Return to Comic Con

A year ago I wrote about the experience of attending New York Comic Con for the first time. This type of entertainment convention, which has its equivalents in cities all over the world, brings together fans of superheroes, science fiction, fantasy and beyond. Along with the elaborate cosplay beloved of attendees, Comic Cons also feature a great variety of visual artists. This year, it happened that the Con fell in the same week the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its first-ever exhibition of Quattrocento Sienese painting, placing a particular emphasis on storytelling. What if there were a connection between the highbrow exhibition uptown and the popular convention downtown? 

Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350 is at the Met through late January 2025, after which it will move to London’s National Gallery. It contains several extraordinary works by artists such as Duccio, the Lorenzetti brothers and Simone Martini, from the first flowering of the Italian Renaissance, and examines the development of narrative imagery in the altarpieces and devotional works created during this visually rich period. 

I was curious about the potential resonance, so I went to the Met show before attending a preview panel at the Con, for the new feature-length animated film, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, which opens in theaters on December 13. Moderator Stephen Colbert was joined by its director, anime veteran Kenji Kamiyama, as well as Rohirrim producer and co-writer Philippa Boyens. Fans were treated to a video message from beloved hobbit-y director Peter Jackson —he’s the executive producer of the forthcoming movie, which is based on stories from Tolkien’s appendices to LOTR. 

Colbert asked Kamiyama what it is about Tolkien and his world that resonated with him, and what felt familiar for someone more accustomed to Japanese legends and storytelling.  

“I think when Tolkien first created this work,” Kamiyama reflected through an interpreter, “perhaps these kinds of fantasy stories were taken as a fairy tale for younger children.” Yet the stories quickly came to be seen as something deeper. As a result, they set the standard for future anime, fantasy and other types of storytelling. 

During the Q and A, Scottish actor Brian Cox, CBE, who voices the character of Helm Hammerhand, was asked by an audience member how he prepared for the role.  

“I think one of the useful things is what is called ‘imagination’,” replied Cox deadpan, causing the room to burst into prolonged laughter. “You want me to elaborate on imagination?” he inquired cheekily.  

“We’ve all been children,” he continued, “and one of the things of a child is the pretending. You know we pretend to be grown-ups when we’re children, and then we get up there, and we realize how disappointing it is.” More raucous laughter. 

“But you know, I value that,” Cox explained. “I value my childhood, and I value what I did when I was a kid. And actually quite frankly, I’m still… even though I’m a certain age — I won’t give away what it is — but I still think of myself as nine, and I’ve never really grown up from that point.” Cox thinks that the childlike gift of the imagination can do its work if you only let it. “You can take yourself on amazing journeys in a very small room,” he said, recalling how he recorded many of his lines for the new film sitting inside a closet at home. 

Following the panel discussion, I headed to the main floor of the Javits Center. At the exhibitor booth for Rocket Pop, Inc., prints by artist Evan Scola caught my eye. They depicted locations from films and novels in the form of vintage posters. Some were truly beautiful — one depicted Tolkien’s lush elven realm of Lothlórien, done in a style reminiscent of the work of Alphonse Mucha and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Others were a bit more tongue-in-cheek, as in the case of a WPA-type poster advertising tourism on Princess Leia’s home planet of Alderaan: the print, a clump of asteroids depicted against a glowing background, provided an element of black humor. 

The most unexpected offering, however, was a German Expressionist-style poster depicting the tumbledown East Hampton mansion known as “Grey Gardens.” The house’s dilapidated façade is well-known to fans of arthouse cinema, thanks to the eponymous 1975 film by the Maysles brothers.  

“Have you seen The Beales of Grey Gardens?” asked Scola. The 2006 follow-up film contains footage that did not make it into the Maysles’s original documentary and reflects on its legacy. “There’s some really deep storytelling going on there,” the artist observed. We discussed how when Grey Gardens premiered, psychologists were just beginning to publish works on codependency in human relationships. I left the booth thinking, here is a popular artist familiar with art history, cinéma vérité and psychological theory, who not only appreciates good storytelling, but can visually share it. 

I descended into the cavernous art exhibition space Artist Alley, and came across the booth of Centurium Studios, featuring the work of artist Michelle Delecki and her husband, writer A.P. Redcrosse. A painting of Superman at once reminiscent of Byzantine art and the planar, vaguely Japanese-woodblock forms of pop artist Patrick Nagel — perhaps best known for his cover of Duran Duran’s 1982 album Rio — stood on an easel. Sheets of action-packed pen-and-ink comic book drawings, made up of panels not much larger than a business card, alternated with pages of brilliantly gilded and jewel-colored borders in the style of medieval illuminated manuscripts. 

