Capitol Comics #2: The Washington Monument: Spider-Man: Homecoming movie adaptation - Mayhem at the Monument (2017)

 by Chris Shields

This series highlights pages from my collection of original comic art that depict Washington, DC monuments and buildings.  As a long-time Washington DC resident, it is always exciting to see the extraordinary town depicted in comics.

Published in 2017 to coincide with the release of Spider-Man: Homecoming, the Mayhem at the Monument book published by LB Kids is an exciting use of a landmark to help dial-up the suspense.  These are pencil sketches made prior to the final artwork.

Why did the movie depict Washington DC? 

In the interview with Jon Watts, director of the movie, he answers this question:

Q When you started on Homecoming, did you make a list of things that you were not going to do? And then were there things that are just so inherent to Spider-Man that you knew you would have to include, and would just have to come up with a more clever way to incorporate them into your version?

Watts: That’s what we tried to do with everything. Like if anything seemed familiar, we tried to come up with something else. The reason to make this movie is to show people things they’ve never seen before and to take them on a journey that they’ve never been on before. So that was actually a great creative limitation, to make everything new. Spider-Man still had to shoot webs and swing around every once in awhile, but then you would come up with, well, what haven’t we seen Spider-Man do? Let’s take away buildings. Let’s throw him in the suburbs and see what he has to do, if he has to go from rooftop to rooftop. Or send him to Washington DC, make him climb up the side of the Washington Monument. What are you going to do then when there’s only one building? What’s that going to look like? So that was the fun challenge, to just keep trying to come up with something we haven’t seen before and keep pushing that.

Why is Steve Kurth the perfect artist for this book? 

Artist Steve Kurth is the penciler for the book, and uses unique storytelling skills to convey the movie in a condensed form.  The Washington Monument rescue depicted relies on dramatic foreshortening, long vertical perspectives, and clear staging.  Kurth has been working for all of the major publishers and in comics for over 25 years. His work can be seen at https://www.instagram.com/stevekurthart/   

As Steve notes in his LinkedIn profile:

"I’ve had the great privilege of working with some incredible editors over the years who have taught me about the art of story and collaboration, as well as some of the best writers and storytellers I could ever hope learn from.  I have spent my entire career breaking down and translating ideas, descriptions and dialogue into the telling of story, be it a single image or sequential. I’m comfortable with a variety of styles and am very familiar with storytelling..".

Link to buy a copy of the book.

 

The elevator rising through the center of the Monument menaces MJ and Spider-Man

WaPo doesn't understand comics 3: This is an editorial cartoon? [UPDATED]

With all due respect to Ellis Rosen, whom I don't know at all, why is this on the editorial page of the Washington Post. Is this a political cartoon? If so what does it mean?

I'm absolutely serious about asking what does it mean. One might have expected to find a cartoon like this in the New Yorker 35 or 40 years ago, but one expected nonsensical comics from them.

The Post made an extremely large mistake by not appointing Ann Telnaes to replace Tom Toles (or Herblock even IMHO), and they continue to compound it by running works like this. 

For their home cartoonist, we should have someone that lives here. Michael de Adder is a perfectly competent cartoonist, but he's a Canadian who stayed in Canada and works on a contract. He's not a WaPo employee. To add to the disrespect they show him, the editor runs his cartoons smaller than this one is, and his color cartoons with extensive cross-hatching are run in black and white, so they are extremely muddy and sometimes unreadable. We deserve our own local cartoonist, and one who is treated with respect, in the great tradition of Herblock.

 

5/16/23: formerly local editorial cartoonist Al Goodwyn wrote in to say that a version of the cartoon had a title of "Monumentally Exhausted" -  here it is in the online version, which I don't understand any better.  Hmmm, the link calls it "Washington Chaos" which isn't any better as a title.

Finally, just to be clear, I know and like Michael de Adder, and I like his work when it's printed in color and larger than 4x4." He's still not a Washingtonian, even a transplanted one like Block, Toles, Telnaes (and me). Also, I'm sure Ellis Rosen is a fine cartoonist - as I said, I don't know him. I just didn't think the Post's editorial page was the place for this cartoon. As a filler on another page, which newspapers used to do, I would have glanced at it, perhaps smiled, and moved on. Adding to this blog on a computer, and not writing it on my phone like I did last night, I can see that he actually IS a New Yorker cartoonist. Good for him. I subscribe to that print magazine too, but I'm way behind on reading it.