The United: Five Triangles

Wherein I shoot my load over my new cover and revisit time space in comics

First things first, I’m REALLY enjoying making the comic that I’ve been working on a for a year or so, The United: Five Triangles. It’s very easy for me to get disheartened while I’m working on a long-form comic, particularly when I’m the sole creator. I’m not a firm believer in the auteur theory as applied in cinema - it takes a lot of people to make a good or bad film - but I do think it can fit the comics medium pretty neatly. One person really can do everything and I write, pencil, ink, letter, edit and design my comics. I’m what’s known as a sextuple threat, something I’m not comfortable putting in the written form because, let’s face it, it looks pretty creepy. I could drone on about marketing, merely to bump myself up to a septuple threat, but I’m frankly terrible at promoting my comics (which can be bought here).

A benefit of being a sole creator is that I can spend more time in the world I’m creating, without the distraction of having to describe that place and the stories that swirl around it to collaborators. The down side is that I don’t have collaborators to bounce ideas off and it takes a long time to do all of the tasks listed above, particularly the drawing. Sometimes it feels like I’m adrift at sea, but I always remind myself of the destination, a reminder that there’s land ahead. With, er, buried treasure. And a parrot. The other thing about being a sole creator is that make my comics process is a very personal journey and the final comic is a very personal piece of work. So it’s good that I’m REALLY enjoying it.

It occurs to me too that no-one actually knows what it’s about yet. So, here we go.

The United: Five Triangles

A government strike team hunting down a serial killer. A journalist who stumbles across the biggest story of his career. A gang of thieves out for revenge. An accountant who constantly runs afoul of HR. The world’s strongest man and his dog.

The United: Five Triangles is a demented love letter to the medium of comics and a weird journey through a world of superheroes, magic, cannibalism and political intrigue.

The front cover of The United: Five Triangles

In other news, my expected finish date for the project has shifted from late 2025 to 2026, which simply reflects that the story has grown organically. I have mentioned before that I don’t write out a script beforehand that’s set in stone, I prefer to just have a clear framework - a beginning, middle and end - in mind and I then let the characters travel between those points as they see fit. (Hence the feeling of being adrift at sea sometimes.) I like this way of working, as I often get surprised at the turn of events too.

Let me know in the comments below what you think of the cover. There’s a story behind the design that I can tell sometime too, if anyone is remotely interested.

Time and Space in Comics Revisited

The first US comic that I ever read was Marvel Team-Up 83. It was given to me very kindly by Mark Stafford, a kid that lived round the corner from me in Ardrossan. I was five years old and I had never seen a full colour comic before, only black and white Marvel UK reprints. It blew my mind, Spider-Man, Black Widow, Nick Fury, Boomerang, Viper and Silver Samurai all wrapped up in an espionage-laden political thriller.

Due to the uneven distribution and retention of American comics in Ayrshire, I never got to read issue 84 until a wee while later, when it was reprinted in Super Spider-Man TV Weekly. I also didn’t know for years that the storyline actually ran between issues 82 to 85 of Marvel Team-Up. I recommend this wee run, it’s a great story and Chris Claremont, Sal Buscema and Steve Leialoha do a fantastic job, while Rich Buckler and Leialoha do a phenomenal cover to issue 83 in particular.

I love this cover, it has a great composition and hints at the carnage that has preceded the shot. The tyre suggests that the flames are engulfing an exploded car, without having to draw the car, and the fire hydrant suggests an American street, without having to show the street. The figurework is great and the whole thing oozes dynamism.

Going back to my childhood, I did manage to get Marvel Team Up 89, which didn’t knock my socks off as a kid, but it did when I re-read it today. The story is a pretty hum-drum affair, but entertaining nonetheless, written by Chris Claremont at the peak of his powers while also co-creating X-Men with John Byrne (and Terry Austin). However, it’s the art that really grabbed me this time round. It’s drawn by Rich Buckler and Joe Rubinstein and there are some genuinely inspired visuals hidden in this otherwise pretty vanilla comic.

Buckler is a comic artist that often gets criticised, mocked even, for his use of assistants to hit deadlines and the blatant swipes from other artists. The Comics Journal accused him of plagiarism in 1983 and that seemed to stick, probably because a lot of “comics journalists” rely on shallow Google searches for their opinions, rather than actually studying the craft.

This swiping, however, was standard practice over at Wallace Wood’s crib, where his assistants would swipe from tear sheets and then Wood would embellish their (sometimes uncredited) pencils to give the comic a consistent look. This approach originally comes from newspaper strips, where the use of assistants was commonplace. (Wood, for example, assisted Eisner on The Spirit for a while.)

Buckler originally came from Detroit and worked under Neal Adams at Continuity Studios and I suspect that’s where learned to focus on always hitting the deadline, irrespective of the means of getting there. There’s a good profile of Buckler here.

There are a couple of pages from Marvel Team-Up 89 that I just wanted to highlight, as they demonstrate a remarkable level of craft and really interesting storytelling techniques.

That second tier shows Nightcrawler moving through a polyptych to the airplane. The angularity of the tier design emphasises the geographic direction of travel and allows Buckler to pop the main figure out of the panel borders in that first panel, with Nightcrawler’s foot dipping into the panel below. The airplane door then juts into the right-hand stack, fulfilling a storytelling purpose too.

Howard Chaykin (who himself was an assistant of Adams prior to Continuity) said, ‘[Buckler] arrived fully formed. Rich came into the business a couple of years later than I did, even though he was a year or so older than me. He was the only one of our generation who arrived ready to do precisely the service that fans wanted. I’ve always felt… he would have had a career on a par with Buscema because he had the skill set and was really good’¹.

The storytelling here is staggeringly good. A four-tier sequence of polyptychs that show two events happening simultaneously. Buckler also shifts the angle, drawing the car from different perspectives, to really push that sense of dynamism. Ms Locke pops the panel borders on the bottom tier to emphasise that she’s a force of nature that cannot be contained - and also to exit the scene. Her arse on the third tier even points at that fourth tier head to add further attention to it. Meanwhile, Nightcrawler is sneaking into the boot of the car. This is very hard to conceptualise and it’s executed incredibly well. It looks deceptively simple.

I recommend reading Marvel Team-Up issues of the late 70s and early 80s. The Claremont/Byrne issues probably stand out the most, but there are some really solid comics after that run too. Buckler drew some stunning issues of All-Star Squadron (which he co-created with Roy Thomas) at DC, which I recommend too.

Recommendations

I recently read a lot of Dr Strange comics on the Marvel Unlimited app, including the Jason Aaron and Chris Bachalo and Waid et al runs. However, it was the run by Jed McKay and Pasquale Ferry that really blew me away. I really recommend that run and I’m gutted that it finished after only 18 issues. I love Ferry’s work, it really reminds me of Rick Leonardi with the overt stylisation and looseness.

Next Time!

I might bang on about noir. Feel free to ask questions in the comments or suggest topics.

1. See: https://13thdimension.com/paul-kupperberg-my-13-favorite-rich-buckler-worlds-finest-covers/