The Webcomics Weekly #172: Brush Strokes and the Two Jacks (2/8/2022 Edition)

The Webcomics Weekly is back in your life. This week, Emma Kubert has a webcomic! It’s called “Brush Stroke” and Elias Rosner has some thoughts on it. The webcomics wranglers also need some help in deciding who a certain character looks like. Meanwhile the second act of “Lavender Jack” ‘The Two Jacks’ begins. The lush romance of “Lore Olympus” also continues.

Before we get going, can someone PLEASE help me identify who Devon looks like? I want to say characters from “Elf Quest” but that doesn’t seem right. It’s bothering me SO MUCH and it’s all I can think about when he shows up. It’s the face shape. So chiseled. So bad boy. So tortured. OK. Onto the review proper.

Maybe it’s because I reviewed “A Fake Affair” a couple weeks ago but I was continually reminded of Akiko Higashimura’s works while reading “Brush Strokes.” A cross between the introspective autobiography of “Blank Canvas” and the more zany antics of “Princess Jellyfish,” “Brush Stroke” tells a semi-autobiographical tale of May Collins, a 21-year old artist who moves cross-country to join her estranged mother in an attempt to reorient her life after her father falls into debt.

Bildungsroman webcomics, especially those which also fit nicely into the Romance genre, can often be torturously slow. It’s good for keeping tensions high and letting those emotional moments really land home, as the development and maturation of the main character is the entire point. However, it’s also maddening to have to read, week in and week out, as there’s often little forward momentum. “Brush Stroke” solves this by giving us a refreshingly fast-paced comic, with conflicts developed and resolved within one or two episodes rather than across twenty.

The flip side of this faster pace is that the emotional developments also occur on the same time scale, dulling their impact on the reader. “Brush Stroke” could benefit from pumping the break just a little, allowing every scene to breathe, with less dialog per chunk, more, smaller glimpses into people’s emotional state and occurring over a greater number of panels (or space, if pure scrolling is used.) This leads me to the other issue with “Brush Stroke:” Kubert’s limited rage of facial expressions.

For a comic like “Inkblot,” a fantasy adventure full of big emotions and even bigger set-pieces, this isn’t a problem. The more limited scope and grounded nature of “Brush Stroke,” however, necessitates a greater range of faces. Without seeing the nuance of a character’s body language or facial expression, it becomes harder to connect to them in the way Kubert intends and it means we get fewer silent panels or quiet, introspective scenes to offset and provide a cleansing palette for the more zany, high-energy scenes.

That said, May’s relationships with her fellow family members are starting to develop nicely and the big personalities work well for the majority of the comic and when Kubert does slow down, the whole comic starts to sing. My absolutely favorite scenes are in ‘Chapter 6: Dripping with Gold’ and ‘Chapter 9: Cleaning Brushes’ when the inks fall away and we’re left with chalk and, well, brush strokes, implying the shapes of people and places against a wonderfully shaded color background. It feels like watching one of those chocolate fountains ripple and swirl, with memories forming in the folds and shudders of the falling chocolate, and then it shifts again and we’re left looking at a wall of brown, melted sweets, wondering and hoping for answers that may come…but not yet.

The second act, ‘The Two Jacks’, begins with the sort of formalist time keeping out of “Batman: Year One” and some absolutely lush coloring by Jann Manley Lee.

Episode 96 marks a rare occurrence in the long run of “Lavender Jack” as it is an episode that does not feature any of our quartet of characters. It’s interesting to think about this after the last several episodes of The Book of Boba Fett, and how it has turned that show into something else entirely. That isn’t the case with the opening of act two, which focuses on a day in the life of Lady Hawthorne the “secretary” (read: real power behind the throne and Queenpin of Gallery), all of which is marked by the kind of punctual time keeping out of “Year One”. The shift in focus allows for macguffin teases like Project Postscript to be revealed and just remind readers how freighting Lady Hawthorne is. While the strip ends on the not-so-subtle threat of what happened to former Lord Mayor Quincy, the real menace comes when Schkade throws in spot blacks to cover a good portion of her face as the American Mr. Garrett comments on widows wearing white.

The marking of time also helps to give a sense of temporal unity between these two strips as episode 97 shows Tuesdays lush sunset from the top of the Margrave building as Johnny Summer has a run in with Inspector Freddie. Jenn Manley Lee’s coloring is one of the secret ingredients of the series. Her use of fiery orange in the big splash image of faux-Jack after they blew up the resistance cell was excellent, but to be honest it is the kinda standard comic book image you’d expect. The subtle gradation of orange and how that layer interacts with everything else on the color pallet for that scene is wonderful. Schakde’s hard shadows slowly grow as the strip moves on and Lee tracks with the soft shadows and keeps the orange in line with everything else! That mixed with a couple of excellent near pinup images of Johnny Summer’s and witty dialog the opening to episode 97 is a joy to read. The rest of the episode is solid too.

These two episodes set the table for this second act as the gang’s all back together and they have to figure out what Project Postscript has to do with everything Mimley and Ducky have been up to these past two years.

After all the buildup of the past dozen episodes or so, Persephone has finally arrived in the Underworld. The jerk who cut her off in line for the train to the Underworld turns out to be Thanatos, God of Death, who did have a decent reason for not wanting to be late: it’s his performance review. (Spoiler alert: he’s not getting a raise.)

But as Hades is busy dealing with his slacker employee, Persephone encounters Minthe, who recognizes her from the tabloids immediately and sends her unknowingly into Tartarus. In “Lore Olympus,” Tartarus is a forest of zombie-like shades who menace Persephone until she releases her powers to protect herself and sets off the intruder alarms across the Underworld. Not to worry, though, Hades literally swoops to her rescue, finding her high heel and lending her his coat in a sequence of events that surely left readers and Hades/Persephone shippers swooning. He brings her back to his office to warm up, then Persephone reveals that she’s there to be an intern. (Seems like she should’ve led with that the moment she arrived? I know, I know, pointing out plotholes spoils the fun.)

The sequence in Tartarus is gorgeous, with Hades checking every tall, dark, and handsome romance hero box there is. He gently puts her shoe back on, a la Prince Charming from Cinderella, saves her from the angry shades like basically any storybook hero, and flies her away from danger safely in his arms. The whole thing is hella romantic and, though Hades is immediately back to his goober self in the next episode, it serves as an excellent reminder that while he might be an emotionally damaged nervous wreck, there’s a reason Persephone falls for him. These episodes are straight out of the romantic tropes playbook and Smythe executes them with precision. Persephone may not want to be a damsel in distress but she embodies that role in the story right now, and though she proves her mettle in a chess match with Hades, putting the heroine in peril and allowing the hero to save her is a classic benchmark event in a romance. Hades seems to realize he’s head over heels for her, ticking the “no going back” box in the stock romance plot outline, and Persephone isn’t far behind.

Unfortunately, since this is a romance and we all know how romances go, obstacles lay ahead for our pair in the form of a jealous lover, Minthe. (And in all fairness, Hades didn’t really break up with her?) The power dynamics inherent in Hades and Persephone’s relationship continue to get more complicated as the story proceeds and we’re not even halfway through to season one.