Back in February at the New York Comic Con, during the panel about the forthcoming movie Will Eisner’s The Spirit, executive producer Michael Uslan recommended that we all go see the exhibit “Reflecting Culture: The Evolution of American Comic Book Superheroes,” that was opening at the Montclair Art Museum this summer (see “Comics in Context” #170). it turned out that Uslan lent a good number of comics and original comics artwork from his own extensive collection to the show. At the convention Uslan assured us that the museum, in Montclair, New Jersey, was merely “a half hour train ride” from Manhattan. Regular readers may recall that, as a result of my expedition to the Newark Museum to see the first section of “Masters of American Comics,” I was suspicious even then of Mr. Uslan’s assurance.

And I was justified. I decided to head out to the Montclair Art Museum on the show’s bright, sunny and delightful opening day, Saturday, July 14, and discovered from website research that on weekends there is apparently no direct route via public transportation from Manhattan to the museum. Moreover, I ended up not arranging to stay overnight with a friend who lived in a nearby New Jersey town, so my journey to Montclair was going to be a day trip. Getting out to Newark, New Jersey by train was simple enough. Waiting a long time in a grungy area of Newark as the summer sun beat down for the bus heading to Montclair was less appealing. But I was pleased to discover that Montclair itself is a rather pretty, upscale town, and that the bus stopped directly across from the museum. I disembarked, notebook in hand, ready to gather information for my column.

An introductory wall text, on “Definitions and Origins,” began promisingly by quoting a definition of the term “superhero” from Dr. Peter Coogan’s remarkable book Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre (see “Comics in Context” #162). The wall text goes on to state one of the themes of the exhibition: that superheroes are modern successors of the title hero of the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, of the heroes of ancient Greek mythology, and of legendary figures like Robin Hood. Moreover, “comic book superheroes became manifestations of American history, culture, and folklore.” And so, the exhibition shows visitors, during World War II superheroes battled the Axis powers. Wonder Woman became a feminist icon. In the 1960s Stan Lee and his collaborators created superheroes with more complex personalities, who felt alienated from the rest of society. In the 1970s superhero comics tackled social issues like drug addiction. The 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of non-Caucasian superheroes like the Black Panther and the John Stewart version of Green Lantern. The “deconstruction” of superheroes got under way in the 1980s, and numerous superhero comics stories were done about the 9/11 attacks. And I suspect that most of my readers are surprised by none of this.

Unfortunately, the Montclair show doesn’t move much beyond what one might term Superhero Comics 101, the most basic kind of course in the genre. Certainly there must be many visitors to the show who know little about the history of the superhero genre, to whom much of this information will be new. But walking around the exhibition, I was reminded of mainstream media articles about superhero comics circa 1970, marveling that they were dealing with social and political issues: comic books had suddenly become “relevant.” Over thirty-five years have passed, but the Montclair show delves little more deeply into the genre. “Masters of American Comics” raised the bar for museum shows about comics considerably. In co-curating a show dealing with Stan Lee’s superhero comics for MoCCA, the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (www.moccany.org), I was careful in writing the wall texts both to provide the basic information for people who knew little about the Marvel series of the 1960s, but also to provide insights that I hoped that even longtime Marvel aficionados would find illuminating and different.

What was most rewarding about “Reflecting Culture” was looking at the original artwork and vintage comic books on display. I continue to be amazed that actual comic books that I bought as far back as the 1960s–and even some comics from the early 21st century–are now displayed as museum pieces. But I was pleased with the selection of vintage comic books on display here, ranging as far back as the Golden Age of the 1940s, and, unlike in Geppi’s Entertainment Museum (see “Comics in Context” #176), the accompanying texts provided satisfying explanations of each book’s significance. There was original comics artwork on display by Neal Adams (from a Batman story and Green Lantern), Dave Cockrum (from Uncanny X-Men), Gene Colan, Amanda Conner, Steve Ditko (from The Amazing Spider-Man), Will Eisner (from The Spirit), Carmine Infantino (from The Flash), Gil Kane, Jack Kirby (from Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles), Joe Kubert, Frank Miller (from Batman: The Dark Knight Returns), Jim Lee, H. G. Peter (an unpublished Wonder Woman splash page), and John Romita Sr. (from The Amazing Spider-Man). Certainly there were many major superhero artists whose work was not represented, but the examples of art by the artists I’ve just named was all worthy of close inspection. There was even Superman co-creator Joe Shuster’s own 1971 recreation of the cover of Action Comics #1, Superman’s first appearance.

