Good-Old-Fashioned Something New: On Lavender Jack and Kamen Rider Build's Approaches to Superhero Visual Storytelling
Tom Reilly & Jordie Bellaire, The Thing #1 (2021)
It may be a traditional slump before the next big surge; it may be the seeds of something; it may be the sentiment is coming from the company I keep. But at the moment there feels to me a burgeoning sense of folks giving up on superheroes. James Tynion and Jonathan Hickman are largely leaving the Big Two behind for Substack while Scott Snyder pursues his own deal with ComiXology and Dark Horse, and Grant Morrison declares “I can't even read superhero comics now. I feel as if I've seen it all before”. For the time being DC’s largely reverted to the barest kind of meat-and-potatoes on its main line after the big plans for the 5G relaunch abolishing the ‘perpetual second act’ status quo fell through, while Marvel struggles to put over its non-X-Men titles. And post-Endgame superhero movies seem to have largely become grudging cultural appointment viewing rather than the reliable self-sustaining hype machine of recent memory; aside from the return of Spider-Men past, the biggest mass-media superhero discussions of 2021 I recall were around Invincible, some awkward ‘okay the Snyder Cut was pretty fun after all’ mutterings, and the fact that a dude named Kingo existed.
This isn’t doomsaying. I like superheroes and would like for them to continue being the biggest thing in the world forever and ever, but them winding up mostly supplanted would be a culturally neutral turn of events. And if the biggest movies are increasingly giving up the genre’s greatest strength in being able to warp to fit virtually any niche, instead contorting every available genre to fit a house style template established back in 2008, then it’s a deserved downfall.
As noted however, I love the weirdos and want to find any way available to keep the passion alive. Lately two of the best ways of going about that for me have been the Webtoons series Lavender Jack by Dan Schkade and Jenn Manley Lee, and the Japanese TV show Kamen Rider Build. Expertly crafted, aggressively emotive, stylish tales of charming, bottomlessly compassionate outlaw heroes, they’re superhero stories trying ten times harder than their contemporaries and making it look twice as easy. They remember ongoing adventure stories typically live and die on their showmanship - bringing in a little of the ‘ol razzle-dazzle, some pizazz - and they put in the legwork to give the proceedings an ethical grounding we all like to think of the genre as being built on moreso than is really often the case.
Just as much as their nuts-and-bolts storytelling virtues however, what they represent to me is a visual overhaul relative to the American standards for capes and tights. Not exactly in the sense you can fully capture with a screenshot: flashy as they both are, Lavender Jack is operating in a pulp tradition predating the superheroes he draws comparisons to, and Kamen Rider has existed in dozens of incarnations since 1971. It’s that the former presents a formalistic reimagining for how we’re presented superhero stories visually, while the latter offers a radically alternative aesthetic.
The Webtoons format is what Scott McCloud described years earlier in Reinventing Comics as ‘The Infinite Canvas’. Rather than being built on grids within fixed-size pages presented one or two at a time, the Infinite Canvas due to being a digital creation is capable of expanding in any direction as far as the creative team pleases. On Webtoons, that means vertically-scrolling stories rather than the traditional horizontally-inclined experience, well-suited for smartphone reading. The result is not simply creators being given literal extra space to express themselves (one of the most interesting frequent results of which has been a transformational use of gutters in many Webtoons, being able to expand or contract as desired to alter pacing and the implied passage of time) but having to rework the basic visual language with a new flow and without prescribed borders.
It’s a set of opportunities Lavender Jack has been only too eager to take advantage of. When you can extend an image as far as you want, the equivalent of a page-turn reveal twist can happen in the course of a ‘panel’ you only see chunks of at a time and hit with the same impact - potentially more even, when the reader believes they understand at first glance what the image is presenting them. There are no limits to dipping into the scope that would physically necessitate the significant page ‘real estate’ of a double-page splash. Without needing regular cutoffs due to page length, and without the cutoff always being the same literal end of a page, transitions are free to present themselves in a multitude of new fashions: layering panels on top of one another amidst a seemingly endless background, or the silhouettes of a crowd expanding and becoming the shadows of a new scene, or a sound effect segmenting chronological slices within a panel or demarcating a new one altogether.
I’m hesitant to offer any big unconditional cheers of ‘this is the one true new way forward!’ for a format in its relative infancy. In return for giving the creator increased control, the sprawl of the two-page-at-a-time physical comic book is lost, as well as the individual comic page as a visual and narrative artifact unto itself. To once again borrow from McCloud, one of his descriptions of the form was as “A still life we explore dynamically”; something of that is arguably lost when the page itself is literally no longer still. To pick an example, it’s difficult to imagine the lived-in, somewhat laid-back, conversational flow of much of Garth Ennis’s output smoothly making the transition to something this streamlined and driven by constant motion. But Lavender Jack exists as a shining testament that the core virtues of superhero storytelling - the glamorously bizarre iconography, the breakneck momentum, the twists and turns, and space to construct a world strange enough to make such a being and the fascinating individuals who would inhabit it - have a welcome home waiting for any who so desire to make the jump.
