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Jump to navigationJump to searchJames Donald Talks To Bookbag About The Death Of Norman Breyfogle (view source)
Revision as of 08:17, 1 October 2018
, 08:17, 1 October 2018no edit summary
Breyfogle could do that. Some of his covers can leave you slack-jawed and breathless but this wasn't his only skill. What set Norm apart from his peers was his sense of dynamism. His art moved smoothly from photo-realistic (or as much as was possible with the constraints of the printing at the time) to utterly surreal. Batman could be a man, broken, torn and bleeding or he could be a mythical shadow. One moment we had a solid object with weight and presence, the next we simply had a slash of lines, an absence of detail that sucked you in like a black hole... Batman could be Bruce Wayne, an orphan seeking to make things right, or he could be PTSD embodied, seeking to spread his own suffering to others... or he was just an idea, a myth, a concept. None of these things were in Grant's script. When others drew for him the tales were good but lacked the magnificence and depth that Breyfogle brought.
[[image:darknight.jpg|left]] Comics are not supposed to be realistic, they are fantasy. Many creators realise this and push the boundaries through wild stories of fantasy, deities and cosmic opera. This can be great but it is often difficult to follow and can turn some off. Grant and Breyfogle didn't do this (unless forced to by company-wide crossover). Decades before Nolan's {{amazonurl|isbn=1401285120|title=Dark Knight trilogy}} they produced a grounded and realistic Batman. This character inhabited a relatable Gotham and fought against street level punks as often as he did against supervillains, yet it remained engaging and fanciful due to the synergy of script and art. A giant Batman could hover over his city like a hologram seen only to the reader to express a simple feeling. The cape and the shadow it cast could take on a life of its own. A monstrous block of metal became a Batmobile as impressive as any seen on screen. Realism could be thrown aside in favour of caricature or cartoonism if it advanced the story...
I started my journey into American comics with UK reprints of Detective comics from this era. I went on to collect the whole run from Grant and Breyfogle and I have, as yet, to find a series of comics, anywhere, that matches this consistency and excellence.
