I've always been a bookworm, and I always loved drawing, but I thought comics were awful and boring when I was a kid. Then, when I was eleven, my family moved to Israel for a year. Being in a foreign country, you go crazy looking for things in English to read. There was a point where I started reading child psychology manuals because that's all I could find in English. And then my little brother and I discovered the Sefer V'Sefel English language bookstore, which had two crates of comic books by the stairs. Daredevil, Manhunter, Cloak and Dagger, and ... Excalibur.
I fell in love.
Davis's art was beautiful and graceful. His characters moved. When you watch a movie fight scene, you can tell how good the actors are by how many cuts the scene has. The fewer the cuts, the more continuous action they can handle, the better they are. Many comic book artists only show a character thinking, "If I fake left and turn, I can hit him. Bingo!" but only physically show a single roundhouse punch or kick, splicing in shots of teammates making similar punches to show progress in the battle. Davis's Nightcrawler would dodge and weave, sometimes evading fists, grabbing guns, and stealing kisses for a whole page before he finally took the villain out.
And Davis's skill as a penciller wasn't just reserved for movement. Most comic book artists can only draw one nose, one type of lips, one size body, relying on hair and costume to tell the characters apart. Several times, Davis had different characters masquerade as each other, and you could still recognize them by their features and body types.
Davis's art was gorgeous, but he wasn't just the penciller, he was the writer for a critical part of the comic's run. I didn't know character development from a hole in the ground at that age, but I knew Captain Britain's alcoholism, Meggan's innocence and her fear that her boyfriend only loved her because she was pretty, and Shadowcat's teenage awkwardness stayed with me for weeks after I read each issue, itching to get back to the store and read more.
Alan Davis also took his comic in directions the rest of Marvel didn't: While the American-based comics played mutants up as pariahs, Excalibur were minor celebrities, and even Nightcrawler (who was always judged by his appearance back in the States, even by some of his teammates!) had flocks of teenage girls eager for his autograph. Davis was more interested in his character's lives than in making them angsty about their collective fate.
Davis paid attention to the details of people's lives -- story details, like hogging the bathroom when you share a house with five other people, or visual details like the texture of a half-eaten banana, or establishing a character's favorite clothes instead of drawing a new outfit every time they're out of uniform. But he also looked at other details most comics gloss over, like innocent bystanders. In most comics, when the heroes and villains demolish buildings and smash each other into cars, civilians are endangered only for a moment before the hero rescues them. In Excalibur, the main human detective, Dai Thomas, lost his wife in a super-battle and has a hard time working with superheroes because of it; and years after the fact, Captain Britain keeps up with the family of a boy whose death he was responsible for.
He could be poignant and funny, playing jokes on the reader that depended on recognizing the ironic relationship between his images and his words, like ending a devastating battle with the line, "We're no one's pawns anymore," but looking down on the heroes to reveal the black-and-white tile floor of their house. The covers alone were usually worth the price, with images of janitors sweeping up, or alien beauty contests. I wanted to be Alan Davis when I grew up. My allowance was only 1.50 shekels, or 75 cents (This was 1990! A comic was $1.50 and candy bars were the same price they are now.) and I would hoard my cash to buy a few precious issues.
After Excalibur, Davis went on to create Clan Destine, a comic about an immortal family with amazing powers, as seen through the eyes of their pre-teen children. Again, it was far more about people's lives than about the villain-du-jour, usually focusing on how self-absorbed these people can be, and how you don't have the luxury of wallowing in angst when you've got kids to take care of. And again, he played with the reader: When the Clan goes out on patrol, they don't see any crime to fight, and the police lines are swamped with reports of people flying over the city, preventing the police from hearing about and stopping any crime that night.
When Alan Davis came to the X-Men, he really blew me away with an issue that contrasted Magneto and Xavier by having them each discuss mutants with a normal person. Magneto is searching for a reason to wipe out humanity. Xavier is trying to convince police officers not to start a massacre. And neither of them stops pushing until they get what they came for. The echoes and intimations of their old relationship, the pieces of each other reflected in the way they think, the subtle visual cues, are absolutely masterful.
I've had a lot of loves since that balmy afternoon in the bookshop -- Wendy Pini, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Will Eisner, Terry Moore -- but the truth is, and will always be, some part of me still wants to be Alan Davis when I grow up.
Background art by Karen Nicholas