Quarter Bin #7 "Stuart Immonen"

The comics that prompted this week’s topic:

ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN #540 (DC)
From November 1996.

INFERNO #1-4 (DC)
From October, November (1997) and January, February (1998).

ACTION COMICS #750 (DC)
From January 1999.

SHOCKROCKETS #1 (Image)
From April 2000.

RISING STARS #14 (Top Cow)
From May 2001.

Now, let me close the loop from those comics, and say the topic is Stuart Immonen. He only provides the cover for ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN in this instance, but provides all honors (cover, writing and art duties) on INFERNO and ACTION COMICS, and then just art in SHOCKROCKETS and RISING STARS. These specific comics are back issues I ordered from Midtown some months back (there’ll be other editions of Quarter Bin culled from such orders, just as the previous Sparx spotlight was), during a recurrent spate of nostalgia for when Stuart came to dominate, at least for me, not just Superman comics, but DC as a whole, when he provided the art for Karl Kesel’s seminal FINAL NIGHT crossover event.

Now, I know for a lot of fans, Stuart is about as relevant as a FINAL NIGHT reference is as a DC event beginning with “Final” (though coming in second to FINAL CRISIS, is, again, a peculiarity and positive connotation that’s somewhat unique to your Comics Reader). I’m not suggesting that Mr. Immonen is totally unappreciated by the fan community, but as far as I’m concerned, he really is, and criminally so. For the last few years he’s been mired in a fairly unexceptional run with Marvel (which, against, is a fairly relative statement, since I very much appreciated the fact that he got to work on ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN while such a statement was still relevant, and thought his evolving style had gotten better than how I’d last seen it), a far cry from how I like to remember him, and hope that he might still one day return to, one of the definitive styles and takes on the Man of Steel, managing to stand out in a time when there were regularly four unique takes, even when all of them were working on pretty much the same stories.

Stuart has a larger career than will be covered in this column, but I’m still getting around to the rest of it, so what I write will seem to be a little limited by some estimations, but even a little is a lot more than most fans generally enjoy. I want to circle back to FINAL NIGHT for a moment. Even though it isn’t written by Stuart, it perfectly represents the kind of vision his work embodies, a deeply human and evocative interpretation of superhero comics that seems to be entirely ignorant of the vast tradition other creators draw from and add to on a monthly basis, even in this fairly expansive era we now enjoy. Karl Kesel is another deeply unappreciated talent, from the school of Mark Waid, Geoff Johns, and James Robinson, ideological successors of Alan Moore who took an abiding appreciation of the past and merged it with a dynamic present. But while it’s apparent with other creators, with Stuart, it’s a part of the background flavor, just another element that is combined to present an original vision.

You might say that it’s obvious that he came from the Legion of Super-Heroes factory, since partisans of that corner of DC lore often seem to bend in a certain direction, and every now and again, his DC work would reflect back on his time with the original teen team sensation, as with the cover of ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN, which sees Superman reflected in the face of Ferro, a new version of an established Legion character who was one of the most prominent efforts of the company’s efforts to make the team relevant by sticking a few of its members in the present (a trick the company has tried again in recent years, and this time, it might actually have stuck). INFERNO, in fact, is another such effort, and while Stuart’s vision of modern youth culture might owe more to Dan Jurgens than Justin Bieber, I was more than happy to finally read it because it is, after all, one of the few projects where he was able to have total creative control.

He was a precursor to Tony Daniel in that regard, graduating to ACTION COMICS after apprenticing for several years with Kesel on ADVENTURES, and beginning a distinguished run on his own. His ultimate statement with DC’s flagship hero, SUPERMAN: END OF THE CENTURY, would be published in February 2000, and pretty mark his end with the company. (By the way, I highly recommend, if you want to sample Stuart’s work from this era, reading it. Or read it just to read a forgotten gem.)

SHOCKROCKETS, by the way, is like a more contemporary STAR WARS, and is from the mind of Kurt Busiek. I would probably recommend reading that, too. You’ll know RISING STARS from J. Michael Straczynski’s early comics days. Stuart was a guest artist.

On the one hand, I can understand why it would have been difficult for fans to get into his art, since it was pretty much the opposite of what Image had conditioned them to expect, and since it wasn’t painted, not impressive enough for those who were wowed by Alex Ross. It was simple, but deceptively so, not too enamored of the strict realism others would glom onto as a counterbalance to the cartoonish proportions most artists favored. Stuart, better than anyone, knew the “man” inside Superman, but still made him look inspiring. In many ways, if you were to compare any modern Superman comic with the originals by Siegel and Shuster, it would be Stuart Immonen’s that feel like a real successor, a real update without the sense that you’re being hoodwinked.

How exactly a talent like that becomes an afterthought is completely beyond me. He’s changed his style to fit in with the times, to blend in, to, in essence, become Clark Kent, rather than Superman, but Stuart Immonen, with all due apologies to Clark, is no Clark Kent. He’s Superman. And he deserves the sky to soar in.