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Friday Recommendation: Angela

By | September 16th, 2011
Posted in Columns | % Comments

Sure, that page up there is from Wizard: The Guide to Comics and not Angela, but I guess it says it all. Except for all the stuff I say after the jump.

What you need to know about Angela: Back in 1947 or whenever it is that Todd McFarlane created Spawn, he began constructing a unique mythology around the character — namely that Spawn was a dead man whose Faustian bargain with Satan led to blah blah blah. Todd McFarlane’s particular gift, when it came to writing, was massive, expository, purple paragraphs of prose that would make Chris Claremont’s lower body tense up a bit. For whatever reason, though, he decided to hand over the reins to four incredibly popular creators, and let them help flesh out Spawn’s world. Dave Sim addressed creator’s-rights issues; Frank Miller went for goonish violence; Alan Moore delved into Spawn’s Hell; and Neil Gaiman gave us a taste of Heaven.

The Heaven vs. Hell conflict is at least as old as that one South Park episode about Terri Schiavo — possibly even older, although records are spotty at best. In its initial years (after that, I’m not the person to ask), Spawn constantly teased that war was coming, but never quite there. There was something about a treaty, or trade regulations, or something — in any event, though, Heaven maintained a vested interest in ensuring that the developing Hell army never got too powerful. When a Hellspawn — that is, a future general in the War on Yahweh — popped up, angels were given hunting permits to go murder them quietly and without fuss. The baddest of all of these hunters was named Angela, as if to fulfill her name’s destiny.

Hundreds of years old, with sweet Zartan face tattoos, a mane of wild red hair, and little clothing to speak of, Angela went after our boy Al “Spawn” Simmons — but the fight ended in a draw, when Spawn’s costume did something and something something dimensional portal something something. (This is a fairly accurate summary of how the book itself explained what happened.) Angela returned to Heaven, but in the process of that something portal something, lost her hunting lance. A few years later, this came back to bite her in the ass, which is, like most of her body, a painfully exposed target. Thus: Neil Gaiman and Greg Capullo’s three-issue Angela mini-series.

Neil Gaiman’s playful perversity when it comes to Earth’s various self-important belief structures is pretty much the reason everyone loves him or at least is begrudgingly willing to cuddle with him. Where Alan Moore’s depiction of Hell was a bit blunt in its tongue-in-cheekiness — the place was essentially a post-apocalyptic bohemian discotheque, one huge junction point of predatory subcultures and Baccho-brutalist pleasures — Neil Gaiman’s idea of Heaven is more subtle in its fun. It’s an endless skyscape of crystal and glass, and yet Angela’s home is still more or less a luxury condo. It’s the domain of the just and holy, but one where everything is regulated to death, the court system wields near-supreme authority, and hate and backstabbing still linger. The women (as noted by Spawn) dress like dancers, and the men just flat-out aren’t there. This, of course, begs a number of questions, but Gaiman doesn’t bother answering them. His gleefully absurd take on paradise was mainlined directly into the Spawn mythos, giving the awkward high-school self-seriousness of that universe a much-needed dose of bizarre humor — one that it never even seemed to recognize.

The plot: Angela has lost her lance while fighting Spawn, and certain parties have used this opportunity to have Angela framed for treason. (Losing the lance is apparently on the same level as an American nuclear technician losing the blueprints for the bomb.) To clear her name, Angela’s allies drag Spawn to Heaven, and from there, it’s violence through to the end.

As you can gather from that summary, this is not Gaiman’s most formally complex work, nor is it his most ambitious. The thing is, when it comes to comics, Gaiman’s ambitious but brief work tends to be the sector I respond to the least. Eternals had no shortage of vision — likewise 1602 — but the worlds it sought to create came across as tinny and flat for lack of room to explore. (If the plot of Sandman had been squooshed into twenty-six issues, it would not be remembered half as fondly.) Gaiman’s best comics — again, in my measurement — are the ones where he has room to play with both the space his characters live in (see above) and the way the characters express themselves. This expression may not always have something to do with the plot — in fact, when it’s best, it usually doesn’t (see below).