Turning from the printed page to the screen, Kamen Rider Build is, in the about 1/3rd of it I’ve watched thus far, gleefully goofy as all get-out. Having not grown up with much in the way of toku beyond a couple seasons of Power Rangers as a kid, it’s been quite an experience. To call it formally experimental would be a stretch when it’s a conventionally-shot program presenting events clearly and linearly based around an extremely familiar template, albeit executed with incredible skill and enthusiasm (and I’m only coming to this now; I imagine a lot of its tricks are old hat). But what it does have to offer is something alien to live-action superheroism, at least next to its American counterparts: unabashed cartoon storytelling. Characters aren’t merely emotionally overblown and inclined towards blunt expository dialogue, they’ll pop around a room in-between cuts to indicate the passage of time without using a montage. The narration calling out transformations, and the equations appearing in the air when our super-science hero applies some serious thought to a problem, are diegetic objects. When a graph appears as Kamen Rider Build calculates an angle of attack on one of the villainous Smash…
…he will grind down that sucker to kick a fool in the face.
It speaks to something fundamental in the sensibility of the whole thing: what is cool will always trump verisimilitude. The VFX are if anything cheaper than the stuff folks mock in Supergirl and The Flash, but there’s no shoddy half-effort at hyper-realistic CGI powers and monstrosities; the villains are fellas in big rubber suits and the special effects look like special effects. Rather than undermining the action, paired with its cartoony presentation it instead serves to simply distance it somewhat: similar to a character’s head in Twin Peaks instantly turning into black smoke with no fanfare, it comes across less as ‘fake’ than happening in a different world with physical rules we’re not fully parsing. Sure monsters look like they’re made of big prop blocks, and flight is janky, and swords look like something you’d win with enough cereal boxtops, and manifestations of inner power appear to be effects layered over people via tools you probably have in your own laptop. These are strange, unnatural forces - why would impossible, unreal things look plausible? How could they? Does $200 million make you really believe Flash running or Spider-Man swinging would look exactly like that if someone could do it ‘for real’?
Frequently while watching the show I think of Grant Morrison’s thoughts on the futility of the idea of ‘realistic’ superheroes. Their sentiment is that the notion of their manifestation in a world with similar physical and psychological rules as our own is not only fundamentally preposterous, but distracts from their usefulness as symbolic constructs. Regarding the increasing efforts towards realism in superhero films in 2013 at SDCC, they mused “What we see now is much more human Superman, and as the idea of humans and super-humans get closer together, Superman becomes more like us, we become more like him.” The visual shift from cloth to faux-kevlar, underwear on the outside to textured rubber and tubing, represents a drive to bridge the gap by pulling the superhero ‘down’ to a human rather than abstract level, rendering them conceptually and aesthetically near-believable…but only ever near-believable. A little niggling part of our brains understand when Captain America’s shield hits something that that’s not how momentum works, that 50 guys at once are never gonna gang up on Batman and immediately win, that when someone does a little hop and it carries them over a building that it doesn’t add up.
Kamen Rider on the other hand wears a plastic suit that makes him look like a life-sized action figure, and between calling out his attack names gives impromptu speeches on how he will never stop fighting for love and peace. In a culture and industry overwhelmingly devoted to one approach, Kamen Rider Build is the opposite side of the coin to Morrison’s outlook: rather than framing superheroism through the lens of a consensus reality we’re familiar with, it brings us into the world of comics not just in terms of color and spectacle, but physics and textures and rules of behavior. In accepting itself as a world separate from our own on every meaningful level, it becomes internally plausible in ways its contemporaries can never approach.
The common factor between both subjects of the piece to me - besides those already outlined - is a sense of forcing the consumer to engage on the creators’ terms to a far greater extent than their contemporaries. Lavender Jack presents its entire adventure in a set of straight, rigid vertical strips, with the pace and flow within that structure entirely in Schkade’s control. Kamen Rider Build embraces a degree of artifice that separates it from any ‘real-world’ understanding of its appearance and mechanics. They demand acquiescence to a specific authorial viewpoint. For some that would be an issue: comics are often touted as being driven in a way unlike any other medium by reader engagement, and there’s a claim to the appeal of the live-action superhero being in large part seeing what they would ‘really’ look like. But with the traditional approaches currently running up against hard limits, it may well be a bolder, unapologetically dominant sense of perspective - willing to drag the consumer kicking and screaming into unfamiliar territory - that’s necessary to find an approach capable of reinvigorating the whole superhero enterprise as it enters one of its darkest hours.
-- David Mann, 1/31/2022