Part 4
Copyright - Frank Cho
Then we get to the art. Oh boy, the art. Arguably the series greatest asset and greatest detriment.
Put simply, when I got back into comics after my wilderness years Frank Cho rapidly became my favourite artist. And that includes 2000ad artists which is saying something.
During the early comic strips you see him rapidly grow as an artist. I mean he starts off very good but over the course of maybe the first 6 or so issues of the comics, maybe the first 6 months of the syndicated strip his level elevated at an impressive rate. Well I guess if you have to turn out a strip a day you have to learn quickly on the job. There's a similar elevation in Bill Watterson't work on Calvin and Hobbes to my eye as well.
His art at its best is energetic, clean and incredibly comfortable on the eye. He has a smooth, slick line that captures emotion and movement with subtlety and vibrance as needed. He poses his characters, gives them body language, that enhances the storytelling immensely. He's able to capture a world of different shapes and forms perfectly. A woodland area looks magical and dreamy. Machinery and spaces look solid, real and lived in. His funny animals are perfectly cartoon like and recognisable yet always conveying even their quietest of emotional reactions to an absolute tee. When he needs to draw funny he draws funny... well funnily. When he wants to capture real, serious emotion, convey tension and atmosphere he does that superbly as well. He can bounce effortlessly from the 'cartoony' to the 'realistic' with the stroke of a pen, or indeed several strokes of pen and brush as the image he is capturing requires.
In short he's able to draw anything brilliantly and has a range of stylistic tools in his armoury to make him almost the perfect comic artist. It's no surprise he became such a big star when he moved to Marvel. His ability to master the real and hyper-real is matched by almost no artist I know and that makes him the perfect superhero artist.
The trouble is he's a big teenager in the way he draws women. Brandy and other female characters in the series are fantastic. Brandy is smart, capable, engaging, vulnerable. She feels really real and rounded as a character and I love reading her grow and develop as a character. Yet Cho seems to find it almost impossible not to sexualise her. He objectifies almost all the female characters he introduces. Or makes a point of the fact that they aren't objects of sexual desire when they aren't.
The problems with his art are exemplified at a time after he finished Liberty Meadows (at least to this point). It all came to a head when in 2016 while working at Marvel he produced a number of sexualised, objectified commission covers involving female characters. Knowing the reactions he was getting from readers like me. I'd almost stopped reading his work entirely as I was getting so fed up with his visual representation of women. It was boring, childish and at times bordering on offensive, if not outright offensive. To reflect on this silly attitude as he saw it he'd have one character or another popping up on these images proclaiming 'Outrage!' to mock the reactions of folks put off by what he was doing.
At this point folks from Comicsgate - the horrible alt-right movement in comics who see any attempt to diversify comics and their creators as taking away their toys. THEIR TOYS. Who stunningly say mainstream superhero comics should keep the politics out, they've always had the politics in them, it's just they don't like the politics they see there now, as it's not their politics. Anyway Comicsgate made him a bit of a cause celebre, an example of how leftist and feminists and progressives had an agenda to stamp on their fun.
"Look what they are doing to poor ol' Frank Cho. It's just harmless fun. If you don't like 'sexy' women just look away and don't stop us having our fun."
To his credit he quickly disassociated himself from the Comicsgaters. He made it very clear that he wanted nothing to do with them and disagreed with what they stood for. All good, the problem is he didn't seem to have the self awareness to reflect on why they assumed he would be with them. Why they so associated themselves with him and what he draws.
To Frank Cho the way he drew women was all a bit of harmless fun. In fact as he sees it he used it as a way to comment on the weakness of men who are so affected and scared by strong, attractive, sexual women. In Liberty Meadows Frank (the character) is the very embodiment of that. He can't handle the fact that he's so attracted to Brandy and can't deal with his emotions. The problems very clearly Frank's not Brandy's.
The thing is he still continually sexualises and objectifies his female characters. He seems (or certainly seemed to, I've not heard a great deal from him for a while.) unable to realise there is a difference between being able to draw strong, sexual women and that being seen as what your art is about. There are countless superb artists known for being able to draw characters in a way that is powerful, sexually exciting and even titillating. The problem Frank Cho has is that is what his art was seen as and that entirely took over and dominated what he produced. In doing that he reduced his visual depiction of women to reductive titillation, not exciting liberating sexual freedom.
Copyright - Frank Cho
All that said the craft, storytelling and humour in Liberty Meadows I remember being top draw. Absolutely fantastic stuff. I think if it wasn't for the problems I've outlined above this series would be a lot higher. A lot higher. As it is until I get to a re-read and see about how I feel about it then it will have to settle for this position. Obviously folks can have very different options either way to my feeling about Frank Cho's art and reflect on whether it's something you want to read based on that. I have to say I'm really looking forward to reading it again as writing this has reminded me just how much affection I have for this incredible series. The trouble is I'm a little nervous as to how I'll feel once I'm doing that read!
