Digitally Speaking...36 "The Deep"

via Gestalt Comics

The Deep #1 (Gestalt)

From 2013.

For a lot of comics fans, Tom Taylor seemed to come out of nowhere when he succeeded James Robinson as writer of Earth 2.  Thankfully, he does have a secret origin, that may or may not involve fire-eating and doomsday weapons.

And The Deep.

Hey, you know Pixar, right?  It's the animation studio that rewrote all the rules that used to govern animation studios, not just in converting them from being hand-drawn to digital playgrounds, but in their whole mindset.  They became a lot more playful.

Even if every other animation studio does things more or less the Pixar way these days, you can still tell when it's a Pixar movie.  

The Deep is the first time I've seen a Pixar movie done by someone else.  Much less in a comic book rather than in a movie.  Hang around enough aspiring writers and you will see them trying to ape what they see in movies or TV shows (I'm sure it's the same with what they read, too, but our cultural currency split off from the common reading experience long before it happened with TV shows and to a far less extent, movies).  I don't think Taylor set out to do this, but I think the Pixar language itself has permeated popular culture so, ah, deeply at this point, it's not surprising to see something like this happen.

The Deep concerns a family that could very easily be the stars of a Pixar movie (probably one better than The Incredibles, which is a statement I will not continue because it would be an even longer digression than talking about Pixar in general), and Taylor's best move is clearly how well he gets their dynamics, especially the two children, one of whom is trying to teach his fish Jeffrey how to fetch, and the other of whom thinks this is stupid.  That sequence alone is gold.

I totally get in an instant why Taylor became in an instant such a hot commodity.  The only thing that's odd about all this is that The Deep was published by Gestalt rather than, y'know, a company anyone actually knows.  This is the kind of comic book that could very easily help younger readers become fans of the medium.  Instead, most of the typical material for this mission is directly based on known commodities.  

Better lead the job to an oddity.  A good one!  And yes, Tom Taylor.