By Harry Kassen — Welcome back to another Comics Anatomy Charity Commission. I’ll be doing these through the Summer and then returning to the previous setup in the Fall. I want to thank Sean for his request for From Hell for last month’s article and I want to thank everyone who read and shared the article itself. I had a great time writing it and I’m proud of the work I did preparing for it.

This month’s pick comes from Tiffany Babb, a comics critic and friend of mine. Her pick was The Fix by Nick Spencer and Steve Lieber, with colors by Ryan Hill and letters by Nic J. Shaw. As with The Wild Storm, I’m not buying anything new for this one. I’ve read the first two volumes, but I only own the first one (I read the other one from the library) so that’s where my examples are going to come from.

Reading this comic, you might see that there’s nothing too flashy going on. When I was re-reading it for this article, nothing in particular jumped out at me as being worth writing about. There was no page with a particularly cool layout, or subtle shift in art style that carried a deeper meaning. No gimmick tied a whole issue together into one enormous mural of a comic. At first this might sound like I’m saying the comic is unremarkable, and that’s what I thought too at first, but in thinking about how much I enjoyed it, something clicked in my mind. That lack of a standout page, moment, or gimmick is, in and of itself, something worth writing about. 

What I mean by that is this: I can’t think of a single standout moment or element from the comic that jumps out as being worthy of analysis on its own, but also the comic as a whole remains supremely enjoyable. Isn’t that worth getting into, all on its own? I say it is, but it’s also probably something that’ll take way more time and space than any of us are willing to give it, so I’ll narrow it down. What I specifically want to cover here is the way the art and the writing interact, and in particular how the art does a lot of heavy lifting for the storytelling, freeing up the writing to develop characters and set up and deliver jokes, which is an important part of this explicitly comedic series. I’ll be relying on just one sequence to do this, but these moments occur throughout the book.

The first example of this, and maybe one of the clearer examples, is the introduction to Josh in the first issue.

This page is clearly a gag. It’s a pretty funny joke. More importantly, it lives or dies by the art. Not only is that little “Meet Josh.” caption, plus the various speech balloons, a little skimpy for a comics page, the joke itself doesn’t exist without the images. The idea for this bit most certainly originated earlier, in the writing process, but the work of conveying it to the reader lands entirely with Lieber.

This is a really simple example of what I’m talking about, but it’s a good one to get the basic point across. This isn’t a sight gag. Using humor to deliver character information is the whole point of this page. Despite that, it functions almost entirely through the images, with the words adding nothing more than a little flavor.

As with any article that takes a position like this one, I want to clarify something here. I’m not saying that the writing is bad. I’m not saying it’s lazy or that there’s a power struggle going on behind the scenes. I don’t have pictures of it at the moment, since I don’t have access to the second volume of this, but I remember that in the second paperback there was a feature in the back about how Nick Spencer and Steve Lieber created The Fix. They explained that Spencer’s scripts essentially write out scene summaries and dialogue, and leave all of the rest up to Lieber. This is a demonstration of trust. Spencer trusts Lieber to deliver the story with less guidance than is standard, and Lieber trusts Spencer to give him enough to work with and a good story to tell. That leads to moments like the one above where the art takes the spotlight. Trust and creative partnership like that is what makes comics work.

Tiffany Babb is a writer and comics critic. She can be found on Twitter @explodingarrow and on her website https://www.tiffanybabb.com/.

Check out past editions of Comics Anatomy.

Harry Kassen is a college student and avid comic book reader. When he’s not doing schoolwork or reading comics, he’s probably sleeping. Catch his thoughts on comics, food, and other things on Twitter @leekassen. You can support his writing via Ko-fi.