Cigarettes

For this week's 4CP Friday at HiLobrow, Matthew Battles considers cigarettes: "As in film, the comic cigarette billows and burns with inspiration, contemplation, pleasure, danger, and idleness." Seeing that all the smokers on 4CP were men, I went looking for some balance, but in my mid-Century comics, the only women I could find lighting up were also taking pleasure in premarital sex and bank robberies.

4CPalimpsest

The mossy green on the top two-thirds of this image is a single, uniform, printed color. The darker areas and ghostly gutters and speech balloon come from the opposite side of the paper. When you're on the lefthand page of a comic, this is the palimpsest effect; if you're on the righthand page, it's foreshadowing.

Jack Kirby's 4CP aesthetic

A possibly outlandish assertion I made about Jack Kirby in my 4CP FAQ has filtered into discussions at HiLobrow and The Comics Journal, so I thought I'd better provide an image to support this claim:

[Kirby] embraced the underlying chaotic, radioactive dots and force fields of the printed page, and he enlarged them into entire galaxies and negative zones. When the Fantastic Four dove into another dimension, they were diving into comic books themselves, shooting past four-color planetoids and through the wavy energy of bleedy black ink. Kirby’s cosmic crackles are benday dots that have gone supernova and collapsed into black holes.