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CBG SATELLITES
The ADD Blog by Alan David Doane
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Scandalous
It's a view from the inside, from behind the "Hollywood" sign, as
Chantler's inventive two-page wide opening panel shows us. The opening
spread is topped by long, narrow panel that stretches across both pages,
showing "The City of Angels" in the distance, with the backside of
HOLLYWOOD in the foreground. Below, four panels show Chantler's version
of Hollywood's landmarks - the Chinese theater, the Brown Derby,
Schwab's pharmacy, and "Mammoth Studios." From the opening page we know
that the view we're about to see will take us behind the facade that is
Hollywood.
Chantler's classic-looking cartoony style is particularly appropriate
for this story. He portrays the glitz and glitter of Hollywood, the
broad shoulders and classy suits, the square-jawed leading men and
elegantly attired women, while combining the entertainment capital's
seemingly glamorous exterior with scenes of its ever-present dark side -
the unkempt investigator digging through the garbage of the stars, the
self-righteous nastiness of the highly-rated gossip columnist, and the
desperate book-burning of a casting director under suspicion of being
"red"-friendly. Chantler's art has more in common with classic comic
strip artists of the 1940's and '50's than most of today's comic book
artists, and it's a style that brings life and personality to the
characters in Torres's story.
Scandalous is a graphic novel in which the end product is
definitely greater than the sum of its parts. While both the artwork and
the storytelling are well-executed, it is the combination of the two
that gives this book its strength. And while it doesn't have the depth
to keep a reader up nights pondering the meaning of life, it does bring
up enough questions to make it something more than just an entertaining
read. The protagonists, Richards and Derrick, are amoral free agents at
best, although you can't help but be sympathetic to their characters in
their confrontation with Turner and the Hollywood establishment. But the
only difference between them and Paige Turner, it seems, is merely
who gets victimized. Just as in real life, even the "good guys"
are far from pure, and the moral ambiguity in this story adds interest
to the characters and their actions. In short, Scandalous is an
entertaining trip into the not-so-distant past, a peek behind the scenes
of an industry that thrives on pretense and hypocrisy, set in an era
when such hypocrisy had the upper hand from the seat of government power
on down.
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Scandalous is writer J. Torres and artist Scott Chantler's
followup to Days Like This (Oni Press, 2003), another
entertainment industry-oriented graphic novel set in mid-20th century.
This time around, Torres and Chantler's field of vision is focused on
the underbelly of 1950's Hollywood. On the surface, at least, this was
an era of optimism, an era that our collective memory tells us was one
in which glamor still ruled the entertainment industry, when the apple
of Hollywood was still in full shine. But behind the scenes, this was
also the era of the "Red Scare" and McCarthyism, a time of suspicion,
paranoia, back-stabbing, and blacklisting. This is the side of 1950's
Hollywood that Torres and Chantler reveal to us in Scandalous.