On The Covers Of Flashpoint No 1; "Kid Flash Lost" # 1 & "Reverse Flash"

1.

What is it that’s going on in Francis Manapul’s cover for “Kid Flash Lost”? Neither a generic could-be-on-any-cover poster shot nor an effective slice-of-narrative snare, Mr Manapul’s work seems so purposeless and ill-judged that it could almost be a submission for a competitiondesigned to find the most apparently accomplished and yet ultimately ennui-inspiring of covers. For there’s no doubt that that big frightened head catches the eye, and the technical business of the foreshortening of Kid Flash’s body is impressive, but the design as a whole offers little else to turn such promising elements into an absolutely compelling, you-must-buy-me front cover.

It’s impossible not to feel that something’s definitely going on here, but what it is and, most importantly, why the reader should care is impossible to deduce. A quick first glance is, I suspect, therefore often swiftly followed by a speedy turning away. And so, although Bart Allen’s expression is undoubtedly one of a boy who’s been catapulted from a speeding bike towards a profoundly unyielding wall, the design gives us no sense of wherever it is that Kid Flash is crashing towards or of the situation that he’s racing away from. Because of that, “Kid Flash Lost” appears to be being sold off of the audience’s presumed interest in a teen superhero’s contextless panic. If you’re the sort of the person who can imagine finding a disembodied head fronted by pouting and kissable lips erotic, or a weeping face of itself tragically compelling, then no doubt the simple sight of a Bart Allen being fear-stricken by something – something – which is before him may well interest you. To many of the rest of us, I suspect, the sight of an event that’s a great deal more beguiling than a single boy’s scared face would be required to transform our browsing into buying.

       

Still, terror is something of a hook upon which to try to snare the reader’s attention, but Mr Manapul’s composition seems almost purposefully designed to confound itself, to deny the reader any extra information that might turn that fearful youth into a scenario which demands investigation. Yes, having Bart’s head effectively cropped by the logo does create a sense that the action we’re seeing is so urgent, his forward motion so extreme, that it can’t even be represented in the frame of the cover without Kid Flash roaring through the top of it. Yet Bart’s body is placed precisely in the centre of the cover, equidistant from each of the vertical sides, leaving it feeling suspended between then rather than dynamically racing through them. In truth, he seems far more a ship in a bottle that a cork being forced out from it. And Kid Flash’s body is, if you cover up his face, patently not that of a superhero who’s out of control. With his hands balled into fists and his legs apparently running forward in an everyday speedster-superheroic fashion, what we have here is a relatively calm body that clearly doesn’t belong to its own panicking head. Certainly what we’re not seeing is a body that’s out of control, that’s desperately trying to brace itself or even avoid a collision of whatever cataclysmic sort awaits. Worse yet, the one part of the composition that is redolent of urgency and excitement, namely Bart’s head, plays second fiddle to the complex and confusing set of logos at the head of the design. In fact, so finicky is the double logo, and particularly the three-part “kid-FLASH-lost” design, that it creates the sense that the drama at hand is one of Bart suddenly realising that he can’t get his haircut under that ugly mass of lettering, which, had it been intended as a gag, might at least have had the virtue of a smidgen of fanboy half-humour.

        

           

Yet the design might still have worked to a degree if it had been accompanied by information explaining to us whatever it is that Kid Flash is so frightened of. Even a clue about how he'd come to this predicament might have turned a generic shot of shock into something of a narrative. But instead, the cover’s been crowded up with elements which quite derail the figure’s sense of forward motion without offering any clarity of purpose to the action at all. And so, the futuristic city that’s been placed behind Bart is one seen from high above ground level, meaning that Bart appears at second glance to be levitating upwards, or even flying,  rather than running forwards. If that was the intention, then a great deal more context needed delivering, as well as more work being done to establish that Bart’s not in control of his movement at all. (Flashes, after all, can't fly.) Finally, and catastrophically, the design motif of a Shazam-esque lightning bolt has been added to the composition, meaning that the reader’s few remaining hopes of avoiding utter confusion are totally short-circuited. Are we supposed to believe that Bart is fearful of running into a cartoon krackle jagging across his path straight above him? And if so, how can any reader grasp that what appears to be the crudest of design affectations is actually the vital jeopardy in the scene?

What? It’s not intended to be any such thing? Sometimes a lightning bolt is just a lightning bolt? Well what’s it doing there in the first place then? First rule of design; if part of the composition isn’t absolutely necessary, then it should be ruthlessly cut, because if it isn’t helping, then it’s inevitably cluttering up the situation. Yet worse than not contributing to the effect of the whole is the element so placed that it inevitably confuses. With the background here presenting the reader with a vanishing point somewhere behind Bart’s chest insignia, and with that lightning bolt instead drawing the readers gaze down and away from there for no good reason at all, we end up with a design that’s simultaneously focusing our eye at one place while purposelessly dragging our gaze away from it too. Both over-busy and strangely static, teasingly dynamic and yet compositionally stymieing, the cover to “Flashpoint: Kid Flash Lost” looks like nothing other than one of a number of artist’s rough ideas waiting for an Art Director’s feedback. What happened, I wonder, to the real cover?

2.

