unusual Moon Knight Adventure Yet … An Exploration into the Meaning of Violence.”

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On the street, a young man discovers a newspaper obituary for someone who we eventually learn was his father. He has what seems to be a mental break, punching strangers on the street, smashing through the door of a church where the dead father’s casket lies, slamming the priest in the face before beating on the coffin in a frenzy. Getting wind of the rampage, Moon Knight pursues him into the church to confront him.

“Moon Knight! What are you doing here? Did you come to hit me too?” the man cries, then prostrates himself and begs him to hit him. “You might as well … He did it often enough! He hit me till I couldn’t sleep at night— any night!”

Moon Knight stands over the cowering wretch, as the watching priest begs the hero to take action: “Stop him! Hit him! You’ve got to stop him! You’re Moon Knight!” When the hero refuses on principle, the tortured man leaps up, battering him in the back of the head—and at last the hero turns and punches the young man unconscious. Out of nowhere the captions beg, “No, Moon Knight! No! No!” As he turns to leave the wounded, shattered man on the ground and the stricken priest looks on, Moon Knight smashes his own fist into the wall in self-torment—and the cycle of selfdestruction goes on, violence triggering more violence.

The artistic device Sienkiewicz invented for the antiheroic and troublingly inconclusive vignette was to intercut the man’s out-of-control rampage with childlike drawings that suggest a monstrous authority figure smacking a child. These tormenting scrawled memories repeat throughout the narrative, doubling the violent gestures of the man and ultimately of Moon Knight, representing the trauma that won’t go away (they are in bright red, like the splattering blood from the unspooling rampage). As a device, it foreshadows the interleafing of multiple drawing styles to express psychic fragmentation that would develop into a Sienkiewicz signature.

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Fig. 6. Moon Knight #9 cover, 1983.

Mixed media. Courtesy of Marvel

Image name?

Collage Catharsis There’s a funny piece of writing in the back of Moon Knight #24’s double-sized annual, penned by Sienkiewicz, “A Tale of Two Covers.” It’s a kind of short story, an imagined conversation with his bosses Denny O’Neil and Ralph Macchio. Its ribbing tone is within the tradition of Marvel’s back-slapping “Bullpen Bulletins,” but spritzed with an extra pulse of uncomfortable implied criticism. It begins with Sienkiewicz ventriloquizing O’Neil asking him to write the column: 32

“Look,” Denny began, “I don’t want you to get the idea that this is something you have to do,” his gloved hand waving the riding crop in what could be construed as a menacing fashion.

“But we’d like to give you the opportunity to do something that you’d like to do to get you involved in every aspect of the book, not just the artwork, to tell the readers some of your viewpoints and …” Denny leaned back, crossed his jackbooted feet on the desk. He smiled a wicked smile, “… to let the readers know that

we’re just one big family here at Marvel.” My mind raced.8 The Sienkiewicz in the column hits upon the idea of writing about his unused covers: “We could run them, along with the ones that were used, and I could write about the dumb … the, uh, reasons that they weren’t used.” Among the examples presented, the four-page column spotlights a cover for Moon Knight #9, a wildly intricate Sienkiewicz concoction with the hero grasping his head, surrounded by looming profiles of his foe Midnight Man and wheeling images of famous paintings (Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Manet’s The Fifer) to boot, just to assert its ambitions. Juxtaposed against this creative miasma is a more conventionally heroic image (figs. 6, 7) of a capering Moon Knight kicking his foe in the face, the cover which was finally used.

“I wanted to do a total image, an essence of the relationship between him and Moon Knight.

The paintings—the Jekyll-and-Hyde shots of Midnight Man’s face. The target around Moon Knight. Moon Knight’s expression of worry and insanity—he was going through a lot back then.”

“That’s all well and good—” Denny smirked.

“But it’s too tall—the paintings would be obscured by the logo. All that we could see would be the two big faces and MK going crazy.

