Undertaker v3: “The Ogre of Camp Sutter”

Jonas (“Undertaker”) Crowe and friends are running low on money, but a big job has come their way if Jonas can just hold his temper for a couple days.

He can’t.  And the results put everyone in mortal danger, beholden to the help of a monster.

The Power of a Good Bad Guy

The first “Undertaker” story had a decent villain at the center of it.  In the end, though, it’s a bit of the usual evil big business guy who wants to own it all, treats everyone poorly, and even in death is trying to screw people over.   The events of that story happen because of the ripple effects of everything that bad guy set up.  Everyone is after the same thing for different reasons, and the conflict is inevitable. It uses some clever bits and great action sequences to sell the story so well.

In this new storyline, the bad guy is a mad doctor who is mostly evil, but really just slightly unethical. It’s hard to describe him without giving everything away, but he is the classic case of a bad guy who believes his own story and doesn’t think he’s doing anything wrong. Once you pair that up with his shared history with Jonas and his cunning for getting out of any situation on top, you get a bad guy who is deliciously evil. He can play mind tricks and follow it up with a well-landed punch to knock an opponent out.  He’s the best of both worlds.

He’s a bit like Convulvulus in “Asterix and the Roman Agent” in that he can talk his way out of anything, and his knowledge of “advanced” medicine (for the time) can help with everything else.

And in this book, he wins far more often than he loses, with some nasty results.  To use a “The Walking Dead” comparison, this is on the level of The Governor versus Rick Grimes, if the Governor only had more of a sadistic medical background.

Meyer’s Composition

The book is beautifully drawn and colored. Ralph Meyer does amazing work at every level, particularly paired up with Caroline Delabie on colors.  Together, they can do both literal colors and interpreted color keying, and it all looks great without hiding any detail in the art.

One thing I don’t think enough people pay attention to when reading comics is the power of composition.  How you lay out an individual panel can often tell the story better than any sequence of panels.  It’s definitely a skill any comics storyteller needs. It goes hand-in-hand with sequential narrative, but I think gets lost and overlooked far too often.

A single image, when properly composed, can guide the eye to the its subject while also being pleasant to look at.  With the right techniques, there can be no doubt where the artist wants your eye to flow through a panel.  It’s often not enough to just have a single strong point in the image.  Often, a skilled artist can set up a composition to make your eye enter and exit the panel in just the right way to best tell the story.

Ralph Meyer is a master at the wide angle establishing panel.  Throw in a bit of the natural landscape, and you hit his sweet spots. Let’s look at a few examples from this book, because they all made me smile when I saw what they were doing.  With skills like these, Meyer could be a master photographer or a landscape painter.  Comics is lucky to have him.

The point of this panel is to show Crowe and company’s arrival at the house that appears lost in the vast emptiness of its terrain.  You may not even notice it at first glance.  But Meyer places the camera behind the wagon and just above it to give the reader a nice wide and deep view of the area.

The rocks in the extreme foreground to the left and the lower right all box in the wagon and point your eye to it.  The darker coloring in what feels like an all-orange scene helps provide a point of contrast for the eye to naturally settle one.  You really only see the house in the middle because it disrupts the random pattern of the greenery in that area.  Your eye catches that pattern interruption along with the fence an the dark roof of the house.

The rocky mountains behind the house are dark and also keep the eye penned in.  The far background mountains are lighter-colored and drawn with a thin line to help them disappear into the background.

Here’s Meyer going with a bird’s eye view.  That back wall of mountainous stone really leads the eye behind Crow’s wagon out to the river and all the way back to where the sun set on the horizon maybe a half hour earlier.  Color works a lot in this one, too, between the orange glow of the campfire and the lighter blue in the sky.  The rest of the panel is one flat blue/grey look, with maybe a soft twinge of green in the trees along the river.  You feel line a drone over the scene here.  Meyer places all the elements well to magnify the height of the angle and to lead the eye across the panel and out.  The lettering works along that line.  (I’ve whited out the words for story spoiler purposes.)

This one is notable for the way Meyer spots his blacks.  He effectively letterboxes the image with solid black along the bottom on the ground and above in the sky.  That stone arc guides the eye straight to the wagon along the road, just off-center in the panel.  The road stretching from lower left to center-right guides the eye to the same place from a different corner.  It’s a great trick.

I could go on and on for days on Meyer’s work, but I’ll end with a non-landscape image that shows the power of his composition:

Dutch angle, low angle, lots of detail in the environment but with more closer to the reader and less further away, with the perspective leading your eye right to Jonas’ diving figure.  Bonus credit to the letterers for placing the “K-POW” behind the bullet trails.  You also get that “frozen moment” feeling and the feeling of quick motion from the way his hat is popping out off his head and the gun is flying out of his hand.  There’s a lot of stuff going on this panel to really place the reader in the scene.  It’s terrific stuff.

Recommended?

Yes!  Jonas Crowe is already a great character with a strong personality and a questionable past.  This book, though, takes it several steps further.  We see his weakness and his humanity. And we also learn a little more about his shadowy past, and what that says about the man.

There’s a tension and an inevitable feeling of loss throughout this book.  The bad guy is just so bad that you know something major could happen at the turn of any page.  I like that anxiety in my comics reading.  I can’t say more without spoilers, but there you go.

If you’ve not read the first two books in this series, there is a text page that the story opens with to bring new readers up to speed.  It does its job well without drowning you in details from the previous story.

Bonus: There’s a small sketchbook section in the back, including a pencil version of one of the pages from the book.  It’s not a whole lot, but it’s still cool. They just needed to fill out that signature for the print edition after the story ran long, I’m sure.

Good (and timely) news: The fourth volume (which should conclude this story) is due out next week.  There’s not long to wait!

— 2018.043 —

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