By Alec Stevens (Piranha Press/DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-56389-061-1
During the explosively expansive 1980s comics publishing exponentially enlarged with new companies offering a vast range of fresh titles and ideas. To combat this explosion of upstarts and Young Turks, Marvel and DC also instigated and created innovative material for those freshly growing markets, with the latter cartoon colossus especially targeting readers for whom old-fashioned comicbooks were anathema …or at least a long-abandoned dalliance.
DC created a number of new, more mature-oriented imprints such as Vertigo and Helix, but some of the most intriguing projects came out of their Piranha Press sub-division, which formed in 1989, floundered about for a few years and was finally re-designated Paradox Press in 1993.
When DC founded this mature-readers special projects imprint, the resulting publications and reader’s reaction to them were wildly mixed. It had long been a Holy Grail of the business to produce comics for people who don’t read comics and, despite the inherent logical flaw, that’s a pretty sound and sensible plan.
However, the delivery of such is always problematic. Is the problem resistance to the medium?
Then try radical art and narrative styles, unusual typography and talent from outside or on the margins of the medium to tell your stories. There were certainly some intriguing results but the product sadly did not reach a new audience whilst often simultaneously alienating those bold yet traditional comics readers already on board…
This eclectic and overwhelmingly effective tome was one of my favourites and, of course, simultaneously one of the least appreciated…
An American Air Force brat, Alex Preston Stevens was born in Salvador, Brazil in 1965, and grew up wherever his father was posted. A committed Christian, the junior Stevens was a professional illustrator by the time he was 20, working for The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Readers Digest, and musical periodicals Pulse! and Classical Pulse! Simultaneously he began selling comic strips, many of them adaptations of literary classics, to Fantagraphics, Kitchen Sink, Heavy Metal and Dark Horse’s Deadline: USA. After this particular all-original work and the companion piece Hardcore he moved on to work for Paradox Press and Gaiman’s Sandman before forming his own imprint Calvary Comics and dedicating himself to specifically spiritual graphic novels and pictorial biographies such as Glory to God, Sadhu Sundar Singh, E. J. Pace: Christian Cartoonist, Erlo Stegen and the Revival Among the Zulus and Clendennen: Soldier of the Cross.
The Sinners was created at a time when the industry was heading into a speculator-fed and gimmick-fuelled decline and deals adroitly – and with dreamlike meta-fictionality – the nature of a fall and road to redemption in its compulsive tale-within-a-tale…
An aged beggar travels from town to town, his hard life leavened by constant introspection. As he wanders he recalls his past, slipping further into dotage, abandoning and casting off snippets of memory and personal history as he determinedly devolves into a blissful second childhood, free of doubt, worry or responsibility.
It was not always so.
As his life plays over in his head once again he sees the child he once was: small, lost in a large family and tormented by siblings who despised or ignored him. His father was an official in the Government, absent for long periods or at home and drunkenly inaccessible. Other than his dutiful mother, the boy was outcast, brimming with unexpressed love no one would acknowledge or reciprocate…
School repeated and intensified the situation: his only solace coming in the form of a passionate teacher who filled him with religious fervour. Years passed and he became a social leper. Nobody knew him or wanted to and as tensions grew in the household he became invisible even to his mother.
After a violent family confrontation he fled and was struck by a vehicle which propelled him into a world of joyous fraternity, a paradise of mannered elegance where the only directive was to be happy.
But even here his outsider’s gloom tainted everything…
When he awoke he was back in his room. He brother would no longer speak to him and his father had gone.
The shunned one left school after being blamed for torturing a simple-headed lad – a deed actually perpetrated by the most popular boy in class – and, forging graduating papers, attended a small obscure university. Even here he was an outsider, finding few friends or lovers and these only for the briefest of moments.
Leaving, he drifted, becoming ever more removed from a society that wouldn’t tolerate him, eventually falling into the distant and disassociated company of Absinthe drinkers. Eventually he returned to his childhood home, only to find it a charred ruin, just moments before his tormented father executed a harsh, self-imposed sentence for his life of cruel neglect and abuse…
Witnessing this act of self-immolation suddenly shattered the son’s brutally suppressed and repressed passions and, on a raging tide of emotion, the transformed outcast began a life of wandering, embracing each day and all people, eschewing plans and dreams and even anticipation, taking each day as it came until eventually they would come no more…
Wistful, playful, powerful and oddly elegiac, this moodily moving exploration of humanity and fate is a supremely effective and thoughtful parable for the unavoidable bad times in our lives, beautifully rendered and scarily evocative.
Challenging and strictly for mature readers, The Sinners offers a decidedly different comics experience for those readers in search of something beyond fights and frights and cosmic disasters…
© 1989 Alec Stevens. All rights reserved.
Hello, Win,
I was 23 years old when I wrote and drew THE SINNERS for Piranha Press in the summer of 1988. For some reason, the cover art wasn’t done until early 1989, and the graphic novel(la) was released in June, ’89. I.D. magazine gave it three (out of four) stars and called it ‘mystical’, and AMAZING HEROES also gave it three stars, but THE L.A. READER gave it their “Critics Choice: Book of the Week” award in November, ’89, comparing it to the writing of Albert Camus and the art of Edvard Munch.
At the time I was very heavily influenced by the German and Austrian Expressionists, as well as Munch, their predecessor, but my literary tastes were more in keeping with the Russians (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Andreyev).
DC’s publisher Jenette Kahn promised me the moon, saying, “Create ten, twelve graphic novels in a row, just create! You’re on the cutting edge!” I finished the second graphic novel HARDCORE, and a third one, called A WINTER WITHIN, was verbally agreed upon, but a contract never materialized. It never progressed beyond the script stage. In retrospect that third book was probably a bit too much like Rudyard Kiplings’ THE LIGHT THAT FAILED, but I was unaware of it at the time. Piranha Press had been a ‘loss leader’ (read: tax write off) for DC Comics for a year, but radical shifts in editorial policy were made in an effort to obtain commercial hits with ‘arty’ material. What really hurt the success of THE SINNERS, in my estimation, was the failed attempt to get it into bookstores. This graphic novel and its followup were only seen by the direct sales/comics shop fans (of mostly traditional fare), so their intended audience didn’t see them. I did a short story for FAST FORWARD #1, Piranha Press’ anthology comic book called “Rising Hill.” I was probably listening to too much Nick Drake music when I wrote and drew that one.
Amazing that this was all only a few years before the Image Comics boom. It was a different world then, the zenith of the black-and-white boom and alternative comics/indie titles of the ’80s. As Scott McCloud said in UNDERSTANDING COMICS, “We thought it was only the beginning, a new plateau. Instead it was the end of everything.”
I had six scripts successively rejected at Piranha Press after that, and knew it was time to move on. One of them was accepted by Dark Horse Comics and published in 1990-91 over six issues of DEADLINE: USA, called “Silence”—also very expressionistic.
Bernie Krigstein, best known for his innovative storytelling for E.C. Comics in ’53 – ’54 (“Master Race”, “The Flying Machine”, “Key Chain”, “Catacombs”, to name a few) was a gallery painter when we met, and I was a frequent guest at his Union Square, NYC studio in the mid to late ’80s. He very much liked the design work in my drawings for THE SINNERS. I was devastated when he passed away suddenly in January, 1990. It seemed the ’90s heralded some radical changes in both my personal and professional life, and there were some very dark, difficult days that followed. But Christ has pierced that darkness and quite literally saved my life, and I am happy to use my God-given talents to glorify His name in art and literature (via my Calvary Comics imprint) and in music (playing guitar in the worship music team at Times Square Church in NYC).