The very worst of sincerly-meant work, to bowdlerise Gore Vidal, has its own integrity, and it's undoubtedly true. For example, you couldn't fake a truly juvenile piece of work such as that which fronts “Flashpoint: Reverse Flash”, because the exhausting excesses of cynicism and thwarted craftmanship that that would demand would inevitably show through as a contempt for the reader. Despite the fact that Ardian Syaf and Vicente Cifuentes’s work is as irredeemably awful an example of comic book art as has ever been seen on a DC Comic's cover, it's still suffused with an enthusiasm and a glee which quite subverts any attempt to evaluate it on any level beyond that of Fanboy-Majeure. If this had been presented to the reader as a doodle which had been sketched out painstakingly by a 13 year old sitting at the back of a Civics lesson, a certain degree of admiration might have been merited simply by the fact that so little knowledge and so much devout fanboyness had been combined to produce an entirely obsessive piece of work. Lost in their apparent adoration of the very idea of the post-Image superhero, Mr Syaf and Mr Cifuentes have moved beyond all non-class of '91 artistic influences into the word of the almost-pure fanboy ideal, where little beyond the devotee’s enthusiasm and a vague sense of both Lee and Leifeld powers their achievements. And so, what we have here is a vision of what a super-villain would look like if matters of conventional anatomy and design were irrelevant, and if the sincerity of fan-affection were all. It's a cover that's irradiated with an intense emotional sense of how important and how frightening a hyper-fast super-villain really must be, and, just as an unkissed youth can summon up what a naked lover might just conceivably look like, they've conjured up an image which is, although neither anatomically accurate or conventionally attractive, most certainly fit for the purposes required. It's impossible not to marvel as well as shudder at those excitingly jutting elbows of Zooms, for example, as if meat cleavers had been surgically inserted into his arm joints just to make him even more pointily-impressive. And there's surely a temptation to revel in the analism of the lattice work which appears to be describing this Flash-fiend’s neck. Is that scar tissue? Is it perhaps an alien parasite under Zoom's costume? Or is this how an artist largely unconcerned with the greater tradition of comic book art suggests the flowing of blood through a super-runner’s veins? No matter, it's superhero porn, and, as Lincoln once said of a book he enjoyed not a whit, those who enjoy this kind of thing will enjoy this, though there's not a hope in hell that anyone beyond a sub-section of the obsessional ever will.. 

       

No conventionally conscientious and competent artist could produce work such as this, because it’d be obvious that they were mocking the audience, that they were deliberately moronisising their work in a desperate attempt to attract a rump of readers with the most incestuously-peculiar of tastes. But Mr Syaf ‘s work seems almost to suggest that of a man who draws like this all the time, even when he’s not managing to convince DC to pay him for covers such as these. On the back of bus tickets found in his jacket pockets, we might imagine, should our entirely-imaginary Mr Syaf ever actually leave the house, are drawings of tiny little bundles of lycra-covered muscles lovingly detailed with hatching, cross-hatching and yet unnamed species of hyper-hatching operating down to the quantum level.

And it’s the way that the art here combines an absolute incompetence with an utter disinterest in the fundamentals of design and figurework that most fascinates. For example, you can trace your way through the past 50 and more years of Flash covers, as I did this morning, and find quite literally less than a handful of them where an energetically racing speedster has been shown cut off at the knee in the manner that the Reverse-Flash has been here. It is of course a cardinal rule of composition that a body is never shown cut off at the knee unless there’s an incredibly specific purpose matched with an unarguably good reason for doing so. Crop at the knee and at the very best, a body looks plain awkward. Crop a running man at the knee without a compelling reason to do so and all that’s created is the sense that the artist can’t draw the human leg, which the strange conglomeration of pseudo-muscles shown on Zoom’s thighs here would seem to confirm. With the incorruptibility of the most truly appalling but sincerely meant superheroic piffle, the figure of Zoom here undoubtedly carries a sense of swagger and pace, but the more the eye rests on the facts of the art rather than that which it adolescently evokes, the more repellently absurd it becomes. Like an innocent shopper faced with an incredibly fast and yet utterly out-of-tune guitar solo being played by a talentless but entirely sincere would-be axe-spanker in a guitar shop, the reader feels surely torn between howling with derision and applauding with a pity and even awe most commonly elicited by outsider art.

Extra marks should be awarded, of course, for the detail scattered across the cover without reference to any compositional principles whatsoever. Negative space is randomly filled up here with what upon weary-eyed inspection reveals itself to be part of Batman’s costume, and here by tokens of other superheroes too. There’s comicbook lightning crackles and spears and lots of squirrely lines! There’s things doing things everywhere!

And in that, this cover undoubtedly has integrity. It’s not rushed, it’s not cynical, it’s not manipulative, it’s not characterised by weariness, it’s not going through the motions, it’s not marked by a longing to be off producing storyboards and film posters. It’s the product of a sensibility that's entirely in love with the most crack-concentrated view of the super-person that’s it possible to hold. We should applaud both the good-hearted naivety and the intensely-focused endeavour of the artists, while wondering exactly how it is again that DC intends to sell its books to anyone beyond the most rabidly obsessed and ill-discerning of fanboy audiences.

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