I’ll freely and gladly admit to being a major Joe Kubert fan. The man has the uncanny ability to put more raw emotion into his artwork than he finds in the script, even those he writes himself. This is a true hallmark of the symbiotic nature of the unique comic art medium.
I grew up in the time of Gil Kane, Jack Kirby, Carmine Infantino, Carl Barks, Steve Ditko, Alex Toth, Dick Sprang, and Wayne Boring, and it was tough to compete with that mob. Now as then, Joe’s work goes straight for the gut, pulls me into his characters and leaves no doubt as to how each feels about the space he or she occupies within the story.
When I first started working for DC Comics back in 1976, my office was located halfway between Joe’s and Julie Schwartz’s, and my tiny fanboy lizard brain thought I had died and gone to heaven. To tell you the truth, I’ve never forgiven Joe Kubert for leaving Hawkman back in 1963. No knock on my old friend Murphy Anderson, who did wonderful work on the feature, but Joe’s Hawkman fried my 13 year-old brain so totally I started reading Our Army At War regularly just to get my fix. No doubt Joe will be thrilled to learn he has redeemed himself every day since. In fact, just a couple years later when my best friend told me he hated the art on Joe’s Tales of the Green Beret comic strip, this teen-aged antiwar activist almost punched the sucker out. I’ve always been well adjusted that way.
A couple years later, I was convinced that Joe Kubert created Clint Eastwood.
Joe has continued in the medium and, lately, has been best known for two collaborations with his wife Muriel: The Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, and the infinite number of Kubert Kids who seem to produce the lion’s share of the nation’s better comics output these days. But even at 78 Joe’s work as a storyteller has been as strong as ever in several graphic novels over the past decade, including the hard firsthand look at the realities of modern day warfare in Fax From Sarajevo and his gut-wrenching account of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, Yossel April 19, 1943.
Yossel was one of the most difficult books I’ve ever read. As an Ashkenazi-American with an extended family barely large enough to fit in an SUV hybrid, I went to high school in Skokie, Illinois, then-home to the largest population of Nazi concentration camp survivors in the world. Most of my friends had at least one parent with numbers tattooed on an arm, and for me every word and every pencil-stroke of Yossel literally vibrated with my heritage so thoroughly that reading it was as painful as it was compelling.
So it is with expected high praise that I announce that Joe Kubert has taken a loving step back in his career and turned out one of the most engrossing graphic novels I’ve read in a long time. Tex – The Lonesome Rider (SAF Comics, just released) is a western graphic novel. In fact, it’s a 224 page western graphic novel. Written by Claudio Nizzi and featuring the late Giovanni Luigi Bonelli’s classic hero Tex Willer, as western stories go, this one is so textbook it honestly works as a tribute to the genre: a lone Texas Ranger on a search through the Southwest for the killers of his friend. Western stories don’t come any more classic than that – and the script is lean and mean with a confidence few comics writers dare show us these days. I hope Signore Nizzi will forgive me if I give his masterful script short shrift and get back to Mister Kubert.
Every panel of Tex is Joe Kubert at his best. He establishes and maintains the historical feeling with a minimalist use of background clutter – the Southwest is, after all, often shown as a vast wasteland in film and photo, and Joe overcomes the tendency to overdress the set. Every classic Kubert shot and pose is here: the tight facial close-ups, the muscle-rippling mano-a-mano struggles, the carefully clever spotting of blacks, the silhouette knockouts, the dramatic camera angles, and of course Joe’s trademark: the high-emotion eye shots. If I were to go over the body of Kubert’s work these past 60+ years (well, gee, he started working at age 12!) and crib the best example of every shot in Kubert’s repertoire and arrange them into a story, at best I’d have a fairly lame knockoff of Tex.
As a graphic novel, Tex – The Lonesome Rider is a compelling, well-executed experience for those of us who enjoy classic western heroic fantasy. As a journey into the craft of one of the comics medium’s true masters, Tex is well deserving of your time and shelf-space.
(Mike Gold takes his e-mail vaguely seriously: arrogantMGMS@aol.com)
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