Sensing that I was in the right place, I pulled out my pack of postcards from the Met, and explained that to my mind, the work on display at the Siena exhibition was not as removed from popular art as you might think. We began by considering Duccio’s depiction of “The Wedding Feast at Cana.” Delecki, who has worked for DC and Marvel Comics, among others, noted the various aspects of the table at the center of the painting, around which the action of the story revolves. 

“Something that’s going on in this specific painting,” she commented, “is that you can see everyday life being captured to create a feeling of naturalness. It feels like a moment in time, which is something very important to the storytelling that takes place in comics as well. We also want to incorporate things that might be happening in the background, that people aren’t really quite looking at, at first. It adds realism and believability. 

“I was an art history major in college,” Delecki explained, “and my original dream was to become either a restorer or a curator in a museum. So my being able to work in comics and publishing, and to use my art history background, really brings a warm joy to me. I feel as though this is my being able to take the classics and bring them to people that might not normally gravitate toward art history. 

“The new project that I’m working on right now, for example,” she continued, “is kind of a love letter to all the Renaissance art that I fell in love with when I was an undergraduate. I’m looking at Albrecht Dürer’s woodcuts, I’m looking at Giotto. I’m also looking at Byzantine art. Because all the gold leafing from Byzantium influences Sienese art. The tragedy of this is that I can’t reproduce all the gold leafing like I would want to do.” 

I asked Redcrosse how he and his wife collaborate to decide what passages from his writing end up becoming source material for the illustrations that accompany his text. 

“When I draft a chapter,” Redcrosse explained, “she’ll pick out her favorite moments, and then we’ll talk through how they should be represented visually. And so she’ll hit the books after we talk through the chapter, and then map everything out visually to say, ‘Is this what we’re looking at?’ and I’ll say, ‘That’s great,’ or suggest a tweaking here or there. She may be pulling influences from all kinds of places, like the Très Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry, for example.”  

By chance, one of the pages of the TRH, created in the early fifteenth century by the Limbourg brothers, happens to be in the Met’s Siena show. “Boy, did I pick the right table,” we laughed.  

“I want the viewer to see and feel what I’m feeling when I see something that’s authentically beautiful,” said Delecki, “and put something that is a bit more sophisticated in design into telling the story.” 

We next considered Duccio’s “The Raising of Lazarus,” noting Lazarus’s sickly green tinge. Delecki pointed out that one of the figures in the panel is holding his nose, an echo of Martha’s warning to Christ that there would be a stench if her brother’s tomb were opened. “That’s something that would definitely be illustrated for a comic book cover,” Delecki maintained, “because it’s so dramatic.” 

I said that one of the things I liked about the Siena show was that in the storytelling, the images present imperfect people trying to do the right thing, often in difficult circumstances. 

“One of the major aspects of the story that we’re putting together right now,” Redcrosse said, “is that it’s about a regular guy who is up the creek and underestimates his own capabilities. He has to learn how to adapt to his surroundings, even if he’s doing it imperfectly.” 

Delecki thinks that such imperfection is what makes a narrative, visual or written, more real to us. “I feel that art is what makes us human,” she says. “So when you do see that maybe a line is out of place, or here,” she pointed to one of the two thieves in “The Crucifixion” by Pietro Lorenzetti, “where a sternum is not quite correctly drawn, you know that was done by a human being. You’re going to want to connect with that, and you’re going to relate to that imperfection, because there’s a sincerity and a beauty in that.” 

The next day, shining like the top of the Chrysler Building in this year’s “Art Deco Superman” cosplay, I dropped by the Centurium Studios booth to say hello. Here, I met the couple’s young daughter, whose eyes shone as she took in my gleaming geekiness and vast red cape (with pockets). Superman was, for a moment, someone she could see before her, outside the pages or screens where he normally resides. 

Perhaps the highbrow have forgotten the childlike delight of using the imagination, or the joy to be found in the creative telling and retelling of tales. This is a pity, and ultimately rather shortsighted. For culturally, historically and spiritually speaking, such popular narrative art has spoken to humanity for millennia, and it will continue to do so long after today’s art institutions are a thing of the past.