A bit of storytelling genius

I don't need to write much about Eric Stanton, the – what, Michelangelo? Remington? Rockwell? – of catfight artists. If you're looking for a complete bio, check here. 

But I noticed this one artistic moment in one of his works, and I wanted to write something about it. The story is Dull Day In The Neighborhood (inked, it appears, by his former studio mate Steve Ditko), and it wraps up with a big all-girl brawl in a vacant lot, concealed from public view by a stockade fence.

(I have noticed, incidentally, that there are a lot of stockade fences in Stanton's art. I don't know if there's some subtext for that, or if they were just a handy visual note to remind readers the action is taking place outside.)

I like these girl-on-girl-on-girl-on-girl battles, but I can tell you from experience they're hard to draw.

Now let me point out the little moment that makes this a better-than-average piece of narrative art.

Rather than actually show the action, Stanton chooses here to suggest the action. We see one woman with fist raised and arm extended; she's just landed a hell of a punch, and is ready to follow up with another, but the stockade fence conceals her victim. Instead we see the victim's one raised leg – she's been knocked completely off balance – and we see the splintering plank of the fence where her head has smacked into it.

The more typical way to have done this, of course, would have been to simply show both women full figure. That's probably what I would have done, and so would 99 percent of the artists who tried to undertake this scene.

The aggressor's stance is perfect. It looks drawn from life, not like a typical comic book pose. Together, the two figures, even though partially concealed, seem to almost flow together. It's very fluid and realistic. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it almost doesn't look like something Stanton would draw. Nor does it look like the angular, awkward, claustrophobic figures for which Ditko is famous.

So, hell... maybe neither one of them pencilled it. It almost looks like something one of the great newspaper action strip artists would have drawn.

Generally speaking, I'm a much bigger fan of Stanton's earlier work, before his women became impossibly endowed and perpetually angry-looking. The work he is reputed to have done in partnership with Ditko is, in my opinion, the best of his career.