And he’s been crazy or in a losing position on the past five covers. I wanted to show him fighting, maybe winning. I thought about it. I really did. But you were moving to a studio and couldn’t be reached in time to do another. Frank Miller was in the office and drew the cover that was used.”9 The column continues in that vein. It gives an askew snapshot of the creative atmosphere at Marvel that Sienkiewicz was defining himself within and against— open enough to let such a column happen, but prickly enough to inspire it—as well as offering testimony to his developing idea of the “total image” of a character’s psychology.

Fig. 7. Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Italian, 1598–1680). Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, 1647–52. White marble. Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome

After some wildly expressive covers (his work on Dazzler is, well, dazzling) and a run filling in on Fantastic Four, Sienkiewicz was offered a shot at Uncanny X-Men. He turned it down to work on the lower-profile New Mutants (figs. 8, 9), replacing Sal Buscema, thinking he would have more room to experiment: “I was exhausted and wanted to try crazy stuff. X-Men was Marvel’s Rolls Royce and I didn’t want to be the crazy guy driving it off a cliff.”10 This suited Marvel as well, as the publisher was still trying to give some definition to New Mutants: “I knew you couldn’t have an old-fashioned artist on something geared to bring in new readers,” editor Ann Nocenti recalled of the shift.11 Sienkiewicz’s very first issue was on the horror-tinged “Demon Bear” saga, centered on the young Dani Moonstar being stalked by an otherworldly ursine spirit; the first page featured her, curled up beneath a checked quilt. The shadows in its folds coalesced into the face of the shadowy snarling bear at the bottom, the incarnation of the nightmare that would haunt her throughout in ever-more unreal forms. “I think I started to feel more in touch with the parts of the bear,” the 33

FPO

Fig. 8. New Mutants cover, 1984. Mixed media. Courtesy of Marvel Fig. 9. Cyclops, 2010. Pen and ink on paper Facing page. New Mutants, 1984. Mixed media. Courtesy of Marvel

artist said later. “I never felt I could have done a real bear. It was something that felt bigger than life. It was not bound by the conventions of light or shadow . . . or physics. It was an emotional element. I think that it was really liberating.”12 The material itself opened up the channel to tilt the balance towards emotional expression over realistic rendering.

On New Mutants, Sienkiewicz’s depiction of established heroes was divisive, but his developing aspirations opened the door to new types of characters like the jittery morphing robotic alien Warlock (introduced in that same first issue, NM #18) and the super-powerful, tortured psychic Legion (introduced in NM #25), with his shock of expressive hair. Both have Sienkiewicz’s creative DNA in them—no one else was ever able to quite do Warlock’s manic weirdness justice—and, 34

like the demon bear, the conception of the characters spurred him on to new types of formal experimentation to convey their essence. Warlock’s mechanomorphic form suggested incorporating all kinds of circuit boardprint graphics, Legion’s divided personalities all kinds of hallucinatory, fractured layouts.

The cover of New Mutants #26 is a tour de force.

Sienkiewicz branched out into collage elements in ways that only Marvel’s mighty comic book progenitor Jack Kirby had been able to get away with. At the center is Legion’s tormented, screaming face, fully painted in woozy orange, eyes accented by dashes of blue and green. It seems to be bursting open another, smaller black-and-white drawn image of the smiling David Haller (Legion’s alter ego), whose torn parts frame it at the bottom. White slashes of tape seem to be

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Warlock, 2016. Pen and ink on paper

both trying to hold the erupting identity together and signaling the composition’s status as a flat layering of images, baring its identity as a collage.

The work is something like a Sienkiewicz “total image.”

The cover gorgeously asserts an inventive artistic idea and flaunts its individuality, its distance from convention, its non-illusionistic “artiness.” But even as it does so, it totally serves the underlying narrative idea and character conception. And in passing, it also (knowingly?) provides a visual metaphor for Sienkiewicz’s creativity itself—a fully painted artwork bursting out from the conventional inks; a new level of artistic ambition too big for the traditional style to contain. Now that I mention it, it is also very much an image of how painful that process would be.

