Style is Substance: Werther Dell’Edera
I think of the late 90s and early 2000s in comics affectionately as the “Horror Hero” era. The period that gave us Spawn, Hellboy, Witchblade, Hack/Slash… There was an interest in bringing subcultures like goth and punk to comics, and creating iconic characters in the aesthetic tradition of superheroes, but darker and more transgressive. Heroic, aspirational figures tinged with something monstrous. That is the tension which makes Erica Slaughter such a compelling character to me. As designed and drawn by Something Is Killing The Children co-creator Werther Dell’Edera, she strikes an appealingly streamlined silhouette, and her limited colour palette (shout out to series colourist Miguel Muerto) makes her striking on the page without being “loud” in the way a costumed character would be. She’s cool in a down-to-earth way that recalls the cosplay-ready characters of the 2010s; Jamie Mckelvie’s America Chavez or David Aja’s Hawkeyes. The monstrous edge comes in when she puts the mask on, and Dell’Edera shifts his style towards the murky, jagged, and harsh. Erica becomes a predatory animal, wild-eyed and frantic. Every issue of Something Is Killing The Children where this aesthetic shift happens demonstrates why Erica Slaughter has hit as few creator-owned characters have, and it all comes down to Werther Dell’Edera being one of comics’ most stylish artists currently working.
Dell’Edera has cited The Dark Knight Returns as a formative comic for him, and I believe some Frank Miller is visible in his art, particularly in his early work. Dark Entries is a noir graphic novel starring John Constantine, presented in stark black and white, with heavy, blocky inking and stripped-back character designs. There’s a “dirty” quality to these pages, with a lot of stray marks and ink spots left in or placed purposefully. Already you can also see a lot of Dell’Edera’s habits in framing scenes which persist to this day. Characters will often be obscured or cut-off partially, to draw the reader’s attention to something else of focus in a panel. Occasionally this is used to throw the reader off-kilter slightly; to add some uncertainty to a scene. It’s a trick that lends itself to suspense and horror stories, as does his penchant for dry-brushing large areas of shadow over scenes. I really love the effect of this technique: creating expanses of darkness which aren’t quite uniform, but seem to shimmer as the eye moves across a page. That particular trick becomes a bigger part of his toolkit in later projects especially.
Before that, I’d like to take a pitstop to look at a few times when he has provided layouts that were “finished” by another artist. Spider-Man: Family Business and Batman/Dylan Dog came out some years apart, but in both comics, Dell’Edera drew layouts for every page, and then another artist, Gabriel Del’Otto and Gigi Cavanego respectively, drew the finished art over them. It’s a practice that was more commonplace before the advent of digital art in comics, and I think it’s an interesting exercise to see where Dell’Edera’s own style comes through in these projects. A lot of it is in the posing. Both of these are splashy superhero comics, so they of course lend themselves to melodramatic body language and big gestures, but even in more grounded stories and low-key scenes I wouldn’t describe the body language Dell’Edera draws as naturalistic. Rather, he tends to go for graphically clear poses, and often uses the shape that a body creates on the page as a compositional element. Silhouette is always important in his art, and that can be seen in pages like this, from Batman/Dylan Dog:
Batman’s body forms an arrow in the third panel, with arms splayed out in parallel to the shape of his cape, all directing the eye towards that kick. Cavanego doesn’t keep the horizontal “speed” lines, but that pose and that composition remind me of many similar pages in Something Is Killing The Children. In Spider-Man Family Business, that same trick with cutting off characters’ faces and figures in odd places is employed to the same effect; throwing the reader off slightly, making us feel as though we’re only catching glimpses of the entirety of this scene. Both Cavanego and Dell’Otto obviously transform these pages quite a bit beyond the “standard” inking process, but interestingly, I think some of the way Dell’Edera draws people comes through in Spider-Man. Peter Parker himself and his sister Teresa (here introduced) both have angular faces with constantly-squinting eyes that feel quite characteristic of what you might see in SIKTC.