I was particularly delighted with Joe Kubert’s cover art for Batman #310 (1979), showing Batman battling the Gentleman Ghost atop a runaway horse-drawn carriage. Daringly, Kubert put the hero and villain in the background, while the horses powerfully hurtle into the foreground, as if to burst from the printed cover and trample the reader. The dynamic power of the galloping horses reinforces the sense of action conveyed by Batman’s fight with the Ghost. The accompanying label commends Kubert’s “powerful, naturalistic style” and “his masterful eye for realistic detail.” But the secret of Kubert’s artwork in “Reflecting Culture” is his ability to make his heroic figures, whether it is Batman, Hawkman, or Sgt. Rock, appear larger-than-life and iconic and simultaneously seem realistic and credible. In his own way, Alex Ross also achieves this same amazing alchemy. (During the run of “Reflecting Culture,” the Montclair Art Museum is also featuring a commendable exhibit, “Comic Book Legends: Joe, Adam, and Andy Kubert,” honoring these three New Jersey residents, just off the entrance lobby.)

Another of my favorites was the original artwork for Gil Kane and Murphy Anderson’s cover for Green Lantern #26 (1964), in which Star Sapphire, shooting an energy beam into Green Lantern’s power battery, triggers another beam which unmasks the superhero as Hal Jordan. (It is reproduced on the cover of the recent Showcase Presents Green Lantern Vol. 2 paperback. It was a pleasure to be able to study Kane’s elegant linework, as inked by Anderson, up close. This also gave me the opportunity to consider the composition of the cover drawing. Star Sapphire’s downward descent, at a slight angle, is roughly echoed by her power beam. Green Lantern’s stance exactly parallels the other power beam which snatches off his mask. While Star Sapphire’s figure is nearly vertical and exudes confidence, Green Lantern/Hal stands at a decided slant, as if he is literally taken aback by his sudden unmasking. She is triumphant; unmasked, he is vulnerable and seems defeated. The two figures form a classical triangular composition, mirrored by their respective power beams.

The argument has been made that hanging pages of original comic book art on the wall of a museum distorts the experience of reading comics because each individual page is only a segment of a longer work. The “Masters of American Comics” exhibition displayed some entire Spirit stories by Will Eisner and an entire EC war story by Harvey Kurtzman, but only excerpts of one or a few pages from Marvel and DC stories drawn by Jack Kirby.

On the other hand, by displaying a single page, or a two-page sequence, a museum focuses the viewer’s attention on that specific segment of the overall story. Whereas in reading the comics story, the reader will probably get caught up in the narrative, if he sees one or two individual pages on a museum wall, he may notice details and nuances that might otherwise have slipped his conscious notice.

The pages in Montclair that most impressed me were pages 15 and 16 from issue 12 of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ masterpiece Watchmen. In the Watchmen trade paperback, page 16 is the reverse side of page 15. Arguably, these two pages work better as a unit within the issue when they are seen side by side. This is how the Montclair Art Museum presents the original art for these pages.

These two pages make up a short scene within a larger story sequence in the twelfth issue. Since Alan Moore notoriously writes extraordinarily lengthy and detailed scene descriptions in his plots, I do not know which visual aspects of this scene should be attributed to writer Moore and which to artist Gibbons. Together, however, they created a two-page sequence that is a masterpiece of comics storytelling, and which whets my interest in someday embarking on a panel-by-panel analysis of the entire Watchmen series.

(And if you have not read Watchmen, I am about to give away one of the secrets of its plot, so you may wish to skip ahead twenty-seven paragraphs.)

