Staple! this Saturday, March 6 (and a few words on Panel Press)
posted in 7000 BC, Jamie Chase Arts, Panel Press, Sleeper Awakes, Staple! |This coming Saturday, March 6th, witnesses the sixth annual Staple! Independent Media Expo here in Austin. The event brings together a splendid group of actants of all stripes covered by the label Independent Media—not to mention the people who love them. If you always thought the marketplace of ideas should feature heavy representation from comic book artists, small press publishers, graphic novelists, videographers, radio dramatists, plus geeks, freaks and an occasional writer of books, then this is the event for you. I’ll be present, and so will my good friends from Panel Press in Santa Fe, Bram and Monica Meehan. It’s actually Bram, Monica and associates that I want to discuss.
Anticipating their return visit to these environs, I’ve been immersing myself in their work. Panel Press, of which Bram and Monica are the principals, publishes a hybrid art form that combines characteristics of both comic books and graphic novels. If the distinction between those two forms is vague, Panel Press happily occupies the overlap.
The works to date have centered on stories relating to a secret government project, the Special Qualities Research Laboratories (SQRL), established to create humans with superpowers. Some of the resulting “meta-humans” are products of bioengineering enhancement. Some are individuals whose innate, once latent abilities have been released by removing psychological, mental or cognitive inhibitions. The most successfully enhanced meta-humans are classed as Alphas; those with less astonishing powers are Betas. The result for all of them is that their ordinary human foibles, failings, vanities and blind spots get written large. From such circumstances do compelling stories grow.
As readers, we are thrust into this world already in its maturity. Raised by Squirrels and Raised by Squirrels: Los Alamos, launch with a bang into mysterious happenings involving meta-humans years after SQRL’s founding. The story of that founding is provided in flashbacks. Penned by Bram and illustrated by Monica, these two publications establish styles of both narrative and illustration that never explicitly connect all the dots. Instead, the Meehans prefer to evoke the shapes and shadows of a world, suggesting much while permitting the reader to participate in the telling by providing specificity from his or her own imagination. The panels most often eschew the hard lines of traditional comics in favor of washes and brushwork. Rendered in black and white, the feel of the work is explicitly, unapologetically noirish. In a bonus, the publications include sketches of the main characters contributed by other artists associated with 7000 BC, the New Mexico comic artist collective of which the Meehans are also a part.
Following the two Raised by Squirrels volumes, Death, Cold as Steel continues to explore the shadowy world of meta-humans and the SQRL, and was again written by Bram, with lettering and book design by Monica. This third outing, however, was illustrated by Jamie Chase, an accomplished fine artist and graphic novelist in his own right. Death, Cold as Steel opens with a murdered meta-human, the Steel Soldier, discovered in a rain swept alley. The ensuing investigation exposes rot at the heart of the SQRL, and the switchback ending pits an unenhanced, even crippled, investigator against a formidable enemy. While bringing forward themes and characters from the first two volumes, Death, Cold as Steel makes no real effort to tie up their loose ends. Again, the audience participates by reading between the lines and in the twilit corners of the illustrations.
Bram and Jamie also collaborated on the fourth volume, The Darkness from Warsaw. Monica reprised her roles in lettering and book design. This outing explores an episode in the history of the SQRL that precedes the other books—albeit in the form of remembrance by a character young in the first volume but now grown elderly. The story makes almost no mention of meta-humans; rather, it is a Poe-like tale of the macabre. The elderly character, Estelle, is visited by a young operative seeking information on the long past disappearance in post-WWII Poland of a troubled figure by the name of Wilson Petrie. Estelle tells of a mysterious stone panel embodying or channeling ancient forces that seemed to possess Petrie, and describes the dangers she and Petrie faced as they sought to return the panel to Warsaw. Like the titles that preceded it, the story progresses as much by evocation as by description. The illustration is powerfully rendered with such bold angles, pronounced perspective and stark attention to detail that it seems homage as much to expressionism as to film noir. As added features, both Death, Cold as Steel and The Darkness from Warsaw conclude with sketch galleries from Jamie’s development for the stories.
If you check out Staple! on Saturday, you will find Bram and Monica selling and signing all the Panel Press titles, as well as works by their cohorts in 7000 BC. If fortune smiles on Austin’s comic collectors, the Meehans’ own titles will be augmented by copies of Jamie’s graphic novel, Muse, and of his dark comic, Myx, as well as the several numbers of Fakin’ the Funk, by Peter and Paul Ziomek, and the lushly phantasmagoric forever all, by Jeff Benham. According to the event layout sent to vendors, the Meehans’ table will be one row over from that of yours truly. After picking up necessary copies of Sleeper Awakes at the Stikmanz outlet, you could do much worse than dropping some greenbacks to acquire a full set of tales of the SQRL and every 7000 BC member publication flown into town in a special New Mexican suitcase.
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