WE WHO HAVE CREWED ABOARD CAPTAIN NEMO’S NAUTILUS have been left by the experience—in all its antique and tempestuous splendor—with a certain look. We recognize one another, even across great distances and gulfs of years. I remember first encountering the work of my fellow Nautilusard Gary Gianni in the illustrations he did for the marvelous Wandering Star editions of the works of Robert E. Howard. I knew him at once: a sailor of the deeps of popular art and literature; a mapper of submerged, half-forgotten kingdoms with names like Valusia and Atlantis and the Misty Isles. And yet never—or never merely—a diver to the benthos and bathos of nostalgia. Our ship, remember, is state of the art, at once the premier and dernier cri of the modernity that Jules Verne arguably invented. The first gesture of modernity is to explode the past and sweep away its fragments. The second is to use those very fragments to construct new art in the landscape and language of brokenness. I saw in Gianni’s classic pen-and-ink style, in the panache of his cross-hatching, in his mastery of black, in the dynamic flow of his composition and figures, in the evident breadth of Gianni’s familiarity with the history of adventure illustration, a third gesture: the modernity of the Nautilus. We do not seek to rise to the surface of history like a sleeper surfacing from a nightmare. We do not dangle our little lines from cobbled boats, fishing up the bits and pieces. The sea is our home. We swim through it, in the state-of-the-art, electric-powered submarine of our imaginations, drawing freely upon it for everything we need. We are practical modernists. Where others become entangled in vast kelp beds of history, we roll cigars. I was not at all surprised to discover, shortly after that first encounter with Gianni, that he had (studiously, gloriously, and with his customary élan) adapted 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as a graphic novel.
If that book, and some of the other work that Gary Gianni has done in comics, like the weekly Prince Valiant page, exhibits a certain stateliness, an air of pageantry—if it never quite abandoned the illustrative tradition of which Gianni is a master—Monsterman leaves no doubt: the dude knows how to rock a comic book page. In addition to all his usual swash and shadow, the easy grace of his figures, the depth and dynamism of his layouts, in these pages you will find Gianni putting on a clinic in the art of page layout, showing the degree to which he has pragmatically absorbed the lessons of layout saboteurs like Eisner and Chaykin and Miller—the Captain Nemos, romantic destroyers of the comics page—and married them to the Gianni style, nourished and enriched by the past as the crew of Nautilus by the bounty of the deep. Add to this a reinvention of the figure of the Occult Detective, steeped like everything Gianni does in a grasp of its history from Carnacki to Hellboy, and the result is thrilling, almost disturbing, and it brings us, out of the sea-bottom of the past, as all art must, something new. (2012)