In the first panel Adrian Veidt, alias Ozymandias, stands inside his Antarctic headquarters, gazing into a doorway. Veidt has modeled himself after Alexander the Great, his costume evokes the garb of classical civilization, and he looks rather like an ancient Greek statue as he stands in profile. He wears a placid expression, looking perhaps as if he is lost in thought. If you have the book, then you know the context: he is looking into his “intrinsic field subtractor” chamber, which he just employed to (apparently) disintegrate the godlike Doctor Manhattan, and in the last panel on the previous page he was mulling over the scientific aspects of destroying the Doctor, apparently oblivious to the moral cost of murder.

In the background of this first panel the alert reader will see the silhouetted figures of the superheroes Nite Owl and Rorschach, as if they embody Nemesis, out to avenge the murder of their colleague. They stand in another doorway, and perhaps are merely watching at this point, and not coming forward,

But revenge will come sooner than they could reach him. A balloon, containing the word “Veidt,” hovers to the right of his head, its tail leading offpanel, towards the second panel in the page’s top tier.

This second panel shows another of Watchmen’s superheroes, Laurie, the Silk Spectre, who was once Doctor Manhattan’s lover, who has surely just witnessed Veidt’s seemingly successful attempt to murder him, and who knows (as do Nite Owl and Rorschach) that Veidt is the mastermind behind the massacre of half the population of New York City. (As I have pointed out in my “1986: The Year That Changed Comics” lectures at MoCCA, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, issue 12 of Watchmen takes on new resonance.) Whereas Veidt was shown turned in profile, Laurie faces the reader, angrily aiming a gun and telling Veidt, “You’re an asshole” (a line which should confirm to the museumgoer who hasn’t read Watchmen that this isn’t a book for small children).

Circular lines curve around Laurie: these are the walls of a circular tunnel (as shown two pages earlier), leading in from the Antarctic snows (accounting for the puddles marking Laurie’s footsteps). The circular lines also serve to emphasize Laurie visually, perhaps harkening back to the occasional circular panels used in comics of the 1930s and 1940s. (Look at an early Batman story, for example.) If Laurie is enacting the role of avenging angel here, the circular lines might even suggest a halo.

Laurie is aiming her gun right at the reader. What this actually signifies is that in this one panel the reader has been given Veidt’s point of view as he, off-panel, turns his head and sees Laurie pointing the gun at him. Moore and Gibbons hardly encourage the reader to identify with Veidt in Watchmen, but by giving the reader Veidt’s literal viewpoint for this one panel, they encourage the reader to consider what it would feel like to see someone about to kill him or her.

Subtly the top tier heightens the intensity of the drama by bringing the reader closer to these two characters, panel by panel. The initial panel on the top tier shows Veidt from his head down to his knees. The second panel gives a closer view of Laurie, from her head to the top of her thighs. The third panel brings us even closer to Veidt, starting from the middle of his forehead, as he raises his left leg, as if that is the only way it could be seen in this close-up.

With the third panel the point of view shifts to Laurie’s. (The first panel was from an “objective” point of view, not that of any of the characters.) Veidt is in the process of turning from his profile position in the first panel to a position facing her. What is most notable about this panel, though, are the multiple images of his hand, held as if to administer a karate chop, and of his left leg, moving up as he is about to launch himself into the air. In contrast with the characters’ static poses in the first two panels, the third panel suggests that Veidt is moving to the attack so quickly that it his movement cannot be “caught” by the artist: it is the equivalent of a blurred movement in a photograph. It’s the kind of multiple image effect one might expect to see in The Flash, and presumably Moore and Gibbons are suggesting that Veidt, though he lacks super-powers, is somehow moving almost too quickly for the human eye to register fully. Even the transcription of Veidt’s battle cry (“Hhhhiiiiiii. . . .”) suggests movement.

