Aqua Leung
By Mark Andrew Smith and Paul Maybury
Image Comics

You’re reading along in the first book of Aqua Leung, Mark Andrew Smith and Paul Maybury’s new graphic novel series. The narrator, the all-knowing millennium tortoise—a giant underwater tortoise whose millennia-old wrinkles ripple like waves over his body—is relaying the history of Atlantis and the story of Aqua Leung’s birth. He introduces a few former citizens of Atlantis who once tried to reunite their scattered race, each presented on the page with a headshot: the octopus king Nakchi Shim, the sea ghost, Doctor Atlantis, Ranghast, and Nori the Robot.

The odd names of the characters seem to fit the genre of the story and the serious tone set by the tortoise’s introduction. Then, just below the headshots, as if as an afterthought, there are three more close-ups that don’t even show entire faces, only three intense pairs of eyes and noses. These, the caption tells you, were the octopus advisors—John, Paul, and George.

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James Bond is probably the favorite and best-known  pop culture spy. The word espionage inevitably evokes images of Sean Connery, Sir Roger Moore, or Pierce Brosnan—a different James Bond for each generation—and no matter which dashing man in a suit with a fancy sports car you choose, the ever-popular spy is always just that: a dashing man in a suit with a fancy sports car. And usually there’s a sexy woman or two somewhere in the picture. The figure of the spy is larger than life.

Comics are not fine art (nor should they strive to be), but lately the fine art world has begun to awaken to the merits of its pop culture counterpart. Though full-blown acceptance of comics as an art form may be a long way off, a number of examples from the New York scene from just last year show quite clearly that the door has been kicked open: an exhibition of contemporary African comics at the Studio Museum in Harlem; “Comic Abstraction,” a show at MoMA that reflected on contemporary fine artists’ use of some of the basic aesthetic elements of comics; and of course, the two part “Masters in American Comics” show at the Newark and Jewish Museums.

Gallerist Adam Baumgold seems to subscribe to this fine art school that welcomes comics into the fold; having shown Chris Ware drawings in the fall of 2005, a collection of Jules Pfeiffer comics in the summer of 2006, and Aline Kominsky Crumb’s first New York solo exhibition in February of last year, the man is clearly an art lover with a penchant for the funnies.

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