Art For Art’s Sake #391: More Of Paul Grist’s ‘Kane’
by Richard Bruton
Welcome to another of your weekly delights of the very best in comic book artwork. Yes, it’s Art For Art’s Sake!
We’ll end with a little of Paul Grist‘s Kane, a beautiful, amazing book from the 1990s, and still my all-time favourite bit of crime noir in comics. It looked a lot like this when published, but there’s unpublished art awaiting you at the end …
But before ending with Kane, there’s all this to enjoy …
Bill Sienkiewicz — The cover to the Aargh! anthology of 1988. Aargh stood for Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia, and it was a one-off anthology published by Alan Moore under his Mad Love publishing company. Back in 1988, the Conservative government of the UK were pushing through Clause 28, a law that basically outlawed the promotion of homosexuality in any way. It’s a great anthology, well worth checking out if you can find it.
John McCrea — The Demon
Leonardo Romero
Kevin Nowlan (1987) — The New Mutants #51
Enki Bilal
Tony Harris — Starman
Jamie Hernandez — Love And Rockets
Darwyn Cooke
Jeff Purves — The Incredible Hulk #358 (1989)
Barry Kitson — Madame Xanadu
Neal Adams — Tarzan
John K Snyder — Grendel
Jim Steranko — Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. #5 (1968)
Jorge Fornes
Tom McWeeney
Jordi Bernet — unpublished cover from The Complete Torpedo (2014)
Jose Garcia Lopez — The Joker
Brian Bolland
Glenn Fabry — Preacher
Travis Cherest — WildC.A.T.s
Daniel Clowes — Young Lust #8 (1993).
Garry Leach — Mysta Mystralis The Laser Eraser from the Axel Pressbutton US reprints, originally published in Warrior, UK.
Brilliant bit of Sergio Aragonés from MAD Magazine #139 — The Vampire (1970)
And now, to end, as promised — Paul Grist‘s Kane, of which you should know that my love knows no bounds. It’s a stunning series of noir crime comics, seriously the best crime comics you will ever read.
First published by Grist’s own Dancing Elephant Press and later Image Comics in 31 single issues and six collections from 1993 to 2001, Kane was just as close to absolute perfection as a crime comic. At the time, all the talk was of what Frank Miller was doing with Sin City, but I said it then and I’ll say it now, Kane was/is so much better in every way. It had a depth that Miller’s work didn’t have, and it wasn’t as bloody, unrelentingly grim, as Grist’s got a fine turn of comedy in his writing that made Kane so much better.
Anyway, a few years while ago, Grist was talking about bringing Kane back. To say I was excited was an understatement — see what I said here. It’s been a few years since that, and no sign of new work yet. But there’s always hope.
Meanwhile, Grist’s been having a studio clearout and has posted up these images from Kane gone by…
Starting off here:
Major studio clear out is uncovering some long abandoned pages. Here’s one I quite like which would have been a cover for issue 2 of Kane.
Then to these:
Here’s a few pages which were probably from around 2014 -15, which was my first serious attempt at doing new Kane comics. Pretty much abandoned after these 5 pages
And finally, this:
Another one from the abandoned Kane pages pile. This is actually the first page of the sequence I posted a couple of days ago.
