Maria Llovet’s effortless line: glimpsing Crave and the Direct Market

1 week ago 5

Tegan O'Neil | November 7, 2024

To begin it must be said, at the risk of stating the obvious, I remain perpetually distracted by the depiction of female beauty in comic books. To which certainly, you nod your head in weary resignation. We noticed.

Honesty brings you to strange places. That’s the theme of the book we’re looking at today, Crave, released monthly from Image comics from fall through spring beginning in late 2023. The product of a rather singular artist on the scene, Maria Llovet. Llovet quietly became a substantial presence on the American Direct Market across the new decade, already having racked up fairly high-profile collaborations with fancy surnames such as Azzarello and Tynion. Substantial presence, as I say, in just a few years: stand-alones and limited series, reprints of old material and serializing the new. She came over from Spain with a great deal of material banked for our market, and somehow found the proposition worthy enough of her time to orient a significant part of her comics work around the peculiar serialization habits of our Direct Market. She’s done work for DC, on a latter-day Sandman spin-off. At this point she could probably eat the hell out of a couple years on Doom Patrol, but you didn’t hear that from me.

It’s interesting to me, if perhaps no-one else, that the American Direct Market has proven so hospitable to so many artists from around the world in recent years. Common sense tells you that Peach Momoko and Gurihiru have no business wasting their time in the American market, and yet, manifestly, they both find reasons to be here. As well, Marvel and DC are getting a lot of talent for a lot of their books from across the Eurozone, Italy and Spain especially.

At the risk of ruining the mood, there’s one big reason why any of this makes sense and it’s because the dollar remains strong. What that means in practice is that a lot of Americans can’t afford to work in their own Direct Market. It’s not an easy place to make money, either solo or freelance or retail. Listen, friend - the Direct Market?

I mean, this is The Comics Journal. Not traditionally big Direct Market boosters, we. But the ol’ D.M. - well, it has its virtues, for its faults.

First of among of which being, ahem, it lived, bitch.

It should be dead, by all rights. It seems like it’s going to die any day now, and yet it never does. There’s a lot of externals to the situation, but the fact remains, it's a terrible system created out of necessity. It survives despite having for multiple decades been built around a de facto monopoly blessed by salutary federal decree. It survives due to the absolute worst conceivable set of anti-social maladaptations on the part of everyone involved. It survives despite the chronic mismanagement of people who actually are responsible for running it. It survives a society-wide attrition of arts spending on the part of both institutions and individuals, a regrettable fact precipitated by the fact that no one has any money even as lots of people still read comic books. It survives despite all these reasons, enough that I was still able to walk into the local comic book store and buy six issues of the serialized Crave from Image this last year.

From what I can see just by piles of copies on the shelf of my store, she sells pretty well. People buy her comics, in the American Direct Market. That’s not the only place they buy her comics, by any means, but that it makes sense economically for her to be as popular here as she is, is historically anomalous. As unhealthy as our domestic industry might seem to us, here in the United States, chronically stymied by the size and scope of our Direct Market liferaft, it is still capable of producing interesting things. And the American popularity of Maria Llovet is a very interesting thing indeed.

Now it must be said in truth and candor I could never have predicted the enduring influence of Milo Manara, at least in the world of- say it with me- American Direct Market mainstream comics. Which sounds like damning with faint praise, but it really isn’t. The Direct Market proved itself to be a canny incubator, as mercenary as the phrase indicates, but genuinely significant as a small-scale laboratory for the wider cultures. Stuff bubbles up to the culture, like, you know, what European cartoonists are in right now. But in hindsight to me - yeah, Manara snuck in there. It’s been about fifteen years, I think, since we all got scandalized by the New 52 Catwoman, a couple years before that he caught peoples’ attention with Gotham City Sirens. But Guillem March smuggling Manara in broad daylight and establishing that school in this country was an integral step in the path.

