Word: visual
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Once the ship starts sinking, people do die becomingly, and the R.M.S. Titanic takes on the personality of a magnificent beast--King Kong or Moby Dick in extremis. The brilliantly realized visual effects are invisible and persuasive. The digitized water looks like real water; the computer blobs look like human beings tumbling down to their deaths from the severed ship's nearly vertical stern. But the narrative events that should add emotional heft are substandard action tropes: kids in jeopardy, bad guys menacing pretty women, Jack manacled to a water pipe. "I'll just wait here," he says gamely...
...picture bear provisional or openly corrected passages, without degenerating into niggle, mess and muddle. Structure was the key, not just to Diebenkorn's forthrightness as a painter but to his delicacy as well. And it survives even in the little still lifes, which are hardly more than visual nouns--a glass of water on a gray cloth, with orange poppies in it; a knife in another glass, bent by refraction--rendered with the immediacy and verve one associates with Manet's asparagus and peonies...
Avery's action--the act of treating patients--makes use of the intimate relationship among medical practice, education and visual display, and at its core, Avery's innovation reminds one of the anatomical theaters in centuries past...
Because of money, I guess, for starters. Also, because it's the coolest space monster ever. Because of visual stylist Jean-Pierre Jeunet of Delicatessen fame. Because of whole ship mama Sigourney Weaver. Because of genetics and the human attachment to willful mediocrity. Because we've never seen an alien underwater (where you also can't scream). Because bounty hunters watch the TV shopping network. Because of Dominique Pinon's forehead. Because aliens bleed acid, and androids bleed semen. Because alien-human hybrids have pixie noses. And, always, because of the deeper issues...
Schrab is a highly gifted visual artist, and his fluid, hyper-kinetic black-and-white illustrations give the comic a definitely "cartoony" feel which contrasts quite effectively with the startling violence which periodically erupts in it. Ben Edlund's popular humor comic "The Tick" is a visible influence in the early adventures of Scud (for example, in the characters like the nefarious "Voodoo Ben" Franklin, a villain suspiciously resembling a founding father who animates his zombie armies using his electrified kite...