Alpha Flag

My friend Sef Joosten (his blog! His dA!) sent me this sweet drawing of the diver. He says the diver’s chest hair looks like a cross-eyed wolf, and I’m inclined to agree. It got me thinking, though!

Hair in comics is a strange thing. No wait, let’s take that back a step. Hair is a strange topic in general. Less the hair on the head (which still manages to have lots of issues, but there are plenty of books about head hair an how it relates to gender and race and all that, so I won’t even try to talk about that), but specifically body hair. I’d say is one of the most culturally-charged body parts.

The slow buildup of soap scum we commonly call culture (read: rules that we, as a group perpetuate, and learn to enforce) has a way of putting pressure on the individuals within it to conform to certain expectations of propriety when it comes to body hair. Some cultures define smooth arms, underarms, and legs as the pinnacle (and by extension, the only form of) attractiveness in women. Some demand the opposite. Back hair in men is disgusting, but arm hair is fine. Chest hair has to go, but beards can stay. Your feet can’t be hairy and you must have sideburns to be sexy. Like etymologies of words you can trace back to roots thousands of years ago, traditions and perceptions of beauty start somewhere practical and morph/evolve over time as usage reshapes them into new, and when looked at from the outside, bizarre, seemingly arbitrary forms.

You always have to question external forces that tell you something genetic is disgusting or inherently wrong when it’s completely harmless. A little bit (or heck, a whole barrel-full) of iconoclasm is good for sanity in cases like these. I feel like before I continue I should mention that I grew up in Australia and then the United States (in Southern California, no less), so my experiences with these issues have been colored accordingly.

Page 9 of Alpha Flag has the diver stripping out of his dive suit to take a shower, revealing that he has quite a fair bit of body hair! Most men have body hair. It spans from small clusters of hairs that you could easily count, to a light dusting on the abdomen, to a full pelt like the diver, to more (what comes after a pelt? A suit of armor? That sounds pretty rad. Let’s go with that)! And then the hair comes in all sorts of shapes and patterns, growing in all sorts of directions. I find the differences and patterns fascinating! It’s like if fingerprints had a stronger connection to genetics. Yet, it got bundled in with fashion somewhere along the line, so we have to deal with real, specific demands being placed on all of us all the time. Demanding people shave their entire bodies is unreasonable when being hairless is “in”, and growing “attractive” distributions of hair is unfeasible (the bald spot under my chin killing all hopes of a beard is proof), just how women can’t just have the “perfect body” that’s popular this season.

Culture isn’t a single, unified front, though, so those subjected to it don’t receive a uniform message. When it comes to things mostly spoken about subtextually like appropriateness of men’s body hair (the message is pretty clear for women in America, so I’ll focus on the dudes), we only get told small chunks of what to do/be, so expectation gets confused. Ask women/gay men/whoever is into men how they like body hair in their partners and you’ll get wildly varied–I’d even say polarized–opinions, with an overall cultural trend emerging only after you collect enough data. Then it usually lines up with popular celebrities/advertising campaigns/culturally projected messages that match up with the ages of those polled.

What does this have to do with comics? Well, in mainstream American comics, body hair has become codified to mean very specific things, most of the time. If you’re hairy, you’re generally feral (Wolverine), from an ancient, brutal ancient civilization (Marvel’s version of Hercules, the modern Hawkman, [Puck]), or evil (too many to list).* It’s really easy to lean on people’s prejudices about certain features to establish your character quickly and without much effort, but it’s so incredibly lazy and generally ends up with you holding an incredibly flat, boring character. I guess I should be glad that some characters even body hair at all, though. For the first couple of decades of comics, showing anything remotely sexual (like traits that appear post-puberty, or heaven forbid nipples on men, the scandalous things) was outright banned. Now it’s only de facto banned by male artists not wanting to seem gay for drawing sexualized (as in, having sex. Not even being sexy.) men. There are comics published in 2010 where a shirtless male character will have a completely hairless body, no nipples, and no crotch as if the hero is some kind of action figure come to life. It’s just silly when compared to the super-sexualized women that stand next to (/behind) them.

*(Of course, there are the occasional heroes that flip back and forth between some and none depending on the artist drawing them, but that’s more of a problem of consistency from comic-to-comic, and that’s a whole ‘nother kettle of fish.)

I guess I just wanted to write this so I could link people when they ask, as they always do, why X character is “so hairy” when they have any form of drawn on body hair. Not drawing body hair is weird. It’s real. People have it. Characters having it shouldn’t really be noteworthy.

I was secretly hoping that these files had been lost–that my eraser had been the last thing to see them as it tore them from the bristol that would ultimately become something presentable, but alack, ’tis not my lot for such fortuitous happenstance. I have enough distance from the work now (both temporally and skill-wise) that I feel okay posting it.

I’ve got some friends whose fingers drip finished images making doing anything else with them a ridiculous waste of time, and a few that labor over each line for way too long. Me? I redraw. A lot. I find that the best way to see if a panel works is to draw it (roughly, of course). If it doesn’t, I’ll just erase it then draw something else. If that doesn’t work, rinse and repeat. It’s the brute-force attack of comics, for all you cryptographers out there. It’s slow and a massive waste of time, but when you’re having a bad day, it’s sometimes the only way to work through a problem when you’re not ready to accept giving up.

I hit a massive rough patch with pages four and five. I’d been out of practice drawing comics for months and suddenly I had to draw a freaking polar bear jumping through a doorway at a my character as he scrambles inside, ultimately to defend himself with a mysterious sword while keeping the polar bear safely on the other side of a door? Who writes this stuff? The pages should just be talking heads.

Context first. I drew the first seven pages together in a batch of rough pencils, and then I went back in and added details so they’d all have a similar level of quality. Let’s get into this mess, shall we? On the left you have my original “final” rough and on the right, the finished pencils. Click to embiggen.

As you can see, there’s a fairly drastic change here. I only kept one of the original panels, eliminated the head-turn polar bear visual gag, too (this comic is SO serious, you guys), much to my friend’s chagrin, added another panel in the middle to expand the jumping action (Where’s Scott McCloud when you need him? [But seriously folks, buy this book.]), and changed almost all of the angles. Phew, what a mess. Where was I going with this? I guess there’s a lesson to be learnt mixed in here. Sometimes your first ideas are perfect for your vision, and sometimes they’re not. It’s important not to get married to any idea before you can see how it fits into the bigger picture, in this case, each panel individually in a page.

This is especially true when you’re just figuring out what you want your comic (illustration, script, job, life, metaphor) to look like! I think we can all agree that the right is leagues better than the left, and not just because I actually learned how to draw polar bears out of embarrassment before continuing. Doin’ Alex Toth proud.

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As you can see, this one went through a similar process (man, some of these panels are really bad). At times of artistic crisis like this page, I just glance down at my WWFQD bracelet. What would Frank Quitely do? He’d keep it simple–keep it readable above all else. I think that solved the majority of my compositional problems in the first seven. I made with a pact with myself at that point on to use one point as much as possible/appropriate, so look for that in upcoming pages.

I’m still working out the look of the world and the characters, so you can expect them to change a little bit visually as the story progresses, but know it’s just my continued attempt to erase and redraw it until I’m satisfied with it enough not to erase it again.

Jon