The Opposite Of Kinetic: John Forte's Legion Of Super-Heroes Part 2

I. I've not come to bury John Forte's famously stiff art on the Legion Of Super-Heroes, but it may seem like I have for awhile, so I would appreciate your patience. In a piece coming soon here on TooBusyThinkingAboutMyComics, I fully intend to discuss those horizontal panels by Mr Forte where I believe his skills and limitations worked in combination to produce comic-book art of a individual quality which no other American superhero artist ever has achieved. And though that quality may not be one of action-lined exhilaration, or of a bone-crunching sense of power, or even of a traditional representation of beauty, his is still a unique achievement that I intend to celebrate. However, before I do, I'd like to take the opportunity to discuss in some detail why Mr Forte's work has, as we talked about in the last entry here, proven so unpopular with so many fans of the Legion Of The Super-Heroes. And I want to do so because, I believe, one of the keys to engaging with John Forte's work is the fact that the very qualities which lead to his art being described as "curious", "frozen", not quite "right", "peculiar" and "flat", also lead to his very best single-panel compositions.

The points which I'm going to discuss below are, of course, mostly very familiar and well-worn where Mr Forte's art is concerned. But what I find most fascinating about his work is how so many individual quirks of design and technique interact with each other to create the curious, frozen, peculiar and flat world associated with his vision on the Legion, and so I'd like to cover each point in turn, almost as if this were a recipe book and the effect of each common ingredient on the final product was being discussed. For it's almost as if Mr Forte were leaving behind him a series of statements about how to pioneer a style of representing superheroes which owes nothing at all to the otherwise-dominant influences of the school of Shuster and Kirby, as if he deliberately piled up a series of left-of-centre artistic choices which ultimately, in combination with each other, stand as a manifesto for how not to follow the forms and conventions of the dominant superhero tradition. And in the present day world of super-hero art, where comics seem to have managed to create a default design-style which is often both stilted and kinetic, both poster-posed and constantly in motion, as if elements of Mr Forte's work had somehow entered the DNA of standard-model capes'n'costumes comics, I do think it's interesting to note alternative strategies of approaching the business of illustrating worlds which are simultaneously fantastic and mundane. For in his own way, both by chance and design, Mr Forte's work is a textbook on how to achieve some very strange, and, on occasion, moving effects indeed, and some greater knowledge of how to create quiet and stillness and sheer alienating oddness in the hustle and bustle of muscle and Kirby krackles can't ever go to waste, I suspect.

On a personal level, I've always been both bored and yet disturbed by John Forte's work. It's always simultaneously drawn me in with the promise of fascination and pushed me away because of the torpor and dislocation I've always found there. I'd really like to know for myself why Mr Forte's work has always affected me in such an apparently disproportionate fashion. It's one thing to note this failure of perspective and that dead-pan sequence of pod-people faces, but it's another to sit down and try to see in a touch more detail how Mr Forte achieved, for good and ill, the results he did.


And it'll be, as I said last time out, from Mr Forte's many horizontal, "widescreen", panels that I'll be drawing the examples I'll be using, because it's there, I believe, that the unique-in-combination strengths and weaknesses of his work can best be illustrated, and that's where, as we'll see later on this week, his most quietly remarkable art can be found.

II. Painting is feeling, Constable once famously declared, but emotions are one quality conspicuous by their absence in the majority of John Forte's work on the LSH. With very few exceptions, Forte's faces are passive if not completely inert. (In the scan below, for example, Lightning Lad appears to be a puppet of Garth Ranzz which has had its strings cut before being dumped in the Legion's HQ.) Even in moments of exceptional stress, Forte's Legionnaires, who could often be pegged at any age from sixteen to thirty-five, betray few hints that they're not zoned out on some Thirtieth Century version of Placidyl. And as we can see from the panel below, this can lead to a substantial problem when trying to work out whose point-of-view we readers should be adopting, especially in a strip such as the Legion where so many characters mill around threatening to diffuse our attention. It's not simply that everybody pretty much looks the same; it's also that nobody appears to be particularly involved in their own adventures. And the only significant markers of character difference, beyond the fundamental and familiar one of "boy/girl", don't help alter the flat, uninvolving surface of the work. Yes, the characters often have different hair-styles, but the differences aren't radical in scale, and, yes, each hero has an individual costume, but placing a wig and a set of different-coloured tights on a string of showroom dummies doesn't make each mannequin distinct so much as accentuate the strange similarities between them.