The second tier consists of a single, long panel. It unites all four characters in the same visual space and serves as an establishing shot, marking the location of each within this chamber. The characters are divided into groups of two. In the background Nite Owl and Rorschach have moved forward, enough so that Nite Owl’s figure is now partly in the light, whereas Rorschach remains mostly in silhouette. The positions of their legs shows that they are now walking. In the foreground Veidt and Laurie are united by the bright blast of her gun, which not only connects the two figures visually but illuminates them both amid the shadows that have swallowed up much of the chamber (as well as Nite Owl and Rorschach).

The figures of Veidt and Laurie are sharply contrasted, and not simply because they are of different sexes. (This panel provides a clear view of Laurie’s microminiskirted legs, for example. Laurie becomes an archetypal female resisting Veidt’s personification of male aggression.) Veidt has no leapt into the air towards Laurie to attack her, thrusting forward his left leg (which he was raising in the previous panel), which looks as if it would have hit her in the lower abdomen (raising some nasty sexual implications). Veidt’s cape flows outward behind him. Hence Veidt is a basically horizontal figure here, whereas Laurie, firing her horizontal gunshot, stands vertically, in opposition to him.

Yet though Veidt and Laurie are in opposition to each other, their figures also echo each other. Veidt continues to utter his battle cry from panel three as Laurie fires her shot, whereupon it continues in the second tier as a cry of pain (“Yaaa. . .”). Whereas in panel three Veidt was extending his left arm to deliver a karate-style blow, in the second tier he holds his arms closer to his body, bringing his hands together, seemingly to clasp them over a gunshot wound. This pose echoes Laurie’s as she holds her arms together, as her hands hold her gun. As Veidt’s left leg extends forward in attack position, his right leg bends, perhaps in reaction to the pain he feels. Laurie extends her right leg forward, anchoring herself to the floor as she fires the shot, but her left leg bends back, perhaps in response to the recoil effect of the gunshot.

Moreover, whereas in the top tier Laurie and Veidt both wore facial expressions of anger, now their reactions are quite different. Veidt looks somber, as if reacting to the pain, while Laurie looks somewhat anguished, perhaps feeling some fear as she saw Veidt hurtling towards her, or perhaps distressed by the act of shooting at him, however much he deserves it.

The bottom tier continues the visual opposition of Laurie (vertical) and Veidt (horizontal): Veidt lies on the floor, seemingly dead, with his left hand over his heart, with blood staining his costume over his heart, and with his right hand, partly clenched, resting in a small puddle of blood on the floor. Laurie stands upright, although not entirely confidently: her head looks down towards Veidt’s body, and her left knee is bent. The bright light from the gun has been supplanted by smoke which curls eerily upward from the barrel.

In the background, Nite Owl and Rorschach continue their advance forward, both now mostly in the light. Shadow covers Nite Owl’s face, though, masking his reaction to what he’s seen; Rorschach, of course, wears a mask which conceals his facial expressions.

The first panel of the bottom tier hides the facial expressions of Veidt and Laurie as well. The seemingly dead Veidt’s face is turned away from us. Laurie has moved, standing beside Veidt’s head, with her back to the reader. We cannot see her face, but her body language–her stance, the position of her head–suggests her uncertainty as she carefully studies the seeming corpse.

Again, the “camera” is being moved subtly closer to the figures. Whereas the middle tier gave us a full figure shot of Laurie, in the third tier’s first panel we see her from the lower third of her head to just above her ankles. We still see the full length of Veidt’s body. In the second panel of the bottom tier, we draw still closer, seeing both Veidt and Laurie from the waist up. Now we can see Veidt’s face, which is once again in profile, but still not Laurie’s. This has the effect of focusing our attention more on Veidt. From the position of her head, Laurie is clearly looking at Veidt’s bloodied clenched hand, and we are being directed to do the same. The starlike points of the puddle of blood further emphasize Veidt’s hand, and oddly contrast with the rounder contours of the puddle of water marking Laurie’s path.

In the Watchmen paperback, one must turn the page to see what comes next, creating more of a feeling of suspense. But in the museum, pages 15 and 16 hang side by side, so the movement of the “camera,” coming increasingly closer to Veidt’s hand, is unbroken (save for having to shift one’s eyes to the top of page 16).

