The world’s greatest artistic masterpieces are being defaced: the Mona Lisa is suddenly winking, the Scream is silenced, and Hopper’s Nighthawks cafe is blowed up! A demented Andy Warhol is seen at the scene of each vandalism. Who you gonna call? Arthur Brut the Mad Dreampainter and his wooden mannequin sidekick Manny!
Can the creative team behind the horror anthology series Ice Cream Man do long-form comics? Actually, yeah. Art Brut, Volume 1: The Winking Woman isn’t bad.
The best part of the book, appropriately enough for a book about art, is Martin Morazzo’s art which is always really attractively drawn anyway but especially so here. The years of illustrating horror pays off as the pages convey a strong sense of menace, with varying degrees of subtlety, throughout.
W. Maxwell Prince’s script is breezy and playful, with one compelling set piece after another. The action is fast-moving and the comic is often fun. Writing a high-concept story in this way comes at a cost though: with too much left unexplained, the narrative feels too light and meaningless. It’s the same problem in stories about magic - if you don’t explain its limitations, then anything can happen as no actions carry any weight and the reader doesn’t care about anything that happens in the story.
Similarly, because Prince chooses not to explain much about this world, it’s hard to really care about anything happening within it. How are worlds created by painters? How is Art able to travel into the paintings? Why is he sane inside the paintings and how does his doll Manny become a giant living being? How is Art’s paint brush a weapon? Why is the little boy doing all that he’s doing? If the subjects of the paintings “die”, then does that mean the paintings also cease existing?
In the same breath, if Prince had tried explaining any of the above questions, the narrative would’ve become leaden and boring. I think he made the right choice though it still means that the book doesn’t really come together to form the strongest narrative. But maybe that’s the point - have a story featuring fine art and have it descend into schlocky action?
I also didn’t really enjoy the Silver Age-style backups about Art and Manny’s past adventures. They’re overly wordy and uninteresting, like a lot of Silver Age comics (again, no idea why it has to be presented in this style either).
I may not have known what was going on or why most of the time but I also wasn’t bored reading this and the visuals and cultural references added to the overall enjoyment. Prince and Morazzo pull off a more successful version of Vertigo’s Art Ops in Art Brut, Volume 1: The Winking Woman. Definitely worth checking out if you’re a fan of this creative team or are intrigued by the idea of an action/horror comic featuring the most famous art ever created!
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