But this is an effective representation of the worldview of a young, and by nature egocentric, child, where distinct character is of little importance, and where the defining individual details of costume and hair-style assume a disproportionately central importance. It's that silent world again, where individuals recede from our attention just as the space their bodies occupy fill up with colour and capes and insignias rather than anything of emotional meaning. And I've no doubt that this quality of Mr Forte's work made it very appealing to the youngest of comic book readers back in the pre-psychedelic sixties, just as an older audience would've felt, and perhaps still do feel, that the world they're looking at in the art isn't one they recognise, even by imaginative extension, as a reflection of their everyday lives.

III. This unnatural similarity between the characters in Mr Forte's work, this sense of a cloned world where a lack of symmetry and colour has been edited from the gene-pool, is accentuated by the lack of distinctive body-language on show in his work. (Sun-Boy's self-regarding pose above is the most distinct the character ever gets in those early Legion stories. It's Mr Forte's first stab at the character and it's downhill in passive-character land from here on in.) Alienated loners such as Timber Wolf and even desperate superhero turncoats such as Beast Boy engage with the world much as Mon-El or Cosmic Boy do; stoically, and only expressing obvious emotion when the script absolutely demands it. Consider the panel below, for example, where the villainous Lex Luthor discovers himself surrounded by the entire membership of the Legion just at the moment when the universe seemed his for the taking. If I were to suggest to you that these so-called Legionnaires were actually life-sized action figures, and that they were so stiff-backed in their pose, with their plastic legs moulded fast one to the other, that there was a risk they'd tumble over before Luthor surrendered, I doubt there'd be too much argument. Arms pressed hard to their sides, with the men's chests pumped forwards to attention while the women rest slightly more relaxed if hardly at ease, these characters are supposed to be closing around a fearsome enemy who has attempted to get " ... rid of all of you permanently". Instead, they look as if they might intend to absent-mindedly stare him into submission, or perhaps hope to cause him to fall over and immobilise himself as a result of trying to break through their massed ranks. They may as well be painted-wooden chess pieces placed where they are by a giant hand. Check-mate, Luthor, you're surrounded by a host of good guys'n'gals, all of whom in combination aren't a fraction as interesting as you are, for at least you're surprised. The mighty heroes of the Legion look as if they've been asked to stay behind after gym to keep an eye on the first form picking up litter, a duty they've embraced, but not with any measure of enthusiasm. Ho-hum. Another cosmic-level bad guy brought to book. And you've missed a crisp packet there, Luther.


III. And so it's not just that Forte's characters tend on the whole to be undemonstrative as individuals and static as posed, but that they also lack any sense of a dynamic relationship to each other. There's a sense in which his characters, and indeed all of the elements which make up each panel's background, have been scratched down into place by a fairly gifted under-five from a transfer set. (Consider the panel at the head of this page too.) The result is nearly always the same; it's as if Mr Forte has worked to catch the moment just before or immediately after the logically energetic and most interesting shot, as if he's the wedding photographer who always catches his subjects disinterested and with their eyes closed long after the bouquet's been caught. "You are now one of us, Superboy!" passively declares Cosmic Boy, which seems more like a declaration of welcome from the pod-people to a pod-person, and the strange exclamation marks in the speech balloons seem far more intense than anything else in view.

It's easy to see why early fans of the Legion had to rely so heavily on chance inference from the art to inform them of the character's inner-life. For the scripts give practically nothing of individual difference away, and the art compounds the one-dimensional nature of the characterisation by refusing to tell us anything of what these Legionnaires mean to each other. The eye trawls the panel in an instinctive sweep to make this scene mean something. Who is a friend of whom? Who is the most proud of being part of such an initiation ceremony, and who wishes they could head off to cruise the bars of future Metropolis? The characters don't even stare back in silence, so disconnected are they, and the trick of perspective is that many of them are staring right past Superboy rather than at him. (What are they looking at?) But in truth there's nothing to note except Chameleon Boy's quite un-Forte-ian pose of a superhero with his hands behind his back. What does that mean? Doesn't he grasp the pride and protocol of the occasion? Is he perhaps so alien that the subtle differences of Terran ceremony escape him, or is he so future-almost-Beatnik-like, just that little bit more relaxed and even sceptical about the whole business, that he doesn't want to conform, man? In such a way did several generations of Legion-watchers collect crumbs of accidentially informing detail in order to create a second dimension for this Shrinking Violet and that Element Boy.