That’s not to minimize Llovet with the association, no- quite the contrary. It’s formative to her work at a glance, just as a wide swathe of artists along similar wavelengths, running a gamut from mainstream superhero stuff like March, to Fantagraphics’ own Katie Skelly. A whole school of talent across multiple fields. None of their sole inspirations, certainly. Possibly even encountered third or fourth hand, initially, in the same way that so many later disciples of Kirby first encountered him in the sinews of John Buscema. An arbiter of potential, strange as it may seem at least to me. As potent for some, albeit on a smaller scale, as Kirby or Moebius in their time.

I like it. I wouldn’t have predicted it. When Manara was actually producing the books that made his name, back in the twentieth century, he seemed to come preceded by a bulletproof reputation even if he was more liable to be a critic’s whipping boy as anything else. They printed his work in Penthouse a fair amount, which probably didn’t help. I never really cared for it, personally, which I say up front to be honest in the matter. On a most profound level he and I do not see eye to eye on the question of what makes a woman attractive. That’s one reason the gradual and then quite sustained presence of Manara as an enduring influence on the industry stuck out to me at the time, and still does. However in the fullness of time I find a surprisingly strong interest in following the work of people who already did the hard part of reading Click so I don’t have to. They’re getting something I’m not, and that’s never not interesting.

I’d much rather discuss Llovet, in any event. Llovet has a really interesting line, informal. She draws very fluidly, which probably contributes to the prolific nature. You can see the intentional pull of the line in her hand. That kind of line - well. That kind of line can take you very far indeed if you know how to use it. Can’t fake it.

Her comics are easy to read, which is not to say unambitious. Simply, she knows precisely how to tell the stories she’s telling, and if she needs to learn something new she picks it up on the way. As I say, a fluid talent. Straight-up protean in some regards, concerning questions of genre, as well as willingness to be a collaborator or even occasionally a set of hired hands. Even though she seems to veer more towards the field of erotic thrillers, either with or without supernatural elements, she’s done a pretty big pile of work in multiple genres. More than we’re going to be looking at today, at any rate, a question I’ll fob off for the moment by saying, it’s too early. She’s managing the equivalent of a monthly release schedule in the Direct Market, and has been for a while. America is only one of her markets, and most of her stuff is probably read in collection, but somehow the newest stuff from her hits the stands here almost every month. Let her, I say, let her cook.

The book were ostensibly here to talk about, Crave - ah, yes, the book. Since we’re talking about a book. This piece was long gestating and in the time since I was buying Crave she released a couple other projects as well. A July cover-dated one shot called All the Things We Didn’t Do Last Night, compiling a three part serial that ran in the first three issues of the Brobdingnagian Image 30th Anniversary Anthology series. Just the existence of such a thing - a cavalcade of the industry’s best, and most interesting, and successful, stopping by to pay tribute to this strange beast of Image Comics. A strange beast built on a backbone of some of the worst business decisions ever made by anyone in the history of business. But, in fairness, they did it all in public. We saw, they took their lumps for bad decisions in real time, every single last one of them. They still built a company that lasted the test of time, and that could change enough in the fulness of that time to accommodate a world where Maria Llovet could thrive as one of the company’s signature talents. Even headlining the Anniversary anthology. That’s a transformation worth at least acknowledging.

Anyway. All the Things We Didn’t Do Last Night - only an issue’s worth of stories, possibly the best thing of hers I’ve read so far. Really accomplished stuff, effortless. An action thing built around the chemistry of the two leads, a jewel thief and an assassin who find themselves rather complicated by the presence of the other. Breezy in the best way, you can imagine reading massive tomes filled with these characters’ dynamite rapport, at some future date. Or even watching the adaptation on Tubi. If you just want one thin book to sell “Maria Llovet” as a concept, as a creator capable of great things? You could do worse.

