Batwoman #13

Labyrinthine Page

JH Williams III grants readers the perspective of gods, or at least a Dungeon Master peering at a fine pre-made dungeon map.The October comic book page focus turns its gaze on Batwoman 13

Pages four and five of Batwoman 13 contain a two-page spread depicting Batwoman and Wonder Woman traversing a labyrinth prison (Batwoman calls it “An Amazonian Arkham Asylum) for monsters and murderers guarded by the Amazons. The two DC heroes walk through the tunnels splashed with blood, corpses, and some fine decorative art. These two pages calmly escalate the tension before a minotaur and Nyx (goddess of night in the personification of a giant millipede) attack and the heroines.

The perspective of the labyrinth walls surely would make Raphael, Leonardo, Donatello, or even Michelangelo (the Renaissance artists, not the Turtles) stare with wonder. The maze radiates from a central cone (the inside filled with chests of gold, armor, and I’m sure what looks like a +3 vorpal blade) and contains twists, sharp angles, and each block of stone. Not only are the perspective walls included, but also Wonder Woman and Batwoman are drawn from various angles (yet always viewed from above) of their progress through the labyrinth. The corpses of monsters and Amazonian guards slump in the various postures of their death and add to the visual perspective variety.

The extended two-page labyrinth with its turns molds tension for the reader because of its complexity. At first glance, the pages' composition resists precise determining (although this confusion swiftly resolves itself) and all the sharp turns and isolated features evoke a horror-movie dread.

For still images on a two-dimensional page, these pictures move. Williams III divides the two pages into five panels with four bold white lines spanning from top to bottom. The three central panels occupy equal width, while the two end panels have dieted. The pages have no borders. The five panels bring to mind ecclesiastical triptychs (pentychs in this instance?) depicting various Biblical narrative scenes. Reading left to right, top to bottom, the narrative moves forward with Wonder Woman and Batwoman as well as the reader’s eye. Not only does the eye move from left to right (in that ingrained English language reading pattern) it also bounces up and down. In the first panel (on the far left) the word balloons hover at about mid-height, the second panel has the stark white of the word balloons ascend to the top of the panel. The red of Batwoman’s costume, Wonder Woman’s costume, and the splashes of blood hoist the eye upward. The second panel has the red at the panel's top balanced with the red thought boxes from Batwoman near the bottom. The second thought box (also red) slides the reader into the third panel. And the pattern continues, up and down. This movement between the highs and lows of the panels adds to the tension and anxiety of layered by the labyrinth. The shifting up and down to such extremes (high and low on the page) disorients, like when someone turns the radio’s volume knob from silent to very loud in rapid succession. To add to the anxiety, the red, pools of spilled blood pull the reader’s eyes through the page as well, and the red matches the same shades of Batwoman’s hair and costume. That Batoman (and Wonder Woman too on her Amazonian chemise) wear the same color as blood is creepy and unnerving…a perfect set of feelings for walking through an Amazonian prison labyrinth filled with the dead bodies of Amazon guards and monster inmates.

In addition to Wonder Woman and Batwoman, and the corridors of the labyrinth, JH Willimas III further generates a feeling of movement with the dead. The slain monsters are known figures from mythology, and seeing them dead reminds one (well, me at any  rate) of watching the first 10 minutes of Transformers the Movie as a kid, where all the Transformers I’d come to know through daily cartoon devotionals died in the opening battle sequence.

The first monster looks to be some kind of armored boar (?) with spears protruding from its back and skull. Two Amazons (one hacked in half and having its arm severed) fill the hallway and one slumps in a corner. The third panel (subtly, I missed it the first two reads through the comic) shows a dead millipede, a servant of Nyx that come to overpower the two heroines later in this issue, along with a dead female corpse that looks like it could be Eddie’s sister. The bottom of the third panel has a dead harpy (or some femme fatale version of Icarus) while the top portion has a giant-faced crab monster and more dead Amazons (there are a lot of dead Amazons). Panel four gives the reader at least five demon corpses, a large crab, some skeleton warriors, and more dead Amazons (one with a severed head. The top of the fifth panel shows a dead giant cyclops and the center of the fifth panel has the shadow of a minotaur that falls upon the heroines on the next page. The dead are visible, but due to their subdued coloring and slouched and prone postures, they are easy to overlook when initially viewing the page, yet their presence unnerves and adds to the tension while simultaneously unifying the page and advancing the reader’s gaze.

JH Williams III leaves the reader with a final grisly image (which also happens to distract from the shadow of the minotaur {all these distractions and from the subtleties in the art add to the anxiety too…a reader could start to feel like she is missing something, overlooking some mosaic on the wall, or colored tile work on the stairs…and then suddenly have to start studying the pages in detail…} by drawing the eye to a dead and decaying body of an Amazon wither intestines hanging from her side and hanging inverted, head down, on some stone terrace of the labyrinthine prison.

Williams III builds the tension in these two pages where nothing physical happens (beyond Wonder Woman and Batwoman walking down a twisty hallway), yet still the pages suggest action past and future while being visually dynamic and moving the reader’s eye, stoking anticipation for the future encounters. A deft weaving of tension, curiosity and wonder snares the reader by knitting the need to know with the terror of discovering what awaits beyond a bend of the labyrinth.