This pattern of slowly zooming in on something, or slowly pulling the “camera” back from it, is a characteristic Watchmen technique. Issue one begins, on the cover, with an extreme close-up of the Comedian’s trademark happy face button, with blood on it, as if from a head wound, and surrounded by a rivulet of blood, from the Comedian’s body. In each succeeding panel on page one the “camera” pulls further up and back, until it reaches the level of the window from which the Comedian fell to his death. Similarly, issue one closes with the “camera” pulling up and back from Laurie and Dan (Nite Owl) standing on a balcony.

The sequence with Veidt’s hand here in issue 12 creates a reverse effect from the opening page of issue 1. In the first issue the “camera” pulled up and back from a small object, amid blood, that was the symbol of the killing of one superhero (the Comedian) by another (Ozymandias). In issue 12, the “camera” step by step moves closer to Veidt’s clenched hand, lying amid blood, giving us a close-up of the hand in the first panel of the top tier of page 16. In the next panel the “camera” moves in still further, as Veidt opens his hand and reveals the bullet, covered with blood, that Laurie shot at him. Earlier, on page 9, Veidt had implied in conversation with a disbelieving Nite Owl that he was capable of catching a bullet that had been fired at him; now we see the proof. The blood-covered bullet becomes not the symbol of death but the symbol of one superhero’s (Veidt’s) ability to survive a murder attempt by another superhero (Laurie).

The third panel cuts to a closeup of Laurie, aghast at realizing what Veidt has done. Then the rhythm of three panels per tier is abruptly interrupted by the second tier, which consists of a single long panel, in which Veidt just as suddenly comes fully to life, raising himself on one hand and kicking Laurie in the abdomen with his left leg. Notice that this parallels the structure of the previous page, in which the top tier of three panels was followed by a second tier consisting of one panel, in which the figures of Veidt and Laurie were joined by the gunshot with which she attacked him. In the second tier of page 16 the figures of Laurie and Veidt are again joined, this time by Veidt’s leg connecting with her stomach. Thus Veidt succeeds in the kicking attack that Laurie thwarted on the previous page. Veidt still occupies a horizontal position and Laurie is in a vertical one, but Veidt is in the process of raising himself to a standing (vertical) position, and Laurie is toppling to a horizontal position, lying on the floor.

Thus Veidt and Laurie exchange positions, both literally and figuratively: he stands up, triumphant, while she lies down, in pain and defeat. This sequence is also a sinister variation on the archetypal pattern of symbolic death and resurrection, as Veidt, who sees himself as a hero but actually fills the role of Watchmen’s primary villain, rises from apparent death.

In this second tier we see Veidt and Laurie from the same direction as Nite Owl and Rorschach do. This subliminally prepares us for the third tier of panels, in which Nite Owl confronts Veidt. With the violent assault over, the third tier returns to the steady three panel per tier pacing thatWatchmen usually employs.

Veidt’s first line in this tier is “There. Something else I wasn’t sure would work,” presumably about his success in catching the bullet, and echoing his comment about his seeming murder of Doctor Manhattan on page 14. This suggests that Veidt cares as little about Laurie’s pain as he did about the moral horror of murdering his former teammate Doctor Manhattan. Veidt’s figure is cropped in this panel so that we do not see his head, but we can imagine his indifferent expression from his dialogue. Instead the “camera” turns our attention to Laurie’s facial expression, reflecting her intense pain, as she lies on the floor, her arms positioned so that her unseen hands clasp her abdomen, just as Veidt’s seemed to cover his seeming wound on the previous page.

On rereading Watchmen the reader may observe that, despite Veidt’s confidence, he is as wrong in believing that he succeeded in killing Doctor Manhattan as Laurie was wrong in thinking she had shot Veidt.

Nite Owl and Rorschach have come much further into the chamber, while the “camera” looked elsewhere in the previous five panels, and they now stand fully in the light. As Laurie did in the first panel of the previous page, Nite Owl demands Ozymandias’s attention by calling his name: “Veidt!” But Veidt will defeat Nite Owl’s attempt at confronting him much more easily than he survived Laurie’s.