Since I’ve been sitting on this review for a while she’s even begun a new series, which in fairness is completely not my bag - a vampire thing, Violent Flowers. I picked up the first issue but I think I’ll be bowing out of this. The coloring looked a bit different, and indeed, she’s doing different things with the color, at least to a degree. I don’t always care for her sense of color, unfortunately. I think it’s a weakness of Crave, to be sure. But, the fact remains, Crave still has a consistent palette, even as much of it seems strangely tentative. It’s flattering to the genre, but not necessarily for the line. Her line, I think, needs a flatter and possibly even more primary tone. Crave is a college story, set entirely on the grounds of a campus filled with horny older teenagers, horny young twenty-something’s, and horny faculty. Lots of varsity colors, wine dark purples and Chardonnay.

But then, right after she was done started doing the vampire thing, switching up the palette ever so slightly. Richer reds and blues. It looks nice, sure, but I can’t deal with vampire politics. I am even less capable of dealing with horny vampire politics - but, alas. Anne Rice is back, in a big way. Those books cast a big shadow. Even I loved those books, even as I generally loathe anyone trying to riff. Generative for so many, and still today. Violent Flowers looks like a fun book, if you like that sort of thing, but alas I’ll have to catch up down the road.

That’s why, I think it’s worthwhile stopping in to check on Llovet, maybe putting her on your radar if you hadn’t already seen. Because as of right this moment she’s going through a period of enhanced productivity, and proving remarkably protean in so doing. Lots of comics working with other people, lots of comics working with just herself. Lots of different genres. We’re not going back to look at everything today - oh, god, no. She’s been working at a full sprint for well over a decade, since I believe the 2012 release of Porcelain in her native Spain. An arresting book, devoted to a very specific iteration of the perennially popular “broken doll in spooky world”aesthetic. It captured that whole aggregated mass of sensation as potently as imaginable. And then you can be quite happy to hear that she moved on immediately.

But, and this is the crucial part, she seems like she’s still sort of figuring it out as she goes. Definitely a cartoonist who learns on the page, and maybe even directs her energies based on personal challenges as much as anything else. Across artistic temperaments a prolific nature finds ways to amuse itself, and warp the inclination of a talent in harmonious direction.

That means there’s a lot to sift through. If you don’t like one, pick up another. She’s putting herself through the paces with no small modicum of ambition. For all the trappings of languid, late-night cable softcore movies, Crave hides a forward-thinking techno-thriller about unscrupulous companies building the world’s most disruptive app. Although the very beginning of the story features a number of seemingly uncanny occurrences, the story is quick to get to the bottom of the question - it’s not supernatural, there are no psychics or shapeshifters or magic or even super-intelligent artificial minds. Someone is fucking with them, for money, with terrible consequences.

A new app gets rolled out for a beta test, live on a college campus. Almost immediately after the app is released absolute chaos unfolds. What’s the catch? Well, honestly, that’s really clever part: because the app we’re shown here, what it does, is completely within the realm of possibility, without even using generative “A.I.” crap. Simply allowing people to post their fantasies to an app. Checking to see if their fantasy matches another person’s fantasy. If the answer is yes the app puts them together. I’d be surprised if no one had ever had the idea, although it seems you’d really need to have a small, densely captive, and supremely horny population to get the most from the exercise - like a college campus, basically. On the already supercharged erogenous zone of a university the app begins destroying things almost the moment it’s released, and the mechanism for the rest of the plot is figuring out how kill the monster.

The characters? Well, about as distinctive as any group of attractive college-age young adults. A weakness of the form, perhaps, that college kids generally aren’t that interesting in and of themselves. They’re old enough to know they shouldn’t be able to get everything they want, while still young enough to be enraptured by the possibility nonetheless. Lots of people get exactly what they want, and sometimes the app even works in bringing horny people together without incident. Not an unambiguous evil. But as put to the service of evil ends, a monster nonetheless.

There’s nuance for you, a nice whipped cream topping after all that roughage, consisting of nubile coeds undergoing the tortures of Job for the sake of being horny. Nice work if you can get it.