DSTLRY is the name of the company - that’s all caps and no vowels, like it’s 1999 and Bobby Gillespie is singing about how much the 21st century is going to suck. I don’t always pay attention to the new publisher announcements, I must admit. It’s hard to get attached to the poor dears. Such a volatile business, with a steep mortality rate. So many lambs to the slaughter.
But once the books are out in the world a publisher rises or falls on the merit of the stories themselves. You need to look past the foofaraw of DSTLRY's early statements regarding digital scarcity - that’s what got the comments from their first announcements, from what I recall. It’s regrettable that their positioning as both a “comics publisher and physical-digital collectibles company” was, in a post-NFT landscape, going to be the first part of the equation to which anyone paid attention. Those are their words, from their website, and asinine buzzwords they are. Below the dignity of everyone involved in the making of these comic books, because the other part of the announcement was that DSTLRY would be staffed by an enviable lineup of veteran creators producing their own work.
And it is, let us be clear, quite the enviable lineup of founders. Just going down the list, we see names like Brian Azzarello, Jock, Jamie McKelvie, Junko Mizuno, Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV, Ram V - as well as the women we’re here to talk about today, Becky Cloonan and Tula Lotay. Good creators are more than most publishers ever manage. Of course, Bravura had a sweet opening lineup too. What was I just saying about the mortality rate of comic book publishers?
Enough preamble, down to brass tacks. We’ve got a new miniseries here in our hot little hands. Name of Somna, by the aforementioned Cloonan and Lotay. This is a real potboiler, an erotic thriller with horror overtones set a few hundred years in the past, back when they were burning witches. The story begins, naturally enough, with a dream - a sex dream, and a pretty intense one, especially for a woman unused to such things. She wakes up and we learn not merely is she the wife of a witchfinder, but that he’s leaving for the work of burning a woman to death at sunrise.
The story is co-credited to Cloonan and Lotay, and they share art duties. At first, Lotay is drawing the erotic dreams and Cloonan the passages set in the dreary waking world, but that breaks down towards the end, just as everything else breaks down towards the end. It’s a story about a profoundly sick society, but not an unfamiliar one. Do we all still read The Crucible in school? We should all know what a witch trial is. The idea that the devil himself might actually be involved in these kinds of events is not a new one for fiction, but still a strong hook. The devil just loves rubbing our noses in our hypocrisy and ignorance. Pretty standard move for ol’ Scratch.
Do not doubt it is an excellent-looking comic book. It got me to thinking, naturally, so I went back to check and see just how long I’ve been reading Becky Cloonan’s work. Apparently-- now, wait, this can’t be right. Demo came out 20 years ago? Man. Demo. That was a whole damn thing. An epoch. An important book, if you had a blog in late 2003. The writer waves to the camera.
If you’ve never heard of it, Demo was a 12-issue series written Brian Wood and published by AiT/Planet Lar. Yeah. Life comes at you, man. In fairness, at the time it really felt like something new. In hindsight? That novel sensation was down to the first exposure to Cloonan’s art. She hit like a thunderclap. There was a stillness and a sense of space in her work that felt both obvious and overlooked at once. Can draw like a house on fire, clearly. She had eclectic taste in projects, I felt in the years after. Did books for Vertigo, had a run on Dark Horse’s Conan. Bits and bobs at Marvel and DC.
At some point the equation changed, however, and we began to see her name more as a writer than an artist. If Image taught us anything, it’s not so easy as its cracked up to be for even an excellent artist to write their own material, to say nothing of pounding out scripts for other artists. And yet, steadily, she built up a portfolio as a writer on books like Gotham Academy and The Punisher over the following decade, keeping her hand in as an artist but having seemingly said goodbye to the grind of periodical comics. Personally, I am quite grateful to her for having written the Batgirls series for DC, from late 2021 through 2023. A world away from the very grown-up goings-on of Somna, but just about my favorite comic book for every month it saw print. She wrote that with frequent collaborator Michael W. Conrad, for a number of artists, and it was simply a delight. I’d still be buying it if it came out, if it ran for a hundred issues. Ah, well. Nothing gold, Ponyboy.
As for Tula Lotay, in my recollection her career begins 10 years ago, in 2014, with the publication of Supreme Blue Rose at Image. That is not strictly true, as there are a handful of credits prior to then, including her first appearance alongside Cloonan. Both women drew features for 2013’s American Vampire Anthology #1, a collection of short stories connected to Scott Snyder’s and Rafael Albuquerque’s Vertigo bloodsucker saga. They weren’t together; Cloonan was writing for herself and Lotay working with the redoubtable Gail Simone.
Supreme Blue Rose was, however, the moment the world sat up to take notice of her. I remember precisely nothing else about that series, including who wrote it and what it was about. The information has been erased from human recall and shall never be retrieved. What lingers is the scent of cordite in the air that accompanied the series’ pronouncement of Lotay’s arrival. She’s remained a favorite in the years to follow. Just recently she did another interesting book, again with Scott Snyder: Barnstormers shipped last year, three issues from Dark Horse. Another comiXology Original to emerge from Snyder’s deal with that company, like 2022’s Night of the Ghoul with Francesco Francavilla, and a number of other series. There are certainly worse things you could do with Amazon’s checkbook than hire excellent cartoonists to draw nice-looking comics for you. Probably the last time that will ever happen, sadly.