In the final tier’s second panel the “camera” radically changes position, so that we now seem to be standing behind Nite Owl and directly behind and to the immediate right of Rorschach. Whereas the previous page showed Nite Owl and Rorschach slowly advancing from the background, now we see Ozymandias advancing towards the foreground. This time the figure in the far background is Laurie, who begins to rise to her feet.

Nite Owl insults Veidt (“Veidt, you bastard. . . .”) and begins to threaten him, but his insult and threat seem standard melodramatic clichés, and his voice trails off (“I’ll. . .”). As if wearily scolding a child, Veidt calls him by his first name over and over (“Oh, Daniel, Daniel, Daniel, Daniel. . . .”), thereby failing to acknowledge his costumed persona. Then, in the page’s final panel, Veidt walks right past Nite Owl and Rorschach and out of the panel: the panel crops most of Veidt’s figure, as if he has already mostly passed out of the scene. “Do grow up. . . .” Veidt tells Nite Owl, who turns, looking bewildered at him. Not only has Nite Owl utterly failed to stop him, but Ozymandias has verbally reduced his would-be opponent to the level of a small child. Rorschach’s cropped figure has slightly turned to watch Ozymandias as he passes, showing us part of his mask: Rorschach’s thoughts on the scene he has witnessed these last two pages remain characteristically enigmatic. In the background Laurie stands upright, but her head is bowed, presumably in pain and defeat.

Nearby hung the original art for a page from another classic Alan Moore story, Batman: The Killing Joke (1988), illustrated by Brian Bolland. This page was from the sequence in which the Joker recounts his (possible) origin, based on the 1951 story “The Mystery of the Red Hood” from Detective Comics #168. In Moore’s version an unnamed comedian is forced by criminals to pose as their supposed masked leader, the Red Hood, but while they are robbing a chemical plant, they are confronted by the Batman. This page has numerous superb visual effects. In one panel we see double images of the Batman in the Red Hood’s goggles, magnifying the threat perceived by the frightened comedian. Bolland takes a surprising but effective minimal approach to the key moment when the Red Hood, desperate to escape Batman, falls into a vat of chemical wastes: the artist represents the two antagonists by only a glove and part of a cape. Best of all is the large panel in which the Red Hood, still masked, climbs out of the chemical wastes outside the factory. Bolland depicts the barbed wire and vegetation in highly detailed, naturalistic fashion, but what is most impressive are the concentric circles in the tainted water, marking when raindrops fall: the patterns are at once beautiful and eerie, thus setting the stage for what will happen on the next page, when the Red Hood unmasks to discover the wastes have given him the garishly colored hair and face of the Joker.

My final favorite artwork in the show was Alex Ross’s gorgeous painted cover for a reprint edition of The History of the DC Universe. Strangely, the accompanying label at the museum claimed that the painting exemplified the influence of Surrealism on Ross’s work, offering Salvador Dali’s work as an example. No, no, no, Ross does not deal in distortions of reality but in endowing the fantastic figures and places of comic book universes with a persuasive semblance of reality. His History of the DC Universe cover really demonstrates the influence on Ross of both the great artists of the Golden Age of Illustration, such as his hero Norman Rockwell, and of cinematic montage.

There is so much in this painting to admire. My favorite section shows the head of the Batman; as usual, Ross makes him look like a real man, wearing a mask made of real fabric, his eyes visible through slits, and simultaneously like a formidable, iconic figure who is larger than life, rather than, say, a guy going to a costume party. Ross makes the bat “ears” on Batman’s cowl so long that they conjure the image of devil’s horns, for the Batman is a man who takes on the image of a fearsome bat–or a devil–to defend us from truly devilish menaces. Look how the tall, thin “horns” of Batman’s cowl are echoed by the tall, thin spires of Gotham City’s skyscrapers to the left of his head. Bats, his symbol, fly amid the skyscrapers, and simultaneously over a scene of the boy Bruce Wayne sitting in darkness behind the slain bodies of his parents. The bats hover over the scene, like omens of the boy’s eventual transformation into Batman. Ross’s positioning of this scene near the head of Batman may suggest that this is something that the adult Batman is constantly thinking about: it is his motivation for his endless war on crime. I am also struck by the pose of the kneeling young Bruce. His body language doesn’t suggest the initial shock and horror of witnessing the murders of his parents. Rather, this scene seems to be set moments later, when that initial shock has passed, and young Bruce has relaxed into a state of quiet mourning, and perhaps contemplation, which will eventually lead to the decision that will shape the rest of his life. The blue colors of the Batman section of the painting suggest both night, which is Batman’s realm, and the “blues”–his endless sorrow.

