John Buscema and Why Avengers’ box-office success matters
Despite the mighty superhero movie’s loss of the top spot in the box office this weekend to Men In Black, Avengers’ record-smashing domestic gross of $500 million made me optimistic for a number of reasons.
As a fan of the film’s director, Joss Whedon, I felt he deserved the mainstream recognition. For Whedon, the movie proved there is indeed life after Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a long-canceled TV show that had delivered the occult, humour, teen romance, and a young (crypto-feminist) female action star to a cult audience including yours truly.
Whedon had earlier post-Buffy setbacks with the short-lived TV series, The Dollhouse, and the failure to come out with a Wonder Woman film for Warner. In spite all these disappointments, he found refuge in the world of comic books. He launched with Dark Horse the extremely hot title called, you guessed it, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It picked up where the show left off with a “Season 8” rolling out in monthly (nearly) 32-page wonders. He also had a 24-issue run penning another hit comic book, Astonishing X-Men.
In my mind, the comic book world provided a creative succor for Whedon.
With Avengers, the film, Whedon is returning the favour. Comic books, like most print media, are experiencing a difficult transition as digital formats continue to expand their reach. And though the audience for the comic book has grown in recent years, a concern about the viability of comic books continues to linger.
I don’t know if great super-powered box-office hits increase readership for comic books - but, at the very least, they force media conglomerates like Warner Bros. (who own DC superheroes such as Superman and Batman) and Disney (owning the Marvel line-up including X-Men, Spider-Man, and The Avengers) to take their mutant-alien-godlike-radiation/chemically enhanced roster of characters as a valuable resource. Superheroes face not the threat of annihilation (actually, they do, in practically ever issue but you know what I mean).
Comics can be understood as a vast research and development wing for media companies. Characters, storylines, audiences can be created, cultivated and refined through the creation of comics at a relatively low-cost. I’m sure there are films with bigger catering budgets than what it cost to put out a dozen issues of a title. Superhero books make good business sense.
But that’s not what excites me about Avengers’ and other super-franchises’ success. What I like most about the pre-eminence of the superhero genre, specifically in comic books, is it is where the art of classical figure drawing has found a safe harbour.
In comic books, the art still survives. Better yet, it prospers in a vibrant form still relevant to popular culture. What little figure drawing exist in painting is widely ignored. But in the split tones of cyan, magenta, yellow and black in comic books, we are reminded that figure drawing can be powerful and compelling.
With the rise of the Avengers to mainstream consciousness, I hope new fans will discover one of the great masters of the form, John Buscema (1927-2002). His pencil work graced numerous Marvel titles over the years but his best could be found in the Conan titles, The Savage Sword of Conan and Conan the Barbarian, and The Mighty Avengers (above). Okay, there was also Wolverine and The Silver Surfer.
In The Mighty Avengers, Buscema could draw the most lovely woman. He excelled in sword and sorcery. One look at a Buscema drawing of the boastful Avenger, Hercules, grappling with a villain revealed an artist steeped in the figurative drawing techniques of the Italian Renaissance.
Buscema’s style reminds me most of Mannerist artist Paolo Veronese (1528-1588). (Note Buscema himself says Michaelangelo was his biggest influence but that Old Master could not draw women well. Buscema certainly could.)
Veronese elongated his figures but not to the exaggerated proportions of his contemporary, El Greco. Veronese figures were sensual, plastic, and full of energetic contrapposto. Just like Buscema.
In fact the first time I saw a painting by Paolo Veronese in real life—The Wedding at Cana in the Louvre (detail below)—the first thing I thought was, “It looks like John Buscema!”
Buscema, without sacrificing energy, action, and the BAM and ZOOM of comics, always kept the figure within a realism, perhaps even a humanism, that suggested bravery and superheroics were within reach of every 8-year old. Like Veronese, Buscema drew the human figure with an elegant solidity.
Later on, we would see in comic book panels, by other artists’ hands, greater physical distortion and abstraction with more arch anatomy with muscles everywhere, bigger ones, larger breasts, canyon-like cleavage, ridiculous proportions,…essentially superheroes on steroids. Gone was the humanist superhero. And I didn’t how much I missed the Buscema way until I saw Whedon’s version of The Avengers.
Which brings me back to Whedon and his contribution. With Buffy, Whedon tried to create a superheroine who avoided the pornstar hair do’s and skin-tight costumes that has prevailed in comics these last few decades. Whedon wanted audiences to identify with the Chosen One (there could only be one true Slayer at a time, always a girl) and he casted a female action protagonist who was coltish/flighty, insecure, of normal proportions, who fended off the world with quips and sometimes a pouty lip. Buffy, played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, even had *gasp* baby fat.
Gellar as Buffy suggested given the right circumstances any girl could be the Next Ones which he underscored in the series’ finale episode.
In Avengers, the movie, Whedon does so again. Yes, it certainly has all the bombast and fireworks of a bonafide summer blockbuster. But its attractiveness is the human story: redemption, finding a place in the world, acceptance, fulling our potential. Yes, Scarlett Johansson, as the Black Widow, looks awesome in her skin tight onesy but its her interrogation technique that let’s us feel we can mix it up with the near-gods and gamma-irradiated big boys.
Buscema, like Whedon, worked to make his audience feel something beyond awe and power. Buscema drew in such a way that made readers believe the humanist figure (and by association humanist figure drawing) could survive, needed to survive in an age of Wonders. Buscema made us believe, pardon the comic-geek pun, that even androids can cry.
------------------