Continued below

Gaiman seemed to embrace the boyish clunkiness of Spawn’s whole deal. Where Todd McFarlane was very, very serious about the whole thing, pointing out the gravity implicit in Spawn’s use of extreme violence, coterie of homeless bros, awkwardly-expressed ticking power-clock, and the color of Spawn’s skin (he was black before he was burnt to expired-steak), Gaiman sees a comic book about a guy with a crazy costume who’s running around messing about with Hell-powers. He didn’t quite treat such an adolescent concept with the amount of condescension that one would expect, but he didn’t assign it the gravity of Norse mythology, either. The sheer silliness of it all was a boon, because it meant Gaiman could afford to be playful.

For a series that begins with Angela murdering an endangered space dragon (this tells us all we need to know about her priorities in life) and ends with Angela and Spawn hacking and carving their way through the legions of some corner of Hell, things are never grim. The series is just as much comedy as brawl — look at Angela’s Heaven court case being thrust into the hands of a public defender on her first case (look at the phrase “Angela’s Heaven court case,” period). There are a couple points where the winking gets too obvious (such as Spawn’s overt commentary on the angels’ striptastic designs), but for the most part, everything is sly and subdued in the face of its own frenzy.

The best and funniest scene doesn’t even happen on a printed page — while never explicitly addressed, it’s clear that Spawn attempted to make out with Angela between the end of #2 and the start of #3, which causes #2 to end with them as unlikely allies finding common ground, and #3 to begin with them not even on speaking terms, carrying on a huffy war of the sexes with a microdemon named Smut caught in the middle.

Enough about that, though, let’s talk about the art. Greg Capullo drew the thing, and let me tell you a secret: he was a pefect choice for it. Capullo took over art duties on Spawn from Todd McFarlane, and before that he was the artist on X-Force. Look at that pedigree and tell me if it makes you think “this guy should be drawing faintly absurd superhero comedy sketches bookended by gut-busting violence.” It probably doesn’t, but this is me telling you to adjust that attitude.

Capullo is, in a lot of ways, the poor-in-wallet-but-rich-in-soul man’s Todd McFarlane. He has Todd’s knack for dynamic, cluttered-but-never-too-cluttered page layouts, and they’re both known to enjoy the simple pleasures of an impossibly vast, flowing cape. Capullo’s anatomy is stronger, though — looking at McFarlane’s renditions of Twitch from back in the day made me wonder what sort of hideous skull cancer the man had survived — and most importantly, his characters can act. Sure, their expressions often range from ‘histrionic’ to ‘histrionic,’ but that’s a step up from McFarlane’s limited pallette. Capullo’s lines are sharp but playful, able to open up and give the lighter pages a necessary brightness without smothering it all in x-treme cross-hatching. Having read Angela, I can’t imagine a better artist for a series about the bizarre political shenanigans surrounding an angel bounty hunter dressed like a Nordic stripper, and her enemy the Hellfire Hamburger Boy. Of course, now Capullo is doing Batman, where his characters’ tense, melodramatic expressons will be hitched to an altogether less freewheeling wagon. C’est la vie.

What this all comes down to: A writer who’s done some great things is kicking his shoes off and having some fun. A penciler who doesn’t get the respect due to him is using the most unlikely showcase to prove that he’s almost secretly amazing. A character who can’t be used anymore thanks to bloody and ceaseless legal wrangling. A story that’s just silly enough to be able to wink while mean-mugging. You can get these comics for cover price if you look. So start looking.


//TAGS | Friday Recommendation

Patrick Tobin

Patrick Tobin (American) is likely shaming his journalism professors from the University of Glasgow by writing about comic books. Luckily, he's also written about film for The Drouth and The Directory of World Cinema: Great Britain. He can be reached via e-mail right here.

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