Copyright - Frank Cho
Then we get to the art. Oh boy, the art. Arguably the series greatest asset and greatest detriment.
Put simply, when I got back into comics after my wilderness years Frank Cho rapidly became my favourite artist. And that includes 2000ad artists which is saying something.
During the early comic strips you see him rapidly grow as an artist. I mean he starts off very good but over the course of maybe the first 6 or so issues of the comics, maybe the first 6 months of the syndicated strip his level elevated at an impressive rate. Well I guess if you have to turn out a strip a day you have to learn quickly on the job. There's a similar elevation in Bill Watterson't work on Calvin and Hobbes to my eye as well.
His art at its best is energetic, clean and incredibly comfortable on the eye. He has a smooth, slick line that captures emotion and movement with subtlety and vibrance as needed. He poses his characters, gives them body language, that enhances the storytelling immensely. He's able to capture a world of different shapes and forms perfectly. A woodland area looks magical and dreamy. Machinery and spaces look solid, real and lived in. His funny animals are perfectly cartoon like and recognisable yet always conveying even their quietest of emotional reactions to an absolute tee. When he needs to draw funny he draws funny... well funnily. When he wants to capture real, serious emotion, convey tension and atmosphere he does that superbly as well. He can bounce effortlessly from the 'cartoony' to the 'realistic' with the stroke of a pen, or indeed several strokes of pen and brush as the image he is capturing requires.
In short he's able to draw anything brilliantly and has a range of stylistic tools in his armoury to make him almost the perfect comic artist. It's no surprise he became such a big star when he moved to Marvel. His ability to master the real and hyper-real is matched by almost no artist I know and that makes him the perfect superhero artist.
The trouble is he's a big teenager in the way he draws women. Brandy and other female characters in the series are fantastic. Brandy is smart, capable, engaging, vulnerable. She feels really real and rounded as a character and I love reading her grow and develop as a character. Yet Cho seems to find it almost impossible not to sexualise her. He objectifies almost all the female characters he introduces. Or makes a point of the fact that they aren't objects of sexual desire when they aren't.
The problems with his art are exemplified at a time after he finished Liberty Meadows (at least to this point). It all came to a head when in 2016 while working at Marvel he produced a number of sexualised, objectified commission covers involving female characters. Knowing the reactions he was getting from readers like me. I'd almost stopped reading his work entirely as I was getting so fed up with his visual representation of women. It was boring, childish and at times bordering on offensive, if not outright offensive. To reflect on this silly attitude as he saw it he'd have one character or another popping up on these images proclaiming 'Outrage!' to mock the reactions of folks put off by what he was doing.
At this point folks from Comicsgate - the horrible alt-right movement in comics who see any attempt to diversify comics and their creators as taking away their toys. THEIR TOYS. Who stunningly say mainstream superhero comics should keep the politics out, they've always had the politics in them, it's just they don't like the politics they see there now, as it's not their politics. Anyway Comicsgate made him a bit of a cause celebre, an example of how leftist and feminists and progressives had an agenda to stamp on their fun.
"Look what they are doing to poor ol' Frank Cho. It's just harmless fun. If you don't like 'sexy' women just look away and don't stop us having our fun."
To his credit he quickly disassociated himself from the Comicsgaters. He made it very clear that he wanted nothing to do with them and disagreed with what they stood for. All good, the problem is he didn't seem to have the self awareness to reflect on why they assumed he would be with them. Why they so associated themselves with him and what he draws.
To Frank Cho the way he drew women was all a bit of harmless fun. In fact as he sees it he used it as a way to comment on the weakness of men who are so affected and scared by strong, attractive, sexual women. In Liberty Meadows Frank (the character) is the very embodiment of that. He can't handle the fact that he's so attracted to Brandy and can't deal with his emotions. The problems very clearly Frank's not Brandy's.
The thing is he still continually sexualises and objectifies his female characters. He seems (or certainly seemed to, I've not heard a great deal from him for a while.) unable to realise there is a difference between being able to draw strong, sexual women and that being seen as what your art is about. There are countless superb artists known for being able to draw characters in a way that is powerful, sexually exciting and even titillating. The problem Frank Cho has is that is what his art was seen as and that entirely took over and dominated what he produced. In doing that he reduced his visual depiction of women to reductive titillation, not exciting liberating sexual freedom.
Copyright - Frank Cho
All that said the craft, storytelling and humour in Liberty Meadows I remember being top draw. Absolutely fantastic stuff. I think if it wasn't for the problems I've outlined above this series would be a lot higher. A lot higher. As it is until I get to a re-read and see about how I feel about it then it will have to settle for this position. Obviously folks can have very different options either way to my feeling about Frank Cho's art and reflect on whether it's something you want to read based on that. I have to say I'm really looking forward to reading it again as writing this has reminded me just how much affection I have for this incredible series. The trouble is I'm a little nervous as to how I'll feel once I'm doing that read!