And really, all of this is essentially preamble to get to discussing Something Is Killing The Children. At 50 issues, it’s hard to argue that this series isn’t the work of Dell’Edera’s career. The series feels perfectly calibrated to his aesthetic and storytelling strengths, and I don’t believe he’s had a better colourist collaborator than Miguel Muerto. Series co-creator and writer James Tynion has related the story of how the comic got started many times, and whenever he does, he returns to the anecdote of picking Dell’Edera from a few options pitched by editor Eric Harburn, because he was impressed by a drawing of a gas station. It’s a cute story, and an illustrative one because SIKTC is a book which thrives on a sense of place. Dell’Edera is called on to render a lot of mundane locales (chain diners, forests, suburban homes, ailing tourist towns) and with a particular mix of familiar intimacy and coldness. A major theme in the series is the way that going back to your life after a tragedy feels alienating and hollow, and that feeling comes through in all the empty space left visible in panels. The establishing shots are conventional in most ways: perspective is on-point and enough clarifying details are included to make sure there’s no ambiguity about what a given location is. They’re also dominated by empty space, even when multiple characters are present. In more tense scenes, Dell’Edera also makes quite liberal use of Dutch angles, but the impression is always of a tangible space being captured, not an abstracted space being sculpted to suit the scene.
That is, unless a scene takes place in the woods. In those scenes, light and shadow intermingle to create hazy impressions. Texture and pattern come to the forefront of the artwork. It’s an effective technique for a series about monsters hiding at the edge of perception, and often making nests in forests. Dell’Edera leans into capturing how it feels to be lost and nervous in the middle of implacable nature.
When talking about his process in the Pen and Ink edition of SIKTC #1, Dell’Edera mentioned that he doesn’t consider character design to be a strong suit of his. His preference is to design characters on the page, determining their look by the needs of the story. That surprises me, not just because Erica Slaughter is such a successful character design, but because the characters of the series strike such a delicate balance between looking like down-to-earth people, and being unique enough that nobody can be confused for anyone else. There are some visual tropes that recur certainly:, faces with high cheekbones and squinting eyes, gangly limbs, but there are more than a few characters that have the look of being developed through multiple drafts. Fashion plays a significant role in setting people apart, though outfits that characters wear are rarely flashy. More so, they create different silhouettes, and do some characterization regarding characters’ cultural backgrounds, social status, and archetypal roles. Erica’s coat is the only thing she wears besides her standard black and white athletic wear, and the army surplus look of it lends her a punk edge alongside her piercings. Cecilia Slaughter’s presence on the page is defined by her classy, slightly androgynous sense of fashion. Our first indication of Jessica (Erica’s mentor)’s personality is that she’s hunting a monster in an outfit that wouldn’t look out of place in a nightclub. Speaking of Jessica, Dell-Edera has said in different interviews that her look is based on Debbie Harry, and that she’s his favorite character to draw; two facts which I find pretty amusing as a pair. In any case, all of his choices are aimed at maintaining the tonal balancing act of Something Is Killing The Children. The series is all low-key naturalism, until the heightened world of monsters and hunters begins to invade that mundanity.
I’ve brought up Frank Miller as a touchstone influence on Dell’Edera, but I see a lot of Italian master artist Sergio Toppi in Dell’Edera’s approach to inking. That fascination with pattern, and building dense textures that shift seamlessly between light and dark out of a thousand tiny marks, distinctly like an inheritance from Toppi. In truth, those textures can be seen all over the work of contemporary European comics artists, from Filipe Andrade to Alessandro Cappuccio. I’m honestly in love with this kind of artwork; leveraging the graphic potential of lines on paper and making the process of art-making obvious in the final product. I look at these images and imagine myself tracing each line, painstakingly building up layer upon layer of ink. Perhaps this is just projection, but even in the most bracing, uncomfortable parts of the horror stories Dell’Edera draws, there’s a playfulness to their execution that always draws me in. Something strikes me about the looseness of some of his drawings, and the physical vigor of his texture work. A visible human touch that reminds me of my own love of drawing.
Really, the unifying quality in all of my favorite art is that they make me want to draw. Drawing, and looking at visual art might be my favorite things in the world. I don’t necessarily want to draw like Werther Dell’Edera, nor do I think I could, but that’s part of it. I love unique, idiosyncratic styles of drawing because they look to me like a mind at work, processing ideas onto the page through a hundred tiny decisions. I love looking at comics drawn by Dell’Edera because I get to admire his technical skill and think about how he’s interpreting the story as he conveys it visually.