Ross places Wonder Woman’s head against a background of classical architecture, suggesting both her home among the Amazons on Paradise Island and her series’ background in Greek and Roman mythology. Ross pursues the mythological theme with the section of the painting devoted to Captain Marvel. I like his depiction of the Captain shouting as lightning dances over his body. It is as if moments before, young Billy Batson shouted the magic word “Shazam,” and the enchanted lightning transformed him into his superhuman counterpart. Even better is the background: pyramids amidst the desert, reminding us that the Captain derives his powers from the wizard Shazam, who came from ancient Egypt. The orange palette of this area of the painting suggests the desert sands.

For the section of the painting devoted to DC’s World War Ii heroes, including Sgt. Rock, the Haunted Tank (complete with the specter of the Civil War’s General Jeb Stuart), and the Blackhawks in their planes, Ross chooses the color red, perhaps as a reminder that war involved death and blood

I love the visual parallels and echoes in this painting, such as the way that the large foreheads of the Guardians of the Universe, who protect the cosmos from injustice and danger, parallel the enormous brow of Darkseid, the DC’s Universe’s foremost embodiment of all that the Guardians oppose.

I also greatly admire the way that Ross unifies the entire composition with circles: the twin planets New Genesis and Apokolips from Jack Kirby’s The New Gods, the time bubble holding three members of the Legion of Super-Heroes, the encircled swastika representing the foes of the World War II heroes, the circular body of the Guardians’ giant power battery, reflecting the images of their Green Lantern Corps. The right of the painting, which would have appeared on the front of this wraparound cover, is dominated by the face of Superman against what is really an exploding circle: the destruction of the planet Krypton. But shooting above the cataclysm is a small, nearly circular object: the tiny spacecraft bringing the future Superman to Earth.

There was more than just comics art to see at the Montclair Art Museum, and I also explored its galleries of 19th and 20th century American art, its gallery devoted to the Hudson River School painter George Inness, and its collection of Native American artwork. Pleased with my visit, I exited the museum, had only a short wait at the bus stop just outside, and embarked on my expedition back home.

But I got off the bus only about five minutes after I got on. Where was my notebook? It was not in my pockets or my bag or on the floor in front of me. I asked to get off the bus and trudged uphill back to the Museum (How did that bus cover so much ground in such a short time?). The notebook wasn’t at the bus stop, or along the path to the Museum, and although the Museum staff was very helpful, we couldn’t find it anywhere on the floors of the Museum either. So I ended up going back through the exhibit, reconstructing my notes on the pages of a magazine I’d brought. I left my phone number at the Museum, in case the notebook turned up, and checked with New Jersey Transit the next day, but the notebook had seemingly dematerialized.

Could it be that some museumgoer spotted it and gratuitously decided to steal it? But why? One of the guards suggested, “Maybe you take good notes.” Hmm.

To cheer myself up upon returning to Manhattan from Montclair, I went to see the movie Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. In it Luna Lovegood tells Harry about nargles, creatures that she claims have stolen many of her belongings. Harry doesn’t believe in them, but he may be mistaken.

I say that Montclair suffers from an infestation of nargles, who are even now attempting to use my notes to become celebrated Internet columnists on comics! Readers, feel free to visit “Reflecting Culture,” which remains at the Montclair Art Museum through January 13, 2008 but beware: the nargles of Montclair may exact a heavy price.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

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