Yet in giving so little information away, John Forte's work demands either the disengagement of the reader through disinterest, or a fierce process of questioning to be undertaken to make the work say something. And today, where panels so often scream at the reader with a thousand whooshes of movement and another thousand cluster-points of attention-demanding detail, his sense of stillness points to a strategy that might be more often put to use when the reader's eye really does need to be pointed at "x" rather than all the various letters of the alphabet.

IV: And if that's at all true for the quieter scenes that Mr Forte lays down, it's also so for many of his actions scenes too, those strange bloodless chases and conflicts where all of the above qualities combine to create the fight that isn't a fight, the showdown that's really the nodding re-acquaintance of passing strangers. (There are some remarkable exceptions to the rule which we'll come to later, mind you, but the truth does generally hold, I think.) Consider the "cat-fight" below, where several of the female Legionnaires fake a punch-up in order to bolster Jimmy Olsen's self-regard. (There's nothing like having a team of universally-famous crime fighters scratch their eyes out in the name of Jimmy's be-freckled sexuality.) It's astonishing how Mr Forte seems not to have thought at all of any of the lacivious possibilities often associated in the unreconstructed "Madman"-era male mind with women in tight-fitting clothes duking it out for the love of a good, stretchy man. In fact, the scene is quite denuded of sexuality. There's not even a trace of the more innocent pleasures of the prettiness of a Jim Moody super-heroine, or the rosy-cheeked good-health of a Curt Swan Bathing Pageant Beauty Queen smile, though to note the total lack of prurience isn't to bemoan its absence. Instead, the point is that those aspects of a superhero's appearance usually engaged with to create some power, illicitly or not, in their appearance are absent here. This is a sexless universe as well as an actionless one. Hands almost grasp hair, but hair isn't pulled and head's aren't jerked to one side. Hands are laid on other's bodies, but "laid" isn't really the operative term: it's a gentle process, this grabbing of a supposed enemy, and only an idiot like Jimmy Olsen could mistake this unconvincing pantomine for a brawl. Perhaps Light Lass and the other spiceless girls did throw themselves into this dust-up with a touch more convincing fervour, but Mr Forte would never let us know. He's caught the moment before Triplicate Girl hauls Light Lass to the floor, before Saturn Girl's possessed her opponents, and even before Jimmy Olsen can seperate the "brawlers" through - perhaps! no! - touching the women in a concerned and sexless fashion to keep them apart.

This is, in fact, one of the few examples of a superhero strip entirely without sex and with very little violence at all. And my assumption is that Mr Forte was either entirely disinterested with those fetishes which have - openly or not - powered the appeal of much of the superhero genre, or that he suppressed his own interest, whatever it was, in such matters in order to neuter the product for its very young audience. Whatever the truth, the result is once again the strangest of apparently-standard-issue comic books. Not only are the characters flat, and their bodies stiff. Not only are they strangely disconnected from each other, even when laying hands on each other in pseudo-violence, but they've been entirely de-sexualised. They're the least typical teenagers in history, though perhaps this all explains the strange quiet crushes several middle-aged, and older, Legion readers seem to still have for the likes of Shrinking Violet and Duplicate Girl. After all, these were girls you really could imagine dating a great waddling blob like Bouncing Boy. Many of them could even be envisaged finding it tough to fill their card for the Legion Prom. By disengaging their personalities and neutering their sexuality, they became even more sympathetic than real young women, let alone other more demonstrative superheroines, for the type of chap who still collected "Adventure Comics" even as those strange little hairs grew on his chest, and, indeed, elsewhere too.

V. Next time round, we'll be taking a look at Mr Forte's famously individual take on perspective, his backward-running panels, and the tripartite structure of his story-telling. I hope you might consider joining me here, as we move closer to the good stuff, those moments when Mr Forte's work produced, in his own unshowy fashion, some splendid comic book moments all of his own.


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