Webcomic Wednesday - “The Hand of Gold” by Jordan Crane

Jordan Crane is one of the most quietly influential comics-makers of the past 15 years, and I mean -makers in multiple senses of the word. As the editor of the landmark comics anthology series NON, Crane provided some of the earliest widespread exposure for the loose grouping of genre-interested underground cartoonists who clustered around the Fort Thunder collective in Providence, Rhode Island, as well as publisher Tom Devlin’s late, lamented Highwater Books imprint. As a designer, his book-as-box-of-treasures NON #5 anticipated Chris Ware’s #1 New York Times bestselling Building Stories box set by over a decade, while his gorgeous screenprinted color palette raised the bar for the craft of handmaking comics. As a cartoonist, his wedding of a lush and elegant line to pleasingly “cartoony” character designs to emotionally wrenching, often horror-tinged narratives set the tone for many subsequent cartoonists’ entire careers. And as the driving force behind the webcomics portal What Things Do, his reliance on continuous scrolling and his attention to reader-pleasing details like the soft, yellowed-old-paper color of the site’s background make his site the gold standard.

You can watch Crane wear most if not all of these hats simultaneously in “The Hand of Gold.” It’s a short but intensely grim Weird Western, a morality play in which an accidental crime that leaves the criminal with little choice to throw his whole moral weight into it is quickly met with maximum, supernatural sanction. It’s a gorgeous thing to look at just based on the colors alone: blue night, orange fire, yellow desert sun. But be sure to dig into the details, like how the gangly character design Crane cooks up for his protagonist naturally enhances the physical impact of his flailing, fleeing, and fighting once the shit hits the fan, or how the way he drops the final period from declarative sentences gives the cowboy’s words an informal tone quickly belied by the severity of the events that befall him. Despite the darkness, it’s comforting to feel like you’re in the hands of a master.