I woke up today on the wrong side of the bed and I'm ready for naptime. Last week I read Love & Rockets Volume 9: Esperanza and it was, for some reason, wildly depressing and I wound up leaving work early. I mean, it's terrific. I had mainly read the earlier Locas comics, so I was looking for this volume because I knew about Vivian 'Frogmouth' Solis but had never read a story with Frogmouth in it. (Volume 9 is her debut.) I love Jaime Hernandez so much and I'm not sure why this collection made me so sad. I guess, like Maggie, I am also getting older. I finished the first arc of Fatale, which is kind of an occult horror/crime story by everyone's favorite crime writer Ed Brubaker. I like it all right, but I'm not sure if I will keep going - I probably will just to find out the secret of Josephine - I'm sure that part of this is purposeful, but I have a really difficult time keeping the Characters That Are Not Josephine straight in my mind. Everyone in this book is expendable, and almost everyone dies in some horrible way, so it's hard for me to keep track of which man it is that's dying in that particular issue and why or if it matters. In the first issue, there is a murder in which the murder victim is posed to look like the tarot card The Hanged Man, and there are some other references to blood magic, but unfortunately the occult aspect of the story is kind of vague by the end of the first arc. Maybe all of that will be explained in the next story arc. After finishing that first arc of Fatale I tried to get into some Phantom Lady as a palate cleanser. A lot of people actually die in Phantom Lady, which I guess is the pre-comics-code world for you. I like that she has a little black light mirror that blinds people. I'm surprised that no one recognizes her, especially her boyfriend, because she has no mask or anything to conceal her identity, she just changes from street clothes into her skimpy costume. I guess they're banking on the idea that debutante and senator's daughter Sandra Knight wouldn't wear something that scandalous. And, of course, her outfit is quite scandalous - one of the covers was featured in Seduction of the Innocent. (This is how I know about Phantom Lady - her famous 'headlights', as Dr. Wertham put it). A very cool design element of Phantom Lady comics is the opening page will be in a monotone, either blue or red: It's very striking and beautiful!
Phantom Lady was illustrated by Matt Baker, who is considered one of the first (if not the first) African-American comic book artists. I don't know a lot about him, but it's something I discovered while looking into the history of Phantom Lady! You can read more about him here and here.
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AuthorArtist, essayist, divinity school dropout. Here for a good time, not for a long time. Archives
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