Will we finally get a new Red Tide?

Neil comments on my long ago post on Steranko's Red Tide that the originals were recently exhibited in the Geppi Museum, and that a new version might finally be in the works.

That is good news indeed.

i know that Mike Richardson of Dark Horse was talking about a new version as long ago as 1999, and that, somehow, nothing ever came of it. So it would be something if it were to finally happen.

For one thing, I could finally replace these crappy scans with crisp new scan of Steranko artwork properly colored and separated. Hopefully without breaking the spine of my new book.

This is Steranko at his game changing best folks. This will be a revelation to people if given the same treatment that Dave Steven's Rocketeer was just given. In the era where it was finally time for someone to step and take the next step after Jack Kirby at his 1966 heights, not one but two people came up: Neal Adams and Jim Steranko. The two of them came at the work from different approaches and, like rock and roll in the post-Beatles era, divided all who came after them. Neal, with his highly illustrative approach, took Batman into a new level of iconography by going the opposite of Kane: his Batman, and Green Lanterns, were populated by real people, with clothing that folded realistically over forearms containing arm hear and fingernails that needed to be trimmed. Steranko took Nick Fury to new heights of symbolism, bringing in pop art influences and different production techniques, but more inportantly, taking the vocabulary of comics to a further extreme than Jack did. If jack's Captain America leap with his feet 6 feet apart, Steranko's Captain America was almost 12 heads tall and had his feet 8 feet apart. All while defeating the hordes of Hydra while a jet black dyed Madame Hydra gesticulated hypnotically in the overlay.

Yes, Chandler was Steranko reigned in, but in service of the story, and adapting his prodigious talents to the form that he himself set up: 8 lines of text broken to under two panels per page.

A Big Little book for adults.

Haiku detective fiction.

And unlike other artist whose blank canvas projects stare back and defeated many an artist, Jim had a work ethic and brought his storytelling talents to bare and nailed the book. Even for a conservative 1976 audience.

Hopefully he will restore the text to the original form that had been intended before, as i understand it, moderate censoring by original publisher Byron Preiss.

More info as we go...

In Praise Of: Chandler - Red Tide by Steranko

The images are fuzzy, a remnant of poor 4-color printing circa 1976, yet, should one have known where to look in the far off days of the bicentennial, one could have found the first graphic novel for a single $1.

Armed with a hard boiled tale that could have flowed from Hammett’s or Cain’s typewriters, Steranko went about a new format, on a new page size, for a new publisher, and was met with staggering indifference by the world at large.

What a shame, as the book itself is a corker.

The illustrations are laid out two to a page, with text underneath allowing Jim to both play with the page format yet separate the two pieces as different graphic elements. Given that the eye tends to track better left to right than up and down, the illustrations are all vertical, and in full color, or what passes for color in those days.

Rumor has it that the illustrations were never inked, but refined pencil work, then colored at the plate level, and my eye tends to agree with this, although I’m willing to be told differently. Has any of this original art turned up?

Set in the 1940’s, the book is just about what you would think: a private eye taking on a case that he really doesn’t want, a dame that can’t be trusted with a body that would stop a truck, a nervous client whose story lacks in credibility what it makes up in dead bodies. It doesn’t end well, they never end well.


I suppose that you could get all huffy about Eisner’s Contract With God being the first true graphic novel, and we could go on and on about what constitutes a graphic novel til we’re niggling about tiny details. I tend to go with a broader definition, one that allows the artist to play with the words and pictures, the defining feature being that they were thinking of an adult audience, one that wouldn’t be reading FOOM. Red Tide has literary pretensions, genre ones certainly, but is aiming at adults as sure as Eisner was with A Contract With God. Rather than argue, I would love to point out that two of the industry’s greatest lights were both, to an indifferent public who believed that comics could only be juvenile and purile, to book stores that didn’t have a section to put them in, against a printing process that hadn’t the slightest chance of doing their artwork justice, fighting to create a new product that was beyond much of what had been done since the graphic narrative of comics had been invented.

Good for them.

In doing some research, it appears that Dark Horse might have been in negotiations to reprint Red Tide in an updated edition back in 1999. Clearly that never happened, and it’s a shame. It would have introduced a whole new audience to the work. An audience already used to and accepting of Sin city would have no problem diving head first into Chandler’s world.

If you can find a copy, and they’re out there, pick one. It’ll be the little digest gem hiding in the collection. I’m looking for one of the larger ones, with a much more limited print run right now.

Said steranko in a later interview:

When the book appeared it was not embraced by the comic-book community because it didn't have word balloons or captions. Believe it or not, they found that shocking! Red Tide ran about 130 pages with two panels per page and text underneath. I used Golden Sectioning, a mathematical formula to arrange elements in a unified structure, to create an image-to-text relationship that readers would be very comfortable with. The text on any given page related only to that page. It was like film, where dialogue, sound effects, and music relate specifically to the scene on screen. I doubt there's been another book published like it since. What may also have had an alienating effect on comics readers was that the book was created as an homage to such noir films as The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep.

I developed a different way to tell a narrative story that was more related to film than comics and perhaps that was too radical for the existing comics audience."