Radiant Comics

I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got seven new comics:

Bloodshot −12

The Fall of the House of Usher – 2 (of 2)

Mind the Gap – 11

The Revival −11

Dark Horse Presents – 25

Miniature Jesus – 3

Harbinger – 13

This week’s comic book cover to look at and examine is “Love and Rockets” Volume 2 Number 16 from Spring 2006 by Jaime Hernandez. Yes, Fantagraphics continued with its season based labeling. I had recently been moving some of my comics around on my shelves when I ran across my copies of the second volume of “Love and Rockets. I noticed that there are a lot of good covers on this series and so I picked this one to write about.

It’s unusual to see a cover with this much white space. The whole physical world beyond the human beings is just the white of the paper. That makes a strong statement right there about not needing to define every little thing. The rest of the color is flat color and well chosen. There is no shading going on with the color at all. As a matter of fact there is no modeling of light going on at all in this cover. There is no need for it. The world holds together perfectly without it.

I don’t know how Jaime Hernandez does it. He uses nearly a single weight thin line to define all of the forms and he does it so well. He makes it look easy but I know it’s not. If you look at the “Art of Jaime Hernandez” book you can see how much work he does to find that one single line he ends up with. I’ve seen plenty of other cartoonists try to work with only a single weight line and it fails far more than it succeeds. I continually find his drawing to be amazing.

Besides the color and the drawing the story here is interesting. The story is about a moment. A moment between two friends who are at an art opening of some kind but have found a space to be by themselves for a little while and share a laugh. There is a bit of strangeness and mystery going on around them but they still steal away for a moment. The guy in the Batman mask and Superman shirt is staring out at the reader making us think that we might know him and might know what he’s doing there. But we don’t. The light blue woman is another mystery. Is that a person or a sculpture? I would think she’s part of the art show but she seems to be sitting on the landing of the stairs as if she’s an actual person. So why is she light blue? Being that I haven’t read this since 2006 I don’t know if the answers to the questions asked by this cover are answered inside but I still like the questions.

The only couple of nits I have to pick with this cover are design nitpicks. I could do without the white stroke around the logo. They should have just had the red meet the black and called it a day. That and the Fantagraphics logo on the bottom seems to fall in an awkward place. I’ve seen much worse but I’m sensitive to logo placements and such because I used to do that sort of thing for a living.

So few covers are about a moment between two people that this one stands out for me. That and it’s really well done.