Lotay does a lot of covers, true. As a storyteller she fits into the lineage of painterly comics stretching all the way back to the 1980s. Elektra: Assassin opened up vistas already implied by years of the prestige format gradually pushing the mechanical possibilities of color reproduction, and we’re still living in that world of possibilities. Ken Steacy’s airbrush was one of the most notable tools to fill that space, and I see a great deal of Steacy in the work of Lotay: similar understandings of garish color as a core tool of composition. Lotay is credited with colors here, alongside her frequent collaborator Dee Cunniffe. Lee Loughridge is also credited, presumably for Cloonan’s sections. Lucas Gattoni letters throughout.
Somna is subtitled “A Bedtime Story,” which makes sense. It’s a story about dreams and sleep, and the porous lines betwixt. At its firmest bedrock it’s a story about the danger of female sexuality in an authoritarian framework. The devil who visits dear Ingrid in her dreams is only taking advantage of preexisting fault lines in their society. Ingrid, as noted above, is a nubile young wife whose husband steadfastly ignores her, despite her frequent entreaties. For what its worth, her husband isn’t even that bad-looking, as these things go, but appears disinterested in the hot little number waiting at home for him in their cold bed. Roland is only really concerned with hunting witches - a clear and present danger to their way of life.
We figure out in short order both that the devil is real—or, if not the devil, someone of infernal proportions, who appears to Ingrid in her dreams—and that his major priority is giving poor Ingrid an orgasm. That is definitely a clear and present danger to their way of life! Did he also appear to Greta, the woman burned in the opening pages? He doesn’t need to appear to Maja, Ingrid’s friend and confident. She’s already sleeping with Sigurd, Greta’s husband. All very convenient that Greta is dead now. The devil sees fit to reveal to Ingrid the truth of Maja’s affair, and from there it’s only a matter of time before more bodies start dropping, with the threat of certain death suspended over their heads every step of the way.
As a collaboration, the story makes excellent use of two very different artists. I will say that Cloonan, drawing the lions’ share of the “real world,” appears to have had the lions’ share of the work cut out for her. The fact that she doesn’t do so much sequential work anymore might tempt you to forget that she is one hell of a draftsman. She can do horses and houses, and seems to have an eye for period clothes. Lotay’s sections are often entirely bereft of 'establishing shots,' focusing on tight close-ups of bodies, hands and faces, lustful conduct in portrait. Her eye for garish color makes everything look like candy, sweet.
Strangely, it’s here the series seems to falter slightly. This comic is about sex, after all. Even if you don’t see anything you wouldn’t see on late night cable, it’s still got long scenes of fucking. A natural fit for Lotay’s style, surely. Her work has always been stridently erotic, a virtue seen even on her covers for mainstream properties, and certainly apparently in her sequential work. But there’s a friction in much of that same work, between the exigencies of genre and storytelling and the sensuality of these objects of desire: the beautiful women (and sometimes men, yes, but who’s counting) who proliferate across Lotay’s art. The aforementioned Barnstormers is a story about airplanes in the interwar period, a rousing adventure yarn with runaway brides and romance and robots. It’s also about sex, in the same way that literally everything Lotay draws is about sex to some degree, and the carnal incipient. But the sex is only one layer.
Lotay drawing these sex scenes qua sex scenes seems almost like ordering a sundae and receiving a bowl of whipped cream. Everyone loves their whipped cream! But page after page of figures in the grip of sensual abandon can be repetitive in the same way page after page of hitting and punching can be repetitive, and they test the skill of the strongest artist to bring the mechanics to life. The great Manara struggles mightily with the challenge of giving women more than one facial expression, we must recall. Lotay’s backgrounds are sparse and the figures seem almost stilted on the page, betraying a tendency towards stiffness in her compositions. This is a familiar tendency among artist who lean heavily on photo reference; she tends to draw only the angles a camera can see. Alex Ross had to throw off that particular bugbear as well, and Phil Noto has struggled in the same way, so Lotay’s in good company. Not a fatal weakness, nor an insurmountable obstacle, but it stands out.
For all that, Lotay’s ability to summon remarkable imagery on command is undimmed. The second issue begins with a dream sequence: Ingrid lying in a tub, submerged in water except for her face. A very difficult thing to draw, water. Seeing her face illuminated, lips parted and skin shining - a moment of endless potential suffused with great insight. Two turns of the page later and Cloonan gives us another splash of Ingrid, this one in the full light of day, her figure small in the shadow of three stained glass windows showcasing angels casting a devil into the fires at spearpoint. As I say, two disparate artists putting their talents together here for a singular effect. I like seeing this kind of collaboration. I’d read another book by Lotay and Cloonan together, in a hot flash, but for what it’s worth I’ll probably end up reading whatever they do separately too.
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