Paper Play Here is the place to comment on the specific context in the 1980s within which all this manic and sometimes fraught invention happened. The outlines are well known: comic book sales had been declining on newsstands but rising at specialty comic stores, shifting the business’s center of gravity. The dedicated stores catered to the hardcore fans, and moreover to adults who had grown up with the material, were hungry for more mature content, and had the disposable income to pay for collections and what were now called “graphic novels.” In contradiction, the industry had grown ever more corporate and distanced from its zany roots, which brought a corresponding pressure to deliver predictable returns and safe formulas, and to advance the whole brand over and against whatever the creative teams behind the individual books were working on (in the mid-’80s, DC’s “Crisis on Infinite Earths” and Marvel’s “Secret Wars” were the beginning of the comics industry’s long infatuation with dropping everything for world-altering cross-promotion). There was, in other words, a kind of split personality opening up in the industry.

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Over and behind this was the specter of the general shoddy treatment of creators at all levels—the simmering feud between Jack Kirby and Marvel, the media stories of the penury of Superman’s creators, and Neal Adams’s abortive attempt to create a comic book union in the late 1970s, on the cusp of Sienkiewicz’s arrival on the scene. There was a keen awareness that however fun the books were, they were in the hands of corporations. What you did wasn’t “yours,” but belonged to them, at the very moment when the adult turn was demanding more sophisticated and discerning sensibilities, building up creators as auteurs. Further, these concerns were thrown into the mix of the societal climate of the 1980s: the sharp right-wing turn of the United States toward religious fundamentalism and “greed is good” Wall Street values, the saber rattling of the late Cold War, the disintegration and excess of the real-life New York where the mythic Marvel Universe was centered, making the eternal adolescent innocence of these heroic myths seem dated.

Such was the stage for 1986, comic book culture’s annus mirabilis, the year of the auteur book: Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, and a pair of Sienkiewicz/Frank Miller collaborations, Daredevil: Love and War and Elektra: Assassin (fig. 10).

The corporate feedback on Sienkiewicz’s more outthere work on New Mutants with Chris Claremont had not been all good; he had been getting static from the “money people” to bring it back in line with the larger X-Men brand. Shifting gears again to team up with ’80s wunderkind Frank Miller was liberating: “As much latitude as Chris was allowing me, there were constraints in terms of telling his story. So with Frank, there was really a sense of working on an image.” The move was very much in line with the era’s assertion of creative rebellion; the two set out, as Sienkiewicz remembered, to go “as far away from the corporate mindset of an assembly line that comics had become.”13

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Fig. 10. Elektra: Assassin #1 recreation, 2017. Watercolor and gouache on paper. Private collection

Love and War is the less consequential of the two works: the one-off plot has Kingpin kidnapping the wife of a noted psychologist to force him to use his expertise to revive his own catatonic wife Vanessa, with Daredevil out to save both. Part of what distinguishes it is Sienkiewicz’s now mainly painted art, too laborintensive for ordinary “assembly line” comics work, which gives the rainy nighttime New York streets a shimmering, mirage-like quality. The most sinister presence in Love and War is a wiry, unhinged predator named Victor, a testament to the deliberate space Sienkiewicz was now putting between his and Adams’s style of intricately rendered anatomical realism, in the name of touching a deeper nerve. Victor is an 38

aged tough with a deteriorating grasp of reality and a slowly mounting, delusional fixation on the kidnapped woman that Kingpin has told him to guard. Sienkiewicz rendered Victor’s eyes as squinting red triangles that seem to merge into one at the bridge of his nose—a cartoon-like device that reads immediately as symbolic rather than literal, of the fact that he is not right.

A showier device from Love and War: in Sienkiewicz’s hands, Kingpin is extra-imposing. Planes of patterned paper stand for the vest swathing his huge form, the flatness popping out against the cloudy textures of the otherwise painted art. In some panels, the walls of his lair in the background are also suggested by expanses