Webcomic Wednesday: The East Meets West Portfolio by Geof Darrow

Ah, tumblr – without you, where would we find ten-plate portfolios by The Matrix concept designer and Hard Boiled cartoonist Geof Darrow that double as wordless webcomics about tourist Clint Eastwood and a guy in a kerchief and a cast murdering a sumo wrestler with a male-pattern-baldness version of Wolverine’s haircut?

Darrow’s compulsively detailed brand of violent science-fiction imagery has steadily become one of the most influential looks in genre comics today (cf. Chris Burnham on Batman Incorporated or the overall vibe of the Brandon Graham-helmed Prophet). I think what draws readers back to his work when they come across it is its sense of humor – an odd thing to say about all those graphic beheadings and bullet-riddlings, but for real. Darrow’s is a world of comically contrasting extremes, rendered visually. In this very paragraph, for example, I refer to Darrow’s work as compulsively detailed, and that’s certainly true, but those details have a leveling effect that places blood spatter or shell casings on the same visual level as the wrinkles in someone’s pants or litter on the street. There’s a back-and-forth in Darrow’s work between spectacle and awkwardness, in other words – it’s work that can present you with a killer close-up on Clint Eastwood’s face, then remind you that he’s dressed like a central-casting Tourist character from a 1980s David Lee Roth video; it’s work that can show you a sidewalk full of sinister suited villains being blown off their feet by gunfire, originating from guns held by a guy drawn to look like he’s doing nothing more physically or emotionally demanding than waiting for a bus; it’s work where the person who beheads a towering goon with a samurai sword is dressed like the first old lady in line for the early bird special at Old Country Buffet.

Darrow could blow you away all the livelong day if he felt like it, but instead he asks you to consider not just the thrill but also the absurdity of being really fucking good at drawing people fighting each other. If you were to read satire into what he does, which I’m not 100% sure you could or should but it might be worth a shot, you could say he’s using his chops to lampoon the culture that values those chops. Geof Darrow is the Steely Dan of comics about dinosaurs and sumo wrestlers roaming the post-apocalyptic wastelands.

(via zachhazardvaupen)