SPECTATORS - Part Twenty

Plus, celebrating the life and art of Tim Sale

Hey, hope you’re having a healthy and peaceful Juneteenth.

Thanks to artist/co-creator Niko Henrichon and letterer/designer Fonografiks for working hard all weekend to bring us the twentieth (!!) installment of our serialized graphic novel Spectators, which I should remind you continues to remain Not Safe for That Job You’re Hopefully Not at Today.

We haven’t yet revealed exactly what year in New York City’s distant future our story has leapt to, but our spectral protagonist Val has just followed some of her fellow wandering spirits to the ruins of an abandoned old Hyperloop station somewhere deep beneath Manhattan…

Spectators 056 057

3.61MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Spectators 056 057

2.08MB ∙ CBZ file

Read now

Read now

---

Next Monday, our exploration of sex, violence and those who watch reaches its sixtieth page, and the unexpected turns have only just begun.

Catch up for free anytime in our handy Exploding Giraffe Archives.

---

Last week, we lost celebrated comic artist Tim Sale, and every single glowing remembrance from his many friends and admirers noted the same two things:

1. Tim Sale was an “artist’s artist,” an idiosyncratic genius whose unique style his contemporaries all loved but could never hope to emulate.

2. While most creators who meet that description end up being insufferable assholes, Tim Sale was somehow one of the sweetest humans in comics.

I only had the pleasure of working with Tim for two pages of a single issue, but I’m happy to report that I experienced both of the above during our all-too-brief collaboration.

Back in 2006, writer Jeph Loeb assembled an all-star lineup of writers and artists (and me) to help complete an issue of Superman/Batman originally plotted by his son Sam Loeb, who died of bone cancer at the incomprehensibly young age of 17 on June 17, 2005.

For my small contribution, Jeph very generously paired me with his longtime partner Tim Sale… who I just realized died almost exactly 17 years after Sam, making this issue even harder for me to revisit now:

Cover by Michael Turner, who we lost just a few years later. Ugh.

I was definitely intimidated to be working with Tim, and was even more hesitant than usual to cover up his and Sam’s work with what my Ex Machina partner Tony Harris lovingly (?) refers to as my “alphabet soup.”

But true to his sterling reputation, Tim couldn’t have been a kinder and more supportive collaborator, and he helped make what might have been a depressing task a completely joyous celebration of Sam Loeb’s life.

I agree with Alan Moore when he says it’s much more important to be a good person than a great artist, but it’s particularly thrilling to meet the occasional creator like Tim Sale who somehow managed to be both.

A few months ago, I finally nabbed my own piece of original Tim Sale artwork, from the excellent Catwoman: When In Rome, an unpublished page that Sale apparently abandoned and later completely redrew from scratch (not unlike the similarly obsessively dedicated Stan Sakai sometimes does), though you’ll be hard-pressed to spot the differences between this first version and the published one:

Catwoman: When in Rome #5, from storytellers Jeph Loeb & Tim Sale, lettered by Richard Starkings, colored by Dave Stewart, edited by Mark Chiarello, owned by DC.

With all due respect to Niko and today’s stunning vignette of Spectators, no one drew buxom femme fatales quite like Tim Sale (that last panel is particularly masterful).

I think I’ll spend this afternoon rereading some of his greatest hits, and encourage you to do the same.

---

Thanks to those of you generous paid subscribers in The Tower who swung by our private forum this past weekend to discuss some of our various “hometown heroes.”

This week’s randomly selected lucky winner is Logan Leger from Baton Rouge, birthplace of countless athletes, musicians, and “entrepreneurs like chicken finger billionaire Todd Graves of Raising Cane’s,” where Logan shares the following local secrets for ordering:

Sub slaw for extra toast, if dining in get butter on both sides of toast (called bob), and the sauce is great but I also like the non-advertised honey mustard—also made in-house.

This is the kind of invaluable insider knowledge you can only get from the explosively brilliant hivemind of The Tower!

Anyway, our intern Genesis the Giraffe (almost always reachable at explodinggiraffesubstack@gmail.com if you ever have questions or concerns) will be sending Logan a prize pack of various titles from the great Brian Michael Bendis, including this mandatory reading for you aspiring creators:

Congrats, and we’ll be giving away more fun swag to some of you subscribers in our monthly, annual and Founder-level tiers this Friday, cool?

---

Finally, I’ll open up the comments to everyone in the hopes that one of you can help me identify this fucking alien lifeform I just glimpsed skittering across the floor of my office:

Sorry for a) ruining your day, and b) failing to get something into frame to better show off this beast’s terrifying scale before it disappeared, but I’d estimate that it was a little over an inch and half long and faster than your worst fears.

So, what the hell is it?

Please let me know before this animal crawls into my ear and wraps itself around my cerebral cortex, rendering me susceptible to Khan’s evil suggestions.

Thanks in advance,

Brian